Astro Teller

speaker

540 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Astro Teller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Leap Academy with Ilana Golan · Google X's Astro Teller: Why the Biggest Breakthroughs Start with Failure | EP167 · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

Why did somebody leave a hat stand in this?

And then I went up and there was a little plaque by it.

And it turned out

After there was an electrolysis process that all of a sudden made it so aluminum went from being more expensive than gold per ounce to being a lot cheaper than gold.

And the first thing that people did was someone, one of the first things that was made was a hat stand.

And then they painted the hat stand to look like wood because that's what a hat stand is.

And the reason that that sticks in my mind is people hadn't yet imagined that

all of the aerospace benefits of aluminum, the idea that we were going to make beer cans and Coke cans out of aluminum or make folding chairs, the lawn chairs from the 70s that many of us still remember, no one could conceive of those things.

The thing I'm most confident about is that we don't know what the future is going to bring, that technology is going to surprise us, and the most profound impacts

of technology, of the technology we can see today, are things that we can't even imagine, maybe don't have words for.

I guarantee you, if you went back to the ARPANET, the original beginning of the internet, and tried to describe them this podcast that we're having, or all of the other things calling a Waymo through the internet, it would have completely broken their brains.

That was not what the internet was for back when it was the ARPANET.

But let me give you two examples of futures that we're really excited about right now.

So one is right now there's about a trillion dollars a year of embodied value that just goes to landfill because we don't know how to get it back.

Not because it couldn't be recycled or reused, but because we don't know what we're looking at.

Literally, if there's a potato chip bag that is going down some conveyor belt somewhere in the world, what's in that potato chip bag?

You have no idea.

If you have a camera, you can see it's a potato chip bag, but it's got like 50 different chemicals in it.

And if it has half a percent of the wrong thing, it will not only turn your whole recycling batch into goop, it might well ruin your recycling machine.

So off to landfill it goes.

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