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Speaker 1: Also media. All right, everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards.

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Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, and we have some sad news for

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Speaker 1: the audience. Up at the top of the episode. Yesterday morning,

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Speaker 1: at about eight hundred hours, Sophie Lichterman's plane left Tokyo

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Speaker 1: bound for Manila. It was shot down over the Sea

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Speaker 1: of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors. She'll

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Speaker 1: be back next week, but with me this week is

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Speaker 1: our beloved returning guest, Jason Pargin. Jason, do you think

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Speaker 1: that mash joke is going to work with our audience?

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Speaker 1: Like years before I was born?

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Speaker 2: It's so dangerous because if there's any kind of an

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Speaker 2: air disaster the day this episode's supposed to go up,

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Speaker 2: then we've got to go in and well, no, that

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Speaker 2: just makes it funnier.

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Speaker 1: I guess that makes it fun The only time I've

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Speaker 1: removed a joke for something like that was we made

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Speaker 1: some jokes at the start of the COVID pandemic when

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Speaker 1: I assumed it was going to be like a Sarr's

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Speaker 1: situation and we cut those bad boys out before air.

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Speaker 1: That did not age well with the entire country lockdown.

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Speaker 1: Jason Pargen You are a my former boss over at

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Speaker 1: cracked dot com, which was briefly defunct but is now funked,

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Speaker 1: but neither of us work there anymore. You are the

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Speaker 1: author of a number of wonderful books. Do you want

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Speaker 1: to talk about the book that you've got that's going

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Speaker 1: to be out in about two weeks at the time

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Speaker 1: which people hear these episodes.

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Speaker 2: Yes, the book is a standalone novel called I'm Starting

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Speaker 2: to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It is

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Speaker 2: not a part of any series. It doesn't require any

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Speaker 2: prior knowledge of me or this podcast or anything else.

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Speaker 2: Anyone can enjoy it as long as you enjoy books.

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Speaker 2: Robert gave a blurb on it, very kind. He said,

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Speaker 2: strangely that the book saved his marriage, which surprives everyone.

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Speaker 2: I didn't know he was married. It's not that kind,

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Speaker 2: I was not.

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Speaker 1: That's that's the magic of your writing, Joseph.

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Speaker 2: But so far the reviews are getting equal equally. The

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Speaker 2: positive ones are half saying, it's fun. It's a fun

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Speaker 2: little roller coaster ride. You can read in the beach.

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Speaker 2: It's something you can read on the on the toilet,

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Speaker 2: like if you don't want to get fecal particles on

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Speaker 2: your phone. Sure, this is something you can have on

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Speaker 2: the toilet instead, and the other half reviews are like,

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Speaker 2: I just put it down and stared at the wall

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Speaker 2: for a while, and then I called my mom. I

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Speaker 2: decided I had to totally change my life. I deleted

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Speaker 2: all the apps off my phone. So I guess it's

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Speaker 2: kind of It depends on how you want to approach it.

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Speaker 2: If you just want to breezy read, it's there for you.

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Speaker 2: But apparently some people they have decided to make permanent

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Speaker 2: life changes after reading it.

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Speaker 1: I mean that's every author's goal, is for the readers

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Speaker 1: to make ill considered, rash decisions that alter the entire

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Speaker 1: course of their existence after finishing your book. Yeah, I've

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Speaker 1: been reading your books. I mean I literally started more

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Speaker 1: than twenty years ago, when I was an adolescent in

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Speaker 1: high school, long before the cracked days, when you were

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Speaker 1: still publishing stuff on the internet. And it's been gratifying

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Speaker 1: to see that you are one of I don't know,

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Speaker 1: like a dozen people in the country who can make

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Speaker 1: a living writing novels. I'm very happy that continues to work, and.

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Speaker 3: It will see we've reached a point where I know

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Speaker 3: for a fact their narrative is going to be geriatric

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Speaker 3: TikTok star tries to write a book, tries to cash

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Speaker 3: in on his TikTok fame.

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Speaker 2: It's like, no, I was writing books before social media existed,

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Speaker 2: before you could upload video to the Internet. I was

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Speaker 2: writing books. This is no I'm a washed up author

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Speaker 2: trying to reclaim my success us with TikTok. It's not

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Speaker 2: the other way around. See.

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Speaker 1: I even had this joke planned when I came in.

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Speaker 1: I was going to do like this series of bits

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Speaker 1: about how you were actually gen Z because of your

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Speaker 1: TikTok stardom, But you've ruined that. Although Jason, I did

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Speaker 1: want to say to start this off, you know Sophie's

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Speaker 1: not here. This episode is just you and I and you,

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Speaker 1: as a gen Z expert on the Tiktoks, know that

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Speaker 1: all the kids these days are using the term raw

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Speaker 1: dog for situations like this, which is deeply upsetting to

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Speaker 1: our ears as old men. But but the kids, the

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Speaker 1: kids love using it for everything from sitting on a

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Speaker 1: plane without a book to not taking psychiatric medication that's

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Speaker 1: prescribed to you from your doctor. So are you ready

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Speaker 1: to uh gen Z terminology? This podcast episode that you suggested.

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Speaker 2: Yes, let's let's let's raw dog. Let's raw dog. Goon this,

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Speaker 2: let's goon this episode. Where are some other terms we.

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Speaker 1: This won't be ohio. I hear the kids are using

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Speaker 1: Ohio as a tur for mid or unimpressive. Right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: they're all right sometimes, Jason, this is a story that

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Speaker 1: you had suggested, and the bastard of this story is

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Speaker 1: kind of the entire c suite at eBay. It's a

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Speaker 1: lot worse that I think listeners are going to be

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Speaker 1: ready for. But to give some context, I want to

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Speaker 1: actually start by peeling back outside of eBay, because as

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Speaker 1: a heads up, the story we're telling is the tale

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Speaker 1: of how eBay's internal security agency decided that a group

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Speaker 1: of elderly blog a pair of elderly bloggers were mortal

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Speaker 1: enemies of the corporation and deployed insane degrees of force

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Speaker 1: and violence to attempt to stop them from publishing blogs.

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Speaker 1: But I wanted to peel back a bit and start

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Speaker 1: by talking about like where the industry of like corporate

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Speaker 1: intelligence is like private intelligence services that a company can

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Speaker 1: hire to deal with threats to their profitability, because I

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Speaker 1: think it's one of the undertold stories of the twenty

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Speaker 1: first century, and it's partly undertold because people who tell

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Speaker 1: it tend to get sued.

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Speaker 2: It's really interesting because I read this story and read

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Speaker 2: the results of it, and like the result, the legal

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Speaker 2: process and all that, and I could not make heads

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Speaker 2: or tails of how any of this could have happened.

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Speaker 2: And when I try to read background on it, could

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Speaker 2: not make heads or tails of how any of this

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Speaker 2: could have happened. Because you know, if you disappoint some

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Speaker 2: guy who owns a mom and pop shop and he's

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Speaker 2: kind of a douchebag or whatever, you can see that

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Speaker 2: guy like mailing you a dead rat or something, the

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Speaker 2: idea of upsetting eBay and they start mailing you dead

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Speaker 2: animals and the mail and that's not the weirdest part

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Speaker 2: of the story. It gets so off the rails. This

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Speaker 2: is the part I don't have is how there are

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Speaker 2: people the company who have this mindset because this story

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Speaker 2: goes to places that you don't see fictional stories going.

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Speaker 2: There's no plot line on succession like this, and it

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Speaker 2: would have come off as corny if there was.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be kind of unbelievable. But we're getting

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Speaker 1: ahead of ourselves and We're done with the cold open, Jason.

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Speaker 1: For whatever reason, the company now has us do that

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Speaker 1: little cold open thing. The listener will have heard an

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Speaker 1: ad in between where I just said the cold open's done,

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Speaker 1: and then Jason. But now we're warmed up, We're hot.

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Speaker 1: Are you ready to go? Are you excited that our

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Speaker 1: corporate overlords now make us do a cold open that

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Speaker 1: has improved the quality of the show. I'm sure so.

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Speaker 1: On February eleventh, twenty eleven, The New York Times published

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Speaker 1: a story about hackers who had forced their way into

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Speaker 1: the computer systems of a security company called HB Gary.

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Speaker 1: At this point, the public conception mostly put spying as

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Speaker 1: the domain of nation state actors. Right like, if you

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Speaker 1: had asked the average person, are there like spy agencies

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Speaker 1: in the employee of like random finance companies, they probably

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Speaker 1: would have said, well, like, not real ones. You know,

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Speaker 1: you've probably got like some sort of physical security for

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Speaker 1: the buildings and stuff, but nothing like the FBI or whatever.

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Speaker 1: But that view was already outdated in two thousand eleven.

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Speaker 1: The HB Gary hack revealed a different world of espionage,

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Speaker 1: paid for by the highest bidder and most importantly petty

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Speaker 1: to an almost unfathomable degree, rather than the kind of

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Speaker 1: stuff that, like cyberpunk stories had primed us to expect

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Speaker 1: from our mega corporations, like a high profile assassinations and

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Speaker 1: burglaries to steal priceless inventions. Most of the stolen documents

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Speaker 1: from HB. Gary revealed them like pitching their corporate clients

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Speaker 1: ways to attack the enemies of like Bank of America

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Speaker 1: and the Chamber of Commerce, and what we would consider

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Speaker 1: incredibly petty ways, ways that kind of more than anything,

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Speaker 1: resemble the way people fight online rather than like, again,

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Speaker 1: the sort of sinister stuff that like you're playing like

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Speaker 1: a cyberpunk pen and paper game, your team's going to

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Speaker 1: be doing.

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Speaker 2: Because I had heard of corporate espionage, which I always

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Speaker 2: thought was just somebody sneaking into another company to try

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Speaker 2: to get a look at their design on a thing,

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Speaker 2: and I just don' that was a thing forever. But

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Speaker 2: why you're describing and what I know is coming in

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Speaker 2: this story, it's almost like a type of psychological guerrilla

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Speaker 2: warfare or just yeah, just trolling people. I don't get it.

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Speaker 1: Well, and it's important to understand. I think part of

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Speaker 1: what kind of brings some context to this is if

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Speaker 1: you actually look at what the FBI was doing at

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Speaker 1: the height of the civil rights movement, most of their

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Speaker 1: actual physical work was nothing that would make a particularly

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Speaker 1: impressive movie. It was literally, we have hired different sort

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Speaker 1: of like a mix of like thugs and just like

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Speaker 1: people that we think we can get to like workforce

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Speaker 1: for a few bucks, to like trail every black person

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Speaker 1: on the campus of this college, right like literally like

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Speaker 1: that that's a big part of like when when those

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Speaker 1: activists broke into that FBI office and leaked all those

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Speaker 1: files to the Washington Post. This was a year YouTube

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Speaker 1: of wore Watergate. That was a big part of what

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Speaker 1: was revealed is that there were like colleges where the

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Speaker 1: FBI was just surveilling like every black student at the college,

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Speaker 1: and it wasn't even with FBI agents. A lot of

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Speaker 1: the time, they had just hired goons to follow these

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Speaker 1: kids around in case they might do something. So to

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Speaker 1: an extent, I guess part of what you have to understand,

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Speaker 1: if you understand, if you study the history of espionage,

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Speaker 1: one percent of it is really cool stuff where they're

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Speaker 1: making like polonium darts to shoot out of umbrellas and

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Speaker 1: assassinating governmental leaders, and ninety nine percent of it is

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Speaker 1: just we hired a dumb guy to follow them around,

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Speaker 1: and they're going to know the dumb guys following them

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Speaker 1: because he's a big like he's not very good at it.

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Speaker 1: But we don't really like, what if they notice, what's

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Speaker 1: the harm to us? We want them scared, right. The

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Speaker 1: whole point is to just intimidate people, and that's largely

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Speaker 1: I think that is the logic that a lot of

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Speaker 1: these corporate security firms function on. It doesn't matter as

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Speaker 1: much are our plans super well thought out. What matters

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Speaker 1: is that we kind of brute force people into being

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Speaker 1: scared to fuck with us, right, And that's the kind

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Speaker 1: of that's the kind of like plots that HB. Gary

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Speaker 1: was shopping around to and they never again, none of

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Speaker 1: the stuff is ever as direct as you want it

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Speaker 1: to be. So HB. Gary, which is the security company,

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Speaker 1: would send the plans they had to this law firm

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Speaker 1: called Hunton and Williams, which represented all of these big

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Speaker 1: like Bank of America represented the Chamber of Commerce, which

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Speaker 1: itself represents a bunch of different financial institutions in the

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Speaker 1: company or in the country. In one document, HB. Gary's

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Speaker 1: chief executive Aaron Barr offered to publicize biographic details about

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Speaker 1: a un organizer that had challenged the Chamber of Commerce

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Speaker 1: when it opposed the Obama Admin's healthcare reform package. And

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Speaker 1: you hear that and it's like, oh, did he like

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Speaker 1: have a drunk driving arrest? Did he kill someone with

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Speaker 1: his car? No, I want to read you a direct

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Speaker 1: quote from Bar on the salacious details he wanted to

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Speaker 1: reveal about this union organizer. They go to a Jewish

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Speaker 1: church in DC. They have two kids, a son and

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Speaker 1: a daughter. And first off that year, I'm sorry twenty eleven, right,

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Speaker 1: I think it's a synagogue. I don't think you call

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Speaker 1: it a Jewish church. I mean, I guess that's not

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Speaker 1: like technically wrong, but like it'd be weird if you

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Speaker 1: called it like a Muslim church, Like we have words

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Speaker 1: for those, but I don't know, it's weirder that he

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Speaker 1: thought that. That was like the damning detail that, like, yeah,

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Speaker 1: he goes to synagogue and he has two kids. That's

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Speaker 1: gonna you blew this all wide open. Hb Gary. A

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Speaker 1: week later, Barr offered to create in depth target dossier's

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Speaker 1: and keep that in mind because we're going to run

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Speaker 1: into that tactic again when we go back to eBay,

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Speaker 1: with the goal of quote mitigating the effect of adversarial

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Speaker 1: groups like US Chamber Watch, which was a citizens group

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Speaker 1: that like criticized and protested the US Chamber of Commerce.

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Speaker 1: One proposition was to publish the petty criminal record of

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Speaker 1: a member in the group. In another instance, HB Gary

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Speaker 1: offered to work with Peter Teal's Palantier, which is a

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Speaker 1: private spy company, to attack WikiLeaks before it could release

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Speaker 1: a tranch of emails from inside Bank of America related

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Speaker 1: to the financial crash. And this is a little bit

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Speaker 1: closer to like the serious cyberpunk stories like WikiLeaks, they're

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Speaker 1: doing some serious business in twenty eleven. This at least

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Speaker 1: sounds like, you know, a little more exciting. But their

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Speaker 1: specific plan to attack WikiLeaks was to submit a bunch

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Speaker 1: of fake documents and then when WikiLeaks reported on them,

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Speaker 1: exposed them as forgeries to damage, specifically to damage Glenn

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Speaker 1: Greenwald's career, which if you'd just given him a little longer, Glenn,

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Speaker 1: Glenn was going to do that on his own.

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Speaker 2: I guess I'm already confused because we have worked in

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Speaker 2: corporate environments where every hour every minute, every penny is

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Speaker 2: being watched, and the question is, well, how does this

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Speaker 2: contribute to the bottom line. So the idea that you've got,

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Speaker 2: like what really, to me sounds like a dirty tricks department. Yeah,

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Speaker 2: and they are reporting to somebody, They're on the payroll

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Speaker 2: with a job title. What they're doing is being documented somewhere.

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Speaker 2: It feels like the type of thing that a company

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Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy would do back when you you know,

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Speaker 2: the way you break your union is you go just

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Speaker 2: burn the guy's house down or whatever to try to intimidate.

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Speaker 2: But you would not think in twenty eleven or whatever

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Speaker 2: that you still have a dirty tricks department. And I

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Speaker 2: know that I sound naive. I guess I just assumed

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Speaker 2: we had moved into, you know, a world where you

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Speaker 2: just sue people when you want to silence them. You

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Speaker 2: would not go digging up, you know, like, hey, there's

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Speaker 2: rumors if these people are Jews, what's going on with that?

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Speaker 1: I wonder how much of it is. These CEOs and

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Speaker 1: stuff are probably all older. They're probably all like mostly

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Speaker 1: baby boomers. You know, in twenty eleven, you would imagine

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Speaker 1: the guys running big banks or probably most of them

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Speaker 1: probably aren't gen X, maybe a few, and I wonder,

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Speaker 1: I mean, even if they were gen X, they were

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Speaker 1: probably raised on stories of Watergate. I wonder how much

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Speaker 1: of this is just like reading about the dirty tricks

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Speaker 1: that the Nixon white House did and assuming like, well,

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Speaker 1: that's probably what we should do with our right for him. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: went well for Nixon. That's why he had so many

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Speaker 1: terms as president. Now, the fact that this hack of

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Speaker 1: HB Gary happened in the first place was because Barr,

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Speaker 1: who was like the dude actually submitting these plans to

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Speaker 1: that legal firm, had made public threats to the leaders

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Speaker 1: of Anonymous, the leaderless hacking collective a couple of weeks earlier,

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Speaker 1: and he had even stated that he had information about

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Speaker 1: the names of several of their quote leaders that he

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Speaker 1: was about to reveal, which I think was a lie,

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Speaker 1: and Anonymous kind of called his bluff, which is when

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Speaker 1: all of these emails got leaked, and for good measure,

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Speaker 1: they took control of Bar's Twitter account just to fuck

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Speaker 1: with him. Now, this led to Bars stepping down as

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Speaker 1: CEO and basically begging Anonymous to leave him alone for

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Speaker 1: the sake of his children. So now one of the

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Speaker 1: things that you saw. As soon as like bar got embarrassed,

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Speaker 1: is Palenteer and all of these other companies that he

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Speaker 1: had been talking about working with sought to distance themselves

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Speaker 1: from HB. Gary. Hey, this was just some lone asshole

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Speaker 1: making like proposals to his court, Like we never agreed

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Speaker 1: to do any of these jobs with them. We had

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Speaker 1: Palenteer would never do anything this unethical, right, like you

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Speaker 1: can trust us. This was just one lone asshole. Fast

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Speaker 1: forward about six years two twenty seventeen, when Harvey Weinstein's

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Speaker 1: life explodes and stories start to come out that he

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Speaker 1: had used a different spy for higher company, Black Cube,

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Speaker 1: in order to harass a lot of the women that

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Speaker 1: he had abused and to try to stop the story

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Speaker 1: that The New York Times ultimately published from coming out

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Speaker 1: about him. Now, Black Cube, the firm that he used,

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Speaker 1: was based in Israel and staffed with a bunch of

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Speaker 1: former Massad guys. And if HB. Gary is kind of

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Speaker 1: like bush league Black Cubes like the New York Yankees, right,

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Speaker 1: this is a high dollar, high power corporate spy firm

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Speaker 1: with absolutely no ethical or moral constraints and a terrifying

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Speaker 1: degree of power. That said like HB. Gary. They wielded

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Speaker 1: this with like an almost there's always this degree of

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Speaker 1: like incompetence that I think is just born from and

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Speaker 1: I think all the HB. Gary guys, a lot of

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Speaker 1: them probably came out of the government too. If you

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Speaker 1: work in government intel agencies all your life, you have

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Speaker 1: this shield of working for the government, and then you

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Speaker 1: move into the private sector and everything is a lot

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Speaker 1: harder and you don't you no longer have that kind

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Speaker 1: of protection, and so you notice just like dumb shit, right.

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Speaker 1: That's that's kind of those thing to me when studying

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Speaker 1: like Black Cube and this constellation of other Israeli companies

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Speaker 1: that all have like former government agents working for them. Specifically,

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Speaker 1: the way that Black Cube went after some of Weinstein's

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Speaker 1: accusers was they hired had a bunch of investigators to

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Speaker 1: make false identities to try to befriend some of the

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Speaker 1: women online who were accusing Weinstein, with the goal of

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Speaker 1: basically disgracing them. And it was just kind of a

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Speaker 1: wildly unsuccessful plan that showed I think a degree of

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Speaker 1: like just assuming everyone was dumb that was involved in this,

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Speaker 1: Like none of these people would be intelligent enough to

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Speaker 1: know that Weinstein might have people going after them, none

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Speaker 1: of them would have any precautions in place, none of

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Speaker 1: them would be talking to people like Ronan Farah or

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Speaker 1: talking to like anyone who might be able to advise

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Speaker 1: them on like the risks that they faced going after Weinstein.

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Speaker 1: It's just this, like, it's very interesting to me, the

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Speaker 1: kind of arrogance that you see with these which is

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Speaker 1: going to be a big part of the eBay story too.

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Speaker 2: Okay, I'm going to be frank here. Every single story

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Speaker 2: I hear about espionage at any level is always a dumb,

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Speaker 2: slapstick affair full of mistakes and people stumbling into the

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Speaker 2: wrong thing, and whenever they succeed, it's almost on accident

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Speaker 2: or because the people they were after were extremely stupid

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Speaker 2: and made a bunch of really obvious mistakes. The listeners

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Speaker 2: who listened to all your episodes, No, we did one

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Speaker 2: a series on MK Ultra Yeah, which had a reputation

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Speaker 2: in the conspiracy world as this other worldly alien high

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Speaker 2: tech mind control manchurion candidates space age stuff, and in

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Speaker 2: reality was just a lot of people getting very high

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Speaker 2: on government funds and one guy who had like a

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Speaker 2: little jerk off room where he watched agents like have

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Speaker 2: sex with prostitutes, and it was just a bunch of

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Speaker 2: very dumb people who had watched a lot of spy

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Speaker 2: movies and themselves were working off of very silly, i

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Speaker 2: don't know, almost childlike ideas of watch that kind of thing,

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Speaker 2: of how it worked and what mind control could do.

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Speaker 2: But ultimately they were just kind of drawing a government

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Speaker 2: paycheck to do a bunch of idiocy. And I rarely

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Speaker 2: hear anything that sounds like James Bond.

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Speaker 1: That's the you get a couple of those, right, Like

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Speaker 1: obviously that has happened in the past, Right you have

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Speaker 1: some especially like you can go into World War Two,

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Speaker 1: you can find some examples of really like effective and

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Speaker 1: intelligent espionage. But I think some of it is that

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Speaker 1: the fact that spy movies are such a big part

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Speaker 1: of the culture has It's kind of like the issue

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Speaker 1: that people say, AI learned language models are going to

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Speaker 1: have where they're going to get trained on more and

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Speaker 1: more stuff that's AI generated and that's going to cause

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Speaker 1: additional sort of hallucinations. I think ever since the end

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Speaker 1: of like the start of the Cold War, every generation

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Speaker 1: of spies has been poisoned by spy movies and it's

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Speaker 1: caused like it's caused a degree of inevitable degeneration.

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Speaker 2: Right.

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Speaker 1: That's a big part of the eBay story, and it's

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Speaker 1: there's a you know I talk about there's this journalist

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Speaker 1: Sebastian Younger I admire lot and he used to work

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Speaker 1: with a photo journalist who died in Libya during the

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Speaker 1: early days of that civil war. But his friend, the

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Speaker 1: story he was in Libya to cover was he was

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Speaker 1: specifically looking to get like photos and interviews with rebels

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Speaker 1: who were in the way that they were dressing and

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Speaker 1: posing consciously aping Hollywood action movies, because these were all

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Speaker 1: kids who had grown up on bootleg American movies, and

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Speaker 1: when they realized I'm about to be fighting in a war,

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Speaker 1: they all started like dressing and acting like different characters

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Speaker 1: from their favorite movies. And I think his instinct was

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Speaker 1: good that there is something like really important in that,

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Speaker 1: and I don't think it's most people are surprised. Are

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Speaker 1: not surprised to hear that, like, young men who become

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Speaker 1: soldiers are influenced by action movies, right, and particularly a

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Speaker 1: lot of like how they act and even their expectations

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Speaker 1: of what war will be like. We just don't extend

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Speaker 1: it enough to be like, no, no, that's true of

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Speaker 1: all the guys in the CIA and the FBI too, right,

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Speaker 1: They've all been raised on this shit and they're all

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Speaker 1: changed by it. So yeah, I did want to talk

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Speaker 1: a little bit more about like what some of these

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Speaker 1: like hack for hire companies today are like because and

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Speaker 1: this is right before we get into the eBay story,

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Speaker 1: but this is kind of important. Black Cube is part

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Speaker 1: of a constellation of companies, and Israel is one of

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Speaker 1: the places where a lot of these companies exist. We

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Speaker 1: have an industry in the United States. There's a sizeable

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Speaker 1: industry that's kind of like the B tier of these

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Speaker 1: hack for higher companies in India as well. And these

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Speaker 1: are you know, it doesn't take they usually are not

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Speaker 1: super expensive, but the amount of damage that they can

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Speaker 1: do to like our collective information ecology is pretty significant.

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Speaker 1: For example, a peer company to Black Cube cobwe Web Technologies,

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Speaker 1: which raged about ten million dollars in twenty nineteen to

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Speaker 1: build a search engine for intelligence information. Basically, all they

415
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Speaker 1: were doing building this search engine was spearfishing huge numbers

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Speaker 1: of random people to steal their personal data and then

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Speaker 1: put it into a searchable database that they could sell

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Speaker 1: access to, so, you know, effectively like stealing people's personal

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Speaker 1: info in order to brag that, like, hey, we have

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Speaker 1: something that equivocates to like a police database that you

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Speaker 1: can pay for access to because we've compromised all of

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Speaker 1: these different people's accounts. Cobweb's plan was to take the

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Speaker 1: work that the kind of work that companies like HB

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Speaker 1: Gary and black Cube had been doing for years and

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Speaker 1: get more proactive with it. Right, Instead of waiting for

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Speaker 1: a company to be like, I want you to target

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Speaker 1: these specific people, we just get as many people as possible,

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Speaker 1: trick random people into giving up their data at scale,

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Speaker 1: and yeah, that's you know. There's actually an interesting report

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Speaker 1: published by Meta previously Facebook recently that kind of goes

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Speaker 1: into more detail on this. You can find the link

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Speaker 1: in our show notes. But that report noted that like

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Speaker 1: basically they've cobweb activated like fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp,

434
00:24:03,960 --> 00:24:07,399
Speaker 1: and Twitter in order to like grab just add mass

435
00:24:07,720 --> 00:24:11,440
Speaker 1: information on activists, politicians, government officials, like everyone they could

436
00:24:11,520 --> 00:24:13,200
Speaker 1: get to fall for their shit.

437
00:24:14,080 --> 00:24:17,080
Speaker 2: But to what end? What was the final goal of

438
00:24:17,160 --> 00:24:18,359
Speaker 2: that project.

439
00:24:18,040 --> 00:24:21,680
Speaker 1: To have a big database that they can sell access

440
00:24:21,720 --> 00:24:24,399
Speaker 1: to and you can search for They sell it to

441
00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:27,800
Speaker 1: anyone who is looking for information on like they can say,

442
00:24:27,840 --> 00:24:30,280
Speaker 1: like you know, if you're if you're an oil and

443
00:24:30,320 --> 00:24:33,000
Speaker 1: gas company, right, and you're worried about protests in the

444
00:24:33,080 --> 00:24:35,560
Speaker 1: UK by anti oil and gas protesters, like some of

445
00:24:35,560 --> 00:24:37,800
Speaker 1: those people who have quote unquote defaced I don't think

446
00:24:37,800 --> 00:24:40,119
Speaker 1: they've done any permanent damage to any paintings actually, but

447
00:24:40,280 --> 00:24:43,080
Speaker 1: like you know those folks, right, you can pay for

448
00:24:43,200 --> 00:24:46,360
Speaker 1: access to this database and we have spearfished and scraped

449
00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:48,680
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who have sympathies to that group,

450
00:24:49,000 --> 00:24:51,120
Speaker 1: and you can see where they are and you can,

451
00:24:51,359 --> 00:24:54,400
Speaker 1: you know, set up your own surveillance potential. You can

452
00:24:54,520 --> 00:24:57,240
Speaker 1: like try to infiltrate, but you'll get all this information

453
00:24:57,359 --> 00:25:00,800
Speaker 1: on their their real world and their digital network. There's

454
00:25:00,800 --> 00:25:04,040
Speaker 1: a lot that's come out recently about how there's this

455
00:25:04,160 --> 00:25:08,119
Speaker 1: kind of unique cell phone identifying number that's supposed to

456
00:25:08,119 --> 00:25:10,640
Speaker 1: be anonymous. But if you also know kind of where

457
00:25:10,680 --> 00:25:14,640
Speaker 1: people live, you can figure out which cell phone goes

458
00:25:14,680 --> 00:25:19,359
Speaker 1: to which person, and using information that is available through

459
00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:22,479
Speaker 1: a lot of these different like data broker companies, you

460
00:25:22,480 --> 00:25:25,600
Speaker 1: can track random people cell phones in the United States.

461
00:25:25,640 --> 00:25:28,720
Speaker 1: If you're a corporate actor in order to like stock

462
00:25:28,920 --> 00:25:30,720
Speaker 1: people who you consider to be a threat. This is

463
00:25:30,720 --> 00:25:34,000
Speaker 1: the thing that's happening right now. It's very easy. It's

464
00:25:34,000 --> 00:25:36,760
Speaker 1: why everyone should use a burner cell phone and light

465
00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:40,760
Speaker 1: their old phone on fire every sixty days. We're always

466
00:25:40,760 --> 00:25:48,000
Speaker 1: saying this, Jason. You communicate entirely through telegram, which not

467
00:25:48,160 --> 00:25:51,639
Speaker 1: the app telegram, but through an old fashioned telegram. We

468
00:25:51,680 --> 00:25:54,159
Speaker 1: actually have an actor portraying your voice right now, in

469
00:25:54,200 --> 00:25:57,320
Speaker 1: face no one's seen you in years.

470
00:25:59,240 --> 00:26:02,280
Speaker 2: Watching the Slasher movie as it took place in nineteen

471
00:26:02,320 --> 00:26:05,439
Speaker 2: eighty nine and a high school kid got invited to

472
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:10,320
Speaker 2: a party via telegram? Oh my god, was that? And

473
00:26:10,560 --> 00:26:13,239
Speaker 2: I was nineteen eighty nine, I was fourteen. Were we

474
00:26:13,280 --> 00:26:17,119
Speaker 2: still send a telegram back then? Am I that old? That?

475
00:26:17,440 --> 00:26:22,080
Speaker 1: That seems a little archaic. But anyway, this has been

476
00:26:22,680 --> 00:26:24,879
Speaker 1: a long lead up to the eBay story. But I

477
00:26:24,920 --> 00:26:27,119
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of set the stage for you. And

478
00:26:27,160 --> 00:26:29,240
Speaker 1: now we're going to pull to an ad break and

479
00:26:29,280 --> 00:26:32,000
Speaker 1: then we will come back with the story that you

480
00:26:32,160 --> 00:26:40,760
Speaker 1: actually asked me to tell you today and we're back.

481
00:26:41,640 --> 00:26:45,960
Speaker 1: So this all brings me to the story of the Steiners.

482
00:26:46,160 --> 00:26:49,479
Speaker 1: They are an now elderly couple who back during the

483
00:26:49,520 --> 00:26:51,760
Speaker 1: early days of the dot com boom, when they were

484
00:26:51,960 --> 00:26:55,480
Speaker 1: a mature adult couple, got really interested in the then

485
00:26:55,600 --> 00:26:59,080
Speaker 1: burgeoning field of online sales. We are talking about the

486
00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:03,320
Speaker 1: mid to late nineteen nineties. David Steiner was a video

487
00:27:03,400 --> 00:27:07,160
Speaker 1: producer who had a childhood fascination with yard sales, which

488
00:27:07,200 --> 00:27:10,639
Speaker 1: is a strange fixation for a little kid or for

489
00:27:10,680 --> 00:27:14,000
Speaker 1: an adult, for someone of any age. But you know,

490
00:27:14,119 --> 00:27:16,359
Speaker 1: it takes all kinds of people to make a world,

491
00:27:16,720 --> 00:27:19,359
Speaker 1: and this fascination. He was kind of one of these,

492
00:27:19,920 --> 00:27:22,840
Speaker 1: you know, after like all these ponn Star shows got big,

493
00:27:22,920 --> 00:27:25,680
Speaker 1: there's a much wider community of people who are kind

494
00:27:25,680 --> 00:27:29,040
Speaker 1: of obsessed with folks like selling old products or antiques

495
00:27:29,119 --> 00:27:32,080
Speaker 1: and you know, trying to find like hidden gyms that

496
00:27:32,119 --> 00:27:34,160
Speaker 1: are worth a bunch of money. Steiner's kind of one

497
00:27:34,200 --> 00:27:36,520
Speaker 1: of the very first generations of people who is like

498
00:27:36,640 --> 00:27:40,640
Speaker 1: obsessed with this stuff and his particular interests. He loves

499
00:27:40,680 --> 00:27:44,919
Speaker 1: like ancient marketing, promotional products, He likes antique tools, and

500
00:27:44,960 --> 00:27:47,840
Speaker 1: he starts following you know, prior to eBay. There are

501
00:27:47,880 --> 00:27:51,200
Speaker 1: a couple of different early auction websites on the old

502
00:27:51,280 --> 00:27:54,359
Speaker 1: Internet that he gets into when he's interested in and

503
00:27:54,400 --> 00:27:57,240
Speaker 1: his wife, na I think she's both like kind of

504
00:27:57,240 --> 00:27:59,520
Speaker 1: maybe shares his interest to a degree, and she's also

505
00:27:59,560 --> 00:28:02,360
Speaker 1: a writer with an interest in kind of doing some journalism.

506
00:28:02,440 --> 00:28:05,919
Speaker 1: So in nineteen ninety nine, this is four years after

507
00:28:06,040 --> 00:28:10,159
Speaker 1: eBay's launch, they start to realize, like, this company in

508
00:28:10,200 --> 00:28:13,880
Speaker 1: particular is the one that's going to actually dominate online auctions.

509
00:28:13,960 --> 00:28:16,359
Speaker 1: Right there had been a couple of competitors, it's clear

510
00:28:16,440 --> 00:28:18,359
Speaker 1: by ninety nine that eBay is going to be the

511
00:28:18,359 --> 00:28:21,840
Speaker 1: big one. And the Steiners are just kind of nerds

512
00:28:21,920 --> 00:28:24,600
Speaker 1: about this stuff, so they decide to turn their obsession

513
00:28:24,720 --> 00:28:27,520
Speaker 1: with this new and exciting thing into a website, which

514
00:28:27,560 --> 00:28:30,479
Speaker 1: is the thing people used to do back before social media.

515
00:28:30,960 --> 00:28:34,600
Speaker 1: And I, yeah, I reading about this stuff always gives

516
00:28:34,600 --> 00:28:36,800
Speaker 1: me this like weird kind of nostalgia that makes me

517
00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:37,880
Speaker 1: feel like an old man.

518
00:28:39,280 --> 00:28:41,680
Speaker 2: In fact, I will step in and because I know

519
00:28:41,720 --> 00:28:45,080
Speaker 2: that the description of these people that prow like garage sales,

520
00:28:45,080 --> 00:28:48,000
Speaker 2: that makes them sound like creepy weirdos. The early days

521
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:52,520
Speaker 2: of eBay were fascinating, Yeah, because suddenly the concept of

522
00:28:52,680 --> 00:28:55,680
Speaker 2: everybody's junk from all over the world is for sale

523
00:28:55,800 --> 00:28:58,000
Speaker 2: and stuff that you it's like, oh my gosh, this

524
00:28:58,160 --> 00:29:01,320
Speaker 2: action figure that I thought only I owned, that I

525
00:29:01,400 --> 00:29:04,280
Speaker 2: lost when I was eight years old, here's this guy

526
00:29:05,040 --> 00:29:08,320
Speaker 2: two thousand miles away from me who's got one. And

527
00:29:08,400 --> 00:29:11,760
Speaker 2: it's I never I thought I had imagined this saying,

528
00:29:11,760 --> 00:29:14,000
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, here is like the idea that all

529
00:29:14,080 --> 00:29:17,120
Speaker 2: this stuff was for sale. And then it immediately created

530
00:29:17,120 --> 00:29:21,000
Speaker 2: this ecosystem of people who were learning all the techniques

531
00:29:21,000 --> 00:29:24,080
Speaker 2: of how to like stealthily outbid somebody and all of

532
00:29:24,120 --> 00:29:27,280
Speaker 2: this stuff, and it's people forget what or if you

533
00:29:27,320 --> 00:29:32,480
Speaker 2: weren't around back then. eBay was the first huge monster

534
00:29:32,880 --> 00:29:34,880
Speaker 2: dot com business and.

535
00:29:34,800 --> 00:29:36,720
Speaker 1: The first ones that made it clear that like there's

536
00:29:36,960 --> 00:29:39,960
Speaker 1: a like not just real money, but like ways for

537
00:29:40,080 --> 00:29:43,080
Speaker 1: regular people to make real money if they can figure

538
00:29:43,120 --> 00:29:45,520
Speaker 1: out how to game an algorithm.

539
00:29:45,760 --> 00:29:49,040
Speaker 2: That and also that stock when they went public, that

540
00:29:49,240 --> 00:29:53,719
Speaker 2: was just like crypto style people getting becoming millionaires overnight.

541
00:29:53,720 --> 00:29:56,880
Speaker 2: eBay was huge. So it was a fascinating scene back

542
00:29:56,880 --> 00:29:58,840
Speaker 2: then because I bought and sold some stuff back in

543
00:29:58,880 --> 00:30:01,880
Speaker 2: the nineties era. eBay it was just you find yourself

544
00:30:01,920 --> 00:30:03,360
Speaker 2: not just in a place where you buy things. You

545
00:30:03,360 --> 00:30:07,040
Speaker 2: find yourself in an ecosystem and in a cultural scene.

546
00:30:07,640 --> 00:30:09,960
Speaker 2: So no, I absolutely in terms of like subjects to

547
00:30:10,040 --> 00:30:13,640
Speaker 2: blog about, yeah, it's I totally get it.

548
00:30:13,840 --> 00:30:16,120
Speaker 1: This is also a very smart thing to do if

549
00:30:16,160 --> 00:30:18,880
Speaker 1: you're in journalism or in more broadly just kind of

550
00:30:18,880 --> 00:30:21,320
Speaker 1: the industry. You and I both spent much of our

551
00:30:21,360 --> 00:30:24,040
Speaker 1: working careers, and just like writing shit for the Internet,

552
00:30:24,360 --> 00:30:26,960
Speaker 1: you find a thing that has just exploded and that

553
00:30:27,040 --> 00:30:30,480
Speaker 1: you know is going to be massive, and you make

554
00:30:30,560 --> 00:30:33,680
Speaker 1: yourself the person that people go to to read about

555
00:30:33,680 --> 00:30:35,720
Speaker 1: that thing. Right, That's that's what the Steiners do. They

556
00:30:36,080 --> 00:30:39,479
Speaker 1: corner this and they their independent publication starts out being

557
00:30:39,560 --> 00:30:44,760
Speaker 1: named auction Bites Bytes, and you know, it's geared towards

558
00:30:45,080 --> 00:30:48,200
Speaker 1: a fairly niche chunk of the Internet, people making their

559
00:30:48,240 --> 00:30:52,640
Speaker 1: living auctioning items on eBay. And also, you know, increasingly

560
00:30:52,760 --> 00:30:54,960
Speaker 1: as Eba becomes more and more of a big business,

561
00:30:55,000 --> 00:30:57,320
Speaker 1: as it becomes clear like how much money is in

562
00:30:57,360 --> 00:30:59,440
Speaker 1: this also the kind of folks who are interested in

563
00:30:59,440 --> 00:31:03,240
Speaker 1: investing in eBay and companies like it now because auction

564
00:31:03,360 --> 00:31:07,880
Speaker 1: bites is kind of the first website that's news for

565
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:11,280
Speaker 1: this early community of sellers, and it expands beyond eBay

566
00:31:11,280 --> 00:31:14,800
Speaker 1: because soon there's Amazon and like you know, independent sellers

567
00:31:14,800 --> 00:31:17,520
Speaker 1: are selling stuff on Amazon, and there's Etsy, and they

568
00:31:17,520 --> 00:31:19,960
Speaker 1: cover all of that, right, Like, they change their name

569
00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:22,400
Speaker 1: to e commerce Bites, which is the name that their

570
00:31:22,440 --> 00:31:27,040
Speaker 1: website still exists under, and they become like the go

571
00:31:27,120 --> 00:31:31,440
Speaker 1: to gumshoe reporters for people who are small and medium

572
00:31:31,520 --> 00:31:35,920
Speaker 1: sized merchants selling products on these services, as well as

573
00:31:35,960 --> 00:31:38,920
Speaker 1: like people in finance who are looking to do investing

574
00:31:39,080 --> 00:31:42,000
Speaker 1: in the companies that actually like are are kind of

575
00:31:42,040 --> 00:31:45,320
Speaker 1: the underpinning of this system. Now, if you've ever worked

576
00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:47,600
Speaker 1: in an industry like e commerce, you should know that

577
00:31:47,720 --> 00:31:50,440
Speaker 1: daily life is a ceaseless war between the companies that

578
00:31:50,480 --> 00:31:53,360
Speaker 1: provide a platform for online sales, who want to keep

579
00:31:53,400 --> 00:31:55,600
Speaker 1: as much of the money transferred through their service as

580
00:31:55,640 --> 00:31:58,640
Speaker 1: possible while spending as little as possible, and the merchants

581
00:31:58,800 --> 00:32:02,960
Speaker 1: who actually provide products. As a result, e Commerce Bites,

582
00:32:03,080 --> 00:32:06,160
Speaker 1: most widely read articles tended to focus on fuck ups

583
00:32:06,200 --> 00:32:10,320
Speaker 1: by companies like eBay. Right, e commerce Bites really winds

584
00:32:10,360 --> 00:32:12,760
Speaker 1: up kind of more on the sides of the merchants,

585
00:32:12,800 --> 00:32:15,080
Speaker 1: and and that leads to them having kind of an

586
00:32:15,160 --> 00:32:22,160
Speaker 1: oppositional and confrontational attitude towards the corporations. Right, because largely.

587
00:32:22,240 --> 00:32:24,280
Speaker 1: You know, that's how the people reading them look at

588
00:32:24,280 --> 00:32:27,200
Speaker 1: the situation. You can get an example of this by

589
00:32:27,200 --> 00:32:30,360
Speaker 1: looking at the site today. One August twenty sixth article

590
00:32:30,400 --> 00:32:34,000
Speaker 1: by Ena promises quote a peak inside eBay payment holds.

591
00:32:34,320 --> 00:32:36,400
Speaker 1: This article is based on an interview with the reader

592
00:32:36,440 --> 00:32:38,760
Speaker 1: who'd sold a high priced item and had the money

593
00:32:38,800 --> 00:32:41,720
Speaker 1: sent to him placed on a thirty day hold, despite

594
00:32:41,720 --> 00:32:43,960
Speaker 1: the fact that the buyer had confirmed receipt of the

595
00:32:43,960 --> 00:32:47,320
Speaker 1: product and satisfaction with the purchase. In an interview I

596
00:32:47,400 --> 00:32:51,280
Speaker 1: found on CBS News's Sixty Minutes, Ena Steiner describes the

597
00:32:51,360 --> 00:32:53,280
Speaker 1: job she and her husband did as acting as a

598
00:32:53,360 --> 00:32:56,959
Speaker 1: conduit from small businesses and independent sellers to the larger

599
00:32:57,000 --> 00:33:00,680
Speaker 1: corporate monolists who ran these websites. And you know that's

600
00:33:00,720 --> 00:33:03,360
Speaker 1: not super interesting to most of us, right, This is

601
00:33:03,400 --> 00:33:06,560
Speaker 1: not like what generally when you think of hard hitting journalism,

602
00:33:06,640 --> 00:33:09,400
Speaker 1: you don't think about like people representing eBay sellers. You know,

603
00:33:09,840 --> 00:33:12,840
Speaker 1: I do think that's a valuable social role, but it

604
00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:15,200
Speaker 1: is not something that should have ever led to an

605
00:33:15,200 --> 00:33:18,840
Speaker 1: exciting case of a deranged spy agency trying to destroy

606
00:33:18,880 --> 00:33:20,000
Speaker 1: people's lives.

607
00:33:20,480 --> 00:33:23,680
Speaker 2: No, but in that early era of the blogging years,

608
00:33:23,880 --> 00:33:26,520
Speaker 2: there was a whole dynamic because you saw the same

609
00:33:26,560 --> 00:33:28,960
Speaker 2: thing in the film in Hollywood business with sites like

610
00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:31,800
Speaker 2: Ain't It Cool News, where once they got a huge

611
00:33:31,840 --> 00:33:34,320
Speaker 2: readership and once they started to be seeing as something

612
00:33:34,600 --> 00:33:37,880
Speaker 2: as an authority, they started to get tips and they

613
00:33:37,920 --> 00:33:41,320
Speaker 2: started to break stories. And keep in mind, there's a

614
00:33:41,360 --> 00:33:43,200
Speaker 2: parallel here because keep in mind, if you were a

615
00:33:43,200 --> 00:33:46,440
Speaker 2: Hollywood studio, once upon a time, you had actual news

616
00:33:46,520 --> 00:33:49,440
Speaker 2: outlets you were dealing with, You had reporters you were

617
00:33:49,480 --> 00:33:54,040
Speaker 2: friendly with, you had a whole mechanism for managing stories, scandals,

618
00:33:54,080 --> 00:33:56,959
Speaker 2: it's something you wanted covered up. So suddenly when the

619
00:33:56,960 --> 00:33:59,240
Speaker 2: Internet comes along and these bloggers come along and they

620
00:33:59,320 --> 00:34:02,480
Speaker 2: just get a blind item via email, they'll just break

621
00:34:02,480 --> 00:34:04,560
Speaker 2: the story. Like they don't they don't care, they don't

622
00:34:04,560 --> 00:34:06,000
Speaker 2: have access, they don't care.

623
00:34:06,120 --> 00:34:07,719
Speaker 1: They have no access, and they don't have any kind

624
00:34:07,760 --> 00:34:10,439
Speaker 1: of ongoing relationships that they want to keep. We don't

625
00:34:10,440 --> 00:34:12,920
Speaker 1: need to keep paramount happy, right like fuck up?

626
00:34:13,080 --> 00:34:17,200
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, So this is similar here because I

627
00:34:17,239 --> 00:34:21,000
Speaker 2: think in the corporate world. Across the corporate world, there

628
00:34:21,080 --> 00:34:25,160
Speaker 2: is real anxiety about this because their ability to manipulate

629
00:34:25,239 --> 00:34:27,600
Speaker 2: and control the flow of information to keep a lid

630
00:34:27,680 --> 00:34:31,239
Speaker 2: on stories, to stay out in front of stories because reporters,

631
00:34:31,239 --> 00:34:33,480
Speaker 2: you know, they will contact you and say, hey, we're

632
00:34:33,480 --> 00:34:36,480
Speaker 2: working on the story about these accusations against your CEO

633
00:34:36,600 --> 00:34:39,560
Speaker 2: or whatever. Do you want to comment. Well, if it's

634
00:34:39,680 --> 00:34:41,400
Speaker 2: just leaks out to the internet, that person is just

635
00:34:41,400 --> 00:34:44,239
Speaker 2: going to post it. So I'm not saying they necessarily

636
00:34:44,280 --> 00:34:47,000
Speaker 2: got you know, that deep with their stories, but I

637
00:34:47,000 --> 00:34:50,319
Speaker 2: can see where a company, if you were from a

638
00:34:50,520 --> 00:34:54,040
Speaker 2: world where you had like you could keep the press

639
00:34:54,080 --> 00:34:57,200
Speaker 2: on a leash, and then suddenly there's these citizen journalists

640
00:34:57,239 --> 00:34:59,560
Speaker 2: out there that was the boogeyman in the corporate.

641
00:34:59,200 --> 00:35:03,400
Speaker 1: World'll be losing your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I

642
00:35:03,440 --> 00:35:07,040
Speaker 1: should also note I said this is a niche audience.

643
00:35:07,080 --> 00:35:09,279
Speaker 1: The Steiners, to this day, at least according to the

644
00:35:09,320 --> 00:35:11,440
Speaker 1: reporting I've read, have a regular audience of about six

645
00:35:11,560 --> 00:35:15,920
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people, which for a website like operated by

646
00:35:15,920 --> 00:35:18,960
Speaker 1: two people, number one, that's a fairly sustainable business. But

647
00:35:19,000 --> 00:35:22,480
Speaker 1: that's like a good readership for an independent news site.

648
00:35:22,520 --> 00:35:26,120
Speaker 1: That is like actually very impressive. It testifies to the

649
00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:29,359
Speaker 1: degree of like work and trust that their audience has

650
00:35:29,360 --> 00:35:31,799
Speaker 1: in them, that they have kept that audience up to

651
00:35:31,960 --> 00:35:35,879
Speaker 1: the modern day, right when so many news organs are

652
00:35:35,880 --> 00:35:39,799
Speaker 1: in the process of collapsing or have collapsed. Much of

653
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:43,600
Speaker 1: ENA's reporting focused on issues that dealt directly with sellers

654
00:35:43,640 --> 00:35:46,560
Speaker 1: but would be of interest to investors. For example, stories

655
00:35:46,560 --> 00:35:49,320
Speaker 1: about eBay holding on the money from transactions for thirty

656
00:35:49,400 --> 00:35:52,319
Speaker 1: days without any real reason seem like petty bullshit, and

657
00:35:52,400 --> 00:35:54,799
Speaker 1: it is, but it's something that at scale could mean

658
00:35:54,840 --> 00:35:57,759
Speaker 1: millions and extra profits, which all gets funneled upwards to

659
00:35:57,800 --> 00:35:59,920
Speaker 1: the handful of people who run the company and own

660
00:36:00,120 --> 00:36:05,280
Speaker 1: stock in it. Enter Devon Winnig, the CEO of eBay

661
00:36:05,360 --> 00:36:07,440
Speaker 1: during the period of time that we are talking about

662
00:36:07,480 --> 00:36:11,440
Speaker 1: in this story, which was up until like twenty nineteen twenty,

663
00:36:11,600 --> 00:36:16,480
Speaker 1: like fifteen to twenty nineteen. So Winnig had been born

664
00:36:16,560 --> 00:36:19,799
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty six. He was the son

665
00:36:19,920 --> 00:36:25,120
Speaker 1: of Jeffrey Winnig, a toxicologist and chief executive of Nastec Pharmaceutical.

666
00:36:25,960 --> 00:36:30,359
Speaker 1: When Jeffrey died suddenly, Devin, age twenty three, took over

667
00:36:30,400 --> 00:36:33,040
Speaker 1: a CEO of the company for a year, raised like

668
00:36:33,120 --> 00:36:36,399
Speaker 1: five million in VC funding, and then joined a law firm.

669
00:36:37,000 --> 00:36:39,560
Speaker 1: Left the job after like a year, and Nastec seems

670
00:36:39,600 --> 00:36:42,880
Speaker 1: to have kind of continued to slow decline afterwards. I

671
00:36:42,920 --> 00:36:45,440
Speaker 1: bring that up because that basic pattern where he hops in,

672
00:36:45,880 --> 00:36:48,440
Speaker 1: raises a bunch of VC funding, sets up a merger,

673
00:36:48,560 --> 00:36:51,200
Speaker 1: is going to kind of become the norm for his

674
00:36:51,440 --> 00:36:55,759
Speaker 1: business career. In nineteen ninety three, Winnig joins Reuters as

675
00:36:55,800 --> 00:36:58,919
Speaker 1: the COO, and over the course of his time there

676
00:36:58,960 --> 00:37:00,640
Speaker 1: he becomes like the number two two men at the

677
00:37:00,680 --> 00:37:03,520
Speaker 1: company and he helps to manage the merger with the

678
00:37:03,560 --> 00:37:09,040
Speaker 1: Thompson Corporation into Thompson Reuters. Now, this was a big

679
00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:11,400
Speaker 1: deal at the time. There was a lot of antitrust

680
00:37:11,480 --> 00:37:14,840
Speaker 1: scrutiny on it because Thompson Reuters when it merged was

681
00:37:14,880 --> 00:37:18,560
Speaker 1: the largest provider of financial news and information on Earth.

682
00:37:19,120 --> 00:37:22,399
Speaker 1: The merger led to massive job cuts across the now

683
00:37:22,440 --> 00:37:28,160
Speaker 1: combined businesses, with leadership particularly DEVN, bragging about more than

684
00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:30,480
Speaker 1: five hundred million pounds worth of savings within the first

685
00:37:30,520 --> 00:37:33,440
Speaker 1: three years after the merger. Now, the reality of this

686
00:37:33,600 --> 00:37:36,440
Speaker 1: was pretty brutal. The merger not only cost a lot

687
00:37:36,440 --> 00:37:38,840
Speaker 1: of people their jobs, but it caused a collapse in

688
00:37:38,960 --> 00:37:43,719
Speaker 1: profitability and influence for Thompson Reuters. It had been easily

689
00:37:43,880 --> 00:37:46,440
Speaker 1: the largest company in the space at the time. Of

690
00:37:46,480 --> 00:37:49,480
Speaker 1: the merger, if you like, combined the readership of both platforms,

691
00:37:49,840 --> 00:37:53,279
Speaker 1: but once they were merged, the quality dropped and Bloomberg

692
00:37:53,360 --> 00:37:56,120
Speaker 1: closed the gap behind them. There were several years of

693
00:37:56,160 --> 00:37:59,719
Speaker 1: botched product launches while Winnig was helping to run the

694
00:37:59,719 --> 00:38:02,760
Speaker 1: Cup company, which proved that the new team running Thompson

695
00:38:02,800 --> 00:38:05,879
Speaker 1: Ruters didn't know what they were doing. This summary from

696
00:38:05,880 --> 00:38:07,960
Speaker 1: an article in The Guardian gives you an idea of

697
00:38:08,000 --> 00:38:11,280
Speaker 1: how disastrous this merger proved to be. In two thousand

698
00:38:11,320 --> 00:38:13,560
Speaker 1: and seven, Thompson Reuter spoke for more than thirty six

699
00:38:13,600 --> 00:38:16,160
Speaker 1: percent of the market against twenty five percent for Bloomberg,

700
00:38:16,400 --> 00:38:18,879
Speaker 1: but according to his its experts, Bloomberg will have nearly

701
00:38:18,920 --> 00:38:21,239
Speaker 1: caught up in twenty eleven with a thirty point eight

702
00:38:21,320 --> 00:38:24,040
Speaker 1: market share against thirty one point four for Thompson Reuters.

703
00:38:24,400 --> 00:38:27,200
Speaker 1: Something has gone horribly wrong. At the very least, the

704
00:38:27,200 --> 00:38:29,520
Speaker 1: task of melding these two companies together has been far

705
00:38:29,560 --> 00:38:33,480
Speaker 1: more complex than originally envisaged. A less kind interpretation is

706
00:38:33,520 --> 00:38:35,880
Speaker 1: that management, which has cut many hundreds of jobs, has

707
00:38:35,880 --> 00:38:38,800
Speaker 1: taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors' billions

708
00:38:38,840 --> 00:38:42,359
Speaker 1: along the way. So you could say the evidence would

709
00:38:42,440 --> 00:38:45,960
Speaker 1: suggest that Devin Winnig is not a business genius, right,

710
00:38:46,080 --> 00:38:49,520
Speaker 1: based on his primary accomplishment. The merger of Thompson Reuter's

711
00:38:49,600 --> 00:38:53,040
Speaker 1: up to this point a disaster for the company's influence

712
00:38:53,080 --> 00:38:55,279
Speaker 1: and for its workers, but it makes a lot of

713
00:38:55,320 --> 00:38:58,239
Speaker 1: money for shareholders, and that's really all that matters. So

714
00:38:58,280 --> 00:39:02,000
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, some of those same people make Devin

715
00:39:02,080 --> 00:39:05,720
Speaker 1: Winnig well they hire He gets hired at eBay, initially

716
00:39:05,760 --> 00:39:10,759
Speaker 1: as the president of their global marketplace business. Right he

717
00:39:10,840 --> 00:39:14,000
Speaker 1: is initially successful here. One of the things that Devin

718
00:39:14,080 --> 00:39:17,719
Speaker 1: recognizes early is that mobile commerce is going to be

719
00:39:18,000 --> 00:39:20,680
Speaker 1: the future for eBay, like sales to users shopping through

720
00:39:20,680 --> 00:39:25,120
Speaker 1: their smartphones, and he reorganizes the company around that, which

721
00:39:25,160 --> 00:39:29,480
Speaker 1: is a very successful move. In twenty fifteen, he becomes

722
00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:33,279
Speaker 1: the CEO of the company, and within a couple of

723
00:39:33,360 --> 00:39:36,920
Speaker 1: years at the job, the Steiners, who are covering eBay

724
00:39:37,040 --> 00:39:40,600
Speaker 1: as Winnig takes over at CEO, notices that his pay

725
00:39:40,719 --> 00:39:45,160
Speaker 1: compensation keeps rising at a rapid rate, particularly during a

726
00:39:45,239 --> 00:39:48,360
Speaker 1: time when eBay itself is having trouble, when they're dealing

727
00:39:48,400 --> 00:39:52,360
Speaker 1: with increased competition from companies like Amazon, and when workers

728
00:39:52,480 --> 00:39:56,960
Speaker 1: are not seeing their compensation rise, So from twenty fifteen

729
00:39:56,960 --> 00:40:00,160
Speaker 1: to twenty eighteen, Devin goes from fourteen point five five

730
00:40:00,200 --> 00:40:02,640
Speaker 1: million a year to seventeen point six million a year.

731
00:40:03,200 --> 00:40:05,760
Speaker 1: This is out of line with the salary increases enjoyed

732
00:40:05,760 --> 00:40:09,120
Speaker 1: by eBay employees during the same period. As Ena Steiner

733
00:40:09,160 --> 00:40:13,680
Speaker 1: wrote on April eighth, twenty eighteen, quote for the first time,

734
00:40:13,760 --> 00:40:17,040
Speaker 1: eBay released a new statistic called the CEO pay ratio

735
00:40:17,160 --> 00:40:20,560
Speaker 1: required now with public companies, eBay reported the ratio of

736
00:40:20,600 --> 00:40:23,800
Speaker 1: the total annual compensation of mister Winning to the median

737
00:40:23,880 --> 00:40:27,239
Speaker 1: annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be

738
00:40:27,280 --> 00:40:31,560
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty three to one. Now here's the thing, Jason,

739
00:40:32,160 --> 00:40:36,960
Speaker 1: that's actually not bad. If we're looking like overall in US,

740
00:40:37,080 --> 00:40:41,560
Speaker 1: like publicly traded companies, on average, CEOs earned three hundred

741
00:40:41,600 --> 00:40:44,280
Speaker 1: and ninety nine times as much as the median worker.

742
00:40:45,760 --> 00:40:49,200
Speaker 1: So you could say eBay is not doing terribly right.

743
00:40:49,760 --> 00:40:52,600
Speaker 1: And ENA's article doesn't portray this as like a polemic.

744
00:40:52,680 --> 00:40:55,080
Speaker 1: She's really just kind of focusing on the facts that like, yeah,

745
00:40:55,080 --> 00:40:58,600
Speaker 1: this is how much Winnig is getting is making, this

746
00:40:58,680 --> 00:41:01,960
Speaker 1: is how it compares to the rate of salary increases

747
00:41:02,000 --> 00:41:04,400
Speaker 1: normal employees have gotten. This is how much it compares

748
00:41:04,400 --> 00:41:06,400
Speaker 1: to the amount of money that normal employees are getting.

749
00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:08,600
Speaker 1: You would also, yeah.

750
00:41:08,360 --> 00:41:10,879
Speaker 2: To any normal person, that kind of really does look

751
00:41:10,920 --> 00:41:14,040
Speaker 2: like he failed his way up into that position.

752
00:41:13,760 --> 00:41:15,319
Speaker 1: Because he did.

753
00:41:15,120 --> 00:41:18,920
Speaker 2: But well, but this is because you're you have to

754
00:41:19,040 --> 00:41:24,400
Speaker 2: understand what is considered success in that world. So like

755
00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:27,799
Speaker 2: taking over a media company and tanking the quality, but

756
00:41:27,880 --> 00:41:30,880
Speaker 2: it's like, well, yeah, you tanked the quality by eighty percent,

757
00:41:30,960 --> 00:41:33,799
Speaker 2: but you cut expenses by ninety percent, So if you

758
00:41:33,840 --> 00:41:36,440
Speaker 2: think about it.

759
00:41:35,360 --> 00:41:38,400
Speaker 1: It's a win. Yeah, And that is how That's how

760
00:41:38,440 --> 00:41:41,440
Speaker 1: a guy like Devin thinks about things. And you know,

761
00:41:41,520 --> 00:41:44,080
Speaker 1: Ina is not. She's not coming at this with the

762
00:41:44,160 --> 00:41:47,279
Speaker 1: kind of ideological lens that like I might if I

763
00:41:47,320 --> 00:41:49,480
Speaker 1: were getting, you know, on more of a rant about

764
00:41:49,480 --> 00:41:53,320
Speaker 1: devn She really is just reporting the facts. But Winnig

765
00:41:53,520 --> 00:41:58,160
Speaker 1: gets real, like comes across like he gets sent from underlings.

766
00:41:58,239 --> 00:42:01,440
Speaker 1: Various articles she's putting out. It's known in eBay's c

767
00:42:01,560 --> 00:42:03,759
Speaker 1: suite that you have to pay attention to the Steiners

768
00:42:03,760 --> 00:42:07,279
Speaker 1: and their articles because your investors do. And everything she

769
00:42:07,440 --> 00:42:12,359
Speaker 1: writes about his compensation makes him angry. Particularly she ends

770
00:42:12,400 --> 00:42:16,480
Speaker 1: one article with this line. eBay employees feel free to

771
00:42:16,920 --> 00:42:19,040
Speaker 1: chime in on whether or not you received a payhike

772
00:42:19,120 --> 00:42:21,440
Speaker 1: of ten to fourteen percent this year and what you

773
00:42:21,480 --> 00:42:23,920
Speaker 1: think of your salary compared to the median salary of

774
00:42:23,960 --> 00:42:27,239
Speaker 1: your colleagues. And again I would say that that's like

775
00:42:27,719 --> 00:42:34,120
Speaker 1: a responsible, very fair way to phrase that. As a journalist.

776
00:42:34,120 --> 00:42:36,840
Speaker 1: This is not like someone at like some far left

777
00:42:36,920 --> 00:42:40,920
Speaker 1: rag right. But look, Devin is threatened by this.

778
00:42:41,560 --> 00:42:44,799
Speaker 2: Either one of us could post online a photo of

779
00:42:45,000 --> 00:42:50,480
Speaker 2: our lunch and will then say ten replies, I will

780
00:42:50,480 --> 00:42:53,640
Speaker 2: be told to kill myself. You will be accused of

781
00:42:53,680 --> 00:42:57,960
Speaker 2: being a CIA plant or a rist and that you

782
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:01,480
Speaker 2: need to kill yourself. Yeah what, This is what the

783
00:43:01,480 --> 00:43:04,120
Speaker 2: first thing that struck me because when I saw what

784
00:43:04,200 --> 00:43:08,279
Speaker 2: they did and then they explained what triggered the insane

785
00:43:08,440 --> 00:43:11,480
Speaker 2: reaction we're about to get to. And it's so mild.

786
00:43:11,719 --> 00:43:16,200
Speaker 1: It's really really mild because like people are not like

787
00:43:16,200 --> 00:43:18,680
Speaker 1: like yellow journalism, they're not muckrakers.

788
00:43:18,719 --> 00:43:22,200
Speaker 2: It's just it's the mildest criticism you can tell how

789
00:43:22,239 --> 00:43:23,680
Speaker 2: to like polite these people are.

790
00:43:24,080 --> 00:43:27,440
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure like Ina is like tips twenty

791
00:43:27,440 --> 00:43:31,680
Speaker 1: five percent at all times and like is unfailingly polite

792
00:43:32,880 --> 00:43:36,200
Speaker 1: to everyone she encounters in the real world.

793
00:43:36,640 --> 00:43:39,919
Speaker 2: Well, I'm saying specifically as a content creator, you can

794
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:43,080
Speaker 2: tell that that's not where she gets her traffic. The

795
00:43:43,160 --> 00:43:45,960
Speaker 2: traffic is not from being an over the top trash

796
00:43:46,760 --> 00:43:50,520
Speaker 2: It's not the way all political commentary has the tone

797
00:43:50,560 --> 00:43:55,759
Speaker 2: now of just constantly calling people pedophiles or whatever like that.

798
00:43:55,840 --> 00:43:57,959
Speaker 2: I guess that's my point. It's not like they took

799
00:43:58,000 --> 00:44:01,840
Speaker 2: on somebody who was just in assassin just constantly tearing

800
00:44:01,840 --> 00:44:04,799
Speaker 2: them down. It was just somebody who did it. Sounds like,

801
00:44:05,600 --> 00:44:08,719
Speaker 2: look to get that size of an audience and to

802
00:44:08,840 --> 00:44:14,680
Speaker 2: do stuff that's actually substantive and mature, that's amazing. And

803
00:44:14,760 --> 00:44:17,360
Speaker 2: when you read that criticism, it's like, Wow, that's the

804
00:44:17,440 --> 00:44:20,319
Speaker 2: stuff that this guy considers crossing the line with what

805
00:44:20,520 --> 00:44:23,799
Speaker 2: kid gloves? Must she have always been handling them with?

806
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:26,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I do want

807
00:44:26,719 --> 00:44:28,680
Speaker 1: to put a pen in that accusing people of being

808
00:44:28,719 --> 00:44:31,440
Speaker 1: pedophiles thing, Jason, because when we come back from the

809
00:44:31,480 --> 00:44:33,560
Speaker 1: ad break, you and I are going to accuse the

810
00:44:33,600 --> 00:44:43,840
Speaker 1: celebrity of being a pedophile. Ah, we're back, Jason. Legal

811
00:44:43,920 --> 00:44:45,480
Speaker 1: got back to me. We're going to have to cut

812
00:44:45,520 --> 00:44:49,760
Speaker 1: the segment that we had planned. So can rest easy tonight.

813
00:44:49,920 --> 00:44:53,080
Speaker 1: The allegations will not be going out in public. But

814
00:44:53,440 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 1: one of these days, Jason, one of these days we'll

815
00:44:56,080 --> 00:44:59,920
Speaker 1: get the truth out to the people. So back to

816
00:45:00,280 --> 00:45:04,680
Speaker 1: Ena and our friend defn Winnig, CEO of eBay, now

817
00:45:04,719 --> 00:45:08,160
Speaker 1: Ina had good reason to be, you know, politely critical

818
00:45:08,200 --> 00:45:11,640
Speaker 1: of winning. His exorbitant raises for himself and the rest

819
00:45:11,680 --> 00:45:13,680
Speaker 1: of his friends in the c suite of eBay had

820
00:45:13,680 --> 00:45:18,000
Speaker 1: coincided with a rash of out landishly wasteful expenses, best

821
00:45:18,040 --> 00:45:22,400
Speaker 1: exemplified by his twenty sixteen construction of the main Street

822
00:45:22,400 --> 00:45:26,200
Speaker 1: building on the eBay campus. This building was envisioned as

823
00:45:26,239 --> 00:45:29,240
Speaker 1: the company's front door, and at the grand opening, Winnig

824
00:45:29,239 --> 00:45:32,720
Speaker 1: explained himself by saying, buildings are symbols of your culture

825
00:45:32,920 --> 00:45:37,239
Speaker 1: and of your brand, and it's like, you know, it

826
00:45:37,320 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 1: looks like any other really nice Silicon Valley office, which

827
00:45:42,440 --> 00:45:45,680
Speaker 1: isn't a weird expense when the companies are like doing great.

828
00:45:45,719 --> 00:45:47,560
Speaker 1: But when you're in a cash crunt, it's going to

829
00:45:47,560 --> 00:45:49,799
Speaker 1: get like criticized that, like, well, you spent how many

830
00:45:49,840 --> 00:45:52,480
Speaker 1: millions of dollars on this building that isn't necessary for

831
00:45:52,600 --> 00:45:55,799
Speaker 1: work It just kind of makes you look nice to

832
00:45:56,040 --> 00:45:57,880
Speaker 1: zero percent of the people who are going to be

833
00:45:57,920 --> 00:46:00,840
Speaker 1: smitting money on your platform because they are not invited

834
00:46:00,920 --> 00:46:04,040
Speaker 1: to the main street building, right, especially.

835
00:46:03,600 --> 00:46:06,760
Speaker 2: When you know that down further in the lower levels

836
00:46:06,800 --> 00:46:10,120
Speaker 2: of the organization, because we have both worked for companies. Yeah,

837
00:46:10,200 --> 00:46:12,520
Speaker 2: that you know, you've got people who are reading memos

838
00:46:12,560 --> 00:46:15,960
Speaker 2: going around about now. Some of you are plugging in

839
00:46:16,000 --> 00:46:19,600
Speaker 2: your phones in the outlets that electricity is not free.

840
00:46:19,719 --> 00:46:22,320
Speaker 2: You must you are not allowed to use those outlets

841
00:46:22,360 --> 00:46:25,759
Speaker 2: for personal devices. That that's up to eighteen cents of

842
00:46:25,760 --> 00:46:28,600
Speaker 2: electricity per month you could be using there. That You've

843
00:46:28,600 --> 00:46:31,000
Speaker 2: got people that are forced to watch every little tiny

844
00:46:31,040 --> 00:46:34,000
Speaker 2: penny and you know, if they work one hour of

845
00:46:34,040 --> 00:46:37,200
Speaker 2: overtime that their boss deemed was inappropriate, that they get

846
00:46:37,280 --> 00:46:39,920
Speaker 2: yelled at. So this is why this it's like no,

847
00:46:40,040 --> 00:46:41,600
Speaker 2: up at the top, they don't have to watch that

848
00:46:41,680 --> 00:46:43,719
Speaker 2: stuff at all. They can just decide, you know what,

849
00:46:44,120 --> 00:46:46,400
Speaker 2: I want a building that will impress visitors.

850
00:46:46,840 --> 00:46:49,759
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's and it's the kind of thing where

851
00:46:49,800 --> 00:46:53,480
Speaker 1: like this is not just like we're like you know,

852
00:46:53,520 --> 00:46:55,840
Speaker 1: some workers at the bottom or even just people like

853
00:46:56,040 --> 00:46:58,279
Speaker 1: Ena criticizing eBay of like wow, this is a really

854
00:46:58,400 --> 00:47:02,000
Speaker 1: unnecessary expense. This is the conclusion reached in January of

855
00:47:02,000 --> 00:47:05,280
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen by Elliott Management after they pumped one point

856
00:47:05,320 --> 00:47:08,440
Speaker 1: four billion dollars into eBay for a four percent stake

857
00:47:08,520 --> 00:47:12,680
Speaker 1: in the company. Now, Elliott Management is one of a

858
00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:15,480
Speaker 1: they have a very milk toast name, Like they're not

859
00:47:15,520 --> 00:47:17,280
Speaker 1: nearly as well known because they don't have a sinister

860
00:47:17,320 --> 00:47:19,200
Speaker 1: and name is like black Rock. But this is one

861
00:47:19,200 --> 00:47:24,800
Speaker 1: of the most bloodthirsty money companies out in the United

862
00:47:24,800 --> 00:47:27,760
Speaker 1: States right now, right they are a ruthless Wall Street

863
00:47:27,840 --> 00:47:30,240
Speaker 1: investment firm. They actually just put out a really interesting

864
00:47:30,320 --> 00:47:32,840
Speaker 1: article about like how they think the AI industry is

865
00:47:32,920 --> 00:47:35,799
Speaker 1: massively overvalued that I think is one of the more

866
00:47:35,840 --> 00:47:38,440
Speaker 1: interesting things that's been written from like that side of

867
00:47:39,680 --> 00:47:42,960
Speaker 1: the ledger. But like, they are not people, unlike a

868
00:47:43,000 --> 00:47:47,160
Speaker 1: lot of like Silicon Valley, which runs on irrational exuberance

869
00:47:47,239 --> 00:47:49,439
Speaker 1: and like think of how profitable this is all going

870
00:47:49,480 --> 00:47:54,000
Speaker 1: to be. These guys are like bloodless vampires, and they

871
00:47:54,040 --> 00:47:57,799
Speaker 1: purely exist to maximize the profit that they can get

872
00:47:57,800 --> 00:48:00,319
Speaker 1: for their investment. And they have no interest and like

873
00:48:00,400 --> 00:48:03,759
Speaker 1: the egos of a guy like Defen winning, right, So

874
00:48:03,800 --> 00:48:06,359
Speaker 1: they took one look at eBay's balance books after they

875
00:48:06,360 --> 00:48:09,279
Speaker 1: pump one point four billion into the company, and they conclude,

876
00:48:09,400 --> 00:48:12,520
Speaker 1: this is one of the most inefficient and chaotic executive

877
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:15,480
Speaker 1: teams that we've ever seen seen, and the company is

878
00:48:15,680 --> 00:48:18,120
Speaker 1: burning through a huge amount of cash on shit that

879
00:48:18,239 --> 00:48:20,879
Speaker 1: nobody needs. And now that we've put all this money

880
00:48:20,920 --> 00:48:23,920
Speaker 1: into the company, we are going to demand serious changes.

881
00:48:24,040 --> 00:48:28,160
Speaker 1: Right And Elliott has the kind of juice that means

882
00:48:28,160 --> 00:48:30,800
Speaker 1: everyone at the company starts sweating. This is actually potentially

883
00:48:30,800 --> 00:48:33,480
Speaker 1: a threat even to winnings job right Like this is

884
00:48:33,520 --> 00:48:35,759
Speaker 1: not you can't ignore the people who are able to

885
00:48:35,760 --> 00:48:38,800
Speaker 1: put one point four billion dollars into your company. Right

886
00:48:38,920 --> 00:48:41,319
Speaker 1: Maybe if you're Apple you can because that's pennies to them,

887
00:48:41,360 --> 00:48:45,719
Speaker 1: But eBay cannot afford to ignore that right now, When

888
00:48:45,760 --> 00:48:47,919
Speaker 1: you are in a company like this and a bunch

889
00:48:47,960 --> 00:48:49,719
Speaker 1: of people with a shitload of money come in and

890
00:48:49,719 --> 00:48:52,279
Speaker 1: say we're going to make some serious changes. If you

891
00:48:52,320 --> 00:48:54,600
Speaker 1: and I have both been in that situation with various

892
00:48:54,600 --> 00:48:57,440
Speaker 1: corporate overlords, the natural impulsey is, well, I need to

893
00:48:57,440 --> 00:48:59,279
Speaker 1: put my head the fuck down, right. I don't want

894
00:48:59,280 --> 00:49:02,120
Speaker 1: to draw any attention to myself unless it's like for

895
00:49:02,200 --> 00:49:05,320
Speaker 1: doing something good, and this is kind of what winning

896
00:49:05,560 --> 00:49:08,319
Speaker 1: wanted to do. But he had a problem, and that

897
00:49:08,440 --> 00:49:12,759
Speaker 1: problem is the Steiners, because their boring industry publication is

898
00:49:12,880 --> 00:49:16,040
Speaker 1: read by the folks at Elliott Right, who are using

899
00:49:16,040 --> 00:49:18,120
Speaker 1: it in part to try and determine whether or not

900
00:49:18,280 --> 00:49:21,280
Speaker 1: the people running eBay are wasting more of their money.

901
00:49:21,640 --> 00:49:25,280
Speaker 1: So this kind of irritation he'd had with the Steiners

902
00:49:25,280 --> 00:49:28,160
Speaker 1: reporting on his salary grows into an obsession as he

903
00:49:28,160 --> 00:49:30,600
Speaker 1: gets more and more worried that his control of the

904
00:49:30,680 --> 00:49:34,480
Speaker 1: company is at risk. Now in April of twenty nineteen,

905
00:49:34,520 --> 00:49:37,480
Speaker 1: then when Ina wrote another article about the fact that

906
00:49:37,520 --> 00:49:42,040
Speaker 1: Devin was very much overpaid, he gets angry. Now he

907
00:49:42,080 --> 00:49:44,439
Speaker 1: has hired a PR company at that point to help

908
00:49:44,520 --> 00:49:47,640
Speaker 1: manage the situation, right and in general the bad PR

909
00:49:47,680 --> 00:49:50,560
Speaker 1: that EBA is getting at this time, and the PR company,

910
00:49:50,600 --> 00:49:55,799
Speaker 1: because they're competent professionals, are like, ignore this, don't get

911
00:49:55,840 --> 00:50:00,279
Speaker 1: obsessed with this. These elderly people and their blog. No

912
00:50:00,360 --> 00:50:03,080
Speaker 1: response you can make to them that will not blow

913
00:50:03,160 --> 00:50:05,479
Speaker 1: up in your face. Just let this buy and try

914
00:50:05,520 --> 00:50:09,040
Speaker 1: to run the company more efficiently, right, which.

915
00:50:08,840 --> 00:50:12,680
Speaker 2: Is like take a pay cut maybe if you think

916
00:50:12,680 --> 00:50:14,880
Speaker 2: that's a vulnerability. And the orders. If you think you

917
00:50:14,920 --> 00:50:17,520
Speaker 2: are overpaid, if you think their criticism is true, then.

918
00:50:17,920 --> 00:50:19,840
Speaker 1: Take a pay cut. Is that just don't take a

919
00:50:19,960 --> 00:50:22,480
Speaker 1: raise this year? Probably, you know, like you could get

920
00:50:22,480 --> 00:50:26,960
Speaker 1: away with that. Maybe Devin for a while goes with

921
00:50:27,040 --> 00:50:30,880
Speaker 1: their recommendation, but whenever he would get angry, he would

922
00:50:30,880 --> 00:50:34,319
Speaker 1: fume about the Steiners to his fellow executives. And when

923
00:50:34,320 --> 00:50:36,640
Speaker 1: he would fume to his fellow executives, all of the

924
00:50:36,680 --> 00:50:39,520
Speaker 1: subordinates below him in the C suite they would send

925
00:50:39,520 --> 00:50:42,319
Speaker 1: his emails on down the line to other people at

926
00:50:42,320 --> 00:50:47,600
Speaker 1: the company, particularly to people in the ebays like Security division, right,

927
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:51,080
Speaker 1: and inevitably all of his complaints wound up at the

928
00:50:51,120 --> 00:50:55,720
Speaker 1: office of his top security director, a man named Jim

929
00:50:56,080 --> 00:51:02,319
Speaker 1: Baw Like Baugh or Bog will go with Bog. So

930
00:51:02,520 --> 00:51:06,240
Speaker 1: in April of twenty nineteen, Bog had his analysts gather

931
00:51:06,520 --> 00:51:10,279
Speaker 1: information and prepared an anonymous, handwritten note to be sent

932
00:51:10,440 --> 00:51:13,799
Speaker 1: to Ena Steiner. He was not maybe we don't know

933
00:51:13,840 --> 00:51:16,120
Speaker 1: if he was ordered to do this, but he has

934
00:51:16,160 --> 00:51:17,880
Speaker 1: his people get a bunch of info on her and

935
00:51:17,920 --> 00:51:22,080
Speaker 1: he puts together a handwritten note threatening her physical person

936
00:51:22,760 --> 00:51:26,360
Speaker 1: and threatening to destroy her reputation. And the goal stated

937
00:51:26,440 --> 00:51:30,520
Speaker 1: in like the emails around this handwritten document was that

938
00:51:30,880 --> 00:51:32,720
Speaker 1: they were making it to get her to quote stop

939
00:51:32,760 --> 00:51:38,080
Speaker 1: publishing articles critical of eBay. Now at this point, I

940
00:51:38,120 --> 00:51:41,520
Speaker 1: don't know entirely where like they don't get the go

941
00:51:41,600 --> 00:51:43,720
Speaker 1: ahead from the C suite, right, I don't know if

942
00:51:43,800 --> 00:51:45,959
Speaker 1: Devin actually makes a call here or if it's someone

943
00:51:46,000 --> 00:51:49,120
Speaker 1: below him, but someone still has a lid on their

944
00:51:49,160 --> 00:51:52,719
Speaker 1: worst impulses at this point April of twenty nineteen. But

945
00:51:53,160 --> 00:51:55,799
Speaker 1: Bog is just kind of getting started here, right. The

946
00:51:55,840 --> 00:51:59,000
Speaker 1: fact that his send a crazy letter to these people

947
00:51:59,040 --> 00:52:02,000
Speaker 1: plan gets kind of killed does not kill his desire

948
00:52:02,200 --> 00:52:05,759
Speaker 1: for vengeance against these bloggers. Now, I want to give

949
00:52:05,800 --> 00:52:09,239
Speaker 1: you some context on Jim Bog because understanding him is

950
00:52:09,840 --> 00:52:12,200
Speaker 1: very critical both to understanding the kind of people who

951
00:52:12,280 --> 00:52:16,600
Speaker 1: wind up in these corporate intelligence roles and to understanding

952
00:52:16,600 --> 00:52:18,760
Speaker 1: all of the insane shit that comes next.

953
00:52:19,000 --> 00:52:19,280
Speaker 2: Bog.

954
00:52:19,400 --> 00:52:20,719
Speaker 1: We don't have a huge amount of de tail in

955
00:52:20,719 --> 00:52:23,000
Speaker 1: his early life or whatever, but he was a he

956
00:52:23,040 --> 00:52:25,560
Speaker 1: worked for the CIA. He was at some point an

957
00:52:25,640 --> 00:52:29,200
Speaker 1: operative at the CIA, right from what I can tell,

958
00:52:29,239 --> 00:52:31,440
Speaker 1: I think he worked there for a decent amount of time.

959
00:52:31,480 --> 00:52:33,120
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if it was a full career but

960
00:52:33,200 --> 00:52:36,080
Speaker 1: it was a matter of multiple years. And then after

961
00:52:36,160 --> 00:52:39,520
Speaker 1: he leaves the CIA, he starts a security firm that

962
00:52:39,640 --> 00:52:44,120
Speaker 1: becomes very popular with Silicon Valley companies. He contracts to Apple,

963
00:52:44,280 --> 00:52:48,160
Speaker 1: to Amazon, He works security for the Oscars one year.

964
00:52:48,400 --> 00:52:51,400
Speaker 1: Probably his biggest role is he provides a protection detail

965
00:52:51,719 --> 00:52:55,919
Speaker 1: to Joe Biden at the twenty sixteen Oscars. So that's

966
00:52:55,920 --> 00:52:58,960
Speaker 1: a little odd, but there you go. Maybe they should

967
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:01,040
Speaker 1: while he dropped out of the campaign. That would have

968
00:53:01,040 --> 00:53:02,719
Speaker 1: been a great thing for Trump to hit him on. Though.

969
00:53:02,840 --> 00:53:05,479
Speaker 1: You know, if only did this.

970
00:53:05,400 --> 00:53:08,319
Speaker 2: Guy give his security firm a cool name like.

971
00:53:08,280 --> 00:53:11,960
Speaker 1: Black It's like Jim baw Consulting or something like that. No, No,

972
00:53:12,120 --> 00:53:15,000
Speaker 1: nothing cool at all. Yeah, at least I'll say this

973
00:53:15,040 --> 00:53:17,480
Speaker 1: for the Black Cube people. That's a cool name for

974
00:53:17,520 --> 00:53:21,840
Speaker 1: a spy company. Like it sounds evil, as does like

975
00:53:21,920 --> 00:53:25,960
Speaker 1: Pallanteer sounds evil. But Joe Bogg is not a particularly

976
00:53:26,040 --> 00:53:29,239
Speaker 1: creative man. So it's a little hard for me to

977
00:53:29,280 --> 00:53:31,960
Speaker 1: tell the degree to which bog was still tied into

978
00:53:31,960 --> 00:53:35,320
Speaker 1: the US intelligence establishment during the period of time that

979
00:53:35,360 --> 00:53:38,759
Speaker 1: he's working at Silicon Valley. To underlings an eBay, he

980
00:53:38,800 --> 00:53:42,040
Speaker 1: would periodically claim that his wife was still employed by

981
00:53:42,080 --> 00:53:45,800
Speaker 1: the CIA. I think there's a good chance he was lying.

982
00:53:46,320 --> 00:53:49,680
Speaker 1: He also would claim in public, often while drinking, that

983
00:53:49,760 --> 00:53:52,719
Speaker 1: he was still a part time employee of the CIA

984
00:53:52,880 --> 00:53:55,719
Speaker 1: in his spare time. I found an article in Puck

985
00:53:55,880 --> 00:53:58,880
Speaker 1: News about claims made in the court case that results

986
00:53:58,880 --> 00:54:02,319
Speaker 1: from all of this quote. Bog detailed how after leaving

987
00:54:02,360 --> 00:54:06,200
Speaker 1: the CIA, he was re enlisted to provide private sector colleagues,

988
00:54:06,280 --> 00:54:09,440
Speaker 1: even a ceo. He boasted to spy on foreign to

989
00:54:09,480 --> 00:54:12,880
Speaker 1: recruit private sector colleagues, even a ceo he boasted to

990
00:54:12,960 --> 00:54:16,680
Speaker 1: spy on foreign leaders and report back on important international meetings.

991
00:54:17,000 --> 00:54:19,760
Speaker 1: I felt honored to be trusted with such sensitive information

992
00:54:19,880 --> 00:54:22,600
Speaker 1: and to be able to provide security assistance to our government.

993
00:54:23,400 --> 00:54:25,360
Speaker 1: So and this is stuff that he says in court

994
00:54:25,400 --> 00:54:28,360
Speaker 1: when he's trying to get his sentence mitigated. I continued

995
00:54:28,400 --> 00:54:31,680
Speaker 1: to work after entering private security for the federal government,

996
00:54:32,000 --> 00:54:35,320
Speaker 1: recruiting like business people, including the CEO of one company,

997
00:54:35,360 --> 00:54:37,920
Speaker 1: to spy on foreign leaders and report back on their

998
00:54:37,960 --> 00:54:40,759
Speaker 1: meetings for the federal government. I think this is the

999
00:54:40,880 --> 00:54:42,160
Speaker 1: kind of thing that happens a lot.

1000
00:54:42,200 --> 00:54:44,799
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, if he was doing that, that's not

1001
00:54:45,280 --> 00:54:48,480
Speaker 2: the weirdest thing we've heard whatsoever. That is the kind

1002
00:54:48,520 --> 00:54:50,719
Speaker 2: of thing in terms of why getting hired under the

1003
00:54:50,760 --> 00:54:55,040
Speaker 2: table or whatever to continue to collect intelligence or whatever. Like, Yeah,

1004
00:54:55,200 --> 00:54:57,319
Speaker 2: it's a very plausible lie. If it's a lie, it's

1005
00:54:57,400 --> 00:54:58,040
Speaker 2: very plausible.

1006
00:54:58,239 --> 00:54:59,919
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes total sense if you're the CI,

1007
00:55:00,400 --> 00:55:02,600
Speaker 1: what would you rather do spend the shitload of money

1008
00:55:02,640 --> 00:55:06,640
Speaker 1: and potentially risk vives of your operatives like wiretapping a

1009
00:55:06,640 --> 00:55:09,759
Speaker 1: guy or when the CEO of tech company X goes

1010
00:55:09,760 --> 00:55:13,680
Speaker 1: to meet with Vladimir Putin talk to him afterwards, right, Like,

1011
00:55:13,680 --> 00:55:15,640
Speaker 1: one of those is much easier than the other.

1012
00:55:15,960 --> 00:55:17,879
Speaker 2: Yeah, there anyway, Yeah, and.

1013
00:55:17,880 --> 00:55:19,640
Speaker 1: It's not all that hard to rope. Like if you're

1014
00:55:19,640 --> 00:55:21,719
Speaker 1: a guy like Bog you go to this, like, Hey,

1015
00:55:22,040 --> 00:55:25,400
Speaker 1: you know you're you've got this kind of boring corporate job.

1016
00:55:25,600 --> 00:55:26,719
Speaker 1: Do you want to feel it? Do you want to

1017
00:55:26,719 --> 00:55:29,000
Speaker 1: be a spy for a little bit? Right? The CIA

1018
00:55:29,160 --> 00:55:30,640
Speaker 1: has a job for you, and all you have to

1019
00:55:30,640 --> 00:55:32,840
Speaker 1: do is the job you were going to do, right, Like,

1020
00:55:32,920 --> 00:55:35,320
Speaker 1: obviously you get a lot of guys who are interested

1021
00:55:35,320 --> 00:55:37,399
Speaker 1: in doing shit like this, if only to make their

1022
00:55:37,400 --> 00:55:38,560
Speaker 1: lives a little less boring.

1023
00:55:39,120 --> 00:55:41,799
Speaker 2: Now, the first and most important requirement is that you

1024
00:55:41,880 --> 00:55:44,399
Speaker 2: not get drunk and tell everyone that you're doing this.

1025
00:55:45,000 --> 00:55:49,360
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, which bog seems to be doing. He drinks

1026
00:55:49,400 --> 00:55:51,600
Speaker 1: a lot, and he tells people a lot about his

1027
00:55:51,920 --> 00:55:54,560
Speaker 1: side work for the CIA and his wife's work for

1028
00:55:54,600 --> 00:55:59,680
Speaker 1: the CIA. Now, we don't know much about the specifics here,

1029
00:55:59,719 --> 00:56:02,040
Speaker 1: like really how far this went, but we do know

1030
00:56:02,120 --> 00:56:04,399
Speaker 1: that he's telling the truth about a lot of it

1031
00:56:04,440 --> 00:56:07,600
Speaker 1: because after he started talking about this stuff in court,

1032
00:56:07,760 --> 00:56:10,880
Speaker 1: the Justice Department had his letter to the court sealed,

1033
00:56:11,000 --> 00:56:15,600
Speaker 1: claiming it contained classified national security secrets. We only know

1034
00:56:16,160 --> 00:56:18,520
Speaker 1: all of the stuff that was in the letter because

1035
00:56:18,600 --> 00:56:22,359
Speaker 1: the court Monitoring Services forgot to redact it when they

1036
00:56:22,360 --> 00:56:24,319
Speaker 1: put it up online, and so the guys at puck

1037
00:56:24,400 --> 00:56:27,200
Speaker 1: News were able to get unredacted versions of what is

1038
00:56:27,280 --> 00:56:31,960
Speaker 1: now a sealed court letter. So again, the security States

1039
00:56:31,960 --> 00:56:35,200
Speaker 1: got a lot of holes in It's still yeah yeah,

1040
00:56:35,400 --> 00:56:39,160
Speaker 1: but uh yeah, fun story. So that is enough about

1041
00:56:39,280 --> 00:56:43,279
Speaker 1: kind of his backstory here. What is interesting to me

1042
00:56:43,320 --> 00:56:46,840
Speaker 1: about Jim is that he definitely has this CIA connection.

1043
00:56:46,920 --> 00:56:49,840
Speaker 1: He definitely has a legit background as a spy and

1044
00:56:49,920 --> 00:56:53,680
Speaker 1: a professional career working or at least, if not as

1045
00:56:53,719 --> 00:56:57,640
Speaker 1: a spy, working in some degree as an intelligence operative. Right,

1046
00:56:58,160 --> 00:57:00,440
Speaker 1: and he is still even though we had this real

1047
00:57:00,480 --> 00:57:05,040
Speaker 1: experience someone whose entire conception of the world and specifically

1048
00:57:05,120 --> 00:57:09,239
Speaker 1: how intelligence works seems to be based on stereotypes from

1049
00:57:09,280 --> 00:57:11,879
Speaker 1: Hollywood movies. And I'm going to read now a quote

1050
00:57:11,880 --> 00:57:14,239
Speaker 1: from The New York Times describing how he would after

1051
00:57:14,280 --> 00:57:17,960
Speaker 1: he gets hired at eBay to run this special elite

1052
00:57:18,000 --> 00:57:21,280
Speaker 1: security analytics team, how he would talk to his team

1053
00:57:21,320 --> 00:57:25,280
Speaker 1: of analysts about threats to eBay. Mister Bog would bring

1054
00:57:25,320 --> 00:57:27,800
Speaker 1: the analysts into a conference room and show the scene

1055
00:57:27,800 --> 00:57:31,640
Speaker 1: from American Gangster where Denzel Washington coolly executes a man

1056
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:33,600
Speaker 1: in front of a crowd to make a point, or

1057
00:57:33,640 --> 00:57:35,480
Speaker 1: a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street where the

1058
00:57:35,480 --> 00:57:38,320
Speaker 1: Feds are investigating shady deeds but none of the perpetrators

1059
00:57:38,360 --> 00:57:40,560
Speaker 1: can recall a thing, or the bit from Meet the

1060
00:57:40,640 --> 00:57:44,640
Speaker 1: Fockers about a retired CIA agent's circle of trust that

1061
00:57:44,680 --> 00:57:47,200
Speaker 1: one came up frequently. No one is supposed to know

1062
00:57:47,240 --> 00:57:49,800
Speaker 1: about this. Mister Bog would tell the analysts about some

1063
00:57:49,880 --> 00:57:52,440
Speaker 1: piece of office gossip. We'll keep it in the circle

1064
00:57:52,520 --> 00:57:53,120
Speaker 1: of trust.

1065
00:57:55,600 --> 00:57:59,120
Speaker 2: So I guess, okay, But right away, here's where I'm

1066
00:57:59,440 --> 00:58:03,280
Speaker 2: again getting confused, because this blogger, they were not a

1067
00:58:03,320 --> 00:58:06,560
Speaker 2: threat to the company. They were a threat to that

1068
00:58:06,800 --> 00:58:11,080
Speaker 2: CEO yep, that they thought was wasting money, both in

1069
00:58:11,160 --> 00:58:13,960
Speaker 2: terms of taking a salary in terms of spending money recklessly.

1070
00:58:14,040 --> 00:58:18,000
Speaker 2: So this is where I didn't get why this guy,

1071
00:58:18,200 --> 00:58:22,720
Speaker 2: this goon took such offense at what these bloggers were

1072
00:58:22,760 --> 00:58:26,080
Speaker 2: doing if he was not ordered to buy the CEO,

1073
00:58:26,120 --> 00:58:29,040
Speaker 2: because they're gonna make the story like, yeah, all the

1074
00:58:29,120 --> 00:58:31,600
Speaker 2: CEO did was vaguely say wow, I don't like this,

1075
00:58:31,720 --> 00:58:33,800
Speaker 2: and that he went off on his own. But it's

1076
00:58:34,480 --> 00:58:36,400
Speaker 2: this is also the part that I could never figure

1077
00:58:36,400 --> 00:58:37,840
Speaker 2: out what his motivation was.

1078
00:58:38,440 --> 00:58:40,320
Speaker 1: Jason, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to talk about

1079
00:58:40,320 --> 00:58:42,320
Speaker 1: the Nazis again here because I think this is an

1080
00:58:42,360 --> 00:58:45,120
Speaker 1: illustrative point, not because these people are Nazis, they're not,

1081
00:58:45,880 --> 00:58:49,200
Speaker 1: but because it's illustrative as to how stuff like this

1082
00:58:49,480 --> 00:58:52,560
Speaker 1: can action like stuff like this filters down and up

1083
00:58:52,720 --> 00:58:56,880
Speaker 1: without necessarily commands being given. There was this understanding in

1084
00:58:56,960 --> 00:59:00,320
Speaker 1: the Third Reich that people who worked at variouslevels of

1085
00:59:00,320 --> 00:59:02,920
Speaker 1: the government should all be working towards the fearer right,

1086
00:59:02,960 --> 00:59:05,920
Speaker 1: which meant that rather than just waiting to get explicit

1087
00:59:05,960 --> 00:59:09,320
Speaker 1: instructions while you were doing something like, you know, helping

1088
00:59:09,320 --> 00:59:12,240
Speaker 1: to set up the architecture of genocide or of state

1089
00:59:12,280 --> 00:59:16,320
Speaker 1: repression in the Gestapo, you should try to figure out

1090
00:59:16,400 --> 00:59:20,800
Speaker 1: what Hitler wanted and provide it for him before he asked, right,

1091
00:59:21,680 --> 00:59:23,680
Speaker 1: And so a lot of the time we don't have

1092
00:59:23,920 --> 00:59:25,919
Speaker 1: a lot of there's not a lot of documentation about

1093
00:59:26,000 --> 00:59:29,320
Speaker 1: Hitler ordering specific crimes against humanity. What you do have

1094
00:59:29,480 --> 00:59:32,240
Speaker 1: is him having dinner with a bunch of his high

1095
00:59:32,320 --> 00:59:36,600
Speaker 1: level adjutants and aids and officials and talking vaguely about

1096
00:59:36,720 --> 00:59:39,080
Speaker 1: things he would like to see happen. And then they

1097
00:59:39,120 --> 00:59:42,720
Speaker 1: go to their underlings and say like, Hey, these are

1098
00:59:42,760 --> 00:59:44,680
Speaker 1: the kind of things Hitler wants. And then it keeps

1099
00:59:44,760 --> 00:59:47,560
Speaker 1: kind of filtering down as people sort of try to

1100
00:59:47,560 --> 00:59:51,320
Speaker 1: figure out what the actual policy implications about these vague,

1101
00:59:51,320 --> 00:59:55,200
Speaker 1: grandiose statements ought to be. And that is not just

1102
00:59:55,280 --> 00:59:58,680
Speaker 1: how the Nazis work. That's how large organizations that are

1103
00:59:58,720 --> 01:00:02,640
Speaker 1: heavily based around and the personality of a leader at

1104
01:00:02,640 --> 01:00:05,400
Speaker 1: the top and pleasing that person work. And I get

1105
01:00:05,440 --> 01:00:08,280
Speaker 1: the feeling Devin Winnig. He is temperamental. He is someone

1106
01:00:08,320 --> 01:00:10,440
Speaker 1: we have some evidence has a lot of mood swings.

1107
01:00:10,880 --> 01:00:12,520
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people at the company have

1108
01:00:12,560 --> 01:00:16,280
Speaker 1: an understanding that their ability to get hired elsewhere, their

1109
01:00:16,320 --> 01:00:19,880
Speaker 1: ability to stay at eBay is dependent upon Devon being

1110
01:00:19,960 --> 01:00:22,840
Speaker 1: happy with them. And when Devin will go on rages

1111
01:00:22,840 --> 01:00:26,160
Speaker 1: about these people, that makes it into a priority for

1112
01:00:26,200 --> 01:00:28,680
Speaker 1: the lower people to find a way to deal with them,

1113
01:00:28,680 --> 01:00:32,000
Speaker 1: even if Devin isn't necessarily ordering them to break the law.

1114
01:00:32,320 --> 01:00:34,680
Speaker 1: This kind of desperation to I want to kind of

1115
01:00:34,800 --> 01:00:38,040
Speaker 1: proactively please the boss is how a lot of this

1116
01:00:38,080 --> 01:00:40,840
Speaker 1: stuff works, right, And I do think that's kind of

1117
01:00:40,840 --> 01:00:43,479
Speaker 1: the broad psychological thing going on here.

1118
01:00:44,280 --> 01:00:48,320
Speaker 2: And if I can make another extremely inappropriate comparison to

1119
01:00:48,360 --> 01:00:51,440
Speaker 2: this day, it's never totally clear to me if, like

1120
01:00:51,560 --> 01:00:54,960
Speaker 2: with the Manson family murders, right, if Charles made example,

1121
01:00:55,360 --> 01:01:00,440
Speaker 2: actually ordered that done, or if he was just extremely high,

1122
01:01:00,480 --> 01:01:02,240
Speaker 2: do you gotta go ahead kill him on put put

1123
01:01:02,280 --> 01:01:04,920
Speaker 2: Pete walls of their blood, and if he was just

1124
01:01:04,960 --> 01:01:07,560
Speaker 2: talking and then they just they they took it as

1125
01:01:07,600 --> 01:01:10,040
Speaker 2: an order because you know, like to this day they

1126
01:01:10,040 --> 01:01:13,200
Speaker 2: talk about Manton's his criminal mastermind and he manipulated everybody

1127
01:01:13,200 --> 01:01:15,520
Speaker 2: else around him. It's like, no, I think they were

1128
01:01:15,560 --> 01:01:19,520
Speaker 2: all just kind of dumb and high and they didn't know,

1129
01:01:20,040 --> 01:01:21,919
Speaker 2: you know, he was just random the way he does,

1130
01:01:22,000 --> 01:01:24,480
Speaker 2: You've seen him in interviews, and so they just went

1131
01:01:24,520 --> 01:01:26,680
Speaker 2: and did it, and maybe he himself didn't know if

1132
01:01:26,720 --> 01:01:29,400
Speaker 2: he wanted it done, because that's kind of the way

1133
01:01:29,520 --> 01:01:30,680
Speaker 2: people work.

1134
01:01:31,600 --> 01:01:34,280
Speaker 1: He you know a lot of the time. And I'm

1135
01:01:34,320 --> 01:01:35,800
Speaker 1: not saying, by the way, just to be clear, I'm

1136
01:01:35,800 --> 01:01:38,920
Speaker 1: not saying that like Hitler was not on board with

1137
01:01:38,960 --> 01:01:41,000
Speaker 1: the crimes committed by the regime, but he was not

1138
01:01:41,080 --> 01:01:43,240
Speaker 1: a nuts and bolts guy and he didn't need to be.

1139
01:01:44,160 --> 01:01:47,920
Speaker 1: And oftentimes that's not how things work. You have, you know,

1140
01:01:48,000 --> 01:01:50,760
Speaker 1: the guy, the person at the top, expressing these kind

1141
01:01:50,760 --> 01:01:54,640
Speaker 1: of like rage filled, grandiose goals, and he has put

1142
01:01:54,640 --> 01:01:58,640
Speaker 1: people in place below him who he knows will do something.

1143
01:01:58,800 --> 01:01:59,520
Speaker 1: He doesn't need this.

1144
01:01:59,520 --> 01:02:03,439
Speaker 2: This is Civix an extremely important point, and I do,

1145
01:02:03,960 --> 01:02:06,080
Speaker 2: I do want to stop and focus on this because

1146
01:02:06,720 --> 01:02:11,680
Speaker 2: this happens all over the place. You create a culture,

1147
01:02:12,400 --> 01:02:16,240
Speaker 2: but it is in many cases intentionally set up so

1148
01:02:16,280 --> 01:02:18,959
Speaker 2: that if there is backlash year you get caught doing

1149
01:02:19,000 --> 01:02:22,640
Speaker 2: something that you can say, well, there was no order

1150
01:02:22,960 --> 01:02:26,480
Speaker 2: telling them to do this. Yeah, and so trying to

1151
01:02:26,640 --> 01:02:29,840
Speaker 2: pin it on you with these nebulous terms of well,

1152
01:02:29,880 --> 01:02:34,240
Speaker 2: but you rewarded similar behavior you made it clear you

1153
01:02:34,240 --> 01:02:37,680
Speaker 2: weren't going to punish such behavior or whatever, that you

1154
01:02:37,760 --> 01:02:40,160
Speaker 2: created a culture, you hired the type of people that

1155
01:02:40,200 --> 01:02:43,880
Speaker 2: would do this kind of thing. It's it's hard and

1156
01:02:43,520 --> 01:02:47,120
Speaker 2: in this criminal this criminal case, I think it's going

1157
01:02:47,160 --> 01:02:49,439
Speaker 2: to turn out to be true. It's hard to pend

1158
01:02:49,480 --> 01:02:51,400
Speaker 2: it on the guy at the top that kind of

1159
01:02:51,480 --> 01:02:54,960
Speaker 2: set the stage for it to happen, right, And the

1160
01:02:55,000 --> 01:02:57,360
Speaker 2: people who really know what they're doing, they make sure

1161
01:02:57,400 --> 01:02:58,479
Speaker 2: that it's run this way.

1162
01:02:58,920 --> 01:03:01,200
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's this is not just eBay, but

1163
01:03:01,240 --> 01:03:06,800
Speaker 1: eBay is a particularly extreme example. Now under bog As,

1164
01:03:06,840 --> 01:03:11,000
Speaker 1: he becomes like is he's basically running this security division

1165
01:03:11,040 --> 01:03:16,360
Speaker 1: within the company. eBay develops a pretty paranoid set of

1166
01:03:16,440 --> 01:03:20,480
Speaker 1: internal security policies. I should note, you know, because we're

1167
01:03:20,480 --> 01:03:23,200
Speaker 1: talking about the most irrational example of this, there's a

1168
01:03:23,240 --> 01:03:26,720
Speaker 1: good reason for some degree of paranoia. The year before

1169
01:03:26,760 --> 01:03:29,760
Speaker 1: all of this happens, everything starts to happen twenty nineteen

1170
01:03:30,000 --> 01:03:34,240
Speaker 1: with the Steiners, there's a mass shooting at YouTube's headquarters

1171
01:03:34,280 --> 01:03:37,400
Speaker 1: in San Bruno, California. The shooter in this case was

1172
01:03:37,480 --> 01:03:42,480
Speaker 1: Nassim Najafi Agdam, who's a vegan activist YouTuber who believed

1173
01:03:42,520 --> 01:03:45,120
Speaker 1: the company had filtered her channel to keep her stuff

1174
01:03:45,160 --> 01:03:49,280
Speaker 1: from getting viewed. She wounded three people before killing herself.

1175
01:03:49,760 --> 01:03:52,400
Speaker 1: And you know, it's kind of hard for me to

1176
01:03:52,440 --> 01:03:55,959
Speaker 1: see eBay attracting exactly that kind of thing. But also

1177
01:03:55,960 --> 01:03:58,680
Speaker 1: it's not hard for me to imagine someone who is

1178
01:03:59,040 --> 01:04:03,360
Speaker 1: not well convincing themselves that eBay has destroyed their business

1179
01:04:03,440 --> 01:04:07,360
Speaker 1: for some reason, and like it's not a non factor. Right.

1180
01:04:07,440 --> 01:04:10,440
Speaker 1: So there's this obsession Bog has with like the physical

1181
01:04:10,480 --> 01:04:13,840
Speaker 1: security of the company that lends to this general air

1182
01:04:14,000 --> 01:04:16,440
Speaker 1: of paranoia. And he would tell his colleagues in the

1183
01:04:16,440 --> 01:04:20,040
Speaker 1: analytics department because they're researching, they're looking into people who

1184
01:04:20,080 --> 01:04:24,160
Speaker 1: are critical of eBay online, right, and the reasonable end

1185
01:04:24,200 --> 01:04:25,680
Speaker 1: of that is we need to you know, if some

1186
01:04:25,720 --> 01:04:27,840
Speaker 1: people are saying on Twitter, I want to like shoot

1187
01:04:27,920 --> 01:04:30,000
Speaker 1: up an eBay campus or something, we need to know

1188
01:04:30,040 --> 01:04:31,920
Speaker 1: about that because that actually could happen.

1189
01:04:32,080 --> 01:04:32,280
Speaker 2: Right.

1190
01:04:32,840 --> 01:04:35,880
Speaker 1: But that's not the only people that they're going after.

1191
01:04:36,120 --> 01:04:40,320
Speaker 1: And this kind of kernel, the justification for what they're

1192
01:04:40,320 --> 01:04:42,840
Speaker 1: doing is where a lot of the madness comes from.

1193
01:04:43,200 --> 01:04:46,080
Speaker 1: And Bog kind of hypes himself up after the shooting

1194
01:04:46,120 --> 01:04:48,640
Speaker 1: on the importance of his role. He would tell his

1195
01:04:48,680 --> 01:04:51,080
Speaker 1: employees quote, we need to be ready. We're the only

1196
01:04:51,120 --> 01:04:54,480
Speaker 1: ones who can prevent this from happening. Bog would hold

1197
01:04:54,480 --> 01:04:57,919
Speaker 1: regular mass shooter drills, and as always, he would play

1198
01:04:57,920 --> 01:05:01,040
Speaker 1: clips from action movies and spy through to inform and

1199
01:05:01,120 --> 01:05:03,520
Speaker 1: motivate his staff on how to deal with the shooting.

1200
01:05:04,080 --> 01:05:06,400
Speaker 1: When he wasn't psyching them up about this stuff, he

1201
01:05:06,560 --> 01:05:09,040
Speaker 1: was frightening them with knives. This is one of my

1202
01:05:09,040 --> 01:05:11,400
Speaker 1: favorite stories from this guy. At one point, he like

1203
01:05:11,680 --> 01:05:15,040
Speaker 1: walking around there's a barbecue grill on the eBay campus,

1204
01:05:15,360 --> 01:05:18,120
Speaker 1: and like someone leaves a knife at the grill and

1205
01:05:18,160 --> 01:05:20,080
Speaker 1: he freaks out about it. He gets the whole team

1206
01:05:20,080 --> 01:05:22,240
Speaker 1: around him and he's like waving the knife around, ranting

1207
01:05:22,240 --> 01:05:24,400
Speaker 1: about how like if a deranged person found this, they

1208
01:05:24,440 --> 01:05:26,680
Speaker 1: could have used this to hurt somebody. And then he

1209
01:05:26,760 --> 01:05:29,280
Speaker 1: takes it into the security office and he stabs a

1210
01:05:29,360 --> 01:05:31,920
Speaker 1: chair and he makes them leave the chair with the

1211
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:34,680
Speaker 1: knife in it there as a warning to everybody about

1212
01:05:34,720 --> 01:05:37,760
Speaker 1: how much more paranoid they need to be. So you

1213
01:05:37,760 --> 01:05:39,880
Speaker 1: can tell this is a man who's got like a

1214
01:05:39,960 --> 01:05:43,880
Speaker 1: good sense of priorities. He's responding rationally to the world.

1215
01:05:44,000 --> 01:05:46,760
Speaker 1: Before we get into this shit with the Steiners.

1216
01:05:47,120 --> 01:05:50,000
Speaker 2: I could speak for the next four and a half

1217
01:05:50,040 --> 01:05:52,680
Speaker 2: hours on this subject, but instead of going to try

1218
01:05:52,720 --> 01:05:56,160
Speaker 2: to condense it down to a few senses. There is

1219
01:05:56,240 --> 01:06:02,480
Speaker 2: a type of hyper performative masculinity that is all about

1220
01:06:02,960 --> 01:06:08,000
Speaker 2: being scared all the time. Yes, and these are the

1221
01:06:08,000 --> 01:06:10,240
Speaker 2: guys that have a pump shot gun like under their

1222
01:06:10,280 --> 01:06:13,960
Speaker 2: bed and a little quick release latch thing because like, well,

1223
01:06:14,000 --> 01:06:16,880
Speaker 2: somebody breaks in, I'll roll out of my bed, grab this,

1224
01:06:17,320 --> 01:06:19,600
Speaker 2: take out the guy at the window, shoot the guy

1225
01:06:19,600 --> 01:06:23,680
Speaker 2: at the door, roll into the hallway, and they spend

1226
01:06:23,720 --> 01:06:26,680
Speaker 2: and they think of it as being tough guy, but

1227
01:06:26,800 --> 01:06:29,520
Speaker 2: they're scared. They're scared to death. They go to the

1228
01:06:29,720 --> 01:06:33,440
Speaker 2: zoo with you know, a gun on their ankles, like

1229
01:06:33,880 --> 01:06:36,600
Speaker 2: there's a mass shooting at the zoo, or what if

1230
01:06:36,640 --> 01:06:38,400
Speaker 2: a bunch of the animals get out and it's up

1231
01:06:38,400 --> 01:06:40,840
Speaker 2: to me to shoot them. It's like they're living in

1232
01:06:40,880 --> 01:06:45,880
Speaker 2: fear and then portraying that as masculinity tough guy stuff,

1233
01:06:45,920 --> 01:06:50,320
Speaker 2: when it's actually the opposite. It's just constantly being overly

1234
01:06:50,360 --> 01:06:52,640
Speaker 2: afraid of everything all the time.

1235
01:06:53,240 --> 01:06:57,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh. We have a lot of problems with

1236
01:06:57,280 --> 01:07:00,439
Speaker 1: this exact kind of guy, right, and Bog is kind

1237
01:07:00,480 --> 01:07:02,919
Speaker 1: of one He's an example of how it works at

1238
01:07:02,960 --> 01:07:05,520
Speaker 1: like the top of sort of a corporate food chain.

1239
01:07:05,600 --> 01:07:08,680
Speaker 1: When this guy gets into security and when I kind

1240
01:07:08,680 --> 01:07:11,640
Speaker 1: of try to psychoanalyze him, again, we don't because he

1241
01:07:11,680 --> 01:07:13,120
Speaker 1: was a CIA agent, we don't get a lot of

1242
01:07:13,120 --> 01:07:16,200
Speaker 1: specifics of his career, but I think that he probably

1243
01:07:16,240 --> 01:07:18,520
Speaker 1: has you know, one of the big one of the

1244
01:07:18,560 --> 01:07:21,880
Speaker 1: two Watergate guys, the Dute, who was played by Woody

1245
01:07:21,920 --> 01:07:24,120
Speaker 1: Harrelson in one of the recent shows. I'm spacing on

1246
01:07:24,160 --> 01:07:27,280
Speaker 1: his name right now, was a former CIA man right,

1247
01:07:27,320 --> 01:07:29,080
Speaker 1: who had been a part of some of like the

1248
01:07:29,120 --> 01:07:32,920
Speaker 1: regime chain shit in Central America, but not doing like

1249
01:07:33,080 --> 01:07:37,560
Speaker 1: exciting murdering people or handing over guns, mostly like making

1250
01:07:37,600 --> 01:07:41,000
Speaker 1: sure payments went where they needed to go in handling paperwork.

1251
01:07:41,080 --> 01:07:44,200
Speaker 1: So he is part of these sketchy, scary, like very

1252
01:07:44,280 --> 01:07:47,760
Speaker 1: movie worthy plots, but in a really boring way. And

1253
01:07:47,800 --> 01:07:50,680
Speaker 1: then when he leaves, he's kind of insecure about the

1254
01:07:50,680 --> 01:07:53,200
Speaker 1: fact that he doesn't actually know how to do anything cool.

1255
01:07:53,360 --> 01:07:55,480
Speaker 1: And that's where a lot of the dumb shit with

1256
01:07:55,520 --> 01:07:58,280
Speaker 1: the Watergate break ins come in. Is like this guy

1257
01:07:58,320 --> 01:08:01,280
Speaker 1: is convinced, well, I was at the sea doing shady shit,

1258
01:08:01,400 --> 01:08:04,160
Speaker 1: I should be able to do something like this even

1259
01:08:04,200 --> 01:08:06,120
Speaker 1: though he doesn't actually know how to do anything but

1260
01:08:06,720 --> 01:08:07,640
Speaker 1: file paperwork.

1261
01:08:07,960 --> 01:08:10,480
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't actually know how. This stuff is done

1262
01:08:10,720 --> 01:08:13,240
Speaker 2: by the people that are actually good at doing the

1263
01:08:13,320 --> 01:08:14,480
Speaker 2: dirty tricks.

1264
01:08:14,440 --> 01:08:17,960
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, And that is the feeling that I

1265
01:08:18,000 --> 01:08:18,799
Speaker 1: get with Bog.

1266
01:08:19,600 --> 01:08:19,680
Speaker 3: So.

1267
01:08:20,920 --> 01:08:24,560
Speaker 1: Bogg's team consists of about a half a dozen analysts,

1268
01:08:24,600 --> 01:08:26,760
Speaker 1: which when he gets hired, are all are I think

1269
01:08:26,840 --> 01:08:30,040
Speaker 1: mostly men. But by May of twenty eighteen, after he's

1270
01:08:30,040 --> 01:08:31,559
Speaker 1: been there, I think a year or two, he had

1271
01:08:31,680 --> 01:08:35,200
Speaker 1: hired or fired and hired people until the entire team

1272
01:08:35,320 --> 01:08:38,479
Speaker 1: was very young women. This is the kind of environment

1273
01:08:38,520 --> 01:08:41,600
Speaker 1: where no one feels safe asking him about this, but

1274
01:08:41,680 --> 01:08:44,040
Speaker 1: he would explain it to them anyway by playing a

1275
01:08:44,120 --> 01:08:47,280
Speaker 1: video of Facebook Cheryl Sandberg giving a speech on how

1276
01:08:47,280 --> 01:08:50,080
Speaker 1: there aren't enough female leaders. And I'm going to quote

1277
01:08:50,080 --> 01:08:52,720
Speaker 1: from the New York Times again, Miss Sandberg did not

1278
01:08:52,840 --> 01:08:55,519
Speaker 1: say these women should all be young and blonde. Charlie's

1279
01:08:55,560 --> 01:08:58,920
Speaker 1: Angels and Jim's Angels were their nicknames in the executive suite,

1280
01:08:59,080 --> 01:09:01,519
Speaker 1: but miss z, which is one of his young employees,

1281
01:09:01,600 --> 01:09:04,080
Speaker 1: wasn't about to point that out. Women got fired too,

1282
01:09:04,160 --> 01:09:07,000
Speaker 1: and afterward the survivors would whisper about why one departed

1283
01:09:07,000 --> 01:09:10,320
Speaker 1: analyst had been reprimanded for not smiling in front of executives.

1284
01:09:10,520 --> 01:09:12,920
Speaker 1: Another was let go because she's sang to keep herself

1285
01:09:12,920 --> 01:09:15,479
Speaker 1: awake during the night shift, a third because she chewed

1286
01:09:15,479 --> 01:09:19,160
Speaker 1: on her pen. So, you know, just to give you

1287
01:09:19,200 --> 01:09:21,439
Speaker 1: a picture of this guy, he makes all of his

1288
01:09:21,479 --> 01:09:23,960
Speaker 1: employees young and blonde. Everyone at the C suite is

1289
01:09:24,000 --> 01:09:26,720
Speaker 1: aware of this. They make Charlie's Angels joke about it,

1290
01:09:26,840 --> 01:09:28,880
Speaker 1: jokes about it, and then he'll fire them if they

1291
01:09:28,880 --> 01:09:31,840
Speaker 1: don't smile enough or you know, aren't acting cute enough

1292
01:09:31,920 --> 01:09:35,720
Speaker 1: for his behavior. Again, very you know, a guy we're

1293
01:09:35,760 --> 01:09:38,880
Speaker 1: all well familiar with. To take the creep factor up

1294
01:09:38,920 --> 01:09:42,280
Speaker 1: a notch, Bog and his top assistant, Stephanie Popp ordered

1295
01:09:42,280 --> 01:09:44,280
Speaker 1: the rest of the analyst team to refer to them

1296
01:09:44,320 --> 01:09:48,040
Speaker 1: as mom and dad, repeatedly telling them we're a family.

1297
01:09:48,360 --> 01:09:53,720
Speaker 1: Which it just sounds like a nightmare working for this team. So,

1298
01:09:53,800 --> 01:09:57,120
Speaker 1: with his Charlie's Angel style hr violation of a team

1299
01:09:57,200 --> 01:10:01,559
Speaker 1: in place, Bog started watching the sty website like a hawk.

1300
01:10:01,760 --> 01:10:05,160
Speaker 1: As you know. In May of twenty nineteen, the CEO

1301
01:10:05,280 --> 01:10:09,760
Speaker 1: began sending more and more messages about their content. That month, May,

1302
01:10:10,040 --> 01:10:13,240
Speaker 1: Ena published an article revealing that Devin Winnig had directed

1303
01:10:13,280 --> 01:10:16,080
Speaker 1: corporate funds to build what she described as a quote

1304
01:10:16,160 --> 01:10:19,879
Speaker 1: lavish New York City pub style lounge on their campus.

1305
01:10:20,240 --> 01:10:22,760
Speaker 1: This was, in fact, a scale replica of a New

1306
01:10:22,840 --> 01:10:27,719
Speaker 1: York City bar, Walker's West, built on the eBay campus

1307
01:10:27,920 --> 01:10:32,120
Speaker 1: entirely for eBay employees. I don't know why this particular

1308
01:10:32,240 --> 01:10:35,040
Speaker 1: bar is important, Like I think it's a popular bar.

1309
01:10:35,120 --> 01:10:37,439
Speaker 1: I think it's just a bar. Winning thought was cool,

1310
01:10:37,840 --> 01:10:41,960
Speaker 1: So he spent shareholder money building a perfect replica, and

1311
01:10:42,240 --> 01:10:45,160
Speaker 1: it opened at three pm every day on the eBay campus.

1312
01:10:46,640 --> 01:10:49,599
Speaker 1: So again, the fact that there's a bar on campus

1313
01:10:49,640 --> 01:10:53,000
Speaker 1: and everyone is drinking is not a non factor in

1314
01:10:53,040 --> 01:10:55,160
Speaker 1: some of the decisions that are going to be made here.

1315
01:10:56,360 --> 01:10:58,680
Speaker 1: ENA's article on the construction of this pub has the

1316
01:10:58,720 --> 01:11:02,200
Speaker 1: same slightly critical professional tone is her other work. Quote

1317
01:11:02,360 --> 01:11:05,559
Speaker 1: sure seems like an unnecessary expense for a company watching

1318
01:11:05,600 --> 01:11:08,000
Speaker 1: its market share get eaten up by Amazon and being

1319
01:11:08,040 --> 01:11:12,040
Speaker 1: warned about overspending by a major investor. This is what

1320
01:11:12,400 --> 01:11:16,679
Speaker 1: kind of infuriates people at the eBay's executive level. Bog

1321
01:11:16,840 --> 01:11:19,479
Speaker 1: gets the article, and he's scared that someone at Elliott's

1322
01:11:19,520 --> 01:11:21,479
Speaker 1: going to read it, and so he forwards a link

1323
01:11:21,600 --> 01:11:25,240
Speaker 1: to the CEO, who forwards it to an underling executive,

1324
01:11:25,280 --> 01:11:28,679
Speaker 1: who sends it to a PR consultant and complains, I'm

1325
01:11:28,680 --> 01:11:32,000
Speaker 1: no longer just accepting ignore as a broader strategy and

1326
01:11:32,080 --> 01:11:35,120
Speaker 1: won a fight back, looking forward to talking asap to

1327
01:11:35,120 --> 01:11:38,000
Speaker 1: get your assessment of how to do that most effectively,

1328
01:11:38,760 --> 01:11:41,559
Speaker 1: and this excerpt from the subsequent court filing describes what

1329
01:11:41,640 --> 01:11:46,439
Speaker 1: happens next. Thereafter, eBay Communications employees sent information to the

1330
01:11:46,439 --> 01:11:49,720
Speaker 1: consultant about the Steiners, including their buying selling history on

1331
01:11:49,760 --> 01:11:53,439
Speaker 1: eBay and the perspective of eBay employees who knew them honor.

1332
01:11:53,439 --> 01:11:57,120
Speaker 1: About May thirty first, twenty nineteen, Executive two in Executive

1333
01:11:57,120 --> 01:12:00,880
Speaker 1: three exchanged messages regarding Ena Steiner in e Commerce Fights

1334
01:12:01,000 --> 01:12:04,280
Speaker 1: and Relevant Part, Executive two described an e Commerce Bights

1335
01:12:04,400 --> 01:12:08,520
Speaker 1: article discussing Executive one that's the CEO's presentation to shareholders

1336
01:12:08,720 --> 01:12:13,640
Speaker 1: during eBay's twenty nineteen annual meetings as shockingly reasonable. Executive

1337
01:12:13,680 --> 01:12:17,200
Speaker 1: three preferred to Ena Steiner as a cow. Executive two

1338
01:12:17,320 --> 01:12:21,200
Speaker 1: responded her day is coming. Executive three stated, I can't wait.

1339
01:12:21,479 --> 01:12:23,600
Speaker 1: Jim Baw came to me with some thoughts, and I

1340
01:12:23,640 --> 01:12:26,439
Speaker 1: told him to stand down and leave it alone. Executive

1341
01:12:26,479 --> 01:12:29,400
Speaker 1: two responded, you are being too kind. Tell them to

1342
01:12:29,400 --> 01:12:32,160
Speaker 1: be my advisor on this issue. Sometimes you just need

1343
01:12:32,160 --> 01:12:35,160
Speaker 1: to make an example out of someone. We are too nice.

1344
01:12:35,280 --> 01:12:38,080
Speaker 1: She needs to be crushed. So I want to go

1345
01:12:38,160 --> 01:12:41,840
Speaker 1: over the escalation here, right, These two executives, they get

1346
01:12:41,880 --> 01:12:44,080
Speaker 1: the message from the CEO, and then they start talking

1347
01:12:44,240 --> 01:12:46,840
Speaker 1: about Steiner and what they need to do about her,

1348
01:12:47,240 --> 01:12:51,439
Speaker 1: and Executive number two is like, well she, I mean,

1349
01:12:51,439 --> 01:12:55,520
Speaker 1: her presentation on like the CEO's shareholder meeting was really reasonable.

1350
01:12:55,840 --> 01:12:57,400
Speaker 1: And then the other guy is like, yeah, but she's

1351
01:12:57,439 --> 01:13:00,200
Speaker 1: a cow. And then they start making these increasingly like

1352
01:13:00,280 --> 01:13:03,040
Speaker 1: movie let like threats her day is coming, will make

1353
01:13:03,080 --> 01:13:05,240
Speaker 1: an example out of her, She needs to be crushed.

1354
01:13:05,760 --> 01:13:08,800
Speaker 1: The the escalation from like, well, this is a pretty

1355
01:13:08,840 --> 01:13:11,400
Speaker 1: reasonable piece of reporting from we need to destroy this

1356
01:13:11,520 --> 01:13:13,840
Speaker 1: human being happens in the space of a couple of

1357
01:13:13,880 --> 01:13:17,000
Speaker 1: text messages, which I find really interesting.

1358
01:13:17,360 --> 01:13:19,720
Speaker 2: And I feel like we've left a lot of the

1359
01:13:19,800 --> 01:13:25,639
Speaker 2: listeners behind because there's such a disconnect the problem, like, again,

1360
01:13:25,720 --> 01:13:29,439
Speaker 2: the fear that these investors were going to see this article.

1361
01:13:30,000 --> 01:13:33,320
Speaker 2: The problem is not the article. The problem is that

1362
01:13:33,360 --> 01:13:35,120
Speaker 2: you built that goddamn bar.

1363
01:13:35,439 --> 01:13:37,800
Speaker 1: Why did you spend all that money at a bar?

1364
01:13:38,560 --> 01:13:40,800
Speaker 2: It's like, well, this is you know, this is the

1365
01:13:40,920 --> 01:13:44,120
Speaker 2: last straw that she told everyone about the bar we built.

1366
01:13:44,160 --> 01:13:46,720
Speaker 2: It's like, no, no, no, back up, you you you went

1367
01:13:46,800 --> 01:13:50,320
Speaker 2: one step too far. Your problem didn't start with a

1368
01:13:50,439 --> 01:13:54,160
Speaker 2: blogger noticing you built a replica of a New York

1369
01:13:54,240 --> 01:13:57,040
Speaker 2: bar for millions of dollars. It's that you did that

1370
01:13:57,160 --> 01:14:01,080
Speaker 2: at all. Because, after all, if she hadn't made that up,

1371
01:14:01,320 --> 01:14:04,559
Speaker 2: if that was fake, well it's easy you can just

1372
01:14:05,000 --> 01:14:06,800
Speaker 2: don't go out and disprove it and say, hey, this

1373
01:14:06,840 --> 01:14:09,240
Speaker 2: is a lie, this is a libelis it's the fact

1374
01:14:09,280 --> 01:14:11,600
Speaker 2: that what she was saying is true that made us

1375
01:14:11,600 --> 01:14:15,880
Speaker 2: so a damaging So now focus on why why is

1376
01:14:15,880 --> 01:14:18,800
Speaker 2: it that what she said was true? That was your

1377
01:14:18,840 --> 01:14:19,800
Speaker 2: own actions?

1378
01:14:20,200 --> 01:14:23,759
Speaker 1: And she finds out about this because the contractor eBay

1379
01:14:23,840 --> 01:14:27,320
Speaker 1: hires like puts a page up on their website like

1380
01:14:27,640 --> 01:14:30,880
Speaker 1: with pictures of the construction and like how much it

1381
01:14:31,000 --> 01:14:33,200
Speaker 1: costs in everything, because they you know, that's how the

1382
01:14:33,240 --> 01:14:38,559
Speaker 1: contractor gets additional business. And Ena just finds it googling around, like, oh,

1383
01:14:38,680 --> 01:14:40,360
Speaker 1: it seems like they spent a lot of money on

1384
01:14:40,400 --> 01:14:45,080
Speaker 1: this fucking thing, like the absolute the number one refusal

1385
01:14:45,120 --> 01:14:46,920
Speaker 1: to see that, like, well, it's your own action that's

1386
01:14:46,920 --> 01:14:49,120
Speaker 1: getting you the bad attention and the fact that, like

1387
01:14:49,160 --> 01:14:52,000
Speaker 1: and you didn't even take any efforts to stop someone

1388
01:14:52,080 --> 01:14:54,800
Speaker 1: from finding this out. You know, you could have had

1389
01:14:54,880 --> 01:14:57,559
Speaker 1: them do in NBA, right, you didn't have to let

1390
01:14:57,600 --> 01:15:00,160
Speaker 1: them publish an article about it on their website. Not

1391
01:15:00,160 --> 01:15:05,160
Speaker 1: think anyone would notice anyway. Bog after this point, gets

1392
01:15:05,160 --> 01:15:09,720
Speaker 1: the go ahead to actually begin offensive actions against the Steiners,

1393
01:15:10,000 --> 01:15:13,080
Speaker 1: and on June sixth, he tasks his team with tracking

1394
01:15:13,120 --> 01:15:16,599
Speaker 1: all of INA's articles and social media posts concerning eBay.

1395
01:15:16,880 --> 01:15:20,040
Speaker 1: On June seventh, he sends a contractor, a retired police

1396
01:15:20,080 --> 01:15:23,920
Speaker 1: captain named Gilbert, to surveil the Steiner's home in the

1397
01:15:23,960 --> 01:15:27,560
Speaker 1: Boston area. The day after this, Bog himself called the

1398
01:15:27,600 --> 01:15:29,519
Speaker 1: Steiner's home in the middle of the night and hung

1399
01:15:29,600 --> 01:15:33,439
Speaker 1: up as soon as they answered. The harassment campaign had begun.

1400
01:15:33,520 --> 01:15:36,000
Speaker 1: And it is amusing to me that apparently the CIA

1401
01:15:36,160 --> 01:15:39,080
Speaker 1: training that this guy had told him, like, start by

1402
01:15:39,120 --> 01:15:41,600
Speaker 1: trolling them on social media, then you call them and

1403
01:15:41,640 --> 01:15:44,080
Speaker 1: you hang up. I guess this might be why we

1404
01:15:44,200 --> 01:15:47,960
Speaker 1: lost Cuba. Unfortunately, as with Cuba, things are going to

1405
01:15:48,080 --> 01:15:50,360
Speaker 1: escalate pretty rapidly from here, and we're going to cover

1406
01:15:50,560 --> 01:15:55,080
Speaker 1: that and more Jason on Thursday's episode. Right now, we're

1407
01:15:55,080 --> 01:15:58,320
Speaker 1: going to cover your books that people can buy or

1408
01:15:58,400 --> 01:16:00,799
Speaker 1: in one case, pre order right now.

1409
01:16:02,600 --> 01:16:05,679
Speaker 2: Yes, the new book is called I'm starting to worry

1410
01:16:05,800 --> 01:16:08,800
Speaker 2: about this Black Box of Doom. Yeah, it's up for

1411
01:16:08,880 --> 01:16:11,200
Speaker 2: pure It is that on September twenty fourth. If you

1412
01:16:11,320 --> 01:16:14,720
Speaker 2: are hearing this after that date, it's already out. If

1413
01:16:14,760 --> 01:16:17,439
Speaker 2: it's not, then that means it got pulled off shelves

1414
01:16:17,439 --> 01:16:20,240
Speaker 2: and I'm probably in jail or something, or I got

1415
01:16:20,280 --> 01:16:24,360
Speaker 2: canceled somehow. There's probably an equally interesting story in that. Otherwise. Yeah,

1416
01:16:24,400 --> 01:16:28,360
Speaker 2: it's available in every format, including an audio, ebook, hardcover.

1417
01:16:29,000 --> 01:16:31,880
Speaker 2: I do not read the audiobook. I'm not an audiobook narrator.

1418
01:16:31,920 --> 01:16:34,360
Speaker 2: People keep asking me that that would be a disaster.

1419
01:16:34,479 --> 01:16:35,880
Speaker 2: They hired a professional.

1420
01:16:36,520 --> 01:16:39,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would love it if if the same thing

1421
01:16:39,160 --> 01:16:41,639
Speaker 1: happened to you. That happened to uh, oh shit, what's

1422
01:16:41,640 --> 01:16:43,720
Speaker 1: his name? Tom Clancy that one time where he like

1423
01:16:43,800 --> 01:16:48,439
Speaker 1: accidentally described a nuclear submarine so accurately the government had

1424
01:16:48,520 --> 01:16:54,879
Speaker 1: to sit down with them. Anyway, you know, read Jason's

1425
01:16:54,880 --> 01:16:58,720
Speaker 1: books before he is arrested for accurately describing aspects of

1426
01:16:58,760 --> 01:17:02,719
Speaker 1: our nuclear defense. Try and listen to the remaining podcast

1427
01:17:02,760 --> 01:17:06,240
Speaker 1: on this network before we get taken out for I

1428
01:17:06,240 --> 01:17:09,040
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't have a joke ready, whatever, I'm tired,

1429
01:17:09,160 --> 01:17:15,000
Speaker 1: Go to Hell. I love you. Behind the Bastards is

1430
01:17:15,000 --> 01:17:17,800
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool

1431
01:17:17,840 --> 01:17:22,120
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check

1432
01:17:22,160 --> 01:17:25,120
Speaker 1: us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

1433
01:17:25,200 --> 01:17:26,680
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.