Jeff Bezos - "I Got RICH When I Understood THIS!" | 2 Hours for 20 Years of Success

If you want to be an entrepreneur, the most important thing is to be customer obsessed. So don't satisfy your customers, figure out how to absolutely delight them. You have got to have some passion for the arena that you're going to develop and work in, because otherwise you're going to be competing against people who do have compassion for that. You have to take risk. You have to be willing to take risk. You've got to have something that might not work. And so you have to accept that your business is going to be in many me was an experiment. Our failures have to grow with the company. We need big failures if we're going to be moving the needle. And if we're not, we're not swinging, we're not swinging hard enough.

Hey, it's Evan Carmichael, and I watch these videos every day because I need them for motivation. Being around successful entrepreneurs every morning helps me believe that I can do great things too. It's like your morning coffee, but for your goals, kickstarting your day with a blast of positivity. So here is a challenge for you: try watching one video every morning for the next 30 days. And let's find out together if they help you do great things too. If you're in, leave a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can celebrate with you. So today, let's get some incredible motivation from the one and only Jeff Bezos.

Enjoy. Never chase the hot thing, whatever it is. That's, that's like trying to catch the wave and you'll never catch it. You need to position yourself and wait for the wave. And the way you do that is you pick something you're passionate about. So that's the number The number one piece of advice that I give to somebody who wants to start a company, or start a new endeavor inside of a bigger company, make sure it's something you're interested in, something you're passionate about. Missionaries build better products. And so I would take a missionary over a mercenary any day. Mercenaries want to, you know, flip the company and get rich. Missionaries want to build a great product or service. And, you know, one of those great paradoxes, it's usually the The visionaries who end up making more money anyway.

Jeff, you've built one of the greatest technology companies in the world in just 20-some years. You've taken a company from nothing to Amazon, which everybody in the world now knows and most people in the world seem to use. Was that harder to do than trying to get a space company off the ground? Which is more of a challenge to you?

Totally different challenges. So one of the things that I find, if I think back on the last 20 years, you have to remember, 20 years ago, I was driving the packages to the post office myself in my 1987 Chevy Blazer, dreaming that one day I might be able to afford a forklift. And the internet, that's 1995, and 21 years later, the internet is this gigantic thing and there are many, many successful companies. The entrepreneurial dynamism that you see on the internet is incredible. And really with Blue Origin, this new challenge that I'm taking on with Blue Origin, what I want to do is put the heavy lifting infrastructure in place so that the next generation can have a dynamic entrepreneurial explosion of ideas and inventions in space, just like we've had with the internet. And the reason you can't do that today is because there's just too much heavy lifting involved, literally. Getting to space is so expensive and so hard. When we started Amazon, I didn't have to build a logistics infrastructure system to deliver parcels. There was something already— UPS already existed and the U.S. Postal Service already existed. I didn't need to build a remote payment system. There were already credit cards. And similarly, there were computers around and that didn't have to get— all those things would have been tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure. The long-distance phone network became the backbone of the internet, but it already existed. And so you could have this dynamic entrepreneurial explosion because all the heavy CapEx infrastructure was in place.

For space, it's not like that.

The price of admission is so high. So that's the big difference. And what I'm super excited about is lowering that cost. I want to dramatically lower that cost so that 20 years from now a new generation of people with startup money, real entrepreneurs, small entrepreneurs, can do amazing things in space. Think how cool that would be. You don't choose your passions, your passions choose you. And I fell in love with space and rockets when I was a 5-year-old boy and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the moon. And I have been passionate about it ever since. And, you know, there's a very real sense in which Amazon, which is an amazing, fun, interesting company to, to have started and lead, is, you know, a lottery winning for me. And so I am taking those lottery winnings and investing them in Blue Origin. And I've been working on that for 15 years. Our motto is Gradatim Ferociter, which means step by step, ferociously. I like to, I'd like to do these things very incrementally. We have, there's a military phrase that I especially love and it says, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. And I have seen that in every endeavor I've ever been in. That's the kind of thing that really allows you to make progress if you do everything in the right sequence, never skip any steps. And so, So we have been working in that vein for a long time, and stuff is coming out the pipeline, and I can tell you it's incredibly gratifying. We have now more than a 1,000-person team at Blue Origin, and that team is incredibly talented, and they're doing a great job. My vision for Blue Origin, the long-term vision, is millions of people living and working in space. We need a spacefaring civilization. For a whole bunch of reasons. And that's the vision.

Also, to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video, I've designed a special free worksheet just for this video. The worksheet will highlight our favorite lessons from the video that will inspire you to remember what you learned today and actually apply them. The worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results. If you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video, absolutely for free, There's a link in the description below. Go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business. I'll see you there.

If you take the US Air Force, one way to make it nimbler would be to make it much smaller. But that's a really bad solution because the scale brings so many advantages. And I see the same thing at Amazon. Amazon, because of our scale, we can do things that we just couldn't ever have done as a garage startup. You know, there's some things only big organizations can do. I love garage startups. I was a garage startup, but you can't build a Boeing 787 in your garage. You need a big organization like Boeing to do that. So if we want scale, we love scale, and you would never trade the scale of the US Air Force for anything. But the question becomes, how do I keep the advantages of scale but still have the advantages of a nimble startup? How do I get the nimbleness too? I want to be able to absorb a punch because of my scale, and I want to be able to dodge a punch because of my nimbleness. Well, the, the way you stay nimble is by making decisions fast. In a 20-person startup company, the decision-making speed is so quick, and that's why they're so nimble. And then in a big company or a big organization like the Air Force, that decision-making has a tendency to speed. The decision-making— you get high-quality decisions. I think sometimes people think the decisions are low quality. I don't think so. I think you usually get high-quality decisions. You just get them slowly.

Sure.

Which is a problem. And so the way to fix that in a large organization— this is what we do at Amazon— is we acknowledge that there are two types of decisions. There are decisions that are— we call them two-way doors. They are decisions where if you, you make a decision, you walk through the door, and it turns out you made the wrong decision, you turn around and I'm gonna come back, and the consequence of that misstep is small. That's a Type 2 decision. That's a two-way door decision. There's a Type 1 decision where it's really hard to reverse. When you walk through that door, you have walked through that door, and it's gonna be expensive or impossible and time-consuming to reverse that decision. So you have to get that right. That's a high consequence decision. Those decisions should be made deliberately, carefully, slowly. At Amazon, I find myself on those, I'm the Chief Slowdown Officer. I slow those decisions down. I'm like, no, I wanna see this one more way. And the team's working on it, roll their eyes. I've already seen it 18 ways, but I thought of a 19th way and I wanna see it. That's correct for a high-consequence irreversible decision. You owe it to your teammates to make those decisions.

Stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress, that's a, a warning flag for me. What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action on it. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we're gonna do to start to address that situation, even if it's not solved, the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think in large part. So stress doesn't come— people get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it. And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that. So, and likewise, if you kind of use the, you know, use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, If you're out of work, but you're going through, you know, a disciplined approach of, you know, a series of job interviews and so on, and working to remedy that situation, you're going to be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.

If I have a new idea that I am in love with and I want to see it pursued, I do have to build support for it, just like anybody would, because you need very smart people to embrace the idea and move it forward. We have a framework at Amazon. It's one of our leadership principles called Disagree and Commit. And that is extremely useful because after you've discussed an idea, you do need to make a decision and move forward. And people, the whole team needs to really commit to that. When I really feel strongly about something and the team disagrees with me, I have a phrase that I like to use, which is helpful, which is I want you to gamble with me on this. It's very different from phrasing that in a different way, because the truth is, when you're in a position like that where nobody knows what the right answer is, you're not saying, I'm right on this, go do this. You're saying, I want you to gamble with me on this, because I don't know if it's right either. I disagree and commit all the time, and I promise the people when I do it, I'm very clear, I don't agree with this. I think it's probably not going to work, but I will never say I told you so, and I'm going to be on your team. I will do everything I can to make it work. My view on work-life balance is that I prefer the phrase work-life harmony. To me, balance implies a strict trade-off, and I have seen situations where people are— they have all the time in the world, maybe they're out of work, have lots of time. You know, it's—

they don't have—

they have all, all the time, and they're so stressed that they're actually terrible at home. Everybody at home is like, boy, I sure wish you'd get a job. And my sister-in-law says, for better, for worse, but not for lunch. And so it's— you've— you really want harmony. You want a— if you're happy at work, if you're finding meaning in your work, if you are— can be hard. They call it work for a reason. It's not going to be fun all the time. That's a pipe dream. None of us enjoys every minute of every day. And to have that kind of idea would just be naive. But there should be fun at work. You should be laughing. There should be moments of joy. And if you're getting energy from work instead of your work draining your energy, then you're going to come home and you're going to be a better mother, a better father, a better wife, a better husband, all of those things. You're going to want to take out the trash. And so even before being asked, that's what's going to happen, Larry. She's going to say Who is this guy? And so you really need to— I think if you're starting to get to the point where you are worried about work-life balance, I would challenge you to think, is just something out of whack? It's probably not the hours. Look, you can— if you're working 120 hours a week, you're also doing something wrong.

That's too much.

It's not sustainable. Maybe you can do that for a week or two, but that's it. But if you're working, you know, 60 hours a week, that's completely sustainable for most people. And the question, if you're burned out by it, it's not the number of hours, it's that you're doing something wrong. You need to figure out what it is, because you're going to take that home, and then your home life is going to be stressful, and then you're going to bring that back into the office, so it's gonna be a negative spiral, and that spiral will also be a positive one as soon as you turn it around.

I think, to some degree, you follow your passions and then wait, you know, you have to hope the wave catches you.

I was always interested in computers. I was always interested in software.

I was always a big reader, and so it wasn't, you know, which made me alert to things like the internet and the possibility that you could build a bookstore online that would have universal selection.

And that was really the founding idea of Amazon.

And so I think everybody has their own passion, their own thing that they're interested in.

Then you're very alert to the things that, that are in the sphere of influence of that passion.

So your passion has led you to change the world, frankly, with Amazon, but yet you've got Blue Origin, you've got Bezos Explorations. Why can't somebody like you just rest on your laurels?

Go play golf.

Well, I love what I do. I also have 4 kids.

I have a wife that I love. I have a lot of passions and interests, but one of them is, at Amazon, the rate of change is so high, and I love that. I love the pace of change. I love the fact that I get to work with these smart, big smart teams. The people I work with are so smart and they're self-selected for loving to invent on behalf of customers.

And so, you know, it's not, do I love every moment of every day?

No, that's why they call it work.

There's always, there are things that I, that I don't enjoy. But if I'm really objective about it and I look at it, I'm so lucky to be working alongside all these passionate people, and I love it.

Why would I— why would I go sit on a beach? There's one reason we have done better than most of our peers in the internet space, you know, over the last 6 years. It is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter. I think in any business, it certainly matters online. Online where word of mouth is so very, very powerful. You know, if you make a customer unhappy, they won't tell 5 friends, they'll tell 5,000 friends. So we are at a point now where we have all the things we need to build an important and lasting company. And if we don't, it will be shame on us.

I talk a lot about willingness to be misunderstood. That's a really important thing to have if you're going to do anything new or different. In the world. It is going to be misunderstood, sometimes by well-meaning critics, sometimes by self-interested critics. You'll get all kinds, and it's okay. It's all part of the process. The only way to avoid criticism altogether is to be completely conventional in everything you do. And so how do you respond to the criticism? What do you do? What's the right thing to do? Well, I think the first thing you do is you ask, are the critics right? You listen, you ask, are they right? Or even if they're not completely right, is there some piece of it that's right that you can be inspired by? And then if you decide, by the way, that the answer is no, that you believe, you have conviction that what you're doing is the right course, then no force in the world should be able to move you. You should have a deep keel. But if you decide that your critics— that there is something, then you should change. And I give you an example from the early days of Amazon of when we refused to change. This is— we were small enough that most people didn't pay much attention to us or care about us. I'm taking you way back to like 1995, 1996. We pioneered this thing called customer reviews. And I got a letter one day from a publisher, a book publisher, that said, hey, you must not understand your business. You're losing sales because you're allowing negative customer reviews on the book detail pages. Why don't you just put positive reviews? And I thought about this, and I thought, no, He's wrong. We don't make money when we sell things. We make money when we help people make purchase decisions. It was a different framing. And so getting to today's news, you know, we listened to our critics and we decided the framing that we have been using all these years is competitive compensation. We look at what what other job opportunities there are and what the competitive compensation levels are. And we offer competitive compensation and actually non-competitive, world-leading benefits packages, but just competitive compensation. And so in light of this, you know, thinking about this and trying to decide, do we want to change? We realized we just made a decision. Well, you can offer competitive compensation or Or you can decide to lead. And as soon as we framed it that way, we're like, let's decide to lead. I think people will follow. And what was it the critics said that caught your eye? Basically they were saying, if you read between the lines, because a lot of the specific criticism was not correct, but if you read between the lines, what they really wanted us to do, they said, because you could also say, look, there are so many companies, there are all the fast food companies, there's, you the baristas, and there's, you know, like, wait a second, why are you focusing on us? But that what they're really saying is, we're focusing on you because you're a leader and we want you to lead. That's what they're actually saying. And as soon as you recognize it that way, instead of it feeling like criticism, it feels empowering. They're asking us to lead because we're a symbol of an innovative, iconic company, we're a gold standard for innovation, we should lead. I did do a lot of soul-searching. I went to my boss at the time, and I really liked my job, and I told my boss I was gonna go do this thing, start an internet bookstore. And my wife had already told my wife, and she's like, great, let's go. And I said to my boss, he's like, this is a good idea. So I think this is a good idea, but it would be an even better idea for somebody who didn't you already have a good job. And that sort of made some logical sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for a couple days. So I went away, and I was really trying to get my head around how to think about this. And I think for me, the right way to make that kind of very personal decision— because those decisions are personal, they're not like data-driven business decisions, they are, you know, what does your heart say? And for me, it was— I could the best way to think about it was to project myself forward to age 80 and say, "Look, when I'm 80 years old, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have. I don't want to be 80 years old in a quiet moment of reflection thinking back over my life and cataloging a bunch of major regrets." And I think that regrets, our biggest regrets in most cases— you can murder somebody, okay, you'd regret that— but in most cases, our biggest regrets turn out to be acts of omission. It's paths not taken, and they haunt us. We wonder, what would have happened? I loved that person, and I never told them, and then they married somebody else. I didn't do this, and so that's the frame of mind that I put myself in, and once I did that, once I thought about it that way, it was immediately obvious to me. I knew that when I'm 80, I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing. If it failed, fine. I would be very proud of the fact when I'm 80 that I tried. And I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn't try. And so that would be a regret. It would be a 100% chance of a regret if I didn't try and basically a 0% chance of regret if I tried and failed. So I think that's a useful metric for any important life decision.

I believe that the primary success factor for Amazon.com has been an obsession over the customer and a focus on customer service. This is clearly important in any business, but especially important online. And the reason for this is that word of mouth is incredibly powerful online. If you make a customer unhappy on the internet, they They won't tell 5 friends. They will tell 5,000 friends on Usenet newsgroups and listservs and so on. Likewise, of course, if you can make a customer happy by meeting or exceeding their expectations, they can also tell 5,000 people and therefore, you know, be evangelists for you. They can use the Internet as a megaphone. So it's very important to do the things that you actually are going to claim to do. And what this means, basically, is the balance of power has shifted away from the merchant and toward the consumer, which is a great thing, I think, for everybody involved. It's even great for the merchant, as long as the merchant realizes it.

I was in our— all the senior people at Amazon do 2 days of customer service training every other year. And several years ago now, I was in one of those customer service training sessions, and I was taking calls from customers. I had an experienced customer service agent with me listening in, helping me figure out how to use the tools, keeping me out of trouble, making sure that I did a good job for the customer. And the customer— this particular call that I got, the customer, as soon as we pulled up her order, the experienced customer service agent leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, and said, she's gonna want to return that table. She had purchased a piece of furniture, a table. And I was—

and I—

so I'm talking to the customer service— to the customer, and the customer says, I need to return this table. And it turned out that the top of the table was scratched. It was packaged poorly. And And then so we finished up and we handled the return and, and got all that done. And I said to the agent, how did you know that the customer was going to return the table? Oh, that table always gets returned. And so that—

what does that mean? That means that, you know, there's not—

it's an anecdote, but if you systematize that and kind of pull back, it means that the, that the, there's no communication flowing from these people who are talking to the customers every day back to our fulfillment centers where the actual shipping and packaging is going on. And it's very difficult to get that communication to happen. It can't just happen easily. So we built a kind of, inspired by the idea of an Andon cord where any customer service agent can pull a product off of the Amazon website if they think that there's a problem. And then of course, that sets in— that's having pulled that product off, that sets in place a whole series of processes that go back. But we're not going to ship the same table to the same customer over and over.

Do something you're very passionate about. And don't try to chase what is kind of the hot passion of the day. I think we actually saw this. I think you see it all over the place in many different contexts. I think we saw it in the internet world quite a bit where, you know, at sort of peak of the sort of internet, you know, mania in say 1999, you found people who were very passionate, so they kind of left that job and decided, "I'm gonna do something on the internet," because it was almost like the 1849 Gold Rush in a way. I mean, you find that people, if you go back and study the history of the 1849 Gold Rush, you find that at that time, everybody who was within shouting distance of California was, they might have been a doctor, but they quit being a doctor and they started panning for gold. And that, that almost never works. And even if it does work, you know, according to some metric— financial success or whatever it might be— I suspect it leaves you ultimately unsatisfied. So you really need to be very clear with yourself. And I think one of the best ways to do that is this notion of projecting yourself forward to age 80. Looking back on your life and trying to make sure you've minimized the number of regrets you have. That works for career decisions, it works for family decisions. You know, do you want— I have a 14-month-old son and it's very easy for me to, if I think about myself when I'm 80, I know I want to watch that little guy grow up. And so it's— I don't want to be 80 and think, shoot, you know, I missed that whole whole thing, and I don't have the kind of relationship with my son that I wished I had, and so on and so on.

One of the great paradoxes of inventing at a high level is that you need to be an expert in your domain area, and you need to have a beginner's mind. You absolutely need both of those things. The world is too complex to actually just be a beginner. So, you know, I can't— no matter how inventive I am, I can't go invent a new kind of brain surgery, you have to be a neurosurgeon. You have to already know all there is to know about brain surgery and then take it to the next level. The problem is, for many people, by the time they become true experts, they've lost that ability to see things in a fresh way. They've lost the beginner's mind. And so that's another thing you always need to be stepping back and If I'm an expert, I'm an expert in launch vehicles or whatever it is, I need to step back and say, okay, what if I were looking at this for the first time? What would I be seeing and noticing? These are just some of the things you need to do to be innovative. I am building along with a team of people, including the father of the 10,000-year clock, a guy named Danny Hillis, in a mountain in West Texas, a very large clock designed to last 10,000 years. Now I know what you're all thinking, moments ago he seemed sane. But the clock is a symbol for long-term thinking. And if we can build a clock, and we think we you can. There's a lot of engineering that goes into this clock. It's exceedingly complicated, and we don't have enough time to talk about the cam that tracks the motion of the Earth's orbit as it deviates over the course of 10,000 years, and so on and so on. There's a lot of interesting stuff if you want to keep time for 10,000 years. Um, but the symbol is important for a couple of reasons. One, if we think long-term— and here I'm thinking, when I say we, I mean we humans— if we think long-term, we can accomplish things that we couldn't otherwise accomplish. So if I came up to you, Werner, and I said, look, I want you to solve world hunger in 5 years, you would rightly decline the challenge. But if I said, Werner, I want you to solve How do we solve world hunger in 100 years? Now that's a different— that's more interesting, because it's— then you start to first create the conditions under which such change could occur. And so, and all we've done there is change the time horizon. We didn't change the challenge, we changed the time horizon. So time horizons matter, they matter a lot. And the other thing I would point out is that we humans are getting awfully awfully sophisticated in technological ways and have a lot of potential to be very dangerous to ourselves. And it seems to me we are, as a species, going to have to start thinking longer term. And so this is a symbol. I think symbols can be very powerful. The clock has 5 anniversary chambers. These are big. This is all carved out inside of a mountain in the remote, you know, kind of— you have It's kind of like a— you have to take a pilgrimage to get there. And when it's finally done, we'll let people come and tour the clock. But it has 5 anniversary chambers. The first one is a room that's kind of like the cuckoo on a clock, and it shows its animation once a year. The second chamber does its animation once every 10 years. The third chamber once every 100 years, the fourth chamber once every 1,000 years, and the fifth anniversary chamber just once at the end of the 10,000 years. And we're only planning to build the animations for the first and second chambers. We figure our future generations can worry about the third, fourth, and fifth chambers. One of the things about maintaining— first of all, it's somewhat about the selection of the people. So if you want to have a creative culture, When I interview people, I ask them to give me an example of something they've invented. And I always point out, it doesn't have to be something that you actually took to the patent office, but something that could be a metric that you invented and followed carefully. It could be a business process that you invented. But how do you go about, what's your method for? So you wanna select people who like to invent their way out of boxes. And don't necessarily immediately go to, either/or. We can do A or B, and, and, you know, the right question is how can we do A and B? What invention do we need to be able to do both?

So that's a lot about selection of people.

And the great thing about corporate cultures is they're very self-reinforcing. So this could— I mean, somebody who comes to Amazon and doesn't like pioneering, doesn't like exploring, doesn't like going down blind alleys that oftentimes turn out to be dead ends, they'll leave. You know, they're self-selecting. And so we have over the last 18 years collected a bunch of people who really enjoy this kind of pioneering approach. The secret sauce of Amazon— where there are several principles at Amazon, but the number one thing that has made us successful by far is obsessive-compulsive focus on the customer. As opposed to obsession over the competitor. And I talk so often to other CEOs and some other CEOs and also founders and entrepreneurs, and I can tell that even though they're talking about customers, they're really focusing on competitors. And it is a huge advantage to any company if you can stay focused on your customer instead of your competitor. So then you have to identify who Who is your customer? So at the Washington Post, for example, is the customer the people who buy advertisements from us? No. The customer is the reader. Full stop. The customer is the reader. And then, by the way, where do advertisers want to be? Advertisers want to be where there are readers. So it's really not that complicated. You know, it sort of, it comes around really well. And in the school, who are the customers? Is it the parents? Is it the teachers? No, it is the child. And that's what we're going to do. We're going to be obsessively compulsively focused on the child. We're going to be scientific when we can be, and we're going to use heart and intuition when we, when we need to. If we look back on our past with a watchful eye, what we see is a message of hope. We have been confronting challenges since we have been writing history. And we have always found the faith to rise above them. Nevertheless, once again, it is time to sit down, find our faith, and get to work. Because despite everything that those who came before us have already done, we still find ourselves in a world with astronomical need. Our past achievements must be used to inform today's problems, but not mask their reality. It is time once again to do what many will say is impossible. You should wake up worried, terrified every morning, but don't be worried about our competitors because they're never going to send us any money anyway. Let's be worried about our customers and stay heads down focused.

Most of these are big markets.

Another way to answer your question about competitors and Walmart is to say, look, they can succeed fabulously and it won't stop us from succeeding.

These retail markets are huge.

It often doesn't make sense for us to think of it as a pitched battle.

I think sometimes people think about business as it's kind of like a sporting event. There's a winner and a loser.

It's not a zero-sum game.

It usually isn't.

I'm sure there are cases where— but most often industries succeed. So I can tell you I think e-commerce is succeeding.

And the way we think about it, nobody else has to fail for us to do well.

I think ebooks is like that. I think there are going to be many winners. I think ebooks is going to be a huge industry. Well, there are many competitors now. I mean, you've got Barnes Noble is one of them. Sony is another now. Apple is another. But I have a list of 50 competitors that we could walk through. I mean, you know, all over the world doing different things. And our focus is going to be, you know what, we'll try to pay attention to those competitors, but we're not going to obsess over them. We're going to obsess success over readers, and that—

because those are the people who are buying that device.

And we're going to make it— and it's not just a business for us, it's a mission for us.

And missionaries build better products.

I get 8 hours of sleep. I prioritize it unless I'm traveling in different time zones. Sometimes it's impossible, but I am very focused on it. And, and, and for me, I need 8 hours of sleep. I think better, I have more energy, my mood is better, all these things. And think about it, as a as a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your, your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day. So let's say that I slept 6 hours a day, or let's go really crazy and say I slept 4 hours a day. So now I just got 4 so-called productive hours back. So if I was going to, you know, have, say, 12 hours of productive time during any waking day, now all of a sudden I have 12 plus 4, I have 16 productive hours. So I have 33% more time to make decisions. So if I was going to make, you know, 100 decisions, now I can make 133 decisions. Decisions. If I did that arithmetic wrong, I'm sorry. And, and so you make 133 decisions. Is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you're tired or grouchy or any number of things? Now, it's different if it's a startup company. I mean, you know, you're really, you know, when Amazon was 100 people, it's a different story. But, but Amazon's not a startup company. Company, and all of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future. None of the people who report to me should really be focused on the current quarter. I always tell people, sometimes I get, you know, we'll have a good quarterly conference call or something, and Wall Street will like our quarterly results, and I'll get people who stop me and say, congratulations on your quarter, and I say thank you. But what I'm really thinking is That quarter was baked 3 years ago. Right now I'm working on a quarter that's going to reveal itself in 2021 sometime. And that's what you need to be doing. You need to be out sort of, you know, 2 or 3 years in advance. And if you are— and then why do I need to make 100 decisions today? If I make like 3 good decisions a day, that's enough. And they should just be as high quality as I can make them. Warren Buffett says he's good if he makes 3 good decisions a year. How do you encourage your employees to be innovative? Well, this is a fantastic and important question. To be innovative, you have to experiment. If you want to have more invention, you need to do more experiments per week, per month, per year, per decade. It's that simple. You cannot invent without experimenting. And here's the other thing about experiments: lots of them fail. If you know it's going to work in advance, it is not an experiment. And what happens in big organizations— Amazon's a big organization now too, the Air Force is a big organization— is that we start to confuse experimentation with operational excellence. So we, you know, operational excellence is one of our four key principles at Amazon. We're building a fulfillment center. We've built over 150 large fulfillment centers around the world now. We know how to do that. That is not an experiment. If we build the 151st fulfillment center, and screw it up, that's just a failure. That's not the kind of failure we're seeking. We want failures where we're trying to do something new, untested, never proven. That's a real experiment, and they come in all scale sizes. So you need to teach people that those two kinds of failure are different. And you need to have— you said something about that hard middle where ideas don't go up. I think this is such an important thing. Amazon, one of the things we try to do is have multiple paths to yes.

What prompted you after you started Amazon to start a whole separate company? And how much of your time do you devote to it?

Well, I had, I had been hoping to build a space company since I was a little kid. And, and then, you know, kind of reality came into play and I realized it was going to be really expensive to start a space company and then I kind of moved on. I fell in love with computers and then I won this kind of lottery called Amazon.com and then I realized, hey wait, I can do that original childhood dream now. And so I started this company and it employs— now we're up to about 700 people and we're building a suborbital tourism vehicle which competes with Virgin Galactic and we're going to— our goal there is to make it possible ultimately for anybody who wants to go to space to be able to afford it. We're just going to keep working at that goal patiently until we achieve it. And then we're also building an orbital vehicle and we'll fly that at the end of this decade for the first time. And so it is— and my belief is that to dramatically lower the cost of space, it's It's all about reusability. You just have to make your vehicles reusable. You can't throw them in the bottom of the ocean every time after you use them if you ever want to dramatically reduce the cost.

So would you go on one of these space trips yourself?

Yeah, absolutely. I fully expect to go into space myself someday. And—

Have you told your family that or your Amazon shareholders?

I've told them. They're sitting here in the front row. So I'm telling them right now. No, they know. They know I can't be kept away. Talk to me about choosing Dolly Parton. Well, look at what she's done and how she's led her life and the way she's done it. These bold things, always with civility and kindness. She's a unifier. You know, we have big problems in the world, and the way to get big problems done is you have to work together. We have too many examples in the world of conflict and people using ad hominem attacks on someone. Social media and so on and so on. You won't find Dolly Parton doing that. Do you plan to give away the majority of your wealth in your lifetime?

Yeah, I do.

And the hard part is figuring out how to do it in a leveraged way. It's not easy. You know, building Amazon was not easy. It took a lot of hard work, a bunch of very smart teammates. And I'm finding— and I think Lauren's finding the same thing— that philanthropy is very similar. It's not easy. It's really hard, and there are a bunch of ways that you— I think that you could do ineffective things too. So we're building the capacity to be able to give away this money. Talk to me about long-term thinking and your point of view on— Well, long-term thinking is a lever. It lets you do things that you could not do or couldn't even conceive of doing if you were thinking short-term. So if I, you know, that's why, you know, the— I have a project where I'm helping group of people build a 10,000-year clock. It kind of ticks once a year and dongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out once a millennium. It's a big 500-foot-tall thing inside a mountain right here. Inside one of those mountains. In a mountain range. And the 10,000-year clock is a symbol. I don't think it'll do anything for the first few hundred years, but after a few hundred years, once it's old, people start to pay attention to older symbols. And so a few hundred years from now, I hope that A lot of people will think about that as a symbol for long-term thinking. If I collaborated with somebody here in this audience and I said, "Look, I want you to solve world hunger and I want you to do it in 5 years," you would properly reject the opportunity. You would say, "Look, it's not possible. It's not practical." But if I said, "Look, I want you to solve world to solve hunger in 100 years, that's a job you'd take because it's a much more addressable problem. You can first create the conditions. You have time to create the conditions where then you can solve the problem. And so that's a very important way of thinking, and it works with everything. I mean, you have to back up and find the right time horizon for what you're trying to do, but, you know, at Amazon, We probably do most of our things we expect to get some results in sort of 5, 6, 7, 8 years, but we find a lot of our, you know, other companies that compete against us in various ways, they're often trying to get things done in, you know, 2 or 3 years. And so we can do things that, you know, if everything has to work in 2 to 3 years, then that limits what you can do. If you give yourself the the breathing room to say, okay, I'm okay if it takes 7 years, all of a sudden you have way more opportunities. I get asked by people at all age ranges, all levels of seniority, what do I think about work-life balance? And my view on work-life balance is that I prefer the phrase work-life harmony. To me, Balance implies a strict trade-off, and I have seen situations where people are— they have all the time in the world, maybe they're out of work, have lots of time, that, you know, it's—

they don't have—

they have all, all the time, and they're so stressed that they're actually terrible at home. Everybody at home is like, boy, I sure wish you'd get a job. And my sister my sister-in-law says, for better, for worse, but not for lunch. And so it's— you really want harmony. You want a— if you're happy at work, if you're finding meaning in your work, if you are— it can be hard. They call it work for a reason. It's not going to be fun all the time. That's a pipe dream. Game. None of us enjoys every minute of every day, and to have that kind of idea would just be naive. But there should be fun at work. You should be laughing. There should be moments of joy. And if you're getting energy from work instead of your work draining your energy, then you're going to come home and you're going to be a better mother, a better father, a better wife, a better husband, all of those things. You're gonna want to take out the trash. And so even before being asked, that's what's gonna happen, Larry. She's gonna say, who is this guy? And so you really need to— I think if you're starting to get to the point where you are worried about work-life balance, I would challenge you to think, is just something out of whack, it's probably not the hours. Look, you can— if you're working 120 hours a week, you're also doing something wrong. That's too much. You— it's not sustainable. Maybe you can do that for a week or two, but that's it. But if you're working, you know, 60 hours a week, that's completely sustainable for most people. And the question— if you're burned out by it, it's not the number of hours, it's this— it's that you're doing something wrong. You need to figure out what it is because you're going to take that home and then your home life is going to be stressful and then you're going to bring that back into the office. So it's going to be a negative spiral and that spiral will also be a positive one as soon as you turn it around. Our mission is Earth's most customer-centric company. I don't know what that means. Well, let me— I'll give you an example.

Um, right after World War II, Morihei-san, the guy who founded Sony, set as the mission for Sony that they were going to make Japan known for quality. You have to remember, this was a time when Japan was known for cheap copycat products.

And Morihei-san said— he didn't say we're going to make Sony known for quality.

He said we're going to make Japan known for quality.

He chose a It was a mission for Sony that was bigger than Sony.

And when we talk about Earth's most customer-centric company, we have a similar idea in mind. We want other companies to look at Amazon and see us as a standard bearer for obsessive focus on the customer as opposed to obsessive focus on the competitor.

So that's one of the reasons we work on differentiated products. It's one of the reasons we take a long-term viewpoint on things.

You can't really do the right thing for customers if you're short-term oriented.

And if you're going to invent new things, you've also got to be able— this goes along with long-term orientation— you've got to be willing to endure a lot of criticism. You know, if you're going to put— Kindle is a good example. If you're going to put your back into reinventing a 500-year-old industry, Some folks are gonna get ornery. Day 2 is stasis followed by irrelevance followed by excruciating painful decline followed by death. And that is why it is always day one.

I went to my boss and said to him, you know, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing and I'm gonna start this this company selling books online. And this is something that I had already been talking to him about in a sort of more general context, but then he said, let's go on a walk. And we went on a 2-hour walk in Central Park in New York City, and the conclusion of that was this. He said, you know, this actually sounds like a really good idea to me, but it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job. And he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. And so I went away and, and, and was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision. And, you know, I already talked to my wife about this, and she was very supportive and said, look, you know, you can count me in 100%, whatever you want to do. It's true, she had married this kind of fairly stable guy in a stable career path, and now he wanted to go do this crazy thing, but she was 100% supportive. So it really was a decision that I had to make for myself. And the framework I found which made the decision incredibly easy was what I called, which only a nerd would call, a regret matrix. Minimization framework. So I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have. And, you know, I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret having wanted, you know, trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. Deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. And I knew that that would haunt me every day. And so when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision. And I think that's a very good—

it's—

if you can project yourself out to age 80 and sort of think, what will I think at that time? It gets you away from from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year. When you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus. And that's the kind of thing that in the short term can confuse you. But if you think about the long term, then you can really make good life decisions that you won't regret later.

And one of the things that we know about Amazon as a role model for this is that our business is— it's a difficult challenge for us because we have deep, large physical infrastructure. We're not only moving information around, we're moving packages around. We deliver 10 billion items, more than 10 billion items a year. This is real physical infrastructure at real scale. And so we can make the argument, and we plan to do so passionately, that if we can do this, Anyone can do this. It's going to be challenging, but we know we can do it and we know we have to do it. Where are we today? Today we're at 40% renewable energy. We've done that by building 15 utility-scale solar and wind farms. We've put rooftop installations on fulfillment centers and sortation centers around the world. Where are we going? Well, on renewable energy, by 2024, we're committing to be at 80% renewable energy, and by 2030, we're committing to be at 100% renewable energy. We're also— we have a lot of delivery vans and they all burn fossil fuels today. I'm incredibly excited to announce that we have just placed an order for 100,000 electric delivery vans. They'll be built by a company called Rivian. This is another example of something very important I want to talk about, which is that when you make a pledge like the Climate Pledge, it will drive the economy to start to build products and services that these large companies need to meet those commitments. This is why we We invested in Rivian. We invested $440 million in Rivian. That's part of what I'm so excited about. As this economy develops and people get serious about being carbon zero through real changes to their real business activities, that is going to be a gigantic signal to the marketplace to start inventing, developing these new technologies that these global companies will need to be able to meet this commitment. And so that's another reason we have to work together. We have to get a number of companies to sign up for this to really drive that market signal in a strong way. Amazon is large, but if we get lots of large companies to agree to the same thing, that will be an even stronger signal to the market. That together with the fact that the supply chains are so interconnected, it becomes the only way to do it. And that's with collaboration. First of all, I love space. I have been a space lover since I was a 5-year-old boy, and I feel like I won the lottery with Amazon. I know I won the lottery, and, and now I'm investing those lottery winnings in Blue Origin, which is the space company. We built, we are flying a suborbital tourism vehicle, and we'll start taking people up hopefully in 2018. That's coming right up. Working on it for more than 10 years. Hopefully, this overnight success is taking longer than 10 years. I don't know. We'll see, you know. And we're also building an orbital vehicle called New Glenn. New Shepard is named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. He went on a suborbital journey. New Glenn is named after the American hero John Glenn, who was the first American to orbit the Earth. And so these are both— these are reusable boosters, fully reusable. That's the key to lowering the cost. Our vision at Blue Origin is that we want millions of people living and working in space. And my personal hope is that I live long enough to see the kind of dynamism in space. I want to see a whole economy, entrepreneurs in space that I got to witness over the last 20 years on the internet. You know, the problem with being an entrepreneur in the space arena is that the price of admission is so darn high. So it, you know, to do interesting things in space, the beginning, you know, kind of the beginning entry level is a few hundred million dollars. So you're not going to get, you know, two kids in their dorm room doing something amazing in space, whereas that's literally what happened to Facebook, right? So on the internet, because the price of admission is so low, you can get these amazing experiments where like one kid in a dorm room does something and it turns into Facebook. And, or, you know, Amazon's case, you know, I started this this thing with an incredibly small amount of capital, and the, you know, it was able to grow because we didn't need a lot to get to begin with. The heavy lifting was in place for Amazon, right? So I didn't need to build a transportation network. It existed already. It was UPS and the Royal Mail and the U.S. Postal Service and Deutsche Post and so on and so on. I didn't have to build a telecommunications backbone to connect with my customers. It was there. It was called the internet. And in fact, the internet was resting on top of the long-distance phone network at that time. You guys remember the dial-up modems? Some of you do. Some of you are too young to— some of you should go to a museum and see a dial-up modem. What was that sound? Yeah. And so I want— I, I recently showed a group of youngsters a pay phone. I came across one and I was like, my God, guys, come over here. This may be the last one. You have to see it. And so, you know, the point is that Amazon was— got to rest on top of— we didn't have to build a payment system. It already existed. It was called the credit card. Computers were already on every desk thanks to, you know, Microsoft, IBM, and Apple. And what were they being used for? To play games, not to buy things on Amazon. And so all that heavy lifting was in place. And I want to, you know, my greatest— I would have such a good feeling if I could be an 80-year-old guy and laying there thinking about my life. If I could say, look, there is now a bunch of entrepreneurs in space because I took my Amazon lottery winnings and built the heavy lifting infrastructure that does take billions of dollars in CapEx to lower the cost of access to space. That's how you get millions of people living and working. And by the way, we need that. For those of you who like to think about the future at all, you can do a simple calculation. You know, we can argue about, you know, what limited resources on Earth and so on and so on, but here's a calculation that you cannot argue with, which is you take current baseline energy usage on Earth Earth, compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years, and you have to cover the entire surface of the Earth in solar cells. So you have to— we're going to have to decide, do we want a society of pioneering, invention, expansion, growth, or do we want a society of stasis? And personally, I believe because the Earth is finite. And if you want a society of stasis, I think it's good. First of all, I don't personally believe that stasis is even compatible with freedom. So I think for me, that's a big problem. Second of all, it's going to be dull. Stasis is going to be very dull. You don't want to live in the stasis world. And so, of course, we're going to continue to get more efficient too. We have been for hundreds of years. We've been getting more productive, more efficient.

That's—

that trend is going going to continue. But even so, we're going to want to use more energy, more energy per capita. And also, I don't want to stabilize population. I would love for there to be a trillion humans in the solar system. With a trillion humans, we would have 1,000 Einsteins and 1,000 Mozarts. It'd be an incredible civilization. Don't you want that dynamism? It'd be so much more interesting. This is for your great-great-great-grandchildren. But what kind of world do you want them to live in? I want them to live in that expansive world that is, you know, learning more about the universe and moving out throughout the solar system. So that we have to do it. And anyway, so it's fun to work on that. And, you know, I get— I have a— I won so many lotteries in my life. I have the best parents in the world, my mom Jackie and my dad Mike. My mom had me when when she was 17 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was still in high school, it was not cool. And she did an amazing job. My dad Mike is a Cuban immigrant who came here when he was 16 without his parents, did an amazing job. So those are the things that are your little gifts in life. You get, sometimes you get, my greatest admiration by the way is withheld for those people, and I know several of them, who had terrible parents and still somehow made it through. That's hard. I had the opposite, so I got lucky.

If you are a lottery winner, as I am, then one of the things that you, you get a chance to do at some point in your life is to be a philanthropist. And so I, you know, I didn't grow up hoping, you know, boy, maybe I'll be a philanthropist one day. That wasn't ever on my list of, you know, archaeologist, astronaut, those things I wanted to be. Physicist, I never. I think in large part because I never expected to have the means to be a philanthropist. But I think that if you win a lottery of this kind of size, that one of the things that that over time you have an obligation to do is to think about the ways that that wealth can be used in a highly leveraged way. I also think, by the way, it's really easy to give away money in highly unleveraged ways where it's just a waste of money. And I suspect that it takes as much sort of time, energy, focus and hard work to effectively give away money as it does to get it in the first place.

I watched the moon landing in 1969 when I was 5 years old, and it had a huge impact on me. I remember I could tell how excited all the grown-ups around me were. And I think, by the way, that's one of the gigantic legacies of Apollo, is it inspired so many so many people to enter science, engineering, become pioneers, explorers. And, you know, it's, I think, hard to overstate the degree to which that program did that for a whole generation of people, not just in the U.S. but around the world. We did something as a civilization that everybody had used as a literal symbol of impossibility. Oh, yeah, that will happen when a man walks on the the moon. And they had to change that metaphor in 1969. And so we all got to witness that as a civilization, and it really made people realize the kinds of things that we can do. And so I definitely got that bug when I was 5, and I kept after it. And I did— I read a lot of science fiction as a kid. I studied the science of rocket engines and propulsion and space vehicles and so on and so on. And the more you learn about something, the more you are attracted to it, because once you start to understand some of the nuances and the details and the things that you really learn a lot about become very appealing. And so that happened. It's a virtuous cycle. And by the time I was in high school, I was, you know, really on this journey of knowing that I really wanted to be part of someday figuring out how to help build infrastructure and get people into space. And my girlfriend, my high school girlfriend, has been interviewed many times, and she says there is no doubt in my mind that Jeff started Amazon just to get enough money to do Blue Origin. And, you know, I can't prove her wrong. So that is, that's been in my life, I think we need infrastructure to go to space. The, the real problem with doing interesting things in space is that the price of admission is so high that you can't have that kind of entrepreneurial dynamism that I witnessed up close and that all of us witnessed happen on the internet over the last two decades. On the internet in the last two decades, you can start a company in your dorm room and it can turn into a giant company. That's not metaphorical, that's Facebook. I started Amazon with a very small amount of capital. I didn't need much capital because all the heavy lifting had already been done. I didn't have to build a transportation system to distribute and deliver packages. It existed. It was called the post office. I didn't have to build a payment system. It existed. It was the credit card, and so on and so on. So when there is deep infrastructure, even Even if that infrastructure took many decades and many billions of dollars to build out, people can stand on top of that infrastructure and do amazing things. We don't have the infrastructure to do that in space today. If you're in your dorm room, you're not going to start an interesting space company. It's, you know, the starting price tags to do really interesting things in space are hundreds of millions of dollars, going quickly to billions. But if we had reusable space view, vehicles, then we'd be able to— that would start to change everything. And you'd find a generation later that you could have, you know, the two kids in their dorm room create the next great space company, and then you'd see thousands of space companies, and you'd eventually get to, you know, really amazing things going on. People are interested in trying to help the world in so many different ways. It's all the things you would expect, you know, but also some unusual things. But it's, you know, some people are very interested in the arts and opera, and they think that's underfunded. And a lot of people are interested in medicine and particular diseases and think that those deserve more R&D dollars. All these things are correct. A lot of people are very interested in homelessness, including me. A lot of people are very interested in education of all kinds, all kinds of, you know, both kind of college scholarship type education, but also apprenticeship programs. You name it, and people are interested in education. I'm very interested in early education, and I may— that, you know, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. My mother has become, in running the Bezos Family Foundation, she has become an expert in early education. I'm a student of Montessori schools. I started at Montessori when I was 2 years old, and the teacher complained to my mother, the Montessori school teacher complained to my mother that I was too task-focused and that she couldn't get me to switch tasks, so she would have to just pick up my chair and move me. And by the way, I think that's, if you ask the people who work with me, that's still probably true today.

Did that teacher ever call you since and say that she was responsible for your success?

No, I'm in touch with several of my high school and elementary school teachers though, but I don't know any of my Montessori school teachers.

So the gift that you're giving, essentially you're going to have some for preschool for children who need preschool, free preschool?

Yeah, full tuition preschool, Montessori-inspired. I'm very excited about that because I'm going to operate that. That's going to be an operating nonprofit. Profit. I'm going to hire an executive team. There's going to be a leadership team. We're going to operate these schools, and we're going to put them in low-income neighborhoods. It's just— there's no doubt. We know for a fact that if a kid falls behind, it's really, really hard to catch up. And if you can give somebody a leg up when they're 2, 3, or 4 years old, by the time they get to kindergarten or first grade, they're much less likely to fall behind. It can still happen, but you've really improved their odds. And a lot of— and probably most of the people in this room have been very mindful about making sure that their kids got very good preschool educations and got that kind of head start. That head start compounds fantastically. If you can get that starting at age 2, 3, 4, That's— there's a powerful compounding effect there. So it's highly levered. That's all that really means. You know, you can— the money spent there is going to pay gigantic dividends for decades. Let's talk about failures. I know Amazon has had its share of failures. In fact, I remember having been part of some of them at Amazon. I'm curious to know, how do you think about failure and how should we we deal with failure when we see it? Well, Amazon is the best place in the world to fail. And the reason for that is we have a lot of practice. Nobody likes to fail, by the way. Failure, even when you know it's important and good, it's embarrassing. It doesn't feel good. We're all human. We had a good idea. We thought it was a good idea and nobody came to the party. That happens. And here's the great thing though. One success, one winner can pay for dozens and dozens of failures. And that is why you should fail.

I've never seen you panic. I've seen you stay the course and you sort of stick to your script. How do you do that and how do you advise us to internalize that as well as a strategy?

Well, I think that if you're straightforward and clear about the way that you're going to operate, then you can operate in whatever way you choose. And we don't even take a position on whether our way is the right way. We just claim it's our way. But, you know, Warren Buffett has a great saying along these lines.

He says you can hold a ballet and that can be successful. And you can hold a rock concert, and that can be successful. Just don't hold a ballet and advertise it as a rock concert. I'm a member of the Business Council, and I meet with lots of other kind of Fortune 500 CEOs from time to time, and I often hear them talking about how stressed they are, and there seems to be, I think, this idea that if the more senior you are, the more stress you should have. I think that's the opposite, because the more senior you are, the more control you have over your environment. To a large degree, you get to pick who your senior staff is. To a large degree, you get to pick your schedule. To a large degree— not 100%, nothing's 100% in this world— to a large degree, you get to decide how you interact. You like to do lots of one-on-ones, or do you like to have small group meetings? You, you have, as the, as this, as a senior executive, you have a lot of control. And what I find is sometimes people forget that they have that control as a senior executive or as a senior officer. They forget that they can construct, to a certain degree, their work environment every day.

I laugh a lot. So it is, you know, there are, I think stress, you can be, one of the things that's very important to note about stress is that stress primarily comes from not taking action over something that you can have some control over. So if I find that some particular thing is causing me to have stress. That's a, a warning flag for me. What it means is there's something that I haven't completely identified, perhaps in my conscious mind, that is bothering me, and I haven't yet taken any action. I find as soon as I identify it and make the first phone call or send off the first email message or whatever it is that we're gonna do to start to address that situation, Even if it's not solved, the mere fact that we're addressing it dramatically reduces any stress that might come from it. So stress comes from ignoring things that you shouldn't be ignoring, I think in large part. So stress doesn't come— people get stress wrong all the time, in my opinion. Stress doesn't come from hard work, for example. You know, you can be working incredibly hard and loving it And likewise, you can be out of work and incredibly stressed over that. So, and likewise, if you kind of use the, you know, use that as an analogy for what I was just talking about, if you're out of work but you're going through, you know, a disciplined approach of, you know, a series of job interviews and so on and working to remedy that situation, you're gonna be a lot less stressed than if you're just worrying about it and doing nothing.

So much has changed. If you were to go back in time to the '60s and bring, you know, the great engineers from that era to today, there are a lot of things that they would be astonished by. First and foremost amongst those is computation. I mean, the— what we can do with computers and software, they could have only dreamed about. Same thing with sensors. Those things have just made gigantic progress. There are things that have made no progress, like high-temperature alloys are are basically the same as they were in the '60s. It's very interesting. But the way that we mill those things and weld those things and so on, that's changed very dramatically. We can make things with much less hand effort. You know, a lot of the manufacturing approaches have changed very dramatically. Some of the best ideas in rocketry were invented back then, and they haven't changed. Regenerative cooling and staging and, you know, common bulkhead tanks and so on and so on. So many brilliant people worked on the space program in the '60s that they came up with an amazing set of genius ideas that we're still using and harvesting today. But the details have changed a lot. One of the biggest things is not, you know, what's in the vehicle at the end, but is the design process now relies so much on computer simulation. You can do a lot of things on the computer today, and certainly all of the aerodynamics can be very finely tuned. You still do some wind tunnel tests to kind of anchor your computer models, but by and large you can simulate very complicated vehicles in a very high-quality way. Even now, one of the hardest simulation— computer simulation problems is, is combustion. Combustion is is a very difficult problem to simulate. So inside the main rocket engine, inside the thrust chamber, you're combusting an oxidizer and a fuel, and that's a very violent reaction. It's very hard to simulate on a computer. We're even making progress on that. And so that really cuts down on the amount of iterations, the kind of test, fail, fix loops that you have to do, trial and error. They did so much trial and error back in the day to get all of this to work, and with slide rules. I mean, it's extraordinary what they accomplished, and the more you know about the Apollo program, the more amazed you become. It just keeps going. We can do, we're doing now, we're building New Glenn, which is a Saturn V class. It's about half the size of Saturn V, class orbital vehicle, which will fly for the first time in 2021. We're doing it with a couple of thousand people, and that would have taken hundreds of thousands of people back in the 1960s. And that's the, that's the dramatic progress with the computer-aided design tools and so on that you see today. It's huge. Everything I've ever done has started small. Amazon started with a couple of people. And Blue Origin started with 5 people, and the budget at Blue Origin was very, very small. Now the budget at Blue Origin approaches $1 billion a year, and next year it'll be more than $1 billion. So, and Amazon, it literally was 10 people. Today it's half a million people, but you— it's hard to remember for you guys, but for me it's like yesterday. I was driving the packages to the post office myself. And hoping one day we could afford a forklift. And so, but so for me, I've seen small things get big and it's part of this day one mentality. I like treating things as if, if they're small, you know, Amazon, even though it is a large company, I want it to have the heart and spirit of a small one. And so anyway, that the day one foundation is going to be like that. We'll, we'll, we'll we'll wander a little bit too. So we have some very specific ideas of what we want to do, but I believe in the power of wandering. All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, you know, not, not analysis. When you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so, But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct, intuition, taste, heart. And that's what we'll do with this Day One Foundation too. It's part of that Day One mentality. As we go about, you know, building out this network of nonprofit schools, we will learn new things and we'll figure out how to make it better. First of all, when you're talking about reusability, you have to be very precise. And know that you need to be talking about true operational reusability. You know, we've— with the Space Shuttle and some other— the solid rocket boosters and so on, there have been some attempts to get reusability in launch vehicles in the past, but they haven't succeeded. And the reason is it wasn't operational reusability. You would have to You know, there was just too much inspection, maintenance, validation of the vehicle that had to be done. You need to get to a place ultimately that is much more like commercial airliners. And obviously you can't, you know, fly your— you can't get on a commercial airliner if the airline throws it away at the end of every trip. Very few people are going to be able to afford to take that vacation. Literally, even if they fly it to the destination and then they have to disassemble the whole thing, X-ray every part, and then reassemble it all and test it again, it's going to be a very expensive vacation. If you can get to real operational reusability, and we've done that on our New Shepard vehicle, our suborbital vehicle, then you can dramatically lower the costs. The cost of launch is, uh, is driven largely by the It's driven by the, the, the non-recurring engineering of designing the vehicle, and it's driven by the cost of throwing that hardware away every time. The propellant costs are vanishingly small. Uh, people don't, uh, pay much attention to it, but the propellant costs for a large, uh, launch vehicle are typically less than $1 million, especially if it's a hydrocarbon, uh, launch vehicle. So, uh, you're, you're, that's, you know, the launch cost is, is, is, is a couple of orders of magnitude larger than the propellant costs. So there's a lot of opportunity over time to dramatically shrink costs, and reusability is, is 8 of the 10 points to dramatically shrink costs. The other thing that you really need to shrink costs is practice, and that's why it's one of the reasons that we did New Shepard first. New Shepard is— I have a video I can show you in a second, but New Shepard is a, is a suborbital tourism vehicle. And that mission is so important for us because that's a mission that we can fly many, many times a year and we will get so much practice. It's 110,000 pounds of thrust, uh, liquid hydrogen engine. And the practice is directly relevant to our larger launch vehicles. And so, uh, you know, even the upper stage is, uh, liquid hydrogen, and it's the same engine. It's an upper stage variant of the BE-3. The professional pride part is so important because 90% of what all of you do, nobody ever sees. It's something— it's inside the work. People see something finished, but they don't see what's inside it. Only you see that. While you're doing the work. And that— so you have those, and those things can't be great since nobody's seen them. Nobody's inspecting it. You're not going to get any credit for it. The only thing that's going to make you have high standards on that piece of the work that nobody's ever going to see is your own professional pride and operational excellence. Those are the 4 cultural attributes that are at Amazon. We use the same ones at Blue Origin. We use the the same ones that AWS. Those things, I would, if they start to erode at the edges, that would make me very nervous. So I spend a lot of time trying to inspect that, audit that, teach that. Teaching things like that is about repetition. Senior leaders need to be broken records on the things that are important to the organization. And if everybody in the organization, Like, you have succeeded when you start to see people roll their eyes because of your repetition on certain important things. Because senior leaders don't have to do a lot of things. They have to pick a few big ideas and enforce tough execution against those big ideas. And that requires a lot of repetition.

Is there a particular recipe that you have in terms of how you actually innovate in that collaborative culture?

I think—

I don't think there's a particular recipe, but there are elements of what we do that I think help.

So one of them is that inside our culture, we understand that even though we have some big businesses, new businesses start out small.

And so it would be very easy for, say, the person who runs our US books category to say, why are we doing these experiments with things? I mean, you know, that generated, you know, a tiny bit of revenue last year. Why don't we instead focus those resources and that, you know, all that brainpower on this, on the books category, which is a big business for us.

And instead, that would be a natural thing to have happen, but instead inside Amazon You know, when a new business reaches some small milestone of sales, email messages go around and everybody's giving virtual high-fives for reaching that milestone.

And I think it's because we know from our past experiences that big things start small. The biggest oak starts from an acorn.

And you've gotta recognize, if you wanna do anything new, You've got to be willing to let that acorn grow into a little sapling and then finally into a small tree and maybe one day it'll be a big business on its own.

And in fact, that's one of the mottos for one of your initiatives and forgive my pronunciation of the Latin, but gradatim ferociter. What does that mean to you?

Well, it means step by step ferociously and it's the motto for Blue Origin.

And basically, you can't skip steps. You have to put one foot in front of the other. Things take time.

There are no shortcuts.

But you want to do those steps with passion and ferocity. So I know you have many interests outside of Amazon.

Tell me about the 10,000-year clock.

Well, I'm building a clock, a big clock. It's kind of a monumental scale. It's inside a mountain in West Texas. It's the invention of a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis, who had been thinking about it for a long time. And it's a symbol for long-term thinking. It's a clock that, you know, you kind of think of it, you know, sort of ticks once a day and, you know, dongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out once a millennium, that sort of thing. So it's a— and it keeps time. It's a completely mechanical clock. It's powered powered by thermal night-day cycles. It's a very sophisticated piece of mechanical machinery, and everything is tested to last 10,000 years. It keeps time for that long. There's a lot of stuff to think through because it's synchronized at solar noon, and there could be— in 10,000 years, it turns out there could be 3-year periods where you have no sunlight at solar noon. Asteroids hit the Earth and change the axis of rotation of the Earth, we have to account for things like that. And so beyond just the normal precession of the Earth. So it's a very complicated mechanical piece of equipment. But what's the purpose, you would say? This is an odd thing to do, to spend any time on. And I think symbols are really important. Symbols can be very, very valuable. And we have, as a species, become so omnipotent on planet Earth that we're really going to have to start thinking longer term. It can, you know, in a lot of different ways, it's— and you can accomplish so much if you think long term that you can't if you think short term. So if I said to you, you know, I want you to take this mission, I want you to solve world hunger in 5 years, you would rightly just You would just turn down that mission. You would say, that's not possible, why would you even bother trying? But if I said to you, let's solve world hunger in 100 years, now that's actually much more tractable. Now you can think about it and you can say, okay, well, how do we create the preconditions that are necessary to solve world hunger? And so long-term thinking is a huge lever, and I think it gets harder to do as the the speed of invention and civilization changes, in part because it sometimes doesn't make sense to think long-term if everything is changing so quickly. That's why, you know, kind of taking that back to the customer needs that I was talking about before, you need to find those things that we know as a society that we'll want even 100 years from now, and then make sure that we go about working on those things.

You mentioned that you wanted innovation to inspire this next generation. Why is it important to you? Why is it so important to you personally to make that happen?

Well, I think, you know, I was a very lucky kid. I was inspired by invention and self-reliance from a number of different people and from, you know, even watching the Apollo program as a little boy. And I think when little kids get inspired, you never know what might happen. It's a big deal and everything about our society gets better over time. I really do believe that, I'm an optimist. You know, the myth of the good old days is usually just that, a myth. We have better medicine than we've ever had before. Everything, you know, all of that is invention. It's people figuring out antibiotics, it's people figuring out new kinds of biomedicines, biotechnology. It's things that have been figured out with the kind of communication that we have, the freedom of speech we have now with the internet.

There's so many things that are getting better, and a lot of that is powered by invention. If you look over, over long periods of time, you know, look over hundreds of years and look at the average sort of life cycle of a new technology, what you find is that it's getting compressed and compressed and compressed. So the rate of change is getting faster and faster. Every decade that goes by, there are sort of more important discoveries per unit time than there were in the previous decade. And a lot of these discoveries tend to, you know, have two uses. I mean, technologies, you know, tend to be agnostic with respect to whether they could be used for good or used for evil. And I think that, you know, over the next 50 years, we are gonna face a lot of very tough decisions as a society in how we make sure that we are harnessing those technologies for good purposes. I think liberty, giving people the freedom to as long as they're not hurting somebody else, do what they want, is super important. I think it's the core essence of the American dream, and I think at times we as a people get confused about it. I mean, I think one of the things that you see come up in various places, and people talk about it under different labels. Sometimes they talk about it as a lack of personal responsibility and other kinds of labels, but what it really is, is is I think people should, you know, carefully reread the first part of the Declaration of Independence because I think sometimes we as a society start to get confused and think that we have a right to happiness. But if you read the Declaration of Independence, it talks about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody has a right to happiness. You should have a right to pursue it, and I think the core of that is liberty.

How do we get young people re-engaged with government service? Well, I think one thing— and I look at this at Amazon too, so I don't think it's just government service. I think a lot of these government organizations are large organizations, and large organizations have a set of problems. And I worry about this at Amazon. I want us to have have the scope and capabilities of a large organization, but the spirit and heart of a small startup company. And I think that large organizations, one of the things that happens is that the rate of the decision-making velocity goes down, and it gets hard for large organizations to make decisions quickly. It's trivial for a 50-person startup person startup, they make decisions like this. But a 500,000-person company like Amazon or a giant government agency, there's a lot of levels of review and different things, and it can really slow. And by the way, that young people don't want to work at a company with a slow decision-making process. It's just not as fun as working at a startup company or somewhere else where— so I think you can do that, and even in a large organization organization, I think if you— if the leadership— this is all about leadership— if the leadership focuses on increasing the decision-making velocity of the organization, you will get— everybody will be happier. It's more fun. Everybody will be happier at work, and you'll get younger people because that's what they want. You can also do— every single person who works in a large company, you get to decide, are you going to help increase the decision-making velocity? Are you going to bring energy to the room? We all know, we all have those people, we work with them. As soon as they walk in the room, the whole room, the energy level goes up. Somehow they bring energy to that conference room. And we also all work with people who are the opposite. Like, the second they walk in the room, the whole room deflates. And you don't want to be that second guy. You want to be that first guy, and you— and we all get to choose that. We all get to decide that. So anyway, I think you can do it in big organizations, and I think one of the things that makes big organizations less attractive to young people is just sometimes we're slow, and you can fight that and you can fix it.

Once you are looking at the odds in a realistic way, it's very important for entrepreneurs to be realistic. If you believe on that first day while you're writing the business plan that there's a 70% chance that the whole thing will fail, then that kind of relieves the pressure of self-doubt. It's sort of like, I don't have any doubt about whether we're going to fail. That's the likely outcome. It just is. To pretend that it's not will lead you to do strange and unnatural things. Things. So we— and what you do with those early investment dollars, so if you have $300,000 and then you have $1 million, what you do with those early precious capital resources is you go about systematically trying to eliminate risk. So you pick whatever you think the biggest problems are and you try to eliminate them one at a time. And that's how small companies get a little bit bigger and then a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger until finally at a certain stage you reach a transition where you have— where the company has more control over its future destiny. You know, when a company is very tiny, it needs a tremendous amount of not only hard work but as we talked about earlier, luck. As a company gets bigger, it starts to become a little more stable where if the— you know, at a certain point in time, the company has a much bigger influence over its future outcome. It needs a lot less luck, and instead it needs the hard work. And at that point, in a way, at that point there's a little bit more pressure because then if you fail, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

The heart of entrepreneurship in some ways is about risk-taking, but I think that people, many I think people misperceive what good entrepreneurs do. Good entrepreneurs don't like risk. They seek to reduce risk. So they are, you know, you kind of, starting a company is already risky, and then you systematically eliminate risk step by step in those early days until you can get a company. You need a lot of, believe me, you know, you need a lot of luck in all endeavors in life, and certainly Amazon has had, planetary alignment of the highest order. We're, you know, lots of luck in our, in our history. But you, but you also need to systematically identify risks. And then as the company gets bigger and more robust, you can start taking risks again. But in those early days, a lot of it is about, okay, we have a good idea. How do we reduce risk? I like time.

I don't—

I'm not efficient with my time. Because efficiency— there's an embedded efficient— there's an embedded assumption when you're being efficient, and the embedded assumption is that you know where you're going. And I like to wander because it's wandering that allows you to invent and to explore and to follow your curiosity. But wandering is very time-consuming, and so If I could have one more thing, it would just be more time.

We got this company just about ready to launch, and we're looking at it, and looking at this little tiny fulfillment center.

We were here by then in this building. We had a basement fulfillment center.

To call it a fulfillment center was very grand. There's a lot of puffery. It was 400 square feet, which is about the size of a one-car garage, and we launched this business and we're looking at it and we didn't know if anybody would order from us. We really didn't. And in fact, one of the software engineers looked at this little space and he said, "I can't figure out whether this is incredibly optimistic or hopelessly pathetic." And indeed we didn't know. We had no idea whether anybody would want to buy things in this way. The business plan called for generating sales very slowly as customers changed their attitudes The original business plan, which I thought was very optimistic at the time, called for Amazon.com to generate $70 million in sales in the year 2001. We actually generated in excess of $3 billion in sales in the year 2001. And we knew, by the way, that we were really on to something in those first 30 days. In the first 30 days, we got orders from all 50 states and 45 different countries with not not a dollar of advertising, just all word of mouth. The first year we didn't spend anything on advertising. All of it was word of mouth. And that really forged the company as a— that we were going to focus on customer experience because we saw the power of word of mouth so very, very clearly in those early days. There's something great about word of mouth online, by the way, and feedback from customers, which is that email turns off the politeness gene in the human being. It's wonderful. So people actually tell you what they really think, usually in all caps. And so we get lots of info and feedback from our customers, and we try to use it well.

Blue Origin is a space company that's developing a vertical takeoff, vertical landing space vehicle. And so it takes off on its tail like a normal rocket and then comes comes back and lands on its tail like a Buck Rogers rocket. It's designed to be reusable. We've built our first development vehicle. We've built our second development vehicle. We're right now working on our third development vehicle. Great team of engineers located in Seattle. Another team of people test and operations in West Texas where we do our flights. And it's proceeding along very nicely. I'm hopeful that this third development vehicle will be our last, but we can't know for sure. And then we will build our operational vehicle and start taking people to suborbital mission. We'll sell tickets. The long-term goal of Blue Origin is to not only do suborbital but also orbital and to democratize space travel so that anybody anybody who wants to go into space can afford to do so. You need reusability. So when you go look at any approach that doesn't have reusability, it's never going to be low cost. There are only two problems with space travel today. It's too expensive and it's too dangerous. Other than that, it's fine. So we hope to solve those two problems. And if you want to solve those problems and have a space spacefaring species, you need to, you need to practice. And you can't practice with expendable vehicles. It's like, you know, it's flying your, you know, you get on a 747 with a bunch of other passengers, fly to Hawaii, and then throw the whole plane away. It's just a bad, it's a bad cost structure. And so we need reusability. So you have to How do you get the vehicle back? And one of the ways to get it back is to put wings on it, and then you can land it on a runway. Another way to get the vehicle back is to land it vertically under, under rocket power. And both techniques have advantages and disadvantages. One of the things I like about vertical landing is if you get it to work, it's very scalable. It scales to very, very large size, whereas wings sort of, you know, they top out a bit. What do you see as the biggest challenges or risk in operating in the space domain? Well, let's start with the fundamental principle. You never want a fair fight. That's for a boxing ring. Outside of a boxing ring, a fair fight is just bad strategy, and it means you didn't prepare properly. And as you pointed out, this nation has enjoyed incredible space dominance for so long, and it's changing because, because other, other, some of our our potential adversaries are getting very sophisticated. And so how, what for me, or if I were in your shoes, the way I would think about this is in this new era, how are we going to maintain space dominance? What does it really mean? And you're gonna need some fundamental capabilities. You have to be able to go to space more frequently with less lead time.

If you looked at what you've brought and the legacy of innovation, how would you describe that?

Well, I think what, you know, Amazon's—

what I would hope Amazon's legacy would be is Earth's most customer-centric company. What we have always wanted to do is raise the standard for what it means to be customer-centric. To such a degree that other organizations, whether they be other companies or whether they be hospitals or government agencies, whatever the organization is, they should look at Amazon as a role model and say, how can we be as customer-centric as Amazon?

Even competitors, I imagine, right?

Hopefully competitors as well.

But if we could make, you know, if that could be our legacy, that we kind of raise the general idea of what it means to be customer-centric, that would be a huge accomplishment.

It would be accomplishing a mission that's much bigger than ourselves. Directionally, our goal, and this has been true for— it's kind of a cultural trait at Amazon— our focus is going to be to be the low-cost provider of these kinds of high-quality services.

So as As we are able to get smarter, as we're able to, you know, figure out how to do things more efficiently, we are gonna be returning those cost efficiencies to customers in the form of lower prices on things like EC2.

There are other things that, you know, that it may be that we need some instance sizes—

sizes that are smaller than what we have today.

So the smallest instance we have today is 10 cents per compute hour.

And we're also looking, you know, always at, you know, returning some of the cost savings we get on things like bandwidth charges, disk space charges, and so on and so on.

The good news is that those things do get cheaper over time. And as we get more efficient and organized, we'll be able to return, I think, quite a bit of savings to customers. The advice that I would give entrepreneurs is— and I do this, I meet sometimes with young aspiring entrepreneurs and, you know, college grads— and I have— the main thing is don't chase the hot new thing, whatever it is. It's so hard to catch something something that everybody already knows is hot. Instead, position yourself and wait for the wave to come to you. And the way you— and so then you would say, well, how are you— where, position myself where? And I think what you do, position yourself in something that captures your curiosity, something that, you know, that you're missionary about. I tell people when we acquire companies, I'm always trying to figure out, is this person who leads this company a missionary or a mercenary? And I don't like mercenaries, and I don't like mercenary cultures. And the missionary is building the product, building the service because they love the customer, because they love the product, because they love the service. The mercenary is building the product or the service so that they can flip the company and make money. And one of the great paradoxes is that the missionaries usually end up making more money than the mercenaries anyway.

A lot of people, and I'm just not one of them, believe that you should live for the now. I think what you do is you think about the, the great expanse of time ahead of you and try to make sure that you're planning for that in a way that's going to leave you ultimately satisfied. So This is just my— this is the way it works for me. And I mean, this is— everybody needs to find that for themselves. So I think there are a lot of paths to satisfaction, and you need to find one that works, works for you.

It's hard to have conviction about whether something will work, and the only thing that I can offer— every once in a while you get this a crisp moment of clarity where you just know some things are going to work if you are persistent enough. And those— I think you can only do that if you start with the customer and work backwards. I don't think you can build that kind of clarity on what your competitors are doing or what kinds of technologies are available in the marketplace. It can— that kind of clarity can only come from a deep understanding of customer needs. And the good thing about customer needs is they change slowly in time, so you can count on them. I know for a fact that 10 years from now Amazon's customers will still want low prices. I know for a fact that Amazon's customers 10 years from now will still want fast delivery. They'll still want vast selection. And it's— there's no chance that 10 years from now somebody Somebody will come to me and say, "Jeff, I love Amazon. I just wish you delivered a little more slowly." So, because those customer needs are so foundational, sometimes around those things you can get real clarity, and then you can invest, and you can know that your investments will pay dividends for customers over time. Whenever you empower people with new tools, you get unexpected and beautiful results. And that's that we're seeing that we're— I think we're still in the early innings of seeing the kinds of change that AWS can bring to a whole group of entrepreneurs, including entrepreneurs inside companies.

Is there a particular methodology to that? Because I think that's really important, especially for young people to actually do that self-assessment and find that passion. Do you have any advice?

I think many, many kids and many grownups do figure out over time what their passions are. And sometimes we let our— I don't think it's that hard. I think what happens though sometimes is that we let our intellectual selves overrule those passions. And so that's what needs to be guarded against.

Kids are very good about knowing what their passions are.

It's a gift if you can keep your childlike sense of wonder, and it helps with creativity. It helps to have fun. You know, you laugh more and play more if you keep that childlike sense of wonder.

And then the other thing I would advise any entrepreneur or large business or large organization, you know, like a government organization, is you need to identify your big ideas, and there should only be 2 or 3 of them. And then if a senior leader a senior leader, the, the main job of a senior leader is to identify 2 or 3 important ideas and then to enforce great execution against those big ideas. And the good news is that the big ideas are usually incredibly easy to identify. You shouldn't need to think about them very much. You already know what they are. Let me give you an example. For Amazon, the consumer business, the 3 The 3 big ideas are low prices, fast delivery, and vast selection. You don't need, you know, it's not the kind, and the way you know that they're the big ideas is because they're so obvious. The big ideas should be obvious. And by the way, it's very hard to maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times. So little things can distract you from the obvious. But you have to back up and say these are the 3 big ideas. How do we always deliver things a little faster? How do we always reduce our cost structure so that we can have prices that are a little lower? And the good thing about these big ideas is they will be stable in time. So I know for a fact that 10 years from now customers are still going to like low prices no matter what happens with technology and everything else No matter what happens, people are gonna like faster delivery. It is impossible for me to imagine a scenario where 10 years from now a customer comes to me and says, Jeff, I love Amazon, I just wish you delivered a little more slowly. This is so inconceivable that you have— you can have great conviction as a leader to continue to put energy into driving speed of delivery. And whatever Whenever you're, you know, in AWS, I know that customers, they like low prices, they like availability, they don't want the services to be down, they like data security. It's not very hard to figure out what the big ideas are, and then you can keep putting energy into those things, and you spin up those flywheels, and they'll still be paying you dividends 10 years from now. Climate change gives us a powerful reason to invest in nature. In too many parts of the world, nature is already flipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source. This is a profound and urgent danger to us all. Now, in this critical year, and what we all know is the decisive decade, we must all stand together to protect our world. World. This $3 billion in pledges will drive a new threefold nature agenda for the Bezos Earth Fund, focused simultaneously on conservation, restoration, and food transformation. We must conserve what we still have, we must restore what we've lost, and we must grow what we need to live without without degrading the planet for future generations to come. The question is simple. Will we in this room work together, do the hard work together, to gift our children and grandchildren an improving natural world? I know the answer is yes. And I look forward to working with all of you on this important and rewarding journey. Thank you.

For some incredible Elon Musk motivation, watch the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it.

Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. Young people globally want to be like Elon Musk. What's your advice to them? I think that probably they shouldn't want to be you. It— I think it sounds better than it is.