Brad Stone on Big Tech Companies (Podcast)

successful company, but not the dominant juggernaut it's become. And this book really is, you know, the sequel to that that talks about how from the low point in when Amazon actually had a pretty substantial negative year in the stock market down over all of these new drivers of revenue and growth, we're just teeing up. And what ends up happening is the company just starts to hit on all cylinders. And that's before the pandemic, and then the

pandemic essentially doubles so many different sectors within Amazon. They were a company that was made for a work from home lockdown situation, UH, perfectly positioned and took full advantage of it. Over the course of those years, Amazon became the second largest employer in the country behind Walmart. Bezos became the wealthiest man in the world. And Amazon just dominates so many areas of our everyday lives, from uh supermarkets and and delivery of just about everything to Amazon

web servers too. You you just go through everything they do, Amazon Prime, in Amazon Video, and it's it's just endless. They have changed the fabric of our society and our economy, and Stone does a fantastic job telling the story of how that happened. I really enjoyed the book, and I think you'll really enjoy our conversation. So, with no further ado, my interview with Amazon Unbound author Brad Stone. This is Mesters in Business with Very Results on Bloomberg Radio. My

special guest this week is Brad Stone. He is the senior executive editor for Technology at Bloomberg News. Previously, he was the Business Week writer covering tech in Silicon Valley, and before that he was the tech correspondent for The New York Times and Newsweek. He is the author of four books, including The Everything Store, Jeff Bezos, and The Age of Amazon From. His most recent book is Amazon Unbound.

Jeff Bezos and the invention of a global empire. Normally, at this point I would say, brad Stone, welcome to Bloomberg. But since you worked for Bloomberg, let me just say welcome to Masters in Business. Thank you very great to be here. So I have to start off with the simple question, and I know you define this in the earlier book, Bezos or Bezos? How do you pronounce his name? It is Bezos, yes, and I have encountered uh and I'm sure he has as well, numerous alternative pronunciations, but

indeed it is Bezos. Interesting. So so let's start out a little bit with your background. I mentioned you're the senior executive editor at Bloomberg News. You were a writer at Business Week for ten years, and before that the New York Times and and Newsweek. How did you start covering technology? What led you into that space? Yeah, well, Verry,

I was way back before the New York Times. I was had a once proud magazine known as Newsweek, and um, I was a junior reporter kind of just looking for an avenue, um, something that I could you know, write about, where my my articles would appear and what was a very competitive magazine at the time. For for journalists. And this was the nineties and the Internet was becoming more popular. And I had, you know, used the Internet and become familiar with it while I was in a college and

I just started writing about it. And then they moved me out to Silicon Valley in good timing, just just in time for the crash. So I read, I read a bunch of your New York time pieces. Um, but they were YouTube and iPads and Google Search. How did you ultimately you happened on to Amazon as a subject matter. I was covering Amazon at the time. Um, it was

it was a little bit overlooked. If we go back to two thousand and six, two seven, you know, the eBay market cap was larger than Amazon's at the time. It's really remarkable to remember that the Amazon was stopped as maybe haven't picked the wrong business model for the Internet age. You know, Google was a much more high

profile and interesting company, it seemed like. And yeah, I remember doing a couple of stories about the introduction of prime and fulfillment by Amazon and and and Amazon Web Services. And I mean I basically I was I would talk to Bezos. Um. When when Amazon got into the fight with the book publishers around kindle pricing. He was. He was on the phone quite a bit arguing Amazon's case, and I was always fascinated by the company. I was

fascinated by Bezos. And then when I went over to Business Week and wrote a couple of stories about Amazon there it was it was really just sort of opportunistic writing my first book. I felt like nobody had really done the great Amazon story, and books had been devoted to the other big tech companies. Of course, I had no idea what kind of juggernaut it was still to become, but it seemed to me that it had been a little bit overlooked. And that book really I read it

on vacation. I think in like it was a good read, and you had fairly decent access to Bezos prior to that. How cooperative was he for the book Everything Store Right. I can't quite remember the timeline, but I went in there to meet with him to pitch the book, and he was very receptive. You know, Amazon has this weird cultural ritual where they start every meeting with a dot

with by reading a document. So I brought him a document to read and spiking the book and yeah, and he read it in sort of silence, and then he said, you know, it's too early to write the Amazon book. I did talk to him a couple of times on news things while I was reporting on it, and he allowed me to talk to his parents and friends and employees, but he was pretty distant. It was limited access for the first book. Uh that that's really kind of interesting.

So tell us a little bit about your research and writing process. The new book, Amazon on Bound is very much told chronologically. How do you go about putting together this monstrous right? Well, let me continue the story. So after after the last book, the Everything Store comes out in twos and thirteen, and Bezos does not like it very I don't know if you recall this, but he had his wife at the time, Mackenzie Um and some

employees like including Andy Jafsey, the new CEO. They all wrote one star reviews, and I thought, I thought Amazon was wasn't aren't they against people buying reviews that that violates their policies? I guess it was on the arm, So right they been, and they bought it and read it, I guess. Um. So anyway, there was a chill, and and a couple of years went by, and and then I and then at some point I realized that, you know, the books took off and had come to be seen

as kind of the definitive history of early Amazon. But I realized that so much had happened Alexa and the global marketplace and Bezos becoming the wealthiest person in the world, that there were simply more story to tell. And so I went back to Amazon, probably a little cheekily and just told them that I was going to do it. And this time there was no meeting with Bezos, but they did allow they did allow me to talk to more more than a dozen senior executives, members of the

Senior Leadership team, the FES team. Yeah, and and they basis a lot of going to talk to friends, and so the access wasn't all that different. But the foundation of the book of both books really were the employees who had been there, had participated in key projects, and then who had left or were there. But we're willing to sort of talk carefully because obviously Amazon and most companies these days they try to lock up former employees

or current employees and nondisclosure agreements. I'd like to say that Amazon has a lot of surface area, right more so than a lot of other companies. It does so many things, and there's actually very few people with any kind of a bird's eye view over it. Maybe really just Jeff Bezos, I mean Andy Chassis and Jeff Wilkie, the former head of the retail business, you know, certainly, but they're extremely disciplined and careful in what they say.

So it's really just it was almost like aggregating enough interviews, enough conversations that I could start to piece together enough of a picture of this entire company. And then also, and by the way, very not just Amazon, put the Washington Post blue Origin Bezos and Space company his basis, his personal type of the natural Enquirer, like lots of different avenues to go down. So it's really almost just a sheer exercise and talking to as many people as

it could. And so people went on the record, even fail the inner circle of people without giving you a

lot of pushback. Did you find this book was a little more challenging because it's such a moving target Compared to the first version, the version that you wrote in Yes and no, it was easier, and that the Everything Store was kind of a calling card so I could talk I could reach out to hundreds of people, and they instantly knew who I was and what I was up to, right and and and in some cases I had earned a measure of trust by what they saw

as a as an accurate retelling of the company's early years. But it was more difficult in that it was it posted an enormous organizational and structural challenge. So in the Everything Store, it was a very linear story. It was a group of it was one guy in Wall Street and then a group of people in a garage and bellevue with an idea to sell books on the Internet straight through, you know, through the dot com boom, almost cratering in the dot com bust, and then a revival.

It feels iconic that that story in a way. And then this story is a sprawl of things happening at the same time. I mean, it's Alexa at the and the entry in the India and Prime Video and the marketplace, and the grocery business and the logistics operation and adds and and all the other stuff I mentioned. So it was an organizational challenge. But in some ways this story

was actually the better story. I mean, when you think about it from a pure value creation point of view, you know, the Everything Store covers the creation of about eighty billion dollars in market capitalization, and this this story covers the creation of one point six trillion. So in some ways, you know, this was the more dramatic business story. Sure, just the numbers are just mind blowing, and we'll talk

about some of the numbers a little later. Any chapter stand out as particularly challenging to write or particularly fun to dive into. I started this book in two dozen seventeen, so this was before h G two, before um the Antitrust Subcommittee report into the big tech companies, before obviously before the pandemic. But the funnest and the most unexpected story was bezos is tangled with the National Enquirer and Medium post about the bodies and the Washot post I

had never expected. Well, let me step back, because you'll appreciate this. Most most companies will draw, you know, we'll build a spense around the private lives of their key executives. Right, it's seen as maybe a no go area. And Amazon was fiercely is fiercely protective of bezos Is privacy, and

Bezos and is seriously protective of his family's privacy. And so for this thing to blow up at the end of two thousand, a pen as I'm writing the book, you know, and an alleged affair, a trashy tabloid newspaper accusations of political interfere inspired the Trump administration, a hall of mirrors, of crazy characters and private detectives and you know, unethical Hollywood characters and perhaps mbs. I mean, it was beyond anything that I had imagined, so in terms of

like challenge and and maybe entertainment value. And I just couldn't sort of couldn't believe that this is where not only this is where, you know, something that I had pried open, but this is where Bezos had kind of led the world and lead his own story. Was astonishing to me. Let's talk a little bit about that empire and put some some flesh on the bones. In terms of numbers, I like the way you broke the book up into three sections, and each section starts with four

data points. Annual revenues, number of employees, the market cap of Amazon and and Bezos is net worth, and some of the numbers from just over a decade, they were doing thirty four billion in sales in and then by it's a hundred and thirty six billion, and then by last year it's two hundred and thirty three billion. And along the way, they went from thirty three thousand employees to three hundred fifty two. Now they have about six

hundred fifty thousand employees. Uh, and Bezos went from a mere fifteen billion in net worth today's worth well over UM was one five. Now he's coming up on two hundred billion. And by the way, very employees, it's over a million now over a million. Yeah. Sword So so that was the question I was gonna ask, is how much of the numbers are pandemic related and how much of this is just an acceleration of all these trends at Amazon that were in place before last year even

you know began. I mean, I think it's both the pandemic was an accelerant and that growth might have happened, and the pandemic just moved everything forward. If if people are wondering, doesn't roll back to Amazon, let people go, I don't think so. I think what the pandemic did is that it made people more familiar with UM, you know,

next Amazon's next day delivery, UM possibilities, grocery shopping. It increased Amazon's profits, and what they always do with that is they reinvested in the more Amazon So it created profilming centers closer to major cities, closer to our homes, more trucks on the highway, more events in our neighborhoods,

more data centers. And what that means is, you know, Amazon spent the pandemic basically capturing more advantages, uh, the advantage advantages of performance centers close order to our homes and faster delivery. And it's not going to unline that. And it just means that shopping offline for food and for everything else is going to be more convenient, and

that is probably frightening for offline competitors supermarkets. The other thing Amazon's doing is creating physical retail stores, so that's still capturing of all retail people shopping in actual stores, and Amazon itself stamping out these Amazon Fresh grocery stores. So it had a productive pandemic. You might you might say it was sort of perversely lucky because it had all the advantages going into it, and now it has even more. So we're gonna get to some of the acquisitions.

We'll talk about Amazon Prime and Whole Foods, but before we do that. Early in the book, you talk about sort of the tens low point for Amazon, which was October. They had kind of stumbled with the Amazon Phone and a lot of the big growth engines were just starting to ramp up. I have to ask, who is possibly worse at assessing padditors then Microsoft, Steve Balmer? Is there

anybody who is? I mean, if this guy, this guy missed everything from the iPhone to the iPod two and and he was dissing Amazon in like they don't make a profit? Who nobody's interested in those guys? I mean, I love your usage of him. What attracted you to using him as the uh, the patsy and as I think I call him the contrarian indicator. Um, but let me give a little bit of the defense of Steve

Balmer and lay to us in fourteen. Um, he wasn't alone, right, There were there were investors like David Einhorn who were who were adding Amazon to the to the bubble stock basket. Um analyts we were mixed. At the time. There was a lot of speculation about the underlying profitability of Amazon Web Services, which the company was disguising on its income statement.

At the R and yet we have to have to understand that Amazon is deliberately opaque, and you know, in a way that it's sort of surprising the sec You know, our other regulatory authorities haven't been more aggressive in getting the company to reveal more, but it is. It doesn't want the world to know how profitable a business Amazon Web Services is, and it's not showing profits. It's disguising its profits on its income statement by investing in more

data centers, more fulfillment centers, expansion. At that point, the expansion in the India begins, and it's spending a billion dollars a year at that point a prime video. So no one has any idea because Bezos is sitting there at the craft table making new bets, and you know, Balmer just happens to be a bit of a loud mouth and expressed it at exactly the wrong time. Because you can go back and march the exact moment when Amazon has to finally reveal a WS as financials and

the thing starts to take off. Huh. It's interesting that it was such a strategic advantage, uh, to not discuss Amazon Web Servers for so long, and they were able to to get away with that because of um it wasn't more than ten percent of the revenues. Is that was that the rationale for hiding that. I think that's right. That they could another business. Another CEO is going to

want to show that off. It's going to want to impress investors, particularly because if you look at the stock performance in two thousand fourteen, I mean my recollection is the stock went down and you know, or at least it was embattled, and you know, another CEO is going to say, well, it's gonna like cater to their own ego, uh and to their recruitment needs of their company into the image and want to release that. But Basos, across the ten years of this of a WS growth, you know,

he thinks long term, he thinks competitively. He didn't want to tip off competitors to how good of a business this was, and he kept it hidden. I mean that takes a little bit of a remarkable act of CEO patients and bravery to do that. But they felt like they had a gold mine there and they wanted to mine it for whatever it was worth. Let's see in let's see what the stock price looks like. Bear with me one second while I pull this up. Oh no,

this was this was not a good year. They were down for the full year, and you're right the bottom while there was a low over the summer in in May, and then there was another low in October. But yeah, that doesn't surprise me that that bomber nailed the bottom. But a lot of people were pretty skeptical in an otherwise pretty decent year for the market, right right, And and when you look back at two thousand fourteen, it's so remarkable that that there was such skepticism because that

that is the year that Amazon introduces Alexa. It is the year that they started preparing to to introduce the financials of aws UM. I think I think that might have been the first year that Amazon Studios originals start to come out, So the first batch of TV shows that weren't all that good, but I think it marked a transformation of Amazon Prime into more of a content service.

So uh and and then and then the expansion in the India really begins in earnest in two thou fourteen, and so they're placing a lot of vests there and to the public markets and two investors. Everything looks kind of dire, but it's really the beginning of probably the most impressive wealth creation, maybe even in the history of business. I mean, Um, it's just it's such a perhaps perhaps alongside Apple, you know, the kind of scale that we haven't really seen before. Right, So so let's talk about

some of the big winners that are driving that growth. Um, Amazon Prime. This really turned out to be quite a game change or not only making clients stickier, but really taking Amazon to a whole new level. It really has evolved. So back into thousan five, you know, when they conceived it, Um Basis wanted to kind of take shipping charges off

the table. Like he knew Amazon could compete with selection, it could be competitive with prices, but the convenience just wasn't there to take many days for people to get their packages. And at the time Amazon had maybe a dozen fu filment centers in the US. So taking shipping off the table, trying to offset it with what was the seventy nine dollar a year charge it made It made a lot of sense. And then you you wrap people up into the Prime ecosystem UM, and they spent more.

And then you fast forward five seven years and Basis sees that maybe shipping isn't going to be that much of a differentiator anymore in a world where Amazon has hundreds of fulfilment centers around the country where one day or two day shipping might be possible even without Prime membership. And so we kind of surprises all of his executives by saying we're gonna put free TV shows and movies

into this. And now today I would say that's probably more more important to the prime to Prime membership, the fact that you get access to prime video, prime music. I mean, they've got I think it's Amazon Music, mkindle club. People don't even know what it gets to you, and maybe that's part of it. They're sort of this hazy, ambiguous it's a lot of it. That's a lot of things, and people tend to maximize the value. It's want to

maximize the value of any club they belong to. So it's a sort of neat psychological trick and and and the center of the Amazon operating model. And and then related to the expansion of groceries, but as well as coming up with um physical locations near I think it was prime members was the purchase of whole foods, which you discussed in the book. You know, remind me a little bit of the Google YouTube purchase. The increase in stock price essentially made the purchase free. To tell us

about the whole Foods purchase. I so I devote a whole chapter to Amazon's adventures slash misadventures in groceries. And it's really interesting because this is one area where Bethos wasn't as far sighted as some of his executives. He had people advocating for an expansion in the grocery delivery as far back because two thousand and seven he thought that this would be an opportunity that would be there for Amazon. Um and and executives were writing papers and

I quote some of them in the book. UM, I love the one that was called Amazon's futurist crap, which stood for can't realize the profits and was a lot of basically consumables and grocery store items. And it wasn't until Google introduces Google Express and instat Cart kind of comes unto the scene, starts raising torrents of money that

he starts moving faster. And the challenge with fresh food is that is that you need to hold different fulfillment network refrigerated and rapid deliveries Mainly people want to be at their homes when they when they get when they get their deliveries. And um and and nothing that Amazon was trying is working very well. There was Prime Now and Amazon Fresh, and so Whole Foods comes along in

two seventeen. It's a distressed asset um. John mackew is beset on all sides by activists investors clinging to his organic selection in an age of broader selection and prevalent junk food and supermarkets. And and Bezos buys it. Now. It's interesting because amazon s futuring groceries isn't necessarily whole food. They're creating these Amazon Fresh supermarkets. But I think they realized, or Bezos realized, that he was going to need to learn a lot about the grocery businesses if Amazon was

going to fill its potential there. So let's talk a little bit about some of their products. Um that we're winners, will talk about Kindle, go on, Alexa and fire TV. It's kind of amazing to think a CEO said, I have an idea for a reader and we're going to build this from scratch. Tell us a little bit about the genesis of Kindle and what it meant for Amazon,

whose roots were in book selling, right right. So we're going back now to to some of the material I cover in the Everything Store, And this is probably about two four and Bezos is basically watching Apple vaporized his music business with the iPod and itube store, and he understands that a digital transformation is coming from media and that Amazon's brand is still very tightly intertwined with the book business, and concludes that if Apple were to ever

move into digital books, that Amazon would be vulnerable. And so he basically tells his leadership team, the f team, that they're going to build a knee reader. At the time, Sony had tried to do it and had sort of failed with the Sony Reader. And there's all sorts of objections because what does Amazon at the time know about building devices, And Beza says, I know it's hard, We're going to do it, and it's a three year process. It's actually very similar to the Alexis story which I

tell him in Amazon Unbound. But he drives the initiative, he sponsors it, he authorizes all sorts of investments, he harangued, He gets his his sales folks to go to New York City and harangue the book publishers and the unlocking more of their catalogs for the for the e book business. They had been very hesitant because it wasn't a major

business for them. Amazon uses its leverage and strength with the publishers to basically get them to digitize their books, and then they announced the thing into two thousand and seven, and that is the beginning. Um that is the beginning of Amazon and devices at leads to everything from Alexa to the failed fire phone, to the fire TVs to

all sorts of things we haven't seen yet. And it's a great illustration of Bezos really inventing his company in every turn and thinking ambitiously in an unbound way about what Amazon could become. It wasn't just a retailer, it wasn't just a bookseller. It wasn't just an enterprise software company. When it's cloud business, he doesn't he doesn't place any limits, it doesn't seem to me, and what what Amazon can be, and that kind of tease up the Echo, which is

its own product category. If this was a standalone product from a new startup company that had sold hundreds of millions of units, they would be a really successful company. Tell us how how did the echo come about? Well, it's interesting that you see the very I don't I don't know if it would be. Um, Amazon probably sells those units at close to cost. And and this will get to the origin. You know, it's the brains of Alexa are in Amazon webster uses and and I'm sure

it gets a nice wholesale rate on that. And that's where Beza started with this. He sent an email to his his colleagues and late to us in ten we should build a computer whose brains are in the cloud that's completely controllable by your voice. Because he's thinking at the time, how does he exploit Amazon's advantage in cloud computing,

and how does he create some consumer facing applications. And he's a big science fiction fan and he's totally engrossed with the possibilities and improvements and voice search at the time. And that's that email spawns Alexa, and very much like the kindle, he gets in the in the weeds, and he sponsors it, and he authorizes the hiring of all sorts of oppressive voice scientists and they bring it out into the world and collect data in a very surreptitious

and interesting way. Um and and now it's so tightly interwoven into the Amazon empire that we don't know if that if it makes money. I don't think it's been as evolutionaries maybe they have hoped. It's certainly not a conversational computer or or really a useful every day assistant in the way that they hoped. And there's not really a productive app ecosystem as there is with the iPhone.

So it's interesting. Um. It certainly has helped to change Amazon's image, and they market the thing, and I think it helps their their image as an innovator. Alexa. What's the title of brad Stone's new book? I don't have an answer. I guess Masos is not too happy with you these days. I didn't hear. It's sorry. I don't have an answer to that. All right, we'll go after the get get it to fix it. Did you see in the new book, I I fleuped out the identity

of the voice Alex. I was very proud of that. Yes, that was really interesting. It's a woman who's a voiceover artist in Colorado? Is that right? What's right? Right? Na? Nina Raleigh? And you know I had I had recalled that the identity of theory had been unveiled a couple of years ago, and so I was very curious. Okay, who's voice is springing from Alexa? And and before we move on from the section of of what's been driving Amazon's growth, I mean, Amazon Web Services is just a monster,

isn't it. Oh, it's it's it's there's a I think it's a fifty billion dollar run rate. Um. You know, it's a ten year old division and tide Amazon. It's in and it's changed the way companies and universities and governments compute and run their businesses. Um, it's it's created, you know, massive new business opportunities from Microsoft and IBM and Google. It is and and it's showing no signs

of slowing down. So when you when you think about you know, Bethos who really had some of the initial ideas, and and Andy Jassey's success running it over the past ten years. And yes, it's it's been remarkable. Earlier we were talking about some of the drivers of growth of Amazon. There are two other areas that help drive growth, but not without some problems. And let's talk about both of them.

The first is the third party market sort of turning Amazon into a quasi eBay in some ways tell us a little bit about what that did, opening Amazon up to basically anyone who wants to sell goods on their site. I would say in the first years it was it was it was pretty positive. I mean, um, creating a third credit marketplace, added selection, and added product categories that Amazon wasn't going to touch itself create minted a lot

of success, particularly in the West. And the key turning point, and the story that I'm telling in the book and the chapter devoted to marketplace, is when Amazon quite consciously in about two thousand fifteen, started pursuing the global selling opportunity of basos stalk companies like Ali Baba with all the express and a startup called wish dot com basically conducting a form of geographic arbitrage, allowing sellers and manufacturers and China and other other parts of the world to

sell in the West and and to lower lower prices

and increased selection. And they pursued task in a very Amazon like way, building systems, self service systems and translation tools, aggregating inventory and lowering the cost of ship and then suddenly the marketplace tilt in favor of of overseas sellers, and you have a lot of disgradled sellers in the West, and an explosion selection lower prices and all kinds of casks, counterfeits, fraud, exploding cover boards, UM, and and perhaps a real depreciation

and the quality of products that are sold on Right. That's where I wanted to get to, is that. Look, my my first Amazon purchase was when my college roommate gave me a gift certificate and I actually hunted down with that. First purchase was in December. UM burn Rate was the book. But I'm I'm kind of surprised at after working so hard to maintain quality and to guarantee lowest prices and to guarantee a very high level of customer service, suddenly there's just fakes and stuff that's poorly

made and falls apart. You mentioned the hoverboard. Um, a number of houses had burned down, and half of the you write in the book half the houses that burnt down due to hoverboard fires, they were purchased on Amazon.

How did the company respond to to this problem? Well, in terms of the hoverboard challenge, I mean they stopped selling them a little a little bit too late, and now they're involved in endless litigation, and in terms of the overall problems of fraud and counterfeit and fake reviews,

they've been a very Amazon and Silicon Valley type. They've created systems, they've they've tried to use technology to an artificial intelligence to weed out fraud, to increase the level of the quality of of sellers on the platform, and with with I think some mixed results. On a related issue to that, I recall sending an email to to Bezos after I'm trying to remember which Michael Lewis book

it was that had come out. Maybe it was Flashboys or The Big Short and I always it had to be after the Kindle because there were all these one star reviews of a Michael Lewis book, because the Kindle release was set by the publisher to take place like three months or six months later, it was it was after the book public It was kind of insane that these Kindle fan boys were one starring reviews. Since then, we've had like a much bigger problem with reviews, fake reviews,

purchase reviews. How is Amazon responding to that? My takeaway, I just can no longer rely on reviews. I just assume most of them are nonsense. That's true. And as a as an author whose sales are are taking place, uh predominantly, And I was getting to test the I just I just saw a I think it was a two star review because somebody felt that there were fingerprints smudges on the cover. You's like, you gotta be getting me but doing Yeah, I mean, I think you know.

They they've done a couple of things. They prioritize UM actual purchases, the reviews from yeah, verified reviews, but they've also i think lowered the significance of reviews. And when when you think back a couple of years ago, and this leads into advertising. Um, the search engine was this taxonomy of useful products UM that a very secretive and is on algorithm would order. And one of the big variables was the number and the quality of reviews that

a product got. And of course that just opened it up to third party sellers gaming the system, buying fake reviews, generating their own, and you know, and that variable ended up being less useful. And now it's basically the Amazon Church results are essentially pay for play people by search ads to appear there, and reviews are no longer important. The advertising is a little bit of a fail also, because you know, I was searching for a lithium battery

the other day. It's number thirty four fifty and up pops during cell and I click it and buy it. And it's only after it arrives that I realized this isn't this is the you know, three thousand and twenty three. Why would that show up in a search for a very specific and so I've I've kind of learned be aware of sponsored results, and really it's best to start your search off of Amazon. I never approached Amazon shopping

that way. Now it's look for what you want to get and then if Amazon has it, great, But don't begin your search on Amazon. I wonder are they trading off advertising revenues for sales. I told the story of the evolution of the ad business inside Amazon and the decision to move sponsored search results up to the top.

Sponsored listing to the top of search results was a very specific decision made by days Os, and I think he understood how profitable the search business could be inside Amazon and simply wanted the cash to go, you know, to make his investments in Prime video and satellite internet access and the other ambitious plans that he has. They saw that it would lead to a decrease in in customer satisfaction. I believe that this might even be seen

as a turning point in Amazon's history. Um He judged that the impact on customer satisfaction would have to be so large as to outweigh the benefit that AMA Amazon would be getting. I call this the gold mine in the back gyard. But I do think there's some cough. And I just did a lithium battery search the one Barry that you just described, and it's a mess. Yeah, it's a debacle, absolutely. Yeah. It's all sponsored a private label brands, and I have, you know, just absolutely no

idea here, right. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, the Amazon search is as often as not unhelpful. Let's let's talk about two of the biggest failures um and I'm going to use those terms loosely, A new one and an old one. The latest debacle h Q two. I mean, how tone deaf was that? That was just such an avoidable self inflicted wounds? How did they blow

that so badly? So it's interesting. I have a chapter in the book about HQ two and and one I think easy answer is that the political environment kind of drastically changed under them as they as they embark on this um on, this on the search, which lasted much

longer than they thought. And it starts with a kind of political earthquake in Seattle, the city council turning hospital, Amazon being blamed for all sorts of ills, and Bezos think looking at Elon with the giga factory in Nevada and fox Kind in Wisconsin and thinking this process is going to underscore who wants us? And in the year plus as they do this, Amazon hits the trillion dollars in market cap, Bezos becomes the wealthiest person in the world.

AOC gets elected, the progressive political movement gathers steam and a sense, and the tech lash begins. And as they announced, um, you know New York City, in Washington, d c um, they you know, they realize that it's it's not just gonna be expression of who whats us. It's going to be a verdict about the role that tech company, me and even big companies are playing in our community. So that's a much different discussion than the one they wanted to have. Huh. So, So to two things about that,

I'm gonna push back a little bit. First, the tech lash had been ramping up for a good couple of years before h Q two. Remember Bernie Sanders almost bat Hillary Clinton to be the nominee. So issues of wealth inequality and income inequality and and the halves and the half nots. I mean, that's been an ongoing discussion for at least since the Great Financial Crisis. Uh, it's certainly accelerated. But but the other thing is when you look at when they started the search, they were already a giant

and wildly successful company. Um. It just seems and and kudos to Scott Galloway at n y U who basically said, all these things are are affront and the areas that are gonna win are gonna be where the CEO has a home or one to live and and he literally said it will either be New York or d C. And lo and behold it was both. Um. So the question is why not why not be small? Are they just at a at a certain point you become so wealthy,

you just out of touch. Why not say Hey, we're gonna come in and here's what we're gonna do for the community, and we're gonna build a waterfront park, and we're gonna help expand um mass transit, and we're gonna do this, and we're gonna do that. This looks like it was just sold so poorly. And I want to actually agree agree with you that there were there worked some quite clear, invisible signs that the political climates and shifted.

But I think it's a function of how reclusive and maybe self absorbed by us and other Amazon executives were, so they just kind of failed to see it. And you know, the fact they you know, they wanted to be wooed by communities. But I think you're making a pretty good point, which is that they actually were going to be the ones that would have to do the wooing.

And seeing two hundred thirty regions prostrate themselves, sorry, prostrate themselves in front of Amazon, a big, wealthy technology company, was just unseemly, I think exactly exactly. It's amazing. And then the other failure I have to talk about, which is kind of shocking, is Blue Origins has just been a mess from day one. It was preordained to fail. How how could you say we're going to set up a private company to reinvigorate space travel, but we're going

to do it on the cheap. It's just it's so opposite of the Amazon approach. What was he thinking? Yeah, well, this is um he sets up Blue Origin in two thousand. He is a relative popper by by today's standards in terms of his his wealth and this whole saying in the space business, Um that the quickest way to become

a millionaire is the start off as a billionaire. So I think he went into it knowing that building rockets is not for the faint of heart, and so he righte he sets out to constrain the investment, to keep the headcount small. He's going to privately fund it, and he's going to think long term, all the sort of

Bezos hallmarks. And what happens is Elon Musk comes in and Um literally you know, starts going quickly raising money from venture capitalists, UM, funding space X with government contracts, and and Bezos's approach seems you know, kind of meager and tame. In response, then Bezos changes gears, starts selling a billion dollars worth of Amazon stock every year to fund it, and sees a lot of dysfunction at the company. Right, Yeah, that this function was ongoing. There's a data point you

mentioned the book that was mind blowing. Elon Musk's SpaceX wins a contract for FO forty million dollars, but like so many Defense Department and government contracts, there are some price over rides and he ends up, according to an inspector general, getting paid seven point seven billion dollars went to space X, which which makes every time he complains

kind of laughing. Right. I think that's more that that first, that was the first installment of a contract than that then kind of continued to evolve UM and that Bezos was looking at back go and you know, we should have we should have been on this UM. He he was ultimately I think jealous, probably a strange position for Jeff Bezos to be in that that musque was getting paid to play. You know, they have similar dreams in

space UM. And here the government is funding SpaceX and its ambitions and helping Elon scale the company, and and Bezos is still shelling out personally for Blue Origins Amazing and our final discussion on failure UM. They had an internal process of reviewing employees called stacked ranking that led to what you described as a quote informal cruelty unquote

that is definitional for the company's corporate culture. Explain what that was about and why they ultimately had to change it right and and different companies have experimented with different versions of this. Bezos early on never wanted Amazon to become a country club, a place where employees got comfortable. He was particularly worried in the fulfillment center is that if people stuck around for too long, they could be

susceptible to organizing efforts from unions. And the review process really encouraged managers to you know, to to evaluate and then and then um dismissed the lowest performers. And this is a management practice that has wreak havoc everywhere Microsoft, off, the General Electric etcetera. Um, there were there was one element that led to I think these sort of negative evaluations of Amazon, Amazon's culture. That was a theme in

the Everything Store. It was obviously there was that high profile New York Times article into those of jifteen and yes, I think after the Times article they re evaluated it. I still get reports periodically that a form of it still exists. And the Amazon so big of a company right now, there are lots of different pockets of of employee you know, experiences and reviews. Um, but I think you know, this is part of the basis is philosophy.

He he wants people to come to Amazon, to have the most productive years of their career, to move at breakneck speed, and when they when they slow down, to move on, he doesn't mind. He doesn't mind that even the compensation systems are sort of geared towards avoiding people becoming extraordinarily so extraordinarily wealthy that they stopped being motivated. And yeah, it is interpreted as a kind of informal

cruelty among some people. And that's why, um, disgruntled former Amazon employees are not a rare species, to say the least. Let's talk a little bit about some really fascinating things with Bezos, including one of my favorite memes circulating Twitter is the photo of him in sort of bookish looking

with glasses. And then there's a photo from I think it was sun Valley where he's kind of jacked in a you know, vest and shirt, strolling confidently towards the viewer, and it was Amazon, Amazon Prime, and that was everywhere for a while. Tell us about the transformation of Bezos from a sort of you know Wall Street geek into

uh an overlord. Right, Well, the physical transformation, so this is only the most obvious part of it, right The guy has been working out and getting in shape, and in the first book I ascribed that from a former friend to his interest in in um in one day going to space until he's trying to safe fit. Now I think it's more. I suspect it's more, you know, the billionaire fixation with longevity and and and health. But

again that that's only part of it. He his eyes have opened up to a larger world beyond Amazon, and and that's me a his ownership of The Washington Post and participation in in Washington, d C. Society, UM Space Company, Hollywood right throwing parties. He simply seems to enjoy the lifestyle, the extravagance that comes with his position, much more than

he ever did. And and the greatest symbol of this, I never thought Jeff Bezos circa even two thousand and ten would be a yacht guy, you know, someone who's spending time on big books. And I was a report

in the book. He's building this massive three three mass math with a with its own support yacht with it was the right room for he and I think part of that the the influence of Laurence Sanchez, his partner, um, and part of it is simply him enjoying the world stage that is human and the robot, the machine that created Amazon. You know, is is susceptible too. I guess some of these human impulses. Yes, so so you we we already talked. Mackenzie Scott, his former wife, gave The

Everything Store a one star review. But but her and and Bezos' new girlfriend, Sanchez could not possibly be more different. She's very social and outgoing. Mackenzie Scott is a little bit more of an introvert and and a homebody. How much of the divorce comes from him wanting to step out a bit and you know, literally the wife wanting a quiet night at home. What's the genesis of this? Because there wasn't a whole lot about the divorce um other than to say it was already sort of happening

before Sanchez ever showed up on the scene. I mean, Barry, this the easiest answers that we have no idea, right, I mean, who really knows what happens in the private confines of that marriage. Other than to observe what what you've just said, which is Mackenzie Scott is fiercely private. I think I think she's done one interview um around the publication of one of her novels. Um. She she speaks very carefully in the in the few medium posts

that she's written about her philanthropic contributions. And she didn't seem to enjoy as much going to the awards shows or to the fashion galas um as as Jeff Bethos did. So yeah, they're they're they're interest for public attention were diverging. Um, that's certainly true. And in Lauren Santis, Bezos has found someone who's extremely comfortable moving in those circles. Um. And yet who you know, I don't think it's it's ever possible to know, Um, you know what what has really

you know, what really happens in a marriage? Huh? To say the least, let's talk a little bit. You mentioned the Washington Post Bezos really helped to drive a huge turnaround at the Post, and I was kind of surprised to read that the tagline democracy dies in darkness? Was

that really a Bezos line? Well, if you if you remember Barry, that was a line in a speech um that Bob Woodward had given crediting of pre Watergate era judge, and then Bezos had heard that, and when he asked Marty Baron and others is the Washington Post to go find a slogan for the paper, he suggested that it

should do something like democracy Dies in Darkness. And then they spent about a year and probably you know, thousands of hundreds of thousands of dollars, paying branding firms and coming up with ideas and firing them, and they basically got back to Democracy Dies in Darkness, which originally they had thought was kind of too dreary, uh, and then ended up being perfect for the age of Donald Trump.

So yes, it was sort of bezos inspiration but a little a little bit of well hard to call, you know, that era luck, But it certainly was for the Post, right, because even though Bezos did drive a remarkable turner on there, they certainly did, they were fortunate by the revival of interest and political news had accompanied the Trump years. So it's interesting because as you read the book, it's as much about Amazon the company as it is about Bezos,

like a bio of him. Was the intention or did it just become clear you can't write about one without writing about the other. I think in both books I thought of them as um as. Yes, as both um. I you know, since I'm working with limited access to Bezos. Um, they're predominantly about the companies. But just is the main character, right, And you can't when you peel back the layers of the onion on most major inventions at Amazon and most big strategic moves, you find you get to Jeff Bezos

and and a decision that he made. And this book Amazon Abound is about transformation. It's it's the transformation of this company into this monolith that is dominating all of our life now and and our economic reality. And then the accompanying transformation of Bezos right into the richest man in the world, into into this figure on the public stage, the evolution of a tech geek into kind of a

business superhero. And yeah, they're really intertwined. I think. I think in some ways they function as biographies for the company and for the man. So there's a quote of his in the book quote you can invent your way out of any box unquote, which kind of raises the question, how does he see himself? Is he an inventor, Is he a business founder? Is he a CEO and a leader? What?

What is his self identified role? Yeah, that one's easy to answer because he keeps insisting and he did so again in his latest shareholder letter that he's an inventor. That is how he wants to be seen. And it's funny because I have a colleague at Bloomberg and we were talking about that and she said, you know, this reminds me a little bit of Taylor Swift, who wants to be seen as a songwriter, but the world kind of sees her, you know, more as a singer and

as a performer. I think that's true with Bezos too. He wants to be seen as an inventor, but you know, by his admire as he will largely be seen I think as an operator and an entrepreneur, a creator of amazing business value, and by his critics as a monopolist. Right, and the verdict is still out on this, but as a as an aggregator of extraordinarily extraordinarily wealth and and not yet really as a philanthropist whose contribution back has

been commensurate with with his um you know, accomplishment. So yes, he wants to be seen as an inventor, and that that might be uh, the jury is out on that a little bit. So when he looks at all of those accomplishments, what does he see as his lasting legacy? How does he want to be remembered? With the caveat that he's still a relatively young man, and is what early fifties, Well, let's see, it's probably it's probably mid the late fifties, right, yeah, mid fifties right now. I

think he wants to be seen as an inventor. I think that he wants to be seen. The last investor letter is really this interest thing, an impassioned defense of Amazon as a contributor, as a as a generator of value, and he goes one by one talking about the the gross merchandise value generated by third party sellers, the salaries of the third party workers, how much Amazon shareholders have benefited, um.

And he's really trying to reframe the debate, I think, around his own wealth and Amazon's own power, and to

shed lights on how much value Amazon is creative. So I think he wants to be seen and he wants Amazon's legacy to be one that has contributed to the economy and positive ways, and and and the reason why he's arguing that so precipitously is because the prevailing sentiment right now at least is that you know, billionaires are bad and in some corners of society, of course, um that they represent something untoward in the distribution of wealth in our society and the widening income gap, and that

big tech companies have come to dominate the economy and the snuff out opportunity for smaller businesses. And look, I mean I try to I try to get into that debate in the book. I think that's a little bit of a harsh view. Amazon has made some real positive contributions and and basis is I think only beginning to grapple with the fact that his legacy right now is very much contested and he'll have to probably spend the next couple of years, you know, turning turning that around

and making significant contributions and changing people's mind. You have to say the least, I'm trying to remember where which document of there's where they might have been. In defense of something that Bernie sanders Um had said, he points out, we employ over a million people, with a second biggest job creator in the country which actually is as good a time as any to talk about what he did with the fifteen dollar an hour um increase. This this was just a brilliant jiu jitsu in response to I

think Bernie Sanders haranguing uh Bezos. He figured out pretty quickly, Hey, this is paying more money is a giant competitive advantage to us. Tell us about how he raised the minimum wage at at Amazon to fifteen right, and we should we should note I mean a lot of a lot of these moves by Amazon, as welcome as they are, our our reaction reactions, and the fight for fifteen dollars an hour, it's something that starts ten years ago among

among big companies and fast food chains. UM employee strikes lots of pressure, and Amazon is growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years, becoming a more and

more prominent employer. The lens of public scrutiny is on their relationship with their employees, and at a certain point, I think they realized that they're going to have to get a head of it, and and they do have the resources to get ahead of it in a way that perhaps some of its competition UM Walmart and the like do not, and so they they raise their their wage.

And sorry, one other thing baries that as they're hiring more and more people, um, you know, hundreds of thousands of people in their for filming centers at a time of economic prosperity and tightness in the labor market, I think they realized they need to sweeten the pot for for workers to even just fill those for filming centers, particularly during the holidays. And so fifteen dollars an hour.

It's a recruiting mechanism. It's a strategic weapon to to bludgeon their competitors over the head who can't match the rate. And then it's a little bit of a of a defense um to the for the activists and the politicians like Bernie Sanders who are criticizing Amazon's relationship with their employees. Yeah, he went away for a little while. Eventually he started coming back at Bezos, but for a while he was pretty satisfied. Let's let's talk about on another jiu jitsu

that was so brilliantly played. Um. Laurence Sanchez's brother got access to a variety of texts and then went about selling them to the National Enquirer. He claimed that he had a nude selfie of quote unquote below the belt selfie that turned out not to be so true, and Bezos just completely up ended what looked like being trapped in a box. Tell us a little bit about that incredible escaping act. Yeah, right, this is this is one of those episodes that I couldn't quite believe I was

I was going to be writing about. Um, Bezos has tangled with the National Enquirer. You mentioned Laurence Snchez, his brother delivering um, delivering those text messages to the paper. Um. He you know, he thought he was trying well, the cup was sort of conducting their relationship out in the open, and you know, for whatever reason, he decided that he wanted to try to get ahead of it. He was also he was also paid quite well by the Inquirer

for the information. And UM, it's it's almost impossible to believe Bezos. Um. Well, it's a really complicated saga. UM. I don't know how far you want me to go back.

But the the Inquirer was very susceptible to accusations that they had political motives, and Bezos and his representatives had had been floating the possibility that they were doing the work for the Trump administration to embarrass Bezos as an owner of the Washington Post, and in the negotiations, um, the Inquirer essentially was threatening Bezos with the release of all of this, these these embarrassing photos, saying you have to stop accusing us of having political motives. It wasn't

politically motivated at all, simply a good story. And then Bezos turns around and publishes told his emails um and suggest that there were political motives and suggests that studies were involved, and then sympathies swing to his side. It was this brilliant move. If people remember that episode at all, they probably think Bezos did the right thing. And as I untangled it, I sort of at least I concluded that there weren't political motivations, so the Staudies weren't involved.

They may have hacked Beazos' phone. We kind of don't know, but it was. It was simply a sort of brilliant pr master master stroke, and they edited the Inquirer ended up getting fired. Um, you know, and I think we we That was my excerpt in Bloomberg Business Week, and

the cover line was Bezos wins again. And of course because he did right and this is one where by all measures, he should have been embarrassed, and he kind of came out on top the New York Post with another memorable headline, Bezos exposes Pecker, referring to David Pecker was the editor of the UM Inquirer and had already been under pressure because of the catching killed deals they had done to protect Donald Trump UM and were some I don't remember what the problem was. I guess that's

a violation of campaign finance laws. And he was sort of in limbo with the Southern District. Is that what took place there? Yeah, they had a non prosecution agreement with the Southern District of New York that required am I, the company that operated the National Inquirer, to to to be a good citizen, to not break the law, to

play by the rules. And so when the Washington Post and Gavin de Becker Bezoss representative started insinuating that the Inquirer was doing the work of the Trump administration to embarrass Jeff Bezos, UM, you know that was that was sensitive for for am I, and Pecker wanted wanted the Dylan Howard, the under the Inquiry to kind of settle

settle settled the matter. That's just an incredible story. And I guess the the lesson is, if you're in the business of challenging wealthiest people in the world with lots of resources, you probably don't want to do it while you're on double secret probation is probably a bit. There's a line from the Wire that I love in this in this context, if you come at the King, you better not miss And they came at the King and

they missed. Before we get to our favorite questions, I have to ask you some recent news that came out after the book was published. What do you make of this eight point four billion dollar purchase of MGM. Is this about Amazon Prime or is this about Bezos getting to hang with Hollywood Royalty. Well, you can hang with Hollywood Royalty without MGM. It's about intellectual property. It's about the vault of franchisees, the deep. The MGM has James Bond,

the Rocky Series, Legally Blonde, et cetera, RoboCop um. Amazon is facing the likes of Disney Plus and an Apple. Um you know, not just Netflix, Paramount, Peacock Network and and franchises are are going to be a big differentiator. UM In addition, we talked about the advertising business and with MGM, Amazon gets this vault of this catalog of

archival programming. They can funnel all that into Prime video and into another streaming service I m DBTV, which is it's free to use and it's supported by advertising, and and this is like, this is these are table stakes now in the new streaming wards being able to mint franchises and have very deep catalogs of libraries of archival programming. Really interesting. All right, for our last regular question, I'm just gonna throw a curveball at you and say congratulations

on winning the Amazon Whole Food sweep steaks. Okay, I love this story. Yeah, thank you Berry. Um, I is that correct? Yes, I'm working on this book and I got a call telling me that I won a Whole Food sweep stakes and I had never entered any but apparently if you use your Amazon credit cards and a Whole Foods, who got entered in? And what are the chances I won? And I thought it was a fraud.

It sounds like a telemarketing scam totally. And I and I think, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna look into this because somebody's abusing you know, the Amazon name, and I find out that it's real, and of course I didn't, I didn't accept it. But it was just so peculiar. I mean, what what are the what are the chances I could be eating you know, free and whole foods now, But sadly my journalistic obligations prevented me from accepting it. That's pretty hilarious. All right, Let's jump to our favorite

questions that we ask all of our guests. And let's start with and I asked this to everybody, not just to you. What are you streaming these days? Give us your favorite Netflix and Amazon Prime shows? Interesting? Let's see, Um, we just started Halston this is the you and McGregor fashion thing on Netflix. We're only one episode in my I'll reserve judgments on that. Um. The Michael Douglas series Comisky Method, so they just did season three. I've loved

that show. The opening of the first episode at the funeral is just totally hilarious. Um, and I haven't been watching a lot of TV. So those are the two right now. UM. I tried, I have I have young daughters, teenage daughters. I tried to introduce one to a classic film, rain Man over the weekend the great Dustin Hoffman films, and she wanted to watching halfway halfway through. UM, so I don't know, maybe maybe you know, it's not it's

not as moving for for the younger generation. My experience is that the younger generation can't enjoy the pacing which is so much slower. I mean, unless you go to something like the front page or bringing up baby. The pacing of movies from the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties are just so much slower than you know, how how rapid the jokes come and how fast explosions come. Today it's a different era and and they don't have the tolerance

for that. I think that might be true, and in the exactly the same way as I rejected the movies of my parents generation. I'm now and there's receiving rooms. Yeah, no, it's it's everything is accelerating. Let's let's talk a little bit about your career and ment yours who helped guide and shape your career? Well? Um, I think probably the most influential with Stephen Levy, um, technology writer at at Newsweek Magazine. UM. He has written great books about Apple

and Facebook and Google. And seeing him work and the way he writes was always very inspirational to me. Um George Hackett was an editor of mine at Newsweek magazine. He was he was quite influential and just a great, great editor. And then um at Josh Turangle, the former editor of Business Week who brought me over from from the New York Times, and the way he managed people and his story sensibility, the way he really refreshed business Week.

When Bloomberg bought it was was wonderful to watch. What are some of your favorite books and and what are you reading right now? Let's see, I'm reading Cast, the wonderful book by Isabel Wilkerson just about um, you know, how we view racial and income divisions in the in the United States. That's that's been really eye opening. I feel like my reading has been eclipsed by self promotion

and book promotion over the past a few weeks. So I feel like I'm really looking forward to this summer when I get to maybe read some of the other excellent books that have that have come out this year. I read the novel Clara and the Sun by A. Kazoo Is Shiguru, which um you know who wrote Remains of the Day is just such a wonderful author. And this book is about it's a sort of science fiction future where people can take home home robots, and it

is it is such a moving novel. I actually read it and then immediately reread it, And so that is a book I heartily recommend. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who was thinking about a career in either investment finance or or journalism or both? Right, well, I would have absolutely no advice on the investment finance side of things, very that that

might be more your per view than mine. Um on journalism, after maybe waving my hands, uh, you know, at them to get them to reconsider if they were really determined, I would um, I would. I would encourage young journalists to kind of find their lean, you know, find something that they're passionate about and interested in, to go deep on um and to sort of master the expertise in

and then to just be persistent. This business is all about persistence and being there after everyone else has left, and going a little deeper and asking that last question and digging into another box of files when you feel like you're exhausted and want to drop. And that's that's the key to this business. Right, it's not rocket science. We don't we don't need PhDs to do it. But often it's just sheer curiosity and persistence and absorption and obsession, right.

I mean I have become over the past decade sort of obsessed with understanding how Amazon works and what drives Jeff Bezos, um, you know, and what's good about it, what's bad about it? And I think you need that kind of absorption, of an obsession of curiosity to succeed as a journalist today. And our final question, what do you know about the world of journalism today? You wish you knew when you were first getting started twenty plus years ago, years ago. I mean, it's just just such

a different environment. I guess I wish I had known how rapidly things would change. You know. I spent the first ten years in my career as I as I said earlier in the conversation that Newsweek, magazine and Newsweek does exist, and magazines of course exists, but that kind of media organization no longer does. Um. There there was a whole class of journal who labored in the salt mine, so to speak, um, not really reporting and writing, but

researching and and and performing support functions. Um, and then every week would be a desperate competitive scramble to get your articles in the magazine. And I actually think I learned a lot from that. But um, there's no replacement for writing and publishing and repeating and reporting and getting out into the world. And and those are the kinds

of skills that are rewarded in today's journalistic environment. And so I think I might wish that if I was able to foresee the way in which the media climate would change that I had been, that I would have been a little bit more productive in my earlier, earlier years, where where like success at a big magazine, just being at a big magazine like like news Week, seemed like a career accomplishment on its own. But of course, you know that world no longer exists. We have been speaking

with Brad Stone. He is the author of Amazon Unbound, Jeff Bezos and The Invention of a Global Empire. Thanks Brad for being so generous with your time. If you enjoyed this conversation, well be sure and check out any of our previous almost four hundred interviews we've done over the past seven years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. We love your comments, feedback in suggestions right to us at m IB podcast at Bloomberg dot net. You can sign up for my daily

reads at rit Halts dot com. Check out my weekly column on Bloomberg dot com slash Opinion. Follow me on Twitter at rit Halts. I would be remiss if I did not thank our crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week. Rolie Volmer is my audio engineer. Atico val Bron is our project manager. Michael Boyle is my producers slash booker. Michael Batnick is my head of research. I'm Barry Rihults. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio