#374 Rare Jeff Bezos Interview

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/82408d9f299903b8

From day one in his very first shareholder letter Jeff Bezos emphasized
the importance of having the very best team. He wrote
Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been
And we'll continue to be
The single most important element
Of Amazon's success. Jeff's focus on talent.
is just like this quote from Steve Jobs that actually happened
In an interview.
that very same year. Steve gave this interview in nineteen ninety seven.
And Steve said.
I think I've consistently figured out who the really smart people were to hang around with.
You must find extraordinary people.
The key observation is that in most things in life
The dynamic range between average quality and best quality
is at most two to one.
But in the field that I was interested in, I noticed that the dynamic range
between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish.
was fifty or a hundred
to one.
Given that
You're well advised.
to go after the cream of the cream.
You're well advised to build a team
that pursues A plus players, and that is exactly
What Ramp did. Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.
In the last twelve months.
They hired only point
Two three percent.
of the people that applied.
So when you use ramp, you now have access

AI engineers working on your behalf.
twenty four seven to automate and improve.
All of your business's financial operations.
And they do this.
All on a single
platform. The longer you use Ramp
the more efficient your company becomes.
This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography.
You can make a lot of different mistakes.
And still recover if you run an efficient operation.
Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business.
If you're too inefficient.
Ramp helps you.
Run an efficient organization. In the end of that interview
Steve Jobs added, he said a small team
of A plus players can run circles.
Around a giant team.
of B and C players.
From a customer perspective, what does a team of A plus players sound like?
It sounds like this customer review that I read, which said
Ramp is like having a teammate.
who you never need to check in on because they have it handled.
Ramp gives you everything you need to optimize all of your financial operations on a single platform.
Ramp's website is incredible.
Make His she's greatest entrepreneurs proud.
by going to ramp dot com to learn how they can help your business today. That is ramp dot com.
Jeff Bezos just did this interview with Andrew Rossorkin at the deal book summit.
And the interview gave me so much energy.
They actually print it out after I finished listening to it.
I printed out the transcript.
And it's like forty five pages long when you when you print it out. And actually went through the transcript just like every book.
That I cover on the podcast.
So I have all my notes, my highlights, my underlines in there.
And then what I decided to do is I rearranged my outline in order
by topic. So if you listen to the full interview, which I highly recommend that you do.
You're gonna see the same topics appear in different parts of the interview. So I wanna start
With one of my favorite things.
That Jeff Bezos said because
Jeff is one of my favorite living entrepreneurs and he says that retirement is lame.
And they start talking about the fact that he says
The this retirement thing I've turned out to be extremely lame at. So he left Amazon.
He was always working on Blue Origin.
But now he's back working at Amazon. He's gonna talk a lot about what he's doing there.
But he said something that was very fascinating.
The importance of building a company.
That can outlast you.
And then he's gonna talk about why he is so bullish.
on AI and he's got a great
metaphor for what he thinks AI is.
So Sorkin asks.
Bezos he says, Amazon is your baby.
You stepped away from that. What did it feel like?
And Bezos says something that's very fascinating. He says
Even when Amazon was a tiny company.
I always had it in my mind.
That I wanted to build a company.
That would outlast me.
So I've always been thinking about it in that framework.
And how it could kind of grow into a young adult.
And be set off into the world successfully.
And independently.
I felt like a parent.
Sending your kid off to college.
And you're hoping that you've created this independent young adult who can go off into the world.
You don't want them to be dependent on you.
If they are, you fail.
And so I wanna pause right there because when I got to this section, there's two things I thought about.
uh based on what Jeff was saying. Uh one comes from Daniel Eck, the founder of Spotify.
The other comes from Steve Jobs.
And so
Earlier this year I actually got to have dinner with Daniel Eck and
It was one of the best. It was it was I would say not one of it was the best and most impactful conversation that I've had all year.
And like an idiot.
I didn't make an episode about it. In fact, if it just texted Daniel, I was like, Hey, we should run that back.
So I'll see if he's up to doing that and then I'll make sure I take notes and and make an episode about it because
I think Dander's one of the obviously one of the most impressive living entrepreneurs and there's just a a ton that we can learn from him.
But
During the conversation that I did have with Daniel.
He was telling about the history of Spotify and he said something that was very fascinating. He has this metaphor.
that a company ages like a child.
And anyone that has kids knows that when your kids are really small
their behavior and their traits is really just a reflection of you and yet
As they age, I'm going through this right now with my my twelve year old daughter and it's kinda hard to deal with, but
As they age they become less of like a copy of you and they have more of their
Like their own like distinct personality emerges. And so by the time they're eighteen, they have traits that are
Perform by their own experience.
And they're completely separate and independent.
of the control or even the influence of their parents.
And Daniel X said a company is the same way. At the beginning, the company is the founder and is wholly reliant on the founder.
But now that Spotify is eighteen years old, it's developed all these skills and traits.
that the founder one could not have predicted.
And has have emerged from within the company, from its own experience. And it's actually the job of the founder.
to make sure that the company can survive and thrive.
Independent.
of any one person.
So it was very interesting for me to hear Bezos use a similar metaphor.
In this interview. I mean he even says I I thought about it in a framework.
how a company could grow into a kind of a young adult and be set off into the world successfully and independently.
The second thing that popped to my mind
And I I double underlined. It was really important to me.
Bezos was talking about he's like, Listen, even at the very beginning, I always wanted to build a company that would outlast me. And so
When Steve Jobs knew he was dying, he was working on w uh with Walter Isaacson on that that biography.
And he said something that's very fascinating and it's gonna sound a lot like what Bezos is saying. And so Steve says
I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs.
When what they really trying to do, what they're really trying to do.
is launch a startup and then sell or go public so they can cash in and move on.
They're unwilling
To do the work it takes to build a real company.
Which is the hardest work in business.
That's how you really make a contribution and add to the legacy of those who went before you.
You build a company that will stand for something a generation or two from now.
That's what Walt Disney did.
And he let him packard.
And the people who built Intel.
They created a company to last.
Not just to make money.
That is what I want Apple to be.
And so Steve was very adamant
About building Apple.
To last beyond him.
And Jeff is saying the exact same thing here in this interview about Amazon.
And so let's go back to what Jeff's saying in the same Amazon. So he says, So I want Amazon to go off without me.
I'm still at Amazon, by the way. I haven't left fully. You never stop being a parent later on.
In the uh interview he says really funny. He's like, I'm a sixty year old man
And my parents are still worrying about me.
So he says my heart is at Amazon.
My curiosity
Is at Amazon.
My love is there. So throughout this entire interview.
Jeff will constantly talk about the importance of curiosity.
He will mention how he follows his curiosity.
Yeah, I just gave a talk, a few talks at these
uh conferences and one of the conferences
were for post exit founders. So founders that have already had a successful exit and they're trying to figure out what to do next. And then
When you have conversations with them one on one in private, a lot of the same questions come come up where they're like, I just don't know what to do. What should I do next?
Do you have any insight into how I
I should choose what I work on next or what my next company should be.
My answer is like very simple. Simil uh very simple and similar.
to what Jeff is saying here. So you just follow your innate curiosity.
There is um this great essay by Paul Graham. I think it's episode three fourteen of Founders. It's called How to Do Great Work. I wanna read an excerpt from it right now.
Because I believe
This is what Jeff is saying in this interview and this is certainly what I've done in my own life.
And I've been obsessed with entrepreneurship, history, podcasts, and reading for my entire life. That's exactly what
Founders is is this is my life's work and it's just a collection of these weird passions.
that have grabbed hold of me, you know, since I was a child.
And so in this essay called How to Do Great Work, it says curiosity is the best guide.
Your curiosity never lies.
And it knows more than you do about what's worth paying attention to. If you asked an Oracle
The secret to doing great work, and the oracle replied with a single word.
My bet.
Would be on curiosity.
Де згол прос
It's kind of a dance.
With curiosity until later on
When Jeff starts telling you and I
About how he's spending time.
What's exciting him?
You realize like he's just dancing with his own curiosity.
So back to Jeff.
He says right now I'm putting a lot of time in at Amazon.
Because I can help and it is super interesting.
And so though Andrew Sorkin
Ask the follow up question.
What is it that you're doing at Amazon?
AI
Jeff says.
It is ninety five percent AI.
We're literally
working on a thousand applications internally.
You have to remember this is
This just sings to my soul. I love how all these things connect over the time.
Uh I'll explain t what I mean in one second.
You have to remember
Modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer.
It can be used to improve
Everything.
It will be
In
Everything.
This is most like electricity. And so I wanna pause there. He just said AI is most like electricity.
This is like gonna be an exception, like an idea inside of an idea. Okay.
I've been obsessed with studying basos for a long time.
And
I'm gonna pause where we were in this interview. I'm gonna go back to this TED talk he gave.
He gave his TikTok twenty one years ago.
I took notes.
On Jeff Bezos' TED Talk.
Five years ago.
And so I went and pulled them up.
His TED talk is called The Electricity
Metaphor.
This is the description of the TED Talk. It says the dot com boom and bust.
is often compared to the gold rush.
But Amazon founder Jeff Bezos says it's more like the early days

industry.
So I'm gonna read you some of my notes from this TED talk. The TED talk is Jeff Bezos on the electricity metaphor of the web's future. He's saying this in 2003, okay?
Basos says.
The internet is so incredible.
It is hard to get the right analogy for it.
A lot of how we decide how we react to things and what to expect about the future depends on how we categorize them.
The tempting analogy for the boom and bust of the internet that he just went through, okay?
of the internet is the gold rush.
And so at the beginning of the Ted talk
He starts to compare and contrast.
The internet rush and the gold rush. He says, Okay, well both of those were very real.
Hu there was huge boom.
There's a huge bust.
And lots of hype.
So many people left what they were doing to join both the gold rush
in the internet rush. And you see this obviously now with AI as well. So this is the point.
Why I'm a uh taking
these ideas that he said twenty one years ago and he's still connecting it with what he's working on today, which I thought was very, very fascinating.
In the gold rush, people literally jumped ship.
San Francisco harbor was clogged with six hundred abandoned
Ships
Entrepreneurs turn the ships into hotels. You wanna hear something wild?
Many years ago, probably six years ago. It's like I think episode like thirty three of Founders or something like that.
I read Levi Strauss's biography.
And Levi wind up going and building his business.
In
San Francisco, and there is a crazy story about what Jeff is referencing in Levi Strauss's autobiography.
that they call them wily entrepreneurs. We're really relentlessly resourceful entrepreneurs.
They would take the abandoned ships, right? The people just left the ships in the harbor, ran got to shore and ran off trying to get gold.
And these wily entrepreneurs pulled them ashore.
And remade them in in the into either warehouses or hotels.
And I just love
the the relentless w sourcefulness that you saw back then.
So then Jeff

This is where the analogy starts to diverge.
In a gold rush, when it's over, it's over.
Therefore, there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic.
And that analogy is the electric industry, which he just referenced. He he's gonna say
The internet, the metaphor for the internet is the electric industry. Now s twenty one years later he's gonna say
The
analogy for AI is also the electric industry. And this is why there are a lot of similarities between the internet and the electric industry.
They are both thin
horizontal enabling layers that go across lots of different industries.
It is not a specific thing.
They both can be used as incredible means of transmitting power. They both are an incredible means.
of communicating information flows.
the part of the electric revolution I want to focus on.
is on the golden age of appliances. So in other words he's talking about
What comes after
The horizontal
Enabling layers are made.
He says the killer app
That got the world ready for appliances, which did not exist before electricity, right?
was the light bulb.
But they were not thinking about appliances when they wired the world.
They weren't putting electricity into the home.
They were putting lighting.
Into the home.
Hey, I want electricity. They said I want lighting.
And I think that's an important part to pause and think about. Like no one said
I want electricity, they said I want lighting.
They want what your product enables, just like s no one saying, Hey, I want AI. They want what is now possible with AI, which is again just a better way to do something, is all a new technology is anyways.
So he's Jeff goes back and talks about the appliances. Appliances benefited from the heavy infrastructure
That was laid down by the electric revolution.
The internet.
Got to stand on top.
of all that heavy infrastructure
That was put in place.
because of the long distance phone network, just like all the AI is now sitting on top of.
All the work done for the Internet. So this this part about
The early internet.
I remember he's saying this in two thousand three.
uh it gets to stand on top of all the heavy infrastructure that was put in place during
uh because the long distance telephone network, I was trying to explain to my twelve year old daughter that I used to call the internet. I even went on YouTube
And played her the sound that it would make when you sign on to like AOL. She just
had no concept that you used to have to call that the internet was a thing that you had to actually access. It wasn't on
twenty four seven and you know, in her hand all the time.
So
Back to what Jeff is saying about the beginning age of the golden age of appliances.
They hadn't yet invented the off switch.
That came much later.
They hadn't invented the electrical outlet either. This thing blew my mind.
They
I'll leave a link down below for the the TED talk. I would highly recommend watching it on YouTube.
In the early days of Electric.
Of electricity. They plug appliances into the light socket.
There was no such thing as an off switch.
And there's no such thing as an electrical outlet. And there's pictures of this
In Jeff's
TED Talk. It's absolutely nuts.
And so his point about the internet that he was making in two thousand three, and I think that what he's
making the point about AI today is that we are still in the figuring this technology out phase.
So back to this. If you think of the internet in terms of the gold rush, you'd be pretty depressed right now.
The last nugget of gold would be gone.
With innovation, there isn't a last nugget.
Every new thing creates two new questions.
And two new opportunities. And this is the last thing I'll read to you from
Jeff's Ted Talk.
If you really do believe it's the very beginning, then you're incredibly optimistic throughout the
this conversation with Andrew Rossorkin.
Jeff kept saying, like today's
by far the most exciting time to be alive in human history. So it says if you really do believe this is the very beginning, then you're incredibly optimistic. I do think
There's more innovation ahead of us.
than there is behind us. We are very, very early. And again
saying that in two thousand three, after the the the dot com bust.
You know, was
Controversial.
But from our vantage point today, we knew he was absolutely correct about this. And so
Real quick before I move on, I just think this is the most important part to repeat.
There's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic.
And that analogy is the electric industry. There are a lot of similarities between the internet
And the electric industry they are both thin.
horizontal enabling layers.
They go across lots of different industries.
They both can be used as incredible means of transmitting power and they're both an incredible means of communicating information flows.
So now we're gonna jump out of the TED Talk.
Back into this latest.
rare Jeff Bezos interview.
he's gonna draw this analogy of why he thinks the same thing is for AI.
by of this trip that inspired him to create AWS. So he says many, many years ago.
I went to a brewery in Luxembourg.
In fact, this trip was one of the tiny calus for founding AWS.
The brewery was three hundred years old.
And they were very proud of their history and they had a museum.
And in that museum was an electric power generator.
It was a hundred years old.
When they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery
With electricity.
There was no power grid.
Keep that in mind, there was no such thing as a power bear.
So they had to build their own power station.
So they made their own electricity.
And at that time, that's what everybody had to do.
If a hotel wanted electricity
They had to have their own electric generator.
And I looked at this and I thought, this is what computation is like today.
Everybody has their own data center and that's just not going to last. It makes no sense.
you are going to buy compute off the grid.
That is AWS.
We were already doing it internally at Amazon for ourselves.
These kind of horizontal layers
Like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence.
They go
Everywhere.
There is not a single application.
That you can think of
That is not going to be made better.
By AI.
And then I love this part. I love what Just says here. He says
We're in multiple golden ages at once. So the world is so interesting right now.
We're in multiple golden ages at once. He's calling he's talking about space.
And AI and also robotics. He says, I think there's never been a more extraordinary moment to be alive.
We are so
Lucky. This section when he's talking about this, you guys he's very excited.
One of my favorite things
that I ever read about Edwin Land. Edwin Land, obviously the founder of Folaroid and Steve Jobs Hero.
And he has this great motto and he says, Optimism is a moral duty.
And it's obvious in this interview that Jeff is optimistic. He's excited about getting the opportunity to work on all these new technologies.
And so he's talking now, he starts talking about Blue Origin.
And there's two lines that I heard Jeff say that I actually love and I repeat over and over again.
Um, it's this idea that people don't have ideas, that ideas have people.
And that you don't choose your passions, they choose you. And so he's talking about
you know, why is Blue Organs so important, why is he dedicating so much of his fortune to it?
He's like, listen, I've been thinking about this since I was a teenager.
In fact, there's an article in my high school newspaper about my space plans.
I would tell everyone.
And those plans included
What I'm still working on.
Which is trying to move all polluting industry off of earth.
This is not fantastical.
This is going to happen.
We need to lower the cost to access space.
We can set up the preconditions.
We're the next generation or the generation after that.
We'll be able to move polluting industry off of earth.
If you want to use large amounts of energy and large amounts of pollutants
You need to do that off of earth.
And he talks about why this is so important. We have to have this energy intensive civilization.
And use ever more energy per capita.
And we'll get all the benefits of using
more and more energy without polluting the planet if you can move it off of Earth.
Space has infinite energy.
Infinite raw materials.
So he he's saying there, like we have to have access to them. That's what I'm trying to do with Blue Origin.
And there was a really fascinating
discussion'cause they were talking about the fact that he hired
He was interviewing a CEO from Blue Origin.
And Andrew Ross Sorkin.
says hey when you were interviewing Dave Limp to be the CEO, he asked you if Blue Origin
Was a hobby or a business?
And Bezos responded like it's a business.
It's not a very good business yet.
But I think this is one of the wildest things I think he says in the entire interview.
That surprised me the most.
Uh, I think from a financial returns point of view, I think it's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in.
But it's going to take a while.
And so the follow up was like, Wait, bigger than Amazon?
Baso says yes.
We lost money to Amazon for eleven years.
Tom Brokaw interviewed me one time about Amazon's losses.
He said Mr. Bezos.
Can you even spell profit?
And I said yes.
P R O P H E T.
And so then we get what I feel is the best question so far, because think about what
What bases just said. You know it's a
His Blue War just has not a very good business yet.
But I think from one at one point
From a financial returns point of view, it's going to be the best business
that I've ever been involved in bigger than Amazon.
And so this follow up question was excellent.
Where do you think your confidence comes from to create a business?
That requires such scale.
Most people want to be able to see where they're going in the case of Amazon, in the case of space.
You cannot see
Where you're going. This is
Excellent.
Bezos says one observation.
I would have is that I think it's genuinely human nature.
to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity.
And so I think entrepreneurs in general
Would be well advised.
to try and biased against that piece of human nature.
The risks are probably not as big as you perceive.
And the opportunities
may be bigger than you perceive.
You say it's confidence.
But maybe it's just trying to compensate for that.
Excepting
That that is a human bias.
And trying to compensate against it.
The second thing I would say
Is that thinking small
Is a self fulfilling
Prophecy. So then
Sorkin asked a follow up question.
Where do you think you learn this?
This is something a wise old man would say.
I remember watching you on sixty minutes in like nineteen ninety nine.
And they were asking you
Whether this whole thing, whether Amazon
Could work out or not.
And you said
It's not a fear.
That it can't work.
It's a fact that it might not work. And so Bezos talks about the very early days of Amazon.
And I've heard this story before, but I absolutely love it.
He says I sold twenty percent of the company.
For a million dollars.
It took fifty meetings.
To raise them money.
And the most common question at the time was
What is the internet?
the whole enterprise could have been extinguished then in those meetings.
I would always tell people
That I thought there was a seventy percent chance.
They would lose their investment.
And then the follow up question from Sorkin was also great here.
What do you think the real odds are with Blue Origin?
Bezos says Blue Origin doesn't have the same level of financing risk.
Because it can finance Blue Origin.
with my Amazon stock.
Blue Origin has a lot of runway.
And then they're gonna start to discuss something that Bezos brings up a few times, which is
really w how you w how you wanna think about your wealth. It's like how much wealth not do you create for yourself, but how much wealth do you create for other people and so
Sorkin asks or Sorkin says.
You know, throughout your whole career at Amazon, you paid yourself like eighty thousand dollars a year in salary.
You never took additional equity in the company the entire time and Bezos was Well, my view
was I was a founder.
I already owned a significant amount of the company and I had plenty of incentive.
And he's not a big fan of the fact that
And you talked about this one of my favorite and what I'll end on later.
Is
Bezos has this willingness to be misunderstood that I think is very wise.
And what he doesn't like is the fact that the recognition for public figures
There's like, you know, a handful of things that people can remember about you.
And many of those things they remember are overweight. So for him, it's just like everybody's like he's one of the richest people in the world.
And I love what he says here. He's like somebody needs to make a list
Where you rank people by how much wealth they've created for other people.
Instead of a list that ranks your own wealth like the Forbes four hundred or the Bloomberg Billionaire Index.
Amazon's market cap is two point three trillion.
I own about two hundred billion dollars of it, which means I've created something like two point one trillion dollars of wealth for other people.
That should put me h pretty high on some kind of list.
And that is a better list.
The list of how much wealth
Have you created for other people?
And then there's a question that goes into a place we might not have predicted beforehand, which is why I wish Bezos did more of these kind of interviews or podcasts.
'Cause he's asked well, you know, do you appreciate that you're one of the most powerful people in the world?
And I love what he says here. This is one of my favorite parts of the interview. I know I keep saying that, but they're all my favorite parts of the interview.
He says, I don't think about it that way.
I don't wake up and think, How am I gonna exercise my power today?
I wake up and I follow my curiosity.
I've always been a wanderer.
And I even organize Amazon meetings with this.
I want crisp documents.
And messy.
Meetings.
I want the meetings to wander and so
Then you've already know this if you've if you've gone through the past episodes I've done I've I don't even know if I've done eight episodes on Bezos, maybe more.
And one of if you could only read one book about Bezos, I would read Invent and Wander.
because it's the collected writings of Bezos. So it's his shareholder letters.
And then it's also transcripts to the few speeches he's given.
Um, and he it was he he worked on it, I think, with Walter Isaacson.
Um, but just reading his shareholder letters from in that book.
I think once a year. I should probably do an episode on his sharehold letters every year. Or at least reread them.
I think they're very important. But the reason I bring that up is because the title of the book is Invent and Wander.
He s says over and over again, he's a wanderer.
And
When you ask Bezos how he thinks about himself, he doesn't he doesn't say even entrepreneur, he says inventor.
So I'm gonna go back to this. I want my meetings to wander.
The only meeting I'm ever on time to is my first one.
Because I won't finish a meeting until I'm really finished.
I really wander in meetings.
There's certain kinds of meetings like a weekly business review.
Where this should be a set pattern.
That can have an agenda and can be very crisp.
But most of the meetings that are useful
Need to wander.
We do these six page memos, we read them together, and then we have a messy
Discussion.
The memo should be like angels seeing from on high. It's so clear and so beautiful.
And the meeting should be completely
Messy.
I am very skeptical.
If the meeting is not messy one time.
I could tell in the meeting.
That the team had rehearsed the meeting.
And I said.
Did you guys rehearse this meeting and they said yes.
I said don't do that again.
You might want to hear rehearse a sales meeting.
But for the CEO, you're seeking truth.
Not a pitch.
I do not want to be pitched.
That is why Messi is good.
You don't want the whole thing to be figured out.
And then present it to you.
You wanna be part of the sausage making.
You wanna make sure they're showing you
The ugly bits.
I always ask
Are there any dissenting opinions?
I want to try to get to the controversy.
And so after I've read that that part, you wanna be part of the sauces making, you wanna they you wanna make sure your team is showing you the ugly bits, you need to ask for dissenting opinions.
I went back and and this is just something that recurs over and over again. So I pulled some things from my notes.
And I think this is why so many of the founders that you and I said in the podcast actually want to get these unfiltered information from the front lines.
uh their executives have a tendency to hide bad info from them. So I'm thinking of like a Monsieur Ortega, Jim Casey was the founder of UPS was talked about the importance of this. Sam Walton, let me read this line from Sam Walton's autobiography.
Listen to everyone in your company and figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines.
The ones who actually talk to your customer.
are the only ones who know who really know what's going on. You better find out what they know.
And then last week when I was rereading my highlights from Brad Jacobs book, How to Uh Make a Few Billion Dollars.
He he he talks about this several times throughout the book. He says often when we buy a company, we discover that the frontline employees, the middle managers, and even some of the senior executives have never been asked
What would you do to improve the company?
You would think the owners will want to know that.
And he also has two
questions that he asks when they acquire new companies.
And he asked the the existing people there.
What's your single best idea to improve our company?
And what is the stupidest thing?
that we're doing as a company. And then Jeff's final idea for meetings, he says, I go last in meetings too. It helps with group
group things. So he speaks last meetings.
He also talks a lot about the fact that
Yeah.
People find it surprising he's a very easy person to influence. He's willing to change his mind and he changes his mind a lot.
And so he says, uh, I'm a very person easy person influence. I change my mind a lot. I take in information and I change.
But a couple percent of the time
No force in the world can move me.
Because I'm so sure of something.
Many people try to talk me out of fulfillment by Amazon as an example.
And I was like, guys.
You will never
Talk me out of this.
I will do this through sheer force of will if need be.
I think one of the things that might surprise you the most if you listen to the full interview.
It's just how much he talks about emotions, energy.
Curiosity, optimism.
And I thought this was very interesting. I don't know if I've heard him say this anywhere else.
And he talks about
The fact of
Like only
Really in his family, only positive emotions were allowed. So optimism was allowed, joy was allowed, happiness was allowed.
But the only negative emotion that was tolerated
And he says this is an unspoken family dynamic.
And uh the only negative emotion and this emotion occasionally. Uh only occasionally, I should say.
was anger.
But he says like s things like sadness, fear, anxiety, these kind of things were looked down upon in his family.
And this is the surprising part.
He says in the scheme of things
That is probably pretty helpful.
for founding a company.
You mostly want to be focused on the positive.
You need optimism.
Optimism and energy.
I don't know how some glum
founder could ever lead a company to success.
You have to have optimism.
You have to have energy.
It's got to be contagious.
There's going to be a lot of bad days and you're going to need to lift your people up.
Your emotions are sort of an early warning system, and this I found
What he's about to say here, I found true for myself, is like when I'm stressed.
It's usually because I'm not doing something I knew I should be doing. So he says if you're stressed
For me, that's kind of an early radar detecting.
That there's something that I'm not taking action on.
And then another important trait for a founder or a leader is the you need to be able to keep the ability to focus. And so
He he's able to avoid he's probably one of the few people in the world.
He's able to avoid social media addiction. And he's like, Listen, I am on social media sometimes
But I'm not addicted to social media.
I try to mine it for ideas.
Yeah, but it this uh what he's about to say here is exactly my same experience. In fact, I had a dinner with a founder friend last night.
I was like hopefully
Like I can work myself in a position where all I do is read books and make podcasts and spend time with family and talk to founders.
And you know, have other people
post to social media for me because
I really do feel I'm just happier reading books and I do feel sometimes it it really addicting.
And the problem is
What what
Bezo says is true. He's like you're you can mining for ideas and there's a lot of good ideas.
But
It's a lot of you have to go to a lot of shit, basically.
Did it turn good fuck?
A few good ideas. He says I try to mine it for ideas sometimes.
It it is a lot of work to find the little nuggets. I follow a bunch of people who I think are really smart.
And Sorkin.
follows up. Well, you're really good at c compartmentalizing and essentially not being addicted.
And Bezos talks about he's been like this since he was a kid. I'm very
Very
Focused.
when I was in Montessori school they told my mom that I was problematic
Because I wouldn't switch
Tasks.
And my teacher would have to pick up the whole chair.
And move me in my chair to the next
Tass.
Bezos is really good at being in the moment. He says I'm a very good focuser.
And then this ends on Bezos willingness to be misunderstood.
How he sees himself.
And then why he doesn't do many interviews. And so
So we're gonna ask them.
I'm curious.
What do you think the world misunderstands about you? That was a great question.
And Bezos says I gave up on being well understood a long time ago.
As a public figure.
To be understood is too difficult.
It is hard enough.
To be well understood by your loved ones.
By your kids and your close family members and your closest friends.
Even that is difficult.
I would pause it to you.
That if you think you understand
Any public figure.
You probably don't.
And so then Jeff talks about how he views himself, which may be misunderstood by everybody else. I think of myself
As an inventor.
That is what I am. If you go back and read
Uh, Jeff's biographies.
Uh, it says this over and over again when he was a y young kid, like his heroes were Thomas Edison
And Walt Disney.
But he thought of them as inventors. He wanted to be an inventor.
And so he says I wake up every day and follow my curiosity. There's that word again.
And I explore.
I really am an inventor. That is how I think of myself. I love problems.
And I love having a team of smart people and we work together.
To find unusual solutions to things.
If I could somehow have a Forbes list of inventors.
And if I could climb my way up to the top of that inventor list.
Then I would be understood.
At least in part.
But as a public figure.
You have to decide how much energy
you're gonna put into being understood.
You can spend a lot of time and it probably still won't work.
It probably helps to do
an occasional interview and he says I did Lex Friedman's podcast.
Which I highly recommend uh listening to. I will leave
Uh the conversation between Jeff Bezos and Lex Friedman.
Uh link down below. In fact
Uh, Lex was kind enough to recommend in that podcast listening to founders in that episode.
And I exchanged messages with Lex because he was uh listening to some of
my Bezos episodes before interviewing Bezos is a way to get get a better understanding
uh basis, which I highly if you haven't listened to the the episodes of Done on Basos, I recommend you do that. But I love this idea. He's like, Well, you know
You have to really decide how much energy you're gonna be put into this into being understood.
Really it just makes me think of like
This indifference to being
uh understood by the outside world. It reminds me of, you know, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett saying that they both had this inner scorecard, this inner clock. They kinda did what they thought was best. They uh
What they thought was right and they trusted their own judgment.
B Bezos and other parts of the interview I didn't talk about, he says the same exact thing. He's like you can't
Make
The wrong decision.
Right.
for good PR and you can't make the right decision what you know is right and not do it because you think, you know, the outside world's you're gonna get bad you're gonna get blowback or people are gonna say bad things about you. You have to do what you feel is right. And I feel
It that's a very consistent theme with what he's saying here.
So you know, you gotta put how much you gotta decide how much energy you're gonna be put into being understood.
You can spend a lot of time.
Probably still won't work.
probably helps to do an occasional interview. So I did like S Friedman's
Uh podcast.
And then he says, uh I really v this is my favorite part, and this is the last that that bas that Bezos says.
He says, I really value my time.
I care deeply.
About the things that I work on.
And every minute I'm doing something like this, like the interview that he's doing with Sorkin.
And every minute I'm doing something like this.
Is a minute.
That I'm not doing something else. And so
That's the end of the interview.
When it got to that part.
made me think of what Charlie Munger said.'Cause what what basis is really talking about is like listen, every minute I'm doing this
is a minute I'm not doing something else. He's talking about making all your decisions through opportunity costs.
Which obviously Monger would repeat.
It's really, really important.
And so Munger, this is Charlie Munger on opportunity costs. Decisions in life are all about opportunity costs.
And wise people think in terms
of personal opportunity costs.
In other words
It's your alternatives that matter. That is how we make
All of our decisions. And so when I had dinner at Charlie Munger's house
He told me that the week before.
uh the Jeff Bezos
was there and I asked
Munger what he thought of Bezos, and he said
He is ferociously
intelligent. That is one of my favorite ways.
I've ever heard.
Another person described and
I think it speaks to why it's important to make
For me to make this episode about this interview.
For you to listen to the full interview and for you to listen to read.
As much as you can about Jeff Bezos.
Uh, there's a few episodes of Founders.
That I'd recommend before I let you go?
Uh, after this I listened to episode three twenty one, which is called Working with Jeff Bezos.
And I've listened to episode two eighty two, which is Jeff Bezos' shareholder letters.
And if you want to listen to another episode I did like this on a rare interview, uh episode three fifty five was on a rare Bernard Arnault interview.
That is
Three hundred and seventy four books down, one thousand go.
And I'll talk to you again soon.