Massive Somali Fraud in Minnesota with Nick Shirley, California Asset Seizure, $20B Groq-Nvidia Deal

**Jason** (0:00)
All right, we have a massive show for you today, Besties, but it's not going to be our prediction show. We thought we were doing predictions end of the year, but we had so many amazing stories to cover in the news that we're going to do predictions next week. The first story is we have investigative journalist Nick Shirley on. He has uncovered in a breaking 42-minute video that went viral, $110 million in potential fraud in Minnesota. It's part of $9 billion in overall fraud, and we've got him on the show here exclusively. This video apparently perhaps prompted responses from Cash Patel and DHS Secretary Christy Noem who have sent agents in to inspect these facilities. Here's some sort of important context. These entitlement frauds in Minnesota have been going on for over 10 years. It's a 13, 14-year-old story. It started by an investigative reporter named Jeff Bailon, launched his first investigation into this in February of 2013 at Fox 9 News, local investigative journalists. And after that expose, charges were brought in 2014 against a Somali woman and her husband. They skipped bail. They never faced trial. Here's a 45-second clip from 2016 from Bailon.

**Jeff Bailon** (1:14)
Ali is facing numerous counts of theft by swindle and racketeering. She ran a daycare business and home healthcare company that catered to low-income families. But former employees told the Fox 9 Investigators back in 2013 that it was really part of a scam to collect millions in public subsidies.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:34)
When I saw the bank account for the business, there were large Cath withdrawals on a continuous basis.

**Jeff Bailon** (1:41)
Can I ask you a few questions? A year after our investigation, Ali was arrested and charged with bilking the state out of about $4 million. Okay.

**Jason** (1:50)
Since 2018, Minnesota has seen nine billion, around nine billion in entitlement frauds according to federal prosecutors. Just to give you guys a concept of what that means, that's half of the total amount spent on 14 entitlement programs in the state. So here's the direct quote from the federal prosecutor on the Minnesota fraud. The magnitude cannot be overstated. It's staggering. Industrial scale fraud. There have been over 90 convictions for more than $800 million in fraud since 2022 In 2022, 47 defendants were charged in a $250 million fraud scheme called Feeding Our Future. That was supposed to feed hungry kids. Then up to 220 million was stolen in funds for kids with autism. Then 300 million was stolen in Medicaid funds meant to help people with disabilities avoid homelessness. So starting with that Feeding Our Future fraud in 2022, 82 of 92 people charged have been Somalian. Joining us right now, 23-year-old investigative journalist, Nick Shirley. Welcome to the program.

**Nick Shirley** (3:00)
Thank you. It's been a crazy past few days out here in Minnesota.

**Jason** (3:04)
So I guess a good place to start is you could tell the audience a little bit about your background. When you got into investigative journalism, obviously you've got a YouTube channel. I watched some of your early videos when you were 16, 17 years old. I would say along the Mr. Beast vibes and then suddenly making a turn into politics, specifically around immigration and some Vox pop kind of man on the street stuff. But maybe you could tell us a little bit of how you got into all this and how you got into this specific story.

**Nick Shirley** (3:39)
Yeah. So I've been doing YouTube as far as I can pretty much remember since I was a sophomore in high school. It was just something I thought I could would be good at. So I do YouTube videos and all I could do in high school is to do prank videos, sneaking into places, just kind of fun stuff you can do on the weekend. And then as I've grown older and I've had other experiences, I've matured and I've wanted to get more into more serious topics. And so as I've been able to go places and kind of see the world for what it is in different countries and whatnot and had different experiences, they kind of led me to get into this more investigative journalism content. And also back in around 2020, you couldn't even make political content on YouTube without being demonetized. For instance, if you were to put Trump in a YouTube title or thumbnail on my channel, you would get demonetized because I was a smaller channel. So it was impossible to make that sort of content. And I was younger. I was about 17, 18 years old at that time.

**Jason** (4:36)
And now YouTube allows you to monetize. I noticed you had ads baked into the program like many podcasters, and you're not affiliated with any news source. And to the best of my knowledge, you're not backed by any special interest groups. You're not backed by some rich billionaire. Where's the money coming to do this reporting from? And just to confirm that with the audience.