Introducing The Moonshot Podcast
Stories Behind 15 Years of Invention
Post-it note origami. A kiddie pool filled with rubber fish. Beer coolers to insulate electronics in the stratosphere. X’s moonshots often have simple beginnings. We’ve retrofitted restaurant chicken fryers to create pressure test chambers and used dog toys and toothbrush parts to build brainwave sensors.
In the beginning, speed and scrappiness are key to moving from idea to first prototype. Each quick model becomes the starting point for another iteration, another cycle of learning.
Breakthroughs rarely happen in a single eureka moment. Instead, the path to invention is usually a series of small learning-oriented iterations. The key is just to start. When your self-driving car is still a post-it note and you have no idea if you’re headed in the right direction (literally), the way forward is to experiment, build, iterate, and learn as fast as possible.
Project Loon’s earliest prototypes started with an insulated beer cooler full of electronics
At X, The Moonshot Factory, we’ve spent the past 15 years creating new technologies to help solve some of the world’s most intractable problems. Thinking back on the last decade and a half, I asked the inventors, designers, engineers, and technologists of some of our most interesting projects to share what they’ve learned about how to take moonshots.
They talked about the joy of making something out of nothing, the mindset you need to challenge impossibility, the messiness of experimentation, how to decide when to double down and when to pivot, the elation of solving the puzzle, and the intellectual honesty required to recognize when it's time to walk away. (We drew on these themes of impossibility and creating something from nothing for our new brand, which we introduced this week).
To apply machine learning and intelligence to the underwater world, the Tidal team first had to create entirely new datasets on fish and ocean ecosystems: They started with these realistic-looking rubber fish
These conversations are at the heart of the Moonshot Podcast, a ten-episode series we’re launching at SXSW today. The series goes behind the scenes to share how some of our moonshots came to be and where they are now—beginning with today’s episode about the origins of Waymo autonomous cars and Wing drone delivery. hese interviews underscore that we, as humans, have the power to create a future we want to live in—even when that future looks highly unlikely at the beginning.
Trailer for The Moonshot Podcast
At X, we believe that the keys to solving many of the world’s hardest problems—food security, energy resilience, the digital divide – are within humanity’s grasp. We all just need the courage to start small and the resilience to keep going until we solve them. My hope is that the stories on this podcast might inspire a new generation of moonshot takers.
Check out the first episode here, and subscribe to the series on Apple, Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music or wherever you listen to your podcasts.