Supercharging Human Health

The Moonshot Podcast is back!

In the season 2 premiere, X’s Captain of Moonshots Astro Teller explores how three X projects developed technology to transform the future of healthcare.

He first sits down with Kathryn Zealand and Anna Roumiantseva from Skip to hear about how the world’s first “e-bike for walking” evolved from their team’s mobility moonshot at X. They recount how an early prototype of Skip’s powered pants helped carry a colleague to top of the Salesforce Tower, and share how the product has developed since spinning out into an independent company (Astro even tries a pair on for size to see their progress firsthand).

Microelectronics expert Will Biederman then joins Astro for a conversation about the origins of Project Iris, a computerized contact lens designed to help measure diabetes risk, which laid the foundation for the continuous glucose monitors that millions of people use today. Finally, Astro chats with Verily CEO Stephen Gillet to hear about his mission to make precision healthcare accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

0:00 - Intro
1:08 - Meet Kathryn Zealand and Anna Roumiantseva, Skip
1:57 - An “e-bike for walking”
2:35 - Why mobility needs a moonshot
3:42 - Limitations with current mobility solutions
6:19 - Criteria for the world’s first “movewear”
7:37 - Understanding the complexities of human motion
9:13 - How much weight Skip’s pants can carry
9:40 - Racing to the top of the Salesforce Tower
13:54 - Skip’s partnership with Arc’teryx
14:40 - The “kill criteria” for Skip’s moonshot
17:29 - Astro tries Skip’s pants on for size
18:55 - Meet Will Biederman, Project Iris
19:26 - Can a computerized contact lens help prevent diabetes?
20:19 - The potential worldwide impact of glucose monitoring
20:52 - Can tears help measure glucose?
22:50 - How to put a computer into a contact lens
24:11 - Project Iris’s early findings using glasses
25:20 - Fitting the “world’s smallest batteries” onto a contact lens
26:18 - A close-up view of the Project Iris contact lens
28:55 - How Project Iris transformed continuous glucose monitoring
31:18 - The origins of the Dexcom 7
32:08 - How glucose monitoring could lead to other health breakthroughs
32:55 - The future of everyday medical technologies
33:42 - Liftware’s “robot in a spoon” to counter tremors
34:16 - Meet Steven Gillett, Verily CEO
35:09 - Verily’s mission to democratize precision healthcare
36:30 - How Verily can aggregate a person’s entire medical history
39:05 - How Verily’s technology keeps private data secure
39:43 - Steve’s vision for how Verily can change the world
41:17 - What needs to happen in order to reach autonomous healthcare
42:27 - Conclusion

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Hosted by Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots, The Moonshot Podcast goes behind the scenes with creators and inventors trying to find radical solutions and breakthrough technologies to the world’s biggest problems. These are the untold stories of innovation from 16 years of Alphabet’s moonshot factory.

The Moonshot Podcast is a Pique Action production for X, The Moonshot Factory, produced in association with Blanchard House.

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