Kimbal Musk: Drone Storytelling at New Heights

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. This is the FoST Podcast– welcome.

My guest today, Kimbal Musk, is a man of many talents. He’s an entrepreneur, philanthropist, chef, and restaurateur, to name just a few. For over two decades, he’s cofounded and invested in companies across the technology, hospitality, entertainment, and agricultural industries, including community-focused restaurant group, The Kitchen, and access to gardening nonprofit Big Green. For this work, he was named a Global Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum. Today we’re going to talk about one of Kimbal’s latest endeavors: the aerial drone company, Nova Sky Stories, which he co-founded in 2022. Nova Sky Stories is a true innovator in this new medium of drone storytelling, combining light and sound to create emotionally powerful experiences for large outdoor groups. They regularly collaborate with some of the best visual and musical artists in the world, from Bjork to Dead & Co to the Dave Matthews Band, to tap into the immense collective wonder and awe of looking up into the night sky. As CEO of Nova Sky Stories, Kimbal is playing an important role in advancing this new art form. Please join me in welcoming Kimbal Musk.

Kimbal Musk, it’s such an honor to have you on the FoST podcast. Thanks for being here.

Kimbal Musk:

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Charlie Melcher:

So Kimbal, I’m really excited about this Nova Sky Stories company that you’ve started, and I would love it if you would tell us the story that was kind of the origin story about your experience at Burning Man in 2021 and how that got you exposed to and excited about telling stories with drones.

Kimbal Musk:

Burning Man 2021 was such a difficult year. We had done everything we could to help the org run Burning Man. It was of course during Covid, and at the end of the day, the org decided not to do the burn, and about 30,000 Burners decided to show up anyway, and I had this conversation with an incredible artist out of Amsterdam, Ralph Nauta, in May or so of 2021. I knew him through his drone art. I said, can you bring the drones to Burning Man? And we helped raise the philanthropic dollars to do that. We arrived and it turned out that the Bureau of Land Management had made it so that no art could be on the ground. No burns were allowed. And so the drones were one of the few things that could actually be art. And so right in the center, at around nine o’clock, and then when we flew the Man, it was a story that came to life for everyone because we were there to burn the Man. And frankly, an experience that was quite depressing. Covid was raging. Forest fires were everywhere. It was one of the most difficult places to even get to, and yet we all had all come together, and when the Man flew, people were just crying. It was just so powerful. It really brought the whole experience together and it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever been part of.

Charlie Melcher:

And for those who haven’t been to Burning Man, it takes its name from this ritualistic burning of this wooden structure of a man.

Kimbal Musk:

It’s a climax and it’s about renewal. When you burn the Man, you burn the past. And so of course, we had a lot to burn that year. That was a tough year.

Charlie Melcher:

And there’s something about the fact that it happens in the air and that it happens at such a scale.

Kimbal Musk:

Oh my God, the scale was— a traditional Man might be 60, 80, 90 feet. That might be the highest. This was 400 feet or 700 feet. I mean, it’s so much bigger.

Charlie Melcher:

And there were, what? 30,000 people, I think I read?

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, right, exactly. 30,000 people that didn’t know what to expect. And I mean, it’s a communal experience. It’s a community coming together.

Charlie Melcher:

I’d love it if you could explain to people, because I had a certain idea of what aerial drone shows were, and it’s an outdated idea.

Kimbal Musk:

So typically what drone shows have been are kind of a light show in the sky most times, not connected to music, not connected to poetry, not really a story. And a really good sky story has the hero’s journey. Jewel just did a Sky Story that flew twice a night every day of the summer at Crystal Bridges in Arkansas. And the story is about connecting to your mindfulness, meditation, meditative experience, but it’s of course with her music. So it does climax to a time where she really does move you in your heart and soul. The drones fly for 10 minutes, but the sky story, actually, it is 20 minutes. The drones take off and they actually fly over you, so you’re within 10 feet of the drones. And that’s very different to a light show. A light show, you might see a light show and go, wow, that’s pretty cool. But then if you see it again, you’re like, oh, well I’ve already seen this one. This really is a story that if you connect to it, you might want to see it over and over again.

Charlie Melcher:

The technology now, it’s not just one color that you can work with sufficient number of drones. So you really have that sense of motion, almost like animation happening, obviously the addition of music. I had traditionally thought of these as almost like a series of fixed simple graphics, and that’s not what it is now. It’s actually— I mean, it was like the jump from 8-bit computer graphics to Nintendo Super Mario Brothers or something.

Kimbal Musk:

You’re using exactly the right example. Think about video games from the eighties and nineties and to today. Yeah, you’re actually dealing with pixels and those pixels are very simple five years ago, then they’re getting a little bit better Two years ago now they’re quite extraordinary like, oh wow, we can do video in the sky, literally have three football fields wide, two football fields high, full video. It’s just like the voice of God. It’s so powerful. The scale blows your mind, and this is pretty high resolution video.

Charlie Melcher:

Yeah, I mean, I do think it feels a bit godly.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah. I think that without overstating it actually, the sense of awe.

Charlie Melcher:

Awe, yeah.

Kimbal Musk:

It delivers. We work with the Australian government and we do a show at Uluru Rock, which is the big rock in the middle of Australia, and it flies twice a night every night of the year for the next five years. It’s just a story with Aboriginal direction and art. That’s a real powerful story, and it has turned the Uluru rock from being something that we kind of know about to now one of the top 10 destinations in the country, and it’s about going to see that story.

Charlie Melcher:

I can’t help but think about how important being outdoors is to these experiences where you feel the atmosphere, the breeze, and also the mere act of looking up to the skies. I mean, we’ve done that since the beginning of time where we’ve looked to try to make sense of the universe by reading the stars, by seeing the constellations in the stars, by trying to navigate the oceans by the stars. There is something I think ingrained in us as a species to look up to those points of light to have it make us feel small. It’s almost like you can take the stars and tell the stories out of them.

Kimbal Musk:

We have a sky story in the works that is using astrology and flying above you where you can actually map out the night sky. It really is amazing. You can really tie it to people in that way. One thing that you mentioned when it comes to being up in the air at high and feeling small: so we work with the Grateful Dead, or Dead & Co. They have these extraordinary shows that last five hours long and people will come see every single one because they’re all different each time. So last year we flew for their outside shows, in concert with the songs that they were singing. So it’s tied to the music. The stage is already huge. So this goes up to 700 feet and you’re seeing the— in this case it was the steel head, but it was really kind of, melting and changing in the sky to the rhythm of the music that they were playing. Someone came up to me and said, they’ve been to 150 Dead & Co shows, and they’d been on every substance you can imagine. He even mentioned he’d been on ayahuasca at a show. But his point was powerful, which was: he did nothing compared to that experience and he just wanted to thank me for it.

Charlie Melcher:

The experience of seeing somewhere between 200 and a thousand drones flying in this programmed way, this dance that takes place between these points of light, it definitely makes one think a little bit of fluid dynamics, of starlings. How inspired by nature is the design work for programming and thinking about controlling a flock of drones?

Kimbal Musk:

And we do call it a flock, actually. So I think that the experience changes for the audience based on how close you are. So in the case of Uluru Rock, for example, you’re far away enough to have the rock in the background, but in the case of Jewel’s, it’s within 10 feet of you, or even, I mean, there’s a net, so it can be very close. That is much more where you actually see the drones when the lights are off because they’re lighting each other up, and that feels very much like a flock of birds, and it’s a much more visceral experience. It’s much more physical. So it adds another dimension to it. Three dimensions, yeah, sure, it’s a three dimensional object, but there’s a fourth dimension that it can actually move towards you. And that physical feeling is like it’s fear in your body or excitement or something, but it’s something in addition to it being a three dimensional experience.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell us about the tech, because this really is an art form enabled by cutting edge technology. How has it evolved? How do these drones work together? What kinds of software tools have you developed to help make these?

Kimbal Musk:

We really in 2023 advanced our liabilities to such a degree. I mean, we’re just so reliable. We can fly every 30 minutes, every 40 minutes, or we kind of like to say on the hour every hour, but we can actually fly more often than that because our drones come back in, they recharge and they fly right back. We can do it with very low labor, with total safety. And then in 2024, now we’re focusing on performance, which is really exciting because now you’re starting to work on high resolution, you’re starting to work on video. We did our first video, you’ll get the NBA All Stars where they spoke to the crowd and it was a giant video screen. It was just incredible. We work on time coding with artists so that it’s perfectly in sync with the music and poetry. That’s actually quite hard. Because what you’re doing is you’re physically flying drones into the sky, there’s just a lot of basic delays that come from launching a thousand drones into the sky. So we have figured out how to time code in real time, and so that’s how we could do Jewel’s show every night in Crystal Bridges.

We are now able to fly between skyscrapers, and that’s of course, you have GPS interference, you have wifi when you’re dealing with people in a high density area and you’ve got— you’re flying very close to buildings. We can fly now one meter away from a building and still have reception and be able to control the drones. So when you start working on performance, it gets really fun to work with an artist and say, let’s figure out how to make your story also move the medium forward as well.

Charlie Melcher:

And what kind of artists are you turning to? Who’s adept at creating art and stories in this medium?

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, so Jewel is a phenomenal example. Uluru is a phenomenal example. We’re also finding governments as our customers. So this might happen, I hope it does. But the Kumbh Mela in India, they’re telling us that over six weeks, 400 million people will come to this, come to wash in the river. They want us to fly every night. There’s an incredible religious leader there, a woman who is going to drive the story. And this is a priestess of, obviously, their religion, that really knows the story that should be told for people coming to the Kumbh Mela. The poetry and music will play on radio, and it’s time coded to the radio playing. That’s extraordinary. And that’s how you get a hundred million people to listen to it at the same time.

Charlie Melcher:

I also just have to note that so much of the news around drones is so tied to war these days.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, I know. That’s right.

Charlie Melcher:

And so it’s so nice to see it tied to really exact opposite: to art and a desire to create common experience and bring people together in a moving way.

Kimbal Musk:

There’s one actually thing that is also related to our technology, is the FAA certifies drones really as one category. And so you could be a military drone, you could be a civilian drone, and you’re kind of under a certain license, which makes no sense at all. Our technology is advanced to a point where we are so much safer and so much more reliable than any other drone out there that the FAA will—it’s not– touch wood, it’s not done yet, but they will issue us a certificate that separates us from all the other drones in the world. We do crash tests to see the safety of the mannequin that’s in there. We have now gone through that full process with the FAA and we passed. So now we still have to get the certificate, but hopefully that won’t be delayed for very long.

Charlie Melcher:

And when you say that safety, does that mean that, God forbid, the drone hit somebody, it wouldn’t hurt them, or…?

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, exactly. So if a drone went out of control, what technology do we have to turn off all the motors? What happens when you turn off all the motors? What does the drone do? And so you start to imagine all these worst case scenarios that never really happen, and then you have crash test dummies that take the hit. But it’s very important to show the FAA that we are a different kind of drone. And the more we build trust with the FAA, the more they trust us as it relates to hurting any of the audience, hurting any of the people that are standing nearby. And we’re really good. We’re really good at it.

Charlie Melcher:

And I know certainly there’s some resistance now to fireworks in certain parts of the country because they can spark fires, because people, when they play with fireworks themselves, there’s accidents. Is this a medium that’s going to replace fireworks because of the safety issues?

Kimbal Musk:

We have replaced fireworks in several cities already. Any of the fire hazard cities, they simply can’t do fireworks for July 4th. We now do that quite often in Colorado, which is our home state, as well as California. It is a very real thing. The reason why the industries don’t really fully compete is: it’s July 4th or it’s New Year’s Eve, right? And while the drones can do something amazing, it’s just not the same business model. You can get a warehouse full of fireworks. You can service 3,000 cities with that warehouse. With drones, you have the physical drones, so you could fly over Denver or you could fly over Chicago. But you can’t do the cities in between, because you just don’t have enough drones. Physically you have to build drones, they just wouldn’t get used enough to justify their existence. So yeah, we’re very busy on July 4th and we’re very busy on New Year’s Eve. But the real business for us is all the permanent shows and residencies around the world that are really about the storytelling that the artist and storyteller wants to make.

Charlie Melcher:

So a little different than spectacle.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, and again, we are able to blow you away with spectacle. There’s no question. We’ve even done a combination of fireworks and drones together and it’s an absolute extraordinary spectacle. So we’re good at that, but that’s not the real power of this medium.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell us more about the business model. How does this really work? What are the economics around it?

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, I think that’s actually a powerful question. So if you would do a single show in… let’s pick Chicago. You did one night show in Chicago. It’s many weeks of work, if not more than that, depending on how good you want the story to be. You could do a one night show in Chicago and it would cost you $250,000, or you could do a show every night for the entire year and it would cost you $2 million. Because once the art is designed, the story is designed and the location’s figured out, the logistics are figured out—the price per show drops to very, very low. It could be $4-5,000 a night. It’s a very, very different situation to one night shows, which again, we are very good at. But really think about it like making a movie. If you made a movie and you only had one place to show at one time, it’s going to be a pretty darn expensive ticket. But if you show that movie in multiple theaters every night of the year, or as long as it’s popular, the costs come down and the revenue comes up.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, it does seem that because of its scale, again, it’s got to be serving a community or a location where there’s the opportunity to bring a lot of people together, either once or as you said, for weeks and months or at a time.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, I mean, what we found is there’s two kinds of customers. One is, they want to bring people to their location more often. So with Uluru Rock— they have hotel rooms, but people fly in, they check it out, they spend a few hours there, and then they fly out again. They don’t stay overnight. So in this case, they wanted to get people to stay overnight, and it’s been a huge success for them. They still sell tickets for it, but they also get people to stay overnight. That’s an example of where you want to drive the business. An example of where you want to make something very special would be the Kumbh Mela in India. You already have hundreds of millions of people coming there. The cost to do the show is negligible relative to the cost of everything else, and you just want to make it really special. The Grateful Dead example is another one, where they just wanted to make it special. They’d already sold out. They wanted to make it special. What we’re learning is the artists that we work with, the storytellers we work with, they’re teaching us new ways to use the medium. So it really is just the beginning. Costs will come down. That’s true. But what’s more interesting is what’s possible will change and it’ll change with every single show we’re doing.

Charlie Melcher:

I am always interested in these new art forms or new media that come up that are enabled by technology, but when they’re so early in their infancy that people are still using them the way they used older media and they haven’t figured out how to think in a new way, how to think through what’s organic to that form. And I completely see this. I mean, the few I’ve seen of yours, of Nova stories, that they’re just innovating each time. And yet it still feels to me like we’re in the equivalent of silent period in the movie industry.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, oh yeah. As of, I dunno, a year ago, we were truly in the silent picture era, and then we are now in the phase where people are—it’s like the talkies, and people are saying, I’m not sure if I want the talkies, why would we want talkies? Wasn’t the other way great? And you’re just laughing a little bit because of course you want talkies.

Charlie Melcher:

I have this theory, and it’s certainly not mine alone, that we’re moving forward into a world where the line between what’s digital and what’s analog is going to blur or even disappear. And certainly if you look at augmented reality, for example, and the success of, I don’t know, Pokémon Go or the mixed reality headsets that are coming, where you can see the world and you can put a layer of digital information onto that world and use this in a way to interact in a new way in the world. I think of these types of drones storytelling as another example of that. Because it’s definitely technology, I mean, there’re drones and there’s sophisticated software controlling it—but we’re not aware of that technology. We are just outdoors in a beautiful place with the fresh air and feeling the awe created by the art. And there’s no walls, there’s no screens, there’s no headset. It’s actually a social medium, in that I can be holding hands or dancing or with other people. And it’s going to be one of those ways that we add some magic into the physical world and do it in a way that is powerfully social, also.

Kimbal Musk:

Powerfully social is so great. We have a New Year’s Eve show that we’re working with an artist where they’re going to fly the same show around the world. Well, the reason we can do that is it’s actually a digital art medium with a physical presence. So the drones need to exist in Rio and London and New York and Tokyo, all. They actually physically have to be there. But we can fly a story that is connected and we can decide whether what time of evening it is and see if they’re actually on the same time zone or different time zones— but what we’re able to do is really absolutely a blend of digital and analog where you physically feel the drones and it’s a digital art medium, so you can fly it in multiple places at the same time.

Charlie Melcher:

I love that expression, “fly a story.” I haven’t heard that before, but I think that’s so great. I’ve heard about print it, or hang it, but to fly it?

Kimbal Musk:

Now we can fly them.

Charlie Melcher:

So cool. And again, I feel like there is something about this medium that it speaks to something very ancient and primal in us. I remember being a student of Walter Ong, who is a sort of media theorist. He wrote this book, “Orality and Literacy,” and he talked about the evolution of humans when they went from being an oral culture to a literary culture. When we shifted from spoken word as the way we communicate and learn about the world, to printed word or written down. And one of the things he talked about was that we lost some of the subtleties, some of the grays, some of the sense of magic and wonder in the world when all of a sudden everything that you could learn was printed, written down in linear, hierarchical text. And this medium that you’re championing brings us back to something that’s more organic to us as a species from an earlier age where we did tell stories to explain the extreme things happening in the world where there was a sense of magic and wonder. I just imagine sitting around the equivalent of some sort of campfire or laying out there with loved ones on a blanket and hearing that great story and then seeing it come to life in the stars above you.

Kimbal Musk:

Yeah, it really is amazing.

Charlie Melcher:

And what would you say to storytellers if they were interested in trying to work in this medium?

Kimbal Musk:

Absolutely. So a storyteller that has an idea of where they would want to fly it: great examples are outdoor museums, botanical gardens, tourist attractions. We’d love, for example, to do Mount Rushmore at some point. That would be a heaven to do something at night that is a story of the United States. We’re looking for storytellers that have a vision of not just the story, but where they would want that story to play. And then we can help from there to figure out who’s in charge of that location, how do we pitch them correctly and do something magical that might be all summer long, or it might be all year long.

Charlie Melcher:

Where do you see this field going? How’s it going to evolve?

Kimbal Musk:

Iconic tourist locations. And again, I’ll use Mount Rushmore as an example because I’m still trying and hopefully they’re listening.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, you know we’re working on something in North Dakota with the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I’m hoping we can get one there.

Kimbal Musk:

I love that. Hopefully it’ll be all summer. I know we’re talking about different ideas there, but our love of this medium is getting it to fly over the Grand Canyon, create stories that people who are coming there will really connect to that location in a way that they would never be able to connect without this medium. I mean, it’s truly, it’s sci fi. It’s so incredible.

Charlie Melcher:

Kimball, thank you for sharing this new medium and your passion for it. Thank you for being willing to be a visionary in it and see the potential and help to foster it. And please keep us up to speed on all of the new Nova Stories because we’d love to share them with our community.

Kimbal Musk:

Absolutely. That’s a great way to keep up is go through, stay connected to our Instagram or our X. It’s wonderful to just follow it and just watch the technology and the artists, that combination of innovation. It’s very exciting to give these incredible storytellers, musicians this new medium. It really is extraordinary.

Charlie Melcher:

And again, I know how much you enjoy bringing people together, that kind of communal social joy to so many more people. That’s what we need.

Kimbal Musk:

It really is my love, absolutely my love to gather people together, create a sense of vulnerability that helps people connect with each other, and a beautiful sky story is just one of the best ways to do it.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been The Future of Storytelling podcast. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed our show, we’d so appreciate it if you’d leave a nice review and share it with a friend. And to stay up to date on the latest storytelling technologies and trends, be sure to subscribe and check out our website at fost.org where you can sign up for our free monthly newsletter.

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.