The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power by Dana Mattioli

Episode Date: July 22, 2024

The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power by Dana Mattioli https://amzn.to/3LyItfx Most Anticipated by Foreign Policy • Globe and Mail • Publishers Weekly • Next Big Idea Club Must Read April Books “Will stand as a classic.” – Christopher Leonard "Riveting, shocking, and full of revelations." - Bryan Burrough From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating exposé of Amazon's endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power, in pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary. In 2017, Lina Khan published a paper that accused Amazon of being a monopoly, having grown so large, and embedded in so many industries, it was akin to a modern-day Standard Oil. Unlike Rockefeller’s empire, however, Bezos’s company had grown voraciously without much scrutiny. In fact, for over twenty years, Amazon had emerged as a Wall Street darling and its “customer obsession” approach made it indelibly attractive to consumers across the globe. But the company was not benevolent; it operated in ways that ensured it stayed on top. Lina Khan’s paper would light a fire in Washington, and in a matter of years, she would become the head of the FTC. In 2023, the FTC filed a monopoly lawsuit against Amazon in what may become one of the largest antitrust cases in the 21st century. With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people – from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive – Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy. It has come to control most of online retail, and uses its own sellers’ data to compete with them through Amazon’s own private label brands. Millions of companies and governmental agencies use AWS, paying hefty fees for the service. And, the company has purposefully avoided collecting taxes for years, exploited partners, and even copied competitors—leveraging its power to extract whatever it can, at any cost. It has continued to gain market share in disparate areas, from media to logistics and beyond. Most companies dominate one or two industries; Amazon now leads in several. And all of this was by design. The Everything War is the definitive, inside story of how it grew into one of the most powerful and feared companies in the world – and why this lawsuit opens a window into the most consequential business story of our times.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm Oaks Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the big show. When the air lady sings it, that makes it official.

The Chris Voss Show family is a family that loves you, but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as the rest of your family, because, well, they know how you are. Anyway, guys, remember, we love you as the Chris Voss Show family, but we don't loan you money, so just keep that in mind. We had an amazing young lady on the show with us today, and her hot new book that's just been tearing up the airwaves and news channels, and she's been pulling the covers back. Is the right word pulling the covers back she's been

pulling the veil back on the big amazon with her latest book it's called the everything war amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power came out april 23rd 2024 dana manatoli is on the show with us today did i get that right dana we're close mattioli mattioli i was thinking ravioli on the thing there but there we go so she's joins us on the show today she's gonna be talking about her hot new book and everything that goes into it and all that good stuff she has been a reporter for the wall street journal since 2006 she's written investigative pieces and front page stories about amazon since 2019 was a finalist for the pulitzer prize in

investigative journalism for her work on amazon her amazon coverage has also received a 2021 gerald lobe award for beat reporting she went out and did some beating punching stuff like that i don't know. Maybe that's what's going on. In 2021, she received the Wirt Prize, an award from the Women's Economic Roundtable that honors excellence in comprehensively reported business journalism for Amazon investigations and received a front page award for her Amazon coverage. And I don't know.

Dana, are you getting any Christmas cards from Jeff Bezos? Unlikely. Holidays? So welcome to the show, Dana. How are you? I'm great. Thank you for having me. There you go. Thank you for coming.

Congratulations on the new book and all the accolades. Give us your dot coms, any place on the internet you want people to find you. Oh, okay. So I'm a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, so you can follow me there. I'm on Twitter at Dana Mattioli and on LinkedIn under the same name. The Wall Street Journal. Is this a local paper or something? Yeah, it's a small regional.

Small 200-year-old regional. So give us a 30,000 overview, if you would please, of your new book. Yeah. So the Everything War tracks Amazon's rise from this garage startup to one of the most dominant and feared companies in corporate America. Wow. It tracks the tactics that this company used to crush all competition in its path and become one of the biggest companies across many industries, not just retail. And the effects of that on society, on competition, business, small business communities. There you go. And what made you focus on what was going on with Amazon? Show me on the doll

where Amazon hurt you. I was the Wall Street Journal's mergers and acquisitions reporter for six years. I loved that job. And it was a high adrenaline job where I got to break news on which companies were getting acquired. And over the course of that time, it started with all the retailers being nervous about Amazon. And when I started on that job, by the time I left, there was not a boardroom in corporate America where they were not Amazon proofing their business, where they were not worried about Jeff Bezos coming in, stealing their lunch. Amazon proofing?

Yeah, they even called it that. They deployed stupid mergers to try to insulate themselves from this giant. And it occurred to me that the logistics companies, the healthcare companies, everyone was nervous about this one company. And no one understood how they always seemed to win, how they were crushing the competition. And it was this black box. And I really wanted to get inside of it and learn exactly what was going on. And over the course of reporting out this book, my reporting for the Wall Street Journal, I learned that Amazon often had its fingers on the scale.

And that's why they're winning so much. And that's, you know, they were doing some things behind the scene that were either unethical or definitely anti-competitive. And that resulted in this historic Federal Trade Commission lawsuit against them that they called the company a monopoly and it could result in its breakup. And is it still ongoing, that lawsuit? That is ongoing. It will go to trial in 2026 and that could have lasting repercussions for this company.

Definitely. I mean, Amazon has been a juggernaut in the way they've risen. Hey, are we Amazon proof the Chris Voss show podcast? They're in podcasting. Oh, crap. We're on Audible and Amazon, I know, is for my book and the podcast is on there too. Plug. Anyway, so tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you grow up? What got you into investigative journalism and interested in that? I came from a finance family

and I knew I did not want to do that. And I was a very curious child. I loved to read. I loved to ask really nosy questions. And, you know, that sort of led me down this path. As far back as when I was eight years old, I wanted to be an investigative journalist. And then, you know, I got my dream job out of college at the Wall Street Journal and I've been there for 18 years since and had really had this front row seat to, you know, business news and finance news and getting inside companies and being paid to learn and be curious. Wow. So I had heard, I remember in the 80s when I was growing up and I was studying to be a stock broker. And of course, don't become a stock broker right before and pass your test right before Black Monday. Was it Black Monday? Yeah. Not a great timing.

Not a great time. My sponsor was like yeah we're not hiring you now the but i remember back then they would do what was the proofing that they would do they would be do proofing against mergers and acquisitions and and corporate buyout raiders corporate raiders that's what it was activist investors yeah yeah and so you had i forget the names they're still around today. Carl Icahn. Yep. Carl Icahn. Yeah. All those guys. He's in the book. Yep. There you go. And you would proof and you take these poison pills to try and,

I guess, dead up the company or make the company unacquisitionable or something. Yeah. And so you had all this stuff, but that's the first time I've heard that term, Amazon proofing, where you have to make sure that Amazon can't get to you and destroy you, I guess. It's funny you bring up the activist investors because Jeff Bezos spun up this massive conglomerate right at the very time when conglomerates went totally out of fashion in America. The activist investors came along and said, General Electric, why are you a TV studio, an airplane maker, a curling iron maker,

a healthcare company? Pick one thing and do it well. Same thing happened to Honeywell, United Technologies, ITT. And they were all told to dismantle and that's what happened. And then Jeff began spinning up his conglomerate at the very same time.

But his worked. His secret sauce is that Amazon is this giant octopus with very many tentacles that are the market leaders in, you know, 40% of e-commerce is on Amazon. World's biggest cloud computing company. Third biggest digital advertiser. Biggest deliverer of parcels in the U.S. Healthcare. Everything. I mean, in all these areas.

And they're able to use those tentacles to strangle competition, to force their terms. And it's really worked for Amazon and the activists haven't come knocking. And probably they couldn't be acquired because for so long, they were like 20 years, they were like negative balance sheet, right? Because they were throwing all their money into growing the company. I mean, one of the reasons that Amazon even exists today is because Jeff Bezos convinced Wall Street that you're not going to judge us based on profits. Yeah. They had this long runway for years. They had losses.

And all of its competitors, Macy's, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lennon's and things, had to manage to Wall Street quarter to quarter. They couldn't play catch up. There's a scene in the book that I love. I spoke with the CEO of Lennon's and things in 1990s, 2000. And they said, did you just not believe in e-commerce? Why were you so far behind? And he was like, Dana, I had to manage to my shareholders. He said, I went to my board of directors and said, we need $100 million to have a logistics business to ship stuff to consumers online. And they said that we can't do that. Our stock will tank. We have to manage our earnings. You

could have 25 million. And he said, that that's not enough so all these companies had that same conversation in their boardrooms and couldn't get the buy-in and it created this delta that just expanded between amazon and everyone else because they didn't have to show profits for very many years and baseless had the vision to like all these guys are not gonna they're not gonna they're not gonna play the same game i am no and if you remember they even hosted a lot of their competitors' online commerce, you know, Toys R Us, Borders, all used Amazon to fulfill their orders and gave them all their customer data, which was like the death knell for a lot of companies. And it became, what's that term, showrooming, where basically people go to Best Buy and

other companies to see the product in physical form and then check it out, see if they really want to buy it, and then they would order it on Amazon. 60% of all product searches in the U.S. don't occur on Google. They occur on Amazon, which is kind of remarkable. I mean, if Amazon ever starts a search engine. It is a search engine, arguably. Technically, yes, you are correct.

Wow, that just hit me like a pile of bricks. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is, because I don't bother searching for products I want to buy on Google. I go right to Amazon. And then, of course, the reviews are a big impact to that. And your book's on Amazon, too, as well, by the way. It is. It's on there.

So pick it up there, wherever fine books are sold, folks. So there's a couple, there's some great, you have a ton of great stories in the book, of course. I've heard some of your media. Give us a couple of tease-outs of some of the examples that you found. Yeah, so I'll give you an example of, you know, the book tracks this copycat mentality at Amazon where the company, because of this toxic culture that Jeff Bezos created, where employees are competing with each other, they do unethical things and steal ideas from other people,

steal product ideas and technology. And there's one scene in the book that really stuck with me. It's a company called Nucleus. And Nucleus had developed an intercom system with a screen on it at a really low price point, $200. And the company goes in for Series A funding to venture capital firms. And it meets with a bunch of traditional VCs, but Amazon also has a venture capital firm,

which presents this weird dichotomy because it's a VC fund, but it also is like one of the biggest corporate titans in business history with competing products. So they get a Series A funding and Amazon is part of it. And some of the investors are worried about that. They're like, is this like letting a fox into the hen house? You know, Amazon competes with this product too. So they get assurances from Amazon that they're not developing anything similar or that they could be open. And Amazon gets a board seat at Nucleus.

It sees all of its latest proprietary technology, customer roadmaps, everything else. And eight months later, the CEO of Nucleus gets a phone call from someone very senior at alexa that says hey i'm really sorry you're not going to press release tomorrow and the ceos what do you mean they were announcing an alexa with the screen on it that does all the things that nucleus does and this i mean i had more examples that could even fit in the book of that very dynamic playing out and it it crushed this company, Home Depot, Best Buy, all of its vendors dropped them. And that just happens time and time again. And I learned that Amazon even has a legal protection in place to do this. In their NDAs, they have something called a residuals clause that says that anyone at Amazon in these meetings with other CEOs,

founders that are divulging all their secrets and confidence and their roadmaps and confidence, anyone in that meeting could use whatever is retained in their memory without penalty. And that's how it happens. So you think you're safe going in with an NDA or signing an NDA or something along those lines. I know like VCs won't sign NDAs because they get so many ideas, but I mean, it's a great thing. But so Amazon's basically set up to where you go tell them your whole business model, how it works. You give them all your meat and potatoes of your plan and everything you've built for all these years. And they go, that's cute.

Somebody can work on that. And they just take it over. I noticed when Amazon started coming out with their own line of of products that were like you would think of them as maybe the generic brand like when you're in albertsons there's like an hour private brand yeah private brand and i remember they were coming out with them and i would notice that amazon would tag them as you know i forget what the option is called it's like the preferred brand or whatever one buys yeah Yeah. And, and you're like, you're like,

wait, your brand is the preferred brand now. There's a lot of self-preferencing we learned about in this book. You know, I spoke to 600 people, including some of Jeff Bezos, his top report, 17 of them,

five board members had hundreds of pages of internal documents. And it's not accidental, but that happens. There's a ton of self-preferencing that goes on. There's a lot of spying that they do on the competition, on their sellers. And it's just a really fascinating dynamic and something I've never seen in 18 years of covering corporate America. I've never seen a company compete like this. And there's a reason that, you know, regulators around the world have said that maybe this is a monopoly.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say it is. I mean, you've seen so many of the companies they put out of business that I know about. You've detailed more of the littler companies. But, you know, what is there, Bed Bath & Beyond? All the different retailers have been hurt. You go to Best Buy to showroom. I might do that. And there's nothing there anymore, really. It's like you almost have to go to their website

to see anything. Like anytime I go into Best Buy, it feels like the shelves are like a ghost town some of the time. Yeah, I agree. I spoke to a lot of those CEOs that have filed for bankruptcy of the big public companies

and some of them didn't want to go on the record, but so many of them told me that behind the scenes, Amazon's fingerprints were all over their bankruptcy filings, if not for Amazon. And then if you go to the other end of the spectrum is the small business side. You know, in just a decade between 2007 and 2017, 40% of the U.S.'s small retailers, toy stores, bookstores closed. And, you know, that has lasting effects on local communities and employment and sales tax collection and, you know, just the way that societies function. So it kind of hits at both ends.

Yeah. We had the CEO of Best Buy, but I think he was one or two CEOs back. He had a book that we interviewed him on. Hubert Jolie. I think so. I think that was his name. So it was kind of interesting to talk to him, but it seemed like he was claiming they competed with it. Yeah, it was Hubert Jolie, the heart of business book that he did.

And he seemed to think that they competed well with him. And I remember sitting there going the whole time, I don't know, man, I've been in your store. Andrew, I can't do that last name, bought a hard copy, would love to get it signed. I'll get you a ticket to Feuder September 5th, whatever that is, advertisement. I'm happy to sign any book copies

if you send me the receipt to my email account and I will mail you a signed book plate. There you go. Dana.Madioli at gmail.com. There you go. We got everybody taken care of there. And it looks like Andrew's coming from LinkedIn or he's got a LinkedIn account. Reach out to her there.

Send her the email. So, yeah, it was really interesting that they can just sit in these boardrooms, have everybody come tell you the secret sauce. And it's quite amazing. And then they just go ahead and they just make a product. It doesn't seem like they're, I mean, it doesn't seem, it seems like they just want to dominate everything. Is there any things that they won't touch? I'm glad you brought that up because there's a scene in the book

that I think encapsulates Bezos' worldview. It's 2006. Amazon's a scene in the book that I think encapsulates Bezos's worldview. It's 2006. Amazon's a $19 billion company. It's in some areas like books and widgets and toys, but it's not an apparel maker. And the apparel industry was very snobby about them. There's this big gala in New York City where all the top CEOs go and in walks Jeff Bezos, which he doesn't... One of these things is not like the other. And one of my sources sees him at the bar and he says, you know, what are you doing here? And Jeff tells him your margin is my opportunity. And that applied not just to retail, not just to apparel, but to everything. I, you know, I spoke to one of Amazon's earliest CFOs for the book,

and this is back when Amazon couldn't turn a profit, you know, they were really more fledgling. And he said, even back then, the senior team under Jeff viewed their total addressable market, you know, how big they could be as anyone else's margins. And that was the vision from day one. And what you've seen now is that's really played out. You know, Andy Jassy, the current CEO has been telling his deputies that Amazon could be a $10 trillion company in the next decade. It's $2 trillion now. So just think about all the areas that they see room to grow. Healthcare, logistics, Hollywood studio, all of these areas. Space is something they're getting into.

Grocery. They're really hard to avoid in a lot of ways. Yeah. And getting harder as it goes. What was that term you said he said he said your your margin is my opportunity your margin is my opportunity and then if you flash back i have i have the guest list for that gala for that year and it reads like a bankruptcy docket now it's like linens and things models and you know circuit city guys like the grim fucking reaper showing up

and dropping that line but you know i mean, I mean, this is capitalism, maybe. I don't know. Is it truly capitalism? Do you, from your research, I mean, your opinion, do you feel it's a monopoly? Well, it's not really, you know, I wanted to present the facts to the readers. And like you said at the beginning, the veil on how this company operated wasn't predestined to be this successful. It did things along the way. And I think when you look at what the regulators have said and, US with the FTC, but also in lots of other countries have looked

into Amazon's business behavior. And they say that Amazon does not compete fairly and that there are tactics that they are deploying that are hurting even shoppers. The crux of the FTC lawsuit is that Amazon has so much power on the third-party sellers on its website. 60% of things sold on Amazon's website are third-party sellers. And it's raised the fees so much for those people from 19% a decade to go to 45 cents of every dollar a third-party seller has in revenue goes back to Amazon that they've had to raise their prices and their goods for all of us. And you have to think about the consequences of that. Amazon raising prices for shoppers across the economy.

Yeah. I consequences of that. Is Amazon raising prices for shoppers across the economy? Yeah. I've noticed that. The giveaway sort of prospect of Amazon, cheap Prime. Prime used to be really cheap to have. I was an Amazon seller for, I don't know, 15 years or something. And we didn't sell a lot of stuff, but we just sold. We got a lot of review products that came from companies, so we'd offload them. And it was kind of like an eBay over there.

It was actually more stable than eBay. But, you know, the return sort of, a bunch of return scammers showed up for that thing. I've got a few, I've got one friend that runs a big Amazon. He's got warehouses and all that stuff and he tries to do that. But like the return thing has killed them. The costs have increased, have killed him, have hurt him. And it's really interesting how they've just become this juggernaut. And now, it used to be you could order Prime and you'd get the next day or the same day.

Now, it's not going to be there in two or three days, unless you want to pay extra. And it's just like, you can feel the vice closing on you at this point, I think, even as a consumer. Yeah, it's kind of a traditional monopoly sort of setup where at the beginning, the monopolies might undercut pricing. And you put other people out of business and you get like a core base of users. And then once you get to this perch where you're the top dog and there's less competition, you can change the terms. You can make it a lesser product or a shittier experience, and people will stay. And the FTC suit says that.

It says you're bombarded by ads now when you go on Amazon.com. That's not a great experience. Irrelevant ads in lots of ways, but they're able to do that. They just added advertisements to Amazon Prime Video. And if you don't want those ads, you got to pay more. Yeah, I was really insulted by that. I was like, what the hell? But it kind of shows that, you know,

once you become a monopoly, you could charge what's called monopoly rent. And you can get extra terms and people will still stay because there's fewer places to go. I want monopoly. I want to be able to charge monopoly. We charge monopoly rent on the show.

So, yeah. So you expose a lot of this stuff was this kind of common knowledge going on among boardrooms in corporate america and you you kind of helped uh uh pull the pull the thing back on it the curtain back on no i mean the fear was very common in corporate america the tactics were not well known amazon is a purposely secretive company you know everyone that works there anyone that interacts with them has an nda so lots of people didn't want to talk to me at first and that's why I wanted to get all these internal documents and really paint a picture of the true nature of how this company has gotten to this perch in corporate America how it competes so that's all exclusive wow and you got them to

talk though some of them so a lot of them yeah yeah. Yeah. What do you see the future? Is the FTC going to have any teeth? I mean, usually these things, and silly, I watched, what was it? I watched the Monopoly fight over Microsoft for, go on for, what was it? Five or 10 years or something. And then eventually you're just like, I don't know, they paid a fine or some crap. Yeah, it was slap on the wrist, a lot of people thought, yeah. Yeah.

And no one cares about Edge or whatever the hell it used to be called that internet explorer was that what it was no it was internet explorer yeah the their browser that was the big argument and then it became edge and still no one cares about it if i ever meet someone who uses it i'll be like seriously it's like when you meet those people who have a yahoo or gmail or aol not gmail aol or or a yahoo or emails you're like you're one of those people aren't you so i'm judging you harshly as we go out any final stories tease outs you want to take and do as we go out yeah i would say just to tease the book a little bit i mean the book will unveil how Amazon partakes in business practices with real victims, where it is spying on its own third-party sellers to create its own designs and put them out of

business, where it is threatening predatory pricing against competitors that won't sell to them. And it's benefiting from things like selling dangerous products, selling carbon monoxide detectors that don't detect carbon monoxide, but saying that they're customer obsessed, even though they're selling things that could literally harm you. So the book's pretty expansive, but I think anyone who reads it will have a really good primer on how Amazon wound up in this hot seat with the federal government and a really good inside look into how Amazon and Jeff Bezos compete. You mean billionaires don't really care about us? Jeez. Who knew?

Is there anything that you saw in writing the book that, I mean, what consumers do? Can consumers hold the power? I mean, if they want to, you know, I watch Walmart change from, you know, not having a lot of healthy foods and organic stuff to where they changed to organic because the consumer used the power of their purse. What can consumers do? You know, it's interesting. I got a lot of emails from people who have read the book now, and some of them describe themselves as like Amazon Prime power users.

They relied on this and they were like outraged after they read it about how Amazon competed. And many of them have canceled their Primes, their Prime accounts. Others have taken an inventory of how much they interact with Amazon. They might not even know it. Amazon underpins a lot of technology and companies, even the CIA with their Amazon web services business. Netflix is on Amazon web services, Lyft, the ride-sharing company. So a lot of people do that to take an internal inventory of how they're interacting with Amazon and seeing if they could make conscious decisions to benefit other companies. Some people have written to me saying that they're shopping local more now that they understand the true cost

there. So it really depends on what your concerns are and how to address them. But there's definitely ways that anyone could make tweaks that would help combat some of that. There you go. And I mean, Main Street, you know, I remember watching in the 80s, Main Street just get disabled. And of course, part of that was watching the middle class get disabled. I'm still waiting for my Ronald Reagan

trickle-down economic check. And, you know, and so I watched the dissolving of all that through the 80s, you know, the Michael Milken era, the Ivan Bioski greed is good era and and I I kind of thought it it's kind of stopped there for a while maybe it balanced out but no it just seems like with Amazon and even Walmart companies you know where you have employees working on welfare and it's just quite extraordinary how capitalism you know i i believe in capitalism i'm an entrepreneur i've always have been since 18 but i do believe that entrepreneurism needs some

checks and balances there's a i mean technically that's what the monopoly laws were originally for but it doesn't seem like you know with with citizens united and other and other SCOTUS right-wing rulings over the past years, it's basically, hey, you can buy a politician if you're a company. It's really easy just to do whatever you want. I'm glad you brought that up because there's a big part of the book, the whole second chunk of it, is about Amazon lobbying in D.C. And they went from having no presence there, spending no money there, and then a few years later having thousands of people working on PR and government relations and lobbying for them. And now, I think the last time I checked,

they spend more than any other company in the US other than Facebook on lobbying. So think about that. I mean, that influence game is so powerful and it's very hard to even substantiate what goes on behind the scenes there and how important that is for a company like amazon oh yeah and they may beat that whole ftc thing in the long run i guess technically or they just pay a fine that seems to be what everyone ends up in

those things it's more like a i almost look at those things as more like a fine shakedown sort of thing you know when the eu does stuff although every now and then the eu stuff will usually like lock in some serious changes but even then there's not i mean there's not much teeth you have when when america is the biggest market i will say you know my antitrust experts that i spoke to for the book they're they're wonder they wonder even if the ftc successful here and there's a breakup of the company is it too little too late to get a standard oil problem where in 1911, the government breaks up standard oil

and John Rockefeller fought that. He did not want that to happen. It was the best thing that ever happened to him because after the breakup, each of the disparate pieces quadrupled in stock market value in like a year and he became even more wealthy

and they were already so big to fail, too big to fail. And maybe that's what happens to Amazon. Yeah. Or like the original Bell telephone. That worked out better, I think, after they broke up. And, you know, you had Cincinnati Bell, and you had all the different Bells running around there.

I think one of them eventually became AT&T, didn't it? That's right. Yeah. Wow, I still remember. I'm old. So there you go. It's been fun to have you on the show. Give us a final pitch out as we go out,

where people can find you on the interwebs, where they can pick up the book, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, I am on LinkedIn at Dana Mattioli. Same as on Twitter at Dana Mattioli. And on the Wall Street Journal, you can follow me there. And the book is sold wherever books are sold, including Amazon. But go get it at your local bookshop if they have it or Barnes & Noble. You know, I spoke to a lot of those types for my book and they they could use the business yeah local bookshops are fun to go into it's kind

of I like it because it's like when you used to go into the record store memory used to spend four hours going in the record store and you just peruse albums and you just it just be like a day thing you can do that with books and what's really cool is I like to get some of my favorite books like some of the stoic books and I'll go get like old copies of them. And I don't know why. I just like it. Yeah. And also, if anyone buys the book today, send me the receipt to dana.madioli at gmail.com, and I will get you assigned a book plate for it.

There you go. Will you send my Audible copy? I'll work on that. I heard it on Amazon. Or on Audible. On Amazon. It was on Amazon, yeah. That's ironic in some way. Thank you very much, Dana, for coming on the show. On Amazon. It was on Amazon, yeah. That's ironic in some way.

Thank you very much, Dana, for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. There you go. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Order up the book wherever fine books are sold. The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power out now, April 23rd, 2024.

Be good to each other, folks. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.