Speaker 1: Robert Evans. Here awake the earliest we have ever been
Speaker 1: awake to record a podcast. I take you seriously exhausted.
Speaker 1: Just this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where one intrepid,
Speaker 1: dogged journalist braves the difficulty of being up barely. What
Speaker 1: is it five and a half hours after dawn? My god? Literally?
Speaker 1: Now it is love and twenty three. Yeah. Well, our
Speaker 1: guest today on this very special episode of Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards is the great Jake Hanrahan. How you doing, buddy, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm good man, I'm good good, Yeah, feeling good man? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is it? Is it an ungodly early hour over there too? No,
Speaker 1: it's like seven pm, seven pm. You know, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: see that. That's that's a nice reasonable hour to be awake.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. Speaking of reasonable, Jake, how do you feel
Speaker 1: about Amazon? Well, it's funny you ask, because I'm then
Speaker 1: this new series called Mega cool. But what about really? Um?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, um yeah. They're like I was saying
Speaker 1: to you guys before we kind of went on, are
Speaker 1: like the more research are doing this, it's just like
Speaker 1: it's almost like comically villainous to a point, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean? And I'm not really wanted to be
Speaker 1: shrill like that, but it actually is like that. It's
Speaker 1: mad like what they're getting up to, it's deeply unsettling,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of weird when you actually realize how
Speaker 1: recent like they became so dominant so quickly that people
Speaker 1: don't think about like twos and fourteen, Amazon was not
Speaker 1: the huge deal, Like it's just like it was not
Speaker 1: a small company, but like, yeah, they were more than
Speaker 1: books by that, but they weren't this like beheemoth that
Speaker 1: was doing everything. And like it's it's weird how quickly
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff slotted into place, and you've
Speaker 1: got mega corps going on, which is great, and you're
Speaker 1: kind of going through methodically the crimes of Amazon, and
Speaker 1: the crimes of Amazon are are also one way or
Speaker 1: the other, the crimes of the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
Speaker 1: And so I wanted to do something a little bit
Speaker 1: different this week. Normally on Behind the Bastards, when we
Speaker 1: cover a guy like Bezos, and we've done, you know,
Speaker 1: our episodes on Bill Gates, on Musk, on uh Zuckerberg,
Speaker 1: we would do like an episode covering his early life,
Speaker 1: and then we would do two or three episodes giving
Speaker 1: the greatest hits of the crimes, but you're going through
Speaker 1: all of the things that are fucked up about Amazon
Speaker 1: bit by bit. So I felt like we would do
Speaker 1: an episode on bastards that's kind of uh leading people
Speaker 1: into Mega corp um. So this episode is more detailed
Speaker 1: than a lot um and we're gonna go into the
Speaker 1: early life of Jeffrey Bezos and we're gonna end a
Speaker 1: little bit on on some specific actions of his that
Speaker 1: I think are horrible. But really, more than anything, I
Speaker 1: want to give people a sense of who this guy
Speaker 1: is so that when they listen into all of the
Speaker 1: you know to the the union busting in, the in
Speaker 1: the worker uh running into the ground, and the hiring
Speaker 1: of Nazis and that sort of thing, when they get
Speaker 1: into that on your show, they can know who the
Speaker 1: man is that that made it all possible. Absolutely, yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what do you know about Mr Bezos? Well, to be honest,
Speaker 1: I've been more focused at the minute on like kind
Speaker 1: of you know, the various different scandals that the company
Speaker 1: has birthed. But what I do know is he's very
Speaker 1: kind of unapologic. You know, there's a lot of stuff,
Speaker 1: you know, I think even in one of the one
Speaker 1: of the first two episodes that's already been out, just
Speaker 1: like quotes where he's just like, no, this is not true.
Speaker 1: I've read several things where there's just irrefutable proof of
Speaker 1: like horrific injuries happening, like you know, you're eight percent
Speaker 1: more likely to get wounded in an Amazon warehouse than
Speaker 1: any other warehouse in their industry. And then when when
Speaker 1: he was speaking about this, he was just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the media is lying. It's it's just like crazy, Like
Speaker 1: he's just like it's kind of he's the kind of
Speaker 1: post the way I guess for business when it comes
Speaker 1: to the kind of post scandalierra where he's like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's not real, and it's like, well it is. But
Speaker 1: he just he just very much embraces that thing of
Speaker 1: like tough luck. You know. Yeah, there's this u there's
Speaker 1: this term people used for Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field,
Speaker 1: And usually when they were talking about it, it it was
Speaker 1: his ability to like kind of make get people hyped
Speaker 1: up about products, his ability to like get his workers
Speaker 1: to work unreasonably in order to like meet deadlines, and
Speaker 1: his ability to make people believe that he was doing
Speaker 1: something magic with these products he was making, and Bezos
Speaker 1: seems to have that for the impact of his I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's weird, like it's there's this degree
Speaker 1: to which like everything seems to slide off him at
Speaker 1: this point. And I don't know that it's much that
Speaker 1: he's distorted reality. Is like he's made Amazon foundational to
Speaker 1: daily reality for so many people that like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean that's messed up, but what are we going to do? Uh? Right?
Speaker 1: And it's so big, so much money. Is he's kind
Speaker 1: of a point where he doesn't, he doesn't really have
Speaker 1: to pay attention, you know, to these bad things. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you had a soul and a heart, you would.
Speaker 1: But you know, I think from from some of the
Speaker 1: things I've read and the way that he allows it
Speaker 1: to happen on Amazon, um, you know, I think he's
Speaker 1: quite happy to just be like, yeah, tough luck. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And we'll get into that. But it is interesting I
Speaker 1: think that. Um. I think one thing for people to
Speaker 1: consider at the start of this, because I've been thinking
Speaker 1: about this myself, is how true is the statement my
Speaker 1: life as I live it right now doesn't work without Amazon?
Speaker 1: Um in terms of like how you get your groceeries.
Speaker 1: How you get stuff for your job if you like work,
Speaker 1: you know remotely, how you get things that you know
Speaker 1: your employees need to you. If you run a business,
Speaker 1: how you get or how you sell like things in
Speaker 1: that business. Um Like, for my part, I've got a
Speaker 1: huge amount of my workload is on Kindle, just because
Speaker 1: the ease eiest way to get research off of a
Speaker 1: book is to highlight it in any book and then
Speaker 1: like you can kind of copy and paste the text
Speaker 1: and do a research doc. It's much easier than just
Speaker 1: like going through a paperback book. Um, which is I
Speaker 1: guess a small example of it. But like I know,
Speaker 1: I have a couple of friends who run small businesses.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who's a teacher, Like they are everybody.
Speaker 1: Everybody knows how fun up Amazon is, and everybody's also like,
Speaker 1: well what else am I gotta do? And that is
Speaker 1: wh you know we are? You know, you're right, It's
Speaker 1: like I use Amazon still my book is on sale
Speaker 1: through Amazone, you know what I mean. But it's like
Speaker 1: I said, in like you know, episode kind of the
Speaker 1: zero of the kind of prologue to Mega Corp. I'm
Speaker 1: not telling people like don't use them. You're bad if
Speaker 1: you use them, you know, be an activist, boycott them.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, if you are
Speaker 1: using them, I think you the very least you should
Speaker 1: know what they're doing to workers, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And I think that's important. And I've had a lot
Speaker 1: of workers and like people just message me already just
Speaker 1: being like absolutely, like thanks for saying. You know. They're
Speaker 1: not like let's burn Amazon. They're just like, we just
Speaker 1: want fairer working conditions, you know what I mean. And
Speaker 1: it's like it's really not. It's not that difficult, you know,
Speaker 1: it's really not. But they still don't provide it for them. No,
Speaker 1: And it is that thing that like, yeah, in a
Speaker 1: world as connected as ours, with things that rely on
Speaker 1: on technology as ours, and with a plague racing through
Speaker 1: where our ability to go places to get things is disrupted, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, something like Amazon is going to be necessary. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and we can also talk about like consumption
Speaker 1: patterns and whatnot, but like our in our current society,
Speaker 1: something like it is necessary. Um, but is the suffering
Speaker 1: is like all of the fucking ship that comes along
Speaker 1: with it? Um? I would argue hopefully not. And I
Speaker 1: think the reason that there's so much suffering associated with
Speaker 1: it that like it's that the company has as many
Speaker 1: horrible stories as you've been finding on a daily basis
Speaker 1: is because of the guy who founded it. Because Amazon
Speaker 1: is very much made in the image of its creator,
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Preston Jourgensen. That's right, Jenson, Um not Bezos. He
Speaker 1: was not born Jeffrey Bezos. He was, however, born on
Speaker 1: January twelfth, nineteen sixty four, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I
Speaker 1: did not expect him to be an Albuquerque baby. Um,
Speaker 1: but he's he's real. He's he's spent most of his
Speaker 1: upbringing in like the south and Southwest, um, kind of
Speaker 1: similar area that I did. His dad, Theodore Jorgenson, was
Speaker 1: nineteen and his mother, Jacqueline Geese, was seventeen. UM. So
Speaker 1: this is a little bit of like a ah uh,
Speaker 1: a problematic union. You know. Um, Theodore is out of
Speaker 1: high school. His his Jeffrey's mom is still in high school.
Speaker 1: There's a two year age difference, which isn't huge, but
Speaker 1: the fact that he's graduated she's in high school is
Speaker 1: a little bit of especially for like the families kind
Speaker 1: of like this, like type deal um and she struggles
Speaker 1: to finish her high school degree while Jeff is growing
Speaker 1: inside of her. Um. Theodore Jorgensen was not very good
Speaker 1: at actually providing for the family. He was a high
Speaker 1: wire unicyclist and a circus performer, and he was obsessed
Speaker 1: with his dreams of unicycle greatness. At one point he
Speaker 1: tried to get on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was
Speaker 1: like the most important thing to him, and he neglected
Speaker 1: his family for the unicycle. It's a dream. It's one
Speaker 1: of those things. It's one of those things, like of
Speaker 1: of the things I did not call and Jeff bezos backstory.
Speaker 1: Dad abandoned them for the unicycle would not have been
Speaker 1: um and and by the way, I should know we'll
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about this. But Jeff grows
Speaker 1: up knowing none of this. He knows nothing. He doesn't
Speaker 1: know his dad's name um as a as for decades.
Speaker 1: So Theodore tries briefly to do like the family thing
Speaker 1: with Jacqueline and Jeff. They move in together. They have
Speaker 1: their kind of Brenda in any moment, but it turns
Speaker 1: out it's hard to make a living as a unicyclist.
Speaker 1: So Theodore is forced to make ends meet at an
Speaker 1: apartment store. This makes him miserable because again his dream
Speaker 1: is the open unicycle road. UM. So he takes to
Speaker 1: drinking more and more. UM. I don't believe he's like abusive.
Speaker 1: He's just like kind of not there. He's just like,
Speaker 1: is incapable of really engaging as a father. UM. His
Speaker 1: father in law, Jeff's father in law. UM, so his
Speaker 1: his his his mom's dad tried to get him a job,
Speaker 1: Theodore a job with the state police, but Theodore couldn't
Speaker 1: be arsked to do that. Eventually, Jackie gave up on
Speaker 1: him and took baby jeff aged seventeen months, and moved
Speaker 1: back in with her parents. She filed for divorce and
Speaker 1: got it. Theo continued to visit his kid on and
Speaker 1: off for a little while, but he missed every child
Speaker 1: support payment that he ever had to make because he
Speaker 1: had absolutely no money. Now, this is not the best
Speaker 1: case scenario for a new child coming into the world.
Speaker 1: I think we can agree, but we widow Jeffy had
Speaker 1: a few things in his corner to offset the fact
Speaker 1: that his bio dad was sort of a deadbeat. For
Speaker 1: one thing, both his maternal and paternal grandparents had a
Speaker 1: lot of resources. So his his dad's dad, um was
Speaker 1: a purchase agent for Sanda Military Base, which was the
Speaker 1: largest nuclear weapons installation in the United States. UM, and
Speaker 1: that's an important gig, right, He's handling all supply purchases
Speaker 1: for the biggest nuke base in the US. Jacqueline. His
Speaker 1: mom's dad, on the other hand, was a guy named
Speaker 1: Lawrence Preston Geese and he ran the local US Atomic
Speaker 1: Energy Commission office. UM. And he's running the Atomic Energy
Speaker 1: Commission Office in like New Mexico, which is the big one, right,
Speaker 1: that's where we figured it all out, right, that's gonna
Speaker 1: be like your and he's a new he's a new
Speaker 1: he's a rocket scientist, you know, he's like a nuclear
Speaker 1: missile expert um and was very prominent in the field.
Speaker 1: And that obviously you can make a good amount of
Speaker 1: money doing that. So while THEO was not a great dad,
Speaker 1: Jeff young Jeff had support from a family with a
Speaker 1: lot of means. The earliest story I found that shows
Speaker 1: any kind of personality from Jeffrey Jorgensen at this point
Speaker 1: is for when he was three. His his mom was
Speaker 1: really paranoid about his health, and she had him sleeping
Speaker 1: in a crib long after the point of which he
Speaker 1: should have stopped sleeping in a crib. And he kept
Speaker 1: arguing with her that it was time for him to
Speaker 1: get a real bed, and she would say no because
Speaker 1: she was worried he was going to fall out, so
Speaker 1: she refused him repeatedly, and one day Jeff got ahold
Speaker 1: of a screwdriver and took the crib apart himself so
Speaker 1: that it was just a bed um. And that's when
Speaker 1: his mom decided to let him, like, okay, you can
Speaker 1: have a yeah. And it's so we have some early
Speaker 1: stories from him, um, and you hear that one a lot.
Speaker 1: Most of them are like from him after he got
Speaker 1: rich and famous. So as with any story like that,
Speaker 1: a little bit of salt, you know. Yeah, I also
Speaker 1: like being three years old, Like if someone gave me
Speaker 1: a screwdriver, I would just like stop myself by accident,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. I don't know about that one.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit, but you know, maybe he did,
Speaker 1: if so, maybe, Yeah, it's yeah, I think you're right,
Speaker 1: A little bit of salt with that one, little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen his mom remarried to Miguel Angel Bezo Perez.
Speaker 1: Miguel was Cuban and had fled the country on the
Speaker 1: insistence of his mother after he was caught painting anti
Speaker 1: castro graffiti. Um, he does get to take like a
Speaker 1: plane out of there. He's not one of the people
Speaker 1: who has to like hide on a smuggle himself out
Speaker 1: on a raft. Um. But yeah, he gets out of
Speaker 1: he has to leave his family behind in Cuba because
Speaker 1: he's you know, to uh, too too much of a
Speaker 1: little can't can't you know not rebel against the system.
Speaker 1: I guess. Um, he's sixteen years old when he entered
Speaker 1: the enters the country, and he speaks almost no English. Um.
Speaker 1: Miguel eventually wound up doing his undergrad at the University
Speaker 1: of Albuquerque, which offered free scholarships to Cuban refugees. He
Speaker 1: worked as a clerk at a bank, and he met
Speaker 1: Jacqueline while he was working there. He and Jackie married,
Speaker 1: and most of what you really need to know about
Speaker 1: Miguel is that he was enough of a father figure
Speaker 1: to Jeff that Jacqueline reached out to Theodore before she
Speaker 1: married Miguel and told him that their son was going
Speaker 1: to be taking her new husband's last name. Um so
Speaker 1: hard hit for Theodore, you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get the feeling. I mean, I think he from
Speaker 1: what i've from what I can I've heard, he regrets
Speaker 1: it now. I think in the time, it was like
Speaker 1: you don't have to pay child support that you're not
Speaker 1: paying already anymore, Like yeah, yeah, I mean life, life
Speaker 1: is hard. Things can be hard and it's sad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I get it. Yeah, And it's one of
Speaker 1: those things like I can't say, like she's obviously not
Speaker 1: in the wrong for that. It's like this your bio
Speaker 1: dad won't do it. This guy comes in out of
Speaker 1: nowhere and adopts your kid, like yeah, yeah, um anyway,
Speaker 1: that's why he's Jeff Bezos and not Jeff Jorgensen. Um So,
Speaker 1: Miguel eventually finished college and got a job working as
Speaker 1: a petroleum engineer for x On. Um so his Jeff
Speaker 1: as as a kid. Jeff's family is like either into
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons or the oil and gas industry, which is
Speaker 1: quite an upbreaking Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, man Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a very it's very like American industry as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nukes and oil, nukes, and gas. Yeah, yeah, like the
Speaker 1: favorite things. Yeah. And so he's you know, his family
Speaker 1: is not They're not like even Bill Gates family rich,
Speaker 1: I don't think, but they are well off. They're very
Speaker 1: very like they're most people would consider them rich. I
Speaker 1: don't think they're like multi millionaires. I'm sure by the
Speaker 1: time they retired they had they had, you know, a
Speaker 1: million or two in the bank. But they're very very comfortable,
Speaker 1: you know. Um, So the family travels a bunch as
Speaker 1: Miguel like gets all these different transfers across the world.
Speaker 1: Um and along the way, you know, as their you know,
Speaker 1: Miguel is starting his career and you know, Jeffrey's growing up. Um.
Speaker 1: Miguel and Jacqueline have a daughter, Christina, and another son Mark.
Speaker 1: We kind of know jeff was, I don't think happy
Speaker 1: to have his dad tracked down. Um and his dad
Speaker 1: like hadn't heard of him. I think it was two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen when he get tracked down. He was like,
Speaker 1: who's jeff Bezos And it was like that your son,
Speaker 1: and he's like a broke failed circus performer. It's it's
Speaker 1: quite a thing. Um. So we don't really have a
Speaker 1: whole lot of detail on how you know, uh, getting
Speaker 1: abandoned by his biological dad may have influenced Jeff Bezos,
Speaker 1: it may not have had much of an influence at all,
Speaker 1: because again, he was four when Miguel comes into the picture,
Speaker 1: so nearly all, if not all, of his early memories
Speaker 1: are going to involve Miguel, who seems to have been
Speaker 1: a pretty good dad. Um. And so when it comes
Speaker 1: to how Miguel influenced his son's development, we have more meat, um,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, he's a he's a Cuban refugee
Speaker 1: into the United States. So obviously coming at it from
Speaker 1: like kind of a very conservative, pro capitalist standpoint, not amunists,
Speaker 1: not very surprising. But I'm going to read a passage
Speaker 1: from the Everything Store that gives a little bit of
Speaker 1: context for that. Jeff and his siblings grew up observing
Speaker 1: their father's tireless work ethic and his frequent expressions of
Speaker 1: love for America and its opportunities and freedoms. Miguel Bezos,
Speaker 1: who later began going by the name Mike, acknowledges that
Speaker 1: he may have also passed on a libertarian aversion to
Speaker 1: government intrusion into the private live and enterprises of citizens.
Speaker 1: Certainly it was something that permeated our home life, he says,
Speaker 1: while noting that dinner time conversations were a political and
Speaker 1: revolved around the kids. I cannot stand any kind of
Speaker 1: totalitarian form of government from the right or the left
Speaker 1: or anything in between. And maybe that had some impact.
Speaker 1: Which is interesting because as we're going to talk about,
Speaker 1: Jeff certainly like benefits from the lax kind of corporate
Speaker 1: law in the United States, but he imposes something of
Speaker 1: a dictatorship on the people who work for him. That's
Speaker 1: his whole It's very totalitarian. Yeah, it's like the Stasi.
Speaker 1: You know, you get searched every time you go in
Speaker 1: and out just for lunch or to the toilet, constant monitoring,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, no, it's it's you know, we like we
Speaker 1: heard in the last episode ID for Megacourt, the the
Speaker 1: internal training video was encouraging managers to spy on, you know,
Speaker 1: quote the behavior of their workers to see if maybe
Speaker 1: they're organizing the union. Like yeah, it's it's ridiculous to Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe he thinks that, but then you know, as all dictators,
Speaker 1: you know, he imposes his his Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 1: interesting to me I mean, this is something we've come
Speaker 1: across a few times with some of these billionaires. But
Speaker 1: like the things that as as well discuss, the things
Speaker 1: that like make Jeff Bezos into the person who is
Speaker 1: able to be as successful as he is, are all
Speaker 1: things that he absolutely doesn't want other people to have.
Speaker 1: He has a very permissive, open environment. He's he's very
Speaker 1: well funded schools. You know, Amazon avoids paying taxes to
Speaker 1: support the schools. A lot of his early jobs give
Speaker 1: him a lot of freedom. And like, yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: this whole Yeah, you benefited from a system that you
Speaker 1: have no desire in maintaining anyway. Well, that's that's what
Speaker 1: we're getting too. So another thing that made an impact
Speaker 1: on young Jeff was money. When he was four, he
Speaker 1: first visited his maternal grandfather's cattle ranch in Texas. The
Speaker 1: family ranch, the Lazy g was more than twenty five
Speaker 1: tho acres um, which is a big ranch. Um. And
Speaker 1: it's you he comes from old Texas money, um. His family.
Speaker 1: The ranch has been in his family's hand since the
Speaker 1: early teen hundreds. Um. And he had an ancestor who
Speaker 1: took part in the early colonization of Texas by white people. Um,
Speaker 1: which is I have a good friend who comes from
Speaker 1: not nearly they don't have nearly as much land anymore,
Speaker 1: but they used to have family land that was that big,
Speaker 1: and then the family kind of fell on hard times.
Speaker 1: But they were like one of the families that was
Speaker 1: part of the Texas Revolution and the establishment of Texas
Speaker 1: as Estate. And like on her old family land there
Speaker 1: is like a slave graveyard. Like that's all of them, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's founded like that, that's the white people who
Speaker 1: found in Texas. Um. So again that's kind of where
Speaker 1: that that's the kind of old money that he's got
Speaker 1: on that side. Huh yeah, Texas and Tea. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: my family didn't own any land, but we didn't get
Speaker 1: here from Italy until like the twenties. So uh yeah
Speaker 1: when uh Jeff Bezos is like Grandpa Lawrence, Like even
Speaker 1: though they have this family land, his grandfather was a
Speaker 1: rocket scientist most of his career and when he retires,
Speaker 1: he goes back to the family the ranch to be
Speaker 1: like a hobby rancher, you know. Um, like I'm retired,
Speaker 1: I don't have to do a grind anymore. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: keep this ranch going just because it seems fun. The
Speaker 1: Lazy G was a large, fully functional ranch, and Jeff
Speaker 1: starts spending his summers there. So for about twelve straight years,
Speaker 1: he spends every summer at the Lazy G doing ranch work,
Speaker 1: cleaning stalls, gelding livestock, doing basic handyman stuff, and the
Speaker 1: experience gave him a crash course and the kind of
Speaker 1: practical engineering you have to do if you're going to
Speaker 1: keep a ranch operational. One of his other biographers, Richard Brandt,
Speaker 1: notes one particular event as an example of the formative
Speaker 1: impact this had on Jeff. One day, his grandpa towed
Speaker 1: in a busted old bulldozer with a stripped transmission. He
Speaker 1: and Jeff set to work on it and had to
Speaker 1: figure out a way to remove a five pound gear
Speaker 1: from the engine. Grandpa Lawrence, built a crane to lift it,
Speaker 1: and Jeff helped him. Experiences like this taught Jeffrey how
Speaker 1: to be a pragmatic engineer and inured him to difficult labor.
Speaker 1: He would later consider it an idyllic childhood, and I'd
Speaker 1: be hard pressed to dis agree with him. There it
Speaker 1: sounds like the perfect way to grow up, right, Like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got like this huge rant lessons, but you've got security. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Who wouldn't want this in their childhood? He later told
Speaker 1: an interviewer, One of the things you learn in a
Speaker 1: rural area like that is self reliance. People do everything themselves.
Speaker 1: That kind of self reliance is something you can learn,
Speaker 1: and my grandfather was a huge role model for me.
Speaker 1: If something is broken, let's fix it. To get something
Speaker 1: new done, you have to be stubborn and focused to
Speaker 1: the point that others might find unreasonable. And you might
Speaker 1: find a certain dark humor in noting that Jeff's self
Speaker 1: reliance today involves telling a lot, hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: people what they have to do for him. One might
Speaker 1: also note that Amazon has contributed to the absolute annihilation
Speaker 1: of rural communities by destroying small businesses. And it is
Speaker 1: kind of tempting to go down this road Jeff talking
Speaker 1: about the value of like rural hard work, and then
Speaker 1: how Amazon has actually impacted rural areas. But it's also
Speaker 1: of the things to blame Amazon for not really fair,
Speaker 1: because he's Amazon was kind of continuing a process that
Speaker 1: got started a lot earlier. When it comes to that,
Speaker 1: I actually found a local article from a paper in
Speaker 1: Swift County, Minnesota, with the title Amazon's dominance not good
Speaker 1: for small Towns, and obviously talks about what you'd expect Amazon,
Speaker 1: the online retailers, destroying a bunch of local brick and
Speaker 1: mortar businesses that give people in the area jobs. But
Speaker 1: then that article gives a list of the local businesses
Speaker 1: in this small town that might get wrecked by Amazon,
Speaker 1: and those businesses include Advance Auto Parts, Auto Zone, O'Riley, Honda, Albertson's, Kroger,
Speaker 1: Walmart Grocery, Barnes and Noble, Joebeth booksellers, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples,
Speaker 1: all of which are like giant corporations that previously came
Speaker 1: in and destroyed small local businesses in rural communities. And
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, Amazon is a part of that tradition,
Speaker 1: but it didn't, it didn't start with them, So I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's like if you're if you're in like
Speaker 1: a hyper corporate environment, that's just the circle of life, really,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: It is, like I think there's a degree to which
Speaker 1: it's worth acknowledging that Jeff benefited, as we've talked about,
Speaker 1: like so much from this kind of rural ideal that
Speaker 1: that does not exist anywhere anymore, um to the extent
Speaker 1: that it existed many places when he was a kid.
Speaker 1: But he's also not didn't start that process. So whatever
Speaker 1: of of Amazon's crimes, I don't really I put that
Speaker 1: more on the Walmart end of the Ledger. So when
Speaker 1: he wasn't spending his summers at the ranch, Jeff spent
Speaker 1: most of his childhood in Houston, Texas. He attended a
Speaker 1: public school and was lucky enough to benefit from a
Speaker 1: school district that had both money um and a devotion
Speaker 1: to take in care of its gifted students. The Vanguard Program,
Speaker 1: as it's called, was a gifted and talented program that
Speaker 1: was meant to find bright kids and encourage them to
Speaker 1: think outside the box and learn how to be independent minds.
Speaker 1: The Vanguard Program was good and in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: and ad executive named Julie Ray grew interested in it
Speaker 1: after her son was admitted. Once he moved on to
Speaker 1: Junior High, she decided to write a book about the
Speaker 1: program him. When she went back to tour the program,
Speaker 1: she met a sixth grader named Jeff Bezos. She used
Speaker 1: the pseudonym Tim for him in her book at his
Speaker 1: parents request. But from Julie's work, we have our first
Speaker 1: early objective peak at young Mr Bezos. So this is
Speaker 1: not coming out of his pr you know, Charing. This
Speaker 1: is not coming from his family, This is not coming
Speaker 1: from him. This is coming from someone who had no
Speaker 1: idea what he was going to become, who was kind
Speaker 1: of trying to analyze his intellectual growth objectively when he
Speaker 1: was in the sixth grade. Um, so it's a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting insight. We don't really have anything like this for
Speaker 1: any of the other guys. So I find this fascinating.
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote from the book The
Speaker 1: Everything Store about this, uh, this early study. Jeff was
Speaker 1: a student of general intellectual excellence, slight of build, friendly
Speaker 1: but serious. He was not particularly gifted in leadership, according
Speaker 1: to his teachers, but he moved confidently among his peers
Speaker 1: and articulately extolled the virtues of the novel he was
Speaker 1: reading at the time, j R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Jeff
Speaker 1: twelve was already competitive. He told Ray he was reading
Speaker 1: a variety of books to qualify for a special Readers certificate,
Speaker 1: but compared himself unfavorably to another classmate, who claimed improbably
Speaker 1: that she was reading a dozen books a week. Jeff
Speaker 1: also showed Ray a science project that he was working
Speaker 1: on called an infinity cube, a battery powered contraption with
Speaker 1: rotating mirrors that created the optical illusion of an endless tunnel.
Speaker 1: Jeff modeled the device after one he had seen in
Speaker 1: a store. That one cost twenty two dollars, but mine
Speaker 1: was cheaper, he told Ray. Teachers said that three of
Speaker 1: Jeff's projects were being entered in a local science competition
Speaker 1: that drew most of its submissions from students in junior
Speaker 1: and senior high schools. So you get a lot from that.
Speaker 1: Number One, he's very advanced. People at the time recognize
Speaker 1: him as brilliant. And number two, like, there's this toy
Speaker 1: he wants. It's too expensive, his mom won't get it,
Speaker 1: so he just builds it. You know, you get a
Speaker 1: lot of like the future Jeff Bezos personality from from
Speaker 1: that kind of decision. I just kept thinking of the
Speaker 1: time cube. They Jeff built the time cube. Put that
Speaker 1: on the internet. Yeah, yeah, that would be that would
Speaker 1: be a fun twist. So from an early age, Jeff
Speaker 1: seemed drawn to the idea of evaluating other people in
Speaker 1: order to maximize their performance. While he was in sixth grade,
Speaker 1: as practice for statistics class, he created a survey to
Speaker 1: evaluate all the teachers in his grade. He claimed its
Speaker 1: goal was to judge teachers on how they teach, not
Speaker 1: as a popularity contest. When Julie met him, he was
Speaker 1: working to lay out the results in a graph that
Speaker 1: would compare all the teachers with each other. So he's
Speaker 1: doing like this Amazon analytic ship as a sixth grader
Speaker 1: to his teachers. Yeah, it's quite impressive. Yeah, and it
Speaker 1: also I'd be scared of that kid, though, like fucking
Speaker 1: Damien vibe, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I would like if a fucking sixth grader is like
Speaker 1: graphing me and a bunch of other people like we're
Speaker 1: their employees and like a char Yeah, maybe maybe i'd
Speaker 1: spray that kid with some pepper water, you know, a
Speaker 1: little bit of pepper water. Don't give him a ruler.
Speaker 1: Who's your head, you know? Yeah, exactly, it's in that room,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's a
Speaker 1: little bit like unsettling. And his own family was not
Speaker 1: immune to this sort of behavior. When he was tinned,
Speaker 1: Jeff grew concerned about his grandmother, who was a smoker.
Speaker 1: His first attempt at convincing her to stop wasn't to
Speaker 1: just say, like, grandma, could you stop smoking? Grandma? I
Speaker 1: don't like it with you know, he calculated how many
Speaker 1: minutes of life she lost per cigarette and then extrapolated
Speaker 1: that based on the total amount of time that she'd
Speaker 1: been smoking, and then told her you've taken nine years
Speaker 1: off your life, and she burst into tears. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of mind this kid, again, always driven by like
Speaker 1: data and always like white people to have. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: don't hurt granny's feelings, Like that's just no, No one
Speaker 1: should do that, you know what I mean? I mean it.
Speaker 1: I think you get this feeling from him with both
Speaker 1: of those anecdotes that as a kid he um and
Speaker 1: as a kid and as an adult he has this
Speaker 1: attitude of like, well, if there's good data to analyze
Speaker 1: exactly how you're performing, why wouldn't you want it? And
Speaker 1: you know most of us are like, well, number one,
Speaker 1: raw data doesn't tell you everything it leaves out. And
Speaker 1: number two, it's kind of exhausting to live your whole
Speaker 1: life that way, Yeah, no it is. And then do
Speaker 1: you know what it reminds me of like the problem
Speaker 1: like particularly like in our profession when you have like
Speaker 1: analysts versus on the ground reporters, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: data is great, and it's a part of the process,
Speaker 1: but it removes the soul of everything if you just
Speaker 1: rely on it, you know what I mean? And that's
Speaker 1: so much problem and it's it's not like it's also
Speaker 1: it also leaves out inherently a lot like you can
Speaker 1: look at there's all there's all these kind of like
Speaker 1: the this wing of scholars who will make the claim
Speaker 1: that like this is the best life has ever been,
Speaker 1: and they'll they always bring up that like because of
Speaker 1: this economic wature, this measure and it's like, well, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of ways in which like those are
Speaker 1: jigged and you look at like yeah, it looks like
Speaker 1: these indexes have been moving up, but you adjust them
Speaker 1: every couple of years, so that like the you know,
Speaker 1: the you're measuring different things that aren't going up in
Speaker 1: price as much to show that people are are gaining more.
Speaker 1: And it's like yeah, and that's why a lot of
Speaker 1: these like statistics on how great a time it is
Speaker 1: to live in now. Don't take into account the fact
Speaker 1: that like people in the United States in particular are
Speaker 1: fucking miserable and self report being miserable. And it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you you can't just reduce everything to data. It doesn't
Speaker 1: like that's a lot Yeah, oh no, no one's dropping
Speaker 1: a rock on your head anymore. Like that was happening
Speaker 1: every week and you know, five years ago, so so
Speaker 1: you'll find it's like, no, there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: other things. I think without without context, statistics are just
Speaker 1: like just ways for people to argue online, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean. It's like these kind of you know,
Speaker 1: like oh, Ben Shapiro Slaughter as some like twelve year olds.
Speaker 1: He's like very much into all that, like, you know,
Speaker 1: statistics without context, and it's they're just digits without any contexts.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not it's not helpful, I don't think,
Speaker 1: but he is, Jeff is in love with statistics and
Speaker 1: digits and yeah, he's he's a he's a data driven
Speaker 1: little boy. Uh. He also lived what sounds to me
Speaker 1: like an exhausting life. He started school at seven am
Speaker 1: every day, um, and he had like the special program
Speaker 1: he was in was just this dizzying mix of classes,
Speaker 1: individual projects in small group discussion time. Julie documented one
Speaker 1: of the group discussions Jeff was a part of UH.
Speaker 1: He and six other students were sitting with the principal
Speaker 1: reading short stories and then discussing the short stories. And
Speaker 1: the first story they read was about an archaeologist who
Speaker 1: faked a cash of artifacts, and Julie recorded what Jeff
Speaker 1: had to say about the story. So these are just
Speaker 1: like some comments that she noted him making about the
Speaker 1: archaeologists in the story. They probably wanted to become famous.
Speaker 1: They wished away the things they didn't want to face.
Speaker 1: Some people go throughrough life thinking like they always have.
Speaker 1: You should be patient, analyze what you've have to work
Speaker 1: with UM. So he is, you know, this is kind
Speaker 1: of the way he's he's thinking about people. I especially
Speaker 1: I think the line some people go through life thinking
Speaker 1: like they always have, like he's. He's always very obsessed
Speaker 1: with this idea of UM like treating things like it's
Speaker 1: the first time anyone's done them, so you can try
Speaker 1: to look at them from a new perspective, which is
Speaker 1: very successful way to think in business. Like it's interesting
Speaker 1: to me some of his his thought processes. He doesn't
Speaker 1: really change, you know, as he grows up. He's kind
Speaker 1: of always the same person who becomes the CEO of Amazon. UM.
Speaker 1: Jeff told Julie Ray that he loved these exercises. Quote
Speaker 1: the way the world is. You know, someone could tell
Speaker 1: you to press the button. You have to think what
Speaker 1: you're doing for you. You have to be able to
Speaker 1: think about what you're doing for yourself, which is again
Speaker 1: interesting because that's the opposite of what he wants from
Speaker 1: his employees, but he recognizes it as the key to
Speaker 1: his own success. UM. Julie's book was not a big hit.
Speaker 1: This book about this special program Jefferson as a kid.
Speaker 1: She had to self publish it, and as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, we know mostly about it because of
Speaker 1: journalists like brad Stone Um who found this out, like
Speaker 1: found copies of the book in the library after it
Speaker 1: had been published, and like grabbed this early look at
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos for us UM. Brad Stone caught up with
Speaker 1: Julie decades later when Jeff was a billionaire, and he
Speaker 1: asked her what she felt about the things Jeff Bezos
Speaker 1: had accomplished in the decades since sixth grade. She said
Speaker 1: she had watched Tim's rise to fame and fortune over
Speaker 1: the past two decades with admiration and amazement, but without
Speaker 1: much surprise. When I met him as a young boy,
Speaker 1: his ability was obvious and it was being nurtured and
Speaker 1: encouraged by the new program. She says. The program also
Speaker 1: benefited by his responsiveness and enthusiasm for learning. It was
Speaker 1: a total validation of the concept. And it's certainly, i
Speaker 1: would say, a validation of the concept of funding public
Speaker 1: schools well enough that they can experiment. UM. In this regard,
Speaker 1: Jeff isn't entirely dissimilar to Bill Gates, although Bill didn't
Speaker 1: go to a public school, but both men benefited as
Speaker 1: kids from communities that put a lot of resources into
Speaker 1: educating them. A lot of a lot of went into
Speaker 1: training up both of these children and giving them opportunities
Speaker 1: when they were little kids, and a lot of that
Speaker 1: came from, like in the fact that the schools they
Speaker 1: were in valued their intellectual freedom and valued their personal
Speaker 1: freedom and considered that an important part of them being
Speaker 1: able to grow into the kind of people that they
Speaker 1: were capable of becoming. UM. And again, it's a total
Speaker 1: You look at what Amazon pays and taxes. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: a bit of a run poll that they kind of
Speaker 1: do as soon as they get up to where they
Speaker 1: where they are. Um. I always find that interesting because
Speaker 1: they benefit from societies that invest a ton of resources
Speaker 1: into them, but they have no interest in investing back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get do you know what? I really get the
Speaker 1: vibe from Bezos kind of a Nixon vibe. You know,
Speaker 1: it's not illegal when I do it, you know that
Speaker 1: kind of thing. It's like I get that vibe from
Speaker 1: him a lot, like I'll take everything and then you know,
Speaker 1: but whatever I do is okay. You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's not really I mean, all right, fine,
Speaker 1: everybody has to give back, but he's the richest. I
Speaker 1: don't enough, Like yeah yeah, yeah, I mean I'm sure
Speaker 1: he talk about how space travel is giving back, but
Speaker 1: that's a discussion for another day. Um. Yeah. So Jeff
Speaker 1: was prone to such intense focus as a kid that
Speaker 1: his teachers would sometimes have to pick him up while
Speaker 1: he was still in his chair and move him to
Speaker 1: different tables when it was time for him to switch
Speaker 1: tasks because he would be so invested in whatever he
Speaker 1: was doing. Um, and he never seemed to like turn off.
Speaker 1: When he was not at school, he would spend his
Speaker 1: time rebuilding radios, building robots from kits, and experimenting with
Speaker 1: electronics purchased from radio shack. His most telling invention was
Speaker 1: an electric alarm, which he wired to alert him if
Speaker 1: his younger brother or sister tried to get into his
Speaker 1: room because he was obsessed with his personal privacy. Um yeah,
Speaker 1: like Bill, Yeah, that's cute. Like Bill Gates, Jeff benefited
Speaker 1: from the fact that he had access to a computer
Speaker 1: earlier than any other kids pretty much in the United States.
Speaker 1: A huge based company provided his school with a terminal
Speaker 1: and loan them extra time on the company mainframe. And
Speaker 1: this was during a period when kind of in the
Speaker 1: same time, Bill Gates's rich parents at like a fancy
Speaker 1: private school raised money via a bake sale to buy
Speaker 1: a terminal for the kids. Um. So this is again
Speaker 1: another thing that kind of all these guys, these early
Speaker 1: tech billionaires have in common, is that adults around them
Speaker 1: make the choice to put a lot of money into
Speaker 1: giving them access to a computer in like the seventies,
Speaker 1: you know, when very few other people have access to computers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the massive like very very privileged position to be as
Speaker 1: a kid, especially but then you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again it's if if, if, if, like either of
Speaker 1: them were to really learn the lesson of their success
Speaker 1: would be like, yeah, you should, you should invest a
Speaker 1: lot in children. Um, But neither of them really seem
Speaker 1: to get that from the book one click quote. The
Speaker 1: setup came with a stack of manuals, but no one
Speaker 1: at the school knew how to use it. Jeff and
Speaker 1: a couple of other stud stayed after class to go
Speaker 1: through the manuals and figure out how to program it,
Speaker 1: but that novelty only lasted about a week. Then they
Speaker 1: discovered that the main frame contained a primitive starf Trek game.
Speaker 1: From then on, all they used the computer for was
Speaker 1: playing Star Trek, each taking on a role of one
Speaker 1: of the characters in the TV program. Like all of
Speaker 1: his other nerdy friends, he considered the choice role in
Speaker 1: the game to be that of Mr Spock. Captain Kirk
Speaker 1: was the backup choice. If Jeff couldn't get either of
Speaker 1: those roles, he preferred to take on the persona of
Speaker 1: the starship's computer, which also says a lot Um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I get like Spock is rad, but wanting to be
Speaker 1: the computer is a little weird. Um. The career that
Speaker 1: most of I mean, bones is right there, Jeff, but whatever.
Speaker 1: The career that most appealed to child Jeff Bezos was archaeology,
Speaker 1: but his heroes were all businessmen, particularly Walt Disney and
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison, both of whom were very successful at monetizing
Speaker 1: the achievements of their employees and utterly ruthless at crushing
Speaker 1: competition to their dominance. He actually admired Disney more than
Speaker 1: Edison because he saw Walt Disney is having been better
Speaker 1: at putting a team together to work in a concerted fashion.
Speaker 1: So like, again, Disney is kind of the guy he's
Speaker 1: worshiping as a little kid. Yeah, but not even for
Speaker 1: like not even like wow, I love his cartoons. It's
Speaker 1: just like the lamest version of like him, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is now. As you probably guessed, Jeff Bezos
Speaker 1: did not get in trouble often as a kid. He
Speaker 1: lost his library privileges once for laughing too loud. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's kind of like most of what you hear
Speaker 1: about it, Like, he's not and we'll talk about his
Speaker 1: laugh a little bit later, but he's he does not
Speaker 1: run into a lot of hot water based on all
Speaker 1: of this, and you might be surprised to know that
Speaker 1: Jeff joined a youth football league, um and was actually
Speaker 1: pretty good at it, which is why there's a number
Speaker 1: of reasons this is weird. For one, football is a
Speaker 1: fucking huge deal in Texas. It's like a religion there.
Speaker 1: There were like schools like the school I went to,
Speaker 1: paid millions and millions of dollars for their football stadium,
Speaker 1: Like schools where I live now cost less than just
Speaker 1: the football stadium from my high school did. It's it's
Speaker 1: a Texas thing. We put ridiculous resources into football. So
Speaker 1: the fact that he was good at football in a
Speaker 1: Texas youth league means something. Um, he was not a
Speaker 1: big kid. His mom didn't want him to join because
Speaker 1: she was worried he'd get beaten badly. But he was
Speaker 1: so good at memorizing plays and understanding like the rule
Speaker 1: mechanics of the games that his coach made him a
Speaker 1: defensive captain. So you're kind of he's he's he's more
Speaker 1: flexible than you might expect, And I think that a
Speaker 1: lot of that goes down to the kind of education
Speaker 1: he has that they really put a lot of value
Speaker 1: in trying to like make these kids, give them space
Speaker 1: to experiments so they grow up well rounded, because clearly
Speaker 1: he does. The fact that he's he's he's building robots,
Speaker 1: and he's playing football. UM is a kind of is
Speaker 1: sort of an example of the success of the school system.
Speaker 1: He grows up in UM. He spent his high school years.
Speaker 1: By the time he moved in the high school he
Speaker 1: got to high school, his family moves to Florida because
Speaker 1: for ex On mobile kind of ship UM. And once
Speaker 1: he gets to Florida, he immediately informs his new public
Speaker 1: school classmates that he was going to be the valedictorian.
Speaker 1: His first summer job in high school was as a
Speaker 1: fry cook at McDonald's, and he passed the time by
Speaker 1: studying the different ways that McDonald's had automated their production process.
Speaker 1: However interested he was in this, he decided early on
Speaker 1: that he did not like working for other people and
Speaker 1: he wanted to own his own business. Someday. He succeeded
Speaker 1: in becoming valedictorian of his high school, and in his speech,
Speaker 1: he called for humankind to colonize space so that they
Speaker 1: could preserve the Earth and turn it into a giant
Speaker 1: park once all the human beings were gone, which is
Speaker 1: a story that story like came out recently Jeff Bezos
Speaker 1: saying that, like, yeah, I think most people will move
Speaker 1: into space and we'll keep a few people behind on
Speaker 1: the Earth to to maintain it as like a park.
Speaker 1: I'm not happy, man, No, it is interesting to me again,
Speaker 1: how consistent all this is. Like, I don't think he's
Speaker 1: ever changed as a person. Uh, it's the same thing.
Speaker 1: You know, who does want to turn the earth into
Speaker 1: a giant park free of human beings. You can't verify that.
Speaker 1: I mean unless it is like audible or something. That's
Speaker 1: my point. You can't verify that. Yeah, well here's some
Speaker 1: ads we are back. Oh my gosh, I do love
Speaker 1: I do love o our good solid ads for products
Speaker 1: and services. So, and one thing I want to add,
Speaker 1: I I really love everyone telling me how many ads
Speaker 1: there are in Megacort. Thanks. I love that. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: quite true. Let me know every every episode, let me know, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's literally every message. If they want to pay for it,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah exactly, or if you're gonna pay for
Speaker 1: you know, put put food in my family's table, Like
Speaker 1: I gotta paper out there. You know, it's it's all good. Look, man,
Speaker 1: you can skip you can skip ads. You can go
Speaker 1: in and cut them out and put the episode up
Speaker 1: as a torrent. Nobody's going to complain. There's options, there's options.
Speaker 1: As soon as he graduated, Jeff Um, he and a
Speaker 1: school friend started a company of their own. UM. So
Speaker 1: he gets out of high school and like the summer
Speaker 1: after high school, he starts a business with a classmate.
Speaker 1: Their business is called the Dream Institute, and Dream is
Speaker 1: an acronym, and it's a terrible acronym because dream stands
Speaker 1: for directed. There's the D reasoning, there's the R e
Speaker 1: A methods that that's not, that's not, that's not an acronym,
Speaker 1: that's not it's and it's fine, but like it's not
Speaker 1: an active Sorry, young Jeff bezos Um. The Dream Institute
Speaker 1: was a two week summer camp program for fifth graders
Speaker 1: where Jeff and his friend would teach kids about engines, fission,
Speaker 1: interstellar travel, and space phenomena, along with stuff like advertising
Speaker 1: and like the history of advertising. It was an eclectic
Speaker 1: program to say the least. You can see it as
Speaker 1: Jeff trying to kind of give act to kids, some
Speaker 1: element of what he had gotten um as a child.
Speaker 1: A local news report on the Dream Institute makes it
Speaker 1: seem like Jeff's primary interest as an educator was teaching
Speaker 1: kids about space. This passage from the book One Click,
Speaker 1: based on interviews with Jeff's early business partner, makes it
Speaker 1: clear where his head was at the time. Quote he said,
Speaker 1: the future of mankind is not on this planet because
Speaker 1: we might be struck by something and we better have
Speaker 1: a spaceship out there. So, I don't know, just interesting
Speaker 1: to me, very consistent. Yeah, he's yeah, he's had that
Speaker 1: that germ like in his you know, the germ of
Speaker 1: an idea in his brain from very young. Clearly. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the Dream Institute didn't last long, not because it failed,
Speaker 1: but because Jeff was off to Princeton, where he got
Speaker 1: a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He did
Speaker 1: very well at school, although he was not the valedictorian.
Speaker 1: And in fact, this is kind of a humbling moment
Speaker 1: for him because at Princeton, for the first time, he's
Speaker 1: surrounded by a bunch of other like young, rich, overachievers, UM,
Speaker 1: and he's not the best anymore. Uh, he doesn't really
Speaker 1: stand out at Princeton, and in fact, one of the
Speaker 1: things when when journalists go back to people who were
Speaker 1: in college with Jeff Bezos, one of the things they
Speaker 1: note is that basically no one who was with him
Speaker 1: in school really noticed him or remembered him Like he didn't.
Speaker 1: He doesn't stand out at all. Uh. One of the
Speaker 1: few anecdotes we get about him from a college friend
Speaker 1: is that he liked to play beer pong, which is
Speaker 1: like the blandest personality trait you can have in college, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody plays beer pog into college, Like is that? What
Speaker 1: is sorry? What is beer pong? Again? It's so you
Speaker 1: have you have like a fucking a table tennis court,
Speaker 1: and we're not going to laugh about that. What did
Speaker 1: Like Jacob didn't play beer poll I don't know doing
Speaker 1: in England, you know, I didn't. I didn't go to
Speaker 1: university though, so I don't know, man, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: think people do it here, you know, I dropped out
Speaker 1: of university. But I definitely, yeah, I can imagine. But
Speaker 1: I think people who just they just get smashed, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't. Yeah, I mean that's mostly what you do.
Speaker 1: The basic ideas you have like a table tennis or
Speaker 1: you could just set up like a card table and
Speaker 1: you stack a bunch of like like quarter full cups
Speaker 1: of beer on it, and you have like table tennis rackets,
Speaker 1: and you have like little clear white plastic balls and
Speaker 1: you hit them to each other. And if you knock,
Speaker 1: if you knock a ball in the one of the
Speaker 1: cups the table tennis racket, there's a number of ways,
Speaker 1: but you're you're you're knocking these balls back and forth.
Speaker 1: And if you knock a ball into a drink, your
Speaker 1: opponent has to drink it. If they knock a ball
Speaker 1: into a drink, you have to drink it. And you
Speaker 1: repeat this until everybody's drunk. Right, that's the basic idea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not I have nothing against beer pong. It's just
Speaker 1: it's like everybody in college like liking I remember he
Speaker 1: liked beer pong. It's like I remember he ate food.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, okay, if you say he refused to play
Speaker 1: beer pong, that's a personality trait. But like you know,
Speaker 1: although just kind of the idea in my head of
Speaker 1: like a guy that just really loves beer pong is
Speaker 1: quite funny. Like every he just like start Jeff calmed
Speaker 1: down like Jesus Christ. I mean, if he liked it
Speaker 1: for the like One of the things I found positive
Speaker 1: about beer pong is that, like I was not a
Speaker 1: very social kid, I was not good Like when I
Speaker 1: was nineteen, I was not good at talking to people
Speaker 1: at parties. But I could drink a lot and if
Speaker 1: I could just play, and beer pong was very simple,
Speaker 1: so you could participate in the party without actually engaging
Speaker 1: with anybody. If you were, you know, an anxious kid
Speaker 1: who didn't really understand how to hang out around people
Speaker 1: until I found mushrooms. I was not very good at
Speaker 1: at being in social situations. So I'm wondering if maybe
Speaker 1: it was something like that for Jeff, where it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: I understand the rules of this, you know what. It
Speaker 1: might be funnier that I can just imagine him being like,
Speaker 1: I want to be the best beer pong you know,
Speaker 1: you don't even care about He's like, I need to win.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I could just say yeah, that that
Speaker 1: that that would not surprise me. Um. Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: read a quote from the book One Click about Jeff
Speaker 1: in uh college from some interviews with his classmates. Quote,
Speaker 1: Jeff wasn't much of a ladies man, perhaps Princeton women
Speaker 1: aren't into beer pong. He explained his own romantic shortcomings
Speaker 1: this way. I'm not the kind of person where women say, oh, look,
Speaker 1: how great he is a half hour after meeting me.
Speaker 1: I'm kind of goofy, and I'm not. It's not the
Speaker 1: kind of thing where people are going to say about me,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this is what we've been looking for.
Speaker 1: Another classmate, e J. Chichilnisky, would bump into him occasionally,
Speaker 1: but today can recall nothing more than that he was
Speaker 1: bright and motivated and organized. So he doesn't really like
Speaker 1: he doesn't stand out at all in in college, which
Speaker 1: is interesting to me, Like he becomes the richest man
Speaker 1: in the world, and all his classmates are like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he was just kind of a kid, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: it's probably worth noting here in terms of weird aspects
Speaker 1: of Jeff Bezos' personality, that he does not like music,
Speaker 1: like period, he doesn't does not get music. That's the
Speaker 1: biggest red flag, right, Like, I don't care what kind
Speaker 1: of music you like. It's like it's the it's the
Speaker 1: chief miracle of human existence. If you don't get it
Speaker 1: at all, that's kind of odd. Yeah, that's really strange. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's so nerving. Actually, yeah, it is weird, like
Speaker 1: force your favorite music. I don't like music, like in general, Like, no,
Speaker 1: that's odd man. Yeah, and he has to um. As
Speaker 1: a kid, he recognizes that this is off putting, and
Speaker 1: so while he's in high school, he memorizes the call
Speaker 1: letters for every local radio station so he can pretend
Speaker 1: to like music if the subject comes up in conversations
Speaker 1: with other kids. It shows the disconnect too, because it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't like music, but I need to be able
Speaker 1: to pretend it. I'll memorize the names of radio stations.
Speaker 1: That way people will think I like music, And it's
Speaker 1: like that's not how people talk about music. Ye, that
Speaker 1: behavior this new radio station, I know the phone number
Speaker 1: to it. No one's gonna be like, oh, he loves music. Yeah, okay, Jeff,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, I don't. I don't. I don't want
Speaker 1: to like second get it. But I've read a lot
Speaker 1: about like, like you know, sociopaths, and they say that
Speaker 1: they're like, you know, there's certain things that they don't
Speaker 1: understand it, but they know how to emulate it to
Speaker 1: fit in. And that sounds like that, you know, I
Speaker 1: was saying that he emulated it pretty badly. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's one of those things I don't know, because
Speaker 1: like I had my version of that, Like I never
Speaker 1: liked football, but I played it, and I like learned
Speaker 1: to feign interest in it because you have to be
Speaker 1: able to pretend to like football in Texas. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's less basic than pretending to understand the appeal of
Speaker 1: music as a concept. Dogs like music, dogs like plants
Speaker 1: grow from it. Like, no, it's very weird that yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it's that's a bit peculiar. A lot of people
Speaker 1: this is relevant to Amazon in part because a lot
Speaker 1: of people claim the reason Apple got the iPod out
Speaker 1: and iTunes that Apple because Amazon and Apple kind of
Speaker 1: had a fight to see who was going to be
Speaker 1: the kings of digital music, and Apple wins um and
Speaker 1: a lot of people will say that it's probably because
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs famously loved music. Jobs was like obsessed with with,
Speaker 1: uh like music, and from a pretty early stage in
Speaker 1: his business, wanted to deliver something like the iPod because
Speaker 1: he cared about people being able to listen to music.
Speaker 1: And Jeff Bezos misses this trade, which is kind of
Speaker 1: an obvious money train right, especially if you're doing Amazon
Speaker 1: ship in the nineties, you should probably be able to
Speaker 1: see that, like, oh yeah, digital music is going to
Speaker 1: be a big deal financially, we should get into that.
Speaker 1: But Jeff doesn't, because like he does not understand the
Speaker 1: appeal of music on a fundamental level. Yeah, that's such
Speaker 1: like a hiccup there. He's just it's like he's just
Speaker 1: like no, I don't. I don't why, like why It's
Speaker 1: like that's that's kind of nuts. Yeah, there's another story
Speaker 1: about him that, like in the early days of the company,
Speaker 1: like two one, Uh, he's like on a work trip
Speaker 1: with a bunch of employees and they have to drive
Speaker 1: back and nine eleven happens, and everybody's like bummed out
Speaker 1: and like freaked out and has to they have to
Speaker 1: drive across the country like right after nine eleven, and
Speaker 1: to try to cheer everyone up, he goes into a
Speaker 1: truck stop and just gets a random assortment of CDs
Speaker 1: just like randomly picks mus off the shelf to play. Okay,
Speaker 1: Jeff to see him put it on, like like you know,
Speaker 1: everyone's like, no, not that song just yet. I can
Speaker 1: only imagine what young Jeffrey bais this is like dating
Speaker 1: profile would look like. I don't think he did. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got other things on his mind dating like what
Speaker 1: he would mock up on there. Oh yeah, you just
Speaker 1: look at the top forty and list all of the bands,
Speaker 1: just like I can calculate how long it's going to
Speaker 1: be before your grandma dies, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's his entire Okay, Cupid, I can tell you when
Speaker 1: your grandparents will die. The women will love this, you
Speaker 1: know what. That might do better than you'd expect to
Speaker 1: be fair worse. During his summer vacation in nineteen four,
Speaker 1: he's in college, Jeff goes to visit his mom and
Speaker 1: dad in Norway, where Mike was working again for x On.
Speaker 1: Jeff got a summer job programming for the oil giant,
Speaker 1: mainly coding a computer model to calculate royalties for the company.
Speaker 1: He gets some work for IBM the next year, and
Speaker 1: when he graduates, he manages to get a job with
Speaker 1: a company called Fittell, off the recommendation of his classmate Chichilnitsky,
Speaker 1: who now claims to barely remember him. Fittell provided computer
Speaker 1: solutions for investment banks and brokerages. When Jeff joined. They
Speaker 1: were in the process of building a sort of internet
Speaker 1: to link computers from a bunch of different financial firms
Speaker 1: together in order to trade more effectively. And the descendant
Speaker 1: of this thing that Jeff was working on is how
Speaker 1: all trading has done today. Right. It's all banks of
Speaker 1: networked machines talking to each other making split second financial
Speaker 1: decisions that no human would have the time to make. Uh.
Speaker 1: And Jeff is not the driving force behind this change, right,
Speaker 1: He's He's one of the people who's coding the early
Speaker 1: stages of this change that I think you could argue
Speaker 1: has been disastrous. But he's not. It's not like this
Speaker 1: is he doesn't start this trend um, but he is
Speaker 1: a part of it. Yeah. Um. He was good at
Speaker 1: the job, and inside of a year he had been
Speaker 1: promoted to manage a dozen programmers. He bounced around different
Speaker 1: early financial tech companies for a while, mainly programming different
Speaker 1: software solutions to allow bankers to communicate with each other.
Speaker 1: In nine nine, he got to talking with a banking
Speaker 1: analyst named Halsey, who also wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1: Halsey and Bezos hit on an idea to expand the
Speaker 1: limited intranets, they've been building into something separate, a network
Speaker 1: that anyone could use to connect subscribers to news stories
Speaker 1: curated algorithmically by the person's interests. So they kind of
Speaker 1: hit upon in the in the eighties this idea of like,
Speaker 1: we should build a news feed that like reads, pays
Speaker 1: attention to what people are reading and gives them more
Speaker 1: of that, which is they never make this, but it
Speaker 1: is interesting that he like this is like how the
Speaker 1: whole internet works now, and they kind of get that
Speaker 1: in the eighties. Like he's clearly understands the promise of
Speaker 1: a lot of this technology earlier than most people. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 1: I think you've definitely heard of his time in some ways,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. Yeah, especially from a data
Speaker 1: perspective line, I think that actually helped him a lot. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it absolutely does. Um And for a while
Speaker 1: Bezos and Halsey like try to get Mary Lynch to
Speaker 1: invest in this idea, but Marylynch is like, I don't
Speaker 1: think there's any financial future in this, and they don't
Speaker 1: put down the money, which is very funny that like
Speaker 1: Mary Lynch could have owned basically Facebook in the late eighties.
Speaker 1: But maybe the Yeah, I mean, obviously it would have
Speaker 1: been a disaster. Probably it didn't happen. Yeah, Jeff moves
Speaker 1: on to a company called D E. Shaw. Now D E.
Speaker 1: Shaw was another investment kind of firm. They manage a
Speaker 1: hedge fund, and it would be the last place Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos ever worked for anyone else. Um. The firm is
Speaker 1: kind of where he gets finished and turned into the
Speaker 1: man who would start Amazon. And a big part of
Speaker 1: that goes to his boss, the founder of the company,
Speaker 1: David Shaw. David is like, he's a brilliant financial technology guy.
Speaker 1: He's he's a really innovative thinker within that field. His company,
Speaker 1: they're kind of they're kind of seen as within this
Speaker 1: industry being mavericks and being like super creative and ahead
Speaker 1: of the curve on everything. And Jeff really admires David Shaw,
Speaker 1: who's analytical. But Jeff like the thing Jeff praises him
Speaker 1: for is having a perfectly developed left and right brain. Um,
Speaker 1: and you kind of get the impression he's one of
Speaker 1: the very few people Jeff ever saw as not just
Speaker 1: a mentor but like an equal. Um. That doesn't happen
Speaker 1: a lot with Bezos, but he really admires this guy.
Speaker 1: So while he's working at D. E. Shaw, Jeff was
Speaker 1: also working to get himself a girlfriend. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to read a quote now from the book The Everything Store.
Speaker 1: There's always one of these for Bezos, for Zuckerberg, for
Speaker 1: fucking uh um Gates. There's always a weirdo quote about
Speaker 1: this sort of thing. Bezos thought analytically about everything, including
Speaker 1: social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom
Speaker 1: dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to
Speaker 1: what he called in plus women. He later famously admitted
Speaker 1: to thinking about how to increase his as women flow,
Speaker 1: a Wall Street corollary to deal flow the number of
Speaker 1: new opportunities a banker can access. So it's it's one
Speaker 1: of those things. It's like if he just said he
Speaker 1: wanted to meet women, so he learned a ballroom dance,
Speaker 1: I'd say, well, that's great. That's what you should do.
Speaker 1: If you want to meet people, go learn a new thing.
Speaker 1: You expose yourself to more people. The fact that he's
Speaker 1: thinking about it like, well, I have to increase the
Speaker 1: flow of women that I communicate with on a daily
Speaker 1: basis in order, Like that's there's implus coefficient will raise
Speaker 1: and then I'll have a higher chance of it. Is like,
Speaker 1: it's not how flow go up? Yeah, women flow up.
Speaker 1: It's so creepy man. Yeah, it's like everything's a transaction,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, he's a way. Sometimes it is, but
Speaker 1: that's not a positive way, you know. And I don't
Speaker 1: think you tend to get the best results if you
Speaker 1: go out to meet people thinking about it like a transaction. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely definitely not worrying about your m flow or whatever
Speaker 1: it was. Yeah. So, Jeff's colleagues knew him as a
Speaker 1: hard worker who also felt the need to brag about
Speaker 1: how hard he worked. He kept a rolled up sleeping
Speaker 1: bag in his office in ostensibly in case he needed
Speaker 1: to work overnight, but his colleagues say it was mostly
Speaker 1: a prop right. Um. The bag and the phone padding
Speaker 1: for it were always in view, like he I'm sure
Speaker 1: he does sleep in his office occasionally, but more than anything,
Speaker 1: it's so that other people know he's willing to sleep
Speaker 1: in his office, you know. Um yeah. Uh. In nine,
Speaker 1: the hedge fund that he worked for hired a woman
Speaker 1: named mckenzy Tuttle. She'd graduated from Princeton, where she'd gotten
Speaker 1: a degree in English and studied with Tony Morrison. She'd
Speaker 1: published a novel prior to starting work as an administrative assistant.
Speaker 1: In short order, she worked directly for Jeff Bezos, who
Speaker 1: had a huge crush on her. One of his then
Speaker 1: colleagues remembers a night out when Bezos hired a limousine
Speaker 1: to take several co workers to a nightclub. Quote, he
Speaker 1: was treating the whole group, but he was clearly focused
Speaker 1: on mackenzie. So I mean, that's whatever. And I should
Speaker 1: note here that, like, because we talked about Bill Gates,
Speaker 1: kind of it on coworkers in a way that was
Speaker 1: more unsettling. McKenzie herself claims that Jeff did not hit
Speaker 1: on her. She disagrees with the version of events put
Speaker 1: forward by her colleagues and claims that she fell in
Speaker 1: love with him. Um and and was the person who
Speaker 1: instigated the relationship. Um and I certainly am not second
Speaker 1: guessing her on this, Like, I don't know he Wasn't
Speaker 1: he a creepy She does not. She she doesn't think
Speaker 1: it's like a creepy office thing. Yeah. She claims that
Speaker 1: she had an office next to his and she fell
Speaker 1: in love with his. Laugh, um laugh, It's like Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's bizarre. That's a that's a fascinating thing to say,
Speaker 1: because I think we should break in to discuss Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos's laugh here, and I want to read a quote
Speaker 1: from Brad Stone, his best biographer, discussing Jeff's laugh. Much
Speaker 1: has been made over the years of Bezos's famous laugh.
Speaker 1: It's a startling, pulse pounding bray that he leans into
Speaker 1: while craning his neck back, closing his eyes, and letting
Speaker 1: loose with a guttural or that sounds like a cross
Speaker 1: between a mating elephant, seal and a power tool. Often
Speaker 1: it comes when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else.
Speaker 1: In a way, bezos His laugh is a mystery that
Speaker 1: has never been solved. One doesn't expect someone so intense
Speaker 1: and focused to have a raucous laugh like that, and
Speaker 1: no one in his family seems to share it. Employees
Speaker 1: know the laugh primarily as a heart stabbing sound that
Speaker 1: slices through conversation and rocks its targets back on their heels.
Speaker 1: More than a few of his colleagues suggests that on
Speaker 1: some level this is intentional. That Bezos wields his laugh
Speaker 1: like a weapon. You can't understand it, says Rick Dalzel,
Speaker 1: Amazon's former chief information officer. It's disarming and punishing. He's
Speaker 1: punishing you. Yeah, he's Gargamo's amazing. Yeah, he's fucking garga Bell. Yeah.
Speaker 1: McKinsey falls over him because if his punishment laugh Jesus,
Speaker 1: yeah she. I don't know. Some people are into like said,
Speaker 1: oh mesochistics. Ship. I don't know, but fucking know, that's
Speaker 1: a weird one if I mean, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: mean I don't want to be like pick on his carrot.
Speaker 1: The laugh is like really unsettling. I think, Yeah, we
Speaker 1: should actually probably in bed audio of that. Yeah, let
Speaker 1: exact me find it. Okay, here's a compilation of Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos laugh. You want to be a chef, maybe you
Speaker 1: want to be a dancer. I don't know what you
Speaker 1: want to do is going to like, but you do
Speaker 1: need to follow your passion. I would love for it
Speaker 1: to be after I'm dead forty minutes with you. It's
Speaker 1: already clicking down or to use everyone, So no droning
Speaker 1: on I see no, no, that's coming up too. But
Speaker 1: that was actually not supposed to be a bad pun
Speaker 1: And then disclosure you are an investor in business decidety.
Speaker 1: I just want to happy, thank you. It is great
Speaker 1: best midnight snack while your brain stormy. I'm asleep at midnight.
Speaker 1: That's important. That's really good. Guy like you actually gets
Speaker 1: it is it's it's weird. It is a little bit
Speaker 1: of a weird laugh. Look, I don't like it. It's
Speaker 1: not nothing good. It is like weirdly the same a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, Like he's practiced it. I don't know,
Speaker 1: has like villain undertone. He's one of those rich people
Speaker 1: who runs the world that gives credence to the lizard
Speaker 1: man conspiracy theories because like you look at you look
Speaker 1: at and listen to Jeff and you're like, yeah, he
Speaker 1: could be a lizard, right, Like he could be a lizard.
Speaker 1: There could be a lizard under that skin, no doubt,
Speaker 1: no doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, um, it's
Speaker 1: just I think it just feels forced. I think that's
Speaker 1: the thing, and it's so over the top, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, When there's no need that, and it
Speaker 1: feels it feels like such an effort to like not
Speaker 1: react genuinely. Um, I don't feel like we're hearing whatever
Speaker 1: is the same thing in the laugh that McKinsey heard,
Speaker 1: probably because he's changed since then. It had to put
Speaker 1: on armor. But it is like Jeff could be a man,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk could only be a human like he's, he's,
Speaker 1: he's his flaws are too obvious and evident, you know, Um,
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos, Yeah, he's, he's, he's very He's polished himself
Speaker 1: to like a higher extent than pretty much any of
Speaker 1: these other any of the other people in his position, um,
Speaker 1: which is probably why he's he's built something that's so
Speaker 1: much more integral to daily life, and why he's he's
Speaker 1: been so much more successful than most of them. Is
Speaker 1: he's he's he's really good at polishing an image. Yeah, hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here. This is actually going to be a
Speaker 1: two parter and wound up running very long, so we
Speaker 1: decided to split it here. If you want to find
Speaker 1: Jake Hanrahan on the internet, you can find him at
Speaker 1: popular front. Um. You can support Popular front you can
Speaker 1: listen to or watch their great content, and of course
Speaker 1: you can find his new show Megacorp on the cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media network. Uh. You can also find this show
Speaker 1: wherever shows are found own, which is wherever you are
Speaker 1: right now, because you found it. M mhm