Why you need to fail at work with Astro Teller

This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. This episode is sponsored by Perplexity AI. How much of your workday actually goes towards making decisions? Now, how much goes towards just finding the information you need to make them? If you run an e-commerce business, your mornings probably start by bouncing between platforms, digging for data, and trying to figure out how it all fits together. That's why I'm excited to tell you about Perplexity Computer. It connects you to the tools you already use, giving you a complete picture of your business. Before you even wake up, it can send your team daily performance reports, pulling revenue, ad spend, margin, inventory, and more. And it doesn't just tell you what's happening. It gets to work, rebuilding your CRM, creating your next ad campaign, or drafting your creator outreach. Perplexity Computer runs all the leading AI models and chooses the right one for each step of the project. For a limited time only, our listeners can try Perplexity Computer for free. Head to pplx.ai/worklife. That's pplx.ai/worklife to try Computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions, while Perplexity Computer is completing full projects. This episode is brought to you by Parloa. Look, most businesses want their customers to feel heard, not stuck waiting around for someone who can help. Nothing makes you feel less important than sitting on hold for hours explaining the same problem to the fifth person who picks up. But here's the thing: the bigger you get, the harder it becomes to show up the way you want to in each customer interaction. Parloa solves that problem. Their voice-first AI agents handle customer conversations in a way that feels natural, personal, and helpful. They work 24/7 across voice, chat, and email in any language with zero wait time. Plus, your team gets access to features like Lens, which flags issues in real time, and Navigator, which figures out why those issues are happening and what to do next. It's secure, scalable, and built to serve the customer. When AI works well, it shouldn't feel like AI. Unhold your customers with Parloa. Learn more at parloa.com. That's P-A-R-L-O-A dot com. We learn nothing when we're right. That's just how human brains work. If you already believe something and then you act on that in the world and you get a yes from the world, whatever that thing is, that model of the world you have, at best you're just deepening your grooves on that belief. But if you have some belief about how the world works and then you get a no from the world, that feels like a failure. There could be some guilt or shame associated with that. But in that moment, if you will let yourself, you can update your model of the world. That is learning at its essence. I'm going to be honest and tell you that I have never thought of myself as very creative. That was my brother growing up, not me. He is and was the actor, director, singer, creative person. And I was always some version of the stage manager. But recently, for a bunch of reasons, I've started to question whether these things are really as innate as we think. I get a terrible idea for car cycling. I'll just write it down. Me too. Dump them in a big acid bath. Big acid bath. What else you got? Anybody? Anybody? Cars should be made out of wood. Yes. Or potentially potato chips. But then I'd eat it when you get there. Or eat it on the way. This is a clip from something called a Bad Ideas Brainstorm that I was part of recently with the team at X, the moonshot factory. If you haven't heard of X, I'm not talking about the company formerly known as Twitter. I'm talking about the arm of Alphabet charged with creating radical technologies to help solve some of the world's hardest problems. Its most famous graduate is probably Waymo, the self-driving car company. But X has also incubated projects involving delivery drones, internet-beaming balloons and lasers, robots that sort through trash, giant kites that generate electricity, and ways to store renewable energy in tanks of molten salt. The things they work on sound as if they belong in a science fiction novel. But the most interesting thing they've done, in my opinion, is to create a home where ideas like this routinely turn into real substantial businesses. So many companies say they want to embrace innovation and support rapid iteration and failure and risk-taking, but very few have managed to foster as much innovation as this team at Alphabet. Which brings us back to the Bad Ideas Brainstorm. A bad ideas brainstorm is, well, exactly what it sounds like: an exercise in being more imaginative than you are critical. It is just one of the many parts of the moonshot factory process designed to help foster innovation. Somehow, during this brainstorm, we went from talking about potato chips as a great way to help recycle cars to this. What if we actually made cars out of not necessarily just wood, but we engineered them for destruction? So we think all the time about making things that last longer, but what if we made cars that actually had a very short lifetime and were easy to recycle? Over the course of an hour, we went from silly, crazy ideas to ones that actually had something worth considering. And I went from feeling intimidated and out of place to throwing out ideas of my own. When I had in my head was also the batteries. that are like part of the whole solar world now. The people in that room weren't trying to be right. They were playing. They were saying stupid things out loud, and they believed in the process. And that brought me back to the question I started with. What if creativity and innovation aren't just qualities that some people have and others don't? What if the environment you're in makes a huge difference? I'm Molly Graham, and this is WorkLife, where we untangle the messy human side of work. My guest today is Astro Teller. He's run X for almost its entire existence. His actual title is Captain of Moonshots, and he and his team have spent the last 15 years trying to engineer a workplace that reliably produces radical innovation. Some of what they've learned runs pretty directly against the way most of us are taught to behave at work. I wanted to understand what that kind of workplace actually requires from us as people. How much do our instincts to look smart, be productive, and keep moving forward get in the way of having truly new ideas? And can you design a culture that helps us get past them? Astro, first of all, welcome to WorkLife. Thank you so much for having me. I've been looking forward to this. Me too. I have to tell you, I've now done, you know, quite a number of interviews, and I loved learning about you for this interview. It made me wish that I had worked at Google X. It's not too late. I know, exactly. But in one of the things I listened to when I was researching this podcast, I heard that you basically have dreamed of creating a place like X since you were eight, which, for someone that has never had a career plan, sounds crazy to me. And I just, I wanted to know more about that. You know, I think it came from a couple different places. It's true. I mean, obviously, I didn't conceive of it as exactly being called X, but I was really interested in robots when I was a kid. I consumed a lot of science fiction. I was a really creative kid. I was a bit of a loner. So somehow those coalesced into this sense that if there could be a place where I felt like I was with my people and we could go make things that would matter for the world using technology, like that I would somehow be in my element. I think it also really mattered. My father's father was Edward Teller, and so I grew up on a fairly steady diet of stories from the Manhattan Project. And I wasn't interested in making bombs, but the idea that this very transdisciplinary team was sequestered far away from everybody else and given great pressure to do something no one had ever done before, that it required a lot of creativity and experimentation. It wasn't clear that it was possible. They were doing it. Whatever you think of atom bombs and hydrogen bombs afterwards, they believed they were trying to save humanity by saving the world from the Nazis. And so, like at a very— Analogous or metaphoric level, I think that I responded to that very strongly, this idea: could you get a bunch of just the right kind of people sequestered away, working really hard together in these transdisciplinary ways to make the world radically better? Well, and I know we were just talking about this before everything started rolling, but, like, your grandfather, who is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, is maybe your most famous grandfather, but you come from sort of a lineage of academics and researchers, yes? Yeah. So my mother's father won an economics Nobel in 1983. He basically created what's called a theory of value. It's the mathematical underpinnings of microeconomics. And so I grew up in this household where being world-class in your intelligence was the only yardstick that mattered. Yeah, and I've heard you say that you were not—you didn't see yourself as smart growing up. Well, I mean, given that, like, both of my grandfathers were considered some of the smartest people in the 20th century, that was, like, somewhat an unreachable bar. It also didn't help that my brother was clearly smarter than me from, I don't know, maybe when he was five and I was seven. It was very clear that I had already lost, at least relative to him, that I was not going to be the one who was going to go win Nobel Prizes for our family next. And in a way, that was pretty devastating for me. But I think it was also really freeing to me, because while I was sad that I had lost, the pressure also kind of missed me in a way. And I grew up really curious about, well, what else could I be good at if I'm not just going to be super smart? And I think that— Interest in other ways of adding value, being more of a three-dimensional person, has stood me in good stead. Yeah. Do you remember, you're probably too young for this, Avis in, like, the 1970s and '80s, their ad was, We try harder. And there was something about that that really resonated with me. Did you actually, like, have a sense at that time, like, I'm not the academic smart one, I'm the creative one, or I'm the—did you have a word for it? I didn't. I really gravitated to a set of characters, like fictional characters, as role models. And maybe not completely an accident, one of them was Professor Xavier, who ran, like, the institute for these very unusual children, mutants. From X-Men, yeah. The X-Men, exactly. He ran the X-Men. But other people were like the Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who, if you remember him, or Cyrano de Bergerac, or Hawkeye from MASH. Wow. This is a real range. The first person I wanted to be when I was growing up, like really young, was Pippi Longstocking. So it was these people who were different and used their difference to make a difference, but in a very kind of nonconformist, iconoclast kind of way. I didn't have a word for it, but those were the people I resonated with. Well, there's somewhat of a direct line, I think, to the people that you hire today. But I am curious, like, and I don't actually know if you started with the name Moonshot Factory, did you, or did that show up eventually? No, actually. I mean, the way we got here was, soon after I started, we were just starting things, and I wrote a strategic planning document. It was only like four or five pages long, but I wanted some sense of, like, what are we trying to do here? And I went to Larry Page, and I was just trying to ask him, like, what's our aspiration for this? I knew conceptually it was sort of a 21st century Bell Labs, but I wanted some more, and I was throwing things out just to try to get a response. And I said, Are we making businesses? And he said, Kind of. Are we doing research? Not really. Are we a product area at Google? He said, No, not that. And when I said, Are we taking moonshots? He said, That's what we're doing. So I said, Okay. And then I went back and I thought about it, and my passion had been for quite a long time, I thought of it as an invention machine. That's how I had conceived of it before. How do you systematize radical innovation? And then once I'd had this conversation with Larry, I took the word moonshot and I paired it with the word factory so that we could feel that balance that we were trying to hold, a very high audacity, trying to do these moonshots, but also very high humility, trying to industrialize or systematize the process of getting to these things. Because the truth is, radical innovation is really easy, super easy, if you don't care about efficiency. You find some really smart people, you tell them to be super audacious, you pour a bunch of money on them, and you will definitely get some moonshots. It's just the return on investment will be so low it's not rational to keep doing that. If you want someone to keep giving you the money, then you have to be interested not only in the moonshot part, but in the factory part too. This episode is brought to you by Planet Visionaries, a podcast in partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Planet Visionaries is the podcast celebrating the people creating practical, hopeful solutions for our planet's urgent conservation challenges. Season six launches this fall with bold, real solutions. Hear from Anna Rathmann of the Jane Goodall Institute on protecting wildlife, Tom Peschak on his epic 396-day journey documenting the entire Amazon, and Lydia Oshi, a Guatemalan leader opening doors for indigenous girls to access global education. Hosted by legendary climber and advocate Alex Honnold, each episode goes beyond the headlines to show what's actually working and who is making it happen. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. This episode is sponsored by Framer. New ideas for your site usually come fast. It’s what’s next—the tickets, the handoffs, the waiting on someone else—where good ideas lose their momentum. Framer closes that gap. You can build together in real time, publish instantly, and use AI agents to turn a rough draft into a production-ready site in minutes. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. Agents work right alongside your team on the same canvas, building custom code components, managing CMS and SEO, and getting it all shipped. They bring the speed and scale, and your team brings the taste, judgment, and final call on what goes live. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/worklife for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That’s framer.com/worklife. Rules and restrictions may apply. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it’s no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn’t just tell you about no fees or minimums. He’d also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It’s pretty much all he talks about. In a good way. What’s in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com/bank. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC. You do seem like you’re almost more in love with the process of innovation than you are with the output, but I don’t know if you agree with that, because what you’re talking about is actually like the factory has to have output. The factory has to have output, but— Weird analogy. We'll try a few of these, but let me try this one. If I gave you money and you went to Vegas and you bet all of my money on 17 on the roulette wheel, and it came up 17 and you brought me back a lot more money, I would never give you my money again. But if you went to Vegas and you counted cards at the blackjack table and you counted them perfectly, you played the statistics perfectly, and you just happened to lose for the weekend, I would happily give you my money again because I'm not judging you on the outcome. I trust the process will cause the right outcomes in the long run. If you get obsessed with the outcome, you do not get what you want in the long run. You just get what you want in the short run. If you get obsessed with process or habits, then you let the outcome be a side effect of doing the right thing every day. That's how I'm wired. And I really want to talk about this because I know I've heard you use the card counting versus just gambling analogy, which I love, and I want to understand better what X does that really you equate to card counting that changes the odds. But just to sit on what you just said for a second, because what I hear is like, if you believe that I'm a great card counter, you'll bet on me every time. So there's a belief behind that that someone has to make. Someone has to say, you might fail a bunch, but I know you, and I know this process that you've built will eventually produce incredible results. That trust is really hard for people at work, like when something fails regularly. Forget X for a second. Yeah. When I'm coaching, and I do have a set of mentees who don't work here, and I tell them, I have some secrets to give you. If you practice these, I almost guarantee you, you will be worse off over the next two years. But you will be much better off. Your personal career and the value that you give to your businesses that you work at will be better over the next 10 years. Do you have the stomach for that? If you don't, that's okay. But my habits, this algorithm that I want to hand to you is totally implementable by you wherever you work, but you'd actually have to have the stomach for playing the long game. Yeah. Can you coach businesses or managers or leaders to have the stomach for that? Well, there's two separate things, and they both have to happen. You have to get the leaders to care enough to play the long game. It's a bit of a long, a hard ask for the employees to play the long game if the leaders aren't interested in playing it. But also, the leaders have a hard time playing the long game if the employees aren't up for coming with them on that journey. And so it's like a trust fall between both sides, and it means taking smart risks, not low risks. If you can find things that have a, you know, 80% chance of not going your way, of ending up with egg on your face, but a 20% chance of being so crazy good that when we look at that trade-off, we could rationally say that's a good trade-off. This is why you'll be worse off over two years, but you'll be better off over 10 years. Because over the next 10 years, it'll hit. But not necessarily over the next two. And some people just, they want to get the next promotion. They really want to get an extra 10% in their compensations. They can have a nicer house. I get that. But you also can't have it both ways. Like, if you want the acceleration that comes from taking these kinds of smart risks, you have to be willing to take the bumpy ride that comes from taking these smart risks. I think it's just the physics of extreme progress. Yeah. Hmm. I feel that intimately and viscerally, but personally. But I, you know, and I've spent a lot of time in my career talking about that bumpy feeling that comes with personal risk. And what you're talking about is being willing to take that on almost at a corporate level. But talk a little bit about the algorithm, though, because, like, one of the things I've, you know, this card-counting metaphor you have, and I think one of your points behind it is sort of when people talk about innovation, they talk about, like, venture capital and just sort of spreading money around on ideas, and that might look a little bit more like gambling, I think. But what you've tried to do is build a card-counting machine in terms of innovation. What are the kinds of things in the algorithm that you do that you think actually dramatically change the odds? I'm going to give you some habit examples. But the issue is not these habits because I'm going to say them and then you're going to say, Yeah, duh. It's about how you actually practice them, how you operationalize them in your personal life and as a group. How does the group operationalize them? We have 26 habits that we are asking everybody here to practice. If you look right outside my office here, there's a poster outside, and— Empathy, humility, and a growth mindset are the three things that are at the top of that poster. This is what I expect from myself, and it's the most basic thing I expect of everybody else here. Those are part of the habits that we're asking for everybody here. First, like, yeah, sure, humility, blah, blah, blah. But how many places have you gone where that was actually at the top of the poster? Then how many places have you gone where that was actually the performance management system, where you were going to get rated on your humility? So the real question is, how do you have enough confidence that you, as an individual, can go do this? And how can individual managers and organizations operationalize this so behaving in these ways is actually not a dumb thing to do? Well, and that's one of the things that I found really inspiring the more time I spent reading and listening, because I talk a lot about, as a leader, that it's super easy to have a poster that you put on the walls that has a bunch of values on it, and that what you say can—and I think there are a lot of companies that say, you know, whatever, be innovative or fail fast or things like that. But then what happens, you know, what—and what I always say is, like, culture is created by what you do, you know, as a leader, and that it flows down. And I think one of the things I'm so curious about is how do you operationalize things like humility and vulnerability and failure, which I know you've done a lot of? So here's an example. Maybe 40, 50 feet that way is a whole wall. Of failure resumes. Did you get to see them yet? I didn't, no. And that's only half of them. If you go on the other side of that part of the building, there's another whole wall of failure resumes. There's probably 150 at least between the two sides. Mine is up there too. Huh. What is that? What is a failure resume? Aha. Writing down the things that just went splat in your life. Could be personal things, could be, as often is, professional things. First of all, the activity of just being brave enough to write it down and share with other people, it's a lot. But it's also really freeing. And once some people are doing it, it becomes almost weird not to do it. And I know that when I look at the failures I've had, I can see how, I mean, of course some of them, it would have been nice if they went well instead of badly. But we learn nothing when we're right. That's just how human brains work. If you already believe something and then you act on that in the world and you get a yes from the world, whatever that thing is, that model of the world you have, at best you're just deepening your grooves on that belief. But if you have some belief about how the world works and then you get a no from the world, ooh, that feels like a failure. There could be some guilt or shame associated with that. But in that moment, if you will let yourself, you can update your model of the world. That is learning at its essence. But if you have any fear or shame or guilt in that moment, you will resist the moment. You will deny that the moment is happening even when it does happen, and that massively undermines your ability to learn from the moment. I hate failing. It's not like I like failing, even though I'm sort of like the crown prince of failure. Failure factory, from what I can tell. But if you are not committed to destigmatizing failure, you are not really committed to learning fast, because the tightest learning loops are the ones that have the most failures in them. So I just participated in one of your many rituals, which is a bad ideas brainstorm. Will you just talk about that ritual and what it is, explain it to folks, and why it exists? Sure. So if I welcome you into a brainstorm and I say, I would like you to be insanely smart and creative right now, go, I have just made it essentially impossible for you to say particularly creative things, right? Your whole, like, body and soul just seized up when I said that to you. But that's what every brainstorm feels like to most people. That writer's block that they feel is caused by the way that that brainstorm started. If I say, Let's see how bad an idea we can make. I'll start, and I put a really horrible idea on the table, and I say, Can you make an idea worse than that? Now we're all grinning, we're laughing. It's a little uncomfortable, but now, like, being smart is off the table, and it's about being weird and creative. You're opening up this different part of your brain. If that was all we did the whole time, it'd be funny, maybe fun, but it wouldn't actually be useful. But as you probably experience, it's actually hard to keep it up, and it drifts weirdly fast into not so bad brainstorms. But by starting it in that way, everyone feels limbered up. They feel more together. Did you have that experience? Yeah, totally. And I definitely started with a feeling of imposter syndrome and, Am I going to be in this spotlight? And then as soon as the first idea came out, which might have been about shooting cars into volcanoes or something, you know, or making cars out of potato chips or something, like, I was like, Oh, okay, like, this is not, you know, this is a place I feel welcome. Your shoulders go down and you're like, Oh, I'm in it now. Yeah. And part of what I hear you talking about is shedding— Sort of like needing to look smart or needing to sort of like shedding some kind of body armor. Do you feel like in order to be truly creative and truly innovative, people actually have to be comfortable looking stupid? A thousand percent. I think, I mean, there's a reason the only thing that's taped up on the door of my office is a poster of the tarot card of the fool. I'm not into tarot cards per se. I don't think they're magical or something, but I do think that it's a profound metaphor for the beginner's mindset, to be able to bring capabilities with you, but also to be like raw and open and curious, not just humble, but like silly and playful. That's the raw material of saying something so different that it gets you out of the rut of expectations and assumptions that all the experts are stuck in. And then, of course, by definition, you are almost certainly wrong when you go out there and you say that thing. But if we do a hundred of them, one of them is going to be great. But like that means 99 of them have to be bad, and that's just tough. So you have to be able to feel like, I know this is part of my job. And then when you see one of your colleagues doing it, you have to like high five or hug them, be like, That was a crazy idea. I love how crazy, probably not right, but I don't care, that your mind works like that is beautiful. And if you're that crazy in the ideas you come up with, one of them will be genius, even if that one wasn't. See, now you feel like, Oh shit, I want that feedback. Yeah. If we give that feedback to each other, it unlocks the ideas. It starts to have them flow. This message is brought to you by Apple Card. Ah, fall. That cozy season where we swap the swimwear for sweaters and sunnies for scarves. But before the Halloween decorations are put away or the Thanksgiving table has been set, there's already holly jolly music playing in the grocery store, reminding you that the year is coming to a close. Time to kick end of year into high gear. When you use Apple Card with Apple Pay, you earn 2% daily cash back on all purchases, including food, decorations, gifts, and more. Get a head start on your end of year purchases. Apply for your Apple Card in the Wallet app on your iPhone today and start using it right away with Apple Pay. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Many leaders know how work should happen, but as teams grow, tools multiply, and processes evolve, it gets harder to see where time is lost or where AI could help. That's exactly the problem today's sponsor, Scribe, is helping solve. Scribe is a specialized intelligence platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500, and Scribe Optimize is where your AI roadmap starts. It automatically captures how your team works across approved business apps. Cross-approved business apps using workflow data to identify inefficiencies and high-impact opportunities to improve or automate. Its live dashboard shows active workflows, while top issues explains what's driving inefficiencies and provides recommendations on where to focus first, with estimated time savings. And it does all this with security and privacy built in. Optimize only runs on applications your admin approves. Data is anonymized by default, and sensitive data is redacted. To see Optimize in action, visit scribe.how/worklife and mention WorkLife for a 30-day risk-free trial. That's S-C-R-I-B-E dot how slash worklife. This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge, and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. So it's interesting because I'm supposed to do a brainstorm with my team in a couple weeks. And, you know, I was thinking, like, as I was sitting downstairs in this bad ideas brainstorm, I was like, what would it be like to try to take a team that honestly probably has pretty typical brainstorming muscles, right? Like, let's think of all the possible things we could do, and let's, like, sort them and, you know, pick which one we like the best and then go try to make it true, which is very much not what you do at X. Like, first of all, talk about sort of what happens once you have an idea, because one of the things you say that I love is fall in love with the problem, not the solution. But I'm also curious how you would change, you know, a team that's sort of, like, got all those older muscles. You know, if I was in a company and I wanted to help them— Sort of show up differently. I would start with, how many people here got A pluses on the test when they were kids? Everyone's going to kind of raise their hand in your organization, in most organizations. How many people fundamentally attach their sense of self-worth to getting a yes on the test, whatever the test is? Everyone's kind of like, Yeah, it's me, right? If we do things that have a decent chance of not working out, we're all going to feel terrible, like failures. And everyone's like, Yeah, because that's like getting a zero on the test, which means we are all constantly in fear of that moment, and so we're avoiding it. What if we could attach our sense of self-worth instead, just for today? Let's just try it. Not to getting yes on the test, but to just exploring as wisely as possible. We just are truth seekers. What's the right answer? And we want to find out, like, what's the highest value thing we could go after, not what's the way we can guarantee a yes on the test. Yeah. Talk a little bit about this idea of falling in love with problems. And one of the things that I just hear so much in your habits and the things that you've built into X is, like, shaking people out of their natural tendencies. And I think, you know, I'm curious, like, what do you do operationally? So we have bad ideas, brainstorm, people pick things to go think about. What do you do operationally to help people sort of stay connected to the problem? And also, yeah, like, what do you do after that idea? Can we take a quick diversion into the monkey and pedestal? Yes, absolutely. This is one of the sort of core metaphors here that works for us in doing exactly what you just described. So for many years at X, I was saying to Xers, Look, we should obviously work on the riskiest parts of the problem first. And even the people here at X were saying, I don't think that's right, Astro. That sounds wrong. And I said, Look— Pretend we were working on the project of getting a monkey to stand on the top of a 10-foot pedestal and recite Shakespeare. In that really extreme situation, which should we do first? Should we train the monkey, or should we build the pedestal? The temptation is actually to build the pedestal because then we're half done and we can, like, strut around. I'm half done with my project. That was pretty fast. Hey, boss, I'm half done. Can I have a promotion? Can I have a bonus? But the truth is, we've burned down 0% of the risk. Like, if you can train the monkey, you can definitely get a pedestal afterwards. If you build the pedestal first, you kind of just wasted your company's money. We can see that's true in that extreme case. But in most cases, most people actually are building the pedestals. They avoid the really hard, weird, scary stuff because at some point they either assume they're going to succeed, which means they're not doing something very risky, so it's probably not going to be very valuable, and/or two, they just don't want to know. They want to put it off because they're scared of it. But what if I could ask you, hey, whatever company we're working at, let's be truth seekers. Like, if we're going to do something, let's make sure it matters. And if it's going to matter, it's going to have risk. And if it's going to have risk, let's ask, what's the end of this picture? What's the best-case scenario for how this could work? The equivalent of the monkey actually standing there and reciting Shakespeare. Cool. Wouldn't that be awesome? Now where's the risk? Let's talk about what the most unlikely part of it is. Because if it's not going to happen, I don't want to waste my company's money, and I don't want to waste my life working on something that's not going to happen. Let's test that first. Are you with me? Right? So the monkey and pedestal has gotten to the place, at least here at X, where people put little monkeys in their slide decks to show where the really big risky stuff is, and that makes sense. And we're like, okay, is most of your money and time going to working on those things? That is not sort of focused on progress. That's focused on learning. And of course, learning and progress would be the same if we had a perfect strategy and perfect work plan. But most people, most of the time, have a very flawed strategy and very flawed work plan. Humility is required to know ahead of time that that is likely to be the case, even if you can't see it. But if you can trust we're probably wrong about what we're currently working on, then instead of working to make progress, you work to discover what's wrong with my strategy and what's wrong with my work plan. And then your work plan itself becomes different. Yeah. It's so hard to ritualize this stuff. Part of what I'm hearing is, like, innovation is an algorithm, according to Astro and X, that is really all about breaking all these deeply human boundaries where, you know, and failure is a part of that, right? Like, it's very uncomfortable to fail, and most companies say, oh, you know, like I said, they say fail, like go out there and do bad, you know, like mess up. But I feel like employees are really good at figuring out, like, you don't actually mean that. So what are some of the things that you've done that have actually made people adopt that monkey mindset and really lean into, let me tell you all the reasons why this project sucks, you know? I mean, I'll give you some of how we've ritualized it here at X, but I want to make sure that this isn't just about X. So let me start with anyone, anywhere in the world. Your boss says to you, You have, you know, six months. You have to add this meaningful new feature to our product. It's super important to us. No messing around. There's no like, Oh, I failed. It's okay, kind of thing. You got to get it done. Even then, if I had your job, this is what I would do. For one month, I would build in parallel five different prototypes. Super, super scrappy, v0.crap. That's what we call it here at X. Then for one month, I would ferociously learn everything I could about the pluses and minuses of those five things. And then I would use the remaining four months to build something, maybe an extension of one of those five things, maybe a mashup of two or three of them, depending on what I learned. Now, I only have four months left, maybe not even, because I need some design time after the first two months. But let's say I take two weeks for that design time. I have three and a half months, not six months. I guarantee you, I am more likely to succeed, to not fail, in that three and a half months than if I had worked the whole time where I'd lied to myself and believed that from day one I could design the correct thing to build and give myself six months to build it. That's how I would maximize my chances of success, even at a place that did not accept failure. So I don't want this to just be, If you're at X, you get to do this and everybody else, like, sucks to be you. That's not the story here. So let me give you one or two examples of ways that we either ritualize it or send signals to people. So we now do Tales from the Crypt, sort of more Halloween-esque, and everybody dresses up and we tell ghost stories. So we take these things that went wrong at X in the past and we tell ghost stories about them, but they're actually an opportunity to learn from them and to have fun and make light of these things so that it feels less scary to have gone. Through them, or to, for the people who are going to go through them, seeing that we can now laugh about even these things that were expensive and complicated in the past. Another example is if you go into our main hallway, you probably have, and you look at the prototypes that are there. They're not mostly the cool finished things. They're the prototypes, the early things that we made with, like, wires sticking out of them. At a visceral level, you internalize that we're proud of the process rather than proud of the outcome, because that's what those scrappy prototypes remind you of, because we're showing you our process, not showing you the end of the road. And that helps you to believe unconsciously that we're serious about it. That's something any company could do. Did you see the line there that says, You may not cross this line? I didn't. So there's a huge line on the floor in that main hallway, and huge letters right in front of the line, it says, You may not cross this line. That is a dumb rule. You basically can't get into the building without walking across that. But having people practice breaking a dumb rule every day is another way, at a very almost subliminal level, that we help people lower their shoulders, bigger smile on their face, and feel a little bit more unleashed. That, again, is something any company can do. That's not that, I don't know, cost us $50 of, you know, for someone to paint that. Like, anyone can do that. Yeah. One of the things that I really felt, and I feel even as you're telling these stories, is I felt it in the bad ideas brainstorm, which is this deep belief in play. Like, talk, just tell me a little bit about some of, like, why is play so important to innovation? Why has that been such an important part of X? Like, I'm just, I'm curious. It's creativity, the ability to perspective shift, which is, I think, most fundamentally what creativity is, to be able to see things differently. Requires letting go of that sort of frontal lobe societal filters. I need to behave. I need to follow the rules. There's a level of nonconformity, of iconoclastness, that has to show up in order for you to say something as meaningfully different that breaks some assumption that the experts have laid out. And if you show up playful and silly, that is already inherently saying, I'm not engaged right now in worry and fear about how I'm being judged. And conversely, the whole idea of being serious is essentially how I hold myself, how I dress myself. I have planned to send you signals that I'm okay, that I'm safe, that I'm conforming. Okay, it's not a judgment thing, but you can't be creative from that place. Astro, it is, as you're talking, I'm like, this is just so counter to so many of the narratives, particularly in the technology industry, but in general around what it means to be, like, really productive or what— Yes. And have I said anything in the last 40 minutes where you're like, No, that's not right? No, no, they all sound right to me. So this is the problem, is that it both is like, That's not how everyone does it, and, Yeah, those things all sound right, but not sound right like, This is the big reveal. Astro figured it out and no one else has. Also, everything I've said to you is like kind of, yeah, duh. Yeah. What's hard is you have to be willing to die on the hill of these things as an individual and as an organization if you want the benefits of these things. And the truth is, most people want innovation. But not badly enough to let their people be playful, because there's a feeling that if they let their people even push their people to be playful, that somehow their people will just become underproductive. And the answer is, in the short term, they will. But in the long term, you will make more value for the world and more value for your company. So again, it's back to you'll be worse off over two years, but better off over ten. Are you willing to make that tradeoff? Yeah, as an individual, as a company. Yeah. So, and I'm very grateful that Alphabet has given me the space where I can die on that hill. And I have, hopefully, if I've done one thing right, it's I feel like the Lorax. I'm the protector of these truths where I'm like constantly—I mean, I dress like this every day. I want to have fun, and I want to make sure wherever we are, if I worked at a different company, it would be exactly the same thing. We're going to move at the speed of how much we trust each other and how much we tell each other the truth. So, like, how are we going to wire our organization for that? I was having a conversation with someone that has worked with you for a long time, and they said I should ask you about the hills that you would die on, and you just used those words. So what are the hills that you would die on? I'll give you a couple different answers. I think they all point at the same place, and there is a dynamic which we're trying to practice here, and I think anyone can practice, which maybe I think is best captured in the beginning-of-the-journey image, which is that tarot card of the fool. Being open to the journey. There's an audacity to the beginning of any journey, and an excitement about what could be. And even an envisioning of what could be, a humility of knowing right from the beginning, you know, it might not, it might end in tears, and it might not, but there will definitely be crocodiles along the way for sure, right? And going not because you don't know that, but even knowing that, you're excited and you're open. You're open to learning, to changing who you are. And so the humility. And so the humility, the sense of urgency, a sense of playfulness, they are all part of this operationalizing a beginner's mindset as an individual and as a group. And I think if you look at a lot of the different pointers at X and the ways that we talk, they're all just different versions of trying to help people understand and operationalize this. So can I give you an example? Yeah. The five X principles, and again, I think anyone could operationalize this in their organization, is find smart risks. Then number two is perspective shift, i.e., be creative, which you need to do to find these smart risks. Then number three is iterate, which just means go try it. Especially in radical innovation, you don't know what the right answer is. Do something quickly, try it out, see what happens. Which, by the way, you need humility in order to have that as an attitude rather than, I'm going to do it right the first time. So number three is iterate. Number four is dispassionately assess. That means just be intellectually honest about the results of what you found after you ran an iteration. And then number five is reinforce the principles. Those first four things is basically just the scientific method, very lightly changed for innovation. There is nothing about that that is wild or like, No, I couldn't do that at my company. But it takes commitment and repetition to get people to practice those things because the forces of normalcy are so strong. The forces of normalcy are so strong, which I think is one of the most interesting... Takeaways here is, like, so much of what you've tried to ritualize is helping people bust out of normalcy, of whatever society is telling them to be or do. Right. Normalcy is not a bad thing. It's like the hump of the bell curve. If that's where you want to be, it's actually a good thing. Yeah. But for anyone who believes that their job is innovation, normalcy is the enemy. I had such a fun day with the team at X. This was honestly one of the coolest experiences I've had recently. I've never walked into a building and had it immediately feel so different from any other workplace I've ever been in. And I have to say that since I recorded this episode with Astro, I've been thinking a lot about my own experiences at work. You know how I said I've never felt creative or visionary at work? It's really interesting because in my last couple of roles as COO, and, you know, being a COO, basically your job title is like, make shit happen. That's what you're supposed to be doing. And I never thought of myself as visionary in those roles. And it wasn't until the last couple that I realized that I actually had a lot of ideas, but the people that I worked for never asked me for them. They were always telling me what they wanted and telling me their vision. They never stopped to say, What do you think? And it's really been making me think, particularly after listening to Astro and experiencing the workplace at X. How much the behavior of a leader matters. Like, I say this all the time to the leaders I work with: culture is created by what you do, not what you say. And so many companies say they want to be innovative and they want to take risks and they want to make it safe for people to fail. But what happens when someone actually fails? What happens when there's a choice between making forward progress or doing something crazy that might, you know, create an amazing opportunity but is really risky? A lot of times, what leaders do in those moments actually sends a signal that none of that is okay, right? They blame someone for failure or they reprimand people. Whereas X celebrates it, right? You hear Astro talk about celebrations and funerals and things that they do to make it not just okay for one failure, but sort of setting a path for all future failures to be okay. So if you're a leader and you're out there and you're thinking, gosh, how do I do this and how do I replicate this? So much of this really comes down to your behavior. And I think for each of us, I know I'm thinking about this with my team, it's really interesting to think, how can you create a workplace that has more space for this? And are you willing, as Astro said, to make the trade-offs that you need to make to do this? Okay, I could go on forever, but that was just one of the things I've been thinking about over the last couple of weeks. I hope you all enjoyed this episode as much as I did, and I'll talk to you all next week. Thanks for listening to WorkLife. If you like the show and want more, hit that follow or subscribe button so you don't miss an episode. And share any episodes you love with a friend or leave a review wherever you're listening to this. WorkLife is a production of TED and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Daphne Chen. Our video editor is Connor Titzworth. Ban Ban Cheng is our story editor. Mixing by Hansdale She. TED's executive producer is Daniela Ballereseo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Highlash, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy. I'm your host, Molly Graham. This episode of TED Talks Daily is brought to you by Apollo.io. We often talk about how great ideas can change the way we work, but turning ideas into action takes focus, and sometimes that focus gets lost in the busy work. For sales teams, finding the right people to connect with, reaching out, and keeping up with follow-ups can mean juggling multiple tools. Apollo.io brings prospecting, outreach, and follow-up together in one platform, helping sales teams find the right buyers and spend less time managing scattered tasks and more time building meaningful connections. Whether you're a small business or a part of a larger organization, Apollo.io helps bring more of your sales workflow into one place so your team can focus on the conversations that matter. Ready to take a closer look? Sign up for free at Apollo.io. That's Apollo.io. With no fees or minimums on checking accounts, it's no wonder the Capital One bank guy is so passionate about banking with Capital One. If he were here, he wouldn't just tell you about no fees or minimums. He'd also talk about how most Capital One cafes are open seven days a week to assist with your banking needs. Yep, even on weekends. It's pretty much all he talks about, in a good way. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See capitalone.com slash bank. Capital One, N.A., member FDIC. Grainger knows if you're a procurement manager at an industrial manufacturing facility, you're balancing inventory and budget while sourcing critical supplies across the operation. Too much inventory? Costs climb. Too little? Production slows. Grainger's $2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.