May 15, 2020 • 15 mins
As Captain of Moonshots (CEO) at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Astro Teller oversees teams inventing and launching audacious new technologies to help solve some of the world’s hardest problems. This has led to breakthrough innovations such as self-driving cars, delivery drones, and smart contact lenses. Through his experience looking out onto 10+ year time horizons and leading moonshots at X, Astro has developed an unmatched vantage point for what the future might hold. In his address, Astro reflects on how the class of 2020 is uniquely positioned -- more than any class we’ve seen in decades -- to unleash their secret superpowers and shape a radically better future for all of us.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Commencement Speeches for the Class of twenty is a production
of I Heart Radio. Class of Parents, Faculty, rising graduates,
Welcome to commencement. You made it. This year is a
(00:22):
little different, a difficult time to graduate because the traditional
graduation day has been put on hold. So we're bringing
it to you wherever you are, because this is still
your day, your moment. And now put your hands together.
It's time to be inspired. This year's commencement speaker the
one and only astro Teller. When I was six, I
(00:54):
wanted to be Pippi Longstocking, the strongest, silliest, most care
for three most underestimated girl in the world. The heroes
of comics, books and film characters like Dathaniel from The
Three Musketeers, the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who, Hawkeye from
(01:14):
Mash and X Men's Professor Xavier all helped me see
who I could hope to become. I also fell in
love with the real life heroes of twentieth century science
and engineering, the more than four thousand audacious men and
women that put a person on the moon, Alan Turing,
and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park who helped win the
(01:37):
Second World War and laid the foundations for modern computer science,
the Manhattan Project, which my grandfather was a part of,
which gave rise not just to the atomic bomb, but
also to the first electronic general purpose computer. All of
these people imagine things that didn't seem possible, made it happen.
(02:02):
They helped me to realize the world is full to
overflowing with latent superheroes. Superheroes are everywhere, not some rare
species that includes you, class of Now that I've seen it,
I can't unsee it. I look at everyone I meet,
(02:23):
and I see a bonfire of possibility inside of them.
I know most of them can't yet see in themselves.
We go through our days with the most powerful parts
of what we can do and what we can imagine
tucked away or unconsciously suppressed, waiting for the right challenge
and the right moment to let the magic out and
(02:45):
move mountains. Now is that moment. This rapidly changing world
calls on all of us to find and let out
our superpowers, all of our passion, all of our talents,
not the workaday versions of ourselves. That part of you
you can feel is in there, even if it scares
(03:08):
you to imagine letting it out into the light. Has
thrown us all into a situation which there are no
easy or obvious answers. The fear and the discomfort can
be intense, and it's easier to see disrupted dreams in
front of us than it is to see opportunities. But
believing the pause button has been hit on your future
(03:31):
will only make it true. This is not a global
game of musical chairs. This graduating class just lost. Counter Intuitively,
the especially disrupted time we've just entered, crossed with your
being early in your careers, have created just the right
set of conditions for your superpowers to be unleashed and
(03:54):
help us all get through the next few years and beyond.
In the pasted it was often the presence or prospect
of a war that generated the conditions for breakthrough innovation.
That's both tragic and absurd. That's why I've spent my
life and career obsessed with finding the cultural conditions that
(04:15):
can be an impetus for radical creativity without the destruction
of international conflict. For as long as I can remember,
I've wanted to create an invention machine, not an actual
physical machine, but a place where groups of passionate, talented
people can throw themselves unleashed and unfiltered at the problems
(04:38):
they care about most, and emerge with radical solutions that
are ten times better than anything that's been possible before.
I've always imagined such a place as the love child
of nineteen sixties NASA and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I've
been trying various iterations of this since I was in
my twenties, and I'm now ten years into building a
(05:01):
moonshot factory, a place where we bring the audacity and
optimism embodied by the space race to inventing and launching
technologies that could help solve the world's most pressing problems,
problems like food scarcity, internet connectivity, and clean energy. Born
Google X, now just X, we've created things like self
(05:25):
driving cars, delivery drones, and verily, the healthcare arm of
alphabet What bothers me is that X shouldn't be the
only moonshot factory. We need more, many more. Not just
big formal moonshot factories. We need millions more people waking
(05:45):
up every day, more creative, more brave, more urgent to
find ten X solutions to the world's biggest problems. I
know there's lots of intelligence, desire, and resources being invested. Already,
No one gets up Monday morning saying this week, I'm
going to make incremental progress. And yet that is almost
(06:08):
exclusively what happens, and it doesn't need to be that way.
We are all superheroes. The ability and aspiration is there,
even if it's buried deep in some of us. What's
holding us back as individuals and organizations is the strong
gravitational pull towards conventional ways of thinking and behaving. Most
(06:33):
of us have been conditioned by the environment around us
not to fail, not to take risks, not to make
anyone uncomfortable, especially if that person is your boss. So
most of us end up being too cautious, too afraid
to rock the status quo or mess something up, And
the irony is it works the other way around. The
(06:55):
most powerful and painful epiphany of my life was to
stop hiding my inner weirdo. You don't get joy, power, money,
a sense of purpose, whatever you crave by protecting yourself,
you get those things, and you protect yourself best by
(07:19):
unleashing yourself. Everyone thinks that's someone else's job to come
up with the weird new ideas and take the big risks.
Big companies think radical thinking is for startups. Startups say
it's the big guys who have all the resources. Universities
do great research but aren't set up to build real
(07:39):
world solutions. Governments get mired in short term problems, and
there you have it. Suddenly it's no one's job, even
when it should be everyone's job to help solve the
problems of our time. You, as the class of have
a huge opportunity. You can decide right now that it's
(07:59):
going to be your job to use your superpowers to
help solve the problems you care about, whether that's something
to help us adapt to our new reality or one
of the many other issues humanity is facing. And I
promise you, if you throw yourself into the deep end
with passion, you will get more of the very things
(08:20):
you worry you'll be risking. The problem I've made my
cause is pretty meta, to create environments where other people
can unleash their full selves on the problems they care about.
After more than twenty years encouraging this at X and
other places, I can tell you these people end up
winning at life in all sorts of ways that really matter,
(08:43):
and it's been extremely fulfilling to watch. There's probably a
little voice in your head saying, yeah, I might have
a superpower in here somewhere. But what holds back humanity's
potential is that but the human tendency to slide towards
the conventional, the way things are supposed to be done.
(09:04):
But you class of don't yet know what's conventional. Society
hasn't quite finished programming you on what you're supposed to do.
What society has been teaching you you're supposed to do,
how you're supposed to think and behave has its uses,
but when it comes to solving hard problems, it is
(09:25):
also a mental straight jacket. Naivete and inexperience is freedom,
freedom from mental ruts and emotional attachments, freedom from crusty
habits that keep you stuck in the status quo instead
of flying towards future possibilities. Think about the people who
(09:46):
started building self driving cars. They weren't car experts. Most
experts would ask what safety features can we add to cars?
Because human drivers can be idiots. That's the conventional question,
and the answers do save lives. But various academic groups
in the nineties used their non expertness. You might even
(10:07):
say they're naivete as their superpower. They came from a
different perspective. What if the car just drove itself and
now self driving cars are well on their way to
becoming a reality. I'm forty nine. I've had to create
a special brand for myself. Is a useful crazy person
(10:28):
because I'm supposed to know better, and so I need
air cover for saying things that aren't normal. Your ideas
are unfettered, your perspectives are fresh, and you're being young.
Gives you air cover for throwing out crazy ideas, So
go for it. Let them rip. You have another big advantage.
(10:49):
You don't already know the answers, and unlike the experts,
you know you don't know the answers. There are still
lots of jobs in which experiences aves a ton of
time and hassle. But when the answers to current problems
are far over the horizon and all the rules have
suddenly changed, like we've just seen, the experts belief they
(11:12):
know the solution and just have to implement it is
why they will fail. Experimenting, iterating, and learning is the
only way forward, and doing that is a lot easier.
With your advantage, you can admit ahead of time, you
don't have the solution up front. For extremely complex problems
(11:33):
like the world is facing today, there are no answers,
there is no playbook. That's why some of the most
exciting innovations come from newcomers or from people who combine
inspiration from many disparate fields. You see this in music, fashion,
and food all the time. At X we have puppeteers
(11:55):
who became roboticists, and we mix machine learning with rene biology.
When you move to a new field, you become a
novice again, which means the expectations of you or zero,
So you can try a lot of new things and
mess up without embarrassment, and you can transplant ideas across fields,
(12:17):
which can spark faster or novel progress. The superpower isn't
to pretend you're more experience than you are, but to
force yourself to be fresh again and again to get
the benefits over and over that being fresh brings. Finally,
I want to remind you that you're playing a long game.
(12:39):
It can feel like you're already behind in life and
the pandemic is going to slow you down even more.
That doesn't have to be true. I believe that after
the wreckage of all this sudden change will see a
period of intense innovation and openness to trying new things,
unlike anything we've seen in decades. Having forty or fifty
(13:02):
years of your career in front of you is a
massive advantage. People who are late in their careers need
to harvest what they can with the time they have left.
They tend to be more interested in lower return sure
things rather than winding journeys that lead to unexpected, discovering adventure.
They're the ones who, in the coming months will be
(13:24):
trying to claw society back towards an old normal that
wasn't working that well anyway. You, however, have the time
to explore interesting paths and let your learning moments and
growth opportunities build on each other. You can head out
purposefully to work on huge problems, thinking long term about
(13:47):
your work and its impact on the world, Ready to
take a winding journey that can't be predicted and is
anything but normal, and I suspect you'll find that you'll
end up having more fun, feeling less fear, doing more
good for the world, and making more money. That's because
you leaned into the best superpower you could have been
(14:10):
given In this pivotal moment in history. Your ideas, your energy,
your spirit is fresh, different is what we need. Hold
onto that, amplify it, lean into it, Celebrate your inner weirdo,
find your superpowers. The world needs you and that fresh
(14:34):
perspective now in a way it hasn't for many generations.
You can find reflection of incredible commitment addresses from all
your favorite speakers at the Commitment Podcast on I Heart
(14:57):
Radio or wherever you listen to podcasts. Can't remember the
cant
Commencement Speeches for the Class of twenty is a production
of I Heart Radio. Class of Parents, Faculty, rising graduates,
Welcome to commencement. You made it. This year is a
(00:22):
little different, a difficult time to graduate because the traditional
graduation day has been put on hold. So we're bringing
it to you wherever you are, because this is still
your day, your moment. And now put your hands together.
It's time to be inspired. This year's commencement speaker the
one and only astro Teller. When I was six, I
(00:54):
wanted to be Pippi Longstocking, the strongest, silliest, most care
for three most underestimated girl in the world. The heroes
of comics, books and film characters like Dathaniel from The
Three Musketeers, the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who, Hawkeye from
(01:14):
Mash and X Men's Professor Xavier all helped me see
who I could hope to become. I also fell in
love with the real life heroes of twentieth century science
and engineering, the more than four thousand audacious men and
women that put a person on the moon, Alan Turing,
and the codebreakers at Bletchley Park who helped win the
(01:37):
Second World War and laid the foundations for modern computer science,
the Manhattan Project, which my grandfather was a part of,
which gave rise not just to the atomic bomb, but
also to the first electronic general purpose computer. All of
these people imagine things that didn't seem possible, made it happen.
(02:02):
They helped me to realize the world is full to
overflowing with latent superheroes. Superheroes are everywhere, not some rare
species that includes you, class of Now that I've seen it,
I can't unsee it. I look at everyone I meet,
(02:23):
and I see a bonfire of possibility inside of them.
I know most of them can't yet see in themselves.
We go through our days with the most powerful parts
of what we can do and what we can imagine
tucked away or unconsciously suppressed, waiting for the right challenge
and the right moment to let the magic out and
(02:45):
move mountains. Now is that moment. This rapidly changing world
calls on all of us to find and let out
our superpowers, all of our passion, all of our talents,
not the workaday versions of ourselves. That part of you
you can feel is in there, even if it scares
(03:08):
you to imagine letting it out into the light. Has
thrown us all into a situation which there are no
easy or obvious answers. The fear and the discomfort can
be intense, and it's easier to see disrupted dreams in
front of us than it is to see opportunities. But
believing the pause button has been hit on your future
(03:31):
will only make it true. This is not a global
game of musical chairs. This graduating class just lost. Counter Intuitively,
the especially disrupted time we've just entered, crossed with your
being early in your careers, have created just the right
set of conditions for your superpowers to be unleashed and
(03:54):
help us all get through the next few years and beyond.
In the pasted it was often the presence or prospect
of a war that generated the conditions for breakthrough innovation.
That's both tragic and absurd. That's why I've spent my
life and career obsessed with finding the cultural conditions that
(04:15):
can be an impetus for radical creativity without the destruction
of international conflict. For as long as I can remember,
I've wanted to create an invention machine, not an actual
physical machine, but a place where groups of passionate, talented
people can throw themselves unleashed and unfiltered at the problems
(04:38):
they care about most, and emerge with radical solutions that
are ten times better than anything that's been possible before.
I've always imagined such a place as the love child
of nineteen sixties NASA and Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I've
been trying various iterations of this since I was in
my twenties, and I'm now ten years into building a
(05:01):
moonshot factory, a place where we bring the audacity and
optimism embodied by the space race to inventing and launching
technologies that could help solve the world's most pressing problems,
problems like food scarcity, internet connectivity, and clean energy. Born
Google X, now just X, we've created things like self
(05:25):
driving cars, delivery drones, and verily, the healthcare arm of
alphabet What bothers me is that X shouldn't be the
only moonshot factory. We need more, many more. Not just
big formal moonshot factories. We need millions more people waking
(05:45):
up every day, more creative, more brave, more urgent to
find ten X solutions to the world's biggest problems. I
know there's lots of intelligence, desire, and resources being invested. Already,
No one gets up Monday morning saying this week, I'm
going to make incremental progress. And yet that is almost
(06:08):
exclusively what happens, and it doesn't need to be that way.
We are all superheroes. The ability and aspiration is there,
even if it's buried deep in some of us. What's
holding us back as individuals and organizations is the strong
gravitational pull towards conventional ways of thinking and behaving. Most
(06:33):
of us have been conditioned by the environment around us
not to fail, not to take risks, not to make
anyone uncomfortable, especially if that person is your boss. So
most of us end up being too cautious, too afraid
to rock the status quo or mess something up, And
the irony is it works the other way around. The
(06:55):
most powerful and painful epiphany of my life was to
stop hiding my inner weirdo. You don't get joy, power, money,
a sense of purpose, whatever you crave by protecting yourself,
you get those things, and you protect yourself best by
(07:19):
unleashing yourself. Everyone thinks that's someone else's job to come
up with the weird new ideas and take the big risks.
Big companies think radical thinking is for startups. Startups say
it's the big guys who have all the resources. Universities
do great research but aren't set up to build real
(07:39):
world solutions. Governments get mired in short term problems, and
there you have it. Suddenly it's no one's job, even
when it should be everyone's job to help solve the
problems of our time. You, as the class of have
a huge opportunity. You can decide right now that it's
(07:59):
going to be your job to use your superpowers to
help solve the problems you care about, whether that's something
to help us adapt to our new reality or one
of the many other issues humanity is facing. And I
promise you, if you throw yourself into the deep end
with passion, you will get more of the very things
(08:20):
you worry you'll be risking. The problem I've made my
cause is pretty meta, to create environments where other people
can unleash their full selves on the problems they care about.
After more than twenty years encouraging this at X and
other places, I can tell you these people end up
winning at life in all sorts of ways that really matter,
(08:43):
and it's been extremely fulfilling to watch. There's probably a
little voice in your head saying, yeah, I might have
a superpower in here somewhere. But what holds back humanity's
potential is that but the human tendency to slide towards
the conventional, the way things are supposed to be done.
(09:04):
But you class of don't yet know what's conventional. Society
hasn't quite finished programming you on what you're supposed to do.
What society has been teaching you you're supposed to do,
how you're supposed to think and behave has its uses,
but when it comes to solving hard problems, it is
(09:25):
also a mental straight jacket. Naivete and inexperience is freedom,
freedom from mental ruts and emotional attachments, freedom from crusty
habits that keep you stuck in the status quo instead
of flying towards future possibilities. Think about the people who
(09:46):
started building self driving cars. They weren't car experts. Most
experts would ask what safety features can we add to cars?
Because human drivers can be idiots. That's the conventional question,
and the answers do save lives. But various academic groups
in the nineties used their non expertness. You might even
(10:07):
say they're naivete as their superpower. They came from a
different perspective. What if the car just drove itself and
now self driving cars are well on their way to
becoming a reality. I'm forty nine. I've had to create
a special brand for myself. Is a useful crazy person
(10:28):
because I'm supposed to know better, and so I need
air cover for saying things that aren't normal. Your ideas
are unfettered, your perspectives are fresh, and you're being young.
Gives you air cover for throwing out crazy ideas, So
go for it. Let them rip. You have another big advantage.
(10:49):
You don't already know the answers, and unlike the experts,
you know you don't know the answers. There are still
lots of jobs in which experiences aves a ton of
time and hassle. But when the answers to current problems
are far over the horizon and all the rules have
suddenly changed, like we've just seen, the experts belief they
(11:12):
know the solution and just have to implement it is
why they will fail. Experimenting, iterating, and learning is the
only way forward, and doing that is a lot easier.
With your advantage, you can admit ahead of time, you
don't have the solution up front. For extremely complex problems
(11:33):
like the world is facing today, there are no answers,
there is no playbook. That's why some of the most
exciting innovations come from newcomers or from people who combine
inspiration from many disparate fields. You see this in music, fashion,
and food all the time. At X we have puppeteers
(11:55):
who became roboticists, and we mix machine learning with rene biology.
When you move to a new field, you become a
novice again, which means the expectations of you or zero,
So you can try a lot of new things and
mess up without embarrassment, and you can transplant ideas across fields,
(12:17):
which can spark faster or novel progress. The superpower isn't
to pretend you're more experience than you are, but to
force yourself to be fresh again and again to get
the benefits over and over that being fresh brings. Finally,
I want to remind you that you're playing a long game.
(12:39):
It can feel like you're already behind in life and
the pandemic is going to slow you down even more.
That doesn't have to be true. I believe that after
the wreckage of all this sudden change will see a
period of intense innovation and openness to trying new things,
unlike anything we've seen in decades. Having forty or fifty
(13:02):
years of your career in front of you is a
massive advantage. People who are late in their careers need
to harvest what they can with the time they have left.
They tend to be more interested in lower return sure
things rather than winding journeys that lead to unexpected, discovering adventure.
They're the ones who, in the coming months will be
(13:24):
trying to claw society back towards an old normal that
wasn't working that well anyway. You, however, have the time
to explore interesting paths and let your learning moments and
growth opportunities build on each other. You can head out
purposefully to work on huge problems, thinking long term about
(13:47):
your work and its impact on the world, Ready to
take a winding journey that can't be predicted and is
anything but normal, and I suspect you'll find that you'll
end up having more fun, feeling less fear, doing more
good for the world, and making more money. That's because
you leaned into the best superpower you could have been
(14:10):
given In this pivotal moment in history. Your ideas, your energy,
your spirit is fresh, different is what we need. Hold
onto that, amplify it, lean into it, Celebrate your inner weirdo,
find your superpowers. The world needs you and that fresh
(14:34):
perspective now in a way it hasn't for many generations.
You can find reflection of incredible commitment addresses from all
your favorite speakers at the Commitment Podcast on I Heart
(14:57):
Radio or wherever you listen to podcasts. Can't remember the
cant
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