Interview Quotes

Reflections on a Miami Childhood and Future Dreams

"Well, this little kid who went, you know, here in high school 40 plus years ago was dreaming at that time of building a space company that would one day take heavy polluting industry off Earth. And this guy sitting here on stage with you is still dreaming the same dream 40 years later."

— Jeff Bezos • 00:54:15

"That kid was also working at the McDonald's on Dixie and 130 something street. I recently took Lauren there. We drove through the drive through, got Big Macs and chicken nuggets. That was a great job, by the way. I learned a lot beyond time. You have to start at the bottom. I cleaned the bathrooms."

— Jeff Bezos • 01:01:55

"Well, Miami has completely transformed over the last 40 years. It's an incredible city today. It has the energy and the dynamism. I love the Latin part of the culture here. Like there's so much energy. It's so alive."

— Jeff Bezos • 03:10:14

The Philosophy of Long-Term Thinking and Regret Minimization

"Well, you know, all big things start small. Sure. So you've got to accept that. That's the way it is. And you've got to plant acorn and work hard and water it and nurture it and maybe it grows into a big tree. For me, I made that decision and I knew that if I didn't try, I would always be haunted by that. I would always have regret. I would always wonder what might have been."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:24:24

"But at the end of the day, you have to project yourself forward, you know, age 80, you know, we're all living longer now. Maybe age 90 and say, do I want to be haunted by that regret? I want to minimize the number of regrets I have in my life."

— Jeff Bezos • 04:42:58

Strategy Through Stability: Focusing on What Doesn't Change

"You have to build a strategy around stability. So you have to find the things that are not going to change. And say 10 years from now, what's going to be the same? And those, most of those things are going to be customer needs."

— Jeff Bezos • 06:00:44

"Like in the context of being a mayor of a city, the same thing works. You can say, look, 10 years from now, is anybody going to say, I love Miami. I just wish the crime was a little worse. Or I love Miami. I wish that the ambulances came more slowly. Or that the taxes were a little higher."

— Jeff Bezos • 07:16:17

The Role of Intuition and Hunches in Innovation

"But the data doesn't tell you anything, everything. It doesn't tell you everything. And so if, for example, it often doesn't tell you about changes or things that you're missing or things that you're not measuring properly. And so that's where anecdotes come into play. And that's where intuition and gut instinct and heart come into play."

— Jeff Bezos • 08:49:38

"Nobody, if you take Echo and Alexa, which has been a fantastically successful product for us, it's installed in hundreds of millions of endpoints. Nobody was asking for a black cylinder that's always on, that you can talk to, and apps for music, and to turn your lights on and off and set timers. And we didn't know if people would want that. You just have to kind of use your intuition."

— Jeff Bezos • 09:15:10

The Vision for Space Exploration and Blue Origin

"Well, for me, there's a bunch of reasons for, you know, but literally since I was a kid, literally a kid here in Miami, I have been thinking that ultimately if we want to keep growing our civilization and using more energy per person and so on and so on, we're eventually going to have to move all of our heavy industry off earth."

— Jeff Bezos • 11:09:08

"This planet is so beautiful and so unusual, this is the one that we're going to want to protect. There's no plan B. We have spent robotic probes to every planet. This is the good one."

— Jeff Bezos • 12:39:16

The Core Identity of an Inventor and Problem Solver

"Well, fundamentally, I'm an inventor. It's the thing I do the best. It's the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm a good brainstormer. I love problem solving. And it's, to me, that creation of new ideas is what drives the world forward."

— Jeff Bezos • 13:25:01

"I don't think there's any problem if we apply human ingenuity to it that we can't solve. And it's fun to do that, too."

— Jeff Bezos • 14:17:23

The Transformative Power of Artificial Intelligence

"It is everything it's cracked up to be. You know, investors right now are investing in everything, the good ideas, the bad ideas. But the fundamentals of what are happening are very powerful, and it will impact every industry. And it will make every industry more productive."

— Jeff Bezos • 14:58:51

"And Miami should have a AI application that reads your building permit for a new house or a new building. And it should give you a yes or a no in 10 seconds. And if the answer is, and if, and if the answer is no, if the answer is no, it should tell you the six things you have to change to get a yes."

— Jeff Bezos • 15:19:21

Lessons Learned from Amazon for Blue Origin

"The first one is absolute customer obsession. Yeah. And I really mean that customer obsession instead of competitor obsession. So we pay attention to customers, I mean to competitors, but we don't obsess over them. We obsess over customers."

— Jeff Bezos • 17:00:15

"The third thing is long-term thinking. That is a giant lever."

— Jeff Bezos • 18:18:49

"And then the last thing that translates to Blue Origin really well, all of these do, is what we tell, taking professional pride in operational excellence. And so, I'm talking about the details that nobody but you will ever know."

— Jeff Bezos • 18:59:04

Maintaining the "Day One" Mentality in a Large Organization

"Well, first of all, you have to talk about it a lot. So, you have to say, literally, we have a building at Amazon headquarters. We named day one. Okay."

— Jeff Bezos • 19:37:33

"The thing to realize there is most decisions are reversible. Very rarely are they high-consequence, irreversible decisions. By the way, when they are, you should go slowly."

— Jeff Bezos • 20:22:56

"I've noticed that people who are right a lot change their mind a lot."

— Jeff Bezos • 21:13:47

The Desired Headline: A Legacy of Continuous Invention

"I want the headline to be world's oldest man. All right. How about world's oldest man and still inventing?"

— Jeff Bezos • 21:42:25

On Harmony vs. Balance

"Balance implies a trade-off. If you're happy at home, you're happy at work, if you're keeping care of yourself, you have more energy, it's harmony. You're an example of all that."

— Jeff Bezos • 23:32:15