The following is a
conversation with Jeff Bezos founder of Amazon and
blue origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length and as he told me it felt like we could have easily talk for many more hours and I'm sure we will
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You spent a lot of your childhood. Would your grandfather on Ranch here in Texas? And I heard you had a lot of work to do it on the ranch. So what's the coolest job you remember doing there? Wow, coolest most interesting my most memorable most remember most and it was it was real. It's real working Ranch my grand. I spent all my Summers on my Ranch from Age 4 to 16 and my grandfather was really taking me those in the Summers and early Summers.
He was letting me pretend to help on the ranch because of course a four-year-old is a burden not a help in real life who can really just watching me and taking care of me and be just doing that because my mom was so young. She had me when she was 17 and so he was sort of giving her a break and my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for the Summers but it's got a little older. I actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it. I was out there like my grandfather had a huge influence on me huge.
Her in my life. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines and you know that all the things that he Rancher would do vaccinated the animals everything but we had a you know, my grandfather after my grandmother died. I was about 12 and I kept coming to the ranch it was then it was just him and me just the two of us and he was completely addicted to
The soap opera the days of our lives and we would go back to the ranch house every day around 1 p.m. Or so to watch Days of Our Lives like Sands through an hourglass. So are the days of our lives just the image of that. He had teachers big crazy dogs. It was really a very formative experience me, but the key thing about it for me the the great gift I got from it was that my grandfather was so resourceful.
Forceful, you know, he did everything himself. He made his own Veterinary tools. He would make needles to suture the cattle up with and he would find a little piece of wire and heat it up and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it. So you learn different things on a ranch than you would learn, you know growing up in a city so self-reliance. Yeah, like figure out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and Ingenuity and a grandfather bought a diesel.
Bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer and you got it for like five thousand dollars because it was completely broken down. I was going to 1955 caterpillar D6 bulldozer knew it would have cost. I don't know more than a hundred thousand dollars and we spent an entire summer fixing the crew pairing that bulldozer. We you know use mail order to to buy big gears for the transmission and they'd show up they'd be too heavy to move. So we'd have to build a crane, you know, just that kind of kind of that problem.
Um solving mentality he had it so powerfully, you know, he he did all of his own. He just he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody he would figure it out on his own. He doing his own Veterinary work, you know, but just the image of the to you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m. To watch soap operas laying on the floor. That's how he watched TV. Yeah. He was a really really remarkable God. That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood.
In all those westerns when he's like when he's not doing what he's doing is just watching soap operas. All right, I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were 5 or watching your Armstrong walking on the moon. So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US was
In many ways epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events for satellite to space for a human to space for a spacewalk first on crude landing on the moon. Then some failures explosions deaths on both sides actually and then the first human walking on the moon what are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time those few years at just 12 years. Well, I mean, there's so much aspiring there.
You know one of the great things to take away from that one of the great Von Braun quotes is I have I have come to use the word impossible with great caution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo is that things? You know that going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible, you know. Oh, yeah, you'll do that when when you know men walk on the Moon Yeah, and of course
It finally happened. So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the Space Race I think, you know with the geopolitical implications and you know, how much resource was put into it, you know at the peak that program was spending, you know, 2 or 3 percent of GDP on the Apollo program so much resource, I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote should have done it. Yeah, and so in that way
Also a technical Marvel, I mean, it's truly incredible. It's you know, it's the 20th century version of building the pyramids or something. It's you know, it's an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time it because it did something that had previously thought impossible it rightly deserves its place as you know in the pantheon of great human achievements, and of course you named the projects the rockets that blue origin is working on after some of the folks involved.
I don't understand why I didn't say new Gagarin is that there's an American by all the naming. I apologize. Very strange Alexa basket for friend clarify a big fan of good guards though. I know fact I think his his first words in space I think are incredible. He you know, he reportedly said my God, it's blue and that really drives home. No one had seen the Earth from space. No one knew that we were on this.
Blue Planet, yeah, no one knew what it looked like from out there and Gagarin was the first person to see it. One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin for for Glen for everybody involved like how big of a risk there all they were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about good garin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight the flight that you know, new Shepherd is named after the first American in space here.
Don't on his suborbital flight. They thought he had about a 75% chance of success. So, you know, that's a pretty big risk 25 percent risk. It's kind of interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people don't know Alan Shepard is the first astronaut the first American in space American in suborbital Flight, correct? And and then the first orbital flight is John Glenn is the first American to orbit the Earth.
By the way, I have the most Charming sweet incredible letter from John Glenn, which I have framed and hang on my office wall where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named new Glenn after him and I sent me that letter about a week before he died and it's really an incredible. It's also very funny letter he's writing and he says, you know, this is a letter about new Glenn from the original Glenn.
And he's just he's got a great sense of humor and he's very he's very happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet. Did he say PS? Don't mess this up ours A know he does it make me look good. It doesn't do that. Okay, but wait, but John wherever you are, we got you covered good. So some back to maybe the big picture of space when you look up at the stars and think big what do you hope is the future of humanity hundreds thousands of years from now out in space.
I would love to see you know, you know a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozart's and 1090 tines that with the you know, our solar system before of life and intelligence and energy and we can easily support a civilisation that large with all of the resources in the solar system. So what do you think that looks like a giant space?
Nations yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space station. So, you know the planetary surfaces are just way too small so you can I mean unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. But but yeah, we will take materials from the Moon and from near-earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on and we'll build a giant O'Neal style colonies and people will live in those and they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces.
You can spin them to get normal Earth gravity. You can put them where you want them. I think most people are going to want to live near Earth not necessarily in Earth orbit, but in you know Earth but near-earth vicinity orbits and so they can move quickly in a relatively quickly back and forth between their station Earth. So but I think a lot of people especially in the early stages are not going to want to give up birth all
either the go to Earth from vacation. Yeah same way that you know, you might go to to Yellowstone National Park for vacation people will end the event and no one and people get to choose where they live on earth or they live in space but they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on Earth one interesting ideas you had is to move the heavy industry away from Earth. So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration.
Is in conflict with the celebration of the planet Earth that we should focus on preserving Earth and basically your ideas that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve Earth exactly this planet we've sent robotic probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one not to play favorites or anything, but the Earth really is the good Planet. It's an amazing. It's amazing the ecosystem we have here.
Or all of the life and the Lush plant life and you know, the Water Resources everything this planet is really extraordinary. And of course we have evolved on this planet. So of course it's perfect for us, but it's also perfect for all the advanced life forms on this planet all the animals and so on and so this is a gym we do need to take care of it. And as we enter the anthropocene as we get as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and
Impactful as we drive across this planet, you know, it's that is going to as we continue we want to use a lot of energy we want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards, you know if you think about
The good old days. They're mostly an illusion. We can almost every way life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or 100 years. We all we live better lives by and large than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on and you can see that in global illiteracy rates Global poverty rates Global infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose we're better off than we used to be and we good.
Antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving medical care and so on and so on and there's one thing that is moving backwards and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that five hundred years ago pre-industrial age. The natural world was pristine it was incredible and we have traded some of that pristine Beauty for all of these other gifts that we have is an advanced Society.
And we can have both but to do that we have to go to space and all of this really the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. And when you look at you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system and and really you can argue about
Then you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that. Eventually we have to do that exactly so you don't often talk about it. But let me ask you on that topic about the blue ring in the orbit of reef space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these? So blue ring is a very interesting space craft that is designed to take up to 3,000 kilograms of payload up to
Geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity it has two different kinds of propulsion. It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion. And so it can you can be you can use blue ring in a couple different ways. You can slowly move. Let's say up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion that might take you know, 100 days or 150 days depend on how much mass you're carrying and then and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you
Change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit, or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change. Your geosynchronous orbit blue ring has a couple of interesting features. It's a it provides a lot of services to these payloads. So the payload that could be one large payload or it can be a number of small payloads and it provides thermal management it provides Electric.
Power it provides compute provides Communications. And so when you design a payload for blue ring, you don't have it so you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do and so we have an unusually large amount of radiation tolerant compute on board blue ring and you can your payload can just use that when it needs to so it's a
It's sort of all these Services it's you know, it's like a set of apis it's a little bit like Amazon web services, but Forest paper base payloads the need to move about in Earth's vicinity or lunar vicinity and a WSS. Okay. So so Computing space so you get you get a John chemical rocket to get a payload into orbit. And then you have these admins that show up this blue ring thing that manages various things like
Pew exactly and it can it can also provide transportation and moved around to different orbits including humans you think so but blue ring is not designed to move humans around it's designed to remove payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander which is of course designed to to land humans on the surface of the Moon. I'm going to ask you about that. But let me I'm actually just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton.
With aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. Yeah What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become why why you're not Jeff Bezos the famous theoretical physicist. So I loved physics and I stood physics and computer science and I was proceeding along along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics, and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist and I was in the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun.
I really loved it. And I was very good at programming and doing these things and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely, but I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. So I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely and then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist and there were there were a few people in my classes like in quantum mechanics and so on who
they could effortlessly do things were so difficult for me and I realized like, you know, there are thousand ways to be smart and to be really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the you know, only the top few percent actually move the state-of-the-art forward. It's one of those things that you have to be really just your brain has to be wired in a certain way and there was a guy named one of these people who
Was convinced me. He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him. He convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Joe Santa and yo Santa was from Sri Lanka and he's he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met my friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night and there was one problem that we worked on for three hours.
And we made no Headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time. And we said yo Santa so we went to your Santa's dorm room and he was there. He was almost always there and we said your son to were having trouble solving this partial differential equation. Would you mind taking a look and he said of course by the way, he was the most humble most kind person and so he took our he looked in our problem and he stared at it for just a few.
S maybe 10 seconds and he said cosine and I said, what do you mean you're Santa what do you mean cosine? So that's the answer and I said Nana come on and he said let me show you and you took out some paper and you wrote down three pages of equations everything cancelled out and the answer was cosine. And I said you have Santa did you do that in your head and you don't know that would be impossible a few years ago. I solved a similar problem and I could map
This problem on to that problem and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that. You realize maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't sure isn't much you're in your the what the universe wants you to be and so I switched to computer science and and you know that worked out really well for me. I enjoy I still enjoy it today. Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition. You need to be a great physicist in applied.
Physics, I think the mathematical skill required today is so high. You have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today and it's not you know it you probably need other skills to intuition lateral thinking and so on but without the without just Top Notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful and visualization skill you have to be able to
really kind of do these kind of thought experiments and if you want to truly great creativity, actually Walter Isaacson writes about you puts you on the same level as Einstein and that's very kind. I have I'm an inventor if you want to boil down what I am I'm really an inventor and I look at things and I can come up with a typical Solutions and you know, and then I can create a hundred such a typical.
Missions for something 99 of them may not survive, you know scrutiny but one of those 100 is like hmm. Maybe there is maybe that might work and then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking that kind of inventiveness in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large. That's where my inventive skills come. That's the thing. I'm if I Soph identify as an inventor more than
Anything else? Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways wild Rises and does that creativity a combined with childlike launder that you've maintained still to this day. All of that combined together. Is there like if you were to study your own brain introspect, how do you think what's your thinking process? Like we'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at
Was on but how do you when you sit down maybe alone maybe with others and thinking through this High dimensional space and looking for Creative Solutions creative paths forward. Is there something you could say about that process? It's such a good question and I honestly don't know how it works. If I did I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering. Yeah, so I you know when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't
Know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line to be efficient efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention real invention not incremental Improvement incremental Improvement is so important and in every Endeavor and everything you do you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better, but I'm talking about real invention real lateral thinking that requires wandering and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of
People they feel like wandering is inefficient and should you know, like when when I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem because if I did that I'd already I could I know there's some kind of straight line that were drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time.
And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with who number you know group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So like, you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea and the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth.
Both things are really pleasurable. And when you wander I think one key thing is to notice a good idea and due to its maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea. Maybe pull it that string because I don't think good ideas. Come fully formed 100% right? In fact when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny, you know that I do on my own.
Head and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea. I will often say look it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea. But work with me. There's something there. There's something there and that is intuition. Yeah, because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning because they do have so many so many easy objections to them. So you need to you need to kind of for warn people and say look, I know it's going to take a lot of
Work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun. So you got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all ha ha ha maybe not on math in a different domain. Yeah. There are a thousand ways to be smart but away and that is a really like when I go around, you know, and I meet people I'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find it is that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and
And fun is that is not it's not like IQ is a single Dimension. There are people who are smart and such unique ways. Yeah, you just gave me a good responses when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet. No, they might tell you yeah, but there are millions of ways to be done. Yeah like this the Mark Twain quote. Okay. All right, you gave me an amazing.
Blue origin rocket Factory and launch complex and the historic Cape Canaveral. That's when you Glenn the the big rocket we talked about as being built and will launch. Can you explain what the new Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works. Sure new Glenn is a very large heavy lift launch vehicle to take about 45 metric tons to Leo very
a very large class. It's about half the thrust a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn 5 rocket. So it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on lift off. The booster has seven be4 engines the each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas liquefied natural gas LNG as the
You'll and locks as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox riched stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle. That was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle and that engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United launch Alliance rocket, then the second stage of new Glenn is powered by two b3u engines, which is a upper stage variant of
Our new Shepherd liquid hydrogen so the be-3 you as 160,000 pounds of thrust. So two of the three hundred and twenty thousand pounds of thrust and hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant in my view for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large hydrogen has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is
Very is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, you know, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen your tanks your liquid hydrogen tank. It's very large. So you really you get more benefit from the higher ISP the specific impulse you get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the second stage.
And that stage carries less propellant so you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta for is an example of a vehicle. That is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen and I think that it's a very effective vehicle but it never was very cost-effective. So it's operationally very capable but not very cost effective size is also costly size is costly so it's interesting Rockets. Love to be big.
Thing works better. What do you mean by that? You still owe me that before? It sounds up and pours the ha ha. I mean when you look at the kind of the physics of Rocket engines, and also when you look at parasitic Mass, it doesn't if you have let's say you have an avionics system. So you have guidance and control system that is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is going to be for a tiny rocket.
And so that's just parasitic mass. That is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket, but is Trivial if you're building a very large Rockets, we have the parasitic Mass thing and then if you look at for example rocket engines have turbo pumps they have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns and those pumps all rotating machines in
Act get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture and any kind of gaps, you know are like between the housing for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel there has to be some Gap there you can have those parts scraping against one another and those gaps Drive in efficiencies. And so, you know if you have a very large
Large turbo pump those gaps and percentage terms in a being very small. And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket, but there's a giant exception to this Rule and it is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very very challenging. It's a pain in the butt and so, you know, it's just, you know, if you have if you're making a small rocket engine you
Move all the pieces by hand. You could assemble it on a table one person can do it, you know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on and so on when you start building big objects infrastructure civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad in the you know, all this we went and visited I took you to the launch pad and you can see it's so Monumental and so just these things become major undertakings both from
An engineering point of view but also from a construction and cost point of
view and even the the foundation of the Launchpad. I mean, this is Florida like isn't like swampland like how deep you have to
go at Cape Canaveral. Yeah. In fact it most ocean, you know, most large pets are hard on beaches somewhere in the ocean side because you want to launch over water for safety reasons the yes, you have to drive pilings, you know dozens and dozens and dozens of
Things, you know 50 100 150 feet deep to get enough structural Integrity for these very large. You know, it's it's yes these turn into major civil engineering projects.
I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty badass.
He's totally bigger against them a more epic it is you must make it epic. Yes fun to look at it's extraordinary. It's
humbling also because they're humans are so small compared to
it. We are building these enormous machines.
They are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power, you know in very very compact package has it's truly
extraordinary, but then there's all the different components and that you know, the materials involved. Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials that comprise the rocket so it has to be as light as possible. I guess whilst withstanding the Heat and the harsh conditions.
Yeah.
I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where what are the things that would Amaze the 1960s Engineers like what what's the change because yeah surprisingly some of rocketry is greatest hits have not changed. They are still they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today and it's exactly what they pioneered back in the 60s but a few things have changed, you know, the use of carbon.
Posits is is very different today. You know, we can build very sophisticated you saw our carbon tape playing machine the builds the giant fairings and we can build these incredibly light very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of I mean the the efficiency the structural efficiency of that material is so high.
Compared to any you know metallic material you might use or anything else. So that's one aluminum lithium and the ability to friction-stir weld aluminum lithium. Remember if the friction welding that I should ask you this this is a remarkable technology this invented decades ago, but has become very practical over the just the last couple of decades and instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal.
Gather it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together. And then you move it at a very precise speed and instead of heating the material Heats it a little bit because of friction but not very much. You can literally immediately after welding. Mr. Friction welding. You can touch the material and it's just barely warm. It's a little Easter.
As the molecules together, it's quite
extraordinary relatively low temperature and I guess high temperatures will make some the that's the way that makes it a weak
point. Exactly. So with traditional traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are you end up with weak regions where you weld and with friction stir welding the welds are just as strong as the bulk material so it really allows you and so because when you're you know, let's say You're Building
The tank that you're going to pressurize, you know a large, you know liquid natural gas tank for our for our booster stage. For example, you know, if you are welding that with traditional methods you have to size those weld lands the thickness of those pieces with that knock down for whatever damage you're doing with the Weld and that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank
and may even just looking at the fairings the result of that the the complex shape that it takes and yeah and like what it's supposed to do.
Is kind of incredible because it so people don't know it's on top of the Rockets going to fall apart that's its task but he has to stay strong sometimes. Yes, and then disappear when it needs to that's right. She's a very difficult task.
Yes, when you need something that needs to have 100% integrity and tell it needs to have 0% Integrity needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away and then when it goes away has to go away completely you use explosive charges for that.
And so it's a very robust way of separating structure when you need to exploding. Yeah, it was a little tiny bits of explosive material and it just it will sever the whole connection.
So if you want to go from 100% structural Integrity to 0 as fast as possible explosives is
explosives idea. This thing is so badass. Okay. So back to the
to stay
Ages so the first stage is
reusable. Yeah. Second stage is Expendable. Second stages liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen. So we get take advantage of the higher specific impulse the the first stage lands down range on a landing platform in the ocean comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.
I mean, there's a million questions. But also, is there a path towards reusability for the second stage
there is
And we know how to do that right now. We're going to work on manufacturing that signal seeds to make it as inexpensive as possible sort of two paths for a second stage make it reusable or work really hard to make it inexpensive. So you can afford to expend it and the that trade is actually not obvious which one is better.
Even in terms of costs even liked I didn't trust the
government.
I'm talking about costs is you know space flight getting into orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in, you know, the 50s and 60s making a sound the only thing that the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit which is if you can do that you open up a bunch of new, you know Endeavors that lots of startup companies are really else can do so, that's we really that's our one of our missions.
Is to you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit so that there can be you know, a kind of a Renaissance a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in
space. I like how you said getting to orbit is a solve problem. It's just the only interesting things reducing the got, you know, you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way this is this would say everything is solved problem. We solved everything the rest is just
What is the Rutherford said that is just stamp collecting that's
just a detail
some of the greatest Innovations and inventions and you know Brilliance is in that cost reduction stage, right and you had a long career of cost reduction
for sure. And if you know when you what does cost reduction really mean it means inventing a better way. Yeah, exactly. Right and when you invent a better way you make the whole world richer so, you know, whatever it was. I don't know how many thousands of years ago. Somebody invented the plow.
And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive and so it is a big deal to to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.
So what are some of the the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side and the engineering side there you're facing in working to get to the first launch of new glider
the first launches one thing we're
We'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year the real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our Factory is efficiently manufacturing a trait so rate production. So consider if you want to launch new Glenn, you know 24 times a year. You need to manufacture a upper stage since they're Expendable every
Out twice a month you need to do what every two weeks. So you need to be you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate and rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place and the same thing. So every every upper stage has to be through you engines so that
Those engines, you know you need if you're going to launch the the vehicle twice a month you need for engines a month. So you need an engine every week. So you need to be that engine needs to be being produced at rate and and that's a and there's all the things that you need to do that all the right Machine Tools all the right fixtures the right people process and cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article right? So that's you know to Launch
Going for the first time you need to produce a first article, but that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce new Glenn's a trait.
So the first one is produced in a way that's enables the production of the second third and fourth and fifth and
so you could think of the first article as kind of pushing it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along, you know in other
AIDS it's kind of the you know, it's the test article in a way that's testing out your your Manufacturing Technologies.
And Manufacturing is the Big
Challenge. Yes. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like any of it as easy. I mean the people who are designing the engines and all this all of it is hard for sure, but the but the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to to get to re manufacturing to do that.
Efficient way again kind of back to our cost point if you get to rate Manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe your haven't really moved the state-of-the-art forward all this has to be about moving the state-of-the-art forward. There are easier easier businesses to do. I always tell people look if you are trying to make money, you know, start of salty snack food company or something, you know you write that I did make the Lex Friedman
Oh chips, you know this this is
don't say it people going to steal
it. Well, yeah, it's hard to see what I'm saying. It's like there's nothing easy about this business and butbut its own reward. It's it's it's fascinating. It's worthwhile. It's meaningful and so, you know, you know not I don't want to pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's less meaningful, you know, you're the end of the day you're not going to you're not going to have accomplished something amazing.
There's even if you do make a lot of money out of
it. Yeah, there's something fundamentally different about the quote unquote business of space exploration. Yeah. It's for sure. It's a grand project of humanity.
Yes. It's one of Humanity's Grand challenges and especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things, you know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this but the fruits of this
This come from building a road to space getting the infrastructure. I give you an analogy when I started Amazon. I didn't have to develop a payment system it already existed. It was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the package has it already existed. It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post. And so and so all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place.
And I could stand on its shoulders and that's why when you look at the internet, you know it by the way another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early. I'm taking you back to like 1994 people using dial-up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long-distance phone network. That's how the internet that's you know how people were accessing servers and so on and that again if that hadn't existed it would have been 100.
Words of billions of capex to put that out there no startup company could have done that. And so the problem, you know, you see in if you look at the dynamism in the Internet space over the last 20 years. It's because you know, you see like two kids in a dorm room could start an Internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure was already there and that's what I want to do it take
No, like Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure. So that the Next Generation, you know, my the generation that's my children and their children these you know, those Generations can then use that heavy infrastructure then they'll be space entrepreneurs Who start in their dorm room. Yeah like that that will be a marker of success when you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room then we know that
We've built enough infrastructure so that Ingenuity and Imagination can really be Unleashed. I find that very exciting
as they will of course, as kids do take all of this hard infrastructure building for
granted of course, which is an entrepreneurial spirit that I say and inventors greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that there are one day taken for granted. You know, nobody thinks of Amazon is an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews.
And we pioneered customer view. So now they are so commonplace same thing with one-click shopping and so on but that's a compliment. That's how you know, you invent something that's so used. So been officially used by so many people that they take it for granted.
I don't know about nobody has to every time I use Amazon. I'm still amazed. How does this work
that proves? You're very curious
explore. All right. All right back to Rockets timeline, you said 2024?
As it stands now are both the first test launch and the launch of escapades explores to Mars still possible and
24 for yeah. Yeah, I think so for sure the first launch and then we'll see if Escapade goes on that or not. I think that the first launch for sure and I hope Escapade to Hope. Well, I just don't know which mission is it's actually going to be slated on. So we also have other things that might go on that first
mission. I got it, but you're optimistic.
At the launches will still do the first launch. I'm very optimistic that the first launch of new Glenn will be in 2024 and I'm just not 100% certain wet payload will be on that first
launch you nervous about it.
Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about a hundred percent. I've you know, every every launch I go to you know for new Shepherd for other vehicles to I'm always nervous for these launches, but yes for sure of
First launch to have no nervousness about that would be you know, some sign of derangement I think so.
Well, I got to visit launch bands pretty I mean that
pig, you know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing a tremendous amount of simulation. So, you know, a lot of the problems that we might find in Flight have been resolved but there are some problems you can only find in flight so, you know cross your fingers.
I guarantee you you'll you'll have fun watching no matter what happened was
100% when the thing is fully assembled comes up.
Yeah. Yes. The transporter erector is directed transporter erector for a rocket of this scale. Yeah his extraordinary that's an incredible machine vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of yeah, you know comes up and over a few hours you do. Yeah. It's a beautiful thing to watch
speaking of which if that makes you nervous.
I don't know if you remember.
But you were aboard new Shepherd on this first crewed flight. How was that experience where you are you terrified then
you know Strangely I wasn't, you know, I ride the rocket must never ever. I've watched other people ride in the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother.
When I told her it's gonna go on the first one and Not only was I going to go but I was going to bring my brother to this is a tough conversation to have with a mom and there's a long pause both of you. It was an incredible experience and we were we were laughing and inside the capsule and you know, we're not nervous the people on the ground were very nervous for us.
Um, it was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not happened even before the flight 4:30 in the morning.
brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren is going to take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave and we go outside outside the ranch house there in West Texas where the launch facility is and all of our family my kids and my brother's kids and our you know, our parents and close friends are assembled there and they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of
Saying maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever. And you know, we might not have felt that way but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way and it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see was almost like attending your own memorial service or something like you could feel how loved you were in that moment and it was it was really
amazing. Yeah, and I mean, there's just a epic nature to it
to the absent.
Floating in zero gravity or to something very interesting zero gravity feels very natural. I don't know if it's because we're you know with like a return to the womb just the worms You're an Alien, but that's what that's what you just said feels. So natural to be in zero g was really interesting and then what people talk about the overview effect and seeing Earth from space. I had that feeling very powerful. I think everyone did you see how
Fragile the Earth is if you're not an environmentalist and we'll make you one the great Jim Lovell quote. He looked back at the Earth from space and he said he realized you don't go to heaven. When you die you go to heaven when you're born and it's just you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this Blackness all this nothingness and there's one Gem of life and it's Earth.
It is a gem what you know, you're you've talked a lot.
What about decision-making throughout your time with Amazon? What was that decision like to Jiraiya to be the first to ride you Shepherd like what just before you talk to your mom? Yeah, what what what like what the pros and cons like actually as one human being as a leader of a company on all fronts, like what was that decision-making like
I decided that first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely. Well, I know the team who built it.
No the vehicle the I'm very comfortable with the like the Escape system. We put as much effort into the Escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering and the entire new Shepherd architecture
can actually describe what you mean by Escape system was involved.
We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule. So then if
anything goes wrong on asset, you know, while the main rocket engines firing we can ignite this solid rocket motor and the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster. It's a very challenging system to build design validate tasked. All of these things. It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on new Shepherd. So the the
Is this safe and reliable as we can make it but we are harnessing whenever you're talking about rocket engines. I don't care what rocket is you're talking about. You are harnessing such vast power in such a small compact geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so the only
only way to improve safety is to have an escape system and you know and historically Rockets human-rated Rockets have had escaped sisters only the space shuttle did not and but Apollo had one the, you know, all of the previous, you know, Gemini excetera. They all had escaped systems and we have on new Shepherd of unusual skills. Most Escape systems are Towers. We have a pusher Escape.
So the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes and it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, so if we have a nominal Mission wheel and with it the tower systems have to be a ejected at a certain point in the mission. And so they get wasted even in a nominal Mission and so again, you know costs really matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the Escape system be a reusable in the event that it's not used in can reuse it.
And have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these suggest about my decision to go.
And so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who designed it. I great trust in them and in the engineering that we did and I thought to myself look if I am not ready to go. Then I wouldn't want anyone to go a tourism vehicle has to be designed in my view have very to be as safe as one can make it you can't make it perfectly safe. It's impossible, but you know just have to
Your people will do think people take risk, you know, they climb mountains. They you know, they Skydive they you know, do deep underwater scuba diving and so on people are okay taking risk, you can't eliminate the risk, but it is something because it's a tourism vehicle. You have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks and I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the reasons I was so calm inside and maybe others weren't as confident know as much about it as I
It was in charge of engaging the Escape systems you
have it's automated. Okay, the Escape system has visualizing his life is completely automated automated is better because it can react so much faster.
So yeah for tourism Rockets safety is a huge priority for space exploration also, but a little tight, you know Delta less.
Yes. I mean I think for you know, if you're doing you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk if you're saving somebody's life, you know, if you
Ooh are you know engaging in real exploration? These are things where you know, I personally think you we would accept more risk in part because you have to
is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress and blue origin
blurs and needs to be much faster. And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago. I
I wanted to come in and blue origin needs me right now. And so I had always when I was a CEO of Amazon my point of view on this is if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company is going to get my full attention and I really just how I think about things. It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders to the Amazon to do that. And so having, you know turned to see I'm still the
Your chair there, but I've turned the CEO role over and the reason the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time of Lords and adding some you know energy some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster and we're going to
what are the ways to speed it up. So there's you've talked a lot of different ways to sort of at an Amazon, you know removing.
Barriers for progress or Distributing making everybody autonomous and self-reliant in terms. Although all those kinds of things is that apply it blue origin or
it does apply. I know I'm leading this directly. We are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry and so, you know at Amazon for you know, ever since the beginning I said, we're going to become the world's most
customer obsessed company and no matter the industry, like people one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know how did you guys how are you? How are you so customers us? How do you act not just pay lip service that but actually do that and from you know, all different Industries should come on a study us to see how we accomplish that and the analogous thing a blue origin and will help us move faster is we're going to become
The world's most decisive company. We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk making those decisions quickly, you know being bold on those things. That's what and having the right culture that supports that you need people to be ambitious technically ambitious, you know, if there are five ways to do something will study them, but let's do them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind. It doesn't you know changing your mind.
And so I took about one way doors into a doors. Most decisions are two way doors.
He explained that because as I love that metaphor
if you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you walk out the door you pick a door you walk out and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision and come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important. It's so hard to reverse
First that they really are one-way door decisions you go in that door, you're not coming back and those decisions have to be made very deliberately very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision you should slow down and do that. So, you know, when I CEO of Amazon often found myself in the position of being the chief slow down officer because somebody would be bringing me a one-way door decision.
No, no, it's okay. I can think of three more ways to analyze that. So let's go do that because we are not going to be able to reverse this one easily. If we maybe you can reverse if it's going to be very costly and very time-consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning and what happens unfortunately in companies what can happen is that you have a one-size-fits-all decision-making process where you end up using the
Process on all
decisions everything am
including the lightweight ones the to a door decisions to a door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization and one-way door decisions are the ones that are the irreversible ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up to, you know, the senior most Executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.
Yeah my
Part of the scale here is to do know the difference in one way into I think you might yes. I mean, I think you mentioned Amazon Prime the decision to sort of create Amazon Prime as a one-way door. I mean, it's unclear if it is or not, but it probably is and it's a really big risk to go there
there bunch of decisions like that that are you know changing the decision is going to be very very complicated. Some of them are tactical decisions to the because some technical decisions.
Like quick-drying cement, you know, if you're going to once you make them it gets really hard and you know choosing which propellants to use in a vehicle, you know selecting LNG for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage that has turned out to be a very good decision. But if you change your mind, that would be that would be a very big setback. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah, so that's the kind of decision you scrutinized.
A very very carefully other things just aren't like that. Most decisions are not that way most decisions should be made by single individuals, but they need and and done quickly in the full understanding that you can always change your
mind. Yeah, one of the things I really liked I perhaps it's not too Wade or decisions is I disagree and commit phrase. So don't so somebody brings up an idea to you if the two-way door.
You state that you don't understand enough to agree. But you still back them. Hey, I'd love for you to explain to
him. Yes just agreed committed as a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing. Yeah. So you know what? He's that my personal
life. I disagree
but commit like it's very common in any Endeavor in life and business and any you know, anybody where you have teammates you have a teammate and the two of you disagree. Yeah. It's um,
Some point, you have to make a decision and you know in companies we tend to organized hierarchically. So there's this, you know, whoever is the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision. So ultimately the CEO gets to make that decision in the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with so like you know how to I would often I would be the one who would disagree and commit some one of my direct reports would very much want to do it do something in a particular way.
I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say I Jeff I think you're wrong. And here's why and we would go back and forth and I would often see know what I don't think you're right, but I'm going to gamble with you and you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I'd known you for 20 years. You have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either.
Not really not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision and I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. So I'm not going to be second-guessing it. I'm not going to be sniping at it. I'm not going to be saying I told you so I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate Behavior. There's so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing and on.
Teams and there are so many ways would two people disagree about something even the I'm assuming like the case where everybody is well-intentioned. They just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is and we have in our society and inside companies. We have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes. A lot of them are I think really bad. So an example of a really bad way of coming
Into agreement is compromised. So compromise, you know, look here's we're in a room here and I could say Lex how tall do you think this feeling is and you'd be like, I don't know Jeff maybe 12 feet tall and I would say I think it's 11 feet tall and then we'd see you know what let's just call it 11 and a half feet that's compromised. Yeah instead of the right thing to do is, you know to go tape measure or figure out some way of
We measuring but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things that requires energy compromise the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth and so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing. You shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth another really bad resolution.
That happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. This is also let's say two Executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth and this is very demoralizing. So, you know, this is where escalation I I try to ask people who you know on my team. It's a
Never get to a point where you are resolving something by you know, who gets exhausted first escalate that I'll help you make the decision really let's because that's so D energizing and such a terrible lousy way to make a decision.
Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible? Because that alternately still high velocity of
this. Yes, and you want to try to get as close to the truth as possible. So you want like, you know exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking.
Yes and compromises not truth-seeking. So, you know, it doesn't matter now and there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth. And that's where disagreeing commit can come in but it's escalation is better than War of Attrition escalate to you know to your boss and say hey we can't agree on this we like each other we're respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to you know, make a decision here so we can move forward but decisiveness.
Moving forward quickly on on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity most of what slows things down is in this taking too long to make decisions at all skill levels, you know, so it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast. We're still decisive we're still quick and that's because the culture supports that
at every scale.
In a distributed way. Yeah, right maximize the velocity of decisions
exactly.
You've mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that. Yeah, there's a lot going on there and you haven't really talked about it much. So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA blue is doing its own land or program. Can you describe it? There's a sexy picture on Instagram with with one of them. Is it the MK1 I
guess. Yeah, the Mark 1 you're the picture of me with Bill.
Nelson the NASA administrator just to
clarify the Landers. The sexy thing about the is
ha ha ha. I know it's not me. It was either her or Bill. I like the yes, the mark one Lander is designed to take 3,000 kilograms to the surface of the Moon and the cargo Expendable cargo. It's Expendable Lander lands on the moon stays there.
3,000 kilograms to the surface. It can be launched on a single new Glenn flight which is very important. So it's a relatively simple architecture just like the human Landing system Lander the called The Mark to mark one is also fueled with liquid hydrogen.
And which is for for high-energy missions, like landing on the surface of the Moon the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big Advantage the disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it's since it's such a deep cryogen. It's not storable. So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant because it's boiling off and so we're doing is part of the of our lunar program is
Of being solar-powered cryocoolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellants for deep space and that's a real game changer. It's a game-changer for any high energy Mission so to the moon but to the outer planets to Mars everywhere.
So the idea would mark one both Mark Watermark to is the new Glen can.
Carry it from the surface of Earth to the surface of.
The moon
exactly. So the mark one is Expendable the lunar the lunar lander were developing for NASA the mark to Lander that's part of the Artemis part of the call to sustaining Lander program. So that Lander is designed to be reusable it can land on the surface of the Moon in a single stage configuration and then take off. So the whole the you know, the look at the Apollo program.
The lunar lander and Apollo was really two stages it would land on the surface and then it would leave The Descent stage on the surface of the Moon and only the asset stage. Go back up into lunar orbit where we rendezvous with the Command Module here. What we're doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over and the point of doing that of course is to reduce cost so that you can make learning.
Lunar missions more affordable over time, which is that's one of NASA's big objectives because this time the the whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon but this time to stay so, you know back in the Apollo program. We went to the moon six times and then into the program and it really was too expensive to to
continue and so there's a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have?
About yeah, so like I said sustainable sustaining wife were a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time.
Well, one of the things we're working on is using lunar resources, like lunar regolith to manufacture Commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the Moon. We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regolith
with stimulant and this solar cell is only about 7% power-efficient. So it's very inefficient compared to you know, the more advanced solar cells that we make here on Earth, but if you couldn't figure out how to make a practical solar self Factory
That you can land on the surface of the Moon and then the raw material for the solar cells is simply lunar regolith, then you can just you know continue to churn out solar cells on the surface of moon have lots of power on the surface of the Moon that will make it easier for people to live on the moon. Similarly. We're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith so lunar regolith by weight is
Has a lot of oxygen in it. It's bound very tightly, you know and as oxides with other elements and so it you have to separate the oxygen which is very energy intensive so that also could work together with the solar cells. But if you can and then ultimately we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles.
Moon and we know there is ice water in those or water ice in those craters and we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen and then you not only have oxygen but you'd also have a very good high efficiency propellant Fuel and didn't hydrogen. So there's a lot that there's a lot we can do to make the move.
And more sustainable over time, but the very first step the thing the kind of gate that all of that has to go through is we need to be able to land cargo and humans on the surface of the Moon at an acceptable cost
to fast forward a little bit. Is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars?
One or the other or both.
It's very unlikely. I think it's probably something that gets done by Future Generations by the time it gets to me. I think in my lifetime, that's probably going to be done by professional astronauts. Sadly. I would love to sign up for that mission. So don't count me out yet Lex, you know, give me give me a fucking shot here maybe but I think if we're if we are placing
Little bets on such a thing in my lifetime that will continue to be done by professional
astronauts. Yeah. So these are risky difficult missions
and probably missions that require a lot of training, you know, you are going there for a very specific purpose to do something. We're going to be able to do a lot on the moon to with automation. So, you know in terms of setting up these factories and do all that we were sophisticated enough now with automation. We probably don't need humans to tend those factories and machines.
So it's there's a lot that's going to be done in both
modes. So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing Humanity forward aisle towards the Stars blue origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors collaborators which and to a degree?
Well, I would say, you know, just like the internet is big and there lots of winners at all skill levels. I mean there are half a dozen giant companies the you know, the internet has made but there
Bunch of medium-sized companies and a bunch of small companies all successful all with profits dreams all driving great customer experiences. That's what we want to see in space that kind of dynamism and spaces big there's room for a bunch of winners and it's going to happen all skill levels. And so, you know SpaceX is going to be successful for sure. I want blue origin to be successful and I hope there are another, you know, five companies right behind us.
But you know, I spoke to Ilan a few times recently about you about blue origin and he was very positive about you as a person and very supportive of all the efforts. You've been leading a blue. What's your thoughts you worked with a lot of leaders at Amazon at Blue. What's your thoughts about Elon as a human being and the leader?
Well, I don't really know Ilan very well. You know, I know his public persona, but I also know you can't know anyone by their public persona. It's impossible. I mean you may think you do but I guarantee you don't so I don't really know, you know Ilan way better than I do lakhs, but in terms of his judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There's no way you could have
Have you know Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader? It's impossible.
Hey, I just I hope you guys hang out sometimes shake hands and instead of have a kind of friendship that would Inspire just the entirety of humanity because what you're doing is like one of the big Grand challenges ahead for
Humanity. Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these Endeavors were very like-minded. Yeah, so I think you'd I think I'm not saying we're identical but I think we're very
like minded and so I you know, I love that idea.
I going back to sexy pictures on your Instagram. There's a video of you from the early days of Amazon giving a tour of your quote sort of offices. I think your dad is holding the
camera is yeah. I know. Yes. It's what the Giant Orange extension cord. Yeah,
and you're like explaining the The Genius of the extension cord. This is a desk and the CRT Monitor and sort of that's where
That's where all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like the center of it all. So what was it like was going through your mind at that time. You left a good job in New York and took this leap. Are you excited? We scare
quotes excited and scared anxious, you know thought the odds of success were low told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success we by which I just been getting your money back not
like turkey not what actually happened because that's the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. It's helpful to be in reality about that. But that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head like you on the one hand you're you know, what the Baseline statistics say about start of companies and other hand you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it's going to work and you're doing both things.
The same time you're holding that contradiction in your head, but it was so if so exciting I love, you know, every from 1994 when the company was founded in 1995 when we opened our doors all the way until today. It's I find Amazon so exciting and that doesn't mean it's like full of pain full of problems for you know, everything. It's like there's so many things that need to be resolved and worked and made better and
And Etc, but but on balance, it's so fun. It's such a privilege. It's been such a joy. I feel so grateful that I've been part of that Journey. It's just been
incredible. It's in some sense. You don't want to single day of comfort you've written about this many times. We'll talk about your writing which I would highly recommend people read and just the letters to shareholders. So you wrote a explaining the idea of day one thinking
I think you first wrote about in 97 letters to shareholders. Then you also in a way wrote about sad to say is that your last letter to shareholders and see how and you said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciatingly painful decline followed by death. And that is why it's always day one.
Can you explain
this day one?
Think this is a really powerful way to describe the beginning In the
Journey of Amazon. It's it's really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth and like every day is day one every day. You're deciding what you're going to do and you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or you need self-consistency self.
Consistency even can be a trap and so day one thinking is kind of we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention about customers about how we're going to operate what are even even even as deeply as what our principles are. We can go back to that turns out we don't change those very often, but I change them occasionally and
When we work on programs that Amazon we often make a list of tenants and this the tenants are kind of they're not principles. They're a little more tactical than principles, but it's kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody whatever those are and one of the things that we do is we put these are the tenants for this program and then parentheses. We always put unless you know a better way.
And that idea unless you know a better way is so important because you never want to get trapped by Dogma. You never want to get trapped by history doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it. There's so much value in what has worked in the past and but you can't be blindly following what you've done and that's the heart of day one. You're always starting fresh.
And did the question of how to fend off day to you said such a question can't have a simple answer as you're saying there will be many elements multiple paths and many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack the essentials maybe others come to mind for day one defense customer Obsession skeptical view of proxies the eager adoption of external trends and high-velocity decision making so we talked about high velocity.
As you're making this more difficult than it sounds so maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on eager adoption of external trends High Velocity decision-making skeptical view of proxies. How do you fight off day
too? Well, you know, I'll talk about because I think it's the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest understand.
Is the skeptical view of proxies one of the things that happens in business probably anything that you're you're you know, you have an ongoing program and something is is underway for a number of years as you develop certain things that you're managing to like. Let's say a typical case would be a metric and that metric isn't the real underlying thing.
And so, you know, maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something. Like if you sell a million units how many customer contacts do you get or how many returns do you get and so on and so on and so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in where somebody a long time ago invented that metric and they invented that metric they decided we
We need to watch for you know, customer returns per unit sold as an important metric, but they had a reason why they chose that metric the person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching and then fast forward five years. That metric is the proxy
proxy real truth is a
proxy for truth proxy for customers say in this case. It's a proxy for customer happiness.
And but that metric is not actually customer happiness. It's a proxy for customer happiness the person who invented the metric understood that connection five years later a kind of inertia can set in and you forget.
The truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place and the world shifts a little and now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be or it's missing something and you have to be on alert for that you have to know. Okay. This is I don't really care about this mattrick. I care about customer happiness and this metric is worth.
Putting energy into and falling and improving and scrutinizing only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness. And so you're going to constantly be on guard and it's very very common. This is a nuanced problem. It's very common, especially in large companies that there are managing to metrics that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist and the world may have shifted off from under them a little
The metric so no longer is relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric
that is a nuanced but that's a big problem. Right? So she's not fra something. So compelling to have an isometric to try to
optimize. Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics you do, you know, you can't ignore them a want them but you just have to be constantly on guard. This is you know a way to slip into day two thinking would be
Manage your business to metrics that you don't really understand and you're not really sure why they were invented in the first place and you're not sure they're still as relevant as they used to
be. What does it take to be a the guy or gal who who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated. I guess. What does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting because that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting.
We all show up. There's the Friday. This is such you have just asked.
Asked a million dollar question. So this is this is what your if I generalize what you're asking you're talking in general about truth-telling. Yeah, and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social
animals. Yeah, we are
and you know take you back in time 10 thousand years and you're in a small village if you go along to get along.
You can survive you can procreate if you're the village truth-teller. You might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night Truth for often. They don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable. They can be awkward. They can be
exhausting impolite. Yeah, that kind of
challenging the can make people defensive even if that's not the intent but any High performing organization
whether it's a sports team a business, you know, a political organization activist group. I don't care what it is. Any High performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that you have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people if to remind people it's okay that it's uncomfortable to live.
The tell people it's not what we're designed to do is humans. It's not really it's kind of a side effect, you know, we can do that, but it's not how we survive. We mostly Survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative and that's really important. And so there's a you know science is all about truth-telling. It's actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth.
And even in science you find that it's hard to tell the truth, right? Even you know, you're supposed to have a hypothesis test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on it's not easy,
but even in science, there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientist and then there's a hierarchy of humans.
Whereas a La Senora T. Somehow seniority matters. Yeah
scientific process, which
it's and that's true inside companies to
So you want to set up your culture so that the most Junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data and and that really is about trying to you know, there are little things you can do. So for example in every meeting that I attend I always speak last and I know from experience that you know,
If I speak first even very strong-willed highly intelligent hide judgment participants in that meeting will wonder well if Jeff thinks that a came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right and so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room.
Go last but everybody else go first. In fact, ideally try to have the most Junior person go first and the second and try to go in order of seniority so that you can hear everyone's opinion and the kind of unfiltered way because we really do we actually literally change our opinions if somebody who you really respect says something makes you change your mind a
little so you're saying implicitly
Lie, or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion that as long as it's backed by
data. Yes, and sometimes it can even by the way a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes their intuition based and sometimes you don't even have a strong data, but you may know you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in it may resonate with a set of
You have and then you may be able to say, you know something about that feels right? Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right, but for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias, like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy.
It's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right. You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of looking for, you know, trying to find the silver lining. Is it look this that might be good, but I'm going to go with it's bad for now until we're sure
So speaking of Happiness bias data collection and anecdotes. You have to how's that for a transition? You have to you have to tell
Me the story of the the call you made the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait
times. Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon and we were going over a weekly Business review and a set of documents and I have I have a saying which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree the anecdotes are usually right and and it doesn't mean you just slave usually go for
all the anecdotes then it means you go examine the data. That's the day it's usually not the data is being Miss collected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something and at the same time, you know, your metrics look like why aren't they shouldn't be complaining? You should doubt the metrics and an early example of this.
Was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting. I think less than I don't know 60 seconds when they called it a 1-800 number to get you know phone customer service. The wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds and but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that and anecdotally it seemed longer than that like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day we're in a meeting or going to the wbr and the weekly Business review.
We get to this mattrick in the DAC and the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric and I said, okay, let's call picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number and called customer service and we just waited in silence for
things to turn out to be like,
oh really long more than 10 minutes. I think. Oh, wow. I mean it was many minutes and so you know it dramatically
The point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren't measuring the right thing and and that, you know set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it, right? And that's an example by the way of of truth-telling is like that's an uncomfortable thing to do, but it's you have to seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it and have to get energized around really fixing things
so that that
It speaks to the the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think companies sometimes say that but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there's something really profound to that which is seeing the World Through The Eyes of the customer like the customer experience the cream of being that's using the product that's enjoying the product they like what
They're like the subtle little things that make up their experience. Like how do you optimize
those?
This is another really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage and then there are small things and internally to Amazon we call them paper cuts. So we have we're always working on the big things. Like if you ask me the end and most of the energy goes into the big things as it should so and you can identify the big things and I would encourage anybody.
If you knew nobody listened to this is a entrepreneur that's a small business whatever, you know, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things. So like I know that in our retail business that Amazon 10 years from now customers are still good about low prices. I know they're still going to want fast delivery and I just know they're still going to want big selection. So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where ten years from now I say,
so we're customer says I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher or I love Amazon. I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. So when you identify the big things you can tell they're worth putting energy into because they're stable and time. Okay, but you're asking about something a little different which is in every customer experience. There are those big things and by the way, it's just honestly hard to focus even on just the big things. So the even though they're obvious there.
Really hard to focus on but in addition to that there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies and we call those paper cuts. We make long lists of them and then we have dedicated teams the go fix paper cuts because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts and they never work their way down the list to get to their working on big things.
As they should and as you want them to and so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts. Where
would you put on the paper cut Spectrum the by now with one click button, which is I think pretty genius. So to me like okay my interaction with things I love on the internet, there's things I do a lot. I may be representing regular human. I would love for those things to be frictionless.
For example booking airline tickets just saying but you know, it's buying a thing with one click making that for experience frictionless intuitive all aspects of that like that that just fundamentally makes my life better not just in terms of efficiency in terms of some kind of
cognitive load. Yeah cognitive
load and Pete inner peace and happiness first of all buying stuff.
Tough isn't a pleasant experience have having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience and like having pain around. That is somehow you're ruining a beaut beautiful experience and I guess all I'm saying as a person who loves good ideas. Is that a paper cut a solution is your paper cut?
Yes, so it's probable that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts. So if you go back and look at our
Our Pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented one-click shopping. There were a whole sea there was more friction. There was a whole series of paper cuts and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you're absolutely right. By the way that they're when you come up with something like one-click shopping again. This is like so ingrained in people now, I'm impressed that you even notice it I mean most ever
anytime I clicked the button. I just never surge of Happiness this there is an in the perfect invention for the perfect moment in the perfect context. There is real Beauty. Yeah, it is actual Beauty and it feels good. It's emotional. It's emotional for the inventor. It's emotional for the team that builds it. It's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal and you can feel those things,
but you keep coming up.
With that idea with those kinds of ideas I guess is the the day one thinking ever.
Yeah and you need you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.
There's a lot of books written about you. There's a is a book invent and wander where Walter Isaacson doesn't intron. It's mostly collected writings of yours. I've read that I also recommend people check out the founders podcast that covers you.
You a lot and it does different analysis of different business advice. You've given over the years. I bring all that up because I saw that there I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans and I forget how it was phrase but that when you were thinking about the Kindle that you're thinking about how technology changes us. Yeah.
We co-evolved. Yeah with
Tools so, you know, we invent new tools and then our tools change
us which is fascinating to think about those in a circle and there's some aspect, you know, even just inside business where you don't just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about like, where's this going to take Humanity if you zoom out a
bit hundred percent and you know, you can feel you your brain brains are plastic.
And you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris would first came on the scene. I'm sure you've had the anybody who's been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see all the little blocks moving and you can your kind of rotating them in your mind and your can just tell as you walk around the world that you have rewired your black brain to play.
and but that happens with everything and so, you know, one of the I think
we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this. I fear I think one of the things that we've done online, you know and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content and you know your podcast flies in the face of this, you know, your you do these long format things and reading books to reading books is along format thing and we all
More of if you if something is convenient we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know, we carry around a little we carry around in our pocket a phone and one of the things that phone does for the most part is they're just an attention shortening device because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans and I'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad but I do think it's happening. It's one of the ways we're co-evolved in with that tool.
Cool, but I think I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span
things. Yeah, I think you've spoken about the value in your own life of focus.
A singular focus on the thing for prolonged periods of time and that's certainly what books do and that's certainly what that piece of technology does. But I bring all that up to ask you about another piece of technology AI that has the potential to have a very strategic Therese to have an impact on human civilization. How do you think AI will change
us?
Weird if you're talking about generative a large language models things like Chad GPT and it's soon successors and these are incredibly powerful Technologies to believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand soon to be even more powerful.
It's interesting to me that that large language models in their current form are not inventions their discoveries. The telescope was an invention but looking through it and Jupiter.
Knowing that it had moons was a discovery like my God has moons and that's what Galileo dude and so this is closer on that spectrum of invention, you know, we know exactly what happens with a 787. It's an engineered object. We designed it. We know how behaves we don't want any surprises large language models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting
Surprised by their capabilities, they're not really engineered objects. Then you know you have this.
Debate about whether they're going to be good for Humanity or bad for Humanity, you know, even specialized a I could be very bad for Humanity. I mean, I just, you know, just regular machine learning models that can make, you know, certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive very powerful and they're not generally eyes. They're just there could just be very
smart weapons
and so we have to think about all of those things.
I'm very optimistic about this. So even in the face of all this uncertainty my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even then they are too unbalanced hurt us and destroy us. I think, you know, we humans have a lot of ways of
We can make ourselves go extinct. You know, these things me help us not do that, you know, so we may actually damn actually save us. So the people who are you know overly concerned. I'm in my view over the colors of it's a valid debate. I think that I think that they may be missing part of the equation which is how helpful they could be and making sure we don't destroy ourselves know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but
Me, I've personally I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey jr. Who you know, some people have talked to you think that's the most boring part of the movie. I thought it was the most fascinating because what's going on here is you realize we have invented these awesome destructive powerful Technologies called nuclear weapons and
they are managed and you know, we we humans are we're not really capable of wielding those weapons. Yeah, we're in and that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is just he wrongly thinks he's like being so petty he thinks that he said something that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him. They didn't talk about him at all as you find out in the final scene of the movie.
And yet he's spent his career trying to be vengeful and and Petty and that's that's the problem. We as a species are not really.
Sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these Technologies. And so and by the way before you get to generally I and the possibility of a I having agency and there's a lot of things would have to happen but there's so much benefit that's going to come from these Technologies in the meantime, even before their you know, generally I in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more Technologies. And so and so I think it's an
Will moment to be alive and to witness the Transformations are going to happen how quickly happened no one knows but over the next 10 years and 20 years. I think we're going to see really remarkable advances and I personally am very excited about it.
If it's not really interesting to say that it's discoveries that it's true that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models. We don't and like it could be a few.
Syntax here and there that that open doors to hold entire new
possibilities. We do know that humans are doing something different from these models in part because you know, we're so power efficient, you know, the human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power and you know, the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power.
To do equivalent tasks. So there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this and also we don't need as much data. So, you know, like self-driving cars or they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive and you know, your average 16 year old figures it out with many fewer miles. So there are still some tricks. I think that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a question.
No scaling things up, but what's interesting is that just scaling things up and I put Justin quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge
dividends. Yeah, and it's a there's some more nuanced aspects about human beings is interesting this able to accomplish like being truly original and novel to you know, a large language models being able to come up with some truly new ideas. That's one and the other one.
Truth, it seems that large language models are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing, but they don't require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth. It can just basically is a very good bullshitter. So if if there's not enough date if there's not enough sort of data in a in the training data about a particular topic is just going to concoct
Accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get language models to infer what is true or not to sort of
introspect? Yeah, they need to be taught to say. I don't know don't know more often. Yeah, and the I know several humans who could be taught that as well sure
and then the other stuff because you're still a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things the other open.
Is what kind of products are created from this?
Oh so many yeah, I mean, you know just to you know, we have Alexa and Echo and Alexa has hundreds of millions of installed base, you know inputs. And so there's this there's you know, there's Alexa everywhere and guess what? Alexa is about to get a lot smarter. Yeah. And so that's really, you know from a product point of view. That's super exciting.
There's so many
Opportunities there so many opportunities shopping assistant, you know, all that stuff is amazing an AWS, you know, we're building Titan which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock which our corporate clients at AWS or Enterprise clients. They want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data. Yes without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model. Yes, and so those
Are the tools we're building for them with bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity
here in the security the prophecy all those things are fascinating of how to so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep the secure this a fast. This is a
very challenging technical problem. And it's one that weird, you know, making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers.
Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots maybe Alexa have a romantic relationship like a
Well, I mean, I think if you look at the styling products here, if you look at the Spectrum of human Variety in what people like, you know, sexual variety, yes, you know, there are people who like everything. So the answer your question has to be yes. I don't know I guess I don't know why widespread. All right, but it will
happen. I was just asking wine for a friend, but it's all right moving on next question.
What's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You're one of the most productive humans in the world?
Well, I first of all I get up in the morning and I putter I like I like have a coffee
to find putter just like I
slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I guess I do believe in wandering and I sort of I you know, I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat.
Laura and I drink my first coffee so I kind of I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally and and then you know, I actually size most days and most days it's not the hard freeze some days. It's really hard and I do it. Anyway, I don't want to you know, and it's painful and I'm like, why am I here and I don't want to do me. Why am I here at the gym? Why am I here at the gym? Why don't I do something else you know this.
It's not always easy.
What's your source of motivation in those moments?
I know that I'll feel better later if I do it and so like the real source of motivation. I can tell the days when I skip it. I'm not quite as alert. I don't feel as good and then there's harder motivations. It's longer-term. You want to be healthy as you age, you know, you want healthspan you want ideally, you know, you want to be healthy and moving around when you're 80 years old, you know, and
So there's a lot of but that kind of motivation is so far in the future. It can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact I'll feel better in about four hours. If I do it now have more energy for the rest of my day and so on and so on.
What's your exercise routine just to linger on that. What do you how much you curl? I mean, what are we talking about
here? Ha ha ha.
That's all I do at the gym. So I
just I my routine, you know on a good day. I do about half an hour of cardio.
Video and I do about 45 minutes of weightlifting resistance training of some kind mostly weights. I have a trainer who you know, I love who pushes me which is really helpful. You know, I'll be like he'll say Jeff do you could we go up on that way a little bit and I'll think about it and I'll be like no, I don't think so and he'll be he'll look at me and say yeah, I think you can
And of course he's right and so it's hard to have somebody push you a little bit
but almost every day you do
that. I do almost every day. I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weight lifting and I wrote a I do a polling day in a pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff.
So puttering coffee
Jan I drink coffee gym and then
work or but what's work look like what are the productive?
Ours look like for you,
I you know, so I a couple years ago I left is the CEO of Amazon and I have never worked harder in my life. I am working so hard and I mostly enjoying it but there are also some very painful days. Most of my time is spent on Blue origin and I've been I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years and in the big I love it and the small there's all the
The come along with everything, you know, we're trying to get to rate manufacturing as we talked about that's super important. We'll get there. We just hired a new CEO guy. I've known for close to 15 years now guy named Dave limp. Ooh, I love he's amazing, you know, so we're super lucky to have Dave and you know, we're going to you're going to see us move faster there. But so my day of work, you know reading documents having meetings sometimes in person sometimes over Zoom depends on where I am.
I am it's all about you know, the technology it's about the organization. It's about you know, I'm very I have architecture and Technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle inside the engines. It's super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology. My least favorite part of it is, you know, building organizations and so on that's important, but it's also
My least favorite part so you know, that's why they call it work. You don't always get to do what you want to
do. How do you achieve time we can focus and truly think through problems.
I do a little thinking Retreats. So for this is not the only I I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at you know, I'm I don't keep to a strict schedule like my meetings often go longer than I planned for them to because I believe in wandering.
My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So the document should be written with such Clarity that it's like angels singing from on high. I like a crisp document in a messy meeting. And so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and and and and trying to like wander your way to a solution and because and that is if when that
It's just right it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels that it has has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic Beauty to it and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like
that. He actually described the crisp document like this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon of the way you approach meetings. This is the six page memo maybe first described the process of running a meeting with memos
and meetings and Amazon and blue origin are unusual when we
we get new when new people come in like a new executive joins. They're a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting will start with the six-page narratively structured memo. And we do study hall when for 30 minutes. We sit there silently together in the meeting and read like notes in the margins and then we then we discuss and the Reason by the way, we do stuff you could say
Everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don't have time to do that and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all and they're trying to catch up and also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading it's better just to carve out the time for people do it. So now we'll all the same page. We've all read the memo and now we can have a really elevated discussion and this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation.
Presentation, you know a PowerPoint presentation of some kind work that has so many difficulties but one of the problems is Powerpoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally the last thing you want to do is sell you want it you're getting your truth-seeking you're trying to find truth and the other problem with power point is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience and a memo is the opposite. It's hard to write a six page of a
Six page memo may take two weeks to write you have to write it. You have to rewrite it. You have to edit it. You have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you right again, it may take two weeks. So the author it's really very difficult job, but for the audience, it's much better so you can read a half hour and you know, their little problems with PowerPoint presentations to you know, senior Executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation I questions going to be answered on the
Slide but you never got there was if you read the whole memo in advance you you know, I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos and then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo they've been answered. It's why I save all that time. You also get you know, if the person is preparing the memo we talked earlier about
You know groupthink and you know, the fact I go last and meetings and that you don't want you know to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely, you know, the author of The memos is guys kind of got to be very vulnerable. They got all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first, but that's great because it makes them really good. And so and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trampling on the max.
I didn't lie in a big, you know PowerPoint
presentation. What's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there and everybody is reading your thing. You're
like to think it's mostly
terrifying. Yeah,
like maybe in a good way. I think it's here if I think it's terrifying in a productive way. Yeah, but I think it's a mostly a very nerve-wracking experience
is their art science to the writing of the six page.
Memo or just writing in general
to the I mean, it's really got to be a real memo. So it means you know paragraphs have topic sentences that use verbs and nouns. You can't that's the other problem with PowerPoint residue often just bullet points and you can you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points when you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure. It's really hard to hide sloppy thinking so it does it it forces the author to be at there.
R best and so you're getting somebody's they're getting some is really their best thinking and then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person. You've got it from the very beginning. So it really saves you time in the long run.
So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy Chris doc.
Yeah, so you don't want you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp. Yeah. There's you know, most meetings. You're trying to solve a really hard problem. There's a different kind of meeting.
We call weekly business reviews or business reviews. They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings. That's usually for incremental Improvement. And you're looking at a series of metrics every time it's the same metrics those beneath some be very efficient. They can start on time and end on time.
So we're about to run out of time which is a good time to ask about the 10,000-year clock. That's what I'm known for.
Or is the humor? Okay. Can you explain what the 10,000-year clock
is pintos? Your clock is a physical clock of monumental scale. It's about 500 feet tall. It's inside a mountain in West Texas is a chamber that's about 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall 10,000. Your cock is a idea conceived by brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the 80s. The idea is to build a cock as a symbol for long-term thinking.
And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000-year clock as it it, you know, it ticks once a year it Chimes once you know every 100 years in the cuckoo comes out once every thousand years, so just sort of slows everything down and it's a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and
Everything else. It's in a remote location both to protect it. But also so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage the idea is that over time this will take hundreds of years. But over time it will take on the patina of age and then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking
Verizon's and my view that's really important as we have become as a species as a civilization more powerful, you know, we're really affecting the planet now, we're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves and the problems we create can be so large, you know, the the unintended consequences of some of our actions like climate change putting carbon the officers a pervert.
Example that's an unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution that a lot of benefits from it. But we've also got this side effect is very detrimental. We need to be we start training ourselves to think longer term long term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems. If you think long term that are impossible to solve if you think short term and we aren't really good at thinking long term as as you know, it's not really you were kind of you know, five years is a tough.
Time frame for most institutions to think past and we probably need to stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years. And we do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those stinking Horizons. And so the clock is in a way. It's an art project. It's a symbol and it if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term that won't happen for her.
Words of years but we have to you know, we're going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of
age. You think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on Earth.
I think so.
But you know, the United States won't exist, like all civilizations rise and fall. 10,000 years is so long.
Like no nation state has ever survived pretty a close to 10,000 years
and the increasing rate of progress makes that even
even less likely so do I think humans will be here? Yes what you know, how will we have changed ourselves? And what will we be and so on so on? I don't know but I think we'll be here
on that grand scale human life feels tiny. Do you Ponder your own mortality Are You Afraid Of
Death? No, I'm you know, I used to be afraid of death.
I did I like my like I remember as a young person being kind of like very scared of mortality like didn't want to think about it and so on and always had a big and as I've gotten older I'm 59. Now as I've gotten older somehow that fear has sort of gone away. I don't you know, I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but I'd like to be it's I'm really more focused on health span. I want to be healthy.
Z I want that square wave I wouldn't you know, this is going to be healthy healthy healthy and then gone I don't want the long Decay but and I'm curious I want to see how things turn out. You know, I'd like to be here. I love my my family and my close friends and I want to I'm curious about them and I want to see so have a lot of reasons to stay around but it's mortality doesn't doesn't have that effect on me that it did, you know, maybe when I was in my
Bunnies,
well, Jeff. Thank you for creating Amazon, one of the most incredible companies in history, and thank you for trying your best to make humans and multiplanetary species expanding out into our solar system may be Beyond to meet the aliens out there and thank you for talking today
Lex. Thank you for doing your part to lengthen. Our attention spans appreciate it very much.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos.
Those the sports podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description, and now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself be stubborn on Vision, but flexible on the details. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
