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The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.
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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.
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And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
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We got Notion for team collaboration, Policy Genius for insurance, Masterclass for learning, Asleep for naps, and Insight Tracker for biological data.
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Also, if you want to work with our amazing team we re always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
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And if you want to get in touch with me for other reasons, like guest suggestions, you can go to lexfriedman.com slash contact.
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Like with aliens, but in this case, it s with me.
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And now, onto the full ad reads.
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This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking app that I ve been using forever, but it s not just for note-taking.
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It s also for team collaboration, and it s been doing that forever.
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But recently, it also has the
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extra added AI capabilities with the Notion AI tool.
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Obviously, everybody s trying to figure out how to integrate the progress with LLMs, the continued progress, the accelerating progress, the boundless progress with LLMs into our productive lives.
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To me, obviously, the note-taking, the putting words onto paper as part of the process of figuring out intellectual puzzles, of thinking through things, designing things, summarizing things, interpreting things, all of that, that s the writing process.
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And integrating AI into that to help you
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almost like a buddy, is obviously empowering.
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But there s an interface question, how to do that well.
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And to me, Notion does that better than any tool I ve used so far.
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This show is also brought to you by Policy Genius, a marketplace for finding and buying life insurance.
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Almost every single conversation I have in different ways, I ponder, I explore.
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I deliberate the simple fact of our mortality, the finiteness of every experience, the human experience, but every experience that makes up the human experience, the good and the bad.
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I think bringing that up as a topic is important because it is one of the big questions for the introspecting animal that is a human being.
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for somebody who s trying to figure out the puzzle of the human condition?
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Why does it have to end?
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Is it good that it has to end?
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How does the fact of it ending play with the richness of the experience of every moment that we feel when we open our eyes to the beauty of that experience?
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Those are good questions, but they also put you in the right mindset to explore the other questions.
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The details of engineering, the details of business and science, all of that are somehow made more visceral, more intensely salient when grounded in the context of pondering one s own mortality.
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That s why I tried to do it.
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And I guess Policy Genius wants you to ponder your mortality and do something about it, a pragmatic angle.
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With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just 292 bucks a year for $1 million of coverage.
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Head to policygenius.com slash Lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save.
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That s policygenius.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Masterclass.
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Ten bucks a month gets you an all-access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world and their particular thing.
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That s how you should learn.
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You should try to find a way to listen to, to get close to the people that are the best at a thing that you re interested in.
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That s not the only way to learn.
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Textbooks, tutorials, lectures, books about a thing are good.
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But the doers of the thing reveal something, not just in their explanations, but in how they construct the explanations, how they think about the words that lead to the formation of the explanations, and all of that becomes
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salient when you just listen to these masterclasses.
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It s the doers that now have become teachers, but they were doers first.
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Anyway, Chris Hatfield, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Daniel Negreanu, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese.
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I would love to talk to Martin Scorsese in this podcast.
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There s just a lot of classes to choose from.
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The ones I mentioned are the ones I ve personally enjoyed.
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But maybe there s many others.
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Maybe you can write to me and recommend ones that were really impactful to you.
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Get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod.
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That s masterclass.com slash lexpod.
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This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep.
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I don t know why I m speaking like this quietly, because when I mention Eight Sleep, I think about myself napping and the calm peace that overtakes my surrounding environment when I m napping on a cold bed with a warm blanket.
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It s a little sampling of heaven.
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No matter how I m feeling, I could be feeling totally shitty about whatever thing.
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I could be angry, I could be sad.
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I could be lonely, all of these things.
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All of the different emotional trajectories that the human mind can take you on somehow get all resolved.
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The knots get untied and everything becomes simple again after a good nap.
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So take the naps seriously, friends.
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They are the cure for many of life s ills.
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And if you want to do your naps the way I do my naps, the right way, you should use 8sleep.
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Check it out and get special savings when you go to 8sleep.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by Inside Tracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body.
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This complex, hierarchical, biological machine that provides an infinity of signals, most of which are ignored when we make health, lifestyle, diet, whatever decisions, life decisions, the future,
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is designing systems, machine learning systems that don t ignore those signals, that leverage those signals, combine them, integrate them with the best scientific work of the day to give you advice on what to do with your life.
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And InsideTracker is taking steps towards that bright, to me, bright future.
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So they re using data from your blood, from DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that to give you lifestyle recommendations.
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I m really glad they are pushing this kind of work forward.
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Get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex.
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This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and now, dear friends, here s Jeff Bezos.
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You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas.
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And I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch.
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So what s the coolest job you remember doing there?
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Wow, coolest.
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Most interesting.
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Most memorable.
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Most memorable.
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Most impactful.
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It s a real working ranch.
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And I spent all my summers on that ranch from age four to 16.
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And my grandfather was really taking me those in the summers.
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In the early summers, he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch.
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Because of course, a four-year-old is a burden, not a help in real life.
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He was really just watching me and taking care of me.
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And he was doing that because my mom was so young.
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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 these summers.
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But as I got a little older, I actually was helpful on the ranch, and I loved it.
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I was out there, like, my grandfather had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life.
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I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch.
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fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines and, you know, done all the things that any rancher would do, vaccinated the animals, everything.
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But we had a, you know, my grandfather, after my grandmother died, I was about 12 and I kept coming to the ranch, so then it was just him and me, just the two of us.
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And he was completely addicted to the soap opera, The Days of Our Lives.
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And we would go back to the ranch house every day around 1 p.m.
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or so to watch Days of Our Lives.
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Like sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives.
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Just the image of that, the two of us sitting there.
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Watching a soap opera.
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He had these big crazy dogs.
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It was really a very formative experience for me.
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But the key thing about it
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for me, the great gift I got from it.
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was that my grandfather was so resourceful.
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He did everything himself.
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He made his own veterinary tools.
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He would make needles to suture the cattle up with.
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He would find a little piece of wire and heat it up and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it.
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So you learn different things on a ranch than you would learn growing up in a city.
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So self-reliance.
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Yeah.
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Figuring out that you can solve problems with enough
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persistence and ingenuity.
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My grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer, and he got it for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down.
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It was like a 1955 Caterpillar D6 bulldozer.
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Knew it would have cost, I don t know, more than $100,000.
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and we spent an entire summer fixing, repairing that bulldozer.
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We d use mail order to buy big gears for the transmission and they d show up and they d be too heavy to move, so we d have to build a crane.
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Just that problem-solving mentality, he had it so powerfully.
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He
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did all of his own, he didn t pick up the phone and call somebody, he would figure it out on his own.
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Doing his own veterinary work.
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But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m.
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to watch soap opera.
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Laying on the floor, that s how he watched TV.
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He was a really, really remarkable guy.
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That s how I imagine Clint Eastwood also.
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In all those westerns.
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When he s not doing what he s doing, he s just watching soap operas.
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All right, I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
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So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that.
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So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic.
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a rapid sequence of dramatic events.
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First satellite to space, first human to space, first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon, then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides actually, and then the first human walking on the moon.
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What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years, just 12 years?
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Well, I mean, there s so much inspiring there.
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You know, one of the great things to take away from that, one of the great von Braun quotes is, I have come to use the word impossible with great caution.
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And so that s kind of the big story of Apollo is that things, you know,
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going to the Moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that s impossible.
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You know, oh yeah, you ll do that when men walk on the Moon.
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And of course it finally happened.
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So I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race,
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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 3% of GDP on the Apollo program.
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So much resource that I think it was pulled forward in time.
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You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we, quote unquote, should have done it.
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And so in that way, it s also a technical marvel.
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I mean, it s truly incredible.
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It s, you know, it s the 20th century version of building the pyramids or something.
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It s, you know, it s an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time and because it did something that had previously been thought impossible, it rightly deserves its place as, you know, in the pantheon of great human achievements.
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And of course, you named the projects, the rockets, that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved.
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I don t understand why it didn t say New Gagarin.
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Is that?
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There s an American bias in the naming.
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I apologize.
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This is very strange.
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Lex.
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Just asking for a friend.
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Clarify.
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I m a big fan of Gagarin s, though.
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In fact, I think his first words in space I think are incredible.
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He purportedly said, my God, it s blue.
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And that really drives home.
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No one had seen the Earth from space.
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No one knew that we were on this blue planet.
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No one knew what it looked like from out there.
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And Gagarin was the first person to see it.
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One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for Glenn, for everybody involved, like how big of a risk they were all taking.
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They were taking huge risks.
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I m not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin s flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight, the flight that New Shepard is named after, the first American in space, he d been on his suborbital flight.
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they thought he had about a 75% chance of success.
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So, you know, that s a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.
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It s kind of interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn.
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So for people who don t know, Alan Shepard is the first
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astronaut.
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The first American in space.
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American in suborbital flight.
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Correct.
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And then the first orbital flight is… John Glenn is the first American to orbit the Earth.
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By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter
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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.
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And he sent me that letter about a week before he died.
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And it s really an incredible, it s also a very funny letter.
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He s writing and he says, you know, this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn.
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And he s just, he s got a great sense of humor and he s very happy about it and grateful.
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It s very
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Does he say, PS, don t mess this up, or is that?
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No, he doesn t.
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Make me look good.
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He doesn t do that, but wait, but John, wherever you are, we got you covered.
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All right, good.
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So back to maybe the big picture of space.
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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?
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I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system.
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If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.
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That would, you know, our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.
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And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system.
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So what do you think that looks like?
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Giant space stations?
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Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations.
1
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You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon and from
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near-Earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we ll build giant O Neill-style colonies, and people will live in those.
1
SPEAKER_00
And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces.
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You can spin them to get normal Earth gravity.
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You can put them where you want them.
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I think most people are going to want to live near Earth, not necessarily in Earth orbit, but in, you know,
1
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but near Earth vicinity orbits.
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And so they can move relatively quickly back and forth between their station and Earth.
1
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So I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not going to want to give up Earth altogether.
1
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They go to Earth for vacation.
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Yeah, same way that you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation.
1
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And people get to choose whether they live on Earth or whether they live in space, but they ll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on Earth.
1
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One of the interesting ideas you had is to move the heavy industry away from Earth.
1
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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.
1
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And basically your idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve Earth.
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SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
1
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This planet, we ve sent
1
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robotic probes to all the planets.
1
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We know that this is the good one.
1
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Earth really is the good planet.
1
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It s amazing, the ecosystem we have here, all of the life and the lush plant life and the water resources, everything.
1
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This planet is really extraordinary.
1
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And of course, we evolved on this planet, so of course it s perfect for us.
1
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it s also perfect for all the advanced life forms on this planet, all the animals and so on.
1
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And so this is a gem.
1
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We do need to take care of it.
1
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And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and
1
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impactful as we stride across this planet, you know, it s – that is going to – as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy.
1
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We want to use a lot of energy per capita.
1
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We ve gotten amazing things.
1
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We don t want to go backwards.
1
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You know, if you think about
1
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good old days, they re mostly an illusion.
1
SPEAKER_00
In almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years ago.
1
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We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates.
1
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Almost any metric you choose, we re better off than we used to be.
1
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We get
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you know, antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving medical care and so on and so on.
1
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And there s one thing that is moving backwards, and it s the natural world.
1
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So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine.
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space.
1
SPEAKER_00
And all of this really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.
1
SPEAKER_00
And when you look at, you do want to continue to use more and more energy.
1
SPEAKER_00
It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that s not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we have to go out into the solar system.
1
SPEAKER_00
And really, you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can t credibly argue about whether you have to do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Eventually, we have to do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
1
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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.
1
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What s your vision for these?
1
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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.
1
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It has two different kinds of propulsion.
1
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It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion.
1
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And so it can, you can be, you can use Blue Ring in a couple of different ways.
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then, and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features.
1
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It provides a lot of services to these payloads.
1
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So the payload – it can be one large payload or it can be a number of small payloads.
1
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It provides thermal management, it provides electric power, it provides compute, provides communications.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don t have to figure out all of those things on your own, so a kind of radiation-tolerant compute.
1
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is a complicated thing to do.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation-tolerant compute on board Blue Ring, and your payload can just use that when it needs to.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it s sort of all these services, it s like a set of APIs, it s a little bit like Amazon Web Services, but for face payloads that need to move about in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so so compute in 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
1
SPEAKER_01
including humans, you think?
1
SPEAKER_00
No, but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around.
1
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It s designed to move payloads around.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we re also building a lunar lander, which is of course designed to land humans on the surface of the moon.
1
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I m gonna ask you about that, but let me actually just step back to the old days.
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SPEAKER_01
You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist.
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SPEAKER_01
What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become, why are you not, Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist?
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SPEAKER_00
So I loved physics, and I studied physics and computer science, and I was proceeding along the physics path I was planning to major in physics, and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.
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SPEAKER_00
And the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun.
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I really loved it.
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SPEAKER_00
And I was very good at the programming and doing those things, and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely.
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SPEAKER_00
but I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist.
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SPEAKER_00
It s why I went to Princeton in the first place, it was definitely.
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And then I realized I was gonna be a mediocre theoretical physicist.
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And there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do
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things that were so difficult for me.
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SPEAKER_00
And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart.
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SPEAKER_00
And to be a 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.
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SPEAKER_00
It s one of those things where you have to be really just, your brain has to be wired in a certain way.
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SPEAKER_00
And there was a guy named, one of these people who convinced me
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SPEAKER_00
He didn t mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist.
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SPEAKER_00
His name was Yosanta, and Yosanta,
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was from Sri Lanka, and he was one of the most brilliant people I d ever met.
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My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night, and there was one problem that we worked on for three hours, and we made no headway whatsoever.
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And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, yo Santa.
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So we went to yo Santa s dorm room and he was there.
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SPEAKER_00
He was almost always there.
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SPEAKER_00
And we said, yo Santa, we re having trouble solving this partial differential equation.
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SPEAKER_00
Would you mind taking a look?
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, of course.
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SPEAKER_00
By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person.
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SPEAKER_00
And so he took our, he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds.
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And he said, cosine.
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I said, what do you mean, Yosanta?
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SPEAKER_00
What do you mean cosine?
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SPEAKER_00
He said, that s the answer.
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And I said, no, no, no, come on.
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SPEAKER_00
And he said, let me show you.
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SPEAKER_00
And he took out some paper and he wrote down three pages of equations, everything canceled out, and the answer was cosine.
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And I said, Yosanta, did you do that in your head?
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And he said, oh, no, that would be impossible.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist isn t what the universe wants you to be.
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SPEAKER_00
And so I switched to computer science and, you know, that worked out really well for me.
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SPEAKER_00
I enjoy it.
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SPEAKER_00
I still enjoy it today.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, there s a particular kind of intuition you need to be a great physicist, applied to physics.
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SPEAKER_00
I think the mathematical skill required today is so high.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today.
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SPEAKER_00
And it s not, you know, you probably need other skills too, intuition, lateral thinking, and so on.
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SPEAKER_00
But without just,
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SPEAKER_00
top-notch math skills, you re unlikely to be successful.
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SPEAKER_01
And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments.
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SPEAKER_01
And if you want truly great creativity, actually, Walter Isaacson writes about you, puts you on the same level as Einstein.
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SPEAKER_00
That s very kind.
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SPEAKER_00
I m an inventor.
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SPEAKER_00
If you want to boil down what I am, I m really an inventor.
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SPEAKER_00
And I look at things and I can come up with
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SPEAKER_00
atypical solutions and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something and 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny.
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SPEAKER_00
But one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work and then you can keep going from there.
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SPEAKER_00
So that kind of lateral thinking
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SPEAKER_00
that kind of inventiveness in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large.
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SPEAKER_00
That s where my inventive skills come.
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SPEAKER_00
That s the thing I m, if I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways, Walter Isaacson does, that creativity combined with childlike wonder that you ve maintained still to this day, all of that combined together.
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SPEAKER_01
Is there, like, if you were to study your own brain introspect,
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SPEAKER_01
How do you think?
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SPEAKER_01
What s your thinking process like?
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SPEAKER_01
We ll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon.
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SPEAKER_01
But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high-dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process?
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SPEAKER_00
It s such a good question.
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SPEAKER_00
I honestly don t know how it works.
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SPEAKER_00
If I did, I would try to explain it.
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SPEAKER_00
I know it involves lots of wandering.
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SPEAKER_00
So when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don t know where I m going.
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SPEAKER_00
So to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention,
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SPEAKER_00
not incremental improvement.
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SPEAKER_00
Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do.
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SPEAKER_00
You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better.
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SPEAKER_00
But I m talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering.
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SPEAKER_00
And you have to give yourself permission to wander.
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SPEAKER_00
I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient and should, you know, like,
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SPEAKER_00
When I sit down at a meeting, I don t know how long the meeting is gonna take if we re trying to solve a problem, because if I did, then I d already, I d know there s some kind of straight line that we re drawing to the solution.
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SPEAKER_00
The reality is, we may have to wander for a long time.
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SPEAKER_00
And I do like group invention.
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SPEAKER_00
I think there s really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and
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SPEAKER_00
spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_01
And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea.
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SPEAKER_01
and to maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea, maybe pull out that string, because I don t think good ideas come fully formed.
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SPEAKER_00
A hundred percent right.
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SPEAKER_00
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 in my own head,
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
There s something there.
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SPEAKER_00
There s something there, and that is intuition, because it s really easy to kill new ideas
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SPEAKER_00
in the beginning, because they do have so many easy objections to them.
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SPEAKER_00
So 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.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s get started on that.
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SPEAKER_00
It ll be fun.
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SPEAKER_01
So you ve got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all.
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SPEAKER_01
Maybe not on math, but... In a different domain.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way.
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SPEAKER_00
And that is a really... When I go around and I meet people, I m always looking for the way that they re smart.
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SPEAKER_00
And you find it is... That s one of the things that makes the world...
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SPEAKER_00
so interesting and fun is that it s not like IQ is a single dimension.
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SPEAKER_00
There are people who are smart in such unique ways.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you just gave me a good response to when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, there s a thousand ways to be smart, sir.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million ways to be dumb.
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SPEAKER_00
I feel like that s a Mark Twain quote.
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SPEAKER_01
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
All right.
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SPEAKER_01
You gave me an amazing tour of Blue Origin, Rocket Factory, and Launch Complex, and the
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SPEAKER_01
historic Cape Canaveral.
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SPEAKER_01
That s where New Glenn, the big rocket we talked about, is being built and will launch.
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SPEAKER_01
Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?
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SPEAKER_00
Sure.
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SPEAKER_00
New Glenn is a very large, heavy lift launch vehicle.
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SPEAKER_00
It ll take about 45 metric tons to LEO, a very large class.
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SPEAKER_00
Um, it s about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn five, uh, rocket.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff.
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SPEAKER_00
The booster has seven B four engines.
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SPEAKER_00
The each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust.
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SPEAKER_00
The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG.
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SPEAKER_00
has the fuel and locks as the oxidizer.
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SPEAKER_00
The cycle is an ox-rich stage combustion cycle.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians.
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SPEAKER_00
It s a very good cycle.
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SPEAKER_00
And that engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket.
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SPEAKER_00
Then the second stage of New Glenn,
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is powered by two BE3U engines, which is a upper stage variant of our new Shepard liquid hydrogen engine.
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SPEAKER_00
The BE3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust, so two of those, 320,000 pounds of thrust.
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SPEAKER_00
and hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP.
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SPEAKER_00
It s not a great propellant in my view for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large.
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SPEAKER_00
Hydrogen
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has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is not dense at all.
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To store liquid hydrogen, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your liquid hydrogen tank gets very large.
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SPEAKER_00
You get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse.
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SPEAKER_00
You get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the second stage.
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SPEAKER_00
and that stage carries less propellant, so you don t get such geometrically gigantic tanks.
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SPEAKER_00
The Delta IV is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen.
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SPEAKER_00
The booster stage is also hydrogen, and I think that it s a very effective vehicle, but it never was very cost-effective.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s operationally very capable, but not very cost effective.
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SPEAKER_01
So size is also costly.
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SPEAKER_00
Size is costly.
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SPEAKER_00
So it s interesting.
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SPEAKER_00
Rockets love to be big.
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SPEAKER_00
Everything works better.
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SPEAKER_00
What do you mean by that?
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SPEAKER_00
You ve told me that before.
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SPEAKER_01
It sounds epic, but what does it mean?
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, when you look at the kind of the physics of rocket engines, and also when you look at parasitic mass,
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SPEAKER_00
It doesn t, if you have, let s say you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system.
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SPEAKER_00
That is gonna be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket.
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SPEAKER_00
And so that s just parasitic mass that is very consequential if you re building a very small rocket.
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SPEAKER_00
but is trivial if you re building a very large rocket.
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SPEAKER_00
You have the parasitic mass thing.
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SPEAKER_00
Then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
And those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger.
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SPEAKER_00
So really tiny turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture.
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SPEAKER_00
And any kind of gaps, you know, are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel, there has to be some gap there.
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SPEAKER_00
You can t have those parts scraping against one another.
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SPEAKER_00
And those gaps drive inefficiencies.
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SPEAKER_00
And so if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps and percentage terms end up being very small.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
But there s a giant exception to this rule.
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SPEAKER_00
and it is manufacturing.
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SPEAKER_00
So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging, it s a pain in the butt.
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SPEAKER_00
And so it s just, 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.
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SPEAKER_00
You don t need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on and so on.
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SPEAKER_00
When you start building big objects,
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infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launchpad and the, you know, all this, we went and visited and took you to the launchpad and you can see it s so monumental.
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SPEAKER_00
And so just these things become major undertakings, both from an engineering point of view,
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SPEAKER_00
but also from a construction and cost point of view.
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SPEAKER_01
And even the foundation of the launch pad.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, this is Florida.
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SPEAKER_01
Isn t it like swampland?
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SPEAKER_01
How deep do you have to go?
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SPEAKER_00
At Cape Canaveral, in fact, at most ocean, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere at the ocean side because you want to launch over water for safety reasons.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, you have to drive pilings
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SPEAKER_00
you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, 50, 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it s, yes, these turn into major civil engineering projects.
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SPEAKER_01
I just have to say, everything about that factory is pretty badass.
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SPEAKER_01
He said tooling, the bigger it gets, the more epic it is.
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SPEAKER_00
It does make it epic.
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SPEAKER_00
It s fun to look at.
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SPEAKER_00
It s extraordinary.
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SPEAKER_01
It s humbling also because humans are so small compared to it.
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SPEAKER_00
We are building these enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power in very, very compact packages.
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SPEAKER_00
It s truly extraordinary.
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SPEAKER_01
But then there s all the different components and the materials involved.
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SPEAKER_01
Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials?
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SPEAKER_01
that comprise the rocket, so it has to be as light as possible, I guess, whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where I say, what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers?
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SPEAKER_00
Like, what s the change?
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SPEAKER_00
Because surprisingly, some of rocketry s greatest hits have not changed.
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SPEAKER_00
They would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today, and it s exactly what they pioneered back in the 60s.
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SPEAKER_00
But a few things have changed.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, the use of,
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SPEAKER_00
carbon composites is very different today.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, we can build very sophisticated – you saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings.
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SPEAKER_00
And we can build these incredibly light
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SPEAKER_00
very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of.
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SPEAKER_00
The structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any metallic material you might use or anything else.
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SPEAKER_00
That s one.
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SPEAKER_00
Aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you?
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SPEAKER_00
This is a remarkable technology.
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SPEAKER_00
It was invented decades ago, but has become very practical over just the last couple of decades.
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SPEAKER_00
And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together,
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SPEAKER_00
it literally stirs the two pieces.
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SPEAKER_00
There s a pin that rotates at a certain rate, and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you wanna 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.
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SPEAKER_00
You can literally, immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material, and it s just barely warm.
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SPEAKER_00
It literally stirs the molecules together.
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SPEAKER_00
It s quite extraordinary.
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SPEAKER_01
Relatively low temperature, and I guess high temperature is what makes it a weak point.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly, so 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.
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SPEAKER_00
And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material.
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SPEAKER_00
So it really allows you, and so, cause when you re, you know, let s say you re building a tank that you re going to pressurize, you know, a 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.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s going to add a lot of weight to that tank.
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SPEAKER_01
I mean, even just looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that it takes and 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.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s its task, but it has to stay strong sometimes and then disappear when it needs to.
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SPEAKER_00
That s right.
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SPEAKER_01
Which is a very difficult task.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, when you need something that needs to have 100% integrity until 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
you use explosive charges for that.
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SPEAKER_00
And so it s a very robust way of separating structure when you need to.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, little tiny bits of explosive material and it just, it ll sever the whole connection.
2
SPEAKER_01
So if you wanna go from 100% structural integrity to zero as fast as possible, it s explosives.
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SPEAKER_01
It s explosives.
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SPEAKER_01
The entirety of this thing is so badass.
2
SPEAKER_01
Okay, so we re back to the two stages.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the first stage is reusable.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, second stage is expendable.
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SPEAKER_00
Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, so we get to take advantage of the higher specific impulse.
2
SPEAKER_00
The first stage lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s a million questions, but also, is there a path towards reusability for the second stage?
2
SPEAKER_00
There is, and we know how to do that.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right now, we re gonna work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible.
2
SPEAKER_00
There s sort of two paths for a second stage.
2
SPEAKER_00
make it reusable, or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it.
2
SPEAKER_00
And that trade is actually not obvious which one is better.
2
SPEAKER_00
Even in terms of cost, like time, cost?
2
SPEAKER_00
I m talking about cost.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem.
2
SPEAKER_00
We solved it back in, you know, the 50s and 60s.
2
SPEAKER_00
The only thing, 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
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, endeavors that lots of startup companies or everybody else can do.
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s – we really – that s our – one of our missions is to, you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit so that there can be
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, a kind of a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.
2
SPEAKER_01
I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way.
2
SPEAKER_01
The physicists will say, everything is a solved problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
We ve solved everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
The rest is just, what Rutherford said, that it s just stamp collecting.
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SPEAKER_01
It s just the details.
2
SPEAKER_01
Some of the greatest innovations and inventions and brilliance is in that cost reduction stage, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
And you ve had a long career of cost reduction.
2
SPEAKER_00
For sure, and when you, what does cost reduction really mean?
2
SPEAKER_00
It means inventing a better way.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer.
2
SPEAKER_00
So whatever it was, I don t know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so it is a big deal to invent better ways.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s how the world gets richer.
2
SPEAKER_01
So what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side, on the engineering side that you re facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn?
2
SPEAKER_00
The first launch is one thing, and we ll do that in 2024, coming up in this coming year.
2
SPEAKER_00
The real thing that s the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently manufacturing at rate.
2
SPEAKER_00
So rate production.
2
SPEAKER_00
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,
2
SPEAKER_00
you know, twice a month, you need to do it every two weeks.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate.
2
SPEAKER_00
And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place.
2
SPEAKER_00
And the same thing, so every upper stage has
2
SPEAKER_00
two BE3U engines.
2
SPEAKER_00
So those engines, you know, you need, if you re gonna launch the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you need an engine every week.
2
SPEAKER_00
So you need to be, that engine needs to be being produced at rate.
2
SPEAKER_00
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, et cetera.
2
SPEAKER_00
So it s one thing to build a first article,
2
SPEAKER_00
right?
2
SPEAKER_00
So that s, you know, to launch New Glenn for the first time, you need to produce a first article.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that s not the hard part.
2
SPEAKER_00
The hard part is everything that s going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glenns at rate.
2
SPEAKER_01
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 sixth.
2
SPEAKER_00
Think of the first article as kind of pushing, it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along.
2
SPEAKER_00
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 manufacturing technologies.
2
SPEAKER_01
Manufacturing is the big challenge.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I don t want to make it sound like any of it is easy.
2
SPEAKER_00
I mean, the people who are designing the engines and all this, all of it is hard for sure.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way.
2
SPEAKER_00
Again, kind of back to our cost point.
2
SPEAKER_00
If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven t really solved the cost problem, and maybe you haven t really moved the state-of-the-art forward.
2
SPEAKER_00
All this has to be about moving the state-of-the-art forward.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are easier businesses to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
I always tell people, look, if you are trying to make money, start a salty snack food company or something.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, you... You write that idea down.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, make the Lex Friedman potato chips.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, this is- Okay, don t say it, or the people are gonna steal it.
2
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, it s hard- You see what I m saying?
2
SPEAKER_00
It s like, there s nothing easy about this business, but it s its own reward.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s fascinating, it s worthwhile, it s meaningful.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so, you know, I don t wanna pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it s less meaningful.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, at the end of the day, you re not gonna
2
SPEAKER_00
you re not going to have accomplished something amazing, even if you do make a lot of money out of it.
3
SPEAKER_00
different about the quote-unquote business of space exploration.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a grand project of humanity.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, it s one of humanity s grand challenges.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll give you an analogy.
3
SPEAKER_01
When I started Amazon,
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t have to develop a payment system.
3
SPEAKER_01
It already existed.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was called the credit card.
3
SPEAKER_01
I didn t have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages.
3
SPEAKER_01
It already existed.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
So all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s why when you look at the internet, you know – and by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early – I m taking you back to like 1994.
3
SPEAKER_01
People were using dial-up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long-distance phone network.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s how the internet – that s, you know, how people were accessing servers and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
That again, if that hadn t existed, it would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there.
3
SPEAKER_01
No startup company could have done that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the problem, you see, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years, it s because you see like,
3
SPEAKER_01
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, it was already there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And that s what I wanna do, I d take my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation
3
SPEAKER_01
the generation that s my children and their children, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then there ll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room.
3
SPEAKER_01
That will be a marker of success.
3
SPEAKER_01
When you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we ve built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed.
3
SPEAKER_01
I find that very exciting.
3
SPEAKER_00
They will, of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted.
3
SPEAKER_01
Of course.
3
SPEAKER_00
Which is the entrepreneurial spirit.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s an inventor s greatest dream, is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
3
SPEAKER_01
We pioneered customer reviews, but now they re so commonplace.
3
SPEAKER_01
Same thing with one-click shopping and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
But that s a compliment.
3
SPEAKER_01
You invent something that s so,
3
SPEAKER_01
used, so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know about nobody.
3
SPEAKER_00
Every time I use Amazon, I m still amazed.
3
SPEAKER_00
How does this work?
3
SPEAKER_01
That proves you re a very curious explorer.
3
SPEAKER_00
All right, all right.
3
SPEAKER_00
Back to rockets.
3
SPEAKER_00
Timeline.
3
SPEAKER_00
You said 2024.
3
SPEAKER_00
as it stands now, are both the first test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible in 2024?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think so.
3
SPEAKER_01
For sure the first launch and then we ll see if Escapade goes on that or not.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that the first launch for sure and I hope Escapade too.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I just don t know which mission it s actually gonna be slated on.
3
SPEAKER_01
So we also have other things that might go on that first mission.
3
SPEAKER_00
Oh, I got it.
3
SPEAKER_00
But you re optimistic that the launches will still- Oh, the first launch.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m very optimistic that the first launch of New Glenn will be in 2024.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m just not 100% certain what payload will be on that first launch.
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you nervous about it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Are you kidding?
3
SPEAKER_01
I m extremely nervous about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh, man.
3
SPEAKER_01
A hundred percent.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve, you know, every, uh, every launch I go to, uh, you know, for New Shepard, for other vehicles too, I m always nervous for these launches, but yes, for sure.
3
SPEAKER_01
A first launch to have no nervousness about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement, I think so.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, I got to visit the launch pad.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s pretty, um, I mean, it s epic.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing, a tremendous amount of simulation.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, a lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been resolved, but there are some problems you can only find in flight.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, cross your fingers.
3
SPEAKER_01
I guarantee you, you ll have fun watching it no matter what happens.
3
SPEAKER_00
100%, when the thing is fully assembled,
3
SPEAKER_00
comes up.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the transporter erector, just the transporter erector for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s an incredible machine.
3
SPEAKER_01
The vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of, you know, comes up.
3
SPEAKER_00
Over a few hours?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, it s a beautiful thing to watch.
3
SPEAKER_00
Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don t know if you remember,
3
SPEAKER_00
but you were aboard New Shepard on its first crewed flight.
3
SPEAKER_00
How was that experience?
3
SPEAKER_00
Were you terrified then?
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, strangely, I wasn t.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, I- You ride the rocket.
3
SPEAKER_01
Less nerve-wracking.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s true.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve watched other people ride in the rocket and I m more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her I was gonna go on the first one.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only was I gonna go, but I was gonna bring my brother, too.
3
SPEAKER_01
This is a tough conversation to have with a mom.
3
SPEAKER_01
And... There s a long pause when you told her.
3
SPEAKER_01
She s like, both of you?
3
SPEAKER_01
an incredible experience, and we were laughing inside the capsule, and we re not nervous.
3
SPEAKER_01
The people on the ground were very nervous for us.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not, it happened even before the flight, at 4.30 in the morning,
3
SPEAKER_01
brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site, and Lauren is gonna take us there in her helicopter, and we re getting ready to leave, and we go outside, outside the ranch house there in West Texas, where the launch facility is, and all of our family, my kids, and my brother s kids, and our, you know, our parents and close friends are assembled there,
3
SPEAKER_01
and they re saying goodbye to us, but they re kind of saying, maybe they think they re saying goodbye to us forever.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we might not have felt that way, but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see, it was almost like attending your own memorial service or something, like you could feel how loved you were in that moment.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was really amazing.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I mean, there s just,
3
SPEAKER_00
epic nature to it too.
3
SPEAKER_01
The ascent, the floating in zero gravity, I ll tell you something very interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
Zero gravity feels very natural.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if it s because we re, you know, it s like a return to the womb.
3
SPEAKER_01
You just confirmed you re an alien.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that s what you just said.
3
SPEAKER_01
It feels so natural to be in zero G. It was really interesting.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then when people talk about the overview effect and seeing Earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think everyone did.
3
SPEAKER_01
you see how fragile the Earth is.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re not an environmentalist, it will make you one.
3
SPEAKER_01
The great Jim Lovell 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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s just, you know, that s the feeling that people get when they re in space.
3
SPEAKER_01
You see all this blackness, all this nothingness, and there s one Jim of life.
3
SPEAKER_01
and it s Earth.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is a gem.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve talked a lot about decision-making throughout your time with Amazon.
3
SPEAKER_00
What was that decision like to be the first to ride in your Shepard?
3
SPEAKER_00
Just before you talk to your mom.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
The pros and cons.
3
SPEAKER_00
Actually, as one human being, as a leader of a company, on all fronts, what was that decision-making like?
3
SPEAKER_01
I decided that, first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know the team who built it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know the vehicle.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m very comfortable with the escape system.
3
SPEAKER_01
We put as much effort
3
SPEAKER_01
into the escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire New Shepard architecture.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you actually describe what do you mean by escape system, what s involved?
3
SPEAKER_01
We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, while the main rocket engine is firing,
3
SPEAKER_01
we can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things.
3
SPEAKER_01
It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it,
3
SPEAKER_01
But we re harnessing, whenever you re talking about rocket engines, I don t care what rocket engine you re talking about, you are harnessing such vast power in such a small, compact, geometric space.
3
SPEAKER_01
The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so the only way to improve safety
3
SPEAKER_01
is to have an escape system.
3
SPEAKER_01
And historically, human-rated rockets have had escape systems, only the space shuttle did not.
3
SPEAKER_01
But Apollo had one, all of the previous, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems.
3
SPEAKER_01
And we have on New Shepard unusual escape, most escape systems are towers.
3
SPEAKER_01
We have a pusher escape system.
3
SPEAKER_01
So the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so they get wasted even in a nominal mission.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so again, you know, cost really matters on these things.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s a very sophisticated thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I knew these things.
3
SPEAKER_01
You asked me about my decision to go.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I know the vehicle very well.
3
SPEAKER_01
I know the people who designed it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I have great trust in them and in the engineering that we did.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I thought to myself, look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn t want anyone to go.
3
SPEAKER_01
A tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view, to be as safe as one can make it.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can t make it perfectly safe.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s impossible.
3
SPEAKER_01
People take risk.
3
SPEAKER_01
They climb mountains.
3
SPEAKER_01
They skydive.
3
SPEAKER_01
They do deep underwater scuba diving and so on.
3
SPEAKER_01
People are okay taking risk.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I felt very good about the system.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think that s one of the reasons I was so calm inside, and maybe others weren t as calm.
3
SPEAKER_01
They didn t know as much about it as I did.
3
SPEAKER_00
Who was in charge of engaging the escape system?
3
SPEAKER_01
It s automated.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
3
SPEAKER_01
the escape system is completely automated.
3
SPEAKER_01
Automated is better because it can react so much faster.
3
SPEAKER_00
So yeah, for tourism, rockets, safety is a huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration also, but a little, you know, a delta less.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yes, I mean, I think for, you know, if you re doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you re saving somebody s life, you know, if you are,
3
SPEAKER_01
you know, engaging in real exploration.
3
SPEAKER_01
These are things where, you know, I personally think we would accept more risk, in part because you have to.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is there a part of you that s frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin?
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
I needed – I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now.
3
SPEAKER_01
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,
3
SPEAKER_01
is gonna get my full attention.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I really, just how I think about things, it was very important to me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so having turned the CEO, I was still the executive chair there, but I turned the CEO role over.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the reason, the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin
3
SPEAKER_01
adding some, you know, energy, some sense of urgency.
3
SPEAKER_01
We need to move much faster, and we re going to.
3
SPEAKER_00
You ve talked a lot of different ways to sort of, at Amazon, removing barriers for progress, sort of distributing, making everybody autonomous and self-reliant, all those kinds of things.
3
SPEAKER_00
Does that apply at Blue Origin?
3
SPEAKER_01
It does apply.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m leading this directly.
3
SPEAKER_01
We are going to become the world s most decisive company.
3
SPEAKER_01
across any industry.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, at Amazon, you know, ever since the beginning, I said, we re going to become the world s most customer-obsessed company.
3
SPEAKER_01
And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know, how did you guys, how are you so customer-obsessed?
3
SPEAKER_01
How do you actually, not just pay lip service to that, but actually do that?
3
SPEAKER_01
And from, you know, all different industries should come want to study us to see how we accomplish that.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the analogous thing at Blue Origin, and it will help us move faster, is we re going to become the world s most decisive company.
3
SPEAKER_01
we re gonna get really good at taking appropriate technology risk, making those decisions quickly, you know, being bold on those things.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s what, and having the right culture that supports that.
3
SPEAKER_01
You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious.
3
SPEAKER_01
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.
3
SPEAKER_01
We can always change our mind.
3
SPEAKER_01
Changing your mind, I talk about one-way doors and two-way doors, most decisions are two-way doors.
3
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain that?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because I love that metaphor.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you make the wrong decision, if it s a two-way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, and you spend a little time there, it turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door.
3
SPEAKER_01
Some decisions,
3
SPEAKER_01
are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one-way door decisions.
3
SPEAKER_01
You go in that door, you re not coming back.
3
SPEAKER_01
And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.
3
SPEAKER_01
If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, when I, the CEO of Amazon,
3
SPEAKER_01
I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer because somebody would be bringing me a one-way door decision.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was, okay, I can think of three more ways to
4
SPEAKER_01
So let s go do that because we are not gonna be able to reverse this one easily.
4
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you can reverse it but it s gonna be very costly and very time consuming.
4
SPEAKER_01
We really have to get this one right from the beginning.
4
SPEAKER_01
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 heavyweight process
4
SPEAKER_01
on all decisions, including the lightweight ones, the two-way door decisions.
4
SPEAKER_01
Two-way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one-way door decisions are the ones that are the irreversible ones.
4
SPEAKER_01
Those are the ones that should be elevated up to the senior most executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here is to know the difference between one-way and two-way.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think you mentioned Amazon Prime, the decision to sort of create Amazon Prime as a one-way door.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s unclear if it is or not, but it probably is, and it s a really big risk to go there.
4
SPEAKER_01
There are a bunch of decisions like that that are, you know, changing the decision is going to be very, very complicated.
4
SPEAKER_01
Some of them are technical decisions too, because some technical decisions are like quick drying cement.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, if you re going to, once you make them, it gets really hard, I mean, you know, choosing which propellants to use in a vehicle.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you change your mind,
4
SPEAKER_01
That would be a very big setback.
4
SPEAKER_01
Do you see what I m saying?
4
SPEAKER_01
So that s the kind of decision you scrutinize very, very carefully.
4
SPEAKER_01
Other things just aren t like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Most decisions are not that way.
4
SPEAKER_01
Most decisions should be made by single individuals, and done quickly, in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, one of the things I really liked, perhaps it s not two-way door decisions, is I disagree and commit phrase.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, don t, so somebody brings up an idea to you, if it s a two-way door, you state that you don t understand enough to agree, but you still back them.
4
SPEAKER_00
I d love for you to explain it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I m gonna try to use that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I m gonna use that in my personal life.
4
SPEAKER_00
I disagree, but commit.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s very common in any endeavor in life, in business, in anybody where you have teammates.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have a teammate, and the two of you disagree.
4
SPEAKER_01
At some point, you have to make a decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
And in companies, we tend to organize hierarchically.
4
SPEAKER_01
So whoever s the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
So ultimately, the CEO gets to make that decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with.
4
SPEAKER_01
So like, you know, I would often, I would be the one who would disagree and commit.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of my direct reports would very much want to do something in a particular way.
4
SPEAKER_01
I would think it was a bad idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
I would explain my point of view.
4
SPEAKER_01
They would say, Jeff, I think you re wrong, and here s why.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we would go back and forth.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I would often say, you know what?
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t think you re right, but I m going to gamble with you.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you re closer to the ground truth than I am.
4
SPEAKER_01
I ve known you for 20 years.
4
SPEAKER_01
You have great judgment.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know that I m right either, not really, not for sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
All these decisions are complicated.
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s do it your way.
4
SPEAKER_01
But at least then you ve made a decision, and I m agreeing to commit to that decision.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I m not going to be second-guessing it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not going to be sniping at it.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m not going to be saying, I told you so.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m going to try actively to help
4
SPEAKER_01
make sure it works.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a really important teammate behavior.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing on teams.
4
SPEAKER_01
And there are so many ways when two people disagree about something, even though I m assuming the case where everybody s well-intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is.
4
SPEAKER_01
And we have in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes.
4
SPEAKER_01
A lot of them are, I think, really bad.
4
SPEAKER_01
So an example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, compromise, you know, we re in a room here and I could say, Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is?
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SPEAKER_01
And you d be like, I don t know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall.
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SPEAKER_01
And I would say, I think it s 11 feet tall.
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SPEAKER_01
And then we d say, you know what, let s just call it 11 1⁄2 feet.
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SPEAKER_01
That s compromise.
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SPEAKER_01
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.
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SPEAKER_01
Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it s low energy.
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SPEAKER_01
But it doesn t lead to truth.
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SPEAKER_01
And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a knowable thing, you shouldn t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
4
SPEAKER_01
Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who s more stubborn.
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SPEAKER_01
This is also, let s say two executives who disagree, and they just have a war of attrition, in which everyone gets exhausted first, capitulates to the other one.
4
SPEAKER_01
Again, you haven t arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, this is where escalation, I try to ask people who, you know, on my team,
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SPEAKER_01
It s a never get to a point where you are resolving something by, you know, who gets exhausted first.
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SPEAKER_01
Escalate that.
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SPEAKER_01
I ll help you make the decision.
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SPEAKER_01
Because that s so de-energizing and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.
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SPEAKER_00
Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible?
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SPEAKER_00
Because that ultimately leads to a high velocity.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
And you want to try to get as close to truth as possible.
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SPEAKER_01
So you want like, you know, exhausting the other person is not truth seeking.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
And compromise is not truth seeking.
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SPEAKER_01
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 disagree and commit can come in.
4
SPEAKER_01
But escalation is better than war of attrition.
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SPEAKER_01
Escalate to your boss and say, hey, we can t agree on this.
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SPEAKER_01
We like each other, we re respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other.
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SPEAKER_01
We need you to make a decision here so we can move forward.
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SPEAKER_01
But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can, is how you increase velocity.
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SPEAKER_01
Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all skill levels.
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SPEAKER_01
So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity.
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SPEAKER_01
Amazon has a million and a half people, and the company is still fast.
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SPEAKER_01
We re still decisive, we re still quick.
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SPEAKER_01
And that s because the culture supports that.
4
SPEAKER_00
At every scale and in a distributed way to try to maximize the velocity of decisions.
4
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_00
You mentioned the lunar program.
4
SPEAKER_00
Let me ask you about that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
There s a lot going on there, and you haven t really talked about it much.
4
SPEAKER_00
So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA, Blue is doing its own lander program.
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SPEAKER_00
Can you describe it?
4
SPEAKER_00
There s a sexy picture on Instagram with one of them.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is it the MK1, I guess?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, the Mark 1.
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SPEAKER_01
The picture here is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator.
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SPEAKER_01
Just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing about the Instagram.
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SPEAKER_01
I know it s not me.
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SPEAKER_01
I know it was either the lander or Bill.
4
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for clarifying.
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SPEAKER_01
Yes, the Mark I lander is designed to take 3,000 kilograms to the surface of the moon in a cargo, expendable cargo.
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SPEAKER_01
It s an expendable lander, lands on the moon, stays there.
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SPEAKER_01
take 3,000 kilograms to the surface.
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SPEAKER_01
It can be launched on a single New Glenn flight, which is very important.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s a relatively simple architecture, just like the human landing system lander, called the Mark II.
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SPEAKER_01
Mark I is also fueled with liquid hydrogen, which is for high energy missions, like landing on the surface of the moon,
4
SPEAKER_01
the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage.
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The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it s such a deep cryogen, it s not storable.
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SPEAKER_01
So it s constantly boiling off and you re losing propellant because it s boiling off.
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SPEAKER_01
And so what we re doing as part of our lunar program
4
SPEAKER_01
is developing solar powered cryo coolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant for deep space.
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SPEAKER_01
And that s a real game changer.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s a game changer for any high energy mission.
4
SPEAKER_01
So to the moon, but to the outer planets, to Mars, everywhere.
4
SPEAKER_00
So the idea with both Mark I and Mark II is the new Glenn can carry it from the surface of Earth to the surface of
4
SPEAKER_00
the Moon.
4
SPEAKER_01
Exactly.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the Mark 1 is expendable.
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SPEAKER_01
The lunar lander we re developing for NASA, the Mark 2 lander, that s part of the Artemis program.
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SPEAKER_01
They call it the sustaining lander program.
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SPEAKER_01
So that lander is designed to be reusable.
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SPEAKER_01
It can land on the surface of the Moon in a single-stage configuration and then take off.
4
SPEAKER_01
So the whole – if you look at the Apollo program,
4
SPEAKER_01
The lunar lander in Apollo was really two stages.
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SPEAKER_01
It would land on the surface and then it would leave the descent stage on the surface of the moon and only the ascent stage would go back up into lunar orbit where it would rendezvous with the command module.
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SPEAKER_01
Here what we re doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that it can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the point of doing that, of course, is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
So back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the program, and it really was too expensive to continue.
4
SPEAKER_00
And so there s a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon?
4
SPEAKER_00
What ideas do you have about a sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time?
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
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 the more advanced solar cells that we make here on Earth.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory,
4
SPEAKER_01
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 continue to churn out solar cells on the surface of the moon, have lots of power on the surface of the moon.
4
SPEAKER_01
That will make it easier for people to live on the moon.
4
SPEAKER_01
Similarly, we re working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.
4
SPEAKER_01
So lunar regolith by weight has a lot of oxygen in it.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s bound very tightly, you know, as oxides with other elements.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive.
4
SPEAKER_01
So that also could work together with the solar cells.
4
SPEAKER_01
But if you can, and then ultimately,
4
SPEAKER_01
we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon.
4
SPEAKER_01
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.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then you d not only have oxygen, but you d also have a very good high efficiency propellant fuel in hydrogen.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time.
4
SPEAKER_01
But the very first step, 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.
4
SPEAKER_00
To fast forward a little bit, is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars?
4
SPEAKER_00
One or the other or both?
4
SPEAKER_01
It s very unlikely.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think it s probably something that gets done by future generations by the time it gets to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think in my lifetime, that s probably gonna be done by professional astronauts.
4
SPEAKER_01
Sadly, I would love to sign up for that mission.
4
SPEAKER_01
So don t count me out yet, Lex.
4
SPEAKER_01
Give me a finding shot here, maybe.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I think if we are placing,
4
SPEAKER_01
reasonable bets on such a thing in my lifetime that will continue to be done by professional astronauts.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so these are risky, difficult missions.
4
SPEAKER_01
And probably missions that require a lot of training.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know, you are going there for a very specific purpose to do something.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re going to be able to do a lot on the Moon too with automation.
4
SPEAKER_01
So, you know, in terms of setting up these factories and doing all that,
4
SPEAKER_01
We re sophisticated enough now with automation that we probably don t need humans to tend those factories and machines.
4
SPEAKER_01
So there s a lot that s gonna be done in both modes.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out towards the stars, Blue Origin and SpaceX.
4
SPEAKER_00
Are you competitors, collaborators, which and to what degree?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I would say, you know, just like the internet is big and there are lots of winners at all skill levels.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies that, you know, the internet has made, but they re a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with profits, dreams, all driving great customer experiences.
4
SPEAKER_01
Um, that s what we want to see in space, that kind of dynamism and space is big.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s room for a bunch of winners and it s going to happen at all skill levels.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so.
4
SPEAKER_01
you know, SpaceX is gonna be successful for sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
I want Blue Origin to be successful.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I hope there are another, you know, five companies right behind us.
4
SPEAKER_00
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 and very supportive of all the efforts you ve been leading at Blue.
4
SPEAKER_00
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 a leader?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I don t really know Elon very well.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know his public persona, but I also know you can t know anyone by their public persona.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s impossible.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you may think you do, but I guarantee you don t.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I don t really know.
4
SPEAKER_01
You know Elon way better than I do, Lex.
4
SPEAKER_01
In terms of his judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader.
4
SPEAKER_01
There s no way you could have Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s impossible.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
Because what you re doing is like one of the big, grand challenges ahead for humanity.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, I agree with you, and I think in a lot of these endeavors, we re very like-minded.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m not saying we re identical, but I think we re very like-minded, and so I love that idea.
5
SPEAKER_01
All right, going back to sexy pictures on your Instagram, there s a video of you from the early days of Amazon giving a tour of your, quote, sort of offices.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think your dad is holding the camera.
5
SPEAKER_00
He is, yeah, I know, yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is what the giant orange extension cord, yeah.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you re like explaining the genius of the extension cord and how this is a desk and a CRT monitor and sort of that s where all the magic happens.
5
SPEAKER_01
I forget what your dad said, but this is like the center of it all.
5
SPEAKER_01
So what was it like?
5
SPEAKER_01
What was going through your mind at that time?
5
SPEAKER_01
You left
5
SPEAKER_01
a good job in New York and took this leap.
5
SPEAKER_01
Were you excited?
5
SPEAKER_01
Were you scared?
5
SPEAKER_00
So excited and scared, anxious, 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 mean getting your money back, not what actually happened.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because that s the truth.
5
SPEAKER_00
Every startup company is unlikely to work.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s helpful to be in reality about that.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that doesn t mean you can t be optimistic.
5
SPEAKER_00
So you kind of have to have this duality in your head.
5
SPEAKER_00
On the one hand, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it s going to work.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you re doing both things at the same time.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re holding that contradiction in your head.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it was so exciting.
5
SPEAKER_00
Every from 1994 when the company was founded to 1995 when we opened our doors, all the way until today, I find Amazon so exciting.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that doesn t mean it s like full of pain, full of problems.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s like there s so many things that need to be resolved and worked and made better and
5
SPEAKER_00
and et cetera, but on balance, it s so fun.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s such a privilege.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s been such a joy.
5
SPEAKER_00
I feel so grateful that I ve been part of that journey.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s just been incredible.
5
SPEAKER_01
So in some sense, you don t want a single day of comfort.
5
SPEAKER_01
You ve written about this many times.
5
SPEAKER_01
We ll talk about your writing, which I would highly recommend people read in just the letters to shareholders.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you wrote up explaining the idea of day one thinking.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think you first wrote about it in 97 letters to shareholders.
5
SPEAKER_01
Then you also, in a way, wrote about, sad to say, is your last letter to shareholders as CEO.
5
SPEAKER_01
And you said that day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death.
5
SPEAKER_01
and that is why it s always day one.
5
SPEAKER_01
Can you explain this day one thing?
5
SPEAKER_01
This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth and like every day is day one.
5
SPEAKER_00
Every day you re deciding what you re gonna do and you,
5
SPEAKER_00
are not trapped by what you were or who you were or any self-consistency.
5
SPEAKER_00
Self-consistency even can be a trap.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so day one thinking is kind of restart fresh every day.
5
SPEAKER_00
and we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about how we re going to operate, even as deeply as what our principles are, we can go back to that.
5
SPEAKER_00
It turns out we don t change those very often, but we change them occasionally.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when we work on
5
SPEAKER_00
programs at Amazon, we often make a list of tenets, and the tenets 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.
5
SPEAKER_00
And one of the things that we do is we put, these are the tenets for this program, and then in parentheses, we always put, unless you know a better way.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that idea, unless you know a better way, is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma.
5
SPEAKER_00
You never want to get trapped by history.
5
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t mean you discard history or ignore it.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s so much value in what has worked in the past, but you can t be blindly following what you ve done, and that s the heart of day one.
5
SPEAKER_00
You re always starting fresh.
5
SPEAKER_01
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Here s a starter pack of essentials.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe others come to mind.
5
SPEAKER_01
For day one, defense.
5
SPEAKER_01
Customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision-making.
5
SPEAKER_01
So we talked about high-velocity decision-making.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s more difficult than it sounds.
5
SPEAKER_01
So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on.
5
SPEAKER_01
Eager adoption of external trends, high-velocity decision-making, skeptical view of proxies.
5
SPEAKER_01
How do you fight off day two?
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, I ll talk about, because I think it s the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand, is the skeptical view of proxies.
5
SPEAKER_00
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 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.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that metric isn t the real underlying thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like, if you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or how many returns do you get?
5
SPEAKER_00
And so on and so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in.
5
SPEAKER_00
where somebody a long time ago invented that metric.
5
SPEAKER_00
They invented that metric.
5
SPEAKER_00
They decided we need to watch for customer returns per unit sold as an important metric.
5
SPEAKER_00
But they had a reason why they chose that metric, the person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy.
5
SPEAKER_00
The real thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
The proxy for truth, I guess.
5
SPEAKER_00
The proxy for truth, the proxy for, let s say in this case it s a proxy for customer happiness.
5
SPEAKER_00
But that metric is not actually customer happiness, it s a proxy for customer happiness.
5
SPEAKER_00
The person who invented the metric understood that connection.
5
SPEAKER_00
Five years later, a kind of inertia can set in and you forget
5
SPEAKER_00
the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place.
5
SPEAKER_00
And the world shifts a little.
5
SPEAKER_00
And now that proxy isn t as valuable as it used to be, or it s missing something.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you have to be on alert for that.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to know, okay, I don t really care about this metric.
5
SPEAKER_00
I care about customer happiness.
5
SPEAKER_00
And this metric is worth
5
SPEAKER_00
putting energy into and following and improving and scrutinizing only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so you got to constantly be on guard and it s very, very common.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is a nuanced problem.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s very common, especially in large companies.
5
SPEAKER_00
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 out from under them a little, and the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.
5
SPEAKER_01
That is a nuance, but that s a big problem, right?
5
SPEAKER_01
There s something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and by the way, you do need metrics.
5
SPEAKER_00
You know, you can t ignore them.
5
SPEAKER_00
You want them, but you just have to be constantly on guard.
5
SPEAKER_00
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.
5
SPEAKER_01
What does it take to be the guy or gal who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated?
5
SPEAKER_01
I guess, what does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting?
5
SPEAKER_01
Because that s a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting.
5
SPEAKER_00
We all showed up here, it s a Friday.
5
SPEAKER_00
This is such, you have just asked a million dollar question, so this is, if I generalize what you re asking,
5
SPEAKER_00
you were talking in general about truth-telling.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we humans are not really truth-seeking animals.
5
SPEAKER_00
We are social animals.
5
SPEAKER_00
And take you back in time 10,000 years and you re in a small village.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you go along to get along, you can survive.
5
SPEAKER_00
You can procreate.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night
5
SPEAKER_00
Truths are often, they don t want to be heard, because important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting.
5
SPEAKER_00
Impolite.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
5
SPEAKER_00
And all that kind of stuff.
5
SPEAKER_00
Challenging.
5
SPEAKER_00
They can make people defensive, even if that s not the intent.
5
SPEAKER_00
But any high-performing organization, whether it s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don t care what it is,
5
SPEAKER_00
Any high-performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to talk to people.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to remind people it s okay that it s uncomfortable.
5
SPEAKER_00
You literally tell people it s not what we re designed to do as humans.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not really – it s kind of a side effect, you know, we can do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it s not how we survive.
5
SPEAKER_00
We mostly survive by being social animals.
5
SPEAKER_00
and being cordial and cooperative, and that s really important.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so there s a, you know, science is all about truth-telling.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth.
5
SPEAKER_00
And even in science, you find that it s hard to tell the truth, right?
5
SPEAKER_00
Even, you know, you re supposed to have a hypothesis, test it, and find data, and reject the hypothesis, and so on.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not easy.
5
SPEAKER_01
But even in science, there s like the senior scientists and the junior scientists, and then there s a hierarchy of humans where somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which it should not.
5
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And that s true inside companies too.
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And so you wanna set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person, if they have data,
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And that really is about trying to, you know, there are little things you can do.
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SPEAKER_00
So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last.
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And I know from experience that, you know, if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high judgment,
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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.
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SPEAKER_00
And so you can do little things like, if you re the most senior person in the room, go last.
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Let everybody else go first.
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In fact, ideally, let s try to have the most junior person go first, and the second, try to go in order of seniority.
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so that you can hear everyone s opinion in a kind of unfiltered way, because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions.
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If somebody who you really respect says something, it makes you change your mind a little.
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SPEAKER_01
So you re saying implicitly or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion as long as it s backed by data?
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SPEAKER_00
Yes, and sometimes it can even, by the way, a lot of our most powerful truths
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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.
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But 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.
5
SPEAKER_00
Let s go collect some data on that.
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Let s try to see if we can actually know whether it s right.
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But for now, let s not disregard it, because it feels right.
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You can also fight inherent bias.
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There s an optimism bias.
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Like, if there are two interpretations of a new set of data, and one of them is happy, and one of them is unhappy,
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it s a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right.
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You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of looking for, you know, trying to find the silver lining and say, look, that might be good, but I m going to go with it s bad for now until we re sure.
5
SPEAKER_01
So speaking of happiness bias, data collection, and anecdotes, you have to, how s that for a transition?
5
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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.
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Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon.
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And we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents.
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And I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
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And it doesn t mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then.
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It means you go examine the data.
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And it s usually not that the data is being,
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miscollected, it s usually that you re not measuring the right thing.
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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 are, they shouldn t be complaining.
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You should doubt the metrics.
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And an early example of this
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was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than, I don t know, 60 seconds.
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When they called a 1-800 number to get, you know, phone customer service, the wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds.
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And, but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that.
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And anecdotally, it seemed longer than that.
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Like, you know, I would call customer service myself.
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And so one day we re in a meeting, we re going through the WBR and the weekly business review.
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And we get to this metric in the DAC, and the guy who leads customer service is defending the metric.
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And I said, okay, let s call.
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Picked up the phone, and I dialed the 1-800 number and called customer service.
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And we just waited in silence.
5
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What did it turn out to be?
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Oh, it was really long, more than 10 minutes, I think.
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I mean, it was many minutes.
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And so it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.
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We weren t measuring the right thing.
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And that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right.
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And that s an example, by the way, of
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of truth-telling is like, that s an uncomfortable thing to do, 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.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience.
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So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy.
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I think companies sometimes say that, but Amazon, Amazon, Amazon.
6
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is really obsessed with that.
6
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I think there s something really profound to that, which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, like the customer experience, the human 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?
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This is another,
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really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage.
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And then there are small things internally to Amazon, we call them paper cuts.
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So we have, we re always working on the big things.
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Like if you ask me, and most of the energy goes into the big things as it should.
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So, and you can identify the big things and I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur
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as a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years.
6
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And those are probably the big things.
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So I know in our retail business at Amazon,
6
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10 years from now, customers are still gonna want low prices.
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I know they re still gonna want fast delivery, and I just know they re still gonna want big selection.
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So it s impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now, I say, where a customer says, I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher.
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Or I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.
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So when you identify the big things, you can tell they re worth putting energy into because they re stable in time.
6
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Okay.
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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.
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So even though they re obvious, they re really hard to focus on.
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But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call those paper cuts.
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And we make long lists of them, and then we have dedicated teams
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the go fix paper cuts, because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts.
6
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They never work their way down the list to get to, they re working on big things, as they should.
6
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and as you want them to.
6
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And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.
6
SPEAKER_00
Where would you put on the paper cut spectrum the buy now with one click button, which is, I think, pretty genius.
6
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So to me, like, okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet.
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There s things I do a lot.
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I may be representing a regular human.
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I would love for those things to be frictionless.
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For example, booking airline tickets.
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Just saying.
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Buying a thing with one click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that.
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That just fundamentally makes my life
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better, not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of... Cognitive load.
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Yeah, cognitive load and inner peace and happiness.
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First of all, buying stuff is a pleasant experience.
6
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Having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience.
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And having pain around that is somehow, you re ruining a beautiful experience.
6
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And I guess all I m saying as a person who loves
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good ideas.
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Is that a paper cut, a solution to a paper cut?
6
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Yes.
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So that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts.
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So if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented one-click shopping,
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there was more friction, there was a whole series of paper cuts, and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts.
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And I think you re absolutely right, by the way, that when you come up with something like one-click shopping, again, this is like so ingrained in people now, I m impressed that you even notice it.
6
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I mean, most people.
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Every time I click the button, I just, a surge of happiness.
6
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There is in the perfect invention, for the perfect moment, in the perfect context, there is real beauty.
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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.
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And you can feel those things.
6
SPEAKER_00
But to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the day one thinking effort.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s a lot of books written about you.
6
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There s a book, Invent and Wander, where Walter Isaacson does an intro, and it s mostly collective writings of yours.
6
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I ve read that.
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I also recommend people check out the Founders Podcast.
6
SPEAKER_00
That covers you a lot, and it does different analysis of different business advice you ve given over the years.
6
SPEAKER_00
I bring all that up because I saw that there, I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans.
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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.
6
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Yeah.
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We co-evolve with our tools.
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So we invent new tools, and then our tools change us.
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SPEAKER_00
It goes in a circle.
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And there s some aspect, even just inside business, where you don t just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about where is this going to take humanity, if you zoom out a bit.
6
100%.
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And you can feel your brain, brains are plastic,
6
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and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed.
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I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris first came on the scene.
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I m sure you ve had, anybody who s been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see
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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.
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And, but that happens with everything.
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And so, you know, one of the, I think we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear.
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I think one of the things that we ve done online
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you know, and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content.
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and, you know, your podcast flies in the face of this.
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You know, you do these long-format things.
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And reading books is a long-format thing.
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And we all do more of – if something is convenient, we do more of it.
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And so when you make tools, you know, we carry around
6
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a little, we carry around in our pocket a phone.
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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.
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And I m not even going to say we know for sure that that s bad, but I do think it s happening.
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That s one of the ways we re co-evolving with that tool.
6
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But I think, I think it s important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think you ve spoken about the value in your own life of focus.
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of singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time.
6
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And that s certainly what books do.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s certainly what that piece of technology does.
6
SPEAKER_00
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.
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How do you think AI will change this?
6
SPEAKER_01
If you re talking about generative AI, large language models, things like Chai GPT and its soon successors, these are incredibly powerful technologies.
6
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To believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful.
6
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It s interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they re discoveries.
6
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The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery.
6
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Like, my God, it has moons.
6
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And that s what Galileo did.
6
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And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention.
6
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You know, we know exactly what happens with a 787.
6
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It s an engineered object.
6
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We designed it.
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We know how it behaves.
6
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We don t want any surprises.
6
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Large language models are much more like discoveries.
6
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We re constantly getting surprised by their capabilities.
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They re not really engineered objects.
6
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Then, you know, you have this
6
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debate about whether they re going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity.
6
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You know, even specialized AI
6
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can be very bad for humanity.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s just, you know, just regular machine learning models that can make, you know, certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive, very powerful, and they re not general AIs, they re just, they could just be very smart weapons.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so we have to think about all of those things.
6
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I m very optimistic about this.
6
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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, on balance, hurt us and destroy us.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think, you know, we humans have a lot of ways of
6
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We can make ourselves go extinct.
6
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These things may help us not do that.
6
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They may actually save us.
6
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So the people who are overly concerned, in my view, overly concerned, it s a valid debate.
6
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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.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer.
6
SPEAKER_01
to me, first of all, I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr.
6
SPEAKER_01
who, you know, some of the people I ve talked to think that s the most boring part of the movie.
6
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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.
6
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And
6
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They are managed and we humans are, we re not really capable of wielding those weapons.
6
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where, and that s what he represented in that movie is here s this guy who is just, he wrongly thinks he s like being so petty.
6
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He thinks that he said something, that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him.
6
SPEAKER_01
They didn t talk about him at all as you find out in the final scene of the movie.
6
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And yet he spent his career trying to
6
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vengeful and petty.
6
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And that s the problem.
6
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We as a species are not really sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies.
6
SPEAKER_01
And by the way, before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency, and there s a lot of things that would have to happen,
6
SPEAKER_01
There s so much benefit that s gonna come from these technologies in the meantime, even before they re
6
SPEAKER_01
you know, general AI in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies and so on.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I think it s an incredible moment to be alive and to witness the transformations that are going to happen.
6
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How quickly it will happen, no one knows.
6
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But over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we re going to see really remarkable advances.
6
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And I personally am very excited about it.
6
SPEAKER_00
First of all, really interesting to say that it s discoveries that it s true that we don t know the limits of what s possible with the current language models.
6
SPEAKER_00
And like it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that open doors to hold entire new possibilities.
6
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We do know that humans are doing something different from these models in part because
6
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know, we re so power efficient.
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, the human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power.
6
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And you know, the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks.
6
SPEAKER_01
So, there s something interesting about the way the human brain does this.
6
SPEAKER_01
And also, we don t need as much data.
6
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So, you know, like self-driving cars are
6
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They have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive.
6
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And, you know, your average 16 year old figures it out with many fewer miles.
6
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So there are still some tricks, I think, that we have yet to learn.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we ve learned the last trick.
6
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it s just a question of scaling things up.
6
SPEAKER_01
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.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and there s some more nuanced aspects about human beings that s interesting if it s able to accomplish like being truly original and novel to, you know, large language models being able to come up with some truly new ideas.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s one, and the other one is truth.
6
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It seems that large language models are very good at sounding
6
SPEAKER_00
like they re saying a true thing, but they don t require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth.
6
SPEAKER_00
Basically, he s a very good bullshitter.
6
SPEAKER_00
So if there s not enough sort of data in the training data about a particular topic, he s just going to concoct
6
SPEAKER_00
accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve.
6
SPEAKER_00
How do you get language models to infer what is true or not, to sort of introspect?
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, they need to be taught to say, I don t know, more often.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I know several humans who could be taught that as well.
6
SPEAKER_00
And then the other stuff, because you re still a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things, the other open question is what kind of products are created from this?
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, so many.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, you know, just to,
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, we have Alexa and Echo, and Alexa has, you know, hundreds of millions of installed bass, you know, inputs.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so there s this, there s, you know, there s Alexa everywhere.
7
SPEAKER_01
And guess what?
7
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Alexa is about to get a lot smarter.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so that s really, you know, from a product point of view, that s super exciting.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s so many opportunities there.
7
SPEAKER_01
So many opportunities.
7
SPEAKER_01
Shopping assistant, you know, all that stuff is amazing.
7
SPEAKER_01
And AWS, you know, we re building Titan, which is our foundational model.
7
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We re also building Bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS.
7
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enterprise clients, they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model.
7
SPEAKER_01
And so those are the tools we re building for them with Bedrock.
7
SPEAKER_01
So there s tremendous opportunity here.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating.
7
SPEAKER_00
of how to, because so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep this secure.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s a fascinating technical problem.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes, this is a very challenging technical problem, and it s one that we re making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots, maybe Alexa, have a romantic relationship?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, I mean, I think if you look at the- Just brainstorming products here.
7
SPEAKER_01
If you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, you know, sexual variety.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
You know, there are people who like everything.
7
SPEAKER_01
So the answer to your question has to be yes.
7
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how- I guess I m asking when.
7
SPEAKER_01
I don t know how widespread that will be.
7
SPEAKER_01
All right.
7
SPEAKER_01
But it will happen.
7
SPEAKER_00
I was just asking Wayne for a friend, but it s all right.
7
SPEAKER_00
Moving on.
7
SPEAKER_00
Next question.
7
SPEAKER_00
What s a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos?
7
SPEAKER_00
You re one of the most productive humans in the world.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter.
7
SPEAKER_01
I have a coffee.
7
SPEAKER_00
Can you define putter?
7
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Just like I slowly move around.
7
SPEAKER_01
I m not as productive as you might think I am.
7
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I mean, because I do believe in wandering, and I read my phone for a while.
7
SPEAKER_01
I read newspapers for a while.
7
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I chat with Laura, and I drink my first coffee.
7
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So I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours.
7
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I get up early,
7
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just naturally, and then I exercise most days, and most days it s not that hard for me.
7
SPEAKER_01
Some days it s really hard, and I do it anyway.
7
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I don t want to, and it s painful, and I m like, why am I here, and I don t want to do that.
7
SPEAKER_01
Why am I here at the gym?
7
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Why am I here at the gym?
7
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Why don t I do something else?
7
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It s not always easy.
7
SPEAKER_00
What s your source of motivation in those moments?
7
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I know that I ll feel better later if I do it.
7
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And so the real source of motivation, I can tell the days when I skip it.
7
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I m not quite as alert.
7
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I don t feel as good.
7
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And then there s harder motivations.
7
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It s longer term.
7
SPEAKER_01
You want to be healthy as you age.
7
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You want healthspan.
7
SPEAKER_01
Ideally, you wanna be healthy and moving around when you re 80 years old.
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But that kind of motivation is so far in the future, it can be very hard to work in the second.
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So thinking about the fact, I ll feel better in about four hours if I do it now, I ll have more energy for the rest of my day, and so on and so on.
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What s your exercise routine, just to linger on that?
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How much do you curl?
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I mean, what are we talking about here?
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That s all I do at the gym, so I just.
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My routine, you know, on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio, and I do about 45 minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights.
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I have a trainer who, you know, I love, who pushes me, which is really helpful.
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You know, I ll be like, he ll say,
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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.
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And he ll be, he ll look at me and say, yeah, I think you can.
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And of course he s right.
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So it s helpful to have somebody push you a little bit.
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But almost every day you do that.
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I do almost every day.
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I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting and I rotate.
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I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day.
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It s all pretty standard stuff.
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So puttering, coffee, gym.
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Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work.
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Work.
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What s work look like?
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What are the productive hours look like for you?
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I, you know, so I, a couple of years ago I left as the CEO of Amazon and I have never worked harder in my life.
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I am working so hard and I m mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days.
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Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I ve been, I m so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years.
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In the big, I love it.
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In the small, there s all the frustrations that come along with everything.
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We re trying to get to rate manufacturing, as we talked about.
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That s super important.
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We ll get there.
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We just hired a new CEO, a guy I ve known for close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limp, who I love.
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He s amazing.
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We re super lucky to have Dave.
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You re going to see us move faster there.
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My day of work,
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reading documents, having meetings, sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am.
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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.
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It s super fun for me.
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My favorite part of it is the technology.
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My least favorite part of it is building organizations and so on.
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That s important, but it s also my least favorite part.
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So that s why they call it work.
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You don t always get to do what you wanna do.
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How do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems?
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I do little thinking retreats.
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So this is not the only, I can do that all day long.
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I m very good at focusing.
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I m very good at, I don t,
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keep to a strict schedule, like my meetings often go longer than I plan for them to because I believe in wandering.
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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.
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I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.
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And so the meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution.
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And when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile.
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It feels good.
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It has a kind of beauty to it.
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an aesthetic beauty to it, and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.
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Can you actually describe the CRISP document?
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Like, this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon, of the way you approach meetings.
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This is the six-page memo.
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Maybe first describe the process of running a meeting with memos.
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Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual.
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When new people come in, like a new executive joins, they re a little taken aback sometimes because a typical meeting,
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We ll start with a six-page narratively structured memo, and we do study hall.
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For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read.
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Take notes in the margins, and then we discuss.
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And the reason, by the way, we do study, 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 they re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.
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It s better just to carve out the time for people.
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So now we re all on the same page.
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We ve all read the memo.
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And now we can have a really elevated discussion.
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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.
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But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade.
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It s kind of a sales tool.
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And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell.
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You want to, again, you re truth-seeking.
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You re trying to find truth.
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And the other problem with PowerPoint is it s easy for the author
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and hard for the audience.
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And a memo is the opposite.
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It s hard to write a six-page memo.
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A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write.
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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.
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It might take two weeks.
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So the author, it s really a very difficult job.
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But for the audience, it s much better.
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So you can read a half hour, and there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too.
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Senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation.
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That question s gonna be answered on the next slide, but you never got there.
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Whereas if you read the whole memo in advance, 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.
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That s why I save all that time.
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You also get, if the person who s preparing the memo, we talked earlier about groupthink and the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don t want your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely.
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The author of the memo has kind of got to be very vulnerable.
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They ve got to put all their thoughts out there.
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and they ve got to go first.
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But that s great, because it makes them really good.
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And you get to see their real ideas, and you re not trompling on them accidentally in a big PowerPoint presentation.
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What s that feel like when you ve authored a thing, and then you re sitting there and everybody s reading your thing?
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I think it s mostly terrifying.
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Yeah.
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Like maybe in a good way?
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Like a purifying?
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I think it s terrifying in a productive way.
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But I think it s emotionally a very nerve-wracking experience.
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Is there art, science to the writing of the six-page memo?
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Or just writing in general to you?
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I mean, it s really got to be a real memo, so it means, you know,
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paragraphs have topic sentences, it s verbs and nouns.
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That s the other problem with PowerPoint, they re often just bullet points and you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points.
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When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it s really hard to hide sloppy thinking.
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So it does—it forces the author to be at their best.
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And so you re getting somebody s, they re getting somebody s really their best thinking.
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And then you don t have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person.
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You ve got it from the very beginning.
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So it really saves you time in the long run.
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So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy.
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Crisp documents.
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Yes, and you don t want, you don t want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp.
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Yeah.
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There s, you know, most meetings you re trying to solve a really hard problem.
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There s a different kind of meeting which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews.
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They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are.
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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.
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Those meetings can be very efficient.
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They can start on time and end on time.
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So we re about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000 year clock.
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That s what I m known for is the humor.
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Okay.
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Can you explain what the 10,000 year clock is?
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10,000 year clock is a physical clock of monumental scale.
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It s about 500 feet tall.
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It s inside a mountain in West Texas in a chamber that s about 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall.
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10,000 year clock is a idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the 80s.
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The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking.
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And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000-year clock as it ticks once a year, it chimes once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out once every 1,000 years.
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So it just sort of slows everything down.
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And it s a completely mechanical clock.
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It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention, so the material choices and everything else.
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It s in a remote location both to protect it but also so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage.
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The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years, but over time it will take on the patina of age.
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And then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons.
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And in my view, that s really important as we have become, as a species, as a civilization, more powerful.
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We re really affecting the planet now.
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We re really affecting each other.
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We have weapons of mass destruction.
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We have all kinds of things.
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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, like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere is a perfect example.
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That s an unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution.
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Got a lot of benefits from it, but we ve also got this side effect that is very detrimental.
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We need to be, we need to start training ourselves to think longer term.
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Long-term thinking is a giant lever.
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You can literally solve problems
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if you think long-term that are impossible to solve if you think short-term.
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And we aren t really good at thinking long-term.
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It s not really, we re kind of, five years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past.
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And we probably need to stretch that to 10 years, and 15 years, and 20 years, and 25 years, and we d do a better job for our children and our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons.
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The clock is, in a way, it s an art project.
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It s a symbol.
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And if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won t happen for hundreds of years.
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But we have to, you know, we re going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of age.
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Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on Earth?
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I think so.
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But you know, the United States won t exist.
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Like whole civilizations rise and fall.
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10,000 years is so long.
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Like no nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to 10,000 years.
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And the increasing rate of progress makes that even less likely.
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So do I think humans will be here?
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Yes.
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How will we have changed ourselves and what will we be and so on and so on?
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I don t know, but I think we ll be here.
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On that grand scale, a human life feels tiny.
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Do you ponder your own mortality?
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Are you afraid of death?
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No, I used to be afraid of death.
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I did.
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I remember as a young person being very scared of mortality, didn t want to think about it and so on.
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And as I ve gotten older, I m 59 now, as I ve gotten older, somehow that fear has sort of gone away.
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I don t
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I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but I d like to be, I m really more focused on health span.
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I wanna be healthy.
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I want that square wave.
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I wanna be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone.
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I don t want the long decay.
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And I m curious, I wanna see how things turn out.
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I d like to be here.
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I love my family and my close friends, and I m curious about them, and I wanna see.
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So I have a lot of reasons
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to stay around, but it s, mortality doesn t have that effect on me that it did, you know, maybe when I was in my 20s.
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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.
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Well, Lex, thank you for doing your part to lengthen our attention space.
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Appreciate that very much.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
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And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself.
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Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.