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DRONE ON explores how drones are reshaping the world. Hosted by Bryce Bladon, the podcast documents the tech, economics and people piloting the world's largest standardized drone imagery network.
From WIREDs mascot to drones: The story of DRONE ON (and its host)
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Drone on the only podcast in the errand on the airwaves. I'm your host, Bryce Bladon. On this show, we explore the technology, economics, and people building the world's largest standardized drone imagery network. Each episode we explain how drones are reshaping industries, creating new economic opportunities, and literally changing how we see the world.
On today's episode, I explain the origins of this podcast, my experience with drones, and why I think you should care about what's happening in the sky above us.
Let's start with what WIRED's mascot has gotta do with drones.
For the past two decades, I've made a living identifying emerging technologies before they become obvious parts of our lives. And I've made it my area of expertise to introduce and explain those new things to their new audiences. Perhaps the best known example [00:01:00] of when I've done this is when I co-founded something called CryptoKitties.
Back in 2017. Uh, the point of the world's first blockchain game was to pilot something called ERC 7 21, which at the time was the first mainstream NFT. And the first NFT primitive on the Ethereum blockchain. The reason my team did this is because we recognize that digital ownership was about to become a fundamental primitive of the internet.
Within months, this novel app earned millions of dollars in revenue while introducing a novel use case for crypto technology. Since then, WikiLeaks and numerous other organization leveraged CryptoKitties and eventually NFTs say fundraising mechanism. The mascot for blockchain technology became Wired's mascot when they purchased their own crypto kitty in 2018 and explored what those new rights empowered them to do.
CryptoKitties led to Dapper Labs founding in 2018, leading investment from companies like A 16 Z. It also led to the conception of a new blockchain network in 2019 called Flow, which is very, very active to this day. Anyways, [00:02:00] CryptoKitties continue to make an impact in terms of this new technology, uh, in ways I didn't anticipate.
In 2023, crypto kitties was parroted on the Simpson's treehouse of horror. You might've seen the cuddle cadence that March. Simpson murdered...
oh, well, I guess I gotta do this. Sorry.
Those were crypto kitties. What CryptoKitties were were the adorable tip of a spear that would become known as the Web3 movement catalyzed by digital ownership. That was a lot of fancy words and jargon to basically say that we saw, or rather, I saw the same pattern that I do now. Powerful infrastructure meets underestimated demand, and this pattern is always the same infrastructure that seems technical and specialized becomes essential when the right use case emerges.
And today I'm seeing that right use case emerge with drones. Drones are, in my mind, infrastructure that nobody seems to be talking about. The drone industry itself is worth roughly twice the valuation of the video game industry. [00:03:00] That is utterly extraordinary. I've always used the video game industry as a real world example for how valuable digital things can become that don't necessarily have real world utility in the way you think.
To put this another way, if you get the latest Mario game, your life doesn't depend on it. But things like insurance, food, housing, those would be more real world applications. The fact that the video game industry has managed to become a $45 billion industry is very remarkable. But what's even more remarkable is that the drone industry is worth roughly twice that.
And that's remarkable because drones have physical hardware inherently as a part of their value offering. Video games, especially modern video games, increasingly do not have nearly the physical components to concern itself with. But I digress. What I'm looking at here is an industry twice as valuable as video game industry without the benefit of digital distribution, without video games, 40 year headstart.[00:04:00]
But what I'm seeing is spatial data. Spatial data is becoming more and more valuable, while purely digital experiences don't grow in the same exponential way. Most people think of drones as toys or delivery experiments, or even tools for warfare, but the real story is infrastructure, specifically the infrastructure for understanding our physical world at an unprecedented scale and resolution.
This story of how my experiences and expertise came to drones basically came to a head in late 2024 when a colleague of a colleague referred somebody named Alec to me, and he had a question, should his company add blockchain technology to their drone data platform? My answer immediately was no. This company had a functioning business model.
Customers pay for ultra high resolution mapping data delivered quickly and affordably. Why complicated? But we talked and I realized that this drone business was something I was only seeing half of. I was only thinking [00:05:00] about the demand side, the Uber for drone data. And what I couldn't see was, and this is a common theme, the infrastructure that enabled it, the supply side.
So this person was Alec, the Chief operating Officer of Spexi geospatial, and Alec through basically refusing to be bullied into accepting Noah as an answer, convinced me without, we're on the verge of a network effect nobody else can see. Lemme just explain what Spexi does first. 'cause I think I've touched on it without actually explaining it.
Spexi operates what is essentially an Uber for drone data. Thousands of certified pilots worldwide can map any location on demand. Now that actually is primarily concentrated in North America, at least at the time of this recording. Um, and these people are paid every two weeks, like traditional contractors.
But what if. Any pilot anywhere in the world could fly missions and get paid fair value for their contribution. What if spatial data collection could scale globally without the friction of traditional payment rails? What if data collection could be standardized in a [00:06:00] way where people flying different drones didn't produce different data, but it all interacted and aligned with one another to create a world map that was consistent throughout?
This is to say the Drone pilot network, the one that Spexi specifically has, but almost anyone could have, is fundamentally a, a creator economy for spatial data. The blockchain piece to Alec and Specie's Credit isn't about adding crypto for crypto's sake, which was my initial assumption as a result of my work with NFTs.
I've gotten a lot of conversations like that that often go in the opposite direction. We wanna launch an NFT. It's the easiest way to make money right now. There's no real reason to do this. The conversation with Spexi was the exact opposite of that. Blockchain as a technology is really good at one thing in particular, letting two people trade value with no one in the middle.
And a good use of blockchain technology, it works with that outcome. So where I see blockchain typically being good is if you need people to trade value when you are creating a [00:07:00] different kind of value. One that's not as tractable or as easy to find as say, dollars and cents. NFTs, were an explicit example of this non fungible value.
That's just one example. The other is paying people who aren't right next to you. It's very easy for me to give my friend Bob right next to me, $5. It's even easy for me to potentially pay him if we live in the same country and we have a half decent country with payment systems. But what if Bob's in the States?
What if Bob's in France? What if Bob did some work for me and needs to get paid immediately? How much is it going to cost me to pay him and how much of that money is actually going to Bob? And it's something blockchain is very good about. That's why cryptocurrencies were effectively the primary use case for nearly a decade.
Blockchain works when it isn't adding crypto for crypto's sakes. It it works, especially in the modern sense when it removes friction from a global network, in this case, a global network of independent contributors or drone pilots. Anyways, why this matters now is that I see a lot of forces converging.
To make this pattern recognition part of my brain [00:08:00] go off, we've got technological maturity. Consumer grade drones are incredibly capable. A hardware that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars is now accessible to individual consumers and operators. Likewise, regulatory clarity has never been better or more favorable.
Aviation authorities worldwide are establishing or have established frameworks for commercial drone operations to create predictable operating conditions. And demand data, demand specifically every industry from agriculture. To insurance, to urban planning needs high resolution spatial data and they need it faster than traditional methods can provide.
And all of those examples I just gave agriculture insurance, urban planning, very much the physical, meaningful needs. I mentioned earlier the, the kind of businesses that matter, but to, you know, even bring up the video game thing that's bringing up before augmented reality. Meta reality. Anything along those lines are things that would potentially benefit from spatial AI or spatial data or, or anything to that [00:09:00] effect.
But lemme get to what I think most people miss. I'm not just talking about data collection. I think we are looking at a foundational layer for how we understand and interact with physical space in a digital world. I think we're looking at like an upgrade to how we think about maps Really. We're at a real multiplier effect moment.
Drones represent an entirely new category of spatial intelligence that wasn't economically feasible before. And I should note, when I started this podcast, I started it ostensibly to learn about drones and organized my thinking. This will probably be one of the first episodes. But to make a long story short, I now work with Spexi and my role isn't about strategic communication.
I am helping to build, uh, the economic and social infrastructure that turns drone operators into a coordinated global network. And I also got this podcast sponsored by my new employers. Thank you, Spexi, for sponsoring the first season of Drone On. But let me bring you this back to why we're talking about drone on.[00:10:00]
I've been documenting my work in new media and emerging technologies. For two decades. I've helped the New York Times Film 360 video for a fencing organization. I worked with the Freelancers Union to organize fair pay for contractors in the us. I help Natural Resources Canada update their web presence alongside their hydrocarbon research drone.
On is my latest attempt to distill and document my understanding of a field that's new to me, but also one that I think is developing in a way that most people, even in it don't necessarily know. Since starting the podcast, I've gone from learning about why a drone company is implementing blockchain technology to joining that drone company to help them realize that vision.
Since starting this podcast, I've flown, filmed and, uh, crashed with a drone, and as a result of this podcast, I've secured sponsorship for our first season, and I've also gotten interviews and insights from some of the most remarkable pilots, builders, and companies defining drones, horizons. So let's talk about what we're building with this show.
Over the coming episodes, we'll explore how drone infrastructure is taking shape. We'll talk to pilots, building this [00:11:00] foundational layer. We'll talk about companies and how they use this data, and I will even start to talk to some of those companies and technologists to start talking about how we solve some of the problems and realize some of the opportunities in front of us.
We'll examine how drones are reshaping industries you might not expect, and we'll look at the economics of spatial data and why location intelligence is becoming as fundamental as internet connectivity. But most importantly, we'll explore what happens when physical world data becomes accessible and immediate as digital information.
This is Drone On. I'm Bryce Bladon. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks for listening to Drone On. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Get a new episode every week and leave us a five star review on your podcast app of choice. You can learn more about our sponsors at Spexi.com. That's spexi.com and LayerDrone.org
Find out how you can contribute to the world's largest drone imagery network too. Thanks again for [00:12:00] listening.