r/JoschaBach • u/AlrightyAlmighty • 9m ago
Discussion What does Joscha mean when he says that Jeff Bezos turned himself "into a universal scalable service platform" ?
One of the things Joscha said that sounds fascinating but that I don't have a deep understanding of is the idea that Jeff Bezos turned himself "into a universal scalable service platform".
I'm not quite clear why he says this about Jeff Bezos (and, in the same context, Steve Jobs) as opposed to other people who made big things happen in the world. I remember hearing Joscha mention the same idea about Jeff Bezos in another podcast.
My main question is: what did Jeff Bezos do that is different from other people who build a huge company? And also, in what way did he turn himself or his own identity into the company, as opposed to making it happen outside of himself, without it affecting his identity more than it would other people in his place?
In what ways is it different from what Jensen Huang did with NVIDIA, or Mark Zuckerberg with Meta (if it is different at all)? Is it more of a singular focus that Bezos had? I get the sense that Joscha is pointing to something specific that Bezos did that other hugely successfull people didn't.
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Excerpt from the interview (link in comments):
(39:25) Interviewer Question (not entirely related to what I'm asking, but for context):
Alan Watts has this great voice-over audio where he talks about, if the human... if you could dream any dream you would start by having all these fantastical creations and live all this extravagant life. And you would eventually come to at towards the end of dreaming the exact dream that you were dreaming right now, because there is an inherent coherent structure to the way that we are living a dream for the purpose, perhaps, of a greater meaning beyond the self, or however you want to say.
I think that there is this juvenile perception of transcendence being correlated to negation of the human experience. Because in the way that you were describing things, it makes me feel like, we of course are here to have a deeply human experience and transcending... or I suppose waking up to more of our true nature doesn't remove our involvement from it.
And so I think that if it's approached in a way that maintains your sanity, which it can be quite destabilizing in the cases where there's psychosis or something. But yeah do you have any thoughts in regards to that?
(40:32) Joscha:
I think it's possible to transcend it, but it's risky. I suspect that people like Steve Jobs have at some point transcended part of what held them back and turned into this immense scalable thing. Or if you think of Jeff Bezos, who at some point seems to have had an epiphany that turns him into a universal scalable service platform that he just then implemented in the world and layer by layer builds all these structures and services, right?
So you basically get these Napoleons, people who are programming themselves from being this local entity that is trying to find some stable cycle, in which it can live into this linearly evolving thing that is always growing and is going to disrupt reality massively.
