10,000-word long article interview with Bezos: I want to see 1 trillion humans living in the solar system and going to the earth just for vacation

Highlight the point

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  Bezos said his childhood with his grandfather on the ranch taught him a lot, the most important of which was self-reliance.

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  Bezos hopes that humans will be able to enter the solar system to survive, and that there are enough resources in space to support the survival of 1 trillion people.

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  Bezos believes that humans can build giant space stations to live in space, and returning to Earth for a vacation is as convenient as going to a park.

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  Bezos wants to lay the groundwork for the future of space exploration, where people can create space businesses in their dorm rooms, like internet companies in a garage.

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  Confident in the New Shepard's rocket's escape system, Bezos said he wasn't scared at all when he first took a space tour.

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  Despite today's rapid technological development, Bezos doesn't think he'll ever be able to go to the moon or Mars in his lifetime.

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  Bezos does not deny that the scenes in the sci-fi movie "Her" will be played out in reality, admitting that humans and artificial intelligence may fall in love.

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  Bezos, 59, who is nearing the age of his sixtieth year, said he doesn't fear death as much as he did in his 20s.

Tencent Technology News According to foreign media reports, as the former richest man in the world and the third person on the Forbes rich list, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (Jeff Bezos) rarely gives interviews, but recently he accepted a two-hour interview with computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman (Lex Fridman), covering topics such as childhood life, space ambitions, the New Glenn rocket, lunar and Martian colonization, artificial intelligence and the future of mankind.

The following is the full text of the interview:

01 Spent his childhood on a ranch and learned to be self-reliant

Q: You spent most of your childhood with your maternal grandfather on a farm in Texas? I've heard you had a lot of work on the ranch, what is the coolest job you remember doing there?

Bezos: It was a real farm, and I spent almost all my summers on that farm from between the ages of 4 and 16. My grandfather took me with him, pretending I could help on the farm. Of course, a four-year-old is actually more of a burden than a helper in real life. He took care of me seriously because my mom was so young. She gave birth to me when she was 17, so my grandfather gave her a chance to breathe. I spend these summers with my grandparents.

But when I was a little older, I was able to help out on the ranch, and I loved it. My grandfather was a big influence on me and I did all the work I would do on the farm. I repaired the windmills, laid the fences, laid the pipes, vaccinated the animals, and did what all ranchers would do. After my grandmother passed away when I was 12 years old, my grandfather and I were the only ones left, even though I still came to the ranch. He was completely addicted to soap operas. Every day around one o'clock in the afternoon, we would go back to the ranch house and watch TV. Time is like sand in an hourglass, and so are our days.

For me, the most important thing I've learned from ranch life is to be versatile. My grandfather did almost everything himself, making his own veterinary tools, such as making his own needles to sew up the wounds of cows. So, what you learn on a farm is completely different from what you learn growing up in a city.

Q: Self-reliant?

Bezos: Exactly, I've found that with enough perseverance and ingenuity, you can solve any problem. My grandfather only spent about $5,000 on a large bulldozer because it was badly damaged. If it's new, it's probably at least $100,000. We spent the whole summer repairing that bulldozer. We replaced the big gears for the transmission by mail order, but they were too heavy to move, so we had to build a crane. This is the kind of problem-solving mentality, my grandfather doesn't pick up the phone and call others, but does the problem himself. He was a very, very remarkable person.

02 I want to see 1 trillion people living in the solar system

Q: I heard that when you were five years old, you fell in love with the idea of space and space exploration when you saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. In the period from 1957 to 1969, the Soviet Union and the United States conducted a space race, and many epic events took place: the first satellite went into space, the first man went into space, the first spacewalk, the first unmanned landing on the moon. Of course, there are failures, explosions and even casualties. Then, the first human walked on the moon. What are some of the more inspiring moments you've seen in your 12 years and in the years since?

Bezos: Actually, there was a lot of inspiration back then. What we can learn from this can be summed up in the famous quote of rocket expert Wernher von Braun: "I use the word 'impossible' very carefully. The Apollo moon landing even later became a metaphor for something that was practically impossible, but in the end we did!

Q: You named the rocket that Blue Origin is working on after some of the people involved in the Apollo program.

Bezos: Exactly, because they're taking a huge risk. Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space, made a suborbital flight, and at that time he had a 75% chance of success. In fact, it's quite a risk.

Q: But Shepard is not as famous as John Glenn!

Bezos: Indeed, Glenn was the first American to fly around the Earth. By the way, I received the most charming, sweetest, and most incredible letter from Glenn, which I framed and hung on the wall of my office.

Q: What did he say in his letter?

Bezos: He told me that he was grateful that we named the New Glenn rocket after him. The letter, which was sent to me a week before he died, reads, "This is a letter about the new Glenn, from the original Glenn. "He has a great sense of humor, which he is happy and grateful.

QUESTION: So, back to the big picture of the universe. When you look up at the stars and imagine the future, what do you think the future of mankind will look like, and what will space look like in hundreds or even thousands of years?

Bezos: I'd love to see a trillion people living in the solar system. If we had a trillion people, at any given time, we would have 1,000 Mozart and 1,000 Einstein. Our solar system will be full of life, wisdom and energy. We can easily use the resources of the solar system to prop up a vast civilization.

Q: What do you think that would look like? Giant space station?

Bezos: yes, the only way to make that vision happen is to build a giant space station, and the planet's surface is so small. So, I mean, unless you turn them into giant space stations or something. In the future, we will be able to get materials from places like the Moon, near-Earth objects, and asteroid belts, and we will build giant colonies where people will live. They have a lot of advantages over the planetary surface. You can rotate them to get normal gravitational pull on the earth, you can put them where you want. I think most people want to live near the Earth, not necessarily in Earth orbit, but in orbit near Earth. As a result, they can travel back and forth between the space station and Earth relatively quickly. I think a lot of people, especially in the early stages, don't want to give up on the planet altogether.

Q: Can they go on vacation to Earth?

Bezos: yes, like you might go on vacation to Yellowstone National Park today, people can choose where they live on Earth, or if they live in space, but they use a lot more energy and material resources in space than they do on Earth.

Q: One of the interesting ideas that you came up with is to move heavy industry off the planet. People sometimes think that space exploration conflicts with protecting the planet and that we should focus on protecting it. Basically, your idea is to combine space travel and space exploration to help protect the planet.

Bezos: We've sent robotic probes to all planets, and we know that Earth is unique. With a unique ecosystem and lush flora and water, this planet is truly special. Of course, we evolved on this planet, so of course this is perfect for us, but it's also perfect for all the higher life forms on this planet, all the animals and so on. So, it's a gem. We really need to protect it. As we enter the Anthropocene, when we humans become so complex, so large and influential, that we are going to take a lot of energy in our strides on this planet. We expect to consume more energy per capita.

No one wants to go back in time. In almost every way, almost everyone is better off today than they were 50 or 100 years ago. In general, we are living better than our grandparents, and they are living better than their grandparents. You can see that the global illiteracy rate, the global poverty rate, and the global infant mortality rate are all decreasing. No matter which measure you choose, we're all better off than we've been in the past. We received antibiotics and all kinds of life-saving medical care. But there's one thing that's going backwards, and that's nature.

In fact, about 500 years ago, in the pre-industrial era, nature remained in its original state. That's incredible. As an advanced society, we have traded some of our raw beauty for all these other gifts. We can have both, but to do that, we have to go into space. The most basic measure is energy use per capita. You do want to continue using more and more energy, which will change your life for the better in many ways, but this could eventually lead to the depletion of the earth's resources. So, we have to go into the solar system. In fact, you can argue about when you have to do it, but you don't have to argue about whether you have to.

Q: What do you think about space infrastructure such as the Blue Ring and Orbital Reef space stations?

Bezos: The Blue Ring is a very interesting spacecraft designed to carry a payload of 3,000 kilograms to geosynchronous orbit or near the Moon. It has two different modes of propulsion, which are chemical propulsion and electric propulsion. So, you can use it in a few different ways. You can move slowly, let's say by electric propulsion to geosynchronous orbit. This can take 100 days or 150 days, depending on the quality of the payload you are carrying. You can also use chemical propulsion, which allows you to quickly change orbits in geosynchronous orbit. Or you can quickly reach a geosynchronous orbit with chemical propulsion and then slowly change orbit with electric propulsion.

The Blue Ring has several interesting features. It has a lot to offer for these payloads. It can carry both larger and smaller payloads, and it provides support for thermal management, power, computing power, and communications. So, when you're designing the payload for the blue ring, you don't need to figure out all these things yourself. However, radiation tolerance calculations are a complex matter. So, we have a lot of radiation tolerance calculations on the blue ring, and your payload can use it when needed. All of these services, like APIs, are a bit like Amazon's cloud computing service, AWS. It can also act as a means of transportation, taking you to different tracks.

Q: Do you think that this includes transporting humans?

Bezos: No, the Blue Ring is not designed to transport humans, but to deliver payloads. So, we're also building a lunar lander, which of course is designed to allow humans to land on the surface of the moon.

03 I didn't want to be a theoretical physicist, so I switched to computer science

Q: When you were a student at Princeton, you aspired to be a theoretical physicist. What attracted you to change your mind and not become the famous theoretical physicist Jeff Bezos?

Bezos: I love physics, I studied physics and computer science Xi, and I went down the path of physics. I'm going to major in physics and I want to be a theoretical physicist. Computer science is a fun thing I want to do. I really like it, I'm good at programming and doing those things, and I absolutely love all the computer science courses. But I was determined to become a theoretical physicist, and that's why I went to Princeton in the first place. Then I realized that I might just be reduced to a mediocre theoretical physicist. In my classes, like quantum mechanics and stuff, there are people who can do things that are hard for me without much effort. I realized that there are 1000 ways to be smart.

Theoretical physics isn't the kind of field where only the top percent can really push the most advanced technology forward, it's one of those things that your brain has to connect in some way. I was advised that I should not try to be a theoretical physicist. His name is Yosanta, he's from Sri Lanka, and he's one of the smartest people I've ever met. One night, my friend Joe and I were solving a very difficult partial differential equation problem. We've been working on it for three hours, and we've made no progress. We looked up at each other at the same time and decided to ask Yosanta for help.

So we went to Yosanta's dorm, where he was almost always there. He stared at the question for a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds, and then gave the answer. We still didn't understand, so he took out some paper and wrote down three pages of equations, and the result was just as he expected. But when asked to explain, Yosanta said, "A few years ago, I solved a similar problem, and I was able to map that question to that problem and find the answer very easily." "If you have that experience, you realize that maybe being a theoretical physicist isn't that easy. So, I switched to computer science, which was really good for me. I love it.

In my opinion, math skills are too demanding today. Today, to be a successful theoretical physicist, you must be a world-class mathematician. You may also need other skills, intuition, lateral thinking, and more. But without top-notch math skills, you're unlikely to succeed.

Q: If you want to be truly creative, you have to be able to imagine. In fact, Walter Isaacson (biographer) once compared you to Albert Einstein.

Bezos: That's great! I'm an inventor. I observe things and can come up with atypical solutions. I can then create 100 of these atypical solutions for something, 99 of which may fail the review, but one of them is fantastic. Then, you can continue from here. So, this lateral thinking, this creativity in a high-dimensional space, that's where my invention skills come from. I position myself as an inventor and not as anything else.

04 It is necessary to lay a solid foundation for future generations to explore space

You took me on a tour of the Blue Origin Rocket Factory and Launch Center in historic Cape Canaveral, where large rockets like the USS New Glenn are being built and launched. Can you explain what the new Glenn Rocket is? Tell me some interesting technical details?

Bezos: The New Glenn is a very large heavy launch vehicle that can carry 45 tons of payload to low earth orbit. Its thrust is about half that of the Saturn 5 rocket, with about 3.9 million pounds (about 1,769 tons) of thrust at launch. There are seven BE-4 engines on the booster, each producing a little more than 550,000 pounds (about 250 tons) of thrust. The fuel used in the engine is liquefied natural gas, with liquid oxygen as an oxidizing agent. The engine will also power the first stage of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket. The second stage of the New Glenn is powered by two BE-3U engines, the upper-stage variant of our New Shepard liquid hydrogen engine.

The BE-3U has 160,000 pounds (about 72 tons) of thrust, and the two have 320,000 pounds. Hydrogen is a good propellant for the second stage of a rocket because of its high ISP (Specific Impulse, an important physical quantity that measures the efficiency of a rocket or aircraft engine). But in my opinion, it's not a good propellant for a booster, because the booster can get big. The ISP of hydrogen is very high, but the density of liquid hydrogen is not high at all. So, in order to store liquid hydrogen, if you need to store a few thousand pounds of liquid hydrogen, your liquid hydrogen tank becomes very large. So, the second stage of the rocket uses liquid hydrogen without a huge fuel tank.

Q: So the size specification is closely related to the cost?

Bezos: Exactly. When you look at the physics of a rocket engine and the parasitic mass, let's say you have an avionics system, guidance and control system, which is about the same mass and size for both large and small rockets. So, if you build very small rockets, the parasitic mass will have a big impact. But if you build a very large rocket, it becomes insignificant. This is parasitic quality.

Another example is that rocket engines have turbopumps. They had to pressurize the fuel in the oxidizer to a very high pressure level in order to inject it into the thrust chamber, where it burned. In fact, as they get bigger, these pumps become more and more efficient. So, it is very challenging to make a very small turbo pump, and there is any gap between the housings. For example, there must be some clearance between the rotating impeller pressurizing the fuel. But you can't let these parts rub against each other, and these gaps can lead to inefficiencies. So, if you have a very large turbo pump, those gaps will end up being very small in percentage. So, there are a lot of things that make you end up loving Big Rocket.

But there is an exception to this rule, and that is in manufacturing, because it is very, very challenging to make large components. If you're making a small rocket engine, you can move all the parts by hand, you can assemble it on a table, and one person can do it. You don't need cranes, heavy lifting jobs and tools, etc. And when you start building large objects, infrastructure, it can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is true both from an engineering standpoint and from a construction and cost standpoint.

Q: However, there are a variety of different components and materials. Can you describe anything interesting about the materials that make up the rockets? I guess they have to be as light as possible, but also able to withstand high temperatures and harsh environments?

Bezos: I sometimes play a little game with other rocket guys, and they ask, "What would have surprised the engineers of the '60s? What changed?" Because surprisingly, some of the most successful rockets have not changed. They will immediately realize that a lot of what we do today is exactly what they pioneered in the 60s. But something has changed. Today, the use of carbon composites is very different. We can make very complex carbon tape laying machines, it can make huge fairings, we can make these very light, very stiff fairing structures out of carbon composites, which they could never have dreamed of. The efficiency, structural efficiency of this material is higher than any metal material or other material that you might use.

Remember the scenario I showed you about lithium aluminium and friction stir welding? It's an amazing technology that was invented decades ago, but it's only become very practical in the last few decades. Instead of welding two pieces of metal together with heat, it directly stirs the two pieces of metal. There is a pin that rotates at a certain speed, and you place the pin between two metal plates that you want to weld together, and then move it at a very precise speed. There is no need to heat the material, it will heat up because of friction, but it is not very hot, you can stir friction welding immediately after welding, you can touch the material, it is almost hot. It stirs the molecules together, which is unusual.

With traditional welding techniques, you will eventually find weak areas where you weld, regardless of the potential strength properties of the material. But with friction stir welding, the weld is as strong as the body material. So, let's say you're building a tank, you're going to pressurize a big LNG tank for our boosters, and if you're welding it with the traditional method, you have to determine the size of those weld areas, the thickness of these pieces, and any damage that you do to the weld that's going to add a lot of weight to the tank. For example, the fairing, it needs to be 100% intact.

Q: Your rocket is a two-stage rocket, and the first stage can be reused?

Bezos: Yes, the second level is consumables. The second stage uses liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, so we can take advantage of a higher specific impulse. The first stage lands on a landing platform at sea, comes back for maintenance, and is then ready for the next mission.

Q: There are a lot of questions here, is there a way to achieve reusability at the second level as well?

Bezos: yes, we know how to do it. Now, we will work on making the second stage so that it is as cheap as possible. There are two ways to do this: the first is to make it reusable, and the second is to work on making it cheaper so you can afford it. It is uncertain which option is better.

Q: Can you talk about the details in terms of cost?

Bezos: Back in the fifties and sixties of the last century, we solved the problem of getting into orbit. Of more interest is how to drastically reduce the cost of getting into orbit. If you can do that, you're blazing a whole new trail. One of our missions is to be a part of the industry and reduce the cost of getting into orbit, which can help people enter a golden age of all sorts of interesting things to do in space.

Q: Some of the greatest innovations, inventions, and brilliance have come at the cost reduction phase. You've also been working on reducing costs for a long time.

Bezos: Absolutely. What does cost reduction really mean? It means inventing a better way. When you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer, whatever it may be. Thousands of years ago, someone invented the plow, which made the whole world richer because it reduced the cost of agriculture. So inventing a better way is a big deal and a way to help the world become richer.

Q: So on the manufacturing side, on the engineering side, what was the biggest challenge you faced in the first launch of the New Glenn?

Bezos: The first launch is one thing, we're going to launch in 2024. The real challenge is to ensure that our factories are producing at high efficiency. Consider that if you want to launch the New Glenn 24 times a year, twice a month, you need to build the second stage of the rocket that acts as a consumable, and each second stage also requires two BE-3U engines. So, you need to make all the production equipment, processes, inspection techniques, acceptance tests, everything work properly. Making a car is at least as difficult as designing a car in the first place, and the two are the same thing.

I would like to emphasize the engines: if you launch twice a month, then you need to add four BE-3U engines. So you need to produce one per week, and the engine needs to be produced at a specific rate. That's everything you need to do, you need to have the right machines, the right fixtures, the right people, the right processes, and so on. The first launch of the New Glenn was important, but it wasn't the hardest part. The hard part was everything going on behind the scenes, setting up the factory to produce more new Glenn.

Q: Is manufacturing the biggest challenge?

Bezos: Yes. It's certainly hard to design the engine and all those parts to work, but the challenge now is that it's hard to evaluate manufacturing and do it in an efficient way. Again, back to our costs: if you evaluate manufacturing in an inefficient way, you're not really addressing costs, and maybe you're not really pushing the technology forward. All of this is to push the boundaries of this technology. There are easier businesses to do, and I always tell people, "If you want to make money, start a savory snack company or something." ”

I would say that it is not easy at all to do rockets, but it is a reward in itself. It's fun, it's worth it, it's meaningful. I don't want to pick on the prickly picks of savory snack companies, but I don't think there's much point in that. At the end of the day, you won't have a great sense of accomplishment, and a "career in space exploration" is something fundamentally different.

It's one of the great challenges facing humanity, especially when you see landing on the moon and Mars, building huge space colonies, unlocking all these things. I may not live to see that day, but the results often come from building roads to space, building infrastructure. I'll give you an analogy. When I started Amazon, I didn't need to develop a payment system, it already existed and was called a credit card. I don't need to develop a shipping system to deliver packages, it already exists and is called a postal service. All this complex infrastructure is in place, and I can stand on their shoulders.

Another example is the Internet, which has the necessary ancillary infrastructure, and in 1994 people began to use dial-up modems, which were carried on long-distance telephone networks. That's how people access servers and so on. Again, if those foundations didn't exist, there would be hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditures, and no startup can do that. So, if you look at the last 20 years of the internet space and see two kids starting an internet company in their dorm room and having success doing something amazing, it's because they don't need to build a huge infrastructure. That's what I want to do, I use the money I'm making on Amazon to build big infrastructure, so that the next generation, my kids and their kids, this generation can use these big infrastructure, and then there will be space entrepreneurs starting businesses out of their dorm rooms. It's going to be a sign of success when you can start a truly valuable space company in your dorm room, and then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that we can really unleash creativity and imagination. I find it exciting.

Q: As things stand, is the first test launch of New Glenn in 2024 and the launch of the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE) mission to Mars for NASA still possible?

Bezos: I'm very optimistic that the first launch of the New Glenn will take place in 2024, and I just can't be 100% sure what the payload of the first launch will be. We did a lot of ground testing, a lot of simulations. So a lot of the problems that we might find in flight have been solved, but there are also some problems that can only be found in flight. So pray, but I promise you, no matter what happens, you'll have a good time.

05 I'm not afraid to travel to space for the first time

Q: I don't know if you remember the first manned flight of the New Shepard, and you were scared?

Bezos: Strangely, I don't feel anything. I've seen other people ride rockets, and that's more nervous than when I'm in a rocket myself. When I told my mother I was going on my first space trip, I had a difficult conversation with her. Not only am I going, I'm going to take my brother with me. It's not easy to talk to a mom about this kind of thing.

But it was an incredible experience, and we had a great laugh in the capsule and were not nervous at all. The people on the ground are worried about us. This was actually the most exciting part of the experience, even before the flight. At half past four in the morning, my brother and I were getting ready to go to the launch site, and Lauren would take us in her helicopter, and we were getting ready to leave. We walked outside, outside the ranch house in West Texas, where the launch facility was located, where all of our families, my children and my brother's children, our parents and close friends gathered to say goodbye to us. Maybe they thought they were going to say goodbye to us forever, and we probably didn't feel that way, but it was clear from their faces that they were very nervous. You can feel that you are cared for, and in that moment, it's really magical.

It feels natural in zero gravity and is really fun. Then people talk about the overview effect and looking at the Earth from space, and I have a very strong feeling. I think everybody is like that: you see how fragile the earth is. If you're not an environmentalist, it will make you an environmentalist. To quote Jim Lovell (American actor), who looked back at Earth from space, he said he realized: "You don't go to heaven when you die, because you go to heaven as soon as you were born." "That's what people feel like in space. You see all the darkness, all the nothingness, and there is one jewel of life, and that is the earth.

Q: During that experience, what was your impression of the system on the rocket?

Bezos: Escape system. We have a solid rocket engine at the bottom of the crew compartment, so if there is a problem during the ascent, when the main rocket engine is ignited, we can ignite this solid rocket engine at the bottom of the crew compartment and get out of the booster. It's a very challenging system that includes building, designing, validating, testing, and more. That's why I'm willing to let anyone aboard the New Shepard. We work hard to make sure that boosters are as safe and reliable as possible, but no matter what rocket engine you're talking about, you're harnessing so much power in such a small, compact geometry. The energy density is so great that it is impossible to ensure that nothing can go wrong.

So, the only way to improve security is to have an escape system. Historically, manned rockets have escape systems, including Apollo, Gemini, etc., only the Space Shuttle does not. We also have an escape system on board the New Shepard, which is reusable in a sense. Cost is really important in those things, so we figured out how to make the escape system reusable. When not in use, it can be a push system. It's a very complicated thing. I knew the craft very well before making the decision to ride, I knew the people who designed it, and I had a lot of trust in them and the engineering efforts we made. I said to myself, "If I'm not ready, then I don't want anyone to go." "In my opinion, the space tourism ship must be designed to be as safe as possible. You can't make it completely secure, but there are things you can do to protect it.

I feel good about this system. I guess it's one of the reasons why I'm so calm inside, maybe other people aren't so calm. They don't have as many as I know.

Q: Who is responsible for activating the escape system?

Bezos: It's automatic. Automation is better because it allows for faster reactions.

06 Blue Origin needs to be accelerated, and Musk is a man of leadership

Q: Are you frustrated by the speed at which Blue Origin is progressing?

Bezos: Blue Origin needs to accelerate, and that's one of the reasons why I stepped down as CEO of Amazon a few years ago, "I want to join, Blue Origin needs me now". When I was the CEO of Amazon, my perception of the question was, "If I were the CEO of a public company, I would keep my full attention." "That's how I think about things. It's important to me. I feel like I have an obligation to do this to all of Amazon's stakeholders. I've stepped down as CEO and the main reason for doing this is that I can spend my time on Blue Origin and add some urgency, "We need to move faster!"

Q: Are there any ways to speed things up? You've talked a lot of different ways at Amazon to remove barriers to process or distribution and allow everyone to do their own thing. Does this apply to Blue Origin?

Bezos: Yes, exactly. This is what I directly lead, and we will be the most disruptive company in all industries in the world. At Amazon, from the very beginning, I said, "We want to be the most customer-focused company in the world." "No matter what industry it is, someday, people in the healthcare industry will come to Amazon and wonder, "How do you care so much about your customers? How do you do it not just pay lip service, but actually do it?" All the different industries should come and study us and see how we do it. Blue Origin has something similar and it will help us grow faster and we will be the most disruptive company in the world. We're going to be really good at taking the right technical risks, making decisions quickly, being bold in those things, and having the right culture to back it up.

You need people to be ambitious, "if there are five ways to do one thing, we'll look at them, but let's look at them quickly and then make a decision". We can change our minds at any time. To change your mind, I talked about one-way doors and two-way doors, and most decisions are two-way.

Q: Can you explain? Because I love the metaphor.

Bezos: If you make a bad decision, if it's a two-way door decision, you pick a door, you go out and stay there for a while. If it's a bad decision, you can come back and choose another door. But there are some decisions that are so important that they are difficult to reverse, and they are one-way door decisions. Once you've entered that door, don't even think about coming back. These decisions must be made very carefully. If you can think of another way to analyze this decision, you should slow down. So when I was the CEO of Amazon, I often found myself in the position of chief deceleration officer, because somebody would give me a one-way decision and I would say, "Okay, I can think of three more ways to analyze this." Let's do it because it's not easy to turn this around. Maybe you can reverse it if it will be very expensive and time-consuming. We have to get it right from the start. ”

Two-way door decisions should be made primarily by individuals or very small teams within an organization, while one-way door decisions are irreversible. These people should be promoted to the C-suite, let them slow down, and make sure they're doing the right thing.

Q: One of the things that I really like, maybe it's not a two-way decision, it's the phrase "I don't agree, but promise." Can you explain?

Bezos: It's very common in life, in the company, anywhere you have teammates. You have a teammate and the two of you disagree. At some point, you have to make a decision. In a company, we tend to be hierarchical, and people in higher positions ultimately make decisions. So in the end, it's up to the CEO to decide. CEOs may not always make decisions they agree with, but I need them to carry out my decisions.

07 It is unlikely that you will land on the moon or Mars in your lifetime

Q: You mentioned the moon landing program. In addition to the Artemis return to the moon program in collaboration with NASA, Blue Origin is also advancing its own lander program, MK1, I guess?

Bezos: That's right, Mark One. It is designed to carry 3,000 kilograms of items to the lunar surface and load consumables. This is a disposable lander: land on the moon, stay there and take three thousand kilograms to the lunar surface. It can be launched in one New Glenn flight, which is very important. So, it's a relatively simple structure compared to the human lander known as Mark II. Mark 1 also uses liquid hydrogen as fuel, which is used for high-energy operations such as landing on the lunar surface, and has a great advantage over high-specific hydrogen.

The disadvantage of hydrogen has always been that it cannot be stored due to the fact that it is a deep refrigerant and is always in a boiling state. So what we're doing as part of the lunar program is developing solar cryocoolers that can actually make hydrogen a storable propellant in deep space. This is the real game-changer. This is disruptive for any high-energy mission. In addition to the Moon, there are exoplanets, Mars, and everywhere.

Q: So the idea of Mark 1 and Mark 2 is that New Glenn can take it from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the Moon?

Bezos: Exactly! So Mark One is a consumable. The lunar lander we are developing for NASA, Mark II, is part of the Artemis program, which they call the Continuous Lander program. So the design of the lander is reusable, it can land on the surface of the moon in a single-stage structure, and then take off. If you look at the Apollo program, the lunar lander and Apollo are actually two stages. It will land on the surface of the moon and then leave the descent stage only to return to lunar orbit with the upper level, where it will rendezvous with the command module.

Here, what we're doing is developing a single-stage lunar lander that carries enough propellant so that it can bring everything back and can be reused again and again. Of course, the purpose of this is to reduce costs. Over time, missions to the moon will become cheaper, and this is one of NASA's goals. Because this time, Artemis's whole purpose is to return to the moon and leave people on it. In the Apollo program, we went to the moon six times and then ended the project, which was really too expensive to sustain any longer.

Q: Here are a couple of questions, one of which is how to stay on the moon? What are your thoughts on sustaining a life where a few people can live there for a long time?

Bezos: One of the things that we're looking at is using lunar resources, like the lunar regolith, to make products, and even solar cells that are used on the surface of the moon. We have built a solar cell made entirely from the lunar regolith, but its conversion efficiency is only about 7%. As a result, it is very inefficient compared to the more advanced solar cells that we make on Earth. But if you can figure out how to build a practical solar cell factory, you can land on the surface of the moon, and then the raw material of these solar cells is just the regolith of the moon, so that you can continue to mass-produce solar cells on the lunar surface and provide more power on the lunar surface. This will make it easier for people to live on the moon.

Similarly, we are working on the extraction of oxygen from the lunar regolith. By weight, the lunar regolith contains a large amount of oxygen, which is tightly bound to other elements in the form of oxides. So you have to separate oxygen, which is very energy intensive. So this can also go hand in hand with the solar cell project. Eventually, we may be able to find water ice in craters that are permanently shadowed at the moon's poles. We know that these craters contain water ice and can break it down into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. In this way, not only oxygen, but also hydrogen, a very good and efficient propellant fuel.

In light of this, there are many things we can do to make the Moon fit for survival over time. But the first step, the threshold that all this must pass, is that we need to be able to send goods and humans to the surface of the moon at an acceptable cost.

Q: Do you think it's possible for you to go to the moon or Mars in person, or is it one or both?

Bezos: Unlikely. I think it might have been done by a latecomer. Sadly, in my lifetime, this will probably be done by a professional astronaut. I'd love to take part in this mission, so don't leave me out just yet, maybe give me a chance to discover. But I think that if such a thing is predicted, in my lifetime, landing on the moon or Mars may only be done by professional astronauts.

Q: Are these tasks dangerous and difficult?

Bezos: It could also be that it takes a lot of training. You go there to do something for a very specific purpose. With automation, we can also do a lot of things on the moon. So in terms of setting up these factories and doing all of this work, we're now mature enough with automation technology that we probably don't need humans to manage these factories and machines. So there's a lot to do in both modes.

Q: I have to ask a bigger question: Are you competitors or collaborators in Blue Origin and SpaceX, the two companies that are pushing humanity into space?

Bezos: I would say that just as the internet is huge and there are a lot of winners at all sizes, the internet has created six large companies, but also some small and medium-sized companies, and they're all very successful, all have profits to be made, and they're all driving great customer experiences. That's what we want to see in space, too. There's a lot of space in this field and there will be a lot of winners, and this will happen to people of all skill levels. So SpaceX will definitely succeed, I hope Blue Origin will succeed, I hope there are five other companies behind us.

Q: But I've had a couple of conversations with Musk recently about you, about Blue Origin, and he's very positive about you as a person, and he's very supportive of all your efforts at Blue Origin. What do you think? You've worked with a lot of executives at Blue Origin at Amazon. As a person, as a leader, what do you think of Musk?

Bezos: I don't know much about Musk. I know his public persona, but I also know that you can't get to know a person by his public image. It's impossible. You may think you know, but this may not be the case. You probably know him better than I do. But judging by the results, he must have been a very capable leader. Otherwise, he could not have owned Tesla and SpaceX.

Q: Yes, I would like you to go out and walk once in a while and build a friendship that can inspire humanity as a whole, because what you are doing is one of the great challenges facing humanity.

Bezos: I agree with you, and I think in these efforts, we're thinking very similarly. I'm not saying we're exactly the same, but I think we're like-minded. So I like the idea.

08 In the future, humans may fall in love with artificial intelligence

Q: Regarding artificial intelligence, it has the potential to have an impact on human civilization in different trajectories. How do you think AI will change us?

Bezos: If you're talking about generative AI, large language models, things like ChatGPT and their successors, these are all very powerful technologies. If you don't think so, it's like an ostrich with its head buried in the sand. For me, it's interesting that large language models in their current form are not inventions, but discoveries. The telescope is an invention, but looking at Jupiter through it, knowing that it has moons, is a discovery. Large language models, on the other hand, are more like discoveries, and they are constantly amazed by their capabilities, but they are not really engineering objects.

And then you argue about whether they're good or bad for humans. Even specialized artificial intelligence can cause harm to humans, and conventional machine Xi models alone can create certain weapons of war, which can be incredibly destructive and very powerful. They are not ordinary artificial intelligence, they can be very clever weapons. So we have to think about all these things. I'm very optimistic, though. So even in the face of all this uncertainty, my own view is that these powerful tools are more likely to help us, save us, than harm us, destroy us.

I think we humans have a lot of ways to make ourselves extinct, and these things might help us avoid that, so they might actually save us. So, in my opinion, for those who are overly worried, this is a valid debate. I think they may be missing part of the equation, which is how much help they have in making sure we don't destroy ourselves.

I don't know if you've seen the movie Oppenheimer, but for me, first of all, I love the movie, and I think the best part of the movie is the bureaucrat played by Robert Downey Jr, which I've talked to with some people and they think it's the most boring part of the movie. But I think that's exactly what is most fascinating, because what's happening here is that you realize that we've invented these horrible, destructive and powerful technologies, called nuclear weapons, and they're controlled, and we humans, we don't really have the ability to use them.

That's the problem. As a species, we are not sophisticated and mature enough to handle these technologies. By the way, there's a lot going on before you talk about the possibility of AI general and AI having agents, but at the same time these technologies will bring a lot of benefits, even before the advent of AI general, like better drugs and better tools to develop more technologies and so on. So I think it's an incredible time to be alive and witness the changes that are coming. No one knows how soon it will happen. But in the next 10 and 20 years, I think we're going to see really significant progress. Personally, I'm very excited about it.

We do know that humans behave differently than these models, in part because we're very energy efficient. The human brain can do so many amazing things, and it only needs 20 watts of energy. The AI technology we use today requires a lot of energy to accomplish the same task. So the way the human brain does this is interesting, and we don't need that much data. And with self-driving cars, they have to travel billions of kilometers to learn how to drive Xi. So, I think there are still some tricks that we haven't learned yet. I don't think it's just a matter of scaling up.

Q: There are some more subtle aspects of humanity, such as real innovation, and if AI can actually do that, that's interesting. Large language models are capable of coming up with some really new ideas, but at the same time, they also seem to be very good at giving statements that sound like reality, the so-called hallucinations. How do you get a language model to deduce what's right and what's wrong to reflect?

Bezos: They need to be taught to say "I don't know," and I know a couple of people who can be taught to say "I don't know" as well.

Q: Because you're still going to be involved in the Amazon AI side of things, the other open question is, what kind of product will this create?

Bezos: A lot. We have Alexa and Echo, and Alexa has hundreds of millions of installs. So Alexa is everywhere and will become smarter as well. From a product perspective, it's very exciting.

There are many opportunities here. Shopping assistant, all of this is great. And AWS, we're building Titan, which is our foundational model. We're also building Bedrock, which is an enterprise customer of AWS. Our enterprise customers, they want to be able to use these powerful models with their own enterprise data without accidentally contributing their enterprise data to that model. These are the tools we built for them with Bedrock. So there's a huge opportunity here.

Q: Do you think one day humans and robots, like Alexa, will fall in love like in the movie "Her"?

Bezos: If you look at the diversity of human beings and what people like, you'll see that some people like everything. So the answer to your question is yes. As for when, I don't know when this technique will become widespread, but there are certainly examples of this.

09 years near, no longer afraid of death

Q: Can you explain what a perpetual clock is?

Bezos: The Perpetual Clock is a giant physical clock. It is about 150 meters tall and is located on a hill in West Texas in a room about 3.6 meters in diameter. The Perpetual Clock was an idea that was come up with in the 80s by a smart man named Danny Hillis. The idea was to build a clock as a symbol of long-term thinking. You can conceptually think of a perpetual clock as it ticks once a year and strikes the time once every 100 years. So it slows everything down. It is a completely mechanical clock that is designed to last up to 10,000 years without human intervention. So the choice of material is very important. It is in a remote place, both to protect it and for tourists to make a pilgrimage.

The idea is that over time, it will take on the luster of the years, and then it will become a symbol of long-term thinking, which will actually hopefully allow humans to expand their thinking horizons. In my opinion, this is very important, because as a species, as a civilization, we become stronger. We're really impacting the planet right now. We're really influencing each other. We have weapons of mass destruction. We have all sorts of things that we can really hurt ourselves and the problems we create can be very big. The unintended consequences of some of our actions, such as climate change, are a good example of this. This is an unintended consequence of the Industrial Revolution, from which we have benefited a lot, but we are also suffering from its side effects.

We need to start training ourselves to think long-term. Thinking long-term is a huge lever. If you think long-term, you can really solve the problem. We're not good at thinking long-term. 5 years is a long time frame for most institutions. We may need to extend it to 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, and if we can expand our thinking, we will do better for our children and grandchildren. So the clock, in a way, it's an art project, it's a symbolic symbol. If it had any power to influence people's long-term thinking, it wouldn't happen for hundreds of years, but we need to build it up now and let it accumulate the luster of the years.

Q: Do you think humans would still exist when the clock was broken?

Bezos: I think so, but the United States will cease to exist. Civilizations as a whole have had their ups and downs. 10,000 years is too long, and no nation-state can last nearly 10,000 years.

Q: On such a grand scale, human life seems insignificant. Have you ever thought about your own death? Are you afraid of death?

Bezos: No. I used to be afraid of death. I remember when I was younger, I was very afraid of death and didn't want to think about it. But as I've gotten older, now 59, that fear seems to have disappeared. I want to live as long as possible, but I'm more concerned about the quality of life. I want to be healthy and leave. I'm curious and I want to see how things turn out. I love my family and close friends. So I had a lot of reasons to stay, but death didn't affect me as much as I did when I was in my twenties. (Compiler/Golden Deer)