The 12 Minute Podcast You Have To Listen To

I’ve listened to the Tim Ferriss Podcast for a while now and he usually interviews people for and hour or longer. This instalment is unique since it’s only 12 minutes long. It features a gentleman by the name of Astro Teller (coolest name EVER, right?) giving a presentation on thinking ten times bigger. Mr. Teller is the CEO of X, the “Moonshot Factory” for Alphabet (yes that’s a thing). You may not know who Alphabet is but you do know at least one of their subsidiary companies, a little business going by the name of Google. 

Astro co-founded a wearable technology company that was sold in 2013 and he is the co-founder and director of Cerebellum Capital, a hedge fund whose investments are continuously designed, executed, and improved entirely by a software algorithm based on techniques from statistical machine learning.

He asks a question in the beginning which frames the fundamental problem with how the vast majority of people (and organizations) think, incrementally. But incremental thinking doesn’t reinvent industry, it doesn’t encourage innovation, and it certainly doesn’t help the long term viability of your organization. This podcast is a great reminder of what we need to be focusing our time on.

We need more Moonshots.