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

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

Robert is joined by Dan and Jordan from Knowledge Fight to continue the bastard who created WeWork. 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. I pointed at the wrong ones of you. Don't worry about it. But I know which ones you are. Should I do the bit?

Robert? What? Robert? What? I don't understand the bit. Never mind. It's the opening bit. Never mind.

Okay. Yeah. Jordan. Oh, right. Where you ask a question. You can ask. That would be interesting. Well, I didn't plan a question.

In their podcast. I have planned several questions. In the podcast. We've done 400 episodes. Hey, Robert, do you like music? In the podcast that these two do, where they talk a little bit about Alex Jones, Jordan, who normally is the person who comes in cold, asks Dan a question at the start. And I guess, yeah, you hit me up with the question.

Yeah, man. Oh, man, now I'm on the spot. Let's see. Robert, have you any experience with roller coasters? What's your style on roller coasters? I've only ever loved one roller coaster, Jordan, and it wasn't a roller coaster. Robert is married to this roller coaster. It was a virtual reality sort of experience and six flags over Texas outside of Dallas.

Is this like a Star Wars type of thing? A little bit. A little bit. You were like an F-16 pilot breaking the sound barrier. Love it. It was very cool. Not really a roller coaster. I don't really like roller coasters.

I've been on a number of them. It's fine. It's just not my thing. Okay. But I liked that ride and then six flags took it away. From you specifically. One day, one day I will take vengeance on them. That is, I want to clarify, that is absolutely a terrorist threat.

One day they're going to wake up and it's only going to be five flags. God damn it. Yeah. I'm going to take at least 18% of those flags. I don't know how to do that percentage. It's hard. Something like that. Rough for me.

Within the ballpark. The answer is, I liked that one, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride thing. That Wind in the Willows. That is fun. That book about a frog that gets drunk and goes down. And the Brer Rabbit one run. I loved that one both before and then in a different way after I realized how racist it was.

There was some song of the south. Yeah. Yeah. It was a real, before it was just like, this is a fun ride. I'm seven. And after it was like, really? Really? Still.

It is 2004. That's Splash Mountain, right? That's the one that has the Brer Rabbit. Because at the end of it, you go over the waterfall. And it killed that guy. Yeah. I think so. And there's so much to unpack about Splash Mountain.

I mean, it has that song of the south connection to it. There's also like a tradition of people flashing on the way down. Like for kids, there's a lot going on. A lot going on. Very complicated. Disney parks in general. My favorite was the Velveteen Rabbit. You go up and you just stay down after that.

My favorite is the Velveteen Dream, wrestler fan. They should have a Velveteen Rabbit ride where they just take something the children love individually and destroy it in front of them. Less of a ride and more of child abuse. But I'll make the park. That's the only way you become a real. The only way you become a real. If it were Adam, it would be a bottle of tequila.

Yes. Thank you for bringing it back to Adam Neumann. Great transition. Very smooth. So we ended the last episode with with we work nearing its height 2016-2017 with a lot of money just gets this in flush $4.4 billion a fucking cash, which they used to make Adam's dumbest dreams come true. Does he double back to the baby clothes?

In a way. It did have a K. Now, before we get into all that, what he did with all this VC money, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about cults some more. Now, we work has been described by a number of former employees as quote like and Neumann has been described as a cult leader. Former employees often call his personal charisma almost intoxicating. One former executive said, if you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general.

Another recalled his sense of himself is beyond human. When you're in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything. There are certainly cult like tactics at use in we work. Colts endeavor to separate their members from the wider world and the friends and family they have outside the cult. And you could argue that things like thank God, it's Monday and mandatory after hours fun events fulfill that role. They also rely on consciousness alteration.

There's all stuff we've talked about keeping people tired, exhausted, fucked up. And of course, the fact that I will note in a point of fairness to the fact that Adam himself was often one of the drunkest people in the company makes this a little bit less manipulative. It's sort of like he kind of just digs that stuff. Yeah, it would be a much clearer red flag if he was not drinking and handing out alcohol. That would be beyond a red flag. Yeah, that would be that would be deliberately drugging his employees.

Backwards into being a cult leader. Yeah. Yeah. It's more complicated than just he's a cult leader, but he uses a lot of those tactics. Clearly, maybe just sort of you get the feeling with him that it's a lot of it's not as much intentional as it is like instinctive, which I guess is how we get our first cult. Some people just know how to do that. No, my family was in a cult whenever I was born.

So I know all of the tricks and all of the ways that you get kind of accidentally swept into all of that shit. And then next thing you know, everybody's wearing the same clothes. Dancing around a fire to journey. Yeah. Tragic. That's the just the drain. Everybody circles.

Although people should consider joining the cult that I'm going to start. Is that right? What do you got? Oh yeah. What do you got? Give me the elevator pitch. Where are people to talk in elevators? I mean, it's a mix of people gifting me with large amounts of machetes.

Great. Getting really high and shoving Adam Neumann off of buildings. It's going to be good cult. I feel like I can do it. Oh, I was just contemplating that there's a shelf life to this thing as there's one Adam Neumann. There is. There is.

One of the tenets of this cult. The great thing about shoving people off of buildings is there's always more people in more buildings. That's true. Or effigies. Which is our motto. Just keep shoving. Just keep shoving.

Is there going to be a Brigham Young to this Adam Neumann WeWork situation? Maybe. We haven't got that. Like actual time hasn't really hit that point yet. So I can't say. All right. Now, if we're going to compare Neumann to a cult leader and we worked for a cult, Keith Ranieri's Nexium cult might be the best one to reference.

Listeners to part three of our series on Keith Ranieri and Nexium would have called that he hosted a yearly event called Vanguard Week where followers from all over the globe would fly in to celebrate Keith's birthday. In the same vein, WeWork had summer camp, an annual event where employees would gather, celebrate, and network. Here's the New York Times talking about this fun set of days. All kinds of activities were offered, yoga, axe throwing, leaf printing, a drum circle, along with entertainment by an expensive array of visiting performers.

The chain smokers once played and received WeWork stock as part of their fee, while the weekend was flown in from Toronto by a helicopter, Tenacious We, an employee band, has also performed. Sounds insufferable. That's terrible. I don't even want to see the real version. It was just so much everything, one former executive said. Alcohol, drugs. There was not a lot of food.

That was the only thing there wasn't a lot of. Anything that would bulwark you against the alcohol and the drugs. I'm super high already, but I'm very hungry. I'm going to eat all of these mushrooms just for sustenance. That has happened to me once, and I. It's not a great food. No, nor is it a great idea. As you were describing that festival, I did point at you very aggressively because they

kind of almost swung you with the axe throwing. Didn't they? Look, my, my coat would indeed center around lots of drugs, throwing axes, dancing around fires. The weekend. Well, that's often, actually, I do, I do quite like, but that's suspiciously like the great outdoor games. So no, no, no, no, there's no, there's no, I feel like, I feel like adding an element

of competition to throwing sharp objects at inert things cheapens it. That's fair. You just, you're just throwing axes and knives for the joy of throwing sharp things at wooden things. That's all it's about. The purity of the. Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Now, summer camp included educational interludes, like speeches from quantum physicist Michael Brooks alongside beer pong and dancing to electronic music. And in the midst of these days long bacchanals, two employees plied with drugs, limitless alcohol, little food and less sleep, Adam Neumann would preach his gospel. In a 2013 summer camp, he took to the stage to say, I think the thing that all of us know is that if you want to succeed in this world, you have to build something that has intention. Every one of us is here because it has meaning, because we want to do something that actually

makes the world a better place and we want to make money doing it. The crowd reportedly broke into wild cheers at this. One former senior executive who was there later recalled, so many of the people were young and had never worked in a real company. They bought all of it. I realized after I got there, it was a cult. Now summer camp started as an event on the land of some of Neumann's friends. But in 2017, it moved to the English country side, using some of the billions of new money

pumped in via SoftBank's $4.4 billion infusion. They flew employees in from all around the world. Attendees reported that they were allowed to walk up to the bar and ask for multiple entire bottles of wine at once. People played Edward Forty hands with fancy bottles of rosé, which is what I would do. That part sounds great. When you realize the liquor is free and expensive and they'll just hand you bottles, that's what you do.

Have you ever done that, take Forty's to your hands? The worst thing I've done in fucking Ljubljana, Slovenia, was you can buy two liters of wine in a gigantic juice box for about a dollar and a half. You mix it with equal parts Pepsi and it is the worst idea. It doesn't sound like a good idea. Terrible. Do you duct tape those to your hands? No, we just drank.

I blacked out throwing an empty bottle on top of a stranger's roof and I came to alone without any of my friends near me receiving a falafel from somebody having already paid with my phone gone nine in the morning, like eight hours later, just the first time. Only time that's ever happened were just like I black out and I come back in the middle of a transaction. Yeah. And you could one the friendship contest, I assume. I had no, I was alone.

Oh, I had lost the friendship contest. The prize was a falafel. I did that once, I tape duct tape forties to my hands. I've done it with forty hands, just not with wine. Yeah. Yeah. It's terrible. It's terrible because you eventually have to pee.

Yeah. Steel reserve isn't something anyone should drink two of. Yeah. That's definitely true. Yeah. Me and my buddies also had a thing we did called Freedom Forties. It was you have to chug a forty and nine minutes and eleven seconds or else the terrorists win.

It's a shockingly hard to do because forties are ghastly. Yeah. It's really the best way to forget. Yeah. Now, one employee later told the New York Times that she realized it was time to quit WeWork when she woke up in a teepee at summer camp to find one of her colleagues outside pissing on her tent. That employee later told New York Magazine, talk to any community manager under twenty-four

and it's the greatest weekend of your life. But I am not here to get peed on. Now I'm going to quote one more time from that New York Magazine article discussing the 2018 summer camp, which spoilers would prove to be the last one. At last year's event, according to a report in Property Magazine, a British real estate publication, Neumann sat on stage next to his wife and McKelvie as the crowd sang, oh lay, oh lay, oh lay. WeWork employee from India started chanting, let's go.

We work. Let's go. Well, another from California screamed, you're changing the world, Adam. We love you. Augusto Contreras, a WeWork employee from Mexico City, proposed to his girlfriend next to a dodgeball tournament. I felt like I was surrounded by my extended family, he told the company blog. He had been at WeWork for seven months.

So they find the people who are vulnerable to this and they're very vulnerable to it. When you were said that it was the last one, I expected the story to be something like really tragic or like fire festively, but it was just like, you're sucking in people who need what this pretends to provide. It doesn't really provide it, but that's coming later. Now, that Fast Company article I've quoted from a couple of times in this episode was released in 2016 and it provides even more detail on the profoundly culty way that Adam presented himself at company events, quote, a Beatles chorus bounces off the bare concrete

walls of what was once JP Morgan's headquarters, come together right now, the nearly a thousand chattering WeWork employees who fill the event space look toward the stage, expecting CEO Adam Neumann to appear from the wings at any second. Instead, he sprints down the center aisle and giddy conversations evolve into a cheer. When John Lennon trills over me, Neumann leaps onto the stage, sticking the landing. This is the way this guy's presenting himself to his employees and kind of seems like a lot of them eat it up. Yeah.

Wall Street has already come out by this time. Yeah. Yeah. They should know that. They should know that, right? But people never learn about this. Yeah. So many movies about this guy.

I mean, World War II came out and we all know what happened in 2016, so. The list is for saving private right. Have you ever watched the presentations that MLMs, like the multi-level marketing company? Yeah. Yeah. This is exactly that. Yeah. I've watched a number of those seminars and the gatherings that they do and that has all

of those signs. I try to repeat frequently that I think everybody has a kind of grift that they're vulnerable to. Yeah. No matter how smart, because it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with the fact that everybody has needs and particularly secret needs that even they don't know how to voice a lot of the time. And if someone other than you, particularly predators, what they're good at is seeing

things in others that they don't see in themselves, but that are present. If they're able to pick that out, they'll get you. It doesn't matter how smart and well-read you are. They'll get you. We all have a thing and Adam found a group of people who I think were raised on stories like Apple's, you know, the history of the Apple Corps, the Google who raised these companies that like changed the world and had these like grand visions and like these legendary leaders and everybody got super fucking rich too.

And Adam knew how to create the feeling that that's what was going on here. It wasn't. Yeah. It was just leasing office space. It wasn't literally like Google. That is like a revolution. We organize the world's information. Yeah.

Apple. It's fundamentally the way that daily life exists for billions of people. Yeah. Those are companies where you really can't oversell at least the impact of what's happening. These people are leasing office space, but he's made it feel like that. Yeah. But there's kids that that is part of why it felt like that. It is.

It is like he watched that Apple commercial where the hammers thrown into the giant screen and all the all the drones are there. And he was like, what if I made all those drones, those guys were super cool. Yeah. That seems like that's the thing I want to throw a hammer in shit that'll weather everything will fall down. It's terrible. It's hard for me not to think that like none of this would be possible without booze.

Like it's like there's it's not for nothing that alcohol is in every story you read about we work. It really seems very the inflated. The only way to have achieved the inflated sense of self confidence that was clearly a major aspect of this would have been to give everyone free guns, which is how my cults kind of work. I thought it was machetes, machetes, machetes don't do it enough man. It's really it's got to be an AK forty seven.

I understand. Now it makes you feel like a revolutionary like holding a Kalashnikov. That's what I hear. And then we're going to shove people off of buildings at a moment at first, but from each according to the bullets they have to each according to the bullets they deserve. Is that really good. I should also abstain from this bit. And here's our special third guess FBI agent done Chicago is actually a lot more than one

of you. Okay. The entire Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Not fans now and they have deep dish pizza or a fuse to try it. That's fine. Yeah, you're fine. Yeah. Don't worry about it.

Every everyone I know from Chicago has said that. It's fine. People not from Chicago are like, oh, you got to try the deep dish pizza. We're all fine. Yeah. Yeah. Now it's like Cali Max. That's good as tech Max.

I'll say it. I'm lipped in both. Fair enough. Not nearly as good. I have no dog in the pizza fight. You know, speaking of dogfights, not speaking of dogfights, speaking of dogfights, you know who would never train dogs to fight. Who is that?

At one point, at one point you probably would assume he wouldn't. When he was five, six, and like a five-year-old Michael Vick, someone who is incapable of hosting dogfights is the sponsors of this show. Silky. One of the better ad transitions on this series. Off we go. 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 not in the good and bad ass way. And 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 happen. 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. We're back. Oh, what I loved about those products and services was that none of them were for dogfights. It's true. It's true.

Sometimes you just can't abandon the dogfight bit when you should. No, it's hard to. It's hard to abandon the dogfight bit. It's also rare these days for me to cast on a podcast that isn't sponsored by a dogfighting way. It is. Well, and I just should say, if you use the promo code BASTARDS, you get access to the 24-hour streaming dogfights, all the best dogfights.

We got chihuahuas and all the sabrametrics about like the wins over dogfighting. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay, so now shortly after Adam Neumann founded WeWork, he'd made what seemed to be at the time an impossible promise that his company would one day beat out JP Morgan and become the largest private office tenant in the city of New York. Given that New York is New York, that's a pretty huge deal. So JP Morgan was prior the most office space?

Yeah. The gigantic bank worth all of the money in the world is saying I'm going to beat them. That's a big thing to hit. But in 2018, this dream became a reality. WeWork now leased 5 million square feet over 50 locations across the city. So you're still not making money, correct? Not a profit. You're still making money.

But not net. Not net. Yeah. Now, those locations, as we got into a little bit, were leased with venture capital money, not actual profits made by the company. And those offices were kept full due to free rent offers and lease buyouts, which is not a strategy that can continue forever. Man, you could just give people homes.

You could give people homes for less and it would make more sense. It does feel like people talk about like we can't afford universal healthcare and then it's like how much money did we work blow through? It's just blue. Like even outside of how much money did we spend on the F-35, which is actually vastly higher. Yeah, sure. But still.

And if he housed people instead of all these offices, those people would get tons of booze. Yeah. Yeah. They'd be drunk as shit. Now SoftBank's massive investment seemed to confirm Adam's grand boast about the importance of his company and his ego swelled consequently. He started talking to colleagues about his desire for eternal life. This is like moon base all over again.

Nope. Nope. Nope. This is where Dan's ears perk up. He invested in life biosciences, and life extensions start up to further this end. The company mission is to create a future where age-related decline is not a fact of life. Adam increasingly threw out wild ideas for ways we work could expand to areas well outside of its wheelhouse.

Sometime after 2017, he started talking about starting an airline called WeFly. It's this type of shit where you look in history and you're like, how is it that people got sold on fucking alchemy and the philosopher stone and eternal life, and then you look at that guy and you're like, oh, they're still doing it. Yeah, they're still doing it. In fairness, WeFly kind of like that makes some sense. It's a good name for an airline. It's just like, what's your experience renting buildings to companies?

What do you want to do? Run an airline. What is an airplane, but an office? A sky office. Yeah, exactly. That is actually where these episodes were written. Exactly, Robert. The WoW Airlines in Iceland that used to.

The World of Warcraft Airlines. And there was WizAir, which is the worst airline. They started, it's like a bike share company, and their next move is like, I think we'll run an airline. Turns out those skills do not translate. Translate? No. Weird.

Wow. Now, Adam increasingly threw out wild ideas for ways WeWork could expand into areas. Well, outside. Oh, right. I read that a little bit. Oh, yeah. So WeFly is one. There was also talk of WeSale and something called WeSleep, which I have no idea what

that was supposed to be. Probably like we need some mattresses. Yeah, maybe mattresses, maybe like a sleep lab. He briefly discussed his ambition to become Israel's prime minister before amending that to say that if he ran for any office, it would be for president of the world. That's an obvious. Cool, cool. Part of how you know this was a little bit culty is that if my boss, this podcast, Jack

O'Brien, someone I have great respect for, I've worked with him 11, 12 years now. The vast majority, basically all of my working life. If he told me seriously that if he ever ran for office, it would be for president of the world and it wasn't like a bad joke, I would just start punching and I love Jack. But that's what you do when you care about someone and they say shit, you just start hitting them. It's a, it's a mentality that needs to be gone from it needs to be hit. Yeah.

Yeah. You don't, you just don't do that, especially when it's paired with like, I'm trying to put money into life extension technology and I want to live forever and be president of the world. Yeah. I'm going to hit you with this brick. Like this is what needs to happen now, become a problem and I have a visceral response to that.

You can be president of the world with one eye, if you will not have both of your eyes while you do it. I will make sure of that. I think it is inevitable that if there is a president of the world, they will have one eye, but there will be an iPad situation because it'll be a dystopian, like a water world type. Yeah. I was going with a, what is his name, a D boy from Friday, the president of the world

and fifth element. Sure. Yeah. That's a great president. That's the one that I'm all about. I, I will say as an anarchist, I have a lot of different conflicting, always shifting ideas about, about how I think the world ought to be. One thing I'm certain of is that based on my ideology, if I ever think someone might

become the president of the world, I'm going to try to hit him with a brick. I think that's fair. Although I also think that I try to break them. Yeah. I think that anytime you hear someone say like, I want to be president of the world, like what scares me about that is not the possibility they'll become president of the world. It's just what that implies about their mental state.

It's the ego. Yeah. It's like, this is, this is trouble. Like I would, I would have a very negative reaction to somebody who was like, I'm going to be president. Yeah. Cause that's a bad thing to want to be, but somebody wants to be president of the world. That's a bricking.

Yeah. That's a brick. It's dubious mentality. Yeah. I mean, the truth is the only people that should be in power, the people who don't want to be in power and that's why we're fucked. Now all of this we've been talking about for several minutes now was a paragraph and I haven't read the last sentence.

Oh no. It's the most insufferable sentence. Mic down Jordan. In the 2018 summer camp, Adam Neumann promised that we work would solve the problem of children without parents and then eradicate world hunger. We're going to kill children without parents. They just start gassing orphans. They shan't be hungry that we works value sword past 10 billion than past 20 billion.

Adam Neumann was now on paper at least a billionaire himself. So there was no indication of how he planned to solve those problems. No, none whatsoever. Okay. Well, a little bit. We'll get to that a little bit. I'll be patient. Medium post right after Elizabeth Warren made a white paper.

You know, he actually, if he had, that would have been more thought than I think he gave to it. Yeah. That sounds right. Yeah. He was becoming a billionaire again on paper that his personal goal was to become the world's first trillionaire. Do we not have one?

Brick him good. No. We don't have one. No, no one's even called Jeff Bezos is out like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are like at 120 million. Something like that. 100 billion. That's not even all that close to a trillion.

I have so little interest in money stuff that I just assumed we had a couple. I feel like it is a matter of like the survival of civilization level importance that we not let anyone reach that level. Yeah. I feel like it's a matter of survival that we don't allow billionaires to exist until no, I mean, you know, we, we, we, we've got to stop that too, but yeah, that's a brick and I want to be a trillionaire. That's a brick and I see a shirt in your future.

That's a brick and that's a brick and I'm, I'm, you want to be, I'm going to hit you with a brick. I just got to do it. If you were a standup comedian touring the Midwest, you would sell a lot of that's a brick and shirts. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the reality of Adam's wealth was less impressive.

He made millions as we work CEO because that's what CEOs do. And he made millions more from having the company lease from properties he owned. But he also had borrowed more than $740 million against his stock in the company, a thing that is legal for some reason. He sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his own shares. This was often done in a very shady fashion. For example, in 2015, he sold tens of millions of dollars worth of shares. Then he had the company launch a stock buyback program to buy employee shares of stock.

The buyback program offered employees a per share price that was markedly lower than what Neumann had been paid for his stock. And since Adam's stock sales weren't public, we works employees didn't realize they were being screwed to subsidize Adam's lifestyle. Man, I feel like all those guys who are like, okay, here's what we'll do to increase productivity. Create a cult and fuck over everybody to work with could really be served by like reading all the literature where they're like, if you pay people a living wage and give them benefits and give them time off, they will work for you on their own.

Jordan, that is not how you become president of the world. It's definitely not. Is it? You know who you become president of the world? Crazy shit. It's racism. It's racism. Oh, no.

Now, because it's the world, it's a number of different racisms because you got to be able to get it. Yeah. Mexicans, Tibetans, you got to really all over the world. It's really a lot of racism. I feel like you start with religion and then move to race. But even then, you've got to... I wonder what it'll be.

We might see it in our lifetimes and I'm really curious. Yeah, I'm really curious to see whether or not it's a racism or a religious bigotry thing. Well, no, just which one, playing to which sort of bigotry wins, you know? Because I feel like it'll be one president who's like, fuck all these different individual races that I've calculated will maximize my vote. And one president will be like, fuck this specific religion. So it'll be like a focus-tested racism versus instinctual racism? I mean, it's actually going to come down to Hillary versus Trump again.

Very frustratingly. The MPAA has to review what type of racism in a bunch of focus groups. Gotcha. Now, during this time, Adam and Rebecca bought a $90 million collection of homes around the world, including a 60-acre estate in Westchester County. I see those kids made it. That marriage worked. It did.

I expected a divorce by now. You know, it's weird. When you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it's easy to stay married. Which really speaks to how unpleasant Jeff Bezos' marriage must have been. Anyway, I'm not going to comment on that anymore. Yeah, they had a $21 million mansion in the Bay Area with a room shaped like a guitar. They hired several nannies for their children, two personal assistants, and a chef. Even as much money as Adam was worth, his spending was incredibly excessive.

And so was WeWork's spending. While Adam's craziest ideas like establishing an airline never went into production, the company did embark on a number of side hustles at his direction. They created WeLive, essentially a very expensive apartment complex with no privacy. Adam said this would drive suicide rates down, because no one feels alone. Elevator talk. I'm getting really uncomfortable. But that is kind of the natural progression.

If they're, like, making this company, if it is, like, you've created this, like, this is the workspace we now own that. Why wouldn't you then get into, like, now we're getting into your living? Yeah, I tried to create a workspace slash living space, so why not just create a living space slash workspace? Yeah, they also created a gym, I think it was called WeRise. That should be their bakery. That should be their bakery, I know, I know, missed opportunities.

And then they created WeGrow. This was a school that Adam hoped would eventually expand into a project to house all the world's orphans. Jesus. Adam said, this fucking sentence, you guys, Adam said of WeGrow's plan to save the orphans. We want to solve this problem and give them a new family, the WeWork family. I'm speechless. It's terrifying.

What kind of person says that? A crazy, I think just a straight up insane person. Yeah. I wonder if there was a moment, I wonder this, because this is the question, like in the movie of this dude's life, does he have that Scarface moment where it's like, you can see him just go past that point and it's like, everything past this is just going to be insane. It was probably that night on the roof. It was that night on the roof, maybe.

Yeah. I can get people to do anything if they'll drink this poop beer. Could be. We start with the thing on the roof and then. This is going to be an insufferable movie, isn't it, that makes him into like a cool, god damn it. It'll be another social network. I want to do it like Wall Street, but it turned out that even when you satirize, it's evil

people. People are going to be like, well shit, that's a great idea. There should be a law that when you do a movie like Wolf of Wall Street, there needs to be a seven minute scene where the character shits himself. Yeah. It's just really unbecoming. Yeah. Make him embarrassing.

And make it uncomfortable for the audience. It should be hard to get over that hump. You should expect it to be over like three minutes in and then it just keeps going. Not like funny, not like the vomiting scene in Team America, just bad, just a bad thing to be a part of. Yeah. Because it happened. I feel like that's a regulation we could pass.

I think so. I think so. It's bipartisan appeal. Yeah. The movie shitting bill has passed through both houses and is now on the president's desk. He was reportedly unable to sign today as he was too busy chopping off his enormous poop so that it could flush in less than 10 flushes.

That did happen. That's just part of politics in America. You can't remove that from the history books. It's where we live now. Yeah. Amazing. It's going to be really funny if we get passed as a nation, him being in office and don't collapse into a civil war, to hear people talk about the dignity of the presidency again.

Like really, it's going to be like, I hope I get to be on TV at some point when that happens and just going to be, what, what, what is left? Did you hear the poop speech? I mean, historically, the dignity of the presidency was lost, you know, I guess, after Andrew Jackson. It was always an illusion. Yeah. But even Jackson presented himself in a stately manner and stuff like. Right.

Like a six foot tall wheel of cheese is where I get off the off board on the dignity of the presidency. That's the best thing he did. Yeah. Three week old six foot tall wheel of cheese. I feel like that's different than accusing everyone else in the country of needing 15 washes to get their poop down the toilet and every, everyone listening, knowing like you couldn't get a poop down the toilet.

Could you the president? Say you told on yourself there with the speech. It's really bad. No one else is having trouble with this. Here I am having pooped for four days and it takes 10 plus. Yeah. I mean, you can say that like the office is undignified historically forever, but I think there is a value to a shared illusion.

Yeah. And that's kind of gone. There's a value, but it's not a good or a bad thing. No. It's just a value in the same way that an AR-15 has a value. Yeah. All right. Now, when we'd last, before we went on this digression, I'd said that Adam wanted to solve

the problem of parentless children and give them a new family that we work with. Right. That's why we went on the digression because that's fucking crazy. It is. It's a nuts fucking sentence. That's crazy. Well, before we work, could house the world's orphans though. We're going to put them on trains because nobody's ever done this before and we'll send

it all the way across the nation. You know, it's better than that. It's better than that, but dumber. We train. In order to make we grow, get to the point where it could house all of the world's orphans. It was going to start as a luxury boutique school for the children of rich people, charging the very wealthy in New York City, $36,000 to $42,000 a year to educate their small children.

Well, this seems like the opposite. So we're going to solve the world's homeless orphan problem by making it impossible for them to afford this. With walled door education. I imagine I'm like flying down to a group of Syrian refugees fleeing like a barrel bombing in Idlib and like putting a hand on one of their soldiers and saying in like 20 years when the cost comes down, take care of you right now. No way.

For now, it's just Sean Penn's kids. And they're getting a great education. Absolutely. Do you know who Sean Penn is? Oh, you're dead now. We grow was Rebecca Neumann's project. His wife. She'd been a core part of we work from the beginning, of course, in 2017, the company

had hired SoulCycle founder Julie Rice is their chief brand officer. But when Rebecca came back from maternity leave later that year, she decided she wanted the title for herself and took it. So Julie had to quit. Okay. According to we works established business practices, she should have been fired. Yeah. And demoted.

I'm disappointed by this. She was. That's what happens because she was originally the chief brand officer, but then Rebecca got it. Yeah. Now support this decision. Rebecca is somewhat famous among we workers for firing people she met and got bad vibes from.

One example is a mechanic for the company Gulfstream Private Jet, who was shit can't because Rebecca quote didn't like his energy. So she's the kind of person we are all, we all like. Now obviously she was the perfect person to design a brand new school from the ground up. Rebecca, of course, had no relevant experience in education and also what if children and running a school? What if these kids have bad vibes?

Well, you then, then you just kill that's you throw them off the top of that building. It's real trouble. Someone who's like, so he's always missing from public education was more preciousness. Yeah. And good vibes. Yeah. Good vibes. Yeah.

She had no relevant experience, but she didn't think that really mattered. She told interviewers that her vision for we grow was a new conscious entrepreneurial school committed to unleashing every child's superpowers. At the school's opening, she reportedly stated, in my book, there's no reason why children in elementary schools can't be launching their own businesses, labor laws, not if they're running shit, Jordan. I mean, if you hire a bunch of eight year olds to work in this coal mine, I mean, if you want to do a school where you're like, Hey, you, it's cool to do a lemonade stand and

learn some lessons from it. I don't know how I'm not going to die on that hill arguing against that, but it sounds like that's not what she's talking about. No, no, she wants them making their own. We didn't the Olsen twins even wait until they were 18 to start their fashion brand or whatever. I think they did. And I think that maybe working their entire childhood had some negative mental health implications, but I don't want to speak for them.

It's telling that kind of the best case scenario for children who work a lot as children is Macaulay Coken. Yeah. Well, his best role was in party monster, which I'm sure he's fucking awesome. He's a great role in party monster. That's a great movie in his great movie. Yeah. Yeah.

He's a great party. I like Macaulay Coken and I'm glad he made it out. He's also good and saved. He's also good and saved. It's tough is what I'm saying. Being a child who works heavily as a child, it's not, maybe it's not good for children. Maybe children shouldn't work a lot. Give me the backing of thousands upon thousands of psychological studies and then I will listen.

You know what psychologically would be awesome for kids in school, fucking, looking at payroll, inventory. Because it's like you talk about like like like child actors and actresses, obviously a lot of them have very negative experiences is very, it's a damaging thing, which is why like we have so much respect for like Daniel Radcliffe's parents who were like, no, we're not going to let our kid move to fucking Los Angeles. Like you either film it and like we're just not going to put him through that. It's tough.

It does things to them and they're not in charge. They actually have a lot of people there to support them and it still is a very difficult to deal with healthily having a kid managing payroll, having a kid managing like debt and like venture capital and like, what a bad idea. It seems woefully stupid. Now we grow launched in the fall of 2018. It was housed in WeWorks headquarters. Problems immediately cropped up due to the fact that Rebecca and her colleagues had failed

to anticipate minor details like paying the school security guards. HR had apparently forgotten to add them to payroll. So this was an immediate bump in the log. Sometimes you don't pay the people, the little people. When you're trying to start a school for entrepreneurs, sure you're going to make mistakes that entrepreneurs should make. To be fair. Under no circumstances should not make.

To be fair, a second grader was in charge of HR. And security. Yeah. Yeah. So these things will happen. It's a learning experience. Other problems came as a result of Becca's own peculiar preferences. She made a rule that parents were allowed to wait in the school lounge to pick up children,

but nannies had to wait outside in the vestibule. This was reportedly because Rebecca didn't want her own children's nannies to enter the school. One person close to the school told interviewers the whole thing was about her and what was right for her children. Right. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. Rebecca herself told Fast Company something similar. She claimed that the inspiration for We Grow had come when she and Adam were looking for fancy rich people schools for their five kids and, quote, we couldn't find the school that we felt would nurture growth. These children come into the world. They are very evolved. They are very special.

They're spiritual. They're all natural, not entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians. And then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system. This sounds familiar. I can't think of anybody. This is very reminiscent of like kind of a lot of the extreme right homeschool kind of. There's some aspects of a lot of different things in that.

Now like everything else the Neumanns embarked on, We Grow put style before substance. The school was designed by a famous architect and featured a vertical garden and whatever acoustic clouds are on the ceiling. We Work bought an alternative college startup, Mission U, in order to hire a COO for We Grow, who presumably knew something about teaching kids. Curriculum included classes on mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and farming. All meals were vegetarian. I don't have any problem with the last two parts, I just don't know for context.

Mindfulness and meditation? Yeah. Maybe not a great idea for teaching kids. I don't know. Nine-year-olds love to sit in quiet and cold spaces, but therefore. We'll talk about mindfulness in another episode. As we work matured and started expanding, yeah, fuck that shit. Robert Evans takes down meditation.

Don't think. I wouldn't have lit nearly as many fires as I've lit in my life if I thought. Right, right. And I've learned so much from those fires. What happens when insulation catches on fire? What happens when drywall catches on fire? What happens when shingles catch on fire? Basically, what happens when people catch on fire?

No lessons I wouldn't have had if I'd thought more. That's a good point. Thank you. All right. I retract. I retract my supportive meditation. As we work matured and started expanding into every conceivable realm, Adam began to revamp his ideas about the we generation.

He modified this to what he called me plus we. There we go. That's what I was waiting for. I literally was about to say that he's going to say it's the me generation, but never mind. You, you. And then he's going to get sued by Pepsi. He explained at a we work summit, quote, on one hand, you want to be your own person, have your own goals.

And on the other hand, you understand that being a part of something greater than yourself is an amazing opportunity and actually makes you stronger. Now Adam and earlier claimed that we works multi-billion dollar valuation was much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue, pointing out that his real estate leasing business was not a real estate business, but instead a community company. We're not selling office space, we're selling community. It's amazing that the thing that can't be sold rich people are always telling us that

it's just not about money, Robert. It's only about money for again, people who will die immediately without a little bit more of it. Right. But we can put them on trains and solve homelessness or some shit. I don't know. Yeah. I've noticed at this point, like there's been literally no conversation at all about like

people having good experiences and we work offices or like. I'm sure they exist. That actual community that he intends to build actually. There's a lot of turnover. It's not like early Apple where it's like people stay for fucking ever or a lot of stuff you hear about early Google. There's a ton of turnover. But he's not even talking about this like great thing that he's bringing into the world

being about the employees of we work. It's the people who rent the office space. And it's always vague and undefined idea in the community too because it's not real. He's again, he's telling this to the bosses, but I mean, in reality, if you're living, if you're working at a we work space, it's just a very mundane office space. Yeah. Like if you're working at. But they have case slightly better interior design, you know, I worked.

I worked at a shared office space for a while and it was just fine. Everybody was there. Yeah. I could never like, I don't know, I can't be productive in a space where I can't wander around shirtless with an AR-15 strap to my chest. We all have our process strapped or taped strapped strapped strapped strapped. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I have a very nice sling. Now several.

You know who doesn't sell slings for AR-15s maybe yet, although we're courting them. The products and services that sponsored this show 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, 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 happen. 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

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bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of passes. A lot of passes. We're good. A lot of runs.

It is rent on time for a spell. He was a good football player. I don't know anything about Michael Vick other than the dog fighting. And football. Those are the only two things I know as well. I don't know anything about the football. I know he was a footballer, but I don't know. I can't analyze him.

He was pretty good. He's pretty good. He's run for more than a hundred yards in it. Okay, never mind. Sorry. So he was good. He was good at the balls. Oh, he was very good at the balls.

Okay, that's good. That's good. He was good at the balls because of the dog fighting, but now I understand more. Now Adam Neumann's most constant refrain when he talked about we worked as employees was this. And this is a quote, we are here in order to change the world. Nothing less than that interests me. And for a while, it seemed like that really might be happening.

By 2018, we work at 466,000 members working at a 485 locations and more than 100 cities in 28 countries. It had more than doubled its revenue every year of its existence. Not only was it Manhattan's largest tenant, but in central London, it controlled more space than anyone but the British government. So this is like, like you can't overstate like how much this company fucking expands, right? Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right.

Right. Right. Right. Right. This and not based on actually any profit anything. Other than just based on and they don't own these buildings. Yes. Leasing them.

Yeah. They're leasing them. So even the geographical brag is kind of a liability. Yeah, that's. You can't be the most profitable profitable company if you're essentially a middleman. It seems like that shouldn't be possible. I don't seems like you're almost offering nothing. Yeah.

Just in the way of getting everything. I wonder if this will ever crash and burn in a page or two? As the summer of 2018 rolled on there were increasing signs of trouble within the company one warning came out of what could be plausibly described as Adam's good intentions his desire to ban the eating of meat or at least the subsidizing of the eating of meat by his company by exchanging it for tequila From the Wall Street Journal when mr. Neumann announced in July 2018 via video call from Israel that the company was banning meat Executives in New York were caught off guard with little explanation from mr. Neumann a group huddled around to determine a rationale They settled on sustainability and the mechanics of what would be banned and how they determined employees couldn't expense meals with meat

And that but that they could eat it in company offices so long as the company didn't pay former employees say they have since seen Mr. Neumann eat meat. Hmm. So he gets a hair up his ass that eating meat is bad Fine, I'm even out down with the idea of a big company being like we're not going to use company money to support the eating of meat anymore Good fine Yeah, exactly like the important thing here is not The meat thing it's the idea that like this guy has an idea and now what is a multi-billion dollar company changes has to change on a dime And that's not good But I honestly think he's like not going far enough like still letting people eat meat in the office like that

I don't know if you're legally do that to be honest Yeah, I'd probably I don't know if you could legally stop people on their lunch breaks from eating whatever they want But back when I worked a group on like people would you know the microwave fish stuff And that's a little disaster differ, but you couldn't stop them eating fish. You just can't microwave it man I'd like to you know what's fun about laws in America is technically a lot of things you can't do but Yeah, you just do it people won't bother you that is true and I have a story to tell you about a machete and a nap the bomb but When we work prepared to go public They basically bribed the major exchanges by promising to list on them if they would ban meat and single use plastics from their

Cafeteria's the president of the New York Stock Exchange agreed to cut out plastics But refused to remove meat NASDAQ turned them down But offered to create a new index the we 50 of companies committed to sustainability. So that's Okay, you're a big hating on plastic Yeah, and it's it's Like he agrees to cut that requirement out if they create a NASDAQ index about sustainable companies named after we work he's got to cut it out with the whee stuff Yeah

So We work had gotten off the ground at this point and secured major investments because of its charismatic founder But now that the company had matured into a multi-billion dollar enterprise It was still run as an extension of the personal will of Adam Neumann in November of 2018 Adam showed up late and profoundly hung over to a meeting with Caldoon Califa Al Mubarak the CEO and managing director of the sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi This was a critical meeting we work was on track to lose hundreds of millions of dollars that year and Mubarak had gotten nervous about all Of the money that he had gambled on the company's success

Adam's job at this meeting was to reassure Mubarak the fact that we work CEO Couldn't stay sober long enough to take a meeting worth potentially billions of dollars rightfully angered the board That'll happen Neumann couldn't have cared less in the summer of 2018 He'd worked out a deal with Masayoshi and Softbank to sell the bulk of we work stock to that company for 16 billion dollars This is the only relatable thing that I've heard about this showing up to a meeting hungover I've never been sober in a meeting But it is like you know, I'm gonna be honest

If there were billions of dollars on the line and probably show up sober to the meeting probably I got a self-destructive streak I think I would I think part of me would really want to tank this meeting on it on a like important level Which is why I would never have to be I would sit staring at the bottle But yeah about all of the explosives that the billions of dollars shetties. Yeah militias I feel like you buildings to toss people off I just be sitting in a meeting just being like I didn't like the only person right now There's a chance to assassinate you if you had a billion dollar meeting tomorrow

You'd show up drunk as shit or hungover But if you had to go through all the steps that this dude has had to go through to get there There's a decent chance by then you'd be like, I'm gonna take this series I'm gonna do this to take this seriously this thing that like the thing that I've built pretend you would become acclimated It's like the code you're building if you had a critical meeting about your book you would probably force yourself to be in The kind of mind-state to deal with like a publisher You would hope so and if you didn't That's true. That's true. And if you didn't that's a bad sign

Now you want to become president of the world. I feel like that's okay though, right Robert. Where's that break me that brick? This is Chicago there should be bricks all over the city of bricks. Yeah, that's our nickname now So yeah, no man had worked out a plan with Masayoshi in 2018 to sell the book of we work stock for 16 billion dollars to Softbank Now Vanity Fair says that this was Neumann's escape plan quote He and his investors would be insanely rich This was a pivotal moment a former we work executive recalled Adam was acting like the Softbank deal was done And we would be flush with cash So he was planning on again like cashing out and escaping which kind of hits the fact that he doesn't believe any of this

He was just trying to get a big enough investment that he could get the fuck out That's the thing that these guys like every time we go through a story about these types of guys Their one failing is they take the grift too far and they don't know when to just bail Like with the guy we talked about with Alex Jones. He should have just bailed a while back He nailed his grift. He got what he needed Could have walked away with the net worth five to ten million dollars way more than that. Yeah, I'm saying minimum Yeah after after the election probably could have yeah Like a great golden parachute. They're not capable

None of them are smart as Tom from my space now right cash out six hundred million bucks doesn't destroy democracy Goes and retires. I got nothing against Tom. Did he cash out for six hundred million? Yeah, he did great good on Tom And you know what he didn't destroy? democracy Anything he provided bands a way to share their mediocre music and green files My space really Nobody hates Tom he's rich as shit. It's fine You know what though, you know, though almost everybody who was on my space who was old enough to have been on it has a negative opinion of him

Because you were forced to be his friend and we should forgive him for that You know what I'll go about is it the only cool person worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Hmm Tom Tom Tommy Tommy so He's got this soft bank deal Doesn't matter that he shows up hungover to a meeting with the head of the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, but then that soft bank deal For sixteen billion dollars falls through. Oh, no Because people other than Masayoshi saw and took a look at the company financials and decided that we work which was losing at this

Point billions of dollars a year Maybe he wasn't the best way to invest sixteen billion dollars Masayoshi agreed to invest another two billion, but at the rate we weren't both burn Yeah, which is still like This is why I say two things money isn't real and it's dumb as shit Yeah, listen your company's fucked. Here's two billion. Here's two billion dollars This is what happens when you have a group of people around you who is willing to say no to you And then it was like oh, it's only two billion. I was like nevermind. Fuck this guy. Yeah, fuck this guy stupid eat them all

So At the rate we work burnt through cash two billion dollars brought the company Eight months something like that nine months. They lost one point three billion in the first six months of this year Eight nine I'm not gonna do the exact lot of leases one point one point three billion in six months. So eight nine months seems fair Yeah, it's absurd And less than uber loses Hmm. Yeah now Like real estate expenses, right? Like it's got

Leases yeah, yeah Yeah, other people will pay him lease and giving them free rent in order to suck them in yeah Yeah, but he just keeps giving free rents. They just keep moving around business. It's a terrible business It's not a great con. Yeah, that's a great. That's that's a parent. That's a Ponzi scheme. Yeah Yeah, essentially In every way but the legal way. Yeah. Yeah, which is the best kind of Ponzi scheme Yeah, there should be a legal problem. It does seem like he should be fired out of a catapult for his crimes Now so again the two billion dollars just gave we were months of breathing room not what they really needed

And so Adam started to get desperate for more funding and I'm gonna quote again from Vanity Fair So he started dogfighting And this is where our sponsor dogfighter without an e Comes into the product use code bastards on dogfighter and you'll get All right, I'm gonna quote from Vanity Fair according to sources he pitched Apple CFO Luca Maestri on doing a deal with WeWork. It's unclear why Apple would want to invest in WeWork and not surprisingly the company passed Norman went to Google and proposed a partnership. They too passed Norman batted around other investment ideas. He earlier discussed buying slack He sat there saying what companies can we buy? Maybe we should buy slack a former executive recalled when Norman returned to WeWorks

New York headquarters later that winter. He seemed desperate He barked orders and haphazardly reorganized divisions at one point having as many as 20 direct reports according to a former WeWork Executive. Masa said we're gonna be a trillion-dollar company. He shouted according to a former executive who heard it you're thinking billions And we should be thinking trillions you people need to be better than you are Neumann seemed shocked by the scale of WeWorks losses sources say he tangled with WeWorks then CFO Artie Minson over the cash squeeze Minson declined to comment But a former senior executive said Neumann drove the decision-making nothing could happen without Adam Former executives said Neumann often reacted poorly

You don't bring bad news to the cult leader one said whoa I've never heard that before. No, but someone's making you know making that that's pretty blood than one. Yeah It's like that old phrase killed a messenger. That's the idea, right? I guess It's one of those things where Steve Jobs is a guy come back to a lot because He had a lot of this in him, but he also had I guess it's a difference of they both both Neumann and Jobs have this kind of deep understanding of the human psyche that allows them to Manipulate people in a profound way

Jobs uses it to figure out something people want that they don't know they want and then deliver it and create changes the entire world The smartphone he knew before anyone else What exactly everyone in the world wanted to carry in their pocket and wouldn't dick them and everything and he was right Yeah, Neumann knows how to manipulate people uses it to get billions of dollars of investment, but provides nothing And I'm not gonna say what jobs right isn't that good obviously because the smartphones fucking complicated is shit in terms of that But at least it's a thing. It's more you can't argue with it. No, it's not a Ponzi scheme It's not it's it's maybe like heroin, but it's not a Ponzi scheme. Yeah This guy just that's just a lot of ideas

Yeah, and if you know like a lot of and mostly the idea of how to convince investors. Yeah, he's a major little baby Yeah Still there were bright spots for we work in 2018 earlier in that year JP Morgan had led a 700 million dollar bond offering for we work while Adams Charisma had started to fail with Masayoshi It worked on JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon Jamie Dimon is a profound piece of shit one of the architects of the 2008 Financial crash No, of course not

Specifically that we help those people accountable to make sure that it would never happen again No, I went to jail for the event eventual dog fighting ring. He ran with Neumann Jamie Dimon's bank had a diamonds bank handed Adam a hundred million dollar personal loan and a five hundred million dollar personal credit line That's not that much for him though, right like based on It's too much well sure, but you were saying like two billion dollars. He was worth four billion at this point on paper Right, but he's also got seven hundred and fifty million dollars that he owes the company, right? Yeah That's tough. Yep. I feel bad like just being broke

Way better, but you're rich way way better than that when you're that Bro, it comes back around a bridge. Yeah, you know, that's the way it works. Yeah for some reason. Mm-hmm I remember I played it. I played a sim game I remember when I was like in my early teens that was essentially like creating an apartment building sim tower I remember that so clearly and I was really good at it And I feel like I would run we work a lot better than that if I just had a sim Well, cuz you wouldn't try to make it everything you would try to run a very simple company that leases office space to people that need it Which is fine?

Knowing Jordan he'd put a movie theater in the basement where you're supposed to put parking and No, but you do remove the fire escapes because that shit's expensive. Yeah. Yeah, no and the extinguishers detectors Buildings don't catch on fire if I know one thing about Chicago history is that fires never happen. It's all a myth Mm-hmm Now Adam was heard to brag to people that Jamie Dimon one of the architects again of the financial crash Was now his personal banker and might soon leave JP Morgan to run Adam's family investment office Speaking of family Adam had started bragging that his children would follow him as the leadership of we work and speaking of unfathomable nepotism

Let's talk a little bit more about Adam's relationship to Jared Kushner They hung out at that fire they hung out a lot See it turns out that the Neumanns and the Kush clan are actually very close friends. Don't call them that that is what they are Kush clan Betsy Davils work with They did body shots a lot Going on is all evil surrounded by Eric Prince ran security at the school. Yeah, and also did body shots. Yeah

Now Jared clearly believed in Adam's promised ability to change the world in the summer of 2018 We work executives rather suddenly learned that Adam had been drafted by Kushner to work on Jay Kush's mid-east peace plan Don't call him Jay Kush. I will Neumann had put we works director of development Ronnie Bihar on the task of finding an advertising firm to put together a video for Kushner about how an economically revitalized West Bank and Gaza might look This I am never I'm never ever envious of their money I don't want I don't even understand a billion dollars But the confidence that it takes the ridiculous insane confidence that it takes for you to be a shitty

We work CEO and be like I think you know what I'm gonna solve Middle East For fuck you for the CEO of an office leasing company and the son of a man who went to prison for real estate scams Yeah, to sit down together be like, you know this thousand this conflict. I think we can do it We deal with this. I think we can bang it on for years. All I can think of is like do they do they like Like each other. I think so. Yeah, I think they do I think that's why he gets this this task part of me wonders if they're even capable of liking each other You know seems like each would know that the other is a fraud. I mean, yeah Right, I don't think so. No, I don't think I think

Trump maybe does I don't think I don't I don't know how much he believes in himself But I think Kushner is just that deluded. Yeah and dumb and has always been rich and totally special And I think I don't think I know him and I think might actually know he's a con artist I really I go back and forth on the guy. Yeah I think Kushner really is genuine about his beliefs. I just think he's stupid as shit. No, I think that I think Trump is So analogous to Alex Jones that it's it's insane like that idea of you waffling back and forth like is this guy stupid? Does he know? Is he insane? What does he do? Yeah, and I don't waffle on Kushner I think he's just never not been rich and has no concept of reality

Okay, I think that I think that about Kushner is a lot of people around him I don't know Adam might be in the same boat or he might be like a literal sociopath I really don't know with Adam, but I think Kushner is just completely out of out of reality So sources close to Adam Neumann tend to credit the 4.4 billion dollar infusion of soft bank cash with inflating Adam's ego Beyond the realm of sanity. How could it not in the what how could it not? How could it not know that that is fair like of course that would break you if I got 4.4 billion dollars I would have a thousand tanks of tomorrow I hate journey and I would make people dance around a fire journey if someone

It's it is the equivalent of giving someone a mental illness to get that much money. It's terrible for you There's a lot of data on that Yeah, the money in the international success of we work got him sit down meetings with world leaders discussing the refugee crisis and problems of peace And war with people like the president of Canada So what he does is lease space. Yeah, and now he is working with world leaders Yes, I assume the thing that he is an expert at leasing space solving the refugee crisis Okay, that's very different that now nope say not the same thing see the reason all those people are leaving Syria Not enough not enough leases, but Shahr al-Assad reduced the number of leases

You're right. Yeah, that's my argument. I saw this big thing was like, there's no office space Leases He only guessed non-leased space, right? Now one former executive claims when Adam got in front of world leaders It was like he started thinking he was one and I'd like to quote now from a particularly batshit insane Gizmono article which covers Adam's ambitions as a global peacemaker and this might be the most Deluded paragraph anyone's ever written the paragraph itself is not deleted, but what it's about is so deluded. I can't fucking describe it I will shit in baby's mouth right now. Is that the sentence? No, but you should put down your mic

In conversations with people inside and outside the company Neumann's pronouncements became wildly He told one investor that he'd convinced Rahm Emanuel to run for president in 2020 on the we work agenda Emanuel did not respond to a request for comment Neumann told colleagues that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with crown prince Muhammad bin Salman to offer women coding classes According to a source in another meeting Neumann said three people were going to save the world bin Salman Jared Kushner and Neumann shortly after the news broke in October 2018 that Saudi agents tortured dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and carved his body with a bone saw Likely on order from the crown prince himself Neumann told George W. Bush's former national security advisor

Stephen Hadley that everything could be worked out if bin Salman had the right mentor Confused Hadley asked who that person might be according to a source familiar with the meeting Neumann paused for a moment and said Me your boy You are on a special level of deluded I'm sure George W. Bush's former national security advisors like this guy's a fucking idiot. Yeah, I Millions of people Honestly, I believe that wrong part though Yeah, that's that's within the realm of believable. We work agenda within the realm of it. Yeah

He wanted to be bin Salman's mentor I That that dude Terrible guy, but not an idiot would shit him out like Adam spent the first half of 2019 preparing for we works long-awaited IPO in the startup world initial public offerings are the stuff of legend When Apple went public it created hundreds of millionaires in a matter of minutes Even the secretary got rich Google's IPO brought even more multi-millionaires into the world Employees of we work clearly expected their IPO would bring the same windfall See oh Adam Neumann showed no outward signs of worry his company even valued at forty seven billion dollars earlier in the air

The fact that he hoped would bring even more VC money in and ideally convinced soft bank that we work was safe to keep pumping money Into and how we would could will convince any of my not convinced listeners money isn't real and is dumb as shit What kind of what kind of person is forty-seven billion dollars? That's a business. That's that's an insane number. It's it's it's idiotic. It is an idiotic number. Yeah 12,000 people who I don't know what they're doing picking lamps jerk Stock in the cakes Enables these lunatics the entire system is built by them. Yeah, and I But there has to be some grunt worker at one of these at Moody's or whatever. It was just like

They're not worth this much guys, and then the top better. Yeah, fuck it. We'll put I think all of the grunt workers are like Yeah, this grifting gonna last long. Yeah But I'm gonna get my $19 an hour while I can look at these assholes. Yeah, yeah, so The reality of we work success was less attractive than the 47 billion dollar valuation by 2019 more than 12 billion dollars of venture capital and debt had been pumped into the company and lost and while it's true that we Works revenue had doubled every year and also lost hundreds of millions of dollars per year and eventually billions of dollars per year And there were no signs of this trend debating on September 18th 2019 the Wall Street Journal published a massive expose a on we work Revealing details about its toxic internal culture and more worryingly to the suits details about Adam's own self-dealing

The report based in part on the August filing his employees had made to the SEC as part of the IPO process Revealed that Adam had taken out more than 740 million dollars in personal loans on his company stock since Adam was dyslexic. He had to have his advisors brief him on the Revelations in the story while he huddled with his people to work at a response to the damning article Investors and board members called for him to step down Adam was initially defiant telling one colleague I'm never not going to be CEO, but that was not in his hands anymore We work CFO held a conference call with the board of directors and said that Adam had to step down Jamie Diamond soon joined the consensus arguing that we work would never get investors to pump in more money while Neumann was CEO

The company that had been worth 47 billion dollars mere weeks ago now teetered on the edge of bankruptcy In the end Adam stepped down. His wife was forced to leave the company, too Hmm, but don't worry about them. They walked away with a severance package worth roughly one and a half billion dollars And she's still a licensed Yogi and a license to be so they can come so was she licensed or was she? Certified Excuse me very different. Who's the licensing board for yogis? I mean she knows the Dalai Lama. She was at his birthday. Yeah Yeah Masayoshi son agreed to pump another nine and a half billion dollars into we work as a rescue package

All talk of exponential growth and world conquest were gone though We grow was shuttered suddenly leaving dozens of wealthy parents with no fancy school to send their children to many were presumably forced to go with Avert your eyes gentlemen Public schools Since the best private schools all have long waiting lists 4000 employees one third of we works workforce were laid off more layoffs are likely to come and that is more or less Where things stand now Adam Neumann vaporize more than ten and a half billion dollars stole another one point five billion dollars

Put thousands people out of jobs and raise the cost of real estate in cities throughout the globe Yeah, that's that's a that's a little side effect of this that oh, yeah, but it's sort of under recognized Yeah, like even as this collapses all the people who would have used the space or we're using it before Now it might be prohibitive for them That's something I even or the landlords are gonna collapse which yeah, isn't my primary worry, but um still Compared to him people who operated reasonably legitimate businesses

it's just a A lot of human shrapnel in the wake of this but he's got a billion and a half dollars good for him So Jordan I want to tell you about a dream I have a dream of a group of people group of human beings Pushing for their greatest potential vibrating off of one another positive positive positive vibrations maybe machetes Uh, we got machetes. We got machetes. Okay, we're all drunk. All right, really drunk And we're just we're just shoving Neumann's off of the links just right off the top. Maybe a Kushner or two, right? Now I have a personal sense of morality That I believe precru oh you'll you'll learn to subsume that to the group

Just let that go for a little while. There you go I feel like a temporary suspension of morality is fine when now we all got a shave our heads We live in yurts. These are all key aspects. Do I get to push him myself? Yes What if what if I were to tell you you'll get cubicle on Mars? Oh, yeah, this ends in Mars No, okay, but you won't need it by the time we get there. Yeah The the kegs provide the oxygen. I'll take the deal So gentlemen, this is the Adam Neumann story an asshole who did nothing but scam people seems a fall apart pretty recently It seems yep just within the last couple of weeks. Yeah

I do like his meteoric rise and fall to only having one point five billion dollars really a tragedy the system works We should subsidize an extra couple billion. Yeah, absolutely Mm-hmm. Where's Masayoshi with that 16 billion dollars, huh? He only gave nine at the well 11. I've got something to sell him. It's called Regularly, so and it's like the Masayoshi the whole reason he has all that money is that he invested a bunch of money in Alibaba back When it was tiny and one of the biggest things ever But like clearly he's a dumb guy. You got lucky once. Oh, I tell him that to his face. I think you're dumb I don't think you're very smart. You get taken in by this shit

That's crowd to fund an opportunity for Robert to tell him to his face. He's dumb More people need to do that to these people. I watched a documentary recently. I was in um It was in Amsterdam and I had an attend an opportunity to attend a movie at the the documentary festival that they hold there And it was a documentary about the world economic forum in Davos and it was the kind of thing where as I was giving it we found out that like a I think Klaus Schwab the guy who founded it was like Like three rows behind us in the room and stuff like they did a Q&A with them afterwards But this documentary which will be I think out for the general public soon is very much worth watching

And it's about like behind the scenes at Davos is the first one that's been able to do that So it's really a lot of interesting stuff a lot of kind of like you get a feel for these people as human beings And what they actually believe I Mean they are that's the problem Um, so there's a great moment in it where the the head of Greenpeace confronts Jair Bolsonaro in a in a like a soiree sort of thing about ostensibly they should talk me the whole thing about how she wants to like confront him and these other people with their damage to the Climate and she gets a chance to and she basically says like well

You know, we're we're looking at what you're gonna do the Amazon like everybody's watching and then walks away and Jerry like clearly Doesn't give a shit like doesn't have the least impact on her and all of her friends are like I can't believe how brave you are. You're so brave you did this great thing and like that's the fucking problem Like if you go if you go up to Jair Bolsonaro and you don't have a lining of questioning that's gonna make him awkward Bottle them hit him in the face of the bottle. Nobody does that to these people. Oh Nobody bottles them. Nobody bottles these people. That is true. I will back you up that no one does do that What do y'all what do y'all what do y'all think at the end of this? I don't know. It's it's interesting like I When you never hear a story like this about somebody who like there's a like real take like not terrible

I mean he's got a billion dollars. Although that is terrible, but like whenever there's a big fall It's just so clear over and over like there's so many times at which where there should have been like hey You said you wanted fucking offices on Mars. Hey, you you you want to be president of the world There's like indications along the way. They're like someone should have stepped in and just we have a system It's based on no one ever stepping in like it as long as the pretense is there and the appearances of You know like this is moving in the right direction people are profiting off it that then there's no incentive to be like hey you seem Like you're acting out here. There's something there's something you're acting out that we should probably

Deal with yeah, we just let it happen and then it just plays its course and everyone gets hurt The way that's how I feel anyway The way I view it is because I'm trying to exist in the present without losing my mind So the way I view it tends towards like trying to find a historical context to all of this stuff and these types of lunatic Grifters have been around since the fucking beginning. It's only the scale that has gotten larger So I never know if this shared imaginary idea of 47 billion dollars, which just doesn't exist No, it's like it's just imaginary. It's just fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like that's too much different from so many you know like obviously the

1929 stock exchange crash because all of that shit was imaginary to go back further and you get so many different Times the economy collapsed in London because that was all imaginary to like all of this shit And the only thing that's changed though is that now a company like we work is Influencing some dumb guy who invested in Alibaba along with NBS and now he's given power to help solve the Middle East peace crisis He seems qualified, you know, like it used to be Financial guy just fucked up the people in the financial world died not like fucking the entirety of Part of the problem with our system is that if you're good at one thing and that one thing allows you to make money Then we decide you're good at everything because money is really the only thing that matters

So good at money you get to control health care. Yeah, you get to control foreign policy You get to pick where the the army guys go. I mean how different is it like the idea that this guy is having conversations about foreign policy How different is it then Trump was a landlord and is now president how different is it than a king? Yeah, these guys parents were the king. So now he's in charge of the army Yeah, and what was the original reality show about the royalty? It's 15% smarter than a monarchy, but not a lot. No The original reality show might have been royalty, but the one that'll change the game is you getting tricked by every cult leader in the world I really want to that would be a great. I want to find out I it's one of those like I want to test myself against the best you'd fail every test

You just need to reduce those people. I want to do enter the dragon pushing them off of buildings Okay, here's here's my new pitch, right? Okay, if I don't get taken in by the cult leader I get all of their money in power. Let's raise the stakes for both of us You can't have their power because you're constitutionally incapable From doing the emotional equivalent of raping people, which is what cult leaders do right and their money isn't real Yeah, sometimes it is that is true Oh on Hubbard's that shit

It's mother fucker had real lucra. It's rolling the dice. He owed it all to somebody else. He just kept it Didn't trick them into giving him stacks Oh, none of these guys are as good as LRH He's successful one out for one of the real ones Realist one. What was it operation whites white cat? Oh, Snow White snow white When he got in vote for free I was more a fan of the time he made his own private Navy Pretend you got I love Elron Hubbard You can't not love the guy to the add to the admiral

Commodore Andy daily is Elron Hubbard and Elron Hubbard should burn in hell twice We're gonna end this episode Ignoring Jordan statement fair with a statement of our undying love to Elron Hubbard stopping and Some plugs. Yeah for your pluggables. We do a podcast called knowledge fight about Alex Jones We put out too much content people can find it by googling Knowledge fight comms or website, and you know we're on iTunes and all that stuff on Twitter It's our at knowledge underscore fight. Yep, and I am Jordan

comedian still Technically speaking I am not busy So go ahead and look at go to bed Jordan is available for any dates in no Moe absolutely gnome is high on my list. I will also do corporate gigs exclusively only work only know only know Only know only know there's a way working. No, okay Well, then I will work for we work for I guess twice the cost of a normal comedian we riff but you gotta send them up you gotta send them up double economy class. Yeah, that's twice his economy. Yeah Thanks for having us. It's been a lot of fun

Yeah, this has been fantastic, and it's a pleasure to meet you in in real-life human person Well, thanks for inviting me to your wonderful city Chicago the city that sleeps occasionally never Awake slightly broad shoulders, but not very the city of angels that is regularly awake But often asleep with broad shoulders and also an apple that is large and windy Yeah, the city of grandfathered in 4 a.m. Bars. I feel like is what we should be known as yeah, that's a good nickname That's true here, huh? Yeah, I was grandfathered in 5 a.m. Bars I have completely changed my opinion of your city based on that knowledge on that I was going to just slander it for years But now that I know that

No, there's a bar near my place that is apparently so old they open at 9 a.m. It's against the law to sell alcohol before 11, but if you've just been around long enough all bets are off Oh Exactly for space Well, I'm Robert Evans. This has been behind the bastards Behind the bastards calm sources bastards pod and Twitter Instagram. I am on Instagram of that. I write okay Continue listening to this podcast listen to knowledge fight. It's what I listen to when I'm at the gym

when I'm driving When I'm masturbating shamefully in someone else's Kitchen yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah knowledge fight the podcast for all those moments That's what we set out to be There's t-shirts on t-public for my show And coming soon I forgot what the t-shirt was. I think you're gonna make a masturbation Joe Knowledge fight if you accidentally catch yourself in the mirror don't look mm-hmm

Bye 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 with like a lot of guns But 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 podcast or wherever you get a podcast Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow?

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The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price To 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 podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts