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 Friedman 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 impactful.
It's a real working ranch.
And I spent all my summers on that ranch from age four
to 16, and my grandfather was really taking me those
in the summers, and in the early summers,
he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch,
because, of course, a four-year-old is a burden,
not a help in real life.
He was really just watching me and taking care of me.
And he was doing that because my mom was so young.
She had me when she was 17,
and so he was sort of giving her a break,
and my grandmother and my grandfather
would take me for these summers.
But as I got a little older,
I actually was helpful on the ranch, and I loved it.
I was out there.
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 done all the things that any rancher would do,
vaccinated the animals, everything.
But we had a, my grandfather, after my grandmother died,
I was about 12, and I kept coming to the ranch.
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 p.m. or so to watch Days of Our Lives,
like Sands Through an Hourglass,
so are the days of our lives.
Just the image of that, the two of us sitting there
watching a soap opera.
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.
He did everything himself.
He made his own veterinary tools.
He would make needles to suture the cattle up with.
He would find a little piece of wire and heat it up
and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it.
So you learn different things on a ranch
than you would learn 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
because it was completely broken down.
It was like a 1955 Caterpillar D6 bulldozer.
Knew it would have cost, I don't know, more than $100,000.
And we spent an entire summer fixing,
like repairing that bulldozer.
We'd use mail order to buy big gears
for the transmission, and they'd show up,
and they'd be too heavy to move,
so we'd have to build a crane.
Just that kind of problem-solving mentality.
He had it so powerfully.
He did all of his own.
He didn't pick up the phone and call somebody.
He would figure it out on his own,
doing his own veterinary work.
But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer
and then going in for a little break at 1 p.m.
You're watching soap opera.
Laying on the floor.
That's how he watched TV.
He was a really, really remarkable guy.
That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also.
In all those Westerns,
when he's not doing what he's doing,
he's just watching soap operas.
All right, I read that you fell in love
with the idea of space and space exploration
when you were five,
while 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 U.S.
was in many ways epic.
It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events.
First satellite to space, first human to space,
first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon,
then some failures, explosions,
deaths on both sides actually,
and then the first human walking on the moon.
What are some of the more inspiring moments
or insights you take away from that time,
those few years, just 12 years?
Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there.
One of the great things to take away from that,
one of the great von Braun quotes is,
I have 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, going to the moon
was literally an analogy that people used
for something that's impossible.
Oh yeah, you'll do that when men walk on the moon.
And of course it finally happened.
So I think it was pulled forward in time
because of the space race.
I think with the geopolitical implications
and how much resource was put into it.
At the peak, that program was spending
two or 3% of GDP on the Apollo program.
So much resource, I think it was pulled forward in time.
We kind of did it ahead of when we quote unquote
should have done it.
And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel.
I mean, it's truly incredible.
It's the 20th century version
of building the pyramids or something.
It's an achievement that because it was pulled forward
in time and because it did something
that had previously been thought impossible,
it rightly deserves its place
as in the pantheon of great human achievements.
And of course you named the projects, the rockets
that Blue Origin is working on
after some of the folks involved.
I don't understand why I didn't say new Gagarin.
Is that?
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's though.
In fact, I think his first words in space
I think are incredible.
He purportedly said, my God, it's blue.
And that really drives home.
No one had seen the earth from space.
No one knew that we were on this blue planet.
No one knew what it looked like from out there.
And Gagarin was the first person to see it.
One of the things I think about is how dangerous
those early days were for Gagarin, for Glenn,
for everybody involved.
Like how big of a risk they were all taking.
They were taking huge risks.
I'm not sure what the Soviets thought
about Gagarin's flight,
but I think that the Americans thought
that the Alan Shepard flight,
the flight that New Shepard is named after,
the first American in space.
He went on his suborbital flight.
They thought he had about a 75% chance of success.
So that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.
It's kind of interesting that Alan Shepard
is not quite as famous as John Glenn.
So for people who don't know,
Alan Shepard is the first astronaut.
The first American in space.
American in suborbital flight.
Correct.
And then the first orbital flight is John Glenn.
John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth.
By the way, I have the most charming, sweet,
incredible letter from John Glenn,
which I have framed and hang on my office wall,
where he tells me how grateful he is
that we have named New Glenn after him.
And 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,
this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn.
And he's just, he's got a great sense of humor.
He's very happy about it and grateful.
It's very sweet.
Does he say, P.S. don't mess this up or is that?
No, he doesn't.
Make me look good.
He doesn't do that.
But John, wherever you are, we got you covered.
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 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, 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.
The planetary surfaces are just way too small.
So you can, I mean, unless you turn them
into giant space stations or something.
But yeah, we will take materials from the moon
and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt
and so on, and we'll build a giant O'Neill style colonies
and people will live in those.
And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces.
You can spin them to get normal earth gravity.
You can put them where you want them.
I think most people are gonna wanna live near earth,
not necessarily in earth orbit,
but in earth vicinity orbits.
And so they can move relatively quickly back and forth
between their station and earth.
I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages,
are not gonna wanna give up earth altogether.
They go to earth for vacation.
Yeah, same way that you might go
to Yellowstone National Park for vacation.
People will, and people will get to choose
where they live on earth or where they live in space,
but they'll be able to use much more energy
and much more material resource in space
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 idea is that space travel
and space exploration is a way to preserve earth.
Exactly.
This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets.
We know that this is the good one.
Yeah, not 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 plant life
and 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 humans have gotten so sophisticated
and large and impactful,
as we stride across this planet,
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.
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 all, we live better lives by and large
than our grandparents did
and their grandparents did and so on.
And you can see that in global illiteracy rates,
global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates,
almost any metric you choose,
we're better off than we used to be.
We get antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving medical care
and so on and so on.
And there's one thing that is moving backwards
and it's the natural world.
So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age,
the natural world was pristine.
It was incredible.
And we have traded some of that pristine beauty
for all of these other gifts
that we have as an advanced society.
And we can have both,
but to do that, we have to go to space.
And all of this really,
the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.
And when you look at,
you 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.
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 a geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity.
It has two different kinds of propulsion.
It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion.
And so you can use Blue Ring in a couple of different ways.
You can slowly move, let's say up to geosynchronous orbit
using electric propulsion that might take 100 days
or 150 days, depending on how much mass you're carrying.
And then, and reserve your chemical propulsion
so that you can change orbits quickly
in geosynchronous orbit.
Or you can use the chemical propulsion first
to quickly get up to geosynchronous
and then use your electrical propulsion
to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit.
Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features.
It provides a lot of services to these payloads.
So the payload, it 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 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 a, 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.
A-W-S-S.
Okay, so compute in 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.
So we're also building a lunar lander,
which is of course designed to land humans
on the surface of the moon.
I want to ask you about that.
Well, let me actually 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 are you 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.
That's why I went to Princeton in the first place.
It was definitely.
And then I realized I was going to be
a mediocre theoretical physicist.
And there were 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, there are a thousand ways to be smart
and to be a really, 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,
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 the universe wants you to be.
And so I switched to computer science
and 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 to do truly great creativity,
actually Walter Isaacson writes about you.
Puts you on the same level as Einstein.
That's very kind.
I have, I'm an inventor.
If you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor.
And I look at things and I can come up with
atypical solutions 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, I self-identify as an inventor
more than anything else.
Yeah, and he describes it in all kinds of different ways
Walter Isaacson does, that creativity,
combined with childlike wonder that you've maintained
still to this day, all of that combined together.
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,
so when I sit down to work on a problem,
I know I don't know where I'm going.
So to go in a straight line, to be efficient,
efficiency and invention are sort of at odds,
because invention, real invention,
not incremental improvement.
Incremental improvement is so important
in every endeavor and everything you do.
You have to work hard on also just making things
a little bit better.
But I'm talking about real invention,
real lateral thinking.
That requires wandering,
and you have to give yourself permission to wander.
I think a lot of people,
they feel like wandering is inefficient,
and 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, 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 really nothing more fun
than sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people
and spitballing and coming up with new ideas
and objections to those ideas
and then solutions to the objections
and going back and forth.
So 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 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
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.
Because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning,
because they do have so many easy objections to them.
So you need to kind of forewarn people and say, look,
I know it's going to take a lot of work
to get this to a fully formed idea.
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.
There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way.
And that is a really, like, when I go around
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
when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet.
You know, there's a thousand ways to be smart, sir.
Well, they might tell you, yeah,
but there are a million 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 and 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,
a 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,
liquefied natural gas, LNG, as the fuel
and LOX as the oxidizer.
The cycle is an ox-rich stage combustion cycle.
It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians.
It's a very good cycle.
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 Shepard 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 not dense at all.
So to store liquid hydrogen,
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 avionics system,
so you have a guidance and control system.
That is gonna be about the same mass and size
for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket.
And so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential
if you're building a very small rocket,
but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket.
So you have the parasitic mass thing.
And then if you look at, for example,
rocket engines have 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 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 in efficiencies.
And so 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 it's just, if you're making a small rocket engine,
you can move all the pieces by hand.
You could assemble it on a table.
One person can do it.
You know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations
and tooling and so on and so on.
When you start building big objects, infrastructure,
civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad
and the, you know, all this, we went and visited
and took you to the launch pad
and you can see it's so monumental.
And so just these things become major undertakings
both from an engineering point of view,
but also from a construction and cost point of view.
And even the foundation of the launch pad.
I mean, this is Florida.
Like, isn't it like swamp land?
Like how deep you have to go.
At Cape Canaveral, in fact, at most ocean, you know,
most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the ocean side
because you want to launch over water for safety reasons.
Yes, you have to drive pilings, you know,
dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know,
50, 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity
for these very large, you know, it's, yes,
these turn into major civil engineering projects.
I just have to say everything about that factory
is pretty bad-ass.
You said tooling, the bigger it gets, the more epic it is.
It does make it epic.
It's fun to look at, it's extraordinary.
It's humbling also,
because 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, you know, the materials involved.
Is there something interesting that you can describe
about the materials that comprise the rocket
so it has to be as light as possible, I guess,
whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions?
Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes
with other rocket people that I run into where,
say, what are the things
that would amaze the 1960s engineers?
Like, what's the change?
Because surprisingly, some of rocketry's greatest hits
have not changed.
They are still, they would recognize immediately
a lot of what we do today,
and it's exactly what they pioneered back in the 60s.
But a few things have changed.
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 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?
This is a remarkable technology.
This 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 want to weld together,
and then you move it at a very precise speed.
And instead of heating the material,
it heats it a little bit because of friction,
but not very much.
You can literally,
immediately after welding with stir friction welding,
you can touch the material, and it's just barely warm.
It literally stirs the molecules together.
It's quite extraordinary.
Relatively low temperature,
and I guess high temperatures is what 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,
because when you're,
let's say you're building a tank
that you're going to pressurize,
a large liquid natural gas tank
for our booster stage, for example.
If you are welding that with traditional methods,
you have to size those weld lands,
the thickness of those pieces,
with that knockdown for whatever damage
you're doing with the weld,
and that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank.
Even just looking at the fairings,
the result of that,
the complex shape that it takes,
and what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible,
because some people don't know it's on top of the rocket,
it's going to fall apart.
That's its task,
but it has to stay strong sometimes,
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'll sever the whole connection.
So if you want to go from 100% structural integrity
to zero as fast as possible, it's explosives.
It's 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 take advantage of the higher specific impulse.
The first stage lands downrange
on a landing platform in the ocean,
comes back for maintenance,
and get ready to do the next mission.
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, like time, cost, all the time.
I'm talking about cost.
Space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem.
We solved it back in the 50s and 60s.
You're making it sound easy.
The only interesting problem is dramatically reducing
the cost of access to orbit,
which is, if you can do that,
you open up a bunch of new endeavors
that lots of startup companies, everybody else can do.
So that's one of our missions,
is to be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit
so that there can be a kind of a renaissance,
a golden age of people doing all kinds
of interesting things in space.
I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem.
It's just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost.
You know you can describe every single problem
facing human civilization that way?
Physicists would say everything is a solved problem.
We've solved everything.
The rest is just, as Rutherford said,
that it's just stamp collecting.
It's just the details.
Some of the greatest innovations and inventions
and brilliance is in that cost reduction stage, right?
And you've had a long career of cost reduction.
For sure.
What does cost reduction really mean?
It means inventing a better way.
Yeah, exactly.
And when you invent a better way,
you make the whole world richer.
So whatever it was,
I don't know how many thousands of years ago,
somebody invented the plow.
And when they invented the plow,
they made the whole world richer
because they made farming less expensive.
And so it is a big deal to invent better ways.
That's how the world gets richer.
So what are some of the biggest challenges
on the manufacturing side and the engineering side
that you're facing in working to get
to the first launch of New Glenn?
The first launch is one thing,
and we'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year.
The real thing that's the bigger challenge
is making sure that our factory
is efficiently manufacturing at rate.
So rate production.
So consider if you want to launch New Glenn
24 times a year.
You need to manufacture a upper stage,
since they're expendable, every twice a month,
you need to do one every two weeks.
So 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.
Every upper stage has two BE3U engines.
So those engines, if you're gonna launch
the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month.
So you need an engine every week.
So you need to be, that engine needs
to be being produced at rate.
And there's all of the things that you need to do that,
all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures,
all the right people, process, et cetera.
So it's one thing to build a first article, right?
So that's, 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 Glenns at rate.
So the first one is produced in a way
that enables the production of the second,
the third and the fourth and the fifth and sixth.
You could think of the first article as kind of pushing,
it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along.
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 wanna make it sound
like any of it is easy.
I mean, the people who are designing the engines
and all of this, all of it is hard for sure.
But the challenge right now is driving really hard
to get to, is to get to rate manufacturing
and to do that in an efficient way.
Again, kind of back to our cost point,
if you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way,
you haven't really solved the cost problem
and maybe you haven't really moved
the state of the art forward.
All this has to be about moving
the state of the art forward.
There are easier businesses to do.
I always tell people, look, if you are trying
to make money, start a salty snack food company
or something.
You write that idea down.
Like make the Lex Friedman 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, 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.
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 that already existed.
It was called the postal service
and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on.
So all this heavy lifting infrastructure
was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders.
And that's why, when you look at the internet,
and 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 how people were accessing servers and so on.
And again, if that hadn't existed,
it would have been hundreds of billions of capex
to put that out there.
No startup company could have done that.
And so the problem you see,
if you look at the dynamism in the internet space
over the last 20 years,
it's because you see like two kids in a dorm room
could start internet company that could be successful
and do amazing things
because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure.
It was already there.
And that's what I wanna do.
I'd take my Amazon winnings
and use that to build heavy infrastructure
so that the next generation,
the generation that's my children and their children,
those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure.
Then there'll be space entrepreneurs
who start in their dorm room.
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.
They will, of course,
as kids do take all of this hard infrastructure
building for granted.
Of course.
Which is the entrepreneurial spirit.
That's an inventor's greatest dream
is that their inventions are so successful
that they are one day taken for granted.
Nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore.
Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an invention.
We pioneered customer reviews,
but now they're so commonplace.
Same thing with one-click shopping and so on.
But that's a compliment.
That's how, 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.
Every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed.
How does this work?
The logistics, the work, the all.
That proves you're a very curious explorer.
All right, all right.
Back to rockets.
Timeline.
You said 2024.
As it stands now, are both the first test launch
and the launch of Escapade Explorers to Mars still possible?
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.
I 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.
So 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 100% 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.
100%.
Every launch I go to for New Shepard,
for other vehicles too,
I'm always nervous for these launches.
But yes, for sure.
A first launch,
to have no nervousness about that
would be some sign of derangement, I think.
Well, I got to visit the launch,
but it's pretty epic.
We have done a tremendous amount of ground testing,
a tremendous amount of simulation.
So 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 cross your fingers.
I guarantee you you'll have fun watching it,
no matter what happens.
100%.
When the thing is fully assembled, it comes up.
Yeah, the transporter erector.
Just the transporter erector for a rocket of this scale
is extraordinary.
That's an incredible machine.
The vehicle travels out horizontally
and then kind of 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 New Shepard
on its first crewed flight.
How was that experience?
Were you terrified then?
You know, strangely, I wasn't.
You ride the rocket.
It's true. Less than ever acting.
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.
She's like, both of you?
It was an incredible experience.
We were laughing inside the capsule
and 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, 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 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 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 ascent, the floating in zero gravity,
I'll tell you something very interesting.
Zero gravity feels very natural.
I don't know if it's because we're,
it's like return to the womb.
It just confirms you're an alien, but that's it.
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 great Jim Lovell quote,
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, 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've talked a lot about decision-making
throughout your time with Amazon.
What was that decision like to be the first
to ride a new shepherd?
Just before you talk to your mom,
the pros and cons.
Actually, as one human being, as a leader of a company,
on all fronts, 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'm very comfortable with the escape system.
We put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle
as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined.
It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering
in the entire new shepherd architecture.
Can you actually describe what do you mean by escape system?
We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule
so that if anything goes wrong on ascent,
while the main rocket engine is firing,
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 shepherd.
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 historically, human-rated rockets
have had escape systems.
Only the space shuttle did not.
But Apollo had one, all of the previous Gemini, et cetera,
they all had escape systems.
And we have, on New Shepard, 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, 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 have great trust in them
and in the engineering that we did.
And I thought to myself, look, if I am not ready to go,
then I wouldn't want anyone to go.
A tourism vehicle has to be designed, in my view,
to have very, to be as safe as one can make it.
You can't make it perfectly safe.
It's impossible.
But you just have to, people will do things.
People take risk.
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.
If the others weren't as calm,
they didn't know as much about it as I did.
Who was in charge of engaging the escape systems?
It's automated.
Okay.
The escape system 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 delta less.
Yes, I mean, I think if you're doing,
there are human activities where we tolerate more risk.
If you're saving somebody's life,
if you are engaging in real exploration,
these are things where 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 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 gonna 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 turned the CEO,
I was still the executive chair there,
but I turned the CEO role over.
And the reason, the primary reason I did that
is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin,
adding some 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, removing barriers for progress,
sort of distributing, making everybody autonomous
and stuff, reliant, all those kinds of things.
Does that apply at Blue Origin, or is?
It does apply.
I know I'm leading this directly.
We are gonna become the world's most decisive company
across any industry.
And so at Amazon, forever since the beginning,
I said we're gonna become the world's most
customer obsessed company.
And no matter the industry,
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
to that, but actually do that?
And from all different industries should come
wanna study us to see how we accomplish that.
And the analogous thing at Blue Origin,
and it will help us move faster,
is we're gonna become the world's most decisive company.
We're gonna get really good
at taking appropriate technology risk
and making those decisions quickly,
being bold on those things.
And having the right culture that supports that,
you need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious.
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.
Changing your mind, I talk about one-way doors
and two-way doors.
Most decisions are two-way doors.
Can you 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, when I was 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.
It's okay, I can think of three more ways to analyze that.
So, let's go do that
because we are not gonna be able to reverse this one easily.
Maybe you can reverse if it's gonna be very costly
and very time consuming.
We really have to get this one right from the beginning.
And 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, 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 irreversible ones.
Those are the ones that should be elevated up
to the senior-most executives who should slow them down
and make sure that the right thing is being done.
Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here
is to know the difference between 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 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 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.
Once you make them, it gets really hard.
Choosing which propellants to use in a vehicle,
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 big setback.
Do you see what I'm saying?
So that's the kind of decision
you scrutinize very, very carefully.
Other things just aren't like that.
Most decisions are not that way.
Most decisions should be made by single individuals
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 if somebody brings up an idea to you,
if it's a two-way door,
you state that you don't understand enough to agree,
but you still back them.
I'd love for you to explain that.
I'm gonna start using that.
Yeah, disagree and commit is a really important principle
that saves a lot of arguing.
Yeah, 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 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 in companies, we tend to organize hierarchically.
So 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 I would often, I would be the one
who would disagree and commit.
Some, one of my direct reports would very much wanna do it,
do something in a particular way.
I would think it was a bad idea.
I would explain my point of view.
They would say, 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 though I'm assuming like the case
where everybody is well-intentioned.
They just have a very different opinion
about what the right decision is.
And we have in our society and inside companies,
we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use
to resolve these kinds of disputes.
A lot of them are, I think, really bad.
So an example of a really bad way
of coming to agreement is compromise.
So compromise, we're in a room here and I could say,
Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is?
And you'd be like, I don't know, Jeff,
maybe 12 feet tall.
And I would say, I think it's 11 feet tall.
And then we'd say, you know what,
let's just call it 11 and a half feet.
That's compromise.
Instead of the right thing to do is to get a tape measure
or figure out some way of actually measuring,
but think getting that tape measure
and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling
and all these things, that requires energy.
Compromise, the advantage of compromise
as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy,
but it doesn't lead to truth.
And so in things like the height of the ceiling
where truth is a noble thing,
you shouldn't allow compromise to be used
when you can know the truth.
Another really bad resolution mechanism
that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn.
This is also, let's say 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 this is where escalation,
I try to ask people who on my team,
I say, never get to a point
where you are resolving something
by who gets exhausted first.
Escalate that.
I'll help you make the decision.
Because that's so de-energizing
and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.
Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible
because that ultimately leads to a high velocity?
Yes, and you want to try to get
as close to truth as possible.
So exhausting the other person is not truth-seeking
and compromise is not truth-seeking.
And there are a lot of cases
where no one knows the real truth
and that's where disagree and commit can come in.
But escalation is better than war of attrition.
Escalate 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 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 skill levels.
So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity.
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 and in a distributed way,
you try to maximize the velocity of decisions.
Exactly.
You mentioned the lunar program.
Let me ask you about that.
Yeah.
There's a lot going on there
and you haven't really talked about it much.
So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA,
Blue is doing its own lander program.
Can you describe it?
There's a sexy picture on Instagram with one of them.
Is it the MK1, I guess?
Yeah, the Mark 1.
The picture here is me with Bill Nelson,
the NASA administrator.
Just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing
about the instrument.
Just really want to clarify that.
I know it's not me.
I know it was either the lander or Bill.
Okay.
I love Bill, but yeah, okay.
Yes, the Mark 1 lander is designed to take 3,000 kilograms
to the surface of the moon into cargo, expendable cargo.
It's an expendable lander, lands on the moon, stays there,
take 3,000 kilograms to the surface.
It can be launched on a single New Glenn flight,
which is very important.
So it's a relatively simple architecture,
just like the human landing system lander,
they're called the Mark 2.
Mark 1 is also fueled with liquid hydrogen,
which is for high energy missions,
like landing on the surface of the moon,
the high specific impulse of hydrogen
is a very big advantage.
The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been
that it's such a deep cryogen, it's not storable.
So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant
because it's boiling off.
And so what we're doing as part of our lunar program
is 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 both Mark 1 and Mark 2
is the New Glenn can carry it from the surface of earth
to the surface of the moon.
Exactly.
So the Mark 1 is expendable.
The lunar lander we're developing for NASA,
the Mark 2 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, if you look at the Apollo program,
the lunar lander in Apollo was really two stages.
It would land on the surface
and then it would leave the descent stage
on the surface of the moon.
And only the ascent stage would go back up into lunar orbit
where it would rendezvous with the command module.
Here, what we're doing is we have a single stage
lunar lander that carries down enough propellant
so that it can bring the whole thing back up
so that it can be reused over and over.
And the point of doing that, of course,
is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions
more affordable over time.
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 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
like a 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 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 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 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 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.
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 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 in terms of setting up these factories
and doing all that, we're sophisticated enough now
with automation that 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 just like the internet is big
and there are lots of winners at all skill levels.
I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies
that the internet has made,
but there are a bunch of medium-sized companies
and a bunch of small companies, all successful,
all with profit streams,
all driving great customer experiences.
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 SpaceX is gonna be successful for sure.
I want Blue Origin to be successful
and I hope there are another five companies right behind us.
But 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.
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 Tesla and SpaceX
without being a capable leader.
It's impossible.
Yeah, I hope you guys hang out sometimes,
shake hands and sort of have a kind of friendship
that would inspire just the entirety of humanity.
Because what you're doing is like one of the big,
grand challenges ahead for humanity.
Well, I agree with you.
And I think in a lot of these endeavors,
we're very like-minded.
Yeah.
So I think, I'm not saying we're identical,
but I think we're very like-minded.
And so I love that idea.
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, yes.
This is what the giant orange extension cord, 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,
thought the odds of success were low,
told all of our early investors
that I thought there was a 30% chance of success,
by which I'd just been getting your money back,
not 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.
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 100% sure it's gonna work.
And you're doing both things at the same time.
You're holding that contradiction in your head.
But it was so exciting.
I love, you know, every from 1994
when the company was founded,
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
in just the letters to shareholders.
So you wrote up explaining the idea of day one thinking.
I think you first wrote about it
in 97 letters to shareholders.
Then you also, in a way, wrote it about,
sad to say is your last letter to shareholders, 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're deciding what you're gonna do.
And you are not trapped by what you were or who you were,
or you need self consistency.
Self consistency even can be a trap.
And so day one thinking is kind of,
we start fresh every day
and we get to make new decisions every day
about invention, about customers,
about how we're going to operate,
even as deeply as what our principles are,
we can go back to that.
It turns out we don't change those very often,
but we change them occasionally.
And when we work on programs at Amazon,
we often make a list of tenets.
And the tenets are kind of, they're not principles,
they're a little more tactical than principles,
but it's kind of the main ideas
that we want this program to embody, whatever those are.
And one of the things that we do is we put,
these are the tenets for this program,
and then in parentheses,
we always put, unless you know a better way.
And that idea, unless you know a better way,
is so important because you never want
to get trapped by dogma.
You never want to get trapped by history.
It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it.
There's so much value in what has worked in the past,
but you can't be blindly following what you've done.
And that's the heart of day one,
is you're always starting fresh.
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 where 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.
Like if you sell a million units,
how many customer contacts do you get?
Or how many returns do you get?
And so on and so on.
And so what happens is a little bit
of a kind of inertia sets in
where somebody a long time ago invented that metric.
And they invented that metric.
They decided we need to watch for, you know,
customer returns per unit sold as an important metric.
But they had a reason why they chose that metric,
the person who invented that metric
and decided it was worth watching.
And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy.
The real thing-
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 got to constantly be on guard.
And it's very, very common.
This is a nuanced problem.
It's very common, especially in large companies,
that they are managing to metrics
that they don't really understand.
They don't really know why they exist.
And the world may have shifted out from under them a little.
And the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were
when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.
That is a nuance, but that's a big problem, right?
There's 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 can't ignore them.
You want them.
But you just have to be constantly on guard.
This is 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?
Because that's a very uncomfortable thing
to bring up in 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, if I generalize what you're asking,
you were talking in general about truth telling.
Yeah.
And we humans are not really truth seeking animals.
We are social animals.
Yeah, we are.
And 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
because important truths can be uncomfortable,
they can be awkward, they can be exhausting.
And polite.
Yes, challenging.
They can make people defensive,
even if that's not the intent.
But any high performing organization,
whether it's a sports team, a business,
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.
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.
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 a hypothesis,
test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on.
It's not easy.
But even in science, there's like the senior scientists
and the junior scientists,
and then there's a hierarchy of humans
where the seniority matters in the scientific process,
which it should not.
And that's true inside companies too.
And so you want to set up your culture
so that the most junior person can overrule
the most senior person if they have data.
And that really is about trying to, you know,
there are little things you can do.
So for example, in every meeting that I attend,
I always speak last.
And I know from experience that, you know,
if I speak first, even very strong-willed,
highly intelligent, high judgment participants
in that meeting will wonder,
well, if Jeff thinks that,
I came in this meeting thinking one thing,
but maybe I'm not right.
And so you can do little things like,
if you're the most senior person in the room, go last.
But everybody else go first.
In fact, ideally,
let's try to have the most junior person go first
and the second, then try to go in order of seniority
so that you can hear everyone's opinion
in a kind of unfiltered way.
Because we really do,
we actually literally change our opinions.
If somebody who you really respect says something,
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,
something about that feels right.
Let's go collect some data on that.
Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right.
But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right.
You can also fight inherent bias.
There's an optimism bias.
Like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data
and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy,
it's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion
that the happy interpretation is right.
You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias
of looking for, 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 question
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.
And it's usually not that the data is being mis-collected,
it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.
And so, if you have a bunch of customers
complaining about something and at the same time,
your metrics look like,
why aren't 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 it a 1-800 number
to get 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, I would call customer service myself.
And so one day we're in a meeting or going through the WBR
and the weekly business review,
and we get to this metric in the deck
and the guy who leads customer service
is to fit in the metric.
And I said, okay, let's call.
And I picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number
and called customer service.
And we just waited in silence for three-
What did it turn out to be?
Oh, it was really long, more than 10 minutes, I think.
Oh, wow.
I mean, it was many minutes.
And so, it dramatically made the point
that something was wrong with the data collection.
We weren't measuring the right thing
and that 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, the human being
that's using the product, that's enjoying the product,
like what they're, like the subtle little things
that make up their experience.
Like, how do you optimize those?
This is another really good and kind of deep question
because there are big things
that are really important to manage
and then there are small things.
Internally, to Amazon, we call them paper cuts.
So, we'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.
And you can identify the big things
and I would encourage anybody,
if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur,
has a small business, whatever,
think about the things that are not going to change
over 10 years and those are probably the big things.
So, like, I know that 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.
They never work their way down the list to get to,
they're working on big things, as they should,
and as you want them to, and so you need special teams
who are charged with fixing paper cuts.
Where would you put on the paper cut spectrum
the buy now with one click button,
which is, I think, pretty genius.
So to me, like, okay, my interaction with things
I love on the internet, there's things I do a lot,
I may be representing a regular human,
I would love for those things to be frictionless.
For example, booking airline tickets, just saying.
But, you know, 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.
But first of all, buying stuff is a pleasant experience.
Having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it
is a pleasant experience.
And 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 that particular thing is probably a solution
to a number of paper cuts.
So if you go back and look at our order pipeline
and how people shopped on Amazon,
before we invented one click shopping,
there was more friction.
There was a whole series of paper cuts
and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts.
And I think you're absolutely right, by the way,
that when you come up with something
like one click shopping, again,
this is like so ingrained in people now.
I'm impressed that you even notice it.
I mean, most people-
Every time I click the button,
I just, a surge of happiness.
This, there is in the perfect invention
for the perfect moment, in the perfect context,
there is real beauty.
It is actual beauty and it feels good.
It's emotional.
It's emotional for the inventor.
It's emotional for the team that builds it.
It's emotional for the customer.
It's a big deal.
And you can feel those things.
But to keep coming up with that idea,
with those kinds of ideas, I guess,
is 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're thinking about how technology changes us.
Changes us, yeah.
We co-evolve with our tools.
So 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, even just inside business,
where you don't just make the customer happy,
but you also have to think about
where is this going to take humanity if you zoom out a bit.
A hundred percent.
And you can feel your brain, brains are plastic,
and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed.
I remember the first time this happened to me
was when Tetris 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'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.
But that happens with everything.
And so one of the, I think,
yeah, we still have yet to see
the full repercussions of this, I fear.
But I think one of the things that we've done online,
and largely because of social media,
is we have trained our brains to be really good
at processing super short form content.
And your podcast flies in the face of this.
You do these long format things.
And reading books is a long format thing.
And we all do more of, if something is convenient,
we do more of it.
And so when you make tools that we carry around
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 various trajectories
to have an impact on human civilization.
How do you think AI will change this?
If you're talking about generative AI,
large language models, things like ChatGPT
and its soon successors.
These are incredibly powerful technologies
to believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand,
soon to be even more powerful.
It's interesting to me that large language models
in their current form are not inventions,
they're discoveries.
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.
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 have this debate about whether they're gonna be
good for humanity or bad for humanity.
Even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity.
I mean, it's just regular machine learning models
that can make certain weapons of war
that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful.
And they're not general AIs,
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 on balance hurt us and destroy us.
I think we humans have a lot of ways of,
we can make ourselves go extinct.
These things may help us not do that.
So they may actually save us.
So the people who are 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, some people have talked to you
and think that's the most boring part of the movie.
I thought it was the most fascinating
because what's going on here is you realize
we have invented these awesome, destructive,
powerful technologies called nuclear weapons
and they are managed and we humans are,
we're not really capable of wielding those weapons.
Where, that's what he represented in that movie
is here's this guy who is, he wrongly thinks,
he's like being so petty, he thinks that he said something,
Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him.
They didn't talk about him at all as you find out
in the final scene of the movie.
And yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful and petty
and that's 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.
So I think it's an incredible moment to be alive
and to witness the transformations that are gonna happen,
how quickly it'll 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 open doors to hold 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 and to learn how to drive.
And, you know, your average 16 year old figures it out
with many fewer miles.
So there are still some tricks,
I think, that we have yet to learn.
I don't think we've learned the last trick.
I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up.
But what's interesting is that just scaling things up,
and I put just in quotes
because it's actually hard to scale things up,
but just scaling things up
also appears to pay huge dividends.
There's some more nuanced aspects about human beings
that's interesting if it's able to accomplish,
like being truly original and novel,
to, you know, large language models
being able to come up with some truly new ideas.
That's one.
And the other one is truth.
It seems that large language models
are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing,
but they don't require or often have a grounding
in sort of a mathematical truth.
It can just, basically is a very good bullshitter.
So if there's not enough data 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 or not, to sort of introspect?
Yeah, they need to be taught to say,
I don't know more often.
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, just to, we have Alexa and Echo
and Alexa has hundreds of millions of installed base inputs.
And so there's Alexa everywhere.
And guess what?
Alexa is about to get a lot smarter.
And so that's really, from a product point of view,
that's super exciting.
There's so many opportunities there.
So many opportunities, shopping assistant,
all that stuff is amazing.
In AWS, we're building Titan,
which is our foundational model.
We're also building Bedrock,
which our corporate clients at AWS are 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.
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,
there's so much value can be gained
by training on private data,
but you want to keep the secure.
That's a fascinating technical problem.
This is a very challenging technical problem.
And it's one that we're 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?
I couldn't see her.
Well, I mean, I think if you look at the spectrum
of human variety and what people like,
sexual variety, there are people who like everything.
So the answer to your question has to be yes.
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.
I'm just 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, first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter.
I 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, because I do believe in wandering
and I read my phone for a while.
I read newspapers for a while.
I chat with Laura and I drink my first coffee.
So I kind of, I move pretty slowly
in the first couple of hours.
I get up early, just naturally.
And then I exercise most days
and most days it's not that hard for me.
Sometimes it's really hard and I do it anyway.
I don't want to, and it's painful.
And I'm like, why am I here?
And I don't want to do that.
Why am I here at the gym?
Why am I here at the gym?
Why don't I do something else?
It's not always easy.
What's your source of motivation in those moments?
I know that I'll feel better later if I do it.
And so 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 want health span.
You want, ideally, you want to be healthy
and moving around when you're 80 years old.
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 you curl?
I mean, what are we talking about here?
That's all I do at the gym.
So I just.
My routine, 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 I love, who pushes me,
which is really helpful.
I'll be like, he'll say,
Jeff, 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.
So it's helpful 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'd rotate.
I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day.
It's all pretty standard stuff.
So puttering, coffee, gym.
Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work.
Work.
So what's work look like?
What are the productive hours look like for you?
So a couple of 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'm so deeply involved here now
for the last couple of years.
And in the big, I love it.
In the small, there's all the frustrations
that come along with everything.
We're trying to get to rate manufacturing
as we talked about.
That's super important.
We'll get there.
We just hired a new CEO,
guy I've known for close to 15 years now,
a guy named Dave Limp, who I love.
He's amazing.
So we're super lucky to have Dave
and you're gonna see us move faster there.
But so my day of work, reading documents,
having meetings, sometimes in person,
sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am.
It's all about the technology.
It's about the organization.
It's about, 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 building organizations
and so on.
That's important, but it's also my least favorite part.
So 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 this is not the only, I can do that all day long.
I'm very good at focusing.
I'm very good at, I don't keep to a strict schedule.
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 asking questions
that nobody knows the answer to
and trying to wander your way to a solution.
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 Blue Origin are unusual.
When new people come in, like a new executive joins,
they're a little taken aback sometimes
because the typical meeting,
we'll start with a six page narratively structured memo
and we do study hall.
For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together
in the meeting and read, 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.
It's better just to carve out the time for people.
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,
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 wanna do is sell.
You wanna, 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 may take two weeks.
So the author, it's really a very difficult job,
but for the audience, it's much better.
So you can read a half hour.
And there are little problems
with PowerPoint presentations too.
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,
I often write lots of questions that I have
in the margins of these memos.
And then I go cross them all out
because by the time I get to the end of the memo,
they've been answered.
So I save all that time.
You also get, if the person who's preparing the memo,
we talked earlier about group think
and the fact that I go last in meetings
and that you don't want your ideas
to pollute the meeting prematurely.
The author of the memos has got to be very vulnerable.
They've got to put all their thoughts out there
and they've got to go first,
but that's great because it makes them really good.
And you get to see their real ideas
and you're not tromping on them accidentally
in a big 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?
I think it's mostly terrifying.
Yeah.
Like maybe in a good way?
I think it's terrifying in a productive way.
But I think it's a mostly 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 paragraphs have topic sentences,
it's verbs and nouns.
That's the other problem with PowerPoint
is 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 forces the author to be at their best.
And so they're getting somebody's really
their best thinking.
And then you don't have to spend a lot of time
trying to tease that thinking out of the person.
You've got it from the very beginning.
So it really saves you time in the long run.
So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy.
Crisp document.
Yeah, so you don't want to pretend
that the discussion should be crisp.
There's most meetings you're trying to solve
a really hard problem.
There's a different kind of meeting
which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews.
They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are.
But these business review meetings,
that's usually for incremental improvement
and you're 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.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
It's funny.
Yes, 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 an idea conceived
by a 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 ticks once a year,
it chimes once every 100 years
and the cuckoo comes out once every 1,000 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 in my view, that's really important
as we have become as a species,
as a civilization, more powerful.
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,
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.
Not 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 it's not really,
we're kind of,
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'd do a better job for our children
or our grandchildren
if we could stretch those thinking horizons.
And so the clock is in a way, it's an art project.
It's a symbol and it,
if it ever has any power to influence people
to think longer term,
that won't happen for hundreds of years,
but we have to,
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 the United States won't exist.
Like all 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.
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.
You know, I used to be afraid of death.
I did.
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 I 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,
I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone.
I don't want the long decay.
But, and I'm curious,
I want to 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 want to see.
So I have a lot of reasons to stay around,
but it's-
mortality doesn't have that effect on me
that it did, you know, maybe when I was in my twenties.
Well, Jeff, thank you for creating Amazon,
one of the most incredible companies in history.
And thank you for trying your best to make humans
a 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 space.
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.
Thank you.