#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin

The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his 1st time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Notion for team collaboration, Policygenius for insurance, Masterclass for learning, A sleep for naps, and Insight Tracker for biological data.

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So what's the coolest job you remember doing there? wow, coolest, um, Most interesting, most most, memorable, most I mean, it impactful.

was a it was real. It's a real working ranch. Um, my grand and I. I spent all my summers on that ranch from age four to sixteen, and my grandfather was really taking me those in the summers. In the in the early summers, he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch. Because, of course, a four year old is a burden, not a help in real life. He can really just watching me and taking care of me, um, and he was doing that because my mom was so young, she had me when she was 17.

And so he was sort of giving her a break, and my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for these summers. But as I got a little older, I actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it. I was out there like my grandfather had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines, and, you know, done all the things that any rancher would do, vaccinated the animals, everything.

Um, uh, but we had a, you know, my grandfather, after my grandmother died, um, I was about twelve, and I kept coming to the ranch. So it was then it was just him and me, just the two of us. And he was completely addicted to the soap opera, the days of our lives. And we would go back to the ranch house every day around one pm or so to watch days of our lives. Uh, and like sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives.

Just the image of that, the two of you sitting He there, watching a soap opera, he had two ranchers,

these big, crazy dogs. It was really a very formative experience for me. But the key thing about it for me, the the the great gift I got from it, was that my grandfather was so resourceful. You know, he did everything himself, he made his own veterinary tools. He would make needles to suture the cattle up with like he would find a little piece of wire and heat it up and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it.

So, you know, you learn different things, um, on a ranch than you would learn, you know, growing up in a city.

so self reliance.

Yeah, like, figuring out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and ingenuity. And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer, and he got it for like $5,000, cause it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955 Caterpillar D6 bulldozer. Knew it would've cost, I don't know, more than 100. And we spent an entire summer fixing, like repairing that bulldozer. And we'd, you know, use mail order to to buy big gears for the transmission.

And they'd show up, they'd be too heavy to move, so we'd have to build a crane. You know, just that kind of kind of that problem solving mentality, um, he had it so powerfully, you know, he, he did all of his own, uh, he just he. He didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own, he doing his own veterinary work, you know,

But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at one watching pm to watch soap

watching days of our lives, opera. laying on the floor, that's how he watched TV. He was a really, really remarkable guy.

that's how I imagine clint eastwood also in all those westerns. When he's, when he's not doing what he's doing, he's just watching soap operas. All right, uh, I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, uh, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. So let me, uh, ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So, the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US.

was in many ways epic. It was, um, a rapid sequence of dramatic events. 1st satellite to space, 1st human to space, 1st spacewalk, 1st uncrewed landing on the moon, then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides, actually, and then the 1st human walking on the moon. Uh, what are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years, that just, uh, twelve years?

well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. Um, you know, one of the great things to take away from that, one of the great von Braun quotes is I have, uh, I have come to use the word impossible with great caution. And so, uh, that's kind of the big story of Apollo, is that things, you know, the uh. Going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible. You know, oh yeah, you'll do that when when, you know, men walk on the moon.

And of course, it finally happened. Um, so, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race. I think, you know, with the geopolitical implications, and you know how much resource was put into it, you know, at the peak, that program was spending, you know, two or 3% of GDP, uh, on the Apollo program, so much resource that I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote should have done it, um, and so in that way, it's also a technical marvel.

I mean, it's truly incredible. It's, uh, you know, it's the 20th century version of building the pyramids or something. It's, you know, it's an achievement that, um, 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.

And of course, you named, uh, the projects, the rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. I don't understand why I didn't say New Gagarin. I is that there's an American is that? Oh,

bias in the naming. I apologize. okay, it's very Uh, Lex strange. Just I'm

asking for a friend.

a big fan of Gagarin's, though, and I, in fact, I, um, I think his his 1st words in space, um, I think, are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said, My God, it's blue, and y- that really drives home. No one had seen the Earth from space, no one knew that we were on this blue planet, no one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the 1st person to see it.

One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for for Glenn, for everybody involved. Like, how how big of a risk they were all taking.

They were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the, uh, Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight, the flight that, you know, New Shepard is named after the 1st American in space. He'd gone on his suborbital flight. They thought he had about 75% chance of success. Um, so, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a twenty five risk.

it's. It's kinda interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people don't know, Alan Shepard is the 1st, uh, astronaut

The 1st American in space, American in suborbital flight, correct?

and and then the 1st orbital flight That is John Glenn.

John Glenn is the 1st American to orbit the Earth. By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter from John Glenn, which I have framed and hang on my office wall.

What does it say?

Where he tells me how, uh, grateful he is that we have named New Glenn after him, and he sent me that letter about a week before he died. Um, and it's really an incredible. It's also a very funny letter. He's, he's writing, and he says, You know, this is, uh, a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn. And he's just he's got a great sense of humor, and he's very, he's very, um, happy about it and grateful.

It's very sweet.

Does he say, PS don't mess this up? or is that No, he doesn't, make me look good?

he doesn't do that, but Okay, all but we. But John, wherever you are, we got you covered.

all right, good, uh. So so back to maybe the big picture of space. When you look up at the stars, uh, and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of years from now, out in space?

I would love to see, you know, a a, you know, 1 trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had 1 trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins. Um, that would, the, you know, our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy. Um, and we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources, um, in the solar system.

So what, what do you think that looks like? Giant space stations?

Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. Um, so you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. But but yeah, w. We will take materials from the moon and from near Earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we'll build, uh, giant O'Neill style colonies, um, and people will live in those. And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces.

You can spin them to get normal Earth gravity, you can put them where you want them. I think most people are gonna wanna live, uh, near Earth, not necessarily in Earth orbit, but in, you know, uh, Earth, but near Earth vicinity, uh, orbits, uh. And so they can move quick, you know, relatively quickly, uh, back and forth between their station and Earth. So I don't th. I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not gonna wanna give up Earth altogether.

They they go to Earth for vacation.

Yeah, same way that, you know, you might go to to Yellowstone National Park for vacation. People will, uh, and the invent and no one. 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.

One of the interesting ideas you had is, uh, to move the heavy industry away from Earth. So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict with the celebration of the planet Earth, that we should focus on preserving Earth. And and basically, your idea is that space travel and space exploration is a way to preserve Earth.

Exactly this planet. We've sent robotic probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one. Yeah, not It's

to play favorites or anything, the. But but

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

And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we get, as we humans have gotten so, uh, sophisticated and large and impactful as we stride across this planet, you know, it's th that is gonna a as we continue. We want to use a lot of energy, we want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We c we don't wanna go backwards, you know? Uh, if you think about, um, the good old days, they're mostly an illusion.

Like in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was, say, 50 years ago or 100 years ago. We all we live better lives by and large than our grandparents did, and then their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates. Like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. And we get, you know, antibiotics and all kinds of life saving medical care and so on, and so on.

And there's one thing that is moving backwards, and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre industrial age, the natural world was pristine. Um, it was incredible. And we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this, really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.

And when you look at, you know, you do wanna continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways. But that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet, and so we have to go out into the solar system. Uh, and 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.

eventually we have to do that. So you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the orbital reef, uh, space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these

so. Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is, uh, designed to take up to three zero kilograms of payload up to, uh, geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity. Uh, it has two different kinds of propulsion, it has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion, and so it can, y, you can be, you can use blue ring in a couple different ways. You can slowly move, let's say, up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion. That might take, you know, a hundred days or 150 days, depending on how much mass you're carrying.

Uh, and then and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit. Or you can use the chemical propulsion 1st to quickly get up to geosynchronous, and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit. Blue Ring has, um, a couple of interesting features. It's a, uh, it, uh, provides a lot of services to these payloads, so the payload. It could be one large payload, or it can be a number of small payloads.

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

So it's a, uh, uh, it's sort of all these services. It's, you know, it's it's like a set of APIs. It's a little bit like Amazon Web Services, but for

for space?

for space payloads that need to move about in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity.

Uh, AWSS, okay, so, uh, 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, uh thing that manages various things like compute,

Exactly, and it can. It can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits.

including humans. You, you think so,

but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around, um, it's designed to move payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander, uh, which is, of course, designed to m to land humans on the surface of the moon.

I wanna ask you about that, but let me let me actually just, uh, step back to the old days. You were at Princeton, uh, with aspirations to be a the theoretical physicist. Um, what attracted you to physics, and why did you change your mind and not become why? why you're not? Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist?

so I loved physics, and I studied physics and computer science, and I was proceeding along, uh, along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist, and I w and the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it, um, and I and I was very good at the the programming and doing those things, and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely.

But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. I'd, it's why I went to Princeton in the 1st place. It was definitely, and then I realized I was gonna be a mediocre theoretical physicist. And there were, um, uh, there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart and to be a really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the, uh, you know, only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward.

It's one of those things where you, you have to be really, uh, just your brain has to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named Um, one of these people who was, uh, convinced me. He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yosanta, and Yosanta, um, was from Sri Lanka, and he's he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met.

My, uh, 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 3 h and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, Yosanta. So we went to Yosanta's dorm room, and he was there, he was almost always there, and we said, Yosanta. We're having trouble solving this, uh, partial differential equation.

Would you mind taking a look? And he said, Of course, he, by the way, he was the most humble, most kind person. And so he took our, he looked at our problem, and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 s, and he said, cosine, and I said, What do you mean, Yosanta? What do you mean? cosine? He said, That's the answer, and I said, No, no, no, come on, and he said, let me show you.

And he took out some paper and he wrote down three pages of equations, everything canceled out, and the answer was cosine. And I said, Yosanta, did you do that in your head? and he said, No, no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem and I could map this problem onto that problem, and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't your, isn't what you're, you're, you're, the what the universe wants you to be.

And so, uh, I switched to computer science and um, and you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it, I still enjoy it today.

yeah. There's a particular kind of intuition you need to be a great physicist in, uh, applied to physics,

I think the mathematical skill required today is so high, you have to be a world class mathematician to be a successful theoretical physicist today. And it's not, you know, it, uh, you probably need other skills too, intuition, lateral thinking and so on. But without the without just top notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful.

and visualization skill. You have to be able to really kinda do these kinds of thought experiments, and if you want a truly great creativity, actually, Walter Isaacson writes about you, uh, and puts you on the same level as Einstein. Uh, Well, he's, and

he's. That's very kind. I have. I'm an inventor. If you, if you wanna boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions, and, you know, uh, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. Ninety nine of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those one hundred is like, Hm, maybe there is, maybe that might work, and then you can keep going from there.

So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of, uh, inventiveness, uh, in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large, that's where my inventive skills come. That's the thing I'm if, if I, I self identify as an inventor more than anything else.

yeah. And he describes in all kinds of different ways. Walter Isaacson does that, uh, creativity, uh, combined with childlike, uh, wonder that you've maintained still to this day, all of that combined together. Is there, like, if you were to study your own brain, introspect, how do you think? What's your thinking process like? We'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper, uh, which is quite rigorous and, uh, famous, uh, at, uh, Amazon. But how do you when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others?

And thinking through this high dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, uh, creative paths forward? Is there something you can say about that process?

it's such a good question, and I honestly don't know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering, so I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds, because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in e.

In every endeavor and everything you do, you have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering, and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, um, they feel like wandering is inefficient. And sh, you know, like when 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, uh, then I'd already I could. I know there's some kind of a straight line that we're drawing to the solution. The reality is, we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a a num, you know, a group of smart people. And spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections, and going back and forth.

So like, um, 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.

hm, hm. And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea and to d to to maybe to n notice the kernel of a good idea. Maybe pull at that string, cause I I don't think, uh, good ideas come fully formed.

A 100% right. The in. In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the 1st level of scrutiny, you know, that I do in my own head and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea. I will often say, Look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me. there's something Th- th, there's there.

something there, and that is intuition. You, uh, because it's really easy to kill new ideas i in the beginning, cause they do have so many, there's so many easy objections to them. So you need to, uh, you need to kind of forewarn people and say, look, I know it's gonna take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun

hm, hm. So you got that ability to say, cosine in you somewhere after all, in maybe not on math, but

a different domain. There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way, and that is a really like, when I go around, you know, and and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart. And you find it is. That's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not. It's not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart in s such unique ways.

yeah. You just gave me a good response. Is when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet, Well, you know, there's a thousand ways to be smart, sir.

well, the what th they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million to be ways to be To D Yeah, right, dumb.

I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote. Okay, all right, you gave me an amazing tour of Blue Origin rocket factory and launch complex in the historic Cape Canaveral. Uh, that's where New Glenn, the the big rocket we talked about, is, uh, being built and will launch. Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is? And, uh, tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?

Sure, um, uh. New Glenn is a, uh, uh, a very large, a heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO, a very, uh, very large class. Um, it's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V uh rocket, so it's about three 9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff. The booster has seven BE-4 engines, the each engine generates a little more than 550 pounds of thrust.

The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG, as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox rich stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. Um, uh, and that engine is also going to power the 1st stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Um, then the 2nd stage of New Glenn, uh, is powered by two BE-3U engines, which is a upper stage variant of our New Shepard liquid hydrogen engine.

So the BE-3U has 160 pounds of thrust, so two of those 320 pounds of thrust. And hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant, in my view, for booster stages, because the stages then get physically so large. Hydrogen has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is, uh, very, is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, you know, to you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your tanks, your liquid hydrogen tank, it's very large.

So, uh, you really. You get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse, you get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the 2nd stage, and that stage carries less propellant, so you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta IV is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen, and I think that it's a very effective vehicle, but it never was very cost effective. Um, so it's operationally very capable, but not very cost effective.

so size is also costly.

Size is costly, so it's interesting. Rockets love to be big, everything works better.

What do you mean by that? You've told me that before. It sounds epic. What was I it?

mean, when you look at the kind of the physics of rocket engines, uh, and also when you look at parasitic mass, it doesn't. If you have, let's say, you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system. That is gonna be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket. And so that's just parasitic mass. That is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket, but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket, so you have the parasitic mass thing.

And then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbopumps, they have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns. And those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger, so really tiny turbopumps are very challenging to manufacture. And any kind of gaps, you know, uh, are like B between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel.

There has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another, and those gaps drive inefficiencies. And so, you know, if you have a very large turbopump, those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small. And so there's a bunch of things that, uh, that that you end up loving about having a large rocket, and that you end up hating for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule, and it is manufacturing, so manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging.

It's a pain in the butt. And so, you know, it's just h, you know, if you have, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the pieces by hand. You can assemble it on a table, one person can do it. Um, you know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on, and so on. When you start building big objects, infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad and the, you know, all this.

We we went and visited, I took you to the launch pad and you can see it's so monumental.

yeah, it is.

Um, and so just these things become major, uh, undertakings, both from an engineering point of view, but also from a construction and cost point of view.

And even the, uh, the foundation of the launch pad. I mean, this is Florida, like, isn't it like swampland, like, how deep You have do you have to go?

to, uh, at Cape Canaveral, um, in fact, most ocean, you know, uh, most launch pads are are on beaches somewhere on the ocean side, cause you want to launch over water for safety reasons. Um, the uh, yes, you have to drive pilings, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, fifty, one hundred, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large. You know, it's it's, uh, yes, these turn into major civil engineering projects.

I just have to say, everything about that factory is pretty badass. You said tooling, the bigger it gets, the more, the more epic it is. It does You,

make it epic, it's fun to look at, it's extraordinary. yeah. It's humbling also, Uh,

cause you know, humans are so small compared w. to it,

We are building these en enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of, uh, chemical, uh power, um, you know, in very, very compact packages. It's truly extraordinary.

but then there's all the different components, uh, and you, you know, the materials involved. Is there something interesting that's you can describe about the materials, uh, that comprise the rocket? So it has to be as light as possible, I guess, whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions.

Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with with other rocket people that I run into, where, say, what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers? Like, what, what's changed? Cause, surprisingly, some of rocketry's greatest hits have not changed. They are still they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today, and it's exactly what they pioneered back in the 60s. But a few things have changed. Um, uh, you know, the use of carbon composites is is very different today.

Um, you know, we can build very sophisticated. You saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings, and we can build these incredibly light, very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of. I mean, the the efficiency, the structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any, you know, metallic material you might use or anything else. So that's one, um, uh, aluminum lithium, and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium.

Do you remember our f the friction stir welding that I showed you? This? This is a a incredible. remarkable technology. This invented decades ago, but has become very practical over the just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a a pin that rotates at a certain rate, and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together.

And then you move it at a at a very precise speed. Um, and instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can, literally, immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm. Um, it's, it literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary,

Relatively low temperature, and I guess high temperature is what makes them the the that's the we that makes it a weak point. exactly. So Yeah, in with traditional, it's amazing.

with traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld. And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material. So it really allows you, and so cause when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're gonna pressurize, you know, a large, you know, liquid natural gas tank for our, for our booster stage, for example, you know, if you are welding that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing with the weld.

And that's gonna add a lot of weight to that tank.

I mean, e even just, uh, looking at the fairings, the result of that, the the complex shape that it takes, and and like, what it's supposed to do. I is kind of incredible. Cause, uh, so people don't know, it's on top of the rocket, it's gonna fall apart, that's its task, but it has to stay strong sometimes and then, uh, disappear when it needs to,

that's right.

which is a very difficult task.

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. You use explosive charges for that, and so it's a very robust way of separating structure, uh, when you need to. exploding. Yeah, little little tiny bits of explosive material, um, and uh, it just it'll sever the whole connection,

So if you want to go from 100 structural integrity to zero as fast as possible, it's explosives.

use explosives.

The entirety of this thing is so badass, okay? So back to the two stages, so the f the 1st stage is reusable.

Yeah, 2nd stage is expendable, 2nd stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, so we get take advantage of the higher specific impulse. Um, the, uh, the 1st stage, uh, lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean, um, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.

Um, I mean, there's a million questions, but also is there a a path towards reusability for the 2nd stage?

There is, and we know how to do that. Um, right now, uh, we're gonna work on manufacturing that 2nd stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a 2nd stage, make it reusable, um, uh, or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And the that trade is actually not obvious which one is better,

Even in terms of cost, even like time even in terms of cost, all that cost, and I'm stuff,

I'm talking about cost. Is it, you know, space flight? Getting into orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in, you know, the 50s and 60s.

and making it sound easy.

The the only thing that the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit. W Uh, which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new, uh, you know, endeavors that lots of startup companies, everybody else can do. So that's we really w. That's our. One of our missions is to, you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit. So that there can be, you know, a kind of a renaissance, uh, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space,

I like how you said, Uh, getting to orbit is a solved problem. Uh, it's just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost. You know, you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way. And the physicists will say everything is a solved problem. We've solved everything. The rest is just, uh, what is it? Rutherford said, that is just stamp collecting, but it's just the details. Some of the greatest innovations and inventions, and, you know, brilliance is, uh, in that cost reduction stage, right?

And you, you've had a long career of cost reduction.

for sure. And if you know when you w. What does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way, right? And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. Um, and so it, it is a big deal to to invent better ways.

That's how the world gets richer.

So, uh, what are some of the the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side and the engineering side that you're facing? T in, uh, working to get, uh, to the 1st launch of New Glenn?

The 1st launch is one thing we'll, and we'll do that in 2024, coming up in this coming year. The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently, uh uh, manufacturing at rate, so rate production. So consider if you want to launch New Glenn, you know, 24 times a year, you need to manufacture a upper stage, since they're expendable. Uh, every, you know, w twice a month, you need to do one every two weeks.

So you need to be, you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the 1st place. And the same thing, so every every, uh uh, upper stage has two BE-3U engines, so those engines, you know, you need. If you're gonna launch the the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month, so you need an engine every week.

So you need to be that engine needs to be being produced at rate. And and that's a um, and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, uh, the right people, process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a 1st article, right? So that's y, you know, w to launch New Glenn for the 1st time, you need to produce a 1st article. But that's not the hard part.

The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glenn's at rate.

So the 1st one is produced in a way that's enables the production of the 2nd and the 3rd and the 4th and the 5th and 6th.

You could think of the 1st article as kind of pushing it, it pushes all of the rate manufacturing, uh, technology along, you know? In other words, it's kind of the, uh, you know, it's the test article in a way that's testing out your your manufacturing technologies.

The manufacturing is the big challenge.

Yes, I mean, I don't wanna make it sound like any of it is easy. I mean, the people who are designing the engines and all this, like all of it, is hard. Um, for sure, but the but the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, uh, is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point. If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem, and maybe you're haven't really moved the state of the art forward.

All this has to be about moving the state of the art forward. There are easier, easier businesses to do. I always tell people, look, if you are trying to make money, you know, like start a salty snack food company or something, you know, you

you can write that idea

you're done. down. Like, make the Lex Friedman potato chips, you know, this, Okay, don't, this is,

don't say it, is it people gonna steal it? But yeah, it's hard.

you see what I'm saying. It's like there's nothing easy about this business, and um, but but it's its own reward. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's fascinating, it's worthwhile, it's meaningful. And so, you know, I, you know, not. I don't wanna pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day, you're not gonna, you're, you're not gonna have accomplished something amazing, Yeah, there's some, even if you do make a lot of money at it.

yeah, there's something fundamentally different about the quote unquote business of space exploration. I mean, it's a for sure, it's a grand project of humanity.

yes, it's one of humanity's grand challenges. And especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the thing. Uh, you know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I give you an analogy. When I started Amazon, I didn't have to develop a payment system, it already existed.

It was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages, it already existed. It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on. So all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place, and I could stand on its shoulders. And that's why when you look at the internet, um, you know it, by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early.

I'm taking you back to, like, 1994. People were using dial up modems, and it was piggybacking on top of the long distance phone network. That's how the internet, that's, you know, how people were accessing servers and so on. And that again, if if that hadn't existed, it would've been hundreds of billions of capex to to put that out there. No startup company could've done that. And so the problem, you know, you see in, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years, it's because, you know, you see.

Like, two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure, it was already there. And that's what I wanna do. I take, you know, my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure. So the next generation, you know, my the generation that's my children and their children, these, you know, the those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then they'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room like that.

That will be a marker of success. When you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be. I find that very exciting,

as they will, of course, as kids do, uh, take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted, of course, that's which is the a that's, entrepreneurial spirit.

that's a, um. An inventor's greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted. You know, nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore, nobody thinks of customer reviews as an in. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they're so commonplace, same thing with one click shopping and so on. But that's a compliment. That's how you know you, you s you invent something that's so used, s so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted.

I don't know about nobody. I s every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed. How does this work? The Well, logistics, the the you, you're uh,

that that proves you're a very curious explorer.

all right, all right. Back to rockets timeline. You said 2024, uh, as it stands now, are both the 1st test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible in

In 2024? Yeah, I think so, um, for sure, the 1st launch, and then we'll see if if escapade goes on that or not. I think that the 1st launch, for sure, and I hope escapade too. hope, Well, I just don't know which mission it's, it's actually gonna be slated on. So we also have other things that might go on that 1st mission.

oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that, uh, the launches will still come Oh, the 1st together.

launch. I'm very optimistic that the 1st launch of New Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not 100 certain what payload will be on that 1st launch.

Are you nervous about it?

Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it. Oh man, 100. I've, you know, every, uh, every launch I go to, uh, you know, for New Shepard, for, uh, other vehicles, too, I'm always nervous for these launches. But yes, for sure, a 1st launch to have no nervousness about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement. I think so,

well, I got to visit the launch pad. It's pretty. Um, I mean, it's epic.

you know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing, a tremendous amount of, uh, simulation. So, uh, you know, a. A lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been resolved, but there are some problems you can only find in flight. So, you know, cross your fingers. Uh, I guarantee you, you'll, uh, you'll have fun watching it, no matter what happens.

100. When the thing is fully assembled and comes up, Yeah, the the the I just uh, the transporter erector, the the erect- just just the transporter yeah, yeah,

erector for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary.

that's an incredible machine.

The vehicle, uh uh, travels out horizontally and then kind of, uh, you know, comes up and over a few hours, beaut- yeah, it's a beautiful thing to watch,

uh. Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you, uh, were aboard, uh, New Shepard on its 1st crewed flight. Uh, how was that experience? were you? were you terrified? Then

you know, strangely, I wasn't, you know,

did you ride the rocket I, it's less nerve wracking? true. I've Okay,

watched other people ride in the rocket, and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. Um, it was a difficult conversation to have with my mother, uh, when I told her I was gonna go on the 1st one, and not only was I gonna go, but I was gonna bring my brother too. This is a tough conversation to have with a mom. And

there's a long pause, and she's you told her

like, both of you, um, and it, it, uh. It was an incredible experience and we were, we were laughing in inside the capsule. And, you know, were not nervous, um, the people on the ground were very nervous for us. Um, uh, it was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not. It happened even before the flight. At 04:30 in the morning, 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 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, our, our parents and, uh, close friends are assembled there. And they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of saying, maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever. And, you know, we might not have felt that way, but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were, that they felt that way.

And it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see. It was almost like attending your own memorial service or something like. You could feel how loved you were in that moment. Um, and it was, uh, it was really amazing.

yeah, and I mean, there's just a epic nature to it too.

The ascent, the floating in zero gravity, I'll tell you something very interesting zero gravity feels very natural. I don't know if it's because, uh, we, you know, it's like Like, a return to the womb you just confirmed or what it is.

you're an alien, but that's fine. I think that's what's I think that's what you just said. feels so natural to Yeah,

be in zero G. It was really interesting. And then what people talk about, the overview effect and seeing Earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. Um, you see how fragile the Earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one. Uh, the 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.

And it's just, you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this blackness, all this nothingness, and there's one gem of life, and it's Earth.

It is a gem. Uh, what, you know, you're? You've talked a lot about decision making throughout your time with Amazon. What was that decision like to, uh, to ride, to be the 1st to ride in New Shepard? Like, what, just be before you talk to your mom, what, what? Like, what? The pros and cons? Like, actually, as one human being, as a, as a leader of a company, um, on all fronts, like, what was that decision making?

Like?

I decided that, uh, 1st of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built it, I know the vehicle, um, the uh, I'm very comfortable with the like. The escape system. We put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire New Shepard architecture.

Can you actually describe what do you mean by escape system? What's involved?

We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule, so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, you know, while the main rocket engine is firing, we can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster. It's a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things. It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard. So the the the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it.

But um, we're harnessing. Whenever you're talking about rocket engines, I don't care what rocket engine you're talking about, you're harnessing such vast power in such a small, compact geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so the only way to, um, improve safety is to have an escape system. And, you know, and historically, rockets, human rated rockets, have had escape systems. Only the space shuttle did not, and um, but Apollo had one.

Um, the, you know, um, all of the previous, you know, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems. And, uh, we have on New Shepard. Unusual. Escape most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system, so the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes. And it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, so if we have a nominal mission, we land with it.

The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission, and so they get wasted even in a nominal mission. And so again, you know, cost really matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable, uh, in the event that it's not used, it can reuse it, um, and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go, and so I know the vehicle very well.

I know the people who, uh, designed it. I have great trust in them, um, and in the engineering that we did. Uh, and I thought to myself, Look, I if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go. A a tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view, to have very to be as safe as one can make it. Uh, uh, uh, you can't make it perfectly safe, it's impossible, but you know, you have to.

Y. y. You know, people will do thing, people take risk, you know, they climb mountains, they, you know, they skydive, they, you know, do deep underwater scuba diving and so on. People are okay taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk, but it is something because it's a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the reasons I was so calm in sight, and maybe others weren't as calm, they didn't know as much about it as I did.

who was in charge of engaging the escape systems? You have, It's automated, oh, okay, the escape system is I was visualizing blood is com is or something. Sure,

completely automated, automated is better because it can react so much faster.

yeah, so yeah. For for tourism, rockets, safety is a huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration also, but a lit, a tiny, you know, delta less.

Yes, I mean, I think, for you know, if you're doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk. If you're saving somebody's life, you know it, um, if you are, you know, engaging in real exploration. Um, these are things where, you know, I personally think you. We would accept more risk in part because you have to.

Is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin?

Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon. Uh, a couple of years ago, I needed, I wanted to come in, and, um, you know, Blue Origin needs me right now. And so I had always. When I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is is, if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company, it's gonna get my full attention.

And I really, uh, it's just how I think about things. I. It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon, uh, to do that. Um, and so, having, you know, turned the CEO, I was still the executive chair there, but I turned the CEO role over. And the reason, the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin. Adding some, you know, energy, some sense of urgency.

We need to move much faster, and we're going to.

Uh, what are the ways to speed it up? So, I mean, th- there's, uh, you've talked a lot of different ways to sort of, uh, at at at Amazon, um, you know, removing, uh, barriers for, for, for progress, sort of distributing, making everybody autonomous and self reliant in term, all the all those kinds of things. Does that apply at Blue Origin, or is the

It does apply. I know I'm l- leading this directly. We are gonna become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so, you know, at Amazon for the, you know, forever. Since the beginning, it's that we're gonna become the world's most customer-obsessed company. And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and wanna know, How did you guys? how do you? how are you so customer obsessed?

How do you actually not just pay lip service to that, but actually do that? Um, and from, you know, all, all different industries should come wanna study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing at Blue Origin, and what will help us move faster, is we're gonna become the world's most decisive company. We're gonna get really good at taking appropriate technology risk and making those decisions quickly. Um, you know, being bold on those things, that's what, and and having the right culture that supports that.

You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious, you know? If there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's study them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind. Uh, it doesn't, you know, changing your mind is, uh, I talk about one way doors and two way doors. Most decisions are two way doors.

can you explain that? Cause? As I I love that, uh, metaphor,

If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.

Um, if you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that. So, you know, uh, when I, uh, CEO of Amazon, I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer because somebody would be bringing me a one way door decision. And it's okay, I can think of three more ways to analyze that, so let's go do that. Because we ha- we are not gonna be able to reverse this one easily.

If we, maybe you can reverse if it's gonna be very costly and very time consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning. And, uh, th- th- th- what happens, unfortunately, in companies, what can happen is that you have a one size all fits all decision making process, where you end up using the heavyweight process on all decisions, for everything. Yeah, including the lightweight ones. The the two way door decisions, two way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization.

And one way door decisions are the ones that that are the irreversible ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up to, you know, the senior most executives, who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.

yeah. I mean, part of the skill here is to to to know the difference between one way and two way. I think you mentioned, yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned Amazon Prime, uh, the decision to sort of create Amazon Prime as a one way door. Uh, I mean, it's not. It's unclear if it is or not, but it probably is, and it's a really big risk to go there.

there are a bunch of decisions like that that are, you know, uh, uh, uh, changing the decision is gonna be very, very complicated. Some of them are technical decisions, too, because some technical decisions are like quick drying cement. You know, if you're gonna, once you make them, it gets really hard. I mean, you know, choosing which propellants to use in a vehicle, you know, selecting LNG for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage.

Uh, that has turned out to be a very good decision. But if you changed your mind, that would be a very, that would be a very big setback. Do you see what I was saying? So that's the kind of decision you scrutinize very, very carefully. Other things just aren't like that. Most decisions are not that way. Most decisions should be made by single individuals, but they need and and and done quickly, in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.

yeah. One of the things I really liked, uh, perhaps it's not two way door decisions, is, uh, I disagree and commit phrase. So don't. So if 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 y- you still back them. Hey, I'd love Well, for you to explain that. I'm I'm struggling yes, disagree and to get it.

commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing. So, you know,

I'm gonna use that in my personal life. I disagree, but commit.

like, it's very common in any endeavor in life, in business and any, you know, anybody where you have teammates, you have a teammate and the two of you disagree. At some point, you have to make a decision. And, you know, in companies, we tend to organize hierarchically, so there's this, uh, you know, whoever's the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision, so ultimately, the CEO gets to make that decision. And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with.

So, like, you know, w- I would, I would, often, I would be the one who would disagree and commit. Some one of my direct reports would very much wanna do it, do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea, I would explain my point of view. They would say, I, Jeff, I think you're wrong, and here's why. And we would go back and forth, and I would often say, you know what, I don't think you're right.

Um, but I'm gonna gamble with you, and, um, you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I've known you for 20 years, you have great judgment. I, I don't know that I'm right either. Not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way, but at least then you've made a decision. And I and I'm agreeing, uh, to commit to that decision. So I'm not gonna be 2nd guessing it, I'm not gonna be sniping at it, I'm not gonna be saying, I told you so.

I'm gonna try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior. There's so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing in on teams, and there are so many ways when two people disagree about something. Even the I'm, I'm assuming, like the case where everybody's well intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of, um, mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of, uh, disputes.

A lot of them are, I think, really bad. So, you know, an example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise, so compromise, you know, like, I, here's. We're in a room here. And I could say, Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is? And you'd be like, I don't know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall, and I would say, I I think it's 11 feet tall. And then, um, we'd say, you know what, let's just call it eleven and a half feet.

That's compromise, instead of the right thing to do is, you know, to get a tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring. But think getting that tape measure and figuring out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things. That requires energy compromise. The advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, um, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so, uh, 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, um, another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. This is also, you know, let's say two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted 1st capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing. So, you know, this is where escalation. I I try to ask people who, you know, on my team, I say, never get to a point where you are resolving something by, you know, who gets exhausted?

1st, escalate that, I'll help you make the decision, like, let's, because that's so de energizing and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.

Do you wanna get to the resolution as quickly as possible, because that ultimately leads to a high velocity of

Yes, and you wanna try to get as close to truth as possible, so you want, like, you know, e- exhausting the other person is not truth seeking, and compromise is not truth seeking. So, you know, it doesn't mean now. And there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth, and that's where disagree and commit can come in. Um, but it's it's um. Escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to s, you know, to your boss and say, Hey, we can't agree on this.

We like each other, we're respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to, you know, make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on on decisions, as quickly as C- as you responsibly can, is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is in is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels, you know? So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity.

You know, Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast. We're still decisive, we're still quick, and that's because the culture supports that.

at every scale, in a d in a distributed way, trying to maximize the velocity of decisions. You've mentioned the lunar program, let me ask you about that. Um, there's, uh, a lot going on there, and you haven't really talked about it much. So, in addition to the Artemis program with NASA, uh, Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? The there's a there's a sexy picture on Instagram with with one of them. Is it the MK?

I guess yeah, the Mark yeah, I, uh, the yeah,

picture is of me with Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator.

just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing about the I instrument. It's really know more clar- yeah,

it's not me, I know it was either U- the lander or Bill. Um, thank right, I love Bill, you for clarifying. but yeah, th- okay, Um, the, uh, yes, the Mark I lander, um, is, uh, designed to take three zero kilograms to the surface of the moon. Cargo, expendable cargo, it's an expendable lander, lands on the moon, stays there, take three zero kilograms to the surface. It can be launched on a single New Glenn flight, which is very important, so it's a relatively simple architecture, just like the human landing system lander.

The the called the Mark II, Mark I is also, uh, fueled with liquid hydrogen and uh, which is for for high energy missions. Like landing on the surface of the moon, the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage. The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it's, uh, since it's such a deep cryogen, it's not storable, so it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant, um, because it's boiling off. And so what we're doing as part of the LU- of our lunar program is developing solar powered cryocoolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant for deep space.

And that's a real game changer. Uh, it's a game changer for any high energy mission, so to the moon, but to the outer planets, to Mars, everywhere.

so the idea with Mark one, both Mark one and Mark two, is the New Glenn can, uh, carry it from the surface of Earth to the surface of the moon.

Exactly. So, uh, the Mark I is expendable, the lunar, the the lunar lander we're developing for NASA, the Mark II lander. That's part of, uh, the Artemis program. They call it the sustaining Lander program, so that lander is designed to be reusable. It can land on the surface of the moon in a, in a single stage configuration and then take off. So the whole, the, you know, the if you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander in Apollo was really two stages.

It would land on the surface and then it would leave the descent stage on the surface of the moon, and only the ascent stage would go back up into lunar orbit, where it would rendezvous with the command module. Here, what we're doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that it can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over. And the point of doing that, of course, is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time.

Which is that's one of NASA's big objectives. Because this time, the the whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon, but this time to stay. So, you know, back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the program, and it really was too expensive to to continue.

And so there's a few questions there, but one is, how do you stay on the moon? What? What ideas do you have about, uh, s like a sus- sustain- sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time?

well, um, one of the things we're working on is, um, using lunar resources like lunar regolith to manufacture, uh, commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon. We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regolith simulant, and this solar cell is only about 7%, uh, power efficient, so it's very inefficient compared to, you know, the more advanced solar cells that we make here on Earth. But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory that you can land on the surface of the moon.

And then the raw material for those solar cells is simply lunar regolith, then you can just, uh, you know, continue to churn out solar cells on the surface of the moon. Have lots of power on the surface of the moon. That will make it easier for people to live on the moon. Uh, similarly, we're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith, so lunar regolith by weight is has a lot of oxygen in it. It's bound very tightly, you know, in as oxides with other elements, and so it.

You have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive. So that also could work together with the, uh, solar cells. But if you can, uh. And then ultimately, we may be able to find practical quantities of ice, uh, in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And we know there is ice water, um, uh, in those, uh, or water ice in those craters. And we know that we can break that down, uh, with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen.

And then you'd not only have oxygen, but you'd also have a very good, high, uh, efficiency propellant, uh, fuel, and and hydrogen. So there's a lot, the there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time. But the very 1st step, the thing, the kind of gate that all of that has to go through, is we need to be able to land, uh, cargo and humans on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost.

to fast forward a little bit, is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars? One or the other, or both?

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

In my lifetime, that will continue to be done by professional astronauts

yeah. So these are risky, difficult missions,

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

so I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out towards the stars. Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators, which, and to what degree?

Well, I would say, you know, just like the internet is big and there are lots of winners at all scale levels. I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies that, you know, the internet has made. But there are a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with profit streams, all driving great customer experiences. Um, that's what we wanna see in space, that kind of dynamism, and space is big.

There's room for a bunch of winners and it's gonna happen at all scale levels. And so, you know, SpaceX is gonna be successful, for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful, and I hope there are another, you know, five companies right behind us.

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

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

Yeah, I just, I. I hope you guys hang out sometimes, shake hands and and sort of, um, have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity. Cause you what you're doing is like one of the big grand challenges ahead for humanity.

Well, I agree with you, and I think in a lot of these, um, endeavors, we're very like minded. So I think, you know, I think, you know, I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we're very like minded. And so I, you know, I, I, I love that idea.

uh, going back to, uh, sexy pictures on your Instagram, uh, there's a video of you from the early days of Amazon, um, giving a tour of your quote, sort of offices. I think your dad is holding the camera.

He is, Yeah, I know, right, yes, this is with the giant orange extension cord. And yeah,

and you're like explaining the the genius of the extension cord and how this is this is a desk and the CRT monitor. And sort of that's where the that's where the all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like the the the center of it all. So, um, what was it like? What was going through your mind at that time? You left a good job in New York and took this leap.

Were you excited? were you scared? so What was

excited and scared, a anxious, you know? Thought the odds of success were low. Uh, told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30 chance of success. I mean, by which I just mean getting our money back. Not like Ter- not what actually happened, because that's the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. It's helpful to be in reality about that, um, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head, like you.

On the one hand, you're, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. And the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100 sure it's gonna work. And you're doing both things at the same time, you're holding that contradiction in your head. But it was so, it was so exciting. I I love, uh, you know, every from 1994, when, uh, the company was founded, to 1995, when we opened our doors, all the way until today, it's.

I find Amazon so exciting. And that doesn't mean it's like, full of pain, full of problems, you know, every. It's like there's so many things that need to be resolved and worked and made better and and et cetera. But but on balance, it's so fun. It's such a privilege. It's been such a joy. I feel so grateful that I've been part of that journey. Um, it's just been incredible.

So, in some sense, you don't want a d a single day of comfort. You've written about this many times. We'll talk about your writing, which, uh, I I would highly recommend people read. And just the letters to shareholders, uh, so you, you wrote a, uh, explaining the idea of day one thinking. I think you 1st wrote about it in 97 letters to shareholders. Then you also, in a way, wrote it about, sad to say, is your last letter as shareholder and CEO.

Um, and you said that day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it's always day one. Um, can can you explain this day one thing? Th- This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.

it's. It's really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth. And like, every day is day one, every day you're deciding what you're gonna do. And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were, or, you need self consistency. Self consistency even can be a trap. And so day one thinking is kind of. We start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about, uh, how we're going to operate, what our even, even, even as deeply as what our principles are.

We can go back to that. It turns out we don't change those very often, but we change them occasionally. And um, when we work on programs at Amazon, we often, uh, make a list of tenets, and this, uh, the tenets are kind of they're not principles, they're a little more tactical than principles. But it's kind of the the main ideas that we want this program to embody, whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put, these are the tenets for this program.

And then, in parentheses, we always put, unless you know a better way, and that idea, unless you know a better way, is so important. Because you never want to get trapped by dogma, you never wanna get trapped by history. It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it. There's so much value in what has worked in the past and. But you can't be blindly following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one is you're always starting fresh.

and, uh, to the question of how to fend off day two, you said such a question can't have a simple answer. As you're saying, there will be many elements, multiple paths and many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack of essentials. Maybe others come to mind for day one defense. Customer obsession, uh, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends and high velocity decision making.

So we talked about high velocity decision making. That's more difficult than it sounds. Uh, so maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on, uh, eager adoption of external trends, high velocity decision making, skeptical view of proxies. How do you fight off day two?

Well, you know, I'll talk about because I think it's the one that is maybe, in some ways, the hardest to understand. Um, is the skeptical view of proxies? Um, one of the things that happens in business, probably anything that you're where you're, you know, you have an ongoing program and something is is underway for a number of years, is you develop certain things that you're managing to. Like, let's say the typical case would be a metric, and that metric isn't the real underlying thing.

And so, uh, you know, maybe the metric is, um, efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like. If you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get, or how many returns do you get? And so on, and so on. And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in. Where somebody a long time ago invented that metric, and they invented that metric. They decided we need to watch for, you know, customer returns per unit sold as an important metric.

But they had a reason why they chose that metric, the person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching. And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy, Hm, the proxy the real thing,

for truth, I guess.

the proxy for truth, the proxy for customer, let's say, in this case, it's a proxy for customer happiness. And but that metric is not actually customer happiness, it's a proxy for customer happiness. The person who invented the metric understood that connection. Five years later, it a kind of inertia can set in and you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the 1st place. And the world shifts a little, and now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be, or it's missing something, and you have to be on alert for that.

You have to know, okay, this is. I don't really care about this metric, I care about customer happiness, and this metric is worth putting energy into and following and improving and scrutinizing only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness. And so you gotta constantly be on guard. And it's very, very common. This is a nuanced problem. It's very common, especially in large companies, that they're 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 ten years earlier invented the metric.

th- that is a nuance, but, uh, that's a big problem, right? It's a huge There's some. There's something problem, so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.

yes, and by the way, you do need metrics, You, you do, you know, you can't ignore them. Um, you want them, but you just have to be constantly on guard. This is, you know, a 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 1st place, and you're not sure they're still as relevant as they used to be.

uh. What does it take to be a the guy or gal who who, uh, who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess, what does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting? Cause that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up in a meeting. Well, We all showed up like this is here except Friday.

f- like, this is such. You have just asked a million dollar question, so th- this is, this is what you're. The if I generalize what you're asking, you're talking in general about truth telling. And we humans are not really truth seeking animals, we are social animals.

yeah, we are.

And, you know, uh, take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive, you can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often n they don't want to be heard, cause important truths can be, um, uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting. Impolite and all Yes,

that kind of stuff. Yeah,

challenging, uh. They can make people defensive, even if that's not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, a political organization, an activist group, I don't care what it is, any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that, and you have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that.

And you have to talk to people, you have to remind people it's okay, that it's uncomfortable. Um, you have to literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do as humans. It's not really, it's kind of a side effect, you know, that we can do that, but it's not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals, um, and being cordial and cooperative, and, um, that's really important. And so there's a, you know, science is all about truth telling.

It's actually a very formal mechanism for, uh, trying to tell the truth, and even in science, you find that it's hard to tell the truth, right? Uh, even, you know, you're supposed to have a hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on. It's not easy,

hm. But even in science, there's like the senior scientist and the junior scientist,

correct?

and then there's a hierarchy of humans where It's still the somehow seniority, a social somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which it s, and it should not.

that's true inside companies too. And so you wanna set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. Um, and, and and that really is about trying to, you know, there are little things you can do. So, for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience that, you know, if I speak 1st. Even very strong willed, um, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, Well, if Jeff thinks that I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right.

And so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room, go last, let everybody else go 1st. In fact, ideally, let's try to have the most junior person go 1st and the 2nd, then try to go in order of seniority. Um, so that you can hear everyone's opinion in a kind of unfiltered way, because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions. If somebody who you really respect says something, makes you change your mind a little,

so you're saying implicitly or explicitly, give permission for people to have a strong opinion that as long as it's backed by data.

yes, and sometimes it can even. By the way, a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes, they're intuition based, and sometimes you don't even have strong data. But you may know, you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in. It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have, and then you may be able to say, you know, I, I, something about that.

Feels right. Let's go collect some data on that, let's try to see if we can d actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it, cause it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias, there's an optimism bias. Like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data, and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy. It's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right.

You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of of looking for, you know, trying to find the silver lining and say, look, this that might be good, but I'm gonna go with it's bad for now until we're sure.

so speaking of happiness, bias, data collection and anecdotes, you have to. How's that for a transition? For us, you have to, you have to tell, uh, me the story of the the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point, um, about wait times.

yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon. And, uh, we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents. And I have. I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And and and it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes. Then it means you go examine the data. Cause the data, and it's usually not that the data is being, um, miscollected, it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.

And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time, you know your metrics look like, why are they shouldn't be complaining? Um, you should doubt the metrics. And an early, uh, example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than I don't know. 60 s when they called a 1800 number to get, am, you know, phone customer service, the wait time was l- supposed to be less than 60 s.

And. But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that, and anecdotally, it seemed longer than that. Like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day we're in a meeting, we're going through the WBR and the weekly business review. And we get to this metric in the deck. And the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric. And I said, Okay, let's call. And I picked up the phone and I dialed the 1800 number and called customer service.

And we just waited in silence for for what the

did it turn out to be like oh, it was 1 min?

really long, more than 10 min, I think, I mean, it was v- it was many minutes. And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren't measuring the right thing. And and that, you know, set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. And that's an example, by the way, of of truth telling. Is like, that's an uncomfortable thing to do, but i it's.

But you have to seek truth, even when it's uncomfortable. And you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things.

So that that speaks to the the obsession with the customer experience. So o- one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think, uh, companies sometimes say that, but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there's something really profound to that, which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, like the customer experience, like Truly, human being that's using the product, that's, uh, enjoying the product, like, what they're like, the subtle little things, um, that make up their experience, like, how do you optimize those?

this is another, um, really good and kind of deep question. Because there are big things that are really important to manage, and then there are small things in internally to Amazon, we call them paper cuts. So we have we're always working on the big things, like, if you ask me the and the and most of the energy goes into the big things as it should. So, um, and you can identify the big things. And and I would encourage anybody, if, if any, you know, anybody listening to this is a entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever.

Um, you know, think about the things that are not going to change over ten years, and those are probably the big things. So, like, I know, uh, in our retail business at Amazon, ten years from now, customers are still gonna want low prices. I know they're still gonna want fast delivery, and I know they're still gonna want big selection. So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where ten years from now I say where a customer says.

I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher, or I love Amazon, I just wish you'd deliver it a little more slowly. So when you identify the big things, you can tell they're worth putting energy into because they're stable in time. Okay, but you're asking about something a little different, which is in every customer experience, there are those big things. And by the way, it's astonishingly hard to focus even on just the big things.

So, e- even though they're obvious, they're really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call those paper cuts. And we make long lists of them, and then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts. Because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts, and they never work their way down the list to get to. They're working on big things as they should and as you want them to.

Um, and so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.

w- where would you put on the on the S paper cut spectrum? The buy now with one click button, which is, I think, pretty genius. So to me, like, Okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet, there's things I do a lot. I may be representing regular human, uh, I would love for those things to be frictionless, for example, uh, booking airline tickets. Just saying, but it, you know, uh, the it's buying a a thing with one click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that like that.

That just fundamentally makes my life better. Not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of, Cognitive load, yeah, cognitive load and p- inner peace and happiness. But 1st of all, buying stuff, uh, isn't a pleasant experience. Ha- have having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience. And like, having pain around that is somehow just you're ruining a beau, a beautiful experience. And m I guess all I'm saying, as a as a person who loves good ideas, is that a paper cut a solution to a paper cut?

yes, so it's probably that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts. So if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented one click shopping, there were a whole ser- there was more friction, there was a whole series of paper cuts, and that, uh, invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you're absolutely right, by the way, that there, when you come up with something like one click shopping again, this is like so ingrained in people now.

I'm impressed that you even notice it. I mean, most every time people I clicked the button, most people I just just never notice

surge of happiness.

this. This there is in in the perfect invention, for the perfect moment, in the perfect context, there is real beauty. It is actual beauty, and it feels good. It's emotional, it's emotional for the inventor, it's emotional for the team that builds it, it's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal and you can feel those things.

but d to to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess, is the the day one thinking effort. Yeah, and you need So

you need a big group of people who feel that kind of, uh, satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.

there's a lot of, uh, books written about you. There's a there's a book, Invent and Wander, where, uh, Walter Isaacson does an intro, and it's mostly collected writings of yours. Um, I've read that. I also recommend people check out the Founders podcast, uh, that covers you a lot, and it does different analysis of different business advice you've given over the years. Um, I bring all that up because, uh, I saw that there, uh, a mention that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans.

And I forget how it was phrased, but that when you were thinking about the Kindle, that you're thinking about how technology Changes us, changes us. Yeah, we co-evolve yeah,

with our tools, so, you know, we invent new tools, and then our tools change us.

which is fascinating to think about. Goes in a circle And there's some aspect, you know, even just inside business, where you don't just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about, like, where is this going to take humanity? If you zoom out a a bit?

100%. And you know, uh, you, you can feel you, your brain, brains are plastic, and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris, which first came on the scene. I'm sure you've had that. Anybody who's been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see all the little blocks moving and you can.

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 bl- brain to play Tetris. And but that happens with everything. And so, you know, one of the I think, yeah, we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear. But I think one of the things that we've done online, you know, and largely because of social media, is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content.

And, you know, your podcast flies in the face of this, you know, you're, you're, you, you do these long format things, and, uh, reading, books, dude, reading books is a long format thing. And we all do more of if if you, if something is convenient, we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know, that we carry around, um, a little we carry around in our pocket a phone. And one of the things that phone does for the most part is it is an attention shortening device, because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans.

And I'm not even gonna say we know for sure that that's bad, but I do think it's happening. It's one of the ways we're co-evolving with that tool. But I think I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.

yeah, I I think it. Uh, you've spoken about the value in your own life of focus, of singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time. And that's certainly what books do, and that's certainly what that piece of technology does. But I bring all that up to to ask you about another piece of technology, AI, that has the potential to have, um, various trajectories, uh, to have an impact on human civilization. H- How do you think AI will change us?

We're t here, talking about, you know, generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT and its soon successors. And, um, these are incredibly powerful technologies. To believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful. Um, I, I. It's interesting to me that th- that large language models, in their current form, are not inventions, they're discoveries. You know, the telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery.

Like, my god, it has moons, and that's what Galileo did. And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention. You know, we know exactly what happens with a 787, it's an engineered object, uh, we designed it, we know how it behaves, uh, we don't want any surprises. Um, large language models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. They're not really engineered objects. Um, then, you know, you have this debate about whether they're gonna be good for humanity or bad for humanity.

Um, you know, even specialized AI can be very bad for humanity. I mean, I it's just, you know, just regular machine learning models that can, eh? Can make, you know, certain W- weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful. And they're not general AIs, they're just they could just be very smart weapons. Um, and so we have to think about all of those things. J- I'm very optimistic about this. So, uh, even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that 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.

I think, you know, we humans have a lot of ways of, um, we could make ourselves go extinct, you know? So these things may help us not do that, you know, so we may actually they may actually save us. So the people who are, you know, overly concerned, I in my view, overly, it's a valid debate. Um, I I think that I 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.

Um, I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but to me, I've I. First of all, I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr. Who, you know, some people have talked to, think that's the most boring part of the movie. I thought it was the most fascinating, because what's going on here is you realize we have invented these awesome, destructive, powerful technologies called nuclear weapons, and they are managed.

And, you know, we pe- we, we humans are, eh, we're not really capable of wielding those weapons. Where, you know, and that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is, uh, eh, just. He wrongly thinks he's like being so petty. He thinks that he said something that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him. He they didn't talk about him at all, as you find out in the final scene of the movie.

And yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful and, uh, and and petty, and that's that's the problem. We as a species are not really sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies. And so, and and by the way, before you get to general AI and the the possibility of AI having agency, and there's a lot of things that would have to happen. But um, there's so much benefit that's gonna come from these technologies in the meantime, even before they're, you know, general AI.

In terms of better medicines and, uh, better tools to develop more technologies and so on. So I think it's an incredible moment to be alive and to witness the transformations that are gonna happen. How quickly they'll happen, no one knows, but over the next ten years and twenty years, I think we're gonna see really remarkable advances, and I personally am very excited about it.

First of all, really interesting to say that it's discoveries that, uh, it's true that we don't know the limits of what's possible, uh, with the current language models. We don't, And like W- the. It could be a few tricks and hacks here and there, that that, uh, open doors to hold entire new possibilities.

we do know that humans are doing something different, um, from these models, in part because, you know, we're so power efficient. You know, the human brain does remarkable things, and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And, you know, uh, the the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks. So there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this, and also we don't need as much data.

So, you know, like self-driving cars are, they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive. And you know, your average 16 year old, uh, figures it out, you know, with many fewer miles. So there are still some tricks, I think, that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up, um, but what's interesting is that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends.

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

It can just like, basically, is a very good bullshitter. So if if, if there's not enough data, if there's not enough sort of data, f- uh, in the in the training data about a particular topic, it's just going to concoct, um, accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get, uh, language models to infer what is true or not? To sort of introspect,

yeah, they need to be taught to say, I don't know

I don't know. more often, Yeah,

and, uh, the the I know of several humans who could be taught that as well. sure, and Yeah,

and then the other stuff, because you're still, uh, a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things. The other open question is what kind of products are created from this?

oh, so many. I mean, you know, uh, just to, you know, we have, um, Alexa and Echo, and Alexa has, you know, hundreds of millions of installed base, you know, inputs. And so there's this, there's, you know, there's Alexa everywhere, and guess what, Alexa is about to get a lot smarter. And so that's really, you know, from a product point of view, that's super exciting,

there's so many opportunities there.

so many opportunities. Shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing. And AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our, uh, foundational model, we're also building, y- um, Bedrock, which our corporate clients at AWS, our 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. And so those are the tools we're building for them with Bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here.

yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating of how to cause. So much value can be gained by training on private data, but you wanna keep the secure. That's a that's a fascinating Yes, this is, technical problem.

this is a very challenging technical problem, and it's one that we're, you know, making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers.

Uh, do you think there will be a day when humans and robots, maybe Alexa, have a romantic relationship? That could be her. Well, I mean, I I think think if you there's brainstorming look at the if products here.

you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, you know, sexual variety, you know, there are people who like everything. So the answer to your question has to be yes. I don't know how,

I I guess I'm asking

I don't know how widespread when that will be, all right, but it will happen.

I was just asking one for a friend, but it's all right. I was just moving on the next question. Uh, what's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You're one of the most productive humans in the world.

well, I first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter. I like, I like, have a coffee, You need to find I putter. just like I slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I cause I do believe in wandering and I sort of I, I, you know, I read my phone for a while, I read newspapers for a while, I chat, uh, with Lauren, I drink my first coffee.

Um, so I kind of, I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early, just naturally, uh, and uh, and then, you know, I exercise most days, and, uh, most days it's not that hard for me, some days it's really hard. And I do it anyway. I don't want to, you know, and it's painful, and I'm like, why am I here? and I don't want to do You mean, why am this.

I here at the gym?

Why, why am I here at the gym? Why don't I do something else? You know, there's it, it's not always easy. Uh, what's your to s.

source of motivation in those moments?

I know that I'll feel better later if I do it. And so, like the the real source of motivation, I can tell the days when I skip it, I'm not, I'm not quite as alert, I don't feel as good. Um, and then there's harder motivations. It's longer term. You wanna be healthy as you age, you know, you want healthspan, you want, ideally, you know, you wanna be healthy and moving around when you're 80 years old, you know?

And so there's a lot of, but that kind of motivation, so far in the future, it can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact I'll feel better in about 4 hours if I do it now, I'll have more energy for the rest of my day and so on, and so on.

what's your, uh, exercise routine? Just to linger on that, what do you? how much you curl? I mean, what are we talking about here? That's all I do at the gym, so I just,

I, uh, I, my my routine. Um, you know, on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio, and I do about 45 min of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who, you know, I love, um, who pushes me, um, which is really helpful. You know, he'll b- I'll be like, uh, he'll say, uh, Jeff, do you think you could? Can we go up on that weight a little bit?

And I'll think about it and I'll be like, No, I don't think so. And he'll be, he'll look at me and say, Yeah, I think you can. And of course, he's right. Yeah, of course, And so it's helpful of course, to have somebody push you a little bit.

but almost every day you do that,

I, I do almost every day. I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting, and, um, I rotate. I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff so puttering, coffee, gym, puttering, coffee, gym and then work.

work. So what's work look like? what, what? what are the productive, uh, hours look like for you?

I, you know, so I. A couple years ago, I left as the CEO of Amazon I heard, and I have never worked harder in my life. So, like, I am, I am working so hard and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days. Uh, most of my, uh, time is spent on, um, Blue Origin, and I've been, I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years. And in the big, I love it, in the small, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything.

You know, we're trying to get to rate manufacturing, as we talked about, that's super important. We'll get there. We just hired a new CEO, a guy I've known for close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limp, who I love. He's amazing, you know? Um, so we're super lucky to have Dave, and you know, we're gonna, you're, you're gonna see us move faster there. But so, uh, uh, my day of work, you know, reading documents, having meetings, um, sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am.

It's all about, you know, the technology, it's about the organization, it's about, you know, I'm very, um, I've. I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It's super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology. Um, my least favorite part of it is, you know, building organizations and so on. That's important, but it's also my least favorite part. So, you know, that's why they call it work.

You don't always get to do what you wanna do.

how do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems?

I do little thinking retreats, so for, uh, this is not the only I d I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing, I'm very good at, um, you know, I'm. I don't keep to a strict schedule. Like my meetings often go longer than I plan for them to, because I believe in wandering. I li- my perfect meeting starts with a crisp document, so the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high.

I like a crisp document and a messy meeting, and so the meeting is about, like, asking questions that nobody knows the answer to, and and trying to f- like, wander your way to a solution. And, uh, uh, cause like, uh, i, uh, and and that is if. When, when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good, it has a has a kind of beauty to it, it has an aesthetic beauty to it, and and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.

can you actually describe the the crisp document like? This is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon, uh, of the way you approach meetings. Is this the six-page memo? Maybe first describe the process of of running a meeting with memos? And

meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When we, when we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins, uh, they're a little taken aback sometimes. Because a typical meeting will start with a six-page narratively structured memo, and we do study hall. We for 30 min, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read,

I love this.

take notes in the margins, and then we s then we discuss. 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.

It's better just to carve out the time for people.

and do it together.

So now we're all on the same page, we've all read the memo, and now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, you know, a Powerpoint presentation of some kind, where there that has so many difficulties. But one of the problems is Powerpoint is really designed to persuade, it's kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you wanna do is sell, you wanna, you're again, you're truth seeking, you're trying to find truth.

And the other problem with Powerpoint is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It's hard to write a six-page memo, a good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it, they have to poke holes in it for you, you write it again, it might take two weeks.

So the author, it's really a very difficult job, but for the audience, it's much better. So you can read a half hour, and, you know, there are little problems with Powerpoint presentations too, you know, senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question's gonna be answered on the next slide, but you never got there. Whereas if you read the whole memo in advance, you, you know, I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos, and then I go cross them all out.

Because by the time I get to the end of the memo, they've been It answers answered. That's why I save all that time. You also get, you know, the person who's preparing the memo. We talked earlier about, um, you know, c- group think, and you know, the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don't want, you know, to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely. Um, you know, the author of the memos, M is, has, has kind of got to be very vulnerable.

They've got to put all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first. But that's great, cause it makes them really good. And so, and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trampling on them accidentally in a big, you know, PowerPoint presentation

What's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there and everybody's reading your thing? You you're like,

I think it's mostly terrifying. It's,

or like, maybe in a good I think it's, way, I think it's, like a purifying,

I think it's terrifying in a in a productive way. Um, but I I think it's emotionally a very nerve-wracking experience.

Is there a art science to the writing of the six-page memo, or just writing in general to you?

The, I mean, it's really got to be a real memo. So that means, you know, paragraphs have topic sentences, that you can use verbs and nouns, you can't. That's the other problem with PowerPoint, is they're often just bullet points, and you can, you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points. When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it's really hard to hide sloppy thinking. So it does it, it forces the author to be at their best.

And so you're getting somebody's, they're getting somebody's really their best thinking. And then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person. You've got it from the very beginning, so it really saves you time in the long run.

uh, so that part is crisp, and then the rest is messy, crisp document,

Yeah, so you don't want, messy. you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp. There's, you know, most meetings, you're trying to solve a really hard problem. There's a different kind of meeting, which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews. They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are, but these business review meetings, that's usually for incremental improvement. And you're look looking at a series of metrics, every time it's the same metrics, those meetings can be very efficient, they can start on time and end on time.

so we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000 year clock.

That's funny.

That's the that's, uh, that's what I'm known for is the humor. Okay, uh, can you explain what 10,000 year clock is?

10,000 year clock is a physical clock of monumental scale. It's about 500 feet tall, it's inside a mountain in West Texas, in a chamber that's about twelve feet in diameter and 500 feet tall. 10,000 year clock is a idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the eighties. Um, the idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000 year clock as it, it, it, you know, it.

It ticks once a year, um, it chimes once, you know, every hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out once every thousand years, so it just every sort of slows

thousand years.

everything down. And um, it's a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and everything else, um, it's in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to kind of make a a pilgrimage. The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years, but over time, it will take on the patina of age, and then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking.

That m will actually hopefully get humans to extend their, uh, thinking horizons. And in my view, that's really important as we have become, as a species, as a civilization, more powerful. You know, we're really affecting the planet now, we're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction, we have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves, and the problems we create can be so large. You know, the co- the unintended consequences of some of our actions, like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere, is a perfect example.

That's an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution, that a lot of benefits from it, but we've also got this side effect that is very detrimental. We need to be, we need to start training ourselves to think longer term. Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long term that are impossible to solve if you think short term. And we aren't really good at thinking long term, as a, you know, it's not really we're kind of, you know, five years is a tough timeframe for most, uh, institutions to think past.

Um, and we probably need to stretch that to ten years and fifteen years and twenty years and twenty-five years. And we'd do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so the clock is, in a way, it's an art project, um, it's a symbol, um, and it. If it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won't happen for hundreds of years. But we have to, you know, we're gonna build it now and let it accrue the patina of age.

Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on Earth?

I think so, but, you know, the United States won't exist. Like Oh boy, whole civilizations rise and fall, 10,000 years is so long, like no nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to 10,000 years.

and the increasing rate of progress makes that even

Even less likely. more. So do I think humans will be here? Yes, what, you know, w- how will we have changed ourselves, and what will we be? And so on, and so on? I, I don't know, but I think we'll be here.

On that grand scale, human life feels tiny. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?

No, I'm, uh, you know, I, I used to be afraid of death. Um, I did. I like my like. I remember as a young person being kind of, like, very scared of mortality, like, uh, didn't wanna think about it and so on, and always had a big. And as I've gotten older, I'm 59 now, as I've gotten older, somehow that fear has sort of gone away. I don't, um, you know, I, I'm. I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but I'd like to be.

It's I'm really more focused on health span. I wanna be healthy, I want that square wave, I wanna, you know, this is, I wanna be healthy, healthy, healthy and then gone. I don't want the long decay. Um, but I, I, and I'm curious, I wanna see how things turn out. You know, I'd like to be here. I love my my family and my close friends, and I wanna. I'm curious about them and I wanna see. So I have a lot of reasons to stay around, but it's, eh, mortality doesn't, doesn't have that effect on me that it did, you know, maybe when I was in my twenties.

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 multiplanetary species. Expanding out into our solar system, maybe beyond, to meet the aliens out there. And, uh, thank you for talking today.

Oh, Lex, thank you for, uh, doing your part to lengthen our attention spans. You're Appreciate that very much.

very much blessed. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself. Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.