Ex-Amazon VP tells us what it’s really like working with Jeff Bezos

You know, you asked me about flaws earlier. Like taking your CFO and bitch slapping him in front of a room, it was a message. ♪ I feel like I can rule the world ♪ ♪ I know I can be what I want to ♪ ♪ I put my all in it like no days off on the road ♪ ♪ Let's travel never looking back ♪ All right, Ethan Evans is here. Ethan, your former VP over at Amazon Prime. You're there for a long time. You're there, you're at Amazon for what? 15 years. 20 years, 200 years maybe. Yeah, dog years for sure. So Sam, you don't know this, but me and Ethan kind of loosely worked together. When my company got bought by Twitch, I joined what's called the ET team, the executive team. And on that team was Ethan and I was, you know, everybody else was somebody at Twitch. Hey, this person, they work on chat. This person works on video. And then I was like, what does that guy do? Oh, he's the parental guardian. He was assigned by Amazon. Amazon bought this company for a billion dollars and they had to put an adult in the room. And so I was told you were the adult in the room. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, gotcha. Better say smart things to this guy. Is that true? That is largely true. There was in fact, early on, there was a huge overtone that I was just a spy and that my job there was to like shadow Emmett and then take him out. So there was very much a worry that I was the replacement and waiting when they got sick of Emmett. That was never the actual plan, but you can't convince people of that. Telling them there is no conspiracy is hopeless. It only heightens it. Right, oh yeah, you're right. Denial just makes it worse. Do you guys remember when Twitch was acquired? It was the biggest deal ever. And now thinking, like you're saying, Twitch was acquired for only $1 billion. Yep, actually 970 million. So yeah, like it didn't even quite make a billion. I like the mental win of not paying the full billion. Cause you know, at that point, like is the deal really gonna fall apart over the last 30? No. But somebody had to win at the end. And it's like, you will feel worse if this falls apart than I will. Is what I read when I read that price. Well, I think the most interesting thing is Twitch definitely had the last laugh because Amazon stock 5X in the earn out period for those people. So we had engineers, you know, whose market salary anywhere else was say 200, 250K back then vesting out at 2 million a year. And of course we lost them all at the end, not because they hated Twitch, but because nobody can stand to go from 2 million to 250K. Right, you had to correct the salary. Right, well, and we're not gonna pay them 2 million again. So there's this huge vest cliff because of the 5Xing from the big buyout. And we lost a lot of people cause there's no way to make that right. I'm fascinated. We are fascinated, this podcast, on greatness. And that's one of the reasons why we're so into hearing about like the Amazon mafia, Bezos, your career. You're an executive coach now and you've led hundreds of people and you're a hands-on manager. If you were giving Bezos a 360 review or like trying to say like, here's your weaknesses, what would that list look like? Because we know his strengths, which we're gonna continue asking about. We know that he's smart. We think we know his strengths. What would you say for both? I think both are real world. Start with the weaknesses where you're like, you know, you'd be a little bit better if you fixed blank or you tend to be blank and people don't like that. Yeah, so I watched Jeff work to turn a weakness into a strength. And it was really funny because I saw a moment where he was obviously working on it, probably had talked, he got an executive coach. And it seemed like you could see the coach kind of with the puppet strings or the hand up the butt, right? So Jeff was not mean, but very demanding and never said anything good. He just would come in and be like, okay, I see your idea. Here's the three things to fix, get moving. And for some people who didn't have very thick skin, no matter what results you took to him, they'd get like a nod and then the three things to improve. And that only criticism, only corrective feedback, that was one of his flaws. When he gave feedback, would he be correct? Was his taste good? His taste was great. It doesn't mean he didn't make mistakes. We know about the Fire Phone, $170 million of write-off just for the hardware that got thrown in a dumpster, let alone all the opportunity cost. But he was generally right. He fought the right battle on Kindle. He fought the right battle on Prime and two-day shipping becoming one-day shipping. He fought a lot of right battles. And in fact, it was annoying because he was so right. We would bust our butts preparing and we would think like, we know our business, we've got it. And he would look at our stuff and like two minutes later be like, what about this? And he'd be like... But a flaw of his was being always critical. And I was in a meeting where he more or less told us everything we had missed for an hour and then stood up to leave and then literally turned back to the table and said, oh yeah, but good job, you're doing great. And walked back out. And you can just see, he was like checking off his list and he's like, oh right, the coach said praise. Now, he evolved over time, right? And got better over time. So he didn't compliment enough. What else? What are some other... If you're working with him, you're gonna say needs to compliment more. What else? Well, I'm gonna say, give your team some sort of props or support. Jeff fell into the flaw of every great man, which I think is having been right a lot, he started to believe his vision was perfect. And that's what led to the Fire Phone disaster. So he's probably learned this lesson, but I would say, realize that being really smart and really right and having the courage of your convictions can lead you as CEO to eventually drive the company off a cliff. Everyone was trying to tell him the Fire Phone was not a good product. It's like trying to tell a new father that baby is butt ugly. It's just not something you can do effectively. This is really hard, of course, because he had gotten several products that people had told him weren't gonna work and they did. Now everybody's telling him again, it's not gonna work. And it turns out that everybody's right, not Jeff. I don't know how to fix that, but that's certainly a growth area. Of course, if we look at modern Jeff, that's a whole other thing. If we come all the way to modern Jeff, I have like a list of criticisms. He seems to have changed radically since he left Amazon. He could be very cutting. So we talked about not praising enough. One of his famous ridicules he made of a team that is well-documented is too much. There was a team in the room, he didn't like what they had presented, and he stopped the meeting and said, so is the A team for this project available? Because this is clearly the B team. And, and. Dude, did he like snap? Right. So that just destroys them or what? Well, I mean, they had, you know, that's the thing is I talked to a VP. I saw one VP get torn apart in a meeting. And he went out of the meeting and called his boss and said, the SVP who worked directly for Jeff, and said, it was a terrible meeting. This is what happened. You know no one can deal with him. Jeff would get frustrated and go into attack mode. And what that really was, yes, he was frustrated with the team he screwed up, but he was also frustrated with himself that he let it get that way. But he would just be relentless. And it was like beating himself up and you with him. A case of that, that I know about is one year, we had a, you know, somebody had a great idea, which is we're gonna give customers an app where they can snap a price, a picture of a price in a store and send it to us to say, hey, we found this in a store at a lower price. So that sounds great. Except the way it plays out in the media is Amazon is using its customers to spy on small town America, you know, to undercut them. And Jeff in the meeting, I talked to the woman who was in PR sitting across from him. And he came into the meeting and was like, how could we be so stupid? How could anyone screw this up? And she's sitting across from him, kind of feeling like he's saying this to her, but she eventually realized he's just saying it to himself. The bottom line is, I guess he let, he's famous for his laugh. He let his emotions through on both sides. If he was unhappy, that unhappiness came out, you know, in conduct. Do you think that that thing you said, because the thing you said where you could be working, the team could be working on something for a month or three months. You come in, you present a plan, you think you've thought of everything. And here's a person who they've been in back to back to back meetings about other things. They open the piece of paper, they read the thing, and they're able to put their finger right on the key point of leverage. Maybe the key flaw in the thing or the weakness or quickly identify why this is good or why this is bad. I saw Emmett do a lot of that too. And it kind of, I didn't know what to make of it. I'm curious what you make of it. These people are just smarter, that's why they're at the top. Is it that they have a lot of pattern recognition? Is that a gift or is that a learned behavior? What is that? I think the best way to become successful is to see how other people did it, whether you're going to copy them or just use it as inspiration, because then now you know what's possible. So starting at the age of 24, I did this relentlessly and I was very methodical about it. And I created a spreadsheet where I tracked roughly 50 people who were uber successful. And I looked at the year that they were born, the year that they started their apprenticeship, and then the year that they started the first thing that made them successful, finally, the year that they broke through. And I aggregated all this data along with the stories of what they did to be an apprentice and what they did to finally break through, and I put it together in a database. And HubSpot went and found this thing that I frankly even forgot about, but it did change my life and they resurfaced it, they made it even better, and they put it into a thing that you can download for free right now. So if you click the link in the description or click the QR code right here, you can see this database that I made when I was 24 and it changed my life. And so if you're looking to become successful or you're already successful and just want some more inspiration, check it out. Well, Jeff is one of the few people, you know, we're all smart people here. He's one of the few people I sat around and thought, okay, but smarter. Like, here's a guy who's clearly smarter. Emmett was somewhat that way as well. You could sit around and be like, I am smart, you are smart, but that guy's really sharp. However, I think it was pattern recognition. He did that all day. Three, four, five of those reviews a day. He did it for years. We've all heard that thing about 10,000 hours to become an expert. He literally spent 10,000 hours reading those documents and giving feedback. So sure, he also had greater context, but it was 10,000 hours of taking a business you don't really know, reading about it for 20 minutes, and then having the ability to turn it into an insight. Have you guys ever met someone who's successful and not smart? Yeah, I went to a real estate conference. I met a bunch of them, it was great. Whatever people call Jeff smart, I'm like, did you have any peers who became uber successful who were average smart? Oh boy, ah, you're putting me on dangerous ground because the peers will see this. Bro, didn't you just LinkedIn post about how someone tried to seduce your wife? You don't mind revealing it all. That post was a while ago, but anyway, it's obviously very memorable. Yes, there were a couple of people at Amazon, and what I think is everyone who ends up rich, unless they're just lucky or inherited, has some gift. The person I'm thinking of had a gift of loyalty. If Jeff wanted it done, that guy was gonna run through any wall to get there. He made a ton of money from Amazon from Jeff rewarding him, not for him being the smartest guy, but for him being the I will just take on any mess you give me. I don't think Jeff gave him things expecting brilliant transformative results. He expected him to go in and grind away and turn a D into a B. And sometimes, this is an important point you'll like, in a business as big as Amazon, sometimes all you need is a B because there's some other A product that's gonna drag through the revenue, and a B product on that engine or a B support system is completely good enough. And I need a guy who's gonna go take a D or an F and get it to a B, and that's all I need. And that's better than the high beta leader who's gonna try and make that thing an A but might not get there. We were at an offsite once for Twitch, and this lady presented what she called the trust equation. And she had three parts of the room labeled. So one part of the room was intimacy. So it was like, how close do you feel to each other? Another one was credibility. And she said, this is saying, if you say, I got it, I'll take care of it, that means I got it. I will actually go try to take care of it. And then the third one was integrity. It was like, does somebody have kind of your best interest or the team's best interest at heart? And she said, walk to the area of the room that you think is most important. The most important variable in the trust equation, I think, let's say there's 20 of us, 18 of us walked to integrity, including myself. One guy, Hubert, if you remember, walked over to intimacy. Yeah, of course he did. And then Emmett walked over to credibility and sat there. And I was like, what is going on? And to me, I couldn't even believe it. I was like, what could possibly be more important in a team working together or having trust than the integrity of the person? That just seemed like, I couldn't, and I guess 18 people agreed. And Emmett, they were like, well, that's interesting. Why are you over there? And he goes, because you know how many times in a company, somebody tells me, I got this. And I think, okay, good, they got this. And I go move my attention to something else. And two months later, I come back and find out that that area is a mess. And they, in fact, did not got this. And he goes, I don't care how smart you are. I don't care how much I like you. I don't even care if you're a particularly good person. I just care that when you say, I got this, that means you got this. And it was like such a wound in the CEO. Is that, what do you make of that? Well, that's this guy who I don't think was the smartest, but he was the, I got this guy. And he had Bezos trust that he would do an above average, very good, but not great job. And that he could then, therefore Jeff could turn his back on some fire and be like, that guy will throw his body on it, roll around and take the burns until the fire's mostly out. And he had a couple of those guys and they never became top leaders, but they kept getting moved and rewarded. And I get it because. You know, Sam, you mentioned me leading hundreds of people. I didn't lead on the scale of Jeff himself by any means, but you get to a point where you're like, I just need to be able to get this out of my head. I can't worry about this anymore. Hey, what was it like working with coworkers who became incredibly wealthy? If I was wealthy and a boss said to me, is the A team here? I would be like, I'm out. Like, I don't know if I feel like putting up with this. What is the motivating factor for these people? And what's it like working with coworkers who are generationally rich? Yeah, great question. You know, I think the guy I'm talking about ended up the last time I knew is probably worth about 75 million. So clearly generationally rich. By the way, this Amazon stock price 2005, I think is like in the $2 range. It's now 248. Oh, I have a number for you if you want it. You'll love this. I calculated at one point, from my first day to my last day, Amazon stock went up 9,082%. Because I know my exact start date, my exact stop date, so I could do the math. 9,082%. It's of course gone up more since then. But yeah, 9,000%. Anyway. Had you held the whole time, where would you be at? Oh, today. Held even until today. Oh hell, I don't know, 40 or 50 million, I guess. I try not to think of, I've never done that math. I'm afraid to do that math. I don't want the pain of that because I went to Amazon with no real savings. I was 35, I was married, I had my first child, adopted from China. My wife and I were kind of doing the paycheck to paycheck thing. And so I had to live on some of the stock. I think Guy Kawasaki talks about the cost of, he talks about a $5 million Porsche, and that was a $50,000 Porsche bought with stock that would have been worth five million if only he'd have kept it. Yeah, every diaper you look at now, and you're like, oh. That's a $1,000 diaper. That's a $180 diaper right there. Exactly. The most interesting thing was watching people lose touch. With the super wealthy, it wasn't that they took a private jet or that they had three houses. It was watching a guy come in when we were working on a product once and suggest that we needed to prioritize automating people's whole home Sonos systems, that that was gonna be a good market. And it was just this reality that this guy thinks lots of people have whole home Sonos systems. And that's just, particularly then. Is there a soul for that? Comedians talk about this where they, why do comedians retire? They're not like athletes where they don't have the speed anymore. So why do comedians fall off? And the reason is they get rich. And when you get rich, you use money to solve your problems and problems are the source of all the comedy, the tragedies and the irritations of life is what's relatable. And when you're not living a relatable life, how do you relate to the audience? How does the executive team that's worth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, what are they doing to actually stay in touch and understand the customer? Well, they do, Jeff's email probably still, but certainly then was open to the world. So he read customer emails because anybody on earth could email Jeff at Amazon and get Jeff and complain about shit. And he read a lot of those. Eventually, of course, he had a team that told him which ones to read, but he was reading the direct complaints. I think losing touch happens over time. And I've tried to watch myself lose touch because I also do it, I have done it. And I've tried to watch what are the decisions in my life? I have gardeners, I hate mowing, so I don't. Well, everyone else who's fighting with their lawnmower, different experience. I think reading those emails and hearing the complaints of actual people helped a lot. That was a big Jeff trick for a long time. Which is pretty crazy, isn't it? That a company as powerful as Amazon, which has billions of data points, you can get one or you could read a email and you read that same email five times in a week and you're like, I see a trend. That's A, a magic power, and B, really interesting. Yeah, Jeff said between data and anecdotes, trust the anecdotes. His reasoning was even at Amazon scale, let's say 99% of packages get to houses on time and right. Well, yeah, but 1% of Amazon scale still means like 25 million packages a day not getting there right. When somebody then calls up to say like, I didn't get my thing and blah, blah, blah, that's a real story from that 1%, which is still huge. There was this whole process you may have heard about. If you haven't, it's fun. He was very, very busy. So what he would do when he got one of those complaints from one of your areas, and of course he knew everybody's area, you'd get an email and it would be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top. And everybody, we called these question mark emails, and everybody knew what that meant, which is it meant you have 24 hours to get back and explain what's going on. So you'd scramble around and try and figure out what the hell happened to this customer. And then the biggest thing was, could you show it was a weird exception and no big deal, or second best, that it was a problem, but you had a solution and it was implemented or going to be implemented soon. And then worst was where you're like, yeah, this is and where it's going to take a while. So I remember one of these, you like his pithy criticisms, you'll love this. He sent us an email and we got something worse than a question mark. This is when I ran Amazon's app store. He sent us an email that said, please tell me we're not doing this. And unfortunately, we had to respond and say, yeah, actually we are. And his reply to that was just euthanize me. He just got done watching season one of Entourage. He's trying to like implement some Ari Gold stuff. Yeah, just euthanize me. But that's how he scaled that process, was he'd send out these question marks and he'd get back his answers. Everyone from Amazon can tell a question mark email story, like I just did. They all have their own version. And that's a way to scale that culture across hundreds of leaders, is this standardized process of customers complain to me, I send you question marks, you tell me what's going on, you better damn well fix it. Because Sam, Jeff viewed every customer as his customer. He still would say, well, my customer. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you and it's due tomorrow. Well, the breeze assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. Amazon Bezos kind of seems like a near perfect entrepreneur. I think Zuck takes the crown right now. One, he hasn't had too many personal scandals. And also he's right, like all the time. And Jeff was like that. I mean, I've read the everything's true book, I've read some books about him, now we're talking to you. It seems like he's just mostly nailed it. Yeah, I think that's true. And look, if Jeff called me and wanted me to take a job for him tomorrow, I would stop what I'm doing and go do it. Because I respect him that much and his ability. And he's the only person on earth I would take that call from. And it's, you know, to go to Sean's point in the trust equation, he has a high trust equation with me because I know he's good. I know he's gonna do a good job. I know he's good. I know how he thinks and that I can be successful working for him. I don't want that call in the sense that I have, you know, stuff I like doing. But, you know, he is that good. So you're right about that. Can we talk about this idea of strategically patient, but tactically impatient? What does that mean? Another Jeff idea. Basically, Jeff said, look, important things take a long time. So today he would say like putting people in space takes a long time. You can have the idea, you can have the right vision, but it's still gonna take years and years to like design rockets and build a rocket base and, you know, set up or learn and build all the software. So that means you have to be on big strategic ideas, you have to be patient. Another example of that would be Prime. You can have the idea of two day shipping, that's gonna be great. But to really realize that and then make it one day shipping and make it same day shipping, that's decades of work. So his point was to do anything great, you're gonna have to be patient for the end result, but every day you better be making every tiny bit of progress you can squeeze out. Like the difference between a day that's a nine and a 10 on progress, that's one thing done and three things done, that's what accumulates to ever get you there. So he was always pushing on what can you do more this quarter on this five year project? Because it's, you know, five years is an accumulation of 20 quarters, we can't lose any of those or we won't get there. So it's like you have this 10 year view with a 24 hour clock. Yes. That you're giving yourself every day. That's how he saw it. You can't take 10 year view and say, oh, I got 10 years to get there, you'll never get there. You'll never get there, right? That he wanted us busting our ass every day and he was very, you know, Amazon has a lot of euphemisms, I can't say they're all directly from Jeff, but a lot of euphemisms to say, yes, we're a sweatshop in a slightly more acceptable way. They would say things like, well, his biggest one was to say, I don't like the term work-life balance, I prefer work-life harmony. If you enjoy your work, the fact that you're working a lot may mean, still mean that your life is in harmony. So that was a way of saying like, yeah, screw balance, you know, put in a lot. He would say, we work long, hard and smart, two out of three don't count. So it's great that you're working smarter, but we also want harder. So, you know, just because you had a good idea doesn't mean you can go home at three. We still go like, great, write that one down and get me another one by seven and another one by 10 and you can go home at 10. The last one Amazon said was like, your career will have seasons and maybe Amazon isn't the right place in certain seasons, i.e. if you have kids and you don't wanna not see them, don't work here, right? Like, or, you know, do work here and don't see them, that's okay too, like go home at six, put them to bed, get back on at eight, work till midnight, no problem. And that's how his people worked and he built a company of, another saying you might enjoy, Sam, is it was often said Amazon is a place where high performers go to feel bad about themselves because he had this idea of a relentlessly high bar. You know, and so, great, you're super smart, you killed it, we're gonna up the goal. Dude, do you ever get nervous talking trash? Now? Yeah. No. Because you're very transparent and I dig it, but has it gotten back to you where these guys are like, what the hell, why are you talking about all of this? I know that inside Amazon, like some people will watch this inside Amazon and it'll go around and they'll be like, can you believe he said that? But others will be like, yeah, and well, that's true or it was true. I still think about what I say. It's like when you asked me about who's not as smart, I was like, oh, what do I actually wanna say? Because some of the people I might have thought that of might hear this and know that I'm thinking of them. I try to be polite, but life's too short for bullshit. Here, I'll be transparent this way. When I got to VP, I looked around at my peers and I did what all of us do, even if we don't admit it, I evaluated. Now, Amazon was huge, there were about 300 VPs and so I kind of stack ranked myself, like where am I in the 300? Because there were only about a dozen SVPs, so if I wanna be one of them, like gonna have to be on top of the pile of 300. And I looked at some of my peers and I thought, I am better than you. But I looked at others and I thought, oh shit, I'm not punching on his level. So I stack ranked myself and I said, I'm kind of in the middle. And I don't have any problem admitting, I feel I was like a middle VP at Amazon. I can live with that. But that's because I could see the people who were better and I could also see some people that, at least in my estimation, I could run circles around. So do I worry about it? I don't wanna like personally name and insult any of the people I thought I could run circles around. I'm happy to name the ones I thought were better. But unless you go super dystopian, no one can do anything to me. One of the great things about being retired, what are they gonna do? Tell me I'm a bad person? Tell me I'm wrong? Great. Sign up for my coaching program? Right, or here's the worst thing. You know this from Twitch, Sean. The worst thing anybody can do is respond to this podcast and say, Ethan is so wrong. Do a post or a tweet. What an asshole, he's completely wrong. Wow, what did he say? Right, exactly. So I'm not out to insult anyone, but the only thing they can do coming after me is make me more famous, right? Like lend their voice to mine. So that's the old Calvin Klein, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Well, Ethan, I'll give you permission to beat me up because I'm curious. You know, I was at Amazon, I was kind of a kid. I was, what, 29, 30 years old maybe. Feel free to beat me up. Well, what did you think? Was I, maybe there was nothing notable. I'm curious, I'd love to know. On the positive side, you taught me about the value of 10-year plans and 10-year lists because you and I had a discussion of you had a 10-year plan and 10-year goals and we're checking them off. And I remember discussing with you, I dug out my old 10-year plan, which I had written but done nothing with, and now I pay much more attention to that. The things, if I were to criticize this, Sean, I knew then, one is you obviously didn't fit at Twitch, let alone at Amazon. Meaning you were clearly entrepreneurial-driven. It was pretty obvious that you were a round peg in a square hole. And you weren't gonna be like, oh, I'm in a corporation now, I'll learn how to be corporate. So that made you smart but kind of useless because. He kept it too real. Well. Like keeping it real goes wrong. Well, keeping it real is great, but you're inside a machine, you know, a real, like a real rock inside. A machine just stops the machine. It doesn't change the machine. He said I was a bad boy All I'm hearing is I was a bad boy I'm not gonna lie And then of course the other thing is you quickly learned that at twitch it was okay to just mail it in Right the like Oh Twitch had this idea. I guess the weirdest question. I was ever asked by legitimately asked by a twitch leader as the Amazon guy Was you guys keep talking to us about money and profit, why do we have to worry about that? We're owned by Amazon now. Can't you just pay for it? And that was like the disconnect child. Well, that was the disconnect. I was fighting Was oh, well since Amazon is a big company. We never have to make money We just have to be twitch and and make gamers happy and that is our only job And the fact that we're burning a billion dollars of cash because this is another fact Sam at times Twitch was burning Certainly hundreds of millions and over the first five years burned over a billion dollars of cash With no real sight to profitability every year Emmett and team would prepare a plan that said profitable in three years and Every year at the end of the year We would be in the exact same spot and turn in the same plan that said profitable in three years and for about five years Andy Jassy let that fly Eventually, he did get tired of it and Emmett left and there were layoffs and you know now it's maybe somewhat different But for five consecutive years, it was profitable in three years But we're gonna burn 200 million this year and then we did that for five years, right? Can I ask you a question about being a small business owner now, I think like you have a coaching business Yeah, you do podcasts. You're we're all the same here We're all the same here and yet like both Sean and I we've founded companies and I look at these guys who run these huge businesses or who are part of these huge businesses and Every once in a while, I feel envy where I'm like, they're taking over the world and it sounds really interesting and fascinating this scale You've experienced that now you're experiencing being your own boss and having a small business Yeah, and you don't have billions of dollars to play with and you're not gonna change the entire world You're gonna like be the director of your own movie at a much smaller scale. Can you compare and contrast? Those two careers in which you prefer and why oh, I tell people I'm much happier now But also I didn't know that would be true. So what I tell people I will contrast it but just to give you numbers I tell people all the time at Amazon if you'd have asked me how happy I was I'd said would have said seven or eight out of ten like I'm well paid. I'm doing important work It's big-scale when I left now, I would say it's 11 out of 12 and there are two things going on there Number one, I moved up like three points in happiness. But number two, I didn't know the scale went to 12 I didn't know I could work from home and work on only things I love and work only part-time and make kind of equal money You know at Amazon my target comp my last year. This is something Emmett knows was $900,000 because the stock always did better I tended to make low one millions, but that was like what Amazon thought I was worth what I do today This year I'll end the year at like seven or eight hundred thousand dollars But as opposed to 50 to 60 hours a week plus travel That'll be an average of 20 hours a week with a lot of vacation So I'm very okay with that. So Contrasting though. The biggest thing is loss of identity I don't really know how like you introduced me as former Amazon VP or you said former Amazon I don't really have a good way, you know a Good current title. Sure. I'm a executive coach. You kind of feel like we we Yeah Because you know, even even if I'm good at what I do you just don't have that platform So to summarize the thing you're envying is real It's the platform that if I as an Amazon VP let alone one of the SVPs or somebody else there Wanted to talk to anyone at any company They would generally take the call Because it's Amazon calling and that might mean a billion dollars for them. Usually it didn't but they had that image, right? That's the loss That said I love working for myself much more. Do you guys ever think about this? I think I read a lot of history Ethan and I and I like studying CEOs. I like studying personalities Oftentimes I wonder like what will what would certain Titans do if they weren't doing the thing that they? Are known for and would they still be successful like who who's an animal that couldn't be held back? Who was just put the perfect place at the perfect time and they took advantage of it Do you think about that ever with with some of the great guys who you've been around? Yeah, of course you wonder how much was Jeff was going to be who he is. No matter what and how much was he was like a Traitor. Yeah, he was he worked at a place called de Shaw and and he was a trader and he used to talk about this Idea of the everything store, I guess with the de Shaw guy and then one day he loaded up his car and drove to Seattle To go build it. And of course as they say the rest is history only, you know 35 years of work or whatever to get there I think Jeff of course would have been very successful, but I think of this like I'm sure Both of you know Naval Ravikant and his writing Naval writes about like how do you live so that 99 times out of a hundred you end up wealthy But he has an acknowledgments. You're not going to end up equally wealthy in those 99 parallel lives I think there's a very realistic life where Jeff ends up running some company or founding a few companies Some of succeed and fail and ending up certainly with a hundred million dollars or something, but not being Jeff Bezos He would even tell you his signature Insight was the Internet is going to be a huge opportunity. I have to get in on that and So part of that tells you it was a moment in time Because if he's 10 years older He's already deeply entrenched in a partner de Shaw making 10 million a year and he probably doesn't Drop everything to go and if he's 10 years later, he's too late. And can he find the next thing? Can he? Whatever attached to the iPhone or I don't know and that's no insult to Jeff. I just think for anybody There's something about timing. I think about all time Sean I don't know if you do either but I think about because if it is if what you're saying is true That means that opportunity selection. I think Sean you call it something else. Will you say project? Yeah project selection is far more important than anything else because oftentimes I tell myself and I think most people tell themselves Which is like I'm already doing this thing. I'm already deep down it. I might as well just keep going and Or they'll say like oh, but I can like pivot I can make this, you know into something else But the reality is is that oftentimes if you the greatness requires a great person But an equally great opportunity and the great opportunity thing is probably easier to change and how great you are Well, yeah, so a story that would reinforce that I told you when I joined Amazon They wouldn't tell me what I was gonna do So I got to Amazon and I asked my boss like on the second day. I said like so I'm here What am I supposed to do? And he said well, I have two teams that don't have leaders yet There's a team that's supposed to build a video product and there's a team that's gonna do a shared ingestion Platform that will like take in all the books music and video and you know make them available to these three product teams What do you want to do and I said, oh I'm a product guy I want to do the video team well, lo and behold this other guy starts the next week and He comes in and he'd kind of apparently been told you'll be the video guy But I'm in that chair and so he gets the ingestion platform And if you were to look at our two careers, they're very different now How much is it that I'm really? Better than him and how much is it I was a week earlier and got to take the chair He wanted and for that matter that my boss whether through ignorance or low integrity gave it to me I can't answer that. We can't a B test that but I think a lot about the opportunity. I effectively took away from him Well, even now you look at You know, he retired business retires. I don't know whatever whenever he retired Goes to you know, he's in Ibiza He's taking oyster right, you know down and he's having a good time for a period of time he had you know, he was in retirement mode and Then the AI window opens and now he's back and he's got a new company but he understood when the you know, he understood when there was actually a big fat pitch to swing at and The fat pitch now with AI and what he's doing building the sort of like artificial general engineer with Prometheus That's his he sees that as the you know, the sort of bigger Amazon sized opportunity again And what's that opportunity Sean? Is it he's taking AI to like manufacturing companies Ethan? You might know better than me. My understanding is he says The kind of large language model approach which is giving us awesome kind of knowledge workers will not give us awesome Engineering and so we need to build, you know an artificial general engineer meaning we need to build a AI Specialized to actually build things to make stuff in the real world I don't know what that means if it's going into robots or if it's planning tools I'm not sure exactly what it is, but it's to build shit, you know, it's well with the name Jeff likes literal names So even though Prometheus isn't exactly literal he clearly means, you know building a giant worker He liked to name things what they do. It's why before it was prime video. It was simply Amazon video and Amazon music. So Yeah, okay you have a great point, but he's sitting in a very different chair now like let's put it this way He can single-handedly choose any swing to take Like in my case, maybe I could have chosen a different swing, but like I didn't have unlimited job opportunities I had to pick from the swings that were offered to me now modern Jeff Can just look at the world and decide when to swing I think any baseball player since we're using this analogy would love new rules to baseball because I'm a star I get to sit in the dugout and Decide when I'll come to the plate. Oh this this picture is his pitch counts in the high 80s I'm gonna come take my swings now. Oh, it's a reliever. I'll sit back down and wait He's in that situation where he can literally decide when to go to the plate. It's great Well, I think what's even more impressive and use the baseball analogy is not swinging so he you know Warren Buffett famously said, you know There's no called strikes and investing meaning you could sit there and look at every possible Investment and there's no penalty for not swinging. You just have to hit when you do swing And so what's actually impressive to me isn't that you know, he swung at the obvious pitch of AI it's that for five years or six years of whatever in between he didn't get itchy and Swing at the wrong thing right like, you know, if you look at what he did Amazon Blue Origin, which is another like you know space travel was probably one now as Elon is shown with SpaceX is The second or third biggest opportunity in the world and then and then AI and so it's it's all the other stuff He didn't swing at that. I think is you know, it's the dog that didn't bark That's actually the one that you should pay attention to Because I would say most of us Spend too much of our time Swinging at useless stuff at as you know Swinging at the wrong pitches to the point where we're not even available mentally or physically to swing at the big ones Well interesting point Jeff got pitched a lot internally and externally to enter industries. He's always declined So he came from de Shaw people were always pitching him. Let's go into finance, right? We have you know a billion credit cards on file. We have financial relationships. We should become a bank We should this we should that he always declined and his argument was it's well-served Like there's a lot of people in that space and it's heavily regulated and I he generally Tried to avoid things with lots of regulation because that slowed down his ability to do whatever he wanted He was pitched health care, which he's dabbled in certainly He was pitched travel. I was part of pitching travel to him like Oh Amazon, you know has all these customer relationships We should compete with Expedia or Airbnb or whatever. He declined that so he has some algorithm Which I don't know is he's totally shared for deciding what to swing at I know some of the variables he considers Like is it highly regulated? Is it already mature? So a lot of times people at the podcast they'll reach out to me and they're wondering hey Sam and Sean How do you meet all these amazing entrepreneurs? How do you find all these stories? Well, I have a hack you see I actually have a community called Hampton It's a community for entrepreneurs doing at least 3 million revenue Although we do on average just something like 25 million dollars a year in revenue We have the founders of door dash a figure of blue to all these amazing companies are part of Hampton And what's interesting is because of the environment in Hampton, which frankly is very similar to my first million We have a very unique high trust environment when people apply and go through the vetting process they're put in groups of like eight or nine other entrepreneurs and they get real about everything that's going on in their life and In their business and sort of like when people listen to MFM they get inspired to come up with new solutions for business That's what happens in real life in Hampton. It's life-changing and so if you're a founder of a startup that does at least 3 million in revenue and you just want to go ahead and Pull forward five or ten years worth of success then check it out. The URL is join Hampton Calm again the URL join Hampton calm How do as a guy like him or even the Andy Jassy I think his name is when your CEO of one of the largest companies and or one of the wealthiest persons on people on earth How do you say stay normal like in terms of day-to-day activity and or do you even want to I? Can I can better tell the stories of watching him progressively get pushed behind the security wall when I started at Amazon? There was a one sort of slightly overweight security guard sitting at a desk And that guy was some retired Limited pro baseball pitcher. I think he'd pitch for like a season or something, but he was now a security guard Well, some reporters slipped by and got straight to Jeff's office and walked into his office and was asking him questions We had a new security firm the next day and you know Like much tighter we had gates all of a sudden and you had to badge in and out as opposed to just flash your badge to the to the retired pitcher So that was phase one then one day A, we built new buildings, we built a campus, and I was going to visit Jeff, and I saw this person who had this absolutely terrible cube, and it sat on the elevator, like open to the elevator bay, and it had a glass wall, but it was a person just sitting there. And I walked by it and I thought, what a shit seat, all the elevator traffic. And then, of course, the light went off like, oh wait, security. So I went back to the guy, because I'm curious, and I'm like, so you're security, right? He's like, yeah. And I'm like, so where's the panic button? And he's like, oh, it's right here. And at that point, somewhere in the building, there was a SWAT team, like if that guy pushed the button, the guys with the guns would run down the hall. And the last time I was in Amazon's executive suite, that was still a floor that anyone could take the elevator to. In the new buildings now, like Andy Jassy, there's the Andy Jassy elevator that you don't get in without permission and can be stopped, and then you're just stuck in the elevator. And then you end up on a floor that you can't get to without going through, and it's like Fort Knox. So they became progressively isolated. Did I see them try to be normal? Yes. Jeff used to come out, we held an annual picnic in the beginning at a big farm outside of Seattle. He would come out to the farm. There was a weird game we played called Broomball. Broomball took one of the exercise balls you work out on, the squishy ones, not heavy, and brooms, and you kind of played soccer. Well, people got really hurt in this because you have enthusiastic engineers who have no coordination, but lots of enthusiasm swinging brooms at each other. One of my bosses had somebody else break his hand by hitting his hand. Jeff used to play Broomball. I don't think he's probably been, well, certainly since he retired, but I don't think he was at an Amazon picnic for a shit ton long time while he was still there because they had to become these affairs that were held in the stadium in Amazon with food trucks and 10,000 people. His presence or absence, A, it was probably unpleasant, and B, only 2% of those people would ever talk to him anyway, so I don't think he went. So I think he gave up being a man of the people when there were too many people to know. Hey, can you tell the story of Amazon Prime? That starts somewhere. It does. It starts with an idea. So were you there? What was it? I joined Amazon right after Prime. I've met the engineer who may still be at Amazon. One of you can Google in the background. His name is Charlie Ward. Charlie Ward, who became a VP at Amazon, claims that as a principal engineer, he invented the idea of Amazon Prime. I believe Jeff Bezos also claims that Jeff himself invented it. So I don't know if they had the same idea at the same time or if there's a little appropriation going on there. What wasn't that unique, right, like Costco? Well, there's multiple things, right? Was the initial thing just, hey, there's a membership with perks, or was it two-day? Hey, what if we could do two-day shipping? That'll change everything. Originally, there was supposed to be no perks. It wasn't a perk-based program. It was purely a fast-shipping program. That was the initial idea. And I think the biggest thing that would be interesting is Jeff was about to have a shitty quarter, and he could see things lining up. It was right after the internet crashed, kind of instilled a bubble. He could see the quarter wasn't gonna be what Wall Street wanted, and so he said, we need something. And so Prime was originally called Project 100 because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in 100 days. It's not a two-day shipping program. It's a two-day delivery program. And you might be like, what's the difference? That's a distinction without a difference. Jeff figured out, we're gonna call it two-day delivery. It began with a lot of FedEx two-day shipping, but he knew over time he'd get down to where two days he could do often one day through the post office or one day on his own trucks, and it never told you the shipping method. So the origin, anyway, was Jeff trying to have good news to tell investors in a rough time because back then, he wasn't Jeff Bezos, the inevitable tycoon. He was still Jeff Bezos, the dot-com, maybe dot-bomb guy. In any case, whether it was from him or from Charlie, there was this thing at Amazon, you'll love this. It was called the Idea Tool, and anybody could put any idea into the Idea Tool, and Jeff would sometimes look at them and maybe others, and some of them would get done. Charlie put a description of a rapid shipping program into the Idea Tool, and then, presto, 100 days later, you have the launch of Amazon Prime. The idea of adding ancillary benefits to it, perks, came later. Well, even the fast shipping thing, okay, that sounds not controversial, but nobody was doing it, and I think nobody was doing it because it was gonna be expensive. You'd lose money, and so there had to be some strategic rationale or some big-picture vision or some clever hack to make that pencil out when it wasn't clear that it would pencil out, right? Yeah, well, Jeff was willing to lose money for a long time, but the big joke at Amazon for a long time was, oh, yeah, we lose money on every unit, but we'll make it up in volume, which, of course, on straight math, you're just gonna lose more money, but, of course, with economy of scale and potentially the evolution of time, things like Moore's Law or whatever, you can shift the unit economics so that you can do that. Prime had a trial run that you're not thinking of or recalling, and that trial run was simply free shipping. Before there was Prime, Jeff had a big argument, again, with this other guy, Jeff Wilkie, who was the Walmart guy, where he said, look, we have to figure out a way to do free shipping, and Wilkie said, yeah, but, Jeff, shipping costs money. It's a thing, we actually pay for that, so Jeff said, but my customers hate paying for shipping, so we gotta figure out how to do it. Well, probably from free economics, you know a lot of the story, because it's been documented, but the key thing is, what they did is when that very first came out, to get free shipping, you had to pay $100, and they realized, oh, okay, at $100, we can put enough stuff in a box to get enough profit to give the shipping away, and then they started carving away, so if you actually look at the history, it went 100, 75, 50, then 25, and it sat at 25 for many, many years, and the secret they figured out by experimentation was at that point in time, the big things we shipped, I mentioned, were books, music, DVDs. $25 was this magic number that meant you had to buy two. You had to put two things in the box, and what they figured out was there wasn't enough profit in a single DVD to cover the shipping and still be in business, but if you could put two or more in the box, DVDs, CDs, some mix, there was enough profit to ship it for free, so Prime was an outgrowth already of having figured all that out, and seeing like, oh, we can figure out how to ship for free. Can I ask you a question about Amazon's website? I use Amazon as an example about why bad design is better than good design, and I use the example, good design is used, I think, poorly. Good design means the customer does the desired action, but oftentimes, like a Brooklyn cool kid will think good design means certain colors, and flat, whatever this bullshit is, but if you go to Amazon Kindle, which is their listing page, which is one of the top-selling products, I'd imagine, on Amazon, it's like thousands and thousands, or it's probably actually hundreds of thousands of words if you add up all the reviews. It's mostly copy, it's pretty ugly, there are some photos, but it is not what a 25-year-old cool kid would ever design. Can you tell me about some of the A-B experiments that you guys ran, or what the strategy was for using copy versus like this beautiful, whatever the trend has been throughout the eras of like making things pretty? Yeah, well, first, everything at Amazon is A-B tested, and the winner is what drives up sales. It's a program called Web Lab, and you run a web lab, and they have a complicated system so that thousands of competing experiments can be running at the same time, and yet somehow, they can distill the data for one experiment and tell you what it did. So it is data-driven, and it's profit-driven. Nobody cares about the pixels as long as they sell. There were many pushes in Amazon to make it prettier, and there were several design VPs hired who fought for that. The actual algorithm behind the Amazon homepage and Amazon pages for a long time was not what was on them, but how fast they load. Because Amazon came of age when internet was still somewhat slow, and they realized the biggest thing that drove abandonment was slow page load time, looking at the spinner. So the biggest single metric was not what are you putting on there, but how you militantly could not add a millisecond to load time. If you wanted to add a feature, you had to figure out how to do it load time neutral. So the design, the overall design principle, I guess I'm telling you, that was hidden behind the scenes was speed equals sales, and beyond that, whatever goes on the website equals sales, and pretty pixels didn't seem to matter. Clarity, having that buy box always be the same so you could find the buy button, and what could you put in the buy box that had an attractive offer? Low price, showing a discount, showing the delivery schedule. But mostly Jeff figured out low price drove business. I was there, I said I joined in 2005. That means I was there in sort of the recession of 2007, 2008. Amazon froze hiring for a little while, and I had been in a couple startups that had run out of money, so I started looking over my shoulder, like, oh, is it time to get the resume sharp again? Amazon profited during that time because since we had focused so much on low prices, when money got tight, more people converted to online shopping. So that low price was just a huge driver for many, many years. I feel guilty sometimes shopping on Amazon because I just buy the cheapest, dumbest shit that ends up just getting thrown away, particularly with kids. Sean and I talk about this all the time. For birthday parties, it's just plastic bullshit. And I'll be like, oh, someone just went on Amazon and typed in kid's bike because I just got four of the exact same ones. Was there ever a sentiment of, I don't know if this is actually a net positive? So obviously there was some thinking about that. Jeff did the climate initiative. We've tried to do package stuff. Jeff has some environmental bones in his body, clearly. But in the end, I think he's also very much a libertarian and a free market guy. And his viewpoint is give customers the choice. It's up to them what they buy. Do I have some problems with it? Do I think Amazon is always a positive? I worry about some of that just like you do. But I think from what I know of Jeff's expressed values, he would say, give customers choice, they will do the right thing. So he's a free market economics believer. I think he would also say, well, a lot of people are dumb. Effectively, he wouldn't use those words. He'd say, a lot of people buy dumb shit. Like, we are, well, am I doing wrong by letting people buy the dumb shit they want and making it easy, you know, I don't know. I think, again, he'd be like, there's always been dumb people buying dumb shit. I just give them a broader range of dumb shit to buy. And also, he would certainly say, if I don't sell them the dumb shit, you know, the Bentonville boys will. So, you know, because Walmart was a huge stocking horse and opponent for a long time. He'd say like, hmm, if people want dumb shit, we should do it best. There's an Ethan ascribing a new Amazon principle. Amazon should sell the dumb shit fastest and cheapest. Was there anybody that, you know, he quoted a lot or he seemed to admire or, you know, was a big fan of that we wouldn't know? The big one, I can't remember, but it's somebody Warren Buffett also follows. You guys will know him. The gentleman who said, the market isn't short-term, it's a voting machine. Long-term, it's a weighing machine. Benjamin Graham. Benjamin Graham. So, Jeff quoted that a lot. He had a variation of it, which is he said, look, when Amazon stock goes up 10%, it doesn't mean we're 10% smarter. So when it goes down 10%, don't go around hang dog and feel like we're 10% dumber. Like, you know, because it's a voting machine, it's gonna go up and down. What we, the only thing we can do is focus on increasing our weight over time and that will eventually, you know, eventually it'll be pulled back to the norm. He talked a lot about stock price in the sense of you've gotta put up with the volatility because I'm not gonna try, you know, he's got that famous statement in his letters about we'll take cash flows over short-term gap results. You know, we prioritize free cash flow, not optimizing for quarters. He did say, you'll like this. If you look at Amazon's history, it turned profitable for a single quarter and then went negative again. And he definitely said back at the time in that era, letting us go profitable for a quarter was a terrible mistake because now there's a comp versus if we had just stayed slightly in the red, we'd have been the, you know, always losing money company until we were ready to be profitable. So he felt kind of hosed by that one profitable anchor point. I was in the room with him once when his CFO, they were having an argument about what to invest in a program, I think it was Kendall. The CFO, it's the previous CFO, a guy named Tom Skutak, was trying to reel him in and said, Jeff, you know, we only have so much money in the bank, like trying to say, because Jeff was investing in this and investing in that. Oh, well, do this, do that. And This is Jeff sharp edge. He turned to the CFO and said Tom. Well, how much is that Tom? I might want to spend it Yeah, just making clear like Remember our roles here. You count the pennies. I use the pennies like so Thank you for your input. But your job is to tell me how many pennies we have. I will decide what to do with them and He definitely could put people in their place, you know wasn't that you asked me about flaws earlier Like taking your CFO and bitch-slapping him in front of a room It was a message Because the CFO was trying to be pretty diplomatic right like hey Jeff stop wasting money like that would have been like f off But like hey Jeff, you know that we only have so much money in the bank is a pretty soft way to roll out like Hey boss. Could you think a little bit before you spend another 10 million? Because we didn't have that many at the time You know Jeff wasn't having any of it Dude, you're fun to talk to you. Yep. You also have a great voice. Thank you. You got a great voice You have an announcer voice. It's lovely Yeah, appreciate that. What do you what do you what are you gonna do in the next couple years? What's your 10-year goal? So I left Amazon to try to help other people have success to pay I say to pay for my good fortune But that's specifically by helping others have both career success and I think something you guys are more into now career satisfaction What's it all for? So I'm trying to help people get to financial security But then to say what are they going to do with that? Because a lot of people don't have any clear so focused on I got to get the nest egg big I got to pay off the mortgage. I got to get the kids through college. So that's my main teaching is yes, but then what and And For me that's meant different types of social impact. Of course, my social impact mostly is helping other people succeed I also do work though helping those displaced by the war in Ukraine I run a charity in Poland that kind of catches them as they come across the border and rehomes them in Poland So I have a number of things that give me personal meaning the next thing I'm going to do I think is something Sam you've done. I'm going to start a small coaching a community I get too many people asking me for coaching I have to scale it somehow and that really means bringing people together in small groups and masterminds so I can scale a little So that's next up on the business front 10-year plan is to My vision is create more people who have the money and the confidence to then do something good in the world I think there's a lot of people who envision that one day they'll do something good. I was one of them I crossed that to where to some degree. I'm now doing something good. I want to create more people in that situation That's pretty cool. I think you're surprisingly good answer for What sounds like a simple question that almost nobody really has a good answer to so props to credit Sean You're the one who inspired him Well done Well, they're having the 10-year plan, you know, I do have it written out and Bill Gates I think said most people underestimate. I'm sorry overestimate what they can do in one year, but underestimate what they can do in 10 years So I combined that with what Sean said about 10-year plans and I thought okay. Well Gates is pretty smart Is that right? And I think it is Everybody has all these ambitions for what they're going to do this year, but they have no real plan beyond that better to spread it out slightly but then stick to a long-term goal and I want my life to mean something and that's something I think is the Other people I leave behind who are equipped to do more than I did or more than I can do alone Hold up that note Sean. I know something cool just came out of that He said something it's it's on red, I It's just a triangle or a funnel a triangle a little like a cone like a vision, right? So if you're looking out him 10, you know, I've made it really broad. It was just 10 years out You know, it should be very simple something you could fit on the size of a sticky note, right? What you just said you said cool 10 years from now There I want there to be a batch of people who are in a much better spot and you define that spot He said people who've had the money and success so they can go do the good. They've always wanted to do Yep, that resonates with me. There's a lot. I have that I thought I went out to a date night with my wife and we were talking and you know She she had written in her college essay that she was like gonna, you know start an orphanage She's gonna do something good in the world I was something she really was impacted by something she saw when she was younger that she wanted to always do and She said out loud. She's like, you know, I have no plan of how to do that I have no idea when I'm gonna do that. It's sort of just this thing. I say yeah and and there's a Danger in that and being the type of person who just has shit that they say and so, you know you got a pull reality gonna pull the future forward sometimes and I think there's a lot of people who Dream of doing good that tell themselves that someday I'll do that That's someday has this completely ill-defined and if it sounds like what you're trying to do is get people to a point where They feel you know They've slayed the money monster enough and the success monster enough and the I'm enough monster where they're comfortable in their own skin To go do something. They actually would feel really satisfied and really good about themselves for doing internally Yeah, I think that's a great idea. So I just drew this to say hey, I think everybody should kind of have a simple What are these building blocks of each year? What are they building towards? Is there something or we just stack in Legos and we'll see what happens at the end. Yeah I'm a big believer in planning one thing if you want to give people sort of a tangible you know, a lot of people are working in corporate jobs, I Absolutely use twitch to get where I am today and the specific way I used it was I started broadcasting on twitch not as a gamer but as a coach and A lot of people made fun like what's grandpa doing here talking to us, you know, and all the usual dicks but It gave me a chance to practice talking to random people about their careers and lives and hone my message and my answers and get comfortable on a mic and on a screen Sam I don't know if you ever saw this he would go live on twitch, which is like not you would Ethan Yeah, yeah, I would go live there would be like 30 or 40 viewers in the chat, which is on twitch You know, not not small but not big for sure. I guess it's not like you're not crushing it It's very modest and you know, it's username, you know balls balls 63 and 63 is listening to this guy's like are you really a VP at Amazon like what? You're just giving career advice out here and then he would do it he would do it weekly and he would I really admired that that takes courage and Like not worrying about appearances and you were just getting reps. I didn't know where it was going. But yeah, but maybe you didn't But I knew generally so fun fact though Amazon VPs Executives were not allowed to speak to the public without PR approval So I knew that and I'm like that I want to do what I want to do so before I ever did it I sent email both to a leader in Amazon who you would have known a guy named Mike Frazzini and Emmet and I was very careful and I said I figured like how can I get around this stupid PR restriction and I said Emmet I Think it would be really valuable if I started streaming on Twitch because I need to use our product. I'm one of our executives I want to be an expert on the product, you know, do you support me streaming on Twitch? And by the way, I don't want any special privileges. I don't want to be made a partner You know, will you support me doing this? And of course, what's he gonna do? I did a lot of this baiting people into obvious responses. Of course, he wrote back. That's awesome. You should totally do it So fast-forward I'm doing it it leaks back to Amazon some Amazon lawyer sees it they forward it to an Amazon HR guy who works for Andy Jassy that VP calls me up and says like Seems like you're talking in public without PR approval every week. And of course like oh No, well first I've had PR training and if you look at anything I've done you'll notice I refuse to talk about the Amazon business I only give career advice ie I'm you know safe But I'm using our product. I work at this company and You know all the bullshit you'd expect me to say bottom line is I have my CEO's approval to use the product and that's what? I'm doing well credit to this HR guy. He goes silent for about a minute at last. He's smart and says Okay, I see you've thought about this because he realizes I've like put up the shields that are gonna get hard You judoed him a little yeah, but he saw it and he's like so what's really going on here? I Envisioned some future where maybe I'll want to coach full-time and he's like, okay. I got it You're you're going out on your own soon. You're gonna hang out your own shingle Fine, don't say anything stupid Right, like, you know, he could see like this is a problem I don't have to fight because it's gonna go away in six months when you leave or you know The takeaway point I think for people is How can you use what you're doing today to start building towards that good you want to do tomorrow? I saw an opportunity to get in reps on twitch Well, everybody has some asset like that in what they're doing today that can become that orphanage tomorrow I don't know what it is and it takes a little creativity I remember Tony Robbins talked about this early in Tony's career He you know now he sells out stadiums and whatever coaches presidents, but obviously you can't start there So, where did he where did Tony Robbins actually start? I don't know if you guys know the night home He used to call into radio stations. Mm-hmm and just say my name is Anthony Robbins And I'm you know, but and he would make a bold claim that he couldn't even really fully back up He's like if anybody's got a trauma Phobia, I will cure it. I'll cure it in seven minutes. I don't care if you've had it for 17 years You give me seven minutes and I will snap you out of that pattern and people were like guys guys a charlatan He said oh you think I'm a charlatan wonderful. Well, why don't you say it to my face and there's what he's like I will be here to prove it I will be at the mall on Westridge by the fountain and he's like you can anybody can come and you can see for yourself That this is real This is realer than real and then he would go to the mall and two people would show up and he would get some guy To stop smoking cigarettes and he tried to do it in seven minutes It actually took 70 minutes for him to like run his whole routine until he felt like he got him there but then he would do it he would check back anybody I got him and he would do it again the next week and The next week and he was just performing at malls Like not even like a sanctioned thing Just meet me by the by the fountain and he would call into radio stations with a shock value thing Just to get reps. He did that for you for like his first three years. Yeah. Well, definitely my early days on Twitch were grim, right and he had to learn all this all the things and All the things about trolls and whatever that are part of particularly that social media So I I did some reps and I tell people now people wonder like why can't I be thrown by most questions, right? And it's because I've answered 10,000 questions live. So if it's a career question, anyway Unlikely, you're gonna ask me something. I haven't heard before Thanks for doing this man. I like talking to you. You can talk about stressful or complicated things in a way. That's quite soothing Thank you And I think it's a we enjoyed it a lot. What do you think Sean? I Feel like you're always able to tell the truth without the other person feeling bad on the other side Even if it wasn't what they wanted to hear and I thought that was pretty rare I remember I think it the first few times I interact with you when I was at twitch and you know it's still the case today where You don't have to choose between I'll just say what they'll what they kind of what will be not confrontational here I'll just tell them what they want to hear but then I did I'm a disservice on the long run Or I'll tell them the truth but they're gonna feel like shit walking out of here and I'm the bad guy and that's kind of a trap I fall into a lot and you have a gift of doing Telling them the truth, but in a way that that doesn't leave them feeling bad I don't know exactly how you do it But I try to try I'm trying to piece it together still is there a tip and how to do that? Um, there is it comes from a book a little bit less known called leadership and self-deception by the Arbinger Institute, but basically You have to see the person as a human not as a machine to fix so I I have to care about the person first and That doesn't change what I say It changes my tone in my body language if I'm caring about you Sean as a person or you Sam And I'm trying to help you the idea that I'm trying to help you will come through more strongly than the fact I'm saying your baby's ugly right, it's like mmm, I hate to break it to you, but you know, you got to change the baby's outfit because Whatever like I it's honest empathy that that I think is the secret is care about the person first the message then hits less hard a second trick if you like it as a coach because I know Sam was talking about coaches and I'll quit going on about it as A coach you have a different tool as a coach Sean if I were coaching you I'd I have a signature line that then lets me say anything to you. I say well Sam as a coach It's unfortunately my job you're paying me to give you some very difficult news And at that point I've set you up because you've laid down the money you've asked for it from that moment. I Can kind of say anything and you're gonna be like, well, I did pay him to do that And so that's another now I keep the honest caring for you But there's also this positional thing in that circumstance where I could say, you know It's not that I want to say something mean to you It's that you're actually paying me to give you the strongest truth. I can right Well, thanks for doing this dude, yeah, I'm like looking at my computer come all these things you keep mentioning I'm like running down I'm like looking at leadership self-deception. I'm like writing all this stuff down You're this is a good episode because we took a ton of notes, but we appreciate you. Thank you, Sam I thank you very much both of you for the invite. It's good to reconnect with you Sean after a few years Happy to talk more some other time. All right. Thank you. That's it. That's the pop All right, let's take a quick break I want to tell you about marketing school It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot podcast network And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su and these guys are both marketers who are running businesses And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.