Astro Teller
Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderscientistauthor@astroteller ↗LinkedIn ↗astroteller.net ↗Wikipedia ↗
At Alphabet’s X, Teller oversees the research, development, and spinout of radical technologies and businesses, including Waymo, Wing, and Verily. Prior to leading X, he co-founded wearable maker BodyMedia and machine-learning hedge fund Cerebellum Capital, and has published novels and nonfiction books including Exegesis and Sacred Cows.
2shows
2appearances
47statements
8resolved
5supported
1contradicted
63%fully supported
Everything Astro Teller said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Teller: Remote work hurts creativity, creates silos, and reduces hard work
“And so far I've seen no evidence that we can be at our creative best when we're remote from each other. I think people work somewhat less hard, but they also work in much more siloed ways.”
Teller: Climate change wouldn't be happening if society embraced nuclear power
“The disaster which is climate change right now would not be happening if we as a society had not let our fears about the first thing translate into an inability to use the upside of nuclear power to save us from what is now arguably the biggest problem in the …”
Teller: AI catastrophe ranks far behind climate change and nuclear weapons
“I think that the world is overrun with serious problems. I would put at the top of that list, climate change. Nowhere close to second place. I would put nuclear weapons, just since we use that as an example, and I would put AI doing something particularly horr…”
Teller: Extreme AI outcomes will not happen in our lifetime
“Do I believe that anything particularly extreme in our lifetime is going to happen? I don't. I'm sorry, but I've been working on robots trying to open doorknobs for like the last 30 years, and it's been a slog.”
Teller: X bans employees from discussing who originated an idea
“We've literally don't track whose idea it was.
We don't let people talk about who founded the idea.”
Astro Teller: Innovation alpha comes from efficient discovery, not generating ideas
“Ideas are trivially easy.
We have a thousand ideas a year that many of them just don't even get code names.
Ideas are not the hard part.
Our alpha comes from how efficiently we can discover which ideas are valuable.”
Teller: Google Glass was too early, but the core thesis was right
“Google glass. Turns out we were too, too early there, but increasingly it's looking like we were very right. The whole world has come back around to that. But when we made it, we were trying to figure out, we have a sense that people want to get away from thei…”
Teller: De-risk the hardest element before building supporting infrastructure
“In this extreme situation, we can see that if you built the pedestal, you're half done, but you're really zero percent done at burning down the risk.
[1649] Pablo Srugo: That's right.
[1650] Astro Teller: The point of a testable hypothesis, especially at X, …”
Astro Teller: Standard product-market fit rarely changes complex global systems
“Finding some little thing that people will buy, which in some sense is a product market fit actually doesn't have a very good chance of changing the system. If our real goal is to fix the system, then we have to figure out a much more complex set of things.”
Teller: Narrow product-market fit risks building 'a ladder to the moon'
“And I worry that there's a bunch of product market fit that is so siloed. It's just building a ladder to the moon. You might build a pretty tall ladder, but you're not going to get to the moon.”
Teller: Selling to incumbents can build a billion-dollar company without changing the industry
“You can make a billion dollars a year selling to incumbents, but you're probably not going to change some huge industry if the incumbents who are your main customers don't want the industry to change.”
Teller: Missing digital grid maps cause 10-year delays for connecting solar power
“If you go to a system operator and say, show me the digital map of where every inverter, every transformer, every wire is in your grid, they will just say, we don't have that. And that's why it takes them 10 years. When you wonder why there are 10 year waits i…”
Teller: No one is better than random at predicting the future
“I, one of the core axioms at X is I do not believe that anyone, certainly including myself, is any better than random at predicting the future.”
Teller: Creating moonshots is easy by dumping money on smart people
“Taking moonshots is really easy. Super easy. If you don't care about efficiency, you find really high energy people who think they're right and are pretty smart. You dump a bunch of money on them and you'll get some moonshots or anyway, some like fairly big co…”
Teller: X operates as the card counters of innovation
“At X, we're trying to be the card counters of innovation.”
Teller: X gives founder shares to teams whose projects graduate
“Finally, you try one and it actually gets all the way through X. You graduate. We give that team founders shares like a lot of the company goes to them and you took no risk the whole time while you were doing it.”
Teller: X evaluates 200 early-stage ideas annually with zero full-time staff
“So at the very early part of the process, we look at one to 200 ideas per year.
In enough detail that they get a code name in the very early part of the process.
No person is full time on any one of those projects.
At the very least, we would ask you to have a…”
Teller: Tech ecosystem poorly bridges basic science to venture funding
“We're paradigm shifting system engineers. We're trying to bridge that gap between basic science and something that's like venture investable, but that's like often a five or six year gap that gets filled very badly.”
Teller: Moonshots require a global problem, sci-fi solution, and testable tech
“A moonshot for us is huge problem with the world. Science fiction sounding solution to that problem. And some technology or set of technologies that give us A sense that this is a testable hypothesis for making that science fiction sounding solution.”
Teller: Waymo shifted framing from carmaker to mobility to safest driver
“So if the first five years were Waymo thought we're going to be making and selling a car the next five years, they thought. Actually, our job is transforming mobility, just moving people from point A to point B. That's our job. But even that framing while bett…”
Teller: X shut down its nuclear fusion project after 1,000 plasma shots
“We closed this down about a year and a half ago. We had a fusion project. We ran it. We did build something the size of a house. We did almost a thousand plasma shots. We convinced ourself it was not going to change the world. And we closed the project down”
Teller: Artificial intelligence is just 'algebra on steroids' and math
“Artificial intelligence number one is algebra on steroids. Just so we're clear. It is a very big field of study. And when you get out of microscope and you like look down inside the computer, you cannot find the AI in there anywhere. It's just math.”
Teller: Modern commercial airplanes fly themselves almost entirely using AI
“The plane that flew you here flew itself almost the entire way using artificial intelligence, and we all rely on artificial intelligence every day, whether we realize it or not.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Astro's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 BIG TECHNOLOGYLEDGER | Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X | 1 | 26 | 57% 4/7 | full record on Big Technology → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Captain of Moonshots and CEO, X | 1 | 21 | 100% 1/1 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |