Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Mathew Ball On The Metaverse And Jason Del Rey On Amazon After Bezos

Episode Date: July 30, 2022

Matthew Ball comes on to talk about his new book: The Metaverse: And How it Will Revolutionize Everything. Then, Jason Del Rey @DelRey talks to us about how Amazon has been faring in the post-Jeff Bezos era. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Matthew Ball. Thanks for coming on the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. The book, I'm going to say this real quick.

Everyone knows this, but the book is The Metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything with Matthew Ball. Chris and I both have copies. It's an amazing book. Matt, aside from thank you for coming on, let me just say this real quick. You're maybe the most quoted person on my podcast. Maybe Mark German has been quoted more. But I first knew you as the guy that made me understand Netflix and the streaming wars and the MV and all that stuff. I'm just curious, is there something about that sort of thinking that led you to thinking about the metaverse?

Like, is the metaverse in a structural sense? Like, is there some sort of like narrative, like storytelling thing that maybe prepared you for thinking about this stuff? I wouldn't say that there was a narrative element, but more broadly, I see my, I mean, let me take a step back. My career started in deep tech. I was actually focused on oil and gas and aerospace and defense technology. And that was deep, highly technical, primarily focused on industrial applications. After that, I moved to the early mobile app economy, helped a number of different major film studios, book publisher, radio and terrestrial broadcast companies. shifted digital rights acquisitions and so forth. I worked for Peter Chernin, where we built,

bought, development, scaled, early direct-consumer digital media and community companies. And then I moved to Amazon, which operated the world's second-largest video service and probably the most sophisticated or orthogonal business model. None of those directly led to the Metaverse, but I do think in hindsight they were the template for this convergence of many, many different technologies and certainly practiced,

my non-linear thinking about what could be and how. When you say template, though, like, I think this is actually very interesting. And I've listened to many of your interviews recently. I listened to a lot of the things that you published previously, I've read rather. When you're talking about these military applications, when you're talking about online communities, when you're talking about, you know, being at Amazon and working on these universes, as I think Brian is alluding to, I do see a kind of three, through line where each of those different verticals or spaces or structures do kind of lead to

this place where you want to integrate all of those things kind of into one context, into one container. One of things that I've noticed about you is how you tell stories. So to what degree is the metaverse kind of a great unraveling of almost the story of your experiences and how much of this is sort of the, I don't know, the sum total of your lived experience versus like there's going to be many, many more big technology, I guess, epochs, and this is just one more step along the way. So that's a great question. I mean, I certainly wouldn't define the meta versus the sum total of my experiences, but I do think that the degree to which I was prepared to work in this space is the sum total, because I see that as deep tech as business model transformation, as the assembly of digital communities of really unprecedented geographic dispersion plus scale.

And then in building orthogonal business models, I don't know that I could have done that without those experiences, or at least not in the same way. But certainly narratively, it's all cohesive because if you take a look at my work, as you mentioned, it's not just that it's narrative. It's also that it's deeply historical, right? Taking a look at why we are arranged the way that we are. And that requires not necessarily the specific body of work that I had,

certainly not, but it does require going around the block a number of different times. But I think the reason why, one, well, I don't want to make this too personal, but like the way you think about things tends to, I think, be similar in resonance in tone to how I think about things. I seem to be a very visual thinker, and I think about things almost as though everything is vectors pushing on everything else. And so when you can trace back the lineage of how things have gotten to where they are now, they kind of make sense. and that they would not only make sense to keep doing more of the momentum or motion that is already in place, but that there will be these adjustments and changes and shifts over time. And so when I hear you talk about, again, like kind of your deep tech background or working on Amazon, or you talk about some of the anecdotes and stories about kids trying to pinch to Zoom magazines and having it not work,

it only makes sense that those things will continue to unfold and that technology will meet those strange kind of, like, I don't know, idiosyncrasies or what's the, Brian, what's the word where something is out of time? Anachronistic, right? So, right? Whereas I feel like, like, Brian and myself and you, I think, live in sort of a near future, maybe three to five years out where things are making sense and we're just waiting for reality to catch up. And so that's why I think when I read this book, I'm like, yes, of course, this makes

sense. It's so obvious. I guess I wonder, do you find yourself being, and this is going to sound a little funny, but frustrated by some of the conversations and questions that you have to keep answering over and over again? Or do you feel like this is actually your job as a storyteller to bring people into the current moment and to translate from the future into the present? No, it actually doesn't frustrate me because in a huge, I mean, if we take a step back when it comes to my book, I had a pretty intensive writing process. And that is to say that I did it pretty quickly in about four or five months,

partly while doing the rest of my job. And I did something that in hindsight, I wasn't sure was smart, which was continue to have a lot of conversations. I was doing speeches. I was working with a bunch of companies in the space as opposed to just going heads down as an author. And that process ended up being instrumental in the book because it revealed in a way that wasn't otherwise possible. well, what I truly didn't understand, not fully, or at least the better way to articulate certain things. And so that's why I talk about going around the block.

I don't just mean working on multiple different problems. I partly mean the community of people around us. This thing about the early efforts with the iPhone, you know, so many of the stories that I've been exposed to are essential to writing this. And I actually don't know how many people who hadn't been reading Engadget or Gizmodo for 20 years. could truly have the same perspective. Yeah, I feel like, and the next one's for Brian, but I really am curious about what you didn't understand

and what you've kind of come to recently in your insights. Because I feel like the three of us have probably read or consumed many of the same sources of information where voracious consumers of all of this content in different formats. And the way in which we synthesize and kind of create little zip files of knowledge and nuggets is the process of digesting and then bringing a certain lens. that provides some elucidation or understanding. So what is it that maybe in the last six months you didn't understand that has become clearer to you in this process? Well, I would certainly say that my understanding of blockchain, both good and bad, grew quite a bit.

On top of that, I would say many of the deep technical problems on computing and networking were other topics that I just needed more time in the field. So for example, I talk in the book about the challenges of latency and how much of that is a conquest against the speed of light. I talk about the ways in which we think about cloud data centers as analogous to a power plant. You know, the classic example is, why am I having my Xbox compute and process and render my game rather than using the industrial factories?

the cloud data center, just like I don't have a generator outside of my home, and instead I use the power grid. And the answer has a lot to do with latency, but it also has to be about GPU sharing. We're pretty good at sharing capacity on a server or CPU, but it turns out that we can't really split GPUs. They're not divisible units of power. And those are the types of things that I just knew generally, but not specifically.

And when you start writing in long form, you're writing for an audience that is not expert. You start to very quickly figure out like, oh, I could go two clicks, but not three clicks. And actually, the four clicks are the core. You, jumping to the book, like it's like chapter three where the title is the definition of it, which is kind of, you're cute about it because you kind of spend a whole chapter giving a definition-ish. it's too much to have like a one-sentence definition of it. But one of the things that you said that is important to me is, does it have to be immersive?

It has to be 3D, if I'm reading you correctly. If it's not immersive, then it's just what we currently have on the internet, right? Like, the idea of what the next thing is, is it has to sort of be this full takeover sensory, right? Am I reading that correctly? I would disagree with some of the, bonifiers. You talk about full takeover sensory. No, it doesn't need to be full takeover, sensory. And I don't mean to pick too much specifically on your off-the-cuff words, but I think they're a helpful

tool, right? Full cutoff. Now we're basically talking about being in a sensory deprivation tech. That's the ready player one example. I'm literally in a shipping container strapped in a haptic suit. It doesn't need that. It's not clear that we need full senses generally, however one would define that. But 3D is key to you? 3D is key. Otherwise, we're just talking about the internet, but more and with some other applications. I think in the same way that we would say that going to a visual form of the internet, one that supports persistent connections to servers, was essential for this generation of the internet. But certainly when you take a look at industrial applications, when we're

talking about the role of XR in surgery or education in operating infrastructure, in turning the world's largest asset class, which is real estate, from something that's barely online to something that exists online. That does require not necessarily 3D as the consumer might look at it on a screen, but 3D in the sense of graphics-based computing and digital twin simulations. And so, yes, I do consider that a requirement. It doesn't mean that there won't be lots of 2D and text things that are part of it. Is the blockchain a requirement to you? You mentioned offhand that that's what you've been thinking about a lot over the last six months or whatever.

To what degree is crypto and blockchain vital to your vision of the Metaverse? It's not vital. But again, this is why my book's 105,000 words and why my definition chapter is 14,000 words, switch is it actually all comes down to the specific language, vital. I don't think it's vital, right? You can technically say TCPIP was not vital to an internet working standard. We could have other versions of the internet with other protocol stacks. HTML is not vital to the internet.

It's a markup language we used. What's interesting about blockchain is there are basically two different arguments. One is on the pro side. One is that it is technically required to the extent in which if we want to actually realize the full vision of the metaverse, then we need a better way of harnessing the collective resources, spare GPUs and CPUs, network capacity. And that blockchain is a great system for that. Now, that still doesn't mean it's necessary, right? We have lots of different mechanisms for accessing decentralized technology.

But they would say functionally, it's the best, most optimized, and therefore it's required to actually build the metaversus we have met. The second argument is not about technical realization. It's about having a metaverse we want, which is where we talk about the distribution of power, individual property rights, self-custody of your data. That's more about a thriving and healthy metaphors. Again, I still wouldn't say any is a strict requirement because we do have substitutive technologies for that. One of the things that I've been wondering about, I suppose, is the timing of many of these

constructs in the world of technology allow us, as you say, to talk about things that have been just not part of internet lore up until now. You know, blockchain, of course, is one of those concepts, distributed database that everyone can write to and read to, and that is essentially trustworthy. My, I guess my question is about governance around the metaverse because you've talked about getting the metaverse that we want, and we've talked about the sort of visions for the Metaverse, which of course most people think of as being dystopic. I guess I've sort of a two-part question. One is, is there a government, and I know you're Canadian, so I'm sort of teeing you off

for this, but is there a government in the world that would be best suited for taking over and running the Metaverse? And secondly, to what degree, if at all, are DOWs and other structures that are kind of in the Web3 world useful as a prototyping tool for thinking about how to go to the web three govern in the Metaverse? So if we take a look at the Metaverse in its idealized version, it's highly interoperable with common standards, not unlike the Internet today. The Internet today is basically like a public good, right?

TCPI sits outside of the reach of any company and even if the IETF Internet Engineering Task Force revises something, it's still kind of up to the adoption of all of the various parties. That makes it a public good. No one controls it. The challenge when we look at the Metaverse is everyone adopted those standards and protocols because they preceded the commercial internet. When we talk about the advent of the Metaverse, people are pioneering standards and de facto ones.

And so there's a question as to whether or not interoperability can exist. I certainly believe it can. We're seeing that already. But the question is to what extent? So some argue it will be so limited that to call it the metaverse is facile. The flip side of that is when we take a look at other economies. South Korea has established the South Korean Metaverse alliance, now more than 500 companies from banks to refrigerator manufacturers, automotive companies, and smartphone OEMs.

And they're essentially mandating standards, not literally, but essentially. And that will disadvantage the average or the occasional company, but build a collectively more prosperous ecosystem and hopefully metaverse. That might provide an advantage versus the West. But then if you take a look at China, China is fascinating. You've basically one company in Tencent that publishes almost all virtual experiences from Nintendo to Activision Blizzard, Square Enix, their entire portfolio. They can standardize internally plus WeChat, plus QQ, and then

the question is, will the CCP allow it? So the CCP is definitely best position to de facto construct one, one probably more comprehensive than that we see in the West, but they may also just block it because of the threat of poses. Well, along those lines, why won't the big platforms sort of own this? Chris and I spoke to Chris Dixon six weeks ago, and part of his argument for Web3 is that We're going to disintermediate the big platforms. We're going to give a thousand flowers will bloom.

People will have ownership and things like that. And I know from my own research and history of stuff like that, even when the big platforms and the big companies know what's coming, like happened when the web came around, that doesn't mean that they will own it. But given that all of the big platforms are all looking in this direction, you're talking about standards, you're talking about people building on the stuff. How do we know that this won't just be a total capture by the Google, the Apple, the Amazon, the meta, all that

stuff? Well, how do we know? We don't. I think, look, I think where I disagree with Chris, or on the margin is, the truth of the matter is there's not a war between centralization, decentralization not at least in the sense of one side can win it's a spectrum the early internet the first 20 years of the internet was heavily decentralized and again to the public good that doesn't mean that we didn't see strong forces of centralization and positive feedback we were all on google think of the famous line competition to click away it was we didn't use it we all ended up on the facebook platform and then they progressively closed even on highly decentralized underpinnings. There's many different positive feedback loops to decentralization, brand, trust,

revenue, which begets more investment and better engineers and better product, that all is centralizing. OpenC has nearly 80% share in marketplace-based NFT transactions. They exist in a decentralized ecosystem. They take a larger cut than many of their competitors, but they have habit. And now they have authentication, validation, and blue checks. I think the question is, more around the around where are we? We definitely believe that we centralized too much over the last 15 and 20 years. And there is a very strong argument that building on blockchains makes it much harder and certainly less defensible to lock people in.

And so that's more in my mind significantly kicking off that center back towards decentralization, but not moving it all together, no. And I mean, to clarify, I suppose, I do tend to think of things in kind of a mode of respiration of kind of a breathing in and a breathing out. And certainly there was decentralization in the beginning, and then we've moved towards centralization, and now there may be a move towards decentralization again,

as just kind of, you know, poles that kind of move and sway over time. One question I have, and I guess I'm asking on a technical, complexity perspective, given that you've written about and talked about different formats, different open source methodologies, different consortia that are coming together to standardize aspects of the Metaverse. To what degree do you think? I think I'm asking because it seems like the technologies of the Metaverse are just much more complex relative to the HTML of the early web. That adversarial interoperability might be a mechanism by which, to Brian's point, we do achieve some kind of imposed decentralization on what might start out as a very centralized

kind of metaverse. Is that likely to work, or is that the formats technologies are simply just too complex to sort of move towards that style of force interoperability? That's a good question. Look, I can't speak with certainty on either side. I will tell you that I am at least hopeful about path dependency. And I think that's one of the reasons why I find Epic Games and Tim Sweetie, when I talk about extensively in the book, so inspiring, which is, I do think you can see this one individual as very consequential into the ultimate outcome.

Now, what does that mean for ultimate decentralization? How dramatic a shift can that be? That's dependency is just changing the path. That doesn't mean doing a 90 degree or 180. That's as yet to BC. It partly comes down to the question of, do you think the world without Steve Jobs is entirely different or just farther behind and somewhat different?

I will say that when we talk about decentralization, there's one thing that I find really encouraging, which is, you know, if you take a look at Epic, and I read about this at the end of my book, They are rewriting their user agreements and their terms of service to relinquish controls that almost every platform holds tight. For example, they've said that if they ever have a dispute with the developer who's violating their terms of service, whether it's non-payment or abuse of the license or even using it for terrorism, allegedly, they have to go to the courts to get an injunction.

That's actually decentralization, because they no longer have centralization. authority over the rights of that developer, and they are giving it over to the legal system, poorly organized, though it may be, that is decentralized. It's the democratic system. If he can push the polls of Yula's, that is really significant, and I think it is very specific to the individual. I did a story a couple months ago that people have been suggesting that we don't have the bandwidth to do a full metaverse maybe for decades. And again, a metaverse like you're describing where it's 3D, where in the COVID times, in the lockdown times,

just streaming video kind of took our existing infrastructure to its limits. What are your thoughts on that? Do we have the infrastructure to do what we're dreaming of? Is this something that maybe the infrastructure is going to keep us from doing for maybe more time than Mark Zuckerberg would like? Yeah, I think part of the question here is really about what degree of experience for whom and when. Overall, your points are exactly right, but it's very unevenly distributed. So let me give an example. Just from a latency perspective, which is pretty essential here, we believe that three-quarters of Americans can reliably access.

a high fidelity real-time rendered world. That's not great, right? And it's reliable. It doesn't mean high bandwidth. It doesn't mean all the time. But one in four can't. When you take a look at the Middle East, it's only one in four that can. When you take a look at India, it's one in ten can. Solving that is a big portion of what we need to do. And it's separate from whether or not the price of an Oculus and other devices comes down over time. But as we solve many of those things, we will solve many of the aforementioned bandwidth problems. But overall, we do think we're very short of what's required. My favorite example is this quote from John Carmich,

who is the former founder of ID, he was the CTO of Oculus, and he is called Building the Metaverse of Moral Imperative. He said that if you asked him in 2000, if we had 100x the computing power we had today, would we be able to build the Metaverse? He said, I would have said, yeah. Well, it's been 22 years. We have six or seven billion devices with over 120 X-that power. And he still admits that there are enormous concessions required.

Intel believes that we need a thousand factor increase. And so we generally find that we need a lot more than we ever prepare for. But that doesn't mean that we won't be able to build certain elements of the experience for some people very soon. We're seeing that already. on a similar sort of line, you know, I'm 44, I'm old enough. My entire adult life, I've been told that VR is the next big thing. I know VR is just one component of this or AR or whatever. But, you know, I was also, I'm old enough to remember when the video on the web was going to happen,

and it never happened, never happened until YouTube came and then it happened. And the mobile web never, it was going to happen, it was going to happen, and then the iPhone came and it happened. Is there some sort of a trigger technologically, some sort of innovation that you can see that we're still waiting for for the Metaverse to mainstream? Well, so it depends. I mean, look, we've got three quarters of American, Canadian, British, Australian kids are using Roblox each day. That's, sorry, not each day on a regular basis. That's pretty meaningful. And if you draw that trend out, it doesn't matter how fully realized it is or not.

It doesn't matter if they think of the term metaphors. That's pretty consequential. But I think the most important way to think about it in my perspective is really to take in mind that we see these first, these critical mass points. For example, we know that 3G was not for any physical reason. There's no law of the earth. But 3G was a breaking point for the mobile ecosystem or like building point. When you take a look at what's happened with gaming, it was really around 2015 that we had the advent of widely deployed GPUs and CPUs and socks

that enabled large 3D rendered social experiences with dozens or 100 plus people. And when that happened, we had this massive burst in the game. gaming industry. Roblox took off. Fortnite became the biggest game in the world. And so we don't know exactly what the next unlock is, but we didn't know exactly that 2015 was going to transform gaming. But certainly there are those who believe that the AR and VR of our imagination

does require extraordinary advances in battery for which we have no foreseeable path, or the mainstream at-scale demonstration of of quantum computer. All right, Matt. I've got one more for you, and this is going to be a little bit of off-the-wall question. I've never heard you talk about this before or write about it. So we'll see where this goes, and we'll see if you have an answer. But, you know, famously, I would say a lot of Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley culture was informed through the use of psychedelics. And the psychedelic experience seems to be to be somewhat adjacent to the sort of vision of the

metaverse that technologists and designers dream of. Increasingly in media, whether you're watching movies or films, the type of content, visuals that you're seeing are clearly psychedelically inspired, if not enriched. And even in most of Apple's keynotes, there's some allusion to the crack marketing team that goes often has some sort of crazy trip to come up with the next name for some geographic region in California. My question to you is really about timing and about generational change. I think both to Brian's point about where we are generationally in terms of also how we grew up on the internet, you know, seeing these sea changes happen as a result of a younger generation coming

up in a 3D environment and making an assumption that should be the way that you connect and compute with other people, seems like the baseline is being reset. So I wonder to what degree do you think that psychedelics and the sort of psychedelic revival that is currently going on has had an influence on the receptivity of these concepts and of the desire to almost create this space in which those types of experiences might be more generalizable or more generally shared to other people without necessarily having to rely on psychedelic substances to achieve these extraworldly moments. So that's a really good question, and I'm loath to respond because I don't think I can

do that the detail that you provided any justice. The answer is, I mean like I don't know. To what degree was it or was it not instrumental is not something that I can speak to in great detail. I will tell you one of my favorite stories, this is somewhat aside, which is when I grew up the Fantasia, which was one of my favorite movies, was famous, right? It was a classic. That's one of the things that your parents gave you or when you were growing up. I think what's fascinating about that is it's actually Walt Disney's third film. That's crazy. They made Snow White. Then it was Song of the South, which does not hold up well.

But then they made Fantasia. And Fantasia was not successful. And then they re-released it and it still didn't work. And then they re-released it and it still didn't work. And then in the 60s, they released it again. And they started, you can find the posters online. They redid the posters and they're psychedelic, right? The ad company really knew what they were doing.

And it became this hit, this hit. in the boomer generation. And it is that, not the 30s, that made it the cultural touchstone that it is today. And so without weighing into what should or shouldn't be, I'm Canadian enough to have a pretty permissive approach to what shouldn't be allowed, there's a pretty good example of what people want and what can be creatively liberating and how so much of that is about cultural shift as opposed to necessarily legal shift. Yeah, and it just seems to me that, for the generation that's growing up in a world in which those types of experiences are more normalized, talking about the

metaverse is actually not that strange. Whereas when I've heard you give interviews, the level of skepticism and doubt and resistance that I hear seems to come from sort of a perspective that has an aversion to that level of loss of control or to being in this contrived space or environment. And yet what you can imagine could occur as a creative of endeavor in those spaces, I think is just really fascinating.

You know, and yeah, it just seems like there might be a kernel of something there. But anyways, so Matthew Ball, thank you so much for joining us today. The book is called The Metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything. It's funny because I'm sort of going back and rereading Michael Pollens, how to change your mind, which seems somewhat related. Anyways, thanks again for joining us. This is super, super amazing. Yeah, my pleasure, guys. Thank you, Matt. Cheers.

Hey, everybody, Brian here. This next segment starts out a little low on volume, but if you stick with it for about 10 minutes, it definitely gets better, close to normal. So, Chris, go recording, and then let's just go. I'm good. Okay, Jason, you're good? I am. Okay, I'll kick us off.

Welcome everybody to the TechMeme Ride Home Experience for Friday, July 29th. We're actually recording, I think this is the earliest show we've ever recorded, 9 a.m. PST, noon EST. So you're not going to get, well, actually, maybe you will get a sexier voice from me. I'm not sure. I'm just barely having my coffee, so I'm getting started. Does this mean I can't take a gummy halfway to this? It's probably a good thing that you haven't taken your gummy yet.

But it is Friday, so, you know, you do you. But yeah, so today, today we've actually got a very, a guest that's actually been a friend of the TechMean pod for a long time. In fact, I just listened to your interview from 2019, Jason, with Brian. And it's pretty fascinating to just think about all the changes that have occurred since then. And you guys actually were live in person the last time you, at least during that show. So it's great to have you back on. But Brian, you want to introduce Jason?

Yeah. So Jason Delray is my go-to for. covering Amazon. And it's funny, you know what, let's, I was going to do broader tech earnings first, but let's go ahead and start with Amazon because, Jason, when we, when we recorded that episode, I think it was at the box studios or something. I remember one of my questions to you was that, does Amazon feel different? There was like a vibe shift. Like I felt like at the time, they were behaving differently. They were more aggressive or whatever. I'm kind of wondering, because, I mean, let's just go into, the post Jeff Bezos era. Do you feel like those last few years of Bezos being the CEO

at Amazon, things were, in retrospect, pretty much already starting to be influx? Yeah, I mean, I can take that in a few ways. I think the last few years have been influx is

a generous way to say it. I mean, I just think they, obviously, they've had scrutiny come at them in so many different ways from Congress, regulators. And I'm just talking to the U.S. for now. Congress, regulators, labor, internal worker organizing, both on the corporate side in some ways, but also most notably in the warehouse network. And, you know, back to, A, you know, that Bezos taking. his eye off the ball as he was out being the world's richest men and becoming less involved. But also, I think, just in a lot of ways, like, the world changed and, like, Amazon leadership didn't change. They thought, you know, the same type of public relations strategies, the same type of treatment of partners, all the way down to the same way you manage your workforce,

could still work. And I think over the last few years, in many ways, they've been shown to have been wrong. Now, still an open question where any of this goes from regulation to the labor organizing to the impact on just sort of the company's core business. But I think 2018, 2019 started to feel like a shift in all these different ways. And we're seeing some of the fallout now. Well, I mean, that's maybe the nature of regime changes like this, right? You know, maybe Jeff had a bit of senioritis as were sort of armchair, you know, analyzing him.

All of a sudden he becomes buff. All of a sudden, you know, there's things in his personal life that are changing. But it's also the nature of things that maybe when someone is thinking of leaving, they take their eye off the ball. But at the same time, until they leave, some of those new ideas and those new ways of working, can't come to the four because people aren't in position yet. There's the whole question of the succession and not just at the top, but all, you know, how a reorg would go when there's somebody new at the top. So in a way, maybe those last three or four years of the Bezos tenure,

things were in flux, but also kind of frozen, as you're describing at the same time. Yeah, I think maybe so. I think, you know, I should also just note, like, the pandemic's arrival in, I guess late 2019 and then really 2020 in the U.S. Totally overwhelmed, you know, people's personalized, but also just corporations large and small. And so Bezos did get more involved and, you know, okay the giant warehouse buildout hiring sprees that he and others felt

the company needed to, you know, try to keep up with demands. And let me be clear here. like Amazon for tons and tons of people and, you know, was a lifeline. And, you know, not only people who chose to stay home, but people who, you know, still have to stay home because of, you know, what the virus could mean to them or indefinitely did at the time because of, you know, health conditions or whatnot. And so, you know, Amazon keeping up with demand, like there was a lot of good around that.

on the financial side, obviously, Jassy comes in, and we can, I don't know how deep we want to go into this, but Jassy comes in last July, realizes quickly, I think, with some others, that the company was overextending itself with warehouses and hiring and starts to pull back, and then in the last couple of quarters,

we finally see that manifest itself in the company's financials. Is that maybe the biggest sort of thing that Bezos got head-saked by COVID, like basically half of the tech industry did. But then... I think the retail world did in some ways too, right?

I mean, we're seeing what's going on with inventory overstock. I cover... I follow Walmart relatively closely to them. I'm writing next year I'll have a book out about the Walmart Amazon rivalry and Walmart's attempts to reinvent itself under its current CEO.

And so I think a lot of the retail industry did in different ways, but I'm sorry, I'll let you finish the question. Well, I mean, I guess the question is, you know, and I guess this would lead into my questions about Andy Jesse. Is your sense that

he, I mean, I think we can posit that he obviously might have a different personality than Bezos did, but is what he, he's been doing this year so far been characterized as, which is kind of undoing some of the excesses or undoing some of the mistakes

or the, or just the legacy stuff that it's like the dam is breaking because now all the new ideas can't happen. Is there a sense inside Amazon that we are undoing some mistakes, I guess what I'm asking? I think for sure. And whether they're

messaged internally as cost cutting or undoing mistakes or you know as amazon i think rightfully says publicly a lot you know we experiment in a lot of ways and um we got things right we get things wrong and we're not afraid to cupcake and move on um it's definitely been a lot of what's happening and how jassy has spent you know i i think based on some other reporting and folks i've talked to maybe as much as a third of this time was trying to figure out the retail warehousing capacity and hiring issues. And so that has happened for sure.

But we also got a hint that the company is going to continue to step up investments in AWS, not surprising for a couple of reasons. One, Jassy ran AWS for a long time, obviously, to profit, one of the main profit engines of the company and still a lot of room for growth there. And so they'll be shifting some capital spending there. from the retail business, it seems. So spending time there. And then on the retail side,

I think Jassy is still undecided about the physical store initiatives. I mean, obviously, they closed down the bookstores. You know, they brought in a new head of the store unit from the UK and under his new leadership and also with Jassy okaying it. They closed down the bookstores. But there's one area I think Jassi is likely still a fan, which is, you know, the walk out of the store without paying Amazon Go type technology. Now, how that manifests itself long term, is it Amazon's own stores or perhaps more likely is Amazon just sell that technology more broadly as they've started to do? I think that's one sort of area of invention outside of AWS where I think there's a long-term commitment there.

We've also heard that maybe they're cutting back their ambitions in terms of drone delivery and stuff, which if you tie that with like the retail experiments, you know, the physical retail experiments and things like that. Like that's where I think people are getting the sense that that era, that Bezos era of, oh, we'll deliver things by drones. oh, we'll dream up new gadgets and new sort of, you know, the joke was two or three years ago when Amazon did a hardware event, it was the worst thing to cover because they would announce 75 things, you know. So are we getting the sense that that is part of the sort of vibe shift, that that sort of experimentation is maybe going to be curtailed? I don't know yet. That's for sure something I'm watching closely. I will say, as I've talked to former Amazon leaders, over the last couple years during the pandemic and reflected on where Amazon is as a company.

Something that came up a lot was like, when was the last big Amazon invention? And most people honestly would point to Alexa and Echo, which I'm forgetting now whether that was 13 or 14, but that period. And these are, and let me be clear, these are people who are overall fans of the company, worked there a long time,

but just felt like, you know, as the company grew, they made, you know, sort of amazing incremental advancements in sort of the speed of prime, building out their own delivery network. And, yes, some people would say, you know,

the just-walk-out technology of the retail stores, you know, could be a huge business in the future, but still unproven and how expensive it would be was a big question mark. And I just thought, you know, that was really telling about the back half of the Bezos era was that you have people who were fans of the company just wondering, like, where was the invention? Like, you know, we refer to ourselves in some ways as an innovation company and where's that, where's that hit? And, you know, I'll let, you know, other people judge whether that's fair or not.

But hearing it over and over again and or things like, you know, it is day two at Amazon, you know, famously that Bezos and Amazonians talk about, you know, it's always day one, you know, where it's always time to, you know, build. Hearing fans of the company who've worked inside saying it feels like day two, I think that's, you know, somewhat worrisome for the company. I guess one of the things to consider here is to place Amazon kind of in the broader context of the rest of the tech world. And to look at a kind of, I don't know if maturing is the right word, but certainly there's been a series of leadership changes that are occurring, you know, other companies. You know, specifically, obviously Facebook and meta is one of the most recent ones.

That's probably in sort of a, it's not really a parallel class, but in terms of the way that we think about it and the way in which it is, ubiquitous in the way in which it touches so many people in somewhat controversial ways. I suppose one of the questions that I have is about assumptions that the pandemic drove about the likely state of how things were going to be going forward, because obviously the big question about the pandemic, and even, you know, as we're still in it in many respects, is when it would end and whether or not we were actually bringing the future forward by five or ten years, such that it would make sense to push super hard in this expansion because, you know, as both a product person and as a technologist

and someone who's been in the field building products, it's always been one of those. And we actually, Brian and I talked about this on a recent show. It's one of those things where rolling out products takes a long time because you kind of have to bring people along for those transitions, right? So whether it's voice computing and Alexa, you kind of have to get people into the mindset of having an always-on speaker in the house and that while there are privacy implications for that,

that the convenience that you get out of it is actually worth it from a tradeoff perspective and that that'll become clear to you over time. But we're also sort of in a moment where, like, as product designers, it's oftentimes, you know, how do you explain this to your mom? Or how do you get people who are non-technophiles to understand this?

And I feel like that's actually another shift that has occurred where there was an assumption that bringing the future forward by five or 10 years meant that more and more people would just, you know, have computers, have some technical sophistication. And maybe instead of five or ten years, we've actually brought the future forward by like two or three. So there's a recalibration and a resetting. And that's like, I guess I'm trying to unpack what you said about the executives were wrong about certain things to understand, one, what you see is how they were wrong. And then two, whether or not, like, if they had not made those

big leaps to assume that the future was going to get here that much faster, that they actually could have been left behind had the future actually arrived as fast as maybe some of us optimistically thought. Absolutely. Like, I probably don't have to be clear on this, but I have not run a sizable business. I've not,

I've definitely not run any of the Amazon side or divisions that these DPs or GMs or senior VPs or CEOs are running. So, and I can see the headlines and the, customer complaints if, you know, Amazon had not hired as much as they did and or built out as many delivery stations. And they, you know, sort of couldn't keep up with demand. You know, they struggle at times for sure, just like a lot of people did.

So 100%. I mean, I don't know if a no-win situation, if it's, I'd go as far as a no-win situation, but, you know, they made a bet that thought that some of the top leaders thought was in the best interest of customers. They talk about customer obsession. I, you know, ad nauseum. I think in this, I think in this way that did actually lead that decision. And, and it seems like they were, they were off. So I don't, you know, my job is not to judge them, but I don't, I don't judge them. Well, from an analysis perspective, right? Like, yeah, you can sort of say, well, you know, based on what they knew or based on what we thought we knew about, you know, a global

pandemic, it made sense to push so heavily in this direction. One, because, you know, as you said, there was customer demand. There was suddenly we were all at home. And Amazon was like, you know, just as AWS is perfectly set up for like the holiday shopping season, suddenly, you know, Amazon and its logistics prowess was sort of perfectly set up for taking advantage of the changes that, you know, were brought on by the pandemic. And so now, I guess my question is kind of like, were they wrong or is it now a period of recalibration and cutting back on many of the things that, you know, were sort of speculative? bets, knowing that many of the things that were leading to those ideas being interesting,

you know, maybe before are now no longer as relevant or interesting because the behavior of their customers and their expectations of many more people have evolved or changed. I guess my question is, do you see that now and going forward those customer expectations are actually quite different than they were two or three years ago? Or are customer expectations and behaviors resetting to how they were previously two or three years ago? Well, let me answer it just way. I think the bet on rapid expansion did not pay off, and now they are recalibrating.

And I think that is what good businesses do when they have a bet that doesn't pay off. And now the question is, I mean, frankly, just to get in the weeds on the wood, you know, on the logistics. things business a little. Can they get Prime back to a place that they have promised customers? It is no longer a two-day delivery service. I mean, and beyond that, like the big announcement, and I get into this in my book a little bit, the back and forth between Amazon Walmart on this, but their big announcement back in, I think, the spring of, I want to say 19, that Prime was now a one day. They'll say shipping service, but most people expect it. when they see shipping, they expect I order it today, I'll get it tomorrow.

So one day delivery service next day. You know, they, I think they've made progress this year, but they're, it's, they're 100% not there. And in that time frame, they raise the, they raise the price of the service. And I just think that is one thing I will knock them on as not customer obsessed. The fact that, you know, Prime has not been what they said it would be. And they will say all the other perks. but they sold it to many people as a one-and-two-day delivery service. And for a lot of people, in a lot of times over the last few years, it has not been that.

Some of it's understandable. But I think they could do better in that regard. And I think, frankly, I think competitors, you know, had an opportunity to sort of go hard at them on that. And I've not seen that happen. Maybe this competitor just couldn't do any better. put a pin in making Prime more attractive to people again, because I want to come back to that with the healthcare question. But before we get on to that in the recent acquisition,

I feel like Andy Jassy, I don't follow as close as you do. He still feels opaque to me. When we were talking about the experimentation that Bezos loved, the guy has a rocket company, for God's sakes, wants to go to space. So it's no, it was obvious that he loved to try weird off the wall things. Is your sense of Jassy, you know, maybe the best way to do it is everyone said that, you know, Tim Cook to Steve Jobs was not a product guy. He's more of the nuts and bolts sort of logistics guy, more, you know, keeping the trains

running on time guy. And that's kind of proven not to be true. If you had to contrast the personality or the vision that. Andy Jassy has to Bezos's. What do you think you would say? So I think for sure people describe Jassy as more of an operator and that means, you know, to mean

he has really, like he dives into the weeds to the point that it has annoyed some Cedar executives who were used to more free reign under Jeff and just more trust. I think also while he started, Jesse started sort of in the retail business way back in, oh man, late 90s, early 2000s. He was, you know, launching and running AWS. And so I find often journalists, or I'll just speak for myself, I often try to look for like deeper meaning or like

hidden signs when there's a executive transition and not just to, look at about what to expect and not just look at like the facts and the facts are like jassy ran loved running a w s ran that thing for so long and like he's gonna he's i think he's amazon under him is going to invest even more heavily into that business than maybe would have under uh... bezos and i think um amazon's always going to be a retail and marketplace company but um that's not where his main interests are and i think coming in him seeing, you know, flaws in that. He had to dive in and understand what was going wrong in that business. But I think, you know, if we're looking just like investment-wise, I think

we're going to, his vision is AWS expanding in all sorts of different ways and getting this retail business right. And that part of that means pulling back on some of the Bezos-led expansion, like the visible stuff. On a personal level, um, I've had limited interactions with Andy, Ned Bezos a handful of times. People will say like, Jesse, they described him as like more human than Bezos. I think his EQ is higher. I think, you know, I think they need him to get out there more talking to critics. I mean, Walmart back in the 2000s did sort of a listening tour of all their critics.

you know, a lot of it was self-serving, but, you know, their leader got at, their CEO got out there. And Amazon hasn't done a lot of that. So we've seen reports that Jassy's been in D.C. a few times already. What the company's been doing in D.C. the last few years, I think, has, we'll see if it works or not. But it was a very combative relationship. And it appears like he's trying to smooth some things over. And, you know, you definitely feel like that. sort of charm initiative to regulators, that's definitely coming from Jesse.

Oh, well, I mean... And by Charmant Initiative, what I'm saying is, as opposed to being very combative and, you know, Bezos only ever testified before Congress, like, I think once in his entire tenure. But like, you hear these rumors now that Amazon is floating possible remedies. Okay, maybe we'll do A and B in order to placate you so that maybe you don't come down like that was never on the table in my understanding in the basis well well so i read so i reported on one of those which was you know the private like the consideration that if they got if there were some really harsh remedies on the table that internally there was some alignment that they would while

they don't think they should have to they'd give up the private label business because if it becomes not worth it then it's just it's just not worth it to them um that that that that was dating back to like to last year, and I guess Jassy came in in July. I don't know that he let... I don't believe he led that conversation. So, you know, I think there's a recognition. Jesse's a bright guy, more EQ than Jeff.

And I think there's a recognition that you can only be combative for so long. And so I don't know. know what exactly he has said in these DC meetings. I'm sure he's he has pushed back hard against the self-preferencing bill that still hasn't gotten a vote and maybe will never. But I think just the fact that he's been willing and to be there, whereas predecessor was not, even though he lived there in many ways and had a mansion there, I think just says something about a strategy difference and just sort of a personal difference in approaches.

Real quick before I ask you about One Medical. You said something a few minutes ago that I kind of did a whiplash on, which was, do we know that AWS and Amazon retail will always be one company? Like, what would you put the odds on them splitting out AWS and retail? say by the end of this decade. Ooh. I suddenly turned into Scott Galloway. Does that mean you're for it or that means you want it?

No, no, no. I'm just asking me to predict it. And I'll take a shot and there's literally no downside to me getting it wrong. I don't even know what year we're in. We're in 2022. So the end of this decade, whether by choice or by outside force, I'd say they're retail-in-a-A-W-S are separate companies by the end of this decade. Well, except for the fact that I can see if they go into health care that having AWS still in-house might be useful. So, okay, the one medical acquisition, and I'm going to tie it back into the Amazon Prime thing, which is Prime is a lot less valuable to me.

You're raising the prices. I don't care about your Lord of the Rings show. But, hey, if all of a sudden there is a suite of clinics around the country that if I have a sore throat as part of my Amazon Prime membership, it'll cost me $10 to go in and get a quick checkout. And oh, by the way, Amazon will ship me the medicine that I need and things like that. That would make prime an interesting thing. What's your take on the direction that you think Amazon wants to go in with health care? Yeah, I think Jassy is a big believer that they can be a huge innovator here. I think in some ways the Amazon Care initiative, which,

is sort of the virtual care and in-home care that they piloted and rolled out with employees sort of came out of someone who, I believe, was reporting up into his work. So he's a big believer. I think they're trying to put all the pieces together. And I think they have a real shot to be super disruptive from everything from pharmacy to care. Now they have the physical clinics with a, with a, sizable existing customers based there. I just think that the execution of piecing that all together is really hard.

And I think there are a lot of pundits who just assume Amazon will nail it. And I'm just interested to see how it goes. I have a chapter in my book that's coming out about both Amazon and Walmart's healthcare initiatives and Walmart's building. their own sort of everything clinics inside inside some stores. I think they have a couple dozen. And both these companies feel like with their customer base and their customer touch, that they can do better in terms of the experience, the transparency and pricing and all that.

And I think Amazon with the one medical acquisition is sort of several steps ahead. And I do think there's a world where prime, you know, people are getting, you know, starting maybe to question prime a little bit with delivery not being what it was. Yeah, the content's great. The music's fine. But Amazon feeling pressure to add to it. And for sure, this is an area where there is a ton of potential. I just think the execution's hard and will take several years. And so we'll first see if this acquisition is allowed to happen. I I expected to happen, but you never know based on what we just saw the FTC try to do with Facebook's acquisition and that news that just broke this week.

But it seems like I guess I wonder if you see that there are any parallels, lessons to be learned, or insights, you know, to be gleaned from what happened with Whole Foods. I mean, essentially it feels like Amazon, you know, comes along and grab some of these marquee brands that are, you know, quite well known, you know, are good at what they do and they don't have a lot of kind of Amazonification, if you will, like internally of how they run. And I was thinking sort of more actually of MGM in that case, but like, you know, Whole Foods obviously had some tech, but wasn't, you know, very online. You know, they're, you couldn't really buy from their stores through the internet. And of course, now you can shop, you know, Whole Foods from the Amazon website. In a similar

way, I've been a customer of one medical for quite some time, and they actually are quite very online. And the quality of care and service is actually very good relative to any other care provider that I've had previously. What I guess my question and thought is, you know, Amazon seems to find in some ways these best of breed companies that may be a little bit more expensive because they're doing what they do, you know, quite well, but without the efficiencies that Amazon tends to bring through just, you know, their rigor and through their, um, uh, What was Beza's original job? He was a hedge fund manager or something?

An analyst for a hedge fund, yeah. Yeah. So anyways, it kind of all comes down to like quant, whereas like these folks tend to, you know, do a pretty good job on Qual. So my question is, you know, I've sort of like done a little, like digging and did notice

that this Amazon clinic brand might be present. I don't know if one medical replaces clinic, if it operates alongside clinic, if these two things are internally competitive and whether or not Amazon will more or less leave one medical as is in place, just like they did with Whole Foods, but over time, start to replace or improve the efficiencies of those services. And then my second question is about personnel and human resources.

Obviously, in the case of logistics, Amazon is struggling to find a sufficient number of workers for the warehouses and for drivers and et cetera. I would imagine that there's a similar crunch either occurring or will occur in the healthcare space. And so if Amazon wants to roll out one medical to all of its customers in, you know, all different places that exist, what likely do you see happening on the labor front with regards to staffing one medical? So the first is about technology and changing one medical and then the other is about personnel. Yep. And I just, you mentioned Whole Foods. So I just have to ask one question because I'm, I ownership of Whole Foods and 100%. And so. Well, wait. I would have started. Can you guys unpack that? Because like, what were

your expectations? What did you think it would become? Like, I liked Whole Foods as it was. I mean, it was expensive, but produce was good, et cetera. What did you expect versus what is it is to you? I have returned things to Whole Foods, but I expected them to. You bought at Amazon? Because I've done that. Yes, yes, yes. Right.

So it was a distribution center. I was expecting more of that, of using their footprints to be like in the real world more for the other stuff that Amazon does. And yes, when I ordered groceries from Amazon that comes from the Whole Foods down in Gowanus. So, like, that's fine. If all they wanted was for them to just have an easy entree

into making groceries a part of our lives, our Amazon life, fine. I just thought that there was more technology stuff, more integration into everything else Amazon does, and I haven't seen any of that, really. Yeah, and I think maybe we're starting to see

some of it. I believe just, you know, they have their, you know, to just walk out technology or some some of their new technologies just starting to roll out in some whole food stores and how many years out are we we we're five five years five years five i think it was i think yeah 2017 um wow um that's crazy so maybe it's just maybe it's just slower maybe maybe it's just slower than i thought and actually my family we we do minimal pop i live in new jersey we we do minimal poppins at whole food So I'm not the best personal case.

We're not a regular. I just thought what stood out to me was Amazon pulling back the delivery from Whole Foods. Again, we didn't use it often. But the free, quote unquote, free delivery from Whole Foods for prime members last year was just a super un-Amazonian, if that's a word, decision. And I just think that spoke to difficulties and them not getting out of it, what they thought they were going to. But let me go back to one medical for a second. I think I'll start with the staffing side and the labor issues you were talking about.

I think even at one medical size from folks I've talked to in some limited research I've done as I've started to look into the company, I think there's already quite a bit of turnover among their staff, you know, take online reviews for, you know, what they are. But I've seen a bunch about, you know, just turnover and that affecting the experience. I'm not a customer or patient. I don't know what the right word is anymore. So maybe you've had a different experience than you do repeatedly. No, I mean, like, there's definitely been mobility.

There's been turnover and by mobility. I mean, sort of people moving from, I think, one office to another. The way which the clinics are set up, like, it's, I think what's really interesting is it almost is run a little bit more like a customer service, like for your health kind of operation where you start in an app, you send a message, that message gets triaged. And then based on that triage, it'll determine what type of service, you know, you might need or what the nearest or local clinic is. Now, I've also moved a lot in the last, you know, 10, 15 years. so my one medical office has always kind of been moving around with me. So in that sense, I also haven't really developed like a long-term relationship with any particular doctor. And again, this is very just my personal experience.

But as a result, I haven't noticed any impact on the care I've received necessarily. And in terms of, you know, my records being kind of up to date and having access to those things and having generally people on the other end that felt competent when I've periodically dipped into, you know, Aetna or other types of health care providers, it just felt like I was dealing with this. you know, like the government, like this monolithic sort of organization that really just does everything inside of itself and has no sense for the customer. Whereas when medical, I at least felt like I was treated like, you know, a person. So I don't mean to overgeneralize on my personal experience, but I believe that the turnover that you're mentioning is probably true. I don't

know if it's higher or lower than the industry average. And I don't know if it's a benefit of working for one medical. They actually give you that level of flexibility. All fair and good point. So, so I, I would imagine if this deal is approved that they leave it alone for a period of time, there's going to be a lot of learning that needs to happen. I think, you know, even as Amazon's done, a bunch of hiring in healthcare, again, from reporting for my book, I've talked to folks specifically worked on the Amazon care business, which is the virtual and in-home sort of concierge service, and talk to some nurses who said, said, you know, it is a technology-focused organization, which is sometimes very frustrating

for folks who come from the medical field and feeling like leadership still needs to figure out where health care is different from other industries as it pertains to technology, you know, type of technology that's necessary. and so, and then also I've talked to folks who, you know, we're sort of in tech health who go into Amazon and just, you know, and feel like there's really a focus, and maybe you need some of this on everything that's wrong with health care inside the Amazon health organization rather than, you know,

acknowledging the parts of the systems that work and maybe not trying to reinvent everything from scratch. So there's been a learning experience, I think, inside that org. And, you know, so I think they'll leave it alone for a while. I think absolutely you don't do this deal unless you see a path to integration into a bundle, whether that's prime health or whatever they want to call it. And again, maybe, yeah. Oh, yeah, primary care for sure.

And, you know, if some of these technology integrations at Whole Foods have taken five years to happen, and that's not healthcare and sort of a straightforward, rather straightforward retail business, you know, maybe we have to set our expectations on, you know, how long this health care path will take. And I think Jassy is a leader who will, is in it for the long term. And so maybe if I come back and talk to you guys in three years, we won't have seen, you know, a huge revolution in health care from Amazon, but maybe seven years. Oh, God, if I'm still covering this company in seven years, that'll be about 16 years of coverage by that. Well, listen. It can't be three years because theoretically your book is going to come out before. Let me ask you one more. and then let's wrap on this.

Healthcare as an industry is also heavily unionized. And you had a piece just this morning. Leith Internal Memo reveals Amazon's anti-union strategies. So among other things that maybe are evolving, do we see Amazon's labor strategy evolving or are they going to double down in fighting against unionization? One of the basis's last things was about how it's going to be the world's best place to work, right?

So how does that jive with all these things that you're seeing now? Yeah. Earth's best employer and safe as, safe as place to work, I think. Yeah, I mean, I'm trying to think of how to wrap this in a couple of minutes because I have a lot of thoughts on this topic. I think Amazon leadership, including Jassy, has thought for a lot of. a long time that we do a lot of things better than our peers as it relates to employment. And we don't, not only do we not get credit for that, but we get knocked for our quote-unquote

sort of innovations around productivity and the like. And, you know, I was talking to a radio station today about the leaked memo and long-term how Amazon deals with unions. I don't see any signs that they're going to just say, you know what? We're going to stop the captive audience meetings when, you know, and telling workers why unions are going to be

terrible for them. And we're just going to say, if you want to organize this warehouse, we're not going to stand in your way, come in, come in and do it. Organizers. Like, I've seen zero sign of that. That said, this is not going to stop any time soon. You have the homegrown Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island.

Still have Bessemer, Alabama vote up in the air. The Teamsters all over just trying to create havoc. I just wonder at what point it becomes a resource staffing and just energy distraction enough that Amazon comes to agreement with someone. I still think it's far-fetched. And, you know, former executives say, you know, unionization they see. And this memo says, you know, basically as, you know, an existential threat to how they do business. But things change. I don't know.

Things change. And so I'm not expecting it, but there's been so much upheaval at Amazon in the last few years that nothing would surprise me. Well, as I said, it's not going to be three years before you come on again because you have to come on to tell us about this book. Do you have a title for the book yet? We have a working title that's, the working title is winner sells all. By next year, I will know for sure whether that is the title we go out in. And it is sort of the eternal dance, I guess, between Amazon and Walmart. It is, and it's, you know, I wean in, you know, I,

I look at some key inflection points and topics in their rivalry from health care to grocery. But the book leans a little more heavily into the Walmart side, going inside sort of the Doug. Doug McMillan's been the CEO of Walmart for about eight, I want to say about eight years now, going inside his tenure, the Jet.com acquisition. They're moving to health care and trying to sort of weigh out the stakes of these. both for these companies, but also for us all that so much of retail in the U.S. goes through both of them. Okay. Thank you, Jason, for coming on and talking about that. I just did a search on Amazon, and I did not see a placeholder for the book.

So, right, we're not that close yet. We're not. It's day zero. It is day zero. And maybe by the time the book comes out, Amazon will be past day two and at day three. Amazing. Well, Jason, once again, thank you so much for coming on.

It's been far overdue, but this is super enlightening. And as Brian said, we will definitely have you back on again soon. Thanks, Jason. Thanks to you both. I love everybody.