The Tim Ferriss Show - #309: Astro Teller, CEO of X - How to Think 10x Bigger

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

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Starting point is 00:01:22 Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email Check it out. includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free. It's always going to be free. And you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first

Starting point is 00:02:23 subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Well, hello boys and girls, this is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is typically my job to deconstruct world-class performers across all different

Starting point is 00:03:16 industries and areas of expertise. This episode is going to be short and sweet. Instead of my long-form interviews, which range from one to four hours, that's long. If you want those, you can find 300 plus at tim.blog forward slash podcast. But this particular episode is going to be a short one. It will be roughly 10 minutes in length. And it explains how to 10x your thinking and your goals, or put another way, how to escape incremental thinking and think truly big, that's capital B-I-G. And I love this audio so much that I now listen to it on a regular basis as a reminder.

Starting point is 00:03:57 And even if you only listen repeatedly to the first minute or so, the exercise that is described, it can be tremendously powerful. So perhaps you'll end up doing the same thing and listening to it every Monday or once every month or whatever. The speaker is Dr. Astro Teller at Astro Teller on Twitter. Astro is currently captain of moonshots. Yes, that's his title. But you can think of him as CEO of X, formerly known as Google X, but now Alphabet's Moonshot factory for building magical, audacious ideas that through science and technology can be brought to reality. Astro is also co-founder and current director of

Starting point is 00:04:36 Cerebellum Capital, a hedge fund management firm whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved by a software system based on techniques from statistical machine learning. He was also the co-founder and CEO of Body Media Inc., a leading wearable body monitoring company that was sold to Jawbone in 2013. And Dr. Teller, Astro, as I call him, holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Stanford, Masters of Science in Symbolic and Heuristic Computation, also from Stanford, master's of science in symbolic and heuristic computation, also from Stanford University. Not only would I not qualify to study such a thing, I can barely pronounce it, and a PhD in artificial intelligence from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a recipient of the prestigious Hertz Fellowship. The audio that you're going to hear was recorded as part of A360,

Starting point is 00:05:21 that's the letter A-3-6-0, a high-end membership group run by past podcast guest and founder and chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation, Peter Diamandis, a very impressive guy in his own right. For more on A360, if you want to know how this group comes together, what it involves, and its digital cousin or version, you can think of it, digital since a 360 is in person and abundance digital is as you would guess digital please check out diamandis.com that's d-i-a-m-a-n-d-i-s.com and look under memberships so without further ado please enjoy astro teller ceo of x on how to think 10 times bigger. Astro Teller, please come on up.

Starting point is 00:06:14 Love this man. All right. You guys having fun? Awesome. So I run an experiment very frequently. I've done it before in this room. And typically it's with people who are one or two layers below you in organizations much like yours. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether they're just like yours. But here's what the experiment looks like. I ask people, I'm going to give you two choices. Choice A, choice B. Choice A, you can give a million dollars bottom line to your company through your efforts this year, guaranteed,

Starting point is 00:06:54 100%. That's choice A. Choice B, you can give a billion dollars bottom line to your company through your efforts this year with one chance in 100. Choice A, choice B. Who wants to do choice A? Who's going to do choice A for the company? Absolutely nobody raises their hand. Who's going to do choice B? Everybody raises their hand. So congratulations. I mean, I'm not even testing you guys. I'm sure you can all do the math in your head. The expected utility is 10 times as high for choice B as for choice A. Universally, these people are listening to me because they think that I'm going to give them the special sauce about how to make innovation. And I say, you already know the answer. Now, here's the tricky bit. Does your boss want you to pick choice A?

Starting point is 00:07:47 Raise your hand if you think that your boss would let you pick choice B. Not a single hand in the room goes up. They don't need a lecture from me in how to be innovative. They need to change their context, or maybe their boss can become smart just before they quit en masse and change the context for them. The context matters so much. The expectations matter so much. The people matter. The resources matter. But that's not the biggest issue. There have been these times in the world, and sadly, they've been

Starting point is 00:08:27 mostly military in nature, where you get a huge number of really smart people together, you know, not five or ten, but a hundred or more. And you give them the resources, but much more importantly, the expectation that they will produce miracles. The founding of Bletchley Park and the creation of the modern computer science and cryptography, or the harnessing of the atom at the Manhattan Project. These are examples that we're all sort of well-schooled in. And I like the phrase moonshot thinking because it points us at one of the few examples, this is JFK's speech at Rice University, and then the Apollo 11 mission after that

Starting point is 00:09:13 that actually put someone on the moon, to remind us it doesn't have to be about war, that you can create that same kind of exigency without war. Why do we have to wait for a war to say to a group of people, you can do it. You can go 10 times bigger. You can change the world that much. A huge change, not an incremental change. I expect that from you, and I don't want you, metaphorically and literally, to choose choice A. Your job is choice B. To tell those

Starting point is 00:09:46 people and to give them that freedom. So the question is, are you in that context? Are you creating that context for your organization? Because that's the hard part, is people will flock to you once you've actually created the context. They're not that hard to find. It's making the context that's the hard part. So you need to set up part of your organization. I don't think it's realistic to think all of your organization can be like this. It's very hard to think, and I don't think it's realistic, that everyone's going to be choosing choice B. You need some people choosing choice A, but they can't all be choosing choice A. So you need to take a set of people and you put them on the side.

Starting point is 00:10:30 This is probably not 50% of your company's resources, but it's not 1% either. It's probably like 5% or 10%. You can afford it. You can't afford not to over some 10-year period, actually. You will be eaten alive because other people are getting better at doing this. Maybe it's not worth it. Who cares? Why go big like that? You know, Icarus died and Daedalus lived, right? So maybe that's, maybe incremental improvement, slow and steady wins the race. We have all these phrases for that. Let me give you, I have all these sort of perspectives in my mind and why this doesn't work, but here's one of my favorite ones. How many of you know the mutilated checkerboard problem? It's a famous psychology experiment from almost 40 years ago now.

Starting point is 00:11:09 So here's how it works. Somebody sits down each of the subjects with a checkerboard, which has 64 squares on it if you haven't looked recently, and gives them 32 dominoes. Each domino can perfectly cover a vertical or horizontal pair of squares and says to each of the subjects, can you cover this board perfectly with your domino can perfectly cover a vertical or horizontal pair of squares and says to each of the subjects, can you cover this board perfectly with your dominoes? And every single subject, independent of IQ, within 30 seconds says, yeah, duh. And then they get a little devious, the researcher does, and cuts off the upper left-hand square from the checkerboard and the

Starting point is 00:11:42 bottom right-hand square. And now says, and takes away one of their dominoes and says, can you still cover? You have 32 squares and 31 dominoes. Can you still cover your board with these dominoes? And now every single person, independent of IQ, stalls, unable to demonstrate a solution or prove that there isn't one. It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard. Turns out it is. Now, if the researcher writes the word salt, just the word salt on the white squares and pepper on the black squares, everyone solves it within 30 seconds. Everybody. And peanut butter and jelly will work as well. Maybe better if they're brown and red. And the insight is that you've had two salts or two peppers, depending on the orientation

Starting point is 00:12:31 of the board, removed, and each domino covers one salt and one pepper, whichever way you turn it. So there's now not the same number of salt and peppers left. The perspective shift is what it's all about. That's why going 10 times bigger is more important and works better than going 10% bigger. When you shoot for 10% better, you're in a smartness contest. You're putting all of your people in a smartness contest with everyone else in the world. They're not going to win. It doesn't matter how much money you give them. But if you push them, if you give them the expectation and the freedom to be weird,

Starting point is 00:13:10 that's moonshot thinking. Then they can do the perspective shifts. And not only, if you shoot for 10 times bigger instead of 10% bigger, it's almost never 100 times harder. And the payoff is 100 times. So you already know that you've got a better return on your investment. But sometimes it's literally easier, and the reason is because that perspective shift is actually cheap relative to being smarter than everyone around you. So one of the things that I get from... So you need to create this organization that looks more like

Starting point is 00:13:43 Willy Wonka's Chocolate factory than an incubator or an innovation center. Any place that's called an innovation center isn't, almost by definition. And you need to fill it with Peter Pans with PhDs, people who wear t-shirts that say safety third on them, right? You need these people to understand and to feel good about the fact that they're going to fail most of the time. It's not maybe. There's no way that they won't fail most of the time. And you have to impress upon them, and it is possible. They love it once you let them go. It's not just a moonshot and moonshot thinking when you choose to go big at the high level. You impress upon them that it's moonshots all the way down, that in every sub-problem, rather than being clinical and traditional about how they approach

Starting point is 00:14:47 the architecture for that problem, or hiring people for that problem, or how they fail fast and test things for that problem, they can be weirder. They can shoot to be 10 times better than anyone has ever done before in each of those sub-problems. And in each of those ways, it will again pay off because the perspective shifts will unlock more than smartness will. And, at least my experience is, if these people are surrounded by a dura of business speak, you will ruin it all. If they believe that they have to have a business plan for the weirdness that they are embarked

Starting point is 00:15:32 upon, you will kill it absolutely stillbirth guaranteed. But if you tell them that moonshot thinking is identifying an enormous problem with the world, picking a science fiction sounding product or service, which if it could be made, would make that problem go away, and that there's some set of technical plausibly reasons, at least a glimmer of hope, that you could actually make that science fiction sounding product or service that would make that problem go away. That problem making it go away is unlocking enormous value in the world. Have faith. If you solve that problem, the money will come find your organization. This is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And

Starting point is 00:16:32 Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

Starting point is 00:17:16 This episode is brought to you by LegalZoom, which more than 2 million Americans have used to help start their businesses. Past guests even, such as, well, WordPress lead developer, CEO of Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, now valued at more than a billion dollars, have used LegalZoom to help with their business needs, specifically in his case, to form his company. But LegalZoom isn't just for launching your business. Their services include everything from helping you to manage changing tax laws, reviewing contracts, creating NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, important stuff, handling lease agreements, and assisting with really any other legal challenge, hurdle, inconvenience that typically takes time and

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #309: Astro Teller, CEO of X - How to Think 10x Bigger

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #309: Astro Teller, CEO of X - How to Think 10x Bigger

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