Jeff Bezos like you’ve never seen him

Why naïve positivism cannot be the answer to journalism’s negativity bias.

While I appreciate the openness and the approach to »take a walk« in the perspective of your interview partner, I must say that I find Lex Fridman’s interview with ex Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos rather irritating.

I agree that the conventional media are often too negatitistic in their coverage of personalities like Bezos or Musk. A more balanced coverage would often be good. But that does, in my view, not mean that a completely positivistic and uncritical interview like this one is the answer.

Sure, the parts in which Bezos talks about his management philosophy are very instructive, especially when he talks about lean management techniques and iterative decision processes.

Moreover, it is interesting to observe how self-reflective Bezos can be — at least in the confinements of his mindset.

I also suppose that all the details about rocket engineering he presents, must be quite fascinating for people and companies that are into this kind of stuff.

Apart from that, though, I find the interview really irritating.

Bezos, the long-term thinker?

We meet a man with a pronounced achiever mindset and a very mechanistic worldview, seeming to believe that technology can fix almost everything — without being challenged on this rather naïve view, nor being challenged on anything else.

Bezos admits that the capitalist growth mindset is destructive to the ecosystem, calling that a “trade-off“ — but at least admitting it.

He then presents his solution: space-colonies that include all our heavy industries from earth. I do not think, this is the solution, but I won’t go so far to completely dismiss it either. Yet, even if you fully agree with Bezos: The interview involuntarily produces an interesting performative contradiction.

Bezos more than once emphasizes the need for long-term thinking — but does not seem to be such a great long-term thinker himself.

He proposes, we should expand the time horizon of our thinking ahead from an average of 5 years to 25 years.

Actually, that’s not such a long time horizon. Indigenous cultures consider the next 7 generations. But even if you just think 25 years ahead, you should, in my view, come to the conclusion that we will most likely not have transferred our heavy, CO2 intensive industries to space by then. Global warming, however, will most likely be a big problem in 25 years.

So, the time horizon of his space industry solution simply does not match the time horizon of the global warming problem.

His solution, thus, might be generally interesting and probably useful in other contexts. But it is very likely not the solution humanity most urgently needs right now — let alone the millions of other species with whom we are sharing this planet and which he hardly mentions at all.

This contradiction seems pretty obvious, but Fridman never confronts Bezos with this. Although Bezos sells his space factories as the solution to remaining our Western life standard without damaging the ecosystem much more.

He just gets away with that. We do not learn in how far Bezos has reflected on the mismatch of time horizons that, at least right now, seem to make his solution not very useful to humanity.

The whole “industry in space“ thing remains a superficial rudimentary idea, as Fridman does not ask the questions that could make a discussion about it actually relevant.

Bezos, the ecologist?

Bezos then presents himself as an »ecologist«, referencing the paradigm shift of seeing the blue planet from space, but neither his company nor himself have a track record of trying to mitigate the crossing of various planetary boundaries or allocating enough resources to this.

The most absurd part of the interview, in my view, is when Fridman presents Bezos as a person that does not only think about the success of his company but also about the general direction of humanity, referencing — really?! — the Amazon button that makes you buy something with one click.

Neither does he mention Amazon’s poor climate and environmental records, nor does he question Amazons even poorer social track record, tolerating the exploitation of warehouse workers, traders on the platform and many more stakeholders.

Bezos, the humanist?

It would have been interesting to ask if Amazon, on the bottom line, is more beneficial or detrimental to societies, generating jobs and GDP on the one hand but increasing inequalities on the other hand.

That would not be a negativistic question to ask. You could make him weigh the pros and cons of such meta-questions in an open but still critical way. Only then would you know how capable Bezos really is of pondering such systemic questions.

Without the critical element in such questions, like here, he gets away with presenting himself as a benign humanist who reflects the really big questions of our species, meaning to do good and to serve us all.

But the audience never finds out whether this is actually true. And from the bits and pieces that we hear, there is a lot of reason to be skeptical.