Elon Musk: SpaceX, Mars, Tesla Autopilot, Self-Driving, Robotics, and AI — Lex Fridman Podcast #252

00:00- The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

00:06This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length.

00:11And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will.

00:17This is the Lex Fridman podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.

00:24You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas,

00:30and I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch. So what's the coolest job you remember doing there?

00:35- Wow, coolest. - Most interesting. Most memorable. - Most memorable. Most impactful.

00:41- And it was a real working ranch. My grand, I spent all my summers on that ranch

00:46from age four to 16. And my grandfather was really taking me to those

00:52in the summers, in the early summers, he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch. 'Cause of course, a 4-year-old is a burden,

00:59not a help in real life. He was really just watching me and taking care of me

01:04and be was doing that because my mom was so young. She had me when she was 17,

01:09and so he was sort of giving her a break. And my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for these summers.

01:15But as I got a little older, I actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it. I was out there,

01:20like my grandfather had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life.

01:25I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch. I've fixed windmills and laid fences

01:33and pipelines and you know, done all the things that any rancher would do, vaccinated, the animals, everything.

01:41But we had a you know, my grandfather, after my grandmother died, I was about 12

01:47and I kept coming to the ranch. So it was then, it was just him and me, just the two of us. And he was completely addicted to the soap opera,

01:55the Days of Our Lives. And we would go back to the ranch house every day around 1:00 PM or so to watch days of our lives

02:03like sands through an hourglass. So are the days of our lives. - Just the image of the two sitting there

02:11watching a soap opera as ranchers. - He had these big, crazy dogs. It was really a very formative experience for me.

02:16But the key thing about it for me, the great gift I got from it

02:21was that my grandfather was so resourceful, you know, he did everything himself. He made his own veterinary tools.

02:28He would make needles to suture the cattle up with, like he would find a little piece of wire and heat it up

02:34and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it. So, you know, you learn different things

02:40on a ranch than you would learn you know, growing up in a city. - So self-reliance. - Yeah, like figuring out that you can solve problems

02:48with enough persistence and ingenuity. And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer,

02:55which is a big bulldozer, and he got it for like $5,000. 'cause it was completely broken down. It was like a 1955 Caterpillar, D6 bulldozer

03:04knew it would've cost, I don't know, more than a $100,000. And we spent an entire summer fixing,

03:10like repairing that bulldozer. And we'd, you know, use mail order to buy big gears for the transmission.

03:17And they'd show up. They'd be too heavy to move, so we'd have to build a crane, you know, just that kind of, kinda that problem solving mentality.

03:26He had it so powerfully, you know, he did all of his own.

03:31He'd just, he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure it out on his own.

03:37Doing his own veterinary work, you know. - But just the image of the two of you fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in

03:43for a little break at 1:00 PM to watch a soap opera. - Laying on the floor.

03:48That's how he watched TV. - Yeah. - He was a really, really remarkable guy. - That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also

03:55in all those westerns. When he's not doing what he is doing, he's just watching soap operas.

04:01All right, I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five watching Neil Armstrong

04:07walking on the moon. So let me ask you to look back at the historical context

04:14and impact of that. So the space race from 1957 to 1969

04:21between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events

04:29for satellite to space, for a human to space, for a spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon,

04:35then some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides actually, and then the first human walking on the moon.

04:43What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years, that just 12 years?

04:51- Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. You know, one of the great things to take away from that,

04:57one of the great von Braun quotes is "I have come to use the word impossible with great caution."

05:04- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo

05:10is that things, you know, going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used

05:17for something that's impossible. You know, oh yeah, you'll do that when you know, men walk on the moon.

05:22- Yeah. - And of course it finally happened. So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time

05:29because of the space race, I think you know, with the geopolitical implications

05:34and you know, how much resource was put into it, you know, at the peak, that program was spending, you know, two or 3% of GDP on the Apollo program.

05:43So much resource. I think it was pulled forward in time. You know, we kind of did it ahead

05:50of when we quote unquote should have done it. - Yeah. - And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel.

05:57I mean, it's truly incredible. It's, you know, it's the 20th century version

06:03of building the pyramids or something. It's you know, it's an achievement that because it was pulled forward in time

06:09and because it did something that had previously thought impossible, it rightly deserves its place, as you know,

06:14in the pantheon of great human achievements. - And of course, you named the projects The Rockets

06:21that Blue Origin is working on after some of the folks involved. - Yeah. - I don't understand why I didn't say New Gagarin.

06:26is that- - There's an American bias in the naming. I apologize. - It's very strange. - Lex.

06:31- Just asking for a friend. Clarify. - I'm a big fan of Gagarin though. And in fact, I think his first words in space,

06:41I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said "my God, it's blue."

06:47And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet.

06:55- Yeah. - No one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the first person to see it.

07:01- One of the things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for Gagarin,

07:06for Glen, for everybody involved. Like how big of a risk they were all taking. - They were taking huge risks.

07:12I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought

07:19that the Alan Shephard flight, the flight that you know, New Shephard is named after, the first American in space.

07:24He went on his suborbital flight. They thought he had about a 75% chance of success.

07:31So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.

07:36- It's kind of interesting that Alan Shephard is not quite as famous as John Glenn. So for people who don't know, Alan Shephard

07:42is the first astronaut- - The first American in space. - American in suborbital flight.

07:48- Correct. - And then the first orbital flight is- - John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth.

07:54By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter from John Glenn,

08:00which I have framed and hang on my office wall. - What did he say? - Where he tells me how grateful he is

08:07that we have named New Glenn after him. And he sent me that letter about a week before he died.

08:13And it's really an incredible, it's also a very funny letter. He's writing and he says you know,

08:20this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn. And he's just, he's got a great sense of humor,

08:26and he's very happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet. - Does he say ps don't mess this up? Or is that-

08:34- No, he doesn't. - Make me look good. - He doesn't do that. - Okay. - But wait, but John, wherever you are, we got you covered.

08:39- All right, good. So back to maybe the big picture of space. When you look up at the stars and think big,

08:47what do you hope is the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of years from now out in space?

08:54- I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system.

09:01If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.

09:08That would, you know, our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.

09:14And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the solar system.

09:21- So what do you think that looks like? Giant space stations? - Yeah, the only way to get to that vision

09:26is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. So you can, I mean, unless you turn them

09:34into giant space stations or something. But, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon

09:40and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on, and we'll build giant O'Neill style colonies

09:49and people will live in those. And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spin them to get normal earth gravity.

09:57You can put them where you want them. I think most people are gonna wanna live near Earth,

10:03not necessarily in earth orbit, but in you know, earth, but near earth vicinity orbits.

10:10And so they can move you know, relatively quickly back and forth between their station and Earth.

10:19So I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, are not gonna want to give up Earth altogether.

10:24- They go to earth for vacation. - Yeah. Same way that you know, you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation.

10:31People will, and no one, and people will get to choose where they live on earth or whether they live in space,

10:37but they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space

10:42than they would be able to use on earth. - One of the interesting ideas you had is to move the heavy industry away from Earth.

10:49So people sometimes have this idea that somehow space exploration is in conflict

10:55with the celebration of the planet earth, that we should focus on preserving earth. And basically your ideas that space travel

11:04and space exploration is a way to preserve earth. - Exactly. This planet, we've sent robotic probes to all the planets.

11:13We know that this is the good one. - Yeah. Not to play favorites or anything.

11:19- But earth really is the good planet. It's amazing, the ecosystem we have here,

11:24all of the life and the lush, the plant life and you know, the water resources, everything.

11:30This planet is really extraordinary. And of course, we evolved on this planet, so of course it's perfect for us,

11:37but 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.

11:43We do need to take care of it. And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we get, as we humans have gotten

11:51so sophisticated and large and impactful, as we stride across this planet, you know,

11:58that is going to, as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita.

12:04We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about the good old days,

12:15they're mostly an illusion. Like in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today

12:21than it was say, 50 years ago or a hundred years. We live better lives by and large than our grandparents did,

12:29and their grandparents did, and so on. And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates,

12:39like almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be. And we get, you know, antibiotics

12:45and all kinds of lifesaving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing that is moving backwards,

12:52and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre-industrial age,

12:59the natural world was pristine. It was incredible. And we have traded some of that pristine beauty

13:09for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society. And we can have both.

13:16But to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this, really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.

13:25And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy, it is going to make your life better in so many ways.

13:33But that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system

13:40and really you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue

13:47about whether you have to do that. - Eventually, we have to do that. - Exactly.

13:52- Well, you don't often talk about it, but let me ask you on that topic about the Blue Ring and the orbital reef space infrastructure projects.

14:01What's your vision for these? - So Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft

14:07that is designed to take up to 3000 kilograms of payload

14:12up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity. It has two different kinds of propulsion.

14:20It has chemical propulsion, and it has electric propulsion. And so it can,

14:25you can use blue ring in a couple different ways. You can slowly move, let's say up to geosynchronous orbit

14:32using electric propulsion that might take you know, a hundred days or 150 days depending on how much mass you're carrying.

14:40And then, and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit.

14:46Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion

14:53to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit. Blue Ring has a couple of interesting features.

14:59It provides a lot of services to these payloads.

15:05So the payload, it could be one large payload, or it can be a number of small payloads, and it provides thermal management,

15:12it provides electric power, it provides compute, provides communications.

15:19And so when you design a payload for Blue Ring, you don't have,

15:24you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute

15:30is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount

15:36of radiation tolerant compute on board Blue Ring, and you can, your payload can just use that

15:41when it needs to. So it's sort of all these services,

15:46it'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

15:55an earth vicinity or lunar vicinity. - AWSS space. Okay, so computing space.

16:02So you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to orbit,

16:08and then you have these admins that show up, this Blue Ring thing that manages various things

16:13like compute. - Exactly. And it can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits.

16:19- Including humans, you think? - No, but Blue Ring is not designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payloads around.

16:26- Okay. - So we're also building a lunar lander, which is of course designed to land humans

16:33on the surface of the moon. - I'm gonna ask you about that, but let me ask you to just step back to the old days.

16:40You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. - Yeah.

16:47- What attracted you to physics and why did you change your mind and not become, why you're not Jeff Bezos,

16:54the famous theoretical physicist? - So I loved physics and I studied physics

16:59and computer science, and I was proceeding along the physics path.

17:05I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. And the computer science

17:10was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it. And I was very good at the programming

17:17and doing those things. And I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely,

17:23but I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. It's why I went to Princeton in the first place.

17:29It was definitely, and then I realized I was gonna be a mediocre theoretical physicist.

17:35And there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on,

17:42who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized like you know, there are a thousand ways

17:49to be smart and to be a really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields

17:56where only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward.

18:02It's one of those things where you have to be really just, your brain has to be wired in a certain way.

18:09And there was a guy named, one of these people who convinced me.

18:14He didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist.

18:20His name was Yosanta. And Yosanta was from Sri Lanka.

18:26And he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult

18:34partial differential equations problem set one night. And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours,

18:41and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time

18:48and we said, Yosanta. So we went to Yosanta's dorm room. And he was there, he was almost always there.

18:54And we said Yosanta, we're having trouble solving this partial differential equation,

19:00would you mind taking a look? And he said of course. By the way, he was the most humble, most kind person.

19:07And so he took our, he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds.

19:13And he said cosine. And I said, what do you mean Yosanta? What do you mean cosine?

19:18He 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

19:24and he wrote down three pages of equations, everything canceled out.

19:29And the answer was cosine. And I said Yosanta, did you do that in your head?

19:35And he said oh no, that would be impossible. A few years ago I solved a similar problem

19:40and I could map this problem onto that problem. And then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.

19:47I had a few, you know, you have an experience like that, you realize maybe being a theoretical physicist

19:54isn't what your, isn't what the universe wants you to be.

19:59And so I switched to computer science and you know, that worked out really well for me.

20:05I 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.

20:12- I think the mathematical skill required today is so high. You have to be a world-class mathematician

20:20to be a successful theoretical physicist today. And it's not you know,

20:26you probably need other skills too, intuition, lateral thinking, and so on.

20:32But without just top-notch math skills, you're unlikely to be successful.

20:39- And visualization skill, you have to be able to really kind of do these kinds of thought experiments.

20:45And if you want truly great creativity, actually Walter Isaacson writes about you. It puts you on the same level as Einstein.

20:52- Well, that's very kind. I'm an inventor.

20:57If you wanna boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things

21:03and I can come up with atypical solutions and you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions

21:11for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny.

21:18But one of those 100 is like hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there.

21:25So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness in a high dimensionality space where the search space

21:33is very large, that's where my inventive skills come. That's the thing is I self-identify

21:40as an inventor more than anything else. - Yeah, and he describes in all kinds of different ways,

21:45Walter Isaacson does that creativity combined with childlike wander that you've maintained

21:54still to this day, all of that combined together. Is there, like if you were to study your own brain introspect, how do you think,

22:02what's your thinking process like? We'll talk about the writing process of putting it down on paper,

22:07which is quite rigorous and famous at Amazon.

22:12But how do you, when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high dimensional space

22:19and looking for creative solutions, creative paths forward, is there something you could say about that process?

22:26- It's such a good question, and I honestly don't know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it.

22:32I know it involves lots of wandering. - Yeah. - So I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem,

22:40I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line, to be efficient,

22:47efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention,

22:53not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do.

22:58You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention,

23:04real lateral thinking, that requires wandering. And you have to give yourself permission to wander.

23:11I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient.

23:20And you know, like when I sit down at a meeting,

23:26I don't know how long the meeting is gonna take if we're trying to solve a problem. Because if I did, then I'd already,

23:33I'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.

23:42And I do like group invention. I think there's certainly nothing more fun than sitting at a whiteboard with you know,

23:49a group of smart people and spit balling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas,

23:57and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So like you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea

24:06in the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth

24:12and both things are really pleasurable. - And when you wander, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea

24:21and to maybe, to notice the kernel of a good idea. Maybe pull at that string.

24:28Because I don't think a good idea has come fully formed. - A hundred percent right.

24:33In fact, when I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny,

24:40you know, that I do in my own head and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea, I will often say look,

24:47it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea, but work with me.

24:53- There's something there. - There's something there. And that is intuition. - Yeah.

24:58- Because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning. 'Cause they do have so many,

25:04so many easy objections to them. So you need to, you need to kind of forewarn people

25:09and say look, I know it's gonna take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that.

25:16It'll be fun. - So you got that ability to say cosine in you somewhere after all.

25:22Maybe not on math, but- - In a different domain. - Yeah. - There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way.

25:27- Yeah. - And that is a really, like when I go around, you know, and I meet people, I'm always looking

25:33for the way that they're smart. And you find it is, that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting

25:42and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single dimension.

25:48There are people who are smart in such unique ways. - Yeah, you just gave me a good response

25:54to when somebody calls me an idiot on the internet. You know, that's a thousand ways to be smart, sir.

26:01- Well, they might tell you, yeah, but there are a million to be ways to be dumb. - Yeah, right.

26:06I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote. Okay. All right, you gave me an amazing tour

26:12of Blue Origin Rocket Factory and Launch Complex in the historic Cape Canaveral. That's where New Glenn,

26:18the big rocket we talked about is being built and will launch.

26:24Can you explain what the New Glenn Rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works?

26:29- Sure. New Glenn is a very large,

26:35a heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO,

26:41very, very large class. It's about half the thrust,

26:46a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V Rocket. So it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff.

26:55The booster has seven BE-4 engines. Each engine generates a little more

27:02than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas,

27:09liquified natural gas, LNG as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer.

27:15The cycle is an ox-riched stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians.

27:21It's a very good cycle. And that engine is also going to power the first stage

27:29of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of New Glenn

27:36is powered by two BE-3U engines, which is a upper stage variant

27:41of our New Shephard liquid hydrogen engine. So the BE-3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust.

27:47So two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust and hydrogen is a very good propellant

27:54for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant in my view for booster stages

28:03because the stages then get physically so large. Hydrogen has very high ISP,

28:10but liquid hydrogen is very, is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, you know,

28:17if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your tanks, your liquid hydrogen tank, it's very large.

28:23So you really, you get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse.

28:29You get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the second stage. And that stage carries less propellant.

28:37So you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta IV is an example of a vehicle

28:44that is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen. And I think that it's a very effective vehicle,

28:49but it never was very cost effective. So it's operationally very capable

28:55but not very cost effective. - So size is also costly. - Size is costly. So it's interesting.

29:01Rockets love to be big. Everything works better. - What do you mean by that? You've told me that before.

29:07It sounds epic, but what does it mean? - I mean, when you look at the, kind of the physics of rocket engines

29:15and also when you look at parasitic mass, it doesn't, if you have, let's say you have an avionic system,

29:22so you have a guidance and control system, that is gonna be about the same mass and size

29:29for a giant rocket as it is gonna be for a tiny rocket. And so that's just parasitic mass

29:37that is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket, but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket.

29:44So you have the parasitic mass thing. And then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps.

29:50They have to pressurize the fuel and the oxidizer up to a very high pressure level

29:55in order to inject it into the thrust chamber where it burns. And those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact

30:03get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny turbo pumps

30:09are very challenging to manufacture. And any kind of gaps, you know,

30:15are like between the housing for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel,

30:22there has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another. And those gaps drive inefficiencies.

30:31And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps in percentage terms end up being very small.

30:39And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket

30:46and that you end up hating for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule,

30:51and it is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging.

30:58It's a pain in the butt. And so, you know, it's just if you have, if you're making a small rocket engine,

31:03you 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

31:12and tooling, and so on and so on. When you start building big objects, infrastructure,

31:19civil infrastructure, just like the launchpad and the you know, all this, we went and visited,

31:25I took you to the launchpad and you can see it's so monumental. - Yeah, it is. - And so just these things become major undertakings,

31:33both from an engineering point of view, but also from a construction and cost point of view. - And even the foundation of the launchpad,

31:39I mean, this is Florida, like isn't like swamp land? Like how deep do you have to go? - You have to at Cape Canaveral,

31:46in fact, at most ocean, you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the oceanside.

31:52'cause you wanna launch over water for safety reasons. The yes, you have to drive pilings,

32:01you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, 50, a 100, 150 feet deep

32:07to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it's yes, these turn into major civil engineering projects.

32:15- I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty badass. You said tooling, the bigger it gets,

32:21the more epic it is. - It does make it epic. - Yeah. - It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary. - It's humbling also,

32:27'cause you know, humans are so small compared to it. - We are building these enormous machines

32:33that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power, you know, in very, very compact packages.

32:43It's truly extraordinary. - But then there's all the different components and that you know, the materials involved.

32:50Is there something interesting that you can describe about the materials that's comprised the rockets?

32:57So it has to be as light as possible, I guess, whilst withstanding the heat and the harsh conditions?

33:03- Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rocket people that I run into where

33:09say what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers? Like what's changed?

33:15'Cause surprisingly, some of rocketry greatest hits have not changed. They are still,

33:20they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today. And it's exactly what they pioneered back in the '60s.

33:27But a few things have changed. You know, the use of carbon composites

33:34is very different today. You know, we can build very sophisticated,

33:39you saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant fairings. And we can build these incredibly light,

33:48very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material

33:55that they could not have dreamed of. I mean the efficiency, the structural efficiency

34:00of that material is so high compared to any you know, metallic material you might use or anything else.

34:07So that's one. Aluminum lithium and the ability

34:15to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you? - Yes, incredible.

34:21- This is a remarkable technology. This was invented decades ago, but has become very practical

34:26over just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces

34:32of metal together, it literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin that rotates at a certain rate

34:40and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you wanna weld together.

34:46And then you move it at a very precise speed. And instead of heating the material,

34:52it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally immediately after welding

34:57with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm. It literally stirs the molecules together.

35:05It's quite extraordinary. - Relatively low temperature. And I guess high temperature is what makes them, that makes it a weak point?

35:11- Exactly. So with traditional welding techniques, you may have

35:16whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld.

35:24And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material.

35:29So it really allows you, and so, 'cause when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're gonna pressurize

35:36you know, a large liquid natural gas tank for our booster stage, for example.

35:41You know, if you are welding that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces

35:48with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing with the weld. And that's gonna add a lot of weight to that tank.

35:53- I mean, even just the looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that it takes and-

36:01- Yeah. - And like what it's supposed to do is kind of incredible 'cause so people don't know it's on top of the rocket,

36:06it's gonna fall apart. That's its task. But it has to stay strong sometimes.

36:11- Yes. - And then disappear when it needs to. - That's right. - Which is a very difficult task.

36:17- Yes. When you need something that needs to have 100% integrity until it needs to have 0% integrity.

36:24It needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away. And then when it goes away, it has to go away completely.

36:31You use explosive charges for that. And so it's a very robust way

36:36of separating structure when you need to. - Exploding

36:41- Yeah. Little tiny bits of explosive material and it just, it'll sever the whole connection.

36:49- So if you wanna go from 100% structural integrity to zero as fast as possible use explosives,

36:58- Use explosives. - The entirety of this thing is so badass. Okay, so we're back to the two stages.

37:04So the first stage is reusable. - Yeah. Second stage is expendable. Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen.

37:11So we could take advantage of the higher specific impulse. The the first stage lands downrange on a landing platform

37:20in the ocean, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.

37:26- I mean there's a million questions, but also is there a path towards reusability for the second stage?

37:32- There is, and we know how to do that. Right now we're gonna work on manufacturing

37:39that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a second stage,

37:45make it reusable, or work really hard to make it inexpensive

37:50so you can afford to expend it. And that trade is actually not obvious which one is better.

38:00- Even in terms of cost. Even like time cost? - I'm talking about cost is, you know, space flight, getting into orbit is a solved problem.

38:08We solved it back in you know, the '50s and '60s. - You're making it sound easy. - So the only thing that,

38:14the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit,

38:19which is if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new, you know, endeavors

38:26that lots of startup companies, everybody else can do. So that's, we really, that's one of our missions

38:32is to you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost to orbit so that there can be

38:40you know, a kind of a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.

38:47- I like how you said getting to orbit is a solved problem. It is just the only interesting thing is reducing the cost.

38:53You know, how you can describe every single problem facing human civilization that way. The physicist would say everything is a solved problem.

39:00We've solved everything. The rest is just well, Rutherford said that "it's just stamp collecting."

39:06It's just the details. It's some of the greatest innovations and inventions and you know, brilliance is in that cost reduction stage.

39:14Right, and you, you've had a long career of cost reduction. - For sure. And when you,

39:20what does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way. - Yeah, exactly.

39:25- Right, and when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago,

39:32somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer

39:37because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal to invent better ways.

39:45That's how the world gets richer. - So what are some of the biggest challenges

39:52on the manufacturing side and the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of New Glenn?

40:01- The first launch is one thing and we'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year.

40:07The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory

40:12is efficiently manufacturing at rate.

40:18So rate production. So consider if you wanna launch New Glenn

40:23you know, 24 times a year. You need to manufacture a upper stage

40:30since they're expendable every, you know, twice a month, you need to do one every two weeks.

40:36So you need to be, you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques

40:43and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult

40:51as designing the vehicle in the first place. And the same thing. So every upper stage has two BE-3U engines.

41:03So those engines you know, you need if you're gonna launch this the vehicle twice a month,

41:08you 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.

41:16And that's a, and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures,

41:24the right people, process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article, right.

41:30So that's you know, to launch New Glenn for the first time, you need to produce a first article.

41:37But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on

41:42behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glenn's at rate.

41:47- So the first one is produced in a way that enables the production of the second and third and the fourth and the fifth and sixth, and so on.

41:54- You could think of the first article as kind of pushing, it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along.

42:02You know, in other words, it's kind of the, it's the test article in a way

42:09that's testing out your manufacturing technologies. - The manufacturing is the big challenge.

42:15- Yes. I mean I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy. I mean the people who are designing the engines

42:21and all this, all of it is hard for sure. But the challenge right now is driving really hard

42:29to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point.

42:36If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem

42:41and maybe you haven't really moved this state of the art forward. All this has to be about moving the state-of-the art forward.

42:48There are easier businesses to do. I always tell people look, if you are trying to make money,

42:53you know, like start a salty snack food company or something, you know. - I'm gonna write that idea down.

43:01- Like make the Lex Fridman potato chips, you know, this is- - Don't say it, people are gonna steal it.

43:08But yeah, it's hard. - You see what I'm saying? It's like there's nothing easy about this business

43:14but it's its own reward. It's fascinating, it's worthwhile, it's meaningful.

43:22And so you know, not, I don't wanna pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day,

43:29you're not gonna have accomplished something amazing. - Yeah, there's-

43:34- 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.

43:41- Yeah, for sure. - It's a grand project of humanity. - Yes. It's one of humanity's grand challenges.

43:47And especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies

43:54and unlocking all the things. You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this,

44:01but the fruits of this come from building a road to space,

44:06getting the infrastructure. I'll give you an analogy. When I started Amazon,

44:12I didn't have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card.

44:18I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed.

44:23It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post. And so all this heavy lifting infrastructure

44:32was already in place. And I could stand on its shoulders. And that's why when you look at the internet,

44:40you know, by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early, I'm taking you back to like 1994,

44:46people were using dial up modems. And it was piggybacking on top of the long distance phone network.

44:53That's how the internet, that's you know, how people were accessing servers and so on.

44:58And that again, if that hadn't existed, it would've been hundreds of billions of CapEx

45:05to put that out there. No startup company could have done that. And so the problem you know, you see in,

45:13if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years,

45:18it's because you know, you see like two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful

45:24and do amazing things. Beause they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure. It was already there.

45:30And that's what I wanna do. I take you know, my Amazon winnings

45:36and use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation you know, the generation that's my children and their children,

45:45these, you know, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then there'll be space entrepreneurs

45:51who start in their dorm room. - Yeah. - Like that will be a marker of success. When you can have a really valuable space company

46:00started in a dorm room, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed.

46:09I find that very exciting. - As they will of course, as kids do, take all of this hard infrastructurability for granted.

46:15- Of course. Which is- - That's the entrepreneurial spirit. - That's an inventors greatest dream.

46:23- Yeah. - Is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted.

46:29You know, nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as, we pioneered customer reviews,

46:35but now they're so commonplace. Same thing with one click shopping and so on. But that's a compliment.

46:40That's how you know, you invent something that's so used, so beneficially used by so many people

46:48that they take it for granted. - I don't know about nobody. That's every time I use Amazon, I'm still amazed how does this work?

46:53Logistics. - Well, that proves you're very curious explorer. - All right, all right, back to rockets.

46:59Timeline. You said 2024. As it stands now,

47:06are both the first test launch and the launch of escapade explorers to Mars still possible?

47:11- In 2024? - In 2024. Yeah. - Yeah, I think so. For sure the first launch, and then we'll see if escapade goes on that or not.

47:19I think that the first launch for sure. And I hope escapade too. - Hope.

47:24- Well, I just don't know which mission it's actually gonna be slated on. So we also have other things

47:30that might go on that first mission. - Oh, I got it. But you're optimistic that the launches will still- - Oh, the first launch,

47:36I'm very optimistic that the first launch of New Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not a hundred percent certain

47:43what payload will be on that first launch. - Are you nervous about it? - Are you kidding? I'm extremely nervous about it.

47:51- Oh man. - A hundred percent. I've, you know, every launch I go to,

47:56you know, for New Shephard, for other vehicles too, I'm always nervous for these launches.

48:02But yes, for sure. A first launch to have no nervousness about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement,

48:08I think so. - Well, I got to visit the launchpad, it's pretty, I mean, it's epic.

48:14- You know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing, a tremendous amount of simulation.

48:21So, you know, a lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been resolved,

48:28but there are some problems you can only find in flight. So, you know, cross your fingers.

48:33I guarantee you, you'll have fun watching it no matter what happens. - 100% when the thing is fully assembled and comes up.

48:40- Yeah, the transporter erector. - The erector, yeah. - Just the transporter erector for a rocket of this scale

48:48- Yeah. - is extraordinary. - That's an incredible machine. - The vehicle travels out horizontally

48:54and then kind of- - Yeah. - You know, comes up. - Over a few hours? - Yeah, it's a beautiful thing to watch.

49:00- Speaking of which, if that makes you nervous, I don't know if you remember,

49:06but you were aboard a New Shephard on its first crude flight.

49:14How was that experience? Were you terrified then?

49:20- You know, strangely, I wasn't, you know. - When you ride the rocket- - It's true. - less nerve wracking.

49:25- Its true. I've watched other people ride the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself.

49:31It was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her I was gonna go on the first one.

49:38And not only was I gonna go, but I was gonna bring my brother too. This is a tough conversation to have with a mom.

49:44- There's a long pause when you told her. - She's like both of you?

49:50And it was an incredible experience and we were laughing inside the capsule

49:59and you know, we're not nervous. The people on the ground were very nervous for us.

50:05It was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts

50:12of the experience was not happened even before the flight

50:17at 4:30 in the morning, brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site

50:23and Lauren is gonna take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave. And we go outside the ranch house there

50:29in west Texas where the launch facility is. And all of our family, my kids and my brother's kids

50:38and our you know, our parents, and close friends

50:44are assembled there. And they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of saying,

50:50maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever. And you know, we might not have felt that way.

50:56But it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way. And it was sort of powerful

51:01because it allowed us to see, it was almost like attending your own memorial service or something.

51:07Like you could feel how loved you were in that moment. And it was really amazing.

51:12- Yeah, and I mean there's just a epic nature to it too.

51:18- The accent, the floating and zero gravity. I'll tell you something very interesting. Zero gravity feels very natural.

51:25I don't know if it's because we are, you know, it's like return to the womb or what. - You just confirmed you're an alien.

51:33But that's okay. I think that's what you just said. - It feels so natural to be in zero G.

51:38It was really interesting. And then what people talk about the overview effect and seeing earth from space,

51:44I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. You see how fragile the earth is.

51:51If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one. The the great Jim Lovell quote, you know,

51:57he looked back at the earth from space and he said he realized "you don't go to heaven when you die.

52:03You go to heaven when you're born." And it's just you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space.

52:09You see all this blackness, all this nothingness, and there's one gem of life, and it's earth.

52:15- It is a gem. What, you know, you've talked a lot about decision making throughout your time with Amazon.

52:23What was that decision like to be the first to ride New Shephard?

52:29Like what, just be before you talked to your mom. - Yeah. - What, like the pros and cons,

52:34like actually as one human being, as a leader of a company on all fronts,

52:41like what was that decision making like? - I decided that, first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well.

52:48I know the team who built it. I know the vehicle. I am very comfortable with like the escape system.

52:57We put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle

53:03as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined. It's one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire New Shephard architecture.

53:10- Can you actually describe, what do you mean by escape system? What's involved? - We have a solid rocket motor

53:16in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on ascent,

53:23you know, while the main rocket engine is firing, we can ignite this solid rocket motor

53:30in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster.

53:35It's a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things.

53:42It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shephard.

53:47So the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it.

53:53But we are harnessing, whenever you're talking about rocket engines,

53:59I don't care what rocket engine you're talking about, you are harnessing such vast power

54:06in such a small, compact, geometric space. The power density is so enormous that it is impossible

54:15to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong. And so the only way to improve safety

54:23is to have an escape system. And you know, and historically rockets, human rated rockets have had escape systems.

54:29Only the space shuttle did not. And, but Apollo had one,

54:35you know, all of the previous, you know, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems.

54:42And we have on New shephard of unusual escapes, most escape systems are towers.

54:48We have a pusher escape system. So the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule.

54:53And 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.

55:02The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission, and so they get wasted even in a nominal mission.

55:09And so again, you know, cost really matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable ,

55:16in the event that it's not used, you can reuse it and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing.

55:23So I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go and so I know the vehicle very well.

55:28I know the people who designed it. I had great trust in them and in the engineering that we did.

55:35And I thought to myself look, if I am not ready to go,

55:41then I wouldn't want anyone to go. A tourism vehicle has to be designed in my view,

55:47to have very, to be as safe as one can make it. You can't make it perfectly safe.

55:52It's impossible. But you know, you just have to, people will do things.

55:58People take risks, you know, they climb mountains, they skydive, they do deep underwater scuba diving,

56:05and so on. People are okay taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk.

56:10But it is something, because it's a tourism vehicle, you have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks.

56:16And I felt very good about the system. I think it's one of the reasons I was so calm

56:22inside and maybe others weren't just calm, they didn't know as much about it as I did. - Who was in charge of engaging the escape system?

56:28Did you have- - It's automated. - Okay. - The escape system is- - I was visualizing deployment of that. - is completely automated.

56:34Automated is better because it can react so much faster. - So yeah, for tourism rockets

56:40safety is a huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration also, but a tiny, you know, a delta less.

56:46- Yes. I mean I think for you know, if you're doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk.

56:52If you're saving somebody's life, you know, if you are engaging in real exploration,

56:59these are things where, you know, I personally think we would accept more risk

57:07in part because you have to. - Is there a part of you that's frustrated

57:12by the rate of progress in Blue Origin? - Blue Origin needs to be much faster.

57:18And it's one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago.

57:25I needed, I wanted to come in and Blue Origin needs me right now. And so I had always, when I was the CEO of Amazon,

57:33my point of view on this is if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company it's going to get my full attention.

57:39And I really, it's just how I think about things. It was very important to me.

57:46I felt I had an obligation to all the stakeholders at Amazon to do that.

57:52And so having, you know, turned the CEO, I'm still the executive chair there, but I've turned the CEO role over.

57:59And the reason, the primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time on Blue Origin

58:06adding some you know, energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster and we're going to.

58:13- What are the ways to speed it up? So, I mean there's,

58:18you've talked a lot of different ways to sort of at Amazon,

58:23you know, removing barriers for progress or distributing,

58:30making everybody autonomous and self reliant in terms of all those kinds of things. Is that apply at Blue Origin

58:37or is the- - It does apply. You know, I'm leading this directly. We are gonna become the world's most decisive company

58:45across any industry. And so you know, at Amazon ever since the beginning,

58:53I said we are gonna become the world's most customer obsessed company.

58:59And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and wanna know

59:06how did you guys, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you actually not just pay lip service, but actually do that?

59:13And from you know, all different industries should come on and study us to see how we accomplish that.

59:19And the analogous thing at Blue Origin and it will help us move faster

59:24is we are gonna become the world's most decisive company. We're gonna get really good

59:30at taking appropriate technology risk and making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things.

59:37That's what, and having the right culture that supports that. You need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious.

59:44You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them. But let's study them very quickly and make a decision.

59:51We can always change our mind. It doesn't you know, changing your mind is, I took about one-way doors and two-way doors.

59:59Most decisions are two-way doors. - Can ou explain that? 'Cause I love that metaphor.

1:00:06- If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you walk out the door,

1:00:12you 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.

1:00:20Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse

1:00:27that they really are one-way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back.

1:00:32And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.

1:00:38If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that.

1:00:43So, you know, when I was the CEO of Amazon, I often found myself in the position

1:00:49of being the chief slowdown officer because somebody would be bringing me

1:00:54a one-way door decision. And I would say okay, I can think of three more ways to analyze that. So let's go do that.

1:01:00Because we ha we are not gonna be able to reverse this one easily. Maybe you can reverse it, but it's gonna be very costly

1:01:06and very time consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning. And what happens, unfortunately in companies,

1:01:16what can happen is that you have a one size fits all decision making process

1:01:24where you end up using the heavyweight process on all decisions.

1:01:29- For everything, yeah. - Including the lightweight ones. The two-way door decisions. Two-way door decisions should mostly be made

1:01:35by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization.

1:01:41And one-way door decisions are the ones the irreversible ones, those are the ones that should be elevated up

1:01:47to you know, the senior most executives who should slow them down and make sure

1:01:53that the right thing is being done. - Yeah, I mean, part of the skill here is to know the difference in one-way and two-way,

1:01:59I think you mentioned. - Yes. - I mean I think you mentioned Amazon Prime, the decision to sort of create Amazon Prime

1:02:06as a one-way door. I mean, it's not, it's unclear if it is or not, but it probably is, and it's a really big risk to go there.

1:02:14- There are a bunch of decisions like that that are you know, changing the decision

1:02:20is gonna be very, very complicated. Some of them are technical decisions too, because some technical decisions

1:02:26are like quick drying cement. You know, if you're gonna, once you make 'em, it gets really hard. I mean, you know, choosing which propellants

1:02:32to use in a vehicle. You know, selecting LNG for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage,

1:02:40that has turned out to be a very good decision. But if you changed your mind, that would be a very,

1:02:48that would be a very big setback. Do you see what I'm saying? - Yeah. - So that's the kind of decision

1:02:54you scrutinize very, very carefully. Other things just aren't like that. Most decisions are not that way.

1:03:01Most decisions should be made by single individuals, but they need, and done quickly in the full understanding

1:03:08that you can always change your mind. - Yeah, one of the things I really liked, perhaps it's not a two-way door decision

1:03:14is I disagree and commit phrase. So don't,

1:03:21so somebody brings up an idea to you. If it's a two-way door, you state that you don't understand enough to agree,

1:03:29but you still back them. I'd love for you to explain it. - Yeah, disagree and commit is a really important principle

1:03:36that saves a lot of arguing. - Yeah. - So- - I'm gonna use that in my personal life.

1:03:41I disagree, but commit. - It's very common in any endeavor in life,

1:03:47in business, and any you know, anybody where you have teammates. You have a teammate and the two of you disagree.

1:03:54At some point you have to make a decision. And you know, in companies we tend to organize hierarchically.

1:04:00So there's this you know, whoever's the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision.

1:04:06So ultimately the CEO gets to make that decision. And the CEO may not always make the decision

1:04:11that they agree with. So like you know, I would often I would be the one who would disagree and commit.

1:04:17One of my direct reports would very much wanna do it, do something in a particular way.

1:04:24I 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.

1:04:33And we would go back and forth and I would often say you know what? I don't think you're right,

1:04:40but I'm gonna gamble with you and you're closer to the ground truth than I am.

1:04:48I had known you for 20 years, you have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either.

1:04:53Not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way.

1:04:59But at least then you've made a decision. And I'm agreeing to commit to that decision.

1:05:05So 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.

1:05:10I'm gonna try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior.

1:05:18There's so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing on teams.

1:05:25And there are so many ways when two people disagree about something, even, I'm assuming in the case where everybody's well intentioned,

1:05:32they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have, in our society and inside companies,

1:05:40we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes.

1:05:46A lot of 'em are, I think really bad. So, you know, an example of a really bad way

1:05:53of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise, you know, look,

1:05:58we're in a room here and I could say Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is?

1:06:04And you'd be like I don't know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall. And I would say I think it's 11 feet tall.

1:06:11- Yeah. - And then we'd say you know what? Let's just call it 11 and a half feet. That's compromise.

1:06:17- Yeah. - Instead of the right thing to do is you know, to get a tape measure or figure out some way

1:06:23of actually measuring, but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling

1:06:29and all these things that requires energy. Compromise, the advantage of compromise

1:06:34as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy, but it doesn't lead to truth.

1:06:41And so in things like the height of the ceiling, where truth is a noble thing,

1:06:46you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth. Another really bad resolution mechanism

1:06:54that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. - Yeah. - This is also, let's say two executives who disagree

1:07:03and they just have a war of attrition. And whichever one gets exhausted first

1:07:09capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth. And this is very demoralizing.

1:07:15So, you know, this is where escalation, I try to ask people who you know, on my team

1:07:23and say never get to a point where you are resolving something by you know,

1:07:28who gets exhausted first. Escalate that. I'll help you make the decision.

1:07:34Because that's so de-energized and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.

1:07:40- So you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to high velocity of decision. - Yes.

1:07:46And you wanna try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want like you know, exhausting the other person

1:07:52is not truth seeking. - Yes. - And compromise is not truth seeking.

1:07:57So, you know, it doesn't mean, now, and there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that's where disagreeing commit can come in.

1:08:04But it's escalation is better than more of attrition.

1:08:09Escalate to you know, to your boss and say hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other, we're respectful of each other,

1:08:16but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to you know, make a decision here so we can move forward.

1:08:22But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions

1:08:27as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long

1:08:35to make decisions at all scale levels. You know, so it has to be part of the culture

1:08:41to get high velocity. You know, Amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast.

1:08:48We're still decisive, we're still quick. And that's because the culture supports that.

1:08:53- At every scale in a distributed way. - Yes. - Try to maximize the velocity of decisions. - Exactly.

1:08:59- You've mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that. - Yeah. - There's a lot going on there

1:09:06and you haven't really talked about it much. So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA,

1:09:11Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? There's a sexy picture on Instagram with one of them.

1:09:19Is it the MK1, I guess? - Yeah, The MK1. The picture is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator.

1:09:26- Just to clarify, the Lander is the sexy thing about the Instagram. Really wanna clarify that.

1:09:31- I know it's not me. I know it was either the lander or Bill. - Okay.

1:09:36I love Bill, but- - Thank you for clarifying. - Okay. - Yes, the MK1 Lander is designed to take 3000 kilograms

1:09:47to the surface of the moon in a cargo, expendable cargo. It's an expendable lander. Lands on the moon, stays there,

1:09:54take 3000 kilograms to the surface. It can be launched on a single New Glenn flight,

1:09:59which is very important. So it's a relatively simple architecture, just like the human landing system lander

1:10:06that they called the MK2. MK1 is also fueled with liquid hydrogen,

1:10:14and which is for high energy emissions, like landing on the surface of the moon,

1:10:20the high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage. The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been

1:10:28that it's, since it's such a deep cryogen, it's not storable.

1:10:33So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant because it's boiling off.

1:10:39And so we're doing, as part of our lunar program, it's developing solar powered cryo coolers

1:10:46that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant for deep space.

1:10:52And 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,

1:10:58to Mars, everywhere. - So the idea with MK1, both MK1 and MK2 is the New Glenn can carry it from the surface of earth

1:11:09to the surface of the moon. - Exactly. So the Mk1 is expendable.

1:11:16The lunar lander we're developing for NASA, the Mk2 lander, that's part of the Artemis program.

1:11:24They call it the sustaining lander program. So that lander is designed to be reusable.

1:11:31It can land on the surface of the moon in a single stage configuration and then take off. So the whole you know,

1:11:38if you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander and Apollo was really two stages.

1:11:44It would land on the surface and then it would leave the descent stage on the surface of the moon,

1:11:50and only the absent stage would go back up into lunar orbit where it would rendezvous with the command module.

1:11:56Here what we're doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant

1:12:02so 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,

1:12:08is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time,

1:12:14which is, that's one of NASA's big objectives because this time the whole point of Artemis

1:12:21is go back to the moon, but this time to stay. So, you know, back in the Apollo program,

1:12:28we went to the moon six times and then ended the program and it really was too expensive to continue.

1:12:36- And so there's a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have about-

1:12:43- Yeah. - Like sustaining life where a few folks can stay there

1:12:49for prolonged periods of time? - Well, one of the things we're working on

1:12:55is using lunar resources like lunar regolith

1:13:00to manufacture commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon.

1:13:06We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regolith stimulant,

1:13:13and this solar cell is only about 7% power efficient.

1:13:18So it's very inefficient compared to you know, the more advanced solar cells that we make here on earth.

1:13:25But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory

1:13:31that you can land on the surface of the moon, and then the raw material for those solar cells

1:13:37is simply lunar regolith, then you can just you know, continue to churn out solar cells on the surface of the moon,

1:13:45have lots of power on the surface of the moon. That will make it easier for people to live on the moon.

1:13:51Similarly, we're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.

1:13:58So lunar regolith by weight has a lot of oxygen in it. It's bound very tightly, you know,

1:14:04as oxides with other elements. And so you have to separate the oxygen,

1:14:10which is very energy intensive. So that also could work together with the solar cells.

1:14:17But if you can, and then ultimately we may be able to find practical quantities of ice

1:14:26in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon.

1:14:31And we know there is ice water in those, or water ice in those craters.

1:14:39And we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen.

1:14:46And then you'd not only have oxygen, but you'd also have a very good high efficiency propellant

1:14:54fuel in hydrogen. So there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time.

1:15:02But the very first step, the thing, the kind of gate that all of that has to go through

1:15:07is we need to be able to land cargo and humans

1:15:13on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost. - To fast forward a little bit,

1:15:18is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars?

1:15:25One or the other, or both? - It's very unlikely. I think it's probably something that gets done

1:15:33by future generations by the time it gets to me. I think in my lifetime that's probably gonna be done

1:15:38by professional astronauts. Sadly, I would love to sign up for that mission.

1:15:43So don't count me out yet, Lex, you know, give me a fighting shot here maybe.

1:15:50But I think if we are placing reasonable bets on such a thing,

1:15:56in my lifetime, that will continue to be done by professional astronauts. - Yeah, so these are risky, difficult missions.

1:16:02- And probably missions that require a lot of training. You know, you are going there for a very specific purpose

1:16:08to do something. We're gonna be able to do a lot on the moon too with automation. So, you know, in terms of setting up these factories

1:16:15and doing all that, we are sophisticated enough now with automation and we probably don't need humans

1:16:21to tend those factories and machines. So there's a lot that's gonna be done in both modes.

1:16:28- So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward

1:16:36out towards the stars, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators?

1:16:42Which, and to what degree? - Well, I would say you know, just like the internet is big

1:16:47and there are lots of winners at all scale levels. I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies that you know, the internet has made,

1:16:54but they're a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with profits, dreams,

1:17:00all driving great customer experiences. That's what we wanna see in space.

1:17:06That kind of dynamism and space is big. There's room for a bunch of winners

1:17:11and it's gonna happen at all skill levels. And so you know, SpaceX is gonna be successful for sure.

1:17:17I want Blue Origin to be successful and I hope there are another you know, five companies right behind us.

1:17:25- But, you know, I spoke to Elon a few times recently about you, about Blue Origin, and he was very positive

1:17:32about you as a person and very supportive of all the efforts you've been leading at Blue. What's your thoughts?

1:17:38You worked with a lot of leaders at Amazon, at Blue. What's your thoughts about Elon as a human being

1:17:44and a leader? - Well, I don't really know Elon very well. You know, I know his public persona,

1:17:53but I also know you can't know anyone by their public persona. It's impossible.

1:17:58I 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,

1:18:06but in terms of his, judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader.

1:18:13There's no way you could have you know, Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader.

1:18:19It's impossible. - Yeah, I just, I hope you guys hang out sometimes,

1:18:25shake hands, and sort of have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity.

1:18:32'cause you, what you're doing is like one of the big grand challenges ahead for humanity.

1:18:40- Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these endeavors, we're very like-minded.

1:18:45- Yeah. - And so I think, you know, I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we're very like-minded.

1:18:51And so I, you know, I love that idea. - All right, going back to sexy pictures on your Instagram,

1:18:58there's a video of you from the early days of Amazon giving a tour of your quote sort of offices.

1:19:06I think your dad is holding the camera. - He is, yeah. I know, right. Yes. This is what the giant orange extension cord and yeah.

1:19:12- And you're like explaining the genius of the extension cord and how this is a desk and the CRT monitor and sort of

1:19:21that's where all the magic happens. I forget what your dad said, but this is like the center of it all.

1:19:27So 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.

1:19:36Were you excited? Were you scared? - So excited and scared. Anxious, you know, thought the odds of success were low,

1:19:43told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success by which I mean just be getting your money back.

1:19:50Not like, not what actually happened. Because that's the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work.

1:19:58It's helpful to be in reality about that, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic.

1:20:05So you kind of have to have this duality in your head. Like on the one hand, you know what the baseline statistics say

1:20:11about startup companies. And the other hand you have to ignore all of that and just be a hundred percent sure it's gonna work.

1:20:19And you're doing both things at the same time. You're holding that contradiction in your head. But it was so, it was so exciting.

1:20:26I love you know, every, from 1994 when the company was founded to 1995,

1:20:33when we opened our doors all the way until today, I find Amazon so exciting.

1:20:40And 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

1:20:49and worked and made better, and et cetera. But on balance, it's so fun.

1:20:55It's such a privilege. It's been such a joy. I feel so grateful that I've been part of that journey.

1:21:03It's just been incredible. - So in some sense, you don't want a single day of comfort. You've written about this many times.

1:21:10We'll talk about your writing, which I would highly recommend people read and just the letters to shareholders.

1:21:17So you wrote up explaining the idea of day one thinking, I think you first wrote about in 97 letters to shareholders.

1:21:25Then you also, in a way wrote it about sad to say, is your last letter to shareholders as CEO.

1:21:35And you said that day two is stasis followed by irrelevance,

1:21:40followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death.

1:21:45And that is why it's always day one. Can you explain this day one thing?

1:21:52This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon. - It's really a very simple,

1:22:00and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth. And like every day is day one.

1:22:08Every day you are deciding what you're gonna do. And you are not trapped

1:22:16by what you were or who you were, or any self-consistency. Self-consistency even can be a trap.

1:22:23And so day one thinking is kind of, we start fresh every day

1:22:30and we get to make new decisions every day about invention,

1:22:35about customers, about how we're going to operate, what our, even as deeply as what our principles are.

1:22:44We can go back to that. It turns out we don't change those very often, but we change them occasionally.

1:22:50And when we work on programs at Amazon,

1:22:56we often make a list of tenants. And this, the tenants are kind of,

1:23:02they're not principles. They're a little more tactical than principles, but it's kind of the main ideas

1:23:08that we want this program to embody, whatever those are. And one of the things that we do

1:23:15is we put, these are the tenets for this program. And in parentheses we always put, unless you know a better way.

1:23:22And that idea, unless you know a better way,

1:23:28is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma. You never wanna get trapped by history.

1:23:35It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it. There's so much value in what has worked in the past.

1:23:42But you can't be blindly following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one

1:23:48is you're always starting fresh. - And to the question of how to fend off day two,

1:23:54you said such a question, can't have a simple answer as you're saying, there will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps.

1:24:01I don't know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here's a starter pack of essentials.

1:24:07Maybe others come to mind for day one, defense, customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies,

1:24:14the eager adoption of external trends and high velocity decision making.

1:24:19So we talked about high velocity decision making, that's more difficult than it sounds.

1:24:24So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on.

1:24:29Eager adoption of external trends, high velocity decision making, skeptical view of proxies.

1:24:35How 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

1:24:41the hardest to understand is the skeptical view of proxies.

1:24:49One of the things that happens in business, probably anything that you're,

1:24:54where you're you know, you have an ongoing program and something is underway for a number of years,

1:25:01is you develop certain things that you're managing to like, let's say the typical case would be a metric.

1:25:08And that metric isn't the real underlying thing. And so you know, maybe the metric

1:25:17is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something.

1:25:22If you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get? Or how many returns do you get?

1:25:28And so on and so on. And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of a inertia sets in

1:25:36where somebody a long time ago invented that metric and they invented that metric.

1:25:42They decided we need to watch for you know, customer returns per unit sold as an important metric.

1:25:50But they had a reason why they chose that metric. The person who invented that metric

1:25:55and decided it was worth watching. And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy.

1:26:01- 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.

1:26:09And, but that metric is not actually customer happiness, it's a proxy for customer happiness.

1:26:15The person who invented the metric understood that connection. Five years later, a kind of inertia can set in

1:26:25and you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place.

1:26:32And the world shifts a little. And now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be

1:26:38or it's missing something. And you have to be on alert for that. You have to know, okay, this is,

1:26:44I don't really care about this metric. I care about customer happiness.

1:26:49And this metric is worth putting energy into

1:26:54and following and improving and scrutinizing only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness.

1:27:03And so you've gotta constantly be on guard. And it's very, very common. This is a nuanced problem.

1:27:09It's very common, especially in large companies, that they're managing to metrics

1:27:14that 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.

1:27:22And the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.

1:27:29- That is a nuance, but that's a big problem, right? - It's a huge problem.

1:27:34- That something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize. - Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics.

1:27:41- Yes you do. - You know, you can't ignore them, and want them, but you just have to be constantly on guard.

1:27:48This is, you know, a way to slip into day two thinking would be to manage your business to metrics

1:27:54that you don't really understand. And you're not really sure why they were invented in the first place,

1:28:00and you're not sure they're still as relevant as they used to be. - What does it take to be the guy or gal

1:28:05who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess what does it take to have a culture

1:28:13that enables that in the meeting? 'Cause that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting.

1:28:18We all showed up here, it's a Friday. - This is such, you have just asked a million dollar question.

1:28:25So this is what you're, if I generalize what you're asking,

1:28:31you are talking in general about truth telling. - Yeah. - And we humans are not really truth seeking animals.

1:28:41We are social animals. - Yeah, we are. - And you know, take you back in time 10,000 years

1:28:47and you're in a small village, if you go along to get along, you can survive.

1:28:53You can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night.

1:29:01Truths are often, they don't want to be heard. 'Cause important truths can be uncomfortable,

1:29:10they can be awkward, they can be exhausting. - Impolite and all that kind of stuff.

1:29:15- Yes, challenging. They can make people defensive even if that's not the intent. But any high performing organization,

1:29:22whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, a political organization, an activist group, I don't care what it is.

1:29:29Any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture

1:29:36that supports truth telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. And you have to talk about the fact

1:29:42that 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.

1:29:50You have to literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do as humans.

1:29:56It's not really, it's kind of a side effect. You know, we can do that, but it's not how we survive.

1:30:02We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative.

1:30:08And that's really important. And so there's a, you know, science is all about truth telling.

1:30:14It's actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth.

1:30:22And even in science, you find that it's hard to tell the truth.

1:30:27Right. Even, you know, you're supposed to have hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis,

1:30:34and so on. It's not easy. - But even in science, there's like the senior scientists

1:30:40and the junior scientists. - Correct. - And then there's a hierarchy of humans where somehow seniority matters.

1:30:46- Yes. - In the scientific process, which is odd. - And that's true inside companies too.

1:30:52And so you wanna set up your culture so that the most junior person

1:30:58can overrule the most senior person if they have data.

1:31:04And that really is about trying to you know, there are little things you can do.

1:31:10So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last.

1:31:16And I know from experience that,

1:31:21you know, if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent,

1:31:31high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well if Jeff thinks that

1:31:38I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right.

1:31:44And so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room, go last.

1:31:52Let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally let's try to have the most junior person

1:31:57go first and the second and try to go in order of seniority so that you can hear everyone's opinion

1:32:05in a kind of unfiltered way. Because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions.

1:32:11If somebody who you really respect says something, it makes you change your mind a little.

1:32:17- So you're saying implicitly or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion

1:32:25as 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.

1:32:34They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition based. And sometimes you don't even have strong data,

1:32:41but you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in.

1:32:47It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have. And then you may be able to say you know,

1:32:53something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that.

1:32:58Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it

1:33:05'cause it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias.

1:33:10Like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of 'em is unhappy,

1:33:18it'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

1:33:27of looking for you know, trying to find the silver lining and say look, that might be good,

1:33:32but I'm gonna go with it's bad for now until we're sure. - So speaking of happiness bias, data collection,

1:33:40and anecdotes, you have to, how's that for a transition?

1:33:45You have to tell me the story of the call you made,

1:33:51the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times.

1:33:57- Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon. And we were going over a weekly business review

1:34:05and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree,

1:34:12the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly

1:34:17go follow the anecdotes then. It means you go examine the data. 'Cause the data, and it's usually not that the data is being miscollected,

1:34:26it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers

1:34:32complaining about something, and at the same time, you know, your metrics look like why are,

1:34:38they shouldn't be complaining. You should doubt the metrics. And an early example of this was we had metrics

1:34:48that showed that our customers were waiting, I think less than I don't know, 60 seconds

1:34:54when they called a 1-800 number to get, you know, phone customer service. The wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds.

1:35:02And, but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally it seemed longer than that.

1:35:09Like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day we're in a meeting, we're going through the WBR and the weekly business review,

1:35:17and we get to this metric in the deck, and the guy who leads customer service

1:35:23is to fit in the metric. And I said, okay, let's call picked up the phone.

1:35:31And I dialed the 1-800 number and called customer service. And we just waited in silence.

1:35:38- What did it turn out to be, like a couple minutes? - Oh, it was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think. - Oh wow. - I mean it was many minutes.

1:35:45And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.

1:35:50We weren't measuring the right thing. And that, you know, set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right.

1:35:56And that's an example by the way of truth telling, is like that's an uncomfortable thing to do.

1:36:03But you have to seek truth even when it's uncomfortable

1:36:09and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things.

1:36:16- So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach

1:36:22to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think companies sometimes say that,

1:36:30but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there's something really profound to that,

1:36:37which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, like the customer experience, truly like being,

1:36:43that's using the product, that's enjoying the product. They like the subtle little things

1:36:50that make up their experience. Like how do you optimize those? - This is another really good

1:37:00and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage.

1:37:07And then there are small things internally in Amazon, we call them paper cuts.

1:37:13So we have, we're always working on the big things, like if you ask me, and most of the energy goes into the big things

1:37:20as it should. So, and you can identify the big things. And and I would encourage anybody

1:37:25if anybody listening to this as a entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever,

1:37:33you know, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.

1:37:38So like I know in our retail business at Amazon, 10 years from now,

1:37:44customers 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.

1:37:50So it's impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now I say,

1:37:55where 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.

1:38:02So when you identify the big things, you can tell they're worth putting energy into

1:38:08because they're stable in time. Okay, but you're asking about something a little different,

1:38:14which is in every customer experience, there are those big things. And by the way, it's astonishingly hard to focus

1:38:20even on just the big things. So even though they're obvious, they're really hard to focus on.

1:38:27But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies.

1:38:33And we call those paper cuts and we make long lists of them. And then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts

1:38:44because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts

1:38:49and they never work their way down the list to get to, they're working on big things as they should

1:38:56and as you want them to. And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.

1:39:04- Well, where would you put, on the paper cuts spectrum, the buy now with one click button,

1:39:10which is I think pretty genius. So to me like, okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet,

1:39:18there's things I do a lot. I may be representing regular human, I would love for those things to be frictionless.

1:39:25For example, booking airline tickets. Just saying, but you know, it's buying a thing

1:39:35with one click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that.

1:39:41Like that just fundamentally makes my life better.

1:39:46Not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of- - Cognitive load. - Yeah, cognitive load and inner peace and happiness.

1:39:53First of all, buying stuff isn't a pleasant experience. Having enough money to buy a thing

1:40:01and then buying it is a pleasant experience. And like having pain around that is somehow

1:40:06just you're ruining a beautiful experience. And I guess all I'm saying

1:40:12as a person who loves good ideas, is that a paper cut, a solution to a paper cut?

1:40:17- Yes. So it's probably, that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts.

1:40:23So if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon, before we invented 1-click shopping,

1:40:30there were a whole, there was more friction. There was a whole series of paper cuts

1:40:36and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you're absolutely right by the way,

1:40:44that there, when you come up with something like 1-click shopping, again, this is like so ingrained in people now,

1:40:51I'm impressed that you even notice it. I mean, most people- - Every time I click the button. - I just, surge of happiness.

1:41:00- This, there is in the perfect invention for the perfect moment, in the perfect context,

1:41:06there is real beauty. - Yeah. - It is actual beauty.

1:41:11And it feels good. It's emotional, it's emotional for the inventor, it's emotional for the team that builds it.

1:41:18It's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal. And you can feel those things. - But to keep coming up with that idea,

1:41:26with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the the day one thinking effort. - Yeah, and you need a big group of people

1:41:32who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.

1:41:38- There's a lot of books written about you. There's a book Invent and Wander

1:41:43where Walter Isaacson does an intro. It's mostly collective writings of yours. I've read that.

1:41:49I also recommend people check out the Founders Podcast. That covers you a lot and it does different analysis

1:41:56of different business advice you've given over the years. I bring all that up because I saw that there,

1:42:05I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans.

1:42:10And I forget how it was phrased, but that when you were thinking about the Kindle, that you are thinking about how technology changes us.

1:42:21Yeah. - We co-evolve with our tools. So, you know, we invent new tools

1:42:29and then our tools change us. - Which is fascinating to think about. - It goes in a circle. - And there's some aspect, you know,

1:42:35even just inside business where you don't just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about like

1:42:41where is this going to take humanity if you zoom out a bit. - A hundred percent.

1:42:47And you know, you can feel in your brain,

1:42:53brains are plastic, and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me

1:43:00was when Tetris, it first came on the scene. I'm sure you've had,

1:43:06anybody who's been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep

1:43:12and you see all the little blocks moving. And you can, you're kind of rotating them in your mind

1:43:19and you can just tell as you walk around the world that you have rewired your brain to play Tetris.

1:43:25And, but that happens with everything. And so, you know, one of the, I think we still

1:43:34have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear. But I think one of the things that we've done online,

1:43:42you know, and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good

1:43:47at processing super short form content. And, you know, your podcast flies in the face of this.

1:43:55You know, you do these long format things and reading books do too.

1:44:00Reading books is a long format thing. And we all do more of if you, if something is convenient, we do more of it.

1:44:09And so when you make tools, you know that we carry around a little,

1:44:15we 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

1:44:23because 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,

1:44:30but 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

1:44:37and some of your life doing long attention span things. - Yeah, I think you've spoken about the value

1:44:45in your own life of focus, of singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time.

1:44:50And 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

1:44:59of technology, AI that has the potential to have a various trajectories

1:45:07to have an impact on human civilization. How do you think AI will change us?

1:45:14- You're talking about you know, generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT

1:45:20and its soon successors, and these are incredibly powerful technologies.

1:45:29To believe otherwise is to bury her head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful.

1:45:41It's interesting to me that that large language models in their current form are not inventions,

1:45:49they're discoveries. You know, the telescope was an invention,

1:45:55but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery.

1:46:03My God, it has moons. And that's what Galileo did.

1:46:09And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention. You know, we know exactly what happens with a 787.

1:46:17It's an engineered object. We designed it, we know how it behaves. We don't want any surprises.

1:46:24Large language models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting surprised by their capabilities.

1:46:31They're not really engineered objects. Then you know, you have this debate

1:46:39about whether they're gonna be good for humanity or bad for humanity.

1:46:45You know, even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity.

1:46:51I mean, you know, just regular machine learning models that can make you know, certain weapons of war

1:47:00that could be incredibly destructive are very powerful. And they're not general AIs, they're just,

1:47:07they could just be very smart weapons.

1:47:12And so we have to think about all of those things.

1:47:17I'm very optimistic about this. So even in the face of all this uncertainty,

1:47:24my own view is that these powerful tools

1:47:30are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to unbalance, hurt us, and destroy us.

1:47:39I think you know, we humans have a lot of ways of, we can make ourselves go extinct.

1:47:44You know, these things may help us not do that. You know, so they may actually save us.

1:47:50So the people who are you know, overly concerned, in my view, overly concerned. It's a valid debate.

1:47:58I think that they may be missing part of the equation, which is how helpful they could be

1:48:03in making sure we don't destroy ourselves. I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer,

1:48:11but to me, first of all, I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie

1:48:17is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr. who you know, some of the people I've talked to

1:48:24think that's the most boring part of the movie. I thought it was the most fascinating because what's going on here

1:48:31is you realize we have invented these awesome, destructive,

1:48:36powerful technologies called nuclear weapons and they're managed and you know, we humans are,

1:48:47we're not really capable of wielding those weapons. We're, you know, that's what he represented

1:48:54in that movie is here's this guy who is just, he wrongly thinks, he's like being so petty.

1:49:03He thinks that he said something, that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him. They didn't talk about him at all,

1:49:09as you find out in the final scene of the movie. And yet he spent his career trying to be vengeful

1:49:17and petty. And that's the problem. We as a species are not really sophisticated enough

1:49:29and mature enough to handle these technologies. And so, and by the way, before you get to general AI

1:49:36and 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

1:49:44from these technologies in the meantime, even before they're, you know, general AI

1:49:49in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies, and so on.

1:49:55I think it's an incredible moment to be alive and to witness the transformations that are gonna happen.

1:50:02How quickly will happen no one knows. But over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we're gonna see really remarkable advances.

1:50:10And I personally am very excited about it. - First of all, really interesting to say that it's discoveries that it's true

1:50:18that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models.

1:50:24- We don't. - And like it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that that open doors

1:50:31to whole entire new possibilities. - We do know that humans are doing something different

1:50:37from these models in part because you know, we're so power efficient.

1:50:44You know, the human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power.

1:50:51And you know, the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks.

1:50:59So there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this and also we don't need as much data.

1:51:04So, you know, like self-driving cars are, they have to drive billions and billions of miles

1:51:11to try to learn how to drive. And you know, your average 16-year-old figures it out with many fewer miles.

1:51:19So there are still some tricks I think that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick.

1:51:26I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up, but what's interesting is that just scaling things up,

1:51:33and I put just in quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears

1:51:38to pay huge dividends. - Yeah, and there's some more nuanced aspect about human beings that's interesting.

1:51:44If it's able to accomplish like being truly original and novel to you know, large language models,

1:51:51being able to come up with some truly new ideas. That's one. And the other one is truth.

1:51:59It seems that large language models are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing,

1:52:06but they don't require or often have a grounding in sort of a mathematical truth.

1:52:14It can just, it basically is a very good bullshitter. So if there's not enough data,

1:52:19if there's not enough sort of data in the training data about a particular topic,

1:52:25it's just going to concoct accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve.

1:52:35How do you get language models to infer what is true and not to sort of introspect?

1:52:41- Yeah, they need to be taught to say I don't know more often. - Yeah.

1:52:47- And I know of several humans who could be taught that as well. - Sure. - And then the other stuff,

1:52:52because you're still a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things, the other open question is what kind of products

1:52:59are created from this? - Oh, so many. - Yeah. - I mean, you know, just to,

1:53:05we have Alexa and Echo and Alexa has you know,

1:53:10hundreds of millions of installed base, you know, inputs. And so there's, you know, there's Alexa everywhere

1:53:18and guess what Alexa is about to get a lot smarter. - Yeah. - And so that's really you know,

1:53:24from a product point of view, that's super exciting. - There's so many opportunities there. - So many opportunities.

1:53:30Shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing. And AWS you know, we're building Titan,

1:53:36which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock, which our corporate clients at AWS, our enterprise clients,

1:53:47they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data Without accidentally contributing their corporate data

1:53:55to that model. And so those are the tools we're building for them with Bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here.

1:54:02- Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating of how to, 'cause so much value can be gained

1:54:08by training on private data that you want to keep the secure. It's a fascinating technical problem.

1:54:13- Yes. This is a very challenging technical problem and it's one that we're you know, making progress on

1:54:18and dedicated to solving for our customers. - Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots maybe Alexa

1:54:25have a romantic relationship? Like in the movie Her. - Well, I mean, I think-

1:54:30- I'm just brainstorming products here. - If you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like you know, sexual variety.

1:54:37- Yes. - You know, there are people who like everything. So the answer to your question has to be yes.

1:54:43- Okay. - I don't know how- - I guess I'm asking when? - I don't know how widespread that will be. - All right.

1:54:48- But it will happen. - I was just asking when for a friend, but it's all right.

1:54:53Moving on. Next question. What's a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos?

1:55:01You're one of the most productive humans in the world. - Well, I first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter.

1:55:07I like have a coffee. - Can you define putter? - Just like I slowly move around.

1:55:14I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, 'cause I do believe in wandering

1:55:19and I sort of I, you know, I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while.

1:55:26I chat with Lauren, I drink my first coffee. So I kind of, I move pretty slowly

1:55:33in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally. And then, you know, I exercise most days

1:55:42and most days it's not that hard for me. Some days it's really hard and I do it anyway. I don't want to you know, and it's painful.

1:55:49And I'm like why am I here and I don't want to. - Why am I here at the gym? - Why am I here at the gym?

1:55:54Why don't I do something else? You know, it's not always easy. - What's your social motivation in those moments?

1:56:02- I know that I'll feel better later if I do it. And so like the real source of motivation,

1:56:08I can tell the days when I skip it, I'm not quite as alert. I don't feel as good.

1:56:14And then there's harder motivations. It's longer term, you want to be healthy as you age,

1:56:19you know, you want health span, you want, ideally, you know, you want to be healthy and moving around

1:56:26when you're 80 years old, you know, and so there's a lot of, but that kind of motivation is so far in the future.

1:56:33It can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact I'll feel better

1:56:38in 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?

1:56:44Just to linger on that. How much do you curl? I mean, what are we talking about here?

1:56:49That's all I do at the gym. So I just- - My routine, you know, on a good day,

1:56:55I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about 45 minutes of weightlifting,

1:57:01resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who you know, I love

1:57:08who pushes me, which is really helpful. You know, I'll be like,

1:57:13he'll say Jeff, you think you could, can we go up on that weight a little bit?

1:57:18And 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.

1:57:30And of course he's right. - Yeah, of course, of course. - So it's cool to have somebody push you a little bit. - But almost every day you do that?

1:57:37- I do, almost every day. I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting

1:57:42and I rotate. I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff.

1:57:48- So puttering, coffee, gym. - Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work. - Work.

1:57:53What's work look like? What are the productive hours look like for you? - I, you know, so a couple years ago

1:58:00I left as the CEO of Amazon. And I have never worked harder in my life.

1:58:08I am working so hard and I'm mostly enjoying it. But there are also some very painful days.

1:58:14Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I've been, I'm so deeply involved here now

1:58:21for the last couple of years. And in the big, I love it and the small, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything.

1:58:27You know, we're trying to get to rate manufacturing as we talked about. That's super important. We'll get there.

1:58:33We just hired a new CEO, a guy I've known for close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limp, who I love.

1:58:39He's amazing. You know, so we're super lucky to have Dave and you know, we're going to,

1:58:45you're gonna see us move faster there. But, so my day of work, you know, reading documents,

1:58:51having meetings, sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am.

1:58:56It's all about you know, the technology. It's about the organization. It's about you know, I'm very,

1:59:04I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle,

1:59:13inside the engines. It's super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology.

1:59:19My least favorite part of it is you know, building organizations and so on.

1:59:25That's important, but it's also my least favorite part. So, you know, that's why they call it work. You don't always get to do what you wanna do.

1:59:31- How do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems? - I do little thinking retreats.

1:59:38So for, this is not the only, I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing.

1:59:44I'm very good at you know, I don't keep to a strict schedule.

1:59:50Like my meetings often go longer than I plan for them to because I believe in wandering,

1:59:55My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So the document should be written with such clarity

2:00:02that it's like angels singing from on high. I like a crisp document and a messy meeting.

2:00:08And so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to

2:00:14and trying to like wander your way to a solution.

2:00:20And because like when that happens just right,

2:00:27it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it.

2:00:34And you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that. - Can you actually describe the crisp document?

2:00:39Like this is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon, of the way you approach meetings?

2:00:44Is this the six page memo? Maybe first describe the process

2:00:50of running a meeting with memos. - Meetings at Amazon and at Blue Origin are unusual.

2:00:55When we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins,

2:01:00they're a little taken aback sometimes because a typical meeting, we'll start with a six page narratively structured memo

2:01:09and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together

2:01:14in the meeting and read. - I love this. - Take notes in the margins. And then we discuss.

2:01:22And the reason, by the way we do study, you could say I would like everybody to read these memos

2:01:27in advance, but the problem is people don't have time to do that.

2:01:32And 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.

2:01:38And they're also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading. - Yeah, Exactly.

2:01:44- It's better just to carve out the time for people - And do it together. - So now we're all on the same page. We've all read the memo

2:01:50and now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, you know,

2:01:57a PowerPoint presentation of some kind where that has so many difficulties. But one of the problems is PowerPoint

2:02:04is really designed to persuade. It's kind of a sales tool. And internally the last thing you want to do is sell.

2:02:12You want to, you're again, you're truth seeking. You're trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint

2:02:17is it's easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite.

2:02:24It'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,

2:02:30you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it might take two weeks.

2:02:37So the author, it's really a very difficult job, but for the audience it's much better.

2:02:45So you can read a half hour and you know, there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too.

2:02:50You know, senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question's gonna be answered on the next slide,

2:02:56but you never got there. If you read the whole memo in advance, you know, I often write lots of questions

2:03:01that 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,

2:03:08they've been answered. That's why I save all that time. You also get, you know, if the person who's preparing the memo,

2:03:15we talked earlier about you know, group think and you know, the fact that I go last in meetings

2:03:22and that you don't want you know, your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely.

2:03:29You know, the author of the memos has kind of got to be very vulnerable.

2:03:35They've gotta put all their thoughts out there. And they've got to go first. But that's great 'cause it makes 'em really good.

2:03:42And so, and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trampling on them accidentally in a big,

2:03:48you know, PowerPoint presentation. - What's that feel like when you've authored a thing and then you're sitting there

2:03:53and everybody's reading your thing, you're like- - I think it's mostly terrifying. - Yeah.

2:04:00Like maybe in a good way? - I think it's- - Like purifying. - I think it's terrifying in a productive way.

2:04:08- Yeah. - But I think it's emotionally a very nerve wracking experience. - Is there a art science to the writing

2:04:16of the six page memo or just writing in general to you? - I mean, it's really got to be a real memo.

2:04:23So it means you know, paragraphs have topic sentences, like it's verbs and nouns.

2:04:30You can't, that's the other problem with PowerPoints, they're often just bullet points and you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking

2:04:36behind bullet points. When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it's really hard to hide sloppy thinking.

2:04:43So it does, it forces the author to be at their best. And so you're getting somebody's,

2:04:50they're getting somebody's really their best thinking. And then you don't have to spend a lot of time

2:04:55trying to tease that thinking out of the person. And you've got it from the very beginning.

2:05:00So it really saves you time in the long run. - So that part is crisp and then the rest is messy,

2:05:06crisp document. - Yeah, so you don't wanna pretend that the discussion should be crisp.

2:05:11There's, you know, most meetings, you're trying to solve a really hard problem. There's a different kind of meeting,

2:05:17which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews that may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are.

2:05:22But these business review meetings, that's usually for incremental improvement. And you're like looking at a series of metrics,

2:05:28every time it's the same metrics. Those meetings can be very efficient. They can start on time and end on time.

2:05:35- So we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000 year clock.

2:05:44That's what I'm known for, is the humor. Okay.

2:05:49Can you explain what the 10,000 year clock is? - 10,000 year clock is a physical clock of monumental scale.

2:05:56It's about 500 feet tall. It's inside a mountain in west Texas in a chamber that's about 12 feet in diameter

2:06:03and 500 feet tall. 10,000 year clock is a idea conceived by brilliant guy named Danny Hillis

2:06:10way back in the '80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol

2:06:15for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just very conceptually think

2:06:21of the 10,000 year clock as it you know, it ticks once a year.

2:06:27It chimes once you know, every a hundred years. And the cuckoo comes out once every a thousand years.

2:06:33So it just sort of slows everything down. And it's a completely mechanical clock.

2:06:40It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and everything else.

2:06:48It's in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to kind of make a pilgrimage.

2:06:57The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years,

2:07:02but over time it will take on the patina of age and then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking

2:07:11that will actually, hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons.

2:07:18And my view that's really important as we have become,

2:07:23as a species, as a civilization more powerful, you know, we're really affecting the planet now.

2:07:29We're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction, we have all kinds of things

2:07:35where we can really hurt ourselves. And the problems we create can be so large.

2:07:40You know, the unintended consequences of some of our actions like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere is a perfect example.

2:07:47That's an unintended consequence of the industrial revolution that a lot of benefits from it. But we've also got this side effect

2:07:55that is very detrimental. We need to be, we need to start training ourselves to think longer term.

2:08:01Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term

2:08:06that are impossible to solve if you think short term. And we aren't really good at thinking long-term

2:08:11as you know, it's not really, we're kind of, you know, five years is a tough timeframe

2:08:18for most institutions to think past. And we probably need to stretch that to 10 years

2:08:25and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years. And we do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch

2:08:32those thinking horizons. And so the clock is, in a way, it's an art project,

2:08:38it's a symbol. And if it ever has any power to influence people

2:08:44to think longer term, that won't happen for hundreds of years. But we have to, you know, we're gonna build it now

2:08:50and let it accrue the patina of age. - Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out?

2:08:55Here on earth? - I think so. But you know, the United States won't exist.

2:09:01Like whole civilizations rise and fall. 10,000 years is so long. Like no nation state has ever survived

2:09:10for anywhere close to 10,000 years. - And the increasing rate of progress makes that even-

2:09:15- Even less likely so. Do I think humans will be here? Yes. What, you know, how will we have changed ourselves

2:09:21and 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.

2:09:28Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? - No, I'm you know, I used to be afraid of death.

2:09:36I did. I like I remember as a young person being kind of like very scared of mortality,

2:09:45like didn't want to think about it and so on. And always had a big, and as I've gotten older, I'm 59 now.

2:09:51As I've gotten older, somehow that fear has sort of gone away.

2:09:58I 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.

2:10:05I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want to you know, this I wanna be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone.

2:10:12I don't want the long decay. And I'm curious, I wanna see how things turn out.

2:10:18You know, I'd like to be here. I love my family and my close friends and I want to,

2:10:24I'm curious about them and I wanna see, so I have a lot of reasons to stay around, but it's mortality doesn't have have that effect

2:10:34on me that it did you know, maybe when I was in my 20s. - Well Jeff, thank you for creating Amazon,

2:10:41one of the most incredible companies in history. And thank you for trying your best to make humans

2:10:46and multi-planetary species expanding out into our solar system, maybe beyond,

2:10:51to meet the aliens out there. And thank you for talking today. - Well, Lex, thank you for doing your part

2:10:58to lengthen our attention spans. Appreciate that very much.

2:11:04- Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeff Bezos. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors

2:11:09in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Jeff Bezos himself.

2:11:15"Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on the details."

2:11:20Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.