Episode Transcription

00:00 hey, thanks for listening to the show or watching the show or or you know, reading the show. We prefer to read the transcript. It is an option. If not, a lot of people choose, but you know, mean some people do. I've been reading this podcast. I've been reading this podcast lately. Hey, you know, I've got some shows. Hey, this week I'm in Kansas City. I'm in Saint Louis and Springfield doing the show me tour and and then later this month I'm in Vegas all week, so you'll know where to find me. 00:31 yeah, I'll be at the Chris Angel show every night every night. I'm using my entire paycheck to buy Chris Angel tickets, so no please come hang out of the shows. I would love to see you there and then I've got Birmingham, Alabama and Georgia and you know I've got to I got tour dates and they're on my website, Paul read the actor dot com and would we're gonna jump into the episode. 00:52 all right, man, have you heard of the Panama Papers? Hey, April Fools, don't you imagine them? brought another one. I brought another one for weeks. I'm like people like I want to know what the Panama Papers are 01:07 I got hate crying by the IRS. I'm not joking. I say like I'm doing it like I don't got nothing to do. You underestimate how much time I have you underestimate. I would say I a Panda Express papers. 01:28 Things I learned last night. 01:37 All right, what are the Panama Papers, the Panama Papers? I think the best place to start with a story is in early twenty fifteen a okay list by the name of Bastion Obermeyer. He worked for a German open myer Obermeyer Obermeyer. That's not the brand of cookie that we had to sell right. Did you have to sell cookie dough when you were a kid? 02:01 do you remember when someone would come to your public school and they would enlist you in their M L M yeah, I do remember that and we had to sell cookie dough and they'd be like if you sell enough you get a TV, but nobody ever got the TV yeah, because he was like a billion points, but so instead you get those like we're plastic thing. You're just like get a racers. get a race, neighbors and going door to door without your parents, by the way, just going to be like you want some cookie dough. My school wasn't cookie dough. My school was butter braids 02:29 What is a butter braid? Oh my gosh, honestly, though red or what is it butter braid? It's it's kind of like if a cinnamon roll was a loaf of bread. Okay, but they would, okay, they would put filling and stuff in it. Honestly, very delicious. Actually, I was going to get a different picture, but I'm getting this because I remember this was the piece of paper we we took around with us to show people because we would be like that's what people would say. You'd ring the doorbell. They'd be like, well, what is a butter braid? And then you'd show them this and people would be like that does look pretty good. Actually, 02:59 we had a full and people would buy that if someone came to my door and was like, would you like to buy this weird croissant? ah No, these were genuinely delicious though. They had like a filling, so this is a strawberry one like they could never tell you how it helps your school. Yeah, it helps our school, but how oh 03:22 your principal is going to get to go to vacation this year for this hey, the also the domain on this is everything mommy hood dot com and I just got to say I don't like it. It's crazy that the date is twenty twenty. I crazy like this date is just p covid three twenty three 03:43 to four. That is like ten days in which I'm not going to lie like in the middle of lockdown, a butter braid would have friggin hit. We found we found this cranberry cheese at high V yeah too early in the pandemic, and so we were eating cranberry cheese and wine every night. Where do you yeah? That sounds great. It was all and I lived right next to a Texas Road House 04:12 wolf, because you could just walk over and go to the pick up window. Yep, yeah. Lockdown was a weird thing because for some people it was obviously not good yeah, but for me it was the best for a lot of our listeners. It was like the beginning of their life. They were so young and don't remember anything and for us it was the worst year of my life. Yeah, for you it was pretty though pretty rough. Yeah, all everything that you did everything since been pretty bad. Yeah, yeah, you know most things since 04:40 I worked at the church. didn't have to go service with little glimmers of joy. We had online church only. And I remember I had to reply to comments. I sat there replying to comments and I'm not exaggerating. I had, I don't think I've ever told anybody this. My wife obviously saw it, but I had to have the online service playing right here. And then I'd be replying. I'd be replying to comments. And I had, cause it just came out animal crossing on the Nintendo switch. And I sat there playing animal crossing and then I had to reply to a comment. And then I play. 05:10 I like, and then I replied to a comment. I can't believe you quit that job. 05:15 everyone's like pastor Tim really give us some insight in these comments as your lead pastors up there being like lead self leadership is really about leading yourself and you're like I said that that was my line quoted. That was my line. So anyway, that was so that's a butter braid. We would sell cookie dough, but we didn't you didn't have the butter braids right. They would order them. Yeah, they ordered them. They came to do another trip where you go deliver them. You you were the hire. We didn't have to deliver them. They came in the mail. Oh 05:45 not at our school. We were the entire supply chain. Otis Spunk Meyer was like, let the kids do the work. Otis Spunk Meyer was like, yeah, we'll give the school $200 in exchange for child labor. Send the kids door to door. Teach him how to be salesman. Sell chocolate chips, sell oatmeal raisin, sell the whole thing. Right. And then in a couple of weeks, 06:06 it's all going to come in now. I call the sales. You had the spreadsheet, you know, paper written stuff down, then you track all and then you get all the product, you a check and then you would give it to the school and the have to keep in it to Otis Spunk Meyer and then Big Otis would be like all right, that's good and then you would have to they would just send home a gigantic box of frozen cookie dough with you. That is crazy. I wonder how many people bought cookie dough and didn't get it because like kids were running that 06:33 like yeah, the kids would be like oh, I think he ordered four, but I don't. I can't read. You have the ever and it had stickers with their names on him and then you had put it in your wagon. I had a wagon and I would take it door to door, but like also it was hot. Not that cookie dough was frozen. The cookie dough was frozen when I got it. I'm sorry this was frozen earlier. You know I'm saying like I for sure gave somebody food poisoning. 07:02 and that's on Otis Spunker for trusting third graders. I for sure gave some food place that areas and I gave it to one neighbor on purpose and they know why I'm going to come to your house last. I hate crime them. I hate crime them, crime them. I hate crime to them. Oh the reference to our show is a joke. We made a couple weeks ago 07:32 you don't remember me saying I hate crime doing the Panda Express Park. I do remember that that's a good line. New March. You can buy that shit right now. I hate crimes, Tim and the that's public. You can't wear a band express. They'll have some questions. Okay, so this is Bastion Obermeyer. Okay, okay, that's how we got here. Otis Spunk, Myer, open, Myer. Oh, that's right. That's how we got here. Sorry for the tangent. 08:02 and I know you're here for the hoes, the chair and let him talk. No yeah, so bass and Obermeyer. He was a journalist while this episode so long. We got a rapid word for a paper in Germany. I believe okay called. There's going to be so much of this. Sorry, is it relevant? Yes, okay, so douche zy tongue, so douche, so you're confident with that. You're going to go with seduce. No, I'm not confident with that, but it's all I got. 08:29 seduce zytung. All right, you know blairs half German and then he he worked alongside another journalist by the name of Frederick Obermeier, who is not related to him and in fact they're their names both over Meyer spelled completely different, but they just happen to be both the over Myers and so this is his other and they're not related for just go back and forth between them for a second and they're not related. They're uh 08:57 today. Just this is just what people look like there and they both look like their advertisements for Warby Parker glasses uh crazy uh so Bastion uh late July uh or early early in twenty fifteen. I don't know if it's July or something, but early twenty fifteen he just gets a message uh from a guy calling himself John Doe. 09:25 This is late at night. He's like trying to take care of his kids, do all the nightly chores and stuff. of honestly at first a little annoyed by this message because he just gets this message that just slides in um and this guy says, Hey, my name's John Doe. Are you interested in data? And he's like, I mean, what kind of data are we talking about? And he's like, I've got lots if you want to see it. 09:50 and so he's a journalist and so he's like I get weird messages like this all the time of people like yeah, I get weird messages all the time. You're like you want my data. Are you interested in data? What kind of data data boy? You're like what got him and so long story short, they're messaging back and forth and John Doe is telling him he's like he's like I can't reveal my identity identity to you. 10:18 I can't meet you in person, this is the only way we can ever communicate. And he says, And he says, because I'm in danger. And he says, but I have a lot of data for you. And he's like, how much data are we talking? And he says, more data than you've ever seen in your life. So he sends him this set of documents. And this first set of documents was enough to kind of pique Obermeier's interest. 10:41 But it wasn't anything groundbreaking. was just like, honestly, like a lot of articles of organization for like businesses. And he's like, okay, I'm not sure what I should really do with that. And he's like, wait till you see the second set. Wait till you see the second set. That's more data. I've got more data for you. And so he sends them a second set of data and the second set of data is 2.6 terabytes of essentially spreadsheets. 11:12 And so this is 11.5 million documents of essentially, and I mean there's PDFs and other document like Word docs and stuff like this too. But essentially these are inventories and articles of organizations and legal documents uh of businesses being put together in Panama, uh shell companies being put together in Panama. 11:41 all of the information about them. what you're actually seeing in these documents is when a shell company is created and you're seeing who is creating them. And so it's linking a bunch of people all over the world to um sometimes legal, but sometimes illegal activities to operate with tax havens and tax avoidance and also 12:11 conduct crime and this all came specifically from this company. um Let me get the name of it right. uh Mo sack flan seca, which is a law firm out of Panama. Okay, here's Ramon phone sack phone sack. Hold on to me yeah fun set fun seca sorry fun sec. Yeah, was gonna say I don't like phone sack. I them together and you're again mosac 12:37 okay. These are the founders of the company. I don't like this guy, so yeah you you shouldn't because you're gonna know sack. He lives in Panama because his dad moved to Panama uh after World War Two. I wonder why, because he was one of them yeah and he uh got enlisted by the CIA. When did you move here? uh Forty four forty five somewhere around there. 13:04 what brought you to Panama? I like the weather, the sports, the the international law. We just really like it. Well, no, his dad got courted by the CIA to be a spy for the communist sure or I guess a spy on the communists and so that's mosak. You're in mosak. Okay, Ramon Fonseca is a little bit of a different story. Ramon, he uh 13:34 He wanted to be a priest and so he went and went to seminary, started learning that world. And I don't know exactly what happened, but he failed at being a priest. And so then he started uh going to school to be a lawyer. He shifted to law and learned all that law. And then at some point he met Mossack and they said, hey, let's start a firm together. And they created uh Mossack Fonseca. 14:03 uh And this company, what they did is they would organize businesses in Panama. And so honestly, we used a company like this to file our businesses. um And what these companies do is you go to them, they take care of all of the paperwork for you, and they organize your business. help you file with the government, make you a legal entity. And then um you have a person there who essentially operates as your government. 14:32 go before where it's like they will sign documents for you. They will do all of the like legal side of things. They're like a lawyer. They're a lawyer that do that type of things. It's called a registered agent. They did that. the catch was they did it in Panama and Panama is a tax haven country. Because they allow a lot of that stuff is not public information. don't broadcast that out. don't. 15:00 And so if you were someone somewhere else in the world who wanted to hide your wealth, Panama was always a great place to do that. Right. And so they would operate in Panama doing this. And what's interesting about it is technically what they are doing is illegal or is legal. um But because the nature of the fact that it was so private in Panama, it attracted a lot of people who were doing it for illegal means, who were tax evading or who were laundering money. 15:27 or who were like drug cartels sure on monitoring money trying to obfuscate things. And it's interesting when all of this came out they talked about how they're like we don't know what who our customers are in a lot of cases a lot of times where there is a there's barrier. Yeah. There's a ball. don't yeah we don't understand these things we don't know what's going on sure and so they describe themselves as a car manufacturer like we're a car manufacturer we make cars people buy them. 15:56 if they use the car to rob a bank, that's not on us. Okay, so that was an interesting defense that they used for a long time. I mean, unless they come to you and they go, hey, I'm going to buy this car to rob a bank. Well, what's it? I need a car that I can rob a bank with, which which and that's and that's honestly, hey, hey, come on down to Toyota, you know, 16:19 look at the spacious back third row. These seats fold down plenty of room for cash bags if you'd like and you can actually fold down the captain seats as well. If you need to lay down and hide behind here for the cup and the pulling open door of this on this mini van, Toyota Sienna ah is perfect because if you just open that sliding door to do and then close it, you know and 16:43 you know. I think this is in the you acceleration on this is pretty great, so I think that for the needs that you've stated that you have and I know about this might be the best vehicle for you to rub a bank with, but don't worry, we're not going to write down in your need, but I'm not going to I'm not going to tell anybody your I know your needs, but I won't tell anybody I got you. I got you. 17:09 Yeah, kind of except so they used that as like their defense when this started hitting the news, good defense, but they quickly backpedaled and changed that analogy okay, and they change it to no. We're like a life manufacturer. If someone uses a knife to kill people, the knife manufacturer is not in trouble. a little bit more. Well, the reason they backpedaled is because there was a specific document that was a part of this 17:38 that they were like, we probably shouldn't use the card analogy here because it's probably a little too on the nose. Oh, because there was in 1983 and this was there's documents. there's documents in the leak, the Panama Papers leak that talked about how Mosak Fonseca worked for uh set up a shell company for an organization uh that was out of London. 18:05 And in 1983, there was this famous gold heist called the Brinks Mat Gold Heist. And there was this facility right next to Heathrow Airport where there was this big robbery that occurred. And the people who broke in, they expected there to be money there. They didn't know there was gold. There ended up actually being $26 million worth of gold. Oh my gosh. used these gold bars, melted them down, and it was never recovered. 18:34 the gold bars. They never found the gold bars or the people who the robbers and they just made out with them. When this happened, obviously it was huge. what? They made out with them? 18:51 yeah, so look at all his gold. I know what I'm going to do when get home and you get home. I'm not even gonna wait. I don't wait on in the age of e land. It's a good thing we bought this as you ve from most sack from Sika with fall down captain sees a perfect thing that I just bought this twenty nineteen Toyota Sienna 19:19 with plenty of room for making out with gold. 19:24 purchase it now. Hey, this week sponsor is this nineteen ninety one Ford F one fifty available in Independence, Missouri. It's just someone's face, but market place. I runs drives great, but to be a project truck, but no longer have the time to do so. So forty five hundred or best OBL, which is our best offer. So it looks like a pretty decent truck. And so if you're in the Kansas City area and you're looking for a Ford F one fifty 19:51 get your needs met with this one that's on Facebook marketplace. The seller's name is Nathan Sipes, so Nathan Sipes dot com slash tillin pot yeah. I'm gonna message him right now. I'm gonna tell him hey man, just plug your truck. 20:08 a man just uh just promoted this on my podcast. Hope you get a say on my podcast. If you're going to sell you owe me twenty percent. uh 20:25 Use code till and podcast at checkout. You go to pick that up and you just say, you just say, Hey, till and podcast. And then he has to give us 20%. uh 20:40 Thanks for watching our show if you like it. A great way to help out is by being a Patreon supporter. Doing that helps make this show possible, but it also gets a lot of perks for you. You can get every episode a week early ad free. You get access to a Discord where you can meet a lot of other people who love the show and actually hang out with Jaren and I every month on a hangout. And we're also in that Discord chat all the time, hanging, talking with people, talking about episodes and just random stuff in life. It's super fun. 21:03 We do, there's a way to get birthday messages, a free gift, merch discounts in there. So there's a lot of really great reasons to be a Patreon supporter. You get a lot of benefits out of it. And it also makes the show keep happening. So if that sounds great to you, you can go to support.tillin.com or tillin.com slash support, uh or just tillin.com and search around until you find the links uh and become a Patreon supporter. really appreciate you doing that. But if not, right back to the episode, right? 21:31 I'm going to send you a screenshot of this, so that you can put that in the ad. That's crazy. A ran just promoted this on my 21:53 If a Ford is a Ford F one fifties, your speed. We have plenty of merch on tiller.com and you can buy that's so funny. All right, back to the episode. 22:08 this week sponsored this guy's for that one. Okay, I don't remember what I was talking about. Oh the bank or the robbery yeah they just made. They got away with it well the uh the reason why mosak fun seca changed the story line and stopped using the car analogy is because it came out that in these document links there was documents from when the shell company opened up right after that robbery. 22:37 and the the dollar amount that they were trying to put into the shell company, most like Fonseca, we're saying there's a pretty good chance that this is that robbery and it's in writing that they recognize that there's probably that robbery. Oh wow, they don't email back. Is this this robbery that is a place and the guy's like here like guys like L O. Yeah, L O. And the guy's like ha sick. Why does gold have saliva? 23:05 so slobbery. So it was the amount that was like sloppy. What they're clearly trying to launder. Yeah. And what's interesting is in this case, there's documentation. If you follow the thread line of this whole like that show company a couple uh months later, the police started to figure it out and we're like narrowing in on the show company and they set up another shell company and moved all the money to a different shell company and office gated it before the police could get to the end line of it. And they did that on their own. 23:35 got it so the the journalists get these documents. They're reading through these documents. They're realizing. Oh, this is pretty big. There's a lot, a lot of people. This is a full service crime center. Yeah, what it is yeah and and it's and there's a lot going on here right. It's eleven million documents. There's a ton of people named in it. World leaders, celebrities, cartels, terror organizations, 24:02 It is massive. And so the two of them, they say, we can't take this on by ourselves. Right. And so they call the ICIJ, which is the International Consortium of Journalists. they do that. And they say, hey, we need help going through this. And so they put together a group of 200 journalists from or I think it was actually 400 journalists from 200 uh papers around the world. And they said, we're going to work on this together. Sure. They all were going to follow the trails for their locality. 24:32 and figure out all this stuff of the people near them that weren't involved in this. Do I just want to be a journalist? Is there money in it? Because like not really yeah, unless you become like an author and sell books and do that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean money, but like I just love putting puzzles together, you know, and that's what these people did. But here's the thing they recognize very quickly that there was a lot of very powerful people in these papers and so 24:59 all of these people, basic all these journalists basically went into hiding for a year and you could just become a youtuber who does this stuff and that stuff doesn't have to be true. 25:11 You're right. Yeah, you're right like that dumb kid like that dumb kid. Are you talking about the yeah yeah, and you know who was talking about? I don't know who I'm talking about when I say that dumb kid because that feels like enough. Yeah, I know exactly who you're talking about. Actually, sadly, and that's what I'm saying is that like he's just on YouTube just saying stuff yeah yeah and he's built a career. That's what I'm saying. It's crazy. don't know what I'm talking I'm a remember 25:39 ah No, but that's what I'm saying is like you could just I don't know. Maybe when my takes the cake comes out, maybe it'll blow up like that. People like there's fraud happening. So what's interesting is each of these people recognize that how dangerous this was yeah and so they all went into hiding for like a year. They all worked on air gapped computers, which if you remember right in our last episode, these are computers that have never been connected or much, much previous. was couple weeks ago. Yeah, we did an episode a while ago where we talked about air gaps. 26:08 If you don't remember, air-gapped computers are machines that have never been connected to the internet. physically can't. They don't have Wi-Fi cards. They don't have ethernet ports. It's impossible to connect them to the internet. The only way to get data on them is through flash drives. ah so they're isolated machines that are disconnected from any network. What's interesting about it is they also noticed, or they also knew, that, okay, at the end of the day, even if it's air-gapped, it's a physical machine that exists and that data's there. 26:35 and so what they did is they took them apart and on the hard drives, the screws that attach the hard drives they put. How do they get these these air gap computers yeah and get them anywhere? No, but I mean like how do we get the data from it? Is that what the whole thing is? John Doe leaked the data. The guy who's interested in some had access to one of these air gap things. No, not an air gap computer. He he got out. We'll talk about how okay, okay, okay, okay. 27:01 but he distributed the data to these. But I'm saying like the data is on the air gap computer. That's where I was confused. But keep on with the air gap stuff. Yes, the air gap computer, the way they got the data is through flash drives. Right. The flash drives on and they were able to download. Ah, you got you. And they recognize that they had hard drives in there and people could still if someone got into that facility, wherever they had the computer or their home or whatever, they could take that hard drive, copy the contents of the hard drive, know what was on it. And so what they did to be able to tell if somebody did that on the screws that screw the hard drive in the machine, they 27:30 painted over that with uh glitter nail polish. And the reason they did that is because... It's clear unless you shine a light on it? Well, no, they took a picture of it. It's a high-res picture of it. And because it's glitter, it is always random. And so they could, if someone ever took that off and then tried to put it back and put glitter on it, it would be a different pattern of glitter. So they can compare it with the picture and know somebody got into this hard drive. Isn't that crazy? Geez. Yeah. 27:58 The level of security I don't have anything I'm trying to hide that back. Also, I don't know if I have the brain to be like here's how I would hide that yeah that crazy yeah. So these journalists spent two years ah or they spent one full year going pouring through these documents, putting all the plants together and then finally on April third twenty sixteen at six PM European time four hundred journalists in eighty countries 28:28 published at the exact same time, articles outlining what they found in these papers. And so obviously this was massive news. What we found from it is there was uh offshore companies operated out of this single company basically worldwide. they incorporated, what's interesting is initially when this company was founded, the earliest companies that they started were all in Panama. 28:55 But when the US took over control of Panama, the laws changed and Panama wasn't as good of a shell company country. then they went global and they started using all these other countries that have good shell company locations and they opened up these franchises essentially in all these different countries to operate their shell companies. so obviously, ah 29:19 Tons and tons and tons of companies were opened operating out of these different companies and yeah, they were linked to crazy. think the number was 12 world leaders, uh dozens of celebrities and then hundreds of very wealthy individual. 29:38 third one from the bottom and Nevada Reno, Nevada is a tax haven. Oh, it is Nevada. That's what we're talking about Nevada. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so why is the I don't know it's not red. I don't know why it's not red. I was looking at that too when I okay this, but yeah Reno, Nevada is a big tax haven. What's really interesting is in this propaganda or was trying to make it seem like oh it's everyone else, not us, and then they put the there's twelve hundred documents from Nevada on their hand. What's really interesting is this leak? There are 30:08 tons of people from all over the world listed in this. World leaders, celebrities, there are very few Americans listed in this document. And listed in this leak. one of the reasons for it is because the United States has its own tax havens in Delaware, Nevada, uh Wyoming, South Dakota, are all tax havens. And so you don't have to leave the country to set up quote unquote offshore accounts where you could hide your money. 30:36 so there were very few Americans listed in this. I got some offshore account. If the IRS hears that I don't know, I'm joking. I if we do, if that turns out to be true, that's crazy. That's it. That was an accident, but like I don't know that I have business managers yeah and so kill them. I mean, I don't know. Does the IRS kill people potentially 31:04 That's a good. That's a good river to start. Yeah, the IRS kill the IRS kills people. I got hate crying by the IRS. You hate me because I don't pay taxes. Yeah, I don't like me that yes. Yes, that is why we should not joke about me not paying taxes. the way, I'm pretty big that I don't pay taxes. I haven't paid taxes like seven years. I'm paying taxes anyway, so let me let me pull up this this picture. The extent of people listed 31:33 in these documents is pretty wild. So ah this is an image from, I believe, a French uh newspaper listing the people whose names were found in this. And so at the top we have a bunch of leaders of countries. I think there's 12 of them. And so these are actual presidents, kings, prime ministers who have money in offshore accounts operated by Mossack, Fronseca. 32:02 What's interesting is the list below. think it's actually far more interesting because these are global leaders. Associates of our associates and one of them that's really interesting is this guy by the name of let me make sure I get his name right. Sir gay, Sergey, Walt rolled again. Okay, Sergey rolled again. He is a celloist and a successful celloist, but he is listed as the owner of multiple companies in these papers. 32:31 that total over two billion dollars worth of assets, which would make his net worth two billion dollars. The interesting thing about world again ah is he's not only a cellist, but he is a close friend of Vladimir Putin. Yeah, he's actually been lifelong friends with him. Here he is at Putin's wedding or another dedication. This is Putin's. This is a Putin's child dedication and he's actually the godfather of Putin's daughter. 33:01 and he says he's not a wealthy. He all the time looks so happy in this too, like you would not even imagine the joy and so rolled again. He looks like go back to Putin. He looks like Stephen Miller. I know isn't that kind of weird in that weird. It's got a weird wow, but rolled again. What was kind of surmised from this document is rolled again. 33:29 there are these moments where you can see money moving through rolled against accounts from different shell company to shell company to shell company. And then it goes out to a Russian bank and people are like, yeah, he is the, started calling him Putin's wallet. This guy's Interesting. Okay. And there's, he's not the only one Putin you'll see his childhood friends, close friends. There are multiple people and we see this. There is the president of Syria is down there. 33:59 there are multiple. The president of China is down there. ah Yeah, there are multiple world leaders who have these associates who have billions of dollars worth of asset under management from these shell companies that are running through these UAE, president of Argentina, and so this is the prime minister. This hit the news. Russia immediately started calling this right western propaganda. Of course, China, China, 34:24 blocked it from all of their internet like it was completely black listed it within four hours. It was gone from Chinese media right. em What is really interesting though is the day this came out. There was also an interview with the Prime Minister of Iceland yeah who was on the graphic yeah the Prime Minister of Iceland. Let me get his name right. uh Sigmund are oh Dave you 34:49 let me get his name right. Sigmund, er, uh I goon, goon, me get his name right. As I say it completely wrong for sure, goon, log us in and he ran on a campaign ah that was about integrity. Yeah, well, it was specifically about the rich avoiding taxes was like how he campaigned into power and so he has this interview and in this interview, these people sock man. There's this interview where he is taken in and they 35:17 Filment at the prime minister's mansion and the ICIJ journalists were like, okay, the local Icelandic journalist was like, I want to interview him, but he's going to know something's up if I'm the one interviewing him. Right. And so he says, I'll come with you. I'm going to hide in a different room. You want another ICIJ journalist, you approach him, you say you want to interview him about Icelandic, the Icelandic economy. And so they show up, he does this interview, they agree to it. He sits down and for like 20 minutes. 35:46 He just soft lobs questions, kind of buttering them up being like, talk about the economy. Your presidency, you were seeing the numbers go up, you're doing such a great job, things are so great. And then it turns, and I actually have the video footage of this. want you to watch. uh It's going to start, the first couple seconds of this are going to be in Icelandic, it's going to quickly shift to the interview where it's in English. m And so this is that video. This is the prime minister. Have you or did you have any connections yourself to an offshore company? 36:15 myself. Well, the Icelandic companies, and I have worked for Icelandic companies, had connections with also companies, the, what's it called? workers unions. So it would have been through such arrangements, but I have always 36:44 given all of my assets and that of my family up for taxes. there has never been any of my assets hidden anywhere. Mr Prime Minister, what can you tell me about a company called Vintris? Well, it's a company, if I recall correctly, which is associated with one of the companies that I was on a port of. 37:14 was had an account. Oh my gosh. As I mentioned, has been with the tax on the tax account since it was established. The other journalist came out and then he stormed out of the room. He went to his kitchen because he saw this other journalist and he's like, oh, you're trapping me. And they start arguing in Icelandic. And then he leaves the room. They 37:44 They filmed this two weeks in advance of everything leaking out, but they released this video the same time everything else came out. 37:55 Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of things. I learned last night. If you liked the show, you want to support us, we've got merchandise that you can get and it's good stylish stuff that I made. put a lot of work into this stuff, so it's great to find other tilling fans in the wild and be like, wait a minute. I know that shirt. And so yeah, we would love for you to do that. You can pop over to shop.tillin.com or the QR code or there's a link in the description. There's plenty of ways to find it. We promise we made it super easy. So thanks for supporting the show and thanks for listening. 38:26 so what happened to this guy that that company was his offshore company and a little bit of background about that is when he got into politics, he sold that company to his wife for one dollar through the offshore system, so his wife was on the paperwork as the owner of the company right nine million in assets under there that he was very clearly. He did not disclose. I this is what I'm trying to explain to people to is like you don't understand the level of wealth that exists yeah because I 38:55 is just yesterday. Logan Paul sold a Pokemon card for sixteen point five million dollars. You know he sold that to Anthony scare moochy son. That's crazy scare moochy was the press secretary for eleven days in the first Trump administration and it's just like that that guy scar moochy who I've listened to several podcasts of and I was like oh, I think this guy's guy now I'm sitting here on like his son was able to spend sixteen point five 39:22 million dollars on a Pokemon card. That means that if that's the amount of money you can spend on a Pokemon card, that means you have a lot more much more. Yeah. And that's where I go like, why are we scrapping? But I will also say, no, I will don't interrupt me in the middle of my, my trying to start a revolution. I'm not, I'm not. A lot of those are in and of themselves tax havens because you don't pay property taxes on a Pokemon card. Right. And so if you have $16 million in assets and that's a Pokemon card, 39:52 that is a tax haven and then in and of itself and that's the same thing with fine art like fine arts the same thing. I understand money into these things that are just fake tax holdings, so this kid might have. I mean I don't think the kid might have bought that maybe how old is he? I don't know how old he is. He's an adult. he's an adult. Okay, so he might have just wanted that he might just have the money. I just wanted that to pay sixteen point five million dollars for yeah yeah, but that's what I'm saying is that like it's like whenever and this is where I'm annoyed by 40:21 is that whenever people talk about the rich, it's things like this where they're doing these offshore accounts and stuff. We're not talking about the dude in your town who makes two hundred grand a year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, it's a different. It's a different thing entirely like, and I don't think people understand how much money there is. Yeah, it's insane that some of these people just have yeah, yeah, and they're going to and what we see in these papers, they're going to extreme lengths to keep it hidden for tax avoidance. Yeah, 40:51 But not just that is one of the interesting things in this. And through all this, there is a storyline about a prince. And I want to say the United Arab Emirates. can't remember what nation, but a nation in that general region of the world. And uh he had a shell company that owned a plot of three houses in a row on the beach in Malibu, totally 80 million dollars. Right. And an interesting thing from that is 41:20 there is a actual logical explanation to that of if the prince is coming to Malibu for a vacation yeah, you don't want to. You don't want anyone to know that this is his house right and that he's going to be there and so there is like and then and that's true of like celebrities to like there is a real like actual reason why you want to keep some of this stuff hidden. They're going to live in a gated community. You want to lose like because yeah you don't 41:45 it's a security risk. Yeah, there is like a safety thing there and there is also a privacy thing like there is a level of like does a privacy thing. I've decided that I'm going to because I saw a guy doing like I'm paparazzi in the paparazzi. Have you seen that or like the paparazzi that there was a camera and there's another guy who just takes his picture and films them and then they get real mad. Yeah, but I think he's not going far enough because I'm I don't have anything to do during the week. 42:10 yeah, and so now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna pick one guy out of the paparazzi yeah, and then I'm gonna sleep outside of his house yeah, and when he wakes up in the morning goes out to his car. I'm taking his picture and I'm yelling stuff at him and I'm gonna follow him everywhere he goes yeah yeah until he is a mental breakdown and I'm to stand over him and I'm going to take a picture was mental breakdown and then I'm going to print out like a magazine cover that it says his name is probably Michael. I assume Michael loses it. I'm gonna put I'm going to send it to him in the mail 42:39 Yeah, just over and over again. Just I mean I'll just thousands of copies of this magazine. Michael lost it. Yeah, you're to figure out every grocery store you frequent and change out all the I'm not joking. I say like I'm done it like I don't got nothing to do. You underestimate how much time I have you underestimate me. Yeah, you underestimate how insane I am. 43:04 So so but did that the Iceland guy get in trouble? Here's was crazy. Gunn Lageson. That video comes out the logins the next morning sounds like good night the next morning. The next morning he looks out the door of his prime minister's mansion to this and this is what we got to do guys. What's really interesting about this is Iceland, uh specifically uh Reykjavik Reykjavik. Is that how pronounce it? Yeah where the mansion is 43:31 there's a hundred and thirty thousand people who live there. This is a crowd of twenty thousand people, so this is almost twenty percent of the population of that city show up to protest him and I'm not exaggerating when I say they are egging his house. They all brought a good and they are a private is to judge and someone said we ran out of eggs and so they start going trying to buy eggs. They like sold the city out of eggs because they were I love it and forty eight hours later he steps down forty eight hours after this thing hit. 43:59 good so like it actually was like real. It's crazy double like impact in Iceland because every it came out that this guy was just a liar and he was he was literally doing the thing that he campaigned against to get his position of power and this also this is two thousand sixteen yeah. Gosh, I feel like I feel like politicians have figured out now that if they just push through long enough, it'll go away. Yeah, that is true. That is true and uh so this was obviously worldwide news right. 44:27 those 12 world leaders, a bunch of world leaders with who obfuscated through other people. ah What's interesting is there's a bunch of celebrities. Jackie Chan was in there. ah He had like 12 companies in there. ah And then who else was Lionel Messi was in there, which ironically he was under investigation for tax fraud already. And then when that came out, it was like, oh, here it is. ah And so there's a lot of these celebrities. And here's the thing. Here's the thing about the papers. I think I kind of said this. 44:55 but a lot of the people in these papers were doing this legally because if you have a shell company and you disclose that you own that shell company in your taxes, that is just a legal operation of that is a that is an asset that you own yeah, but a lot of people were using these illegally and they were using them to high taxes or to launder money, and so this was actually linked to multiple terror groups that and cartels that were laundering money through this panamanian company right to hide their activities uh and so 45:25 This hits the news. The biggest impact was in Iceland. There was impact worldwide. There was a lot of people who, uh, who I don't want to face, say face like the music for this, but it did open the eyes of a lot of people worldwide of what their governments were doing and what important people within their country were doing. Um, a year later there was a Maltese investigative journalist and Mike blogger. She was like a independent journalist and this 45:53 The important thing about this is this exposed the dealings of one specific company that operated shell businesses. This is not all the shell businesses. There's a lot more out there. And this kind of opened up the doors for journalists in 2017. I shouldn't say the years because I don't know the exact years, but throughout the rest of 2010s, we saw two more leaks come out. The Pandora papers uh and the Paradise papers. Love the... 46:16 Loved the P. Littering on Paradise Pandora. Yeah. And in that we just we saw more and more of shell Panda Express. We saw more and more of these shell. Panda Express papers. We saw more and more of these shell companies get exposed and more and more of these journalists were independently trying to chase down right people who were doing operating shell companies. And there was a specific journalist by the name of Daphne Galiza Galizia. 46:44 uh who was trying to uncover a specific politician uh in Malta who was corrupt using these shell companies. And she was getting really close down the trail. They had for years been trying to silence her actually. She had faced a ton of cases like defamation cases that she kept winning. uh And one day she wrote a blog outlining her most recent findings. And the last line of that blog was, need to come to terms with the fact that most of these people empower our crooks. 47:15 And it was the last line that she wrote in that blog. She got out, got in her car, backed out of her house, drove a few yards down the street and died in a car bomb. ah And this was an interesting moment in this whole storyline where all these journalists kind of got put on notice of like, hey, this is not just like powerful people in the world and celebrities and world leaders. These are criminals as well that are doing things and they are not. uh 47:44 opposed to killing people who are going to bring a light on their shade. Right. ah And so they don't need to PR this. Yeah, they'll just kill you. Yeah. And so this became or that event kind of took this down uh a different light. A month after all this happened, uh John Doe, uh which sidebar, we found out the way in one of the early releases, we found out the way he got access to all these documents. He was actually a hacker. 48:14 who found that uh the company, MoSack Fonseca, their website was running an out of date WordPress plugin called Slider Revolution. And they used that vulnerability to get into the website. And they had on the same server hosted all of their company's documents. so he just pulled everything. And so uh crazy, ridiculously easy vulnerability to patch 48:42 weren't aware of weren't paying attention to or something like that and ended up costing them um quite a bit because you're running a weird shell company and you need to make sure that you don't have any weird back ends or or back doors open. You know, hire Tim. Yeah, I could have. I could have stopped that. You what Tim loves crime, put it on record. Tim loves crime. I mean to be completely fair, if they hired me, that would have never happened. 49:10 I would have, I would have caught that vulnerability. loves crime. You heard it here, folks, but here's the thing. Here's the crazy thing. Um, uh, most act Fonseca. They obviously got put in this, this negative life. They went under this huge investigation. Long story short, they ended up managing to get out free on all this because they, don't know how, but in Panamanian courts, they were able to say, Hey, we weren't aware of a lot of these things that people were doing. 49:36 but it was still enough of an impact on their reputation as a business. They were not a safe place for you to move that money. And so their company ended up going out of business. Yeah. And then throughout the stress of all of it, most sack died. I don't know what happened to front sake. I don't know what he's out doing in the world anymore, um but ended up having that impact. John, this is interesting. They had this thing called shelf companies ah where they would start a company and they called it like, 50:04 aging wine on a shelf and so they would start a company in two thousand three and they'd set it on the shelf and when you came and you say hey, I got to move ten million dollars. They say oh, we have the perfect company for that. Let me pull it off the shelf that way. It's not a new yeah and then it's like you've been operating this company since two thousand three and then now all this money is moving through it. That's crazy yeah and they had they had subscription services for eight seventy five a month. They had subscription services where it's kind of like some of the bits that I have going right now. Like I've got some bits that I started when we were live together as roommates that 50:33 I mean I'm not going to that's not going to pay off. I hate that thirty years got a shelf bits. have shelf shelf. It's well they had it. They had this. They had this subscription service eight seventy five a month and basically the subscription service was we're just going to sign documents for you to make sure things continue moving the direction you want them to move and there was a story line. Okay, this man I can't remember the name of this guy, but he was an overseas. I'm sure it matters. He was an overseas criminal in human trafficking. 51:00 he gets put in prison. He got caught. I was to guess his name. It wasn't him. He kills himself. He goes to prison. He gets he goes to prison. He is in prison and his business is still he's still signing documents for his business while he's in prison because I bet that's still true of the of the other guy to he's paying for this eight seventy five a month eight dollars and seventy five cents subscription service. Oh, that's yeah. I thought you were saying eight hundred and seventy five eight dollars and seventy five cents a month. 51:25 for them to just keep signing documents like forging your signal. I don't know. I feel like tending to that big of an operation. It's probably worth eight hundred and seventy five dollars a month. That's what's crazy is like they were an economy of scale like this was a thousand, thousands of thousand small, but shell businesses that they were operating. That's crazy and so John Doe a month after all this comes out. He puts out a manifesto okay called the next revolution will be digitized. 51:55 And basically it's this whole manifesto about how um the elites of the world are tricking you. And this whole economy is set up to benefit the people at the top and extract from the people at the bottom. Which is interesting that we just talked about this in the last episode. But I want to read the last like paragraph and a half because it's really interesting. And he says, so he's setting up this whole story about how capitalism is essentially economic slavery. 52:24 where the elites are getting all the benefit and everybody else is suffering. And then he says this, in this system, our system, the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst the reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world would shock us all awake. But when it takes a whistleblower to sound the alarm, it is cause for even greater concern. 52:51 It signals that democracies, checks and balances have all failed, that the breakdown is systemic and that severe instability could be just around the corner. So now is the time for real action. And that starts with asking questions. Historians can easily recount the issues involving taxation and imbalances of power that have led to revolutions in ages past. Then military might was necessary to subjugate peoples, whereas now curtailing information access 53:21 is just as effective or more so, since the act is often invisible. Yet we live in a time of inexpensive, limitless digital storage and fast internet connections that transcend national boundaries. It doesn't take much to connect the dots from start to finish, inception to global media distribution. The next revolution will be digitized, or perhaps it has already begun. What is really interesting is I think his diagnosis of what's going on here is perfect. 53:50 But what's unfortunate is I think he put this message out. Because in 2016, that last line was true. The last line is uh the limitless digital storage, faster internet connections, transcend national boundaries. What has happened over the last decade is this internet that was uh open and built by 54:18 tons and ran by us. The people has been consolidated to a handful of corporations, so you think that he put that out and the corporations were like that's our vulnerability. I so we need to make it. We need to tighten that up. I think it is. I think it's probably I love when Tim gets back into conspiracies a little bit. I think it's fun right. I think it's probably two things at once because because what we we've seen since then and it started a little bit before, but I think what we've seen since then is we've seen the majority of online data. 54:47 is now concentrated to Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle. um Meta has some of it, but it's really just their ecosystem that they have. Apple's the same thing, but it's really just their ecosystem. Majority is four companies are operating all of the data on the internet, which means they have control of all of the data on the internet. uh And this thing that he's talking about where there's limitless access to data, 55:16 and all this can be accessed digitally. I think it's kind of like what we've seen with uh the media landscape where everything's consolidating to a handful of companies that write all of these, different things that you can't get real actionable uh or right. What I should say is true information anymore because the people who can show there's only a couple of people who actually control it puppet master to the top and it relies on you have a couple of weeks ago cloud. There's this big uh cloud flare had an issue that 55:43 took down half the internet and this thing went viral. um But it's really accurate because it really is this handful of companies and cloud flirt probably shouldn't be that big. They were in this case because of the DNS. But what is the what is the single pillar at the bottom? I don't know what they're it's cut off. I think it was like a meme. It's a meme. It's not like actual company um but it really is Amazon's AWS Microsoft's Azure Google's cloud services Oracle's cloud services. 56:11 are the majority of the internet. Cloudflare runs DNS. They also have cloud services too now. The majority of the internet is a handful of companies now. Even if you're hosting with Squarespace or Webflow or a WordPress host, they're using, they're renting AWS servers and Google servers. And so all of this data is concentrated in one place. And so I think the point he's making, the revolution will be digitized. We have access to all this information. I don't think it's true anymore. And so I don't know what to do with that information. 56:40 his diagnosis is accurate and I think they've patched the vulnerability. That's interesting. Yeah, wow. So I wish there was a nice happy ending to this. I guess the happy ending is that that interview was really cool to watch and watch that guy kicked out of his job and be exposed as a liar. But yeah, everything else is just there's an underworld of really rich people moving money around and getting away with it. That's nuts. Yep. That I mean, that's true. 57:11 well another encouraging episode from things I learned last night. You know if you like this and you want to know what else is the government hide from me. Why don't you listen to the Montauk project episode? The great episode about all how trustworthy everyone is so you can go listen to that and or watch that. Thanks for being here for our show. All my targets are at Paul, right the actor, I can you can get next week's episode. Oh speaking of shell companies, 57:38 we have a show company you pay into it every month. We have a service and it's called Patreon and we would love to see you over there and we take all that money and we hide it and so please join us over there. I don't know how to end it. Fiddle off man. That's crazy.