Welcome to The Spatial Stack, where modern geospatial technology takes center stage. Our episodes feature interviews with leading experts, insightful discussions on the integration of AI and big data in spatial tech, and case studies on groundbreaking projects worldwide. Tune in to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving world of geospatial technology!
Épisodes
The Map Anyone Can Edit (and the Tools Behind It) with Jake Low
27 oct. 2026 · 46 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Jake Low, software developer at OpenStreetMap US and maintainer of MapRoulette, OSMCha, Field Papers, and Layercake. Jake explains how a map that anyone can edit takes in about 40,000 changesets a day, and why his job is building tools for…
Thinking Spatially for a Living: Chris Tucker on 175 Years of the American Geographical Society
8 sept. 2026 · 47 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Dr. Chris Tucker, chairman of the American Geographical Society, in the year the AGS turns 175. Chris makes the case that spatial thinking is foundational literacy, on the level of language or math, and that the 4.5 million people who have…
Mapping the Invisible: Soil Fungi, Satellites, and the Largest Network on Earth with Justin Stewart
26 août 2026 · 39 min
What does it take to map something you have never seen? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Justin Stewart, quantitative ecologist at SPUN, the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, to unpack how his team built the first global map of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the soil…
Beyond the Blue Dot: AI & LLM Navigation with Zephr's Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao
16 juil. 2026 · 43 min
What does it actually take for an AI to navigate you through the real world, without a screen and without a camera running the whole time? In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt Forrest sits down with Sean Gorman and Pramukta Rao, the co-founders of Zephr, to unpack how they ground large…
Why the GIS Title Is Shrinking but Spatial Work Is Growing
14 juil. 2026 · 17 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down solo to work through a fight that broke out across Reddit and LinkedIn last week: is GIS dying, or is it just changing its name? It started with a GIS manager who argued the field is alive, pointing to a friend who landed a $200,000 job building…
AI, Embeddings, and the Future of Location Data with Dataplor's Ryan Urabe
17 juin 2026 · 49 min
What does it actually take to make AI useful on location data? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Ryan Urabe, co-founder and CTO of Dataplor, to unpack how AI, embeddings, and agents are changing the way we work with points of interest and places data. Ryan explains why general-purpose…
Mapping Every Field on Earth: Global Field Boundaries, Open Data, and GeoAI with Taylor Geospatial
10 juin 2026 · 43 min
What does it actually take to map every agricultural field on Earth? In this episode, Matt sits down with Jen Marcus, Vice President of Strategic Innovation Programs at Taylor Geospatial, and Isaac Corley, Director of AI/ML Research at Taylor Geospatial and a torchgeo maintainer, the team behind…
Rebuilding Climate Risk: SPHERE, DuckDB, and the Modern GIS Stack with Troy Schmidt
27 mai 2026 · 41 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Troy Schmidt, a 20-year GIS developer and the creator of SPHERE, an open-source Python package that runs FEMA's HAZUS flood risk methodology on GeoParquet and DuckDB. Troy dives into why depth damage functions are simpler than the…
From Geospatial Data Scientist to Full-Time Creator with Maggie Ma
20 mai 2026 · 38 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Maggie Ma, tech content creator at @maggieindata and former geospatial data scientist. Maggie left her corporate data science role last year to become a full-time content creator across Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok. She's a 3x…
Chatting with the Physical World: Google's Yael Maguire on AI, Maps, and 280 Billion Images
22 avr. 2026 · 38 min
What happens when you give an AI the ability to see and understand the physical world? In this episode, Matt Forrest sits down with Yael Maguire, GM and VP of Google Maps Platform and Google Earth, to unpack the massive platform shift happening at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and…
Beyond the CSV: Visualizing POI Data for Global Expansion Strategy with Emily Lisle from Dataplor
20 avr. 2026 · 43 min
The future is spatial, but how do we actually make sense of the data? In this episode, we sit down with Emily Lisle from Dataplor to discuss the current state of location intelligence and how to overcome the biggest location intelligence challenges facing businesses today. We dive into the data…
AI Is Reshaping GIS Careers (Here's How to Stay Ahead)
3 avr. 2026 · 7 min
A viral LinkedIn post called "Something Big Is Happening" by Matt Schumer has been making the rounds and for good reason. In this episode, I break down why the pace of AI development should have every GIS professional paying attention, what I'm seeing in the geospatial space right now (from Claude…
Desktop GIS is Dying. Here’s What Replaced It.
20 mars 2026 · 21 min
If you are still trying to run your entire geospatial workflow on a local desktop, you are fighting a losing battle. The "Modern GIS Stack" looks chaotic at first glance with dozens of logos, cloud formats, and new databases. But once you strip away the noise, there are actually only a few key…
The Next GPS? Why GeoAI is the New Invisible Infrastructure with Pierrick Poulenas (Picterra)
18 mars 2026 · 33 min
Have you ever stopped to think about how GPS completely changed the world simply by becoming an invisible infrastructure running in the background of our everyday apps? According to Pierrick Poulenas, the CEO and co-founder of Picterra, the exact same pattern is playing out right now with Earth…
Mastering Spatial Data in R: TidyCensus, PMTiles, & AI with Kyle Walker
17 févr. 2026 · 51 min
In this episode of the Spatial Stack, Matt sits down with Kyle Walker, Professor of Geography at TCU and the creator of popular R packages like tigris and tidycensus. Kyle dives into why he views US Census data as critical infrastructure and how open data is fundamentally transforming…
#40: The "GPT Moment" for Earth: Moving from Computer Vision to Large Earth Models
11 févr. 2026 · 60 min
We have never had more data about our planet: petabytes of satellite imagery, aerial photos, and sensor readings collected daily. Yet, turning that massive volume of "noise" into a clear signal remains the fundamental challenge of the geospatial industry. In this episode of the Spatial Stack, I…
#39: Why Geospatial Needs the Lakehouse with Damian Wylie
4 févr. 2026 · 38 min
There are trillions of dollars invested in the physical world every da: infrastructure, supply chains, and our planet. Yet many of these massive decisions are made without the data to back them up. For too long, geospatial analytics has been gated behind specialized teams and siloed technology,…
#38: How Apache Sedona Solved Big Data’s Hardest Problem with Jia Yu
29 janv. 2026 · 55 min
Large Language Models can write poetry and debug code, but they still don't understand the fundamental physics of the real world. Ask an AI to find the "nearest restaurant" to a specific coordinate, and it struggles because it lacks Spatial Intelligence. In this episode, we sit down with Jia Yu,…
The Hidden History (and Flaws) of the Zip Code
23 janv. 2026 · 10 min
In 1963, the US Postal Service introduced "Mr. Zip" to make mail delivery faster. They never intended for those five digits to determine your insurance premiums, your home value, or your health outcomes. In this short deep-dive, we explore how an arbitrary logistical tool became a shorthand for…
#37: From Static Maps to Living Systems: How AI Is Changing Global Mapping with Cliff Allison from TomTom
21 janv. 2026 · 58 min
Maps have been around for thousands of years, but what they represent and how they work is changing faster than ever. In this episode, I’m joined by Cliff Allison, who has spent more than 30 years building enterprise-scale mapping systems for governments and global organizations. Today, he leads…