Rare Jeff Bezos Interview

1. 0:00 – 5:02

   Retirement Is Lame: Building a Company That Outlasts You

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      Jeff Bezos just did this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit, and the interview gave me so much energy that I actually printed 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 re- 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 said something that was 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've failed." 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 Ek, the founder of Spotify, the other comes from Steve Jobs. And so earlier this year, I actually got to have dinner with Daniel Ek, and it was one of the best... It w- 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, I 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 Daniel's one of the, obviously, one of the most impressive living entrepreneurs, and there's just a ton that we can learn from him. But during the conversation that I did have with Daniel, he was telling me 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 18, they have traits that are formed by their own experience, and they're completely separate and independent of the control or even the influence of their parents. And Daniel Ek 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 18 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. It was really important to me. Bezos was talking about it. 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, well, with Walter Isaacson on that, that biography, and he said something that was very fascinating, and this is gonna sound a lot like what Bezos is saying. And so Steve says, "I hate it when people call themselves entrepreneurs when what they're 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 Hewlett & 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 this 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 something really funny. He's like, "I'm a 60-year-old man, and my parents are still worrying about me."

2. 5:02 – 7:33

   Following Your Curiosity and What Bezos Does at Amazon Now

   1. DSDavid Senra5:02

      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. 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 should choose what I work on next or what my next company should be?" My answer is, like, very similar, similar-- uh, very simple and similar to what Jeff is saying here. So, so you just follow your innate curiosity. There is, um, this great essay by Paul Graham. I think it's episode 314 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 e-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." This whole process is kind of a dance with curiosity. And so 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 asks a follow-up question, "What is it that you're doing at Amazon?" "AI," Jeff says. "It is 95% AI. We're literally working on 1,000 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 to- 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 inception, like an idea inside of an idea, okay? I've been obsessed with studying Bezos for a long time, and I'm gonna pause where we were in this interview. I wanna go back

3. 7:33 – 13:53

   The 2003 TED Talk: Gold Rush vs. the Electric Industry

   1. DSDavid Senra7:33

      to this TED Talk he gave. He gave this TED Talk 21 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 of the electric 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? Bezos 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. And he says, "Okay, well, both of those were very real. Hu- there was huge boom, there was a huge bust, and lots of hype. So many people left what they were doing to join both the Gold Rush and the internet rush," and you see this obviously now with AI as well. So this is the point of why I'm, uh, uh, taking these ideas that he said 21 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 600 abandoned ships. Entrepreneurs turned the ships into hotels." You wanna hear something wild? Many years ago, probably six years ago, it's like, I think, episode, like, 33 of Founders or something like that, I read Levi Strauss' biography. And Levi w-wind up going and building his business in San Francisco, and there is a crazy story about what Jeff is referencing in Levi Strauss' autobiography that they call them wily entrepreneurs who were 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 e- in- into either warehouses or hotels. And I just love that, the relentless resourcefulness that you saw back then. So then Jeff, back to the TED Talk, says, "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- 21 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 wanna 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. And 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. No one said, '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 no one's 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, remember he's saying this in 2003, uh, it gets to stand on top of all the heavy infrastructure that was put in place during, uh, because of the long-distance telephone network. I was trying to explain to my 12-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, uh, just had no concept that you used to have to call, [chuckles] that the internet was a thing that you had to actually access. It wasn't on 24/7 in, 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, it, it... I'll leave a link down below for the, the TED Talk. I would highly recommend watching it on YouTube. I- in the early days of electri- [chuckles] of electricity, they'd plug appliances into the light socket. There was no such thing as an off switch, and there was 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 2003, 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 Ross Sorkin, Jeff kept saying, like, "Today's by far the most exciting time to be alive in human history." So he 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 2003 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 that 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.

4. 13:53 – 15:56

   The Luxembourg Brewery and Multiple Golden Ages

   1. DSDavid Senra13:53

      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 catalysts for founding AWS. The brewery was 300 years old, and they were very proud of their history, and they had a museum. And in that museum was an electric-powered generator. It was 100 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 grid. "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 Jeff says here. He says, "We're in multiple golden ages at once." So he says, "The world is so interesting right now. We're in multiple golden ages at once." So he's callin'- 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 can see he's very excited. One of my favorite things that I ever read about Edwin Land, Edwin Land, obviously the founder of Polaroid 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.

5. 15:56 – 18:19

   Blue Origin and Moving Polluting Industry Off Earth

   1. DSDavid Senra15:56

      And so he's talking, now he starts talking about Blue Origin. And there's two lines that I heard Jeff say that I absolutely 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 Origin so important? Why is he dedicating so much of his fortune to it? And 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 where the next generation or the generation after that will 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 at Blue Origin. And there was a really fascinating discussion, 'cause they were talking about the fact that he hired-- He was interviewing a CEO for 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?" Bezos says, "Yes. We lost money at Amazon for 11 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 Bezos just said, you know? It's, it's Blue Origin's 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.

6. 18:19 – 20:19

   Overestimating Risk and Thinking Big

   1. DSDavid Senra18:19

      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 wanna 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 bias 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, accepting 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 asks a follow-up question. "Where do you think you learned this? This is something a wise old man would say. I remember watching you on 60 Minutes in like 1999, 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 20% of the company for a million dollars. It took 50 meetings to raise that 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 70% 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 I can finance Blue Origin with my Amazon stock. Blue Origin has a lot of runway."

7. 20:19 – 22:14

   Wealth Created for Others and Not Thinking About Power

   1. DSDavid Senra20:19

      And then they're gonna start to discuss something that Bezos brings up a few times, which is really how you, what, 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 $80,000 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 he, he talks 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, especially 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 400 or the Bloomberg Billionaire Index, Amazon's market cap is 2.3 trillion. I own about $200 billion of it, which means I've created something like $2.1 trillion of wealth for other people. That should put me hi- 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 [laughs] 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."

8. 22:14 – 25:27

   Crisp Memos, Messy Meetings, and Seeking Truth

   1. DSDavid Senra22:14

      And so I think you already know this if you've, if you've gone through the past episodes I've done. I, I don't even know. I've probably 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 shareholder 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 wanna 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 singing 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 wanna hearse- 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 messy is good." You don't want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented 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 read that, that part, you wanna be part of the sausage-making, you want, they 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 reoccurs 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 study 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 Amancio Ortega. Jim Casey, who 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 would wanna know that." And he also has two questions that he asks when they acquire new companies, and he asks 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 think." So he speaks last in meetings.

9. 25:27 – 25:59

   Changing His Mind, Yet Immovable Convictions

   1. DSDavid Senra25:27

      He also talks a lot about the fact that he, [laughs] 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 to 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.'"

10. 25:59 – 28:46

    Optimism, Emotions as an Early Warning System, and Focus

    1. DSDavid Senra25:59

       I think one of the things that might surprise you the most if you listen to the full interview is 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 f- r- 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 wanna 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 know 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 [laughs] y- 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." It, but it's, 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, and 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's really addicting. And the problem is what, what Bezos says is true. He's like, "You, you can mine it for ideas, and there's a lot of good ideas, but it's a lot of, you have to go through a lot of shit [laughs] basically to get to a good f- a few good ideas." He says, "I try to mine it for ideas sometimes. Uh, 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 cr- compartmentalizing," 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 task." Bezos

11. 28:46 – 31:48

    Being Misunderstood and Seeing Himself as an Inventor

    1. DSDavid Senra28:46

       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 Sorkin asks him, "I'm curious what 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 posit 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 Fridman's podcast," which I highly recommend, uh, listening to. I will leave, uh, the conversation between Jeff Bezos and Lex Fridman, uh, linked 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, with Lex because he was, uh, listening to some of my Bezos episodes before interviewing Bezos as a way to get, get a better understanding of Bezos, which I highly, if you haven't listened to the episodes I've done on Bezos, highly 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 and to being understood." Really, this 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 in o- 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 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 Lex Fridman's, uh, podcast, and then he says, uh, "I really v-" This is

12. 31:48 – 33:31

    Opportunity Costs, Munger on Bezos, and Recommended Episodes

    1. DSDavid Senra31:48

       my favorite part, and this is the last that, that Bez- 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 I got to that part, made me think of what Charlie Munger said, 'cause what, what Bezos 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 Munger 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, that Jeff Bezos was there, and I asked Munger what he thought of Bezos, and he said, "He is ferociously intelligent." That is one of [chuckles] 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 list- 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'd listen to episode three twenty-one, which is called Working with Jeff Bezos, and I would listen to episode two eighty-two, which is Jeff Bezos's Shareholder Letters. And if you wanna 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 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.

Episode duration: 33:31