A Bit of Optimism - Landing Moonshots with Google's Innovation Chief Dr. Astro Teller
Episode Date: September 3, 2024Before Elon Musk rebranded Twitter, X was already in use — at Google. Google X was Google's secret research lab, where Google's most imaginative ideas came to life.As CEO and co-founder, Astro Telle...r's job is to harness X's wildest, most futuristic technology to solve the world's hardest problems. The same "moonshot factory" that created Google Brain and Waymo self-driving cars is also working on carbon capture, laser-beam Internet, delivery drones, and more.I sat down with Astro to discuss how we build cultures of radical innovation. He shares some useful wisdom about unlearning what we know and why the counterintuitive approach is the key to landing moonshots.This...is A Bit of Optimism.To learn more about Astro and his work, check out:X, the moonshot factoryÂ
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The term moonshot has become so overused, it's almost lost its meaning.
For a moonshot to actually be a moonshot, it has to be beyond hard,
stretch the limits of our imagination, and have a very high chance of failure.
But if it works, if it works, it could change the world.
That's where Astro Teller comes in.
He's the co-founder and CEO of X,
the secretive lab behind Google's most remarkable innovations.
From pioneering self-driving cars to bringing the internet to all people in every part of the world,
even finding ways to better predict natural disasters.
So how do they do it?
Astro Teller may just be the patron saint of innovation
because he has figured out some remarkable counterintuitive ways
to inspire people, push the limits,
and actually deliver on some incredible, well, moonshots.
This is a bit of optimism.
Astro, I'm a huge fan of yours.
So the fact that you're here and we're doing this together is just sheer joy and thrill for me.
Likewise, Simon.
Thank you.
You know, you do what are affectionately known in the rest of the world as moonshots.
The organization formerly known as Google X, now X not to be confused with formerly known as Twitter X.
Two different organizations.
confused with formerly known as Twitter X, two different organizations. But Google X used to be the secret lab at Google where they would attempt to do what are known as moonshots, which is
crazy outlandish ideas that only a company with the resources and brainpower of Google could do.
Were you there from the very beginning? I was. So what happened was that the founders of
Google were thinking about what became Google X, even for several years before it existed.
They recruited someone whose name was Sebastian Thrun to run the place as they were starting to
get it up and running. This was almost 15 years ago now. And they asked him if he wanted a co-founder. He and I had known each other for a long time
and had been looking for an opportunity to work together. I was running a hedge fund in San
Francisco at the time. And Sebastian came and asked me, would you like to come do this thing?
And I said, no, because I was really dedicated to my
investors. And then he came and asked me again. And so I went to my board of directors and I said,
okay, I'm going to say no again. But before I do, I just want to hear that you're all as serious
about what we're doing as I am. And they said, what are you crazy Astro? Go do that. We got this
covered. So I made my CTO at that hedge fund, CEO, and I came and helped start Google X.
Okay.
So now let's get into the real nitty gritty.
Thank you for that.
But let's get into the real nitty gritty because I think every company writes on its fake values list that's written on the wall.
And I say fake because, you know.
I know exactly what you mean. It's just a list of stuff on a wall. And I say fake because, you know. I know exactly what you mean.
It's just a list of stuff on a wall. But they all have innovation, right? Which I think is
funny because every company thinks they're innovative, but most companies are not.
And even companies that say, even the companies that are, that are driving to innovation,
the innovations that they're thinking of are, I think, fair to say, even if they're good,
thinking of are, I think, fair to say, even if they're good, small in comparison to the stuff that you're doing over at X and have always done. Just so that people understand some of the size
of the thinking that's happening there, just so we can contextualize it, give a couple of the
brands that have spun off that people might know that came out of this brilliant lab? So some ones that people may be familiar with, Google Brain, which started at X, was arguably
the original epicenter of what is now this modern day explosion of deep learning.
And it was the first place where really large networks were industrialized, essentially. A year or two after
we did that, it was going so well. In that particular case, we chose to move Google Brain
back to Google. We decided that was the best way to harvest the value that was coming from that
thing. Let me use one or two examples to show you the breadth. We started something which internally was called Chauffeur a long time
ago. It was our exploration into self-driving cars. That project has grown up. It's graduated
from X. It's now a standalone business inside the Alphabet family called Waymo. And so if you go to
San Francisco now, you can get a ride from Waymo Cars, and it's a transportation as a service experience.
There's just no one sitting in the front seat, and you don't even need to be whitelisted.
You just download the app, order a car, it appears it takes you around.
For listeners of yours who've tried it before, it's really exciting for the first four or five minutes, and then it's boring.
And that's awesome.
I've had friends who've taken Waymos in San Francisco and I was like, what's it like?
As if it's the first time on a plane. And they're all like, yeah, whatever. It's an Uber without a
driver. And that is the highest compliment that I can imagine because inside of Waymo,
over this 14-year arc, we had to first solve all the safety problems, but then we had to solve like, hey,
let's make sure we don't make the driver inside seasick now that it's safe for people outside
the car. And then there were all these like third order effects, like the body language of the car.
We don't realize that little things that we do when we're driving signal to people like, hey,
I'm going to merge now. No, really, like, leave me some space.
All of these things, it turns out we have to get good at. Like, where are you going to drop someone
off when they're arriving somewhere? There's so many things. It's sort of an AI hard problem.
It's been an incredible ride. And the fact that it's boring is the largest compliment we could
ever get.
I never thought about that, of course, because like when you're merging into traffic,
you sort of like nudge your way forward, which says you better slow down because I'm a going.
Whereas an AI model would just be like, oh, there's a space I'm going to accelerate now,
which as you said, it's almost what's so fascinating. It's like these automotive nonverbal cues. Right. But so of course, that wasn't on the list of problems to solve until we were
actually out in the world and people are saying, this is the thing we really care about. Okay,
great to know. And then we can go solve that. Now, everybody wishes they were more innovative.
And I think leaders everywhere are trying to, quote unquote, get their people to be more
innovative. What have you learned after 15 years at being at
X that you didn't know before, but is part of the real formula? Is it how you hire? Is it
the culture? What is it specifically that you do that lets people dream big, but also
know how to make that stuff? How do you get innovation out of people?
big, but also know how to make that stuff. How do you get innovation out of people?
So let me take a step back and make sure that we're all on the same page about what we're trying to do so that when I describe how we're trying to do it, it will make sense.
So what we call a moonshot has three basic parts. Number one, there has to be a huge problem in the
world that you want to solve, that you want to make go away. Number two, there has to be some
kind of science fiction
sounding product or service that you're proposing that we would make that however unlikely it is,
we could actually make it, get it to work, get it to be cheap enough, whatever. If we could make it,
we can agree, it would probably make that problem with the world go away. And then you have to have
a proposal of some breakthrough technology for how we can take
at least a run at making that thing that's sort of at least an order of magnitude better
than the solutions that are currently out there.
If you have those three things, we would call that a moonshot story hypothesis.
You're probably wrong, but it's cool by itself once you get to that stage. Then the question is, how fast, how cheaply can we verify that you're wrong so we can
get on to the next thing?
Because in the early days, they all sound crazy.
We can't pre-pick which ones are the right ones.
So the best we can do is just be better than other people at filtering the ideas.
That's what we try really hard to be good at.
other people at filtering the ideas. That's what we try really hard to be good at. And so if you,
Simon, worked at X and you come up with the teleportation proposal and you have like,
hey, I think I have a way of making teleportation work and here's this crazy idea.
If we can try it, but it's going to take four years and $10 million before we find out if we're on the right track? Nope, not interested. But if you say,
hey, crazy idea, here's how great it would be for the world if it worked, I know that it's probably
not going to work, but I think we can learn something for a few tens of thousands of dollars
in the next month or two. Oh yeah, you've got our attention. I don't care how unlikely it is if we
can learn for that cheap and that fast. So that's the game we're playing,
is churning through ideas, throwing most of them away for good reasons with evidence.
And so the most fundamental thing we're doing is playing the long game and trying to have
really high amounts of audacity so we're willing to go on these unlikely journeys,
of audacity, so we're willing to go on these unlikely journeys, but then with equally high levels of humility, knowing right from the beginning that it's probably not going to work,
and being able to be sanguine enough about it that we can be proud of going on the journey,
and then proud of turning off the journey when it turns out it's not the right journey,
instead of resisting that reality or going through a long grieving process
when it turns out not to be the right thing to do. And so all of the cultural work at X is about
trying to help people get from this sort of gambler's mentality of innovation over into this
card counting mentality of innovation, where we can feel together as a community supporting each other in this process
where we are passionate about being dispassionate. We pursue each of these ideas hoping it will work,
but also realistic that most of them won't and hungry to discover where we're wrong.
This is a big deal and it's worth repeating. And you said it, which is moving from a gambler's
mentality to a card counting mentality, which I think is a great way of putting it. Most innovation, especially in big companies,
happens where somebody comes up with ideas or a group of people come up with ideas.
Some executive who has to sign off on it wants the ROI, wants to know what the bet is,
and they pick what they think is going to be the best bet. And if it fails, it probably takes too
long. They write it off and then they repeat that system.
And it doesn't produce high quantities of great innovation.
And as you said, you might hit it now and then, but it is a gambling.
It was a little bit of luck or a lot of luck that it worked in the first place.
Whereas what you're doing is you're creating a mentality of trying, not just evaluating
on paper and taking bets.
And you're allowing the reality of, is this possible or not to dictate if we go forwards
or not. So egos kind of aren't really involved. You don't really have camps being pitted against
each other that my idea is better than your idea because the data will prove whether it's viable
or not. And I assume that it makes people much more cooperative that you're all trying to help each other make your ideas work because nobody's going to be rewarded because
you're not gamblers. What you described is our aspirational state. The actual work that's going
on here, and you've spent time here at the Moonshot Factory, so you know what I'm talking about,
is trying to get our way step by step towards that aspiration
because you're right and it sounds great, but it's really hard for us to do because that's not what
the rest of the world has encouraged us to be like since we were six years old. The rest of the world,
if I say, I don't know what the answer is to your question, or I say, your idea is better than mine,
and we can all agree abstractly that that's the right way for us to be and that the best innovation factory
would have those kinds of characteristics. But that is not how you jack up your career in almost
all of the world. So getting the culture to reinforce all of these pieces that are aligned
with the audacity, with the humility, with taking long
time horizons. Part of the problem is we train particularly engineers, but arguably other skills
too. If you're making version 17 of some satellite, I'm sure you know what you're doing.
And so you just want to be left alone for two years so you can make the next version. And you
can pretty much predict what's going to make the next version better. And it's
going to be incremental. It's not going to be radically better. If we're shooting over the
horizon, the temptation is there in all of us to say, give me enough people, enough money, enough
time, and leave me alone. Let me build it right the first time. I get that temptation. The smarter people are,
the more that temptation is high in us. But when we're shooting over the horizon,
you don't even know if you're going in the right direction. So how fast you head there
is like not the question. It's like being able to work the sextant that's important,
not how fast you row in your boat. So what I love about this is, I know that we call moonshots moonshots because
we always like, we could put a man on the moon, but we can't dot, dot, dot. I get it. It's like
that we landed somebody on the moon in 1969. 1969, for heaven's sakes. It is the great things
to point to of human ingenuity that we use as a point of reference.
And though that's true, it's your description of those three characteristics that define how X goes about pursuing ideas. It seems to mirror exactly what they did back in the
60s when Kennedy challenged everybody, which was it had to be for some greater good. And in his
man to the moon speech, he says, in order to serve mankind, in order
to do something great, to advance the human race forwards, he literally talks about why
we're doing this, the audacity that we're going to put a person on the moon and bring
them back again safely.
And then the trials and trials and trials to prove that I think we can do this.
Like we have the rocket power.
We can figure this out and give it enough time,
less than a decade,
with a computer the power of a Commodore 64,
and we did it.
That's, I think, the most impressive thing.
It's not the accomplishment.
It's that your three criteria
match the actual moonshot.
Yes, thank you.
And we're adding on.
I mean, so obviously we're trying to learn from
all of the great work that's happened before us. Yeah. Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, you know,
the Apollo space mission, as you were just describing, Bletchley PARC during World War II,
and the invention of the computer. There's a lot to learn from. One of the things that
distinguishes us from the eponymous moonshot
is efficiency was not the goal. There was a national security and national pride issue,
which trumped efficiency. And that helped and then made it sort of a special case.
We do not have that benefit. We are and should be held to an efficiency standard.
that benefit, we are and should be held to an efficiency standard. That's in principle what distinguishes or part of what distinguishes gambling from being a card counter. Like
everything that we're doing here, yes, those three circles and the intersection, it has to have those
three things, but it's also how are we going to pursue this as efficiently as possible? So it's
not just, can we do it? So let me give
you an example of something that I think is a learning that we've had that's very much in the
culture here now. We call it moonshot compost. So we take a run at something. A lot of people
are passionate about it. I'll use an example. We have a moonshot now for helping the electric grids of the world move into the 21st century
in a variety of ways so that we can help them to take care of the grids as they are, plan
for the grids as they want to be in the future, and operate the grids in real time in ways
that will make them much greener and more resilient.
That doesn't exist.
We think we can make it. The moonshot we have now, which is called Tapestry, is actually well
on its way to doing that. And that is not our first run at that particular problem.
And when we took previous runs at it, and they didn't work out, and I still remember the
conversation I had with somebody internally where they talked about doing another run at it. And I said, fine, it's a huge problem with the world. I would love to see it fixed.
Can we please make sure that we learn everything possible from all the ways it didn't work before?
So when we take our next run at it, we're at least somewhat more likely to do it. We don't
duplicate any of our past mistakes. And so that concept of moonshot compost is one of maybe 10
cultural memes here that people really get that when we try to learn in a space and it doesn't
work, when we stop it, many of the people stay, the patents stay, the code stays, we maintain
some partnerships. And so then when we try again, we're not starting from
scratch. We have all of this like learning and intellectual momentum that we can already build
on, even if the project has a new name or kind of starting over. So again, this is something that,
you know, even though it's the adage, you know, you either get it right or you learn a lesson.
How many organizations are actually like pulling out the old data to be like, all right,
we're going to try this again. Let's, let's spend some time to sort of like go through. So we don't
repeat the mistakes. You know, a friend of mine who is a consultant says of her clients, they
never have the time or money to do it right the first time, but they always have the time and
money to do it again. Right. And I'm so glad you brought up never time to do it right, but always
time to do it over. Right. that stuff gets brought up at x all
the time because that's what they learn in the rest of the world and measure twice cut once
it's like a seamstress saying yeah when the most expensive thing you have is the fabric
and you pretty much know what you're gonna do measure, measure twice and cut once, makes sense. But when you have no
idea what the real problem even is, let alone what the solution is, it might be that there is no
solution or that now isn't the time to find a solution that the tech needs to move forward
another decade. Who knows? The whole concept of doing it right the first time is just out the
window. Oh, that's such a, it screws with our heads, as you said, because we've had it drilled in us.
You know, so that must be the hardest thing you have to do is where you're taking people
who are not 12 years old and you're hiring them and you have to unteach them their incentive
structures, their reward structures, their
grade structures, everything that they did to get to the point of being smart enough,
good enough, talented enough to get a job with you.
And they're like, congratulations, now forget everything you've learned.
You're going to try something new.
That must be the single hardest thing you have to deal with.
Exactly right.
You know, you've probably heard that really great painters who break all the rules learn first how to follow the rules.
Yes.
We want the same thing in the people who work at X.
If we're trying to do something really radical, we don't want people who are starting at zero.
We want people with all of the skills to do things the normal way who also have the mental plasticity to put that aside, to limber up as individuals, but more importantly, as groups and to say, OK, now how can we be productively nonconformist, bringing our skills to the table, but not all of our biases and the habits?
Because as they say, the tools that got you here won't get you there, right?
If you're going to bring to bear on some really big problem the same things that everyone else has been trying,
you shouldn't expect to get better results
than everyone else is bringing.
Can you give some specific guidance
as how you actually do do that at a cultural level
from a leadership standpoint? How do you
actually get people to let go? My experience is that at first, you have to give them some
intellectual architecture that gives them a boost while they sort of get into the flow of things.
You can't just say, let it go. That doesn't work. Forget everything you've learned.
Right. So an example, which I know you've heard, but it go. That doesn't work. Forget everything you've learned. Right.
So an example, which I know you've heard, but many of your listeners won't.
For many years, I was just saying, we have to work on the hardest parts of the problem
first.
Yeah.
And it just was clearly like not working for people at X.
And then I was at a Wall Street Journal live conference and someone asked me about just
like you're doing.
And I said, work on the hardest parts of the problem first. And they said, what does that mean? I don't get it. And I said, look,
hyperbolically, if you were trying to teach a monkey to stand on the top of a 10 foot pedestal
and recite Shakespeare, what should you do first? Train the monkey or build the pedestal?
In that extreme circumstance, I think we could all agree
there's no point building the pedestal first because you've removed 0% of the risk. All of
the risk is can you train the monkey? But when you actually look in slightly more subtle circumstances
all over the world, almost all the time, everyone's building pedestals because then you can be half
done. You spent a couple of years, you got a bonus, you got a promotion. And if it's incremental,
if you kind of, if there isn't a lot of risk and it's possibility, it's just hard work.
Yeah. Then it's fine to do the pedestal first. Cause it's kind of all pedestal,
but just me saying that it became a meme here at X. And so now people literally put little monkey icons
by the parts of what they're working on in slide decks that are like the make or break it part of
what they're doing. And so that is an intellectual architecture that has helped people focus in on,
are we really de-risking the hard parts now? Or are we kicking the can down the road in sort of chickening ways?
Yeah. Yeah. And you're right, because egos are fragile, right? And we've all been in this
meeting where we spent two years and spent $10 million building the pedestal, that because we
don't want to hurt anybody's feelings, we go, great job to the monkey Shakespeare project team,
brilliant job building this
pedestal that's exactly what we envision with this perfect pedestal we just want to say good
work to everybody you know keep up keep keep it up and we do that we sort of halfway there
halfway there and just want to just a quick high five to the monkey team for building a great
pedestal and we do this in the meetings because for good reasons, we don't want to be like, what the hell are you doing? Building the pedestal,
like train the monkey. Right. Um, I'll give you another example. When, when someone cancels their
own project, which is arguably the pinnacle of what we're trying to do here, it's very hard.
It doesn't happen all the time, but when people do that, we stand them up at an X all hands meeting. We give them a standing ovation. We give them all
very large bonuses. And we make a point to Xers every single time. This is the rate limiting step
of innovation. Not coming up with ideas. I don't think anyone's much better than random at coming up with ideas.
Not killing off bad ideas.
Anyone can kill off bad ideas.
It's killing off the pretty good ones.
The ones that still feel possible.
And we want them to work.
But when the project lead says, you know what?
The reward-risk ratio of this thing, now that we are two years in, we've learned a lot,
it's just not as good as some of the other stuff going on at X. And I think we should stop working on this. I hope I find another project to work on. And that's, of course, better for X, and it's
better for them as individuals. So that's another example. But it goes into compost, right? Because
if you came up with Netflix 20 years ago,
the technology was DVDs. That's the best you could do. It was an upgrade from videotape,
but that's the best you could do. So you would put it on the pile. And then as the internet matured, you'd be like, okay, let's take it off the pile and try again now that we have the internet.
Exactly. Exactly. And that happens regularly here that we're too early. And sometimes we're too early
and we come back to it. That's happened quite a few times. Sometimes we're too early and the
world comes back to it. Google Glass, for various reasons, arguably we were too early, but we were
exactly right. There's now a whole bunch of work and products being sold that are very much in the
vein of Google Glass. So, you know, we were prescient,
but our job is to, arguably our job is to be the right amount too early. But in order to be the
right amounts too early, we not infrequently have to be too, too early. Are only companies like
Google able to do this because there's a lot of failure, which means there's a lot of waste,
which means you need a lot of money. You know, how is this methodology or mentality transferable to a startup or a lesser resourced organization? Like my, my little company, I don't think I could
afford to do this or could I? I mean, I don't know that you could afford to do it at the scale that
we're doing it. But if you said to your team, I would like to, whatever it is, I'd like to have
10 times as many podcast listeners a year from now.
Instead of having one idea about how we're going to do that,
we're going to spend a month coming up with 100 crazy ideas.
Then we're going to spend two months beating the crap out of all of those 100 ideas.
We'll have used up three of the 12 months that we have.
Then we're going to spend another three months on the top four ideas and give them each a chance
to prove their weight. And then we're going to push the last six months the best of those four
ideas. I guarantee you, you would make more progress on building your listenership for
your podcast doing that
than if you picked some idea and just hoped you were right from the beginning and pushed
really hard for 12 months. So that is exactly the process that we're doing.
You do realize that one example, you have screwed a lot of people's heads right now.
You've screwed with a lot of people's heads right now because we're all rethinking how we do this
stuff. Like I think we all embarrassingly take bets and it's because we're afraid of losing.
And you're not saying you're going to lose. You're saying the irony is, is there's less risk in your
assessment than in the, in the way we traditionally do it. Great irony is your wasteful method,
quote unquote, is actually more efficient, less wasteful and more effective than the gambling method.
Right.
And so most people think Google's doing this because they have infinite money.
I think that Google's letting us do this because they're inspired and they understand
that we're creating value disproportionately, which is why they're still giving us money
to do this.
Has there been a project that I know your nature is to be like, well,
give it a try. But has there been one where you sort of said, give it a try, but in your head,
you're like, yeah, no, like this is, this is actually outlandish and we're forced to eat your
hat. Oh, constantly. God's silly. Let me tell you about one that I'm really excited about now. And I remember just being like, no. We now have
something that's graduated from X. It's on the outside that is a substantially cheaper way
to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere than other people have figured out how to do.
It's the world's largest snow globe. The team has figured out a way to, on very small pieces of sand, basically, amorphous
silica, put these little chemical fingers called amines that are designed to hang on
to the sand and to grab CO2 molecules out of the air at one temperature, at a colder
temperature, and then at a colder temperature,
and then at a higher temperature, they let go of it. And then the trick is, part of why it's so expensive to grab CO2 from the air, is that you have to get it up to almost like 90 degrees
Celsius before it will let go. The team designed a way to get it down to about 45 degrees Celsius.
And that turns out is the heat of waste that comes
out of factories and data centers. You can get all the 45 degrees Celsius heat you want almost
anywhere in the world. So all of a sudden, the single biggest cost just evaporated.
Imagine now six years ago, somebody who was a genius engineer, but maybe not a genius communicator,
trying to describe making the world's largest snow globe and how this was going to solve climate
change. When that was described in the beginning, I was deeply, deeply dubious. And here we are six
years later, it's a super exciting, it's one of the things we're most proud about that's come out
of X. It's called 280 Earth, if people want to look into it.
280 Earth?
280 Earth.
The number of parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere now is about 480, very roughly.
But pre-industrialization, it was at 280 parts per million.
So the goal is, how do we get back there?
The thing that I'm realizing that is one
of the big problems, and I'll admit it happens in our company too, the skeptical authority giver
hears ideas all the time and goes, ah, I don't think so. And the amount of ideas that get killed
by a person who may or may not fully understand what's happening or has bias or baggage or whatever.
And I've done it.
I have heard ideas that I've killed because I think it's a waste of money and I'm playing
the gambling game.
And now we're back to, I don't care how crazy your idea is.
I care how inexpensively we can explore it.
There's only one thing on the door of my huddle. It's a blown
up picture of the tarot card of the fool. The beginning of a journey is sacred. It's full of
mystery and wonder you can expect to get laughed at. If my job here was to stop all the bad
adventures, there wouldn't be any adventures. That's why most
places don't do radical innovation. So instead, I say, we're going to start almost every adventure
that we can do it relatively inexpensively in the early days. And here's what I want in exchange
from you, Simon, if you're going to work here at X. You can start crazy ideas that no one else will start,
but you have to make a deal with me right at the beginning. We're not going to fall in love with
this thing and then try for the rest of your life to prove that you're right. In exchange for me
letting you go on this journey, you have to be committed to the intellectual honest process
of finding evidence and then agreeing together with us, what does that evidence tell
us about whether we should keep going? If you can do that with us, then we can start on these crazy
journeys. This is magic, right? Which is most companies, when they do innovation, they're
looking to how efficiently we can get to yes. In other words, how efficiently we can get to a
minimal viable product. And you're saying, how efficiently can I get to no? How efficiently can I prove
that this is the wrong answer? For radical innovation, 99% of the things we're going to try,
the answer should be no. So if our attitude going in is how fast we can get to yes,
God, are we going to waste our money? And by the way, this is very grounded in reality in
other places. The same year that Babe Ruth broke the record for home runs, he also broke the record for strikeouts. If you want radical innovation, you have to be willing
to strike out more than anybody else. Those strikeouts, they hurt us, right? It's why I'm
somewhat fairly like branded as like the high priest of failure. I hate failure. I don't want
to fail, but I'm obsessed with learning and what we can get from
learning. And if we avoid failure because of all of the ways in which we think will be censured by
our peers, by our spouses, by our managers, when we fail, and then we avoid it, what we're doing,
whether we acknowledge it or not, is we're avoiding learning. Because the moment where
you thought something would happen in the world and it didn't happen,
that is by definition when you heard, you don't learn anything when you're right.
This stuff is interesting. Oh my God. I mean, so the stuff that you're saying makes so much sense and there's so much logic. Why aren't all companies doing innovation like this? And
why are we still gambling? And I don't, I don because, you know, that's how people are taught to do it, because we will adapt.
You know, companies, especially, you know, whorish companies, if there's a more efficient way to get something out of it and extract something, they'll do it, right?
They'll incentivize people to do it.
Why aren't more companies copying you?
more companies copying you. Arguably, you are one of the high priests of being human is hard and tuning up and managing our psychology to get the most out of ourselves as individuals and teams
is hard. Everything we're talking about, it's not the technology. It's the personal stuff.
It's working on ourselves
and practicing a set of habits that are really easy to describe, but are very hard to practice
because they're not what's encouraged in the rest of the world. And it's what we spend our energy on.
I think most people aren't yet ready to put in that level of cultural engineering. And it takes a level of sort of
passion and playing the long game, believing in people, believing the best in them. There's a bit
of a trust fall in what we're talking about. It makes sense. But I think there's a level of like
dispassion necessary and belief in the process necessary when you're
card counting that for people who aren't really believing in the process, I'm glad that you're
a believer, but you have to really believe before you start practicing it.
I'm going to be interested over a beer sometime to ask you whether you tried the hundred crazy
ideas that you winnowed down to one idea.
You said it was a great idea and it was cracking everyone's brain open. I'm going to ask you next
time over a beer whether you actually did it. It's harder than it sounds, even though it's right.
Fair bet. What are some of the cultural things that you do at X that work, that other people
could easily implement that start to move a culture in that direction,
moving from gambler to car counter that you've learned over the years, that you've learned over
the years? I think it's actually a huge number of small things. And I'll give you an example or two,
but it starts, if you understand the process, which we just described, then you need to send a ton of signals to your people.
This is what we care about. So for example, if you come into our lobby,
you won't see finished versions of all our products. You will see in process versions,
beaten up versions where they got beat up and dirty, the janky early ones in the field.
And the reason is because we're
actually proud of the learning and the getting in touch with the real world as fast as possible.
We're not proud about the outcomes. We're proud about the process. But if you don't show that in
the jewel case in your lobby, people know. Not consciously, but unconsciously, they notice.
When you come into our building, the walls are literally plywood.
The whole building kind of yells to you unconsciously, this place is a work in progress.
There's graffiti. I mean, like graffiti from when the building was built, things like, you know,
gas line, you know, a little arrow pointing up on the pillars here, like right next to me.
And we don't remove them because we want to tell
the people who work here, everything is a work in progress. So we have purposefully done hundreds
of things like that to try to send each other the signals. We're here to have fun. We're serious
about being playful. We know that we're going to try crazy things and then we're going to do
hard filtering because we're humble enough to do things, and then we're going to do hard filtering
because we're humble enough to do that.
But everything has to send that signal, and it's lots of little stuff like that, like
putting the fool.
I think most CEOs would be uncomfortable putting the fool as the only thing on the door of
their office.
That is one of the hundreds of ways that I try to say to people, it's about the journey.
It's not about taking ourself, God forbid, not about taking me too seriously.
You're right.
People want to put their trophies in the front because they want you to see, look at our
amazing accomplishments.
They don't put the bumpy journey to get there and celebrate the bumpy journey.
They celebrate the wins.
I don't know if I've told you this or not, but it's a perfect reminder.
And I got the chance to get to know Dr. James Kars,
who is the originator of Finite and Infinite Games before he died. And when I first met him,
many people come up with theories about how the world works, but Kars came up with the truth.
And that's once in a hundred years. And so of course, I'm like, I couldn't wait to sit down
with him. And the first question, the poor guy, like I barely said hello.
The first question I asked him is, how did you come up with it?
Like, how did you come up with a truth like finite and infinite games?
And he was saying back in the 70s, there were all of these intellectual salons that they would bring together, you know, a mathematician, a philosopher, you know, a finance guy, you know, whatever. And game theory was all the rage in the 70s, kind of like AI now,
like it's all anybody wanted to talk to. It's the subject of every conference, right? It was game
theory. And he was invited to one of these salons. And by the way, the prisoner's dilemma was one of
the things that came out of one of these salons. So he went to the salon and they're all
talking about winning and losing. And they're all of their thinking is about how to win, how to win,
how to avoid loss. And he raised the question, what about playing? And they basically ignored
him. And he comes back home and he sort of, now that he has this idea stuck in his head, he starts
to view the world through this lens and he sees his own kids and he sees when they play ping pong,
there's always fighting. There's always an accusation of cheating and it often doesn't
end well. But when they do Lego or they're drawing or they're building something, it's quiet.
It goes on for hours. One kid leaves to go do something for another hour, comes back.
The kids are rotating, but the game remains. And he realized play without an end is way more
innovative. And the things that they were inventing was way more powerful than a competition.
And he was the only one who talked about the value of playing over the value of the outcome
of winning and losing.
And even the prisoner's dilemma is a win-loss scenario.
Falsely, I might add.
And I think what is so magical about X and you and your leadership and your culture and what you're doing is you're one of the very few organizations that has fully staked its flag on playing, knowing that the creativity,
the cooperation, the joy, the fun, the getting to leave, join is way more powerful than
incentivizing people on win or loss. That it is the janky version on the way that you can laugh
at and say, I remember that is what it's about. And we have these different sayings to try to get at this idea
that we want to shape the play without killing the joy and creativity of the play.
So sometimes we say responsibly irresponsible. Someone recently said a term I kind of like,
he said, the non-stupid suspension of disbelief.
That's what we have to do in the early days of a project.
So it's very hard to get at it,
but I think it's like you need rigor and directionality to it
or it's just random.
But you need to have it be so that the play is guided
to cause efficiency.
Sure, of course. So much that it turns back into a grim
grinding of the gears, because you're not going to get radical innovation out of that.
Look, this is the biggest insight I've had from talking to you, which is when other companies
talk about fun, it usually comes with play hard, work hard, play hard. The fun happens
after the work. They don't actually talk about
the fun in the work. And I don't think a lot of companies will define their culture as fun,
nor do they aspire to be fun. I mean, you can't help talking about your work, your culture,
without a big shit-eating grin on your face. Thank you. Yes.
And yes, you have stress. And yes, there's highs. And yes, there's lows. And yes,
there's frustration. But fun can have stress and yes, there's frustration, but fun
can have stress and fun can have exhaustion and fun can have all those things.
But the point is when you sit back, you'll be like, yeah, it's fun.
I like working there because it's fun, say very few people in the world.
And I think if you can make fun integrated into the process, what you end up with is
innovation.
And just to put a final pin on it,
as rich as Google is, you're actually not throwing huge amounts of money to small numbers of
problems. You're throwing little amounts of money to lots of problems. And that restriction of
resources produces imagination. Add in fun. I mean, you're literally creating moon shots on a daily basis amen maybe as a parting shot one
of the things that we say to xers is we use the metaphor of uh alexander the great chopping the
gordian knot you know the story of that i think for all the non-merids out here i'll describe it
very briefly there was alexander the great as he was sort of heading into the rest of Asia, which he
ultimately took over a lot of Asia, he stopped in what I think is modern day Syria.
And there was a temple and there was a very complex knot that had been tied in front of
the temple.
And there was a legend that whoever figured out how to untie this knot would take over
the rest of Asia.
And he walked up to this knot, he pulled out his sword, and he just sliced through the knot.
And so this is known as cutting the Gordian knot, that some things can't be done
in the normal way at all. It was probably an untieable knot, supposedly. But he just cheated. He found a
cheat in the game. And that cheat in the game, when you step back far enough, it was just a
different game he was playing. What we say is, we're giving the people at X just barely enough
money to go look for Gordian knot chops. We're purposefully not giving them enough money to
untie any of the knots they're interested in
looking at. And that's to force creativity. So we, yes, we want to have fun. Yes, we actually
really restrict it. And it's purposefully to try to prevent them from hiring an army of not untires,
metaphorically speaking. Also known as the entire consulting economy. And on that note,
also known as the entire consulting economy.
And on that note, Astro, always a pleasure.
I always learn something from you.
I accept your challenge, and I look forward to having a beer with you soon.
What a joy, Simon.
I look forward to having you come visit so we can do that.
Thank you so much.
I can't wait.
Thank you, Simon.
You're the best, Astro.
I'll talk to you real soon.
All right.
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Until then, take care of yourself.
Take care of each other.
A Bit of Optimism is a production of The Optimism Company. take care of yourself, take care of each other.