Money Heist | Business | Mindset of Jeff Bezos - Talks on Business, Family, Wealth & Growth Strategy
MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together jeff welcome to berlin thanks it's great to be here i have to tell you when we were sitting in the first row just a couple of minutes ago when the heartbeat uh was there jeff looked at me and i was breathing in and out and he looked at me and asked matthias are you nervous he said yes i'm always nervous on occasions like that then he said so am i i said really the richest man in the world is nervous because he received the axon springer award so be a bit forgiving we are both nervous um jeff we are so glad uh to really celebrate you tonight uh most importantly apart from all the reasons that we heard because you are a role model for other young founders for entrepreneurs who really have great ideas crazy ideas unconventional ideas and need encouragement to simply do it and go for it and you have shown it to the world so that is really for me the most important thing and in that context the first question you used to work in new york as an investment banker so an investment bank is actually the exact opposite of an entrepreneur he's delegating risks to other people and basically how did you find out how did you think that you should move from investment banking to really launch a company um i think i'd always wanted to do it even since i was a kid um had the idea one of the people who every time i look at something it looks like it could be improved you know there's something wrong with it so i go through like wow how could this restaurant be better how could and you know and so i've always had that kind of idea by the way before we really get into this the how about this amazing production that you and your team have put together this is truly incredible for its originality like these boxes that you were filming live that's just crazy cool so thank you um truly it's incredible but i think the great thing about uh humans in general is we're always improving things and so entrepreneurs and inventors and you know if they follow their curiosity and they follow their passions and they figure something out and then they figure how to make it better and they're never satisfied and and you need to harness that in my view you need to harness that energy primarily on your customers instead of on your competitors and so where i see i sometimes see companies and even young small startup companies entrepreneurs go awry is they start to pay more attention to their competition than they do to their customers and i think that that um i think that in big mature industries that can be that might be a winning approach in some cases kind of close following let other people be the pioneers and you know uh and and go down the blind alleys there's many things that that a new inventive company tries won't work um and so those mistakes and errors and failures do cost real money um and and and so maybe in a mature industry where growth rates are slow and change is very slow but as you see in the world more and more there aren't very many mature industries change is happening everywhere you know we see it in the automobile industry with self-driving cars and but you could go right down the line of every industry and you would see it but do you have any idea where where your ambition really uh comes from what was driving you um i i really don't know you know my i've been passionate about certain things uh forever um and i fell in love with computers in fourth grade i got very lucky um my elementary school had a teletype that got connected to a mainframe computer that some business in downtown houston donated a little bit of computer time to this is you know you can picture these teletypes they had the punch tape and they had a 300 baud modem you would dial up the phone and put it in the cradle and so we had some time sharing on that mainframe computer and none of the teachers knew how to use it so me and two other kids stayed after school and sort of figured out how to do it and figured out and kind of taught ourselves programming from books i think one thing that is um i got very lucky early in my childhood look we all get um gifts uh we get certain things in our life that are that we're very lucky about and one of the most powerful one is who your early role models are you know you could they could be it was your grand grandfather it was in a big sense my mom and dad but my grandfather too and you know i had my mom had me when she was uh 17 years old and she was still in high school in albuquerque new mexico and this is in 1964. i can assure you that being a pregnant uh teenager in high school was not cool in albuquerque new mexico at that time and uh so it's in in so it was a very it was difficult for her my grandfather went to bat for her and when they tried to kick her out of school and you know he they're they're incredible i had so the gift i had is i had this incredible family could you describe a little bit the role of your grandfather because john has mentioned it i think it was really important it was super important for me and um i spent an unusual amount of time with my grandparents and especially with my grandfather on the ranch so he had a ranch in south texas and i would spend my summers there from age four to 16. and they when i was four they were taking me for the summer to kind of give my parents a break you know it's sort of because they were so young um and it was useful i was a handful i'm sure and uh and anyway he he he he created the illusion for me when i was four years old that i was helping him on the ranch which of course could not have been true but i believed it and um and then as by the time i was 16 of course i was actually helping on the ranch i you know i could i can fix prolapsed cattle i can you know we did all of our own veterinary work some of the cattle even survived um and we fixed windmills and laid you know water pipelines and built fences and barns and fixed that fixed the bulldozer that you guys talked about and so one of the things that's so interesting about that lifestyle and about my grandfather is he did everything himself you know he didn't call a vet if one of the animals was sick he figured out what to do himself and uh so what does it mean no delegation being resourceful i think is the you know that you can always you can't if there's a problem there's a solution and of course as you as you mature and and get into the business world and anything you do on a team you very quickly realize that it's not about just your own resourcefulness it's about team resourcefulness and how does that work and um but that attitude of my grandfather's influence was very but he was full of wisdom john mentioned the story about the words my grandfather gave to me at one point of it's it's harder to be kind than clever that story the the slightly longer version of that story because this was really powerful wisdom is that i made my grandmother burst into tears and the way i did it was we were driving on a long road trip and she was a chain smoker and this was i was probably i don't know 10 years old so this was around 1974 and it was in a period of time where there were heavy radio advertisements sort of anti-smoking radio advertisements trying to convince people to stop smoking and one of the advertisements had this figure in it it said something like um every puff of a cigarette takes so many minutes off of your life i think it was two minutes but i can't remember every puff of a cigarette so i sat there in the back seat on this long car ride and calculated how many years she had taken off of her life and in my 10 year old mind i had been extremely clever to do this and so when i was finished with my arithmetic i um proudly announced to her how many years she had taken off of her life and i got a reaction i did not expect with her bursting into tears and so my grandfather stopped the car and he uh took me out of the car and i had no idea what was about to happen because he had never said a crossword to me and i thought is he might actually be angry with me but he wasn't he took me out just because so she we had some privacy from her and he said this these incredible words you're gonna he said you're gonna figure out one day that it's harder to be kind than clever wonderful actually your brother MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together i you know i i have i laugh uh easily but but he he is um really very this is very funny and my sister too we're all very close and i have my mother uh to thank for that uh because she worked hard to make sure as we grew up that we stayed close together and she takes all the grandkids for one week every summer so that me and my sister and our spouses can go on a trip together so we end up spending a lot of time together for me the most moving image that we saw tonight is the one that john showed where you and mackenzie are preparing the table the famous table which is very moving because it shows how he really started from the very scratch i mean and also it illustrates symbolically that it was the the the launch of amazon was really something that you did uh together oh yeah could you describe a little bit what mckenzie's role was well first of all um mckenzie you know she had married this stable guy working on wall street and a year after we got married i went to her and said i want to quit my job move across the country and start this internet bookstore and mackenzie of course like everybody that i explained this to her first question was what's the internet because nobody knew this is 1994.
and um but but she but even before she could say what's the internet she said great let's go because she wanted to support it and she knew that i had always had this passion for invention and and and and starting a company and so uh again i think you know mckenzie is an example of this um but it's talking about with my my mom and my dad who's a cuban immigrant and you have he came to the u.s when he was 16 and refugee camp in the everglades they are uh they're so loving and supportive that when you have loving and supportive people in your life like mackenzie my parents my grandfather my grandmother you end up being able to take risk because i think it's one of those things you know it doesn't you kind of know somebody's got your back um and so it's just i don't even think you're thinking about it logically it's an emotional thing it's so interesting you think that unconditional love if you feel and experience unconditional love it i think it helps you take risks and by the way i think it's probably true of all kinds of risks in life not just starting a business i mean life is full of different risks and i think that the when you think about the things that you will regret when you're 80 they are almost always the things that you did not do there are acts of omission they're not you're not very rarely are you gonna regret something that you did and it failed and didn't work or whatever but the acts of omission the thing you know it's not and again i'm not just talking about business things it's like you know uh i loved that person and i never told them and then you know 50 years later you'd be like why didn't i tell her you know why didn't i go after it so that's the kind of that's the kind of life regret that is very hard to be happy about when you're telling yourself in a private moment that story of your life so i think it's it's anyway i have been i've been won that lottery i won that lottery of having um so many people in my life um who have given me that unconditional love and and i do think you know mackenzie's definitely one of those and so we moved and then mackenzie who has basically no uh skill in this area at all really i mean you're the least suited person for this she did our accounting um for like the first year was it the first year something like that and um she did it well i mean that's really that's what's amazing my wife is a is a novelist she's won the american book award um you know uh tony morrison the nobel prize winning author who was mackenzie's teacher princeton so did she said on charlie on the charlie rose show that mckenzie tony morrison the nobel prize winner said about mckenzie that mackenzie uh was her best student ever um and so anyway she's mackenzie is a very talented novelist but she is not an accountant but she pulled it off and then you know again you know just we all get done what we need to get done did she then suggest that you focus on book business at the beginning being an author no i was your idea i picked books it is true you know she's a big reader i'm a big reader but the but that's not why i picked books i picked books because there were more items in the book category than any other category and so you could build universal selection there were 3 million in 1994 when i was pulling this idea together the the the three million different books active and in print at any given time the largest physical bookstores only had about 150 000 different titles and so i could see how you could make a bookstore online with universal selection every book ever printed even the out of print ones was the original vision for the company and so that's why books and when did you know that amazon is going to be going to be something way bigger than just a bookstore well i knew that the books strangely because i was very prepared for this to take a really long time i knew that the books um business was going to be successful in the first 30 days i was shocked at how many books we sold we were ill-prepared um you know i had we had all the we had only 10 people in the company at that time and most of them were software engineers and so everybody including me and the sufferers were all like packing boxes we didn't even have packing tables and down we were on our hands and knees on a concrete floor packing the boxes and about you know one or two in the morning i said to one of my uh software engineering colleagues i said um you know paul um we uh this is killing my knees we need to get knee pads and paul looked at me and he's like jeff we need to get packing tables and and i i was like oh my god that is such a good idea the next day i bought packing tables and it doubled our productivity and probably saved our backs and our knees too but nevertheless i mean amazon had serious crisises in 2002 you went almost bankrupt so what went wrong and what did you learn from that we had so many there have been so many um we haven't had any existential crisis knock on wood i find i don't want to jinx anything um but we've had a lot of uh kind of dramatic events i remember um there early on we only had 125 employees when barnes noble who the big united states bookseller opened their online website to compete against us barnesandnoble.com we had about a two-year window we opened in 95 they opened in 97 and at that time all of the headlines and the funniest were about how we were about to be destroyed by this much larger company we had 125 employees and 60 million dollars a year in annual sales 60 million with an m and that uh and barnes noble at the time had 30 000 employees and about 3 billion dollars in sales so they were giant we were tiny and we had limited resources and the the headlines were very negative about amazon and the the one that's most similar memorable was just amazon.toast and um and so i called an all hands meeting which was not hard to do with just 125 people and we got in a room and because it was so um scary for all of us this idea that now we finally had a big competitor that literally everybody's parents were calling and saying you know are you okay it's usually the moms calling and asking their children are you gonna be okay so and i said look you know it it's okay to be afraid um but don't be afraid of our competitors because they're never gonna send us any money be afraid of our customers and if we just stay focused on them in in in in instead of obsessing over this big competitor that we just got that we'll be fine um and i really do believe that i think that if you stay focused then the more drama there is and everything else no matter what the drama is whatever the external distraction is the the what's your your response to it should be to double down on the customer satisfying them not just satisfying them delighting them yeah today amazon uh is employing uh 566 000 people you're probably the biggest drop creator of uh recent times at the same time you're aggressively criticized by unions and by media for paying low wages for inappropriate working conditions how do you deal with these accusations well first of all when any criticism my approach to criticism and what i teach and preach inside amazon is when you're criticized first look in a mirror and decide are your critics right if they're right change don't list no but not in this case but we've had critics be right before and we've changed we have we've we have made mistakes um and you know i can go i can go through a long list of probably the one of the early most painful ones it's it's so stupid it's hard to believe how we ever did it but um in the early on with the kindle maybe the first year of the kindle or the second year of the kindle we had um accidentally illegally sold um for given away i guess copies of the famous novel 1984 because it had a complicated copyright history it was in copyright in the u.s and not in the uk or something strange like this so it was in the public domain but only in certain geographies and we had screwed that up and the the somehow and this is this is a kind of mistake that only a corporation can make an individual can't make this mistake um because somehow it's like it happens at the at the intersections of the different teams so you've got the legal department saying oh crap we've made this mistake and and you've got the books team anyway the answer that the the company came up with was to without any notice or warning just electronically go into everybody's kindle who had downloaded that book and just disappear it MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together so it'd be as if we walked into your bedroom in the middle of the night found your bookshelf and just took that book away and um and so it was a it's a we were rightly criticized for that it was uh and and we we responded to that on the condition the issue of of working conditions i'm very proud of our working conditions and i'm very proud of the wages that we pay you know in germany we employ 16 000 people we pay at the high end of the range for uh any comparable work so is it a union fight because the union wants to make sure that you are unionized or what what is the real substance of the code it's a good question i you know and this is in my longer version of how to deal with critics because there are two kinds of critics uh there are well-meaning critics um who uh you know they they're worried it's not gonna work but they do want it to work and so it could be i can give you example customer reviews would be one of those um when we first did customer reviews 20 years ago publishers were some book publishers were not happy about it because some of them were negative and so it was very controversial practice at that time but we thought it was right and so we stuck to our guns and and and had a deep kill on that and didn't didn't didn't change um but there's a second kind of critic which is the self-interested critic and they come in all shapes and sizes you know they're so they can be any kind of institution competitors um of course and so when you are doing something a new way and if customers embrace the new way what's going to happen is incumbents who are practicing the older way are not going to like you and they're going to be self-interested critics and so you do need as you're looking yourself in the mirror to try and tease those two things apart you know in our view you know we have very we have we have workers councils of course and we have very good communications with our employees we don't believe that we need a union to be an intermediary between us and our employees but of course at the end of the day it's always the employee's choice and and that's how it should be so we're but for sure we would be very naive to believe that we're not going to be criticized i mean that's just part of the terrain you have to accept that one that i tell people is if you're going to be if you're going to do anything new or innovative you have to be willing to be misunderstood if you cannot if you can't afford to be misunderstood then for goodness sake don't do anything new or innovative maggie thatcher said leadership is not to be pleased by the moment um perfect but your most prominent critic at the moment is the president of the united states uh people are even saying that he may be willing to prepare initiatives to break up amazon because it's too big it's too successful it's too dominant in too many sectors or for very other reasons first of all is this scenario of a break of something that you take seriously or uh you think it's just a fantasy for me again this is one of the things where you know i focus on and ask our teams to focus on what we can control and i expect whether it's you know the current u.s administration or any other government
agency anywhere in the world amazon is now a large corporation and i expect us to be scrutinized we should be scrutinized i think all large institutions should be scrutinized and examined it's it's reasonable and um what's you know one thing to note about us is that we have uh we have we have gotten big in absolute terms only very recently so we've always been growing fast in percentage terms but in in 2010 just eight years ago we had 30 000 employees so in the last eight years we've gone from 30 000 employees to 560 000 employees so for us it's kind of you know in my mind i'm still delivering the packages to the post office myself you see what i'm saying i still i still have all the memories of you know hoping that one day we could afford a forklift and so obviously that's my my intellectual brain knows that's just not the case anymore we have 560 000 employees all over the world and and i know um we should be scrutinized and i think it's true big government institutions should be scrutinized big non-profit institutions should be scrutinized big universities should be scrutinized it just makes sense it's it's a and that's by the way why the work that the washington post and the other great newspapers around the world do is so important because they're often the ones doing that initial scrutiny even before the government agencies do but in a way the general sentiment towards the big innovative tech companies has changed i mean facebook google apple amazon they used to be seen as the nice guys in t-shirts that are saving the world and now they are sometimes portrayed as the kind of evil of the world um and the debate about the big four or the big five the economist is suggesting a split up other powerful people like josh soros are giving speeches in davos um the eu commission is taking pretty tough positions here do you think that there is a change in mindset in the society and what should the the big tech companies what should amazon learn from that or do with that i i think i do sense i mean i think again i think it's a natural instinct i think we humans especially in the western world and especially inside democracies are wired to be uh skeptical and mindful of large institutions of any kind we're skeptical i'm sure we're skeptical of our government always in the united states state governments local governments i assume it's similar in germany it's healthy um because they're big powerful institutions you know the the police the military whatever it is it doesn't mean that you don't trust them or that they're bad or evil or anything like that they're just they have they have a lot of power and control and so you want to inspect them maybe that's a better word you kind of want to always be inspecting them and i think if you look at the big tech companies they have gotten large enough that it that they need they're going to be inspected and and by the way it's not personal i think where some of the you can go astray on this if you're the founder of a company one of these big tech companies or any other big institution if you if you go astray on this you might start to take it personally like why why are you inspecting me um you know and and i think that you know i i i wish that um that people would just say yes it's fine the whole attitude towards data protection and privacy has always been different between europe and the united states but is also at the moment in the context of cambridge analytica changing in the united states um what are the consequences for a company like amazon um i don't you know my view on on this for for amazon is it is hysterical or is it inappropriate no i honestly i think this is one of the great questions of our age you know we have i think of the internet so the internet is this big new powerful technology it's horizontal it affects every industry and then if you think of even more broadly tech and machine learning and big data and all these these kinds of things these are big horizontal powerful technologies and in my view so we've been at scale the internet is quite old at this point it's been around a long time but at scale it's really only been around you know 10 or 15 years it's so it's because you know go back in time 20 years it was tiny and so at scale the interest around only 10 or 15 years and we haven't learned as a civilization as a human species we haven't learned how to operate it yet so we're still we're we as a as a civilization are still figuring that out and so it has fantastic it gives us fantastic capabilities i mean you know the fact that i can look up almost anything on wikipedia in five seconds is an unbelievable capability that just simply didn't exist 20 years ago and and so on and so on and so on there's so many good things but we're also finding out that that these powerful tools enable some very bad things too like uh you know letting authoritarian governments interfere in free democratic elections around the world this is an incredibly scary thing so you're advocating a balance of let's say entrepreneurs who are really moving their businesses forward politicians and regulators who are defining a certain framework society journalists who are asking questions amazon's role in this which is what you asked me is i think first of all we have a duty on behalf of of society to try and help educate uh any regulators you know give them our point of view on this sincerely without any cynicism or skepticism this is what we believe and then um but it's not ultimately our decision so we will uh we'll work with any set of regulations that we're given ultimately society decides that we will follow those rules regardless of the impact they have on our business and we will find a new way if need be to delight customers so we will always be again some of these things what you have to worry about is the problem what i would not want to see happen is um that is you don't want to block invention and innovation so that's always the the one of the things one of the unintended consequences often of regulation is that it really favors the incumbents now amazon at this point is an incumbent so maybe i should be happy about that but but i wouldn't be because i think for society you really want to see continued progress you really want to see so to the degree that we have regulation you want to be sure that it is incenting innovation and not blocking it while at the same time but data security privacy um encryption you know how do you uh uh how do you safeguard people's physical safety against terrorists and bad actors all over the world and how do you balance that against privacy these are very challenging questions and we are running out of time but we're not going to answer them no in even a few years i mean i think it's going to be an ongoing thing for but data security and privacy is going to be a competitive advantage for companies or disadvantages they're not respectful with that i 100 agree with this and i think you know with customers one of the reasons we have been able to extend into new business areas and first new product categories going way back we just sold books and then we started selling music and dvds and electronics and toys and so on and then we've extended into electronic reading with kindle the reason customers have been receptive in large part to our new initiatives is because we have worked hard to earn trust with them earning trust with customers is is a valuable business asset and if you uh mistreat their data they will know they will figure it out customers are very smart you should never underestimate customers people are getting hungry but i have some brief questions left you aren't preparing a second headquarter it's going to be in the u.s why didn't you consider to do it in europe i wanted it in a time zone either and we looked at canada us and mexico um and toronto europe's decision it's not against here okay i'm glad to hear that when you buy when you bought the post uh there were people saying well that's just a personal toy he wants to have some political influence other people thought that that is a new strategic element of jeff's strategy yeah so what was it i yeah of course you can explain things to people but you can't understand things to people and so i can i i can you know uh all i can do is is say what really my thought process was and i was not looking to buy a newspaper i had i had it had never even crossed my mind um and so when the opportunity came up uh because i only came up because i had known don graham at that point for more than 15 years any of you who are lucky enough to know don knows that he is the most honorable gentleman that you will ever meet you know don very well um he's a remarkable guy and he so loved the post that he believed even though this was a huge personal sacrifice for him because they've been in his family for so long that he needed to find a new home for it um i think he was i think he didn't there were certain purchasers he was hoping would not end up buying the post um because he wanted it to remain independent um he when so when he approached me uh with this i said you know i'm the wrong guy because i don't know anything about the newspaper business and he said that's okay because we have a lot of people at the post who know a lot about the newspaper business and what we really need is somebody who knows something more about the internet and the post was in very difficult financial position at that time and so for me i had to decide what it was hopeless and i didn't believe it was hopeless i thought i was optimistic that the post could be turned around um and then second i had to decide did i want to put my own time and energy into this and and that for me i just had to ask the simple question is it an important institution and the answer to that question is yes it was very obvious to me as soon as i thought about it that way it's like okay i think i actually can help i can help in two ways i can provide financial resources while this turnaround occurs and i can also help with my internet knowledge and then is it worth is it an institution worth saving you bet it's the it's the most important newspaper in the most important capital city in the western world crazy not to not to save that newspaper i'm going to be very happy when i'm 80 that i made that decision i assume that you have seen steven spielberg's film the post i have yeah i've seen it a couple of times so what is the lesson that you learned from that and could you imagine also to buy and save other newspapers no i i get that i get that request uh monthly yeah i get i get i i really do and i and i yes and i i tell them i know i'm the post is it for me i'm not in i'm not interested in buying other newspapers but i do i do i watch that movie and um you know it's it's helpful uh i love that movie and also reading katherine graham's memoir which one pulitzer prize is an amazing book um because it it gets me ready you know i i as the owner of the post i know that at times the post is going to write stories they're going to make very powerful people very unhappy are you upset if they are writing critical stories about amazon which no they do no i'm not upset at all when i first bought the poster and i'd never i would be humiliated to interfere i would be so embarrassed i would i would turn bright red and it has nothing to do with um i don't even get so far i just don't want to for me it would feel icky it would feel gross it would feel it would be one of those things when i'm 80 years old i would be so unhappy with myself if i interfered why would i i want that paper to be independent um so it's we have a fantastic editor in marty barron we have a fantastic publisher in fred ryan the head of our technology team a guy named shylash is fantastic they don't need my help in in the newsroom for sure um first of all that's also an expert's job it would be like me getting on the airplane and going up to the front of the plane and the pilots should move aside let me do this you know no you are not getting an airplane but you are sending rockets to the space could you share with us briefly the best segue ever could you share with us briefly the vision of blue origin and the idea of kind of space tourism with renewable rockets super important to me and if i i believe on the longest time frame and i really hear i'm thinking of a time frame of of a couple hundred years um so over many decades i believe and i get increasing conviction with this with every passing year the blue origin the space company is the most important work i'm doing um and so there is a whole plan uh for blu-ray retail uh online uh e-commerce uh publishing uh that's all less relevant yes than the facebook and i'll tell you why and and so first of all of course i'm interested in space because i'm passionate about it and i've been studying it and thinking about it since i'm a five-year-old boy but that is not why i'm pursuing this work i'm pursuing this work because i i believe if we don't we will eventually end up with a civilization of stasis which i find very demoralizing i don't want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in a civilization of stasis we all enjoy a dynamic civilization of growth and change and and let's think about what powers that we are not uh really energy constrained and so let me give you just a couple of numbers if you take your body your metabolic rate as a human as just an animal you eat food that's your metabolism you burn about a hundred watts your power your your your body is about a hundred it's the same as a 100 watt light bulb we're incredibly efficient your brain is about 60 watts of that amazing and so um MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together but you know but if you extrapolate in developed countries where we use a lot of energy on average in developed countries our civilizational metabolic rate is 11 000 watts so our if in a natural state you know where we're animals we're only using 100 watts in our actual developed world state we're using 11 000 watts and it's growing for a century or more it's been compounding at a few percent a year our energy usage as a civilization now if you take baseline energy usage globally across the whole world and compound it at just a few percent a year for just a few hundred years you have to cover the entire surface of the earth and solar cells so that's the re that's the real energy crisis and it's happening soon and by soon i mean within just a few hundred years and so we don't actually have that much time so what can you do well you can have a life of stasis where you cap how much energy we get to use you have to work only on efficiency by the way we've always been working on energy efficiency and still we grow our energy usage it's not like we have been squandering energy we have been getting better at using it with every passing decade and still we grow it so stasis would be very bad i think now take the alternative scenario where you move out into the solar system the solar system can easily support a trillion humans and if we had a trillion humans we would have a thousand einsteins and a thousand mozarts and unlimited for all practical purposes resources from solar power and so on why not that's that's the world i want my great grandchildren's great grandchildren to live in and by the way i believe that we will move all heavy in that time frame we will move all heavy industry off of earth and earth will be zoned residential and light industry it will basically be a very beautiful planet we have sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system now and believe me this is the best one it is not even close but jeff when can i buy the first ticket to do a little space we're going to be so that the the first tourism vehicle will uh we may fly we won't be selling tickets yet but we may put humans in it at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year so it's very good and then we're getting very close we've been working from our engineers we're building a very large orbital vehicle we've been working on that for more than five years it'll fly for the first time in 2020 and the key is reusability so you mentioned it the the we cannot this civilization i'm talking about of you know getting comfortable living and working in space and having millions of people and then billions of people and then finally a trillion people in space you can't do that with space vehicles that you use once and then throw away it's a ridiculous costly way to get into space the most recent uh thing that amazon is planning is home robots so i assume it's more than alexa walking so what's the vision behind it which i saw that rumor in the press and i can't comment on that okay i see so it seems to be very serious jeff jeff you are one of the one of the most long-term thinking entrepreneurs if it is about companies and products and services if it is about philanthropy you recently said that you're a very short-term thinker you really want to deal with the now and here yeah can you explain that approach i think that's all yeah and everything and i'm going to end up doing a mixture of things um we started doing in seattle there's a homeless shelter called mary's place run by a woman named marty and MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together and that has really impacted my thinking on this issue because what i'm seeing is that when you of course i'm i'm in favor of all the i mean long-term oriented philanthropy also is a good idea so i'm not against that it's just i'm finding i'm very motivated by the here and now there so seeing you know a lot of the homelessness that mary's place works on is transient homelessness so when you go study homelessness there are a bunch of causes of homelessness uh mental uh incapacity issues are a very hard to cure problem um you know a serious drug addiction a very hard to cure problem um but there's a another kind another bucket of homelessness which is transient homelessness which is you know a woman with kids and the father runs away and he was the only person providing any income and they have no support system they have no family that's transient homelessness you can really help that person and you by the way only need to help them for like six to nine months you get them trained that you get them a job they're perfectly productive members of society last week we had bill gates for dinner here and he said that he has a ridiculous amount of money and it's so hard to find appropriate ways to do good with the money so what does money mean for you being the first person in history that has a net worth of three digit amount of billion the only way that i can see to deploy this much financial resource is by converting my amazon winnings into space travel so that's basically blue origin is expensive enough to be able to use that fortune and i'm currently liquidating about a billion dollars a year of amazon stock to fund blue origin and i plan to continue to do that um uh for a long time so and you know so because you're i mean you're right you're not gonna you're not gonna spend it on like a second you know dinner out you know there's no uh it's you're not you know that's not what we're talking about so so for me i'm very lucky because i feel like i have a mission-driven purpose with blue origin that is i think incredibly important for civilization long term and i am going to use my financial lottery winnings from amazon to fund that with regard to your personal lifestyle there are no guilty pleasures that you are doing unreasonable things with i don't think they're that guilty i mean i i um i have lots of pleasures and you know um we just came back from an amazing uh trip uh with the kids mackenzie and i did she planned the whole thing it was her birthday trip but she planned it all we went to norway for three days and we stayed in an ice hotel um we went dog sledding we uh we uh went to a wolf preserve and actually got to interact with you know uh these timber wolves i mean it was really an incredible uh uh vacation an incredible holiday and all we got it all done in three and a half days so it was really it was amazing wonderful jeff john mentioned that's the last uh question john mentioned that you are an ideal family man yeah your kids are extremely important for you just mentioned that when we spoke earlier if we would talk to your kids where would they criticize their dad they would make fun of my singing oh okay no god no okay no um they would uh make fun of my inability to remember exact words i'm always quoting like churchill or something and getting it wrong you know he's and they're like that's not even close to what churchill said um they would they would probably depending on the moment they might uh criticize my laugh their kids you know but but i i'm lucky i have a very good relationship with him this work-life harmony thing is what i try to teach young employees actually and senior executives at amazon too but especially the people coming i get we're asked about work-life balance all the time and my view is that's a debilitating phrase because it it implies there's a strict trade-off and the reality is if i'm happy at home i come into the office with tremendous energy and if i'm happy at work i come home with tremendous energy and so it actually is a circle it's not a balance and and i think that that is uh is worth everybody paying attention to you want to have you never want to be that guy and we all know we all have a co-worker who is that person who as soon as they come into the meeting they drain all the energy out of the room you can just feel the energy level go that you don't want to be that guy so you want to come into the office and give everybody a kick in their step jeff we thank you very much we we congratulate you for all you have achieved and congratulations very nice thank you that was great MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together MONEY & FAME HEIST: Let's learn & grow together
2021-01-24 06:42
