Lex Friedman Podcast #405 - Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin
Crispy docs and messy meetings.
On ruthless self-assessment
I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist. And there were a few people in my classes like in quantum mechanics and so on who they could effortlessly do things that were so difficult for me. And I realized there are a thousand ways to be smart.
On coming up with 99 shit ideas to come up with one gem
I'm an inventor. If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor. And I look at things and I can come up with atypical solutions and, you know, and then I can create a hundred such atypical solutions for something. 99 of them may not survive, you know, scrutiny. But one of those 100 is like, hmm, maybe there is, maybe that might work. And then you can keep going from there.
On the importance of wandering
when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going. So to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention, not incremental improvement. And incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do. You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better. But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering. And you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, they feel like wandering is inefficient
On a thousand ways to be smart
There are a thousand ways to be smart, by the way. And that is a really like when I go around, you know, and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find that's one of the things that makes the world so interesting and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single dimension. There are people who are smart in such unique ways.
On rate manufacturing
if you're going to launch the vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month. So you need an engine every week. So that engine needs to be being produced at rate and there's all of the things that you need to do that, all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, the right people, process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article. So that's, you know, to launch New Glen for the first time, you need to produce a first article. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glens at rate.
On advancing manufacturing technology
the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point. If you get to rate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you haven't really solved the cost problem and maybe you haven't really moved this state of the art forward. All this has to be about moving this state of the art forward.
On decisiveness
We are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so, you know, at Amazon, for, you know, ever since the beginning, I said, we're going to become the world's most customer obsessed company. And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know, how did you guys, how are you, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you actually not just pay lip service that, but actually do that. And from, you know, all different industries should come on to study us to see how we accomplish that. And the analogous thing at Blue Origin and it will help us move faster is we're going to become the world's most decisive company.
On one-way doors vs. two-way doors
You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's study them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind. It doesn't, you know, changing your mind. I took about one way doors and two way doors. Most decisions are two way doors. If you make the wrong decision, if it's a two way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out, and you spend a little time there. It turns out to be the wrong decision. Come back in and pick another door. Some decisions are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse that they really are one way door decisions.
On disagreeing and committing
I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say, Jeff, I think you're wrong. And here's why. And we would go back and forth. And I would often say, you know what? I don't think you're right. But I'm going to gamble with you. And you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I had known you for 20 years. You have great judgment. I don't know that I'm right either. Not really, not for sure. All these decisions are complicated. Let's do it your way. But at least then you've made a decision. And I'm agreeing to commit to that decision. So I'm not going to be second guessing it. I'm not going to be sniping at it. I'm not going to be saying, I told you so. I'm going to try actively to help make sure it works. That's a really important teammate behavior.
On compromise
Compromise the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
On stubbornness
Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn. Never get to a point where you are resolving something by who gets exhausted first. Escalate that. I'll help you make the decision. Because that's so de-energizing and such a terrible lousy way to make a decision.
On decisiveness at scale
Yes. And you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want like exhausting the other person is not truth seeking. And compromise is not truth seeking. So now there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth. And that's where disagreeing and commit can come in. But escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, hey, we can't agree on this. We like each other. We're respectful of each other. But we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can, is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all scale levels. So it has to be part of the culture to get high velocity. Amazon has a million and a half people. And the company is still fast.
On day one thinking
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 how we're going to operate.
On tenants
when we work on programs that Amazon, we often make a list of tenants and the tenants are kind of they're not principles. They're a little more tactical than principles but it's kind of the main ideas that we want this program to embody whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put these are the tenants for this program and then we in parentheses we always put unless you know a better way. And that idea unless you know a better way is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma. You never want to get trapped by history.
On metrics
It's very common, especially in large companies, that they are managing to metrics, that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist. And the world may have shifted off from under them a little. And the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.
On truth seeking
we humans are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals. Yeah, we are. And, you know, take you back in time 10,000 years and you're in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you're the village truth teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often they don't want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable.
On hunches
a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches. They turn out to be based on anecdotes. They're intuition based. And sometimes you don't even have strong data. But you may know, you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in, it may resonate with the set of anecdotes you have. And then you may be able to say, you know, something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right.
On the beauty of invention
…the perfect invention for the perfect moment in the perfect context, there is real beauty. It is actual beauty and it feels good. It's emotional. It's emotional for the inventor. It's emotional for the team that builds it. It's emotional for the customer. It's a big deal. And you can feel those things.
On books being antidotes to short attention spans
one of the things that phone does, for the most part, is it is an attention shortening device, because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans. And I'm not even going to say we know for sure that that's bad, but I do think it's happening. It's one of the ways we're co evolving with that tool. But I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.
On the power efficiency of the human brain compared to AI
We do know that humans are doing something different from these models in part because we're so power efficient. The human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks. So, there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this. And also, we don't need as much data. So, you know, like self-driving cars or they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive. And, you know, your average 16 year old figures it out with many fewer miles. So, there are still some tricks I think that we have yet to learn. I don't think we've learned the last trick. I don't think it's just a question of scaling things up.
On LLMs trained on private data
So many opportunities, shopping assistance. You know, like all that stuff is amazing. In AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS, or enterprise clients. They want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data. Yes. Without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model. So those are the tools we're building for them with bedrock. So there's tremendous opportunity here.
On thinking retreats
I do little thinking retreats. So, this is not the only way. I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at, you know, I don't keep to a strict schedule. Like my meetings often go longer than I planned for them to because I believe in wandering. My perfect meeting starts with a crisp document. So, the document should be written with such clarity that it's like angels singing from on high.
On breakthroughs
I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so, the meeting is about like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to like wander your way to a solution. And that is, when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels to me. It has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it. And you get real breakthroughs and meetings like that.
On pre-meeting study hall
We do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read. Notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance. But the problem is people don't have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting, having only skipped the memo, or maybe not read it at all. And they're trying to catch up. And they're also bluffing like they were in college, having pretended to do the reading. It's better just to carve out the time for people. So now we've all the same page. We've all read the memo. And now we can have a really elevated discussion.