Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405

The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and

blue

origin

. This is the first time you have had a conversation of this type and of this duration and, as you told me, I felt that we could have easily talked for many more hours and I am sure we will, this is the Le stre

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and now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos, you spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas, mhm, and I heard you had a lot of work to do on the ranch, so what's the coolest job you remember having? made there.

Wow. The coolest. um. More interesting. More memorable. in the early summers he let me pretend to help out on the ranch because of course a four year old is a burden not a help in real life he really just watched me and took care of me um and he was doing that because my mom was very young and she had me when she was 17, so he was giving her a break and my grandmother and grandfather would take me to these summers, but as I got a little older, I was actually helpful in the ranch and I loved it.

I was there like my grandfather had a big influence on me. A huge factor in my life. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I fixed it when Mills and put up fences and pipes, and you know, I did. all the things that any rancher would do vaccinate the animals everything um uh but we had a you know my grandfather after my grandmother died um he was about 12 years old and I kept coming to the ranch so that's when it was just me and him The two of us and him were completely addicted to the soap opera the days of our lives and we returned to the ranch house every day around 1 in the afternoon. or something like that to watch Days of Our Lives uh like Sands through an hourglass, that's the days of our lives, just the image of the two sitting there watching slow popper they had big crazy dogs, it was really a very experience formative for me, but the key For me, the great gift I received was that my grandfather was so ingenious, you know, he did everything himself, he made his own veterinary tools, he made needles to adapt to livestock, like he found a little piece of wire and Heat it, beat it thin, drill a hole and sharpen it so you know you learn different things on a ranch than you would, you know, growing up in a city, so self-sufficiency, yeah, it's like finding out that you can solve. problems with enough persistence and ingenuity and my grandfather bought a D6 dozer which is a big dozer and you got it for about $5,000 because it was completely broken, broken down, it was like a 1955 Caterpillar D6 dozer, I knew what it would have cost, I don't know. over $100,000 and we spent a whole summer fixing, like fixing that excavator, we knew we used mail order to buy big gears for the transmission and they showed up, they were too heavy to move so we had to build a crane , you know, that kind of problem-solving mentality, um, he had it so powerful, you know, he did everything on his own, uh, he just didn't pick up the phone and call someone that he would solve it with. his, him doing his own veterinary work, you know, but just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 excavator and then taking a little break at 1 p.m. to look at him lying on the floor, that's how he watched TV, he was a really extraordinary guy, that's how I imagine Clint Eastwood too in all those westerns when he's not doing what he's doing, he's just watching soap operas, okay? , uh, I read. that you fell in love with the idea of ​​space and space exploration when you were five years old watching Neil Armstrong walk on the moon, so let me ask you to look back at the historical context and the impact of that on the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US were in many ways epic, it was a rapid sequence of dramatic events from satellite to space, the first human being in space, the first spacewalk, the first non-crude landing on the moon, then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides and then the first human being to walk on the moon, what are some of the most inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time?

Those few years, which are only 12 years, well, I mean, there's a lot to inspire there, you know, one of the best things you can take away. From that one of Von Brown's great quotes is: I have come to use the word impossible with great caution, yes, yes, and that is the great story of Apollo, is that things that you know, going to the moon was literally. an analogy that people used for something that is impossible, you know, oh yeah, you will when you know that men walk on the Moon Yeah, and of course, it finally happened, so you know, I think it was moved forward in time because of the Space.

Raza, I think you know the geopolitical implications and you know how many resources were put into it, you know that at the peak that program was spending, you know, two or 3% of the GDP, on the Apollo program, so many resources, I think it was ahead of schedule. over time, you know we did it before quote unquote we should have done it, yeah, um, and in that way it's also a technical Marvel, I mean, it's really amazing, it's, you know, it's the 20th century version of the construction of the pyramids or something is, you know, it's an achievement that, um, because it was ahead of time and because it did something that was previously thought impossible, it rightly deserves its place, as you know, in the pantheon of great achievements. humans and, of course, you named the projects. the rockets Blue Origin is working on after some of the people involved.

I don't understand why I didn't say new gagaran. It's just that there is an American bias in the name. Sorry, it's very strange, just asking a friend to clarify. I'm a big fan of garens though, and I actually think they were his first words in space. I think they are amazing. You know, he supposedly said my God, it's

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and that really reminds me that no one had ever seen the Earth from space. Nobody knew that. We were on this blue planet, yeah, no one knew what it looked like from there and Gagaran was the first person to see it.

One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagaran, for Glenn, for everyone involved, like how big a risk everyone was taking, they were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think the Americans thought Allen Shepard's flight, the flight you know, the new Shephard is named after. The first American in space made his flight. suborbital. They thought it had about a 75% chance of success. So you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk. It's interesting that Alan Shepard is not as famous as John Glenn. so for people who don't know, Alan Shepard is the first astronaut, the first American in space, American in suborbital flight, right and then the first orbital flight is, so John Glenn is the first American to orbit the Earth. , by the way, I have more Lovely, sweet, incredible letter from John Glenn, which I have framed and hanging on the wall of my office, which says where he tells me how grateful he is that we named the new Glenn after him and tells me They sent that letter about a week before he died. and it's really amazing, it's also a really funny letter that he's writing and he's like, you know, this is a letter about the new Glenn from the

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al Glenn and he just has a great sense of humor and he's so happy about it and grateful, it's so sweet. , says?

PS, don't ruin this or it doesn't, it doesn't make me look good, it doesn't do that, but hey, John, wherever you are, we've got you covered, uh, so we're back to maybe. the big picture of space when you look at the stars, uh, and think big, what do you hope the future of humanity will be hundreds of thousands of years from now in space? I would love to see, you know, a billion humans living in the solar system if we had a billion humans we would at one point have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins um, would you know that our solar system would be full of life, intelligence and energy? um, and we can easily sustain such a large civilization with all the resources, um, in the solar system, so what do you think giant space stations look like?

Yes, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, planetary surfaces are too small, um, so you can, I mean. unless you turn them into giant space stations or something, but yeah, we'll take materials from the Moon and near-Earth objects and the asteroid belt, etc., and build giant O'Neal-style colonies and people will live. on those and they have many advantages over planetary surfaces, you can rotate them to get normal Earth gravity, you can put them wherever you want. I think most people will want to live close to the Earth, not necessarily in Earth orbit, but on you.

I know that the Earth, but close to the Earth, has orbits and therefore they can move Qui, you know, relatively quickly, back and forth between their station and the Earth, so I don't think many people, especially In the early stages, you may not want to do it. they give up on Earth completely, they go to Earth on vacation, yeah, the same way you know you could go to Yellowstone National Park on vacation, people uh and the ad and no one and people will be able to choose whether they live on the Earth or if they live. in space, but they will be able to use much more energy and many more material resources in space than they could on Earth.

One of the interesting ideas you had is to move heavy industry away from Earth, so people sometimes have this. idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict with celebrating planet Earth, that we should focus on preserving the Earth, and basically his idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve the Earth, exactly this planet to which we have sent robotic probes. All of us planets know that this is the good one, yes, it is not the favorite or anything like that, but the Earth really is the good planet, it is incredible, the ecosystem we have here is amazing, all the life and the exuberant plant life and you.

Know about water resources, this whole planet is really extraordinary and of course we 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 , etc., and this is a gym. We need to take care of it and as we enter the anthropos as we move forward, we humans become so sophisticated and large and impactful as we move across this planet, you know that's what we want to use as we continue. a lot of energy we want to use a lot of energy per capita we have achieved incredible things we don't want to go back you know if you think about the good old days they are mostly an illusion like in almost everyone way life is better for almost everyone today than it did, say, 50 years or 100 years, we all live better lives overall than our grandparents and then their grandparents, etc., and you can see that in global illiteracy rates.

Global poverty. rates Global infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose, we are better than before and we know that there are antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving healthcare, etc., and there is one thing that is going backwards. and it is the natural world, so it is a fact that 500 years ago, in the pre-industrial era, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible and we have exchanged some of that pristine beauty for all these other gifts that we have as 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 per capita energy use and when you look you know you want to keep using more and more energy, that's going to improve your life in many ways, but that's not ultimately compatible with living on a finite planet, so we have to go out into the solar system, and you can actually argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly do it.

Argue about whether you have to do that eventually, we have to do it exactly right. You don't usually talk about it, but let me ask you about that thing about the blue ring and the Orbital Reef. uh, space infrastructure projects. What is your vision for these? The Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to carry up to 3,000 kilograms of payload to geosynchronous orbit or into the lunar vicinity. It has two different types of propulsion: it has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion, so it can. You can use the blue ring in two different ways, you can move slowly, say up to a geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion, which could take 100 or 150 days depending on how much mass you are carrying, and then reserve your chemical. propulsion so it can change orbit quickly into a geosynchronous orbit or it can use chemical propulsion first to quickly get to geosynchronous and then use its electric propulsion to slowly change its ju synchronous orbit.

The blue ring has a couple of interesting features, it's a uh it provides a lot of services to these payloads, so payLo could be one large payload or it could be a number of small payloads and it provides thermal management, it provides electrical power,it provides uh computing, it provides communications, so when you design a payload for Blue Ring that you don't have, you don't have to figure out all that stuff on your own, so the radiation tolerant calculation is a complicated thing to do, so so we have an unusually large amount of radiation-tolerant computing on board. blue ring and you can, your payload can use it when needed, so it's a uh uh, it's kind of all these services, you know, it's like a set of APIs, it's a little bit like Amazon web services, but for the facial payloads they need. move in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity, uh, a WSS space, okay, so Compu in space, then you get a giant chemical rocket to send a payload and then you have these managers that show this blue ring, uh, thing which manages various things as it calculates exactly and can, it can also provide transportation and move you to different orbits, including humans, you think not, but the blue ring is not designed to move humans, it is designed to move payloads, so we are also building a lunar lander, uh, which of course is designed to take humans to the surface of the Moon.

I'm going to ask you about that, well, let me, let me go back to the old days when you were at Princeton, with aspirations of being a theoretical physicist, yeah. um what attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become why why aren't you the famous theoretical physicist Jeff Bezos? So I loved physics and I was studying physics and computer science and I was moving down the path of physics. I was planning on majoring in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist and I and computer science was something I did for fun.

I really loved it and I was very good at programming and doing that stuff and I enjoyed all of my computer science classes immensely, but I was really determined to be a theoretical physicist. That's why I went to Princeton in the first place, it definitely was and then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist and there was um uh. There were some people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who could effortlessly do things that were very difficult for me, and I realized that there are a thousand ways to be smart and to be truly knowledgeable in theoretical physics.

It's not one of those fields where, you know, only the top percentage advances the state of the art, it's one of those things where you really have to be, it's just that your brain has to be wired in a certain way and there was a guy called um one of these people who convinced me that he didn't mean to convince me but just by watching him he convinced me that I shouldn't try to be a theoretical physicist his name was Yos Santa and Yos Santa um he was from Sri Lanka and he was one of the brightest people I have ever met.

My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem one night and there was a problem that we worked on for three hours, MH and We made no progress and we looked at each other at the same time and said Yos Santa, so we went to Yos Santa's bedroom, yes, and he was there, he was almost always there and we said, Santo, we are having problems. solving this partial differential equation, would you mind taking a look? And he said, by the way, he was the most humble and kind person, so he took our problem and stared at it for a few seconds, maybe 10. seconds and he said coin and I said what do you mean yant what do you mean by cosine ?

He said that's the answer and I said no, no, no, come on and he said, let me show you and he took out a paper and wrote three pages. of equations everything came out canceled M and the answer was cosine and I said and Santa, did you do that in your head and he said oh no, that would be impossible? A few years ago I solved a similar problem and I was able to map this problem onto that problem and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had some, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize that maybe being a theoretical physicist is not who you are, what the universe wants you to be and so I switched to computer science and, you know, that worked out very well. for me.

I enjoy it, I still enjoy it today. Yes, there is a particular type of intuition you need to be a great physicist applied to physics. I think the mathematical ability that is required today. It's so high that you have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today and you don't know it. You probably need other skills, also intuition, lateral thinking, etc., but without top-level math skills you are unlikely to succeed. and visualization ability, you have to be able to do these kinds of thought experiments and if you want really great creativity, actually Walter Ison writes about you, he puts you on the same level as Einstein, well, he's very kind.

I'm an inventor if you want to sum up what I am. I'm really an inventor and I look at things and I can find outlier solutions and you know, and then I can create a hundred outlier solutions for something 99 of them might not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like hm, maybe there's something that can work and then you can go from there, so that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of uh inventiveness in a high dimensional space where the search space is very large, that's where my inventive skills come from, that's what Which I am if I identify as an inventor more than anything else, yes, and he describes it in many different ways.

Walter Ison does that, uh, creativity combined with childishness, uh. You have maintained to this day, all that combined is there as if you study your own brain through introspection, how do you think? What is your thought process? We will talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper. which is pretty rigorous and famous on Amazon, but how do you do it when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and think about this high-dimensional space and look for creative solutions, creative paths forward? Is there anything you can say about that process? Good question and honestly I don't know how it works.

If I knew, I would try to explain it. I know it involves a lot of rambling. Yeah, so you know, when I sit down to work on a problem. I know. Don't know. where I'm going to go in a straight line to be efficient, efficiency and invention are somewhat at odds because invention is an actual invention, not an incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is very important in every effort, in everything you do you also have to work hard. I'm just making things a little 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 feel that wandering is inefficient and you should know when, when. I sit in a meeting and I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we are trying to solve a problem, because if I did then I would already know that there is some kind of straight line that we have. When arriving at the solution, the reality is that we may have to wander for a long time and I like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting in front of a whiteboard with a group of smart people, spitting out and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then the solution to the objections and the back and forth, so, you know. , sometimes you wake up with an idea and in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit with a group of people and you go back and forth and both of those things are really pleasurable and when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea and maybe notice the core of a good idea, maybe pull on that thread because I don't think good ideas emerge. completely 100% formed, in fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives the first level of scrutiny, you know, I do it in my own head and I'm ready to tell someone else about the idea.

I often say, look, it will be very easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me, there is something there, there is something there and that is intuition, yes, because it is very easy to eliminate new ideas at the beginning because they do it. I have so many easy objections to them, so you need to, uh, you need to warn people and say, look, I know it's going to take a lot of work to get this into a fully formed idea, let's start with that. Be funny, so you have the ability to say endorsement somewhere after all, maybe not in math in a different domain.

Yes, by the way, there are a thousand ways to be smart and that's really like when I go around, you know, and I find myself. I'm always looking for the way to be smart and find it. That's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun. It's not that IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart and have such unique ways, yes, you just gave me a good response when someone calls me an idiot on the internet, you know there are a thousand ways to be smart, sir, well, they might say yes to you, but there are a million ways to do it.

Yeah right, I feel like it's a Mark Twain quote, okay, you gave me an amazing tour of the Blue Origin rocket factory and launch complex at historic Cape Canaveral, that's where the new Glenn is being built, the big rocket we talked about. launch, can you explain what the new Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works? I'm sure the new Glenn is a very big and heavy launch vehicle. It will take about 45 metric tons for Leo. Very large class um it's about half the thrust a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn 5 rockets uh so it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust at liftoff.

The engine has seven or four engines. Each engine generates a little over 550,000 pounds of thrust the engines are fueled by liquefied natural gas LG liquefied natural gas as fuel and locks as oxidizer the cycle is an OXR stage combustion cycle it is a cycle that was actually pioneered by the Russians it's a very good cycle um uh and that engine is It will also power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of the new Glenn uh is powered by two b3u engines, which is an upper stage variant of our new Shephard liquid hydrogen engine, so the b3u has 160,000 pounds of thrust, so two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust and hydrogen is a very good propellant for the upper stages because it has a very high ISP.

In my opinion, it is not a great propellant for booster stages because the stages become physically as large as hydrogen has. Very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is not very dense, 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 is very large, so you really get more benefits. from the higher isps specific impulse, you get more benefit from the higher specific impulse in the second stage and that stage carries less propellant, so you don't get such geometrically giant tanks. The Delta 4 is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen as its propellant.

The scenario is also hydrogen and I think it is a very efficient vehicle, but it was never very profitable, so it is operationally very capable but not very profitable, so the size is also expensive, so it is interesting. Rockets love to be big, everything works better. What do you mean by that? You told me before it sounds epic, but what do I mean when you look at the kind of physics of rocket engines, huh, and also when you look at parasitic mass, don't you if you have? Let's say you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system that will be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is for a small rocket, so that's just a paronic mass which is very important if you're building a very small rocket, but it's trivial if you're building a very large rocket, so you have the parasitic mass and then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps, they have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer. . at a very high pressure level to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns and those pumps, all rotating machines, actually get more efficient as they get bigger, so really small turbo pumps are very difficult to make and any kind of space I know there's something like between the casing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel, there has to be some space there, you can't have those parts rubbing against each other and those spaces create inefficiencies, so What do you know if you have a very big one. turbo pump those gaps and percentage terms end up being very small, so there are a lot of things that you end up loving for having a big rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket, but there is one big exception to this rule and that is manufacturing , so making large structures is very, very challenging, it's a pain in the ass, and so you know if you have it, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the parts by hand, you can assemble it in a table one person can do it um you know you don't need cranes and heavy lifting operations and tools and so on when you start building large objects infrastructure civil infrastructure like the launch pad and you know all this stuff we went to and I visited, I took you to the platform oflaunch and you can see it's so monumental, yeah, um, and these things become major undertakings from both an engineering standpoint and a construction standpoint and a cost standpoint and even the uh.

Launchpad base, I mean, this is Florida, isn't it like a swamp land? How deep are you at Cape Canaveral? Yeah, actually, most oceans, you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere on the ocean side because you want to launch. over the water for safety reasons um, uh, yeah, you have to drive piles, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of piles, you know, 50, 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, It's, uh, yeah, these became important civilians. engineering projects, I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty badass, you said tools, the bigger it gets the more epic it is, it makes it epic.

It's fun to watch it's extraordinary, it's humiliating too because your humans are very small in Compared to that, we're building these enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical energy, um, you know, in very, very compact packages, it's really extraordinary, but then there's everything. the different components, uh, and you know the materials involved, is there anything interesting you can describe about the materials that make up the rocket, so it has to be as light as possible, I guess, while withstanding the heat and harsh conditions, yeah, I play a Sometimes it's a little kind of game with other Rocket people I meet where they say what are the things that would surprise engineers from the 1960s.

Engineers like what's changed because, Surprisingly, some of Rocket Tre's biggest hits haven't changed, they still are, you would immediately recognize a lot of what we do today and it's exactly what they pioneered in the '60s, but some things have changed, you know, the use of Carbon composites is very different today, you know, we can build very sophisticated things, you saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings and we can build these incredibly light and stiff fairing structures with a carbon composite material that we never they could have dreamed. I mean, the structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any metal material you can find. use or anything else, so that's a um uh aluminum, lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum and lithium.

Remember friction stir welding I showed you? This is a remarkable technology that was invented decades ago but has become very practical with the passage of time. just in the last couple of decades and instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together, you literally shake the two pieces together, there's a pin that spins at a certain speed and you put it between the two plates of metal that you want to weld. and then you move it at a very precise speed and instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit due to friction, but not much, literally, immediately after welding with friction stir welding, you can touch the material and it's barely it's warm, it literally stirs up the molecules, it's a fairly extraordinary relatively low temperature and I guess the high temperature is what makes them the we, what makes them a weak point, exactly so with traditional soldering techniques you can have whatever.

The underlying strength characteristics of the material are that you end up with weak regions where you weld and with friction stir welding, the weld is only as strong as the bulk material, so it really allows you, and because when you know, Let's say you're building a tank that you're going to pressurize, you know, a large liquid natural gas tank for our booster stage, for example, you know, if you're welding, with traditional methods you have to size those weld lands to the thickness of those pieces. with that drop for whatever damage you're doing with the welding and that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank, I mean even just looking at the fairings the result of that is the complex shape it takes and yeah and what it's supposed to do is some kind of amazing CU, so people don't know that it's on top of the rocket, it's going to fall apart, that's your job, but sometimes you have to stay strong, yeah, and then disappear when necessary, that's right . which is a very difficult task, yes, when you need something that must have 100% integrity and tell it that it must have 0% integrity, it must remain attached until it is ready to disappear and then when it disappears, it must disappear completely. you use explosive charges for that, so it's a very robust way to separate the structure, uh, when you need to explode, yeah, a few little pieces of explosive material, um, and uh, it'll just sever the whole connection, so if you want to go through from 100% structural integrity to zero, as fast as possible is explosives, use explosives, this is all so badass, okay, so we go back to the two stages, so the first stage is reusable, yes, the second stage is dispensable, the second stage is liquid hydrogen. oxygen so we can take advantage of the higher specific impulse um, uh, the first stage, uh, lands on a landing pad in the ocean, um, comes back for maintenance and prepares to do the next mission, um, I mean, there's a million questions, but it's also There is a path to reuse for the second stage and we know how to do it right now.

We are going to work on the manufacturing of this second stage so that it is as economical as possible. There are two paths to a second stage. reusable um uh or work really hard to make it affordable so you can afford to spend it and that trade off is actually not obvious which is better even in terms of cost, even in terms of time, even in terms of I'm talking about cost , are you? You know spaceflight getting into orbit is a solved problem, we solved it in the 50's and 60's, you're making it very easy, the only thing the only interesting problem is to drastically reduce the cost of access to orbit, which is if you can . do it, you open up a lot of new efforts, you know, that a lot of startups can do everyone else, so that's our mission, to be part of this industry and reduce the cost of 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 solved problem, it's just that the only interesting thing is lowering the C, you know you can. describes every problem facing human civilization that way, the way the physicist would say everything is a problem solved, we've solved everything, the rest is just, uh, what Ruford said, which is just stamp collecting, it's just the detail, some of the greatest innovations and inventions and You know Brilliance is in that stage of cost reduction, and I'm sure you've had a long career of cost reduction and if you know when cost reduction really means, it means inventing a way better, yes, exactly correct and when you invent. a better way to make the whole world rich so you know whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago someone invented the plow and when they invented the plow they made the whole world rich because they made farming less expensive um and So, It is very important to invent better ways, that is how the world becomes richer.

So what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side on the engineering side that you're facing as you work to get to the first? launch of the new Glenn, the first launch is something that we and we will do it in 20124, next year, the real thing, the biggest challenge is to make sure that our factory is manufacturing efficiently at a pace, so rate the production, so What to consider If you want to launch a new Glenn, you know that 24 times a year you need to make an upper stage, since they are expendable. Every two times a month, you have to do one every two weeks, so you have to have everything. of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance testing and everything that works at pace and pace of manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place and the same, so each higher stage has two b3u engines, so those The engines you know you need if you're going to release this vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month, so you need one engine every week, so you need to produce that engine at a rate and that's a um. and there are all the things you need to do, all the right machine tools, all the right accessories, the right people processing, etc., so it's one thing to create a first article correctly so you know we're launching the new Glenn for the first time.

I need to produce a first article, but that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that happens behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce new rods at such a rate that the first is produced in a way that allows the production of the second. third and fourth and fifth and sixth, you could think of the first article as kind of a push, it drives the whole pace of manufacturing, uh, technology, you know, in other words, it's kind of, you know, it's the article of try in a way. that's testing your manufacturing technologies, manufacturing is the big challenge, yeah, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like any of this is easy, I mean the people who design the engines and all this, so it's all difficult, um.

Of course, but the challenge right now is really elusive, is to get manufacturing qualified and do it in an efficient way again, that is, get back to our cost point, if you manage to qualify manufacturing in an inefficient way. I haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe I haven't really advanced the latest in technology, this is all about advancing the latest in technology, there are easier businesses to do, I always tell people look, if you're trying to make money, you know how to start a salty snack company or something, you know, you write down that idea, like making Lex Friedman potato chips, you know this, don't say it, people are going to steal it, but yeah, it's difficult, you see what I'm saying, it's like there's nothing easy in this business and um, but it's its own reward, it's, it's, it's fascinating, it's worth it, it's meaningful, so you know, I, no, I know.

I don't want to upset the salty snack companies, but I think it's less significant. You know that at the end of the day, you're not going to achieve something amazing. Yes, even if you do a lot. make money, yes, there is something fundamentally different in the business of space exploration, in quotes, yes, it is surely a great project of humanity, yes, it is one of the great challenges of humanity, and especially if you look at going to the moon, go to Mars and build giants. O'Neal colonies and unlock all things. You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a path to space, getting the infrastructure.

I give you an analogy when I started with Amazon. I didn't have to develop a payment system, it already existed, it was called a credit card. I didn't have to develop a transport system to deliver parcels, it already existed, it was called postal service, Royal May and Deutsche Post etc. 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, by the way, you know another giant piece of infrastructure that existed at the beginning. I'll take you back to how in 1994, people used dial-up modems and got on the long distance telephone network, that's how the Internet works, you know how people accessed servers, etc., and again, if That wouldn't have existed, there would have been hundreds. of billions of capital expenditures to publish that, no startup could have done it, so the problem that you know you see if you look at the dynamism in the Internet space over the last 20 years is because you know you see like two children in a dorm they could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure;

I was already there and that's what I want to do. I take my profits from Amazon and use them to build infrastructure so that the Next Generation, you know, the generation that is my children and their children, these, you know, those Generations can then use that heavy infrastructure, then there will be space entrepreneurs who start in your bedroom, yeah, like that, that's going to be a marker of When you can be successful when you can start a really valuable space company in a bedroom, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed.

I find it very exciting as of course they will when the kids take it all. of this hard infrastructure capacity, of course, which is the entrepreneurial spirit, that is the greatest dream of an inventor is that his inventions are so successful that one day they will be taken for granted, you know, no one thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore , nobody thinks about the client. reviews as pioneers in customer reviews, but now they are so common, same withone click shopping etc. but that's a compliment, that's how you know you invent something that is so used and so beneficial by so many people who take it for granted, I don't know about anyone, every time I use Amazon I still get amazing how this works, the logistics showing that you are a very curious explorer, okay, back to the Rockets timeline, you said 2024, as it is now.

Both the first test launch and the launch of the Escapade Tom Mars rovers in 2024 are possible, yes, I think so, it will be the first launch for sure and then we will see if Escapade continues with that or not. I think the first launch is safe. and I hope Escapade does too, well I just don't know which lady it will be programmed in, so we also have other things that could go in that first mission. Oh, I have, but you're optimistic that the launches will happen. Still, oh, the first pitch. I'm very optimistic that the first launch of the new Glenn will be in 2024 and I'm just not 100% sure what the payload will be on that first launch.

You are nervous? Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it, oh man, 100%. You know, every launch I go to, you know, for the new Shepard and other vehicles as well. I'm always nervous about these launches, but I'm sure that a first launch so I don't have nervousness about it would be some sign of disorder. I think very good, I had to visit the launch, but it's nice. I mean, it's epic. You know, we've done a tremendous amount of ground testing. of simulation, so you know that many of the problems that we can encounter in flight have been solved, but there are some problems that you can only encounter in flight, so cross your fingers, I guarantee you will have It's fun to watch no matter what happens to the 100% when the thing is fully assembled and it shows up, yeah, the transporter mounter, just the transporter mounter for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary, it's an incredible machine, it travels horizontally and then, yeah.

I know, it comes up in a few hours, yes, it's a beautiful thing to see, speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you were on board a new Shepherd on this first raw flight. How was that experience? you were terrified so you know Strangely I wasn't, you know I, you rode on the rocket, okay, I saw other people ride on the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket, um, it was a difficult conversation to have with my mother uh, when I told her I was going to the first one and not only was I going, but I was also bringing my brother, this is a difficult conversation to have with a mother and there is a long pause, I told her.

She likes both of them um H, it was an amazing experience and we were laughing inside the capsule and you know, we weren't nervous um the people on the ground were very nervous for us um U, it was actually one of the most emotional Powerful parts of the experience did not happen even before the flight at 4:30 in the morning. Brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren will take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to go. and we go outside the ranch house there in West Texas where the launch facility is and our whole family, my kids and my brother's kids and our, you know, our parents and close friends are gathered there and They say goodbye to us. but they're like saying maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever and you know maybe we didn't feel that way but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were about feeling that way and it was a powerful thing. because it allowed us to see that it was almost like attending your own memorial service or something like you could feel how loved you were in that moment um and it was uh it was really amazing yeah and I mean it's also got an epic nature to it. nod floating zero gravity i'll tell you something very interesting zero gravity feels very natural i don't know if it's because we know it's like going back to the womb it just confirmed that you're an alien but that's what i think i think That's what you just said.

It's so natural to be in Zurg, it was really interesting and then what people talk about is the overview effect and seeing the Earth from space. I had that very powerful feeling. I think everyone did. You see how fragile the Earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, you'll become one, uh, the great Jim level quote, you know, he looked down at the Earth from space and said he realized you don't go to heaven when you die, you go to heaven when you die. . "You are born and you know that that is the feeling that people have when they are in space.

You see all this blackness, all this nothingness and there is a jewel of life and it is the Earth, it is a jewel, uh, what you know you are" . I've talked a lot about decision-making throughout your time with Amazon, what was that decision to travel to be the first to ride on his Shepherd like? What should he do before talking to his mother? Yes, what are the pros and cons actually. as a human being as a leader of a company um on all fronts like what was that decision to make you like I decided that first of all I knew the vehicle extremely well I know the team that built it I know the vehicle um the uh I feel very comfortable with the system exhaust.

We put as much effort into that vehicle's exhaust system as we did into the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the most difficult pieces of engineering in the entire new Shepard architecture. Actually, describe what you mean by exhaust system. What's involved: We have a solid rocket motor at the base of the crew capsule, so if something goes wrong by nodding, you know, while the main rocket motor is on, we can ignite this solid rocket motor. at the base of the crew capsule and escaping the booster is a very challenging system to build, validate the design, test all of these things, it's the reason I'm comfortable letting anyone use the new Shephard so the booster be as secure and reliable as possible. we can do it, but we're taking advantage every time you talk about rocket engines.

No matter what rocket engine you're talking about, you're harnessing such enormous power in such a small compact geometric space, the power density is so enormous that it's impossible to be sure that nothing will go wrong, so the only way to improve safety is having an escape system and, you know, historically human-rated rockets have had escape systems, it's just that the space shuttle didn't have them and, um, but Apollo. had one, you know, all the previous ones, you know, Gemini, etc., they all had exhaust systems and, on the new Shephard, we have unusual exhausts, most of the exhaust systems are towers, we have a thrust, so the solid rocket motor is actually built into the base of the crew capsule and it pushes and it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, if we have a nominal mission, we land with it, the systems of tower have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission, so it would be wasted even on a nominal mission and, again, you know that costs really matter in these things, so we figured out how to make the escape system reusable.

In case it is not used, you can reuse it and make it a pusher. The system is a very sophisticated thing, so I knew these things that you asked me about my decision to go, so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who designed it. I have great confidence in them and the engineering we did. and I thought to myself look, if I'm not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go. In my opinion, a tourist vehicle has to be designed to be very safe, since one can do it, but one cannot do it.

It's perfectly safe, it's impossible, but you know you have to do it. People will do things. People take risks. You know they climb mountains. You know they do skydiving. eliminate the risk, but it's something because it's a touring vehicle, you have to do everything you can 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 were just calm and didn't do it. I don't know as much as I do who was in charge of activating the Escape system. Did you have it automated?

Okay, the Escape system you're viewing is completely automated. It is better automated because it can react much faster. So yes, for tourism. Rocket safety. It's also a huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration, but a bummer, you know, one less Delta, yeah, I mean, I think if you're doing it, you know there are human activities where we tolerate more risk if You are saving someone's life. You know, if you do it, you know engage in real exploration, these are things where you know, I personally think we would accept more risks partly because you have to. Is there a part of you that is frustrated by the rate of progress in the blue origin?

Blue Origin needs to be much faster and it is one of the reasons I left my position as CEO of Amazon. A couple of years ago I needed, I wanted to get in and um, Blue Origin needs me right now and that's why I've always done it. When I was CEO of Amazon, my view on this is that if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company, you're going to get my full attention and that's really how I think about things. It was very important to me. I felt like I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that, so knowing that I converted the CE, I'm still the CEO there, but I handed over the CEO role and the main reason I did that is so that I could spend time on the blue origin adding some energy, you know, some sense of urgency, we need to move a lot faster and we're going to, what are the ways to speed it up?

So I mean, you've talked a lot about different ways of, at Amazon, removing barriers to Progress, distributing, making everyone autonomous and self-sufficient in terms of all those kinds of things, that applies to the Blue origin or is It applies, I know. I'm leading this directly, we're going to become the most decisive company in the world in any industry and at Amazon, they've known that from the beginning. I said we would become the most customer obsessed company in the world and regardless of the industry like people one day people will come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know how you guys are so obsessed with the customer, how they act, not just pay lip service, but actually do that, um and you know all the different industries should come to study us to see how we achieve that and the analogue at Blue Origin and what will help us move forward The faster we will become the most decisive company in the world that we are going to achieve. good to take the right technology, take risks to make those decisions quickly, you know, be bold in those things, that is and have the right culture to support it, you need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious, you know if there are five ways to do something that we will study. but let's study them very quickly and make a decision, we can always change our mind.

Don't you know, change your mind. I'm talking about one-way doors and two-way doors. Most decisions are two-way doors. Can you explain that? I love that metaphor if you make the wrong decision if it's a two-way decision you go out the door you choose a door you go out you spend a little time there it turns out to be the wrong decision you can go back in and choose another door some decisions are so momentous and so important and so difficult to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions, you walk through that door and you're not going to come back MH and those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully, um If you can think of another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do it so you know.

When I was CEO of Amazon, I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer because someone brought me one. Gate decision and I say, “Okay.” I can think of three more ways to look at that, so let's do it because we're not going to be able to reverse this easily, maybe you can reverse it if it's going to be very expensive. and it takes a lot of time, we really have to do this right from the beginning and unfortunately what happens in companies, what can happen is that you have a one size fits all decision making process and you end up using the heavy process in all decisions, yes, including light ones, two-way door decisions, two-way door decisions, for the most part, must be made by individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization, and One-way door decisions are the ones that are irreversible, those are the ones that must be made. elevated to you know most of the high level executives who should slow them down and make sure the right thing is being done.

Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here is knowing the difference between one-way and two-way. I think you, me, yes. I mean, I think you mentioned Amazon Prime, uh, the decision to create Amazon Prime as a one-way door and I mean, it's not clear if it is or not, but it probably is and it's a really big risk to go there. A lot ofdecisions like that, you know that changing the decision is going to be very, very complicated, some of them are also technical decisions, because some technical decisions are like quick-drying cement, you know if you will do it once you make them, it gets really difficult , I mean, you know how to choose which propellants to use in a vehicle, you know, selecting LG for the boost stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage, that turned out to be a very good decision, but if you change your mind, it would be a very good decision.

That would be a very big setback, you know what I'm saying? That's the kind of decision that's scrutinized very carefully. Other things just aren't like that. Most decisions are not like that. Most decisions should be made by individual people but I need and and it's done quickly with the full understanding that you can always change your mind yeah one of the things I really liked maybe these not two way decisions is , uh, I disagree and make a sentence, so don't do it, for someone to bring up an idea. to you if it's two-way or if you claim you don't understand enough to agree but still support them.

I would love to explain to you that yes, disagreeing and compromising is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguments, yes. You know, I want to use that in my personal life. I don't agree, but I compromise as if it were very common in any endeavor in life, in business and in any acquaintance, where you have teammates, you have a teammate and the two of you don't agree, yes, in sometime. You have to make a decision and you know in companies we tend to organize hierarchically so you know whoever is the most senior person ultimately makes the decision so ultimately the CEO makes that decision and it's The CEO may not always make the decision. which they agree with, as you know.

I would do it. Often I would be the one to disagree and commit one of my direct reports would really like to make them do something in a particular way I would think it's 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 went back and forth and he often said: you know what I don't think you're right, but I'm going to bet with you and you're closer to the fundamental truth than I knew. you have had great judgment for 20 years I don't know if I'm right either I'm really not sure all these decisions are complicated let's do it your way but at least then you have made a decision and I agree to commit to that decision, so I'm not going to doubt it.

I'm not going to criticize him. I'm not going to say I told you so, so I'm going to actively try to help make sure that happens. It works, he's a really important teammate. Behavior, there are a lot of ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing in teams and there are a lot of ways that two people disagree about something, even I guess in the case where everyone means well, they just have a A very different opinion on what the right decision is and we have in our society and within companies, we have a lot of mechanisms that we use to resolve these types of disputes, I think a lot of them are really bad, so that's an example of a really bad situation.

The way to reach an agreement is a compromise, so a compromise, you know, look, we're in a room here and could I say Lex, how high do you think this ceiling is? and you'd say, I don't know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall. and I would say I think it's 11 feet tall and then we would say you know how to just call it 11 and A2 feet that are compromised instead of the right thing is get a tape measure or find some way. of measuring, but think about getting that tape measure and figuring out how to get it to the top of the roof and all these things that require energy commitment, the advantage of commitment as a resolution mechanism is that it consumes little energy, but it doesn't lead to the truth . and so on things like ceiling height, where the truth is something knowable, you shouldn't allow a compromise to be used when you can know the truth.

MH, um, another really bad resolution mechanism happens all the time, it's just who's more stubborn, yeah, this. That is also to say, two executives who disagree and simply have a war of attrition in which everyone exhausts themselves and first capitulates to the other. You haven't gotten to the truth and this is very demoralizing, so you know this is where the escalation. I try Ask the people you know on my team and tell them that you never get to a point where you are solving something, you know who gets tired first. Intensify that I will help you make the decision, like this because that is so de-energizing and so terrible. way to make a decision, so you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to a high speed of yes and you want to try to get as close to the truth as possible, so you want, like If you knew, exhaust the other person. it's not seeking the truth, yeah, and compromise is not seeking the truth, so you know, it doesn't mean now and there are many cases where no one knows the real truth and that's where disagreements and compromise can come in, but It's your climb. better than War of Attrition escalate so you meet your boss and say hey, we can't agree on this, we like each other, we respect each other but we don't agree with each other, we need you to know that you make a decision here. so we can move forward, but the decision to move quickly on decisions as quickly as possible responsibly is the way to increase speed, most of what slows things down is taking too much time to make decisions at all levels of skill, you know, so he has to do it. be part of the culture to get high speed, you know, Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast, we are still decisive, we are still fast and that's because the culture supports it at all scales in a distributed place. try to maximize the speed 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, other than the Artemis program with NASA, uh. blue is doing his own Lander program, can you describe it?

There is a sexy photo on Instagram with one of them, is it the MK1? I guess so, the mark in the photo is me with Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, just to clarify the Lander. It's the sexy thing I really want to clarify. I know it was Lander or Bill. Okay, I love it B, clarifying. Okay, uh, yeah, the Maran Lander is designed to carry 3,000 kilograms of cargo to the surface of the Moon. Expendable cargo. It is an expendable lander lands on the moon it stays there it carries 3,000 kg to the surface it can be launched in a single new Glenn flight, which is very important so it is a relatively simple architecture like the Lander human landing system al which they called Mark 2 Mark 1 It is also fueled by liquid hydrogen and, which is for high energy missions like landing on the surface of the Moon, the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a big advantage.

AG, the disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it is because it is so deep. Cryogen is not storable, so it is constantly boiling and you are losing propellant because it is boiling, so what we are doing as part of the L of our lunar program is developing solar-powered cryocoolers that can convert hydrogen into a storable booster for deep space and that's a real game Cher uh it's a game changer for any high energy mission so to the moon but to the planets outside Mars everywhere so the idea with Mark one , both Mark 1 and Mark I, is that the new Glenn can carry it. from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the Moon exactly so that mark one is expendable the lunar the lunar lander that we are developing for NASA the Mark 2 lander that is part of the prr they call it the lander program lifter so that the 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 you already know, if you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander and Apollo was actually two stages that I would land on. the surface and then it would leave the Descent stage on the surface of the Moon and only the ascent stage would return to lunar orbit where it would rendezvous with the Command Module here what we are doing is we have a single lunar stage. lander that carries enough propellant so that it can recover it all and be able to reuse it over and over again and the goal of doing that, of course, is to reduce the cost so that lunar missions can become more affordable over time, which is one of the big goals of NASA because this time the goal of Artemis is to return to the moon, but it's time to stay in MH, so you know, in the Apollo program we went to the moon six times and then we finished the program and it was really too expensive to continue, so there are some questions there, but one is how to stay on the moon, what ideas do you have about, yes, how to maintain a sustainable life where some people can stay there for long periods of time.

One of the things we are working on is using lunar resources like lunar regolith to make commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the Moon. We have already built a solar cell that is completely made of a lunar regolith simulant and this. The solar cell is only 7% energy efficient so it is very inefficient compared to the more advanced solar cells we make here on Earth, but if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory that you can land on Earth surface. from the Moon and then the raw material for those solar cells is just lunar regolith, so you can, you know, continue to produce solar cells on the surface of the Moon, have a lot of power on the surface of the Moon, which will make it easier . for people to live on the moon, similarly, we are working to extract oxygen from the lunar regolith, so lunar regolith by weight has a lot of oxygen and is very tightly bound, like oxides, with other elements, so you have to do it. separate oxygen, which consumes a lot of energy, so it could also work in conjunction with solar cells, but if it can, we may eventually find practical amounts of ice in the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon's poles and We know there is water ice in those craters or ice water in those craters and we know that we can break it down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen and then not only would you have oxygen but you would also have very good efficiency. propellant, uh, hydrogen fuel, so there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time, but the first step, the kind of gate that all of that has to go through, is that we have to be able to land cargo and humans on the surface of the Moon at an acceptable cost to move a little faster, is there any chance that Jeff Basil will set foot on the Moon and on Mars, one or the other or both?

It is very unlikely. I think it's probably something. Future generations will do that by the time it reaches me. I think in my lifetime it will probably be done by professional astronauts. Unfortunately, I would love to sign up for that mission. So don't count me out just yet. Lex, you know? Maybe it will give me a fighting chance here, but I think if we do it, we are making reasonable bets on something like this in my lifetime that will continue to be done by professional astronauts, yes, so these are difficult and risky missions and probably missions that require a lot of training , you know you're going there for a very specific purpose to do something that we'll also be able to do a lot of on the Moon with automation, so you know in terms of setting up these factories and doing all that.

We are now sophisticated enough with automation that we probably don't need humans to man those factories and machines. So there are a lot of things that are going to be done in both modes, so I have to ask a broader question about the two companies. pushing humanity towards the stars, blue origin and SpaceX, are you competitors, collaborators, and to what extent? Well, I would say you know, just like the Internet is big and there are many winners at all levels of scale. I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies. You know, the Internet has created, but there's a bunch of mid-sized businesses and a bunch of small businesses, all successful, all with profit streams, all driving great customer experiences, that's what we want to see in the space, that kind of of dynamism and space.

It's big, there's room for a bunch of winners, and it will happen at all skill levels, so you know SpaceX will be successful for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful and I hope there are five other companies that are right behind it. us, but you know I spoke to Elon several times recently about you about the origin of Blue and he was very positive about you as a person and he was very supportive of all the efforts that you've been leading at Blue. What is your opinion? With whoyou worked? Amazon Leaders in Blue What do you think about Elon as a human being and leader?

Well, I don't really know Elon very well. You know, I know his public persona, but I also know that you can't know anyone by his public persona. It's impossible, I mean, you might think so, but I guarantee you don't, so I don't really know if you know Elon much better than I know Lex, but in terms of judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. um there's no way you can meet Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader it's impossible yeah I just hope that you guys sometimes hold hands and have a kind of friendship that would inspire all of humanity because you , what you are doing is like one of the great challenges that humanity faces.

Well, I agree with you and I think that in many of these efforts we are very like-minded, yeah, so I think I think I'm. I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we have very similar ideas, so you know, I love that idea. Okay, back to the sexy photos on your Instagram. There's a video of you from the early days of Amazon. tour your date guy offices I think your dad is holding the camera, he's yeah, I know, yeah, this is what the Giant Orange extension cord is and yeah, and you're like explaining The Genius of the Extension Cord how This is a desktop and the CRT monitor and that's pretty much where all the magic is Captain.

I forget what your dad said, but this is like the center of everything, so what was it like that was going through your mind at that moment when you left? a good job in New York and I made this leap you were excited you were scared so excited and scared anxious you know I thought the chances of success were low I told all of our early investors I thought there was a 30% chance of success so I just finished to get your money back, it's not like that's not what really happened, because that's the truth, every startup is unlikely to work out, it helps to be realistic about that, um, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic , so in a way.

You have to have this duality in your head, like on the one hand you know what the benchmark statistics say about startups and on the other hand you have to ignore all that and be 100% sure that it's going to work. You're doing both at the same time, you have that Addiction thing in your head, but it was so exciting, I love you, you know, from 1994 when the company was founded, 1995 when we opened our doors to today. I find Amazon very exciting and that doesn't mean it's full of pain.of problems, you know, it's like there are so many things that need to be solved, worked on and improved, etc., but overall, it's a lot of fun, it's a great privilege, it has been a great joy.

I feel very grateful to have been a part of That journey, um, it's been just incredible, so in a sense, you don't want a single day of solace. You've written about this many times. We'll talk about your writings, which, uh, I would highly recommend that people read just the letters to shareholders. uh so you wrote uh explaining the idea of ​​the first day thinking, I think you first wrote bought in 97 letters to shareholders and then somehow you also wrote it about how sad it is to say that it's your last letter to shareholders Co um and you said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciating and painful decline followed by death and that's why it's always the first day.

Can you explain this day just one thing? This is a really powerful way to describe Amazon's beginning and journey. It's really very simple. And I think of an 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're not trapped by what you were or who you were or any self-consistency. -Consistency can even be a trap, so on the first day we think we start over every day and we can make new decisions every day about the invention, the customers, how we are going to operate, even as deeply as what is our The principles are ones that we can go back to and it turns out that we don't change them very often, but we do change them occasionally and when we work on programs at Amazon, we often make a list of tenants and these are the tenants.

They're not principles, they're a little more tactical than principles, but they are the main ideas that we want this show to embody, whatever they are, and one of the things we do is put these are the tenants of this show and in parentheses. We always say 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, it doesn't mean you dismiss history or ignore it. There's a lot of value in what's worked in the past, but you can't blindly follow what you've done and that's the heart of day one: you're always starting over and, uh, left wondering how to defend yourself from the day. two, you said that question cannot have a simple answer, since you are saying that there will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps.

I don't know the full answer, but you may know parts of it. Here's an Essentials starter pack perhaps. Others come to mind from day one: obsession with the defense client, a skeptical view of proxies, enthusiastic adoption of external trends and high-speed decision making, so we talk about high-speed decision making. speed, which is harder than it looks, so maybe you can pick one that stands out. for you, as you can comment on the enthusiastic adoption of external trends. High-speed decision making. Skeptical view of the representatives. How do you fight the second day? Well, you know, I'll talk about him because I think he's the one who is maybe, in some ways, the best.

The most difficult thing to understand is the skeptical view of the representatives. One of the things that happens in business, probably anything you're in, you know you have an ongoing program and something is going on for several years, if you develop certain. things that you're getting to like, let's say the typical case would be a metric and that metric is not the actual underlying thing, so, you know, maybe the metric is an efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like if you sell a million units, how many customer contacts you get or how many returns you get, and so on, and so on, what happens is a kind of inertia that sets in in the sense that someone invented a long time ago time that metric and they invented that metric, they decided that we had to keep an eye on 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 the It's worth watching it and then moving forward five years. that metric is the proxy MH the proxy of truth I guess the proxy of truth the proxy of the customer let's say that in this case it is a proxy of the customer's happiness but that metric is not actually the customer's happiness it is a proxy of 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 looking at that metric in the first place and the world changes a little bit, yeah, and now that proxy is not as valuable as it used to be or it's missing something and you have to be alert for that, you have to know, okay, this is it.

I don't really care about this metric. I care about customer happiness and this metric is worth putting energy into, tracking and improving. Scrutinize only to the extent that it really affects customer happiness, so you have to constantly be on guard and it is very, very common, this is a problem with nuances, it is very common, especially in large companies, which manage metrics that They really don't understand. They don't really know why they exist and the world may have moved on from them a bit and the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when someone 10 years earlier invented the metric which is a nuance, but that's a big problem. true, there is something so compelling about having a good metric to try to optimize, yes, and by the way, you need metrics, yes, you know you can't ignore them, you want them, but you just have to constantly be on guard, this is you.

One way to get into day two thinking would be to run your business based on metrics that you don't really understand and you're not 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 the guy or girl who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess you need to have a culture that allows that in the meeting, because it's a very awkward thing to bring up in a meeting. We all showed up here on Friday.

You just asked a million dollar question. So this is what you are. If I generalize what you're asking, you were speaking generally. about the truth, you can survive, you can procreate if you are the people's truth teller, you can be beaten to death in the middle of the night, truths often don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be uncomfortable. They can be exhausting, rude, all those kinds of challenging things, they can make people defensive, even if that's not the intention, but any high-performing organization or if it's a sports team, a company, you know. , a political organization, an activist group, I don't care what.

It's any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports the truth, tell people that's not what we're designed to do as humans, it's not really some kind of side effect, you know we can do that, but That's not how we survive. We survive mainly by being social animals, and by being cordial and cooperative, and that's really important, so you know science is about telling the truth, it's actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth and even in science You discover that it's hard to tell the truth, right? You even know that you are supposed to have a hypothesis, test it, find data, reject the hypothesis, etc., it is not easy, but even in science there are senior scientists and young scientists, and then there is a hierarchy of humans where the seniority of Somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which is true within companies as well, so you want to set up your culture so that the younger person can override the more senior person if they have data um and and and that's really what it's all about. of trying to let you know that there are little things you can do, for example, in every meeting I attend, I always speak last and I know from experience that you know if I speak first, even participants with a lot of willpower, very intelligent, with high judgment.

In that meeting I'll wonder if Jeff thinks I came into this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right, so you can do little things like, if you're the most senior person in the room, go last, let everyone else go. In fact, ideally you should first try to get the youngest person to go first and then try to go in order of seniority, so that you can hear everyone's opinion in an unfiltered way, because really we do, we literally change our opinions if someone someone you really respect says something that changes your mind a little bit, so you're implicitly or explicitly saying agree so that people have a strong opinion that, as long as it's backed by data, yes and sometimes it can even, for True, many of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches, they are based on anecdotes, they are based on your intuition, and sometimes you don't even have solid data, but you may know that you know the person well enough to trust their judgment.

You may feel inclined. in it can resonate with a set of anecdotes that you have and then you can say that you know something that seems right to you, let's collect some data on that, let's try to see if we can really know if it's right, but for now let's not do it. ignore it because it feels good, you can also fight the inherent bias, there is an optimism bias, for example if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and the other is not happy, it is a bit dangerous come to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is correct, you might want to compensate for that human bias of looking for, you know, trying to find the positive side and I said, look at this, that might be good, but I'm going to go with the bad. for now until I'm sure So, speaking of happiness bias data collection and anecdotes, you have to tell me the story of the call you made, the customer service call you made to prove a point about weight. times, yeah, this is very early in Amazon's history and we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents and I have a saying that is when the data and the anecdotes don't agree, the anecdotes are usually correct and it doesn't mean If you just slavishly follow the anecdotes, then it means you're going to examine the data because the data and it's usually not that the data is being collected in a miscellaneous way, it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing andthen you know if you have a lot of customers complaining about something and at the same time you know that your metrics look like why they shouldn't complain.

You should doubt metrics and an early example of this was we had metrics that showed our customers were waiting, I think less than I don't know, 60 seconds when they called a 1 1800 number to call customer service, they were supposed to. that the wait time would be less than 60 seconds, but we had many complaints that it was longer. than that and anecdotally it seemed longer than that as you know I would call customer service myself so one day we're in a meeting and we go to the wbr and the weekly business review and we come up with this metric in the platform and The guy who runs customer service has to fit the metric and I said, "Okay, let's call." I picked up the phone, dialed the 1800 number and called customer service and we just waited in silence.

How did it turn out? Oh, it was really long. over 10 minutes, I think oh wow, I mean it was a lot of minutes, so it dramatically made it clear that something was wrong with the data collection, we weren't measuring the right thing and that set off a whole chain of events where We began to measure it correctly and that is an example of telling the truth, it is something uncomfortable to do, yes, but it is, but you have to look for the truth even when it is uncomfortable and you have to get people's attention and them.

They have to accept it and they have to energize themselves to really fix things, so that speaks to the obsession with customer experience, so one of the defining aspects of their approach to Amazon is simply being obsessed with making customers happy I think companies. I sometimes say that, but Amazon is really obsessed with it. I think there is something really profound about seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, how the customer experiences the human being who uses the product, who enjoys the product as it is. like the subtle little things that make up his experience, like how to optimize them.

This is another really good and deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage and then there are small things internally at Amazon. We call them paper cuts, so we're always working on the big things, like if you ask me, and most of the energy goes into the big things like it should, so you can identify the big things and I would encourage anyone. If anyone you know is listening to this, you're an entrepreneur like a small business, whatever, think about the things that aren't going to change in 10 years and those are probably the most important things, as I know in our retail business in Amazon 10.

In a few years, customers will still want low prices. I know they'll still want fast delivery and I just know they'll still want a great selection, so it's impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now I'll say where the customer says I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher o I love Amazon. I just wish you would deliver a little more slowly so that when you identify the important things you can say that they are worth it. Putting energy in because they are stable over time, that's fine, but you're asking about something a little different, which is that in each experience of the customer there are important things and by the way, it is surprisingly difficult to focus on even just the important things, so even though they are obvious, it is very difficult to focus on them, but on top of that, there are all these little deficiencies in the customer experience and to those We call them paper cuts and we make long lists of them and then we have dedicated teams that are responsible for fixing the paper cuts.

Because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts, they never move down the list to get to them, they are working on big things the way they should and the way you want them to, which is why special teams are needed. who are in charge of fixing paper cuts, where would you put the paper cut? Spectrum, buy now with a one-click button, which I think is pretty cool, so for me it's okay my interaction with the things that I love on the Internet, there are things that I do a lot. maybe introduce a normal human being, uh, I would love for those things to be frictionless, for example, booking plane tickets, just saying, but you know, it's buying something with a click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all the aspects of that that fundamentally make my life better. not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of cognitive load, yes, cognitive load and peace, inner peace and happiness, first of all, buying things, uh, it's not a pleasant experience, having enough money to buy something and then buying it is pleasant. experience and having pain around it is that you are somehow ruining a beautiful experience and I guess all I'm saying as a person who loves good ideas is that a paper cut is a solution to a paper cut, yeah, so it's probably that particular thing is probably a solution to a series of paper cuts, so if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented one-click purchasing, there was a whole Be, there was more friction, there was a whole series of paper cuts and that invention eliminated a lot of paper cuts and I think you're absolutely right that when you come up with something like one-click shopping again, this is something so ingrained in the people now I'm impressed that you even notice it, I mean most people every time I click the button, most people feel happiness.

This is the perfect invention for the perfect time in the perfect context. There is real beauty, yes, it is real beauty and it feels good, it is 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 problem and you can feel those things, but to keep generating that idea with those types of ideas, I guess it's the effort of thinking of the first day, yes. and you need, you need a great group of people who get that kind of satisfaction from creating that kind of beauty.

There are many books written about you. There is a book. Invents and wanders where Walter Isaacson makes an introduction and is mainly. Your collective writings. I've read that I also recommend people check out the founders

podcast

. That covers you a lot and does different analysis of the different trading advice you've given over the years. I mention all that because. I saw you mentioned that you said books are an antidote to short attention spans and I forget how it was worded, but when you were thinking about the Kindle you were thinking about how technology changes, yes, we co-evolve, yes. with our tools, so you know we invent new tools and then our tools change us, which is fascinating to think about, it goes in a circle and there is an aspect that you know, even within the business, where you not only make the customer happy but You also have to think about where this will take humanity if you go a little further away from 100%.

And you know you can feel like your brain is plastic and you can feel your brain reprogramming. I remember the first time this happened to me. It was when Tetris first appeared on the scene. I'm sure anyone who's ever been a game player has had this experience where you close your eyes to lie down and sleep and you see all the little blocks moving and you can. You're rotating them in your mind and you can tell as you're walking around the world that you've rewired your BL brain to play Tetris and that happens with everything, so you know one of the ones I think we still have to do.

I'm afraid you see all the repercussions of this, but I think one of the things that we've done online, and largely because of social media, is that we've trained our brains to be really good at processing formatted content. super short and you already know your podcast. goes against this, you know, you do these long-form things and, uh, reading books is a long-form thing and we all do more if something is convenient, we do more and so, when you create tools you know that we have a little bit of our pocket a phone and one of the things that phone does for the most part is an attention span device because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention span. and I'm not even going to say that we know for sure that that's bad, but I do think that it's happening, it's one of the ways that we're co-evolving with that tool, but I think it's important to dedicate some of your time and some of your life doing things that require a lot of attention, yes, I think you've talked about the value in your own life of singular focus on one thing for extended periods of time and that's certainly what books do and that's certainly what that piece of the Technology does, but I bring all that up to ask you about another piece of technology, AI, that has the potential to have multiple trajectories, uh, to impact human civilization.

How do you think AI will change us if talking about, you know, generative AI, large language models, things like GPT chat and its soon-to-be successors, and um, these are incredibly powerful technologies, to believe otherwise is to bury your head. in the arena so that soon it will be even more powerful, um, it's interesting to me that such a big language. Models in their current form are not inventions, they are discoveries. You know the telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter knowing it had moons was a discovery like, oh my God, it has moons and that's what Galileo did, so this is closer. that spectrum of invention, you know, we know exactly what happens with a 787, it is an engineering object, we design it, we know how it behaves, we don't want surprises, great language models are much more like discoveries, they surprise us constantly. capabilities, they're not really designed objects, so you know you have this debate about whether they're going to be good or bad for humanity, you know, even specialized AI can be very bad for humanity, I mean, you know, regular models of machine learning that can make you aware of certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful and they're not general AIS, they could just be very smart weapons, so we have to think about all those things, I'm very optimistic about it, so even In the face of all this uncertainty, my own opinion is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help and save us, even than, overall, to harm and destroy us. we, I think you know that humans have many ways to go extinct, you know these things can help us not do that, you know, they might actually save us, so the people you know are too worried.

In my opinion, too concerned, it is a valid debate. I think I think they may be missing part of the equation, which is how useful they could be in ensuring that we don't destroy ourselves. I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but I first of all 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 and I think that's the most boring part of the movie. It was the most fascinating thing because what's happening here is you realize that we have invented these incredibly powerful destructive technologies called nuclear weapons and they are managed and you know that we humans are not really capable of wielding those weapons.

I know that's what he portrayed in that movie, here's this guy who just mistakenly thinks he's so petty that he thinks he said something that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him, they didn't talk about him at all like you. find out in the final scene of the movie and yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful and uh and Petty and that's the problem: we, as a species, are not sophisticated and mature enough to handle these technologies and so on. the long before you get to General Ai and the possibility of AI having agency and a lot of things would have to happen, but in the meantime, there are many benefits that will come from these Technologies, even before you know about General AI in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies, etc., so I think it's an incredible time to be alive and witness the transformations that will happen, how quickly it will happen, no one knows, but over the next 10 and 20 years.

I think we're going to see some really notable progress and I'm personally very excited about this. First of all, it's really interesting to say that these are discoveries, that it's true that we don't know the limits of what is possible with current language models. And there might be a few tricks and hacks here and there that open doors to offer entirely new possibilities. We know that humans are doing something different than these models, in part because you know we are very energy efficient. The human brain does extraordinary things and it does it with about 20 watts of power and you know, the artificial intelligence techniques that we use today use many kilowatts of power to perform equivalent tasks, so there is something interesting in the way that the human brain does this and we also don't needso much data, so you know, like self-driving cars, they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try to learn how to drive, and you know the average 16-year-old figures it out with a lot of.

Fewer miles, so there are still some tricks left. I think we still have to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a matter of scaling things up, but the interesting thing is that we just scale things up. and I just put that in quotes because it's actually hard to broaden things, but just broadening things also seems to pay huge dividends, yeah, and there's a more nuanced aspect about human beings that's interesting if you can manage to be truly original and novel, you know, a lot of big language models are capable of generating some really new ideas, uh, that's one and the other one is, uh, the truth is, it seems like the big language models are very good at sounding like they're saying something true, but they don't do it.

It doesn't require or often have a basis in some kind of mathematical truth, it can basically be a very good lie, so if there isn't enough data in the training data on a particular topic, I'm just going to make up narratives that sound accurate, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get language models to infer what is true and not do a kind of introspection? Yes, it is necessary to teach them to say: I don't know anymore. often yes, and I know several humans who could also be taught that, of course, and then the other things, because you're still a little bit involved on the Amazon side with the AI ​​stuff.

The other open question is what kind of products are created from this. oh, so many, yeah, I mean, you know, you just know we have Alexa and Eko and Alexa, you know, hundreds of millions of installed bases, you know inputs, and then there's this, you know there's Alexa everywhere and guess what? Alexa is about to do. much smarter yeah and that's really what you know from a product standpoint that's super exciting there's so many opportunities there's so many opportunities purchasing assistant you know that's all amazing on AWS you know we're building Titan, which is our fundamental model.

We're also building um Bedrock, where our corporate customers on AWS, our enterprise customers, 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 those are the tools that have. We're building for them with a solid foundation, so there's a huge opportunity here, yes, security, privacy, all of those things are fascinating, because you can get a lot of value training with private data, but you want to keep this secure, that It's a fascinating technical problem. This is a very challenging technical issue and we know we are making progress and dedicated to solving it for our customers.

Do you think there will come a day when humans and robots maybe Alexa have a romantic relationship like she can? I mean, think that if you look at the brainstorming products here, if you look at the spectrum of the human variety and what people like you know, the sexual variety yes, you know that they are people who like everything, so The answer to your question has to be yes, no. I don't know, I don't know how widespread that will be, okay, but it will happen. I was just asking for a friend, but that's okay, I'll just move on to the next question, what is a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos?

You are one of the most productive human beings in the world. Well, first of all I get up in the morning and do as I like to have a coffee, find a putter, as well as I move slowly. I'm not as productive as you might think. I mean, because I believe in wandering and something like that. You know, I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while I chat with Lauren I have my first coffee um so I move pretty slowly in the first few hours I get up early naturally uh and uh and then you know I exercise most days and most days it's it's not. hard for me sometimes it's really hard and I do it anyway I don't want you to know and it's painful and I wonder why I'm here and I don't want to do it why I'm here at the gym why am I here at the gym?

Why don't I do something else? You know it's not always easy. What is your source of motivation in those moments? I know I will feel better later if I do and I like the real source. for motivation I can tell the days I skip it I'm not as alert I don't feel as good um and then there are harder motivations it's longer term you want to be healthy as you get older you know you want health ideally you know you want to be healthy and move when you're 80, you know, and there are a lot of them, but that kind of motivation is so far in the future that it can be very difficult to work on the latter. so thinking about the fact that I will feel better in about four hours if I do it now I have more energy for the rest of the day and so on what is your exercise routine just to stop at that what do you do? how much do you do? your curl, I mean, what are we talking about here?

That's all I do in the gym, so I just do my routine, you know, on a good day I do about half an hour of cardio and about 45 minutes of resistance training with weight lifting. some kind, mainly weights, I have a trainer that you know I love, that pushes me, which is very helpful, you know, I'll say, uh, he'll say, uh, Jeff, could you? Can we increase that weight a little? and I'll think about it and say no I don't think so and he'll look at me and say yes I think you can and of course he's right so it sucks that someone puts pressure on me. you a little, but almost every day you do that.

I do it almost every day. I do a little cardio and a little weight lifting and, um, broken. I do a pulling day, a pushing day and a leg day, everything is nice. Standard stuff, so messing around in the cafe gym, pronounce cafe gym and then work, work, so what does work look like? What do productive hours look like for you? You already know, a couple of years ago I left the position of CEO of Amazon and I have never done so. I worked the hardest in my life. I'm working very hard and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days.

Most of my time is spent in a blue origin and I have been so deeply involved here. now for the last few years and in the big way, I love it, in the small way, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything you know, we're trying to qualify manufacturing like we talked about, that's very important, we'll get there. Just hired a new CEO that I've known for almost 15 years, a guy named Dave limp who I love, he's amazing, you know, we're very lucky to have Dave and you know we're going to go. to see us move faster there, but that's my work day, you know, reading documents, having meetings, um, sometimes in person, sometimes, over Zoom, it depends on where I am, it's all about, you know , the technology, it's about the organization, it's about, you know, I'm very um I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day about various subsystems within the vehicle, within the engines, it's super fun for me, my favorite part It's technology, um, my least favorite part is, you know, building organizations, etc., that's important, but it's also my least favorite part, so you know, that's why they call it work.

You can't always do what you want. How do you find time where you can focus and really think about problems? I think little. Withdrawals, so stop this. It's not the only thing I can do all day I'm very good at concentrating I'm very good at um, you know, I don't follow a set schedule, as my meetings often last longer than I plan. Because I believe in wandering a lot, my perfect meeting starts with a clear document, so the document must be written with such clarity that it is like angels singing from above. I like neat documents and a messy meeting so the meeting is like asking questions that no one knows the answer to and and and and trying to meander towards a solution and um uh because I like it and that's yeah when that happens well it makes everyone the other meetings are worth it it feels good it has a kind of beauty it has an aesthetic beauty and you get real progress and meetings like that.

Can you really describe the document neatly like this? It is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon. The way you approach meetings? The page note maybe first describes the process of running a meeting with notes and meetings at Amazon and the blue origin is unusual when we are new, when new people come in, like if a new executive joins, sometimes they are surprised a little bit because the typical The meeting will start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we will study in the room for 30 minutes, we will sit together quietly in the meeting and read, take notes in the margins and then discuss the reason for the way what studied.

Let's say I would like everyone to read these memos ahead of time, but the problem is that people don't have time to do so and end up coming to the meeting just skimming the memo or maybe not reading it at all and are trying to catch up. and they're also bragging like they're in college having pretended to read yes, exactly, it's better to just make time for people, so now we're all on the same page, we've all read the memo and now we can have a really lofty discussion. and this is much better by having a slideshow.

You know, a PowerPoint presentation of some kind that has a lot of difficulties, but one of the problems is that Powerpoint is really designed to persuade. It's a kind of sales tool. and internally the last thing you want to do is sell, you want to do it again, you're looking for the truth, you're trying to find the truth and the other problem with PowerPoint is that it's easy for the author and hard for the audience, and one note is everything. otherwise. it's hard to write a six-page memo a good six-page memo can 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 If you write it again, you might get It takes two weeks, so the author is really a very difficult job, but for the audience it is much better, so you can read for half an hour and you know that there are also small problems with PowerPoint presentations.

You know, the top executives. interrupt with questions mid-presentation, that question will be answered on the next slide, but it never got there where, if you read the entire memo ahead of time, you'll know that I often write down a lot of questions that I have in the margins of these memos and then write them down. I cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo they have already been answered, which is why I save all that time. You also know the person who is preparing the memo we talked about earlier, you know, group.

Think about and know the fact that I am the last one in meetings and you don't want your ideas to contaminate the meeting prematurely. You know the author of the memo has to be very vulnerable. they have to express all their thoughts and they have to go first, but that's great because it makes them really good and then you can see their real ideas and you're not accidentally knocking them down into some big power that you already know. On-time presentation, how does it feel when you've written something and then you're sitting there and everyone is reading yours?

You think I think it's terrifying, yeah, maybe in a good way, I think it's cleansing, I think it's terrifying. in a productive way, yeah, um, but I think it's emotionally a very stressful experience. Is there art science in the writing of the six-page memo or simply in the writing? Overall, I mean, it really has to be a real experience. memo, then it means that you know the paragraphs have topic sentences, they are verbs and nouns which you can't, that's the other problem with the PowerPoint version, they are often just bullet points and you can hide a lot of sloppy ideas behind the bullet points when you have to do it. write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it's very difficult to hide sloppy thinking, so you do it, you force the author to do their best and then you get someone gets their best thought and then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to provoke that thought in the person that you have it from the beginning, so it really saves you time in the long run, so that part is crystal clear and then the rest is a confusing and crystal clear document, yes and you don't want to, you don't want to pretend that the Discussion should be sharp, yes, you know that most meetings you are trying to solve a really difficult problem.

There is a different type of meeting that we call weekly business reviews or business reviews. they can be weekly, monthly or daily, whatever, but these business review meetings are usually for incremental improvement and you look at a series of metrics each time they are the same metrics, those meetings can be very efficient, they can start on time and finish. 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, it's for humor. Okay, can you explain what the 10,000 year clock is? The 10,000 Year Clock is a Physical Clock of monumental scale It is approximately 500 feet tall It is inside a mountain in West Texas in a chamber that is approximately 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet high.

The 10,000 year clock is an idea conceived by a brilliant guy called Danny Hillis back in the '80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking and you can think very conceptually about the 10,000 year clock, since you know it ticks once a year. It rings once you know every hundred years and the cuckoo comes out once every thousand years, so it just slows everything down and, it's a completely mechanical clock, it's designed to last 10,000 years without human intervention, so the material choices and everything the rest is in a remote location to protect but also so that visitors have to make a kind of 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 become in a symbol of long-term thinking that In fact, I hope that humans expand their horizons of thought and my opinion is really important as we have become as a species and civilization more powerful.

You know, we're really affecting the planet. Now we are really affecting each other. We have mass weapons. destruction, we have all kinds of things where we can really get hurt and the problems we create can be so big, you know, the unintended consequences of some of our actions, like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere as a perfect example , that's an unintended consequence. We obtained many benefits from the Industrial Revolution, but we also have this side effect that is very harmful. We need to start training ourselves to think longer term. Long-term thinking is a giant lever that you can literally solve. problems if you think about the long term that are impossible to solve if you think about the short term and we're not really good at thinking about the long term since you know we're not really, you know, five years is a difficult period of time. for most institutions. think beyond um and we probably need to extend that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years and we would do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could extend those Horizons of thought and so the clock is on a In a way , it's an art project, it's a symbol, and if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won't happen for hundreds of years, but we have to know that we will build it now and leave it . acrid patina of age, do you think humans will be here when time here on Earth runs out?

I think so, but you know the United States will not exist as if all civilization arose and F 10,000 years is as long as any nation state has ever existed. ever survived for about 10,000 years and the increasing rate of progress makes it even less likely. I also believe that humans will be here. Yes, what do you know? How will we have changed ourselves and what will we be?, etc., etc. I don't know, but I think we'll be here on that grand scale. Human life feels small. Do you reflect on your own mortality? Do you fear death? Don't know.

I used to be afraid of death. I remember when I was young I was very afraid of mortality, I didn't want to think about it, etc., and I always had a big one and as I got older, I'm now 59, as I got older. Somehow that fear has disappeared. Don't know. um, you know. I'd like to stay alive as long as possible, but I wish I was. I'm really more focused on health duration. I want to be healthy. I want that square wave I want to, you know, I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy and then fade away, I don't want the long decline, um, but I'm curious, I want to see how things turn out, you know, I'd like to be here.

I love my family and my close friends and I want to. I'm curious about them and I want to see them, so I have every reason to stay, but mortality doesn't have that effect. On me, you knew, maybe when I was 20, Jeff, thank you for creating Amazon, one of the most incredible companies of history, and thank you for doing everything possible for humans and multiplanetary species to expand Bing to our solar system, perhaps. Beyond knowing the aliens that exist and thank you for speaking today Al Lex, thank you for doing your part to lengthen our attention span.

I really appreciate it, thank you very much for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos to support this podcast. Consult our sponsors. in the description and now let me leave you with a few words from Jeff Bezos himself be stubborn with Vision but flexible on the details thanks for listening and hope to see you next time