Video2017

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.

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Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 70 recordings of Jeff Bezos →

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.
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.’
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.’
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.
2017
Summit LA17: a conversation with Mark Bezos
The most personal Bezos interview of the Amazon-CEO years: his brother Mark asks about their grandfather’s ranch (castrating cattle, fixing a bulldozer), their parents, how Jeff thinks about risk and decision-making, and why he ‘hates the Plan B argument’ for space.
2018
‘Alexa, open the Spheres’
Bezos opens Amazon’s three glass domes by asking a ‘special friend’ for help: ‘Alexa, open the Spheres’ (‘OK, Jeff’), thanks real-estate chief John Schoettler, and after a tour pronounces that ‘the plants look happy.’
2018
Axel Springer Award conversation
Accepting the Axel Springer Award in Berlin, Bezos gives his most personal interview to that point: his childhood and his parents, meeting MacKenzie at D. E. Shaw, why he sells about $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin (‘the most important work I’m doing’), why he bought The Washington Post, and what it is like to have the U.S. president as a critic.
2018
ISDC 2018: ‘We will have to leave this planet’
Accepting the National Space Society’s O’Neill award, Bezos tells Alan Boyle that ‘we will have to leave this planet... and it’s going to make this planet better,’ explains why ‘you cannot make a giant space company in your dorm room’ and why Blue Origin’s job is to build the infrastructure that will let future entrepreneurs do so, and reiterates ‘we don’t skip steps, and we’ve got to go back to the moon.’
2018
Economic Club of Washington: the Rubenstein interview
In the most-watched Bezos interview of the decade, David Rubenstein draws out the story of Amazon’s founding, the 1990s dot-com bust, the Kindle, AWS, the ‘two-pizza’ and ‘six-page memo’ rules, why he gets eight hours of sleep and makes ‘three good decisions a day,’ and why he bought The Washington Post.
2018
Air, Space and Cyber Conference fireside chat
Six days after the Economic Club interview, Bezos sells an Air Force audience on reusable rockets and cloud computing: ‘you never want a fair fight,’ launch cadence must rise with less lead time, New Shepard ‘will be putting people in space this coming year,’ and government customers benefit from being ‘co-customers’ of AWS.