Welcome back everyone. We have an exciting episode to
get into today. First of all, Jeff Bezos last
week gave an hour long interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, which
is rare. He does not do these interviews
that frequently. In fact, he he does them
incredibly rarely. So it's kind of a cool thing to
see Jeff Bezos sit down with someone like Andrew Ross that,
that he asks all the right questions.
Andrew gave a great interview to Bezos.
In fact, I would I would go out on a limb and say this is one of
the best interviews that I've ever seen.
I'm an executive in years. It's just one of the best and I
have to go through it. We have to highlight some of the
best takeaways from this interview.
Like 1 little little thing. I'll spoil just a bit of it.
Jeff Bezos is still working at Amazon.
Like a lot, a lot more than I thought.
I realize that he's the chairman and he's he, he holds an
important position, but it seemed like he was kind of
disconnected, like he's not doing much there.
That's not the case according to what he's saying.
He is still actively involved daily at Amazon and there's a
lot of other Nuggets of information that we'll be going
over in today's episode. We also have a a bunch of other
news to get into as well. Stocks are going crazy right
now. 2 days ago I made the video where I went over Google's
cheap. That was the title of it.
I'm putting $10,000 more into the stock now.
I'm not a market timer. I'm not trying to use some
technical analysis to time the bottom, but Google stock is up
around 9% since the publishing of that video just two days ago.
Google is going up because the company is high quality, it's
cheap and it's it's getting a lot of good news, just a good
news barrage over the past couple of days.
There's a lot of things impacting Google's price that
we'll be talking about today. We also have a Netflix going up
to $939. They just got a big raise in
price and target price from JP Morgan.
We'll be looking at that analyst note and we have Costco going up
another percent. It's just slowly climbing
throughout the entire year and it's finally above $1000 per
share. So I'll be going over what I'm
going to be doing to celebrate Costco surpassing $1000 per
share. So we have all of this to get
into, plus the interview. It's a lot to talk about.
Let's go ahead and jump in now. To start off, before we jump
into the full length interview with Jeff Bezos, I want to take
a look at My Portfolio in the market, just to give an update
of how things are going over the past couple of days.
Primarily, I made a video recently about Google, and it's
not the first one I've made. I've been talking about Google
for some time, a company that I think is a unique situation
where it's incredibly high quality, but it's being priced
with a lot of negative sentiment.
Now, sentiment is something that's fickle.
Sentiment can change on a dime and a lot of times the price
drives the sentiment. When the price is going down,
people view the company mentally in their head negatively.
It follows the price. So it when the price goes up,
you see the opposite happening. As the price of Google goes up,
the sentiment is getting more positive.
People are now viewing it from a different lens.
When we look at what's happened with Google over the past couple
of days, one is that they are they're trading higher because
of Google's quantum computing chip.
Now, when I looked at this news, the quantum computing chip, I
saw as an iterative positive development from Google.
I don't quite know the practical applications in terms of how
they're going to productize it, but there are some potential
applications they have in the future training AI for one of
them. So this is something unique that
Google is leading on. Their quantum computing is
incredibly competitive. There's other companies that are
nowhere close to them, so that's one important thing.
And that bumped up the stock a little bit.
And then we also had other news today that made the stock go up
even further, the news that GM is exiting their robo taxi
market. GM was a robo taxi competitor
with Tesla and Waymo. They had one called Cruise.
So G Miss Cruise was their robotaxi efforts.
They're going to try to compete with Waymo.
They are abandoning this effort. It says that GM Motors will no
longer fund its cruise division robotaxi development, the
company said Tuesday. Now they have put billions of
dollars, billions into this effort and they got essentially
nowhere. Like they don't have much to
show for it. There wasn't cruises driving
around the roads, taking fare, making progress.
And so they're just scrapping the project.
So you can see how that could impact Google a little bit.
Waymo now has even 1 less competitor.
You also see Tesla trading up today as a result as well.
So with these two pieces of news and Google being a great company
that's been undervalued, the stock is now racing up towards
$200 per share. I've thought for a while it's
inevitable Google will get to $200 per share.
It's just a matter of time. Everything that I look at for
company is stacked in the right direction.
There'd have to be something majorly bad with Google,
something way out of left field to take this company down.
So right now, this move makes sense in My Portfolio.
When I look at it in the passive income portfolio, we're seeing
major gains today. Google is a a huge weighted
position now in this portfolio. If we go to tech care, we take a
look at Google, it's now a $51,000 position and the past
two days have taken it from a flat position to a $6000 gain.
Google's also a company that I own in my secondary portfolio,
the Story Fund. If we look at the Story fund,
this one is also racing up to all time highs.
It's doing really well. But Google's also a huge
position in this portfolio. It's my third largest one.
It makes up a 17% way to position.
It's a $50,000 position with $20,000 in the green.
And a lot of that has come just in the past two days.
To me, this move up in Google is totally justified.
It's warranted, it's expected, and it was predictable.
Now, it wasn't predictable that it was going to happen this
quickly in two days, but I think on the longer term, it was
predictable that Google is undervalued and it's going to go
up. The next one that I look at here
is Netflix. Netflix is now up another 2.8%
on the day, another $26. It's racing closer and closer to
$1000 per share. It's one of the best performing
stocks in the entire market this year with gains that surpassed
100%. So it's been a a double this
year. Incredible performance from
Netflix and the great thing about this stock is I don't
think it's stopping here. It's one that I feel very
comfortable holding right now. I would tell you if I thought
the stock was stretched, that faced a lot of headwinds, if I
think it's a good time to take gains with Netflix, I don't.
I think it's also inevitable that this company is going above
$1000 per share. When we look at why Netflix is
moving upwards, we see that there are now analysts getting
on board with the story and raising their price targets.
The analyst at JP Morgan wrote that they see subscriptions
growing, quote supported by the strong content, helping the
organic growth and ramping ad tear contribution.
Every part of Netflix's business is doing incredible this month.
The content slate for Netflix is completely stacked.
They have live NFL games, they have Squid Game season 2, they
have movies that are highly anticipated like Carry On and a
bunch of other stuff. There's so much stuff they're
doing this month. I think they're going to just
grow and grow. So I look at Netflix and it's
another one that doesn't surprise me.
When we look at both Netflix and Google going up the way that
they are, it's pushing the Story Fund in aggregate higher and
higher. Now the Story Fund is far above
the S&P 500 and the QQQ sense. Inception.
When I benchmark the performance, the story fund is
at 84.7%. The benchmark is at 53%.
The gap in performance equates to $48,000, so this portfolio
would be $48,000 less had I just thrown this money in the market.
Now of course, we can't forget about another company, Costco
here. Costco is just a silent
continual compounder. It's a company that it's fun to
look at from time to time. Everybody would like to own it.
Nobody buys into it because it's just too expensive all the time,
which I understand. But this stock continues to grow
alongside it's incredible fundamentals.
It now surpassed $1000 per share, which I think is a good
landmark. That's such a cool landmark for
this company. When we look at their
performance, cost goes up 54% this year.
But the incredible thing is they accomplished this capital gains
or appreciation while paying out a year's worth of income and
dividends. They paid out $16.00 in a
special dividend, so they're dividing out huge amounts of
money while growing in capital appreciation.
The combination of which is incredible gains.
This year Costco is one of my largest positions.
It's an $86,000 position, 51,000 of that being gains.
So the majority of this company is just from gains.
It's one of my longest held holdings.
I invested in Costco day one of creating My Portfolio all the
way back in 2017. I bought my first share of
Costco two years before starting my YouTube channel.
Now that Costco's reached $1000 per share, I feel like the only
appropriate way to celebrate this landmark is by having a hot
dog and drink. Now, of course, we can't forget
about Amazon. Amazon is up 2.2% today.
It's up to 230. Ever since Jeff Bezos stopped
selling shares in Amazon, the stock has been allowed to soar.
Now we get this breakout towards the end of the year.
This is being driven both by Jeff Bezos not selling and by
their AI announcements. Amazon showed that every single
part of their business, every part of it, is being impacted by
artificial intelligence in a very meaningful.
So investors are now viewing this through the lens of an AI
Dominic growth story. Amazon is a $97,000 position,
$39,000 in the green. It hasn't performed quite as
well as Netflix, but it's getting there.
And Amazon has a lot of levers to turn to make this stock go up
even further. Now there's more companies I
could highlight that are doing particularly good right now, but
the moral is the same. If you're buying dominant, high
quality companies, ones that have incredible business models,
they're asset light, they have lots of levers to turn for
profitability. They can push their stock higher
and higher. If you're buying those type of
companies on a dip when other people don't want to own them,
when there's negative sentiment, time is on your side.
So whether or not you buy it perfectly or you get a little
bit off with your buy, wait long enough with a high quality
company and typically things work out.
Now let's go to move on and talk more about Amazon.
We have an interview here from Jeff Bezos and this is one of
the very rare interviews he gives.
The first thing he talks about in the interview is Trump.
Now, I know Trump is a divisive topic, but it's interesting to
get these leaders of business perspective on Donald Trump
because in this case, you have Jeff Bezos, who owns the
Washington Post. The Washington Post has a
history of being very critical of Donald Trump.
But the Washington Post made an interesting decision this last
election cycle. They made the decision to not
endorse a candidate. Now, they didn't endorse Trump,
but they just didn't endorse anyone.
They wanted to remain apolitical.
And that was a decision primarily made by Jeff Bezos.
He's the owner. He said.
We're not going to endorse anyone because we want to clean
up our reputation and remain impartial.
So here's Jeff Bezos explaining the situation and specifically
what he's looking forward to with President Trump.
It hadn't come up before and, you know, we just decided that,
you know, it wasn't going to help for well, first of all, it
wasn't going to influence the election either way.
You know, there we we didn't believe there's no evidence that
newspaper endorsements influenced elections or no
independent voter in Pennsylvania at that time was
going to say, oh, is that what the Washington Post thinks?
Well, then I'll do that. So that wasn't going to happen.
And at the same time, you know, we're struggling with the issue
that all traditional media is struggling with, which is a very
difficult and significant loss of trust.
And, you know, the trust surveys have been done for many decades
now. And the media has been going
down in those surveys for decades.
They've always been able to hang on to the one, you know, small,
positive, but they're always above Congress.
This year they lost even that, falling below Congress, which is
not easy to achieve. Congress was thrilled, by the
way, not to be at the very bottom of the list.
And so we just decided that the the pluses of doing this were
very small and it added to the perception of bias.
You know, the newspapers and media in general, if they are
going to try and be objective and independent, they have just
passed the same requirement that a voting machine does.
They have to count the votes accurately and people have to
believe that they count the votes accurately.
Both requirements are just as important for a voting machine.
This point is incredibly accurate.
It's not enough just for the Washington Post to be accurate
with their reporting, but they have to have people believe that
they're accurate what they're reporting.
If they're reporting accurate truths but nobody believes them,
then it doesn't really matter. They're not accomplishing their
goal. So they have to build
credibility, and that's what he's talking about.
The big thing he's trying to do here is get rid of the
perception of bias and build credibility.
And media is similar and there is a there's a strong person.
Not all of it is the media's fault, there's a lot of a lot of
external factors involved too. But where we can do something,
we should. OK, let me ask you and you, you
know that there was blowback. I just want to read you.
This is Marty Baron was your former editor of that paper.
He said this is cowardice with democracy as its casualty.
David Remnick said if Jeff Bezos had said two years ago that he
thought the editorial page should get rid of endorsements,
all of them, you could argue the case one way or another, But he
was effectively suggesting that given this scenario, with the
timing of it. Look at if I had had the
prescience to think about this topic at all two years before,
that would have been better for perception reasons.
But in fact, we made this decision.
It was the right decision. I'm proud of the decision we
made and it was far from cowardly because we knew there
would be blowback and we did the right thing anyway.
It's not cowardly when he's making a decision that he knows
he's going to be heavily scrutinized and criticized for,
but he feels it's the right decision anyway.
That is the opposite of cowardice.
Cowardice would be doing whatever is easiest, whether
whatever has the path of least resistance, wherever you're
going to get the most acclaim and agreement and the least
amount of pushback. Cowardice would just be to
endorse a candidate because you've done it in the past and
it seems like it's going to ruffle some feathers if you
don't do it again. And his other point that he
highlights here, I think is what separates a lot of good business
leaders from very not good business leaders.
He says that that he knew it was the right decision, so they made
the decision even though they knew they'd get pushed back.
What he didn't do is he didn't take the temperature of the room
and see what the the popular opinion was.
He didn't try to decide based on what was most popular, what
would be most acceptable, what other people's opinions of it
would be. He just did what he thought was
the right decision, regardless of the immediate blowback.
Jeff Bezos is managing the Washington Post the way that
he's had success in Amazon, by making the right decisions, not
the decisions that lead to the path of least resistance and the
least amount of criticism. The Washington Post got a
tremendous amount of criticism, hundreds of thousands of people.
They cancelled their subscription to it because he
refused to endorse a candidate. And he stands by that decision,
saying it was the right thing to do.
And you can see his resolve once he's made a decision that he
knows is the right direction to go.
Let me ask you about that though.
There was blowback, I think 250,000 people cancelled their
subscription. So did you think when you were
doing this that some people were going to say that actually it
creates less trust in media? I mean, right, part, part of it
was it was aimed at creating more trust in media.
And at the same time, clearly there were other people saying
maybe there's less trust. No, I don't follow that logic.
You don't, And So what did you? Were you surprised at the?
Not really. We knew there would.
We knew that this was going to be perceived in a very big way.
As I said, you know these things punch above their weight.
And were you worried about that at all?
I mean. You can't worry, you can't do
the wrong thing because you're worried about bad PR or whatever
it is you want to call it. So you, this is, this was the
right decision. We made the right decision.
I'm very proud of the decision. He is willing to endure short
term pain and suffering for the long term success of a company.
A lot of leaders do the exact opposite.
They don't want to go through any period of discomfort or
short term pain, so they'll make the easiest decisions.
Now, later, he's asked specifically about Trump and
whether or not he's excited or concerned.
I'm actually very optimistic this time around that we're
going to see. I'm very hopeful about this his
he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation.
And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I'm going to
help him because we do have too much regulation in this country.
This country is so set up right to grow.
By the way, all of our problems, all of our economic problems,
like if you look at the the deficit and I mean you know, the
debt, the national debt and how gigantic it is as a portion of
GDP. These are real problems and
they're real long term problems. And the way you get out of them
is by outgrowing them. You're going to get, you're
going to you're going to solve the problem of the national debt
by making it a smaller percentage of GDP, not by
shrinking the national debt, but by growing the GDP.
You have to grow the denominator and that means you have to grow
GDP at, you know, 345 percent a year and you know, let the
national debt grow slower than that.
If you can do that, this is a very manageable problem.
So we need a growth orientation in this country.
This is the most important thing, a growth mindset.
And we are the luckiest country in the world.
We have all these natural resources, including energy
independence. We have the best risk capital
system in the world by far. So, you know, people get
confused. I'm glad he talks about this
subject. I think one of the most ignored
things in politics is the national debt.
It's something that concerns me the most, frankly, out of all
the existing problems we face. We have a staggering amount of
debt. The national debt interest keeps
going up and we're paying hundreds of billions of dollars
per year in interest. And it's not enough to just try
to cut down costs. We do have to do what he says
and have a growth mindset. So hopefully, and again he goes
into this with optimism and hope, he's hoping that this will
be a more growth oriented presidency, that we can make a
lot of GDP growth, that we can make the GDP much bigger in
contrast to the debt. Now, he also goes on stating
some of the benefits of the United States.
And this is part of the reason I think the United States is such
a good place to invest in. There is so much momentum in the
United States, so many good things happening for investors.
And we are the luckiest country in the world.
We have all these natural resources, including energy
independence. We have the best risk capital
system in the world by far. So, you know, people get
confused about why does the United States have so much
venture success, so much entrepreneurial success?
Why are the big tech companies here and not somewhere else?
What's really going on with all this dynamism in this country
compared to what we see around elsewhere in the world?
And the there are a bunch of reasons for that, but the
biggest 1/8 of 10 points there is that we have better risk
capital. So it's not the banking system.
You know, we have a good banking system, but so does Europe.
What's different here is that you can get, you can raise, you
know, $50 million of seed capital to do something that
only has a 10% chance of working.
That's crazy. And but the people who are
giving you that seed capital know that the that their
expected value is still positive in many cases, or they're at
least gambling that that's true. That risk capital system that we
have in this country is turning out to be very hard for other
countries to duplicate. So we have that.
We have, you know, we speak English and English is turning
into the lingua franca of the whole world.
It's a, you know, there's so many advantages here, but we are
burdened by excessive permitting and regulation.
You can't build a bridge and all these, you know what they are.
We see these examples of time. We need to be able to build
solar fields. This is another point that I
agree 100% with them on. If we were to look at the United
States and do analysis on different countries the same way
we do it on companies, the United States has an incredibly
powerful economic model, a very wide mode.
There's so many attributes, like he points out with English.
English is becoming the standard language of the world.
The entire business world, of science and education,
mathematics, of programming, most things are being done in
English, and that has huge network effects because most of
the people are using English in the business world.
It'll continue to have the same network effects that Facebook
did. So we have advantages of
language. We have advantages of a reserve
currency. We have the advantages of risk
capital, meaning the money that investors are willing to put at
risk. In the US, investors are
everywhere. There's people wanting to put
money at risk everywhere. That opportunity for an
entrepreneur with a good idea, a good team, one that can
illustrate good execution on an idea.
They will get the capital they need.
They'll get funding. If you go to other countries,
you're not going to find people willing to dish out risk
capital. So we have that system in the US
uniquely that doesn't exist other places.
There's small pockets here and there.
There's some other places have a small amount, but it's an
incredible amount in the US. So when we look at why most of
my positions are in the US, you know, I only look at a couple
companies in Europe and some other places.
The majority of it is just because that's where most the
great companies in the world are right now.
Frankly, that's just the truth. But as he mentions, the biggest
challenge being faced right now is over regulation.
He points out that right now in the United States, it's tough to
build a bridge without spending $100 billion.
The prices we pay to do simple things that were cheaper 10 or
20 years ago are incredible now because of the amount of red
tape. So he's hoping that a lot of
those regulations, a lot of the ones that aren't serving us, can
be removed with the new administration.
Now, Andrew moves this song to ask, I think a great question,
which is Elon Musk and Donald Trump have become a little bit
like buddies, a little bit of a bromance there.
Elon Musk is at Mar a Lago. He's spending days at a time
there. It seems like he's like part of
the family now with Donald Trump.
Elon Musk put a lot on the table to get Donald Trump elected.
So Donald Trump in a way kind of owes them a little bit because
Elon Musk put so much effort into helping his campaign.
But it also raises a few questions and I think very
genuine concerns. I've had a lot of people
genuinely ask me, isn't it a little bit of a conflict of
interest to have somebody so involved in so many businesses
like Elon Musk be so closely tied to the president?
Isn't that a little bit troubling?
Or couldn't that cause issues? Imagine if you were a big
competitor to one of Elon Musk's businesses, like you're a big
competitor to Tesla or big competitor to SpaceX.
And then Elon Musk is best friends with the president.
Elon Musk has influence over policy.
What can be enacted. Do you think Elon Musk is going
to use his connections to advantage his business and
disadvantage yours? Is he going to use the
government as a means of exercising control over your
company, damaging your business model in favor of his?
Those are genuine concerns that some leaders may have.
Blue Origin competes with SpaceX.
So this is a great question for Jeff Bezos.
What does he think about Elon Musk's alignment with Donald
Trump? I don't I, I, I take it face
value, what has been said, which is that, you know, he is not
going to use his political power to advantage his own companies
or to disadvantage his competitors.
I take that at face value. Again, I could be wrong about
that, but I, I think it could be true.
I think he probably is trying to, you know, I think this
department of Government efficiency and that he and Vivek
are helping Trump with and so on.
Again, I'd like to take, I have a lot of, I've had a lot of
success in life not being cynical and I've very rarely
been taken advantage of as a result.
It's happened a couple of times, but not very often.
And I think that cynicism, you know, why be cynical about that?
Let's go into it hoping that the statements that have been made
are correct, that this is going to be done, you know, above
board in the public interest. And if that turns out to be
naive, well, then we'll see. But I, I actually think it's
going to be great. I'm hoping.
One of the commonalities that I see with all these business
leaders, anybody that's really accomplished a lot in their life
is they're not very cynical, they're not pessimistic.
They don't have those qualities that in many cases are self
fulfilling. If someone has a viewpoint that
everything is going to be bad, everything is going to be
negative all the time, they always assume the worst in other
people. They're very distrusting.
They're not going to be successful in business.
You don't build a business, especially as a founder and
ACEO, as someone that is not optimistic about the future.
And in some cases, I think a little bit overly optimistic.
Founders like Jeff Bezos really have to assume that things are
going to work out. They have to always look at
different ways to maneuver things in a positive way.
But so far, he's not concerned about this relationship.
He's optimistic about Elon Musk and Doge.
Hopefully they can accomplish some good things.
And if there is something that goes wrong, if, if Elon Musk
obviously does something that's very targeted, you can deal with
that when it happens. You can cross that bridge when
you get there. But so far, we have no reason to
preemptively jump to those conclusions.
Now, the next thing that Jeff Bezos is asked about is his
retirement. You'll notice that many people
like Jeff Bezos when they retire from building a massive company
like Amazon, they don't truly ever retire.
And we see a very similar thing here.
Jeff Bezos gave up his position in Amazon.
He gave it over to Andy Jassi, who was the CEO of AWS.
Andy Jassi has said that he talks to Jeff Bezos frequently,
at least once a week. But other than that, we haven't
really seen the relationship. In fact, we haven't heard too
much about it over the past couple of months.
I had the impression that Jeff Bezos really is not doing much
with Amazon anymore, but after listening to this, it seems like
he could be doing a lot more at Amazon than I previously
thought. Let's go ahead and listen to
what he says about his retirement.
There are two I've I've actually never worked harder this.
He says that I've actually never worked harder.
That's what I mean. People like him, they don't
really retire. When you're used to working this
much for this long, you can't sit still.
It doesn't matter how many toys you get.
Doesn't matter if you're on a big lavish boat.
It gets boring. You want to keep working.
The retirement thing I've turned out to be extremely lame at and
so I'm, I'm, you know, I'm waking up every morning and, and
doing meetings from 9:00 to 7:00 and reading documents and I most
of it is Blue Origin, but quite a bit of it is still Amazon too.
But later in this interview, he shifts the focus back over to
Amazon, and the first thing that he's asked about is the unique
way that Jeff Bezos paid himself.
Jeff Bezos paid himself a small salary and without stock based
comp, most CE OS today of large corporations, they get paid
primarily through stock based comp, which they immediately
sell. So it's a constant stream of
income, like a salary. They're treated more as an
employee than a shareholder. Jeff Bezos had an entirely
different way of paying himself. I just felt, how could I
possibly need more incentive than owning such a you know,
most founders own big chunks of the company they don't really
need. They're more like owner
operators. The way they increase their
wealth is not by getting, you know, more equity.
They just want to make the equity they have more valuable.
And, and so I never, I just would have felt icky about it.
And I really, I'm actually very proud of that decision.
I, I, I sometimes wish that there were A, and maybe you can
do this, Andrew, or maybe the Washington Post will do this,
But somebody needs to make a list where they rank people by
how much wealth they've created for other people.
And so instead of the Forbes list ranks you by your own
wealth. So, you know, Amazon's market
cap is 2.3 trillion today. I own about, you know, 200
billion ish of it. So if you take 2.3 billion and
subtract out the piece I kept from myself, then, you know,
I've created something like 2.1 trillion of wealth for other
people. That should put me pretty high
on some kind of list and and that's a better list.
You know what? How much wealth have you created
for other people? He viewed Amazon from the owner
operator perspective. He had his chunk of the company.
His goal is to grow it, grow it and grow it.
The way that he would grow it is not by extracting money from the
company whenever it became profitable or whenever customers
gave it money. It was just by growing the value
of the total pie. If Jeff Bezos didn't grow the
value of the total pie, if he didn't create value for other
people, he also would not create any value for himself.
So he was completely aligned with all the investors.
And it is correct to view it from the standpoint that he
created a tremendous amount of wealth for millions of other
people, for investors, for the US Roth Ras and four O 1 KS that
are invested in Amazon, for thousands, maybe millions of
employees at Amazon that got stock based compensation.
It's the same thing that many other great CE OS do.
Without Jensen and NVIDIA, he wouldn't have created all that
wealth for those NVIDIA employees.
There's so many millionaires working at NVIDIA that they got
a job there, they got a chunk of the company, and he made them
rich by leading this company to enormous success.
So I think it would be an interesting list to see the
amount of wealth that different operators have created by
growing businesses. Now finally we get to the heart
of this question, which is what is he actively doing at Amazon?
He's noted a few times that he's working there.
He's at least doing a lot of work every morning answering
questions. Since he's involved in Amazon,
what exactly is he doing here? He mentions that the majority of
what he's working on right now is what he believes is the most
important part of Amazon's development, which is AI.
Help us, help us with this. You just said you're very,
you're very involved with it right now.
What is it that you're doing at Amazon AIAI?
Yeah. And so, I mean, there are a few
things, but but it's 95% AI. And where do you?
It's just so because there we are literally working on 1000
applications internally. So AI, you have to remember AI,
modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer.
It it, it, it will, it, it can be used to improve everything.
It will be in everything. This is most like electricity
art. I went to a brewery in
Luxembourg many years ago now. In fact, this trip was one of
the little tiny catalysts for the founding of.
This story, by the way, is fantastic.
Listen to this story he shares of visiting this brewery.
It's incredible the insight he can draw out of some real world
experience like just visiting a brewery.
AWS the and the brewery was 300 years old this company making
beer for 300 years. A lot of the oldest companies in
the world are breweries by the way.
I don't know why this is. And they were very proud of
their history and how to museum. And in that museum was an
electric power generator, 100 years old.
And because when they wanted to improve the efficiency of their
brewery with electricity, there was no power grid, so they had
to build their own power station.
So they made their own electricity.
And at that time, that's what everybody did.
If a hotel wanted electricity, they had their own electric
generator. Now most people would just visit
this brewery, see that they had their own little electric power
generator and go, oh, that's interesting.
I guess that's how how it was. That would be the conclusion.
They wouldn't think about it much more than that.
It would just be an interesting thing that you notice.
That'd be the case with me. If I visited it.
I would not draw any greater connection.
But notice how Jeff Bezos takes that little that little piece of
information, that little think he notices and comes to a rather
big conclusion. And I looked at this and I
thought this is what computation is like today.
Everybody has their own data center and that's not going to
last. It makes no sense.
You're going to buy compute off the grid.
That's AWS we had, we were doing it internally at Amazon for
ourselves and the APIs were created.
There's that's a very interesting story in its own
right, but. The reason that AWS is so
successful today, and it's the biggest one, is because he came
to that realization before anyone else.
Even the people working at Microsoft, which was by far the
tech leader. They should have had the lead in
this category. We're six years behind Jeff
Bezos. He's the inventor.
He's the mind that thought of this before other people.
Even Google, which had YouTube and Gmail and distributed
servers, didn't come to that conclusion before Jeff Bezos.
Him looking at things through a very interesting way, visiting a
brewery and coming to that conclusion gave him a huge
advantage. The this is, you know, these
kind of horizontal layers like electricity and compute and now
artificial intelligence, they, they go everywhere.
There isn't. I guarantee you there is not a
single application that you can think of that is not going to be
made better by AI. He defines AI as this horizontal
application, which is something that I haven't heard before, but
basically you can't look at it as some vertical thing that a
couple companies are going to benefit from.
It is going to be everywhere, part of everything, and this is
what I think the limited view of investors have a difficult time
wrapping our heads around. AI is going to be a part of
everything, everywhere, every single thing we do.
When I look at the holdings and I go through the ones that I
own, I try to see how AI can impact those businesses and they
can impact a lot of them in various ways that we didn't
expect before with Amazon in and of itself.
Amazon has literally 1000 different ways that they're
benefiting from AI and. Where do you think Amazon is in
this? We've been talking about large
language models, yeah, all day. We talked to Sam, we talked to
Sundar. Clearly AWS has a big
opportunity, but on the language model piece, it doesn't have its
own. Does it matter you've.
Been so busy. Yeah, Andrew, but you did not
see. I did yesterday.
Announcements yesterday. I did see the.
Announcement about Nova, yes, well, that is a large language
model and it is our own. And do you believe that that
model is competitive with these other models?
It is absolutely competitive. So it is benchmarks
extraordinarily well. It's a world class foundation
model, it's a frontier model and and it's very, very priced
performance. Andrew says you don't have your
own model. He corrects him and says, yes,
we do. It was released yesterday.
It's very powerful and it's price competitive.
The big thing that I recognized at this point in the interview
is that Jeff Bezos is still deeply in the trenches at
Amazon. He knows all the details of
what's going on at the company. He knew about Nova long before
it was released. He's been involved directly with
the AI. He understands the big vision of
AI. He doesn't have a myopic,
limited view of it. He understood very clearly how
it's going to impact things, how it's this big horizontal layer,
how Amazon needs to be in the lead in this type of category,
just like they were with AWS and compute.
Now, don't get me wrong, I think that Andy Jassi's doing a great
job as Aceo of Amazon. I don't have any complaints for
him. He's doing things that I think
are great. I think he's a good
communicator. I think he's a good long term
focus person. He grew US to the size that it
is. He has a very long tenure at
Amazon, and it seems like his relationship with Bezos is
great. It's everything you get asked
for with a handoff for the executive position.
It's the exact opposite of Bob Iger choosing Bob Chapeck, which
was a total disaster. Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy are
very good team leading this company, but it does surprise me
a little bit how much Jeff Bezos continues to be involved in
Amazon. Now the next thing that he's
asked about is this question of what is the meaning of life?
If artificial intelligence can do everything a human does but
better, If it's better all these different subjects, if it's just
going to dominate and do everything better than humans,
then then what are we doing here?
What what is the point of this life?
I think he has a great perspective on this as well.
So. Well, I, you know, so I've had
this conversation about with various people about what it
means to be human and, and people say, well, you know, if
AI is smarter than us, better than us and various things,
won't that take the meaning out of your life or, you know, some
question along those lines. And I said, look, I consider
myself to be a very good writer, but I know people who are much
better writers than I am. And in fact, I don't think
there's any single thing that I'm the best in the world at.
If I go, if I'm really, really honest with myself there, I can
always find somebody I know. I know people who are better
than me at math. I know you know people who are
better than me at dancing, that's for sure.
So, you know, they're like literally I go right down the
line. I can always find somebody
better. And and yet that doesn't take
meaning for if you're if meaning only if you only get meaning
because you're the best in the world of something, then very
few of us are going to have meaning in our lives.
There isn't going to be a lot of meaning.
And really your meaning is coming from your relationships.
You know how uplifting people so like, if you, if you think about
it by the way, the uplifting can be very local.
Do you think? It's like if you're just
uplifting your brother and sister, you're uplifting your
kids, you're uplifting, you know your friends and and the people
in your community, you're going to get meaning from that.
AI cannot uplift people the same way humans can.
It can't serve people the same way humans can.
It can't have the same impact on our immediate family, on our
friends, on our loved ones the same way that humans can.
So even though AI is getting very powerful, it's nowhere
close to replacing humans. And AI is always trained on
human data. AI is always being trained with
what humans are doing. It's a system that tries to
mimic human behavior and human prediction.
So I look at AI the same way. I would even go a step further
and say that a lot of people concerned about artificial
intelligence should look at it more of an iterative step.
It's one more thing that will make things more efficient, make
things faster, quicker, just like we've been doing over the
past 20 years. We've seen these type of
developments over and over again.
When we look at all these type of developments, they do have
some major impacts, but ultimately humans find ways to
create unique value, to add value to different companies and
in a world is becoming increasingly artificial.
I think there's going to be. More need for humans than ever.
So those are my major takeaways from this Jeff Bezos interview.
Hope you enjoyed. See in the next one.