Amazon Unbound Author Brad Stone On How Nerdy Bezos Turned Into Ripped Bezos

Brad Stone is the author of Amazon Unbound, a new book about the inner workings of Amazon, which releases this week. Stone joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the book, Bezos's transformation, Amazon's culture, and what's in store for the company now that Bezos is leaving the CEO role. Check out our sponsor, Flatfile: https://flatfile.io Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversations of the tech world and beyond. Joining us today is the author of the new book, Amazon Unbound, a revealing look into what I think is the most fascinating company on the planet. He is also the Senior Executive Editor for Global Technology at Bloomberg News, where he's assembled one of my favorite teams of reporters, a lot of good folks on that team. Brad Stone, welcome to the show. Thank you, Alex. I have plowed through your book. I think it's a fantastic book, and I'm thrilled that you're here to speak with me about it, speak with us about it. It's interesting because the book's title is Amazon Unbound, yet Bezos' face is on the cover. And there were times where I'm like, is this an Amazon book?

• 1:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is this a Bezos book? And you really can't. Untwine the two, even though Bezos is going to step down as the CEO. So what happens to Amazon when Bezos leaves? Is he actually going to leave? Because he's scheduled to leave within a couple of months.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  That's right, but let's be specific. Leave the CEO spot and become executive chairman. You know, I don't know. I'm not privy to any reasons other than the ones that he shared, that he, you know, has a lot of competing obligations in his life. But you can't help but go back about a year to that horribly awkward Zoom House Committee meeting where Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai testified. And, you know, it was a circus of political questions and theatrics. And I just wonder if Jeff sat there and thought, is this really how I want to be spending my time, right?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  The most valuable resource he has, which he so strategically apportions out to all of the things in his world. And, and, and, and look, I mean, he, he says he's not going anywhere. He wants to stay at, at Amazon to work on new projects. It's always been his passion. And, you know, we don't know how much room he'll give Andy Jassy to run. You know, I assume that Jassy will now be doing the stuff that Bezos does not find fun, like appearing for, for those committee meetings. But there's a sense that he's really gonna, you know, drift away and, and, and give up, you know, Amazon's his legacy. Amazon's the biggest planet in his solar system. So I think Amazon will be fine. He is key to the company's inventiveness and hopefully that comes through in the book.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  So if he were to really leave, that probably is a problem for Amazon.

• 3:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And I'm definitely, I definitely want to talk about the role of like whether Bezos or the Amazon employees are core to invention inside the company. So why don't we save that for a minute? I want to, and I guess like if he was going to, you know, take this step back, he would follow the path of Bill Gates and Larry and Sergey, who sort of left when the going got, got rough. So that sounds like a good reason. And of course I agree with you. I think he's going to stay involved with the company. You know, you've written two books on Bezos. He is a uniquely driven person, obviously with all this ambition inside Amazon, then the Washington Post and then space. I'm sure you've thought about this over the course of writing these books, but what do you think drives Bezos?

• 4:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like oftentimes it's like a slight or a CEO trying to prove something.

• 4:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, psychoanalyze him for a minute and, and, you know, bring us into what you think is actually behind this man's ambition.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Sure. You know, as you say, I've, I've written two books, which is, you know, hard to believe, writing two books about one, any one person or one company. And, and that should equip me to give a nice pithy answer, but it, you, it's really a good question, Alex. And of course, I'm not a psycho analyst. But, you know, I think, I think

• 4:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  That we know, yeah.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  The, you know, one that, one easy answer that I'll, I'll grasp for is, you know, his interest in, his curiosity and his sort of interest in building things. I know, you know, he'll, he really does try to position himself or describe himself as an inventor, as a builder. It's a, it's sometimes a little bit like Miley Cyrus saying she's a songwriter. You know, the world just sort of refuses to see them in that way. Right? We know Bezos as like an operator, as maybe a monopolist, as this dominant force in business. He wants to be seen as an inventor. And look, what we know is he's a voracious reader. He loves science fiction. It, you know, reading sci-fi books and, and being a

• 5:43Speaker 01

  futurist has allowed him to conceptualize products like Alexa. I think that one reason why he bought the Washington Post is because it was a, a building challenge, you know, to come in and apply his principles of, of business to a newspaper, a institution that was kind of reeling. He, he, you know, he was building the 10,000 year clock. He's building Blue Origin. He's building New Philanthropies. He's, he likes to do everything a little bit differently. Right? I think that curiosity and that, that drive to kind of construct lasting things is, is, is key to what drives him. But, you know, we can't also dismiss some of the more human things, like he's competitive. We know that, right?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You know, he's always been super competitive with Google in particular. I think, you know, he would take a lot of pride in being the largest company in the world one day by, by revenue. And so, you know, there, there probably are some more, you know, down to earth, terrestrial answers to your question.

• 6:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it does. The curiosity and the passion to invent does strike me and I definitely saw that while I was writing Always Day One. And you speak to these managers and inside Amazon and ask them to speak about Bezos and always comes down to the fact that like they view this invention, the self-actualization as the key part to the life they want to live versus cruising around on yachts, which is funny because you did find.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Because Jeff Bezos is building a yacht.

• 7:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Changing. Yeah, exactly. How do you, how do you think Jeff Bezos? From the Everything Store, which is your first book, is different from the one that you write about in Amazon Unbound?

• 7:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he totally is, right? And the first key is just the visual cues, right? The, the geeky, right? Slightly ruffled, rumpled technologist of the early years is gone. You don't hear the laugh as much anymore. And, you know, replacing him as the master of the universe, yes, who's, you know, kudos to his personal trainer, who, you know, is being seen courtside at Wimbledon and on the yacht of David Geffen. So a lot has changed and it's funny, I tried to chart that change in, in Amazon Unbound. In, in the introduction, I really talk about how in the early years, he was so focused on Amazon.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  He was not someone who his, his colleagues and his friends thought would be buying boats or buying fancy cars. He even made it almost a character point that he was driving to work every day in his whole old beat up Chevy Blazer and then, and then a Honda. And, you know, and now he does tend to collect, you know, the assets of the extremely wealthy. The boat, the boat is, is, you know, is sort of a theme I almost play with at the end of the, in, at the end of the book because it illustrates how much he has changed. And then the other thing is, I would say that, you know, Amazon. On is continues to be a focus, but there are no so many competing things. And I think I quote Jamie Dimon of Citi in the book early saying that,

• 8:47Speaker 01

  you know, Jeff, the larger world really opened up to him. And that means being, you know, a citizen in elite circles in Washington and Hollywood, you know, meeting with world leaders. But it also means applying his unique intellect to these real, you know, big societal challenges like global warming. I mean, I think he feels like he has a responsibility to address that. So, you know, the Bezos that, you know, we covered 10 years ago, probably would have thought that's not, you know, part of his mission. And now it certainly is.

• 9:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you make of the fact that nerdy Bezos took Amazon to one level, but the companies really seem to explode? You know, in the era of Jack Bezos or Lex Luthor Bezos.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Is that, is that a leadership lesson? Like maybe don't be so humble?

• 9:40Speaker 01

  No, because nerdy Bezos, nerdy Bezos constructed.

• 9:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  Set the foundation.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Intricate, right. The intricate machinery that allowed this thing to explode. Almost everything that's happened over the last five years. What has been fueled by the acceleration of prime, by, by the operations expertise that they developed in the fulfillment centers, by the, by the traffic that was drawn and then created an opportunity for an ad business. And by the explosion of AWS, which was founded in like 2005, 2006. So yeah, nerdy Bezos, who knows? Nerdy Bezos might have been a more effective leader and, you know, we might find out in a couple of years that as you called him, Jacked Bezos, you know, has, has taken his eye off the ball a little bit and created some of the problems that, you know, and vulnerabilities that we could talk about.

• 10:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it is interesting when I speak with people and they always like, especially when it comes to Microsoft. And this is when we talk about evaluating Steve Ballmer's legacy. They always want to point to profits, but oftentimes it is the five years before that laid the foundation for the five next years inside a company. And so all that hard work that nerdy Bezos did is seeming to pay off now. Maybe he's just enjoying the fruits of his labor. So let's talk about Bezos's image. I mean, we've been dancing around a little bit, but the role that he plays in shaping it. One of the things I find fascinating about the guy is that he does seem to be extremely image conscious. Like you mentioned, he wants to be known as an inventor, like all CEOs are. And yet, he doesn't do any interviews,

• 11:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  or hardly any. I can't remember the last time he actually sat down for a one-on-one with a journalist. And it's so strange, because he owns a newspaper, he owns the Washington Post, but he didn't sit down with you for this one. There was a scene with him at the beginning of the Everything Store, so you got him there. Why do you think Bezos is so press shy? Like, what's behind his strategy there?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  It's a really good question. He has done a couple onstage interviews over the past few years. They tend to be about Blue Origin. When they're not, they tend to be with very friendly interviewers. He did one in LA a couple of years ago, and the interviewer was his brother. So, you know, no, no...

• 11:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  It was a great conversation.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It was.

• 11:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  His brother put up pictures of him dressed up as like a peach, and he was the grapes, or something like that.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 12:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  But no journalists.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, occasionally, he'll do one with Stephen Levy at Wired. Those are always great conversations. Look, I don't know. I think maybe, you know, there comes a point where you don't feel like you have to explain yourself anymore. It's also true that Amazon has its own channels now. Like a lot of companies, they sort of feel like they can go directly to their customers. And, you know, why wrestle with a, you know, potentially combative journalist? And look, you know, in the early years, he was very available and was very strategic. He was building a brand. He was trying to insert, implant the amazon.com brand and the value proposition into customers' minds. For a

• 12:50Speaker 01

  while, he was on CNBC all the time. He was trying to reassure investors during the dot com bus. And now, what would the point be? Right? I mean, it's like, he doesn't do, he doesn't spend his time on things without, kind of outward... Goals, clear pragmatic goals. So, you know, in turn, you know, which is probably why he talks about Blue Origin, you know, he's, he's still on a mission there. And in terms of Amazon, you know, the thing is a runaway freight train and there's not much he has to do. I could kind of see him, well, you know, he, he used to lend his, his gravitas and presence to, to product launches. And then that sort of went famously wrong with the launch of the Fire Phone,

• 13:30Speaker 01

  where his presence raised expectations so high that then the resulting kind of reception of the phone was extremely disappointing and the thing flopped and they, they, they had to pull it from the market. And now he doesn't even do those anymore. So maybe those are some of the factors. And maybe to go back to what I was saying about Congress, he just doesn't want to spend his time doing it.

• 13:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. The old days Bezos is, I mean, nerdy Bezos, going back to him, like, kind of hilarious, like, shows up at the, you know, on the side of a building, like, talking about the strategy for Amazon. And you can watch that video on YouTube, or I think he even did a Pizza Hut commercial.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  Taco Bell. Taco Bell. Yeah. One of the more bizarre relics of Amazon history.

• 14:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And now, like, you'll see him, he'll still be out there, but he controls the media now. He'll do it on his Instagram. What do you think Bezos thinks about you? Because your books have definitely been, you know, the first one for sure. Our second one, without a doubt, will be the big sort of image shapers for him in terms of like, people who want to really know who Jeff Bezos is. Do you have a sense of how he feels about you, Brad?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Alex, I urge you to go and, and get the answer to that one yourself. I do, I cannot say. Look, I, I know that he, he, what he did allow me to talk to many members of the S Team, many employees and, and some personal friends.

• 14:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  The S Team is his senior leadership.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Right. Personal friends. So that was good. You know, I, I hope, I think, I think I'm speculating that he recognizes that these books have been embraced by Amazon employees and potential employees and people in the ecosystem. And that therefore is important to get them right. And which is why the company really engaged with me and went into a pretty significant fact checking process. But personally, I have no idea.

• 15:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  I would imagine that he doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about it.

• 15:24Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'll, I'll say, well, you never know with CEOs when it comes to this type of stuff. I'll say when I was in Seattle. Almost everyone I spoke with were told me that your book was spot on and like, you know, the first one, Everything Store. And I think they'll say the same about this one.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  That's nice to hear because I did get some resistance on the first one from them.

• 15:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Oh, right. Mackenzie Bezos wrote you a one star review. Do you think she's gonna come in and give you a five star review now that you're now that they're divorced?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  I would hope, you know, she's listening. I'll say I'll welcome that. That would be nice publicity. But no, I feel like she has kept, you know, deliberately a very private public profile. And so I would be, I would unfortunately, I don't think I can anticipate that if Lauren Sanchez wants to leave me a review, I would welcome that as well.

• 16:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  I don't think Michael Sanchez is going to leave you a very positive review. That's Lauren's brother, who apparently is the one that ended up leaking all these sultry messages between Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez. Well, I can ask you some more organizational questions, but why don't we just talk about that for a minute? So everybody thought that it was Saudi Arabia that hacked Jeff Bezos' phone? Turns out it was Lauren Sanchez's brother? What did you find out?

• 16:40Speaker 01

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't say, I would say more that there was a kind of cloud of ambiguity. And, and it was, you know, there were plenty of reports that Michael Sanchez had, had, you know, had provided information to the National Enquirer. But there were also, there was also a forensics report that Jeff's phone had been hacked. You know, it's, it's very possible that was true. You know, I, when I set out to write this book, I did not imagine that I would be going down this avenue and writing about.

• 17:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, has all this happened afterwards? Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Right. I had to spend a lot of time unraveling it. And, you know, what I concluded was really just based on the current available evidence. And, you know, it is always possible that, you know, something comes out that blows up our understanding of it. But there's no evidence when you look at the voluminous case files and the, and the Southern District of New York investigated it because Bezos was accusing AMI, the company that owns the Enquirer, of extorting him. And, and, you know, which is a crime, and they investigated it. And they, and they dropped the case. And my reading, and they might have had other reasons for doing that, but my reading of the available evidence is at points, you know, very clearly.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  You know, to Michael as the leaker and no political motives or international intrigue, at least leading to those articles and to the frictions between AMI and the Bezos camp. You know, Bezos and his associates raised the idea that this was because of the Washington Post motivated by enmity from Trump World to the Post reporting or enmity from Saudi Arabia. I don't think that they were being disingenuous when they suggested that. I mean, Michael Sanchez was a prominent, well, he's a conservative voice on Twitter. The Saudis did have reasons, you know, to view the Washington Post as a political enemy.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  But, you know, when you look at it, it in retrospect feels a little bit like misdirection, that this was really, you know, a much simpler saga of an extremely prominent and wealthy person who, you know, started a relationship, you know, which he either didn't care or didn't understand that the world would be sort of interested in. And he made himself vulnerable to, you know, to prying eyes. And, you know, and it's a funny little side story, but I think it also helps to chart what we've been talking about, which is the evolution of Jeff, you know, from, you know, a sort of like classic tech nerd internet

• 19:21Speaker 01

  builder into, you know, this transformation into something quite different.

• 19:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and it was interesting that Jeff Bezos, you know, you titled your chapter "complexifier." And he said owning the Washington Post is a "complexifier" for him and, you know, not so vaguely alluded to the fact that Trump World and Saudi Arabia might be behind the fact that his messages got out even though it seems clear that it was Michael Sanchez. It's weird that Lauren Sanchez, Bezos' girlfriend, would forward those messages to her brother. What I I mean, what's going on there?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  No, that does seem a little

• 19:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  You because you noted, you said it's a weird sibling relationship.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But I feel like there's more you wanted to say there. Yeah.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  It's one more. It's another one of those like, am I writing a business book here? Like, what, what? But I, you know, I don't, I can't really say my, my sense of from studying it was that, you know, they were close at the time. It was almost like sharing, you know, you know, almost like humble bragging. And also a little strategizing, a little like Cyrano de Brusac, like, you know, how should I respond to this kind of, kind of thing? And beyond that, you know, maybe we don't need to read too much into it. But yeah, one of the more unusual aspects of, of, of a, of a story about a company.

• 20:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I think after you sold the book, I mean, the Bezos story just kept blowing up between, you know, the divorce and then the way that he handled these messages getting out.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And then HQ two happened.

• 20:53Alex Kantrowitz?

  Trust HQ two.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  And the pandemic, it's wild.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  So, okay, you said, am I writing a business book? Am I writing a personal book? Let's talk a little bit about the business book element. Do you see Bezos as? So I think one of the questions that I've had writing about Bezos is, is he a visionary? Or is he a facilitator? Because he does come up with ideas on his own, but he's also built systems inside Amazon to bring ideas to his leadership with as little friction as possible. And I've always fallen on the side of facilitator, that it's the systems that Bezos has built that have enabled Amazon to be so inventive. But it does seem after reading Amazon Unbound that there is, you know, it's definitely a visionary element in there where things like Alexa, something that he came up with.

• 21:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Things like the Go store where you can check out without scanning any items and waiting online as you leave actually was something that was more Bezos's idea than I had originally recognized. So what's your take on the visionary versus facilitator debate?

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a great, great question and good, good insight, Alex. I just cracked open my book because I was thinking about this precise thing when I was looking for epigraphs. And I use a quote from a great book called The Last Days of Night about Thomas Edison and Tesla and their rivalry. It's actually a novel. And I'll just read the first line. And it's about Edison, but it's, "His genius was not in inventing, rather it was inventing a system of invention."

• 22:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes, that's what I've always felt is the case with Bezos.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  But it really is both. He has created systems of invention. And what we mean by that is processes and rituals and customs inside Amazon and ways to think about things and ways to escalate problems and ways to go to multiple people for decisions and overlook or get over no's from bosses. That's all the system of invention. It's been tremendously successful at Amazon and the Washington Post. I would argue it has not been as successful at Blue Origin, and I have a chapter on that. But he also is an inventor. And you mentioned Alexa, which springs fully formed from his mind in an email in late 2010 that

• 23:18Speaker 01

  he sends to a couple of folks, including Ian Freed, who was running the Fire Phone Project, and Greg Hart, his technical assistant at the time. And Bezos was thinking about ways to capitalize.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  On AWS and he says, we should build a $20 computer whose brains are in the cloud that is completely controlled by your voice. And he is describing the echo and

• 23:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  He drew it out and it's like almost exactly what it looks like today. Um, it's pretty unbelievable.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he, I have, I have the, the sketch on the whiteboard.

• 23:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  In the book.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, in the book and, um, yeah. And then you look at other things and, you know, little decisions, um, to integrate video into Prime, um, to it, to push the frontier of, of, uh, visual computing, image recognition to create the ghost or, yeah, a lot of these ideas, you do archaeology on them when you're writing about Amazon and you pull on the threads and trace them back and low and behold, they start with something that Jeff said or emailed. And look, that's not the inventor in the classical sense of a guy with a lab coat in a, you know, in a, in a room, you know, tinkering, but you know, he does conceptualize a lot of these ideas and then he invests his own time and, and, and, and authorizes

• 24:33Speaker 01

  the investment of dollars as well, and then has incredibly high standards and pushes his teams to go realize these goals.

• 24:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there are so many interesting, uh, examples of that, like in terms of the processes of invention in the book, you talk about how if your manager says no to something inside Amazon, you go to another one. And in most companies, that's completely heretical, uh, might get you fired, but in Amazon, it's just like, all right, if one person doesn't believe in it, then okay, maybe somebody else will and they'll be able to bring it to life.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Right. They call it multiple, multiple paths to yes.

• 25:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And then like, as you walk through, I mean, I'm sure you've walked through the campus there in Seattle, but as you walk through, you see everything is geared towards pushing people toward invention, whether it's, you know, the spheres, which are these, you know, giant glass balls with plants in them that are supposed to make people feel creative to the fact that there are posters of products that they've created along the walls with. Everybody who was part of that original team signing those posters and of course it's right in their leadership principles, which you know, people inside Amazon, uh, you know, they, um, they hold more closely than their own religion often like you had a line in the book where someone had to say, would you please stop evaluating our relationship based off of leadership principles, which is like totally par for the course inside Amazon.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Totally, totally.

• 25:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  So another, you know, obviously Amazon's like a very inventive place. It seems exciting in some ways, but people work so hard there. And you've spoken with some people who have sort of been disenchanted by how hard that they had to work. But you know, it's not unheard of for people inside Amazon to put nights, holidays, weekends. You know, everybody in the retail organization works right through Thanksgiving. They have these pagers that put them on call just and, and you know, if they're sleeping and it rings, goodbye sleep, you're back on, uh, back on. And like, there was that New York Times article that talked about how hard Amazon is as a, as a workplace. And I think it sort of overdramatized the thing, but people do work extremely, extremely hard there.

• 26:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  What, what, in what world is working that hard worth it? Uh, you know, basically for someone to like, give away their life, you know, to this company. I'm, I'm just curious, how do you think they justify it, uh, in terms of the hours they put in? Like, is there something so special about Amazon's mythology? Is there something so special about the workplace? How, how do people end up doing this? I don't know what happens in a lot of jobs.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, you know, the, the easiest answer is, is, you know, it's self-interest, right? They're all capitalists, uh, who go to work to, um, you know, at the, one of the most exciting companies in the world to get the experience on the resume. Um, they get, uh, shares of stock that vest over a period of four years. They have self-interest in making that stock price go up and, uh, and, and, and getting wealthier, adding to their personal wealth. Um, you know, does anyone have a, you know? Patriotic fervor about Amazon. I mean, I'm sure some people do, the old timers probably do, but there's also a lot of turnover at Amazon. I, you know, so I would just, I would

• 27:40Speaker 01

  just answer your question. It's, it's self-interest. It's what you learn there. It's kind of the big leagues, you know, the idea that you, you know, you get to work alongside some business legends of the, the, the possibility that you might get to sit in a meeting with Jeff Bezos is probably pretty motivating, that you might get one of those panic inducing question mark emails that he sends when he wants something fixed, you know, is probably adds to a sense of excitement. But look, I mean, Amazon disputes this, but my sense is that the, the turnover rate, at least in the lower levels and, and almost recently in the upper levels of management is pretty high, you know, that there's a pretty good

• 28:21Speaker 01

  burnout rate there. The, the turnover in the fulfillment center is as high. And it's because Jeff has designed this, you know, as a place where it is impossible to get comfortable, you know, everything from the compensation system to the pace of work, to the pace of meetings, to the six page documents you have to prepare, often at night or over the weekend. It's designed to be hard. He doesn't, he never wanted to become a country club. And so, you know, people go there for the experience and the opportunity to make some money, or because they're interested in the, in the technical problems. And, you know, and then often you find them, you know, leaving or leaving and coming back sometimes, you know, all, all manner of motivation.

• 29:01Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that's one of the things that struck me about Amazon employees is that they wanted to learn these rituals and mechanisms and ways of doing business that Amazon does that has made it so successful. They could potentially apply it outside or they would be different. You know, they'd be able to operate at a higher level. And then they go outside and a lot of them just realize they just don't want to be anywhere else. It is sort of the Stockholm syndrome and they just boomerang right back to Amazon, which is interesting.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  It's such a, you know what, it's such an idiosyncratic place to work. I often wonder if sometimes for people who stay there for a while, it makes them almost kind of unsuitable to go, to go elsewhere.

• 29:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's the other side of, yeah, because managers say, hey, I hired someone from Amazon. They're a huge pain in my ass and they're making me write everything down. I can't do this anymore.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Right now, you know, these are, there's a lot, it's so big, it's over a million employees right now, we could probably find all manner of experience, but all this is very familiar.

• 29:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Last question of this segment, you manage a team of 60 people or so. How, if at all, have you learned and applied some of the stuff that you've learned about Amazon into your own role as a manager?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, really good question. Wow. So I, I, I run a tech team at Bloomberg News. We've got people all over the world. I have never instituted six-page documents or any, any Bezos.

• 30:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, you do make them right, but it's for a different.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. But I do, but I do often, I feel like I maybe think about things in a little bit, because like, how, how, when, you know, I've written two books and spent the better part of 10 years studying one guy in one company. So maybe it's inevitable, but sometimes I, I, I might not even be able to put my finger on it, but approaching things or thinking things in the way that I would imagine an Amazon executive or Jeff might. You know, and that's, you know, for, for us, it's like a focus on, you know, they would say a focus on the customer. For us, it's a focus on the reader and always keeping in mind, do, you know, are we writing in a way they understand? Are we keeping them engaged

• 31:05Speaker 01

  in stories? You know, are we following, are we, are we leaning, you know, and sometimes it's, you know, Amazon's great at leaning into technological changes, right? They, you know, they don't try to protect the business model today if something about, if something about the industry is going to change tomorrow. A great example is one, and one with unintended consequences, is when Alibaba and a company called Wish started to do a cross-border e-commerce, like allow sellers in one country to sell in another. And Amazon had this great marketplace business of sellers just selling in the country. They went and blew it up and started selling from China into the US and Europe, and they made all their sellers

• 31:47Speaker 01

  in the US upset, angry, right? They really disrupted themselves. It created all sorts of chaos. But, you know, and, and for me, it's like, okay, if something happening in the tech world, in the media world, that, that makes the things we're doing today, you know, outdated tomorrow. And if so, you know, do we need to adapt? I would say that's maybe one place where I try to maybe think, but the Amazon reporting has impacted me a little bit.

• 32:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Fascinating. Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be back here for more of a rapid fire type of question and answer stuff about the future of Amazon and some of the other stuff we haven't covered yet. All right, hang with us. We'll be back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what Avpoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended

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• 33:35Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 34:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 34:28Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back for the second half here on the Big Technology Podcast with Brad Stone, the author of the new book just came out this week. It's called Amazon Unbound. So we talked a lot about Jeff Bezos and his leadership practices and the personality. Let's just go into a few other ancillary parts of his empire that might make sense to touch on. First, the Washington Post. It plays a big role in your book. You seem to be fairly on the side of the fact that Bezos' ownership doesn't necessarily impact the way that they do their editorial business, or the way that they write stories, the way they structure their decisions from a news gathering standpoint. But I want to press you on that a little bit,

• 35:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  because as I'm reading the book, I'm reading about people inside the Washington Post using, like Jeff Bezos' sayings, talking about one-way doors and two-way doors, which is his decision framework. One-way door, you can't go back. Two-way doors, make the decision, then you can go back. How is it possible that a company whose upper leadership is all bought into Bezos and seeing the way that he transformed the company, won't have any influence in terms of the fact that he's the owner when it comes down to the editorial operations? I haven't seen any hard-hitting stuff about Amazon in the Washington Post.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Okay, well, let's put that aside for a second, and maybe we could try to come back to it.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Jeff has had a tremendous impact on the Post. He has saved the Post. He took an atmosphere of melancholic decline and turned it around, and the size of the newsroom has doubled, and they've leaned into all the changes that have hit the media business, and the subscription business is growing, and they've got a sense of passion and purpose. On the business side, I think they are very Bezos-like, and he's meeting with them every other week, and he's asking them to bring me new things, and they're writing documents. But that's the business side and we know journalists, right? We're an irascible, independent, stubborn, frankly unpleasant bunch of people. And you know, there's no, I mean, I, and Marty Baron, you know, who, who until recently was the post editor is the fiercest of them all.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And there's no way that any, you know, that those journalists are going to take their marching orders from Seattle. And if they were asked to, they'd probably walk out the door and, and look, I asked, I, you know, and I examined the record. No, I don't think he has any kind of an impact, nor does he want to on the, on the post editorial strategy. When it comes to the post coverage of Amazon, like I'm, I'm pretty loath to criticize other journalists. And look, I think Jay Green, who covers Amazon for the post is one of, one of the best Amazon reporters out there. But you know, at, at Bloomberg, you know, we're, we don't think, you know, I don't think Bloomberg news, I don't know this for sure. I don't think Bloomberg news covers Mike Bloomberg.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  I mean, the sense is that there's plenty of other media in the world that can, you know, that can do that and take those shots if they want to. So, but I, I don't think the post is reluctant to cover Amazon. You know, they've got a good crew and they've been building their technology team quite a bit. Is there some sort of like, maybe, you know, back of the mind worry that it's not a great career move to write critically about the boss? That's probably always true at, at any media organization you work with. But then again, that, that tech team's a good one and I don't think they pull punches. So, you know.

• 37:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt. No, I think the tech team is, is excellent over there. But yeah, I do, I do wonder about like, whether it's actually possible to fully unpack Bezos's influence on that company with the way that they cover Amazon. And if, you know, at the end of the day, like, I mean, I don't think that the journalists there are like trying to please him. I agree with you about the sentiment there. But you know, as the Washington Post develops into one of the more, I mean, it's always been an important publication in the United States. But like now it's one of the last standing. I do think it's something interesting to think about. Okay. But I, I won't put you in the position of having to criticize Washington Post journalists. I think the team there is great too.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  No, and, and I'm an admirer. And one thing that I discovered in reading the book is that. Bezos is a careful reader of the post and articles have inspired product initiatives inside Amazon. I thought that was kind of interesting.

• 38:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's fascinating. Okay, quickly antitrust. One of the interesting things about antitrust was the coverage, the mention of this A and P case that the Amazon executives have read, which basically showed how A and P grocery stores got torn apart by like pretty serious antitrust push and didn't say much. And that seems to be behind the combative attitude that Amazon has when it comes to antitrust. You know, we've, we see them get over their skis a little bit on Twitter, trying to criticize their opponents. But do you think that that's just the overall strategy, which is Amazon doesn't want to just sit there and take the beating?

• 39:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think the strategy has a number of components. You know, one is to answer critics and correct mistakes if they, where they think they see them and to leave no blade of grass untouched, as they say, which is, you know, to really contest everything. But I think you look at the lobbying budget in DC and Amazon's budget has increased. So they're playing an influence game behind the scenes. And then, you know, we're talking about, okay, so combative, trying to influence, but they also lead with their chin a little bit and, and, and sort of, you know, go into submissive pose when, when they need to. And you see that again and again, when they sort of make mistakes, they retreat. You know, they, when David Sapolsky, the chief Amazon lawyer, you know, some, some comments were

• 40:14Speaker 01

  leaked to him that were critical of, of, of an Amazon worker, he, who was protesting, he immediately apologized. And they say that, you know, that they, you know, are, are willing to like comply with new regulations and laws and they've supported, you know, various initiatives. So I think, you know, they read the, the book about the great A and P, but the lessons they really learned are, were from Microsoft's, I think, combativeness and unavailability in the 1990s, which led to the years of, of an antitrust case. And, and they don't want to be Microsoft. And so they're going to engage with the process in all kinds of ways at every opportunity and, and to kind of make sure or head off any kind of significant scrutiny if they can.

• 40:56Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. One of the interesting things that I saw you point out was how they told, inside the company, they say, if things are, if the critics are right, then change. Which takes a lot. You don't hear that often within companies and they did change when with the Bernie Sanders stuff.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  But let's also admit, you know, not to be, well, let's not be too nice to them on the, on the private label stuff and the, and the accusation that they, that Amazon managers were peaking at third-party data to figure out what to sell on private label. It's so clear now from reporting across the tech press and in my book that they were doing that for a period of years and Amazon doesn't seem willing and maybe the lawyers aren't allowing them to admit that they made a mistake there and that the guardrails inside the company weren't as high as they needed to be. So that's interesting. Maybe that, that they see is a little bit more existential and they're digging in.

• 41:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there was that answer that Bezos gave in the testimony where he's like, well, our policy is not to do this. I can't promise you. We've never done it.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  And there's like, we're going to study it. You know, we're, we're investigating and I don't see that they've ever given an answer on it.

• 42:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. All right. Let, let me just ask you a one-word question and then we'll let you get out of here into your, to your staff meeting. Bezos, you know, he's going to, going to step down from the CEO role at Amazon. He has three options to focus the majority of his time or the plurality of time of his time. It's the Washington Post or maybe four, Washington Post, space, philanthropy and Amazon, which gets most of Bezos' time?

• 42:30Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna cheat because I don't think it's, well, you asked plurality.

• 42:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. Good question. I, okay, it's not the Washington Post because I think he's, he can continue on a bi, bi-monthly cadence. I, I think it's going to, I think it's still Amazon in the short term. And then, you know, Blue, Blue Origin is, you know, they're, they're about to start sending suborbital tourists to suborbital space, but the, the company is dysfunctional and it's being quite badly outrun by SpaceX. So if, if it doesn't show signs of improvement, he might have to take some time and, and, and spend, spend more of his time there, at least in the short term to try to fix it. And who knows, maybe shuffle some management. And then over the long term, I think it's philanthropy because, you know, the legacies

• 43:22Speaker 01

  of, of great business people are measured not just by how they amass their fortunes, but by how they distribute them. And, you know, Jeff got a late start and has a lot of work to do.

• 43:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and he also gave himself that late start. He'd been so reluctant to part with the money. I'll say my personal opinion is that it's space, especially now that he's in this ego fight with Elon Musk. And I don't think he's gonna go down without a fight. So I'm going with space. Okay, you may be right. Brad, thank you for joining. The book is Amazon Unbound. It's terrific book. It's available now. It went on sale yesterday, and I highly recommend it. I enjoyed reading it cover to cover, and hope you do too. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening. It's great having you here on another week. If this is your first time here, please hit subscribe. We do these conversations every Wednesday. If you've been listening for a while and can rate us, that would be great. Thank you to Nate Gwatin, he does the editing, Red Circle,

• 44:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  the hosting and ad selling. That's it for us here on Big Technology Podcast. We will see you next week.

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