#309: Astro Teller, CEO of X - How to Think 10x Bigger

This is a very short, roughly 10-minute, episode. It explains how to 10x your thinking and your goals, or -- put another way -- how to escape incremental thinking and think truly BIG. I loved it so much that I now listen to it on a regular basis as a reminder. Perhaps you'll end up doing the same. The speaker is Dr. Astro Teller (@astroteller https://twitter.com/astroteller). Astro is currently Captain of Moonshots (CEO) of X http://solveforx.com/, Alphabet's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Inc. moonshot factory for building magical, audacious ideas that, through science and technology, can be brought to reality. Astro is also co-founder and a current Director of Cerebellum Capital http://www.cerebellumcapital.com/, a hedge fund management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning. Astro was also the co-founder and CEO of BodyMedia, Inc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BodyMedia, a leading wearable body monitoring company that was sold to Jawbone https://jawbone.com in 2013. Dr. Teller holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Stanford University, Master of Science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University, and a Ph. D. in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Hertz fellowship. It was recorded as part of A360, a high-end membership group run by past podcast guest and Founder and Chairman of The XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis. For more on A360 and its digital version (Abundance Digital), please visit Diamandis.com http://diamandis.com/ and look under "Memberships." This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/. I've used this service for many of my businesses, as have quite a few of the icons on this podcast -- such as Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg of WordPress fame. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is a reliable resource that more than a million people have already trusted for everything from setting up wills, proper trademark searches, forming LLCs, setting up non-profits, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom https://www.legalzoom.com/ is not a law firm, but it does have a network of independent attorneys available in most states who can give you advice on the best way to get started, provide contract reviews, and otherwise help you run your business with complete transparency and up-front pricing. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  Well, hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is typically my job to deconstruct world-class performers across all different industries and areas of expertise. This episode is going to be short and sweet. Instead of my long-form interviews, which range from one to four hours, that's long. If you want those, you can find 300 plus at tim.blog/podcast. But this particular episode is going to be a short one. It will be roughly 10 minutes in length. And it explains how to 10x your thinking and your goals, or, put another way, how

• 2:03Tim Ferriss?

  to escape incremental thinking and think truly big. That's capital B I G. And I love this audio so much that I now listen to it on a regular basis as a reminder. And even if you only listen repeatedly to the first minute or so, the exercise that is described, it can be tremendously powerful. So perhaps you'll end up doing the same thing and listening to it every Monday or once every month or whatever. The speaker is Dr. Astro Teller, @astroTeller on Twitter. Astro is currently Captain of Moon Shots. Yes, that's his title. But you can think of him as CEO of X, formerly known as Google X,

• 2:44Tim Ferriss?

  but now Alphabet's moonshot factory for building magical, audacious ideas that through science and technology can be brought to reality. Astro is also co-founder and current director of Cerebell Capital, a hedge fund management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Body Media Inc., a leading wearable body monitoring company that was sold to Jawbone in 2013. And Dr. Teller, Astro, as I call him, holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford, Master of Science in Symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University. Not only would I not qualify to study such a thing, I can barely pronounce it, and a PhD in Artificial

• 3:29Tim Ferriss?

  Intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Hertz Fellowship. The audio that you're going to hear was recorded as part of A360, that's the letter A, three, six, zero, a high-end membership group run by past podcast guest and founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, Peter Diamandis, a very impressive guy in his own right. For more on A360, if you want to know how this group comes together, what it involves, and its digital cousin, or version, you can think of it, Abundance Digital, since A360 is in person and Abundance Digital is, as you would guess, digital, please check out diamandis.com, that's D-I-A-M-A-N-D-I-S dot com, and look under Memberships. So

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  without further ado, please enjoy Astro Teller, CEO of X, on How to Think 10 Times Bigger.

• 4:24Tim Ferriss?

  Astro Teller, please come on up.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  Love this man. Alright, you guys having fun?

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Awesome. So, I run an experiment very frequently. I've done it before in this room. And typically, it's with people who are one or two layers below you in organizations much like yours. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether they're just like yours. But here's what the experiment looks like. I ask people, I'm gonna give you two choices. Choice A, choice B. Choice A, you can give a million dollars, bottom line, to your company through your efforts this year. Guaranteed, 100%. That's choice A. Choice B, you can give a billion dollars, bottom line, to your company through your efforts this year,

• 5:22Speaker 03

  with one chance in 100. Choice A, choice B.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Who wants to do choice A? Who's gonna do choice A for the company? Absolutely nobody raises their hand. Who's gonna do choice B? Everybody raises their hand. So, congratulations, I mean, I'm not even testing you guys. I'm sure you can all do the math in your head. The expected utility is 10 times as high for choice B as for choice A. Now universally, these people are listening to me because they think that I'm gonna give them the special sauce about how to make innovation. And I say, "You already know the answer."

• 6:00Speaker 03

  Now, here's the tricky bit. Does your boss want you to pick choice A? Raise your hand if you think that your boss would let you pick choice B. Not a single hand in the room goes up.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  They don't need a lecture from me in how to be innovative. They need to change their context, or maybe their boss can become smart just before they quit en masse, and change the context for them. The context matters so much. The expectations matter so much. The people matter, the resources matter, but that's not the biggest issue. There have been these times in the world, and sadly, they've been mostly military in nature, where you get a huge number of really smart people together. You know, not five or 10, but 100 or more.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  And you give them the resources, but much more importantly, the expectation that they will produce miracles.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  The founding of Bletchley Park and the creation of the modern computer science and cryptography, or the harnessing of the atom at the Manhattan Project. These are examples that we're all sort of well-schooled in. And I like the phrase "moonshot thinking" because it points us at one of the few examples. This is JFK's speech at Rice University, and then the Apollo 11 mission after that that actually put someone on the moon, to remind us, it doesn't have to be about war, that you can create that same kind of exigency without war. Why do we have to wait for a war to say to a group of people, "You can do it. You can go 10 times bigger.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  You can change the world that much. A huge change, not an incremental change." I expect that from you, and I don't want you, metaphorically and literally, to choose choice A. Your job is choice B. To tell those people and to give them that freedom. So the question is, are you in that context? Are you creating that context for your organization? Because that's the hard part. Is, you know, people will flock to you once you've actually created the context. They're not that hard to find. It's making the context that's the hard part. So you need to set up part of your organization, I don't think it's realistic, to think all of your organization can be like this. It's very hard to think, and I don't think it's realistic, that everyone's going to be choosing choice B.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  You need some people choosing choice A. But they can't all be choosing choice A. So you need to take a set of people, and you put them on the side. This is probably not 50% of your company's resources, but it's not 1% either. It's probably like 5% or 10%. You can afford it. You can't afford not to over some 10-year period, actually. You will be eaten alive because other people are getting better at doing this.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Maybe it's not worth it. Who cares? Why go big like that? You know, Icarus died and Daedalus lived, right? So maybe that's, maybe incremental improvement, slow and steady wins the race. We have all these phrases for that. Let me give you, I have all these sort of perspectives in my mind and why this doesn't work. But here's one of my favorite ones. How many of you know the mutilated checkerboard problem? It's a famous psychology experiment from almost 40 years ago now. So here's how it works. Somebody sits down each of the subjects with a checkerboard, and which has 64 squares on it, if you haven't looked recently, and gives them 32 dominos. Each domino can perfectly cover a vertical or horizontal pair of squares.

• 9:41Speaker 03

  And says to each of the subjects, can you cover this board perfectly with your dominos? And every single subject, independent of IQ, within 30 seconds says, yeah, duh. And then they get a little devious, the researcher does, and cuts off the upper left-hand square from the checkerboard and the bottom right-hand square. And now says, and takes away one of their dominos and says, can you still cover, you have 30, 62 squares and 31 dominos, can you still cover your board with these dominos? And now every single person, independent of IQ, stalls, unable to demonstrate a solution or prove that there isn't one.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Doesn't seem like it could be that hard. Turns out it is. Now, if the researcher writes the word salt, just the word salt, on the white squares and pepper on the black squares, everyone solves it within 30 seconds, everybody. And peanut butter and jelly would work as well, maybe better if they're brown and red. And the insight is that you've had two salts or two peppers, depending on the orientation of the board, removed, and each domino covers one salt and one pepper, whichever way you turn it. So there's now not the same number of salt and peppers left. The perspective shift is what it's all about. That's why going 10 times bigger is more important and works better than going 10% bigger.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  When you shoot for 10% better, you're in a smartness contest. You're putting all of your people in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. They're not gonna win. It doesn't matter how much money you give them. But if you push them, if you give them the expectation and the freedom to be weird, that's moonshot thinking. Then they can do the perspective shifts. And not only, if you shoot for 10 times bigger instead of 10% bigger, it's almost never 100 times harder and the payoff is 100 times. So you already know that you've got a better return on your investment. But sometimes it's literally easier. And the reason is because that perspective shift is actually cheap relative to being smarter than everyone around you.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  So one of the things that I get from, so you need to create this organization that looks more like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory than an incubator or an innovation center. Any place that's called an innovation center isn't, almost by definition.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  And you need to fill it with Peter Pan's with PhDs. People who wear T-shirts that say "Safety Third" on them, right? That's...

• 12:31Speaker 03

  You need these people to understand and to feel good about the fact that they're going to fail most of the time. It's not maybe, there's no way that they won't fail most of the time. And you have to impress upon them, and it is possible. They love it once you let them go. It's not just a moonshot and moonshot thinking when you choose to go big at the high level.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  You impress upon them that it's moonshots all the way down. That in every sub-problem, rather than being clinical and traditional about how they approach the architecture for that problem, or hiring people for that problem, or how they fail fast and test things for that problem, they can be weirder. They can shoot to be 10 times better than anyone has ever done before in each of those sub-problems. And in each of those ways, it will again pay off because the perspective shifts will unlock more than smartness will.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  And, at least my experience is, if these people are surrounded by a dura of business speak, you will ruin it all.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  If they believe that they have to have a business plan for the weirdness that they are embarked upon, you will kill it, absolutely stillbirth guaranteed.

• 13:56Speaker 03

  But if you tell them that moonshot thinking is identifying an enormous problem with the world, picking a science fiction sounding product or service which if it could be made, would make that problem go away, and that there's some set of technical plausibly reasons, at least a glimmer of hope, that you could actually make that science fiction sounding product or service that would make that problem go away. That problem, making it go away, is unlocking enormous value in the world. Have faith. If you solve that problem, the money will come find your organization.

• 14:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow ...dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 15:15Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than $1 billion, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing

• 16:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 16:42Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know what the special savings is, folks, but it's titillating. If you want special savings, enter promo code TIM, T-I-M, at checkout. Capital T, lowercase i-M. Again, take a peek, LegalZoom.com and enter promo code TIM.