Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Idiot Who Made, And Destroyed, WeWork

Episode Date: December 17, 2019

Robert is joined by Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight to discuss the story of how one man made a billion dollars for no discernible reason at all. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's in Chicago? Meet me. I'm in Chicago. This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the show that tells you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And today, I'm in the windy city that never sleeps on a big apple, Chicago, Illinois, with my co-hosts today, the hosts of the Wonderful Knowledge Fight podcast, my favorite podcast. Dan and Jordan! Hey, everybody! I don't know your last names.

Well, it's irrelevant. You wave them up. We're not allowed to say our last names on television. It's a Mr. Mixle Plick situation. We'll be banished to another dimension should we say our names. Oddly enough, I have a friend who's like that, and it's Mr. Missle Plick. You said his name backwards twice, though, so you got him. I got you. Terrible. You can only visit him on certain occasions. Thanks for having us. It's nice. In Chicago, there's so many choices of people you could sit down with.

A lot of things going on in Chicago. I was surprised at the cars as a southerner and then a west coaster. I didn't realize you had them here yet, but that's good. That's good. That's pretty recent. That's good. Once the city burned down the first time, we were like, well, let's wait for the second to get some cars, but we decided against it. I'm proud of y'all. There's a lot going on in Chicago. Mainly it's cold. Yeah.

Very cold. Yeah. Have you been yelled at about food at all? Oh, my God. Actually, I have a tail. This will be dropping on episode of Worst Here Ever, but we went totally on accident when we were covering... Cody Johnson, Katie Stoll and I were covering the Midwest Fairfest. We went to, accidentally, what has to be one of the fanciest restaurants... It's one of the fanciest restaurants. Maybe the fanciest I've been to in my life, so I'm guessing it's one of the fancier ones in Chicago.

Potbelly. No, it is. No? Okay. The Capitol Grill. It was a place that we walked in and they asked to take our coats and we said no, and they immediately looked like, oh, you're not supposed to be here. That is just not done. But they seated us and we ordered lobster bisque, which was fantastic. The food was phenomenal.

And as I was eating my bisque, the waiter walked by and gave me, fetched me a look of pity and said, sir, is there something wrong with your soup spoon? No! I had used the wrong spoon. I was half sure the problem was going to be that you put ketchup in the bisque, which is frowned upon in Chicago. I'm not quite that much an animal, but I am apparently a filthy animal because I used, yeah, you know, I'm deeply ashamed. Wow. As Chicagoans allow us to resolve, or what is that called, absolve you of your food sin? Oh, I thought you were going to double down.

No, I don't give a shit about bisque. We have never been to a swanky restaurant. Do I look like I've ever touched a soup spoon? It was purely by accident that we went there. Jordan thought Bouillabaisse was a cold soup. I really did. I really did. This is on the way here.

Every soup that's not clam chowder, I assume, is Gus Paco. Gus Paco. I don't know other soups. Jordan didn't know about tripe until earlier today. I did not know about tripe. That's a shame. I really don't think it, once I learned about tripe, it did not bother me that I didn't know about it for this long. It's not good.

So, normally, y'all host a podcast where you sit around, drink novelty beverages, and talk a little bit about Alex Jones. That is true. We're not doing anything like that today. Nothing even vaguely reminiscent of that. You told me earlier that we were going to talk about somebody that has nothing to do with infowars. Couldn't be less involved. And I was almost convinced it was a trap. No.

No. We talked about Alex Jones before and then Mike Adams. Yeah, normally I would have you on to discuss someone in Alex Jones' universe because that's your wheelhouse. But sometimes the sausage just got to be made and you are the sausage packers? Sure. Nearby? Yeah, I'll take it. At the moment.

Chicago's not had sausage packing for a while, but I think we'll start the project again. Well, do you guys know the name of a little fella named Adam Neumann? No. It does ring a bell. Have you heard of a company called WeWork? Yes. It's that guy. Oh boy.

Oh boy. And he is a real piece of shit. Okay, that sounds right. So, I'm just going to dive into this shit right now. So, well, now I actually scroll to the bottom of the page. Very professional. This is how the sausage gets made when we don't print it out. Adam, no discernible middle name, Neumann, was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, on April 25, 1979.

It's very close to my birthday. I'm already very invested in this story. And you were also born in Tel Aviv. That is correct. Well, the American Tel Aviv. Yes, yes. Which is Van Nuys, California. Yes.

He gets a lot of shit about the right to return laws for California. Which is, you do not have them. Stay the fuck out of California. There's too many people. No one's from here. So, yeah. When he was seven, his parents divorced and his mother moved to New York City to do her medical residency. Adam and his sister, Avi, moved in with her.

Now, I found other variations of Adam's story that Clem the Split happened when he was nine and that they moved to Minneapolis first. I think he lies a lot. You know it's a bastard. On this show, whenever it's like, I've heard multiple stories about his life. About, like, specifically when he, like, yeah, like, in so consequential details. I don't know. I ran into both.

We don't have a lot of granular details of his childhood. Like, not a lot of anecdotes about him as a kid. But we know it was rough. He was severely dyslexic. Still is severely dyslexic. You don't just, um... Is that why we work as one word? Maybe.

Does that, is that a dyslexic thing? I don't think it is. Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we slander dyslexia and talk about terrible people. Hmm. So, yeah, he was dyslexic. Couldn't read or write at all until the third grade. Um, and his mom moved constantly. So he lived in a lot of different homes and usually didn't spend enough time in any one place to build strong attachments to people there.

I get that a little bit. Yeah. Now, in 1990, when he was 11, Adam's mom moved back to Israel, his family, and he settled in a kibbutz. You guys know much about kibbutzes? I know a little bit about kibbutzes. I like the word a lot. Kibbutze. Yeah, it's like a commune, essentially, right?

Yeah, it's like an Israeli type of commune thing. I'm going to talk about them a little bit. The first kibbutz was founded in a place called Degania in Palestine at the time. Now the nation known as Israel. In 1909 and 1910. Now this is too complex a topic to do justice to as an aside in this episode, but it's reasonably accurate to say that the inspiring motivations behind the establishment of the first kibbutzes, kibbutzem, I'm not really sure what's correct.

I don't know, Yiddish, is a mix of Zionism, admiration of like literal classical Spartan values, and communism. It was initially very militant, so when the Israeli war for independence or the Nakba, whichever term you prefer to use, when that happened, a lot of the cells of Israeli, or not, I mean they weren't Israeli at that point, of Jewish partisans who were active, were based around kibbutzes and stuff. There were kibbutzes that were manufacturing arms and stuff, and later wars and stuff. So there was like a militant swing to them, but also very leftist, very communist,

very like, like, like, communitarian. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I assume that'll never go wrong. And just a really fucking complicated thing. I mean, please don't take this, like, read up more on them. I don't want to like, like, and they're all different too. So I'm sure there's a lot of kibbutzes that have very different backgrounds. But I found like a really fun lecture on the history of kibbutzes by a guy named Henry Neer, who was a professor some fucking college, and I'm going to quote from that now.

It was governed by all the members gathered in their weekly meetings. Meals were eaten in common in the Central Dining Hall, which also served as a social and cultural center, and other items of consumption were distributed freely, or in accordance with the principle, to each according to his or her need. In its early stages, all decisions were taken in common by all the members. That's the idea of a kibbutz, like, pretty radical ground up democracy. Sounds pretty, pretty alright.

Sounds like a fun day to live. I don't know about the making arms part, I don't know if I'm going to sign up for that aspect of this. Well, I enjoy to make some arms. It's not my thing, man. Little bit arms here, little bit arms there. I just feel like I don't have the right kind of like dexterity in those skills. No, I mean, really, I really want kids for making art, because they're little fingers can get in all those holes.

Sure, sure, yeah. Poked little baby fingers. Nobody makes an AK-47 like a couple of three month olds. They really know how to... They started me young, yeah. Now, women and men both worked all day in the kibbutzes. Their children were cared for in small groups, looked after by individuals who were a mix of teacher and nanny.

Kids spent time in their parents' home after working hours, but most cases slept with other kids in a children's house at night. In the early days at least, all of the kibbutzes were part of a utopian movement towards a better society. One of the founders of the first kibbutz, Joseph Barrettz, wrote this in his memoirs. We were happy enough working on the land, but we knew more and more certainly that the ways of the old settlements were not for us. This was not the way we hoped to settle the country.

This old way with Jews on top and Arabs working for them. Anyway, we thought that there shouldn't be employers or employed at all. There must be a better way. Very left-wing, very like utopian projects. I just want to emphasize that. Yeah, this being the show though, I'm waiting for a hammer to drop. Yeah, it goes in a not as utopian direction. They're still around.

They're not all at least the same that they were. So obviously in the early days, they were all about agriculture. Some still focus on that, but today they serve in a variety of industries. For example, kibbutz sasa serves the Israeli military making special military-grade plastics. His 200 members sold some $850 million in products in 2010. These are not small, but necessary. That's a sizable business.

It's very different than what I was imagining. And kibbutz niram, where Adam Neumann spent his formative years, currently hosts an innovation center that seems to focus as an incubator for the Israeli tech industry and looks like literally any tech building in San Francisco from the pictures I've seen. So these are no longer necessarily rural or hard-scrabble things. There's big businesses that are operated in these centers. By the time Adam and his family arrived at kibbutz niram, kibbutz has had moderated significantly from their early radical leftist ideology

and rather than being educated in a group of children on site, he went to the Shahar Hanegev. I'm so sorry for surely pronouncing that. School, which is near the Gaza Strip. His mother worked as an oncologist at a nearby hospital. And living in a kibbutz and taking part in its communal life was something that Adam's mom valued. He later recalled, it was important to my mother that we all do something special. So yeah, every write-up you're going to find of this guy's life focuses on his time in the kibbutz.

It seems to be something Adam himself has made a point of discussing with every journalist who interviewed him. Despite how often it comes up, you seldom hear any details of his time there. One of the few scraps I ran into came from a Haritz article. As a child who lived in a lot of places, one of the hardest things for me was to join a new community. It was hardest at the kibbutz, but that was also one of the most impressive communities. I remember how much fun it was to be a child in the kibbutz. I feel like I would probably speak the same, but also like, you know, not very in detail about like, the time when I lived in like, I don't know, Boston, I don't remember much of it,

but I could probably be like, you know, hey, it made me who I am. Right, right, right. He really drives home that it was like a formative thing for him, but you also get the idea that was kind of painful. He talks a lot about how the other kids that were on the kibbutz had all been born and grown up there, and he had moved there when he was like 11 or 12 or so. So that was obviously difficult. So he would have been something of an outsider.

He says he like made his way in and it was really rewarding. I kind of get the feeling that maybe this guy's never quite felt like he belonged anywhere. It's like being a new kid in school, but the school happens to be a commune and nobody wants you there. And nobody wants you there. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I wasn't there. I didn't grow up in that particular Israeli kibbutz.

Now, as a young adult, Adam went to the Israeli Naval Academy and served in the Navy for five years. So he didn't do like the minimum service you need to do. Like he made a thing of it. He retired as a captain or left the service as a captain. Once he'd done his time, he followed in his mother's footsteps and moved to New York. He was 22 years old and it was 2001, widely considered to be the very best year in history to move people together. I remember, well, the blueprint three or no, the blueprint dropped the first album. Absolutely.

That was really, really good. The Strokes first album. That was awesome. All of those. All of those happened on a day that I don't think anybody remembers for any reason at all. No, no, no. 2001, particularly like the fall, early winter 2001, like autumn. Great time to be in New York.

I assume 2001, particularly good time to be in New York. Brooklyn Dance Punk was taken the nation by storm. Absolutely. Yeah, it was fantastic. So he moves there in a perfect time. Now his sister, Abby, had already beaten him to New York. She had been a former teen Miss Israel and had managed to turn that into a career as a model. She was very successful model and is very famous in Israel, much more famous than actually he is to this day.

He stayed in her Tribeca apartment while he worked to figure out what his future would be. Eventually, he settled on business and enrolled at Baruch College in between classes. He, in his own words, spent his first years in New York, hanging out at clubs and, quote, hitting on every girl in the city. He looked for, you know, spent the rest of his time looking for get rich quick schemes. His first months in the USA brought with them some sobering revelations about American culture. Quote. It's bullshit. Yeah, kind of actually.

Yeah. It's all a fucking lie. It's garbage. We propagandize around the fucking world. That a lot of other people are also trying get rich quick schemes. Yeah. These are sobering revelations. Shit, they're sitting full of people like me.

It seems like a lot of people really wish they could get rich quick. The whole thing about the American character being con artists. It's a mix of con artists and gold rushers. The honest people are looking for a gold rush. The not honest people are con artists. The goal is always the same, which is to spend as little time living in the part of America that exists for people who aren't rich. Yeah. Which is hard.

Which is hard. And filled with go fund me's for insulin. Yeah. So are the places for Americans who aren't rich are not great. No, no. Most people want to get out of there. Yeah. No.

I for one don't understand why you would want to live anywhere but the Pacific Palisades. But you know, my butler lives elsewhere and he says there's decent parts. You fly him in for the weekdays or is he a weekend butler? No, no, no, no, no. Split custody of the butler with your ex-wife? He takes the bus in and there's a tracking chip on him when he's in the palace. We don't want him to stay. Absolutely.

Good Lord, no. Not after dark. No. Unless there's a party in which case we deliver a small series of electric shocks every 15 minutes. So we just get too comfortable. All right. Yeah. Ethics.

So yeah, Adam had a rough arrival to the United States and I'm going to quote him now. After I arrived in the United States, I realized that in the army, Israelis learned how to be part of something bigger than themselves. Things I had experienced in my life all came together. In our life, we had a lot of movement and a lot of new things. So I feel sorry for someone who's having a bit of a hard time because I know what it's like to be new. He found that he was like really frustrated by particularly the distance and kind of facelessness

of American culture. Elevator rides were the things that most struck him. He recalled later to an interviewer that whenever he would travel up the elevator in his sister's apartment, he would wonder why is nobody talking to each other? We're in the same building. How come you don't know everybody? Oh man. Man.

If somebody talked to me in an elevator, I lose my shit. Yeah. Absolutely furious. To be fair, I've had those very similar thoughts, but every time I've tried to act the opposite, it's been a disaster. No. Every time I've tried to say hi to people, they don't want to be to say, I look like me.

Yeah. It's a captive environment. There's no escape route. That's the issue there. Yeah. I mean, obviously until the door's open. You seem very suspicious. You strike up a conversation in those times when we've, as a culture just decided, shut

it down. Yeah. Start a conversation in the bathroom. The bus? Never. The bus. Never the bus. Absolutely not.

Never elevators. No. No. I keep a tear gas grenade on me at all times. If anyone talks, I just pull that pen. I will admit that I will begin a conversation if we're stuck in the elevator. And I'm just at the place where I have to poop in the corner. Yeah.

And that, in that situation, I'm going to start with. That's more of just a warning. Sorry. Yeah. This is going to be rough for all of us. I think we'll make it through. There are different protocols for once you get to that point. Right.

The only place in America it's okay to talk to people is in line at the movies. That's a good one. That works. That's it really. Okay. That's it. Other than that, zip it. Yeah.

Keep it shut. Doctors waiting rooms. No. Under no circumstances. No. No eye contact on planes. No. I think we say a holding cell is probably a good place.

Yeah. You in on a. Yeah. Holding cell is not a good place to talk. Holding cells, movie theater lines. That's less talking. That's more like collaboration. Yeah.

You're in a holding cell. You're getting something cooking. That's the beginning of the movie blow. Yeah. That's a rich scheme in the works. I can say a lot of people at gun stores want to have conversations with you while you're waiting. You should not.

You should not. You should not talk to those people. It does not end well. You will learn uncomfortable things about them. Yeah. I imagine every conversation at a gun store starts with my ex-wife and that's where it goes. Yeah.

Well, the government. Let me tell you about the government. The federal government. Either that or I got a lot of fucking gophers on my property. How many misdemeanors for I can't buy one of these no more. I imagine the people around there are full of trivia. It is actually just mostly mostly gun trivia. Yeah.

Very accurate trivia. Yeah. You know, they change the way the feed and ramp loads back in 1962. So that's a, yeah, it's very, very boring. It's a general rule. So, yeah, Adam gets to the US fresh out of the military is frustrated at like the, the distance and the kind of soullessness lack of communication in American culture. Yeah.

He challenges his sister, Abby, to a friend making competition to see who could learn the names and establish cordial social relationships with the most people in the building the fastest. That pisses me off. Yeah. This is the first time. This is the beginning of me saying, fuck this guy. Yeah. This is it.

This is all I need. Is him trying to connect with people? Yeah. He'll be like, let's have a friendship contest. Fuck that guy. Fuck that guy. I'm out. I'm out.

Well, you're trying to gamify like a natural interaction between people. That just seems weird. Also, his sister's name is Addie. I'm a hack and a fraud and spelled it wrong. Not Addie. Not Addie. Addie. Yeah.

Is that long for something? Probably. I don't know. It's just sister. She didn't do anything wrong. They get into a contest to see who can build the most cordial social relationships. Is she the fastest? Yeah.

She's super. She's going to win this contest. She absolutely wins this contest very quickly. Almost immediately. This guy seems like a creep and she's a model. Yeah. This guy's weird. Yeah.

He's trying to start conversations in the fucking elevator. Yeah. And she's one of the most beautiful. Yes. She wins handle. Right. She has like six times as many friends as him after a week. It is not a close, not a close thing.

Feel for the guy. Not a near run game. But Adam claims as a result of their contest, the entire energy of the building changed. To what? A positive one. From what? He would, he would, he would bother, borrow a shaker from each other. It was good.

I don't know. He says it was good. Okay. All right. Now this is a common refrain in Adam's interviews, both the difficulty of meeting new people when they move a lot, the cold and informal nature of life and American society. And oddly enough, this sort of like understanding that whatever it is about our hypercapitalist world makes people not want to connect with one another.

It was paired in Adam with a deep bone level belief in the goodness of capitalism. So that's interesting. That doesn't make sense on any level. It will continue to not. Okay. Or maybe it will. Capitalism alienates us from each other and damn it. It's awesome.

I believe in it. I think it's more of a capitalism alienates or people in capitalist societies are alienated. What if we could find a way using capitalism to make them less alienated? You just got to put like financial incentives for that friendship contest. Oh boy. That sounds like it's a disingenuous friendship. Got to turn this into like a reality show. Are there other friendships than those based on money?

Like my friendship with my butler, for example, I don't know his name. Why would you? Yeah, of course. Why would I? It seems odd. But no, when his wife died because she couldn't afford her insulin, I did consider sending a flower, but then I thought kind of sends the wrong message. Well, I mean, if you inject the flower with insulin, that's a real bad one.

Yeah, especially that. I just, I didn't want him to think he could talk to me in my elevator. Right. That's a good call. You make him take the dumb waiter, of course. Oh, well, absolutely. I mean, either that or the stairs. Yeah.

Usually the stairs. Fair. Yeah. I mean, Adam, after this, decided to drop out of college and launch himself into a frenzy of ill-conceived business ventures. First, he started a business selling women's shoes with collapsible high heels for reasons I cannot quite explain. Probably one of those like, like operations, you know, like Cutco, the Knife Say Oh People.

He's probably like some women's shoe company he got hooked up with, right? No, no, no. He started, he started a business. Oh, he did that himself. No, he started his first two business. I'll give him credit for that. His first two businesses are not cons. They're products.

They're just bad. They're bad products. Right. But they are. He is trying to start a legitimate business that sells a product. Right. I think we are three people here who have very little use for collapsible heel shoes, perhaps we do not.

I'm not going to speak for the women listening as to whether or not that's a good idea. But he did not execute it well. Okay. As proven by the fact that the company didn't work. All right. Now, I think I'm a little bit late. But here's my pitch. Let's get some wheels on those.

Do you remember those sneakers? The wheelies? Yeah. I don't see any problem there. High wheelies? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Soap shoes. Collapsible high heels and expanded. You know, perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Next, he made the leap to selling specialty baby clothing. It collapses, of course. It collapses.

What's the specialty? We actually break away baby clothing. Turned out that attracted so very well to the wrong people. Absolutely to the wrong people. This baby is dressed up like a cop and it's about to dance. In fact, the Vatican ordered $7 million worth, which was really. Watch out. Yeah.

The ones he designed were called crawlers with a K and they were normal baby pants with knee pads sewn into the legs, which actually meshes. It doesn't sound terrible. Uncomfortable with my Vatican joke. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. I don't think the Vatican has carpet though, so you don't need to, what?

So in order to distract us from that, whatever. I'd like to point out I did not take part in that. That's good. Yeah. You know who else doesn't. He's a conscientious objector. Yeah. You know who else is a conscientious objector in the realm of priests and molesting baby?

Sponsors? The sponsors. The show. There we go. And that is, that is an ad plug. Product. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations.

And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse.

And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me. About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that

down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back and we're talking about Adam Neumann and his so far God awful attempts to make it big in America. Women's shoes, padded knee baby clothes. To his credit, real businesses.

That's not as crazy as some things I've heard. Are you telling me that his name is a Neumann? A Neumann. Yeah, it is. Okay, there we go. I just needed that clear superhero. I just needed to be, yeah. The guy, it's the superhero whose power is talking to you in an elevator.

Right, right. His power is never taking the hint. I feel like I have a completely unfair picture of this guy already in my head. You don't. I think I've nailed him. So, now Adam had started crawlers with a $100,000 investment from his grandmother. By the time the financial crisis slammed down in 2008, he'd spent every dime of that investment and his almost shockingly bad idea for a company was nearly out of gas.

Here a lawyer just renew his visa to stay in the USA. It comes from the wealthier family. Gotcha. Not like rich, but well enough off that his grandma had an extra $100,000. Yeah. Yeah. So, this difficult time for Adam's business prospects proved to be the most important period of his life.

For one thing, it's when he met his future wife, Rebecca Paltrow. He was 28 at the time, and Rebecca recalls that he was really, really thin and he was shaking because I think he was smoking too many cigarettes. He was engaged in a friend making contest. He approached me and then we got married. She claims simultaneously that when she first talked to him, she realized both that he was full of shit and that he was her soulmate. Wow.

That's a shocking portrait of another person. Yeah. I guess that's the most self-aware thing you could say. It is the most self-aware thing she has ever said. Yeah. Now, they went out for lunch and Adam couldn't afford to pay for anything or for the cab ride because he was broke. Do you accept novelty baby clothes?

They did not. Rebecca insulted him for talking a big game but having no actual money and Adam justified it by calling himself an entrepreneur whose money was all an inventory. Sure. Sure. But yeah, they got together and married a couple of months later, so very, very quickly. All right. He's getting better at making friends.

He's got a lot, but he's good at making this one friend. Okay. So, at the time, Rebecca had done a little bit more with her life than her paramour. She'd been a stock trader for like a week or two. She'd spent time in a Buddhist monastery and been to the Dalai Lama's birthday party because she's rich as well. She toured with Michael Franti in spearhead. What?

Not playing. She was just like wandering around again. Even so, I reject this. Are you a spearhead fan? No. Actually, weirdly, I was hanging out with a friend of mine from high school last night. And one of the things I've always accused him of is being super into spearhead. And he claims that that is not true at all.

They literally were something that I was yelling about last night. Why would... That's a wild coincidence. Yeah. It's because they have a line in one of their songs, like, there's a war on cancer, war on drugs, war on police, war on hugs. I'm like, there is not a war on hugs. There is absolutely a war on...

Have you been in an elevator recently? Zero people hugging you. And when you try to hug someone on it, they do not appreciate it, Dan. My mind is completely blown that this lady went on tour with spearhead. Yeah, she went on tour with spearhead. Goddamn spearhead. And it's here I should drop that she's Gwyneth Paltrow's first cousin. Oh, I totally knew that.

Yeah. Yep. Now, keep that one in mind. Yeah, the goopy of it all. Now, Rebecca and Adam started dating, and she helped him quit smoking and stuff. You said cousin? First cousin. Okay.

Close cousins. So she's dupe. Gotcha. They started dating. She helped him quit smoking and soda. She introduced him to Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and worked to stop him from obsessing over money so much. I assume that worked.

It absolutely did. Gotcha. So this is the end of the story. This is the end of the story. Good episode, guys. Good, good. This is about a man who played a friend game in his building, and we hate him. And that is the end of his gripes.

He played a friend game that's kind of endearing, but also profoundly lame. This episode is just about getting our fans to hunt this man down. He lives in a small apartment in Van Nuys now. So grab a gun. Friendless. Yeah. No. So yeah, she tried to make him stop obsessing over money, and Adam later recalled, Rebecca

said, stop. No more talking about money. We're going to talk about wellness, happiness, fulfillment. And if the money is supposed to follow, it will. And if it doesn't, it doesn't matter, because we will be happy and fulfilled. That's the thing an asshole says. That is the thing a rich asshole said. No poor asshole has ever said, if the money's supposed to follow, it will.

No, they say, what about the insulin? Poor assholes say, like, food is good. Yeah. Poor assholes say, like, we got to fucking make rent. Yeah. So it was clear, though, that making fuckloads of money was the only thing that would actually make Adam happy and fulfilled. The baby close game was not working out, but while he was failing at a second business,

Adam fell in love with the building where crawlers had its office space, an otherwise empty former warehouse in Brooklyn's rapidly gentrifying Dumbo neighborhood. That's a neighborhood. Yes. I know. Every new thing I learned about New York. So many fucking racist crows in that neighborhood. It's terrible.

It's awful. They had to have a warning. Yeah. Disney plus. One of the strangest juxtapositions of my life was, as a child, the racist crows in Dumbo. Yeah. And then as an adult, the very different, but also similar racist crows in Fritz the Cat.

Yeah. But very different. Wow. I don't know. Even, like, the rick is it really directly deals with things like police violence against the black community. Very complicated film. The most complicated film with a mouse Nazi bike.

Was he a mouse? What species was the Nazi biker? I have no idea. I just remember Fritz the cat's the one with the bag, right? I'm way off. I'm thinking of a completely different cat. Now I remember what we're actually talking about. Fritz the cat is the one about the cat who fucks.

Yeah. I was thinking about a different. Yeah. Great movie. I've never seen it not tripping, but have seen it five or six times. And remember enjoying it and also feeling confused and conflicted at certain parts. Ralph Bakshi. Everybody.

Lot of lot of check him out. Yeah. We got really turned on by certain things. Yeah. All of the all of the same issue watching the Robin Hood Disney movie. If you remember that one. Yeah. Yeah.

Lot of lot of complicated feelings. Chip and Dale's rescue Rangers. Ja Ja Gabor Fritz is interesting because all of the all of the black people are crows, much like in Dumbo, but all of the police are literal pigs. And it's it's quite a film made like the 60s 70s. Weird movie. Yeah. Don't haven't haven't seen a good breakdown on on the haven't seen it sober.

Maybe I should. Maybe maybe I'm talking about horrible, horrible racist propaganda. I don't think it was though. I think it was about as woke as possible for the era. Sure. But I may be wrong on that. I remember enjoying it. This has been too long at aggression on Fritz the cat.

So yeah, the baby close game, you know, they so yeah, Adam falls in love with the building where the crawlers had its office space, which is an empty warehouse in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood. He meets up with the neighborhood Joshua Goodman and tells him, give me the building. Goodman was like, no, I assume that's a knife point that he told him. It's great. It's going to be great to be like the kind of person who could just be like, I want that building.

Get me that building. I want that building. So Goodman's like, no, and shoots back because basically Adam's not saying like, give me ownership of the building. He's saying like, let me control the space and rent it out. It's empty. And Goodman is like, why would I do that? You sell baby clothes.

Goodman makes a good point here. Yeah. You know nothing about this industry. Goodman, good point. And Neumann responds. Your business is empty. What do you know about real estate? Get on.

Yeah. So. All right. What do you know about business, you asshole? Let's do this. Let's tit for tat this all day. I feel like they might be in an impasse. He convinces Goodman.

And Goodman pairs with Adam and his business partner, a guy named Miguel McKelvie, who'd grown up in a commune in Oregon. So they both have that sort of like similar background. Everybody's commune. Gotcha. And together they found a company called Green Desk, which was built as an environmentally friendly co-working space. Now the idea for Green Desk was actually based on a failed business plan Adam had created

for a competition at Baruch College before he dropped out. The idea was, in his words, community structured real estate, which would meld working and living space together in a manner reminiscent of the kibbutz. The plan failed to progress to the second round of the contest. And Adam complained to the dean about this. And the dean told him, there's no 23 year old or any inexperienced real estate person who will ever be able to raise enough money to do anything like concept living. So I really feel like that reminds me more of like when the railroad barons built their

own cities and use their own currency and shit like that made people live on them. So that's where I'm at right now. Yep. That business model's been tried before. You're heading right in the right direction. Okay, there we go. All right. So now Green Desk though wasn't a whole lot like a kibbutz.

It was basically a way for small businesses and individuals working as contractors to lease short term office space for an affordable price. And this wound up being a really fucking smart move because in 2008 the economy collapsed and there were suddenly a ton of people out of work and switching careers and businesses looking to cut costs. And Green Desk did really well. We have an overhead projector. We have a table.

There's pens. And do you have money? Yeah. Within a year the business was valued at around $3 million. So they do not bad. Very successful. Not bad. That's probably more successful than the other two of his business.

Neither of the other two succeed. Okay. Neither of them made money. Okay. No, no. This is his first success. Okay. Now Goodman was like, we should maybe do this in more buildings.

This is a good idea. Let's expand, you know, conservatively to other spaces and, you know, see how far this plan takes us. Let's get the fuck out of Dumbo. Sure. Let's continue and try another couple of spaces. But Neumann and Nickelveer are like, fuck that, we're going to start another business. So they sell out their shares in Green Desk in 2010 for about $300,000.

Most of the money went to the guy who owned the space, obviously. They used this seed money to launch WeWork. Now unlike Green Desk, which had been a modest ambition based around compromise with an uncertain landlord, WeWork was from the beginning a bold vision. Adam Neumann wanted to create what he called a capitalist kibbutz, a global network of workspaces that would eventually extend beyond merely short term office rentals. So what he'd like to do is create a capitalist commune. Yeah.

I feel like there's a contradiction there, but I can't put my finger on it. They both start with C. I guess alliteration is my issue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They should have fixed that in post. Now from the beginning, they had trouble convincing landlords that they wanted to rent them space of their vision. McKelvie, his partner later recalled, we didn't have credibility or credit. We had no business taking out a 40,000 square foot lease. But using Adam's charisma, his ability to convince people, which is significant, they

managed to get people on board. Not for friendships. Not for friendships. I mean, not compared to his sister. Yeah. She is a model. Now in that same interview, Neumann explained that the landlords needed a lot more than just a vision.

In the end, they were only able to convince one person to rent them one floor in a building as a trial run. But this was a wild success. And over the next five years, WeWork expanded all over the world at an astonishing pace. People started to invest millions and then tens of millions and eventually billions of dollars in the company. When Adam would sell them on the idea, he presented WeWork as much more than just a real estate company.

He spoke about creating the first physical social network. All I hear is Enron. It's interesting. It's interesting. You just described Enron to me. That's all I'm hearing. Yeah. It's a physical social network and they immediately me and Jordan both deep inhaled.

Yeah. Whoo. That sounds like bullshit. Yeah. Got a lot of bells. Especially knowing what WeWork is, you know, like it just absolutely is like, fuck this. What I wanted to do was build a flag factory that only builds giant red flags. That's what I'm going for right here.

Gotcha. Probably more successful than baby clothes. Yes. I mean, I could actually use a couple of red flags. I am full of them. Yeah. He wanted to create the first physical social network and when he would like explain what that meant to people, he said he wanted WeWork offices to not just be places where people

worked. He wanted them to be places where people could talk about their jobs, their families, their problems and love. Oh, so like an office. Like a neighborhood, I think is more the idea. He was trying to recreate that like 50s style idea of a neighborhood, but condensed with and specially catered and decorated office buildings that he owned and sold access to. Hmm.

I feel like that's this is the this is him rigging the friendship contest. That's what I'm hearing right here. I'm getting strong vibes. This is this is him just being like fucking sister, I'm going to I'll show her my business is going to be a friendship competition. You do feel like this was the result of him fuming over losing the friendship contest and reading like an old history of the labor movement that talked about company towns. Yeah, or he's like walking home after his sister wins and he hears that St. Peter, don't

you call me because I can't go so my soul do the company store. Wait a tick. Like ball. Yeah, exploitation. It's an absurd thing to try to sell for hundreds of millions of dollars. A very silly idea. Obviously the idea of like what's rent short term office paid totally reasonable within the context of businesses people can run.

Absolutely. People need it. Why not? Which is what Green Desk was. That's not what Adam is trying to sell. Does Green Desk continue like through as the I don't know, probably, I think so. But yeah, Adam, this is a dumb idea, a stupid idea to like literally any normal person. But Adam was selling this idea to normal people.

He was selling this idea to investors and investors. I know one thing about capitalism are all super fucking dumb. The more money they have to invest, the dumber they is. Robert, money equals intelligence. How many times do rich people have to tell us that there are better? And that's why that's why they have money is the most profitable company in the world. Of course. It doesn't lose two billion dollars every six months or so.

What a silly thing. People wouldn't keep pumping money and do it. What kind of company could exist losing that much money on a regular basis? A smart one. Oh, God. So Adam sold this idea to investors and also to his employees. And the answer to how he sold this very dumb idea basically boils down to the fact that he was really fucking charismatic on one-on-one situations.

So he made friends with these investors. He, more like cult members. Oh, boy. Now, there's a really good New York Times article, Adam Neumann and the Art of Failing Up, which is a pretty good way to frame it. I'm going to read a section. A history of white people in America. I'm going to read a section from that article that I think encapsulates the way Adam both

led and sold his company. And this is from to that. Yeah. Adam Neumann stood on the 57th floor of the Woolworth building, the neogothic skyscraper that was once the tallest in the world. It was laid on a Friday night in 2013, and the WeWork founder and chief executive had just made a move to add the top 30 floors to his rapidly expanding real estate dealings. Mr. Neumann and three employees had already enjoyed a few drinks when he decided to bring

them to tour his latest coup. In the gutted out space, they tossed beer bottles into empty elevator shafts, listening to them clink on the way down. Then Mr. Neumann told them all to follow him out to the ledge. No guardrails, no enclosures. Just four inebriated startup executives teetering on the edge of death. I was up there with him at the top of the world, and he said, everything is going to be amazing, recalled Harrison Weber.

WeWork's editorial director at the time. Then Mr. Neumann picked up an old beer bottle, a remnant apparently from some previous bender. He asked the employees to drink the rank liquid. Everyone took a swig, except for Mr. Weber. What is this? The end of a lost? It felt like a loyalty thing, he said. In that moment, I felt what a deeply persuasive person he is.

Man, I assumed that he would be up there the way I would, which is just screaming at them. Do it, man! Push me over, fucking do it! You would have the balls to kill me! You would have the fucking balls! No! Then I'm still CEO! I'll give you one shot, right fucking now, if you got the balls.

That is how you get invested. You can't be too charismatic when you're doing that. I honestly feel like that behavior is very similar to a lot of people that I may have been annoyed by in past jobs. You know, like, that does not seem far afield from some professional douches. Oh, no. Absolutely not. It's just, it's a real bummer.

It's an elevation of scale, like if the shitty bosses that I've had had that kind of bullshit charisma as well as just an insane psychopathic confidence, then they would try and do the same shit. It's just a different level of abuse of power. I can't even, like, suggest music to people, unless I feel like they're gonna reject me for it, let alone, like, drink this swill. Yeah. It's amazing.

And it's a testament to how good he was at doing this to most people, that by 2015, we workers valued it more than $10 billion. Jesus. They rented out hundreds of properties on multiple continents. So whatever you can say about them, at least in 2015, it looks like it's fucking working like gangbusters. It's such like, things just don't exist anymore. There's nothing.

There's no thing of value. No, money's not real is the thing. Yeah. It's imaginary. It's entirely imaginary. Yeah. This story really illustrates a couple of things to me. One, money isn't real.

And two, money is, like, dumb. Not in the sense that, like, ah, it's so dumb that, like, we have to live under capitalism. No. Money is dumb in the sense that, like, money makes bad decisions. Yeah. You have of it the worst decisions you make. That tends to be the truth. And the story of WeWork is the story of a lot of people with infinite resources making

horrible decisions until their resources are less infinite. It's like Tarantino's career. Like once he got enough cachet, he makes movies that are probably an hour too long. But when he was coming up, it was, like, perfectly paced, right time, all that stuff. You're making the argument that, like, you got to stay hungry, that kind of thing. But when this dude was hungry, he made collapsible shoes. Yeah. I'm saying you got to surround yourself with people who are going to say, no, whenever

you have a dumb idea. But this isn't a dumb idea, clearly. Well, yeah. At the same time. It's a great idea. I get it. But yeah. I don't know if I've ever, I think I've talked to, like, maybe two people who have used

WeWork spaces. Yeah. And I've talked to a lot of people in my life. Yeah, so that seems, it seems like a low engagement. It'll make sense why, what's going on here a little bit later. Great question. I have a desk. I'm poor as shit, I have a desk.

Now in articles at the time, around 2015 to 2016, WeWork was kind of hitting its zenith. Adam and those around him tended to credit their meteoric rise on the hip, cool flair that they brought to it was traditionally the least soulful part of a person's life. The office. WeWork spaces were decorated in, like, a variety of super cool, like, funky hip furniture and stuff you'd find. They absolutely have kegs. This is a Pucci the dog.

Yeah, yeah. Pucci all over. It's a Pucci. It's a Pucci situation. But it works longer than Pucci did. They had funky comfortable furniture, kombucha and beer on tap. I'm going to quote now from a 2016 article. Thank you.

Kombucha and beer. Oh yeah. It's cool, bro. It's cool, bro. We got fucking, we got bruised, bro. I may have actually worked at a company that supplied a couple WeWork locations with coffee. I may have actually dealt with their corporate structure before.

I want to punch that idea in the face. I should probably not talk about this. I will say that I worked in the past at an unnamed company that had a Thirsty Thursday where they provided employees initially with unlimited beer and wine on Thursday afternoons. People made horrible decisions. Why? It was a really bad idea actually to give a bunch of people who are united by nothing then that they work in the same building access to unlimited free alcohol once a week.

There was some of that vibe at the, fuck it, at Groupon until someone threw up in one of the social rooms and then they were like, hey, let's, let's not allow this anymore. I've always thought a lot of my inner office relationships could have been improved by less inhibitions. Sure. I think the way to run an office really is once a year, you just dose everyone against their will and consent with like nine to 10 hits of MDMA per person, like enough that they're hallucinating, like not just rolling, but like really can't control their bodies.

You got to go to nine or 10, you can't just go three or one. Yeah, we're talking about a gram apiece at once, so really just overdose the whole office. It's the elderly woman who sits at the front desk, who's going to be our test subject here. And then friendship contest. And then friendship contest. Yeah. It's going to be a few days after until people are ready to have a friendship contest or talk.

Fuck a trust fall. So I found a fun quote in a 2016 Fast Company article about what it was that made WeWork special. And this was a very positive article. This is back before anyone's got questions about WeWork. It has to be the beer, a coworker tells me, believing that the secret to WeWork's success is the always-on-tap brew in its kitchens, but the hip, fun, millennial things people most often cite when they try to describe WeWork are almost irrelevant.

As I discover while working from two New York locations this winter, the room full of old arcade games at the 2-2-2 Broadway location is empty all day, and the controllers for a nearby Nintendo 64 sit in a neat line, wrapped tightly by their cords in a way that suggests they've been undisturbed for some time. At the end of the day, I see only three people pull the famous WeWork tap. Mostly people inside WeWork are just working. It'd be so funny if they had all this video games and beer, but they also had a really strict dress code.

You get the feeling it's the kind of thing like going for a job interview at WeWork, and somebody would be like, yeah, you want a beer from the tap, but if you actually take it during the job interview, they'll be like, okay. Everybody's watching you out of the corner of their eye, just like, eh, we'll see what you do. But there is a lot of drinking, which we'll get to later. It's just not when you'd choose to. Now more than beer, WeWork owed its success to investors.

Its whole business hinged on getting angel investors and giant companies to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into its expansion, not unlike Uber. The reason so many of these very moneyed individuals were willing to trust Adam Neumann with fortunes that could have funded whole nations is that he was very good at selling them on a stupid dream. Am I taking them up to the roof? Am I taking them up to the roof? Do it, man.

Fuck you, do it. Or invest in my company. Fuck you, do it. The focus of his promise has centered around his time in the kibbutz. He would weave a story to investors of the idea that office space could fulfill the same role of the kibbutz in creating community and inspiring creativity. He invented his own buzzword term. This is going to piss you off.

Monorail, monorail. That basically turned down Jordan's mic before you said this. The Wii generation. Yeah, the Wii generation. That's WII. WEE generation. The Wii generation. The Wii generation.

Oh my God. It's what it used to describe millennials who'd grown up in a world we're renting and not owning was the norm and no employment and situation was likely to last more than a couple of years. Now most people. Adult roommates. The only star of generation. Yeah.

Fuck off. Most people view this as a problem for millennials, but Adam Neumann viewed it as a marketing opportunity. The Wii generation, he told investors, cares about the world, actually wants to do cool things and loves working. And when he made these claims, it was not without any kind of backing. In 2016, a group called Project Time Off released a study on the work habits of millennials. They measured members of our demographic for habits evident of what they called work martyrdom. Now work martyrs are more likely to forfeit vacation days, more likely to work excessive

hours, and more likely to be seen as workaholics by their colleagues than members of any other generation. This is getting too real. Yeah. Yeah. When Adam Neumann frames this as living to work, it sounds like one thing, but if you read the statements that that Project Time Off study found millennials tended to agree with, I think you're presented with a much darker picture and I'm going to read four

of them right now. No one else at my company can do the work while I'm away. I want to show complete dedication to my company and job. I don't want others to think I am replaceable. Oh boy. I feel guilty for using my paid time off. That's not healthy. Right, right, right.

Those are symptoms of deep problems within art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You might as well have just been like, I'm drowning. I am dying. I'm drowning. I know the bottom can fall out at any moment. Something. Everything about my life could be on the street in three weeks.

Yeah. Yeah. That's what that says to me. I broke my foot and now I'm homeless. Yeah, exactly. These are signs of panic at the reality of poverty and its very imminent nature in most of our lives. Not signs of a love of work.

No. And I think Adam knows that. Oh. Born in 1979, he's not a millennial, the cutoff for that is usually 1981, but he's close enough that I think he gets what it's like for the folks in the wee generation. But he also understands how employers think. If you are running a company, you want your employees to spend unreasonable hours at the office and devote themselves irrationally to the work that is great for your bottom line.

Nap rooms, yoga classes and free beer seem like perks, but the goal in providing all that is to keep you in the office longer, working more hours. I think what Adam sold more than anything was a vision to employers of employees who made work the center of their very life. Here's another Adam Neumann quote from that fast company interview. If you understand that being part of something greater than yourself is meaningful and if you're not just driven by material goods, then you're part of the wee generation. All right.

So I am wondering how many people have shipped him because the numbers are more than zero. Not one. More than zero. Shocking. There were no knives on the roof. You can make a knife out of anything. No one took their beer bottles. That really would have been the just way for the story to end.

There really was a moment where just a little trip and we would have been saved. We work all over. No, this would have had to happen. Infinite universes. Yeah. There was a banana peel up on top. This is actually the only universe where he wasn't shoved off that roof. Yeah.

I knew we were living in the wrong one. And the 80 percent of the universe is where he was. The police didn't even prosecute. No, no, no. And this is also... Someone told them the story and they were like, you know what? No. This is also the only universe where the baby clothes thing didn't take off.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised. It's a great idea in every other universe. Because babies are always complaining about their knees. That's what everyone knows about babies. As your baby had to have knee surgery, I think you need these. He made blow shop pants for babies.

I retract my interaction with this bit now. So Adam's not a dumb guy. Anti-materialism like anti-capitalism has grown up among members of our generation because we've been largely cheated out of the promises that our system may do older generations. Adam's anti-materialism, however, is not a rejection of capitalism. It's a way to make capitalism more profitable. If you convince workers that their job provides them with a variety of non-material benefits, then you can work them hard while paying them less.

Now if a potential investor needed proof that millennials could be sold on Adam Neumann's vision of the workplace as a neighborhood, they need look no further than the actual staff at WeWork. I'm going to quote from a New York Times right up here. It's actually really weird to think about. I'm sorry to interrupt you. People work at WeWork. Yeah.

They do. I mean, it's a big company. Yeah. So I think of it as like an empty space. We work at WeWork. But you got to manage all that shit. Yeah. You got salespeople.

You got the whole thing. Yeah. Yeah. Now I'm going to quote from that New York Times piece about sort of the culture of the company. Oh boy. It might be a mic down clip for you, Jordan. Across podcasts.

People have learned that. I need to shut the fuck up. Okay. Telling Jordan to put the mic down is now the John Monch of podcasts. Mr. Neumann would convince employees to take shots of pricey Don Julio Tequila, $110 a bottle, work 20-hour days, attend 2 a.m. meetings. He convinced them to smoke marijuana at work, dance to journey around a fire in the woods on weekend excursions.

Book more pot. Drink more tequila. Even people who don't really seem to tequila type would go along with his act, including a pre-White House Jared Kushner, whom bribed while scoping out a property in Philadelphia. In his view, WeWork didn't simply sub-leaf its office space to workers. It supplied them with kombucha, cold brew coffee, and an ecstatic sense of community. They're coming to us for energy, for culture, Mr. Neumann would say. Don't stop believing.

I'm doing all right. Yeah. I'm doing fine. It's spring feeling over there. Now, you guys want to guess if Jay Kush is going to play a bigger role in this episode? I'm getting the sense he is. Oh, he absolutely is. He accidentally entered into a friendship contest.

He did. He did. And everyone lost. Okay. You know who arguably won? So here's what he's doing. He's making weed and tequila lame. And he's getting the people who work for him to be his friends.

He's forcing them to drink and smoke at work. High and drunk. Yeah. In order to break down their defenses, force them to continue working as hard as humanly possible, while at the same time, worshiping him as something of a charismatic God. And this sounds familiar to me and I don't know why it doesn't. It sounds like nothing that's ever been done before. As a loyalty test, he makes them dance around a fire to journey, which is mathematically

the douchiest thing you could possibly do. All right. Now we're not going to be. We're not going to be attacking journey on this podcast. Yeah, the keyboardist for journey is married to Paula White Kane, Trump's spiritual advisor. That makes complete sense. That's entirely. That's entirely.

Yeah. Jonathan Kane, I believe. That makes total sense and I have now stopped believing. I'm not going to hold on to that feeling. What are you going to do? We all in the sky. Just stop turning. You're going to have to switch back to rush.

Oh yeah. They did that one too. That's a better song. Don't stop believing. Faithfully. That's not a great song. No. It's not that great.

Although in the music video, there's a great shot of Steve Perry shaving his mustache, looking really sad. It's just like, you know, hey man, got to go, got to go do shows, got to shave this mustache off. He wasn't faithful to it. This is the most affecting moment. This is the push. It's stuck with me stuck with me.

Now, Adam's wife, Rebecca, was a major part of the whole operation. She eventually became the chief brand officer more and then a little bit. That's not a job. That's not a job. Refuse. It is now. Pass. She was an integral part of designing the feel of we work as a brand.

Stop it. Get the fuck out of here. As a certified yogi, and more importantly, and more importantly, certified Jordan, what's more legitimate than a certified yogi, then a certified yogi who was the cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow and went to the Dalai Lama's birthday. Oh, man. Oh, boy. I'm doing great.

I'm doing all right. Makes total sense. There's rigid certification for you. This is something that you've got to do eight years of school, you do five year internship. I'm honestly shocked that you don't know this. It's actually easier to be an oncologist reading the autobiography of a yoga, a big yogi by Sri Ramakrishna or whatever his name is, and he said specifically, after he learned how to float, that was when he got his certifications.

That was it. There's government regulations about this. Once he got the power of levitation. Now, Rebecca, as a certified yogi and a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow, was an expert at adding wooey new age nonsense to what should have been like a business. She repeatedly claimed in interviews that when she met Adam, she was suddenly taken with a strong belief that he could save the world. In an episode of The School of Greatness, an insufferable YouTube show, she said this,

my intention was never to find a way to make the most money. My intention when I met him was just, how do we expand this good vibration to the planet? Boo. She's got to explain the vibration, man. I've got to expand Adam's good vibes. Has anybody ever defined megalomania to her? It wouldn't take. Okay.

I'm going to tell you right now. It would not take. Fair enough. Fair enough. I apologize. Gwyneth Paltrow's first cousin. Every time I think of words, I assume that people understand their meaning and apply them.

I'm having a really tough time because I was coming in with a fairly positive view of her. Gwyneth Paltrow? No, her cousin, the wife, because you said earlier that when they first met, she made fun of him. She told him he was full of shit. Yeah. Yeah.

And then she married him and got involved in his business. I thought like, yeah, maybe she's pretty cool. And then everything, every added detail is just like, nah, she's not good. You're full of shit. Like me. Yeah. I can use you as a weapon. Now, Adam embraced the image of the guru CEO.

He threw raucous wild parties in the office where employees were all but forced to drink. He walked around barefoot and would have his personal trainer meet him in his office and then walk around afterwards, drenched in sweat to lead his employees. Cool. It seems like a good guide to work for. Yeah. Jack, do a little bit of that, that Twitter stuff, like maybe not forcing his employees to drink, but having like sort of a guru vibe, jack at Twitter.

Oh yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Every time I watch Silicon Valley, the only thing I can think of is I don't know how to parody these people anymore.

You can't go. They're beyond parody. You can't go extreme enough. You know, it's not beyond parody and it's crazy. Oh no. The products and services that they show. I'm a product that supports Robert. I have no downsides and should be bought immediately.

Yeah, it's a parody. Insert me work commercial. No, we work. Actually, you work. Our only sponsors are Coke Industries and of course there's subsidiary Nordine defense systems. Nordine, if a wedding has to be blown up at range with a thermobaric warhead, it has to be Nordine.

Oh boy. The world's in a great shape, right, products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of goods. He's a shark. He's in a good and bad ass way, he's in nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Their profits double or their revenue doubles every year, but no, they're not making any much. So spontaneous encounters is a real fun way to say bottleneck.

Most employees also hot desked, which meant they didn't have assigned desks. They just wound up wherever they could get in the morning. Now this was supposed to make things feel free and open, but it really resulted in employees spending huge jumps of their day finding somewhere quiet enough to get some work done. Sounds like a fucking nightmare. I'm not going to go to an office and you can't make me. I have enough guns at this point that nobody can. Adam attempted to cultivate a capitalist kibbutz style culture by hosting yoga classes, wine

tastings, networking panels, and all night drinking bouts that employees were expected to attend. I really feel like he's doing the kibbutz thing, but that from each part, he's skipping that part. The whole part where he's like, everything's good, but I'm exploiting you, doesn't sound very kibbutz-like. I thought the kibbutz was cool, but no one liked me. What if they had to?

What if I forced them to exploit their labor? What if they'd be homeless if they didn't? What if I got them all really fucked up? Also, they're wasted. We work offices, we're emblazoned with slogans on the wall like, hustle harder and love what you do. These could be seen as either motivational or haunting, depending on your personal attitude. It's the Cowboys locker room, I think.

Rapid growth came with equally rapid turnover. Few employees were able to handle Adam, or we work for very long. The expansion was so rapid and turnover was so high that no one seemed to notice it was all built on sand. We work would offer potential corporate clients free rent and volunteer to buy out their existing leases. This brought clients into we work properties, but required huge amounts of money, which was furnished by hundreds of millions of dollars in VC cash.

Many companies began surfing through a series of free rent deals at sundry we work properties, doing the corporate equivalent of signing up for Uber with a burner email to take advantage of a week of free rides. This is how he's keeping spaces open, how he's justifying the massive expansion. You get free rent, you get like, we'll buy out your fucking lease. The idea is that eventually they'll own so much space that everyone will have to use them. It's kind of like with Uber, eventually, like we're going to burn through money now,

but at a certain point, we'll be the only ones able to offer this service and then the money will flow. They'll do the loss leader Walmart thing where it's like they're, we're willing to take a hit on this just to make sure all the other stores in the town go out of business and then we'll raise prices. Yeah. And unlike Walmart, Walmart's an objectively brilliant idea. A store where I can buy nine millimeter bullets, time cop DVDs in Arizona IST within 10 feet

of each other. That's not, the necessities as it were, the necessities are a thing that exists. Look if you have time cop on DVD, Arizona IST and enough nine millimeter ammo, you can get all the other necessities. It's true. I can't afford time cop. I had to torrent it. It's unfortunate.

That's heartbreaking. From walmart.com. At a 2015 industry conference, Adam Neumann declared, we are in a consumption phase like nothing that has ever been seen. Does he mean humans or we work? No, we work. Okay. Yeah.

He matched these words with actions by embarking on a mass leasing frenzy, committing we work to filling up more and more office space and more and more cities around the globe. One executive told the New York Times, there was no discipline as to how Adam approved leases. Adam called, no one knew what anyone was doing. Now empty facilities were being filled by offering businesses free rent, which kept the show game moving along and kept we works valuation rising because all the investors are seeing is how fast the shit's expanding and revenue is it doubling every year.

Net revenue. Different story. Yeah. Revenues. So it looks like, okay, once we get through this consumption phase, this is going to be making a fuckload of money. When you say that they're signing leases and there's clients, is this like, I have a small business and I want to use the office space.

Is that the lease that we're talking about or is it him having a lease? He's leasing space from landlords. Okay. He's in many cases paying, I've been like, I'll pay you double whatever your current tenants are paying for the space because he just wants to have the right to all of the space. Okay. That's the idea.

Right. You acquire all of the space. He's a great negotiator. He's a brilliant negotiator. Double whatever they're paying you. Now by 2015, we work with an estimated $10 billion in monopoly money. Keeping all this going was exhausting for employees. One of them later recalled, quote, we would joke that we worked like slaves.

Adam would have meetings on Sunday and you could never miss those. Sometimes it wouldn't happen or it would happen hours late and you'd be there all night. You'd cry in the bathroom all the time. It's a good bit. Good bit. It really feels like the lesson that tech venture people learned from Enron was we should try harder to get away with it. Oh, only one of them died.

Yeah, exactly. Fuck yeah. We're good. We work CFO for a time was Ariel Tiger, one of Adam's native buddies. Chief phone officer. Yeah. Not really. I'm a conscientious joker to that joke.

He frequently threatened to fire people while wandering. We works open desk office from Vanity Fair, quote, every two weeks, Ariel would get a print out of payroll and he would go through the red and red line the shit out of it saying he wanted to reduce people's pay, a former executive said. I remember walking through the office and Ariel would loudly say, why do we have all these people? I could do what they're doing with two people. So I kind of like that guy.

Healthy work. He is actually the most reasonable person in the story. That's a fun vibe. The guy who threatened. The guy shouting that in the office, not a healthy vibe is what I'm trying to paint the picture of here. What's your payroll strategy? Well, I either give a thumbs up or thumbs down and one of them dies.

I don't like that guy in the real world, but like in a movie, I might want to play him. You know what I mean? That's the kind of feeling I got. Yeah, Matthew McConaughey would be a good pick for that. In June of 2015, we work raised $434 million more to fund their reckless growth. Right around that same time, 32 BJ service employees, International Union, which represents cleaners in New York, launched a protest outside of we works offices. Their issue was the fact that Neumann and McKelvie used non-union labor to clean their

offices for $10 an hour, which is like half what they're supposed to get paid in the city of New York. Now, Neumann attempted to deal directly with picketing cleaners by approaching them with a New York Times reporter behind them and talking about his own background as an immigrant. And then getting them really dry. Like you, I came here with not but $100,000 from my grandmother. Free booze and kombucha for all. This didn't work.

They didn't buy that shit. Did you take him to the roof? Yeah, I don't think he got to, I think they heckled him immediately. Adam later told a reporter with Fast Company, the last thing I was going to do was work with the union because I didn't believe that it's fair to blackmail someone to do something. You're literally a landlord. Oh boy. Oh boy.

Now frustrating. He did eventually sit down with Hector Figueroa, the union president, Figueroa recalled, rather than talking about the issue itself, he wanted to have a conversation about who we are, his people. But Figueroa. Take your shoes off, bro. Let's figure this whole thing out. What do you think about Starrs?

Then he got me really drunk. He pushed me off the roof. Figueroa was too smart for that shit. He pressed the issue and eventually Adam agreed to hire back unionized cleaners for 1846 an hour and health benefits. Figueroa was so grateful that he got his way that he gave Adam a union jacket. For what it's worth, he walked away from the interaction feeling positively towards Adam.

Less positive was the fact that in 2015, a San Francisco landlord kicked out two tenants' rights organizations from their offices to make room for we work. Adam had offered to pay double the rent, which guaranteed him the space and ensured that San Francisco's homelessness problem would get even worse. This may seem out of character for someone raised in the socialistic nexus of the kibbutz, but in later interviews, Adam was quick to mention that he considered the kibbutzim to be failed social experiments. Their chief law in his eyes was that everyone made the same amount of money.

That's the problem. Community was important to him, but only up to the point where you exhibited any weakness. Adam said, on one hand, community. On the other hand, you eat what you kill. So that's where the Spartan culture comes in there. I got you. I don't think so, because the actual kibbutz is would have fucked that shit. So this guy is just a fucking piece of shit.

Yeah, and has a real misunderstanding about it. What if I could evict everybody in the kibbutz? Yeah. If I could evict them for not being cool enough or drinking patron with me. But I'm sure he would rationalize it like, all right, this like, let's say in San Francisco, this housing organization, we take over their lease here or whatever, but they can just use the WeWork space. They can just use the WeWork space.

I'm sure that there's something like that's how you sleep at night, knowing that, you know, you've done this. You just created value, man. It's value. It's good to create value. Sure. And these fucking people trying to help homeless people get to get fucked up at work. There you go.

Yeah. Everybody with you. Free beard, guys. Anyway, in 2017, Adam got on the phone with an executive from Blackstone, a major investment firm to complain because it had invested money in a rival company to WeWork. We don't work. Yeah. We work in hell.

Adam also refused to work with landlords who lease space to other co-working companies. And he sued several of these rivals for trademark infringement. Your work, you are work. We Labs and High Work, he said, were all infringing on WeWork's copyright. Well, Adam's company did not claim exclusive rights to the word work. He believed they owned the use of that word after a two-letter pronoun. Wow. That was the company's argument.

So they are saying that if you put any two letters in front of work, you are infringing upon them. You are infringing on WeWork's copyright. All right. Okay. I feel like he might sue you or hire you to give his employees mandatory twerking lessons. Well, Joe, we are going to test this thing. There we go.

I think we got to do it. Now while the company's valuation rose, there were worrying signs that beneath all the glamour, this was just a grift. In 2013, Neumann tried to buy a stake in a Chicago building that planned to lease space to WeWork. The board rejected this idea because it would be a conflict of interest for Neumann to personally own a property that his company leased. That's a little bit of a problem.

It's called vertical integration, Robert. It's vertical integration. That's totally fine. It's called stealing money from investors. It's totally fine. Nobody's ever had an issue with it. Now, in 2014, Adam maneuvered himself into control of the board of directors so he could approve his plan of personally buying up a number of properties and leasing them back

to his company for millions of dollars. WeWork eventually signed lease agreements with four buildings Neumann owned. Since 2016, they paid almost $17 million to his properties. This is essentially theft of venture capital money, funneling it directly into the owner's pocket without informing the people paying of what's happening. See, if it wasn't him getting the money, I'm fine. Yeah, because venture capital, they're also idiots. I'm fine with stealing money from venture capital.

But it is a grift. I can't do it because I have some sort of moral compass or whatever, but I'm fine with other people robbing hooding. I'm not going to do it. It is a huge grift and an obvious one. Yeah. Once we start wheat work. It wasn't.

And there we go. It wasn't obvious at first. None of this actually came out until a while later when they filed for their IPO and all this stuff became public knowledge. Now as the grift spun on, Adam continued to motivate his employees with impossible stories of where the brand was going. Into this in 2015, he claimed, we work Mars as in our pipeline. Oh, red, red flag, red flag, this dude, that's a little bad.

You only can go to Mars in our world. Once you say my business is going to Mars, that means we're in med bed territory. Yeah, yeah. That's that's generally when if I were in that meeting, I'd have to walk away. You know what? Oh, Mars. It's been a good ride. Mars.

Mars. Okay. On the half chance you're talking. Literally, I have to leave. He said to his employees that he'd met with Elon Musk and offered the company services in prepping a future Mars mission. And I just love the thought that he thinks the company that leases office space with him.

Anything to contribute to that? Yeah. At the same time, I completely believe him that he met with Elon Musk and they had that conversation. He didn't say he met with Elon Musk. He also said that Musk turned him down, which makes sense. Even Elon Musk is a little bit like, no, this at Mars. I have a, I have a monopoly on the Mars grift right now, buddy.

Don't, don't try and step on my game. Now grand visions of the future were mixed with Adam's own growing reputation as something very much like a cult leader. I'm going to quote Jordan. Smell better. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You absolutely did.

I'm going to quote now from New York magazine. Within WeWork, a mystique quickly developed around Neumann who did little to downplay it until recently an executive conference room at WeWork headquarters was decorated with a large photograph of Neumann surfing a wave. He has bragged about working 20 hour days and regularly called executive meetings that would begin after midnight. I've had meetings that started at 2 a.m. where he joined us 45 minutes late, but that meeting was worth millions of former WeWork executive told me.

We were so drunk. We could not stand. Shitting ourselves in the room. Many people told me they bought into WeWork's grand mission only when Neumann was doing the preaching. At the beginning of every week, WeWork employees were required to stay after work for a thank God it's Monday team building event that could last for hours. Oh okay.

So they also made them exhausted and tired and less than capable of making fully realized decisions. All the things that cult leaders don't do. I've heard of that before. Nope. It's all the things you don't do as a cult leader. Gotcha. Neumann would typically speak after which employees often walked around handing out shots

of tequila that people were expected to consume. Every time I'm out, he brings me back in. One former employee says Neumann offered her tequila during her job interview, and liquor was a constant presence at pretty much every company event, another perk for the largely millennial staff. I'm picturing this dude like with a lampshade on his head. Yes. Like just do-do-do.

Dancing around. Many employees know the name of Neumann's favorite tequila, Don Julio 1942, and offices around the country would keep it stocked for when he came to visit. One morning in 2014, not long after we work opened a new location in Washington, D.C., an employee arrived to find the game room trashed. There were cups lying around the room, which smelled to him like weed. When the employee reviewed the security footage from the night before to identify the culprits, he saw Neumann and Michael Gross.

We works vice chairman, drinking and partying on the time crisis arcade machine. Drinking weed. The room smelled like weed and there was also like empty cups, yeah. I really feel like I have no problem with that. Of all of the things so far, he owns this business, he got drunk and high. It's not like he was tweaking on crystal meth or anything like that. Look, you're no square. Yeah, I'm cool with all of this stuff.

The exploiting labor and that bullshit, I'm against. You do get the feeling that when he wasn't around, the people didn't really drink or party. Yeah, I would assume so. Yeah. Absolutely. My experience with like workplaces that have alcohol in them, it's like most people don't. Yeah.

Even when it's available. Now, not everyone bought the permanent party vibe of the company. In 2015, we work bought a fancy private jet, which Adam Neumann immediately took to using all over the world. He smoked weed in it constantly, sometimes breaking international law to do so. His former chief of staff, Medina Barty, got pregnant and had to stop traveling with Neumann to company events because he refused to not hot box the company plane when she was in it.

Right. Right. Good stuff. She wound up filing a federal complaint against Adam for, among other things, retaliating against her for getting pregnant. That's what I was expecting to get. According to the Washington Post, Barty quotes... And bogarting the wheat here.

Yes. According to the Post, Barty quote, alleges that female employees were subjected to sexually offensive conduct, disparage for taking maternity leave and often paid significantly less than their male counterparts. According to a complaint filed Thursday with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Barty had two children during her more than five years at WeWork and claims Neumann referred to maternity leave as retirement and vacation, according to the complaint. She alleges she was demoted after both pregnancies and replaced by men at higher wages and given

no instruction about her new responsibilities. So cool. Yeah. Yeah. Now that story didn't drop until 2019. In 2016, the company was still riding high, flushed with billions of dollars in VC money and on its way to becoming the largest private office renter in New York City. In the spring of that year, Neumann met the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son, at a dinner.

Masayoshi held the purse springs to SoftBank's $100 billion investment fund. He was one of the biggest investors in the startup world, or the rest of the world, no matter. Yeah. Adam badly wanted his money. He invited Massa on a tour of the company offices and Massa told him he had 12 minutes to listen to a presentation. Neumann gave him the pitch and followed him out to his car when it was over, continuing

to pitch. Yeah. And then he played Masayoshi Takanaka's seven goblins, I assume, for 12 minutes. I don't understand that joke in any way. Never mind. All right. Somehow, Adam won Masayoshi's son over. The elder businessman told Neumann that the only problem with his business plan was that

we work was thinking too small. It should move from leasing office space to small businesses and working to leasing space to all businesses. Masayoshi offered him $4.4 billion on the spot. Okay. All right. No. Bad.

Seems like a bad idea. Right? Bad. It seems like a ridiculous thing to do. What you should do is own your own country. Yes. That's kind of where this goes. Yeah.

Okay. That's right. Isn't this now just becoming entirely like real estate based? Cause like if you're going to go to bigger companies, then you're going to need a building and again, entire building that you would then rent to them. Yeah. You would rent to them instead of them renting it because they all rent their spaces. Yeah. It's a stupid idea.

This is an inversion of reality as a business model. It's this thing people talked about with Steve Jobs, this reality distortion field that he had. Like Adam clearly has that ability and he enraptures this guy and convinces him that like this dream of changing the world, changing work is more than just like what it actually is, which is we rent office space. I don't understand how he did it, but he did it and he got 4.4 billion fucking dollars to do it.

That's insane. That's one of those things that I've talked about on our podcast is like, I would love to just like measure whether or not, like I want to talk to this guy and see if he can get me on his side. Yeah. Like I want to measure my ability to fight off a cult leader. I really don't want you to do that because I know that you'll lose. I gotta, I gotta, I was, I was born in it.

I need closure on my life. I have to defeat a cult leader before I can grow as a person. I mean, we could hunt down Adam Neumann and throw rocks at him. I am also fine with that. That would count. I don't think I trust you to go to the roof with Adam. I don't trust me to go to the roof by myself. I would, I do think that if should, you know, our lives ever go in that direction, let's

say some investor gives us 4.4 billion dollars. And I get to start my, the cult that I've been working on for years. I feel like a nice offshoot of that would be like, maybe we make a reality show where we try and we do terrible, terrible, uh, cults of personality. Absolutely. Well, speaking of terrible cults of personality, the episode's over, uh, part one, and it's time for you to plug your own cults of personality. Sure.

Um, well, we do a podcast called knowledge fight that people can find just by, I guess Googling it. It's on iTunes. We're talking about Alex Jones. It's on Spotify. That's true. Um, various other places around. Yeah.

And then, uh, you know, we have Twitter and all that stuff. It's at knowledge underscore fight and, uh, I'm Jordan. I am a somewhat of a comedian. And if you're looking to book me, I'm available to tweet, tweet at go to bed Jordan. That'll, that'll do it. If you, uh, run a comedy venue in no, Alaska, please force Jordan to come up. I'm not busy. I want to try to send you to Alaska.

Get me a plane ticket. That's my goal for this. No, not you. Go. I can't come. No. Just Jordan. Oh, come on.

I'm going to follow. I'm going to send you. I want to send, I want to send you to Panama. I want to get you both opposite sides of the hemisphere. All right. I'll just be sitting at Panama song the whole time. No drink at Cabo Wabos in honor of Adam Neumann. Well I'm Robert Evans.

This is my podcast. You're listening to it. So you know what it is. You can find the sources on behind the bastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram and at Bastard pot. You can find me on Twitter at I write okay. And you can find love in your heart anywhere. You also find a dollar because capitalism, my friends is the essence of love.

And that's the note we're going to write out on. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. And our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest?

I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.