So, here's a weird thing, I've received emails from two people named Madison about Jeff Bezos' name. One was in response to us talking about what like his friends call him. Like, do they call him Jeff if they work at Amazon? And uh, Madison wanted us to know that, in fact, at the fulfillment center where she worked, they called him J-Buzz, but not to his face. I imagined he doesn't spend a ton of time around, and Madison confirmed that. Saying that it wasn't really as if J-Buzz was her boss, so much as her boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's... et cetera.

I also got an email from Madison (a separate Madison) that wanted me to know that it wasn't Jeff Bee-zos it was Jeff Bae-zos. And I don't know what I say; I don't know if I say Bee-zos or Bae-zos or Bee-zoar or J-Buzz or what. I but I think that I generally say Bee-zos, cause I feel like, that's what I hear the news people say, but I probably said Bee-zos on the pod one time. I apologize to J-Buzz for mispronouncing his name. You know, I've heard that J-Buzz will still, still reads emails from customers. Which, I feel like, once you let people know that it's a problem, it’s gonna be an issue. I mean, I have things to say to J-Buzz. Would it be like, would he be more likely to respond if I called him J-Buzz who knows, I don't! No one knows. No one could ever. Only J-Buzz knows. And my, so I want to say, "Hey, I have some issues with Amazon, one time I got a counterfeit memory card. It said that it was 64 megabytes per second or whatever, but it wasn't. It just had a label, like, put on top of another label. It was all lies, and it didn't work on my camera at all, and that was extremely inconvenient for me.

And also, you have a hundred and thirty billion dollars, and people who work for you need food stamps. So, like, two problems. You, you just go at its buddy, whichever one you want to tackle first. So, I have also gotten an email from someone, who was not named Madison about Jeff Bezos; because we criticized him, I think on the pod, for thinking the only thing he could do with his hundred million billion plus dollar fortune, was rockets... ships. I don't know to, to the asteroids I don't know, what we're doing with rocket ships I'm a big fan, I'm a fan of rocket ships, don't get me wrong. But it does seem like the only the only thing imaginable thing that you could take you could do with such a magnificent fortune was the only vision I can see. I got I got some other suggestions lots of other people do, I'm not gonna go through them or anything. But I do, I did think it was interesting the response this person had, which basically was to say, like I depend on someone whose livelihood depends on the value of Amazon stock, and I imagine there's a lot of people like that. People who work for Amazon and who have a lot of Amazon stock, but not like A LOT. not like bae-zos levels, bee-zos, level, J buzz level stock, but yeah. And so, I I get that, and and their point was like, well if it be-be-be-Beezer gets out there, and it starts to toss a bunch of cash at the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood. the people, are gonna start selling off the stock because they don't agree with these donations politically. I don't think this is why the Beez isn't donating his cash right now. He could, there's a lot of great things, he could just, give it to Meals-on-Wheels, and nobody would complain. Like there's hungry old people in America, that's not okay. It’d be an easy enough thing for there to find, like a fairly bland commu- universally appreciated charity, that everybody be like yeah, good job. There's fewer people over 65 who don't have three meals a day good work Beezer. And I don't think that's it. 

I think that an important thing to realize is that when we say that Jeff Bezoar, has a net worth of 130 billion dollars.
That doesn't mean he's got like a bank account, like a savings account with 130 billion lyin’ in it. He's got a lot of Amazon stock, and so he owns a large piece of amazon dot com because he, at one point, I think, probably owned all of it. And then got investors, and then he sold some of the stock to the stock market, and then a bunch of people (including, I gotta admit me) bought some of it. And uh yeah so, we got this this good ol’ situation where a lot of a lot of the stock is owned by a lot of different people. But most, like the biggest hunk of it, is bought is owned by Jeff, and that's when like the fact that Jeff keeps making money. He’s not making more money. He’s not getting richer because Amazon is making money, and it's paying him like these billion dollars a year salary. He's getting richer because the portion of amazon dot com stock that he owns is becoming worth more, and it's become worth a lot more over the last 10 years. 
And so he gets paid isn't like this isn't his salary it's not the money that he's getting it's just like I owned this block, it’s like, it's like basically like saying look I bought a book, (I didn’t even buy this it was sent to me, thank you to Joseph and Jeffrey) I bought a book, and, and I bought it for for $29.99, that's an expensive, I don't know why it's such an expensive book, it's got a lot of pretty pictures in It, and then magic happened, and suddenly people realize it's the only one, and it's very important, the author, the person who made all the pretty pictures and it died. And of, just in his sleep, it while he was cuddled next to his loving Mastiff, so it wasn't that tragic or any the old guy, but he only made one of these books, and I bought it for $29.99, let's say $100 so that it's less confusing I bought it for $100 because I was like, I like Anthony Peesmith's art a lot. If Anthony Peesmith and I knew each other actually, but and it turned out that everybody in the world was like super into Anthony Peesmith, but I was the only one who had his book. And so suddenly, well let's say that there's ten of them, kind of, it's gonna be important for there to be 10 copies of this book. There are ten books they also for $100 because Anthony Peesmith sold them to all of his friends, me and his nine other best friends bought Anthony Peesmith's book of beautiful pictures, it was called Amber Catamounts. (that's a kind of, what some people call mountain lions, Catamounts) 
Amber Catamounts which is a beautiful, beautiful title for a book, and so Amber Catamounts. There's ten copies in the world, and suddenly they're very valuable. And, and, and Mr. Peesmith's friend, who is not me, well just call that person Sandra, had that book, and then somebody was like hey, I'll pay, I'll pay you ten thousand dollars for that book. So suddenly I now have ten thousand dollars of new net worth, because the market has, (we got there) has decided that Amber Catamounts is worth ten thousand dollars. And then, and then everybody sees like oh, oh, like maybe somebody wants to buy MY book for ten thousand dollars. But then they take it to an auction house, and in fact, it turns out that people are so into Peesmith's work that they're paying a million dollars for, for, Amber Catamounts, and I've so now suddenly I have a net worth of a million dollars. This is, this is, so this is what's happening to Just-Bees. Just Bees, this is what's happening to all of the bees that live inside of Jeff. He owned a thing that was worth a hundred dollars, and now it's worth a billion dollars, and that's not really that much of an exaggeration. He did, he didn't get paid, [so] he could have this money, and I'm not saying that that means that he can't do good things besides rocket ships with this money. Of course, he can, but I think that's an important thing to recognize. The other thing is interestingly, if I then sell my copy of Amber Catamounts for a million dollars, I have to pay taxes on that, but I don't pay ordinary income tax on it, because I don't know why cause I didn't work very hard for that money, I just got really lucky. And so, the government is like well we don't want to tax people for being lucky, only for working hard. [laughs] I think the logic [laughs more] logic is that you want people to invest their money. And so, you don't want to tax them on the gains that they get from their investments, especially because they might lose money, they might lose money on their investments. And so, you're like well if they took a risk. Oh, oh, ahhh, there's so many different reasons why this I don't like this. But anyway, I have to pay 17 percent tax on Amber- my, my million dollars, minus 10 that I made from, from, Amber Catamounts, versus having to pay 40% tax if I had worked for that million dollars. So, Jeff Beez has all of this money, but he can't like sell all of the Amazon stock today, if he did that the price of Amazon would decline substantially, and it would actually be a bad thing for the company, he doesn't want to do that. but you could, over time, sell off pieces of Amazon you could even sell it to Amazon, you could also just sell it on the market, you could yeah. I’m sure lots of people would like to come in and and buy big pieces of Amazon.

But there's other reasons why Jeff might want to own a lot of Amazon stock, it might give him more interest in the in the running of the company. It might give more power on the board or something, I don't know how Amazon works, but there are things like that where you don't want to sell all your stock because then you lose power over your company. But I know that he's got enough money that he could totally do good stuff with it. But I also know that if the Beez starts to pay everyone in his warehouses, like, 25 dollars an hour - 30 dollars an hour, like a really great living wage, then you'd end up with an Amazon that's suddenly worth a lot less money. So, you might say, like: "Well, you could pay all of your employees with you 130 million dollars", and suddenly he wouldn't have 130 million dollars anymore. And this is how capitalists think.

But, like, if we're gonna look at the simple things to make life a little bit better — look at people who are over 65 who aren't working anymore, who are living off of social security and Medicaid and basically need an extra meal a day. That we have that problem, and also people under the age of 18 who have a similar problem. Like, that we have that insecurity is this is a not, like, it's not just a "you should be able to eat food, you're an American" thing. It's also "you should be secure." You should have that level of security, especially if you're a child, I would say. Though I obviously also feel like this is messed up for old people to be hungry. But not having that security of knowing where your food is coming from influences your ability to learn, it influences you, like, the level of stress you're experiencing, which has all kinds of negative impacts on a person's life long-term.

And so, like, those investments aren't just investments in social good, they're investments in the future of the country. And I, I, just don't... I don't see having the access to the level of wealth that I have access to and to not be thinking about that, and not be thinking about how do we alleviate these "now" problems as well as thinking about how to make the world a bigger, cooler, more awesome place in the future.

Beez, I don't know that we are gonna agree on a lot of stuff. But if you wanna give me a call. I'll just email you this video. If you wanna give me a call we can talk about, you know, how Meals on Wheels works, how school lunch programs work, that kind of thing. And maybe... we could work it out. That'd be great.

I got a book coming out soon too, we're gonna sell it on your store. It's called An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, comes out September 25th, it's available for preorder now on Amazon. But, you know, if you wanna get on Barnes & Noble... why not? Or go to a Barnes & Noble. Or go to your local bookstore. I don't — definitely would not encourage you to buy it from Amazon cause I feel weird about Amazon. But that's a story for another day.