Things Astro Says on Podcasts

Dave, you were going to say.

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. No CEO 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 compute and money on them. And then there's another ratio. Have you started down that journey yet?

Me too.

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 how to couple that into a business so that it gets bigger over time so it doesn't cost too much.

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

do I regret it, though? But

do you, but it was something that you reject, you never expected to try. So,

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

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. 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. 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?

Well, yes, to some extent. I would like to think that I literally believe that we did. So that's the first half of the answer. And yes, I do think that, 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. 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.

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

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

Absolutely. You know, I've run the following experiment. I apologize to Peter, who's heard this a bunch. Salim'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 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! All right, so you all pass the math test. 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. So 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 the mess that comes with them is tolerated. This is

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