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