Listener Charlie wants to know about X, the Alphabet subsidiary where Google engineers conduct super secret research and development on everything from jetpacks to augmented reality headsets. We learn about its history and some of its successes and failures.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Radio. And how the tech are you? Listener Charlie Kniehouse asked if I might do an episode about Google X, which these days is just called X. So that is what we are going to do, and X focuses on moon shots. Well, was a moon shot some of you might be asking? That would be a project that's really ambitious. There's no assurance that the project is going to be successful, and even if it is successful, there's no assurance that it would be marketable or profitable, at least in the short term. And the term itself moonshot is a play off of long shot. You know, a bet has really tough odds, but if it works, it will have an enormous payout. And it references also the Apollo program in the Space race, you know, the the one that sent human beings to the Moon. The space missions are a great example of ambitious projects that had no guarantee of success and that subsequently provided tremendous benefits beyond just the program itself. Sure, the Space race likely would not have been nearly as productive had it not also been for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. But whatever the driving factors of the space race were, the truth is that the work that was done by scientists, engineers, mathematicians and others, it did more than just see people land on the moon. And I can't believe I just said just see people in on the moon, because that alone is truly monumental, But no, their work would make possible new technologies that were useful in lots of other ways. So there were a lot of other benefits they came out of the space race. Like the primary goal obviously was let's get there before the other guys do. But in order to do that, there were so many innovations made that would filter their way into other aspects of our lives that we saw an incredible benefit from that work. And that's kind of the idea here, that's the hope with a moonshot project. You identify a really tough goal that you want to achieve, so it has to be really challenging. It maybe something that is years out from even being possible, and it may eventually turn out that that goal is just not achievable, at least not with whatever current resources are available. But the hope is, even if you can't realize the end goal, you'll discover useful stuff along your journey, and it may turn out that you didn't get to the destination you had planned on, but you did create something truly remarkable. All the same, X serves that purpose for Google, but to be more accurate, it really serves that purpose for Alphabet. That's the parent company that oversees Google, as well as several other spin off companies like Waimo, which actually got its start as a Google X project. Now, to be clear, Google Slash Alphabet is not the only company to have a department like this. Over at Lockheed Martin, you've got skunk Works. That division serves a similar purpose. It is produced notable aircraft like the U Tube spy plane and the F twenty two Raptor fighter aircraft, among many others. A. T and T has Bell Labs, which is notable for being the think tank that produced transformative technologies like the solid state transistor and the laser Xerox had the Palo Alto Research Center or Park p A r C is now a standalone company, so it's no longer a Xerox division, and Park was notable for producing a lot of the innovations Steve Jobs would later lift to use in the Macintosh computer, you know, things like the graphic user interface and the computer mouse. Jobs was given a tour of Park, saw that Xerox engineers had developed this incredible technology, but that Xerox never really invested in making that a consumer product. So it was this technology that was just kind of wasting away, and so Steve Jobs made sure it didn't go to waste. However, let's focus on x and its story now. These things can be a little bit complicated to unravel, largely because Google has always been a company of engineers, and their ways can be complex and mysterious or sometimes haphazard and difficult to untangle. Engineers are great. I love engineers. I loved talking with them. However, sometimes it takes an engineer to suss out what the heck another engineer has been doing this whole time. I actually feel like a lot of Google products fall into that category where if you are an engineer, you start to grock what is going on pretty quickly, But if you are a mere mortal like myself, you might encounter a Google product and you're spending the first you know, hour or so just trying to figure out how you're supposed to use it. And once you do, and you realize why the decisions were made to make it that way, it clicks. But it's not as intuitive as say, Apple's approach to things like user interfaces. Anyway, one way to tell the story of Google X is to talk about Sebastian Throne. Uh. Sebastian Throne was born in what at that point was West Germany. Now you would just call it Germany, and this was back in nineteen sixty seven. He studied computer science, among many other subjects, and by he had become part of the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University. In two thousand one, he took a year off from CMU and he spent a year at Stanford and that must have been quite a year, because in two thousand three he would leave CMU officially and join the teaching staff at Stanford University. He also became the head of the artificial intelligence laboratory there, and he would participate in a really important competition, actually several of them, but the one I'm specifically talking about is the DARPA Grand Challenge. So DARPA is the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This is part of the Department of Defense, and it is instrumental and developing the next generation of technologies that the Department of Defense and by extension, the U. S Military will depend upon. So this is all about creating technologies that ultimately contribute to national defense. Now, DARPA doesn't really do research on its own. It's not like it's some secret underground government lab filled with robots and panels with flashing lights. I wish it were now. It's more filled with like administrators and budget sheets. DARPA really awards grants to organizations like universities or research facilities, sometimes private companies for specific projects. And occasionally DARTBA holds competitions in which the agency identifies a goal or a task of some sort and the various participants try to create a solution that meets the criteria and beats out all the other competitors and usually will win some sort of prize, like, you know, a couple of billion dollars in some cases. Now I should note that Throne had previously participated in other DARPA challenges. These were not Grand challenges, but these were various robotics challenges, and so he was working on things with robotics and artificial intelligence, so he was no stranger to competing, and he had been involved in those kind of competitions even before he was part of the car Carnegie melon University. I keep wanting to say Carnegie because that's how Andrew Carnegie said it, but I've been reprimanded. It's Carnegie Mellon University. And he had been participating on teams with Carnegie Mellon. He did some a few times before he even joined Carnegie Mellon, and then he did it again with Stanford. So in two thousand four he participated in the first of several Grand challenges that would kick off the quest to create autonomous vehicles. The two thousand four DARPA Grand Challenge invited racing teams from various universities and research facilities to build an autonomous vehicle that would be capable of traveling a hundred fifty miles or two dty kilometers along a predetermined desert route. And it turned out this was a moonshot sort of project because ultimately not a single one of the vehicles that participated was able to complete the course. In fact, the vehicle that traveled the furthest only made its seven point three two miles down the road or eleven point seven eight kilometers. That one was actually from Thrones Old stomping grounds of Carnegie Mellon, undaunted. DARPA then held another Grand Challenge the following year. They changed up the course, they changed up some of the requirements, and that year would be very different. For one thing, there was now an actual community that had grown up around this quest to build autonomous vehicle technology. There were people who were developing new approaches and new you know, new technologies to make this happen, and that meant there were new opportunities to collaborate and share knowledge. And while this was a competition, there were teams that were eager to develop or learn best practices and then share them with others. It became a very community experience and and the the engineers learned through their failures, and in two thousand five, Stanford's team would take first place in the competition. Interestingly, Carnegie Melon had two teams and both of those teams took second and third place. So you know, Thrun certainly had his influence on Carnegie Mellon. I mean he had been there previously, and so presumably some of the people who are working on the team were people who either had studied directly under Throne or at least new people who had, So yeah, he was very much at the center of this work. Now, I've done episodes about the Grand Challenges before, so we're not going to go over all that there were more after the two thousand five one anyway, and that's a that's a story that's worthy of its own series of podcasts, So we'll stick with Thrun's work, and it definitely caught the attention of Google. In two thousand seventh, Round would join Google as a Google Fellow, that is, a level ten Googler or level ten Google engineer, which sounds kind of like I'm talking about a cult at that point, right. So in Google there was, and I presume still is, sort of a hierarchy for engineers. So if you're like level one, you're kind of at the entry level of engineers at Google, so you might do something like work in I T Support. By the time you hit around level five, you're talking about folks who frequently have a doctorate in their respective fields, they're they're an expert at whatever they do. But beyond level five, you've got the engineers at Google that the company views as being pivotal for a project to succeed. So these are people who not only are experts, but they are drivers for success. These are people with vision and capability, and they make the impossible possible. By the time you're hitting up to level nine, it means you are a distinguished engineer and you are highly respected generally speaking, at least for your expertise and ability. And then to become a level ten is to be a Google Fellow, which usually means you're also the leading expert in whatever your particular field is. So it's not just that you're an expert, you are the expert that other experts refer to when they need help. Uh. And there have also been a couple of Google Senior Fellows level elevens, but you know enough about that. So Thrown as a Google Fellow worked on some interesting challenges. He helped build out tech that would make turn by turn directions possible in Google Maps. And you'all, I don't know how many of you remember this, but way back in the early days of web based map solutions. You had to plot out your your route and then print it out right. I'm talking back in the old map quest days, and this was definitely a huge jump from just using a regular old map or atlas right where you just had to turn the page, find the right map and trace your route. It was better than that, but it did also mean that you typically needed to have an extra person, like an actual navigator, looking after the instruction so that you didn't miss a turn because you know it was printed, you couldn't you couldn't know how close you were to the next turn. You just had to really pay attention. And it was only later that we would get the turn by turn capabilities coupled with accurate GPS receivers that would transform navigation forever. I'm sure several of you out there have used maps to get around, either because you've been driving for a while, or maybe you drive in places where there's little to no reception, so you have to have those physical maps. But for a lot of people that has a lost art, it is something that they are not used to and it would be very challenging for them to do it today. But this term by turned approach, in part, it's one reason why people don't get lost as frequently, and in another part, it's kind of made us less capable of reading maps, so you could look at it as both a positive and a negative. Thrown had also worked on street View, which is the Google project that saw vehicles with cameras mounted on their rooftops drive slowly through various neighbors hoods and map the photographs of actual locations to their coordinates on a map. Also one that got a lot of controversy as it went into various neighborhoods around the United States and later on the world. And perhaps most importantly, Thrown brought his experience in developing autonomous vehicle technology to a project that at the time was called Chauffeur. This was Google's own driverless vehicle effort. We'll talk more about how that became kind of the the seed for Google X, but first let's take a quick break. Okay, before we went to break, Sebastian Thrun had started work on Chauffeur, Google's driverless car initiative way back in the days. It's around like two thousand and nine ish, and Google's co founders Larry Page and Sarah gay Brenn were really impressed by Thron's work, and they approached him and gave him the chance to spearhead an entire department dedicated to pursue challenging opportunities. Uh. They also gave him a new title, the Director of Other, which I don't know. That kind of sounds like it came out of like a Neil game In book or something. To me, it's got that kind of ring to it. But yeah, this is still early on in the phase where he was Director of Other, as this concept of Google X began to take shape. Now, at that stage, Google's whole R and D approach was super duper secret, Like the outside world had no knowledge of this developing department within Google. Later we would have a better idea of what kinds of projects were going on inside that department. But for a while, it was really hush hush, so much so that I actually remember visiting someone at Google around this time and then getting quite cross with them once word broke out about Google's self driving vehicles got into the public. I mean, if you can't trust a nice guy like me who just happens to be the host of a widely distributed tech podcast, whom can you trust? But I should be fair. Even within Google itself, the X department, as it would become known, was mysterious. To get entry to their buildings, you needed an authorized key card, and not very many people had one of those, Like they had normal key cards where they could get through most of Google campus. But once you got up to this, yeah, you had to have special authorization essentially. And while the standard googler at the time was given up to of their work week to tackle personal projects which could one day become a Google product, a lot of Google products actually began as one of those time projects. The X team was actually less structured than that. So with in the Google X division, creativity reigned supreme. The department welcomed unlikely, outlandish ideas many in fact, probably most of them wouldn't pan out, but it sounds like the early motto was something along the lines of you never know if you don't try. So. Thrown was also fiercely protective of his team. He wanted them to have all the freedom to experiment and test ideas and to collaborate across teams. So maybe one team that's working on one really big problem ends up collaborating with a team that's working on a totally different problem, and that cross pollination ends up fueling new creativity. He didn't want his team members to ever have to worry about attending meetings where they have to give status updates and budget reports and that kind of thing. He wanted them to focus completely on their projects and not worry about having to justify those brought projects to to top brass. So Google effectively funded the X division, but the individual projects inside didn't have to break down costs or anything like that, at least not to a really granular level, certainly not to a level that you would expect for most businesses. Thron led the division from twenty ten until two thousand twelve. He actually got really focused on the driverless car project, ultimately kind of stepping back from overseeing the overall UH projects in Google X, and then ultimately left Google altogether in order to found a new education company called Udacity. So taking his place was Eric quote unquote astro Teller. Astro's nickname apparently that's what he goes by all the time. And boy, howney, does this guy have a pedigree. So astro Teller's grandfather is the guy who spearheaded the development of the hydrogen bomb a k A Edward Teller. One day, I'm gonna have to do a full episode about Edward Teller, because that was one complicated dude. Uh, A brilliant person, a vilified person for reasons that would become clear if I do a full episode. So we'll put that aside. In the future. Maybe I'll do an Edward Teller episode anyway, Astro's other grandfather had also had won Nobel prizes, So so yeah, Astro came from a family that had a reputation for big thinking, and he would be very modest when describing his own role within his family. And Astro Teller had kind of a moonshot task of his own, which was to take this creative, whirlwind, chaotic department and give it a little more structure. You know, there was still a clear need for lots of freedom, but without any structure, there was little chance of being able to actually harness whatever came out of the research, Right, Like, you want to make sure that if you do come up with things that are useful, that you have a process in place to make that come to fruition. Otherwise, if you're just creating cool stuff but nobody ever gets to see it, it would be kind of like, you know, Willie Wonka's chocolate factory before he ever gave out the golden tickets. Yeah, it's an amazing place, but who gets to see it. So to that end, tell her brought in a woman named Obie Felton who had previously worked in Google's marketing department. So she was not from an engineering background, she was from a product marketing background, and she was specifically brought in because she could bring that kind of perspective to the department, and she helped design Google X so that had a little more framework to it. Her title became head of getting moon Shots ready for contact with the real world, and she would later go on to leave Google and found her own start up with a focus on mental health. So yeah, she and and many others who have worked at Google X have gone on to become sort of a who's who have startup founders and industry leaders. It's it's really fascinating. In fact, I even got to interview a a former director over at at Google X, and it's just fascinating to talk with people who have been in those positions. Now. According to an article titled The Truth about Google X by John Gartner, and Fast Company. For a project to be considered within Google X. For for this to be something that the department actually pursues, UH, it has to meet three criteria. One is that the projects should address a problem that affects millions or potentially billions of people. Two is that some part of the solution should at least resemble science fiction. It should be you know, incorporating innovation in some way. Third is that these solutions need to rely on technologies that are either currently available or kind of on the cusp of availability. Alternatively, Wired says that third criterion is really that the solution should produce is a radically positive outcome, and that the outcome should be ten times better than whatever exists today. So, whatever the the challenges, whatever the goal is, the realization of that goal should be that where we are there is ten times better than where we were before. Now this appears to be when the department also began to formalize its approach a little bit, which was trying to make a project fail right away. And and I really do mean that. I mean the team would get together and they would start to identify, you know, some sort of approach to solving a problem, and they would first try to tackle the hardest part of whatever that problem was right away, you know, identify what is going to be the most difficult thing to get beyond with that problem, and try to solve for that first. And the wisdom was that the team discovered that the hardest part of the challenge was totally beyond reach, it would be best to just admit failure at least for now, and to move on. So Google X would pursue some goals but abandon lots of others. Like they might say, you know what, this just isn't going to be a thing yet, let's put it aside now. Reasons for abandoning a project were varied and are varied to this day. So it might just be that the costs of the project are estimated to be beyond whatever the benefits are. Now. By costs, I don't necessarily just mean money, although it could be that those costs could be in stuff like effort. So if a project aims to create a new way to do something, but it turns out that this new way actually requires more work to complete than existing ways, well that's a good reason to pull the eject lever on that project. You know, I'm often left thinking about people and I'm guilty of this too, people who would spend more time and effort getting out of doing something than it would say for them to actually do the thing. That's the kind of stuff that the department wants to avoid. So an example of such a project was an attempt to build a safe jet pack. If you've been asking where's my jet pack? Well, Google's answer would be we tried. So. I had a tech Crunch Disrupt conference back in fourteen. Astro Teller was a speaker there and revealed that the Google X division had been at work on a jet pack, because that was one of those projects that Astro himself was saying, I just think it would be cool to have one. But ultimately the team concluded that it would be such an inefficient device from a power perspective, that it would be so fuel inefficient that it just made no sense to pursue. You would be able to get around with other ways using way less fuel than if you were to use the jet pack. It would just be this noisy, inefficient means of transportation, and that's before you even get to the safety concerns. So they said, yeah, this is a non starter because we can already get around using way less fuel, using you know, conventional means, so there's no point in pursuing this. Another abandoned project was a hoverboard, another thing astro Teller really wanted, and this would be kind of like what you would see in the film Back to the Future Too, and in a small bit and Back to the Future three. So way back when Back to the Future Too was in production, the production team teased the general public. They said that the hoverboard technology actually existed. They used it in the movie, but the toy companies figured out that it was too dangerous for the public, so it would never go on sale. So it's this this kind of joke that these hoverboards really existed, but it was all a prank. Of course, they didn't really exist. However, a team at Google tried to make it work. They used stuff like graphite and magnets to make a very small version of this work, and they could get it to work on a very small scale with models, but then they found it very difficult to scale that up to a hoverboard that would actually be human size and capable of holding a human up, and the problems might not have been insurmountable. Maybe with enough time and resources they could have gotten around it, But they figured that even if they did suss out all the problems and solve them, the benefits of the technology are so niche that it's not worth all that time and effort and other resources that would be necessary to make it become a reality. So the hoverboard went into the project graveyard at Google X. Now, in other cases, it might be that the actual challenge is just so ambitious as to be deemed impossible. One such idea, at least according to an article in Forbes by Eric Mack and repeated in the Fast Company epiece, was a supposed teleportation method, as in yeah, you get zapped from one physical location to appear in another. However, the Google team concluded that this particular concept violates a few basic laws of physics as we understand them, which even Scotty on Star Trek would say is a real deal breaker. You cannot break the laws of physics. Now, there are likely dozens or hundreds or maybe thousands of projects that X has tackled and abandoned since it was founded back in two that we will never really hear about. It is rare to get a glimpse at what was going on within this first division within Google and then subsidiary company of Alphabet. However, we can talk about some of the work that happened within the department that did see at least some level of mainstream visibility. And one thing that we can talk about right off the bat is the driverless car technology that kind of started the whole thing. Now, Eventually people began to spot vehicles that were operating around the Google campus in California, and some of these vehicles had these weird frames attached to the rooftops that had all this electronic equipment on it, and some folks even noticed that the people in the cars weren't necessarily touching the steering wheel while the car was in motion. Eventually, that project would evolve into the spinoff company Weymo. So Google did at one point come forward and say, yes, we're working on driverless cars. That was the point where I got really snitty at the Googler I know who didn't tell me about it because they weren't supposed to, so they were doing the right thing. I was just being kind of cranky about it. And once we began to learn about that, it became known as Project Weymo, and then eventually was spun off as a startup called Weymo, which is against still a subsidiary of Alphabet. So Alphabet being the parent company Google, exists beneath Alphabet, so does Weimo, you know, so does YouTube that kind of thing. So Weymo continues to work on bringing driverless car technology to market, and it operates some limited implementations. Uh, there is a limited self driving taxi service in the Phoenix, Arizona area that you know. It's it's very tightly controlled, right, Like, you can't go beyond a heavily defined region within which this service can operate. So if you needed a ride that was outside that region, you can't do it in Weymo because it needs that controlled environment in order to operate safely. But it's still is a platform upon which the company is learning, uh new things that are informing the future of autonomous driving. Much of the company's work also is focusing on automating the trucking industry, which would be huge. So this is one of the projects that grew out of Google X that's actually stuck around. Now when we come back, I'm going to talk about other projects, some of which also stuck around, and some of which did not. But they did get going in Google X, and they had a good amount of steam behind them at one point, but some of them just didn't pan out. We're going to talk about more of those when we come back after this break. So before the break, I hinted that there are some projects that started in Google X that got really far but ultimately didn't pan out. One of those had to do with high altitude balloons. So the problem that was identified was that there are areas in the world that have limited to no connectivity to the Internet, and the Internet is such an important tool that this was seen as a massive detriment to those communities and that there should be solutions to provide the potential at least to connect to the Internet. And the concept here was to use high altitude balloons flying well above weather systems, and that these balloons would carry essentially Internet transmitters, kind of similar to what satellite Internet does, except it's not all the way out into orbit. It's being carried by these balloons, and you could use these networks of balloons to provide connectivity to remote and underserved locations like parts of Africa. This would become known as Project loon I actually wrote an article about this for How Stuff Works way back in the day, and this project started around two thousand eleven. Engineers worked on it in secret for about two years, and then Google announced the program in two thousand and thirteen. That's when it got the name Project Loon, or at least publicly it was known as Project Loon. They might have been calling it that within the department for a while, I don't know, But like Weymo, Google would eventually create a spin off company called Loon to bring this technology to market. That happened in two thousand eighteen, when Loon would become its own company as a subsidiary under Alphabet. The new company landed a deal to provide Internet connectivity over parts of Kenya, and while it seemed like Loon was on its way to success, in reality it became clear that the operational costs and the risks were too great to make Loon a viable business, so Google popped the Loon project in twenty one. But like I said earlier in this episode, sometimes the pursuit of a goal can generate benefits even if you never achieve the final goal itself. So with the case of Loon, sign antists were able to leverage high resolution data that was gathered by the project's high altitude balloons and study stuff like climate modeling or how gravity waves moved through the stratosphere. So again, without this project, that data wouldn't have been available to the scientific community. So there were benefits that emerged from this project, even though the project itself you might describe as a failure because it was unable to achieve the goal that was, you know, established from the get go. Now, another famous project to emerge from Google X was Google Glass. That's the augmented reality headset Google unveiled way back in now. For those of y'all not familiar with Google Glass, the original version looked kind of like frames for eyeglasses. No lenses in the original um and they had stems that would go over the ears, so you know, you had a little nose rest the would sit on the bridge of your nose and the stems would go over your ear, over the backs of your ears, and instead of lenses, you had this clear prism that was located a little bit above and to the right of your right eye, and a tiny projector from the stem on that side could beam in images into that prism. So when you looked up and to the right a little bit through this prism, you could see the images that were projected on there. They kind of overlaid whatever was behind it in your in your field of view, so the prism wouldn't block your forward view. So in theory it would be safe to where even if you were, you know, driving a car or something, because the idea was that it wasn't supposed to interfere with your vision. And you would pair the Google Glass with an Android smartphone, and the smartphone would provide the connectivity for the glass itself. It acted kind of like a modem for the Google Glass. The headset included small bone conduction speaker in it so that you could hear your audio through. The headset had a microphone so we could pick up voice commands. Uh. It also could pick up gesture commands both from physical touch as well as moving your head in certain ways. You could you could use that to have it do specific actions. And it had a camera incorporated and as well, so you can actually use your Google Glass to take photos. And I actually had a Google Glass headset once upon a time, and I wore it to Dragon Con that year. That's a big science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic book convention that takes place here in Atlanta, and it's known for being incredibly popular with Cause players. In fact, sometimes it feels like Cause players out number of people in mundane clothing by a factor of two to one or maybe more. So. I wore this brand new Google Glass headset, which lots of folks had not even heard of at that point, and I went to Dragon Con. I used the headset to take photos of people after first asking or permission to do so. Always important anyone going to a convention. You see some cosplay you love, ask permission before you start taking photos. It's just polite. So that was a lot of fun for me. And partly the reason it was so much fun for me is a lot of the pictures I got, at least the initial pictures I got, were people looking at me very confused because I chose to use the voice command to take a photo using Google Glass. So I would use the activation phrase, which I'm not gonna say simply because it's the same phrase Google uses today for its smart speakers, and I have one behind me, and if I say it, I'll wake it up. But then you would say take a picture. So I would say take a picture, and the person I was looking at would say huh or you know what or something like that, and that would be the photo I would end up with as someone looking confused and saying, why are you talking to me like this? And then I would explain, oh, I just took a photo using this headset, and and they went bonkers. It was like it was like I was the future, I was science fiction at this science fiction convention. I would show them the picture that would come up on my phone that was taken by the headset and they loved it. Well. That was a fun, positive experience for me with Google Glass. However, Google Glass in general got some awful reviews. For one thing, it was really expensive and this was a pilot program, like these were not rolled out for general consumption. That also meant they were available in very limited numbers, so it was also kind of elitist. Although I will point out there was at least one other person at Dragon Con that same year wearing Google Glass because we took a picture of each other wearing them. Uh. There was also a concern for privacy because you're wearing a camera on your face, so there was this fear that someone could be taking photos or videos surreptitiously, and a midley that is creepy. Now you could you could counter that by saying everyone is carrying a camera with them all the time, it's in their pocket, it's a smartphone, that this is already happening. People are taking photos and videos surreptitiously all the time. However, there's just there's like a psychological difference when it's something that you're wearing on your face as opposed to something you're holding in your hand. And um, you know, I gotta admit, like the first time I wore my Google glass without thinking and walked right into a public restroom, I realized, woe, this is a problem. This is not something that there's got to be protocol here because this is inappropriate. I did a I did a Grandpa Simpson immediate one a turn and walked right back out of the restroom, and then handed my Google glass too to my wife, who looked after them while I went right back in. Anyway, Google glass ultimately failed to emerge as a consumer product. Google made the determination that it just wasn't going to work. It was going to be too expensive, it was going to be too niche. They're all ready was this big backlash against it. So instead they focused Google Glass for the enterprise market, enterprise customers and businesses. So businesses buy them and give them to their employees, who then use Google Glass to do stuff like keep track of checklists or instructions and that kind of thing while the employees are working on a job, which is nifty. It's just not quite as amazing as what Google was kind of hoping for, or seeming to hope for, back when they unveiled the technology nearly a decade ago. Glass does remain active. It is still under X, so that is still an ongoing project and it did not uh spin off. It did not quote unquote graduate. That's what Google says whenever one of their their projects spins off into a subsidiary company. Now, another initiative that began under Google X was a service in which flying vehicles would deliver small packages. So we're talking about drone to livery meaning a service that uses drones to deliver stuff, you know, not a service that delivers drones, though I guess a larger drone could potentially deliver a smaller n you know what I'm getting lost in the weeds. Here engineers began serious work on this project in two thousand twelve. Two years later, Google acknowledged what it had been working on, because keep in mind early on this is in the top secret phase, and Google began to test this technology in Australia. Google would spin this project off as a startup called Wing, so, like Waymo and formerly Loon, Wing has become another company under alphabet. Wing delivers packages kind of the same way that NASA used a skycrane to lower the recent Mars rovers on the Red Planet. Namely the delivery system the drone in this case hovers above the ground. It lowers the package or payload using cables and a winch, and then once it detects that the payload has touched down, it detaches the cable from the package and then the drone can fly back home, presumably to get a treat, probably a microchip. In two thousand thirteen, Google acquired a company called mccannie m a k A n I. That company was working on a wind energy solution, a really interesting idea, and it used kites with turbines in the kites rather than a traditional wind turbine. The big benefit here being that the kites. One they're deployable at different places. They are still tethered to ground units so that you can actually harness the electricity that's being generated and store it in batteries or transmitted to wherever you need to use it. Uh. But they used way less material than your traditional wind farm would. So Google acquires them in two thousand thirteen. The Google X division got to work on the technology, and by two thousand nineteen, Alphabet was ready to graduate mccannie as its own company again as a subsidiary to Alphabet. But mcconnie fell into a similar fate like Loon did. Engineers were unable to find a way to make mcconnie work so that it was both practical and reliable, and essentially the company said that the road to commercialization was too risky and thus didn't meet the threshold for support. So Alphabet ultimately shut down mccannie in twenty just a year after it had graduated. There are other projects that emerged from Google X or just X because you know, like I said, Google X itself would get spun off into its own company, so also a subsidiary to Alphabet. So there's another project that's called Malta. This is a company that is working to store energy in the form of heat using tanks of molten salt. So imagine that you've generated electrical energy in some way. You know you've created this electrical energy. You need to store that electrical energy till you actually need to use it, right, because electricity is something where you either use it or you store it, or you lose it. So in this case, Malta converts the electricity into thermal energy, which is stored in these vats of molten salts. Then when you need electricity, you essentially reverse this process. You convert the thermal energy into electricity. So this is kind of like batteries, right, it's energy storage. Now, obviously batteries are electrochemical and and this is good old heat we're talking about with molten salts, but still similar in concept and the idea like this is a way of of storing the electricity you've generated. Another graduated project is Intrinsic. This company aims to revolutionize industrial robots and make them capable of handling different tasks so that as a company's business changes, the robots can continue to be useful. Because typically your your industrial robot is something that's designed to do a very specific series of actions and that's it. Like, it's great at doing those, but you can't tell it to do anything else. Typically, So Intrinsics part in this is to develop kind of the software that would allow robots to be able to learn and adapt to changing situations rather than be tied down to one specific process. Now, obviously this also requires the robot to be capable of doing whatever the extra activities are, but it is meant to increase a robot's usefulness. And this sounds deceptively simple, but it turns out it is super complicated. It touches on tons of advanced computer science problems like perception, which is still something that's really tricky, motion planning simulation, and tons more. It also involves working on force control so that robots use the appropriate amount of force for whatever the task at hand happens to be, or task it clamp as it were. Intrinsics work is atributing to a growing wealth of knowledge and expertise when it comes to robotics and AI. While Intrinsic is focused on industrial robotics, those same advances are going to play an important role for robotics in general, which I anticipate will include robots that share spaces with human beings. Now, there are other ones that we could talk about. Their contact lenses that can detect glucose levels in tiers, which could be really useful for people who are dealing with diabetes. You know, these kind of concepts that are really really mind blowing. But I think the truly remarkable thing about X is that, unlike your traditional company, X isn't focused on producing the biggest return on investment within the shortest amount of time. This is not the type of business that is looking forward to the next quarter. It's the type that looks forward to the next ten years. And well, it's true that more ideas get shot down that move forward. It's also true that some of the ones that do move forward ultimately have to be put on the shelf, like Loon and mccannie. What the engineers learn along the way can often find its way into other products. The benefits of the research manifest in ways that the team couldn't possibly have predicted when they first started. And while we might not ever get that jet back or that hoverboard, we might discover that some elements that were uncovered during those projects get incorporated into stuff we used today. Now, I want to be clear, I still have some major issues with Alphabet the company. Like I often say Google, but really at this point you just mean Alphabet because the company as a as a whole is a data black hole. I mean, it sucks up information at a scale that is impossible for me to get my mind wrapped around. Google has benefited from our personal information, I mean because of us and our data, Google has become ridiculously profitable. And we shouldn't get Alphabet a free path us just because one of its subsidiaries is working on some truly difficult problems and coming up with novel solutions that could potentially be of enormous benefit. That is good, all props to the x UH company and Alphabet for even doing this, But we can't just you know, paying everything with a with a happy brush. We have to keep everything else in mind too. Still, it was fun to look into this, and a lot of these could be their own episodes, right. There could be a way Mo episode, There could be a Loon episode. In fact, I think I have done a Loon episode, So maybe I'll do some more episodes about specific parts of X in the future. In the meantime, if you have suggestions for topics I should tackle on tech stuff, there's some alliteration for you. You can reach out to me in a couple of ways. One way is on Twitter. We have the handle text stuff h s W there that's how we got this request for example. Another way is to who download the I Heart Radio app, navigate over to the text Stuff part of the app. There's a little microphone icon you can click on that leave a voice message up to thirty seconds in length and let me know what you would like me to cover that way. Either way, I hope you're doing well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y text Stuff is an I heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.