Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Very senior executive, so he had some capital to invest a few years later which we will get into. They moved the family to Houston. (a) Mike's story is just amazing, (b) Bezos grew up. His dad worked for Exxon, Standard Oil. There's the connection. Right, and grew up in Houston around the space program. We're not going to get into Blue Origin on this episode, but I think the last time we would have talked about Jeff's space routes would have been, I think, on the Virgin Galactic episode. We were talking about the development of the X Prize and SEDS, the college organization for students for the exploration and development of space, something like that. But basically, this college space club, Jeff was the head of that club, the president of the one, and maybe the founder of it at Princeton. There's this very clear throughline from spending time during his childhood in Houston through that and obviously Blue Origin. I didn't think about that. Definitely, Pop Gise, his grandfather, has a big influence on Jeff—which we'll talk about in one sec—and introduces him to science fiction and space because he was involved in all that at DARPA, but I didn't think about that yet. Jeff grew up in Houston during the Apollo era. This was the heyday of NASA. Super cool. Jeff goes to a Montessori Preschool in Houston, and he gets put into a new program for gifted young students in the Houston elementary school system. This is crazy. At the time, there was a woman named Julie Ray who was writing a book about this whole new concept of gifted streams in elementary school education. Houston is one of the leading school systems that's doing this. She goes to the administration and she's like, hey, is there a student that I could shadow and see how gifted education is working? They're like, we have exactly the student for you, Jeffrey Bezos.…

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