Tyler talks about Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and Amazon Prime Day after 2018’s Amazon Prime Day where over 100 million products were sold. Jeff Bezos is rich. Like really rich. Live $150 billion net worth rich. Tyler talks about the ramifications of people like Jeff Bezos and their companies being more powerful than states and countries.
Can we trust these companies? If we didn’t, would over 100 million people be signing up and paying for Amazon Prime? Tyler believes that people once a companies services reach a certain level of convenience, that people ignore things like privacy issues and warehouse conditions. Do you? Listen and/or watch and let Tyler know what you think!
Link to podcast here: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/tyler-talks/id1396635219?mt=2
Link to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaBFGsY6xbw&feature=youtu.be
Link to Website: https://tylerbryden.com/podcast/amazon-jeff-bezos-amazon-prime-day/
Links from video:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/594b8a/guide-to-amazon-prime-day-2018-best-deals
https://twitter.com/apompliano/status/944028683878010880
https://patch.com/virginia/arlington-va/jeff-bezos-may-buy-major-arlington-developer-report
https://merch.amazon.com/landing
https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
Transcript (Unedited)
Alright, hello everyone, it’s to bring here today. I didn’t really know what I wanted to talk about, but I got some inspiration quite easily. Can’t see. It probably should have left this to the inbox-ing but I… a selfish person, and want instant gratification. So I opened a box already. But if you can tell also from the picture in the back, these are the little fine attention to detail pieces that I hope one day someone realizes but I wanted to talk about Amazon and Amazon had Amazon Prime Day here, just this week of leaf July to July, 16th, 2018. this is just a massive, massive thing for them. 100 million products they sold alone this year, it has been increasingly just a massive event for Amazon. Their stock prices are up. Jeff bass is rich. And it’s just a really interesting thing to look at because there’s a lot of things going on in terms of obviously the political environment, but in terms of just Amazon in general, and I think this idea of companies like Amazon becoming more powerful, and bigger than countries and having really the power to shape, shape society, because of the technology infrastructure they have the access to capital, and just the people that they have the intelligence, the developers, they do a lot of vetting for the people that they’re hiring, and have really tried to suck some of the best talent in the world. And so there’s a lot of things going on with Amazon, the day I want to touch on some of those have just got some notes here. Just there’s not too many people. I don’t think who… when I talk about the… I say Amazon, they’re probably not thinking about the jungle. They are thinking about Jeff bass and the e-commerce company and so just a couple things on them. Founded by Jeff bass July 5th, 1994 largest internet retailer in the world. It started as an online bookstore. Everyone knows this later diversified to sell videos downloads all that stuff and does… so if you go on Amazon today, you’ll get the Amazon Basics, which is their own sort of product line, which they’re always recommending. And from my experience, I can get their HDMI chords and stuff. I had no problem with it.
And so not only are they obviously selling through their own products, mass of third party seller platform and some of the biggest companies on there it’s really interesting to see how this has “Houthis come together and just been such a massive force and obviously some of the criticism that were here about Amazon. Is it taking over and sort of destroying the small businesses and even large big box stores? And of course we look at Walmart, 2015 Amazon or pass warmer is a most valuable retailer in the United States by market capitalization. And just to see… one of the examples that a lot of people talk about is the idea of toys as who in the beginning of its move of trying to get into e-commerce actually used Amazon to do his fulfilment. And so this has been the situation. A lot of people have, I believe, found they want to use the shipping abilities, the operations and the technology, everything that Amazon has, and this is good in the beginning for them but it gets people used and tailored to shopping on Amazon. And so for that to her as example people are used to bind to a rest toys on Amazon instead of going to the Toys R-Us-stores and down the line.
That’s obviously had some pretty negative impacts bankruptcy and just a lot of problems in them trying to shift and adapt to a market that’s changing so quickly and has been monopolized by Amazon has just been very aggressive logistically sound and has to really took an advantage of an opportunity in the internet boom in the beginning but just jet bases in the team there of just really streamline their operations. Some of the criticism of Amazon also goes towards just like the over-aggressive room progress for improvement. If you are at an Amazon warehouse, you have a real-time device that’s giving you feedback on your performance so you can speed up or see where you’re at. And there’s obviously massive tracking systems in there. There’s reprimands if you’re not hitting your targets. And that’s something that I did wanna touch on a little bit today about this. Some of the backlash that we’re seeing for the worker conditions for some of these Amazon workers as well too.
But I’m just a couple more things on Amazon, Prime 36-hour shopping, event invented to celebrate Jeff basis on my marketplace.
Donation use took about a vented article and it started three years ago, 2015 and the year after that 60 percent jump I saw on Prime Day, and so it’s a massive day for them. 00 million products sold this year, and in general, hundred million people they released this year, 00 million people are now subscribed to Amazon Prime, so, I believe here in Canada, I’m paying like 79-99. I think they just had a price boost up or down in the US right now. That’s a lot of people paying for this.
And so I got my box there, I use, I use Amazon Prime to my delight, I love it. And I think a lot of people are looking at the convenience, the easiness of it, the ability to look at the reviews ability to just quickly, validate that you’re gonna get the product you want, if you have a problem. I just got a notification that I got a damaged but a blender, ponders come in our way, got a damage blender notification basically as instantly, as it got damaged already. The process had started, to ship me on a new one. I’ve never had any problems with really any of my orders off Amazon Nate. Like they’ve got the money, they don’t care about being stingy on a couple of dollars that they’re losing off a product. It’s all about the customer service, it’s about keeping those customers loyal especially from an Amazon Prime member.
Let’s just think of the power of that Amazon Prime. They are spreading out world-wide right now 00 million people subscribe you have, if you raised the price by dollar, that’s 100 million. You just raised. There is so much power in so many people who are invested in Teso. I’ve got some people in my office. Well to… we fall victim to a soldier to Amazon Prime, we fall back them to Prime Day, and they’ve just got such a good system and structure set up. One of the things that has really made them so successful is that work around information architecture and setting up processes that are very scalable. And so you… I’ve probably experienced that in as you go to Amazon, you look at a product.
15-00 minutes later, next day. That products falling around the Facebook following around through Google ads, that they were one of the originators of. Oh, you forgot, you forgot this, in the car. Come pick it up, you know what I mean? There are so many strategies that they have implemented that all seems so personalized to you, but are be doing on a mass of massive system and delivering that to obviously billions of people hundred million people alone, just on Amazon Prime.
So a couple other things that I wanted to talk about here.
One thing that I think has really overlooked for a lot of people, anyways, is that Amazon is not just selling, selling, all the products and everything online. They have the largest The, the largest provider of cloud infrastructure services as well too. So Amazon Web Services. I think I had a couple of things pulled up on here. macaula. So this is… and I’ll put this on the screen.
Amazon Web Services here. And there are way too many things in here for me to look at, I use a couple of the things on here, not as much as someone who’s doing a little bit more hard core developer who wants to access all the Apis and actually run to run it through their own computer, and everything without its much more technical. That’s what I’m trying to get to. It is not for the layman, developer, someone who is doing front end web development someone who’s doing Word Press square space, that kind of stuff. And so they are… you can see some of the customers build on as its massive they have speech-to-text, Apis machine learning API is just a massive infrastructure of so many different things, databases compute migration network. Like just too much stuff for me to even look at. I haven’t got too much into this, but it is so, such a big part of their business as well too, that just a lot of people actually don’t really think of… I think I had… what did I have for the stats there? Press release 150000 developers, this is in two 0006-2006 Amazon Web Service started 5000 developers signed up since it’s a deception big people use at NASA, using it, Netflix, the BOMA presidential campaign of 2012 used it, they just got 600 million dollar contract with CIA another part of the some of the criticism they are using the CIA, and some of these law enforcement agencies, are using basically their visual recognition so I… so even on these Amazon Go stores, if I’m a shopper, I go into the store, it’s actually detecting basically my identity to match with what I’m buying. And so this is gonna be applied. What people are very nervous about of this, not the on Life of breach security, and minority report stuff, CIA and these law enforcement agencies, actually, using some of the apis that Amazon’s developed here to detect detect offenders to tech criminals and we’re gonna see that role out there. A very interesting thing to see. People are obviously a little bit worried about this and if there’s some conflict of interest and this is where it was to where I was really trying to go with the idea of these companies being more powerful the cities than countries than almost the world which is crazy. We continue to see this right now. A big thing that Amazon has been moving towards is trying to find their second headquarters. We can see the rush. Like the C, the countries, the states of the provinces they want and I don’t think we’re getting it down here in Canada, we I don’t think so. They want this, they’re talking about, we’re gonna get 50000 jobs gonna be a five billion dollar facility more residents tourism all this stuff will be coming to the city of Amazon chooses and so literal federal, state and province the governments are are rallying trying to put these proposals in you can see how much this is wanted. We’re seeing another example here in town in Toronto actually with the Google smart city like these massive companies are taking over, taking over cities and being a main core component in driving innovation in them and a lot of people are asking What are the consequences for that? So for example, there was on that Google smart city that they’re trying to build in Toronto.
There was backlash and outrage over the idea that Google was actually able keep that data for the city, and that data could be access later through Google or access just not as secure and safe. We want to keep that data here in Toronto and keep it here in Canada. And so are they gonna adhere to that? What things can they do when they’re building that whole infrastructure and technology and they have they have the back doors to it, they understand how to access it. We just down in the US, the company, the voting poll boost in the United States they actually had a back-door entrance to the polling stations. They could have manipulated that and doing these things are possible and I think we really do sort of underestimate this idea of what these companies can do these ideas of, “Are these companies good, are they for bad are they driven are they driven only by capitalism? A lot of people, a lot of these companies talk about the culture that they’ve developed all this kind of stuff. So I really struggle to see that one of the big things of Google was basically “Do no evil that was removed from their official mandate, this year. So maybe we’re in this time where we should be looking at these at these big monopolies, and companies that control this technology. And I know for a fact I would not do well if Google went down, they could do well. Amazon doesn’t affect me as much right now, but these companies are so tightly connected. We’re now getting an obviously Amazon Echo smart homes all this kind of stuff, is making us so interconnected and reliant and dependent on these companies. That it process in one of those really scary situations, seen something that these smart homes for Amazon can do, they can actually lock the doors in the house or unlock the doors of someone’s coming to deliver.
You don’t know what’s gonna go on. Amazon has not had the perfect track record in terms of infrastructure that’s gone down many times, there’s been big days when their whole servers, all their services have gone down, they’ve had problems. These glitches can happen and actually have a really big impact on real human life. Imagine if the server goes down, and it walks you in your house all day. No, maybe that might not happen, but things like that are actually risky. And as we continue to integrate these companies into our life, we have to have to be wary of it, and to continue on that.
Amazon is now getting much deeper into lobbying Jeff bass trying to think when he bought it a couple of years ago, but bought Washington Post for 250 million. They are now in part of the political discourse and actually generating content is that content bias is it neutral is it supporting Amazon’s agenda, all these questions really do arise quite quickly when we start to look at just the power and capacity of Amazon, of course, some of these other tech companies as well too.
Now.
Felt at a half. Pull up here, just wanted to pull up actually what the Amazon looks like. I got my account here. This is probably sort of showing my cards of what I’m actually looking at right now, but just the success that they’ve had, you can see the organization that user experience. A lot of thing that I look at is the idea of Wow can we get someone to go to.
Go to a site, check out smoothly and have a good experience through that, but then obviously wanna come back, enjoy that experience and really gain some customer loyalty. And I don’t think we’ve seen too many companies do that as successfully as Amazon, I’m trying to think of the number right now, too, but over 500 S I think the average customer spends… I’m well over for that quote from my year. And there’s something so exciting about ordering it, seeing that prime knowing that it’s coming in two days, I get an extra little dot me, but because I get a text message when it arrives at the office here, and so nothing better than knowing that I have a product coming in, that I’m excited for that I’ve got on Amazon, I know what’s gonna be good. And I think a lot of people feel that same way.
And we looked at that I wanted to pull up this article, as well too, that this is one of those. I think I sort of hypocritical places where we are because one of my big beliefs is that there’s a level of convenience that once we hit that level of convenience people don’t necessarily care about the moral components of everything else. So we hear a lot of Amazon here, about people having problems, workers having problems, just trying to pull up here. “Tishman labor issues, people calling at modern day slavery, brutal life working people, working “declension hours again getting reprimanded. If they’re not hitting their targets as I could imagine Amazon Prime Day how many orders come in 00 million orders come in, all of those have to be fulfilled in that in that certain amount of time, these people are walking through the facilities trying to get everything done. The people who are actually delivering the stuff is crazy people, they say that, walk like an average of 15 miles a day, on what these complaints are. This is one of the things where I get a little blurry as well too, because calling at modern day slavery all this stuff, I believe what some of the response has been as Amazon people who work at Amazon, get a fantastic benefit there are on that minimum not even on that minimum age 15 dollars an hour. And then there’s just this… like jobs are hard people work hard. So this idea of modern day slavery is a really interesting tithing to look at… and we’re seeing, we’re seeing boycotts. There was massive strikes, I believe in Brazil Over Amazon or basically on protest an Amazon Prime Day.
It’s a really sort of odd situation because we look at it, people who work at Amazon, in some cases, at least if they have the drive and the ambition they can leave, they can leave, Amazon and go and get a job now, not gonna get another job. Now, not everyone has that situation. And that’s often what we hear. A lot of them are working in fulfillment center that are in a relatively rural area. There may be unskilled workers and there’s not that Tony too many other options, for them. And so it is a little bit more of that life or death situation, which makes it seem a little bit more unbearable and getting towards that really difficult level that we’re talking about, but again it’s the other side of this is life is hard working as part of life and working is sometimes not the most enjoyable thing that we do so I don’t know where I lie in this debate, but it’s definitely something I think about and I think it’s one of those things where you can see that capitalist nature come in when the profits at all cost, are there and available, then that really seems to be the direction that it goes. And I don’t think I have the figure on me right right now, but Jeff basis is worth like 150 billion USD, in. So there was something saying like the amount of money that he makes and a minute is equivalent to what one of their workers makes in a year or something. It’s a little bit blurry on that line, but that contrast is there. And so when we look at that, that is a really difficult thing. And another big knock on Jeff faster has been his… an Amazon in general, lack of dedication to philanthropy and just donating to non-profits, all that stuff as well, too.
Is that necessary is that reasonable? I don’t know, I don’t know if that’s a reasonable thing to critique, but you do see such a mass of double of inequality at Amazon and I think that’s really reflective of the whole world in general right now. So again, going back to that, I think people are very aware of this stuff, but yet there’s that level of convenience and ease, and satisfaction that comes with it that even the most righteous people often overlook. And so I have some very, very protest friends who probably not who in many cases if it wasn’t convenient for them to order it would be very against Amazon but because of the how it works for them, there, they are down to support it, as well, too. And so there’s just a couple of notes, I’m gonna share this link in this in the article under the post here. But there was some really cool sort of stories… not cool, but stories on some of the controversies that Amazon has had idea that it is trying to under-controlled underlying infrastructure of the economy and through all the technology and everything to have obviously the privacy piece here with these Amazon Echo devices with just the knowledge of what people are buying on such a large scale and really being the amount of data that they can pass through, make decisions on predict customer behavior predict the products that are gonna be successful next. And just seeing what people want is, is pretty damn incredible. And so to know that they have that power and… and can use that for either the good or for the bad is… and something to think about echo. In hotel rooms. Now they are building partnerships with hotels and putting eco-devices in there and now they’re seeing that or now seeing the habits of travelers. There’s some really interesting things that are happening along this line. And so I just wanted to pull up a couple of other things here.
This is just one of the classics and I wanted to look at Jeff bass was in his office 19… 99. one of the interesting things is that in a lot of way, Jeff bass was very successful at a pretty young age, he was obviously brilliant, very intelligent person but in a lot of ways, he came from, he’s one of those… of not rags to riches stories, but he did not come from a big wealthy family that paved the way for him to do it. In a lot of ways. He is one of those self-made, the people that we look at that we admire, who really changed the world built a business that was innovative and has obviously become one of the most successful business people, of all time, and one of the most successful companies of all time itself.
I just want to show this contrast here. Near Jeff days back in 1999, I was a computer. Science is a Computer Engineering graduate. So he knew his stuff and he built this infrastructure and one of the big things that people always talk about him is this formal on algorithm that he built to stop risk, so that he could predict what he wanted to do in his life, and that protection led him to starting Amazon instead of continuing at his job. And so people… one of the those things is that his whole life is basically run off formless and algorithms and so he is really sort of one of those, streamline robots in that regard, which is a really interesting thing to think about. So I’m just looking at here, I wanted to show the contrast this is what we’re seeing with Jeff here. Now, a little bit bigger, a little bit stronger and this has really come there’s a big… so me, community here that really try to compare these two. So really funny thing to look at just a couple of other things was this Amazon show down for these headquarters that people were looking at really crazy just to see the desire for these cities to have it in there. And I consider a D again, considered that the impact that it’s gonna have Amazon merge. I thought was a really cool thing to check out. If you haven’t checked it out, you have to apply for it. It took me a year to actually get in and I haven’t really used it too much, I thought I would use it more but you can really design your own shirts. Artwork, printed up in the order either order for yourself, quite very cheaply to actually get access basically get your church closing whatever you want with your own designs on it or you can actually design essence Dom directly in the market place right away. So it is a really powerful platform if you have done it if you know how to design well and do it right, something to look into if you’re interested in, may be monetizing a little bit off Amazon.
And then there was also Amazon Associates as well to an Amazon Associates is basically an affiliate program, you can take. And I think I had it back here up on my Amazon. You can see this little bar up in the top. I can go to product here and I believe I haven’t done this too much, but you can basically get the text. I don’t wanna cause any problems here. I wanna show any of my information either well too, but you can hit this text and get the link and if I embed that on my site talk about the product that I like and recommend it and someone clicks on that link and buy the product that I can actually get a commission to it. Or, one of people who are making a bit of their living or maybe even their whole living of affiliate becoming an authority in a mech, and then recommending products or just doing reviews and stuff like that. And I believe it’s actually sort the second way that people monetize sites, a lot of people using Google AdSense to the Agile peer on your site, a lot of other people are doing this more natural brought in actually doing affiliate programs as well too. And so that’s something to look into as well, too, just another way to monetize. And I’m setting up a couple of things around that as well, too. Of course, another big one last thing, and I’ll pull up here.
Then I had talked about, I believe in my last podcast. Well, to Audible. That’s where they really originally came from and selling buffs and they’ve continued that obviously with physical books, online, but also the audio Buchan were here with Audible and another fantastic thing. Use an access. Then they got me, they’ve got the cost paid for a lot of stuff. He cost me a lot of money. Amazon. But it’s one of those things where I’ve got a ton of value from them and I’ve really only had a pretty decent experience is so far. So when I look at all this stuff, think about all of these different components and parts of Amazon. You have to respect the scale that they’ve gotten to the success that they had, but you also have to think about those other questions of Where does this lead to, where are their priorities, what does their future look like and how it’s not going to have an effect on our own lives as well, too. So I think that’s all I got here today. Continuing to grow, we’ve got original content coming out now, they’re on streaming service to music, they’ve got the money, they’ve got the teams, they’re gonna continue expanding and I think very similar to a Zuckerberg like vision, wants to be ubiquitous and all-consuming, across the world until everyone is buying everything from Amazon, and we’re all interconnected through their infrastructure and devices, so we’ll see how that goes.
“if we’re gonna have to see, and the future is coming. I think it’s coming quicker quicker than we think it is but we also know that these companies are looking for the long run, and so basis is already looking at space and space travel, is trying to extend lives, for people and invested in companies like that, and even a focus on one of those good side focuses of trying to look at some options so that we don’t deplete our resources, here on our so I think I’ve done here today. I appreciate you checking this. Oh, let me know if you’ve got Amazon Prime, you got some thoughts on this stuff. I am really interested in just this idea of people overlooking some moral stuff because of convenience and I, of course, low cost and everything that comes with Amazon here.
So thank you very much.
I am just going to shift here back to the old full-screen Brit or the B at the end of the day, and I look forward to see you back next week with as not sure, not sure on those people run into live improvising like everyone else, I think so thank you very much, have a great… we can