1183: Astro Teller | How to Systematically Realize the Impossible

Summary

The Jordan Harbinger Show
Episode 1183: Astro Teller | How to Systematically Realize the Impossible
Release Date: July 15, 2025

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Introduction to Astro Teller and X (Formerly Google X)

In this episode, host Jordan Harbinger welcomes Astro Teller, the Head of X, previously known as Google X. X is Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, renowned for pioneering ambitious projects aimed at solving some of the world's most pressing problems through radical innovation.

Notable Quote:
"Our job is not to solve Google's current problems. That is explicitly not our job. Our job is to go find new problems for Alphabet and in the world."
— Astro Teller [05:02]

Culture of Innovation at X

Astro Teller elaborates on X's innovative culture, emphasizing the importance of nonconformity and questioning existing rules. The office environment is designed to encourage rebellious thinking in a productive manner, fostering an atmosphere where unconventional ideas can thrive.

Notable Quote:
"Here at Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, our job is to harvest nonconformity in a productive way."
— Astro Teller [03:07]

Systematizing Moonshots

X aims to systematize radical innovation by developing "moonshots"—ambitious projects that address significant global challenges with science-fiction-like solutions. The process involves identifying a huge problem, proposing a radical solution, and leveraging breakthrough technology to test the viability of these ideas.

Notable Quote:
"We're trying to be a kind of 21st-century Bell Labs. Our job is to go find new problems for Alphabet and in the world."
— Astro Teller [04:49]

Prototyping and Iteration

Astro discusses X's approach to prototyping, which involves rapidly creating minimal viable products to test hypotheses quickly and cost-effectively. This method allows the team to gather evidence on whether an idea holds promise or needs to be abandoned.

Notable Quote:
"The goal is not to make a product. The goal is to get the first one or two pieces of evidence as fast as we can, as cheaply as we can."
— Astro Teller [07:51]

Projects and Failures

Astro shares insights into various projects undertaken at X, highlighting both successes and setbacks. Notable projects include:

• Tara (Wireless Optical Communications): A successor to the Loon balloon project, Tara utilizes lasers for high-speed data transmission on the ground, overcoming previous limitations faced by Loon.

  Notable Quote:
  "Tara is now moving more data to customers in 20 countries around the world every 15 minutes than Loon did in its entire nine-year history."
  — Astro Teller [34:01]

• Methanol Production from Seawater: A carbon-negative process aiming to convert seawater and sunlight into methanol. Despite initial success, the project was halted due to economic infeasibility.

  Notable Quote:
  "We built a system to take seawater and sunlight and turn it into methanol, but we couldn't get it cheaper than about $15 a gallon of gas equivalent."
  — Astro Teller [15:08]

Handling Regulations and Ethics

Astro emphasizes the importance of collaborating with regulators early in the development process. By engaging with regulators proactively, X ensures that new technologies are aligned with societal needs and ethical standards.

Notable Quote:
"We're trying to bring regulators into the process early, and they usually become partners with us."
— Astro Teller [16:31]

Drone Delivery via Wing

One of the standout projects discussed is Wing, X’s drone delivery service. Currently operational in several countries, Wing promises rapid, efficient deliveries with minimal environmental impact. Astro explains the challenges and triumphs in making drone noise unobtrusive and integrating the service into daily life.

Notable Quote:
"Wing is going to make people feel that it's a now thing in about 12 to 18 months."
— Astro Teller [19:15]

Dealing with Resistance to Technology

Astro acknowledges the societal resistance to new technologies, using self-driving cars as an example. He advocates for compassion and understanding, recognizing that emotional discomfort often underpins resistance to technological advancements.

Notable Quote:
"People have a hard time with trust in something we don't understand. It's uncomfortable."
— Astro Teller [48:12]

Unintended Consequences and Public Policy

Astro discusses the importance of anticipating and mitigating unintended consequences of new technologies. He distinguishes between issues developers can control and broader societal impacts, advocating for public policy interventions to address the latter.

Notable Quote:
"The technology maker has a responsibility to explain to the public policymakers what our technology is and how it's evolving."
— Astro Teller [55:29]

Programming Biology and Future Technologies

Looking ahead, Astro predicts that synthetic biology will be as transformative in the 21st century as silicon programming was in the 20th. By reprogramming biological systems, humanity could achieve unprecedented advancements in areas like medicine and environmental sustainability.

Notable Quote:
"Programming biology is going to be absolutely transformative for humanity."
— Astro Teller [59:00]

Over- and Under-Hype of Technologies

Astro warns against the common tendency to overhype technologies in the short term while underestimating their long-term impact. He encourages a balanced perspective, recognizing both the immediate challenges and the future potential of technological innovations.

Notable Quote:
"Whenever anyone brings up any subject about technology, you say, that's probably overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term."
— Astro Teller [61:00]

Innovation Advice and Culture

Astro critiques the simplistic notion of "failing fast," arguing that the real challenge lies in creating a culture that genuinely embraces the cessation of flawed projects. He emphasizes the need for environments that support intellectual honesty and learning from failures.

Notable Quote:
"Fail fast is true and not helpful. It's how you help people to stop doing that thing that’s wrong."
— Astro Teller [64:22]

Conclusion

Astro Teller concludes by highlighting the continuous learning process at X, where even failed projects contribute valuable knowledge. He underscores the importance of resilience, adaptability, and collaborative effort in driving meaningful innovation.

Notable Quote:
"We are building towards something and it just takes a certain amount of whoops to find what's really important."
— Astro Teller [34:48]

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Key Takeaways:

• Structured Innovation: X's systematic approach to moonshots involves identifying significant problems, proposing radical solutions, and leveraging breakthrough technologies.

• Prototyping and Iteration: Rapid, cost-effective prototyping is crucial for testing and validating ideas quickly.

• Collaboration with Regulators: Early and ongoing engagement with regulatory bodies ensures that innovations align with societal and ethical standards.

• Handling Failures: Embracing failures as learning opportunities fosters a culture of intellectual honesty and continuous improvement.

• Future of Technology: Synthetic biology and advanced robotics hold immense potential to revolutionize various aspects of human life, provided they are developed responsibly.

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This episode offers a deep dive into Astro Teller's philosophy on innovation, the workings of X, and the delicate balance between technological advancement and societal impact. It provides valuable insights for anyone interested in the future of technology and the processes behind groundbreaking innovations.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger.

[Astro Teller]

Show, to be able to suspend your disbelief for a non stupid reason, to have a specific theory about the world. It's okay that you're probably wrong, but that makes it testable. The next step is how fast, how cheaply can you verify that you're wrong? Get some evidence that you're wrong so that we can put your idea to rest and move on to the next idea. If you need to be right, you're going to hate this place.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Fortune 500 CEO, Russian Chess Grandmaster, Four Star General, or Russian spy, sometimes all the same person. If you're new to the show or you're looking for a handy way to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more that'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today on the show, Head of Moonshots over at Alphabet, formerly Google Astro, Astro Teller joins me here on the show as head of X, formerly Google X. I don't know why these tech guys always name things so weird. Not his fault. Astro and his crew run a bit of a pirate ship. People rollerblade through the office, through the hallways, coming up with and executing on seemingly crazy ideas that just could change the world. From hot air balloons that bring Internet access to remote areas, to robots that genotype plants and help farmers grow more food, to drone delivery that could drop off Amazon packages to, well, the Amazon or deliver blood and organs to hospitals in minutes. Even in busy cities, the tech being worked on here has the potential to change how we all live. And I wanted to give you all a front row seat to some of this tech and learn how they think about innovation over here. So thanks to the team at X for letting us conduct this interview in Astro's office right here in Mountain View. So here we go with Astro Teller. So when we arrived here, there's that line on the floor that says, you may never cross this line, which I made Abby take a photo of me crossing the line. I think that's what that's there for, right?

[Astro Teller]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Okay.

[Astro Teller]

How did it feel?

[Jordan Harbinger]

A little rebellious, I suppose. There's also two lines. So it's like, which line am I not supposed to cross? I crossed both.

[Astro Teller]

Good.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Is that the idea? Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

It was meant to be a very thin X, but yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, okay, that makes sense. I was like, these lines aren't really demarcating anything too differently from one another. Nah, that's clever. Yeah. I crossed both lines and then took a cheeky picture. But what's the idea behind that? Just get everybody rebelling before they actually get to work.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. Like here at Alphabet's Moonshot Factory, our job is to harvest nonconformity in a productive way. It's easy to be randomly non conformist, just be an anarchist, Just like go.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Off in random directions, light things on fire.

[Astro Teller]

The reason we call it a moonshot factory is because we're trying to systematize radical innovation. So we're trying to take moonshots, hence the word moonshot. But factory, we're trying to systematize the process. And so reminding people to get out of their comfort zones, to realize the extent to which there are rules in their heads. If you work here at X, I don't want you hurting anybody. I don't want you embezzling. And good. There are a huge number of rules in your head that are not actually rules, they're just how it's done. And it's your job to question all of those. And so putting a dumb rule like you may not cross this line across the entrance to our building forces people every day to say, what are the dumb rules in my life? And how comfortable can I get breaking them?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I like that. Well, it's like the. You have to push the eject button on the USB drive before you pull it out. That's a dumb rule. I don't understand that one. I feel like you need to get rid of that one. Next. By the way, I went into the restroom here. Usually don't start a show like this, but I went to the restroom here and I was like, watch this place be the only place where the infrared faucets actually work. And it's true. Yes, they work. And I was, you go to the airport and you're like, elon, what are you doing with your life? When I can't get the water to Work at lax, but here at Google X, you figured out how to get those things to work. You know, some engineer probably spent his day off fine tuning those things.

[Astro Teller]

I wouldn't actually put it out of the question.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So for people who don't know, can you. You mentioned that X is like you're systematizing the moonshot thing. It sort of feels like q branch of MI6, but for everyone because we all get to play with the tech. Thanks.

[Astro Teller]

I love that framing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. We're trying to be a kind of 21st century Bell Labs. So our job is not to solve Google's current problems. That is explicitly not our job. Our job is to go find new problems for Alphabet and in the world. Huge problems that we can come up with a science fiction sounding product or service that however unlikely it is, we could actually make it. We can agree ahead of time. If we could make that science fiction sounding product or service, it would largely or meaningfully resolve that huge problem with the world. And then we have to convince ourselves that there's some breakthrough technology which even if it doesn't guarantee us that we can make that science fiction sounding product or service, it gives us a chance.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

If we have all three of those things, the huge problem, the radical proposed solution and the breakthrough technology, we're not done. That's legitimate beginning of the journey. That is a moonshot story hypothesis. And then we can go test it.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. It seems like it's gotta be tough to figure out if you're chasing a moonshot or a mirage. And I suppose it's a years long process sometimes in figuring out whether or not you're gonna hit a crazy dead end because you have to pick something that's like okay, that's currently kind of impossible, but not because physics don't allow it to be possible, but it's just practical enough for us to chase it. We just need to figure out how to get laser Internet to go through clouds sometimes in some way. But that's not like physically impossible. It's just hard, really hard. And no one knows how to do it yet. There's got to be like a really good sifting process for those kind of problems.

[Astro Teller]

Exactly. So we start with another way of talking about it is a non stupid suspension of disbelief. Again, very easy to just suspend disbelief and wanting to have the world be the way you want to have it if you're willing to deny reality. But to be able to suspend your disbelief for a non stupid reason, to have a specific theory about the world, it's okay. That you're probably wrong, but that makes it testable. And then if you work here, the next step is how fast, how cheaply can you verify that you're wrong? Get some evidence that you're wrong so that we can put your idea to rest and move on to the next idea. Yeah, if you need to be right, you're gonna hate this place.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Yeah, that's gotta be tough.

[Astro Teller]

You have to be excited about the idea of how great we are at filtering the ideas, not how great you are at having been right with your idea.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, the prototype thing that you mentioned earlier. I heard you talk about this on the Moonshot podcast, which we'll link to in the show notes. The robot that's downstairs, across the line you're never supposed to cross looks like a little tiny car wash kind of thing. This is the thing that goes to the farmer field and looks at the plants and genotypes the plants. But the prototype to that was like. What was it? It was like a push cart with a couple of Google Pixel phones duct taped to the thing or whatever. I mean, exaggerating, but it was basically exactly.

[Astro Teller]

In the very early days of one of our explorations in the computational agriculture, someone was talking about being able to get out in a field regularly and not only see a strawberry plant, for example, and know the characteristics of the strawberry plant while rolling by it at 10 miles an hour, but being able to look at that strawberry plant a week from now and know it was the same strawberry plant. So you can track how it grows over time. If you were here at X and you were proposing that, the answer is cool, awesome idea. Let's talk about how that would be good for the world. Sure. We can maybe satisfy ourselves. That would help the farmers of the world grow crops more effectively. What is the absolute cheapest, fastest way you could get out into a strawberry field and find out if it's a little less crazy than we thought or a little bit more crazy than we thought? Four bicycle wheels, some PVC tubing, a laptop, and a GoPro camera and some duct tape. Get out there tomorrow, literally tomorrow, and start capturing some images. The goal is not to make a product. The goal is to get the first one or two pieces of evidence as fast as we can, as cheaply as we can. Is this one of these things that might be a once in a generation opportunity for us?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I love these kinds of ideas. You've worked on some really cool projects. Smart contact lenses that track glucose levels, which is anything that's in your eyes is always Very sci fi to me. And cool. Some people think it's creepy. I'm fine with it. Wearable tech that can enhance human senses. But what's one project at X that felt like pure science fiction, but was real enough to prototype? Because the agricultural thing, okay, fine. But some of this stuff is like, wait, this is a real thing that you really had made? It's quite shocking.

[Astro Teller]

People maybe forget for several of the things that we've made, how science fiction they were when we proposed them.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

So self driving cars, which now quite recently, Waymo, which originally came from X, people are saying, oh yeah, that's actually going to be like how we get around. Fifteen and a half years ago, when we started Waymo, nobody was saying that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It was up there with flying cars.

[Astro Teller]

Exactly. We now have Tara. This is using wireless optical communications. It's essentially a box a little bit smaller than a traffic light. You strap it to a pole, you plug in the Internet and it shoots a laser up to 20km. It has to be able to see another one of these boxes strapped to another pole. But as long as those two boxes can see each other for a tiny amount of money, in one hour, you can get the equivalent of a fiber optic cable. But instead of having to trench the fiber over months or years for millions of dollars, you have it up for a microscopic fraction of a million dollars in one hour. 20 gigabits per second. The same thing you would get in a fiber optic cable.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. That's crazy.

[Astro Teller]

That is now out in the world. It's live in more than 20 countries. I guarantee you that had people laughing seven and a half years ago when we started that project.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's impressive. I think you talked about this on the Moonshot podcast as well. Is this the one that goes over rivers that are sort of unpredictably, like during flood season, they go crazy.

[Astro Teller]

Exactly. If anyone wants to see more about a bunch of the things we're going to be talking about here today, if you just Google Moonshot Factory, Moonshot podcast. We have an entire season that goes into detail about many of the things we're talking about, including the history of Waymo, the history of Tara and other things.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, yeah. We'll link to this stuff in the show notes. I wonder which of the projects, smart glasses, enhanced hearing, whatever, which something that came really close to making it out in the world. And then it was like, this thing's just not quite gonna.

[Astro Teller]

Well, somewhat famously, Google Glass was something where we were, it now turns out exactly right. And we were too early.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Too early. Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

I think there were also mistakes that we made in how we rolled it out. But even if we hadn't made those mistakes, we were probably too early. And we just have to accept that at X because our job is to be the right amount too early. But if you're trying to be the right amount too early, occasionally you're going to be not enough too early.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

And sometimes you're going to be too, too early too early.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When Google Glass came out, there was a shooting range in San Francisco, which is actually surprising in itself, but there was a shooting range and it had a sign on the door that said no cyborgs. And it had a picture of Google Glass. And I guess it's for privacy because people who shoot guns in San Francisco are maybe like, I don't want the government spying on me. I don't want Google spying on me. But a lot of people were really against just having video cameras in public. And I guess they forgot that everybody has a phone with a video camera on it. I'm not sure what the deal was there.

[Astro Teller]

People are now desperately trying to get themselves on video everywhere they go. So I think that ship has sailed.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I wonder what the cost is sort of emotionally, of constantly living in a mindset of, well, this might not work. Like, you have to eventually come around. Everyone here has to eventually come around. To be comfortable with that uncertainty, bear with me.

[Astro Teller]

Let me use an analogy for you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure.

[Astro Teller]

Let's say I taught you card counting. You know how card counting works in Vegas from blackjack, the way that most people understand card counting. I teach you how to do that and I give you some of my money and you're going to go bet with my money in Vegas using the process of card counting. You're going to lose money of mine regularly when you're card counting. And I will have zero stress over whether you're losing my money on more than half the hands. Probably. My stress is entirely going to be about whether you're following the process correctly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

This what we're doing, we're trying to be the card counters of innovation rather than the gamblers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Astro Teller]

I have considerable stress about whether we're following the process correctly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a great analogy. And I suppose it's also a little bit easier because what you're saying is if you're following the process, eventually the odds are in your favor that something's going to pop off. I know nothing about card counting, but I assume people do that because it increases your odds. What's a moonshot? Y' all killed early. That still haunts you because it might have actually worked. That you can talk about.

[Astro Teller]

I mean, there's lots. I'll give you an example of one that we killed for the right reasons at the time. But it was particularly heartbreaking for us, and we keep coming back to it, that we haven't found the right inn. We built a system a little bit bigger than this table for taking seawater and sunlight and turning it into methanol so you could actually stick this thing. You got out. Basically, you're taking CO2 out of the seawater and you take some water, split it up. So you get H2 from splitting up the water and the CO2, you make it carbon monoxide. You strip off one of the oxygens. So you take carbon monoxide and two H2s, you jam them together, you get methanol.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Astro Teller]

You can do this using sunlight.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Wow. Okay.

[Astro Teller]

So you can have a carbon negative process that turns this thing into methanol, which you can then burn in a normal gas tank and then it will go back up in the atmosphere. But the whole thing is circular then.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's.

[Astro Teller]

The whole process is carbon neutral, which means that the 4 billion internal combustion engines in the world don't have to be thrown away. Oh, my God, how great would that be for humanity? Both because we don't have to throw all the internal combustion engines away, and because you could do it in a carbon neutral way. When the first drips were coming out of this machine, people were just sobbing. It was so emotional. But a year later, we could not convince ourselves we were going to get it cheaper than about $15 gallon of gas equivalent.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

Okay, this was maybe eight, nine years ago.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Just wait. Gas will be 25 bucks.

[Astro Teller]

Well, that was part of the. We had an argument about that. But in the end, $15 gallon of gas equivalent, even once we got there, was not going to change the world. So we killed the project. But we just keep coming back to it. Like, oh, my God, that would be so great if we could get it down to $5.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. I mean, maybe in like Singapore or Monaco, where gas is probably close to that already, you could probably get away with that. I guess it depends on. Well, yeah, there's a lot of factors. I can see why that's so tempting. It's just like, man, if oil prices do this, we're back in business. We're back in it. Is there a moonshot that you think should be happening right now but isn't because of, I don't know, fear or Bureaucracy or something like that, like some other hang up.

[Astro Teller]

Well, I'm very grateful to the people here at X and to Alphabet. No, I think we're limited by our creativity.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I thought maybe more government stuff as opposed to, you know, the.

[Astro Teller]

I mean, we work with regulators around the world, but obviously sometimes we have to pace ourselves around the regulators. But we have found regulators to be very thoughtful. My belief about the reason regulators get a bad rap that they don't deserve. If I worked in secret, if anybody works in secret, until you're absolutely done, you've spent all the money you have, you have something which you really want to get approved because it's done, and you take it to the regulators and say, will you please approve this? They're going to be like, oh, this is the first time I'm seeing this. I don't know. Like, no, maybe a couple years from now. They need bake time. If you go to them early, when you're nowhere close to done and you say that over there, the moon is where we're trying to get to. This is the help we want to give to humanity. If we could do that in a way which was helpful to humanity, was good to the citizens of this country, wasn't irresponsible, could you be excited about that with us? The regulators almost always say, yes, great. We're early in our process. We don't need to be right about how we're currently doing it. Would you give us feedback and go on this journey with us? And then they usually say, yeah, sure. And then they become a partner with us. And so we have to take them with us, but they usually come with us. We found them to be actually good partners most of the time.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. That's interesting because that's not what you typically hear about regulators, for sure.

[Astro Teller]

But like I said, I think some of that is the fault of the people who didn't bring the regulators into the process. They wait till the end and then say, here's my baby, tell me it's beautiful. That's not a great position for the regulator to be in. That's right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

It's not a good strategy. Oh, and by the way, I need this faster. We're going bankrupt. Exactly. Yeah. I've got to let everyone go. Hurry up. So I'm stoked for drone delivery. I heard the podcast, of course, but what are the challenges here? Because it just sounds like the best way. Less traffic on the road, hopefully a lower carbon footprint. You get your stuff super fast. I don't have to wait for UPS to Do its whole route just come straight to me from the Amazon warehouse or whatever. As long as they don't hit power lines or birds. When are we doing this?

[Astro Teller]

It's happening in rural Australia or whatever.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

It's happening increasingly in North Carolina, in Texas, a little bit in Arkansas. In London.

[Jordan Harbinger]

In London. Oh, that's cool. I haven't seen that.

[Astro Teller]

Like, downtown London.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Where did they land in downtown London?

[Astro Teller]

They're actually taking things between hospitals.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, I see. That's a good idea.

[Astro Teller]

First, your listeners might be excited to know that thing that many people have felt over the last maybe 12, 18 months where they finally clicked in on Waymo and they thought, oh, that's not a future thing, that's a now thing.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, just drove by me on the road.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. Wing, the drones for package delivery that came from X is going to be making people feel that way in about 12 to 18 months.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Really.

[Astro Teller]

It's the rate at which it's ramping up and the ways that they've structured themselves as Waymo did, so that they could scale, which is what most of the work is before the public really understands. There's so much safety work and so much preparation to scale that it can take a decade from when you start to when you're really, really ready for people on the street to be like, oh, yeah, there's a drone delivering to somebody. But it's now coming quite quickly. And the sorts of things that have to be solved now is what happens. Do you go to the Wing app and then say, what kind of food can you bring me? Do you go to McDonald's and see if they have a relationship with Wing? Do you go to DoorDash? So it's partly about making those partnerships, but it is also partly about the consuming public getting used to using it. Right. There was a period of a decade between when Doordash existed and when Everybody was using DoorDash.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's a good point. I didn't know that. Yeah. The noise issue and the way that this got handled was so interesting. It's quite nerdy. But you're proud of it because I heard your voice on the podcast talking about how this. Because a drone noise, it's a little creepy, but that wasn't somehow a deal breaker.

[Astro Teller]

Yes. And even more interestingly, we were positive. I can't tell you how positive we were so positive, it didn't even occur to us it was something to be positive about, that the noise that people would object to was the hover noise. Now, we have made that a hum and not like an angry B sound.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, the angry B sound.

[Astro Teller]

We were very focused on this and making it sound M and not like Z. Yeah, yeah. And then when we actually started doing deliveries, and this is so typical of getting out into the real world, you don't know how people are really going to experience your thing until you get out into the world. When we get out there, partly because we had already solved that hum thing in hover mode, nobody cared about it hovering. And I believe it's because if it's delivering to you, you're so happy that what you want is dropping out of the sky. And your neighbors, they might care a little bit, but they can get a delivery too. But if something is going over your house, Even if it's 60, 70 miles an hour, you can only hear it for one second. It's 200ft in the air, so you can barely hear it. There were people who were annoyed and I think it was fundamentally because they didn't feel like it was part of their world, someone else was getting a delivery. And so one, making sure they know they can get deliveries too, helped them a lot. But the other one was we had to do substantial work to change the sound it made in forward flight. We didn't think that anyone was going to care because it is technically quieter. Like if you literally take a sound meter at a fixed distance away, it's quieter than hover sound. But it was the sound that people were more sensitive to for whatever reason. So we did a lot of work and now people don't hear it anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Change the sound, different propellers, different frequencies. It's kind of like fireworks. When they're your fireworks, they're exciting. When they're your neighbor's fireworks, you just, you better not light anything on fire that better not fly into my yard. He better stop by 10pm Right. It's one of those things and it's really incredible. 3 to 25 minute delivery time. I mean, depending on distance, that beats Amazon's best delivery time by about like a day or whatever. Almost.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. And the average delivery times are considerably shorter than that. And the specificity, if you could know within a few seconds when something is getting to your house instead of like, I don't know, tomorrow sometime, sometime before.

[Jordan Harbinger]

10Pm and I'm like, or, even, come.

[Astro Teller]

On, even, you know, a delivery company that's bringing dinner to your house will give you maybe a 30 minute window. You're not going to stand outside for 30 minutes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

If you have 20 or 30 seconds where you know when it's coming which the drone does because it doesn't have to stop at traffic lights. There is no traffic for it, so it's it can tell ahead of time exactly when it will be there.

[Jordan Harbinger]

The only thing is like your Chinese food hit a power line. So sorry about that.

[Astro Teller]

But since we've never had Chinese food hit a power line, well, I'll let you know when it happens. But so far, never.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And now an ad pivot that won't get me banned from Google's campus nor into hot water with my sponsors. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Quilt Mind. I used to think LinkedIn was for job hunters only, and it turns out it's actually a goldmine if you know how to use it. Quiltmind is a company that helps execs build real audiences on LinkedIn without living on the platform. My friend Dove, who runs it, pointed out I had nearly 25,000 followers and I basically never posted. These folks chose to follow me and I wasn't doing anything about it. And apparently I'm not alone. A lot of professionals have solid followings but never post, usually because it's one more thing on an already full plate. Quiltmind fixes that. I spend 30 minutes a week on a call. They pull out stories and insights from my work and what we discuss, and they turn them into posts that sound exactly like me, only you know, better. They also keep me on track, which is key because consistency is really important with a platform like this. A few months in, advertisers started reaching out to my network, which is podcast one, saying, hey, whatever Jordan's doing on LinkedIn, we really like it. That's when I realized this was not just kind of a nice to have, it was actually bringing me more business, keeping me top of mind with the right people. So if you want to see what I'm sharing, look me up on LinkedIn. And if you're thinking about trying it yourself, shoot A note to [e-mail] that's jordanadience@q u I l t m I n d.com this episode is also sponsored by Quince. I'm not big on chasing fashion trends, but I am into clothes that fit well, feel great, don't self destruct in the wash. And that's why Jen and I keep going back to quints. They have totally nailed that sweet spot between quality and price. Quinte has gear for men, women, kids, even jewelry, bedding, home stuff. Jen is obsessed with their stretch silk tanks. She has them in basically every color my summer go to is their European very fancy linen short sleeve shirt. It's lightweight, it looks sharp. I'll be rocking it in Portugal in a few weeks when I go visit Gabriel. The best part is Quint's costs about half of what you'd pay for similar luxury brands. They cut out the middleman. They work directly with top tier factories so you get premium materials and quality craftsmanship without the designer markup. And they're not cutting corners on ethics either. Quint's only partners with factories that meet high standards for safety, sustainability, fair labor. We've ordered a ton from Quint's and haven't looked back. So if you want quality without the price tag, definitely check them out.

[C]

Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quince.comjordan for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com jordan to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comjordan if you're wondering how I managed.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To book all these great authors, thinkers, creators, inventors, innovators every single week, it is because of my network. The circle of people that I know, like and trust me. I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at 6minutenetworking.com. This course is about improving your skills, inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. And this is non cringy, very easy, very down to earth, not awkward, self helpy strategy, cheesy stuff. Just practical exercises that'll make you a better connector, a better colleague, a better friend, a better peer. In a few minutes a day is really all it takes. I wanted it to be bingeable. Many of the guests on the show, by the way, already subscribe and contribute to the course. Come on and join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course again. It's all free without any shenanigans, I promise [e-mail] all right, now back to Astro Teller Blood samples organs that I think is really particularly exciting because getting your Chinese food quick is cool and getting your toilet paper rolls refilled is cool. But having an organ come from somebody maybe in another state or another hospital across the state and then you getting that in time, that's literally life saving.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. And I don't think people have really thought through how much moving things through the air is going to change our lives. I mean for the better. If you have a sick kid at home and it's Two in the morning and you need medicine. You don't even bother going to the CVS because it's not open. But if you could just wish for something using your phone, and three minutes later, it was literally coming out of the sky onto your backyard or wherever it was that you wanted it, oh, my God, that would change your life. Like right now, we're used to sharing cars or sharing bedrooms, but you have a hammer in your house or apartment. I guarantee you, you do, and you use it 1 10,000th of the time. Maybe 10,000 people could share that one hammer. Except that there's no way to share the hammer. Except what if there was Harry Potter owl post where you just knew if you ever needed a hammer, it'd be there in a minute. You'd pay pennies for the hour you kept it, and then it would just disappear back into the ether. Not just the hammer. But for so many things in our lives, I mean, that's just another example. But I think if you could have what you want when you want it, you wouldn't buy more cream for your coffee than you need.

[Jordan Harbinger]

My garage would be. I could park my car in my garage.

[Astro Teller]

Wouldn't that be amazing? Right? There's so much that we stockpile perishables and non perishables in case we need it. You have batteries discharging in a drawer in your apartment or house, Many. On the off chance someday you need them. And you know, it's dumb to be letting them discharge and you have them anyway, as we all do. But if you knew that whatever battery shape you wanted would just appear in one minute, you would keep no batteries in your house.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I want to do this with my kids toys. They can vanish. And then when my kid cries and says, where's that rabbit with the thing on it? We can go, bing, bring that thing back. We thought she forgot. How long till a drone can fly me to and from the hospital, though? That's what I want. Because, you know, it's great if you can get an organ. Obviously, that's useful. But what happens if I'm in a crash? You ever go to New York in the ambulance and you're just like, ugh, I feel bad for whoever's in the back of that thing or waiting on the road for that thing to arrive and it's going three miles an hour through traffic? This could be the end of that. You could have emergency drone life flights, which get you to the hospital in, like, five minutes.

[Astro Teller]

The correct answer is Wing has no immediate plans to do that. Yeah, and I will just observe that they've gone from like a 2 1/2 pound payload to a 5 pound payload recently.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure.

[Astro Teller]

If they do a doubling every two years or so, then you can think within 10 years they could take something the weight of a person. So I'd say order of magnitude 10 years.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. That's interesting. I feel like that's inevitable because that's. Well, it'll be battlefield first. Right. It'll be done in the battlefield. And then you'll say, oh, we should put these in Manhattan. Have you seen the Humanoid Robot Factory? You know what we're talking about by any chance?

[Astro Teller]

Let me give you a spicy take on robots with legs.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

Because I've had this conversation over and over again.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Astro Teller]

Show me a robot with a wheeled base like the one you saw downstairs that's super useful. And it just can't be that next level of useful because it can't get to the second floor. I am happy to get at legs. Legs is not the hard part. Until you have something which is useful with wheels on the bottom. Why are you working on legs? I mean, that isn't even the spicy part. I think that's just obvious.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, sure.

[Astro Teller]

The spicy comment would be given that there's some reason to believe that working on robots with legs is a bit of a distraction because it looks cool.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I think that's true.

[Astro Teller]

And I would encourage everyone to sort of refocus on making sure the robot can be maximally useful in the easiest way possible, not the coolest way possible. I think if you find organizations that are working with that attitude in mind, you will probably find the winners.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense actually. Even Rosie, I think it was, her name was Rosie on the Jetsons. Even she didn't have legs, she had little wheels on the bottom. But then again, I don't know if they had stairs in their house. I guess the mystery is yet to be solved. Tell me more about Loon the Balloon Internet access. Because this I thought was. This was one of the big things everybody heard about X when it was going down. And it just seems so amazing and useful. This was for me, science fiction, like Internet coming from the sky.

[Astro Teller]

Spoiler alert. It didn't work well enough. And I'm going to get back and tell you the story in a second. And the reason in the end it couldn't close, wasn't technical or operational. The problem ultimately was that we couldn't get it profitable enough in the beginning. It made a lot of sense to try the following. You want Something that can beam the Internet over large parts of the Earth. People may be more familiar now with Starlink. Yes, but there's a time delay. The speed of light is the speed of light. If it has to go up to 6 or 700,000ft, then it's going to take a lot longer than if it only has to go up to 60 or 65,000ft. And it's a lot easier to talk to phones using the normal protocols, like 4G or 5G if you're close enough to them, which you can do from 65,000ft, but you cannot do at 600 or 700,000ft.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That makes sense.

[Astro Teller]

So at 65,000ft, as opposed to 650,000ft, that's not a satellite, that's a balloon. So could you hang balloons in 65,000ft, make them stay up for a year or more, hang cell towers under them, have them somehow magically make an ad hoc mesh network so they're all talking to each other and sharing data back and forth, beaming the Internet across the Earth, where some of them always have a connection back to an Internet backbone, so that if one balloon is getting data from users on the ground and it doesn't itself have a connection to the Internet, it can bounce that data to another balloon that does have connection back to the Internet backbone. We built this, it was flying around the world. We were delivering data to many hundreds of thousands of people in several countries. So super proud of the technical and operational work it took to get that done. And while from a business perspective, we couldn't get it to close with the telcos that we were working with, the way that those balloons were passing data, or at least one of the ways those balloons were passing data back and forth was using lasers.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

And so as this project went away, we called this process Moonshot composting. The people, the data, the ideas, the patents, even some of the partners. This laser, some of these people said, hold on, the lasers that the balloons were using to talk to each other, what if we did that on the ground?

[Jordan Harbinger]

On the ground? Yeah.

[Astro Teller]

I know it's not supposed to work on the ground because of rain, because of fog, particulates in the air, from like smoke from a fire or something like that. But what if, Let us just try, seven and a half years later, that project Tara that I was describing before is now moving more data to customers in 20 countries around the world every 15 minutes than Loon did in its entire nine year history. So back to your question about how does it feel to fail? It's learning. It's not failing if you take a long enough time horizon. We're building towards something and it just takes a certain amount of whoops, nothing under that rock to find what's really important.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. So even though the balloon part didn't work out, the laser part did. So it's still a win.

[Astro Teller]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's amazing. I love the explanation you give in the podcast, which is light is so much faster than radio waves. So you can wiggle. Basically, the slowest you can wiggle, and that's a technical term. The slowest you can wiggle a Photon is like 100 times faster than the fastest you can wiggle an electron in a radio wave.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So fiber optic Internet is going to be. You think 5G is fast? Fiber optic Internet is like at the slowest, a hundred times plus faster than that.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah. Inherently, as you move from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G, what we've gotten is we're moving in higher and higher frequency of radio frequencies wiggling faster. As you described it. That means you can pack more data in, but it's also becoming more point to point. So you have to be more focused. It's just the way the radio frequencies work. Unfortunately, right after 5G is something called the terahertz gap, which is a problem for two very different interesting reasons. The first problem is that gap from about 300 gigahertz to about 3 terahertz. This is the frequency at which something is wiggling is too fast for radio frequencies, but too slow for optics.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Astro Teller]

It's like an uncomfortable tweener stage. Also in that same gap is the oxygen absorbing band. That is, if you send an electromagnetic thing that's radiating at this frequency, it tends to be eaten up by the oxygen in the air. That is like a microwave wiggles the water molecules. That's why your food heats up in the microwave. So that space doesn't work very well. On the other side of the terahertz gap is optics. And optics have some things that are really appealing. You can put in, as you just described, hundreds of times as much data into a very narrow band. And it's unregulated. You don't have to buy spectrum. It's just light. The one thing that you have to be able to satisfy yourself is you have to be able to see things. It can't go through walls anymore.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right. So it's not going to work if your phone is in your pocket. It's got to be line of sight.

[Astro Teller]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you're sort of capped at 5G or whatever. The fastest radar.

[Astro Teller]

For now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

For now.

[Astro Teller]

But as this team has announced, they have a chip. I actually have it over there. I can show it to you afterwards.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sitting at a top secret shelf with a pile of post it.

[Astro Teller]

Well, we've announced it now. A little bit smaller than a smushed pea.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Astro Teller]

This chip is not a computer chip. It's made in a fab. But it is an electrically steerable laser. So you push one laser into this computer chip, it splits it up into hundreds of little baby lasers that are very carefully aligned and then it slows up some of the laser waves relative to others very carefully, just a tiny bit billionths of a second. So that the waves either add to each other or cancel each other out in just the right way. So that instead of seeing hundreds of lasers coming out of this chip, it's effectively one laser which we can point just by electrically changing the properties of this chip many thousands of times a second. Making a laser where you can point it around without having to have any moving parts and is the size of a smushed pea. Not even is going to totally change whether it can be in your phone and how data gets moved around.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Jeez. Yeah. I just wonder how it'd work if it's in my pocket or in a closed room. Yeah. Wow. Going back to something you said earlier, how do you manage or handle brilliant people who can't maybe detach their identity from their ideas? I take it many of them don't last here. Yeah, I've changed.

[Astro Teller]

I'm role playing with you. But if you wanted to come to X, this is one of the first things that we would talk about, which is we're card counters here. We're not gamblers. If you just believe in flying cars and you want to do flying cars, I sincerely wish you the best and I'm begging you, do not come to X because you will be miserable here. Howard Hughes. Yeah. I need you to understand we will miss occasional opportunities like that. We're at peace with missing those opportunities because on balance, for every one person who is a Howard Hughes, there are lots of people, thousands, who think they're Howard Hughes and aren't. And so I don't believe that me or anyone else is particularly good at predicting the future. But we can be world class at discovering the future efficiently. If you want to be part of a team that does that and tying your sense of self worth to that, you might love it here at X. But if you don't think you can Rewire your sense of self worth to how great you are at filtering ideas. If you're going to get stuck on I want to have my idea live. You're just going to be miserable here and I need you to know that before you come.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that makes sense. It's got to be a culture where people are not afraid to maybe look dumb sometimes. I mean, not dumb, but like maybe your idea doesn't work and everybody knows about it kind of thing. That happens all the time, I assume, and it's part of the culture. But it's got to be tough to do that in an environment full of PhDs and egos and big bets and stuff like that.

[Astro Teller]

Let me give you two very different examples about how we try to help people get used to that one. I have wheels on my feet.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you're rollerblading around.

[Astro Teller]

It reminds me not to take myself too seriously. It reminds everybody else here to not take me or themselves too seriously. There's a flying pig on the wall right there where we try to remind each other about that all the time, just to have some levity in the process. We're serious about what we do, but that doesn't mean we have to do it seriously. Here's something on the other end of the spectrum, but I think it also answers your question. We worked on nuclear fusion for the last four or five years, and I don't know if you heard I did, but in our podcast series we talked about with great pride exactly why we went after this particular way of doing nuclear fusion. And even now that we've closed that project down very recently, I'm so proud not only of having done it, but of the people who did it. And they got a standing ovation at the all hands out there on the bleachers very recently, and they felt great saying we had a small chance of creating an enormous amount of goodness for the world and for Alphabet because of this thing. We went and looked at it in a really thoughtful, scrappy way. It took very big brains being very entrepreneurial to do it like they did it. They had a 250 page slide deck about why they closed their own project down. They were sad, but they were also incredibly proud. And people are pawing at each other to get those people onto their team for the next thing they try because of how smart they are and how intellectually honest they were. Getting the culture to reward is the trick, but it is inherently a positive, not a negative.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I love that, man. Too bad the fusion thing didn't work out. I feel like that's the key sort of bottleneck for a lot of these projects. Right. Desalination of water, decarbon the atmosphere once you have unlimited energy solves a lot of issues.

[Astro Teller]

We'll try again.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, give it a shot, See what you come up with. What ethical line have you seen people flirt with in the name of progress that think maybe deserves a little bit more scrutiny? Maybe the AI stuff or I don't know what your feelings are on that.

[Astro Teller]

Rather than throwing anyone else under the bus.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure, yeah.

[Astro Teller]

Let me try to describe for you how we don't do that. And I don't just mean I'm going to claim we don't do that. Let me tell you the process we try to go through because I guess I wish more people did something sort of like the following. When you come and propose a moonshot, let's hear what the huge problem is. Let's hear what your radical proposed solution is. That science fiction sounding product or service. One of the things we'll do is we will try to game out like, what are the unintended consequences. It's pretty hard to come up with, like, unless you're an actually bad person, which presuming you're not, if you work at X, we tend to have a hard time pre guessing what bad stuff can happen. Occasionally it happens and we do try, but that's like table stakes what we do, which I feel really good about and I wish more people did. This is the real answer to your question is we get out in the world as fast as possible way before we're done in ways that are safe and go learn what we're wrong about. Waymo has been on the road and until like two years ago, nobody could buy a ride with nobody in the front seat. We've been driving for 13 years before that where there was one of our people in the front seat with their hands right by the steering wheel many hours a day. And these were trained professionals. They were as much as they could, not touching the steering wheel, the gas pedals, but they could and they had been trained on how to deal with even really emergency situations. That was an example where we were getting Waymo out into the world really early and doing it in a safe way. It was extra expense to us, but that meant that no one else was in danger. And then we discovered so many things that you would never come up with. People read the body language of cars, right? So Waymo's first job was making sure it was safe. Don't hit anything, don't hurt anybody. Then it had to worry about things like don't make the passenger seasick by going too jerky away. But there's a lot of stuff past there. Like how do you show people not with your physical body, but with your car's body when you're going to merge? There's like, I'm thinking about it. And then there's like, okay, I'm really doing it, which tells them to give you the space. All of those things you have to just learn in the world. And there are second and third order effects of all of these things. And we've learned lots that we thought we were helping in one way and we had to change what we were doing. We can only learn that these unintended consequences and the best way to deal with them, not by sitting here on a whiteboard and writing out how we might be wrong, but by getting out in the world in really thoughtful, responsible ways with the actual communities who are going to have to, in the end have these things as part of their lives and saying to the communities, how would you wish this was different? And getting their feedback that works wonders in terms of actually solving for the unintended consequences.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Even Google might be trying to forget about Google Glass, but make sure you don't forget about supporting the amazing sponsors that make this show possible. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Audible. People always ask me how I managed to get through so much content, especially since I prep for every interview. I'm talking two to three books a week, and it's all thanks to Audible. I've got Audible in my ears while I'm getting my 10,000 steps in running errands, even doing stuff around the house. I don't mess with physical books anymore at all. Audible is just way more efficient. I listen on 2 or even 3x speed, which lets me cover a lot of ground without sacrificing quality. Right now I'm listening to Good Inside by Dr. Becky Kennedy. She's got this really down to earth way of talking about parenting that is not preachy. And here's what a lot of people don't realize. Audible is not just audiobooks anymore. You get access to thousands of titles with your membership, Podcasts, Audible originals, and cool stuff like their Words and music series where artists tell their stories in their own words. The variety makes the membership way more valuable, so you never run out of great stuff to check out. One day I'm deep in a parenting guide, the next it's a podcast or a spy thriller. So whether you're into suspense, self development, or you just want to make traffic suck less? Audible's got you covered.

[C]

Start listening and discover what's beyond the edge of your seat. New members can try Audible now free for 30 days and dive into a world of new thrills. Visit audible.com jhs or text jhs to 500500 that's audible.com jhs or text JHS.

[Jordan Harbinger]

To 500500 this episode is also sponsored by Progressive. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Shift a little money here, a little there, hope it all works out well. With the name your price tool from Progressive, you can be a better budgeter and potentially lower your insurance bill too. You tell Progressive what you want to pay for car insurance. They'll help you find options within your budget. Try it [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate and probably very good looking listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They really do make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the podcast are searchable and Clickable [e-mail] deals and if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, please do email us. Anybody here can help you. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Astro Teller. I find it interesting how many people resist technology. I'm sure you've seen the Waymo cars getting vandalized because there's nobody in it. And it's like what's really going on here? Some of it is kids be punks, but some of it is like this. We don't want self driving cars. It's bad for society somehow. And I wonder what you think about that. Is this just oh, we can't get rid of the elevator operators. It's just kind of that same thing. We can't have this automation. It's going to be dangerous. It's sort of this weird unfounded fear and it's weird that young people are doing it. Like you would think they would be the first ones who realize humans are pretty bad drivers. Maybe we should let computers do a little bit more of that.

[Astro Teller]

Yes, and let's have some compassion. Like the world is changing really fast right now and I think that's disorienting for People of all ages. So I really do have compassion for everybody in that experience. I would also say technology, while it is usually, maybe not exclusively, but the vast majority of time really great for humanity, it tends to have concentrated harm and diffuse benefits. So if you lost your job as an elevator operator, the fact that everybody in the world gets to where they wanted to go a second earlier or a penny cheaper is cold comfort to you because you lost your job. Is that overall better for society? Yes, it is. And society should find some way, this is like a public policy issue, to take care of that elevator oper. I don't think that's best understood as the elevator company is a bad company. It's us as a society that have failed that elevator operator by wiring our society in a way that takes care of them, at least helps them to get to the next job with some retraining or whatever that is. Also, there tends to be with technology some upfront, if not harm, then at least complexity, even though there's long term benefits. So you can say that the move for society from an agrarian society to an industrial society was net a positive. Sure, I think so. Most people wouldn't go back, but the way that worked for society, that was a bumpy ride.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that's true.

[Astro Teller]

And in some ways we may have a bumpy ride in front of us. And so by recognizing these things, it's not to say that technology is bad or wrong, or that we should try to slow it up, but recognizing how change functions in our society might help us to be able to metabolize the change better.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That makes sense. I wonder if you've ever had to pull the plug on a project because maybe it was veering into territory that made you uncomfortable, or because the potential societal cost outweighed the benefits in some way, even if it promised massive profits or technological leaps forward.

[Astro Teller]

Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one that I think is just easy to describe.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure.

[Astro Teller]

A long time ago, this was like 13, 12 or 13 years ago we had made. It was only a week or two of progress. It was early in the stage. It was a brainstorm about finding much cheaper ways to collect huge amounts of water and reclaiming it in various ways so that it could be sold and used by cities. And there's a lot to be said for that if that water was really going to end up in the ocean. But as we dug into it further, it became clear that the vast majority of the water we'd be collecting would otherwise have either ended up in the water table, like going down into the ground where eventually you can get it from a well or was going into the dirt that eventually got used by farmers and other plants. It wasn't like found value that we were sort of harvesting for the world. It was really like, I'm taking your clean water and I got it before you did and then I'm selling it back to you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right.

[Astro Teller]

That was an example where once we had the clarity that that's what was really being proposed, not consciously, but de facto we canceled the project. We're like, nope, not going forward with that one.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that makes sense. That's. That's kind of interesting. It reminds me of when we had those droughts and they were trying to capture the LA water that was just going into the ocean and it turned out to be not just a matter of plugging up the drain. Right. It was like, oh, there's a lot of stuff that goes into this. You can't just like block the river thing that goes into the ocean. There's a little bit more to it than that. Water's just that. That's got to be one of the most complex systems that, I mean, that we have anywhere on the planet. I mean that whole thing.

[Astro Teller]

We've taken a couple runs at clean water other than the one I just named. One of the ones we were really proud about and sad to end was we made a box that would turn air and sunlight into clean water. Even in low humidity environments, it could take the water out of the air just using sunlight. And so you could make a box that would make 5ish liters a day and it'd be like no bigger than this table. That'd be pretty profound. In a lot of the world where there's a hard time getting safe clean water and what ultimately matters is the techno economics. If you can do that for a dollar a liter, nobody cares. At 10 cents a liter, it's kind of glamping. There'll be uses, but it's not going to change the world. At $0.01 a liter, it would absolutely change the world. We convinced ourselves that the box that we had made could get to below 10 cents a liter. But we could not convince ourselves we were going to get down to a penny a liter. And as we sometimes do, we published our results in Nature. I think in that case so that other people could know what we did and build on top of it if they had a better idea.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that stuff's interesting. I was nerd out about those ideas. I can't remember who it was on the show was Telling me that they figured out how to make something where people could clean the water and kids could get the clean water. But the problem ended up being education because they would take the bucket that they had the clean water and then they would be like, all right, we're going to use this to feed our pigs in the morning and then we're going to bring it to the clean water thing later. And it's like, why are we still getting sick? It was like, oh, gosh. Okay. So the problem is that they don't have clean waters. They keep. They just don't.

[Astro Teller]

Germ theory.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah. Yeah. Ex. Working on the frontier of human capability, I wonder if anything scares you about the technologies that you're creating. Is there anything where you're like, oh, we have to be really careful with this one.

[Astro Teller]

I mean, yes, I'm open to lots of the things that we do having potential bad uses. I think that that's any technology or product that you make. Think of it as like three basic buckets. Bucket one, that's your job. It's like core to what the thing is, don't mess that up. So if it's a self driving car or a drone for package delivery, don't hit anybody, don't hit a building. That's your job. Right. The second bucket is second order effects that you have enough control over. It really is your job to still handle them, even if it's kind of an exogenous thing, which maybe a bad company would ignore. I think hopefully as a good company we don't want to ignore it. So you were mentioning the sound that our drones make. We could say not our problem, but we don't because I think that's legitimately still our problem. To make it so that that doesn't bother the people that it's flying over. Then there's a third bucket where it's something that the product maker can't change and we wouldn't want the product maker to change. So might some people lose their jobs because some technology is coming onto the scene? Of course, that actually has happened for most technologies. Does that need to be addressed? Yes, for sure. But you don't want individual companies saying, I will decide how society is going to respond to this. That is a public policy issue. So the technology maker has a responsibility to explain to the public policymakers, here's what our technology is, here's how it's going to evolve over time. Now you make public policy that helps our society embrace this as best as possible and of course regulate us to the extent that that's important.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I think it's gotta be quite a delicate dance because you're right, a lot of companies are like, we're just gonna break this and then they can try and stop us and we'll litigate it for 20 years and make money in the meantime. It's like the opposite of that particular course of action. I wonder if there's an uncomfortable truth about human nature that you've had to face while trying to solve these big idealistic problems.

[Astro Teller]

Aside from the fact that people have a hard time with change. Again, I have great compassion for this. But I think that there are people who sincerely, even if they knew for a fact that self driving cars are in all cases, even in this extreme scenario, the self driving car is absolutely, period, full stop, safer than Bob at driving your kid across town or whatever. Some people just rather have Bob drive across town. And is that reasonable from a scientific perspective? From an intellectual perspective, it's hard to get behind that. But is that understandable from an emotional perspective? Yes, it is. Because putting trust in something we don't understand is uncomfortable. And so I'm using that as an example. And I think there's a lot of things like this in the world where we too quickly write off people's feelings as though they don't count if they sort of don't match up to the facts. And I think we're a little we society a little too fast on the trigger on that one. It's part of being a society. We need to bring those people along and find ways to help them through the process.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, you're right, it's tough. I mean, it's easy to sort of mock the people that think they'll be a better driver than a waymo. Because I've been driving for 30 years, I'm a better driver when I'm drunk than I am when I'm sober. Like those people, we just kind of imagine that they're all like that. But there is a part of me that's like, do I want only robots flying my plane when I go to New York or do I want a human in there just because it just seems like there should be? I'm kind of in the latter camp, you know, even if there's just like a 20 year old kid sitting there who knows kind of how everything's supposed to go, could take over in an emergency. That makes me feel a lot better than knowing that it's just an iPad flying the 747.

[Astro Teller]

I get it. And that's a fascinating example because in that example, planes are now flying themselves enough of the time that humans aren't having emergency experiences often enough. And so one of the biggest risks that airlines have now is that they don't feel great handing responsibility back to the humans because they haven't had practice, because the software is doing it. Most of the time we're in this uncanny valley where partly because a lot of people totally understandably feel as you've described, including the unions, for a very different reason, we're a little betwixt in between. The robots aren't quite good enough to do it all of the time, but the humans have to work in simulators to get a lot of this experience because they're not getting it in the planes. It's complicated.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So if your flight is too cheap, ask yourself, are you on the training flight for that guy? Is the autopilot off on this one? That's like, why is this flight $400 cheaper than the other one? It's the same seat, it's the same route. You might be on the emergency training route. We hear a lot about humanity's big problems. Climate change, inequality, misinformation. What do you think is an underrated invisible crisis that maybe we're ignoring because it's less dramatic but quietly, equally more dangerous?

[Astro Teller]

I'm such an optimist. Let me reframe that as an opportunity.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, reframe. Just take the question apart and put it back together if you want, that's fine.

[Astro Teller]

We as a species are so used to refusing to go back to the past with respect to all the changes we've gotten used to, and yet almost unable to imagine how different the world could be. So here's an example. I believe that the 21st century will be defined at least as much by humanity having learned to program biology, synthetic biology, as humanity learning to program silicon defined the 20th century. Programming Silicon opened up the opportunity to solve a huge number of problems. Programming biology, being able to take these self replicating carbon negative machines that the world has built for us over a couple billion years and repurpose them to make things for us is going to be absolutely transformative for humanity. And it will allow us to make things faster, more custom make them at a much lower carbon footprint to make them cheaper. It's going to solve a whole bunch of humanity's problems. And it's all going to stem from being able to program biology. That sounds science fiction now, but will for sure be one of the big stories for humanity in the 21st century.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I'm hoping I Live long enough to, like, reprint the liver I need or the pancreas that I need, or come to Mountain View and have one installed that was made back here somewhere, because that's. I mean, look, we have cancer to deal with, but if you can get a new heart because your Tigger is not working as well as it used to, that would be pretty amazing. And it seems like that's actually not, again, not completely impossible. Even with tech we have now, we haven't quite gotten it right. But it's not merely the stuff of Netflix specials at this point. On the opposite side of this, what technology or idea do you think that a lot of people are super excited about, but deep down, maybe you suspect is fundamentally flawed or just overhyped?

[Astro Teller]

One of the easiest ways to predict the future, for anyone who'd like to predict the future at a cocktail party, is just say the following line over and over again, because it tends to be true. Whenever anyone brings up any subject about technology, you say, that's probably overhyped in the short term and underhyped in the long term. Because every technology in the history of humanity that has been true of. I see people get too excited over some short period of time and not excited enough over a much longer period of time. And so whether this is synthetic genomics or artificial intelligence or others, I think over the next two or three years, the world's going to change less than we think because the world just changes kind of slow. There's a lot going on right now, and over 10 or 20 years, I think most people haven't fully absorbed how much the world is going to change and can change for the better.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is how I feel about AI. You talk to somebody who loves AI. We're all losing our jobs tomorrow. You're not going to need anybody to do anything. We need universal basic income yesterday or we're all going to die. But yeah, maybe in 10 or 20 years it'll be like, holy moly. This thing really is doing everyone's job and it's arranged a government and a world for us. That is much. We never would have thought of many of these things ourselves. Look how efficient our systems are. But that's less exciting than every single person in New York is going to lose their job by 2026 because of AI. So what was the phrase that makes us sound smart? Overhyped in the short term, underhyped in the long term.

[Astro Teller]

Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay.

[Astro Teller]

I mean, I'll give you another example that it just sticks in my mind. I was at an exhibition on the history of design and aluminum. This was like 20 years ago, and there was a hat stand in the corner, and I literally thought it was a hat stand. I had a coat. I was about to hang it, and then I realized it was actually part of the exhibit. And it looked like it was made of wood. That's why I thought it was just a hat stand or a coat stand. But it was actually made of aluminum and then painted to look like wood. And there had been this moment where aluminum went from more expensive than gold. And then once people figured out how to use electricity basically to extract aluminum much cheaper than they had before, all of a sudden it was this new material with these cool properties, and we didn't know what to do with it. And one of the first things people had done was made something out of wood, and then they felt obligated to paint it to look like wood, because that's what hat stands were, were things that were made out of wood. The reason I bring this up is it is also a truism that people are so wrong over at least the medium to long term about how technology will change our lives. That it will is a near certainty. But how it will, you can always find somebody who is right afterwards. That's just like random luck. If you get a million people to pick the number of jelly beans in a huge jar, one of them will be right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Right? That's true.

[Astro Teller]

But they weren't right because they were wise. They just guessed a number and they happened by random chance to be the person guessing the number. But you can be certain that we're not right about how technology will play out and asking ourselves how we can be in discovery about what it will be while taking care of society along the way. I think that's the real trick.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What do you think is the most overrated piece of innovation advice that you hear repeated? And you're just kind of like, oh, whatever, there's gotta be something as sort.

[Astro Teller]

Of the crown prince of failure, which I think is horribly misunderstood. Fail fast is true and not helpful. Yes. Once you have the evidence that you're doing the wrong thing, you should stop doing that thing. I don't know who would argue against that, but everybody knows that. The question isn't whether stopping once you know you're wrong is a good idea. That is super not helpful. It's how do you help people to do that? Which, since we're at the end of our time here, that's what we go into in a lot of detail in our podcast, is how to create an environment and a culture that actually makes that possible. And I do hope that your listeners check out Moonshot Factory Moonshot Podcast. If you Google that or look at the link that you'll provide, you can go a lot deeper on a bunch of the things we've been talking about.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much for having us over here at X. It's cool to see the Moonshot Factory in person, especially because I walked past many signs that said no visitors beyond this point. Abby was with me, but still counts.

[Astro Teller]

Thank you, Jordan. That was fun.

[Jordan Harbinger]

When disaster strikes, it's not your go bag or survival stash that saves you you, it's your neighbors. Amanda Ripley joins me to reveal why most people freeze instead of panic, and how our biggest threat in a crisis isn't chaos, it's denial.

[D]

Disasters happen quite frequently, and they've gotten more frequent, and weather and geological disasters specifically have increased about 400% over the past 50 years. But we've actually gotten much better at surviving them over the same time period. So the number of deaths has dropped by about -2. In 1990, the National Hurricane center could predict the path of a hurricane only about 24 hours in advance. That's all you had to get out of the way, which really isn't enough just based on the way people make decisions about evacuation and also based on the design of dense urban places. So now the National Hurricane center can predict that path of a hurricane with pretty good accuracy 72 hours beforehand, which is actually a pretty big difference when it comes to getting out of harm's way. So this is a recurring nightmare for many millions of people at this point, evacuating, worrying, recovering, rebuilding, all of this. And it's actually a massive tax on our economy. So the bottom line is if you haven't personally experienced a disaster yet, you probably, probably will, unfortunately. But the upside is that the number of deaths has dropped. Humans tend to become polite and courteous and cooperative almost to a fault. In most disasters, including strangers. Actually, your best ally are the people around you.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This episode might just change the way you think about prepping and who you should be getting to know before the next emergency. Check out episode 1106 with Amanda Ripley. One thing we didn't have a chance to get to on the show was robotics. What they're going to end up doing for us, According to Astroteller, what they'll be doing for us actually is not just manufacturing. Robotics is actually way behind AI. You know, AI is super smart and amazing, but robotics needs maybe another decade or two before it can do something else like plumbing, which is complex and has tons of unique cases for a robot to be able to handle. He talked a little bit about why put feet on something until you can get something with wheels to work. One thing I found super interesting on the Moonshot podcast was in the home. Robots have to physically move in ways that are seen by humans as safe, not just vaguely non threatening. They're actually working with experts on choreography and dance and things like that to make robots appear more friendly and less threatening. This is really of course, important for nursing homes schools. They have this dance choreographer that I heard on the podcast where she gave an example that let's say I'm walking towards you in a hallway. I would reorient pretty early so that I don't crash into you. A robot will just walk straight at you and reorient at kind of the last minute. That's very weird. It comes across to humans as threatening, so they need to change that. However, too human is also freaky and deceptive, right? So you want people to know that it's a robot and not get tricked into thinking it's a human and then find out it's a robot. That's also extra creepy. So they're finding the balance here and that balance will probably change from generation to generation. Humans are really, we are programmed for fear with respect to robots. We have sci fi narratives, horror flicks, iRobot, all kinds of movies where the robots turn against us. Terminator comes to mind and it kind of should, right? Taking the advantages of computers and AI and how they think leagues above humans and then moving that into the physical world rightfully scares a lot of people, myself included. So that was kind of a fascinating aside on the podcast. You can expect discussions like that on the Moonshot podcast. So if you're interested in what they're doing over there at X, not the Twitter X, the other X. I can recommend that you check out that podcast. And on that note, all things Astroteller will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show. [e-mail] deals Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also our newsletter wee bit wiser. The idea here is to give you something specific and practical, something that'll have an immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships. In under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out. It's a great companion to the show. Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. And don't forget about six minute networking as well. Over at sixminutenetworking.com I'm ordanharbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show. It's created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in futurism, robotics, innovation, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn and we'll see you next time.