When Astro Teller announces something, I perk up like a lab rat who just heard the food pellet dispenser. The man calls himself the “Captain of Moonshots,” and—unlike your average LinkedIn guru—he actually delivers. My well attuned European skepticism twitches, whispering, “Easy there, this might be another crazy talk.” But then I remember: Astro has both the audacity and the budget to back it up.
This week at SXSW, amid a city fueled by mind-tiring innovation and irresponsibly strong coffee, Teller launched his latest project: The Moonshot Podcast. My initial reaction? Equal parts “Yes, more Astro!” and “God, not another podcast.” But then, this isn’t just any podcats: it’s an Astro Teller production. The launch venue was the Thompson Hotel’s Red River Ballroom, a place so polished it looks like a VC’s fever dream. You can almost hear the distant hum of futuristic elevator music and the soft rustle of freshly printed NDAs.
X marks the spot (where wild ideas go to explode
If you haven’t been following Astro Teller’s career like an overzealous fan (guilty), here’s the short version: He runs X, Alphabet’s semi-secretive mad scientist lab where outrageous tech ideas either change the world or go out in a glorious blaze. Google Glass? That’s X. Waymo’s self-driving cars? That’s X. Wing’s delivery drones? Also X. Loon’s balloon-powered internet? Yeah… that one didn’t exactly make it, but X as well.
Why am I obsessed with Teller? Because he’s the rare breed of a leader with energy to spare , who combines big-brain ambition with the willingness to publicly faceplant. He preaches the gospel of failing fast, learning faster, and moving on before the ashes cool.
Plus, with a name like Astro Teller, he’s either a tech visionary or a Bond villain, and honestly, either would be great. Sharing the stage with Astro were three people who sounded like the cast of a niche sci-fi dramedy: That Adam Savage. The MythBusters guy who lives for blowing things up in the name of science; Nick Thompson , CEO of The Atlantic, a magazine so old it probably has parchment archives but is now straddling the line between print relic and digital juggernaut; Dr. Catie Cuan , A robot choreographer. As in, she teaches robots to dance. That is a thing now. I’m still processing this information. You’re not alone.
Savage, ever the chaos enthusiast, championed the necessity of destruction in the name of innovation. Thompson waxed poetic on how the right narrative can turn a high-profile failure into an eventual win. And Cuan? She blew my mind by explaining how programming robots to move gracefully isn’t just for fun—it shifts how humans perceive AI altogether. Look, I love Astro Teller, but even I recognize the irony of discussing failure while nibbling on gourmet hors d’oeuvres in a five-star hotel. But here’s the thing: failure isn’t just a necessary evil in Teller’s world. It’s the main event.
“We don’t fail just for the hell of it,” Astro said, exuding the kind of calm only someone with infinite Google money can pull off. “We fail to learn—fast and cheap—so we can figure out what actually works.” Savage nodded. “Every rocket I build, every contraption I test—none of it works the first time. You learn from the explosion, pick up the pieces, and build something better.”
Meanwhile, Cuan explained that teaching robots to dance is an endless loop of missteps. But every wobbly algorithm, every mechanical misfire, gets them closer to something that feels alive. Thompson tied it all together: “People love to laugh at a spectacular failure. But if you control the story, you turn the faceplant into a stepping stone.”
So, what’s Astro’s new podcast about? Simple: embracing failure as the messy, necessary path to breakthrough innovation. He wants to make “failing fast” aspirational, because the reality is, you learn more from the disasters than the smooth rides. Expect deep dives into wild ideas, entrepreneurs teetering between genius and meltdown, and—if we’re lucky—a cameo from Dr. Cuan’s dancing robots.
By the time the event wrapped, my skepticism had quieted. Because for all the big talk and moon metaphors, Astro Teller doesn’t just sell optimism, he builds the machines that make it plausible. Stepping out of the Thompson Hotel into the Austin sun, a stone cold espresso dopio in hand, I felt it again: that intoxicating sense that maybe, just maybe, the impossible is within reach.
Or at least worth a (moon)hot.
Jay Graber’s keynote at SXSW : The Latin T-Shirt that rocked the tech world
After refueling with yet another latte (it’s SXSW—sleep is optional), I hustled over to Jay Graber’s keynote, eager to see how the founder of Bluesky would shake up the festival. I arrived just in time. Turns out, she did so quite literally with her T-shirt, which blared the Latin phrase: “Mundus sine Caesaribus” (A world without Caesars). A world without emperors, overlords, or, in modern parlance, Big Tech autocrats.
The message from Graber was hardly subtle. The audience buzzed with excitement—and maybe a little unease—because it’s not every day you see a shirt that simultaneously references Roman history and calls for the end of digital (and, let’s face it here in Trump Land) political tyranny.
Jay Graber is on my radar for a while now. She is one of the rising stars in the decentralized tech movement. She’s building Bluesky, a platform-turned-protocol that aims to give power back to users by removing the central authority so many social media giants cling to. If you did not get this; in Elmo speak: she runs a powerful fast growing platform that looks just like Twitter (X), but without supervillain and extreme right logarithms and it is decentralized. That is important: as platforms like Facebook (cough Meta) and Twitter (cough X) shape our reality through algorithms and data collection, Graber wants to flip the script. Bluesky promises a future where you can choose your own social “instance,” control your data, and basically opt out of being treated like a product.
In an age where privacy feels like a quaint relic, she’s offering a vision of social media that’s more akin to email: federated, user-driven, and hard for any one corporation to dominate. The moment Graber stepped on stage, all eyes were on her T-shirt. Written in bold Romanesque font, “Mundus sine Caesaribus” had the room enthralled. She explained. “A reminder that no single entity should wield absolute power—especially over something as critical as our digital spaces.” She didn’t mention Zuckerberg directly and Musk (maybe that would have been too on the nose), but the implication was crystal clear: if you’re building a platform meant to rival Big Tech, a T-shirt proclaiming “A world without emperors” says it all.
She’s shaking the foundation of social media by pushing for decentralized protocols, challenging the idea that a single corporation—or a single CEO—should control the data and speech of billions.Bluesky’s architecture reflects this vision. It’s designed so that your posts are truly yours, giving users the power to take their data wherever they go. Privacy and control aren’t afterthoughts; they’re built into the foundation. And then there’s the leadership angle. Unlike the usual tech founders chasing quick cash or a lucrative buyout, she seems genuinely invested in building something different: a long-term, community-owned ecosystem that doesn’t just answer to profit.
The audience at SXSW ate it up, especially her emphasis on transparency and accountability. The Q&A that followed was packed: How do you moderate hate speech in a decentralized system? Won’t this just create siloed echo chambers? Is this real, or just a pipe dream?
Graber tackled each question head-on. She acknowledged the complexity: moderation alone is a headache that gives most platform teams nightmares, but stressed that community-driven governance is more durable in the long run. It’s a fair point, especially given the whiplash we’ve seen under single-point leadership at other platforms.
Graber laid out a roadmap that’s both ambitious and refreshingly un-corporate. She wants to build a protocol—like email—where you can choose your server based on the rules and culture you prefer. Don’t like the vibe on one server? Migrate to another. Or start your own. The idea is that control stays at the edges (users), not at the center (corporations). “Social media isn’t just about content,” Graber said, leaning forward with conviction. “It’s about community and identity. If we can build a truly open network, we can give people the power to shape their own communities without fear of a single ‘Caesar’ changing the rules overnight.” Her concluding note drew raucous applause: “We deserve a better future than one decided by a few powerful gatekeepers. Let’s build it—together.” If you’d swapped out “algorithmic transparency” for “liberty,” it would have sounded downright revolutionary.
The New Order?
Walking out of the keynote, I felt a twinge of that SXSW optimism that tends to overshadow my usual techno skeptical lens. Maybe I’ve just had too many caffeinated cocktails, or maybe—just maybe—people like Jay Graber are onto something real. Her T-shirt was more than just a fashion statement; it was a banner, a call to arms for anyone fed up with platform paternalism and fucking lousy politics. Sure, “Mundus sine Caesaribus” might be a little dramatic, but so is the notion that one or two companies control the digital world we inhabit, even in the country we live in, the kingdom of the nice people of Belgium.
Between Astro Teller’s vow to fail faster and Jay Graber’s dream of dismantling digital Caesars, this year’s SXSW has been one giant pep rally for big ideas sofar.
Will The Moonshot Podcast actually inspire a new generation of risk-takers, or is it just another PR stunt? Will Bluesky genuinely dethrone the social media giants, or fade away into the ether of well-intentioned open-source projects? Honestly, who knows? But SXSW, in all its taco-scented glory, is the place for such moonshots and manifestos. It’s where starstruck fans like me can gush over Astro Teller while simultaneously questioning the logic of building balloon-powered internet. It’s where Latin T-shirts quietly declare war on digital kingdoms, and no one bats an eye, because in Austin, weird is the status quo.
The future might be uncertain, but after all, someone’s got to taste-test the moonshots. Might as well be me.
