Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin

The following is a conversation with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin. This is his first time doing a conversation of this kind and of this length. And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked for many more hours, and I'm sure we will. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.

You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather on a ranch here in Texas. Mm-hmm.

That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also in all those westerns, when he's not doing what he's doing, he's just watching soap operas. All right. I read that you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you were five, watching Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. So, let me ask you to look back at the historical context and impact of that. So, the space race from 1957 to 1969 between the Soviet Union and the US was, in many ways, epic. It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events. First satellite to space, first human to space, first spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon. Then, some failures, explosions, deaths on both sides actually. And then, the first human walking on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments or insights you take away from that time, those few years at just 12 years? Well, I mean there's so much inspiring there. One of the great things to take away from that, one of the great von Braun quotes is, "I have come to use the word impossible with great caution." And so, that's kind of the big story of Apollo is that going to the moon was literally an analogy that people used for something that's impossible. "Oh, yeah, you'll do that when men walk on the moon." And of course, it finally happened. So, I think it was pulled forward in time because of the space race.

I'm going to ask you about that, but let me ask you to just step back to the old days. You were at Princeton with aspirations to be a theoretical physicist. Yeah.

Yeah, right. I feel like that's a Mark Twain quote. Okay. All right. You gave me an amazing tour of Blue Origin Rocket Factory and Launch Complex in the historic Cape Canaveral. That's where New Glenn, the big rocket we talked about, is being built and will launch. Can you explain what the New Glenn rocket is and tell me some interesting technical aspects of how it works? Sure. New Glenn is a very large heavy-lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to LEO, very large class. It's about half the thrust, a little more than half the thrust of the Saturn V rocket. So, it's about 3.9 million pounds of thrust on liftoff. The booster has seven BE-4 engines. Each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust. The engines are fueled by liquified natural gas, LNG as the fuel, and LOX as the oxidizer. The cycle is an ox-riched stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. And that engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United Launch Alliance rocket. Then the second stage of New Glenn is powered by two BE-3U engines, which is a upper-stage variant of our New Shepard liquid hydrogen engine.

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? Yeah, The Mark 1. The picture here is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA Administrator.

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. He is. Yeah, I know, right? Yes. This is what? The giant orange extension cord.

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? 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.

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

So we're about to run out of time, which is a good time to ask about the 10,000-Year Clock. It's funny.