Speaker 1: Also media. All right, everyone, welcome back to Behind the Bastards.
Speaker 1: I'm Robert Evans, and we have some sad news for
Speaker 1: the audience. Up at the top of the episode. Yesterday morning,
Speaker 1: at about eight hundred hours, Sophie Lichterman's plane left Tokyo
Speaker 1: bound for Manila. It was shot down over the Sea
Speaker 1: of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors. She'll
Speaker 1: be back next week, but with me this week is
Speaker 1: our beloved returning guest, Jason Pargin. Jason, do you think
Speaker 1: that mash joke is going to work with our audience?
Speaker 1: Like years before I was born?
Speaker 2: It's so dangerous because if there's any kind of an
Speaker 2: air disaster the day this episode's supposed to go up,
Speaker 2: then we've got to go in and well, no, that
Speaker 2: just makes it funnier.
Speaker 1: I guess that makes it fun The only time I've
Speaker 1: removed a joke for something like that was we made
Speaker 1: some jokes at the start of the COVID pandemic when
Speaker 1: I assumed it was going to be like a Sarr's
Speaker 1: situation and we cut those bad boys out before air.
Speaker 1: That did not age well with the entire country lockdown.
Speaker 1: Jason Pargen You are a my former boss over at
Speaker 1: cracked dot com, which was briefly defunct but is now funked,
Speaker 1: but neither of us work there anymore. You are the
Speaker 1: author of a number of wonderful books. Do you want
Speaker 1: to talk about the book that you've got that's going
Speaker 1: to be out in about two weeks at the time
Speaker 1: which people hear these episodes.
Speaker 2: Yes, the book is a standalone novel called I'm Starting
Speaker 2: to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It is
Speaker 2: not a part of any series. It doesn't require any
Speaker 2: prior knowledge of me or this podcast or anything else.
Speaker 2: Anyone can enjoy it as long as you enjoy books.
Speaker 2: Robert gave a blurb on it, very kind. He said,
Speaker 2: strangely that the book saved his marriage, which surprives everyone.
Speaker 2: I didn't know he was married. It's not that kind,
Speaker 2: I was not.
Speaker 1: That's that's the magic of your writing, Joseph.
Speaker 2: But so far the reviews are getting equal equally. The
Speaker 2: positive ones are half saying, it's fun. It's a fun
Speaker 2: little roller coaster ride. You can read in the beach.
Speaker 2: It's something you can read on the on the toilet,
Speaker 2: like if you don't want to get fecal particles on
Speaker 2: your phone. Sure, this is something you can have on
Speaker 2: the toilet instead, and the other half reviews are like,
Speaker 2: I just put it down and stared at the wall
Speaker 2: for a while, and then I called my mom. I
Speaker 2: decided I had to totally change my life. I deleted
Speaker 2: all the apps off my phone. So I guess it's
Speaker 2: kind of It depends on how you want to approach it.
Speaker 2: If you just want to breezy read, it's there for you.
Speaker 2: But apparently some people they have decided to make permanent
Speaker 2: life changes after reading it.
Speaker 1: I mean that's every author's goal, is for the readers
Speaker 1: to make ill considered, rash decisions that alter the entire
Speaker 1: course of their existence after finishing your book. Yeah, I've
Speaker 1: been reading your books. I mean I literally started more
Speaker 1: than twenty years ago, when I was an adolescent in
Speaker 1: high school, long before the cracked days, when you were
Speaker 1: still publishing stuff on the internet. And it's been gratifying
Speaker 1: to see that you are one of I don't know,
Speaker 1: like a dozen people in the country who can make
Speaker 1: a living writing novels. I'm very happy that continues to work, and.
Speaker 3: It will see we've reached a point where I know
Speaker 3: for a fact their narrative is going to be geriatric
Speaker 3: TikTok star tries to write a book, tries to cash
Speaker 3: in on his TikTok fame.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, I was writing books before social media existed,
Speaker 2: before you could upload video to the Internet. I was
Speaker 2: writing books. This is no I'm a washed up author
Speaker 2: trying to reclaim my success us with TikTok. It's not
Speaker 2: the other way around. See.
Speaker 1: I even had this joke planned when I came in.
Speaker 1: I was going to do like this series of bits
Speaker 1: about how you were actually gen Z because of your
Speaker 1: TikTok stardom, But you've ruined that. Although Jason, I did
Speaker 1: want to say to start this off, you know Sophie's
Speaker 1: not here. This episode is just you and I and you,
Speaker 1: as a gen Z expert on the Tiktoks, know that
Speaker 1: all the kids these days are using the term raw
Speaker 1: dog for situations like this, which is deeply upsetting to
Speaker 1: our ears as old men. But but the kids, the
Speaker 1: kids love using it for everything from sitting on a
Speaker 1: plane without a book to not taking psychiatric medication that's
Speaker 1: prescribed to you from your doctor. So are you ready
Speaker 1: to uh gen Z terminology? This podcast episode that you suggested.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's let's let's raw dog. Let's raw dog. Goon this,
Speaker 2: let's goon this episode. Where are some other terms we.
Speaker 1: This won't be ohio. I hear the kids are using
Speaker 1: Ohio as a tur for mid or unimpressive. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all right sometimes, Jason, this is a story that
Speaker 1: you had suggested, and the bastard of this story is
Speaker 1: kind of the entire c suite at eBay. It's a
Speaker 1: lot worse that I think listeners are going to be
Speaker 1: ready for. But to give some context, I want to
Speaker 1: actually start by peeling back outside of eBay, because as
Speaker 1: a heads up, the story we're telling is the tale
Speaker 1: of how eBay's internal security agency decided that a group
Speaker 1: of elderly blog a pair of elderly bloggers were mortal
Speaker 1: enemies of the corporation and deployed insane degrees of force
Speaker 1: and violence to attempt to stop them from publishing blogs.
Speaker 1: But I wanted to peel back a bit and start
Speaker 1: by talking about like where the industry of like corporate
Speaker 1: intelligence is like private intelligence services that a company can
Speaker 1: hire to deal with threats to their profitability, because I
Speaker 1: think it's one of the undertold stories of the twenty
Speaker 1: first century, and it's partly undertold because people who tell
Speaker 1: it tend to get sued.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting because I read this story and read
Speaker 2: the results of it, and like the result, the legal
Speaker 2: process and all that, and I could not make heads
Speaker 2: or tails of how any of this could have happened.
Speaker 2: And when I try to read background on it, could
Speaker 2: not make heads or tails of how any of this
Speaker 2: could have happened. Because you know, if you disappoint some
Speaker 2: guy who owns a mom and pop shop and he's
Speaker 2: kind of a douchebag or whatever, you can see that
Speaker 2: guy like mailing you a dead rat or something, the
Speaker 2: idea of upsetting eBay and they start mailing you dead
Speaker 2: animals and the mail and that's not the weirdest part
Speaker 2: of the story. It gets so off the rails. This
Speaker 2: is the part I don't have is how there are
Speaker 2: people the company who have this mindset because this story
Speaker 2: goes to places that you don't see fictional stories going.
Speaker 2: There's no plot line on succession like this, and it
Speaker 2: would have come off as corny if there was.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it would be kind of unbelievable. But we're getting
Speaker 1: ahead of ourselves and We're done with the cold open, Jason.
Speaker 1: For whatever reason, the company now has us do that
Speaker 1: little cold open thing. The listener will have heard an
Speaker 1: ad in between where I just said the cold open's done,
Speaker 1: and then Jason. But now we're warmed up, We're hot.
Speaker 1: Are you ready to go? Are you excited that our
Speaker 1: corporate overlords now make us do a cold open that
Speaker 1: has improved the quality of the show. I'm sure so.
Speaker 1: On February eleventh, twenty eleven, The New York Times published
Speaker 1: a story about hackers who had forced their way into
Speaker 1: the computer systems of a security company called HB Gary.
Speaker 1: At this point, the public conception mostly put spying as
Speaker 1: the domain of nation state actors. Right like, if you
Speaker 1: had asked the average person, are there like spy agencies
Speaker 1: in the employee of like random finance companies, they probably
Speaker 1: would have said, well, like, not real ones. You know,
Speaker 1: you've probably got like some sort of physical security for
Speaker 1: the buildings and stuff, but nothing like the FBI or whatever.
Speaker 1: But that view was already outdated in two thousand eleven.
Speaker 1: The HB Gary hack revealed a different world of espionage,
Speaker 1: paid for by the highest bidder and most importantly petty
Speaker 1: to an almost unfathomable degree, rather than the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that, like cyberpunk stories had primed us to expect
Speaker 1: from our mega corporations, like a high profile assassinations and
Speaker 1: burglaries to steal priceless inventions. Most of the stolen documents
Speaker 1: from HB. Gary revealed them like pitching their corporate clients
Speaker 1: ways to attack the enemies of like Bank of America
Speaker 1: and the Chamber of Commerce, and what we would consider
Speaker 1: incredibly petty ways, ways that kind of more than anything,
Speaker 1: resemble the way people fight online rather than like, again,
Speaker 1: the sort of sinister stuff that like you're playing like
Speaker 1: a cyberpunk pen and paper game, your team's going to
Speaker 1: be doing.
Speaker 2: Because I had heard of corporate espionage, which I always
Speaker 2: thought was just somebody sneaking into another company to try
Speaker 2: to get a look at their design on a thing,
Speaker 2: and I just don' that was a thing forever. But
Speaker 2: why you're describing and what I know is coming in
Speaker 2: this story, it's almost like a type of psychological guerrilla
Speaker 2: warfare or just yeah, just trolling people. I don't get it.
Speaker 1: Well, and it's important to understand. I think part of
Speaker 1: what kind of brings some context to this is if
Speaker 1: you actually look at what the FBI was doing at
Speaker 1: the height of the civil rights movement, most of their
Speaker 1: actual physical work was nothing that would make a particularly
Speaker 1: impressive movie. It was literally, we have hired different sort
Speaker 1: of like a mix of like thugs and just like
Speaker 1: people that we think we can get to like workforce
Speaker 1: for a few bucks, to like trail every black person
Speaker 1: on the campus of this college, right like literally like
Speaker 1: that that's a big part of like when when those
Speaker 1: activists broke into that FBI office and leaked all those
Speaker 1: files to the Washington Post. This was a year YouTube
Speaker 1: of wore Watergate. That was a big part of what
Speaker 1: was revealed is that there were like colleges where the
Speaker 1: FBI was just surveilling like every black student at the college,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't even with FBI agents. A lot of
Speaker 1: the time, they had just hired goons to follow these
Speaker 1: kids around in case they might do something. So to
Speaker 1: an extent, I guess part of what you have to understand,
Speaker 1: if you understand, if you study the history of espionage,
Speaker 1: one percent of it is really cool stuff where they're
Speaker 1: making like polonium darts to shoot out of umbrellas and
Speaker 1: assassinating governmental leaders, and ninety nine percent of it is
Speaker 1: just we hired a dumb guy to follow them around,
Speaker 1: and they're going to know the dumb guys following them
Speaker 1: because he's a big like he's not very good at it.
Speaker 1: But we don't really like, what if they notice, what's
Speaker 1: the harm to us? We want them scared, right. The
Speaker 1: whole point is to just intimidate people, and that's largely
Speaker 1: I think that is the logic that a lot of
Speaker 1: these corporate security firms function on. It doesn't matter as
Speaker 1: much are our plans super well thought out. What matters
Speaker 1: is that we kind of brute force people into being
Speaker 1: scared to fuck with us, right, And that's the kind
Speaker 1: of that's the kind of like plots that HB. Gary
Speaker 1: was shopping around to and they never again, none of
Speaker 1: the stuff is ever as direct as you want it
Speaker 1: to be. So HB. Gary, which is the security company,
Speaker 1: would send the plans they had to this law firm
Speaker 1: called Hunton and Williams, which represented all of these big
Speaker 1: like Bank of America represented the Chamber of Commerce, which
Speaker 1: itself represents a bunch of different financial institutions in the
Speaker 1: company or in the country. In one document, HB. Gary's
Speaker 1: chief executive Aaron Barr offered to publicize biographic details about
Speaker 1: a un organizer that had challenged the Chamber of Commerce
Speaker 1: when it opposed the Obama Admin's healthcare reform package. And
Speaker 1: you hear that and it's like, oh, did he like
Speaker 1: have a drunk driving arrest? Did he kill someone with
Speaker 1: his car? No, I want to read you a direct
Speaker 1: quote from Bar on the salacious details he wanted to
Speaker 1: reveal about this union organizer. They go to a Jewish
Speaker 1: church in DC. They have two kids, a son and
Speaker 1: a daughter. And first off that year, I'm sorry twenty eleven, right,
Speaker 1: I think it's a synagogue. I don't think you call
Speaker 1: it a Jewish church. I mean, I guess that's not
Speaker 1: like technically wrong, but like it'd be weird if you
Speaker 1: called it like a Muslim church, Like we have words
Speaker 1: for those, but I don't know, it's weirder that he
Speaker 1: thought that. That was like the damning detail that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: he goes to synagogue and he has two kids. That's
Speaker 1: gonna you blew this all wide open. Hb Gary. A
Speaker 1: week later, Barr offered to create in depth target dossier's
Speaker 1: and keep that in mind because we're going to run
Speaker 1: into that tactic again when we go back to eBay,
Speaker 1: with the goal of quote mitigating the effect of adversarial
Speaker 1: groups like US Chamber Watch, which was a citizens group
Speaker 1: that like criticized and protested the US Chamber of Commerce.
Speaker 1: One proposition was to publish the petty criminal record of
Speaker 1: a member in the group. In another instance, HB Gary
Speaker 1: offered to work with Peter Teal's Palantier, which is a
Speaker 1: private spy company, to attack WikiLeaks before it could release
Speaker 1: a tranch of emails from inside Bank of America related
Speaker 1: to the financial crash. And this is a little bit
Speaker 1: closer to like the serious cyberpunk stories like WikiLeaks, they're
Speaker 1: doing some serious business in twenty eleven. This at least
Speaker 1: sounds like, you know, a little more exciting. But their
Speaker 1: specific plan to attack WikiLeaks was to submit a bunch
Speaker 1: of fake documents and then when WikiLeaks reported on them,
Speaker 1: exposed them as forgeries to damage, specifically to damage Glenn
Speaker 1: Greenwald's career, which if you'd just given him a little longer, Glenn,
Speaker 1: Glenn was going to do that on his own.
Speaker 2: I guess I'm already confused because we have worked in
Speaker 2: corporate environments where every hour every minute, every penny is
Speaker 2: being watched, and the question is, well, how does this
Speaker 2: contribute to the bottom line. So the idea that you've got,
Speaker 2: like what really, to me sounds like a dirty tricks department. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they are reporting to somebody, They're on the payroll
Speaker 2: with a job title. What they're doing is being documented somewhere.
Speaker 2: It feels like the type of thing that a company
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy would do back when you you know,
Speaker 2: the way you break your union is you go just
Speaker 2: burn the guy's house down or whatever to try to intimidate.
Speaker 2: But you would not think in twenty eleven or whatever
Speaker 2: that you still have a dirty tricks department. And I
Speaker 2: know that I sound naive. I guess I just assumed
Speaker 2: we had moved into, you know, a world where you
Speaker 2: just sue people when you want to silence them. You
Speaker 2: would not go digging up, you know, like, hey, there's
Speaker 2: rumors if these people are Jews, what's going on with that?
Speaker 1: I wonder how much of it is. These CEOs and
Speaker 1: stuff are probably all older. They're probably all like mostly
Speaker 1: baby boomers. You know, in twenty eleven, you would imagine
Speaker 1: the guys running big banks or probably most of them
Speaker 1: probably aren't gen X, maybe a few, and I wonder,
Speaker 1: I mean, even if they were gen X, they were
Speaker 1: probably raised on stories of Watergate. I wonder how much
Speaker 1: of this is just like reading about the dirty tricks
Speaker 1: that the Nixon white House did and assuming like, well,
Speaker 1: that's probably what we should do with our right for him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: went well for Nixon. That's why he had so many
Speaker 1: terms as president. Now, the fact that this hack of
Speaker 1: HB Gary happened in the first place was because Barr,
Speaker 1: who was like the dude actually submitting these plans to
Speaker 1: that legal firm, had made public threats to the leaders
Speaker 1: of Anonymous, the leaderless hacking collective a couple of weeks earlier,
Speaker 1: and he had even stated that he had information about
Speaker 1: the names of several of their quote leaders that he
Speaker 1: was about to reveal, which I think was a lie,
Speaker 1: and Anonymous kind of called his bluff, which is when
Speaker 1: all of these emails got leaked, and for good measure,
Speaker 1: they took control of Bar's Twitter account just to fuck
Speaker 1: with him. Now, this led to Bars stepping down as
Speaker 1: CEO and basically begging Anonymous to leave him alone for
Speaker 1: the sake of his children. So now one of the
Speaker 1: things that you saw. As soon as like bar got embarrassed,
Speaker 1: is Palenteer and all of these other companies that he
Speaker 1: had been talking about working with sought to distance themselves
Speaker 1: from HB. Gary. Hey, this was just some lone asshole
Speaker 1: making like proposals to his court, Like we never agreed
Speaker 1: to do any of these jobs with them. We had
Speaker 1: Palenteer would never do anything this unethical, right, like you
Speaker 1: can trust us. This was just one lone asshole. Fast
Speaker 1: forward about six years two twenty seventeen, when Harvey Weinstein's
Speaker 1: life explodes and stories start to come out that he
Speaker 1: had used a different spy for higher company, Black Cube,
Speaker 1: in order to harass a lot of the women that
Speaker 1: he had abused and to try to stop the story
Speaker 1: that The New York Times ultimately published from coming out
Speaker 1: about him. Now, Black Cube, the firm that he used,
Speaker 1: was based in Israel and staffed with a bunch of
Speaker 1: former Massad guys. And if HB. Gary is kind of
Speaker 1: like bush league Black Cubes like the New York Yankees, right,
Speaker 1: this is a high dollar, high power corporate spy firm
Speaker 1: with absolutely no ethical or moral constraints and a terrifying
Speaker 1: degree of power. That said like HB. Gary. They wielded
Speaker 1: this with like an almost there's always this degree of
Speaker 1: like incompetence that I think is just born from and
Speaker 1: I think all the HB. Gary guys, a lot of
Speaker 1: them probably came out of the government too. If you
Speaker 1: work in government intel agencies all your life, you have
Speaker 1: this shield of working for the government, and then you
Speaker 1: move into the private sector and everything is a lot
Speaker 1: harder and you don't you no longer have that kind
Speaker 1: of protection, and so you notice just like dumb shit, right.
Speaker 1: That's that's kind of those thing to me when studying
Speaker 1: like Black Cube and this constellation of other Israeli companies
Speaker 1: that all have like former government agents working for them. Specifically,
Speaker 1: the way that Black Cube went after some of Weinstein's
Speaker 1: accusers was they hired had a bunch of investigators to
Speaker 1: make false identities to try to befriend some of the
Speaker 1: women online who were accusing Weinstein, with the goal of
Speaker 1: basically disgracing them. And it was just kind of a
Speaker 1: wildly unsuccessful plan that showed I think a degree of
Speaker 1: like just assuming everyone was dumb that was involved in this,
Speaker 1: Like none of these people would be intelligent enough to
Speaker 1: know that Weinstein might have people going after them, none
Speaker 1: of them would have any precautions in place, none of
Speaker 1: them would be talking to people like Ronan Farah or
Speaker 1: talking to like anyone who might be able to advise
Speaker 1: them on like the risks that they faced going after Weinstein.
Speaker 1: It's just this, like, it's very interesting to me, the
Speaker 1: kind of arrogance that you see with these which is
Speaker 1: going to be a big part of the eBay story too.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm going to be frank here. Every single story
Speaker 2: I hear about espionage at any level is always a dumb,
Speaker 2: slapstick affair full of mistakes and people stumbling into the
Speaker 2: wrong thing, and whenever they succeed, it's almost on accident
Speaker 2: or because the people they were after were extremely stupid
Speaker 2: and made a bunch of really obvious mistakes. The listeners
Speaker 2: who listened to all your episodes, No, we did one
Speaker 2: a series on MK Ultra Yeah, which had a reputation
Speaker 2: in the conspiracy world as this other worldly alien high
Speaker 2: tech mind control manchurion candidates space age stuff, and in
Speaker 2: reality was just a lot of people getting very high
Speaker 2: on government funds and one guy who had like a
Speaker 2: little jerk off room where he watched agents like have
Speaker 2: sex with prostitutes, and it was just a bunch of
Speaker 2: very dumb people who had watched a lot of spy
Speaker 2: movies and themselves were working off of very silly, i
Speaker 2: don't know, almost childlike ideas of watch that kind of thing,
Speaker 2: of how it worked and what mind control could do.
Speaker 2: But ultimately they were just kind of drawing a government
Speaker 2: paycheck to do a bunch of idiocy. And I rarely
Speaker 2: hear anything that sounds like James Bond.
Speaker 1: That's the you get a couple of those, right, Like
Speaker 1: obviously that has happened in the past, Right you have
Speaker 1: some especially like you can go into World War Two,
Speaker 1: you can find some examples of really like effective and
Speaker 1: intelligent espionage. But I think some of it is that
Speaker 1: the fact that spy movies are such a big part
Speaker 1: of the culture has It's kind of like the issue
Speaker 1: that people say, AI learned language models are going to
Speaker 1: have where they're going to get trained on more and
Speaker 1: more stuff that's AI generated and that's going to cause
Speaker 1: additional sort of hallucinations. I think ever since the end
Speaker 1: of like the start of the Cold War, every generation
Speaker 1: of spies has been poisoned by spy movies and it's
Speaker 1: caused like it's caused a degree of inevitable degeneration.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's a big part of the eBay story, and it's
Speaker 1: there's a you know I talk about there's this journalist
Speaker 1: Sebastian Younger I admire lot and he used to work
Speaker 1: with a photo journalist who died in Libya during the
Speaker 1: early days of that civil war. But his friend, the
Speaker 1: story he was in Libya to cover was he was
Speaker 1: specifically looking to get like photos and interviews with rebels
Speaker 1: who were in the way that they were dressing and
Speaker 1: posing consciously aping Hollywood action movies, because these were all
Speaker 1: kids who had grown up on bootleg American movies, and
Speaker 1: when they realized I'm about to be fighting in a war,
Speaker 1: they all started like dressing and acting like different characters
Speaker 1: from their favorite movies. And I think his instinct was
Speaker 1: good that there is something like really important in that,
Speaker 1: and I don't think it's most people are surprised. Are
Speaker 1: not surprised to hear that, like, young men who become
Speaker 1: soldiers are influenced by action movies, right, and particularly a
Speaker 1: lot of like how they act and even their expectations
Speaker 1: of what war will be like. We just don't extend
Speaker 1: it enough to be like, no, no, that's true of
Speaker 1: all the guys in the CIA and the FBI too, right,
Speaker 1: They've all been raised on this shit and they're all
Speaker 1: changed by it. So yeah, I did want to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit more about like what some of these
Speaker 1: like hack for hire companies today are like because and
Speaker 1: this is right before we get into the eBay story,
Speaker 1: but this is kind of important. Black Cube is part
Speaker 1: of a constellation of companies, and Israel is one of
Speaker 1: the places where a lot of these companies exist. We
Speaker 1: have an industry in the United States. There's a sizeable
Speaker 1: industry that's kind of like the B tier of these
Speaker 1: hack for higher companies in India as well. And these
Speaker 1: are you know, it doesn't take they usually are not
Speaker 1: super expensive, but the amount of damage that they can
Speaker 1: do to like our collective information ecology is pretty significant.
Speaker 1: For example, a peer company to Black Cube cobwe Web Technologies,
Speaker 1: which raged about ten million dollars in twenty nineteen to
Speaker 1: build a search engine for intelligence information. Basically, all they
Speaker 1: were doing building this search engine was spearfishing huge numbers
Speaker 1: of random people to steal their personal data and then
Speaker 1: put it into a searchable database that they could sell
Speaker 1: access to, so, you know, effectively like stealing people's personal
Speaker 1: info in order to brag that, like, hey, we have
Speaker 1: something that equivocates to like a police database that you
Speaker 1: can pay for access to because we've compromised all of
Speaker 1: these different people's accounts. Cobweb's plan was to take the
Speaker 1: work that the kind of work that companies like HB
Speaker 1: Gary and black Cube had been doing for years and
Speaker 1: get more proactive with it. Right, Instead of waiting for
Speaker 1: a company to be like, I want you to target
Speaker 1: these specific people, we just get as many people as possible,
Speaker 1: trick random people into giving up their data at scale,
Speaker 1: and yeah, that's you know. There's actually an interesting report
Speaker 1: published by Meta previously Facebook recently that kind of goes
Speaker 1: into more detail on this. You can find the link
Speaker 1: in our show notes. But that report noted that like
Speaker 1: basically they've cobweb activated like fake accounts on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp,
Speaker 1: and Twitter in order to like grab just add mass
Speaker 1: information on activists, politicians, government officials, like everyone they could
Speaker 1: get to fall for their shit.
Speaker 2: But to what end? What was the final goal of
Speaker 2: that project.
Speaker 1: To have a big database that they can sell access
Speaker 1: to and you can search for They sell it to
Speaker 1: anyone who is looking for information on like they can say,
Speaker 1: like you know, if you're if you're an oil and
Speaker 1: gas company, right, and you're worried about protests in the
Speaker 1: UK by anti oil and gas protesters, like some of
Speaker 1: those people who have quote unquote defaced I don't think
Speaker 1: they've done any permanent damage to any paintings actually, but
Speaker 1: like you know those folks, right, you can pay for
Speaker 1: access to this database and we have spearfished and scraped
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who have sympathies to that group,
Speaker 1: and you can see where they are and you can,
Speaker 1: you know, set up your own surveillance potential. You can
Speaker 1: like try to infiltrate, but you'll get all this information
Speaker 1: on their their real world and their digital network. There's
Speaker 1: a lot that's come out recently about how there's this
Speaker 1: kind of unique cell phone identifying number that's supposed to
Speaker 1: be anonymous. But if you also know kind of where
Speaker 1: people live, you can figure out which cell phone goes
Speaker 1: to which person, and using information that is available through
Speaker 1: a lot of these different like data broker companies, you
Speaker 1: can track random people cell phones in the United States.
Speaker 1: If you're a corporate actor in order to like stock
Speaker 1: people who you consider to be a threat. This is
Speaker 1: the thing that's happening right now. It's very easy. It's
Speaker 1: why everyone should use a burner cell phone and light
Speaker 1: their old phone on fire every sixty days. We're always
Speaker 1: saying this, Jason. You communicate entirely through telegram, which not
Speaker 1: the app telegram, but through an old fashioned telegram. We
Speaker 1: actually have an actor portraying your voice right now, in
Speaker 1: face no one's seen you in years.
Speaker 2: Watching the Slasher movie as it took place in nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty nine and a high school kid got invited to
Speaker 2: a party via telegram? Oh my god, was that? And
Speaker 2: I was nineteen eighty nine, I was fourteen. Were we
Speaker 2: still send a telegram back then? Am I that old? That?
Speaker 1: That seems a little archaic. But anyway, this has been
Speaker 1: a long lead up to the eBay story. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to kind of set the stage for you. And
Speaker 1: now we're going to pull to an ad break and
Speaker 1: then we will come back with the story that you
Speaker 1: actually asked me to tell you today and we're back.
Speaker 1: So this all brings me to the story of the Steiners.
Speaker 1: They are an now elderly couple who back during the
Speaker 1: early days of the dot com boom, when they were
Speaker 1: a mature adult couple, got really interested in the then
Speaker 1: burgeoning field of online sales. We are talking about the
Speaker 1: mid to late nineteen nineties. David Steiner was a video
Speaker 1: producer who had a childhood fascination with yard sales, which
Speaker 1: is a strange fixation for a little kid or for
Speaker 1: an adult, for someone of any age. But you know,
Speaker 1: it takes all kinds of people to make a world,
Speaker 1: and this fascination. He was kind of one of these,
Speaker 1: you know, after like all these ponn Star shows got big,
Speaker 1: there's a much wider community of people who are kind
Speaker 1: of obsessed with folks like selling old products or antiques
Speaker 1: and you know, trying to find like hidden gyms that
Speaker 1: are worth a bunch of money. Steiner's kind of one
Speaker 1: of the very first generations of people who is like
Speaker 1: obsessed with this stuff and his particular interests. He loves
Speaker 1: like ancient marketing, promotional products, He likes antique tools, and
Speaker 1: he starts following you know, prior to eBay. There are
Speaker 1: a couple of different early auction websites on the old
Speaker 1: Internet that he gets into when he's interested in and
Speaker 1: his wife, na I think she's both like kind of
Speaker 1: maybe shares his interest to a degree, and she's also
Speaker 1: a writer with an interest in kind of doing some journalism.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen ninety nine, this is four years after
Speaker 1: eBay's launch, they start to realize, like, this company in
Speaker 1: particular is the one that's going to actually dominate online auctions.
Speaker 1: Right there had been a couple of competitors, it's clear
Speaker 1: by ninety nine that eBay is going to be the
Speaker 1: big one. And the Steiners are just kind of nerds
Speaker 1: about this stuff, so they decide to turn their obsession
Speaker 1: with this new and exciting thing into a website, which
Speaker 1: is the thing people used to do back before social media.
Speaker 1: And I, yeah, I reading about this stuff always gives
Speaker 1: me this like weird kind of nostalgia that makes me
Speaker 1: feel like an old man.
Speaker 2: In fact, I will step in and because I know
Speaker 2: that the description of these people that prow like garage sales,
Speaker 2: that makes them sound like creepy weirdos. The early days
Speaker 2: of eBay were fascinating, Yeah, because suddenly the concept of
Speaker 2: everybody's junk from all over the world is for sale
Speaker 2: and stuff that you it's like, oh my gosh, this
Speaker 2: action figure that I thought only I owned, that I
Speaker 2: lost when I was eight years old, here's this guy
Speaker 2: two thousand miles away from me who's got one. And
Speaker 2: it's I never I thought I had imagined this saying,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh, here is like the idea that all
Speaker 2: this stuff was for sale. And then it immediately created
Speaker 2: this ecosystem of people who were learning all the techniques
Speaker 2: of how to like stealthily outbid somebody and all of
Speaker 2: this stuff, and it's people forget what or if you
Speaker 2: weren't around back then. eBay was the first huge monster
Speaker 2: dot com business and.
Speaker 1: The first ones that made it clear that like there's
Speaker 1: a like not just real money, but like ways for
Speaker 1: regular people to make real money if they can figure
Speaker 1: out how to game an algorithm.
Speaker 2: That and also that stock when they went public, that
Speaker 2: was just like crypto style people getting becoming millionaires overnight.
Speaker 2: eBay was huge. So it was a fascinating scene back
Speaker 2: then because I bought and sold some stuff back in
Speaker 2: the nineties era. eBay it was just you find yourself
Speaker 2: not just in a place where you buy things. You
Speaker 2: find yourself in an ecosystem and in a cultural scene.
Speaker 2: So no, I absolutely in terms of like subjects to
Speaker 2: blog about, yeah, it's I totally get it.
Speaker 1: This is also a very smart thing to do if
Speaker 1: you're in journalism or in more broadly just kind of
Speaker 1: the industry. You and I both spent much of our
Speaker 1: working careers, and just like writing shit for the Internet,
Speaker 1: you find a thing that has just exploded and that
Speaker 1: you know is going to be massive, and you make
Speaker 1: yourself the person that people go to to read about
Speaker 1: that thing. Right, That's that's what the Steiners do. They
Speaker 1: corner this and they their independent publication starts out being
Speaker 1: named auction Bites Bytes, and you know, it's geared towards
Speaker 1: a fairly niche chunk of the Internet, people making their
Speaker 1: living auctioning items on eBay. And also, you know, increasingly
Speaker 1: as Eba becomes more and more of a big business,
Speaker 1: as it becomes clear like how much money is in
Speaker 1: this also the kind of folks who are interested in
Speaker 1: investing in eBay and companies like it now because auction
Speaker 1: bites is kind of the first website that's news for
Speaker 1: this early community of sellers, and it expands beyond eBay
Speaker 1: because soon there's Amazon and like you know, independent sellers
Speaker 1: are selling stuff on Amazon, and there's Etsy, and they
Speaker 1: cover all of that, right, Like, they change their name
Speaker 1: to e commerce Bites, which is the name that their
Speaker 1: website still exists under, and they become like the go
Speaker 1: to gumshoe reporters for people who are small and medium
Speaker 1: sized merchants selling products on these services, as well as
Speaker 1: like people in finance who are looking to do investing
Speaker 1: in the companies that actually like are are kind of
Speaker 1: the underpinning of this system. Now, if you've ever worked
Speaker 1: in an industry like e commerce, you should know that
Speaker 1: daily life is a ceaseless war between the companies that
Speaker 1: provide a platform for online sales, who want to keep
Speaker 1: as much of the money transferred through their service as
Speaker 1: possible while spending as little as possible, and the merchants
Speaker 1: who actually provide products. As a result, e Commerce Bites,
Speaker 1: most widely read articles tended to focus on fuck ups
Speaker 1: by companies like eBay. Right, e commerce Bites really winds
Speaker 1: up kind of more on the sides of the merchants,
Speaker 1: and and that leads to them having kind of an
Speaker 1: oppositional and confrontational attitude towards the corporations. Right, because largely.
Speaker 1: You know, that's how the people reading them look at
Speaker 1: the situation. You can get an example of this by
Speaker 1: looking at the site today. One August twenty sixth article
Speaker 1: by Ena promises quote a peak inside eBay payment holds.
Speaker 1: This article is based on an interview with the reader
Speaker 1: who'd sold a high priced item and had the money
Speaker 1: sent to him placed on a thirty day hold, despite
Speaker 1: the fact that the buyer had confirmed receipt of the
Speaker 1: product and satisfaction with the purchase. In an interview I
Speaker 1: found on CBS News's Sixty Minutes, Ena Steiner describes the
Speaker 1: job she and her husband did as acting as a
Speaker 1: conduit from small businesses and independent sellers to the larger
Speaker 1: corporate monolists who ran these websites. And you know that's
Speaker 1: not super interesting to most of us, right, This is
Speaker 1: not like what generally when you think of hard hitting journalism,
Speaker 1: you don't think about like people representing eBay sellers. You know,
Speaker 1: I do think that's a valuable social role, but it
Speaker 1: is not something that should have ever led to an
Speaker 1: exciting case of a deranged spy agency trying to destroy
Speaker 1: people's lives.
Speaker 2: No, but in that early era of the blogging years,
Speaker 2: there was a whole dynamic because you saw the same
Speaker 2: thing in the film in Hollywood business with sites like
Speaker 2: Ain't It Cool News, where once they got a huge
Speaker 2: readership and once they started to be seeing as something
Speaker 2: as an authority, they started to get tips and they
Speaker 2: started to break stories. And keep in mind, there's a
Speaker 2: parallel here because keep in mind, if you were a
Speaker 2: Hollywood studio, once upon a time, you had actual news
Speaker 2: outlets you were dealing with, You had reporters you were
Speaker 2: friendly with, you had a whole mechanism for managing stories, scandals,
Speaker 2: it's something you wanted covered up. So suddenly when the
Speaker 2: Internet comes along and these bloggers come along and they
Speaker 2: just get a blind item via email, they'll just break
Speaker 2: the story. Like they don't they don't care, they don't
Speaker 2: have access, they don't care.
Speaker 1: They have no access, and they don't have any kind
Speaker 1: of ongoing relationships that they want to keep. We don't
Speaker 1: need to keep paramount happy, right like fuck up?
Speaker 2: You know. Yeah, So this is similar here because I
Speaker 2: think in the corporate world. Across the corporate world, there
Speaker 2: is real anxiety about this because their ability to manipulate
Speaker 2: and control the flow of information to keep a lid
Speaker 2: on stories, to stay out in front of stories because reporters,
Speaker 2: you know, they will contact you and say, hey, we're
Speaker 2: working on the story about these accusations against your CEO
Speaker 2: or whatever. Do you want to comment. Well, if it's
Speaker 2: just leaks out to the internet, that person is just
Speaker 2: going to post it. So I'm not saying they necessarily
Speaker 2: got you know, that deep with their stories, but I
Speaker 2: can see where a company, if you were from a
Speaker 2: world where you had like you could keep the press
Speaker 2: on a leash, and then suddenly there's these citizen journalists
Speaker 2: out there that was the boogeyman in the corporate.
Speaker 1: World'll be losing your mind. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I
Speaker 1: should also note I said this is a niche audience.
Speaker 1: The Steiners, to this day, at least according to the
Speaker 1: reporting I've read, have a regular audience of about six
Speaker 1: hundred thousand people, which for a website like operated by
Speaker 1: two people, number one, that's a fairly sustainable business. But
Speaker 1: that's like a good readership for an independent news site.
Speaker 1: That is like actually very impressive. It testifies to the
Speaker 1: degree of like work and trust that their audience has
Speaker 1: in them, that they have kept that audience up to
Speaker 1: the modern day, right when so many news organs are
Speaker 1: in the process of collapsing or have collapsed. Much of
Speaker 1: ENA's reporting focused on issues that dealt directly with sellers
Speaker 1: but would be of interest to investors. For example, stories
Speaker 1: about eBay holding on the money from transactions for thirty
Speaker 1: days without any real reason seem like petty bullshit, and
Speaker 1: it is, but it's something that at scale could mean
Speaker 1: millions and extra profits, which all gets funneled upwards to
Speaker 1: the handful of people who run the company and own
Speaker 1: stock in it. Enter Devon Winnig, the CEO of eBay
Speaker 1: during the period of time that we are talking about
Speaker 1: in this story, which was up until like twenty nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: like fifteen to twenty nineteen. So Winnig had been born
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn in nineteen sixty six. He was the son
Speaker 1: of Jeffrey Winnig, a toxicologist and chief executive of Nastec Pharmaceutical.
Speaker 1: When Jeffrey died suddenly, Devin, age twenty three, took over
Speaker 1: a CEO of the company for a year, raised like
Speaker 1: five million in VC funding, and then joined a law firm.
Speaker 1: Left the job after like a year, and Nastec seems
Speaker 1: to have kind of continued to slow decline afterwards. I
Speaker 1: bring that up because that basic pattern where he hops in,
Speaker 1: raises a bunch of VC funding, sets up a merger,
Speaker 1: is going to kind of become the norm for his
Speaker 1: business career. In nineteen ninety three, Winnig joins Reuters as
Speaker 1: the COO, and over the course of his time there
Speaker 1: he becomes like the number two two men at the
Speaker 1: company and he helps to manage the merger with the
Speaker 1: Thompson Corporation into Thompson Reuters. Now, this was a big
Speaker 1: deal at the time. There was a lot of antitrust
Speaker 1: scrutiny on it because Thompson Reuters when it merged was
Speaker 1: the largest provider of financial news and information on Earth.
Speaker 1: The merger led to massive job cuts across the now
Speaker 1: combined businesses, with leadership particularly DEVN, bragging about more than
Speaker 1: five hundred million pounds worth of savings within the first
Speaker 1: three years after the merger. Now, the reality of this
Speaker 1: was pretty brutal. The merger not only cost a lot
Speaker 1: of people their jobs, but it caused a collapse in
Speaker 1: profitability and influence for Thompson Reuters. It had been easily
Speaker 1: the largest company in the space at the time. Of
Speaker 1: the merger, if you like, combined the readership of both platforms,
Speaker 1: but once they were merged, the quality dropped and Bloomberg
Speaker 1: closed the gap behind them. There were several years of
Speaker 1: botched product launches while Winnig was helping to run the
Speaker 1: Cup company, which proved that the new team running Thompson
Speaker 1: Ruters didn't know what they were doing. This summary from
Speaker 1: an article in The Guardian gives you an idea of
Speaker 1: how disastrous this merger proved to be. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, Thompson Reuter spoke for more than thirty six
Speaker 1: percent of the market against twenty five percent for Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: but according to his its experts, Bloomberg will have nearly
Speaker 1: caught up in twenty eleven with a thirty point eight
Speaker 1: market share against thirty one point four for Thompson Reuters.
Speaker 1: Something has gone horribly wrong. At the very least, the
Speaker 1: task of melding these two companies together has been far
Speaker 1: more complex than originally envisaged. A less kind interpretation is
Speaker 1: that management, which has cut many hundreds of jobs, has
Speaker 1: taken its eye off the ball, losing hapless investors' billions
Speaker 1: along the way. So you could say the evidence would
Speaker 1: suggest that Devin Winnig is not a business genius, right,
Speaker 1: based on his primary accomplishment. The merger of Thompson Reuter's
Speaker 1: up to this point a disaster for the company's influence
Speaker 1: and for its workers, but it makes a lot of
Speaker 1: money for shareholders, and that's really all that matters. So
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven, some of those same people make Devin
Speaker 1: Winnig well they hire He gets hired at eBay, initially
Speaker 1: as the president of their global marketplace business. Right he
Speaker 1: is initially successful here. One of the things that Devin
Speaker 1: recognizes early is that mobile commerce is going to be
Speaker 1: the future for eBay, like sales to users shopping through
Speaker 1: their smartphones, and he reorganizes the company around that, which
Speaker 1: is a very successful move. In twenty fifteen, he becomes
Speaker 1: the CEO of the company, and within a couple of
Speaker 1: years at the job, the Steiners, who are covering eBay
Speaker 1: as Winnig takes over at CEO, notices that his pay
Speaker 1: compensation keeps rising at a rapid rate, particularly during a
Speaker 1: time when eBay itself is having trouble, when they're dealing
Speaker 1: with increased competition from companies like Amazon, and when workers
Speaker 1: are not seeing their compensation rise, So from twenty fifteen
Speaker 1: to twenty eighteen, Devin goes from fourteen point five five
Speaker 1: million a year to seventeen point six million a year.
Speaker 1: This is out of line with the salary increases enjoyed
Speaker 1: by eBay employees during the same period. As Ena Steiner
Speaker 1: wrote on April eighth, twenty eighteen, quote for the first time,
Speaker 1: eBay released a new statistic called the CEO pay ratio
Speaker 1: required now with public companies, eBay reported the ratio of
Speaker 1: the total annual compensation of mister Winning to the median
Speaker 1: annual total compensation of all employees is estimated to be
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty three to one. Now here's the thing, Jason,
Speaker 1: that's actually not bad. If we're looking like overall in US,
Speaker 1: like publicly traded companies, on average, CEOs earned three hundred
Speaker 1: and ninety nine times as much as the median worker.
Speaker 1: So you could say eBay is not doing terribly right.
Speaker 1: And ENA's article doesn't portray this as like a polemic.
Speaker 1: She's really just kind of focusing on the facts that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is how much Winnig is getting is making, this
Speaker 1: is how it compares to the rate of salary increases
Speaker 1: normal employees have gotten. This is how much it compares
Speaker 1: to the amount of money that normal employees are getting.
Speaker 1: You would also, yeah.
Speaker 2: To any normal person, that kind of really does look
Speaker 2: like he failed his way up into that position.
Speaker 1: Because he did.
Speaker 2: But well, but this is because you're you have to
Speaker 2: understand what is considered success in that world. So like
Speaker 2: taking over a media company and tanking the quality, but
Speaker 2: it's like, well, yeah, you tanked the quality by eighty percent,
Speaker 2: but you cut expenses by ninety percent, So if you
Speaker 2: think about it.
Speaker 1: It's a win. Yeah, And that is how That's how
Speaker 1: a guy like Devin thinks about things. And you know,
Speaker 1: Ina is not. She's not coming at this with the
Speaker 1: kind of ideological lens that like I might if I
Speaker 1: were getting, you know, on more of a rant about
Speaker 1: devn She really is just reporting the facts. But Winnig
Speaker 1: gets real, like comes across like he gets sent from underlings.
Speaker 1: Various articles she's putting out. It's known in eBay's c
Speaker 1: suite that you have to pay attention to the Steiners
Speaker 1: and their articles because your investors do. And everything she
Speaker 1: writes about his compensation makes him angry. Particularly she ends
Speaker 1: one article with this line. eBay employees feel free to
Speaker 1: chime in on whether or not you received a payhike
Speaker 1: of ten to fourteen percent this year and what you
Speaker 1: think of your salary compared to the median salary of
Speaker 1: your colleagues. And again I would say that that's like
Speaker 1: a responsible, very fair way to phrase that. As a journalist.
Speaker 1: This is not like someone at like some far left
Speaker 1: rag right. But look, Devin is threatened by this.
Speaker 2: Either one of us could post online a photo of
Speaker 2: our lunch and will then say ten replies, I will
Speaker 2: be told to kill myself. You will be accused of
Speaker 2: being a CIA plant or a rist and that you
Speaker 2: need to kill yourself. Yeah what, This is what the
Speaker 2: first thing that struck me because when I saw what
Speaker 2: they did and then they explained what triggered the insane
Speaker 2: reaction we're about to get to. And it's so mild.
Speaker 1: It's really really mild because like people are not like
Speaker 1: like yellow journalism, they're not muckrakers.
Speaker 2: It's just it's the mildest criticism you can tell how
Speaker 2: to like polite these people are.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm sure like Ina is like tips twenty
Speaker 1: five percent at all times and like is unfailingly polite
Speaker 1: to everyone she encounters in the real world.
Speaker 2: Well, I'm saying specifically as a content creator, you can
Speaker 2: tell that that's not where she gets her traffic. The
Speaker 2: traffic is not from being an over the top trash
Speaker 2: It's not the way all political commentary has the tone
Speaker 2: now of just constantly calling people pedophiles or whatever like that.
Speaker 2: I guess that's my point. It's not like they took
Speaker 2: on somebody who was just in assassin just constantly tearing
Speaker 2: them down. It was just somebody who did it. Sounds like,
Speaker 2: look to get that size of an audience and to
Speaker 2: do stuff that's actually substantive and mature, that's amazing. And
Speaker 2: when you read that criticism, it's like, Wow, that's the
Speaker 2: stuff that this guy considers crossing the line with what
Speaker 2: kid gloves? Must she have always been handling them with?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I do want
Speaker 1: to put a pen in that accusing people of being
Speaker 1: pedophiles thing, Jason, because when we come back from the
Speaker 1: ad break, you and I are going to accuse the
Speaker 1: celebrity of being a pedophile. Ah, we're back, Jason. Legal
Speaker 1: got back to me. We're going to have to cut
Speaker 1: the segment that we had planned. So can rest easy tonight.
Speaker 1: The allegations will not be going out in public. But
Speaker 1: one of these days, Jason, one of these days we'll
Speaker 1: get the truth out to the people. So back to
Speaker 1: Ena and our friend defn Winnig, CEO of eBay, now
Speaker 1: Ina had good reason to be, you know, politely critical
Speaker 1: of winning. His exorbitant raises for himself and the rest
Speaker 1: of his friends in the c suite of eBay had
Speaker 1: coincided with a rash of out landishly wasteful expenses, best
Speaker 1: exemplified by his twenty sixteen construction of the main Street
Speaker 1: building on the eBay campus. This building was envisioned as
Speaker 1: the company's front door, and at the grand opening, Winnig
Speaker 1: explained himself by saying, buildings are symbols of your culture
Speaker 1: and of your brand, and it's like, you know, it
Speaker 1: looks like any other really nice Silicon Valley office, which
Speaker 1: isn't a weird expense when the companies are like doing great.
Speaker 1: But when you're in a cash crunt, it's going to
Speaker 1: get like criticized that, like, well, you spent how many
Speaker 1: millions of dollars on this building that isn't necessary for
Speaker 1: work It just kind of makes you look nice to
Speaker 1: zero percent of the people who are going to be
Speaker 1: smitting money on your platform because they are not invited
Speaker 1: to the main street building, right, especially.
Speaker 2: When you know that down further in the lower levels
Speaker 2: of the organization, because we have both worked for companies. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that you know, you've got people who are reading memos
Speaker 2: going around about now. Some of you are plugging in
Speaker 2: your phones in the outlets that electricity is not free.
Speaker 2: You must you are not allowed to use those outlets
Speaker 2: for personal devices. That that's up to eighteen cents of
Speaker 2: electricity per month you could be using there. That You've
Speaker 2: got people that are forced to watch every little tiny
Speaker 2: penny and you know, if they work one hour of
Speaker 2: overtime that their boss deemed was inappropriate, that they get
Speaker 2: yelled at. So this is why this it's like no,
Speaker 2: up at the top, they don't have to watch that
Speaker 2: stuff at all. They can just decide, you know what,
Speaker 2: I want a building that will impress visitors.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's and it's the kind of thing where
Speaker 1: like this is not just like we're like you know,
Speaker 1: some workers at the bottom or even just people like
Speaker 1: Ena criticizing eBay of like wow, this is a really
Speaker 1: unnecessary expense. This is the conclusion reached in January of
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen by Elliott Management after they pumped one point
Speaker 1: four billion dollars into eBay for a four percent stake
Speaker 1: in the company. Now, Elliott Management is one of a
Speaker 1: they have a very milk toast name, Like they're not
Speaker 1: nearly as well known because they don't have a sinister
Speaker 1: and name is like black Rock. But this is one
Speaker 1: of the most bloodthirsty money companies out in the United
Speaker 1: States right now, right they are a ruthless Wall Street
Speaker 1: investment firm. They actually just put out a really interesting
Speaker 1: article about like how they think the AI industry is
Speaker 1: massively overvalued that I think is one of the more
Speaker 1: interesting things that's been written from like that side of
Speaker 1: the ledger. But like, they are not people, unlike a
Speaker 1: lot of like Silicon Valley, which runs on irrational exuberance
Speaker 1: and like think of how profitable this is all going
Speaker 1: to be. These guys are like bloodless vampires, and they
Speaker 1: purely exist to maximize the profit that they can get
Speaker 1: for their investment. And they have no interest and like
Speaker 1: the egos of a guy like Defen winning, right, So
Speaker 1: they took one look at eBay's balance books after they
Speaker 1: pump one point four billion into the company, and they conclude,
Speaker 1: this is one of the most inefficient and chaotic executive
Speaker 1: teams that we've ever seen seen, and the company is
Speaker 1: burning through a huge amount of cash on shit that
Speaker 1: nobody needs. And now that we've put all this money
Speaker 1: into the company, we are going to demand serious changes.
Speaker 1: Right And Elliott has the kind of juice that means
Speaker 1: everyone at the company starts sweating. This is actually potentially
Speaker 1: a threat even to winnings job right Like this is
Speaker 1: not you can't ignore the people who are able to
Speaker 1: put one point four billion dollars into your company. Right
Speaker 1: Maybe if you're Apple you can because that's pennies to them,
Speaker 1: But eBay cannot afford to ignore that right now, When
Speaker 1: you are in a company like this and a bunch
Speaker 1: of people with a shitload of money come in and
Speaker 1: say we're going to make some serious changes. If you
Speaker 1: and I have both been in that situation with various
Speaker 1: corporate overlords, the natural impulsey is, well, I need to
Speaker 1: put my head the fuck down, right. I don't want
Speaker 1: to draw any attention to myself unless it's like for
Speaker 1: doing something good, and this is kind of what winning
Speaker 1: wanted to do. But he had a problem, and that
Speaker 1: problem is the Steiners, because their boring industry publication is
Speaker 1: read by the folks at Elliott Right, who are using
Speaker 1: it in part to try and determine whether or not
Speaker 1: the people running eBay are wasting more of their money.
Speaker 1: So this kind of irritation he'd had with the Steiners
Speaker 1: reporting on his salary grows into an obsession as he
Speaker 1: gets more and more worried that his control of the
Speaker 1: company is at risk. Now in April of twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: then when Ina wrote another article about the fact that
Speaker 1: Devin was very much overpaid, he gets angry. Now he
Speaker 1: has hired a PR company at that point to help
Speaker 1: manage the situation, right and in general the bad PR
Speaker 1: that EBA is getting at this time, and the PR company,
Speaker 1: because they're competent professionals, are like, ignore this, don't get
Speaker 1: obsessed with this. These elderly people and their blog. No
Speaker 1: response you can make to them that will not blow
Speaker 1: up in your face. Just let this buy and try
Speaker 1: to run the company more efficiently, right, which.
Speaker 2: Is like take a pay cut maybe if you think
Speaker 2: that's a vulnerability. And the orders. If you think you
Speaker 2: are overpaid, if you think their criticism is true, then.
Speaker 1: Take a pay cut. Is that just don't take a
Speaker 1: raise this year? Probably, you know, like you could get
Speaker 1: away with that. Maybe Devin for a while goes with
Speaker 1: their recommendation, but whenever he would get angry, he would
Speaker 1: fume about the Steiners to his fellow executives. And when
Speaker 1: he would fume to his fellow executives, all of the
Speaker 1: subordinates below him in the C suite they would send
Speaker 1: his emails on down the line to other people at
Speaker 1: the company, particularly to people in the ebays like Security division, right,
Speaker 1: and inevitably all of his complaints wound up at the
Speaker 1: office of his top security director, a man named Jim
Speaker 1: Baw Like Baugh or Bog will go with Bog. So
Speaker 1: in April of twenty nineteen, Bog had his analysts gather
Speaker 1: information and prepared an anonymous, handwritten note to be sent
Speaker 1: to Ena Steiner. He was not maybe we don't know
Speaker 1: if he was ordered to do this, but he has
Speaker 1: his people get a bunch of info on her and
Speaker 1: he puts together a handwritten note threatening her physical person
Speaker 1: and threatening to destroy her reputation. And the goal stated
Speaker 1: in like the emails around this handwritten document was that
Speaker 1: they were making it to get her to quote stop
Speaker 1: publishing articles critical of eBay. Now at this point, I
Speaker 1: don't know entirely where like they don't get the go
Speaker 1: ahead from the C suite, right, I don't know if
Speaker 1: Devin actually makes a call here or if it's someone
Speaker 1: below him, but someone still has a lid on their
Speaker 1: worst impulses at this point April of twenty nineteen. But
Speaker 1: Bog is just kind of getting started here, right. The
Speaker 1: fact that his send a crazy letter to these people
Speaker 1: plan gets kind of killed does not kill his desire
Speaker 1: for vengeance against these bloggers. Now, I want to give
Speaker 1: you some context on Jim Bog because understanding him is
Speaker 1: very critical both to understanding the kind of people who
Speaker 1: wind up in these corporate intelligence roles and to understanding
Speaker 1: all of the insane shit that comes next.
Speaker 2: Bog.
Speaker 1: We don't have a huge amount of de tail in
Speaker 1: his early life or whatever, but he was a he
Speaker 1: worked for the CIA. He was at some point an
Speaker 1: operative at the CIA, right from what I can tell,
Speaker 1: I think he worked there for a decent amount of time.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure if it was a full career but
Speaker 1: it was a matter of multiple years. And then after
Speaker 1: he leaves the CIA, he starts a security firm that
Speaker 1: becomes very popular with Silicon Valley companies. He contracts to Apple,
Speaker 1: to Amazon, He works security for the Oscars one year.
Speaker 1: Probably his biggest role is he provides a protection detail
Speaker 1: to Joe Biden at the twenty sixteen Oscars. So that's
Speaker 1: a little odd, but there you go. Maybe they should
Speaker 1: while he dropped out of the campaign. That would have
Speaker 1: been a great thing for Trump to hit him on. Though.
Speaker 1: You know, if only did this.
Speaker 2: Guy give his security firm a cool name like.
Speaker 1: Black It's like Jim baw Consulting or something like that. No, No,
Speaker 1: nothing cool at all. Yeah, at least I'll say this
Speaker 1: for the Black Cube people. That's a cool name for
Speaker 1: a spy company. Like it sounds evil, as does like
Speaker 1: Pallanteer sounds evil. But Joe Bogg is not a particularly
Speaker 1: creative man. So it's a little hard for me to
Speaker 1: tell the degree to which bog was still tied into
Speaker 1: the US intelligence establishment during the period of time that
Speaker 1: he's working at Silicon Valley. To underlings an eBay, he
Speaker 1: would periodically claim that his wife was still employed by
Speaker 1: the CIA. I think there's a good chance he was lying.
Speaker 1: He also would claim in public, often while drinking, that
Speaker 1: he was still a part time employee of the CIA
Speaker 1: in his spare time. I found an article in Puck
Speaker 1: News about claims made in the court case that results
Speaker 1: from all of this quote. Bog detailed how after leaving
Speaker 1: the CIA, he was re enlisted to provide private sector colleagues,
Speaker 1: even a ceo. He boasted to spy on foreign to
Speaker 1: recruit private sector colleagues, even a ceo he boasted to
Speaker 1: spy on foreign leaders and report back on important international meetings.
Speaker 1: I felt honored to be trusted with such sensitive information
Speaker 1: and to be able to provide security assistance to our government.
Speaker 1: So and this is stuff that he says in court
Speaker 1: when he's trying to get his sentence mitigated. I continued
Speaker 1: to work after entering private security for the federal government,
Speaker 1: recruiting like business people, including the CEO of one company,
Speaker 1: to spy on foreign leaders and report back on their
Speaker 1: meetings for the federal government. I think this is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that happens a lot.
Speaker 2: But yeah, yeah, if he was doing that, that's not
Speaker 2: the weirdest thing we've heard whatsoever. That is the kind
Speaker 2: of thing in terms of why getting hired under the
Speaker 2: table or whatever to continue to collect intelligence or whatever. Like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a very plausible lie. If it's a lie, it's
Speaker 2: very plausible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it makes total sense if you're the CI,
Speaker 1: what would you rather do spend the shitload of money
Speaker 1: and potentially risk vives of your operatives like wiretapping a
Speaker 1: guy or when the CEO of tech company X goes
Speaker 1: to meet with Vladimir Putin talk to him afterwards, right, Like,
Speaker 1: one of those is much easier than the other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there anyway, Yeah, and.
Speaker 1: It's not all that hard to rope. Like if you're
Speaker 1: a guy like Bog you go to this, like, Hey,
Speaker 1: you know you're you've got this kind of boring corporate job.
Speaker 1: Do you want to feel it? Do you want to
Speaker 1: be a spy for a little bit? Right? The CIA
Speaker 1: has a job for you, and all you have to
Speaker 1: do is the job you were going to do, right, Like,
Speaker 1: obviously you get a lot of guys who are interested
Speaker 1: in doing shit like this, if only to make their
Speaker 1: lives a little less boring.
Speaker 2: Now, the first and most important requirement is that you
Speaker 2: not get drunk and tell everyone that you're doing this.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, which bog seems to be doing. He drinks
Speaker 1: a lot, and he tells people a lot about his
Speaker 1: side work for the CIA and his wife's work for
Speaker 1: the CIA. Now, we don't know much about the specifics here,
Speaker 1: like really how far this went, but we do know
Speaker 1: that he's telling the truth about a lot of it
Speaker 1: because after he started talking about this stuff in court,
Speaker 1: the Justice Department had his letter to the court sealed,
Speaker 1: claiming it contained classified national security secrets. We only know
Speaker 1: all of the stuff that was in the letter because
Speaker 1: the court Monitoring Services forgot to redact it when they
Speaker 1: put it up online, and so the guys at puck
Speaker 1: News were able to get unredacted versions of what is
Speaker 1: now a sealed court letter. So again, the security States
Speaker 1: got a lot of holes in It's still yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: but uh yeah, fun story. So that is enough about
Speaker 1: kind of his backstory here. What is interesting to me
Speaker 1: about Jim is that he definitely has this CIA connection.
Speaker 1: He definitely has a legit background as a spy and
Speaker 1: a professional career working or at least, if not as
Speaker 1: a spy, working in some degree as an intelligence operative. Right,
Speaker 1: and he is still even though we had this real
Speaker 1: experience someone whose entire conception of the world and specifically
Speaker 1: how intelligence works seems to be based on stereotypes from
Speaker 1: Hollywood movies. And I'm going to read now a quote
Speaker 1: from The New York Times describing how he would after
Speaker 1: he gets hired at eBay to run this special elite
Speaker 1: security analytics team, how he would talk to his team
Speaker 1: of analysts about threats to eBay. Mister Bog would bring
Speaker 1: the analysts into a conference room and show the scene
Speaker 1: from American Gangster where Denzel Washington coolly executes a man
Speaker 1: in front of a crowd to make a point, or
Speaker 1: a clip from The Wolf of Wall Street where the
Speaker 1: Feds are investigating shady deeds but none of the perpetrators
Speaker 1: can recall a thing, or the bit from Meet the
Speaker 1: Fockers about a retired CIA agent's circle of trust that
Speaker 1: one came up frequently. No one is supposed to know
Speaker 1: about this. Mister Bog would tell the analysts about some
Speaker 1: piece of office gossip. We'll keep it in the circle
Speaker 1: of trust.
Speaker 2: So I guess, okay, But right away, here's where I'm
Speaker 2: again getting confused, because this blogger, they were not a
Speaker 2: threat to the company. They were a threat to that
Speaker 2: CEO yep, that they thought was wasting money, both in
Speaker 2: terms of taking a salary in terms of spending money recklessly.
Speaker 2: So this is where I didn't get why this guy,
Speaker 2: this goon took such offense at what these bloggers were
Speaker 2: doing if he was not ordered to buy the CEO,
Speaker 2: because they're gonna make the story like, yeah, all the
Speaker 2: CEO did was vaguely say wow, I don't like this,
Speaker 2: and that he went off on his own. But it's
Speaker 2: this is also the part that I could never figure
Speaker 2: out what his motivation was.
Speaker 1: Jason, if you'll forgive me, I'd like to talk about
Speaker 1: the Nazis again here because I think this is an
Speaker 1: illustrative point, not because these people are Nazis, they're not,
Speaker 1: but because it's illustrative as to how stuff like this
Speaker 1: can action like stuff like this filters down and up
Speaker 1: without necessarily commands being given. There was this understanding in
Speaker 1: the Third Reich that people who worked at variouslevels of
Speaker 1: the government should all be working towards the fearer right,
Speaker 1: which meant that rather than just waiting to get explicit
Speaker 1: instructions while you were doing something like, you know, helping
Speaker 1: to set up the architecture of genocide or of state
Speaker 1: repression in the Gestapo, you should try to figure out
Speaker 1: what Hitler wanted and provide it for him before he asked, right,
Speaker 1: And so a lot of the time we don't have
Speaker 1: a lot of there's not a lot of documentation about
Speaker 1: Hitler ordering specific crimes against humanity. What you do have
Speaker 1: is him having dinner with a bunch of his high
Speaker 1: level adjutants and aids and officials and talking vaguely about
Speaker 1: things he would like to see happen. And then they
Speaker 1: go to their underlings and say like, Hey, these are
Speaker 1: the kind of things Hitler wants. And then it keeps
Speaker 1: kind of filtering down as people sort of try to
Speaker 1: figure out what the actual policy implications about these vague,
Speaker 1: grandiose statements ought to be. And that is not just
Speaker 1: how the Nazis work. That's how large organizations that are
Speaker 1: heavily based around and the personality of a leader at
Speaker 1: the top and pleasing that person work. And I get
Speaker 1: the feeling Devin Winnig. He is temperamental. He is someone
Speaker 1: we have some evidence has a lot of mood swings.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people at the company have
Speaker 1: an understanding that their ability to get hired elsewhere, their
Speaker 1: ability to stay at eBay is dependent upon Devon being
Speaker 1: happy with them. And when Devin will go on rages
Speaker 1: about these people, that makes it into a priority for
Speaker 1: the lower people to find a way to deal with them,
Speaker 1: even if Devin isn't necessarily ordering them to break the law.
Speaker 1: This kind of desperation to I want to kind of
Speaker 1: proactively please the boss is how a lot of this
Speaker 1: stuff works, right, And I do think that's kind of
Speaker 1: the broad psychological thing going on here.
Speaker 2: And if I can make another extremely inappropriate comparison to
Speaker 2: this day, it's never totally clear to me if, like
Speaker 2: with the Manson family murders, right, if Charles made example,
Speaker 2: actually ordered that done, or if he was just extremely high,
Speaker 2: do you gotta go ahead kill him on put put
Speaker 2: Pete walls of their blood, and if he was just
Speaker 2: talking and then they just they they took it as
Speaker 2: an order because you know, like to this day they
Speaker 2: talk about Manton's his criminal mastermind and he manipulated everybody
Speaker 2: else around him. It's like, no, I think they were
Speaker 2: all just kind of dumb and high and they didn't know,
Speaker 2: you know, he was just random the way he does,
Speaker 2: You've seen him in interviews, and so they just went
Speaker 2: and did it, and maybe he himself didn't know if
Speaker 2: he wanted it done, because that's kind of the way
Speaker 2: people work.
Speaker 1: He you know a lot of the time. And I'm
Speaker 1: not saying, by the way, just to be clear, I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that like Hitler was not on board with
Speaker 1: the crimes committed by the regime, but he was not
Speaker 1: a nuts and bolts guy and he didn't need to be.
Speaker 1: And oftentimes that's not how things work. You have, you know,
Speaker 1: the guy, the person at the top, expressing these kind
Speaker 1: of like rage filled, grandiose goals, and he has put
Speaker 1: people in place below him who he knows will do something.
Speaker 1: He doesn't need this.
Speaker 2: This is Civix an extremely important point, and I do,
Speaker 2: I do want to stop and focus on this because
Speaker 2: this happens all over the place. You create a culture,
Speaker 2: but it is in many cases intentionally set up so
Speaker 2: that if there is backlash year you get caught doing
Speaker 2: something that you can say, well, there was no order
Speaker 2: telling them to do this. Yeah, and so trying to
Speaker 2: pin it on you with these nebulous terms of well,
Speaker 2: but you rewarded similar behavior you made it clear you
Speaker 2: weren't going to punish such behavior or whatever, that you
Speaker 2: created a culture, you hired the type of people that
Speaker 2: would do this kind of thing. It's it's hard and
Speaker 2: in this criminal this criminal case, I think it's going
Speaker 2: to turn out to be true. It's hard to pend
Speaker 2: it on the guy at the top that kind of
Speaker 2: set the stage for it to happen, right, And the
Speaker 2: people who really know what they're doing, they make sure
Speaker 2: that it's run this way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it's this is not just eBay, but
Speaker 1: eBay is a particularly extreme example. Now under bog As,
Speaker 1: he becomes like is he's basically running this security division
Speaker 1: within the company. eBay develops a pretty paranoid set of
Speaker 1: internal security policies. I should note, you know, because we're
Speaker 1: talking about the most irrational example of this, there's a
Speaker 1: good reason for some degree of paranoia. The year before
Speaker 1: all of this happens, everything starts to happen twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: with the Steiners, there's a mass shooting at YouTube's headquarters
Speaker 1: in San Bruno, California. The shooter in this case was
Speaker 1: Nassim Najafi Agdam, who's a vegan activist YouTuber who believed
Speaker 1: the company had filtered her channel to keep her stuff
Speaker 1: from getting viewed. She wounded three people before killing herself.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's kind of hard for me to
Speaker 1: see eBay attracting exactly that kind of thing. But also
Speaker 1: it's not hard for me to imagine someone who is
Speaker 1: not well convincing themselves that eBay has destroyed their business
Speaker 1: for some reason, and like it's not a non factor. Right.
Speaker 1: So there's this obsession Bog has with like the physical
Speaker 1: security of the company that lends to this general air
Speaker 1: of paranoia. And he would tell his colleagues in the
Speaker 1: analytics department because they're researching, they're looking into people who
Speaker 1: are critical of eBay online, right, and the reasonable end
Speaker 1: of that is we need to you know, if some
Speaker 1: people are saying on Twitter, I want to like shoot
Speaker 1: up an eBay campus or something, we need to know
Speaker 1: about that because that actually could happen.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: But that's not the only people that they're going after.
Speaker 1: And this kind of kernel, the justification for what they're
Speaker 1: doing is where a lot of the madness comes from.
Speaker 1: And Bog kind of hypes himself up after the shooting
Speaker 1: on the importance of his role. He would tell his
Speaker 1: employees quote, we need to be ready. We're the only
Speaker 1: ones who can prevent this from happening. Bog would hold
Speaker 1: regular mass shooter drills, and as always, he would play
Speaker 1: clips from action movies and spy through to inform and
Speaker 1: motivate his staff on how to deal with the shooting.
Speaker 1: When he wasn't psyching them up about this stuff, he
Speaker 1: was frightening them with knives. This is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite stories from this guy. At one point, he like
Speaker 1: walking around there's a barbecue grill on the eBay campus,
Speaker 1: and like someone leaves a knife at the grill and
Speaker 1: he freaks out about it. He gets the whole team
Speaker 1: around him and he's like waving the knife around, ranting
Speaker 1: about how like if a deranged person found this, they
Speaker 1: could have used this to hurt somebody. And then he
Speaker 1: takes it into the security office and he stabs a
Speaker 1: chair and he makes them leave the chair with the
Speaker 1: knife in it there as a warning to everybody about
Speaker 1: how much more paranoid they need to be. So you
Speaker 1: can tell this is a man who's got like a
Speaker 1: good sense of priorities. He's responding rationally to the world.
Speaker 1: Before we get into this shit with the Steiners.
Speaker 2: I could speak for the next four and a half
Speaker 2: hours on this subject, but instead of going to try
Speaker 2: to condense it down to a few senses. There is
Speaker 2: a type of hyper performative masculinity that is all about
Speaker 2: being scared all the time. Yes, and these are the
Speaker 2: guys that have a pump shot gun like under their
Speaker 2: bed and a little quick release latch thing because like, well,
Speaker 2: somebody breaks in, I'll roll out of my bed, grab this,
Speaker 2: take out the guy at the window, shoot the guy
Speaker 2: at the door, roll into the hallway, and they spend
Speaker 2: and they think of it as being tough guy, but
Speaker 2: they're scared. They're scared to death. They go to the
Speaker 2: zoo with you know, a gun on their ankles, like
Speaker 2: there's a mass shooting at the zoo, or what if
Speaker 2: a bunch of the animals get out and it's up
Speaker 2: to me to shoot them. It's like they're living in
Speaker 2: fear and then portraying that as masculinity tough guy stuff,
Speaker 2: when it's actually the opposite. It's just constantly being overly
Speaker 2: afraid of everything all the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I uh. We have a lot of problems with
Speaker 1: this exact kind of guy, right, and Bog is kind
Speaker 1: of one He's an example of how it works at
Speaker 1: like the top of sort of a corporate food chain.
Speaker 1: When this guy gets into security and when I kind
Speaker 1: of try to psychoanalyze him, again, we don't because he
Speaker 1: was a CIA agent, we don't get a lot of
Speaker 1: specifics of his career, but I think that he probably
Speaker 1: has you know, one of the big one of the
Speaker 1: two Watergate guys, the Dute, who was played by Woody
Speaker 1: Harrelson in one of the recent shows. I'm spacing on
Speaker 1: his name right now, was a former CIA man right,
Speaker 1: who had been a part of some of like the
Speaker 1: regime chain shit in Central America, but not doing like
Speaker 1: exciting murdering people or handing over guns, mostly like making
Speaker 1: sure payments went where they needed to go in handling paperwork.
Speaker 1: So he is part of these sketchy, scary, like very
Speaker 1: movie worthy plots, but in a really boring way. And
Speaker 1: then when he leaves, he's kind of insecure about the
Speaker 1: fact that he doesn't actually know how to do anything cool.
Speaker 1: And that's where a lot of the dumb shit with
Speaker 1: the Watergate break ins come in. Is like this guy
Speaker 1: is convinced, well, I was at the sea doing shady shit,
Speaker 1: I should be able to do something like this even
Speaker 1: though he doesn't actually know how to do anything but
Speaker 1: file paperwork.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't actually know how. This stuff is done
Speaker 2: by the people that are actually good at doing the
Speaker 2: dirty tricks.
Speaker 1: Right right, Yeah, And that is the feeling that I
Speaker 1: get with Bog.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 1: Bogg's team consists of about a half a dozen analysts,
Speaker 1: which when he gets hired, are all are I think
Speaker 1: mostly men. But by May of twenty eighteen, after he's
Speaker 1: been there, I think a year or two, he had
Speaker 1: hired or fired and hired people until the entire team
Speaker 1: was very young women. This is the kind of environment
Speaker 1: where no one feels safe asking him about this, but
Speaker 1: he would explain it to them anyway by playing a
Speaker 1: video of Facebook Cheryl Sandberg giving a speech on how
Speaker 1: there aren't enough female leaders. And I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from the New York Times again, Miss Sandberg did not
Speaker 1: say these women should all be young and blonde. Charlie's
Speaker 1: Angels and Jim's Angels were their nicknames in the executive suite,
Speaker 1: but miss z, which is one of his young employees,
Speaker 1: wasn't about to point that out. Women got fired too,
Speaker 1: and afterward the survivors would whisper about why one departed
Speaker 1: analyst had been reprimanded for not smiling in front of executives.
Speaker 1: Another was let go because she's sang to keep herself
Speaker 1: awake during the night shift, a third because she chewed
Speaker 1: on her pen. So, you know, just to give you
Speaker 1: a picture of this guy, he makes all of his
Speaker 1: employees young and blonde. Everyone at the C suite is
Speaker 1: aware of this. They make Charlie's Angels joke about it,
Speaker 1: jokes about it, and then he'll fire them if they
Speaker 1: don't smile enough or you know, aren't acting cute enough
Speaker 1: for his behavior. Again, very you know, a guy we're
Speaker 1: all well familiar with. To take the creep factor up
Speaker 1: a notch, Bog and his top assistant, Stephanie Popp ordered
Speaker 1: the rest of the analyst team to refer to them
Speaker 1: as mom and dad, repeatedly telling them we're a family.
Speaker 1: Which it just sounds like a nightmare working for this team. So,
Speaker 1: with his Charlie's Angel style hr violation of a team
Speaker 1: in place, Bog started watching the sty website like a hawk.
Speaker 1: As you know. In May of twenty nineteen, the CEO
Speaker 1: began sending more and more messages about their content. That month, May,
Speaker 1: Ena published an article revealing that Devin Winnig had directed
Speaker 1: corporate funds to build what she described as a quote
Speaker 1: lavish New York City pub style lounge on their campus.
Speaker 1: This was, in fact, a scale replica of a New
Speaker 1: York City bar, Walker's West, built on the eBay campus
Speaker 1: entirely for eBay employees. I don't know why this particular
Speaker 1: bar is important, Like I think it's a popular bar.
Speaker 1: I think it's just a bar. Winning thought was cool,
Speaker 1: So he spent shareholder money building a perfect replica, and
Speaker 1: it opened at three pm every day on the eBay campus.
Speaker 1: So again, the fact that there's a bar on campus
Speaker 1: and everyone is drinking is not a non factor in
Speaker 1: some of the decisions that are going to be made here.
Speaker 1: ENA's article on the construction of this pub has the
Speaker 1: same slightly critical professional tone is her other work. Quote
Speaker 1: sure seems like an unnecessary expense for a company watching
Speaker 1: its market share get eaten up by Amazon and being
Speaker 1: warned about overspending by a major investor. This is what
Speaker 1: kind of infuriates people at the eBay's executive level. Bog
Speaker 1: gets the article, and he's scared that someone at Elliott's
Speaker 1: going to read it, and so he forwards a link
Speaker 1: to the CEO, who forwards it to an underling executive,
Speaker 1: who sends it to a PR consultant and complains, I'm
Speaker 1: no longer just accepting ignore as a broader strategy and
Speaker 1: won a fight back, looking forward to talking asap to
Speaker 1: get your assessment of how to do that most effectively,
Speaker 1: and this excerpt from the subsequent court filing describes what
Speaker 1: happens next. Thereafter, eBay Communications employees sent information to the
Speaker 1: consultant about the Steiners, including their buying selling history on
Speaker 1: eBay and the perspective of eBay employees who knew them honor.
Speaker 1: About May thirty first, twenty nineteen, Executive two in Executive
Speaker 1: three exchanged messages regarding Ena Steiner in e Commerce Fights
Speaker 1: and Relevant Part, Executive two described an e Commerce Bights
Speaker 1: article discussing Executive one that's the CEO's presentation to shareholders
Speaker 1: during eBay's twenty nineteen annual meetings as shockingly reasonable. Executive
Speaker 1: three preferred to Ena Steiner as a cow. Executive two
Speaker 1: responded her day is coming. Executive three stated, I can't wait.
Speaker 1: Jim Baw came to me with some thoughts, and I
Speaker 1: told him to stand down and leave it alone. Executive
Speaker 1: two responded, you are being too kind. Tell them to
Speaker 1: be my advisor on this issue. Sometimes you just need
Speaker 1: to make an example out of someone. We are too nice.
Speaker 1: She needs to be crushed. So I want to go
Speaker 1: over the escalation here, right, These two executives, they get
Speaker 1: the message from the CEO, and then they start talking
Speaker 1: about Steiner and what they need to do about her,
Speaker 1: and Executive number two is like, well she, I mean,
Speaker 1: her presentation on like the CEO's shareholder meeting was really reasonable.
Speaker 1: And then the other guy is like, yeah, but she's
Speaker 1: a cow. And then they start making these increasingly like
Speaker 1: movie let like threats her day is coming, will make
Speaker 1: an example out of her, She needs to be crushed.
Speaker 1: The the escalation from like, well, this is a pretty
Speaker 1: reasonable piece of reporting from we need to destroy this
Speaker 1: human being happens in the space of a couple of
Speaker 1: text messages, which I find really interesting.
Speaker 2: And I feel like we've left a lot of the
Speaker 2: listeners behind because there's such a disconnect the problem, like, again,
Speaker 2: the fear that these investors were going to see this article.
Speaker 2: The problem is not the article. The problem is that
Speaker 2: you built that goddamn bar.
Speaker 1: Why did you spend all that money at a bar?
Speaker 2: It's like, well, this is you know, this is the
Speaker 2: last straw that she told everyone about the bar we built.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, no, no, back up, you you you went
Speaker 2: one step too far. Your problem didn't start with a
Speaker 2: blogger noticing you built a replica of a New York
Speaker 2: bar for millions of dollars. It's that you did that
Speaker 2: at all. Because, after all, if she hadn't made that up,
Speaker 2: if that was fake, well it's easy you can just
Speaker 2: don't go out and disprove it and say, hey, this
Speaker 2: is a lie, this is a libelis it's the fact
Speaker 2: that what she was saying is true that made us
Speaker 2: so a damaging So now focus on why why is
Speaker 2: it that what she said was true? That was your
Speaker 2: own actions?
Speaker 1: And she finds out about this because the contractor eBay
Speaker 1: hires like puts a page up on their website like
Speaker 1: with pictures of the construction and like how much it
Speaker 1: costs in everything, because they you know, that's how the
Speaker 1: contractor gets additional business. And Ena just finds it googling around, like, oh,
Speaker 1: it seems like they spent a lot of money on
Speaker 1: this fucking thing, like the absolute the number one refusal
Speaker 1: to see that, like, well, it's your own action that's
Speaker 1: getting you the bad attention and the fact that, like
Speaker 1: and you didn't even take any efforts to stop someone
Speaker 1: from finding this out. You know, you could have had
Speaker 1: them do in NBA, right, you didn't have to let
Speaker 1: them publish an article about it on their website. Not
Speaker 1: think anyone would notice anyway. Bog after this point, gets
Speaker 1: the go ahead to actually begin offensive actions against the Steiners,
Speaker 1: and on June sixth, he tasks his team with tracking
Speaker 1: all of INA's articles and social media posts concerning eBay.
Speaker 1: On June seventh, he sends a contractor, a retired police
Speaker 1: captain named Gilbert, to surveil the Steiner's home in the
Speaker 1: Boston area. The day after this, Bog himself called the
Speaker 1: Steiner's home in the middle of the night and hung
Speaker 1: up as soon as they answered. The harassment campaign had begun.
Speaker 1: And it is amusing to me that apparently the CIA
Speaker 1: training that this guy had told him, like, start by
Speaker 1: trolling them on social media, then you call them and
Speaker 1: you hang up. I guess this might be why we
Speaker 1: lost Cuba. Unfortunately, as with Cuba, things are going to
Speaker 1: escalate pretty rapidly from here, and we're going to cover
Speaker 1: that and more Jason on Thursday's episode. Right now, we're
Speaker 1: going to cover your books that people can buy or
Speaker 1: in one case, pre order right now.
Speaker 2: Yes, the new book is called I'm starting to worry
Speaker 2: about this Black Box of Doom. Yeah, it's up for
Speaker 2: pure It is that on September twenty fourth. If you
Speaker 2: are hearing this after that date, it's already out. If
Speaker 2: it's not, then that means it got pulled off shelves
Speaker 2: and I'm probably in jail or something, or I got
Speaker 2: canceled somehow. There's probably an equally interesting story in that. Otherwise. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's available in every format, including an audio, ebook, hardcover.
Speaker 2: I do not read the audiobook. I'm not an audiobook narrator.
Speaker 2: People keep asking me that that would be a disaster.
Speaker 2: They hired a professional.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would love it if if the same thing
Speaker 1: happened to you. That happened to uh, oh shit, what's
Speaker 1: his name? Tom Clancy that one time where he like
Speaker 1: accidentally described a nuclear submarine so accurately the government had
Speaker 1: to sit down with them. Anyway, you know, read Jason's
Speaker 1: books before he is arrested for accurately describing aspects of
Speaker 1: our nuclear defense. Try and listen to the remaining podcast
Speaker 1: on this network before we get taken out for I
Speaker 1: don't know, I don't have a joke ready, whatever, I'm tired,
Speaker 1: Go to Hell. I love you. Behind the Bastards is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool
Speaker 1: Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you get your podcasts.