The Moonshot Mindset with Adam Savage and Sergey Brin: The Moonshot Podcast

We're here at the final episode of season two. During season two, we got to go on some amazing journeys with past Xers to hear about the moonshots they're taking at the frontiers of health, biology, computing, and more. The difficulties they've had, the wins they've experienced, and even when it didn't work, how we could repurpose those learnings in surprising ways. For this episode, what we're going to explore is what if you could make an invention machine that is systematizing radical innovation. This is the meta moonshot that I've dedicated the last 16 years of my life to. Innovation is a team sport. It's earned this question: could we now push technology farther in a broader set of domains? I'm famous for saying failure is always an option. The joke is I no longer believe that it's not an option. It's intrinsic to the process. It just occurred to me, we're moonshot busters.

Absolutely, you're moonshot busters.

I'm Astro Teller, your host and Captain of Moonshots, and this is the Moonshot Podcast. I'm joined by Adam Savage, my longtime friend and King of Experimental Curiosity. He's the host of the very popular YouTube show Tested. He was the one who built and ran MythBusters, and we thought we would try something a little bit different. So he's going to interview me as we dig in on what innovation is, how can you really drive it, and how can we all be more innovative in our lives.

So we are turning the tables here. I'm interviewing you. Oh, wait. This was always the better seat. Who knew. Hi, everybody. This is Adam Savage. I'm sitting down with my friend Astro Teller, Captain of the Moonshot Factory here at Alphabet. Dude, how are you?

I'm great. Adam, I'm so glad that we're switching places for today. I think of you as the poster child, the embodiment of the idea of prototyping to drive learning. And I hope that is what we do here. I know that you describe your shop as a possibility engine, and I think maybe we're just a radical possibility engine here. In fact, there are many of your best people from MythBusters who now work here at X. I hope that we get to riff on what it means to be weird, crazy, even silly with a purpose. I would like to think that both you and I have specialized in that over time, doing it ourselves and trying to inspire other people to do it.

We do, and it feels like a particular grace to get to play in that space. Because I was just saying to someone last week, no, no, no, I've had the experience. I can tell you that art and science are the same process. From having been inside both of these plasma pools, the same mechanism is still going on. We're still trying to figure out the shape of the world through different metrics, I agree.

And wouldn't you even say they're often in the same plasma pool. They have to coexist. But it's not like I'm going to do my science over here. And then with a completely different set of people in a completely separate building, I'm going to do my art over here. There is so much art in the science of taking moonshots. At least I've found.

No, it really is. And the whole idea that science is this area where things are clearly delineated and art is this area of fuzzy lines. And I mean, the first thing any scientist learned is that the closer you look at anything, the fuzzier it gets. I have so many questions, but I'd love to start by asking what was the original charge for Google X. What was the original vision for it, and when were you brought in, the founders, Larry and Sergey?

Long before Google X existed, I think right from the start, Google had a vision to do a lot more than just organize the world's information. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but they were convinced to start with organizing the world's information. So some of it, I think, came just from their raw intellect and excitement for helping the world. Some of it came from their understanding of the corporate physics that companies tend to calcify as they get larger, unless you do something to mitigate against that. And so they had this vision from very early on that they wanted somehow to have a part of Google that was separated from Google, whose mission would not be to help Google with its current problems, but to go find new problems for Google—now we would call it Alphabet—to have, and then hopefully to find solutions to those problems. So we were just ramping up the self-driving car project at Alphabet. Literally a couple people. And the person who started that was a man named Sebastian Thrun, but there wasn't really a place for that to live. And I think that became part of their excuse for making a home just as this thing, what now people understand is Waymo, got off the ground. And they asked Sebastian, would you co-found? And he said, yes. And he came and he asked me. And so I came on as his first mate and co-founder for what became Google X. And then after about two years, he moved on. He started Udacity on the outside. And that's how I moved up from first mate to Captain.

Tell me about your two famous grandfathers, and you were talking off camera about ways in which your upbringing may have made you perfectly suited for this job. Talk to me about that.

My mother's father won a Nobel Prize in economics in 1983, and my father's father was Edward Teller, who was the father of the hydrogen bomb, part of the Manhattan Project, the father of SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative. So I grew up in a household where being smart was the only yardstick. And as it happens, my brother is meaningfully smarter than I am. And I knew that from a young age. And I think that was actually one of the best things that's ever happened for me, though I certainly didn't experience it at the time. But because I had lost in my family's eyes, as I experienced it from this very early age, it caused me to get really interested in what else I was good at and what else are people good at. And so I think I've become a much more well-rounded person than I would have otherwise. I've learned to be a better public speaker. I've learned to be much more creative than I would have been otherwise, to manage and lead people—muscles that have nothing to do with being smart, actually. But I think that was really helpful to me while I was growing up. My father grew up in Los Alamos. Yeah, and for a while. So hearing from my father and from my grandfather about Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project, this idea that you could get a bunch of exceptional people, sequester them away—you have to protect the environment—get them to work really hard, really fast, and really scrappy ways on something that really matters. I thought, wow, I want to do that when I grow up. So from when I was six or seven years old, I obviously didn't conceive of the moonshot factory specifically. I've had a fascination with regularizing, with systematizing the process of getting people together. And I think having grown up on a steady diet of those things, I really affected my excitement and interest and maybe some of my philosophy about how to set it up here.

One of the things I like to tell young people when I speak to them is I say, I think some of you might be wondering about your future and you might be thinking, maybe I'm a genius. And I go, none of you are geniuses. None of us are geniuses. I've met one or two. They are so rare. You got to. We all go. The rest of us have to work together. It's a struggle. And working together, it has to be the fun of working together. Because innovation is a team sport. It just is. We should be the most excited by the people who cheer on their teams and support and nurture their teams. That's what great leadership of innovation looks like, I think.

You have talked about when a moonshot idea comes into your purview, your guys' goal is to beat the crap out of it, is to throw every sling and arrow at it, to see why it's a terrible idea. And if it survives that, then you start to investigate. One of the most fundamental truths about innovation, which I know you know very well, but the visionary class would like us to believe is not the case, is that radical innovation is almost all you like. Look under some rock and it's like, nope, nothing under that rock. Or put the rock down fast. Radical innovation is mostly about failure and learning. It is not a story of success where some genius just had the right idea. That's just not how it works. And so if you were setting up a moonshot factory, unless you want to set yourself up for failure and constantly trying to smokescreen your way through the process, you would start with, this is how it actually works. So let's be honest and then set up a culture that can embrace that instead of trying to be in denial about it.

I'd like to talk about the culture that embraces that, because within America, right now, within the world right now, there is a standard way to build a company. There are hierarchies you can choose. But a moonshot factory, I think, requires a fundamentally different kind of structure, one in which failure is not just accepted but encouraged. I'd love you to talk about some of the differences between the structure of Google X and other parts of Alphabet.

I would start with we are not an incubator. So if you come to work here at X, the very first thing I need you to know is you're not on the teleporter team. If you're working on the teleporter, you're on the X team. It can't be that you're trying to keep the teleporter alive. If you're trying to do that and I aren't on the same team, because my interest is not actually in having the teleporter work. My interest is, how can we solve as many of the world's big problems as possible per dollar spent. So that has to be the team you're on if you want to be here with me. Once we agree that that's the team we're on, now you're not sitting on the other side of the table. You're on my side of the table. And we're saying we're buying options on the future for Alphabet and for the world. Might this be a once-in-a-generation opportunity? I don't know, let's go find out. And you find out by pressure testing, pressure testing the idea, then pressure testing the engineering. If I was trying to get you to come work at X, one of the other things that I would tell you is if you need to be right, this is going to be a horrible place for you because 99% of the things that we try turn out not to be real dents in the universe, real once-in-a-generation opportunities. So everyone who comes in here has to move their sense of self-worth as a professional from 'I made my thing work' to 'I'm world class at discovering which of the 100 things we're looking at is worth making.' I'm famous for saying failure is always an option, and I no longer... The joke is I no longer believe that it's not an option. It's intrinsic to the process, completely intrinsic.

So after 16 years of doing this, I'm curious if you have a metric as to what if you're better at spotting a reasonable moonshot? So moonshot, huge problem with the world, radical proposed solution, breakthrough technology that at the highest level hasn't changed.

And I would say we hold our bar, if anything, even higher than we used to in terms of the craziness of what we should be shooting for. That maybe makes it harder in some ways, but it makes it more fun, I think ultimately more profitable, more good for the world. We're much more three-dimensional at how we test things. I think no one said techno-economics for the first two or three years of Google X. Now it's weird. If you go a day without hearing somebody say techno-economics, it's just one of the fundamental ways to pressure test what we're doing. And for a lot of things, it's the question: if you're going to work in a commoditized field like energy, the levelized cost of energy, LCOE, like that's it. That's the techno-economics. Right. And so you can't put that off till year five. You should be having that conversation in the first conversation, like, what would this be. And if we don't know, that's fine. But that's the first question to go sort of bang on. So we're much more three-dimensional about who would want this, why would they want this. And being able to be clever about how we get really signals about what people would want, why they would want it, what they would do with it, maybe long before we can have a really polished version of it. So that helps. I think there's just a certain amount of pattern matching in art as well as in science you were suggesting. Now that we've seen, we've started and killed about 2,000 ideas over the last 16 years.

Wow, what a great metric. You started and killed 2,000 ideas. It's so awesome.

And we now have a really searchable way of being able to interrogate it.

Fantastic to look at your past.

Yeah, so if you want to say, ultrasound, everything that had ultrasound in it, then there's dozens where we like ultrasound played some part in it. And you can look at those and these things come back more and more frequently, but being able to say, why did that one die. That's why. So I'm curious if there's been places where in failing at one idea of a moonshot, but looking at why something was hard, found another one.

For sure.

We call this moonshot compost, and it happens constantly. In fact, literally the previous meeting, which was one of our internal meetings where people are bringing very early investigations to the table, they were talking about a particular idea, and we're like, oh, a quarter of that idea was that thing that we killed about a year ago. Yes, because it wasn't useful for other reasons. But it's perfect for this. And he said, right, that's why I'm excited about this. And so the ability to re-harvest people, patents, code, learnings, partnerships, whatever it is that we got along the way when most of our stuff is misadventures. That learning isn't just oh, don't go that way. There's so much where we're like, oh God, this would be awesome if we only had unobtainium. And then you put it aside. But you're also like, note to self, if anyone finds unobtainium, let's get this out of the refrigerator. Meanwhile, you've got this crew where somebody's like the world's expert at a totally pointless thing. That may not be pointless next week.

Yeah, I love that. So it also strikes me that with that kind of institutional knowledge, you must have some long-term employees. People have been around for a goodly portion because you need that institutional memory, don't you.

We do. Several of them used to work for you, as you know. Turns out MythBuster and it's a nice character overlap.

Exactly, yeah.

We do have, we're very fortunate that there are a bunch of people here. I mean, we have several who've been here 15 years, at least another 20 or 30 who've been here at least 8 to 10. And that institutional knowledge is super important because there is a certain 'trust the process' feeling here, which it would be easy to follow if the process were really rigid and explicit, but because it's not, you can't take a bunch of iconoclasts, tell them to think differently and then be and be nonconformist. Which is the whole point in taking a moonshot is you have to say no. You're wrong to experts, at least in some way about that field. You cannot take those people and then say, and here's the rule book you must follow to get there. That is definitionally a failure. So you have to create these guardrails that sort of shape and direct them with very light process and that there's rules of thumb. We're not going to let anyone hurt anybody. No fraud or embezzlement, please. But beyond those pretty wide guardrails, you have to leave a lot of space. And so the institutional memory of why this stuff is set up the way it is, very important. Some of our most beloved Xers came from MythBusters. Why do you think that is.

I'll start by saying spending 13 years being a MythBuster, being able to move the levers of that machine, which was 25 people strong across two different shops, was a really remarkable gift. We had these associate producers who had a huge amount of autonomy over finding us a location, finding us an expert, finding us materials. We would ask for specific things. We were often wrong in the framing of our question, and they would have to come back and help us understand. And that feedback loop between production and Jamie and I and Kari and Grant and Tory trying to solve these problems on camera. There's this moment when Discovery was thinking about making everything 3D, and they sent out the best 3D producer in the world who worked for James Cameron at the time, and he came and embedded with us for three days. And at the end of three days, he turned to me and Tappert, my co-producer, and said, let me get this straight. The experiment takes precedence over the filming. And we said, yeah. He said, I would have never imagined that model could work. But that was the model all the way down. So we built this marvelous team of contingency planners who understood how to build relationships, and that comes right from the top of most of the core team of MythBusters. Coming from the film industry, which is a collaborative medium, and understanding, I don't want to know how you do your job. If I do, there's a problem. I just want to know you can do it. And then we're all pulling on the same rope. It just occurred to me, we're moonshot busters.

You absolutely are moonshot busters. That's literally what we do. We come up with moonshots, and then we try to bust them. And when you fail at that, you've succeeded.

Exactly, that's most of our work. Oh, that's beautiful. I'm going to ask you for some stories. Must have some spectacular stories of amazing successes or failures over the past 16 years, or even just insane things you learned unexpectedly.

I more than I can count. This place produces them on the daily. I will just give you a few off the top of my head and I encourage this kind of thing, but it makes me the happiest when it's not a specific thing that I encouraged. I remember the Everyday Robot group, in a moment of frustration mixed with playfulness, started shaming their robots where if the robot poured Coke on somebody's keyboard while it was trying to clean up their desk, they would hang a sign around its neck that said 'I spilled Coke on Mario's keyboard,' and they would make the robot have to wear it for the day. Amazing, as though shaming it would cause it to be better behaved. Obviously they knew that wasn't going to happen. That just made me happy because I understand that playfulness translates over time to a radically different kind of creativity. So I don't care about the poster on the board.

Wait, I'm just curious. I love to dial into that different kind of creativity. Is it specifically that the team would take time to externalize an emotion that's happening on the team?

To a certain extent, that's being a little bit, yes. Externalizing the emotion is healthy. It's cathartic. But also, if you can't be playful during your work, yeah, you won't be playful in your work. And playfulness is the root of creativity because creativity is the act of doing something not normal. And so when I see the playfulness during the work, I know that they have, they're building the muscle for doing the playfulness in the work.

I love that. I'll give you a different example. That's not playfulness. But when the Wing team started, I told them that they had to crash five wings before not too long. And I think there was a little bit of 'you're kidding, right.' And then they had to work through the fact that I wasn't kidding and that I was trying to help them connect with the idea that if they crashed these huge like electric airplanes, too often it would be a disaster. It would be way too expensive. But if they never crashed one, the amount of slowness they would have to introduce into the process to never crash one would mean they were guaranteed to be wasting Alphabet's money. So I wanted them to find the sweet spot. Yeah, it was when they brought me the first picture of a full wipeout crash where there was a yard sale of this thing spread across a crash site. I felt like, good. They heard me, and they get why to do it. That they weren't bringing it to me as an apology. They were saying, we heard you and we're doing it. They really understood the assignment.

Yeah, I mean, so there's been so many things like that where people have had fun in hard times. Yeah, and we lost a balloon in the early days. And we tracked it across the United States and up into Northern Canada via UFO sightings. And the fact that was the easiest way to find out where it was. Yeah, happened to mix nicely with, just the hilarity of it. And at the same time, it was like demystifying this thing. The fact that that kind of thing is an almost daily habit here is partly because what we're trying to do is audacious, but it is also because the people here have a sense of humor about what they're doing. Back to your point earlier, and can imbue these hard things that we're doing with playfulness and the creative process. Our monkey on a pedestal point.

No, we've never talked about this.

No. All right. Well, rabbit hole. But it'll be worth it. So for years I was saying to people here at X, you have to work on the riskiest part of the problem first. And everyone was like, I don't think that's right. That sounds wrong. I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Astro, it just kind of didn't work for them. And so I said, look, imagine that we had a project at X and the project was to get a monkey to stand on the top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare. Which should we do first. Build the pedestal or train the monkey. If we build the pedestal, we're half done. But in that extreme case, we can all see that we're not half done. We're 0% done. Because the entire risk, all of the real work in the sense of is it even possible, is piled up on the monkey, not on the pedestal. So you should train the monkey first. And don't worry about the pedestal. You always get it later if you actually train the monkey. This has taken on a life of its own here. Where now, I've probably been in three meetings today where people said 'this is the monkey' and that is just shorthand at X. Now, for this is the riskiest part of the problem. This is what we need to focus on. That's an example. This is back to your question of stories. Stories are such a powerful way. They're architectures for understanding. That's what a story actually is. I don't mean a marketing slogan, but when you create an architecture for understanding something that is portable, that makes it easy to remember, it makes it easy to pass on, you can now pass on the monkey story to somebody else. It changes things. And the fact that this place is full of stories in several senses of the word is part of what makes this machinery, which is the factory, work so well.

As a young model maker, I accreted towards always doing the toughest part of a problem first. And it was also partly because I really liked the endorphin rush of doing the pedestal once I've done all the hard stuff. I love doing that pedestal at the end of everything, right. Because there'll be a payoff for all the work of the pedestal. Now that the monkey's trained.

Yeah, and we've all built a pedestal before solving the hard problem. It sounds like you've really carved out a place here also for joy. One of the meditation teachers I read early in my life said, don't wish for happiness. That's impossible. But joy, while fleeting, is definitely something to shoot for.

Yeah, I think I could do you one better. The only thing that's taped up on the door of my huddle here is a poster of the tarot card of the fool. Joy might be somewhat harder to access, but the beginner's mindset if you practice, you can have that almost all the time. And there is a joyful, playful, almost ridiculousness of that feeling at the beginning of a journey where you say, yeah, but what if. The fun of getting to say what if, the acknowledgment at the beginning of the journey, you don't know where it will take you. It's probably going to have misadventures. You might have to start over. And that starting over is part of the fun. Not like a punishment. That's why it's the only thing that's taped up on the outside. And so when you say that we have joy here, I would hope, yes, I hope there's a lot of joy here at X, but I hope the beginner's mindset is actually the thing that's closest to what we maintain as our central ethos.

I remember telling a JPL scientist how hilariously terrible of an idea I thought the sky crane was. And they were like, yes. And it was the least terrible idea we had to deal with. That's why we made it work. And I thought of you as the second I heard that, I'm like, that's this whole place's ethos. We do bad idea brainstorms.

No, explain to me how this works. I love this idea.

So if you join a brainstorm and any of us is there. But even worse, if I'm there and I say, tell me your great idea, be brilliant right now. Guess how many brilliant ideas I'm going to get out of you. Guess 0. Guess how much creativity you're going to be able to muster in the moment where seized up with 'please the boss, please the boss.' But if I say this is a bad idea brainstorm. We're going to come up with some truly horrendous ideas. I don't want to hear it unless it definitely sucks. All of a sudden you've been challenged by how bad the idea can be. It does the opposite. If we keep putting stuff on the table, you'd be surprised. It doesn't take that long before someone's like, that idea might not be totally bad.

I love this, it's totally true. And it keeps your mind open to the real possibilities. Yeah, I'm curious about, I really appreciate, like I said in the beginning, take an idea and beat the hell out of it until it survives. And I recognize in you having the global perspective around what you guys are tackling, have to keep on removing your bias or your desires from the future. But I would be remiss if I didn't, in this interview, talk about one of the newest things that we've been dealing with in the past three years, which is I'm curious about what your thoughts were initially when the first hype started. And then how has your ideas about AI and its utility changed over the last three or four years.

Let me hit that in four waves. AI is 70 years old as a field. I got a PhD in artificial intelligence almost 30 years ago.

I did not realize that.

So I was doing this when there was literally an AI winter. That's what the few of us who were in the field at the time called it way back then. So I have a lot of affection for the field, and maybe a very different perspective on it, because I was doing it so long before the hype cycle. Yeah, and there have been several hype cycles, by the way. Then, not coincidentally, Google Brain came from X. So the modern explosion of machine learning not in whole but in part came from Google Brain, which came from X. The transformer, which is one of the fundamental aspects of how to get these deep neural networks to pay attention to a very long document or something like that, to be able to look around and figure out what in that document it wants to use, and in what way. That came from Google Brain. Ultimately, the TPUs that came from Google Brain. So, X has a certain pride in having helped in that part of the process, and partly because I have a background in it, partly because Google Brain was here in the early days. This place uses artificial intelligence in almost everything we do. But people here know not to start their talk about what they'd like to do or what they're currently doing with AI. What I tell everybody here is imagine what it would sound like if you pitched a startup, a new business you'd like to create and you said there's going to be electricity in our business. Everyone would worry about you. Yes, I'm glad to hear you plan to use electricity in your business. And that is utterly useless since everybody's using electricity in their business. What are you going to do. So we really try to focus people on what are the benefits you're trying to create for humanity, why does that create a lot of value. And then in the implementation details, if artificial intelligence is nowhere to be seen, I'll be a little bit surprised. But that can't be the justification for doing it, right. So I actually encourage people to see how long into their pitch they can get before they say artificial intelligence at all.

Astro, you spent a lot of time in this job thinking about the future, thinking about what might affect it, how the things you're inventing might be received by it in this moment in time. AI, I'm curious how you think about the next 10 years of humanity, the next 100 years. Where is your brain at on this.

Number one, there's a lot of fear out there. And I'm not saying that fear is wrong, but I don't think that a lot of great things have been produced while under the yoke of fear. This is true. So I hope that we can come at our jobs wide eyes, wide open about what problems might occur so that we can head those problems off at the pass, but not crippled by fear of what the future might bring. The second one is, I don't think anyone can predict the future, and I worry about people who can predict the future in specifics. But I think that there are things that are very likely to be true about the future, and we actually have a name for them here. It's called the axioms. Now we have 23 things listing things about the future that are totally obvious. We'll still have clocks 10 years from now. Not interesting. Too obvious. But if they're too wild, then I'm not willing to treat them as risk-free. So the sweet spot is. What things would I be willing to treat as risk-free about the future that are non-obvious, and we could write down. So an example is the value of landfill will be positive by 2040. Now, how to make that real. Not positive about. But we've seen enough evidence around e-waste and building materials and plastics and other things. And we can extrapolate various trends that we can be comfortable that that's true. Now, that is still to be solved. We have to go make that true. But the trends tell us that is fairly likely to be the case. So what are true statements you could make that would then teach you where the puck is going to be.

Yeah.

I will also tell you that the following are reliable statements about the future: one, people think in linear terms. They don't think in exponential terms. But technology is exponential in nature. And so practicing getting people out of linear projection into exponential projection is critical. If you want to guesstimate where the puck is going to be in 10 years or more. And the other one is, and this is maybe a cousin of that. People over-predict what will be true, how much the world will change over the next three years and under-predict how much it will change over the next 10.

You and I are of a certain age, but one of the things about being in my late 50s, where I am right now. Is that I'm feeling a more really interesting perspective on the world. I realized I'm one-fifth as old as America, right. The fractions are getting closer to each other, and that's shocking to me. But it also, it also makes me feel a little more balanced about how things are in the world and where things are going. I mean, it's a difficult moment, but I'm curious about you've had this front row seat to so much innovation over the last 20 years. I'm curious if you think it's given you a different perspective on the world than your average person has.

I'm sure it has. I'll tell you something that I've heard over and over again that now I just smile when I hear it, which is people worrying. All the moonshots have been used up, that there's no more good ones out there. And I smile because I get the feeling, I get it. Yeah, at the same time, the world is awash in problems. We're definitely not going to run out of problems for humanity and creativity. Surely that's not in short supply. I would say the world is speeding up. It's scarier and more confusing now than it used to try to shoot over the horizon. Given how much changes in the 10 years it takes to get to the horizon, as it were. But I think, if anything, humanity's creativity, the fact that we're standing on the shoulders of so many giants from before. How technology is making more possible than used to be possible. I think moonshots are speeding up, not slowing down.

But I'm wanting to know is there a moonshot you wish you had been able to tackle. Or is there a white whale for you, or a future moonshot that you're really excited about.

I'll give you a few examples. There's no shortage of them. I would say education and civic engagement, democracy come up over and over again as the most foundational issues. And so I'm sad we haven't found something yet in those spaces. Arguably, that's part of why Sebastian left after two years to start Udacity, because he was that passionate about education. And we'll keep looking. Battery technology, being able to up the gravimetric density, or the volumetric density or the dollar density of batteries by a factor of 10 on any of those fronts would change the world. If you solved this. Oh, all of these things like electric aircraft. If you could have batteries that were 10 times as dense, then all of a sudden you could have electric aircraft. All right, well, we're not there yet, but good to know. So that's an example. I'll give you one I've been bringing up for about the last seven or eight years, and there haven't been any takers here. And I push my ideas very gently, because I don't want this place to be about my ideas in particular. But I believe that work has four basic elements to it. There's a sense of purpose. It's the mission that defines the work, a sense of community. It's the people you're doing the purpose with. You want to be able to develop and demonstrate mastery. I'm good at something. I feel good about myself that I got better at it, and I can show other people as well as myself that I got good at it. And then getting paid. I think we're going to go through a significant transition over the next couple of decades about how we receive money, about how we feed ourselves and satisfy Maslow's hierarchy of needs up to self-actualization. I'm really worried that even if money wasn't part of the issue, doing those other three things, having a community with which you have a sense of purpose and that you can get good at things is super important to being a human. Yeah, and I think there's a moonshot in finding ways to get people self-organized around purposes, sense of community, getting better at things. I might be joining one community where I'm the learner and you're the teacher, and you might do the opposite and pay might even be part of it. If we're creating value in a citizen science-like way, and there's some money for all of us, cool. But I think money so defines work right now that we're losing the thread as the world is about to start changing really fast. So that's a guess that there's a moonshot in there somewhere.

Astro, it's so inspiring to talk to you as a manager, as a maker, as a person. It's just really inspiring.

Thank you, my friend.

Thanks, Adam. That's been great.

Really appreciate our time together here. That was a fantastic conversation with Adam Savage. Now that I think about it, we're moonshot busters here at X. No wonder Adam and I have always been friends and seen eye to eye on the benefits and fun of pressure testing ideas. Next up, I'm going to talk with my longtime mentor and co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin. We're going to talk about why the world needs a moonshot factory at all. What are some of his favorite moonshots from X over the years. Some of his favorite memories from those moonshots, and even a little bit about what kinds of moonshots he'd like to see us take next. Sergey, thank you for doing this with me.

Well, we're doing it right now. X, the moonshot factory, was your brainchild as much as anybody's. And before we get into reminiscing, what were you thinking 15-plus years ago. What did you think maybe it could become.

What are some of your early memories of the things that we've got going, and maybe some of the false starts that we had along the way. I know Glass was very close to your heart.

That's true. No, no, we had phenomenal people in that doing a lot of interesting applications we hadn't even considered. I'm still quite optimistic about the category. And I still think people are going to use these things in ways we don't even expect as of yet. What about Wing drones for package delivery, you were really passionate about in the early days as we were starting that program up.

Oh, right. There's North Carolina. We did all that testing in Virginia. And we do actually have a little bit of activity here. It's pretty cool to have anything that fits in a breadbox just sort of magically appear like Harry Potter owl post out of the sky for you. And I remember in the early days that seemed pretty fanciful, but now it's routine. I think there are people in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who just don't think anything of it, because it's just part of their daily lives.

Another thing from early days of X that's come a long way is Waymo. We made a fairly big deal of Waymo pretty early, although we didn't call it Waymo until later. But it took such a long time for Waymo to actually be useful as it is now. But it's kind of crested this acceptance. And by the way, back then nobody else wanted to do self-driving. Now everybody's come around and everybody, oh, everything will be self-driving. I think maybe not appreciating just how much work it has taken. So I'm glad the world is now all believe that it's both possible and desirable and so forth. But I think sometimes they also underestimate just how much work it takes to get there. What are some of the other either highlights or lowlights. As you look back on how X developed, some of the things that you spent extra time on.

Exactly, it's kind of funny how that worked. I think at the time, we thought we were going to need something like a TPU that we hadn't named it at the time. That was part of why we started it then. It was so successful after about two years at X that we thought, oh, maybe it doesn't need any hardware, which was part of the thinking in moving it over to Google. But then later it turned out that actually hardware was very important in the process. At the time, it was a really weird out-there idea, but nevertheless just having that enormous, I guess, matrix multiply compute capability in those chips. That's just so much more cost-efficient. That has been huge. A lot of the things we've talked about did take, in hindsight, more patience. I'm not sure I had the patience at the time. I guess look, you never know which stream of work will have such a big payoff. Or at least I don't think I could have predicted it.

What do you think is the non-obvious parts of the wave that's coming. Ignore the hype cycle. But AI is going to change humanity more than people expect. It'll probably take a bit longer than people expect, and yet it will change humanity more than people see coming. But I think few people can see it as clearly as you. What would you say is when you move the hype away and you look at where you think AI is going to take humanity, how it's going to help us. What we're going to have to adjust in how we function as society in order to take full advantage of AI.

Yeah, skating to where the puck is going to be is something as humanity started to get our heads around with Moore's law, just about the time that it stopped being true. But it was true for five or six decades.

But what you're now talking about is an exponential, where the doubling time isn't every 18 months, it's every three months. Do you have a moonshot or even a moonshot you'd love to see us do next.

Well, the theory is you only need one, you make one, and then it goes.

You have to get the raw materials.

Have to end by saying. I'm so grateful to you, Sergey. I've learned so much from you. And you, Larry. Alphabet, Google have been so supportive to me personally and to the moonshot factory. Thank you.

Definitely, well, let's make more good trouble together.

Awesome, that's a wrap on season two of The Moonshot Podcast. I'm really grateful to Adam Savage and Sergey Brin for having done this episode with me so that we can explore the last 16 years not only of the moonshot factory, but unpack what innovation is and how we can all do it together. And a huge thank you to you, all of the listeners, for having been with us on this journey and all of the comments and suggestions that you've sent to us. I hope that this podcast has helped and inspired you to start taking a little bit more of a moonshot in your own life and until next time, stay curious and keep shooting for the moon. This is The Moonshot Podcast, a Peak Action Production for X, the moonshot factory, with me, Astro Teller. You can find more podcasts and on our YouTube channel. If you want to take your own moonshots, we've developed a masterclass certificate course. Check it out in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe. It helps other people find out about this series.