Junior vs Senior

Jeff Bezos(01:30:49) Yes, and that’s true inside companies too. And so you want to set up your culture so that the most junior person can overrule the most senior person if they have data. And that really is about trying to… There are little things you can do. So for example, in every meeting that I attend, I always speak last. And I know from experience that if I speak first, even very strong-willed, highly intelligent, high judgment participants in that meeting will wonder, “Well, if Jeff thinks that, I came in this meeting thinking one thing, but maybe I’m not right.” And so you can do little things like if you’re the most senior person in the room, go last, let everybody else go first. In fact, ideally, let’s try to have the most junior person go first and the second and try to go in order of seniority so that you can hear everyone’s opinion in an unfiltered way. Because we really do, we actually literally change our opinions. If somebody who you really respect says something, it makes you change your mind a little.

Science is all about truth telling

Jeff Bezos(01:29:14) Yes, challenging. They can make people defensive even if that’s not the intent. But any high performing organization, whether it’s a sports team, a business, a political organization, an activist group, I don’t care what it is, any high performing organization has to have mechanisms and a culture that supports truth-telling. One of the things you have to do is you have to talk about that. You have to talk about the fact that it takes energy to do that. You have to talk to people, you have to remind people, “It’s okay that it’s uncomfortable.” Literally tell people, “It’s not what we’re designed to do as humans.” It’s kind of a side effect. We can do that, but it’s not how we survive. We mostly survive by being social animals and being cordial and cooperative, and that’s really important.

(01:30:10) And so science is all about truth-telling. It’s actually a very formal mechanism for trying to tell the truth. And even in science, you find that it’s hard to tell the truth. Even you’re supposed to have hypothesis and test it and find data and reject the hypothesis and so on, it’s not easy.