The Everything War with Dana Mattioli 40:10

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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Hey, everyone. It's Reid. Before we get started, you know, I get the chance to interview some incredible people.

And now I have an opportunity to expand on some of those ideas and some of those conversations on my Substack. It's called The Homefront. I hope you'll check it out. I write two, three times a week. I offer other insights, philosophical, political, tactical, what's going on. Again, that's The Homefront over at Substack. I hope you'll check it out and I hope you'll sign up. And now, on with the show.

Welcome back to The Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gaylor. Today, I'm joined by award-winning reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Dana Mattioli.

Dana has written for the Journal for nearly two decades and has covered Amazon since 2019. Before covering Amazon, she covered mergers and acquisitions, one of the Journal's highest profile beats. Her brand new book, Out Yesterday, is The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power, and is now available wherever fine books are sold, even Amazon.

Today, she's coming to us from New York City. Dana, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. There's a line in here towards the beginning of the book, Dana, about how when Jeff Bezos was talking about Amazon and then it sort of became part of the culture is that, you know, he wanted Amazon to be in every part of your life, which he has succeeded. But it made me think about the...

that old clip from The Office when Ryan Howard goes to New York to create Dunder Mifflin 2.0, where, you know, they had a social media site and all this other stuff. And, you know, that was a joke in a show a long time ago. But the truth is, is Amazon is everywhere all the time. You really can't escape it. Yeah, he wanted Amazon to be this daily habit. And it's kind of even crazy in 2024 to think that this started out as a little online bookstore. Yeah.

that was an against all odds success story. Now it's infiltrated like every part of modern commerce, the economy, our lives and

I almost equate it to this like giant octopus with all of these disparate tentacles that have become market leaders in their own right, way beyond retail. I want to push back a little bit on the the origin story here, because, you know, if there's one thing, you know, as a former Republican, you know, you go back to William F. Buckley and all these other people like Republicans love to pull yourself up by the bootstrap story. Right. Or these guys started something in a garage. But let's be clear, like Jeff Bezos went to Princeton.

Right. This is not a dumb guy. He worked at D.E. Shaw, like one of the powerhouse hedge funds. In fact, it was at D.E. Shaw, like where David Shaw sort of came up even with the idea. And then he got a was it like a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar loan from his parents, which is like, you know, amortized to today's dollars, like a million bucks.

Right. So like, yes, you know, guy who was very smart, very ambitious, understood the nature of business and everything else. But the truth is, is like this was not a guy who, you know, spent nights at tech school.

and, you know, decided to start selling secondhand books out of his garage. Sure. I mean, Jeff definitely, by the time he set up Amazon, came from a place of privilege. He was working at a hedge fund in Manhattan making, you know, a million dollars a year plus. He had a safety net to fall back on. And he had, you know, funding from his parents and was able to receive funding beyond that. But what's interesting to me is, you know, he started this e-commerce company at a time when something like 23% of Americans even had a computer. Right.

And there's early signs in the book where some of the early employees were these idealists that wanted to change the world, were there to democratize reading. And it starts to click for them in the first few weeks of Amazon launching that

Oh, my God, what's going to happen to the local bookstores, Jeff? And there's a conversation about that where they start piecing together, like, what are the repercussions for this business model? And especially as it starts taking off. I mean, we're now on the receiving end of many of those repercussions, you know, local bookstores, you know, maybe at the front of that list. In fact, I'm a guy who loves a local bookstore. But, you know, at the same time, I was also a guy when I was in high school in Dallas where you will never find me happier than in Borders Books and Music.

Right. Like it was everything I could have wanted. A lot of those places are gone. Barnes and Noble is still a pretty healthy retail presence. But it is one of those things, though, where to me in any way, looking at so many of these stories, whether or not it's anecdotal.

Amazon or Google, who, you know, I don't know if they famously did it or infamously did it once said, don't be evil. That's not their tagline anymore. Facebook, that's a whole other ballgame, right? You know, they want to connect the world and they certainly have in their own sort of destructive ways. But the idealism is,

Does it start with the founder or is that really the acolytes? And then the acolytes are clearly the scales fall from their eyes in a pretty big hurry. Yeah, those are the acolytes. But the acolytes left once they realized the culture taking shape. You know, they didn't want to work for a cutthroat company. There's a scene in the book where Jeff tells them, like, you just don't have the killer instinct, like derisively. Right. And the writing's on the wall for them. And what we see now is, you know, I've covered companies for nearly 18 years at The Wall Street Journal in some fashion. I even covered Wall Street and investment banks.

Amazon's culture is one of the most aggressive and cutthroat ones I've covered, or it is the most. And I think that translates into some of the business practices you see today, where you see employees doing whatever they can to keep their jobs and get ahead, even if it's anti-competitive behavior. Let's spend some time on the culture. So, I mean, I famously once said,

in the New York Times, and they actually it was an actually in the print edition, Dana, that I was helping run a presidential campaign, not a Montessori school, right? So like, I'm not necessarily opposed to high pressure work environments. That being said, it was interesting to see how, you know, it was with the bottom five or 6% were going to get axed every year, which I guess wasn't necessarily unusual, I guess, Jack Welch did it at GE. And so,

you know, if you're always in line for the guillotine, I guess you're going to do whatever you can to make sure you're going to get to the back of that line as quick as you can or stay there as long as you can. Yeah, that's right. Between the stack ranking, which a lot of companies had done, but a lot of them have abandoned it because of situations like this. And they also, you know, backload their pay. So you get paid the majority of your restricted stock units in years three and four if you make it to them. And some of the scenes in the book,

that are some of the most alarming are driven largely by that culture. Like, you know, there's a situation where they hired someone from Trader Joe's in the snack section because Amazon was working on its own product of private label foods. And the employee wasn't really told what she'd be working on in her interview. She moves to Seattle and her first week in headquarters, she stumbles upon this room that has brown paper over the windows and the door so no one could see inside it. Right.

She walks in and it's filled with Trader Joe's products. And what she didn't know was when Amazon's managers pitched the private label food brand, the goal was to copy the top 200 items from Trader Joe's. So then the pressure starts mounting that manager says, give us all the data that you kept.

And, you know, it becomes like a really uncomfortable situation. She sent some of the data and then he wants more. And this was reported to their legal department. They did fire the team. But the people in private label, the people on that team told me this is really emblematic of the pressure they were under. They had to create hits because they didn't want their head to be on the chopping block. I sort of see a lot of the stuff that you talk about vis-a-vis what and it's interesting that.

the anodyne and basically non-denial denial responses that Amazon gives you to just about everything, which is we have plans in place. We have firewalls in place. And it's sort of like the difference between as designed and as built, right? You know, the architect builds a building and then the engineers and the construction guys come in and there's always a difference. It doesn't matter. They could have looked at everything. And then, you know, the architect's like,

The power line is where the water line is supposed to be. Or, you know, did you know that this column is going to go through the elevator shaft? There's always something different. The point is, is like you can have all of the processes, all the rules, all the protocols in place. The truth is, if there's a collective desire not to worry about it or to not go looking for it, like I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here. Right. Then you're not going to find it. You're not going to care about it. Right. If the rules aren't being enforced, no one's going to follow them. And that's what we see time and time again in different parts of the business.

So I've always been fascinated, too, by this idea, especially in a place like with Amazon. Look, I spent a lot of time prior to my current iteration doing public affairs and public relations for companies like Amazon. I'm not sure. Maybe we did something for Amazon on the sales tax thing years ago. Right. But I was I'm still always fascinated. Right.

by people who go to work for a massive company like an Amazon or name your big Fortune 100 company. And they suddenly imbue themselves with this identity of Amazon, right? That working for this company becomes part of their personality or part of how they see themselves when the reality is, Dana, if they got hit by a bus on the way to work, Amazon ain't slowing down for them.

Right. Like, yeah, you send a letter to their family and an email saying, by the way, Bob got hit by a bus. But like, I've always been fascinated by that psychological shift.

Yeah, even some of Amazon's most senior employees, someone on the S team, which is people that reported to either Jeff Bezos when he was there or Andy Jassy, told me that Jeff viewed people as disposable. And that really does trickle down within the company. And, you know, people feel like they're only as good as their last home run. And to your point, like, yeah, the company cycles through people really quickly. It could be a pretty grueling culture. The churn is really, really high. And I think that's emblematic of what you just described. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I had a friend who worked there and I think at five years you get a different color badge. It goes from blue to red or whatever, because there's so few people that make it that long that having a different color badge is like, wow, you've been here that long. How have you done it? Right. A lot of people don't even make it to their restricted stock units in like years three and four. And then what another phenomenon I see is when they do, if they make it to the four years, like they're gone on four years in a day.

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So let's talk about how Amazon operates. And so I want to take a couple of things and bring them together. There's the politics, which is for a long time basis like, I don't want to have anything to do with these DC people. Obviously, he buys the Washington Post. They grow. They're starting to get more regulatory scrutiny for a lot of things, which based on your book seems like they deserve it. And in fact, they are in litigation right now with the FTC, which we'll get to towards the end of the show.

But, you know, it's interesting to see how, you know, they have the it just like their old rundown office to begin with in Seattle. They have an old rundown townhouse in D.C. One guy who's, you know, sort of a hail fellow, well-met old school lobbyist. And they come to a point like, nope, can't have that anymore. And now it's like, got to have the killers, got to have the killers on board there and everything.

Then you bring in like a Jay Carney, right, who worked for Time. I mean, I think I remember him from the 2000 Bush campaign when he wrote for Time. Then he's, you know, he's at the Obama White House. And suddenly you now have

Yeah, that's right. So they bring in Jay Carney, who's supposed to be this big hitter. And Amazon was like really late to the whole government relations thing.

They were spending like a paltry amount on lobbying. They had this little townhouse staffed with like five people working on all these issues, even though at this point it's like a conglomerate. Even though they viewed themselves as a startup, they had like sort of a weird disconnect there. So the board convinces Jeff that we need to start taking D.C. seriously, even though you don't want to do this. Let's bring someone in. They bring in Jay Carney and.

And they feel like they're pretty well positioned because everyone expects it's going to be a Hillary Clinton win. Right. And then the year later, it's Trump. And they're just total.

totally flat footed. They had not prepared for a Trump White House. Jeff had actually made some nasty remarks about Trump a few weeks prior to the outcome of the election on Twitter and at a Vanity Fair conference. And it's just this mad scramble. And, you know, before he even became president, Trump had said on Fox News, you know, this company is a monopoly and they should be broken up. So they're just like facing down the barrel at this point. Right. So let me ask you this. How is it

That Amazon found itself in a position now, and I take Trump's position then, and whatever it is now is sort of meaningless because he says anything he feels like whenever he feels like it. And that was probably more personally based on what Bezos has said about him as opposed to really any understanding of how the business worked. But it's a pretty amazing thing when you can be a company that finds yourself in the sights of both Donald J. Trump,

Yeah, that's one of the strangest things about this to me is this is like obviously a very fractured political landscape. Like the sides can't agree that the sky is blue. There are the strangest bedfellows on this antitrust fight. I mean, it's just so strange.

I mean, Elizabeth Warren and Ken Buck are in agreement that these companies are too big, right? Complete opposite sides of the spectrum. You know, Amazon was not welcomed at the Biden White House or the Trump White House. And there have been bipartisan investigations into big tech. You know, we even wrote recently that on the FTC and the antitrust side of this, the policy side, there are Republicans that agree with like what Lena Kahn's doing. They call themselves the conservatives, right? So it's kind of a funny battle. Right.

Right. Considering, too, that she wrote her senior thesis about Hannah Arendt. I mean, I want to go back and find that because I find that fascinating. But, you know, let's talk about the monopoly. So let's do a little history. So, you know, the late 1800s in this country, we have the Gilded Age, right? Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Carnegie, you name it, right? We had all the guys, all the old guys who, you know, still have things named after them. And

You know, back then, too, right, there was bipartisan support for antitrust legislation, the Sherman Antitrust Act. But it was a very different time, obviously, but also that, you know, you take a standard oil and that, you know, they own the train tracks, they own the oil wells, they own the refineries. They are able to put enormous pressure on not only their competitors by undercutting prices.

but also threatening, you know, customers who are using somebody else's oil, you know, keep buying from them, we'll never sell to you again. And they get broken up, you know, Standard Oil becomes Exxon, Chevron, you know, Sunoco, all of those different things. Giant leaders in their own right. Giant leaders in their own right. And of course, they're all sort of coming back together. Same with Ma Bell and AT&T, right? They were shattered and then they sort of gravitational pull of the interstellar corporate dust brings them back together. But

Amazon is interesting because you know you go back to Robert Bork who I only remember vaguely as a kid Dana but always had that really screwy haircut and weird beard and like I just just even

Even as a child, I found him or as a, you know, look, I grew up in D.C. So like I was more attuned to this stuff than other kids. I always found him very off putting. But it was this whole Chicago School of Economics, which I feel like we've sort of reached the end state of. And maybe that's what we're seeing now, which is like no regulation. You know, the government only causes trouble.

If there's any regulation at all, you're going to kill innovation, et cetera, et cetera. But really what that opens the door for, you know, starting in the 70s. And I think we forget, Dana, too, not to be too long wood in my soliloquies, how long people have been at this, right? These these policy ideas, these ideological ideas have been around for decades and they've come to full flower.

Yeah. I mean, the first antitrust laws were derived in the Gilded Age to combat the trust. There was like the wariness of the farmers and everyday people about how much power the railroad trusts and the sugar trusts had accumulated. Right. And these CEOs became the symbols of corporate greed. So the antitrust laws were written. They were sort of enforced to protect competition and competition.

They were enforced in the manner of the trust busters for decades. And then Robert Bork and the Chicago school comes along and they say, hey, we're doing this all wrong. We're actually inhibiting competition with these laws. We need to reframe them and look at their effects on prices and efficiency. And that kind of gave rise to what we see today with big tech.

These companies, for the most part, you don't pay to go on Google or Facebook as a consumer. They're free. Amazon in its early days was undercutting the market, so it was low prices. So they were able to skate by without much enforcement, even though there were other effects to these companies growing so much in size.

And that's what Lena and John Cantor and these new trust busters want to address. Right. Because I'm going to lay something out and tell me where I get my metaphor, where my metaphor literally and figuratively goes off the tracks. Okay. So Amazon owns the railroads. Okay. They also own the trains and they own the box cars. And you're going to put your stuff in their box cars, literally and figuratively in some ways.

But when they do it, they're going to charge you for being in their boxcars. Then they're going to take a cut of the sales you make from getting your thing from point A to point B. And then, by the way, if you want to be at the front of the train, not the back of the train, you also have to buy billboards to put on the side of the boxcars.

And then after all that, as they're putting your stuff in their box cars, if they like the size and shape of it, they're going to go make their own and say, by the way, you can't even put your stuff on our box cars anymore.

It's actually a really good analogy. And that's sort of what the FTC lawsuit says. Because Amazon owns the infrastructure, you know, they own the platform and they compete on it. And they have all of these different services that are, in theory, optional. But when you talk to sellers, you have to have advertising. You have to be on their logistics program to have a prime badge. There's all these things that sellers have to pay. The fees have exploded on sellers in the last decade from something like

19% to 45%. That's Amazon's cut. And Lena Kahn calls that the Amazon tax. And when I speak to sellers about what that means, it's really hard for them. The margins are compressed and a lot of them have had to raise their prices for consumers. One seller I spoke to

He runs his dad's. His dad's passed a small business to him. They make not glamorous stuff. They make like buckets and doormats and stuff like that for industrial uses. And he has $10 million in revenue on Amazon every year. But after paying for advertising on the site and logistics and all the other fees and his overhead, it translates into $30,000 in profits. So he's had to raise his prices. Which makes it almost not worth doing, right? Exactly. He could probably go make $30,000 a year driving for Uber. Right.

another big tech company and save himself all the trouble. That's exactly right. But I get, you know, let me talk about the price piece of this because

If you look at whether or not it's regulation, whether or not it's local taxation, federal taxation, whatever it is, right? What's the siren song of corporate America? You do that, costs are going to go up. But in this case, none of that is causing the jack in prices. It's that Amazon wants more that's costing customers more. So I guess I go back to the

to this idea to really strike against the Bork idea of, you know, whatever, you know, the price is not going up, the customer satisfaction, customer's number one is, well, in fact,

They are now costing consumers more because of their own internal predatory practices. I think that would be like the trust buster argument here is that for a while, Amazon traded off of this reputation for low prices because it did. It undercut the market on books and a lot of other categories to get market share. And they did that when Lena was like first writing her book.

antitrust article for the Yale Law Review. What happens is when you're building a monopoly, you're doing everything you can to steal market share and your rivals go out of business, right? I mean, Toys R Us doesn't really exist anymore. If you think about the last decade, it's been marked by this retail apocalypse, right? Let me just tell you, if there's any reason why I'll never forgive Amazon, it's because Toys R Us went out of business. And I haven't shopped there since I was a kid, but it was a magical place when I was a kid.

Right. Totally. And I spoke to three or four of their former CEOs for this book, and they say that Amazon's fingerprints are all over their bankruptcy. They could not compete. And, you know, stores like that don't exist anymore. And what the trust busters would say is you put enough of them out of business and you get more customer loyalty because there's fewer places to turn. And then you could start changing the experience. You could start tagging on the fees. You could raise the prices. You could make this experience for shoppers less special. Put ads on your content.

Exactly. Or you could put ads on Prime Video. You could flood the search page with the relevant ads, but there's fewer places for people to turn because they're locked in. Right. So let me ask a question at its core, because we all use Amazon, right? Whether or not it's to have things delivered, whether or not it's Whole Foods, whether or not it's Amazon Web Services, AWS, which I want to talk about in a second. Does it matter? Does it matter to the average consumer?

Does it matter to the country? I mean, at the end of the day, if Amazon's this big? I think it does. Even for the consumer standpoint, I think a lot of consumers don't understand that 60% of what's sold on Amazon is from third party sellers. So it's unregulated. You know, there's examples of in the book about, you know, children's toys with lead in them.

you know, strangulation hazards on children's clothing. I think that does matter. It also matters for entrepreneurs. There's also scenes in the book where Amazon's meeting with lots of up-and-coming startups, right? And

you know, their ideas are now going to other parts of Amazon and they're putting out competing products. I mean, those are engines of innovation and employment. There are ramifications to this. You know, I read the piece about the different startups, the different mom and pop stores or the couple of guys in Pennsylvania, wherever it was, they created something or the people who were already on the website. But first, you know, you get a meeting, Amazon calls and says, hey, I want to talk to you. And, you know, you're a two guy shop.

You created something. You're really good at it. You make you're making some money. And then it's like, OK, yeah, we're going to send over this NDA. Just sign it and send it back. Of course, you know, maybe you're not lawyered up. Maybe you're not as savvy as you might. And you don't read the fine print, which is basically like we can take anything you tell us and go use it and you can't do anything about it.

Which is not what an NDA is, right? That's not what an NDA is. That's basically they just signed their death warrant. Right. And the pattern played out the same way every single time. They'd get access to these companies. The companies would open the kimono in good faith negotiations. They'd give over their financials, their patents, their engineering, their technology, their roadmaps. And then Amazon would engage with them for months. They'd bring the heads of different businesses at Amazon that stood to benefit from that information because they're creating competing products.

And then, you know, once you're a third-party seller, I was shocked. Dana, shocked.

I guess I shouldn't have been, by all of the data that Amazon requires you to provide to them that basically tells them everything about your business from soup to nuts. Yeah, it's definitely a pain point for sellers on the site that sometimes they'll get kicked off of Amazon.com and Amazon will say, well, send us who your manufacturer is or information like that. And they're worried about providing it because there is this

weird dynamic where they rely on the platform, but they're also competing with it. It's their biggest rival. And that goes for also their partners on things like the Alexa side or content, right? What's striking to me is that Amazon, so many of its fiercest competitors work with it in some respect, whether that's on the Alexa side or Amazon Web Services, right? Because it's become unavoidable.

You could make the argument that Amazon is many, many different companies, but let's make it simple for me because I'm a simpleton, which is you have all the stuff that normal human beings see from Amazon, which is the website, the movies, everything else, right? Whole Foods. And then you've got Amazon Web Services, which serves as a significant amount of online infrastructure for many companies, large and small.

And one, and I don't know if this is still true, but one, AWS really subsidizes the other. So the argument could be that like, well, maybe they shouldn't be together, right? That these are two separate and distinct things. And that without this, there's no way you could basically, I think we used to call it dumping, Danny. You couldn't dump these products onto the market if you didn't know that there was going to be sufficient cash flow and capital reserves available or profit opportunities.

on the come line, you know, because AWS is running the internet. Yeah, it's interesting. There's this misnomer that Amazon's retail isn't profitable. It's very profitable. I have the internal numbers in the book, largely because it's been ratcheting up those fees, right? Whereas it wouldn't have been in times past. But I think the secret sauce for Amazon is this conglomerate. You know,

You know, other dynasties like this have been forced to break up because it just didn't make sense. The activists said, GE, why are you doing all these things? Focus on turbines and two other things and spin them off. And they did. And that's largely happened throughout corporate America. Bezos created this conglomerate as the model went out of fashion, but it gives it a lot of power and they've made it work. And it gives them a lot of leverage with all their partners, their competitors even, and with sellers. So-

All of this now leads to where we are now. But I want to talk about something towards the end of the book when Bezos, and I want to talk a little bit about Bezos before we get to the court cases. Bezos is upset because Amazon has a bad reputation and they keep getting bad stories in the press. And he wants the image to be better. And I have been part of these campaigns, Dana. They go through all of these very time-intensive campaigns.

expensive operations to fly people around and create new stories and all this other stuff. And the only people getting healthy on the deal is like, you know, PR firms, right? Because they're marking everything up. But it's like the idea of when I used to do crisis communications work for a company, your problem is not bad news stories. Your problem is the thing that you're doing that's causing the bad news stories.

That's what the first question I used to ask. Have you stopped doing the thing that got you in trouble? If you haven't, you should do that first. You know, so suddenly you have, you know, these powerhouse lobbyists, these powerhouse high profile guys like Carney. I'm sure they've got 800 PR firms on standby, right? And crisis firms and everything else who are all get all willing to bill out the wazoo. But the truth is, is what we all know is that if you're not going to act better, you're not going to get better news.

Yeah. And Bezos, his strategy was really just to he tell his team, punch them back rather than like fixing like the underlying cause of why they're being criticized. You know, they were very sensitive. They almost had a victim mentality at Amazon senior levels. They're like, no other company has ever been attacked like us in history. Dana, no one understands us. They don't understand why we're so brilliant. And if they were sitting where we were and I've seen this in politics, too, they're not sitting where we were.

So they don't understand. And if they were smart enough to be here, they'd be here. And they almost said, you know, they didn't almost say it. They thought that their treatment was like worse than like the big tobacco CEOs back in the day. And he said, punch back.

Instead of saying like, OK, well, we're being criticized for the way our warehouse workers are treated or our effects on competition and everything else. And this created this like very pugnacious, combative stance as it relates to their public relations, but also government relations, where they hired really smart people to do their bidding on the Hill. People with backgrounds from the DOJ and the FTC and different campaigns. But in Seattle, it became so common.

reactionary and, you know, scorched earth that they undermined all that team's efforts. And they got in Twitter pissing matches with active senators and congresspeople or Joe Biden. And that really just hurt their cause. Right. Because, you know, like I know that Bezos, you know, fancies himself a David, but like he's Goliath, right? He's the man, right? He is definitely the man. They are the man. But let me just you mentioned something I don't want to let go before our conversation ends is so let's talk about the warehouse piece.

Amazon is making a hell of a lot of money on a daily, quarterly, annualized basis. And they keep having trouble in their warehouses. I know they have been... You talk about punching back on unionization efforts. I assume they're as hard as anybody. But why is it that even today, I guess...

If you're expendable at the corporate office, then you're even more expendable on the assembly line. Like why not just say,

We could solve a lot of our problems here if we paid people the money we have to pay them. Yeah, their biggest resistance right now is to a union. I would say that they actually pay above rate on the warehouse workers side of the business. They're pretty competitive. They're higher than Walmart and higher than minimum wage, certainly. But the biggest rallying cries from the warehouses are worker safety and then also the unions. And they're staunchly anti-union. And that's

been a source of friction between them and the Biden administration, where President Biden says he's the most pro-union president in history, right? And he's embraced Amazon's rivals like Chris Smalls, who is the union activist at the Staten Island warehouse for Amazon, like Doug McMillan, the CEO of Walmart. But, you know, Jeff Bezos couldn't get an audience there because even though the Trump years were

horrible four years for them. The Biden years have not been great either. And Bezos has been mostly persona non grata. And, you know, Amazon learned that they were viewed as too toxic to touch.

So let's talk about where are we now with Amazon, Dana? The book's out. You know, they still have their issues. There shouldn't be called Amazon. They should be called Leviathan or, you know, the squid from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Where are they now and where do they go in the future? So the FTC filed a monopoly lawsuit against them in September saying that they are a monopoly. There's some language in the lawsuit that insinuates that they could be seeking a breakup of the company.

But this won't go to court until 2026. Right. And Amazon doesn't seem too deterred by this litigation. There's a scene in the book that I think is really telling. It's a few weeks after the lawsuit is filed and Amazon's having this all hands meeting and their general counsels on stage talking about the lawsuit. And he basically says, you know, this is kind of like a Taylor Swift lyrics. Haters are going to hate. Shake it off.

And at the same time, Andy Jassy, the current CEO, in the midst of all these regulators saying Amazon's too big, has told his team we could be a $10 trillion company in the next decade. So I don't think anything's really going to stop them from growing and sprouting new tentacles and trying to reach those goals. Is there a tipping point, though, where enough – I mean, again, we're stuck, right?

I mean, we have Amazon for so many things. We got, what, three choices for cell phone providers. We got more options in streaming, but the truth is you're still going to use one of five or six streamers. It's probably going to come through your internet provider, of which there's probably two where you live, right? Three if you count Starlink, I guess. So is there any escape for Joe and Jan public here? Yeah, I think people could be more intentional, but it's hard. In the epilogue, I get into how...

While I was reporting out this book, Amazon bought my doctor's office, like literally bought one medical where all my labs are, all my tests. Right. So they're encroaching into ever new spaces and it does make it hard to avoid. And, you know, what's interesting, full circle, I went back to some of Amazon's earliest employees from the 1994, 1995 era to get their thoughts on Amazon. And a lot of them, even though they became like remarkably wealthy from working there and the stock options and whatnot, they're still

say that they either canceled their prime or they're concerned that they helped create a monster, right? So they try to eschew it as well, but some of them say it's unavoidable. And so first, let me ask you this. As a neophyte to antitrust litigation, why is it going to take another two and a half years to go to trial? Oh, there's just so much...

Stuff that goes on in the background about everyone's trying to do their discovery and haggle about the number of witnesses. Like no one makes this an easy process. So this is actually a generally normal timeline. Yeah. Okay. And so, you know, worst case for Amazon is they do get broken up. Yeah.

I'd say that's the worst case scenario and that, you know, they're holding on to this business model and the way that they're structured because it works very well for them. What does it look like in the future for them? I mean, is Amazon, you know, okay, so they're on the cutting edge of, you know, figuring out how to replicate other people's stuff and jack fees and all that other stuff. But are they, you know, a second quarter century into the 21st century kind of company? Are they going to figure it out?

Are they that advanced? Are they artificial intelligence? All these other things that are now rising to the fore. Is Amazon prepared for that? Are they going to get swallowed up in an eddy they can't see? No, I think that they're pretty well positioned. If you think about what they're targeting next, it's areas with a lot of white space. It's health care, which they've just like really touched the tip of the iceberg there. It's satellites to go head to head with Starlink.

And an AI where they're pretty well positioned. Right. So his Andy Jassy's goal of being a 10 trillion dollar company, even though that sounds absurd at face value because there's nothing like that, might not be that far off.

What role does Bezos still play in the company? He's executive chair. He no longer is CEO of the company, and he spends a lot of his time on Blue Origin, which is the space company. What is it with these guys and rockets? If you figure it out, let me know. I mean, it's just like, oh, look, I love rockets. I think they're cool, right? I like space stuff. I just don't like, of all the things you could spend your time on, like with all the things we got to work on, like, really? Another gigantic phallic rocket?

rocket shooting into space or not like that's what you it just doesn't make any sense to me it's not my area of expertise either no i just it's just it's just so weird they all want to they all want to leave the planet as fast as they can well maybe we should encourage that all right dana what else i mean you're on the amazon beat is there anything else amazon related that that you're working on that the good folks here need to hear

You know, we just had a really interesting front page story come out last week about Amazon's, you know, they tout being customer obsessed. That's something that they say every speech that they have. And this story was about a secret operation they had inside the company under a shell company called Big River Services to get onto their rivals' websites to be sellers on like Walmart.com and all over the world, really, and to get onto FedEx and to get information about their fiercest competitors. I just think that was...

a pretty elucidating investigation because it just pokes through the veneer of them being solely customer obsessed. They're also competitor obsessed. And it shows the lengths to which they will go to to win. Again, it's that whole idea of what the letter and what the spirit is. Like you could say you're customer obsessed all you want. It's just not true anymore. Right. The customer is a means to an end. And there's some contradictions there. Like, you know, the worst thing I could think of as a mother is to buy a children's toy with lead in it. Right. But

there's things like that that exist on the platform. I don't know if that's customer obsessed. No, I wouldn't think so. But if they wanted to, they would sell the same lead laden child's product for less if they thought they could put the other guy out of business, probably. So, all right, Dana, thank you so much for joining us. Before you go, where can we find your work and where can we find you online? I am on Twitter and I write for the Wall Street Journal, but we would love if you could place an order for the book at sold everywhere, including Amazon.

All right, guys, the book is The Everything War, Amazon's ruthless quest to own the world and remake corporate power just dropped yesterday. And go find it at a nice local bookseller or Dana's website or the publisher's website, any place but Amazon. No offense to Amazon. As always, gang, you can find me on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen USA. And always please go sign up.

The home front over on Substack. Dana Mattioli, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Reid. And everybody else, we'll see you next time. Thanks again to everyone for listening. Be sure to follow and subscribe to The Lincoln Project on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or however you listen. Don't forget to leave a five-star review.

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