Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here again. As I stated last time,
Speaker 1: this episode ran very long, so we split into two parts. UM.
Speaker 1: I'm going to just dive into the episode with Jake
Speaker 1: and I right now, So thanks for listening watching if
Speaker 1: you can see sound. Um. In any case, here's more bezos.
Speaker 1: Jeff had been a demanding taskmaster to his employees up
Speaker 1: to this point, but he also sounds like he was
Speaker 1: a reasonably well liked boss that complaints you here later
Speaker 1: about him. He's very strict, he's very like dedicated. He
Speaker 1: wants a lot of work out of you. UM. I
Speaker 1: haven't heard anything like allegations that he was abusive at
Speaker 1: this point, and that's because I think he's not really
Speaker 1: in charge. He's not running the company. He's got people
Speaker 1: above him, and I think that tempers some of what
Speaker 1: will later become his worst attributes as a boss. For
Speaker 1: some time, Jeff had been talking out different business ideas
Speaker 1: with his mentor, David Shaw. Many of these ideas were
Speaker 1: financed focused, but one of the ideas they would talk
Speaker 1: about was what they call the Everything Store. Now. The
Speaker 1: Internet was young back then, and it was still very small,
Speaker 1: but both men were enough future focused to understand its
Speaker 1: potential and the fact that an online company that could
Speaker 1: sell products directly from manufacturer to consumer could save a
Speaker 1: fortune on store space and among other things and undercut
Speaker 1: retail chains. This was not a revolutionary idea. I'm sure
Speaker 1: a number of people realized this was going to happen
Speaker 1: at some point, but Jeff and David are talking about
Speaker 1: it very early on, and Jeff did come up with
Speaker 1: one innovative plan for how this store would work. His
Speaker 1: idea was that it should be driven by customer reviews.
Speaker 1: Any customers should be able to leave a review, UM,
Speaker 1: and you know, all of those reviews should be collected,
Speaker 1: and you should get people buying, should be like shown
Speaker 1: products based on what which stuff is best reviewed? UM. Now,
Speaker 1: this had never been done on a large scale. That's
Speaker 1: how the whole internet works now. But Jeff is really
Speaker 1: like kind of the first person who commits to doing
Speaker 1: this anywhere in internet commerce. UM. And that's really when
Speaker 1: you're looking kind of what set Amazon initially apart from
Speaker 1: other attempts. That was a big part of it. UM.
Speaker 1: For a while, the Everything Store was a fun thought
Speaker 1: experiment for Shaw, but Bezos grew obsessed with it in
Speaker 1: his free time, he would read analyzes of the growth
Speaker 1: of the early Internet, and in nine he came across
Speaker 1: information that web activity had surged by two hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty thousand percent in the last year. So he thought
Speaker 1: quite accurately that someone could make a shipload of money
Speaker 1: on the Internet with a growth percentage like that. So
Speaker 1: he decides to quit his high paying job because he's
Speaker 1: already very success He could have stayed at D. E.
Speaker 1: Shaw for the rest of his career and almost certainly
Speaker 1: would have been a multimillionaire. You know, UM would have
Speaker 1: been a very successful career, but he's he wants more
Speaker 1: than that, so he quits his job. Um kind of
Speaker 1: baffles his mentor, and he and his new wife, Mackenzie
Speaker 1: Flight of Texas, grab a ship car from some family
Speaker 1: members and drive to California. Mackenzie drives while Jeff spends
Speaker 1: the whole time like putting together spreadsheets and reading different
Speaker 1: sort of business laws and figuring out how he's going
Speaker 1: to make this this company he wants to form work Um.
Speaker 1: One of the things he finds out on his drive
Speaker 1: is that, due to a nineteen two Supreme Court case,
Speaker 1: merchants did not have to collect sales tax and states
Speaker 1: they didn't operate in. And this is kind of the
Speaker 1: loophole that makes early Amazon dot Com possible, the fact
Speaker 1: that like again when it because a big part of
Speaker 1: it is that they can really undercut prices. Part of
Speaker 1: that is we're not paying for a brick and mortar store,
Speaker 1: so we don't have to pay for like employees to
Speaker 1: stock ship, we don't have to play pay for storage space.
Speaker 1: We can sell direct from the manufacturer. But part of
Speaker 1: it is due that is because if you're an online
Speaker 1: retailer in this period, you don't have to collect sales
Speaker 1: tax from any state but the one year in So
Speaker 1: if people who live in the state that your business
Speaker 1: is operated in buy from you, they have to pay
Speaker 1: sales tax, but nobody else does, which again means you
Speaker 1: can undercut everybody else. So Jeff had initially picked California
Speaker 1: as the place to launch Amazon dot Com, but when
Speaker 1: he learns about this law, he moves to Washington State instead.
Speaker 1: Um and he picks Washington because number one, no income
Speaker 1: tax in Washington. I think that has an impact on it.
Speaker 1: Number two, and I think the main reason he picks
Speaker 1: it is because it has really good infrastructure. Microsoft is
Speaker 1: based near Seattle, so it has the kind of infrastructure
Speaker 1: you need to create a tech company. But almost no
Speaker 1: one lives in Washington. The whole Pacific Northwest is very
Speaker 1: like sparsely populated, so it meant that like the least
Speaker 1: number of customers possible would have to pay sales tax
Speaker 1: for Amazon products, and no one in the other forty
Speaker 1: nine states has to pay. The initial plan was to
Speaker 1: sell books, because virtually all books came from one or
Speaker 1: two distribution companies who already had good distribution infrastructure, and
Speaker 1: because books are comparatively simple to ship and store. The
Speaker 1: plan from the beginning, but from Jeff, was to make
Speaker 1: money selling a single product online and then branch out
Speaker 1: eventually to selling everything. The first name for what would
Speaker 1: be called Amazon was very stupid. Jeff wanted to call
Speaker 1: it Cadabra Incorporated, like like a yeah, that was his
Speaker 1: was really married to this name for a while, um,
Speaker 1: which is terrible, and a lot of his friends tell
Speaker 1: him it's a bad name. There's kind of this like
Speaker 1: early Journey, where everyone around Jeff is being like, hey,
Speaker 1: how about this as a name? How about this is
Speaker 1: a name? Like one of his friends suggest, why don't
Speaker 1: we just call it make it so dot com based
Speaker 1: on like Captain Picard, who T and G is on
Speaker 1: the air at the point, and that's like Jeff's favorite
Speaker 1: Star Trek character. I think they decide not to do
Speaker 1: that because I'm sure it would be copyright infringement. Um.
Speaker 1: So they stick with Cadabra, even though everyone's trying to
Speaker 1: talk him out of it. Um. He and Mackenzy get
Speaker 1: to Seattle. They rent a three bedroom home, which is
Speaker 1: their first headquarters. They operated out of the garage, and
Speaker 1: they immediately set to work starting a business. Their first lawyer,
Speaker 1: the first lawyer for what becomes Amazon, is the one
Speaker 1: who finally talks Jeff out of Cadabra Incorporated as a name,
Speaker 1: and he does so by pointing out that over the
Speaker 1: phone it sounds like saying cadaver, and He's like, people,
Speaker 1: as I got a yeah, that's not a bad point. Um.
Speaker 1: Sitting together in their living room, m Z and Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos registered a number of domains with potential names Awake
Speaker 1: dot com, brows dot com, book Mall dot com. The
Speaker 1: name they kept coming back to was relentless dot com.
Speaker 1: They really like this. Jeff loves that name. He like
Speaker 1: I think he prefers it to Amazon. I believe it
Speaker 1: is still his favorite possible name for his company, Relentless.
Speaker 1: That's what he thinks is the best possible name. I
Speaker 1: think it's shit. Um. I think Amazon's a fine name
Speaker 1: for a company. Yeah, relentless is a bad name. But
Speaker 1: Jeff never is able to really let this go. He
Speaker 1: buys the relentless dot com domain in n He really
Speaker 1: tries to make this happen again. His friends kind of
Speaker 1: come together, friends and like early employees, and eventually you're like,
Speaker 1: it's creepy, Jeff, Like, it's a creepy name for your store.
Speaker 1: People are not going it's not going to be good
Speaker 1: for us UM and Amazon. He finally gets convinced to
Speaker 1: pick Amazon, and the reason they decide on it is
Speaker 1: that it kind of speak to his how grand his
Speaker 1: goal is because the Amazon is the biggest river in
Speaker 1: the world, right um, But it also is is it's
Speaker 1: a placid name. It's not a name that scares anybody.
Speaker 1: But Jeff never gives up on relentless dot com entirely.
Speaker 1: And in fact, Jake, if you open a browser right
Speaker 1: now and you type in relentless dot com, it'll take
Speaker 1: you to Amazon. Well and dot com. Jesus Christ couldn't
Speaker 1: even give it to the drinks company, just like nope. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's one of those things. It's this, it's what
Speaker 1: we've been kind of coming back to and back to.
Speaker 1: It's like he's never really changed as a person, Like
Speaker 1: he liked everything about him today is the same as
Speaker 1: when he was in sixth grade pretty much. And obviously
Speaker 1: the fact like he wanted relentless dot com to be
Speaker 1: the name. I don't think he every gets over that,
Speaker 1: um relentless, that it's relentless energy dot com. That's so long, man,
Speaker 1: he can sell it to them. Yeah, another one of
Speaker 1: Amazon's victims, that energy company. You know who else is
Speaker 1: a victim of Amazon? Jeff Well, Jeff Jake, the products
Speaker 1: and services that support this podcast. Yeah, actually, I'm sure
Speaker 1: a number of them sell products on Amazon. But whatever,
Speaker 1: we don't need to think about that as uh we
Speaker 1: are back so uh. The same month that Jeff bought
Speaker 1: the relentless dot com domain, he drove down to Portland,
Speaker 1: Oregon to take a four day course on book selling
Speaker 1: sponsored by the American Booksellers Association. He learned the ropes
Speaker 1: of the business, and soon they were off selling books
Speaker 1: at a slow pace at first. UM and Jeff and
Speaker 1: his first couple of employees are like physically because the
Speaker 1: way it works is they're they're buying books from one
Speaker 1: of the two distributors who sells books to all the bookstores.
Speaker 1: Like they get in order. They order the book from
Speaker 1: the distributor, and then the distributorship the book to them,
Speaker 1: and then they mail the book to the customer. Right.
Speaker 1: They don't have a warehouse, they have a garage, so
Speaker 1: like they're getting books as they're ordered and their painstakingly
Speaker 1: mailing out each book themselves. And Jeff is to his credit,
Speaker 1: involved in all of the ship work from the start,
Speaker 1: Like he's putting stuff in packages, he's picking up deliveries,
Speaker 1: he's mailing them off, and so is Mackenzie. And so
Speaker 1: we're like they're all kind of doing everything right, all
Speaker 1: of the early employees are doing every part of running
Speaker 1: the business. There's no there's no like where there's no
Speaker 1: warehouse staff, right, Like Jeff is the warehouse and so
Speaker 1: is Mackenzie. Like everyone is everything in early Amazon. Um
Speaker 1: that said, when it came to funding Amazon, other people
Speaker 1: did most of the heavy lifting. Amazon did start with
Speaker 1: ten thousand dollars that Jeff Bezos had saved up himself,
Speaker 1: and another eight four thousand dollars in what are generally
Speaker 1: referred to as interest free loans. Now, a lot of
Speaker 1: this company this money actually came from his first employees.
Speaker 1: He would basically when he was bringing he would he
Speaker 1: was hiring people he'd met elsewhere in business and saying like, look,
Speaker 1: you come to this company, take a pay cut, and
Speaker 1: if you pay I'll let you buy stock now, right,
Speaker 1: and like that's a big part of how he founds
Speaker 1: the early company. So for example, um, his first employee
Speaker 1: is a guy named Shell Kaplan, who many consider the
Speaker 1: co founder of the company and who Jeff later kind
Speaker 1: of betrays. Shell was Jeff's good friend, and he joins
Speaker 1: Amazon because he believes in the vision of the company
Speaker 1: so much that he takes a fifty pay cut and
Speaker 1: he pays five grand to buy stock when he joins
Speaker 1: in order to help fund the company. Oh he must
Speaker 1: be fucking loaded enough. Oh yeah, I mean he's yes,
Speaker 1: he did very very well. And in fact, like he
Speaker 1: considered buying more but didn't want to gamble that much.
Speaker 1: And it's like, I mean, it worked out well for him. Um,
Speaker 1: Jeff's parents were the first angel investors he had, dumping
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand dollars of their oil money into the venture.
Speaker 1: In early nine, Jeff told his parents there was a
Speaker 1: seventy chance they'd lose it all, explaining, I want you
Speaker 1: to know what the risks are because I still want
Speaker 1: to come home for Thanksgiving if this doesn't work. UM,
Speaker 1: which is at least respectable. Uh. From the beginning, Amazon's
Speaker 1: promise to customers was a bookstore that was always in stock.
Speaker 1: Now they were really just letting regular people order books
Speaker 1: the same way that bookstores did, straight from the people
Speaker 1: who actually like kept them in a warehouse and charging
Speaker 1: a premium for the privilege. The book distributors had a
Speaker 1: rule where they'd only ship a book if you ordered
Speaker 1: ten at a time. Since Amazon wasn't selling enough books
Speaker 1: to to order ten books at a time generally, the
Speaker 1: company developed a sneaky strategy of ordering the book they needed,
Speaker 1: and like nine copies of an out of print book,
Speaker 1: if the books were out of stock or out of print,
Speaker 1: the order would get auto canceled by the ordering software UM,
Speaker 1: and the one book that Amazon needed would get shipped
Speaker 1: their way. And so that's how they got over this
Speaker 1: limit was kind of like fucking with the system and
Speaker 1: and hurting this company's profitability that they were utterly reliant on.
Speaker 1: But at this stage, it's not really a big enough
Speaker 1: business that anyone notices what they're doing. Um, In its
Speaker 1: first year of operation, Amazon required another cash infusion from
Speaker 1: Jeff's parents, this one of a hundred and forty five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. So fucking hell he gets I mean, he's
Speaker 1: kind of funded by x on Mobile, you know, like
Speaker 1: his dad gets rich from x on Mobile, and that's
Speaker 1: what allows Amazon to survive its first year or two.
Speaker 1: What what I don't get is why did he need
Speaker 1: those big lumps of money from his parents. You know,
Speaker 1: you already had like a really good job. I know
Speaker 1: he quit, but did he not like save anything, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean? I don't know. You know, it's
Speaker 1: an idea too. I think tim grand which is what
Speaker 1: he invested in, its more money. I don't, I don't
Speaker 1: he wasn't. I don't know if it's that he made
Speaker 1: his parents put most of the investment in, or if
Speaker 1: he just like legitimately that was kind of what you
Speaker 1: made in fintech at that point. I really don't know
Speaker 1: what his actual net worth was. Um, but yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it is kind of worth noting as a
Speaker 1: number of people will always point out that like, again,
Speaker 1: he's he's he's very reliant on his his family money
Speaker 1: in order to uh, you know, a couple of hundred grand.
Speaker 1: It's not an insignificant investment against the thing that all
Speaker 1: these guys have in common. Um. That said, Bezos and
Speaker 1: his early employees knew that like mom and dad's money
Speaker 1: ain't gonna keep going forever, and they have to pound
Speaker 1: the pavement to find investors. It was not an easy
Speaker 1: sell at first Amazon. The year his mom and dad
Speaker 1: put a hundred and four you have granted into the business,
Speaker 1: the company lost three hundred thousand dollars. Um. Amazon is
Speaker 1: a lost leader for a while. Jeff told every potential
Speaker 1: investor that the company had a seventy chance of failing,
Speaker 1: but he projected net sales of seventy four million dollars
Speaker 1: by the year two thousands. So he's like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: losing money now, but we'll be making tens of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars by the year two thousand. And it's one
Speaker 1: of those things I think at the time most people
Speaker 1: would have probably rightly been like, well that is a
Speaker 1: is nonsense, Like you're just you're just pulling a number
Speaker 1: out of your ass. He was actually pessimistic with that estimate,
Speaker 1: because actual net sales for Amazon in the year two
Speaker 1: thousand were one point six four billion dollars um. Now,
Speaker 1: Amazon still loses money in the year two thousand up
Speaker 1: until like two thousand fifteen. I think they're losing money constantly. Uh,
Speaker 1: but their income grows and that's why people keep investing
Speaker 1: in them, and then they keep like reinvesting their profits
Speaker 1: back into expanding the business. Um. So the investment money
Speaker 1: starts to come in. N venture capitalists port tens of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars into Amazon, and things begin moving very
Speaker 1: fast for Jeff. Amazon's first company motto was get Big Fast,
Speaker 1: which is also the motto for a significant portion of
Speaker 1: steroid twitter. Um. And I guess we can make a
Speaker 1: comment about all the testosterone Jeff appears to be taking
Speaker 1: these days. But yeah, he got big fast, that's for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The company had its I p O in nine. It
Speaker 1: succeeded in winning a stupid legal fight with Barnes and Noble,
Speaker 1: who are like desperate to try to kill Amazon, but
Speaker 1: not quite smart enough to figure out how UM and
Speaker 1: it expands from books to CDs, DVDs, toys, and electronics.
Speaker 1: In his first letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos and some
Speaker 1: of his early employees wrote, this is day one for
Speaker 1: the Internet, and if we execute well day one for
Speaker 1: Amazon dot Com. Now that is important because it's become
Speaker 1: kind of like a religion within Amazon corporate culture. You
Speaker 1: will hear day one constantly. There's Day one posters everywhere.
Speaker 1: Jeff regularly emphasizes the need for day one thinking. Treating
Speaker 1: what they're doing like it's the first time anybody's done
Speaker 1: it again. Not a bad way too, obviously, this is
Speaker 1: a part of the company's success. That's not a bad
Speaker 1: way to look at things if you're trying to innovate them. UM.
Speaker 1: For its first few years, Amazon grew meteorically. Bezos was
Speaker 1: Person of the Year in nineteen, which actually causes some
Speaker 1: problems for him because the article itself and all the
Speaker 1: attention generated by this fawning piece helps to send a
Speaker 1: flood of customers to Amazon for holiday season, and this
Speaker 1: is the first time Amazon has a huge holiday season.
Speaker 1: They've recently expanded to products other than books. Um, and
Speaker 1: they get all this media attention and people start flowing
Speaker 1: flooding there to like buy Christmas presents and Hanakah presents
Speaker 1: and stuff from them. Um and Bezos had put millions
Speaker 1: in investment capital into expanding Amazon for this moment. This
Speaker 1: had been his goal and was part of the strategy.
Speaker 1: But they kind of suck it up because actually keeping
Speaker 1: number one, keeping the most popular toys and stock proved
Speaker 1: to be kind of impossible. They were selling too fast,
Speaker 1: but a bunch of other stuff they bought didn't sell,
Speaker 1: and so like their warehouses are filled with unsold inventory
Speaker 1: while people can't get the products that they actually want. Um.
Speaker 1: It's enough of like a cluster fuck, and largely caused
Speaker 1: by issues with the warehouse right, Like he hadn't scaled
Speaker 1: up distribution enough in order to actually handle the demand.
Speaker 1: They've only got like five warehouses at this point. So
Speaker 1: this causes enough of a calamity that it starts. It
Speaker 1: results in this like flood of bad press. Journalists start
Speaker 1: writing articles about how Amazon stock is overvalued and like
Speaker 1: the company is about to come to a crashing end,
Speaker 1: and it's actually really kind of an existential threat for Amazon,
Speaker 1: and in order to kind of meet the threat, Bezos
Speaker 1: institutes what he calls a Save Santa operation. He forces
Speaker 1: his like all of his employees, like the guys who
Speaker 1: are like coding, the people who are like doing marketing,
Speaker 1: the people who are like all of his like actual
Speaker 1: staff employees, he forces to take two weeks each leave
Speaker 1: their families and spend two weeks of the holidays staffing
Speaker 1: customer service lines or working distribution in like isolated warehouses.
Speaker 1: To save money, workers were kept two to a hotel room.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote from the Everything Store here to
Speaker 1: talk about this first big Amazon holiday season infirmly. Some
Speaker 1: employees stayed at the Golden Nugget in Reno, and after
Speaker 1: they worked at the graveyard shift, they met for beers
Speaker 1: at the casino bar at six am. Later, a few
Speaker 1: swore they had been working alongside furloughed prisoners from a
Speaker 1: nearby jail, though that is difficult to prove. Early employee
Speaker 1: Tom shon Hoff was among the group that went to Delaware,
Speaker 1: where the facility was having problems with the quality of
Speaker 1: the temporary labor pool. There were a lot of temp
Speaker 1: workers that looked like the rehab center had pushed them
Speaker 1: out the back door. He says he watched one worker
Speaker 1: get fired for intoxication and then wet himself while he
Speaker 1: tried to protest. So, yeah, we're starting to see the beginnings,
Speaker 1: right of like the Jeff Wayno today, it was enough
Speaker 1: of a debacle that some executives and it's kind of
Speaker 1: a mix of how badly the Christmas season goes and
Speaker 1: how like how infuriated they are by this time article
Speaker 1: where he like is fluffing himself and that leads to
Speaker 1: a lot of this rush on Amazon. Some executives try
Speaker 1: to push him out of his company. They call him
Speaker 1: impetuous and controlling Um, and this sparks a fight with
Speaker 1: the board and alleged fight with the board. Some board
Speaker 1: members deny it happened. There are there are other people
Speaker 1: who are executives at the time who say it happened.
Speaker 1: There's this fight to try to oust Jeff Um. And
Speaker 1: this is not that long after uh, Steve Jobs had
Speaker 1: been ousted from Apple, right, there's this period where Jobs
Speaker 1: gets forced out of Apple. He creates a computer company,
Speaker 1: he creates pixar Um. Jeff manages to avoid this happening
Speaker 1: because he keeps the majority of Amazon stock, but the
Speaker 1: early years are rough, and you know, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of people saying Amazon and is dead in the like
Speaker 1: two thousand, two thousand one, people saying the company is
Speaker 1: never going to survive another couple of years. Bezos actually
Speaker 1: gets investigated for insider trading in two thousand one because
Speaker 1: of like how bad some of the financial decisions he
Speaker 1: makes are. Um and the company is just bleeding money
Speaker 1: through its early years, like their their profits are increasing rapidly,
Speaker 1: but they're just like pissing cash into a fucking trash fire.
Speaker 1: That said, by the early odds, things had started to
Speaker 1: stabilize and the company began to grow like exponentially. It's
Speaker 1: profitability again. They're still losing money, but they're growing profits
Speaker 1: by so much that investors are willing to keep pumping
Speaker 1: money into the company because they're like, well, if we
Speaker 1: stop reinvesting in the company, eventually there will be dividends
Speaker 1: and shipped for us. It's just yeah, you know that
Speaker 1: that's kind of like how he sells this to them, um,
Speaker 1: And you know the broad strokes of the rest of
Speaker 1: the story, Jake, everybody does because we've all lived through it, right.
Speaker 1: Amazon expands steadily and despite losing to Apple in the
Speaker 1: digital music race because Jeff Bezos doesn't understand music. The
Speaker 1: company rises is to become the globe striding colossus we
Speaker 1: all know today. To close us out, then, I think
Speaker 1: the best thing I could do, rather than sort of like, oh,
Speaker 1: let's talk about how they started Amazon Web Services, or
Speaker 1: let's talk about how they expanded in the television, right,
Speaker 1: I think the best way I could actually close us
Speaker 1: out today is to hone in on the first stirrings
Speaker 1: of two problems that are kind of the main things
Speaker 1: Amazon gets criticized for today. Number one would be it's relentless,
Speaker 1: obsessive and unhealthy work culture, and number two would be
Speaker 1: the callous disregard for human warehouse workers in its distribution
Speaker 1: centers or fulfillment centers, as they call it. The first
Speaker 1: major publication to report on Amazon's corporate culture in a
Speaker 1: really critical way with The New York Times in two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen. Here's how it opened. They are told to
Speaker 1: forget the poor habits they learned at previous jobs. One
Speaker 1: employee recalled when they hit the wall from unrelenting pace.
Speaker 1: There is only one solution. Climbed the wall. Others reported
Speaker 1: to be the best Amazon ians they can be. They
Speaker 1: should be guided by the leadership Principles fourteen rules inscribed
Speaker 1: on handy laminated cards when quizzed days later those with
Speaker 1: perfect scores or in a virtual award proclaiming I'm peculiar,
Speaker 1: the company's proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions and one
Speaker 1: of the things that really separates Amazon from the other
Speaker 1: big dot com startups like Google. They don't go to
Speaker 1: any real efforts to make it comfortable or to like
Speaker 1: give perks to employees, like you get money and you'll
Speaker 1: get stock and you can get rich working at Amazon.
Speaker 1: But like there is like there's no like massage rooms.
Speaker 1: There's no like game rooms for chilling out in like
Speaker 1: Google gets famous for. Like Amazon, Like, yeah, you are
Speaker 1: going to work like yourself to the bone at Amazon.
Speaker 1: That's the promise we make you um and the times
Speaker 1: sites employees like bo Olsen, a bookmarketer who said his
Speaker 1: main memory of Amazon was seeing people weep at their desks.
Speaker 1: You walk out of a conference room and you'll see
Speaker 1: a grown man covering his face. Nearly every person I
Speaker 1: worked with I saw cry at their desk. Much of
Speaker 1: the heart nous and irrational workaholism was justified by the
Speaker 1: near sanctified fourteen rules Bezos had for his employees. Quote.
Speaker 1: According to early executives and employees, Mr Bezos was determined
Speaker 1: almost from the moment he founded Amazon in nineteen four
Speaker 1: to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time, bureaucracy,
Speaker 1: profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he
Speaker 1: wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of
Speaker 1: them proudly counterintuitive, onto instructions simple enough for a new
Speaker 1: worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly
Speaker 1: limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter, and stringent
Speaker 1: enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared. The result
Speaker 1: was the Leadership Principles, the articles of faith that described
Speaker 1: the way Amazonian should act. In contrast to companies where
Speaker 1: declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has
Speaker 1: rules that are part of its daily language and rituals
Speaker 1: used in hiring, cited at meetings, and quoted in food
Speaker 1: truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them
Speaker 1: to their children. The guidelines conjure and Empire of elite
Speaker 1: workers principle number five higher and develop the best who
Speaker 1: hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from
Speaker 1: the forces red tape office politics that keep them from
Speaker 1: developing their Utmost employees are to exhibit ownership number two
Speaker 1: or mastery of every emblement of their businesses and to
Speaker 1: dive deep number twelve or find the underlying ideas that
Speaker 1: can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even
Speaker 1: ask for them. And the indoctrination that that goes on
Speaker 1: in Amazon that like to get people kind of roped
Speaker 1: into this idea. The overwork that comes with it is
Speaker 1: also consuming. That employees take to calling themselves ammabots with
Speaker 1: a myth mix of like pride and resignation, like there's
Speaker 1: an element of pride that were like robots for Jeff's
Speaker 1: big vision. Being the ultimate data guy, Jeff takes full
Speaker 1: advantage of the fact that Amazon's online nature gives him
Speaker 1: like a wider variety of metrics than any other boss
Speaker 1: has ever had to analyze and judge how the human
Speaker 1: beings in his company are working. Employee evaluations are often
Speaker 1: fifth to sixty pages long, filled with numbers like on
Speaker 1: people's performance that employees are expected to memorize, and then
Speaker 1: they'll get cold called by their managers. And if they
Speaker 1: haven't memorized all the different numbers about their metrics and
Speaker 1: aren't able to like explain or justify them, they get
Speaker 1: in trouble quote from The Times. Explanations like we're not
Speaker 1: totally sure or all get back to you are not acceptable,
Speaker 1: many employees said. Some managers sometimes dismissed such responses as
Speaker 1: stupid or told the workers to just stop it. And
Speaker 1: in this Amazon is very much taking after its founder.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna quote here from the Everything sort of
Speaker 1: talk about how Jeff actually refers to like speaks directly
Speaker 1: to the people who work for him. Bezos was prone
Speaker 1: to melodramatic temper tantrums that some Amazon employees called privately nutters.
Speaker 1: A colleague failing to meet Bezos's exacting standards would predictably
Speaker 1: set off a nutter if an employee did not have
Speaker 1: the right answers, or tried to bluff the right answer,
Speaker 1: or took credit for someone else's work, or exhibited a
Speaker 1: whiff of internal politics, or showed any kind of uncertainty
Speaker 1: or frailty in the heat of battle. The vessel in Basos,
Speaker 1: his forehead popped out and his filter fell away. He
Speaker 1: was capable of both hyperbole and cruelty in these moments,
Speaker 1: and over the years he delivered some devastating rebukes to employees.
Speaker 1: Among his greatest hits collected and relaid by Amazon veterans,
Speaker 1: are I'm sorry? Did I take my stupid pills today?
Speaker 1: Are you trying to take credit for something you had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with? Are you lazy or just incompetent?
Speaker 1: I trust you to one run world class operations, and
Speaker 1: this is another example of how you are letting me down.
Speaker 1: If I hear that idea again, I'm going to have
Speaker 1: to kill myself. Does it surprise you that I don't
Speaker 1: know that that you don't know the answer to that question?
Speaker 1: And why are you ruining my life? Uh? Some of
Speaker 1: them are pretty funny. I mean it's pretty bad, but
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that, like you know, And you can
Speaker 1: see with that both how someone could be like really
Speaker 1: fucked up by that, especially if like you devote your
Speaker 1: whole life to this company and in your boss just
Speaker 1: basically said you're ruining. But you can also see how
Speaker 1: people would find that like intoxicating and would draw into
Speaker 1: a guy like that. And would be desperate to like
Speaker 1: please him and get positive Like when it's paired with
Speaker 1: all that rules, yeah, it's very cold, like yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So you can see both white people would find it
Speaker 1: off putting, but also why that would inspire people to
Speaker 1: work even harder, you know. Um. In two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: Amazon hired Elizabeth Willett, a former Army captain who had
Speaker 1: served in Iraq. After some time, she had a child,
Speaker 1: and she arranged with her boss to come to work
Speaker 1: earlier and leave earlier so that she could pick up
Speaker 1: her baby and then she would get on her laptop
Speaker 1: and work from home. Her boss told her this was fine,
Speaker 1: but her colleagues thought she was skipping work because she
Speaker 1: was leaving early and they didn't know she was coming
Speaker 1: in early, and they informed on her to the boss
Speaker 1: that she'd gotten approval from to do this. That boss
Speaker 1: then attacked her, saying, I can't stand here and defend
Speaker 1: you if your peers are saying you're not doing your work.
Speaker 1: And this is kind of emblematic of a dark trended Amazon,
Speaker 1: which is that a lot of these these fourteen principles
Speaker 1: and the system of coworker evaluations often based on the
Speaker 1: principles wind up being used uncommonly, often to attack specific
Speaker 1: groups of employees. And one of the things that like
Speaker 1: women who work there will note is that one of
Speaker 1: these fourteen principles is you have to be honest. And
Speaker 1: one of the pieces of criticism that like female employees
Speaker 1: get from their coworkers at Amazon is that they're all dishonest.
Speaker 1: Like that's that's a common it's a part of why
Speaker 1: there's very few women in high management. And one of
Speaker 1: the claims they'll make is that like, well, these principles
Speaker 1: are used as a justification to attack us and just
Speaker 1: say that like, well, you're not following the principles, when
Speaker 1: in reality, it's just like people kind of being shitty
Speaker 1: towards women in the way that they often are. Um,
Speaker 1: it's an allegation, very very whole, like that ship, you
Speaker 1: know what I mean, that's actually and it's like mind games,
Speaker 1: that's like abusive type ship, Like right, he gave her
Speaker 1: the permission and then he's having to go for something
Speaker 1: that you know, essentially he should have told the colleagues
Speaker 1: it's none of your business, like stop informing, Like but no,
Speaker 1: it's like now that person is in trouble that's fucking weird.
Speaker 1: That's not right well, and it's again because Jeff isn't
Speaker 1: directly involved in that story, but the system he's builts.
Speaker 1: And part of why that, part of why that boss
Speaker 1: is doing that is that that boss is going to
Speaker 1: get evaluated by all of their employees. And so the boss,
Speaker 1: even though he gave her permission to do this, even
Speaker 1: though she's been doing a great job, he can't defend
Speaker 1: her because then his subordinates will criticize him, and so
Speaker 1: he throws her under the bus to protect his own career.
Speaker 1: And that's the that is how the system Jeff built works, right,
Speaker 1: That's it working as intended um, which is kind of
Speaker 1: sucked up, I would argue, uh, and it gets sucked
Speaker 1: up at her because again, that story is one of
Speaker 1: the less unsettling ones from the Times. A woman who
Speaker 1: had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after
Speaker 1: she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that
Speaker 1: while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal.
Speaker 1: Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip
Speaker 1: the day after she had surgery. I'm sorry, the work
Speaker 1: is still going to need to get done, she said,
Speaker 1: her boss told her, from where you are in life,
Speaker 1: trying to start a family, I don't know if this
Speaker 1: is the right place for you. A woman who had
Speaker 1: breast cancer was told that she was being put on
Speaker 1: a performance improvement plan, Amazon code for you're in danger
Speaker 1: of being fired because difficulties in her personal life had
Speaker 1: interfered with her fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed
Speaker 1: others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt
Speaker 1: they had also been judged harshly instead of being given
Speaker 1: time to recover. And that's not unique at Amazon. It's
Speaker 1: just again, it's part of this system that that that
Speaker 1: that Jeff has built. Now, when this report, this New
Speaker 1: York Times article drops, Amazon makes statements about like we're
Speaker 1: going to investigate a lot of these claims, like this
Speaker 1: is not us, Jeff Bezo, since that a letter saying
Speaker 1: like what's described in this New York Times article isn't
Speaker 1: the Amazon that I know or that our employees know. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the standard kind of pr flak response to this ship.
Speaker 1: There are some changes made to the employee self review process,
Speaker 1: but fundamentally nothing changes about the way the company treats
Speaker 1: its own people, because again, to Jeff, the human beings
Speaker 1: that work for Amazon are both like robots that are
Speaker 1: there to execute his ideas, but they're also there to
Speaker 1: be targets for his anger when things go wrong. And
Speaker 1: a good example of this comes from the first Prime Day,
Speaker 1: which is Amazon's big sales day, and the very first
Speaker 1: Prime Day occurs in two thousand fifteen. Um, Amazon programmers
Speaker 1: and other staff work twenty four hour days in order
Speaker 1: to prepare the site to host its first massive sales event,
Speaker 1: which went on to be the biggest sales day in
Speaker 1: company history. So this is a huge success by any
Speaker 1: kind of financial metric. Right, they announced this thing, they
Speaker 1: roll out this big day of sales, and it's it's
Speaker 1: the best they've ever done, right, Um, But the rollout
Speaker 1: of the software that organized the deals was imperfect. So,
Speaker 1: like they're kind of algorithmically picking which stuff to put
Speaker 1: on sale. Um, some of the products that they're relying
Speaker 1: on to be big sellers sell out and so people
Speaker 1: can't get them other like weird products, Like there's like
Speaker 1: discounts on pop tarts and ship and people are like,
Speaker 1: I can't get these electronics that obviously I want, but
Speaker 1: you're trying to get me to buy these discounted pop
Speaker 1: it's not it doesn't hurt again, it's the best sales
Speaker 1: that the company has ever had. It doesn't hurt them financially.
Speaker 1: But there's a bunch of people on like Twitter making
Speaker 1: fun of Amazon because of some like technical glitches, and this,
Speaker 1: to Jeff Bezos completely wipes out the fact that they've
Speaker 1: made the most money they've ever made. People are making
Speaker 1: fun of Amazon, and so he's furious at the people
Speaker 1: who have just executed his dream to do Prime Day. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: I think a reasonable person would be like, yes, of course,
Speaker 1: some weird ship went wrong around the edges. We made
Speaker 1: the most money ever. This is worth celebrating, Jeff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dollars going to buy. Yeah. But Jeff gets really fucking angry,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote here from the book Amazon Unbound.
Speaker 1: Behind the scenes, Jeff lost his mind over the negative
Speaker 1: online reactions, said Craig Berman, a senior PR vice president
Speaker 1: who was at his son's swim meet in Oregon when
Speaker 1: all hell broke loose. He was screaming at me and
Speaker 1: my team that we needed to be clear that these
Speaker 1: aren't shitty deals. He was being maniacal, saying get this fixed.
Speaker 1: You've got to show this as a success, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, it's it's the kind of like poisoned
Speaker 1: internet brain a lot of big wealthy people have where
Speaker 1: it's like, I mean, by any measure of the word success,
Speaker 1: this is a success. But people are angry at you
Speaker 1: on Twitter. So you're like, you're broken about it. I
Speaker 1: I you know, I really kind of get my head
Speaker 1: around that. I mean, you know, I'm one for Twitter
Speaker 1: and that it's fine, Like it's decent. But if you
Speaker 1: had all the money in the world, it's why, like,
Speaker 1: oh are you with this person on Twitter? You can
Speaker 1: go and do anything. I'd be on a quad bike,
Speaker 1: like just doing something, you know what I mean, Like, oh,
Speaker 1: someone's about on Twitter by Like it's just I it's
Speaker 1: You're right, it's like a poison you know. I mean,
Speaker 1: but I think it comes comes with ego, you know,
Speaker 1: when everything you built. Yep. I think so it's because
Speaker 1: this company is like fundamentally extremely personal to him. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it is the core of his identity. Yep. Cool shit. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's probably no better example of how uncaring and actively
Speaker 1: harmful Jeff can be towards his employees than the story
Speaker 1: of Amazon's fulfillment centers. We've all seen articles that dropped
Speaker 1: early this year about people pissing in bottles to make
Speaker 1: the inhuman metrics for cargo moved or packages delivered. Um,
Speaker 1: you have a show, you know, Mega corp is largely
Speaker 1: about this. This is a big part of Mega Corps
Speaker 1: is like Amazon fulfillment center workers and how they're treated. Um.
Speaker 1: And so at the end of this episode, I'd like
Speaker 1: to talk about how that system started, right like the
Speaker 1: very early days of what led to this people pissing
Speaker 1: in bottles and like passing out and stuff on the
Speaker 1: work floor and RV city setting up outside of fcs
Speaker 1: in order to keep them like all that ship. So
Speaker 1: the man who largely built Amazon's fulfillment center system was
Speaker 1: Dave Clark. He was a former middle school band teacher
Speaker 1: who got hired in nineteen nine when the company had
Speaker 1: only seven warehouses in the US. By two thousand twelve,
Speaker 1: when he becomes head of Global Operations, Amazon has forty
Speaker 1: warehouses in the US and twenty four other warehouses worldwide,
Speaker 1: but these were located mostly in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: So at this point twelve, Amazon has a bunch of
Speaker 1: warehouses like sixty seventy in the world. But they're all
Speaker 1: in like really inconvenient places. And the reason why they're
Speaker 1: inconvenient places is those are general lead the places with
Speaker 1: the chiefest labor and also the most advantageous for tax purposes.
Speaker 1: So we'll set up like the warehouses will be in
Speaker 1: some bum funk town in the middle of nowhere because
Speaker 1: that town gives them a tax break and because it's
Speaker 1: cheap to higher workers around there, right, And that makes
Speaker 1: sense for a company that isn't trying to do what
Speaker 1: Amazon starts trying to do. Right. That can work great
Speaker 1: if you're just trying to sell products online minimize your costs.
Speaker 1: But if you're obsessed with the idea that like there
Speaker 1: should be two day or one day shipping, you can't
Speaker 1: do that. You have to have a fat you have
Speaker 1: to have a fulfillment center in every major city if
Speaker 1: you're going to do that kind of business. Right. Um, So,
Speaker 1: Dave Clark is the guy who kind of oversees the
Speaker 1: pivot from we have our warehouse systems set up in
Speaker 1: order to maximize the amount of stuff that we can
Speaker 1: hold and ship out and minimize the costs too. We
Speaker 1: don't care about minimizing the costs anymore. We care about
Speaker 1: getting as many fulfillment centers started as possible so that
Speaker 1: we can get products to people in a day or two. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: And that's again it's become such of like Amazon's two
Speaker 1: day shipping has become such a part of just like
Speaker 1: life now that it it's it's not until like right
Speaker 1: around when the Trump years start that like they actually
Speaker 1: get this really off the ground. You know, it's fairly
Speaker 1: recent that this has been an aspect of modern life
Speaker 1: that you could expect two days shipping on your Amazon products. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's just kind of taken over everything because it's
Speaker 1: it's offers such close to day. Yeah, I've had ship
Speaker 1: arrived like same day that I didn't even like try
Speaker 1: to order same day. Yeah yeah, yeah, same, It just happened. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: over the next five years, Amazon adds a hundred fulfillment
Speaker 1: centers worldwide, and this is where most of their gargantuan
Speaker 1: like huge warehouses and like that are in every city
Speaker 1: kind of or at least on the outskirts of every city.
Speaker 1: This is where all that comes from. So Dave Clark's
Speaker 1: the guy who's like expanding massively the fulfillment center system
Speaker 1: so that they can do this now. At the same time,
Speaker 1: Amazon they realized they can't rely on like ups or
Speaker 1: usp us, so they get their own like fleet of planes. Um.
Speaker 1: But they don't. So one of the things Amazon does
Speaker 1: with its warehouses and with everything is they never want
Speaker 1: to interface with unions in any way, shape or form. Ever.
Speaker 1: They never want to, like, in any way deal with them.
Speaker 1: This is a problem with getting your own planes because
Speaker 1: pilots are unionized, right. Um. So Amazon basically leases planes
Speaker 1: from a company that actually runs everything and hires the
Speaker 1: pilots so that they don't have to deal directly with
Speaker 1: unionized pilots. Um. And they structure their distribution network very
Speaker 1: carefully to avoid any unionized warehouse workers. This also allows
Speaker 1: them to avoid scrutiny over the hours worked or miles
Speaker 1: driven by people in distribution. When this starts killing people
Speaker 1: because drivers are involved in crashes, they run people down
Speaker 1: on the side of people like are dying in the warehouses. Um.
Speaker 1: You can find a bunch of stories about this, and
Speaker 1: when those stories start to come out that there's like
Speaker 1: drivers crashing and killing people trying to make Amazon's like metrics,
Speaker 1: there's backlash um, you know, both from the media, from
Speaker 1: public outcry, and from some people inside of Amazon itself.
Speaker 1: One of these people is Mark Onetto. Mark was head
Speaker 1: of operations in the mid Auts, and he introduced a
Speaker 1: number of innovations to try and make fulfillment centers run
Speaker 1: more smoothly. He was also very concerned with the treatment
Speaker 1: of employees in these fulfillment centers, and he tried to
Speaker 1: force empathy for employees onto Jeffrey Bezos quote from Amazon
Speaker 1: on Bound. In two thousand nine, Onetto's human resources deputy
Speaker 1: David knee Kirk wrote a paper titled Respect for People
Speaker 1: and presented it at an S team meeting. The S
Speaker 1: team is like Jeff and his his like trusted advisors,
Speaker 1: right like it's the top of the Amazon Empire. The paper, yeah,
Speaker 1: the steam. The paper drew from Toyota's proven lean ideology
Speaker 1: and argued for treating people fairly, building mutual trust between
Speaker 1: managers and associates, and empowering leaders to inspire employees rather
Speaker 1: than act as disciplinarians. Bezos hated it. He not only
Speaker 1: railed against it in the meeting, but he called knee
Speaker 1: Kirk the following morning to continue the brow beating. Amazon
Speaker 1: should never imply that it didn't have respect for people
Speaker 1: embedded in the very fabric of how it operated, he said.
Speaker 1: Bezos also solemnly declared that one of the biggest threats
Speaker 1: of the company was a disgruntled and entrenched hourly workforce,
Speaker 1: like the unionized workers that impaired US automakers with strikes
Speaker 1: and onerous contract negotiations. Amazon later denied that Bezos said this.
Speaker 1: He encouraged nie Kirk and Noetto to focus on ensuring
Speaker 1: that FC workers who weren't advancing with an with an
Speaker 1: Amazon stayed for a maximum of three years. He like
Speaker 1: cancels bonuses makes it impossible for well to get raises
Speaker 1: past a certain point, like, rather than we shouldn't be
Speaker 1: enabling the self respect of our fulfillment center workers, we
Speaker 1: should make sure there's as much turnover as possible so
Speaker 1: that nobody's there very longs that no kind of culture conform,
Speaker 1: so that people don't get to identify themselves as part
Speaker 1: of a community of labors and unionized. So Onetto is
Speaker 1: pushing against this, Bezos pushes back, and Nonetto's end at
Speaker 1: the company comes in two thousand eleven, when a local
Speaker 1: Pennsylvania paper reports that an Amazon warehouse near al In
Speaker 1: Town had gotten so hot during the summer that workers
Speaker 1: had passed out and been taken to hospitals. And Amazon
Speaker 1: had been so aware of the danger that they had
Speaker 1: ambulances just waiting outside for when people passed out. Right
Speaker 1: like that, This was like there were yeah, of course
Speaker 1: X number of employees are going to pass out in
Speaker 1: our unair conditioned warehouses in the dead of summer, and
Speaker 1: we'll just keep ambulances on site. There was in my research.
Speaker 1: I actually spoke to someone that spoke to the workers
Speaker 1: there and they were saying, uh, in the offices when
Speaker 1: people went into complain, they had the air con on
Speaker 1: full blast in the office, but in the who house
Speaker 1: they had nothing like yep, so grim. And here's the thing.
Speaker 1: Ohnetto had seen this coming, and in fact, months earlier
Speaker 1: he'd presented a white paper to Bezos another top brass
Speaker 1: about rooftop air conditioners and FC facilities and said they
Speaker 1: were they would cost like fifty two million dollars, but
Speaker 1: he was like, we need to do this. It's going
Speaker 1: to be necessary both for maintaining productivity and taking care
Speaker 1: of our people. Bezos himself shut down the request to
Speaker 1: put in air conditioners now. When the story goes viral
Speaker 1: that workers are passing out, he immediately approves air conditioners
Speaker 1: for the FCS, Like right, it's this kind of thing
Speaker 1: where he's like, no, we're not going to spend that money. Oh,
Speaker 1: now people are yelling at us. Now it's bad PR.
Speaker 1: We'll do it now. And then after he's forced to
Speaker 1: like put in air conditioners, he attacks Onetto for not
Speaker 1: stopping the disaster. The guy who had been like, we
Speaker 1: have to do this and Jeff had said no. Jeff
Speaker 1: goes after him and blames him for the fact that
Speaker 1: there's bad PR and I'm gonna quote from Amazon unbound
Speaker 1: and like how he does this? Fuming a Netto prepared
Speaker 1: to remind Bezos of his original proposal. Colleagues begged him
Speaker 1: to let it go, but he couldn't, as they anticipated.
Speaker 1: The meeting did not go well. Bezos said that as
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, he did remember the paper and
Speaker 1: that it was so poorly written an ambiguous that no
Speaker 1: one had understood what course of a of action Onetto
Speaker 1: was recommending. As other s team members cringed, Bezos declared
Speaker 1: that the entire incident was evidence of what happens when
Speaker 1: Amazon puts people in top jobs who can't articulate their
Speaker 1: ideas clearly and support them with data. And I think
Speaker 1: it's because the actual data, like Jeff was willing to accept,
Speaker 1: oh we'll lose ex productivity in order to save this
Speaker 1: amount of money by not air conditioning our factory or fcs,
Speaker 1: it's worth it netto was saying like, it's bad to
Speaker 1: do this to people. And the thing that Jeff's data
Speaker 1: didn't account for is that like, well, it may not
Speaker 1: have cost you money, but it did cost you bad
Speaker 1: pr when it came out that you were doing this
Speaker 1: to your workers and that hurt your bottom line. But
Speaker 1: no data that Otto could have presented would ever have
Speaker 1: made that case right. There was no like white paper
Speaker 1: saying this is how much money will lose. When The
Speaker 1: New York Times writes a story about this, you know,
Speaker 1: um yeah, yeah, I still don't think he's fully grossed that.
Speaker 1: It's like, you know, he's made more money than he's
Speaker 1: ever made throughout the COVID and the union workers, you know,
Speaker 1: doing the most efforts right now to unionize, and he's
Speaker 1: still just spending millions and millions trying to stop them.
Speaker 1: You know what I mean, rather than just being like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what, we made loads and loads of money. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's put it back in, let's actually fix this,
Speaker 1: and it's just no, he's just just not having it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like you could you split one percent
Speaker 1: of Amazon profits among FC workers and suddenly you've got
Speaker 1: aware a work force that's like a lot more mode.
Speaker 1: You would have much more career people, you'd have less
Speaker 1: turn up. But whatever, I know, I'm not a businessman. Uh.
Speaker 1: It would also be at least less unethical. So the
Speaker 1: guy who Atto leaves after this, like he quits I
Speaker 1: think the very next year. Um, and the guy who
Speaker 1: takes over from anetto spearheads a bid to acquire a
Speaker 1: company called Kiva. Kiva is a robotics startup. They make
Speaker 1: machines that can transport merchandise containers around warehouses and streamline
Speaker 1: the whole process. Before Kiva, Amazon pickers had walked upwards
Speaker 1: of twelve miles a day to grab products and take
Speaker 1: them to shipping. Kiva bots are able to kind of
Speaker 1: like move all of the shipping containers and these warehouses
Speaker 1: around in order to make things more efficient, so that
Speaker 1: workers have to walk less and can pack more per
Speaker 1: like our um. And these robots really start to hit
Speaker 1: their stride and warehouses around two fourteen. They increase the
Speaker 1: amount of products per square foot and an Amazon FC
Speaker 1: by five deeper scent because it's just so much more efficient.
Speaker 1: But they come with downsides to primarily for the human workers. Quote.
Speaker 1: The robots also transformed labor that was physically exhausting characterized
Speaker 1: by endless walking into work that was instead mentally straining,
Speaker 1: with employees standing in placement not and listeningly repeating the
Speaker 1: same movements over and over. Report in the Center for
Speaker 1: Investigative Reportings Reveal magazine cited an Ocean letter to Amazon
Speaker 1: that said the robots exposed employees to ergonomic risk factors,
Speaker 1: including stress from repeated movements and standing up for ten
Speaker 1: hours a day. Just as the tyrannical invisible force of
Speaker 1: software guided the robot swarms, it also monitored worker performance,
Speaker 1: flagging any quantifiable decrease in productivity and subjecting employees to
Speaker 1: performance improvement plans and possible termination. And that at this
Speaker 1: point where where we are when megacorps starts, Jake, this
Speaker 1: is kind of what feeds into all that Like this
Speaker 1: is how this is. You know, it all makes sense, right,
Speaker 1: None of it is a Yeah, the diet thing is
Speaker 1: just like the obsession with data above just humanity basically
Speaker 1: is kind of you know the stage that the you
Speaker 1: know that all of this is kind of dancing on
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, And it's just it's it's
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's almost like unintentional horrors is just
Speaker 1: like yeah, like just just not even caring, you know
Speaker 1: what I mean, It's like whatever, whatever. The data doesn't
Speaker 1: show that. It's just like me, these are human beings
Speaker 1: with families and lives. It got you know what I mean,
Speaker 1: got to eat, but the data doesn't it doesn't show
Speaker 1: that that level of kind of context. Um, it's just
Speaker 1: kind of sad, you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is kind of sad. But that's the that's the
Speaker 1: that's the podcast, that's the episode. Yeah, where you're going
Speaker 1: over it all. It's very jolly. Yeah, it's fun everybody.
Speaker 1: So you know, consider this part one and consider listening
Speaker 1: to Megacorps to get the full story. Now you know
Speaker 1: who f Bezos is, it's time to learn in detail
Speaker 1: every funked up thing his company has done. Um, Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1: And you know, I would say it's not exactly a
Speaker 1: lot of people have been like, oh it's it's not
Speaker 1: exactly the most uplifting podcast. It's like, well, no, what
Speaker 1: did you think was going to happen? This is about scandals.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the arguably the biggest kind of
Speaker 1: company on earth in a way. So yeah, no it's not.
Speaker 1: But like I said in the kind of in the
Speaker 1: in the intro to the thing, Um, you know, if
Speaker 1: you if you have ever bought anything from Amazon, I
Speaker 1: think you should at least have to be aware of
Speaker 1: the way they operate. And it's not just about the work,
Speaker 1: because we're going to be going into like the surveillance,
Speaker 1: the deals they did with them I six and the
Speaker 1: c I A. Like, there's so many layers to it. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: and uh yeah, check out Megacorp, Jake, do you have
Speaker 1: anything else you want to plug? Um? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: if anyone wants to just check out my work, just
Speaker 1: goes to Jake Hanrahan dot com. Um and you just
Speaker 1: see all my links or whatever. Yeah, alright, check out
Speaker 1: Jake Hanrahand, check out Popular Front, check out Megacorp, and
Speaker 1: check out of the Internet now and go do something offline.
Speaker 1: You've you've spent enough time online today. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: bam