Jeff Bezos, Shah Rukh Khan, and Zoya Akhtar

Shah Rukh Khan: Tell me, have you seen any perceptible change in India apart from the traffic when you came last time? Apart from the traffic. Apart from traffic. Jeff Bezos: You know, it's interesting.

I so I guess the I the first time I came to India was about 11 years ago. I don't know that I have seen perceptible changes of any great magnitude. The thing, what I would actually say is that I notice there's certain things that seem to me to be the same, and I love those things.

One of the things I notice every time I come here is that there is so much energy here, and dynamism, and color. The word I would use for it is the whole place seems so full of life. And everywhere you go, every single thing you do, and the diversity of India.

When I come here, I've never seen a more diverse place. Everywhere I travel in the world, nowhere more diverse than India. So the energy, self-improvement.

Every time I come here, I find that the people that I talk to are focused on and interested in being better tomorrow than they are today. Everybody here seems to be focused on self-improvement. Zoya Akhtar: Did you think online retail would get this big?

Jeff Bezos: Oh, no. So, you know, when I started Amazon, it was 25 years ago. I started Amazon in 1994. When I went to seek investors, the first question I had to answer is, "What is the Internet?"

None of my investors had ever heard of the Internet. And the the idea that I had in mind was to build a bookstore. I realized that we could build a store which would have every book ever printed in any language, in print or out of print, and we could do that online.

It would be impossible in a physical store. And that was the founding idea of Amazon. And but did I expect what would happen today?

No. You know, we started, I've been at Amazon when it was one person, me, when it was 10 people, when it was 100 people, when it was 1,000 people. And today, when it's. You know, more than 700,000 people and approaching 70,000 people just here in India. So, no, I did not predict that.

And actually, I think if anybody had predicted that, they would've needed to be immediately institutionalized in a mental facility. Because it's not a normal thing to have happen. My dream when I started Amazon was that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.

So it's been a very, fun journey for me. And by the way, I still tap dance into work. I'm having so much fun.

Zoya Akhtar: Is there anything you don't sell on Amazon? Anything we don't sell? Yeah, or anything you tried to sell and didn't work?

Jeff Bezos: Anything you decided not to go with? Oh, well, there are things we tried to sell that didn't work. We tried to sell a phone called the Fire Phone, and we worked on it for four years, and no one bought it.

I think my mother bought one. And I don't think she was that happy with it. But it is.

But no, there are things, there are things that we deliberately don't sell. We don't sell guns. We don't sell tobacco.

There are things we don't sell, but and that we make deliberate decisions about. But other than those things, we try to sell everything that anyone might want to buy, and we're trying to make it as convenient as possible for people. You know, in the early 21st century, we're all busy.