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

you asked me about flaws earlier like taking your cfo and bitch slapping him in front of a broom it was a message i feel like i could rule the world i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days on on a road less travel ethan evans is here ethan said your former vp over at amazon prime you're there for a long time you're they're you're at amazon for what fifteen years twenty years fifteen two hundred years but yeah dog years for sure so sam you you don't know this but me and ethan kinda loosely worked together when my company got bought by twitch i joined what's called a a et team executive team and on that team was ethan and i was i 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 is that heck i 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 so i was told you were the adult in the room and i was oh oh okay gotcha i better stay more things to this guy is that true that is largely true there was in fact early on there was a huge overt tone that i was just a spy and that my job there was to like shadow him and then take him out so there was very much a worry that i i was the replacement and waiting when they got sick of ami that was never that was never the actual plan but you can't convince people with that telling them there is no conspiracy as hopeless was it only heighten right oh yeah did not you're right denial just makes it worse because remember when twitch was acquired it was the biggest deal ever and now thinking i like you're saying twitch was acquired for only one billion dollars yep actually nine hundred seventy million so yeah like it didn't even quite make a billion i like the mental win of not paying the full billion because you know what that point like is the deal really gonna fall apart over the last thirty no i'm not sure but somebody had to win at the end and it's like you will feel worse if this falls apart than i will right is what i whenever i read even i read that price well i think the most interesting thing is twitch definitely had the last laugh because amazon stock five x in the in the earn out period for those people yeah so we had engineers you know whose market salary anywhere else was say two hundred two hundred and fifty k back then vest out at two 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 two million to two hundred and fifty k right you the correct the salary right well when we're not gonna pay them two million again so there's this this huge vest cliff because of the five thing from the big buyout and we lost a lot of people because 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 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 were hands on manager if you were giving bezos a three six year review or like trying to say like here's your weaknesses what 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 stress what would you say for both i think both are yeah like but with the start 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 his strength and it was really funny because i saw a moment where he was obviously working on it probably a talk he got an executive coach and it seemed like you could see the coach kinda with the the puppet strings or the hand up the butt right like 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 get like a nod and then the three things to improve and that all 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 a hundred and seventy million dollars 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 kendall 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 you'd be like but but in flaw of his was being always critical and i was in a meeting where he more or less you know told us everything we have missed for an hour and then stood up to leave and then literally turn back to the table i said oh yeah but good job you're doing great and walk back out and you could just see he was like checking off his list and he's like alright the coach said praise it would it no he evolved over time right and got okay so so he he didn't compliment enough what else what what some other if if you're working with you're gonna say needs to compliment more what i well i'm gonna say you know give your team some sort of props 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 disaster so he's probably learned this lesson but i would say realized 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 was not a good product so it's i try and 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 them weren't 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 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 ridicule 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 stop the meeting and said so as the a team for this project available because this is clearly the b team and and dude did they like snap right now did 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 sv worked directly for jeff and said it was a terrible meeting this is what happened you know no one can deal with them jeff would get frustrated and go into attack mode and what that really was yes he was frustrated with the team that 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 a case of that that i know about is one gear 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 his 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 p 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 led his emotions through on both sides if he was unhappy that unhappiness came out you know in in conduct do you think that that thing you said because the thing you said were you could be working a team could be working on something for a month or three months you come in and you present a plan you think you thought of everything and 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 on 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 it kinda shut i didn't know what to make of it i'm curious what you make of it is it just 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 becomes successful is to see how other people did it whether you're gonna copy them or just use it as inspiration because then now you know what's possible so starting at the age of twenty four i did this relentlessly and i was very methodical about it and i created a spreadsheet where i tracked roughly fifty 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 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 twenty four 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 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 in was somewhat that way as well you could sit around me be like i am smart you are smart but that guy is 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 ten thousand hours to become an expert he literally spent ten thousand hours reading those documents and giving feedback so sure he also had greater context but it was ten thousand hours of taking a business you don't really know reading about it for twenty minutes and then having the ability to turn it into an insight have you guys ever met someone who's successful in not smart yeah i went a real estate conference we've met a bunch of them this was great like whatever people call a jeff smart i'm like did you have any peers who became uber successful who were average smart oh boy you're putting me on dangerous his ground because the peers will see this bro did it you just like linkedin post about how like someone tries to seduce your wife like you're you're you don't mind revealing at all that post a while ago but anyway it's obviously very memorable yes there were a couple of people at amazon and i think what i think is everyone who ends up rich unless they're just lucky or inherited it 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 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 and 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 and it 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 like the high beta leader who's gonna try and make that thing an a but might not get there we were at a off site once for twitch and this lady presented what she called the trust equation mh 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 was credibility and she said this is saying if you say i got it i'll take care of it that means 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 of the team's best interest at heart gap and she said walk to the area of the room that you think it most important the most important variable in the trust equation i think there let's say there's twenty of us eighteen of us walk to integrity including myself one guy hub bear if you're walked over to intimacy yep of course did and then emmett walked over to credibility and sat there yeah i was like what 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 i that's just seem like i i couldn't and i guess eighteen people agreed and i 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 didn't care if you're particularly good person i just care that when you say i got this that means you got this and it was like such a like a wound in the ceo that what do make well that that's 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 then he could then therefore jeff could turn his back on some fire and be like that guy will throw his body on it and roll around and take the burns until the fire is 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 does the is the a team here i would be like i'm out like i i mean i i don't 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 generate generational rich yeah great question you know i i think the guy i'm talking about ended up the last time i knew is probably worth about seventy five million so clearly generational rich by the way this amazon stock price two thousand five i think is like in the two dollar range it's now two hundred forty eight i number for if you want it you'll love this yeah yep i calculated at one point for my first date and my last day amazon stock went up nine thousand eighty two percent because i know my exact start date my exact stop dates so i could do the math nine thousand eighty two percent it's of course gone up more since then but yeah nine thousand percent anyway had you held the whole time of where would you be a oh today held even until today oh hell i don't know forty or fifty million i guess i i try not to think of i've never done that math i'm afraid to do that math okay you know i don't want i don't want the pain of that because i went to amazon with no real savings like i was thirty five 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 and you know got i think guy kawasaki sa talks about the cost of like you know he talks about like a five million dollar porsche and that was like a fifty thousand dollar porsche of bought with stock that would have been worth five million if only he had kept it yeah every diaper you look at now and you're like oh that's a thousand dollar a hundred and eighty dollar diaper right there exactly the 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 so that was gonna be a good market and it was just this reality that like this guy thinks lots of people have whole home sonos systems and that's just you know particularly then is there a solve for that you know comedian talk about this where they you know why do comedian retire they're not like athletes where they're you know they they don't have the speed anymore so why do comedian fall off and the reason is they get rich and when you you're rich you use money to solve your problems and problems are the source of all the comedy the tragedies yep the irritation of life is what's relatable and when you're not 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 do they doing to actually stayed touch and understand the customer well they they do you know 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 my self lose touch because i also do it i have done it and i've tried to watch like what are the decisions in my life you know like i have gardeners i hate mowing so i don't well everyone else who's like fighting with their lawn mower you know 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 which is pretty crazy isn't it that a a company as powerful as amazon which has which billions of data points you can get one or you could read our email and or and you read that same email five times in a week and or you're like i see a trend that's a a magic power and be really interesting yeah jeff jeff said between data and anecdotes trust the anecdotes his reasoning was even at at amazon scale let's say ninety nine percent of packages get to houses on time and write well yeah but one percent of amazon scale still means like twenty five million packages a day not getting there right and so 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 one percent which is still huge and we 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 he you'd get an email and it will be a forward of that complaint with just a single question mark at the top and everybody we called these question mark mails emails and everybody knew what that meant which is meant you have twenty four 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 gonna be implemented soon and the worst was where you're like yeah this is where it's gonna take a while so i remember one of these you you like his pit criticisms you'll love this he sent us an email we got something worse than a question mark this is when i ran in 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 eu me you just got want to season one of on entourage it's trying like it but lets all gold stuff yeah just but it was that's how he scaled that process was you'd send these question 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 that's a way to scale that culture across hundreds of leaders is this standardized process of customers complaining to me i send you question marks you tell me what's going on you better damn will fix it you know because say i'm jeff viewed every customer is his customer even you know he's 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 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 dot com the agent customer platform for growing businesses amazon bezos kinda seems like a near perfect entrepreneur i think z has the takes a 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 it i mean i've read the everything store ever some books about them 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 and the trust equation he has a high trust equation with me because 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'd like doing but you know he's he is that good so you're right about that can we talk about this idea of strategically patient tactically impatient sure 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 they 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 ten 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 twenty quarters we can't lose any of those or we won't get there so it's like you have this ten year a ten year view with a twenty four hour clock yes that you're giving yourself every day ten year view and say i got ten years to get there you'll never 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 eu i can't say they're all directly from jeff but a lot of eu to say yes we're a sweat shop 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 means still mean that your life is in harmony so that was a way of saying like yes 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're had a good idea it doesn't mean you can go home at three we still like great write that one down and get me another one by seven and another one by ten and even can go home at ten 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 mh right like or you know do work here and don't see them that's okay too like go home at six put them in into bed get back on at eight worked 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 we're relentlessly high bar you know and so great you're super smart you killed it we're gonna the goal dude do you ever get nervous talking trash now yeah no because you're you're very transparent 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 watch this inside amazon and it'll go around and 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 ask me about you know who's who's not as smart i was like oh what do i actually wanna say because you know 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 shirt for bullshit i here i'll be transparent this way when i got to vp i looked around at my peers and i i did what all of us do even if we don't admit it i evaluated now amazon is huge there were about three hundred p's and so i kinda stack rank myself like where am i in the three hundred because there were only about a dozen sv so if i wanna be one of them like gonna have to be on top of the pile of three hundred 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 am not i'm not punching on his level like so i staggering rang myself and i said i'm kind of in the middle and i don't have any problem at admitting i feel i was like a a middle vp at amazon i can live with that but that's because i could see the people who are 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 you know unless you go super dystopian and 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 for my coaching program right or or here's here's the worst thing you know this call you know this from quit no you know this from twitch sean the worst thing anybody can do is respond to this podcast and say ethan is so wrong do opposed to a tweet what an asshole is 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 lynn their voice to mind 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 come because i'm curious you know i was at amazon i was kind of a kid i was what twenty nine thirty years old maybe feel free to beat me up well what did you what did you think was i maybe there was nothing notable i'm curious love to know on the positive side you taught me about the value of ten year plans and ten year list because you and i had a discussion of you had a ten year plan and like ten year goals and we're checking them off and i remember discussing with you i dug out my old ten year plan which i had written but done nothing with and now i pay much more attention to that the things if i were criticized this sean i knew in one is you obviously didn't fit it twitch let alone at amazon meaning you were clearly entrepreneurial driven it was pretty obvious that like you were round peg in a square hole and 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 he kept it too real wow we keep it the real goes wrong well keeping it real is great but your inside a machine you know a real like a real rock inside a machine just stops the machine it doesn't change the machine you said that was a bad boy all i'm hearing because i was available boy i know i'm kinda loving it 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 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 disconnection well that was the disconnect that 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 it's another fact scam 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 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 ja let that fly eventually he did get tired of it and emmett it left and never were layoffs offs 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 two hundred million this year so 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 you have a coaching business yeah you do podcasts here you're we're all the same here and yet like both sean and i we've we've founded companies and i look at these guys who run these huge businesses or who are part of these huge businesses and everyone once in all i feel envy where i'm like they're taking over the world and it sounds really interesting in fascinating the scale you've experienced that now you're experiencing being your own boss and having a small business yep and you don't have billions of dollars to play with and you're not gonna change the entire world but you're gonna like be the director of your own movie at a 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 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 eleven out of twelve 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 twelve i didn't know i could work from home and work on only things i love and work only part time and make kinda equal money you know at amazon my target comp my last year this is something ami knows was nine hundred thousand dollars 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 fifty to sixty hours a week plus travel that'll be an average of twenty 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 kinda feel like we where yeah yay 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 envy is real it's the platform that if i as an amazon vp let alone one of the vps 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's said i love working for myself much more do you guys ever think about this i think i i i i read a lot of history ethan and i and i like studying ceos i like studying personalities often oftentimes i wonder like what will what would certain titans do if they weren't doing the thing that they are 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 so 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 so he was like a a trader yeah he was he worked at a place called d shaw and and he was a trader and he used to talk about this idea the everything store i guess with the d shaw guy and then one day he loaded up his car drove to seattle to go build it and of course as they say the rest is history only you know thirty five 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 ra cotton in his writing neville writes about like how do you live so that ninety nine times out of a hundred you end up wealthy but he has an acknowledgment you're not gonna end up equally wealthy in those ninety nine parallel lives i think there's a a very realistic life where jeff ends up running some company or founding a few companies some 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 ten years older he's already deeply entrenched in a partner at d shaw making ten million a year and he probably doesn't drop everything to go and if he's ten 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 it all time sean i don't know if you do either but i think about because it if it is if what you're saying is true that means that opportunity selection i think sean you call it something else would you say projects 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 mh 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 the greatness requires a a great person but an equally great opportunity and the great opportunity thing is probably easier to change and how great you are well so a story that would reinforce that i told you when i joined the 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 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 we'll like take all the books music and video and you know make them available to these three product teams what do you wanna do and i said oh i'm a product guy i wanna do the video team well low 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 wants it 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 ab 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 retire i don't know whatever whatever retired but goes to you know he's in a ibiza he's taking oyster right and you got down and he 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 this 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 and what's that opportunity sean is that he's taking ai to like manufacturing companies ethan you might have better than me my understanding is he says the kinda 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 i'm not sure exactly what it is but it's to build shit you know it's well with the name jeff likes the literal lambs 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 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 could 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 dug out and decide when i'll come to the plate oh this this picture is is pitch counts in the high eighties i'm gonna come take my swings now oh it's a relieve 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 i think what's even more impressive and use the baseball analogy is not swinging so he you know yeah warren buffett famously said you know there's no cold strikes in 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's swung at the obvious pitch of ai it's that for five years or six years or 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 in 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 you he didn't swing out that i think is you know it's the dog that didn't bark that's actually the the one that you you should pay attention to because i would say most of us spend too much of our time swinging at useless stuff at you know swinging at the wrong pitches to the point where we're not even available mentally or physically to 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 d 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 wanted he was pitched health care which he's dabble in certainly he was pitch travel i was part of pitching travel to him like oh amazon you know has all these customer relationships we should compete with ex xp 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 same 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 three million revenue although we do on average something like twenty five million dollars in revenue we have the founders of door a fig of blue shoe 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 applying and go through this vetting process they're putting 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 m mfa 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 start that does at least three million in revenue and you just wanna go ahead pull forward five or ten years worth of success then check it out the url is join hampton dot com again the url join hampton dot com how do like i like him or even the andy ja think his name is when your ceo of one of the largest companies and or or one of the wealthiest persons on people on earth how do you keep 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 one sort of slightly overweight security guards sitting at a desk and that guy was some retired limited pro baseball picture i think he'd pitched 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 picture so that was phase one then one day 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 opened 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 it's security so i went back to the guy because i'm curious and i'm like so your security right he's like yeah and i'm like so where's the panic button he's like oh it's right here and you know at that point somewhere in the building there was a swat team you know 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 four that anyone could take the elevator two in the new buildings now like andy ja there's the andy chassis 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 you know and it's 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 we held an annual picnic in the beginning at like a big farm outside of seattle he would come out to the farm there was a weird game we played called broom ball broom ball took like a one of the exercise balls you work out on the squishy ones not heavy and broom and you kinda played soccer well people got really hurt in this because you have enthusiastic engineers who have no coordination but lots of enthusiasm swinging broom at each other one of my bosses had somebody else break his hand by hitting his hand jeff used to play broom ball i don't think he's probably been that well certainly since he retired but i don't think it was at an amazon picnic for like a shit long 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 ten thousand people his presence are absence you know a it was probably unpleasant it'd be only two percent 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 starts with an idea so what were you there what was it i joined amazon right after prime i've met the engineer who may still be at amazon you can 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 you know if there's a little appropriation going on there what wasn't that unique right like costco like well there's 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 yeah there's so there originally there was supposed to be no perks it wasn't a per 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 he could see things lining up it was right after the internet crash kind of instilled the 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 one hundred because they had to figure out how to announce it and start doing it in one hundred days it's not a two day shipping program it's a two day delivery program and you might be like what 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 gets down to where two days he could do often one day through the post office or one day on his own trucks and 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 ty he was still jeff bezos the dot com maybe dot bomb guy in any case whether it was for from him or from charlie charlotte there was this thing at amazon is you'll love this it was called the idea tool and anybody could put any idea into the idea tool and you know 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 i then presto a hundred 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's gonna be expensive if you'd lose money mh and so there had to be some strategic rationale or some big picture vision or some clever hack to make that pencil out when you didn't it wasn't clear that it would pencil out right yeah i 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 could shift the unit economics so that you can do that with prime had a trial run that you're not thinking of a recalling and that trial run was simply free shipping before there was prime jeff had a big argument again with his other guy jeff wi who was the walmart guy where he said look we have to figure out a way to do free shipping and wi said yeah but jeff shipping costs money like 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 freak 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 a hundred dollars and they realized like oh okay at a hundred dollars we can put enough stuff in a box to get enough profit to to give the shipping away and then they started carving away so if you actually look at the history it went a hundred seventy five fifty then twenty five and it sat at twenty five 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 twenty five dollars 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 dvd cds some mix there was enough profit to ship it for free so prime was an outgrow already of having figured all that out and seen 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 like good good design is used i think poorly good design means the the customer does the desired action but oftentimes like a brooklyn cool kid will think good design means like certain color flat like whatever this bullshit is but if you go to like amazon kindle which is their listing page which is like one of the top selling products how to match 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 mh it's mostly copy it's pretty ugly there are some photos but it is not what a twenty five year old cool kid whatever design can you tell me about some of the ab b experiments that you guys ran or what the 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 ab b tested and the winner is what drives up sales it's a program called web lab and you run a web lab and there are many they have a complicated system so that thousands of competing experiments can be running at the same time and yet somehow they can dis instill 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 you militant could not add a millisecond to load time you know if you wanted to add a feature you had to figure out how to do it load time neutral so the design the the the overall design principle i guess i'm telling you it 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 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 two thousand five that means i was there in sort of the recession of two thousand seven two thousand eight 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 you know is it time to get the resume sharp again amazon profit 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 it just a huge driver for many many years i feel guilty sometimes shopping on amazon because they just hey 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 like for birthday parties it's just plastic bullshit because and like i'll be like oh someone just went on amazon and type in kid's bike because i just got four of the exact same ones was there ever like a sentiment of like i don't know if this is actually a net positive so obviously there was some thinking about that you know 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 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 wouldn't use those words we say a lot of people buy dumb shit like like we are can well 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 brought range of dumb shit to buy and also he would certainly say if i don't sell them the dumb shit you know the benton and boys will so you know because walmart was a huge stocking horse and opponent for a long time and say like if people want dumb shit we should do it best there there's a there's an ethan at a sc a new amazon principle amazon should sell the dumb shit fastest and cheapest was was there anybody that you know he quoted a lot or he seemed to admire or you know was a big fan of that you we wouldn't we wouldn't know the big one i can't remember but if somebody warren buffett also follows you guys will know i'm the gentleman who said the market isn't a short term it's a voting machine long term it's a weighing machine benjamin graham benjamin graham so jeff quoted that a lot his he had a variation of it which is he said look when amazon stock goes up ten percent you're it doesn't mean we're ten percent smarter so when it goes down ten percent don't go around hang dog and feel like we're ten percent dumb 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 gaap results you know we prioritize free cash flow not optimizing for quarters he 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 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 kinda hose 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 is the previous cfo guy named tom sku tac 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 we'll do this do that and this is jeff sharp badge he turned to the cfo it said tom well how much is that tom i might wanna spend it yeah it's 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 and wasn't that 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 and because the cfo was trying to be pretty diplomatic right like hey jeff stop wasting money like that would have been like off but like hey jeff you know we only have so much money in the bank is a pretty soft way to roll like hey boss could you think a little bit before you spend another ten 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 it you you have you you also have a gray voice thank you we got a great voice you have an announce our voice it's lovely wow appreciate that what do you what do you what do you gotta do in the next couple years what's your ten year goal so i left amazon to try to help other people have success to pay i i say to pay for on 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 gonna do with that because a lot of people don't have any they're still focused on i gotta get the nest egg big i gotta pay off the mortgage i gotta get to kids through college so that's my main teaching is yes but then what 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 kinda catches them as they come across the border and re homes 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 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 in mastermind so i can scale a little so that's next up on the business front ten 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 wanna create more people in that situation that's pretty cool this guy i think you're a surprisingly good answer for what sounds like a simple question that almost nobody really has a good answer to so props you credit sean you're the one who inspired him to well done well thank you for calling thank you coach sean at no well to having the ten year plan know i do have it written out and bill gates i think said most people underestimate sorry overestimate what they can do in one year but underestimate what they can do in ten years so i combine that with what sean said about ten 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 gonna 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 pull up that note sean i know something cool just came out of that ethan something see it's it's on red i can you really can you it just to see trying a a triangle you're a little like a comb like vision right so if you're looking out ten and you know i made it really broad it was just ten years out you know it should be very simple something fit on the size of a sticky out right what you just said you said cool ten years from now they're want there to be a batch of people who are in a much better spot and you define that spot you said people who 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 i i i have that i i i went out to a date night with my wife and we were talking and you know 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 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 i have no idea when i'm gonna do that sort of just this thing i say yep and and there's a danger in that yep and being the type of person who had just has shit that they say and so you know you gotta pull out you gotta 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 someday has it's 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 slay the money monster enough and the success monster enough and the i'm 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 kinda have a simple what are these building blocks of each year what are they building towards is there something or we just stacking legos and we'll see what happens at the end yeah i'm a big believer in planning one thing if you wanna give people sort of a tangible you know a lot of people are working in corporate jobs i absolutely used 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 a grandpa pod 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 hey i don't know if you ever saw this he would go live on twitch which is like not you would ethan yeah yeah it would go live there would be like thirty or forty viewers in the chat which is on twitch you know not not small but not big for like it's not like you're not crushing it and it's very modest and you know it's username you know ball's balls sixty three and balls sixty three is listening to this guy like are you really a vp at amazon like what you're just giving career advice out here and then he would do it and he would do it weekly and he would i really admire 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 but and maybe you didn't need that time i really but i knew generally so fun fact though amazon vps executives were not allowed to speak to the public without p approval so i knew that and i'm like that i wanna do what i wanna 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 f and to and i was very careful and i said i i figured like how can i get around the stupid p restriction and i said i think it would be really valuable if i started streaming on twitch because i need to use our product and i'm one of our executives i wanna 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 wanna 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 dating people in obvious responses of course he wrote back that's awesome you 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 ja that vp calls me up and says like seems like you're talking in public without p approval every week and of course like oh no well first i've had p 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 i e 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 realized realizes i've like put up the shields that are gonna get hard gonna be you you you j him a little yeah but he saw it and he's like so what's really going on here i envision some future where maybe i wanna 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 shin fine don't say anything stupid right like you know he 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 wanna 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 be come 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 coach 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 call he used to call into radio stations mh 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 pho i will cure it i'll cure it in seven minutes i don't care if you've had it for seventeen years you give me seven minutes and i will snap you out of that pattern and people were like oh this guys a charlotte and he said oh you think i'm a charlotte wonderful well why don't you say it to my face and they're like what he's like i will be here to prove it i will be at the mall on west by the fountain and he's like you can anybody can come and you could see for yourself that this is real this is real 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 seventy minutes for him to like run his whole routine until he felt like he got him there but then he would do it he check back anyway like i got him and he would do it again the next week in the next week and he was just performing at malls on like not even thing just meet me by the by the fountain and he would call into radio stations with the shock value thing just to get rep he did that free you for like for three years yeah well definitely my early days on twitch where grim right and god 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 ten thousand questions live so if it's a career question anyway unlikely you're gonna ask me something i haven't heard before well 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 oh thank you and and i think it's 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 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 wanna hear but then i did a 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 by fall into a lot and you have a gift of doing telling them the truth but in a way that that doesn't leave him feeling bad and i don't know exactly how you do it but i try to i'm trying to piece it together still is there a tip and how to do that there is it comes from a book little bit less known called leadership and self deception by the ar 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 and 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 that i'm saying your baby's ugly right it's like i hate to break it to you but you know you gotta 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 the 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 it's 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 kinda 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 position thing in that circumstance where i could say you know it's not that i wanna 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 soon yeah i'm like looking at my computer all these things you keep mentioning i'm like running down i'm like looking at leadership self deception i'm like and all this stuff down here this is a good episode because we took a ton of notes but we appreciate you alright thank you sam 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 alright thank you that's it that's a pop i feel like i could rule where to i know i could be what i want to from at all in it like a day's off on a goal travel never looking back alright let's take a quick break i wanna 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 hs 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 out wherever you get your podcast