1183: Astro Teller | How to Systematically Realize the Impossible

1183: Astro Teller | How to Systematically Realize the Impossible

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

Astro Teller: 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 gonna 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, grand Master, four Star General, or Russian spy, sometimes all the same person.[00:01:00]

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That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit Jordan harbinger.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 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 [00:02:00] 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? Yes. Yeah. Okay. How did it feel? 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. Good. Is that the idea? Yeah. It was meant to be a very thin X, but yeah. Oh, okay. That makes sense. I was like, these lines aren't really demarcating anything too differently from one another. No, 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

Jordan Harbinger: here

Astro Teller: at Alphabet's Moonshot Factory? Mm-hmm. Our job is to harvest [00:03:00] non-conformity in a productive way. It's easy to be randomly, non-conformist. Just be an anarchist. Right? Just like go off in random directions, light things on fire.

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. So reminding people to get out of their comfort zones to realize the extent to which there are rules in their heads.

Like, if you work here at X, I don't want you hurting anybody. I don't want you embezzling. Yeah. Good. There are huge number of rules Yeah. In your head that are not actually rules, they're just how it's done. Okay. 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 [00:04:00] how comfortable can

Jordan Harbinger: I get breaking

Astro Teller: them?

Jordan Harbinger: I like that. Well, it's like the, uh, 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, the restroom here usually don't start a show like this, but I went into 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 the, 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. I wouldn't actually put it outta the question. Yeah. So for people who don't know, can you, you, you, you mentioned that X is like you're systematizing the moonshot thing. It sort of feels like Q branch of MI six, but for everyone because we all get to play with the tech and Thanks.

I love that framing. 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 [00:05:00] 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.

Yeah. 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, right?

If we have all three of those things, the huge problem, the radical proposed solution and the breakthrough technology, we are not done. That's legitimate beginning of the journey. That is a moonshot story hypothesis. Then

Jordan Harbinger: we can go test it. 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 year's long process [00:06:00] 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.

It's gotta 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-ST 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. Yeah. If you're willing to deny reality.

To be able to suspend your disbelief for a non-ST stupid reason, to have a specific theory about the world, it's okay that you're probably wrong. Mm-hmm. But that makes it testable. And then if you work here, the next step is how fast, how [00:07:00] 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. Yeah. Yeah. That's gotta be tough. 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? Mm-hmm. With

Jordan Harbinger: your idea. 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 the, kind of looks like a little tiny car wash kind of thing. That's the thing that goes to the farmer field and looks at the plants and genotypes of the plants. But the prototype to that was like, what was it like? It was like a push cart with an a couple of Google Pixel phones, duct tape to the thing or whatever.

I mean, ba, I mean exaggerating, but it was basically that. 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 [00:08:00] field regularly. 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 [00:09:00] as fast as we can, as cheaply as we can. Is this one of these things that might be a gener once in a generation opportunity for us? Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: I, I love these, 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 like 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 the 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. Yeah. So self-driving cars. Yeah. Which now quite recently, Waymo, uh, which originally came from X, people are saying, oh yeah, that's actually gonna be like how we get around.

15 and a half years ago when we started Waymo, nobody was saying that it was [00:10:00] up there with flying cars. Exactly. We now have Tara. This is, uh, 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 20 kilometers.

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 mm-hmm. Over months or years for millions of dollars.

Right. You have it up for a microscopic fraction of a million dollars. Wow. In one hour. 20 gigabits per second. The same thing you would get in a fiber optic cable. Yeah, that's crazy. That is now out in the world. It's live in more than 20 countries. I guarantee you. That was like had people laughing seven and a half years ago when we started that

Jordan Harbinger: project.

That's impressive. I think you talked [00:11:00] 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. Uh, if anyone wants to see more about a bunch of the things we're gonna 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, got this thing's just not quite gonna gonna happen.

Astro Teller: Well, somewhat famously. Google Glass Yeah. Was something That's right where we were. It now turns out exactly right. Yeah. And we were too early. Too early. Yeah. 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.

We just have to accept that at [00:12:00] X because our job is to be the right amount too early. Yeah. But if you're trying to be the right amount too early, occasionally you're gonna be not enough too early.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Astro Teller: And sometimes you're gonna be too, too early. Too, 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 I, 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. People are now desperately trying to get themselves on video

Astro Teller: everywhere they go. So sure.

Jordan Harbinger: I think

Astro Teller: that ship has sailed.

Jordan Harbinger: I wonder what the cost is sort of emotionally. 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. Let me [00:13:00] use an analogy for you.

Astro Teller: Sure. Let's say I taught you card counting. Mm-hmm. You know how card counting works in Vegas from For Blackjack. 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 gonna go bet with my money in Vegas using the process of card counting, you're gonna lose money of mine.

Yeah. Regularly, right 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 gonna be about whether you are following the process correctly. Right.

We are 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

Jordan Harbinger: following the process correctly. Right. 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 what the, the odds are in your favor that something's gonna pop off.

I know nothing about [00:14:00] card counting, but I assume people do that 'cause 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: Yeah, 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 sea water and sunlight and turning it into methanol so you could actually stick this thing you got out. You basically, you're taking CO2 out of the sea water. You take some water, split it up. So you get H two 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 in two H twos, you jam it together, you get methanol.

Okay. You can do this using sunlight. Wow. Okay. So you can have a carbon negative process that [00:15:00] 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. Yeah, it's 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Astro Teller: When the first drips were coming out of this machine, people were just crying, sobbing. Yeah. It was so emotional. But a year later, we could not convince ourselves we were gonna get it cheaper than about $15 gallon of gas equivalent.

Right. Okay. This was maybe eight, nine years ago.

Jordan Harbinger: Just wait. Gas will be 25 bucks. We'll be fine.

Astro Teller: Well, that was part of the, like we had an argument about that, but in the end, $15 gallon of gas equivalent, even once we got there, was not gonna change the world. Yeah. 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 [00:16:00] mean maybe in like Singapore or uh, 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.

You know, we're back in it. Uh, 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 hangup?

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.

I thought maybe more government stuff as opposed to, you know, the, I mean, ment, I mean, we, we work with regulators around the world. Yeah. But obviously sometimes we have to pace ourselves around the regulators. But we have found regulators to be very thoughtful. Hmm. My belief about the reason regulators get a, 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 [00:17:00] get approved 'cause it's done. And you take to the regulars and say, will you please approve this? They're gonna be like, oh, this is the first time I've seen this.

I don't know, like, no. Like maybe a couple years from now. Like 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? Mm-hmm. And go on this journey with us. And then they usually say, yeah, sure. And then they become a partner with us. I see. And so we have to take them with us, but they usually come with us.

We, we've found them to be actually good partners most of the time.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. 'cause that's not what you typically hear about regulators. For sure.

Astro Teller: But like I [00:18:00] said, I think some of that is the fault of the people who didn't bring the regulators into the process. Right. They wait till the end and then say, here's my baby.

Tell me it's beautiful. Right, right. That's not a great position

Jordan Harbinger: for the regulator to

Astro Teller: be

Jordan Harbinger: in. That's right. It's not a good strategy. Oh, and by the way, I need this faster. We're going bankrupt. Exactly. Yeah. I've gotta 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 lower carbon footprint. You get your stuff super fast, right? I don't have to wait for UPS to do his whole route, just come straight to me from the Amazon warehouse or whatever. As long as they don't hit power lines or birds.

Like when are we doing this? It's happening. So

Astro Teller: in rural Australia or whatever. Right. It's happening increasingly in North Carolina. In Texas? Uh, a little bit In Arkansas, in London. In, in London. Oh, that's cool. I haven't seen that. Um, like downtown London. Where do they land? In downtown London. They're actually taking things between hospitals.

Oh, I see. Interesting. That's a good idea. [00:19:00] 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 had clicked in on Waymo and they thought, oh, that's not a future thing. That's a now thing. Yeah. Just drove by me on the road.

Yeah. Wing. I. The drones for package delivery that came from X is gonna be making people feel that way in about 12 to 18 months. Really, 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 a most of the work is before the public really understands.

Mm-hmm. That there's so much safety work and so much preparation to scale that it can take a decade from when you start Yeah. To when you're really ready for people on the street to be like, oh yeah, there's a drone delivering to somebody. Yeah. But it's now coming quite quickly and the sorts of things that have to be solved now is what happens.

Like do [00:20:00] 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? Mm-hmm. 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.

Yeah, 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. That's the noise issue. And the way that this got handled was so interesting. I, it's quite nerdy, but I I, you're proud of it. 'cause I heard your voice on the podcast talking about how this 'cause a drone noise.

It's a little creepy, but that wasn't somehow a deal breaker. Yes.

Astro Teller: 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. Mm-hmm. Now we have made that a hum and not like an angry bee sound.[00:21:00]

Yeah. The angry bee sound. We were very focused on this and making it sound Mm. 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. Mm-hmm. How people are really gonna 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, in hover mode, nobody cared about it hovering. And I believe it's because if it's delivering to you, you're so happy. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Z Yeah. Even if it's 60, 70 miles an hour, you can only hear it for one second. Mm-hmm. It's 200 feet in the air so you can barely hear it. There were people who were annoyed. Yeah. And I think it was fundamentally 'cause they didn't feel like they, it was part of their world.

Someone else was getting a delivery and so one, making sure they know they can get deliveries [00:22:00] 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 gonna care. 'cause it is technically quieter. Right? 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

Jordan Harbinger: don't hear it anymore. Right. Change the sound. Different propellers, different frequencies is it's, it's kinda 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. You better stop by 10:00 PM Right. It's one of those things, and it's really incredible. Three 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, sometimes

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:00] sometime before 10:00 PM and I'm like, or even, come on,

Astro Teller: even, you know, a delivery company that's bringing dinner to your house will give you maybe a 30 minute window.

Mm-hmm. You're not gonna stand outside for 30 minutes. Right. 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 a traffic lights. Right. No traffic does. There's no traffic for it. So it's get, it can tell ahead of time exactly when it will be there.

The only

Jordan Harbinger: thing is like, uh, your, your Chinese food hit a power line, so sorry about that, but

Astro Teller: since we've never had Chinese food hit a power line, uh, well, I'll let you know when it happens exactly. 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 gold mine if you know how to use it. Quilt Mind 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.[00:24:00]

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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. over@sixminutenetworking.com. Alright, now back to Astro Teller. Blood samples organs that I think is really particularly exciting. 'cause getting your Chinese food quick is cool and getting your toilet paper rolls refilled is cool, but having an organ come from somebody in a, maybe in another state or [00:27:00] another hospital across the state and then you getting that in time is, that's literally lifesaving.

Astro Teller: Yeah. And I don't think people have really thought through how much moving things through the air is gonna 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 'cause 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, Uber, or sharing bedrooms, but you have a hammer in your house or apartment, I guarantee you. You do. And you use it one 10000th of the time maybe. Yeah. 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.[00:28:00]

You'd pay pennies for the hour, you kept it and then it would just disappear back into the ether. That's right. 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.

No, my garage would be, I could park my car in

Jordan Harbinger: my garage. You imagine. Wouldn't be amazing.

Astro Teller: Right? There's so much that we stockpile, perishables and non-perishables in case we need it. Yeah. You have batteries discharging in a drawer in your apartment or house. Many on the off chance someday you need them.

Yeah. And you know it's dumb to be letting them discharge and you have them anyway as we all do. Mm-hmm. But if you knew that whatever battery shape you wanted would just appear in one minute mm-hmm. You would keep no batteries in your house.

Jordan Harbinger: I wanna do this with my kids' toys. They can vanish and then when my kid cries and says, where's that rabbit with a thing on it?

And we can go. B bring that thing back. We thought she forgot, uh, how long till a drone can fly me to and from the hospital though, that's what I want. 'cause you know, it's great if you can get an organ, obviously that's useful. But [00:29:00] what happens if I'm in Acra? 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, 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. The

Astro Teller: correct answer is. Wing has no immediate plans to do that.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

Astro Teller: And I will just observe that they've gone from like a two and a half pound payload to a five pound payload recently.

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

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. That's interesting. I feel like that's inevitable. 'cause 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? We say, you know what we're talking about by any chance, let me give you a spicy take

Astro Teller: on robots with legs. Yeah. 'cause [00:30:00] I've had this conversation over and over again. Okay.

Show me a robot with a wheeled base like the one you saw downstairs. Yeah, 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'm 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? Mm-hmm. I mean, that isn't even the spicy part. I think that's just obvious. Yeah, sure. 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. Yeah. I think that's totally true, and I would encourage true 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, yeah, you will probably find the winners.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes a lot of [00:31:00] sense. Actually, even Rosie, I think it was her name was Rosie on the Jetsons. Yeah. Even she didn't have legs. Exactly. 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 loon, the balloon internet access. 'cause 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 use, 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 gonna 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 The speed of [00:32:00] light is the speed of light. If it has to go up to six or 700,000 feet, then it's gonna take a lot longer than if it only has to go up to 60 or 65,000 feet.

Sure. 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 65,000 feet, but you cannot do at 600 or 600 to 700,000 feet. That makes sense. So at 65,000 feet as opposed to 650,000 feet, that's not a satellite, right? That's a balloon.

So could you hang balloons in 65,000 feet, 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 [00:33:00] 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 mm-hmm.

Connection back to the internet backbone. We built this, it was flying around the world. We were delivering, uh, data to many hundreds of thousands of people in several countries. That's crazy. 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. Yeah. And so as this project went away, we call 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.[00:34:00]

What if we did that on the ground? On the ground?

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Then Loon did in its entire nine year history. Wow. So back to your question about how does it feel to like fail? Right. It's learning. It's not failing. If you take a long enough time horizon. Like we're building towards something and it just takes a certain amount of like, whoops. Nothing under that rock.

Yeah. 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. Exactly. Yeah. That's amazing. I love the, the explanation you given the podcast, which is light is so much faster than [00:35:00] 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 a hundred times faster than the fastest. You can wiggle an electron in a radio wave. Yeah. So fiber optic internet is gonna 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 two G to 3G to 4G to 5G.

Mm-hmm. What we've gotten is we're moving in higher and higher frequency of radio frequencies. Wiggling faster as you described it, right? 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 three terahertz. This is the frequency at which something is [00:36:00] wiggling is too fast for radio frequencies, but too slow for optics. I see. It's like an uncomfortable tweener stage, huh? 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.

Yeah, that is it. Like a microwave wiggles the water molecules. Right. 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. They, one thing that you have to be able to satisfy yourself is you have to be able to see things that can't go through walls anymore.

Jordan Harbinger: Right. So it's not gonna work if your phone is in your pocket. It's gotta be line of sight. Exactly. So you're sort of capped at [00:37:00] 5G plus or whatever the fastest radio is.

Astro Teller: Well, for now, for now, but as this team has announced, they have a chip. I actually have it over there. I can show it to you afterwards. S sitting. It's sitting

Jordan Harbinger: at a top secret shelf with a pile of post of notes on,

Astro Teller: well, we've announced it now, a little bit smaller than a smooshed pea. Okay. 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 billions 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 [00:38:00] 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 smooshed P, not even. Wow. Is gonna totally change whether it can be in your phone and how data gets moved around. Geez.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I just wonder how it would 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. Where they change.

Astro Teller: I'm roleplaying with you, but Sure. If you wanted to come to X, this is one of the first things that we would talk about, which is we are card counters here. We are not gamblers. If you just believe in flying cars and you wanna do flying cars, I sincerely wish you the best.

Mm-hmm. And I'm begging you do not come to X because you'll be miserable here. Howard Hughes. I need, yeah, I need you to understand [00:39:00] we will miss occasional opportunities like that. We are 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.

Right. 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 wanna be part of a team that does that and tying your sense of self-worth to that, you might love it here at X. Yeah. 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 gonna get stuck on I want to have my idea live. Mm-hmm. You're just gonna be miserable here and I need you to know that before you come.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that makes sense. It, it's gotta be a, a culture where, 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 gotta be tough to do that in an environment full of [00:40:00] PhDs and egos and big bets and stuff like that.

Astro Teller: Lemme give you two very different examples about how we try to help people get used to that one. I have wheels on my feet. Yeah, you have rollerblading around it reminds me not to take myself too seriously.

It reminds everybody else here to not take me or themselves too seriously. Mm-hmm. There's a flying pig on the wall right there. Oh yeah. 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, yeah. 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 [00:41:00] ovation at the all hands out there on the 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 'cause 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.

Sure. For the next thing they try. Sure. 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. Yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: no, I love that, man. Too bad the fusion thing didn't work out. I feel like that's the, that's the key sort of bottleneck for a lot of these projects, right?

Desalination of water, decarb, the atmosphere [00:42:00] once you have unlimited energy, uh, solves a lot of issues. We'll try again. Yeah, give it a shot. See what you see, what you come up with. What ethical line have you seen people flirt with in the name of progress that you think maybe deserves a little bit more scrutiny?

Maybe the AI stuff or I don't know if you're, what your feelings are on that

Astro Teller: rather than throwing anyone else under the bus. Sure. Yeah. Let me try to describe for you how we don't do that. And I don't just mean I'm gonna claim we don't do that. Let me tell you the process we try to go through. 'cause 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 I'm 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 [00:43:00] table stakes. Mm-hmm. 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 or the gas pedals, right. 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. Mm-hmm. 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 [00:44:00] 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 I had to worry about things like, don't make the passenger, you know, seasick by going too jerky away.

But there's a lot of stuff passed there. Like how do you show people, not with your physical body, but with your car's body, uh, when you're gonna merge? There's like, I'm thinking about it, right? And then there's like, okay, I'm really doing it. Which tells them to like give you the space, right? All of those things you have to just learn in the world.

Yeah. And there are like 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. But 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.

Right. But by [00:45:00] getting out in the world in really thoughtful, responsible ways with the actual communities who are gonna 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.

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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? 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, 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, that same [00:48:00] thing. We can't have this automation, it's gonna be dangerous.

It's this 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 to 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.

Sure. 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. 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 a second earlier or a penny cheaper.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. You don't care is cold

Astro Teller: comfort to you, right? 'cause you lost your job. Is that overall better for society? Yes, it is. And [00:49:00] society should find some way. This is like a public policy issue to take care of that elevator operator. I don't think that's best understood as the elevator company is a bad company, right?

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, than 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's bad or wrong or that we should try to slow it up, but [00:50:00] 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. Yeah, I mean, I'll give you one that

Astro Teller: I think is just easy to describe.

Sure. 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, in the 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 gonna 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 [00:51:00] 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. Right? And, and I'm, I got it before you did, and then I'm selling it back to you. Right. That was an example where once we had the clarity that that's what was really being proposed, not consciously, but defacto, we canceled the project.

Yeah. 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. Yeah. You can't just like block the river thing that goes into the ocean. Uh, there's a little bit more to it than that water's just that, that's gotta be one of the most complex systems that, I mean, that we have anywhere on the planet. I mean, that, that whole thing.

Astro Teller: We've taken a couple runs at Clean Water [00:52:00] 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 five-ish liters a day and 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. Sure. 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 gonna change the world.

At 1 cent 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 gonna get down to a penny a liter. And as we sometimes do, we published [00:53:00] our results in nature, I think, in that case.

Oh, wow. So that other people could know what we did and build on top of it if they had a better idea than this. Yeah, that's, that

Jordan Harbinger: stuff's interesting. I, I, I always nerd out about those, those ideas. I can't remember who it was in the show. It was telling me that they figured out how to do, make something where that 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 gonna use this to like, feed our pigs in the morning and then we're gonna bring it to the clean water thing later.

And it's like, why are we still getting sick? It was just like, oh gosh. Okay. So the problem is that, that they don't have clean water, so they keep, they, they just don't understand ger disease. Yeah. Yeah. It x working on the frontier of human capability. I wonder if anything scares you about the technologies that you're creating.

Like is there anything where you're like, oh, we have to be really careful with this one? I

Astro Teller: mean, yes. I, I am 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 [00:54:00] 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, a drone for package delivery, don't hit anybody. Don't hit a building. Like 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 wanna ignore it. So you were mentioning the sound that our drones make. We could say not our problem, but we don't. 'cause I think that's legitimately still our problem. Mm-hmm. 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 [00:55:00] technologies. Mm-hmm. Does that need to be addressed? Yes, for sure. But you don't want individual companies saying, I will decide how society is gonna respond to this.

Mm-hmm. That is a public policy issue. So the technology maker has a responsibility to explain to the public policy makers, here's what our technology is, here's how it's gonna 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, it's gotta be quite a, a delicate dance. 'cause 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, 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, aside from the fact that people have a hard

Astro Teller: time with change.

Yeah, there are. Again, I have great compassion for this, but [00:56:00] 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.

Mm-hmm. Some people just rather have Bob Drive. Yeah. Across town. 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 don't sort of don't match up to the facts. And I, I think we're a little we society. Yeah, a little too fast on the trigger on that one.

It's part of being a [00:57:00] 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. 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 an emergency, that makes me feel a lot better than knowing that it's just an iPad flying the 7 47.

Astro Teller: I get it, and that's a fascinating example because in that example, planes are now flying themselves enough of the time. Humans aren't having emergency experiences often enough. Hmm. And so one of the biggest risks that airlines have now is that they don't feel great handing responsibility back to the humans.

Oh. Because they [00:58:00] 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 sure. A very different reason. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So

Jordan Harbinger: if your flight is too cheap, ask yourself, are you on? 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 slash more dangerous? I'm such an optimist.

Astro Teller: Let me reframe that as an [00:59:00] opportunity. Yeah, reframe.

Just take the question apart and put it back together if you want. That's fine. 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. To find 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 gonna be absolutely transformative for humanity.

[01:00:00] 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 humanities problems. Hmm. And it's all going to stem from being able to program biology. Wow. 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, you know, 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 yours, your ticker's 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, it's just 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 [01:01:00] overhyped?

Astro Teller: One of the easiest ways to predict the future for anyone who'd like to predict the future to cocktail party is just say the following line over and over again. 'cause it tends to be true whenever anyone brings up any subject about technology, you say that's probably over-hyped in the short term and under hyped 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 gonna change less than we think.

'cause the world just changes kind of slow. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. And can change for the better.

Jordan Harbinger: This is how I feel about AI right now. You, you talk to somebody who [01:02:00] loves ai, we're all losing our jobs tomorrow.

You're not gonna need anybody to do anything. We need universal basic income yesterday and we're all gonna 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 in the world for us. That is much, we never would've 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 gonna lose their job by 2026 because of ai. It's just, uh, but so what was the, what was the phrase that makes us sound smart over-hyped in the short term? Under hyped in the long term? Yes. 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. 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. [01:03:00] And there had been this moment where aluminum went from more expensive than gold, and then just 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.

Wow. 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 where things were made out of wood. The reason I'm bringing 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, is a near certainty, but how it will, mm-hmm. You can always find somebody who is right afterwards. That's just like random luck. Right. If you get, you know, 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. It ha they happened by random chance to be the person guessing the number. [01:04:00] But you can be certain that we are 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, uh, whatever. There's gotta be something

Astro Teller: as sort of the crown prince of failure, which I think is horribly misunderstood. Fail fast is true. Mm-hmm. 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. Mm-hmm. But everybody knows that. The question isn't whether stopping once you know you're wrong is a good idea. Mm-hmm. 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. Yeah. That's what we go into in a lot of detail in our podcast, right, is how to create an environment and a culture that actually [01:05:00] makes that possible.

And I do hope that your listeners check out Moonshot Factory Moonshot podcast. Yes. If you Google that or look at the link that you'll provide, you can That's right. Go a lot deeper on a bunch of the things we've been talking

Jordan Harbinger: about. Yeah. I, 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 and said, no visitors beyond this point.

Abby was with me, but still counts. Thank you, Jordan. That was fun. When disaster strikes, it's not your go bag or survival stash that saves 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.

JHS Clip: 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 you'd actually gotten much better at surviving them over the same time period. So the number of deaths has dropped by about two thirds.

In [01:06:00] 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 outta 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 the path of 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 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 [01:07:00] 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 gonna end up doing for us though, according to Astro Teller, 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 [01:08:00] 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 in 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 this terminator comes to mind and it, it kinda 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 [01:09:00] 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 could recommend that you check out that podcast. And on that note, all things Astro Teller will be in the show notes on the website, advertisers deals, discount Codes, ways to support the show, all at Jordan harbinger.com/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, a relationships in under two minutes. If you haven't signed up yet, I invite you to come check it out.

It is a great companion to the show. Jordan harbinger.com/news is where you can find it. And don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show, it's created an association with PodcastOne.

My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, 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 [01:10:00] you care about.

If you know somebody who's interested in futurism, robotics, innovation, definitely share this episode with 'em. 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.