16 Lessons in Conversation with Jeff Bezos
Lex Fridman holds a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a research scientist at MIT and hosts a podcast featuring scientists, artists, entrepreneurs and more.
His recent conversation with Jeff Bezos was one of my favorite podcast episodes I’ve ever listened to.
Clocking in at 2 hours and 11 minutes it covers a range of topics from space exploration to decision making, dispute resolution, and how humans co-volve with the technology we use.
I’ve listened to it twice, the second time to go back and take notes and timestamps on the topics I found most interesting.
Using the word “impossible” with great caution
05:12
Stating that something would happen “when man walks on the moon” was equated with the impossible, and then humans contrived a way to travel into space.
What else do we currently consider impossible that will one day change?
“The Earth is Blue, how wonderful, it is amazing”
06:53
A quote by Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet Cosmonaut, and the first person in space. Imagine being the first one to cast your eyes on “the Big Blue marble.”
We’ve traded pristine beauty for gifts of an advanced society
13:05
The one thing that is moving backward is the natural world. Prior to the industrial world, the natural world was pristine. Bezos believes that we can have both, but we have to go to space. By most metrics, we are better off than we have been than any time in history. “Energy usage per capita” as he describes it - more energy will make our life better in so many ways but this is incompatible with living on a finite planet. His solution - space. Anything from moving heavy industry away from earth itself to humans living on colonies in near-earth orbit.
Parasitic Mass
29:20
“Rockets love to be big, ” Bezos states.
Note: Parasitic Mass is the mass of all components of the system in a rocket, weapon or space transportation system that are not considered payload.
In relation to parasitic mass “it’s consequential when building a very small rocket, but very trivial if you’re building a very large rocket.”
There are some parallels in the SaaS world in how we think about cost to run a business before you’ve reached a certain revenue run rate, ideally on the way to profitability , where cost centers are disproportionately weighted when the business is smaller. It ties into the idea of scale and “revenue per X” calculations.
Friction Stir Welding
34:00
Is a welding technique that uses frictional heat to meld pieces of metal together rather than flame-based welding. Traditional heat based welding creates weakness in the materials being joined which requires additional material to be added at the joint. Friction based welding does not create these weaknesses and therefore calls for less material. When building rocket ship components, structural integrity and weight are both paramount.
The technique was invented in 1991 and has greatly impacted Bezos’ Blue Origin space program. What an interesting invention!
“A Solved Problem” and Reducing the Cost to get to Orbit
38:16
“Getting into orbit is a solved problem” so now the focus is dramatically reducing the access to orbit to open up new endeavors.
Lex comments that you could describe every problem facing human civilization as a solved problem and that all are in the cost reduction stage, and he notes this cost reduction stage is where we’ve seen some true brilliance in the past.
Jeff notes that cost reduction really means inventing a better way which makes the whole world richer- citing the invention of the plow which made farmers less expensive and the whole world richer.
Manufacturing at Rate
40:42
It’s not about shipping the first article, it’s about the ability to keep up with the schedule of the demand in order to ship continually. One of the largest challenges facing space exploration, along with cost.
Infrastructure for the Space Entrepreneur Generation
48:36
Amazon would not have been possible to build if the underlying infrastructure for the business to operate it did not already exist. The internet existed, payment systems existed and postal services existed for people to find, access, purchase and receive their books.
Jeff’s vision is to use his earnings from Amazon to build this baseline infrastructure for the next generations of entrepreneurs, rather than building internet businesses in their garage, they will be building space exploration businesses from their dorm rooms.
“You go to Heaven when you’re born”
52:04
Speaking about his first ascent into space, Jeff quotes Apollo 8 astronaut Jim Lovell, “You go to heaven when you're born,” referring to the overview effect, “all this blackness and all this nothingness and you see this one gem of life, and it's earth.”
Decision Making: One and Two Way Doors
1:00:03
A thought process fundamental to the way Amazon operates, Jeff talks about one way doors, decisions you cannot ever or easily reverse, and two way doors, those which are less impactful and easier to reverse. Read more in the Inc. article here.
What often happens in companies is they have a one size fits all decision making process, which applies the heavy decision making process to all decisions when in reality, type 2 decisions should be made by single individuals or small teams.
Skeptic View of Proxies
1:24:00
Don’t confuse the metric you’re measuring with the actual thing.
Examples: Number of returns per unit sold is an approximation of customer satisfaction but it is not representative of customer satisfaction.
Don’t blindly follow metrics especially if you don’t understand the specific reason they were put in place!
Humans are not truth seekers
1:28:47
We are not truth seeking animals, but social animals. This drives our behaviours.
We co-volve with technology
1:42:14
“Books are an antidote for short attention spans” - Bezos
Technology changes us, we co-volve with our tools. We invent new tools and our tools change us.
Phone as an attention shortening device. Bezos believes it’s important to spend some of your life doing long attention span activities.
Invention vs Discovery
1:45:52
In a conversation on how Bezos views generative AI.
The telescope was an invention, the fact that Saturn has moons is a discovery. We know exactly what happens with an engineered object, but Large Language Models (LLMs), constantly surprise us with their capabilities. Bezos considers these LLMs, like ChatGPT, are more akin to discoveries than inventions.
His overall view is that he is optimistic amongst the uncertainty, these more powerful tools are much more likely to save us than unbalance and destroy us. Humans have a lot of ways that we can make ourselves go extinct, but he believes that these can more likely help save us.
Thinking Retreats
1:59:52
Jeff mentions that he takes “thinking retreats” which reminded me of the Bill Gates documentary Inside Bill’s Brain where he mentions his “think weeks” and “reading vacations” where he goes away for weeks a year.
They must be on to something!
Memo Driven Meetings
2:00:01
Bezos believes in Memo driven meetings rather than those run with slides. This requires a thorough and thoughtful internal memo which attendees read silently together in the first part of the meeting and then discuss together for the remainder.
It puts a large responsibility on the memo writer to detail in narrative format the considerations - not allowing them to “hide” behind bullet points on slides.
The memo should be structured and the meeting should be messy.
