WEBVTT - Part One: That Time eBay's Private Spies Went To War With Some Bloggers 0:00:01.800 --> 0:00:07.280 Also media. All right, everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards. 0:00:07.320 --> 0:00:10.640 I'm Robert Evans, and we have some sad news for 0:00:10.720 --> 0:00:15.280 the audience. Up at the top of the episode. Yesterday morning, 0:00:15.320 --> 0:00:19.920 at about eight hundred hours, Sophie Lichterman's plane left Tokyo 0:00:20.239 --> 0:00:23.200 bound for Manila. It was shot down over the Sea 0:00:23.239 --> 0:00:26.880 of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors. She'll 0:00:26.920 --> 0:00:29.040 be back next week, but with me this week is 0:00:29.120 --> 0:00:34.080 our beloved returning guest, Jason Pargin. Jason, do you think 0:00:34.120 --> 0:00:39.280 that mash joke is going to work with our audience? 0:00:40.440 --> 0:00:42.280 Like years before I was born? 0:00:44.920 --> 0:00:47.519 It's so dangerous because if there's any kind of an 0:00:47.520 --> 0:00:50.480 air disaster the day this episode's supposed to go up, 0:00:50.880 --> 0:00:53.280 then we've got to go in and well, no, that 0:00:53.360 --> 0:00:54.200 just makes it funnier. 0:00:54.240 --> 0:00:56.480 I guess that makes it fun The only time I've 0:00:56.480 --> 0:00:58.440 removed a joke for something like that was we made 0:00:58.520 --> 0:01:00.800 some jokes at the start of the COVID pandemic when 0:01:00.840 --> 0:01:02.960 I assumed it was going to be like a Sarr's 0:01:03.040 --> 0:01:07.080 situation and we cut those bad boys out before air. 0:01:07.640 --> 0:01:10.840 That did not age well with the entire country lockdown. 0:01:14.160 --> 0:01:19.880 Jason Pargen You are a my former boss over at 0:01:20.000 --> 0:01:24.920 cracked dot com, which was briefly defunct but is now funked, 0:01:24.920 --> 0:01:27.280 but neither of us work there anymore. You are the 0:01:27.319 --> 0:01:31.560 author of a number of wonderful books. Do you want 0:01:31.600 --> 0:01:33.520 to talk about the book that you've got that's going 0:01:33.560 --> 0:01:35.760 to be out in about two weeks at the time 0:01:35.800 --> 0:01:37.399 which people hear these episodes. 0:01:38.200 --> 0:01:41.560 Yes, the book is a standalone novel called I'm Starting 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:45.600 to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It is 0:01:45.680 --> 0:01:48.320 not a part of any series. It doesn't require any 0:01:48.360 --> 0:01:52.360 prior knowledge of me or this podcast or anything else. 0:01:52.440 --> 0:01:56.360 Anyone can enjoy it as long as you enjoy books. 0:01:57.200 --> 0:02:02.200 Robert gave a blurb on it, very kind. He said, 0:02:02.360 --> 0:02:07.240 strangely that the book saved his marriage, which surprives everyone. 0:02:07.280 --> 0:02:09.000 I didn't know he was married. It's not that kind, 0:02:09.080 --> 0:02:09.560 I was not. 0:02:10.160 --> 0:02:12.680 That's that's the magic of your writing, Joseph. 0:02:14.639 --> 0:02:19.240 But so far the reviews are getting equal equally. The 0:02:19.320 --> 0:02:24.359 positive ones are half saying, it's fun. It's a fun 0:02:24.440 --> 0:02:26.400 little roller coaster ride. You can read in the beach. 0:02:26.440 --> 0:02:28.960 It's something you can read on the on the toilet, 0:02:29.080 --> 0:02:30.960 like if you don't want to get fecal particles on 0:02:31.000 --> 0:02:33.079 your phone. Sure, this is something you can have on 0:02:33.120 --> 0:02:35.640 the toilet instead, and the other half reviews are like, 0:02:36.360 --> 0:02:38.680 I just put it down and stared at the wall 0:02:38.720 --> 0:02:41.240 for a while, and then I called my mom. I 0:02:41.320 --> 0:02:44.760 decided I had to totally change my life. I deleted 0:02:44.800 --> 0:02:47.600 all the apps off my phone. So I guess it's 0:02:47.680 --> 0:02:50.160 kind of It depends on how you want to approach it. 0:02:50.520 --> 0:02:53.919 If you just want to breezy read, it's there for you. 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:57.560 But apparently some people they have decided to make permanent 0:02:57.600 --> 0:02:58.880 life changes after reading it. 0:02:59.120 --> 0:03:01.800 I mean that's every author's goal, is for the readers 0:03:01.880 --> 0:03:05.720 to make ill considered, rash decisions that alter the entire 0:03:05.800 --> 0:03:10.120 course of their existence after finishing your book. Yeah, I've 0:03:10.120 --> 0:03:13.440 been reading your books. I mean I literally started more 0:03:13.480 --> 0:03:16.400 than twenty years ago, when I was an adolescent in 0:03:16.480 --> 0:03:19.200 high school, long before the cracked days, when you were 0:03:19.200 --> 0:03:23.080 still publishing stuff on the internet. And it's been gratifying 0:03:23.120 --> 0:03:24.640 to see that you are one of I don't know, 0:03:24.720 --> 0:03:27.119 like a dozen people in the country who can make 0:03:27.400 --> 0:03:32.359 a living writing novels. I'm very happy that continues to work, and. 0:03:32.320 --> 0:03:35.640 It will see we've reached a point where I know 0:03:35.760 --> 0:03:39.240 for a fact their narrative is going to be geriatric 0:03:39.320 --> 0:03:43.040 TikTok star tries to write a book, tries to cash 0:03:43.080 --> 0:03:44.480 in on his TikTok fame. 0:03:44.840 --> 0:03:49.440 It's like, no, I was writing books before social media existed, 0:03:49.480 --> 0:03:52.840 before you could upload video to the Internet. I was 0:03:52.880 --> 0:03:57.320 writing books. This is no I'm a washed up author 0:03:57.480 --> 0:04:01.440 trying to reclaim my success us with TikTok. It's not 0:04:01.520 --> 0:04:03.160 the other way around. See. 0:04:03.200 --> 0:04:04.920 I even had this joke planned when I came in. 0:04:04.960 --> 0:04:06.560 I was going to do like this series of bits 0:04:06.560 --> 0:04:09.040 about how you were actually gen Z because of your 0:04:09.040 --> 0:04:13.000 TikTok stardom, But you've ruined that. Although Jason, I did 0:04:13.000 --> 0:04:15.600 want to say to start this off, you know Sophie's 0:04:15.640 --> 0:04:18.760 not here. This episode is just you and I and you, 0:04:18.880 --> 0:04:21.359 as a gen Z expert on the Tiktoks, know that 0:04:21.400 --> 0:04:23.200 all the kids these days are using the term raw 0:04:23.279 --> 0:04:27.240 dog for situations like this, which is deeply upsetting to 0:04:27.320 --> 0:04:30.560 our ears as old men. But but the kids, the 0:04:30.640 --> 0:04:32.919 kids love using it for everything from sitting on a 0:04:32.920 --> 0:04:37.680 plane without a book to not taking psychiatric medication that's 0:04:37.680 --> 0:04:40.560 prescribed to you from your doctor. So are you ready 0:04:40.920 --> 0:04:46.240 to uh gen Z terminology? This podcast episode that you suggested. 0:04:47.400 --> 0:04:51.520 Yes, let's let's let's raw dog. Let's raw dog. Goon this, 0:04:53.040 --> 0:04:55.240 let's goon this episode. Where are some other terms we. 0:04:55.640 --> 0:04:58.880 This won't be ohio. I hear the kids are using 0:04:59.120 --> 0:05:06.240 Ohio as a tur for mid or unimpressive. Right, Yeah, 0:05:06.279 --> 0:05:08.920 they're all right sometimes, Jason, this is a story that 0:05:09.000 --> 0:05:12.599 you had suggested, and the bastard of this story is 0:05:12.680 --> 0:05:16.400 kind of the entire c suite at eBay. It's a 0:05:16.440 --> 0:05:18.359 lot worse that I think listeners are going to be 0:05:18.400 --> 0:05:20.640 ready for. But to give some context, I want to 0:05:20.680 --> 0:05:24.760 actually start by peeling back outside of eBay, because as 0:05:24.760 --> 0:05:27.640 a heads up, the story we're telling is the tale 0:05:27.680 --> 0:05:34.719 of how eBay's internal security agency decided that a group 0:05:34.800 --> 0:05:37.960 of elderly blog a pair of elderly bloggers were mortal 0:05:38.080 --> 0:05:42.200 enemies of the corporation and deployed insane degrees of force 0:05:42.320 --> 0:05:47.120 and violence to attempt to stop them from publishing blogs. 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:49.880 But I wanted to peel back a bit and start 0:05:49.920 --> 0:05:54.520 by talking about like where the industry of like corporate 0:05:54.640 --> 0:05:59.120 intelligence is like private intelligence services that a company can 0:05:59.200 --> 0:06:02.640 hire to deal with threats to their profitability, because I 0:06:02.680 --> 0:06:05.719 think it's one of the undertold stories of the twenty 0:06:05.720 --> 0:06:08.440 first century, and it's partly undertold because people who tell 0:06:08.480 --> 0:06:09.920 it tend to get sued. 0:06:11.400 --> 0:06:16.200 It's really interesting because I read this story and read 0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:19.560 the results of it, and like the result, the legal 0:06:19.600 --> 0:06:22.560 process and all that, and I could not make heads 0:06:22.600 --> 0:06:26.000 or tails of how any of this could have happened. 0:06:26.240 --> 0:06:29.040 And when I try to read background on it, could 0:06:29.040 --> 0:06:31.680 not make heads or tails of how any of this 0:06:31.720 --> 0:06:35.200 could have happened. Because you know, if you disappoint some 0:06:35.200 --> 0:06:37.520 guy who owns a mom and pop shop and he's 0:06:37.600 --> 0:06:39.800 kind of a douchebag or whatever, you can see that 0:06:39.839 --> 0:06:43.479 guy like mailing you a dead rat or something, the 0:06:43.600 --> 0:06:48.520 idea of upsetting eBay and they start mailing you dead 0:06:48.560 --> 0:06:51.880 animals and the mail and that's not the weirdest part 0:06:51.880 --> 0:06:55.320 of the story. It gets so off the rails. This 0:06:55.400 --> 0:06:59.480 is the part I don't have is how there are 0:06:59.560 --> 0:07:03.920 people the company who have this mindset because this story 0:07:04.000 --> 0:07:07.320 goes to places that you don't see fictional stories going. 0:07:07.400 --> 0:07:10.360 There's no plot line on succession like this, and it 0:07:10.440 --> 0:07:12.240 would have come off as corny if there was. 0:07:12.560 --> 0:07:14.920 Yeah, it would be kind of unbelievable. But we're getting 0:07:14.960 --> 0:07:24.440 ahead of ourselves and We're done with the cold open, Jason. 0:07:24.760 --> 0:07:26.760 For whatever reason, the company now has us do that 0:07:26.800 --> 0:07:29.960 little cold open thing. The listener will have heard an 0:07:30.040 --> 0:07:34.440 ad in between where I just said the cold open's done, 0:07:34.520 --> 0:07:37.640 and then Jason. But now we're warmed up, We're hot. 0:07:37.680 --> 0:07:40.520 Are you ready to go? Are you excited that our 0:07:40.560 --> 0:07:43.960 corporate overlords now make us do a cold open that 0:07:44.320 --> 0:07:47.000 has improved the quality of the show. I'm sure so. 0:07:47.600 --> 0:07:51.679 On February eleventh, twenty eleven, The New York Times published 0:07:51.680 --> 0:07:54.120 a story about hackers who had forced their way into 0:07:54.200 --> 0:07:57.720 the computer systems of a security company called HB Gary. 0:07:58.280 --> 0:08:01.640 At this point, the public conception mostly put spying as 0:08:01.640 --> 0:08:04.960 the domain of nation state actors. Right like, if you 0:08:05.040 --> 0:08:09.240 had asked the average person, are there like spy agencies 0:08:09.320 --> 0:08:15.000 in the employee of like random finance companies, they probably 0:08:15.040 --> 0:08:17.280 would have said, well, like, not real ones. You know, 0:08:17.320 --> 0:08:20.400 you've probably got like some sort of physical security for 0:08:20.440 --> 0:08:24.520 the buildings and stuff, but nothing like the FBI or whatever. 0:08:25.000 --> 0:08:28.360 But that view was already outdated in two thousand eleven. 0:08:29.360 --> 0:08:32.959 The HB Gary hack revealed a different world of espionage, 0:08:33.000 --> 0:08:36.040 paid for by the highest bidder and most importantly petty 0:08:36.120 --> 0:08:39.880 to an almost unfathomable degree, rather than the kind of 0:08:39.920 --> 0:08:43.800 stuff that, like cyberpunk stories had primed us to expect 0:08:43.840 --> 0:08:47.600 from our mega corporations, like a high profile assassinations and 0:08:48.000 --> 0:08:52.640 burglaries to steal priceless inventions. Most of the stolen documents 0:08:52.679 --> 0:08:56.160 from HB. Gary revealed them like pitching their corporate clients 0:08:56.520 --> 0:08:59.600 ways to attack the enemies of like Bank of America 0:08:59.640 --> 0:09:03.520 and the Chamber of Commerce, and what we would consider 0:09:03.600 --> 0:09:07.000 incredibly petty ways, ways that kind of more than anything, 0:09:07.040 --> 0:09:10.679 resemble the way people fight online rather than like, again, 0:09:10.720 --> 0:09:13.480 the sort of sinister stuff that like you're playing like 0:09:13.800 --> 0:09:17.120 a cyberpunk pen and paper game, your team's going to 0:09:17.160 --> 0:09:17.559 be doing. 0:09:18.480 --> 0:09:21.720 Because I had heard of corporate espionage, which I always 0:09:21.720 --> 0:09:24.640 thought was just somebody sneaking into another company to try 0:09:24.640 --> 0:09:27.120 to get a look at their design on a thing, 0:09:27.600 --> 0:09:30.320 and I just don' that was a thing forever. But 0:09:30.760 --> 0:09:33.199 why you're describing and what I know is coming in 0:09:33.280 --> 0:09:38.679 this story, it's almost like a type of psychological guerrilla 0:09:38.720 --> 0:09:42.280 warfare or just yeah, just trolling people. I don't get it. 0:09:42.360 --> 0:09:44.400 Well, and it's important to understand. I think part of 0:09:44.400 --> 0:09:46.760 what kind of brings some context to this is if 0:09:46.760 --> 0:09:49.640 you actually look at what the FBI was doing at 0:09:49.679 --> 0:09:52.440 the height of the civil rights movement, most of their 0:09:52.480 --> 0:09:56.280 actual physical work was nothing that would make a particularly 0:09:56.320 --> 0:10:00.600 impressive movie. It was literally, we have hired different sort 0:10:00.600 --> 0:10:03.320 of like a mix of like thugs and just like 0:10:03.679 --> 0:10:05.880 people that we think we can get to like workforce 0:10:05.920 --> 0:10:08.600 for a few bucks, to like trail every black person 0:10:08.640 --> 0:10:11.720 on the campus of this college, right like literally like 0:10:11.720 --> 0:10:14.040 that that's a big part of like when when those 0:10:14.080 --> 0:10:17.520 activists broke into that FBI office and leaked all those 0:10:17.559 --> 0:10:20.000 files to the Washington Post. This was a year YouTube 0:10:20.000 --> 0:10:23.000 of wore Watergate. That was a big part of what 0:10:23.040 --> 0:10:24.880 was revealed is that there were like colleges where the 0:10:24.920 --> 0:10:28.040 FBI was just surveilling like every black student at the college, 0:10:28.040 --> 0:10:30.120 and it wasn't even with FBI agents. A lot of 0:10:30.160 --> 0:10:33.040 the time, they had just hired goons to follow these 0:10:33.120 --> 0:10:36.679 kids around in case they might do something. So to 0:10:36.720 --> 0:10:39.480 an extent, I guess part of what you have to understand, 0:10:39.520 --> 0:10:42.080 if you understand, if you study the history of espionage, 0:10:42.160 --> 0:10:44.960 one percent of it is really cool stuff where they're 0:10:44.960 --> 0:10:48.480 making like polonium darts to shoot out of umbrellas and 0:10:48.679 --> 0:10:52.440 assassinating governmental leaders, and ninety nine percent of it is 0:10:52.600 --> 0:10:55.800 just we hired a dumb guy to follow them around, 0:10:55.880 --> 0:10:57.959 and they're going to know the dumb guys following them 0:10:58.000 --> 0:11:01.640 because he's a big like he's not very good at it. 0:11:01.679 --> 0:11:04.160 But we don't really like, what if they notice, what's 0:11:04.200 --> 0:11:06.360 the harm to us? We want them scared, right. The 0:11:06.400 --> 0:11:10.080 whole point is to just intimidate people, and that's largely 0:11:10.480 --> 0:11:12.840 I think that is the logic that a lot of 0:11:12.840 --> 0:11:16.040 these corporate security firms function on. It doesn't matter as 0:11:16.160 --> 0:11:19.760 much are our plans super well thought out. What matters 0:11:19.840 --> 0:11:22.880 is that we kind of brute force people into being 0:11:22.960 --> 0:11:26.360 scared to fuck with us, right, And that's the kind 0:11:26.400 --> 0:11:29.400 of that's the kind of like plots that HB. Gary 0:11:30.320 --> 0:11:35.000 was shopping around to and they never again, none of 0:11:35.000 --> 0:11:36.720 the stuff is ever as direct as you want it 0:11:36.720 --> 0:11:39.679 to be. So HB. Gary, which is the security company, 0:11:39.920 --> 0:11:42.160 would send the plans they had to this law firm 0:11:42.280 --> 0:11:45.760 called Hunton and Williams, which represented all of these big 0:11:45.960 --> 0:11:48.800 like Bank of America represented the Chamber of Commerce, which 0:11:48.800 --> 0:11:51.719 itself represents a bunch of different financial institutions in the 0:11:51.760 --> 0:11:55.640 company or in the country. In one document, HB. Gary's 0:11:55.720 --> 0:11:59.760 chief executive Aaron Barr offered to publicize biographic details about 0:11:59.760 --> 0:12:02.600 a un organizer that had challenged the Chamber of Commerce 0:12:02.960 --> 0:12:06.000 when it opposed the Obama Admin's healthcare reform package. And 0:12:06.040 --> 0:12:07.600 you hear that and it's like, oh, did he like 0:12:08.000 --> 0:12:10.240 have a drunk driving arrest? Did he kill someone with 0:12:10.280 --> 0:12:12.400 his car? No, I want to read you a direct 0:12:12.480 --> 0:12:15.720 quote from Bar on the salacious details he wanted to 0:12:15.720 --> 0:12:19.040 reveal about this union organizer. They go to a Jewish 0:12:19.120 --> 0:12:21.920 church in DC. They have two kids, a son and 0:12:21.960 --> 0:12:29.800 a daughter. And first off that year, I'm sorry twenty eleven, right, 0:12:30.200 --> 0:12:32.559 I think it's a synagogue. I don't think you call 0:12:32.640 --> 0:12:35.000 it a Jewish church. I mean, I guess that's not 0:12:35.160 --> 0:12:37.600 like technically wrong, but like it'd be weird if you 0:12:37.600 --> 0:12:39.800 called it like a Muslim church, Like we have words 0:12:39.840 --> 0:12:43.400 for those, but I don't know, it's weirder that he 0:12:43.440 --> 0:12:46.640 thought that. That was like the damning detail that, like, yeah, 0:12:46.920 --> 0:12:51.200 he goes to synagogue and he has two kids. That's 0:12:51.240 --> 0:12:55.080 gonna you blew this all wide open. Hb Gary. A 0:12:55.120 --> 0:12:58.840 week later, Barr offered to create in depth target dossier's 0:12:59.040 --> 0:13:01.520 and keep that in mind because we're going to run 0:13:01.520 --> 0:13:03.920 into that tactic again when we go back to eBay, 0:13:04.520 --> 0:13:07.600 with the goal of quote mitigating the effect of adversarial 0:13:07.679 --> 0:13:11.400 groups like US Chamber Watch, which was a citizens group 0:13:11.480 --> 0:13:14.760 that like criticized and protested the US Chamber of Commerce. 0:13:15.520 --> 0:13:18.319 One proposition was to publish the petty criminal record of 0:13:18.360 --> 0:13:21.800 a member in the group. In another instance, HB Gary 0:13:21.880 --> 0:13:25.040 offered to work with Peter Teal's Palantier, which is a 0:13:25.160 --> 0:13:30.079 private spy company, to attack WikiLeaks before it could release 0:13:30.120 --> 0:13:33.240 a tranch of emails from inside Bank of America related 0:13:33.280 --> 0:13:36.240 to the financial crash. And this is a little bit 0:13:36.320 --> 0:13:40.360 closer to like the serious cyberpunk stories like WikiLeaks, they're 0:13:40.360 --> 0:13:43.480 doing some serious business in twenty eleven. This at least 0:13:43.480 --> 0:13:46.640 sounds like, you know, a little more exciting. But their 0:13:46.640 --> 0:13:49.440 specific plan to attack WikiLeaks was to submit a bunch 0:13:49.440 --> 0:13:53.320 of fake documents and then when WikiLeaks reported on them, 0:13:53.840 --> 0:13:57.640 exposed them as forgeries to damage, specifically to damage Glenn 0:13:57.720 --> 0:14:02.160 Greenwald's career, which if you'd just given him a little longer, Glenn, 0:14:02.280 --> 0:14:04.120 Glenn was going to do that on his own. 0:14:05.720 --> 0:14:09.120 I guess I'm already confused because we have worked in 0:14:09.160 --> 0:14:14.000 corporate environments where every hour every minute, every penny is 0:14:14.040 --> 0:14:16.480 being watched, and the question is, well, how does this 0:14:16.520 --> 0:14:21.280 contribute to the bottom line. So the idea that you've got, 0:14:21.680 --> 0:14:25.880 like what really, to me sounds like a dirty tricks department. Yeah, 0:14:26.040 --> 0:14:29.680 and they are reporting to somebody, They're on the payroll 0:14:29.720 --> 0:14:33.440 with a job title. What they're doing is being documented somewhere. 0:14:34.040 --> 0:14:36.720 It feels like the type of thing that a company 0:14:36.800 --> 0:14:39.880 in nineteen seventy would do back when you you know, 0:14:39.920 --> 0:14:41.640 the way you break your union is you go just 0:14:41.680 --> 0:14:44.920 burn the guy's house down or whatever to try to intimidate. 0:14:45.080 --> 0:14:48.280 But you would not think in twenty eleven or whatever 0:14:49.320 --> 0:14:52.080 that you still have a dirty tricks department. And I 0:14:52.160 --> 0:14:55.240 know that I sound naive. I guess I just assumed 0:14:55.880 --> 0:14:58.680 we had moved into, you know, a world where you 0:14:58.800 --> 0:15:00.880 just sue people when you want to silence them. You 0:15:00.880 --> 0:15:04.240 would not go digging up, you know, like, hey, there's 0:15:04.360 --> 0:15:07.880 rumors if these people are Jews, what's going on with that? 0:15:08.680 --> 0:15:11.400 I wonder how much of it is. These CEOs and 0:15:11.440 --> 0:15:14.720 stuff are probably all older. They're probably all like mostly 0:15:14.760 --> 0:15:18.000 baby boomers. You know, in twenty eleven, you would imagine 0:15:18.000 --> 0:15:20.480 the guys running big banks or probably most of them 0:15:20.480 --> 0:15:23.800 probably aren't gen X, maybe a few, and I wonder, 0:15:24.040 --> 0:15:25.520 I mean, even if they were gen X, they were 0:15:25.520 --> 0:15:28.320 probably raised on stories of Watergate. I wonder how much 0:15:28.360 --> 0:15:31.200 of this is just like reading about the dirty tricks 0:15:31.240 --> 0:15:33.360 that the Nixon white House did and assuming like, well, 0:15:33.400 --> 0:15:37.240 that's probably what we should do with our right for him. Yeah, 0:15:37.560 --> 0:15:40.440 went well for Nixon. That's why he had so many 0:15:40.520 --> 0:15:43.280 terms as president. Now, the fact that this hack of 0:15:43.400 --> 0:15:46.280 HB Gary happened in the first place was because Barr, 0:15:46.720 --> 0:15:49.760 who was like the dude actually submitting these plans to 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:52.840 that legal firm, had made public threats to the leaders 0:15:52.880 --> 0:15:56.920 of Anonymous, the leaderless hacking collective a couple of weeks earlier, 0:15:57.160 --> 0:15:59.360 and he had even stated that he had information about 0:15:59.360 --> 0:16:01.960 the names of several of their quote leaders that he 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:04.480 was about to reveal, which I think was a lie, 0:16:04.520 --> 0:16:06.680 and Anonymous kind of called his bluff, which is when 0:16:06.680 --> 0:16:09.840 all of these emails got leaked, and for good measure, 0:16:09.880 --> 0:16:12.320 they took control of Bar's Twitter account just to fuck 0:16:12.320 --> 0:16:15.080 with him. Now, this led to Bars stepping down as 0:16:15.160 --> 0:16:18.320 CEO and basically begging Anonymous to leave him alone for 0:16:18.360 --> 0:16:20.560 the sake of his children. So now one of the 0:16:20.600 --> 0:16:23.440 things that you saw. As soon as like bar got embarrassed, 0:16:23.560 --> 0:16:25.720 is Palenteer and all of these other companies that he 0:16:25.840 --> 0:16:29.600 had been talking about working with sought to distance themselves 0:16:29.640 --> 0:16:32.240 from HB. Gary. Hey, this was just some lone asshole 0:16:32.320 --> 0:16:35.680 making like proposals to his court, Like we never agreed 0:16:35.680 --> 0:16:37.320 to do any of these jobs with them. We had 0:16:37.400 --> 0:16:41.200 Palenteer would never do anything this unethical, right, like you 0:16:41.240 --> 0:16:44.880 can trust us. This was just one lone asshole. Fast 0:16:44.920 --> 0:16:48.760 forward about six years two twenty seventeen, when Harvey Weinstein's 0:16:48.760 --> 0:16:51.880 life explodes and stories start to come out that he 0:16:51.920 --> 0:16:55.440 had used a different spy for higher company, Black Cube, 0:16:56.040 --> 0:16:58.200 in order to harass a lot of the women that 0:16:58.240 --> 0:17:00.960 he had abused and to try to stop the story 0:17:01.000 --> 0:17:03.200 that The New York Times ultimately published from coming out 0:17:03.240 --> 0:17:06.320 about him. Now, Black Cube, the firm that he used, 0:17:06.480 --> 0:17:08.520 was based in Israel and staffed with a bunch of 0:17:08.600 --> 0:17:12.119 former Massad guys. And if HB. Gary is kind of 0:17:12.160 --> 0:17:16.320 like bush league Black Cubes like the New York Yankees, right, 0:17:16.400 --> 0:17:20.040 this is a high dollar, high power corporate spy firm 0:17:20.080 --> 0:17:24.480 with absolutely no ethical or moral constraints and a terrifying 0:17:24.520 --> 0:17:29.560 degree of power. That said like HB. Gary. They wielded 0:17:29.600 --> 0:17:32.920 this with like an almost there's always this degree of 0:17:32.960 --> 0:17:36.760 like incompetence that I think is just born from and 0:17:36.840 --> 0:17:38.760 I think all the HB. Gary guys, a lot of 0:17:38.800 --> 0:17:41.240 them probably came out of the government too. If you 0:17:41.320 --> 0:17:44.119 work in government intel agencies all your life, you have 0:17:44.280 --> 0:17:47.359 this shield of working for the government, and then you 0:17:47.440 --> 0:17:50.760 move into the private sector and everything is a lot 0:17:50.840 --> 0:17:53.440 harder and you don't you no longer have that kind 0:17:53.480 --> 0:17:58.160 of protection, and so you notice just like dumb shit, right. 0:17:58.880 --> 0:18:01.480 That's that's kind of those thing to me when studying 0:18:01.520 --> 0:18:05.000 like Black Cube and this constellation of other Israeli companies 0:18:05.040 --> 0:18:09.920 that all have like former government agents working for them. Specifically, 0:18:09.960 --> 0:18:13.000 the way that Black Cube went after some of Weinstein's 0:18:13.000 --> 0:18:15.960 accusers was they hired had a bunch of investigators to 0:18:16.000 --> 0:18:18.960 make false identities to try to befriend some of the 0:18:19.000 --> 0:18:22.760 women online who were accusing Weinstein, with the goal of 0:18:22.800 --> 0:18:25.720 basically disgracing them. And it was just kind of a 0:18:25.800 --> 0:18:30.119 wildly unsuccessful plan that showed I think a degree of 0:18:30.200 --> 0:18:33.879 like just assuming everyone was dumb that was involved in this, 0:18:34.040 --> 0:18:36.159 Like none of these people would be intelligent enough to 0:18:36.240 --> 0:18:39.080 know that Weinstein might have people going after them, none 0:18:39.119 --> 0:18:41.240 of them would have any precautions in place, none of 0:18:41.240 --> 0:18:44.040 them would be talking to people like Ronan Farah or 0:18:44.040 --> 0:18:46.160 talking to like anyone who might be able to advise 0:18:46.200 --> 0:18:49.959 them on like the risks that they faced going after Weinstein. 0:18:50.040 --> 0:18:52.439 It's just this, like, it's very interesting to me, the 0:18:52.480 --> 0:18:54.320 kind of arrogance that you see with these which is 0:18:54.359 --> 0:18:56.280 going to be a big part of the eBay story too. 0:18:57.000 --> 0:18:59.600 Okay, I'm going to be frank here. Every single story 0:18:59.640 --> 0:19:04.399 I hear about espionage at any level is always a dumb, 0:19:04.480 --> 0:19:08.639 slapstick affair full of mistakes and people stumbling into the 0:19:08.680 --> 0:19:11.960 wrong thing, and whenever they succeed, it's almost on accident 0:19:12.119 --> 0:19:14.600 or because the people they were after were extremely stupid 0:19:14.600 --> 0:19:17.640 and made a bunch of really obvious mistakes. The listeners 0:19:17.840 --> 0:19:19.760 who listened to all your episodes, No, we did one 0:19:19.960 --> 0:19:23.639 a series on MK Ultra Yeah, which had a reputation 0:19:23.720 --> 0:19:28.280 in the conspiracy world as this other worldly alien high 0:19:28.359 --> 0:19:31.800 tech mind control manchurion candidates space age stuff, and in 0:19:31.840 --> 0:19:35.119 reality was just a lot of people getting very high 0:19:35.200 --> 0:19:38.439 on government funds and one guy who had like a 0:19:38.480 --> 0:19:42.480 little jerk off room where he watched agents like have 0:19:42.560 --> 0:19:44.919 sex with prostitutes, and it was just a bunch of 0:19:45.040 --> 0:19:47.120 very dumb people who had watched a lot of spy 0:19:47.240 --> 0:19:52.159 movies and themselves were working off of very silly, i 0:19:52.200 --> 0:19:56.000 don't know, almost childlike ideas of watch that kind of thing, 0:19:56.640 --> 0:19:59.080 of how it worked and what mind control could do. 0:20:00.040 --> 0:20:02.840 But ultimately they were just kind of drawing a government 0:20:02.880 --> 0:20:06.159 paycheck to do a bunch of idiocy. And I rarely 0:20:06.240 --> 0:20:08.359 hear anything that sounds like James Bond. 0:20:08.920 --> 0:20:11.600 That's the you get a couple of those, right, Like 0:20:11.680 --> 0:20:14.439 obviously that has happened in the past, Right you have 0:20:14.520 --> 0:20:16.199 some especially like you can go into World War Two, 0:20:16.200 --> 0:20:19.080 you can find some examples of really like effective and 0:20:19.160 --> 0:20:23.480 intelligent espionage. But I think some of it is that 0:20:23.640 --> 0:20:26.600 the fact that spy movies are such a big part 0:20:26.600 --> 0:20:29.719 of the culture has It's kind of like the issue 0:20:29.720 --> 0:20:33.320 that people say, AI learned language models are going to 0:20:33.320 --> 0:20:35.040 have where they're going to get trained on more and 0:20:35.040 --> 0:20:37.240 more stuff that's AI generated and that's going to cause 0:20:37.240 --> 0:20:41.640 additional sort of hallucinations. I think ever since the end 0:20:41.640 --> 0:20:44.400 of like the start of the Cold War, every generation 0:20:44.520 --> 0:20:48.360 of spies has been poisoned by spy movies and it's 0:20:48.480 --> 0:20:52.040 caused like it's caused a degree of inevitable degeneration. 0:20:52.320 --> 0:20:52.480 Right. 0:20:52.720 --> 0:20:55.240 That's a big part of the eBay story, and it's 0:20:56.480 --> 0:20:58.399 there's a you know I talk about there's this journalist 0:20:58.400 --> 0:21:01.040 Sebastian Younger I admire lot and he used to work 0:21:01.080 --> 0:21:05.199 with a photo journalist who died in Libya during the 0:21:05.200 --> 0:21:07.960 early days of that civil war. But his friend, the 0:21:08.040 --> 0:21:10.040 story he was in Libya to cover was he was 0:21:10.040 --> 0:21:15.280 specifically looking to get like photos and interviews with rebels 0:21:15.359 --> 0:21:18.439 who were in the way that they were dressing and 0:21:18.680 --> 0:21:22.560 posing consciously aping Hollywood action movies, because these were all 0:21:22.640 --> 0:21:25.399 kids who had grown up on bootleg American movies, and 0:21:25.440 --> 0:21:27.680 when they realized I'm about to be fighting in a war, 0:21:27.760 --> 0:21:30.880 they all started like dressing and acting like different characters 0:21:30.880 --> 0:21:34.040 from their favorite movies. And I think his instinct was 0:21:34.040 --> 0:21:36.280 good that there is something like really important in that, 0:21:36.800 --> 0:21:40.080 and I don't think it's most people are surprised. Are 0:21:40.080 --> 0:21:42.600 not surprised to hear that, like, young men who become 0:21:42.640 --> 0:21:47.320 soldiers are influenced by action movies, right, and particularly a 0:21:47.359 --> 0:21:50.080 lot of like how they act and even their expectations 0:21:50.440 --> 0:21:52.879 of what war will be like. We just don't extend 0:21:52.920 --> 0:21:54.240 it enough to be like, no, no, that's true of 0:21:54.280 --> 0:21:56.960 all the guys in the CIA and the FBI too, right, 0:21:57.000 --> 0:21:59.479 They've all been raised on this shit and they're all 0:22:00.040 --> 0:22:03.639 changed by it. So yeah, I did want to talk 0:22:03.720 --> 0:22:06.400 a little bit more about like what some of these 0:22:06.480 --> 0:22:10.119 like hack for hire companies today are like because and 0:22:10.160 --> 0:22:12.000 this is right before we get into the eBay story, 0:22:12.040 --> 0:22:14.800 but this is kind of important. Black Cube is part 0:22:14.800 --> 0:22:18.159 of a constellation of companies, and Israel is one of 0:22:18.160 --> 0:22:20.199 the places where a lot of these companies exist. We 0:22:20.240 --> 0:22:22.640 have an industry in the United States. There's a sizeable 0:22:22.720 --> 0:22:25.000 industry that's kind of like the B tier of these 0:22:25.040 --> 0:22:29.240 hack for higher companies in India as well. And these 0:22:29.280 --> 0:22:31.439 are you know, it doesn't take they usually are not 0:22:31.640 --> 0:22:34.640 super expensive, but the amount of damage that they can 0:22:34.720 --> 0:22:41.200 do to like our collective information ecology is pretty significant. 0:22:41.240 --> 0:22:46.000 For example, a peer company to Black Cube cobwe Web Technologies, 0:22:46.000 --> 0:22:49.280 which raged about ten million dollars in twenty nineteen to 0:22:49.320 --> 0:22:54.360 build a search engine for intelligence information. Basically, all they 0:22:54.359 --> 0:22:58.680 were doing building this search engine was spearfishing huge numbers 0:22:58.760 --> 0:23:02.280 of random people to steal their personal data and then 0:23:02.320 --> 0:23:05.240 put it into a searchable database that they could sell 0:23:05.280 --> 0:23:10.280 access to, so, you know, effectively like stealing people's personal 0:23:10.320 --> 0:23:12.760 info in order to brag that, like, hey, we have 0:23:12.880 --> 0:23:16.159 something that equivocates to like a police database that you 0:23:16.200 --> 0:23:19.199 can pay for access to because we've compromised all of 0:23:19.240 --> 0:23:23.320 these different people's accounts. Cobweb's plan was to take the 0:23:23.359 --> 0:23:25.640 work that the kind of work that companies like HB 0:23:25.760 --> 0:23:28.240 Gary and black Cube had been doing for years and 0:23:28.280 --> 0:23:30.879 get more proactive with it. Right, Instead of waiting for 0:23:30.960 --> 0:23:32.719 a company to be like, I want you to target 0:23:32.720 --> 0:23:36.440 these specific people, we just get as many people as possible, 0:23:36.480 --> 0:23:39.800 trick random people into giving up their data at scale, 0:23:40.840 --> 0:23:44.320 and yeah, that's you know. There's actually an interesting report 0:23:44.320 --> 0:23:49.720 published by Meta previously Facebook recently that kind of goes 0:23:49.840 --> 0:23:51.960 into more detail on this. You can find the link 0:23:52.040 --> 0:23:58.040 in our show notes. But that report noted that like 0:23:58.600 --> 0:24:03.920 basically they've cobweb activated like fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, 0:24:03.960 --> 0:24:07.399 and Twitter in order to like grab just add mass 0:24:07.720 --> 0:24:11.440 information on activists, politicians, government officials, like everyone they could 0:24:11.520 --> 0:24:13.200 get to fall for their shit. 0:24:14.080 --> 0:24:17.080 But to what end? What was the final goal of 0:24:17.160 --> 0:24:18.359 that project. 0:24:18.040 --> 0:24:21.680 To have a big database that they can sell access 0:24:21.720 --> 0:24:24.399 to and you can search for They sell it to 0:24:24.800 --> 0:24:27.800 anyone who is looking for information on like they can say, 0:24:27.840 --> 0:24:30.280 like you know, if you're if you're an oil and 0:24:30.320 --> 0:24:33.000 gas company, right, and you're worried about protests in the 0:24:33.080 --> 0:24:35.560 UK by anti oil and gas protesters, like some of 0:24:35.560 --> 0:24:37.800 those people who have quote unquote defaced I don't think 0:24:37.800 --> 0:24:40.119 they've done any permanent damage to any paintings actually, but 0:24:40.280 --> 0:24:43.080 like you know those folks, right, you can pay for 0:24:43.200 --> 0:24:46.360 access to this database and we have spearfished and scraped 0:24:46.400 --> 0:24:48.680 a bunch of people who have sympathies to that group, 0:24:49.000 --> 0:24:51.120 and you can see where they are and you can, 0:24:51.359 --> 0:24:54.400 you know, set up your own surveillance potential. You can 0:24:54.520 --> 0:24:57.240 like try to infiltrate, but you'll get all this information 0:24:57.359 --> 0:25:00.800 on their their real world and their digital network. There's 0:25:00.800 --> 0:25:04.040 a lot that's come out recently about how there's this 0:25:04.160 --> 0:25:08.119 kind of unique cell phone identifying number that's supposed to 0:25:08.119 --> 0:25:10.640 be anonymous. But if you also know kind of where 0:25:10.680 --> 0:25:14.640 people live, you can figure out which cell phone goes 0:25:14.680 --> 0:25:19.359 to which person, and using information that is available through 0:25:19.400 --> 0:25:22.479 a lot of these different like data broker companies, you 0:25:22.480 --> 0:25:25.600 can track random people cell phones in the United States. 0:25:25.640 --> 0:25:28.720 If you're a corporate actor in order to like stock 0:25:28.920 --> 0:25:30.720 people who you consider to be a threat. This is 0:25:30.720 --> 0:25:34.000 the thing that's happening right now. It's very easy. It's 0:25:34.000 --> 0:25:36.760 why everyone should use a burner cell phone and light 0:25:36.840 --> 0:25:40.760 their old phone on fire every sixty days. We're always 0:25:40.760 --> 0:25:48.000 saying this, Jason. You communicate entirely through telegram, which not 0:25:48.160 --> 0:25:51.639 the app telegram, but through an old fashioned telegram. We 0:25:51.680 --> 0:25:54.159 actually have an actor portraying your voice right now, in 0:25:54.200 --> 0:25:57.320 face no one's seen you in years. 0:25:59.240 --> 0:26:02.280 Watching the Slasher movie as it took place in nineteen 0:26:02.320 --> 0:26:05.439 eighty nine and a high school kid got invited to 0:26:05.520 --> 0:26:10.320 a party via telegram? Oh my god, was that? And 0:26:10.560 --> 0:26:13.239 I was nineteen eighty nine, I was fourteen. Were we 0:26:13.280 --> 0:26:17.119 still send a telegram back then? Am I that old? That? 0:26:17.440 --> 0:26:22.080 That seems a little archaic. But anyway, this has been 0:26:22.680 --> 0:26:24.879 a long lead up to the eBay story. But I 0:26:24.920 --> 0:26:27.119 wanted to kind of set the stage for you. And 0:26:27.160 --> 0:26:29.240 now we're going to pull to an ad break and 0:26:29.280 --> 0:26:32.000 then we will come back with the story that you 0:26:32.160 --> 0:26:40.760 actually asked me to tell you today and we're back. 0:26:41.640 --> 0:26:45.960 So this all brings me to the story of the Steiners. 0:26:46.160 --> 0:26:49.479 They are an now elderly couple who back during the 0:26:49.520 --> 0:26:51.760 early days of the dot com boom, when they were 0:26:51.960 --> 0:26:55.480 a mature adult couple, got really interested in the then 0:26:55.600 --> 0:26:59.080 burgeoning field of online sales. We are talking about the 0:26:59.160 --> 0:27:03.320 mid to late nineteen nineties. David Steiner was a video 0:27:03.400 --> 0:27:07.160 producer who had a childhood fascination with yard sales, which 0:27:07.200 --> 0:27:10.639 is a strange fixation for a little kid or for 0:27:10.680 --> 0:27:14.000 an adult, for someone of any age. But you know, 0:27:14.119 --> 0:27:16.359 it takes all kinds of people to make a world, 0:27:16.720 --> 0:27:19.359 and this fascination. He was kind of one of these, 0:27:19.920 --> 0:27:22.840 you know, after like all these ponn Star shows got big, 0:27:22.920 --> 0:27:25.680 there's a much wider community of people who are kind 0:27:25.680 --> 0:27:29.040 of obsessed with folks like selling old products or antiques 0:27:29.119 --> 0:27:32.080 and you know, trying to find like hidden gyms that 0:27:32.119 --> 0:27:34.160 are worth a bunch of money. Steiner's kind of one 0:27:34.200 --> 0:27:36.520 of the very first generations of people who is like 0:27:36.640 --> 0:27:40.640 obsessed with this stuff and his particular interests. He loves 0:27:40.680 --> 0:27:44.919 like ancient marketing, promotional products, He likes antique tools, and 0:27:44.960 --> 0:27:47.840 he starts following you know, prior to eBay. There are 0:27:47.880 --> 0:27:51.200 a couple of different early auction websites on the old 0:27:51.280 --> 0:27:54.359 Internet that he gets into when he's interested in and 0:27:54.400 --> 0:27:57.240 his wife, na I think she's both like kind of 0:27:57.240 --> 0:27:59.520 maybe shares his interest to a degree, and she's also 0:27:59.560 --> 0:28:02.360 a writer with an interest in kind of doing some journalism. 0:28:02.440 --> 0:28:05.919 So in nineteen ninety nine, this is four years after 0:28:06.040 --> 0:28:10.159 eBay's launch, they start to realize, like, this company in 0:28:10.200 --> 0:28:13.880 particular is the one that's going to actually dominate online auctions. 0:28:13.960 --> 0:28:16.359 Right there had been a couple of competitors, it's clear 0:28:16.440 --> 0:28:18.359 by ninety nine that eBay is going to be the 0:28:18.359 --> 0:28:21.840 big one. And the Steiners are just kind of nerds 0:28:21.920 --> 0:28:24.600 about this stuff, so they decide to turn their obsession 0:28:24.720 --> 0:28:27.520 with this new and exciting thing into a website, which 0:28:27.560 --> 0:28:30.479 is the thing people used to do back before social media. 0:28:30.960 --> 0:28:34.600 And I, yeah, I reading about this stuff always gives 0:28:34.600 --> 0:28:36.800 me this like weird kind of nostalgia that makes me 0:28:36.840 --> 0:28:37.880 feel like an old man. 0:28:39.280 --> 0:28:41.680 In fact, I will step in and because I know 0:28:41.720 --> 0:28:45.080 that the description of these people that prow like garage sales, 0:28:45.080 --> 0:28:48.000 that makes them sound like creepy weirdos. The early days 0:28:48.000 --> 0:28:52.520 of eBay were fascinating, Yeah, because suddenly the concept of 0:28:52.680 --> 0:28:55.680 everybody's junk from all over the world is for sale 0:28:55.800 --> 0:28:58.000 and stuff that you it's like, oh my gosh, this 0:28:58.160 --> 0:29:01.320 action figure that I thought only I owned, that I 0:29:01.400 --> 0:29:04.280 lost when I was eight years old, here's this guy 0:29:05.040 --> 0:29:08.320 two thousand miles away from me who's got one. And 0:29:08.400 --> 0:29:11.760 it's I never I thought I had imagined this saying, 0:29:11.760 --> 0:29:14.000 oh my gosh, here is like the idea that all 0:29:14.080 --> 0:29:17.120 this stuff was for sale. And then it immediately created 0:29:17.120 --> 0:29:21.000 this ecosystem of people who were learning all the techniques 0:29:21.000 --> 0:29:24.080 of how to like stealthily outbid somebody and all of 0:29:24.120 --> 0:29:27.280 this stuff, and it's people forget what or if you 0:29:27.320 --> 0:29:32.480 weren't around back then. eBay was the first huge monster 0:29:32.880 --> 0:29:34.880 dot com business and. 0:29:34.800 --> 0:29:36.720 The first ones that made it clear that like there's 0:29:36.960 --> 0:29:39.960 a like not just real money, but like ways for 0:29:40.080 --> 0:29:43.080 regular people to make real money if they can figure 0:29:43.120 --> 0:29:45.520 out how to game an algorithm. 0:29:45.760 --> 0:29:49.040 That and also that stock when they went public, that 0:29:49.240 --> 0:29:53.719 was just like crypto style people getting becoming millionaires overnight. 0:29:53.720 --> 0:29:56.880 eBay was huge. So it was a fascinating scene back 0:29:56.880 --> 0:29:58.840 then because I bought and sold some stuff back in 0:29:58.880 --> 0:30:01.880 the nineties era. eBay it was just you find yourself 0:30:01.920 --> 0:30:03.360 not just in a place where you buy things. You 0:30:03.360 --> 0:30:07.040 find yourself in an ecosystem and in a cultural scene. 0:30:07.640 --> 0:30:09.960 So no, I absolutely in terms of like subjects to 0:30:10.040 --> 0:30:13.640 blog about, yeah, it's I totally get it. 0:30:13.840 --> 0:30:16.120 This is also a very smart thing to do if 0:30:16.160 --> 0:30:18.880 you're in journalism or in more broadly just kind of 0:30:18.880 --> 0:30:21.320 the industry. You and I both spent much of our 0:30:21.360 --> 0:30:24.040 working careers, and just like writing shit for the Internet, 0:30:24.360 --> 0:30:26.960 you find a thing that has just exploded and that 0:30:27.040 --> 0:30:30.480 you know is going to be massive, and you make 0:30:30.560 --> 0:30:33.680 yourself the person that people go to to read about 0:30:33.680 --> 0:30:35.720 that thing. Right, That's that's what the Steiners do. They 0:30:36.080 --> 0:30:39.479 corner this and they their independent publication starts out being 0:30:39.560 --> 0:30:44.760 named auction Bites Bytes, and you know, it's geared towards 0:30:45.080 --> 0:30:48.200 a fairly niche chunk of the Internet, people making their 0:30:48.240 --> 0:30:52.640 living auctioning items on eBay. And also, you know, increasingly 0:30:52.760 --> 0:30:54.960 as Eba becomes more and more of a big business, 0:30:55.000 --> 0:30:57.320 as it becomes clear like how much money is in 0:30:57.360 --> 0:30:59.440 this also the kind of folks who are interested in 0:30:59.440 --> 0:31:03.240 investing in eBay and companies like it now because auction 0:31:03.360 --> 0:31:07.880 bites is kind of the first website that's news for 0:31:08.000 --> 0:31:11.280 this early community of sellers, and it expands beyond eBay 0:31:11.280 --> 0:31:14.800 because soon there's Amazon and like you know, independent sellers 0:31:14.800 --> 0:31:17.520 are selling stuff on Amazon, and there's Etsy, and they 0:31:17.520 --> 0:31:19.960 cover all of that, right, Like, they change their name 0:31:20.000 --> 0:31:22.400 to e commerce Bites, which is the name that their 0:31:22.440 --> 0:31:27.040 website still exists under, and they become like the go 0:31:27.120 --> 0:31:31.440 to gumshoe reporters for people who are small and medium 0:31:31.520 --> 0:31:35.920 sized merchants selling products on these services, as well as 0:31:35.960 --> 0:31:38.920 like people in finance who are looking to do investing 0:31:39.080 --> 0:31:42.000 in the companies that actually like are are kind of 0:31:42.040 --> 0:31:45.320 the underpinning of this system. Now, if you've ever worked 0:31:45.400 --> 0:31:47.600 in an industry like e commerce, you should know that 0:31:47.720 --> 0:31:50.440 daily life is a ceaseless war between the companies that 0:31:50.480 --> 0:31:53.360 provide a platform for online sales, who want to keep 0:31:53.400 --> 0:31:55.600 as much of the money transferred through their service as 0:31:55.640 --> 0:31:58.640 possible while spending as little as possible, and the merchants 0:31:58.800 --> 0:32:02.960 who actually provide products. As a result, e Commerce Bites, 0:32:03.080 --> 0:32:06.160 most widely read articles tended to focus on fuck ups 0:32:06.200 --> 0:32:10.320 by companies like eBay. Right, e commerce Bites really winds 0:32:10.360 --> 0:32:12.760 up kind of more on the sides of the merchants, 0:32:12.800 --> 0:32:15.080 and and that leads to them having kind of an 0:32:15.160 --> 0:32:22.160 oppositional and confrontational attitude towards the corporations. Right, because largely. 0:32:22.240 --> 0:32:24.280 You know, that's how the people reading them look at 0:32:24.280 --> 0:32:27.200 the situation. You can get an example of this by 0:32:27.200 --> 0:32:30.360 looking at the site today. One August twenty sixth article 0:32:30.400 --> 0:32:34.000 by Ena promises quote a peak inside eBay payment holds. 0:32:34.320 --> 0:32:36.400 This article is based on an interview with the reader 0:32:36.440 --> 0:32:38.760 who'd sold a high priced item and had the money 0:32:38.800 --> 0:32:41.720 sent to him placed on a thirty day hold, despite 0:32:41.720 --> 0:32:43.960 the fact that the buyer had confirmed receipt of the 0:32:43.960 --> 0:32:47.320 product and satisfaction with the purchase. In an interview I 0:32:47.400 --> 0:32:51.280 found on CBS News's Sixty Minutes, Ena Steiner describes the 0:32:51.360 --> 0:32:53.280 job she and her husband did as acting as a 0:32:53.360 --> 0:32:56.959 conduit from small businesses and independent sellers to the larger 0:32:57.000 --> 0:33:00.680 corporate monolists who ran these websites. And you know that's 0:33:00.720 --> 0:33:03.360 not super interesting to most of us, right, This is 0:33:03.400 --> 0:33:06.560 not like what generally when you think of hard hitting journalism, 0:33:06.640 --> 0:33:09.400 you don't think about like people representing eBay sellers. You know, 0:33:09.840 --> 0:33:12.840 I do think that's a valuable social role, but it 0:33:12.920 --> 0:33:15.200 is not something that should have ever led to an 0:33:15.200 --> 0:33:18.840 exciting case of a deranged spy agency trying to destroy 0:33:18.880 --> 0:33:20.000 people's lives. 0:33:20.480 --> 0:33:23.680 No, but in that early era of the blogging years, 0:33:23.880 --> 0:33:26.520 there was a whole dynamic because you saw the same 0:33:26.560 --> 0:33:28.960 thing in the film in Hollywood business with sites like 0:33:29.000 --> 0:33:31.800 Ain't It Cool News, where once they got a huge 0:33:31.840 --> 0:33:34.320 readership and once they started to be seeing as something 0:33:34.600 --> 0:33:37.880 as an authority, they started to get tips and they 0:33:37.920 --> 0:33:41.320 started to break stories. And keep in mind, there's a 0:33:41.360 --> 0:33:43.200 parallel here because keep in mind, if you were a 0:33:43.200 --> 0:33:46.440 Hollywood studio, once upon a time, you had actual news 0:33:46.520 --> 0:33:49.440 outlets you were dealing with, You had reporters you were 0:33:49.480 --> 0:33:54.040 friendly with, you had a whole mechanism for managing stories, scandals, 0:33:54.080 --> 0:33:56.959 it's something you wanted covered up. So suddenly when the 0:33:56.960 --> 0:33:59.240 Internet comes along and these bloggers come along and they 0:33:59.320 --> 0:34:02.480 just get a blind item via email, they'll just break 0:34:02.480 --> 0:34:04.560 the story. Like they don't they don't care, they don't 0:34:04.560 --> 0:34:06.000 have access, they don't care. 0:34:06.120 --> 0:34:07.719 They have no access, and they don't have any kind 0:34:07.760 --> 0:34:10.439 of ongoing relationships that they want to keep. We don't 0:34:10.440 --> 0:34:12.920 need to keep paramount happy, right like fuck up? 0:34:13.080 --> 0:34:17.200 You know. Yeah, So this is similar here because I 0:34:17.239 --> 0:34:21.000 think in the corporate world. Across the corporate world, there 0:34:21.080 --> 0:34:25.160 is real anxiety about this because their ability to manipulate 0:34:25.239 --> 0:34:27.600 and control the flow of information to keep a lid 0:34:27.680 --> 0:34:31.239 on stories, to stay out in front of stories because reporters, 0:34:31.239 --> 0:34:33.480 you know, they will contact you and say, hey, we're 0:34:33.480 --> 0:34:36.480 working on the story about these accusations against your CEO 0:34:36.600 --> 0:34:39.560 or whatever. Do you want to comment. Well, if it's 0:34:39.680 --> 0:34:41.400 just leaks out to the internet, that person is just 0:34:41.400 --> 0:34:44.239 going to post it. So I'm not saying they necessarily 0:34:44.280 --> 0:34:47.000 got you know, that deep with their stories, but I 0:34:47.000 --> 0:34:50.319 can see where a company, if you were from a 0:34:50.520 --> 0:34:54.040 world where you had like you could keep the press 0:34:54.080 --> 0:34:57.200 on a leash, and then suddenly there's these citizen journalists 0:34:57.239 --> 0:34:59.560 out there that was the boogeyman in the corporate. 0:34:59.200 --> 0:35:03.400 World'll be losing your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I 0:35:03.440 --> 0:35:07.040 should also note I said this is a niche audience. 0:35:07.080 --> 0:35:09.279 The Steiners, to this day, at least according to the 0:35:09.320 --> 0:35:11.440 reporting I've read, have a regular audience of about six 0:35:11.560 --> 0:35:15.920 hundred thousand people, which for a website like operated by 0:35:15.920 --> 0:35:18.960 two people, number one, that's a fairly sustainable business. But 0:35:19.000 --> 0:35:22.480 that's like a good readership for an independent news site. 0:35:22.520 --> 0:35:26.120 That is like actually very impressive. It testifies to the 0:35:26.160 --> 0:35:29.359 degree of like work and trust that their audience has 0:35:29.360 --> 0:35:31.799 in them, that they have kept that audience up to 0:35:31.960 --> 0:35:35.879 the modern day, right when so many news organs are 0:35:35.880 --> 0:35:39.799 in the process of collapsing or have collapsed. Much of 0:35:40.000 --> 0:35:43.600 ENA's reporting focused on issues that dealt directly with sellers 0:35:43.640 --> 0:35:46.560 but would be of interest to investors. For example, stories 0:35:46.560 --> 0:35:49.320 about eBay holding on the money from transactions for thirty 0:35:49.400 --> 0:35:52.319 days without any real reason seem like petty bullshit, and 0:35:52.400 --> 0:35:54.799 it is, but it's something that at scale could mean 0:35:54.840 --> 0:35:57.759 millions and extra profits, which all gets funneled upwards to 0:35:57.800 --> 0:35:59.920 the handful of people who run the company and own 0:36:00.120 --> 0:36:05.280 stock in it. Enter Devon Winnig, the CEO of eBay 0:36:05.360 --> 0:36:07.440 during the period of time that we are talking about 0:36:07.480 --> 0:36:11.440 in this story, which was up until like twenty nineteen twenty, 0:36:11.600 --> 0:36:16.480 like fifteen to twenty nineteen. So Winnig had been born 0:36:16.560 --> 0:36:19.799 in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty six. He was the son 0:36:19.920 --> 0:36:25.120 of Jeffrey Winnig, a toxicologist and chief executive of Nastec Pharmaceutical. 0:36:25.960 --> 0:36:30.359 When Jeffrey died suddenly, Devin, age twenty three, took over 0:36:30.400 --> 0:36:33.040 a CEO of the company for a year, raised like 0:36:33.120 --> 0:36:36.399 five million in VC funding, and then joined a law firm. 0:36:37.000 --> 0:36:39.560 Left the job after like a year, and Nastec seems 0:36:39.600 --> 0:36:42.880 to have kind of continued to slow decline afterwards. I 0:36:42.920 --> 0:36:45.440 bring that up because that basic pattern where he hops in, 0:36:45.880 --> 0:36:48.440 raises a bunch of VC funding, sets up a merger, 0:36:48.560 --> 0:36:51.200 is going to kind of become the norm for his 0:36:51.440 --> 0:36:55.759 business career. In nineteen ninety three, Winnig joins Reuters as 0:36:55.800 --> 0:36:58.919 the COO, and over the course of his time there 0:36:58.960 --> 0:37:00.640 he becomes like the number two two men at the 0:37:00.680 --> 0:37:03.520 company and he helps to manage the merger with the 0:37:03.560 --> 0:37:09.040 Thompson Corporation into Thompson Reuters. Now, this was a big 0:37:09.080 --> 0:37:11.400 deal at the time. There was a lot of antitrust 0:37:11.480 --> 0:37:14.840 scrutiny on it because Thompson Reuters when it merged was 0:37:14.880 --> 0:37:18.560 the largest provider of financial news and information on Earth. 0:37:19.120 --> 0:37:22.399 The merger led to massive job cuts across the now 0:37:22.440 --> 0:37:28.160 combined businesses, with leadership particularly DEVN, bragging about more than 0:37:28.200 --> 0:37:30.480 five hundred million pounds worth of savings within the first 0:37:30.520 --> 0:37:33.440 three years after the merger. Now, the reality of this 0:37:33.600 --> 0:37:36.440 was pretty brutal. The merger not only cost a lot 0:37:36.440 --> 0:37:38.840 of people their jobs, but it caused a collapse in 0:37:38.960 --> 0:37:43.719 profitability and influence for Thompson Reuters. It had been easily 0:37:43.880 --> 0:37:46.440 the largest company in the space at the time. Of 0:37:46.480 --> 0:37:49.480 the merger, if you like, combined the readership of both platforms, 0:37:49.840 --> 0:37:53.279 but once they were merged, the quality dropped and Bloomberg 0:37:53.360 --> 0:37:56.120 closed the gap behind them. There were several years of 0:37:56.160 --> 0:37:59.719 botched product launches while Winnig was helping to run the 0:37:59.719 --> 0:38:02.760 Cup company, which proved that the new team running Thompson 0:38:02.800 --> 0:38:05.879 Ruters didn't know what they were doing. This summary from 0:38:05.880 --> 0:38:07.960 an article in The Guardian gives you an idea of 0:38:08.000 --> 0:38:11.280 how disastrous this merger proved to be. In two thousand 0:38:11.320 --> 0:38:13.560 and seven, Thompson Reuter spoke for more than thirty six 0:38:13.600 --> 0:38:16.160 percent of the market against twenty five percent for Bloomberg, 0:38:16.400 --> 0:38:18.879 but according to his its experts, Bloomberg will have nearly 0:38:18.920 --> 0:38:21.239 caught up in twenty eleven with a thirty point eight 0:38:21.320 --> 0:38:24.040 market share against thirty one point four for Thompson Reuters. 0:38:24.400 --> 0:38:27.200 Something has gone horribly wrong. At the very least, the 0:38:27.200 --> 0:38:29.520 task of melding these two companies together has been far 0:38:29.560 --> 0:38:33.480 more complex than originally envisaged. A less kind interpretation is 0:38:33.520 --> 0:38:35.880 that management, which has cut many hundreds of jobs, has 0:38:35.880 --> 0:38:38.800 taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors' billions 0:38:38.840 --> 0:38:42.359 along the way. So you could say the evidence would 0:38:42.440 --> 0:38:45.960 suggest that Devin Winnig is not a business genius, right, 0:38:46.080 --> 0:38:49.520 based on his primary accomplishment. The merger of Thompson Reuter's 0:38:49.600 --> 0:38:53.040 up to this point a disaster for the company's influence 0:38:53.080 --> 0:38:55.279 and for its workers, but it makes a lot of 0:38:55.320 --> 0:38:58.239 money for shareholders, and that's really all that matters. So 0:38:58.280 --> 0:39:02.000 in twenty eleven, some of those same people make Devin 0:39:02.080 --> 0:39:05.720 Winnig well they hire He gets hired at eBay, initially 0:39:05.760 --> 0:39:10.759 as the president of their global marketplace business. Right he 0:39:10.840 --> 0:39:14.000 is initially successful here. One of the things that Devin 0:39:14.080 --> 0:39:17.719 recognizes early is that mobile commerce is going to be 0:39:18.000 --> 0:39:20.680 the future for eBay, like sales to users shopping through 0:39:20.680 --> 0:39:25.120 their smartphones, and he reorganizes the company around that, which 0:39:25.160 --> 0:39:29.480 is a very successful move. In twenty fifteen, he becomes 0:39:29.480 --> 0:39:33.279 the CEO of the company, and within a couple of 0:39:33.360 --> 0:39:36.920 years at the job, the Steiners, who are covering eBay 0:39:37.040 --> 0:39:40.600 as Winnig takes over at CEO, notices that his pay 0:39:40.719 --> 0:39:45.160 compensation keeps rising at a rapid rate, particularly during a 0:39:45.239 --> 0:39:48.360 time when eBay itself is having trouble, when they're dealing 0:39:48.400 --> 0:39:52.360 with increased competition from companies like Amazon, and when workers 0:39:52.480 --> 0:39:56.960 are not seeing their compensation rise, So from twenty fifteen 0:39:56.960 --> 0:40:00.160 to twenty eighteen, Devin goes from fourteen point five five 0:40:00.200 --> 0:40:02.640 million a year to seventeen point six million a year. 0:40:03.200 --> 0:40:05.760 This is out of line with the salary increases enjoyed 0:40:05.760 --> 0:40:09.120 by eBay employees during the same period. As Ena Steiner 0:40:09.160 --> 0:40:13.680 wrote on April eighth, twenty eighteen, quote for the first time, 0:40:13.760 --> 0:40:17.040 eBay released a new statistic called the CEO pay ratio 0:40:17.160 --> 0:40:20.560 required now with public companies, eBay reported the ratio of 0:40:20.600 --> 0:40:23.800 the total annual compensation of mister Winning to the median 0:40:23.880 --> 0:40:27.239 annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be 0:40:27.280 --> 0:40:31.560 one hundred and forty three to one. Now here's the thing, Jason, 0:40:32.160 --> 0:40:36.960 that's actually not bad. If we're looking like overall in US, 0:40:37.080 --> 0:40:41.560 like publicly traded companies, on average, CEOs earned three hundred 0:40:41.600 --> 0:40:44.280 and ninety nine times as much as the median worker. 0:40:45.760 --> 0:40:49.200 So you could say eBay is not doing terribly right. 0:40:49.760 --> 0:40:52.600 And ENA's article doesn't portray this as like a polemic. 0:40:52.680 --> 0:40:55.080 She's really just kind of focusing on the facts that like, yeah, 0:40:55.080 --> 0:40:58.600 this is how much Winnig is getting is making, this 0:40:58.680 --> 0:41:01.960 is how it compares to the rate of salary increases 0:41:02.000 --> 0:41:04.400 normal employees have gotten. This is how much it compares 0:41:04.400 --> 0:41:06.400 to the amount of money that normal employees are getting. 0:41:06.760 --> 0:41:08.600 You would also, yeah. 0:41:08.360 --> 0:41:10.879 To any normal person, that kind of really does look 0:41:10.920 --> 0:41:14.040 like he failed his way up into that position. 0:41:13.760 --> 0:41:15.319 Because he did. 0:41:15.120 --> 0:41:18.920 But well, but this is because you're you have to 0:41:19.040 --> 0:41:24.400 understand what is considered success in that world. So like 0:41:24.480 --> 0:41:27.799 taking over a media company and tanking the quality, but 0:41:27.880 --> 0:41:30.880 it's like, well, yeah, you tanked the quality by eighty percent, 0:41:30.960 --> 0:41:33.799 but you cut expenses by ninety percent, So if you 0:41:33.840 --> 0:41:36.440 think about it. 0:41:35.360 --> 0:41:38.400 It's a win. Yeah, And that is how That's how 0:41:38.440 --> 0:41:41.440 a guy like Devin thinks about things. And you know, 0:41:41.520 --> 0:41:44.080 Ina is not. She's not coming at this with the 0:41:44.160 --> 0:41:47.279 kind of ideological lens that like I might if I 0:41:47.320 --> 0:41:49.480 were getting, you know, on more of a rant about 0:41:49.480 --> 0:41:53.320 devn She really is just reporting the facts. But Winnig 0:41:53.520 --> 0:41:58.160 gets real, like comes across like he gets sent from underlings. 0:41:58.239 --> 0:42:01.440 Various articles she's putting out. It's known in eBay's c 0:42:01.560 --> 0:42:03.759 suite that you have to pay attention to the Steiners 0:42:03.760 --> 0:42:07.279 and their articles because your investors do. And everything she 0:42:07.440 --> 0:42:12.359 writes about his compensation makes him angry. Particularly she ends 0:42:12.400 --> 0:42:16.480 one article with this line. eBay employees feel free to 0:42:16.920 --> 0:42:19.040 chime in on whether or not you received a payhike 0:42:19.120 --> 0:42:21.440 of ten to fourteen percent this year and what you 0:42:21.480 --> 0:42:23.920 think of your salary compared to the median salary of 0:42:23.960 --> 0:42:27.239 your colleagues. And again I would say that that's like 0:42:27.719 --> 0:42:34.120 a responsible, very fair way to phrase that. As a journalist. 0:42:34.120 --> 0:42:36.840 This is not like someone at like some far left 0:42:36.920 --> 0:42:40.920 rag right. But look, Devin is threatened by this. 0:42:41.560 --> 0:42:44.799 Either one of us could post online a photo of 0:42:45.000 --> 0:42:50.480 our lunch and will then say ten replies, I will 0:42:50.480 --> 0:42:53.640 be told to kill myself. You will be accused of 0:42:53.680 --> 0:42:57.960 being a CIA plant or a rist and that you 0:42:58.000 --> 0:43:01.480 need to kill yourself. Yeah what, This is what the 0:43:01.480 --> 0:43:04.120 first thing that struck me because when I saw what 0:43:04.200 --> 0:43:08.279 they did and then they explained what triggered the insane 0:43:08.440 --> 0:43:11.480 reaction we're about to get to. And it's so mild. 0:43:11.719 --> 0:43:16.200 It's really really mild because like people are not like 0:43:16.200 --> 0:43:18.680 like yellow journalism, they're not muckrakers. 0:43:18.719 --> 0:43:22.200 It's just it's the mildest criticism you can tell how 0:43:22.239 --> 0:43:23.680 to like polite these people are. 0:43:24.080 --> 0:43:27.440 Yeah, yeah, I'm sure like Ina is like tips twenty 0:43:27.440 --> 0:43:31.680 five percent at all times and like is unfailingly polite 0:43:32.880 --> 0:43:36.200 to everyone she encounters in the real world. 0:43:36.640 --> 0:43:39.919 Well, I'm saying specifically as a content creator, you can 0:43:40.000 --> 0:43:43.080 tell that that's not where she gets her traffic. The 0:43:43.160 --> 0:43:45.960 traffic is not from being an over the top trash 0:43:46.760 --> 0:43:50.520 It's not the way all political commentary has the tone 0:43:50.560 --> 0:43:55.759 now of just constantly calling people pedophiles or whatever like that. 0:43:55.840 --> 0:43:57.959 I guess that's my point. It's not like they took 0:43:58.000 --> 0:44:01.840 on somebody who was just in assassin just constantly tearing 0:44:01.840 --> 0:44:04.799 them down. It was just somebody who did it. Sounds like, 0:44:05.600 --> 0:44:08.719 look to get that size of an audience and to 0:44:08.840 --> 0:44:14.680 do stuff that's actually substantive and mature, that's amazing. And 0:44:14.760 --> 0:44:17.360 when you read that criticism, it's like, Wow, that's the 0:44:17.440 --> 0:44:20.319 stuff that this guy considers crossing the line with what 0:44:20.520 --> 0:44:23.799 kid gloves? Must she have always been handling them with? 0:44:24.280 --> 0:44:26.680 Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I do want 0:44:26.719 --> 0:44:28.680 to put a pen in that accusing people of being 0:44:28.719 --> 0:44:31.440 pedophiles thing, Jason, because when we come back from the 0:44:31.480 --> 0:44:33.560 ad break, you and I are going to accuse the 0:44:33.600 --> 0:44:43.840 celebrity of being a pedophile. Ah, we're back, Jason. Legal 0:44:43.920 --> 0:44:45.480 got back to me. We're going to have to cut 0:44:45.520 --> 0:44:49.760 the segment that we had planned. So can rest easy tonight. 0:44:49.920 --> 0:44:53.080 The allegations will not be going out in public. But 0:44:53.440 --> 0:44:56.040 one of these days, Jason, one of these days we'll 0:44:56.080 --> 0:44:59.920 get the truth out to the people. So back to 0:45:00.280 --> 0:45:04.680 Ena and our friend defn Winnig, CEO of eBay, now 0:45:04.719 --> 0:45:08.160 Ina had good reason to be, you know, politely critical 0:45:08.200 --> 0:45:11.640 of winning. His exorbitant raises for himself and the rest 0:45:11.680 --> 0:45:13.680 of his friends in the c suite of eBay had 0:45:13.680 --> 0:45:18.000 coincided with a rash of out landishly wasteful expenses, best 0:45:18.040 --> 0:45:22.400 exemplified by his twenty sixteen construction of the main Street 0:45:22.400 --> 0:45:26.200 building on the eBay campus. This building was envisioned as 0:45:26.239 --> 0:45:29.240 the company's front door, and at the grand opening, Winnig 0:45:29.239 --> 0:45:32.720 explained himself by saying, buildings are symbols of your culture 0:45:32.920 --> 0:45:37.239 and of your brand, and it's like, you know, it 0:45:37.320 --> 0:45:41.880 looks like any other really nice Silicon Valley office, which 0:45:42.440 --> 0:45:45.680 isn't a weird expense when the companies are like doing great. 0:45:45.719 --> 0:45:47.560 But when you're in a cash crunt, it's going to 0:45:47.560 --> 0:45:49.799 get like criticized that, like, well, you spent how many 0:45:49.840 --> 0:45:52.480 millions of dollars on this building that isn't necessary for 0:45:52.600 --> 0:45:55.799 work It just kind of makes you look nice to 0:45:56.040 --> 0:45:57.880 zero percent of the people who are going to be 0:45:57.920 --> 0:46:00.840 smitting money on your platform because they are not invited 0:46:00.920 --> 0:46:04.040 to the main street building, right, especially. 0:46:03.600 --> 0:46:06.760 When you know that down further in the lower levels 0:46:06.800 --> 0:46:10.120 of the organization, because we have both worked for companies. Yeah, 0:46:10.200 --> 0:46:12.520 that you know, you've got people who are reading memos 0:46:12.560 --> 0:46:15.960 going around about now. Some of you are plugging in 0:46:16.000 --> 0:46:19.600 your phones in the outlets that electricity is not free. 0:46:19.719 --> 0:46:22.320 You must you are not allowed to use those outlets 0:46:22.360 --> 0:46:25.759 for personal devices. That that's up to eighteen cents of 0:46:25.760 --> 0:46:28.600 electricity per month you could be using there. That You've 0:46:28.600 --> 0:46:31.000 got people that are forced to watch every little tiny 0:46:31.040 --> 0:46:34.000 penny and you know, if they work one hour of 0:46:34.040 --> 0:46:37.200 overtime that their boss deemed was inappropriate, that they get 0:46:37.280 --> 0:46:39.920 yelled at. So this is why this it's like no, 0:46:40.040 --> 0:46:41.600 up at the top, they don't have to watch that 0:46:41.680 --> 0:46:43.719 stuff at all. They can just decide, you know what, 0:46:44.120 --> 0:46:46.400 I want a building that will impress visitors. 0:46:46.840 --> 0:46:49.759 Yeah, and it's and it's the kind of thing where 0:46:49.800 --> 0:46:53.480 like this is not just like we're like you know, 0:46:53.520 --> 0:46:55.840 some workers at the bottom or even just people like 0:46:56.040 --> 0:46:58.279 Ena criticizing eBay of like wow, this is a really 0:46:58.400 --> 0:47:02.000 unnecessary expense. This is the conclusion reached in January of 0:47:02.000 --> 0:47:05.280 twenty nineteen by Elliott Management after they pumped one point 0:47:05.320 --> 0:47:08.440 four billion dollars into eBay for a four percent stake 0:47:08.520 --> 0:47:12.680 in the company. Now, Elliott Management is one of a 0:47:13.160 --> 0:47:15.480 they have a very milk toast name, Like they're not 0:47:15.520 --> 0:47:17.280 nearly as well known because they don't have a sinister 0:47:17.320 --> 0:47:19.200 and name is like black Rock. But this is one 0:47:19.200 --> 0:47:24.800 of the most bloodthirsty money companies out in the United 0:47:24.800 --> 0:47:27.760 States right now, right they are a ruthless Wall Street 0:47:27.840 --> 0:47:30.240 investment firm. They actually just put out a really interesting 0:47:30.320 --> 0:47:32.840 article about like how they think the AI industry is 0:47:32.920 --> 0:47:35.799 massively overvalued that I think is one of the more 0:47:35.840 --> 0:47:38.440 interesting things that's been written from like that side of 0:47:39.680 --> 0:47:42.960 the ledger. But like, they are not people, unlike a 0:47:43.000 --> 0:47:47.160 lot of like Silicon Valley, which runs on irrational exuberance 0:47:47.239 --> 0:47:49.439 and like think of how profitable this is all going 0:47:49.480 --> 0:47:54.000 to be. These guys are like bloodless vampires, and they 0:47:54.040 --> 0:47:57.799 purely exist to maximize the profit that they can get 0:47:57.800 --> 0:48:00.319 for their investment. And they have no interest and like 0:48:00.400 --> 0:48:03.759 the egos of a guy like Defen winning, right, So 0:48:03.800 --> 0:48:06.359 they took one look at eBay's balance books after they 0:48:06.360 --> 0:48:09.279 pump one point four billion into the company, and they conclude, 0:48:09.400 --> 0:48:12.520 this is one of the most inefficient and chaotic executive 0:48:12.840 --> 0:48:15.480 teams that we've ever seen seen, and the company is 0:48:15.680 --> 0:48:18.120 burning through a huge amount of cash on shit that 0:48:18.239 --> 0:48:20.879 nobody needs. And now that we've put all this money 0:48:20.920 --> 0:48:23.920 into the company, we are going to demand serious changes. 0:48:24.040 --> 0:48:28.160 Right And Elliott has the kind of juice that means 0:48:28.160 --> 0:48:30.800 everyone at the company starts sweating. This is actually potentially 0:48:30.800 --> 0:48:33.480 a threat even to winnings job right Like this is 0:48:33.520 --> 0:48:35.759 not you can't ignore the people who are able to 0:48:35.760 --> 0:48:38.800 put one point four billion dollars into your company. Right 0:48:38.920 --> 0:48:41.319 Maybe if you're Apple you can because that's pennies to them, 0:48:41.360 --> 0:48:45.719 But eBay cannot afford to ignore that right now, When 0:48:45.760 --> 0:48:47.919 you are in a company like this and a bunch 0:48:47.960 --> 0:48:49.719 of people with a shitload of money come in and 0:48:49.719 --> 0:48:52.279 say we're going to make some serious changes. If you 0:48:52.320 --> 0:48:54.600 and I have both been in that situation with various 0:48:54.600 --> 0:48:57.440 corporate overlords, the natural impulsey is, well, I need to 0:48:57.440 --> 0:48:59.279 put my head the fuck down, right. I don't want 0:48:59.280 --> 0:49:02.120 to draw any attention to myself unless it's like for 0:49:02.200 --> 0:49:05.320 doing something good, and this is kind of what winning 0:49:05.560 --> 0:49:08.319 wanted to do. But he had a problem, and that 0:49:08.440 --> 0:49:12.759 problem is the Steiners, because their boring industry publication is 0:49:12.880 --> 0:49:16.040 read by the folks at Elliott Right, who are using 0:49:16.040 --> 0:49:18.120 it in part to try and determine whether or not 0:49:18.280 --> 0:49:21.280 the people running eBay are wasting more of their money. 0:49:21.640 --> 0:49:25.280 So this kind of irritation he'd had with the Steiners 0:49:25.280 --> 0:49:28.160 reporting on his salary grows into an obsession as he 0:49:28.160 --> 0:49:30.600 gets more and more worried that his control of the 0:49:30.680 --> 0:49:34.480 company is at risk. Now in April of twenty nineteen, 0:49:34.520 --> 0:49:37.480 then when Ina wrote another article about the fact that 0:49:37.520 --> 0:49:42.040 Devin was very much overpaid, he gets angry. Now he 0:49:42.080 --> 0:49:44.439 has hired a PR company at that point to help 0:49:44.520 --> 0:49:47.640 manage the situation, right and in general the bad PR 0:49:47.680 --> 0:49:50.560 that EBA is getting at this time, and the PR company, 0:49:50.600 --> 0:49:55.799 because they're competent professionals, are like, ignore this, don't get 0:49:55.840 --> 0:50:00.279 obsessed with this. These elderly people and their blog. No 0:50:00.360 --> 0:50:03.080 response you can make to them that will not blow 0:50:03.160 --> 0:50:05.479 up in your face. Just let this buy and try 0:50:05.520 --> 0:50:09.040 to run the company more efficiently, right, which. 0:50:08.840 --> 0:50:12.680 Is like take a pay cut maybe if you think 0:50:12.680 --> 0:50:14.880 that's a vulnerability. And the orders. If you think you 0:50:14.920 --> 0:50:17.520 are overpaid, if you think their criticism is true, then. 0:50:17.920 --> 0:50:19.840 Take a pay cut. Is that just don't take a 0:50:19.960 --> 0:50:22.480 raise this year? Probably, you know, like you could get 0:50:22.480 --> 0:50:26.960 away with that. Maybe Devin for a while goes with 0:50:27.040 --> 0:50:30.880 their recommendation, but whenever he would get angry, he would 0:50:30.880 --> 0:50:34.319 fume about the Steiners to his fellow executives. And when 0:50:34.320 --> 0:50:36.640 he would fume to his fellow executives, all of the 0:50:36.680 --> 0:50:39.520 subordinates below him in the C suite they would send 0:50:39.520 --> 0:50:42.319 his emails on down the line to other people at 0:50:42.320 --> 0:50:47.600 the company, particularly to people in the ebays like Security division, right, 0:50:48.000 --> 0:50:51.080 and inevitably all of his complaints wound up at the 0:50:51.120 --> 0:50:55.720 office of his top security director, a man named Jim 0:50:56.080 --> 0:51:02.319 Baw Like Baugh or Bog will go with Bog. So 0:51:02.520 --> 0:51:06.240 in April of twenty nineteen, Bog had his analysts gather 0:51:06.520 --> 0:51:10.279 information and prepared an anonymous, handwritten note to be sent 0:51:10.440 --> 0:51:13.799 to Ena Steiner. He was not maybe we don't know 0:51:13.840 --> 0:51:16.120 if he was ordered to do this, but he has 0:51:16.160 --> 0:51:17.880 his people get a bunch of info on her and 0:51:17.920 --> 0:51:22.080 he puts together a handwritten note threatening her physical person 0:51:22.760 --> 0:51:26.360 and threatening to destroy her reputation. And the goal stated 0:51:26.440 --> 0:51:30.520 in like the emails around this handwritten document was that 0:51:30.880 --> 0:51:32.720 they were making it to get her to quote stop 0:51:32.760 --> 0:51:38.080 publishing articles critical of eBay. Now at this point, I 0:51:38.120 --> 0:51:41.520 don't know entirely where like they don't get the go 0:51:41.600 --> 0:51:43.720 ahead from the C suite, right, I don't know if 0:51:43.800 --> 0:51:45.959 Devin actually makes a call here or if it's someone 0:51:46.000 --> 0:51:49.120 below him, but someone still has a lid on their 0:51:49.160 --> 0:51:52.719 worst impulses at this point April of twenty nineteen. But 0:51:53.160 --> 0:51:55.799 Bog is just kind of getting started here, right. The 0:51:55.840 --> 0:51:59.000 fact that his send a crazy letter to these people 0:51:59.040 --> 0:52:02.000 plan gets kind of killed does not kill his desire 0:52:02.200 --> 0:52:05.759 for vengeance against these bloggers. Now, I want to give 0:52:05.800 --> 0:52:09.239 you some context on Jim Bog because understanding him is 0:52:09.840 --> 0:52:12.200 very critical both to understanding the kind of people who 0:52:12.280 --> 0:52:16.600 wind up in these corporate intelligence roles and to understanding 0:52:16.600 --> 0:52:18.760 all of the insane shit that comes next. 0:52:19.000 --> 0:52:19.280 Bog. 0:52:19.400 --> 0:52:20.719 We don't have a huge amount of de tail in 0:52:20.719 --> 0:52:23.000 his early life or whatever, but he was a he 0:52:23.040 --> 0:52:25.560 worked for the CIA. He was at some point an 0:52:25.640 --> 0:52:29.200 operative at the CIA, right from what I can tell, 0:52:29.239 --> 0:52:31.440 I think he worked there for a decent amount of time. 0:52:31.480 --> 0:52:33.120 I'm not sure if it was a full career but 0:52:33.200 --> 0:52:36.080 it was a matter of multiple years. And then after 0:52:36.160 --> 0:52:39.520 he leaves the CIA, he starts a security firm that 0:52:39.640 --> 0:52:44.120 becomes very popular with Silicon Valley companies. He contracts to Apple, 0:52:44.280 --> 0:52:48.160 to Amazon, He works security for the Oscars one year. 0:52:48.400 --> 0:52:51.400 Probably his biggest role is he provides a protection detail 0:52:51.719 --> 0:52:55.919 to Joe Biden at the twenty sixteen Oscars. So that's 0:52:55.920 --> 0:52:58.960 a little odd, but there you go. Maybe they should 0:52:59.000 --> 0:53:01.040 while he dropped out of the campaign. That would have 0:53:01.040 --> 0:53:02.719 been a great thing for Trump to hit him on. Though. 0:53:02.840 --> 0:53:05.479 You know, if only did this. 0:53:05.400 --> 0:53:08.319 Guy give his security firm a cool name like. 0:53:08.280 --> 0:53:11.960 Black It's like Jim baw Consulting or something like that. No, No, 0:53:12.120 --> 0:53:15.000 nothing cool at all. Yeah, at least I'll say this 0:53:15.040 --> 0:53:17.480 for the Black Cube people. That's a cool name for 0:53:17.520 --> 0:53:21.840 a spy company. Like it sounds evil, as does like 0:53:21.920 --> 0:53:25.960 Pallanteer sounds evil. But Joe Bogg is not a particularly 0:53:26.040 --> 0:53:29.239 creative man. So it's a little hard for me to 0:53:29.280 --> 0:53:31.960 tell the degree to which bog was still tied into 0:53:31.960 --> 0:53:35.320 the US intelligence establishment during the period of time that 0:53:35.360 --> 0:53:38.759 he's working at Silicon Valley. To underlings an eBay, he 0:53:38.800 --> 0:53:42.040 would periodically claim that his wife was still employed by 0:53:42.080 --> 0:53:45.800 the CIA. I think there's a good chance he was lying. 0:53:46.320 --> 0:53:49.680 He also would claim in public, often while drinking, that 0:53:49.760 --> 0:53:52.719 he was still a part time employee of the CIA 0:53:52.880 --> 0:53:55.719 in his spare time. I found an article in Puck 0:53:55.880 --> 0:53:58.880 News about claims made in the court case that results 0:53:58.880 --> 0:54:02.319 from all of this quote. Bog detailed how after leaving 0:54:02.360 --> 0:54:06.200 the CIA, he was re enlisted to provide private sector colleagues, 0:54:06.280 --> 0:54:09.440 even a ceo. He boasted to spy on foreign to 0:54:09.480 --> 0:54:12.880 recruit private sector colleagues, even a ceo he boasted to 0:54:12.960 --> 0:54:16.680 spy on foreign leaders and report back on important international meetings. 0:54:17.000 --> 0:54:19.760 I felt honored to be trusted with such sensitive information 0:54:19.880 --> 0:54:22.600 and to be able to provide security assistance to our government. 0:54:23.400 --> 0:54:25.360 So and this is stuff that he says in court 0:54:25.400 --> 0:54:28.360 when he's trying to get his sentence mitigated. I continued 0:54:28.400 --> 0:54:31.680 to work after entering private security for the federal government, 0:54:32.000 --> 0:54:35.320 recruiting like business people, including the CEO of one company, 0:54:35.360 --> 0:54:37.920 to spy on foreign leaders and report back on their 0:54:37.960 --> 0:54:40.759 meetings for the federal government. I think this is the 0:54:40.880 --> 0:54:42.160 kind of thing that happens a lot. 0:54:42.200 --> 0:54:44.799 But yeah, yeah, if he was doing that, that's not 0:54:45.280 --> 0:54:48.480 the weirdest thing we've heard whatsoever. That is the kind 0:54:48.520 --> 0:54:50.719 of thing in terms of why getting hired under the 0:54:50.760 --> 0:54:55.040 table or whatever to continue to collect intelligence or whatever. Like, Yeah, 0:54:55.200 --> 0:54:57.319 it's a very plausible lie. If it's a lie, it's 0:54:57.400 --> 0:54:58.040 very plausible. 0:54:58.239 --> 0:54:59.919 Yeah, and it makes total sense if you're the CI, 0:55:00.400 --> 0:55:02.600 what would you rather do spend the shitload of money 0:55:02.640 --> 0:55:06.640 and potentially risk vives of your operatives like wiretapping a 0:55:06.640 --> 0:55:09.759 guy or when the CEO of tech company X goes 0:55:09.760 --> 0:55:13.680 to meet with Vladimir Putin talk to him afterwards, right, Like, 0:55:13.680 --> 0:55:15.640 one of those is much easier than the other. 0:55:15.960 --> 0:55:17.879 Yeah, there anyway, Yeah, and. 0:55:17.880 --> 0:55:19.640 It's not all that hard to rope. Like if you're 0:55:19.640 --> 0:55:21.719 a guy like Bog you go to this, like, Hey, 0:55:22.040 --> 0:55:25.400 you know you're you've got this kind of boring corporate job. 0:55:25.600 --> 0:55:26.719 Do you want to feel it? Do you want to 0:55:26.719 --> 0:55:29.000 be a spy for a little bit? Right? The CIA 0:55:29.160 --> 0:55:30.640 has a job for you, and all you have to 0:55:30.640 --> 0:55:32.840 do is the job you were going to do, right, Like, 0:55:32.920 --> 0:55:35.320 obviously you get a lot of guys who are interested 0:55:35.320 --> 0:55:37.399 in doing shit like this, if only to make their 0:55:37.400 --> 0:55:38.560 lives a little less boring. 0:55:39.120 --> 0:55:41.799 Now, the first and most important requirement is that you 0:55:41.880 --> 0:55:44.399 not get drunk and tell everyone that you're doing this. 0:55:45.000 --> 0:55:49.360 Right, yeah, which bog seems to be doing. He drinks 0:55:49.400 --> 0:55:51.600 a lot, and he tells people a lot about his 0:55:51.920 --> 0:55:54.560 side work for the CIA and his wife's work for 0:55:54.600 --> 0:55:59.680 the CIA. Now, we don't know much about the specifics here, 0:55:59.719 --> 0:56:02.040 like really how far this went, but we do know 0:56:02.120 --> 0:56:04.399 that he's telling the truth about a lot of it 0:56:04.440 --> 0:56:07.600 because after he started talking about this stuff in court, 0:56:07.760 --> 0:56:10.880 the Justice Department had his letter to the court sealed, 0:56:11.000 --> 0:56:15.600 claiming it contained classified national security secrets. We only know 0:56:16.160 --> 0:56:18.520 all of the stuff that was in the letter because 0:56:18.600 --> 0:56:22.359 the court Monitoring Services forgot to redact it when they 0:56:22.360 --> 0:56:24.319 put it up online, and so the guys at puck 0:56:24.400 --> 0:56:27.200 News were able to get unredacted versions of what is 0:56:27.280 --> 0:56:31.960 now a sealed court letter. So again, the security States 0:56:31.960 --> 0:56:35.200 got a lot of holes in It's still yeah yeah, 0:56:35.400 --> 0:56:39.160 but uh yeah, fun story. So that is enough about 0:56:39.280 --> 0:56:43.279 kind of his backstory here. What is interesting to me 0:56:43.320 --> 0:56:46.840 about Jim is that he definitely has this CIA connection. 0:56:46.920 --> 0:56:49.840 He definitely has a legit background as a spy and 0:56:49.920 --> 0:56:53.680 a professional career working or at least, if not as 0:56:53.719 --> 0:56:57.640 a spy, working in some degree as an intelligence operative. Right, 0:56:58.160 --> 0:57:00.440 and he is still even though we had this real 0:57:00.480 --> 0:57:05.040 experience someone whose entire conception of the world and specifically 0:57:05.120 --> 0:57:09.239 how intelligence works seems to be based on stereotypes from 0:57:09.280 --> 0:57:11.879 Hollywood movies. And I'm going to read now a quote 0:57:11.880 --> 0:57:14.239 from The New York Times describing how he would after 0:57:14.280 --> 0:57:17.960 he gets hired at eBay to run this special elite 0:57:18.000 --> 0:57:21.280 security analytics team, how he would talk to his team 0:57:21.320 --> 0:57:25.280 of analysts about threats to eBay. Mister Bog would bring 0:57:25.320 --> 0:57:27.800 the analysts into a conference room and show the scene 0:57:27.800 --> 0:57:31.640 from American Gangster where Denzel Washington coolly executes a man 0:57:31.680 --> 0:57:33.600 in front of a crowd to make a point, or 0:57:33.640 --> 0:57:35.480 a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street where the 0:57:35.480 --> 0:57:38.320 Feds are investigating shady deeds but none of the perpetrators 0:57:38.360 --> 0:57:40.560 can recall a thing, or the bit from Meet the 0:57:40.640 --> 0:57:44.640 Fockers about a retired CIA agent's circle of trust that 0:57:44.680 --> 0:57:47.200 one came up frequently. No one is supposed to know 0:57:47.240 --> 0:57:49.800 about this. Mister Bog would tell the analysts about some 0:57:49.880 --> 0:57:52.440 piece of office gossip. We'll keep it in the circle 0:57:52.520 --> 0:57:53.120 of trust. 0:57:55.600 --> 0:57:59.120 So I guess, okay, But right away, here's where I'm 0:57:59.440 --> 0:58:03.280 again getting confused, because this blogger, they were not a 0:58:03.320 --> 0:58:06.560 threat to the company. They were a threat to that 0:58:06.800 --> 0:58:11.080 CEO yep, that they thought was wasting money, both in 0:58:11.160 --> 0:58:13.960 terms of taking a salary in terms of spending money recklessly. 0:58:14.040 --> 0:58:18.000 So this is where I didn't get why this guy, 0:58:18.200 --> 0:58:22.720 this goon took such offense at what these bloggers were 0:58:22.760 --> 0:58:26.080 doing if he was not ordered to buy the CEO, 0:58:26.120 --> 0:58:29.040 because they're gonna make the story like, yeah, all the 0:58:29.120 --> 0:58:31.600 CEO did was vaguely say wow, I don't like this, 0:58:31.720 --> 0:58:33.800 and that he went off on his own. But it's 0:58:34.480 --> 0:58:36.400 this is also the part that I could never figure 0:58:36.400 --> 0:58:37.840 out what his motivation was. 0:58:38.440 --> 0:58:40.320 Jason, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to talk about 0:58:40.320 --> 0:58:42.320 the Nazis again here because I think this is an 0:58:42.360 --> 0:58:45.120 illustrative point, not because these people are Nazis, they're not, 0:58:45.880 --> 0:58:49.200 but because it's illustrative as to how stuff like this 0:58:49.480 --> 0:58:52.560 can action like stuff like this filters down and up 0:58:52.720 --> 0:58:56.880 without necessarily commands being given. There was this understanding in 0:58:56.960 --> 0:59:00.320 the Third Reich that people who worked at variouslevels of 0:59:00.320 --> 0:59:02.920 the government should all be working towards the fearer right, 0:59:02.960 --> 0:59:05.920 which meant that rather than just waiting to get explicit 0:59:05.960 --> 0:59:09.320 instructions while you were doing something like, you know, helping 0:59:09.320 --> 0:59:12.240 to set up the architecture of genocide or of state 0:59:12.280 --> 0:59:16.320 repression in the Gestapo, you should try to figure out 0:59:16.400 --> 0:59:20.800 what Hitler wanted and provide it for him before he asked, right, 0:59:21.680 --> 0:59:23.680 And so a lot of the time we don't have 0:59:23.920 --> 0:59:25.919 a lot of there's not a lot of documentation about 0:59:26.000 --> 0:59:29.320 Hitler ordering specific crimes against humanity. What you do have 0:59:29.480 --> 0:59:32.240 is him having dinner with a bunch of his high 0:59:32.320 --> 0:59:36.600 level adjutants and aids and officials and talking vaguely about 0:59:36.720 --> 0:59:39.080 things he would like to see happen. And then they 0:59:39.120 --> 0:59:42.720 go to their underlings and say like, Hey, these are 0:59:42.760 --> 0:59:44.680 the kind of things Hitler wants. And then it keeps 0:59:44.760 --> 0:59:47.560 kind of filtering down as people sort of try to 0:59:47.560 --> 0:59:51.320 figure out what the actual policy implications about these vague, 0:59:51.320 --> 0:59:55.200 grandiose statements ought to be. And that is not just 0:59:55.280 --> 0:59:58.680 how the Nazis work. That's how large organizations that are 0:59:58.720 --> 1:00:02.640 heavily based around and the personality of a leader at 1:00:02.640 --> 1:00:05.400 the top and pleasing that person work. And I get 1:00:05.440 --> 1:00:08.280 the feeling Devin Winnig. He is temperamental. He is someone 1:00:08.320 --> 1:00:10.440 we have some evidence has a lot of mood swings. 1:00:10.880 --> 1:00:12.520 I think a lot of people at the company have 1:00:12.560 --> 1:00:16.280 an understanding that their ability to get hired elsewhere, their 1:00:16.320 --> 1:00:19.880 ability to stay at eBay is dependent upon Devon being 1:00:19.960 --> 1:00:22.840 happy with them. And when Devin will go on rages 1:00:22.840 --> 1:00:26.160 about these people, that makes it into a priority for 1:00:26.200 --> 1:00:28.680 the lower people to find a way to deal with them, 1:00:28.680 --> 1:00:32.000 even if Devin isn't necessarily ordering them to break the law. 1:00:32.320 --> 1:00:34.680 This kind of desperation to I want to kind of 1:00:34.800 --> 1:00:38.040 proactively please the boss is how a lot of this 1:00:38.080 --> 1:00:40.840 stuff works, right, And I do think that's kind of 1:00:40.840 --> 1:00:43.479 the broad psychological thing going on here. 1:00:44.280 --> 1:00:48.320 And if I can make another extremely inappropriate comparison to 1:00:48.360 --> 1:00:51.440 this day, it's never totally clear to me if, like 1:00:51.560 --> 1:00:54.960 with the Manson family murders, right, if Charles made example, 1:00:55.360 --> 1:01:00.440 actually ordered that done, or if he was just extremely high, 1:01:00.480 --> 1:01:02.240 do you gotta go ahead kill him on put put 1:01:02.280 --> 1:01:04.920 Pete walls of their blood, and if he was just 1:01:04.960 --> 1:01:07.560 talking and then they just they they took it as 1:01:07.600 --> 1:01:10.040 an order because you know, like to this day they 1:01:10.040 --> 1:01:13.200 talk about Manton's his criminal mastermind and he manipulated everybody 1:01:13.200 --> 1:01:15.520 else around him. It's like, no, I think they were 1:01:15.560 --> 1:01:19.520 all just kind of dumb and high and they didn't know, 1:01:20.040 --> 1:01:21.919 you know, he was just random the way he does, 1:01:22.000 --> 1:01:24.480 You've seen him in interviews, and so they just went 1:01:24.520 --> 1:01:26.680 and did it, and maybe he himself didn't know if 1:01:26.720 --> 1:01:29.400 he wanted it done, because that's kind of the way 1:01:29.520 --> 1:01:30.680 people work. 1:01:31.600 --> 1:01:34.280 He you know a lot of the time. And I'm 1:01:34.320 --> 1:01:35.800 not saying, by the way, just to be clear, I'm 1:01:35.800 --> 1:01:38.920 not saying that like Hitler was not on board with 1:01:38.960 --> 1:01:41.000 the crimes committed by the regime, but he was not 1:01:41.080 --> 1:01:43.240 a nuts and bolts guy and he didn't need to be. 1:01:44.160 --> 1:01:47.920 And oftentimes that's not how things work. You have, you know, 1:01:48.000 --> 1:01:50.760 the guy, the person at the top, expressing these kind 1:01:50.760 --> 1:01:54.640 of like rage filled, grandiose goals, and he has put 1:01:54.640 --> 1:01:58.640 people in place below him who he knows will do something. 1:01:58.800 --> 1:01:59.520 He doesn't need this. 1:01:59.520 --> 1:02:03.439 This is Civix an extremely important point, and I do, 1:02:03.960 --> 1:02:06.080 I do want to stop and focus on this because 1:02:06.720 --> 1:02:11.680 this happens all over the place. You create a culture, 1:02:12.400 --> 1:02:16.240 but it is in many cases intentionally set up so 1:02:16.280 --> 1:02:18.959 that if there is backlash year you get caught doing 1:02:19.000 --> 1:02:22.640 something that you can say, well, there was no order 1:02:22.960 --> 1:02:26.480 telling them to do this. Yeah, and so trying to 1:02:26.640 --> 1:02:29.840 pin it on you with these nebulous terms of well, 1:02:29.880 --> 1:02:34.240 but you rewarded similar behavior you made it clear you 1:02:34.240 --> 1:02:37.680 weren't going to punish such behavior or whatever, that you 1:02:37.760 --> 1:02:40.160 created a culture, you hired the type of people that 1:02:40.200 --> 1:02:43.880 would do this kind of thing. It's it's hard and 1:02:43.520 --> 1:02:47.120 in this criminal this criminal case, I think it's going 1:02:47.160 --> 1:02:49.439 to turn out to be true. It's hard to pend 1:02:49.480 --> 1:02:51.400 it on the guy at the top that kind of 1:02:51.480 --> 1:02:54.960 set the stage for it to happen, right, And the 1:02:55.000 --> 1:02:57.360 people who really know what they're doing, they make sure 1:02:57.400 --> 1:02:58.479 that it's run this way. 1:02:58.920 --> 1:03:01.200 Yeah, yeah, And it's this is not just eBay, but 1:03:01.240 --> 1:03:06.800 eBay is a particularly extreme example. Now under bog As, 1:03:06.840 --> 1:03:11.000 he becomes like is he's basically running this security division 1:03:11.040 --> 1:03:16.360 within the company. eBay develops a pretty paranoid set of 1:03:16.440 --> 1:03:20.480 internal security policies. I should note, you know, because we're 1:03:20.480 --> 1:03:23.200 talking about the most irrational example of this, there's a 1:03:23.240 --> 1:03:26.720 good reason for some degree of paranoia. The year before 1:03:26.760 --> 1:03:29.760 all of this happens, everything starts to happen twenty nineteen 1:03:30.000 --> 1:03:34.240 with the Steiners, there's a mass shooting at YouTube's headquarters 1:03:34.280 --> 1:03:37.400 in San Bruno, California. The shooter in this case was 1:03:37.480 --> 1:03:42.480 Nassim Najafi Agdam, who's a vegan activist YouTuber who believed 1:03:42.520 --> 1:03:45.120 the company had filtered her channel to keep her stuff 1:03:45.160 --> 1:03:49.280 from getting viewed. She wounded three people before killing herself. 1:03:49.760 --> 1:03:52.400 And you know, it's kind of hard for me to 1:03:52.440 --> 1:03:55.959 see eBay attracting exactly that kind of thing. But also 1:03:55.960 --> 1:03:58.680 it's not hard for me to imagine someone who is 1:03:59.040 --> 1:04:03.360 not well convincing themselves that eBay has destroyed their business 1:04:03.440 --> 1:04:07.360 for some reason, and like it's not a non factor. Right. 1:04:07.440 --> 1:04:10.440 So there's this obsession Bog has with like the physical 1:04:10.480 --> 1:04:13.840 security of the company that lends to this general air 1:04:14.000 --> 1:04:16.440 of paranoia. And he would tell his colleagues in the 1:04:16.440 --> 1:04:20.040 analytics department because they're researching, they're looking into people who 1:04:20.080 --> 1:04:24.160 are critical of eBay online, right, and the reasonable end 1:04:24.200 --> 1:04:25.680 of that is we need to you know, if some 1:04:25.720 --> 1:04:27.840 people are saying on Twitter, I want to like shoot 1:04:27.920 --> 1:04:30.000 up an eBay campus or something, we need to know 1:04:30.040 --> 1:04:31.920 about that because that actually could happen. 1:04:32.080 --> 1:04:32.280 Right. 1:04:32.840 --> 1:04:35.880 But that's not the only people that they're going after. 1:04:36.120 --> 1:04:40.320 And this kind of kernel, the justification for what they're 1:04:40.320 --> 1:04:42.840 doing is where a lot of the madness comes from. 1:04:43.200 --> 1:04:46.080 And Bog kind of hypes himself up after the shooting 1:04:46.120 --> 1:04:48.640 on the importance of his role. He would tell his 1:04:48.680 --> 1:04:51.080 employees quote, we need to be ready. We're the only 1:04:51.120 --> 1:04:54.480 ones who can prevent this from happening. Bog would hold 1:04:54.480 --> 1:04:57.919 regular mass shooter drills, and as always, he would play 1:04:57.920 --> 1:05:01.040 clips from action movies and spy through to inform and 1:05:01.120 --> 1:05:03.520 motivate his staff on how to deal with the shooting. 1:05:04.080 --> 1:05:06.400 When he wasn't psyching them up about this stuff, he 1:05:06.560 --> 1:05:09.040 was frightening them with knives. This is one of my 1:05:09.040 --> 1:05:11.400 favorite stories from this guy. At one point, he like 1:05:11.680 --> 1:05:15.040 walking around there's a barbecue grill on the eBay campus, 1:05:15.360 --> 1:05:18.120 and like someone leaves a knife at the grill and 1:05:18.160 --> 1:05:20.080 he freaks out about it. He gets the whole team 1:05:20.080 --> 1:05:22.240 around him and he's like waving the knife around, ranting 1:05:22.240 --> 1:05:24.400 about how like if a deranged person found this, they 1:05:24.440 --> 1:05:26.680 could have used this to hurt somebody. And then he 1:05:26.760 --> 1:05:29.280 takes it into the security office and he stabs a 1:05:29.360 --> 1:05:31.920 chair and he makes them leave the chair with the 1:05:32.000 --> 1:05:34.680 knife in it there as a warning to everybody about 1:05:34.720 --> 1:05:37.760 how much more paranoid they need to be. So you 1:05:37.760 --> 1:05:39.880 can tell this is a man who's got like a 1:05:39.960 --> 1:05:43.880 good sense of priorities. He's responding rationally to the world. 1:05:44.000 --> 1:05:46.760 Before we get into this shit with the Steiners. 1:05:47.120 --> 1:05:50.000 I could speak for the next four and a half 1:05:50.040 --> 1:05:52.680 hours on this subject, but instead of going to try 1:05:52.720 --> 1:05:56.160 to condense it down to a few senses. There is 1:05:56.240 --> 1:06:02.480 a type of hyper performative masculinity that is all about 1:06:02.960 --> 1:06:08.000 being scared all the time. Yes, and these are the 1:06:08.000 --> 1:06:10.240 guys that have a pump shot gun like under their 1:06:10.280 --> 1:06:13.960 bed and a little quick release latch thing because like, well, 1:06:14.000 --> 1:06:16.880 somebody breaks in, I'll roll out of my bed, grab this, 1:06:17.320 --> 1:06:19.600 take out the guy at the window, shoot the guy 1:06:19.600 --> 1:06:23.680 at the door, roll into the hallway, and they spend 1:06:23.720 --> 1:06:26.680 and they think of it as being tough guy, but 1:06:26.800 --> 1:06:29.520 they're scared. They're scared to death. They go to the 1:06:29.720 --> 1:06:33.440 zoo with you know, a gun on their ankles, like 1:06:33.880 --> 1:06:36.600 there's a mass shooting at the zoo, or what if 1:06:36.640 --> 1:06:38.400 a bunch of the animals get out and it's up 1:06:38.400 --> 1:06:40.840 to me to shoot them. It's like they're living in 1:06:40.880 --> 1:06:45.880 fear and then portraying that as masculinity tough guy stuff, 1:06:45.920 --> 1:06:50.320 when it's actually the opposite. It's just constantly being overly 1:06:50.360 --> 1:06:52.640 afraid of everything all the time. 1:06:53.240 --> 1:06:57.120 Yeah, I uh. We have a lot of problems with 1:06:57.280 --> 1:07:00.439 this exact kind of guy, right, and Bog is kind 1:07:00.480 --> 1:07:02.919 of one He's an example of how it works at 1:07:02.960 --> 1:07:05.520 like the top of sort of a corporate food chain. 1:07:05.600 --> 1:07:08.680 When this guy gets into security and when I kind 1:07:08.680 --> 1:07:11.640 of try to psychoanalyze him, again, we don't because he 1:07:11.680 --> 1:07:13.120 was a CIA agent, we don't get a lot of 1:07:13.120 --> 1:07:16.200 specifics of his career, but I think that he probably 1:07:16.240 --> 1:07:18.520 has you know, one of the big one of the 1:07:18.560 --> 1:07:21.880 two Watergate guys, the Dute, who was played by Woody 1:07:21.920 --> 1:07:24.120 Harrelson in one of the recent shows. I'm spacing on 1:07:24.160 --> 1:07:27.280 his name right now, was a former CIA man right, 1:07:27.320 --> 1:07:29.080 who had been a part of some of like the 1:07:29.120 --> 1:07:32.920 regime chain shit in Central America, but not doing like 1:07:33.080 --> 1:07:37.560 exciting murdering people or handing over guns, mostly like making 1:07:37.600 --> 1:07:41.000 sure payments went where they needed to go in handling paperwork. 1:07:41.080 --> 1:07:44.200 So he is part of these sketchy, scary, like very 1:07:44.280 --> 1:07:47.760 movie worthy plots, but in a really boring way. And 1:07:47.800 --> 1:07:50.680 then when he leaves, he's kind of insecure about the 1:07:50.680 --> 1:07:53.200 fact that he doesn't actually know how to do anything cool. 1:07:53.360 --> 1:07:55.480 And that's where a lot of the dumb shit with 1:07:55.520 --> 1:07:58.280 the Watergate break ins come in. Is like this guy 1:07:58.320 --> 1:08:01.280 is convinced, well, I was at the sea doing shady shit, 1:08:01.400 --> 1:08:04.160 I should be able to do something like this even 1:08:04.200 --> 1:08:06.120 though he doesn't actually know how to do anything but 1:08:06.720 --> 1:08:07.640 file paperwork. 1:08:07.960 --> 1:08:10.480 Yeah, they don't actually know how. This stuff is done 1:08:10.720 --> 1:08:13.240 by the people that are actually good at doing the 1:08:13.320 --> 1:08:14.480 dirty tricks. 1:08:14.440 --> 1:08:17.960 Right right, Yeah, And that is the feeling that I 1:08:18.000 --> 1:08:18.799 get with Bog. 1:08:19.600 --> 1:08:19.680 So. 1:08:20.920 --> 1:08:24.560 Bogg's team consists of about a half a dozen analysts, 1:08:24.600 --> 1:08:26.760 which when he gets hired, are all are I think 1:08:26.840 --> 1:08:30.040 mostly men. But by May of twenty eighteen, after he's 1:08:30.040 --> 1:08:31.559 been there, I think a year or two, he had 1:08:31.680 --> 1:08:35.200 hired or fired and hired people until the entire team 1:08:35.320 --> 1:08:38.479 was very young women. This is the kind of environment 1:08:38.520 --> 1:08:41.600 where no one feels safe asking him about this, but 1:08:41.680 --> 1:08:44.040 he would explain it to them anyway by playing a 1:08:44.120 --> 1:08:47.280 video of Facebook Cheryl Sandberg giving a speech on how 1:08:47.280 --> 1:08:50.080 there aren't enough female leaders. And I'm going to quote 1:08:50.080 --> 1:08:52.720 from the New York Times again, Miss Sandberg did not 1:08:52.840 --> 1:08:55.519 say these women should all be young and blonde. Charlie's 1:08:55.560 --> 1:08:58.920 Angels and Jim's Angels were their nicknames in the executive suite, 1:08:59.080 --> 1:09:01.519 but miss z, which is one of his young employees, 1:09:01.600 --> 1:09:04.080 wasn't about to point that out. Women got fired too, 1:09:04.160 --> 1:09:07.000 and afterward the survivors would whisper about why one departed 1:09:07.000 --> 1:09:10.320 analyst had been reprimanded for not smiling in front of executives. 1:09:10.520 --> 1:09:12.920 Another was let go because she's sang to keep herself 1:09:12.920 --> 1:09:15.479 awake during the night shift, a third because she chewed 1:09:15.479 --> 1:09:19.160 on her pen. So, you know, just to give you 1:09:19.200 --> 1:09:21.439 a picture of this guy, he makes all of his 1:09:21.479 --> 1:09:23.960 employees young and blonde. Everyone at the C suite is 1:09:24.000 --> 1:09:26.720 aware of this. They make Charlie's Angels joke about it, 1:09:26.840 --> 1:09:28.880 jokes about it, and then he'll fire them if they 1:09:28.880 --> 1:09:31.840 don't smile enough or you know, aren't acting cute enough 1:09:31.920 --> 1:09:35.720 for his behavior. Again, very you know, a guy we're 1:09:35.760 --> 1:09:38.880 all well familiar with. To take the creep factor up 1:09:38.920 --> 1:09:42.280 a notch, Bog and his top assistant, Stephanie Popp ordered 1:09:42.280 --> 1:09:44.280 the rest of the analyst team to refer to them 1:09:44.320 --> 1:09:48.040 as mom and dad, repeatedly telling them we're a family. 1:09:48.360 --> 1:09:53.720 Which it just sounds like a nightmare working for this team. So, 1:09:53.800 --> 1:09:57.120 with his Charlie's Angel style hr violation of a team 1:09:57.200 --> 1:10:01.559 in place, Bog started watching the sty website like a hawk. 1:10:01.760 --> 1:10:05.160 As you know. In May of twenty nineteen, the CEO 1:10:05.280 --> 1:10:09.760 began sending more and more messages about their content. That month, May, 1:10:10.040 --> 1:10:13.240 Ena published an article revealing that Devin Winnig had directed 1:10:13.280 --> 1:10:16.080 corporate funds to build what she described as a quote 1:10:16.160 --> 1:10:19.879 lavish New York City pub style lounge on their campus. 1:10:20.240 --> 1:10:22.760 This was, in fact, a scale replica of a New 1:10:22.840 --> 1:10:27.719 York City bar, Walker's West, built on the eBay campus 1:10:27.920 --> 1:10:32.120 entirely for eBay employees. I don't know why this particular 1:10:32.240 --> 1:10:35.040 bar is important, Like I think it's a popular bar. 1:10:35.120 --> 1:10:37.439 I think it's just a bar. Winning thought was cool, 1:10:37.840 --> 1:10:41.960 So he spent shareholder money building a perfect replica, and 1:10:42.240 --> 1:10:45.160 it opened at three pm every day on the eBay campus. 1:10:46.640 --> 1:10:49.599 So again, the fact that there's a bar on campus 1:10:49.640 --> 1:10:53.000 and everyone is drinking is not a non factor in 1:10:53.040 --> 1:10:55.160 some of the decisions that are going to be made here. 1:10:56.360 --> 1:10:58.680 ENA's article on the construction of this pub has the 1:10:58.720 --> 1:11:02.200 same slightly critical professional tone is her other work. Quote 1:11:02.360 --> 1:11:05.559 sure seems like an unnecessary expense for a company watching 1:11:05.600 --> 1:11:08.000 its market share get eaten up by Amazon and being 1:11:08.040 --> 1:11:12.040 warned about overspending by a major investor. This is what 1:11:12.400 --> 1:11:16.679 kind of infuriates people at the eBay's executive level. Bog 1:11:16.840 --> 1:11:19.479 gets the article, and he's scared that someone at Elliott's 1:11:19.520 --> 1:11:21.479 going to read it, and so he forwards a link 1:11:21.600 --> 1:11:25.240 to the CEO, who forwards it to an underling executive, 1:11:25.280 --> 1:11:28.679 who sends it to a PR consultant and complains, I'm 1:11:28.680 --> 1:11:32.000 no longer just accepting ignore as a broader strategy and 1:11:32.080 --> 1:11:35.120 won a fight back, looking forward to talking asap to 1:11:35.120 --> 1:11:38.000 get your assessment of how to do that most effectively, 1:11:38.760 --> 1:11:41.559 and this excerpt from the subsequent court filing describes what 1:11:41.640 --> 1:11:46.439 happens next. Thereafter, eBay Communications employees sent information to the 1:11:46.439 --> 1:11:49.720 consultant about the Steiners, including their buying selling history on 1:11:49.760 --> 1:11:53.439 eBay and the perspective of eBay employees who knew them honor. 1:11:53.439 --> 1:11:57.120 About May thirty first, twenty nineteen, Executive two in Executive 1:11:57.120 --> 1:12:00.880 three exchanged messages regarding Ena Steiner in e Commerce Fights 1:12:01.000 --> 1:12:04.280 and Relevant Part, Executive two described an e Commerce Bights 1:12:04.400 --> 1:12:08.520 article discussing Executive one that's the CEO's presentation to shareholders 1:12:08.720 --> 1:12:13.640 during eBay's twenty nineteen annual meetings as shockingly reasonable. Executive 1:12:13.680 --> 1:12:17.200 three preferred to Ena Steiner as a cow. Executive two 1:12:17.320 --> 1:12:21.200 responded her day is coming. Executive three stated, I can't wait. 1:12:21.479 --> 1:12:23.600 Jim Baw came to me with some thoughts, and I 1:12:23.640 --> 1:12:26.439 told him to stand down and leave it alone. Executive 1:12:26.479 --> 1:12:29.400 two responded, you are being too kind. Tell them to 1:12:29.400 --> 1:12:32.160 be my advisor on this issue. Sometimes you just need 1:12:32.160 --> 1:12:35.160 to make an example out of someone. We are too nice. 1:12:35.280 --> 1:12:38.080 She needs to be crushed. So I want to go 1:12:38.160 --> 1:12:41.840 over the escalation here, right, These two executives, they get 1:12:41.880 --> 1:12:44.080 the message from the CEO, and then they start talking 1:12:44.240 --> 1:12:46.840 about Steiner and what they need to do about her, 1:12:47.240 --> 1:12:51.439 and Executive number two is like, well she, I mean, 1:12:51.439 --> 1:12:55.520 her presentation on like the CEO's shareholder meeting was really reasonable. 1:12:55.840 --> 1:12:57.400 And then the other guy is like, yeah, but she's 1:12:57.439 --> 1:13:00.200 a cow. And then they start making these increasingly like 1:13:00.280 --> 1:13:03.040 movie let like threats her day is coming, will make 1:13:03.080 --> 1:13:05.240 an example out of her, She needs to be crushed. 1:13:05.760 --> 1:13:08.800 The the escalation from like, well, this is a pretty 1:13:08.840 --> 1:13:11.400 reasonable piece of reporting from we need to destroy this 1:13:11.520 --> 1:13:13.840 human being happens in the space of a couple of 1:13:13.880 --> 1:13:17.000 text messages, which I find really interesting. 1:13:17.360 --> 1:13:19.720 And I feel like we've left a lot of the 1:13:19.800 --> 1:13:25.639 listeners behind because there's such a disconnect the problem, like, again, 1:13:25.720 --> 1:13:29.439 the fear that these investors were going to see this article. 1:13:30.000 --> 1:13:33.320 The problem is not the article. The problem is that 1:13:33.360 --> 1:13:35.120 you built that goddamn bar. 1:13:35.439 --> 1:13:37.800 Why did you spend all that money at a bar? 1:13:38.560 --> 1:13:40.800 It's like, well, this is you know, this is the 1:13:40.920 --> 1:13:44.120 last straw that she told everyone about the bar we built. 1:13:44.160 --> 1:13:46.720 It's like, no, no, no, back up, you you you went 1:13:46.800 --> 1:13:50.320 one step too far. Your problem didn't start with a 1:13:50.439 --> 1:13:54.160 blogger noticing you built a replica of a New York 1:13:54.240 --> 1:13:57.040 bar for millions of dollars. It's that you did that 1:13:57.160 --> 1:14:01.080 at all. Because, after all, if she hadn't made that up, 1:14:01.320 --> 1:14:04.559 if that was fake, well it's easy you can just 1:14:05.000 --> 1:14:06.800 don't go out and disprove it and say, hey, this 1:14:06.840 --> 1:14:09.240 is a lie, this is a libelis it's the fact 1:14:09.280 --> 1:14:11.600 that what she was saying is true that made us 1:14:11.600 --> 1:14:15.880 so a damaging So now focus on why why is 1:14:15.880 --> 1:14:18.800 it that what she said was true? That was your 1:14:18.840 --> 1:14:19.800 own actions? 1:14:20.200 --> 1:14:23.759 And she finds out about this because the contractor eBay 1:14:23.840 --> 1:14:27.320 hires like puts a page up on their website like 1:14:27.640 --> 1:14:30.880 with pictures of the construction and like how much it 1:14:31.000 --> 1:14:33.200 costs in everything, because they you know, that's how the 1:14:33.240 --> 1:14:38.559 contractor gets additional business. And Ena just finds it googling around, like, oh, 1:14:38.680 --> 1:14:40.360 it seems like they spent a lot of money on 1:14:40.400 --> 1:14:45.080 this fucking thing, like the absolute the number one refusal 1:14:45.120 --> 1:14:46.920 to see that, like, well, it's your own action that's 1:14:46.920 --> 1:14:49.120 getting you the bad attention and the fact that, like 1:14:49.160 --> 1:14:52.000 and you didn't even take any efforts to stop someone 1:14:52.080 --> 1:14:54.800 from finding this out. You know, you could have had 1:14:54.880 --> 1:14:57.559 them do in NBA, right, you didn't have to let 1:14:57.600 --> 1:15:00.160 them publish an article about it on their website. Not 1:15:00.160 --> 1:15:05.160 think anyone would notice anyway. Bog after this point, gets 1:15:05.160 --> 1:15:09.720 the go ahead to actually begin offensive actions against the Steiners, 1:15:10.000 --> 1:15:13.080 and on June sixth, he tasks his team with tracking 1:15:13.120 --> 1:15:16.599 all of INA's articles and social media posts concerning eBay. 1:15:16.880 --> 1:15:20.040 On June seventh, he sends a contractor, a retired police 1:15:20.080 --> 1:15:23.920 captain named Gilbert, to surveil the Steiner's home in the 1:15:23.960 --> 1:15:27.560 Boston area. The day after this, Bog himself called the 1:15:27.600 --> 1:15:29.519 Steiner's home in the middle of the night and hung 1:15:29.600 --> 1:15:33.439 up as soon as they answered. The harassment campaign had begun. 1:15:33.520 --> 1:15:36.000 And it is amusing to me that apparently the CIA 1:15:36.160 --> 1:15:39.080 training that this guy had told him, like, start by 1:15:39.120 --> 1:15:41.600 trolling them on social media, then you call them and 1:15:41.640 --> 1:15:44.080 you hang up. I guess this might be why we 1:15:44.200 --> 1:15:47.960 lost Cuba. Unfortunately, as with Cuba, things are going to 1:15:48.080 --> 1:15:50.360 escalate pretty rapidly from here, and we're going to cover 1:15:50.560 --> 1:15:55.080 that and more Jason on Thursday's episode. Right now, we're 1:15:55.080 --> 1:15:58.320 going to cover your books that people can buy or 1:15:58.400 --> 1:16:00.799 in one case, pre order right now. 1:16:02.600 --> 1:16:05.679 Yes, the new book is called I'm starting to worry 1:16:05.800 --> 1:16:08.800 about this Black Box of Doom. Yeah, it's up for 1:16:08.880 --> 1:16:11.200 pure It is that on September twenty fourth. If you 1:16:11.320 --> 1:16:14.720 are hearing this after that date, it's already out. If 1:16:14.760 --> 1:16:17.439 it's not, then that means it got pulled off shelves 1:16:17.439 --> 1:16:20.240 and I'm probably in jail or something, or I got 1:16:20.280 --> 1:16:24.360 canceled somehow. There's probably an equally interesting story in that. Otherwise. Yeah, 1:16:24.400 --> 1:16:28.360 it's available in every format, including an audio, ebook, hardcover. 1:16:29.000 --> 1:16:31.880 I do not read the audiobook. I'm not an audiobook narrator. 1:16:31.920 --> 1:16:34.360 People keep asking me that that would be a disaster. 1:16:34.479 --> 1:16:35.880 They hired a professional. 1:16:36.520 --> 1:16:39.120 Yeah, I would love it if if the same thing 1:16:39.160 --> 1:16:41.639 happened to you. That happened to uh, oh shit, what's 1:16:41.640 --> 1:16:43.720 his name? Tom Clancy that one time where he like 1:16:43.800 --> 1:16:48.439 accidentally described a nuclear submarine so accurately the government had 1:16:48.520 --> 1:16:54.879 to sit down with them. Anyway, you know, read Jason's 1:16:54.880 --> 1:16:58.720 books before he is arrested for accurately describing aspects of 1:16:58.760 --> 1:17:02.719 our nuclear defense. Try and listen to the remaining podcast 1:17:02.760 --> 1:17:06.240 on this network before we get taken out for I 1:17:06.240 --> 1:17:09.040 don't know, I don't have a joke ready, whatever, I'm tired, 1:17:09.160 --> 1:17:15.000 Go to Hell. I love you. Behind the Bastards is 1:17:15.000 --> 1:17:17.800 a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool 1:17:17.840 --> 1:17:22.120 Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check 1:17:22.160 --> 1:17:25.120 us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever 1:17:25.200 --> 1:17:26.680 you get your podcasts.