Video2014

Fire Phone launch

Bezos spends roughly ninety minutes demonstrating Amazon’s first phone to an invited audience in Seattle: the four-camera ‘Dynamic Perspective’ head-tracking display, the Firefly recognition button, Mayday support and a year of Prime.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

2010
We are what we choose
Bezos returns to his alma mater to deliver the Baccalaureate address, built around the story of his grandmother and his grandfather’s lesson that ‘it’s harder to be kind than clever.’
2010
Charlie Rose: the new Kindle
Bezos sits with Charlie Rose the evening after Amazon unveiled the $139 Wi-Fi Kindle, insisting the device should remain ‘for uncompromised reading’ rather than chase the iPad.
2011
Kindle Fire unveiled
Bezos’s first full product keynote in the Apple style: he walks through the $79 Kindle, Kindle Touch and the $199 Kindle Fire tablet with its Silk browser, framing Amazon as selling ‘premium products at non-premium prices’ and the Fire as a service, not a device.
2012
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon
Bezos brings the new 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD to Fallon’s couch, deflects questions about an Amazon smartphone, and tells the story of driving packages to the post office with MacKenzie in a Chevy Blazer in 1995.
2012
Charlie Rose: Amazon’s holiday push
In the middle of a rare publicity week, Bezos tells Charlie Rose that Amazon is ‘willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time,’ explains why it sells Kindle hardware at cost and makes money when people use it, and discusses physical expansion and competition with Apple and Google.
2013
60 Minutes: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos looks to the future
In a heavily promoted segment aired the night before Cyber Monday, Bezos walks Charlie Rose through a 1.2-million-square-foot fulfillment center, defends selling the Kindle Fire HDX at break-even, and then unveils ‘Prime Air’ octocopter delivery drones, saying 30-minute drone delivery is ‘years’ away and depends on FAA rules.
2014
Fire Phone launch
Bezos spends roughly ninety minutes demonstrating Amazon’s first phone to an invited audience in Seattle: the four-camera ‘Dynamic Perspective’ head-tracking display, the Firefly recognition button, Mayday support and a year of Prime.
2014
Ignition 2014: the Business Insider interview
A rare long-form interview, given weeks after Amazon wrote off $170 million of Fire Phone inventory and reported a $437 million quarterly loss.
2016
Code Conference 2016
Bezos’s first Code Conference appearance: he says heavy industry should eventually move off Earth, calls Blue Origin ‘the most important work I’m doing,’ describes Alexa and machine learning as a ‘golden era’ of technology, and, asked about Donald Trump’s attacks on him and The Washington Post, says Trump’s behavior ‘is not appropriate for a presidential candidate.’
2016
Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit
Three weeks before the 2016 election, Bezos tells Walter Isaacson that Donald Trump’s threats against the press ‘erode our democracy around the edges,’ that his first instinct to take Trump’s attacks lightly ‘was a mistake,’ and jokes that ‘I have a rocket company, so the capability is there’ to send Trump to space.
2016
Pathfinder Award: why we must go to space
Receiving the Museum of Flight’s Pathfinder Award for his Blue Origin work, Bezos explains why he believes humanity must expand into space to keep growing its energy use, walks through Blue Origin’s step-by-step approach (‘gradatim ferociter’), and takes questions from Boeing chief pilot Steve Taylor about the company’s culture and tortoise mascot.
2016
Pathfinder Awards: management style, drones and the 10,000-year clock
Companion clips from the same Pathfinder evening: Bezos on changing your mind (‘anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world’), six-page memos, growing the size of failures, printable drone landing symbols, Amazon’s 40-plane air fleet and the $42 million Clock of the Long Now on his Texas land.
2016
Charlie Rose: a conversation with Jeff Bezos
A full-hour Charlie Rose conversation recorded the week Amazon reported its sixth straight profitable quarter and days after Bezos’s Vanity Fair and Pathfinder appearances; topics per contemporaneous summaries include Amazon’s culture of invention, Blue Origin, The Washington Post and the 2016 election.