Seth Godin on living in Amazon's world

into bankruptcy in the space of about six months. But a lot of people who become investigative journalists set out to be that they want to go shed light on wrongdoing in corporate America. I didn't necessarily set out to do that, and I still don't. I'm primarily driven by curiosity. I want to explain things. I'm Bethany McClain. This is making a killing. If you type relentless dot com into

your browser, you'll be redirected to Amazon dot com. Relentless was the original name that Jeff Bezos wanted for Amazon, and now more than ever, we can understand why the company that started out selling books is in so many ways today the Everything store. In nineteen ninety six, Amazon had one hundred and fifty one employees and five point

one million dollars in revenue. Last year, Amazon had six hundred and forty seven thousand, five hundred employees and total revenue across all its business segments, which obviously includes a lot more than books these days, of two hundred and thirty two point eight nine billion. Its net income, though,

was only ten billion dollars. Amazon has long been criticized for its risky strategy of inefficiency, burning capital without delivering consistent profits, but this strategy helped it dominate several key markets online retail, ebooks, audio books, cloud computing, to name just a very few, and it keeps on coming. There's Amazon grocery, Amazon restaurants, Amazon healthcare. There's so much to understand about Amazon, and given its rate of growth and

change lately, it can feel a little dizzying. But my main interest is not in whatever the latest daily headlines are about the company. I'm interested in what all those headlines add up to, taken as a whole, what Amazon has become, what industries it has disrupted and forever changed, and ultimately what that means for all of us because okay, not quite all of us, but most of us are Amazon's customers. I'll confess to getting boxes on a frighteningly

regular basis. That means, in a sense, where Amazon's enablers as it decimate its other businesses, from our neighborhood bookstores to now our grocery stores to maybe our pharmacies. If ultimately it's Amazon's world and we just live in it, is that a good thing? Can Amazon be trusted to wield its ever growing power benevolently or are we all going to come to regret the monster we've created? Is Amazon a modern day Frankenstein? My guest now is Seth Godin,

who hardly needs an introduction. Seth and I share a publishing on the Mater portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Random House, and one of my memories from long ago as of my publisher handing me sus remarkable book, Purple Cow. But it's hard to believe this is the first time

we're actually meeting live. He's exactly who I wanted to talk to in order to dive into questions of Amazon and publishing, but also retail in marketing and trust Sas latest book, This Is Marketing, is a New York Times bestseller. I know it's supposedly terrible podcasting to talk about something only we can see, so let me just what we're looking at. There are these two pictures of Jeff Bezos side by side. On the left is this nineteen ninety eight Jeff looking very gentle and sweet and a frumpy

brown sweater like a New York City book editor. This Jeff's caption is I sell books. Over on the right is Jeff from twenty seventeen with a shaved head, aviator, glasses, black vest, muscles, bulging, very badass, looking like he should be the lead in the next Fast and Furious movie. This Jeff's caption is I saw whatever the fuck I want. I love this because it's just the perfect metaphor for Amazon's evolution, the change from selling books to selling everything

but more as this attitude of relentlessness is relentless. The right word seth well. Relentless was Jeff's word. The original name for Amazon was relentless dot com. I think it's important to differentiate between the media's perception of Amazon as the work of someone who has a plan about what he's going to sell on how he's going to sell it. It's more are about the system and if we can understand the systems analysis of what is it like to work there what is it like to sell there, what

is it like to be an investor? Each of the elements of the system add up into the Amazon as we experience it. I don't think Jeff could change the system by himself, even if he wanted to. He's responsible for the system. We are all impacted by the system. But what we're going to need to understand is systems that end up changing our culture at some level are on us because we are the culture, and we as a people have the privilege and the possibility of changing

systems if it's important enough to us. We just can't wait till it's too late, because if we do, then we don't get to change the system. It's interesting because I mentioned this analogy of Amazon as being like Frankenstein, and it's an interesting comparison because when you talk about even Jeff bez As being unable to control the monster he's created, right, it's taken on a life of its own. What are the key ingredients in that system that make

it so powerful or make it so disruptive. Well, so let's talk about the Amazon we see, not Amazon Web services or the other things that contribute most of their profit. Yeah, but the Amazon that we see is a company that sells everything. They don't sell anything, and that's a really big distinction. Most of the retail that we've ever seen in our whole lives is run by merchants, and merchants are driven by the idea that they have a limited

amount of shelf space. So there's a skill and a talent and a gift involved in being a good merchant. Selectivity and curation, and not just curation, but owning the outcome of what you just did. So when Nieman Marcus pushes a certain kind of look, or when an item is sold in a chain of car stores and a

different item isn't these have impacts on us. Amazon began with the insight that there's infinite shelf space, and therefore the entire organization is built around we sell everything, and no one here has the power to sell a thing. So the entire system is run by an algorithm, and the algorithm says this click, this moment, this bit on the screen, what's its maximum value today? And the problem with day trading today is you don't know where that

cycle keeps pushing you. There's no long arc. There's just the oh if I use this word instead of that word, today's sales go up. And the problem with that is it usually leads to a race to the bottom, a race to the bottom in what respect in terms of the cheapest merchandise wins rather than the quality merchandise. So that's a great question. So race to the bottom could be make it cheaper so you can sell it cheaper.

Race to the bottom could be make it more urgent, or pander to the people that you're trying to sell to make it more vivid. It said that if you ab test a website enough, sooner or later it will become a porn site because it's really depressing. It is depressing, but sooner or later, this picture will get more clicks than that picture this claim will get. So if you look at the horrible news and the buzzfeedification of the web, it didn't happen because Walter Conkite's airs wanted it to happen.

It happened because the algorithm said, make the headline one that people click on. And the same thing's true with solar lanterns, and the same things true with paper clips. Expand that solar lantern piece of it. You and I had discussed that, but expand, expand tell us what happened with solar lanterns in the old days. If someone came up with an idea for a solar lantern, there wouldn't

be very many factories that could make one. You would take a risk, craft it, bring it to the merchant at Walmarter Kmarter Target and say here, I made this. The merchant would have to allocate you scarce shelf space. You'd have to stand behind it. There might be one or two to choose from, and if it was good, you would change the culture because you could get a piece of the market. In the modern age of infinite shelf space with dozens or maybe fifty companies, many of

them in China, but around the world. Using cheap labor and cheap systems, anyone can commission a solar lantern. You don't have to have a known brand name. You'll still get shelf space. You need reviews, you can buy reviews. You can buy reviews for a nickel, And so all of a sudden, the consumer who types in solar lantern because the search box wins every time you type it in, because it's convenient solar lantern, and you end up at Amazon's right. But then Amazon search box shows you fifty

solar lanterns, twenty solar lanterns. Anyone can sell a solar lantern. They're sorted by review, but the reviews are fake. And which one are you going to buy? They're all the same, Buy the cheap one, the algorithm keeps saying, by the cheap one. Okay. There's nothing that sounds appealing about this. Is there a good side to it? Is there any benefit apart from cheaper merchandise. It's all going to work

itself out in the following way. More access, more choice will enable more consumers to make better decisions, and that over time, the fake reviews will work themselves out. That Amazon will always give you a refund if you say my solar lantern is lousy. Amazon's brand is the most respected brand in America. You're not going to switch. You don't have a lot of choices. This is hypercapitalism. It's infinite choice, with nobody being the nanny state, nobody saying

I'm the merchant, I'm in charge. Instead pick So let's go back to this, to the retail part of Amazon, this obvious retail part, because I want to push a little bit on what the cost of this has been and there's this common perception right that it's Amazon that's putting retailers out of business Jim Boree Toys r US. But this has been happening for a long time. We had superstars years ago putting the little guy out of business.

I remember watching the nineteen ninety eight Tom Hanks make Ryan movie You've Got Mail, or the Big Fox Box Barnes and Noble look alike as putting cute little shop around the corner out of business. Now the bad guy is Amazon. So has anything really changed or is this just evolution. Well, there's a very long history of retailers going out of business, and if Amazon wasn't putting them out of business, somebody else would retailers go out of

business because landlords never go out of business. The question for me is what will we do to our culture when there is no main Street. I'm not saying that our culture can't survive without main Street. I'm saying that there's going to be a significant cost to that dislocation. Because what main Street does for us, in addition to giving us a convenient place to pick up a kind bar, is oh there's a bathroom, Oh there's lights, Oh there's

another human being. Maybe I could have a conversation without human being exactly. If you watch enough Old Star Trek, you'll come to see there are no stores. No one goes shopping in science fiction. You know, I had never noticed that, but you're absolutely right. The real question is this improvement that's going on making things cheaper. Improvement in quotes, right, This improvement in quotes, this change things are cheaper. I shop at Amazon all the time because it's more convenient,

more reliable, cheaper. I like that brand as something that makes it easier for me to do my life. Most of the cash benefit accrues to the middleman in this case Amazon, but it is all being sucked out of somewhere. And the question is when that somewhere is gone, what will we replace it with? And will we be able to fashion another culture, a better culture, one that we're proud of when we take away the thing that has

fueled it. And So, when I think about the book industry and the people that I cherish that I've worked with for all those years, there isn't going to be a New York City book industry in twenty years. It's impossible to imagine that it will exist because they don't have any friction. If there is no friction, where are they going to generate the heat they need to pay the bills? They won't be able to. So what will

those people do? How will we create cycles a forward motion that enable people who create, or merchants or people who sell, or people who own a factory to thrive in a world where there is no friction. It's a great irony, isn't it that it is all of us Amazon's customers who are enabling something that in the end may be very antithetical to our interests. It may not be what we want. Is there something or welly in

about the Amazon that it's going to become? Well? So, then the question is, once you build the systems and the algorithm, and you are doing it to please the public markets, where do we see that the public markets have ever been right in their long term perspective about what it is to please them? Because the companies that we are the most proud of, the ones that we point to, aren't the ones that Wall Street is happy

within the long run. That what it means to be to make Wall Street happy in the long run is that you are predictably and reliably beating estimates on your quarterly earnings per share, yep, not that you're leaving behind something better than you found it. So let's pause on

that point. Because Amazons somehow manage to play the game differently, at least for a number of years, in the sense that Amazon didn't produce consistent profits, and yet the company has had unlimited access to capital raising and a soaring stock price. Why were the rules different from Amazon? Why was Jeff bez Us able to play by a different set of rules, at least in the short term. Well, to bring in a overused phrase, Jeff is almost always the smartest guy in the room and real, for real,

no sarcasm in that right. And he understood that something was shifting in the stock market because something was shifting in the way the Internet worked, and that there are stocks that are traded because their numbers make sense, and there are stocks that are traded because their story makes sense. And if you can have the best story stock and there's a limited supply of it, people who want the

best story stock will buy it. So Jeff said, here's what I want you to measure me on, and he has regularly exceeded the thing he said to be measured on Other companies say you want to be measure us on profit, go ahead, measure us on profit. So Jeff's consistency in that approach was key. He's vulnerable now for the following reason. Lots and lots of the key people who he works with need the stock price to keep going up. When it was just him, it was okay

if the story hit a speedboat. But when it's lots of people who are all have their hands on the algorithm. The challenge you have, and I live through this when a Well was my biggest customer, and I live through this when I worked at Yahoo, is that these people have their hands on the dials and there are decisions that they will make based on what Wall Street is telling them, because at some point Wall Street always says, we heard the story, now we want to go back

to the thing we like to measure. Jeff business has also been able to do something else that I think is really interesting, which is that he's created sort of this with Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business. It essentially gives him leverage in the retail business that other retailers don't have because he's got this money making appendage

kind of stuck on this mammoth retail business. And so I think the AWS accounts for what like one hundred and fifty percent of Amazon's operating business, And so how does that give Amazon advantages that other retailers don't have? Okay, just a little bit of background here. Twenty five years ago, the typical newspaper made one hundred and ten percent of its profit from classified ads. But people didn't think of

the newspaper as the classifies with some bonuses. Right well, AWS is the invisible cloud in the sky that runs many, many websites. And the brilliance that Jeff brought to the table was this. He said, I'm going to need something like this. If I'm going to need something like this, I bet my competitors are going to need something like this. And if I'm willing to lose money building it to scale, I can erect a moat, so my competitors will need to use mine because it's so much cheaper. I want

to jump in and blow your mind. We all think of Amazon as the boxes that show up at our doorstops, but that's just the Amazon. We can see the Amazon that sells more batteries than drursa more diapers than Pampers. CNN famously said Amazon is building an army of brands, and their private label sales reach seven point billion last year. There are more than one hundred million Americans paying more than one hundred dollars a year for the service of Amazon Prime, and Amazon commands half of the US e

commerce market. But the rest of it, the Amazon you don't see, is even more staggering. There's Amazon Web Services or AWS, which accounted for fifty percent of the company's operating and come last year. There's Amazon Video, Amazon Studios, Amazon Go, Amazon Fresh, Amazon restaurants, They own whole Foods, They acquired an online pharmacy. They are leaders in AI

and deep learning. Their revenue across all business segments total two hundred and thirty two point eight nine billion, that's billion with a B last year, up thirty one percent from the year before, and there are no signs of a slowdown in twenty nineteen. I understand the concept of Amazon selling everything and and not selling anything in particular, but the question for me is when can they changed

that dial. And if you look a little bit closer into the publishing world, right, Amazon just originally sold books, and they didn't sell a particular book. They sold books and everybody loved it. But now Amazon is also the publisher, the creator, publishing its own books within its own system. And so I was struck by this Wall Street Journal story that begins with its great anecdote about a guy named Mark Sullivan in his book Beneath a Scarlet Sky.

Amazon published it and effectively used Amazon's tools to make it into a best seller. And so what happens if Amazon starts working that dial? Okay, so I can talk about the book thing from personal experience, because it was my idea. I met with Jeff in nineteen ninety five and I said, you're already doing the hard part. You should do the part about publishing. And he laughed and said,

not too soon. Five years later I went back. Five years later, I went back and about I don't know, eight years ago, they called me up and they said, okay, we're ready. Now it's time. Now it's time. Now what do I mean by the hard part? The hard part is they know who the readers are, and they know what the readers want. No one in New York has ever done that. Random House doesn't know who the readers are. Penguin doesn't know what the readers want. There's this disconnect, right.

Amazon's created a knowledge in exactly. So they ought to be able to go to the author and say, based on what we know, we can find books for our readers instead of you trying to find readers for the books. That's a game changer. That's magnificent. They can upend the entire system exactly. And this is where that everything and anything thing kicks in because guess what Amazon has done.

Many many books like Sullivan's book, But they're pointing to the Sullivan book because it turns out they didn't pick his book to be a bestseller. They're playing a portfolio theory. Lots of books went through the system and Amazon has failed to act as a merchant and say we pick this book that in fact, it's a super level playing field. They don't promote their books that much more than other

people's the way a real merchant would do it. They don't make other people's books harder to find, the way a real merchant would. It's still back to this idea of everything. So the egalitarian and me says terrific. Now you don't have to look or sound like an author

to get new York to pick you. You can go straight to the Kindle and get twenty of your friends to buy your book, and a twenty of your friends buy your book on the Kindle and it's amazing, and now four million of your friends have bought the book and you're a best selling author. But what happens if Amazon becomes not just the everything store but the only store? Then can't they start to work that lever? Why wouldn't

they work those levers eventually? Well, everything in their algorithm, in their DNA, in their setup is don't work that lever. That the entire mindset is the system will figure out what's going to be sold. They don't think like direct marketers or as marketers. They think like algorithm marketers. Put it in tag it properly, see what happens because it doesn't cost them anything. Because they know something's going to work, doesn't matter to them which one works. That's brand new thinking.

I am not anti Amazon. I am anti letting an algorithm run wild forever. At some point I want human beings to stand up and say, we understand the algorithm. We're proud of the algorithm. We change the algorithm, and this is the problem. We have with Facebook and Google, you'd vote for man not machine. Google famously says it's not up to us. The algorithm decided to put this

as the first match. This is nonsense. There are more than three thousand people at Google who do nothing but tweak the algorithm, but they don't want to accept responsibility for the fact that they do that. There are thousands of people at Amazon who are working on their search algorithm. There are thousands of people Amazon who are figuring out what clues and signals you can put next to something

to move it up or move it down. There are lots of things that are built by hand that become the rules in the algorithm that shift how entire industries operate. Because the algorithm is in just a bunch of code, it's a series of principles. Well, then, let me push back on your point that there's something non merchant like about Amazon, because aren't all those people in effect being merchants in that sense that they are influencing the decisions we're going to make about how we pick things and

how we make our selection. Aren't they embedding a humanity or a friction into the system, perhaps in a slightly different way than a traditional retailer would have. Let me try to differentiate what I mean by merchant. In the traditional model, a merchant owns twenty square feet of the

shelf and has a name. The challenge I have here are that people who are better at coding than being in a community are anonymously making decisions that have ramifications far outside their twenty square feet right, and when we see the bad outcomes of that, we don't even know

who to ask. Not only that, but we can't determine whether it's an innocent side effect or the point you seem perhaps a little more optimistic than I would expect you to be, or a little more optimistic than I might be given that pressure from Wall Street that at some point Wall Street is going to say, turn up the dial, do this, make the extra twelve cents on this, use your power to make a best seller, to pick a book that's going to be a best seller, use

your power to pick one product over the other, and, by the way, make the person making the product pay for that in some way. I mean, it's not benign the way you're describing it, but doesn't have the potential to become something very not benign. So when I think about monopolies that have failed us and what has happened when they have tried to extract more money. We see all the way back to the first example of Standard oil.

Standard Oil basically acted like gangsters and eliminated their competition. If we think about the company everyone hates the most, their cable company, they have done things like limit choice and given us a horrible customer service, lied to us, and tricked us because we don't have any choices. When I think about how Amazon will make more money, those

aren't the side effects that I see. I think they will make more money by incrementally increasing the cost of using AWS, which will be paid for by all of us,

but not very much. And then I think they will make more money by pushing the retail division to actually make a profit, which means that each of us will pay an extra five twenty dollars a month, and we'll pay it because by that point we won't have any choice, right, We can't go back to the store down the street to buy our book or our toilet paper or our whatever instead, because that start down the street won't exist anymore.

This is true, but it's still going to be cheaper than the stores solder to us, we still come out ahead on the money side. On the money side, cheaper is an interesting word because it depends on what costs you're trying to measure exact for your point. So my whole articulation here is not about the fact that Amazon is going to be a net drag on the gross national product of the United States or our efficiency to acquire stuff. It's impossible for me to imagine that that

will occur. What I believe is a change is being made to our culture, starting with some of the things we care the most about, books and television, and we're not prepared to talk about it, and we're not aware of how the change is happening, and that if the change becomes algorithmic, I worry about that because as bad as the people in Hollywood have behaved over the years, we knew who the people in Hollywood were, and the people in Hollywood were in our communion accountability versus anonymity.

Maybe that's a way to sum it up. I think I get it. Going back to the publishing example, It's not so much that somebody at Amazon is saying, let's

make this book a best seller. It's more that an algorithm is making the book a best seller, and nobody's controlling it, but something is controlling it, and so the choices where we get are going to be dictated by something we can't see, and we'll be buying a book that wasn't hand selected for us by a someone who loves books, but rather as the result of an algorithm. So here's the JK. Rowling story. When I was a book packager, I did one hundred and twenty books in

ten years. I did almanacs, I did how two books, and I also did young adult fiction. And I did a series for Scholastic based on Nintendo games because boys weren't reading enough books. So I got the rights to Nintendo games and turn them into novels. And Scholastic made me take out all vampires, all casual death because they said, we're not no casual death none. That's what Nintendo games are filled with, right right, we are not ready to

have nine and ten year old boys read this. Two years later, after the series it sold pretty well, they came out with this book that no one had ever heard of, called Harry Potter. And I don't need to tell you there's a lot of casual death in Harry Potter, and then bookstores took this book and hand sold it, which is a longstanding, treasured tradition in book publishing, which is the actual owner, the actual clerk saw the nerdy ten year old walk in and handed the book to

the kid and said, you need to read this. And Harry Potter went on to make JK. Rerewlling the most successful author in history, first billionaire as an author. It is inconceivable that if Amazon had existed, then that Harry Potter would have worked. That's an incredibly frightening thought. Change that comes down from tastemakers is different from change that comes up from the grass. And I think we need both. We've always had both, But the algorithm takes one of

those away. Yeah, it's not even change coming from tastemakers, it's changed coming from an algorithm. Right, And how does that play out? We're talking about books which are of critical interest to you and to me and to all of us who care about the culture. But what about when it comes the same sort of power being applied to other aspects of our life, from what food we

eat to what medicines we have available. As Amazon becomes Amazon Restaurants and Amazon Healthcare, so The healthcare thing is interesting because Walmart is quietly planning on healthcare being the

next pillar that they're going to embrace. If we can figure out how to apply the efficiency of the algorithm to the price of an antibiotic, if we can figure out how to use rules based thinking to make sure people don't waste their lives and their money on placebos when they're not effective, you know, then we're going to come out ahead. But again, what's a challenge here is that the science of direct marketing is different than the magic of a human who sees us, who understands us,

who speaks to us a certain way. And what we know about medicine is that a third of the time we get better because we believe we're going to get better, not because we took the right pill on the right day. I worry about the lack of choice. That what all the people who are trying to play this game are trying to do is lock people in, because in an open system with unlimited choice and efficiency, nobody makes any money.

So the race is always to create some version of monopoly, because monopoly creates the ultimate form of scarcity, so that you can get your money back and That's why people are arguing that a nonprofit in the center of the system that is truly motivated to keep turning the algorithm toward efficient is a worthwhile thing to have. And if you're a capitalist, I think it's important to acknowledge that monopoly is almost the opposite of capitalism. It is not

a useful product of capitalism. So when I look at healthcare, the book industry is tinker toys compared to the complexity of healthcare. Who's paying, who's the customer, what do they want? What if you get it wrong? Right? My mom used to run the bookstore that she founded in Buffalo where it was in the all By Knox Art Museum, So she had certain art books that no one else had. And I still remember the day Charlie, before she died, she got a call from Amazon and they said, do

you have this book? A human called her and she said yes. They say, we'll pay full price and we'll pay you to have you fedexit to our customer because they were willing to lose money to be able to keep the promise. We have every book, and they found a copy of the book for well, if someone needs chemo medicine, it's different than if they need a book about Magreet and you're going to have to figure out where in the supply chain you live, what are the shortcuts?

What are the shortcuts you can't take? Will you let everyone play? When Orn Hatch says, I want you to be able to sell bees wax vitamins and call them a drug, these are all very different decisions, then please carry my kindle book called The Martian. In some ways, though, I guess the silver lining to that analysis is that

this isn't going to be easy for Amazon. In other words, we're on a path at being Amazon's world and we're just going to live in it, but we're not getting going to get there quite as quickly if they're not going to be able to take over our healthcare business as well. There's stuff we need and there's stuff we want, And the thing about stuff you want is that once you have it, you want something else. So last year we spent as much on self storage as we spend

on going to the movies. That we have more stuff than we have room for. That's really depressing. True. So this, once you've created the actual everything store and everyone is a click away from everything, that's not enough. Now I want to buy something from Shopify that nobody else has now, I want to buy an experience that no one else has experienced. We're watching already a whole generation now that would rather have a smartphone than a car. Why is

that right? Because the potemic value of a car has gone down, whereas the value of being connected has gone up. So the culture and the economy are going to keep shifting. And it's not clear that it's Amazon's world when it comes to this thing that they do the same way. It's not UPS's world, even though they deliver everything. UPS is sort of invisible. And has UPS's ubiquity changed our culture? Of course it has, but I don't want to call it UPS world, even though UPS comes to my house

every day. So is there any chance that consumers start to say, no, no, no, this actually isn't what we want, or that businesses that are being decimated, are producers are that are having their margins shrunk by Amazon start to put pressure on the system. Is there a way to stop the algorithm in process? I think there is zero chance that individual consumers and individual providers will have any impact whatsoever on the algorithm. Zero zero. That's pretty strong

It's like saying I'm tired of the telephone. I'm not going to have telephone calls anymore. I'm going to walk to people's houses and talk to them face to face. At and T did not worry about that problem in nineteen sixty not going to be a problem. The problem for monopolists is when the culture says to the government, we care very much about antitrust and it comes in waves.

There was no antitrust thinking before standard oil, and then there was a ton of anti trust thinking and Teddy Roosevelt was it the heart of it, and then it faded over time. So it comes and it goes, and it's been gone a long time. But I think when we saw when we see the high jinks at the

FCC and everything else, it's due to come back. And when it comes back, and it's already come back in Europe, that is something that these giant algorithmic companies have to figure out how to deal with because they can't make it go away. Do you think that's on Bezos's radar screen? Oh, I think that they spend a lot of time thinking about that. I mean from all the way from the early days of sales tax, they could have fought the

sales tax being harder. Instead, one day they took a deep breath and they said, fine, we're going to collect sales tax. Is there any chance, if Amazon is around in a hundred years that we have both this or an Amazon like thing is around in a hundred years, that we can also still have independent stores on Main Street? Or does one automatically at some point come at the expense of the other. So what we know is that

there's a really big desire. We don't know if it's primordial or recent for human beings to go to a store on Main Street that I was in a fancy mall last week, the busiest business by far with Starbucks, because everyone was window shopping at everything else and drinking the one thing that they could afford in the store in the mall. Right, So merchants and retailers are clever. They like being merchants and retailers. They will show up with new things to do in those spaces that human

beings will pay a little to engage with. I think the big shift is going to be landlords have to understand that the thing that they were charging a huge tax on has gone away, and you can't charge the pottery barn tax anymore. You can't charge the proud attacks anymore. And we're going to see landlords to take a big hit. Or what we're seeing in New York is dozens and

dozens and dozens of empty storefronts. And one of the things I proposed on my blog, which was really interesting feedback I got, was I think a vacancy tax is a great idea. I think if your store is vacant for more than three months, you should have to pay a tax on it, because it should pay for the cops and the lights and everything else we have to do to make up for the fact that you're not doing it. I think that's a fantastic idea. It makes perfect sense. And I got four angry notes, all four

from landlords, so that's not surprising, all right. If you could change one thing about the business world, or if you could have maybe a bit stick with Amazon, if you could have Amazon do one thing differently, what would it be. I think we need to do two things to be our best selves as humans in a commercial economy, and they are to solve interesting problems and to lead.

And what it means to lead is to see other people, to truly see them, to figure out where you can help them, where you can take them, and what you'll take responsibility for. That is an interesting problem. There are lots of interesting problems when I think about the least thing a human can do in the commercial world is to say, will this be on the test? What does my boss want me to do? And worst of all,

I'm just doing my job. And so I guess what I would hope for in a relentless company that's driven by a series of algorithms is how many people they are are charged with never saying I'm just doing my job and instead are saying, here, I made this, and I'm proud of it. You want the algorithm to have accountability.

I do, indeed. So I loved my conversation with Seth in large part because what comes out of his mouth is not what you think is going to come out of his mouth, and those are always the best conversations. So I'm both more optimistic and more pessimistic after my conversation. I'm disheartened because I really do see the dangers of

the algorithm. As Seth calls it. We want accountability, we want humanity, we want that great independent bookstore on the corner of our main street, or at least we're going to want them when they disappear. But I'm less concerned about Amazon taking over the world than I was. Healthcare is going to be interesting, even for Jeff Bezos. We also spent a lot of time talking about not just the Amazon you can see as a consumer, but the Amazon you can't see, the algorithm, and I think I'm

a little bit reassured on that front. While the Frankenstein Bezos has built may not be controllable if Seth is right, it's also not going to be able to act with outright malice. Does that pass for optimism? Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes. My executive producers are Alison McClean no relation and Megan Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Nea Loebell. Engineering by Jason Gambrel. Our music

is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclein, Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter at Bethany mac twelve