Amazon

Get ready for an amazing adventure into Amazon... NO, not The Amazon Rainforest. I mean, Amazon the all encompassing entity that has changed the way people shop forever. We’ll discover tons of fun facts, its origin story, and even delve into this company’s deepest darkest secrets. Who is it? It must be the delivery guy. We’ll unpack Amazon on this week’s episode of FYI!

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foreign get ready for an amazing adventure into Amazon no not the Amazon rainforest I mean Amazon The all-encompassing Entity that has changed the way people shop forever we'll discover tons of fun facts its origin story and even delve into this company's deepest darkest secrets[Music] who is it it must be the delivery guy we'll unpack Amazon on this week's episode of f why I welcome to for your info English you got it[Music] thank you[Applause][Music] hello hello hello and welcome to another exciting edition of FYI for your English the topic based show where we have fun while we learn about a different topic every week in English and remember there's a bonus part where we look at fun facts and we also have little English lessons I hope you'll join us in the bonus part because it's gonna be tons of fun as always and as well as getting a bonus part you can also have access to weekly classes with yours truly that's right un servidor with me you can have weekly classes with me where we review each episode and we review the vocabulary therein and I'll tell you something I want to send a shout out to all my students all my students on patreon who are kicking but you guys are doing a wonderful job and I am proud of each and every one of you so a shout out to all my patrons especially my super duper students Lena Javier Paco Roberto Jose Maria Mila and Alex and don't forget about my Interstellar students who also get a monthly private class with me where we can gauge your progress to gauge is another way of saying to measure so you can have a weekly class with me and a monthly class with me if you're doing your math correctly that's five classes with me a month for our group classes and one of them is a private class that's for our Interstellar students either way I won't get into the detail Tales but you can get PDF documents as I just said classes with me which I think is the real bonus here so if you enjoy learning with me here on each episode just remember there's more and it's at patreon.com Alberto Alonso if you want some extra info or maybe just a sample or two you can reach out uh you can find me I'm very easy to find on Instagram on Facebook the one I use the most I guess is Instagram and Twitter but you can find all of that at my website that's Alberto alonso.com all right now that we've gotten that out of the way let's take a look at our intro I started off by saying get ready for an amazing adventure into Amazon and if you were paying attention I didn't say the Amazon I said Amazon because if we're talking about the Amazon we're talking about a river or a jungle another way to say it is a rain forest if I'm not mistaken the word in Spanish is Selva it's a pretty logical word in English rainforest then I said I mean and we use this structure all the time what do you mean what are you trying to say I mean what I'm trying to say is and remember it's an irregular verb it's mean meant meant so I meant Amazon The all-encompassing Entity I think you say englobad it covers everything it's all encompassing and it's true it has changed the way we shop forever I don't remember the last time I went to a shop well no that's not true but I don't go as often as I used to go not nearly as much then I said we'll discover tons of fun facts it's origin story that's its B beginnings and then we'll delve into and to delve into is to go deeper into the company's deepest darkest secrets and then you heard a buzzer I like what you call it in Spanish a little telephone telefonillo a buzzer well I guess it makes sense and then I said who is it remember we don't say who are you we say who is it when we answer the phone or the door and this is a sentence I've said a million times it must be the delivery guy let's be honest we really say it must be the Amazon guy and I wrapped up saying we'll unpack Amazon on this week's episode of f y i and to unpack is just like what it sounds like and I use that word on purpose for that double entender let's start off with a fun fact now let's see if you know this trivia question Amazon Prime subscribers what was Amazon's original name because Jeff Bezos oh and by the way in English is not bathos it's Bezos right the Z is he initially wanted to call it Kadabra like Abracadabra something a magician would say another one he was toying with was relentless and Relentless is something or someone that is Unstoppable and that's a really good name for the company or at least what the company has become and we'll look at how Relentless Amazon really is so friends told them listen Relentless I don't know man it sounds a little bit too evil so good taste prevailed and he settled on Amazon he liked that it had an A and A Z in it so that means it had everything covered and also that it started with an A so alphabetically it would make sense and come up really really high on the search lists also he said he wanted the company to be like the Amazon River massive powerful so I guess he settled on the right name I can't imagine it as Kadabra or even worse Relentless but they are Relentless they will stop at nothing to take over the world because when we think of Amazon don't just think about a delivery company or a website they call it the everything store for a reason and what they don't have they'll buy up they'll purchase they'll acquire such as ring which is a very popular thing in the United States it's a camera that people put at their front door and it's extremely popular and then they've got your fire stick which is connected to your TV where you can watch your Amazon Prime subscription in Amazon series and TV and film they've got it all covered I mean just look around your house if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber they've got you in their environment your TV is hooked up to your fire stick your fire stick is hooked up to your Alexa oops sorry I didn't mean to set off your Alexis Amigos not find Something's Cooking in my kitchen by donor on Spotify although I've got to be honest I've noticed that here in Spain it's not as popular as in the United States my dad for example has like 75 Alexa's one in the living room one in the front yard one in the backyard I think it's a bit Overkill Overkill is too much but they're even involved in facial recognition they've got their own supermarkets smart supermarkets where you don't even have to take out your wallet you don't have to check out and as we know they even have drones AI it's incredible they have robots it sounds like something out of the future and don't forget about Amazon pay which is a big thing these days as well these digital payments and don't forget that they reinvented books as We Know It with Kindle Kindle was released in the United States on November 19 2007. now does anybody else know why that's a very important date that's my birthday guys November 19th well this November 19th specifically in 2007 the Amazon Kindle came out in the United States and it sold out within five and a half hours of its release by the year 2009 two years later they were out selling printed books so what doesn't Amazon do what business are they not involved in I mean we already know we can watch TV listen to music read a book buy a vacuum cleaner and get it delivered to the comfort of our home all while we watch a movie on Amazon video so basically Jeff Bezos wants you to just go to Amazon the everything's store as they call it Jeff Bezos does not want you to leave Amazon he wants you to rely on him for everything and here's another fun fact Amazon also produces their own original content and they were the first streaming platform to win best picture Oscar that's right the Oscar for Best Picture the movie is called transparent I'm gonna be transparent with you guys I haven't seen it okay what I'm getting at here is that they've got their finger in every industry and they show no signs of quitting it seems like Jeff and Company want to take over the world and I just told you about the Amazon branded companies they also own over 40 subsidiaries and Brands you might be familiar with some of them Whole Foods audible or audible I don't know how you say it in Spanish which by the way I've got an exclusive podcast on Audible Amazon audible it's called this show is the milk if you haven't listened to it give it a listen it's tons of fun and it's based on my best-selling milk books they also have the book review site Goodreads and I know many of you are familiar with twitch the streaming platform so he really wants to conquer the world but wait he wants to conquer so much more than the world he wants to conquer the universe ah hey I'm not overstating this here he's into space exploration as well with his company blue origin he wants to go when no man has gone before and it seems like he's doing just that oh and don't forget about AWS how could I forget Amazon web services look him up to look up is to look for something on the Internet or in a guidebook a phone book if any of you guys remember those things well you probably couldn't listen to this podcast right now if it weren't for Amazon web services they host twitch Facebook Twitter even the CIA what does that mean that means they basically own the internet they can turn it off if they want and that also means that if AWS sneezes the whole internet gets sick you know those days days where Facebook is down and Twitter well that's usually AWS I'm not saying they do it on purpose but I can't believe that they have all that power and don't forget they have data on everyone and that's a word you can say both ways you can say data or data well at least 200 million people globally who have an Amazon Prime subscription and all the others who use their other products let's put it this way a buttload of people and a butt load means a lot of people and if you were paying attention I said they collaborate with the CIA they host their websites I don't want to be a conspiracy theorist here but uh hey if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it's a duck this guy is very powerful but is he some sort of super villain well I'll tell you what I'll tell you a little bit about Jeff Bezos and then you be the judge[Music] little Jeff was born in Albuquerque New Mexico on January 12 1964. he was born to a 17 year old mom who had trouble with his 18 year old dad well that's what happens when teenagers get married now I told you he was born in Albuquerque but he was raised in Houston and Miami but he was raised by his mother because after 17 months of marriage she divorced him he only agreed to marry her because she was Knocked Up Knocked Up is another way of saying pregnant but this guy was supposedly a drinker a partier I mean I get it he was an 18 year old boy but he shirked his responsibility to shirk is to evade so after about a little over a year our buddy Jeff Bezos did not have a dad now his name was not Jeff Bezos at that moment his name was Jeff Jorgensen that was his original dad's his biological dad's last name I know I know what you're thinking so where did he get the Bezos from I'm getting there hang on three years after his mother divorced his biological dad she married a Cuban man named Miguel Bezos if you say it in English it almost sounds like besos okay really bad joke sorry but there was an interesting turn of events a twist with his biological dad but we'll talk about that in the bonus episode now Jeff was always a tinkerer as a kid a tinkerer is somebody who likes to play to take things apart to put things together to invent things he wanted to know how things worked in fact when he felt he was too old to sleep in his crib his crib is where a baby sleeps he managed to take it apart with a screwdriver by himself I guess he thought it was taking up too much room in his room hey there's a double trouble by the time he entered High School Bezos had transformed his home garage into a laboratory hey wait those are two words the British pronounced differently I say garage they say garage I say laboratory they say laboratory well either way with that second one you can say lab so yeah he built a lab in his home garage with his inventions and in high school he fell in love with computers these new things that were taken over the world well not yet but he had a feeling he had a hunch that computers and internet would be the future he started out working in the I.T industry and in the financial sector but not before being valedictorian of his class he was in so many honor societies I mean he was a model student and in 1986 he graduated from the very reputable Princeton University I don't know why I said that in a British accent when it's located in New Jersey well either way he got two degrees one in electrical engineering and another one in computer science then as I said he worked in the financial sector but in the tech side of it and this was on Wall Street this was from 1986 when he graduated to early 1994. oh and he also worked at Mickey D's what Mickey D's that's how we say McDonald's I'll tell you more about that in the bonus part and then he was working in this Tech Finance firm down on Wall Street called d e Shaw now this is where he learned so much of the stuff that he would later parlay into Amazon and he was doing really well they loved him in this company he was Rising really quickly up the ranks oh and another perk about this job this is where he met his now ex-wife Mackenzie Tuttle and in 1993 they got married but she played a very large role in the founding of Amazon especially in the early years the couple got divorced in 2019 after 25 years of marriage but don't worry she got 25 of the couple's stock in Amazon which was worth about are you ready for this a whopping 38 billion dollars man that's a huge chunk of change so aside from meeting his wife or as I said ex-wife this was also an important point in his life because this is where he reached his turning point this is where he decided to leave Wall Street behind and leave a high-paying job behind because he was the vice president of the company as I said he worked his way up but after four years he decided to go out and do it on his own the thing that really changed his mind was when he read that the internet grew two thousand three hundred percent in one year and that figure blew his mind it astounded him and he knew that there was a lot of money to be made so he turned his back on Wall Street to launch an online bookstore well it wasn't books at first at first he didn't know what he wanted to sell so he made a list of products that he wanted to sell online products that would be easy to sell products that wouldn't go bad think about it books don't have an expiration date so he made a list and out of those 10 things he decided it would be books he was going to sell books online so he got a a loan I guess you could call it um prestamo you say in Spanish from his parents for three hundred thousand dollars and they started the company now don't worry he paid his parents back like I said it's not really a loan it's just that they invested in the company and they are six percent owners they are billionaires and when they asked his mom I mean how did you do that you know give your son all your savings and she said we weren't betting on the internet we were betting on Jeff and that's one thing thing will will learn about Jeff Bezos his mother has been his rock all throughout his life he even said that he hit the lottery with her and on July 5th 1994 Jeff Bezos started a little humble Bookseller called Amazon this was in Bellevue Washington and to keep people motivated what they would do is anytime somebody got a sale they would ring a bell in the office three years later he took the company public they had their IPO which is initial public offering it's when people can buy shares in your company the company sold its first book in 1995. the book was called fluid Concepts and creative analogies by Douglas hofstadter and it wasn't easy they made some money at first but then let me remind you the.com Bubble Burst and many many people lost their jobs or many people were laid off as we say many companies went bankrupt or another way to say it is they declared chapter 11 and it was tough but Jeff and Company were able to weather the storm but in 2000 in the midst of this crisis Amazon laid off 14 of its Workforce the good news for them was that by 2003 they rebounded and they made a profit for the first time after a couple hard years and now as I said before Amazon is everywhere they sell 350 million products worldwide in 2022 they had 300 million active users they shipped to more than 100 countries including Cuba Iran North Korea Sudan and Syria and as I said before 200 million people globally have an Amazon Prime subscription including me and the company is worth one trillion dollars I can't even fathom that number we've got to wrap up here you get it wrap up okay all right all right but I guess there's a lesson that we can take with us here no matter how hard things look keep pushing on don't ever give up even when things are tough as the idiomatic expression goes when the going gets tough the tough get going and we're gonna get going right now I sure hope you'll join us in the bonus episode of today's F why[Applause] foreign[Applause][Music][Music]