Greetings from San Francisco. Sorry we can't be there, but we're zooming in from here, and I'm honored to welcome David Miliband as a special guest who happens to be passing through San Francisco for an interview here today. Welcome, David.
Thank you, Will. I always learn from you. It's always fun to be with you. So glad to do this.
And it's not our first time we met.
It's not our first somehow. The Brits in a room of 400 mainly Americans, somehow we find each other.
And I remember you talked to me. First of all, you talked to me about your own ambitions for the company, which were remarkable. You talked about this being a global space that Planet was going to occupy, and it was going to occupy it with a real mission to use the technology and the insight for social good, not just for building the best satellite company in the world. And you also struck me because you brought the technological expertise that you got from your British education, but you then brought it into a space of extraordinary commercial dynamism here in the US. And you had this vision of a global company, not just a US company. And that really spoke to my commitment to Europe and to Britain, as well as to the work I do here.
Did you think we would be here today? Do you think at that time, did you believe that we would get it done?
Well, you had — I don't want to say messianic, but you had an absolute drive that was remarkable. You said, 'Look, it's probably five or ten years away that we'll be doing production in Europe.' It is sometime only in the last year, really, that you've set up this European advisory board, which I'm really thrilled to be part of. But what you did see was that the world was going to become more and more chaotic. You saw that in, I think it was 2014 or 2015 even. And at a time when there's chaos, information is the beginnings of order. And I thought that was really powerful.
Yeah, especially shared information, a common operating picture. And you know, our thesis was both that greater transparency could help both security and sustainability. Which brings me to your fabulous career, because you were environment secretary and then foreign secretary, dealing with both of those issues. And moreover, you know, in your current role, just how connected they are. So, tell the audience a little bit about what IRC does.
We're an international humanitarian aid organization which focuses on people whose lives are shattered by conflict and disaster. And as you know, there are 65 wars going on around the world at the moment, 120 million refugees and displaced people, 300 million people who are hungry, 800 million people living on less than $3 a day. Those are the people that we're trying to help in Sudan, in Gaza, in Ukraine. So, in my work, I see the failures of politics. I also see the interaction of the climate crisis with local political crisis, local wars. 15 of the top 20 humanitarian crises in the world are in countries that are in the top quartile of climate vulnerability. So, if you're thinking about the Sahel, if you're thinking about Sudan, places where conflict is over resources and resources are under stress increasingly because of the climate crisis. The lines of causation go in both directions. The climate crisis increases resource pressure. Resource pressure is a source of conflict. It is also the case that conflict denudes the capacity of societies to withstand the climate crisis that you're facing. And you see this vicious circle of conflict, climate, misgovernance, bad governance. Somalia's a good example. 2010-2011 famine, 250,000 people died in the famine before famine was declared. Then a country that's subject to successive drought and floods because the rise in average global temperatures is associated with more extreme weather events. We're going to suffer that with the El Niño, which I think is going to be magnified this winter, at least winter in the northern hemisphere. And one of the saddest things for me: less than $3 per person per year is spent on adapting to the climate crisis in places like Somalia. My organization, we're the big reformers of the humanitarian sector. What does that mean? We want to synthesize information rather than have information stuck in silos. We want to anticipate crises, not just react to them. And we want to personalize services, not just have them bog standard delivered to people. That's a point of connection with what you're trying to do with...
100%. I was just resonating with what you were saying. That's very much what we are trying to do here. And I was also at the UN, the hunger week, and at a crisis event held by UNDP.
Development Program, exactly. And it was all about trying to get beyond crisis and getting to preventative stuff. And we can do some stuff in that area, like we can tell the top five or ten centimeters of soil, the amount of water in it around the whole world every day. That's useful because if it's saturated, then you know the next time it rains it's going to flood. If it's of course too dry for too long, you know there's going to be crop issues in the region. It's not perfect — if there's an earthquake, we can't tend to predict it. But in some of those other cases, you can get ahead a little bit in preparation. And our whole thesis with what we call planetary intelligence is upgrading LLMs, large language models, into large earth models towards something that can answer questions about real-time aspects of the planet to help a whole myriad of applications in other sectors: agriculture, disaster response, I've already mentioned, but finance, insurance — you can see how our data in principle has a lot of value. AI is unlocking that value. I think it's an incredibly exciting time for AI and space. We have a real resource for AI that upgrades AI and upgrades our space data. Really, what it does is enables far more people without satellite imagery expertise to get at the value that's latent in our data.
We've shown actually just with a little bit of information, if you can get to a farmer a week before the flood or even a day before the flood, we've shown in studies in Nigeria what a difference it makes to people's ability to sustain their livelihoods, right, if they get early warning. I think there's another point though, which takes us into delicate and difficult territory, but important territory. Which is that the security side of this, or rather the insecurity side, is also something where you've got something distinctive to offer, I think. And yes, some political earthquakes can't be predicted, but other political earthquakes can. I mean, we know for example, of the 65 conflicts I mentioned, most of them are so-called civil wars. They're wars within states. The actors in those conflicts are not just from within that state. If you take Sudan, the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world, there's a dozen different external sponsors of the different groups, some governments and non-government inside Sudan...
...stoking crisis. And so the insecurity — now that's also, if you think about it from a European perspective, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the threats to European security, there's a reason why there was proper anticipation of the war in Ukraine. I remember going to the Munich Security Conference in 2022, and you had the British intelligence, you had American intelligence very publicly saying there's a war coming, and an argument with others saying no, it's not. And so, I think that the security stroke insecurity, the conflict and the mustering of different sides from outside to sponsor it, and then climate rolled into it — those are all points of connection with, I think, the work that you're doing and that your satellites are doing every day.
Yeah, and Ukraine is a fantastic example. It's basically getting ahead of challenges, to seeing them earlier, hopefully weeks or even months in advance, to enable that country to defend itself. It is also about picking up the pieces afterwards. We can look back through time, see where Russian vehicles that were laying mines were and the tracks they have, so you know roughly where the mines are to then at least prioritize efforts, which helps speed up the clearing process because there's huge amounts of land that, of course, doing it manually by hand is really, really difficult. But yeah, again, Ukraine shows an exemplar of how these things work together. Obviously in this case it started with an active conflict, but it quickly led to food security issues around the world because the World Food Program gets 48% or so of its grain from Ukraine.
When we started Planet, of course we really cared about the sustainability piece of it. That mission is huge, but it's interrelated with the security mission. I always thought that transparency would drive greater accountability, and that would drive better behavior. Obviously that didn't deter the Russians. But could you see that transparency can help reduce the risky behavior that people do that kicks off conflicts? The environment side is pretty clear.
Well, I think... Yeah. I think that the truth about geopolitics today is that there really aren't any effective policemen. And really since the financial crisis, since 2008, we've been seeing a radical diffusion of power around the world. So, you've got this situation of no policeman internationally, weaker rules, weaker norms. You've got an assault on truth domestically, right? And the fact that you've got your own ethics guidelines, you've got your own way in which you're choosing different partners — they're choosing you, but you're also choosing them. I think the commitment to tell it straight, because the satellite doesn't lie, the telescope doesn't lie, the photo doesn't lie, I think is important. Now, the leap of then saying, is it going to be a conflict preventer? I think it can be an impunity exposer. It can follow the human trail. Where you begin to see people moving, that's evidence that something terrible is happening. When people are fleeing, I think that's important. Advance warning can help. But I think that the fact that you've got increasing numbers of defense departments wanting to understand what you're seeing, I think that is very, very important.
And let's go over to that because the UK did a new defense review, strategic defense review, and it called on leveraging drones and satellites, a bit like Ukraine has. Our hope is to help provide you with your own eyes, not to be contingent on anyone else. And that's partly why we just opened our first satellite manufacturing facility. That's why we expanded to have a UK office, trying to build up that capacity at least in the way in which satellites can play a role in that. And that's actually surprisingly easy in both cost terms and in speed than many of the other harder — certainly more ships and planes tend to take a long time, but that information can be really quick.
Yeah, I mean, here's how I would put it to you. The 1966 defense white paper, the first sentence was, 'Defense is the servant of foreign policy.' And the greatest strength that the UK has had in the post-Second World War period is that it's not just dependent on its eyes, it's not just dependent on American eyes. It's got Five Eyes, obviously, but it's also got well beyond that. It's got alliance structure baked in, including NATO, previously an economic and social alliance structure in the European Union. And that is even more important in a hyper-connected world, which is what we're living in today. And I think that the UK has got...
