Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and brother Mark give a rare interview about growing up and secrets to success

Oh yes, thank you very much, so this gentleman certainly needs no introduction. My name is Marc Bezos and everyone can call me what my friends do. By the way, they usually just refer to me as Jeff's

brother

, so they know he really does. Go both ways, my

brother

has a TED talk on small acts of kindness as a volunteer firefighter and it has millions of views and every once in a while someone stops me and says, I love your TED talk on being a firefighter and small acts of kindness. and I, if I normally say, well, thank you, but it's actually my brother, his TED talk, but if I'm in a hurry, I just say thank you, thank you, yes, absolutely, but if any of you get confused, it's me. the smaller bank account on your left so he's the big brother so Jeff before we get started I think you know this is obviously a crowd of influencers starting out.

I think we might as well make the most of his time. I'm going to dive right into this if you don't mind, come on, you're the captain of the industry

amazon

.com private space flight with Blue Origin the Washington Post levels of you know Fame and wealth that are hard to fathom I guess you know one The question that is probably on everyone's mind is if you had to pick one thing, what would you say is your favorite part about having me as a little brother? I think I've taken the liberty of writing down some ideas.

I know you answer this. And there's a lot of things I love about having Mark as a brother, but what he just did is number one on top of this, what I am with my brother, I just laugh continuously, yeah, because he's the funniest guy. of my life, well, thank you. We're an easy audience and I appreciate that. I'm actually an easy audience, it's true, he is. I'm fine, so this is what we're going to do if you all don't mind, the fact that you know a casual sibling chat. This is not unique to us, this is something we do quite often, it's

rare

that we have, you know, a couple thousand closest friends with us, yeah, and it's also usually having a fire, yeah, and bourbon, Yes, which we don't have now. but now, and what are we going to talk about, the things that I'm going to chat with Jeff about or not, the kind of things that you would maybe hear in most

interview

s because you know, I don't know, the 2p2 rules are not really It's my problem, so we're not going to talk about that stuff, but you know we have a shared history, so what I really want to focus on is that you know the influences and the inspirations that have led to some of the things. the basis of you know what is a little intimidating he knows too much is like that and what I would like to do is invite you all to join you know what some of our biggest

success

es are I guess from my point of view. and because we have a shared history, what I've done is to show a smile as I've walked through it and take the liberty of gathering a bunch of family photos, so I'm going to throw some of them behind us and just so you guys can understand, so if we start talking in shorthand, you will understand what we are referring to, so it all sounds good, so I will do it and I appreciate your page that this is not the type of thing. which I usually do, so I appreciate your patience, so let's dive into it, so when we were kids we spent every summer on our grandfather's ranch in South Texas, we called our grandfather pop, that's pop, there there is the pop. probably just fixing that windmill, yeah, always fixing windmills, yeah, before you got on them and smashed bottles on them, which he did recently in an Instagram video, so you know, one of the things that we would do every summer, it was truly magical. experience, there's a little Jeff, yeah, that was my ultimate cuteness there, all downhill from there, that's a 1962 International Harvester explorer, we all learn to drive past that car, that car, once you can drive that car, you can drive anything and then this is like this.

The two of us, that's Jeff, showing me how to open or close the door, which doesn't sound like it's that complicated, but he was having trouble. Doors with wire spacing are difficult and then this is red, well it's Christina or her sister Christina, but the red horse, that's red, so I guess one of the things we learn every summer, yeah, this is pop again, so there was like we alluded to with the windmills, there was always work to do on the ranch and yes, one of the things that you know, I think we learned to value and you've talked about this in the past, is the role that plays wit, self-sufficiency, yes, it's certainly in a place like the ranch, but yeah, can you talk a little bit about?

Well, one of the best things you learn is, first of all, we had a very lucky childhood, we got to spend a lot of time with dad and our grandparents, and you learn different things from grandparents than you learned from parents, it's just very different. relationship I spent all my summers on his ranch from the age of 4 to 16 and he was incredibly gentle with Lion, you know, if you're in the middle of nowhere in a rural area, you don't pick up the phone and call someone when something goes wrong. breaks, you figure out how to fix it yourself and as a kid you got to see him solve all these problems and be a real problem solver, he even did his own work on Neri's bed, he made his own suture needles.

He would like to take a piece of wire, use a blowtorch to heat it, crush it, sharpen it, punch a hole, make a needle and some of the cattle even survived so you know, but you did it, we learned a lot of things from watching him because he would take big projects that I didn't really know how to do and then I would figure out how to do them you know a good example of that is you guys built a house yeah I think I think. bought this from a Sears catalog, it was a kid's house and we built that thing, someone came out, everything showed up in big boxes and someone, a professional, came and poured the foundation and then we did the rest, but I'm pretty sure that it was quite a project to go there, some of it, you can see some of the cows that didn't survive the procedure, so you know, when I was going through this, I certainly came across this photo, yeah, I'm not exactly sure. what you're doing here is almost positive, it seems like we were wrong, maybe that vent really pissed me off.

I don't know, that's certainly fine. I think there are a couple of things here, first of all, OSHA would not be happy with the way you do it. I'm on that ladder and you know it's like you're making a spear here. I don't know what I'm doing, yeah, and you know. I think you know that if you can talk a little. I know there are you know, this bulldozer in the background is a crawler bulldozer that my grandfather bought used for five thousand dollars, which is a huge bargain. You know, this thing should cost a lot more than that, the reason it was so cheap is because it was completely broken, the transmission was disassembling the hydraulic system didn't work, so we spent basically a whole summer repairing it and big giant gears arrived in the mail. from Caterpillar and we knew we couldn't even move the gear so Mike the first thing my grandfather did was build a crane to move the equipment so that's the kind of self-sufficiency and ingenuity and you know there's a story there too you know which is kind of legendary in our family, one of the things pop did one summer was a little out of character, oh I know what story you're talking about, so he was actually a very careful conservative person, not prone to crazy acts or anything like that, a quiet, introspective and even very devilish and introverted person, but one day he was alone, he had driven to the ranch and he was at the main gate of the ranch and he forgot to park the car, so when he got to the gate he noticed The car was rolling slowly down the hill toward the door, he thought.

This is fantastic, I have just enough time to open the door, open the door, the car will drive by and it will be wonderful. He almost got the door open when the car crashed into the door and his thumb got caught between the door and the fence post and it ripped all the flesh off his thumb that was hanging there by a tiny thread and he was so angry with himself that he tore it off. that piece of meat and he threw it in the brush he got back in the car and headed to the emergency room in Dili Texas 16 miles away and when he got there they said this is great we can put it back where is it and he said that I threw it in the weeds, they came back with the nurses and everyone searched for hours? for the thumb and they never found that piece of flesh, something probably ate it, so they took them back to the ER and said look, you have two options, you're going to have to get a skin graft for that and we can stitch you up. put your thumb on your stomach and leave it there for six weeks that's the best way to do it or we can just cut a piece of skin graft off your butt and just stitch it up and it'll never be as good but the bonus is they won't sew your thumb in my stomach for six weeks and he said, "I'll take the option of doing this skin graft off my butt" and they did it, it was very

success

ful, it worked well and he, but the funniest thing about this story.

It's just that I have incredibly vivid memories when we all do it of him. His mornings were definitely completely ritualized. He would wake up, have cereal for breakfast, read the newspaper and shave with an electric shaver for a long time as if he shaved with that electric shaver. for about 15 minutes and while he ate his cereal and when he finished shaving his face with that razor, then he made two quick passes over his thumb because his group of thumbs but hair that by the way did not bother him at all, no, no . completely unflappable for unflappable, so thumb but hair on one side you know the value of ingenuity and self-sufficiency how do you apply it?

You know the work you do every day, how do you do it well? I think I know there are many entrepreneurs and people who pursue dreams and passions in this car. You know, always, you, the whole point of moving things forward is that you run into problems, you run into failures, things don't work, you have to go back. and try again every one of those times where you take a step back and go back and try again you're using ingenuity you're using self-reliance you're trying to invent your way out of a box and I have tons of examples on Amazon where we have had to do this we have failed so many times we have written that Iowans think of us it is a great place to feel because we are good at it we have a lot of practice and I can

give

you An example: many years ago we started.

We wanted a third-party sales business because we knew we could add selection to the store that way and we started Amazon auctions. Nobody came. I think maybe our mother was the only one who bought anything. I bought a coffee. cup, you had a coffee, I did well, so there were those who were buyers and and and that's a we, so we said, well, look, we opened this thing called Z stores, we trained, which was like fixed price auctions again, no one came , I didn't use. that and finally and each one of these failures is like a year and a half, so we are trying to invent new things and finally we came up with the idea of ​​putting the third party selection on the same details page, it's the same product. detail pages where we had our own inventory in our own retail inventory we called this

mark

etplace and it started working right away so just that ingenuity of trying new things to find out what customers really want yeah yeah okay worth it and everything and it's worth it even in your daily life, do you know how it helps your children?

What is correct? My wife has a great saying: we let our kids use them even now when they're 17 or 12, but even when they were 4 we let them use our knives and by the time they were, I don't know, maybe 7 or 8 they would we would let certain power tools be used and my wife has the best credit for her because she has this great fascia so I would rather have a child with nine fingers than a child with no resources and I think that is a fantastic attitude towards life, fortunately you have resourceful children with 10 fingers, yes, exactly, and you know, I know that ingenuity is very important, actually, if it were a prerequisite for the selection of a spouse, then this is yes, I did it when I was 20, this is how you know, you know, pre-tender calm before the game, so I had this, but at one point I decided I wanted to get married and all my friends set me up and I had my list of criteria and this was like good old-fashioned blind dates usage.

I went on dozens of blind dates and it turns out I kept meeting people who were professional blind daters and I became kind of a professional blind dater and then we would sit down. and most of the conversation was quickly about how yes, we are not right for each other, but how do you meet people and you know that it has actually become a right, but when I had time, my friends, my criteria were one of those I would list. was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third world prison and my friends told me what are your future plans you know and I said no it's just a visualization for someone really resourcefulBeen passionate about space all your life.

You know this is not just a toy. You know Blue Origin is doing it. What I mean is that no, actually this is an important way, my view is like Minh's, credibly important work that needs to be done and done as quickly as possible and I have my own reasons why I think it is They can explain it quite simply and it's not for me. It's not like there's a common type of argument that's been around for a long time, it was actually first popularized by Arthur C Clarke, so all civilizations either go into space or die out and this is the plan B type of argument.

What do you know when the Earth is destroyed. somehow we better make sure we don't have all our eggs in one basket and I hate the plan B argument. I think you know that plan B regarding the destruction of the Earth is to make sure a plan works, so We've sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system, believe me this is the best we know, it's not even close, you know, my friends who say they want to move to Mars or something. I still like, why don't you go live in Antarctica for a year first because it's a garden paradise compared to Mars and So really this is that this planet is so amazing that it's a jewel in our solar system and if We take the baseline energy use on Earth and compound it by a few percent a year for just a few hundred years, we have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells, so that's not going to happen, so We have two options: either we go out into space or we change to a stasis civilization and I personally don't like the idea of ​​stasis, you know, we have our grandchildren and their grandchildren will live in a much better world if they can continue to advance, develop and using more energy and all the things we have enjoyed for hundreds of years as a

growing

civilization.

I don't even believe in stasis. I think things are

growing

or shrinking. I don't think stasis is very unusual and in real life it doesn't exist. I don't even think Liberty is consistent with the idea of ​​stasis. I mean, if you get real stasis, someone is going to have to tell you how many kids you can have, how much energy you can use. There will be all kinds of things that are simply not consistent with freedom, but in space we have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources we could have. a billion humans in the sewer system and it still wouldn't be overcrowded, so if you had a billion humans you would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and a thousand DaVinci and how cool would that be, but we have to go to space and we have to go to the space to save the Earth, that is why this work is so important and we do not have to do it always.

Now we've gotten so big as a civilization on Earth that we have to hurry up and So I think actually, over a long period of time, the most important work that I'm doing is Blue Origin and I'm moving forward for humanity to become set in the solar system, and what kind of time period we're talking about. Well, the grand vision, you know, billions of humans in the solar system, etc., I mean, it's hundreds of years, but you know, and we can have it in just a couple of decades. I think we can have space travel at a much lower cost. then we can start to really have a dynamic business explosion in the space.

You know you can't have much business in the space these days because the basic entry price is too expensive. I mean, do anything, even something relatively small. in space is still very, very expensive, we need to reduce the cost of admission so that thousands of entrepreneurs can have companies in space, something like what we have seen on the Internet right now: it cannot be two children in a bedroom. do Facebook but they can't create a space company, it's not practical, we want that to be practical, yeah, just so you know, and you know, that leads me to think about some of the conversations we've had.

This is another vision of those mountains in West Texas, you know, sitting around that campfire and anyway, some of the deepest conversations we've had for me revolve around the topic of long-term thinking, yeah, which is something you've really accepted and already know. you have contributed to the companies that you run and you know, if you just talk a little bit, I don't think that most people who run companies or that you know, even starting a company like Blue Origin, allow themselves to think in centuries even for visions of a vision of what they are creating or you know Amazon.

I know you've said you know five to seven year timelines for the experiments you're doing. Where do you talk to me about the long term? Thinking and your view on long-term thinking is a lever that allows you to do things that you couldn't do or couldn't even conceive of doing if you were thinking short-term, so if you know that, that's why you know that I have a project where I am helping a group of people build the 10,000 year clock, which ticks once a year and chimes once every century and the cuckoo goes out once every millennium.

It's a big thing 500 feet high inside a mountain. here within one of those mountain ranges and the ten thousand, your watch is a symbol. I don't think it's any use for the first few hundred years, but after a few years, once it's old, you'll start paying attention to the older symbols and So in a few hundred years I hope people will think about that. as a symbol for long-term thinking. You know, if I collaborated with someone here in this hearing and said, look, I want you to solve the problem of world hunger and me. If I wanted you to do it in five years, you would appropriately turn down the opportunity, you would say look, it's not possible, it's not practical, but if I said, look, I want you to solve world hunger in a hundred years, that's a job you would take because it's a much more approachable problem, first you can create the conditions, you have time to create the conditions in which you can then solve the problem, and that's a very important way of thinking and I think it works with everything, I mean, you have to go back.

Get up and find the right time horizon for what you're trying to do, but you know at Amazon we probably do most of our own stuff. We hope to get some results in five, six, seven, eight years, but we found a lot of our own things. I know other companies that compete against us in various ways, they often try to do things and you know, two or three years, so we can do things that you know, if everything has to work in two or three years, then. that limits what you can do if you

give

yourself a break to say "okay, I'm fine" if it takes seven years, suddenly you have a lot more opportunities, one of the things I want to change here is when when we raise a glass around the fire and you usually toast, the standard toast, a standard toast that you usually start the night with with a yawn, it's to adventure and companionship, to adventure in companionship and literally that's how he starts it, it's about every dinner right every dinner every night and you know it's interesting to me because I know you're someone who pays attention to the words you use correctly, you're careful about the words you use and they seem like very specific words so I was wondering if we could talk a little about why the adventure and why the companionship and as I was thinking about this, you know, it occurred to me that you've been taking some adventures that you know your whole life here, your grandmother, nanny, yeah. that's nanny and you know when you were a kid you used to go on road trips with, yeah, Danny and Wally, on Caravan Club armed road trips, you had 300 Airstream trailers here, yeah, all driving down the highway together, which we parked like that before that they were hipsters. big, cool wagon wheel formations, yeah, there was no avocado toast in this and you know, you and I had the good, fun opportunity to drive across the country, yeah, yeah, and the defender there was great, it was a amazing trip, it was a very truss and then you know, we also spent three days horseback riding which was a 50 mile ride in west Texas yes, every day is super fun, my butt hurts, yes, I apologize for the quality , like I said, this is not what I do, so this is the best I could do here, but I took this photo of Jeff sleeping on that trail, it was cold, this is that ring, you can see how I'm storing that pillow, here it's when you know it's really good to be a mammal you provide your own heat provide your own body heat keep the frost off your face I guess, I guess you know all these adventures, you know, this is, you're falling into a cave, yeah, do rappelling, it was really fun that you were on that trip, I was on that trip too, you know, but you know, people have asked me this, you know, because they know we went on a lot of adventures together and they were a little incredulous when I answered . the question, but they asked me, you know?

Is he on his phone all the time? Can he ever unplug? the country and you know it's not like you didn't do the work, but most of the time it was this and I see the same thing when you're with your kids and you know how I do it. I don't have a fraction of the responsibility that you do and I find that I'm always struggling with, you know, my phone. I'm just curious to know what kind of discipline or what kind of you know how do you compartmentalize the way that I know I don't like it so much when I have dinner I have dinner whether it's with friends or with my family and I like if I'm I like to be talking to the people I'm with I like to do whatever I don't like to multitask.

It bothers me if I'm reading my email. I really want to read my email. When my mom tells me a story about how she was in Montessori school and then they couldn't get her to change assignments. then the Montessori School teacher would have to literally lift my chair and just move me to the next homework station, so I don't know, it's not that it's not intentional, it's not orderly, I don't need discipline to not be checking. my email for me is very natural I love being present and whatever it is I'm working and I'm happy multitasking but I do it in series you know I'll go around and then and you don't honestly know if something really important is happening someone will find me, You know, it's not like I have to check my text messages every five minutes or anything, it's not that, it's not a big deal, right, and usually when they find you, it's

rare

ly to give you good news, oh yeah, no Yes. someone comes and says you need to check your text messages right now, that has to be bad news, usually, honestly, you know, usually it's a family matter, it's like a medical matter or something, but it's not.

I think it's probably just a very personal decision. I think some people are very good at multitasking and therefore they can do two things, one and you know, I'm in a restaurant with my wife or something and we'll see a couple texting but every once in a while they show their phones and look like they're having a really nice date so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that it's just not how I'm wired so you know , rediscovering the meaning of adventure, do you know what you can do? Tell me a little about the role adventure plays in your life and what it brings you.

It's more than just a distraction, you know, so when I say adventure, companionship to me is adventure. You can choose, we can all choose our life stories and it is the choices that define us, not our gifts. Everyone in this room has many gifts. I have many gifts. You can never be proud of your gifts because they are gifts to those who gave them to you. you might know high or you might be very good at math or you might be extremely beautiful or handsome or you know there are many gifts and you might just be really proud of your choices because those are the things that you are you are what you are about acting and one of the most important choices that each of us has and you know it as well as I do is that you can choose a quiet and comfortable life or you can choose a life of service and adventure.

And when you're 80, which of those things do you think you'll be most proud of? You will be prouder of having chosen a life of service or adventure. You see it in your job as a firefighter and everything else you do, Robin. Hood, etc., and so on, and I feel like that's an adventure that you already know, that's a shorthand way of thinking about it, and I think one of the other things that we've talked about when we talk about adventures is you. You know how to expose yourself well to new things and you know how to totally maintain that childlike sense of wonder and you know, I know you know this is important to you in our personal lives, which is why we do all these fun things, but it also plays a big role in knowing how you approach the businesses you are involved in if you want to be an inventor of any kind, invent a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything an inventor is.

It requires because the world is very complicated, you have to be a domain expert, I mean, in a way, even if you are not at the beginning, you have to learn, learn, learn, learn, learn,learn enough to become a domain expert, but the danger is once. You've become a domain expert, you can get trapped by that knowledge, so inventors have this paradoxical ability of having to know 10,000 hours of practice and be a true domain expert and have that beginner's mind, have that ability to look at it again, even though they know a lot about the domain and that's the key to inventing, you have to have both and I think that's intentional.

I think we all have that in us and we could all do it, but you have to be intentional about it. say yes, I will become an expert and keep my beginner's mind, but I know I want to say this is so important, you always know it's a common refrain even on Amazon until now it's still daytime. one day, one, so you know one of these, so I guess the other half of that toast is, you know, fellowship, yeah, right, to adventure and fellowship, and again, fellowship is a very specific word, right? You know, friendship is much more common, so why did you do it?

What's happening? What about companionship? The word companionship evokes a vision of traveling down the road together is a has more journey yes I'm in French so my friendship would be great it would be great to roar ship capture friendship and travel that road together this is so this is on the down, but there we are, yeah, there's our brother and there's McKenzie, our brother-in-law, Steve, yeah buddy, Danny, no, I'm great, great trip, that was enough, you don't have to worry about checking your phone, no, no, no, radio. signs down there so you know another adventure. I guess an opportunity for adventure and a fun trip of companionship was this trip and you know we were at sea for 30 days young and we did this when you were at sea for 30 days this It seems like it's focused so why not You know?

Can you talk a little about what we learned? Excuse me by the way, where am I? The R game is very strong. Are you crushing me with the beard game? I don't even know. try the beard, my beard doesn't work at all, I have that shitty beard, but we, this is the recovery expedition we went on and recovered the Apollo 11 Saturn V F1 engines from the bottom of the Atlantic, in 14,000 feet of water . We have been resting there peacefully for over four decades and we made it through. It was an incredible adventure. The captain there were 60 people on the boat, including our mother Jackie, and she was the only woman on the boat, so it was 59. men and my mom and when I got on the boat for the first time, the captain came and found me and this It's a big 300-foot boat with, you know, a moon pool and submersibles for diving, very high-tech remotely operated vehicles.

The captain came, a very friendly Norwegian guy. and he said, "We've never had a woman on the boat before and I took the liberty of removing all the pornography from the common areas and I just wanted to make sure it was okay with you and I said, yeah, that sounds like it." Well that's good, I never found that stash, so we were successful, we got those engines back and we're, where are they? One of them is in the Smithsonian and one is in the Museum of Flight in Seattle, well, hopefully there will be another five-year-old who stumbles upon them and is inspired, like you were, you know they are incredible engineering objects.

I mean, still today there's probably no rocket engine that's been more successful than the Saturn 5 f1, so you know one of the While I was putting this together and looking at all these photos, you think about the adventures we've had together and you know, again, you know how much time and effort you put into Amazon at the Washington Post and Blue Origin. and you know, i also know that you are a devoted husband and a loving father to your children, you have a fantastic relationship, the

bezos

have many children, we have four, I have four, my sister has three, yes, we are making sure that The population is not what we need, we have to go to space, yes, well, one of the questions I have is: do you know how you can establish that work-life balance that everyone you know talks about and do you think?

You have, I mean, you live a great life, right? but I also talk to interns across the spectrum and I get this question about work-life balance all the time from both ends of the spectrum and my opinion is that I don't even like the phrase work-life balance . I think it's misleading. I like the phrase work-life harmony because I know that if I'm energized at work, happy at work, feeling like I add value, part of a team, whatever energizes you, that makes me better at home, makes me a better husband. a better parent and in the same way if I'm happy at home that makes me a better employee a better boss all the things it's not about it's not primarily about there can be critical periods where it's about the number of hours and the week, but that's not the case.

That's not the real thing, it's usually about whether you have energy and it's your job that deprives you of energy or your job generates energy for you and you know there are people, everyone in this room notices the people you fall in with. in these two fields. we are in a meeting and the person walks into the room some people walk into the meeting and add energy to the meeting other people walk into the meeting and the whole meeting just deflates and those people just drain energy from the meeting and you have to decide which That's the kind of person you're going to be, you're going to add energy and the same thing at home and the same thing at home and that's how it is a wheel it's a cycle it's a flywheel it's a circle it's not a balance because of balance that's why That metaphor is so dangerous because it implies that there is strict compensation and you could be out of work and have all the time in the world for your family, but really depressed and demoralized by your job situation and your family you wouldn't.

They want to be around you, they wish you would take a vacation with them, so it's not about the number of hours, not primarily. I guess if you went crazy with, you know, 100 hours a week or something, yeah, maybe there are limits and probably, but I've never had a problem and I think it's because both sides of my life give me energy and that It's what I would recommend, it's what I recommend to interns and executives, so we ran out of time. I just want to say. So that you already know, first of all, thank you all for joining us around the proverbial campfire.

It's not lost on me that I'm incredibly happy to have the opportunity to have conversations like this with you often and I appreciate them. opportunities and there is only one more, so thank you very much, thank you all. I guess there's only one more thing to say, we should toast the adventure, companionship with you.