EP. 95 — How Amazon Reshaped America with Alec MacGillis

Adam: [00:00:22] Hello, everyone, welcome to Factually!, I’m Adam Conover, and let’s talk about a company that I think you’re familiar with. You might order from it, you might order from it every day. You might order from it even though you don’t want to, but you feel like you have no choice. And even if you do avoid it as best you can, I would bet that you end up using this company’s services without even realizing it. Of course, I am talking about Amazon, but I think you might not realize just how huge of a footprint Amazon actually has in America today. Let’s break it down a little bit. What started as a gleam in the eye of a young Bezos who had a simple dream to bend the book publishing industry to his will, has grown into a corporate megastructure that touches every part of American society. Now, you might say, hey, Adam, hold on a second. You’re exaggerating why Amazon hasn’t even hit eight percent of all retail purchases yet. And to that, I would say, hold on a second. Hypothetical person, eight percent, are you listening to yourself? Eight percent of all retail purchases in the country is massive, especially when you realize that that includes around 40 percent of all online orders, by far the largest of any one company. One hundred and twelve million people pay for Amazon Prime in the U.S., almost three quarters of U.S. households. That’s more than the number of households that I don’t know, do most things fill in your own statistic. It’s an enormous number. And Amazon is way more than a retailer. It’s cloud computing service is what most of the Internet runs on. So even if you try to avoid Amazon, you still end up using it when you’re just watching Netflix. According to a law review article on the company’s huge influence, Amazon is now, quote, “a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer and a leading host of cloud server space.” I mean, what the fuck kind of bookstore is this? Now look, I’m not just mad at them for making money. That’s not the problem. The real issue is that a disproportionate share of control over all those markets translates into a disproportionate share of power over our society. Amazon literally has the power to determine how massive parts of American society run. And they abuse this power in all sorts of ways. For instance, because they operate the dominant marketplace for online retail and sell their own goods on that marketplace, they actually compete with the other sellers on their platform. In fact, the company actually takes data from those sellers to develop its own products to compete with them. So Amazon is able to put completely unrelated companies out of business. Again, it’s about power. When Amazon is the only game in town, that game ends up rigged. Or to take another example, Amazon is so powerful that it is literally able to bend our governments to its whims. When Amazon was choosing sites for its new corporate headquarters, it led a contest where cities around the country were asked to compete for the honor of having an Amazon HQ in their backyard. And these cities bent over backwards to offer the company inducements, perks and massive, massive tax breaks. Some cities even offered to not charge Amazon any payroll taxes whatsoever for years. Think about how perverse this is. Cities across America felt so needy for Amazon’s favor that they were willing to give exorbitant freebies at public expense to one of the largest, most successful companies in world history. I mean, Amazon doesn’t need those handouts. The people in those cities did, but they weren’t getting it. Bezos was. And all of that success comes at a huge price for Amazon’s workers. Amazon is now the second largest employer in the entire United States. Now, Amazon did commit to a fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage a few years ago, but tales of abuses still abound. Whether it’s factory workers being treated like robots, drivers forced to choose speed over safety, white collar workers pushed to the brink of emotional collapse. Amazon receiving special favor from OSHA when its safety negligence resulted in the deaths of factory workers or its well known, relentless effort to stifle any hint of a union from popping up at one of its warehouses. You might have heard in the news over the last few weeks that in order to stop a unionization vote in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon has flooded workers with anti-union propaganda and even strong-armed local officials into changing the pattern of a traffic light to stop union organizers from campaigning. Now, despite all of that, Amazon workers in Bessemer are still engaged in a historic struggle for unionization. I stand in solidarity with them on that, and you know what, I hope you do, too, you can make your own choices, but, you know, why not side with the little guy versus, you know, the literal richest man in the world? But look, Amazon is not the story of a single evil person who works out his biceps way too much, which, by the way, he does. I mean, you don’t need to have your polo shirts cut so tight, Jeff. But no, look, it’s much bigger than that. It’s the story of the fraying fabric of American society. See, Amazon, in reality, has just taken advantage of massive trends in America that have been brewing for decades. The death of antitrust, the shift towards online commerce, de-unionization, and the concentration of all economic activity in just a few metropolitan areas. These trends have allowed Amazon to fill a power vacuum and exert dominance over our entire society. And how we got there is a very complex story, and no one tells it better than Alec MacGillis. He’s a reporter for ProPublica and most recently he’s the author of Fulfillment Winning and Losing in One-Click America. It’s an incredible book and I think you’re going to be gobsmacked by this interview. Please welcome Alec MacGillis. [00:06:36][374.5]

Adam: [00:06:39] Alec, thank you so much for being here. [00:06:40][1.3]

Alec: [00:06:41] Well, thanks for having me, Adam. [00:06:42][0.8]

Adam: [00:06:43] So you’ve written a new book called Fulfillments. It’s about Amazon in in one word. But you tell me what it’s about. What do you cover in the book? [00:06:52][9.0]

Alec: [00:06:54] This book is really kind of it’s it’s it’s about what’s happening to us as a country, as a whole right now in this moment where we’ve had for years now these growing divides between sort of richer places and poorer places in this country, what I call sort of winner, winner take all places and left behind places. And it’s not just about the urban rural divide, which we’ve heard so much about, but it’s also about cities, the divide between cities, some cities that are just getting richer and richer to the point of becoming almost unlivable. And then other a whole bunch of other cities that have really kind of felt fallen further and further behind. And the way I chose to tell the story is through through Amazon and Amazon is kind of the thread that takes you around the country. It’s the frame that I use to look onto our country and what we’re becoming. It’s not so much on Amazon itself, Amazon, the company, but it’s really about everything that falls within Amazon’s growing shadow. It’s just about Amazon’s America. And and it’s just been really kind of striking to me that I started this book several years ago. But but that, you know, as I was wrapping up the book this past year, that the things I was worried about and things that I saw happening around the country have just been greatly accelerated and exacerbated during a pandemic. So it’s it’s been it’s been pretty eerie to watch that happening. [00:08:17][83.5]

Adam: [00:08:18] Yeah. I mean, there’s so much there I want to unpack. First of all, just just the fact you said cities that have become so rich, they’ve become unlivable is such a stark way to put it. I live in one of those cities. Los Angeles has incredibly high housing prices, but we don’t normally think of it that way with, hey, when when people get rich, when an area gets rich, that’s a good thing. But there’s actually like a detriment like the richness of some of these areas has worsened the quality of life for people in them. How has how has Amazon exacerbated this divide? Let’s just start simple. [00:08:51][33.3]

Alec: [00:08:52] Yes. You know, it’s a it’s a huge problem. And in the cities, I chose to focus on the winner take all cities that I chose to focus on the book. I could have chosen any number of cities. Right. I focus on Seattle and Washington, D.C. and and it’s it just so happens that I actually picked Washington as the second city before Amazon picked it as the as the home of its second headquarters. So that was sort of serendipitous in that regard. But but what you’ve what you’ve seen is that we used to have in this country, we’ve always had cities that were wealthier and poorer. But but that divide has grown so much worse, so much larger in the last few decades, just like the divide between wealthy people and poor people has grown larger, just like the income scale is growing larger among individuals. The divide among cities has also grown much larger. And and part of that reason, part of the reason for that is that we’ve had a concentration in our economy, concentration and certain companies and certain certain markets. So to put it very, very bluntly, take, for instance, my industry of the media. My industry has been devastated by the concentration of ad revenue in a couple of companies, mostly Google, Google and Facebook, but also increasingly Amazon. So all this money that used to be spread around the country in ad revenue, that used to go to to local newspapers, local radio stations, local TV stations, and it was just really kind of kind of picture kind of spread all around, has a huge share of that, that that business has just kind of been sucked into a couple companies, the biggest of which biggest of which are in the Bay Area. And and so one reason that you have this just insane, almost like dystopian levels of wealth and inequality within the Bay Area is is what’s happened in that media market, the concentration within that market. Then take another industry, retail. So retail used to have the money and retail. The retail business, again, used to be spread all around the country in weather in bigger chains, smaller chains, mom and pops, you know, Sears, Wal-Mart, Macy’s, the local the smaller department store chains, all that. And now you have a growing, growing share of that revenue, that money, that business sucked to this one company in Seattle. And and so you end up with concentrated, concentrated industries based in certain places and and in those places then have become just wildly wealthy to the point where where a city like Seattle that used to be very much sort of a normal city of sort of a middle, very middle class kind of city, almost kind of almost kind of a, you know, kind of a rough edge city, you know, sort of. Kind of a you know, it was like he used to be like a natural resource outpost, basically it was a large. [00:11:58][185.8]

Adam: [00:11:58] Yeah I used to think it was I used to think it was really funny. The first time I visited Seattle, I was like, I can’t believe Frasier was set in Seattle because in Frasier, he’s like a rich guy who’s like going to the opera and stuff. And you go to Seattle and it’s like, yeah, it’s as you say, it’s like a lot of people in flannels and driving driving beat up old cars. It’s a small city. It’s got coffee, sure, but it’s not like, you know, it’s that downtown New York or anything like that. [00:12:23][24.5]

Alec: [00:12:23] No, no. The first time I went there, I was just one reason I loved it so much as a city the first time I went there in, like, sometime in the, you know, probably around 2004 or 2005 was that you still had this real sense of it being this kind of natural resource outpost. You could still picture it as this place where the the log that the logs, literally would like roll down the hill to the port and be taken off in the ships. That’s how it started. It was a place that where the timber came down and they took it down to San Francisco to to build San Francisco. And it was you’ve got the rail right there, the port right there. And and it was just it was really kind of rough hewn in that sense. And now it’s just been utterly transformed. And and in in the book, I focus in particular on what’s happened to to Seattle’s historic black neighborhood, the central district, which was this amazing neighborhood that I think a lot of people outside of Seattle don’t even really know, just what an incredibly thriving and vibrant black community Seattle had for decades with incredible music. Jimi Hendrix, all these people kind came out of Seattle, Seattle music scene, Quincy Jones and and now that part of town, it’s I mean, the word gentrification doesn’t even really begin to describe it, like just the complete erasure that has happened as far as Seattle’s wealth has just grown to stratospheric levels. [00:13:48][85.0]

Adam: [00:13:49] I’m almost picturing what you’re describing where we had these industries that were distributed across the country and extremely local, like local retailers, local newspapers, local TV stations, and all those dollars floating around gets sucked up by one company in a single location. It’s almost like damming a river or something like that, where all the water that was flowing to all these other places is now collected in one spot. And what is the result of that drought in one place and a flood in another that that like these cities, like you’re saying, like Seattle becomes flooded with money. And that is to the detriment of a lot of things, like, as you’re saying, neighborhoods becoming a race through gentrification. [00:14:32][43.6]

Alec: [00:14:33] Absolutely. It’s it’s the bottom line is that it’s not it’s not good for anyone. It doesn’t. [00:14:38][4.7]

Adam: [00:14:39] It’s probably good for like one or two people. [00:14:41][1.3]

Alec: [00:14:42] Correct yeah, I can think of a few that it’s good for, but for places it’s not good for it’s not good for either kind of place to have that kind of a profound imbalance. And it simply is different than than what we’ve ever experienced before. One extraordinary stat that I, you know, focus on right right away in the intro of the book is that for for many decades, so you know so the middle of the last century, all the way up to like 1980, there are only a small set of places in this country that were that were more than 20 percent above median income. And most cities were most cities and places were kind of close to the median there, like the kind of hugged at that median line you had, you know, maybe New York and a couple of other places were above the line. And then maybe like the Deep South and Appalachia were well below the 20 percent line below. Now you have just a whole swaths of the country that are, that are above 20 percent richer than than the norm. And so basically, all the coasts, most of the coasts, most of the coastal cities are now above that line, the 20 percent line richer line. And then you have enormous swaths of the country that are below 20 percent poor. So whole swaths of the Midwest, whole swaths of of the interior West are now way below the median. And that’s so something’s happened there. And so you have this massive gulf between our cities and you look down to the city level to back and the 60s, you look at the cities that were highest per capita income in our country back then, and they included all these cities in the Midwest, all these places like, you know, Milwaukee, even Des Moines, Iowa, Rockford, Rockford, Illinois. Now all but one, I believe all but one of the richest 20, 20 cities in the country are now on the coasts. I mean, you’ve had this complete. [00:16:45][122.9]

Adam: [00:16:47] Is Chicago the other one? I’m just curious. [00:16:47][0.5]

Alec: [00:16:47] No, no, I believe it’s actually Minneapolis. [00:16:50][2.2]

Adam: [00:16:51] Wow. [00:16:52][1.0]

Alec: [00:16:54] So you’ve just had this incredible sorting out and and it’s not healthy. [00:16:58][4.0]

Adam: [00:17:00] Yeah, I mean, that’s something that like I’ve I’ve it’s a pattern that is like slowly become apparent to me throughout my life, you know, when I don’t know, when I think about like when you hear the way people talked about cities in America, you know, the way people talk about Detroit you read something from 50 years ago written about Detroit and the way it’s written about now and the smaller cities as well. Yeah, it’s really, really stark. Bring bring Amazon into this. How did how how does Amazon contribute to this? And I’m really curious, like what the effect is on smaller places of Amazon as well, because it’s not just about things leaving, it’s also about like what Amazon is bringing to those places that transforms it, doesn’t it? [00:17:48][48.8]

Alec: [00:17:49] Absolutely. I mean, I so I chose Amazon as the frame the thread for the book basically for two reasons. One, because it actually has contributed to this problem. It’s a it’s a it’s a cause of it in the way that I that I’ve described here, where you have you have a company that has gotten so powerful, so dominant that it that it actually sucks the money and money in the wealth from certain places into into the cities where it’s got its headquarters. But then it also also works well as a frame because it is because it’s simply everywhere in this country. So it’s a way to take you. It’s a way to take you around the country and to sort of show show all these different sorts of places that that are that occupy different roles kind of within the Amazon ecosystem. And if Amazon is, it’s there are other there are other dominant companies in our country such as Google and Facebook, but they’re not they’re not physically present in the way that Amazon is. [00:18:57][67.9]

Adam: [00:18:58] Right there there’s Amazon fulfillment warehouses all across the country in these smaller cities. But there aren’t no one’s going to work at the at the Google data. I mean, there’s Google data centers, but it’s not it’s not in every county in the way that Amazon is to a certain extent. [00:19:13][15.1]

Alec: [00:19:13] Exactly. And so Amazon is just offers a in essence sense, offers up a thread around the country that the other companies don’t in. But it just allows you to look at what you look at, what all these places are really coming in that shadow. You have in a sense now a story. You have you have the headquarter cities like like Washington and Seattle, where you have and then also cities like New York that have become effectively kind of headquarter cities for Amazon, even though, you know, HQ2 pulled out of Amazon, pulled out of New York. It turned 2018. You still have now tons of of high paying Amazon jobs going into New York, going to Boston, the engineers, the programmers in those cities. And then you have the warehouse cities, you have cities like Baltimore, Baltimore in the book is one of the two main sort of left behind places, Baltimore the other one is is various places, parts of Ohio. And you have the warehouse cities that have become the city square that are almost serve in a sense, as as the kind of it’s the back office. It’s the pantry. In a way. It’s the place that that that that that has the thousands now incredibly large numbers of of these fifteen dollar an hour jobs as opposed to the the programmers who are making, you know, $150,000 plus great, great stock equity in the headquarters towns. And so you have these this growing number of warehouse towns where where Amazon occupies a completely different sort of different sort of role, different sort of presence, where where it’s really become in a sense, you know, one of the the few growing employers in my I focus on Baltimore partly I live I live in Baltimore, but also because the city is has one the starkest sort of examples of of that warehouse, that new warehouse world, because the city the place where Amazon now has one of its main big warehouses here in Baltimore, was once the home of what was the greatest the largest steel mill in the entire world. It was it was a Bethlehem steel mill at a spot in Baltimore called Sparrows Point. It’s a peninsula down outside of Baltimore, down along the water. And back in the 60s, the steel mill employed some thirty thousand people. It was just an incredible place with a whole coal company town, five, six thousand people living there with with a grid of streets and shops and movie theaters and. The whole skyline of of steel mill, all different sorts of mills, all different sorts of furnaces, and and now that’s all gone completely wiped clean off this peninsula. And now it is a logistics hub that has to one now two massive warehouses. And if you have a place like Baltimore where exactly the same location where you used to have guys making thirty five dollars an hour with really good benefits, doing very challenging, very tough, very dangerous, but but also very fulfilling and meaningful work building things are now in that exact same spot. You have now thousands of people packing boxes onto conveyor belts for for 50 bucks an hour. And so it’s that transformation is transformation of work and what we do within our our identity that that to me is really at the core of of what’s happening in these warehouse towns. [00:23:09][235.4]

Adam: [00:23:09] Wow. Let’s let’s talk a little bit about what that work is. I mean, you said that the work at Bethlehem Steel so fulfilling. I assume you think that working in the Amazon factory, not fulfilling what what is the difference between those two kinds of work and what characterizes the kind of work that Amazon has people do in these places? [00:23:27][17.7]

Alec: [00:23:29] So I was I was actually able to it was kind of amazingly serendipitous, I was actually I was able to find someone through whom to tell the story of of of that changing type of work. I found a man who, who spent several decades working at Beth Steel and and and that was his life. That was his livelihood. That was his identity. And and it was it was he worked in all these different jobs in the mill he had he was incredibly tough work. He had a couple really serious workplace injuries. But he loved the work and he and he stayed with it all the way until the point that Beth Steel basically started going out of business. He then in his in his 60s, went to work at at at the warehouse, one of the warehouses that that came in the Amazon warehouses that came to Baltimore. And so he went from making thirty five bucks an hour to making fifteen bucks an hour. And he just hated the job. He was he was driving a forklift under incredible pressure to get pallets off of the trucks into the warehouse on incredible time pressure feeling just this feeling yourself just just always on the clock. Always the sense that there’s a sort of an algorithm that’s that’s that’s tracking your your performance with with, you know, some some young supervisor. Some twenty five year old logistics guy who’s really riding you to get your numbers up barely any time even to take a bathroom break, there’s a really kind of sad, painful, poignant moment in the book where this gentleman feels the need finally to go into the corner you know he doesn’t have time to get to the men’s room. And he has to go into the corner behind his behind his parkas forklift for some privacy and and no no sense of any kind of community with the people around you at the steel mill. You’d have you’d know the guys you worked with, you you knew you knew them. You knew their cousins, their uncles knew their fathers. You’re part of a community. You would you you know, you’d go have a couple of beers with them after work. Now, at the warehouse, you’re utterly atomized. You’re very likely working completely on your own within the warehouse, barely in contact with other people. There’s no no hope for any kind of solidarity in the form of of union organizing. That steel was one reason they had such high wages there was, of course, that they were that it was unionized and steel workers. You don’t have that at the warehouse. So it’s just this it’s a much more lonely, kind of rudimentary, really almost kind of robotic kind of work that you’re that you’re being asked to do and and just much less purposeful. There’s a reason why those jobs have such extraordinarily high turnover because they’re incredibly just physically wearing and then also just very emotionally, emotionally wearing and emotionally difficult. [00:26:48][198.7]

Adam: [00:26:49] Yeah, my God, that’s such a stark picture you draw, but I wonder that that turnover. Is there some way in which, you know, Amazon- I also think about Uber. We’ve talked about them on the show many times and and how much you know, Uber’s entire business model, is to just, you know, decrease and take advantage of decreased worker power. And, you know, turnover is almost part of the business model that, that people drive for a little while and then they quit. And the new people are there’s always more. Right. There’s always more people who want to do it. And it seems that these companies are taking advantage of some sort of underlying lack of opportunity and desperation of the American workforce. That that, as you say, I mean, the it’s not as it’s not as though Amazon is saying like, oh, hey, we got to let these people take bathroom breaks because otherwise they’ll leave and we’ll never have another worker here. You know, they’re like we you’re a cog you can be replaced is the attitude and what what creates that state of affairs? [00:27:50][60.4]

Alec: [00:27:51] Absolutely. They can, they can completely depend on that kind of that kind of constant stream of actually, one of the one of the workers I spoke with refer to himself as a refugee. I mean, that he and and the other people he saw working at the warehouse, especially this past year during the pandemic recession, that he that that he saw all these all these kind of refugees washing ashore, washing into the into the into the warehouse who were desperate even for these these incredibly difficult training fifteen dollars an hour jobs. [00:28:21][29.7]

Adam: [00:28:23] Do some other forms of work like their previous employer closed. [00:28:25][2.2]

Alec: [00:28:26] Exactly. And there’s there’s a there’s a scene that I sort of end the book with that it’s just I couldn’t believe it when I came across this, but a I ran into a guy who was outside the recruiting center at one of the warehouses, and I asked him what kind of work he did before he was thirty three years old. And he said, oh, you know, this is Baltimore. He said, I just been, you know, been hustling and just getting by. And I kind of pressed him. I said, no, what have you been what he’s been doing? And he finally said, OK, you want to talk? I said, Yeah, let’s talk. He said, All right, let me just tell you that the fentanyl drug market in Baltimore has really taken a hit. And because the pandemic no one is my customers aren’t able to to to go in and steal stuff anymore, the stores are all closed. They got no money to to buy their drugs from me. And it’s gotten really hard out there. And and so I’m so here I am. And you know, I used to make 75K on average on the corner and that’s all gone now because of the pandemic. So, so I’m going to have to make a change here. And this is going to, this is going to suck. And I’m not looking forward to this but I got to, I got to suck it up all my all my he said all my homeboys are doing the same thing. We’re all we’re all we’re all coming over to Amazon. And it’s just, you really it hit me. I mean, this is like this is basically the wire season sex that the drug dealers, the drug dealers are going down to to Amazon to get a job at the warehouse because everybody’s doing it. Everybody’s doing it, even at even the dealers. [00:30:06][100.2]

Adam: [00:30:07] Well, this is the state of the American economy, the American workforce, whatever you want to call it, or even you’re dealing drugs is no longer even lucrative. If you’re lucky, it’s a middle class income. I mean, seventy five thousand dollars is. Yeah. A middle class income in America. You’re not putting your kid through college for that. Barely. And, you know, so even that is now a precarious like being a drug dealer is now the same as working at, you know, working for the auto factory or Bethlehem Steel, where it’s a disappearing middle class income. And now you’ve got to go drive Uber. Holy shit. That’s completely opposite of the way. [00:30:46][39.5]

Alec: [00:30:47] I couldn’t believe it. [00:30:47][0.5]

Adam: [00:30:47] That’s, that’s wild. I mean, what about what about smaller, smaller towns, rural areas? I mean, we’ve talked big cities. We’ve talked to. I mean, Baltimore is not a small city, I would say. But, you know, the it’s not not one of our not one of our most cosmopolitan megaplexes of a city. What about, you know, like the the middle of the country? [00:31:08][20.3]

Alec: [00:31:09] I have a whole I’ve actually two whole chapters basically on the unraveling of, of middle America, small cities and small towns in middle America. And and one of them focuses on a heartbreaking story of a guy family in Dayton, Ohio, just a classic story of white downward mobility. And this is a guy who, whose father had a small trucking company in Dayton that served all the auto parts makers in the Dayton area. Dayton was a huge auto parts, auto parts hub that all fell apart in, in the years leading up to the Great Recession. And so that father, the father lost his business, his son probably might have ended up working with him down the line, but but instead the father went bankrupt. So the son is left in his early 20s with a whole succession of different low wage jobs and finally ends up in the business of being a cardboard maker. And that’s what he does now. He, he makes cardboard boxes, which is a huge industry now in the Dayton area, because because Dayton has cities like Dayton have gone from being these great hubs of innovation and manufacturing. Dayton, of course, was the home of the Wright brothers. And just all these amazing inventors and innovators from the late 19th century was the place that was putting out more patents than anywhere else in the country in the late 19th century, the really kind of the Silicon Valley of its time and a really amazing place. And, and now it has become what is essentially a logistics hub. It’s a place that packages and moves goods that have been made elsewhere. So there’s just all these trucking companies and packaging companies and cardboard making companies. And in this guy now works at a cardboard company making the same wage he’s made basically his entire young adulthood is he’s right now around 12 or 13 bucks an hour. His his family has spent he’s got four four kids. They’ve spent a lot of time in shelters in recent years. He’s he’s gone through his family’s had all sorts of really ugly things they’ve dealt with, including domestic violence that are clearly linked, linked to the not excuse bye, but linked to the economic stress they’ve been going through. This chapter tells the story of the really kind of the unraveling of this man’s life and of of Dayton, Ohio, in this kind of age of of logistics. And I also have a chapter on an even more sort of rural area, southeast Ohio, Appalachia, southeast Ohio, where where you have just the real kind of grinding rural rise of grinding rural poverty that we’ve that we’ve seen so much of around the country. And in there also Amazon has become Amazon. And Amazon is so aware of how desperate places like that are that when it was building to its first two warehouses in in Ohio, it put one of them on the Columbus Beltway right at the spot in the Columbus Beltway, where the road shoots down to southeast Ohio about an hour away so that all the folks without work town in that part of Ohio could make that hour long drive up. Pretty awful hour long commute to one of those warehouses because they knew that that would be one of their main workforce sources, the people so desperate for work that they would make that that hour drive up up to the Columbus area. [00:35:06][237.5]

Adam: [00:35:07] Now, is that look, I can imagine how Amazon will present that to the local politicians in the area we’re bringing jobs to the area. In fact, Amazon has engaged in making different areas, have competitions for tax breaks in order to locate, at least very famously, HQ2 site. Are those is that area actually deriving a benefit from the location of that of that warehouse? I mean, it sounds horrible to drive for an hour to work for those low wages and those grinding conditions, but is that better than not? [00:35:39][31.3]

Alec: [00:35:41] That’s absolutely what Amazon the case that they make and they and they were making that very course very aggressively when I was when I was talking about with them about all this, they basically say, look, we’re we’re better than nothing. And that that is that is sort of their main argument, that it’s OK. [00:35:58][17.4]

Adam: [00:35:59] That’s honestly not a bad slogan. Not a bad slogan overall for Amazon, like, hey, you could not you could have nothing or you could order this shit and have it come to your house. [00:36:08][9.7]

Alec: [00:36:09] Right. And that has become, you know, at least just some points along with almost come to the point of saying, look, yes, this is the system we have now. The the economic reality that we have is far from ideal. But but but but we’re better than nothing. And if it weren’t us, it would be someone else. That’s basically that’s the other thing they like to to point to that we’re just kind of it just happens to be us. There was this massive, massive shift in the economy. Someone was going to come in and fill this kind of e-commerce role and and it’s us. It could just well be someone’s called something else. What that seems to overlook is that is that there are specific things that they have chosen to do, specific ways they’ve chosen to behave, choices they have made. Not just sort of things in the in the ecosystem, but the choices they’ve made that have actually made made the problem worse. So choices they’ve made about about how aggressively to pursue tax breaks in the places they move into, which then has the result of of kind of commiserating the local infrastructure, the local the local tax base, undermining undermining communities because they’re. [00:37:33][84.2]

Adam: [00:37:33] Giving us the roads and all the that the people who live there depend on don’t see any benefit from Amazon coming there. [00:37:40][6.7]

Alec: [00:37:41] Absolutely. What the some of the sort of grittiest reporting in the book is stuff I was able to get through Freedom of Information requests and other reporting showing just how those deals get made and just how how aggressive and and and also kind of secretive Amazon is in seeking those deals. There’s a lot of that in the book. So you have to have those tax breaks. You have all of the ways that Amazon has, in fact, gained that’s dominant role through, you know, as in competition with with other retailers through through again, through choices they’ve made choices about how to how to evade sales taxes for many years, thereby building up it’s edge against other retailers. Choices in how aggressively to to to handle it’s the merchants who sell on the site and thereby build up its dominance. Specific things they’ve done that have actually given them this role of of just extraordinary, unfathomable dominance with within our economy. So so, yes, it’s now gone to the point where for this given place, whether it’s Baltimore or or high poverty, rural Ohio, having that option of that of that fifteen dollars an hour, very difficult warehouse job is, quote, better than nothing. But there are things they did to get us to the point where we were left with them as the only option. [00:39:17][96.5]

Adam: [00:39:19] Well, look, I have a lot more questions for you about how they got to that point and about what it means for us that they have so much power, but we have to take a really quick break. We’ll be right back with more Alec MacGillis. OK, we’re back with Alec MacGillis, so I want to ask you this, Tim Wu in his book The Curse of Bigness about monopoly power. One of things that really stuck with me from that book is that he talks about monopoly power as not just being economically bad. You know, all we have to pay more prices, et cetera, et cetera. But it’s it’s essentially undemocratic that when a single company has so much power over the way the rest of us live our lives, that is bad. It means that they can reshape not just our economy, but our lives themselves and the country in their image. And that’s inherently undemocratic. Amazon certainly fits the bill as a company that has that much power. And I’m curious how you’ve seen them use their power and how that shaped America today. [00:40:27][68.8]

Alec: [00:40:29] Tim is absolutely right about this. And it’s one reason that I chose to to focus much of the book in Washington, D.C., even before Amazon picked DC for HQ2. I knew that I was going to put much of the book there because it’s it’s a very clear regional example of how the company’s growing growing dominance has has then translated into into a level of political dominance that that that does verge on becoming a threatening democracy. You have it’s really the extent to which Amazon has taken over our our national capital or federal capital. It’s just incredible. And I and I, I don’t think we’ve really grappled with that yet. I mean, you have first, of course, simply the fact that the owner of Amazon, the richest or second richest man in the world, bought the newspaper. But this incredibly, incredibly, this great influential newspaper that that had played such a role in sort of setting our our national debate, our national conversation. He buys the newspaper. He he then he buys the biggest mansion in town, this incredible sort of double wide mansion that he bought with explicit intent of turning it into a kind of a salon where where he’d be sort of convening all of the sort of Washington power brokers Washington influence into the into this mansion for, you know, for for soirees. You have Amazon building up its its lobbying operation in the city just exponentially to the point where it’s now one of the biggest lobbying shops in Washington, 18 million dollars a year they’re spending now on lobbyists and they’re just there’s all over the place. It’s, of course, led by Jay Carney, who used to be Barack Obama’s press secretary. You have you have then on top of that, Amazon becoming incredibly influential within not just we haven’t talked much about the cloud, but you have to you have this huge growing Amazon web services sector of its business, which now provides so much of its profits, and that that that cloud business has become incredibly dominant within the federal defense realm. So, so much of our so much of our the CIA, so much of the government more broadly is now run through, run through Amazon Web Services, run through their their cloud. So you have a huge presence in DC just through that. And then finally now you have HQ2 where you have them putting twenty five thousand more very high paid well-paid jobs just across the river in Arlington, which is going to make them, you know, by far the biggest non-government employer in the area. And and just you’re going to end up with just this this one company having having just this massive presence in in our nation’s capital. And it’s something it’s something that normally, to be honest, I would I would be expecting the local newspaper to write about just how this one company is taking over their city. But they have. [00:43:57][208.6]

Adam: [00:43:59] Yeah. My God. And yeah, the amount of the amount of influence that Bezos and Amazon can have just by controlling all of those all of those outlets at once, everything from the newspaper to. Yeah. Like having the having the individual people over. Oh I’ve been to Jeff’s house. [00:44:16][17.3]

Alec: [00:44:17] Exactly right. [00:44:18][0.8]

Adam: [00:44:19] Jeff’s a nice guy. The hors d’oeuvres were great last year. [00:44:20][0.9]

Alec: [00:44:20] Yeah, exactly. Or even just the guy. It’s also going to be the guy who’s the dad on your daughter’s soccer team. You chat with him on the sideline and he’s with some, you know, Amazon vice president, Amazon programmer guy. He seems like a nice guy. Like, you know, they’re not so bad. We should just, you know, it becomes. It becomes so everywhere, so omnipresent that you don’t even think to to challenge it, they’re just the guy, they’re just the people down the street. [00:44:48][27.4]

Adam: [00:44:49] But this amount of power I mean, this is like early 20th century robber baron Andrew Carnegie, like, you know, massive power residing in one person and one company. Like, it really feels like we’re we’re headed back to those days, especially when you look at Amazon. I mean, how long before Jeff Bezos does what like Andrew Carnegie did, like, oh I’ll put a library in every city to make everybody love me, you know what I mean? It’s like that’s a it was a good thing. We have a lot of those libraries still, but it was also an exercise of pure power that, you know, redounded to his benefit. But it also strikes me that, you know, that period in American history when we had those massively powerful economic figures was not a good time for the average American. That was not when we had our most prosperous period as Americans. The time that we had that was in the 50s and the 60s, like after those companies had been broken up, after we got rid of Standard Oil and et cetera, and that we, you know, we had higher taxes and less consolidation, at least on a on a broad scale. And so to me, it seems very worrisome that we seem to be backsliding to that previous state. I mean, talking about, you know, Tim Wu’s book, again, the subtitle is The New Gilded Age. Is that what you feel that we’re moving into? [00:46:11][82.1]

Alec: [00:46:12] We’re absolutely moving back there. I mean, it’s in so many different ways. The you even just the way the way that Amazon has been has been able to grow so, so successful and wealthy, you can actually compare its very specific ways to to what, say, Standard Oil or the railroads were able to do back in the Rockefeller days where where you where they they acquired such dominance. So you basically had no choice but to kind of to ship your goods on their on their rails. They got their cut and they became and there’s no way around it. And you had to pay you had to pay the price they were demanding you had no other no other option. It was almost like a tax. It was almost they were just kind of collecting was it was it was a rent that they were collecting essentially on on on on all commerce in the country. And and that’s and that’s what you see now with the Amazon able to if you’re both in the in the cloud realm, you sort of have a lot of cases now. You have no choice but to go to one or just a handful of companies for for your cloud services. So they’re basically kind of taking their cut of that part of this new massive part of our economy. All the stuff that would take the cloud. [00:47:31][79.6]

Adam: [00:47:32] They take it from Netflix, they take it from like every every company that’s built on their servers. [00:47:35][3.1]

Alec: [00:47:36] Zoom everything. And and then and then even more of course, more starkly, you have it on on the retail side where if you’re a third party merchant merchant now trying to sell your your goods, you have, you really have you feel like you have no choice but to but to to sell on Amazon. And and so you’re you’re there as a third party merchant, which is now a massive part of their retail side. It’s well over half of their site now is other people selling their stuff on Amazon. And those those sellers are now facing ever, ever higher cuts that that Amazon is taking, whether it’s just the basic the basic commission, the advertising they feel forced to do all these different slices that Amazon takes to the point where it’s now twenty five thirty percent, that their typical merchant is, as is often losing to Amazon. So they really they’re just there as kind of a gatekeeper collecting their tax on all these parts of our economy, not unlike what what John D. Rockefeller was was doing back at the turn of the century. And and then the other obvious example that you already mentioned is this philanthropy that we now, you know, yes, we can point to those libraries and those universities that were that came out of came out of those those early those Gilded Age plutocrats. And and we’re now at the point where we are now left kind of kind of hoping for those those kind of those crumbs to fall from from our from our new plutocrats. And and that’s that’s what we’re kind of left with, hoping that that a Gates or Bezos or someone else will will deign to to throw some money toward climate change, as Jeff Bezos just recently did, or deign to throw some money toward the local the local housing shortage. I have a whole chapter in the book about the big fight in Seattle over affordable housing. And of course, this is a huge crisis in Seattle with housing prices going through the roof. And there was a big fight there in the last couple of years over whether to basically tax Amazon to to provide more money for for housing, for housing and homelessness services. And an Amazon launched an incredibly effective lobbying fight, political fight against that, that that proposed tax ended up ended up killing it and and then turned around and and threw some crumbs, some philanthropic crumbs toward toward some housing, local affordable housing funds. And and so you think, oh, what’s the big deal? You know, they’re giving it this way instead of that way. And I and I, you know, I have a very good commentary. And it’s in the book from a local activist young woman who just said this is not the way it’s supposed to work. You know, we’re we’re a society where democratic society, we’re supposed to decide as a whole how we’re going to decide who we’re going to say to to help people and provide provide basic services in our city, in our society. It’s not supposed to be left just to the whim of this or that guy to throw a couple to throw a couple of crumbs when he feels like it. [00:50:53][196.6]

Adam: [00:50:54] Yeah. And of course, what the crumbs do they throw will be crumbs that they can afford that are structured the way they want them to, and they’ll be biased towards doing things that can put their name on. Right. Andrew Carnegie libraries. They’re all called Carnegie Libraries and he’s remembered to this day, you know, so that’s what Bezos would be incentivized to do rather than to, you know, support a more invisible sort of policy that might result in better outcomes. And certainly there’ll be there’ll be less of it. And it’s of a piece with what we’ve seen. You know, all of these companies do the gig economy companies with Prop 22 for the first time, they’re facing regulation and they fight back with that by saying, oh, well, we’ll offer this instead. But of course, it’s far less. But we can present it as though we’ve solved the problem. We’ve, you know, added employee benefits when really the employee benefits they’ve added are paltry compared to the ones that they took away. I want to talk a little bit about the the the third party sellers, because that is so much part of Amazon. And I now avoid Amazon in my in my own online shopping, which, by the way, is like enormously inconvenient to do. Like if you try to do so many things that you try to order them, you try to order them not on Amazon, you quickly find you have nowhere to go. And a lot of times you order something from a third party website and it still shows up at your house at an Amazon box because you didn’t even realize the company is using Amazon fulfillment. But when I did use Amazon more regularly, I would start to get a sense that, you know, you’d order something and then the box would come and you’d be like, hold on a second. Like, where did this come from? Like, this seems like it came from a weird place that seems like an oddly packaged item. And you start to realize that there’s a lot of like what what Amazon has done to our even our supply chain has become very odd. There was a report in The Verge by Josh Dzieza, I think I’m pronouncing it right about how entire towns now have like a small towns have been consumed by this industry where people basically order goods on Amazon, repackage them and then resell them on Amazon in a way that they just sort of become this weird arbitrage, like turn around people with garages full of packages, selling, selling things in order to make like a couple of nickels profit on it on eBay. And it’s this weird sort of pointless labor that’s being done. This doesn’t need to be done on improving the product at all. It’s just, you know, buying it from here for slightly less and selling it on Amazon for slightly more. Have you seen any any of these weird consequences? [00:53:28][154.5]

Alec: [00:53:30] Absolutely. And I have a whole whole chapter in the book about this whole realm. And it’s and. [00:53:35][4.9]

Adam: [00:53:35] I wish I hadn’t even tried to explain it. You tell me about it, please. [00:53:37][2.2]

Alec: [00:53:37] It’s it’s so I. I have a chapter in the book about third party sellers, and I and I based it in El Paso where and I actually based it in the office supply industry, these these companies that are just like the company, the famous company, you know, in the office in Scranton, P.A., who who sell paper and other office supplies to mainly to other businesses, to to local schools or law firms or whoever, wherever, and his office supplies and and and I found a couple of very colorful, very charismatic office supply dealers in El Paso who have in recent years felt extraordinary pressure to to to sell on Amazon. And and they were getting pressure from the company and also pressure from from some of their local clients, including the El Paso city government and El Paso school districts that were big customers of theirs. And are now wanting to buy directly from from Amazon instead. Amazon has sort of reached out to them and said, why don’t you just buy buy from us? It’s much more convenient. You know, everything’s more convenient on Amazon. And and then the the the city and the school systems went to their local suppliers and said, hey, we’d really rather do this through Amazon. We can still buy from you on Amazon. But let’s just let’s just do this through Amazon instead. What that, of course, overlooks is that is that these third party merchants, these local suppliers, are going to lose a big cut to Amazon when when you have that middlemen there. And I was actually able to to get into a I slipped into a a a pitch session where Amazon some some top Amazon reps were meeting with El Paso office supply dealers at a convention and making this sell to them, urging them to to just kind of give up and join Amazon and do other they’re selling through the site and and watching how they made a pitch and watching how they kind of withheld the very important point about the cut that they were going to be taking from these these local businessmen until the very end and actually didn’t even withhold it. And they had to be kind of pressed to to kind of reveal it. And and so I take you into this whole world of this. The pressure that is that is that these local suppliers are facing the conundrum that they’re facing, where they feel like they have no choice. And then this kind of a poignant moment at the end of this chapter where where I’m talking to the son of one of these these these suppliers, these local businesses. And he works in the business. He’s he’s he helps. He’s a salesman. It’s a it’s a it’s a really friendly Mexican-American family there on the border. And and he mentioned just in passing that he’s on the side he’s been getting into to to just doing selling of his own on Amazon, just what you described, like buying goods basically sight unseen and then all sorts of goods just kind of discarded goods, surplus goods, and then and then and then packaging them or sometimes not even repackaging it’s they’re goods, you know, as a seller never even see, they just there’s kind of moving out there in the ether and but you’re you’ve you’ve bought them and then you’re going to resell them on Amazon. And it’s that whole bizarre realm of of just stuff moving in boxes into as as the Verge piece described in the some town and somewhere in Montana, you know, and and and and so much of our economy is now that realm. And I found another it’s happened again. I once I was in Ohio outside Dayton at one of the big data centers outside Dayton, where the outside Columbus were the with the cloud lives in those data centers and I needed to use the restroom. So I went to a church nearby, like a modern church, evangelical church, windowless church, and I asked to use the restroom there. And I said, sure, go on. And I come out and I start chatting with the nice, you know, the woman at the desk there about how weird is having this data center next door. And and she mentioned just in passing that she herself has now gotten into selling goods through Amazon, you know, on the just the, quote, fulfillment where you just, again, goods that she’s never even seen. There just she bought them somewhere online. She’s reselling them online. She gets a cut. She’s got some box in a warehouse somewhere. So, Carol, that’s basically her stuff. And and that’s that’s just something she’s doing on the side. It’s just it’s completely bizarre. [00:58:32][294.9]

Adam: [00:58:34] Yeah, I mean, there was this like story, one of these weird Internet stories I saw a month or two ago about someone had found a house for sale on a Zillow or Trulia type site. And as this massive house and people were, you know, you could do the walk through of the house and people were baffled by it because it was like this endless warren of like shelves like first there’s just like someone’s weird little living area, you know, sort of sort of like someone who sort of sleeping on their pullout couch. And then you go down the hallway and you go down a little bit and suddenly there’s boxes and boxes of CDs and random goods and books and it goes endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. And what people have some Internet sleuths figure out what this was and they figured out it was somebody had purchased a church and was an old church that no longer had a congregation, was living in the front, and then in the back was, you know, selling goods out of it, selling and selling things on Amazon and had made a little ersatz like, you know, fulfillment center of their own in which they were selling Shania Twain CDs. And just like basically it like just flotsam, like anything that passed through their hands that could be sold on Amazon would be. And I looked at it, I was like, holy shit, this is where the stuff I order on Amazon is coming from. Like, I know I know the story about the fulfillment center with the people running around with the robots and they’re being timed and stuff, and that’s half of it. But the other half is just this almost invisible network of I mean, nobody even knew that this guy was doing this, except he tried to, you know, eventually sold the house on Zillow and we could see pictures. Right. But like like Amazon probably doesn’t even know what the inside of this place looks like, like this is. And that is such a massive distorting effect for a company like this to have that there’s hundreds of thousands of homes like that across America now. I’m making up the number, but a massive number that are that are full to the brim of weird shit that someone is selling when they when they used to they used to have a job. Now they’re doing this. And that’s why we even do we even have a cognizance of what this company has done to our society yet. [01:00:47][133.4]

Alec: [01:00:48] No, and that’s that’s we absolutely do not. And because so much of it is invisible, I mean, think about it like that. That basement was invisible until until we were given a glimpse of it. The it’s all so much of this is behind closed doors. That’s why I’ve come to think of this, that and it’s gotten so much worse now during the pandemic. But that’s everything you used to. You used to go to a store. Right. And you would you would in some form interact was with someone at the store. It was somehow a social activity. And, you know, I don’t want to glamorize romanticize it, you know, that the malls could be pretty bleak and and some of the strip shopping centers could be pretty bleak. But there are still, you know, as I describe in the book, in a chapter about this, this regional department store chain that the Bon-Ton, the chain that grew up on a small town, Pennsylvania, and spread around to small cities in the Midwest. And there’s there’s still a social element there. You were you were out in the world. You were you were in your town. You were together with other people. They would have at the Bon-Ton, they would have wine receptions for for moms to come together when they would have a new line of fashion coming to town. There were all these different elements of your that involved actual interaction with other human beings. And now so much of it is behind closed doors from from that basement with the guy with his goods stocked away, just waiting to send off to get sent off. And then they pass through that windowless warehouse. And then and then they’re showing up in that box on your on your on your on your front step. And it’s all so invisible. And you think about that, like that’s how how much how much less human interaction is involved in that chain than than than what used to be. And just the the atomization that produces and now that we’re seeing just how unhealthy this for us all to be shut in, you know, with the pandemic to lose that that social interaction, that basic humanity. Well, we’ve been we’ve been heading that way for quite a while in this new world as it was. This has only made it worse, but we were already heading in that direction. [01:03:04][136.4]

Adam: [01:03:06] Well, first of all, you know, I have to thank you for doing the work of a journalist and making the invisible visible, because that is what that is fundamentally what what journalists do. And I think that’s often lost in our conversation about journalism and the purpose of news and everything else is to like just make us, you know, turn events that otherwise no one would see into knowledge so that we can have a conversation about it. What can be done about this? Is that something that you take a position on? [01:03:38][32.2]

Alec: [01:03:40] I. I don’t take a position on the book in the sense that I don’t make an argument in the book, the book is not an argument book. It’s not a thesis book. It doesn’t have there’s not a you know, there’s not one of those concluding chapters with the list of things that must be done. But there is definitely an underlying sense, which I give some sort of implicit bearing to in near the book’s end. That part of the problem here, a big part of the problem is the concentration, that part of the reason we have such that we have such concentrated wealth and prosperity in certain places to the point where they themselves have become kind of unlivable, is that in such in such an unhealthy imbalance across our country is that we have such concentration with within certain markets and certain companies, and that one way to restore some basic sense of balance across our country would be to to break up that concentration. And so the book, the book is definitely, definitely makes an implicit case for for this new this new push toward a new kind of new push toward toward competition, toward antitrust, not unlike what we what we did a century ago. [01:04:59][79.1]

Adam: [01:05:00] Yeah, I’ve seen that argument bubble up more and more in our conversation about what’s wrong with our economy, with, you know, why why is it that the American dream has gone in reverse? And, you know, I’ve experienced in my own family that, you know, the the the progression we used to have of, you know, you get a good job and you send your kids to college and, you know, you have a pension and all that. And now we are all upwardly mobile has has reversed in many ways. And when you look at the totality of the more and more it seems to be about the story of concentration and the to me, the more and more it seems like the number one thing we need to do is start putting in antitrust, starting to look at breaking these companies up. Do you have any hope that I know this is not your this is not what the book is about, but we have a new administration and I don’t know what the priorities of the Justice Department are going to be if they’re going to be thinking about antitrust enforcement. But do you have any hope that the conversation is moving in that direction and maybe we’ll see more of that in the future? [01:06:05][65.2]

Alec: [01:06:06] I do actually have some hope on this front. The obviously the the resistance is going to be huge, that there are just this massive lobbying operations that that are made all the more effective, of course, because they have quite a few people from the sort of Democratic realm, Democratic administrations, the Obama administration, who people who have close ties with with people that are now now coming into the government, something that, you know, that can’t be overlooked is just how much tech has helped by the fact that it is that it is very much a democratically aligned industry and the sort of complicity of democratic, you know, sort of Democratic power brokers in tech is is a big issue. But that but there are now more and more people on both sides of the line of the political spectrum who see this problem. And I think that’s one reason that I think it does have a chance, is that this is one of the few areas of policy where there actually is some some agreement across across the spectrum. And people for the people of different motivations, maybe for why they are wary of big tech. They’re coming from different places on this. But the fact that they that they share a general worry, wariness and a general sense that something needs to be done to rein in these giants means that that there’s actually some hope for getting something done that you might actually be able to to build some kind of a coalition on the on the score. [01:07:42][95.8]

Adam: [01:07:44] I’m hopeful of that as well, and I think it’s one of the big jobs of the next five years in American politics and policy, but, you know, the first step of that is making clear what actually is at stake and what is happening, what these companies are doing across the country. And thank you for coming here to do that for us. And thank you for for spreading that, you know, for telling these stories that otherwise wouldn’t be told. The book is called Fulfillment. People can get it wherever the hell they get a book. I assume they can get it on Amazon, right. [01:08:14][30.3]

Alec: [01:08:15] They can as long as they keep selling it there. [01:08:18][3.2]

Adam: [01:08:21] You know, maybe get it from your public library and then download it to your Kindle, perhaps. Alec, thank you so much for being here. I can’t thank you enough. This is wonderful. [01:08:30][9.4]

Alec: [01:08:32] Thank you, Adam. [01:08:32][0.4]

Adam: [01:08:37] Well, thank you once again to Alec MacGillis for coming on the show, the book again is called Fulfillment. If you love that interview as much as I did, I hope you will tell a friend or family member about the show. That is the thing that helps us out the most here. Just say to someone, hey, I heard this good interview. You should check it out. Take a listen to the podcast. I want to thank our producers, Kimmie Lucas and Sam Rodman, our engineer, Andrew Carson, Andrew W.K. for our theme song You Can Find Me Online at AdamConover.Nets or @AdamConover wherever you get your social media. And until next week, we’ll see you on Factually!. Thank you so much for listening. [01:08:37][0.0]

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