Grubstakers - Episode 01: Jeff Bezos

Episode Date: February 5, 2018

On the debut episode of Grubstakers, the only podcast about billionaires, we examine the life of Jeff Bezos founder of amazon.com and the richest man on Earth. We trace his rise from humble nerd fucking his subordinates to his innovative idea to bankrupt and ruin every mom and pop bookseller in the country to his more sinister current form. Perhaps the most horrific labor abuser in America his fortune was accumulated through staggering exploitation. Don't listen if you want to feel good about your amazon prime account. Support current and former amazon employees in their struggle to unionize. https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ Here's the tumblr with some of the research we did and any necessary corrections: https://grubstakers.tumblr.com/post/170516717367/research-for-episode-1-jeff-bezos

Hey, welcome to Grubstakers, a new podcast about billionaires. I'm Sean McCarthy. I'm joined by my friend. I'm Yogi Bollywalt. I'm Andy Palmer. I'm Steve Jeffries. And yeah, as we mentioned, this will be a new podcast about billionaires. We don't like them.

Yeah. We're not fans. It's based around the hypothesis that we are aiming to test. We're using the scientific method. So, you know, Reddit's going to like this because we're going to test the idea that billionaires are bad. And we're going to test the idea that billionaires are bad. And we're going to do that by examining every billionaire and seeing if we can find a good one.

And we'll also get inspired by their entrepreneurial ethics, their go-getter attitude, and their need to succeed. And their happenstance, which is being born white or rich. I think the central question of this podcast is who is John Galt? That's right. And we're going to answer that. Turns out he has slaves. Because of my success in the private sector,

I had the chance to run America's largest city for 12 years. I taught those kids lessons on product development and marketing. They taught me what it was like growing up feeling targeted for your race. And that's just not true. You know, I love having the support of real billionaires. And I think we should talk a bit about why each of us don't believe there is any such thing as a good billionaire. And I would say for myself, as we've kind of hinted at here, in order to amass a billion dollars, you either have to have some starting amount of capital that was acquired

unethically, or you have to do some unethical things to do that. And just the simple fact of owning a billion dollars, which is more than any one human being could spend in a lifetime, you are actually taking dollars out of the mouths of hungry babies. You know, there's 40 million people living below the poverty line, 40-some million people in food insecurity in the United States. So why do you, this individual, need all that money? What Sean is saying is that you're synergizing and innovating to create a better society. Oh, and if you're wondering what grub stakers means, it is a gilded age term for someone who would give a prospector money to send them off to the great frontier to go look for gold.

And in exchange for giving them money, they would automatically get a share of the profits from that prospector, which is essentially a very concise explanation of what a capitalist is. Basically, someone who has money already spends some of it, doesn't do shit, and then gets more money in return. Now, Andy, I think you're being unfair because they earned that money that they gave to the prospectors through the sale of cotton to England that they picked themselves.

Never mind how they first got the pile of money. Of course not. We should never talk about where the money originally came from. We have to start that this is all natural and this all appeared and private property rights are natural. And at no point was there any sort of commons between all human beings. Hey, Jeffries, would you kill a baby for a billion dollars? No. I think I would.

I think I would. Kill a baby? I think for a billion dollars. Yeah. It would probably be something where you would do it and then justify to yourself, like, you know, that baby was probably gonna be Hitler. I wouldn't even justify it. I'd be like, I'm sorry, a billion dollars

doesn't hear your fucking pleas. You kill the baby and then you donate half of it to the pro-life movement and you're so killed. You're like, I'm not gonna let any more babies be killed. I don't know. I don't think I could kill it. But if it was choking and I had to save it, but if I didn't save it, I'd get a billion. I think I could live with that.

Like you kill one baby. I'd perform an abortion for a billion dollars. Exactly. You kill one baby. Successfully? Untrained. I'd wing an abortion. Third trimester abortion for a billion.

But like what if you kill the baby, then you talk 30 people out of getting an abortion. And then that's like a net positive And you have a billion dollars So we're all set A billion dollars is a billion dollars That's a positive I need Well anyway so on this week we're going to start By talking about Jeff Bezos

Who is the richest man on earth But before we get there does anyone else want to Kind of comment on their particular thoughts on billionaires On what they're looking forward to exploring With this podcast these kinds of things. I find them inspiring. I mean, I take like a slightly different view and say like we should. I'm looking forward to spending a lot of time on how we actually don't need billionaires and their money in order to finance things that everyone needs.

Right. And so there's a lot of artificial artificial scarcity created in the economy like unemployment is it really a necessity these guys do there need to be several thousand negative errors in order for there to be one billionaire i think i think if innovation isn't rewarded then we won't get any more nintendo switches you know i i really uh i really disagree with steven i'm taking a different stance on this. I'm looking at the research like inspiration. I really think that I'm going to become a billionaire outside of this podcast, and that's

why I'm a part of this group, guys. Well, it's better to discuss, you know, billionaires so you can learn how to be one. Yeah, yeah. If you don't agree with us politically, at least listen to learn how to become a billionaire. Because I think at the end of the day, everyone could benefit from learning how to cheat the system and bend arms to get what you want out of life. Isn't that right, guys? Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, just to pick up on what Stephen said, I fully believe that if you killed every billionaire on the planet tomorrow, nothing would change. Like, it's very much, not that I'm advocating that. I think you are. That's just not true. It's sort of like how Amazon fired all those workers trying to unionize and then said they didn't fire them because of unionization. Today we're talking about Jeff Bezos, by the way.

But the point is, billionaires are not necessary for the system in any way. And a lot of our public dialogue is based around convincing people that they are. And it's an illusion. They're totally not. And yeah, I think that just about leaves us ready to start our investigation of one Mr. Jeffrey Bezos. Jeff Bezos. Yeah, we're starting our billionaire podcast with the most billionaire.

The white whale. The white whale. The Moby Dick. And, you know, I think hopefully when this comes out, Jeff Bezos doesn't try to embarrass us by releasing the tapes of me trying to get Alexa to say the N-word. But I do like to imagine Jeff Bezos sits in his mansion

and he has the master Alexa where he can listen in to all the other Alexas. So he just starts his morning like, Alexa, let's hear what's going on in 179 Grove Street, apartment 3F. No, no, wait, 3E. I want to pick up on that relationship that is sean's actual address by the way i just want the listeners to know i'm not very creative so i just had to

use where i actually live not very good at the original thinking part of a podcast wait sean we actually live at sick yeah okay so you're just making yogi beep our address now you're gonna you each owe me a hundred dollars if you want me to do that. Now you know how I'll make my billions. But Jeff Bezos is very interesting. His childhood, he was born in Texas or Florida? He was born in New Mexico, actually. He moved around a lot.

But just to give you the headline numbers, according to Forbes, as of February 2018, Bezos is worth $ 118.8 billion bloombergism is 120 billion he's the richest person on earth and uh arguably the richest person in history though inflation adjusted there was a point in 99 where bill gates had more money right but he also inflation adjusted uh what was rockefeller had probably the equivalent of 300 billion dollars he had a bigger share of the u.s economy rockefeller did and then you know when people want to get like really pedantic and assholey they'd be like well julius caesar had total control of the roman economy which controlled like half of europe and

well first of all it was crass who had the most money done i read something that william the conquerors were for trillion dollars nice so these are just like descendants of William the Conqueror trying to feel important. Actually, there's these Neanderthals I know about and they owned all the rocks.

So, I think they're actually the main group. Well, Genghis Khan controlled life and death for millions, which you really,

when you put an economic value on that based on the value of the human life, he was a multi-trillionaire. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But anyways,

Bezos, worth about $120 billion, likely to be the richest person of all time, and as we mentioned, he was born in New Mexico. His mother... There's not a lot of information about Bezos' biological father. His adopted father was a

refugee from Cuba, who later went on to become a petroleum engineer at ExxonMobil. His mother gave birth to him at 17 years old in 1964. His family on his maternal side were settlers in Texas who were very large Texas landowners. I believe they had like a 25,000 acre ranch. Even today, he's one of the largest landowners in Texas. And the point of all this is he grew up in pretty relative material comfort with his Exxon global warming money. Yeah, there's this talk between him and his brother, Stephen Bezos, that's like an hour long.

No relation to our Stephen. A very, very difficult watch to get through it. But they talk about uh their grandfather who they lovingly called pop and uh what an upstanding man this guy was and this guy worked at um you're telling me it's difficult to watch two billionaires masturbate on stage well it's it's one earned billionaire literally and one inherited billionaire um but uh their grandfather worked at the Sandia National Laboratories and, uh, I'm pretty sure that is where we did some sort of nuclear development. Uh, from the research I found, like they did work on Sputnik and stuff.

And basically his grandfather is certainly somewhat connected to the nukes that this country has produced. And between the landmass, I think Sean deduced that that at one point their family might have owned slaves in Texas. Right. Well, they were settlers in Texas, which of course was a slave state and kind of infamously took two additional years to implement the Emancipation Proclamation after the Civil War. Whether it's slavery or nukes, in one way or another,

Amazon's been ruining the world since before all of us were born. Yeah. I don't know why I said that, guys. Well, anyways, but yeah, like, as Yogi mentioned, his grandfather on his mother's side worked at DARPA, which, of course, was famous for inventing the internet, basically. So that's what the kind of dick-sucky biographies you'll read of Bezos. So, I mean, they're responsible for just untold human suffering. Yeah, but think about the memes, Stephen.

They were responsible for probably like for a well-off family, like about an average amount of human suffering. And I think that Jeff Bezos from a young age looked at that and said, I can do so much better. It's pretty hard to top the internet. He was.

So as a youth, he was like seriously interested in a space exploration. And he shares that with Elon Musk. He has since founded a private space exploration company, Blue Origin or something. But when he was valedictorian, he gave like a speech, which was mostly about space travel.

And he ended it with the phrase, they talk about this hour-long thing, he goes, space is the final frontier. Meet me there. That's how he ended it. And then he said, unless you had a miscarriage in which case my company will fire you. But it is...

More on that later. Yeah. But yeah, no, he's also a big star trek fan which i always find ironic that like this guy uh likes a utopian socialist space exploring society that would have no place for a fucking vulture like him um what do you mean he liked the Frangie episodes. He's a fan of Quark's Bar. Yeah. But so Bezos' biography, as we mentioned, father petroleum engineer, maternal side, Texas landowners, grew up in relative comfort, graduated Princeton,

Phi Beta Kappa in 1986 with a BS in computer science and electrical engineering, where he went on to work at Wall Street for a bit in the 80s. Can we go back to Star Trek for a second? Sure. You know how there's like this Cold War analogy where it's like the Klingons versus the Federation? You think the Klingons are the capitalists

and the Federation's the Soviets? Because the Federation is post-capitalist. That's true. But we don't know much about the Klingons. Yeah, post-scarcity, like theviet union anyway back to uh back to jeff basis he's got uh two siblings one brother steven and then a sister christina and uh steven like did a ted talk about like being nice to people i don't know he seems like a real cuck anyway um uh but uh his though, you can't really find any information about her, which is just strange. Because in this day and age, with how exposed and vulnerable we all are digitally, the fact that a billionaire sibling has zero information about her on the Internet, that's bizarre.

Yeah, I'm guessing she probably went down the path of that Kennedy daughter that got lobotomized. And they're just hiding her in a sanitarium somewhere away from the public eye. Andy, you're so bright today. I just feel like when you have enough money, you can probably hire lawyers to take down blog posts about you. Just have a really official letterhead sent to some P.O. box somewhere. I don't know. Where are we at in his life story though so he well so he graduated princeton i did want to just random fact about him his high school girlfriend she tells a story about he sent her on like an elaborate scavenger hunt

for her birthday and stuff uh you know so that was supposed to be like a charming story about what a like entrepreneur he is uh but anyways uh the the interesting point about her is she uh since went on to work in the u.s uh antitrust law enforcement division wow his first high school girlfriend and it's like oh i wonder why she can't find any case to investigate related to amazon.com yeah um but yeah no he graduated princeton he went on to work on wall street and various kind of- Every time she tries to investigate one, he sends her on a scavenger hunt. Okay, go into my warehouse.

Find all the boxes with prime numbers. Shipping to prime addresses. And you will find the solution to your problems. She just like steps over like seven dead bodies that have like died of heat exhaustion in the warehouses. No corruption here. You can't find those prime, prime, prime boxes. And as soon as you get to the first... Here's a stack of cash.

Go away. But yeah, so he worked in Wall Street for a bit in various kind of computer science fields. Interesting fact, he was actually his wife's boss, his future wife's boss. That's right, he interviewed her. He was the vice president, I think his last job before he founded Amazon was he was the vice president at D.E. Shaw, a financial firm in New York.

Yeah, he hired his wife and then started dating her and in conversations about her, he was just kind of like well, I mean, I knew she was smart because I read her resume. started dating her and like in conversations about her he was just kind of like well i mean you know i knew she was smart because i read her resume like it's like you know he got the like cliff notes on the person he was about to date it kind of weirdly is like online dating showing up at your work it's like well this is everything you've done and i'm looking at you and you do

look fuckable i think i'm gonna make this. That is like the most weird nerd move to just read someone's resume and be like, I should make babies with this person. He talks about when it comes to his wife that he wanted a woman that could get him out a third world country prison. That's the type of woman he wanted. He wants

a woman who can get him out of the third world country he's creating in America. You know what I'm hearing is a bunch of cucks that don't go trolling for puss on linkedin that's right that's right um i'll give him credit for uh i'll give him credit for two things still being married to the same woman and uh not allowing any public information of affairs to come out so sean you know why that's that's happening? Why is that? Obviously, because he eats the butt. You can't maintain a relationship post two decades without eating that butt. He also, in that hour-long talk, has this quote about his wife.

Andy, would you play this quote that I gave you? Yes, I will. All right, so we're just going to edit out Andy looking at it. Sean, shut the fuck up now. And my wife, best to her credit, she has this great saying. She says, I would much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid. And which I just think is a fantastic attitude about life. Wow. Yeah, so, but, you know, forget the 10% of Amazon warehouse workers on food stamps.

They don't have kids. Well, that's just one out of 10 being maimed, and that's okay for the greater good. Those food stamps are resources, and I'm sure quite a few of them can't count to 10 on their fingers from factory accidents. A random note, his wife is Mackenzie Bezos, and she is a novelist. Do you guys want to know how you make your living as a novelist? Oh, how's that? You marry the richest man in the history of the world. But so, yeah, Bezos worked at D.E. Shaw, and he, of course, left his lucrative hedge fund and founded Amazon.com in 1994 in which his parents invested

$300,000. Oh, really? Yeah. A small loan. Small loan, yeah, right. Just a small loan from his parents and just his inner resourcefulness. He came to Seattle with a dream and $300,000. Just the $300,000 on his back.

Guys, come on. He had a house in Bellevue. That's not a cheap city. That's some mean streets out there, right? Yogi grew up in Bellevue for the listeners. That's right. For the reference, if you're listening, we all come from the Seattle area.

And one of the more surreal things is that in the last probably four, five years, we live in New York now, but when we left Seattle, there wasn't a lot of Amazon presence there, even though it was started there. And in the last four years, the city has, it seems, completely transformed from everything we've heard from people that as amazon like exploded its uh housing prices have gone through the roof local bands write songs about basically like douchebags ruining the nightlife and seattle so you might say uh amazon has disrupted the housing market. And now they also have a giant indoor playground that's shaped like glass testicles right next to the Space Needle.

Those huge Amazon buildings are designed so no one ever has to leave. Yeah, yeah. Sort of like the warehouse. Oh, really? But for corporate. And so they've like a third world prison within a first world yeah just so his wife

can get him out of those that's really what he's doing there yeah random digression yesterday I ordered a Howard Zinn book off Amazon Prime and I kind of hope the picker who has 30 seconds to find that book appreciates the irony of me ordering this critique of capitalism while he is trapped

in the teeth of late stage capitalism well i mean we we might not even be able to have a pod on this and have it like touch on these controversial issues of amazon if it didn't actually work as like a really successful product oh yeah so like i mean i use amazon a ton yeah i think we're all prime members aren't we yeah yeah according to we're all Prime members, aren't we? Yeah. Yeah. According to... We're all complicit in this. Even though Sean and Andy live in the same building, they're both...

You know what? They have two separate accounts. If one thing happens from this podcast, one of us should cancel our Prime account. But, yeah, it's... The Institute for Local Self-Reliance estimates half of American households have an Amazon Prime account. What? Yep. That's fucking nuts. I know households have an Amazon Prime account. What? Yep.

That's fucking nuts. I know. Half? What? Yeah, I know. It's crazy. Wow. So the story of Amazon's founding.

Bezos, and to his credit, he's a smart guy. We're not arguing that. We're just saying he doesn't deserve to have 120 billion dollars but uh he essentially he realized that there was clearly a growing opportunity with e-commerce and he had a couple different ideas for what he wanted to sell through the internet and he settled on books um because the web was still in its early stage then and books are you know um very easy to transport um and there's not a lot of quality difference between the picture and the actual thing usually and so you know some other e-commerce startups failed because the

internet was not at that time at the uh technological capacity to deliver you know all the things it does today so he recognized books early and uh the market rewarded him for his genius books have a good shelf life nice right and so he based amazon in se genius. Books have a good shelf life. Nice. Right. And so he based Amazon in Seattle because it had a big pool of software engineers and was less than 400 miles from Roseburg, Oregon, which was home to the largest book distribution warehouse in the country. And I'm quoting from Cora there.

But yeah. And then it kept growing and growing and it never stopped some guy wrote some book about Bezos and his wife didn't like it and the way she responded was by leaving a thousand word one star

review on Amazon I thought that was really interesting she used the service her husband created to critique a book about her husband about the company he created. Well, that wasn't bad of her. All right. So we have sort of the founding of Amazon. Now, the founder now has over $100 billion.

$120. $120 billion. Let's take a couple steps down to the people who work under him. Right. In corporate. Yeah. And Bezos had his own very customer-obsessed vision of how he wanted to manage a company. And it's kind of an interesting division because in Amazon, it employs, as of quarter four 2017, it employs 566,000 people worldwide.

Hard to find the breakdown of how many of those are part-time or full-time, but the point is 566,000 employees. Vast, vast majority of those are low-paid warehouse employees. However, there are corporate employees in Amazon. I think as of 2015, Seattle Times estimates that's about $35,658. It's probably more like $40,000 to $60,000 now. These corporate white-collar employees, they make a median income of $90,000. So that's not a bad job, even if you're work to the bone. But I think what's interesting about Amazon is you learn how that work to the bone, burn these people out.

They also, at the corporate office, have a median turnover rate of one year. You know, the median employee leaves after one year. And that filters all the way down now to their warehouses and to Whole Foods. So I guess not to dominate the conversation, but there was a couple years ago a semi-viral New York Times story about the corporate culture that we could discuss briefly. And just basically, at corporate Amazon, workers are sort of encouraged to snitch on each other through what's called the anytime feedback tool, where any employee— So they have like a built-in snitching tool.

Exactly. Because—and the entire structure incentivizes it because every year amazon uh purges the lowest performing employees so um the anytime feedback tool allows you to snitch on any employee to their manager even if you don't work in their division or whatever um and people talk about like how like they would take like a week off because their dad was dying of cancer. There's so many stories. There's a lot of stories of cancer and miscarriages being met with pink slips, as they should be. He's disrupting the cancer treatment industry. Amazon focuses on success, and if you can't carry that baby to term, you're not amazon material that's true amazon is like uh they like people who

make it all the trimesters and then not give up after the second right right right but even those corporate workers who make you know 90k which is more than adequate anywhere uh i mean if you are just literally at work the whole time. Oh, yeah. Even that would be, you know, pretty hectic. Whether or not you work at a warehouse or not. Right. Well, it's like sometimes you'll get these bootlickers or whatever

who are like, oh, I don't mind putting in the extra hours or whatever. And it's like, that's great, but there are human beings out there, in fact, I would argue the majority, who believe there should be a life outside of work and then death. But anyways, and yeah, just like right. Basically, you're putting your life into a product where unless you have like a significant stake in the company itself, you have no ownership over what you've created. Like there was kind of the pride of creating it, but at the end of, you know, spending 10 years of your life helping move boxes around,

if that's all you have from your life, like you can't build anything outside of life, you can't maintain relationships with an 80-hour work week, obviously, like that's all you have to show for it. And you don't even own it. Hearing a lot of jealousy of success right now um but yeah just quoting from that new york times story uh emails

arrive past midnight followed by text messages asking why they were not answered um lots of 85 hour work weeks um and uh and if i can just do another thing is like a big thing with amazon is data you know they collect a lot of data customers, but also a lot of data on their employees. And at every level of the corporate world, again, from these well-paying white collar jobs all the way down to the warehouse jobs, which we'll get to in a minute. They track all sorts of things about employee behavior, length of bathroom breaks, these kinds of things. Just quoting from the New York Times story, the data system quote can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock. And all these things go on there, you know, reports, which of course, as we mentioned, there is an annual pairing down as well as weekly or monthly evaluation meetings. You know, sometimes they'll receive from the New York Times story

50 or 60 page long printouts evaluating their performance, which they are expected to memorize and answer pop quiz questions about. And they go through every single one of the cross tabs. Time spent crying. Urinated pants. Business reviews.

Yes, but they use emojis for all of these things. So instead of writing out text... Straight your employee by emoji. That's what makes it a fun office. And most of them are just the I'm thinking emoji. One more fun thing from the New York Times story. A woman who had breast cancer was told she was put on a, quote, performance improvement plan,

Amazon code for you're in danger of being fired because of difficulties in her personal life that had interfered with her work goals. And yeah, breast cancer, one of those difficulties in the personal life. You know, it's one of those things where Amazon has been known for improving, you know, their algorithm or their data,

and that's why they've been so successful as a company. But the other thing that they kind of do most of the time is they'll just buy the rival competitor. Oh, yeah. There's a list of companies that they bought. The most known places like DP Review they bought, Box Office Mojo, companies that would rival Kindle,

a whole bunch of diapers.com websites. Basically anything that you don't know about anymore. companies that would rival Kindle, a whole bunch of diapers.com websites. Basically, anything that you don't know about anymore. Diapers.com for use by their warehouse employees so they can soil themselves while they're working. I mean, anything that you could use to buy stuff online, they bought out as a small company and then put it within Amazon so that they monopolize ordering stuff online.

And they did that by buying other companies that claimed to do it and then there's like an article posted about how they like bought a company that was basically Facebook in like 2000 or 99 but then they just kind of scrubbed it because of its implications on the ordering world and then Facebook came out a handful of years later and became one of the biggest players on the internet. So as much as you could talk about the things that they supposedly do well, they've really halted a lot of other companies' progress in society, basically. I mean, it's a classic. I mean, straight from the rulebook of horizontal integration from the old industrial capitalists in the 20s and 30s. Everybody could go into that they want to control every aspect of the supply chain right well they like in amazon's case they actually are now competing with people that use their own services

like the aws or whatever oh really yeah so like people that use amazon web services are some of their big competitors in some cases. Those are like the third party sellers on Amazon or is that? Oh, wait, AWS. So that's like a, that's a hosting. Yeah. Like a big data warehouse slash. Oh, is that their cloud thing?

Yeah. That's their cloud thing. I mean, Andy, you would probably know more about this. Well, I just know because my, like we, we interact with that at my job or I work for a website, and so we use Amazon Hosting. Tell the listeners where you work, Andy. By the way, Andy said the N-word this morning. Repeatedly to Alexa. I just said N-words in Paris to get Sean's Alexa to say the N-word.

Come on, let's move on. Everyone knows you yell the N-word. Andy, one of the amazon workplace principles is that leaders are vocally self-critical so i think you're gonna need to self-crit now yeah come on for saying the n-word all right so what's this website you're talking about oh it's uh yeah amazon web hosting services yeah amazon web services i just know it because it's like oh we're like we're just using Amazon in day-to-day office work. Yeah, it's ubiquitous.

It's for small web developers, it's everywhere. Yeah. But also for some, I have to look it up, but I was reading an article that said their competitors are having to use Amazon services. Oh, because they're the most efficient. Yeah, as well as just buying up their competitors, which is the classic horizontal. I imagine, yeah, if you try to make something that's competitive with Amazon on Amazon Web Services,

I mean, I don't know what the legality of that is, especially with the whole net neutrality getting crushed. There's like any number of ways you could exploit that basic need to use a service. Yeah, could they undermine their competitors on Amazon Web Services? They would never. That would be unethical. I mean, it's like, yes.

Just as an example of their control over multiple industries. Yeah. I mean, there's so many different antitrust laws that they could very easily be shown to violating. It's just we have a government since particularly the 80s that is not interested in enforcing antitrust anymore but um and whose fault is that sean ronald reagan that's right i mean the antitrust people are very busy with some fun scavenger hunts antitrust was the name of rihanna's album but she just changed it to anti let's move on guys yeah

um but so anyways as we've kind of talked about a bit there's a very grueling um system uh for amazon corporate white collar workers but you know people might make the argument oh they signed up for that they're making a lot of money you know this kind of stuff but as in the vast vast majority of amazon's employees are in their warehouses or service centers, as they're euphemistically called, or now another 87,000 work in Whole Foods. And these people are now being subjected to these same kinds of pop quizzes and performance evaluations and everything else while they're making $12 an hour in a very precarious situation.

Yeah. So Amazon likes to kind of position itself as being one of the, you know, they're in Seattle, so they're not technically Silicon Valley, but being one of those, you know, tech innovators. And that's how they very much position themselves in the public eye. But the workforce, Sean and I were looking up this morning, their total workforce is something like 566,000 globally. I'm coming up with 32.33, repeating, of course.

And their tech workforce, which is essentially managers, programmers, administrative. We talked about this earlier. Oh, yeah. It's functionally like 40,000, which means that 520,000 people are probably for the most part in product distribution, such as functionally in the warehouses. That's the bulk of Amazon, because instead of just, you know, moving bits around, they're moving products around.

With that comes sort of the real dirt on Amazon is basically their warehouses. It's almost become a kind of a cliche in media to talk about how much of a hellhole Amazon warehouses are. But just the kind of the, well, doing research for this, just the sheer volume of stories about how terrible it is to work in an Amazon warehouse. It's kind of overwhelming, really. Yeah, yeah. You need a warehouse to house the amount of complaints. Yeah, of working in a warehouse. And so they're spread out all over the country.

Part of Amazon blowing up recently is they just kept building warehouses everywhere in the United States. Globally, they're in Italy, they're in Germany. Why did you only mention white countries? Which we'll talk about in a minute because there's a real man in the high castle situation there to name drop an Amazon Prime series. I wonder where they got the inspiration or to name drop an Amazon Prime series. But yeah, I wonder where they got the inspiration for Man in the High Castle.

So there was, there was interestingly, like this is seen by many local politicians as like a big boon in local economies. Like it's, they, there have apparently been over a billion dollars in subsidies, about a billion,

$200 million in like state and local subsidies for Amazon. I believe that comes from an estimate from the economic policy. Yeah. It comes, it comes from, yeah, it's good jobs first. They're a subsidy tracker.

That's where I got it. Yeah. Just in the U S right. Just in the U S we'll put it on our Tumblr. Yeah. And essentially, essentially it's um another the actually so there was a billion dollars in subsidies but then the economic policy institute then also did a study uh following up on that using that and they found out that

amazon warehouses actually don't create local jobs. Essentially what will happen is it's kind of the Walmart effect where Amazon will build all of these facilities and hire a bunch of people. And they haven't been able to prove the end result of this, but they found out that basically everyone that's hired is kind of offset by jobs that are lost at brick-and-mortar stores. And so ultimately Amazon's just getting free money for not necessarily creating new jobs, but just displacing jobs.

If I could just quote a sentence from the EPI, they say, quote, two years after an Amazon fulfillment center opens in a county, overall private sector employment in the county has not increased. Yeah. But in fairness, the Progressive Policy Institute put out a study attempting to refute the Economic Policy Institute study. And would you guys like to guess who one of the funders of the Progressive Policy Institute is? Who's one of the founders of PPI? PPI also takes money from Amazon.com. Oh, wow. And of course, they do not disclose these kinds of things when they put out studies

saying that Amazon warehouse jobs are a ladder to the middle class or whatever the fuck. Yeah, so when basically these warehouses show up in counties where the local workforce has been demolished, probably largely by the housing crisis. After that's kind of killed off all the rural jobs. You know, the triple parentheses housing crisis. Sean's words. Sean doesn't like the Jews. So once that goes up,

people are basically forced into getting these like 1250 an hour jobs because there's nothing else there. Right. And essentially what a day-to-day work at an Amazon fulfillment center is, which is their term for the warehouses, is you have a little barcode gun, and it tells you what product to pick up. You go

pick that up, the gun records you picking up that product, moving it from point A to point B, and then it gives you another product in that area, and then records the rate of products you move. A typical employee there will walk about 12 to 15 miles. And I would walk 15 miles.

And I would walk 15 miles. And this is why Amazon's starting Amazon Gym. It's a very, very intricate scientific method where you walk 12 to 15 miles in the span of an 8-hour workday and you lose up to 10 ounces

of dignity minimum. I can honestly see a gym membership for the corporate amazon employees where they just get to do the job of the warehouse and uh also in addition to the gun there's of course been uh press stories recently about the new thing they're going to do that uh tracks the hand motions and will send little vibrations when they're making yeah they're patenting a wristband basically uh that yeah it sends vibrations if you reach for the wrong product like gizmodo had a good analogy it's like a nintendo 64 rumble patch you click on the wrong item so you get the power glove yeah yeah originally they were going to do a cock ring but but they felt that that wasn't gender neutral

enough. Might as well just have it shock them. Yeah, yeah, basically. God, they're tracking their hand movements. They're tracking their hand movements. They just patched it that. It can tell when they flip them off. Yeah.

And there's this, the Huffington Post had this fucking depressing article from two years ago. Which one? This is one of the many. So since 2013 to 2017, there have been five known deaths in Amazon warehouses that are directly attributable to Amazon. Mostly just someone getting run over by a forklift crushing their head. Well, Andy, maybe they should have met production quotas if they wanted to continue being alive. The actual number of deaths is probably much higher. Cool. But Amazon has this sort of policy of deflecting every health problem in their warehouse, making it sound like it's not work related and what do you mean

like what do they say they'll say like uh well one case i read about was a lady you know she's walking all day and she got like little fractures in her feet and so then you know her doctor was like yeah these these are from working on walking on concrete you know 12 miles a day and so uh amazon then just has a policy of completely denying oh really that that is a workplace related injury on top of that they actually have policies where they if in the case of a medical emergency they say contact security first do not call 9-1-1 so they have their local security force um provide the emergency response i like how jeff bezos is like patrick stewart in the green room yeah yeah i don't get the reference oh he's a neo-nazi club owner oh you know they didn't really go to out the side authorities there uh There was another story of a woman who was between 24 and 36 weeks pregnant with twins,

and she was in labor pain for 20 minutes. And the 9-11 dispatcher asked the Amazon Care, basically their clinic or paramedic, on-site paramedic, to bring her to the front entrance and the paramedic said that they couldn't do that because there was only one person there and the paramedic was already tending to someone else. Oh, wow. It's crazy how it feels like

this big brother oligarch will become Amazon's... Amazon's going to be like, hey, we're making healthcare and all these other things less for, like, society's benefit and more so they can just cover up their own incidents. Do you know what I mean? Oh, yeah, yeah.

It's like we're going to have Amazon hospitals and it's like, well, it's just hospitals for people that work at Amazon. Well, there are also, there are doctors apparently who refuse to work with people at the warehouses because the warehouse management will tell the doctors what to do or what not to do or argue with what the doctors do because certain procedures that the doctors do would mark it down

as a workplace injury. And that would go into official statistics. So like there was someone who got like an injury and they were swelling and the doctor was like, okay, well, I'm going to give them a steroid injection to lower the swelling because that's what you're, you know, some kind of injection. And Amazon was like, no, don't do that. You can't do that. Wow. And their reasoning was it would then go into their, you know, OHCA.

Because they're really focused on metrics at Emerson. Yeah. It's about efficiency. It's about numbers. There was a fun report in, I think, 2011 from the Morning Call, an Allentown, Pennsylvania local paper, and they kind of examined one of those Amazon warehouses. And in that case, they were incredibly hot.

They were like 120 degrees inside. And there were ambulances stationed outside to uh take uh people away when they passed out of heat exhaustion so of course eventually amazon uh put air conditioners in the facilities and then they made a big show of how this was like such a humanitarian effort of them but of course for some reason that coincided with them starting to ship perishable goods through uh amazon um whatever their grocery service is so it's just kind of funny how it's like they're so data driven and they just don't give a shit about their employees that it's like they they would rather keep their fucking products cool than their employees from passing out well a lot like a

lot is made about amazon's attempt like research into automation or something like that. To a certain extent, there are robots at the warehouses. They mainly just bring shelves to the employees, the pickers. To make them work faster. Yeah. The shelf workers come at you and you'll have to pick three or four items from it, and then another one comes. And the advantage is that robots don't complain

to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Yes. But the only, I mean, the much larger story about why Amazon is so successful beyond automation is just regular bread-and-butter exploitation of humans. Yeah, yeah. It's a much more primitive operation than people, I think, give it credit for. like just regular bread and butter exploitation of humans yeah yeah like um it's very it's more of a it's much more primitive operation people i think give it credit for right yeah people are

just basically work to the bone apparently uh amazon also largely relies on uh temporary employment uh programs um basically if you read any article about like contract work yeah like contract work just temp agencies if you read any article about like contract work, yeah, like contract work, just temp agencies. If you read any article about like Amazon warehouse employees, you'll see the names of several different temp agencies. One that pops up a lot is called integrity. And essentially what they'll do is like during the holiday season, you know, they'll have the holiday rush and integrity will lure employees in by saying like, you know you work hard you you know make a good impression you can get to work for amazon proper and so they'll bring people in during the holidays and then they'll just kind of like fire them by voicemail or lay them off by voicemail once the

rush is over yeah or some people they'll have badges you know to get into the amazon facilities and they'll just come in one day and find out that their badge no longer works on the door and that's how they get told that they're no longer working at the warehouse that's fucking crazy they're not even fucking told like hey you're fired what?

even more than automation like one of the big innovations is just the cybernetic array that basically runs they're hiring like an app that tells you when to fire and when to hire people. Yeah, yeah. And they can forecast when you need to do that. Breast cancer, terminate. If they're being honest, I mean, that might be, you know, one correlate that they would investigate.

Well, and another thing just to build on the kind of incentives they lure people in with, there's an Atlantic article that talks about how for warehouse employees, Amazon offers them the fact that they will get vested stock options after two years. But of course, the vast majority of warehouse employees are laid off or just quit from exhaustion and burnout before the two-year mark. So they, you know, like sometimes people talk about, you know, they don't like this high turnover rate, but there's a lot of actually positive incentives where a high turnover rate outweighs the costs of it. Because, you know, A, you don't have to form a union when like workers are uh leaving constantly and they're not forming the social bonds that might you know allow a union to form and these kinds of things right they're putting the stocks like a carrot on the stick and then

just hoping that the horse dies before they get the carrot yep one thing i wanted to mention quickly about that hour-long interview between his brother and him they mentioned at the beginning of it like oh the people in this room listening to us live are like friends and family and so it's like you know it's like an informative thing on jeff bezos's life done by his brother to his friends and family like it's like the most hey we all fucking know this shit group you know what i mean like he says friends and family and it like pans to the audience and you see like jeffrey epstein with like two 13 year old girls there brian singer with two 13 year old boys and we're gonna fly to the island after this right really have some pizza they're 13 but they are qualified massage therapists

our new uh warehouse employees je, Jeffrey Epstein's victims. But yeah, I mean, like. They don't hire children. They hire people in their 20s and 30s because they're more resilient. And once they use their usefulness, some of them collapse and die. There's this really depressing Huffington post article on this guy jeff who was like lost a job at a housing supply store during the housing crash had a bunch of debt from devry university goes to work on an amazon uh at warehouse as kind of his last uh just basically his only option and so he's walking you know you know, the 12, 15 miles a day.

And just out of nowhere, one day he collapses. Turns out it's like a heart problem that's basically been known to kill young athletes. What? It'll appear in like young people. And it's this sort of where if you're put under a strenuous condition, you have this heart condition, it can kill you. And it's, it's this sort of where if you're put under a strenuous condition, you have this heart condition,

it can kill you. And it killed this guy. And he was working for integrity, the temp agency. And essentially his widow who had his kid asked Amazon, like, well, can you help us?

And Amazon was like, well, we, you know, we feel a lot of sympathy for you. And, um, we just feel so much sympathy, but didn't offer her any financial assistance. We don't really feel what you would call financial sympathy.

Yeah. We more feel verbal sympathy for you. Eventually, the only money she got was money from other warehouse employees who basically bundled money for her to give to her. Jesus Christ. And the article basically... Wow, so pro people supported this lady more than the fucking corporation would? Oh, yeah, yeah. Totally.

Holy... Then the richest man... The article ends with her getting evicted from her house. And apparently at this particular warehouse where was this it was the Chester warehouse I think it was in Pennsylvania it says it had been open for four

months at the time of this guy ironically his name is Jeff at the time of Jeff's death it had been open for four months and the local fire and EMS department had dispatched personnel to its address 34 times during that period. And in its first two and a half years of operation, more than 180 calls were placed to 911, many of them patients in their 20s and 30s. And the most common issues cited were difficulty breathing, chest pains, cardiac problems, spells of unconsciousness, or other undefined illnesses,

and the frequency of calls tended to climb during peak season. All of which are a fireable offense. Yeah. But yeah, no, I mean, like, it's just kind of horrific going through Amazon's labor practices, and we're already, you know, running late on time, but I do want to get to a couple other things. Andy, I know you did a bit of research on this 2014 Supreme Court case where essentially Amazon makes warehouse employees go through security checks

to make sure they're not stealing things. These can take sometimes half an hour to an hour, and these employees are not paid for these mandatory security checks, which they will be fired if they don't go through. And they sued, and the Supreme Court said, no, Amazon can just do that. Yeah, so they filed a class action lawsuit And they sued and the Supreme Court said, no, Amazon can just do that. Yeah.

So they filed a class action lawsuit that made it all the way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the temp agency that ran them through these security tests or checks was not required to pay them for the 20 to 30 minutes. What? That includes Sonia Sotomayor and the notorious RBG. I just had the mental image of, like, a dead worker from Amazon being covered with, like, a notorious RBG towel from the beach. They got their dead worker, and they've got to, like, get them out of the factory. Or, like, and the EMS arrives, and they're like, wait, wait, wait. like get them out of the fact or like in the

ems arrives and they're like wait wait wait first run them through the x-ray i want to make sure he didn't pocket any thumb drives integrity yeah it's part of like a scam with the morgue where they like get amazon employees who are on the brink of death to like steal little trinkets and then they extract them at the morgue site like oh we get so many thumb drives you have no fucking idea we're gonna compete against bezos by undercutting his prices all of us have nine fingers but so many thumb So the Supreme Court's ruling is kind of incredible. Most of the decision was written by Clarence Thomas, but Sonia Sotomayor had... Basically, it rested on the idea that employees only need to be paid for something that is necessary for production.

And because getting screened was not necessary for their production, they don't have to get paid for it. And Sonia Sotomayor says, Employees could skip the screenings altogether without the safety or effectiveness of their principal activities being substantially impaired yeah principal activities like paying rent or having a job yeah so what she's not saying is that the employees in this case don't have a choice it's being forced on them by their employers but the entire supreme court ruling if you read it the way that they phrase it makes it sound like it's entirely the choice yeah it, it's optional. Nope, nope, nope.

That it's just something they can choose to do. Well, it's the whole thing where people say, you know, Amazon warehouse employees are like voluntary. They enter in a voluntary transaction. But what you look at, like with all these different studies and articles, is that these Amazon warehouses open in economically depressed areas where it's like there's no choice but to work at Amazon. So that's why they're able to kind of grind through all these workers is because they have such a pool of precarious workers who have you know amazon or nothing or amazon or the gas station you know yeah so it's like there's there's

only so much choice when you need to provide health care for your children or pay your rent or whatever else and another thing i did want to talk about. Oh, also real quickly, just to return to injuries. In the Seattle Times article, they interviewed some managers who talked about how Amazon would have meetings on how they could get rid of people who were hurt. Just straight up. Literally normal. Yeah.

I like the idea of Bezos being like, so, okay, well, I guess we can't shoot them, but... They would also tell doctors to put bandages on instead of stitches so that it wouldn't get reported. I just like that there's a company called Integrity that hires people to work at a place called a fulfillment center. Oh, that's so fucking terrible.

It's all Orwellian, man. So do we want to talk about the greatest story about Amazon contracting? Oh, yeah, you did tease that so we should tell the germany story so uh the best so we yeah we teased a little bit about how one of amazon's biggest hits with prime was man in the high castle um which is a show about modern day nazis uh andy has watched every episode with commentary. Honestly, that is the reason I got into some crime, was to watch the whole series without having to rely on Sean's account.

But in February 2013, it came out that in a warehouse in Germany, they hired a company called Hess Security. Hess. Which was a reference, apparently the name is a reference to Rudolf Hess, one of Hitler's deputies. He was the Commandant of Auschwitz, wasn't he? Or is that a different Hess? I think that was Hess. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, I get them mixed up too. Yeah, there's the Commandant of Auschwitz, and then there was another one who tried to take a plane and fly it to England. Stay tuned for our Nazi podcast coming up after this and so this this security basically i thought this was the contractors who ran the warehouse then hired neo-nazi security officials to intimidate uh immigrants who were working at the warehouse yeah and these like they would show they did this documentary these knots these neo-nazi security officials, and the people in the security company had well-known neo-Nazi connections. They would also wear this clothing line that's manufactured in Berlin and is so associated with far-right neo-Nazism. Hugo Boss.

It's so associated. I think, what is it it called Abercrombie and Fitch it's called Thor Steinar and it's it was Amazon stopped selling the clothing because of its neo-nazi affiliations in 2009 and so they

basically this documentary anything like that would happen at the Amazon Treblinka Fulfillment Center. These people would like break into these immigrants like housing. And just to intimidate them, like they told one woman for complaining that she had to leave, that she was basically evicted from her housing. You must leave now. And they shined headlights into her room while she was packing just to intimidate her while they evicted her from her housing.

They needed her to leave that bad? And as soon as the story broke, Amazon said we didn't hire them. What? It was the contractor who hired them and then a story came right after that that said amazon fired the nazi security company so they didn't hire them but they did have the power to fire right as soon as that story broke wasn't there also some story about like how they're selling

basically nazi merch on amazon yeah and people were like hey cut that shit about how they're selling basically Nazi merch on Amazon. And people are like, hey, cut that shit out. And they're like, listen, we sell a lot of shirts from a lot of people. It was just kind of funny because it was discovered by a Czech group, a group in the Czech Republic, that they were selling shirts that said, I love Reinhard Heydrich. And Reinhard Heydrich was, of course, the Nazi who was the governor of, at that time, Czechoslovakia. And he was known as the hangman of Prague for atrocities committed against the Czech people. But yeah, they were selling neo-Nazi merch for a bit. That made me think that that's why they created the Man in the High Castle show.

So that when you would Google Amazon Nazi, that these results of real fucked up shit they did would come up third and fourth. First and second. What's great is that literally when I was doing some research for this, because I was like, oh, I need to access that one story. Well, to be fair, Andy does Google companies and the word Nazi after it quite often.

And it's a surprisingly informed search option. So he does that so he knows which businesses to support. So if you Google Amazon Nazi, try this on your own. The first four options are for Man in the High Castle. And then the next one is this story about the Nazis. The literal Nazis in Germany that worked for Amazon to intimidate their immigrant employees.

They just greenlit a show about like union crushing. Teach the controversy. So yeah, I know we're kind of running along, but can we talk a little bit about Amazon union crushing? Because there was an incident in I think

2001 where they fired 800 some Seattle employees for trying to unionize and then, of course, said it wasn't for trying to unionize because, of course, it is illegal to fire people for trying to unionize, but it still happens all the time. Yeah, and there was the 2000 firing, and then in 2014, some people tried to unionize uh it was just like 30 people in a warehouse they tried to get the international association of machinists and aerospace workers

to support their union and they had a vote and the vote lost 21 to 6 which amazon then did a press release saying like see they would rather work directly with amazon and what they didn't mention was that like as soon as that vote came up amazon bought a law firm that specializes in fighting off organized labor what really yeah yeah and then they they bought a gun yeah then they like intimidated like aggressively intimidated uh this small group of like machinists in this one warehouse and there were thousands of people working in the warehouse it was just a subset of those people aggressively intimidated them and they also apparently they would have the company would give managers anti-union material to hand out and they would warn them how to spot union organizing by being on the lookout for hushed conversations Jesus Christ what if they just want to say racial slurs? But yeah, no, I love

this idea. So like another thing when we were researching the jobs, Amazon has made a promise that they're going to create 100,000 American jobs this year. And of course, CNN and other outlets just dutifully report this press release without any critical examination of how much those jobs will pay and these kinds of things. But I do like the idea that Amazon is creating new American jobs for the Pinkertons. They're bringing back anti-labor private militias. But yeah, I guess another fun story is Amazon was sued by the Humane Society for having dogfighting videos

and selling cock fighting magazines. I just love the name of this. There are two cock fighting magazines called The Game Cock and The Feathered Warrior. I guess there was also a guide to pedophilia. I mean, as far as my complaints with Amazon as a proud... I'd like to imagine the one guy who ordered like the game cock and then was horrified that it was a magazine. Right.

Right. It was like a bad man. Right. Right. Right. Oh yeah. He's a bad man. Yeah.

He's a really big bad man. I was going to say he was looking for porn, but yeah. No, I like to think he was wanting more information on shuttle cock. Shuttle cock. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The game cock is like, this isn't a pickup artist book um so i think we're we're winding down yeah and um i think that one thing i'd like to introduce is uh uh we'd like to judge these billionaires on a certain scale uh my scale today will be uh free shipping two-day shipping four to six-day shipping and lastly your package was lost, there's an internal investigation pressing. I think Bezos certainly hits

the your package was lost, there's an internal investigation pressing because his roots are in pain and he certainly contributes to said pain. And let's be honest, I mean, sure, when I come, I yell Bezos but that's not really here or there. That's just my American spirit.

You respect the entrepreneur. I don't hate the player. I hate the game. I'm going to say he's about where my package of cat food is, which is at – Deeply embedded within the U.S. Postal Service. Yeah, deeply embedded. Set for delivery December 17th, if you check the status. And so I'm very excited for the delivery on September 17th,

or December 17th. 2018. The wet cat food. 2017. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Of course, Amazon Go recently opened a store in Seattle in January 2018, which has no cashiers. You just go in, scan your smartphone, and it charges you on the way out.

So more creative destruction going on. They'll be destroying a lot of great jobs. But I guess I would just say for anyone interested, there's so much on just labor abuses of Jeff Bezos. There's not a lot of his personal life. He's done a good job hiding that. But whatever you think of his genius in founding Amazon, he has formed a company at many levels, including now at Whole Foods, based around horrific labor abuse about stifling unionization and preventing people from being able to obtain a living wage.

And I would encourage anyone interested to check out FACE. It's an organization that stands for Former and Current Employees of Amazon. We'll link to it. And this collects a lot of different stories of different abuses that have occurred in Amazon warehouses and different Amazon employment situations. And they also make attempts to unionize Amazon workers. So hopefully that will happen. And you know, hopefully we'll eventually have a government that will make unionization mandatory in companies like this. So that would be at least the least they can do and uh i guess just one other thing i want to mention because people will sometimes say he's such a huge philanthropist uh him and his wife donated 33 million to uh give scholarships for dreamers you know uh undocumented children

or children who are brought to the u.s undocumented uh 33 million donation for these scholarships would be about equivalent of 110 on a 40 thousand net worth um so you know whenever people say you have a forty thousand dollar net worth you would be giving a hundred and ten dollars you would be giving a hundred which is not nothing but people act like he's such a big philanthropist and it's like no he's worth a hundred and twenty billion dollars forty thousand dollars in the bank exactly they're playing people you make forty thousand no no no you have forty thousand in the bank you are giving a hundred and ten dollars they're playing. You have $40,000 in the bank. Oh, really? You are giving $110. They're playing people who have zero net worth who still give $100 or $150. Of course.

Negative net worth. Yes. Or negative. Loans. So long and short, he's a shitty philanthropist, a shitty human being with a terrible labor record, and all of his assets should be seized, and Bernie Sanders 2020. Now, I know what you guys are thinking at this point corbin 2022 corbin 2022 but now how all this stuff about billionaires is fun

but how can we play some games games you say games are we doing zero drops today andy i i sent you yeah andy was asleep at the switch and And fucking we used zero of them? I was talking about the sweaty people. Okay. Collapsing from the death. We had 50 minutes of sweaty people material. I graciously cut up six drops, and you choose to use zero of them. I used one. That I pressed you for.

I'm sorry. I couldn't get it to load on my keyboard. Oh, well, that's my fault. Stay tuned. You couldn't do that? You couldn't get it to load on my keyboard. Oh, well, that's my fault. Stay tuned. You couldn't do that? You couldn't do that? I was very engaged with this material. That's alright. I understand.

Stay tuned next week for another billionaire and drops this time. I think we're already over, so I think we should probably just save that one. Let's get fans before we do that. I agree with you, but I'm sorry to have yelled at you about the drops. I think we're going to cut the drop stuff, but we might keep it in.

We're not going to keep it in. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. See you next week. Bye-bye. Bye. Mr. Boo-Boo, would you consider yourself a revolutionary? Well, no, but I do believe corporations rob us of our dignity and independence,

and that these systems must be ripped down, burnt down, or leveled by any force necessary. But that's just one little bear's opinion. A cute, fuzzy little bear. Defense rests.