Inside Alphabet’s X: Nurturing Radical Creativity

AZEEM AZHAR: Hi there. I’m Azeem Azhar, and you are listening to Exponential View. Every week, I come together with a brilliant mind to explore how our society is changing under the force of rapidly-evolving technologies. To receive a regular dose of these insights, please hit subscribe on your podcast player of choice, and if you can leave us a rating, five stars is best. It really does help others find these discussions. Today I’m in conversation with Astro Teller, the CEO of X, the organization established by Google’s founders to find technological solutions to challenges so tough that overcoming them sometimes seems impossible. Astro lives and breathes innovation. He is charged with nurturing outlandish ideas until they become the everyday. Waymo, the self-driving car company, is just one example. But for every success, there are many, many failures. We dig into X’s decade of innovation leadership and the moonshot challenges that are still waiting to be solved. Now, this podcast was recorded before the coronavirus pandemic, so if you are suffering an overflow of COVID-19 years, relax. We don’t mention it. But if you are desperate for deep insights into the current crisis, we’ve got that covered. Just hit subscribe. Now on with my conversation with Astro Teller. Astro, thanks for taking the time to speak with me today.

ASTRO TELLER: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

AZEEM AZHAR: X is a decade old. Are you still excited and enthusiastic?

ASTRO TELLER: More than ever. I feel like X is at a somewhat meta level, itself a moonshot. And what we say about many of the things that we try to do here, in the first decade, we’d like to get something if we can from it sounds totally crazy to yeah, that’s going to be a thing. So think of Waymo or, one or two years behind it, Wing, as examples that a decade ago, that was considered crazy. Now things like drone package delivery or self-driving cars are not considered crazy. They’re in the world. People are paying for it. In the same way, I’d like to think X over this first decade, we’ve gone from, would it be possible to make a place that had a really strong, positive feedback loop with its employees and with its parent company and a positive feedback loop with the world so that we could make the world better while simultaneously making a good return for our investors.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, let’s take stock as to where you’ve got to after this first decade.

ASTRO TELLER: So, X was created a decade ago while Alphabet was still at the time called Google. And the founders had already conceived of the idea that large companies tend to slow down over time. And the founders of Google were really excited about making the world better in lots of other areas that had nothing to do with, at the time, Google’s business. It’s really curious way you framed that founding story, because in 2010, most companies would’ve looked on Google as if it was the most innovative company in the world. It was growing incredibly fast. It had spun out into email services and maps and a bunch of other things. It famously hired brilliant, creative people and gave them 20% of their time to do whatever they wanted to do, and still that wasn’t enough for the founders. I wasn’t there at the time, but I’m confident that was a temporary compromise on the part of the founders, where they’re like, look, we’ll get our feet wet with organizing the world’s information, but the world has other problems than that. And I’m confident that Larry and Sergey from the beginning saw it that way.

AZEEM AZHAR: Right.

ASTRO TELLER: So, X was created to go make new things. You know, we’re not designing businesses at the beginning, but the long-term aspiration now as X has grown up is that X hands things to Alphabet, which can be really good for the world, are built with a important hard technology core, and can be a part of how Alphabet continues to grow financially as well.

AZEEM AZHAR: One of the things that I want to try to get across is the scale of what you’re able to do in X, both in terms of actually not a huge number of people, but also quite significant outputs. I mean, we are recording this a couple of weeks after one of your moonshots, Waymo, has just brought on outside capital for the first time. And it was more than $2 billion of outside capital that went into Waymo. So, there’s a lot of leverage between this moonshot factory that you’ve built and the scale and impact that it has. I mean, how many moonshots have gone through in the last decade?

ASTRO TELLER: We’ve probably looked at maybe as many as 2000 ideas over the last decade with some seriousness, that got at least weeks or months of work. Out the other side, the list of things that have graduated and become meaningful to Alphabet and/or the world, it depends a little bit how you count. So for example, Google Brain was the first major thing that left X, but because Alphabet didn’t exist at the time and it was already becoming important to Google, that went back inside of Google rather than becoming an independent business.

AZEEM AZHAR: Right. And Google Brain is the major AI capability and platform that lives within Google services.

ASTRO TELLER: Exactly, which has grown enormously since it left us.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, each time one of us uses a Google service, it’s quite possibly using some bit of Google Brain.

ASTRO TELLER: Correct. But then things like Waymo and Verily, the life science business, those both left X to become independent businesses, what are called other bets at Alphabet. Wing is another one that I had just mentioned before. That’s the drone package delivery project. Makani, the airborne wind turbine project, was one that we did spin out, but ultimately we decided the road was too long and too risky so we stopped funding that one.

AZEEM AZHAR: And the Makani journey was quite long. It was over a decade, I think, from when it started to when you’ve decided it can’t go any further.

ASTRO TELLER: The energy production business is not for the faint of heart, but it’s important. So it was worth taking a real run at that. Like Dandelion, which is a geothermal heat pump business. Malta, which is a grid scale energy storage business. So depending on how you count, maybe let’s call it a thousand ideas turned into 10 ideas.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, that’s quite a winnowing process. There are two ways of looking at that. One is to say, “hey, you got it wrong.” And the other, “wow, we got it right 1% of the time.” And I’m curious about that second approach, because that seems to be the secret of innovation, right? Thomas Edison, the wizard of Menlo Park. “I’ve not failed 10,000 times. I found 10,000 ways not to get something to work.”

ASTRO TELLER: Yeah. If I could put a wrinkle on it…

AZEEM AZHAR: Right.

ASTRO TELLER: I would put it this way with respect to how we think about X. If you’re serious about innovation, you would be lucky to succeed 1% of the time. You don’t get a choice about that. That’s just how life is. The question is how efficiently are we going to discover and throw out the 99% that eventually aren’t going to turn and to work out. That’s actually where the efficiency is. You can’t pre-decide which ones are the 1%. You can’t know ahead of time or you wouldn’t waste all that energy. Nobody’s that smart. But if we’re somewhat more intellectually honest, we can find Achilles heels in our own projects faster. We’re constantly trying to innovate, but weirdly what we’re innovating on is how wisely we can turn off the 99%. The 1% that’s left over, that’s a side effect of our process. It’s the efficiency of discovering which 99% won’t and shouldn’t make it that’s actually where we spend all our energy.

AZEEM AZHAR: This is one of your ideas that I think inverts the traditional logic of business. How have you developed that approach? What have been the main inputs to it over the last few years?

ASTRO TELLER: There have been lots of inputs, but let me give you one that’s inspired me for a long time. So, when I started being a CEO, I was a serial entrepreneur before I was a here at X. But I was never trained as a manager or a leader or a CEO. I ended up in that role. And I was really bad at it, extraordinarily bad at it, actually. And so I had this crisis of confidence early in my first role as a CEO, where I had to decide either I’m going to not do this, or I’m going to commit myself to getting good at this. Those are the only two reasonable choices. I decided on the second. So, then I was this clean slate. And for whatever reason, I became fascinated between you… Every manager in the world has this experience. You tell people, “Hey, let’s go do this,” and you give them a description. You put it on posters on the wall. And people don’t do anything like what the poster says. I became fascinated with why. Why aren’t those two things the same? Because business books are essentially trying to tell you over and over again how to make the poster, but who cares how to make the poster if no one’s going to do what the poster says? And the answer is that businesses are cultures. Any organization is a culture. And people respond to the unconscious and conscious-level signals that happen inside a culture, that tell people, “Here’s how we really want you to behave.” Now, some of them are overt. If you do these things, you will get promoted, and when you get promoted, you will get more money. That’s a pretty overt signal. But on the other end of the spectrum, I don’t know… I’m just going to turn my laptop here in this conference room. I don’t know if you can tell, but over there, there’s graffiti on the cement. That graffiti is not something we put there. It was left over from this building from whatever it was, from a mall, a long time ago. It was notes from the builders about, like, don’t drill here or something like that. We left that there because it’s one of 10,000 unconscious signals. Don’t polish. This place is a work in progress. If there was mahogany paneling on the walls, it would send people a signal that we value the polish and being done part of the process rather than the learning and the flow and the iteration of trying to make something. So, what we’ve learned over a decade, all of us together, is how to try to set the emotional paths of least resistance so that the way people spend their time here actually leads towards radical candor, towards intellectual honesty, towards being very audacious, being willing to try almost everything, but being very humble and being clear that almost everything we try won’t work out. But it’s easy to say that, and then you have to pick a thousand signals that tell people that’s actually what you want them to do and embed them in how we behave.

AZEEM AZHAR: You’ve described yourself as a culture engineer. And in this example, you’ve shown some of the cultural behaviors that you need to get if people are going to go after these audacious goals. And so how do you turn that into some kind of organization and direction rather than chaos?

ASTRO TELLER: Well, it’s lightly managed chaos. I’m going to give you another example. This is my laptop, and just random stickers on my laptop.

AZEEM AZHAR: Astro is showing me a laptop with a lot of stickers, X stickers, skull and crossbones. “Save the Oompa-Loompas,” it says in one corner.

ASTRO TELLER: So, one of the analogies that I like is, in the story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the magic does not come from Wonka. The magic comes from the Oompa-Loompas. But if you’ve read the book or if you’ve seen the movies, you know that the Oompa-Loompas, if you had ordered them to stand in straight lines and not misbehave, the magic would absolutely have left the building. There would be no everlasting gobstopper on the other side of that. On the other hand, they’re sufficiently crazy and disorganized that they need to be a little bit protected and lightly organized and appreciating the subtlety of being responsibly irresponsible. That’s another way that we try to capture the same idea here, that we are trying to give people the space to think differently than the rest of the world and think differently than each other. We celebrate it when they do, but we also need to shape that in a way that doesn’t control or stifle their creativity so that we can manage that chaos and get both the benefits of them being unleashed while it not just being a complete wild west free-for-all.

AZEEM AZHAR: I wonder about the execs that you work with and coming from more traditional management and control backgrounds. What have you learned about how they take onboard this new way of doing business, and what do they have to unlearn?

ASTRO TELLER: Different ones have to unlearn different things. About a year ago, we hired a senior person here at X. It was one of the most senior people we’d hired in a long time. Her name is Wendy Tan White.

AZEEM AZHAR: Oh, yes. I know Wendy. Yeah.

ASTRO TELLER: Great. So, I mean, Wendy has an illustrious career. She’s a technologist. She was an entrepreneur. She had been an investor in large things and in small things. She understood kind of deep tech, risky investing. She’d been here a few months, and I was telling her, “You’ve got the responsible part, Wendy. I’m totally sold on that. I know you’ve got the irresponsible in you, but you need to let it out more.” It happened that she had to delay starting here because she and her family were off to the Shaolin mountains to do kung fu together for a couple weeks. That… We don’t do kung fu here, but people who do that, it signals to me, it signals to us, that they have the capacity to unlearn all the self-stifling that we’ve been taught. All of us have been taught to self-stifle our entire adult lives. But people send these little signals through the choices they make. I want to stop self-stifling. I’m ready to stop self-stifling. And no real surprise, Wendy’s an amazing human being and she’s flourishing here.

AZEEM AZHAR: Well, I’m glad to hear that as somebody who’s known her since 1996. Very happy that she’s doing well. How do you go about setting targets for teams within X? I mean, Google is very famous for using a system called the OKR, the objective and key result. It’s a very functional system that drives from the bottom up teams to… Well, let’s face it, Google has done pretty well as a business. And OKRs have worked very well for Google, copied by startups and larger companies around the world. But that’s not what you use within X, is it?

ASTRO TELLER: No. I mean, I don’t forbid people from using OKRs, but I’m not a fan. I’m not saying that Google shouldn’t do those, but for what we’re trying to do, I’ve redirected us towards audacious goals instead. The setting of them and our quarterly celebration of them is actually a microcosm of the five basic principles that we have here. Very simply, it is iterate. That’s principle number one. Perspective shift. That’s number two. We want people to take smart risks. I’ll describe that in a second. That’s number three. We want people to dispassionately assess, number four. And then number five, we need them to reinforce the principles. That actually is the fifth principle, because this is culture engineering.

ASTRO TELLER: So, in the audacious goals, every team stands up and says, “Here’s this thing we’re going to try to do over the next quarter. I have no idea if it’ll work, chances are not awesome, but it’s inspiring to us because it’s right at the edge of possible.” And then they say, “Here’s what we said we were going to do last time and how well it worked and what we learned from it.” So, we’re teaching people tight learning loops. Don’t make a two-year plan. Make a one-quarter plan. We’re asking them to dispassionately assess how they did in front of everyone else so they’re practicing it. The audacity of what they’re trying pushes them both to take perspective shifting, try something weird or different, don’t just keep going in the same direction, and also smart risks. And then when the whole rest of X celebrates them, not because they succeeded but because it was a great thing to have tried and for having tried, whether it worked out or not, we’re reinforcing the principles. So this is an example where we’re using audacious goals as a way to practice the habits of innovation.

AZEEM AZHAR: So, a successful paper isn’t necessarily the one that worked all the way. It’s the one that galvanized activity around it. But again, culturally, it’s really different to what happens in a traditional business. So, do you really sit people down and gather them together and say, “Let’s hear how you’ve done,” and teams stand up and said, “Well, we tried this and it didn’t work”?

ASTRO TELLER: Absolutely. I’m going to tell you another story, because what’s weird about this is this is the secrets. I’m giving you all the secrets. The problem is actually doing it. So, there’s a wonderful person whose name is Elliott, who runs our computational agriculture project, but coming at it in what I thought wasn’t nearly experimental enough. And all of a sudden his report backs, like a light had turned on, all of a sudden started looking like exactly how I wished he would talk. And I felt terrible. I felt like I had browbeat him into this. I want him to… I want everyone to be thinking that way and practicing these habits, but I want them to do it because they believe it, not because I said so. So, I went to him and I said, “Elliott, I feel really bad. I feel like maybe I browbeat you into all of a sudden showing up more the way I’m hoping for. Please don’t do that for me. It won’t work until you believe it.” And he said, “No, no. I know. I’m super excited to do this.” And I said, “So, you know that running lots of experiments really fast will produce value faster than the way everybody else does it?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I knew that.” And I said, “Did you just find that out?” And he said, “No, no, no. I knew that the whole time.” I said, “Okay, but then why weren’t you doing that two years ago?” And he said, “I didn’t think you really meant it.”

AZEEM AZHAR: Wow.

ASTRO TELLER: That’s the problem. It takes two years for an incredibly smart person who’s really listening to go, “Wait, you actually want us to walk through the open door?” They all know that you could produce value much faster doing what I’m describing here. It’s that no one actually lives up to, yes, we will celebrate you for the quality of the experiment you ran rather than just whether you got a yes or a no. Because as soon as you reward people on the outcome rather than the quality of the experiment, the innovation is dead.

AZEEM AZHAR: Well, one of the things that’s often leveled at X is that your experience is so unique. The entity came together with the two rather amazing founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and also Sebastian Thrun who went off to build Udacity and a number of other companies. So three quite amazing people in this remarkable company growing very fast, very, very profitable, able to attract the very best talent in the world. So, when people say to you, “But this only works because it’s Google and this only works because of that particular context,” what do you think about that?

ASTRO TELLER: I’m going to partly agree, but maybe not for the reason your listeners would think. It has nothing to do with the money. The convening power of Alphabet helps, but that’s not really what that is either. Choice A, you can create one unit of value for your business. Choice B, you can create a hundred units of value, but you only have a 10% chance. Who here is going to choose choice A? I used to do this with big rooms full of CXOs. Nobody raises their hand. Who’s going to choose choice B? Everybody raises their hand. They want me to be proud of them. I say, “Congratulations. You’ve all passed a math test. Now hold on. While your hands are all up, leave your hand up only if your manager, if your CEO, if your board of directors, even kind of slightly in your most optimistic moments, supports you choosing choice B.” Every hand in the room goes down. And then I say, “You don’t need a lecture on innovation. You need a new manager.”

ASTRO TELLER: What Larry and Sergey and to some extent Sebastian did for X, for me, was that they created a willingness to do X. It’s not that some other business couldn’t do X, and I’m actually trying to encourage other businesses to set up their own X. It’s that they would have to do what Larry and Sergey did, which is to be willing to have 90% of the experiments, in fact, 99% of the experiments, turn up a zero. If you don’t have the stomach for that, then innovation just won’t happen and you might as well not start.

AZEEM AZHAR: Well, I suppose there is some other maths that comes to bear, right? If you have a 99% failure rate and the 1% successes are outsized, as long as you can run a portfolio, you’ll beat the odds. You’ll beat the market. I mean, that’s what venture capitalists try to do. They have a 70% failure rate, 30% success rate. They have portfolios with a minimum of 25 companies over seven or eight years. And it makes sense because the risk that you end up losing your shirt is quite low. So there is some minimal scale, I guess, that you need to achieve.

ASTRO TELLER: Yes. You’re also talking at the project level, but I was just describing our computational agriculture group and their attitude of experimentation. If they picked one plant one particular way, maybe it works. Maybe it doesn’t. That’s a choice A. It’s inherently, it has to work because I’ve only got one thing. If they move to an experimental mindset, let’s look at 20 different plants and lots of different characteristics about the plants, let’s work with farmers in a very rapid, iterative way, whatever it is we discover won’t be ready for primetime yet because we’ve been very scrappy and prototyping with how we’re approaching it. But when we get that aha moment, that is that choice B thing, or lots of choice Bs. One of them pans out, now we can go industrialize that aha. And so I would say even within a business, you can have this exact attitude that I’m describing.

AZEEM AZHAR: How do you think about the ethical dimension of the choices you make, of the projects you choose to support, and the ones that you try to steer away from?

ASTRO TELLER: This is on our mind all the time. Well, first of all, let me remind you what we count as a moonshot, because it’s part of the answer, actually. It has to have three basic elements. Number one, there has to be a huge problem with the world that we can name, describe, and we want to solve. Number two, there has to be a radical proposed solution, a science fiction-sounding product or service that would fix that problem, however unlikely it is that we could actually make it. And then third, there has to be some kind of technology core that gives us some belief that maybe we could make some progress on, that we have an entry point at least into those experiments to try to make that science fiction-sounding product or service that would solve that huge problem with the world.

ASTRO TELLER: So, observation number one. I got through that without saying the word money or profit. One of the ways to try to help the things that we do here lean towards the positive is, what if we just focused on doing good things for the world and presume that money will come back and find us in fair and interesting ways? Tends to not be as good, as safe an assumption. So, that’s an example that’s wired into the DNA of who we are, that helps us lean towards, we hope, more ethical outcomes. If we thought we were going to build something and then try to sell it really fast, maybe… I guess some people try to hype their thing. They don’t really want to talk about the negatives or what the unintended consequences would be. If it’s going to take us a decade to get from crazy to, oh yeah, that’s going to be a thing, and another decade from that’s going to be a thing to it being a really large, substantial positive for the world, hopefully business, if it turns out somewhere in there, year 15, to be bad for the world, there is no way that everyone’s not going to see that coming. So, our interests and the world’s interests are inherently a lot more aligned because we’re playing such a long game, which is why we refer to it as lasting innovation. It doesn’t count if it feels good today. It only counts when they look backwards at these efforts 20 years in the future, says, “We’re glad about that one.”

AZEEM AZHAR: And I suppose one of the advantages of the decade or two-decade time frame is that the innovations can add fundamentally to the body of knowledge in the same way that the original moonshot, outside of being able to put a Luna Lander on the moon, had constructed some breakthroughs in software engineering and material science and a whole bunch of other things that spilled over into the economy at large.

ASTRO TELLER: We try one to 2000 and we have no idea which ones are going to work. So, if you can either tell us something you think is a good idea we’re missing, we’re all ears, and that’s not hyperbole. I mean, we really want to get that feedback. Or if you can help us for any of those one or 2000 things, point at something and say, this one has unintended consequences. It’s not going to work out in the long run. We want to know that now. Let’s just kill that and move on. Another example is who we have here. If we had a bunch of white men in their 40s and 50s and it was nobody but that, and they were all technologists, even if they were great people, there would be an inherent bias, a limitation in how they saw the world. But getting more diversity, which includes gender diversity and racial diversity but I mean all kinds of diversity, having veterans in the building, having people who are international, for example, people who come from very different disciplines, the more diversity we can get, people come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. They can see the world differently because of their backgrounds and then they can help us to see coming opportunities we might not have seen and potential unintended consequences we might not have seen. And then we actually do ethics training here. We think people are inherently ethical if you give them half an excuse to just be good people, but training them on the basics of ethics gives us a shared platform and vocabulary so that when we’re talking about whether something would be good for the world and people disagree, we can use vocabulary that we all understand.

AZEEM AZHAR: A number of the projects that you are looking to develop and deploy impact other parts of the world. How do you bridge the gap between the brilliance that happens over on the west coast of the US and the reality of how the problem manifests itself to the communities who are affected by it, which may be many thousands of miles away?

ASTRO TELLER: The most easy way to see is we go there. So, Wing was designed in Mountain View, but they’re actually doing deliveries right now in Virginia and in Finland and in Australia. Loon was designed here, but they’re actually flying over much of the Southern half of the world. And they’re spending a lot of time in Africa, a lot of time in Latin America. Actually their main launch facility is in Puerto Rico. So, they’re out in the world talking to people on the ground.

AZEEM AZHAR: If we think about some of the first projects that we know about that came through X, they were things like the Google Brain and AI and self-driving cars and Google Glass. If I look at the set that come through now, free space optics, molten salt for renewable energy storage, computational agriculture, they seem to have a very different flavor about them. They seem to be much more, I would say, relevant to the condition that we find the planet and humanity in today. Is that a noticeable shift in the portfolio and the interests of people within X, or is that just what you are talking about now?

ASTRO TELLER: The world has changed over the last decade, so I think that’s one of the things that’s shifted. We are trying to chase the world’s biggest, most pressing problems, and the climate crisis and aspects of the climate crisis, adaptation and mitigation are, brighter topics closer to the bullseye than they were a decade ago. Sometimes we have to try and fail a bunch of times before we get our aha, and even then it needs to be developed for a number of years before we’re ready to start sharing it with the world. So, you may also be watching us learn and getting better at what we’re doing.

AZEEM AZHAR: I think one of the myths about technology and innovation is that these things happen overnight. I think what you’ve talked about quite regularly is that overnight success takes a really long time, years and years, perhaps longer. How do you have to manage and motivate them over those long stretches of time? Is this something that they can learn themselves, or is it a particular type of person who is born that way?

ASTRO TELLER: I think a lot of Silicon Valley, maybe to some extent the whole world, mythologizes the outcome and mythologizes, often the idea that one person hiding somewhere came up with the idea by him or herself. And as you just described, that’s not what happens. And some people can’t let go of that mythology. S,o what I would say, if you were interested in a job at X, is I would say, if you have a thing you’re just determined to do, please don’t come here. If you need it to be about you, please don’t come here. The people here are excited about working in teams to learn. I’m sorry to seem like it’s the journey, but it is the journey.

AZEEM AZHAR: You must have seen some of the differences between educational systems and cultural heritage playing out across the many hundreds or thousands of people who’ve come through the doors. Which education systems do you think are getting it right when you think about people who can join you on this journey?

ASTRO TELLER: I’m not sure that a particular education system is the thing that we would index on. It’s felt more like having a puppeteer, someone who has a puppeteering background, on a robotics project is not only it turns out wonderful and really helps change and shape who they are as an organization. And I’ve seen that play out so many times where having a rocket scientist or a fashion designer or something else, where the fashion designer happens to be on Loon but their facility with fabrics is actually really-

AZEEM AZHAR: Right, so Loon is using balloons-

ASTRO TELLER: Yes.

AZEEM AZHAR: …putting up big balloons for wireless signals.

ASTRO TELLER: We’re making the balloons. It’s much more a fabric than it is like thinking like a structural engineer. So, it’s not surprising that this woman who’s a fashion designer has had a real impact on that team. So, that’s what it feels like to us, is finding people from these other domains.

AZEEM AZHAR: As you look at the people who are able to make the most contribution, what are the things that you wished universities and schools would let them do more of, and what would you wish those universities and schools would do a little less?

ASTRO TELLER: We get a lot of people, world class people, and particularly world class engineers who join X, who are pretty dug in on the idea you build it right the first time.

AZEEM AZHAR: Right.

ASTRO TELLER: And they have these sayings, like measure twice and cut once. And I get that, but nobody seems to have explained to these people that that is a really good attitude when where you’re going is well-understood but it is mal-fit to purpose when you don’t know where you’re going. And it’s super expensive and inefficient to have the hubris to think that you pre-know the answer and can design it right the first time. So, it doesn’t mean that they’re completely wrong, but they’re wrong in this context. And I think, I’m using this as an example, there’s a lot of things that we teach both to kids and to people once they’re grown up without actually explaining to them whether this is a good habit is context-dependent. And I just wish people had more of a sense that you have to adapt to the context you’re in.

AZEEM AZHAR: We’ve just celebrated the 10th anniversary of X. You wrote a great blog post,
“Tips for Unleashing Radical Creativity,” which I recommend people read. What are the things that you think you might put into the 20th anniversary blog post?

ASTRO TELLER: I hope that we can be particularly proud of some of the benefits we’ve actually created for the world by then. It’s our reason for being. If that’s not true, the rest doesn’t matter. I would hope that a decade from now there are other moonshot factories, and if we could have inspired other people to be working on the world’s biggest problems a little bit faster, a little bit more flexibly, awesome.

AZEEM AZHAR: Well, I wish you the best with those. We’re all going to keep a close eye on what you’re up to. Thanks very much.

ASTRO TELLER: Thanks for your time. Cheers.

AZEEM AZHAR: That’s it for today. If you enjoyed this conversation, explore the archive for more. Subscribe and spread the word. I’m Azeem Azhar. This podcast was produced by Marija Gavrilov and Fred Casella. Our sound editor was Bojan Sabioncello.