The Moonshot Podcast
The Moonshot Podcast chronicles the untold stories of innovation - both highs and lows - from 15 years inside Google’s Moonshot Factory. Go behind the scenes with the inventors and creators exploring the huge problems, radical solutions and breakthrough technologies that have the potential to reshape our world. Self-driving cars, superhuman hearing, robots, drone delivery, wildfire prediction and much more.
A Blanchard House production, The Moonshot Podcast is now available on all major streaming platforms.
Find us on ApplePodcasts / Spotify / YouTube Music
Episode 1: Driving the Future
Fifteen years ago, the world thought self-driving cars were impossible - even the experts doubted it. Today, they’re on the road. In the first episode of The Moonshot Podcast, join Astro Teller inside X, Alphabet’s Moonshot Factory, to discover the early days of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles and Wing’s autonomous drone deliveries.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube Music
Episode 2: Essential Connections
Nearly 3 billion people still don’t have a reliable internet connection. In this episode of The Moonshot Podcast, Astro Teller dives into X’s decade-long mission to bring fast, reliable and affordable connectivity to people everywhere. We uncover the inside story of Loon - the audacious attempt to use high-altitude balloons for internet access - and how its legacy lives on in Taara, a revolutionary way to deliver fast, affordable connectivity over long distances using beams of light. Expect balloons in jail, monkeys causing mischief, and a digital leap over the world’s deepest river.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube Music
Episode 3: Machines That Think – The AI Moonshot
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping everything - but how did we get here? Dive deep with Astro Teller into the origins of Google Brain, meeting Andrew Ng and Jeff Dean, two of AI’s early pioneers. Their innovations helped shatter a decades-long computing block and catapulted deep learning from the academic arena to the commercial prime time. We’ll also explore Codey, an AI system that writes and rewrites software. How do those designing AI’s next generation think about its opportunities and challenges? Could AI revolutionize the process of innovation itself?
Listen on: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube Music
Episode 4: Feeding the World
Agriculture is the world’s oldest industry – and it’s racing to meet one of the newest and biggest challenges of our time: how to feed a growing global population that will soon hit 10 billion people. In this episode, Astro Teller explores how two moonshot teams set out to reinvent the way we grow food, using cutting-edge technology in some unexpected places. We follow the team behind Mineral, who began their journey with a pair of bicycles and a radical idea for rethinking farming from the ground up. And we head underwater with Tidal, where the team is using computer vision to transform ocean aquaculture.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts / Spotify / YouTube Music