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