♪ emily: he's one of the closest confidants of the google cofounders. the leader of alphabet's secretive x lab. he picked up the nickname astro in childhood with no idea he would someday be working on so-called moon shots a reality. raised by parents he calls hyper intellectual hippies, one of his grandfathers won a nobel prize in economics and some say should have one won in physics for his work on the hydrogen bomb. it is only fitting that astro teller is working on ideas that

could change the world or more likely fail miserably. he says that is all part of the magic. joining me today on bloomberg studio 1.0 zero, astro teller, head of alphabet's x lab. captain of moon shots. your official title. >> i function as the ceo, but i go by captain of moon shots. youy: how much time do shave off. you are making the most of those minutes. south.a couple miles this is where the magic happens or sometimes doesn't. you have far more failure than success. what is the mission of x?

>> it was created to be the part of alphabet that would make, hopefully, some new googles for alphabet. things like the self-driving car business, the life science business, the stratospheric balloon business, the self flying vehicles for package delivery, google brain, which came from here even though it went back to google, these are attempts on our part to make something that hopefully in the long run could be as valuable as google and is good for the world as google. online search ad is growing down. is there more pressure on acts to deliver a moonshot that works -- x to deliver a moonshot that works? astro: that is not my experience. i sit regularly with them and the spirit of the conversation is essentially, you give me a

lot of money every year and you have to wait a long time, in the order of like 7, 8, 9 years. a lot of the money you have given during that time just falls away. not because i'm purposefully wasting, but because i'm running experiments and the answer to have a lot of experiments is no. you have to decide if the value is worth the money and the time value of money. that is the real conversation that we should be having and that we are having. if that has a good return on investment for alphabet and if that is good for the world, we should keep doing it. emily: since you mentioned ruth porat, there is this perception she was brought into tighten the belt and that x and some of these experimental projects google has spent dime on would be the first step on the chopping block. has that been the case? astro: that has not been my experience at all. to buy googleants

brain and verily and these other companies and all these other things we have produced. just imagine what they would have to pay alphabet to buy it and haul it away with them. it would be a very large amount of money. i know what we spent. i don't know what number you just taped in your mind, but i guarantee what we spent is the tiny fraction of the number you imagine. this is worth enough more than what we spent in that it is a good return on investment. now, it requires long-term thinking, but larry and sergei and ruth exercise long-term thinking. emily: you are saying there is no change in the long-term thinking and their level of long-term thinking, and their prioritization of these moonshot projects? astro: larry and sergei are very serious about trying to get to a great future as fast as possible . ashink ruth sees her job

causing this to happen. emily: you had a very early conversation with larry page about what x ultimately became. tell me about the conversation. astro: i was sitting down with and the first couple of months felt very tactics driven. we were trying to find concrete things we wanted to spend time on. the self-driving car, google early contact lens work that we did, a few other things like that. conversation,ve a like what is the bigger picture? i felt like i was not getting a lot of traction about this conversation, so i sat down with larry and i said, i'm just going to name some things to see what we are doing. is this just another business unit for google? he said, no.

ok, are we a research center? no. i agreed. i was glad. my conception of what we were doing is also that this is not what we were doing. i tried throwing out various things to him and when i said, are we taking moon shots? he said, yes, that is what we are doing. astro: the way we define a moonshot is there has to be a huge problem in the world that you can name and you want to fix that problem. if you don't have a problem to solve then we are just wasting our time. than what name that, is the radical proposed solution , the science-fiction sounding product or service, however unlikely it is that we could make it, that if we made it, it would solve that huge problem in the world. is it totally crazy or is it mostly crazy? what is the reason to believe

that maybe we could do it. some way we could get started, some early tests we could run if then it turns out it is impossible, fine, we will move on to something else. if the early tests happen to work out, we will keep going. those three things are what define a moonshot for us. work for us to make sure we have a diverse pipeline before we make our hiring decisions than if we didn't. it just takes more work. ♪

emily: let's talk about the way you built the team. it has been very deliberate. you wrote in an op-ed to the wall street journal that you said the single biggest fixable problem for humanity is how undervalued women on the planet are. if we actually had women working on things, than things like climate change would probably

get better faster. what do you mean? astro: number one, working on diversity and inclusive innovation is just the right thing to do. emily: is it the smart thing to do? astro: i wish that it being the right thing to do was all it took to cause change. but it's not. i just want to flag that it is the right thing to do and that is part of what makes me feel good about doing it. number two, it is good business. we are not an engineering doanization trying to creativity, so it is good ofiness to bring in lots creativity. women are half of the world's people. not necessarily going to have a worse workforce if we are just giving up on half of the people in the world? google's be fair, record on women and underrepresented minorities if

you look at the number, is simply average. average is not great for where we are in this day and age. are you punching above google's numbers? are you doing better or are you doing things differently than alphabet itself? have ai don't want to fight between us and google, but i think if you ask the people here, they would say, culturally, this is a very positive place for women and foreid folk. emily: how did you create that culture? astro: i think if you have more people that are just weird relatively to each other and we encourage them to be themselves and to speak up and say what they are thinking, we will be better off. that has translated into some things that don't feel like work to me, but half of my leadership team is women. that is not because i sat out to make half of my leadership team women.

that should not even be exceptional. half of the world is women. it should not be weird to say that. we still have a long way to go. i'm not suggesting we are done, but i think that what x is doing is somewhat more right than silicon valley as a is we are serious, we actually want these things and we spend our energy on them. emily: you are part of alphabet and google has been in the middle of a cultural crisis. 20,000 employees walked out of the company because of how the company has been handling sexual misconduct over the years. does that concern you? the employee unrest that google and alphabet are feeling right now? astro: i think it is fantastic. i think when you look at that from the outside, don't you see this feeling like maybe we are going to be ok as a species if those people in that company care enough to say what they think and to try to create some pressure on the company to be the kind of company they would

be proud of? i'm not saying every walkout person was exactly right, but it is certainly their right to be unhappy and they are probably at least partially right about the things that they complain about. that is how wed should fix society, having employees say, wait, this is my company, i'm a part of this, and we collectively are saying this is the kind of company we want to be. that is incredibly healthy. emily: are there things that google did wrong along the way? do you think mistakes were made? astro: yes, certainly mistakes were made. probably one of the main things is short-term thinking, like, oh we need somebody by yesterday to let'shis seat, because, be honest, it takes more work for us to make sure we have a diverse pipeline before we make

our hiring decisions than if we didn't. it just takes more work. emily: do you think that google and the founders over prioritize the brilliance of specific people and specific men? when you think about andy ruben --hech devolve -- duval left because of sexual misconduct. astro: i thicket is pretty complicated. there are thousands of exceptional people at alphabet. would be fair to recognize that those are not the only people being set up as exceptional. now, was our hygiene in andgnizing these people then helping them out of the building at the right pace good as it could have been? i don't think so. -- we aree rich duval not going to get into the sordid but there is a lot of in between, but should that have

been handled differently? astro: yes. i wish i had handled it differently. the thing that i most wish i could have created an environment that was different was actually not the details of how we went through the investigation process, but i'm sure you can imagine. we did that by the book and we did with the investigation said. because you don't want the sort of go around the investigations when they happen, i actually feel ok about that part of it. but other things have come out, other elements of people being uncomfortable that i wish generally -- this is not about rich -- that we could be even what i thinkfacing of as the gray area issues within x faster. emily: from the outside, we don't see a lot of larry page. is he still the right person to

be leading alphabet in the middle of all of this given all of this? are thearry and sergey two most phenomenally creative people i've ever met in my life. and they set a standard in support that standard percolating throughout the organization. that is why alphabet is the way it is. that is not an argument that either larry or sergey are perfect human beings, but i think pretty clearly, alphabet would be worse off if we did not have support at the top from larry and from sergey. emily: you would say the same applies from larry as to sergey, even though sergey has also had issues that we don't need to get into. some executives are being held to a higher standard this day and age. astro: i have low confidence, very low confidence to be honest that if we swap them out for one or two other people that we

would be better off even in the sort of human elements that we say that we care so much about. moonshot is not chronicle or loon. it is the factory. ♪

emily: i actually still have them. these are my google glass. what do you think? astro: those are good frames on you. [laughter] emily: these are one of the first moonshot and they did not work out in the initial iteration and they became sort of a punchline essentially. do you think of glass as a failure? astro: it was certainly an experiment. there were aspects of it that were absolutely a failure. i want to be fair to glass. having learned a lot of lessons,

some of them may be more painfully than we needed to, glass is still very much an ongoing business and quite successful, it is just not much in the public eye. emily: that's right. glass never left. astro: glass never left. it turns out the right place for this for right now in society are the parts of society that are less fashion conscious and that have real, practical needs. ,hese are doctors and nurses people who work in manufacturing environments, who work on oil rigs, maintaining airplanes. the irony is this is one of the technologies from silicon valley that the digirati said no thank you to, but the heartland of america is happy to have because of the productivity enhancement. emily: do you think glass will ever be back in this form? astro: as glasses, they will absolutely be back. emily: when? astro: 3-6 years.

it will depend on the technology, social readiness. it is one we pretend that it is done when it is not done, so x has worked even harder afterward to be clear with each thing, intowings -- we get out the world, we are not putting it anywhere that it is not safe, but we are not pretending that we are more done than we are done because we don't want to re-create that glass failure mode. emily: as much as you want things to succeed, you have actually created a culture of failure here or a culture where it is ok to fail in the hope that you will succeed. tell me about that. astro: so, the secret is i hate failing. [laughter] astro: but i want to win in the long run. i want us to win in the long run. we have to create a culture, if we want you to be honest, if we want you to fearlessly run the right experiment and then be honest about the outcome that

says, we embrace the quality of the experiment, not the outcome. emily: what are some of the epic failures? i would love to feel how this has worked in practice. astro: we built a system that could turn seawater into methanol using clean energy. that is real save the world kind of stuff and we got it working. and it turned out that the cheapest we believed we could get it was $15 gallon of gas equivalent and this was one of these honesty moments, where we said, we want to save the world, we are proud we built this machine, but if the cheapest we are going to get this is $15 gallon of gas equivalent, that is not going to save the world. no one is going to buy that. we publish the business failure and we publish the science learnings that we had in the international journal of greenhouse gas control and said,

here's what we learned, can anyone build on this? emily: let's talk about the projects you are working on that have like real potential. astro: one of the ones i think that has a lot of potential, the self-driving car business. emily: of course. people would think of this is probably the biggest success of x so far. astro: i thick it is in a great position. it has helped everyone around the world get serious about this particular space. it has done a great job in making these cars drive safely. already now charging people as a transportation service in arizona. that is going exceptionally well. .mily: it has spun out of x it is a unit under alphabet. you have morgan stanley saying it is worth $175 billion. however, skeptics say, one of my going to see the self-driving car? it is going to take you long. who is right? astro: these things are going to

take time, so you can see one of those if you walk outside our building, if you go to arizona. there are now many hundreds of cars on the road. emily: when does it hit the mainstream? astro: for regulatory reasons, it is going to take a while. the world has already paid for a lot of cars, so as those cars are retired, that is one of the things that will pull self-driving car's into the mainstream. emily: then there is loon. astro: that is doing very well. there was recently an emergency in peru and we got to jump in and help connect a lot of people who had lost internet. that is the third time we have done that. emily: these are the internet beaming balloons. astro: exactly. that one is making good progress. like each of these things, it is a long process. we have increasing faith that loon is the right way to bring

connectivity to several billion people in the world. emily: where are you focusing on a project? is it energy? health care? automation, farming, agriculture? astro: yes, all of those. we have every single thing you just named. we have at least one exploration in. but there are some i'm feeling particularly good about right now. agriculture as an example. humanity's ability to produce enough food to feed everyone in the world and to do that in a sustainable way -- we are topping out. it is pretty scary. we now have several things here at x that are looking at food production from several different avenues and we are excited about those things. i feel really good about that. emily: health care. astro: sure. here's an example. this is an early thing we are exploring. spaces in which the

innovation went like this because there was a simulator for the same people are innovating in. if you could go into cell biology, for example, if you could simulate how a cell works, then you could run experiments, thousands, maybe even millions of times the rate that humans can run those experience -- experiments in the lab and that would cause an and norma's explosion in the innovation and the life sciences. being able to simulate a cell accurately in a computer, who knows if we can do that? but that is an example where we have some interesting progress. emily: we are coming up in the 10 year anniversary of google x. what do the next 10 years look like? astro: i think we are better than almost anywhere else that many of these. these habits of culture engineering and dealing with failure productively.

we are still not great compared to where we would like to be. i would like for it to become natural and seamless for us to do it here and i would love to find a way to franchise this -- not literally -- but to start doing this in other places. ormoonshot is not waymo loon. it is the factory. it is making a moonshot factory. the way we are doing it here involves building trust, driving diversity, and having people practice being their whole selves, being weird, being creative, making -- taking chances, being in the flow when they are here. if i could get you and everyone else to believe that you could do more good for the world and make more money and be a happier person all of the same time, that would change the world more than anyone of the moon shots we are taking. emily: astro teller, captain of

moonshot's, thank you for joining us. astro: thank you for having me. ♪ everyone uses their phone differently.

that's why xfinity mobile lets you design your own data. you can share 1, 3, or 10 gigs of data between lines, mix in lines of unlimited, and switch it up at any time. all with millions of secure wifi hotspots and the best lte everywhere else. it's a different kind of wireless network, designed to save you money. switch and save up to $400 a year on your wireless bill. plus, get $250 back when you buy an eligible phone. that's simple. easy. awesome. call, click, or visit a store today.

clock a.m. here in hong kong. you're watching "bloomberg markets: asia." the shadow of in travel bands. use, they maying -- of what they may rollout. partner joins the backlash against the hong kong movement. ♪

two words today, headline risk, back and forth, the latest , perhapsrough here they are weighing a currency packed moving markets today. i'll give you a chart later that shows you the while sweeps you've seen in the currency market. at where we are market wise. you can seal the currency, -- you can see on the currency, we opened lower and we have almost reversed losses and come back in. you're looking at a two-day chart of the chinese currency. you can access