Welcome back everyone. We have an exciting episode to get into today. First of all, Jeff Bezos last week gave an hour long interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, which is rare. He does not do these interviews that frequently. In fact, he he does them incredibly rarely. So it's kind of a cool thing to see Jeff Bezos sit down with someone like Andrew Ross that, that he asks all the right questions. Andrew gave a great interview to Bezos.
In fact, I would I would go out on a limb and say this is one of the best interviews that I've ever seen. I'm an executive in years. It's just one of the best and I have to go through it. We have to highlight some of the best takeaways from this interview. Like 1 little little thing. I'll spoil just a bit of it. Jeff Bezos is still working at Amazon. Like a lot, a lot more than I thought.
I realize that he's the chairman and he's he, he holds an important position, but it seemed like he was kind of disconnected, like he's not doing much there. That's not the case according to what he's saying. He is still actively involved daily at Amazon and there's a lot of other Nuggets of information that we'll be going over in today's episode. We also have a a bunch of other news to get into as well. Stocks are going crazy right
now. 2 days ago I made the video where I went over Google's cheap. That was the title of it. I'm putting $10,000 more into the stock now. I'm not a market timer. I'm not trying to use some technical analysis to time the bottom, but Google stock is up around 9% since the publishing of that video just two days ago. Google is going up because the company is high quality, it's cheap and it's it's getting a lot of good news, just a good news barrage over the past couple of days.
There's a lot of things impacting Google's price that we'll be talking about today. We also have a Netflix going up to $939. They just got a big raise in price and target price from JP Morgan. We'll be looking at that analyst note and we have Costco going up another percent. It's just slowly climbing throughout the entire year and it's finally above $1000 per share. So I'll be going over what I'm going to be doing to celebrate Costco surpassing $1000 per
share. So we have all of this to get into, plus the interview. It's a lot to talk about. Let's go ahead and jump in now. To start off, before we jump into the full length interview with Jeff Bezos, I want to take a look at My Portfolio in the market, just to give an update of how things are going over the past couple of days. Primarily, I made a video recently about Google, and it's
not the first one I've made. I've been talking about Google for some time, a company that I think is a unique situation where it's incredibly high quality, but it's being priced with a lot of negative sentiment. Now, sentiment is something that's fickle. Sentiment can change on a dime and a lot of times the price drives the sentiment. When the price is going down, people view the company mentally in their head negatively. It follows the price. So it when the price goes up,
you see the opposite happening. As the price of Google goes up, the sentiment is getting more positive. People are now viewing it from a different lens. When we look at what's happened with Google over the past couple of days, one is that they are they're trading higher because of Google's quantum computing chip. Now, when I looked at this news, the quantum computing chip, I saw as an iterative positive development from Google.
I don't quite know the practical applications in terms of how they're going to productize it, but there are some potential applications they have in the future training AI for one of them. So this is something unique that Google is leading on. Their quantum computing is incredibly competitive. There's other companies that are nowhere close to them, so that's one important thing. And that bumped up the stock a little bit.
And then we also had other news today that made the stock go up even further, the news that GM is exiting their robo taxi market. GM was a robo taxi competitor with Tesla and Waymo. They had one called Cruise. So G Miss Cruise was their robotaxi efforts. They're going to try to compete with Waymo.
They are abandoning this effort. It says that GM Motors will no longer fund its cruise division robotaxi development, the company said Tuesday. Now they have put billions of dollars, billions into this effort and they got essentially nowhere. Like they don't have much to show for it. There wasn't cruises driving around the roads, taking fare, making progress. And so they're just scrapping the project. So you can see how that could impact Google a little bit.
Waymo now has even 1 less competitor. You also see Tesla trading up today as a result as well. So with these two pieces of news and Google being a great company that's been undervalued, the stock is now racing up towards $200 per share. I've thought for a while it's inevitable Google will get to $200 per share. It's just a matter of time. Everything that I look at for company is stacked in the right direction.
There'd have to be something majorly bad with Google, something way out of left field to take this company down. So right now, this move makes sense in My Portfolio. When I look at it in the passive income portfolio, we're seeing major gains today. Google is a a huge weighted position now in this portfolio. If we go to tech care, we take a look at Google, it's now a $51,000 position and the past two days have taken it from a flat position to a $6000 gain.
Google's also a company that I own in my secondary portfolio, the Story Fund. If we look at the Story fund, this one is also racing up to all time highs. It's doing really well. But Google's also a huge position in this portfolio. It's my third largest one. It makes up a 17% way to position. It's a $50,000 position with $20,000 in the green. And a lot of that has come just in the past two days. To me, this move up in Google is totally justified.
It's warranted, it's expected, and it was predictable. Now, it wasn't predictable that it was going to happen this quickly in two days, but I think on the longer term, it was predictable that Google is undervalued and it's going to go up. The next one that I look at here is Netflix. Netflix is now up another 2.8% on the day, another $26. It's racing closer and closer to $1000 per share. It's one of the best performing stocks in the entire market this year with gains that surpassed
100%. So it's been a a double this year. Incredible performance from Netflix and the great thing about this stock is I don't think it's stopping here. It's one that I feel very comfortable holding right now. I would tell you if I thought the stock was stretched, that faced a lot of headwinds, if I think it's a good time to take gains with Netflix, I don't. I think it's also inevitable that this company is going above
$1000 per share. When we look at why Netflix is moving upwards, we see that there are now analysts getting on board with the story and raising their price targets. The analyst at JP Morgan wrote that they see subscriptions growing, quote supported by the strong content, helping the organic growth and ramping ad tear contribution. Every part of Netflix's business is doing incredible this month. The content slate for Netflix is completely stacked.
They have live NFL games, they have Squid Game season 2, they have movies that are highly anticipated like Carry On and a bunch of other stuff. There's so much stuff they're doing this month. I think they're going to just grow and grow. So I look at Netflix and it's another one that doesn't surprise me. When we look at both Netflix and Google going up the way that they are, it's pushing the Story Fund in aggregate higher and higher. Now the Story Fund is far above
the S&P 500 and the QQQ sense. Inception. When I benchmark the performance, the story fund is at 84.7%. The benchmark is at 53%. The gap in performance equates to $48,000, so this portfolio would be $48,000 less had I just thrown this money in the market. Now of course, we can't forget about another company, Costco here. Costco is just a silent continual compounder. It's a company that it's fun to look at from time to time. Everybody would like to own it.
Nobody buys into it because it's just too expensive all the time, which I understand. But this stock continues to grow alongside it's incredible fundamentals. It now surpassed $1000 per share, which I think is a good landmark. That's such a cool landmark for this company. When we look at their performance, cost goes up 54% this year. But the incredible thing is they accomplished this capital gains or appreciation while paying out a year's worth of income and
dividends. They paid out $16.00 in a special dividend, so they're dividing out huge amounts of money while growing in capital appreciation. The combination of which is incredible gains. This year Costco is one of my largest positions. It's an $86,000 position, 51,000 of that being gains. So the majority of this company is just from gains. It's one of my longest held holdings.
I invested in Costco day one of creating My Portfolio all the way back in 2017. I bought my first share of Costco two years before starting my YouTube channel. Now that Costco's reached $1000 per share, I feel like the only appropriate way to celebrate this landmark is by having a hot dog and drink. Now, of course, we can't forget about Amazon. Amazon is up 2.2% today. It's up to 230. Ever since Jeff Bezos stopped selling shares in Amazon, the stock has been allowed to soar.
Now we get this breakout towards the end of the year. This is being driven both by Jeff Bezos not selling and by their AI announcements. Amazon showed that every single part of their business, every part of it, is being impacted by artificial intelligence in a very meaningful. So investors are now viewing this through the lens of an AI Dominic growth story. Amazon is a $97,000 position, $39,000 in the green. It hasn't performed quite as well as Netflix, but it's getting there.
And Amazon has a lot of levers to turn to make this stock go up even further. Now there's more companies I could highlight that are doing particularly good right now, but the moral is the same. If you're buying dominant, high quality companies, ones that have incredible business models, they're asset light, they have lots of levers to turn for profitability. They can push their stock higher
and higher. If you're buying those type of companies on a dip when other people don't want to own them, when there's negative sentiment, time is on your side. So whether or not you buy it perfectly or you get a little bit off with your buy, wait long enough with a high quality company and typically things work out. Now let's go to move on and talk more about Amazon. We have an interview here from Jeff Bezos and this is one of the very rare interviews he gives.
The first thing he talks about in the interview is Trump. Now, I know Trump is a divisive topic, but it's interesting to get these leaders of business perspective on Donald Trump because in this case, you have Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. The Washington Post has a history of being very critical of Donald Trump. But the Washington Post made an interesting decision this last election cycle. They made the decision to not
endorse a candidate. Now, they didn't endorse Trump, but they just didn't endorse anyone. They wanted to remain apolitical. And that was a decision primarily made by Jeff Bezos. He's the owner. He said. We're not going to endorse anyone because we want to clean up our reputation and remain impartial. So here's Jeff Bezos explaining the situation and specifically what he's looking forward to with President Trump.
It hadn't come up before and, you know, we just decided that, you know, it wasn't going to help for well, first of all, it wasn't going to influence the election either way. You know, there we we didn't believe there's no evidence that newspaper endorsements influenced elections or no independent voter in Pennsylvania at that time was going to say, oh, is that what the Washington Post thinks? Well, then I'll do that. So that wasn't going to happen.
And at the same time, you know, we're struggling with the issue that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very difficult and significant loss of trust. And, you know, the trust surveys have been done for many decades now. And the media has been going down in those surveys for decades. They've always been able to hang on to the one, you know, small, positive, but they're always above Congress. This year they lost even that, falling below Congress, which is
not easy to achieve. Congress was thrilled, by the way, not to be at the very bottom of the list. And so we just decided that the the pluses of doing this were very small and it added to the perception of bias. You know, the newspapers and media in general, if they are going to try and be objective and independent, they have just passed the same requirement that a voting machine does. They have to count the votes accurately and people have to believe that they count the votes accurately.
Both requirements are just as important for a voting machine. This point is incredibly accurate. It's not enough just for the Washington Post to be accurate with their reporting, but they have to have people believe that they're accurate what they're reporting. If they're reporting accurate truths but nobody believes them, then it doesn't really matter. They're not accomplishing their goal. So they have to build credibility, and that's what he's talking about.
The big thing he's trying to do here is get rid of the perception of bias and build credibility. And media is similar and there is a there's a strong person. Not all of it is the media's fault, there's a lot of a lot of external factors involved too. But where we can do something, we should. OK, let me ask you and you, you know that there was blowback. I just want to read you. This is Marty Baron was your former editor of that paper.
He said this is cowardice with democracy as its casualty. David Remnick said if Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements, all of them, you could argue the case one way or another, But he was effectively suggesting that given this scenario, with the timing of it. Look at if I had had the prescience to think about this topic at all two years before, that would have been better for perception reasons.
But in fact, we made this decision. It was the right decision. I'm proud of the decision we made and it was far from cowardly because we knew there would be blowback and we did the right thing anyway. It's not cowardly when he's making a decision that he knows he's going to be heavily scrutinized and criticized for, but he feels it's the right decision anyway. That is the opposite of cowardice.
Cowardice would be doing whatever is easiest, whether whatever has the path of least resistance, wherever you're going to get the most acclaim and agreement and the least amount of pushback. Cowardice would just be to endorse a candidate because you've done it in the past and it seems like it's going to ruffle some feathers if you don't do it again. And his other point that he highlights here, I think is what separates a lot of good business leaders from very not good business leaders.
He says that that he knew it was the right decision, so they made the decision even though they knew they'd get pushed back. What he didn't do is he didn't take the temperature of the room and see what the the popular opinion was. He didn't try to decide based on what was most popular, what would be most acceptable, what other people's opinions of it would be. He just did what he thought was the right decision, regardless of the immediate blowback.
Jeff Bezos is managing the Washington Post the way that he's had success in Amazon, by making the right decisions, not the decisions that lead to the path of least resistance and the least amount of criticism. The Washington Post got a tremendous amount of criticism, hundreds of thousands of people. They cancelled their subscription to it because he refused to endorse a candidate. And he stands by that decision, saying it was the right thing to do.
And you can see his resolve once he's made a decision that he knows is the right direction to go. Let me ask you about that though. There was blowback, I think 250,000 people cancelled their subscription. So did you think when you were doing this that some people were going to say that actually it creates less trust in media? I mean, right, part, part of it was it was aimed at creating more trust in media. And at the same time, clearly there were other people saying
maybe there's less trust. No, I don't follow that logic. You don't, And So what did you? Were you surprised at the? Not really. We knew there would. We knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way. As I said, you know these things punch above their weight. And were you worried about that at all? I mean. You can't worry, you can't do the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR or whatever it is you want to call it. So you, this is, this was the
right decision. We made the right decision. I'm very proud of the decision. He is willing to endure short term pain and suffering for the long term success of a company. A lot of leaders do the exact opposite. They don't want to go through any period of discomfort or short term pain, so they'll make the easiest decisions. Now, later, he's asked specifically about Trump and whether or not he's excited or concerned. I'm actually very optimistic this time around that we're
going to see. I'm very hopeful about this his he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to help him because we do have too much regulation in this country. This country is so set up right to grow. By the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems, like if you look at the the deficit and I mean you know, the debt, the national debt and how gigantic it is as a portion of
GDP. These are real problems and they're real long term problems. And the way you get out of them is by outgrowing them. You're going to get, you're going to you're going to solve the problem of the national debt by making it a smaller percentage of GDP, not by shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP. You have to grow the denominator and that means you have to grow GDP at, you know, 345 percent a year and you know, let the national debt grow slower than that.
If you can do that, this is a very manageable problem. So we need a growth orientation in this country. This is the most important thing, a growth mindset. And we are the luckiest country in the world. We have all these natural resources, including energy independence. We have the best risk capital system in the world by far. So, you know, people get confused. I'm glad he talks about this subject. I think one of the most ignored things in politics is the national debt.
It's something that concerns me the most, frankly, out of all the existing problems we face. We have a staggering amount of debt. The national debt interest keeps going up and we're paying hundreds of billions of dollars per year in interest. And it's not enough to just try to cut down costs. We do have to do what he says
and have a growth mindset. So hopefully, and again he goes into this with optimism and hope, he's hoping that this will be a more growth oriented presidency, that we can make a lot of GDP growth, that we can make the GDP much bigger in contrast to the debt. Now, he also goes on stating some of the benefits of the United States.
And this is part of the reason I think the United States is such a good place to invest in. There is so much momentum in the United States, so many good things happening for investors. And we are the luckiest country in the world. We have all these natural resources, including energy independence. We have the best risk capital system in the world by far. So, you know, people get confused about why does the United States have so much venture success, so much entrepreneurial success?
Why are the big tech companies here and not somewhere else? What's really going on with all this dynamism in this country compared to what we see around elsewhere in the world? And the there are a bunch of reasons for that, but the biggest 1/8 of 10 points there is that we have better risk capital. So it's not the banking system. You know, we have a good banking system, but so does Europe.
What's different here is that you can get, you can raise, you know, $50 million of seed capital to do something that only has a 10% chance of working. That's crazy. And but the people who are giving you that seed capital know that the that their expected value is still positive in many cases, or they're at least gambling that that's true. That risk capital system that we have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other countries to duplicate. So we have that.
We have, you know, we speak English and English is turning into the lingua franca of the whole world. It's a, you know, there's so many advantages here, but we are burdened by excessive permitting and regulation. You can't build a bridge and all these, you know what they are. We see these examples of time. We need to be able to build
solar fields. This is another point that I agree 100% with them on. If we were to look at the United States and do analysis on different countries the same way we do it on companies, the United States has an incredibly powerful economic model, a very wide mode. There's so many attributes, like he points out with English. English is becoming the standard language of the world.
The entire business world, of science and education, mathematics, of programming, most things are being done in English, and that has huge network effects because most of the people are using English in the business world. It'll continue to have the same network effects that Facebook did. So we have advantages of language. We have advantages of a reserve currency. We have the advantages of risk capital, meaning the money that investors are willing to put at
risk. In the US, investors are everywhere. There's people wanting to put money at risk everywhere. That opportunity for an entrepreneur with a good idea, a good team, one that can illustrate good execution on an idea. They will get the capital they need. They'll get funding. If you go to other countries, you're not going to find people willing to dish out risk capital. So we have that system in the US uniquely that doesn't exist other places. There's small pockets here and there.
There's some other places have a small amount, but it's an incredible amount in the US. So when we look at why most of my positions are in the US, you know, I only look at a couple companies in Europe and some other places. The majority of it is just because that's where most the great companies in the world are right now. Frankly, that's just the truth. But as he mentions, the biggest challenge being faced right now is over regulation.
He points out that right now in the United States, it's tough to build a bridge without spending $100 billion. The prices we pay to do simple things that were cheaper 10 or 20 years ago are incredible now because of the amount of red tape. So he's hoping that a lot of those regulations, a lot of the ones that aren't serving us, can be removed with the new administration.
Now, Andrew moves this song to ask, I think a great question, which is Elon Musk and Donald Trump have become a little bit like buddies, a little bit of a bromance there. Elon Musk is at Mar a Lago. He's spending days at a time there. It seems like he's like part of the family now with Donald Trump. Elon Musk put a lot on the table to get Donald Trump elected. So Donald Trump in a way kind of owes them a little bit because Elon Musk put so much effort into helping his campaign.
But it also raises a few questions and I think very genuine concerns. I've had a lot of people genuinely ask me, isn't it a little bit of a conflict of interest to have somebody so involved in so many businesses like Elon Musk be so closely tied to the president? Isn't that a little bit troubling? Or couldn't that cause issues? Imagine if you were a big competitor to one of Elon Musk's businesses, like you're a big competitor to Tesla or big competitor to SpaceX.
And then Elon Musk is best friends with the president. Elon Musk has influence over policy. What can be enacted. Do you think Elon Musk is going to use his connections to advantage his business and disadvantage yours? Is he going to use the government as a means of exercising control over your company, damaging your business model in favor of his? Those are genuine concerns that some leaders may have. Blue Origin competes with SpaceX. So this is a great question for Jeff Bezos.
What does he think about Elon Musk's alignment with Donald Trump? I don't I, I, I take it face value, what has been said, which is that, you know, he is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors. I take that at face value. Again, I could be wrong about that, but I, I think it could be true.
I think he probably is trying to, you know, I think this department of Government efficiency and that he and Vivek are helping Trump with and so on. Again, I'd like to take, I have a lot of, I've had a lot of success in life not being cynical and I've very rarely been taken advantage of as a result. It's happened a couple of times, but not very often. And I think that cynicism, you know, why be cynical about that?
Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made are correct, that this is going to be done, you know, above board in the public interest. And if that turns out to be naive, well, then we'll see. But I, I actually think it's going to be great. I'm hoping. One of the commonalities that I see with all these business leaders, anybody that's really accomplished a lot in their life is they're not very cynical, they're not pessimistic.
They don't have those qualities that in many cases are self fulfilling. If someone has a viewpoint that everything is going to be bad, everything is going to be negative all the time, they always assume the worst in other people. They're very distrusting. They're not going to be successful in business. You don't build a business, especially as a founder and ACEO, as someone that is not optimistic about the future. And in some cases, I think a little bit overly optimistic.
Founders like Jeff Bezos really have to assume that things are going to work out. They have to always look at different ways to maneuver things in a positive way. But so far, he's not concerned about this relationship. He's optimistic about Elon Musk and Doge. Hopefully they can accomplish some good things. And if there is something that goes wrong, if, if Elon Musk obviously does something that's very targeted, you can deal with that when it happens. You can cross that bridge when
you get there. But so far, we have no reason to preemptively jump to those conclusions. Now, the next thing that Jeff Bezos is asked about is his retirement. You'll notice that many people like Jeff Bezos when they retire from building a massive company like Amazon, they don't truly ever retire. And we see a very similar thing here. Jeff Bezos gave up his position in Amazon. He gave it over to Andy Jassi, who was the CEO of AWS.
Andy Jassi has said that he talks to Jeff Bezos frequently, at least once a week. But other than that, we haven't really seen the relationship. In fact, we haven't heard too much about it over the past couple of months. I had the impression that Jeff Bezos really is not doing much with Amazon anymore, but after listening to this, it seems like he could be doing a lot more at Amazon than I previously thought. Let's go ahead and listen to what he says about his retirement.
There are two I've I've actually never worked harder this. He says that I've actually never worked harder. That's what I mean. People like him, they don't really retire. When you're used to working this much for this long, you can't sit still. It doesn't matter how many toys you get. Doesn't matter if you're on a big lavish boat. It gets boring. You want to keep working.
The retirement thing I've turned out to be extremely lame at and so I'm, I'm, you know, I'm waking up every morning and, and doing meetings from 9:00 to 7:00 and reading documents and I most of it is Blue Origin, but quite a bit of it is still Amazon too. But later in this interview, he shifts the focus back over to Amazon, and the first thing that he's asked about is the unique way that Jeff Bezos paid himself.
Jeff Bezos paid himself a small salary and without stock based comp, most CE OS today of large corporations, they get paid primarily through stock based comp, which they immediately sell. So it's a constant stream of income, like a salary. They're treated more as an employee than a shareholder. Jeff Bezos had an entirely
different way of paying himself. I just felt, how could I possibly need more incentive than owning such a you know, most founders own big chunks of the company they don't really need. They're more like owner operators. The way they increase their wealth is not by getting, you know, more equity. They just want to make the equity they have more valuable. And, and so I never, I just would have felt icky about it. And I really, I'm actually very proud of that decision.
I, I, I sometimes wish that there were A, and maybe you can do this, Andrew, or maybe the Washington Post will do this, But somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by how much wealth they've created for other people. And so instead of the Forbes list ranks you by your own wealth. So, you know, Amazon's market
cap is 2.3 trillion today. I own about, you know, 200 billion ish of it. So if you take 2.3 billion and subtract out the piece I kept from myself, then, you know, I've created something like 2.1 trillion of wealth for other people. That should put me pretty high on some kind of list and and that's a better list. You know what? How much wealth have you created for other people? He viewed Amazon from the owner operator perspective. He had his chunk of the company.
His goal is to grow it, grow it and grow it. The way that he would grow it is not by extracting money from the company whenever it became profitable or whenever customers gave it money. It was just by growing the value of the total pie. If Jeff Bezos didn't grow the value of the total pie, if he didn't create value for other people, he also would not create any value for himself. So he was completely aligned with all the investors.
And it is correct to view it from the standpoint that he created a tremendous amount of wealth for millions of other people, for investors, for the US Roth Ras and four O 1 KS that are invested in Amazon, for thousands, maybe millions of employees at Amazon that got stock based compensation. It's the same thing that many other great CE OS do. Without Jensen and NVIDIA, he wouldn't have created all that wealth for those NVIDIA employees.
There's so many millionaires working at NVIDIA that they got a job there, they got a chunk of the company, and he made them rich by leading this company to enormous success. So I think it would be an interesting list to see the amount of wealth that different operators have created by growing businesses. Now finally we get to the heart of this question, which is what is he actively doing at Amazon? He's noted a few times that he's working there.
He's at least doing a lot of work every morning answering questions. Since he's involved in Amazon, what exactly is he doing here? He mentions that the majority of what he's working on right now is what he believes is the most important part of Amazon's development, which is AI. Help us, help us with this. You just said you're very, you're very involved with it right now. What is it that you're doing at Amazon AIAI?
Yeah. And so, I mean, there are a few things, but but it's 95% AI. And where do you? It's just so because there we are literally working on 1000 applications internally. So AI, you have to remember AI, modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It it, it, it will, it, it can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything. This is most like electricity art. I went to a brewery in
Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of the little tiny catalysts for the founding of. This story, by the way, is fantastic. Listen to this story he shares of visiting this brewery. It's incredible the insight he can draw out of some real world experience like just visiting a brewery. AWS the and the brewery was 300 years old this company making beer for 300 years. A lot of the oldest companies in the world are breweries by the way.
I don't know why this is. And they were very proud of their history and how to museum. And in that museum was an electric power generator, 100 years old. And because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had to build their own power station. So they made their own electricity. And at that time, that's what everybody did. If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric
generator. Now most people would just visit this brewery, see that they had their own little electric power generator and go, oh, that's interesting. I guess that's how how it was. That would be the conclusion. They wouldn't think about it much more than that. It would just be an interesting thing that you notice. That'd be the case with me. If I visited it. I would not draw any greater connection.
But notice how Jeff Bezos takes that little that little piece of information, that little think he notices and comes to a rather big conclusion. And I looked at this and I thought this is what computation is like today. Everybody has their own data center and that's not going to last. It makes no sense. You're going to buy compute off the grid. That's AWS we had, we were doing it internally at Amazon for ourselves and the APIs were created.
There's that's a very interesting story in its own right, but. The reason that AWS is so successful today, and it's the biggest one, is because he came to that realization before anyone else. Even the people working at Microsoft, which was by far the tech leader. They should have had the lead in this category. We're six years behind Jeff Bezos. He's the inventor. He's the mind that thought of this before other people.
Even Google, which had YouTube and Gmail and distributed servers, didn't come to that conclusion before Jeff Bezos. Him looking at things through a very interesting way, visiting a brewery and coming to that conclusion gave him a huge advantage. The this is, you know, these kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence, they, they go everywhere.
There isn't. I guarantee you there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI. He defines AI as this horizontal application, which is something that I haven't heard before, but basically you can't look at it as some vertical thing that a couple companies are going to benefit from. It is going to be everywhere, part of everything, and this is what I think the limited view of investors have a difficult time
wrapping our heads around. AI is going to be a part of everything, everywhere, every single thing we do. When I look at the holdings and I go through the ones that I own, I try to see how AI can impact those businesses and they can impact a lot of them in various ways that we didn't expect before with Amazon in and of itself. Amazon has literally 1000 different ways that they're benefiting from AI and. Where do you think Amazon is in this? We've been talking about large
language models, yeah, all day. We talked to Sam, we talked to Sundar. Clearly AWS has a big opportunity, but on the language model piece, it doesn't have its own. Does it matter you've. Been so busy. Yeah, Andrew, but you did not see. I did yesterday. Announcements yesterday. I did see the. Announcement about Nova, yes, well, that is a large language model and it is our own. And do you believe that that model is competitive with these other models?
It is absolutely competitive. So it is benchmarks extraordinarily well. It's a world class foundation model, it's a frontier model and and it's very, very priced performance. Andrew says you don't have your own model. He corrects him and says, yes, we do. It was released yesterday. It's very powerful and it's price competitive. The big thing that I recognized at this point in the interview is that Jeff Bezos is still deeply in the trenches at Amazon. He knows all the details of
what's going on at the company. He knew about Nova long before it was released. He's been involved directly with the AI. He understands the big vision of AI. He doesn't have a myopic, limited view of it. He understood very clearly how it's going to impact things, how it's this big horizontal layer, how Amazon needs to be in the lead in this type of category, just like they were with AWS and compute.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think that Andy Jassi's doing a great job as Aceo of Amazon. I don't have any complaints for him. He's doing things that I think are great. I think he's a good communicator. I think he's a good long term focus person. He grew US to the size that it is. He has a very long tenure at Amazon, and it seems like his relationship with Bezos is great. It's everything you get asked for with a handoff for the executive position.
It's the exact opposite of Bob Iger choosing Bob Chapeck, which was a total disaster. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy are very good team leading this company, but it does surprise me a little bit how much Jeff Bezos continues to be involved in Amazon. Now the next thing that he's asked about is this question of what is the meaning of life?
If artificial intelligence can do everything a human does but better, If it's better all these different subjects, if it's just going to dominate and do everything better than humans, then then what are we doing here? What what is the point of this life? I think he has a great perspective on this as well.
So. Well, I, you know, so I've had this conversation about with various people about what it means to be human and, and people say, well, you know, if AI is smarter than us, better than us and various things, won't that take the meaning out of your life or, you know, some
question along those lines. And I said, look, I consider myself to be a very good writer, but I know people who are much better writers than I am. And in fact, I don't think there's any single thing that I'm the best in the world at. If I go, if I'm really, really honest with myself there, I can always find somebody I know. I know people who are better than me at math. I know you know people who are better than me at dancing, that's for sure.
So, you know, they're like literally I go right down the line. I can always find somebody better. And and yet that doesn't take meaning for if you're if meaning only if you only get meaning because you're the best in the world of something, then very few of us are going to have meaning in our lives. There isn't going to be a lot of meaning. And really your meaning is coming from your relationships.
You know how uplifting people so like, if you, if you think about it by the way, the uplifting can be very local. Do you think? It's like if you're just uplifting your brother and sister, you're uplifting your kids, you're uplifting, you know your friends and and the people in your community, you're going to get meaning from that. AI cannot uplift people the same way humans can. It can't serve people the same way humans can.
It can't have the same impact on our immediate family, on our friends, on our loved ones the same way that humans can. So even though AI is getting very powerful, it's nowhere close to replacing humans. And AI is always trained on human data. AI is always being trained with what humans are doing. It's a system that tries to mimic human behavior and human prediction.
So I look at AI the same way. I would even go a step further and say that a lot of people concerned about artificial intelligence should look at it more of an iterative step. It's one more thing that will make things more efficient, make things faster, quicker, just like we've been doing over the past 20 years. We've seen these type of developments over and over again.
When we look at all these type of developments, they do have some major impacts, but ultimately humans find ways to create unique value, to add value to different companies and in a world is becoming increasingly artificial. I think there's going to be. More need for humans than ever. So those are my major takeaways from this Jeff Bezos interview. Hope you enjoyed. See in the next one.