Part One: Jeff Bezos and the Birth of Amazon

Robert is joined by Jake Hanrahan to discuss Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.

Footnotes:

1. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/1/10/18176048/jeff-bezos-ami-extortion-medium-photos-divorce
2. https://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/love-sex/inside-the-bezos-divorce-adultery-lies-and-mile-high-trysts-18776678
3. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/10-things-you-didnt-know-649386/
4. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/jeff-bezos-defends-amazon-workplace-in-response-to-article/
5. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-has-a-sexist-and-toxic-culture-some-employees-say-2020-9
6. https://archive.md/tWoVG

For more about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, check out Megacorp.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Robert Evans. Here awake the earliest we have ever been
awake to record a podcast. I take you seriously exhausted.
Just this is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where one intrepid,
dogged journalist braves the difficulty of being up barely. What

(00:27):
is it five and a half hours after dawn? My god? Literally?
Now it is love and twenty three. Yeah. Well, our
guest today on this very special episode of Behind the
Bastards is the great Jake Hanrahan. How you doing, buddy, Yeah,
I'm good man, I'm good good, Yeah, feeling good man? Yeah?

(00:48):
Is it? Is it an ungodly early hour over there too? No,
it's like seven pm, seven pm. You know, I'm gonna
see that. That's that's a nice reasonable hour to be awake.
Mm hmm. Speaking of reasonable, Jake, how do you feel
about Amazon? Well, it's funny you ask, because I'm then

(01:10):
this new series called Mega cool. But what about really? Um?
Yeah yeah, yeah, um yeah. They're like I was saying
to you guys before we kind of went on, are
like the more research are doing this, it's just like
it's almost like comically villainous to a point, you know
what I mean? And I'm not really wanted to be
shrill like that, but it actually is like that. It's
mad like what they're getting up to, it's deeply unsettling,

(01:32):
and it's kind of weird when you actually realize how
recent like they became so dominant so quickly that people
don't think about like twos and fourteen, Amazon was not
the huge deal, Like it's just like it was not
a small company, but like, yeah, they were more than
books by that, but they weren't this like beheemoth that
was doing everything. And like it's it's weird how quickly

(01:54):
a lot of this stuff slotted into place, and you've
got mega corps going on, which is great, and you're
kind of going through methodically the crimes of Amazon, and
the crimes of Amazon are are also one way or
the other, the crimes of the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
And so I wanted to do something a little bit

(02:14):
different this week. Normally on Behind the Bastards, when we
cover a guy like Bezos, and we've done, you know,
our episodes on Bill Gates, on Musk, on uh Zuckerberg,
we would do like an episode covering his early life,
and then we would do two or three episodes giving
the greatest hits of the crimes, but you're going through
all of the things that are fucked up about Amazon

(02:35):
bit by bit. So I felt like we would do
an episode on bastards that's kind of uh leading people
into Mega corp um. So this episode is more detailed
than a lot um and we're gonna go into the
early life of Jeffrey Bezos and we're gonna end a
little bit on on some specific actions of his that
I think are horrible. But really, more than anything, I

(02:55):
want to give people a sense of who this guy
is so that when they listen into all of the
you know to the the union busting in, the in
the worker uh running into the ground, and the hiring
of Nazis and that sort of thing, when they get
into that on your show, they can know who the
man is that that made it all possible. Absolutely, yeah, Yeah,

(03:18):
what do you know about Mr Bezos? Well, to be honest,
I've been more focused at the minute on like kind
of you know, the various different scandals that the company
has birthed. But what I do know is he's very
kind of unapologic. You know, there's a lot of stuff,
you know, I think even in one of the one

(03:38):
of the first two episodes that's already been out, just
like quotes where he's just like, no, this is not true.
I've read several things where there's just irrefutable proof of
like horrific injuries happening, like you know, you're eight percent
more likely to get wounded in an Amazon warehouse than
any other warehouse in their industry. And then when when
he was speaking about this, he was just like, yeah,

(03:59):
the media is lying. It's it's just like crazy, Like
he's just like it's kind of he's the kind of
post the way I guess for business when it comes
to the kind of post scandalierra where he's like, yeah, no,
it's not real, and it's like, well it is. But
he just he just very much embraces that thing of
like tough luck. You know. Yeah, there's this u there's
this term people used for Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field,

(04:21):
And usually when they were talking about it, it it was
his ability to like kind of make get people hyped
up about products, his ability to like get his workers
to work unreasonably in order to like meet deadlines, and
his ability to make people believe that he was doing
something magic with these products he was making, and Bezos
seems to have that for the impact of his I don't.

(04:42):
I don't know. It's weird, like it's there's this degree
to which like everything seems to slide off him at
this point. And I don't know that it's much that
he's distorted reality. Is like he's made Amazon foundational to
daily reality for so many people that like, yeah, I
mean that's messed up, but what are we going to do? Uh? Right?

(05:04):
And it's so big, so much money. Is he's kind
of a point where he doesn't, he doesn't really have
to pay attention, you know, to these bad things. I mean,
if you had a soul and a heart, you would.
But you know, I think from from some of the
things I've read and the way that he allows it
to happen on Amazon, um, you know, I think he's
quite happy to just be like, yeah, tough luck. Yeah.

(05:25):
And we'll get into that. But it is interesting I
think that. Um. I think one thing for people to
consider at the start of this, because I've been thinking
about this myself, is how true is the statement my
life as I live it right now doesn't work without Amazon?
Um in terms of like how you get your groceeries.
How you get stuff for your job if you like work,

(05:46):
you know remotely, how you get things that you know
your employees need to you. If you run a business,
how you get or how you sell like things in
that business. Um Like, for my part, I've got a
huge amount of my workload is on Kindle, just because
the ease eiest way to get research off of a
book is to highlight it in any book and then
like you can kind of copy and paste the text
and do a research doc. It's much easier than just

(06:07):
like going through a paperback book. Um, which is I
guess a small example of it. But like I know,
I have a couple of friends who run small businesses.
I have a friend who's a teacher, Like they are everybody.
Everybody knows how fun up Amazon is, and everybody's also like,
well what else am I gotta do? And that is
wh you know we are? You know, you're right, It's
like I use Amazon still my book is on sale

(06:29):
through Amazone, you know what I mean. But it's like
I said, in like you know, episode kind of the
zero of the kind of prologue to Mega Corp. I'm
not telling people like don't use them. You're bad if
you use them, you know, be an activist, boycott them.
I'm not saying that. I'm just saying, if you are
using them, I think you the very least you should
know what they're doing to workers, you know what I mean.

(06:49):
And I think that's important. And I've had a lot
of workers and like people just message me already just
being like absolutely, like thanks for saying. You know. They're
not like let's burn Amazon. They're just like, we just
want fairer working conditions, you know what I mean. And
it's like it's really not. It's not that difficult, you know,
it's really not. But they still don't provide it for them. No,
And it is that thing that like, yeah, in a

(07:10):
world as connected as ours, with things that rely on
on technology as ours, and with a plague racing through
where our ability to go places to get things is disrupted, Yeah,
I mean, something like Amazon is going to be necessary. Um,
you know, and we can also talk about like consumption
patterns and whatnot, but like our in our current society,

(07:32):
something like it is necessary. Um, but is the suffering
is like all of the fucking ship that comes along
with it? Um? I would argue hopefully not. And I
think the reason that there's so much suffering associated with
it that like it's that the company has as many
horrible stories as you've been finding on a daily basis

(07:55):
is because of the guy who founded it. Because Amazon
is very much made in the image of its creator,
Jeffrey Preston Jourgensen. That's right, Jenson, Um not Bezos. He
was not born Jeffrey Bezos. He was, however, born on
January twelfth, nineteen sixty four, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I

(08:17):
did not expect him to be an Albuquerque baby. Um,
but he's he's real. He's he's spent most of his
upbringing in like the south and Southwest, um, kind of
similar area that I did. His dad, Theodore Jorgenson, was
nineteen and his mother, Jacqueline Geese, was seventeen. UM. So
this is a little bit of like a ah uh,

(08:38):
a problematic union. You know. Um, Theodore is out of
high school. His his Jeffrey's mom is still in high school.
There's a two year age difference, which isn't huge, but
the fact that he's graduated she's in high school is
a little bit of especially for like the families kind
of like this, like type deal um and she struggles
to finish her high school degree while Jeff is growing

(09:00):
inside of her. Um. Theodore Jorgensen was not very good
at actually providing for the family. He was a high
wire unicyclist and a circus performer, and he was obsessed
with his dreams of unicycle greatness. At one point he
tried to get on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was
like the most important thing to him, and he neglected
his family for the unicycle. It's a dream. It's one

(09:24):
of those things. It's one of those things, like of
of the things I did not call and Jeff bezos backstory.
Dad abandoned them for the unicycle would not have been
um and and by the way, I should know we'll
talk a little bit more about this. But Jeff grows
up knowing none of this. He knows nothing. He doesn't

(09:45):
know his dad's name um as a as for decades.
So Theodore tries briefly to do like the family thing
with Jacqueline and Jeff. They move in together. They have
their kind of Brenda in any moment, but it turns
out it's hard to make a living as a unicyclist.
So Theodore is forced to make ends meet at an
apartment store. This makes him miserable because again his dream
is the open unicycle road. UM. So he takes to

(10:08):
drinking more and more. UM. I don't believe he's like abusive.
He's just like kind of not there. He's just like,
is incapable of really engaging as a father. UM. His
father in law, Jeff's father in law. UM, so his
his his his mom's dad tried to get him a job,
Theodore a job with the state police, but Theodore couldn't
be arsked to do that. Eventually, Jackie gave up on

(10:31):
him and took baby jeff aged seventeen months, and moved
back in with her parents. She filed for divorce and
got it. Theo continued to visit his kid on and
off for a little while, but he missed every child
support payment that he ever had to make because he
had absolutely no money. Now, this is not the best
case scenario for a new child coming into the world.

(10:51):
I think we can agree, but we widow Jeffy had
a few things in his corner to offset the fact
that his bio dad was sort of a deadbeat. For
one thing, both his maternal and paternal grandparents had a
lot of resources. So his his dad's dad, um was
a purchase agent for Sanda Military Base, which was the
largest nuclear weapons installation in the United States. UM, and

(11:13):
that's an important gig, right, He's handling all supply purchases
for the biggest nuke base in the US. Jacqueline. His
mom's dad, on the other hand, was a guy named
Lawrence Preston Geese and he ran the local US Atomic
Energy Commission office. UM. And he's running the Atomic Energy
Commission Office in like New Mexico, which is the big one, right,

(11:33):
that's where we figured it all out, right, that's gonna
be like your and he's a new he's a new
he's a rocket scientist, you know, he's like a nuclear
missile expert um and was very prominent in the field.
And that obviously you can make a good amount of
money doing that. So while THEO was not a great dad,
Jeff young Jeff had support from a family with a
lot of means. The earliest story I found that shows

(11:56):
any kind of personality from Jeffrey Jorgensen at this point
is for when he was three. His his mom was
really paranoid about his health, and she had him sleeping
in a crib long after the point of which he
should have stopped sleeping in a crib. And he kept
arguing with her that it was time for him to
get a real bed, and she would say no because
she was worried he was going to fall out, so
she refused him repeatedly, and one day Jeff got ahold

(12:18):
of a screwdriver and took the crib apart himself so
that it was just a bed um. And that's when
his mom decided to let him, like, okay, you can
have a yeah. And it's so we have some early
stories from him, um, and you hear that one a lot.
Most of them are like from him after he got
rich and famous. So as with any story like that,
a little bit of salt, you know. Yeah, I also

(12:40):
like being three years old, Like if someone gave me
a screwdriver, I would just like stop myself by accident,
you know what I mean. I don't know about that one.
It's a little bit, but you know, maybe he did,
if so, maybe, Yeah, it's yeah, I think you're right,
A little bit of salt with that one, little bit. Yeah.
So in nineteen his mom remarried to Miguel Angel Bezo Perez.

(13:01):
Miguel was Cuban and had fled the country on the
insistence of his mother after he was caught painting anti
castro graffiti. Um, he does get to take like a
plane out of there. He's not one of the people
who has to like hide on a smuggle himself out
on a raft. Um. But yeah, he gets out of
he has to leave his family behind in Cuba because
he's you know, to uh, too too much of a

(13:22):
little can't can't you know not rebel against the system.
I guess. Um, he's sixteen years old when he entered
the enters the country, and he speaks almost no English. Um.
Miguel eventually wound up doing his undergrad at the University
of Albuquerque, which offered free scholarships to Cuban refugees. He
worked as a clerk at a bank, and he met
Jacqueline while he was working there. He and Jackie married,

(13:44):
and most of what you really need to know about
Miguel is that he was enough of a father figure
to Jeff that Jacqueline reached out to Theodore before she
married Miguel and told him that their son was going
to be taking her new husband's last name. Um so
hard hit for Theodore, you know what I mean. Yeah,
you get the feeling. I mean, I think he from

(14:04):
what i've from what I can I've heard, he regrets
it now. I think in the time, it was like
you don't have to pay child support that you're not
paying already anymore, Like yeah, yeah, I mean life, life
is hard. Things can be hard and it's sad. Yeah,
but yeah, I get it. Yeah, And it's one of
those things like I can't say, like she's obviously not
in the wrong for that. It's like this your bio
dad won't do it. This guy comes in out of

(14:26):
nowhere and adopts your kid, like yeah, yeah, um anyway,
that's why he's Jeff Bezos and not Jeff Jorgensen. Um So,
Miguel eventually finished college and got a job working as
a petroleum engineer for x On. Um so his Jeff
as as a kid. Jeff's family is like either into
nuclear weapons or the oil and gas industry, which is

(14:49):
quite an upbreaking Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, man Like, yeah,
it's a very it's very like American industry as well. Yeah,
nukes and oil, nukes, and gas. Yeah, yeah, like the
favorite things. Yeah. And so he's you know, his family
is not They're not like even Bill Gates family rich,
I don't think, but they are well off. They're very

(15:09):
very like they're most people would consider them rich. I
don't think they're like multi millionaires. I'm sure by the
time they retired they had they had, you know, a
million or two in the bank. But they're very very comfortable,
you know. Um, So the family travels a bunch as
Miguel like gets all these different transfers across the world.
Um and along the way, you know, as their you know,

(15:32):
Miguel is starting his career and you know, Jeffrey's growing up. Um.
Miguel and Jacqueline have a daughter, Christina, and another son Mark.
We kind of know jeff was, I don't think happy
to have his dad tracked down. Um and his dad
like hadn't heard of him. I think it was two
thousand fifteen when he get tracked down. He was like,
who's jeff Bezos And it was like that your son,

(15:54):
and he's like a broke failed circus performer. It's it's
quite a thing. Um. So we don't really have a
whole lot of detail on how you know, uh, getting
abandoned by his biological dad may have influenced Jeff Bezos,
it may not have had much of an influence at all,
because again, he was four when Miguel comes into the picture,
so nearly all, if not all, of his early memories

(16:16):
are going to involve Miguel, who seems to have been
a pretty good dad. Um. And so when it comes
to how Miguel influenced his son's development, we have more meat, um,
and it's you know, he's a he's a Cuban refugee
into the United States. So obviously coming at it from
like kind of a very conservative, pro capitalist standpoint, not amunists,

(16:37):
not very surprising. But I'm going to read a passage
from the Everything Store that gives a little bit of
context for that. Jeff and his siblings grew up observing
their father's tireless work ethic and his frequent expressions of
love for America and its opportunities and freedoms. Miguel Bezos,
who later began going by the name Mike, acknowledges that
he may have also passed on a libertarian aversion to

(16:58):
government intrusion into the private live and enterprises of citizens.
Certainly it was something that permeated our home life, he says,
while noting that dinner time conversations were a political and
revolved around the kids. I cannot stand any kind of
totalitarian form of government from the right or the left
or anything in between. And maybe that had some impact.
Which is interesting because as we're going to talk about,

(17:19):
Jeff certainly like benefits from the lax kind of corporate
law in the United States, but he imposes something of
a dictatorship on the people who work for him. That's
his whole It's very totalitarian. Yeah, it's like the Stasi.
You know, you get searched every time you go in
and out just for lunch or to the toilet, constant monitoring,
Like yeah, no, it's it's you know, we like we

(17:40):
heard in the last episode ID for Megacourt, the the
internal training video was encouraging managers to spy on, you know,
quote the behavior of their workers to see if maybe
they're organizing the union. Like yeah, it's it's ridiculous to Okay,
maybe he thinks that, but then you know, as all dictators,
you know, he imposes his his Yeah, and it's it's

(18:02):
interesting to me I mean, this is something we've come
across a few times with some of these billionaires. But
like the things that as as well discuss, the things
that like make Jeff Bezos into the person who is
able to be as successful as he is, are all
things that he absolutely doesn't want other people to have.
He has a very permissive, open environment. He's he's very
well funded schools. You know, Amazon avoids paying taxes to

(18:24):
support the schools. A lot of his early jobs give
him a lot of freedom. And like, yeah, it's it's
this whole Yeah, you benefited from a system that you
have no desire in maintaining anyway. Well, that's that's what
we're getting too. So another thing that made an impact
on young Jeff was money. When he was four, he
first visited his maternal grandfather's cattle ranch in Texas. The

(18:46):
family ranch, the Lazy g was more than twenty five
tho acres um, which is a big ranch. Um. And
it's you he comes from old Texas money, um. His family.
The ranch has been in his family's hand since the
early teen hundreds. Um. And he had an ancestor who
took part in the early colonization of Texas by white people. Um,
which is I have a good friend who comes from

(19:10):
not nearly they don't have nearly as much land anymore,
but they used to have family land that was that big,
and then the family kind of fell on hard times.
But they were like one of the families that was
part of the Texas Revolution and the establishment of Texas
as Estate. And like on her old family land there
is like a slave graveyard. Like that's all of them, right,
Like that's founded like that, that's the white people who

(19:30):
found in Texas. Um. So again that's kind of where
that that's the kind of old money that he's got
on that side. Huh yeah, Texas and Tea. Yeah yeah,
my family didn't own any land, but we didn't get
here from Italy until like the twenties. So uh yeah
when uh Jeff Bezos is like Grandpa Lawrence, Like even

(19:54):
though they have this family land, his grandfather was a
rocket scientist most of his career and when he retires,
he goes back to the family the ranch to be
like a hobby rancher, you know. Um, like I'm retired,
I don't have to do a grind anymore. I'm gonna
keep this ranch going just because it seems fun. The
Lazy G was a large, fully functional ranch, and Jeff
starts spending his summers there. So for about twelve straight years,

(20:16):
he spends every summer at the Lazy G doing ranch work,
cleaning stalls, gelding livestock, doing basic handyman stuff, and the
experience gave him a crash course and the kind of
practical engineering you have to do if you're going to
keep a ranch operational. One of his other biographers, Richard Brandt,
notes one particular event as an example of the formative

(20:36):
impact this had on Jeff. One day, his grandpa towed
in a busted old bulldozer with a stripped transmission. He
and Jeff set to work on it and had to
figure out a way to remove a five pound gear
from the engine. Grandpa Lawrence, built a crane to lift it,
and Jeff helped him. Experiences like this taught Jeffrey how
to be a pragmatic engineer and inured him to difficult labor.
He would later consider it an idyllic childhood, and I'd

(20:59):
be hard pressed to dis agree with him. There it
sounds like the perfect way to grow up, right, Like, Yeah,
you've got like this huge rant lessons, but you've got security. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who wouldn't want this in their childhood? He later told
an interviewer, One of the things you learn in a
rural area like that is self reliance. People do everything themselves.

(21:19):
That kind of self reliance is something you can learn,
and my grandfather was a huge role model for me.
If something is broken, let's fix it. To get something
new done, you have to be stubborn and focused to
the point that others might find unreasonable. And you might
find a certain dark humor in noting that Jeff's self
reliance today involves telling a lot, hundreds of thousands of
people what they have to do for him. One might

(21:39):
also note that Amazon has contributed to the absolute annihilation
of rural communities by destroying small businesses. And it is
kind of tempting to go down this road Jeff talking
about the value of like rural hard work, and then
how Amazon has actually impacted rural areas. But it's also
of the things to blame Amazon for not really fair,
because he's Amazon was kind of continuing a process that

(22:04):
got started a lot earlier. When it comes to that,
I actually found a local article from a paper in
Swift County, Minnesota, with the title Amazon's dominance not good
for small Towns, and obviously talks about what you'd expect Amazon,
the online retailers, destroying a bunch of local brick and
mortar businesses that give people in the area jobs. But
then that article gives a list of the local businesses

(22:25):
in this small town that might get wrecked by Amazon,
and those businesses include Advance Auto Parts, Auto Zone, O'Riley, Honda, Albertson's, Kroger,
Walmart Grocery, Barnes and Noble, Joebeth booksellers, Best Buy, Office Depot, Staples,
all of which are like giant corporations that previously came
in and destroyed small local businesses in rural communities. And
it's like, yeah, Amazon is a part of that tradition,

(22:47):
but it didn't, it didn't start with them, So I
don't know. It's like if you're if you're in like
a hyper corporate environment, that's just the circle of life, really,
you know what I mean. Yeah, it's one of those things.
It is, like I think there's a degree to which
it's worth acknowledging that Jeff benefited, as we've talked about,
like so much from this kind of rural ideal that

(23:07):
that does not exist anywhere anymore, um to the extent
that it existed many places when he was a kid.
But he's also not didn't start that process. So whatever
of of Amazon's crimes, I don't really I put that
more on the Walmart end of the Ledger. So when
he wasn't spending his summers at the ranch, Jeff spent
most of his childhood in Houston, Texas. He attended a

(23:29):
public school and was lucky enough to benefit from a
school district that had both money um and a devotion
to take in care of its gifted students. The Vanguard Program,
as it's called, was a gifted and talented program that
was meant to find bright kids and encourage them to
think outside the box and learn how to be independent minds.
The Vanguard Program was good and in the early nineteen seventies,

(23:51):
and ad executive named Julie Ray grew interested in it
after her son was admitted. Once he moved on to
Junior High, she decided to write a book about the
program him. When she went back to tour the program,
she met a sixth grader named Jeff Bezos. She used
the pseudonym Tim for him in her book at his
parents request. But from Julie's work, we have our first
early objective peak at young Mr Bezos. So this is

(24:13):
not coming out of his pr you know, Charing. This
is not coming from his family, This is not coming
from him. This is coming from someone who had no
idea what he was going to become, who was kind
of trying to analyze his intellectual growth objectively when he
was in the sixth grade. Um, so it's a pretty
interesting insight. We don't really have anything like this for
any of the other guys. So I find this fascinating.

(24:33):
I'm going to read a quote from the book The
Everything Store about this, uh, this early study. Jeff was
a student of general intellectual excellence, slight of build, friendly
but serious. He was not particularly gifted in leadership, according
to his teachers, but he moved confidently among his peers
and articulately extolled the virtues of the novel he was
reading at the time, j R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Jeff

(24:57):
twelve was already competitive. He told Ray he was reading
a variety of books to qualify for a special Readers certificate,
but compared himself unfavorably to another classmate, who claimed improbably
that she was reading a dozen books a week. Jeff
also showed Ray a science project that he was working
on called an infinity cube, a battery powered contraption with
rotating mirrors that created the optical illusion of an endless tunnel.

(25:20):
Jeff modeled the device after one he had seen in
a store. That one cost twenty two dollars, but mine
was cheaper, he told Ray. Teachers said that three of
Jeff's projects were being entered in a local science competition
that drew most of its submissions from students in junior
and senior high schools. So you get a lot from that.
Number One, he's very advanced. People at the time recognize

(25:41):
him as brilliant. And number two, like, there's this toy
he wants. It's too expensive, his mom won't get it,
so he just builds it. You know, you get a
lot of like the future Jeff Bezos personality from from
that kind of decision. I just kept thinking of the
time cube. They Jeff built the time cube. Put that
on the internet. Yeah, yeah, that would be that would

(26:07):
be a fun twist. So from an early age, Jeff
seemed drawn to the idea of evaluating other people in
order to maximize their performance. While he was in sixth grade,
as practice for statistics class, he created a survey to
evaluate all the teachers in his grade. He claimed its
goal was to judge teachers on how they teach, not
as a popularity contest. When Julie met him, he was

(26:30):
working to lay out the results in a graph that
would compare all the teachers with each other. So he's
doing like this Amazon analytic ship as a sixth grader
to his teachers. Yeah, it's quite impressive. Yeah, and it
also I'd be scared of that kid, though, like fucking
Damien vibe, you know what I mean? Yeah, I think
I would like if a fucking sixth grader is like

(26:53):
graphing me and a bunch of other people like we're
their employees and like a char Yeah, maybe maybe i'd
spray that kid with some pepper water, you know, a
little bit of pepper water. Don't give him a ruler.
Who's your head, you know? Yeah, exactly, it's in that room,
you know what I mean. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's a
little bit like unsettling. And his own family was not

(27:16):
immune to this sort of behavior. When he was tinned,
Jeff grew concerned about his grandmother, who was a smoker.
His first attempt at convincing her to stop wasn't to
just say, like, grandma, could you stop smoking? Grandma? I
don't like it with you know, he calculated how many
minutes of life she lost per cigarette and then extrapolated
that based on the total amount of time that she'd
been smoking, and then told her you've taken nine years

(27:39):
off your life, and she burst into tears. That's the
kind of mind this kid, again, always driven by like
data and always like white people to have. Yeah, but
don't hurt granny's feelings, Like that's just no, No one
should do that, you know what I mean? I mean it.

(28:00):
I think you get this feeling from him with both
of those anecdotes that as a kid he um and
as a kid and as an adult he has this
attitude of like, well, if there's good data to analyze
exactly how you're performing, why wouldn't you want it? And
you know most of us are like, well, number one,
raw data doesn't tell you everything it leaves out. And
number two, it's kind of exhausting to live your whole

(28:22):
life that way, Yeah, no it is. And then do
you know what it reminds me of like the problem
like particularly like in our profession when you have like
analysts versus on the ground reporters, and it's like, yeah,
data is great, and it's a part of the process,
but it removes the soul of everything if you just
rely on it, you know what I mean? And that's
so much problem and it's it's not like it's also

(28:44):
it also leaves out inherently a lot like you can
look at there's all there's all these kind of like
the this wing of scholars who will make the claim
that like this is the best life has ever been,
and they'll they always bring up that like because of
this economic wature, this measure and it's like, well, but
there's a lot of ways in which like those are
jigged and you look at like yeah, it looks like
these indexes have been moving up, but you adjust them

(29:06):
every couple of years, so that like the you know,
the you're measuring different things that aren't going up in
price as much to show that people are are gaining more.
And it's like yeah, and that's why a lot of
these like statistics on how great a time it is
to live in now. Don't take into account the fact
that like people in the United States in particular are
fucking miserable and self report being miserable. And it's like, yeah,

(29:28):
you you can't just reduce everything to data. It doesn't
like that's a lot Yeah, oh no, no one's dropping
a rock on your head anymore. Like that was happening
every week and you know, five years ago, so so
you'll find it's like, no, there's there's a lot of
other things. I think without without context, statistics are just
like just ways for people to argue online, you know

(29:49):
what I mean. It's like these kind of you know,
like oh, Ben Shapiro Slaughter as some like twelve year olds.
He's like very much into all that, like, you know,
statistics without context, and it's they're just digits without any contexts.
You know, it's not it's not helpful, I don't think,
but he is, Jeff is in love with statistics and
digits and yeah, he's he's a he's a data driven
little boy. Uh. He also lived what sounds to me

(30:13):
like an exhausting life. He started school at seven am
every day, um, and he had like the special program
he was in was just this dizzying mix of classes,
individual projects in small group discussion time. Julie documented one
of the group discussions Jeff was a part of UH.
He and six other students were sitting with the principal
reading short stories and then discussing the short stories. And

(30:35):
the first story they read was about an archaeologist who
faked a cash of artifacts, and Julie recorded what Jeff
had to say about the story. So these are just
like some comments that she noted him making about the
archaeologists in the story. They probably wanted to become famous.
They wished away the things they didn't want to face.
Some people go throughrough life thinking like they always have.
You should be patient, analyze what you've have to work

(30:58):
with UM. So he is, you know, this is kind
of the way he's he's thinking about people. I especially
I think the line some people go through life thinking
like they always have, like he's. He's always very obsessed
with this idea of UM like treating things like it's
the first time anyone's done them, so you can try
to look at them from a new perspective, which is

(31:19):
very successful way to think in business. Like it's interesting
to me some of his his thought processes. He doesn't
really change, you know, as he grows up. He's kind
of always the same person who becomes the CEO of Amazon. UM.
Jeff told Julie Ray that he loved these exercises. Quote
the way the world is. You know, someone could tell
you to press the button. You have to think what

(31:39):
you're doing for you. You have to be able to
think about what you're doing for yourself, which is again
interesting because that's the opposite of what he wants from
his employees, but he recognizes it as the key to
his own success. UM. Julie's book was not a big hit.
This book about this special program Jefferson as a kid.
She had to self publish it, and as far as
I can tell, we know mostly about it because of

(32:01):
journalists like brad Stone Um who found this out, like
found copies of the book in the library after it
had been published, and like grabbed this early look at
Jeff Bezos for us UM. Brad Stone caught up with
Julie decades later when Jeff was a billionaire, and he
asked her what she felt about the things Jeff Bezos
had accomplished in the decades since sixth grade. She said

(32:22):
she had watched Tim's rise to fame and fortune over
the past two decades with admiration and amazement, but without
much surprise. When I met him as a young boy,
his ability was obvious and it was being nurtured and
encouraged by the new program. She says. The program also
benefited by his responsiveness and enthusiasm for learning. It was
a total validation of the concept. And it's certainly, i
would say, a validation of the concept of funding public

(32:45):
schools well enough that they can experiment. UM. In this regard,
Jeff isn't entirely dissimilar to Bill Gates, although Bill didn't
go to a public school, but both men benefited as
kids from communities that put a lot of resources into
educating them. A lot of a lot of went into
training up both of these children and giving them opportunities
when they were little kids, and a lot of that

(33:06):
came from, like in the fact that the schools they
were in valued their intellectual freedom and valued their personal
freedom and considered that an important part of them being
able to grow into the kind of people that they
were capable of becoming. UM. And again, it's a total
You look at what Amazon pays and taxes. Uh, it's
a bit of a run poll that they kind of

(33:27):
do as soon as they get up to where they
where they are. Um. I always find that interesting because
they benefit from societies that invest a ton of resources
into them, but they have no interest in investing back. Yeah,
I get do you know what? I really get the
vibe from Bezos kind of a Nixon vibe. You know,
it's not illegal when I do it, you know that

(33:48):
kind of thing. It's like I get that vibe from
him a lot, like I'll take everything and then you know,
but whatever I do is okay. You know what I mean.
It's like, yeah, it's not really I mean, all right, fine,
everybody has to give back, but he's the richest. I
don't enough, Like yeah yeah, yeah, I mean I'm sure
he talk about how space travel is giving back, but

(34:10):
that's a discussion for another day. Um. Yeah. So Jeff
was prone to such intense focus as a kid that
his teachers would sometimes have to pick him up while
he was still in his chair and move him to
different tables when it was time for him to switch
tasks because he would be so invested in whatever he
was doing. Um, and he never seemed to like turn off.

(34:31):
When he was not at school, he would spend his
time rebuilding radios, building robots from kits, and experimenting with
electronics purchased from radio shack. His most telling invention was
an electric alarm, which he wired to alert him if
his younger brother or sister tried to get into his
room because he was obsessed with his personal privacy. Um yeah,
like Bill, Yeah, that's cute. Like Bill Gates, Jeff benefited

(34:54):
from the fact that he had access to a computer
earlier than any other kids pretty much in the United States.
A huge based company provided his school with a terminal
and loan them extra time on the company mainframe. And
this was during a period when kind of in the
same time, Bill Gates's rich parents at like a fancy
private school raised money via a bake sale to buy
a terminal for the kids. Um. So this is again

(35:17):
another thing that kind of all these guys, these early
tech billionaires have in common, is that adults around them
make the choice to put a lot of money into
giving them access to a computer in like the seventies,
you know, when very few other people have access to computers. Yeah,
the massive like very very privileged position to be as
a kid, especially but then you know what I mean. Yeah,

(35:38):
and again it's if if, if, if, like either of
them were to really learn the lesson of their success
would be like, yeah, you should, you should invest a
lot in children. Um, But neither of them really seem
to get that from the book one click quote. The
setup came with a stack of manuals, but no one
at the school knew how to use it. Jeff and

(35:59):
a couple of other stud stayed after class to go
through the manuals and figure out how to program it,
but that novelty only lasted about a week. Then they
discovered that the main frame contained a primitive starf Trek game.
From then on, all they used the computer for was
playing Star Trek, each taking on a role of one
of the characters in the TV program. Like all of
his other nerdy friends, he considered the choice role in
the game to be that of Mr Spock. Captain Kirk

(36:21):
was the backup choice. If Jeff couldn't get either of
those roles, he preferred to take on the persona of
the starship's computer, which also says a lot Um, Yeah,
I get like Spock is rad, but wanting to be
the computer is a little weird. Um. The career that
most of I mean, bones is right there, Jeff, but whatever.

(36:42):
The career that most appealed to child Jeff Bezos was archaeology,
but his heroes were all businessmen, particularly Walt Disney and
Thomas Edison, both of whom were very successful at monetizing
the achievements of their employees and utterly ruthless at crushing
competition to their dominance. He actually admired Disney more than
Edison because he saw Walt Disney is having been better

(37:03):
at putting a team together to work in a concerted fashion.
So like, again, Disney is kind of the guy he's
worshiping as a little kid. Yeah, but not even for
like not even like wow, I love his cartoons. It's
just like the lamest version of like him, you know, Yeah,
it really is now. As you probably guessed, Jeff Bezos

(37:23):
did not get in trouble often as a kid. He
lost his library privileges once for laughing too loud. Um,
but that's kind of like most of what you hear
about it, Like, he's not and we'll talk about his
laugh a little bit later, but he's he does not
run into a lot of hot water based on all
of this, and you might be surprised to know that
Jeff joined a youth football league, um and was actually

(37:43):
pretty good at it, which is why there's a number
of reasons this is weird. For one, football is a
fucking huge deal in Texas. It's like a religion there.
There were like schools like the school I went to,
paid millions and millions of dollars for their football stadium,
Like schools where I live now cost less than just
the football stadium from my high school did. It's it's
a Texas thing. We put ridiculous resources into football. So

(38:07):
the fact that he was good at football in a
Texas youth league means something. Um, he was not a
big kid. His mom didn't want him to join because
she was worried he'd get beaten badly. But he was
so good at memorizing plays and understanding like the rule
mechanics of the games that his coach made him a
defensive captain. So you're kind of he's he's he's more
flexible than you might expect, And I think that a

(38:28):
lot of that goes down to the kind of education
he has that they really put a lot of value
in trying to like make these kids, give them space
to experiments so they grow up well rounded, because clearly
he does. The fact that he's he's he's building robots,
and he's playing football. UM is a kind of is
sort of an example of the success of the school system.
He grows up in UM. He spent his high school years.

(38:52):
By the time he moved in the high school he
got to high school, his family moves to Florida because
for ex On mobile kind of ship UM. And once
he gets to Florida, he immediately informs his new public
school classmates that he was going to be the valedictorian.
His first summer job in high school was as a
fry cook at McDonald's, and he passed the time by
studying the different ways that McDonald's had automated their production process.

(39:14):
However interested he was in this, he decided early on
that he did not like working for other people and
he wanted to own his own business. Someday. He succeeded
in becoming valedictorian of his high school, and in his speech,
he called for humankind to colonize space so that they
could preserve the Earth and turn it into a giant
park once all the human beings were gone, which is

(39:35):
a story that story like came out recently Jeff Bezos
saying that, like, yeah, I think most people will move
into space and we'll keep a few people behind on
the Earth to to maintain it as like a park.
I'm not happy, man, No, it is interesting to me again,
how consistent all this is. Like, I don't think he's
ever changed as a person. Uh, it's the same thing.

(39:59):
You know, who does want to turn the earth into
a giant park free of human beings. You can't verify that.
I mean unless it is like audible or something. That's
my point. You can't verify that. Yeah, well here's some
ads we are back. Oh my gosh, I do love

(40:26):
I do love o our good solid ads for products
and services. So, and one thing I want to add,
I I really love everyone telling me how many ads
there are in Megacort. Thanks. I love that. Yeah, that's
quite true. Let me know every every episode, let me know, yeah,
that's literally every message. If they want to pay for it,

(40:48):
you know, yeah exactly, or if you're gonna pay for
you know, put put food in my family's table, Like
I gotta paper out there. You know, it's it's all good. Look, man,
you can skip you can skip ads. You can go
in and cut them out and put the episode up
as a torrent. Nobody's going to complain. There's options, there's options.
As soon as he graduated, Jeff Um, he and a

(41:10):
school friend started a company of their own. UM. So
he gets out of high school and like the summer
after high school, he starts a business with a classmate.
Their business is called the Dream Institute, and Dream is
an acronym, and it's a terrible acronym because dream stands
for directed. There's the D reasoning, there's the R e

(41:30):
A methods that that's not, that's not, that's not an acronym,
that's not it's and it's fine, but like it's not
an active Sorry, young Jeff bezos Um. The Dream Institute
was a two week summer camp program for fifth graders
where Jeff and his friend would teach kids about engines, fission,
interstellar travel, and space phenomena, along with stuff like advertising

(41:54):
and like the history of advertising. It was an eclectic
program to say the least. You can see it as
Jeff trying to kind of give act to kids, some
element of what he had gotten um as a child.
A local news report on the Dream Institute makes it
seem like Jeff's primary interest as an educator was teaching
kids about space. This passage from the book One Click,

(42:14):
based on interviews with Jeff's early business partner, makes it
clear where his head was at the time. Quote he said,
the future of mankind is not on this planet because
we might be struck by something and we better have
a spaceship out there. So, I don't know, just interesting
to me, very consistent. Yeah, he's yeah, he's had that
that germ like in his you know, the germ of

(42:34):
an idea in his brain from very young. Clearly. Yeah. Now,
the Dream Institute didn't last long, not because it failed,
but because Jeff was off to Princeton, where he got
a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He did
very well at school, although he was not the valedictorian.
And in fact, this is kind of a humbling moment
for him because at Princeton, for the first time, he's
surrounded by a bunch of other like young, rich, overachievers, UM,

(42:57):
and he's not the best anymore. Uh, he doesn't really
stand out at Princeton, and in fact, one of the
things when when journalists go back to people who were
in college with Jeff Bezos, one of the things they
note is that basically no one who was with him
in school really noticed him or remembered him Like he didn't.
He doesn't stand out at all. Uh. One of the
few anecdotes we get about him from a college friend

(43:19):
is that he liked to play beer pong, which is
like the blandest personality trait you can have in college, Like, yeah,
everybody plays beer pog into college, Like is that? What
is sorry? What is beer pong? Again? It's so you
have you have like a fucking a table tennis court,
and we're not going to laugh about that. What did

(43:40):
Like Jacob didn't play beer poll I don't know doing
in England, you know, I didn't. I didn't go to
university though, so I don't know, man, Like, I don't
think people do it here, you know, I dropped out
of university. But I definitely, yeah, I can imagine. But
I think people who just they just get smashed, you know,
I don't. Yeah, I mean that's mostly what you do.

(44:01):
The basic ideas you have like a table tennis or
you could just set up like a card table and
you stack a bunch of like like quarter full cups
of beer on it, and you have like table tennis rackets,
and you have like little clear white plastic balls and
you hit them to each other. And if you knock,
if you knock a ball in the one of the
cups the table tennis racket, there's a number of ways,

(44:21):
but you're you're you're knocking these balls back and forth.
And if you knock a ball into a drink, your
opponent has to drink it. If they knock a ball
into a drink, you have to drink it. And you
repeat this until everybody's drunk. Right, that's the basic idea. Yeah,
it's not I have nothing against beer pong. It's just
it's like everybody in college like liking I remember he

(44:42):
liked beer pong. It's like I remember he ate food.
Yeah yeah, okay, if you say he refused to play
beer pong, that's a personality trait. But like you know,
although just kind of the idea in my head of
like a guy that just really loves beer pong is
quite funny. Like every he just like start Jeff calmed

(45:03):
down like Jesus Christ. I mean, if he liked it
for the like One of the things I found positive
about beer pong is that, like I was not a
very social kid, I was not good Like when I
was nineteen, I was not good at talking to people
at parties. But I could drink a lot and if
I could just play, and beer pong was very simple,
so you could participate in the party without actually engaging

(45:25):
with anybody. If you were, you know, an anxious kid
who didn't really understand how to hang out around people
until I found mushrooms. I was not very good at
at being in social situations. So I'm wondering if maybe
it was something like that for Jeff, where it's like, oh,
I understand the rules of this, you know what. It
might be funnier that I can just imagine him being like,
I want to be the best beer pong you know,

(45:48):
you don't even care about He's like, I need to win.
I don't know. I could just say yeah, that that
that that would not surprise me. Um. Yeah, I'm gonna
read a quote from the book One Click about Jeff
in uh college from some interviews with his classmates. Quote,
Jeff wasn't much of a ladies man, perhaps Princeton women
aren't into beer pong. He explained his own romantic shortcomings

(46:10):
this way. I'm not the kind of person where women say, oh, look,
how great he is a half hour after meeting me.
I'm kind of goofy, and I'm not. It's not the
kind of thing where people are going to say about me,
Oh my god, this is what we've been looking for.
Another classmate, e J. Chichilnisky, would bump into him occasionally,
but today can recall nothing more than that he was
bright and motivated and organized. So he doesn't really like

(46:32):
he doesn't stand out at all in in college, which
is interesting to me, Like he becomes the richest man
in the world, and all his classmates are like, yeah,
he was just kind of a kid, you know. Um,
it's probably worth noting here in terms of weird aspects
of Jeff Bezos' personality, that he does not like music,
like period, he doesn't does not get music. That's the

(46:55):
biggest red flag, right, Like, I don't care what kind
of music you like. It's like it's the it's the
chief miracle of human existence. If you don't get it
at all, that's kind of odd. Yeah, that's really strange. Yeah,
that's that's so nerving. Actually, yeah, it is weird, like
force your favorite music. I don't like music, like in general, Like, no,

(47:17):
that's odd man. Yeah, and he has to um. As
a kid, he recognizes that this is off putting, and
so while he's in high school, he memorizes the call
letters for every local radio station so he can pretend
to like music if the subject comes up in conversations
with other kids. It shows the disconnect too, because it's like,
I don't like music, but I need to be able
to pretend it. I'll memorize the names of radio stations.

(47:39):
That way people will think I like music, And it's
like that's not how people talk about music. Ye, that
behavior this new radio station, I know the phone number
to it. No one's gonna be like, oh, he loves music. Yeah, okay, Jeff,
Like I mean, I don't. I don't. I don't want
to like second get it. But I've read a lot

(48:00):
about like, like you know, sociopaths, and they say that
they're like, you know, there's certain things that they don't
understand it, but they know how to emulate it to
fit in. And that sounds like that, you know, I
was saying that he emulated it pretty badly. So yeah,
and it's one of those things I don't know, because
like I had my version of that, Like I never
liked football, but I played it, and I like learned
to feign interest in it because you have to be

(48:21):
able to pretend to like football in Texas. But yeah,
that's less basic than pretending to understand the appeal of
music as a concept. Dogs like music, dogs like plants
grow from it. Like, no, it's very weird that yeah,
that's it's that's a bit peculiar. A lot of people
this is relevant to Amazon in part because a lot

(48:43):
of people claim the reason Apple got the iPod out
and iTunes that Apple because Amazon and Apple kind of
had a fight to see who was going to be
the kings of digital music, and Apple wins um and
a lot of people will say that it's probably because
Steve Jobs famously loved music. Jobs was like obsessed with with,
uh like music, and from a pretty early stage in

(49:04):
his business, wanted to deliver something like the iPod because
he cared about people being able to listen to music.
And Jeff Bezos misses this trade, which is kind of
an obvious money train right, especially if you're doing Amazon
ship in the nineties, you should probably be able to
see that, like, oh yeah, digital music is going to
be a big deal financially, we should get into that.
But Jeff doesn't, because like he does not understand the

(49:25):
appeal of music on a fundamental level. Yeah, that's such
like a hiccup there. He's just it's like he's just
like no, I don't. I don't why, like why It's
like that's that's kind of nuts. Yeah, there's another story
about him that, like in the early days of the company,
like two one, Uh, he's like on a work trip
with a bunch of employees and they have to drive
back and nine eleven happens, and everybody's like bummed out

(49:48):
and like freaked out and has to they have to
drive across the country like right after nine eleven, and
to try to cheer everyone up, he goes into a
truck stop and just gets a random assortment of CDs
just like randomly picks mus off the shelf to play. Okay,
Jeff to see him put it on, like like you know,

(50:10):
everyone's like, no, not that song just yet. I can
only imagine what young Jeffrey bais this is like dating
profile would look like. I don't think he did. I mean, yeah,
he's got other things on his mind dating like what
he would mock up on there. Oh yeah, you just

(50:30):
look at the top forty and list all of the bands,
just like I can calculate how long it's going to
be before your grandma dies, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah,
that's his entire Okay, Cupid, I can tell you when
your grandparents will die. The women will love this, you
know what. That might do better than you'd expect to

(50:52):
be fair worse. During his summer vacation in nineteen four,
he's in college, Jeff goes to visit his mom and
dad in Norway, where Mike was working again for x On.
Jeff got a summer job programming for the oil giant,
mainly coding a computer model to calculate royalties for the company.

(51:13):
He gets some work for IBM the next year, and
when he graduates, he manages to get a job with
a company called Fittell, off the recommendation of his classmate Chichilnitsky,
who now claims to barely remember him. Fittell provided computer
solutions for investment banks and brokerages. When Jeff joined. They
were in the process of building a sort of internet
to link computers from a bunch of different financial firms

(51:34):
together in order to trade more effectively. And the descendant
of this thing that Jeff was working on is how
all trading has done today. Right. It's all banks of
networked machines talking to each other making split second financial
decisions that no human would have the time to make. Uh.
And Jeff is not the driving force behind this change, right,
He's He's one of the people who's coding the early

(51:54):
stages of this change that I think you could argue
has been disastrous. But he's not. It's not like this
is he doesn't start this trend um, but he is
a part of it. Yeah. Um. He was good at
the job, and inside of a year he had been
promoted to manage a dozen programmers. He bounced around different
early financial tech companies for a while, mainly programming different
software solutions to allow bankers to communicate with each other.

(52:17):
In nine nine, he got to talking with a banking
analyst named Halsey, who also wanted to be an entrepreneur.
Halsey and Bezos hit on an idea to expand the
limited intranets, they've been building into something separate, a network
that anyone could use to connect subscribers to news stories
curated algorithmically by the person's interests. So they kind of

(52:37):
hit upon in the in the eighties this idea of like,
we should build a news feed that like reads, pays
attention to what people are reading and gives them more
of that, which is they never make this, but it
is interesting that he like this is like how the
whole internet works now, and they kind of get that
in the eighties. Like he's clearly understands the promise of
a lot of this technology earlier than most people. Yeah, definitely,

(53:00):
I think you've definitely heard of his time in some ways,
you know what I mean. Yeah, especially from a data
perspective line, I think that actually helped him a lot. Yeah,
I think it absolutely does. Um And for a while
Bezos and Halsey like try to get Mary Lynch to
invest in this idea, but Marylynch is like, I don't
think there's any financial future in this, and they don't
put down the money, which is very funny that like

(53:21):
Mary Lynch could have owned basically Facebook in the late eighties.
But maybe the Yeah, I mean, obviously it would have
been a disaster. Probably it didn't happen. Yeah, Jeff moves
on to a company called D E. Shaw. Now D E.
Shaw was another investment kind of firm. They manage a
hedge fund, and it would be the last place Jeff

(53:42):
Bezos ever worked for anyone else. Um. The firm is
kind of where he gets finished and turned into the
man who would start Amazon. And a big part of
that goes to his boss, the founder of the company,
David Shaw. David is like, he's a brilliant financial technology guy.
He's he's a really innovative thinker within that field. His company,
they're kind of they're kind of seen as within this

(54:03):
industry being mavericks and being like super creative and ahead
of the curve on everything. And Jeff really admires David Shaw,
who's analytical. But Jeff like the thing Jeff praises him
for is having a perfectly developed left and right brain. Um,
and you kind of get the impression he's one of
the very few people Jeff ever saw as not just
a mentor but like an equal. Um. That doesn't happen

(54:26):
a lot with Bezos, but he really admires this guy.
So while he's working at D. E. Shaw, Jeff was
also working to get himself a girlfriend. And I'm going
to read a quote now from the book The Everything Store.
There's always one of these for Bezos, for Zuckerberg, for
fucking uh um Gates. There's always a weirdo quote about
this sort of thing. Bezos thought analytically about everything, including

(54:48):
social situations. Single at the time, he started taking ballroom
dance classes, calculating that it would increase his exposure to
what he called in plus women. He later famously admitted
to thinking about how to increase his as women flow,
a Wall Street corollary to deal flow the number of
new opportunities a banker can access. So it's it's one

(55:10):
of those things. It's like if he just said he
wanted to meet women, so he learned a ballroom dance,
I'd say, well, that's great. That's what you should do.
If you want to meet people, go learn a new thing.
You expose yourself to more people. The fact that he's
thinking about it like, well, I have to increase the
flow of women that I communicate with on a daily
basis in order, Like that's there's implus coefficient will raise
and then I'll have a higher chance of it. Is like,
it's not how flow go up? Yeah, women flow up.

(55:34):
It's so creepy man. Yeah, it's like everything's a transaction,
you know. Yeah, he's a way. Sometimes it is, but
that's not a positive way, you know. And I don't
think you tend to get the best results if you
go out to meet people thinking about it like a transaction. Yeah. Yeah,
definitely definitely not worrying about your m flow or whatever
it was. Yeah. So, Jeff's colleagues knew him as a

(55:57):
hard worker who also felt the need to brag about
how hard he worked. He kept a rolled up sleeping
bag in his office in ostensibly in case he needed
to work overnight, but his colleagues say it was mostly
a prop right. Um. The bag and the phone padding
for it were always in view, like he I'm sure
he does sleep in his office occasionally, but more than anything,
it's so that other people know he's willing to sleep

(56:19):
in his office, you know. Um yeah. Uh. In nine,
the hedge fund that he worked for hired a woman
named mckenzy Tuttle. She'd graduated from Princeton, where she'd gotten
a degree in English and studied with Tony Morrison. She'd
published a novel prior to starting work as an administrative assistant.
In short order, she worked directly for Jeff Bezos, who

(56:40):
had a huge crush on her. One of his then
colleagues remembers a night out when Bezos hired a limousine
to take several co workers to a nightclub. Quote, he
was treating the whole group, but he was clearly focused
on mackenzie. So I mean, that's whatever. And I should
note here that, like, because we talked about Bill Gates,
kind of it on coworkers in a way that was

(57:02):
more unsettling. McKenzie herself claims that Jeff did not hit
on her. She disagrees with the version of events put
forward by her colleagues and claims that she fell in
love with him. Um and and was the person who
instigated the relationship. Um and I certainly am not second
guessing her on this, Like, I don't know he Wasn't
he a creepy She does not. She she doesn't think

(57:22):
it's like a creepy office thing. Yeah. She claims that
she had an office next to his and she fell
in love with his. Laugh, um laugh, It's like Yeah,
it's it's bizarre. That's a that's a fascinating thing to say,
because I think we should break in to discuss Jeff

(57:42):
Bezos's laugh here, and I want to read a quote
from Brad Stone, his best biographer, discussing Jeff's laugh. Much
has been made over the years of Bezos's famous laugh.
It's a startling, pulse pounding bray that he leans into
while craning his neck back, closing his eyes, and letting
loose with a guttural or that sounds like a cross
between a mating elephant, seal and a power tool. Often

(58:04):
it comes when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else.
In a way, bezos His laugh is a mystery that
has never been solved. One doesn't expect someone so intense
and focused to have a raucous laugh like that, and
no one in his family seems to share it. Employees
know the laugh primarily as a heart stabbing sound that
slices through conversation and rocks its targets back on their heels.

(58:25):
More than a few of his colleagues suggests that on
some level this is intentional. That Bezos wields his laugh
like a weapon. You can't understand it, says Rick Dalzel,
Amazon's former chief information officer. It's disarming and punishing. He's
punishing you. Yeah, he's Gargamo's amazing. Yeah, he's fucking garga Bell. Yeah.
McKinsey falls over him because if his punishment laugh Jesus,

(58:49):
yeah she. I don't know. Some people are into like said,
oh mesochistics. Ship. I don't know, but fucking know, that's
a weird one if I mean, you know, I don't
mean I don't want to be like pick on his carrot.
The laugh is like really unsettling. I think, Yeah, we
should actually probably in bed audio of that. Yeah, let
exact me find it. Okay, here's a compilation of Jeff

(59:16):
Bezos laugh. You want to be a chef, maybe you
want to be a dancer. I don't know what you
want to do is going to like, but you do
need to follow your passion. I would love for it
to be after I'm dead forty minutes with you. It's

(59:36):
already clicking down or to use everyone, So no droning
on I see no, no, that's coming up too. But
that was actually not supposed to be a bad pun
And then disclosure you are an investor in business decidety.
I just want to happy, thank you. It is great
best midnight snack while your brain stormy. I'm asleep at midnight.
That's important. That's really good. Guy like you actually gets

(01:00:00):
it is it's it's weird. It is a little bit
of a weird laugh. Look, I don't like it. It's
not nothing good. It is like weirdly the same a
lot of the time, Like he's practiced it. I don't know,
has like villain undertone. He's one of those rich people

(01:00:22):
who runs the world that gives credence to the lizard
man conspiracy theories because like you look at you look
at and listen to Jeff and you're like, yeah, he
could be a lizard, right, Like he could be a lizard.
There could be a lizard under that skin, no doubt,
no doubt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's like, um, it's
just I think it just feels forced. I think that's
the thing, and it's so over the top, you know

(01:00:42):
what I mean, When there's no need that, and it
feels it feels like such an effort to like not
react genuinely. Um, I don't feel like we're hearing whatever
is the same thing in the laugh that McKinsey heard,
probably because he's changed since then. It had to put
on armor. But it is like Jeff could be a man,
Elon Musk could only be a human like he's, he's,

(01:01:03):
he's his flaws are too obvious and evident, you know, Um,
Jeff Bezos, Yeah, he's, he's, he's very He's polished himself
to like a higher extent than pretty much any of
these other any of the other people in his position, um,
which is probably why he's he's built something that's so
much more integral to daily life, and why he's he's

(01:01:27):
been so much more successful than most of them. Is
he's he's he's really good at polishing an image. Yeah, hey, everybody,
Robert Evans here. This is actually going to be a
two parter and wound up running very long, so we
decided to split it here. If you want to find
Jake Hanrahan on the internet, you can find him at
popular front. Um. You can support Popular front you can

(01:01:49):
listen to or watch their great content, and of course
you can find his new show Megacorp on the cool
Zone Media network. Uh. You can also find this show
wherever shows are found own, which is wherever you are
right now, because you found it. M mhm