#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos is the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. Thank you for listening ❤ Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Notion: https://notion.com/lex – Policygenius: https://policygenius.com/lex – MasterClass: https://masterclass.com/lexpod to get 15% off – Eight Sleep: https://www.eightsleep.com/lex to get special savings – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/jeff-bezos-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Jeff’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jeffbezos Jeff’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeffbezos Amazon: https://amazon.com Blue Origin: https://blueorigin.com Invent and Wander (book): https://amzn.to/41bF2SY PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (08:53) – Texas ranch and childhood (12:31) – Space exploration and rocket engineering (25:05) – Physics (34:39) – New Glenn rocket (1:17:28) – Lunar program (1:27:24) – Amazon (1:44:45) – Principles (2:03:25) – Productivity (2:14:03) – Future of humanity

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. And 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, Policy Genius for insurance, MasterClass for learning, Aesleep for naps, and InsightTracker for biological data. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring, go to lexfridman.com/hiring.

• 0:43Lex Fridman?

  And if you want to get in touch with me for other reasons, like guest suggestions, you can go to lexfridman.com/contact, like with aliens, but in this case, it's with me. And now, on to the full ad reads. There's always no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking app that I've been using forever, but it's not just for note-taking. It's also for team collaboration. And it's been doing that forever. But recently, it also has the extra added AI capabilities with the Notion AI tool. Obviously, everybody's trying to figure out

• 1:28Lex Fridman?

  how to integrate the progress with LLMs, the continued progress, the accelerating progress, the boundless progress with LLMs into our productive lives. To me, obviously, the note-taking, the putting words onto paper as part of the process of figuring out intellectual puzzles, of thinking through things, designing things. Summarizing things, interpreting things, all of that. That's the writing process. And integrating AI into that to help you, almost like a buddy, is obviously empowering. But there's an interface question, how to do that well. And to me, Notion does that better than any tool I've used so far.

• 2:13Lex Fridman?

  Notion AI can now give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your Wiki, projects, docs, and meeting notes. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase, notion.com/lex, to try the power of Notion AI today. This show is also brought to you by PolicyGenius, a marketplace for finding and buying life insurance. Almost every single conversation I have in different ways, I ponder, I explore, I deliberate. The simple fact of our mortality, the finiteness of every experience, the human experience, but every experience that makes up the human experience,

• 2:57Lex Fridman?

  the good and the bad. I think bringing that up as a topic is important because it is one of the big questions for the introspecting animal that is a human being, for somebody who's trying to figure out the puzzle of the human condition. Why does it have to end? Is it good that it has to end? How does the fact of it ending play with the richness of the experience of every moment that we feel when we open our eyes to the beauty of that experience? Those are good questions, but they also put you in the right mindset to explore the other questions,

• 3:42Lex Fridman?

  the details of engineering, the details...

• 3:46Lex Fridman?

  Of business and science, all of that are somehow made more visceral, more intensely salient when grounded in the context of pondering one's own mortality. That's why I tried to do it. And I guess Policy Genius wants you to ponder your mortality and do something about it. A pragmatic angle. With Policy Genius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just 292 bucks a year for $1 million of coverage. Head to policygenius.com/lex or click the link in the description to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save.

• 4:31Lex Fridman?

  That's policygenius.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by MasterClass. 10 bucks a month gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world and their particular thing. That's how you should learn. You should try to find a way to listen to, to get close to the people that are the best at a thing that you're interested in. That's not the only way to learn. Textbooks, tutorials, lectures, books about a thing are good, but the doers of the thing reveal something, not just in their explanations, but in how they construct the explanations,

• 5:15Lex Fridman?

  how they think about the words that lead to the formation of the explanations. And all of that becomes salient when you just listen to these masterclasses. It's the doers that now have become teachers, but they were doers first. Anyway, Chris Hatfield, Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Daniel Negrono, Neil Gaiman, Martin Scorsese. I would love to talk to Martin Scorsese on this podcast. There's just a lot of classes to choose from. The ones I mentioned are the ones I've personally enjoyed, but maybe there's many others. Maybe you can write to me and recommend ones that were really impactful to you. Get unlimited access to every masterclass and get an additional 15% off an annual membership

• 5:59Lex Fridman?

  at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod.

• 6:06Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep. I don't know why I'm speaking like this quietly, because when I mention Eight Sleep, I think about myself napping and the calm peace that overtakes my surrounding environment when I'm napping. On a cold bed with a warm blanket, it's a little sampling of heaven. No matter how I'm feeling, I could be feeling totally shitty about whatever thing. I could be angry, I could be sad. I could be lonely, all of these things. All of the different emotional trajectories that the human mind can take you on somehow get all resolved.

• 6:51Lex Fridman?

  The knots get untied and everything becomes simple again after a good nap. So take the naps seriously, friends. They are the cure for many of life's ills. And if you want to do your naps the way I do my naps, the right way, you should use Eight Sleep. Check it out and get special savings when you go to eightsleep.com/lex. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data that comes from my body. This complex hierarchical biological machine that provides an infinity of signals,

• 7:35Lex Fridman?

  most of which are ignored when we make health, lifestyle, diet, whatever decisions, life decisions. The future is designing systems, machine learning systems, that don't ignore those signals, that leverage those signals, combine them, integrate them with the best scientific work of the day to give you advice on what to do with your life. And InsideTracker is taking steps towards that bright, to me, bright future. So they're using data from your blood, from DNA data, fitness tracker data, all of that to give you lifestyle recommendations.

• 8:19Lex Fridman?

  I'm really glad they are pushing this kind of work forward. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com/lex.

• 8:31Lex Fridman?

  This is the Lex Fridman Podcast and now dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.

• 8:53Lex Fridman?

  You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas. And I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch. So what's the coolest job you remember doing there?

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Wow, coolest.

• 9:06Lex Fridman?

  Most interesting, most memorable.

• 9:08Speaker 01

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

• 9:34Speaker 01

  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 the 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.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  But we had a, you know, my grandfather, after my grandmother died, I was about 12 and I kept coming to the ranch. So it was then it was just him and me, just the two of us. And he was completely addicted to the soap opera, The Days of Our Lives. And we would go back to the ranch house every day around 1:00 PM or so to watch Days of Our Lives. Like sands through an hourglass. So are the days of our lives.

• 10:36Lex Fridman?

  Just the image of that, the two of us sitting there. Watching a soap opera.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  He had these big crazy dogs. It was really a very formative experience for me. But the key thing about it for me, 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. 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 learn different things on a ranch than you would learn, you know, growing up in a city.

• 11:12Lex Fridman?

  So self reliance.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like figuring out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and ingenuity. And my grandfather bought a D six bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer. And he got it for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955 Caterpillar D six bulldozer. Knew it would have cost, I don't know, more than a hundred thousand dollars. And we spent an entire summer fixing, like preparing 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. He had it so

• 11:57Speaker 01

  powerfully, you know, he, he did all of his own, he just, he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own. He doing his own veterinary work, you know?

• 12:08Lex Fridman?

  Which is the image of the two of you fixing a D six bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1pm to watch soap opera.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Laying on the floor. That's how he watched TV.

• 12:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  He was a really, really remarkable guy.

• 12:21Lex Fridman?

  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. I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.

• 12:40Lex Fridman?

  So let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events. First satellite to space, first human to space, first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon. Then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides, actually. And then the first human walking on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time? Those few years, just 12 years?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. One of the great things to take away from that, one of the great Von Braun quotes is, "I have, I have come to use the word impossible with great caution."

• 13:36Speaker 01

  And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo is that things, you know, that 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.

• 13:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And of course it finally happened. So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race. I think, you know, with the geopolitical implications and, you know, how much resource was put into it, you know? At the peak, that program was spending, you know, two or three percent of GDP on the Apollo program. So much resource that I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote, should have done it.

• 14:21Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel. I mean, it's truly incredible. It's, you know, it's the 20th century version of. Building the pyramids or something. It's, you know, it's an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time 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.

• 14:46Lex Fridman?

  And of course, you named the projects, the rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. I don't understand why it didn't say New Gagarin. Is that?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  There's an American bias in the naming. I apologize.

• 14:59Lex Fridman?

  Very strange.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Lex.

• 15:01Lex Fridman?

  Sassy for a friend.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  I'm a big fan of Gagarin's though. In fact, I, I think his, his first words in space, I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said, my God, it's blue. And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet. No one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the first person to see it.

• 15:30Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  They were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight, the flight that, you know, New Shepard is named after, the first American in space, he went on his suborbital flight. They thought he had about a 75% chance of success. So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.

• 16:05Lex Fridman?

  It's, it's kind of interesting that Alan Shepard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't know, Alan Shepard is the first astronaut.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  The first American in space.

• 16:15Lex Fridman?

  American in suborbital flight.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 16:18Lex Fridman?

  And, and then the first orbital flight is.

• 16:20Speaker 01

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

• 16:33Lex Fridman?

  What did he say?

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named New Glenn after him. And he sent me that letter about a week before he died. 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 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 happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet.

• 16:59Lex Fridman?

  Does he say PS don't mess this up or is that?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  No, he doesn't.

• 17:04Lex Fridman?

  Make me look good.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  He doesn't do that.

• 17:05Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  But wait, but John, wherever you are, we got you covered.

• 17:08Lex Fridman?

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

• 17:23Speaker 01

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

• 17:50Lex Fridman?

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

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. So you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. But, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on. And we'll build a giant O'Neill style colonies 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 going to want to live near earth, not necessarily in earth orbit, but in, you know, earth,

• 18:37Speaker 01

  but near earth vicinity orbits. And so they can move, you know, relatively quickly back and forth between their station and earth. So, but I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not going to want to give up earth altogether.

• 18:53Lex Fridman?

  They go to earth for vacation?

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, same way that, you know, you might go to, to Yellowstone National Park for vacation. People will, and the, and no one, and people get to choose where they live on earth or where they live in space. But they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on earth.

• 19:14Lex Fridman?

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

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Exactly. This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one.

• 19:46Lex Fridman?

  Not to play favorites or anything, but.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  But Earth really is the good planet. It's an amazing, it's, it's amazing. The ecosystem we have here, all of the life and the lush, 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 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 sophisticated and large and impactful, as we stride across this planet, you know, it's, that is gonna, as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  We want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about

• 20:43Speaker 01

  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. We all, we live better lives by and large than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. 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.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  It was incredible and we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita. And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system. And, and really, you could argue about when you have

• 22:13Speaker 01

  to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that.

• 22:18Lex Fridman?

  Eventually, we have to do that.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:21Lex Fridman?

  So you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the Orbital Reef space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  So Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to 3,000 kilograms of payload up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity. It has two different kinds of propulsion. It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion. And so it can, you can be, you can use Blue Ring in a couple of different ways. You can slowly move, let's say up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion. That might take, you know, 100 days or 150 days, depending on how much mass you're carrying. And then and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous

• 23:14Speaker 01

  orbit. Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit. Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features. It's a, it provides a lot of services to these payloads. So the payload 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 compute, provides communications. And so when you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don't have, it's, you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  So kind of radiation tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation tolerant compute onboard Blue Ring. And you can, your payload can just use that when it needs to. So it's a, it's sort of all these services. It's, you know, it's, it's like a set of APIs. It's a little bit like Amazon Web Services, but for space payloads that need to move about in Earth vicinity or lunar vicinity.

• 24:26Lex Fridman?

  AWSS.

• 24:30Lex Fridman?

  Okay. So, so compute in space. So you get, you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit. And then you have these admins that show up, this Blue Ring thing that manages various things like compute.

• 24:43Speaker 01

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

• 24:48Lex Fridman?

  Including humans, you think?

• 24:49Speaker 01

  No, but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander, which is of course designed to, to land humans on the surface of the moon.

• 25:03Lex Fridman?

  I want to ask you about that. Let me, let me actually just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:16Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  So I loved physics and I studied physics and computer science. And I was proceeding along, along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. And I, and the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  And I, and I was very good at the programming and doing those things. And I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely. But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. That's why I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely. And then I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist. And there were, there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized, like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart. And to be a really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields where the,

• 26:26Speaker 01

  you know, only the top few percent actually move the steel of the art forward. It's one of those things where you, you have to be really, just your brain has to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named, one of these people who was convinced me, he didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Joe Santa. And Joe Santa was from Sri Lanka. And he's, he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night. And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  And we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, Joe Santa. So we went to Joe Santa's dorm room. And he was there, he was almost always there. And we said, Joe Santa, we're having trouble solving this partial differential equation. Would you mind taking a look? And he said, of course. By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person. And so he took our, he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds. And he said, cosine. And I said, what do you mean, Joe Santa? 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.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  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, Joe Santa, did you do that in your head? And he said, no, no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem and I could map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist

• 28:23Speaker 01

  isn't sure, isn't what you're, you're, what the universe wants you to be. And so I switched to computer science and, and, you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it. I still enjoy it today.

• 28:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's a particular kind of intuition. You need to be a great physicist in applied to physics.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 29:08Lex Fridman?

  And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments. And if you want to truly great creativity, actually Walter Isaacson writes about you. It puts you on the same level as Einstein.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  That's very kind. I have, I'm an inventor. If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions and, you know, and then I can create 100 such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny, but one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness in a high dimensionality space where the search space is very large, that's where

• 30:05Speaker 01

  my inventive skills come. That's the thing I'm, if I, I self identify as an inventor more than anything else.

• 30:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And he describes in all kinds of different ways, Walter Isaacson does, that creativity. Combined with childlike wander 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, which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon. But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process?

• 30:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 31:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  So I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do. You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking. That requires wandering and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people,

• 31:44Speaker 01

  they feel like wandering is inefficient and, you know, like, when, when I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem. Because if I did, then I'd already, I could, I know there's some kind of straight line that we're drawing to the solution. The reality is, we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with a number, you know, a group of smart people and spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  And then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So like, you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth. And both things are really pleasurable.

• 32:44Lex Fridman?

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

• 33:00Speaker 01

  A hundred percent right. In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea, and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny, you know, that I do 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.

• 33:22Lex Fridman?

  There's something there.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  There's something there, and that is intuition.

• 33:26Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 01

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

• 33:46Lex Fridman?

  So you got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all.

• 33:51Lex Fridman?

  Maybe not on math.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  In a different domain.

• 33:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Speaker 01

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

• 34:22Lex Fridman?

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

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million ways to be dumb.

• 34:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, right. 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. That's where New Glenn, the, the big rocket we talked about is being built and will launch. Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is? And tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Sure. Um, uh, New Glenn is a, a, a very large, a heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to Leo, very, a very large class. Um, it's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V rocket. So it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff. The booster has seven BE4 engines. The, each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by

• 35:37Speaker 01

  liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox riched staged 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 first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of New Glenn is powered by two BE3U engines, which is a upper stage variant of our New Shepard liquid hydrogen engine. So the BE3U has 160,000 pounds of

• 36:16Speaker 01

  thrust. So two of those 320,000 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, 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 second stage.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  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. 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 it?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  I mean, when you look at the, kind of the physics of rocket engines, 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 going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is going to 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 turbo pumps.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  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 turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture. And any kind of gaps, you know, are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel, there has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another. And those gaps drive inefficiencies.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small. And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule. And it is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging. It's a pain in the butt. And so, you know, it's just, you know, if you have, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the pieces by hand. You could assemble it on a table. One person can do it. Um, you know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling

• 39:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:57Speaker 01

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

• 40:06Lex Fridman?

  And even the, uh, the foundation of the launch pad. I mean, this is Florida. Like, isn't like swampland? Like how deep?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  You have to, at Cape Canaveral.

• 40:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Um, in fact, at most ocean, you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the ocean side because 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, 50, 100, 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.

• 40:44Lex Fridman?

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

• 40:51Speaker 01

  It does make it epic. It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary.

• 40:55Lex Fridman?

  It's humbling also because your humans are so small compared to it.

• 40:58Speaker 01

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

• 41:13Lex Fridman?

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

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where say, what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers? Like, what's changed? Because 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.

• 42:00Speaker 01

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

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you? This is a remarkable technology that was invented decades ago, but has become very practical over the just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate. And you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together. And then you move it at a very precise speed. And instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  You can literally immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm. It's it literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary.

• 43:35Lex Fridman?

  Relatively low temperature and I guess high temperatures will make them the that's the that makes it a weak point.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. So in with traditional with traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld. And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material. So it really allows you and so because when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're going to 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 knock down for whatever damage you're doing with the weld and that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank.

• 44:22Lex Fridman?

  I mean, even just looking at the fairings, the result of that, the the complex shape that it takes. And yeah, and like what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible because if people don't know it's on top of the rocket, it's going to fall apart. That's its task, but it has to stay strong sometimes.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:41Lex Fridman?

  And then disappear when it needs to.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:44Lex Fridman?

  So very difficult task.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  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. When you need to.

• 45:09Lex Fridman?

  Exploding.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, little tiny bits of explosive material. And it just it'll sever the whole connection.

• 45:18Lex Fridman?

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

• 45:27Speaker 01

  Use explosives.

• 45:28Lex Fridman?

  The entirety of this thing is so badass. Okay, so we're back to the two stages. So the first stage is reusable.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, second stage is expendable. Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen. So we get to take advantage of the higher specific impulse. The first stage lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.

• 45:56Lex Fridman?

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

• 46:01Speaker 01

  There is, and we know how to do that. Right now, we're going to work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a second stage. Make it reusable or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And that trade is actually not obvious, which one is better?

• 46:29Lex Fridman?

  Even in terms of cost, even like time?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Even in terms of, and I'm talking about costs. You know, space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in, you know, the 50s and 60s.

• 46:40Lex Fridman?

  Making it sound easy.

• 46:41Speaker 01

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

• 47:16Lex Fridman?

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

• 47:47Speaker 01

  For sure. And you know, when you, what does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way.

• 47:53Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Right? And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.

• 48:17Lex Fridman?

  So what are some of the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side and the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glen?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  The first launch is one thing, and we'll do that in 2024, coming up in this coming year. The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently manufacturing at rate. So rate production. So consider if you want to launch New Glen, you know, 24 times a year, you need to manufacture a upper stage, since they're expendable, every, you know, twice a month, you need to do it every two weeks. So you need to be, you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and

• 49:12Speaker 01

  acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Designing the vehicle in the first place and the same thing. So every, every upper stage has two BE3U engines. So those engines, you know, you need, if you're going to launch the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month. So you need an engine every week. So you need to be, that engine needs to be being produced at rate. And, and that's a, and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, the right people, process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article, right? So that's, you know, to launch New

• 50:02Speaker 01

  Glen for the first time, you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glen's at rate.

• 50:16Lex Fridman?

  So the first one is produced in a way that's enables the production of the second, the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and say.

• 50:22Speaker 01

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

• 50:42Lex Fridman?

  Manufacturing is the big challenge.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy. I mean, the people who are designing the engines and all this, all of it is hard, for sure. But the, but the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, is to get to rate manufacturing 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?

• 51:26Lex Fridman?

  Let me write that idea down.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Like, make the Lex Fridman potato chips, you know?

• 51:33Lex Fridman?

  Don't, don't say it. People are going to steal it.

• 51:38Lex Fridman?

  Well, yeah, it's hard.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  You see what I'm saying? It's like, there's nothing easy about this business. And but but it's its own reward. It's it's it's fascinating, it's worthwhile, it's meaningful. And so, you know, I, you know, not, I don't want to pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day, you're not going to, you're not going to have accomplished something amazing.

• 52:02Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Even if you do make a lot of money out of it.

• 52:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, there's something fundamentally different about the quote unquote business of space exploration.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 52:11Lex Fridman?

  It's a grand project of humanity.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yes, it's one of humanity's grand challenges. And especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things. You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this. But the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I'll 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.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And so, and 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, you know, 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 that hadn't existed, it would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there. No startup company could have done that.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  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 want to 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 is, you know, th- those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then there'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room.

• 54:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  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 unleashed. I find that very exciting.

• 54:39Lex Fridman?

  As they will, of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructure building for granted.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 54:46Lex Fridman?

  Which is entrepreneurial spirit.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  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 invention. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they're so commonplace. Same thing with one click shopping and so on.

• 55:08Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  But that's a compliment. That's how, you know, you, you invent something that's so used, so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted.

• 55:19Lex Fridman?

  I don't know about nobody. Every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed. How does this work?

• 55:24Speaker 01

  That proves you're a very curious explorer.

• 55:27Lex Fridman?

  All right, all right. Back to rockets. Timeline. You said 2024. Uh, as it stands now, are both the first test launch and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible in 2024?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  24?

• 55:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so. Um, for sure, the first launch, and then we'll see if, if Escapade goes on that or not. I think that the first launch for sure, and I hope Escapade too.

• 55:52Lex Fridman?

  Hope?

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Well, I just don't know which mission is, is actually going to be slated on. So we also have other things that might go on that first mission.

• 56:00Lex Fridman?

  Oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that, uh, the launches will still.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Oh, the first launch, I'm very optimistic that the first launch of New Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not a hundred percent certain what payload will be on that first launch.

• 56:13Lex Fridman?

  Are you nervous about it?

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I've, you know, every, every launch I go to, you know, for New Shepard, for other vehicles too, I'm always nervous for these launches. But yes, for sure. A first launch, to have no nervousness about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement, I think. So.

• 56:38Lex Fridman?

  Well, I got to visit the launch, but it's pretty, I mean, it's epic.

• 56:43Speaker 01

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

• 57:06Lex Fridman?

  100%. When the thing is fully assembled and comes up.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. The transporter erector, just the transporter erector for a rocket of this scale is extraordinary.

• 57:18Lex Fridman?

  That's an incredible machine.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of, you know, comes up.

• 57:26Lex Fridman?

  Over a few hours?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a beautiful thing to watch.

• 57:29Lex Fridman?

  Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you were aboard New Shepard on its first crewed flight. How was that experience? Were you, were you terrified then?

• 57:49Speaker 01

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

• 57:51Lex Fridman?

  You ride the rocket?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  It's true. I've watched other people ride in the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her I was gonna go on the first 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.

• 58:13Lex Fridman?

  And. There's a long pause.

• 58:16Speaker 01

  She's like, both of you? And it was an incredible experience and we were, we were laughing inside the capsule and, you know, we're not nervous. The people on the ground were very nervous for us. It was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not, it happened even before the flight, at 4:30 in the morning.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren is going to take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave and we go outside, outside the ranch house there in West Texas where the launch facility is. And all of our family, my kids and my brother's kids and our, you know, our, our parents and close friends are assembled there and they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of saying, maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever. And, you know, we might not have felt that way, but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way. And it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see, it was almost like attending

• 59:33Speaker 01

  your own memorial service or something like you could feel how loved you were in that moment. And it was, it was really amazing.

• 59:41Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. And I mean, there's just a epic nature to it, too.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  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 we're, you know, it's like return to the womb.

• 59:59Lex Fridman?

  He just confirmed you're an alien, but I think that's what, I think that's what you just said.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  It feels so natural to be in zero G. It was really interesting. And then when people talk about the overview effect and seeing Earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. You see how fragile the Earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one. The great Jim 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.

• 1:00:44Lex Fridman?

  It is a gem. What, you know, you're, you've talked a lot about decision making throughout your time with Amazon. What was that decision like to, to ride, to be the first to ride New Shepard? Like what, just before you talk to your mom?

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Lex Fridman?

  What, like the pros and cons? Like actually as one human being, as a leader of a company.

• 1:01:09Lex Fridman?

  On all fronts, like what was that decision making like?

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

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

• 1:01:39Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  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 booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it. But we're harnessing, whenever you're talking about rocket engines,

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

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

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  And 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, costs really matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable in the event that it's not used, you can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  things. You asked me about my decision to go. And so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who designed it. I have great trust in them and in the engineering that we did. And I thought to myself, look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go. A tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view, to have very, to be as safe as one can make it. You can't make it perfectly safe. It's impossible. But you know, you just have to, people will do things. People take risk, you know, they climb mountains, they, you know, they skydive, they, you know, do deep underwater scuba diving and so on.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  People are okay taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk, but it is something, because it's a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the reasons I was so calm inside. If you others weren't just calm, they didn't know as much about it as I did.

• 1:04:55Lex Fridman?

  Who was in charge of engaging the escape systems?

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  It's automated.

• 1:04:58Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 1:04:59Speaker 01

  The escape system is completely automated. Automated is better because it can react so much faster.

• 1:05:07Lex Fridman?

  So yeah, for tourism rockets, safety is a huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration also, but a little, you know, a delta less.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:38Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  chair there, but I've 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.

• 1:06:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  It does apply. I know I'm leading this directly. We are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so, you know, at Amazon, for, you know, ever since the beginning, I said, we're going to 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 want to know, how did you guys, how do you, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you act, not just pay lip service, but actually do that? And from, you know, all different industries should come want to study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing at Blue Origin,

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  it will help us move faster, is we're going to become the world's most decisive company. We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things. That's what, and having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's study them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind. It doesn't, you know, changing your mind, I talk about one-way doors and two-way doors. Most decisions are two-way doors.

• 1:08:32Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain that? Because I love that metaphor.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out. 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. But they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that. So, you know, when I, the CEO of Amazon. I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  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 are not going to be able to reverse this one easily. Maybe you can reverse if it's going to be very costly and very time consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning. And what happens unfortunately in companies, what can happen. Is that you have a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Where you end up using the heavyweight process.

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  On all decisions.

• 1:09:57Lex Fridman?

  For everything, yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Including the lightweight ones, 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 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.

• 1:10:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, my part of the skill here is to know the difference between one-way and two-way. I think you.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:29Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  There are a bunch of decisions like that that are, you know,

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  changing the decision is going to 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. That has turned out to be a very good decision. But if you change your mind,

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  that would be, that would be a very big setback. Do you see what I'm saying?

• 1:11:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  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 done quickly in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.

• 1:11:39Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, one of the things I really liked, perhaps it's not two-way door decisions, is I disagree and commit.

• 1:11:47Lex Fridman?

  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 you still back them. I mean, I'd love for you to explain it.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.

• 1:12:07Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:12:08Lex Fridman?

  I want to use that in my personal life. I disagree, but commit.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 01

  At some point, you have to make a decision. And, you know, in companies, we tend to organize hierarchically. So there's this, you know, whoever'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, I would often, I would be the one who would disagree and commit. Some, one of my draft reports would very much want to do it, do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say, 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?

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  I don't think you're right, but I'm going to gamble with you. And you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I'd known you for 20 years. You have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either, not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision. And I, and I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. So I'm not going to be second guessing it. I'm not going to be sniping at it. I'm not going to be saying, I told you so. I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  There are 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 though I'm assuming like the case where everybody is well intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes. A lot of them are, I think, really bad. So an example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise, you know, here's, we're in a room here and I could say, Lex, how tall do you think this

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  ceiling is? And you'd be like, I don't know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall. And I would say, I think it's 11 feet tall. And then we'd say, you know what, let's just call it 11 and a half feet. That's compromise. Instead of, the right thing to do is, you know, to get a tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring, but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things, that requires energy. Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a knowable thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  used when you can know the truth. Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. This is also, let's say, two executives who disagree, and they just have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth, and this is very demoralizing. So, you know, this is where escalation, I try to ask people who, you know, on my team, I'd say, never get to a point where you are resolving something by, you know, who gets exhausted first.

• 1:16:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:16:09Lex Fridman?

  Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to a high velocity of the decision?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want like, you know, exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking.

• 1:16:23Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  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 disagreement commit can come in.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  But it's, it's escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to, you know, to your boss and say, hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other. We're respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to, you know, make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on, on decisions, as quickly 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.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  We're still decisive. We're still quick and that's because the culture supports that.

• 1:17:22Lex Fridman?

  At every scale and in a distributed way, try to maximize the velocity of decisions.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:17:28Lex Fridman?

  You've mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that.

• 1:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot going on there and you haven't really talked about it much. So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA, Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? There's a, there's a sexy picture on Instagram with, with one of them. Is it the MK1, I guess?

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Mark 1. The picture is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator.

• 1:17:55Lex Fridman?

  Just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing about the Instagram.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  I know it's not me. I know it was either the lander or Bill.

• 1:18:05Lex Fridman?

  I love Bill, but yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  Okay. The, yes, the Mark I lander is designed to take 3,000 kilograms to the surface of the moon in a cargo, expendable cargo. It's expendable lander, lands on the moon, stays there, take 3,000 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 that they call the Mark II. Mark I is also fueled with liquid hydrogen and which is for, for high energy missions like landing on the surface

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  of the moon, the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage. The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it's such a deep cryogen, it's not storable. So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant because it's boiling off. And so what we're doing as part of the, 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. It's a game changer for any high energy mission. So to the moon, but to the outer planets, to Mars, everywhere.

• 1:19:29Lex Fridman?

  So the idea with Mark I, both Mark I and Mark II is the New Glenn can

• 1:19:36Lex Fridman?

  carry it from the surface of Earth to the surface of the moon.

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the Mark I is expendable. The lunar, the lunar lander we're developing for NASA, the Mark II lander, that's part of 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.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Here what we're doing is we have a single-stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that it can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over. And the point of doing that, of course, is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time, which is, that's one of NASA's big objectives. Because this time, the whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon, but this time to stay. So, you know, back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the program, and it really was too expensive to, to continue.

• 1:21:05Lex Fridman?

  And so, there's a few questions there, but one is, how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have about, uh?

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Lex Fridman?

  Like a sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

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

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  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. 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 you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive. So that also could work together with the solar cells.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  But if you can, and then ultimately... We may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And we know there is ice water in those or water ice in those craters. And we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. And then you'd not only have oxygen, but you'd also have a very good, high efficiency propellant fuel and in hydrogen. So there's a lot, there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  But the very first step, the thing, the kind of gate that all of that has to go through is we need to be able to land cargo and humans on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost.

• 1:23:45Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

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

• 1:24:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so these are risky, difficult missions.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  And probably missions that require a lot of training. You know, you are going there for a very specific purpose to do something. We're going to be able to do a lot on the moon, 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. So it's, there's a lot that's going to be done in both modes.

• 1:24:57Lex Fridman?

  So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing.

• 1:25:04Lex Fridman?

  Humanity Forward Out Towards the Stars, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators, which and to what degree?

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  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 they're a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with profit streams, all driving great customer experiences.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:25:54Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  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. 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 in terms of his, judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There's no way you could have, you know, Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It's impossible.

• 1:26:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I just, I hope you guys hang out sometimes, shake hands and sort of

• 1:26:58Lex Fridman?

  have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity. Cause what you're doing is like one of the big, grand challenges ahead for humanity.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these endeavors, we're very like minded.

• 1:27:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  So I think, you know, I think, I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we're very like minded. And so I, you know, I, I love that idea.

• 1:27:25Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  He is. Yeah, I know. Yes. This is what the giant orange extension cord. Yeah.

• 1:27:42Lex Fridman?

  And you're like explaining the genius of the extension cord. And how this is a desk and the CRT monitor and sort of that's where the, that's where all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like the, the center of it all. So 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?

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  So excited and scared, anxious, you know, thought the odds of success were low. Told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success. By which I'd just been getting your money back, not like, 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. But that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head. Like, 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 going to work.

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  And you're doing both things at the same time. You're holding that contradiction in your head. But it was so, so exciting. I love, you know, every from 1994, when the company was founded, 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, 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. It's just been incredible.

• 1:29:33Lex Fridman?

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

• 1:30:18Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain this day one thing? This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

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

• 1:32:20Lex Fridman?

  And to the question of how to fend off day two, you said, "Such a question can't have a simple answer." As you're saying, "There will be many elements, multiple paths and many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack of essentials." Maybe others come to mind. For day one, defense. Customer obsession, 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. So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on.

• 1:32:59Lex Fridman?

  Eager adoption of external trends, high-velocity decision-making, skeptical view of proxies. How do you fight off day two?

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I'll talk about, because I think it's the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  is the skeptical view of proxies. One of the things that happens in business, probably anything that you're, where you're, you know, you have an ongoing program and something is 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.

• 1:33:42Speaker 01

  And so, you know, maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold, or something like, if you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get? 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.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy. The proxy for truth, I guess. The proxy for truth, the proxy for customers, 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, a kind of inertia can set in, and you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place. And the world shifts a little. And now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be, or it's missing something. And you have to be on alert for

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  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've got to 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 are managing to metrics that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted out from under them a little, and the metrics are no longer

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.

• 1:35:58Lex Fridman?

  That is a nuance, but uh, that's a big problem, right?

• 1:36:02Speaker 01

  It's a huge problem.

• 1:36:03Lex Fridman?

  There's something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics.

• 1:36:10Lex Fridman?

  Yes, you do.

• 1:36:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:32Lex Fridman?

  Uh, what does it take to be 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 at a meeting. We all showed up here, it's a Friday.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  This is such, you have just asked a million dollar question. So th- this is, this is what you're, if I generalize what you're asking, you're talking in general about truth telling.

• 1:37:03Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  And we humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals.

• 1:37:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, we are.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  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, they don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable. They can be awkward. They can be exhausting.

• 1:37:41Lex Fridman?

  Impolite.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:37:43Lex Fridman?

  All that kind of stuff.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Challenging. They can make people defensive, even if that's not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, a political organization, activist group, I don't care what it is. Any high performing organization.

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

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

• 1:38:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:05Lex Fridman?

  But even in science, there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientists. And then there's a hierarchy of humans where the somehow seniority, somehow seniority matters. Yeah. The scientific process, which is.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  And that's true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person. If they have data.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  And, and that really is about trying to, you know, there are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience that, you know, if I speak first, even very strong willed, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well, if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right. And so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Go last, but everybody else go first. In fact, ideally, let's try to have the most junior person go first and the second, then try to go in order of seniority. 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, it makes you change your mind a little.

• 1:40:46Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and sometimes it can even, by the way, a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition based and sometimes you don't even have strong data. But you may know, you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in. It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have. And then you may be able to say, you know, something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias.

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  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 going to go with it's bad for now until we're sure.

• 1:42:05Lex Fridman?

  So speaking of happiness bias, data collection and anecdotes, you have to, how's that for a transition? You have to, you have to tell me the story of the, the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon. And we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents. And I have, I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then. It means you go examine the data. Because it's usually not the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time, you know, your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  You should doubt the metrics. And an early example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than, I don't know, 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get, you know, phone customer service. The wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds. And, but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally, it seemed longer than that. Like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day, we're in a meeting or 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.

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  Picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number and called customer service. And we just waited in silence.

• 1:44:08Lex Fridman?

  What did it turn out to be?

• 1:44:09Speaker 01

  Oh, it was really long, more than 10 minutes, I think.

• 1:44:11Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  I mean, it was, it was many minutes. And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren't measuring the right thing. And, 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 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.

• 1:44:45Lex Fridman?

  So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think 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, the human being that's using the product, that's enjoying the product. They're like, what they're like, the subtle little things that make up their experience. Like, how do you optimize those?

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  This is another really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage. And then there are small things internally to Amazon. We call them paper cuts. So we have, we're always working on the big things. Like if you ask me, and most of the energy goes into the big things, as it should. So, and you can identify the big things. And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, you know, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.

• 1:46:07Speaker 01

  So like, I know that in our retail business at Amazon, 10 years from now, customers are still going to want low prices. I know they're still going to want fast delivery. And I just know they're still going to want big selection. So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now, I say, where customers says, I love Amazon. I just wish the prices were a little higher. Or I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. So when you identify the big things, you can tell they're worth putting energy into because they're stable in time.

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  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 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. They never work their way down the list to get to, they're working on big things as

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  they should, and as you want them to. And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.

• 1:47:33Lex Fridman?

  Where would you put on the 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 a regular human. I would love for those things to be frictionless. For example, booking airline tickets. Just saying. But, you know, it's buying a thing with one click. Making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that. Like that, that just fundamentally makes my life better. Not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Cognitive load.

• 1:48:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, cognitive load and inner peace and happiness. First of all, buying stuff isn't a pleasant experience. Having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience. And like, having pain around that is somehow just you're ruining a beautiful experience. And I guess all I'm saying, as a person who loves good ideas, is that a paper cut? A solution to a paper cut?

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  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, there was more friction. There was a whole series of paper cuts. And that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you're absolutely right, by the way, that there, when you come up with something like one click shopping, again, this is like so ingrained in people now. I'm impressed that you even noticed it. I mean, most-

• 1:49:23Lex Fridman?

  Every time I click the button, I just never- Surge of happiness.

• 1:49:28Speaker 01

  This, there is in, in the perfect invention, for the perfect moment, in the perfect context, there is real beauty.

• 1:49:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:49:52Lex Fridman?

  But to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the day one thinking effort.

• 1:49:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:50:07Lex Fridman?

  There's a lot of books written about you. There's a, there's a book Invent and Wander where Walter Isaacson does an intro. It's mostly collective writings of yours. I've read that. I also recommend people check out the Founder's Podcast. That covers you a lot and it does different analysis of different business advice you've given over the years.

• 1:50:29Lex Fridman?

  I bring all that up because I saw that there, I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans. And I forget how it was phrased, but that when you were thinking about the Kindle, that you're thinking about how technology changes us. Yeah.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  We co-evolve-

• 1:50:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  With our tools. So you know, we invent new tools and then our tools change us.

• 1:51:00Lex Fridman?

  Which is fascinating to think about.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  It goes in a circle.

• 1:51:02Lex Fridman?

  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 bit.

• 1:51:14Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And, you know, you, you can feel in 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 first came on the scene. I'm sure you've had, anybody who's been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see 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

• 1:51:51Speaker 01

  your brain to play Tetris. And, but that happens with everything. And so, you know, one of the, I think, 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, you do these long format things and reading, reading books is a long format thing. And

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  we all do more of, if you, if something is convenient, we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know, that we carry around a little, we carry around in our pocket, a phone. And one of the things that phone does, for the most part, is it is an attention shortening device. Because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans. And I'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad, but I do think it's happening. That's one of the ways we're co-evolving with that tool. But I think, I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.

• 1:53:10Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I think you've spoken about the value in your own life of focus.

• 1:53:16Lex Fridman?

  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 ask you about another piece of technology, AI, that has the potential to have various trajectories, to have an impact on human civilization. How do you think AI will change us?

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  If you're talking about generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT and its soon successors. And these are incredibly powerful technologies. To believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful.

• 1:54:10Speaker 01

  It's interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they're discoveries.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  You know, the telescope was an invention. But looking through it at Jupiter,

• 1:54:29Speaker 01

  knowing that it had moons was a discovery.

• 1:54:33Speaker 01

  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. We designed it, we know how it behaves. We don't want any surprises. Large language models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. They're not really engineered objects.

• 1:55:04Speaker 01

  Then, you know, you have this debate about whether they're going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity.

• 1:55:13Speaker 01

  You know, even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity. I mean, it's just, you know, just regular machine learning models that can make, you know, certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive, very powerful. And they're not general AIs. They're just, they could just be very smart weapons.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  And so we have to think about all of those things.

• 1:55:46Speaker 01

  I'm very optimistic about this. So 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,

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  we can make ourselves go extinct, you know, these things may help us not do that, you know, so we may actually, they actually save us. So the people who are, you know, overly concerned, I mean, my view overly concerned, it's a valid debate. I think that, I think that they may be missing part of the equation, which is how helpful they could be in making sure we don't destroy ourselves.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

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

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  of wielding those weapons. Where, and that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is,

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  he wrongly thinks he's like, being so petty, he thinks that he said something, Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him. They didn't talk about him at all, as you find out in the final scene of the movie. And yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful and petty. And that's, that's the problem. We as a species are not really.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  Sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies. And so, and by the way, before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency, and there's a lot of things would have to happen, but there's so much benefit that's going to come from these technologies in the meantime, even before they're, you know, general AI in terms of better medicines and 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 going to happen. How quickly it will happen, no one knows, but over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we're going to see really remarkable advances. And I personally am very excited about it.

• 1:58:41Lex Fridman?

  First of all, really interesting to say that it's discoveries that it's true that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  We don't.

• 1:58:53Lex Fridman?

  And like, it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that, that open doors to whole entire new possibilities.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  We do know that humans are doing something different 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, 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 figures it out.

• 1:59:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  But what's interesting is that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up. But just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends.

• 2:00:09Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, 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, large language models being able to come up with some truly new ideas. That's one. And the other one is truth. It seems that large language models are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing. But they don't require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth. It could just basically is a very good bullshitter.

• 2:00:46Lex Fridman?

  So if there's not enough, if there's not enough sort of data in the in the training data about a particular topic is just going to concoct.

• 2:00:57Lex Fridman?

  Accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get language models to infer what is true and not to sort of introspect?

• 2:01:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they need to be taught to say, I don't know more often.

• 2:01:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Speaker 01

  And I know several humans who could be taught that as well.

• 2:01:19Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:01:30Speaker 01

  Oh, so many.

• 2:01:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:32Speaker 01

  I mean, you know, just to, you know, we have Alexa and Echo. And Alexa has, you know, hundreds of millions of installed base, you know, inputs. And so there's this, there's, you know, there's Alexa everywhere. And guess what? Alexa is about to get a lot smarter.

• 2:01:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  And so that's really, you know, from a product point of view, that's super exciting.

• 2:01:56Lex Fridman?

  There's so many opportunities there.

• 2:01:57Speaker 01

  So many opportunities, shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing. And AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS.

• 2:02:14Speaker 01

  Our enterprise clients, they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data.

• 2:02:20Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:02:20Speaker 01

  Without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model.

• 2:02:26Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  And so those are the tools we're building for them with Bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here.

• 2:02:31Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating of how to, because so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep this secure. That's a fascinating technical problem.

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:50Lex Fridman?

  Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots, maybe Alexa, have a romantic relationship like it could be her?

• 2:02:58Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I think if you look at the

• 2:03:00Lex Fridman?

  Just brainstorming products here.

• 2:03:01Speaker 01

  If you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, you know, sexual variety.

• 2:03:07Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  You know, there are people who like everything, so the answer to your question has to be yes.

• 2:03:12Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 2:03:12Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:03:13Lex Fridman?

  I guess I'm asking when.

• 2:03:14Speaker 01

  I don't know how widespread that will be.

• 2:03:15Lex Fridman?

  All right.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  But it will happen.

• 2:03:18Lex Fridman?

  I was just asking when for a friend, but it's all right.

• 2:03:22Lex Fridman?

  Moving on. Next question. What's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You're one of the most productive humans in the world.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Well, I, first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter. I like, I like have a coffee.

• 2:03:38Lex Fridman?

  Can you define putter?

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Just like I slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I, because I do believe in wandering and I sort of, I, you know, I read my phone for a while, I read newspapers for a while, I chat with Laura and I drink my first coffee. So I kind of, I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early, just naturally. And, and then, you know, I exercise most days and 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.

• 2:04:21Lex Fridman?

  Why am I here at the gym?

• 2:04:22Speaker 01

  Why am I here at the gym? Why don't I do something else? You know, this, it's not always easy.

• 2:04:28Lex Fridman?

  What's your source of motivation in those moments?

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  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. And then there's harder motivations. It's longer term. You want to be healthy as you age, you know, you want health span, you want ideally, you know, you want to be healthy and moving around when you're 80 years old, you know, and so there's a lot of, but that kind of motivation is so far in the future, it can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact I'll feel better in about four hours. If I do it now, I have more energy for the rest of my day and so on and so on.

• 2:05:11Lex Fridman?

  What's your exercise routine? Just to linger on that, what do you, how much you curl? I mean, what are we talking about here?

• 2:05:18Lex Fridman?

  That's all I do at the gym. So I just.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  I, I, my, my routine, um, you know, on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about 45 minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who, you know, I love, uh, who pushes me, um, which is really helpful. You know, I'll be like, uh, he'll say, uh, Jeff, do you see, you could, can we go up on that way a little bit? And I'll think about it and I'll be like, no, I don't think so. And he'll be, he'll look at me and say, yeah, I think you can.

• 2:05:59Speaker 01

  And of course he's right. So it's helpful to have somebody push you a little bit.

• 2:06:04Lex Fridman?

  But almost every day you do that?

• 2:06:05Speaker 01

  I, I do almost every day. I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting. And, um, I'd rotate, I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff.

• 2:06:17Lex Fridman?

  So puttering, coffee, gym?

• 2:06:19Speaker 01

  Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work.

• 2:06:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:06:27Speaker 01

  I, you know, so I, a couple of years ago, I left as the CEO of Amazon and I have never worked harder in my life.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  I am working so hard and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days. Most of my time is spent on 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 guy I've known for close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limpu. I love, he's amazing, you know, so we're super lucky to have Dave. And you know, we're gonna, you're gonna see us move faster there.

• 2:07:15Speaker 01

  But so my day of work, you know, reading documents, having meetings, sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom. Depends on where I am. It's all about, you know, the technology, it's about the organization, it's about, you know, I'm very, I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It's super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology. My least favorite part of it is, you know, building organizations and so on. That's important, but it's also my least favorite part. So, you know, that's why they call it work. You don't always get to do what you want to do.

• 2:08:00Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:08:05Speaker 01

  I do little thinking retreats. So for, this is not the only, I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at, you know, I'm, I don't keep to a strict schedule. Like my meetings often go longer than I plan for them to, because I believe in wandering. My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high. I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and, and, and, and trying to like wander your way to a solution.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  And, uh, uh, cause like, uh, and, and that is if, when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has, it has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it and, and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.

• 2:09:06Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:09:20Speaker 01

  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 the typical meeting, we'll start with a six page narratively structured memo. And we do study hall. We're for 30 minutes. We sit there silently together in the meeting and read. Take notes in the margins and then we, 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,

• 2:10:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:10:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Speaker 01

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

• 2:10:15Lex Fridman?

  And do it together.

• 2:10:16Speaker 01

  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. That has so many difficulties, but one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to, 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

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  have to talk to people about it, they have to poke holes in it for you, you write it again. It may 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 answered. That's why I save all that time. You also get, you know, if

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  the person is preparing the memo, we talked earlier about, you know, group think and, you know, the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don't want, you know, your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely. You know, the author of the memo is, 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 because it makes them really good. And so, and you get to see their real ideas and you're not tromping on them accidentally in a big, you know, PowerPoint presentation.

• 2:12:19Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  I think it's mostly terrifying.

• 2:12:29Lex Fridman?

  Like maybe in a good way?

• 2:12:31Speaker 01

  I think it's

• 2:12:31Lex Fridman?

  Like a purifying?

• 2:12:32Speaker 01

  I think it's terrifying in a, in a productive way.

• 2:12:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:37Speaker 01

  But I, I think it's emotionally a very nerve wracking experience.

• 2:12:42Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:12:48Speaker 01

  The, I mean, it's really got to be a real memo. So it means, you know, paragraphs have topic sentences, it's verbs and nouns. You can't, that's the other problem with PowerPoint, because 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. And you've got it from the very beginning. And so it really saves you time in the long run.

• 2:13:32Lex Fridman?

  So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy. Crisp, docile.

• 2:13:35Speaker 01

  Yes, and you don't want, 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 like, 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.

• 2:14:04Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:14:15Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  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 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall. 10,000 year clock is an idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the eighties.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000 year clock as it, it, you know, it ticks once a year, it chimes once, you know, every hundred years and the cuckoo comes out once every thousand years. So it just sort of slows everything down. And it's a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and everything else, it's in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage.

• 2:15:26Speaker 01

  The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years, but over time, it will take on the patina of age. And then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons. And my view, that's really important as we have become as a species, as a civilization, more powerful. You know, we're really affecting the planet now. We're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can really hurt

• 2:16:05Speaker 01

  ourselves. And the problems we create can be so large, you know, the unintended consequences of some of our actions, like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere is a perfect example. That's an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution. They'll have 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 you know, it's not really, you were kind of, you know, five years is a tough timeframe

• 2:16:47Speaker 01

  for most institutions to think past. And we probably need to stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years. And we'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. It's a symbol. And it, if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won't happen for hundreds of years. But we have to, you know, we're going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of age.

• 2:17:21Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  But, you know, the United States won't exist. Like, 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.

• 2:17:41Lex Fridman?

  And the increasing rate of progress makes that even

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

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

• 2:17:54Lex Fridman?

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

• 2:18:01Speaker 01

  No, I'm, you know, I, I used to be afraid of death. I did. I like my, like, I remember as a young person being kind of like, very scared of mortality, like, didn't want to think about it and so on. And always had a big, and as I've gotten older, I'm 59 now. As I've gotten older, somehow that fear has sort of gone away. I don't, you know, I, I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but I'd like to be, it's, I'm really more focused on health span. I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want to, you know, I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone. I don't want the long decay.

• 2:18:44Speaker 01

  But, and I'm curious, I want to see how things turn out, you know, I'd like to be here. I love my, my family and my close friends and I want to, I'm curious about them and I want to see. So I have a lot of reasons to stay around, but it's, mortality doesn't, doesn't have that effect on me that it did, you know, maybe when I was in my twenties.

• 2:19:07Lex Fridman?

  Well, Jeff, thank you for creating Amazon, one of the most incredible companies in history. And thank you for trying your best to make humans a multi-planetary species, expanding out into our solar system, maybe beyond, to meet the aliens out there. And thank you for talking today.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  Well, Lex, thank you for doing your part to lengthen our attention spans. Appreciate that very much.

• 2:19:33Lex Fridman?

  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.