Derek Thompson and the Moonshot Factory

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Inside the parent company of Google is a secretive laboratory known only as X.

Its scientists have looked into cold fusion, modeled hoverboards, and designed the world's most advanced self-driving car.

Few journalists have been inside.

Derek Thompson has.

What did he find?

And what did he take away?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, executive editor of The Atlantic.

Jeffrey Goldberg is out gallivanting this week, but here with me in New York.

What?

Where are you?

I am in New York, across the table.

Wow, this is the best podcast ever.

Already.

Already.

Already.

My esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner, CVS anchor, Atlantic contributing editor, and awesome person.

And live person in New York City with you.

You exist.

I couldn't be more excited.

You're a human.

With us today is other Thompson, Derek.

No relations.

No Relation, Atlantic staff writer, author of the hitbook Hitmakers,

Oracle and all things businessy and technological.

Also, another Thompson.

Yeah, another human being sitting in the room with us.

Another human being in the room.

This feels good.

Listeners, this is rare.

This is rare.

Guys, I feel magic.

I'm savoring it.

Speaking of magic, Arthur C.

Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

This week, we're going to talk about the art and craft of making technology so advanced it might be magic.

But first, I wanted to get a sense of your priors.

What technology of the past century or so do you consider magical?

Oh, wow.

I mean, I want to say something other than like the iPhone because that's the most obvious answer ever, but the iPhone's pretty great.

If we're we're talking the last century,

did you say last century?

Yeah, last century.

Yeah.

If we're talking the last century, I mean, I'm going to say the record player.

Yeah.

That was the last century, right?

Yeah, that was.

I'm pretty sure.

I mean, it's like sort of a descendant of the phonograph.

I'm going to count it.

Insofar as it brought music into the home for sort of recreational

vibratory purposes, and that for someone who loves music is a powerful innovation, invention, I should say, Derek.

There you go.

Yeah.

I can see that.

That would have been been a great slogan for the first record player, only for vibratory purposes.

And then also the toaster, because what is better than toast?

God, that's good.

Oh my gosh, few things.

You're welcome.

Okay, Derek.

Toaster is number two for me.

I love, I love a good toaster.

Even more than a good toaster is a good air conditioner.

I cannot imagine life in New York City during the summer without air conditioning.

This was an invention of the very early 20th century.

It was actually the first prototype invention, not innovation, the invention of the air conditioning was a humidity control system for printers to make sure that as they were printing pieces of paper, printing photographs,

the pieces of paper weren't

sort of bloating with the humidity in the rooms.

They needed a humidity controlling technology.

Very quickly occurred to people that if you can control humidity, you can control the weather.

And what's more important than humidity?

Heat.

So they eventually used it as an air conditioning technology.

It spread all over the world.

It made Houston livable and Atlanta and Singapore.

I think it probably changed the course of modern history.

Some people even think that it's responsible for the durability of the Republican Party because it allowed a lot of old conservatives to move south and turn those states red.

Air conditioning is the best.

That's pretty darn great.

Air conditioning and red states.

I see a whole like spin-off podcast.

This could be a beat, just like the intersection of those two things.

I'm going to make a bid for maps in your pocket always.

Being able to walk out my front door in any city that I'm in, basically, and like know that I can walk in a direction and I'll be able to find my way back to where I come from.

That is magic.

That is

magic.

Darn magic.

You used to have to be a wizard to do that.

Indeed.

Yes.

Now you just need a phone.

There's, yeah, there's a little distinguish that distinguishes old-time wizard from modern-day phone haver.

So let's be clear, Matt Thompson is a wizard.

You just happen to have Google Maps.

Derek, you recently got the opportunity to go inside a mysterious place that few outsiders have ever visited, a place known only as X.

This is, of course, the highly secretive factory housed within Alphabet, the company sort of kind of formerly known as Google.

Derek, what did you discover?

What on earth is X?

I think we should probably, yeah, define X first because it's a little bit confusing.

So everyone knows what Google is.

Google is that search advertising company.

Google sort of reorganized itself so that it was a company belonging to a larger organization called Alphabet.

Google is a company in Alphabet, and X is another company alongside Google in Alphabet.

So it's often called Google X.

They don't love that because they're not completely associated with Google.

They're just another thing under the Alphabet umbrella.

But all that money is coming from Google.

So Google X is not a terrible

mistaken term for the company.

Essentially, several years ago, the founders of Google said, we got all this money.

We should have a division.

that is all about doing awesome, weird, crazy stuff.

And they tapped this guy named Astro Teller.

And it's rather remarkable that his name is Astro Teller, and he's the head of a moonshot factory.

It's a little Dickensian, a little on the nose.

His actual name is Eric.

But he came up with this idea.

I prefer.

I think Astro is pretty good.

He's had the nickname Astro since high school.

It's true.

It is true.

Yeah, he did not rename himself Astro in order to make it apropos with a Moonshot Factory.

But he essentially said, look, we can't be an ordinary corporate research lab.

Google doesn't need any research help.

They've got thousands of people doing a fine job over at Google.

We don't need to create a philanthropy.

There's already google.org.

What do we need?

Let's make this division all about bold ideas, inventing the future, only products that help many, many people or improve existing products by an order of magnitude.

And they have an entire company, essentially, devoted to doing really, really hard stuff.

That is what I sort of knew going in.

But what I found that was so interesting, and one of the more interesting things about this piece is sort of the emotional tenor of the company itself, is that, you know, most of us go to work to succeed.

Most of us go to work to get like pats in the back and high fives.

Like, that's a good day's work.

My job is to write articles for the internet and for a magazine and have those articles be read.

It's a difficult job, but

that's an easily done thing and lots of people do that.

X is only doing things that have never been done before.

It's creating self-driving cars.

It's creating drones.

It's creating contact lenses that measure glucose levels to see if from a diabetic's tears to see if they need an insulin injection.

It's finding ways to store warmth from renewable energy in molten salt.

It's only doing the hardest, weirdest stuff.

And that means they're failing all the time, constantly failing.

And the way that they organize the sort of and manage the psychology of their workforce to be prepared to fail, excited to fail, over and over again was fascinating to me.

I just wanted everyone to know I fail often at work.

But this is, I mean, to be clear.

I mean, I also failed so much.

I mean, you fail except for a lot of people.

I have never personally witnessed Alex failing, but.

Well, watch, just listen to this podcast.

No, but Derek, one of the things that's there are many great aspects of the story.

One of the most exciting is the fact that very few journalists are allowed into X headquarters.

They keep things fairly under wraps, but you got in there somehow.

Yeah, I got in somehow.

Did you sneak in?

Very politely.

Actually, I opened up a chocolate bar, and there was a little golden ticket inside that chocolate bar that's

X on it.

I mean, it does feel like this secret, wondrous world of zany personalities that may change the world.

It totally does.

Were there umpalumpas?

There were no umpa lumpas that I can legally talk about.

I had to sign a couple agreements to make NDAs to make absolutely sure that the umpa loompa story stayed tucked in.

No, but you're absolutely right.

There are not many journalists who have ever been inside of X.

So it was an enormous honor to see what they were working on, to see the building itself, to see they have this enormous display where they show people coming into the main atrium as a self-driving car would see them, which is this sort of weird rainbow pointless picture.

I think I said in the piece, it's like George Surat tried to paint an Atari game.

It's really funky.

There's a lot of cool stuff about just being there.

But I was really lucky because I got to talk to so many people.

Astro Teller at the top.

I talked to engineers working on their drones.

I talked to people working on Project Loon, which has balloons hiding this guy, delivering internet.

You say that like just kind of offhandedly, but

we want to know more about Project Loon, which has come into the fore in the wake of the hurricane hitting Puerto Rico and a lack of basic infrastructure, including information infrastructure.

But we'll get to that in a second.

At any rate, you got into the,

I don't want to call it the Death Star because it's not nefarious, but it's a really special.

Yeah, no, I was.

I was a bit of a Charlie Bucket, yeah.

And that was really, that was really, really fun.

Knowing that I was having conversations with engineers that no journalist has ever had before, you know, in a fun way, you know, made me feel like, you know, they're,

I'm not, you know, my interviews with them aren't like the vanguard of a new technology, but the same way that they're sort of pressing forward, you know, leading the world in self-driving car technology and renewable energy technology, that I felt that I too was sort of getting, you know, first-of-its-kind interviews with people who had not talked to the press before, and that I was getting that story

in its virgin form.

I feel that I must ask, watching you, hearing the excitement that you're bringing to this conversation, did they make you drink Kool-Aid?

So, it's really interesting because I am so,

I can, I am so excited about what they're doing.

I think it is such a lovely antidote to the dominant Silicon Valley narrative right now, which is that the valley is evil and that it's working on stuff that is either monopolistically evil or stuff that is stupid.

That it's either Facebook fake news, Russian propaganda, or bodega and juicero and using mayonnaise to reinvent the future, right?

Like, and it was nice to, I know lots of people in Silicon Valley associated with or who actually live there who have said, you don't know that, you don't realize that the people who are the quietest about their work are doing the biggest breakthrough stuff.

And so going to a place that's very quiet about what it's working on and meeting lots of people who are truly, you know, working on incredibly brave and awesome stuff is inspiring.

That said, X only exists because Google's profits are quasi-monopolistic or straight up monopolistic.

The same way that Bell Labs in the middle of the 20th century only existed because ATT was a government-sanctioned monopoly.

X can only truly exist and spend millions and millions of dollars a year because Google's making money hand over fist and there's all sorts of sort of creepy aspects of that.

So, yeah, did I drink a certain amount of Kool-Aid?

Yes, I died.

But I was on the rocks.

It was sort of watered down.

Right, yeah, watered down down with the arsenic of realizing that all of

that its very capacity to exist comes from Google's quasi-monopoly.

So for the uninitiated, people who haven't read the story, it's not just a sort of wacky lab.

There are three sort of criteria that each project has to meet.

Will you tell us about those?

Sure.

Yeah, three intersecting event diagrams.

It has to be, every X project has to be, one, it is a world-shaking idea.

Two, it is the solution to that world-shaking problem comes from technology.

And three, that technology has to be feasible.

And that essentially means that they are working on technological solutions that's sort of the vanguard of

that technology.

So they're not working on stuff that's impossible.

If someone said, you know, let's do teleportation.

Teleportation could be huge for infrastructure.

It could be

live in the farm and...

technically work in downtown New York City.

You could record a podcast with your friends like no problem DC or New York.

Can we have that teleportation now?

The problem with teleportation is that we're not even a little bit close to teleportation.

They looked into

what's the other thing they looked into: space elevators.

How cool would space elevators be?

You've got cargo,

you want to send it around the world.

You can zoom it up to the exosphere, and then the Earth turns and you zoom it over to China really, really quickly.

I thought about that.

Space elevators could be amazing, but the material needed to build the cord that gets that stuff into space isn't even close to being ready to be built, like taller than essentially a building or even a floor.

So, again, we're not even close to that technology being ready, and so X doesn't focus on that.

There has to be some element of feasibility.

So, balloons in the sky is not a big, silly, far-out project.

Balloons in the sky that beam internet to places without much infrastructure, that's not a silly project.

Tell us why.

How is that loony idea possibly sane?

So yes, the loony idea is sane.

So let's think about Project Loon, which is X's relatively famous internet balloon company.

Let's think about it through these intersecting event diagrams.

4 billion people around the world don't have access to high-speed internet.

That's a big problem.

Balloons, they exist.

So that's feasibility.

You have number three, right?

The technology, so

parts number two and three, the technological solution is, is it really possible to fly a balloon 70,000 feet over the earth, orient it toward a certain part of Puerto Rico or Lima, Peru,

while maintaining a connection to the ground

and sort of navigating the skies as if it's a highway?

And the answer essentially is yes.

They figured out these problems.

To be clear, the system is to give internet data coverage to areas of the world that don't have it, using the balloons as kind of the hubs.

The balloons live in the stratosphere.

Yes.

Imagine you take the technology that exists at the top of a cellular tower and you float it at the bottom of a balloon.

And that balloon is 70,000 feet over the earth, which means that next time you're at cruising altitude, remember these balloons will be as far above you as the earth is far below.

They're way, way up there.

And the great thing, I had so many conversations about balloon science with people at X.

The fascinating thing about balloon science to me is that

they made a joke where they said, balloon science isn't rocket science.

It's harder because there are rocket scientists who study rocket science and have for decades.

No one has studied the answer to this question, how do you float balloons up here, except for a few people maybe at NASA and the government?

But there are no companies that do this already.

And there's all sorts of interesting challenges, such as, for example, these balloons are essentially self-driving vehicles.

X doesn't want to call them that because there's different different regulations for self-driving vehicles, but they're essentially self-driving balloons in the stratosphere.

All right, well, how does a car self-drive itself?

There is a street grid, and there is a technology, and there is a motor.

Well, you can't have a motor at 70,000 feet up.

You can't have a person up there.

So, how do these balloons get around?

And by the way, there is no Matt, your favorite technology, Google Maps.

No Google Maps, the stratosphere.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Unfortunately.

That said, one day.

One day.

The stratosphere is so named because there's a bunch of strata, levels of temperature and wind current and pressure, and the balloons essentially have to float up and down until they find the right current, which happens to be pushing that balloon toward Lima as opposed to away from Lima.

It finds a way to catch that current and it floats.

And because it has no way of staying over Lima, if

the wind is still pushing it, another balloon has to be floating behind it.

So it's a hard problem.

So this is a really, really hard problem that requires a network of essentially self-driving balloons way, way, way up there.

And just to keep in mind, these aren't balloons like the ones I bring to birthday parties routinely.

These are balloons the size of

tennis courts.

Yeah, the size of tennis courts, the size of a mansion when it's all the way blown up, heavy-duty plastic.

In fact, because again, no one had made balloons like this, the person in charge of stitching them is actually a fashion designer that they picked up from New York City whose experience was stitching purses and dresses.

Wow.

So essentially, she is stitching plastic to make mansion-sized internet balloons.

This sounds so entirely fucking hare-brained, but there was a rigorous process to get here, to come up with this idea, and it's working.

Can you tell us how

the ideation phase of balloons as data centers sort of led to this endpoint?

Yeah.

So this whole concept of balloons delivering internet actually emerged from a totally different idea.

A guy at X named Rich Duval had this Zani concept of connecting people to the internet in rural areas or poorer areas with

cheap, solar-powered computers, essentially.

This was his solution to the problem of lack of connectivity.

And at X, when you have a new idea, you have a proposal, you first deliver it to what I call a justice league of nerds.

A bunch of nerds.

Isn't that the Atlantic?

Yes, you go to the Atlantic and you say this is a cover story.

You deliver it to a bunch of material scientists and philosophers and data scientists who are at X, and you say, what do you think about this idea?

And they try to evaluate it as quickly as possible, try to kill it.

And they killed this idea very quickly.

They said, Rich, if your problem is the lack of connectivity in the world, then you can't solve it with a computer because a computer needs...

bandwidth to connect to the internet.

And if there's no internet there, then that's the problem.

Let's bring internet to these places.

It doesn't take a balloon scientist to figure that out.

Doesn't take a balloon scientist to figure that out.

And so they looked at, you know, should we build satellites?

Nope, too expensive.

Should we build towers?

I don't know.

The towers and cables are really expensive to build and difficult in mountains and jungles, which you have a lot of in places like Peru.

Okay, let's find a solution that's somewhere in between, in terms of altitude, somewhere in between a tower and a satellite, a balloon, a stratospheric balloon.

And so that's how they sort of happened on this idea.

Well, wait, balloons are cheap enough.

We can hang a computer at the bottom of it.

If it can connect to the Earth in terms of its bandwidth, in terms of its internet, this is a real solution.

A network of global self-driving internet balloons.

All right.

In a minute, I want to talk about what Derek learned from X, how that applies to Silicon Valley today, and what has changed about invention from yesteryear.

Stick with us.

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So Derek, you went to the fancy new X center of innovation in modern Silicon Valley, but one of the things that you dwell on in your piece is how invention at X and in Silicon Valley today is different from the way that it was in decades past, in the heyday of companies like Xerox PARC and Bell Labs.

What has changed?

So the big idea of this article, and every Atlantic article needs its big idea, right?

The big idea isn't just that X is cool.

It's cool, but fine.

The big idea is that that which we call breakthrough technology is two parts.

There is invention and there's commercialized innovation.

Invention is just the prototype.

It is Bell Labs coming up with the transistor, the sort of unit of electronics in the 1940s.

Commercialized innovation is Texas Instruments building the first transistor radio.

The golden age of invention, I think, was in the middle of the 20th century for computer technology.

This is a period where Bell Labs, the research division of ATT, gave birth to the solar cell, the laser, the transistor, so many communications patents that are just the backbone of modern technology.

And then Xerox PARC, which was the research division at Xerox, which came up with essentially everything we associate with the modern computer, the mouse, the cursor, applications opening in Windows.

All of that came from research that was done at Xerox PARC.

And in many ways, I think that these organizations essentially planted the seeds of the tree of IT technology that we're still harvesting from.

And if breakthrough technology is both invention and commercialized innovation, it is perhaps the case that right now the U.S.

is a little bit too obsessed with its billionaire unicorns, its commercialized innovation, making money fast, putting stuff in the hands of consumers.

And we've forgotten this essential first step, which is scientific invention.

I mean, this is a big difference from the way that we talk about technological innovation right now, isn't it?

The idea is that the private sector is really good at invention and innovation, the federal government is bureaucratic.

Get the federal government out of my invention back then.

Yeah, and so, no, I mean, you can tell, I think, a really interesting story that the government invented the iPhone.

How?

Well, in 1957, Sputnik goes up into the sky and Eisenhower freaks out.

So he starts this thing in the government called ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency.

ARPA develops the first prototype of the Internet.

It develops a technology behind GPS.

The government essentially says, no, ARPA should just focus on missile stuff.

So they sort of recall it DARPA, right?

It should just focus on defense.

So a lot of the scientists from ARPA who still want to focus on computers and internet stuff go out to Xerox PARC, invent the guts of the modern computer, the mouse, the cursor, applications opening and windows.

Their technology is most famously stolen by a young twenty-something upstart named Steve Jobs, who uses their tech to build the first modern desktop computer and then continues to iterate on it until he has the sort of apotheosis of that technology, which is now our iPhone.

So right there, in 70 seconds, you can very quickly grasp that that which we call the iPhone is in many ways the great, great, great grandchild of Sputnik and the U.S.

government's reaction to it.

But don't tell anybody that because we're on a course to continue maligning the government and its role in terms of invention.

You make some important points in the piece, Derek, among them the funding for government-sponsored invention and innovation is I won't say drying up, but definitely dwindling, right?

As total federal research and development spending has declined from nearly 12% of the budget in the 60s to just 4% today,

you make the point that some analysts say that corporate America has picked up the slack.

And yet it's not quite the same when corporate America is the sort of origin point for invention, is it?

No, it's not.

As I say in the piece, corporate R and D, research and development, is much more D than R.

It's much more taking technologies that already exist and turning them into new products than it is doing basic research.

And so you even have the Trump administration in its first budget of 2017 calling for even more cuts to NIH, calling for even more cuts to scientific funding in the U.S., even on top of the the 70% decline that you mentioned.

And so I think we're in a dangerous period right now.

I've talked to people, I've spoken with people in the Trump administration who have made this point explicitly.

They say the private sector is just better at doing this than the government is.

Why do they think that, though?

Is it just because people haven't connected the dots and they don't understand that, as you say, the seeds of the harvest we've been reaping for the last 30 years were planted by the government?

Is that the reason?

Yeah, I think in many ways

it's an ahistorical view of the development of IT.

I think the other part is that there are other ideologies that are just weighing on these people stronger than fact.

And that ideology is an Ann Randian sense that the private sector is just better.

Full stop.

The period just goes there.

Better at, it doesn't matter, at everything.

And so we should, of course, shift everything toward the private sector and therefore cut taxes.

And so much of conservative policy, I think, stems from sort of that seed.

But the the federal government has changed a lot too.

And mightn't part of that shift in thinking or the ahistoricism that you're talking about be in part owing to the changes in the federal government as well?

Absolutely.

For example, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, which became DARPA, it arose out of the needs and incentives of defense, of defending Sputnik, of the U.S.

maintaining its

technological line against Russia as part of of the Cold War.

And Cold War, actually, that spending, many things came out of that.

GPS, which powers now Google Maps, for example, my favorite tech.

Hasn't the federal government changed to?

Could the federal government of today ever achieve those big leaps that supported innovations in days past?

It's such a good question.

And the answer is, I don't know.

You're absolutely right in the fundamental point that a enormous source of our RD funding came from abject existential fear of the Soviets taking over everything.

That's why we had a much larger defense budget.

And in that defense budget, we had larger R ⁇ D.

That said, I think that, and you're not saying this, I'm responding to

the conservative argument here, I think.

That said,

the fact that we don't have an existential enemy is no excuse for the drying up of basic science research that we have today.

I mean, you look at some commercial breakthroughs that don't even seem like they have anything to do with government.

So for example, between 2012 and 2016, the U.S.

was the world's leading oil producer.

That seems like a private sector achievement.

But in many ways, it was thanks to hydraulic fracturing experiments that

were funded by the federal government after the 1970s oil crisis.

So there are so many examples of private sector successes.

When we see the success, we associate it directly with the company that did it, and we don't roll back the tape and see, wait, how did that technology develop?

To Matt's point, though, our ability to band together and acknowledge a common existential threat has been wildly compromised.

I don't know if it exists in this country anymore.

The idea that during an oil crisis in the 1970s, we said, okay, we need to come together and look at other sources of energy.

Well, I mean, some people will argue climate change is an existential threat.

It's ongoing, and yet we're having a debate over whether it's real.

The fossil fuel industry is not,

what's the best euphemistic way to say this?

The fossil fuel industry is reluctant, shall we say, to cede any power or see the federal government take a position on research that could and potentially would undermine its grip on the energy sector.

So, I mean, when you talk about the things that sort of powered the federal government, the existential threats that the American people kind of came together or supported their government making a

concerted effort to battle, I don't know that we're in that place politically anymore where we can say, yes, we as a nation, as a society, have this problem and we need to solve it.

Aaron Powell,

I couldn't agree more.

I think that there are so many variables that feed in

to a loss of love for invention.

One of them is the decline of the Soviet Union.

Another is the fracturing of America's collective sense of reality and collective sense of the biggest threats that face us.

Another is the fact that I think there is very sadly in the U.S.

a certain strain that finds science to be elitist because it comes from universities, and universities are liberal backwaters, yada, yada, yada.

That's me emulating the argument, not holding it.

There are so many variables that go into this, and that's why I wanted to use a piece about X.

And no one at X was talking to me about, you know, we need more basic science funding, but they were talking about how they were trying to be a better or trying to be the 21st century's version perhaps of Bell Labs or of Xerox PARC while solving for the fact that Xerox Park and Bell Labs never successfully commercialized their inventions.

And so they

are in this.

They are in this discussion.

I wanted to make sure that that was clear.

So Xerox Park and Bell Labs are both interesting case studies of incubators that could exist precisely because their parent companies were essentially monopolies, right?

Is that an argument then for allowing

monopolies to exist?

So, I thought about this a lot, and I thought about, you know, I knew that in all of my interviews talking about this piece, I would have to answer some version of that question.

And so, here's sort of where I've settled on it.

I think it is fair to say: one,

that perhaps the only good thing about monopolies is that they provide the sort of durability of funding that basic science and adventurous radical invention needs.

That might be the only

good thing about them.

That said,

that is not an argument for the U.S.

government to just let monopolies run rampant.

AT ⁇ T, the parent of Bell Labs, was a government-sanctioned monopoly.

So what did that mean for Bell Labs?

It meant that when Bell Labs came up with a new invention like the transistor, they couldn't commercialize it.

They had to share it.

So who sold the transistor radio?

Not AT ⁇ T, Texas Instruments, your favorite calculator company.

They sold the first transistor radio.

And other companies benefited tremendously from Bell Labs discoveries.

I mean, the externality of Bell Labs literally might be in the trillions of dollars.

If you think about the benefits of cellular technology, solar technology, the worldwide benefits of these breakthroughs, I mean, it's completely immense.

But this was a government-managed monopoly.

What does that mean for Google and Alphabet?

I'm not ready to propose a policy, I think.

But to the extent that we are

interested in the lessons of Bell Labs, I think it is worth looking at the way the government managed AT ⁇ T in the 1950s, 1960s to sort of inspire a way we can think about managing a new varietal of monopoly in terms of Facebook and Google.

One of the other things I came away from your story believing is the idea that failure is a critical part of invention and innovation.

And you write about this aspect of X, which I think everybody should pay attention to.

Last November, X employees gathered in the main hall to hear testimonials, not only about failed experiments, but also about failed relationships, family deaths, and personal tragedies.

They placed old prototypes and family mementos on a small altar.

It was, several employees told me, a resoundingly successful and deeply emotional event.

You know, when you talk about this place of innovation and invention, so much of it seems untethered to everybody else's corporate reality, business reality, workplace reality.

But that idea that failure should be accepted and in some ways dealt with head on and embraced is almost a lesson you could see other companies picking up.

insofar as they want to continue to innovate and invent and foster a culture of innovation and invention.

Yeah, Astro Teller likes to recount this allegory of a firm that has to get a monkey to stand on top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite passages from Shakespeare, which sounds ridiculous.

But the point is, if this is your job, if this is the company's job, get the monkey, put him on a pedestal, get him to recite Othello.

What do you start with?

Most companies, most groups, would start with the pedestal.

You would start with the easy thing that demonstrates the low-hanging fruit, that shows progress to your boss.

And he says something else.

You've utterly wasted your company's money if you build the pedestal first, because all of the hard part is getting the monkey to recite Shakespeare.

If you can get the monkey to recite Shakespeare, we can always build the pedestal afterwards.

But if you can't, thank goodness we didn't spend a moment or a penny building what turned out to be a useless pedestal.

So this, I think, is fascinating.

But the thing is, if you're going to start every project by teaching the monkey Othello,

you're going to fail a lot.

And your failures are going to be massively front-loaded.

And the people working on these projects are going to come into work day after day knowing that that proverbial monkey is not going to make any progress.

And so there's all sorts of interesting ways they essentially have to manage their workforce to embrace this.

They have to tell people, take big risks.

That is your job.

If you don't take big risks, then we'll fire you.

Won't fire you for failing.

We'll fire you for being too smallball.

When they do succeed, for example, I talked to one guy who designed sort of the perfect wincing instrument for one of their aerodynamic drones.

When he got up in front of the company to tell this wonderful story, he invented this wonderful new piece of drone tech.

He actually spent an enormous amount of time talking about all of the prototypes that failed.

Again, even when they succeed, they want to show the company that simplicity is complicated, that success is a button at the end of a long road of failure.

They even have failure bonuses and the Dia de los Muertos event that you described.

As much architecting and thought goes into the creation of all of these products, in a way, the most thoughtful creation at X is the sort of psychological mind state of their workers to make sure that they are ready to come into work and fail and come into work again and fail and be excited about

learning from all their little mistakes.

One of the dimensions that I was really interested in after reading your piece was just time and just thinking in terms of long horizons of time, thinking in terms of the inventions today or the innovations that might be a step towards something decades hence, but you might not even be around to realize that.

How did the folks that you talked to think about

working on technologies today that may not actually reach viability until long after they can stop working on the project.

They might be coming up with an air dehumidifying system for

paper that ends up making Texas livable.

Right.

Well, this is the thing.

So as I say in the piece that technology is feral, by which I mean if one organization comes up with a certain cool new tech, they can't hold on to it.

It's going to run away.

No matter how hard you try to keep it, someone else is going to improve on it.

That's the way it should be in a free market.

So Derek, you sound really excited about this thing.

I have one question for you.

Did they make you drink Kool-Aid?

Right.

So I think there are, you know, in the tech community, they sometimes talk about FUDs, fears, uncertainties, and doubts.

And I definitely have some FUDs about X, two in particular.

The first is that they haven't shipped anything that's been super successful yet.

Google Glass is maybe their most famous product to have hit the market, and we all know how well that went.

Second,

you know, X only exists because of the immense profitability of Google, which is perhaps meeting the modern definition of a monopoly.

And when any institution only exists because a monopoly is funding it, it's going to have lessons that might not be perfectly applicable to every technological competitor out there.

So that's, so I think that in many ways, X is weird, X is strange, and X might ultimately prove to be very unsuccessful in making things.

That said, I think there's something sort of inherently inspiring about the way they talk about their ambition and their willingness to embrace the many, many failures they know are going to happen along the way.

All right.

And with that, it's time for our closing segment, Keepers.

Derek, we'll start with you.

What have you heard, read, watched, experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

So when the movie It came out, I realized that I had never read Stephen King before.

And I should probably read some Stephen King.

I mean,

don't count me in that club.

Oh, man.

I'm too scared.

I'm scared of scary music.

It would be hopeless for me to actually try and read a Stephen King novel.

As a gothic literature major, I am.

Do you have a favorite Stephen King?

I do, actually.

Is it not it?

It's Gerald's game.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Oh, deep cuts.

I don't recommend The Last third.

It's actually being made into a movie.

Oh.

It has one of the

scariest scenes ever committed to text that I can think of.

Yeah.

Disqualifying for my book.

So

I wanted to read it.

I didn't realize it would be 1,200 pages.

Jesus,

gothic writers go on and on.

Stephen King.

It goes in three minutes.

So I adore it.

I just finished it.

It's not even that scary.

It's a brilliant book about childhood and growing old and memory.

It's honestly a piece of literature.

And I was in another New York studio, in another New York recording studio.

Cheater.

And I'm sorry, I was cheating.

And I'm walking out the glass door.

And to my left, I see someone who looks a hell of a lot like Stephen King.

And I walk through, I say, I can't possibly, I can't possibly talk to him.

I'll literally melt.

And I realize, no, YOLO.

I'm absolutely talking to Stephen King.

So I knock on the glass door to be let back into the studio studio foyer, and I walk up to Mr.

King and I say, Mr.

King, I just wanted you to know that I'm in the middle of it.

And it's so amazing that I've literally canceled plans with three friends this week just to keep reading it.

And Stephen King, without looking at me, goes,

Son, when you hear it in your closet tonight, your social life will be the least of your concerns.

No way.

That's so I'm terrified just hearing that anecdote.

OMG.

And I

laughed

the most frightful laugh of my life and just sort of backed away and exited through the glass doors and thought to myself, that might be the single most beautiful

literary moment I'll ever have in my life.

Yes, that's awesome.

Think definitively.

Bravo.

And

I must keep it forever.

I got to recommend read the part of, read the shining, read the beginning of the shining before they get to the Overlook Hotel.

It's a short memoir about alcoholism.

It's just, it's kind of amazing.

Alex, what's your name?

My keeper is: I want to keep Derek's story.

No, it's so good, but mine actually goes hand in hand.

The reason I can't read or watch scary movies or read scary novels is because it prevents me from sleeping.

And sleeping right now is really a high priority in my generally sleepless night

life.

Here's what I'll tell you, America, and anybody else listening to this overseas: naps

are underrated.

The truth.

In a moment when they're sort of overrated, I was not a convert.

I am now, and I feel like I just discovered a drug that is legal and free.

And what is better than legal-free drugs?

Take a nap after you listen to this podcast.

You'll thank me tomorrow.

Few things are better than legal-free drugs.

You heard it here first.

Naps.

Mykeeper, I've been holding on to this one for a while, but I have watched and re-watched it enough times that it's the thing that I hope I never lose.

It is a YouTube series, five-episode YouTube series called The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo.

It is exactly pretty much what it sounds like.

It's a very sort of gender-fluid story about friendship, about a set of buddies who have a complex mix of relationships with one another.

and it has the most delightful and specific sense of humor it is a thompsonian sense of humor

perhaps even a wagnerian sense of humor uh it is filled with not only jokes it's filled with these specific character moments upon re-watching it i am astonished and delighted by how much character development they built into the first scenes in this YouTube series that feels sort of off the cuff and improvised, but is actually very carefully put together.

It has characters that are just extraordinary, moments that are both hilarious and memorable, and meaningful even.

I can't recommend it highly enough.

I'm going to play you a clip.

It's sort of hard to pluck out a moment, but I trust that you can figure out what's happening from context cues.

Here it is.

I feel like he's going to wake up in the next half hour and if you come over and you give like really heavy gay best friend vibes, then he'll get the hint that, you know we've moved past the sexual part of the experience.

Right, like maybe I can hit on him a little bit or something.

Yeah, yeah, turn him off, you know, say, like, hey, girl, and like, I don't get baseball, and like, my car's broken, and I don't know how to change the tire, and like, I have a slightly uncomfortable relationship with my father, but I know that he loves and supports me, and also he's where I got my sense of humor.

Exactly, yeah, turn him off, that's great.

Okay, I'll see you in a little bit.

Maybe we can get the gay and wondrous life of Caleb Gallo, done by Brian Jordan Alvarez.

Give it a watch, and then take a nap, and then take a nap, and then watch it,

And then watch or read.

Or read it.

Yeah.

Alex.

Derek.

It's been beautiful, you guys.

It really has.

We got to do this live more often.

In person, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is.

There's nothing like it.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau.

We taped in person this week at Argo Studios in Manhattan, thanks to Paul Ruist for engineering support.

Thanks as always to the one and only John Batiste, creator of our theme, whose rendition of the battle hymn will once again play in full after these credits conclude.

Cheers to our guest Derek Thompson and to my esteemed co-host Alex Wagner.

We'll be back with our editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on the next episode of Radio Atlantic.

If you've got thoughts or feedback on our episode we want to hear from you, give us a call at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information once again that's 202-266-7600

as always please look for us at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio and if you like what you're hearing please don't forget to rate and review us in apple podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app you'll find detailed show notes linked from the episode description most importantly thank you for listening.

May all your failures be productive pit stops on the pathway to success.

We'll see you next week.

to the glory of the coming of the law.

Years travelling, defended with red and rattlesnake.

Candles and fading faithful lighting of the terrible whistle

His troop is marching on

glory glory

hallelujah

Glory, glory, high,

hallelujah

Hallelujah

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