Big Technology Podcast - The Definitive WeWork Story — With Eliot Brown And Maureen Farrell

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

Eliot Brown And Maureen Farrell are the authors of The Cult of We: WeWork and the Great Start-Up Delusion. The new book digs into the rise and fall of Adam Neumann's WeWork. And though it's the story of one company, it's really a lens through which you can see all the markets' irrationality. The authors join for a macro discussion of the factors that led WeWork — a real estate company — to become the world's most valuable "tech" startup. And why it couldn't keep the show rolling. Check out the book: https://amzn.to/3Btv6XS

Hello and welcome to the big technology podcast, a show for cool, had a nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Man, do we have a show for you today? Because in studio, quote unquote, we're recording through a browser, but in studio, we have Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. They are the authors of Cult of We. We work in the great startup. delusion. It just came out yesterday. I finished the book. Well, I'm actually about 10 pages from the end. So I'll admit it. It's an amazing, amazing, amazing book. Congratulations, guys. We're like recording this a couple weeks before it actually comes out. So you haven't experienced the wave of praise that's about to head your way. But you should be excited because this book rules. Thank you so much. Thanks, Alex. Of course. Now, for full disclosure, Elliot and I are longtime friends. And

And in exchange for that, he's not going to annoy me when I drive. For folks out there listening, Elliot is a very courteous passenger in the car. Just kidding. I'll trade that as long as you, you know, you can give us any hard questions as long as I can bother you in the car. Okay, that's a deal. And Maureen, nice to meet you for the first time. Yeah, very nice to meet you too. I'm a slow driver.

I'd probably, I don't know, maybe drive you both crazy. I'm always a little below the speed limit. Uh-huh. Well, look, having had a few experiences with Elliot as a co-pilot, I give you tremendous praise for putting up with this guy as you drove this book together and it came out so good. Something must have worked. I second the motion. It's a real testament to your character. Okay, so let's get into it.

We'll just talk a little bit about WeWork. So one of the weirdest things about WeWork, and we can talk a little bit about WeWork is in this answer. but there was already an office rental company called Regis. That's the right way to pronounce it, right? Regis. Regis. Okay. So there was Regis, which is basically exactly what WeWork does.

It lets you, if you have a company that's not big enough to have your own office or prefer somebody else handle all that stuff to rent something. So there was already a Regis when Adam Newman founded Wework. And it was like very rationally valued. So why did we need Wework? And then why did WeWork end up being one of the most, if not the most highly valued companies in the world, given that there was a very obvious comp right next to it? I'll start with that one.

I could probably talk for an hour about Regis. And, yeah, like, so the story of Regis is interesting because basically the exact same thing happened with Regis that happened with WeWork. It was like, WeWork, but 20 years earlier. And if you go back to 1999, you have this office space sub-leasing company that tries to IPO, did it in 2000, at a really high valuation, and they said they were part of the tech sector. They said that, you know, they were part of the new dot-com economy because they had broadband going to their offices, and they had a tech-like valuation, and then eventually it totally imploded, and its U.S. arm went into bankruptcy. And then 15 years later, they were very sort of rationally, normally valued like a real estate company. And then WeWork comes along. So I think the only thing to sort of add, we can talk a whole ton about what was going on in the world that led to why WeWork was essentially valued like, like,

than Regis on a, you know, like-to-like basis. But, you know, I think the broad issue is that WeWork did do a little things different, a few things different. They had a cool factor that Regis did not have. They had a communal factor that Regis did not have. But, like, economically, they were like the same business. But they took that cool and that hip and made it look a lot more like a startup up and feel like a sharing economy bet and that like dazzled investors to the point that they were

able to ignore that like fundamentally this is like the same business as regis right and so you brought up that it was valued as a tech company but it should have been a real estate company so let's talk this is kind of foundational to the whole discussion of what we're about to get into so let's talk about valuations morey maybe you want to take this one why would how are tech companies valued versus real estate companies, and why does that matter here? Sure. So, I mean, real estate companies, there's a finite, there's a finite amount you start to see of the growth in them or growth profits in fairness.

I mean, it costs a certain amount of money to own physical space. And unlike software, we could build a piece of software and infinitely, to a certain extent, charge for it. It doesn't cost more to make every new piece of software. But a real estate company, I mean, the valuations are very different because the profits are capped to a certain extent. You need to keep on building out more real estate and it costs money to operate. It costs money to run.

So they're fundamentally different business models. But, you know, Adam Newman, the CEO of WeWork, his talent, his gift, his, you know, downfall maybe ultimately was making people see something. he wanted them to see. And he knew he was smart enough in a bunch of different things, but particularly to sort of take the language of tech and apply it to a real estate company and make everyone believe him and sort of suspend disbelief that this one thing was real estate and one thing was tech. And he knew the valuations were so completely different. And he was very fixated on the valuation of the company. Right. And so just to go about,

back to valuation and Elliott, you've been instructive in helping me figure this one out. But if you're a tech company because you have essentially unlimited or seemingly unlimited profit because you can build something once and sell at infinite times, you can end up with the valuation and the value that investors and the value that the market gives you is somewhere 30 times your revenue or your profit. Where a real estate company, because you're limited, your valuation is going to be much less. And investors are, you know, is it going to say, all right, well, you know, if you're making, you know, 200 million in a year, you should really only be worth maybe two times

that. So we say your company's worth 400 million. And that's where things start to get, start to get really interesting with the VCs. Is that a good summary of how this works? Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of precisely right. Like, I think one of the ways we talk about the WeWork story is like it's completely,

a story about valuation, which is not a really good, interesting way to hook anyone into caring about it. Listen, everyone, don't drop off. It's about to get wild, I promise. But so, like, behind the clouds of marijuana smoke and, and fountains of tequila, like, what essentially, the reason we all cared about this was because WeWork was the most valuable startup in the country. And it wasn't because they were a fast-growing office space sub-leasing company. Like, that's just not a terribly interesting. you know, thing to do, like how many episodes have you done about Regis? Zero. Yeah, so far. I couldn't even pronounce it right, like, five minutes ago. But so, like, the reason that WeWork became so big, the reason that they built this empire of like six or 700,000 desks around the world is all because they were valued like

a tech company. And when you're valued super high and people are like, you're worth 47 billion, that means you can raise billions of dollars really easily because they're only selling a little small. of the company yeah yeah yeah exactly and uh so i'd like to actually get into sort of the startup environment at the time that this all happened because it was very different from when it is now there was like this period of irrational exuberance in some way where investors were just tossing money at anything and saying it was a tech company elliott one of your favorite examples is casper where it's a mattress company and all of a sudden it became

tech company somehow which always was strange to me so can you guys tell me a little bit more about this era of sort of irrational exuberance and then when we work how we work waltzes into that and says we're a tech company too even though for every desk itself it had to build that desk spoiler alert you may see there was a cost of tax sorry Alex I was going to say spoiler alert you may see a few references to Casper Elliott's favorite example of this in our book it pops up a lot there may have been a lot more references But that's another story, so much for cut. We were cutting down the Casper's.

I didn't even know Elliot was interested in WeWork, by the way, for a long time. I thought the guy only cared about Casper. Every time we would hang out, he goes, you know, they're made it. The mattresses are made in the same factory that every other mattresses are made. But they have this valuation because they're funded by VCs or they have a website or something like that. It's pretty amazing. So, yeah, like one of the things, One of the reasons I got interested in moving to San Francisco from New York and starting to cover BC instead of real estate, which I covered beforehand, was because I would just see all these startups and these startup ads in the subway for these products that, like, me as a guy who majored in history and could use basic functions on Microsoft Excel, I was like, this makes absolutely no economic sense.

And it was sort of like, what is going on in the world that people think that a company called ship should make sense where they spend like what seems to be like $30 or $40 of labor to come to your door and pick up packages and then charge you like $5 for it? And or like, why do we get these Uber rides across town or free valet parking with these Uber for valet parking apps? Like what's going on in the world. So what essentially was happening was just too much money was trying to get into Silicon Valley. at the same time and venture capitalists have like even more so than journalists have this super herd mentality where it's not that one person becomes successful at something it's that one investment appears like it might be successful in seven years and then everyone else follows and piles in and so that's why we have all these like crazy mini bubbles of you know 3D printing and

blockchain uh which we've had like three brief waves of because it just goes as a herd, and then people get really excited and just like overfund things. And suddenly you look up and there's like five different companies, 200 different companies selling you mattresses, claiming their tech companies. So I don't know if that really answers the question or that was just a rant. But that's some of what is going on are going to be a rants. Yeah. So what are grilled cheese valuations? Maybe you can unpack that a little bit.

That was one of my favorite lines in the whole book. Yeah. melt is uh i think it's melt right um yeah there's one on market street next to the old busted office so this company thought that this this grilled cheese and sandwich shop that has pretty good chicken sandwiches if i recall um uh thought that it was a tech company because they had some tech addled way of ordering your sandwich in their their fast food issue you know fast-ish food sort of Shake Shack like restaurant. And then eventually, you know, they stopped being able to raise money at really high

valuations and like things weren't growing in this like super rapid curve where suddenly everyone was just buying grilled, everyone in their brother was buying grilled cheese and giving them huge profits per sandwich. And so the valuation of melt really fell because they previously had a tech valuation. And then eventually investors realized it's like, oh, this restaurant that serves grilled cheese It's actually a grilled cheese restaurant. It's a platform for grilled cheese. Excuse me, Elliot.

Respect the name. AI enhanced grilled cheese. Right. So VC has always been doing this, by the way. It's always been putting money and making lots of bets. Many of them weird. And actually, the weird bets are a feature of the fact that, you know, they're going to go places that people won't be necessarily. So what changed here?

And I'm curious what the, you know, where the money came from that started to make VCs. And we're going to get into SoftBank soon. But before SoftBank comes into the picture, was there like this ultimate surge of money coming into VCs that ended up driving them, you know, to the far corners of the earth to try to imagine things were tech companies? And I'm curious what role the mutual funds played in that. Well, so that is like a huge big shift. that came in this era, like the 2010s, and we're, you know, it's starting to change now a lot. But the VCs, mutual funds, and others saw that the,

I mean, especially the mutual funds and other pockets of capital that typically got returns in the public markets, started to see companies like Facebook going public later and later and realizing instead of like Amazon, where you could capture, you know, 1,000% returns over few years in the public markets, Facebook, a lot of the returns went to private investors. So there was this sort of reckoning of that and, you know, companies wanted to go public later.

They had the capital sort of moved into the private markets and there was more and more going to VCs, first of all, just because the returns had been so good. But then mutual funds like Fidelity, Tiro Price, Wellington started to see if they could devote some portion of their fund to these private companies, maybe they could get these giant returns. And it worked. I mean, Henry Ellen Bogan at Tiro Price was one of the first mutual fund managers to do that.

And he started having some huge success and, you know, other people looked at that. But that basically fundamentally changed the landscape for a tech company raising money. And there was just so much money flooding into these quote unquote tech companies. some of whom weren't, many of whom weren't, to go after these potential gigantic returns. Yeah. And so there was money in search of companies to invest in versus companies in search of money to invest in that. This is basically what happened in the market. That was, yeah.

In broad terms, that shift. Does zero, does the fact that we're like at a zero interest rate policy, does that play into it at all? or was this sort of before that? Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, that's like sort of central to everything. So basically like,

you know, if you want to go super macro, after the recession in, you know, after the financial crisis in 2008, then you have like the Fed buying lots of money. And so like yield, the return you get on your investment generally,

just throwing in the savings account or bonds, fell. And so then you just have all these guys working in offices whose job, like their sole job is like, you must get 7% average annual return because you're managing other people's money and that's what you promised. And it's like, well, it's not really a high return world. So what am I supposed to do with that? And so then, right, like you to fulfill your mandate, you suddenly have to start taking bigger risks than just like putting something in a savings account. And so that's what

was happening is these guys are like, well, where do I get risk? And they're like, you know, I think the cartoonish version is they like they read the paper and they're like, wow, that Facebook, that thing looks like it's really taken off. I missed out on that. How do I get on that next time? What's the next Facebook? And so suddenly a grilled cheese restaurant is raising money at like this, you know, totally insane valuation. Okay. So into this environment where people were, uh, where venture capitalists and mutual funds were interested in funding anything from, uh, uh, sort of, what you mentioned, uh, sort of dormant service that was losing money to a mattress service. that said it was a tech company to grilled cheese company in walks Adam Newman, which is really,

really interesting. So because he was sort of, you know, in reading the book, it's very clear that he's a man that meets the moment. He knew that there were people that wanted to invest their money. And he stood there and said, and it didn't really matter if they were a tech company or not. And he stood there and said, hey, I have just a thing for you. It's called a WeWork. which is, again, this office rental space, and he capitalized it on it pretty well.

So I'd love for you guys to just describe our main character here. Tell me like what your perspective is on Adam Newman and sort of how he was so effective in selling. And, you know, I read the book and I thought that some of his charisma really was infectious. Like it comes out, there was a moment where I think they just raised some money and he's chanting with one of his co-workers or co-founders, like, we're going to take over the world. We're going to take over the world. I love that.

And, you know, obviously, like, I guess there were some downsides to that. But it did seem like I read the beginning, you know, and he talked about how WeWork was a place that was going to build a community for people and sell not just real estate, but other services. And it was the place where people are going to be where work and life were melded. and that was going to be their community. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. So just, you know, in your words, tell me a little bit about who Adam Newman is and how he was able to accomplish this. I think Adam was one of the world's greatest salesman. And I don't say that in a complimentary way.

I mean, I think he just has this incredible gift to what I often say is like he takes a pigeon and he gathers somebody else next to him. And he says, hey, you see that? That's a swan. And he convinces that person to see that pigeon as a swan. And then, you know, they convince somebody else the same thing. And a huge amount of it is the in-person reaction. Like, I don't think it usually translates that well through video, through phone, or, you know, quotes on a paper. But, like, when he has you in the room, he has this way of sort of, you know, looking at you and sort of talking to you, it being super nice.

ask questions about you that make you feel sort of alive with sort of older investors like baby boomer landlords he would he would make them feel sort of young and hip and fun in a way that they'd been craving or apparently had been craving in their lives like so you know normally if you're like landlord in New York you're you know you in a pinstripe suit and you meet someone at some fancy not very good Italian restaurant for lunch and that's your business meeting and then here Adam would have them at like 10 a.m. to his office in Lower Manhattan and like take them around a tour and show them the beer on tap and then make them do tequila shots. And they'd be like it's 10 a.m. He's come on. We do this all the time here. Yeah, they like really feel like they're

young again. And so it's these like personal connections and sort of the way he'd talk about the future that made everyone seem like this has everything. He's cool. It prints money. This is the greatest investment ever. One of the things that was interesting to me was it really felt like the customer was not necessarily the people sitting in the desk in WeWork. For him, the customer was the venture capitalist who he was selling on the idea of investing in WeWork. So can you guys take me through just quickly, like maybe just list off the various rounds

and like what the valuations were? Do you have like a list of that in front of you or can you say it offhand or even just give me just like this, or give us, really, this broad outline of how this company skyrocketed and value. I can probably do it off the top of my head. Okay, so they're worth like pretty little for 2010 and 2011 when he's just raising from friends and family. And then he gets his first venture capital from at the end of 2011, early 2012, and that's $100 million valuation. And then Goldman Sachs, like the next year, offers him a $200 million valuation. And he turns it down. And there's like this silence on the phone after he does that.

He quickly finds someone else to give him a $400 million valuation. And so that's 2013. 2014, no, later in 2013, he goes up to $1.5 billion from J.P. Morgan. 2015, end of 2014, it becomes $5 billion from TRO price. Six months later, it becomes $10 billion. That's from Fidelity, the mutual fund. late 2016 early 2017 they go to 16 billion it becomes 20 in 2017 and then 47 in at the beginning of 2019 that was their valuation and what was the last we won't give any spoilers right now that's what

you're here to do so when was the last we know it doesn't go well when was the how much did he raise those last rounds five billion or something like that the total was like over 10 And it's a little complicated to some, yeah, I mean, we don't need to get them the new ones. The total was over 10. And from SoftBank, it was like, you know, SoftBank also put 10 in, but gave some to existing shareholders. Yeah. And so that, this is a lot of the setup. Where is the conflict here?

Because, all right, maybe, maybe, you know, he takes on this money. What's the problem with that just because investors think that it's, you know, worth a lot more than it is. He's still building this thing. What's the issue? I mean, the biggest one of many issues there is. that, you know, it's sort of this like mass delusion of this valuation. I mean, if there comes a point where, you know, someone, the world stops and people wake up and look at where this thing is going and it can't get anywhere near the promises it's made. I mean, I think

the interesting thing, I mean, I love that you say that the client is the venture capital firms because that it's a really interesting takeaway because it is fascinating to watch that. But, yeah, at some point, I mean, you raise so much money and there's nothing behind it. And, I mean, he's taking money out every step of the way, too. And, you know, if someone wakes up and doesn't, the whole thing comes crashing down. I mean, one of the biggest problems is they kept on needing more money to grow. The, you know, it wasn't, if the music stopped, which it did, the company was going to run out of money. And I mean, we clearly we saw that happen.

And I don't think, hopefully that's not too much of a spoiler, but you need to just keep on funding this to keep the growth going, to keep it at a level where anyone was going to give it even the same valuations. So just like there are like, yeah, the numbers. Yeah, I think like part of what he did here is like every single round, particularly for the last five years or so, it was like, okay, just give me a little more money. And by little, I mean, a really large amount. and we're going to do this new thing.

And then everything's going to be profitable and we're going to be great. And then the numbers kept getting married. Like, we're going to need money to build apartments because that's going to be the next big area. And then, like, that didn't really work out. And they're like, we need to go to China. Like, that's the next big area. And then, like, you know, that didn't really work out. And then, like, we need to elevate consciousness.

That's like, and do elementary schools. That's our next big thing. And so, like, but then if you actually went back each time, you're like, well, you always said, you're going to be profitable, and it turns out that actually your loss is just doubled year over year, literally, you know, again and again and again. And so, like, you know, you keep doing that. We've learned with, we've all learned a lot about exponential growth in the past year. Like, you keep doing that. The numbers get really ginormous really quickly. So, you know, we work with soon, like on path to lose like $4 billion. Yeah. And like going back to our valuation conversation,

when you're when your software company and you're valued high you can lose money for a long time because eventually you can make it back because you couldn't just keep selling that software once you get a good and your cost don't go up as much but when you're a real estate company which we work turned out to be you know you can have that loss and keep growing revenue but like you just mentioned the losses will grow with it and there's really not an easy way to pull back and become profitable like there was one really interesting line where Adam said we can in order to become profitable we just stop our expansion and we'll become profitable right away because that will like cut our costs and then there was this

great moment of realization from the employees where they like that was just smoke and mirrors you know as they they had been there the whole time and not realize that that was fairly amazing I mean I think that is I mean when you think about the whole the big picture of this story I think that's one of the things that just keeps on flooring me about it it was you know it's to the extent that anyone's ever compared him and people do obviously Adam Newman's Elizabeth Holmes like she was hiding the fact that they didn't you know couldn't do what they promised what they set out to do she was the CEO of there knows it was a pure fraud she was no one was allowed to go and see the technology because it didn't exist it

didn't work they were hiding it with Adam Newman I think with these projections the most fascinating thing is that he was saying this company was going to be profitable that the numbers look a certain way, but they're going to look so drastically different. Then you had the world's top investors, so many different ones, that saw projections. He didn't hide them. And he would paint this vision for the future, like the swan, like Elliot said, the pigeon is the swan. But you could go back and look at every number. I mean, we've seen these pitch decks.

And then you see six months later, they're nowhere near the numbers he says they're going to be. Yet he's still managed. And he just collects more and more impressive kind of people that other people believe in. And sorry, I'll be quick. Like, Alex, you know, you sort of asked like, what's wrong with that? Well, like, the problem is you have to keep the train running. And you need money to keep supporting it. Yeah.

Right. And everyone who all the 15,000 employees who you've brought in that are, you've told this is a consciousness elevating company and we're here to make the world better. and you've given them stock options at a certain price. Like, you need things, the valuation to keep going up. You need money to keep coming in. And every time that happens, you need new investors to sort of believe what you're selling them. And eventually, Adam ran out of investors who would believe it, particularly those

who had the billions he needed to keep this train going uphill. Right. And, you know, it's interesting that the numbers were public. And Elliot, I remember we were all telling you, write the we work book, write the we work book, because you would be like, this doesn't make sense. And you said, I'll do it when it all falls apart. Wow. And it all falls apart. And here's the book.

So another interesting story, Elliot, I'm just going to tell all your secret stories here. Tell me if I have to delete this. This might have been setting confidence. But Adam, even when he met you, told you, you were covering real estate when you met him first. And he goes, no, you're not the right reporter. I'm here to talk to the tech reporter. and how that interaction go down. We could keep that in.

Yeah, of course. That's my A material. So, yeah, I met Adam in 2013 when I was a real estate reporter and I was just interested in this co-working company that was kind of rapidly expanding. And I go down there and we meet and he was like really gracious and nice and fun and energetic and sort of doing all these things that he's being a salesman. And I'm like, wow, this is really. interesting. But he's like, but you cover real estate, and we aren't a real estate company.

Like, do you have anyone else at the Wall Street Journal who covers community companies? And it's like, I, you know, I don't think we do, but I would probably be the best person either way. Right. But he was incredibly insistent that they were not a real estate company, which I didn't, at the time, I just found puzzling. I didn't even know anything about valuation and tech companies and venture capital at all. I just found it really strange. And then sort of like was digging into that and talking to a bunch of people like, why is he so insistent about this? Yeah.

The last thing that a last piece of, you know, potential pushback that I'll throw out there before we go to break is we work still exists. And I've gone and worked in their Salesforce tower location and really enjoyed it. And, yeah, they lost a lot of money. And Adam looked like a fool going out because the valuations are pretty high. But it looks like it will be the dominant co-working company for a long time moving forward. And some might ask, what's the problem with what happened? It's tough to build things and he built it. Yeah, I mean, the response to that is he took $12 billion to make an $8 billion company, which, like, if I were doing it, I would prefer, if I were an investor, I'd prefer that, you know, maybe one or two billion goes.

over 10 years to build an $8 billion company. So it's artificial. It's subsidized by SoftBank. So, like, you know, you're literally sitting in one of the most valuable pieces of office space in San Francisco. They spent four or five times as much per, like, square foot to renovate that building. It has a really nice atrium as a result. It basically rules. So thank you, SoftBank.

Yes, but it's completely subsidized. It made absolutely no economic sense. right? And so that's great in all. It's just not very replicable. It's not sort of good for the concept of reality. But if you're a fan of using soft banks money to make a nicer office space for yourself, like the royal you or plural you, like that is one thing that's happened here is we now have a really kind of large co-working industry that also spawned all these other sort of artificially highly valued companies as a result of this mirage. Elliot, you missed one big thing in your math.

I mean, if you're Adam Newman and you spend a billion to make it or two to make an $8 billion company, you also do not walk away. I mean, in that $10 billion plus, he's walked away with a billion dollars plus of that, a lot of money was torched and burned, but he has a pretty good, pretty incredible exit package out of all that. So the math wouldn't have worked in that way either. do you think we work but do you think there's a potential possibility where we work long-term does achieve some sort of valuation close to what Adam was hoping for as it grows over time

or do you think that money that all these investors put in is essentially gone? I mean, I guess if you could think of that question in a few ways. It's a great question. But I mean, the valuation he was talking about and we get into this in the book at times was like a close to trillion dollar valuation he was talking to Masa about. So that seems unimaginable. Getting back to 47 billion. There are no three trillion dollar companies. So that's pretty dreamy.

Exactly. But something closer to what it was, I don't know, maybe. I mean, it just seems like they have an office, a real estate veteran who's, running the company now, he's cut costs. It seems like things are maybe turning around. They're still losing a lot of money. But it's hard to imagine it's going to be a gigantic company in valuation, even if it stays, but it could be really successful still. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're a real estate company now. And like real estate companies grow at a certain speed, even the best ones. And they get certain profits, certain levels of profits, even the best ones.

And unless they find some sort of magic way to become much more profitable, then first of all, they're losing gobs of money. So first, they'd have to become profitable at all. But if they find some magic way to become more profitable than a normal real estate company than maybe, but I don't really think anyone knows that magic elixir. And if you talk to the former employees that we work who were just so bought into the concept they weren't a real estate company, they now were like, oh, yeah, I see. It was a real estate company. Yeah. And I heard similar things where people would talk to me about the allegation. algorithms they had to place people in space efficiently and how no one else could do that.

And obviously, that all just turned out to be Adam. So, but, you know, I think rework would have probably hit a wall after reading the book. It's clear we work would have hit a wall by making its way through conventional investors and probably hit that wall somewhere around 2017 or so, or even 2016. But the party kept going, thanks to one guy. After the break, we're going to hear a little bit more about main character. Number two, Masa, the head of SoftBank, and how he ended up fueling the growth. And what you guys say is the delusion.

So stick with us. We'll be back right after this. Hey, everyone. Let me tell you about the Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less

and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here for the second part of the big technology podcast with the cult of we crew, Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Welcome back, guys, second half. Here we go. all right we're psyched happy to be back so let's uh we made it through the break let's talk about

masa yoshi's son of soft bank he's main character number two so who is he and how did he end up getting involved in this story sure so he has been a very long-term prolific investor um he has his own fund in Tokyo, based out of Tokyo, Japan called Sock Bank. And he's built it, you know, mostly with his own money over several decades. And he's both made some, he's been on top of the world in terms of one of the wealthiest men in the world based on his technology investment bets. He's also, he's very proud to say he lost more money than anyone else in the world during, the dot-com crash. He's, I mean, I don't, I think more than Adam Newman, I mean, he's one of the biggest

risk takers imaginable. And he sort of, he prides himself on that. He's taken big, big bets, one lost money, invested in, I mean, his biggest win was investing in Alibaba, the Chinese retail, online retailer, very early on. But he's just sort of consistently been a venture, P.E. investor. He's taken big stakes in companies. And anything to add, Elliot, then we could talk about this vision fund, which is what really made this happen. Maybe Elliot can talk about the combination of Mossa and Adam. What happens when these two people come together? this combustible reaction where I think they would both describe crazy meets crazier so yeah like basically they they first meet in India and we have a pretty fun scene that

you know follows some drunken passout and security coming to his room but you know they briefly meet in India but Adam's sort of at Adams hotel room right now I'm curious Who's crazy and who's crazier? Well, so, yeah, I'll answer this way. So, like, basically, Adam gets this investment from Masa, and they get it. Like, Masa rolls up to WeWork on the way to Trump Tower at the end of 2016 when he has gobs of money from the Middle East

because he had just raised all this money from the Middle East to invest in tech. And he meets Adam. They go on a 12-minute tour of WeWork headquarters. And then, like, getting the car. and drive up to Trump Tower. And in the car ride, in those, you know, 40 blocks, they hash out a deal on paper of over $4 billion investment. And so, like, that's one of those things where we saw that.

It was like, there must have been more to it. And then you learn about it. And like, there was not that much more to it. It was like, I think the second largest venture capital investment of all time hashed out, you know, after a four minute tour. Yeah. Right. And so then when that deal is closing, you know, getting completed, Masa says to Adam, you know, this question along the lines of like, in a fight who wins, the crazy guy or the smart guy, like the crazy guy. And the lesson is, you need to be crazier. And so then Adam would tell people he was really excited to hear the

sandwich. He like, you know, calls up his board and he's like, hey, guess what Masa just told me? He's like, I always thought I was crazy. He told me to be crazier. And so, like, I mean, that's one thing. And you're like, wow, that's kind of scary. And then you, like, look at what happened. And then Adam would come back from these meetings with Massa and, like, tell staff, like, no, we have to think even bigger. And so it would get, like, he indeed wanted to be crazier after this guy who was just feeding him wheelbarrow loads of cash was like, yeah, think even bigger and crazier.

Like, you know, becoming the dominant co-working company in the world is not enough. Right. And so just to take a step back, Adam was a guy meeting the moment where there was all this cash that VCs were looking to invest like we described in the first half. Maso was, I think was he the biggest VC out there? He had this thing called the Vision Fund where he raised so much money, $100 billion and would basically say he wanted to invest in the biggest tech companies, the ones that could really dominate their field and then just give them a ton of money. And I think that you guys had this one anecdote in the book where he would force founders into taking $500 million checks when they wanted $150 million. And when they said, nah, it's too much. We won't be able to grow sustainably with that. We worry about the valuation. He would use it as a threat and say, hey, do you want me to go back your competitor?

Indeed. Yes. So it was crazy. He was going after. I mean, he had this huge win in Alibaba. That was the most successful investment, pretty much of all. all time, his most successful investment. And he was going to create the next Alibaba and just create industries out of thin air, dominate every industry. And I mean, it kind of played out

like you might think, not just, I mean, we work on probably the most spectacular fashion of the rise and fall or like burning money. But in so many other cases, I mean, like you said, this happened constantly, Alex, the $150 million that you're seeking. and you have a path to using it, he gives you $500 million. I mean, what do you think is going to happen in that case? Like, is money going to be, like, spent in a smart way, like, constructively or are people going to make some bad decisions?

And it was definitely the latter in that case. But, yeah, I mean, he's still, as we discussed earlier, like revolutionized industries along the way and give us all cheaper Uber-Ry, and all sorts of exciting things. Great office space, sales, you can work at Salesforce Tower. Thank you, Massa.

Thank you, Mass. So eventually Adam comes up with this idea that WeWork is going to be worth $3 trillion, a trillion in office space, a trillion in services, a trillion, what was the third trillion? Ownership. And that will be the great, you know,

Illuminati triangle of WeWork. Is that what's on you to cover your book? book, I think. I get it now. Yeah, do you want to behind the scenes here with the cover? Sure. Okay, so on the cover of the book, which everyone should have in their hand in order to see it best, definitely better than I agree. So it's a triangle and then there is some light illuminating from the back of it, some rays

of light. And so the cover illustrators at Crown, the publisher, had, you know, we told them about the triangle and so they did this and then they added those lines. We're like, wow, that looks really cool. And then I think like two days later, I was on the phone with a source and they were describing this triangle. They're like, yeah, and sometimes Adam would draw some lines of light behind it. So it was really a luminaity like here. Oh, there you go.

And it looks like it's going well, right? And then how does it come crashing down? The public markets. So they were forced to go to try to go public because Masa just didn't have the cash. So let's go through that and then talk about what happened with the public. markets. Sure. Yeah. So they get to the public markets because Masa and Adam, I mean, they had this combustible, intense partnership. Masa had first invested $4.4 billion after the 12-minute tour. He invests. They're working together. Adam starts getting crazier and crazier,

thinking even bigger thoughts, spending more money, taking more money out. He comes up. with this giant idea, this $3 trillion company that he's going to build. He asks Masa for $70 billion to help him get there. And instead, Masa and Adam agree to something that's basically going to be a $20 billion buyout. They're going to put $10 billion into WeWork. $10 billion will let people cash out. They're going to be pretty much equal partners. And Adam's completely over the moon about this. It's going to remove every restriction from him. He would, this, like, frustrated that I was board of directors and his investors, like, people were putting all these constraints on him, which is, you know, completely ironic when we

heard things like he never really showed up for board meetings. He had cashed out so much money. Still, Masavut had even fewer constraints, think even bigger. They construct this deal, and we had reported on some of it at the journal, but as we got deeper into the book, I mean, this deal was as close to a done deal as you could ever imagine. They worked on it. There were teams of lawyers, meetings all over the world about this. They would have meetings like every night, like certain teams within WeWork to work through all the, you know, dot all the eyes and teas. And it's supposed to be done by Thanksgiving of 2018.

yet things, you know, delay it, this deal from getting done, including Adam Newman pushing for more, um, more items that he needs. Like, he wants more certainty that he'll be CEO forever. He's taking, you know, structuring his compensation package. It delays the deal and a few other things closer to the Christmas holiday near the end of December. And then a few different things happen. Saudi Arabia, which had been a huge backer of the Vision Fund, decides they don't want to participate in it. So Masa, instead of using the Vision Fund, has to use this publicly traded stock that he has in Japan. And then the tech markets around the world in December start to crash. They do the IPO of a company, SoftBank does an IPO of a company.

Basically, soft bank stock starts to fall. And we, at the journal, also report that this deal is happening. And the investors in Japan get really spooked. SoftBank stocks fall. And they basically, Moss's CFO, soft bank CFO, so she can't do the deal. He's very highly leveraged. There's so much debt on the balance sheet of soft bank. If this deal goes through, it's going to crush the company.

So he tells Adam on Christmas Eve of 2018, sorry, I can't do it. which then there's no other choice. They need money. We work needs money to keep going. They know at that moment, or within the next few days, they're going to have to go forward with an IPO, something Adam never really wanted to do. Okay.

I want to get into the story of how the IPO goes south right after the break. So let's take a quick break. We'll be right back here on the big technology podcast talking about Cultive Week. And we're back here for one final segment on the big technology podcast. We're speaking with Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, two great Wall Street Journal reporters who have written the definitive book on WeWork. It is a great book. I'm not just saying this because I'm friends with Elliot. Elliot, you know I'd be honest with you if this book sucked.

It's amazing. I literally just plowed through the thing. It's really so good. So let's get to the, you know, where the rubber meets the road, which is the IPO. So just quickly tell us. So WeWorks losing money. They need money from the public markets in order to stay solvent, essentially. And they go to the public markets and they start talking about the energy of we trying to make all these cases that, you know, they are more than just a real estate company.

But the argument that works so well with private market investors kind of falls flat with public market investors. So how does that happen? Yeah. So, I mean, you know, this is a emperor's new clothes story. And the IPO was essentially the parade or whatever when the emperor goes out and everyone looks at him and says, hey, he's not wearing clothes. Oh, wow. He's not wearing any clothes.

And so that's what happened with WeWork. They put out this document into the world that says all of their financials. And it lays out all of these conflicts of interest that Adam has. where, you know, he's literally getting rich off of the company, paying him rent in office buildings and a number of other things. And there's like rampant nepotism. And then they also have all this like weird, coobey language about elevating consciousness and, you know,

the energy of we. And, you know, there were also like a lot of concerns about we work because, in part because like the Wall Street Journal was writing stories about how Adam had all these conflicts of interest. When you say the Wall Street Journal here and in the book, you mean you guys, right? Yes, it was the two of us and others, but we were the main obsessive ones. And, you know, we'd written on, and this wasn't even in the IPO document, we'd written how much money Adam took out and, you know, how it was like over $700 million, including loans, which turned out to be an even higher number in reality. We were wrong, but wrong in the conservative way.

Yeah, well, this is totally bonkers. So the guy raises something around $10, $11 billion. He took out almost a billion for himself. How does that happen? How do investors let that fly? I mean, that's this one of many mysteries. I mean, not mysteries. He just did it and said if you're, I mean, basically the way he did it was saying like,

hey, I'm going to take out money in this round or like, the round's going to be a little bigger than you thought. And I'm just going to do you guys a favor and just take some money out so you guys can invest more. and then if anyone spoke up and said, huh, that doesn't sound right. It's like, okay, great, don't worry about it. Someone else will be right behind you and can get those shares, who doesn't care?

That was, I mean, basically essentially how it worked out. But when we were hearing of the fact that he had cashed out so much, I mean, people were saying we have never seen anything like this and any other startup ever. I mean, Travis Kalanick, he was so obsessed with following Travis's, the former CEO of Uber's playbook for, fundraising. But Travis never took any money out of the company until like after he was pushed out of CEO and he would tell every investor that like stick with me. I believe in this company

I'm not selling. And did everything except also take out money and then get these gigantic loans that J.P. Morgan and others back against his stock. Right. And so J.P. Morgan gave him those loans in part because they wanted him to use them to IPO because they hadn't had a real strong tech portfolio when they thought this could help. So they really didn't want to call off this IPO. What ended up pushing them to call it off? Because they filed the paperwork where they put the prospectus in. The SEC approved it and away it goes.

So how does J.P. Morgan end up calling it off? I mean, I'll take this on there. Two things. I mean, number one, they were going out there. I mean, they and other banks were telling Adam, oh, you can go public at $60 billion, more, $90 billion, as it was getting closer to the IPO, even before the people started to see the documents.

But like over late August and early September, it was just very clear people weren't buying. I mean, they were sort of testing the market out. And oh, would you take this company, you know, would you buy the stock at $20 billion, $15 billion? And people were incredibly spooked. So there was just a question of whether if they went to market, who was going to buy the stock,

that was a big question as time was going on. Then there was an article that Elliot wrote he had been working on for so long and over the course of, as I was like, we were both reporting on the IPO, Elliot wrote the story on, you know, sort of explaining the whole history of Adam

and some of his behaviors. But they were becoming aware that this story was coming and realizing that with some of the revelations, in Elliott's piece, particularly him taking marijuana on an international flight, something that's potentially a felony,

if that was going to come out in the journal, they knew the story was coming because we all fact-checked everything very carefully that there was going to be no way that he could stay a CEO and they could take a company public once that was made public. What do you guys think would have happened

if they did IPO and went through with it? I think that Adam wouldn't have lasted long. I mean, you know, it was pretty clear, given that they didn't IPO and they were way off about how much cash they had. So they had a lot less than they thought and they almost ran out of money. They would have just started burning through money really fast. They would have kept expanding and spending even more. And then COVID would have hit. And then they would have just been like lighting money on fire with a much sort of bigger base and more, you know, extended over.

reach. And so it's just hard for me to imagine that Adam could have ever been a public CEO of a public company being speaking on a quarterly conference calls about consciousness and you know like speaking the language of Wall Street.

Community-based Ibida. Can you say what that is? Because they try to make their numbers. I thought you wanted listeners to keep listening. Well, we're at almost an hour now. So let's get nerdy. Community adjusted EBITDA. Before we go in to that, I'll just say we have a fun section coming up as we end this.

So if you're here now, stay with us. We're going to get to some of the more fun stuff, even though this has been a blast. It's been super fun. But this one important thing to talk about, community-based EBITO. Community adjusted EBITs. So yeah, normally you have like, it used to be in the old world. We only cared about net loss, net net profit, net income. Then companies started talking a lot more about essentially income before a few of these other things like taxes.

depreciation. So that's EBITDA. And then you adjust the EBITDA to account for other things that look bad. And that's adjusted EBITA. And then we work out this other thing called community adjusted EBDA where they took out these other things to make it look like they had a huge profit. So they were trying to say they were profitable. Yes. It was a way of showing profit. And it was in a sort of tricky way that took advantage of how landlords give we work, you know, in the same way that a tenant gives an, a landlord gives an apartment tenant the first month free, landlords do that for real estate. And so they would sort of trick with accounting tricks to make it look like they

had a lot more money coming in or fewer expenses. So they would get like a full year free, but they wouldn't factor that into the cost that they were paying sometimes. Exactly. And GAAP accounting, like normal accounting says like you have to factor that in. And that's the smart way to do it. But they wouldn't do that. And, you know, suddenly this $2 billion loss would go to like a modest profit.

it's like wow this thing does have decent margins like maybe we should invest in it so that was the idea didn't work the SEC didn't like it yeah they kept fighting them on it they changed the name to something incredibly uninteresting and the SEC still wasn't happy and so yeah that that was another sort of accounting trick legal right like they were they were allowed to make a funny name for something um but uh not terribly savory so final step of this is they call the IP off and then Adam Newman, who really was WeWork. I think there's a line in the book, I am WeWork and WeWork is Me.

Yes. He said that. I love that. For a company literally named Wee. It was MeWork, really. So then he gets pushed out. Yeah. So basically after my story runs, there's this few day period where it's pretty clear that he's

never going to IPO as CEO, and then the knives come out. And so, you know, this whole thing is a tale of founder control. And the reason that Adam got all of this money out of the company and started buying wave pool companies and investing in elementary schools was because he had full control of we work, even though he didn't own more than half of the shares. And that's just the thing in Silicon Valley because you just say the word founder and people, you know, see this, this or this new glow on you, as though you're some superhuman type of person. That lasts as long as there's money to fund the business. But if the business has no money and people no longer are impressed with you as a founder,

then something's got to give. So it was either WeWork was going to run out of money or Adam needed to go. And so Adam eventually decided that he needed to go because the investor said he did, or else there would be this huge fight in the company. Yeah, they impressed it on him. It basically said, do you want to walk away with nothing or do you want to walk away with a lot of money? And he walked away with a lot of money.

Precisely. We should write a book. That's right. That's right. People should buy your book. Yeah, exactly. All right. It's a wild story.

By the way, did Adam, I'm kind of curious how Adam, you mentioned that you fact check, how is Adam reacted? and what do you think he's going to feel when he reached this thing, if he reads this thing? Do you think he's going to read it? I think that he, you know, reviews previously are he hasn't read that many stories or some of the stories we've, you know, said he's highly dyslexic.

So whether or not he'll take the time to listen to the audiobook version, I have no idea. We spent a long time going through with their fact checker, or our fact checker went through with his PR person, and we went through, you know, with his PR person. And, you know, I can't imagine that they're going to love the portrayal. But, you know, hopefully they think it's fair. We certainly think it's fair. We kind of went above and beyond. And, yeah, I mean, actually, a number of people have read this and been like, oh, you guys weren't that hard on Adam, which was kind of surprising, given how much stuff we have in there on.

I thought it was totally appropriate tone-wise. Thank you. That's great here. I'm not just saying that. Okay, let's get to like what, I guess, like a little lightning around because there were so many fun nuggets in the book. I just want to give you guys a moment to talk about a few of them. So what is jet ski surfing? Want me to do that?

Yeah. Okay. So Adam, like surfing, I haven't gone surfing myself. So surfing, like paddling is a huge part of the sport. like, you know, it's the pain before the reward, you have to be patient, and then you wait for your awesome wave, and then you stand up and ride it. Adam serves differently. He goes on a jet ski. A surf coach will bring him up to a perfect wave, and he'll step onto the board, and the board will then be placed onto this awesome wave, and then he goes on it. And so this is, like, totally

considered cheating and like he's an apostate in the server community for this have had like angry emails from surfers like I saw this guy at this beach and like he just the surfers emailed you that's amazing as someone who gets in the water every now and again I read that and it made me mad you cannot jet ski out through the brick

you got to paddle out through that stuff ridiculous let's move on oh sorry go ahead yeah there's this surfer blog that that had a big field day when they found out about it. Yeah. He said, the way I surf, I don't have time to paddle is what he told a colleague. That's ridiculous.

Okay. Fun fact number two. Adam Newman doesn't use a computer. Yeah. It's incredible. I mean, he, I mean, partially as we said, he's, he's a, he's a, wait, hold on, because he's a tech founder. Yeah. I mean, oh my God.

Yeah. I mean... Oh, is it because of dyslexia? Partially struggles to type and write, but I don't think that explains the full thing. Now I feel bad. No, I mean, there's so many amazing ironies in this story every step of the way, and I think that's got to be one of the greatest that he... And, like, he spoke the language of tech in such a, like, fluid way.

People are always, like, kind of floored when he would explain things and, you know, say that something we works business what about it was techie and yet yeah he couldn't use a computer at all i think elli maybe you have some so you have some great story of like him trying to turn on his computer when you're in there not knowing really basically how to use it witnessing that yeah so when i met him in 2013 um after like waiting for him for 45 minutes i sit in the office and he like tries to show me a video of summer camp because they had a summer camp because that's what office space subway some companies do and uh he opens the macbook and like can't figure it out and so then like calls it to his assistant like stella and like she comes running in and she just

like tresses play uh and it's like wow i do think that you know i mean i wouldn't want to invest in adam's companies but i do kind of feel like i'd like to hang out with the guy like it does seem fun next next thing we'll move to is um how adam almost didn't take soft banks money not because it came from the Saudis, but because there was a stipulation that he couldn't use it to fund anything having to do with the Israeli military. Yeah, so at the, as they're like just about, you know, in the process of sort of receiving the first check from SoftBank, he gets, SoftBank makes clear to him that the Arab investors, there were two, the Saudis and an Abu Dhabi investors. Fund had a request, which is that, yeah, this money can't be used for the Israeli military. And I think, like, this is essentially when the geopolitical implications hit him. He's like, oh, I'm indirectly accepting billions of dollars from, like, Middle Eastern

governments, and I'm an Israeli, like, I was born in Israel and I'm Jewish. And, like, you know, there were not normalized relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Like, you couldn't, Israelis couldn't go to Saudi Arabia, right? And yet they're giving, indirectly giving him all this money. And so then, yeah, he suddenly freaks out. And he's like, let's call off the entire deal. And, you know, he was calmed down by his staff. And then it really wasn't that much longer later, maybe a year later, he was sort of bragged everyone how he met the Saudi crown prince and how it

amazing it was. And to be fair, he thought they were going to sign the Middle East peace agreement. I mean, when they were convincing him some of his other people on his staff, like you can't just like bail on this investment. But people were saying, you know,

take the money and do something good with it. Let's take this money. And yeah, he was saying the first, the Middle East Peace Accord would be signed in a we work. And he would be crucial to, you know, solving, like be part of the Middle East Peace Awards.

There was like a part of the book. where, like, he said, oh, Muhammad bin Salman just needs a good advisor. And someone said, who is that? And he said, me. The person he said it to wasn't nobody. It was like the national security advisor on George L.B. Bush. And he also said, his wife said at one point that some people say he's the Messiah. And he said one day he wants to be the president of the world.

What do you? I mean, I'm curious, like, what you think about this type of person. You know, maybe in the olden days, they would. be like a religious figure or something like that, but he was a CEO. Do you think he has some sort of narcissism to him? Or what do you think the story is that? I mean, yes. Yeah. I mean, I think essentially what happened is he just got, the more money he got, the more power he got. And the more his head, like, went into the clouds. And, you know, in the WeWorks story, like, 2018 is really sort of the peak of the Roman Empire before it all crumbled. And, and, and, and,

And that's when you see the most amount of this sort of like these crazy statements. Got complex stuff. Right. And, and, you know, he literally thought he would live forever because then he's like funding a live forever company or aging, you know, curing company. That happens a lot in Silicon Valley. Yeah. That one happens to not be that unique. But, yeah, thinking you're going to be the richest thinking that somehow that your office space sub-leasing company is going to be the place where nations come to settle their differences, which is one of the things he said.

like you know how do you square that with the rap any sort of reality that any of us know this is we're still in the in the fun lightning round but i need to stop and ask this question i meant to ask it earlier but we were making we had momentum going through the story uh do you think adam and this whole idea exists if we don't have a workaholism culture i mean a big part of his and pitched to investors was the line between work and life is blurred and people live at the office now and that's why this company is going to be valued. So do you think this entire thing is sort of a product of, yeah, of the workaholism culture that we live in? I'm sure that's part of it. Yeah, I mean, that's definitely part of it. You want work to be fun, though. I mean, I think it's different nation-by-nation workaholism. You know, the U.S. has a problem with it. I think many countries in Asia. China does. Excuse me, China. Yeah, exactly. But Europe, I mean, I think that, you know, culturally it's different. So it's interesting, though, that, I mean, certain parts of Europe,

and the summer is so much better there in a non-COVID world. But I, but it's translated into, you know, these beautiful office spaces did fill up all over the world. So I don't know. That's just one other side to this, that there is interest no matter what, I think, in being in beautiful office space. Yeah. Yeah. It did just strike me that. Like, you know, I feel like Adam would have like started his own religion if he was born a thousand years ago. And like now we don't have religion. We have, you know, religions in decline. People have replaced it with work. So of course, he was a guy who took advantage of this work culture. Anyway, just, just that was one thought. Okay, let's get back to the good stuff. Last one. What's we work, Mars?

So in, I don't even get the year wrong, 2017, he was obsessed with Elon Musk and always wanted him to meet Elon Musk and he told Forbes like, if I ever meet Elon Musk, I'm going to pitch him on WeWork Mars. And then he does get a meeting with Elon and at least the way he relays it back to staff. Well, I know we heard this from a few points. So yeah, he gets the meeting. and first of all, Elon keeps him waiting for a long time, which is funny because Adam is late for everyone. And so then finally gets to meet Elon and it's pretty brief, and he sort of starts talking to him about building community on Mars. And he's like, this is what he tells us that. He's like, the hard part about what you're doing to get to Mars isn't getting there. It's building community when you're there.

And Elon is just like, no. The hard part is getting there. get in there. God, to be a fly on the wall, that is such an amazing, amazing story. And it, like, almost perfectly captures Adam and Elon. So good. So good. The book is Cult of We.

We work in the great startup delusion. Morgan Farrell, thanks for coming by, the Big Technology podcast. Elliot Brown, good to see you again. Good to see you. Thanks for having us. Thank you for bringing your A-game, guys. It is a terrific book. I smiled and start to finish.

Adam Newman is just an unbelievable main character, just great stories and anecdotes all along. And if you read it, and I hope you do, you'll learn not only about WeWork, but a lot about society and our economy as well. And I can't recommend it enough. Okay, that'll do it for us here on the Big Technology podcast. Thank you, Nick Guatany for editing by the time this goes live. You will hopefully be enjoying your vacation, promised to get you early, the audio early, and I did. so I hope you're having a good time and you don't have to think about any of this stuff

while you're out there. Thank you to Red Circle for hosting and selling the ads. Appreciate you guys, as always. And thank you to you, the listeners, for sticking with us, especially if you're still here an hour plus into a conversation.

I told these guys it was going to be a long one because I kept reading stuff in the book I wanted to talk about and we covered it all. If you're still here, if you rate us, that would be a great help. Every rating goes a little bit of way to help elevate

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