founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

This is his first time doing a conversation

of this kind and of this length.

And as he told me, it felt like we could have easily talked

for many more hours, and I'm sure we will.

This is the Lex Fridman podcast.

And now, dear friends, here's Jeff Bezos.

You spent a lot of your childhood with your grandfather

on a ranch here in Texas,

and I heard you had a lot of work to do around the ranch.

So what's the coolest job you remember doing there?

- Wow, coolest.

- Most interesting.

Most memorable.

- Most memorable.

Most impactful.

- And it was a real working ranch.

My grand, I spent all my summers on that ranch

from age four to 16.

And my grandfather was really taking me to those

in the summers, in the early summers,

he was letting me pretend to help on the ranch.

'Cause of course, a 4-year-old is a burden,

not a help in real life.

He was really just watching me and taking care of me

and be was doing that because my mom was so young.

She had me when she was 17,

and so he was sort of giving her a break.

And my grandmother and my grandfather

would take me for these summers.

But as I got a little older,

I actually was helpful on the ranch and I loved it.

I was out there,

like my grandfather had a huge influence on me,

huge factor in my life.

I did all the jobs you would do on a ranch.

I've fixed windmills and laid fences

and pipelines and you know, done all the things

that any rancher would do,

vaccinated, the animals, everything.

But we had a you know, my grandfather,

after my grandmother died, I was about 12

and I kept coming to the ranch.

So it was then, it was just him and me, just the two of us.

And he was completely addicted to the soap opera,

the Days of Our Lives.

And we would go back to the ranch house every day

around 1:00 PM or so to watch days of our lives

like sands through an hourglass.

So are the days of our lives.

- Just the image of the two sitting there

watching a soap opera as ranchers.

- He had these big, crazy dogs.

It was really a very formative experience for me.

But the key thing about it for me,

the great gift I got from it

was that my grandfather was so resourceful, you know,

he did everything himself.

He made his own veterinary tools.

He would make needles to suture the cattle up with,

like he would find a little piece of wire and heat it up

and pound it thin and drill a hole in it and sharpen it.

So, you know, you learn different things

on a ranch than you would learn

you know, growing up in a city.

- So self-reliance.

- Yeah, like figuring out that you can solve problems

with enough persistence and ingenuity.

And my grandfather bought a D6 bulldozer,

which is a big bulldozer, and he got it for like $5,000.

'cause it was completely broken down.

It was like a 1955 Caterpillar, D6 bulldozer

knew it would've cost, I don't know,

more than a $100,000.

And we spent an entire summer fixing,

like repairing that bulldozer.

And we'd, you know, use mail order

to buy big gears for the transmission.

And they'd show up.

They'd be too heavy to move,

so we'd have to build a crane, you know,

just that kind of, kinda that problem solving mentality.

He had it so powerfully, you know,

he did all of his own.

He'd just, he didn't pick up the phone and call somebody.

He would figure it out on his own.

Doing his own veterinary work, you know.

- But just the image of the two of you

fixing a D6 bulldozer and then going in

for a little break at 1:00 PM to watch a soap opera.

- Laying on the floor.

That's how he watched TV.

- Yeah.

- He was a really, really remarkable guy.

- That's how I imagine Clint Eastwood also

in all those westerns.

When he's not doing what he is doing,

he's just watching soap operas.

All right, I read that you fell in love

with the idea of space and space exploration

when you were five watching Neil Armstrong

walking on the moon.

So let me ask you to look back at the historical context

and impact of that.

So the space race from 1957 to 1969

between the Soviet Union and the US was in many ways epic.

It was a rapid sequence of dramatic events

for satellite to space, for a human to space,

for a spacewalk, first uncrewed landing on the moon,

then some failures, explosions,

deaths on both sides actually,

and then the first human walking on the moon.

What are some of the more inspiring moments

or insights you take away from that time,

those few years, that just 12 years?

- Well, I mean, there's so much inspiring there.

You know, one of the great things to take away from that,

one of the great von Braun quotes is

"I have come to use the word impossible with great caution."

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And so that's kind of the big story of Apollo

is that things, you know, going to the moon

was literally an analogy that people used

for something that's impossible.

You know, oh yeah, you'll do that when you know,

men walk on the moon.

- Yeah.

- And of course it finally happened.

So, you know, I think it was pulled forward in time

because of the space race,

I think you know, with the geopolitical implications

and you know, how much resource was put into it,

you know, at the peak, that program was spending,

you know, two or 3% of GDP on the Apollo program.

So much resource.

I think it was pulled forward in time.

You know, we kind of did it ahead

of when we quote unquote should have done it.

- Yeah.

- And so in that way, it's also a technical marvel.

I mean, it's truly incredible.

It's, you know, it's the 20th century version

of building the pyramids or something.

It's you know, it's an achievement

that because it was pulled forward in time

and because it did something

that had previously thought impossible,

it rightly deserves its place, as you know,

in the pantheon of great human achievements.

- And of course, you named the projects The Rockets

that Blue Origin is working on

after some of the folks involved.

- Yeah.

- I don't understand why I didn't say New Gagarin.

is that-

- There's an American bias in the naming.

I apologize.

- It's very strange.

- Lex.

- Just asking for a friend.

Clarify.

- I'm a big fan of Gagarin though.

And in fact, I think his first words in space,

I think are incredible.

He, you know, he purportedly said "my God, it's blue."

And that really drives home.

No one had seen the earth from space.

No one knew that we were on this blue planet.

- Yeah.

- No one knew what it looked like from out there.

And Gagarin was the first person to see it.

- One of the things I think about is how dangerous

those early days were for Gagarin,

for Glen, for everybody involved.