Muchos Bezos

Uncanny Valley | WIRED

WIRED

Technology

4.1 • 570 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2021

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Few tech companies have charted a more fascinating course than Amazon. It's expanded from its humble beginnings as a bookseller to an absolute juggernaut that spans scores of product categories and service offerings. It's set out to change the way the internet is structured, the way we interact with computers, and the way we shop—online and off.

On this episode of Gadget Lab, journalist and author Brad Stone joins us to dish about stories from his new book Amazon Unbound, including Amazon's more aggressive business maneuvers and Jeff Bezos' personal shenanigans.

Show Notes:

Find Brad’s book Amazon Unbound here. Read an excerpt from the book about the secret origins of Amazon’s Alexa here. Read about how Bezos battled the tabloids here.

Recommendations:

Brad recommends the book Press Reset by Jason Schreier. Lauren recommends Anne Helen Peterson’s CultureStudy newsletter on Substack. Mike also recommends a Substack: Tom Moon’s music newsletter, EchoLocator.

Brad Stone can be found on Twitter @BradStone. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Lauren, Mike.
0:02.5	Lauren, when you order stuff on Amazon, how much are you thinking about Amazon as a corporation
0:08.3	and not just an e-commerce site? Like, does that factor into your buying?
0:12.8	Hmm, that's a good question. And I would say, yeah, like increasingly so. I think I pause a little
0:18.6	bit now when I'm about to impulse buy something. And I think, you know, like, I wonder what the toll of this is, like to the people working there, to the environment. And, and do I really need this thing? Do you think about it? No. To be totally honest, I am a trained monkey. I just click the button. And then I start waiting for the thing to arrive at my door.
0:43.5	That's what Amazon wants. And that's mostly what we're going to be talking about today on today's show. We're going to talk about Amazon. What better way to get to the heart of Amazon than to bring
0:47.2	on Bradstone. Indeed.
1:00.8	Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Collory, a senior editor here at Wired.
1:07.6	And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior writer at Wired. And we are also joined by journalist and author Brad Stone. Welcome, Brad.
1:12.7	Hi, guys. Great to have you here. Brad is a longtime Bloomberg reporter,
1:18.6	and he's the author of not one, but two books about Amazon. Brad's first book about Amazon is called The Everything Store, and it came out in 2013. The new book came out this very week,
1:25.2	and it's called Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos and the
1:28.6	invention of a global empire. You can actually read an excerpt from the book that we published
1:33.5	this week on Wired. In the second half of the show, we're going to talk about Amazon's
1:38.7	founder, CEO, and soon to not be CEO, Jeff Bezos. But for this first half, there will, of course, be some Bezos talk,
1:46.8	but we're mostly going to concentrate on Amazon as a company.
1:50.2	Now, Brad, I assume you felt the need to write a whole second book about Amazon
1:54.9	just because so much has happened since the publication of your first book in 2013.
1:59.0	The company has gone off in all these interesting directions in recent years.
2:02.8	Groceries, movies, TV shows, Alexa, you had some catching up to do.
2:07.9	Yeah, or that or I'm a glutton for punishment because I got to say, like, reporting,
2:13.0	trying to dig, dig up the secrets of this intensely secretive, dominating company is exhausting.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WIRED, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WIRED and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.