Astro teller is working on ideas that could change the world, or more likely fail miserably. But he says that is all part of the magic. Joining me today on bloomberg studio 1. 0, astro teller, head of alphabets x lab. And captain of moonshots, which is your official title. As i understand it. Astro it is. I function as the ceo, but i go by captain of moonshots. Emily you rolled in on wheels. This is your standard mode of transportation . Astro it is. Emily how much time do you shave off . Astro i have worked that out. About eight minutes a day. Emily wow. [laughter] you are making the most of those eight minutes. We are in the x lab, just a couple miles south of googles headquarters. This is where the magic happens, or sometimes doesnt happen, as you are quick to point out, because you have far more failures than you do successes. What is the mission of x . Astro x was created to be the part of alphabet that would make, hopefully, some new googles for alphabet to have. Things like waymo, the selfdriving car business, the life science business, the Stratospheric Balloon business, wing, the self flying vehicles for package delivery, google brain, which came from here, even though it went back to google. These are attempts on our part to make something that hopefully in the long run could be as valuable as google and as good for the world as google. Emily googles core business, online ads, search ads, is slowing down. Is there more pressure on x to deliver a hit, a moonshot that works . Astro that is not my experience. My experience i sit regularly with larry, sergey, and ruth. The spirit of the conversation is essentially, you give me a lot of money every year, and you have to wait a long time, on the order of 7, 9 years. A lot of the money you have given during that time just falls away. Not because im purposefully wasting it, but because we are running experiments and the answer to a lot of experiments is no. You have to decide if the value of that set of things is worth the money and the time value of money. That is the real conversation that we should be having and that we are having. If that has a good return on investment for alphabet and if that is good for the world, we should keep doing it. Emily well, since you mentioned ruth porat, the cfo, there is this perception she was brought into tighten the belt and that x and some of these experimental projects that google has spent time on would be the first step on the chopping block. Has that been the case . Astro no, that has not been my experience at all. I mean, some Company Wants to come and buy google brain and verily and waymo and all these other things we have produced. Just imagine what they would have to pay alphabet to buy it and haul it away with them. All of that stuff. It would be a very large amount of money. I know what weve spent. I dont know what number you just picked in your mind, but i guarantee what we spent is a tiny fraction of the number you just imagined. This is worth more than what we spent, then it is a good return on investment. Now, it requires longterm thinking, but larry and sergey and ruth exercise longterm thinking very naturally. Emily you are saying there is no change in the longterm thinking, in their level of longterm thinking, and their prioritization of these moonshot projects . Astro larry and sergey are very serious about trying to get to a great future as fast as possible for all of us. I think ruth sees her job as helping them to cause that to happen in the best way possible. Emily as legend has it and bloomberg reporting, you had a very early conversation with larry page about what x ultimately became. Tell me about that conversation. Astro i was sitting down with larry, and it was very the first couple of months felt very tacticsdriven. We were trying to find concrete things we wanted to spend time on. The selfdriving car, google glass, the early contact lens work that we did, a few other things like that. And i wanted to have a conversation, like, what is the Bigger Picture here . I felt like i was not getting a lot of traction with larry or sergey about this conversation, so i sat down with larry and i said, im just going to name some things to see what we are doing. Is this just another Business Unit for google . He said, no. Ok, are we a Research Center . No. And i mean, i agreed. I was glad. My conception of what we were doing is also that this is not what we were doing. I tried throwing out various things to him and when i said, are we taking moonshots . He said, yes, that is what we are doing. Emily so what is a moonshot . Astro the way we define a moonshot at x, it has three basic elements. There has to be a huge problem in the world that you can name and you want to fix that problem. If you dont have a problem to solve, then we are just wasting our time. Or you are just doing tech for techs sake. If you can name that, then what is the radical proposed solution, the sciencefiction sounding product or service, however unlikely it is that we could make it, that if we made it, would solve that huge problem in the world . Then, is it totally crazy or is it mostly crazy . What is the reason to believe that maybe we could do it . Some way we could get started, some early tests we could run, if then it turns out it is impossible, fine, we will move on to something else. If those early tests happen to work out, we will keep going. Those three things are what, for us now, define a moonshot. It takes more work for us to make sure we have a diverse pipeline before we make our hiring decisions than if we didnt. It just takes more work. Emily so lets talk about the way you built the team. It has been very deliberate. You wrote in an oped to the wall street journal, you said the single biggest fixable problem for humanity is how undervalued women on the planet are. If we actually had women as full participants, a lot of things, including climate change, would probably get better faster. What do you mean . Astro number one, working on diversity and inclusive innovation is just the right thing to do. Emily is it the smart thing to do, too . Astro i wish that it being the right thing to do was all it took to cause change. But its not. I just want to flag, it is the right thing to do, and that is part of what makes me feel good about doing it. Number two, it is Good Business. We are not an Engineering Organization trying to bolt on some creativity, so it is Good Business to bring in lots of diverse people. Women in particular is half of the worlds people. Like, if we will be like, we will get to them later for half of the worlds people, how are we not necessarily going to have a worse workforce if we are just giving up on half, even sort of giving up on half of the people in the world . Emily to be fair, googles record on women and underrepresented minorities, if you look at the number, is simply average. Average is not great for where we are in this day and age. Are you punching above googles numbers . Are you doing better, or are you doing things differently than alphabet itself . Astro i mean, i dont want to have a fight between us and google, but i think if you ask the people here, they would say, number one, culturally, this is a very positive place for women and for eid folk. Emily how did you create that culture . Astro i actually think that if we just have more people who are just weird relative to each other and we encourage them to be themselves and to speak up and say what they are thinking, we will be better off. And so, that has translated into some things that dont feel like work to me, but half of my Leadership Team is women. That is not because i set out to make half of my Leadership Team women. Like, that should not even be exceptional. Half of the world is women. Half of the United States is women. It should not be weird to say that. We still have a long way to go. Im not suggesting we are done, but i think that what x is doing somewhat more right than Silicon Valley or as a whole is we are serious, we actually want these things and we spend our energy on them. Emily you are part of alphabet and google has been in the middle of sort of a cultural crisis. You had 20,000 employees walking out of the company because of how the company has been handling Sexual Misconduct over the years. Does that concern you . This sort of employee unrest that google and alphabet are feeling right now . Astro i think it is fantastic. I think when you look at that from the outside, dont you see like this feeling like, maybe we are going to be ok as a species if, a, those people in that company care enough to say what they think and to try to create some pressure on the company to be the kind of company they would be proud of . Im not saying every walkout person was exactly right, but it is certainly their right to be unhappy, and they are probably at least partially right about the things that they complain about. In the particular case, i think they were largely right. That is good. That is actually how we should fix society, having employees say, wait, this is my company too, im a part of this, and we collectively are saying this is the kind of company we want to be. That is incredibly healthy and positive. Emily now, when you look and you have been around here a long time are there things that google did wrong along the way . Do you think mistakes were made . Astro yes, certainly mistakes were made. Probably one of the main things is shortterm thinking, like, oh god, we need somebody by yesterday to fill this seat, because, lets be honest, it takes more work for us to make sure we have a diverse pipeline before we make our hiring decisions than if we didnt. It just takes more work. Emily do you think that google and the founders overprioritize the brilliance of specific people and specific men . Like, when you think about andy ruben or rich duval, an exexecutive who left because of Sexual Misconduct. Astro i think this is pretty complicated. There are thousands of Exceptional People at alphabet. So, i think it would be fair to recognize it is not like those were the only people being set up as exceptional. Now, was our hygiene in recognizing these people and then helping them out of the building at the right pace as good as it could have been . I dont think so. Emily like rich duval we are not going to get into the sordid details but he propositioned an employee he was interviewing, she did not get the job, she reported it. There is a lot in between, but should that have been handled differently . Astro yes. I wish i had handled it differently. The thing that i most wish i could have created an environment that was different was actually not the details of how we went through the investigation process that im sure you can imagine. We did that by the book and we did what the investigation said. Because you dont want the leader to sort of go around the investigations when they happen, i actually feel ok about that part of it. But other things have come out, other elements of people being uncomfortable that i wish generally this is not about rich that we could be even better at surfacing what i think of as the sort of gray area issues within x faster. Emily from the outside, we dont see a lot of larry page. Is he still the right person to be leading alphabet in the middle of all of this given all of this . Astro larry and sergey are the two most phenomenally creative people ive ever met in my life. And they set a standard and support that standard percolating throughout the organization. That is why alphabet is the way it is. That is not an argument that either larry or sergey are perfect human beings, but i think pretty clearly, alphabet would be worse off if we did not have support at the top from larry and from sergey. Emily you would say the same applies from larry as to sergey, even though sergey has also had some of his own issues that we dont need to get into. But you know in this day and age, some executives are being held to a higher standard. Astro i have low confidence, very low confidence, to be honest, that if we swap larry and sergey out for one or two other people that we would be better off even in the sort of human elements that we say that we care so much about. My moonshot is not waymo or wing or chronicle or loon. It is the factory. Emily now, one of the first moon shots, i actually still have them. These are my google glass. What do you think . These are still pretty fashionable. Astro those are good frames on you. [laughter] emily these were one of the first moonshots and they did not work out in the initial iteration and they became sort of a punchline, essentially. Do you think of glass as a failure . Astro it was certainly an experiment. There were aspects of it that were absolutely a failure. I want to be fair to glass. Having learned a lot of lessons, some of them may be more painfully than we needed to, glass is still very much an ongoing business and quite successful, it is just not much in the public eye. Emily thats right. So glass is back, or glass never went away. Astro glass never left. Glass, it turns out the right place for this for right now in society are the parts of society that are less fashion conscious and that have real, practical needs. So these are doctors and nurses, people who work in manufacturing environments, who work on oil rigs, who are maintaining airplanes. The irony is this is one of the technologies from Silicon Valley that the digirati said no thank you to, but the heartland of america is super happy to have because of the productivity enhancements that it gets. Emily do you think glass will ever be back in this form . Ar glasses . Astro yes, as glasses, they will absolutely be back. Emily when . Astro i dont know. 36 years . It will depend on the technology, will depend on social readiness. It is when we pretend that it is done when it is not done, so x has worked even harder afterward to be clear with each thing, like waymo or loon or wing. We get out into the world, we are not putting it anywhere that it is not safe, but we are not pretending that we are more done than we are done, because we dont want to recreate that glass failure mode. Emily as much as you want things to succeed, you have actually created a culture of failure here or a culture where it is ok to fail in the hope that you will succeed. Tell me about that. Astro so, the secret is, i hate failing. [laughter] astro but i want to win in the long run. I want us to win in the long run. We have to create a culture, if we want you to be honest, if we want you to fearlessly run the right experiment and then be honest about the outcome that says, we embrace the quality of the experiment, not the outcome. Emily what are some of the epic failures . Like, i would love to hear how this has worked in practice. Astro so we built a system that could turn seawater into methanol using clean energy. That is real save the world kind of stuff, and we got it working. And it turned out that the cheapest we believed we could get it was 15 gallon of gas equivalent. And this was one of these honesty moments, where we said, we want to save the world, we are incredibly proud we built this machine, but if the cheapest we are going to get this anytime soon is 15 gallon of gas equivalent, that is not going to save the world. No one is going to buy that. We publish the business failure and we publish the science learnings that we had in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas control and said, heres what we learned, can anyone build on this . Emily lets talk about the projects you are working on that have real potential. Astro one of the ones that i think that has a lot of potential, the selfdriving car business. Emily of course. We have to talk about waymo. People would think of waymo as the biggest success of x so far. Astro i think waymo is in great position. Waymo has done a great job in making these cars drive safely. Waymo is already now charging people as a Transportation Service in arizona. That is going exceptionally well. We are really proud of waymo. Emily waymo has spun out of x. It is a unit under alphabet. You have Morgan Stanley saying it is worth 175 billion. However, there are skeptics who say, when am i going to see the selfdriving car . It is taking too long. Who is right . Astro these things are going to take time, so you can see one of those if you just outside our building, if you go to arizona. There are now many hundreds of cars on the road. Emily when does it hit the mainstream . Astro for regulatory reasons, it is going to take a while. And, look, the world has already paid for a lot of cars, so as those cars are retired, that is one of the things that will pull selfdriving cars into the mainstream. Emily then of course there is loon. Astro loon is doing very well. There was recently an emergency in peru and we got to jump in and help connect a lot of people who had lost internet. That is the third time we have done that. Emily these are the internet beaming balloons. Astro exactly. So that one is making good progress. Like each of these things, it is a long process. But we have increasing faith that loon is actually the right way to bring connectivity to several billion people in the world who dont have it today. Emily where are you focusing current projects . Is it energy . Is it health care . Automation, farming, agriculture . Astro yes, all of those. We have every single thing you just named. We have at least one exploration in. But there are some im feeling particularly good about right now. Agriculture as an example. You know, humanitys ability to produce enough food to feed everyone in the world, and to do that in a Sustainable Way we are topping out. It is pretty scary. We now have several things here at x that are looking at Food Production from several different avenues, and we are excited about those things. I feel really good about that. Emily health care. What about health care . Astro sure. Heres an example. You know, this is an early thing that we are exploring. But there are spaces in which the innovation went like this because there was a simulator for the thing people are innovating on. If you could go into cell biology, for example, if you could simulate how a cell works, then you could run experiments at thousands, maybe even millions of times the rate that humans can run those experiments in the lab, and that would cause an enormous explosion in the innovation in the life sciences. Now, being able to simulate a cell accurately in a computer, who knows if we can do that . But that is an example where we have some interesting progress. Emily we are coming up on the 10 Year Anniversary of google x. What do the next 10 years look like . Astro i think we are better than almost anywhere else at many of these things, these habits of culture engineering and dealing with failure productively. We are still not great compared to what i think we could be. I would like in the next 10 years for it to become natural and seamless for us to do it here, and i would love to find a way to franchise this maybe not literally but to start doing this in other places. My moonshot is not waymo or wing or chronicle or loon. It is the factory. It is making a moonshot factory. The way we are doing it here involves building trust, driving diversity, and having people practice being their whole selves, being weird, being creative, taking chances, being in the flow when they are here. If i could get you and everyone else to believe that you could do more good for the world and make more money and be a happier person all at the same time, that would change the world more than any one of the moonshots we are taking. Emily astro teller, xs captain of moonshots, thank you so much for joining us. Astro thank you for having me. From the couldnt be prouders to the wait did we just winners. Everyone uses their phone differently. Thats why Xfinity Mobile lets you design your own data. Now you can share it between lines. Mix with unlimited, and switch it up at anytime so you only pay for what you need. Its a different kind of Wireless Network designed to save you money. Save up to 400 a year on your wireless bill. Plus get 250 back when you buy an eligible phone. Call, click, or visit a store today. Alix big oil battles climate change. Ceos say reducing emissions is not just their job. But consumers, too. We speak to the ceo of equinor. Its big bet on wind. Conocos tantalizing dividends. The company raise dividends to woo investors who were disillusioned by Energy Stocks and buybacks. A 2. 6 billion historic blackout. 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