[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm a big fan of Gagarin's though. In fact, I, um, I think his, his first words in space, um, I think are incredible. He, you know, he purportedly said, my God, it's blue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that really drives home. No one had seen the earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet. No one knew what it looked like from out there. And Gagarin was the first person to see it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were taking huge risks. I'm not sure what the Soviets thought about Gagarin's flight, but I think that the Americans thought that the Alan Shepard flight, the flight that, you know, New Shepard is named after the first American in space. He went on his suborbital flight. They thought he had about a 75% chance of success.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, so, you know, that's a pretty big risk, a 25% risk.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That John Glenn is the first American to orbit the earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the way, I have the most charming, sweet, incredible letter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From John Glenn, which I have framed and hang on my office wall, where he tells me how grateful he is that we have named new Glenn after him. And they sent me that letter about a week before he died.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and it's really incredible. It's also a very funny letter. He's, he's writing and he says, you know, this is a letter about New Glenn from the original Glenn and he's just, he's got a great sense of humor and he's very, he's very happy about it and grateful. It's very sweet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He doesn't do that. But John, wherever you are, we got you covered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I would love to see, you know, a trillion humans living in the solar system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, that would be, you know, our solar system be full of life and intelligence and energy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and we can easily support a civilization that large with all of the resources, um, in the solar system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, the only way to get to that vision is with giant space stations. You know, the planetary surfaces are just way too small. Um, so you can, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something, but, but yeah, we will take materials from the moon and from


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Near earth objects and from the asteroid belt and so on and we'll build.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, near earth, not necessarily an earth orbit, but in, you know, uh, earth, but near earth vicinity, uh, orbits, uh, and so they can move quick, you know, relatively quickly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, back and forth between their station and earth. So I don't think, I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages are not going to want to give up earth altogether. They go to earth for vacation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, same way that, you know, you might go to Yellowstone National Park for vacation. People will, uh, and the, and no one, and people get to choose where they live on earth or where they live in space, but they'll be able to use much more energy and much more material resource in space than they would be able to use on earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The earth really is the good planet. It's an amazing, it's, it's amazing. The ecosystem we have here, all of the life and the lush, uh, the plant life and you know, the water resources, everything. This planet is really extraordinary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And of course we evolved on this planet. So of course it's perfect for us, but it's also perfect for all of the advanced life forms on this planet, all the animals and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so this is a gym. We do need to take care of it. And as we enter the Anthropocene, as we get, as we humans have gotten so sophisticated and large and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Impactful as we stride across this planet, you know, it's that that is going to, as we continue, we want to use a lot of energy. We want to use a lot of energy per capita. We've gotten amazing things. We don't want to go backwards. You know, if you think about, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The good old days, they're mostly an illusion. Like in almost every way, life is better for almost everyone today than it was say 50 years ago or a hundred years ago. We all, we live better lives by and large than our grandparents did and their grandparents did and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you can see that in global illiteracy rates, global poverty rates, global infant mortality rates.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Almost any metric you choose, we're better off than we used to be and we get, you know, antibiotics and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All kinds of life saving medical care and so on and so on. And there's one thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That is moving backwards and it's the natural world. So it is a fact that 500 years ago, pre industrial age, the natural world was pristine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, it was incredible and we have traded some of that pristine beauty for all of these other gifts that we have as an advanced society.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we can have both, but to do that, we have to go to space. And all of this really, the most fundamental measure is energy usage per capita.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when you look at, you know, you do want to continue to use more and more energy. It is going to make your life better in so many ways, but that's not compatible ultimately with living on a finite planet. And so we have to go out into the solar system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and really you could argue about when you have to do that, but you can't credibly argue about whether you have to do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So blue ring is a very interesting spacecraft that is designed to take up to 3000 kilograms of payload up to geosynchronous orbit or in lunar vicinity. Uh, it has two different kinds of propulsion. It has chemical propulsion and it has electric propulsion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so it can, you can be, you can use blue ring in a couple different ways. You can slowly move, let's say up to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion that might take, you know, a hundred days or 150 days, depending on how much mass you're carrying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, and reserve your chemical propulsion so that you can change orbits quickly in geosynchronous orbit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or you can use the chemical propulsion first to quickly get up to geosynchronous and then use your electrical propulsion to slowly change your geosynchronous orbit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Blue ring has a couple of interesting features. It's a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it provides a lot of services to these payloads. So the payload, it could be one large payload or it can be a number of small payloads.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it provides thermal management. It provides electric power. It provides a compute, um, provides communications.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so when you design a payload for blue ring, you don't have, you don't have to figure out all of those things on your own. So kind of radiation tolerant compute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, uh, it's sort of all these services. It's, you know, it's, it's like a set of APIs. It's a little bit like Amazon web services, but for face payloads that need to move about an earth vicinity or lunar vicinity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly, and it can also provide transportation and move you around to different orbits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, the blue ring is not designed to move humans around, uhm, it's designed to move payloads around. So we're also building a lunar lander, uh, which is of course designed to land humans on the surface of the moon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I loved physics and I studied physics and computer science and I was proceeding along, uh, along the physics path. I was planning to major in physics and I wanted to be a theoretical physicist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was, and the computer science was sort of something I was doing for fun. I really loved it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and I, and I was very good at the programming and doing those things and I enjoyed all my computer science classes immensely.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I really was determined to be a theoretical physicist. That's why I went to Princeton in the first place. It was definitely. And then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I realized I was going to be a mediocre theoretical physicist and there were, um, uh, there were a few people in my classes, like in quantum mechanics and so on, who they could effortlessly do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Things were so difficult for me and I realized like, you know, there are a thousand ways to be smart.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And to be really, you know, theoretical physics is not one of those fields.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where the, uh, you know, only the top few percent actually move the state of the art forward. It's one of those things where you, you have to be really, uh, just your brain has to be wired in a certain way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there was a guy named, um, one of these people who was, uh, convinced me, he didn't mean to convince me, but just by observing him, he convinced me that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name was Josanta. And Josanta,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, was from Sri Lanka and he's, he was one of the most brilliant people I'd ever met. My, uh, friend Joe and I were working on a very difficult partial differential equations problem set one night. And there was one problem that we worked on for three hours and we made no headway whatsoever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we looked up at each other at the same time and we said, Yo Santa. So we went to Yo Santa's dorm room and he was there. He was almost always there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we said, Yo Santa, we're having trouble solving this, uh, partial differential equation, would you mind taking a look? And he said, of course, by the way, he was the most humble, most kind person. And so he took our, he looked at our problem and he stared at it for just a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds. And he said, cosine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I said, what do you mean yosanta? What do you mean cosine? He said, that's the answer. And I said, no, no, no, come on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he said, let me show you. And he took out some paper and he wrote down three pages of equations. Everything canceled out and the answer was cosine. And I said, Yo Santa, did you do that in your head? And he said, Oh no, that would be impossible. A few years ago, I solved a similar problem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I could map this problem onto that problem and then it was immediately obvious that the answer was cosine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think the mathematical skill required today is so high. You have to be a world class mathematician.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To be a successful theoretical physicist today and it's not, you know, it, uh, you probably need other skills to intuition, lateral thinking and so on. But without the, without just.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm really an inventor and I look at things and I can come up with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A typical solutions and you know, and then I can create a hundred such a typical solutions for something 99 of them may not survive, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I, I self identify as an inventor more than anything else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's such a good question, and I honestly don't know how it works. If I did, I would try to explain it. I know it involves lots of wandering.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I, you know, when I sit down to work on a problem, I know I don't know where I'm going.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So to, to go in a straight line, to be efficient, efficiency and invention are sort of at odds because invention, real invention.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not incremental improvement. Incremental improvement is so important in every endeavor and everything you do. You have to work hard on also just making things a little bit better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I'm talking about real invention, real lateral thinking that requires wandering and you have to give yourself permission to wander. I think a lot of people, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At a meeting, I don't know how long the meeting is going to take if we're trying to solve a problem because if I did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then I'd already, I know there's some kind of straight line that we're drawing to the solution.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The reality is we may have to wander for a long time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I do like group invention. I think there's really nothing more fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then sitting at a whiteboard with a group of smart people and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Spitballing and coming up with new ideas and objections to those ideas and then solutions to the objections and going back and forth. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, uhm, you know, sometimes you wake up with an idea and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The middle of the night and sometimes you sit down with a group of people and go back and forth and both things are really pleasurable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I come up with what I think is a good idea and it survives kind of the first level of scrutiny, you know, that I do in my own head and I'm ready to tell somebody else about the idea, I will often say, look, it is going to be really easy for you to find objections to this idea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But work with me. There's something there. There's something there and that is intuition.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it's really easy to kill new ideas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the beginning, cause they do have so many, so many easy objections to them. So you need to, uh, you need to kind of forewarn people and say, look, I know it's going to take a lot of work to get this to a fully formed idea. Let's get started on that. It'll be fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are a thousand ways to be smart by the way. And that is a really, like when I go around, you know, and I meet people, I'm always looking for the way that they're smart and you find it is, that's one of the things that makes the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So interesting and fun is that it is not, it's not like IQ is a single.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dimension, there are people who are smart in such unique ways.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, uh, New Glenn is a, uh, uh, a very large, heavy lift launch vehicle. It'll take about 45 metric tons to Leo, very, uh, very large class.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The each engine generates a little more than 550,000 pounds of thrust.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The engines are fueled by liquid natural gas, liquefied natural gas, LNG as the fuel and LOX as the oxidizer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The cycle is an Ox rich stage combustion cycle. It's a cycle that was really pioneered by the Russians. It's a very good cycle. Um, uh, and that engine is also going to power the first stage of the Vulcan rocket, which is the United launch Alliance rocket. Um, then the second stage of new Glenn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, is powered by two BE3U engines, which is a upper stage variant of our new shepherd liquid hydrogen engine. So the BE3U has 160,000 pounds of thrust. So two of those 320,000 pounds of thrust.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And hydrogen is a very good propellant for upper stages because it has very high ISP. It's not a great propellant in my view for booster stages because the stages then get physically so large.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Has very high ISP, but liquid hydrogen is, uh, very, is not dense at all. So to store liquid hydrogen, you know, if you need to store many thousands of pounds of liquid hydrogen, your tanks, your liquid hydrogen tank, it's very large.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, uh, you really, you get more benefit from the higher ISP, the specific impulse. You get more benefit from the higher specific impulse on the second stage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that stage carries less propellant, so you don't get such geometrically gigantic tanks. The Delta 4 is an example of a vehicle that is all hydrogen. The booster stage is also hydrogen. And I think that it's a very effective vehicle, but it never was very cost effective.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, so it's operationally very capable, but not very cost effective.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean when you look at the kind of the physics of rocket engines.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It doesn't, if you have, let's say you have an avionics system, so you have a guidance and control system.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is going to be about the same mass and size for a giant rocket as it is going to be for a tiny rocket.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so that's just parasitic mass that is very consequential if you're building a very small rocket.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All rotating machines, in fact, get more efficient as they get larger. So really tiny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Turbo pumps are very challenging to manufacture and any kind of gaps, you know, uh, are like between the housing, for example, and the rotating impeller that pressurizes the fuel. There has to be some gap there. You can't have those parts scraping against one another.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And those gaps drive inefficiencies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, you know, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps and percentage terms end up being very small.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so there's a bunch of things that you end up loving about having a large rocket and that you end up hating for a small rocket, but there's a giant exception to this rule and it is manufacturing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So manufacturing large structures is very, very challenging. It's a pain in the butt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, you know, it's just, you know, if you have, if you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the pieces by hand. You could assemble it on a table. One person can do it. Uhm, you know, you don't need cranes and heavy lift operations and tooling and so on and so on. When you start building big objects,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Infrastructure, civil infrastructure, just like the launch pad and the, you know, all this, we, we went and visited and took you to the launch pad and you can see it's so monumental. And so just these things become major undertakings, both from an engineering point of view, but also from a construction and cost point of view.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to, at Cape Canaveral, um, in fact at most ocean, you know, most launch pads are on beaches somewhere in the ocean side because you want to launch over water for safety reasons. Um, the, uh, yes, you have to drive pilings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, dozens and dozens and dozens of pilings, you know, 50, 100, 150 feet deep to get enough structural integrity for these very large, you know, it's, it's, uh, yes, these turned into major civil engineering projects. I just have to say everything about that factory is pretty badass.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It does make it epic. It's fun to look at. It's extraordinary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Enormous machines that are harnessing enormous amounts of chemical power you know in very very compact packages truly extraordinary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I play a little kind of game sometimes with other rock people that I run into where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what are the things that would amaze the 1960s engineers? Like what, what's the change? Cause surprisingly some of rocketry's greatest hits have not changed. They are still, they would recognize immediately a lot of what we do today and it's exactly what they pioneered.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Carbon composites is, is very different today. You know, we can build.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composite material that they could not have dreamed of. I mean the efficiency, the structural efficiency of that material is so high.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Compared to any, you know, metallic material you might use or anything else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's one. Um, uh, aluminum lithium and the ability to friction stir weld aluminum lithium. Do you remember the friction stir welding that I showed you? This is a remarkable technology that was invented decades ago, but has become very practical over just the last couple of decades. And instead of using heat to weld two pieces of metal together,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It literally stirs the two pieces. There's a pin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That rotates at a certain rate and you put that pin between the two plates of metal that you want to weld together.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you move it at a very precise speed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and instead of heating the material, it heats it a little bit because of friction, but not very much. You can literally immediately after welding with stir friction welding, you can touch the material and it's just barely warm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, it's, it literally stirs the molecules together. It's quite extraordinary.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly, so with traditional welding techniques, you may have, whatever the underlying strength characteristics of the material are, you end up with weak regions where you weld. And with friction stir welding, the welds are just as strong as the bulk material.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it really allows you, and so, cause when you're, you know, let's say you're building a tank that you're going to pressurize, you know, a large, you know, liquid natural gas tank for our, for our booster stage, for example.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, if you are welding that with traditional methods, you have to size those weld lands, the thickness of those pieces with that knockdown for whatever damage you're doing with the weld. And that's going to add a lot of weight to that tank.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, when you need something that needs to have 100% integrity until it needs to have 0% integrity. It needs to stay attached until it's ready to go away. And then when it goes away, it has to go away completely. You use explosive charges for that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so it's a very robust way of separating structure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, when you need to. Exploding. Yeah. Little tiny bits of explosive material, um, and, uh, it just, it'll sever the whole connection.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. Second stage is expendable. Second stage is liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen. So we get to take advantage of the higher specific impulse. Um, the, uh, the first stage, uh, lands downrange on a landing platform in the ocean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, comes back for maintenance and get ready to do the next mission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is, and we know how to do that. Uhm, right now, we're gonna work on manufacturing that second stage to make it as inexpensive as possible. Sort of two paths for a second stage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Make it reusable, uhm, uh, or work really hard to make it inexpensive so you can afford to expend it. And that trade is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually not obvious which one is better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even in terms of cost, even like time. I'm talking about costs is it, you know, space flight getting into orbit is a solved problem. We solved it back in, you know, the fifties and sixties. The only thing that the only interesting problem is dramatically reducing the cost of access to orbit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which is, if you can do that, you open up a bunch of new, uh, you know, endeavors that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lots of startup companies, everybody else can do. So that's, we really.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's our one of our missions is to be part of this industry and lower the cost orbit so that there can be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, a kind of a renaissance, a golden age of people doing all kinds of interesting things in space.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For sure. And if, you know, when you, what does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, and when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So, you know, whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is a big deal to, to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first launch is one thing and we'll do that in 2024 coming up in this coming year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The real thing that's the bigger challenge is making sure that our factory is efficiently, uh, uh, manufacturing at rate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So rate production. So consider if you want to launch new Glenn, you know, 24 times a year, you need to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Manufacture a upper stage, since they're expendable, uh, every.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, twice a month, you need to do it every two weeks. So you need to be, you need to have all of your.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Designing the vehicle in the first place and the same thing. So every, every, uh, uh, upper stage has.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To be three engines. So those engines, you know, you need, if you're going to launch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The vehicle twice a month, you need four engines a month, so you need an engine every week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you need to be, that engine needs to be being produced at rate. And, and that's a, um, and there's all of the things that you need to do that all the right machine tools, all the right fixtures, uh, the right people process, et cetera. So it's one thing to build a first article.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right? So that's, you know, to launch New Glenn for the first time, you need to produce a first article.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that's not the hard part. The hard part is everything that's going on behind the scenes to build a factory that can produce New Glens at rate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Think of the first article as kind of pushing, it, it pushes all of the rate manufacturing technology along. You know, in other words, it's kind of the, uh, you know, it's the test article in a way that's testing out your, your manufacturing technologies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, I mean, I don't want to make it sound like any of it is easy. I mean, the people who are designing the engines and all this, all of it is hard. Um, for sure, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the challenge right now is driving really hard to get to, uh, is to get to rate manufacturing and to do that in an efficient way. Again, kind of back to our cost point.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But yeah, it's hard. You see what I'm saying? It's like, there's nothing easy about this business and, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's its own reward. It's, it's, it's, uh, it's fascinating. It's worthwhile. It's meaningful. And so, you know, I, you know, not, I don't want to pick on salty snack food companies, but I think it's, it's less meaningful. You know, at the end of the day, you're not going to, you're not going to have accomplished something amazing. Yeah, there's even if you do make a lot of money out of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, it's one of humanity's grand challenges.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And especially as you look at going to the moon and going to Mars and building giant O'Neill colonies and unlocking all the things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I won't live long enough to see the fruits of this, but the fruits of this come from building a road to space, getting the infrastructure. I give you an analogy. When I started Amazon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I didn't have to develop a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card. I didn't have to develop a transportation system to deliver the packages. It already existed. It was called the postal service and Royal Mail and Deutsche Post and so on. So,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All this heavy lifting infrastructure was already in place and I could stand on its shoulders.


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[Assistant] And that's why when you look at the internet, um, you know, by the way, another giant piece of infrastructure that was around in the early, I'm taking you back to like 1994.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People using dial up modems and it was piggybacking on top of the long distance phone network. That's how the internet, that's how people were accessing servers and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That again, if, if that hadn't existed, it would have been hundreds of billions of capex to put that out there. No startup company could have done that. And so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The problem, you know, you see in, if you look at the dynamism in the internet space over the last 20 years, it's because, you know, you see like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Two kids in a dorm room could start an internet company that could be successful and do amazing things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because they didn't have to build heavy infrastructure. It was already there. And that's what.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wanted to take, you know, my Amazon winnings.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And use that to build heavy infrastructure so that the next generation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, my, the generation that's my children and their children is, you know, those generations can then use that heavy infrastructure. Then there'll be space entrepreneurs who start in their dorm room. Like that, that will be a marker of success.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed. I find that very exciting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course. Which is the entrepreneurial spirit. That's a, um, an inventor's greatest dream is that their inventions are so successful that they are one day taken for granted.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, nobody thinks of Amazon as an invention anymore. Nobody thinks of customer reviews. We pioneered customer reviews, but now they're so commonplace. Same thing with one click shopping and so on. But that's a compliment. That's how, you know, you invent something that's so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Used so beneficially used by so many people that they take it for granted.


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[Assistant] Yeah, I think so. Uhm, for sure the first launch and then we'll see if, if Escapade goes on that or not. I think that the first launch for sure and I hope Escapade too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I just don't know which mission it's actually going to be slated on. So we also have other things that might go on that first mission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, the first launch, I'm very optimistic that the first launch of new Glenn will be in 2024. And I'm just not a hundred percent certain what payload will be on that first launch.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh man. 100%. I've, you know, every, uh, every launch I go to, uh, you know, for new shepherd, for other vehicles too, I'm always nervous for these launches, but yes, for sure. A first launch to have no nervous about that would be, you know, some sign of derangement, I think. So.


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[Assistant] You know, we have done a tremendous amount of ground testing, a tremendous amount of simulation, so,


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[Assistant] Uh, you know, a lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been resolved, but there are some problems you can only find in flight. So, you know, cross your fingers. Uh, I guarantee you, you'll, uh, you'll have fun watching it no matter what happens.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The vehicle travels out horizontally and then kind of, uh, you know, comes up.


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[Assistant] You know, strangely I wasn't, you know, I. You ride the rocket. It's true. I've watched other people ride in the rocket and I'm more nervous than when I was inside the rocket myself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was an incredible experience and we were, we were laughing and inside the capsule and you know, we're not nervous. Um, the people on the ground were very nervous for us. Um, uh, it was actually one of the most.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Emotionally powerful parts of the experience was not happened even before the flight at four thirty in the morning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Brother and I are getting ready to go to the launch site and Lauren is going to take us there in her helicopter and we're getting ready to leave and we go outside, outside the ranch house there in, in West Texas where the launch facility is. And all of our family, my kids and my brother's kids and our, you know, our, our, our


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Parents and uh, close friends are assembled there.


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[Assistant] And they're saying goodbye to us, but they're kind of saying, maybe they think they're saying goodbye to us forever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, we might not have felt that way, but it was obvious from their faces how nervous they were that they felt that way. And it was sort of powerful because...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It allowed us to see, it was almost like attending your own memorial service or something like you could feel how loved you were in that moment. Um, and it was, uh, it was really amazing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Assent, floating and zero gravity. I'll tell you something very interesting. Zero gravity feels very natural. I don't know if it's because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're, you know, it's like a return to the womb. He just confirmed you're an alien, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think that's what you just said. It feels so natural to be in zero G. It was really interesting. And then when people talk about the overview effect and seeing earth from space, I had that feeling very powerfully. I think everyone did. Um, you see how fragile the earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the great Jim Lovell quote, you know, he looked back at the earth from space and he said, he realized you don't go to heaven when you die, you go to heaven when you're born.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's just, you know, that's the feeling that people get when they're in space. You see all this blackness, all this nothingness and there's one gem of life and it's earth. It is a gem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I decided that, uh, first of all, I knew the vehicle extremely well. I know the team who built it. I know the vehicle. Um, the, uh, I'm very comfortable with the, like the escape system. We put as much effort.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Into the escape system on that vehicle, as we put into all the rest of the vehicle combined, it's one of the hardest pieces of engineering in the entire new shepherd architecture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have a solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule so that if anything goes wrong on ascent, you know, while the main rocket engine is firing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We can ignite this solid rocket motor in the base of the crew capsule and escape from the booster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a very challenging system to build, design, validate, test, all of these things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is the reason that I am comfortable letting anyone go on New Shepard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The booster is as safe and reliable as we can make it, but, um, we're harnessing, whenever you're talking about rocket engines, I don't care what rocket engine you're talking about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You are harnessing such vast power.


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[Assistant] In such a small compact geometric space.


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[Assistant] The power density is so enormous.


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[Assistant] That it is impossible to ever be sure that nothing will go wrong.


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[Assistant] And so the only way to, um, improve safety.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is to have an escape system and you know and historically.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rockets, human rated rockets have had escape systems, only the space shuttle did not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, um, but Apollo had one, um, the, you know, um, all of the previous, you know, Gemini, et cetera, they all had escape systems. And.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we have on New Shepard, unusual escape systems. Most escape systems are towers. We have a pusher escape system. So the solid rocket motor is actually embedded in the base of the crew capsule and it pushes. And it's reusable in the sense that if we don't use it, so if we have a nominal mission,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We land with it. The tower systems have to be ejected at a certain point in the mission. And so they get wasted even in a nominal mission.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so again, you know, costs really matters on these things. So we figured out how to have the escape system be a reusable, uh, in the event that it's not used, you can reuse it, um, and have it be a pusher system. It's a very sophisticated thing. So I knew these things. You asked me about my decision to go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so I know the vehicle very well. I know the people who.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Designed it. I have great trust in them, and in the engineering that we did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I thought to myself, look, if I am not ready to go, then I wouldn't want anyone to go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A tourism vehicle has to be designed in my view.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To have very, to be as safe as one can make it. You can't make it perfectly safe. It's impossible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you know, you just have to, you know, people will do things, people take risks, you know, they climb mountains, they, you know, they skydive, they, you know, do deep underwater scuba diving and so on. People are okay taking risks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't eliminate the risk, but it is something because it's a tourism vehicle. You have to do your utmost to eliminate those risks. And I felt very good about the system. I think that's one of the reasons I was so calm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The escape system is completely automated. Automated is better because it can react so much faster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, I mean, I think for, you know, if you're doing, you know, there are human activities where we tolerate more risk. If you're saving somebody's life, you know, if you are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, engaging in real exploration. Um, these are things where, you know, I personally think you, we would accept more risk in part because you have to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Blue Origin needs to be much faster and it's one of the reasons that I left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My role as the CEO of Amazon, uh, a couple of years ago, I needed, I wanted to come in and, um, Blue Origin needs me right now. And so I had always, when I was the CEO of Amazon, my point of view on this is if I'm the CEO of a publicly traded company,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's going to get my full attention and I really, it's just how I think about things. It was very important to me. I felt I had an obligation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To all the stakeholders at Amazon, uh, to do that. Uhm, and so having, you know, turned the CEO, I'm still the executive chair there, but I've turned the CEO role over and the reason,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The primary reason I did that is so that I could spend time of origin adding some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, energy, some sense of urgency. We need to move much faster and we're going to. Uh, what are the ways to speed it up?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It does apply. I know I'm leading this directly. We are going to become the world's most decisive company across any industry. And so, you know, at Amazon for, you know, forever since the beginning, I said, we're going to become the world's most customer obsessed company.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And no matter the industry, like people, one day people are going to come to Amazon from the healthcare industry and want to know, how did you guys, how do you, how are you so customer obsessed? How do you actually not just pay lip service to that, but actually do that? Um, and from, you know, all different industries should come on to study us to see how we accomplish that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the analogous thing of Blue Origin, it will help us move faster.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is we're going to become the world's most decisive company.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risk and making those decisions quickly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, being bold on those things. That's what, and having the right culture that supports that, you need people to be ambitious, technically ambitious. You know, if there are five ways to do something, we'll study them, but let's study them very quickly and make a decision. We can always change our mind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it doesn't, you know, changing your mind. I talk about one way doors and two way doors. Most decisions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are two way doors. Can you explain that? Cause I love that metaphor. If you make the wrong decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If it's a two way door decision, you walk out the door, you pick a door, you walk out and you spend a little time there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Turns out to be the wrong decision. You can come back in and pick another door. Some decisions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are so consequential and so important and so hard to reverse.


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[Assistant] But they really are one way door decisions. You go in that door, you're not coming back.


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[Assistant] And those decisions have to be made very deliberately, very carefully.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, if you can think of yet another way to analyze the decision, you should slow down and do that. So.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I often found myself in the position of being the chief slow down officer because somebody would be bringing me a one way door decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, it's okay. I can think of three more ways to analyze that. So let's go do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because we are not going to be able to reverse this one easily. Maybe you can reverse it, but it's going to be very costly and very time consuming. We really have to get this one right from the beginning. And, uh, what happens, unfortunately, in companies, what can happen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is that you have a one size fits all decision making process.


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[Assistant] Where you end up using the heavyweight process.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On all decisions, including the lightweight ones, the two way door decisions. Two way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization. And one way door decisions are the ones that are the irreversible ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To, you know, the senior most executives who should slow them down and make sure that the right thing is being done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There are a bunch of decisions like that that are, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Changing the decision is going to be very, very complicated. Some of them are technical decisions too, because some technical decisions are like quick drying cement. You know, if you're going to, once you make them, it gets really hard, you know, choosing which propellants to use in a vehicle.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know selecting LNG for the booster stage and selecting hydrogen for the upper stage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That has turned out to be a very good decision, but if you change your mind, that would be a very good decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That would be a very big setback. Do you see what I'm saying? So that's the kind of decision you scrutinize very, very carefully. Other things just aren't like that. Most decisions are not that way. Most decisions should be made by single individuals, but they need and done quickly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the full understanding that you can always change your mind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like it's very common in any endeavor in life and business and any, you know, anybody where you have teammates, you have a teammate and the two of you disagree. At some point you have to make a decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, in companies we tend to organize hierarchically. So there's this, you know, whoever's the more senior person ultimately gets to make the decision. So ultimately the CEO gets to make that decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the CEO may not always make the decision that they agree with. So like, you know, I would often, I would be the one who would disagree and commit. Some, one of my draft reports would very much want to do it, do something in a particular way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I would think it was a bad idea. I would explain my point of view


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They would say, Jeff, I think you're wrong and here's why. And we would go back and forth and I would often say, you know what? I don't think you're right. Um, but I'm going to gamble with you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, um, you're closer to the ground truth than I am. I had known you for 20 years. You have great judgment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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. There's so many ways.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That dispute resolution is a really interesting thing in, on Teams.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there are so many ways when two people disagree about something, even though I'm assuming like the case where everybody is well intentioned, they just have a very different opinion about what the right decision is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we have in our society and inside companies, we have a bunch of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So compromise, you know, look, I, here's, we're in a room 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, um, we'd say, you know what, let's just call it 11 and a half feet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's compromised. Instead of the right thing to do is, you know, to go tape measure or figure out some way of actually measuring.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, but it doesn't lead to truth. And so, uh, in things like the height of the ceiling where truth is a knowable thing, you shouldn't allow compromise to be used when you can know the truth. Um, another really bad resolution mechanism that happens all the time is just who's more stubborn.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is also, let's say two executives who disagree and they just have a war of attrition in which everyone gets exhausted first.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Capitulates to the other one. Again, you haven't arrived at truth and this is very demoralizing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, this is where escalation, I, I try to ask people who, you know, on my team, they say, never get to a point


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where you are resolving something by, you know, who gets exhausted first, escalate that. I'll help you make the decision. Let's because that's so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Deenergizing is such a terrible lousy way to make a decision.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, and you want to try to get as close to truth as possible. So you want, like, you know, exhausting the other person is not truth seeking, and compromise is not truth seeking.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, it doesn't mean, no, and there are a lot of cases where no one knows the real truth and that's where disagree and commit can come in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's, it's, uhm, escalation is better than war of attrition. Escalate to, you know, 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, you know, make a decision here so we can move forward. But decisiveness,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Moving forward quickly on decisions, as quickly as you responsibly can.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is how you increase velocity. Most of what slows things down is taking too long to make decisions at all skill levels. You know, so it has to be part of the culture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To get high velocity. You know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, the Mark 1, the picture is me with Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator. Just to clarify, the lander is the sexy thing about the instrument.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's designed to take 3,000 kilograms to the surface of the moon in a 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just like the human landing system lander, called the Mark 2, Mark 1 is also, uh, fueled with liquid hydrogen and, uh, which is for, for high energy missions like landing on the surface of the moon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The high specific impulse of hydrogen is a very big advantage. The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it's, uh, since it's such a deep cryogen, it's not storable. So it's constantly boiling off and you're losing propellant, um, because it's boiling off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so what we're doing as part of the, of our lunar program.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's developing solar powered cryocoolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant for deep space. And that's a real game changer. Uh, it's a game changer for any high energy mission. So to the moon, but to the outer planets, to Mars, everywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Exactly. So the Mark 1 is expendable. The lunar, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It can land on the surface of the moon in a single stage configuration and then take off. So the whole, the, you know, the, if you look at the Apollo program,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The lunar lander in 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. Here what we're doing is we have a single stage


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Lunar lander that carries down enough propellants that 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because this time the whole point of Artemis is go back to the moon, but this time to stay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, you know, back in the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the program and it really was too expensive to, to continue.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, um, one of the things we're working on is, um, using lunar resources like lunar regolith to manufacture commodities and even solar cells on the surface of the moon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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, you know, the more advanced solar cells that we make here on earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But if you can figure out how to make a practical solar cell factory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That you can land on the surface of the moon and then the raw material for those solar cells is simply lunar regolith.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then you can just, uh, you know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Similarly, we're working on extracting oxygen from lunar regolith.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So lunar regolith by weight is, has a lot of oxygen in it. It's bound very tightly, you know, in, as oxides with other elements. And so you have to separate the oxygen, which is very energy intensive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that also could work together with the, uh, solar cells. But if you can, uh, and then ultimately,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We may be able to find practical quantities of ice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, in the permanently shadowed craters on the poles of the moon. And we know there is ice water, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In those water ice in those craters and we know that we can break that down with electrolysis into hydrogen and oxygen and then you not only have oxygen but you'd also have a very good high


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Efficiency propellant, uh, fuel and hydrogen. So there's a lot, there's a lot we can do to make the moon more sustainable over time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the very first step, the thing, the kind of gate that all of that has to go through is we need to be able to land.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, cargo and humans on the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, reasonable bets on such a thing in my lifetime that will continue to be done by professional astronauts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And probably missions that require a lot of training. You know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were sophisticated enough now with automation that we probably don't need humans to tend those factories and machines. Um, so it's, there's a lot that's going to be done in both modes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I would say, you know, just like the internet is big and there are lots of winners at all skill levels. I mean, there are half a dozen giant companies that, you know, the internet has made, but they're.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A bunch of medium sized companies and a bunch of small companies all successful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All with profit streams, all driving great customer experiences.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, SpaceX is going to be successful for sure. I want Blue Origin to be successful and I hope there are another, you know, five companies right behind us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I don't really know Elon very well. Um, you know, I know his public persona, but I also know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't know anyone by their public persona. Um, it's impossible. I mean, 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, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In terms of his judging by the results, he must be a very capable leader. Uhm, there's no way you could have, you know, Tesla and SpaceX without being a capable leader. It's impossible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I agree with you and I think in a lot of these, uhm, endeavors we're very like-minded.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I think, I think, I'm not saying we're identical, but I think we're very like-minded. And so I, you know, I, I love that idea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So excited and scared and anxious, you know, thought the odds of success were low, uh, told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success by which I just been getting your money back. Not like turning out what actually happened because that's the truth. Every startup company is unlikely to work. It's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Helpful to be in reality about that. Um, but that doesn't mean you can't be optimistic. So you kind of have to have this duality in your head. Like on the one hand, you're, you know, what the baseline statistics say about startup companies. And the other hand, you have to ignore all of that and just be a hundred percent sure it's going to work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was so, so exciting. I love, you know, every from 1994 when the company was founded to 1995 when we opened our doors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the way until today, it's, I find Amazon so exciting and that doesn't mean it's like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Full of pain, full of problems. It's like, there's so many things that need to be resolved and worked and made better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And et cetera, but, but on balance, it's so fun. It's such a privilege. It's been such a joy. I feel so grateful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That I've been part of that journey. Um, it's just been incredible.


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[Assistant] Simple and i think age old idea about renewal and rebirth and like every day is day one every day you're deciding what you're gonna do and you.


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[Assistant] 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 kind of, we start fresh every day.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about, uh, how we're going to operate. Even, even, even as deeply as what our principles are, we can go back to that. Turns out we don't change those very often, but we change them occasionally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We often, uh, make a list of tenants and the tenants are kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're not principles, they're a little more tactical than principles, but it's kind of the main ideas.


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[Assistant] That we want this program to embody whatever those are.


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[Assistant] And one of the things that we do is we put, these are the tenants for this program in parentheses, we always put, unless you know a better way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that idea, unless you know a better way.


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[Assistant] Is so important because you never want to get trapped by dogma.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You never want to get trapped by history. It doesn't mean you discard history or ignore it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's so much value in what has worked in the past and, but you can't be blindly following what you've done. And that's the heart of day one. You're always starting fresh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, you know, I'll talk about, because I think it's the one that is maybe in some ways the hardest to understand, uhm, is the skeptical view of proxies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, one of the things that happens in business, probably anything that you're.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're, you know, you have an ongoing program and something is underway for a number of years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As you develop certain things that you're managing to, like let's say, the typical case would be a metric.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that metric isn't the real underlying thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, you know, maybe the metric is, um, efficiency metric around customer contacts per unit sold or something like if you sell.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A million units, how many customer contacts do you get or how many returns do you get and so on and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so what happens is a little bit of a kind of inertia sets in where.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Somebody a long time ago invented that metric.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they invented that metric, they decided we need to watch for, you know, customer returns per unit sold.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then fast forward five years, that metric is the proxy. Proxy for truth, I guess. Proxy for truth, the proxy for


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Customers say in this case it's a proxy for customer happiness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And but that metric is not actually customer happiness. It's a proxy for customer happiness.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The person who invented the metric understood that connection.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It kind of inertia can set in and you forget.


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[Assistant] The truth behind why you were watching that metric in the first place. And the world shifts a little.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And now that proxy isn't as valuable as it used to be, or it's missing something.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you have to be on alert for that. You have to know, okay, this is, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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 are managing to metrics that they don't really understand. They don't really know why they exist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the world may have shifted out from under them a little, and the metrics are no longer as relevant as they were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When somebody 10 years earlier invented the metric.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes. And by the way, you do need metrics. Yes you do. You know, you can't ignore them. Uhm, you want them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you just have to be constantly on guard. This is, you know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We all showed up here at the Friday. This is such, you have just asked a million dollar question, so this is, this is what you're, if I generalize what you're asking, you're talking in general about truth telling. Yeah. And we humans,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are not really truth seeking animals. We are social animals.


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[Assistant] And you know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Want to be heard, because important truths can be.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, uncomfortable, they can be awkward, they can be exhausting. Impolite. Yes! Challenging, they can make people defensive even if that's not the intent.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But any high performing organization, whether it's a sports team, a business, you know, a political organization, activist group, I don't care what it is, any high performing organization.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to have mechanisms and a culture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To do that, you have to talk to people, you have to remind people it's okay that it's uncomfortable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and being cordial and cooperative and, um, that's really important. And so there's a.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, science is all about truth telling. It's actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, even, you know, you're supposed to have hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on. It's not easy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Overrule the most senior person, if they have data.


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[Assistant] Uhm, and, and that really is about trying to, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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, you know, if I speak first, even very strong-willed, um, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, well, if Jeff thinks that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I'm not right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so you can do little things like if you're the most senior person in the room, go last, but everybody else go first. In fact, ideally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Try to have the most junior person go first and the second then try to go in order of seniority.


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[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're intuition based and sometimes you don't even have strong data.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you may know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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. Like if there are two interpretations of a new set of data and one of them is happy and one of them is unhappy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's a little dangerous to jump to the conclusion that the happy interpretation is right. You may want to sort of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Compensate for that human bias of, of looking for, you know, trying to find the silver lining.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This, that might be good, but I'm going to go with it's bad for now until we're sure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, this is very early in the history of Amazon and, uh, we were going over a weekly business review and a set of documents.


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[Assistant] I have, I have a saying which is when the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then, it means you go examine the data. It's usually not that the data is being, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Miscollected it's usually that you're not measuring the right thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, you know, if you have a bunch of customers complaining about something


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And at the same time, you know, your metrics look like why they shouldn't be complaining. Um, you should doubt the metrics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, 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 or going through the WBR and the weekly business review and we get to this metric in the deck.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the guy who leads customer service is to fit in the metric and I said, okay, let's call.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean it was, it was many minutes. And so, you know, it dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We weren't measuring the right thing and, and that, you know, set off a whole chain of events where we started measuring it right. And that's an example by the way of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of truth telling is like, that's an uncomfortable thing to do, but it's, but you have to seek truth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Good and kind of deep question because there are big things that are really important to manage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there are small things internally into Amazon. We call them paper cuts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and you can identify the big things, and I would encourage anybody, if anybody listening to this is an entrepreneur, that's a small business, whatever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, think about the things that are not going to change over 10 years, and those are probably the big things. So like, I know that in our retail business today, Amazon, 10 years from now, customers are still going to want low prices.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you identify the big things, you can tell they're worth putting energy into because they're stable in time. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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. And then we have dedicated teams.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To get to, they're working on big things as they should and as you want them to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and so you need special teams who are charged with fixing paper cuts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was more friction, there was a whole series of paper cuts.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that invention eliminated a bunch of paper cuts. And I think you're absolutely right by the way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every time I click the button, I just, the surge of happiness. There is, in the perfect invention, for the perfect moment, in the perfect context, there is real beauty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, and you need a big group of people who feel that kind of satisfaction with creating that kind of beauty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We co-evolve with our tools. So, you know, we invent new tools and then our tools change us.


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[Assistant] And you can feel your brain getting reprogrammed. I remember the first time this happened to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was when Tetris first came on the scene.


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[Assistant] I'm sure you've had anybody who's been a game player has this experience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where you close your eyes to lay down to go to sleep and you see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All the little blocks moving and you can, 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. And, but that happens with everything. And so, you know, one of the, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We still have yet to see the full repercussions of this, I fear. I think one of the things that we've done online.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, and largely because of social media is we have trained our brains to be really good at processing super short form content.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, reading books is a long format thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we all do more of, if, if you, if something is convenient, we do more of it. And so when you make tools, you know, we carry around.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, a little, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because most of the things we do on our phone shorten our attention spans.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think it's important to spend some of your time and some of your life doing long attention span things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, generative AI, large language models, things like chat GPT and it's soon successors and, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are incredibly powerful technologies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To believe otherwise is to bury her head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The large language models in their current form are not inventions, they're discoveries. You know, the telescope was an invention, but looking through it at Jupiter, knowing that it had moons was a discovery. Like my God, it has moons. And that's what Galileo did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so this is closer on that spectrum of invention. You know, we know exactly what happens with a 787. It's an engineered object.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We designed it. We know how it behaves. We don't want any surprises.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, large language models are much more like discoveries. We're constantly getting surprised by their capabilities. They're not really engineered objects. Uhm, then, you know, you have this


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Debate about whether they're going to be good for humanity or bad for humanity. Uhm, you know, even specialized AI.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Could be very bad for humanity. I mean, it's just, you know, just regular machine learning models that can, can make.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, certain weapons of war that could be incredibly destructive, very powerful, and they're not generally eyes. They're just, they could just be very smart weapons. And so we have to think about all of those things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which I'm very optimistic about this, so even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are much more likely to help us and save us even.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Than they are to on balance hurt us and destroy us. I think, you know, we humans have a lot of ways of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Help us not do that, you know, so we may actually, they actually save us for the people who are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, overly concerned, in my view, overly, cause it's a valid debate.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I think that, 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. Uhm, I don't know if you saw the movie Oppenheimer, but


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To me, first of all, I loved the movie and I thought the best part of the movie.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is this bureaucrat played by Robert Downey jr.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who, you know, some people have 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have invented these awesome, destructive, powerful technologies called nuclear weapons and they are managed and you know, we, we, we humans are


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're not really capable of wielding those weapons.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where, you know, that's what he represented in that movie is here's this guy who.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is, uh, just, he wrongly thinks he's like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being so petty, he thinks that he said something, that Oppenheimer said something bad to Einstein about him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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 would have to happen, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, there's so much benefit that's going to come from these technologies in the meantime, even before they're.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, 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 it happened, no one knows, but over the next 10 years and 20 years, I think we're going to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really remarkable advances and I personally am very excited about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We do know that humans are doing something different.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, from these models in part because, you know, we're so power efficient. You know, the human brain does remarkable things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it does it on about 20 watts of power.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, uh, the, 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 are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They have to drive billions and billions of miles to try and to learn how to drive. And you know, your average 16 year old, uh, figures it out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, they need to be taught to say, I don't know more often. And, uh, I know of several humans who could be taught that as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, you know, just to, you know, we have, um, Alexa and Echo and Alexa has, you know, hundreds of millions of installed base, you know, inputs. And so there's this, there's, you know, there's Alexa everywhere. And guess what? Alexa is about to get a lot smarter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so that's really, you know, from a product point of view, that's super exciting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So many opportunities, shopping assistant, you know, like all that stuff is amazing. In AWS, you know, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building, um, Bedrock, which our corporate clients at AWS are enterprise clients. They,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is a very challenging technical problem and it's one that we're, you know, making progress on and dedicated to solving for our customers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I mean, I think if you look at the, if you look at the spectrum of human variety and what people like, you know, sexual variety. Yes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I, first of all, I get up in the morning and I putter. I like, I like have a coffee. Can you define putter?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just like, I slowly move around. I'm not as productive as you might think I am. I mean, I, cause I do believe in wandering and I sort of, I, you know, I read my phone for a while. I read newspapers for a while. I chat with Laura and I drink my first coffee.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, so I kind of, I moved pretty slowly in the first couple of hours. I get up early, just naturally, uh, and, uh, and then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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 that. Why am I here at the gym?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know that I'll feel better later if I do it. And so, like, 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, uhm, 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,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ideally, you know, you want to be healthy and moving around when you're 80 years old, you know, and so there's a lot of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I, my, my routine, um, you know, 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.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have a trainer who, you know, I love, uh, who pushes me, um, which is really helpful. You know, I'll be like, uh, he'll say,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Jeff, do you see, you could, can we go up on that way a little bit and I'll think about it and I'll be like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I don't think so. And he'll be, he'll look at me and say, yeah, I think you can.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And of course he's right. So it's helpful to have somebody push you a little bit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, you know, so I, a couple years ago, I left as the CEO of Amazon and I have never worked harder in my life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I am working so hard and I'm mostly enjoying it, but there are also some very painful days.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, most of my time is spent on, um, Blue Origin and I've been, I'm so deeply involved here now for the last couple of years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the big, I love it. In the small, there's all the frustrations that come along with everything. You know, 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 guy I've known for


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Close to 15 years now, a guy named Dave Lemp, who I love. He's amazing. You know, um, so we're super lucky to have Dave and you know, we're going to, you're going to see us move faster there. But so my day of work, you know, reading documents.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Having meetings, uhm, sometimes in person, sometimes over zoom, depends on where I am. It's all about, you know, the technology. It's about the organization. It's about, you know, I'm very, uhm, I have.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Architecture and technology meetings almost every day on various.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 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 to do. How do you achieve time where you can focus and truly think through problems?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do little thinking retreats. So for, this is not the only, I, I can do that all day long. I'm very good at focusing. I'm very good at, um, you know, I'm, I don't,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Keep to a strict schedule. Like 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 like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Asking questions that nobody knows the answer to and, and, and, and trying to like wander your way to a solution and, uh,