Jeff Bezos and the Birth of Amazon explores Bezos's controversial legacy, contrasting his unapologetic stance on warehouse worker safety with claims of an 80% injury rate. The discussion traces his trajectory from a data-obsessed child in Albuquerque to a Princeton dropout who founded the Dream Institute at 14, highlighting alleged sociopathic traits like his transactional dating and unsettling laugh. Ultimately, the episode suggests Bezos's polished image masks a ruthless management style rooted in childhood pragmatism, raising questions about whether his vision for space colonization stems from genuine ambition or a desire to escape Earth's flaws. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:01:33
This is an iHeart podcast.
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On the Ceno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversation about recovery, resilience, and redemption.
On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available at the bench, featuring powerful conversations with guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
I'm an alcoholic.
Without this probe, I'm a die.
Listen to Ceno's show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, where it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Listen to Math and Magic on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
On paper, the three hosts of the Nick Dick and Paul Show are geniuses.
We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
The Problem with Microservices00:08:52
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
Listen to the Nick Dick and Paul Show on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating While Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Robert Evans here, awake the earliest we have ever been awake to record a podcast.
I just cannot take you seriously.
It is 11:22 a.m.
It is 11.
So strung out exhausted.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where one intrepid, dogged journalist braves the difficulty of being up barely, what is it, five and a half hours after dawn?
My God.
Literally, now it is 11:23.
Yeah, well, our guest today on this very special episode of Behind the Bastards is the great Jake Hanrahan.
Cheers, man.
How you doing, buddy?
Yeah, I'm good, man.
I'm good.
Good.
Yeah, feeling good, man.
Yeah.
Is it an ungodly early hour over there, too?
No, it's like 7 p.m., like 7:23 p.m.
You know what I mean?
That's a nice, reasonable hour to be awake.
Speaking of reasonable, Jake, how do you feel about Amazon?
Well, it's funny you asked because I've been doing this new series called Megacorp.
All about really?
Yeah, man.
I was saying to you guys before we kind of went on air, like the more research I do on this, it's just like, it's almost like comically villainous to a point.
You know what I mean?
And I'm not really wanting 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, 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 it.
2014, Amazon was not the huge deal.
Like, it was just like it was not a small company, but like, yeah, they were more than books by that, but they weren't this like behemoth that was doing everything.
And like, it's, it's weird how quickly a lot of this stuff slotted into place.
And you've got Megacorp going on, which is great, and you're kind of going through methodically the crimes of Amazon.
And the crimes of Amazon are also, one way or the other, the crimes of the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
So I wanted to do something a little bit different this week.
Normally on Behind the Bastards, when we cover a guy like Bezos, and we've done our episodes on Bill Gates, on Musk, on 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 bit by bit.
So I felt like we would do an episode on bastards that's kind of leading people in to Megacorp.
So this episode is more detailed than a lot.
And we're going to go into the early life of Jeffrey Bezos.
And we're going to end a little bit on some specific actions of his that I think are horrible.
But really more than anything, I want to give people a sense of who this guy is so that when they listen into all of the, you know, to the union busting and the worker 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 made it all possible.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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 unapologetic.
You know, there's a lot of stuff, you know, I think even in one 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 80% more likely to get wounded in an Amazon warehouse than any other warehouse in their industry.
And then when he was speaking about this, he was just like, yeah, the media's lying.
It's just like crazy.
Like, he's just like, it's kind of, he's the kind of poster boy, I guess, for business when it comes to the kind of post-scandal era where he's like, yeah, no, it's not real.
And it's like, well, it is.
But he just very much embraces that thing of like tough luck, you know?
Yeah, there's this, there's this term people used for Steve Jobs, the reality distortion field.
Right.
And usually when they were talking about 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.
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, 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 as much that he's distorted reality as 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?
Right.
He's so big.
They've got so much money.
He's kind of at a point where 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 some of the things I've read and the way that he allows it to happen at Amazon, you know, I think he's quite happy to just be like, yeah, tough luck.
Yeah, and we'll get into that.
But it is interesting, I think, that 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 in terms of like how you get your groceries, how you get stuff for your job, if you like work remotely, how you get things that your employees need to you, if you run a business, how you get or how you sell like things in that business.
Like for my part, a huge amount of my workload is on Kindle just because the easiest way to get research off of a book is to highlight it in an e-book and then like you can kind of copy and paste the text into a research doc.
It's much easier than just like going through a paperback book, 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 all, everybody, everybody knows how fucked up Amazon is.
And everybody's also like, well, what else am I going to do?
And that is where we are.
We are.
You know, you're right.
It's like I use Amazon still.
My book is on sale through Amazon.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But it's like I said in like, you know, episode kind of the zero, the kind of prologue to MegaCorp.
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?
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 world as connected as ours with things as reliant on technology as ours and with a plague racing through where our ability to like go places to get things is disrupted.
Yeah, we, something like Amazon is going to be necessary.
You know, and we can also talk about like consumption patterns and whatnot, but like in our current society, something like it is necessary.
But is the suffering is like all of the fucking shit that comes along with it?
I would argue, hopefully not.
No, no.
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 is because of the guy who founded it.
Because Amazon is very much made in the image of its creator, Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.
That's right.
Billionaire Upbringing Secrets Revealed00:15:06
Jorgensen.
Not Bezos.
He was not born Jeffrey Bezos.
He was, however, born on January 12th, 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
I did not expect him to be an Albuquerque baby.
But he's real.
He spent most of his upbringing in like the South and Southwest, kind of similar area that I did.
His dad, Theodore Jorgensen, was 19 and his mother, Jacqueline Geese, was 17.
So this is a little bit of like a problematic union.
Theodore's out of high school.
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 type deal.
And she struggles to finish her high school degree while Jeff is growing inside of her.
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.
Yeah.
The dream, you know.
It's one of those things.
kill you bro it's one of those things like of of the things i did not call in jeff bezos' backstory dad abandoned them for the unicycle would not have been um and and by the way i i should note we'll talk a little bit more about this but jeff grows up knowing none of this he knows nothing he doesn't 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 Annetti moment, but it turns out it's hard to make a living as a unicyclist.
So Theodore was forced to make ends meet at a department store.
This makes him miserable because, again, his dream is the open unicycle road.
So he takes to drinking more and more.
I don't believe he's like abusive.
He's just like kind of not there.
He just like is incapable of really engaging as a father.
His father-in-law, Jeff's father-in-law, so his mom's dad tried to get him a job, Theodore, a job with the state police, but Theodore couldn't be arsed to do that.
Eventually, Jackie gave up on him and took baby Jeff, aged 17 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, 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 dad's dad was a purchase agent for Sandia Military Base, which was the largest nuclear weapons installation in the United States.
And that's an important gig, right?
He's handling all supply purchases for the biggest nuke base in the U.S. Jacqueline, his mom's dad, on the other hand, was a guy named Lawrence Preston Geese, and he ran the local U.S. Atomic Energy Commission office.
And he's running the Atomic Energy Commission office in like New Mexico, which is the big one, right?
That's like where we figured it all out, right?
That's going to be like your, yeah.
And he's a new, he's a new, he's a rocket scientist, you know, he's like a nuclear missile expert 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 any kind of personality from Jeffrey Jorgensen at this point is from when he was three.
His mom was really paranoid about his health, and she had him sleeping in a crib long after the point at 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 a hold of a screwdriver and took the crib apart himself so that it was just a bed.
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.
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, yeah.
Also, like being three years old, like if someone gave me a screwdriver, I would just like stab myself by accident.
You know what I mean?
I don't know about that one.
It's a little bit, you know, maybe he did if so.
Yeah, maybe.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think you're right.
A little bit of salt with that one.
A little bit, yeah.
So in 1968, his mom remarried to Miguel Angel Bezos Perez.
Miguel was Cuban and had fled the country on the insistence of his mother after he was caught painting anti-Castro graffiti.
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.
But yeah, he gets out of, he has to like leave his family behind in Cuba because he's too much of a little can't you know not rebel against the system, I guess.
He's 16 years old when he entered the enters the country and he speaks almost no English.
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.
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.
That's so a hard hit for Theodore.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, you get the feeling.
I mean, I think he, from what I've, from what I can, I've heard, he regrets it now.
I think at the time it was like, you don't have to pay child support that you're not paying already anymore.
Like, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, life, life is hard.
Things can be hard.
Sharing it.
It's sad enough, 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 is like your bio dad won't do it.
This guy comes in out of nowhere and adopts your kid.
Like, yeah, of course.
That's what you do.
Yeah.
Anyway, that's why he's Jeff Bezos and not Jeff Jorgensen.
So Miguel eventually finished college and got a job working as a petroleum engineer for Exxon.
So his Jeff, as a kid, Jeff's family is like either into nuclear weapons or the oil and gas industry, which is quite an upbringing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, man.
Like, yeah.
It's very like American industry as well, right?
Nukes and oil.
Nukes and gas, yeah.
Yeah, like the favorite things, you know?
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, 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?
So the family travels a bunch as Miguel like gets all these different transfers across the world.
And along the way, you know, as they're, you know, Miguel is starting his career and, you know, Jeffrey's growing up, 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.
And his dad, like, hadn't heard of him.
I think it was 2015 when he got tracked down.
He was like, who's Jeff Bezos?
And it's like, that's your son.
Yeah, you forgot the name.
And he's like a broke, failed circus performer.
It's quite a thing.
So we don't really have a whole lot of detail on how, you know, 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 are going to involve Miguel, who seems to have been a pretty good dad.
And so when it comes to how Miguel influenced his son's development, we have more meat.
And it's, you know, 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 extremely anti-communist as well.
You know what I mean?
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 government intrusion into the private lives and enterprises of citizens.
Certainly it was something that permeated our home life, he says, while noting that dinner time conversations were apolitical 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, 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 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 heard in the last episode I did for Megacorp, 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 a 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 will when he needs to.
Yeah, and it's, it's 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 we'll discuss, the things that like make Jeff Bezos into the person who's 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 very well-funded schools.
You know, Amazon avoids paying taxes to support the schools.
A lot of his early jobs give him a lot of freedom.
And like, yeah, it's this whole, yeah, you benefited from a system that you have no desire in maintaining.
Anyway, that's what we're getting to.
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 family ranch, the Lazy G, was more than 25,000 acres, which is a big ranch.
And he comes from old Texas money.
The ranch has been in his family's hands since the early 1800s.
And he had an ancestor who took part in the early colonization of Texas by white people.
Which is, I have a good friend who comes from 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 a state.
And like on her old family land, there is like a slave graveyard.
Like that's all of them, right?
Like that's who found like that's the white people who founded Texas.
So again, that's kind of where that's the kind of old money that he's got on that side.
Huh?
Yeah, Texas and Oklahoma.
You're from near Texas, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
My family didn't own any land.
But we didn't get here from Italy until like the 20s.
So yeah, when Jeff Bezos's like grandpa, Lawrence, like even 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 ranch to be like a hobby rancher, you know?
Like, I'm retired.
I don't have to do a grind anymore.
I'm going to 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 12 straight years, 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 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 500-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 endured him to difficult labor.
He would later consider it an idyllic childhood.
And I'd be hard-pressed to disagree with him there.
It sounds like the perfect way to grow up, right?
Like, yeah, you've got like this huge ranch.
You're not learning your lessons, but you've got security.
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.
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 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 Amazon was kind of continuing a process that 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 it 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 in this small town that might get wrecked by Amazon.
And those businesses include Advance Auto Parts, AutoZone, O'Reilly Honda, Albertsons, Kroger, Walmart Grocery, Barnes Noble, Joe Beth 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, but it didn't start with them.
So I don't know.
It's like 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 does not exist anywhere anymore, to the extent that it existed many places when he was a kid.
Education Shapes Future Leaders00:14:59
But he's also not, didn't start that process.
So whatever.
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 public school and was lucky enough to benefit from a school district that had both money and a devotion to taking 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 1970s, an 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.
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 peek at young Mr. Bezos.
So this is not coming out of his PR, you know, churn.
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.
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.
I'm going to read a quote from the book, The Everything Store, about 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.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.
Jeff, 12, was already competitive.
He told Ray that he was reading a variety of books to qualify for a special reader's 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.
Jeff modeled the device after one he had seen in a store.
That one cost $22, 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 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 that kind of decision.
I just keep thinking of the time cube.
Yeah.
Jeff built the time cube.
Put that on the 1998 internet.
Yeah.
Oh, that would be, that would 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 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 shit as a sixth grader to his teachers.
Yeah, it's quite impressive.
Yeah.
And it also, I'd be scared of that kid, though.
It's like fucking Damien vibe, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I think I would like if a fucking sixth grader is like graphing me and a bunch of other people like we're their employees on like a chart.
Yeah, maybe, maybe I'd spray that kid with some pepper water, you know, a little bit of pepper water.
Just don't give him a ruler.
He'll measure your head.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, exactly.
It's in that realm, you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a little bit like unsettling.
And his own family was not immune to this sort of behavior.
When he was 10, 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 smoking.
No, 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 off your life.
And she burst into tears.
That's the kind of mind this kid has.
Again, always driven by like data and always like, why?
It's a very practical one to have.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, don't hurt Granny's feelings.
Like, that's just, no, no one should do that.
You know what I mean?
I mean, I think you get this feeling from him with both of those anecdotes that as a kid, he 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, I think most of us advanced 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 life that way.
Yeah, no, it is.
And do you know what, though?
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 obviously a big problem.
And it's not like, it's also, it also leaves out inherently a lot.
Like you can look at, there's all these kind of like this wing of scholars who will make the claim that like this is the best life has ever been.
And they'll always bring up that like, because of this economic measure or this measure.
And it's like, well, but there's a lot of ways in which like those are jigged.
You look at like, yeah, it looks like these indexes have been moving up, but you adjust them 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 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, you can't just reduce everything to data.
It doesn't matter a lot.
Yeah, oh, no, no one's dropping a rock on your head anymore.
Like that was happening every week and you know 500 years ago.
So you're fine.
It's like, no, there's a lot of other things.
I think without context, statistics are just like just ways for people to argue online.
You know what I mean?
It's like these kind of, you know, like, oh, Ben Shapiro slaughters some like 12-year-olds.
He's like very much into all that, like, you know, statistics without context.
And they're just digits without any context.
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 a data-driven little boy.
He also lived what sounds to me like an exhausting life.
He started school at 7 a.m. every day.
And he had like the special program he was in was just this dizzying mix of classes, individual projects, and small group discussion time.
Julie documented one of the group discussions Jeff was a part of.
He and six other students were sitting with the principal reading short stories and then discussing the short stories.
And the first story they read was about an archaeologist who faked a cache 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 through life thinking like they always have.
You should be patient.
Analyze what you have to work with.
So he's, you know, this is kind of the way he's thinking about people.
I especially, I think, the line, some people go through life thinking like they always have.
Like he's always very obsessed with this idea of 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 a very successful way to think in business.
Like it's interesting to me, some of 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.
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 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.
Julie's book was not a big hit, this book about this special program Jeff is in as a kid.
She had to self-publish it.
And as far as I can tell, we know mostly about it because of journalists like Brad Stone, 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.
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 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 schools well enough that they can experiment.
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 money went into training up both of these children and giving them opportunities when they were little kids.
And a lot of that came from like in the fact that the schools they were in valued their intellectual freedom and valued their personal freedom and consider that an important part of them being able to grow into the kind of people that they were capable of becoming.
And again, it's a total, you look at what Amazon pays in taxes.
It's a bit of a rug pull that they kind of do as soon as they get up to where they are.
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, a kind of a Nixon vibe.
You know, it's not illegal when I do it.
You know, that 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, it's not really, I mean, all right, fine.
Not everybody has to give back, but he's the richest man on earth.
Like, if there's anyone who could, yeah, you know what I mean?
It's a bit, yeah, it's a lot of people.
I mean, I love talk about how space travel is giving back, but that's a discussion for another day.
Yeah.
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.
And he never seemed to like turn off.
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.
Yeah.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah, that's cute.
Like Bill Gates, Jeff benefited from the fact that he had access to a computer earlier than any other kids pretty much in the United States.
A Houston-based company provided his school with a terminal and loaned 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.
So this is, again, 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 70s, you know, when very few other people have access to computers.
Yeah, it's a massive, like very, very privileged position to be at as a kid, especially back then, you know what I mean?
Yeah, and again, it's if if if Jeff, if like either of them were to really learn the lesson of their success, it would be like, yeah, you should, you should invest a lot in children.
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 a couple of other students 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 mainframe contained a primitive Star 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 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.
Yeah.
I get it.
Spock is rad, but wanting to be the computer is a little weird.
The career that most, I mean, Bones is right there, Jeff, but whatever.
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 as having been better at putting a team together to work in a concerted fashion.
So like, again, Disney's 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 for like the lamest version of like him.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
It really is.
Now, as you probably guessed, Jeff Bezos did not get in trouble often as a kid.
He lost his library privileges once for laughing too loud.
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 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 and was actually pretty good at it, which is weird.
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 for my high school did.
Wow.
It's a Texas thing.
We put ridiculous resources into football.
So the fact that he was good at football in a Texas youth league means something.
Texas Football Obsession Explained00:16:17
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 more flexible than you might expect.
And I think that a 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 experiment so they grow up well-rounded.
Because clearly he does.
The fact that he's building robots and he's playing football is a kind of, is sort of an example of the success of the school system he grows up in.
He spent his high school years.
By the time he moved into high school, he got to high school.
His family moves to Florida for ExxonMobil kind of shit.
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.
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 a story.
That story 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 maintain it as like a park.
And what he's up to, 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.
No.
It's the same thing.
You know who doesn't 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.
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I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
Hi, Dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
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Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lesla Cruzette.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It is an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
A better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Oh my gosh.
I do love our good solid ads for products and services.
So, and one thing I want to add, I really love everyone telling me how many ads there are in MegaCourt.
Thanks.
I love that.
Yeah, that's crazy.
That's let me know every episode.
Let me know.
Yeah.
That's literally every message.
If they want to pay for it, you know, yeah, exactly.
If you want to pay for it, you know, put food on my family's table.
Like, I got a PayPal out there, you know, it's all good.
Look, man, you can skip ads.
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As soon as he graduated, Jeff, he and a school friend started a company of their own.
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 REA methods.
No, you can't do that.
That's not an acronym.
And it's fine, but like, it's not an acronym.
Sorry, young Jeff Bezos.
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 and like the history of advertising.
It was an eclectic program, to say the least.
You could see it as Jeff trying to kind of give back to kids some element of what he'd gotten 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, 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 had that germ of 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.
And he's not the best anymore.
He doesn't really stand out at Princeton.
And in fact, one of the things 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.
One of the few anecdotes we get about him from a college friend 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 pong at college.
Like, is that what is sorry?
What is beer pong again?
It's so you have you have like a fucking table tennis course.
We're not gonna laugh about that.
Like Jake didn't play beer pong.
That was the only thing that wasn't.
I don't know if you do it in England, you know.
I didn't go to university either, 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 did beer pong.
Yeah, I can imagine.
But I think people here just, they just get smashed.
You know what I mean?
I don't think they're doing it.
Yeah, I mean, that's mostly what you do.
The basic idea is you have like a table tennis, or you could just set up like a card table and you stack a bunch of 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 into one of the cups, you're...
You can clearly use the table tennis racket.
There's a number of ways, but 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.
Okay, that sounds pretty fun.
It is.
Yeah, it's not.
I have nothing against beer pong.
It's just it's like everybody in college was like liking personality.
I remember he liked beer pong.
It's like, I remember he ate food.
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
If you say he he refused to play beer pong, that's a personality trait.
Do you know what though?
Like, just kind of the idea in my head of like a guy that just really loves beer pong is quite funny.
Like every party, just like, when does beer pong start?
Just like Jeff, calm 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 19.
I was not good at like 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 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 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.
Do you know what might be funnier, though?
I can just imagine him being like, I want to be the best at beer pong.
You know what I mean?
I'm going to win.
Yeah, he didn't even care about it.
He's like, I need to win.
I don't know.
I could just see.
Yeah.
That would not surprise me.
Yeah.
I'm going to read a quote from the book One Click about Jeff in 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 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. Chichelmitsky, 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, he doesn't stand out at all in college, which is interesting to me.
Like he becomes the richest man in the world and all of his classmates are like, yeah, he was just kind of a kid, you know?
Yeah.
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 like music.
He does not get music.
That's the biggest red flag, right?
Like, I don't care what kind of music you like, but it's like, 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 unnerving, actually.
Yeah, it is weird.
What's your favorite music?
I don't like music.
Like, in general, like, nah, that's odd, man.
Yeah.
And he has to, 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.
That's so true.
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.
That way people will think I like music.
And it's like, that's not how people talk about music, Jeff.
This is like bot behavior.
Have you heard this new radio station?
I know the phone number to it.
No one's going to be like, oh, he loves music.
Yeah.
Okay, Jeff.
Do you know what?
Like, I mean, I don't want to second guess it, but I've read a lot about 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, it was saying that he emulated it pretty badly.
Yeah, and it's one of those things.
I don't know, because I had my version of that.
Like, I never liked football, but I played it and I learned to feign interest in it because you have to be able to pretend that you 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 music.
You plant on the dog will.
Yeah, plants grow from it.
No, it's very weird that.
Yeah, that's a bit peculiar.
Lot of people.
This is relevant to Amazon in part because a lot 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 and from a pretty early stage in 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 shit in the 90s, 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 appeal of music on a fundamental level.
Yeah, that's such like a hiccup there.
He's just yeah, 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 2001 uh, he's like on a work trip with a bunch of employees and they have to drive back and 9-11 happens and everybody's like bummed out and like freaked out and has to.
They have to drive across the country, like right after 9-11.
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 music off the shelf to play.
Oh, no.
Okay, Jeff, people.
I could just see him putting on like, you know, little bitches.
Humans like music.
Everyone's like, no, not that song, not now.
Yeah.
I can only imagine what young Jeffrey Bezos' like dating profile would look like.
I don't think he's been.
I mean, he's got other things on his mind.
No, I mean, like, what he would mock up on there.
Bezos' Famous Laugh Mystery00:08:13
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, just look at the top 40 and list all of the bands.
So you just be like, I can calculate how long it's going to be before your grandma dies.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's my part.
That's his entire okay, Cupid.
I can tell you when your grandparents will die.
Yeah.
It's like the women will love this.
You know what?
That might do better than you'd expect.
To be fair, it's been worse.
During his summer vacation in 1984, while he's in college, Jeff goes to visit his mom and dad in Norway, where Mike was working again for Exxon.
Jeff got a summer job programming for the oil giant, mainly coding a computer model to calculate royalties for the company.
He gets some work for IBM the next year, and when he graduates, he manages to get a job with a company called FitTel off the recommendation of his classmate, Chichelmitsky, who now claims to barely remember him.
Fitel 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 together in order to trade more effectively.
And the descendant of this thing that Jeff was working on is how all trading is 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.
And Jeff is not the driving force behind this change, right?
He's one of the people who's coding the early 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, but he is a part of it.
Yeah.
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.
In 1989, 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'd 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 hit upon in the 80s 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 80s.
Like he clearly understands the promise of a lot of this technology earlier than most people.
Yeah, definitely.
I think he was definitely ahead of his time in some ways.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Especially from a data perspective.
I think that actually helped him a lot.
Yeah, I think it absolutely does.
And for a while, Bezos and Halsey like try to get Merrill Lynch to invest in this idea, but Merrill Lynch 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 Merrill Lynch could have owned basically Facebook in the late 80s.
Oh, yeah, fuck them anyway.
Maybe the, yeah, yeah.
Fuck.
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 Bezos ever worked for anyone else.
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 a, he's a brilliant financial technology guy.
He's a really innovative thinker within that field.
His company, they're kind of seen as within this 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.
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.
That doesn't happen 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 Gates.
There's always a weirdo quote about this sort of thing.
Bezos thought analytically about everything, including 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 women flow, a Wall Street corollary to deal flow, the number of new opportunities a banker can access.
So it's one of those things.
It's like if he just said he wanted to meet women so he learned how to ballroom dance, I'd say, well, that's great.
That's what you should do.
If you want to meet TV, 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 to like, and then this in-plus coefficient will raise and then I'll have a higher chance of, it is like women flow go up.
Yeah, women flow go up.
It's so creepy, man.
Yeah, it's like everything's a transaction.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, he's a very good idea.
Which in a way, sometimes it is, but that's not a positive way.
You know what I mean?
No, 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 hard worker who also felt the need to brag about how hard he worked.
He kept a rolled-up sleeping bag in his office ostensibly in case he needed to work overnight, but his colleagues say it was mostly a prop, right?
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 in his office, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
In 1992, the hedge fund that he worked for hired a woman named McKinsey 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 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 McKinsey.
So, I mean, it's whatever.
And I should note here that, like, because we talked, Bill Gates kind of hit on co-workers in a way that was more unsettling.
McKinsey 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 and was the person who instigated the relationship.
And I certainly am not second-guessing her on this.
Like, I don't know.
He wasn't doing any creepy shit.
She doesn't think this is like a creepy office thing.
Yeah.
She claims that she had an office next to his and she fell in love with his laugh.
Have you heard his fucking laugh?
It's like the guy from Smurfs.
Yeah, it's bizarre.
That's a fascinating thing to say because I think we should break in to discuss Jeff Bezos' 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' 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 roar that sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool.
Often it comes when nothing is obviously funny to anyone else.
In a way, Bezos's 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.
More than a few of his colleagues suggest that on some level, this is intentional, that Bezos wields his laugh like a weapon.
You can't understand it, says Rick Dalzell, Amazon's former chief information officer.
It's disarming and punishing.
He's punishing you.
Yeah, he's Gargamo.
Gargamo.
Unfiltered Industry Conversations00:03:49
That's amazing.
Yeah, he's fucking Gargamel.
Yeah, and McKinsey falls for him because of his punishment laugh.
Jesus, yeah, she, I don't know.
Some people are into like pseudo-masochistic shit.
I don't know, but fucking hell.
That's a weird one.
I mean, you know, I don't want to be like pick on his character, but the laugh is like really unsettling, I think.
Yeah, we should actually probably embed audio of that.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
One sec.
Let me find it.
I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him.
I was, hi, dad.
And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen and she says, I have some cookies and milk.
This is this badass convict.
Right.
Just finished five years.
I'm going to have cookies and milk tomorrow.
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Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
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They cannot feed their kids.
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Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
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What Koogler did that I think was so unique, he's the writer director.
Who do you think he is?
Podcast Expertise vs Reality00:03:38
I don't know.
You meet the like the president?
You think he goes to president?
You think Canada has a president?
You think China has a president?
Lazla proves that.
God, I love that thing.
I use it all the time.
I wrap it in a blanket and sing to it.
It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus.
Yep.
It was a good one.
I like that saying.
It's an actual Polish saying, it is an actual Polish saying.
Better version of Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
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Okay, here's a compilation of Jeff Bezos' laughs.
I'm afraid.
You want to be a chef?
Maybe you want to be a dancer.
I don't know what you want to do.
I'm not sure my boss is going to like that.
Not to.
But you do need to follow your passion.
I would love for it to be after I'm dead.
40 minutes with you.
It's already clicking down.
We're going 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 society.
Yes, just one.
Happy investor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It is great.
Best Midnight Snack while you're brainstorming.
I'm asleep at midnight.
That's important.
That's really good.
A guy like you actually gets to sleep.
It's weird.
It is a little bit of a weird laugh.
Look.
I don't like it.
It's nothing.
Not nothing good.
It is like weirdly the same a lot of the time.
Like he's practiced it.
I don't know.
It has like villain undertones.
Yeah, practiced.
He's one of those rich people who runs the world that gives credence to the Lizard Man conspiracy theories.
Because 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.
Yeah, no doubt.
No doubt.
Yeah, yeah.
But it's like, it's just, I think it just feels forced.
I think that's the thing.
And it's so over the top.
You know what I mean?
When there's no need.
That's why it feels great.
And it feels like such an effort to not react genuinely.
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 and had to put on armor.
But it is like Jeff could be a lizard man.
Elon Musk could only be a human.
Like he's, he's, he's, his flaws are too obvious and evident.
You know?
Jeff Bezos, yeah, 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, which is probably why he's built something that's so much more integral to daily life and why he's he's been so much more successful than most of them is he's he 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.
It 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.
You can support Popular Front.
You can listen to or watch their great content.
And of course, you can find his new show, Megacorp, on the CoolZone Media Network.
You can also find this show wherever shows are found, which is wherever you are right now because you found it.
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Two-Part Story Split Decision00:02:37
The Twilight Gazebo.
Sunset Gardens.
Twilight Gazebo.
What's next?
Dead Man's Grove?
Mom, could you please try to be a little bit positive about this?
From Kenya Barris, the visionary creator of Blackish, comes Big Age, an Audible original about finding your way in life's next chapter.
This audio comedy series follows a retired couple's reluctant relocation to Sunset Gardens, a flirting senior community that is anything but relaxing.
Starring comedy legends Jennifer Lewis, Cedric the Entertainer, and Nici Nash Betz.
Through its blend of outrageous comedy, Key Party Anyone, and touching revelations, Big Age explores what it means to grow older without growing old at heart.
Go to audible.com slash big age series to start listening today.
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On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon Danny Trail to talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.
The entire season two is now available at a bench, featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.
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Without this probe, I'm a guy.
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We can explain how AI works, data centers, but there are certain things that we don't necessarily understand.
Better version of play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
Yes.
Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time.
I actually, I thought it was.
I got that wrong.
But hey, no one's perfect.
We're pretty close, though.
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Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
Coming up this season on Math and Magic, CEO of Liquid Death Mike Cesario.
People think that creative ideas are like these light bulb moments that happen when you're in the shower, or it's really like a stone sculpture.
You're constantly just chipping away and refining.
Take to interactive CEO Strauss Selnick and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
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