Grubstakers - Episode 114: Dan Snyder feat. Joel Walkowski

Episode Date: November 12, 2019

We cover the lifestyle and misdeeds of Dan Snyder the owner of the Washington Redskins. He was the youngest owner at the age of 34, and it didnt work out well. This year the team is 1-8 a abysmal record contributed by Dan Snyder being a bit of a worm and weasel. We are joined by Joel Walkowski co-host of the Hold my Bread podcast. We didnt have time to discuss all of the mistreated players, but this story on Trent Williams should show you what they think of their talent. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/redskins/2019/11/08/trent-williams-washington-redskins-cancer-bruce-allen/2517544001/ Follow Joel on twitter @theWALKOWSKI

I want to be held accountable for what I'm doing. This may sound like an exaggeration, but it was like the 9-11 of my career and certainly of making kombucha. Jesus is smart. This idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very, it's a deceptive term, income inequality. Well, let's flip it around. It comes from outcome inequality. Let's do it again. In 5, 4, 3, 2. I got the loot, Steve! Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I am joined by all of my co-hosts today.

Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poyle. And so this week we're doing an episode on Daniel Schneider, the owner of the Washington Redskins. And we are thrilled to be joined by our first returning guest, the host of the new podcast, Hold My Bread. Mr. Joel Wachowski is here today. Wow, wow, wow. It's really great to be here. And I did not know I had the honor, the very pristine distinction of being the first return guest.

I do have some exciting news to share with you guys. Since my last appearance on Hold My Bread bread i am in fact a billionaire yeah i made one billion dollars um worked a lot of day rates and rented seven apartments so i'm doing good when was your last appearance on your podcast on your podcast silly goose oh oh okay you said your own name oh my last appearance on my podcast was uh saturday i had on an options trader and didn't understand a thing he was talking about but i followed his advice i made 150 so hey i'm pretty sure that's halfway there and just for clarification joel is not the first guest we invited to come back he is just the only one who's ever agreed to come back yeah they're gonna feed

me cashews and uh give me a banana. It'll be all right. We'll have a good time with it. But, Joel, you are also a professional gambler, and you make very entertaining Instagram and other videos on gambling on the NFL season. So that's why it's so interesting to talk to you about Daniel Schneider, because, I mean, I guess it's what, free money, just saying the redskins are gonna lose absolutely um my picks are terrible if i were to follow that advice i'd probably be ahead on the year but i was attracted for snyder because i feel like one of the big scandals waiting to happen is the secondary ticket market like i feel like it's controlled by bots all the prices are are falsely

inflated to three four times but i'm a diehard detroit lions fan and they play in washington in a few weeks and i looked at tickets yeah you know i expect like 80 90 dollars right seven dollars that is the level of goodwill daniel snyder has brought the washington football team to seven dollars for to see some of the best in the world do their thing. So yeah, I'm going to go down. I'm going to buy a whole section. It'll be great. The bot people just didn't think it was worth the money to turn their computer on.

Yeah. Well, I think the bots are just programmed to avoid slurs, so they haven't gotten the tickets. Like $7 tickets, $800 for parking, and that'll get you in the Redskins Stadium. Or FedEx Field, as it is called. Yeah, formerly RFK. You know, he did more to race him than Sirhan Sirhan.

Oh. But I guess just to kind of start with some general information about Daniel Schneider, he bought the Washington Redskins. Is it Schneider or Snyder? Is it Snyder? Snyder. Snyder. It's hard Germanic.

That's why I was very surprised to find out he was Jewish with a name like Snyder. Snyder is like my family name on my mom's side. So you're related to Dan Schneider? I am related to a billionaire, but he gave away all his money. Dan Schneider, incidentally, is the

Nickelodeon pedophile that raped a whole bunch of kids. That's what, like, I was trying to do research and I was, like, getting into these 8chan threads. That's right.

No, this Daniel Schneider only raped the entire DMV metro area. My guess is, like, they were spelled the same like 200 years ago and then there was just some hungover

Ellis Island clerk. Right. It was just like a Schneider, SNY. But so, according to Forbes, ago and then there was just some hungover ellis island clerk right it was just like a snyder sny um but so according to forbes magazine dan schneider has a 2.6 billion u.s dollar net worth as of november 2019 most of that comes from he started what was called schneider communications we'll talk about that in a little bit. He sold it to a French company in the year 2000 for about $2.1 billion. Interesting thing we've noticed with a lot of these kind of,

let's say, tech-adjacent billionaires is they all managed to dump their stock right before the tech boom fell out in 2000. So good timing. It's because the companies would falter without their sterling leadership, of course what what can instill more honor into the meritocracy id yeah um yeah uh so and uh also so in 1999 he buys the washington redskins for about 750 million today cbs news says they are the number seven uh valued nfl team with a valuation of about 3.4 billion so he's definitely increased the valuation of the team. The on-field performance, not so much, improved since 1999. He's made it worse several times.

But this is just the case of a rich person being able to fail upward. By being able to buy into this club, he's basically opening a faucet for money with an asset that will only appreciate in value. So he can fail as hard as he possibly can which he has but there's no way for it to make an impression on his bottom line when he's being bailed out by television contracts and you know a lot of corporate deals i mean he actively loses hundreds of millions of dollars in six flags amusement park a few years after he buys the redskins team again it's just because he doesn't know how to fucking sell amusement parks.

It's not that hard. He just made the Redskins into Bitcoin with a racist name. He also, so, and we'll talk about the Six Flags story a bit more, but it seems like he used the same tactics with Six Flags that he did with the Redskins in terms of like, you know, gouging the attendees and all that on parking and whatever else. It's just with the Redskins, you have a captive audience. You have fans who can't leave,

so you can just gouge the shit out of them, and that's a smart business strategy. But what I did want to mention was, he also brought a racist mascot into Six Flags. That's right, yeah. Into Six Flags. Like, they hired some Chinese. Yeah, he's borrowing practices

from the Washington Redskins. That's what he does. We're going to gouge parking. Six flags! One flag! One flag! So they had like this guy, this mascot, Mr. Mix, and it was like an old man that's like preparing Six Flags.

Mr. Six. Mr. Six is what his name is. And then when Snyder came in, he was like, fuck this old guy. We're going to put a loud Asian dude and it's going to be an ad campaign where it's like, fuck this old guy. We're going to put a loud Asian dude, and it's going to be an ad campaign where it's like people, like a kid literally peeing himself, and this Asian guy peeing like, one flag. Six flags. One flag. One button.

And it's like the cringiest Japanese game show host Asian yelling at your face for no reason. And it's terrible. Oh, is that where it came from? It's just like that Japanese show, Japanese game show, Fab, 10 years ago? That's what it's emulating because even the way

the shot looks, it's just his face in the middle of the screen, like a giant stop sign. So it's very interesting because just a guy having an Asian accent, yelling things,

isn't technically racist, but when it's done in this way... Six flags! One flag! One button! And if you watch the commercial, you'll see the shot is actually composed very similarly to the Redskins logo. He's only shot in profile against a burgundy backdrop.

It is disturbing, to say the least. Even worse is when Six Flags went bankrupt, he made the mascot disembowel himself with a katana. Give me that Harry Curie. And the biggest crime of all, the previous Six Flags commercials worked great. Who doesn't love the Venga boys? Right. Who likes to party?

We like to party. Those were fun commercials. In the comments on YouTube for the original commercials, people were like, yo, I love this commercial. Got me hyped to go to Six Flags. And you don't see people rave about commercials that often. But you watch the YouTube comments on that bad boy. People love those shits. I just imagine that the guy who did it, like the actor, like just to get into character,

he has to like picture the new apartment he's going to get from debasing himself so much. I believe it was actually Scarlett Johansson. According to a write-up in the Washington City paper, which Dan Schneider would sue. Schneider. Schneider would sue the Washington City paper for this and other allegations. So they said that emulate Charlie Chan was what Asian actors trying out for the mascot job

were allegedly told during 2008 auditions. Schneider fired Mr. Six. Mr. Six was fired in 2006 because Schneider deemed him, quote, creepy. Yes, they hired a Japanese actor to scream more flags, more fun in a vaguely Asian accent in TV commercials. They just didn't want to pay Mr. Six's healthcare premiums. Imagine yourself as the last samurai. The Chicago chapter of the Japanese American Citizen League, which publicized the Charlie Chan angle,

was among the advocacy groups critical of the effort. The campaign was canceled shortly after its debut. So, yes. That might be true. They made like 15 commercials. They're all still on YouTube. And literally one of them is a kid peeing himself at a party

and the guy going one flag. Some of them are even more innocuous. They're like a kid dancing and he's like two flags. Like, dancing is two flags worth of fun. But rides, that's six flag fun right there. What a hipster angle to take, Sean. We're going to start this wonderful podcast. You'll like no i've been into dan snyder since his first racist mascot

scandal you're mad about the redskins what about his six flags but i mean it is like an example like he really did take every single part of the business practice from the redskins and when did he become a part of the six flags ownership group i think it's oh four two thousand yeah five i think okay so then he's only six years into his redskins ownership tenure so he's probably like viewed as like one of the better more exciting owners in sports he is yeah because the first few years he was just dumping money into veteran players that didn't work out but from a you know fans perspective it was like this this team could be great this year. We got this fucking great guy. They all ended up being lemons,

and he dismantled the radio crew that was the Redskins crew for a long time before rehiring the head coach that got them to a few playoffs a few years before. Joe Gibbs. That's right. And Joe Gibbs, he is kind of a famous person in Redskins history. We'll get into that a little years before. Joe Gibbs. That's right. And Joe Gibbs, he is a kind of famous person in Redskins history. We'll get into that a little bit later. But he was pretty vouched for around the Six Flags time.

Bill Gates invested a lot in Six Flags. And they took that initial investment of $112 million and turned it into $0. He mismanaged Six Flags so flag flagrantly it was given over to these their lenders yeah so all these people it's kind of like the plot of a movie like hey you you're now in charge of an amusement park it's we bought a zoo but we bought it into a six flags but just a couple other things from forbes uh like is there a campaign like, six flags, more fun, owned by a bank? A couple other things from Forbes

before we start the chronological biography. I did want to mention, so as of the time we're recording this, the Redskins are 1-8, I believe. 1-8. Yeah, they've had an abysmal season. It's rather hopeless. They fired their coach at 5 a.m., and he proceeded to just go publicly play poker.

And meanwhile, the Redskins, we're kind of talking about this, like, oh, it's a dearth of talent. They've had every exciting young coach pass through their building. They've not hired any of them. Kyle Shanahan, Sean McVay, Matt LaFleur all worked for the Redskins within this decade. Kyle Shanahan was chased out of town. And they've done nothing to capitalize on it.

They've had talent, but they've just been mismanaged. I mean, even RG3. I don't know. Do we want to talk about this stuff? Do you want to do his bio first? Like with RG3, there's a MRSA on the field, and that might have been part of the reason why his knees got fucked up. They have one of the worst maintained fields or at least did

prior to I don't know how it is this season. And you see that he's a guy who like he's not a business person buying into the Redskins. He's someone who loves the Redskins. All he cares about in this world is bringing them back into prominence and it's just that

love of them that microman it's just that love of them that micromanaging that just kind of makes them an embarrassment rg3 gets mercer and he becomes the nfl's first purple quarterback but what i wanted to mention was in 2019 uh forbes reported he bought a 192 million dollar yacht lady s the lady s which has its own imax theater and it's just one of those things where again it's the giant middle finger to all fans of this football team like you're stuck you can't go anywhere i'm gonna run this thing into the ground and uh i'm gonna buy a 200 million dollar yacht you guys know what's great when you're on the water watch an avatar in 3d it does have an IMAX.

He had to buy the IMAX and he had to spend $3 million just to have the IMAX installed. When asked about it, he's like, well, you can't have the sound spilling over into the cabin. What a piece of shit. I did notice I spent too much time on my phone today.

I did notice that there's a video of the boat being built at time lapse, and it uses the same stock music as Tulsi Gabbard's Twitter workout video today. That's wonderful. Both are queens of the waves. That's true. Oh, he was a George Bush supporter. Oh, he what? Yeah, he voted for him.

Although he said he had issues with his foreign policy. He didn't like how he treated the economy either. He was also a fundraiser for Jeb Bush, which may or may not have something to do with this audio drop we found. I don't think it should change it, but that's, again,

I don't think politicians ought to be having any say about that, to be honest with you. I don't find politicians ought to be having any say about that, to be honest with you. I don't find it offensive. Native American tribes generally don't find it offensive. We had a similar kind of flap with FSU, if you recall, the Seminoles. And the Seminole tribe itself kind of came to defense of the university and it subsided. It's just, it's a sport for crying out loud.

It's a sport for crying out loud. It's a football team. I mean, Washington has a huge fan base. I'm missing something here, I guess. He'll defend the name, but he won't use it. I know. Why won't he say, like, if Native Americans don't mind, why not just say, oh yeah, the Redskins don't mind. Those people with red skin. There is a disconnect, yeah,

because he would never refer to them as Redskins, but also... There's plenty of other, like the Atlanta Braves. Yeah, Cleveland Indians. Cleveland Indians, yeah. Yeah, but those aren't slurs. Redskins is something your uncle would say after seven brandies

yeah that the audio we got for the Jeb Bush drop there was from the TYT Sports and they mentioned the same thing

with the Seminoles apparently the Seminole tribe gave them permission to use that name for their team in Florida I believe

and so there's no Redskins tribe because it's a slur it's not a fucking term of a group of people and there are some native american organizations that come to defense of the name but those organizations are in fact funded by snyder right the smokes the spokesperson is a redskins employee right. And they foot the bill for him to make all these public appearances. Right, Yogi, you were saying they set up some deal with some various groups

to support the name in exchange for merchandising rights. Yeah, so they had this, the drop we have is people in a bar watch the Redskins game that supports Snyder. You know, I think it's really admirable what Dan Snyder is doing for the Navajo Nation. So Dan Snyder had the Navajo Nation president

and his wife sit next to him at a game with Redskin hats on. And the reason was... Foolproof PR. This was in 2014. And the reason was Dan Snyder told the Navajo people that I will put Navajo made merch on the washington redskins website and open the doors for you to make merch for every other team as well and so

the navajo president's like you know what if you're gonna make jobs with the nfl i i guess i'll swallow my pride on this one that shit never fucking happened you can't buy navajo native american stuff from the NFL. You don't know. Maybe he set up like a sweatshop in the Navajo Nation, forcing them to make hats. That'd be more expensive than Sri Lanka. And that's the thing is like,

he doesn't follow through on that, but wouldn't that be some cool gear? Yeah, it'd be amazing. It'd be great. If I was a Washington fan, I would be embarrassed to wear that material. If it was like actually made in lining the pockets of the indigenous people,

we'd be smirching with our moniker. You know, maybe I feel better about having that RG3 jersey. It'd be a great thing. But yeah,

so I mean, he just fucking fleeces the people that he's next to always. And he's just a fucking snake. Snyder's a straight snake. And I wonder

how he became this way, Sean. Once you're finished with the fucking granola bar. Yeah, Sean has the eating habits of a squirrel. He's been eating like small amounts of nuts the entire time I've been here. Here, I'll stall. Six flags!

One flag! One bun! How many more times do you need me to play that, Sean? Six. Six flags! One flag! One bun! Six flags! One flag! times you made a play that sean six sorry you looked like you were still in the process that does describe the nfl's refereeing nice uh we should also just mention

before we start the biography here um part a big part of his wealth is he gave a um he made about 207 million dollars for for the naming rights of the stadium. They call it FedEx Field or FedEx, yeah, FedEx Field. And it's just interesting to me that, like, I guess that a company like FedEx has no problem being associated with a name that is a racial slur.

Well, if you look back at the history of when he bought the team for $800 million, he sold off 35%. as a racial slur well if you look back at the history of when he bought the team for 800 million dollars he sold off 35 a large chunk of that was to a fedex executive so when they're getting the money for the naming rights a lot of that goes back to the zone pocket yeah so it makes sense they're gonna overpay just to double back around right there but i also liked uh the anecdote is that the redskins sued season ticket holders who were unable to pay during the 2008-2009 recession hell yeah was this the old ladies thing that he was suing yeah he did sue an 89 year old woman for not paying her season tickets and they always always had, like, they were so, when he bought the team, there was a long season ticket waiting list.

Right, right. And he always said, like, yeah, we have 200,000 people on the season ticket waiting list. And if that's a truth, you're not suing lapsed ticket members. Yeah. Right. And, yeah, it is just something where he's really,

let's say, parsimonious with his money. Like he's been sued by a nanny. He's been sued by a nanny. He's been sued by Redskins field employees for nonpayment of wages. We'll get into all of that. But he hasn't been sued in a few years. He must be getting better, right, Sean? Yeah, he's been hanging out on the yacht.

So nobody has any place to serve the papers anymore. No, he has it written into his... International waters. Into all contracts of employment, you're not allowed to sue Daniel Snyder anymore. Interesting. Well, for all... They force it all into arbitration.

All of the employees at the stadium, like the ticketing... I think it's because of the ticketing staff. Right. They sued him for Lost wages Yeah and he said There's like a

Archaic like Amusement law That's like Written for golf caddies That he tried in for As an office worker He used like a Like a

1932 law About like Like traveling traveling amusement park staff or something. But he's not a lawyer. He's not smart. He just fell into money. And these are obviously office workers. Yeah, right. And he is the archetype of an evil billionaire.

He's always walking around with a cigar in his mouth. He paid for FedEx Field to have a cigar bar installed even though there's a local rule saying you can't smoke indoors anywhere even at a cigar bar it is great like i mean once you own an nfl team there's no way to lose money right like dan schneider is proof of this right he's failed up absolutely absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Just because of the television contracts, they're going to be bigger every time. There's demand for it. Like, it's one of the...

Live entertainment is the biggest commodity you can have, and he's got, you know, one of the... One 32nd of it. Yeah. Like, I mean, the pie's not that big, and even if you're the worst part... You know what's crazy? The Redskins, as terrible as they are,

there are a handful of other teams that are just as bad, if not worse. Maybe not mismanaged as bad, but records-wise they're not that good as well. They're worse teams than Washington, but he's actively trying and alienating an entire fan base. The Lions are that bad, but

they're owned by a 90-year-old woman. Typically, a losing record correlates with a loss of net worth for your team so how much the team is worth goes down but they're like the the snyder is like an extreme outlier basically and like i think you you found a um a chart that plotted like cumulative wins yeah if you look against the worth of the team. Yeah. If you,

there's a, there was a great graphic put together by the Washington post before this season. There were a few publications Snyder hasn't bought though. He's on record as saying, if I could, I would. And they made this awesome graphic that had like a paragraph about what

happened in that season, the win loss record. And then at the bottom, it put the value of the team. And, you know, it started, he bought it for a lot of credit, and now he's probably made like four or five times his money. He bought it for about $800 million. $800 million, a lot of it borrowed. It's currently valued at about $3.1 billion.

$3.4. $3.4 billion. So almost like four times over, it's grown four times in 20 years. Yeah. And I'm just kind of doing it in my head where he he owns 65 percent of it. So it's probably like. All right. Yeah. So like his own return, not accounting for debt is probably like three times. It would be like so tight to be a billionaire and just have my legal team spend all their time looking up 1844 laws that allow them to sue people who make signs about how I'm a dumbass. Well, they're not allowed to bring signs into the building because there's so many anti-Snyder signs.

You see, because of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, These people are actually my slaves still. Could you look into 1902 and see if there's anything in there that'll allow me to not pay my workers? I do like that he borrowed money to buy a sports team. I was like, whoa, why didn't I think of that? Just

to add on to the no signs thing, how he's making money off both ends of this is, of course, he adds a giant, long, pat-down security procedure thing to check you for signs. Sure, of course. And then he charges you to bypass the giant pat-down. Oh, wow.

So you could just make money on both ends. After the September 11th attacks, he added a $4 security fee to every ticket sold. He wouldn't even pay to keep people safe out of his own pocket. Like any terrorist would want to bomb the fucking Redskins Stadium. If they're going to bomb any stadium, it's going to be fucking the Patriots. Come on, let's be honest here. Terrorism, America, Redskins?

No. We already killed enough of those people. They bomb the stadium and they accidentally make the field safer for the players. Blowing giant craters in it. Yeah, you said that and I just had to block out all my daydreams about a mass shooting at Lambeau Field. But let's start the loosely chronological biography of Dan Snyder. I want to read, this is an article from the Washingtonian in 2006. It's a real kiss-ass profile.

He got direct access, the reporter did, and part of it was Snyder made him say you can't quote anyone anonymously and I get to respond to all claims. So he only gets people who are willing to go on the record who are all Snyder's friends and are all like, yeah, this guy's great. He's self-made.

It's like half the article is about his charitable givings which i should just mention according to forbes magazine he is uh his giving as a percentage of net worth is one percent so very low 29 million total does it not even a drop in the bucket uh but yeah and still his charitable giving is like half of this article um but so what we know about Dan Schneider is he's born in Silver Springs, Maryland in 1964. His birthday is November 23rd, I believe. So it's coming up. Yeah. Happy birthday. If you're listening, send this to him for his birthday and pretend we were really nice to him hey if if the

day after your birthday i will be down for the lions redskins games if you want to come i will be sitting at the 50 yard line for 15 so thank you jill's gonna get thrown out by security uh so uh he grows up in a community called white oak maryland in the oak hill apartments he grows up with his parents and his older sister um they say it's in this article they say it's a working class neighborhood but um when uh dan was 12 years old his father gerald snyder took a book assignment in england and the family moved to a small town near London where Dan enrolled in a private school. And it's just kind of an interesting thing where in this profile Dan says

you know I grew up we didn't have any money we didn't have a television or whatever. You went to a fucking private school in England in London. I think you did all right. I don't know there weren't any TVs in Harry Potter. Dan Snyder says quote I wore a blazer and tie every day.

They were very strict. I didn't turn in my homework one day and the teacher caned me on the knuckles. I never forgot to do my homework after that. It made a big impression on me. You guys know how broke kids wear blazers every day, right? You know how all these broke-ass kids

wear blazers and ties? Yeah, you have teachers being paid enough to do corporal punishment. It sounds like he's pretty well off. If that happens in Chicago or Detroit public schools, it's like, yeah, fine. Right, but they're not wearing blazers every day. Yeah, they're blazing every day.

What up? It is true. Corporal punishment only occurs in both the best schools and the absolute worst schools. There's no in between. Because you either have too good of a life that you need to be knocked down, or your life sucks so much that it needs to continue to get knocked down, so you've got to climb your way back up.

If your teacher is hitting you, you are either wearing a blazer or you haven't eaten in three days. But yeah, so after he spends two years at this private school, and then the Snyders move back to the united states uh they live with um uh his father's mother his grandmother in queens new york um and then they move back to montgomery county um and so dan goes to woodward high school uh and uh basically they interview some uh some friends uh from most accounts, Snyder was not a standout student or a jock. He had buddies. He had a buddy, Don Batson, who says,

Dan and I were new to the school. We were branded as newcomers. The cliques were set. He had been in England. They called him the English kid. 70s school nicknames were the best. Q, I can rant about beating up the English kids

in the yard. Were you a bully? Were you a bully? No, I wasn't. He's referencing a drop where someone says... We haven't used that drop in a while. Oh, sorry. I haven't been on the show since it's become a movie.

That's one of the dust off a classic, sorry. I haven't been on the show since it's become a movie. No, that's one of the... Dust off a classic, actually. I'm telling you, these stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. Thank you, Andy. Yeah. Did you know that when they broadcast the NFL games in London, they actually refer to the Redskins as the Packies? Fuck you and your rat face.

But so after high school, Snyder tries college. He's at Montgomery College. Shouts to Sean for doing days of research without learning someone's name. Oh, he clicked the running theme on this podcast Yeah, yeah, he went to Woodward High School In Montgomery County

And then he just the wrong name entirely Let me tell you about Dan Schneider His social security number is Right, like No, it's actually a legal liability I say the wrong name on the podcast To M. Unitas Us We're so big, Joe, no, it's actually a legal liability. I say the wrong name on the podcast to immunize us. We're so big, Joel, that we have to pretend to be bad to be good.

We're bulletproof right now. We never actually say their names. No one knows if we're talking about the Redskins owner or if we're talking about the Nickelodeon pedophile. And you know what? That's a great place to be. We found a Nassau County law from 1898. It says if you don't actually

pronounce someone's name correctly, you're not responsible for libel. The fun thing about the state of the legal profession is you can just find them on the street, and they'll find all of the loopholes for about six bucks. The price of admission to the game?

We are recording on a tennis court right now, so somehow we can't be held liable for slander. You're not the only one who can look up amusement laws, Dan. So according to the Washingtonian, like we said, he tried college at Montgomery College and then at University of Maryland, and then, quote, it didn't engage him. What did engage him were ideas

about starting a business rich kid problems uh snyder's first venture when he was 20 was a travel business aimed at college students working out of a bedroom in his parents apartment he sold trip packages and leased jets to fly kids to beaches for spring break. Typical lower three quintile household behavior. You see, first you get a paper route. That's how it starts. Yeah, you save up a couple bucks and then you flip that into a Learjet and you flip that into NetJets. His story is like GT Dave and mixed with NetJets in your parents' basement and then all of

a sudden you're just fucking renting jets out to people. The Spanx lady's husband. Yeah, he said because of this jet business, he was a millionaire by age 20. But like Steve was saying, it's like, you need startup capital to rent jets. People just don't let you do that. Apparently, he just walks into a bank

and asks for money, and they give it to him. They just love his moxie so much. He uses English accent. Well, he has an an english accent and he's smoking a cigar so he seems all right how many zeros did you want okay um and so then he gets the idea after this jet business flying kids out to spring break he gets the idea of starting a magazine for the college crowd called Campus USA. Gold. What a title. What a dork. That sounds like the fake anti-propaganda

magazine in a high school movie from the 80s. What publication do you write for? Campus USA. The best magazine in the world focusing on the best planet in the country. Yeah, we're doing an article on the raddest frats.

This is the plot of a Van Wilder movie. He has to turn in his article for Campus USA. The banker's like, please be a friend for the CIA. Oh, you run and own Campus USA, you say?

Let me call my manager over real quick. No, it's cool. Harvey Weinstein's on the board. This is a Mossad operation. For a guy who wasn't engaged by college, he started two businesses trying to have fun in college. Right, right. Yeah, and so Campus USA, it's interesting where,

it's not directly stated, but I think it's pretty clear the money for these ventures comes from his dad, his mom, like, again, quoting from Washingtonian. One of Jerry Schneider's, his dad, gifts to his son was not forcing him to follow a path through college to grad school. Instead, the father joined the magazine project as editor, columnist, and writer under an assumed name. As publisher, the son sold ads and ran the business, which grew fast and needed capital. joined the magazine project as editor columnist and writer under an assumed name as publisher the son sold ads and ran the business which grew fast and needed capital and then in the mid 80s they're looking around for capital and dan snyder uh manages to meet mort zuckerman a real estate magnet magnate and the publisher of u.s news and world report um and he convinces him to give him a three million dollar business loan which uh

campus usa promptly goes bankrupt and he defaults on that loan um a running theme in his life yeah begins at a young age yeah so he says you know mort zuckerman was mad at him but later he gave him uh gave him stock in um uh snyder communications which turned out to be worth hundreds of millions or whatever the case was man Man, imagine someone giving you three million and you losing it and them being mad at you but not mad enough to do anything but to let you try and fail again.

He cared about what this guy thought of him so much. That he gave him that stock later. It'd be like you're at a casino and you're gaming the system. They're beating you up in the back room. And then they're like, all right, we're double or nothing. If you can make it back and pay us back,

we'll let you do it again. I can imagine that guy who got screwed over. He's like, well, I am mad at you, but dot com stock, that's only going up. You're in 1998. It is a running theme on this podcast. We probably said it ad nauseum, but every entrepreneur, hustle, alpha leader, CEO guy talks about, you know, I failed a million times before I succeeded.

But you have to be at a comfortable position to where you can fail and not immediately be wiped out and forced into, you know, wage slavery and debt for the rest of your life. So, you know, Snyder has his Campus USA fail. He defaults on a $3 million loan, and then right away he's able to launch his next business. The friends and family LLC strikes again. Right. And from the Washingtonian, the way the story goes is, so, yeah, he loses the $3 million.

Within two years, Campus USA goes bankrupt. Then in 1989, Snyder started making a marketing company the idea was to develop wallboard advertising and distribute product samples such as soaps and packages of medicine to colleges and doctors offices i thought i thought this was billboards when i first started reading it but these are indoors right right like the idea is you have a captive audience people in doctors waiting room waiting rooms um you get a free soap penicillin and i was just like i was really struggling to figure out how he made money off this yeah we're just gonna distribute medicine on bulletin boards i can't even picture were these like wall boards are they like a business

thing i'm 33 years old I have no recollection of ever seeing a wall but I don't yeah I don't know what this is right um I have seen like ads for various medicines in doctors waiting rooms at various points in my life I don't remember any of the names of them okay but I guess they I guess they sell that as ad space and it's apparently somewhat lucrative well the washington city paper in their write-up of this uh he's they use the word market segments which is how snyder viewed cancer patients and diabetics during his marketing days uh he gives a an interview to a pbs show called ceo exchange in 2000 snyder tells the host that his business depended on coming up with, quote, $5 million niches

that he could sell goods and services to. As for examples, Snyder said, we were looking at trend lines. We saw that the aging baby boomer demographics were coming on strong. That meant there was going to be a lot more diabetic patients, a lot more cancer patients, et cetera. How do we capture those market segments? Supply and demand. That's what the man knew.

All I want to say is representation matters. There's got to be some diabetic hopping around. They're like, oh, I'm glad I'm on that wall board. Oh, an ad for prosthetic feet. Thank you, Dan. That'd be a good tagline. Snyder Communications, the last advertisement you're ever going to see. Yeah, we view cancer patients as people.

They've got checking accounts, don't they? He keeps his Dan Snyder sucks sign rolled up in his prosthetic. But so, again, where the startup capital comes for this after he's just you know wiped out a three million dollar loan um the washingtonian says his sister used seven credit cards to raise 35 000 his father took a second mortgage on his property in england but we just got done with the story about how he had a jet leasing business at age 20. That was also on the credit card. Yeah, that was, if this was seven credit cards, then I shudder to think.

How much consumer debt they went into to start this. He spread his jet out over like eight different credit cards. Just calling up MasterCard like, so I'm trying to get a G6 on this thing. Could you increase my limit a little bit? He just really understood the concept of airline miles.

Seven credit cards. That's what she maxed out? What year is this? Early 90s? 89, 1990. Man man fucking mooks back then you gotta spin airline miles to make your line miles but it is something where you know uh uh we don't know the that's the story we're told we don't know the exact story about how much money but again these stories about how he grew up poor just do not seem true to me at all um snyder says by 1990 he starts this business snyder communications 1989 1989 he says by 1990 it was hot it was doubling and doubling we started to

acquire companies that were doing product samplings in uh different areas when new mothers were sent home from the maternity ward they were giving goodie bags of creams and diapers through Dan Snyder's company and it is also just like you need various connections into the medical community to get this kind of stuff. Sure. Where hospitals are giving out your product. You can't just show up to a hospital with a bunch of bags of cream. Give this to your new mothers. One of those old wooden boxes that he opens up.

$500,000 worth of product to upload. How much are you offering? Opens up his jacket and it's just full of cream. So the Washingtonian, the reporter asked Snyder when he first felt rich. He says, quote, in 1991, when I bought my first jet, that was a pretty rich feeling. He was 26 years old. So in just two years, this business has really taken off um he uh he meets his wife in 93 uh and it is kind of ominous here the way the washingtonian

describes this in 1992 snyder expanded his company into telemarketing aiming at the untapped immigrant market his revenues rose from 2.7 million in 1991 to $4.1 million in 1992 and $9 million a year later. I still don't understand how he's buying a jet at these numbers. This guy's the king of buying jets that don't make sense. I actually might be able to explain some of the immigrant number things because like I remember when my parents, well when I was born I guess, my parents would call India and it would cost like $40 to do because of how expensive the phone lines were.

So I bet at this time there was just an influx of immigrants that were calling back home a whole bunch because before then all they could do was write letters.

So a phone call was so fucking amazing, you know? So you gotta think that they're just charging immigrants an arm and a fucking leg to call, you know, everywhere from, you know, Mexico to India

to wherever anyone was from. I thought he was targeting them. They had a meeting where he's like, oh wait, immigrants have dinner too. Let's call them then. He's like calling people in the Asian community being like, you know what is better than one flag?

Six flags! One flag! One! And I say, you know, this Washingtonian article, the way they describe this, aiming telemarketing at the untapped immigrant market. That seems like a very, let's say, whitewashing way of saying doing boiler room scams to people who don't speak english and possibly do not have legal papers um so the redskins.com the fan forum actually put together a very detailed list kind of like a timeline of there have been two there have been two what are called uh phone slamming uh yeah slamming uh violations cases there have been two uh slamming cases against snyder's company which is when a telephone provider or any service provider signs you up for services that you didn't actually ask for or consent to when you download software

and they give you like a make affery toolbar you don't want right so um in california uh just from the the forum uh california fined uh quest uh 38 million dollars for thousands of slamming violations between 1999 and 2000 um and snyder direct services was named in the decision so what was happening was quest uh interestingly enough enron verizon among others were all subcontracting out to Snyder Communications. Not Enron. Yes. They were all subcontracting out to Snyder Communications to, you know, sell their products. Sure. Florida from 1997 to 2000, where both state attorney generals allege, quote, thousands of

violations where they were just signing people up for shit without any consent or understanding of what they were signing up for. Like, and in particular in California, they're slamming, quote, targeted customers indicating Spanish or Asian language as their preferred language, unquote. So that is why his telemarketing to immigrant communities is a bit of an ominous sentence. I've actually got some audio from their training sessions for the callers for identifying such potential customers. Six blacks, more blacks, more fun!

That's when you start your pitch, when you hear hear that but so just to kind of go through the the timeline really quick um uh snyder communications and again this is from the redskins.com forum uh snyder communications uh paid sales reps on a commission only basis years later employees selling at&t service filed class action lawsuits for, quote, breach of contract and fraud, alleging they were denied commission. 4,000 different sales agents for Snyder Communications joined this class action. And then GTE was the predecessor to Verizon. Their, quote, phone slamming operation was alleged to be a $200 million deal. In 97, Snyder Communications signed a three- alleged to be a $200 million deal.

In 97, Snyder Communications signed a three-year telemarketing agreement with Enron. And the basic story of the Florida case is that, according to a write-up in the Washington Post, the Florida attorney general alleged that Snyder Communications had hijacked customers on a grand scale after getting a 1997 contract from the predecessor to Verizon. He says, quote, Our investigation revealed thousands of instances in which the marketing agent's representatives forged customers' signatures to switch them to GTE. GTE is the company that's now Verizon. To switch them to GTE long distance, said the Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth in a written

statement. Florida authorities also alleged that GTE employees at, quote, phone marts, small shops in the malls, tricked customers into signing authorizations forms. They would be given a piece of paper that was supposedly a receipt for making a payment, but it was really an authorization to switch to a more expensive phone plan. So, you know, he's alleged to be, his company to have been doing this for Quest, to have been doing this for the predecessor to Verizon, probably considering he got a three-year contract in 97 with Enron, probably was doing similar kind of shady shit for Enron as well. Man, you know, I usually don't believe in prosecutorial misconduct. Most people at Enron were railroaded.

You mean Elizabeth Holmes' dad? Yeah. But so, and you know, so this is like in Florida settled with a $3 million fine, but he actually got out just in time, Snyder did, because in 2000, he sells Snyder Communications to a French company called Havas, H-A-V-A-S. Apparently, they buy it for, I think we said

earlier, 2.1 billion or something in that neighborhood in the year 2000. And just according to the Redskins forum, they took a 1.3 billion pound loss on this. Oh, wow. So it was something where he, not only did they have to pay these fines, which were kind of small, but they bought it right when the bottom fell out of the tech market, which is partially how he was selling his telemarketing company. But things get better for Dan Snyder, because in 1999, as we've mentioned here,

he buys the Redskins. Yeah. Like he sells this and he never has a job again. Essentially. Right. He just becomes owner of the Redskins full time. So this like Wells Fargo style account forgery is how he really founded his house basically.

Right. Yeah. And it had to be a corporate directive. It's like, it's fraud and deception at a pretty grand scale so they had to be part of the pitch he laid out to these companies yeah yeah in 99 when he joined the team according to this Washington City paper piece that's really good on him author John Feinstein said when Snyder didn't like a defensive coordinator Mike

Nolan's play calling he left a gallon of 31 flavors ice cream on his desk with a note, this is what I like, not vanilla. But apparently later he sent even more ice cream, three five-gallon drums, this time with another note, I wasn't joking. I do not like vanilla. Like this is this guy's business strategy. I don't like how the defense is playing. I know. I'm going to send ice cream to the defensive coordinator. vanilla like this is this guy's business strategy i don't like how the defense is playing i know

i'm gonna send ice cream to the defensive coordinator i wonder if that was part of his enron scams like a filipino family gets a gallon ice cream that could work um and we should mention in 1996 he ipo'd it so he ipo'd it in 96 he sold it in 2000 and then since then his main business has been the redskins and increasing the um the market value of the redskins somehow yes like um by the way this is a tangent but uh going back to six flags you know how they told the actor to sound like charlie chan right well i'm looking at now the uh of people who played Charlie Chan the first one is a Warner Olin he is a Swedish American actor a really Japanese

name Warren yeah it's then Sidney Toller it's just a list of people who taped their eyes Roland Winters might be in some trouble. So the Washingtonian has, they go through some of the ways he's been able to increase revenue since he took over the Redskins in 1999. As we've mentioned here, he kind of comes in with good terms. He fires the general manager when he comes in.

And I think they even go to the playoffs his first year there. He fires Charlie Casserly, the team's general manager, for the last 10 years. They'd gone to four Super Bowls, winning three with Casserly's 23-year career as GM. And Snyder replaced him with the NFL scout

and kindergarten ninja actor Vinny Serrano. I just love that you know that they're putting kindergarten ninja actor Vinnie Serrano. I just love that. You know that they're putting kindergarten ninja actor just like this fucking idiot because he was an NFL scout, so he did have some NFL experience. Yeah, but in everything I read, it was brought up in the first sentence about Vinnie Serrano.

He's the kindergarten ninja for life. They had to give him a job after they passed him over for the Six Flag mascot role. So the Washingtonian writes it up. He sold the naming rights we've mentioned. For 27 years, $200 million to call the stadium FedEx Stadium. He added 10,000 seats to make it the largest stadium in the NFL with 92,000 seats. And over the past few years, as interest has declined, he's

very quietly removed those same seats. Oh, really? I think a lot of the seats they added were at the player level. Oh, yeah, there were the $3,000 dream seats. Generally regarded as the worst

seats in the house because you can't see anything. Yeah, there were seats right behind the Redskins bench. It's not like if it was basketball or something. Yeah, you could really just see the players' asses. You're just right behind their heads. It's really just a 50-yard field and the rest of it is seats. Well, and he did something where he sold standing room only tickets for $25, but the way it was structured, those tickets would only be sold to lobbyists.

Oh, really? Wow. Yeah, because back in the day, the Vrezkis were the crown jewel of D.C. entertainment. They were the team of Washington insiders. There were even training materials about how his ticket agents were to sell to lobbyists and use the legal terminology that wouldn't implicate them. Yes.

This is a way to skirt laws against lobbying, like, like gifts in exchange for influence and stuff. Absolutely. So Daniel Snyder, he combines the two great American pastimes, pro sports and corporate fraud. That's right.

I'm just imagining their, their sales agent training manual they're like telling them how to be like hey you did a hell of a job on those uh cluster bomb sales to saudi arabia sneak in a compliment if you can you know i just imagine the you know low-level congressman who's standing, who's got standing room tickets, and he's like, all right, this is worth paving over Yellowstone. Well. Yeah, get into it. And we could go back into this in more detail in a minute here,

but the story of how he was able to clear-cut his yard is basically, according to the Washington Post, in 2001, one of his reps met the director of the parks department under George W. Bush at FedEx Stadium at a Redskins game and then put pressure on her subordinate to allow him to clear out his yard without any environmental review. And he had protected lands with a view of the Potomac River, so he wanted a better view of that river,

so he cleared out every tree on a certain parcel of property. Including, like, hundreds of years old, old growth forests. Right. Right. Apparently, improving the view increased the value of his property by millions. Of course it did. Because the house itself is worth, I think, like $50 million. It was made for some queen or some shit.

I don't know if it's the same location. But to have a view of the river i mean you're just putting a mansion and then adding another mansion to it which is the fucking view of the river well plus you know included in that price is you know all the lobbying you put into clearing out those trees but he did have to pay a hundred dollar fine for the clear cutting. It was such a fucking insult. It kind of balanced out. Didn't he promise the forest rangers that he would plant a bunch of saplings

for local plants? Yeah, I'll believe that motherfucker did that shit. That will take 30 years to grow. By which time they'll have sold. Yeah, he'll cut it down again. Yeah, or cut it that will take, you know, 30 years to grow. By which time they'll have sold. Yeah, he'll cut it down again. Yeah, or cut it down for $100.

The Reitman said we're connected to Nazis and still haven't given that $11 million they're going to say they're going to give. No way Snyder planted any fucking trees. Not happening. Right, so... Yeah, get a Google satellite view of the property. Let's look for saplings.

So according to the Washington Post post it was a fran p manella was the park service director according to the washington post there was an internal um inspector general report at the park service in the aftermath of this it was written in like 2004 the report says that manella was asked to help snyder after she was approached by someone at a Redskins game during the 2001-2002 season. She was appointed by President Bush in 2001. And then it goes on that she pressured her subordinate, Daniel Smith, and he in turn pressured lower level officials to approve a deal that allowed Snyder to clear cut 50,000 square feet of mature trees and replace them with saplings. And interestingly enough, the report says that the subordinate Smith was, quote, unduly influenced during the decision, oh, he unduly influenced the decision by inserting himself into the process through personal communications with Mr. Snyder, his representative, and C&O Canal officials. The inspector general referred its findings to the U.S. attorney's office, which declined to prosecute, according to the report.

So, yes, he got special permission from the Parks Department to clear cut 50,000 acres and increase the view and value of his property by millions of dollars. And like Joel said, he paid like $100 or something. Yeah, $100. Some total middle finger. DC was actually on track to meet its carbon reduction until that happened. Really? Yeah. No, actually.

Yeah. I made it up. But it sounds believable, right? It does, yeah. But so, and, you know, we mentioned he adds a bunch of luxury suites. He adds the tailgate club for special access, the touchdown club, which, you know, he claims this $200,000 waiting list for season tickets. For an extra $7,500, you can jump to the front of the line for the season tickets.

And then there's a very good write-up in Slate, which kind of goes through all the different ways he's been able to tack on fees. He says there's another fee if you want to bypass the huge lines at FedEx Field on game day. These are created by, we mentioned earlier, Snyder's security searching everybody, you know, to take their own food or T-shirts that they're not allowed to bring in the stadium. You know, and these things might dub Snyder. You're not allowed to bring your own T-shirts? I guess so. Well, I guess you're not allowed to bring T-shirts that dub Snyder and his ex-personnel man Vinnie Corrado as dumb and dumber,

which is a popular thing among Washington Redskins fans. Well, even when he first bought the team, he bought them from Jack Kent Cooke, and one of the provisions of the rule was he promised he wouldn't change the name of the stadium from Jack Kent Cooke Stadium, and he changed it immediately. It was the first order of business for five thousand dollars you can bring a gun for six thousand you can open up on the poor fans and he even like makes money from the media like if you aren't if you don't pay the redskins for the right to cover the team you'll have to

file your reports from a parking lot yeah yeah like the last year the redskins for the right to cover the team, you'll have to file your reports from a parking lot. Last year, the Redskins beat reporter had to report from outside her car because she didn't pay the fee. The beloved local reporters got screwed like that.

The announcer, didn't they have a long-time announcer of redskins yeah he yeah that mentioned yeah the radio crew um they fired you know actually i got he had like all of his uh all of the the catchphrases uh yeah the replaced by just like snyder i have it right here yeah because he owns the redskins broadcastcast Network, and he has his own arm that covers the team. And if you're going to cover them fair and balanced, you're going to have to pay a price for it. I forget.

Somebody, or I guess it's a common thing to dub his media properties Dan Jazeera. That's like propaganda for him. Well, one of the radios, like, the radio stations in, like, 2008 was, like, so horrendously slanted towards Snyder and just the, like, papering over the Redskins' losses that they started up Dan Gisera for all of his media empire around the Redskins. Yeah, there's a... Does that mean, like,

that the military accidentally shot a missile into them? Yeah, a drone target. What were you going to say? Well, he made this service where you pay for a behind-the-scenes

look at the team where you get videos of the players training and it caused a controversy because all the players would just eat fast food on camera and meanwhile rather than be like oh it's fine the redskins paid someone to determine that kudoba wasn't fast food meanwhile they're doing this thing where they get access and they get in trouble with the NFL Players Union for doing unauthorized contact drills. And they ask the NFLPA, like, how did you find out about this breach? And like, actually, they just posted it on their website.

And we should mention the skipping the line thing. He tried to do a similar thing when he bought six flags, charge you $1 per person per day to uh skip the line and jump right to your favorite roller coaster one thing he didn't do at six flags though is he didn't sell uh fans at fedex field uh expired airplane peanuts uh he would sell five ounce royal blue and white bags adorned with the independence air logo and it'd gone under a year before so these were year old airplane tickets that Snyder's selling to the fucking fans of the Redskins

I saw that and I was like he seems cheap but do peanuts go bad really like you wouldn't be dissatisfied you wouldn't know unless you read the bag why are you reading the ingredients of what you're eating the Washington City paper investigated this and they quote, a spokesman for the peanut council told the city paper...

Just say Jimmy Carter. He told the city paper that to prevent rancidity, the recommended shelf life of a foil bag out of shell peanuts was quote, about three months. So this is an airline that went under a year. Peanuts go rancid?

I guess so. Yeah, they go bad. Yeah, they get mold and shit. Food that is from the earth goes bad. Man, I'm at odds with the sage words of the peanut council. They make that last for a year. The peanut council is in the pocket

of the Dallas Cowboys. Bad mouthing. Dan Snyder. I want to mention that one thing Stephen mentioned earlier. This was the beloved former play-by-play announcer Herzog got fired. His signature call was touchdown Washington Redskins. Now I truly observe the horror of this season. was Frank Herzog. His signature call was, Touchdown, Washington Redskins. Touchdown, Washington Redskins. Now I truly observe the horror of this season.

He was replaced by Larry Michael, whose saying was, Brought to you by Subway. If you love bacon, come into Subway. Eat fresh. Yeah, Snyder. Every opportunity to just saw parts of the franchise and sell them. Well, he sold some great things at Six Flags. We mentioned this off mic, but I just wanted the pod to know that at Six Flags,

he sold a $1,200 mattress. That's right. That's right. And he also didn't reopen the New Orleans location after Hurricane Katrina. You know, because people who've dealt with hurricanes don't love... You'd already sold off four of the flags. It's weird because there you could sell the mattress

as a flotation device. Did he say that they sold the mattresses in the park? In the park, you could buy a mattress. You're like, oh, well, the rides are kind of affordable. But then they really get you with the mattress. Yeah, your kid's bugging you for a mattress.

Well, they cut back on ride maintenance, so they're like, hey, you're going to need one of these if you get flung out of the roller coaster. I can imagine them just piled up next to the roller coaster. Did we mention the Pentagon flag hat? No, not yet, no. Why is there a swedish word that's crossed out in sharpie and then it says six flags yeah it's a japanese word so according to the washington city paper the pentagon flag hat was a redskins cap sold for

profit by snyder to quote commemorate september 11th in time for the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks ads boasted that the 2399 caps they make the Redskins mascot have a single tear they were uh uh black Redskins hats with a uh red white and blue pentagon sewn on the side why's it gotta be black Sean they were expected to quote be worn by redskins coaches no other nfl team put out 9-11 commemorative products for sale during the 2006 season for profit or otherwise uh and yeah as we mentioned he added the four dollar quote security surcharge to the ticket prices after 9-11 if i ever become a weird old collector guy the thing i'm definitely going to collect is 9-11 memorabilia after i mean fans complained they eventually got rid of the 10 9-11 truth surcharge yeah the seahawks couldn't play that for 20 years

in 2005 he was inducted into the greater washington Sports Hall of Fame. The reason for this was because under his ownership for the fourth consecutive year in 2004. Greater than what? The Washington Redskins set an all-time NFL regular season home-paid attendance record with a total of 667,000 persons for eight games. He sold a lot of tickets. That's why he's in the jewish sports hall of fame

you know for an extra uh six dollars snyder will sell you the pentagon cap with a cruise missile sewn onto it flying towards the pentagon uh and we should mention and then i guess we'll talk about six flags for a little bit he was sued by his nanny a write write-up in the New York Times says that a nanny said that Dan Snyder had underpaid her. She won $44,000 in unpaid overtime. She says that in 2004, Snyder told her, quote, I pay you more than my Redskins Park people. I can't afford to pay you like this. And this is, of course, the person who raised his three children.

One of the most offensive things about daniel snyder is how deeply lame he is like you get to this like oh he's got a lawsuit with his nanny this will be salacious like oh it's just he doesn't want to pay for labor again yeah i mean we did like a full epstein sweep on this guy nothing he just loves football so i imagine by the time you're a billionaire if you have sex with the nanny and she goes public she's dead well in terms of epstein thing the only thing i found was uh harvey weinstein was he appointed harvey weinstein to be on the board of directors of six flags after he bought it which is a little weird um but also there's a deadspin article um that's actually

a write-up of a New York Times article about how Washington Redskins cheerleaders were asked to be quote escorts for various investors yeah so they went to Costa Rica in 2013 and it was for a calendar photo shoot and when they got there they immediately took away the cheerleaders passports Jesus Christ made them take photos topless in front of investors and partners of the Redskins. And then later on. They came from the Ghislaine Maxwell School of Cheerleader Management. And then later on, they were told that certain investors chose them to be personal escorts at nightclubs later on that evening. And not like, hey, let's go dancing, like dark, dungy rooms.

And apparently when that happened, the cheerleaders, a few of them started crying. Yes. You know, because when you're being sex trafficked, you cry every now and then, if you know what I mean. Right. Just the write up in New York Times. One evening at the end of a 14 hour day that included posing and dance practice, the squad's director told nine of the 36 cheerleaders that their work was not done. They had a special assignment for the night. Some of the male sponsors had picked them to be personal escorts at a nice nightclub. So quote, Oh, my God. Sean, why are you hard? And honestly, given the NFL, this is almost pretty good treatment of cheerleaders.

Seriously. Yeah, seriously. Like, sex traffic? I traffic to me you know that's top third uh just quoting from that same article again five cheerleaders characterized a 2012 team bonding party as a wild gathering where men shot liquor into the cheerleaders mouths with turkey basters below the deck i guess this was on a yacht below the yacht uh below the deck yeah below the deck men handed out cash prizes in turkey twerking contests no cheerleaders came that claimed that they were touched inappropriately um but it was kind of uh i'd been given a one cheerleader said quote i'd be given a heads up that we were going on this particular man's yacht and

that he had a lot of money and that you could make a lot of money there if you want it. But that was not for me. And lots of us felt the same way, but we were too scared to complain. We felt that our place on the team would be compromised if we did unquote. So, you know,

still though, like I feel like if you're, it's almost like being a billionaire is virtually pointless in terms of enjoying. You could never enjoy a billion dollars even if you actively tried to. And so if you're not caught up in the Epstein stuff, what are you even doing with your life? Yeah, you're just treating your cheerleaders so poorly they get caught up in the upstate stuff like you need to be like directly you're you're nothing basically if you're if you're a billionaire you're not directly involved in that yeah he just wants to get ahead in every business transaction whether it's dealing with the immigrant families dealing with six flags

investors dealing with his cheerleaders players coaches general managers he just wants to have one up. Like he hired a coach once. He wanted to fire the coach, Jim Zorn. And rather than firing him, he'd have to pay out the contract. So he spent a year trying to humiliate him out of his job. Just like half the Redskins budget is like ice cream to leave in this guy's locker. But yeah, you're right. he's like a boring billionaire he has a 200 million dollar yacht and he probably parks in london instead of the united

arab emirates where all the epstein billionaires go i think he keeps the yacht in maryland actually which is like you you think it would be impossible for oceanfront property not to be beautiful sure maryland says otherwise um so just to go through this slate article from 2010 about uh six flags uh so he gained control of six flags by leading a stockholder coup in 2005 he added big names to the board like jack camp and harvey weinstein to the board of directors Jack Kemp and Harvey Weinstein, to the board of directors. At the time, Six Flags stock in 2005 sold for... Great judge of character. At the time, Six Flags stock sold for $11.93 a share in 2005.

By 2010, it was trading at $0.017 per share. We mentioned Bill Gates lost a bunch of money on this. By the dip. As of others, as did others. Quoting from Slate, Snyder inflated the parking rates at Six Flags lots all over the country. The inflation was a boon to owners of retail and storage businesses near Six Flags in New England, which began offering parking spots for $10. In 2007, Snyder sent Shapiro, his hand-picked CEO, to lobby the mayor of a Massachusetts town called Agawam, A-G-A-W-A-M, the mayor. Agwam. Yeah, Agwam.

You gotta say it with a new English. Agwam. He sent his CEO to lobby the Agwam mayor and the town council into banning visitors from parking at the non six flags owned lots shapiro testified at a public hearing that it was unsafe for pedestrians to walk from six to six flags from anywhere but its own lots the local politicians banned the satellite lots um but then um try to keep that confined to the cut rate roller coasters. But so then a local business owner informed the city council that Snyder had concocted an identical phony argument to prevent pedestrian traffic to FedEx Field. The stadium. Right. So he was jacking up the Redskins football ticket prices for parking, and then he was making the argument,

and he actually lobbied local government to ban people from parking anywhere else because it would be unsafe to walk to the stadium. But that stadium ban was tossed out in 2004 when the invented, yes, a judge in Prince George's County, Maryland, ruled that the Redskins management had invented the safety issue to force ticket holders to pay Snyder's top in the league parking fees. Picturing him on Rollercoaster Tycoon, like naming one of the people after that judge and then putting him into one of the overpowered rollercoasters that blows up. I'm picturing him on Rollercoaster Tycoon just designing the parking lots it's the only way i can make sense of his building his six flags empire yeah and he's made all this money and really his business model is to just inflate parking prices he's like hiring private coders to make a patch where you can bribe the mayor.

So I guess to kind of wind down here, he has a private equity firm called Red Zone, which we've talked about how shitty private equity is. So he was sued when Six Flags went down the tube. One of his other investors sued him, and he presented the argument that as the thing was going down the tubes, he started using Six Flags to market his other properties. Joel mentioned the $1,200 mattresses and stuff. But another one, again, quoting from Slate, Red Zone, a private investment firm. Someone's sleeping on a Six Flags mattress right now. Yeah. And like I was saying earlier, some of them have to still be in circulation.

If you're listening, go home, check your mattress tag, and if it is from Six Flags, please reach out to the pod. I think we'd love to find out about that. Maybe we'll find them on eBay. There's probably still flood water from katrina in those things absolutely how much do you think it is for shipping on an ebay mattress uh so uh from the right up in slate uh red zone which is of course uh snyder's private equity firm uh they had two major deals with six flags uh one was a promotional and franchising pact with the Snyder-owned

Johnny Rockets that gave his eateries prime exposure in the parks, plus 5% of everything sold at the Six Flags-based burger joints. The other was the $175 million purchase of Dick Clark Productions by Red Zone in 2007. And then that's $ million they're only two uh their most well-known tv hits are so you think you can dance and dick clark's rocking new year's eve so this is probably an overvaluation that he uh funneled through six flags wait when did he get johnny rockets uh in the 50s when they were the best hamburger chain in the world, he didn't change a thing. It was like the only business not complaining about the Redskins name, so he bought them. That is like the Dick Clark thing

just goes with his previous business model of just trying to wrongly appear cool to teenagers. So according to Slate, Red Zone buys Dick Clark Produ uh overpays in 2007 then in uh it turns around and sells a 40 stake in dick clark productions to six flags so he is the owner of this public company and is also using it to subsidize his various self-dealing yes uh when negotiating terms for this red zone to six flags deal s Snyder went toe-to-toe with himself. Wait, so he sold the Dick Clark Productions to Six Flags?

Yes. Are they trying to get, like, Dick Clark-themed rides? It would be fun to ride, like, a ball drop ride. That would be pretty sick. Yeah, right, right, right. Strap yourself to a giant crystal and then slowly descend. And, yeah, so the guy who sued him said, quote, if you walk into Six Flags Great Adventure now,

you will walk right into a Johnny Rockets. So he managed to run a public company into the ground while also primarily using it to soak revenue into his other private investments made through his private equity firm. You know the old malt shop when you would just go in, play some tunes buy a

mattress hamburgers mattresses welcome to six five i did want to mention uh corinne of the washington city paper write-up and we haven't said this yet he got he sued the guy who wrote this and they had a little um drawing of him with the devil horns he sued him he said it was an anti-semitic caricature. Which I don't get because they don't believe in hell. So how can that be anti-Semitic to call a Jewish person the devil? If you look it up, it's just like the usual devil scribble over any face. Right, right.

It was the least insulting devil horns you'll ever see. There are kinder truck stop bathroom walls. But so this Washington City paper write-up says that Andy Man was the fake name widely believed to be used by top Redskins officials to post anti-media rants

on fan message boards. In 2005, Washington City paper reported that Carl Swanson, Snyder's longtime PR chief, had registered on sportsjournalist.com, a website where Andy Mann often sniped at the Washington Post. Andy Mann, which could be pig Latin. Yeah, that was Redskins executives.

It's definitely not 20-year-old Andy Palmer. Andy Mann, which could be Pig Latin for Danny M., Snyder's first name and middle initial, all but disappeared after the report. He created the burner account. Isn't that great? He deserves his billions just for that. We've had other billionaires that kind of get into this.

Being petty is a billionaire trait. Well, specifically, though, having a secret account on the employee forum. kind of get into this uh being petty is a billionaire tree well uh specifically though but yeah i am having a secret account on the employee forum and uh just to go through one last labor story we mentioned earlier uh from the washington city paper in 2008 snyder faced a lawsuit from a group of fedex field ticket office employees who weren't being paid for extra hours the team argued that the redskins ticket office wasn't covered by standard overtime laws citing a 1932 exemption for quote amusement and recreation employees in the federal fair labor standards what a piece of shit so great this is like the fucking fdr laws which are the first laws on the book which said you know retail workers didn't have to be paid minimum wage

and they just got some lawyers to dig through this shit to bilk their employees on overtime. Yeah, so the exemption was meant to cover lifeguards and greenskeepers, not office employees. Snyder settled the suit earlier in 2010. But, you know, I mean, that just kind of gives you an overview of this guy who, you know, got rich on kind of a shady media company that was involved in some slammer scams where they were charging people for services they didn't want, probably doing some shady boiler room shit. I mean, that's just what we know is the two lawsuits in California and Florida. I'm sure there was tons of other shit that they just got away with. And we've gone through the annals of it,

his entire career, and we haven't seen him do one thing. Well, like he's just been mediocre the entire time and his net worth has doubled every five years. Well, it's like, I mean, it's,

it's kind of the Warren Buffett strategy where you become a monopolist where like Warren Buffett owns a stake in all four major American airlines. So if you fly in the United States, you know, it sucks shit, but no matter how much it sucks, Warren Buffett makes money if you fly. So it's the exact same thing with Dan Snyder and the Redskins.

You want to be a Washington football fan. Well, you know, that's the only one that's the game in town and you don't got a choice. As long as Dan Snyder owns it, he's going to gouge you and run the team into the fucking ground and he loves the team he's ruining the very thing that's been his lifelong object of affection so it's like a billionaire but like you kind of feel a little bad for him because at the end of the day he wants to do a good job with this

enterprise but he uses these same business practices to how he treats his football team and you see that he's manufactured a terrible culture that pervades any chance of success it is it also seems like his his biggest strength is just asking for money like i imagine if you get loaned enough money eventually you can't fail it's like the old adage like you know i owe a thousand dollars that's i have a problem i owe a billion dollars you have a problem like you just borrow enough money and then suddenly the people who you bought it from will start working for it or you borrowed it from start working for you it is kind of great though if you become a billionaire you can just play madden in real life yeah just do roster creation mode and he plays it exactly like i do where you like

fuck up make a bunch of acquisitions and then get bored and turn it off but the season just keeps going right it works on the fans are mad at you yeah it's early november he's turned off the machine yeah well like joe mentioned though he was the ultimate fan as a kid and he and his dad loved watching the redskin games and uh incidentally you know in 2001 we didn't mention this yet well back when he was a kid that was that was that's now called genocide in uh in 2001 he had thyroid cancer which he beats and then in 2003 his dad dies and then in 2005 his favorite player sean taylor dies then in 2008, his wife gets breast cancer. It's almost like this guy that owns a team that's a Native American slur keeps having people dying and slowly dying around them.

His team is on a Native American burial ground. That's right. Exactly. It's like a poltergeist situation. Yep. Would you call that stream of good coaches he let go a trail of tears? So back to his coaching and aptitude and the death of his favorite player, there was a coach, Greg Williams.

He found some scandal later on, but he was a candidate for the Redskins head coaching job, and they said he couldn't take the job because of a missing man formation that they did, which was which was of course them lining up with 10 players as a tribute to the fallen Sean Taylor. They used this guy's like tribute to like a

fallen co-worker brother as a reason not to hire him. Piece of shit. And like apparently the like coaches that came out during that period, Snyder would be like let's get this quarterback, let's draft this quarterback instead of that person. And so one of the coaches, I think it was Schottenheimer, didn't put up with that shit, so got some decent stuff done.

But then when he was fired, the next coach had to put up with Snyder making more moves behind his back. Yeah, he's never learned. He's done the same thing since buying the team in 1999. And like this year, they knew they were going to fire the coach. They picked a quarterback who has no relationship to the coach, and they picked that quarterback because he's born

in Maryland. Local boy. And I guess the last thing, we should just mention, the name is a slur. The patent office in the United... Wait, what? The patent office in the united the patent office washington the patent office george washington man that guy's a bitch yeah the the u.s patent office actually vacated the patent because under law you're not allowed to patent racial slurs

i got something i'll say otherwise Every time Chris Rock performs I get a little bit of it That's how I made my billion This is where the real secrets come out It's the Warren Buffet idea You monopolize the slurs And now you get a little piece Every time anyone uses a slur

Yeah, was SNL bad for Shane Gillis? Yeah Was it good for Joel Walkowski? You know it. That would be like the whitest white guy you could possibly be would be the private equity billionaire who bought the N-word. Get a little taste every time you use it. But so, yeah, the patent office vacates the the term redskins as a name and then this gets thrown out on appeal i think in 2018 so a different court says no yeah this is fine and then the

supreme court doesn't hear the case but i think it is something where in all decency snyder said we will never change the name but they should just vacate the patent and be like okay you want to use this name you can't make any fucking money on merch because it is a slur. And most of the Native Americans that Snyder has not paid say, yes, this is very offensive. Yeah, and if you talk to a Washington fan, he made his money young and they are waiting for him to die.

And they've accepted like, oh, I have to wait three decades for this guy to pass on. Try to introduce him to Ghislaine Maxwell or some sort of cocaine dealer. Get him involved in the party billionaire lifestyle. Maybe they'll do a compromise where they change the name to the proud and respected Native Americans and then change the logo to something way more racist than even Chief Wahoo. Yeah, Washington natives and them just sell ads for casinos. But is there anything we didn't get to? Any final thoughts on Dan Snyder?

I mean, there is a litany of player acquisition, coach acquisition that goes back decades, just leading to a bulletproof case for ineptitude. If you're reading, find that Washington Post graphic. The reading for this episode was really enjoyable. So if you liked our conversation, it's definitely a great time to kill at work to just Google Daniel Snyder articles. Because you'll find he owns the media, because you see like a slew of stuff when he when he buys it in 2010 right no negative stories again till 2019

just like you can tell when his employees are in the middle of contract negotiations that's when the bad stories appear um joey you want to plug your stuff yeah oh yeah yeah i have i am the host of hold my bread with the hilarious matt backus we are the only comedy finance podcast we're trying to be guests here we're trying to make money every week and we might have we have wall street insiders on we talk to them anonymously we correspond with martin shkreli so we've got a lot of really good stuff going on over there raising his commissary fund or well i feel like he was railroaded he just leaned into the character no i mean that's actually what we've said is

screlly was the fall guy for an entire business model jacking up drug prices absolutely and he was just he was not an insider so he was punished like an outsider well um and joel's also a very funny stand-up comedian so we will we will have in the description of this episode where you can find Joel. Yeah, follow me on my pics, and I might do a little something when I'm down in Washington commemorating good old Dan.

And thank you again, Joel, for being our first returning guest. I did it. Hopefully not our last, and I'm sure we'll see you again in the not-too-distant future. Thank you, Grubstakers. And with that, this has been Grubstakers.

I'm Yogi Paiwong. I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. Check us out on Patreon. Goodbye.