Podcasts about amazon unbound jeff bezos

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire

Taking your shoes off before you enter a home is a thoughtful gesture and something many people have done for a long time. And it really is good idea. Why? Listen as I explain what people track in on the bottom of their shoes besides dirt. It's really pretty disgusting. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/07/03/my-shoes-dirty-studies-suggest-theyre-covered-fecal-bacteria/1637780001/ Whether you like Amazon or not, you have to admire the incredible success that company has achieved with Jeff Bezos at the helm. How did Amazon get to be such a giant company so fast? You see their trucks everywhere, many of us send or receive products and do a lot of shopping on Amazon. Beyond that there is Alexa, Kindle, Whole Foods, and much more to Amazon. Is Jeff Bezos just a genius? Why didn't someone else think of this before or at least try to compete better? Someone who understands Amazon well is Brad Stone, senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (https://amzn.to/3hxau9u). Listen as he takes us inside the workings at Amazon and explains how Jeff Bezos did what he did – the good and bad.  Speaking and listening. You do those two things more than any others all day long. Yet, you were probably never taught how to speak or how to listen – at least not in any formal way. However, the better you are at these skills, the more interesting people will think you are and the more effective you will be in life according to my guest Julian Treasure. He is a leading expert in communication and sound and is author of the book How to be Heard: Secrets for Powerful Speaking and Listening (https://amzn.to/3hEMyBk). Listen as he explains the science of how we talk and listen and how all of us can improve our skills to be more effective communicators in any situation. Julian's TED Talks can be found at: https://bit.ly/2QA27yP & https://bit.ly/3hGPayh  In just about every grocery store you go into, there are no windows except in the front of the store. Why? Listen as I explain the reasons why. https://bit.ly/2RCz7XH PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Indeed is offering SYSK listeners a $75 Sponsored Job Credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING We love the Think Fast, Talk Smart podcast! https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/business-podcasts/think-fast-talk-smart-podcast Go to https://uscellular.com/TryUS and download the USCellular TryUS app to get 30 days of FREE service! Keep you current phone, carrier & number while testing a new network! NerdWallet lets you compare top travel credit cards side-by-side to maximize your spending! Compare & find smarter credit cards, savings accounts, & more https://NerdWallet.com TurboTax Experts make all your moves count — filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund, guaranteed! See guarantee details at https://TurboTax.com/Guarantees Dell TechFest starts now! To thank you for 40 unforgettable years, Dell Technologies is celebrating with anniversary savings on their most popular tech. Shop at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chapter 1 What's Amazon Unbound Book by Brad Stone"Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire" is a non-fiction book written by Brad Stone. It serves as a sequel to Stone's earlier work, "The Everything Store," which explored the rise of Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos. In "Amazon Unbound," Stone delves into the more recent developments and challenges faced by Amazon, covering the period from approximately 2014 to 2021. The book provides insights into how Amazon expanded its influence into new areas, such as artificial intelligence, voice assistants, and streaming services. It also explores the controversies surrounding the company, including issues with workplace conditions, labor practices, and antitrust scrutiny.Through extensive research and interviews with key individuals, Stone aims to shed light on the leadership and strategies employed by Bezos as he strove to maintain Amazon's dominance in an evolving retail landscape. The book offers a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the company and the impact it has had on industries and societies worldwide.Ultimately, "Amazon Unbound" seeks to provide readers with a comprehensive and updated understanding of Amazon's growth and influence and its implications for the future of commerce, technology, and society.Chapter 2 Is Amazon Unbound Book A Good BookAs an AI language model, I don't have personal opinions or experiences. However, I can provide you with some information about the book "Amazon Unbound" by Brad Stone and how it has been received by others."Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire" is a non-fiction book that provides an in-depth look into the rise and expansion of Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos. It explores the strategies and practices that contributed to the company's immense success, as well as its impact on various industries and society as a whole. Overall, "Amazon Unbound" has received positive reviews from readers and critics. It offers a comprehensive and engaging narrative that provides insights into the inner workings of Amazon, including its growth, innovations, controversies, and challenges. Many readers have found the book to be well-researched, informative, and thought-provoking.However, it's worth noting that opinions on books can be subjective, and individual preferences may vary. If you are interested in the topic of Amazon, entrepreneurship, or technology, you might find "Amazon Unbound" to be a good book. It's always recommended to read reviews, book summaries, or sample chapters before deciding if a book aligns with your interests and reading preferences.Chapter 3 Amazon Unbound Book by Brad Stone Summary"Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire" is a book written by journalist Brad Stone. It provides a detailed account of the rise and expansion of Amazon, focusing on the role of its founder Jeff Bezos. Here is a summary of the book:1. Origins of Amazon: The book explores Amazon's humble beginnings as an online bookstore in Jeff Bezos's garage and traces its early growth and success. It also looks at Bezos's background and entrepreneurial drive.2. The Amazon Revolution: Stone delves into the revolutionary aspects of Amazon's business model, such as its customer-centric approach, relentless focus on innovation, and disruptive impact on the retail industry.3. Expansion into New Markets: The book follows Amazon's expansion beyond books into various other product categories, including electronics, toys, and clothing. It also covers the development of Amazon Prime, Amazon's subscription service offering fast shipping and other benefits.4. The Ecosystem: Stone explores how Amazon has built an...

The Big Tech companies have ushered in a new era of global monopoly. And the most influential, the most powerful of all of them, is Amazon.In this episode, we focus in on two of the fundamental pillars of Amazon's dominance: its online marketplace and its cloud computing arm.And a former Amazon VP speaks out.Featured in this episode: Matt Stoller, Brad Stone (Bloomberg), Dana Mattioli (Wall Street Journal), Tim BrayTo learn more:Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone“Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie” in BIG by Matt Stoller“Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products” in The Wall Street Journal by Dana MattioliAdditional music from Audio NetworkSponsors: Athletic Greens, Free Lunch Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Effortless: Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most, Project Hail Mary, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, Klara and the Sun, A Hail Mary-küldetés, Nyolc nyomozó, Madi

Author of that Jeff Bezos biography, it's safe to say Brad Stone understands everyone's favourite cardboard abuser, Amazon like the back of his hand. As the company turns a pivotal moment as the baton is handed to Andy Jassy from Jeff Bezos, where does it go next? How will it maintain and strengthen its power? Find out this and a whole lot more on Mouthwash.ABOUT BRAD (@bradstone)Brad Stone is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News where he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he's authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He's a regular contributor to Bloomberg's technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology. Author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley; it's safe to say Brad gets Silicon Valley and specifically, everyone's favourite cardboard abuser, Amazon.Previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek, Brad lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We can't live without it … Amazon is everywhere. We use its services for gifts, groceries, home goods and just about everything else. And with over 200 million Prime members, the retail giant is now an unstoppable, global force. This week's guest, Brad Stone, details the company's spectacular rise in Amazon Unbound. And in this episode, the bestselling author discusses all things Amazon and Jeff Bezos with host Charles Mizrahi. Topics Discussed: An Introduction to Brad Stone (00:00:00) Key to the Castle (00:02:27) Bezos Idea Factory (00:08:01) Alexa and Echo (00:15:08) The School of Bezos-ology (00:22:55) Unintentional Consequences (00:29:31) The Spectacular Rise of Prime (00:40:16) America Runs on AWS (00:49:40) Guest Bio: Brad Stone is an author, journalist and senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News. Over the past decade, he's written dozens of cover stories for Bloomberg Businessweek — covering tech giants such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. Stone is also a bestselling author of four books. His latest book, Amazon Unbound, tracks the unprecedented growth of one of the most dominant and feared companies in the world. In addition, Stone shares special insights on the company's founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos. Resources Mentioned: ·      https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612 (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire) ·      https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-ebook/dp/B00BWQW73E (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon) Transcript: https://charlesmizrahi.com/podcast/2021/11/02/invention-global-empire-amazon-brad-stone/ (https://charlesmizrahi.com/podcast/) Don't Forget To... • Subscribe to my podcast! • Download this episode to save for later • Liked this episode? Leave a kind review!   Subscribe to Charles' Alpha Investor newsletter today: https://pro.banyanhill.com/m/1729783 (https://pro.banyanhill.com/m/1729783)

Over the past two decades, no industry has had a greater impact on the world than the tech industry, born and bred in California's Silicon Valley. And perhaps few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than the enigmatic tech investor and entrepreneur, Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and tech leader has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing the tech industry and countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, particularly during the Trump administration. But despite his power, no public figure might be quite so mysterious as Thiel. In the first major biography of Thiel, reporter Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of Thiel's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thinker to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investments in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. Chafkin's book, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, explores the extent to which Thiel has sought to have influence far beyond California's tech industry, including funding the lawsuit that destroyed the blog Gawker and supporting conservative political candidates, including Donald Trump in 2016. To understand Silicon Valley and its impact, particularly on American political and civic life, an understanding of Thiel is a critical piece of the puzzle. Please join us for an important discussion on this critical player in the tech industry and American life. The discussion will be led by Brad Stone, best known for chronicling another enigmatic tech mogul, Amazon's Jeff Bezos. SPEAKERS Max Chafkin Features Editor and Technology Reporter, Bloomberg Businessweek; Author, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power Brad Stone Senior Executive Editor, Global Technology, Bloomberg News; Author, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on September 27th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada.On this special episode I am thrilled to be sharing a excerpt from the recent season three opener of my Remarkable Retail podcast, where my podcast partner Steve Dennis and I interview Brad Stone. Brad is the senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News and author of Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.  Let's listen in now starting with an introduction by Steve. Remarkable Retail is back with Season 3 and we kick it off with our special guest Brad Stone, senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News and bestselling author of several books, including his latest Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.In this fast-paced interview--nicely timed for the week that Andy Jassy takes over as CEO of Amazon--we have the opportunity to dig into the company's journey since Brad's last book ( The Everything Store) and take an insider's view of Jeff Bezos' unique leadership style. In addition to unpacking some of the keys to the company's remarkable growth--and apparent invincibility--Brad shares some illuminating and amusing anecdotes. We also tee up what's most important to keep an eye on in the future.Brad Stone is the author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021. It traces the transformation of Amazon into one of the largest and most feared companies of the world and the accompanying emergence of its founder, Jeff Bezos, as the richest man alive.Brad is also the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which chronicled the foundational early years of the company. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into more than 35 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In 2017, he also published The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. Brad is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News where he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he's authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He's a regular contributor to Bloomberg's technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology.He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters.Steve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus        Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  and       The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.  You can learn more about Michael       here  or on       LinkedIn. 

To some, Amazon is a great business that brings opportunity to over a million employees and generates value for hundreds of millions of customers. To others, it's a company that exploits its workers and destroys small businesses. Similarly, some see Jeff Bezos as a successful visionary, and they look forward to seeing him apply his talents to exploring outer space. Others consider Bezos to be a policy failure, just as they view every other billionaire. Today, I'm speaking with Brad Stone to discuss the accuracy of these perceptions. We'll also discuss how these views affect Amazon, how Bezos himself has viewed the company during his tenure as CEO, and what the future may hold for this retail giant. Brad is the senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News, as well as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of four books, the most recent of which is https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08T9YJ2B8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 (Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire), released last May.

To some, Amazon is a great business that brings opportunity to over a million employees and generates value for hundreds of millions of customers. To others, it's a company that exploits its workers and destroys small businesses. Similarly, some see Jeff Bezos as a successful visionary, and they look forward to seeing him apply his talents to exploring outer space. Others consider Bezos to be a policy failure, just as they view every other billionaire. Today, I'm speaking with Brad Stone to discuss the accuracy of these perceptions. We'll also discuss how these views affect Amazon, how Bezos himself has viewed the company during his tenure as CEO, and what the future may hold for this retail giant. Brad is the senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News, as well as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. He is also the author of four books, the most recent of which is Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, released last May.

Bloomberg News Senior Executive Editor of Global Tech Brad Stone discusses Amazon earnings and his book "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire." Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Bloomberg News Senior Executive Editor of Global Tech Brad Stone discusses Amazon earnings and his book "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire." Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Paul Brennan. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Brad Stone, Bloomberg Global Technology Senior Executive Editor and Author of "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire," discusses Jeff Bezos and what's driving his space ambitions. Janet Kavandi, Sierra Space Executive Vice President and Former Director of NASA's Glenn Research Center, discusses the new era of human space flight. Danielle Wood, MIT Media Lab Director of the Space Enabled Research Group, discusses how space technology can be used to help society. Chad Anderson, Space Capital Managing Partner, sees a massive market opportunity in space investing. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Jeff Bezos' empire, once housed in a garage, now spans the globe. Between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon's cloud computing unit AWS, plus Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post, it's nearly impossible to go a day without encountering its impact. Many argue we live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its founder. But how did this man and his company come to dominate such a large part of modern commerce? Sometimes called Amazon's biographer, journalist Brad Stone joined us with the deeply reported and vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became arguably one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy, also contained in his book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. In conversation with The New York Times' Karen Weise, Stone took us from his bestseller which captured the rise of Amazon, The Everything Store, to the Amazon and Bezos of today. He looked at how Amazon has expanded over the last decade especially, with new products like virtual assistant Alexa and with a workforce that has quintupled in size. Stone presented a picture of a man, probing the evolution of Bezos himself, from a geeky technologist to billionaire–and to his transition away from day-to-day activities as CEO to executive chairman. Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which has been translated into over thirty-five languages, and The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. He has covered Silicon Valley for more than twenty years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Karen Weise is a technology correspondent for The New York Times based in Seattle, covering Amazon, Microsoft, and the region's tech scene. Before joining The New York Times in 2018, she worked for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News, as well as the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica. Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781982132613  Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Brad Stone, Bloomberg Global Technology Senior Executive Editor and Author of "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire," discusses Jeff Bezos and what's driving his space ambitions. Janet Kavandi, Sierra Space Executive Vice President and Former Director of NASA's Glenn Research Center, discusses the new era of human space flight. Danielle Wood, MIT Media Lab Director of the Space Enabled Research Group, discusses how space technology can be used to help society. Chad Anderson, Space Capital Managing Partner, sees a massive market opportunity in space investing. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

This week Rachel would rather be reading something to help her be great, and it sounds like she found it! Rachel welcomes Ron Friedman to talk about his fantastic book. Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success by Ron Friedman Rachel has some companion books that she think would be good reads, too: Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone CenterStage: My Most Fascinating Interviews―from A-Rod to Jay-Z by Michael Kay

Brad Stone is a Senior Executive Editor at Bloomberg News. He joins me this week to talk about his excellent book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. We talk about automation, HQ2, Prime Studios, fake reviews, Seinfeld, and the tension between creativity and analytics at the world's largest e-tailer.Support the show

On today's episode, Ryan talks to journalist and author Brad Stone about his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, the future implications of technology guided business practices, the moral tension that arises in the midst of large scale business growth, and more. Brad Stone is the author of four books, including 2014's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters.Beekeeper's Naturals is the company that's reinventing your medicine with clean, effective products that actually work. Beekeepers Naturals has great products like Propolis Spray and B.LXR. Visit beekeepersnaturals.com/STOIC or enter code “STOIC” to get 20% off your first order.DECKED truck bed tool boxes and cargo van storage systems revolutionize organization with a heavy-duty in-vehicle storage system featuring slide out toolboxes. DECKED makes organizing, accessing, protecting, and securing everything you need so much easier. Get your DECKED Drawer System at Decked.com/STOIC and get free shipping.Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business this fall. It's the largest marketplace for job seekers in the world, and it has great search features so that you can find candidates with any hard or soft skills that you need. And now, you can post a job for free. Just visit linkedin.com/STOIC to post a job for free. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Brad Stone: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

July 2021 is a big month for Amazon's Founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos. Not only did he step down as CEO of the company he built into a $1.63 trillion empire, he will also fly into space on the first crewed flight of his New Shepard rocket ship. And yet, the space trip is just the most recent of Bezos' boundary-breaking endeavors. Bezos and his company have revolutionized American business, extending their reach into nearly every industry— from retail, to media, to healthcare, and cloud computing. Brad Stone—the author, most recently, of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire—explains that the e-commerce giant has often seemed “unbound from the laws of corporate gravity.” While most companies eventually plateau, Stone says that Amazon has defied these business norms by continuing to grow rapidly. Stone, a Senior Executive Editor at Bloomberg News with years of experience reporting on the company, examines Amazon's various successes and Bezos' sweeping influence. Specifically, he traces Bezos' transformation from a frugal tech nerd to a buff billionaire whose high-profile divorce made headlines. But what exactly accounts for Amazon's extraordinary rise? If there is one thing that drives Bezos, Stone points out, it's his deep fear of stasis.

We're back with Season 3 and we kick it off with our special guest Brad Stone, senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News and bestselling author of several books, including his latest Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.We open up the episode with our quick takes on recent earnings announcements from Nike and Bed, Bath & Beyond, pending IPO action from digitally native brand pioneers Warby Parker and Allbirds and what we should make of deal activity in the lingerie category. Indeed, we over it all!Then, in a fast-paced interview--nicely timed for the week that Andy Jassy takes over as CEO of Amazon--we have the opportunity to dig into the company's journey since Brad's last book ( The Everything Store) and take an insider's view of Jeff Bezos' unique leadership style. In addition to unpacking some of the keys to the company's remarkable growth--and apparent invincibility--Brad shares some illuminating and amusing anecdotes. We also tee up what's most important to keep an eye on in the future.NOTE: We'll be releasing episodes every two weeks, through September 7, when we'll move back to a weekly format.Brad Stone is the author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021. It traces the transformation of Amazon into one of the largest and most feared companies of the world and the accompanying emergence of its founder, Jeff Bezos, as the richest man alive.Brad is also the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which chronicled the foundational early years of the company. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into more than 35 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In 2017, he also published The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. Brad is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News where he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he's authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He's a regular contributor to Bloomberg's technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology.He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters.Steve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus        Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  and       The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois.  You can learn more about Michael       here  or on       LinkedIn. 

Google Play Store audiobook preview, "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the invention of a Global Empire," by Brad Stone, Senior Executive Editor of Global Technology at Bloomberg News. Author of the New York Times Bestseller "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon," translated into over 35 languages, and "The Upstarts: Uber, AirBnB," and "The battle for the New Silicon Valley." He has covered Silicon Valley for more than 20 years and lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Deciding not to clone Seth Klarman. Why I sold Intel. Keep an eye on Tempur Sealy International.Updating my cash strategy.Ring Energy update.Alibaba deep dive coming.Time management.Covid update.From this episode:Intel Stock Update from Sven Carlin - https://youtu.be/J5dbZ1fZwagMy interview with Tom - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/17-after-dinner-investor-jason-rothman/id1553654437How Julian Robertson built a hedge fund dynasty - https://www.ft.com/content/e1d1c558-9a87-4843-9cd8-29ab203b7911 Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built - https://amzn.to/3xB3xsCWhat I'm reading:Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire - https://amzn.to/2SbxAItMore From After Dinner Investor:Newsletter - https://afterdinnerinvestor.substack.comYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI4soDcgEYnJhhrsT0MqIDgTwitter - https://twitter.com/afterinvestor

Bloomberg Opinion columnist Barry Ritholtz speaks with Brad Stone, author of the just-published “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire” and senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg News. Stone is also the author of the New York Times bestseller “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” and “The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley.”

0:00 Allerlei grote websites waren dinsdag een tijdje onbereikbaar door een storing bij één zogenoemd contentdistributienetwerk. Er zijn maar een paar van dit soort bedrijven en deze CDN's worden steeds belangrijker voor het blijven draaien van het internet.  10:52 De Amerikaanse oud-president Trump mag nog zeker anderhalf jaar lang geen berichten plaatsen op Facebook en Instagram. Dat heeft Facebook besloten na een eerdere uitspraak van hun onafhankelijke toezichtraad.  22:34 Het EK voetbal staat voor de deur. Misschien heb jij hiervoor ook wel een enorme nieuwe tv gekocht, maar het EK kijken in de hoogste 4K kwaliteit is lang niet voor iedereen mogelijk. 35:11 Tips Joost: Koop een schotel- of DVB-T-antenne voor gratis tv met weinig vertraging Nik: Het spel 7 Billion Humans Nando: Het boek Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, geschreven door Brad Stone Casper: Het boek De meest besproken man van Nederland, geschreven door Jeroen Pen Gasten: Joost Schellevis, Nando Kasteleijn en Nik Wouters Presentatie: Casper Meijer

Brad Stone, the senior executive editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News, joins to discuss his latest book: Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. We hear how the company has transformed under Jeff Bezos’s leadership and the existential threats coming for its market dominance. Follow Brad on Twitter, @BradStone.  Scott opens with his thoughts on “burning benjamins” — AKA what happens when billionaires lose other people’s money.  Additional Reading: MeWork Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Brad Stone discusses his new book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. The book looks at the rise of company founder Bezos, and weighs whether or not our world is better off for having Amazon in it.

Bloomberg's Brad Stone is one of the country's leading experts on the global commerce company Amazon. His bestselling book from a decade ago, The Everything Store, gave one of the most detailed pictures of Amazon's unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos. His coverage in Bloomberg Businessweek has helped shaped our understanding of the internet giant. Since Stone's first book on Amazon was published, the company has expanded to become the most valuable internet company and one of the globe's largest retailers. Its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to well over $1 trillion dollars. The company's holdings also include Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon's cloud computing unit, AWS, which powers many of the country's largest websites. Throughout the pandemic, Amazon became a lifeline for many people and small businesses around the world for home supplies, cleaning products and PPE. Bezos also has a personal ownership of The Washington Post, expanding the Amazon owner's impact. In Stone's new book, Amazon Unbound, the author presents another deeply reported narrative of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also looks at the evolution of Bezos himself from a geeky start-up guy to leading one of the globe's most influential companies. Please join us for this important event to better understand one of the private sector giants that is shaping modern life, and the company's enigmatic leader who is shaping that vision. SPEAKERS Brad Stone Senior Executive Editor, Global Technology, Bloomberg News; Author, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire In Conversation with Sarah Frier Technology Reporter, Bloomberg; Author, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on May 25th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bloomberg's Brad Stone is one of the country's leading experts on the global commerce company Amazon. His bestselling book from a decade ago, The Everything Store, gave one of the most detailed pictures of Amazon's unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos. His coverage in Bloomberg Businessweek has helped shaped our understanding of the internet giant. Since Stone's first book on Amazon was published, the company has expanded to become the most valuable internet company and one of the globe's largest retailers. Its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to well over $1 trillion dollars. The company's holdings also include Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon's cloud computing unit, AWS, which powers many of the country's largest websites. Throughout the pandemic, Amazon became a lifeline for many people and small businesses around the world for home supplies, cleaning products and PPE. Bezos also has a personal ownership of The Washington Post, expanding the Amazon owner's impact. In Stone's new book, Amazon Unbound, the author presents another deeply reported narrative of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Stone also looks at the evolution of Bezos himself from a geeky start-up guy to leading one of the globe's most influential companies. Please join us for this important event to better understand one of the private sector giants that is shaping modern life, and the company's enigmatic leader who is shaping that vision. SPEAKERS Brad Stone Senior Executive Editor, Global Technology, Bloomberg News; Author, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire In Conversation with Sarah Frier Technology Reporter, Bloomberg; Author, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on May 25th, 2021 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Brad Stone, author of the bestseller Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. Amazon is an e-commerce behemoth; a Hollywood studio; an essential cloud services provider to multinationals; the savior of Whole Foods. Founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and plows his unprecedented wealth into rockets. So then what the heck is Amazon?

A Dutch court ruled that Royal Dutch Shell should reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030. We hear from Harry Brekelmans, the Projects and Technology Director at Royal Dutch Shell. Sara Shaw from environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth, which is one of the organisations that brought the case, discusses the background. MGM has just been bought by the web giant Amazon for just under $8.5 billion. Brad Stone, the author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, explains why. Also in the programme, online messaging service WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has launched legal action in India to counter a new law there which gives the government greater power to monitor activity online, including on messaging apps. And - For years the ride sharing company Uber has resisted calls to recognise unions, which had criticised the firm for not granting drivers basic rights such as sick pay or a minimum wage. Now, Uber says it will, for the first time, recognise a union in the UK. Plus, will a craze for a cryptocurrency which was started as a joke, end in tears? PHOTO: Shell/EPA

RUNDOWN  Laughter begins at the top of the show as Mitch introduces his special co-host from the old KJR days. Then, the guys catch up after some time apart before reluctantly diving in to Phil's historic victory on the PGA Championship. Five guests beginning with longtime friends Rick Neuheisel then Steve Phillips followed by author Brad Stone and closing out with teen golf sensation Chloe Kovelesky and her mother Tina. The "Other Stuff" segment covers a handful of topics including Shohei Ohtani, a possible NBA scheduling change, and footballs with implanted chips. Happy Memorial Day!   GUESTS Rick Neuheisel | CBS Sports college football analyst Steve Phillips | Former Mets GM Brad Stone | Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire author Chloe & Tina Kovelesky | 14 year old Women's U.S. Open qualifier and Mom of Chloe TABLE OF CONTENTS 0:00 | Well, well, well...look who is in the co-host chair for today's show! 20:40 | The guys share their radio roots and catch up on their happenings these days. 30:16 | Mitch's biggest nightmare came true, Phil Mickelson won another major.  49:05 | GUEST: Rick Neuheisel returns to weigh in on the new PAC-12 commish and reveals he will be officiating a wedding! 1:13:15 | GUEST: Steve Phillips swings by to break down current baseball trends that are changing the game. 1:36:00 | GUEST: Author Brad Stone jumps aboard to discuss his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire which outlines the evolution of the company. 1:50:19 | GUEST: Golf phenom Chloe Kovelesky and her Mom Tina join the show to chat about her qualification to the Women's U.S. Open at age 14. 2:05:53 | Shohei Ohtani is an unprecedented talent that is not receiving nearly enough publicity nationally. 2:09:32 | The NBA will reconsider the concept of a midseason tournament to maintain interest leading up to the playoffs. 2:11:08 | Patrick Mahomes is ready for the NFL to insert microchips into the football to take the guesswork out of goal line plays.

Brad Stone discusses his latest book release Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. He shares insight on Amazon’s foray into technology-led search advertising, particularly sponsored products and why Amazon may be under more scrutiny than competitors for using data to make private label competition. 

Brad Stone, Bloomberg’s Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology, covers high-tech companies, startups, cybersecurity, and internet trends around the world. His most recent book, Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, builds on his 2013 bestseller as a gateway to how technology changes lives. He joins the podcast to talk about scoops in Silicon Valley and how companies like UBER (NYSE:UBER) and Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) are continuing to thrive through uncertain times.   Inside the ICE House: https://www.theice.com/insights/conversations/inside-the-ice-house  

Bloomberg News' Brad Stone reports on the growth and evolution of Amazon and profiles its founder Jeff Bezos. He's interviewed by Insider's chief tech correspondent Eugene Kim. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We look at two new books about Amazon—Fulfillment by Alec Macgillis and Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone—as an occasion to further consider the galactic expansion of this evil empire, the relentlessly sociopathic god-emperor at the top, and bad takes that revere Bezos as a quirky innovator and blame consumer choices in the market for the human misery Amazon causes. We’ve dug into Amazon a lot over the last couple months. But Amazon is big. It contains multitudes and contradictions. There’s always more to cover, to analyze, to track, to just try wrapping our minds around. Some stuff we reference: • Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America | Alec MacGillis: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159276 • Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | Brad Stone: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Amazon-Unbound/Brad-Stone/9781982132613 • To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos | Ben Smith: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/books/review/amazon-unbound-brad-stone.html • We know about Amazon’s sins. Do we care? | James Kwak: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-know-about-amazons-sins-do-we-care/2021/03/18/b7ff73ce-7acb-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

Purchase Brad’s books (Amazon Unbound, The Upstarts, and The Everything Store) at The Realignment’s Bookshop store: https://bookshop.org/lists/the-realignment-bookshop Brad Stone, Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News and author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, joins The Realignment to discuss the challenges, impact, and scope of Jeff Bezos and Amazon’s ambitions in cloud computing, streaming services, news media, retail, politics and more.

At our house, we take our shoes off when we come in from outside and it turns out to be a good idea. This episode begins with an explanation of what is clinging to your shoes when you walk into your house and why leaving your shoes outside is a really good idea. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/07/03/my-shoes-dirty-studies-suggest-theyre-covered-fecal-bacteria/1637780001/ How did Amazon get to be such a giant company? For many of us, Amazon has become an important presence in our lives whether it is shopping on their website, reading on your Kindle, listening to your Alexa speaker - Amazon is everywhere. How did it happen? Is Jeff Bezos a genius or was he just at the right place at the right time? One person who understands Amazon better than most is Brad Stone. Brad is senior executive editor for global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire (https://amzn.to/3hxau9u). Listen as he gives us a peek behind the curtain at Amazon and explains how Jeff Bezos made the company so successful.  The Covid epidemic has helped to create another epidemic - workplace anxiety. A large percentage of people today are very concerned about their job security and other workplace issues caused by all the uncertainty we have experienced over the last year. That anxiety then spills over into peoples’ personal lives and can even cause health problems. What’s so interesting is that even though many people experience this anxiety, no one talks about. Chester Elton has investigated this. Chester is co-author of the book, Anxiety at Work: 8 Strategies to Help Teams Build Resilience, Handle Uncertainty, and Get Stuff Done (https://amzn.to/3huFbfy). He joins me to discuss this silent epidemic among today’s workforce and what people can do to relieve their anxiety so we can get on with life.   If you are passionate about something - anything - it is probably good for your health. Listen as I reveal how one doctor discovered why people with a genuine passion have a huge health advantage at any age. Source: Tel Franklin, M.D. author of Expect a Miracle (https://amzn.to/3tW2Xn2). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really enjoy The Jordan Harbinger Show and we think you will as well! There’s just SO much here. Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start for some episode recommendations, OR search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.  https://nuts.com is the simple and convenient way to have nutritious, delicious, healthy nuts, dried fruit, flours, grains and so many other high-quality foods delivered straight to your door! New Nuts.com customers get free shipping on your first order when you text SYSK to 64-000. So text SYSK to 64-000 to get free shipping on your first order from Nuts.com With Grove, making the switch to natural products has never been easier! Go to https://grove.co/SOMETHING and choose a free gift with your 1st order of $30 or more! Helix is offering up to $200 off all mattress orders AND two free pillows for our listeners at https://helixsleep.com/sysk Search for Home. Made., an original podcast by Rocket Mortgage that explores the meaning of home and what it can teach us about ourselves and others.  Go Daddy lets you create your website or store for FREE right now at https://godaddy.com Discover matches all the cash back you earn on your credit card at the end of your first year automatically and is accepted at 99% of places in the U.S. that take credit cards! Learn more at https://discover.com/yes Over the last 6 years, donations made at Walgreens in support of Red Nose Day have helped positively impact over 25 million kids. You can join in helping to change the lives of kids facing poverty. To help Walgreens support even more kids, donate today at checkout or at https://Walgreens.com/RedNoseDay. https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Based on the dogged reporting of investigative journalist and Yahoo News contributor Jana Winter, Americans have recently learned about the covert internet surveillance operation being inexplicably run out of the U.S. Postal Service. The operation, charmingly dubbed “iCop,” targets citizens’ social media posts, and both the exact ends of this invasive effort, and the legal authority under which it exists, are unknown. Winter joins Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman and Victoria Bassetti on this episode to discuss the fruits of her reporting, the implications of her findings, and to ask why Democrats have not risen to the occasion to protect their constituents.Plus, author Brad Stone joins to talk about his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. They discuss some of Amazon’s unlikely successes (like Alexa), and notorious failures (like the Fire phone), as well as the scandalous episode where some of Bezos’s intimate text messages were leaked to the public.GUESTS:Jana Winter (@janawinter), Investigative journalist; contributor, Yahoo NewsBrad Stone (@BradStone), Author; head, Global Technology coverage, BloombergHOSTS:Michael Isikoff (@Isikoff), Chief Investigative Correspondent, Yahoo NewsDaniel Klaidman (@dklaidman), Editor in Chief, Yahoo NewsVictoria Bassetti (@VBass), fellow, Brennan Center for Justice (contributing co-host) RESOURCES:“House Votes to Create Capitol Riot Commission” by Nicholas Fandos (May 19, New York Times)“Facial recognition, fake identities and digital surveillance tools: Inside the post office’s covert internet operations program” by Jana Winter (May 18, Yahoo News)“Chief postal inspector tells lawmakers that social media monitoring began after George Floyd protests” by Jana Winter (Apr. 30, Yahoo News)“The postal service is running a ‘covert operations program’ that monitors Americans’ social media posts” by Jana Winter (Apr. 21, Yahoo News)Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

In this episode of "Keen On", Andrew is joined by Brad Stone, the author of "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire", to discuss how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. Brad Stone is the author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021. It traces the transformation of Amazon into one of the largest and most feared companies of the world and the accompanying emergence of its founder, Jeff Bezos, as the richest man alive. Brad is also the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which chronicled the foundational early years of the company. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into more than 35 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In 2017, he also published The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley. Brad is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News where he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he’s authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He’s a regular contributor to Bloomberg’s technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology. He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originally from Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and three daughters. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca interviews Brad Stone, the Bloomberg reporter with two books on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. His latest, "Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire", examines the company and its founder's transformation within the echelons of power, wealth, and ubiquity. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Brad Stone in conversation with Nick Bilton at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing his new book, “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire“ The talk aired on May 17, 2021 from the Live Talks Los Angeles studios.  For more information on Live Talks Los Angeles-- upcoming talks, videos, podcast or our online store -- visit us at livetalksla.org and subscribe to this podcast.

BigBrain's CEO Nik Bonaddio joins us to chat about the app that allows you to compete against the world in live trivia contests for real-money prizes. Plus, we talk to Dr. Kate Darling, a Research Specialist at the MIT Media Lab, about her new book The New Breed: What Our History with Animals Reveals about Our Future with Robots. Also, author Brad Stone reveals how money, sex, power (and more), are covered in his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire. In Socially Speaking, we discuss whether Facebook's new feature, the "read before you share warning", is a good idea and question if it will change the amount of misinformation that appears on the platform. Find out more information from our guests here: Big Brain App media.mit.edu Brad Stone You can also find both AmberMac and Michael B on Twitter. 

What I learned from reading Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone.Listen to every full episode for less than a $1 a week. Upgrade here. 

Author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire Interview starts at 2:00 and ends at 34:00 Note: I will be discussing my Brad Stone interview Monday May 17, 2021 at 1 pm EDT on Clubhouse. Whether you are a current member of Clubhouse or want to join in order to participate in the discussion, click here. I've also created a club named The Reading Edge. Use this link to join! Links The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone (2013) The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone (2017) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the David Rubenstein Show (YouTube)- September 19, 2018 Steve Jobs: A Biography by Walter Isaacson Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that changed Everything by Steven Levy Next Week's Guest A.G. Riddle, author of Pandemic and other science-based thrillers If you'd like brief daily updates on technology, books, marriage, and puppies, you can follow along with my Morning Journal flash briefing. From your Echo device, just say, “Alexa, enable Morning Journal.” Then each morning say, “Alexa, what's my flash briefing?” I post a five-minute audio journal each day except Sunday, usually by 8:00 am Eastern Time.  The Kindle Chronicles is now available at Audible Podcasts. The only thing missing are ratings! If you have time, please consider leaving one in order to help others learn about the show.  Right-click here and then click "Save Link As..." to download the audio to your computer, phone, or MP3 player.

Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Stacy-Marie Ishmael are joined by Brad Stone to talk about the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, covering things like AMI’s extortion of Bezos, what the single cow burger tells about who Bezos has become, the impact of Amazon’s labor practices, and many more Bezos/Amazon topics.  In the Plus segment: Neobanks.  Mentioned in the show: “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker,” by Jeff Bezos “Colonial Pipeline Paid the Ransom. Bad Move,” by Timothy L. O'Brien for Bloomberg  “The Deadly Toll of Amazon’s Trucking Boom,” by Paris Martineau for The Information “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld for the New York Times  “Simple Banking Customers Still Locked Out; Parent BBVA Says Its Customer Service Crashed,” by Mike Rogoway for Oregon Live Email: slatemoney@slate.com Podcast production by Jessamine Molli. Twitter: @felixsalmon, @EmilyRPeck, @s_m_i Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Felix Salmon, Emily Peck, and Stacy-Marie Ishmael are joined by Brad Stone to talk about the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, covering things like AMI’s extortion of Bezos, what the single cow burger tells about who Bezos has become, the impact of Amazon’s labor practices, and many more Bezos/Amazon topics.  In the Plus segment: Neobanks.  Mentioned in the show: “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker,” by Jeff Bezos “Colonial Pipeline Paid the Ransom. Bad Move,” by Timothy L. O'Brien for Bloomberg  “The Deadly Toll of Amazon’s Trucking Boom,” by Paris Martineau for The Information “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld for the New York Times  “Simple Banking Customers Still Locked Out; Parent BBVA Says Its Customer Service Crashed,” by Mike Rogoway for Oregon Live Email: slatemoney@slate.com Podcast production by Jessamine Molli. Twitter: @felixsalmon, @EmilyRPeck, @s_m_i Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Disney+ subscriber growth falls short of Wall Street’s expectations. Marriott International and Airbnb find room for improvement. Roblox pops on strong revenue. DoorDash shares rev 20% on upbeat guidance. The Trade Desk and Unity Software both fall despite encouraging 1st-quarter reports. Bill Ackman orders up a 6% stake in Domino’s Pizza. Krispy Kreme plots a return to the public markets. Jason Moser and Ron Gross analyze those stories and share two stocks on their radar: Home Depot and Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical. Plus, Bloomberg senior editor Brad Stone shares how Amazon secretly developed the Echo, which cities were the real finalists to be the home of HQ2, and other insights from his new book Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.   Looking for more stocks for your radar? Get 50% off our Stock Advisor service just by going to http://RadarStocks.fool.com.

Gavin McLoughlin is joined by Brad Stone senior executive editor for technology at Bloomberg News and the author of ‘Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire’ Taking Stock on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify.      Download, listen and subscribe on the Newstalk App.     You can also listen to Newstalk live on newstalk.com or on Alexa, by adding the Newstalk skill and asking: 'Alexa, play Newstalk'.

Bloomberg's Brad Stone and Recode's Jason Del Rey report on all things Amazon and Jeff Bezos. They discuss the company’s underrated tech and how Amazon made Alexa smart (a tale of Xboxes, decoys, and apartments-in-disguise), plus the company’s ambitions in Hollywood.  This is just a preview of a much longer conversation. You can hear the full thing on the Recode Media podcast.   Featuring: Brad Stone (@BradStone), tech writer for Bloomberg and author of ‘Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire.’ Guest Host: Jason Del Rey (@DelRey), senior correspondent at Recode More to explore: Subscribe for free to Recode Media, where Peter Kafka, one of the media industry's most acclaimed reporters, talks to business titans, journalists, comedians, and more to get their take on today's media landscape. About Recode by Vox: Recode by Vox helps you understand how tech is changing the world — and changing us. Support Recode by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts ^^^ Copy edits needed only on content above. Thanks so much! ^^^ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

About BradAuthor and Senior Executive Editor, Bloomberg TechnologyBrad Stone is the author of four books, including Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire,published by Simon & Schuster in May 2021. It traces the transformation of Amazon into one of the largest and most feared companies of the world and the accompanying emergence of Jeff Bezos as the richest man alive. Brad is also the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, which chronicled the foundational early years of the company and its founder. The book, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, was translated into more than 35 languages and won the 2013 Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. In 2017, he also published The Upstarts: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley.Brad is Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg Newswhere he oversees a team of 65 reporters and editors that covers high-tech companies, startups, cyber security and internet trends around the world. Over the last ten years, as a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek, he’s authored over two dozen cover stories on companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Softbank, Twitter, Facebook and the Chinese internet juggernauts Didi, Tencent and Baidu. He’s a regular contributor to Bloomberg’s technology newsletter Fully Charged, and to the daily Bloomberg TV news program, Bloomberg Technology. He was previously a San Francisco-based correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. A graduate of Columbia University, he is originallyfrom Cleveland, Ohio and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wifeand three daughtersLinks: The Everything Store: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon/dp/0316219282/ Amazon Unbound: https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Unbound-Invention-Global-Empire/dp/1982132612/ Andy Jassy book review: https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1Q4CQQV1ALSN0/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00FJFJOLC TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me. I linked against an early version of their tool, canarytokens.org in the very early days of my newsletter, and what it does is relatively simple and straightforward. It winds up embedding credentials, files, that sort of thing in various parts of your environment, wherever you want to; it gives you fake AWS API credentials, for example. And the only thing that these things do is alert you whenever someone attempts to use those things. It’s an awesome approach. I’ve used something similar for years. Check them out. But wait, there’s more. They also have an enterprise option that you should be very much aware of canary.tools. You can take a look at this, but what it does is it provides an enterprise approach to drive these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets Nmap scanned, or someone attempts to log into it, or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It’s awesome. If you don’t do something like this, you’re likely to find out that you’ve gotten breached, the hard way. Take a look at this. It’s one of those few things that I look at and say, “Wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it.” That’s canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprise-y. Take a look. I’m a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by VMware. Because let’s face it, the past year hasn’t been kind to our AWS bills, or honestly any cloud bills. The pandemic had a bunch of impacts: it forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would have otherwise, we saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn’t. What do you do about it? Well, the CloudLIVE 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing, be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought—ahem, ahem—and get some behind the scenes look into various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20, the CloudLIVE 2021 conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend, so you really have no excuses for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Visit cloudlive.com/coreyto learn more and save your virtual seat today. That’s cloud L-I-V-E slash Corey. C-O-R-E-Y. Drop the E, we’re all in trouble. My thanks to VMware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. Sometimes people tell me that I should write a book about Amazon. And that sounds awful. But to be sure, today, my guest is Brad Stone, someone who has written not one, but two books about Amazon, one of which coming out on May 11th, or as most of you will know while listening to this, today. Brad, thanks for joining me.Brad: Corey, thanks for having me.Corey: So, what on earth would inspire you to not just write a book about one of what is in many ways an incredibly secretive company, but then to go back and do it again?Brad: Yeah. I’m a glutton for punishment. And Corey, my hair right now is completely white way before it should be, and I think that Amazon might be responsible for some of that. So, as you contemplate your own project, consider that this company—will you already know: it can age you. They are sometimes resistant to scrutiny.So, to answer your question, I set out to write The Everything Store back in 2011, and this was a much smaller company. It was a cute little tiny internet company of about $100 billion in market value. And poor, impoverished Jeff Bezos maybe had, I’d be guessing maybe $50 billion.So anyway, it was a much different time. And that was a great experience. The company was kind of flowering as the book came out. And to my surprise, it was embraced not by Bezos or the management team, who maybe we’ll talk about didn’t love it, but by Amazon employees, and customers, and competitors, and prospective employees. And I was really proud of it that this had become a kind of definitive account of the early years of the company.And then a funny thing happened. The little cute little internet company became a juggernaut, a $1.5 trillion market cap. Bezos is the wealthiest guy in the world now with a $200 billion fortune, and Alexa, and the rise of AWS, and the Go store, and incursions into India and Mexico and other countries, I mean, so much had changed, and my definitive history felt a little out of date. And so back in 2017—also a different world, Bezos is a happily married man; he’s the CEO of Amazon, Amazon’s headquarters are in Seattle only—I set out to research and write Amazon Unbound. And as I was writing the story, yeah, just, like, the ground kept shifting under my feet.Corey: Not a lot changes in the big sphere. I mean, one of the things that Bezos said is, “Oh, what’s going to be different in 10 years? I think the better question is, ‘what’s going to not be different in 10 years?’” but watching the company shift, watching it grow, just from the outside has been a real wild ride, I’ve got to say. And I restrict myself primarily to the AWS parts because well, there’s too much to cover if you go far beyond that, and two, it’s a very different place with very different challenges around it.I viewed The Everything Store when it came out and I read that, almost like it was a biography of Jeff Bezos himself. And in some respects, Amazon Unbound feels like it hews in that direction as well, but it also goes beyond that. How do you approach separating out the story of Amazon from the story of Jeff Bezos?Brad: Yeah, you’re putting your finger on almost the core challenge, and the adjoining challenge, which is how do you create a narrative, a linear story? Often readers want a chronological story out of a miasma of overlapping events, and initiatives, and challenges. Amazon’s really decentralized; everything is happening at once. Bezos is close to some things, he was very close to Alexa. He is really distant from other things.Andy Jassy for years had a lot of independence to run AWS. So, how do you tell that story, and then keep Bezos in the center? I mean, Andy Jassy and Jeff Wilke and everyone, I mean, those are great business people. Not necessarily dynamic personalities as, Corey, you know well, but people want to read about Jeff Bezos. He is a larger-than-life figure.He’s a pioneer. He’s an innovator. He’s controversial. And so the challenge all along is to, kind of, keep him in the center. And so that’s just, like, a writing challenge. It’s a narrative challenge.And the lucky thing is that Amazon does tend to orbit around Jeff Bezos’s brain. And so in all the storytelling, even the AWS bits of the book, which we can talk about, as an author, you can always bring Bezos back just by following the facts. You’ll eventually get, in the evolution of any story, to an S Team meeting, or to an acquisition discussion where Jeff had an impact, said something insightful, walked out of a meeting, raise the bar, had impossibly high standards. So, the last thing I’ll say is, because Amazon’s so decentralized, when you write these books you have to talk to a lot of people. And then you get all the pieces of the puzzle, and you start to assemble them, and the challenge as a writer is to, kind of, keep Bezos, your main character in the lens at all times, never let him drift too far out.Corey: One of the things that I learned from it was just the way that Bezos apparently talks to his senior executives, as far as, “I will invest in this project, more than you might think I would.” I guess I’ve never really heard of a budget meeting talking about, “I”—in the first person—“Will invest.” Like, that is what happens, but for some reason the business books never put it quite that starkly or frame it quite that way. But in hindsight, it made a lot of things of my own understanding of Amazon fall into place. That makes sense.Brad: He’s got a lot of levers, ways in which he’ll back a new initiative or express his support. And one of them is simply how he spends his time. So, with Alexa in the early years, he would meet once or twice a week with that team. But another lever is just the amount of investment. And oftentimes teams will come to him—the India team is a great example—they’ll come to the S Team with a budget, and they’ll list out their priorities and their goals for the coming year, and he’ll say, “You know, you’re thinking about this all wrong. Don’t constrain yourself. Tell us what the goals are, tell us what the opportunity is, then we’ll figure out how much it costs.”And his mindset is like you can kind of break up opportunity into two categories: one are the land grabs, the big immediate opportunities where he will go all out, and India was a great example of that, I think the failed fire phone was another example, Prime Video, he doesn’t cap the investment, he wants to win. And then there are the more greenfield opportunities that he thinks he can go slower on and groceries for a long time was in that category. And there the budgets might be more constrained. The other example is the much older businesses, just like the retail business. That’s 20 years old—I have a chapter about that—and the advertising business, and he recognized that the retail business wasn’t profitable and it was depending on advertising as a crutch, and he blew it up because he thinks that those older divisions shouldn’t require investment; they should be able to stand on their own.Corey: One quote you had as well, that just really resonated with me, as far as basically my entire ethos of how I make fun of Amazon is—and I’m going to read the excerpt here. My apologies. You have to listen to your own words being read back toward you—Brad: [laugh].Corey: These were typically Amazonian names: geeky, obscure, and endlessly debated inside AWS since—according to an early AWS exec—Bezos had once mused, “You know, the name is about 3% of what matters, but sometimes 3% is the difference between winning and losing.” And I just want to call that out because I don’t think I’ve ever seen an AWS exec ever admit that names might be even 3% worth of important. Looking at how terrible some of their service names are, I would say that 3% might be an aspirational target for their worldview.Brad: [laugh]. Let me throw this back at you, Corey. Have you ever figured out why certain AWS services are Amazon and why others are AWS?Corey: I did. I got to sit down—in the before times—with then the VP of Global Marketing, Ariel Kelman—who’s now Oracle’s Chief Marketing Officer—and Jeff Barr. And the direction that they took that in was that if you could use an AWS service without getting into the AWS weeds of a bunch of other services, then it was called Amazon whatever. Amazon S3, for example, as a primitive service doesn’t need a bunch of other AWS services hooked into it, so that gets the Amazon moniker. Whereas if you’re dealing with a service that requires the integration of a whole bunch of AWS in the weeds stuff—Brad: Mmm, right.Corey: —then it’s AWS. For example, AWS Systems Manager is useless without a whole bunch of other Amazon services. And they say they don’t get it perfectly right all the time, but that is the direction that it’s gone in. And for better or worse, I still have to look a lot of them up myself because I don’t care nearly as much as their branding people do.Brad: Right. Well, I’ll tell you in the chapter about AWS, that quote comes up when the team is contemplating the names of the databases. And they do go into long debates, and I remember talking to Charlie Bell about the search for Redshift, and they go back and forth on it, and the funny thing about that one was, of course, Oracle interpreted it as a competitive slight. Its corporate color, I guess, being red, which he intended it more as a physics term. But yeah, when they were launching Aurora and Redshift, they contemplated those names quite a bit. And I don’t know if it’s 3%. I don’t know if it does matter, but certainly, those services have become really important to a lot of businesses.Corey: Oh, yeah. And once you name something, it’s really hard to rename it. And AWS does view for—better or worse—APIs as a promise, so when you build something and presented a certain way, they’re never going to turn it off. Our grandkids are going to have to deal with some of these decisions once they get into computers. That’s a problem.And I understand the ethos behind it, but again, it’s easy to make fun of names; it’s an accessible thing because let’s be very real here, a lot of what AWS does is incredibly inaccessible to people who don’t live in this space. But naming is something that everyone can get behind making fun of.Brad: Absolutely. Yep. And [laugh] it’s perhaps why they spend a lot of time on it because they know that this is going to be the shingle that they hang out to the world. I don’t know that they’re anticipating your ridicule, but it’s obviously key to the marketing process for them.Corey: Some of the more aware ones do. But that’s a different topic for a different time. One question I have for you that I wrestle with myself is I’ve been spending the last four years or so basically studying AWS all the time. And there’s a lot of things they get right; there’s a lot of things that they get wrong. But for better or worse, it’s very difficult not to come away from an in-depth study with an appreciation for an awful lot of the things that they do. At least for me.I’m not saying that I fall in love with the company and will excuse them their wrongs; I absolutely do not do that. But it is hard, bordering on impossible for me, to not come away with a deep respect for a lot of the things that they do and clearly believe. How do you feel about that? Looking at Amazon, do you come away with this with, “Ooh. Remind me to never to become a Prime member and get rid of everything with an Amazon logo in my house,” versus the you’re about to wind up wondering if they can hire you for some esoteric role? Where do you fall on that spectrum?Brad: I think I’m probably with you. I come away with an admiration. And look, I mean, let me say upfront, I am a Prime member. I have a Alexas in my home, probably more than my wife and kids are comfortable with. We watch Prime Video, we have Prime Video.We order from Amazon all the time, we ordered from Whole Foods. I’m an Amazon customer, and so part of my appreciation comes from, like all other customers, the fact that Amazon uniquely restores time to our lives rather than extracts it. I wouldn’t say that about the social networks, right? You know, those can be time-wasters. Amazon’s a great efficiency machine.But in terms of my journalism, you know, now two books and this big in-depth study in Amazon Unbound, and you have to admire what they have built. I mean, a historic American institution that has not only changed our economic reality, in ways good and bad but over the last year and a half, in the pandemic was among the few institutions that functioned properly and served as a kind of lifeline. And there is a critique in Amazon Unbound and we can talk about it, but it’s hard to come away—I think you said it well—it’s hard to come away after studying this company and studying the top executives, and how Jeff Bezos, thinks and how he has conceived products without real admiration for what they have built over the last 25 years.Corey: Well, let’s get into your critique of Amazon. What do you think is, from what you’ve seen with all of the years of research you put into this company, what’s the worst thing about them?Brad: Well, that’s a good way to put it, Corey. [laugh]. Let me—Corey: [laugh]. It’s like, talk about a target-rich opportunity. Like, “Oh, wow. It’s like my children. I can’t stand any of them. How in the world could I pick just one?” But give it a shot.Brad: Right. Well, let me start this way, which is I often will listen to their critiques from Amazon critics—and I’m sure you might feel this way as well—and just think, like, “Do they get it?” They’ll argue that Amazon exercised its size and might to buy the companies that led to Alexa. As I write in the Alexa chapter, that’s not true at all. They bought a couple of small companies, and those executives were all horrified at what Amazon was trying to do, and then they made it work.Or the critics will say, “Fifty percent or more of internet users start their product searches on Amazon. Amazon has lock-in.” That’s not true either. Lock-in on the internet is only as strong as a browser window that remains open. And you could always go find a competitor or search on a search engine.So, I find at least some of the public criticism to be a little specious. And often, these are people that complained about Walmart for ten years. And now Amazon’s the big, bad boogeyman.Corey: Oh, I still know people who refuse to do business with Walmart but buy a bunch of stuff from Amazon, and I’m looking at these things going, any complaints you have about Walmart are very difficult to avoid mapping to Amazon.Brad: Here’s maybe the distillation of the critique that’s an Amazon Unbound. We make fun of Facebook for, “Move fast and break things.” And they broke things, including, potentially, our democracy. When you look at the creation of the Amazon Marketplace, Jeff wanted a leader who can answer the question, “How would you bring a million sellers into the Amazon Marketplace?” And what that tells you is he wanted to create a system, a self-service system, where you could funnel sellers the world over into the system and sell immediately.And that happened, and a lot of those sellers, there was no friction, and many of them came from the Wild West of Chinese eCommerce. And you had—inevitably because there were no guardrails—you had fraud and counterfeit, and all sorts of lawsuits and damage. Amazon moved fast and broke things. And then subsequently tried to clean it up. And if you look at the emergence of the Amazon supply chain and the logistics division, the vans that now crawl our streets, or the semi-trailers on our highways, or the planes.Amazon moved fast there, too. And the first innings of that game were all about hiring contractors, not employees, getting them on the road with a minimum of guidance. And people died. There were accidents. You know, there weren’t just drivers flinging packages into our front yards, or going to the bathroom on somebody’s porch.That happened, but there were also accidents and costs. And so I think some of the critique is that Amazon, despite its profession that it focuses only on customers, is also very competitor-aware and competitor-driven, and they move fast, often to kind of get ahead of competitors, and they build the systems and they’re often self-service systems, and they avoid employment where it’s possible, and the result have been costs to society, the cost of moving quickly. And then on the back-end when there are lawsuits, Amazon attempts to either evade responsibility or settle cases, and then hide those from the public. And I think that is at the heart of what I show in a couple of ways in Amazon Unbound. And it’s not just Amazon; it’s very typical right now of corporate America and particularly tech companies.And part of it is the state of the laws and regulations that allow the companies to get away with it, and really restrict the rights of plaintiffs, of people who are wronged from extracting significant penalties from these companies and really changing their behavior.Corey: Which makes perfect sense. I have the luxury of not having to think about that by having a mental division and hopefully one day a real division between AWS and Amazon’s retail arm. For me at least, the thing I always had an issue with was their treatment of staff in many respects. It is well known that in the FAANG constellation of tech companies, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, apparently, it’s an acronym and it’s cutesy. People in tech think they’re funny.But the problem is that Amazon’s compensation is significantly below that. One thing I loved in your book was that you do a breakdown of how those base salaries work, how most of it is stock-based and with a back-loaded vesting and the rest, and looking through the somewhat lengthy excerpt—but I will not read your own words to you this time—it more or less completely confirms what I said in my exposé of this, which means if we’re wrong, we’re both wrong. And we’ve—and people have been very convincing and very unified across the board. We’re clearly not wrong. It’s nice to at least get external confirmation of some of the things that I stumble over.Brad: But I think this is all part of the same thing. What I described as the move fast and break things mentality, often in a race with competition, and your issues about the quality, the tenor of work, and the compensation schemes, I think maybe and this might have been a more elegant answer to your question, we can wrap it all up under the mantle of empathy. And I think it probably starts with the founder and soon-to-be-former CEO. And look, I mean, an epic business figure, a builder, an inventor, but when you lay out the hierarchy of qualities, and attributes, and strengths, maybe empathy with the plight of others wasn’t near the top. And when it comes to the treatment of the workforce, and the white-collar employees, and the compensation schemes, and how they’re very specifically designed to make people uncomfortable, to keep them running fast, to churn them out if they don’t cut it, and the same thing in the workforce, and then the big-scale systems and marketplace and logistics—look, maybe empathy is a drag, and not having it can be a business accelerant, and I think that’s what we’re talking about, right?That some of these systems seem a little inhumane, and maybe to their credit, when Amazon recognizes that—or when Jeff has recognized it00, he’s course-corrected a little bit. But I think it’s all part of that same bundle. And maybe perversely, it’s one of the reasons why Amazon has succeeded so much.Corey: I think that it’s hard to argue against the idea of culture flowing from the top. And every anecdote I’ve ever heard about Jeff Bezos, never having met the man myself, is always filtered through someone else; in many cases, you. But there are a lot of anecdotes from folks inside Amazon, folks outside Amazon, et cetera, and I think that no one could make a serious argument that he is not fearsomely intelligent, penetratingly insightful, and profoundly gifted in a whole bunch of different ways. People like to say, “Well, he started Amazon with several $100,000 and loan from his parents, so he’s not really in any ways a self-made anything.” Well, no one is self-made. Let’s be very clear on that.But getting a few $100,000 to invest in a business, especially these days, is not that high of a stumbling block for an awful lot of folks similarly situated. He has had outsized success based upon where he started and where he wound up ending now. But not a single story that I’ve ever heard about him makes me think, yeah, that’s the kind of guy I want to be friends with. That’s the kind of guy I want to invite to a backyard barbecue and hang out with, and trade stories about our respective kids, and just basically have a social conversation with. Even a business conversation doesn’t feel like it would be particularly warm or compelling.It would be educational, don’t get me wrong, but he doesn’t strike me as someone who really understands empathy in any meaningful sense. I’m sure he has those aspects to him. I’m sure he has a warm, wonderful relationship with his kids, presumably because they still speak to him, but none of that ever leaks through into his public or corporate persona.Brad: Mmm, partially agree, partially disagree. I mean, certainly maybe the warmth you’re right on, but this is someone who’s incredibly charismatic, who is incredibly smart, who thinks really deeply about the future, and has intense personal opinions about current events. And getting a beer with him—which I have not done—with sound fantastic. Kicking back at the fireplace at his ranch in Texas, [laugh] to me, I’m sure it’s tremendously entertaining to talk to him. But when it comes to folks like us, Corey, I have a feeling it’s not going to happen, whether you want to or not.He’s also incredibly guarded around the jackals of the media, so perhaps it doesn’t make a difference one way or another. But, yeah, you’re right. I mean, he’s all business at work. And it is interesting that the turnover in the executive ranks, even among the veterans right now, is pretty high. And I don’t know, I mean, I think Amazon goes through people in a way, maybe a little less on the AWS side. You would know that better than me. But—Corey: Yes and no. There’s been some turnover there that you can also pretty easily write down to internal political drama—for lack of a better term—palace intrigue. For lack of a better term. When, for example, Adam Selipsky is going to be the new CEO of AWS as Andy Jesse ascends to be the CEO of all Amazon—the everything CEO as it were. And that has absolutely got to have rubbed some people in unpleasant ways.Let’s be realistic here about what this shows: he quit AWS to go be the CEO of Tableau, and now he’s coming back to run AWS. Clearly, the way to get ahead there is to quit. And that might not be the message they’re intending to send, but that’s something that people can look at and take away, that leaving a company doesn’t mean you can’t boomerang and go back there at a higher level in the future.Brad: Right.Corey: And that might be what people are waking up to because it used to be a culture of once you’re out, you’re out. Clearly not the case anymore. They were passed over for a promotion they wanted, “Well, okay, I’m going to go talk to another company. Oh, my God, they’re paying people in yachts.” And it becomes, at some level, time for something new.I don’t begrudge people who decide to stay; I don’t begrudge people who decide to leave, but one of my big thrusts for a long time has been understand the trade-offs of either one of those decisions and what the other side looks like so you go into it with your eyes open. And I feel like, on some level, a lot of folks there didn’t necessarily feel that they could have their eyes open in the way that they can now.Brad: Mm-hm. Interesting. Yeah. Selipsky coming back, I never thought about that, sends a strong message. And Amazon wants builders, and operators, and entrepreneurial thinking at the top and in the S Team. And the fact that Andy had a experienced leadership team at AWS and then went outside it for the CEO could be interpreted as pretty demotivating for that team. Now, they’ve all worked with Adam before, and I’ve met him and he seems like a great guy so maybe there are no hard feelings, but—Corey: I never have. He left a few months before I started this place. So, it—I get the sense that he knew I was coming and said, “Well, better get out of here. This isn’t going to go well at all.”Brad: [laugh]. I actually went to interview him for this book, and I sat in his office at Tableau thinking, “Okay, here’s a former AWS guy,” and I got to tell you, he was really on script and didn’t say anything bad, and I thought, “Okay, well, that wasn’t the best use of my time.” He was great to meet, and it was an interesting conversation, but the goss he did not deliver. And so when I saw that he got this job, I thought, well, he’s smart. He smartly didn’t burn any bridges, at least with me.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at ChaosSearch., you could run Elasticsearch or Elastic Cloud—or OpenSearch as they’re calling it now—or a self-hosted ELK stack. But why? ChaosSearch gives you the same API you’ve come to know and tolerate, along with unlimited data retention and no data movement. Just throw your data into S3 and proceed from there as you would expect. This is great for IT operations folks, for app performance monitoring, cybersecurity. If you’re using Elasticsearch, consider not running Elasticsearch. They’re also available now in the AWS marketplace if you’d prefer not to go direct and have half of whatever you pay them count towards your EDB commitment. Discover what companies like HubSpot, Klarna, Equifax, Armor Security, and Blackboard already have. To learn more, visit chaossearch.io and tell them I sent you just so you can see them facepalm, yet again.Corey: No. And it’s pretty clear that you don’t get to rise to those levels without being incredibly disciplined with respect to message. I don’t pity Andy Jesse’s new job wherein a key portion of the job description is going to be testifying before Congress. Without going into details, I’ve been in situations where I’ve gotten to ask him questions before in a real-time Q&A environment, and my real question hidden behind the question was, “How long can I knock him off of his prepared talking points?” Because I—Brad: Good luck. [laugh].Corey: Yeah. I got the answer: about two and a half seconds, which honestly was a little bit longer than I thought I would get. But yeah, incredibly disciplined and incredibly insightful, penetrating answers, but they always go right back to talking points. And that’s what you have to do at that level. I’ve heard stories—it may have been from your book—that Andy and Adam were both still friendly after Adam’s departure, they would still hang out socially and clearly, relationships are still being maintained, if oh, by the way, you’re going to be my successor. It’s kind of neat. I’m curious to see how this plays out once that transition goes into effect.Brad: Yeah, it’ll be interesting. And then also, Andy’s grand homecoming to the other parts of the business. He started in the retail organization. He was Jeff’s shadow. He ran the marketing department at very early Amazon.He’s been in all those meetings over the years, but he’s also been very focused on AWS. So, I would imagine there’s a learning curve as he gets back into the details of the other 75% of Amazon.Corey: It turns out that part of the business has likely changed in the last 15 years, just a smidgen when every person you knew over there is now 10,000 people. There was an anecdote in your book that early on in those days, Andy Jesse was almost let go as part of a layoff or a restructuring, and Jeff Bezos personally saved his job. How solid is that?Brad: Oh, that is solid. An S Team member told me that, who was Andy’s boss at the time. And the story was, in the late 90s—I hope I remember this right—there was a purge of the marketing department. Jeff always thought that marketing—in the early days marketing was purely satisfying customers, so why do we need all these people? And there was a purge of the marketing department back when Amazon was trying to right-size the ship and get profitable and survive the dotcom bust.And Jeff intervened in the layoffs and said, “Not Andy. He’s one of the most—yeah, highest ceiling folks we have.” And he made him his first full-time shadow. Oh, and that comes right from an S Team member. I won’t say the name because I can’t remember if that was on or off the record.But yeah, it was super interesting. You know what? I’ve always wondered how good of a identifier of talent and character is Bezos. And he has some weaknesses there. I mean, obviously, in his personal life, he certainly didn’t identify Lauren Sánchez’s brother as the threat that he became.You know, I tell the story in the book of the horrific story of the CEO of Amazon Mexico, who Jeff interviewed, and they hired and then later ended up what appears to be hiring an assassin to kill his wife. I tell the story in the book. It’s a horrible story. So, not to lay that at the feet of Jeff Bezos, of course, but he often I think, moves quickly. And I actually have a quote from a friend of his in the book saying, “It’s better to not be kind of paranoid, and the”—sort of—I can’t remember what the quote is.It’s to trust people rather than be paranoid about everyone. And if you trust someone wrongly, then you of course-correct. With Andy, though, he somehow had an intuitive sense that this guy was very high potential, and that’s pretty impressive.Corey: You’re never going to bet a thousand. There’s always going to be people that slip through the cracks. But learning who these people are and getting different angles on them is always interesting. Every once in a while—and maybe I’m completely wrong on this, but never having spent time one on one with Andy Jassy, I have to rely on other folks and different anecdotes, most of them, I can’t disclose the source of, but every time that I wind up hearing about these stories, and maybe I’m projecting here, but there are aspects of him where it seems like there is a genuinely nice person in there who is worried, on some level, that people are going to find out that he’s a nice person.Brad: [laugh]. I think he is. He’s extraordinarily nice. He seems like a regular guy, and what’s sort of impressive is that obviously he’s extraordinarily wealthy now, and unlike, let’s say Bezos, who’s obviously much more wealthy, but who, who really has leaned into that lifestyle, my sense is Andy does not. He’s still—I don’t know if he’s on the corporate jet yet, but at least until recently he wasn’t, and he presents humbly. I don’t know if he’s still getting as close from wherever, [unintelligible 00:32:50] or Nordstroms.Corey: He might be, but it is clear that he’s having them tailored because fit is something—I spent a lot of time in better years focusing on sartorial attention, and wherever he’s sourcing them from aside, they fit well.Brad: Okay, well, they didn’t always. Right?Corey: No. He’s, he’s… there’s been a lot of changes over the past decade. He is either discovered a hidden wellspring of being one of the best naturally talented speakers on the planet, or he’s gone through some coaching to improve in those areas. Not that he was bad at the start, but now he’s compelling.Brad: Okay. Well, now we’re talking about his clothes and his speaking style. But—Corey: Let’s be very honest here. If he were a woman, we would have been talking about that as the beginning topic of this. It’s on some level—Brad: Or we wouldn’t have because we’d know it’s improper these days.Corey: We would like to hope. But I am absolutely willing to turn it back around.Brad: [laugh]. Anyway.Corey: So, I’m curious, going back a little bit to criticisms here, Amazon has been criticized roundly by regulators and Congress and the rest—folks on both sides of the aisle—for a variety of things. What do you see is being the fair criticisms versus the unfair criticisms?Brad: Well, I mean, I think we covered some of the unfair ones. But there’s one criticism that Amazon uses AWS to subsidize other parts of the business. I don’t know how you feel about that, but until recently at least, my reading of the balance sheet was that the enormous profits of AWS were primarily going to buy more AWS. They were investing in capital assets and building more data centers.Corey: Via a series of capital leases because cash flow is king in how they drive those things there. Oh, yeah.Brad: Right. Yeah. You know, and I illustrate in the book how when it did become apparent that retail was leaning on advertising, Jeff didn’t accept that. He wanted retail to stand on its own, and it led to some layoffs and fiercer negotiations with brands, higher fees for sellers. Advertising is the free cash flow that goes in Prime movies, and TV shows, and Alexa, and stuff we probably don’t know about.So, this idea that Amazon is sort of improperly funneling money between the divisions to undercut competitors on price, I think we could put that in the unfair bucket. In the fair bucket, those are the things that we can all look at and just go, “Okay, that feels a little wrong.” So, for an example, the private brand strategy. Now, of course, every supermarket and drugstore is going to line their shelves with store brands. But when you go to an Amazon search results page these days, and they are pockmarked with Amazon brands, and Whole Foods brands, and then sponsored listings, the pay-to-play highest bidder wins.And then we now know that, at least for a couple of years, Amazon managers, private label managers were kind of peeking at the third-party data to figure out what was selling and what they should introduce is a private Amazon brand. It just feels a little creepy that Amazon as the everything store is so different than your normal Costco or your drugstore. The shelves are endless; Amazon has the data, access to the data, and the way that they’re parlaying their valuable real estate and the data at their disposal to figure out what to launch, it just feels a little wrong. And it’s a small part of their business, but I think it’s one where they’re vulnerable. The other thing is, in the book, I tried to figure out how can I take the gauge of third-party sellers?There’s so many disgruntled voices, but do they really speak for everyone? And so instead of going to the enemies, I went to every third-party seller that had been mentioned in Jeff Bezos’s shareholder letters over the past decade. And these were the allies. These were the success stories that Bezos was touting in his sacrosanct investor letter, and almost to a one, they had all become disgruntled. And so the way in which the rules of the marketplace change, the way that the fees go up, and the difficulty that sellers often have in getting a person or a guiding hand at Amazon to help them with those changes, that kind of feels wrong.And I think that maybe that’s not a source of regulation, but it could be a source of disruptive competition. If somebody can figure out how to create a marketplace that caters to sellers a little better with lower fees, then they could do to Amazon with Amazon years ago did to eBay. And considering that Marketplace is now a preponderance of sales more than even retail on amazon.com, that can end up hurting the company.Corey: Yeah, at some point, you need to continue growing things, and you’ve run out of genuinely helpful ways, and in turn in start to have to modify customer behavior in order to continue doing things, or expand into brand new markets. We saw the AWS bleeding over into Alexa as an example of that. And I think there’s a lot of interesting things still to come in spaces like that. It’s interesting watching how the Alexa ecosystem has evolved. There’s still some very basic usability bugs that drive me nuts, but at the same token, it’s not something that I think we’re going to see radically changing the world the next five years. It feels like a hobby, but also a lucrative one, and keeps people continuing to feed into the Amazon ecosystem. Do you see that playing out differently?Brad: Wait, with Alexa?Brad: Absolutely.Brad: Yeah. I agree with you. I mean, it feels like there was more promise in the early years, and that maybe they’ve hit a little bit of a wall in terms of the AI and the natural language understanding. It feels like the ecosystem that they tried to build, the app store-like ecosystem of third-party skills makers, that hasn’t crystallized in the way we hoped—in the way they hoped. And then some of these new devices like the glasses or the wristband that have Alexa feel, just, strange, right?Like, I’m not putting Alexa on my face. And those haven’t done as well. And so yeah, I think they pioneered a category: Alexa plays music and answers basic queries really well, and yet it hasn’t quite been conversational in the way that I think Jeff Bezos had hoped in the early days. I don’t know if it’s a profitable business now. I mean, they make a lot of money on the hardware, but the team is huge.I think it was, like, 10,000 people the last I checked. And the R&D costs are quite large. And they’re continuing to try to improve the AI, so I think Jeff Bezos talks about the seeds, and then the main businesses, and I don’t think Alexa has graduated yet. I think there’s still a little bit of a question mark.Corey: It’s one of those things that we remain to see. One last thing that I wanted to highlight and thank you for, was that when you wrote the original book, The Everything Store, Andy Jassy wrote a one-star review. It went into some depth about all the things that, from his perspective, you got wrong, were unfair about, et cetera.And that can be played off as a lot of different things, but you can almost set that aside for a minute and look at it as the really only time in recent memory that Andy Jassy has sat down and written something, clearly himself, and then posted it publicly. He writes a lot—Amazon has a writing culture—but they don’t sign their six-pagers. It’s very difficult to figure out where one person starts and one person stops. This shows that he is a gifted writer in many respects, and I don’t think we have another writing sample from him to compare it to.Brad: So, Corey, you’re saying I should be honored by his one-star review of The Everything Store?Corey: Oh, absolutely.Brad: [laugh].Corey: He, he just ignores me. You actually got a response.Brad: I got a response. Well.Corey: And we’ll put a link to that review in the [show notes 00:40:10] because of course we will.Brad: Yes, thank you. Do you—remember, other Amazon executives also left one-star reviews. And Jeff’s wife, and now ex-wife Mackenzie left a one-star review. And it was a part of a, I think a little bit of a reflexive reaction and campaign that Jeff himself orchestrated at my—this was understanding now, in retrospect. After the book came out, he didn’t like it.He didn’t like aspects of his family life that were represented in the book, and he asked members of the S Team to leave bad reviews. And not all of them did, and Andy did. So, you wonder why he’s CEO now. No, I’m kidding about that. But you know what?It ended up, kind of perversely, even though that was uncomfortable in the moment, ended up being good for the first book. And I’ve seen Andy subsequently, and no hard feelings. I don’t quite remember what his review said. Didn’t it, strangely, like, quote a movie or something like that?Corey: I recall that it did. It went in a bunch of different directions, and at the end—it ended with, “Well, maybe someday he’ll write the actual story. And I’m not trying to bait anyone into doing it, but this book isn’t it.” Well, in the absence of factual corrections, that’s what we go with. That is also a very Amazonian thing. They don’t tell their own story, but they’re super quick to correct the record—Brad: Yeah.Corey: —after someone says a thing.Brad: But I don’t recall him making many specific claims of anything I got wrong. But why don’t we hope that there’s a sequel review for Amazon Unbound? I will look forward to that from Andy.Corey: I absolutely hope so. It’s one of those things that we just really, I guess, hope goes in a positive direction. Now, I will say I don’t try to do any reviews that are all positive. And that’s true. There’s one thing that you wrote that I vehemently disagree with.Brad: Okay, let’s hear it.Corey: Former Distinguished Engineer and VP at AWS, Tim Bray, who resigned on conscientious objector grounds, more or less, has been a guest on the show, and I have to say, you did him dirty. You described him—Brad: How did I—what did I do? Mm-hm.Corey: Oh, I quote, “Bray, a fedora-wearing software developer”—which is true, but still is evocative in an unpleasant way—“And one of the creators of the influential web programming language, XML”—which is true, but talk about bringing up someone’s demons to haunt them. Oh, my starts.Brad: [laugh]. But wait. How is the fedora-wearing pejorative?Corey: Oh, it has a whole implication series of, and entire subculture of the gamer types, people who are misogynist, et cetera. It winds up being an unfair characterization—Brad: But he does wear a fedora.Corey: He does. And he can pull it off. He has also mentioned that he is well into retirement age, and it was a different era when he wore one. But that’s not something that people often will associate with him. It’s—Brad: I’m so naive. You’re referring to things that I do not understand what the implication was that I made. But—Corey: Oh, spend more time with the children of Reddit. You’ll catch on quickly.Brad: [laugh]. I try, I try not to do that. But thank you, Corey.Corey: Of course. So, thank you so much for taking the time to go through what you’ve written. I’m looking forward to seeing the reaction once the book is published widely. Where can people buy it? There’s an easy answer, of course, of Amazon itself, but is there somewhere you would prefer them to shop?Brad: Well, everyone can make their own decisions. I flattered if anyone decides to pick up the book. But of course, there is always their independent bookstore. On sale now.Corey: Excellent. And we will, of course, throw a link to the book in the [show notes 00:43:31]. Brad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it.Brad: Corey, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you.Corey: Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire, on sale now wherever fine books are sold—and crappy ones, too. I’m Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you’ve hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice and then a multi-paragraph, very long screed telling me exactly what I got wrong.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Author of The Last Green Valley Interview starts at 6:34 and ends at 49:20 Note: I will be discussing my Mark Sullivan interview Monday May 9, 2021 at 1 pm EDT on Clubhouse. Whether you are a current member of Clubhouse or want to join in order to participate in the discussion, click here. I've also created a club named The Reading Edge. Use this link to join! Links “Amazon Partners with Tile to take on Apple AirTags” by Jon Fortt and Fahiemah Al-Ali at CNBC - May 7, 2021 Kevin Kelly recommends Push to Kindle on Recomendo - $2/month on patreon gets uo 100 credits a month to use with Push to Kindle. 20 credits are apparently free each month. Mark Sullivan's web page Beneath a Scarlet Sky: A Novel by Mark Sullivan Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, MT Sleeping Bear: A Thriller by Connor Sullivan (Mark's son) - available for preorder with release on July 6, 2021. James Patterson's blurb for the book: “Sleeping Bear is one of the very best thrillers you'll read this year. It's one of those rare novels that keeps getting better and better and better. Remember the author's name—Connor Sullivan.”  “Amazon Unbound: Brad Stone on Amazon and Jeff Bezos” - Clubhouse event hosted by Steven Levy on Wednesday, May 12, 2021 at 8:30 Pm (EDT) Next Week's Guest Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire - available for pre-order with release May 11, 2021 If you'd like brief daily updates on technology, books, marriage, and puppies, you can follow along with my Morning Journal flash briefing. From your Echo device, just say, “Alexa, enable Morning Journal.” Then each morning say, “Alexa, what's my flash briefing?” I post a five-minute audio journal each day except Sunday, usually by 8:00 am Eastern Time.  The Kindle Chronicles is now available at Audible Podcasts. The only thing missing are ratings! If you have time, please consider leaving one in order to help others learn about the show.  Right-click here and then click "Save Link As..." to download the audio to your computer, phone, or MP3 player.

Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Interview starts at 9:33 and ends at 51:30 Note: I will be discussing my James McQuivey interview Saturday April 24, 2021 at 4 pm EDT on Clubhouse. If you are a member of Clubhouse, please click here to join me. I've also created a club named The Reading Edge. Use this link to join! Links Amazon updates Echo Buds (CNBC) Pre-order Echo Buds (2nd Gen) here at reduced price Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone - available for preorder with delivery May 11, 2021 James McQuivey's blog posts at Forrester.com Jeff Bezos's last letter to shareholders as CEO - April 15, 2021 The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich The “Big Five” human personality traits (Psychology Today) “The Clubhouse Party is Over” by Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair - April 23, 2021 Next Week's Guest Kjersti Egerdahl, senior editor at Amazon Original Stories Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa If you'd like brief daily updates on technology, books, marriage, and puppies, you can follow along with my Morning Journal flash briefing. From your Echo device, just say, “Alexa, enable Morning Journal.” Then each morning say, “Alexa, what's my flash briefing?” I post a five-minute audio journal each day except Sunday, usually by 8:00 am Eastern Time.  The Kindle Chronicles is now available at Audible Podcasts. The only thing missing are ratings! If you have time, please consider leaving one in order to help others learn about the show.  Right-click here and then click "Save Link As..." to download the audio to your computer, phone, or MP3 player.