Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.’

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 2017

    ‘Why it’s always Day 1’ (all-hands clip)

    Asked by an employee what ‘Day 2’ would look like, Bezos answers: ‘Day 2 is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.’

12. 2017

    Space Symposium: inside the New Shepard capsule

    Bezos lounges in a full-scale mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, shows off the booster that has flown to space five times, and tells reporters that ‘the only thing that’s disruptive is customer adoption’ and that cutting launch costs by 10x or 100x will ‘unleash’ entrepreneurs in ‘a golden age of space exploration.’

13. 2017

    Apollo exhibit opening: talk with students

    At the opening of the Museum of Flight’s Apollo exhibit, which displays Saturn V F-1 engine parts Bezos’s expedition raised from the Atlantic in 2013, Bezos tells students about watching Apollo 11 at age five, the engine recovery and Blue Origin’s plans.