YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Bezos

lines on the record: 167
first: 2023-12-14
most recent: 2023-12-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, I used to be afraid of death. I did. I remember as a young person being kind of very scared of mortality. Like didn't want to think about it and so on. And always had a big, 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'd like to be, I'm really more focused on health span. I want to be healthy. I want that square wave. I want to, you know, 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 want to, I'm curious about them. And I want to see. So I have a lot of reasons to stay around.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so You know, the United States won't exist, like whole civilizations rise and fall. 10,000 years is so long. No nation state has ever survived for anywhere close to ten thousand years”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We used 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. It's not really, we're kind of five years is a tough time frame 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 do a better job for our children or our grandchildren if we could stretch those thinking horizons. And so the clock is, 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 have to, you know, we're going to build it now and let it accrue the patina of age.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. We need to be”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 kind of make a pilgrimage. The idea is that over time, this will take”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your clock is a physical clock. Of monumental scale. It's about 500 feet tall. It's inside a mountain in West Texas in 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 hundred years and the cuckoo comes out once every thousand years. So it just sort of slows everything down”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and you don't want to pretend that the discussion should be crisp. There's most meanings you're trying to solve a really hard problem. There's a different kind of meeting, which we call weekly business reviews or business reviews. They may be weekly or monthly or daily, whatever they are. But these business review meetings, that's usually for incremental improvement and you're looking 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's really got to be a real memo. So, I mean, paragraphs have topic sentences, it's verbs and nouns. That's the other problem with PowerPoint is 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 you're getting 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. You've got it from the very beginning. So it really saves you time in the long run.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You also get the person who's preparing the memo. We talked earlier about. groupthink and the fact that I go last in meetings and that you don't want your ideas to kind of pollute the meeting prematurely the author of the memos has kind of 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 so, and you get to see their real ideas and you're not trompling on them accidentally in a big PowerPoint presentation.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for the audience, it's much better. So you can read a half hour and, you know, there are little problems with PowerPoint presentations too. Senior executives interrupt with questions halfway through the presentation. That question is going to be answered on the next slide, but you never got there. Whereas 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 may take two weeks. So the author, it's really a very difficult job.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And now we can have a really elevated discussion. And this is so much better from having a slideshow presentation, you know, a PowerPoint presentation 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 it's better just to carve out the time for people so now we're all the same page we've all read the memo”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A meeting with memos. Meetings at Amazon and Blue Origin are unusual. When we get new, when new people come in, like a new executive joins, they're a little taken aback sometimes because a 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. 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do little thinking retreats. So this is not the only, I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at I don't keep to a strict schedule. Like my meetings often go longer than I plan 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 like asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and trying to wander your way to a solution. And that is 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In person, sometimes over Zoom depends on where I am. It's all about the technology. It's about the organization. It's about, you know, I'm very, I have architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various subsystems inside the vehicle, inside the engines. It's super 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, you know, that's why they call it work. You don't always get to do what you want.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 in the big 11 it, in 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, you know. So we're super lucky to have Dave. And, you know, we're going to see us move faster there. But so my day of work, you know, reading documents, having meetings, sometimes.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Almost every day I do a little bit of cardio and a little bit of weightlifting and I rotate, I do a pulling day and a pushing day and a leg day. It's all pretty standard stuff”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My routine on a good day, I do about half an hour of cardio and I do about 45 minutes of weightlifting, resistance training of some kind, mostly weights. I have a trainer who I love who pushes me, which is really helpful. I'll be like, he'll say Jeff, do you think you could we go up on that way a little bit and I'll think about it and I'll be like No, I don't think so and he'll be he'll look at me and say yeah, I think you can And of course he's right so it's helpful to have somebody push you a little bit”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 know, you want health span. You want ideally moving around when you're 80 years old. 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 have more energy for the rest of my day and so on and so on.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like I slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I because I do believe in wandering and I sort of read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat with Lauren. I drink my first coffee. So I kind of, I move pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early just naturally. And then, you know, I exercise most days and most days it's not that hard for me. Sometimes it's really hard. And I do it anyway. I don't want to, you know, and it's painful. And I'm like, why am I here? And I don't want to do anything. Why am I here at the gym? Why am I here at the gym? Why don't I do something else? You know, it's not always easy. What's this so-called?”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, you know, sexual variety. You know, there are people who like everything. So, the answer to your question has to be yes. I don't know. I guess I'm asking how widespread that will be.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many opportunities, shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing, and AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock, which are corporate clients at AWS, are 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you know, just to, you know, 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 that's really, you know, from a product point of view, that's super exciting.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do know that humans are doing something different from these models, in part because... We're so power efficient. You know, the human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And, you know, the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks. So there's something interesting about the way the human brain does this. And also, we don't need as much data. So, you know, like self-driving cars or they have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive and 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sophisticated enough and mature enough to handle these technologies. And so, and by the way, before you get to general AI and the possibility of AI having agency, and there's a lot of things that have to happen, but there's so much benefit that's going to come from these technologies in the meantime, even before their general AI in terms of better medicines and better tools to develop more technologies and so on. 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called nuclear weapons and they are managed and we humans are we're not really capable of wielding those weapons where you know that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who is just he wrongly thinks he's like being so petty he thinks that he said something 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 spent his career trying to be vengeful and petty and that's that's the problem we as a species are not really”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could make ourselves go extinct. These things may help us not do that. So we may actually, they actually save us so the people who are overly concerned, in my view, overly concerned. It's 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. I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer. 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 people I've talked to you 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Then you have this Debate about whether they're going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity. Even specialized AI can be very bad for humanity. I mean, just regular machine learning models can make certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive, very powerful. And they're not general AIs. They're just could just be very smart weapons. And so we have to think about all of those things.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're talking about generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT, and it's 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 wounds.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We still have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear. I think one of the things that we've done online, you know, and largely because of social media, is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content. And your podcast flies in the face of this. You do these long format things. reading books is a long format thing And we all do more of if you if something is convenient, we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know, that 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. And you can feel your brains are plastic and you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me was when Tetris, who first came on the scene. I'm sure you've had 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. And so, you know, one of the, I think.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your paper cut. Yes. So it's probably that particular thing is probably a solution to a number of paper cuts. So if you go back and look at our order pipeline and how people shopped on Amazon before we invented one click shopping, there were 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 there when you come up with something like one click shopping again this is like so ingrained in people now i'm impressed that you even notice it i mean most every time”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 paper cuts.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, I say 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. 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. And we make long lists of them.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is another really good and kind of That are really important to manage. And then there are small things internally into Amazon. We call them paper cuts. So we have, we're always working on the big things. Like, 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 any, anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur as a small business, whatever, you know, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years. And those are probably the big things. So I know in our retail business at Amazon 10 years from now, customers are still going to want low prices.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it was many minutes. And so, you know, 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that. And anecdotally, it seemed longer than that. Like, you know, I would call customer service myself. And so one day we're in a meeting, we're going through the WBR and the weekly business review. And we get to this metric in the DAC. And the guy who leads customer service is to fit in 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 for the...”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon. And we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents. 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. And it's usually not the data is being miscollected. It's usually that you're not measuring the right thing. And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something and at the same time your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining, you should doubt the metrics. And an early example of this was we had metrics that showed that our customers were waiting, I think, less than, I don't know, 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right. You may want to sort of compensate for that human bias of looking for 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, something about that feels right. Let's go collect some data on that. Let's try to see if we can actually know whether it's right. But for now, let's not disregard it because it feels right. You can also fight inherent bias. There's an optimism bias. If there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy,”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go last. But 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 a kind of unfiltered way. Because we really do. We actually literally change our opinions. If somebody who you really respect says something. Makes you change your mind a little.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the scientific process, which it's, 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, you know, there are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last And I know from experience that 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. So you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room,”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But any high performing organization, whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, 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 and you have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people. You have to remind people it's okay that it's uncomfortable. You have to literally tell people it's not what we're designed to do as humans. It's not really, it's kind of a side effect. You know, we can do that, but it's not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative. And that's really important. And so there's a, you know, 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.”
2023-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #405 – Jeff Bezos: Amazon and Blue Origin · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source