Muchos Bezos: Inside Amazon’s Empire With Author Brad Stone
MC: 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 but-
LG: That’s what Amazon wants.
MC: That’s mostly what we’re going to be talking about today on today’s show. We’re going to talk about Amazon.
LG: What better way to get to the heart of Amazon than to bring on Brad Stone.
MC: Indeed.
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MC: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, a senior editor here at WIRED.
LG: I’m Lauren Goode. I’m a senior writer at WIRED.
MC: We are also joined by journalist and author, Brad Stone. Welcome, Brad.
Brad Stone: Hi, guys.
MC: Great to have you here. Brad is a long time Bloomberg reporter, 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, and it’s called Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of A Global Empire. You can actually read an excerpt from the book that we published this week on WIRED. In the second half of the show, we’re going to talk about Amazon’s founder, CEO, and soon to not be CEO Jeff Bezos, but for this first half, there will, of course, be some Bezos talk, but we’re mostly going to concentrate on Amazon as a company.
Now, Brad, I assume you felt the need to write a whole second book about Amazon just because so much has happened since the publication of your first book in 2013. The company has gone off in all these interesting directions in recent years. Groceries, movies, TV shows, Alexa. You had some catching up to do.
BS: Yeah, that or I’m a glutton for punishment because I got to say reporting, trying to dig up the secrets of this intensely secretive, dominating company is exhausting, but like a lot of journalists, I’m drawn to a good story. I’m a business journalist. I’m drawn to a good business story, and in 2017 when I started on this project, yeah, the Kindle company had become the Alexa company. The $100 billion company had become, at that point, the 800 or $900 billion company, and Bezos had transformed almost within front of our eyes from this geeky tech guy to a, I don’t know, Vin Diesel or The Rock or I don’t know. The the nerd version of that.
So, I started on it, and while I was researching the book, we had HQ2, we had Bezos’s has National Enquirer scandal, we had the antitrust investigation in the big tech at Amazon, and then the pandemic. It really was, in some ways, fortuitous timing for me because here was a company becoming so big and dominating that a lot of people were starting, as Lauren said earlier, to ask questions about the impact. Then, of course, Bezos resigns as CEO right as I’m about to finish the manuscript, and it’s really the end of an era. So, this is a book about the last 10 years and Amazon’s growth from a tech juggernaut into a global empire.
LG: You were thinking, I’m never going to be finished reading this book as all of these things kept happening.
BS: Well, I was thinking, boy, this is juicier than I thought.
LG: Did you end up dumpster diving for this book?