Interview Quotes

Early Life and Influences

"My grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer, which is a big bulldozer. And he got it for like $5,000 because it was completely broken down. And we spent an entire summer fixing, like repairing that bulldozer."

— Jeff Bezos • 00:17:26

"The key thing about it, for me, the great gift I got from it, was that my grandfather was so resourceful. He did everything himself."

— Jeff Bezos • 00:13:54

The Space Race and Blue Origin

"One of the great von Braun quotes is, I have come to use the word impossible with great caution."

— Jeff Bezos • 00:27:24

"He purportedly said, 'My God, it's blue.' And that really drives home. No one had seen the Earth from space. No one knew that we were on this blue planet."

— Jeff Bezos • 00:37:19

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

— Jeff Bezos • 00:54:36

The Nature of Invention and Decision Making

"If you, if you want to boil down what I am, I'm really an inventor."

— Jeff Bezos • 01:23:16

"The reality is we may have to wander for a long time. And I do like group invention."

— Jeff Bezos • 01:32:58

"Two-way door decisions should mostly be made by single individuals or by very small teams deep in the organization. And one-way door decisions are the ones that are the irreversible ones. Those are the ones that should be elevated up to, you know, the senior most executives."

— Jeff Bezos • 02:33:34

"Disagree and commit is a really important principle that saves a lot of arguing."

— Jeff Bezos • 02:42:13

"Compromise, the advantage of compromise as a resolution mechanism is that it's low energy. But it doesn't lead to truth."

— Jeff Bezos • 02:47:55

Amazon's Philosophy and "Day One" Thinking

"I told all of our early investors that I thought there was a 30% chance of success, by which I've just been getting your money back, not what actually happened."

— Jeff Bezos • 03:27:47

"Day one thinking is kind of, we start fresh every day. And we get to make new decisions every day about invention, about customers, about how we're going to operate."

— Jeff Bezos • 03:34:06

"Customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision-making."

— Jeff Bezos • 03:38:11

"When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. And it doesn't mean you just slavishly go follow the anecdotes then. It means you go examine the data."

— Jeff Bezos • 03:52:00

"We call those paper cuts. And we make long lists of them. And then we have dedicated teams that go fix paper cuts."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:02:39

The Future of Humanity and Technology

"If you're talking about generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT and its soon successors, these are incredibly powerful technologies to believe otherwise is to bury your head in the sand, soon to be even more powerful."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:21:58

"My own view is that these powerful tools are much more likely to help us and save us even than they are to, on balance, hurt us and destroy us."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:26:03

"The human brain does remarkable things and it does it on about 20 watts of power. And, you know, the AI techniques we use today use many kilowatts of power to do equivalent tasks."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:39:00

Life's Work and Legacy

"The 10,000-year clock is an idea conceived by a brilliant guy named Danny Hillis way back in the 80s. The idea is to build a clock as a symbol for long-term thinking."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:55:10

"I want to be healthy, healthy, healthy, and then gone. I don't want the long decay."

— Jeff Bezos • 05:15:19

"My favorite part of it is the technology. My least favorite part of it is, you know, building organizations and so on."

— Jeff Bezos • 05:33:21

"When we get new—when new people come in, like a new executive joins, they're a little taken aback sometimes. Because a typical meeting will start with a six-page narratively structured memo. And we do study hall."

— Jeff Bezos • 05:37:53