House Speaker Johnson talks to media as Senate dismisses impeachment against Mayorkas
Mike Johnson (00:00):
He’s probably the least effective and I think most dangerous in terms of his policy implementations of any cabinet secretary in the history of the United States. And if there’s ever been a cabinet secretary that deserved to be impeached, he is that. And the idea that the Senate and under Chuck Schumer’s leadership voted on party lines to not even allow the American people to evaluate the evidence is shameful. I think it’s a violation of their constitutional responsibility. And I think there’ll be a reckoning for all this in the election cycle in the fall. I really do.
The American people know and all the polling confirms what we know that the American people understand the open border is by design. It was designed by this administration. They did this intentionally. These are policy choices. It began on the first day that Joe Biden took office, and we documented in the House 64 specific executive actions, from executive orders that he took to actions that Secretary Mayorkas implemented that opened that border wide. And that is what’s led to this catastrophe and that is why we’re in such dire straits.
(01:00)
We have, by our estimates, probably 16 million illegals that have come across that border since Joe Biden took office. 16 million people. The official number is a little over nine million encounters at the border. We know that that includes at least 340 suspects on the terrorism watch list that were encountered at the border. But the dangerous thing, the scary thing to a lot of American people is we don’t know how many terrorists came in totally undetected. We know we’ve got over two million, probably close to three million got-aways that have been documented, but we don’t know who’s come in over those open completely unpatrolled sectors of the border.
On January 3rd, we took 64 House Republicans down to the border and it was the largest congressional trip ever. And what we saw at Eagle Pass, the Del Rio sector, which was ground zero at the time, was just maddening. It was infuriating, it was heartbreaking all at the same time because of the humanitarian catastrophe that has been created there.
And they estimated down there and they told us the Border Patrol agents and the officials who were in charge said, by their estimation, 60% to 70% of the people that cross that border at the Del Rio sector are single adult males between the ages of 18 and 45 of military capability. We have no idea what they’re planning, but we assume that their terrorism cells set up around the country, maybe in a community nearby. And every American is concerned about this and every state is a border state.
(02:21)
And here’s the important point. The American people by the polling confirmed also know that Joe Biden has the executive authority right now and he has since day one to solve that catastrophe to end it, because it’s policy choices that got us into that and it’s policy choices that can get us out. He could use Section 212-F of the Immigration Nationality Act, issue an executive order and close the border. He has unilateral authority. The President can determine if it’s in the country’s best interest to do that. He can shut it down and he won’t.
I’ve asked him myself repeatedly, I’ve shown him the law, I’ve read him the provision of the law and he won’t use it. He’s got an array, he’s got a menu of options. I sent him that in paperwork as well. “Mr. President, here’s eight or nine things you can do right now to solve this problem.” He won’t do it. I can’t answer for that. He’ll have to, I think he’ll answer to the American people in November and I think that’s one of the big reasons that the Republicans are going to have a very, very good election cycle. I believe we’re going to grow the House majority, I believe we’re going to win the White House and the Senate as well.
(03:17)
The other big thing going on, of course is the supplemental. And so what we’ve done here in the House is we’ve taken the House supplemental, or the Senate supplemental and we’ve made it into our own. It’s an improvement in the process, an improvement in the policy. What we’re going to allow is an amendment process. If four separate bills that will be in one rule to be put on the floor, and everybody will be able to vote their own conscience in their own district. They can vote up or down on the Israel aid, the Ukraine aid, the Indo-Pacific, and then this separate package that we have with other national security measures.
We’ve included a lot of innovations here. It is different than the Senate’s bill. For the Ukraine piece, for example, we’ve introduced the loan concept, the Repo Act, so any funding that goes to support the government of Ukraine is converted to a loan. We introduced the Repo Act, which is the seizure, as you know, of corrupt Russian oligarchs assets and that could be used to fund the resistance in Ukraine as well.
(04:13)
We have sanctions for Iran and Russia and China, the aggressors who are causing all this problem, the new axis of evil. We have a lot of new changes in here. We have accountability and a strategy shift as well, because what we’ve said is that the White House has to provide to Congress within 45 days of this bill being signed into law, an actual strategy, a plan to show what is the objective in Ukraine? What is the end game? How are we going to get to that? And how are we going to show absolute accountability for the weapons systems and all that.
Importantly, people need to understand on the Ukraine piece, for example, 80% of the money that would be allocated in this legislation is for replenishment of our own weapons and stocks. This is something that makes sense. What we’re doing is funding America’s industrial defense base. These are jobs in America building weapons that we use and that other countries buy from us and that’s what that will go to fund.
(05:05)
So there’s a lot of other innovations in the bill. We’re very anxious to get the assistance to Israel, our dear friend and close ally over there in the Middle East, in the middle of a war to just justify their very existence. They need the assistance now and we should be providing it to them and that’s our intention to do it as quickly as possible.
The Indo-Pacific is to face down China and all these pieces are very, very important. I think it’s important to the American people. I think all of the members of Congress will have the opportunity in single subjects to vote their will and their way on that and then we’ll put that together, send it to the Senate and go through those obligations met.
I’m going to say this and then I’ll open to questions. This is an important time on the world stage. We live in unprecedented, very challenging times. The world is on fire and one of the reasons it’s on fire is because we’re projecting weakness from this White House on the world stage. And I’m a Reagan Republican, I believe in the concept of peace through strength, and I think America is an exceptional nation. I think we’re the greatest nation in the history of the world and I hope you agree. I believe because of that we have a very special responsibility. The responsibility of the free world was placed upon the shoulders of America after World War Two.
(06:09)
It doesn’t mean we’re the world’s policemen. It doesn’t mean we should be intervening in conflicts around the world, but it does mean that we have to stand for freedom and we have to be the beacon of light and we have to show strength. Because the perception of a strong America is good for the entire world. It’s good not just for the security and safety of Americans, but for the security and safety of free people all around the globe. The only thing that has kept terrorist and tyrants at bay is the perception of a strong America, that we would stand strong and we will. And I think the Congress is going to show that. This is a very important message that we’re going to send to the world this week and I’m anxious to get it done and I’m glad to get there. A few questions.
Speaker 2 (06:47):Mr. Speaker, Why are you willing to risk losing your job over this Ukraine funding?
Mike Johnson (06:53):
Listen, my philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may. If I operated out of fear over a motion to vacate, I would never be able to do my job. Look, history judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now, a critical time in the world stage. I could make a selfish decision and do something that’s different, but I’m doing here what I believe to be the right thing.
I think providing lethal aid to Ukraine right now is critically important. I really do. I really do believe the intel and the briefings that we’ve gotten. I believe Xi and Vladimir Putin and Iran really are an axis of evil. I think they’re in coordination on this. I think that Vladimir Putin would continue to march through Europe if he were allowed. I think he might go to the Balkans next. I think he might have a showdown with Poland or one of our NATO allies.
(07:46)
To put it bluntly, I would rather send bullets to Ukraine than American boys. My son is going to begin in the Naval Academy this fall. This is a live fire exercise for me as it is so many American families. This is not a game. It’s not a joke. We can’t play politics of this. We have to do the right thing and I’m going to allow an opportunity for every single member of the House to vote their conscience and their will on this. And I think that’s the way this institution is supposed to work, and I’m willing to take personal risk for that because we have to do the right thing and history will judge us.
Speaker 3 (08:15):[inaudible 00:08:14] you had said LNG was one of your priorities. Is that going to be included in any of these bills? And if not, why did it drop out?
Mike Johnson (08:21):
We’ve been working on the LNG component because it’s so critical to national defense. I’m from an oil and gas state, Louisiana. I mean, energy is a big thing to us, but this is not a parochial issue, it’s an important issue for the whole country. When the President issued his executive order to effectively close down our natural gas exports, liquified natural gas, that did terrible harm to our security. It makes no sense. I’ve spoken to him about this personally.
I asked him personally when I was at The Oval Office, “Mr. President, why in the world would you issue an executive order to stop LNG exports? Sir, you don’t to fuel Vladimir Putin’s war machine, do you?” He said, “Well, no, of course not.” “Well, but Mr. President, that’s exactly what your executive order did.” “What do you mean?” “Well, sir, if they can’t buy their liquefied natural gas and get it off the coast of Louisiana or Texas for example, they’re going to go to Vladimir Putin for that supply, and that’s going to fuel his war machine and that’s going to give him more of what he needs for his aggression in Ukraine. Is this completely counterproductive public policy national security foreign policy? I don’t understand it. Sir, rescind the executive order.”
I’m not even sure currently that he even understands the full implications of that, but that’s what it means. So we’ve been pushing the LNG is part of the national security concept and philosophy here because energy security is national security and we cannot allow Vladimir Putin and Iran to be supplying oil and gas to Europe. That is not good for the stability of the region and all of us. We try to put it in this package in every package we’ll continue to fight for that and continue to make the case because it’s critical for our stability.
Speaker 4 (09:54):Byron Donald has a wildly popular resolution to rename the Press Room after Frederick Douglas. Do you think that this resolution will [inaudible 00:10:04] something you could do as Speaker?
Mike Johnson (10:03):I love the idea and Byron’s a good friend and that’s a great concept. Frederick Douglass was a great American. We will look into that, yeah.
Speaker 5 (10:12):What is in this fourth bill that we haven’t seen yet? If you can walk us through what provisions are?
Mike Johnson (10:16):
Yeah, so the fourth bill in the package, it’s Israel, Indo-Pacific, Ukraine and the fourth bill, which is our national security additional foreign policy measures. And that’s where you’ll find the provisions of the repo act, for example, which is the use of the Russian sovereign assets that are in the US that will be transferred for use in Ukraine. I think that’s a just and right use. Using corrupt Russian oligarchs assets to fund the resistance of the Ukrainians is pure poetry, in my view.
We also have in that package sanctions on Iran and Russia and China to try to tamp down on their aggression. We’ve not done enough of that. The White House and the executive branch has not used its sanctions authority and its discretion I think in any way close to what it should be.
I want you to think about this. Remember, in the last administration when President Trump was president, we didn’t have hot wars like this around the globe. We didn’t have our adversaries acting so aggressively and marching into territory that is not there’s. Why? You know why? Because they perceived that the President was strong, that some of them feared him. Most of them respected him. They thought, “We’re not really sure what this president may do to us if we act like that.” That’s the Reagan doctrine. That is peace through strength. That’s a core foundational principle of America. And when we do not advance and sustain that, it’s trouble for everybody around the globe. And that’s what you’re seeing right now. It’s a stark contrast between the last administration and this one. And that’s why, frankly, I think President Trump is going to be reelected and he’s going to restore order to this mess.
Speaker 6 (11:48):Will a majority of Republicans support the aid package for Ukraine?
Mike Johnson (11:53):
Oh, I believe they will. I believe they will. I mean we’ve not whipped that yet in a formal whip count, but anecdotally I can tell you that most of my colleagues I think understand the necessity of that. Now, some of them quibble about the humanitarian component and I understand that. I firmly believe they need the lethal aid. I too have concerns about that. But the beauty of this process that we’ve set up, I said it’s better policy and better processes. We’re going to put this bill on the floor and it’ll have an amendment process that’s allowed. And so I suspect, and I believe there will be an amendment to strike that component out of the Ukraine bill and we’ll see if that gets the majority number of votes.
But what we want and what we demand, what the American people want is they want to know if this is an investment we’re going to make, why is this in America’s interest? Why is this in our nation’s interest for security and safety and stability? And we need to make that case and explain to them that if we invest in this way, this is a really important thing to prevent a further cost to us down the road. Not only is it important to defend freedom and the innocent people in Ukraine, the innocent families and the 20,000 children that have been kidnapped and all these other things, this is an evil regime.
I believe Vladimir Putin is an evil regime. I believe he is making this aggression on Ukraine because he saw an opportunity and I think it needs to stop. Because if it doesn’t, and he continues, he disrupts the world order that we’ve maintained since World War Two and it’s, many of us believe, that it is likely that he might try to invade a NATO country or go to the border for example of Poland and set up a standoff that gets NATO allies involved. I don’t want American boots on the ground over there. I don’t want us to be involved in this any further. I think this needs to be brought to an end. But I’m afraid that we’ll need a stronger president to help broker that peace deal. I expect Donald Trump will do that. And that’s what we’re trying to get to that point.
Speaker 7 (13:44):On Ukraine, you have highlighted this is a loan, but there’s language in that Ukraine bill that says they can be canceled by 2026. Members of your party have criticized that as too lenient. Why did you add that language in there around a loan being forgiven so soon?
Mike Johnson (13:59):
Well, the loan concept is, speaking of Donald Trump, is something that he endorses an idea and that makes sense I think to a lot, most House Republicans and Democrats. And the reason it has that provision and that allows a president in a few years to forgive the loan if they deem it in our nation’s interest, is because that might be a very important chip in a game when you’re looking at strategy down the road and maybe you’re trying to broker a peace deal. That might be an important thing to have, an important option for the President to have. And I think that makes sense to Republicans and Democrats. We would want the Commander in Chief to be able to make those decisions. And then Congress, of course, has oversight, all of it. So I think it’s a good policy. Let me go over here. Yes.
Speaker 8 (14:44):
You mentioned in your text earlier today about a border bill possibly, and so I just was wondering, A, if that’s going to be a separate thing than these four other bills? And has the decision been made to bundle these four bills together before they go to the Senate?
Mike Johnson (14:57):
The Senate? Yeah. Two good questions. Border is our number one priority. Number one priority. The house Republicans have been hammering the border. I started with it here. I do it at every interview. Y’all probably been bored of me talking about it at our press conferences, because it is the number one issue for America and is the most inexcusable. The idea that this president and his administration have allowed this is unconscionable to us. We don’t understand it. The American people don’t understand it.
I’ve been in 23 states in the last several weeks traveling around campaigning for our incumbents and candidates, and I’m telling you, it’s the number one question everywhere. It doesn’t matter where I’m out west in the Midwest, I mean, Long Island, Deep South, it’s the same. Everybody’s concerned about it and they cannot understand why this would be allowed.
So yes, we’re going to push a very aggressive border security measure on the floor. It’s part of this whole process. All these things are intertwined. If you’re going to talk about national security, and this is a national security supplemental package, you have to begin at our own border. And that’s what we’ve been saying over and over and over.
(15:52)
So, we’re going to put the key elements of HR2, which was our legislation the House Republicans passed over a year ago. It’s been sitting on Chuck Schumer’s desk collecting dust as they mock it. We’re going to reintroduce that. And catch and release, reinstate Remain in Mexico, fix the broken asylum process, fix the broken parole process that’s been abused, rebuild portions of the wall. We have some very important innovations in there and we’re adding to it this time a provision, there’ll be an amendment brought that would add a provision that would allow a state like Texas to be reimbursed for all the money that their taxpayers have had to spend to do the federal government’s job. I think that’s just and right.
I think it’s going to be a popular measure and I expect we’re going to vote that through with a big, sadly, I think it’ll be a partisan vote, but I believe every Republican will support it. And then we will go out and tell the American people, “We’re still fighting for you,” at the same time that we’re demanding that the President uses his executive authority to actually fix this. He’s unwilling to do it, and everybody knows that. And we’ll keep highlighting it. Last one. Hey Libby.
Libby (16:55):Hey. If Marjorie Taylor Green does make the motion to vacate privileged, would you seek help from Democrats? Would you accept that help if that vote came to the floor?
Mike Johnson (17:02):
I have not asked a single Democrat to get involved in that at all. I do not spend time walking around thinking about the motion to vacate. I have a job to do here and I’m going to do the job. And regardless of personal consequences, that’s what we’re supposed to do. If Marjorie brings the motion, she brings the motion and we’ll let the chips fall where they may. I have to do what I have to do and then the members will vote their conscience as well.
I’m often reminded, people say, “There’s a whirlwind right now. I mean, there’s a lot going on. You seem to be pretty calm all the time. How do you maintain that composure?” I remind myself of what John Quincy Adams said. He used to sit right over there. And he was the hellhound of slavery and he used to bring the same resolution over and over and over to end slavery in America. And he kept failing over and over and over.
And as the story goes, a young member of Congress came up to him one day and said, “Mr. President,” he was president and then a member of Congress and said, “Mr. President, why do you keep doing it? Why do you keep bringing the resolution?” And he said, “Young man, it’s very simple.” He said, “Duty is ours. Results are God’s.” And to me, that’s a very liberating thought. I’m going to do my duty and the results are not ultimately up to me. So I’m comfortable with that and we’ll see what happens, and we’ll lay the chips down on the table then.
Thank you all for being here. Appreciate it.
Pentagon Holds Press Briefing After Israel Vows 'Consequences' For Iran Drone Strikes
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (00:00):
… afternoon, everyone. Just a few things here at the top, then we’ll get right to your questions.
This morning, Secretary Austin had his first engagement with Admiral Dong Jun, Minister of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China, via teleconference from here at the Pentagon. The two leaders discussed US-PRC defense relations and regional and global security issues.
During the discussion, Secretary Austin emphasized the importance of continuing to open lines of military-to-military communication between the US and the People’s Republic of China. He also underscored the importance of respect for high seas freedom of navigation guaranteed under international law, especially in the South China Sea, and reiterated that the United States will continue to fly, sail, and operate safely and responsibly wherever international law allows.
Secretary Austin also discussed Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine and expressed concerns about recent provocations from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. In addition, the Secretary reiterated that the United States remains committed to our longstanding One China policy, which is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the Three US-China Joint Communiques, and the Six Assurances, and he reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability across the strait.
(01:19)
The department will continue to engage in active discussions with PRC counterparts about future engagements between defense and military officials at multiple levels, as agreed to by President Biden and PRC President Xi Jinping in November 2023. A full readout of today’s call is available on Defense.gov.
(01:38)
Switching gears, Secretary Austin spoke with Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant last night to discuss the aftermath of Iran’s unprecedented April 13 attacks which, as you know, US, Israeli, and partner forces thwarted in a combined defensive operation.
During the call, the Secretary reiterated steadfast US support for Israel’s defense and reaffirmed the strategic goal of regional stability. As you saw from our call readouts posted yesterday, Secretary Austin continues to communicate with leaders throughout the Middle East region and beyond to emphasize that while the United States does not seek escalation, we will continue to defend Israel and US personnel.
Separately, Secretary Austin also spoke with Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov earlier today to discuss the situation on the ground and reaffirm our unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s defense capabilities and fight for freedom from Russian aggression. A full readout will be posted today on the DOD website.
And then finally, looking ahead to tomorrow, Secretary Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General C.Q. Brown Jr. will provide testimony before the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee at 10:00 AM on Capitol Hill regarding the Fiscal Year 2025 DOD budget request.
With that, I’d be happy to take your questions. We’ll go to AP, Lita.
Lita (02:53):Thanks, Pat. The Secretary’s been speaking to Minister Gallant quite frequently. Has he spoken to him again today? Are there plans to do another call today?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (03:05):He has not spoken with him today, and I don’t have a call to read out. Of course, we’ll keep you updated.
Lita (03:10):And can you describe in any way what the Secretary believes is whether or not the Israelis and Minister Gallant are heeding US entreaties to not trigger a wider conflict in the Middle East? Is there a sense that Israel is listening to that message?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (03:34):Well, I appreciate the question, Lita. I don’t want to speak for Israel of course. The Secretary has been very clear in his conversations with Minister Gallant, per our readouts, that we will firmly support Israel’s defense, but you’ve also heard us say that we do not want to see a wider regional conflict, and I’ll just leave it there.
Liz?
Liz (03:56):Is it expected that Israel would give the US a heads-up if it does a counter-attack and give the US any formal warning?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (04:06):As I’m sure you can appreciate, I can’t go into specific diplomatic discussions. Again, we maintain frequent contact, not only with our Israeli partners but our partners throughout the region. Thank you.
Fadi?
Fadi (04:20):Thank you, General. So according to the readout and what you just stated, that the Secretary reaffirmed a strategic goal of regional stability. In light of this call, is Secretary Austin more or less hopeful that this goal can be achieved?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (04:41):Well, look, I’m not going to characterize the Secretary’s sentiment other than to say what we’ve put out there. We’ve been working very hard for many months to prevent a wider regional conflict in the region, and we’ll continue to work toward that end.
Fadi (04:58):Does the Secretary see a way to achieve this option if Israel decides to strike Iran?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (05:08):Well, again, without getting into hypotheticals, I guess much will depend on what happens exactly and how Iran might respond. So again, as you’ve heard us say, while we don’t seek to escalate, we don’t seek escalation in the region, we will continue to support Israel’s defense, we will continue to defend our personnel. And you’ve also heard us say, as I just mentioned, that we don’t want to see this spiral into a wider regional war, nor do we seek conflict with Iran.
So again, we’ll continue to work toward that end.
Fadi (05:42):A follow-up on this. It’s interesting that you said this depends on how Iran reacts. Doesn’t it depend as well on how Israel reacts?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (05:51):I appreciate you commenting on my commentary being interesting, but, I mean, my words speak for themselves. I mean, you’re asking if Israel does something, how will the US respond? Well, a lot will depend on what happens, and as you know, right now, nothing has happened. So we’ll have to see. Thanks.
Lara?
Lara (06:13):Thank you. Can you speak generally about how long it takes to set up JLOTS once they arrive? Like, typically, what kind of a timeframe are we looking at?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (06:22):Yeah. A lot of the components are already in the theater. And as I’m sure you can appreciate, there’s sort of a sequencing that will take place to construct and implement JLOTS. Based on the information that I have right now, we’re still on track to have JLOTS achieve operating capability by the end of the month or early May. And so, what you will probably see in the next two to three weeks is components of JLOTS starting to be constructed. But again, planners are working through those details, and we’ll certainly provide you much more information as we get closer to.
Lara (07:05):Has the date shifted, though, because originally it was third week of April, then it was end of April. Now, it’s maybe early May.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (07:10):I’m telling you that there’s IOC and there’s FOC. Right now, we’re tracking that it will be operational, which means it will have some initial operating capability by the end of the month or early May.
Lara (07:25):So it shifted?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (07:25):What we said when we announced it was that it would be operational within 60 days, and we’re still on track for that. Thanks. Chris?
Chris (07:33):In the Secretary’s call on PRC Minister today, did he bring up the issue of the air intercepts with American aircraft, and he pressed for an explanation of why those occurred and what the Chinese reasoning was for those.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (07:51):Yeah, thanks, Chris. I’m really not going to have much more to provide beyond what we included in our readout. As I mentioned, there was a discussion about the fact that the United States will continue to fly, sail and operate safely and responsibly wherever international law allows. Janne?
Janne (08:09):Thank you, General. Iran and North Korea are working together to pursue the performance of nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles. And is it possible that these weapons was used to attack Israel?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (08:31):I can’t speculate, Janne. Certainly, when it comes to threats posed by the DPRK in Iran, something that we take very seriously. Which should be obvious, but again, just for the sake of restating it, we will continue to work very closely with our partners, both in the Middle East region as well as the Indo-Pacific region, to address potential threats to our peoples, and work very hard towards regional security and stability.
And on that front, when it comes to the Indo-Pacific Pacific region, just to make clear, similar to our ironclad defense of Israel, our relationship and our alliance with the Republic of Korea and Japan are also ironclad, and we will stand beside them to work together towards security and stability throughout the region. Let me-
Janne (09:25):One more. Do you predict that Israel or Iran might use nuclear weapons in the future?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (09:35):Again, I can’t get into predicting the future, Janne, other than we’re going to work very hard again to ensure security and stability and prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Oren?
Oren (09:49):Two different questions. One, is there any more clarity or information on whether there was or wasn’t a 50% failure rate from Iranian ballistic missiles? And second, in the call between Secretary Austin and Minister Umerov on the unwavering commitment, we’re still unclear if Congress is going to pass a supplemental. And it looks like that commitment is very much wavering. What did Secretary Austin tell Minister Umerov on that? And does the Secretary believe the supplemental will pass? Specifically on Ukraine?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (10:18):So, on the 50% number, I don’t have anything new for you, Oren, other than to say, as I highlighted yesterday, that the air threats that Iran launched toward Israel, the vast majority of those were taken down, and clearly Iran failed to achieve their objective of causing destruction within Israel. Very minimal damage on the ground. When it comes to the unwavering commitment of the United States for Israel, I think it’s important, first of all, as you highlight.
Oren (10:54):For Ukraine.
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (10:55):I’m sorry. So many countries to talk about today. The unwavering support of the United States for Ukraine. Look, we absolutely need the supplemental, but I think it’s also important to look at what the United States is doing with many other countries to support Ukraine. In fact, we’re about to conduct the 21st Ukraine Defense Contact Group. And two years after Russia’s invasion, you have a coalition of nearly 50 nations that have worked together for over two years to support Ukraine.
And the United States continues to provide a significant leadership role when it comes to working with those partners to ensure Ukraine has the capabilities it needs, as well as helping with the capability coalitions that looks at not only the near-term requirements, but also the long-term defense requirements that Ukraine will have. And so, we absolutely are committed to Ukraine’s defense, and we’ll continue to work closely with Congress to get the resources we need to support them.
Tom?
Tom (11:57):Getting back to JLOTS, has the security arrangements been worked out about who will secure the aid once it gets into Gaza? Presumably the idea, but any other countries we expect to get involved in that as well? And also, as far as who will be driving the aid in, is that USAID doing that and contracting out? Do we have any details on the way ahead?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (12:20):Yeah, Tom, we’ll certainly have much more to provide in the near future. Right now, what I would tell you is, again, we’re making progress on that front. When it comes to security, again, with the important point here that there will be no US forces on the ground in Gaza. Israel has signed up to provide security. And so, we’re obviously working through, with USAID, who is going to receive that aid, how it’s going to be offloaded onto land and then distributed throughout Gaza.
So, again, I’m not in a position right now to go into much more detail than that, other than progress continues to be made. And like I said, we’re on track right now for a late April, early May initial operating capability.
Let me go to Carla, and then I’ll come to Konstantin.
Carla (13:07):Thank you, Pat. Is CENTCOM Commander General Erik Kurilla still in the region, and is he still working to coordinate a potential defense for any future attacks?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (13:18):I’d refer you to CENTCOM on his specific whereabouts. I do know that he’s traveling right now, overseas, but I’d refer you to them for the specifics.
Carla (13:28):And then on the video call, did Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin mention the surge in sales that you confirmed yesterday that China has been doing, supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine. Did he mention that at all? And did he ask China to stop?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (13:45):Again, as I highlighted in the topper, the Secretary did raise Russian aggression in Ukraine. But beyond that, I’m not going to be able to provide any further details. Thank you.
I’ll start with Konstantin, then I’ll come to you, Rob.
Konstantin (14:00):Thanks. Just a quick follow up on Tom’s question. Has any decision been made in terms of security being provided at sea? So Navy ships or other security arrangements for the seaward component of JLOTS?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (14:15):Yeah. First let me just say that when it comes to JLOTS and when it comes to US forces supporting this effort, it’s important to understand that safety of our forces is paramount. So that is something that is being taken into consideration throughout this planning process. And so, in addition to some Israeli support, when it comes to the maritime aspect of security, certainly, you know, within 6th Fleet, we have capabilities there as well.
And as I understand it, the JLOTS vessels and personnel have organic force protection capability as well. So again, not going to go into the specifics on that, but that is something that is fundamental to the entire planning of this operation.
Go to Ryo, then I’ll go to the phone real quick.
Ryo (15:05):I have a follow-up on the Secretary’s call with the Chinese Defense Minister this morning. During the call, did the Secretary receive any explanations or any commitment from the Chinese side regarding the recent tensions in [inaudible 00:15:18] in the South China Sea?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (15:21):Yeah, appreciate the question. I’ll let the PRC speak for themselves. Again, I’d refer you to the readout in terms of what was discussed and our positions. Thank you.
All right, let me go to the phone here real quick. J.J. from WTOP?
J.J. (15:35):General, thank you for the chance to do this. Two quick questions, Israel, it seems is planning a limited response to Iran’s attack. The Pentagon has said it doesn’t want a wider war, how do Israel’s plans impact the Pentagon’s plans in the region?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (15:50):Yeah, again, seen those reports and certainly would refer you to the Israelis, J.J., when it comes to anything they might do, which of course, is an Israeli decision.
(16:04)
As I’ve highlighted, we do not seek escalation in the region, but we will not hesitate to defend Israel and protect our personnel. Again, we do not want to see a wider regional war. We don’t seek conflict with Iran, but we won’t hesitate to take necessary actions to protect our forces.
J.J. (16:21):Thank you. Iran and Russia have developed-
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (16:26):I’m sorry J.J., I can’t hear you.
J.J. (16:29):Yeah, Iran and Russia have developed a military partnership, which may be to Iran’s benefit as Israel prepares for whatever response it’s going to give. Iran also helps Russia in its war with Ukraine, so how does that partnership impact the Pentagon’s view and plans for dealing with both of those countries?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (16:49):Well, you raise a really good point. And I think it’s often forgotten about, the fact that Iran has been providing Russia with capabilities to include one way attack drones, as you know, to conduct its illegal war inside Ukraine.
And so, while you see the United States and other international partners working together to promote regional security and stability and deliver humanitarian assistance, you see countries like Iran exporting terror and destruction. Thank you. Eunice?
Eunice (17:25):Thank you General. This administration has been calling for one thing since Saturday, and that is de-escalation, which sounds like the perfectly reasonable thing for hundreds of millions of people in the region, but you’re also saying that we’re not going to hesitate to defend Israel, so doesn’t that give enough freedom to the Netanyahu government to escalate just as much as they’d like? Because the US is going to be there, under any circumstances, to defend?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (17:50):Well again, certainly, the bottom line upfront, we don’t want to see a wider regional war, and we’ve been working very hard toward that end ever since the Hamas Israel conflict, as you know, kicked off back in October.
And when it comes to a potential Israeli response, again that is a sovereign decision for Israel to make. They were attacked by Iran in an unprecedented attack over 300 air threats, so that is their decision. But again, we’ve been very clear that we don’t want to see things escalate.
What I’m saying is that if Iran were to conduct another attack against Israel, just to be crystal clear, the United States will support the defense of Israel, just as we did this last weekend.
Eunice (18:41):So, wouldn’t that make a potential Israeli government decision binding for the Pentagon?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (18:48):Again, look, I’m not going to get into the Israeli decision-making, I’d refer you to them. I think we’ve been very clear that we don’t want to see escalation, that we don’t want to see a wider regional war, and I’ll just leave it at that. Ma’am?
Speaker 15 (19:02):
Thank you. So China has continued to become more aggressive towards the Philippines and in the past, MMCA, a US official stated that we’ll continue to press the PRC on those issues, did Austin press them on this particular issue?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (19:20):Well, again, I’d refer you back to the readout. The Secretary, as I highlighted, made clear in the discussion that it is important to respect the high seas freedom of navigation that is guaranteed under international law, especially in the South China Sea. And that the United States will continue to fly, sail and operate safely and responsibly wherever international law allows.
Speaker 15 (19:47):Correct, but did he press them on Thomas Shoal like the Philippines not just the South China Sea?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (19:55):Yeah, I appreciate the question, I’d refer you back to the readout. That’s about the extent of what I can provide today.
Liz, and then go to-
Liz (20:00):You’ve you said several times that the US does not seek a wider regional war. Is that message to Iran or a message to Israel?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (20:09):I think it’s just a statement of fact.
Carla?
Carla (20:12):Thank you, Pat. The IDF is now saying that an Israeli air strike killed a Hezbollah Commander in Lebanon today. Can you confirm, was the Secretary given any sort of notification in his call with his Israeli counterpart yesterday?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (20:29):That’s news to me, Carla, I’d have to refer you to the Israelis to talk about that.
Let me go the phone here, Jeff Schogol, Task & Purpose?
Jeff Schogol (20:37):Thank you. Just two quick questions. Has there been any change to the US Military’s footprint in Niger? And also, there was a fire at the Army’s ammunition plant in Scranton yesterday. At the risk of invoking Billy Joel, do we know who started the fire?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (20:55):On Niger, Jeff, no change in the US Force posture at this time.
On the fire, I’d have to refer you to the Army, because we didn’t start the fire.
Yes, ma’am?
Speaker 17 (21:11):Just to clarify and follow-up. So is the message that no matter what Israel does, if it reacts, the US will defend it regardless?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (21:19):Well, look, I think the President and the Secretary have been clear, that the United States and our support for Israel’s defense is ironclad.
Speaker 17 (21:28):So, doesn’t that take away any leverage you might have had to try to influence the Israeli decision?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (21:34):Look, Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood and again, I think it’s important to take a step back here and look at the US Israel defense relationship. The multi-decades long relationship that we have with Israel and understand again, that the United States recognizes the neighborhood that Israel lives in, the threats to regional security and stability that exist if Israel is not able to defend itself.
And so, I’ll just leave it there.
Speaker 17 (22:02):Doesn’t that give them carte blanche then just to go as big as they want?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (22:05):I’m not going to get into hypotheticals. Like I said, whether or not Israel responds is an Israeli decision. We don’t want to see a wider regional conflict. You see the Department of Defense and the broader US government working hard to deescalate tensions in the region. You can see that in all the readouts the Secretary’s had with his counterparts throughout the Middle East Region, and I’ll just leave it there.
All right, let me go Heather, from USNI?
Heather (22:30):Thank you so much. Just wanted to check in on what we’re seeing right now with the Houthis. It seems like they’re getting quieter. Do you think that’s related to what happened over the weekend with Iran? Or are we expecting to see more?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (22:47):I don’t have any updates to provide, Heather. As it relates to the Houthis, clearly, we continue to have forces there that work together as part of Prosperity Guardian to deter, disrupt, and degrade Houthi capability, but I’d refer you to CENTCOM. They may have more.
And Heather, while I have you on the phone here too, and the group, I just want to clarify a question you asked yesterday. You asked about whether or not airbase… or, excuse me, land-based, sea-based fighter aircraft… I don’t think you said “fighter,” I think you just said “aircraft” participated in the taking down of… or in the action yesterday.
What I thought you were asking was, were sea-based aircraft part of the capabilities we had that were supporting this overall effort. That is true. But just to clarify, the fighter aircraft that were participating in the operation to take down drones were land-based aircraft, not sea-based aircraft. So just to clarify that.
All right, any other questions? Last question. Yes, sir?
Chris (23:54):Thanks, Pat. I didn’t thank you the first time. A point of clarification on the… You said there’d be the Israeli support for the maritime aspect of security on JLOTS. Does that include aerial support for those ships, such as monitoring for threats, et cetera?
Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder (24:16):Don’t want to get into the specifics, in terms of air coverage. I mean, clearly, the United States is going to do what we need to do to protect our forces. As I understand it, Israel has signed up to provide maritime security and land-based security. So I’ll just leave it there.
Okay, thanks very much, everybody. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Salman Rushdie has been a marked man for nearly half his life. In 1989, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini declared his novel, The Satanic Verses, Blasphemous, an insult to Islam, and called for the Indian-born writer’s assassination. Rushdie went into hiding with around-the-clock police protection for 10 years. He eventually moved to the U.S and thought he was safe. But in August 2022, as he was about to speak at a literary festival in Chautauqua, New York, Salman Rushdie was attacked by a Muslim man with a knife. Rushdie, who’s now 76, lost his right eye and came close to dying. He’s come to terms with the attempt on his life by writing a book about it called, Simply Knife, which comes out Tuesday. This is his first television interview since the attack.
Speaker 2 (00:52):The story will continue in a moment.
Speaker 1 (00:58):You had, had a dream two days, I think it was, before the attack. What was the dream?
Speaker 3 (01:04):
I had a premonition. I had a dream of being attacked in an amphitheater, but it was a Roman Empire dream, as if I was in the Coliseum. And it was just somebody with a spear stabbing downwards, and I was rolling around on the floor trying to get away from him. And I woke up and was quite shaken by it, and I had to go to Chautauqua. And I said to my wife, Eliza, I said, “I don’t want to go.”
Speaker 1 (01:31):Because of the dream?
Speaker 3 (01:32):Because of the dream. And then I thought, don’t be silly. It’s a dream.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Salman Rushdie, one of his generation’s most acclaimed writers had been invited to the town of Chautauqua, close to Lake Erie, to speak about a subject he knows all too well, the importance of protecting writers whose lives are under threat.
Did you have any anxiety, being in such a public space?
Speaker 3 (01:55):Not really, because in the more than 20 years that I’ve been living in America, I’ve done a lot of these things.
Speaker 1 (02:03):You haven’t had security around you, a close protection detail for a long time?
Speaker 3 (02:06):Long time. But what happens in many places that you go and lecture is that they’re used to having a certain degree of security, venue security. In this case, there wasn’t any.
Speaker 1 (02:17):The irony, of course, is you were there to talk about writers in danger.
Speaker 3 (02:21):Yeah, exactly. And the need for writers from other countries to have safe spaces in America amongst other places. And then, yeah, it just turned out not to be a safe space for me.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
For years, no place was safe for Salman Rushdie, whose sprawling 600-page novel, the Satanic Verses, offended some Muslims for its depiction of the Prophet Muhammad. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious decree calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989. There were worldwide protests from London to Lahore. The Satanic Verses was burned, and 12 people died in clashes with police. The book’s Japanese translator was murdered, and others associated with it were attacked.
Did you have any idea that it would cause violence?
Speaker 3 (03:11):No, I had no idea. I thought probably some conservative religious people wouldn’t like it, but they didn’t like anything I wrote anyway. So I thought, well, they don’t have to read it.
Speaker 1 (03:20):Were you naive?
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Probably. It’s easy looking back to think, nothing like this had ever happened to anybody. And of course, almost all the people who attacked the book, did so without reading it. I was often told that I had intended to insult, offend people. My view is if I need to insult you, I can do it really quickly. I don’t need to spend five years of my life trying to write a 600-page book, to insult you.
Speaker 1 (03:47):Rushdie was living in London when he went into hiding, and for the next 10 years, the British government provided him with 24-hour police protection.
Did people try to kill you?
Speaker 3 (03:56):Yes. There were maybe as many as half a dozen serious assassination attempts, which were not random people. They were state-sponsored terrorism professionals.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
After diplomatic negotiations, the Iranian State called off its assassins in 1998. Rushdie finally came out of the shadows. He moved to New York and for the next two decades lived openly. He was a man about town. He continued writing and became a celebrated advocate for freedom of expression. So when he received the invitation to speak in Chautauqua in August 2022, he gladly accepted.
Speaker 3 (04:32):I was seated at stage right-
Speaker 1 (04:34):In his new book, Knife, he describes what happened next.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
“Then in the corner of my right eye, the last thing my right eye would ever see, I saw the man in black running towards me, down the right-hand side of the seating area, black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low, a squat missile. I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other, and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, so it’s you. Here you are.”
Speaker 1 (05:13):So it’s you, here you are?
Speaker 3 (05:15):Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:15):It’s like you’ve been waiting for it.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
Yeah. That’s what it felt like. It felt like something coming out of the distant past and trying to drag me back in time, if you like, back into that distant past in order to kill me. And when he got to me, he basically hit me very hard, here. And initially, I thought I’d been punched.
Speaker 1 (05:36):You didn’t actually see a knife.
Speaker 3 (05:37):I didn’t see the knife, and I didn’t realize until I saw blood coming out that there had been a knife in his fist.
Speaker 1 (05:44):So where was that stab?
Speaker 3 (05:45):Here.
Speaker 1 (05:46):In your neck?
Speaker 3 (05:47):
In my neck, yeah. Then there were a lot more. The worst wounds was there was a big slash wound like this across my neck, and there was a puncture, a stab wound here, and then of course, there was the attack on my eye.
Speaker 1 (06:01):Do you remember being stabbed in the eye?
Speaker 3 (06:04):No. I remember falling, then I remember not knowing what had happened to my eye.
Speaker 1 (06:10):He was also stabbed in his hand, chest, abdomen, and thigh. 15 wounds in all. He was both stabbing and also slashing?
Speaker 3 (06:19):Stabbing, slashing. I think he was just wildly-
Speaker 1 (06:21):The attack lasted 27 seconds. To feel just how long that is.
This is what 27 seconds is. That’s it.
Speaker 3 (06:57):That’s quite a long time. That’s the extraordinary half minute of intimacy in which life meets death.
Speaker 1 (07:08):What stopped it from being longer?
Speaker 3 (07:10):The audience pulling him off me.
Speaker 1 (07:12):Strangers to you?
Speaker 3 (07:13):Total… To this day, I don’t know their names.
Speaker 1 (07:15):Some of those strangers restrained the attacker, while others desperately try to stem the flow of Rushdie’s blood.
Speaker 3 (07:22)There was really a lot of blood.
Speaker 1 (07:24):You were actually watching your blood.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
I was actually watching it spread. And then I remember thinking that I was probably dying. And it was interesting because it was quite matter of fact. It wasn’t like I was terrified of it or whatever. And yeah, there was nothing, no heavenly choirs, no pearly gates. I’m not a supernatural person. I believe that death comes as the end. There was nothing that happened that made me change my mind about that.
Speaker 1 (07:50):You have not had a revelation?
Speaker 3 (07:51):I have not had any revelation, except that there’s no revelation to be had.
Speaker 1 (07:56):His attacker, the man in black, was hustled off the stage.
In the book, you do not use the attacker’s name.
Speaker 3 (08:04):Yeah. I thought, I don’t want his name in my book and I don’t use it in conversation either.
Speaker 1 (08:09):But that is important to you, not to give him space in your brain.
Speaker 3 (08:12):Yeah. He and I had 27 seconds together. That’s it. I don’t need to give him any more of my time.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Paramedics flew Rushdie to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, 40 miles away, where a team of doctors battled for eight hours to save his life. When he finally came out of surgery, his wife, Eliza, a poet and novelist was waiting.
Speaker 4 (08:35):And he wasn’t moving and he was just laid out.
Speaker 1 (08:38):He looked half dead to you?
Speaker 4 (08:40):Yes, he did. He was a different color. He was cold. His face was stapled, just staples holding his face together.
Speaker 1 (08:51):Rushdie was on a ventilator, unable to speak. Eliza and the doctors had no idea whether the knife that had penetrated his eye had damaged his brain.
Speaker 4 (09:01):
Someone from the staff said that we would use this system of wiggling the toes
Speaker 1 (09:09):To communicate?
Speaker 4 (09:11):To communicate.
Speaker 1 (09:11):Do you remember the first question you asked to get a wiggle?
Speaker 4 (09:12):
I think I said, “Salman, it’s Eliza. Can you hear me?” And there was a wiggle. And asked him, I think, “Do you know where you are?” And wiggled, and it was a very basic simple questions.
Speaker 3 (09:29):You can’t express yourself with any subtlety with your toes.
Speaker 4 (09:33):Which is your favorite thing.
Speaker 1 (09:37):After 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehab, Rushdie was discharged.
Speaker 3 (09:43):
One of the surgeons who had saved my life said to me, “First you were really unlucky, and then you were really lucky.” I said, “What’s the lucky part?” And he said, “Well, the lucky part is that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill a man with a knife.”
Speaker 1 (09:58):You’re not a believer in miracles, but the fact that you survived, you write in the book is a miracle.
Speaker 3 (10:04):
This is a contradiction. How does somebody who doesn’t believe in the supernatural account for the fact that something has happened, which feels like a miracle? I certainly don’t feel that some hand reached down from the skies and guarded me, but I do think something happened, which wasn’t supposed to happen and I have no explanation for it.
Speaker 1 (10:23):
His attacker was a 24-year-old from New Jersey who lived in his mother’s basement. He’s believed to be a lone wolf. He’s pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and is awaiting trial. In an interview, he told the New York Post, he’d only read a couple pages of the Satanic Verses and seen some clips of Rushdie on YouTube. He said he didn’t like him very much, because Rushdie had attacked Islam. Does it matter to you what his motive was?
Speaker 3 (10:51):
It’s interesting to me, because it’s a mystery. If I had written a character who knew so little about his proposed victim, and yet was willing to commit the crime of murder, my publishers might well say to me that that’s under motivated.
Speaker 1 (11:06):You need to develop that character.
Speaker 3 (11:08):Yeah. Not enough of a reason, not convincing, but yet that’s what he did.
Speaker 1 (11:14):Rushdie’s Knife, his 22nd book, is one he initially did not want to write.
Speaker 3 (11:20):That was the last thing I wanted to do.
Speaker 1 (11:21):Because you didn’t want this to yet again define you.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Yeah. It was very difficult for me after the Satanic Verses was published, that the only thing anybody knew about me was this death threat. But it became clear to me that I couldn’t write anything else.
Speaker 1 (11:35):You had to write this first report.
Speaker 3 (11:36):
I had to write this first. I just thought I need to focus on, to use the cliche, the elephant in the room. And the moment I thought that, something changed in my head and it then became a book I really very much wanted to write.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
You say, “The language was my knife. If I had unexpectedly been caught in an unwanted knife fight, maybe this was the knife I could use to fight back, to take charge of what had happened to me, to own it, make it mine.”
Speaker 3 (12:00):
Yeah. Language is a way of breaking open the world. I don’t have any other weapons, but I’ve been using this particular tool for quite a long time, so I thought this was my way of dealing with it.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
It’s been almost two years since the attack and Rushdie is back home now in New York, slowly getting used to navigating the world with one eye.
How much time did it take to readjust?
Speaker 3 (12:27):I’m still doing it.
Speaker 1 (12:28):You still are?
Speaker 3 (12:29):Yeah.
Speaker 1 (12:30):Do you feel like you are a different person after the attack?
Speaker 3 (12:33):I don’t feel I’m very different, but I do feel that it has left a shadow. And I think that shadow is just there, and some days it’s dark and some days it’s not.
Speaker 1 (12:42):Do you feel less than you were before?
Speaker 3 (12:44):No. I just feel more the presence of death.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
In an interview almost 25 years ago, you said of the fatwa, “I want to find an end to this story. It is the one story I must find an end to.” Have you found that ending, and an ending to this story as well?
Speaker 3 (12:58):Well, I thought I had, and then it turned out I hadn’t. I’m hoping this is just a last twitch of that story. I don’t know. I’ll let you know.
Speaker 2 (13:16):Salman Rushdie on censorship in America today.
Speaker 3 (13:20):There’s a movement from the left and movement from the right.
Speaker 2 (13:22):At sixtyminutesovertime.com, sponsored by Nurtec ODT.
Address by Prime Minister KISHIDA Fumio at a Joint Meeting of the United States Congress (“For the Future: Our Global Partnership”)
1. Introduction
Mr. Speaker, Madam Vice President, Honorable Members of the United States Congress, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Thank you, I never get such nice applause from the Japanese Diet.
And let me introduce my wife, Yuko, who is in the gallery. The fact that I married Yuko should give you great confidence in all my decisions.
I am truly honored to speak here in this citadel of democracy and before you, the representatives of the American people.
Nine years ago, the late Prime Minister Abe, who was a close friend of mine, stood in this very spot and gave an address titled “Toward an Alliance of Hope.” I was Foreign Minister in his Cabinet at that time, and I was deeply struck to witness the bond between our two countries.
Since childhood, I have felt a connection to the United States, perhaps because I spent my first three years of elementary school at PS 20 and PS 13 in Queens, New York. Even though I was the only Japanese student there, my classmates kindly accepted me and helped me immerse myself in a new culture.
We arrived in the fall of 1963, and for several years my family lived like Americans. My father would take the subway to Manhattan where he worked as a trade official. We rooted for the Mets and the Yankees, and ate hot dogs at Coney Island. On vacation, we would go to Niagara Falls or here to Washington, D.C.
And I remember things that were strange and funny to a little Japanese boy, like watching the Flintstones . . . I still miss that show. Although I could never translate “yabba dabba doo.”
After 60 years, I have a message for the good people of Queens. Thank you for making my family and me feel so welcome. I have never forgotten it.
So, I speak to you today as a long and close friend of the United States.
I know that the National Park Service is undertaking a rehabilitation project in the Tidal Basin. As a gesture of friendship, Japan will provide 250 cherry trees that will be planted there, in anticipation of the 250th anniversary of your independence.
2. The leadership of the United States
As you might also remember, the 1964 World’s Fair was held in Queens. Its symbol was a giant Unisphere, and the fair’s theme was “Peace Through Understanding.”
And yet we also know that peace requires more than understanding. It requires resolve.
The U.S. shaped the international order in the postwar world through economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power. It championed freedom and democracy. It encouraged the stability and prosperity of nations, including Japan.
And, when necessary, it made noble sacrifices to fulfill its commitment to a better world.
The United States policy was based on the premise that humanity does not want to live oppressed by an authoritarian state, where you are tracked and surveilled and denied from expressing what is in your heart and on your mind.
You believed that freedom is the oxygen of humanity.
The world needs the United States to continue playing this pivotal role in the affairs of nations.
And yet, as we meet here today, I detect an undercurrent of self-doubt among some Americans about what your role in the world should be.
3. New Challenges
This self-doubt is arising at a time when our world is at history’s turning point. The post-Cold War era is already behind us, and we are now at an inflection point that will define the next stage of human history.
The international order that the U.S. worked for generations to build is facing new challenges, challenges from those with values and principles very different from ours.
Freedom and democracy are currently under threat around the globe.
Climate change has caused natural disasters, poverty, and displacement on a global scale. In the COVID-19 pandemic, all humanity suffered.
Rapid advances in AI technology have resulted in a battle over the soul of AI that is raging between its promise and its perils.
The balance of economic power is shifting. The Global South plays a greater role in responding to challenges and opportunities and calls for a larger voice.
Turning to Japan’s own neighborhood, China’s current external stance and military actions present an unprecedented and the greatest strategic challenge, not only to the peace and security of Japan but to the peace and stability of the international community at large.
While such a challenge from China continues, our commitment to upholding a free and open international order based on the rule of law, as well as peace, will continue to be the defining agenda going forward.
As a Hiroshima native, I have devoted my political career to bringing about a world without nuclear weapons. For years, I have worked to revitalize the Non-Proliferation Treaty regime so that we can gain momentum in pursuit of the aspiration. But there exists an imminent danger of nuclear weapons proliferation in East Asia. North Korea’s nuclear and missile program is a direct threat. The issue of abductions by North Korea remains a critical issue.
North Korea’s provocations have impact beyond the region. It has also exported its ballistic missiles to support Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, greatly increasing the suffering of the Ukrainian people.
Russia’s unprovoked, unjust, and brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has entered its third year. As I often say, Ukraine of today may be East Asia of tomorrow. Furthermore, Russia continues to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, which has contributed to worldwide concern that yet another catastrophe by nuclear weapon use is a real possibility. In this reality, close coordination between Japan and the U.S. is required more than ever to ensure that the deterrence our Alliance provides remains credible and resilient.
New forms of oppression are being imposed on the world. Freedom is being suppressed through digital technologies. Social media is censored, monitored, and controlled.
There are growing cases of economic coercion and the so-called “debt trap” diplomacy, whereby the economic dependency of nations is exploited and weaponized.
Facing such rapidly-changing pressures, how do we continue to safeguard our common values?
4. Global Partners
I want to address those Americans who feel the loneliness and exhaustion of being the country that has upheld the international order almost singlehandedly.
I understand it is a heavy burden to carry such hopes on your shoulders.
Although the world looks to your leadership, the U.S. should not be expected to do it all, unaided and on your own.
Yes, the leadership of the United States is indispensable.
Without U.S. support, how long before the hopes of Ukraine would collapse under the onslaught from Moscow?
Without the presence of the United States, how long before the Indo-Pacific would face even harsher realities?
Ladies and gentlemen, as the United States’ closest friend, tomodachi, the people of Japan are with you, side by side, to assure the survival of liberty. Not just for our people, but for all people.
I am not saying this out of my strong attachment to America. I am an idealist but a realist, too. The defense of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law is the national interest of Japan.
The Japanese people are fully committed to these values. I do not want to leave our children a society where human rights are suppressed, where political self-determination is denied, where our lives are monitored by digital technology.
I know you don’t either. Upholding these values is both a cause and a benefit for our two countries as well as for the generations to come across the world.
Right now, Japanese and U.S. service members are working side by side to deter aggression and ensure peace.
I admire them, I thank them, and I know I speak for all of us when I say--they have the gratitude of both our nations.
On the spaceship called “Freedom and Democracy,” Japan is proud to be your shipmate.
We are on deck, we are on task. And we are ready to do what is necessary.
The democratic nations of the world must have all hands on deck.
I am here to say that Japan is already standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States.
You are not alone.
We are with you.
Japan has changed over the years. We have transformed ourselves from a reticent ally, recovering from the devastation of World War II, to a strong, committed ally, looking outward to the world.
Japan has transformed its national security strategy. Uncertainty about the future stability of the Indo-Pacific region caused us to change our policies and our very mindset. I myself have stood at the forefront in making our bilateral alliance even stronger.
In 2022, we announced that we would secure a substantial increase of our defense budget by FY 2027 to 2% of GDP, possess counterstrike capabilities, and improve cybersecurity. Today, the deterrence that our Alliance provides is stronger than ever, bolstered by U.S. extended deterrence for Japan.
Japan has taken strong sanctions against Russia in the wake of its aggression against Ukraine. We have announced over $12 billion in aid to Ukraine, including anti-drone detection systems. This is part of NATO’s aid package, and, yes, we are even working with NATO on the other side of the world from us.
I might add that in February, to help a devastated Ukraine get through these agonizing times, I hosted the conference for Ukraine’s economic growth and reconstruction. Japan will continue to stand with Ukraine.
As the geopolitical landscape changed and as Japan grew in confidence, we expanded our outlook beyond that of being America’s closest ally. We first became a regional partner of the United States, and now we have become your global partner. Never has our relationship been so close, our vision and approach so united.
Today, our partnership goes beyond the bilateral. Examples include trilateral and quadrilateral cooperation among the U.S., Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, India, and the Philippines as well as cooperation through the G7 and with ASEAN. The three leaders of the U.S., the Republic of Korea and Japan convened at Camp David last summer to inaugurate a new era of our partnership.
From these various endeavors emerges a multi-layered regional framework where our Alliance serves as a force multiplier. And, together with these likeminded countries, we are working to realize a Free and Open Indo-Pacific.
Here in this chamber, we should have strong bipartisan support for these efforts.
Japan believes in U.S. leadership, and we also believe in the U.S. economy.
Japan is the number one foreign direct investor in the United States. Japanese companies have invested around 800 billion dollars, creating almost one million American jobs. These are good jobs with half a million jobs in the manufacturing sector alone.
At home, I am embarking on a set of initiatives called a New Form of Capitalism to drive the Japanese economy. The public and private sectors are joining hands to transform the social challenges we face into engines of growth. Wage increases, capital investment, stock prices -- all have attained levels not seen for thirty years. The Japanese economy is now making strides by capitalizing on these unprecedented and major changes. A growth-oriented Japanese economy should also spur even greater investment in the United States. And we can then help boost the global economy to steer it toward a strong growth trajectory in the years to come.
Just yesterday, President Biden and I demonstrated our commitment to leading the world on the development of the next generation of emerging technologies, such as AI, quantum, semiconductors, biotechnology, and clean energy.
And the scope of our bilateral cooperation expands to space as well, illuminating our path toward a brighter and more hopeful tomorrow. The TV broadcast of Apollo 11’s lunar landing of 1969 is still seared into my memory. Japan’s lunar lander mission in January achieved the first pinpoint landing in history. Yesterday, President Biden and I announced that a Japanese national will be the first non-American astronaut to land on the Moon on a future Artemis mission.
We have two astronauts with us today. Would Mr. Hoshide and Mr. Tani please stand?
Mr. Akihiko Hoshide has flown to space three times and served as commander of the International Space Station for five months in 2021.
Next to him, is Mr. Daniel Tani. He is a retired Japanese American astronaut who has conducted six spacewalks and in his two missions logged over 50 million miles.
Which is a lot of frequent flyer points.
Mr. Hoshide and Mr. Tani are living symbols of our collaboration in space, and we will have many more such collaborations in the future.
Thank you, gentlemen.
5. Conclusion
Let me close with this final thought. I want you to know how seriously Japan takes its role as the United States’ closest ally.
Together we carry a large responsibility. I believe that we are essential to peace…vital to freedom…and fundamental to prosperity.
Bonded by our beliefs, I pledge to you Japan’s firm alliance and enduring friendship.
“Global Partners for the Future.” - We are your global partner today, and we will be your global partner in the years ahead.
Thank you for inviting me, thank you for your hospitality, and thank you for the role you play in the world.
Lex Fridman (01:15:45):So during the acquisition, the way you knew the people, it’s the right team are the ones that could believe that this consulting business can grow, can integrate with the IBM and all of that.
Ginni Rometty (01:15:57):
Yeah, I was lucky. Look, I did things that helped that. I mean, I knew that people joining us would feel more comfortable if they had people leading it, that they recognized, et cetera. But again, I learned. Those that didn’t then, I eventually had to take some action out. But PWCC had a lot of really dedicated leaders to it. And I give them a lot of credit.
Lex Fridman (01:16:19):
What’s amazing to see a thing that kind of start at that very stressful time, and then it turns out to be a success. Yeah. That’s just beautiful to see. So what about the acquisition itself? Is there something interesting to say about the, like, what you learned about maybe negotiation? Because there’s a lot of money involved too.
Ginni Rometty (01:16:36):To me, it was a win-win. And we both actually cared that customers got value. So there was this, like, third thing that had a benefit. Not them, not us, there was this third thing. And then next to that.
Lex Fridman (01:16:50):I like how you think that people would have the wisdom or what it takes to have great negotiation. But yeah, so it’s a win-win is one of the ways
Ginni Rometty (01:16:57):
you can have successful negotiations. But it’s, like, obvious to even say that, right? I mean, if you can, back to being in service of something, we were both in service of clients. So in and then, you know, I always say, when you have a negotiation with someone, okay, both parties always kind of walk away a little bit. Okay, that’s good. If they both walk away going, yeah, I should have got a little bit more. Okay, but it’s okay if I should have got. Okay, they’re both a little fussy. When one walks away and thinks they did great and the other one did horrible, they’re usually, like, born bad. I mean, because they never worked that way. And I’ve always felt that way with negotiations that you push too far down, you usually will be sorry
Lex Fridman (01:17:38):you did that, you know? So don’t push too far. I mean, that’s ultimately what collaboration and empathy means is you’re interested in the long-term success of everybody together versus, like, your short-term success.
Ginni Rometty (01:17:49):And then you get the discretionary energy from them versus, like, okay, you screwed me here. I’m done, right?
Lex Fridman (01:17:54):So let’s even rewind even back.
Ginni Rometty (01:17:57):No. Oh, no. Do you feel like this is a nostalgia interview?
Lex Fridman (01:18:02):Oh, no. Let me just ask the romantic question. What did you love most about engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, so in those early days, from your degree to the early?
Ginni Rometty (01:18:11):
I just, I love that logic part of it, right? And you do get a sense of completion at some point when you reach certain milestones that, you know, like, yes, it worked, or yes, it, you know, that finite answer to that. So that’s what I loved about it. I loved the problem-solving of it.
Lex Fridman (01:18:26):Computing, what led you down that path? Computing in general, what made you fall in love with computing, with engineering?
Ginni Rometty (01:18:33):
It’s probably that back to that desire, wanting to know how things work, right? And so that’s like a natural thing. You know, math, I loved math for that reason. I always wanted to study how did that, you know, how did it get that to work kind of thing? So it goes back in that time. But I did start, when I went to, when I started at Northwestern, I wasn’t, I was already in the engineering school, but my first thought was to be a doctor, that that was far more noble, that I should be a medical doctor, until I could not pass human reproduction as a course. And I thought the irony that I could not.
Lex Fridman (01:19:01):I’m like, I got all these colored pencils,
Ginni Rometty (01:19:04):
like I don’t have these pictures, this is not working out for me. I’m going to stick to math. It was the only course in my four-year college education I had to take pass-fail, because otherwise I risked impairing my grade point average. Engineering it is, so but.
Lex Fridman (01:19:04):
I’m going to stick to math. It was the only course in my four-year college education I had to take pass-fail, because otherwise I risked impairing my grade point average. Engineering it is, so but. After about 10 years, you jumped from the technical role of systems engineer to management, to a leadership role. Did you miss at that time the sort of the technical direct contribution versus being a leader, a manager?
Ginni Rometty (01:19:30):
That’s an interesting point. Like I say, I’ve always been sort of a doer leader, you know, so. So you never lost that. I never really did, even, you know, and I think this is really important for today. The best way people learn is experientially, I think. Now you may, that’s being a generalization, because there are people can learn all different ways, right? So I’ve done things like with my whole team. They all had to learn how to build cloud applications.
We called it code off. And so, you know, I don’t care what your job is, write code, you know? And I remember when we were trying to get the company to understand AI, we did something called a cognitive jam. Okay, there’s a reason we picked the word cognitive, by the way, instead of AI. Today, we use the word AI. It was really symbolic.
(01:20:18):
It was to mean this is to help you think, not replace your thinking. There was so much in the zeitgeist about AI being a bad thing at that time. So that was why we picked a mouthful of a word like cognitive, and it was like, no, no, this is to help you, actually. So do what, you know, do what you do better or do something you haven’t yet learned. And we did something called the cognitive jam, but the whole point was everybody in the company could volunteer, get on a team. You either had to build something that improved one of our products or did something for a client or did a social, solved a social issue with AI. And again, this goes back now, 10 years, and people did things from bullying applications to, you know, railroad stuff to whatever it was, but it got like 100,000 people to understand, you know, viscerally what is AI. So that’s a long answer to my belief around experiential, and so do you ever give it up? I don’t think so, because I actually think that’s pretty good to get your hands dirty in something. You know, you can’t do it, you know, depending what you’re doing, your effort to do that will be less, but. So even the CEO,
Lex Fridman (01:21:20):tried to get your hands dirty a little bit.
Ginni Rometty (01:21:23):I’ve played, I mean, he’s still, I’m not saying I’m any good at any of it,
Lex Fridman (01:21:27):you know, anymore, but. But to build up into a.
Ginni Rometty (01:21:29):But it’s that, yeah, it’s that really understand, right, and not be afraid of.
Lex Fridman (01:21:35):
Like we mentioned at the beginning, IBM research has helped catalyze some of the biggest accomplishments in computing and artificial intelligence history. So D-Blue, IBM D-Blue versus Kasparov chess match in 96 and 97. Just to ask kind of like what your perception is, what your memory is of it, what is that moment? Like the seminal moment, I believe probably one of the greatest moments in AI history, when the machine first beat a human at a thing that humans thought.
Ginni Rometty (01:22:05):
You make a very interesting point, because it is like one of the first demonstrations of using a game to like bring something to people’s consciousness, right? And to this day, people use games, right, to demonstrate different things. But at the time, it’s funny. I didn’t necessarily think of it so much as AI, and I’ll tell you why. I was, and I’m not a chess player. You might be a chess player, so I’m not expert at it. But I think I understand properly of chess, that chess has got a finite number of moves that can be made.
Therefore, if it’s finite, really what’s a demonstration of a supercomputing, right? It’s about the amount of time and how fast it can crunch through to find the right move. So in some ways, I thought of it as almost a bigger demonstration of that. But it is absolutely, as you said, it was a motivator, one of the big milestones of AI, because it put in your consciousness that it’s man in this other machine, right?
Lex Fridman (01:22:57):
I’m doing something. So you saw it as just a challenging computation problem, and this is a way to demonstrate hardware and software computation at its best. Yes, I did. But the thing is, there is a romantic notion that chess is the embodiment of human intellect, I mean, intelligence, that you can’t build a machine that can beat a chess champion in chess, and the fact that it did.
Ginni Rometty (01:23:18):See, and I was blessed by not being a chess expert.
Lex Fridman (01:23:20):So it wasn’t like college. So it’s just a computation problem, I like it.
Ginni Rometty (01:23:23):It was a computation problem to me.
Lex Fridman (01:23:24):Well, that’s probably required to not be paralyzed by the immensity of the task. So that this is just solvable. But it was a very, I think that was a powerful moment, so speaking just as an AI person, that reinvigorated the dream.
Ginni Rometty (01:23:43):You were a little kid back then, though, right, at 95? You have to be, like, were you,
Lex Fridman (01:23:47):do you remember it, actually, at the moment? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ginni Rometty (01:23:50):What did you think at the moment about it?
Lex Fridman (01:23:53):
It was awe-inspiring, because especially sort of growing up in the Soviet Union, you think, especially of Garry Kasparov and chess, like, your intuition is weak about those things. I didn’t see it as computation. I thought of it as intelligence, because chess, for a human being, doesn’t feel like computation. It feels like some complicated relationship between memory and patterns and intuition and guts and instinct and all of those, like.
Ginni Rometty (01:24:31):If you watch someone play, that’s what you would conclude, right?
Lex Fridman (01:24:33):
So to see a machine be able to beat a human, I mean, you get a little bit of that with Chad G.P.T. now. It’s like, language was to us humans the thing that we kinda, surely the poetry of language is something only humans can really have. It’s going to be very difficult to replicate the magic of a natural language without deeply understanding language. But it seems like Chad G.P.T. can do some incredible things with language. In natural language dialogue. But that was the first moment in AI. Through all the AI winters from the 60s, the promise of the, it was, wow, this is possible for a simple set of algorithms to accomplish something that we think of as intelligence. So that was truly inspiring, that maybe intelligence, maybe the human mind is just algorithms. That was the thought at the time. And of course now, the funny thing, what happens is the moment you accomplish it, everyone says, oh, it’s just brute force algorithms. It’s silly.
(01:25:39):
And this continues. Every single time you pass a benchmark, a threshold to win a game, people say, oh, well, it’s just this. It’s just this. It’s just this. I think that’s funny, and there’s going to be a moment when we’re going to have to contend with AI systems that exhibit human-like emotions and feelings, and you have to start to have some difficult discussions about, well, how do we treat those beings? And what role do they have in society? What are the rules around that? And this is really exciting because that also puts a mirror to ourselves to see, okay, what’s the right way to treat each other as human beings? Because it’s a good test for that.
Ginni Rometty (01:26:22):
And it is, because I always say it’s a reflection of humanity. I mean, it’s taught by what man, bad stuff in the past, you’ll teach it bad stuff for the future, which is why I think efforts to regulate it are a fool’s errand. You need to regulate uses, because it’s not the technology itself is not inherently good or bad, but how it’s used or taught can be good or bad, for sure. And so that’s, to me, will unveil now a whole different way of having to look at technology.
Lex Fridman (01:26:53):Well, what about another magical leap with the early days of Watson with beating the Jeopardy challenge? What was your experience like with Watson? What’s your vision for Watson in general?
Ginni Rometty (01:27:01):
Yeah. What was it? And it was really inspired by first chess, right, and Kasparov, and then you come forward in time. And I think what Watson did, because you used a really important word, AI had kind of waxed and waned in these winters, right? In and out, in and out, popular or not, more money, less money, in and out, confidence, no confidence. And so I think that was one of the first times it brought to the forefront of people like, whoa, like it humanized it. Because here it is playing against these two gentlemen, and as you did lose at first, and then finally won at the end of the day. And what it was doing is making you say, hey, natural language, it’s actually understanding natural language. It’s one of the first demonstrations of natural language support, and a bit of reasoning over lots of data, right? And so that it could have access to a lot of things, come up with a conclusion on it.
(01:27:55):
And to me, that was a really big moment. And I do think it brought to the conscious of the public, and in good ways and bad, because it probably set expectations very high of like, whoa, what this could be. But, and I still do believe that it has got the ability to change and help us, man, make better decisions. That so many decisions are not optimal in this world. Even medical decisions, and it’s right or wrong what took us down a path of healthcare first with our AI.
And we took many pivots, and I think there’s a really valuable lesson in what we learned. One is that, I actually don’t think the challenges are the technology. Yes, those are challenges, but the challenges are the people technologies around this. So do people trust it? How will they use it? I mean, I saw that straight up with doctors and like, meaning they’re so busy in the way they’ve been taught to do something.
(01:28:51):
Do they really have time to learn another way? I saw it was a mistake when you put it on top of processes that didn’t change, kind of like paving a cow path. Didn’t work. I mean, it was all human change management around it that were really its biggest challenges. And another valuable lesson we picked, back to usage, you think of IBM as moonshops, we picked really hard problems to start with.
I think you see a lot of technology now starts with really simple problems. And by that, it probably starts to build trust because I start little. It’s like, oh, I’m not ready to outsource my diagnosis to you, but I’ll get some information here about a test question. So very different thinking. So a lot of things to learn. We were making a market at the time. And when you make a market, choice of problem you work on gets to be very important. When you’re catching up, well, then it’s a scale game. So very different thing. But Watson proved, I think, I mean, I hope I’m not being too…
I think Watson brought AI back out a winner for the world. And that since then there’s just been one company after another and innovations and people working on it. And I have no regrets of anything that we did. We learned so much. I mean, we probably rebuilt it many times over. It made it more modular.
And today, to IBM, a Watson is more about AI inside of a lot of things, if you think of it that way, which is more like an ingredient versus it’s a thing in and of itself. And I think that’s how it’ll bring its real value. You know, more as an ingredient and it’s so badly needed. And even back then the issue was so much data. Like, what do you ever do? You can’t get through it. You can’t use it for anything. You know this well, it’s your profession. So we have to have it. So that’s gonna propel it forward.
Lex Fridman (01:30:31):So it’s part of the suite of tools that you use when you go to enterprise and you try to solve
Ginni Rometty (01:30:36):
all types of problems. Yeah, so AI for security, AI in automated operations, AI in your robotics, AI on your factory floor. You know what I mean? It’s all part of, and I think, and that’s why even to this day, thousands, I mean thousands and thousands of clients of IBM still have the Watson components that it’s the AI being used. So it became a platform is how I would say it, right? And an ingredient that went inside and consultants, like you said, had to learn. They had to learn, don’t just put it on something. You gotta rethink how that thing should work because with the AI, it could work entirely differently.
And so I also felt it could open up and still will open up jobs to a lot of people because more like an assistant and it could help me be qualified to do something. And we even years ago saw this with the French banks, very unionized, but that idea that you could, in this case, the unions voted for it because it felt people did a better job. And so, and that’s just part about being really dedicated to help it help humanity, not destroy it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:31:38):Speaking of which, a funny side note. So Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey, what do you think about the fact that Hal 9000 was named after IBM?
Ginni Rometty (01:31:52):I really don’t think it was.
Lex Fridman (01:31:53):I know there’s- You don’t think so? I really don’t. It could be more fake news.
Ginni Rometty (01:31:56):It’s more fake news. I have done, I’ve like researched this, tried to find any evidence and people have talked to you. Was it really, you know, one letter, it was one letter- One letter off, so-
Lex Fridman (01:32:03):Off, right? One letter off, so- Off, right? For people that don’t know, H is one letter off of I, A is one letter off of B,
Ginni Rometty (01:32:10):and then L is one letter off of M. I think that’s a solution found afterwards, you know? But here’s what I think it more was. I do think it’s one of the early demonstrations of evil AI. Yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:32:21):
Like can be taught bad. I could push back on that because it’s presented as evil in the movie because it hurts, the AI hurts people, but it’s a really interesting ethical question because the role of HAL 9000 is to carry out a successful mission.
And so the question that is a human question, it’s not an AI question, at what price? Humans wage war, they pay very heavy costs for a vision, for a goal of a future that creates a better world. And so that’s the question, certainly in space. Doctors ask that question all the time, but unlimited resources, who do I allocate my time and money and efforts to?
Ginni Rometty (01:33:02):
I agree. Like I said, I’ve spent a decade talking about this question of AI ethics, right? And that it needs really considerable, not just attention, because otherwise it will mirror everything we love and everything we don’t love. And again, and that’s the beauty in the eye of the holder, right, depending your culture and everything else. With what you’re doing and what you’re gonna do, how do you think about it? Do you think about the AI you’re going to develop as having guardrails dictated by some of your beliefs or?
Lex Fridman (01:33:31):
Yeah, for sure. So there’s so many interesting ways to do this the right way, and I don’t think anyone has an answer. I tend to believe that transparency is really important. So I think some aspect of your work should be open-sourced, or at least have an open-source competitor that creates a kind of forcing function for transparency of how you do things. So the other is, I tend to believe, maybe it’s because of the podcast and I’ve just talked to a lot of people, you should know the people involved.
Ginni Rometty (01:34:03):Yeah. I agree, a hundred percent.
Lex Fridman (01:34:04):
As opposed to hide behind a company wall. Sometimes there’s a pressure, you have a PR team, you have to care for investors and discussions, so on, let’s protect, let’s surely not tweet. And you form this bubble where you have incredible engineers doing fascinating work and also doing work that’s difficult, complex human questions being answered. And we don’t know about any of them as a society, and so we can’t really have that conversation. Even though that conversation would be great for hiring, it would be great for revealing the complexities of what the company is facing, so when the company makes mistakes, you understand that it wasn’t malevolence or half-assedness, and the decision-making is just a really hard problem. And so I think transparency is just good for everybody. And, I mean, in general, just having a lot of public conversations about this is serious stuff
It’s that AI will have a transformative impact on our society, and it might do so very, very quickly through all kinds of ways we’re not expecting, which is social media recommendation systems. They, at scale, have impact on the way we think, on the way we consume news, and our growth, like the kind of stuff we consume to grow and learn and become better human beings, all of that, that’s all AI. And then, obviously, the tools that run companies on which we depend, the infrastructure on which we depend, we need to know all about those AI decisions. And it’s not as simple as, well, we don’t want the AI to say these specific set of bad things. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it’s possible to prevent evil or bad things by creating a set of cold mathematical rules. Unfortunately, it’s all fuzzy and gray areas. It’s all a giant mess.
Ginni Rometty (01:35:59):
It is, I mean, you think about it like a knife. A knife can do good, and a knife can do bad, okay? You can’t, it’s very hard. You can’t ban knives. You can’t ban knives. And that, this is, I think back, it was probably 20, I don’t know, 15, 16, we did principles of trust and transparency. Notice the word transparency. That belief that with AI, it should be explainable. You should know who taught it. You should know the data that went into training it. You should know how it was written. If it’s being used, you have a right to know these things. And I think those are pretty, to this day, really powerful principles to be followed, right? And part of it, we ended up writing, because here we were, when we were working on particularly healthcare, like, okay, you care who trained it and what, and where did, and that’s sort of simple, you know, that comes to your mind, and you’re like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense for something important like that. But it just, in general, people won’t trust the technologies, I don’t think, unless they have transparency into those things. In the end, they won’t really trust it.
Lex Fridman (01:36:55):
I think a lot of people would like to know sort of, because a lot of us, I certainly do, suffer from imposter syndrome, that self-critical brain. So, you know, taking that big step into leadership, did you at times suffer from imposter syndrome? Like, how did I get here? Do I really belong here? Or were you able to summon the courage and sort of the confidence to really step up?
Ginni Rometty (01:37:22):
I think that’s very natural for someone. Like, no matter, like, the bigger the job gets, you turn and you look to the left and the right, and you see people around you, and you think, what am I doing here, right? But then you remember what you do, and there’s no one else doing it, and so you get that confidence. So, I do hear a lot of people talk about imposter syndrome, right?
And I kind of, actually, this past year, I’ve spent some time helping people on that topic. And part of the stress, you have to believe you have a right to be like anyone else does if you’ve prepared for that moment, you know? And so, it’s a bit more of a, I know it’s hard to say it, like a confidence thing more than anything else. So, yes, there are times I look around, but then I think, wow, I’m in a position to make something change. So, I can’t say I have ever really dwelled on that feeling for long.
Lex Fridman (01:38:20):So, I guess you just focus on the work. I have an opportunity, I’m gonna stop propagating.
Ginni Rometty (01:38:22):You know, it’s good or bad, I just focus on the work. Yeah, good or bad, yeah.
Lex Fridman (01:38:26):
One important lesson you said you learned from your mom is never let anyone else define you. Only you define who you are. So, what’s the trajectory, let’s say, of your self-definition journey, of you discovering who you are from having that very difficult upbringing?
Ginni Rometty (01:38:47):
You know they say pivotal moments happen and you don’t realize it when they’re happening? So, most of my, I feel like most of my self-discovery, it’s been like something happens in a year or two or some number later, I look back on it and say, you know, I learned this from that. It’s like not in the moment always with me. That could just be how I am. So, I feel like it’s been, know yourself, it’s a good thing, right? I’ve actually heard you say that on a different podcast when you ask people questions. You’re like, well, it depends, you know, like know yourself a bit, right? And, uh.
Lex Fridman (01:39:20):
But to know who you are, though, there’s a lot of things, like you said, Nick. Like, for me, there’s moods when you’re super self-critical, sometimes you’re super confident, and there’s many, sometimes you’re emotional, sometimes you’re cool under pressure, and all those are the same human being. Yeah, and I think that’s fine.
Ginni Rometty (01:39:39):Self-awareness, that’s different.
Lex Fridman (01:39:41):Was there societal expectations and norms regarding gender that you felt in your career? You’ve spoken to that a little bit, but was there some aspect of that that was constraining, empowering, or both?
Ginni Rometty (01:39:56):
You know, I chose to never look at it, okay? Now, whether that is right or wrong, and again, I’m a product of the 70s, and 70s and the 80s, where I think I was surrounded, all the other women around me viewed our way to get ahead was just to work hard. Work hard, work hard, and that was the way you differentiated yourself. And that’s obvious it did help. I mean, there’s no doubt about it. You were always, you know, you learned a lot of things, which qualified opened up another door, opened up another door. I’m very remindful that I have worked for companies that are very steeped in those values of equal opportunity. And so nothing remarkable about that. And I mean, when I was a wee kid, I’m taught hire a diverse team.
I get evaluated for it. I get evaluated if my team has built up their skills. So this is, you know, when you’re really formative, you’re in a culture that that’s what it’s valuing, right? So it becomes part of you. So I say sometimes to chagrin, did I ever feel I was held back for that reason? No, were there plenty of times when, you know, I write about a few of the stories in the book, I’m laying cables at night and the guys are at the bar. Now, I didn’t really wanna go with them to the bar anyways. They’d be like, we’ll be back to get you, you know, bye. And I’m like, okay.
(01:41:08):
I mean, I learned a lot. So it didn’t. Now, all that said, back to my earlier story about being a role model, you know, it would be foolish to not believe that there were times that that mattered. And I would say two things, even not that long ago, you know, a colleague called me and I was talking about media and about women CEOs and said, do you notice that sometimes when it’s a woman CEO, they call the person by name.
And when it’s a man, they call the company out, not the person’s name exactly associated with the issue. And I said, yeah, well, I think you have to just understand much of what you do, it will be magnified because there are so few of you. And sometimes it will be, you know, really can be blown out of proportion, right? And so that can happen and you get to learn in which way. Now, all that said, on gender, it is an interesting thing with the book as I’ve talked to, you know, having a book. Even some of my best friends, the first reaction is, I can’t wait for my daughter to read it. I say, well, that’s interesting. Do you think you could read it?
Lex Fridman (01:42:17):Yeah, it’s fascinating.
Ginni Rometty (01:42:17):
It’s an interesting reaction. And here I am 40 years later, that’s an interesting reaction, right? And I say, no, the book, I really worked hard to write it for everyone. I just happened to be a woman, right? But there’s still that there. And so, look, until I think people see and never feel that they have a, it doesn’t even matter whether there’s a woman, could be another diverse group that feels it. It’s okay to ask those questions. And that’s why actually I’m okay talking about it because there were times I felt it, right? There were times in my life on my looks or my weight or my clothing or endless numbers of things that people would comment on that they would not have commented on if it was someone else.
Now, on the other hand, when there’s so few of you and, you know, there’s good and bad. I mean, there’s benefit to that too, right? If you do good work, it’s easier to be recognized. And so, a pro and a con, and I think I’ve just grown up believing my advice to young women, go into engineering. Not because you’re gonna be an engineer. It teaches you to solve problems. And anything new job you do is gonna be solving problems. Things like that are what I take away from that in that journey.
Lex Fridman (01:43:28):
It is interesting that I hear from women that even on this podcast, when I talk to incredible women like yourself, it is inspiring to young women to hear. I mean, you like to see, you talk to somebody from Turkey and then Turkish people all get excited. It’s so true. So you get like somebody that looks like you, somebody that, and the category could be tiny, it could be, it can be huge. That’s just the reality of the world.
Ginni Rometty (01:43:57):
It is the reality of the world. And the work I do now to put this group called 110, put 1 million black employees into the middle class without college degrees. Get them the right skills, upwardly mobile jobs. So one of my last years we had been working on, it just did regular leadership session at IBM and had our black colleagues. We’re talking about what did it feel like to be a black leader? And here, these are extremely accomplished people. And I can remember very well one telling a story about, look, I felt if I failed or succeeded, it’s not just me. It came from a country in Africa. I feel like the whole country is on my shoulder, my success or failure. That’s a burden. I mean, like, I don’t feel that burden. Not true. As a woman CEO, I did feel like, even the headlines when I was named said, her appointment will either, her success or failure will be a statement for the whole gender kind of thing.
And I didn’t dwell on it, but I could see how people, like you said, it could be a small group, could be whatever. And so that is a lot of pressure on people and they need role models. You are a role model for people. Look at what you’re able to do. You do these podcasts, you understand your science very well, you’re very well prepared, your ability to translate it to people. That’s not an insignificant thing. And you may think, oh, is that about the power of me? Not really, right? And you obviously believe, you don’t do this because you just like sitting at a microphone. You do it because you think, okay, if I can get people to say things that are really valuable to other people, they’re gonna learn something. I assume that is, I mean, you never told me, my interpretation is, that’s why you do this podcast. That you feel like in service of other people that you can bring them something unique by the way you do this.
Now, I should ask you, why do you do it? That’s my impression.
Lex Fridman (01:45:38):
By the way, can I just comment on the fact that you keep asking me really hard questions? I really, I appreciate it, I love this. I’m really honored by it. As a fan of podcasts myself, what I hope is to talk to people like you and to show that you are a fascinating and beautiful human being outside of your actual accomplishments also. So sometimes people are very focused on very specific things about, like you said, science, like what the actual work is, whether it’s nuclear fusion or it’s GIGPT.
I just wanna show that it’s, because I see it at MIT and everywhere, it’s just human beings trying their best, they’re flawed, but just realizing that all of these very well accomplished people are all the same. Yeah, that’s a very good, well said. And then so then regular people and young people, they’re able to see, you know, I can do this too, I can have a very big impact. No imposter syndrome, right? Yeah, exactly. It’s like we’re all kind of imposters. We’re all like trying to figure it out on our own.
Ginni Rometty (01:46:42):To a certain degree. Yeah. To a certain degree.
Lex Fridman (01:46:45):
So let me just ask you about family. You wrote that my family still jokes that the reason I never had children on my own was because I had already raised my family. They’re right. So this is talking to you about upbringing, but in general, what was your, you know, leading a giant company, what was the right place to find a work-life balance for you to have time for family, have time for away from work and be successful?
Ginni Rometty (01:47:13):
So I had to learn that and I might have said, you know, you’re the only one that can determine your own work-life balance. Companies are innate things. I mean, they will take everything they can from you and it’s not a bad thing. They just will, as will bosses. I mean, you give it, they’ll take it. And when people ask for, you know, I need a roof, I’m like, okay. I had to come to terms with the criminal was me if I needed that balance. I had to set those boundaries. And so when I comment about a family, because I am in extreme awe of people with children who work, it is a extremely hard thing to do. I watch my siblings. I love my nieces and nephews.
And you know, A, the emotional, their pain is your pain every minute of a day. And then you still have a job on top of it. And so when my mom had to go back to school and had to work, I was the one. And so when she couldn’t go to the teacher meeting, I went to the teacher meeting. And so in some ways, there’s an age gap between my brother and I and my other two sisters. And so I’m still, they still call me mama bear even. I mean, I’m extremely protective of all of them. And it is as if I had raised them and my mom did a great job raising them. I didn’t, but I was there. And so when it came time to have children and my husband came from a family where his father died and was raised by a single mother, very similar end point, different reasons why he ended up, you know, his father did not abandon them. And I don’t want people to believe to do my job, you can have no children. That is not right. I know other great women CEOs, Marilyn Hewson, who ran Lockheed Martin, extremely technical company, Mary Barra, who runs General Motors, Ellen Coleman, who run DuPont. These are all my friends to this day.
(01:49:01):
And they’ve been fantastic mothers and husbands, good parents, right? And so I talk about it because it was a choice we made. And so, you know, we both felt, look, we’d reached a point where for his reasons, what he had to do, I’d already felt that way. And that we were comfortable just being great aunts and uncles. And I’m a great aunt, you know? Well, I like to think that for my little guys and they’re older now, but lots of them. And there’s no doubt though, the choices we made, Mark and I, that that made it easier for me to focus on work. I mean, it’s just math, you know, when you’ve got less people to have to take care of.
And so I’m very considerate of that. And I think much of it informed many of the policies I put into because I had such great empathy for those who then still had these other responsibilities. And I desperately wanted them all to stay in the workforce. So I can remember, and my siblings have been more successful than I, by the way, I mean, to my mother’s credit.
And my one sister who, you know, went to Northwestern, has an MBA, built some of the most sophisticated systems. She spent her whole career at Accenture and just recently retired as the chief executive of all of consulting. But at one point she took off time to spend with her family and then went to go back to work. She’s talking to me and she’s like, I don’t know if I should go back to work. You know, maybe life’s path, you know, technology goes so fast, it’s been a few years.
(01:50:29):
I’m sitting there like, what are you talking about? I’m like, you know, look at her credentials. They’re far outstanding. I’m like, and I thought to myself, like, ding, one of those moments. If my own sister feels that way with all her credentials, I’ll bet I went back to work the next day and I said, hey, pull for me. All the people who’ve left for parental reasons and, or whatever, family reasons, didn’t come back. And it began a program of returnships. And I can’t tell you how many, in men and women, was because they didn’t feel confident to come back. They thought technology passed them by. Okay, we said, it’s three months. You could stay one month, three months, doesn’t matter. Well, a lot of people, like one day, they’re like, you’re right, not that much happened. It happened, but I caught up.
Lex Fridman (01:51:11):Actually, no more than I think, you know?
Ginni Rometty (01:51:13):
Yeah. And I, so it was a long answer to your question about, I didn’t, but I am so empathetic and I am in awe of what they are able to do. So, and it made me then, I think, more empathetic to the policies and the like around that topic, so you could keep great people in the workforce.
Lex Fridman (01:51:30):So you mentioned your friends with Mayabara, the CEO of GM. I didn’t mean to name drop. So don’t, I didn’t mean it that way. No, I love her, she’s amazing. So I just wanted to, I’m just curious.
Ginni Rometty (01:51:40):I’ll tell Mary she should do your podcast. We’ll make it happen, but. She’s a great leader. She’s amazing. I tell Mary what I think of her is, I think she’s one of the most authentic leaders out there.
Lex Fridman (01:51:49):Most authentic. I mean, just very different companies, huge challenge.
Ginni Rometty (01:51:53):
I worked there first, though, remember, right? So I’m very, you know, in some ways I’m very beholden, right, you know, I’m very appreciative of what they did. I mean, Mary and I are circa the same, well, I’m a bit older, so, but circa that genre.
Lex Fridman (01:52:05):Do you exchange wisdoms?
Ginni Rometty (01:52:06):
Oh yeah, yeah. When you do anything hard, it takes time and perseverance, like we talked about. And you can get that, where do you get the fuel for it? You can either get it from your attitude, or you can get it from your network or your relationships. And I’m a firm believer relationships are from what you give, not what you get. Meaning, you give, trust me, they will come back at the time they need to come back to you at these moments in life. If you focus on, how can I bring Lex value? There’ll be a day I need Lex, and he will be back. And so, to those women, to me, relationships are not transactional.
And it’s a proof that to this day, even though I’m no longer still active as a CEO, these are all still my friends. And they’re, we are friends, all of us. And I can remember some of them, when I first became a CEO, calling me and saying, hey, it’s a little lonely here, so let me talk to you. And then when they became, I did the same for them. And then they remember, and they do for the next generation. And so, it’s a very supportive, almost to a T, any of the women you could name who have been CEOs, I would say, almost to a T, have all been very supportive. In fact, a number of us work on a little, another non-for-profit right now called Journey, which some women who had started, the Fortune’s Most Powerful Women had started, which was, could we get more women, particularly diverse women, but women in general, to more quickly be into positions of leadership and power? And so, many of the women you named and more, we all dedicate time mentoring in kind of creating this little group of fellows every year to do this.
Lex Fridman (01:53:44):
Friendship and love is core to this whole thing, not just the success, but just the whole human condition. Let me ask one last question. Advice for young people. You’ve had a difficult upbringing, a difficult life, and you’ve become one of the most successful human beings in history. What advice would you give to young people, or just people in general who are struggling a bit, trying to figure out how they can have a career they can be proud of, or maybe a life they can be proud of?
Ginni Rometty (01:54:12):
I feel like a life you can be proud of is just one if you leave something a little bit better. It doesn’t have to be big, you know? That’s a life well-lived, right? It was Churchill who said, you might remember it better than I. You make a living by what you get, and you live a life by what you give, something to that effect. But my advice would probably, when I’m asked this, I would tell them to ask more questions than give answers.
Just focus on being a sponge. It’s funny, I asked my husband the same question the other day. I said, hey, we’re talking to somebody, and people were asking this, and he sort of paused for a while, and he said, I tell them, patience. I said, what do you mean? And he said, I see so many young people, they’re in such a hurry to somewhere, I don’t know where, and that if they just had patience and let life unfold, I think they may be surprised where they ended up. And actually, I think that’s a really good answer,
Lex Fridman (01:55:13):to be honest. Along the way, keep asking questions, keep that childlike curiosity.
Ginni Rometty (01:55:18):I know, it sounds so easy to say, it’s just so, you know.
Lex Fridman (01:55:23):
Yeah, like you said, the obvious things, I think they tend to be the most profound. Jeannie, you’re an incredible human being. You’re an inspiration to so many. Thank you for helping run and contribute to one of the great companies that brings so much good power to the world, and thank you for putting in the hard work of putting it all in the great book, and thank you for talking today.
Ginni Rometty (01:55:47):This was a huge honor. Thank you for doing it. You did a lovely job.
Lex Fridman (01:55:50):
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Jeannie Rometty. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, let me leave you with some words from Eleanor Roosevelt. Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized either way. Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
Lex Fridman (45:10):And that there could be much larger implications that are much more difficult to predict, and it’s our responsibility to really work hard to figure that out.
Ginni Rometty (45:17):
I was talking to AI ethics a decade ago, and I’m like, why won’t anybody listen to us? That’s another one of those values things that you realize, hey, if I’m gonna bring technology in the world, I better bring it safely, right? And that to me comes with, when you’re an older company that’s been around, you realize that society gave you a license to operate, and it can take it away. And we see that happen to companies. And therefore, you’re like, okay, like why I feel so strong about skills. Hey, if I’m gonna bring in, it’s gonna create all these new jobs, job dislocation, then I should help. I’m trying to help people get new skills. Anyways, that’s a long answer to what good tech, but the idea that there’s kind of in retrospect a set of principles you could look at and maybe learn something from my sort of rocky road through there.
Lex Fridman (46:05):
But it started with the power of we, and there’s that big leap, I think, that propagates through the things you’re saying, which is the leap from focusing on yourself to the focusing on others. So that having that empathy, you’ve said at some point in our lives and careers, our attention turns from ourselves to others. We still have our own goals, but we recognize that our actions affect many, that it is impossible to achieve anything truly meaningful alone. So it’s to you, I think, maybe you can correct me, but ultimate good power is about collaboration. And maybe in a large company, it’s a delegation on great teams.
Ginni Rometty (46:45):
The ultimate good power is actually doing something for society. That would be my ultimate definition of good power, by the way. So it’s about the results of the thing. Yeah, but how it’s done, right? The how it’s done. And so, you know, when you said a leap, do you think people make a leap when they go from thinking about themselves to others? Do you think it’s a leap,
Lex Fridman (47:05):
or do you think it kind of just is a sort of slow point? I think the leap is in deciding that this is a, it’s like deciding that you will care about others, that this is, it’s like a leap of going to the gym for the first time. It’s, yes, it takes a long time to develop that and to actually care, but the decision that I’m going to actually care about other human beings, yeah. Yeah. I think, or at least, like, yeah, it just feels like a deliberate action you take of empathy.
Ginni Rometty (47:32):
Yeah, because sometimes I think it happens a little, it’s maybe not as deliberate. Yeah, it’s a little bit more gradual because it might happen because you realize that, geez, I can’t get this done alone, so I gotta have other people with me, but how do I get them to help me do something? So I think it does happen a little bit more gradually, and as you get more confident, you start to not think so much that it’s about you, and you start to think about this other thing you’re trying to accomplish. And so that’s why I felt it was a little more gradual.
I also felt like I can remember so well, you know, this idea that, again, now we’re in the 80s, 90s, I’m a woman, I’m in technology, and I was down in Australia at a conference, and I gave this great speech, again, I’m thinking I gave this great speech, financial services, this man walks up to me after, I think he’s gonna ask me some great question, and he said to me, I wish my daughter could have been here.
And in that moment, and at that point, up to then, I’d always been about, look, please, don’t notice I’m a woman, do not notice that, I just want to be recognized for my work, crossing over from me to we, like it or not, I was a role model for some number of people. And maybe I didn’t want to be, but that didn’t really matter. So I could either accept that and embrace it or not. I think it’s a good example of that transition. I did have a little epiphany with that happening, and then I’m like, okay, because I would always be like, no, I won’t go on a women’s conference, I won’t talk here, I won’t, no, no, no.
But then I sort of realized, wait a second, that old saying, you cannot be what you cannot see, and I said to myself, wait a second, okay, I am in these positions I have a responsibility to, and it’s to others, and that’s what I meant, and I felt like it can be somewhat gradual that you come, and you may have these pivotal moments that you see it, but then you feel it, and you sort of move over that transom into the power of we.
Lex Fridman (49:31):
You’re one of the most powerful tech leaders ever, and as you mentioned the word power, the old saying goes, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Was there an aspect of power that was, that you had to resist its ability to corrupt your mind, to sort of delude you into thinking you’re smarter than you are, that kind of,
Ginni Rometty (49:59):
all the ways that power corrupts. That’s very dangerous, I agree with, I mean, I think you gotta be careful who you surround yourself with. That’s how I would answer that question, right? And people who will hold the mirror up to you, can be done in a very positive way, by the way, it doesn’t mean, you know, but that we’re sycophants, you cannot have that, right? I mean, it’s like, I always say to someone like, hey, listen to me, tell me what would make me better, or do something, or, I have a husband that’ll do that for me quite easily, by the way. He’ll always tell me.
Lex Fridman (50:25):But he’s the one that can give you some criticism sometimes.
Ginni Rometty (50:28):
I have been surrounded myself with a number of people that will do that, and I think you have to have that. I had a woman that worked with me for a very long time, and at one time we were competitors, and then at some point she started to work for me, and stayed with me for quite a while, and she was one of the few people that would tell me the truth, and you know, sometimes I’m like, enough already. And she’d be like, do not roll your eyes at this, and you absolutely have got to have that. And I think it also comes, it’ll go back to my complete commitment to inclusion and diversity, because you gotta have that variety around you, you’ll get a better product, and a better answer at the end of the day. And so that, to resist that allure, I think it’s about who you surround yourself with. Current politics would say that too.
Lex Fridman (51:09):So you write about, and in general, you value diversity a lot, so can you speak to almost like philosophically, what does diversity mean to you?
Ginni Rometty (51:19):
Diversity to me means I’m gonna get a better product, a better answer, I value different views, and so it’s inclusion. So I always say inclusion, diversity’s a number, inclusion’s a choice. And you can make that choice every single day. That’s a good line. I really believe, and I’ve witnessed it, that I’ve had, when my teams are diverse, I get a better answer. My friends are diverse, I have a better life. I mean, all these kinds of things. And so I also believe it’s like no silver thread, there’s no easy way, you have to authentically believe it. I mean, do you authentically believe that diversity’s a good thing?
Lex Fridman (51:58):Yeah, but I believe that diversity, like broad,
Ginni Rometty (52:01):a thought, I very broadly define it.
Lex Fridman (52:03):
Yeah, so like there’s, you know, sometimes the way diversity’s looked at, or the way diversity’s used today is like surface-level characteristics, which are also important, but they’re usually reflective of something else, which is a diversity of background, a diversity of thought, a diversity of struggle. Some people that grew up middle-class versus poor, different countries, different motivations, all of that. Yeah, it’s beautiful when different people from very different walks of life get together. Yeah, it’s beautiful to see. But like sometimes it’s very difficult to get at that on a sheet of paper of the characteristics that defines the diversity.
Ginni Rometty (52:40):
I know, so it is, it’s just like, oh, I can’t hire exactly for, or if I’m trying to. But I do know one thing, that when people say, well, I can’t find these kind of people I’m looking for, I’m like, you’re just not looking in the right places. Right, you have to open up, like just.
Lex Fridman (52:52):You gotta really open up new pools, right? You have to think, like everybody, you don’t have to have a PhD, just like you said.
Ginni Rometty (52:59):Yeah. I’m sorry to say it, you know, I know it’s very valuable what you have, trust me, but.
Lex Fridman (53:02):
Well, it could, just like you said, it could even be a negative. So you mentioned, like for good power, you are a CEO, you were a CEO for a long time of a public company. Were there times when there was pressure to sacrifice what is good for the world, for the bottom line?
Ginni Rometty (53:23):
You know, to do what’s good for the company? There were a lot of times for that. I mean, I think every company faces that today, in that I always felt like there’s so much discussion about stakeholder capitalism, right? Do you just serve a shareholder or do you have multiple? I have always found, and I’ve been very vocal about that topic, that when I participated, the Business Roundtable wrote up a new purpose statement that had multiple stakeholders. I think it’s common sense. Like, if you’re gonna be 100 years old, you only get there because you actually do, at some time, balance all these different stakeholders in what it is that you do, and short-term, long-term, all these trade-offs.
And I always say, people who write about it, they write about it black and white, but I have to live in a gray world. Nothing I’ve ever done has been in a black and white world, hardly. Maybe things of values that I had to answer, but most of it is gray. And so, I think back lots of different decisions.
(54:16):
I think back, as you would well remember, you’re a student of history. IBM was one of, really, the originators of the semiconductor industry, and certainly of commercializing the semiconductor industry. Great R&D and manufacturing, but it is a game of volume. And so, when I came on, we were still manufacturing R&D and manufacturing our own chips. We were losing a lot of money. Yet, here we had to fight a war on cloud and AI. And so, okay, now shareholders would say, fine, shut it down. Okay, those chips also power some of the most important systems that power the banks of today. If I just shut it down, well, what would that do? And so, okay, the answer wasn’t just stop it.
The answer wasn’t just keep putting money into it. The answer was, and we had to kind of sit in an uncomfortable spot till we found a way. I mean, it’s gonna sound so basic, but you, as an engineer, understand it. We had to separate. It was a very integrated process of research, development, and manufacturing. And you’d also, you’d be perfecting things in manufacturing. And these were very high-performance chips. We had to be able to separate those. We eventually found a way to do that so that we could take the manufacturing elsewhere and we would maintain the R&D. It’s a, I think it’s a great example of the question you just asked because people would have applauded. Others would have been, this is horrible. Or we had a financial roadmap that had been put in place that said I’ll make this amount of EPS by this date. There came a time we couldn’t honor it because we had to invest. And so, there’s a million of these decisions. I think most people that run firms, any size firm, they’re just one right after another like that. And you’re always making that short and long tension of what am I giving up?
Lex Fridman (56:01):Well, what is that partnership like with the clients? Because you work with gigantic businesses. And what’s it like sort of, really forming a great relationship with them, understanding what their needs are, being in service of their,
Ginni Rometty (56:16):
of their needs? Yeah, very simple. Honor your promises. And that happens over time. I mean, in service of, which is often why you can work with competitors because if you are really in service of you and you need something, it takes two of us to do it, that becomes easier to do because I really, we both care, you get what you needed. And so, I can remember during one of the times I was on a European trip, and at the time, and this is still true, about views about technology and national technology giants and global ones and the pros and the cons and countries want their own national champions, quite obvious, I mean, if I’m France or Germany. And there was a lot of discussion about security and data and who was getting access to what.
And I can remember being in one of the, I was with Chancellor Merkel, I had met her many times, she’s very well prepared, very well prepared every time, she would know. And I started to explain all these things about why, how, you know, how we don’t share data, how, who it belongs to, our systems never had backdoors, and she sort of stopped me.
Like, you’re one of the good guys, like, stop. Now, that wasn’t about me personally, she’s talking about a company that’s acted consistent with values for decades, right? So, to me, how you work with those big kind of clients is you honor your promises, you say what you do and you do what you say, and you act with values over a long period of time. And that, to me, people say we’re value, it is not a fluffy thing, it is not a fluffy thing, it is a, I mean, if I was starting a company now, I’d spend a lot of time on that, on, you know, why we do what we do and why some things are tolerable and some things, and, you know, what your fundamental beliefs are. And many people sort of zoom past that stage, right? It’s okay for a while.
Lex Fridman (58:08):Until. And never sacrifice that.
Ginni Rometty (58:10):You would never sacrifice that. I don’t think you can.
Lex Fridman (58:14):
So, there was a lot of pressure when you took over as CEO, and there was 22 consecutive quarters of revenue decline between 2012 and the summer of 2017. So, it was a stressful time. Maybe not, maybe you can correct me on that. So, as a CEO, what was it like going through that time, with the decisions, the tensions, in terms of investing versus making a profit?
Ginni Rometty (58:38):
I always felt that. That sense of urgency was so high, and even if I was calm on the outside, because you have one of the world’s largest pensions, so so many people depend on you. You have a huge workforce, they’re depending on you. You have clients whose businesses don’t run if you don’t perform, et cetera. And shareholders, of course, right? And so, but I also am really clear, this was perhaps the largest reinvention IBM ever had to undertake. Had a board that understood that.
In fact, some of the headlines were like, this is existential, right? I mean, nobody gives you a right to exist forever. And there aren’t many texts, you’re the student of it. They are gone, they are all gone. And so, if we didn’t reinvent ourselves, we were gonna be extinct. And so, now, but you’re big, and it’s like changing, what’s that old saying? Can I change the wheels while the train’s running, or something like that? Or the engines while the plane’s flying? And that’s what you have to do, and that took time. And so, Lex, do I wish it would have been faster? Absolutely, but the team worked so hard, and in that timeframe, 50% of the portfolio was changed. It’s a very large company.
(59:54):
And if you would, I also divested $10 billion to businesses. So, if you would look at that growth rate without divestitures and currency, which now, today, everyone talks about currency. Back then, we were the only international guy. Net of divestitures and currency, the growth was flat. Is flat great? No, but flat for a big transformation? I was really proud of the team for what they did. That is actually pretty miraculous to have made it through that. I have my little nephew one day, and he would see it on TV occasionally when there’d be criticism, and he’d say, auntie, does it make you mad when they talk mean? Yeah.
And I just looked at him, and he said, how do you feel? And I was like, I’m doing what has to be done. And I happened to be the one there. And if you have great conviction, and I did, a great conviction, I knew it was the right thing, I knew it would be needed for IBM to live its second century and my successor, they have picked up, gone forward. I mean, you go back, we did the acquisition of Red Hat. I mean, we had to find our way on cloud, right? We were late to it, so we had to find our way, and eventually that led us to hybrid cloud. We did a lot of work with Red Hat back in 2017. Oh, we’d always done a lot of work with them. We actually were one of the first investors when they were first formed.
But that was 2018. We took quite a hit for even, oh, it was the largest to then software acquisition ever, but it is the foundation, right, of what is our hybrid cloud play today and doing very, very well. So, but I had to take a short-term hit for that, right? Short-term hit for a very large $34 billion acquisition. But it was, for all of us, it was the right thing to do. So, I think when you get really centered on, you know it’s the right thing to do,
Lex Fridman (01:01:37):you just keep going, right? So the team had the vision, they had the belief, and everything else,
Ginni Rometty (01:01:42):the criticism doesn’t matter. We didn’t always have exactly the right, this wasn’t a straight arrow, but stay down, you know you’re right, keep going, okay, made a mistake. You know, there’s no bad mistake as long as you learn from it, right, and keep moving. So, yes, did it take longer, but we are the largest that was there.
Lex Fridman (01:01:57):Could you maybe just, on a small tangent, educate me a little bit? So, Red Hat originally is Linux, open-source distribution of Linux, but it’s also consulting, well, it’s, it’s.
Ginni Rometty (01:02:07):A little bit of consulting, but it’s mostly software distribution, it’s mostly Linux, it was mostly software.
Lex Fridman (01:02:11):
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So, but today, IBM is very much, there’s, you know, most IT services in the world is done by IBM, there’s so many, so many varied, so basically, if you have issues, problems to solve in business, in the software space, IBM can help.
Ginni Rometty (01:02:32):
Yes, and so, in that, my last year, our services business, we broke it into two pieces, and one piece was spun off into a company called Kindrel, which is managed outsourcing, keeping things running, and they’re off creating their own company. What IBM then retained is really the part I built with PWCC, the big consulting arm, and so today, the IBM of today in 2023 is, you know, at least ending 2022, was 30% consulting, and the other 70% would be, what would you consider software cloud AI? So hybrid cloud and AI is the other, and some hardware, obviously. Still, the mainframe is modernized, alive, and kicking, and still running some of the most important things, every bank you can think of, practically, in the world, and so that is the IBM of today, versus perhaps, you know, and Red Hat is a big piece and an important part of that software portfolio, and they had some services with them for implementation, but it wasn’t a very large part, and it’s grown by leaps and bounds, you know, because originally, the belief was everything was gonna go to the public cloud, and at least many people thought that way.
We didn’t, and in fact, I mean, we tried. We procured a public cloud company. We really tried to work it, but what we found was a lot of the mission-critical work, it was tuned for consumer world. It wasn’t tuned for the enterprise, so then, time is elapsing here, though, and you gotta be upscale, and we didn’t have any application. Remember, we’re not an application company, so it wasn’t like we had an office. We didn’t have anything that, like, pulled things out to the cloud, and so as we looked for what our best, what we really, back to who you are, we really know mission-critical work. We know where it lives today, and we know how to make it live on the cloud, which led us down hybrid cloud. You know, that belief that the real world would turn into. There’ll be things on traditional that you’ll never move, because it doesn’t make sense. There’ll be private clouds for, you know, have all the benefit of the cloud, but they just don’t have, you know, infinite expansion, and then there’ll be public clouds, and you’re gonna have to connect them and be secure, and that’s what took us down the path with Red Hat, that belief.
Lex Fridman (01:04:44):The structure of that is fundamentally different than something that’s consumer-facing, so the lesson you learn there is you can’t just reuse something that’s optimized for consumers.
Ginni Rometty (01:04:52):
Yeah, very interesting point. Doesn’t mean consumer companies can’t move up into the enterprise, because obviously they have, right? But I think it’s very hard to take something from the enterprise and come on down, because it’s gotta be simple, consumable,
Lex Fridman (01:05:04):all the things we talked about already. Plus, you have to have the relationships with the enterprise.
Ginni Rometty (01:05:07):
Yeah, very different, yeah. I mean, you know our history, right? At one time, we had the PC business, and the short answer to why we would not do that is it’s a consumer-facing business. We were good at the enterprise, and that consumer business, A, highly competitive, gotta be low-cost, all the things that are not the same muscles, necessarily, of being in an innovation-driven technology business.
Lex Fridman (01:05:30):
Yeah, but what is now Lenovo, I guess, that’s what’s been talked about. That’s right, Lenovo acquired it. You’re extremely good at that, but not as good as you’re saying is at an enterprise, or it’s not, it was.
Ginni Rometty (01:05:41):
Lenovo’s very good at their PC world, yes, but I wouldn’t, and they can sell into the enterprise, right, but you as a consumer can go buy a Lenovo, too, so look in China, right, look in other places, so that’s what I mean by consumer, an end device, and that was a big decision, because it would have been one of the last things that had our logo on it that sits in your hands, right, so when a new generation says, well, what does IBM do, right?
Lex Fridman (01:06:02):Was that a difficult decision, do you remember?
Ginni Rometty (01:06:05):
This is a long time ago now, it’s like 2005, so they’re all difficult, because it’s not only things, it’s people, but it’s back to knowing who you are is how I would sum that up as, right, and we were never great at making a lot of money at that, and you can remember, originally it was IBM PC, then there were IBM clones, or they weren’t called IBM clones back then, as the field became highly, highly competitive, and as things commoditized, we often, as they commoditized, we would move them out and move on to the next innovation level.
Lex Fridman (01:06:39):But because of that, it’s not as public-facing,
Ginni Rometty (01:06:43):
even though it’s one of the most recognizable logos ever. Yeah, isn’t it true, that is very true, that is actually a very important point, and that is branding, as you say, one of the most recognizable and a very highly-ranked brand strength around the world, and so that’s a trade-off. I mean, I can’t, you know, because there was a time you’d have something of IBM in your home, or a cash register, as an example. You’d walk into a store, actually they’re still in places, that went to Toshiba.
Lex Fridman (01:07:13):Can you speak to consulting a little bit? What does that entail, to train up, to hire a workforce that can be of service to all kinds of different problems in the software space, in the tech space? What’s entailed in that?
Ginni Rometty (01:07:26):
I mean, you have to value a different set of things, right? And so, you’ve gotta always stay ahead. It’s about hiring people who are willing to learn. It is about, at the same time, in my view, it’s what really drives you to be customer-centric.
Lex Fridman (01:07:43):Yeah. Maybe you can educate me. I think consulting is a kind of, you roll in and you try to solve problems that businesses have, like with expertise, right?
Ginni Rometty (01:07:54):
Okay. Is that the process of consulting? Somewhat, right? So, okay, so fair enough. When you say the word consulting, it’s a really broad spectrum. I mean, I think people could be sitting here thinking it does any, it could be, I just give advice and I leave, to all the way to, I run your systems, right? And I think it’s generally, people use the word to cover everything in that space. So, we sort of fit in the spot, which is, we would come in and live at that intersection of business and technology. So, yeah, we could give you recommendations and then we’d implement them and see them through, because we had the technology to go to the implementation and see them through. And at the time, back then, that’s what, there’d been five of those that had failed, that the companies had bought other consulting firms. And so, we were, okay, that was the great thing about, I mean, the harrowing thing about it was, here, please go work on this. None of the others have ever succeeded before. And yet, on the other hand, the great promise was, you could really, clients were dying at that time when we were doing that, to get more value out of their technology and have it really change the way the business worked. So, I think of it as, how do we improve business and apply technology and see it all the way through? That’s what we do today still.
Lex Fridman (01:08:60):
So, the see it all the way through, yes. So, let me say, it’s almost like a personal question. So, that was a big thing you were a part of that you led in 2002, that you championed and helped, I should say, negotiate the purchase of Monday, the consulting arm of PricewaterhouseCoopers for $3.5 billion. So, what were some of the challenges of that that you remember, personal and business?
Ginni Rometty (01:09:27):
At that time, PW really had to divest. And so, they were in peril of going to IPO, right? So, we sort of swept in at that point and said, and we’d been thinking about it a long time and started to work on that as an acquisition. So, kind of balancing, which way would they go, IPO or acquisition? And so, the challenges are obvious and part of it’s why they went with us as an acquisition. Big difference to be a private firm than a public firm. Very big. I can remember one of the guys, he asked somebody, how long have you been with IBM? And the person answered, 143 quarters.
Lex Fridman (01:09:59):Okay, that’s a little enlightening about a business model.
Ginni Rometty (01:10:01):
All right. So, we had the challenges of being private versus public. You have the challenge of, when you acquire something like that, as I say, you acquire hearts, not parts.
They could leave. You could destroy your value by them leaving. They can walk right out the door. I mean, yes, you can put lots of restraints, but still, that you have there. And then, we had to really build a new business model that people and clients would see as valuable and be willing to pay for. And so, we had to do something that lived at that intersection and say that how this was unique is what we were doing. So, you had the people aspect. You had that they were gonna be public and they had always been private their whole life. And then, you had the business model. So, and the others had all failed, that had tried to do this. So, yeah, it was a tough thing to do.
Lex Fridman (01:10:53):What about the personal side of that? That was a big leap, step up for you. You’ve been at IBM for a long time. Yeah. This is a big sort of leadership, very impactful, large-scale leadership decisions. What was that like?
Ginni Rometty (01:11:11):
So, unlike in my career earlier where I said I was changing jobs, I said I wasn’t comfortable, et cetera, so now here, fast forward 10 years, and I’m like, okay. Honestly, how I felt inside, on one hand, I did what I learned. Like, inventory what you know how to do. Like, you have some good strengths that could work here. But the other part of me said, boy, this is really high-profile. And I felt, and I can remember saying to someone, like, this is gonna kill me or catapult. Probably nothing in between.
Lex Fridman (01:11:42):And that wasn’t terrifying to you? That was okay? You were okay with it?
Ginni Rometty (01:11:45):
I was okay with that because I felt I knew enough, you know, like these things I had, and I’ll tell you the one thing I felt I knew the best. Consultants, of any, worth their weight, they really do care that they deliver for an end client. And I felt I understood service to a client so well, that what it meant to really provide value. So I knew we would have, like, something that I knew the PwC people, more than anything, wanted to deliver value to those clients they had, next to then developing their people. That those were, like, the really two things.
And that I could, and I also knew they felt they could do better if they had more technology. And we did, so there really was a reason, you know, that I could really believe in. So I authentically believed, back to that point, and I also felt I had built some of those skills to be able to do that. But, I wouldn’t call it terrifying, but make no mistake, Lex, it was very hard. And it turned out to be extremely successful. By the time we ended, it was worth 19 and a half, well, by the time I stepped, I ran it for, oh goodness gracious, quite a long time. I’m gonna say seven or eight, nine years.
And we were 19 and a half billion dollars. It made 2.7 billion in profit. It was very consequential to IBM. The fact that it was consequential is also very, I mean, there was a time, as we moved through it, I can even remember it, we just weren’t meeting the goals as fast as we should. And some of it was clients were like, oh, now you’re IBM. So, I mean, some things, I knew would happen, but they happened so much faster. It’d be things like, clients would say, oh, IBM cares about a quarter, so let’s negotiate every quarter on these prices.
(01:13:32):
And when they were private, they didn’t have these issues. Well, that had an impact on margins really fast. And so that ability- So you picked up a lot of challenges. You pick them up right away. And I thought, oh boy, I mean, if I don’t get this turned around, this is really a problem. And the team learned a lot of lessons. I mean, I learned people I had to move out, that I learned that when people don’t believe they can do something, they probably won’t do it. So, we wanted to run the business at a certain level. I really did have some great leaders, but they didn’t really believe it could do that. And I finally had to come to terms with, if you don’t really believe in something, you really aren’t gonna probably make it happen at the end of the day. And so, we would change that.
(01:14:10):
We would have to actually get some more help to help us on doing so. But then it turned, and I can remember the day that we started really getting the business to hum and start to, it was almost like, finally! And I gave the team this little plaque, this little kind of corny paperweight thing. And I’m gonna believe, I remember if it was Thomas Edison, and he said, many of life’s greatest failures are people who gave up right before they were going to be successful. And it’s so true.
I mean, there was also a governor of Texas who’s passed, but she had said, someone said, what’s the secret of your success? And she said, it’s passion and perseverance when everyone else would have given up. And I feel that’s what that taught me. That taught me, no matter how bad this gets, you are not giving up. And this, now you can’t keep doing the same thing, like the doctor, this hurts, oh, then stop doing it. You can’t keep doing the same thing. We had to keep changing till we found our right way to get the model to work right.
And client work, we never, never had an issue and kept so many of the people. And now we are 25 years almost later, and a number of them run parts of the IBM business still today. So it’s that old Maya Angelou saying, when you say, what do I remember? They’ll say, you won’t remember the specifics of this, but you’ll remember how you felt. And that’s kind of how I feel. And I think they do too, the whole team does, of that. Like, I’ll get anniversary notes still on that, when you’ve been through something like that together with people.
Ginni Rometty: IBM CEO on Leadership, Power, and Adversity | Lex Fridman Podcast #362
Lex Fridman (00:00):
The following is a conversation with Ginni Rometty, who was a longtime CEO, president, and chairman of IBM. And for many years, she was widely considered to be one of the most powerful women in the world. She’s the author of a new book on power, leadership, and her life story called Good Power. Coming out on March 7th. She is an incredible leader and human being, both fearless and compassionate. It was a huge honor and pleasure for me to sit down and have this chat with her. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It’s the best way to support this podcast. We got Athletic Greens for health, ExpressVPN for privacy and security, and InsideTracker for biological monitoring. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, we’re always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring. And now, on to the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you skip them, please still check our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will, too.
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This show is brought to you by Athletic Greens and the AG1 Drink, which is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. I’ve drank it twice today already. It’s delicious, and it’s a refreshing start for usually the second work session of the day. I start the day with a cup of coffee and just deep, deep, deep focus on the hardest task of the day. And then I break the fast with Athletic Greens, either with a workout before or if I’m not working out that day, just with a kind of mental break.
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But I do it less mantra-like and more just calming my mind and thinking about all the things I’m grateful for, really focusing on the gratitude part. Anyway, so that’s associated with Athletic Greens, and also later on in the day, usually I’ll take another Athletic Greens and I’ll do the same when I’m traveling. I got the travel packs and I got, I guess the non-travel pack version at home. They’ll give you one month’s supply of fish oil when you sign up at athleticgreens.com slash Lex.
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This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I’ve used them for many years to protect my privacy on the internet. It actually takes me back to the early days of the internet for me, my own personal experience, and it was shadier and darker and more dangerous, but also more exciting. And it was unclear what the internet was going to become. And so there’s that hacker, I guess, ethic. There’s also a kind of deep sense of freedom. Before big companies came in and tried to figure out how to make a lot of money, and really through that process of capitalism, able to get kind of control. But I’m actually very, very happy to a degree that internet has maintained its freedom. But still, I think some of the initial days of the real kind of almost anarchic freedom has dissipated somewhat. I think about that sometimes. And I think that’s what a VPN represents to me, is a kind of statement of freedom, of protecting your identity, of respecting your privacy. To me, it’s a powerful statement. It’s an important one to remember. And it’s one I’ll probably return to time and time again. Anyway, go to expressvpn.com slash LexPod for an extra three months free.
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It’s important to have that data, and it’s important to make the right decisions based on that data, but not over obsess about the data. And that’s a really nice balance. Now, if you’re just completely blind and just kind of hope everything’s gonna turn out okay until you end up in a hospital, that’s not the way to go. So the balance there for me is you should be taking blood tests like with InsideTracker and getting information about your body that you can get from that data, and then make decisions based on that, and then that’s it. Pick the low-hanging fruit of that fruit tree that represents the problems of life.
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I guess what that horrible metaphor means is that you should fix the easy problems, and that means the things that are obviously wrong based on the data you collect from your blood. Okay, get special savings for a limited time when you go to insidetracker.com slash Lex. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Jeanne Rometty.
(05:22):
You worked at IBM for over 40 years, starting as a systems engineer, and you ran the company as chairman, president, and CEO from 2011 to 2020. IBM is one of the largest tech companies in the world with, maybe you can correct me on this, with about 280,000 employees. What are the biggest challenges running a company of that size? Let’s start with a sort of big overview question.
Ginni Rometty (05:48):
The biggest challenges I think are not in running them, it’s in changing them. And that idea to know what you should change and what you should not change. Actually, people don’t always ask that question. What should endure, even if it has to be modernized, but what should endure? And then I found the hardest part was changing how work got done. It’s such a big company.
Lex Fridman (06:08):What was the parts that you thought should endure? The core of the company that was beautiful and powerful and could persist through time, that should persist through time.
Ginni Rometty (06:16):I’d be interested, do you have a perception of what you think it would be?
Lex Fridman (06:21):
Do I have a perception? Well, I’m a romantic for history of long-running companies, so there’s kind of a tradition. As a AI person, to me, IBM has some epic sort of research accomplishments where you show off Deep Blue and Watson, just impressive big moonshot challenges in accomplishing those. But that’s, I think, probably a small part of what IBM is. That’s mostly like the sexy public-facing part.
Ginni Rometty (06:51):
Yeah, no, well, certainly the research part itself is over 3,000, so it’s not that small. That’s a pretty big research group. But the part that should endure ends up being a company that does things that are essential to the world, meaning, think back, you said you’re a romantic.
It was the 30s, the social security system. It was putting the man on the moon. It was, to this day, banks don’t run, railroads don’t run. That is, at its core, it’s doing mission-critical work. And so that part, I think, is, at its core, it’s a business-to-business company. And at its core, it’s about doing things that are really important to the world becoming running and being better.
Lex Fridman (07:36):Running the infrastructure of the world, so doing it at scale, doing it reliably.
Ginni Rometty (07:40):
And yes, secure in this world, that’s like everything. And in fact, when I started, I almost felt people were looking for what that was. And together, we sort of, in a word, it was to be essential. And the reason I loved that word was, I can’t call myself essential. You have to determine I am, right? So it was to be essential, even though some of what we did is exactly what you said, it’s below the surface. So many people, because people say to me, well, what does IBM do now, right? And over the years, it’s changed so much. And today, it’s really a software and consulting company.
Consulting is a third of it. And the software is all hybrid cloud and AI. That would not have been true, as you well know, back even two decades ago, right? So it changes, but I think at its core, it’s that be essential. You said moonshot, can’t all be moonshots, because moonshots don’t always work, but mission-critical work.
Lex Fridman (08:29):So, given the size, though, when you started running it, did you feel the sort of thing that people usually associate with size, which is bureaucracy and maybe the aspect of size that hinder progress or hinder pivoting, did you feel that?
Ginni Rometty (08:48):
You would, for lots of reasons. I think when you’re a big company, sometimes people think of process as the client themselves. I always say to people, your process is not your customer. There is a real customer here that you exist for. And that’s really easy to fall into, because people are a master to this process, and that’s not right. And when you’re big, the other thing, boy, there’s a premium on it, is speed, right? That in our industry, you gotta be fast. And go back, like, when I took over, and it was 2012, we had a lot of catching up to do and a lot of things to do, and it was moving so fast. And as you well know, all those trends were happening at once, which made them go even faster. And so, pretty unprecedented, actually, for that many trends to be at one time. And I used to say to people, go faster, go faster, go faster. And honestly, I’ve tired them out. I mean, it kind of dawned on me that when you’re that big, that’s a really valuable lesson. And it taught me the hows, perhaps more important than the what. Because if I didn’t do something to change how work was done, like change those processes, or give them new tools, help them with skills, they couldn’t. They’d just do the same thing faster. If someone tells you, you’ve got hiking boots, and they’re like, no, go run a marathon. You’re like, I can’t do it in those boots. But, so you’ve gotta do something. And at first, I think the ways for big companies, I would call them like blunt clubs. You do what everyone does. You reduce layers. Because if you reduce layers, decisions go faster. There’s just, it’s math. If there’s less decision points, things go faster. You do the blunt club thing. And then after that, though, it did lead me down a long journey of they sound like buzzwords, but if you really do them at scale, they’re hard, around things like agile.
(10:42):
And because you’ve really gotta change the way work gets done. And we ended up training, God, hundreds of thousands of people on that stuff. To really change it. On how to do agile, correctly. On how to do it correctly. That’s right, versus, because everybody talks about it. But the idea that you would really have small, multidisciplinary teams, work from the outside in, set those sort of interim steps, take the feedback pivot, and then do it on not just products, do it on lots of things. It’s hard to do at scale. People always say, oh, I got this agile group over here of 40 people. But not when you’re a couple hundred thousand people. You gotta get a lot of people to work that way.
Lex Fridman (11:18):The blunt club thing you’re talking about. So flatten the organization as much as possible.
Ginni Rometty (11:22):
Yeah, yeah, I probably reduced the layers of management by half. And so, that has lots of benefits, right? Time to a decision. More autonomy to people. And then, the idea of faster clarity of where you’re going. Because you’re not just filtered through so many different layers. And I think it’s the kind of thing a lot of companies, if you’re big, have to just keep going through. It’s kind of like grass grows. It just comes back. And you gotta go back down and work on it. So it’s a natural thing.
But I hear so many people talk about it, Lex. This idea of, okay, who makes a decision? You’ve often heard nobody can say yes and everybody can say no. And that’s actually what you’re trying to get out of a system like that.
Lex Fridman (12:06):So, I mean, your book, in general, the way you lead is very much about we and us. You know, the power of we. But is there times when a leader has to step in and be almost autocratic, take control, and make hard, unpopular decisions?
Ginni Rometty (12:21):
Oh, I am sure you know the answer to that. And it is, of course, yes. It’s fun to hear you say it. Yeah, you know, because I actually, A, there’s a leader for a time, but then there’s a leader for a situation, right? And so I’ve had to do plenty of unpopular things. I think any time you have to run a company that endures a century and has to endure another century, you will do unpopular things. You have no choice. And I often felt I had to sacrifice things for the long term. And whether that would have been really difficult things like job changes or reductions, or whether it would be things like, hey, we’re gonna change the way we do our semiconductors, and a whole different philosophy, you have no choice. I mean, and in times of crisis as well, you gotta be, I always said it’s not a popularity contest. So that’s, none of these jobs are popularity contests. I don’t care if your company’s got one person or half a million, they’re not popularity contests.
Lex Fridman (13:18):But psychologically, is it difficult to just sort of step in as a new CEO? Because you’re fighting against tradition, against all these people that act like experts of their thing, and they are experts of their thing,
Ginni Rometty (13:32):
to step in and say, we have to do differently. When you gotta change a company, it’s really tempting to say throw everything else out, back to that what must endure, right? But I know when I took over to start, I knew how much had to change. The more I got into it, I could see, wow, a lot more had to change, right? Because we needed a platform, we’d always done our best. When we had a platform, a technology platform, you will go back in time, and you’ll think of the mainframe systems, you’ll think of the PC, you’ll think of perhaps middleware, you could even call services a platform.
(14:02):
We needed a platform, the next platform here to be there. Skills, when I took over, if I, we inventoried, who had modern skills for the future, it was two out of 10 people, for the future. Not that they didn’t have relevant skills today, but for the future, two out of 10, yikes, that’s a big problem, right? The speed at which things were getting done, that has to, so you got so much to do, and you say, is that a scary thing? Yes, do you have to sometimes dictate? Yes, but I did find, and it is worth it, I know every big company I know, my good friend that runs General Motors, as she’s had to change, go back to what is them, them. And when you do that, that back to be essential, we kind of started with, hey, it’s be essential, then the next thing I did with the team was say, okay, now this means new era of computing, new buyers are out there, and hey, we better have new skills. Okay, now the next thing, how do you operationalize it? And it just takes some time, but you can engineer that, and get people to build belief.
Lex Fridman (15:02):And for the skills, that means hiring, and that means training?
Ginni Rometty (15:07):
Yes, oh boy, that’s a long, skills is a really long topic in and of itself, I try to put my view in it. I learned a lot, and I changed my view on this a lot. I’ll go back at my very beginning, say 40 years ago, I would have said, at that point, okay, I was always in a hurry, I was interviewing to hire people, I don’t know how you hire people. 40 years ago, I’d be like, okay, I gotta fit in these interviews, I gotta hire someone to get this done. Okay, then time would go on, I’m like, oh, that’s not very good. In fact, someone once said to me, hey, hire the best people to work for you, and your job gets a lot easier. Okay, I should spend more time on this topic, spend more time on it. Then it was like, okay, hire experts, okay? Okay, hired a lot of experts over my life.
(15:49):
And then I was really like an epiphany, and it really happened over my tenure running the company and having to change skills. If someone’s an expert at something and has just done that for 30 years, the odds of them really wanting to change a lot are pretty low. And when you’re in a really dynamic industry, that’s a problem. And so, okay, that was kind of my first revelation on this. And then when I looked to hiring, I can remember when I started my job, and we needed cyber people. And I go out there and I look, unemployment in the US was almost 10%, can’t find them. Okay, it’s 10%, and I can’t find the people. Okay, what’s the issue? Okay, they’re not teaching the right things.
That led me down a path, and it was serendipity that I happened to do a review of corporate social responsibility. We had this one little fledgling school in a low-income area, and high school with a community college, we gave them internships, direction on curriculum. Lo and behold, we could hire these kids.
(16:49):
Hmm, this is not CSR. I just found a new talent pool, which takes me to now what I’m doing in my post-retirement. I’m like, this idea that don’t hire just for a college degree, we had 99% of our hires were college and PhDs, and I’m all for it. So you’re very, don’t, don’t. I’m deeply offended. No, you should not be. And I’m vice chair at Northwestern, one of the vice chairs. But I said, I just really like aptitude does not equal access. These people didn’t have access, but they had aptitude. It changed my whole view to skills first. And so now for hiring, that’s kind of a long story to tell you, the number one thing I would hire for now is somebody’s willingness to learn. You know, and you can test, you can try different ways, but their curiosity and willingness to learn, hands down, I will take that trait over anything else they have.
Lex Fridman (17:38):So the interview process, the questions you asked, everything changed. The kind of things you talked to them about is to try to get at how curious they are.
Ginni Rometty (17:46):
You can do testing, and I mean, we triangulated around it lots of ways. And now look, at the heart of it, what it would do is change. You don’t think of buying skills, you think of building skills. And when you think that way, with so many people, and I think this country, many developed countries being disenfranchised, you gotta bring them back into the workforce somehow, and they gotta get some kind of contemporary skills. And if you took that approach, you can bring them back into the workforce.
Lex Fridman (18:13):Yeah, I think some interesting combination of humility and passion, because like you said, experts sometimes lack humility if they call themselves an expert for a few too many years. So you have to have that beginner’s mind and a passion to be able to aggressively constantly be a beginner at everything and learn and learn and learn.
Ginni Rometty (18:33):
You know, I saw it firsthand when we were beginning this path down the cloud in AI, and people would say, oh, IBM, it’s existential, they gotta change, and all these things. And I did hire a lot of people from outside, very willing to learn new things. Come on in, come on in. And I sometimes say, shiny objects, trained in shiny objects, come on in. But I saw something, it was another one of these, and you’re not a shiny object, I’m not saying that. But I learned something. Okay, some of them did fantastic.
(19:06):
And others, they’re like, well, let me school you on everything. But they didn’t realize, we did really mission-critical work, and they’d break a bank. I mean, they would not understand the certain kind of security and the auditability and everything they had to go on. And then I watched IBM people say, oh, I actually could learn something. Some were like, yeah, okay, I don’t know how to do, that’s a really good thing I could learn. And in the end, there was not one group was a winner and one was a loser. The winners were the people who were willing to learn from each other. I mean, to me, it was a very stark example of that point, and I saw it firsthand. So that’s why I’m so committed to this idea about skills first, and that’s how people should be hired, promoted, paid, you name it.
Lex Fridman (19:47):
Yeah, the AI in general, it seems like nobody really understands now what the future will look like. We’re all trying to figure it out. So what IBM will look like in 50 years in relation to the software business, to AI is unknown. What Google will look like, what all these companies, we’re trying to figure it out. And that means constantly learning, taking risks, all of those things. And nobody’s really skilled in AI. It’s like,
Ginni Rometty (20:15):Because you have to keep evolving, right? You’re absolutely right. That’s right. Couldn’t agree more with you on that.
Lex Fridman (20:20):
You wrote in the book, so speaking of hiring, quote, my drive for perfection often meant I only focused on what needed to change without acknowledging the positive. This could keep people from trusting themselves. It could take me a while to learn that just because I could point something out didn’t mean I should.
I still spotted errors, but I became more deliberate about what I mentioned and sent back to get fixed. I also tried to curtail my tendency to micromanage and let people execute. I had to stop assuming my way was the best or only way. I was learning that giving other people control builds their confidence and that constantly trying to control people destroys it. So what’s the right balance between showing the way and helping people find the way?
Ginni Rometty (21:09):
That is a good question because like a really flip answer would be as it gets bigger, you have no choice but to just, you know, you can’t do it. You have to tell or show. I mean, you’ve got to let people find their way because it’s so big you can’t, right? That’s an obvious answer. Scope of work, bigger it gets, okay, I’ve got to let more stuff go. But I have always believed that a leader’s job is to do as well. And I think there’s like a few areas that are really important that you always do. Now it doesn’t, meaning you’re showing. So like when it has to do with values and value-based decisions, like I think it’s really important to constantly show people that you walk your talk on that kind of thing. It’s super important. And I actually think it’s a struggle young companies have because the values aren’t deeply rooted and when a storm comes, it’s easy to uproot. And so I always felt like when it was that time, I showed it. I got taught that so young at IBM and even General Motors that, in fact, I do write about that in the book. First time I was a manager, I had a gentleman telling dirty jokes and not to me, but to other people and it really offended people and some of the women. And this is the very early 80s.
And they came, said something, I talked to my boss, I’m a first time manager, and he was unequivocal with what I should do. He said, and this was a top performer, it stops immediately or you fire him. So there are a few areas like that that I actually think you have to always continue to role model and show. That to me, isn’t the kind that like when do you let go of stuff.
Lex Fridman (23:06):The values and relationships with clients.
Ginni Rometty (23:09):
Yeah, whatever you’re in service of. And the other thing was, I really felt it was really important to role model learning. So, I can remember when we started down the journey and we went on to this thing called the Think Academy, IBM’s longtime motto had been Think. And we said, okay, I’m gonna make the first Friday of every month compulsory education.
And, okay, I mean everybody, like everybody, I don’t care what your job is. When the whole company has to transform, everybody’s gotta have some skin in this game and understand it. I taught the first hour of every month for four years. Now, okay, I had to learn something. But it made me learn. But I was like, okay, if I can teach this, you can do it, right? I mean, you know, that kind of thing.
Lex Fridman (23:53):So it was a compulsory Thursday night education for you.
Ginni Rometty (23:56):Oh, I’m a little bit better prepared than that. But yes, you’re so right, yes.
Lex Fridman (24:00):Yeah. So you prepare. Yeah. That’s another habit. You like to prepare.
Ginni Rometty (24:05):Yeah, but there’s roots in that go back deeply. Deeply, deeply, deeply. And I think it’s an interesting reason. So why do, why, you’re prepared, my friend. Yes, you are. You prepare for your interviews.
Lex Fridman (24:17):Sure. The rest you wing? Yeah, I wing.
Ginni Rometty (24:20):But that’s okay. I mean, you don’t have to prepare everything. I don’t prepare everything either.
Lex Fridman (24:23):No, but I unfortunately wing stuff. I save it to last minute. I push everything. I’m always almost late. And I don’t know why that is. I mean, there’s some deep psychological thing we should probably investigate. But it’s probably the anxiety brings out the performance.
Ginni Rometty (24:38):That can be, that’s very true with some people.
Lex Fridman (24:39):
I mean, so I’m a programmer and engineer at heart. And so programmers famously overestimate, or underestimate, sorry, how long something’s going to take. And so I just, everything, I always underestimate. It’s almost as if I want to feel this chaos of anxiety of a deadline or something like this. Otherwise, I’ll be lazy sitting on a beach with a pina colada and relaxing. I don’t know. So that, we have to know ourselves. But for you, you like to prepare.
Ginni Rometty (25:07):
Yeah, it came from a few different places. I mean, one would have been as a kid, I think I was not a memorizer and my brother is brilliant. He can, he read it once, boom, done. And so I always wanted to understand like how something happened. It didn’t matter what it was I was doing. Whether it was algebra, theorems, I always wanted, don’t give me the answer. Don’t give me the answer. You know, I want to figure it out, figure it out. So I could reproduce it again and didn’t have to memorize. So it started with that. And then over time, okay, so I was in university in the seventies. When I was in engineering school, I was the only woman. You know, I meet people still to this day and they’re like, oh, I remember you. I’m like, yeah, sorry, I don’t remember you. There were 30 of you, one of me. And I think you already get that feeling of, okay, I better really study hard because whatever I say is going to be remembered in this class, good or bad. And it started there. So in some ways, I did it for two reasons.
(26:01):
Early on, I think it was a shield for confidence. The more I studied, the more prepared I was, the more confident. That’s probably still true to this day. The second reason I did it evolved over time and became different to prepare. If I was really prepared, then when we’re in the moment, I can really listen to you.
See, because I don’t have to be doing all this stuff on the fly in my head. And I could actually take things I know and maybe help the situation. So it really became a way that I could be present in the moment. And I think it’s something a lot of people, that in the moment, I learned it from my husband. He doesn’t prepare by the way at all. So that’s not it.
Lex Fridman (26:43):But I watched the in the moment part. The negative example.
Ginni Rometty (26:46):
No, no, no. And I’m not going to change that. As he says, he’s a type C, I’m an A, okay? That’s how love works, yeah. And I have been married 43 years and that seems to work. But that idea that you could be in the moment with people is a really important thing.
Lex Fridman (26:49):
He’s a type C, I’m an A, okay? That’s how love works, yeah. Yeah, so the preparation gives you the freedom to really be present. So just to linger on, you mentioned your brother. And it seems like in the book that you really had to work hard when you studied to sort of, given that you weren’t good at memorization, you really, truly, deeply wanted to understand the stuff and you put in the hard work. And that seems to persist throughout your career. So, you know, hard work is often associated with, sort of has negative associations. Well, maybe with burnout, with dissatisfaction. Is there some aspect of hard work at the core of who you are that led to happiness for you? Did you enjoy it?
Ginni Rometty (27:42):
I enjoyed it. So I’ll be the first. And I’m really careful to say that to people because I don’t think everyone should associate, gee, to do what you did, you have to, there’s only one route there, right? And that’s just not true. And I do it because I like it. In fact, I’m careful. And as time goes on, you have to be careful as more and more people watch you. Whether you like it, you’re a role model or not. You are a role model for people. Whether you know it, like it, want it, does not matter. I learned that the hard way. And I would have to say to people, hey, just because I do this does not mean, I do it for these reasons, right? And so be really explicit. And I’d come to believe, usually when people say the word power, I don’t know, do you have a positive or negative notion when I say the word power? We’ll just do it. Probably negative one, yeah. For some stereotype or some view that somebody’s abused it in some way. You can read the newspaper, somebody’s doing something.
(28:30):
Personal people, like I’ll ask people, do you want power? And they’re like, oh no, I’d rather do good. And I think the irony is you need power to do good. And so that sort of led me down to, it was, I thought about my own life, right? Because it starts in a, like many of us, you know, you don’t have a lot, but you don’t know that because you’re like everybody else around you at that time. And on one end, tragedy, right? My father leaves my mother homeless, no money, no food, nothing, four kids. She’s never worked a day in her life outside of a home.
And I, the irony that I hear I would end up as the ninth CEO of one of America’s iconic companies. And now I co-chair this group 110. And that journey, I said, the biggest thing I learned was you could do really hard, meaningful things in a positive way. So now you asked me about why do I work so hard? I ended up writing the book in three pieces for this reason. When you really think of your life and power, I thought it kind of fell like a pebble in water.
(29:33):
Like there’s a ring about, you really care about yourself and like the power of yourself, power of me. There’s a time it transcends to that you are working with and for others and another moment when it becomes like about society. So my hard work, I’d ask you, one day sit really hard and think about when you close your eyes, who do you see from your early life, right? And what did you learn? And maybe it’s not that hard for you. I mean, it’s funny the things then, if I really looked at it, it’s no surprise what I do today. And that hard work part, my great-grandma, as you and I were comparing notes on Russia, right? And never spoke English, spoke Russian, came here to this country, was a cleaning person at the Wrigley Building in Chicago.
Yet if she hadn’t saved every dime she made, my mother wouldn’t have a home and wouldn’t have had a car, right? What did I learn from that? Hard work. In fact, actually, when I went to college, she’s like, you know, you really should be on a farm. You’re so big and strong, you know? That was her view. And then my grandmother, another tragic life.
(30:36):
What did she do though? And think how long, that’s in the 40s, the 50s. She made lampshades and she taught me how to sew, right? So I could sew clothes when we couldn’t afford them. But my memory of my grandma is working seven days a week, sewing lampshades. And then here comes my mom in her situation who climbs her way out of it. So I associate that with, well, strong women, by the way, all strong women, and I associate hard work with how you are sure you can always take care of yourself. And so I think that the roots go way back there and they were always teaching something, right? My great-grandma was teaching me how to cook, how to work a farm, I didn’t need to be on a farm. My grandma taught me, you know, here’s how to sew, here’s how to run a business. And then my mother would teach us that, look, with just a little bit of education, look at the difference it could make, right? So anyways, that’s a long answer to, I think that hard work thing is really deeply rooted from that background.
Lex Fridman (31:37):And it gives you a way out from hard times.
Ginni Rometty (31:39):Yeah, you know, I think I’ve seen you on other podcasts say, I thought I did, do you want a plan B? Didn’t you say, no, you would not like a plan B? Yeah, I don’t want a plan B. Because you’re like, I would prefer my backup against,
Lex Fridman (31:52):Am I remembering? You have a story like that. You seem to like, at least certain moments in your life seem to do well in desperate times.
Ginni Rometty (32:03):
True enough, true enough, that’s true. I learned that very well. But I also think that maybe this isn’t the same kind of plan B. I think of it as, like I was taught, always be able to take care of yourself. Don’t have to rely on someone else. And I think that to me, so that’s my plan B. I can take care of myself. And it’s even after what I lived through with my father, I thought, well, this is at a bar for bad. After this,
nothing’s bad. And it’s a very freeing thought.
Lex Fridman (32:34):The being able to take care of yourself, is that, you mean practically, or do you mean just the self-belief that I’ll figure it out?
Ginni Rometty (32:40):I’ll figure it out and practically both, right?
Lex Fridman (32:43):
So you wrote, quote, I vividly remember the last two weeks of my freshman year when I only had 25 cents left. I put the quarter in a clear plastic box on my desk and just stared at it. This is it, I thought. No more money. So do you think there’s some aspect of that financial stress, even desperation, just being hungry, does that play a role in that drive that led to your success to be the CEO of one of the great companies ever?
Ginni Rometty (33:14):
It’s a really interesting question because I was just talking to another colleague who’s CEO of another great American company this weekend. And he mentioned to me about all this adversity and he said, or I said to him, I said, do you think part of your success is because you had bad stuff happen? And he said yes, you know? And so I guess I’d be lying if I didn’t say, I don’t think you have to have tragedy, but it does teach you one really important thing is that there is always a way forward, always, and it’s in your control.
Lex Fridman (33:49):I think there’s probably wisdom for mentorship there, or whether you’re a parent or a mentor, that easy times don’t result in growth.
Ginni Rometty (33:58):Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of my friends, and they worry, they say, gee, my kids have never had bad times. And so what happens here? So I don’t know, is it required? And why you end up, not required, but it sure doesn’t hurt.
Lex Fridman (34:12):You had this good line about advice you were given that growth and comfort never coexist. Growth and comfort never coexist. And you have to get used to that thought.
Ginni Rometty (34:23):If someone said that they think of me like one of the more profound sort of lessons I had, and the irony is, it’s from my husband, which is even more, you know, funny, actually.
Lex Fridman (34:33):You could just steal it.
Ginni Rometty (34:35):
I mean, you don’t have to give him credit. Oh, I have, I have, shamelessly, as he’ll tell you. Okay, so the story behind growth and comfort never coexist, but honestly, I think it’s been a really freeing thought for me, and it’s helped me immensely since mid-career. And as I write about it in the book, I’m mid-career, and I’d been running a pretty big business, actually, and the fella I work for is gonna get a new job. He’s gonna get promoted. He calls me and he says, hey, you’re gonna get my job. I really want you to have it. And I said to him, no way. I said, I’m not ready for that job. I got a lot more things I gotta learn. That is like a huge job. Round the world, every product line, development, you name it, every function, I can’t do it. He looked at me, he says, well, I think you should go to the interview.
(35:23):
I went to the interview the next day. Blah, blah, blah. Guy says to me, looks at me, and he says, I wanna offer you that job. And I said, I would like to think about it. I said, I wanna go home and talk to my husband about it. Kinda looked at me, okay. I went home. My husband is sitting there, and he says to me, I went on and on about the story, et cetera, and he says, do you think a man would have answered it that way?
And I said, hmm. He says, I know you. He’s like, six months, you’re gonna be bored. And all you can think of is what you don’t know. And he said, and I know these other people. You have way more skill than them, and they think they could do it. And he’s like, why? And for me, it internalized this feeling that, I am gonna say something that’s a bit stereotyped, that it resonates with many, many women, and I’ll ask you if it does after, is that they’re the most harsh critic of themselves.
(36:21):
And so this idea that I won’t grow unless I can feel uncomfortable, doesn’t mean I always have to show it, by the way. So that’s why I meant growth and comfort can never coexist. So I was like, he’s exactly right. Now, the end of that story is I went in and I took the job. When I went back to the man who was really my mentor looking out for me, and he looked at me and he said, don’t ever do that again. And I said, I understand, because it was okay to be uncomfortable. I didn’t have to use it.
Now, I would take stock of the things I can do, and really think, or I look for times to be uncomfortable, because I know if I am nervous, like, I don’t know if you’re nervous to meet me. We never met in real person.
Lex Fridman (37:02):100%, I’m still terrified.
Ginni Rometty (37:03):No, you’re not. But then it means you’re learning something, right? Putting it together. So that, to me, matters.
Lex Fridman (37:11):
I think it’s interesting. Maybe you could speak to that, the sort of the self-critical thing inside your brain. Because I think sometimes it’s talked about that women have that.
But I have that, definitely. And I think that’s not just solely property of women in the workplace. But I also want to sort of push back on the idea that that’s a bad thing that you should silence. Because I think that anxiety, that leads to growth also. That’s like this discomfort. So there’s this weird balance you have to have between that self-critical engine and confidence. Yeah, I think that’s a good point. You have to kind of dance. Because if you’re super confident, people will value you higher. That’s important. But if you’re way too confident, maybe in the short term you’ll gain, but in the long term you won’t grow.
Ginni Rometty (37:58):
Very good point. So I can’t really disagree with that. And to me, even when I took on jobs, I always felt people say, well, is it, what point are you confident enough? And I came to sort of believe, again, a theme of my beliefs, that if I was willing to ask lots of questions and understood enough, that’s all I needed to know. Let me ask you about your husband a little bit. Oh.
Lex Fridman (38:21):So you write in the book. He’s just jumping around. Like I said, I’m a bit of a romantic. So how did you meet your husband?
Ginni Rometty (38:27):
So I met my husband when I was 19 years old. So I was a young kid. And I met him when I had a General Motors scholarship. So I was at Northwestern University through my first two years. Had a lot of loans, financial aid. And a professor said, hey, you should sign up for this interview. They’re looking to bring forward diverse candidates through their management track. Now, these programs don’t exist anymore like that. They will pay your tuition, your room and board, your expenses at Northwestern, other Ivy League school, these very expensive schools. And I think you’d be a good fit. I am eternally thankful for that advice. I went and I interviewed, I actually got the scholarship.
I mean, without it, I’d have graduated with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. So part of that was in the summer, I had to work in Detroit. I lived in a little room by a cement plant. Not theirs, but I mean, that’s all I could afford. It’s very romantic. Very, very romantic. And the person who owned the house said, hey, I’m having a party, you’re not invited. I’m going to fix you up with someone tonight. And that turned out to be my husband. And so it was a blind date is how we very first met. And then it was over.
Lex Fridman (39:35):
It was, the story was written. Yep. If it’s okay, just zoom out to, you mentioned power and good power a few times. So if we can just even talk about it. Your book is called Good Power, Leading Positive Change in Our Lives, Work, and World. What is good power? What’s the essence of good?
Ginni Rometty (39:53):
Yeah. So the essence of it would be doing something hard or meaningful, but in a positive way. I would also tell you, I hope one day I’m remembered for how I did things, not just for what I did. I think that could almost be more important. And I think it’s a choice we can all make. So the essence to me of good power, if I had to contrast good to bad, let’s say, would be that first off, you have to embrace and navigate tension. This is the world we live in. And by embracing tension, not running from it, you would bridge divides that unites people, not divides them. It’s a hard thing to do, but you can do it. You do it with respect, which is the opposite of fear. A lot of people think the way to get things done is fear. And then the third thing would be, you gotta celebrate some progress versus perfection.
Because I also think that’s what stops a lot of things from happening. Because if you go for whatever your definition of perfect is, it’s either polarization or paralyzation. I mean, something happens in there. Versus, no, no, no, I can, don’t worry about getting to that actual exact endpoint. If I keep taking a step forward of progress, really tough stuff can get done. And so my view of that is like, honestly, I hope it can, you know, I said it’s like a memoir with purpose. I’m only doing it, it was a really hard thing for me to do because I don’t actually talk about all these things. And I had to, nobody cares about your scientific description of this. They want the stories in your life to bring it alive. So it’s a memoir with purpose. And in the writing of it, it became the power of me, the power of we, and the power of us. The idea that you build a foundation when you’re young.
(41:38):
Mostly from my work life, the power of we, which says, I kind of, in retrospect, could see five principles on how to really drive change that would be done in a good way. And then eventually you could scale that, the power really of us, which is what I’m doing about finding better jobs for more people now that I co-chair an organization called 110. So that essence of navigate tensions, do it respectfully, celebrate progress, and indulge me one more minute, these sort of, again, it’s retrospect that I, I didn’t know this in the moment. I had to learn it. I learned it. I am blessed by a lot of people I worked with and around.
But some of the principles, like the first one is, says, if you’re gonna do something, change something, do something, you gotta be in service of something. Being in service of is really different than serving. Super different. And like, I just had my knee replaced. And I interviewed all these doctors. You can tell the difference of the guy who’s gonna do a surgery. Hey, my surgery’s fine. I really don’t care whether you can walk and do the stuff you wanted to do again, but, cause my surgery’s fine. Your hardware’s good. I actually had some trouble. And I had a doctor who was like, you know, this doesn’t sound right. I’m coming to you.
(43:01):
The surgery was fine. It was me that was reacting wrong to it. And he didn’t care until I could walk again. Okay, there’s a big difference in those two things. And it’s true in any business you have. A waiter serves you food. Okay, he serves his food. He did his job. Or did he care? He had a good time. So that thought, to be in service of, it took me a while to get that, like to try to write it, to get that across, cause I think it’s like so fundamental.
If people were really in service of something, you gotta believe that if I fulfill your needs, at the end of the day, mine will be fulfilled. And that is that essence that makes it so different. And then the second part, second principle is about building belief, which is I gotta hope you’ll voluntarily believe in a new future or some alternate reality, and you will use your discretionary energy versus me ordering you. You’ll get so much more done. Then the third, change and endure. We kind of talked about that earlier. Focus more on the how and the skills. And then the part on good tech and being resilient. So anyways, I just felt that, like good tech, everybody’s a tech company. I don’t care what you do today. And there’s some fundamental things you gotta do. In fact, pick up today’s, any newspaper, right? Chat GPT, you’re an AI guy.
(44:19):
All right? I believe one of the tenets of good tech is, it’s like responsibility for the long term. It says, so if you’re gonna invent something, you better look at its upside and its downside. Like we did quantum computing. Great, a lot of great stuff, right? Materials development, risk management calculations, endless lists one day. On the other side, it can break encryption. That’s a bad thing. So we worked equally hard on all the algorithms that would sustain quantum. I think with chat, okay, great.
There’s equal, and there are people working on it, but like, okay, the things that say, hey, I can tell this was written with that, right? Because the implications on how people learn, right? If this is not a great thing, if all it does is do your homework, that is not the idea of homework as someone who liked to study so hard. But anyways, you get my point. It’s just the upside and the downside.
President Biden, Japan's PM Fumio Kishida Toast At State Dinner
President Joe Biden (01:02):
Looking forward to this visit for a while. We would like to thank you to come. I’m delighted you’re here. And even the cherry blossoms bloomed early in anticipation. Well, they did by the way. They did. And all of us, as you all know, those blossoms are the first sign of spring has arrived, and they remind us that we can begin anew every year, and tomorrow can be a better day than today. It’s a symbol of what both our countries hold dear, new beginnings. So thank you again for being here. And a few days after my inauguration, over three years ago, I received a big shiny blue and red envelope covered with stickers on the envelope. It was a big envelope and it was full of letters from elementary school teacher in Japan who compiled them from her students. She teaches children who stutter like I did as a child, and she wanted me to know that when she told them, her class, about that I had a similar liability at the time. The kids lit up smiling, and they said, “We’re the same. We’re the same.”
(02:18)
Well, we are the same, Japan and the United States. We may be divided by distance, but generations after generation, we’ve been brought together, the same hopes, the same values, the same commitment to democracy and freedom and dignity for all. And today, without question, our alliance is literally stronger than it has ever been. This was both not inevitable, but it was also, the fact is that both the Prime Minister and I came of age as our countries, as they came together. We both remember the choices that were made to forge a friendship that were once only a devastating fight that existed before. We both remember that hard work, what it has done to find healing and where there was once such hardship. We both remember Japanese and American people who not only brought us together, but who brought us forward, transforming our relationship from bitter foes to the best friends we could be.
(03:22)
Tonight, we pledge to keep going. We stand at an inflection point where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of the future for decades to come. A future that the kids of our two families and children of our two countries remember. But I also know that Japan and the United States stand together, and everyone should know that as well, committed to each other and committed to building a future worthy of the highest hopes of our predecessors and our people have dreamed of. Ladies and gentlemen, so please join me in raising your glass… And I don’t have a glass [inaudible 00:04:02]. There you go. Do you have one for the Prime Minister?
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (04:11):Thank you.
President Joe Biden (04:11):Join me in raising your glasses to our alliance, to our friendship and the words of those young students in Japan, to the same future we share. Cheers. Turn it over to you, Mr. Prime Minister.
(04:32)
Thank you. Mr. Prime Minister.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (04:36):Thank you.
Mr. President, Dr. Biden, distinguished guests and ladies and gentlemen, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to you for hosting such a wonderful dinner and your warm welcome and hospitality. Before I came here, my protocol staff told me that no one had ever complained that my speech was too short. This is probably good advice, so I’ll keep my speech short. First and foremost, to be honest, my breath is taken and I’m speechless in front of such a huge number of prominent American and Japanese guests. My wife, Yuko, also left breathless, just told me that it was hard to tell who the guest of honor is. So I was relieved when I was shown the seat right next to the president.
(06:17)
Last year, President Biden and Dr. Biden visited my hometown of Hiroshima to attend the G7 Summit meeting. It is a little known fact that the largest number of Japanese immigrants to the United States came from Hiroshima. Many Hiroshimans headed to the United States to seek a new world, a better future, and greater heights. Mr. President, I know that the late Senator Daniel Inouye was a good friend of yours.
President Joe Biden (07:04):He was.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (07:06):
His mother was also from Hiroshima. Looking back at the long history of Japan and the United States, our predecessors have carved out the path in various fields such as business, academia, art and sports, traveling back and forth between the two countries.
The Pacific Ocean does not separate Japan and the United States, rather, it unites us. These were the words that President Kennedy sent to Prime Minister Ikeda, also hailing from Hiroshima, at the state luncheon held at the White House about 60 years ago. I like this line. I use it so many times that my staff tried deleting it whenever this phrase appeared on speech drafts. However, there is nothing that expresses our relationship as visibly as this, and never have these words being more relevant than today. Japan and the United States are united than ever before. I believe that the Pacific Ocean has brought Japan and United States together and so close because of the pioneering spirit of those who came before us, and frontier spirit that we all have in common.
(09:20)
The success of those standing on the frontier is not just because of their individual efforts, but also the result of collective efforts as a team. This holds true even between nations. Our joint efforts are valuable, indispensable for our bright future and for the peace and stability of the world. We are now standing at the turning point in history, embarking on a new frontier and elevate this unshakable Japan-US relationship to even greater heights and hand it to the next generation. Finally, let me conclude with a line from Star Trek, which you all know. “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” By the way, George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu, the helmsman of the USS Enterprise also has roots in Hiroshima.
Mr. President, Dr. Biden, distinguished guests and ladies and gentlemen, I would like to propose a toast to our voyage to the frontier of the Japan-US relationship with this word, boldly go.
Dinner Guests (11:35):Cheers.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida (11:36):And boldly go. Cheers.
Lex Fridman (01:42:33) And there’s some aspect, even just inside business, where you don’t just make the customer happy, but you also have to think about where is this going to take humanity if you zoom out a bit?
Jeff Bezos (01:42:45) A hundred percent and you can feel your brain. Brains are plastic and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris who’d first came on the scene. Anybody who’s been a game player has this experience where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see all the little blocks moving and you’re kind of rotating them in your mind and you can just tell as you walk around the world that you have rewired your brain to play Tetris. But that happens with everything. I think we still have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear, but I think one of the things that we’ve done online and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content. (01:43:52) Your podcast flies in the face of this. You do these long format things.
Lex Fridman (01:43:59) Books do too.
Jeff Bezos (01:44:00) And reading books is a long format thing and if something is convenient, we do more of it. We carry around in our pocket a phone, and one of the things that phone does for the most part is it is an attention shortening device because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans. And I’m not even going to say we know for sure that that’s bad, but I do think it’s happening. That’s one of the ways we’re co-evolving with that tool. But I think it’s important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.
Lex Fridman (01:44:41) Yeah, I think you’ve spoken about the value in your own life of focus, of singular focus on a thing for prolonged periods of time, and that’s certainly what books do and that’s certainly what that piece of technology does. But I bring all that up to ask you about another piece of technology, AI, that has the potential to have various trajectories to have an impact on human civilization. How do you think AI will change us?
Jeff Bezos (01:45:14) If you’re talking about generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT, and its soon successors, these are incredibly powerful technologies. To believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful. It’s interesting to me that large language models in their current form are not inventions, they’re discoveries. The telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons, was a discovery. My God, it has moons. And that’s what Galileo did. And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention. We know exactly what happens with a 787, it’s an engineered object. We designed it. We know how it behaves. We don’t want any surprises. Large language models are much more like discoveries. We’re constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. They’re not really engineered objects. (01:46:35) Then you have this debate about whether they’re going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity. Even specialized AI could be very bad for humanity. Just regular machine learning models can make certain weapons of war, that could be incredibly destructive and very powerful. And they’re not general AIs. They could just be very smart weapons. And so we have to think about all of those things. I’m very optimistic about this. So even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to on balance hurt us and destroy us. I think we humans have a lot of ways of we can make ourselves go extinct. These things may help us not do that, so they may actually save us. So the people who are overly concerned, in my view, overly, it is a valid debate. I think that they may be missing part of the equation, which is how helpful they could be in making sure we don’t destroy ourselves. (01:48:07) I don’t know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but to me, first of all, I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr, who some of the people I’ve talked to think that’s the most boring part of the movie. I thought it was the most fascinating because what’s going on here is you realize we have invented these awesome, destructive, powerful technologies called nuclear weapons and they’re managed and we humans, we’re not really capable of wielding those weapons. And that’s what he represented in that movie is here’s this guy, he wrongly thinks… he’s being so petty. He thinks that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him. They didn’t talk about him at all as you find out in the final scene of the movie. And yet he’s spent his career trying to be vengeful and petty. (01:49:19) And that’s the problem. We as a species are not really sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies. And by the way, before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency and there’s a lot of things would have to happen, but there’s so much benefit that’s going to come from these technologies in the meantime, even before there are general AI in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies and so on. So I think it’s an incredible moment to be alive and to witness the transformations that are going to happen. How quickly will happen, no one knows. But over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we’re going to see really remarkable advances. And I personally am very excited about it.
Lex Fridman (01:50:12) First of all, really interesting to say that it’s discoveries, that it’s true that we don’t know the limits of what’s possible with the current language models.
Jeff Bezos (01:50:24) We don’t.
Lex Fridman (01:50:24) And it could be a few tricks and hacks here and there that open doors to hold entire new possibilities.
Jeff Bezos (01:50:33) 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 self-driving cars, they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try to learn how to drive. And your average 16-year-old figures it out with many fewer miles. So there are still some tricks, I think, that we have yet to learn. I don’t think we’ve learned the last trick. I don’t think it’s just a question of scaling things up. But what’s interesting is that just scaling things up, and I put just in quotes because it’s actually hard to scale things up, but just scaling things up also appears to pay huge dividends.
Lex Fridman (01:51:40) Yeah. And there’s some more nuanced aspect about human beings that’s interesting if it’s able to accomplish like being truly original and novel. Large language models, being able to come up with some truly new ideas. That’s one. And the other one is truth. It seems that large language models are very good at sounding like they’re saying a true thing, but they don’t require or often have a grounding in a mathematical truth, basically is a very good bullshitter. So if there’s not enough data in the training data about a particular topic, it’s just going to concoct accurate sounding narratives, which is a very fascinating problem to try to solve, how do you get language models to infer what is true or not to introspect?
Jeff Bezos (01:52:41) Yeah, they need to be taught to say, “I don’t know,” more often and I know several humans who could be taught that as well.
Lex Fridman (01:52:50) Sure. And then the other stuff, because you’re still a bit involved in the Amazon side with the AI things, the other open question is what kind of products are created from this?
Jeff Bezos (01:53:01) Oh, so many. We have Alexa and Echo and Alexa has hundreds of millions of installed base inputs. And so there’s Alexa everywhere. And guess what? Alexa is about to get a lot smarter. And so from a product point of view, that’s super exciting.
Lex Fridman (01:53:27) There’s so many opportunities there
Jeff Bezos (01:53:30) So many opportunities. Shopping assistant, all that stuff is amazing. And AWS, we’re building Titan, which is our foundational model. We’re also building Bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS. Our enterprise clients, they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own corporate data without accidentally contributing their corporate data to that model. And so those are the tools we’re building for them with Bedrock. So there’s tremendous opportunity here.
Lex Fridman (01:54:03) Yeah, the security, the privacy, all those things are fascinating. Because so much value can be gained by training on private data, but you want to keep this secure. It’s a fascinating technical problem.
Jeff Bezos (01:54:13) Yes. This is a very challenging technical problem and it’s one that we’re making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers.
Lex Fridman (01:54:21) Do you think there will be a day when humans and robots, maybe Alexa, have a romantic relationship like in the movie Her?
Jeff Bezos (01:54:29) Well, I think if you look at the-
Lex Fridman (01:54:31) Just brainstorming products here.
Jeff Bezos (01:54:32) … if you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, sexual variety, there are people who like everything. So the answer to your question has to be yes.
Lex Fridman (01:54:43) Okay. I guess I’m asking when-
Jeff Bezos (01:54:45) I don’t know how widespread that will be.
Lex Fridman (01:54:45) … All right.
Jeff Bezos (01:54:48) But it will happen. Productivity
Lex Fridman (01:54:49) I was just asking when for a friend, but it’s all right. Moving on. Next question. What’s a perfectly productive day in the life of Jeff Bezos? You’re one of the most productive humans in the world.
Jeff Bezos (01:55:03) Well, first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter. I have a coffee.
Lex Fridman (01:55:09) Can you define putter?
Jeff Bezos (01:55:11) I slowly move around. I’m not as productive as you might think I am. Because I do believe in wandering and I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat with Laura and I drink my first coffee. So I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally, and then I exercise most days. Most days it’s not that hard for me. Some days it’s really hard and I do it anyway, I don’t want to, and it’s painful. And I’m like, “Why am I here?” And I don’t want to do any of this.
Lex Fridman (01:55:52) “Why am I here at the gym?”
Jeff Bezos (01:55:53) “Why am I here at the gym? Why don’t I do something else?” It’s not always easy.
Lex Fridman (01:55:59) What’s your social motivation in those moments?
Jeff Bezos (01:56:02) I know that I’ll feel better later if I do it. And so the real source of motivation, I can tell the days when I skip it, I’m not quite as alert. I don’t feel as good. And then there’s harder motivations. It’s longer term, you want to be healthy as you age. You want health span. Ideally, you want to be healthy and moving around when you’re 80 years old. And so there’s a lot of… But that kind of motivation is so far in the future, it can be very hard to work in the second. So thinking about the fact I’ll feel better in about four hours if I do it now, I’ll have more energy for the rest of my day and so on and so on.
Lex Fridman (01:56:42) What’s your exercise routine, just to linger on that? How much you curl? What are we talking about here? That’s all I do at the gym so I just…
Jeff Bezos (01:56:52) My routine on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about forty-five minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who I love who pushes me, which is really helpful. He’ll say, “Jeff, can we go up on that weight a little bit?” (01:57:18) And I’ll think about it and I’ll be like, “No, I don’t think so.” (01:57:23) And he’ll look at me and say, “Yeah, I think you can.” And of course he’s right.
Lex Fridman (01:57:31) Yeah, of course. Of course.
Jeff Bezos (01:57:32) So it’s helpful to have somebody push you a little bit.
Lex Fridman (01:57:34) But almost every day, you do that?
Jeff Bezos (01:57:37) Almost every day, I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting and I’d rotate. I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day. It’s all pretty standard stuff.
Lex Fridman (01:57:48) So puttering, coffee, gym-
Jeff Bezos (01:57:49) Puttering, coffee, gym, and then work.
Lex Fridman (01:57:53) … work. But what’s work look like? What do the productive hours look like for you?
Jeff Bezos (01:57:59) So a couple years ago, I left as the CEO of Amazon, and I have never worked harder in my life. I am working so hard and I’m mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days. Most of my time is spent on Blue Origin and I’m so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years. And in the big, I love it, and the small, there’s all the frustrations that come along with everything. We’re trying to get to rate manufacturing as we talked about. That’s super important. We’ll get there. We just hired a new CEO, a guy I’ve known for close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Limp who I love. He’s amazing. So we’re super lucky to have Dave, and you’re going to see us move faster there.
(01:58:46) So my day of work, reading documents, having meetings, sometimes in person, sometimes over Zoom, depends on where I am. It’s all about the technology, it’s about the organization. I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It’s super fun for me. My favorite part of it is the technology. My least favorite part of it is building organizations and so on. That’s important, but it’s also my least favorite part. So that’s why they call it work. You don’t always get to do what you want to do.
Lex Fridman (01:59:31) How do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems?
Jeff Bezos (01:59:36) 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 don’t keep to a strict schedule. 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. I like a crisp document and a messy meeting. And so the meeting is about asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution. And when that happens just right, it makes all the other meetings worthwhile. It feels good. It has a kind of beauty to it. It has an aesthetic beauty to it, and you get real breakthroughs in meetings like that.
Lex Fridman (02:00:37) Can you actually describe the crisp document? This is one of the legendary aspects of Amazon, of the way you approach meetings is this, the six-page memo. Maybe first describe the process of running a meeting with memos.
Jeff Bezos (02:00:51) Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When new people come in, like a new executive joins, they’re a little taken aback sometimes because the typical meeting, we’ll start with a six-page narratively structured memo and we do study hall. For 30 minutes, we sit there silently together in the meeting and read.
Lex Fridman (02:00:51) I love this.
Jeff Bezos (02:01:17) Take notes in the margins. And then we discuss. And the reason, by the way, we do study, you could say, I would like everybody to read these memos in advance, but the problem is people don’t have time to do that. And they end up coming to the meeting having only skimmed the memo or maybe not read it at all, and they’re trying to catch up. And they’re also bluffing like they were in college having pretended to do the reading.
Lex Fridman (02:01:42) Yeah. Exactly.
Jeff Bezos (02:01:43) It’s better just to carve out the time for people.
Lex Fridman (02:01:47) Yeah. And do it together.
Jeff Bezos (02:01:47) So now we’re all on the same page, we’ve all read the memo, and now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, a PowerPoint presentation of some kind, where that has so many difficulties. But one of the problems is PowerPoint is really designed to persuade. It’s kind of a sales tool. And internally, the last thing you want to do is sell. Again, you’re truth seeking. You’re trying to find truth. And the other problem with PowerPoint is it’s easy for the author and hard for the audience. And a memo is the opposite. It’s hard to write a six-page memo. A good six-page memo might take two weeks to write. You have to write it, you have to rewrite it, you have to edit it, you have to talk to people about it. They have to poke holes in it for you. You write it again, it might take two weeks. So the author, it’s really a very difficult job, but for the audience it’s much better.
(02:02:45) So you can read a half hour, and there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too. Senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question’s going to be answered on the next slide, but you never got there. If you read the whole memo in advance… I often write lots of questions that I have in the margins of these memos, and then I go cross them all out because by the time I get to the end of the memo, they’ve been answered. That’s why I save all that time.
(02:03:11) You also get, if the person who’s preparing the memo, we talked earlier about group think and the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don’t want your ideas to pollute the meeting prematurely, the author of the memos has got to be very vulnerable. They’ve got to put all their thoughts out there and they’ve got to go first. But that’s great because it makes them really good. And you get to see their real ideas and you’re not trompling on them accidentally in a big PowerPoint presentation meeting.
Lex Fridman (02:03:50) What’s that feel like when you’ve authored a thing and then you’re sitting there and everybody’s reading your thing?
Jeff Bezos (02:03:54) I think it’s mostly terrifying.
Lex Fridman (02:03:57) Yeah. But maybe in a good way? Like a purifying?
Jeff Bezos (02:04:02) I think it’s terrifying in a productive way, but I think it’s emotionally, a very nerve-racking experience.
Lex Fridman (02:04:13) Is there a art, science to the writing of this six-page memo or just writing in general to you?
Jeff Bezos (02:04:20) It’s really got to be a real memo. So it means paragraphs have topic sentences. It’s verbs and nouns. That’s the other problem with PowerPoint presentations, they’re often just bullet points. And you can hide a lot of sloppy thinking behind bullet points. When you have to write in complete sentences with narrative structure, it’s really hard to hide sloppy thinking. So it forces the author to be at their best, and so they’re somebody’s really their best thinking. And then you don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to tease that thinking out of the person, and you’ve got it from the very beginning. So it really saves you time in the long run.
Lex Fridman (02:05:03) So that part is crisp, and then the rest is messy. Crisp document, messy meeting.
Jeff Bezos (02:05:07) Yeah, so you don’t want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp. Most meetings, you’re trying to solve a really hard problem. There’s a different kind of meeting, which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews that may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings, that’s usually for incremental improvement. And you’re looking at a series of metrics, every time it’s the same metrics. Those meetings can be very efficient. They can start on time and end on time. Future of humanity
Lex Fridman (02:05:35) So we’re about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000-Year Clock.
Jeff Bezos (02:05:43) It’s funny.
Lex Fridman (02:05:44) Yes, that’s what I’m known for, is the humor. Okay. Can you explain what the 10,000-Year Clock is?
Jeff Bezos (02:05:53) Is? 10,000-Year Clock is a physical clock of monumental scale. It’s about 500 feet tall. It’s inside a mountain in west Texas at a chamber that’s about 12 feet in diameter and 500 feet tall. 10,000-Year Clock is an idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the ’80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking. And you can kind of just very conceptually think of the 10,000-Year Clock as it ticks once a year, it chimes once every a hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out once every a thousand years. So it just sort of slows everything down. And it’s a completely mechanical clock. It is designed to last 10,000 years with no human intervention. So the material choices and everything else. It’s in a remote location, both to protect it, but also so that visitors have to make a pilgrimage.
(02:06:57) The idea is that over time, and this will take hundreds of years, but over time, it will take on the patina of age, and then it will become a symbol for long-term thinking that will actually hopefully get humans to extend their thinking horizons. And in my view, that’s really important as we have become, as a species, as a civilization, more powerful. We’re really affecting the planet now. We’re really affecting each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all kinds of things where we can really hurt ourselves and the problems we create can be so large. The unintended consequences of some of our actions like climate change, putting carbon in the atmosphere is a perfect example. That’s an unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution, got a lot of benefits from it, but we’ve also got this side effect that is very detrimental.
(02:07:56) We need to start training ourselves to think longer term. Long-term thinking is a giant lever. You can literally solve problems if you think long-term, that are impossible to solve if you think short-term. And we aren’t really good at thinking long-term. Five years is a tough timeframe for most institutions to think past. And we probably need to stretch that to 10 years and 15 years and 20 years and 25 years, and we’d do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so the clock, in a way, it’s an art project, it’s a symbol. And if it ever has any power to influence people to think longer term, that won’t happen for hundreds of years, but we are going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of age.
Lex Fridman (02:08:52) Do you think humans will be here when the clock runs out here on earth?
Jeff Bezos (02:08:56) I think so. But the United States won’t exist. Whole civilizations rise and fall. 10,000 years is so long. No nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to 10,000 years.
Lex Fridman (02:09:12) And the increasing rate of progress makes that even fantastic.
Jeff Bezos (02:09:15) Even less likely so. Do I think humans will be here? Yes. How will we have changed ourselves and what will we be and so on and so on? I don’t know, but I think we’ll be here.
Lex Fridman (02:09:25) On that grand scale, a human life feels tiny. Do you ponder your own mortality? Are you afraid of death?
Jeff Bezos (02:09:32) No. I used to be afraid of death. I did. I remember as a young person being very scared of mortality, didn’t want to think about it, and so on. And as I’ve gotten older, I’m 59 now, as I’ve gotten older, somehow that fear has sort of gone away. I would like to stay alive for as long as possible, but I’m really more focused on health span. I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone. I don’t want the long decay. And I’m curious. I want to see how things turn out. I’d like to be here. I love my family and my close friends, and I’m curious about them, and I want to see. So I have a lot of reasons to stay around, but mortality doesn’t have that effect on me that it did maybe when I was in my twenties.
Jeff Bezos (01:03:44) It’s very common in any endeavor in life, in business and anybody where you have teammates, you have a teammate and the two of you disagree. At some point, you have to make a decision. And in companies, we tend to organize hierarchically. Whoever’s the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision. So ultimately, the CEO gets to make that decision. And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with. So I would be the one who would disagree and commit. One of my direct reports would very much want to do something in a particular way. I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view. They would say, ” Jeff, I think you’re wrong and here’s why,” and we would go back and forth.
(01:04:35) 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’d 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.
(01:05:18) There’s so many ways that dispute resolution is a really interesting thing on teams. And there are so many ways when two people disagree about something, even … I’m assuming the case for everybody is well-intentioned. They just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is. And in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of mechanisms that we use to resolve these kinds of disputes. A lot of them are, I think, really bad. So an example of a really bad way of coming to agreement is compromise. So compromise, we’re in a room here and I could say, “Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is?”
Jeff Bezos (01:06:00) I’m here and I could say, “Lex, how tall do you think this ceiling is?” And you’d be like, “I don’t know, Jeff, maybe 12 feet tall.” And I would say, “I think it’s 11 feet tall.” And then we’d say, “You know what? Let’s just call it 11 and a half feet.” That’s compromise, instead of. The right thing to do is to get a tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring, but think getting that tape measure and figure out how to get it to the top of the ceiling and all these things, that requires energy. Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it’s low energy, but it doesn’t lead to truth. And so in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a noble thing, you shouldn’t allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth.
(01:06:51) Another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who’s more stubborn? This is also, let’s say two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition, and whichever one gets exhausted first capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven’t arrived at truth and this is very demoralizing. So this is where escalation, I try to ask people on my team and say, “Never get to a point where you are resolving something by who gets exhausted first. Escalate that.” I’ll help you make the decision because that’s so de-energized and such a terrible, lousy way to make a decision.
Lex Fridman (01:07:40) Do you want to get to the resolution as quickly as possible because that ultimately leads to high velocity of decision?
Jeff Bezos (01:07:45) Yes, and you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. Exhausting the other person is not truth seeking.
Lex Fridman (01:07:53) Yes.
Jeff Bezos (01:07:54) And compromise is not truth seeking. And there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that’s where disagree and commit can come in, but escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to your boss and say, “Hey, we can’t agree on this. We like each other. We’re respectful of each other, but we strongly disagree with each other. We need you to make a decision here so we can move forward.” But decisiveness, moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all 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. We’re still decisive, we’re still quick, and that’s because the culture supports that.
Lex Fridman (01:08:53) At every scale in a distributed way-
Jeff Bezos (01:08:53) Yes.
Lex Fridman (01:08:56) Try to maximize the velocity of decisions.
Jeff Bezos (01:08:58) Exactly. Lunar program
Lex Fridman (01:08:59) You’ve mentioned the lunar program. Let me ask you about that. There’s a lot going on there and you haven’t really talked about it much. So in addition to the Artemis program with NASA, Blue is doing its own lander program. Can you describe it? There’s a sexy picture on Instagram with one of them. Is it the MK1, I guess?
Jeff Bezos (01:09:20) Yeah, The Mark 1. The picture here is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA Administrator.
Lex Fridman (01:09:26) Just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing about the [inaudible 01:09:29]. I really want to clarify that.
Jeff Bezos (01:09:32) I know it’s not me. I know it was either the lander or Bill.
Lex Fridman (01:09:34) Okay. I love Bill, but- Jeff Bezos (01:09:37) Thank you for clarifying. Lex Fridman (01:09:37) Okay.
Jeff Bezos (01:09:40) Yes, the Mark 1 lander is designed to take 3,000 kilograms to the surface of the moon and to cargo expendable cargo. It’s an expendable lander. Lands on the moon, stays there, take 3,000 kilograms to the surface. It can be launched on a single New Glenn flight, which is very important. So it’s a relatively simple architecture, just like the human landing system lander, they’re called the Mark 2. Mark 1 is also fueled with liquid hydrogen, which is for high energy emissions like landing on the surface of the moon. The high specific impulsive hydrogen is a very big advantage.
(01:10:24) The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that since it’s such a deep cryogen, it’s not storable. So it’s constantly boiling off and you’re losing propellant because it’s boiling off. And so what we’re doing as part of our lunar program is developing solar-powered cryo coolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant for deep space. And that’s a real game-changer. It’s a game-changer for any high energy mission. So to the moon, but to the outer planets, to Mars, everywhere.
Lex Fridman (01:11:00) So the idea with both Mark 1 and Mark 2 is the New Glenn can carry it from the surface of earth to the surface of the moon?
Jeff Bezos (01:11:12) Exactly. So the Mark 1 is expendable. The lunar lander we’re developing for NASA, the Mark 2 lander, that’s part of the Artemis program. They call it the Sustaining Lander Program. So that lander is designed to be reusable. It can land on the surface of the moon in a single stage configuration and then take off. So if you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander and Apollo was really two stages. It would land on the surface and then it would leave the descent stage on the surface of the moon and only the ascent stage would go back up into lunar orbit where it would rendezvous with the command module.
(01:11:56) Here, what we’re doing is we have a single stage lunar lander that carries down enough propellant so that it can bring the whole thing back up so that it can be reused over and over. And the point of doing that, of course, is to reduce cost so that you can make lunar missions more affordable over time, which is that’s one of NASA’s big objectives because this time… The whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon, but this time to stay. So back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the program and it really was too expensive to continue.
Lex Fridman (01:12:35) And so there’s a few questions there, but one is how do you stay on the moon? What ideas do you have about sustaining life where a few folks can stay there for prolonged periods of time?
Jeff Bezos (01:12:51) Well, one of the things we’re working on is using lunar resources like lunar regolith to manufacture commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon. We’ve already built a solar cell that is completely made from lunar regolith stimulant, and this solar cell is only about 7% power efficient. So it’s very inefficient compared to the more advanced solar cells that we make here on earth. But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory that you can land on the surface of the moon and then the raw material for those solar cells is simply lunar regolith, then you can just continue to churn out solar cells on the surface of the moon, have lots of power on the surface of the moon. That will make it easier for people to live on the moon.
(01:13:51) Similarly, we’re working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith. So lunar regolith by weight has a lot of oxygen in it. It’s bound very tightly as oxides with other elements. And so you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive. So that also could work together with the solar cells. And then ultimately, we may be able to find practical quantities of ice in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And we know there is ice water or water ice in those craters, and we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen. And then you’d not only have oxygen, but you’d also have a very good high efficiency propellant fuel in hydrogen.
(01:14:57) So there’s a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time, but the very first step, the gate that all of that has to go through is we need to be able to land cargo and humans on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost.
Lex Fridman (01:15:16) To fast-forward a little bit, is there any chance Jeff Bezos steps foot on the moon and on Mars, one or the other or both?
Jeff Bezos (01:15:27) It’s very unlikely. I think it’s probably something that gets done by future generations by the time it gets to me. I think in my lifetime that’s probably going to be done by professional astronauts, sadly. I would love to sign up for that mission. So don’t count me out yet, Lex. Give me a finding shot here maybe, but I think if we are placing reasonable bets on such a thing, in my lifetime, that will continue to be done by professional astronauts.
Lex Fridman (01:15:59) So these are risky, difficult missions?
Jeff Bezos (01:16:02) And probably missions that require a lot of training. 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 in terms of setting up these factories and doing all that, we are sophisticated enough now with automation that we probably don’t need humans to tend those factories and machines. So there’s a lot that’s going to be done in both modes.
Lex Fridman (01:16:28) So I have to ask the bigger picture question about the two companies pushing humanity forward out towards the stars, Blue Origin and SpaceX. Are you competitors, collaborators? Which and to what degree?
Jeff Bezos (01:16:44) Well, I would say just like the internet is big and there are lots of winners at all scale levels, there are half a dozen giant companies that the internet has made, but there are a bunch of medium-sized companies and a bunch of small companies, all successful, all with profit streams, all driving great customer experiences. That’s what we want to see in space, that kind of dynamism. And space is big. There’s room for a bunch of winners and it’s going to happen at all skill levels. And so SpaceX is going to be successful for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful, and I hope there are another five companies right behind us.
Lex Fridman (01:17:25) But I spoke to Elon a few times recently about you, about Blue Origin, and he was very positive about you as a person and very supportive of all the efforts you’ve been leading at Blue. What’s your thoughts? You worked with a lot of leaders at Amazon at Blue. What’s your thoughts about Elon as a human being and a leader?
Jeff Bezos (01:17:46) Well, I don’t really know Elon very well. I know his public persona, but I also know you can’t know anyone by their public persona. It’s impossible. You may think you do, but I guarantee you don’t. So I don’t really know. You know Elon way better than I do, Lex, but in terms of judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. There’s no way you could have Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It’s impossible.
Lex Fridman (01:18:22) Yeah, I hope you guys hang out sometimes, shake hands and sort of have a kind of friendship that would inspire just the entirety of humanity, because what you’re doing is one of the big grand challenges ahead for humanity.
Jeff Bezos (01:18:40) Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these endeavors we’re very like-minded. So I’m not saying we’re identical, but I think we’re very like-minded. And so I love that idea. Amazon
Lex Fridman (01:18:56) All right, going back to sexy pictures on your Instagram, there’s a video of you from the early days of Amazon, giving a tour of your, “Offices.” I think your dad is holding the camera.
Jeff Bezos (01:19:10) He is. Yeah, I know, right? Yes. This is what? The giant orange extension cord.
Lex Fridman (01:19:12) And you’re explaining the genius of the extension cord and how this is a desk and the CRT monitor, and that’s where all the magic happened. I forget what your dad said, but this is the center of it all. So what was it like? What was going through your mind at that time? You left a good job in New York and took this leap. Were you excited? Were you scared?
Jeff Bezos (01:19:37) So excited and scared, anxious. Thought the odds of success were low. Told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success by which I just mean getting your money back, not what actually happened. Because that’s the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. It’s helpful to be in reality about that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be optimistic. So you have to have this duality in your head. On the one hand, you know what the baseline statistics say about startup companies, and the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be 100% sure it’s going to work, and you’re doing both things at the same time. You’re holding that contradiction in your head.
(01:20:24) But it was so exciting. From 1994 when the company was founded to 1995 when we opened our doors, all the way until today, I find Amazon so exciting. And that doesn’t mean… It’s full of pain, full of problems. It’s like there’s so many things that need to be resolved and worked and made better and et cetera. But on balance, it’s so fun. It’s such a privilege. It’s been such a joy. I feel so grateful that I’ve been part of that journey. It’s just been incredible.
Lex Fridman (01:21:04) So in some sense, you don’t want a single day of comfort. You’ve written about this many times. We’ll talk about your writing, which I would highly recommend people read and just the letters to shareholders. So explaining the idea of day one thinking, I think you first wrote about in 97 letters to shareholders. Then you also in a way wrote it about, sad to say, is your last letter to shareholders as CEO. And you said that, “Day two is stasis followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating painful decline, followed by death.” And that is why it’s always day one. Can you explain this day one thing? This is a really powerful way to describe the beginning and the journey of Amazon.
Jeff Bezos (01:21:56) It’s really a very simple, and I think age-old idea about renewal and rebirth and every day is day one. Every day you are deciding what you’re going to do and you are not trapped by what you were or who you were or any self-consistency. Self-consistency even can be a trap. And so day one thinking is we start fresh every day and we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about how we’re going to operate. Even as deeply as what our principles are, we can go back to that. It turns out we don’t change those very often, but we change them occasionally.
(01:22:49) And when we work on programs at Amazon, we often make a list of tenants. And the tenants are… They’re not principles, they’re a little more tactical than principles, but it’s the main ideas that we want this program to embody, whatever those are. And one of the things that we do is we put, “These are the tenets for this program and parentheses.” We always put, “Unless you know a better way.” And that idea, “Unless you know a better way,” is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma. You never want to get trapped by history. It doesn’t mean you discard history or ignore it. There’s so much value in what has worked in the past, but you can’t be blindly following what you’ve done. And that’s the heart of day one, is you’re always starting afresh.
Lex Fridman (01:23:51) And to the question of how to fend off day two, you said, “Such a question can’t have a simple answer,” as you’re saying. “There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials, maybe others come to mind. For day one, defense, customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends and high velocity decision-making.”
(01:24:19) So we talked about high velocity decision-making, that’s more difficult than it sounds. So maybe you can pick one that stands out to you as you can comment on. Eager adoption of external trends, high velocity decision-making, skeptical view of proxies. How do you fight off day two?
Jeff Bezos (01:24:36) Well, I’ll talk about… Because I think it’s the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand, is the skeptical view of proxies. One of the things that happens in business, probably anything where you have an ongoing program and something is underway for a number of years, is you develop certain things that you’re managing to. The typical case would be a metric, and that metric isn’t the real underlying thing. And so maybe the metric is efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like. If you sell a million units, how many customer contacts do you get or how many returns do you get? And so on and so on.
(01:25:30) And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in where somebody a long time ago invented that metric and they invented that metric, they decided, “We need to watch for customer returns per unit sold as an important metric.” But they had a reason why they chose that metric, the person who invented that metric and decided it was worth watching. And then fast-forward five years, that metric is the proxy.
Lex Fridman (01:26:02) The proxy for truth, I guess.
Jeff Bezos (01:26:04) The proxy for truth. Let’s say in this case it’s a proxy for customer happiness, but that metric is not actually customer happiness. It’s a proxy for customer happiness. The person who invented the metric understood that connection. Five years later, a kind of inertia can set in and you forget the truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place. And the world shifts a little and now that proxy isn’t as valuable as it used to be or it’s missing something. And you have to be on alert for that. You have to know, “Okay, I don’t really care about this metric. I care about customer happiness and this metric is worth putting energy into and following and improving and scrutinizing, only in so much as it actually affects customer happiness.”
(01:27:03) And so you’ve got to constantly be on guard and it’s very, very common. This is a nuanced problem. It’s very common, especially in large companies, that they’re managing to metrics that they don’t really understand. They don’t really know why they exist, and the world may have shifted out from under them a little and the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were when somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.
Lex Fridman (01:27:29) That is a nuance, but that’s a big problem. Right?
Jeff Bezos (01:27:33) It’s a huge problem.
Lex Fridman (01:27:34) There’s something so compelling to have a nice metric to try to optimize.
Jeff Bezos (01:27:38) Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics. Lex Fridman (01:27:41) Yes, you do. Jeff Bezos (01:27:41) You can’t ignore them. Want them, but you just have to be constantly on guard. This is a way to slip into day two thinking would be to manage your business to metrics that you don’t really understand and you’re not really sure why they were invented in the first place, and you’re not sure they’re still as relevant as they used to be.
Lex Fridman (01:28:03) What does it take to be the guy or gal who brings up the point that this proxy might be outdated? I guess what does it take to have a culture that enables that in the meeting? Because that’s a very uncomfortable thing to bring up at a meeting. “We all showed up here, it’s a Friday.”
Jeff Bezos (01:28:21) You have just asked a million-dollar question. So if I generalize what you’re asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.
Lex Fridman (01:28:42) Yeah, we are.
Jeff Bezos (01:28:44) And take you back in time 10,000 years and you’re in a small village. If you go along to get along, you can survive. You can procreate. If you’re the village truth-teller, you might get clubbed to death in the middle of the night. Truths are often… They don’t want to be heard because important truths can be uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting.
Lex Fridman (01:29:12) Impolite and all that kind of stuff.
Jeff Bezos (01:29:14) Yes, challenging. They can make people defensive even if that’s not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don’t care what it is, any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people, you have to remind people, “It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable.” Literally tell people, “It’s not what we’re designed to do as humans.” It’s kind of a side effect. We can do that, but it’s not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative, and that’s really important.
(01:30:10) And so science is all about truth-telling. It’s actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth. And even in science, you find that it’s hard to tell the truth. Even you’re supposed to have hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on, it’s not easy.
Lex Fridman (01:30:36) But even in science, there’s like the senior scientists and the junior scientists.
Jeff Bezos (01:30:36) Correct.
Lex Fridman (01:30:41) And then there’s a hierarchy of humans where somehow seniority matters in the scientific process, which it should not.
Jeff Bezos (01:30:49) Yes, and that’s true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. And that really is about trying to… 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 if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, “Well, if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right.” And so you can do little things like if you’re the most senior person in the room, go last, let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally, let’s try to have the most junior person go first and the second and try to go in order of seniority so that you can hear everyone’s opinion in an unfiltered way. Because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions. If somebody who you really respect says something, it makes you change your mind a little.
Lex Fridman (01:32:17) So you’re saying implicitly or explicitly, give permission for people to have a strong opinion, as long as it’s backed by data.
Jeff Bezos (01:32:27) Yes, and sometimes it can even… By the way, a lot of our most powerful truths turn out to be hunches, they turn out to be based on anecdotes, they’re intuition based. And sometimes you don’t even have strong data, but you may know the person well enough to trust their judgment. You may feel yourself leaning in. It may resonate with a set of anecdotes you have, and then you may be able to say, “Something about that feels right. Let’s go collect some data on that. Let’s try to see if we can actually know whether it’s right. But for now, let’s not disregard it. It feels right.”
(01:33:06) You can also fight inherent bias. There’s an optimism bias. If there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy, it’s a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right. You may want to compensate for that human bias of trying to find the silver lining and say, “Look, that might be good, but I’m going to go with it’s bad for now until we’re sure.”
Lex Fridman (01:33:36) So speaking of happiness bias, data collection and anecdotes, you have to… How’s that for a transition? You have to tell me the story of the call you made, the customer service call you made to demonstrate a point about wait times?
Jeff Bezos (01:33:57) Yeah. This is very early in the history of Amazon.
Lex Fridman (01:34:00) Yes.
Jeff Bezos (01:34:00) And we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents, and I have a saying, which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn’t mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then. It means you go examine the data because it’s usually not that the data is being miscollected, it’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing. And so of you have a bunch of customers complaining about something and at the same time, your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.
(01:34:43) And an early example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think less than, I don’t know, 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get phone customer service. The wait time was supposed to be less than 60 seconds, but we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally it seemed longer than that. I would call customer service myself. And so one day we’re in a meeting, we’re going through the WBR, the weekly business review, and we get to this metric in the deck, and the guy who leads customer service is defending the metric. And I said, “Okay, let’s call.” Picked up the phone, and I dialed the 1-800 number and called customer service, and we just waited in silence.
Lex Fridman (01:35:39) What did it turn out to be?
Jeff Bezos (01:35:40) Oh, it was really long, more than 10 minutes, I think.
Lex Fridman (01:35:42) Oh, wow. Jeff Bezos (01:35:43) It was many minutes. And so it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren’t measuring the right thing, and that set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. And that’s an example, by the way, of truth-telling is like that’s an uncomfortable thing to do, but you have to seek truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and you have to get people’s attention and they have to buy into it, and they have to get energized around really fixing things. Principles
Lex Fridman (01:36:16) So that speaks to the obsession with the customer experience. So one of the defining aspects of your approach to Amazon is just being obsessed with making customers happy. I think companies sometimes say that, but Amazon is really obsessed with that. I think there’s something really profound to that, which is seeing the world through the eyes of the customer, like the customer experience, the human being that’s using the product, that’s enjoying the product, the subtle little things that make up their experience. How do you optimize those?
Jeff Bezos (01:36:55) This is another really good and deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage, and then there are small things. Internally into Amazon, we call them paper cuts. So we’re always working on the big things, if you ask me. And most of the energy goes into the big things, as it should, and you can identify the big things. And I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, has a small business, whatever, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things.
(01:37:38) So I know in our retail business at Amazon, 10 years from now, customers are still going to want low prices. I know they’re still going to want fast delivery, and I just know they’re still going to want big selection. So it’s impossible to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now where a customer says, “I love Amazon, I just wish the prices were a little higher,” or, “I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly.” So when you identify the big things you can tell they’re worth putting energy into because they’re stable in time.
(01:38:10) Okay, but you’re asking about something a little different, which is in every customer experience, there are those big things. And by the way, it’s astonishingly hard to focus even on just the big things. So even though they’re obvious, they’re really hard to focus on. But in addition to that, there are all these little tiny customer experience deficiencies, and we call those paper cuts. We make long lists of them. And then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts because the teams working on the big issues never get to the paper cuts. They never work their way down the list to get to… They’re working on big things, as they should and as you want them to. And so you need special teams who are charged with fixing…
Jeff Bezos (01:39:00) Special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts. Lex Fridman (01:39:04) Where would you put on the paper cut spectrum the Buy now with the 1-Click button? Which is, I think, pretty genius. So to me, okay, my interaction with things I love on the internet, there’s things I do a lot. I, maybe representing a regular human, I would love for those things to be frictionless. For example, booking airline tickets, just saying. But it’s buying a thing with one click, making that experience frictionless, intuitive, all aspects of that, that just fundamentally makes my life better, not just in terms of efficiency, in terms of some kind of- Cognitive load.
Lex Fridman (01:39:50) … Yeah, cognitive load and inner peace and happiness. Because, first of all, buying stuff is a pleasant experience. Having enough money to buy a thing and then buying it is a pleasant experience. And having pain around that is somehow just you’re ruining a beautiful experience. And I guess all I’m saying as a person who loves good ideas, is that a paper cut, a solution to a paper cut?
Jeff Bezos (01:40:17) Yes. So that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts. So if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented 1-Click shopping, there was more friction. There was a whole series of paper cuts and that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you’re absolutely right by the way, that when you come up with something like 1-Click shopping, again, this is so ingrained in people now, I’m impressed that you even notice it. Most people-
Lex Fridman (01:40:54) Every time I click the button, I just-
Jeff Bezos (01:40:54) … most people never notice.
Lex Fridman (01:40:55) … just a surge of happiness.
Jeff Bezos (01:41:00) There is in the perfect invention for the perfect moment in the perfect context, there is real beauty. It is actual beauty and it feels good. It’s emotional. It’s emotional for the inventor, it’s emotional for the team that builds it. It’s emotional for the customer. It’s a big deal and you can feel those things.
Lex Fridman (01:41:23) But to keep coming up with that idea, with those kinds of ideas, I guess is the day one thinking effort.
Jeff Bezos (01:41:29) Yeah, and you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.
Lex Fridman (01:41:38) There’s a lot of books written about you. There’s a book Invent & Wander where Walter Isaacson does an intro. It’s mostly collective writings of yours. I’ve read that. I also recommend people check out the Founders Podcast that covers you a lot and it does different analysis of different business advice you’ve given over the years. I bring all that up because I mentioned that you said that books are an antidote for short attention spans. And I forget how it was phrased, but that when you were thinking about the Kindle that you were thinking about how technology changes us.
Jeff Bezos (01:42:20) Changes us. We co-evolve with our tools. So we invent new tools and then our tools change us.
Lex Fridman (01:42:30) Which is fascinating to think about.
