#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin

The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. And I'm sure we will have a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

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This is the Lex treatment podcast and now dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos. You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on ranch here in Texas. And I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch. So what's the coolest job you remember doing there? Wow, coolest. Most interesting. Most memorable. Most memorable.

It was real. It's a real working ranch. My grand and I spent all my summers on that ranch from age four to 16. And my grandfather was really taking me those in the summers and in the early summers. He was letting me pretend to help on the ranch because of course a four year old is a burden not a help in real life who can really just watching me and taking care of me.

He was doing that because my mom was so young she had me when she was 17 and so he was sort of giving her a break and my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for the summers. But it's got a little older actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it. I was out there like my grandfather had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life.

I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines and you know, done all the things that any rancher would do vaccinated the animals everything. But we had a you know my grandfather after my grandmother, they're died. I was about 12 and I kept coming to the ranch. So it was then it was just him and me just the two of us.

And he was completely addicted to the soap opera the days of our lives and we would go back to the ranch house every day around one p.m. or so to watch days of our lives and like sands through an hour glass. So are the days of our lives just the image of that. He was watching a soap opera. He had these big crazy dogs. It was really a very far from the experience. But the key thing about it for me that the great gift I got from it was that my grandfather was so resourceful.

You know, he did everything himself. He made his own veterinary tools. He would make needles to suture the cattle up with it. He would find a little piece of wire and heated up and pound it then and drill a hole in it and sharpen it. So you learn different things on a ranch than you would learn, you know, growing up in a city. So self-reliance. Yeah. Like, figure out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and genuity and I grab father bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer.

You got it for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955 caterpillar D6 bulldozer knew it would have cost I don't know more than $100,000. And we spent an entire summer fixing the repairing that bulldozer. We'd, you know, use mail order to buy big gears for the transmission and they'd show up. They'd be too heavy to move. So we'd have to build a crane.

You know, just that kind of, kind of that problem solving mentality. He had it so powerfully. You know, he did all of his own. He just, he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own. He doing his own veterinary work, you know. But just the image of the two you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m. to watch soap operas laying on the floor. That's how he watched TV. Yeah. He was a really, really remarkable guy.

That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also. You know, those westerns when he's when he's not doing what he's doing is just watching soap operas. All right. I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five watching you are strong walking on the moon. So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic.

It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events for satellite the space for a human to space for a spacewalk first on crude landing on the moon. Then some failures explosions death on both sides actually. And then the first human walking on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time? Those few years at just 12 years.

Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. You know, one of the great things to take away from that. One of the great von Braun quotes is I have I have come to use the word impossible with great caution. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo is that things, you know, going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible.

You know, oh, yeah, you'll do that when you know, men walk on the moon. Yeah. And of course it finally happened. So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race. I think, you know, with the geopolitical implications and, you know, how much resource was put into it. You know, at the peak that program was spending, you know, two or three percent of GDP on the Apollo program. So much resource that I think it was pulled forward in time.

You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote should have done it. Yeah. And so in that way, it's also a tactical marvel. I mean, it's truly incredible. It's, you know, it's the 20th century version of building the pyramids or something. It's, you know, it's an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time, because it did something that had previously thought impossible. It rightly deserves its place as, you know, in the pantheon of great human achievements.

And of course, you named the projects, the rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. I don't understand why I didn't say New Gagarin. Is that American bias in the naming? I apologize. Very strange. Lex. I'm asking for a friend. I have a big fan of Gagarin, though. In fact, I, I think his, his first words in space, I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said, my God, it's blue.

And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet. Yeah. No one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the first person to see it. One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for, for Glenn, for everybody involved. Like how big of a risk they're all taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight.

But I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepherd flight, the flight that, you know, New Shepherd is named after the first American in space. He went on his suburbial flight. They thought he had about a 75% chance of success. So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk. It's kind of interesting that Alan Shepherd is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't know, Alan Shepherd is the first astronaut. For some American in space. American in suborbital flight.

Correct. And then the first orbital flight is... Then John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth. By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter from John Glenn, which I have framed and hang on my office wall. Where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named New Glenn after him. And they sent me that letter about a week before he died. And it's really incredible.

It's also a very funny letter. He's writing and he says, you know, this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn. And he's got a great sense of humor. And he's very happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet. Does he say PS don't mess this up or is it? No, he doesn't. Make me look good. He doesn't do that. But we put John wherever you are. We got your cover. So back to maybe the big picture of space.

When you look up at the stars and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space. I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, in any given time, a thousand Mozart and a thousand Einstein's. That would be our solar system before life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system.

So what do you think that looks like? Giant space stations? Yeah. The only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. So you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. But, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on. And we'll build giant, onule-style colonies. And people will live in those.

And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spend them to get normal earth gravity. You can put them where you want them. I think most people are going to want to live near earth, not necessarily an earth orbit. But in, you know, earth, but near earth vicinity orbits. And so they can move, you know, relatively quickly back and forth between their station and earth.

So I don't think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not going to want to give up earth altogether. They go to earth for vacation. Yeah. And you know, you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation, people will, and no one, and people will get to choose where they live on earth or where they live in space. But they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space. And they would be able to use on earth.

One interesting idea is you had is to move the heavy industry away from earth. So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict with the celebration of the planet earth. That we should focus on preserving earth. And basically your idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve earth. Exactly. This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one. Not to play favorites or anything.

Earth really is the good planet. It's amazing. The ecosystem we have, you're all of the life and the lush plant life and you know, the water resources, everything this planet is really extraordinary. And of course, we evolved on this planet. So of course, it's perfect for us. But it's also perfect for all the advanced life forms on this planet, all the animals and so on. And so this is a gym. We do need to take care of it.

And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we get, as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and impactful as we strive across this planet, you know, it's that that is going to as we continue. We want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about the good old days, they're mostly in illusion.

We can almost every way life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or a hundred years. We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. We get, you know, antibiotics and all kinds of life saving medical care and so on and so on.

And there's one thing that is moving backwards and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible and we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have 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 energy usage per capita.

And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system. And really you can argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that. Eventually we have to do that. Exactly.

So you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the Orbital Reef Space Infrastructure Projects. What's your vision for these? So Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to 3,000 kilograms of payload up to Geosynchronous Orbit or in lunar vicinity. It has two different kinds of propulsion. It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion.

And so you can use Blue Ring in a couple of different ways. You can slowly move, let's say, up to Geosynchronous Orbit using electric propulsion that might take, you know, 100 days or 150 days depending on how much mass you're carrying.

And then and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in Geosynchronous Orbit. Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to Geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your Geosynchronous Orbit. Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features. It provides a lot of services to these payloads. So the payload, it can be one large payload or it can be a number of small payloads.

And it provides thermal management, it provides electric power, it provides compute, provides communications. And so when you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation tolerant compute on board Blue Ring. And you can, your payload can just use that what it needs to.

So I would say it's sort of all these services. It's, you know, it's, it's like a set of APIs. It's a little bit like Amazon Web Services, but for space. For space payloads that need to move about in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity. AWS S. Okay, so, so compute and space. So you get, you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit. And then you have these admins that show up this blue ring thing that manages various things like compute.

Exactly. And it can, it can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits, including humans. Do you think? But Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander, which is of course designed to land humans on the surface of the moon. I'm going to ask about that. Well, let me, let me actually just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist.

What attracted you to physics? And why did you change your mind and not become why why you're not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist? So I loved physics and I said physics and computer science. And I was proceeding along along the physics path. I was playing the major in physics. And I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.

And I was in the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it. And I, and I was very good at the programming and doing those things. And I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely. But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. I saw I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely. And then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist.

And there were, there were a few people in my classes like in quantum mechanics and so on who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart. And to be really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the, you know, only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward. It's one of those things where you have to be really just your brain has to be wired in a certain way.

And there was a guy named one of these people who was convinced me he didn't mean to convince me, which is by observing him. He convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yo Santa. And Yo Santa was from Sri Lanka and he's he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My friend, Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problems set one night.

And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, Yo Santa. So we went to Yo Santa's dorm room. And he was there. He was almost always there. And we said, Yo Santa, we're having trouble solving this partial differential equation, which mind taking a look. And he said, of course, by the way, he was the most humble, most kind person.

And so he took our, he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds. And he said, cosine. And I said, what do you mean, Yo Santa? What do you mean cosine? He said, that's the answer. And I said, no, no, come on. And he said, let me show you. And he took out some paper and he wrote down three pages of equations.

Everything canceled out. And the answer was cosine. And I said, Yo Santa, did you do that in your head? And he said, no, no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem. And I could map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that. You realize maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't sure, isn't what you're doing.

And so I switched to computer science and, and you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it. I still enjoy it today. Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition. You need to be a great physicist and applied to physics. I think the mathematical skill required today is so high. You have to be a world class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today. And it's not, you know, you probably need other skills to intuition, lateral thinking, and so on.

Without the without just top notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful. And visualizations skill yet to be able to really kind of do these kind of thought experiments. And if you wanted to truly great creativity, actually walk our Isaacson rights about you.

I put you on the same level as Einstein. That's very kind. I have an inventor. If you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with a typical solutions. And, you know, and then I can create 100 such a typical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny. But one of those 100 is like, maybe there is maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking.

That kind of inventiveness in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large. That's where my inventive skills come. That's the thing I'm, if I, I self identify as an inventor more than anything else. Yeah. And he describes in all kinds of different ways. Walter Isaacson does that creativity combined with childlike, a launder that you've maintained still to this day. All of that combined together. Is there like a few words to study your brain introspect?

How do you think what you're thinking process like we'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon. But how do you when you sit down? Maybe alone, maybe with others and thinking through this high dimensional space and looking for creative solutions.

A creative path forward. Is there something you could say about that process? It's such a good question. And I honestly don't know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering. So I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line to be efficient efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention real invention, not incremental improvement.

Real improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering. And you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people.

I feel like wandering is inefficient and you know, like when when I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem because if I did, then I'd already I know there's some kind of straight line that we're drawing to the solution.

The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a num, you know, group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.

So like, you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth and both things are really pleasurable. And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea and to maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea. Maybe pull at that string because I don't think a good idea has come fully formed.

100% right. In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny, you know, that I do my own head. And I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea. I will often say, look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea. But work with me. There's something there. There's something there. And that is intuition.

Yeah. Because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning because they do have so many, so many easy objections to them. So you need to, you need to kind of forewarn people and say, look, I know it's going to take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun. So you got that ability to say cosine and use somewhere after all. Maybe not on math in a different domain.

There are a thousand ways to be smart by the way. And that is a really like when I go around, you know, and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart. And you find it is that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart and so such unique ways. Yeah, you just gave me a good response is when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet.

You know, as a thousand ways to be smart. Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million to be ways to be done. I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote. All right. You gave me an amazing tour of the origin rocket factory and launch complex and the historic Cape Canaveral. That's when you Glenn, the big rocket we talked about as being built and will launch. Can you explain what the new Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?

Sure. New Glenn is a very large heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to Leo, very very large class. It's about half the thrust a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn five rockets. So it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on lift off. The booster has seven BE4 engines. The each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG, as the fuel and locks as the oxidizer.

The cycle is an ox-rich stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. That engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of new Glenn is powered by two BE3U engines, which is an upper stage variant of our new shepherd liquid hydrogen engine. The BE3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust, so two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust.

Hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant, in my view, for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large. Hydrogen has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is not dense at all. To store liquid hydrogen, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your tank, your liquid hydrogen tank, it's very large. You get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse.

You get more benefit from the higher, specific impulse on the second stage. That stage carries less propellant, so you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta IV is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen, and I think that it's a very effective vehicle, but it never was very cost effective. It's operationally very capable, but not very cost effective. The size is also costly.

The size is costly, so it's interesting. Rockets love to be big. Everything works better. What do you mean by that? You've told me that before. It sounds epic. I mean when you look at the physics of rocket engines, and also when you look at parasitic mass, it does it. If you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system, that is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket, as it is going to be for a tiny rocket.

That's just parasitic mass that is very consequential 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 thing. Then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps. They have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns. Those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger.

So really tiny turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture. And any kind of gaps between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel, there has to be some gap there. You can have those parts scraping against one another, and those gaps drive inefficiencies. And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps and percentage terms, you know, being very small.

And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket, and that you end up hating for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule, and it is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging. It's a pain in the butt. And so, you know, it's just, you know, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the pieces by hand. You could assemble it on a table.

One person can do it. You know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on and so on. When you start building big objects, infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad and the, you know, all this, we went and visited it and took you to the launch pad. And you can see it's so monumental. And so just these things become major undertakings, both from an engineering point of view, but also from a construction and cost point of view.

Even the foundation of the launch pad. I mean, this is Florida. Like isn't like swamp land, like how deep at Cape Canaveral. Yeah, in fact, at most ocean, you know, most large paths are on beaches, somewhere in the oceans, like because you want to launch over water for safety reasons.

The yes, you have to drive pilings, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, 50 hundred and 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it's, it's, yes, these turned into major civil engineering projects. I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty bad as he said tooling the bigger he gets the more the more epic it is.

It does make it epic. It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary. It's humbling also because the human's are so small compared to it. We are building these enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power. You know, in very, very compact packages, it's truly extraordinary. But then there's all the different components and that you know, the materials involved.

Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials that comprise the rocket. So it has to be as light as possible, I guess, whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions. Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where they what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers.

Like what? What's the change? Because surprisingly some of rocket trees greatest hits have not changed. They are still they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today. And it's exactly what they pioneered back in the 60s. But a few things have changed. You know, the use of carbon composites is is very different today.

You know, we can build very sophisticated. You saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings. And we can build these incredibly light, very stiff, fairing structures out of carbon composites. Carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of. I mean the efficiency, the structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any, you know, metallic material you might use or anything else.

So that's one aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Remember the friction welding that I should do. This is a remarkable technology. This invented decades ago, but has become very practical over the just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate.

And you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together. And then you move it at a very precise speed. And instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm.

It literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary. Relatively low temperature. And I guess high temperatures will make the, that's the, that makes it a weak point. Exactly. So with traditional, with traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld.

And if you're fixing stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material. So it really allows you, and so, because when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're going to press rise, you know, large, you know, liquid natural gas tank for, for our booster stage, for example, you know, if you are welding that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing with the weld. And that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank.

And I mean, even just looking at the fairings, the result of that, the, the complex shape that it takes. And, yeah. And like what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible, because people don't know it's on top of the rocket. It's going to fall apart. That's its task, but it has to stay strong sometimes. Yes. And then disappear when it needs to. That's right. She's a very difficult task. Yes. When you need something that needs to have 100% integrity.

And tell it needs to have 0% integrity. It needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away. And then when it goes away, it has to go away completely. You use explosive charges for that. And so it's a very robust way of separating structure when you need to. Exploding. Yeah. It was a little tiny bits of explosive material. And it just, it will sever the whole connection. So if you want to go from 100% structural integrity to zero as fast as possible, it's explosive. It's explosive.

The entirety of this thing is so bad as OK. So we're back to the two stages. So the first stage is reusable. Yeah. Second stage is expendable. Second stage is liquid hydrogen liquid oxygen. So we get to get advantage of the higher specific impulse. The first stage lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean. Comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission. I mean, there's a million questions. But also is there a path towards reusability for the second stage?

There is. And we know how to do that. Right now we're going to work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a second stage. Make it reusable or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And the that trade is actually not obvious which one is better. Even in terms of cost, even like time. I'm talking about costs. Is it space flight getting into orbit is a solve problem we solved it back in the 50s and 60s.

Making it sound the only thing that the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit. Which is if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new endeavors that lots of startup companies everybody else can do. So that's we really that's our one of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost orbit so that there can be a kind of a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.

I like how you said getting to orbit is a solve problem. It's just the only interesting things reducing the cost. You can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way. Physicists would say everything is a solve problem. We solved everything the rest is just with the Rutherford said that it's just stamp collecting.

It's just the details. Some of the greatest innovations and inventions and you know brilliance is in that cost reduction stage right and you you've had a long career of cost reduction. For sure and you know when you what is cost reduction really mean it means inventing a better way. Yeah exactly right and when you invent a better way you make the whole world richer. So you know whatever it was I don't know how many thousands of years ago somebody invented the plow.

And when they invented the plow they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer. So what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side and the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn?

The first launch is one thing and we'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year. The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently manufacturing at rate. So rate production. So consider if you want to launch New Glenn you know 24 times a year. You need to manufacture a upper stage since they're expendable every you know twice a month you need to do whatever two weeks.

So you need to be you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place in the same thing. So every every upper stage has to be through you engines. So those engines you know you need if you're going to launch this the vehicle twice a month you need four engines a month.

So you need an engine every week. So you need to be that engine needs to be being produced at rate. And and that's a and there's all of the things that you need to do that all the right machine tools all the right fixtures the right people process etc.

So it's one thing to build a first article right so that's you know we want to launch new Glenn for the first time you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part the hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce new glens at rate.

So the first one is produced in a way that's enables the production of the second and third and the fourth and the fifth and so you can think of the first article as kind of pushing it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along you know in other words it's kind of the you know it's the test article in a way that's testing out your your manufacturing technologies.

So the first one is the big challenge. Yes I mean I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy I mean the people who are deciding the engines and all this like all of it is hard for sure but the but the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to is to get to rate manufacturing to do that

in a way again kind of back to our cost point if you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way you haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe you're haven't really moved this data the art forward all this has to be about moving this data the art forward there are easier easier businesses to do I always tell people look if you are trying to make money you know like start a salty snack food company or something you know you

write that I did. I think make the Lex Friedman potato chips you know this don't don't say it is the people want to steal it. But yeah it's hard to see what I was saying it's like there's nothing easy about this business and but it's its own reward it's it's it's it's it's fascinating it's worth while it's meaningful and so you know I you know not I don't want to pick on salty snack food companies but I think it's it's less meaningful you know you're at the end of the day you're

not going to you're not going to have accomplished something amazing. Yeah there's even if you do make a lot of money on it. Yeah there's something funny about the different about the quote unquote business of space exploration. Yeah it's for sure it's a grand project of humanity. Yes it's one of humanity's grand challenges and especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things.

You know I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this but the fruits of this come from building a road to space getting the infrastructure. I give you an analogy when I started Amazon I didn't have to develop a payment system it already existed it was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages it already existed it was called the postal service and royal mail and Deutsche Post and so on.

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 another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early and taking you back to like 1994 people were using dial up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long distance phone network.

That's how the internet that's you know how people were accessing servers and so on and that again if that hadn't existed it would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there no startup company could have done that.

And so the problem you know you see if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years it's because you know you see like two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure was already there. And that's what I want to take you know my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so the next generation.

You know my the generation that's my children and their children is you know that those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure then there'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. Yeah like that that will be a marker of success when you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so the ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed I find that very exciting.

As they will of course as kids do take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted of course which is after a neural spirit that say an inventor is the greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted.

You know nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore nobody thinks of customer reviews and we pioneered customer reviews but now they're so commonplace same thing with one click shopping and so on but that's a compliment that's how you know you you invent something that's so used so beneficial use by so many people that they take it for granted. I don't know about nobody every time I use Amazon I'm still amazed how does this work. So you're that proves you're a very curious explorer.

All right all right back to rockets timeline. You said 2024 as it stands now are both the first test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorer's tomorrow still possible. Yeah I think so for sure the first launch and then we'll see if Escapade goes on that or not I think that the first launch for sure and I hope Escapade too. Hope. Well I just don't know which mission is it's actually going to be slated on so we also have other things that might go on that first mission.

Oh I got it but you're optimistic that the launch is still. Oh the first launch I'm very optimistic that the first launch of new Glenn will be in 2024 and I'm just not 100% certain what payload will be on that first launch. You nervous about it. Are you kidding I'm extremely nervous about it. Oh man 100%. I have you know every every launch I go to you know for new shepherd for other vehicles too I'm always nervous for these launches.

But yes for sure a first launch to have no nervousness about that would be you know some sign of derangement I think so well I got to visit launch but it's pretty. I think that big. We have done a tremendous amount of ground testing a tremendous amount of simulation so. A lot of the problems that we might find and flight have been resolved but there are some problems you can only find and flight so you know cross your fingers.

I guarantee you you'll you'll have fun watching no matter what happens 100% when the thing is fully assembled comes up. The transport or a reactor just a reactor for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary that's an incredible machine vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of you know comes up over a few hours. Yeah it's a beautiful thing to watch speaking of which if that makes you nervous I don't know if you remember but you were aboard a new shepherd on its first launch.

On its first crew flight how was that experience were you were you terrified then. You know strangely I wasn't you know I ride the rocket. It's never I've watched other people ride in the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her I was going to go on the first one and not only was I going to go but I was going to bring my brother to this is a tough conversation to have with a mom.

And the long pause. You think both of you. It was an incredible experience and we were we were laughing inside the capsule and you know we're not nervous. To people on the ground were very nervous for us. It was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not happened even before the flight at 4.30 in the morning.

Brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren is going to take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave and we go outside outside the ranch house there in west Texas where the launch facility is. And all of our family my kids and my brothers kids and our you know our parents and close friends are assembled there and they're saying goodbye to us but they're kind of saying maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever.

And you know we might not have felt that way but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way and it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see almost like attending your own memorial service or something like you could feel how loved you were in that moment. And it was it was really amazing. Yeah and I mean there's just a epic nature to it too. The accent the floating zero gravity to something very interesting zero gravity feels very natural.

I don't know if it's because we're you know it's like return to the wounds or what you're nailing but I think that's what I think that's what you just said feels so natural to be in zero G it was really interesting. And then what people talk about the overview effect and seeing earth from space. I had that feeling very powerful I think everyone did. You see how fragile the earth is if you're not an environmentalist it will make you one.

The great Jim level quote you know he looked back at the earth from space and he said he realized you don't go to heaven when you die you go to heaven when you're born. And it's just you know that's the feeling that people get when they're in space you see all this blackness all this nothingness and there's one gym of life and it's earth is a gem. What you know you're you've talked a lot about decision making throughout your time with Amazon.

What was that decision like to try to be the first to ride you shepherd like what just before you talk to your mom. Yeah what it what like the pros and cons like actually as one human being as a leader of a company. On all fronts like what was that decision making like I decided that first of all I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built it I know the vehicle.

The I'm very comfortable with the like the escape system we put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire new shepherd architecture can actually describe what do you mean by escape system what's involved. We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on accent. You know while the main rocket engines firing.

We can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster. It's a very challenging system to build design validate tasks all of these things. The reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on new shepherd so the the booster is this safe and reliable as we can make it. But we are harnessing whenever you're talking about rocket engines.

I don't care what rocket is you're talking about you are harnessing such vast power in such a small compact geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so the only way to improve safety is to have an escape system. And historically rockets human rated rockets have had escape systems only the space shuttle did not. But Apollo had one the you know all of the previous you know Gemini etc. they all had escape systems.

And we have on new separate unusual skates most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system so the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes. And it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it. So if we have a nominal mission we land with it the tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission. And so they get wasted even an nominal mission. And so again you know cost really matters on these things.

So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable in the event that it's not used you can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these things you asked me about my decision to go. And so I know the vehicle very well I know the people who designed it. I great trust in them and in the engineering that we did. And I thought to myself look if I am not ready to go then I wouldn't want anyone to go.

A tourism vehicle has to be designed in my view to have very to be as safe as one can make it. You can't make it perfectly safe. It's impossible. But you know you have to people will do the people take risk you know they climb mountains they you know they skydive they you know to do deep underwater scuba diving and so on. People are okay taking risk you can't eliminate the risk but it is something because it's a tourism vehicle you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks.

And I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the reasons I was so calm inside and if the others were just calm they didn't know as much about it as I did. What was in charge of engaging the escape systems you have it's automated. It's completely automated automated is better because it can react so much faster. So yeah for tourism rockets safety is a huge huge huge priority for space exploration also but a little bit tight you know a delta less.

Yes I mean I think for you know if you're doing you know there are human activities where we tolerate more risk if you're saving somebody's life you know if you are you know engaging in real exploration. These are things where you know I personally think you we would accept more risk in part because you have to. Is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin.

Blue Origin needs to be much faster and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago I needed I wanted to come in and you know Blue Origin needs me right now and so I had always when I was the CEO of Amazon my point of view on this is if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company. Is going to get my full attention and I really just how I think about things I was very important to me I felt I had an obligation.

To all the stakeholders to Amazon to do that and so having you know turn the sea I'm still the executive chair there but I turned the CEO role over. And the reason the primary reason I did that is that I could spend time of origin adding some you know energy some sense of urgency we need to move much faster and we're going to.

What are the ways to speed it up so I mean there's a. You've talked a lot of different ways to sort of an Amazon you know removing barriers for for progress or distributing making everybody autonomous and stuff for lion in terms all those kinds of things is that apply it Blue Origin or it does apply I know I'm leading this directly we are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry.

And so you know at Amazon for you know ever since the beginning it's we're going to come the world's most customer obsessed company. And no matter the industry like people one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry want to know how did you guys how do you how are you so customer obsessed how do you actually not just pay lip service that but actually do that.

And from you know all different industry should come on a study us to see how we accomplish that and the analogous thing of Blue Origin and will help us move faster is we're going to become the world's most decisive company we're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk making those decisions quickly.

You know being bold on those things that's what and having the right culture that supports that you need people to be ambitious technically ambitious you know if there are five ways to do something we'll study them but let's study them very quickly and make a decision we can always change our mind. It doesn't you know changing your mind I talk about one way doors and two way doors most decisions are two way doors.

Can you explain that because I love that metaphor if you make the wrong decision if it's a two way door decision you walk out the door you pick a door you walk out. You spend a little time there turns out to be the wrong decision you can come back in and pick another door.

Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one way door decisions you go in that door you're not coming back and those decisions have to be made very deliberately very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision you should slow down and do that so you know when I see your Amazon often found myself in the position of being the chief slow down officer because somebody would be bringing me a one way door decision.

It's okay I can think of three more ways to analyze that so let's go do that because we are not going to be able to reverse this one easily maybe you can reverse it's going to be very costly and very time consuming we really have to get this one right from the beginning.

And what happens unfortunately in companies what can happen is that you have a one size fits all decision making process where you end up using the heavy weight process on all decisions including the lightweight ones the two way door decisions two way door decisions should must be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organ.

And one way door decisions are the ones that the your first one's those are the ones that should be elevated up to you know the senior most executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done. Yeah, I mean part of the skill here is to to know the difference in one way and two way I think you're yes I mean I think you mentioned Amazon Prime.

The decision to sort of create Amazon Prime as a one way door. I mean it's not it's unclear if it is or not but it probably is and it's a really big risk to go there.

There are a bunch of decisions like that that are you know changing the decision is going to be very very complicated some of them are technical decisions to the cause some technical decisions are like quick drying cement you know if you're going to once you make them it gets really hard you know choosing which propellants to use in a way. You know selecting LNG for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage.

That has turned out to be a very good decision but if you change your mind. That would be a very that would be a very big setback do you see what I was saying. Yeah, so that's the kind of decision you scrutinize very very carefully other things just aren't like the most decisions are not that way most decisions are not that way most. Decisions should be made by single individuals but they need and and done quickly in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.

Yeah, one of the things I really liked perhaps it's not too way door decisions is I disagree and commit phrase so don't so somebody brings up an idea to you if the two way door. You state that you don't understand enough to agree but you still back them. I'd love to be to explain. Yeah, disagreeing commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing. Yeah, so you know what I use that my personal.

I disagree but commit it's very common in any endeavor in life and business and any you know anybody where you have teammates. You have a teammate and the two of you disagree at some point you have to make a decision and you know in companies we tend to organize hierarchically so there's this you know whoever is the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision so ultimately the CEO gets to make that decision.

And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with so like you know I would often I would be the one who would disagree commit. Some one of my draft reports would very much want to do it do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea I would explain my point of view they would say I Jeff I think you're wrong and here's why and we would go back and forth and I would often see you know what I don't think you're right.

But I'm going to gamble with you and you're closer to the ground truth than I am I had known you for 20 years you have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either not really not for sure all these decisions are complicated let's do it your way but at least then you've made a decision.

And I'm agreeing to commit to that decision so I'm not going to be second guessing I'm not going to be sniping at it I'm not going to be saying I told you so I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works that's a really important team a behavior.

There's so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing in on teams and there are so many ways to two people disagree about something even the I'm assuming what the case where everybody is well intentioned they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have in our society and inside companies we have a bunch of mechanisms that we used to resolve these kinds of disputes.

A lot of them are I think really bad so example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise so compromise you know look I here's we're in a room here and I could say Lex how tall do you think this ceiling is.

And you'd be like I don't know Jeff maybe 12 feet tall and I would say I think it's 11 feet tall and then we'd say you know what let's just call it 11 and a half feet that's compromise instead of the right thing to do is you know to get a tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things that requires energy compromise the advantage of compromise.

As a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy but it doesn't lead to truth and so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.

Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn this is also let's say to executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one again you haven't arrived at truth and this is very demoralizing. So you know this is where escalation I try to ask people who you know on my team.

It's a never get to a point where you are resolving something by you know who gets exhausted first escalate that I'll help you make the decision let's because that's so de-energizing and such a terrible lousy way to make a decision. Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to high velocity of this. Yes and you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want like you know exhausting the other person is not truth seeking.

And compromise is not truth seeking. So you know it doesn't mean now and there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that's where disagreeing commit can come in. But it's escalation is better than war of attrition escalate to you know to your boss and say hey we can't agree on this we like each other we're respectful of each other but we strongly disagree with each other.

We need you to you know make a decision here so we can move forward but decisiveness moving forward quickly on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can. So this is how you increase velocity most of what slows things down is into is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels you know so it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. You know Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast.

We're still decisive we're still quick and that's because the culture supports that. At every scale in the distributed way. Yes. So you know you're going to have a lot of the last year decisions exactly. You mentioned the lunar program let me ask you about that yeah. There's a lot going on there and you haven't really talked about it much so in addition to the Artemis program with NASA.

Blue is doing its own lander program can you describe it the there's a sexy picture on Instagram with with one of them is at the Mk1 I guess. Is it with me with Bill Nelson the NASA administrator just to clarify the lander is the sexy thing about the. I know it's not me I know it was either you the lander or bill okay. I like bill but there.

Okay. Yes the Mk1 lander is designed to take 3000 kilograms to the surface of the moon in cargo expendable cargo expendable lander lands on the moon stays there. Take 3000 kilograms to the surface it can be lost on a single new Glenn flight which is very important so it's a relatively simple architecture. Just like the human landing system lander the call the mark to mark one is also. Fueled with liquid hydrogen. And which is for for high energy missions like landing on the source of the moon.

The high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage the disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it's such a deep cryogen it's not storeable. So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant because it's boiling off. And so what we're doing is part of the of our lunar program is developing solar powered cryocoolers that can actually make hydrogen a storeable propellant for deep space.

That's a real game changer it's a game changer for any high energy mission so to the moon but to the outer planets to Mars everywhere. So the idea with mark one both mark one and mark two is the new glenkin. Carry it from the surface of earth to the surface of. The moon exactly so the mark one is expendable the lunar the lunar lander were developing for NASA the mark to lander that's part of the artisbury they call it the sustaining lander program. So that lander is designed to be reusable.

It can land on the surface moon in a single stage configuration and then take off so the whole the you know the you look at the Apollo program. The lunar lander in Apollo was really two stages it would land on the surface and then it would leave the descent stage on the surface of the moon and only the the asset stage would go back up into lunar orbit where it would run to do with the command module.

Here what we're doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellants that can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over. And the point of doing that of course is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time which is that's one of NASA's big objectives. Because this time the whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon but this time to stay.

So you know back in the Apollo program we went to the moon six times and then into the program and it really was too expensive to to continue. And so there's a few questions there but one is how do you stay on the moon what ideas do you have about. Yes it's like a sustained and sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time.

Well one of the things we're working on is using lunar resources like lunar regolith to manufacture commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon. We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regolith stimulant and this solar cell is only about 7% power efficient so it's very inefficient compared to you know the more advanced solar cells that we make here on earth.

But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory that you can land on the surface of the moon and then the raw material for those solar cells is simply lunar regolith then you can just you know continue to turn out solar cells on the surface of the moon have lots of power on the surface of the moon that will make it easier for people to live on the moon. Similarly we're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith so lunar regolith by weight has a lot of oxygen in it.

It's bound very tightly you know as oxides with other elements and so you have to separate the oxygen which is very energy intensive. So that also could work together with the solar cells but if you can and then ultimately we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon.

And we know there is ice water in those or water ice in those craters and we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen and then you not only have oxygen but you'd also have a very good high efficiency propellant fuel in hydrogen.

So there's a lot there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time but the very first step the thing the kind of gate that all of that has to go through is we need to be able to land cargo and humans on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost. To fast forward a little bit is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars one or the other or both.

It's very unlikely I think it's probably something that gets done by future generations by the time it gets to me I think in my lifetime that's probably going to be done by professional astronauts. I would love to sign up for that mission so don't count me out yet Lex you know give me give me a funding shot here maybe but I think if we're if we are placing reasonable bets on such a thing in my lifetime that will continue to be done by professional astronauts.

Yes, these are risky difficult missions and probably missions that require a lot of training you know you are going there for a very specific purpose to do something we're going to be able to do a lot on the moon to with automation. So you know in terms of setting up these factories into all that we we're sophisticated enough now with automation that we probably don't need humans to tend those factories and machines. So it's there's a lot that's going to be done in both modes.

So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out towards the stars blue origin and space X are you competitors collaborators which in to a degree.

Well I would say you know just like the internet is big and there lots of winners at all skill levels I mean there are half a dozen giant companies that you know the internet has made but there a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies all successful all with profits dreams all driving great customer experiences.

That's what we want to see in space that kind of dynamism and space is big there's room for a bunch of winners and it's going to happen at all skill levels and so you know space X is going to be successful for sure I want blue origin to be successful and I hope there are another you know five companies right behind us.

But you know I spoke to Elon a few times recently about you about blue origin and he was very positive about you as a person very supportive of all the efforts you've been leading a blue what's your thoughts you worked with a lot of leaders at Amazon. At blue what's your thoughts about Elon as a human being and the leader.

Well I don't really know Elon very well you know I know his public persona but I also know you can't know anyone by their public persona it's impossible I mean you may think you do but I guarantee you don't I don't really know you know Elon way better than I do Lex but. In terms of his judging by the results he must be a very capable leader there's no way you could have you know Tesla and space X without being a capable leader it's impossible.

Yeah I just I hope you guys hang out sometimes shake hands and sort of have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity because what you're doing is like one of the big grand challenges ahead for humanity well I agree with you and I think in a lot of these endeavors were very like minded yeah so I think you know I think I'm not saying we're identical but I think we're very like minded and so I.

You know I love that idea I go back to sexy pictures on your Instagram there's a video of you from the early days of Amazon giving a tour of your quote sort of offices I think your dad is holding the camera is yeah I know I yes.

This is what giant orange extension cord yeah and you're like explaining the genius of the extension cord. How is it this a desk and the CRT monitor and sort of that's where the that's where all the magic happened I forget what your dad said this is like the the center of it all so what was it like what's going

your mind at that time you left a good job in New York and took this leap were you excited were you scared so excited and scared anxious you know thought the odds of success were low told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success by which I just been getting your money back not like turning not what actually happened because that's the truth every start of company is unlikely to work.

It's helpful to be in reality about that but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic so you kind of have to have this duality in your head like you on the one hand you know what the baseline statistics say about start of companies and the other hand you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it's going to work.

And you're doing both things at the same time you're holding that contradiction in your head but it was so so exciting I love you know every from 1994 when the company was founded 1995 when we opened our doors all the way until today it's I find Amazon so exciting and that doesn't mean it's like full of pain full of problems you know it's like there's so many things that need to be resolved.

It's so fun it's such a privilege it's been such a joy I feel so grateful that I've been part of that journey it's just been incredible. So in some sense you don't want a single day of comfort you've written about this many times we'll talk about your writing which I would highly recommend people read in just the letters to shareholders. So you wrote explaining the idea of day one thinking I think you first wrote about in 97 letters to shareholders then you also in a way wrote about.

So you said that you said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciating painful decline followed by death and that is why it's always day one. Can you explain this day one thing this is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.

It's really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth and like every day is day one every day you're deciding what you're going to do and you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or you need self consistency self consistency even can be a trap.

And so day one thinking is kind of we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention about customers about how we're going to operate what are even even even as deeply as what our principles are we can go back to that turns out we don't change those very often but change them occasionally and.

When we work on programs that Amazon we often make a list of tenants and the tenants are kind of they're not principles they're a little more tactical than principles but it's kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put these are the tenants for this program in the when parentheses we always put unless you know a better way.

And that idea unless you know a better way is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma you never want to get trapped by history doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it there's so much value in what has worked in the past.

And you can't be blindly following what you've done and that's the heart of day one you're always starting fresh and to the question of how to fend off day two you said such a question can't have a simple answer as you're saying there will be many elements multiple paths and many traps I don't know the whole answer but I may know bits of it here's a starter pack of essentials maybe others come to mind for day one defense.

Customer obsession skeptical view of proxies the eager adoption of external trends and high velocity decision making so we talked about high velocity decision making that's more difficult than it sounds. So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on eager adoption of external trends high velocity decision making skeptical view proxies how do you fight off day two.

Well you know I'll talk about because I think it's the one is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand is the skeptical view of proxies. One of the things that happens in business probably anything that you're where you're you know you have an ongoing program and something is is underway for a number of years is you develop certain things that you're managing to like let's say the typical case would be a metric.

And that metric isn't the real underlying thing and so you know maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like if you sell.

Well a million units how many customer contacts do you get or how many returns do you get and so on and so on and so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in where somebody a long time ago invented that metric and they invented that metric they decided we need to watch for you know customer returns per unit sold as an important metric but they had a reason why they chose that metric.

The person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching and then fast forward five years that metric is the proxy. The proxy for truth the proxy for the customer say in this case is a proxy for customer happiness. And but that metric is not actually customer happiness it's a proxy for customer happiness the person who invented the metric understood that connection five years later.

It kind of inertia can set in and you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place and the world shifts a little.

And now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be or it's missing something and you have to be on alert for that you have to know okay this is I don't really care about this metric I care about customer happiness and this metric is worth putting energy into and following and improving and scrutinizing only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness. And so you got a constant beyond guard and it's very very common this is a nuanced problem.

It's very common especially in large companies that they are managing to metrics that they don't really understand they don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted off from under them a little in the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody ten years earlier invented the metric.

That isn't you on but that's a big problem right something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize yes and by the way you do need metrics you do you can't ignore them.

They want them but you just have to be constantly on guard this is you know a way to slip into day two thinking would be to manage your business to metrics that you don't really understand and you're not really sure why they were invented in the first place and you're not sure they're still as relevant as they used to be.

What does it take to be a guy or gal who who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated I guess what does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting is that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up in a meeting. We all should up here to Friday. This is such you have just asked a million dollar question so this is this is what you're if I generalize what you're asking you were talking in general about truth telling yeah.

And we humans are not really truth seeking animals we are social animals yeah we are and you know take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village if you go along to get along.

You can survive you can procreate if you're the village truth teller you might get club to death in the middle of the night truth are often they don't want to be heard because important truth can be uncomfortable they can be awkward they can be exhausting in polite yes challenging they can make people defensive even if that's not the intent.

But any high performing organization whether it's a sports team a business you know a political organization activist group I don't care what it is any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth telling one of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that you have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that you have to talk to people you have to remind people it's okay

that it's uncomfortable you have to literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do is humans it's not really it's kind of a side effect you know we can do that but it's not how we survive we mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative and that's really important and so there's a you know sciences all about truth telling it's actually a very formal

mechanism for trying to tell the truth and even in science you find that it's hard to tell the truth right and even you know you're supposed to have hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on it's not easy but even in science there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientists and then there's a hierarchy of humans where the

some host seniority matters in the scientific process which is and that's true inside companies too and so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overruled most senior person if they have data and and that really is about trying to you know there are little things you can do so for example in every meeting that I attend I always speak last

and I know from experience that you know if I speak first even very strong willed highly intelligent high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder well if Jeff thinks that I came in this meeting thinking one thing but maybe I'm not right and so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room go last but everybody else go first in fact ideally

let's try to have the most junior person go first and the second and try to go in order of seniority so that you can hear everyone's opinion and the kind of unfiltered way because we really do we actually literally change our opinions if somebody who you really respect says something makes you change your mind a little so you're saying implicitly or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion that as long as it's back by data

yes and sometimes it can even by the way a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches they turn out to be based on anecdotes they're intuition based and sometimes you don't even have strong data but you may know you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment you may feel yourself leaning in it may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have and then you may be able to say you know

something about that feels right let's go collect some data on that let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right but for now let's not disregard it because it feels right you can also fight inherent bias there's an optimism bias like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy

it's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right you may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of looking for you know trying to find the silver lining is to look this that might be good but I'm going to go with it's bad for now until we're sure so speaking of happiness bias data collection and anecdotes you have to how's that for transition

you have to you have to tell me the story of the call you made the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times yeah this is very early in the history of Amazon and we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents and I have I have a saying which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree

the anecdotes are usually right and and it doesn't mean you just slavishly go fall the anecdotes then it means you go examine the data is the date and it's usually not the data is being miscollected it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing and so you know if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something and at the same time you know your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining you should doubt the metrics and early example of this

was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting I think less than I don't know 60 seconds when they called it 1 800 number to get you know phone customer service the wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds and but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that and anecdotally it seems longer than that like you know I would call customer service myself and so one day we're in a meeting or going to the WBR and the weekly business review

we get to this metric in the deck and the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric and I said okay let's call picked up the phone and I dialed the 1 800 number and called customer service and we just waited in silence for the first what is it turned out to be like oh really long more than 10 minutes I think oh wow I mean it was it was many minutes and so you know it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection

we weren't measuring the right thing and that you know set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right and that's an example by the way of truth telling is like that's an uncomfortable thing to do but it's but you have to seek truth even

when it's uncomfortable and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it and they have to get energized around really fixing things so that that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience so one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy

I think a company sometimes say that but Amazon is really obsessed with that I think there's something really profound to that which is seeing the world to the eyes of the customer like the customer experience the true of being that's using the product that's enjoying the product like what they're like the subtle little things that make up their experience like how do you optimize those

this is another really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage and then there are small things internally to Amazon we call them paper cuts so we have we're always working on the big things like if you ask me the and most of the energy goes into the big things as it should so and you can identify the big things and I would encourage anybody if you know anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur

small business whatever you know think about the things are not going to change over 10 years and those are probably the big things so like I know in our retail business today Amazon 10 years from now customers are still going to want low prices I know they're still going to want fast delivery and I just know they're still going to want big selection so it's impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now I say where customers

is I love Amazon I just wish the prices were a little higher or I love Amazon I just wish you delivered a little more slowly so when you identify the big things you can tell their worth putting energy into because they're stable in time okay but you're asking about something a little different which is in every customer experience there are those big things and by the way it's

astonishingly hard to focus even on just the big things so the even though they're obvious they're really hard to focus on but in addition to that there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies and we call those paper cuts and we make long lists of them and then we have dedicated teams the go fix paper cuts because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts

and they never work their way down the list to get to they're working on big things as they should and as you want them to and so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts where would you put on the paper cuts spectrum the by now the one click button which is I think pretty genius so to me like okay my interaction with things I love on the internet there's things I do a lot I may be representing regular human

I would love for those things to be frictionless for example booking airline tickets just saying but you know it's buying a thing with one click making that experience frictionless intuitive all aspects of that like that that just fundamentally makes my life better not just in terms of efficiency in terms of some kind of cognitive load yeah cognitive load and piece inner piece and happiness first of all buying stuff

is an pleasant experience having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience and like having pain around that is somehow just you're ruining a beautiful experience and I guess all I'm saying as a as a person who loves good ideas is that a paper cut a solution to paper cuts yes so it's probably that particular thing is probably a solution to a number 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 shopping there was more friction there was a whole series of paper cuts and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts and I think you're absolutely right by the way that there when you come up with something like one click shopping again this is like so in green

people now I'm impressed that you even notice it I mean every time I click the button I just never surge of happiness this there is in in the perfect invention for the perfect moment in the perfect context there is real beauty yeah it is actual beauty and it feels good it's emotional it's emotional for the inventor it's emotional for the team that builds it it's emotional for the customer it's a big deal and you can feel those things

but you keep coming up with that idea with those kinds of ideas I guess is the day one thinking effort yeah and you need you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty

there's a lot of books written about you there's a book in Ventin Wander where Walter Isaacson doesn't intro it's mostly collected writings of yours I've read that I also recommend people check out the founders podcast that covers you a lot and it does different analysis of different business advice you've given over the years

I bring all that up because I saw that there a mention that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans and I forget how it was phrased but that when you were thinking about the Kindle that you're thinking about how technology changes us yeah we co-volve yeah 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's some aspect you know even just inside business

well you don't just make the customer happy we also have to think about like where is this going to take humanity if you zoom out a bit 100% and you know you you can feel your brain brains are plastic and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris

which first came on the scene I'm sure you've had anybody who's been a gameplayer has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see all the little blocks moving and you can you're kind of rotating them in your mind

and you can just tell as you walk around the world that you have rewired your brain to play Tetris and but that happens with everything and so you know one of the I think yeah we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this I fear I think one of the things that we've done online you know and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short forum content and you know your podcast flies in the face of this you know

you do these long format things and reading books reading books is a long format thing and we all do more of if you if something is convenient we do more of it and so when you make tools you know that we carry around a little we carry around in our pocket a phone and one of the things that phone does for the most part is it is an attention shortening device

because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans and I'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad but I do think it's happening that's one of the ways we're co evolving with that tool

but I think I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things yeah I think you've spoken about the value in your own life of focus I've singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time and that's certainly what books do

and that's certainly what that piece of technology does but I bring all that up to ask you about another piece of technology AI that has the potential to have various trajectories to have an impact on human civilization how do you think AI will change this

what are you talking about you know generative AI large language models things like chat GPT and it's soon successors and these are incredibly powerful technologies to believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand soon to be even more powerful it's interesting to me that the large language models in their current form are not inventions their discoveries you know the telescope was an invention but looking through it at Jupiter knowing that it had moons was a discovery

like my god it has moons and that's what Galileo did and so this is closer on that spectrum of invention you know we know exactly what happens with a seven eighty seven it's an engineered object we designed it we know how behaves we don't want any surprises

large language models are much more like discoveries we're constantly getting surprised by the capabilities they're not really engineered objects then you know you have this debate about whether they're going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity

you know even specialized AI can be very bad for humanity I mean I just you know just regular machine learning models that can can make you know certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive very powerful and they're not generally eyes they're just they could just be very smart weapons

and so we have to think about all of those things I'm very optimistic about this so even in the face of all this uncertainty my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to balance hurt us and destroy us I think you know we humans have a lot of ways of we can make ourselves go extinct these things may help us not do that you know so we may actually they actually save us so the people who are you know overly concerned

I mean my view overly clear so it's a valid debate I think that I think that they may be missing part of the equation which is how helpful they could be in making sure we don't destroy ourselves you know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer but to me I first of all I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr. who you know some people have talked to you think that's the most boring part of the movie I thought it was the most fascinating

because what's going on here is you realize we have invented these awesome destructive powerful technologies called nuclear weapons and they are managed and you know we we we humans are we're not really capable of wielding those weapons and we're you know that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is just he wrongly thinks he's like being so petty he thinks that he said something that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him

they didn't talk about him at all as you find out in the final scene of the movie and yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful and and petty and that's that's the problem we as a species are not really sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies and so and by the way before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency and there's a lot of things would have to happen

but there's so much benefit that's going to come from these technologies in the meantime even before their you know general AI in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies and so and so I think it's an incredible moment to be alive and to witness the transformations are going to happen how quickly happen no one knows but over the next 10 years and 20 years I think we're going to see really remarkable advances and I personally am very excited about it

first of all really interesting to say that's discoveries that it's true that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models we don't and like it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that open doors to hold entire new possibilities we do know that humans are doing something different from these models and part because you know we're so power efficient you know the human brain does remarkable things

and it does it on about 20 watts of power and you know the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks so there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this and also we don't need as much data so you know like self-driving cars or they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive

and you know your average 16 year old figures it out with many fewer miles so there are still some tricks I think that we have yet to learn I don't think we've learned the last trick I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up but what's interesting is that just scaling things up and I put just in quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends

yeah and there's some more nuanced aspect about human beings that's interesting with table to accomplish like being truly original and novel to you know large language models being able to come up with some truly new ideas that's one and the other one is truth it seems that large language models are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing but they don't require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth it can just basically is a very good bullshitter

so if there's not enough data if there's not enough sort of data in the in the training data about a particular topic is just going to concoct accurate sounding narratives which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve how do you get language models to infer what is true or not to sort of introspect yeah they need to be taught to say I don't know more often and I know several humans who could be taught that as well

and then the other stuff because you're still a bit involved in Amazon side with the AI things the other open questions what kind of products are created from this oh so many yeah I mean you know I just to you know we have Alexa and echo and Alexa has you know hundreds of millions of installed base you know inputs and so there's this there's you know there's Alexa everywhere and guess what Alexa is about to get a lot smarter yeah

and so that's really you know from a product point of view that's super exciting so many opportunities there so many opportunities shopping assistant you know like all that stuff is amazing an AWS you know we're building Titan which is our foundational model we're also building

a bedrock which are corporate clients at AWS or enterprise clients they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data yes without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model yeah so those are the tools we're building for them with bedrock so there's tremendous opportunity here yeah the security they probably see all those things are fascinating of how to because so much value can be gained by training on private data

but you want to keep the secure this is a yes this is a very challenging technical problem and it's one that we're you know making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers do you think there will be a day when humans and robots maybe Alexa have a romantic relationship like it well I mean if you look at the brainstorming products here if you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like you know sexual variety

yes you know there are people who like everything so the answer question has to be yes I guess I'm not I don't know why it spread down will be all right but it will happen I was just asking one for a friend but it's all right I was moving on next question what's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos you're one of the most productive humans in the world well I first of all I get up in the morning and I putter I like I like have a coffee you define putter

just like I slowly move around I'm not as productive as you might think I am I mean I because I do believe in wandering and I sort of I you know I read my phone for a while I read newspapers for a while I chat with Lauren I drink my first coffee so I kind of I move pretty slowly in the first cup of I get up early just naturally and and then you know I exercise most days and most days it's not the heart for me sometimes it's really hard and I do it anyway I don't want to you know and it's painful

and I'm like why am I here and I don't want to do me why am I here at the gym why am I here at the gym why don't I do something else you know it's not always easy what's the source of motivation in those moments I know that I'll feel better later if I do it and so like the real source of motivation I can tell the days when I skip it I'm not I'm not quite as alert it don't feel as good and then there's harder motivations it's longer term you want to be healthy as you age you know you want health

spend you want ideally you know you want to be healthy and moving around when you're 80 years old you know and so there's a lot of but that kind of motivation is so far in the future it can be very hard to work in the second so thinking about the fact I'll feel better

in about four hours if I do it now I have more energy for the rest of my day and so on and so on what's your exercise routine just the exercise routine that what do you how much you curl I mean what are we talking about here that's all I do at the gym side just I my routine you know on a good day I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about 45 minutes of weight lifting resistance training of some kind mostly weights I have a trainer who you know I love who pushes me

which is really helpful you know I'll be like he'll say Jeff do you see you could can we go up on that way a little bit and I'll think about it and I'll be like no I don't think so and he'll be he'll look at me and say yeah I think you can and of course he's right yeah so it's always have somebody push you a little bit but almost every day you do that I do almost every day I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weight

lifting and I'd rotate I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day it's all pretty standard stuff so puttering coffee Jim I drink coffee Jim and then work work what's work look like what what what are the

productive hours look like for you I you know so I a couple years ago I left us the CEO of Amazon and I have never worked harder in my life I am I am working so hard and I'm mostly enjoying it but there are also some very painful days most of my time is spent on blu origin and I've been I'm

so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years and in the big I love it and the small there's all the frustrations that come along with everything you know we're trying to get to rate manufacturing as we talked about that's super important we'll get there we just hire a new CEO

guy I've known for close to 15 years now guy name Dave Limp who I love he's amazing you know so we're super lucky to have Dave and you know we're gonna you're gonna see us move faster there but so my day of work you know reading documents having meetings sometimes in person sometimes over Zoom depends on where I am it's all about you know the technology it's about the organization it's about you know I'm very I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems

inside the vehicle inside the engines it's super fun for me my favorite part of it is the technology my least favorite part of it is you know building organizations and so on that's important but it's also my least favorite part so you know that's how they call it work you don't always

get to do what you want to do how do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems I do little thinking retreats so for this is not the only I can do that all day long I'm very good at focusing I'm very good at you know I'm I don't keep to a strict schedule like my meetings

often go longer than I plan for them to because I believe in wandering I like my perfect meeting starts with a crisp document so the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high I like a crisp document and a messy meeting and so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and and and trying to like wander your way to a solution and because like and that is when that happens just right it makes all the

other meetings worthwhile it feels like it has a kind of beauty to it it has an aesthetic beauty to it and you get real breakthroughs and meetings like that can you actually describe the crisp document like this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon of the way you approach meetings is this the six page memo maybe first described the process of a meeting with memos and meetings at Amazon and blorge and are unusual when we

get new when new people come in like a new executive joints they're a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting will start with the six page narratively structured memo and we do study hall for 30 minutes we sit there silently together in the meeting and read I love the notes in the margins and then we then we do it and the reason by the way we do stuff you could say I would like everybody to read these memos in advance but the

problem is people don't have time to do that and they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all and they're trying to catch up and also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading exactly it's better just to carve out the time for people to do it so now we all the same page we've all read the memo and now we can have a really elevated discussion and this is so much better from

having a slideshow presentation you know a PowerPoint presentation of some kind where that has so many difficulties but one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade it's kind of a sales tool and internally the last thing you want to do is sell you want to you're again you're truth seeking you're trying to find truth and the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for the author and hard

for the audience and a memo is the opposite it's hard to write a six page a good six page memo might take two weeks to write you have to write it you have to rewrite it you have to edit it you have to talk to people about it they have to poke holes in it for you you write it again it might take two weeks so the author it's really a very difficult job but for the audience it's much better so you can read a

half hour and you know there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too you know senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation that question is going to be answered on the next slide but you never got there was if you read the whole memo in advance you

you know I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos and then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo they've been answered so I save all that time you also get you know if the person is preparing the memo we talked earlier about

you know groupthink and you know the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don't want you know to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely um you know the author of the memos is has kind of got to be very vulnerable they kind of put all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first but that's great because it makes them really good and so and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trompling on them

accidentally in a big you know PowerPoint presentation. What's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there and everybody's reading your thing you're like I think it's mostly terrifying yeah like maybe in a good way I think it's like a purifying I think it's terrifying in a in a productive way yeah um but I I think it's emotionally a very nerve racking experience. Is there art science to the writing of the six-page memo or just writing in

general to you? The I mean it's really got to be a real memo so it means you know paragraphs have topic sentences like it's verbs and nouns you can't that's the other problem with PowerPoint is they're often just bullet points and you can you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet

points when you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure it's really hard to hide sloppy thinking so it does it it forces the author to be at their best and so you're getting somebody's they're getting somebody's really their best thinking and then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person you've got it from the very beginning so it really saves you time the long run so that part is crisp and then the rest is

messy. Chris doc. Yeah so you don't want you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp yeah there's you know most meetings you're trying to solve a really hard problem there's a different kind of meeting which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews that may be weekly or monthly or daily whatever they are but these business review meetings that's usually for incremental improvement and you're looking at a series of metrics every time it's the same

metrics those meetings can be very efficient they can start on time and end on time. So we're about to run out of time which is a good time to ask about the 10,000 year clock. That's what I'm known for is the humor okay can you explain what the 10,000 year clock is? Pint as your clock is a physical clock of monumental scale it's about 500 feet tall it's inside a mountain in west Texas in a chamber that's about 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall 10,000 year clock is an idea conceived by

brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the 80s the idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long term thinking and you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000 year clock as it it you know it ticks once a year it chimes once you know every hundred years and the

kuku comes out once every thousand years so it just sort of slows everything down and it's a completely mechanical clock it is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention so the material choices and everything else it's in a remote location both to protect it but also

so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage the idea is that over time this will take hundreds of years but over time it will take on the patina of age and then it will become a symbol for long term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons

and my view that's really important as we have become as a species as a civilization more powerful you know we're really affecting the planet now we're really affecting each other we have weapons of mass destruction we have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves and the problems

we create can be so large you know the unintended consequences of some of our actions the climate change putting carbon in the atmosphere as a perfect example that's an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution that a lot of benefits from it but we've also got this

side effect that is very detrimental we need to be we start training ourselves to think longer term long term thinking is a giant lever you can literally solve problems if you think long term that are impossible to solve if you think short term and we aren't really good at thinking

long term as you know it's not really you were kind of you know five years is a tough time frame for most institutions to think past and we probably need to stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years and we do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could

stretch those thinking horizons and so the clock is in a way it's an art project it's a symbol and it if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term that won't happen for hundreds of years but we have to you know we're gonna build it now and let it accrue the patina of age

do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on earth i think so but you know the united states won't exist like whole civilizations rise and fell 10,000 years is so long like no nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to 10,000 years

and the increasing rate of progress makes that even even less likely so do i think humans will be here yes what you know how will we have changed ourselves and what will we be and so on so on i don't know but i think we'll be here on that grand scale a human life feels tiny do you ponder

your own mortality are you afraid of death no i'm you know i i used to be afraid of death i did i like my like i remember as a young person being kind of like very scared of mortality like you didn't want to think about it and so on and always had a big and as i've gotten older

i'm 59 now as i've gotten older somehow that fear has sort of gone away i don't you know i i would like to stay alive for as long as possible but i'd like to be it's i'm really more focused on health span i want to be healthy i want that square wave i want to you know this

i want to be healthy healthy healthy and then gone i don't want the long decay um but and i'm curious i want to see how things turn out you know i'd like to be here i love my my family and my close friends and i want to i'm curious about them and i want to see so

i have a lot of reasons to stay around but it's mortality doesn't doesn't have that effect on me that it did you know maybe when i was in my 20s well Jeff thank you for creating amazon one of the most incredible companies in history and thank you for trying your best to make humans a

multi-planetary species expanding out into our solar system maybe beyond to meet the aliens out there and thank you for talking today welllex thank you for doing your part to lengthen our attention spans appreciate that very much thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos

to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself be stubborn on vision but flexible on the details thank you for listening and hope to see you next time