November 21, 2019 • 20 mins
Three teens in Alabama were tired of playing video games and decided to make a YouTube video. They wanted to make a “To Catch a Predator” style video so they set up some fake online dating profiles saying they were minors. All it took was two days and they made contact with a local teacher. The action was swift after they posted their video confronting him. Anna Claire Vollers, reporter for AL.com, joins us for Hive vs. Predator.
Next, we had critical testimony in the impeachment hearings. Ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, testified that there was indeed a quid pro quo in demanding that Ukraine investigate Burisma and the Bidens in exchange for military aid and a visit to the White House. Sondland also threw everyone under the bus saying that indicated that Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and Mick Mulvaney all knew what was going on. My producer Victor Wright, joins us for more.
Finally, for generations General Electric was a breeding ground for CEOs and business leaders, now, Amazon has taken that spot. Amazon employees are taking the 14 leadership principles they learn while on the job and are applying them to the startups and businesses they go on to run. Dana Mattioli, reporter for the WSJ, joins us for how Amazon is America’s new CEO factory.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Thursday, November one. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles
and this is the daily diet. Three teens in Alabama
were tired of playing video games and decided to make
a YouTube video. They wanted to make a to catch
up predator style video, so they set up some fake
online dating profiles saying they were miners and all it
(00:22):
took was two days and they made a contact with
a local teacher. The action was swift after they posted
their video confronting him. Anna Claire Vahler's reporter for a
l dot Com joins us for Hive versus Predator. Next,
we had critical testimony in the impeachment hearings. Ambassador to
the European Union Gordon Sollin testified that there was indeed
(00:44):
a quid pro quo in demanding that Ukraine investigated Barisma
and the Bidens in exchange for military aid and a
visit to the White House. Sololon also threw everyone under
the bus, saying that Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and mc
mulvaney all knew what was going on. My producer, Victor
Wright joins us for more. Finally, for Generations General Electric
(01:05):
was the breeding ground for CEOs and business leaders. Now
Amazon has taken that spot. Amazon employees are taking the
fourteen leadership principles they learn while on the job and
are applying them to the startups and businesses they go
on to run. Dana Mattioli, reporter for The Wall Street Journal,
joins us for how Amazon is America's new CEO factory.
(01:25):
News without the noise. Let's dive in. They're coming to
Walmart at twelve fift Hey, he came here to meet
an underage kid. Underage kid. Wow, you've been doing Hatchie
Weaver everywhere. Hey he works for the Calhoun County Board
of Education and he just came here to meet an
underage kid. Joining us now is Anna Claire Vahler's reporter
(01:48):
for a l dot Com. Thanks for joining us, Annah, Yeah,
thanks for having me. We're gonna be talking about these
Alabama teens who set out to catch a child predator.
They ended up getting a teacher at another gentleman. This
group of friends, they call themselves the Hive. They're just
a group of high school friends. They were sitting around
playing Xbox and we're looking for ideas to make YouTube videos,
(02:10):
and they decided on trying to catch somebody in this fashion,
and they did. They caught up two people and tell
us a little bit about this whole story. It comes
out of Calhoun County, which is a pretty rural area
in the eastern part of Alabama, and these three eighteen
year old have been friends forever their high school seniors.
Once they decided they wanted to try to catch a
child predator, they started making fake online dating app accounts
(02:35):
on Grinder and Tender and some apps like that, And
what I kind of found the most disturbing was that
it took less than a day for them to find
people who were willing to talk with them, even though
they said that they were under age, because you have
to be eighteen to sign up for a lot of
these dating apps. Once they started making correspondences with people,
they specifically say, oh I'm seventeen, I'm fourteen, and they
(02:55):
said it multiple times to have it on the record.
So later on, if some of these people we're saying, oh,
I didn't know they were underage, they already had it there.
They were really pretty smart about the whole thing. And
I've seen some of the chatlogs. They would talk about, oh,
I can't talk to you until I'm out of class
or something like that. So it was very very clear
that they were in high school to these guys that
(03:16):
they were chatting with. And once the men started sending
them explicit photos, they apparently did a Google search for
explicit photos of like adults and would send those to
the men, so that they're not in trouble for sending,
you know, any kind of underage explicit photos. They're big fish.
Came two days after they first started, and this one
had happened to be a teacher. That's what intrigued them
(03:38):
the most. They said, Okay, this is a teacher. He
might be endangering kids. Let's go after this guy. How
did that come out? The teacher wanted to meet, and
so they set up a meeting at the local walmart
because it's a public place, figuring if this guy was
possibly dangerous, at least they wouldn't be in an area
that didn't have a lot of people. So they met
him around midnight in the walmart and they had one
(03:59):
of the guys stand around in the appointed area and
then they waited for the teacher to approach him, and
once he did, the other guys jump out with their camera.
The minute the teacher sees the camera starts walking away
like it seems like he has realized that something's gone
horribly wrong here, and so they follow him through the Walmart,
yelling at him and asking, you know, what are you
(04:20):
here for? And this guy works for the local school
board and he's here to meet underage kids, and they
follow him all the way out to his car and
the parking lot of Walmart. That's where the video ends.
And it was less than a day that the local
school board has convened an emergency meeting, the police are
investigating him, and eventually this man gets arrested, and that's
where we are now. The quickest of turnarounds there, As
(04:40):
he said, the next day after the video was posted,
they were already on it addressing the issue. And they're
gonna eat on thousands and thousands of hits on their
YouTube page also, so they're happy about that. Tell us
briefly about the second man that they also caught, because
that happened a few hours before the specific when they
were just talking about the teacher. They set up another
meeting with another guy who had been corresponding with one
(05:03):
of their fourteen year old fake accounts, so that guy,
they arranged to meet him at the Walmart earlier that evening,
and he met them and he ends up talking to
them actually for quite a while. I was sort of surprised,
and honestly, it looks as though he's admitting to trying
to meet a fourteen year old at the walmart. And
so that man got arrested also the same day that
the teacher did, and so there are two guys behind
(05:25):
bars because of these teenagers. So these teenagers, Dylan Buzby,
Cody Waller, and Jackson Luillis, they called themselves the Hive,
and as we mentioned, they're just friends for many years.
They've been getting a lot of positive feedback, including law enforcement,
although law enforcement did say this is still pretty stupid idea.
You should you should leave this work to law enforcement
because it could be potentially dangerous. But they're also getting
(05:46):
a lot of blowback from other people. I'm assuming comments
online and things saying you ruin this guy's career. You're
targeting people on Grinder and LGBTQ community because you're going
on these sites, but the kids are saying no. In
the case of the teacher, he could have potentially hurt
a child. So they're very happy with what they're doing.
One of them has a relative who I think had
(06:07):
been molested in the past, and another one said, you know,
he's been approached by strangers online looking for sexual encounters before.
So this kind of thing is personal for them. And
and they said, you know, it's something that kids their
age have to deal with online when they're interacting with
folks online, and so I think for them it was
a way to kind of stick up for their fellow
teens and look out for other kids who you know,
(06:29):
may not have that kind of protection. One of the
teens his dad is a cop. I think he said
he wants to maybe be a future FBI agent. One
of the other kids says that he wants to be
a cop. Also, do they have any more plans to
make more videos? When they talk to me, you could
tell they were trying to say all the right things
as far as, oh, we realized this is stupid. You know,
we don't encourage anybody else to do this. And I
(06:50):
asked him, Okay, but are you going to make more videos?
And they're like, well, yeah, of course, said they say.
You know, after kind of all the buzz dies down
a little bit, they are planning to keep this at
Anna Claire Vahler's reporter for al dot com. Thank you
very much for joining us. Thank you. Was there a
(07:15):
quid pro quote with regard to the requested White House
call and the White House meeting? The answer is yes,
we all understood that these prerequisites for the White House
call and the right White House meeting reflected President Trump's
desires and requirements. Joining me now is my producer, Victor Wright.
(07:36):
Thanks for being here, Victor, thank you. We're gonna be
talking about some key testimony in the impeachment hearings. Gordon Sandlin,
he's the United States Ambassador to the European Union. He testified,
and I mean he threw people under the bus. He
said there was a quid pro quo with the President
withholding age so that Ukraine can start these investigations into
(07:57):
the bidens and Barisma and all that. Gordon Slon might
be the most important witness save for somebody like John Bolton,
who can maybe connect a few more of the dots.
But Gordon Solon was heavily involved in this pressure campaign
for Ukraine. As I said, he threw a lot of
people under the bus. He said that Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker,
(08:18):
and he worked with Rudy Giuliani. But he also mentioned
that Mike Pompeo knew about this. Vice President Mike Pence
knew about this. Basically, it was no secret. Everybody knew
about it. Here's a little clip who wanted to play
from Gordon Sallon's testimony where he basically said, we worked
with Rudy Giuliani at the express direction of the President.
(08:38):
Secretary Perry, Ambassador Vulker, and I worked with Mr Rudy
Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the
President of the United States. We did not want to
work with Mr Giuliani. Simply put, we were playing the
(08:59):
hand we were dell. We all understood that if we
refused to work with Mr Giuliani, we would lose a
very important opportunity to cement relations between the United States
and Ukraine. So we followed the President's orders. Now this
is really key, and a lot of people took this
(09:20):
as Gordon Sonlon directly tying the President to this pressure
campaign because it came from the top. And when he
talks about how many people were involved and how many
people knew about this, you kind of almost start to
believe that this was the buzz, that the president knew
all about this, and as I said that before, he
mentioned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on
this and Vice President Mike Pence was told about the
(09:43):
link between the Ukraine military aid and the investigations. But
I think Gordon Sonolon later said that Mike Pence didn't
really acknowledge him when he told them anything like that.
One of the other things President Trump's priority was that
Ukrainians had to announce that they would start the investigation.
Not necessary early go through with it, but they at
least wanted that announcement right exactly in the questioning, they asked,
(10:07):
so in order to get that White House meeting, Ukraine
would have to start those investigations into Trump's political rivals,
and Solomon responded with, well, they would have to acknowledge
and announced to the public that they were doing it
in the first place. And they said, well, did they
actually care if they did them? And Goldman said no,
I never really heard about that, and this points to
(10:30):
it being more of a political affair. He didn't really
care about the corruption or the investigation itself. He just
needed it announced it would look bad for Joe Biden
if his son was brought up into this corruption probe.
At that point, another clip that we wanted to play.
Gordon Sonland, in his opening testimony, said that there was
a clear quid pro quote. Was there a quid pro
(10:54):
quote as I testified previously with regard to the requested
White House call all and the White House meeting? The
answer is yes. We all understood that these prerequisites for
the White House call and the right White House meeting
reflected President Trump's desires and requirements. The President, on his part,
(11:16):
he spoke to reporters later and said, oh, you know,
I told him that I didn't want a quid pro quo.
I didn't want anything. I just wanted Zelensky to do
the right thing. And this is a drawback to a
phone call that Gordon Solon had with the President where
he just expressly asked them, what do you want out
of these guys? And this is what big part of
the President and the Republican's defense where he says, I
didn't want anything. I didn't want to quit pro quote.
(11:38):
I think it was important to also note that there
was never a point where President Trump said this is
a quid pro quote to Zelinski, but it was heavily
implied and everyone in the circle, according to Sollon, knew
that it was implied. Yeah, let's play that clip when
Gordon Solon was talking about the president saying he didn't
(11:58):
want anything. I just said, what do you want from Ukraine?
I may have even used a four letter word, and
he said, I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.
I just want Zelenski to do the right thing, to
do what he ran on her words to that effect.
One of the main criticisms of Gordon Solon was that
he couldn't really remember a lot of what was going on.
(12:19):
He wasn't a note taker like some of the other
witnesses giving testimony before. And he kept throwing it saying, well,
the White House didn't give me documents that I wanted,
they didn't release certain text messages, they didn't release things
that could maybe make me remember some of the other details.
Republicans jumped on that because saying he didn't really remember
a lot of details. Democrats were very frustrated by some
(12:41):
of that stuff as well. So, just to end it off, Victor,
you were talking about how this could mark a shift
in this whole impeachment hearing, but still both Republicans and
Democrats are seeing the same set of details in completely
different ways. There's one report that says that this testimony
could be the or an after phase, where before they
(13:02):
were just trying to get some of the facts out there,
and after now we're seeing a lot of the political
machine move after this testimony. Republicans say, listen, the investigation
never went down, which means Trump really shouldn't be impeached,
whereas Democrats are saying he was caught in a bribe.
Even though the bribe didn't go through, it's still happened,
(13:23):
and that is enough for the impeachment to happen. Thank you, Victor,
Thank you. Some of the executive recruiters I spoke to
classified Amazon as a so called academy company, and that
an executive recruiter parlance is a term they designate to
(13:45):
these big companies that have really good leadership programs that
wind up spawning a lot of CEO Joining us now
is Danta Mattioli, covering Amazon for the Wall Street Journal.
Thanks for joining us, Dana, great to be here. For decades,
General Electric was the breeding ground for CEOs and top
level executives for the people that it went there to work.
(14:07):
They went through the rigorous management program that they had there,
and then they went off to start other businesses and
serve on boards and whatnot. The new company that has
stepped in where people are going through the program and
then moving on to other things is Amazon. They've become
the new CEO factory. Dana tell us a little bit
about what's going on with it. For decades, GEO was
(14:29):
the breeding ground for future CEO and a CEO named
Jack Welsh, and as they've become less relevant and sort
of stumbled, Amazon and other tech titans have become the
new conglomerates of the day. And Amazon in particular is
one of the biggest companies in the US in terms
of employers, and they are churning out lots of CEOs
and founders of big companies. I guess a lot of
(14:50):
people in high level positions at Amazon tend to stay
there for many years. So some of these other people
are maybe not seeing as many opportunities at the highest
levels there, so they're moving to other places. One of
the things that they're doing, though, is taking a lot
of the leadership principles that they learn at Amazon and
they're applying it to their own businesses. So Amazon has
these tried and true fourteen leadership principles that are sort
(15:14):
of ingrained in anyone who's ever worked there at the
point where they leave and they bring these leadership principles
where they work, connect or they even find themselves accidentally
reciting them to their children. So when these people leave
and they become CEOs elsewhere in places like Tableau or Zoo,
Lily or Hulu all have Amazon alumni who have either
(15:35):
run it or founded it, they tend to bring a
lot of that with them because it's what they know
and it's what they've seen work. So what are some
of these principles that they carry on the top One
is customer obsession. That's one that you hear Jeff Bezos
talk about literally all the time. It's funny. The lead
anecdote of the story is a CEO from a company
called Latchell. He had worked at Amazon for three years,
(15:57):
but his company also has fourteen leadership principles, like five
or six of them are exactly the same as Amazon.
So that's customer obsession, bias for action, earned trust. The
list goes on. If you can help explain some of
these bias for action. Speed matters in business, So we
take this to mean, you know, if a project comes up,
get to it right away, respond to the customers, things
(16:19):
like that. It also means move quickly, and Jeff Bezos
speaks a lot about the concept of a two way door,
meaning that if you do something and it doesn't work out,
you could always reverse it and unwind it, so you
don't have to over analyze something people are getting involved
in it or making a decision as long as you
could reverse it if it turns out not to work.
One of the principles that causes a little bit of
(16:40):
not controversy, but people have feelings on it on both sides.
I guess it's have backbone, disagree and commit. I think
a lot of people might think that people can be
a little too forceful or not nice to people. Is
that one that causes a little bit of trouble, so
amazon they don't commit to this idea of social cohesion
where people are nice for the sake of being nice,
(17:02):
rather than piping up and saying when they disagree about something,
or engaging in not arguments per se, but really getting
to the merits of the way decisions are made, and
sometimes that could come across as argumentative or told bristle
some people, and that type of culture is not always
for everyone. In the article you mentioned part of the culture,
some of it they're not taking with them to their
(17:22):
new businesses. What we found when I spoke to a
lot of these CEOs that were sort of bread at
Amazon is that their cherry picking which parts of it
to bring to the next role. So there's some aspects
that they really like that they think translate well, and
there's others where they disagree with the way Amazon handled
something or they don't necessarily think it's a good fit
for the new organization. One of the CEO as I
(17:42):
spoke to, said he didn't want to export their culture.
He was striving for a more empathetic culture rather than
sharp elbows or confrontation. But he did bring up over
some other parts of what Amazon does. It must be
a point of pride for them to kind of cultivate
these talents and then have them go on and and
start other businesses, startups, or run other big companies. How
(18:03):
do they feel about losing some of this talent? Though
I do think it is a point of pride I
spoke with Jeff Wilkie, who is the CEO of Amazon's
consumer side of the business, and he basically said, you know,
we'd love to keep all these people at Amazon, but
he's excited to see them go off and start their
own businesses or run existing companies. And it's definitely a
point of pride. Everybody wants to work for a huge,
(18:24):
successful company. But this also from an outsider perspective, seems
like just another feather in their hat as a great
place to work if you do learn really good business
principles there, and then as evidenced by all these people
moving on to do bigger and better things, that just
still seems like a great place to find employment. So
some of the executive recruiters I spoke to classified Amazon
(18:45):
as a so called academy company, and that an executive
recruiter parlance is a term they designate to these big
companies that have really good leadership programs that wind up
spawning a lot of CEO So twenty years ago you
would have heard them with ched G is the ultimate
academy company, and they say that Amazon has that title
along with places like PEPSI that have great management programs
(19:07):
and keepin off CEOs, So for sure, I think people
do view this as something that they want in their
resume where they could maybe get some of that leadership
by osmosis, And if they don't want to stay, there's
other options for them in the workforce, whether that's leading
something else or working elsewhere. Danta Mattioli, covering Amazon for
The Wall Street Journal. Thank you very much for joining us,
(19:28):
Thanks for having me. That's it for today. Join us
on social media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter
and Instagram. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
us and I heard radio, or subscribe wherever you get
(19:49):
your podcasts. This episode of The Daily Dive is produced
by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar
Ramirez and this was your Daily Dive d FA
It's Thursday, November one. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles
and this is the daily diet. Three teens in Alabama
were tired of playing video games and decided to make
a YouTube video. They wanted to make a to catch
up predator style video, so they set up some fake
online dating profiles saying they were miners and all it
(00:22):
took was two days and they made a contact with
a local teacher. The action was swift after they posted
their video confronting him. Anna Claire Vahler's reporter for a
l dot Com joins us for Hive versus Predator. Next,
we had critical testimony in the impeachment hearings. Ambassador to
the European Union Gordon Sollin testified that there was indeed
(00:44):
a quid pro quo in demanding that Ukraine investigated Barisma
and the Bidens in exchange for military aid and a
visit to the White House. Sololon also threw everyone under
the bus, saying that Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, and mc
mulvaney all knew what was going on. My producer, Victor
Wright joins us for more. Finally, for Generations General Electric
(01:05):
was the breeding ground for CEOs and business leaders. Now
Amazon has taken that spot. Amazon employees are taking the
fourteen leadership principles they learn while on the job and
are applying them to the startups and businesses they go
on to run. Dana Mattioli, reporter for The Wall Street Journal,
joins us for how Amazon is America's new CEO factory.
(01:25):
News without the noise. Let's dive in. They're coming to
Walmart at twelve fift Hey, he came here to meet
an underage kid. Underage kid. Wow, you've been doing Hatchie
Weaver everywhere. Hey he works for the Calhoun County Board
of Education and he just came here to meet an
underage kid. Joining us now is Anna Claire Vahler's reporter
(01:48):
for a l dot Com. Thanks for joining us, Annah, Yeah,
thanks for having me. We're gonna be talking about these
Alabama teens who set out to catch a child predator.
They ended up getting a teacher at another gentleman. This
group of friends, they call themselves the Hive. They're just
a group of high school friends. They were sitting around
playing Xbox and we're looking for ideas to make YouTube videos,
(02:10):
and they decided on trying to catch somebody in this fashion,
and they did. They caught up two people and tell
us a little bit about this whole story. It comes
out of Calhoun County, which is a pretty rural area
in the eastern part of Alabama, and these three eighteen
year old have been friends forever their high school seniors.
Once they decided they wanted to try to catch a
child predator, they started making fake online dating app accounts
(02:35):
on Grinder and Tender and some apps like that, And
what I kind of found the most disturbing was that
it took less than a day for them to find
people who were willing to talk with them, even though
they said that they were under age, because you have
to be eighteen to sign up for a lot of
these dating apps. Once they started making correspondences with people,
they specifically say, oh I'm seventeen, I'm fourteen, and they
(02:55):
said it multiple times to have it on the record.
So later on, if some of these people we're saying, oh,
I didn't know they were underage, they already had it there.
They were really pretty smart about the whole thing. And
I've seen some of the chatlogs. They would talk about, oh,
I can't talk to you until I'm out of class
or something like that. So it was very very clear
that they were in high school to these guys that
(03:16):
they were chatting with. And once the men started sending
them explicit photos, they apparently did a Google search for
explicit photos of like adults and would send those to
the men, so that they're not in trouble for sending,
you know, any kind of underage explicit photos. They're big fish.
Came two days after they first started, and this one
had happened to be a teacher. That's what intrigued them
(03:38):
the most. They said, Okay, this is a teacher. He
might be endangering kids. Let's go after this guy. How
did that come out? The teacher wanted to meet, and
so they set up a meeting at the local walmart
because it's a public place, figuring if this guy was
possibly dangerous, at least they wouldn't be in an area
that didn't have a lot of people. So they met
him around midnight in the walmart and they had one
(03:59):
of the guys stand around in the appointed area and
then they waited for the teacher to approach him, and
once he did, the other guys jump out with their camera.
The minute the teacher sees the camera starts walking away
like it seems like he has realized that something's gone
horribly wrong here, and so they follow him through the Walmart,
yelling at him and asking, you know, what are you
(04:20):
here for? And this guy works for the local school
board and he's here to meet underage kids, and they
follow him all the way out to his car and
the parking lot of Walmart. That's where the video ends.
And it was less than a day that the local
school board has convened an emergency meeting, the police are
investigating him, and eventually this man gets arrested, and that's
where we are now. The quickest of turnarounds there, As
(04:40):
he said, the next day after the video was posted,
they were already on it addressing the issue. And they're
gonna eat on thousands and thousands of hits on their
YouTube page also, so they're happy about that. Tell us
briefly about the second man that they also caught, because
that happened a few hours before the specific when they
were just talking about the teacher. They set up another
meeting with another guy who had been corresponding with one
(05:03):
of their fourteen year old fake accounts, so that guy,
they arranged to meet him at the Walmart earlier that evening,
and he met them and he ends up talking to
them actually for quite a while. I was sort of surprised,
and honestly, it looks as though he's admitting to trying
to meet a fourteen year old at the walmart. And
so that man got arrested also the same day that
the teacher did, and so there are two guys behind
(05:25):
bars because of these teenagers. So these teenagers, Dylan Buzby,
Cody Waller, and Jackson Luillis, they called themselves the Hive,
and as we mentioned, they're just friends for many years.
They've been getting a lot of positive feedback, including law enforcement,
although law enforcement did say this is still pretty stupid idea.
You should you should leave this work to law enforcement
because it could be potentially dangerous. But they're also getting
(05:46):
a lot of blowback from other people. I'm assuming comments
online and things saying you ruin this guy's career. You're
targeting people on Grinder and LGBTQ community because you're going
on these sites, but the kids are saying no. In
the case of the teacher, he could have potentially hurt
a child. So they're very happy with what they're doing.
One of them has a relative who I think had
(06:07):
been molested in the past, and another one said, you know,
he's been approached by strangers online looking for sexual encounters before.
So this kind of thing is personal for them. And
and they said, you know, it's something that kids their
age have to deal with online when they're interacting with
folks online, and so I think for them it was
a way to kind of stick up for their fellow
teens and look out for other kids who you know,
(06:29):
may not have that kind of protection. One of the
teens his dad is a cop. I think he said
he wants to maybe be a future FBI agent. One
of the other kids says that he wants to be
a cop. Also, do they have any more plans to
make more videos? When they talk to me, you could
tell they were trying to say all the right things
as far as, oh, we realized this is stupid. You know,
we don't encourage anybody else to do this. And I
(06:50):
asked him, Okay, but are you going to make more videos?
And they're like, well, yeah, of course, said they say.
You know, after kind of all the buzz dies down
a little bit, they are planning to keep this at
Anna Claire Vahler's reporter for al dot com. Thank you
very much for joining us. Thank you. Was there a
(07:15):
quid pro quote with regard to the requested White House
call and the White House meeting? The answer is yes,
we all understood that these prerequisites for the White House
call and the right White House meeting reflected President Trump's
desires and requirements. Joining me now is my producer, Victor Wright.
(07:36):
Thanks for being here, Victor, thank you. We're gonna be
talking about some key testimony in the impeachment hearings. Gordon Sandlin,
he's the United States Ambassador to the European Union. He testified,
and I mean he threw people under the bus. He
said there was a quid pro quo with the President
withholding age so that Ukraine can start these investigations into
(07:57):
the bidens and Barisma and all that. Gordon Slon might
be the most important witness save for somebody like John Bolton,
who can maybe connect a few more of the dots.
But Gordon Solon was heavily involved in this pressure campaign
for Ukraine. As I said, he threw a lot of
people under the bus. He said that Secretary Perry, Ambassador Volker,
(08:18):
and he worked with Rudy Giuliani. But he also mentioned
that Mike Pompeo knew about this. Vice President Mike Pence
knew about this. Basically, it was no secret. Everybody knew
about it. Here's a little clip who wanted to play
from Gordon Sallon's testimony where he basically said, we worked
with Rudy Giuliani at the express direction of the President.
(08:38):
Secretary Perry, Ambassador Vulker, and I worked with Mr Rudy
Giuliani on Ukraine matters at the express direction of the
President of the United States. We did not want to
work with Mr Giuliani. Simply put, we were playing the
(08:59):
hand we were dell. We all understood that if we
refused to work with Mr Giuliani, we would lose a
very important opportunity to cement relations between the United States
and Ukraine. So we followed the President's orders. Now this
is really key, and a lot of people took this
(09:20):
as Gordon Sonlon directly tying the President to this pressure
campaign because it came from the top. And when he
talks about how many people were involved and how many
people knew about this, you kind of almost start to
believe that this was the buzz, that the president knew
all about this, and as I said that before, he
mentioned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed off on
this and Vice President Mike Pence was told about the
(09:43):
link between the Ukraine military aid and the investigations. But
I think Gordon Sonolon later said that Mike Pence didn't
really acknowledge him when he told them anything like that.
One of the other things President Trump's priority was that
Ukrainians had to announce that they would start the investigation.
Not necessary early go through with it, but they at
least wanted that announcement right exactly in the questioning, they asked,
(10:07):
so in order to get that White House meeting, Ukraine
would have to start those investigations into Trump's political rivals,
and Solomon responded with, well, they would have to acknowledge
and announced to the public that they were doing it
in the first place. And they said, well, did they
actually care if they did them? And Goldman said no,
I never really heard about that, and this points to
(10:30):
it being more of a political affair. He didn't really
care about the corruption or the investigation itself. He just
needed it announced it would look bad for Joe Biden
if his son was brought up into this corruption probe.
At that point, another clip that we wanted to play.
Gordon Sonland, in his opening testimony, said that there was
a clear quid pro quote. Was there a quid pro
(10:54):
quote as I testified previously with regard to the requested
White House call all and the White House meeting? The
answer is yes. We all understood that these prerequisites for
the White House call and the right White House meeting
reflected President Trump's desires and requirements. The President, on his part,
(11:16):
he spoke to reporters later and said, oh, you know,
I told him that I didn't want a quid pro quo.
I didn't want anything. I just wanted Zelensky to do
the right thing. And this is a drawback to a
phone call that Gordon Solon had with the President where
he just expressly asked them, what do you want out
of these guys? And this is what big part of
the President and the Republican's defense where he says, I
didn't want anything. I didn't want to quit pro quote.
(11:38):
I think it was important to also note that there
was never a point where President Trump said this is
a quid pro quote to Zelinski, but it was heavily
implied and everyone in the circle, according to Sollon, knew
that it was implied. Yeah, let's play that clip when
Gordon Solon was talking about the president saying he didn't
(11:58):
want anything. I just said, what do you want from Ukraine?
I may have even used a four letter word, and
he said, I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo.
I just want Zelenski to do the right thing, to
do what he ran on her words to that effect.
One of the main criticisms of Gordon Solon was that
he couldn't really remember a lot of what was going on.
(12:19):
He wasn't a note taker like some of the other
witnesses giving testimony before. And he kept throwing it saying, well,
the White House didn't give me documents that I wanted,
they didn't release certain text messages, they didn't release things
that could maybe make me remember some of the other details.
Republicans jumped on that because saying he didn't really remember
a lot of details. Democrats were very frustrated by some
(12:41):
of that stuff as well. So, just to end it off, Victor,
you were talking about how this could mark a shift
in this whole impeachment hearing, but still both Republicans and
Democrats are seeing the same set of details in completely
different ways. There's one report that says that this testimony
could be the or an after phase, where before they
(13:02):
were just trying to get some of the facts out there,
and after now we're seeing a lot of the political
machine move after this testimony. Republicans say, listen, the investigation
never went down, which means Trump really shouldn't be impeached,
whereas Democrats are saying he was caught in a bribe.
Even though the bribe didn't go through, it's still happened,
(13:23):
and that is enough for the impeachment to happen. Thank you, Victor,
Thank you. Some of the executive recruiters I spoke to
classified Amazon as a so called academy company, and that
an executive recruiter parlance is a term they designate to
(13:45):
these big companies that have really good leadership programs that
wind up spawning a lot of CEO Joining us now
is Danta Mattioli, covering Amazon for the Wall Street Journal.
Thanks for joining us, Dana, great to be here. For decades,
General Electric was the breeding ground for CEOs and top
level executives for the people that it went there to work.
(14:07):
They went through the rigorous management program that they had there,
and then they went off to start other businesses and
serve on boards and whatnot. The new company that has
stepped in where people are going through the program and
then moving on to other things is Amazon. They've become
the new CEO factory. Dana tell us a little bit
about what's going on with it. For decades, GEO was
(14:29):
the breeding ground for future CEO and a CEO named
Jack Welsh, and as they've become less relevant and sort
of stumbled, Amazon and other tech titans have become the
new conglomerates of the day. And Amazon in particular is
one of the biggest companies in the US in terms
of employers, and they are churning out lots of CEOs
and founders of big companies. I guess a lot of
(14:50):
people in high level positions at Amazon tend to stay
there for many years. So some of these other people
are maybe not seeing as many opportunities at the highest
levels there, so they're moving to other places. One of
the things that they're doing, though, is taking a lot
of the leadership principles that they learn at Amazon and
they're applying it to their own businesses. So Amazon has
these tried and true fourteen leadership principles that are sort
(15:14):
of ingrained in anyone who's ever worked there at the
point where they leave and they bring these leadership principles
where they work, connect or they even find themselves accidentally
reciting them to their children. So when these people leave
and they become CEOs elsewhere in places like Tableau or Zoo,
Lily or Hulu all have Amazon alumni who have either
(15:35):
run it or founded it, they tend to bring a
lot of that with them because it's what they know
and it's what they've seen work. So what are some
of these principles that they carry on the top One
is customer obsession. That's one that you hear Jeff Bezos
talk about literally all the time. It's funny. The lead
anecdote of the story is a CEO from a company
called Latchell. He had worked at Amazon for three years,
(15:57):
but his company also has fourteen leadership principles, like five
or six of them are exactly the same as Amazon.
So that's customer obsession, bias for action, earned trust. The
list goes on. If you can help explain some of
these bias for action. Speed matters in business, So we
take this to mean, you know, if a project comes up,
get to it right away, respond to the customers, things
(16:19):
like that. It also means move quickly, and Jeff Bezos
speaks a lot about the concept of a two way door,
meaning that if you do something and it doesn't work out,
you could always reverse it and unwind it, so you
don't have to over analyze something people are getting involved
in it or making a decision as long as you
could reverse it if it turns out not to work.
One of the principles that causes a little bit of
(16:40):
not controversy, but people have feelings on it on both sides.
I guess it's have backbone, disagree and commit. I think
a lot of people might think that people can be
a little too forceful or not nice to people. Is
that one that causes a little bit of trouble, so
amazon they don't commit to this idea of social cohesion
where people are nice for the sake of being nice,
(17:02):
rather than piping up and saying when they disagree about something,
or engaging in not arguments per se, but really getting
to the merits of the way decisions are made, and
sometimes that could come across as argumentative or told bristle
some people, and that type of culture is not always
for everyone. In the article you mentioned part of the culture,
some of it they're not taking with them to their
(17:22):
new businesses. What we found when I spoke to a
lot of these CEOs that were sort of bread at
Amazon is that their cherry picking which parts of it
to bring to the next role. So there's some aspects
that they really like that they think translate well, and
there's others where they disagree with the way Amazon handled
something or they don't necessarily think it's a good fit
for the new organization. One of the CEO as I
(17:42):
spoke to, said he didn't want to export their culture.
He was striving for a more empathetic culture rather than
sharp elbows or confrontation. But he did bring up over
some other parts of what Amazon does. It must be
a point of pride for them to kind of cultivate
these talents and then have them go on and and
start other businesses, startups, or run other big companies. How
(18:03):
do they feel about losing some of this talent? Though
I do think it is a point of pride I
spoke with Jeff Wilkie, who is the CEO of Amazon's
consumer side of the business, and he basically said, you know,
we'd love to keep all these people at Amazon, but
he's excited to see them go off and start their
own businesses or run existing companies. And it's definitely a
point of pride. Everybody wants to work for a huge,
(18:24):
successful company. But this also from an outsider perspective, seems
like just another feather in their hat as a great
place to work if you do learn really good business
principles there, and then as evidenced by all these people
moving on to do bigger and better things, that just
still seems like a great place to find employment. So
some of the executive recruiters I spoke to classified Amazon
(18:45):
as a so called academy company, and that an executive
recruiter parlance is a term they designate to these big
companies that have really good leadership programs that wind up
spawning a lot of CEO So twenty years ago you
would have heard them with ched G is the ultimate
academy company, and they say that Amazon has that title
along with places like PEPSI that have great management programs
(19:07):
and keepin off CEOs, So for sure, I think people
do view this as something that they want in their
resume where they could maybe get some of that leadership
by osmosis, And if they don't want to stay, there's
other options for them in the workforce, whether that's leading
something else or working elsewhere. Danta Mattioli, covering Amazon for
The Wall Street Journal. Thank you very much for joining us,
(19:28):
Thanks for having me. That's it for today. Join us
on social media at Daily Dive Pod on both Twitter
and Instagram. Leave us a comment, give us a rating,
and tell us the stories that you're interested in. Follow
us and I heard radio, or subscribe wherever you get
(19:49):
your podcasts. This episode of The Daily Dive is produced
by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sargentina. I'm Oscar
Ramirez and this was your Daily Dive d FA
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