Google X's Astro Teller: The $1B Bet No CEO Will Back, Moonshots 3x Cheaper in 16 Yrs, and Clean Water at 1¢/L| EP #300

The mates sit down with Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, at MOONSHOTS Live 2026 to discuss how moonshots are built, why ambitious innovation is getting cheaper, and how X turns thousands of ideas into breakthrough technologies. This episode was filmed at Moonshots Live 2026. Learn more at https://moonshots.com/ Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else - https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360 Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader. Dave Blundin is the founder & GP of Link Ventures Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross is a computer scientist and founder of Reified Astro Teller is the co-founder and Captain of Moonshots at X, Alphabet’s innovation lab, where he leads the development of ambitious technologies aimed at solving some of the world’s biggest problems. – This event is presented with: Google — https://www.google.com/ Circle — https://www.circle.com/ Future Vision XPRIZE Partners: Salesforce — https://www.salesforce.com/ ARK Invest — https://www.ark-invest.com/ Xsolla — https://xsolla.com/ Range — https://www.rangemp.com/ Build with Gemini XPRIZE Partner: Google — https://www.google.com/ _ Connect with Peter: X Instagram Substack Website Xprize A360 Connect with Dave: Web X LinkedIn Instagram TikTok Connect with Salim: LinkedIn X Join Salim’s 10X Shift Subscribe to Salim’s YouTube channel Exponential Venture Capital Connect with Alex Website LinkedIn X Email Substack Spotify Threads Connect with Astro Website X LinkedIn Listen to MOONSHOTS: Apple YouTube Follow MOONSHOTS: Instagram TikTok X Threads – *Recorded on September 25th, 2026 *The views expressed by me and all guests are personal opinions and do not constitute Financial, Medical, or Legal advice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:05Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure, pal. And we've known each other for, God knows, a couple of decades now. You know, I think most people don't know something about you. It's worth mentioning, just for fun, since we're talking about genetics. His maternal grandfather was a Nobel laureate in economics and his paternal grandfather was Edward Teller, the creator of the hydrogen bomb. It's a pretty interesting fact.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  No pressure.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  No pressure.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  It was a high-pressure childhood, yes.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I guess so. So, um, let me, let me kick off the first question. So you've been in the moonshot business for over 20 years. Walk us through your advice of what it actually takes to come up with a moonshot and launch a moonshot. You know, how do you make this real? We've got a lot of individuals here who are here because they believe in optimism, they believe in moonshots. You know, in 10 seconds, no, just kidding. What's your advice? I mean, you've learned so much.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Let me, let me give you two quick things. The first one is, let's just define moonshot, at least how we think of a moonshot.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  Which is how I think of it as well.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Excellent.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I've learned from you.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  So, three basic components. First, there has to be a huge problem with the world that you can name and you want to solve. If you can't name the huge problem, then it's arguably an academic exercise. Second, there has to be some kind of science fiction sounding product or service that, no matter how unlikely it is you could make it, we could pre-agree that if you made that science fiction sounding product or service, it would resolve that huge problem with the world. And then, three, there has to be some kind of breakthrough technology that gives us a prayer, at least a tiny chance, at minimum, of being able to make that science fiction sounding product or service and resolving that huge problem with the world. When you have that, we would call that a moonshot story hypothesis.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  That does not mean you're gonna win, but at least means it's testable. The second thing I would say is, one of the fundamental issues that we found at X is that you have to have two things in equal amounts in order to be a moonshot explorer, to be a moonshot team. The first one is, you have to have very high audacity. You have to be willing to suspend your disbelief for non-stupid reasons and go on unlikely journeys that might actually profoundly help the world. But the second thing you have to have, in equal measure, is humility. You have to know from the first moment you set out on that unlikely journey that it's

• 2:48Speaker 02

  unlikely, because if you don't, you will go ruinously far down that path before you find out that that is one of the 99% that just isn't gonna work out. So being able to say right at the beginning, "I'm proud that I'm trying this, but it probably won't work. Let me learn as fast and as cheaply as I can, whether this is even possible," allows you to get onto the next moonshot when that moonshot's not the right one to do.

• 3:15Speaker 00

  So your advice for folks, I mean, with the challenge of picking a moonshot, I mean, right now, the speed at which you can test things, create things, right? But what about the beginning, choosing the idea? Any advice there? Well, put it this way, what do you do to shut down an idea quickly?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  So sometimes the idea's just not big enough. Sometimes the idea is too reasonable or likely to succeed. Sometimes it's just not good for the world or the potential for too many sort of secondary problems associated with it is just too high. Often it's techno-economics. I cannot tell you the number of moonshots that feel so good to people in their early days. Often these are very technical people. And it's not until you say, "Really? Like, let's go step by step. What is the best-case scenario for the build of materials that you would make this from? What is like just the raw cost in weight of the stuff that would go into that?

• 4:21Speaker 02

  What are people really gonna pay? Could this even plausibly..."

• 4:25Speaker 00

  Zero, zero, you know, what does Elon call it? First principle thinking in that regard.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  Right, first principle thinking about the techno-economics. You can often kill moonshots in the very early days because it's just not gonna turn into an enduring business. And at least what I believe is that purpose and profit can support each other. And then if you're doing something that's gonna lose money, it's probably not gonna change the world.

• 4:48Speaker 00

  Yeah. Dave?

• 4:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, really curious about, you know, Alex and Peter have this Solve Everything book, just phenomenal, but they rate at which physics and material science chemistry is gonna change, just astronomically accelerating. So when you joined Google, what, 25, 23 years ago? How long ago?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  16 and a half years ago. I co-founded X, 16 and a half years.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  16 and a half years ago, okay. And at the time, it was about a $30 billion company?

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Ish, yes. It was, it was very sweet, it was very small back then.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  Very tiny, little $30 billion company. Now, just about half a trillion dollar company. So the scale of R&D in a corporate environment like that has grown miraculously, just absolutely tremendously. And I think you were saying backstage that the ideal target for a new idea, 100 ideas a year, two of them succeed?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  That's right. We start 100 to 200 ideas a year that make it far enough that they end up with a code name. Who knows how many we actually look at? But 100 to 200 ideas a year that are, make it far enough, we'd get a code name. Of those, about five to six years later, we graduate two moonshots out of X.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  So 2% hit rate.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  And so then, if, you know, if AGI is imminent and the idea rate...

• 6:03Speaker 02

  No, it's here.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Astronomically, right. Does, does that grow on that same exponential curve? Just that the number of things at the front of the funnel go from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000 to...

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure. I mean, there's no shortage of problems with the world. There's no shortage of creative ideas for running at those problems. I think AI is going to somewhat shrink that time from a crazy idea to us having derisked it to the point where we can say definitively, "Here's evidence it's not a crazy idea anymore." So that's getting shorter. I hope that AI is going to let us raise our audacity even higher, so we'll be shooting higher and so we'll be able to do more in a shorter amount of time. But I'm, but fundamentally, I think the structure will be the same.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  I think, I think, you know, if you asked me three years ago, what are the big things that came out of, out of X? Waymo is at the top of the list.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Google Brain.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, but now, so I was gonna ask about it. So Google Brain was probably like, "Yeah, this is cool," up until some point a couple of years ago, when it's like, "No, this is the entire future of Google now."

• 7:06Speaker 02

  You guys just spent 80% of the last three hours talking about the stuff that arguably like Google Brain sort of birthed in.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Wait, what is Google Brain? Define it, because we know DeepMind, but we don't know Google Brain.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  So Google Brain, which started at X 15 and a half years ago or so, was one of the earliest things that we started. At the time, there were a set of academics who were kind of out of vogue. This was like Andrew Ng, Jan Le Cun, a few others, who were saying, "I think scale might matter." And neural nets were absolutely dead in the field at the time. And they're saying, "I think scale might matter and it might actually bring neural networks back." And everyone else in the field said, "Nope, you're crazy." Andrew Ng came to Google X at the time and we set up what is, what was called Google Brain with Jeff Dean. So the two of them paired together to say, "What if we industrialized neural networks?

• 8:02Speaker 02

  What if we made them tens of thousands of times bigger than anyone had ever done before? Could that actually be the breakthrough that everyone's been waiting for?" So we were the first ones who really made what...

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Fast forward?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Called deep learning. TPUs ultimately came from Google Brain. The transformer, which is sort of underpins everything, it's literally the T in ChatGPT. That came from Google Brain. So, you know, our job is to make the seed crystals that ultimately go on to change the world, and I think Google Brain counts as one of them.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  But there must have been a long period of time there where that was kind of quaint and promising, and then a period of time just recently where it's like, "Holy crap, that was a lot more than quaint and promising."

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Of course, but I think the reality of any innovation is it takes a super long time. Every single innovation is like a overnight success that was 15 to 20 years in the making. And just because the general public only wakes up to it in year 18 of that slog, it feels like it happened overnight for them.

• 9:04Speaker 00

  Overnight success after 11 years of hard work.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  So Astro, you...

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Jump in, guys.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  ...watched hundreds of moonshots evaluated, hundreds... What are a couple of examples of moonshots that you would like to have seen that didn't quite make it, didn't cut the mustard or whatever? You would have loved to have had them come to fruition?

• 9:23Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I have a very long list. I'll give you two examples, but... We've been working on clean water over and over again. If you can make clean water, if you could pull it from the atmosphere, if you could decal for a tenth the price, you have to be able to get to like a penny a liter, all-in cost, for it to really change the world. But we have almost 3 billion people in the world who are water stressed, who don't have clean water to drink. That's gonna get worse as climate change picks up. We're gonna have hundreds of millions of climate refugees around the world, and it's often going to start because they don't have enough clean water. This is one of the biggest problems to solve.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  But techno-economics, we've done some great work in this space, but it's gonna be 10 cents a liter. Nope, we'll, we'll stop doing that, try it again. So that's an example of something I keep coming back to.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Two more.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Two more, okay. Being able to time shift and location shift energy, and I say it that way on purpose, because if you say transmission lines and batteries, people tend to narrow their focus in. But being able to time shift and location shift energy is absolutely gonna change the world. We've taken a bunch of runs at those. So far, you know, we haven't been super excited with what we've found. Education is another one. Education is not working. It's, it's not working in the developed world, it's not working in the developing world.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  We're gonna keep coming back to that one until we find something because that has got to be one of the most fundamental moonshots that you could do.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  Got it. Love it.

• 11:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd love to talk a bit about the history of moonshots. So, one of your grandfathers invented the hydrogen bomb. And then, if you look at history, and I should add, maybe humanity was in the process once upon a time of landing humans on the moon in actual moonshots. And then, that stopped. Sometime, one can quibble over the chronology, but arguably, depending on which version of the Great Stagnation thesis one subscribes to, there was maybe up to a 50-year period, call it 1970 to 2020-ish, again, one can quibble at the margins, when it would seem that there was, call it, a reduced launch velocity of moonshots from humanity as all. We stopped landing humans on the moon.

• 11:48Speaker 04

  We stopped inventing arguably applied physical innovations, regardless of their warfare potential or not, like hydrogen bombs. And then, again, arguably, sometime around 2020 or so, plus or minus a few years, moonshots started again. We got superintelligence that actually works. We're getting robots that actually work. Physical intelligence, so-called, is seeming to work. We got arguably, medical nanotechnology in the form of lipid nanoparticles that helped to treat a pandemic. So, a few related sub-questions. One, do you believe, do you subscribe to any variant of a Great Stagnation hypothesis that there was a half-century pause in moonshots? And to the extent you do, another question, how do we prevent that from happening again?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Well, the first thing is, I know you didn't maybe intend it that way, but I'm gonna take that as an enormous compliment and 11-year-in-the-making joke that we just made. Since we started in 2010, and you said 2020 several times, exactly my point, is, we started literally a moonshot factory in 2010.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  So, you brought moonshots back?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Well, yes, to some extent. I would like to think that I really did. So, that's the first half of the answer. And, yes, I do think, I don't know, I don't think anyone was planning on it being a stagnation, but I think functionally, we had lost our way a little bit. Somewhere between, you know, you had your Star Trek stuff up here a little bit.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Somewhere between like the 1960s and NASA and the inspiration that that created, there was a period where we sort of lost the explorer spirit.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  What do you think, do you have an etiology, a diagnosis? What do you think went wrong?

• 13:34Speaker 02

  I don't know, but here is a partial answer to that, and then I want to get to the future. But here's, can I tell you all a dirty little secret?

• 13:42Speaker 04

  It'll be our little secret.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Taking moonshots is really, really easy.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Huh.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  It's laughably easy. If you don't care about efficiency. You just find some super energetic people who are sort of delusionally optimistic, pour a bunch of money on them, you will absolutely get some moonshots. It's just not a very good return on investment. And so, I think we had a period, mostly because of World War II and the Cold War, where people didn't care about the return on investment. Then there was a period where people probably still wanted moonshots, but they cared about the return on investment. And so, there was less of it. What X has been trying to practice is making a moonshot factory, being able to get at

• 14:32Speaker 02

  that audacity efficiently enough to systematize the process. Not just to do it a lot, but to do it efficiently, so it is rational for people to put a lot more money in. And, to your point about the future, good news, I think, we get approached now on a weekly basis from some large company or some country, saying they want to set up their own moonshot factory. I'm not sure exactly how we can help them with that, but there is a hunger to do more of this, and so, good news, I expect you will see a lot more of it in the future, not just for that.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  But Astro, take a second, and there are a number of people here in the audience that are running companies that do want to set up a moonshot factory. And, and we have discussed a little bit about this, right? Which, let me paraphrase what I've learned from you, you're my moonshot mentor here, which is, you know, your core organization is responsible for delivering 10% profit year after year. And, and Saleem and I have written about this, that your moonshot factory, if you would, needs to be on the edge of the organization where your crazy thinkers exist, right? And, again, quoting you, you know, "If you work on anything at 10%, you're fired.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Focus on 10x, 1,000%, and then have that side moonshot organization report directly to the CEO." Is that still a formulation?

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You know, I've run the following experiment, I apologize to Peter who's heard this a bunch, Saleem's probably heard it a few times too, but just bear with me for 45, 50 seconds. Choice A, choice B. Choice A, you can give a million dollars of value to your business this year, but it's, and it's guaranteed. Or B, choice B, billion, you can give a billion dollars of value to your business this year, but it's not guaranteed, it's one chance in 100. So, A, million, guaranteed, B, billion, one chance in 100. Who's choosing choice A? All right, almost nobody here, almost nobody in the world raises their hand. Who's choosing choice B? Woo!

• 16:38Speaker 02

  All right, so you all passed the math test. Because it has 10 times the expected utility. I've done this with CXOs the world over. And I've said, "Okay, now keep your hand up if, on their best days, in your wildest dreams, your manager, your CEO, your board of directors actually supports you doing choice B." And every hand in the room goes down. And I say, "You don't need a lecture on innovation, you need a new manager." This, so the formulation, the formulation you just described is exactly right, and it's because of this thing, you have to sequester the choice Bs to a place where they're actually wanted, and, and the mess that comes with them is tolerated.

• 17:23Speaker 00

  This is Lockheed Skunk Works, off on the edge, this is Steve Jobs taking the Mac team off campus to build it.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  The capability of the human mind to do this is very hard. There's something I've been observing over the last few years, and I'd love for you to comment on this. Peter wrote about this in one of his original books, "The Demilitization of the World", right? So, throughout human history, it's always been true that advanced technologies cost a lot. And today, for the first time in human history, advanced technologies are cheap. Solar energy, cheap, sensors are cheap, blockchains, open source and free, et cetera, et cetera. This should enable, you know, for a CFO, or for a big company, when you want to do something very disruptive, if you had to make a big bet, put a lot of resources, CFO hated you, they would defund it as fast as they could. Today, you can take a portfolio of very disruptive experiments at the edge.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  So now, it just comes down to mindset, and are you willing to go for it? Do you agree with that, and how much are you seeing companies do that?

• 18:23Speaker 02

  I do agree. I think it is a, I hear a lot, "Oh, well, Alphabet has lots of money, and so that's why this is happening." I guarantee you, that is not why. We have tiny teams. The teams that graduate from us, Google Brain, when they graduated, there were like 18 people, and that's pretty normal. We keep our teams tiny because, I say to them all the time is, "I want you to find a cheat in the video game of life, a Gordian knot-chopping moment. If you can't find that, I don't want you solving things the normal way. I'd rather you stop and we go find a different moonshot, because that's what moonshots mean." So, I believe it is mostly a mindset issue.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  And, for those of you out there who are interested in learning more, we did a masterclass certificate course. It's about 20 hours if you do all the work, it's about 3 and 1/2 hours if you just watch the videos. I encourage people to go watch, it's on Breakthrough Innovation, and it will step people through. Our secret sauce is not secret, we're telling people exactly how to do it.

• 19:28Speaker 00

  And tonight, Astro, there's an evening program by your team, doing a 50-minute condensed version of that, you know, 10-hour course.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Exactly. 7 o'clock tonight, Joe Sargent, it's gonna be a lot of fun, it's on rapid prototyping.

• 19:41Speaker 04

  I'd also love to maybe better understand and develop the record on the economics of moonshots. I could make, on the one hand, an argument that the real cost of moonshots increases over time because expectations go up, and we see Ehrlich's problem solved left and right by people sitting on the toilet casually solving hard problems. I could make the argument in the opposite direction, that the real cost of achieving a moonshot is hyper-deflating, because we have superintelligence now, and we can solve lots of hard problems. I could probably make some sort of mediocre, middle-of-the-road argument as well. What would be your position on the long-term economics of the real costs of moonshots?

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Hyper-inflating, hyper-deflating, staying the same?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  I mean, we track, because we're obsessed with the efficiency of getting at moonshots, we track what it costs for us to get to our graduates very carefully. And I can tell you that it's down by about a factor of 3 over the last 16 years. There's a lot of waste and complexity, and it's a bit of a lagging indicator, so some of what you're...

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Wait, wait, factor of 3 over, that's inflation.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  No, no, it is a factor of 3 cheaper, just to be clear.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  Okay, but that factor of 3 over 16 years, sounds, rhymes to me like 10% per year, which, or at least market returns, maybe market returns.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Well, we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the cost to get to a Waymo. I guarantee you, the value of the Waymo is so huge relative to not only the cost of developing that team, but developing all of the other things that didn't work. It is a very good return on investment, so I'm not worried about that. I'm looking at what does it cost for each individual thing that makes it all the way through our process? And that is getting cheaper at, I don't know, 10%, 20% year over year, something like that. Some of that is because we're getting better at our job. Some of that is we're graduating things a little bit earlier. A lot of it is because of artificial intelligence, so it's a mix of all of those things. But it's cheaper to get to moonshots now than it was in the past.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  So maybe just to develop this a little bit more, some would argue that to solve some of the grandest challenges in science and engineering, it's not going to be like a sort of a one-shot, spiky capability launch. It's going to be the result of our economy macro growth, that we grow our capacity of our economy holistically, and that enables particular moonshots to become easier. And when I hear you say 3X cost reduction, presumably in real terms, over 16 years, that to me, maybe you take a different position, that to me sounds basically like just the result of markets doubling, say, every 10 years, stock market doubles every 10 years. So the result of the reduced cost of moonshots sounds to me like basically just our economy

• 22:30Speaker 04

  is capable of more things, and it's basically the same cost.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  I disagree. I think you're confusing the cost to paint a house with the value of the house. They're like apples and oranges. They're not the same thing. I'm talking about how cheap it is for us to paint our house, not what the world will paint the house after.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Why stop at two moonshots a year, Astro? I mean, why aren't you pushing out 100 baby moonshot Alphabet companies per year? I mean, this is about 10X growth, right?

• 22:58Speaker 02

  True. I mean, again, if all I cared about was moonshots and I didn't care about efficiency, I guess we would do that. Because I'm obsessed about efficiency, there's a cultural rhythm and a set of habits that are really easy to describe but fiendishly hard to get people to practice. Things like playing the long game, being intellectually honest, showing up with humility, being a team player and not being an egomaniac. Like, everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, duh," everyone wants that. But just take a moment and ask yourself super honestly, is that how your organization really functions today? Right, I can hear the laughter, because it isn't. It's not your fault.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  But someone would have to be maniacally determined to create a microcosm in which those things were actually the adaptive behaviors in order to do that. That's what I'm maniacally focused on, is create, is the culture engineering necessary to get people to practice the habits that drive innovation efficiently? Unfortunately, I know how to do that with a few hundred people. I don't know how to do that with a few thousand people. It's a culture problem that I just don't know how to solve.

• 24:07Speaker 04

  So, Astro, aren't you making the argument then that the ultimate moonshot is the meta moonshot of solving the organizational problem of launching more moonshots?

• 24:17Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm going to connect your question with the way I think about it, which is, I would say the meta moonshot, we often talk about as the meta moonshot, is how to systematize radical innovation. So to your question then, there is a meta meta moonshot, which is how to systematize, systematize the radical innovation. How to copy and paste moonshot factories.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  There you go.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Which, back to what I was saying before, the world is coming and asking us that. We would love to help. I haven't yet figured out how to do the meta meta moonshot, but we're excited to help.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  Organizational singularity, Saleem.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we might be, we might have that methodology for you, because we've been building for 10 years a societal layer, we're now 50,000 people globally, on how do you actually create an environment where you can spin off these things very, very quickly? So I think it's almost like you've solved the inner few layers of Stuart Brand's paste layer thing, and we've solved the outer through layer.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  We should talk offline.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So the strong collaboration that could come.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  Dave, you were going to say?

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Well, I'd like to take your exact quote and say, "Look, you know, if you, hey, dirty little secret, everybody, doing a moonshot is really, really easy. You take fanatically focused people who care about a mission, who are really, really smart, and you pour money on them." Great. Now, there will be a world where you swap out the people and you swap in AGIs, and you take out the money and you pour compute on them. That world isn't here yet. There's got to be some transition world we're in right now, where there are three AIs and three people, and I poured computing money on them. And then there's another ratio, and have you started down that journey yet?

• 25:55Speaker 02

  Totally. I mean, all right, I'm going to connect your question to like a side rant. On the one hand, if someone came to you and said, "I want to pitch you my company. Are you ready for my pitch? We use electricity." You would think I was nuts. Like, on the one hand, you'd be frightened if I didn't use electricity in my business, but you'd be like, "So what? That's an implementation detail. What are you doing?" I feel the same way about AI. I actually try to say AI as little as possible, because it's driving me crazy the way I...

• 26:27Speaker 00

  We should say SI now, superintelligence.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Sorry, I got a PhD 30 years ago in artificial intelligence, so a little stuck on that one.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 26:40Speaker 02

  On the one hand, like what you just described, every one of our moonshots, that's it. It's a bunch of agents and a bunch of people working together to try to solve a problem. That's an implementation detail. What we're obsessed with is the problem, whether it's clean water, or it's a way to make grid-scale energy storage, or it's education, whether it's how to fix the electric grid, how to make our world sort of actually circular so we're not sending trillions of dollars a year to landfill, like, those are the things that we're obsessed about. And then in the background, yeah, it's humans and agents like making it happen. But most of our obsession is the problem, and like how to couple that into a business so that it gets bigger over time, so it doesn't cost too much.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Let me translate that into a budget question. So if you said, "Here, clean water is a great one, great, you know, moonshot, I need," what was it, like a penny a liter or less?

• 27:26Speaker 02

  About a penny a liter to really change the world, yeah.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  So it's a great moonshot. If I said, "Let's turn," have you already got a team on that one?

• 27:33Speaker 02

  We have had teams on them in the past, yes. We do have a team on it right now.

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Okay, so is there, what's bigger, their AI bill or their salary bill?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  It's still their salary in that particular case, but I don't know by how much, honestly. So I don't know what fraction it is for sure, but I would say they are absolutely teammates in the process of innovation. And in fact, you know, we are finding ways all the time to automate parts of the moonshot factory so we can go faster and be more efficient.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Your best guess then, you know, if you're hyper-focused on the efficiency of that innovation machine, there's a case study. Right now, their AI bill is smaller than their headcount bill. When's the day when it hits 50/50, 75% AI, and then 100%?

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I'm not sure any time in the next decade it's going to be 100% because I think figuring out which problems to solve and making sure they're being solved in societally acceptable ways is an important part of the problem. If you need to have distributors helping to sell this, if you have to land it in communities in ways that that community feels are acceptable to them, like, you need humans as part of that process for at least the next decade or two. So, but look, it'll go as fast as, as efficient. Like, we're not going to use compute just to use compute. And there are people who are spinning up agents because it feels powerful to spin up agents.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  But there is a difference between spinning up an agent and actually getting benefit. Astro, you, go ahead, Saleem.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think of moonshots as two classes. One is pain points, solve hunger, solve education, solve whatever. And then there's the aspirational moonshots. Elon, get us to Mars, right? Solve aging, et cetera. How much of your work in moonshots focuses on one versus the other? Is it an equal balance, or do you focus only on the problem side?

• 29:30Speaker 02

  I mean, if you worked at X, what I would say is, "Gee, Saleem, can't I have both? I want you to find the most audacious things you can work on, that we can move from crazy idea to not crazy idea in less than a decade, and then from not crazy idea to an enduring business in less than another decade." So if you want to go to Mars, I would start with, "Okay, I'm listening. How is that in less than two decades going to be an enduring business?" I'm not saying it can't, but that would be my test.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  So time, you're constraining yourself just so you can give a sense of, if we can reliably work on this problem over this next decade and spin out something, that becomes the main criteria.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Because...

• 30:12Speaker 03

  That makes sense.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Because I'm getting money, our investor is Alphabet, I have to tell Alphabet, "Here's what I'm doing with your money," and they have to feel good about the sort of flywheel that I'm creating for them.

• 30:24Speaker 00

  Astro, one of the things I find fascinating is the fact that you kill the vast majority of the ideas that are started. Just to give us some numbers here, total number of projects started versus graduated, it's under 1%?

• 30:41Speaker 02

  I think it's close to 2%, but call it like 2,000 things over the last 16 years that got code names, of which we've had, a little bit depending on how you count, sort of 35 to 50 graduates.

• 30:52Speaker 00

  So talk about this idea of the importance of killing your babies early.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  Well, um...

• 30:58Speaker 00

  Not his actual babies.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Yes. I'm going to use, I'm going to use the monkey and pedestal analogy, which I know you know well. But imagine we were working on a moonshot together, all of us, and we were trying to get a monkey to stand on the top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare. Which should we do first? Train the monkey or build the pedestal? It is so weirdly tempting, if we're being honest with each other, in something where it's not that extreme a situation, to build the pedestal, because then you're half-done, and you can get another round of funding, live to fight another day. You can go to your boss and say, "Can I have a promotion? I'm half-done, man. Can I, can I have a bonus?" This is what drives the world, and it drives me crazy.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  So what we say at X is, forget the pedestal, only focus on the monkey. If you can train the monkey, we can always build the pedestal afterwards, and if you can't train the monkey, thank God we didn't waste Alphabet's money and our time on that. And so it's not that I want to lose. I am like the crown prince of failure, but it's not because I like to fail. It's because you learn nothing when you're right. You only learn things when you're wrong.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Crown prince of failure. Love it.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  And so if you accept, which it sounds like you do, that that's true, and moonshots is a process almost entirely taken up with learning, then we're going to go on an adventure, which is defined entirely by how fast we learn, which means if we in any way feel bad in the moment where we learn, because we had a model of the world and it turned out to be wrong in some way, then we will unconsciously, or maybe even consciously, avoid that moment. So we're going to de-stigmatize failure. If you work at X, I need you to be on the mission with me to optimize X's portfolio. It's not that I don't want the teleporter to work, Peter, who's working on this for me, but I want to find out as efficiently as possible if it's gonna work.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  I don't want you in denial about the fact that you just really want the teleporter to work, and we go for like five years, we spend tens of millions of dollars, and it's still kind of going sideways, and it's a zombie. How many people have you here have spent at least five years on something that was a zombie, where you knew for at least two or three years that it was a zombie?

• 33:23Speaker 03

  What's the worst failure? Like the failure where you were like, "That's really crazy", and turns out, you know what? That really was really dumb.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Oh, we've had lots of those. We have one right now, which is almost certainly wrong. It would be a problem for physics if it turned out to be right. So, but it's working. We do not know why it's working in the lab. We're working ferociously hard to find why we're kidding ourselves, so that we can kill it off. But it's about five months into trying to discover this sort of like cold fusion moment, which I hate, cold fusion, it's not cold and it's not fusion, but...

• 34:10Speaker 03

  It's okay, guys. It didn't work anyway. It's all right.

• 34:12Speaker 02

  We don't want to be that group, right? We are trying to be the opposite of that.

• 34:16Speaker 03

  You're not gonna tell us what this thing is?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Oh, come on.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  If it works out, we'll tell you about it. All right, so we have one right now that's like, makes me deeply uncomfortable and deeply excited.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Okay, a couple of audience questions here. Rich asks, "Are there any moonshots that you regret denying in the past, as our world's problems have changed, that you would pursue today?"

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I mean, we were wrong a bunch. So I'm about to say no to that question, but I do not want that to be confused with, "We've never been wrong. We're wrong all the time."

• 34:45Speaker 03

  I think the question, the question is...

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Do I regret it, though?

• 34:48Speaker 03

  But it was something that you reject, you never even try.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I want to be really clear. The cost for a false positive, where we believe it's a moonshot, we run it for many years, and then it turns out not to be, is very high, many tens of millions of dollars potentially. The cost of a false negative, where it actually is a moonshot, but I rejected it, is zero. As long as you believe that there's an infinite number of problems in the world and an infinite number of creative solutions, we can always just go draw again from the distribution of moonshots. It costs us nothing to say no. So I say no and have no regrets, even about the stuff we were wrong about. We probably don't do it fast enough.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Paul asks, "What about moonshots in material sciences? Do you see any particular promising fields to inquire in that area?"

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, side rant, I'm super excited about the new material space. And I think people haven't played out in their minds, because there's like such a fervor about the technology, and everyone's like, "And then we'll make a business out of it." Yeah, that's harder than it sounds. Look how many centuries it took for us to really refine steel. Steel completely changed the world, but not until it was industrialized in a bunch of ways. There are a lot of new materials that if you could make one flake of room temperature superconductor, that would be pretty cool, Nobel Prize, yay. That is not a business. That's like the first 5% of a business.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  How do you make, you know, thousands of tons a day of that material? How do you make it with very high ductility, so that you could put it into like winding wires and things like that? All of the stuff that it takes, the other 95% of the work, for new materials or otherwise, that's what it really takes to make a moonshot. So I'm super excited about lots of things like new materials, but I'm kind of focused on the hill after the one that people are focused on, which is, how would we scale these up as they show up in the world? Not just how do we find them in the first place.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  All right, last quick question from the audience, and a quick answer hopefully. So other companies keep trying to replicate X and fail. What's the single hardest piece for them to replicate that you think most outside observers still underestimate?

• 37:14Speaker 02

  I really believe it's what I said, which is, you have to have a leadership team that is maniacally focused on engineering a culture in which people can show up in the ways that tend to drive radical innovation most efficiently. And if I can make a plug, just like you have a moonshot podcast, we have a moonshot podcast. There are two seasons out now, where you can actually hear about people who went through the process. So this is not me blah blah blahing about moonshots. It's actually the moonshot takers talking about their successes.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Where'd they find it? On YouTube?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  If you just search for "moonshot factory", "moonshot podcast", you can find it anywhere you get podcasts. And I would encourage people to listen to this, because I think what you'll hear is a reflection of exactly what I said, which is the culture, the microcosm which encourages people to do the things that actually drive innovation. It's obvious, you all know what it is. It's making that space, that protected space for those explorers. That's the really hard part.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  I would like to say something to answer that question. You have created a mechanism where you've structured it such that the mothership has left you alone for a long period of time. I've never seen another company do it. Every other company I've ever seen, over time, the immune system cannot resist, reaches out its sticky little hands, it snatches it back, and then messes it up invariably. So congratulations to you for having lasted this long. And congratulations to the Google execs who've left it and had the discipline to leave it on the edge, because that's where all the magic happens.

• 38:51Speaker 00

  Everybody, give it up for Astro Keller!