Jeff Bezos

These companies all understand that they operate within a market governed by power laws, and if you operate within a market governed by power laws, it means you need to play a slightly different game.

Jeff Bezos, love him or hate him, gives quite a good analogy of this.

He uses a baseball analogy, but for my conference talk that I referenced at the start of the episode, I switched this analogy to cricket.

Here's a clip from that talk.

When that was launched, it was the height of dotcom boom.

You know, tech royalty, like Steve Jobs and, um, Jeff Bezos, were all talking about, "This is fantastic.

We can change how cities are built because of this one thing." And it's like, really?

[laughs]

And I wanted to explore that change, both the kind of systemic reasons why it was happening, but also these individual stories because while they're all the same, each one is really different.

Um, I mean, a really good example is Jeff Bezos, who is less known for his ownership of The Washington Post, but that's been at the heart of his relationship with Trump.

And in the first term, Jeff Bezos was an exemplary media owner.

He really...

Tr- Trump threatened him in all kinds of ways.

Yeah.

That was always Bezos's thing.

But I'm s- I'm sure a lot of shenanigans go on there.

No, he actually said you don't help the poor by trying to take down the rich.

I won't lie to you right now.

If Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos called me up on the phone right now and was like, I want to marry you, I would go with them.

And I don't

I don't respect or like these men.

It's really amazing.

And a lot of that just isn't in the day to day when you just read headlines about Bezos and Musk.

We'll come back to how you take us on this journey through the country in the book.

I'll ask more about it.

Um, you know, every time you, we basically love asking who's the richest person from your hometown or from your high school that you know, and you'll hear, oh, it's the guy who makes windows for drive-thrus or, oh, it's the person who puts the plastic around shoelaces or, oh, it's the pedal manufacturer, you know, um, you, you name the obscure quirky thing and, um, in some town, that's the person who's really gotten rich and owns the big house or the nice boat.

And it's really the story of how people are actually getting rich in America.

It's much more of a roadmap than, oh, you should just be like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, which isn't quite as attainable or inspirational in my view.

It's much more encouraging and inspiring on so many levels.

Bald guy.

Jeff Bezos?

That's his name.

Every time I think of him, I just think of real world Lex Luthor.

Aren't they owned by Amazon?

Yeah, so I mean, if you're so inclined to send Jeff Bezos to the moon, you can get it there.

If he promises to stay there.

Jeffrey, Jeffrey Bezos, CEO,

That's right.

And so, y'all, let's get into it because the next, you know, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk of the world are probably going to have a Latino last name.

So we want to be part of that movement.

Yeah, let's do it.