Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and brother Mark give a rare interview about growing up and secrets to success

oh yeah thank you very much so this gentleman certainly needs no introduction my name is Marc Bezos and you're all welcome to call me what my friends do they usually just refer to me as Jeff's brother by the way just so you know it actually does go both ways my brother has a TED talk about small acts of kindness being a volunteer firefighter and it has millions of views and every once in a while somebody will stop me and say I love your TED talk about being a firefighter and small acts of kindness and I if I I usually you know say well thank you but that's really my brother his TED talk but if I'm in a hurry I just say thank you thank you yes absolutely but if any of you do get confused I'm the one with the smaller bank account to your left so he's the big brother so Jeff before we get started I think you know this is a obviously a crowd of influential people people who are starting out I think we might as well just make the most of their time I'm just going to dive right into this if you don't mind let's go you are captain of industry amazon.com private spaceflight with Blue Origin the Washington Post levels of you know Fame and wealth that are hard to comprehend I guess you know one question that probably is at the top of everyone's mind is if you had to choose one thing what would you say is your favorite part of having me as a little brother [Applause] I think I've taken the liberty of writing some thoughts I know you answer this and there are many things I love about having mark as a brother but what he just did is number one at the top of this what I am with my brother I just laugh continuously yeah because he's the funniest guy in my life well thank you you're an easy audience and I appreciate I am actually an easy audience that is true he is I am alright so so here's what we're going to do if all of you don't mind so the fact that you know a fireside chat among brothers this is not unique for us this is something that we do quite often it's rare that we have you know a couple thousand more closest friends with us yeah and it's also really usually actually have a fire yes and bourbon yeah which we don't have now but now so and what what we're going to talk about the things that I'm gonna chat with Jeff about or not the sorts of things perhaps that you would hear in most interviews because you know I don't you know 2p2 rules is not really my jam so we're not going to talk about those things but you know we do have a shared history you know so what I really want to focus on is you know the influences and the inspirations that have led to some of the things the foundation of you know what is a little intimidating he knows way too much it's so and what I'd like to do is invite all of you to join in on you know what is some of our greatest hits I guess from my point of view and because we have such a shared history what I've done wants to gesture grin as I've gone through and taking the liberty of pulling together a bunch of family photos so I'm gonna be throwing some of those up behind us and just so that you guys can sort of understand so if we start talking shorthand you'll understand what it is that we're referring to so all sound good all right so I am gonna and I appreciate your page that this is not the sort of thing that I usually do so I appreciate your patience so we're just going to dive right into it so when we were kids we would spend every summer on our grandfather's ranch in South Texas we called our grandfather pop that's pop there's pop right there we were probably just fixing that windmill yes always fixing windmills yeah before you were climbing them and smashing bottles upon them which he did recently in a Instagram video so you know one of the things that we that we would do you know every summer it was really a magical experience there's a little Jeff yeah that was my maximum cuteness right there all downhill from there that that's a 1962 International Harvester scout we all learn to drive beyond that car that car once you can drive that car you can drive anything and then this is so there's the two of us that is Jeff teaching me how to open or close gate which doesn't seem like it would be that complicated but I was having trouble wire gap gates are tough and then this is that's red well that's Christina or sister Christina but the horse red that's red that's yeah so I guess one of the things that that we learn every summer yeah this is pop again so there was as we as we alluded to with the windmills there was always work to be done on the ranch and yeah one of the the things that you know I think we learned to value and you've spoken about this in the past is the the role that resourcefulness self-reliance yeah plays it's certainly on a place like the ranch but yeah can you talk a little bit about well so one of the great things that you learn first of all we had a very fortunate lucky childhood we got to spend a lot of time with pop and our grandparents and you learn different things from grandparents than you learned from parents it's just a very different relationship I've spent all my summers on his ranch from age 4 to 16 and he was incredibly soft for Lion you know if you're in the middle of nowhere in a rural area you don't pick up the phone and call somebody when something breaks you figure out how to fix it yourself and so as a kid you got to I got to see him solve all these problems and be a real problem solver he even did his own bed Neri work he would make his own needles for the suture up the cattle with he would like take a piece of wire use a blowtorch to heat up pounded flat sharpen it drill a hole through it make a needle and some of the cattle even survived and so you know but but you did we learned a lot of things from watching him because he would he would take on major projects that he didn't really know how to do then figure out how to do them you know a good example of that is you know you guys built a house yeah I think I think he bought this out of a Sears catalog it was a kid house and we built that thing somebody came out it all showed up in big boxes and somebody a professional came out and poured the foundation and then we did the rest of it but I'm pretty sure it was quite a project in going there some of that you can see some of the cows there that didn't survive procedure so you know when I was going through these it certainly I came across this photo yeah I'm not exactly sure what it was you're doing here almost positive looks like we got wrong maybe that vent really pissed me off I don't know that's certainly well I think there's a couple things here first of all OSHA would not be pleased with the way you're on that ladder and you know here's as though you've you're crafting a spear I don't know what I'm doing yeah so and you know I think that you know if you can talk a little bit I know that there's you know this bulldozer in the background that's a caterpillar bulldozer that my grandfather bought used for five thousand dollars which is an enormous bargain you know this thing it should cost way more than that the reason it was so cheap is it was completely broken the transmission was stripped the hydraulics didn't work and so we spent basically a whole summer repairing it and big giant gears would arrive by mail order from Caterpillar and we would you know we couldn't even move the gear so Mike the first thing my grandfather did was build a crane to move the gear so that's that kind of you know self-reliance and resourcefulness and the you know there's also there's a story that you know is somewhat legendary in our family one of the things that pop did one summer it was a little out of character oh I know what story you're talking about so he really actually was a very careful conservative sort of person not prone to crazy acts or anything who kind of introspective and even and very imp and introverted quiet person but one day he was all by himself he had driven to the ranch and he was at the main gate to the ranch and he forgot to put the car in park and so when he got to the gate he noticed that the car was slowly rolling downhill toward the gate he thought this is fantastic I have just enough time to unlatch the gate throw the gate open the car is gonna drive right through and those will be wonderful he almost got the gate unlatched when the car hit the gate and it caught his thumb between the gate and the fence post and it stripped all the flesh off of his thumb it was hanging there by a tiny little thread and he was so angry at himself that he ripped that piece of flesh off and threw it in the brush got back in the car drove himself to the emergency room in Dili Texas 16 miles away and when he got there they said this is great we can reattach that where is it and he said I threw it in the brush they drove back with the nurses and everybody and they all they looked for hours for the thumb and they never found that piece of flesh something probably eaten it so they they take them back to the emergency room and they said look you have two choices you're gonna have to have a skin graft for that and we can sew your your thumb to your stomach and leave it there for six weeks that's the best way to do it or we can just cut a piece of skin graft from your butt and just suture it on and it won't ever be as good but the advantage is your thumb won't be sewn to your stomach for six weeks and he said I'll take option to just do this skin graft from my butt and they did that it was very successful it worked fine and he but the funniest thing about this story is that I have incredibly vivid memories when we all do of him he definitely his mornings were completely ritualized who'd wake up eat breakfast cereal read the newspaper and shave with an electric razor for a really long time like he would shave with that electric razor for like 15 minutes and while he's eating his cereal and when he was done shaving his face with that razor then he would take two quick passes over his thumb because his thumb group but hair which by the way did not bother him at all no he was completely unfazed by unfazed so thumb but hair aside you know the the value of resourcefulness right and and self-reliance what how do you how do you apply that to you know the work that you do on a daily basis how do you well I think you know there are a lot of entrepreneurs and and people pursuing dreams and passions in this car you know you always you you the whole point of of moving things forward is you run into problems you run into failures things don't work you have to back up and try again each one of those times when you have a step back and you back up and you try again you using resourcefulness you're using self-reliance you're trying to invent your way out of a box and I have with tons of examples at Amazon where we've had to do this we've failed so many times we have write the iowa's think of us is a great place to feel because we're good at it we have so much practice and I get to give you one example we many years ago now we started we wanted a third party selling business because we knew we could add selection to the store that way and we started Amazon auctions nobody came I think maybe our mother the only one who purchase something I bought a coffee cup you got a coffee I did okay so there were those who purchasers and and and that's an we so we said well look we do we open this thing called Z shops we train which was like fixed price auctions again nobody came I didn't use that and then finally and each one of these failures it's like a year you half long and so we're trying to invent new things and we finally came across this idea of putting the third-party selection on the same detail page is the same product detail pages that we had our own inventory on our own retail inventory on we called this marketplace and it started working right away and so that just that resourcefulness of trying new things figuring things out what the customers really want yep yeah pays off and everything and it pays off even in your daily lives you know how do you help your children what's the right thing my wife has a great saying we let our kids use even now they're 17 through 12 but even when they were 4 we would let him use our knives and by the time they were I don't know maybe 7 or 8 we would let him use a certain power tools and my wife best to her credit she has this great fascia so I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid and which I just think is a fantastic attitude about life luckily you have resourceful kids with 10 fingers yeah exactly and you know I know that resourcefulness is so important you actually if it was a prerequisite for the selection of a spouse right so this is yeah I had I did in my 20s this is you know you way you know pre tender pre-match calm and so I had this but at a certain point I decided I wanted to get married and I had all my friends setting me up and I had my list of criteria and this was like good old-fashioned blind dates I went on dozens of blind dates and it turns out it kept meeting people who were professional blind daters and I sort of became a professional blind dater and so we would sit down and most of the conversation was quickly about how yeah we're not right for each other but how do you meet people and you know it's actually turned into a right but when I was time my friends my criteria one of the ones that I would list was that I wanted a woman who could get me out of a third-world prison and my friends were like what are your future plans you know and I said no it's just a visualization for somebody really resourceful because I you don't want to go through life with teammates who aren't resourceful and so you do want to go through life with people who if you need could get you out of prison hypothetically speaking hypothetically speak yeah so you know so this is a picture from the recent that was last summer I think yeah we took that we were on a family vacation and I you know so this one jumped out at me because you know you're doing Mackenzie curls there with your wife and you're looking a little buff and so that of course you know made me think of this now as internet memes go swole Jeff is pretty cool right so you know if swole mark raced across the internet I'd be pretty psyched but you know I I this got sent to me by so many people variations of this right oh my god your brother what sauce your brother yeah and then you know but it confused me because in all honesty this is what I grew up with [Laughter] [Applause] yeah I'm just saying right so that you know where when you guys saw us well Jeff I was like I was surprised too right I mean Isis yeah this image sexy right that I I remember that I am how old are your Halloween costume I am one of I had some friends and we went as the foo no no no wait wait wait wait wait there you go here we go that is yeah yeah the winners Ladykillers chicks love that they love that that we were we were very successful in high school so as fitness goes and then and then you know there was this guy who's like what late 90s Jeff right something like that and you know your eating habits at this point in your life we're not great no my this is this is you won't even believe the story it's gonna have to believe me that I tell you this is true when my wife and I got married I had been eating a whole can for a couple of years I had been eating for breakfast every morning a whole can of Pillsbury biscuits so I would wake up in the morning I would preheat the oven to 375 I would get out the bacon the baking sheet I would crack open the Pillsbury biscuits place them on there and with butter and I would eat the whole coke in and I was skinny Ezreal and it was just and I am I after watching meat when so then we get married and she watched me do this every morning as my spouse for like three months and then she finally stopped me one day and she said do you know what's in that and I was like honestly that wasn't even a concept for me that there was something in food you know that there was like I had never read a nutrition label in my life I eat what tasted good to me and so she kind of showed me the ingredients label and we had a little very rudimentary discussion about nutrition and I stopped eating the biscuits well I'm frankly very happy and somewhat surprised that you survived all of that we're glad you're still with us so she was incredulous so one of the things I want to talk about a question that that we've talked about before you were 30 years old in 1994 when you decided to start amazon.com you had a great job you had I remember you had a great apartment on the Upper West Side married for a year had been married for you had not been eating biscuits for nine months and I'm just you know how did you go through making the decision to drop it was a very good job and take it take this chance it all seems very obvious now right this many years later that it paid off but at the time it was not obvious no no it was and and and I did do a lot of soul searching I I went to my boss at the time and I really liked my job and I told my boss I was gonna go do this thing start an internet bookstore and my wife had already told my wife and she's like great let's go and I I said so I'm also gonna do this he's like this is a good idea so I think this is a good idea but it'd be an even better idea for somebody who didn't already have a good job and that sort of made some logical sense to me and he convinced me to think about it for a couple of days so I went away I was really trying to get my head around how to think about this and I think for me the right way to make that kind of very personal decision because those decisions are personal they're not like data driven business decisions there they are you know what does your heart say and for me it was I could the best way to think about it was to project myself forward to age 80 and said look when I'm 80 years old I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have I don't want to be 80 years old in a quiet moment of reflection thinking back over my life and and catalog you a bunch of major regrets and I think that regrets our biggest regrets in most cases you can murder somebody okay you'd regret that but in most cases our biggest regrets turn out to the acts of omission its paths not taken and they haunt us we wonder what would have happened I loved that person and I never told him and then they married somebody else I did you know I didn't do this and so that's the frame of mind that I put myself in and I and once I did that once I thought about that way it was immediately obvious to me I knew that when I'm 80 I would never regret trying this thing that I was super excited about and failing if it failed fine I would be very proud of the fact when I'm 80 that I tried and I also knew that it would always haunt me if I didn't try and so that would be a regret it would be a hundred percent chance of regret if I didn't try and basically a zero percent chance of regret if I tried and failed so I think that's a useful metric for any important life decision and this is this is you know our sister took this photo but you know she was I don't understand why she thought this was a momentous occasion you and Mackenzie yeah we're about to take off driving across the country to start Amazon go to Seattle and that's a yellow lab kamala named after a Star Trek character we're so happy to have these family photos but we can't for the life of us figure out why Kristina bothered to take them but we're so glad she did and then you know she also was smart enough to tell you to leave the dog yeah she saved us probably because we were to drive across the country with the dog which was probably not a good idea she said I keep the dog and when you after you guys get settled I'll send you the dog so what a question I have is you know we just talked about the fact that you know there was certainly no guarantee that Amazon was going to or no there never any kind of startup I think what would Jeff Bezos be doing if this hadn't worked out I I I think I it's a good question and nobody ever really knows what life what twists and turns life takes my best guess is I would be very happy software engineer yeah and working on anything in particular today I might be I don't know I'm very very curious about machine learning and artificial intelligence and and you know we're doing a lot of that probably I would be attracted to that field today and if you know I thought this question I not sure exactly how you would answer it but I am curious you know like your fantasy job not the one that would pay the bills well that I have I have is Union and you know what it is I think he knows my guess is bartender I and I do have by the way I'm really glad I'm wearing my honey badger don't care a t-shirt there it and that thank you for that photo because it looks like I've had about four of those yeah I appreciate you that's like a Bloody Mary that's a really start what are brothers for early start but yeah I have to make a mean cocktail I I do I pride myself on my craft cocktails and I I am and I I do have this fantasy that I want to be a bartender and I know that it is a fantasy like if I were actually a bartender right there fight like it's I'm glamorized the job in my mind I know that but but I love people I like talking to people I love making cocktails you're not very fast I'm super slow it would have to be a bar we'd have to charge a lot for drink and they would and you'd be Europe there'd be a big sign behind the bar that says you can have a good or you can have it fast which is what but yeah I have I have a kind of fantasy there so if we could shift gears a little bit I want to talk about Blue Origin yeah so Blue Origin is your private spaceflight commercial spaceflight company and we'll talk in a minute about all the work that you're doing in that regard but I guess what I want to focus on for a minute or two is the inspiration for that the passion behind it so you know I'm gonna put up a phone this one's really more embarrassing for me than for you but so here we are this is like you're about to block a soccer kick or something that's I'm auditioning for Alvin sorry the far right there is our dad that's Chico in the man over there on the right he's Cuban and it's a kind of you know it's one of those tricks at the universe place on you that my mom's name is Jackie and my name is Jeff and there's no J in Spanish and so he still has to call her Jackie and me yes but he sounds exactly like Ricky Ricardo delightful guy but yeah that's the whole crew that's the whole crew there so you were the bounding Torian of your high school in Miami and I had the opportunity to give a speech yeah at your graduation and you I think the vast majority of your speech was about colonizing space I think all of it I think all of it is yeah right so I still remember your closing line I mean even then it stood out to me yeah and it was do you remember I do I remembered the closet it was something like space the final frontier meet me there that was a that was yeah so and I've been passionate about space rockets and rocket engines since I was a 5 year old boy and so you know I want to talk about that a little bit cuz you know we've talked about or you know it certainly the story you've told about having seen the moon landing in 1969 right so this is pop again that's Christina that's our sister on the floor so this was a very familiar setting for us anytime pop was watching TV yeah he had perfectly good furniture I can see it but yeah no place for laid on the floor to watch television and you remember as seen exactly like this when you were watching the lunar landing yeah no he yeah and I I do think you never know exactly you know you don't choose your passions your pastures choose you how you how they are form you're never completely sure but I do think you get imprinted somehow early on with certain things you just get excited about them and because you're excited you pay more attention and they grow and that's spaces like that for me I watched Neil Armstrong step under the moon when I was five and you know I I do wonder I know that pop was a big fan of the Watergate trials also watch those and yeah I'm setting just like this he was kind of a news junkie anyway religiously you obsessively watched the Watergate hearings I you know do you think at some level that might have influenced you at least by the post yeah it's hard to know you know I bought the post because I think it's an important institution and you know I told the team at the time like you know I the post at the time had it was kind of financially upside-down had a lot of work to do no fault of their own the internet had really taken the wind out of newspaper companies and I said look you know I would not buy a say financially upside down salty snack food company but post is real institutional I think matters and and needs some runway so that's why I did it I happen to know the guy who owned it for so many years yeah Don Graham who is just an amazing person and so that all worked out but did watching the Watergate hearings with pop on the carpet have influenced that probably right at some level you know so going back to to Blue Origin I mean you know space has been such a big part of your life for so long and certainly every memory that's induced and we lived in Houston those marks not too far from our house I think that you know it's science fiction science fiction movies books you know I my passion for that stuff certainly came from you know watching you enjoy it so much but you know I look at this picture and you know I thought to myself well I've seen that face recently haha and it's and this so this is you're standing on the landing pad yeah in West Texas the launch and landing site in West Texas where you're do launching and landing a new Shepherd vehicle for Blue Origin so if you could just take a minute or two and help us understand what is Blue Origin up - well Blue Origin is the vision for Blue Origin is millions of people living and working space and the key thing is we have to dramatically reduce the cost of access to space right now space travel is very expensive and the reason it's expensive it's not hard to understand it's because we throw the hardware away after each use and so we need reusable rocket vehicles and that's what Laura John is working on we're working on making sure that we don't have to throw the plane away every time after you fly out you know to your vacation destination that would definitely increase the cost of your vacation and and so that's what we need to do and we can do it it's totally possible and I think it's I think it's important yeah this is uh this is what the booster looks like when it's coming back down yeah in this cowboy hat still has champagne stains that's right your head still kind of stains so you know I guess you know if we could ton of my favorite shots this is the booster and pin and that's West Texas it's beautiful country so if you could just talk a little bit about you know you've been passionate about space your whole life you know you know this is not just a plaything for you know guarded Blue Origin is doing is not you know no nice thing I mean no actually this is a important way my view is like Minh credibly important work that needs to be done and done as quickly as possible and I have my own reasons why I believe that they can be explained pretty simply and it's not for me it's not the there's a very kind of common argument that's been around for a long time actually kind of first popularized by arthur c clarke so in all civilizations become spacefaring or extinct and this is the kind of plan B argument that you know when earth is destroyed somehow we'd better make sure that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket and I hate the plan B argument I think you know Plan B with respect to earth being destroyed is make sure a plan a works so we have sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system believe me this is the best one we know that it's not even close you know my friends who say they want to move to Mars or something I still like why don't you go live in Antarctica for a year first because it's a garden paradise compared to Mars and so we really this is that this planet is so amazing it's a jewel in our solar system and we have if you take baseline energy usage on earth and just compound it at a few percent a year for just a few hundred years you have to cover the entire Earth's surface in solar cells so that's not going to happen so we have two choices we either go out into space or we switch over to a civilization of stasis and personally I do not like the idea of stasis you know we have it's our grandchildren and their grandchildren will live in a much better world if they can continue to advance and develop and use more energy and and all of the things that we've enjoyed for hundreds of years as a civilization of growth I don't even really believe in stasis I think things are either growing or shrinking I don't I think stasis is highly highly unusual and in real life doesn't exist I don't even think Liberty is consistent with the idea of stasis I mean if you get real stasis somebody's gonna have to tell you how many kids you can have how much energy you can use there'll be all kinds of things that just aren't consistent with with liberty and freedom so but in space we have for all practical purposes unlimited resources we could have a trillion humans in the sewer system and wouldn't still wouldn't be crowded and so then if you had a trillion humans you'd have thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozart's and a thousand DaVinci's and how cool would that be but we have to go to space and we have to go to space to save earth that's why this work is so important and we don't have forever to do it we've now gotten so big as a civilization on earth that we kind of have to hurry and so I believe that the you know the really in the kind of a long time frame the most important work I'm doing is is Blue Origin and pushing forward to get humanity established in the solar system so and what sort of time frame are we talking about well the grand vision you know trillion humans in the solar system and so on that's I mean that's hundreds of years but you know but in and we can have in just a couple of decades I think we can have a much lower cost space travel and then we can start to you know have really a dynamic entrepreneurial explosion in space you know you can't really have much entrepreneurial activity in space today because the just the basic price of admission is too expensive I mean just to do anything even something relatively small in space is still very very expensive we need to lower the cost of admission so that thousands of entrepreneurs can have companies in space kind of like what we've seen on the internet right now you can't be two kids in a dorm room can make Facebook but they can't make a space company it's not practical we want I want to make that practical yeah just so you know and and you know that leads me to think about some of the conversations we've had this is another view of those mountains in West Texas you know sitting around that fire pit and some of the most profound conversations for me anyway that that we've had are around the topic of long-term thinking yeah which is something that you've really embraced and you know you've brought to the businesses that you run and you know if you just talk a little bit I don't think that most people who are running businesses or who are you know making even starting a company like Blue Origin allow themselves to think in centuries even for visions for a vision of what they're creating or you know it Amazon I know that you've said you know five to seven year time frames for experiments that you're running where does it talk to me about long-term thinking and your point of view on well long-term thinking is lever it lets you do things that you could not do or couldn't even conceive of doing if you were thinking short-term so if I you know that's why you know that I have a project where I'm helping a group of people build the 10,000 year clock it kind of ticks once a year and dongs once a century and the cuckoo comes out once a millennium it's a bits of big 500 foot tall thing inside a mountain right here inside one of those mountain range and the ten thousand your clock is a symbol I don't think it'll do anything for the first few hundred years but after a few years once it's old you will start to pay attention to older symbols and so a few hundred years from now I hope that people will think about that as a symbol for long-term thinking if I you know if I collaborated with somebody here in this audience and I said look I want you to solve what world hunger and I want you to do it in five years you would properly reject the opportunity you would say look it's not possible it's not practical but if I said look I want you to solve world hunger in a hundred years that's a job you'd take because it's a much more addressable problem you can first create the conditions you have time to create the conditions where then you can solve the problem and so that's that's a very important way of thinking and and I find it's and it works with everything I mean you have to back up and find the right time horizon for what you're trying to do but you know at Amazon we probably do most of our things we expect that to get some results in sort of five six seven eight years but we find a lot of our you know other companies that compete against us in various ways they're often trying to get things done and you know two or three years and so we can do things that you know if you if you if everything has to work in two to three years then that limits what you can do if you give yourself the breathing room to say okay I'll I'm okay if it takes seven years all of a sudden you have way more opportunities the one of the things I want to shift to here is when when we are raising a glass around a fire and you usually have a toast the standard toast a standard toast that you usually kick off the night with yawn its to adventure and fellowship to adventure in fellowship and literally that's like that he kicks off its about every dinner with right every dinner every night and it's you know it's interesting to me because I know that you are somebody who pays attention to the words that you use right you're careful about the words that you use and those seem like very specific words so I was wondering if we could just talk a little bit about why adventure and why fellowship and as I was thinking about this you know it occurred to me that you've been taking some adventures you know throughout your your whole life here your grandmother nanny yeah that's nanny and you know when you were a kid you used to take road trips with yeah Danny and Wally by armed Caravan Club road trips you had 300 Airstream trailers here yeah all driving down the highway together that we'd park so before they were hipster cool big wagon wheel formations yeah there was no avocado toast at this and and you know you and I had the good the fun opportunity we drove across the country yeah yeah and the defender in there that was a great that was an amazing trip that was a very truss and then you know we also we spent three days on horseback that was a 50 mile ride in West Texas yeah every day is super fun my butt hurt yeah I apologize about the quality like I said this is not what I do so this is the best I could do here but I did take this picture that's Jeff sleeping on that trail ride it was cold this is that ring of you can see how I'm keeping that pillow from my this is when you know it's really good to be a mammal you provide your own heat provide your own body heat keep the frost away from your face I guess I guess you know all of these adventures you know this is this is a you're dropping down into a cave yeah rappelling down that was really fun that you were on that trip I was on that trip too you know but so you know people have asked me this you know because they know that we we go on a lot of adventures together and they're a bit incredulous when I when I answered the question but they asked me you know is he on his phone the whole time can he ever unplug and they're incredulous when I say honestly he's not on his phone that much he's just you know when you you're just your we drove across the country and you know it's not that you didn't do the work but most of the time it was it was this and I see the same thing when you're you know with your kids and you know it's how do you I don't have a fraction of the responsibility that you do and I find that I'm always wrestling with you know my phone I'm just curious like what sort of discipline or what sort of you know how do you go about compartmentalizing the way that I you know I do not so like when I have dinner I have dinner whether it's with friends or with my family and I like to if I'm I like to be talking to the people I'm with I like to do whatever I'm doing I don't like to multitask it bothers me if I'm reading my email I want to be really reading my email when I my mom tells a story about me being in Montessori School and then they couldn't get me to switch tasks so the Montessori School teacher would have to literally pick up my chair and just move me to the next task station so I don't know it's not like it's not intentional isn't neat I don't need discipline in order to not be checking my email for me it's very natural I love being present and whatever I'm working and I'm happy multitasking but I do it serially you know I will spin and then and you don't you know honestly if something really important is happening somebody will find me you know it's not like I have to check my text messages every five minutes or something like that it's not that's not a not a big deal right and usually when they do find you it's rarely to give you good news oh yeah no if somebody comes and says you need to check your text messages right now that's got to be bad news that's usually actually honestly you know it's usually a family thing it's like a medical thing or something it's like but it's not I I think that it's probably just a very personal decision I think some people are very good at multitasking and so they can do two things one sand you know I am at restaurant with my wife or something and we'll see a couple both texting but every once why they show show that their phones and it seems like they're having a very nice date so I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that it's just not how I'm wired got it so you know going back to you know the sense of adventure you know what can you talk to me a little bit about what the role that adventure plays in in your life and you know what is it that it brings to you it's it's more than just a distraction ya know I so that when I say to adventure Fellowship for me adventure is a you can choose we all get to choose our life stories and it's the choices that define us not our gifts everybody in this room has many gifts I have many gifts you can never be proud of your gifts because they're gifts they were given to you you might be you know tall or you might be really good at math or you might be extremely beautiful or handsome or you know there are there many gifts and you can only be proud really of your choices because those are the things that you are that you're that you are acting on and one of the most important choices that each of us has and you know this just as well as I do is you can choose a life of ease and comfort or you can choose a life of service and adventure and when you're 80 which one of those things you think you're gonna be more proud of you're gonna be more proud of having chosen a life of service or adventure you see this in your firefighting work and everything else you do Robin Hood so on and so on and I feel that that is a you know for me adventure is a shorthand way of thinking about that got it and I think that one of the other things that we've talked about when we talk about adventure is you know exposing yourself to new things right and and you know maintaining that childlike sense of wonder totally and you know I know that you know this is important to you certainly in in our personal lives which is why we do all of these fun things but it also plays an important role in you know how you approach the businesses that you're involved in them if you want to be an inventor of any kind inventing a new you know a new service offering for customers or a new product or anything the being an inventor requires because the world is so complicated you have to be a domain expert I mean in a way even if even if you're not at the beginning you have to learn learn learn learn learn enough so to become a domain expert but the danger is once you've become a domain expert you can be trapped by that knowledge and so inventors have this paradoxical ability to have that you know 10,000 hours of practice and be a real domain expert and have that beginner's mind have that that look at it freshly even though they know so much about the domain and that's the key to inventing you have to have both and I think that is intentional I think all of us have that inside of us and we could all do it but you have to be intentional about it you have to say yeah I am gonna become an expert and I'm gonna keep my beginner's mind but I know that I mean this is so important you're always you know it's it's a regular refrain even at Amazon this far into it that it's still day one day one so you know one of these so I guess the other half of that toast is you know to fellowship yeah right to adventure and fellowship and again fellowship is a very specific word right you know friendship is much more common so what why did you what like what about what is it about fellowship me the word fellowship conjures a vision of traveling down the road together it's a it's a it has more journey in it yeah I'm in French so my friendship would be is great it would be great to bellow ship captures friendship and traveling that path together this is so this is down at the bottom but there we are yeah there's our brother and there's McKenzie our brother-in-law Steve yeah friend Danny no I'm great great trip that was that was quite you don't have to worry about checking your phone there no no no radio signals down there so you know another adventure I guess an opportunity for adventure and and fellowship fun trip was this trip and you know we were out at sea for 30 days young and we did this when you've been out at sea for 30 days this looks like it's in focus so but why don't you you know can you talk a little bit about what we learned excuse me by the way where I be R game is very strong are you crushing me on the beard game I don't even try the beard my beard thing doesn't work at all I get that crap beard but the we this is the recovery expedition we went and recovered the Apollo 11 saturn v f1 engines from the bottom of the atlantic under 14,000 feet of water they'd been resting there peacefully for more than four decades and we did it it was the it was a it was an incredible adventure the captain there were 60 people on the boat including our mother Jackie and she was the only woman on the boat so it was 59 men and my mom and when I first got on the boat the captain came and found me and this is a big 300 foot boat with you know a moon pool and and diving submersibles remotely operated vehicles very high-tech the captain came very nice Norwegian guy and he said I we've never had a woman on the boat before and I've taken the liberty of removing all of the pornography from the common areas and I just wanted to make sure that's okay with you and I was like yeah that sounds good that's good I never did find that stash and so so we were successful we recovered those engines and we're so where are they one of them is at the Smithsonian and one of them is at the Seattle Museum of Flight well hopefully there'll be some other five-year-old who runs into them and inspired as you were you know they're incredible engineered objects I mean still today there's probably no rocket engine that has been more successful than the Saturn 5 f1 so you know one of the as I was putting this together and looking at all of these pictures and you know thinking about the adventures that we've had together and you know I again you know knowing how much time and effort you put into Amazon in the Washington Post and Blue Origin and you know I also happen to know that you're a devoted husband and beloved father with your kids you have a fantastic relationship the bezos's have a lot of kids we has four I have four sister has three yeah we're making sure that the population doesn't go that we need we need to go into space yeah well one of the I guess one of the questions I have is you know how do you go about establishing that work-life balance that everybody you know talks about and thinks about you've got I mean you live a big life right and how do you how do you I get down in a lot I get it I teach senior executive kind of leadership classes at Amazon for our most senior execs and I also teach or not teach but I also speak to interns so kind of all across the spectrum and I get this question about work-life balance all the time from from both ends of the spectrum and the my view is I don't even like the phrase work-life balance I think it's misleading I like the phrase work life harmony because I know that if I am energized at work happy at work feeling like I'm adding value part of a team whatever energizes you that makes me better at home it makes me a better husband a better father and likewise if I'm happy at home it makes me a better employee a better boss all the things it's not about it's not primarily about there may be crunch periods where it's about the number of hours and the week but that that's not the that's not the real thing usually it's about do you have energy and is the is your work depriving you of energy or is your work generating energy for you and you know there are people everybody in this room notice people you fall into these two camps you're in a meeting and the person comes in the room some people come into the meeting and they add energy to the meeting other people come into the meeting and the whole meeting just deflates and those people just they drain energy from the meeting and you have to decide which of those kinds of people you're gonna be are you gonna add energy and the same thing at home and the same thing at home and it's so it's a wheel it's a cycle it's a flywheel it's a circle it's not a balance because of balance that's why that metaphor is so dangerous because it implies there's a strict trade-off and you could be out of work have all the time for your family in the world but really depressed and demoralized about your work situation and your family wouldn't want to be anywhere near you they would wish you would take a vacation from them and so it's not about the number of hours not primarily I suppose if you went crazy with you know 100 hours a week or something yeah that maybe maybe there are limits and they probably but I've never had a problem and I think it's because both sides of my life give me energy and that's what I would recommend it's what I do recommend to interns and execs so we're out of time I just want to say that you know first of all thank you all for joining us around the proverbial fire pit it's it's it's not lost on me that I'm incredibly it brings me joy to have the opportunity to have conversations like this with you often and I do cherish those opportunities and there's just one more so thank you very much thank all of you I guess there's just one more thing to say we should toast yep to adventure fellowship [Applause] you

Channel: Summit

Views: 1,516,095

Rating: 4.80094 out of 5

Keywords: summit, conference, ideas, talks, performances, gathering, community, bezos, jeff bezos, mark bezos, amazon.com, amazon, la17, summit la17, festival, ideas conference, ideas festival, lecture, world's richest man

Id: Hq89wYzOjfs

Length: 54min 55sec (3295 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2017