#405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
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The following is a conversation with jeff basis, founder of amazon and blue origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind end of this length. And as he told me, IT felt like we could have easily talk for many more hours, and i'm sure we will in now a quick few second mentioned sponsor checking out in the description is the best way to support this broadcast.

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You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a range here in texas, and I heard you had A A lot of work to do on the ranch. So what's the ool st. Job you remember doing there?

Wow, coolest.

most interesting, memorable.

I think IT was a it's real working ranch. My grant and I spent all my summers on that range age for to sixteen, and my grandfather was really taking me those in the summer. In the early summer, he was let to me pretend to help on the rat, because, of course, of four year old is a burden not to help in real life, just watching me and taking care of me doing that because my mom was so Young shi having when he was seventeen.

And so he was sorted, given her a break, and my grandmother and my grandfather would take me for the summer. But as a got little old, actually was helpful on the ranch. And I loved IT.

I was out there like my grandfather would had a huge influence on me, huge factor in my life. I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch i've fixed when mills and laid fences and pipelines and you that all the things that he really would do vaccinated the animals everything. Um but we had you know my grandfather.

After my grandmother died, I was about twelve and I kept come into the rage. So was then I was just him and me, just the two of us. And he was completely addicted to the sop Opera, the days of our lines. And we would go back to the rain shows every day around one pm or so, to watch days of our lives, like sands through in our glass. So are the days of our lives .

just the image of that? The two, what is a little power?

He has big, crazy dogs. IT was really a very forward of experiment, but the key thing about IT for me, that the great gift I got from IT was that my grandfather was so resourceful, you know, he did everything himself, he made his own veterinary, or he would make needles to suit the. With that he would find little piece of wire and heat IT up and pound IT then, and drill hole in IT and sharpen IT so you learn different things um on a ranch than you would learn you know.

going up in a city. So self reliance yeah .

fearing out that you can solve problems with enough persistence and genuine and a grandfather bota d six bulldozer, which is a big budders. And he got to feel like five thousand dollars because he was completely broken down. I was nineteen fifty five, caterpillars.

D six bodola knew I would have cost, I don't know, more than one hundred thousand dollars. And we spent an entire summer fixing the preparing that bulldozer. We know use male order to to buy big ears for the transmission, and the'd shove that they be too heavy to move.

So we'd have to build a crane. Just that kind of, kind of that problem solving mentality. He had IT so powerfully, you know, he he did all of his own. He he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody. He would figure out on his own the veteran work.

But just the image of the two, you fixing A D six bulldozer than going in for a little break. I want game to so op laying .

on the floor, that's how he watched TV f he was a really, really remark.

That's how imagine clinic would also in all those western when he's when he's not doing what she's doing, he's just watching soap poppers, right? I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration in five, watching your own strong walking on the moon. So let me a ask, you build back at the historical context and impact of that.

So the space raised from nineteen fifty seven to one thousand sixty nine between the soviet union and the us was, in many ways, epic. IT was A A rapid sequence of dramatic events for satellite to space. First human, the space for a spacewalk, first on code, landing on the moon, then some failures, explosions, death, simple size, actually, and then the first human walking on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments are inside to take away from that time, those few years, just uh, twelve years?

Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there. Um you know one of the great things to take away from that one of the great one Brown quotes is I I have come to use the word impossible with great caution.

Yeah, yeah.

And so that kind of the big story of Apollo is the things, you know, the going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible or you'll do that you men walk on the moon. And of course, IT finally happened. Um so you know, I think I was pulled forward in time because of the space race.

I think you know with the geopolitical implications and you know how much resource was put into know at the peak that program was spending two or three percent of GDP ah on the Apollo program, so much resource that I think he was pulled forward in time. You know we kind of did IT ahead of when we quote and quote should have done IT yeah um and so in that way it's also a tactical marvel. I mean, it's truly incredible. It's know it's the tweet century version of building the pyramids or something. It's an achievement that um because IT was pulled forward in time because IT did something that had previous that impossible IT rightly deserves its place, as you know, in the pantheon on of great human achievements.

And of course, you've named the project the rockets that blue origin is working on after some of the folks involved. I don't understand .

why I didn't say new ggaran. Is that american .

for friend?

A big bed of garage though. Fact, I I think his his first words in space, I think, are incredible. He purportedly said, my god is blue.

And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet. No one knew what IT looked like from out there. And ggaran was the first person to see IT.

One of things I think about is how dangerous those early days were for the garden for for glen forbery involved, like how big of a .

risk they were all very taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the soviet thought about ggaran flight, but I think that the americans thought that the alan shepherd flight, the flight that you, a new shepard, is named after the first american space. He going on his suburb flight. They thought he had about a seventy five percent chance of success. So, you know, that's a pretty big risk, twenty five percent risk.

It's of interesting that alan sheep is not quite as famous jung. So for people don't know, all short is the first, uh, astronaut.

first american in space.

american in sub orbital flight. And the first orbital flight .

first is american to orbit the earth. By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter from john glen, which I have framed and hanging on my office wall, where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named new glass after him. And I send me that letter about a week before he died.

And it's really incredible. It's so also a very funny letter he's he's writing in. He says this is a letter about new glen from the original glen and he he's got a great since of humor and he's very, he's very happy about IT and grateful. It's very sweet.

Does he say, P S. Doma s. up.

No, he doesn't make me look good. He doesn't do that job where you are. We got to cover good.

So so back there may be the big picture of space. When you look up at the stars and think big, what do you hope is the future of humanity? Hundreds, thousands of years are now out in space.

I would love to see you a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, a thousand modes, sorts, and one thousand, nine times that with our source system, be full of life and intelligence and energy. And we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources in the source system.

So what would you need that looks like giant space stations?

Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know the planetary surfaces are just way too um so you can and unless you turn them into giant space stations for something but but yeah we will take materials from the moon and from near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on and will build a giant onion style colonies. And people will live in those.

And they have a lot of advantages over planetary surfaces. You can spend them to get Normal earth gravity. You can put them where you want them.

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

They go to earth for vacation.

Yeah, same way you know, you might go to to yellow donate part for vacation. People will they get to know and people get to choose where they live on earth or where they live in space. But they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than theyll be able to use on earth.

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

exactly this planet and robotic probes, all the planets. We know that this is the good one.

Not to play favorite everything.

but the earth really is the good planet. It's amazing. The ecosystem we have here, all of the life in the lush, the plant life and the water resources, everything.

This planet is really extraordinary. And of course, we evolved on this planet. So of course it's perfect for us, but it's also perfect for all the advanced life forms are displayed, all the animals and so on. And so this is a gym we do need to take care of IT.

And as we enter the antipathy, as we get as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and impact for as we dry across this planet, you know, it's that is going to as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capital. We've gotten amazing things.

We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about. The good old days, they're mostly in illusion that in almost every way, life is Better for almost everyone today than IT was, say, fifty years ago, one hundred years.

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

We get, you know, antibody accident, all kinds of life saving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing that is moving backwards in its the natural world. So IT is a fact that five hundred years ago preindustrial age, the natural world was pristine um IT was incredible and we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all these other gifts that we have is an advanced society and we can have both.

But to do that we have to go to space. And all of this really the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capital. And when you look at you know you do want to continue to use more and more energy IT going to make your life Better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately, with living on a fight planet.

And so we have to go into the sore system. And really, you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can't incredibly argue about whether you have to do that. Eventually, we have to do that exactly.

So you don't often talk about about let me ask you on that topic about the blue ring in the orbital reef, uh, space infrastructure projects. What's your vision for these?

So blue ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to three thousand kilograms s of payload, up to jeos en chen orbit or in lunar vicinity. IT has two different kinds of propulsion. IT has chemical propulsion, and IT has electric propulsion.

And so can you can be you can use blue ring in a couple of different ways. You can slowly move, let's say, up to geosynchronous, but using electric propulsion, that might take, you know, one hundred days, one hundred and fifty days, depending how much mass are Carrying. And then and reserve your chemical proportion so that you can change orbits quickly in geos current orbit.

Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geo c. Gruess, and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your secret orbit. Blue ring has A A couple of interesting features.

It's A A IT provides a lot of services to these payload. So the play could be one largest payloads, can be a number of small payloads. And IT provides thermal management, IT provides electric power, IT provides compute Price communications.

And so when you design a payload for blue ring, you don't have you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute is a complicated thing to do. And so we have an unusually large amount of radiation toilet compute on board blue ring.

And you can your payout can just use that what IT needs to. So it's a it's sort of all these services. It's like a set of A P S. It's a little bit like amazon web services. But space payloads that need to move about in earth vitality or lunar vitality.

A W S, S, okay, so computers, space. So you you get a giant chemical rocket to get a payload out to tober. And then you have these admins that show up the boring thing that manages various things like computer. exactly.

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

including humans.

You think the blue ring is not designed to move humans around. It's designed to move payload around. So we're also building a lunar ler, uh, which is a course designed to to land humans.

On the ask about that, let me actually just step back to the old days you were princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicists. Um what attracted you? Do physics and why did you change your mind and not become why why you're not jeff basis, the famous theoretical physicists so I .

loved physics and I stood physics and computer science, and I was proceeding along along the physics path. I was played a major in physics, and I wanted to be a thereto al physicist. And I in the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun.

I really loved IT. Um and I and I was very good the the programing and doing the things. And I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely.

But I really was determined to be a thereafter al physicist. I sy, I went to princeton in the first place. IT was steadily, and then I realized I was gonna be a mediocre odal physicist.

And there were, there were a few people in my classes, like economy, mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do. Things were so difficult for me, and I realized, like, know, there are thousand ways to be smart and to be a really theodore. Physics is not one of those fields where the you know only the top few percent actually move the year you're forward.

It's one of things you you have to be really just your brain has to be wired in a certain way. And there was a guy named um in one of these people who was uh convinced me he didn't mean to convince me but just by observing him he convinced me that I should not try to be a theory ical physicist. His name was your santa and usada was from silica and he was one of the most billion people i'd ever met.

My friend joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problems at one night. And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours, and we made no headway whatsoever. And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, you, santo, so we went to yosano dorm room and he was there.

He was almost always there and we said, just to we're having trouble solve in this uh, partial different equation, which mind taking a look and he said, of course, by the way, he was the most humble, most kind person and so he took her, he looked at our problem and he stared out of for just a few seconds, maybe ten seconds, and he said, cosine and I said, what do you mean, your son? What you mean code? So that's the answer and I to come on and he will show you, he took out some paper and he went, done three pages of equations, everything cancelled out, and the answer was cosine.

And I said, you sana, did you do that in your head? And you don't know, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem, and I could map this problem onto that problem.

And then I was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine. I had a few. You you haven't experience like that.

You realize maybe being a thematically physicist isn't sure isn't what you what the universe wants you to be and so I switched to computer science and um and you know that worked out really well for me. I enjoy IT. I still enjoy IT today.

Yeah there's a particular of intuition. You need to be a great physicists applied to physics.

I think the mathematical school required today is so high, you have to be a world class matheus cian to be a successful theoretical physicist. And it's not, you know, provided other skills to intuition, later thinking and so on. But without the out just top notch, my skills, you're unlikely to be successful .

visualization skill, are to be able to really do these kind of thought experiments. And if you want to truly great creativity, actually what s and write about you puts you on the same levels. Einstein.

that's very kind, but I have, i'm an inventer. If you if you want to boil down what I am, i'm really an invention. And I look at things and I can come up with a typical solutions and, you know, and then I can create one hundred such a typical solutions for something.

Ninety nine of them may not survive, no scrutiny, but one of those one hundred is like, maybe there is, so that might work, and then you can keep going from there. So that kind of lateral thinking, that kind of inventiveness in a high centrality space where the search space is very large, that's where my invinted skills come. That's the thing. I'm if I I self identify as an inventer more than anything else.

yeah, he describes in all kinds of different ways what does that? The creativity, a combined with child, like a wonder that you've maintained still to this day. All of that combined together is there like a few were to study your brain and ttl pect.

How do you think? What's your thinking process like? We will talk about the writing process of putting IT down on paper, which is quite rigorous and famous at a amazon. But how do you when you sit down, maybe alone, maybe with others, and thinking through this high dimensional space and looking for creative solutions, a creative path forward, is there something you could say about .

that process is such a good question, and I honestly don't know how that works. I did. I would try to explain that.

I know that involves lots of wandering. yeah. So I know when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I am going.

So to to go on a straight line to be efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor, in everything you do, you have to work hard on and also just making things a little bit Better. But i'm talking about real invention, a real lateral thinking that requires wandering.

And you have to give ourself permission to wonder. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient. And should you know like when when I sit down at a meeting, I don't know how long the meaning is gonna take if we're trying to solve a problem.

Because if I did that, i'd already I i'd know there's some kind of straight line that were drawing to the solution. The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun then sitting at a White board with a would you know a group of smart people and spit bowling and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and the solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So like um you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea the middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth and both things are really pleasurable.

And when you wonder, I think one key thing is to notice a good idea. And to you maybe to notice the kernel of a good idea, maybe pull that string. Because I I don't think good ideas come fully formed.

Hundred percent right? do. In fact, when I come up with all I think is a good idea and IT survives kind of the first.

Level of scrutiny, you know, that I do in my own head, and i'm ready to tell somebody also about the idea. I will often say, look, this is going to be really easy for you to find rejections to this idea. But work with me.

there's something there.

There's something there and that is intuition. Yeah, you, because it's really easy to kill new ideas in the beginning because they do have so many, so many easy objections to them. So you need to, you need to kind of four warm people and say, look, I know it's gonna a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that.

It'll be fun. So you ve got that ability to say cosine and you somewhere, after all.

maybe not in a different doma. There are a thousand ways to be smart about the way and that is a really like when I go around and I meet people, i'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find IT. Is that one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that is not, is not like I Q is a single dimension. There are people who are smart and such unique ways.

Yeah, you just gave me a good response when somebody calls me at an internet. Know as a thousand ways to be smart.

Well, that you might tell you, yeah, but there are million of ways .

feel like that's a mark twin point, right? You gave me an amazing tour bloor ge in rocket factory and launch complex in the historic cape canara. That's when you glen, the the big rocket we talked about as a being built and will launch. Can you explain what the new ugali rocket is and tell me some interesting technical .

aspects of hot works? sure. A new glass is A A very large a heavy lift launch vehicle to take about forty five metric tons to leo, very, very large class.

It's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the sudden five rockets. So it's about three point nine million pounds of thrust lift off. The booster has seven B E, four engines.

The each engine generates a little more than five hundred and fifty thousand pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, Allen g as the fuel and locks as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox riches stage.

Compassion cycle is a cycle that usually pioneer by the russians. It's a very good cycle. Um and that engine is also going to power the first stage of the volkan rocket which is launch liance rocket.

Then the second stage of new glass is part by two b three u engines which is a upper stage variant of our new shepard liquid hyder gen. So the B E three u has one hundred and sixty thousand pounds of thrust. So two of those three hundred and twenty thousand pounds of thrust.

And hydrogen is a very good propelling for upper stages because he has very high isp. It's not a great propellant, in my view, for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large. Hydrogen has very high I sp, but liquid hygd is a very is not dense at all.

So to store liquid hybrid en, you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hygiene. Your tanks, your liquid hydro en tank is very large. So you really you get more benefit from the higher I sp specific in ples.

You get more benefit from the higher special implies on the second stage and that stage, curious less for talent. So you don't get such a geometrical giant's tanks. The delta four is an example of a vehicle that is all hydration to booster stage is also hyder son. And I think that it's a very effective vehicle, but IT never was very cost effective. It's Operationally very capable but not very cost effect.

The size is also costly.

Size is costly 收入。 It's interesting. Rockets love to be big. Everything works Better .

with me about that. You've don't know that before. That sounds .

like I mean, when you look at the kind of the physics of rocket engines and also when you look at parasitic mass IT doesn't if you have less, you have an avionics stem. So you have a guide and control system that is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as IT is going to be for a tiny rocket.

And so that's just parasitic mass that is very conceptual if you're building a very small rocket, but is trivial if you're building a very large rocket. So if you have the paris of masting and then if you look at, for example, rocket engines have turbo pumps, they have to pressurize the fuel and the oxi zer to a very high pressure level in order to inject IT into the thrust chAmber where burns. And those pumps, all rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger.

So really tiny turbo pumps are very chAllenging to and any kind of gaps you know um are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating euler that precise es. The fuel there has to be some gap there. You can have those parts scraping against one another and those gaps drive and efficiencies.

And so you know if you have a very large turtle pump, those gaps and percentage terms in have been very small. And so there's a bunch of things that you up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up painting for a small rocket. But there's a giant exception to this rule.

And IT is manufacturing. So manufacturing large structures is very, very chAllenging as a pain in the bite. And so it's just if you have you're making a small rocket and you can move all the pieces by hand. You could have symbol on a table. One person can do IT. You don't need cranes and heavy lift Operations and tooling and so on and so on when you start building big objects infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad and all we were and visited and took you to the large pattern you can see is so monumental, yes. And so just these things become major, uh, undertakings, both from an engineering point of view but also from a construction and .

cost point of view. And even the foundation of the watch isn't like sunland, like how .

deep cape canal yeah fact most ocean, most large pets are on beach is somewhere in the oceans because you want to launch over water for safety reasons. The, yes, you have to drive pilot, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilots, you know, fifty, one hundred and fifty feet deep, to get enough structural integrity for these very large. It's, yes, these turned into major civil engineering projects.

I said to say everything about that factory is pretty bad. As he said, tooling, the bigger gets, the more the more application is.

Does make IT epic fun to look at extraordinary. It's humbling .

also because there are humans are so small compared to IT.

We are building in enormous machines. They are harney enormous amounts of uh chemical uh power you know in very, very compact packages. It's truly extraordinary.

But then there's all the different components um and you know the materials involved. There's something interesting that you can describe about the materials ah that comprise the rocket. So IT has to be as latest possible, I guess, while withstanding the heat into the harsh conditions.

Yeah, I play a little kind of games sometimes with the other rocket people that I run into where. So what are the things that would amaze the sixty, sixty engineers? Like what? What's the change? Because, yes, surprisingly, some of rocketry y's greatest hits have not changed.

They are still, they would recognize immediately, a lot of what we do today, and it's exactly what they pioneer back in the sixties, but a few things have changed. The use of carbon composites is is very different today, know, we can build very sophisticated. You saw our carbon tape laying machine that builds the giant ferrings.

And we can build these incredibly light, very stiff faring structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of. I mean, the efficiency, the structural efficiency of that material is so high compared to any mechanical material might use or anything else. So that's one, a aluminum liyang yum.

And the ability to friction stay world aluminum lithium. Remember the fictions? I this is A A remarkable technology this invited decades ago, but has become very practical over the just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to, well to his metal together, IT literally stir the two pieces.

There's a pin that rotates with a certain rate, and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want a world together and then you move IT at a at a very precise speed um and instead of heating the material, IT heats a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally immediately after welding the reading, you can touch the and it's just barely warm IT literally stars the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary.

Road is to the low temperature, and I guess high temperatures will make makes IT the .

weak point exactly with traditional with traditional welding techniques, you may have whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are. You end up with weak regions where you well and with friction stay welding. The welds are just as strong as the bulk material.

So IT really allows you. And so because when you're you let's see you're building a tank that you're gona press rise large liquid natural gas tank for for a booster stage, for example. You know, if you are well in out with traditional methods, you have to size those wildlands the thickness of those pieces with that knocked done for whatever damage you're doing with the world. And that's gonna D A lot of .

weight that tank and even just a looking at the fairings, the result of that, the complex shape that IT takes .

and and like .

what it's supposed to do is, is kind of incredible because people don't know on top of the rockets going to fall apart. That's a task but has to stay strong sometimes yes, and then um disappear. What he needs to this is a very difficult ask yes.

when you need something that needs to have one hundred percent integrity until that needs to have zero percent integrity, needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away. And then when he goes away, has to go away completely. You use explosive charges for that. And so it's a very robust way of separating structure um when you need to exploding yeah a little tiny bits of expressive material um and um it's just little server, the whole connection.

So if you wanna go from one hundred percent structural integrity, the zero as fast as possible .

exploits poses a of this thing .

is so bad as OK. So we back to the two stages. So the first stages reusable.

yeah. Second stage is expendable. Second stage, liquid higher and liquid auction so we can take advantage the higher specific polls um the the first stage lands downs ge on a landing platform in the ocean um comes back for mainland and get ready to do the next mission um I mean this a .

million questions but also is there a path towards reason? Ability for the .

second stage there is and we know how to do that um right now, we're going to work on manufacture that is to make IT as inexpensive as possible. sure. Two path for a second stage make IT reusable or work really hard to make IT inexpensive so you can afford to expand IT. And that trade is actually not obvious which one is Better even in .

terms of costs. In terms of .

and i'm i'm talking about costs is you space flight getting into orbit is solved problem. We solved IT back in the fifty and sixties. The only thing that the only resting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit, which is if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new, you know, endeavors that lots of start of companies of all can do so that we really, that's our one of our missions is to, you know, be part of this industry and lower the cost orbit so that there can be, you know, a kind of a reza, uh, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.

I like you said, uh, getting to orbits solve problem, uh, is just the only interesting thing is reducing the code. You know, you can describe every single problem facing human socialization. That way physicists would say everything is solved.

problem. We've solved everything. The rest is just with the rather for that that just stand collecting. There is the detail some of the greatest innovations and inventions. And you know brilliance is a in that cost reduction stage, right? And you ve had a long career of cost reduction for sure.

Know you know when you what does cost reductions ally mean? IT means inventing a Better way. Yeah, right. And when you invent a Better way, you make the whole world, Richard.

So, you know, whatever IT was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago somebody invented the law. And when they invented the law, they made the whole world, Richard, because they made farming less expensive. Um and so IT IT is a big deal to to invent Better ways. That's how the world gets richer.

So what are some of the the biggest chAllenges on the manufacturing side, on the engineering side that you're facing in working to get to the first launch of new gunn? The first .

launched is one thing we'll do that in twenty twenty four coming up in this coming year. The real thing that the bigger chAllenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently, uh, uh, manufacturing at rate so rate production. So consider if you want to launch new glin, you know twenty four times a year, you need to manufacture a upper stage since they are uh every you know twice a month you need to do and every two weeks.

So you need to be you need to have all of your manufacture facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything Operating at rate and rate. Manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place in the same thing. So every, every a prostates has to B, E through your engines.

So these engines know you need if you're going to launch the vehicle twice amount, you need four engines of months. So you need engine every week. So you need to be that engine needs to be being produced at rate.

And and that say, and there's all of the things that you need to do that all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, the right people of process eeta. So it's one thing to build a first article, right? So that's you to launch new glin for the first time, you need to produce the first started le. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything is going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce new glands at rate.

So the first one is produced in a way that enables the production of the second.

third and four hundred. And you can think of the first article as kind of pushing IT IT pushes all of the manufacturing technology along in of the words it's kind of the um you know it's the test article in a way that's testing out your your manufacturing technologies.

The manufacturing is the big chAllenge.

yes. I mean, I don't want to make IT sound like any of IT is easy. I mean the people who are deciding the engines and all the state, all of IT is hard um for sure.

But but the chAllenge right now is driving really hard to get to is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that and efficient way. Again, kind of back to our costs point. If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe you haven't really moved the state of the art forward.

All this has to be about moving the data, the art forward. There are easy, easier businesses to do. I always tell people, look, if you are trying to make money, we started salty snack food company, or something that .

I did think .

make the lex freeman potato chips don't say .

people going to steal IT. Yeah.

it's hard to see what of saying. It's like there's nothing easy about this business and but it's its own reward. It's it's fascinating, it's worthwhile, it's meaningful. And so no, not I don't want to pick on salty snacks, food companies, but I think it's it's last meaningful. You know you're dinner the day you're rocking, you're not going to have accomplish something amazing yeah is even if you do make .

a lot of money at IT, yeah there's something fundamental different about the coral business of space exploration yeah.

it's for sure it's .

a grand project of humanity.

Yes, it's one of humanity is grand chAllenges. And especially as you look at going to the moon, going to mars and building giant on eal colonies and unlocking all, you know, I won't live along enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I give you an analogy.

When I started amazon, I didn't have to develop a payment system. IT already existed. IT was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages that already existed. IT was called the postal service and royal mail and dojo post and so so all this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders.

And that's why when you look at the internet um you know if by the way, another giant piece of influence ture that was around in the early and taking you back to like one thousand ninety four people were using dialup modems and IT was piggy backing on top of the long distance phone network. That's how the internet that's know how people were accessing servers and so on. And that again, if if that hadn't existed, IT would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there.

No start up company could have done that. And so the problem, you know, you see, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last twenty years, it's because you see like two kids in the dorm move could start the internet company that could be successful and do amazing things because they didn't have to build, have infrastructure was already there. And that's what I wanted to tick, you know, my amazon winnings and use that to build heavy infrastructure.

So the next generation, you know, the generation and that my children and their children is, you know, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then they'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. Yeah like that will be a marker of success when you can have a really valuable space company started in dorm room. Then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that continuity and imagination can really beyond asked. I find that very .

exciting as they will, of course, as kids do take all this hard, if for such ability for granted.

of course, which is the .

interpreter ur spirit.

that an inventions, the greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that there are one day taken for granted. You know, nobody thinks of amazon is an adventure anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews as an we pioneer er views that is so column place simple thing with one click shopping as soon.

Ah but that's a compliment. That's how do you vence something that so used, so beneficially used by so many people that they take IT regretted. I don't know about .

nobody every time he's amazon. I'm still amazed. How does this work that .

that proves you a very curious explore.

All right, all right. Back the rockets time line. You said twenty twenty four, as IT stands now, are both the first test launch and the launch of equiped explores the most still possible yeah I think so um for .

sure the first launch and then we'll see if if escape ie goes on that or not. I think that the first law for sure and I hope as .

a paid to hope.

why I just don't know which mission it's actually going to be slated on. So we also have other things that Michael, on that first mission.

oh, I got IT, but you're optimistic that uh, the launch is still still oh.

the first launch. I am very optimistic that the first launch of new glen will be in twenty twenty four, and i'm just not a one hundred percent certain what payload will be on that first launch.

You nervous about IT.

are you, kid? I'm extremely nervous .

about one hundred percent.

I you know every every loans I go to, you know for new sherd, for other vehicles to i'm always nervous for these launches. But yes, for sure, a first launch to have no nervous about that would be some sign of arrangement, I think.

So when I get to visit launch and is pretty I mean that pay.

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

Have one hundred percent when the thing is fully assembled.

comes up in the transport, or a rector transport a rector for a rocket of .

scale traditionary.

An dict travels out horizon kind of a, you know.

comes up and over a .

few hours you yeah so beautiful thing to watch speaking.

which, if that makes you nervous, I don't you remember but you were aboard a new shepherd on its first crude free. How's that experience? Will you will you terrify them?

You know, strAngely, I wasn't, you know, I ride the rocket.

IT was, no, i've watched other .

people right in the rocket, and i'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself. IT was a difficult conversation to have with my mother when I told her was going go on the first one and not only was I going to go, was gonna ing my brother too. This is a tough conversation .

to have with the .

mom and there's a long part but you like both of you um IT was. Incredible experience and we were we were laughing inside the capsule and you know we're not nervous um to people on the ground were very nervous for us. Um there was actually one of the most emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not happened even before the flight at four thirty in the morning.

Brother are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lawrence is gonna take a year in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave and we go outside outside the ranch house there in west texas where the large facilities is and all of our family, my kids and my brother's kids and but the parents and close friends are assembled there. And they're saying bad to us, but they're kind of saying maybe they think they're saying a bite to us forever. And women not to felt that way, but I was obvious from their faces how nervous they were, that they felt that way.

And IT was sort of powerful because he loved us to see was almost like a tiny room memorial service. Or simply, you could feel how loved you were in that moment. And I was I was really amazing.

Yeah I mean, there's just a epic nature to a two.

The ascent, the flooding is zero. Og takes something very interesting. Geography feels very natural. I don't know if it's because you know would like return to the woods nail.

but that's I think that's that's what you just said.

Feel so natural to be in energy was really interesting. And then what people talk about the overview effect and seeing earth from space, I had that feeling very powerful. I think everyone did you see how fragile the earth is if you're not an environment list that will make you one the great gym level quote.

You know, he looked back at the earth from space and he said he realized you don't go to heaven when you die. You go to heaven when you're born. And it's just, you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this back, this all this nothingness and there's one gym of life and it's earth that is a jm.

ah what you know you're you've talked a lot about decision making throughout your time. Amazon, both that decision like to to be the first to new shepard. Just before I talk your mom. Yeah, like the proof coins. Like actually as one human being, as as a leader of a company on all fronts, that goes, that decision make you like.

I decided that first what I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built IT, I know the vehicle um the i'm very comfortable with the like the escape system. We put as much effort into the escape system on that vehicle as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined is one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire new shepard architecture.

Can actually describe what you mean a escape system.

What's about we have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capture, so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, while the main rocket and is firing, we can ignite the solid rocket motor in the base to the crew capsule and escape from the booster is a very chAllenging system to build, design, validate, test all these things. IT is the reason that i'd control letting anyone go on the shepherd.

So the the booster is as safe and reliable as we can make IT. But we're harnessing whenever you're talking about rocket engines, I don't care what rocket you're talking about, you're honest, sly. Such vast power in such a small compact metric space, the power density is so enormous that IT is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong and so the only way to um improve safety is to have an escape system and you know in historically rockets, human rated rockets have had escape systems.

Only the space shuttle did not and um but a polar had one um the you know um all of the previous geri exact they all had escaped. Systems and we have a new separate, unusual scares. Most escape systems are towers.

We have a pusher escape system. So the third rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capture and pushes. And it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use IT.

So if we have a Normal mission, we land with that. The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission. And so they get wasted even an enormous mission.

And so again, you know, costly matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reused, able, in the event that is not used, you can reuse IT and have to be a push system. It's a very sophisticated thing.

So I knew with these things, you asked me about my decision to go. And so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who design.

I great trust in them and in the engineering that we did. And I thought to my soft look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go. A tourism vehicle has to have been designed, my view, to have very, to be as safe as one can make IT.

You can't make a perfectly safe, it's impossible. But you know, you you have to, you people will do think people take risk. You know, they climb mounds, they they guy dive.

They do deep under water, scuba diving and so on. People are OK taking risk. You can't eliminate the risk.

But IT is something because it's a touch of vehicle. You have to do you're utmost to eliminate those rites. And I felt very good about the system. I think one of the reasons I was so calm and if you others were just calm, they didn't know much about IT as I did.

who was in charge of engaging the escape system.

It's automated, okay? The escape system, generalize, is completely automated. Automated is Better because I can react so much faster.

So yeah for for tourism, rockets, safeties are huge, huge, huge priority for space exploration also. But look, a time deltas.

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

to is there a part of you that's frustrated by the rater progress and blue gen .

nation needs to be much faster. And it's one of the reasons that I left my roles, the C U. Of amazon um a couple of years ago. I needed I wanted to come in and um he blurted, needs me right now and so I had always when I was to see you of amazon, my point of you on this is if find the see you of a publicly traded company is going to get my full attention and I really just how I think about things was very important to me.

I felt to have an obligation to all the stakeholders today was on to do that um and so having, you know, turn the city, I still executive chair there, but i've turned the cereal over. And the reason the primary areas that I did that is that I could spend time of lygon adding some you know energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster and we're going to .

and what are the ways speared up to me? There's and you've talked a lot of different ways to in amazon. Um you are removing barriers for for progress of distributing, making everybody the autonomous and self rely in time, all all those kinds of things. Is that apply blogging or IT does apply?

I know i'm leading this actually, we are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so you know, at amazon, for, you know, ever since the beginning, as if we are going to come the world's most customer obsessed company. And no matter the industry like people, one day people are going to come to amazon from the health care industry.

I want to know, how did you guys how do you how do you so customer service, how do you ask not just pay lip service that but actually do that. Um and from you know all all different industries should come on to study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing of blue origin, and we will help us move faster, is we are going to become the world's most decisive company.

We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk, making those decisions quickly. You know, being bold on those things, that's what. And having the right culture that supports that, you need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious.

You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them. But I studied them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change your mind.

Uh, IT doesn't, you know, changing your mind. I talk about one way doors and two way doors. Most decisions are too way doors.

Can you explain that? Is, as I love that metaphor.

if you make the wrong decision, if it's a two a door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, you spend a little time, there turns out to be the wrong decision, come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequent, al, and so important and so hard to reverse. They really are one way door decisions.

You go in that door, you're not come back. And those decisions have to be made very, deliberately, very carefully. If you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that.

So you know, when I see you, amazon, I often found myself in the position of being the chief slowdown officer because somebody would be bringing me a one way or decision. It's okay. I can think of three more ways to analyzed that.

So let's go do that because we are not gonna build to reverse this one easily. Maybe you can reverse if it's going to be very costly and very time consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning.

And what happens, unfortunately, in companies, what can happen is that you have a one size of fits all decision making process where you are using the heavyweight process. On all this, everything came, including the light wait ones. The two aid or decisions.

Two aid or decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization. And one way to our decisions are the ones, the universal ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up, you know, the serious executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.

Yeah I mean, part of the skill here to know the difference in one way to way. I think yes, I I think you mentioned amazon prime, the decision to sort of create house on prime as a one way door. I mean, it's not it's unclear if is or not, but IT probably isn't. It's a really big risk to go there.

There are bunch of decisions like that that are you know um uh uh changing. The decision is gonna very, very complicated. Some of them are technical decisions to because some technical decisions are like quick drying cement.

You know if you're going once you make them, and it's really hard choosing which propEllents to use in a vehicle. You know, selecting L N, G for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage, that has turned out to be a very good decision. But if you change your mind.

Be a that would be a very big set back to see what I think. So that's the kinder decision. You scrutinies very, very carefully. Other things just start like most decisions are not that way. Most decisions should be made by single individuals, but they need, and done quickly in the full understanding that you can always change your mind.

Yeah, one of the things I really liked, I perhaps not to wait or decisions, is I disagree and commit phrase. So don't. So somebody brings up an idea to you, if the two way, or you say that you don't understand enough to agree, but used to back them, i'd love free to explain.

didn't commit is a really important principal that says a lot of arguing.

So know what is that. My personally, I disagree.

but it's very common in any endeavor in life and business. And anybody where you have teammates, you have a team mate and the two of you disagree, at some point you have to make a decision. And you know in companies we tend to organize herrick ally. So there's know whoever is the more senior person ultimately ts to make decision.

So ultimately this CEO gets to make that decision in the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with so like you know how to I would often I would be the one who would disagree commit some one of my drug reports would very much want to do, to do something in a particular way. I would think that was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view.

They would say, I, jeff, I think you're wrong. And here's why. And we would go back and forth.

And I would often see no what I don't think you're right um but i'm gna gamble with you and um your closer to the ground truth then I am I known you for twenty years. You have great judgment. I don't know that i'm right either.

Not really not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. I took IT your way, but at least then you've made a decision and I and I agreed to commit to that decision.

So i'm not going to be second guessing IT. I'm not going to be snapping at IT. I'm not going to be saying I told you so going to try actively to help make sure IT works. That's a really important t mate behavior. There are so many ways the dispute resolution is a really interesting thing in on teams.

And there are so many ways with two people disagree about saying, even though i'm assuming that the case where everybody y's well intention, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And we have in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of a mechanisms that we used to resolve these kinds of disputes. A lot of them are, I think, really bad.

So example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise, you here's, we're in a room here and I could say, lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is? And you be like iron, jeff, maybe twelve fat tall and I would say I think it's eleven feet talk and then we'd see, you know yet this just caught IT eleven and a half feet.

That's compromise. You instead of the right thing to do is you know to go to tape measure or figure some way actually measuring, but think getting that tape measure and figure how to get IT to the top of the ceiling. And all this, since that requires energy compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that is low energy.

But IT doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling, where the truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth. Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubber.

This is also you have little too executives who disagree, and they just have a war of attrition and which everyone gets exhausted. First capitalists to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth.

And this is very demoralizing. So you, this is where escalation. I try ask people who you know on my team and say, never get to a point where you are resolving something by, you know, who gets exhausted. First, escalate that i'll help you make the decision. No, let's because that's so the energizing and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.

Do you want to get to the resolutions quickly as possible? Because that ultimately .

leads to high velocity? yes. And you want to try to get as close to you as possible.

So you want, like, you know, exhAusting the other person is not truth seeking. yes. And compromise is not truth seeking.

So, you know, IT doesn't mean now in there a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that's we're disagreed, commit and government um but it's it's um escalation is Better than more of a attrition escalate you know to your boss and say, hey, we can agree on this. We like each other. We're respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other.

We need you to me make a decision here so we can look forward. But decisiveness moving forward quickly on on decisions as quickly as as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels.

You so has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. You know amazon has a million and a half people and the company is still fast. We're still decisive. We're still quick, and that's because the culture supports .

that at every scale and in a distributed way. Next mize last year decisions exactly.

You you .

mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask about that. Yes, there's a lot going on there and you haven't really talked about that much. So in addition to the artistic program, when asa blue is doing its own lander program, can you describe IT the a sexy picture and instagram with with one of them is the mk one I guess .

yeah the mark coin, the picture here that would be with build off. And as administrator.

just to clarify the landis, the sexy thing about this.

I know it's not me. I know either the land or bill K I like very, but okay, yes, the markland lander um is a design to take three thousand kilograms to the surface of them and cargo explainable, cargo expended lander lands on the moon days there take three thousand kilograms to the surface. IT can be launched on a single new glen flight, which is very important.

So it's a relatively simple architecture, just like the human landing system ler. But that that called the mark two, mark one is also fuelled with liquid hyder gen, and which is for for high energy missions like planning on the source of the moon. The high specific gup lst of hydrogen is a very big advantage.

The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that is such a deep, it's not storing. So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant because it's boiling off. And so what we're doing is part of the of our lunar program is developing solar powered co coolers that can actually make hydron a storage propellant for deep space.

And that's a real game changer. H, it's a game changer for any high energy mission. So to the moon, but to the other planets, to mars everywhere.

So the idea with mark want both mark one, mark to the new Carry IT from the surface of earth to the surface of the moon.

exactly. So the mark wine is expendable. The lunar, the lunar ander were developing for NASA, the mark two lander.

That's part of a the atmosphere ad they called the sustaining ler program. So that lander is designed to be reusable. IT can land on the surface moon in a single stage configuration and then take off. So the whole that you know the you look at the Apollo program, the lunar ander and Apollo was really two stages.

He would land on the surface, and then IT would leave the decent stage on the service of the moon and only the ascent stage to go back up into the inner orbit, where I would run to you with the command module here. What we're doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that Carries down enough propellant so that can bring the whole thing back up, so that IT can be reached over and over. And the point of doing that of courses to reduce cost, so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time, which is that one of NASA big objectives, because this time the whole point of artists sts.

Is go back to the moon, but this time to stay. So you know, back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times, then ended program and IT really was too expensive to to continue. And so there's .

a few questions that everyone is, how do you stay on the moon? What what ideas do have about yes, like sustained sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for problem .

page of time well um one of the things we're working on is um using lunar resources like lunar regulars to manufactured commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon. We've already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regulate simulate and this source cell is only about seven percent power efficient so it's very inefficient compared to the more advanced solar souls that we make you on earth.

But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar self factory that you can land on the services of the moon, and then the raw material for those soar cls is simply lunar regler, then you can just you continue to turn out solar sales on the service to moon. Have lots of power on the service to moon that will make IT easier for people to live on the moon. A similar we're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regulars.

So lunar regularise, by way, is has a lot of oxygen IT. It's bound very tightly in as oxides with other elements. And so you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive.

So that also could work together with the solar cells. But if you can, and then ultimately, we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the polls of the moon. And we know there is ice water in this, or water ice in those craters, and we know that we can break that down with electroscope hydrogen and oxygen.

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

fast for a little bit. Is there any chance jeff basel steps foot on the moon and on mars? One or the other or both. It's very unlikely.

I think it's probably someone that gets done by future generations. But the time IT gets to me, I think in my lifetime, that's probably going to be done by professional astronauts. Sadly, I would love to stand up for that mission.

So don't count me out yet. lex. You know, give me, give me a finding shot here, maybe. But I think if if we are placing reasonable bets on such a thing in my lifetime, that will continue to be done by professional astronauts.

Yes, these are risky.

difficult missions and probably missions, the requirement of training you, you are going there for a very specific purpose to do something. We're going to be able to do a lot on the moon too, with automation. So you know, in terms of setting up these factories and doing all that, we we are sophisticated enough now with automation that we pride or need humans to tend those factories and machines. So it's there's a lot it's going to be done in both modes.

So have to asked the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out, told the stars, blow origin spaces. Are you competitors, collaborators? Which, to what degree? Well.

I would say, you know, just like the internet is big and there lots of winners at all skill levels. I mean, there are pathetic zen giant companies, you know, the internet has made, but there a bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with private dreams, all driving great customer experiences. Um that's what we want to see in space.

That kind of dynamism in space is big. There is room for a bunch winners, and that's going to happen at all skill levels. And so, you know, space x is gonna be successful for sure. I want glory gin to be successful. And I hope there are another, you know, five companies right behind us.

But you know, I spoke to elon a few times recently about you bu origin, and he was very positive, but he was a person and very supportive of all the efforts you've been leading. A blue, what's your thoughts? You worked with a lot of leaders at amazon at blue, what's your thoughts about you on as a human being and the leader?

Well, I don't really know elon very well. You know I know his public persona, but I also know you can't know anyone by their public persona. Um it's impossible.

I mean, you may think you do, but I guarantee you don't so I don't really know. You know elon way Better than I do relax. But um in in terms of his judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There is no way you could have you know tesla and space sex without being a capable leader. It's impossible.

Hey, I just I hope you guys hanging out sometimes shake hands in sort of have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity because what you're doing is like one of the big grand chAllenges ahead for humanity. Well.

I agree with you, and I thinking a lot of these endeavors were very like minded. And so I think, I think I know I saying we're identical, but I think we're very like minded. And so I love that idea.

I go back to a sexy pictures on your instagram. There's a video of you from the early days of amazon giving a tour year of offices. I think you're dad is all in the camera.

Yeah, I know. right? Yes, that's what the giant orange extension .

cord and you like explaining the the genius of the extension d and a desk in the C. R team monitor. And sort of that's where the that's where all the magic happened.

I forget what you did. This is like the the center of at all. So most of like who's going to remind at that time you left a good job in new york and took this left? Are you excited when you scared.

cited and scared, anxious, thought the odds, success were low, told all of her early investors that I thought there was a thirty percent he has a success by which I just been getting your money back. Not like to not what actually happened because that's the truth. Every start up company is unlikely to work.

It's helpful to be in reality about that, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head like you on the one hand, your you know what the baseline of statistics say about start of companies. And the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be one hundred percent sure is gonna work.

And you're doing both things at the same time you're holding that contradiction in your head. But IT was so if so exciting I love you know every from nineteen ninety four and the company was founded to nineteen ninety five when we opened our doors in all the way until today. It's I find amazon so exciting and that doesn't mean it's like full of pain, full of problems.

It's like there are so many things that need to be resolved to work and made Better and an extra. But on baLance, it's so fun. It's such a privilege in such a joy.

I feel so grateful that i've been part of that journey. Um this has been incredible. So in some sense .

you don't want A A single day of comfort. You've written about this many times. We will talk about your writing, which I would highly recommend people read in just the letters to shareholders.

Uh so you rote explaining the idea of day one thinking. I think you first rote about in ninety seven letters to shareholders. Then you also, in a way, road about, sad to says, you're last letter to shareholder C.

L. And you said that day two is stacks followed by irrelevance, followed by excitation painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it's always day one. Can you explain this day one? Think this is a really powerful way to describe the beginning in the journey of amazon.

It's it's really a very simple and I think age old idea about renewal and rebirth. And like every day is day one every day you're deciding what you're going to do and you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or you need self consistency. Self consistency even can be a trap.

And so day one thinking is kind of we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about, uh, how we're going to Operate or even even even as deeply as what our principles are. We can go back to that. Turns out we don't change this very often, but we change him occasionally.

And when we work on programs that amazon, we often make a list of tenants and the the tenets are kind of they're not principles. There are a little more tactical than principles, but kind of the the main ideas that we want this program to embody, whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put, these are the tenants for this programme.

And then when printing aces, we always put, unless you know a Better way. And that idea, unless you know a Better way, is so important, because you would never want to get trapped by dogma. You d never want to get trapped by history.

IT doesn't mean you discarded history or ignore. There's so much value in what has worked in the past and but you can't be blindly following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one. You're always starting fresh .

and h to the question of how to fend off day to you said such a question can have a simple answer. As you're saying, there will be many elements, multiple pats s in many traps. I don't know the whole answer, but I may no bit of IT.

Here's a starter pack of essentials. Maybe others come to mind for day one. Defense customer obsession, uh, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends in high value sy decision making. So we talked about hythe asi decision making that's more difficult than sounds. So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on eager adoption of external trends, hive losy decision making, skeptical view proxy highly.

You fight off day too well. You know, i'll talk about because I think it's the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest understand is the skeptical view of proxies. Um one of the things that happens in business, probably anything that you where you know you have an ongoing program and something is is underway for a number of years, is you develop certain things that you're managing to like.

Lids said the typical case would be a metric and that metric isn't the real underlying thing. And so you maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like if you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get or how many returns do you get in? So in sn.

And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of a nurse a sets in where somebody a long time ago invinted that metric. And they invinted that metric, they decided we need to watch for, you know, customer returns, poor units sold as an important metric. But they had a reason why they choose that metric.

The person who invented that metric and decided IT was worth watching. And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy, the proxy for truth, I proxy for truth. The proxy for customer, say in this case is a proxy for customer happiness.

And but that metric is not actually customer happiness, is a proxy for customer happiness. The person who invented the metric understood that connection five years later is a kind of a nurse, a concert. And you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place and the world shift a little.

And now that proxy isn't as vibes that used to or its missing something, and you have to be on alert for that. You have to know. okay.

This is I don't really care about this metric. I care about customer or happiness. And this metric is worth putting energy into and falling and improving and scrutinising only in so much as IT actually affects customer happiness.

And so we got a constant beyond guard, and it's very, very common. This is a newest problem, very common, especially in large companies, that they are managing to metrics that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted off from under them a little and the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody ten years earlier invented the metric.

That is a nuance, but as a big problem, right? Something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.

yes. And by the way, you do need metro. No, you can't ignore them. You want them, but you just have to be constantly on guard. This is you know a way to slip in today to thinking would be to manage your business to metrics that you don't really understand and you're not really sure why they were invented in the first place. You are not sure they're still as relevant .

as they used to be. What is the take to be the guy or gal who who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess what does IT take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting? Because that's a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at the meeting.

We all show up here to friday. this. You have just asked a million other questions. So this is, this is, if I generalized what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth telling you, and we humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals.

Yeah, we are.

And take you back in time, ten thousand years, and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive, you can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you make IT club to death.

The middle the night truth are often they don't want to be heard because important truth can be um uncomfortable. They can be awkward. They can be exhAusting.

impolite.

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

Any high performing organization has to have mechanisms in a culture that supports truth telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that and you have to talk about the fact that IT takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people.

You have to remind people it's okay that is uncomfortable, literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do is humans. It's not really it's kind of a side effect. You know we can do that but it's not how we survive.

We must survive by being social animals um and being coordinated and CoOperative and um that's really important and so there's a science is all about truth telling is actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth. And even in science you find that it's hard to tell the truth, right? Even know you to have hypothesis, test IT and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on. It's not easy.

But even in science there's like the senior scientists and the junior scientists. And then there is a hierarchy of humans where the city, but some hosting unity matters in the scientific process.

which is not true inside companies to. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. And and that really is about trying to, you know, there are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience that, you know, if I speak first, even very strong world, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well, if jeff thinks that I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe i'm not right and so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room, go last, but everybody also go first. In fact, ideally it's try to have the most unior person go first in the second and try to go in order of seniority um so you can hear everyone's opinion and the kind of unfiltered way because we really do we actually literally change our opinions of somebody who you really respect, says something, makes you change your mind a little.

So you're saying implicity or explicitly give permission for people to have a strong opinion that as long as is back by data yes.

And sometimes that can even by the way, a lot of our powerful truth turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on antidotes, their intuition based. And sometimes you don't even have a strong data.

But you may know, you may know the person want to trust your judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in IT may resonate with a set of antidotes you have and then you may build a city. You know something about that feels right.

Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard IT because IT feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy, it's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation, right, you may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of of looking for trying to find the solar lighting is to look this that might be good, but i'm going to go with its bad for now and tower. sure.

So speaking of happiness, by as data collection and anecdotes, you have to hold that for a transition. You you have to tell me the story of the the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about eight .

times yeah this is a very early in history of amazon, and we were going over a weekly business review, a set of documents in, I have I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right and and IT doesn't mean you just slave ously go fall the antidote. Then that means you go examine the data is the is usually not the data is being um misconducted.

It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so you know if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something and at the same time, you know your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining, used to doubt the metrics. And an early example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than, I don't know, sixty seconds when they called IT one eight hundred number to get a phone customer service.

The wait time was supposed to be less than sixty seconds. And but we had lot of complaints that IT was longer than that. And anecdotally, IT seemed longer than that.

Like me know, I would call customer arce myself as a one day we're in a meeting or going to the W B, R. And the weekly business review and we get to this metric in the deck and the guy hoo leads customer service is defeated, the metric. And I said, OK, let's call. Pick up the phone, and I doubt the one hundred number and called customer service, and we just waited in the science.

What is turned out to be was .

really love more than ten minutes, I think, oh, wo. IT was many minutes. And so IT dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.

We weren't measure in the right thing. And and that set off whole cheeto events when we start measuring the right. And that's an example, by the way, of of truth telling is like that's an uncomfortable thing to do. But but you have to seek truth even when it's uncomfortable, and you have to get people's attention and they have to buy into IT and they have to get another died around really fixing things.

So that, that speaks the obsession of the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to maxon's, just being obsessed, making customers happy. I think the company is sometimes say that, but m4 is really obsessed with that。 I think there is something really profound to that, which is seen the world to the eyes of the customer. Like the customer experience, if you are being that using the product that's uh enjoy the product, like what they like, the subtle little things um that make up their experience, like how you optimize those.

This is another a really good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage. And then there are small things internally into azz. We call them paper cuts.

So we have we're always working on the big things, like if you asked me, and most of the energy goes into the big things as I should so and you can identify the big things and I would encourage anybody, if if any you know body, listen to this as an entrepreneur, as a small business, whatever um you know think about the things are not going to change over ten years and those are probably the big things. So like I know in our real business city of zon, ten years from now, customers are still going to want low Prices. I know there's still going to want fast delivery and I just know there's still going to want big selection.

So it's impossible to imagine a scenario were ten years from now. I say where customers is. I love amazon on.

I just wish the Prices is a little more higher or I love amazon on, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. So when you identify the big things you can tell their worth putting energy into because they're stable in time. okay.

But you're asking about something a little different, which is in every customer experience, there are those big things. And by the way, it's astonied sly, hard to focus even on just the big things. So you know, they're obvious they're really hard to focus on.

But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call those paper cuts and we make long list of them. And then we have dedicated teams that go fixed ed paper cuts because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts and they never work their way down the list to get to. They are working on big things as they should and as you want them to. Um and so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.

Where would you put on a paper cut spectrum to buy now one click. But which is, I think, pretty genius. So to me like, okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet, there are things I do a lot. I may be representing regular human. I would love for those things to be friction tous, for example, booking airline tickets, just saying, but you know, it's buying A A thing with one click make enough experience, frictionless, intuitive, all eps like that, that just fundamentally makes my life Better, not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind .

of coding tive .

load yeah coding tive load and p inner peace and happiness first, all of buying stuff um isn't a pleasant experience helping enough money buy a thing and then buying IT is a pleasant experience. And like having pain around that is somehow still ruling A A beautiful experience. And I guess all i'm saying as a as a person who loves good ideas is that a paper cut a solution to .

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

most every time I clicked the button, I just never surge of happiness.

This there is in in the perfect invention, for the perfect moment, in the perfect context, there is real beauty, actual beauty. And IT feels good. It's emotional, emotional for the inventor.

It's emotional for the team that builds IT. It's emotional for the customer is a big deal. And you can feel those things .

to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess, is that they want thinking effort.

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

There's a lot of books written about you. There's a book invent in wander where what the ix and doesn't entrance it's mostly collected writings of yours. Um after like that I also recommend people check out the founders pocket um that covers you a law in a different analysis as a different business advice you given over the years. Um I bring all that up because, uh, I saw that there are I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans and I forget how was phrase but that when you are thinking about the kindle that you're thinking about how technology to changes us.

yeah we go off .

and with .

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

which is fascinating .

to think about a irca.

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

a hundred percent, and you know you you can feel your brain, brains are plastic, and you can feel your brain getting reprogram. I remember the first time this happened to me was when tereus, who first came on the scene. I was sure you've had that anybody who has been a game player has this experience where you close eyes to lay down, to go to sleep, and you see all the little blocks moving, and you you're kind of rotating them in your mind.

And you can just tell as you walk around the world that you have required your brain to play techs. And but that happens with everything. And so you know, one of the I think we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this.

I fear I think one of the things that we've done online and largely because of social media as we have train our brains to be really good at processing super short form content. And your podcast lies in the face of this. You do these long format things and uh reading reading books is a long format thing.

And we all do more of if if you if something is convenient, we do more of IT. And so when you make tools, you know that we care around a little. We Carry around in our pocket a phone in one of the things that phone does, for the most part is that is an attention shortening device because most of the things we do on our phone short our attention spans. And i'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad, but do think it's happened as one of the ways were covode ving with that tool. But I think I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.

Yeah, I think you spoken about the value in your own life of focus. I've singular focus on the thing for prolonged players at time, and that certainly what books do and that certainly what that piece of technology does. But I bring all that up to to ask you about another piece of technology, ai, that has the potential to have a very sectaries to have an impact on human civilization. how? How do you think A I will changes .

would hear, talking about generated largest language models, things like ChatGPT and its soon successors. And these are incredibly powerful technologies. To believe otherwise is to bear your head in the sand soon, to be even more powerful.

It's interesting to me that the large language models in their current form are not inventions, their discoveries. And the telescope was an invention. But looking through IT, a jupiter, knowing that had moons was a discovery.

My god, IT has wounds and that we got alot. And so this is clear on that spectrum of invention. We know exactly what happens with a seven eighty seven.

It's an engineer object. We designed IT. We know how behaves.

We don't want any surprises. Largely, english models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting surprised by the capabilities.

They're not really engineered objects. Then you know you have this debate about whether they going to be good for human. You're bad for humanity.

Um you know even specialized day, I can be very bad for humanity. I just regular machine learning models that can make certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful. And they're not generally eyes.

They're just could just be very smart weapons. And so we have to think about all of those things. I'm very optimistic about this.

So I even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that the these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to unbaLance, hurt us and destroy us. I think, you know we humans have a lot of ways of we can make our cells go extinct. You these things help us not do that.

So we may actually actually save us. So the people who are you know overly concerned I in my view overlook is a valid debate. Um I think I think that they may be missing part of of the equation, which is how helpful they could be making sure we don't destroy ourselves if you saw the movie open hammer.

But to me, I I first I loved the movie and I thought the best part of movie is this bureaucrat played by robbert down in junior, who, you know, so people were targeted to get the most boring part of the movie. I thought I was the most fascinating, because what's going on here is you realize we have invented this awesome, destructive, powerful technologies called nuclear weapons, and they are managed. We we humans are.

We are not really capable of of wheeling those weapons. We know that's what he represented in that move is here's this guy who is just, he wrongly thinks he's like being so petty. He thinks he said something oppenheimer's said something bad to einstein about him.

He did didn't talk about him at all. He find out in the final scene of the movie. And yet he spent his career trying to be ventmore in and in petty. And that's that's the problem. We as a species are not really sophisticated enough and not sure enough to these technologies.

And so and by the way, before you get to generally I and the the possibility of A I having agency and there's a lot of things would have to happen, but there's so much benefit that's gonna from these technologies. In the meantime, even before there, generally I in terms of Better medicines and Better tools to develop more technologies. And so so I think it's an incredible moment to be alive to witness the transformations are going to happen.

How quickly happen, no one knows, but over the next ten years and twenty years, I think we're going to see really remarkable advances. And I personally am very excited about IT. First.

about really interesting to say that discoveries, that it's true, that we don't know the limits of what's possible with the current language models we do, and like what IT could be, a few tricks and tacks here and there, they that open doors to hold entire new possibilities.

We do know that humans are doing something different from these models, in part because, you know, we're so power efficient, you know, the human brain does remarkable things. And IT doesn't know about twenty watts of power. And you, the the A I techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks.

So there's something interesting about where the human brain does this. And also, we don't need as much data. So you know like soft driving cars are they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try to learn how to drive.

And you know you're average sixteen year old figures without with many fewer miles. So there are still some tricks, I think, that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick.

I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up. But what's interesting is that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes because it's actually hard to scale things up. But just scaling things up also appears to pay huge .

dividends yeah and is some more new on suspect about human beings is interesting, was able to accomplish like being truly original and novel to you know large language miles being able to come up with some truly new ideas um that's one.

And the other one is, uh, truth IT seems that largest language models are very good at sounding like they're saying a true thing but they don't a require or often have a groundings in sort of a mathematical truth can just basically is a very good bullshitter. So if there's not enough date, if there's not enough data uh in the in the training data about a particular topic is just going to concoct um accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve. How do you get language models to infer what is sure not to sort of introspect yeah think you .

would be taught to say, I don't know, I don't more often yes, I know several humans who could be taught that as well here and in .

the other stuff because you're still a bit involved in naas outside with A I things the other open questions, what kind of products are .

created from this oh so many yeah I mean you know just you know we have um alex and echo and alex a has you know hundreds of millions of installed base inputs. And so there's there's lex everywhere and guess what alex is about to get a law smarter? yes. And so that's really, you know from a product point of view, that's super exciting.

There's so many opportunities there.

so many opportunities shopping this. Know all that stuff is amazing in A W S. You know we're building tighten, which is our a foundation model, were also building bedrock, which are corporate clients with A W U.

S. Enterprise clients. They want to build to use these powerful males with their own corporate data, yes, without accidentally contributed in their corporate data to that model. So those of the tools were building for them with bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here at the security.

the privacy. All those things are fascinating how, because so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep the secure. This this is a very chAllenging .

technical problem and is one that where you making progression and dedicated solving for our customers.

Ah do you think they'll be a day when humans and robots, maybe alexa, have a romantic relationship?

Well, I mean, I think if you look .

at the products.

if you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like sexual variety, there are people who like everything. So the answered question has to be, yes.

I don't know.

widespread up.

alright.

but IT will happen.

I was just asking one for a friend. But right, moving on next question. What's a perfectly productive day in the life of jeff basis, you one of the most productive humans in the world?

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

The potter.

just like, I slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I as I do believe in wandering and I sort of know I read my phone for a while, I read newspapers for a while, I chat with law and I drink my first coffee. So I kind of I moved pretty slowly in the first couple of our I get up early just naturally and and then, you know, I exercise most days and most days it's not the heart for sunday is really hard and I do something I don't want to, you know, it's painful and I like, why am I here and I don't want to do me?

Why I hear at the games?

Why am I here to you? Why I do something? This is not always easy.

this source of motivation in those moments.

I know that i'll feel Better later if I do IT. And so like the the real source of motivation, I can tell the days when I skip IT, i'm not quite as alert, I don't feel as good. And then there's harder motivation that's longer term.

You want to be healthy as you age, you want health spend. You want ideally, you know you want to be healthy and moving around when you're eighty years old. You so here's a lot of but that kind of motive so far in the future, IT can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact i'll feel Better in about four hours if I do IT now have more energy for us my day.

And so and saw on what's exerts a link, what do you? How much you cruel I am?

What are we talking about here?

That's all I do .

at the gym. Just my routine. On a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio, and I do about forty five minutes of wait, lifting resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have trainer who, you know, I love, who pushes me, which is really helpful.

I'll be like, he'll say, jeff, you could could we go up on that way a little bit and I think about IT and be like, no, I don't think so and he'll he'll look at me and say, yeah, I think you can. And of course, right. So it's to have somebody push you a little bit.

But almost day you do that.

I do almost every day. I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weight lifting. And i'd vote. I do a polling day pushing day in a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff.

So a puttering coffee.

Petering coffee, jim. And then work.

what's work? Look like? What the productive hours look for you.

I, you know. So I A couple years ago, I left as the co of amazon, and I have never worked tiger in my life. I am working so hard and i'm mostly doing IT.

But there are also some very painful days. Most of my time is spent on florida, and i've been am so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years. And in the big, I love IT.

In the small, there's all the frustrations to come along with everything. You know, we're trying to get to rate manufacturing as we talked about that important will get there. We just tired new.

You guy have known him for close to fifteen years now. I named dave limp O I love. He's amazing. Um so we're super lucky to have dave and we're going to go to see us. We have fashion there.

But so my day of work, you know reading documents, heavy meetings, sometimes in persons, sometimes over zone, depends on where I am. It's all about, you know, the technology. It's about the organization.

It's about, you know, i'm very I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It's super fund for me. My favorite part of IT is the technology.

My least favorite part of IT is building organizations and so on. That's important, but it's also at least very apart. So know that's why they can't work. You don't know is good to do what you want to do.

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

I do little thinking retreats. So for this is not only I, I can do that all day. I am very good at focusing. I am very good, you know, I don't keep to a strict schedule, like my meetings often go longer than I planned for them too, because I believe in wandering, and that my perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So the document should be written with such clarity that is like Angels seeing from on high.

I like a crisp document in a messy meeting, and so the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and and trying to like, wander your way to a solution. And because in that is if when that happens just right, IT makes all the other meetings worthwhile. IT feels good.

IT has a beauty to IT. IT has in a static beauty to IT you get real breakthrough. The meetings like that .

he actually described the the crib document like this is one of the legendary aspects of amazon of the way approach meetings is the six page memo at first described the process of of the meeting with my moves.

And meetings at amazon and Gloria are unusual. When we we get new, when new people come in like a new executive joins, there are a little taken to back sometimes because the typical meeting will start with the six page nearly structured memo. And we do study hall for thirty minutes. We sit there silently together in the meeting and read, take notes in the margins.

And then we then we discuss, and the reason, by the way, we do, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don't have time to do that, and they end up come to the meeting having always scared the memo or maybe not ready at all. And they are trying to catch up and also blighting like they were in college, having pretended to do the really exact, it's Better just to care about the time for people. So now with all the same page, we've all read the memo, and now we can have a really elevated discussion.

And this is so much Better from having a slideshow presentation. You know, a powerpoint presentation is so kind where that has so many difficulties. But one of the promises, powerpoint is really designed to persuade its kind of a sales to.

And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. You want to you're you're truth seeking. You're trying to find truth.

And the other problem with powerpoint is is easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a mimmo is the opposite. It's hard to write a six pago. A good six pages menu might take two weeks to write you to write IT you have to rewrite IT. You have to, you have to talk to people about IT.

They have to poke holes in IT for you, you write again, IT may take two weeks, so the author is really very difficult job, but for the audience, it's much Better. So you can read a half our there are little problems with powerpoint presentations too. Senior executive interrupt with questions, half of the presentation, a questions gonna be answered on the next slide. But you never got there was read the whole memo in advance. You know, I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos.

And then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of them them or they've been answer, it's why to save all that time you will also get you if the person's preparing the memo we talked earlier about um you know group think and you know the fact I go last than meetings and that you don't want you know to your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely um the author of the memo is is is kind of got to be very vulnerable. They got to put all their thoughts out there and they've got to go first, but that's great because that makes them really good. And so and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trapped on them acacias tally, a big powerpoint presentation.

Feel like when you've thing and then you're sitting there and everybody is reading your thing.

you you're like, I think it's mostly terrified. yeah.

Like maybe in a good way, I think it's sa terrifying .

I think it's terrifying have been a productive way um but I think it's emotionally a very nerve action experience.

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

The I mean, it's really got to be a real memo. So that means, you know, paragraph s have topic sentences, verbs and nouns. And that's the other I was powering.

President, you often just bulletproof ts, and you you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points. When you have to write in complete senses with narrative structure. It's really hard to hide soppy thinking.

So IT does IT IT forces the author to be at their best. And so you're getting somebody, they're getting somebody is really their best thinking. And then you don't have to spend a lot of time trying to tears that, thinking out of the person you've got IT from the very beginning. That really saves you time in the long run.

So that part is crisp and and the rest is messy.

Chris dog, yes, you don't want, you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be is most meetings. You're trying to solve a really hard problem. There's a different kind of meeting, which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews.

They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings that's usually for incremental improvement. And you're looking looking at a series of metrics every time is the same. Matrix needs to be very efficient. They can start on time and end on time.

So we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the ten thousand o'clock. As when i'm known for is the humor. okay. Um can you explain what a ten thousand o'clock is?

Pint as your clock is a physical clock of monumental scales about five hundred feet tall. It's inside a mountain in west taxes in a chAmber that's about twelve feet and diageo and five hundred feet tall. Ten thousand year clock is the idea conceived by Brown guy named danny hillis way back in the eighties, ideas to build a cock as a symbol for long term thinking.

And you can kind of just very conceptual. Think of the ten thousand o'clock as IT you know IT takes once a year um at times once you know every hundred years and the koko comes out once every thousand years so just slows everything down and it's a completely mechanical clock. IT is designed to last ten thousand years with no human intervention.

So the material choices in everything else um it's in a remote location both to protect IT but also so that visitors have to kind of make A A pilgrimage. The idea is that over time, this will take hundreds of years. But over time, I will take on the peta of age, and then I will become a symbol for long term thinking.

Well, actually, hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons. And my view, that's really important. As we have become as a species, as a civilization more powerful, we're really affecting the planet now.

We're really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves.

And the problems we create can be so large, you know, the unintended consequences of our actions, so that climate change, putting carbon the area is a prior example. That's an unintended consequence of the industrial volume. There are benefits from IT.

But we've also got this side effect that is very detrimental. We need to be who you start training ourselves to think longer term. Long term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long term that are impossible to solve if you think short term and we aren't really good at thinking long term, as you know, it's not really you were kind of know five years is a tough time frame for most institutions to think past um and we probably need to stretch that to ten years and fifteen years and twenty years and twenty five years and we do a Better job for our children and our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so in the clock is in ways it's an art project um it's a simul um and IT if I ever has any power to influence people to think clogg term that won't happen for hundreds of years but we have not going to build IT now and let IT accrete the patino of age do you think .

humans will be here when the clock comes out here on earth?

I think so. But you know, the united states will not exist. They call civilizations rise and fall ten thousand years so long like no nation state has ever survived. Pretty were close to ten thousand years.

And the increasing way to progress makes that even.

even less likely. So do I think humans will be here? Yes, what you know, how will we have change selves and what we be, and I don't know, but I think will be here .

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

No, I you know I I used to be afraid of death. Um I did. I like my like I remember as a Young person being kind of like very scared of mortality like you didn't want to think about IT in the saw on and always a big.

And as i've gotten older and fifty nine now, as i've gotten older, somehow that fear has also got away. I don't know. I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but i'd like to be it's a really more focused on health span.

I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy and then gone and I want the long decay. Um but and i'm curious, I want to see how things turn out. You know i'd like to be here. I love my my family and my close friends, and I want to curious about them, and I want to see so have a lot of reasons to stay around. But it's mortality doesn't doesn't have that effect on me that I did you maybe when I was in my twins.

Well, you have thank you for creating amazon, one of the most incredible companies in history, and thank you for trying your best to make humans and multiplying tary species expanding out into our our system, maybe beyond to meet the aliens out there. And thank you for talking today.

relax. Thank you for doing your part to link in our attention space. Appreciate that very much.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with jeff bases to support the pod guests, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from jeff bazas himself. Be stubber on vision but flexible on the details. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.