March 19, 2025 • 34 mins
Astro Teller is Alphabet’s Captain of Moonshots. He oversees projects at X – the moonshot factory behind innovations like Waymo and Google Brain. To celebrate X’s 15 years of pushing boundaries, Astro Teller decided to take listeners inside the factory. On The Moonshot Podcast, inventors and entrepreneurs behind breakthrough technologies reflect on their projects, both the highs and the lows. Teller sits down with Oz to discuss the process of experimentation, the importance of accepting failure and the future of innovation at Alphabet’s X.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Each week on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth
interview with someone who has a front row seat to
the most fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined
by Astroteller. Astroteller is the captain of Moonshots for X,
an innovation lab within Alphabet, Google's parent company. To understand Astroteller,
(00:28):
you have to understand moonshots. Years ago, a moonshot might
have been slang for a long shot, but in the
technological age, it's more akin to a lofty goal or
a giant leap. So to be the captain of Moonshots,
you sort of have to be.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
The ringleader for pioneers. Now.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you've never heard of X, you've probably heard of
the products that came out of what's known as the
Moonshot Factory. Google Glass a leap forward for smart glasses
and computer vision, Weai mow actual self driving tech, and
Google Brain, a groundbreaking AI research team. All of them
got their start at X. But X is more than
(01:08):
an incubator, it's a playground. And thanks to the Moonshop podcast,
we finally get a bird's eye view of the factory floor.
Host Astroteller leads us through what feels like an oral
history about how these innovations came to be from the
perspective of the people who built them, the problems that
sparked the idea, the setbacks, the successes, and how each
(01:31):
project evolved. I had the opportunity to interview Astroteller about
the Moonshop podcast at south By Southwest. We met at
the Google office in Austin, Texas, and the first thing
I wanted to know was what motivated Alphabet to produce
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Our original excuse for making it was that we're turning
fifteen years old and just seemed like a nice time
to stop and look backwards and think about sort of
where have we come? Just for reminiscence, but also as
a way of educating ourselves and maybe sharing with other people,
Like what is a moonshot factory? Does the world only
(02:09):
need one? Does it need zero? Does it actually need
a hundred of them? I hope it's the answer, is
the last, And what can we learn from all of
these people who've gone through this process. Let me give
you a really concrete example, because if I stand on
stage and I say one of the mantras at X
(02:30):
is get into the real world as fast as possible,
get in contact with it, and get this sort of painful, complex,
dirty learning lessons from getting into the world and then
realizing in all kinds of ways you're wrong. I can
talk about why that's a good idea. It is sincerely
one of the mantras and sort of the ways that
we operated X that's very abstract, it's very philosophical. On
(02:55):
the first podcast, there's a nice moment where the Wing
team is talking about the fact that when they got
out in the world first really doing deliveries, which was
first in Australia, they were worried that people be annoyed
by the sound of their drones, and so they had
worked really hard for the propellers that are operating when
it's in hover modes, so it's just hovering above a
house and it's lowering a package on a string for
(03:17):
a delivery. They were worried that that sound is the
sound that would bother people. So they've done all this
work ahead of time to make that as quiet as possible,
and when I got out there, they found out no
one cared about.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
That sound because they were excited to be receiving the packages.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Right exactly, and it was the forward flight this zsh
right as something was going over houses, you know, sixty
seventy miles an hour, two hundred feet in the air,
which we had never considered would be the problem. That
was actually the sound that people were bothered by. And
then we went and we did the hard work of
getting that to be much quieter. And now that doesn't
(03:51):
bother people either. But hearing the chief engineer for Wing
unpack the discovery of that and then how they worked
on it makes this this very abstract idea let's say,
get in contact with the real world all of a sudden,
really concrete for people.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
So they say that, you know, a great podcast always
drops you into a scene, and your podcast drops you
into quite a fascinating scene as a listener with you
and Sebastian Thrun, who originally found at Google x and
hired you in the back of a way, mo I
mean a project that you know, you guys had worked
on that really came to life. But I'm wondering if
you can drop our listeners into a scene, describe what
(04:30):
it's like to be in the Moonshot factory. I'm thinking
about roller skates. I'm thinking about the line that you
cross every morning.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Sure. So the building itself originally was the first air
conditioned mall in California. So it's a relatively old mall,
very high ceilings. We've left it quite raw, polished cement floors,
the concrete beams on the sides, like this one that's
right here where we're recording. This has a lot of
(04:56):
graffiti on it. Not this concrete one because people have
cleaned this one up, but we've left the original construction
markings you know, gas line that way, don't drill or
whatever on the concrete. It's not a decoration for us.
But it was like a why would we spend time
cleaning it up? Is that really the money we want
(05:16):
to spend? B We want the place, and I think
it successfully feels like a work in progress. And if
we're as humans as professionals and our projects are constantly
a work in progress, how can we send a lot
of unconscious signals to encourage that work in progress mentality?
And so the walls are a lot of them made
(05:37):
of plywood. Could we have used something other than plywood? Yes,
but plywood works fine, and it sends that same signal
when you come into the main lobby. We have a
lot of things hanging there on the walls or large robots.
I guess they're sitting on the floor in some cases,
but pretty universally, they're not the finished product that we made.
(06:01):
There's something that we made along the way, and that's
another opportunity for us to signal to each other and
to everyone who visits us. We're more proud of the
process than we are of the outcome, including is you're referencing.
There's this huge line across the floor and it says,
in all caps, right by the line, you may never
(06:23):
cross this line. Exclamation point ever exclamation point, And it's
a stupid rule. You can't get into the building unless
you cross the line, and it's a way to help
people practice breaking stupid rules. We don't want people to
like cause fraud or embezzle money or hurt somebody, but
(06:45):
so many rules are actually in our heads. There are
assumptions about how the world works that we haven't realized
or just assumptions, and they can and need to be questioned.
If you're going to do something unusual.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Can you describe what it feels like to work at
the Moonshot Factory?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
There is a happy, mild mannickness to being around us
every day. The Moonshot Factory is a very matrix place where,
in some great ways and maybe in some not ideal ways,
we're sort of all in each other's business all the time.
There's a lot of hey, can I help with that.
(07:24):
In fact, just as someone was dropping me off in
this room, we were ending a conversation about ways we
could be even better at not worrying about whose job
was what, but we could just like jump in and
help not only things that are still at X, but
we were actually talking about something that has left X,
and people at X were saying, oh, do we still
need to be helping them? He was like, who cares?
(07:45):
Like they're part of us? They were a graduate of ours,
just like, jump in and help. That's a lot of
what it feels like in the conversations in the hallways
every day. There's an ethos of helpfulness, of excitement, a
sense of purpose. The philosophy of experimentation plays out all
(08:05):
the time. Every day. There's very much a why don't
we just try it, like instead of talking about it
when we don't really know what the right answer is.
And this might be about some hr issue or about
some public relations issue. It might be a very technical issue.
It's actually the same thing. It's do we really know
what the right answer is. Let's make a hypothesis and
(08:27):
then find the fastest, simplest, cheapest way to test that hypothesis.
That's kind of how it feels in all the conversations
all the time.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
So I think the process is fascinating, but the output
is also fascinating, right, Like I've also been in a
Way Mow, and you know you have that experience like
this is totally uncanny, and then it becomes normal very quickly.
Google Brain obviously also spun out of X and also
gave birth, in partnership with deep Mind, to last year's
(08:55):
Nobel Prize in chemistry. What marked out, let's say, Way
Mow and Brain as huge successes versus the projects that
didn't graduate.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
What characterizes a success in a failure?
Speaker 3 (09:08):
At least the way it feels at X is we
start on a whole bunch of unlikely journeys. But I
don't know that we're much better than random at predicting
ahead of time, what's going to be a great idea?
If we were great at predicting what's going to be
a great idea. We would only work on the great ideas.
I don't think anybody gets that privilege. There are people
(09:29):
who pick one thing. They announced that they have the
right idea, and then they work really hard on it
and it turns out they did have a great idea.
That's just survivor bias thought. Those are just the ones
you hear. There are a thousand people who said they
had a great idea and worked really hard on it,
and just they didn't have a great idea it turns out,
and so they went away. The one person who made
(09:51):
it is not necessarily smarter. Mostly I believe we believe
at X they just got lucky. So we start about
a thousand things per decade, and then we're always looking
for evidence. Is this really a once in a generation
opportunity for the world to make the world better and
to create an enduring business. And when the evidence starts
(10:11):
to pile up, no, or at least we can't get
good evidence that the answer is yes, we throw it away.
So brain and way Mow survived those pressure tests, that's
really what happened. It wasn't this was the good stuff
ahead of time. It's more like the evidence piled up
that it turns out these were particularly good ideas, And
(10:33):
you know, maybe there were things that we've tried that
were really good ideas, but we just didn't find the
right wedge in on the problem. So maybe somebody else will.
And in a number of cases we've actually when we
wound something down, we've published to the rest of the
world everything that we learned so that they could build
on top of that.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
When we come back.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
How an innovation playground birthed in the era of endless
optimism maintains its momentum. Stay with us, Welcome back to
tech Stuff. I'm talking to Astroteller about the new podcast
out of Alphabet's ex called the Moonshot Podcast. There's an
(11:25):
interesting moment in the podcast where Sebastian Thrunn, the co
founder of x, describes a conversation he had with former
Google CEO Larry Page back in two thousand and five.
Larry asked Thron to come to Google and make a
self driving car essentially out of nowhere, and Thron, though
skeptical of the outcome, took a leap of faith and
(11:46):
started experimenting, creating what would ultimately become the Moonshop Factory.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This was during the era.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Of endless optimism in Silicon Valley, but fifteen years later
there seems to have been something of a vibe shift
cuts at old big tech companies, including cuts that have
affected Eggs, And I wanted to know if Astarteta thought
this vibe shift affects X.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Today, we're constantly learning and trying to improve, but I
hope that that vibe shift hasn't per se changed us
at all. Let me describe that in another way. From
the very beginning, we've been trying to find ways to
make a moonshot factory. That is, keep our audacity really high,
(12:30):
but find ways to systematize the process. So we've been
committed to that for fifteen years. And as soon as
you commit to the factory part of it, not just
the moonshot part of it, you are pre committing to
a constant attempt to up the rigor without killing off
the magic. And so we didn't need a vibe shift
(12:51):
to get interested in efficiency. We've always been interested in
how to keep ratcheting up that efficiency. That's not a
new thing for us. And so that vibe shift of
anything has aligned the world better with what we were
already trying to do, which is, we want to be
creating a great return on investment where the things that
(13:12):
we produce are worth more than enough to justify the
money we've spent and the time that it took to
make ten or fifteen year period. Now it happens that
Alphabet is very long term in its thinking, which it
does to its great long term benefits. And you know,
it has become a very large business by thinking long
term and by having the bravery to place these much
(13:36):
longer term bets, and so X has received the support
from Alphabet, which I'm very grateful for. And in that context,
we're continuing to do our job. How can we take
these audacious attempts to find something really great for the
world that is also you know, significant shareholder value production,
(13:59):
and to do that as efficiently as possible. Understanding we're
still going to be wrong ninety nine percent of the time.
The question is not how do we get it so
we're only wrong ninety percent of the time. The question
at X is how do we discover the ninety nine
percent where we're wrong as fast and as cheaply as possible.
The better we get at that part of the riggor
(14:23):
that one percent that comes through will come through more
and more efficiently because we've spent less and less time
and money on the stuff where it turned out not
to be a great idea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And one of the things you said was that as
a manager, you don't want to be telling people I
want to kill that idea. You want them to come
to you proactivity and kill their own ideas.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
That's right. So if you worked at X and you're
building the Teleporter project or whatever, if I believe that
you can't practice intellectual honesty and work in the betterment
for X and alphabet of X's overall portfolio, including a
dispassionate view of your own work, at least periodically, you
(15:02):
and I are fundamentally in antagonism with each other. You're
not only not on my team, you're actually working against
my team. If you're being overly partisan to what you do,
then why do I even.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Have you here?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
That's horrible. If we were an actual incubator, I would
get it, because then we're just this system and you're
trying to leach energy off of us to launch your thing.
You're supposed to be partisan to your thing, but that's
not what we're doing at the Moonshot Factory. All of
us here, including you if you've joined the Moonshot Factory,
are working to systematize innovation. And while I hope that
(15:38):
your teleporter works out, I don't hope that nearly as
much is that the factory works out. And if you
aren't on that team, you're not going to be happy
at X.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So you, obviously, through an iterative process, taken ideas to fruition,
whether it's Weimo, Brain Wing or others. What does the
iterative process of the Moonshelt Fight Tree itself been. I
think he specifically you spoke about measuring or creating a
balance between efficiency and magic making.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
I mean yes, and I can give you examples of that.
But let me tell you about something that has evolved
for us over time. We've been realizing more and more
that for at least many of the things that we make,
landing them outside Alphabet is actually better for Alphabet and
for the project the proto company as it becomes a company.
(16:33):
So Alphabet can still have a large minority interest in
this business. But if it's outside of Alphabet and Alphabet
doesn't control it, then get it can participate in market
capital and get strategic partners in a way that's different
than if it's inside alphabet. It can go faster in
(16:53):
some ways for being decoupled from Alphabet, which is also
a complex, very large business. So we're finding ways to
sort of systematize the landing of things more and more
outside of Alphabet. And that's something we've learned through the
process of making these other bets. And it sometimes happens
that being in a culturally, operationally and legally separate entity
(17:18):
within Alphabet, weimo wing intrinsic these verily these kinds of
things that came from X. It works. It's sometimes good
for them, but it's not for all of them. And
so that's an example where we've been trying to learn
ourselves how we can do our job better, systematize our
process and the conveyor belt for these ideas to optimize
(17:40):
their chances of being really great for the world.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
I don't want to drag you into politics, but this
word efficiency has obviously become very very loaded recently, and
there's a kind of wider debate within the country about
the value of supporting a government supporting long term science
and research initiatives versus cutting waste and cutting efficiency. If
you have one sort of piece of advice to another organization,
be it government or another company, What would you say
(18:06):
about what you've learned in terms of balancing those two imperatives.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Well, first of all, getting efficient is generally a good goal,
but you have to know what game you're playing. In
our case, because we believe that we're in the moonshot business,
it's super important, as I've been describing, that the efficiency
stays balanced with what we're trying to do, and there
(18:31):
has to be a lot of exploration and a lot
of being wrong. So if you propose the teleporter project,
and I start with here's the thirty reasons, that's stupid.
One you will never bring up a creative idea ever again. Two,
it's easy to say that thirty thousand reasons why some
(18:52):
unusual idea isn't going to work. But then we aren't
going to go on any adventures, which, by the way,
I don't believe in Taro cards metaphysically, but there is
a tarot card poster of the fool. It's the only
thing on the door of my huddle. Because the activity
of setting out on a new journey is the activity
(19:14):
of creation, and that's the job that we're all in
at X, and so if you ran a widget factory,
you might have a very different set of goals with efficiency,
and you might do six sigma and that might be
reasonable for you. Six sigma is the wrong way to
think about efficiency at a moonshot factory. And you know,
(19:34):
I'll leave it to people who are smarter than me
to figure out how the government should focus on efficiency productively.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Fair enough, coming up, what Astro tele learned from his
grandfather about innovation, Stay with us, welcome back to tech stuff.
(20:08):
Before I had the opportunity to interview Astro Teller at
the Google office in Austin, Texas, I saw him on
a live panel moderated by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
At one point, Nick.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Started to say that government had created a lot of
innovation throughout the twentieth century. At one point, Nicholas Thompson
started to ask a question around how government had driven
a lot of innovation in the twentieth century, and Astro
quickly interjected, saying, actually government funded research, which in turn
drove innovation.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It was a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
You'll be able to hear the whole thing because it's
going to be episode ten of the Moonshot podcast, and
Astro Teller has first hand knowledge of these relationships because
his grandfather, Edward Teller, was one of the key members
of the Manhattan Project, the R and D project that
developed nuclear weapons during World War Two. So I asked Teller,
how does he think about the balance between academia and
(21:02):
deep research, government and private labs like Google Eggs when
it comes to building a future.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
I think it's a place for all of them. You know,
there will probably from time to time always be some
issues which are national security level issues, and it's rational
for any government, including the United States government, to spend
money to solve those things in a somewhat cost and
sensitive way because it's a national security issue. The Manhattan
(21:28):
Project was an example of that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You have toio granfather' not working on that, by.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
The way, frequently. Yeah, there will always be a place
in all countries for basic science because the raw material
of training the next generation of people in all the
stem fields creates this sort of rich soil from which
(21:52):
really great new things can spring. And then obviously private organizations,
either ones in history like the Bell Labs or Xerox Park,
or maybe more modern things like x the Moonshot factory,
I think also have a place because something has to
bridge between the Silicon Valley venture world of we can
(22:15):
see where we're going. It's kind of a ways off,
but we can see it, and we just want to
rush there as fast as possible. Academia, Oh my god,
we found a frictionless surface, but we have no idea
what this is good for. There's a big gap between
those two things, and I think that moonshot factories, not
just the one that we're making, but I think others
out in the world could over time fill that gap
(22:39):
really effectively.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I wonder if you you could talk briefly about your
grandfather and was that one conversation or one piece of
advice he gave you from the point of view of
the Manhattan Project that put you on the path through
on today.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I mean, I'd give a few things. First of all,
he liked to quote Neil's Boorr, who said that an
expert is someone who's made the majority of the mistakes
in their field. And I think that that is one
of the things that helped me lock in on the
understanding of failure is an inherent part of becoming an expert,
(23:12):
of becoming really good at something or of learning like
what anything should be to. My grandfather was a great orator,
and I had a mild speech impediment when I was
a kid, and I learned a lot from him by
watching him speak in private settings and interviews like this
on stages. I learned a lot from him about how
(23:33):
he connected with individuals and within an audience. I really
looked up to that particular skill of his and I
learned a lot from it. Also the Manhattan Project. He
had no real interest in bombs. That's not actually what
got him at all excited. He had a great interest
in physics and technology, but his single largest interest was
(23:58):
in being around phenomenal, the interesting and creative other people,
and the idea that you could get a group of
people together and create a subculture somewhat protected from the
rest of the world, so that you could foment some
really new ideas together in a very creative kind of crucible.
(24:22):
That is the thing I most took away from his
experience with the Manhattan Project, And obviously the Moonshot Factory
is pointed in very different directions, but I think I
was inspired by that.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
I'm sure as somebody who knows the real story. You
had a bunch of issues with Oppenheimer the movie, but
that sense that a group of people physically co located
in a space working on a mission was very fascinating.
I think it's part of what comes through with the
podcast as well.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I mean, you have collected all of these people.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Who've been on the journey with you for fifteen years
and kind of sharing stories with one another and with
the public about how that drove innovation.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
At south By Southwest.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
One of the biggest stories was the wooly Mouse, Colossal
Biosciences and the gene editing project to revive the woolly mammoth,
which has created the woody mouse along the way. A
lot of these like science fiction type stories are becoming
science factor right. AI, machine learning, gene editing, quantum has
been in the news in the last couple of weeks
(25:24):
as these platform technologies emerge around you, like, how do
you think about the role of X in terms of
figuring out the past interacting with them.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
One of the things that's really important in the Moonshot
Factor is we're playing such a long game that there's
a temptation for the whole world, and it does seep
into X to what I think of as kind of
swarm with everybody.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Else skate towards the perk core.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Well, yeah, I mean, but I'm interested in like the
pucks that other people aren't watching by the time everyone
is like over fixated on a puck and everyone is
rushing towards that puck as they are right now with
llms and generative AI, I mean, a lot of value
will be created over time, a lot of goodness for
the world through these foundation models and what we can
(26:13):
do with them. The world does not need us rushing
at that. Everyone else is rushing at that. And you know,
we were one of the groups that set off that
sort of ripple effect because of Google Brain. Because of
Google Brain, our job now should be what can we
do today that thirteen or fifteen years from now is
(26:34):
as important then as the effects of Google Brain are today.
That's our real job is to be working on things
that when you looked at them, if you came and
looked at our earliest stuff, you should say, I don't know,
there's probably nothing, and you'd be mostly right, but not
entirely right. And that's our job is for one and
a hundred of those things. To turn out to be
(26:56):
Google Brain level important and we don't know ahead of
time which one is it'll be.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And that takes like.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Constant bravery and creativity and open mindedness paired with humility.
We're wrong most of the time. How can we get
the evidence that verifies this isn't one of those things?
So we can stop doing it?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
And I mean, I'm sure that you have to be
very sensitive in terms of what you share publicly, but
are there any early signals you're getting from interaction with
the real world about things that you're working on today
that maybe you know in season ten of the of
the Google x podcast, the Moonshot Factory podcast will be
featured ten years from now.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I'm increasingly confident by watching the experiments that we've done
and this has been This isn't a single project.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
This is a range of them.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
That biology is moving and a decent clip from being
a science to being an engineering discipline.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (27:48):
What that means is it is already true today that
you can go into ecoli or yeas to bacteria cell
and reprogram it. You can change its d you can
change its environment and ask it as best you can
to do something other than what it would normally do.
Let's say to produce a lot of a thing it's
(28:11):
not used to producing, but that would be useful for people.
That might be an enzyme that goes into laundry detergent
for breaking down things when you put it in the wash.
That could be a human milk sugar that you want
to produce so it can go into baby formula. There's
universe of things you might ask these self replicating carbon
negative machines that biology has invented for us to make
(28:35):
the problem is you don't know what it will do
when you reprogram it. There is no simulator where you
can test it out. So it was incredibly like trial
and error. If you're a strain engineer, you just have
to make some change in the code of this little
tiny factory to sell and then stick it into a
Petri dish and watch it and like, well what does
(28:58):
it do? That caused very slow inovation in this space.
But if you could try this in a computer, you
would be going thousands, tens of thousands of times faster
and discovering stuff. So we're seeing more and more evidence
that that's going to be a thing. I think that's
going to turn out to be really important for humanity.
(29:18):
For healthcare, sure, like making of drugs. Almost anything that
you wouldn't call manufacturing could be the domain of biology
to make. So the clothing that we're wearing, like, there's
no reason biology couldn't be producing this stuff, turning plastics
back into the raw materials, or making those raw materials
(29:41):
in the first place so that we don't have to
burn fossil fuels in order to make plastics. There's no
reason biology couldn't do that. Yes, medicine for people, there's
trillions of dollars a year that humans produce in various
kinds of what look like factories or refineries that we
do in a very industrial way today because we know
(30:04):
how to mechanically make things. We have some facility to
chemically make things, but we haven't figured out how to
program biology to make those things. So I see that
as a big shift in during the twenty first century.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
You're talking at south By Southwest about turning trash back
into treasure. And there was a big Dickens fan growing up,
and Dickens is always writing about kind of hunting through
trash heaps to find these miraculous pieces of treasure and stuff.
It used a phrase that I've never heard before, but
that I'd love you to expound on, which is moonshot compost.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Yes, so I mean let me unpack both a little
bit so that the difference is clear. When I say
turning trash into treasure. What I was talking about was
humanity spends sort of, depending on how you count, five
or six trillion dollars a year making stuff, and then
the leftovers, which again reasonable people could disagree, but it
(30:59):
is arguably worth at least a few trillion dollars a
year goes into landfill of various kinds. This is plastics,
this is e waste, like leftover computers. This is things
like we break down a building like the one we're in,
and all of the rubble, all of the metal, it
all just goes to landfill. We reuse this stuff terribly.
(31:20):
Think how hard we worked to get this metal out
of the ground in the first place. It's already refined,
but we don't quite know how to reuse itself. Just
all goes to landfill. If we could make it profitable
to take that several trillion dollars a year of stuff
that right now is going to landfill and turn it
back into the raw material for humanity. One there's a
(31:42):
ridiculous amount of money to be made doing that, but two,
it would actually cause human existence on earth to be
much more circular. We could stop trying to be so
extractive from the world and be more circular. So that's
what I meant by turning trash into treasure, And there's
lots to be said about that separately. Metaphorically, we think
(32:02):
about the exact same thing at X. So if you
work on the Teleporter project, you're just passionate about it,
you decide that it's not as good as you thought,
we're going to end the Teleporter project. Congratulations, Good for you,
high five that you're doing the right thing. Here's a
bonus for you and for your whole team. Now you
have a few months where you can sort of explore
(32:24):
the factory and find out what your next thing at
the factory is. We don't have to throw away the people.
We don't have to throw away the code that you wrote.
We don't have to throw away the patents that you filed.
We don't have to throw away the partnerships that you
built or the hardware. There's so much that might get
reused in some way from what you did, even if
it's in surprising, very alternate uses, and so the process
(32:49):
of reminding ourselves over and over again. Just because we
stopped the project, it doesn't mean there isn't a lot
of value here. That's what we mean when we say
Moonshot compost. It is the reusing and the sort of
second and third lives of all of this knowledge creation
that because it stays in the factory, it's frictionless for
(33:10):
us to reuse it. And that also makes it easier
when you stop a project to know that it isn't
just like zeroed out, that it's back in the dirt
and it's going to come back in some interesting new forum.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
That was Astrotella Alphabet's Captain of Moonshots. Check out the
Moonshot podcast wherever you get your podcasts for tech stuff,
I'm oz Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis
and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me Carrot
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle via
our Podcasts. Nomad Sound recorded this interview. Jack Insley mikesed
(33:50):
the episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us this Friday for tech Stuff's We Can Tech. We'll
run through the headlines and hear from four or four
Media's Joseph Cox about a tool that allows one ICE
surveillance contractor to scrape over two hundred sites, apps, and
services for data on targeted individuals. Please rate, review, and
(34:12):
reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail
dot com.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
We really want to hear from you.
Welcome to tech Stuff. This is the story.
Speaker 2 (00:04):
Each week on Wednesdays, we bring you an in depth
interview with someone who has a front row seat to
the most fascinating things happening in tech today. We're joined
by Astroteller. Astroteller is the captain of Moonshots for X,
an innovation lab within Alphabet, Google's parent company. To understand Astroteller,
(00:28):
you have to understand moonshots. Years ago, a moonshot might
have been slang for a long shot, but in the
technological age, it's more akin to a lofty goal or
a giant leap. So to be the captain of Moonshots,
you sort of have to be.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
The ringleader for pioneers. Now.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
If you've never heard of X, you've probably heard of
the products that came out of what's known as the
Moonshot Factory. Google Glass a leap forward for smart glasses
and computer vision, Weai mow actual self driving tech, and
Google Brain, a groundbreaking AI research team. All of them
got their start at X. But X is more than
(01:08):
an incubator, it's a playground. And thanks to the Moonshop podcast,
we finally get a bird's eye view of the factory floor.
Host Astroteller leads us through what feels like an oral
history about how these innovations came to be from the
perspective of the people who built them, the problems that
sparked the idea, the setbacks, the successes, and how each
(01:31):
project evolved. I had the opportunity to interview Astroteller about
the Moonshop podcast at south By Southwest. We met at
the Google office in Austin, Texas, and the first thing
I wanted to know was what motivated Alphabet to produce
this podcast.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Our original excuse for making it was that we're turning
fifteen years old and just seemed like a nice time
to stop and look backwards and think about sort of
where have we come? Just for reminiscence, but also as
a way of educating ourselves and maybe sharing with other people,
Like what is a moonshot factory? Does the world only
(02:09):
need one? Does it need zero? Does it actually need
a hundred of them? I hope it's the answer, is
the last, And what can we learn from all of
these people who've gone through this process. Let me give
you a really concrete example, because if I stand on
stage and I say one of the mantras at X
(02:30):
is get into the real world as fast as possible,
get in contact with it, and get this sort of painful, complex,
dirty learning lessons from getting into the world and then
realizing in all kinds of ways you're wrong. I can
talk about why that's a good idea. It is sincerely
one of the mantras and sort of the ways that
we operated X that's very abstract, it's very philosophical. On
(02:55):
the first podcast, there's a nice moment where the Wing
team is talking about the fact that when they got
out in the world first really doing deliveries, which was
first in Australia, they were worried that people be annoyed
by the sound of their drones, and so they had
worked really hard for the propellers that are operating when
it's in hover modes, so it's just hovering above a
house and it's lowering a package on a string for
(03:17):
a delivery. They were worried that that sound is the
sound that would bother people. So they've done all this
work ahead of time to make that as quiet as possible,
and when I got out there, they found out no
one cared about.
Speaker 1 (03:28):
That sound because they were excited to be receiving the packages.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Right exactly, and it was the forward flight this zsh
right as something was going over houses, you know, sixty
seventy miles an hour, two hundred feet in the air,
which we had never considered would be the problem. That
was actually the sound that people were bothered by. And
then we went and we did the hard work of
getting that to be much quieter. And now that doesn't
(03:51):
bother people either. But hearing the chief engineer for Wing
unpack the discovery of that and then how they worked
on it makes this this very abstract idea let's say,
get in contact with the real world all of a sudden,
really concrete for people.
Speaker 2 (04:07):
So they say that, you know, a great podcast always
drops you into a scene, and your podcast drops you
into quite a fascinating scene as a listener with you
and Sebastian Thrun, who originally found at Google x and
hired you in the back of a way, mo I
mean a project that you know, you guys had worked
on that really came to life. But I'm wondering if
you can drop our listeners into a scene, describe what
(04:30):
it's like to be in the Moonshot factory. I'm thinking
about roller skates. I'm thinking about the line that you
cross every morning.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
Sure. So the building itself originally was the first air
conditioned mall in California. So it's a relatively old mall,
very high ceilings. We've left it quite raw, polished cement floors,
the concrete beams on the sides, like this one that's
right here where we're recording. This has a lot of
(04:56):
graffiti on it. Not this concrete one because people have
cleaned this one up, but we've left the original construction
markings you know, gas line that way, don't drill or
whatever on the concrete. It's not a decoration for us.
But it was like a why would we spend time
cleaning it up? Is that really the money we want
(05:16):
to spend? B We want the place, and I think
it successfully feels like a work in progress. And if
we're as humans as professionals and our projects are constantly
a work in progress, how can we send a lot
of unconscious signals to encourage that work in progress mentality?
And so the walls are a lot of them made
(05:37):
of plywood. Could we have used something other than plywood? Yes,
but plywood works fine, and it sends that same signal
when you come into the main lobby. We have a
lot of things hanging there on the walls or large robots.
I guess they're sitting on the floor in some cases,
but pretty universally, they're not the finished product that we made.
(06:01):
There's something that we made along the way, and that's
another opportunity for us to signal to each other and
to everyone who visits us. We're more proud of the
process than we are of the outcome, including is you're referencing.
There's this huge line across the floor and it says,
in all caps, right by the line, you may never
(06:23):
cross this line. Exclamation point ever exclamation point, And it's
a stupid rule. You can't get into the building unless
you cross the line, and it's a way to help
people practice breaking stupid rules. We don't want people to
like cause fraud or embezzle money or hurt somebody, but
(06:45):
so many rules are actually in our heads. There are
assumptions about how the world works that we haven't realized
or just assumptions, and they can and need to be questioned.
If you're going to do something unusual.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
Can you describe what it feels like to work at
the Moonshot Factory?
Speaker 3 (07:03):
There is a happy, mild mannickness to being around us
every day. The Moonshot Factory is a very matrix place where,
in some great ways and maybe in some not ideal ways,
we're sort of all in each other's business all the time.
There's a lot of hey, can I help with that.
(07:24):
In fact, just as someone was dropping me off in
this room, we were ending a conversation about ways we
could be even better at not worrying about whose job
was what, but we could just like jump in and
help not only things that are still at X, but
we were actually talking about something that has left X,
and people at X were saying, oh, do we still
need to be helping them? He was like, who cares?
(07:45):
Like they're part of us? They were a graduate of ours,
just like, jump in and help. That's a lot of
what it feels like in the conversations in the hallways
every day. There's an ethos of helpfulness, of excitement, a
sense of purpose. The philosophy of experimentation plays out all
(08:05):
the time. Every day. There's very much a why don't
we just try it, like instead of talking about it
when we don't really know what the right answer is.
And this might be about some hr issue or about
some public relations issue. It might be a very technical issue.
It's actually the same thing. It's do we really know
what the right answer is. Let's make a hypothesis and
(08:27):
then find the fastest, simplest, cheapest way to test that hypothesis.
That's kind of how it feels in all the conversations
all the time.
Speaker 2 (08:34):
So I think the process is fascinating, but the output
is also fascinating, right, Like I've also been in a
Way Mow, and you know you have that experience like
this is totally uncanny, and then it becomes normal very quickly.
Google Brain obviously also spun out of X and also
gave birth, in partnership with deep Mind, to last year's
(08:55):
Nobel Prize in chemistry. What marked out, let's say, Way
Mow and Brain as huge successes versus the projects that
didn't graduate.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
What characterizes a success in a failure?
Speaker 3 (09:08):
At least the way it feels at X is we
start on a whole bunch of unlikely journeys. But I
don't know that we're much better than random at predicting
ahead of time, what's going to be a great idea?
If we were great at predicting what's going to be
a great idea. We would only work on the great ideas.
I don't think anybody gets that privilege. There are people
(09:29):
who pick one thing. They announced that they have the
right idea, and then they work really hard on it
and it turns out they did have a great idea.
That's just survivor bias thought. Those are just the ones
you hear. There are a thousand people who said they
had a great idea and worked really hard on it,
and just they didn't have a great idea it turns out,
and so they went away. The one person who made
(09:51):
it is not necessarily smarter. Mostly I believe we believe
at X they just got lucky. So we start about
a thousand things per decade, and then we're always looking
for evidence. Is this really a once in a generation
opportunity for the world to make the world better and
to create an enduring business. And when the evidence starts
(10:11):
to pile up, no, or at least we can't get
good evidence that the answer is yes, we throw it away.
So brain and way Mow survived those pressure tests, that's
really what happened. It wasn't this was the good stuff
ahead of time. It's more like the evidence piled up
that it turns out these were particularly good ideas, And
(10:33):
you know, maybe there were things that we've tried that
were really good ideas, but we just didn't find the
right wedge in on the problem. So maybe somebody else will.
And in a number of cases we've actually when we
wound something down, we've published to the rest of the
world everything that we learned so that they could build
on top of that.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
When we come back.
Speaker 2 (11:01):
How an innovation playground birthed in the era of endless
optimism maintains its momentum. Stay with us, Welcome back to
tech Stuff. I'm talking to Astroteller about the new podcast
out of Alphabet's ex called the Moonshot Podcast. There's an
(11:25):
interesting moment in the podcast where Sebastian Thrunn, the co
founder of x, describes a conversation he had with former
Google CEO Larry Page back in two thousand and five.
Larry asked Thron to come to Google and make a
self driving car essentially out of nowhere, and Thron, though
skeptical of the outcome, took a leap of faith and
(11:46):
started experimenting, creating what would ultimately become the Moonshop Factory.
Speaker 1 (11:52):
This was during the era.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
Of endless optimism in Silicon Valley, but fifteen years later
there seems to have been something of a vibe shift
cuts at old big tech companies, including cuts that have
affected Eggs, And I wanted to know if Astarteta thought
this vibe shift affects X.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
Today, we're constantly learning and trying to improve, but I
hope that that vibe shift hasn't per se changed us
at all. Let me describe that in another way. From
the very beginning, we've been trying to find ways to
make a moonshot factory. That is, keep our audacity really high,
(12:30):
but find ways to systematize the process. So we've been
committed to that for fifteen years. And as soon as
you commit to the factory part of it, not just
the moonshot part of it, you are pre committing to
a constant attempt to up the rigor without killing off
the magic. And so we didn't need a vibe shift
(12:51):
to get interested in efficiency. We've always been interested in
how to keep ratcheting up that efficiency. That's not a
new thing for us. And so that vibe shift of
anything has aligned the world better with what we were
already trying to do, which is, we want to be
creating a great return on investment where the things that
(13:12):
we produce are worth more than enough to justify the
money we've spent and the time that it took to
make ten or fifteen year period. Now it happens that
Alphabet is very long term in its thinking, which it
does to its great long term benefits. And you know,
it has become a very large business by thinking long
term and by having the bravery to place these much
(13:36):
longer term bets, and so X has received the support
from Alphabet, which I'm very grateful for. And in that context,
we're continuing to do our job. How can we take
these audacious attempts to find something really great for the
world that is also you know, significant shareholder value production,
(13:59):
and to do that as efficiently as possible. Understanding we're
still going to be wrong ninety nine percent of the time.
The question is not how do we get it so
we're only wrong ninety percent of the time. The question
at X is how do we discover the ninety nine
percent where we're wrong as fast and as cheaply as possible.
The better we get at that part of the riggor
(14:23):
that one percent that comes through will come through more
and more efficiently because we've spent less and less time
and money on the stuff where it turned out not
to be a great idea.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
And one of the things you said was that as
a manager, you don't want to be telling people I
want to kill that idea. You want them to come
to you proactivity and kill their own ideas.
Speaker 3 (14:39):
That's right. So if you worked at X and you're
building the Teleporter project or whatever, if I believe that
you can't practice intellectual honesty and work in the betterment
for X and alphabet of X's overall portfolio, including a
dispassionate view of your own work, at least periodically, you
(15:02):
and I are fundamentally in antagonism with each other. You're
not only not on my team, you're actually working against
my team. If you're being overly partisan to what you do,
then why do I even.
Speaker 1 (15:16):
Have you here?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
That's horrible. If we were an actual incubator, I would
get it, because then we're just this system and you're
trying to leach energy off of us to launch your thing.
You're supposed to be partisan to your thing, but that's
not what we're doing at the Moonshot Factory. All of
us here, including you if you've joined the Moonshot Factory,
are working to systematize innovation. And while I hope that
(15:38):
your teleporter works out, I don't hope that nearly as
much is that the factory works out. And if you
aren't on that team, you're not going to be happy
at X.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
So you, obviously, through an iterative process, taken ideas to fruition,
whether it's Weimo, Brain Wing or others. What does the
iterative process of the Moonshelt Fight Tree itself been. I
think he specifically you spoke about measuring or creating a
balance between efficiency and magic making.
Speaker 3 (16:10):
I mean yes, and I can give you examples of that.
But let me tell you about something that has evolved
for us over time. We've been realizing more and more
that for at least many of the things that we make,
landing them outside Alphabet is actually better for Alphabet and
for the project the proto company as it becomes a company.
(16:33):
So Alphabet can still have a large minority interest in
this business. But if it's outside of Alphabet and Alphabet
doesn't control it, then get it can participate in market
capital and get strategic partners in a way that's different
than if it's inside alphabet. It can go faster in
(16:53):
some ways for being decoupled from Alphabet, which is also
a complex, very large business. So we're finding ways to
sort of systematize the landing of things more and more
outside of Alphabet. And that's something we've learned through the
process of making these other bets. And it sometimes happens
that being in a culturally, operationally and legally separate entity
(17:18):
within Alphabet, weimo wing intrinsic these verily these kinds of
things that came from X. It works. It's sometimes good
for them, but it's not for all of them. And
so that's an example where we've been trying to learn
ourselves how we can do our job better, systematize our
process and the conveyor belt for these ideas to optimize
(17:40):
their chances of being really great for the world.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
I don't want to drag you into politics, but this
word efficiency has obviously become very very loaded recently, and
there's a kind of wider debate within the country about
the value of supporting a government supporting long term science
and research initiatives versus cutting waste and cutting efficiency. If
you have one sort of piece of advice to another organization,
be it government or another company, What would you say
(18:06):
about what you've learned in terms of balancing those two imperatives.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Well, first of all, getting efficient is generally a good goal,
but you have to know what game you're playing. In
our case, because we believe that we're in the moonshot business,
it's super important, as I've been describing, that the efficiency
stays balanced with what we're trying to do, and there
(18:31):
has to be a lot of exploration and a lot
of being wrong. So if you propose the teleporter project,
and I start with here's the thirty reasons, that's stupid.
One you will never bring up a creative idea ever again. Two,
it's easy to say that thirty thousand reasons why some
(18:52):
unusual idea isn't going to work. But then we aren't
going to go on any adventures, which, by the way,
I don't believe in Taro cards metaphysically, but there is
a tarot card poster of the fool. It's the only
thing on the door of my huddle. Because the activity
of setting out on a new journey is the activity
(19:14):
of creation, and that's the job that we're all in
at X, and so if you ran a widget factory,
you might have a very different set of goals with efficiency,
and you might do six sigma and that might be
reasonable for you. Six sigma is the wrong way to
think about efficiency at a moonshot factory. And you know,
(19:34):
I'll leave it to people who are smarter than me
to figure out how the government should focus on efficiency productively.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Fair enough, coming up, what Astro tele learned from his
grandfather about innovation, Stay with us, welcome back to tech stuff.
(20:08):
Before I had the opportunity to interview Astro Teller at
the Google office in Austin, Texas, I saw him on
a live panel moderated by Nicholas Thompson, CEO of the Atlantic.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
At one point, Nick.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Started to say that government had created a lot of
innovation throughout the twentieth century. At one point, Nicholas Thompson
started to ask a question around how government had driven
a lot of innovation in the twentieth century, and Astro
quickly interjected, saying, actually government funded research, which in turn
drove innovation.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
It was a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
You'll be able to hear the whole thing because it's
going to be episode ten of the Moonshot podcast, and
Astro Teller has first hand knowledge of these relationships because
his grandfather, Edward Teller, was one of the key members
of the Manhattan Project, the R and D project that
developed nuclear weapons during World War Two. So I asked Teller,
how does he think about the balance between academia and
(21:02):
deep research, government and private labs like Google Eggs when
it comes to building a future.
Speaker 3 (21:08):
I think it's a place for all of them. You know,
there will probably from time to time always be some
issues which are national security level issues, and it's rational
for any government, including the United States government, to spend
money to solve those things in a somewhat cost and
sensitive way because it's a national security issue. The Manhattan
(21:28):
Project was an example of that.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
You have toio granfather' not working on that, by.
Speaker 3 (21:31):
The way, frequently. Yeah, there will always be a place
in all countries for basic science because the raw material
of training the next generation of people in all the
stem fields creates this sort of rich soil from which
(21:52):
really great new things can spring. And then obviously private organizations,
either ones in history like the Bell Labs or Xerox Park,
or maybe more modern things like x the Moonshot factory,
I think also have a place because something has to
bridge between the Silicon Valley venture world of we can
(22:15):
see where we're going. It's kind of a ways off,
but we can see it, and we just want to
rush there as fast as possible. Academia, Oh my god,
we found a frictionless surface, but we have no idea
what this is good for. There's a big gap between
those two things, and I think that moonshot factories, not
just the one that we're making, but I think others
out in the world could over time fill that gap
(22:39):
really effectively.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I wonder if you you could talk briefly about your
grandfather and was that one conversation or one piece of
advice he gave you from the point of view of
the Manhattan Project that put you on the path through
on today.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I mean, I'd give a few things. First of all,
he liked to quote Neil's Boorr, who said that an
expert is someone who's made the majority of the mistakes
in their field. And I think that that is one
of the things that helped me lock in on the
understanding of failure is an inherent part of becoming an expert,
(23:12):
of becoming really good at something or of learning like
what anything should be to. My grandfather was a great orator,
and I had a mild speech impediment when I was
a kid, and I learned a lot from him by
watching him speak in private settings and interviews like this
on stages. I learned a lot from him about how
(23:33):
he connected with individuals and within an audience. I really
looked up to that particular skill of his and I
learned a lot from it. Also the Manhattan Project. He
had no real interest in bombs. That's not actually what
got him at all excited. He had a great interest
in physics and technology, but his single largest interest was
(23:58):
in being around phenomenal, the interesting and creative other people,
and the idea that you could get a group of
people together and create a subculture somewhat protected from the
rest of the world, so that you could foment some
really new ideas together in a very creative kind of crucible.
(24:22):
That is the thing I most took away from his
experience with the Manhattan Project, And obviously the Moonshot Factory
is pointed in very different directions, but I think I
was inspired by that.
Speaker 1 (24:34):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (24:35):
I'm sure as somebody who knows the real story. You
had a bunch of issues with Oppenheimer the movie, but
that sense that a group of people physically co located
in a space working on a mission was very fascinating.
I think it's part of what comes through with the
podcast as well.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Right.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
I mean, you have collected all of these people.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
Who've been on the journey with you for fifteen years
and kind of sharing stories with one another and with
the public about how that drove innovation.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
At south By Southwest.
Speaker 2 (25:02):
One of the biggest stories was the wooly Mouse, Colossal
Biosciences and the gene editing project to revive the woolly mammoth,
which has created the woody mouse along the way. A
lot of these like science fiction type stories are becoming
science factor right. AI, machine learning, gene editing, quantum has
been in the news in the last couple of weeks
(25:24):
as these platform technologies emerge around you, like, how do
you think about the role of X in terms of
figuring out the past interacting with them.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
One of the things that's really important in the Moonshot
Factor is we're playing such a long game that there's
a temptation for the whole world, and it does seep
into X to what I think of as kind of
swarm with everybody.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Else skate towards the perk core.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
Well, yeah, I mean, but I'm interested in like the
pucks that other people aren't watching by the time everyone
is like over fixated on a puck and everyone is
rushing towards that puck as they are right now with
llms and generative AI, I mean, a lot of value
will be created over time, a lot of goodness for
the world through these foundation models and what we can
(26:13):
do with them. The world does not need us rushing
at that. Everyone else is rushing at that. And you know,
we were one of the groups that set off that
sort of ripple effect because of Google Brain. Because of
Google Brain, our job now should be what can we
do today that thirteen or fifteen years from now is
(26:34):
as important then as the effects of Google Brain are today.
That's our real job is to be working on things
that when you looked at them, if you came and
looked at our earliest stuff, you should say, I don't know,
there's probably nothing, and you'd be mostly right, but not
entirely right. And that's our job is for one and
a hundred of those things. To turn out to be
(26:56):
Google Brain level important and we don't know ahead of
time which one is it'll be.
Speaker 1 (27:00):
And that takes like.
Speaker 3 (27:01):
Constant bravery and creativity and open mindedness paired with humility.
We're wrong most of the time. How can we get
the evidence that verifies this isn't one of those things?
So we can stop doing it?
Speaker 2 (27:15):
And I mean, I'm sure that you have to be
very sensitive in terms of what you share publicly, but
are there any early signals you're getting from interaction with
the real world about things that you're working on today
that maybe you know in season ten of the of
the Google x podcast, the Moonshot Factory podcast will be
featured ten years from now.
Speaker 3 (27:34):
I'm increasingly confident by watching the experiments that we've done
and this has been This isn't a single project.
Speaker 1 (27:40):
This is a range of them.
Speaker 3 (27:41):
That biology is moving and a decent clip from being
a science to being an engineering discipline.
Speaker 1 (27:47):
What does that mean?
Speaker 3 (27:48):
What that means is it is already true today that
you can go into ecoli or yeas to bacteria cell
and reprogram it. You can change its d you can
change its environment and ask it as best you can
to do something other than what it would normally do.
Let's say to produce a lot of a thing it's
(28:11):
not used to producing, but that would be useful for people.
That might be an enzyme that goes into laundry detergent
for breaking down things when you put it in the wash.
That could be a human milk sugar that you want
to produce so it can go into baby formula. There's
universe of things you might ask these self replicating carbon
negative machines that biology has invented for us to make
(28:35):
the problem is you don't know what it will do
when you reprogram it. There is no simulator where you
can test it out. So it was incredibly like trial
and error. If you're a strain engineer, you just have
to make some change in the code of this little
tiny factory to sell and then stick it into a
Petri dish and watch it and like, well what does
(28:58):
it do? That caused very slow inovation in this space.
But if you could try this in a computer, you
would be going thousands, tens of thousands of times faster
and discovering stuff. So we're seeing more and more evidence
that that's going to be a thing. I think that's
going to turn out to be really important for humanity.
(29:18):
For healthcare, sure, like making of drugs. Almost anything that
you wouldn't call manufacturing could be the domain of biology
to make. So the clothing that we're wearing, like, there's
no reason biology couldn't be producing this stuff, turning plastics
back into the raw materials, or making those raw materials
(29:41):
in the first place so that we don't have to
burn fossil fuels in order to make plastics. There's no
reason biology couldn't do that. Yes, medicine for people, there's
trillions of dollars a year that humans produce in various
kinds of what look like factories or refineries that we
do in a very industrial way today because we know
(30:04):
how to mechanically make things. We have some facility to
chemically make things, but we haven't figured out how to
program biology to make those things. So I see that
as a big shift in during the twenty first century.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
You're talking at south By Southwest about turning trash back
into treasure. And there was a big Dickens fan growing up,
and Dickens is always writing about kind of hunting through
trash heaps to find these miraculous pieces of treasure and stuff.
It used a phrase that I've never heard before, but
that I'd love you to expound on, which is moonshot compost.
Speaker 3 (30:39):
Yes, so I mean let me unpack both a little
bit so that the difference is clear. When I say
turning trash into treasure. What I was talking about was
humanity spends sort of, depending on how you count, five
or six trillion dollars a year making stuff, and then
the leftovers, which again reasonable people could disagree, but it
(30:59):
is arguably worth at least a few trillion dollars a
year goes into landfill of various kinds. This is plastics,
this is e waste, like leftover computers. This is things
like we break down a building like the one we're in,
and all of the rubble, all of the metal, it
all just goes to landfill. We reuse this stuff terribly.
(31:20):
Think how hard we worked to get this metal out
of the ground in the first place. It's already refined,
but we don't quite know how to reuse itself. Just
all goes to landfill. If we could make it profitable
to take that several trillion dollars a year of stuff
that right now is going to landfill and turn it
back into the raw material for humanity. One there's a
(31:42):
ridiculous amount of money to be made doing that, but two,
it would actually cause human existence on earth to be
much more circular. We could stop trying to be so
extractive from the world and be more circular. So that's
what I meant by turning trash into treasure, And there's
lots to be said about that separately. Metaphorically, we think
(32:02):
about the exact same thing at X. So if you
work on the Teleporter project, you're just passionate about it,
you decide that it's not as good as you thought,
we're going to end the Teleporter project. Congratulations, Good for you,
high five that you're doing the right thing. Here's a
bonus for you and for your whole team. Now you
have a few months where you can sort of explore
(32:24):
the factory and find out what your next thing at
the factory is. We don't have to throw away the people.
We don't have to throw away the code that you wrote.
We don't have to throw away the patents that you filed.
We don't have to throw away the partnerships that you
built or the hardware. There's so much that might get
reused in some way from what you did, even if
it's in surprising, very alternate uses, and so the process
(32:49):
of reminding ourselves over and over again. Just because we
stopped the project, it doesn't mean there isn't a lot
of value here. That's what we mean when we say
Moonshot compost. It is the reusing and the sort of
second and third lives of all of this knowledge creation
that because it stays in the factory, it's frictionless for
(33:10):
us to reuse it. And that also makes it easier
when you stop a project to know that it isn't
just like zeroed out, that it's back in the dirt
and it's going to come back in some interesting new forum.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
That was Astrotella Alphabet's Captain of Moonshots. Check out the
Moonshot podcast wherever you get your podcasts for tech stuff,
I'm oz Voloshin. This episode was produced by Eliza Dennis
and Victoria Domingez. It was executive produced by me Carrot
Price and Kate Osborne for Kaleidoscope and Katrina Novelle via
our Podcasts. Nomad Sound recorded this interview. Jack Insley mikesed
(33:50):
the episode and Kyle Murdoch wrote our theme song. Join
us this Friday for tech Stuff's We Can Tech. We'll
run through the headlines and hear from four or four
Media's Joseph Cox about a tool that allows one ICE
surveillance contractor to scrape over two hundred sites, apps, and
services for data on targeted individuals. Please rate, review, and
(34:12):
reach out to us at tech Stuff podcast at gmail
dot com.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
We really want to hear from you.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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