Brad Stone

myself as a as a critic of the company. I'm almost a historian. I'm trying to tell the story and that's both the accomplishments and the real reasons to scrutinize the company. But um, just to back up, you know, I wrote a previous book about the company, The Everything Store, in two thousand thirteen. It was the origin story. Jeff Bezos didn't particularly like it. You might recall some some

negative reviews from his family members and close colleagues. But yes, right, um, but but you know, over the years, it's it has become I think the definitive history of the company. And when I reconsidered, you know, whether there was more story to tell. In two thousand and seventeen, I approached the company. I said that I felt like, you know, the the last decade had been, if anything, more interesting than the than the original, uh you know, fifteen years, and that

I wanted to write another installment. And I also think Bob that Amazon change it was. It had been a very secretive, cloistered company up there in Seattle, and to some in some in many respects it's still very secretive. But I think there was an understanding that if they didn't tell their story, if they didn't allow journals to tell their story, then that wasn't going to go very well for them. And so you know, they did allow me to talk to fifteen or so senior executives. Bezos

so didn't talk to me. There there are some still some is there perhaps from the first book, but you know, I got I got a lot of access, and then

the foundation of the new book. It's really just the volumes of interviews with employees who have come and gone or still they're talking um, you know, on background, sharing what they what they saw, what they think of the company there, and their experiences, the things that they're proud of and the things that they, you know, wish the company did it differently, and that's really the foundation of both books. Now that the book is out, what has

the reaction been from inside Seattle, Amazon, HQ, etcetera. Well, there are no one star reviews, so I suppose that's nice.

Um there There really has been no official reaction. I will say informally, I've heard from employees and executives of Amazon who who feel like that, you know that the story that I got the story right, that it accurately captures the the innovation that went into products like Alexa, the determination of Bezos, but also the way in which the company has built systems such as the global marketplace and the transportation network, maybe without a lot of regard

for what some of the consequences might be. And then if when we can talk about that, but then if they've had to go back and kind of repair some of those and the way in which the company has kind of graduated into a whole new realm of scrutiny and skepticism, and Bezos in particular, I think has come under a lot of that criticism. So you know, I probably not hearing the bad stuff, but for what I have heard from from employees and executives has been favorable.

Well usually always here from an employee that got something wrong, whether you did or not, you know that I have gotten. I've gotten a couple of those I should. So what we know is that Bezos will be stepping down and the new person coming in, JOSSI made his bones in a ws To what degree, aid, do you think this will change the company and be to what degree do

you project that Bezos will still be involved? So the change every date they've announced is July five, and that is when Jeff Bezos will no longer be CEO and Andy Jesse will be But in in many respects, Bezos has been pulling away from Amazon for many years. And that's part of the story that I'm telling in this book.

He buys the Washington Post, he's fighting with the Trump administration, he has his tangle with the National Enquirer, and of course the formation of philanthropies, and he's allowing Andy Jasse and the executives on the retail side to run these massive Amazon businesses with a lot of autonomy and and so that's been a gradual process, and I think it will continue to be a gradual process. Bezos his executive chairman. He says he's going to continue to work on new

projects at Amazon. He said in his last investor letter that he's going to be rethinking Amazon's relationship with its blue collar employees and trying to make that a kinder relationship. And so I suspect that not a lot actually changes. Uh. Andy Jasse will certainly be the figurehead he'll be, I think, maybe to the consternation of regulators and lawmakers, when they ask for Jeff Bezos, they will get Andy Jasse, and much the same way Google now gets presents Sundar Pachai

and not the founders Larry Pager, Sergey Brand. But I think Bezos will continue to be involved, and I think but I think the process will continue gradually, and in a couple of years we might see him drop the executive part of that title executive chairman, and then really move on to other things. But I don't. I don't think much actually changes at Amazon other than the very public and visible figure of Andy Jasse taking over CEO.

To what do you degreed? You believe these changes were engendered by his relationship with his new girlfriend, Lawrence Sanchez. In terms of the his his on a lot of levels, but here talking about stepping down. I don't think so. Again, part of the story in this book is is Bezos stepping away from the big business. This is an Amazon, and that process was under way before the relationship started. So I don't know if it was a precipitating factor

in the timing. I will say in the book I revealed that Bezos is building this massive super yacht to sail the high seas on my suspicion because he was never a yacht guy. That that is the the you know, part of the influence of his partner, Um, and so his evolution into a famous figure someone who's turning up at courtside at Wimbledon or partying on the yacht of of Barry Diller, David Geffen, that that is in part the influence of of Laurence Sanchez. He is he has

been taking helicopter flying lessons. There's a lot of things I think that Um, maybe she has influenced him, But in terms of the CEO role, I think this was probably all always in the in the long term plans, and Andy Jasse has been in some ways as close to a disciple as you can get. He was basis is t a or shadow basically as chief of staff now twenty years ago, and he has been in the

aw s business. But he's also been a member of the S team Andy Jasse, which means he's weighing in on every big decision that has been made at the company, from acquisitions, the acquisition of Whole Foods to the decision on where to put HQ two. So it's not like Jesse has really been a stranger to this bigger part of Amazon, the retail side. He's he has been quite involved in it. Okay, let's just staying with this, Lauren Sanchez changes you know that blew up at Piccaba tabloid issue.

You certainly cover that in the book. But the divorce he that Jeff had with Mackenzie was relatively smooth and she's even gotten remarried ding Bezos has not, whereas Gates, the whole situation blew up and is continuing in the news. Do you feel that from the company's perspective, bezos perspective, the business and world perspective, and those could be multiple viewpoints that this is now in the rear view mirror or people still judging him for this, and there might

be another few shoes to drop. I think folks have pretty much moved on. And it might have been it's It might be a symbol of his absolute sort of mastery of the levers of public relations in that he he so swiftly put it behind him and vanquished his rivals. If you remember about the editor of the National Inquirer

who published that story, um was fired afterwards. You know, Bezos wrapped himself up in the mantle of the Washington Post, used the Saudi enmity toward the Washington Post and towards his ownership of it as as kind of a weapon, and imputed political motives to the Inquirer. And as I show in the book, there really weren't any. The Inquirer was was writing about writing a story that Lawrence Sanchez's brother had had given him and trying to embarrass the

wealthiest person in the world. But Bezos really turned the tables on them. He posted that famous Medium article. Uh, he accused them of extortion, and the Southern District of New York investigated it. The FBI investigated it and and moved on. Didn't didn't really find anything. So but are there other shoes to drop? I mean, I wanna approach this topic with a little bit of humility. It is such a crazy topic. The cast of characters you can't even fathom is so bizarre. It's a hall of mirrors.

I concluded, based on the information that's in the court filings, based on people that I talked to, the testimony of the reporters and editors at the Inquirer, that it really was Michael Sanchez delivering them the text, messages and some images in the fall of two thousand and eighteen, and

that's how they got the story. But if you're asking, could could we find out something unfathomable about the Saudi government's hack of his cell phone, tipping off the paper, or some Trump World connection that we we can't possibly guess, I would say it's improbable, but I want to leave open the possible ality for it, and I hope, hopefully do a little bit in the book, because this story has taken so many twists and turns that you don't know.

But I would say if something else emerged, it would probably contradict the information and the timeline that we already have established in the court files, where the editors and reporters of the National Enquirers say, in September two, eighteen, Michael Sanchez approached them with this tip and they knew nothing about it beforehand, and in fact afterwards have to had to kind of read into the tea leaves because

he wasn't being explicit. So this idea that perhaps they were tipped off severally about the Saudi government would be surprising, It would It would contradict a lot of the established evidence. Let's go back to Bezos and him splitting from the company. In the book, he's really the driving force for innovation. He is the one who's pushing the envelope with the moon shots. He's actually in space. But I'm using that in a business sense. Do you believe he will continue

to play that role? And to what degree is the culture of the company, So if he's not doing it, someone else might. It's a great question. And in the book I am telling the origin stories of products like Alexa and and the Ghost Store, of those cashier less supermarkets, and they all start they typically start with a Bezos idea. And in fact, if the Alexa project starts with an email from Bezos to his deputies, we should build a twenty dollar computer whose brains are in the cloud that's

completely controllable by your voice. And I have the first Bezos whiteboard drawing of the product that becomes the the Echo or an Alexa. And so when you peel back the layers to a lot of these projects inside Amazon, not only do you often find a Bezos idea, but you find that it was his sponsorship, his maniacal attention, his willingness to invest uneconomically in the seeds of an idea and then to and then to follow through spending money, losing money, risking failure. That is kind of key to

the inventiveness. And am on and I think you put your finger on on something interesting and real. They would say, They would preach that Amazon has a culture of invention, that it's decentralized, that employees can move quickly on their own. It's the land of a thousand CEOs. It's all by design.

But I just really wonder if in terms of at least minting new product categories, once Bezos really does step away, and again that might not be for a couple of years he's executive chairman, he'll be involved, but once he really does step away, well, Amazon have the same ability to strike fear and employees to go pursue big things and then obviously competitors when they enter new markets. Well, historically, you know, individuals make a difference. They can't be quantified.

You can get a manager who's an NBA, but someone who's an entrepreneur that tends to be a unique character, but staying with the company for a second. For years, their financials were not good. We're going back almost twenties. Does he the worst numbers? To what degree is the company playing to the street at all? Back when when Bezos wrote that first letter to shareholders, he he kind of called his shot. He said, We're not going to really pay attention to short term metrics. We're not going

to focus on profitability. We're gonna run the company for market share and cash flow. And that promise and the patient investors that enlisted got them through many, many tough years. And in fact, as I write in the book, even in two thousand fifteen, Amazon was either losing money or not very profitable, and Steve Ballmer went on the Charlie Rose Show and said, it's not a real company, Charlie, You've got to make money. That's my Steve Balmber impression.

Bob Um maybe needs some work, and it was because not that Amazon was unprofitable, it was almost hiding its profits. Bezos was taking the winnings from the retail business, the winnings from AWS and funneling them in Alexa and China and India and Prime Video, and that all paid remarkable dividends. And I think recently it's an extraordinarily profitable company. The stock prices zoomed up. It's worth one point six trillion dollars. And no, I don't I don't, but I don't think

the operating posture of the company has changed. I don't think they particularly pay attention to two quarterly numbers. I mean, they've got a pretty professional CFO and finance staff that seems to be good at making projections and then exceeding them. Um. But look, Amazon doesn't provide a dividend, it doesn't buy back its own stock. Right, It's not doing the things that would please more short term investors. It's it really is. It continues to take its its profits and build more

fulfillment centers and buy more Prime Video. It's buying the mg MGM and the catalog there, build more data centers, and basically Amazon's winnings go to fund more Amazon, so it's unlike a lot of other companies. It's still incredibly optimistic about the future, and clearly it has not achieved whatever maturity or end goal that it has for being ubiquitous. And one thing you go deeply into in the book is the organizational structure. You know, Bezos basically has the

guy who shadows him. Sounds like a low position, but it's really a privileged position. Their committees you move up. For those who were uninitiated, can you please describe the structure? Okay, Well, so the technical title is the technical assistant, and Bezos had one. He actually hasn't for a couple of years, which might have been a sign that he was ready for the CEO transition. But the others, the other members of the leadership team, the s team, they all have

their t A S and the s TEA. So everybody there, I didn't know everybody there has a t A too. How far down the totem pole does that go or is that it? I? I believe it's just the the the the s VP is the senior vice presidents, and maybe not even all of them. But it's my understanding that the the the upper echelon of the company. They

all have tas. So for example, Beth Galletti, the senior vice president of HR, she has a technical assistant, Andy Jasey as the head of a w S, head of t A, and of course we'll have one of CEO. So that's interesting. It's a way in which I think Amazon training. It's almost a leadership and informer leadership training program where chosen executives just get bathed in the you know, the mechanics of the senior leaders and the leadership committee

at Amazon. So it's a it's an interesting training program. But you know, think of Amazon, I guess as a little bit of a conglomerate. So many disparate businesses right, so much surface area to this company's it almost makes it hard to categorize. But a senior vice president, you know, tends to kind of oversee one or several of these business units and and they run pretty autonomously. Again the Land of a thousand CEOs, they call them single threaded leaders,

a leader of the team. It's like a little CEO of his own group. And they've got a lot of autonomy. But they report, they push up reports, it up through the organization and those have metrics and operating plans, um competitive analysis, and all those reports filter up to the S team. Oh and by the way, Bob, you're probably familiar that all meetings, all deliberations at Amazon start with

the six page documents. Right. It's a very right. It's a writing culture and editorial culture, and so the documents flow up and then the senior leadership team obviously they make the big strategic decisions, but they also push goals they're called S team goals down through the organization. So a small team in Amazon Fresh, the grocery delivery service, and this is an example from my book, might get a goal to go and produce a eclectic product there there I have an example in the book called the

single cow burger. And in fact, a team gets this directive to go produce a single cow burger, or a burger made from the meat of just one cow instead of a hundred uh, and to do it, you know, by by the next quarterly review. And that's how it works. And there are hundreds of S team goals and they pushed down and then the teams proliferate and and they

report their progress upwards. Now we've seen a lot of history, unfortunately, the last couple of decades with these multi furious companies having these goals, and then the people at the bottom or in the middle are so busy getting the goals that they throw their morals right out the window. Wells Fargo being the best case, because rather than you know, say wait a second, this is wrong, it's unachievable, they say, if I want to move up the company, I want

to get my bonus. So how does that you know? Is that a factor you think at Amazon? Absolutely? And in fact that the history of the company is replete with low level executives in fear for their jobs, desperately trying to meet their goals, moving fast and getting getting to some trouble um. There's a great example in the book with the marketplace segment in the in the well, actually it's it's in the consumable segments, so the fresh groceries and other other products that you might find at

a drug store or supermarket. And and they're running the private label division, so it's it's their job to go create Amazon Basics batteries or Amazon Essential diapers or Solomo potato chips, and essentially they start peaking at the data from the third party sellers to see independent sellers on Amazon, what's doing well for them? Maybe Amazon should copy it.

And of course that is now put Amazon at the center of all sorts of questioning in front of the US Congress and the and the EU and and it's arguably violated some antitrust laws. Well we'll see it. Amazon has said, well, there's a policy against that. The people shouldn't have been managers, shouldn't have been doing it. But I think to your point, it's a decentralized culture with big goals and a culture of fear. And you know when when when you create that environment, bad things can happen.

For those who have worked for Amazon, I'm not talking about those in the warehouse, but those working in white collar positions, they portray a terrible culture where they're working around the clock. There's fear, there's expendable it's the opposite of some of these other companies that you know, put them in a blanket and make them feel warm. Is that your experience? One point two million people work for Amazon.

There there. I think it's just honest to say that there is a wide variety of of experience, and there are people that will sing the harmony of Amazon, and you know, drink the kool aid and loved it there or there for years, and and then their fair number of dissidents, and you hear different things, you know, the executive environment in the white collar offices, and then the warehouses. You want to talk about the warehouses predominantly not yet,

let's just stay with white collar. We'll go back to the house. Well, look, I mean there are there. There are many people that have left there with a lot of pride. And then there are people and I profile a couple of them in the book who felt like it was a cruel culture, that they gave more than they got, that they didn't particularly end up admiring bezos

or the or the leadership team there. I I profiled the woman in this book who who ran the first Prime Day in two thousand fifteen, and she came to sort of think that, like here she was sort of engaged in selling people, you know, insta pots and other appliances that perhaps they didn't need, in a kind of

frenzy of discounting. And the other thing that she really took away from the experience was she had gone to herculean lynx to get this thing out the door in two thousand fifteen, the first Prime Day, and you know, afterwards, they presented one of these six page documents that kind of highlighted everything they did wrong. And so it wasn't

a culture of celebrating success. It was this this just really driven culture of how do we get better, how do we fix the errors that we may And she found that thankless, and she she found the culture somewhat difficult. And the big epiphany for her was when she went home, I think it was a couple of years after the first Prime Day. She had taken on a number of different roles, and she said that she found herself using

Amazon's leadership principles on her mother. They're like the crew of the sort of you know, arduous ways that they talked to each other and get to decisions. And that's when she realized that the culture had changed her a

little bit in the way she didn't like. So, you know, all that said, Amazon remains high on the list of of admired employees or places that you know, when LinkedIn does a survey of places people want to work or enjoy working, Amazon, perhaps the Jeff Bezos consternation now appears high on those lists. He never wanted to create a country club. He told human resource employees that it should be challenging, it should be difficult. He wants people to

do their best work and then move on. I think that's accounts for some of the challenges, the cruelty and Amazon culture. It's also been effective and it attracts a certain kind of person. So I think it's a little bit of a it's it's hard to characterize easily or simplistically. I think it's it's it's complex and it's tough, and that's by design, and that attracts some people, and then after a couple of years or even after the first visit, it repels them. Okay, how many people are on the

S team? You're you're challenging you now because they keep adding to it. But I want to say it's about twenty four people right now, and it's as big as as it's ever been. And that's in part because Amazon has continued to expand and they've got members there who represent Amazon fashion and technical engineers on on the on aws who are members of of the S team. Um, there's a Mike Hopkins at Prime Videos on the S

team now. But in part it's also because This was a lily white and male crew for a very long time, and quite rightfully, I think the employees at Amazon and some of the shareholders and some of the outside observers, you know, made the point that Amazon needs to modernize, and as with many things, Bezos kind of got the message, but got it a little late, and he started to, you know, really add to the diversity of that leadership team. Now,

let's talk about the documents. Six pages. That's not sure. Okay, someone wrote a lot of papers in college and as a writer. Now, to what degree are these Let's say I had to do one. To what degree do I have to write something on an a level both in content and style? And you know what's the require? How much time to people put into this? And if you have a public company, it's not a direct analogy. You know,

they're they're managing the street. It's a huge job. In addition to doing the regular job, is producing these six page reports. Similar you've put your finger on why I think the culture can be so enervating too too many people. The documents take a lot of time. That's often work that moves into the night or the weekends. They're also really collaborative it's a collaborative process. It's not like an employee writes one and then they go and are reviewed

in a leadership meeting. These are deliberated over there, edited, they're revised ad nauseam. I described that the process of revisions during Alexa, with even Bezos weighing in and a kind of perpetual tug of war in these documents about what Alexa would do. So in a way, it's not just an end product that's presented at a meeting, but

it's very much part of the deliberative process. Right figuring out what a new product or service is going to do is in part they hash it out over the writing of these documents, and these are edited and revised and aggregated throughout the organization as they pass up, particularly during the the operating reviews, the bi annual review sessions OP one and OP two during the year, and probably by the time something is presented to the senior leadership team,

it's destroyed at least you know, one team's private life for the period of many weeks and been revised a million times. So it's it's core to how Amazon works. It's peculiar. I know a lot of executives who have left and tried to bring it to other companies with mixed success. And I don't know. I think it's the way that Bezos has kind of trained himself and his leadership team to process information, but I'm not so sure. It's kind of how naturally the rest of us might

might do it. Now. You also portray in the book that Bezos has a jobs and personality to a degree that he will make a snap judgment, say negative things, not worry about the reaction. On a personal level, that he's evolved a little bit. What's going on there? So in the Everything Store, I think, I think, I really write, I think I'm capturing Bezos one point oh a little bit. And and that is in large part the person you describe just withering feedback to employees. Did I take my

stupid pills today? A or um? Is this the A team? Where did the A team go? Just? You know, he had a he had a way, particularly when he got impatient, And I flashed back to that in Amazon and Bound. I have an episode that I believe happens around two thou seven where he's reviewing a document that has a mathematical error in it and he he he identifies the air and he says, if I can't trust this number, I don't know why I can trust anything in this document. And he rips it in half and throws it down

the conference from table and walks out. So there's Bezos one oh. My sense is that either he got leadership assistance or else just realized that he really couldn't do that anymore, that with his stature inside the company, with his public profile, perhaps with modernizing norms around around management, that that wasn't really going to be tolerated. And I think Bezos two point oh was equal measures inspiring and intimidating. Certainly the end result of motivating employees was the same.

He still have a couple episodes in the book will walk out of a meeting when he's not satisfied. But Beazos two point oh I think was a little more circumspect with some of his negative negativity. Now that's not to say at Blue Origin and Space Company, which is has lagged SpaceX Elon Musk's company quite a bit, he doesn't show flashes of that. But my sense from talking to innumerable people was that he he doesn't really unleash it,

and the way perhaps you know you're associating with Steve Jobs. Okay, you described the first thing they do in these s meetings is they read the document. Reading when other people there makes one very self conscious. Do they literally read it from beginning to end or is it just there in the reference and how much time does it take

or was allotted for everybody to read it? They sit there in meditational silence, reading it until everybody has done, then they go, or if it's a steam meeting, they'll go around the room and Bezos and I presume Andy Jessey soon speaks last, and the discussion ensues. But they read it. They read the thing, which is right, incredible six pages long. It seems like it could take a while,

but oftentimes that's what they do. And by the way, Bezos brought that to the Washington Post, and when the senior leadership team there convence with Bezos, they'll present him with a document. Now, my impression was with the Post meetings that he was reading those beforehand, which maybe made their time a little bit more efficient, but that is not always the case, and an Amazon certainly they sit there in silence reading. Okay, let's go to the warehouses.

Let's first, talk about practical You know, I'm at a distance, you're right there in the belly of the beast. It seems to me that certain warehouses were created and certain machinery was installed, which were then abandoned repurposed. Do I have that right in terms of do you mean the and the actual physical machinery the culture they know them physical? Well, no, I think that, um, I mean the the Amazon warehouses have evolved quite a bit. They've become somewhat automated over

the years. Amazon bought of robotics system called Kiva back in two thousand and twelve. Those have been rolled out. But when I in the in the time spend where I start this book two twelve, Amazon still only has a couple of dozen fulfillment centers around the country. Now it has north of eight hundred fulfillment centers, sortation centers, transportation hubs. This company and the operations network has sprawled

out in every direction. So you know, part of the reason that Amazon's tax burden is so low, by the way, is because they're buying all this new equipment and then it's depreciating and Amazon's writing that off on their taxes. So it is um you know, it's it's a unique fulfillment network. They keep adding to it and changing it, tweaking it. Bringing in the robotics is one of the

latest changes. Spawning a transportation network so that it's not ups or the post office delivering packages, but it's Amazon vans and Amazon trucks on the highway. That's another change. So it's it's it's pretty fresh, and I think it's also pretty unique. And I think one of the major vectors of growth for Amazon is going to be, you know, not only delivering more of their packages, but one day maybe offering that as a service to other companies. Let

Amazon be your FedEx and deliver a package. Okay, Now we had a move that one best picture. How many people saw it as another debatable issue, but I saw it. It It was an excellent picture depicting the life of an warehouse person an Amazon. So that what you say in the book is a lot of that has been automated, so the people are not running around, but they're getting repetitive use injuries. You also said there was a policy where kind of like g the least performing people are

are cut off. Then there's issues of compensation. What is the status of work in the warehouses today, well, the the status of work is um and it's still a a a position that is is sought after in many parts of the world. Amazon is one of the fastest growing employers. It's now the second largest employer in in the U S after Walmart. It's the wage Amazon has

has raised it in part because of criticism. It's it's fifteen dollars an hour in most places, seventeen dollars an hour in some, and so comparatively against other kinds of warehouse work. You know, Amazon is seen as an employer of choice, and I think we saw that a little bit in Best Summer, Alabama, where employees voted against a union. Now we'll see if the National Labor Relations Board overturns that because some Amazon's conduct, but the workers voted pretty

definitively not to join in the union. We could get back to what that means. But you know, all all that said, I think that the depiction in Nomad Land I thought was accurate. It was it was kind of criticized for being too nice to Amazon, but there was something about it that resonated with me that you know, this was seasonal work, there was no job security, it was very transactional. You know, the character was coming in

there over the holidays. There was a sense of camaraderie but also a real sense of melancholy and isolation in that work. Um and and look, I mean they didn't have a villainous you know, manager firing the Francis mcdormant character, but there was something about it I thought that was quite sad when particularly when you combined it with the rest of your life. So I think that to me sort of captures it. You know, these vast facilities that have employees, but you know, the work is drowned out

by a chorus of conveyor belts and automation. Uh. The workers are really managed in large part by algorithm them that's monitoring everything they do, that's putting them on performance improvement plans that if if their work suffers, you know, managers that will pipe up if they're taking overly long bathroom breaks and and so look, I mean I think

it's it's it's difficult work, I don't you know. I think it's it's highly valued by people who's whose economic opportunities are otherwise limited, and it's probably you know, remarkable. You know, it's probably good for them that there there is opportunity in parts of the country where the manufacturing base really has declined. But I do think the Besos recently has understood that the you know, the company is getting bad image because of some of the testimonies about

this work and the quality of the work. And that's why he has talked about addressing personally the ergonomic issues are on standing in one place and servicing the robots and and the other other things that people talk about. Hopefully we will see Amazon being more mindful about things

like breaks and mandatory over time. Um. Yeah, and and so like I think, I think the company realizes that there's a lot of room for improvement and that it's public image and large part might depend on whether they can really get on top of that issue. So you mentioned Bessemer Alabama, and you talked about the unionization effort and how it failed. But being such a large company, a lot of the questions permeating America. You wonder to what degree they'll be focused on Amazon. There will be

changed their last mild delivery trucks, that's all contractors. This has been a big issue in terms of uber and lift. So to what degree do you think there's going to be changed which will represent change in America or will

continue to hit in this direction. I think that the Biden administration is recognizing the tech companies have gotten away with something here being able to to use to use one of the technical terms invoked now Fisher their their workplaces to employ, you know, to have an employment contract with their white collar are workers with some of their their fulfillment center workers, but then to basically um outsource some of the some of the you know, the harder things,

the things that the company doesn't want liability over, you know, Uber with drivers certainly, you know, Apple does it with janitors, cafeteria workers. And Amazon has done it, has created a fishered workplace with its drivers. Those are those are contractors that are employed by delivery service providers. When they get

into accidents, Amazon kind of throws its hands up. At the same time, they are driving in vans that have the Amazon Prime Swish arrow on them, they have Amazon uniforms, and in in some cases they're cameras in their automobiles run and put there by Amazon, run by Amazon algorithms that are monitoring their performance and their safety records. So Amazon wants all the elements of control over this workforce and really none of the liabilities and the responsibilities or

for maintaining them. There's a professor at Brandeis University named David Wild who wrote a book called The Fisher at Workplace and who has really done a lot of of work in this area. And I believe he either was nominated or currently is a member of the Biden administration, or at least was being considered for a role. And I think the clear message here is that the Biden administration wants to take a look at this and reevaluate

whether these companies should have more responsibility. And certainly some of the legal rulings are on Uber that we've seen in the US and in the United Kingdom suggests that judges are beginning to view that relationship a little more skeptically. Now, one of the discussions in your book is about the last mile problem and faster delivery. People pay approximately twenty dollars for Prime to get two day delivery. Now it's all about one day delivery and then something you can

get now it's all this convenient. Do you believe this actually drive sales? And what is Amazon believe to what did user of focus on this issue, I think historically fast delivery has always has always shown up in the numbers and been meaningful for Amazon's customers, but I will

I will argue that maybe it's less so now. So in the early days when Amazon devised Prime in two thousand five, guaranteeing two day shipping, allow people to pay once for it and then and then feel like they would get things promptly, really made a big difference, and Prime locked people in, made them big Amazon spenders, and really contributed to some of the amazing growth we've seen

since then. But as I mentioned, Amazon has gone from a dozen or so fulfillment centers two hundreds and hundreds, and there's one not far from where I'm sitting, and there's probably not one not far bob from where you're sitting. And what that means is that to day or one day delivery promise it's it really doesn't mean that much anymore. You might be getting your packages from Amazon pretty quickly,

regardless of whether you're a Prime member. So I suspect that's one of the reasons why they're pivoting so hard now to content and not just buying MGM, but spending eleven billion dollars in two thousand twenty to either license or create video. Basically, Prime was a shipping club, and now it's becoming a kind of all access content club. And so yes, shipping, to answer your question, was important.

But I think it's it's almost something that people are now going Amazon customers are going to take for granted because those fulfillment centers and distribution hubs are now all over the country. Let's talk about the store itself first. Let's talk about the actual image, what you actually see. There's a plethora of advertising, which I find very confusing. Can you give us the history of rise of advertising

on the site? It's really interesting, and I devote a chapter to it in the book, and I call the chapter the gold Mine in the backyard because it was there all along, and and for many years Bezos didn't want us, didn't seem to want to rate it. So probably about fifteen years ago they started very carefully putting banner ads on the site. And Bezos comes to the s team with a list of all the product categories that he doesn't want to touch, and that's things like

alcohol and financial instruments and pharmaceuticals. He just says, no way, not interested, And it basically reveals a kind of underlying skepticism in in you know, basic advertising and in the ways in which companies get advertising. So of course, and that's with salespeople and and staffs, and Amazon higher salespeople, but they always constrained its growth and they're just not interested in that kind of revenue or really in cluttering

up the site with ads. And for many years Amazon is analysts are speculating why doesn't Amazon get into advertising more significantly. And the turning point is when they discover what Google had pioneered a decade before, putting ads in search results, and Amazon starts at the bottom of the search results page, moves them to the side, and eventually Bezos decides that he will let sellers and brands compete to get the top ad on the on the search

results page. And that is the gold mine in the backyard. It unlocks a tremendous opportunity. I would argue that it actually depreciates I think, as you're referring to the customer experience a little bit the search for page. Yeah, but and and actually they see that in the test results, they see that it's going to lower the customers um

success rate and getting what they want. But Bezos explicitly makes a decision that the bounty of this revenue is going to be worth any decrease in the customer experience because that is a whole fuel that he can use to go invest in Hollywood, create new devices, pioneer new product categories, or disrupt new industries. And they make the decision.

And right now, Amazon search results are less a taxonomy and useful result and more a very merchandise page of of pay to play advertisements and Amazon's own private label products. And that's a decision they made. I would argue it wasn't very customer centric, but I think last quarter Baby was like six billion dollars was in the other category on their on their income statement where they hied advertising revenues and and it is one of the fastest growing

parts of the company right now. Now, let's talk about third party sellers. You know how they came up with that? Now, all the rules and constraints in the compete competition from China.

They they celebrate the beginning of their marketplace business as starting in two thousand, but it really was as dusty repository of used items for almost a decade after that, and it was when Bezos is sort of casting about for another leader, feeling like they hadn't achieved very much with the marketplace, and he was asking executives, how would you bring a million sellers onto this platform? And that's actually really interesting and revealing question because there's no way

you can do that hand to hand. It gets back to the salesperson point. You can only build a self service system that where sellers can go and sign up and list their wares on on an Amazon product page and start selling to Amazon's customer base tomorrow. So that was like the intuition build a self service platform where any seller can basically go and sign up. And then a couple of things happened well that that took off. It was very effective. It meant that a whole generation

of successful sellers in the West. But then another thing happened, which is Ali Baba started to expand outside China and a little startup called wish dot Com started to engage in a kind of geographical arbitrage where they were allowing Chinese sellers very close to the factories or in some cases the factories themselves to sell abroad. And Bezos, who never wants to be outflanked, essentially, looked at his senior

executives and said, you guys are on this right. And Amazon went to China almost literally, They started sending teams of executives there, and they extended those self service platforms into China translating from Mandarin, and allowed sellers in China to list their wearers on Amazon. Globally. They consolidated their merchandise in in in in giant freight yacht ships. They moved across the country. They stored it in their fulfillment centers.

Amazon did, and they offered these products to sail to their customers. And it was an explosion of selection. It was a proliferation of bizarre brands that no one's ever heard of. It was a lot of low priced stuff generally, it really I think fueled like the Amazon machine and contributed to a lot greater selection and higher sales. But

it also introduced all kinds of chaos to Amazon. And it's it's apparent every time you search for something, um you know, not just the no name brands or the shenanigans with reviews, but a lot of fraud, a lot of counterfeit, a lot of fake reviews. Some real disasters U like the exploding hoverboards that were that went in the news a couple of years ago, where people were buying these hoverboards with lithium ion batteries at Amazon and they were they were catching fire when plugged in and

burning down people's homes. And that is still those cases are still winding their way through the court system. So in a very Amazon or a very big tech company like way, they started creating new systems to address some of the unintended consequences. And these are like anti counterfeiting tools and tools to preserve the sanctity of the review system.

But they unlocked a lot of that cast that they now have to address by creating a self service global marketplace that became international, and really it was almost like pure unadulterated globalization in terms of its complete tilting of

the of the e commerce playing field. Okay, but ultimately these products come from China and Western sellers people in the United States started bitching they can't compete on price, and then there becomes a whole issue that Amazon is caught in the middle of that you're addressed in the book. I went back. I was trying to figure out how to take the temperature of this massive seller community, and there's no way you can pull them all, and opinions vary,

and there's a lot of happy sellers. Then there's a lot of economic opportunity on Amazon right now. In fact, one recent trend are these these companies that are buying up a lot of sellers and rolling them up to

create bigger entities. But I did think it'd be interesting if I went back to every seller who was mentioned in Jeff Bezos shareholder letter over the years, who were sort of celebrated as as success stories, And so I did that, I think going back to around two ten, and they had all become embittered, they had all they had all lost their enthusiasm. One guy compared to being invited over for Thanksgiving dinner only to realize that you're

the turkey. I thought that was a great quote. And what it suggested to me, again because there are happy Amazon sellers, is that this is a playing fielder frontier that is changing so rapidly that yesterday's winners are not are are sometimes today's losers. That you have to constantly reinvent yourself in much the same way that Amazon does.

If you want to be successful on Amazon, and you know, you have sellers that were devoted to single product categories like paddle boards, and they did a great, great business on Amazon for for a couple of years, and then when the marketplace globalized. You know, they're getting their supply from a Chinese manufacturer, So it kind of makes sense that that manufacturer, someone very close to it would say, why are we going through a middleman in the United States.

Here's the opportunity to go direct, and they do that and the middleman is disrupted. And so that is a common experience on Amazon. They really do celebrate the Super Bowl ads are all about the lights turning on in the Middle America. Would working shop, you know, where an entrepreneurs pursuing his or her dreams on Amazon where the

reality of it, I think it's a little different. I think that it's really now tilted in favor of the entrepreneurs, the businesses that are in in low wage, low tax countries, very close to manufacturers who have some of the advantages. I think that Amazon is availing to to these countries like like China where they they really are and they feel like they're in competition with the Ali Baba's and wishes of the world, and they're trying to capture that

global supply. Now, Amazon keeps changing the rules, tightening the screw. As we sit here, DC is cracking down saying that if you sell on Amazon, you can't sell cheaper elsewhere. You know, what do we know the government, especially when it comes to tech, it's always a few steps behind, you know. Is the Amazon just going to continue to get away with this behavior or is something going to change? Well, let me break this specific case down a little bit.

So this is the Attorney General of Washington, d C. And he's basically putting his finger on um, what's what they call him. The business like most favored nation clauses in the agreements between Amazon and sellers, And what Amazon tell sellers is you can't go to Walmart or your own website or Target and list for lower a lower price than you're listing for on Amazon. And by the way, I'm pretty sure Walmart and other retailers do that as well.

And and Amazon has kind of backed away from that in the past over the past few years, but they still implemented in some non subtle ways. They go and find a product elsewhere for cheaper. They're gonna pull you from the search results. You're it's gonna be harder to buy. And so they really are implement They're implementing the same techniques now. And one thing that we should just say so people understand it is that all these retail sites

are scraping each other. They have automated software. Amazon is looking at Walmart all the time, and vice versa, ad nauseam. All these companies have kind of binoculars trained algorithmic binoculars trained on each other to see where prices are lower. And what the A G Is saying is that, you know, that is in effect of forcing a higher price Amazon to Amazon's forcing a higher price elsewhere and not allowing

its sellers to to discount elsewhere. Look, historically that was legal, and I think the question is as Amazon gets bigger and accumulates power, as it commands an ever larger share of um of of e commerce, does it start to kind of look bad? And as I said, Amazon backed away from a form of it, but still does it in some quieter ways. I think ultimately, my guest Bob is that they probably stopped doing that, you know, just because of the optics. I don't think this antitrust case

is existential in any way. It's about one particular form of conduct, something that everybody kind of historically has done, by which Amazon doing tends to tends to look bad. And I think ultimately that they settle this case. Yes, now we expand this and go back to your first book with the example of diapers dot com. If for whatever reason, Amazon wants to be in your business, it appears they'll just put you out of business, or they

said to Zappos. Now, these are historical issues at this point, you know, either sell or compete, and forgetting that they ultimately got out of the diaper's business after selling after buying the diaper business. A lot of third party sellers say, well, if I have a big business selling battery, selling anything, they're gonna look at my data. They're just gonna make it so they win. And do you believe this is conscious?

This bleeds into the other issue. You know, at the street level, they say that Amazon makes more money selling third party products and it does sell its own products. So what is the viewpoint of the Amazon and all this stuff. Well, let me let me take a couple of pieces there. I mean that the quizzy story of now ten years ago, which I tell me everything stories is interesting. Amazon was in hot competition with the company

that owned Diapers dot Com. Discounted the product until everyone was kind of losing money, forced Quizzy into a sale, bought the asset. I think they feared, like Zappos, this could be one of those companies that could be acquired by Walmart or funded by venture capital and Silicon Valley and become really a full featured competitor. And instead they bought it, and then they allowed it to run independently and then eventually closed it down. They did not get

out of the diapers business though, diapers. They still sell tons of diapers on Amazon dot Com. I thought that they closed that down just you know, they closed down diapers dot com right, they bought diapers dot Com. They allowed it to run independently, and eventually they did shut down that website. But on Amazon dot Com, not only can you find all manners of Pampers and Huggies and and Amazon Amazon's own private label products. There they do

a brisk business and diapers. They just don't have a separate website anymore. For example, Zappos is still zappos dot Com. You can still go and buy sneakers there. You can also buy sneakers on Amazon, so they sometimes buy these other companies two uh to, I think the close off future opportunity for them, right and and look, I think that the government has looked at that. The House Antitrust Subcommittee devoted paragraph to that. And so of course my

book was was my first book was cited there. The way in which they Amazon conducted itself back then to pursue rivals, I think was was extraordinary. They cannot get away with that anymore. It's a it's a much larger and more scrutinized company. And in fact, I actually don't think acquisitions like like uh Quidzy or Zappos, if they were doing those types of acquisitions today, they would necessarily get them through the FTC. MGM is a different matter

which we could talk about UM. But then you talked about then you then you talked about UM. The marketplace of vendors on Amazon dot com and whether Amazon peaks at their data to put out their own private label products, and my book shows that they have. You know that that that managers did that. There was a policy against it, as we talked about, they did it anyway because they were trying to meet their goals, and Amazon has to answer some really hard questions about that. Again, they are

now under the microscope. I wouldn't be surprised if there are some very strict policies if the cookie jar is kind of nailed chat right now in terms of access to that third party data. You know, it doesn't excuse

the conduct that happened in the past. Amazon likes to say that, well, if you go into a Costco, it's all Kirkland, if you go into a Walmart, Walmart, their private label brands are predominant and actually private able, and Amazon's a small percentage of their overall sales, it's actually quite prominent in search results. So it's another thing that Amazon's going to have to answer for the fact that they are quite explicitly in competition with their own not

just their own brands, but their own sellers. They're a platform, They're a retail store, and then increasingly they're they're a white label manufacture because a lot of those products and I think a large amount of their sales growth is coming from private label. Let's talk about a WS Amazon Web Services. Uh, it starts, it's the only game in town. They price it relatively reasonable. There's first mover advantage to

degree people are paying attention. All of a sudden under the Trump administration, the Defense Department gives a huge contract to Microsoft, then it's reevaluated, then Microsoft gets again the most recent stories. They might lead it up. But what is the future of the web services industry and Amazon's police in it. It's incredibly competitive now. Um, Amazon is in the lead, but Microsoft is nipping at its heels. Google's a little bit farther behind, and then you have

IBM and Oracle and innumerable other players. These are the largest technology companies in the world, and of course Microsoft by market cap is larger than Amazon. So I think there's obviously tremendous growth in cloud computing the way that you know governments have embraced it. And then the the scramble for for contracts like the Jedi contract, which Amazon loss to Microsoft during the Trump years, but which might be getting reawarded soon depending on on on the legal

outcome of Amazon's protest. This is the direction of enterprise software and enter enterprise computing, and Amazon has been a pioneer, but it's no longer the only one. So if if you're asking about you know, a a legislator or regulator's ability to make a case that Amazon has a dominant position in cloud computing. I think that right now that

there's a pretty weak case there. What what's more interesting or maybe some of the very opaque ties between AWS and Amazon retail and that's really not all that well understood, and it's something that the House Antitrust Subcommittee last year express frustration within their ultimate report, like how do why are these units together? How do they nurture each other? Actually a lot of people internally don't even quite know,

but I suspect that they really help each other. That retail plays a wholesale price for for AWS, and AWS has this available beta tester for new services that allows it to scale very quickly, and that this is you know, have been a very productive union for both sides of the company, and that Bezos and any Jesse would would not willingly separate them. Let's go into entertainment. Yes, this

became a benefit with Prime. So this is a different model from the competitors, certainly Netflix, which is, you know, owns its own vertical so what do we know? The policy is different. They'll allow almost anything on their site, their interface is non attractive. They don't have huge success, although it's hard to tell. Also, adding in the music thing, once you start bundling, they are beating the ten dollar price that other companies have. They don't real they don't

really break out a lot of information. But is it just a matter of time till they get entertainment right or really they don't have the right people in place, You know, I would I would say that I'm not so sure. I agree with the premise. You know, Amazon actually, in a very typical way, has a lot of ways to win. And we look at Prime Video and I totally agree that the menu that shows up on the screen is sometimes bizarre and what am I looking at?

And why can't I find anything? And the original original content that they've produced from their Hollywood division has more mrs than hits. There there have been some great things like Fleabag and the marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Transparent. That's kind of niche programming, but then Jack Ryan maybe has done a little better, and The Boys I found entertaining, and then they some great movies. Um, I love the sound of Metal. I don't know if you saw that one, Bob, Yeah,

so good. Bore at two was horrendous and somehow people have watched and I couldn't watch it. I know I'm not a huge fan of his, but I where he was going on an intellectual level. I just brilliant. Okay, So but here's here's the point that's trying to make. Amazon doesn't That's part of their strategy. They also have the set top box, the Fire TV stick, probably one

of the most successful streaming products alongside Roku. And then you look at Disney Plus and you look at Netflix, and I actually think elements of Apple TV Plus, if not the whole thing. Those running a ws amaz on a loan in this scramble to create an entertainment future, is operating at every level of the stack and succeeding at a at a lot of those places. So it has a lot of advantages here. It's got a lot of resources in cash that it's devoting. It's spent eleven

billion dollars on Prime Video in two thousand twenty. Now they're paying for for MGM, so they're going to deepen their catalog and they're getting access, you know, depending on how you view the MGM library to a lot of I P and potential for franchises and spinoffs. So I don't think that Amazon's foray into Hollywood has been really we could say it's been unsuccessful. In fact, in a lot of ways they're pioneers. Maybe in the Flasher Flasher aspects of it, they've had a checkered history, But I

do think it's a matter of time. The resources that this company is able to bring to bear, the deep pockets, the fact that they really kind of don't explicitly charge for Prime video, that it's wrapped up into this nebulous idea of prime which includes UH ship and includes access to music and kindle. People don't really think about what they're paying for this as in the same way that they might for Netflix every month. So I think Amazon actually has a lot of tools at its disposal to

ultimately really succeed. Now, if you look at the purchase of MGM, you know this is a whole separate issue the percent perception of the Amazon's marketplace share relative to the reality. But under conventional as employed in the last couple of decades uh antitrust laws, it's hard to see a problem with the purchase of MGM, But it does

appear that they overpaid for it. But it's just that these companies, just like Microsoft buying Skype in Nokia, they have so much damn money that it just doesn't make a difference. Well, I mean, Senate, we're hearing Senator Klobascher and other politicians grumble about this, But ultimately the FTC or the d o J is going to ask is

this limiting? Is this still limiting competition? And when you look at at the streaming landscape that we just talked about, there are lots of alternatives in terms of studios and content. MGM is not a big player, So I think it's really hard to make the argument that this deal is anti competitive. I think Amazon will get it approved despite

probably a hostile political environment. Um. And then the second party of your question, which is now promptly escaped me, well, the perception of Amazon in terms of market Here people always saying Amazon is the enemy, but then they trot out statistics, what percentage of retail they have and all these other things to try to prove that, no, that's

not true. Right, Critics are trying to make the case that Amazon is a monopolist, and the challenge there is that it operates in such large markets, and so we talked about cloud computing and and the very big competitors

it has with with Google and Microsoft. And then in in retail, when you look at you know, Walmart and Target and Costco and the large supermarket chains, it's gonna be tricky for regulators or lawmakers to write law or to to make judgments that applied just to Amazon that don't apply across the board, and that don't end up maybe even augmenting Amazon's power. I'll give you an example.

If you were to say tomorrow that retailers weren't allowed to sell private label products or compete with their own vendors, that would cripple a company like Costco, probably probably a Walmart as well, certainly the drug store chains. And Amazon might actually get more profitable because suddenly, uh, those vendors or marketplace sellers that found their listings eclipsed by Amazon products would be back there paying fees and advertising to get in front of customers. So, I you know, Bezos

says he welcomes scrutiny. I think, and obviously they're deploying quite a large lobbying force. I think there are lots of outcomes that end up solidifying Amazon's power, you know, rather than reducing it. And then to the original point, it's not a monopoly and that monopolis in the traditional sense. So I think it's gonna be challenging for regulators to

make that case. Let's talk about hardware. They have the firephone disaster, you mentioned the firestick successful, you have the fire tablet, you have the Kindle, you have the Alexa hardware products. What do we know about Amazon traditionally? One point, oh, is kind of crappy, and then they get it better. They never get it to the level of Apple, but they certainly get it to a serviceable level. Now Amazon's

Kindle is crippled by the Apple antitrust case. So when something like that happens in Amazon, is there a conscious because you know, Basil's philosophy was, we're gonna lower prices, sell more books. We're gonna blow this world up to the advantage of publishers. Okay, so when they put a roadblock in, I mean, is the Kindle busines, Well, that's a business and it'll run, but you know, we're not

focused thing on that anymore. I feel like the Kindle is like the children from a child from a former marriage, right that it was, it was the center of it was the apple of his eye ten years ago. And now they have moved on and the new kids are Alexa and uh, you know maybe the the the Echo buds and this whole other ecosystem of products. So they it's it's interesting unlike Apple, which has this limited span

of products that they cherish and nourish and keep updating. Yeah, they Amazon moves on right They produced a lot of stuff. It's not to say they're not updating the Kindle right all the time or the Kindle Fire tablet, but you get the sense that it's a little bit of of an afterthought right now. The company tries a lot of things,

a lot of strange things. Did you remember hearing about the Halo wrist band which was reading people's moods or the Alexas spectacles that I guess is maybe gathering some diagnostic data because it came from their healthcare group. And then you've got the Echo buds. It's the second generation is out now, and it was just an example that's on my mind. This thing is brutally reviewed on Amazon itself. It's like two and a half stars, and yet they keep and of course people don't even know about it.

It's and also ran to to obviously Apple's product, and yet they keep iterating it's like they're bull headed in the forward momentum. And Prime Day is coming up next month, and I guarantee you Amazon will discount the heck out of this thing. And they, you know, they've got so many advantages, including including controlling the retail outlet, that they kind of muscle their way to success. And we'll see if Amazon cares about the the Echo buds and another

ten years, or even Alexa for that matter. But you're you're right in which it's it's not a very refined strategy, right. They try a lot of things. Do you remember the Alexa microwave? Oh god, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean we haven't heard much about that, or there was an Alexa wall clock. Yeah, they try a lot of things. They orphaned some of them and they move on. Okay, talking

about physical retail, we know from Warby Parker. You know a lot of people you can sell them the glasses by shipping to them, but a lot of people just want to try them on, so they open shops. How big a deal? I mean, first, here's the Amazon stores. You know, he started sort of his bookstores where they have hus be very little inventory, then they buy whole foods. Are they ever going to get this right? And you talk in your book about the no cashier shopping and

all the development that took. Is there a big play here or are they going to play around and move here too. There's a massive play and they are moving here. Essentially, ninetent of all retail is still conducted in physical stores. Bezos has known that forever. He always said he wanted Amazon to do it. Open a store, but do something differently.

And ten years ago they came upon this idea of putting cameras in the ceiling and censors in the shelves and automatically charging people instead of having them wait in front of a cashier. And they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on that. It could be the most expensive initiative and Amazon history. And they trialed them in the seven eleven stores, where by the way, the sandwiches

are got awful and and it was seemingly unsuccessful. But what it was was basically a technology trial, and they've been they've been iterating on it, and now we're seeing them stamp out full size Amazon Fresh supermarkets with either the ghost store technology, the cameras and the sensors, or these dash carts where it's a shopping cart that you roll around and as you put a product in, it

scans it and automatically churches you. So they think they have a novel way to enter physical retail, and I suspect we're at the very earliest stages of seeing a massive expansion where every shopping center, every every mall, every retail set of retail outlets in our communities are going to have at least one Amazon store of some kind, and then Amazon can use those as kind of fulfillment nodes, maybe to have people order and collect packages or maybe

even like a delivery station in the in the back, as well as capturing that of retail that happens in physical environment. So no, I don't think they're giving up. They haven't made a lot of progress recently, but the fact that we're seeing more and more of those ms on Fresh supermarkets tells me that we're still really at the beginning of this. Okay, you have the long history

delineated in your book. I have to ask you, does this ghost store scanning work or they just have built in shrinkage because we all know at first serious the example, oh great concept doesn't work, but as time Alexa has gotten better by the same token. Can't have a conversation with it exactly. Yeah, No, you're right, alexis still a moron.

And the it does seem like the tech companies always sort of overestimate the progress of of their AI systems, and and no doubt that the Ghost Store is an example of that, where they're they're mischarging or not understanding certain transactions. But instead of shrinkage, I think they've got create cadres of of workers, maybe contract workers, probably overseas, who when there's a moment of ambiguity will be reviewing

the footage and making a manual determination. So I don't know the extent to which they still rely on that that would be a worthy focus of follow up. But um I do think that I I don't know there are employees who are concerned early on that the ghost Star wouldn't scale because they had these crews that had to monitor footage. Let's pull back the lens of the landscape. What do we know The guy from Quidzy ultimately went to Walmart during uh COVID Amazon posted amazing numbers. The

most recent Walmart. Walmart numbers are not that good. Let's just talk about the business it's in, which is online retailing. Will anybody ever compete, certainly in in in the US and in parts of Europe, It's hard to imagine who that would be. I mean, I I do think there's room for competitors. I think Walmart's e commerce business has has been growing, as many have during the pandemic. But

Amazon has such a tremendous headstart. eBay was so mismanaged for so many years that no, I I think it's hard. It's hard for anyone to get to that same scale. Now companies like Shopify are showing, you know, of carved out tremendous pieces of it, and Shopify might be one of the best success stories of the past five years

in the technology world. But then you leave, you leave the US in Europe, and you do find countries where Amazon struggled, you know, India, it's it's run headlong into a local competitor, flip Card that was acquired by Walmart, and then Reliance Industries, which seems to have the backing of the of the Modi administration. And you go to different markets, and there's always this kind of nationalist champion.

So I think, you know, and its oldest Marcus, Amazon has a little bit of a hammer lock, and you know, but but the world is large, and it still has There's a lot of countries where Amazon is not even in and there are a lot of countries where it's player number two or three. And to what degree is a first move or advantage in scale, and to what degree is it's special sauce referencing what we did before with Bezos and whether that's you know, dribbled down into

the culture. Well, I mean, Amazon was very early in China and it lost, It lost big and lost billions of dollars. So I don't necessarily think it's the food. First mover advantage has been important all around. But I think you're asking, okay about the keys to Amazon success in general. Yeah, okay, so Amazon wasn't the first online store,

but it was very early on. It was in large part pays us taking advantage of the capital environment in the in the late nineties and dreaming big and feeling like books books were just the beginning and embracing you know,

kind of destiny. Destiny is the everything store and it was Yeah, it was Bezos betting big and basically sinking as profits into new product categories, and being willing to rethink, completely rethink the operations arm and creating a warehouse network that was tailored not for regular retail but for e commerce, and hiring the right people and being so public and

bizarrely charismatic. These were all elements in the success story, as well as good timing and then probably just some luck in terms of them raising money during at the very beginning of the dot com bus that allowed them to navigate the shakeout when a lot of companies went out.

But you know, you look at the constant reinvention of the company by Bezos, Aws the Kindle, Alexa, now Prime Video, and I think it's hard to avoid concluding that there's something about Bezos and his willingness to look around the next hill change the company, bet his winnings again on a new product category, reinvests his ambition, his competitiveness, his savv nous about technology that's been key to its success. Now in the music business, a truly legendary managers someone

who does it twice. So what do we know, Bezos, who's built this the guy who ran the Apple Store for Steve Jobs, reaching success went to J. C. Penny couldn't do anything. If we plucked Basils out of the Amazon and put him in another company that was struggling, would he be able to reinvent it? Is he a wonder kind? I think he has been in terms of amplifying and building on Amazon's advantages. And the closest that I can come to that hypothetical is Bezos at at

Blue Origin, the space company. Different company, different environment, different industry, different set of competitors, and I would argue he hasn't been very successful there. Now. In part that might be because it hasn't really received a lot of his focus. He's been funding it, but he's been managing it from afar, and in part I think sowing some dysfunction because of that choosing to who who to lead the company and then kind of changing leaders halfway through, viewing Elon Musk

competitively and then amplifying his ambitions. So maybe it's a poor example, but I think it's a way of saying that the magic isn't as in broadly applicable that in Space and with Blue Origin, he hasn't succeeded in the same way and at least the way you might think now. At the Washington Post, he took over a paper and decline and he really revived its fortune. So yeah, I think there's probably something that's broadly applicable about the Bezos

management style. But the guy has spread very thin now, and I don't think he's given the care and attention to blue origin that it's required. Okay, you've been following the landscape for decades here, so what do we know? Twenty years ago is all about hardware? Today it's about software. Up until about ten years ago, every month, if not more frequently, there was a new product, whether it be hardware software. That is not the case. We've had consolidation

such we have the Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Apple. Maybe you can throw Microsoft in there. Being this here, where's this all going? I think we're living in an age of oligopoly. I think at it's hard to evaluate these

companies alone. They you know, they they compete with each other really not even on the margins, but in significant business categories and um they you know, because of their their fierce competition with each other, you know, they they're they're moving quickly, They're they're in competition for the best engineers. They're throwing elbows. I worry that it's blotting out a

lot of the opportunity and entrepreneurial opportunity. Um that's that's been so historic to America's success in the vibrancy of Silicon Valley. So you know, it's we're entering a really interesting period where we have a presidential administration now that's committed to reviewing the conduct of these companies. I think we're gonna see a lot more high profile antitrust lawsuits against the big tech companies. It'll be interesting to see

the government to grapple with their complexity. And it's all, of course so fast moving, and these legal processes stretch out over many years. Is and these companies change every every year. So I don't know, I mean, I think I think it'll it'll be it'll be interesting to watch. But I see, you know, these big tech companies in you know, continuing to grow and in some ways probably sapping some of the vibrancy from the economy and some of the opportunity for other companies. Now we talk is

the Internet mature. What I mean by that is if you can look at certain things I'm a big skier, music, etcetera. There's an element, there's a craziness when it develops and then you have a business, but it's relatively regimented and managed. You talk to other people and they'll say the power of the smartphone is so strong computer in your hand that the runway is incredibly long. So what's your viewpoint and what might we see on the horizon technically or

with the Internet. I think it's probably the wrong move to pad against the Internet, right it's I mean, just in my professional career, I've seen the thing explain what over over twenty five years and showed no signs of slowing down. It does always seem like new kind of transitions or new technologies are around the corner. The smartphone gave us, you know, almost ten years of of runway. My last book was about Uber and Airbnb and how

they basically built their businesses on on the smartphone. Um. The fact is people are spending more time on their devices, on their computers, interacting with the world. You know. Cloud computing feels like a change, a revolution in its infancy. Still, so I don't I don't see any reasons to think that anything any anything any of our the slow creep into UH technological society is slowing down. Okay, then drilling down a little bit more to your work directly. You

work for Bloomberg, and what do we know? A lot of media companies have been hurt by the lack of advertising of during COVID. Bloomberg makes most of its money from its UH quote machines and information machines that brokers use. Bloomberg was a three sixty degree news company, then they refocus it to business. Bloomberg will last. But being in this publishing news industry, and I'll make it pretty broad. Our physical magazines going to survive? Is there a hope

for local newspapers? I'm not asking for you to be optimistic, but where is it going? There? Are we going towards a winner take all landscape in news too. I'm extremely concerned about the health and the future of local newspapers. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, and I grew up reading the Cleveland Plane Dealer and it's where I really got my interest in news. That and reading Newsweek magazine actually, which

ended up being my first employer. And you know, recently the sale of the of the Tribune Company assets to private equity, and just the deteriorating health of local newspapers and media outlets and how that's ended up polluting the democratic process. It's really worrisome and I don't see, really

it's hard to be optimistic about that, you want. I mean, what Basos has done with the Washington Post has been remarkable, and it would be great to see him or a billionaire like him, pursue a kind of Carnegie like philanthropy. You know what Carnegie did with the libraries? Was it? It was Carnegie? I guess it was Okay, great, I'm not embarrassing myself with my history there uh to to

do something like that for local newspapers. And unfortunately that that billionaire philanthropist is not has not made him or herself known yet. And meanwhile newspapers are languishing, the business model is deteriorated, and the democratic process I think has been polluted because of that. As for magazines, you know, we're we're still I think, and now the second or third decade of a slow transition, and properly, these properties have to become digital and they have to build events,

businesses and create new relationships with there. There they're subscribers and I think we've seen there have been remarkable examples of magazines. I'm gonna just gonna pick one The Atlantic that I think it's really successfully made the transition. Business Week I think is another good example. It's now inside the Bloomberg empire. It nourishes what we do at Bloomberg in so many different ways. But it's still a time of transition. And the old the the the physical ads

and the actual subscriptions. Of course, you know, the analog print subscriptions, as you would expect, have continued to deteriorate. That's not changing soon. So the magazines that are going to survive are going to have to really complete their their transition. I've written two books on Amazon. What is your personal focus? What is the subject that you're putting paying attention to going forward? I mean, right now, Bob, I'm still locked in the Amazon jail. The book came out, Um,

you know I'm talking about it. I I don't actually see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of I mean, the challenge of the Amazon is they make news every single day or every single week, and you know it's it's MGM or it's a shareholder meeting. Or it's something with the workplace or Bezos news, and so there there is a near future for me of continuing to to blab about Amazon and my books. But longer term, I run a tech team at Bloomberg. It's

I'm extraordinarily proud of it. It's you know, we cover all the big tech companies and investors and trends, and so that gives me a great purview to kind of see all these changes in our society and our business landscape and try to find the stories I'm interested in. I have no idea what that is next. I have to kind of lick my wounds from from this ordeal and then hopefully I'll find something that interests me. Thanks

so much, Brad. This has really been great. Thanks for taking the time to tell the story, Bob, It's been a pleasure. I also want to say for people, these are easily read books. They're written as stories. These are not hardcore business books where your eyes rolled back into your head. And if you want to know what Amazon is doing, Brad literally is the guy in these books? Are the definitive statements. I just want to emphasize that's not a hype. I've certainly read both of them. That's

why I wanted Brad on the podcast. Until next time. This is Bob Blessed sex