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.
Jeff Bezos (01:42:32) It goes in a circle