Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin | Lex Fridman Podcast #405
- The following is a
conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is 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. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos. 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? - Wow, coolest. - Most interesting. Most memorable. - Most memorable. Most impactful. - And it was a real working ranch. My grand, I spent all
my summers on that ranch from age four to 16. And my grandfather was
really taking me to those in the summers, in the early summers, he was letting me pretend
to help on the ranch. 'Cause of course, a
4-year-old is a burden, not a help in real life. He was really just watching
me and taking care of me and be was doing that
because my mom was so young. She had me when she was 17, and so he was sort of giving her a break. And my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for these summers. But as I got a little older, I actually was helpful on
the ranch and I loved it. I was out there, like my grandfather had
a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life. I did all the jobs you
would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences and pipelines and you
know, done all the things that any rancher would do, vaccinated, the animals, everything. 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. - Just the image of the two sitting there watching a soap opera as ranchers. - 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, like he would find a little
piece of wire and heat it up and pound it thin and drill
a hole in it and sharpen it. So, you know, you learn different things on a ranch than you would learn you know, growing up in a city. - So self-reliance. - Yeah, like figuring out
that you can solve problems with enough persistence and ingenuity. And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer, and
he got it for like $5,000. 'cause it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955
Caterpillar, D6 bulldozer knew it would've cost, I don't know, more than a $100,000. And we spent an entire summer fixing, like repairing that bulldozer. And we'd, you know, use mail order to buy big gears for the transmission. And they'd show up. They'd be too heavy to move, so we'd have to build a crane, you know, just that kind of, kinda that
problem solving mentality. He had it so powerfully, you know, he did all of his own. He'd just, he didn't pick up
the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own. Doing his own veterinary work, you know. - But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in for a little break at 1:00
PM to watch a soap opera. - Laying on the floor. That's how he watched TV. - Yeah. - He was a really, really remarkable guy. - That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also in all those westerns. When he's not doing what he is 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. So let me ask you to look
back at the historical context and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and
the US was in many ways epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events for satellite to space,
for a human to space, for a 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, that just 12 years? - Well, I mean, there's
so much inspiring there. You know, one of the great
things to take away from that, one of the great von Braun quotes is "I have come to use the word
impossible with great caution." - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And so that's kind of
the big story of Apollo is that things, you
know, going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible. You know, oh yeah, you'll
do that when you know, men walk on the moon. - Yeah. - And of course it finally happened. So, you know, I think it
was pulled forward in time because of the space race, I think you know, with the
geopolitical implications and you know, how much
resource was put into it, you know, at the peak,
that program was spending, you know, two or 3% of
GDP on the Apollo program. So much resource. I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote
should have done it. - Yeah. - And so in that way, it's
also a 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 thought impossible, it rightly deserves
its place, as you know, in the pantheon of great
human achievements. - And of course, you named
the projects The Rockets that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. - Yeah. - I don't understand why
I didn't say New Gagarin. is that- - There's an American bias in the naming. I apologize. - It's very strange. - Lex. - Just asking for a friend. Clarify. - I'm a big fan of Gagarin though. And in fact, I think his
first words in space, I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly
said "my God, it's blue." And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were
on this blue planet. - Yeah. - No one knew what it
looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the
first person to see it. - One of the things I think
about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin, for Glen, for everybody involved. Like how big of a risk
they were all taking. - 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 Shephard flight, the flight that you know,
New Shephard 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. - It's kind of interesting
that Alan Shephard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't
know, Alan Shephard is the first astronaut- - The first American in space. - American in suborbital flight. - Correct. - And then the first orbital flight is- - 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. - What did he say? - 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 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 happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet. - Does he say ps don't mess this up? Or is that- - No, he doesn't. - Make me look good. - He doesn't do that. - Okay. - But wait, but John, wherever you are, we got you covered. - All right, good. So back to maybe the big picture of space. When you look up at the
stars and think big, what do you hope is
the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of
years from now out in space? - I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living
in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given
time a thousand Mozarts 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. - So what do you think that looks like? Giant space stations? - Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary
surfaces are just way too small. So you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. But, but yeah, we will take
materials from the moon and from near earth objects
and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we'll build
giant 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
gonna wanna live near Earth, not necessarily in earth
orbit, but in you know, earth, but near earth vicinity orbits. And so they can move you
know, relatively quickly back and forth between
their station and Earth. So I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not gonna want to
give up Earth altogether. - They go to earth for vacation. - Yeah. Same way that you know, you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation. People will, and no one, and people will get to choose
where they live on earth or whether they live in space, but they'll be able to
use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on earth. - One of the interesting ideas you had is 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 ideas that space travel and space exploration is
a way to preserve earth. - Exactly. This planet, we've sent robotic
probes to all the planets. We know that this is the good one. - Yeah. Not to play favorites or anything. - But earth really is the good planet. 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, that is going to, as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think
about the good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was say, 50 years
ago or a hundred years. We live better lives by and
large than our grandparents did, and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in
global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global
infant mortality rates, like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. And we get, you know, antibiotics and all kinds of lifesaving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing
that is moving backwards, and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500
years ago, pre-industrial age, the natural world was pristine. It was incredible. And we have traded some
of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both. But to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this, really, the most fundamental measure
is energy usage per capita. And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to
use more and more energy, it is going to make your
life better in so many ways. But that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out
into the solar system and really you could argue
about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that. - Eventually, we have to do that. - Exactly. - Well, you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that
topic about the Blue Ring and the orbital reef space
infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these? - So Blue Ring is a very
interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up
to 3000 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 use blue ring in
a couple different ways. You can slowly move, let's
say up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion that might take you know, a hundred days or 150 days depending on how
much mass you're carrying. And then, and reserve
your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit. Or you can use the
chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your
geosynchronous orbit. Blue Ring has a couple
of interesting features. It provides a lot of services to these payloads. So the payload, it 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, you don't have to figure
out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation tolerant
compute on board Blue Ring, and you can, your
payload can just use that when it needs to. So it's sort of all these services, it's you know, 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 an earth vicinity or lunar vicinity. - AWSS space. Okay, so computing space. So you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit, and then you have these
admins that show up, this Blue Ring thing that
manages various things like compute. - Exactly. And it can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits. - Including humans, you think? - No, but Blue Ring is not
designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payloads around. - Okay. - So we're also building a lunar lander, which is of course designed to land humans on the surface of the moon. - I'm gonna ask you about that, but let me ask you to just
step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be
a theoretical physicist. - Yeah. - What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become, why you're not Jeff Bezos, the famous theoretical physicist? - So I loved physics and I studied physics and computer science, and I was proceeding
along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a
theoretical physicist. And the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it. 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. It's why I went to Princeton
in the first place. It was definitely, and then I realized I was gonna be a mediocre
theoretical physicist. And 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 only the top few percent actually move the state
of the art forward. It's one of those things
where you have to be really just, your brain has
to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named, one of these people who convinced me. He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to
be a theoretical physicist. His name was Yosanta. And Yosanta was from Sri Lanka. And 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, and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each
other at the same time and we said, Yosanta. So we went to Yosanta's dorm room. And he was there, he
was almost always there. And we said Yosanta, we're
having trouble solving this 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 Yosanta? What do you mean cosine? He said that's the answer. And I said no, no, no, come on. And he said let me show you. And he took out some paper and he wrote down three
pages of equations, everything canceled out. And the answer was cosine. And I said Yosanta, did
you do that in your head? And he said oh no, that
would be impossible. A few years ago I solved a similar problem and I could map this
problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few, you know, you
have an experience like that, you realize maybe being
a theoretical physicist isn't what your, isn't what the universe wants you to be. And so I switched to computer
science and you know, that worked out really well for me. I enjoy it. I still enjoy it today. - Yeah, there's a particular
kind of intuition you need to be a great physicist,
applied to physics. - I think the mathematical
skill required today is so high. You have to be a world-class mathematician to be a successful
theoretical physicist today. And it's not you know, you probably need other skills too, intuition, lateral thinking, and so on. But without just top-notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful. - And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments. And if you want truly great creativity, actually Walter Isaacson writes about you. It puts you on the same level as Einstein. - Well, that's very kind. I'm an inventor. If you wanna boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical
solutions and you know, and then I can create a
hundred 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
my inventive skills come. That's the thing is I self-identify as an inventor more than anything else. - Yeah, and he describes in
all kinds of different ways, Walter Isaacson does that creativity combined with childlike
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? - 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. - Yeah. - 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, in 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, they feel like wandering is inefficient. And you know, like when
I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long
the meeting is gonna take if we're trying to solve a problem. Because if I did, then I'd already, I'd know there's some
kind of straight line that we're drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have
to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a
whiteboard with you know, a group of smart people and spit balling and coming up with new ideas
and objections to those ideas, and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So like you know, sometimes
you wake up with an idea in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down
with a group of people and go back and forth and both things are really pleasurable. - And when you wander, I think one key thing
is to notice a good idea and to maybe, to notice
the kernel of a good idea. Maybe pull at that string. Because I don't think a good
idea has come fully formed. - 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. - There's something there. - There's something there. And that is intuition. - Yeah. - Because it's really
easy to kill new ideas in the beginning. 'Cause 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
gonna take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun. - So you got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all. Maybe not on math, but- - In a different domain. - Yeah. - There are a thousand ways
to be smart, by the way. - Yeah. - 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. - Yeah, you just gave me a good response to when somebody calls me
an idiot on the internet. You know, that's a thousand
ways to be smart, sir. - Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million
to be ways to be dumb. - 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 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? - Sure. New Glenn is a very large, a heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO, very, very large class. It's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V Rocket. So it's about 3.9 million
pounds of thrust on liftoff. The booster has seven BE-4 engines. Each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled
by liquid natural gas, liquified natural gas, LNG as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox-riched
stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really
pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. 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 BE-3U engines, which is a upper stage variant of our New Shephard
liquid hydrogen engine. So the BE-3U has 160,000 pounds of 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 very, is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, you know, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your tanks, your liquid
hydrogen tank, it's very large. So 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. 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, but what does it mean? - 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 avionic system, so you have a guidance and control system, that is gonna be about
the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is
gonna be for a tiny rocket. And so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential
if you're building a very small rocket, but is trivial if you're
building a very large rocket. So you have the parasitic mass thing. And then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps. They have to pressurize
the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level in order to inject it
into the thrust chamber where it burns. 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. 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 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, you know, you don't need cranes
and heavy lift operations and tooling, and so on and so on. When you start building big
objects, infrastructure, civil infrastructure,
just like the launchpad and the you know, all this, we went and visited, I took you to the launchpad and you can see it's so monumental. - Yeah, it is. - 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. - And even the foundation
of the launchpad, I mean, this is Florida, like isn't like swamp land? Like how deep do you have to go? - You have to at Cape Canaveral, in fact, at most ocean,
you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the oceanside. 'cause you wanna launch over
water for safety reasons. The yes, you have to drive pilings, you know, dozens and dozens
and dozens of pilings, you know, 50, a 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it's yes, these turn into major
civil engineering projects. - I just have to say
everything about that factory is pretty badass. You said tooling, the bigger it gets, the more epic it is. - It does make it epic. - Yeah. - It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary. - It's humbling also, 'cause you know, humans are
so small compared to it. - We are building these enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power, you know,
in very, very compact packages. It's truly extraordinary. - But then there's all
the different components and that you know, the materials involved. Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials that's comprised the rockets? So it has to be as light
as possible, I guess, whilst withstanding the heat
and the harsh conditions? - Yeah, I play a little
kind of game sometimes with other rocket people
that I run into where say what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers? Like what's changed? 'Cause surprisingly, some
of rocketry greatest hits have not changed. They are still, they would recognize immediately
a lot of what we do today. And it's exactly what they
pioneered back in the '60s. But a few things have changed. You know, the use of carbon composites is 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. Aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Do you remember the friction
stir welding that I showed you? - Yes, incredible. - This is a remarkable technology. This was invented decades ago, but has become very practical over 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 wanna weld together. And then you move it at
a very precise speed. And instead of heating the material, it heats it a little
bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally
immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material
and it's just barely warm. It literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary. - Relatively low temperature. And I guess high temperature
is what makes them, that makes it a weak point? - Exactly. So with traditional welding
techniques, you may have whatever the underlying
strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak
regions where you weld. And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as
strong as the bulk material. So it really allows you, and so, 'cause when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're gonna pressurize you know, a large liquid natural gas tank for our booster stage, for example. You know, if you are welding
that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces with that knockdown for
whatever damage you're doing with the weld. And that's gonna add a lot
of weight to that tank. - I mean, even just the
looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that it takes and- - Yeah. - And like what it's supposed
to do is kind of incredible 'cause so people don't know
it's on top of the rocket, it's gonna fall apart. That's its task. But it has to stay strong sometimes. - Yes. - And then disappear when it needs to. - That's right. - Which is a very difficult task. - Yes. When you need something that
needs to have 100% integrity until it needs to have 0% integrity. It needs to stay attached
until it's ready to go away. And then when it goes away,
it has to go away completely. You use explosive charges for that. And so it's a very robust way of separating structure when you need to. - Exploding - Yeah. Little tiny bits of explosive material and it just, it'll sever
the whole connection. - So if you wanna go from
100% structural integrity to zero as fast as
possible use explosives, - Use explosives. - The entirety of this thing is so badass. Okay, so we're back to the two stages. So the first stage is reusable. - Yeah. Second stage is expendable. Second stage is liquid
hydrogen, liquid oxygen. So we could take advantage of
the higher specific impulse. The the first stage lands
downrange on a landing platform in the ocean, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission. - I mean there's a million questions, but also is there a
path towards reusability for the second stage? - There is, and we know how to do that. Right now we're gonna
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. - Even in terms of cost. Even like time cost? - I'm talking about cost is, you know, space flight, getting into
orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in you
know, the '50s and '60s. - You're making it sound easy. - So the only thing that, the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing
the cost of access to orbit, which is if you can do that, you open up a bunch of
new, you know, endeavors that lots of startup companies,
everybody else can do. So that's, we really, that's 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. - I like how you said getting
to orbit is a solved problem. It is just the only interesting
thing is reducing the cost. You know, how you can
describe every single problem facing human civilization that way. The physicist would say
everything is a solved problem. We've solved everything. The rest is just well,
Rutherford said that "it's just stamp collecting." It's just the details. It's some of the greatest
innovations and inventions and you know, brilliance is
in that cost reduction stage. Right, and you, you've had a
long career of cost reduction. - For sure. And when you, what does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way. - Yeah, exactly. - Right, and when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many
thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal
to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer. - So what are some of
the biggest challenges on the manufacturing side
and the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn? - The first launch is one thing and we'll do that in 2024
coming up in this coming year. The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently manufacturing at rate. So rate production. So consider if you wanna launch New Glenn you know, 24 times a year. You need to manufacture a upper stage since they're expendable
every, you know, twice a month, you need to do one every two weeks. So you need to be, you need to have all of your
manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and
everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing
is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle
in the first place. And the same thing. So every upper stage
has two BE-3U engines. So those engines you know, you need if you're gonna launch this
the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month. So you need an engine every week. So you need to be, that engine needs to be
being produced at rate. And 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 Glenn for the first time, you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is
everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glenn's at rate. - So the first one is produced in a way that enables the production
of the second and third and the fourth and the
fifth and sixth, and so on. - 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, it's the test article in a way that's testing out your
manufacturing technologies. - The manufacturing is the big challenge. - Yes. I mean I don't want to make it
sound like any of it is easy. I mean the people who
are designing the engines and all this, all of it is hard for sure. But the challenge right
now is driving really hard 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 haven't really moved this state of the art forward. All this has to be about moving the state-of-the art forward. There are 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. - I'm gonna write that idea down. - Like make the Lex Fridman potato chips, you know, this is- - Don't say it, people are gonna steal it. But yeah, it's hard. - You see what I'm saying? It's like there's nothing
easy about this business but it's its own reward. It's fascinating, it's
worthwhile, it's meaningful. And so you know, not, I don't wanna pick on
salty snack food companies, but I think it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day, you're not gonna have
accomplished something amazing. - Yeah, there's- - Even if you do make a
lot of money out of it. - Yeah, there's something
fundamentally different about the quote unquote
business of space exploration. - Yeah, for sure. - It's a grand project of humanity. - Yes. It's one of humanity's grand challenges. And especially as you
look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building
giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things. You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come
from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I'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. 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've been hundreds
of billions of CapEx to put that out there. No startup company could have done that. And so the problem you know, you see 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. Beause they didn't have to
build heavy infrastructure. It was already there. And that's what I wanna do. I take you know, my Amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation you know, the generation that's my
children and their children, these, you know, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then there'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. - Yeah. - Like 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. - As they will of course, as kids do, take all of this hard
infrastructurability for granted. - Of course. Which is- - That's the entrepreneurial spirit. - That's an inventors greatest dream. - Yeah. - 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, we pioneered customer reviews, but now they're so commonplace. Same thing with one
click shopping and so on. But that's a compliment. That's how you know, you invent something that's so used, so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted. - I don't know about nobody. That's every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed how does this work? Logistics. - Well, that proves you're
very curious explorer. - All right, all right, back to rockets. Timeline. You said 2024. As it stands now, are both the first test
launch and the launch of escapade explorers
to Mars still possible? - In 2024?
- In 2024. Yeah. - Yeah, I think so. For sure the first launch, and then we'll see if
escapade goes on that or not. I think that the first launch for sure. And I hope escapade too. - Hope. - Well, I just don't know which mission it's actually gonna be slated on. So we also have other things that might go on that first mission. - Oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that
the launches will still- - Oh, the first launch, I'm very optimistic that the first launch of New Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not a hundred percent certain what payload will be on that first launch. - Are you nervous about it? - Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it. - Oh man. - A hundred percent. I've, you know, every launch I go to, you know, for New Shephard,
for other vehicles too, I'm always nervous for these launches. But yes, for sure. A first launch to have
no nervousness about that would be, you know, some
sign of derangement, I think so. - Well, I got to visit the launchpad, it's pretty, I mean, it's epic. - 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
have fun watching it no matter what happens. - 100% when the thing is
fully assembled and comes up. - Yeah, the transporter erector. - The erector, yeah. - Just the transporter erector
for a rocket of this scale - Yeah.
- is extraordinary. - That's an incredible machine. - The vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of- - Yeah. - You know, comes up. - Over a few hours? - Yeah, it's a beautiful thing to watch. - Speaking of which, if
that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember, but you were aboard a New Shephard on its first crude flight. How was that experience? Were you terrified then? - You know, strangely, I wasn't, you know. - When you ride the rocket- - It's true. - less nerve wracking. - Its true. I've watched other people ride 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. - There's a long pause when you told her. - She's like both of you? And it was an incredible experience and 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
happened even before the flight at 4:30 in the morning,
brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren is gonna take
us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave. And we go outside the ranch house there in west Texas where
the launch facility is. And all of our family, my
kids and my brother's kids and our you know, our
parents, and close friends are assembled there. And they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of saying, maybe they think they're
saying goodbye to us forever. And you know, we might
not have felt that way. But it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were
that they felt that way. And it was sort of powerful because it allowed us to see, it was almost like attending
your own memorial service or something. Like you could feel how loved
you were in that moment. And it was really amazing. - Yeah, and I mean there's
just a epic nature to it too. - The accent, the
floating and zero gravity. I'll tell you something very interesting. Zero gravity feels very natural. I don't know if it's because we are, you know, it's like return
to the womb or what. - You just confirmed you're an alien. But that's okay. I think that's what you just said. - It feels so natural to be in zero G. It was really interesting. And then what people talk
about the overview effect and seeing earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. You see how fragile the earth is. If you're not an environmentalist,
it will make you one. The the great Jim Lovell quote, you know, he looked back at the earth from space and he said he realized
"you don't go to heaven when you die. You go to heaven when you're born." And it's just you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this blackness,
all this nothingness, and there's one gem of
life, and it's earth. - It is a gem. What, you know, you've talked a lot about decision making throughout
your time with Amazon. What was that decision
like to be the first to ride New Shephard? Like what, just be before
you talked to your mom. - Yeah. - What, like the pros and cons, like actually as one human being, as a leader of a company on all fronts, like what was that decision making like? - I decided that, first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built it. I know the vehicle. I am very comfortable with
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 Shephard architecture. - Can you actually describe, what do you mean by escape system? What's involved? - We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, you know, while the main
rocket engine is firing, we can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule
and escape from the booster. It's a very challenging system
to build, design, validate, test, all of these things. It is the reason that I am
comfortable letting anyone go on New Shephard. So the booster is as safe and
reliable as we can make it. But we are harnessing, whenever you're talking
about rocket engines, I don't care what rocket
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, you know, all of the previous,
you know, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems. And we have on New shephard
of unusual escapes, most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system. So the solid rocket motor
is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule. And it pushes and it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, so if we have a nominal
mission, we land with it. The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission, and so they get wasted
even in a nominal mission. And so again, you know, cost
really matters on these things. So we figured out how to
have the escape system be a reusable , in the event that it's
not used, you can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go and so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who designed it. I had 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 risks, you
know, they climb mountains, they skydive, they do deep
underwater scuba diving, and so on. People are okay taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk. But it is something, because
it's a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost
to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the
reasons I was so calm inside and maybe others weren't just calm, they didn't know as
much about it as I did. - Who was in charge of
engaging the escape system? Did you have- - It's automated. - Okay. - The escape system is- - I was visualizing deployment of that. - is completely automated. Automated is better because
it can react so much faster. - So yeah, for tourism rockets safety is a huge, huge, huge
priority for space exploration also, but a tiny, you know, a delta less. - Yes. I mean I think for you
know, if you're doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk. If you're saving
somebody's life, you know, if you are engaging in real exploration, these are things where, you know, I personally think we
would accept more risk in part because you have to. - Is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rate of progress in Blue Origin? - Blue Origin needs to be much faster. And it's one of the
reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon
a couple of years ago. I needed, I wanted to come in and 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'm still the executive 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. - 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 of all those kinds of things. Is that apply at Blue Origin or is the- - It does apply. You know, I'm leading this directly. We are gonna become the
world's most decisive company across any industry. And so you know, at Amazon
ever since the beginning, I said we are gonna become the world's most customer
obsessed company. And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare
industry and wanna know how did you guys, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you actually not
just pay lip service, but actually do that? And from you know, all different industries
should come on and study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing at Blue Origin and it will help us move faster is we are gonna become the
world's most decisive company. We're gonna get really good at taking appropriate technology risk and 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 is, I took about one-way
doors and two-way doors. Most decisions are two-way doors. - Can ou explain that? 'Cause I love that metaphor. - If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door
decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision, you can come back in
and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are
one-way door decisions. You go in that door,
you're not coming back. And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully. If you can think of yet another
way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that. So, you know, when I
was the CEO of Amazon, I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer because somebody would be bringing me a one-way door decision. And I would say okay, I can
think of three more ways to analyze that. So let's go do that. Because we ha we are not gonna be able to reverse this one easily. Maybe you can reverse it,
but it's gonna 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 on all decisions. - For everything, yeah. - 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 the irreversible ones, those are the ones that
should be elevated up to you know, the senior most executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done. - Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here is to know the difference
in one-way and two-way, I think you mentioned. - Yes. - I mean I think you
mentioned Amazon Prime, the decision to sort
of create Amazon Prime as a one-way door. I mean, it's not, it's
unclear if it is or not, but it probably is, and it's
a really big risk to go there. - There are a bunch of
decisions like that that are you know, changing the decision is gonna be very, very complicated. Some of them are technical decisions too, because some technical decisions are like quick drying cement. You know, if you're
gonna, once you make 'em, 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 changed your
mind, that would be a very, that would be a very big setback. Do you see what I'm saying? - Yeah. - 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. - Yeah, one of the things I really liked, perhaps it's not a two-way door decision is I disagree and commit phrase. So don't, so somebody brings up an idea to you. If it's a two-way door, you state that you don't
understand enough to agree, but you still back them. I'd love for you to explain it. - Yeah, disagree and commit is
a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing. - Yeah. - So- - I'm gonna use that in my personal life. I disagree, but commit. - It's very common in
any endeavor in life, in business, and any you know, anybody where you have teammates. You have a teammate and
the two of you disagree. At some point you have to make a decision. And you know, in companies we tend to organize hierarchically. So there's this 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. One of my direct reports
would very much wanna do it, do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say Jeff, I think
you're wrong, and here's why. And we would go back and forth and I would often say you know what? I don't think you're right, but I'm gonna gamble with you and you're closer to the
ground truth than I am. I had known you for 20 years,
you have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either. Not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision. And I'm agreeing to
commit to that decision. So I'm not gonna be second guessing it. I'm not gonna be sniping at it. I'm not gonna be saying I told you so. I'm gonna try actively to
help make sure it works. That's a really important
teammate behavior. There's so many ways
that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing on teams. And there are so many ways
when two people disagree about something, even,
I'm assuming in the case where everybody's well intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have, in our society
and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve
these kinds of disputes. A lot of 'em are, I think really bad. So, you know, an example
of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise, you know, look, we're in a room here and I could say Lex, how tall do you
think this ceiling is? And you'd be like I don't
know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall. And I would say I think it's 11 feet tall. - Yeah. - And then we'd say you know what? Let's just call it 11 and a half feet. That's compromise. - Yeah. - Instead of the right
thing to do is you know, to get a tape measure
or figure out some way of actually measuring, but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get
it to the top of the ceiling and all these things that requires energy. Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism
is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the
height of the ceiling, where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth. Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time
is just who's more stubborn. - Yeah. - 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 and say never get to a point where you are resolving
something by you know, who gets exhausted first. Escalate that. I'll help you make the decision. Because that's so de-energized and such a terrible, lousy
way to make a decision. - So you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads
to high velocity of decision. - Yes. And you wanna try to get as
close to truth as possible. So you want like you know,
exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. - Yes. - And compromise is not truth seeking. So, you know, it doesn't mean, now, and there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that's where disagreeing
commit can come in. But it's escalation is better
than more of attrition. Escalate to you know, to your boss and say hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other, we're
respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to you know,
make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving
forward quickly on decisions as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things
down is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels. You know, so it has to
be part of the culture to get high velocity. You know, Amazon has a
million and a half people and the company is still fast. We're still decisive, we're still quick. And that's because the
culture supports that. - At every scale in a distributed way. - Yes. - Try to maximize the
velocity of decisions. - Exactly. - You've mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that. - Yeah. - There's a lot going on there and you haven't really
talked about it much. So in addition to the
Artemis program with NASA, Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? There's a sexy picture on
Instagram with one of them. Is it the MK1, I guess? - Yeah, The MK1. The picture is me with Bill
Nelson, the NASA administrator. - Just to clarify, the
Lander is the sexy thing about the Instagram. Really wanna clarify that. - I know it's not me. I know it was either the lander or Bill. - Okay. I love Bill, but- - Thank you for clarifying. - Okay. - Yes, the MK1 Lander is
designed to take 3000 kilograms to the surface of the moon
in a cargo, expendable cargo. It's an expendable lander. Lands on the moon, stays there, take 3000 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 called the MK2. MK1 is also fueled with liquid hydrogen, and which is for high energy emissions, like landing on the surface of the moon, the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage. The disadvantage of
hydrogen has always been that it's, since 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 we're doing, as
part of our lunar program, it's developing solar powered cryo coolers 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. - So the idea with MK1, both MK1 and MK2 is the New Glenn can carry
it from the surface of earth to the surface of the moon. - Exactly. So the Mk1 is expendable. The lunar lander we're
developing for NASA, the Mk2 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 single stage configuration
and then take off. So the whole you know, if you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander and 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 absent stage would go back up into lunar orbit where it would rendezvous with the command module. Here what we're doing is we
have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that it can bring
the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over. And the point of doing that, of course, is to reduce cost so that
you can make lunar missions more affordable over time, which is, that's one of
NASA's big objectives because this time the
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 continue. - And so there's a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have about- - Yeah. - Like sustaining life where
a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time? - Well, one of the things we're working on is using lunar resources
like lunar regolith to manufacture commodities
and even solar cells on the surface of the moon. We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from
lunar regolith stimulant, and this solar cell is only
about 7% power efficient. So it's very inefficient
compared to you know, the more advanced solar cells
that we make here on earth. But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory that you can land on
the surface of the moon, and then the raw material
for those solar cells is simply lunar regolith, then you can just you know, continue to 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
has a lot of oxygen in it. It's bound very tightly, you know, as oxides with other elements. And so you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive. So that also could work
together with the solar cells. But if you can, and then ultimately we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And we know there is ice water in those, or water ice in those craters. And we know that we can break
that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. And then you'd not only have oxygen, but you'd also have a very
good high efficiency propellant fuel in hydrogen. So there's a lot we can do to make the moon more
sustainable over time. But the very first step, the thing, the kind of gate that all
of that has to go through is we need to be able
to land cargo and humans on the surface of the moon
at an acceptable cost. - To fast forward a little bit, is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars? One or the other, or both? - It's very unlikely. I think it's probably
something that gets done by future generations by
the time it gets to me. I think in my lifetime
that's probably gonna 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 a fighting shot here maybe. But I think if we are
placing reasonable bets on such a thing, in my lifetime, that
will continue to be done by professional astronauts. - Yeah, so these are
risky, difficult missions. - And probably missions that
require a lot of training. You know, you are going there
for a very specific purpose to do something. We're gonna be able to
do a lot on the moon too with automation. So, you know, in terms of
setting up these factories and doing all that, we are
sophisticated enough now with automation and we
probably don't need humans to tend those factories and machines. So there's a lot that's
gonna be done in both modes. - So I have to ask the
bigger picture question about the two companies
pushing humanity forward out towards the stars,
Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators? Which, and to what degree? - Well, I would say you know,
just like the internet is big and there are lots of
winners at all scale levels. I mean, there are half
a dozen giant companies that you know, the internet has made, but they're a bunch of
medium sized companies and a bunch of small
companies, all successful, all with profits, dreams, all driving great customer experiences. That's what we wanna see in space. That kind of dynamism and space is big. There's room for a bunch of winners and it's gonna happen at all skill levels. And so you know, SpaceX is
gonna be successful for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful and I hope there are another you know, five companies right behind us. - But, you know, I spoke to
Elon a few times recently about you, about Blue Origin,
and he was very positive about you as a person and very supportive of all the efforts you've
been leading at Blue. What's your thoughts? You worked with a lot of
leaders at Amazon, at Blue. What's your thoughts about
Elon as a human being and a leader? - Well, I don't really
know Elon very well. 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. - Yeah, I just, I hope you
guys hang out sometimes, shake hands, and sort of
have a kind of friendship that would inspire just
the entirety of humanity. 'cause you, what you're doing is like one of the big grand
challenges ahead for humanity. - Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these endeavors, we're very like-minded. - Yeah. - And so I think, you know, I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we're very like-minded. And so I, you know, I love that idea. - 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. - He is, yeah. I know, right. Yes. This is what the giant orange
extension cord and yeah. - 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 all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like 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? - 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 mean just be
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 know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. And the other hand you
have to ignore all of that and just be a hundred
percent sure it's gonna work. And you're doing both
things at the same time. You're holding that
contradiction in your head. But it was so, it was so exciting. I love you know, every, from 1994 when the company was founded to 1995, when we opened our doors all the way until today,
I find Amazon so exciting. 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 et cetera. 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. - 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 and just the letters to shareholders. So you wrote up explaining
the idea of day one thinking, I think you first wrote about
in 97 letters to shareholders. Then you also, in a way
wrote it 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. Can you explain this day one thing? This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning
and the journey of Amazon. - It's really a very simple, and I think age old idea
about renewal and rebirth. And like every day is day one. Every day you are deciding
what you're gonna do. And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were, or any self-consistency. Self-consistency even can be a trap. And so day one thinking is kind of, we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions
every day about invention, about customers, about how
we're going to operate, what our, 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 tenants. And this, the tenants are kind of, they're not principles. They're a little more
tactical than principles, but it's kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody, whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put, these are the
tenets for this program. And in parentheses we always put, unless you know a better way. And that idea, unless
you know a better way, is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma. You never wanna get trapped by history. It doesn't mean you discard
history or ignore it. There's so much value in
what has worked in the past. But you can't be blindly
following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one is you're always starting fresh. - And 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. Eager adoption of external trends, high velocity decision making, skeptical view of proxies. How do you fight off day two? - Well, you know, I'll talk about, because I think it's the one
that is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand 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. And so you know, maybe the metric is efficiency metric
around customer contacts per unit sold or something. 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 a inertia sets in where somebody a long time
ago invented that metric and they invented that metric. They decided we need
to watch for you know, customer returns per unit
sold as an important metric. But they had a reason why
they chose that metric. The person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching. And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy. - The proxy for truth, I guess. - The proxy for truth,
the proxy for customer, let's say in this case, it's a
proxy for customer happiness. And, but that metric is not
actually customer happiness, it's a proxy for customer happiness. The person who invented the metric understood that connection. Five years later, 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 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 gotta
constantly be on guard. And it's very, very common. This is a nuanced problem. It's very common, especially
in large companies, that they're managing to metrics that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted
out from under them a little. And the metrics are no longer
as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years
earlier invented the metric. - That is a nuance, but
that's a big problem, right? - It's a huge problem. - That something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize. - Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics. - Yes you do. - You know, you can't
ignore them, and want them, but you just have to
be constantly on guard. This is, you know, a way to
slip into day two thinking would be to manage your
business to metrics that you don't really understand. And you're not really sure
why they were invented in the first place, and you're not sure
they're still as relevant as they used to be. - What does it take to be the guy or gal 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. - This is such, you have just asked a
million dollar question. So this is what you're, if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general
about truth telling. - Yeah. - And we humans are not
really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. - Yeah, we are. - And you know, take you
back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village, if you go along to get
along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death
in the middle of the night. Truths are often, they
don't want to be heard. 'Cause important truths
can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward,
they can be exhausting. - Impolite and all that kind of stuff. - Yes, challenging. They can make people defensive even if that's not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it's a sports
team, a business, you know, a political organization,
an activist group, I don't care what it is. Any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. And you have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. And you have to talk to people, you have to remind people it's
okay that it's uncomfortable. 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. 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 and test it and find data
and reject the hypothesis, and so on. It's not easy. - But even in science, there's
like the senior scientists and the junior scientists. - Correct. - And then there's a hierarchy of humans where somehow seniority matters. - Yes. - In the scientific process, which is odd. - And that's true inside companies too. And so you wanna set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior
person if they have data. And that really is about
trying to you know, there are little things you can do. So for example, in every
meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience that, you know, if I speak first, even very strong-willed,
highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well if Jeff thinks that I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right. And so you can do little things like if you're the most senior
person in the room, go last. Let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally let's try to
have the most junior person go first and the second
and try to go in order of seniority so that you
can hear everyone's opinion 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. - So you're saying
implicitly or explicitly give permission for people
to have a strong opinion as long as it's backed by data. - Yes. And sometimes it can even, by the way, a lot of our most powerful
truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition based. And sometimes you don't
even have strong data, but you may know 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 'cause it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias. Like if there are two
interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy
and one of 'em is unhappy, it's a little dangerous
to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right. You may want to sort of
compensate for that human bias of looking for you know, trying
to find the silver lining and say look, that might be good, but I'm gonna go with it's
bad for now until we're sure. - So speaking of happiness
bias, data collection, and anecdotes, you have to, how's that for a transition? You have to tell me the
story of the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times. - Yeah, this is very early
in the history of Amazon. And we were going over
a weekly business review and a set of documents,
and I have 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. 'Cause the data, and it's usually not that 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 are, they shouldn't be complaining. 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, we're going through the WBR and the
weekly business review, and we get to this metric in the deck, and the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric. And I said, okay, let's call picked up the phone. And I dialed the 1-800 number
and called customer service. And we just waited in silence. - What did it turn out to
be, like a couple minutes? - Oh, it was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think. - Oh wow. - I mean it was many minutes. And so, you know, it
dramatically made the point that something was wrong
with the data collection. We weren't measuring the right thing. And that, you know, set
off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. And that's an example by
the way of truth telling, is like that's an
uncomfortable thing to do. But you have to seek truth
even when it's uncomfortable and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized
around really fixing things. - So that 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, truly like being, that's using the product,
that's enjoying the product. They like the subtle little things that make up their experience. Like how do you optimize those? - This is another really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage. And then there are small
things internally in 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 and I would encourage anybody if anybody listening to
this as a 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. So like I know in our
retail business at Amazon, 10 years from now, customers are still gonna want low prices. I know they're still
gonna want fast delivery. And I just know they're still
gonna want big selection. So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now I say, where a customer says, I love Amazon, I just wish the prices
were a little higher. 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. 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 and they never work their
way down the list to get to, they're working on big
things as they should and as you want them to. And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts. - Well, where would you put,
on the paper cuts spectrum, the buy now with one click button, which is I think pretty genius. So to me like, okay, my interaction with things
I love on the internet, there's things I do a lot. I may be representing regular human, 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 just fundamentally
makes my life better. Not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of- - Cognitive load. - 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? - 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 1-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 1-click shopping, again, this is like so
ingrained in people now, I'm impressed that you even notice it. I mean, most people- - Every time I click the button. - I just, surge of happiness. - This, there is in the perfect invention for the perfect moment,
in the perfect context, there is real beauty. - Yeah. - It is actual beauty. And it feels good. It's emotional, it's
emotional for the inventor, it's emotional for the
team that builds it. It's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal. And you can feel those things. - But to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the the day
one thinking effort. - Yeah, and you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty. - There's a lot of
books written about you. There's a book 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 Founders Podcast. That covers you a lot and
it does different analysis of different business advice
you've given over the years. I bring all that up
because I saw that there, 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 are thinking about
how technology changes us. Yeah. - We co-evolve with our tools. So, you know, we invent new tools and then our tools change us. - Which is fascinating to think about. - It goes in a circle. - And there's some aspect, you know, even just inside business 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. - A hundred percent. And you know, 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, it
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
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 do these long format things and reading books do too. Reading books is a long format thing. And we all do more of if you, if something is convenient,
we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know that we carry around a little, we carry around in our pocket a phone. And one of the things that phone does for the most part is it is an
attention shortening device because most of the
things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans. And I'm not even gonna 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 it's important
to spend some of your time and some of your life doing
long attention span things. - Yeah, I think you've
spoken about the value in your own life of focus, 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 a various trajectories to have an impact on human civilization. How do you think AI will change us? - You're talking about
you know, generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT and its soon successors, and these are incredibly
powerful technologies. To believe otherwise is to
bury her head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful. It's interesting to me that
that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they're discoveries. You know, the telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery. 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. Then you know, you have this debate about whether they're
gonna be good for humanity or bad for humanity. You know, even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity. I mean, you know, just regular
machine learning models that can make you know,
certain weapons of war that could be incredibly
destructive are very powerful. And they're not general AIs, they're just, they could just be very smart weapons. And so we have to think
about all of those things. I'm very optimistic about this. So even in the face of
all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to
help us and save us even than they are to unbalance,
hurt us, and destroy us. I think you know, we humans
have a lot of ways of, we can make ourselves go extinct. You know, these things
may help us not do that. You know, so they may actually save us. So the people who are you
know, overly concerned, in my view, overly concerned. It's a valid debate. 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. 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 of
the people I've talked to think that's the most
boring part of the movie. I thought it was the most fascinating because what's going on here is you realize we have invented
these awesome, destructive, powerful technologies
called nuclear weapons and they're managed and
you know, we humans are, we're not really capable
of wielding those weapons. We're, you know, that's
what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is just, he wrongly thinks,
he's like being so petty. He thinks that he said something, that Oppenheimer said something
bad to Einstein about him. They didn't talk about him at all, as you find out in the
final scene of the movie. And yet he spent his career
trying to be vengeful and petty. And that's the problem. We as a species are not
really sophisticated enough and mature enough to
handle these technologies. And so, and by the way,
before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency and there's a lot of things
would have to happen, but there's so much
benefit that's gonna 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. I think it's an incredible
moment to be alive and to witness the transformations
that are gonna happen. How quickly will happen no one knows. But over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we're gonna see
really remarkable advances. And I personally am very excited about it. - First of all, really interesting to say that it's discoveries that it's true that we don't know the
limits of what's possible with the current language models. - We don't. - And like it could be
a few tricks and hacks here and there that that open doors to whole entire new possibilities. - 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 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 to learn how to drive. And you know, your average 16-year-old figures it out with many fewer miles. So there are still some tricks I think that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've
learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a
question of scaling things up, but what's interesting is
that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes
because it's actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends. - Yeah, and there's
some more nuanced aspect about human beings that's interesting. 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 can just, it basically
is a very good bullshitter. So if there's not enough data, if there's not enough sort of data in the training data
about a particular topic, it's just going to concoct
accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating
problem to try to solve. How do you get language models to infer what is true and
not to sort of introspect? - Yeah, they need to be taught to say I don't know more often. - Yeah. - And I know of several humans who could be taught that as well. - 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? - Oh, so many. - Yeah. - I mean, you know, just to, we have Alexa and Echo
and Alexa has you know, hundreds of millions of
installed base, you know, inputs. And so there's, you know,
there's Alexa everywhere and guess what Alexa is
about to get a lot smarter. - Yeah. - And so that's really you know, from a product point of
view, that's super exciting. - There's so many opportunities there. - So many opportunities. Shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing. And AWS you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock, which our corporate clients at
AWS, our enterprise clients, they want to be able to
use these powerful models with their own corporate data Without accidentally
contributing their corporate data to that model. And so those are the tools we're building for them with Bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here. - Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are
fascinating of how to, 'cause so much value can be gained by training on private data that you want to keep the secure. It's a fascinating technical problem. - Yes. This is a very challenging
technical problem and it's one that we're you
know, making progress on and dedicated to solving
for our customers. - Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots maybe Alexa have a romantic relationship? Like in the movie Her. - Well, I mean, I think- - I'm just brainstorming products here. - If you look at the
spectrum of human variety and what people like you
know, sexual variety. - Yes. - You know, there are
people who like everything. So the answer to your
question has to be yes. - Okay. - I don't know how- - I guess I'm asking when? - I don't know how
widespread that will be. - All right. - But it will happen. - I was just asking when for
a friend, but it's all right. Moving on. Next question. What's a perfectly productive
day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You're one of the most
productive humans in the world. - Well, I first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter. I like have a coffee. - Can you define putter? - Just like I slowly move around. I'm not as productive
as you might think I am. I mean, 'cause I do believe in wandering and I sort of I, you know,
I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat with Lauren, I
drink my first coffee. So I kind of, I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally. 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. - Why am I here at the gym? - Why am I here at the gym? Why don't I do something else? You know, it's not always easy. - What's your social
motivation in those moments? - I know that I'll feel
better later if I do it. And so like the real source of motivation, I can tell the days when I skip it, I'm not 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'll have more energy
for the rest of my day and so on and so on. - What's your exercise routine? Just to linger on that. How much do you curl? I mean, what are we talking about here? That's all I do at the gym. So I just- - My routine, you know, on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about 45
minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of
some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who you know, I love who pushes me, which is really helpful. You know, I'll be like, he'll say Jeff, you think you could, can we go up on that weight a little bit? And I'll think about it? And I'll be like no, I don't think so. And he'll look at me and
say yeah, I think you can. And of course he's right. - Yeah, of course, of course. - So it's cool to have
somebody push you a little bit. - But almost every day you do that? - I do, almost every day.
I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting and I rotate. I do a pulling day and a
pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff. - So puttering, coffee, gym. - Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work. - Work. What's work look like? What are the productive
hours look like for you? - I, you know, so a couple years ago I left as the CEO of Amazon. And I have never worked harder in my life. 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 and the small, there's
all the frustrations that come along with everything. You know, we're trying to
get to rate manufacturing as we talked about. That's super important. We'll get there. We just hired a new CEO, a guy I've known for
close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limp, who I love. He's amazing. You know, so we're
super lucky to have Dave and you know, we're going to, you're gonna see us move faster there. But, so my day of work, you
know, reading documents, having meetings, sometimes in
person, sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am. It's all about you know, the technology. It's about the organization. It's about you know, I'm very, I have architecture
and technology meetings almost every day on various
subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It's super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology. My least favorite part of it is you know, building
organizations and so on. That's important, but it's
also my least favorite part. So, you know, that's
why they call it work. You don't always get to
do what you wanna do. - How do you achieve
time where you can focus and truly think through problems? - I do little thinking retreats. So for, 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 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 trying to like wander
your way to a solution. And because like when
that happens just right, it makes all the other
meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it. And you get real breakthroughs
in meetings like that. - Can you actually describe
the crisp document? Like this is one of the
legendary aspects of Amazon, of the way you approach meetings? Is this the six page memo? Maybe first describe the process of running a meeting with memos. - Meetings at Amazon and
at Blue Origin are unusual. When we get new, when new people come in,
like a new executive joins, they're a little taken aback sometimes because a typical meeting, we'll start with a six page
narratively structured memo and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit
there silently together in the meeting and read. - I love this. - Take notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way we do study, you could say I would like
everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem
is people don't have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo
or maybe not read it at all. And they're trying to catch up. And they're also bluffing
like they were in college having pretended to do the reading. - Yeah, Exactly. - It's better just to carve
out the time for people - And do it together. - So now we're all on the same page. We've all read the memo and now we can have a
really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow
presentation, you know, a PowerPoint presentation of some kind where that has so many difficulties. But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally the last
thing you want to do is sell. You want to, you're again,
you're truth seeking. You're trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it's easy for the author
and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It's hard to write a six page memo. A good six page memo might
take two weeks to write. You have to write it,
you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have
to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it
might take two weeks. So the author, it's really
a very difficult job, but for the audience it's much better. So you can read a half hour and you know, there are little problems with
PowerPoint presentations too. You know, senior executives
interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question's gonna be
answered on the next slide, but you never got there. If you read the whole memo in advance, 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 the person who's 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 memos has kind of got to be very vulnerable. They've gotta put all
their thoughts out there. And they've got to go first. But that's great 'cause
it makes 'em really good. And so, and you get to
see their real ideas and you're not trampling on
them accidentally in a big, you know, PowerPoint presentation. - What's that feel like
when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there and everybody's reading your thing, you're like- - I think it's mostly terrifying. - Yeah. Like maybe in a good way? - I think it's- - Like purifying. - I think it's terrifying
in a productive way. - Yeah. - But I think it's emotionally a very nerve wracking experience. - Is there a art science to the writing of the six page memo or just
writing in general to you? - I mean, it's really
got to be a real memo. So it means you know,
paragraphs have topic sentences, like it's verbs and nouns. You can't, that's the other
problem with PowerPoints, they're often just bullet points and 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 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. So it really saves you
time in the long run. - So that part is crisp
and then the rest is messy, crisp document. - Yeah, so you don't wanna 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 that
may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings, that's usually for
incremental improvement. And you're 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. - So we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask
about the 10,000 year clock. That's what I'm known for, is the humor. Okay. Can you explain what the
10,000 year clock is? - 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 a idea conceived by brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the '80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just
very conceptually think of the 10,000 year clock as it you know, it ticks once a year. It chimes once you know,
every a hundred years. And the cuckoo comes out
once every a thousand years. So it just sort of slows everything down. And it's a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices
and everything else. It's in a remote location,
both to protect it, but also so that visitors have
to kind of make a pilgrimage. The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years, but over time it will
take on the patina of age and then it will become a
symbol for long-term thinking that will actually, hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons. And my view that's really
important as we have become, as a species, as a
civilization more powerful, you know, we're really
affecting the planet now. We're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction, we have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves. And the problems we
create can be so large. You know, the unintended consequences of some of our actions
like climate change, putting carbon in the
atmosphere is a perfect example. That's an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution
that a lot of benefits from it. But we've also got this side effect that is very detrimental. We need to be, we need to
start training ourselves to think longer term. Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term that are impossible to solve
if you think short term. And we aren't really good
at thinking long-term as you know, it's not really, we're kind of, you know, five
years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past. And we probably need to
stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years. And we do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so the clock is, in a
way, it's an art project, it's a symbol. And if it ever has any
power to influence people to think longer term, that won't happen for hundreds of years. But we have to, you know,
we're gonna build it now and let it accrue the patina of age. - Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out? Here on earth? - I think so. But you know, the United
States won't exist. Like whole civilizations rise and fall. 10,000 years is so long. Like no nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to 10,000 years. - And the increasing rate of progress makes that even- - Even less likely 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 and so on. I don't know, but I think we'll be here. - On that grand scale,
a human life feels tiny. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? - No, I'm you know, I used
to be afraid of death. I did. I 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
would like to stay alive for as long as possible,
but I'd like to be, I'm really more focused on health span. I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want to you know, this I wanna be healthy,
healthy, healthy, and then gone. I don't want the long decay. And I'm curious, I wanna
see how things turn out. You know, I'd like to be here. I love my family and my close friends and I want to, I'm curious about them and I wanna see, so I have a lot of reasons to stay around, but it's mortality doesn't
have have that effect on me that it did you know,
maybe when I was in my 20s. - Well Jeff, thank you
for creating Amazon, one of the most incredible
companies in history. And thank you for trying
your best to make humans and multi-planetary species expanding out into our solar system, maybe beyond, to meet the aliens out there. And thank you for talking today. - Well, Lex, thank you for doing your part to lengthen our attention spans. Appreciate that very much. - Thanks for listening to this
conversation with Jeff Bezos. To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself. "Be stubborn on vision, but
flexible on the details." Thank you for listening and
hope to see you next time.