The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman ReevesWiedeman.net "Vivid, carefully reported drama that readers will gulp down as if it were a fast-paced novel" (Ken Auletta) ꟷ The inside story of WeWork and its CEO, Adam Neumann, which tells the remarkable saga of one of the most audacious, and improbable, rises and falls in American business history In its earliest days, WeWork promised the impossible: to make the American work place cool. Adam Neumann, an immigrant determined to make his fortune in the United States, landed on the idea of repurposing surplus New York office space for the burgeoning freelance class. Over the course of ten years, WeWork attracted billions of dollars from some of the most sought-after investors in the world, while spending it to build a global real estate empire that he insisted was much more than that: an organization that aspired to nothing less than "elevating the world's consciousness." Moving between New York real estate, Silicon Valley venture capital, and the very specific force field of spirituality and ambition erected by Adam Neumann himself, Billion Dollar Loser lays bare the internal drama inside WeWork. Based on more than two hundred interviews, this book chronicles the breakneck speed at which WeWork's CEO built and grew his company along with Neumann's relationship to a world of investors, including Masayoshi Son of Softbank, who fueled its chaotic expansion into everything from apartment buildings to elementary schools. Culminating in a day-by-day account of the five weeks leading up to WeWork's botched IPO and Neumann's dramatic ouster, Wiedeman exposes the story of the company's desperate attempt to secure the funding it needed in the final moments of a decade defined by excess. Billion Dollar Loser is the first book to indelibly capture the highly leveraged, all-blue-sky world of American business in President Trump's first term, and also offers a sober reckoning with its fallout as a new era begins. Reeves Wiedeman is a Contributing Editor at New York magazine. He has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's, Men's Journal, and other publications. Billion Dollar Loser, about the rise and fall of WeWork, is his first book.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The chrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys for tuning in and checking it out and hopefully making your day. Be sure to watch the video version of this interview. You can go to youtube.com, 4chesschrisfoss, hit that bell notification button, and you can also go to thecvpn.com and subscribe to online podcasts. We have a lot of groups for The Chris Foss Show on Facebook. The best thing I can do is tell you to go over to Facebook and search for us.

There's groups, there's the Chris Voss Show page, et cetera, et cetera. You can follow me on goodreads.com forward slash Chris Voss over there as well. Today we have an incredible author who's written an amazing book that's probably an incredibly entertaining read, mind-blowing, eye-opening, as well as sad in some ways and many fashions. The book is called Billion Dollar Loser, the Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork. You may have heard of this company. The author is Reeves Weideman. He comes to us as a contributing editor in New York Magazine. He has written for The New Yorker,

The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Harper's, Men's Journal, and other publications. Welcome to the show. How are you, Reeves? I'm doing all right. Thanks for having me, Chris. Awesome sauce. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, your dot coms, and all that good stuff. Googling my name will probably do it as well as anything. Reeves

Weidman, I have a website, reevesweidman.net, that has a lot of information about the book and my work. And that's my handle on Twitter as well, where I do occasional posting. So those are probably the best places to find updates on the book and the work that I do. And you write some great journalist articles and everything else, wonderful work. I was reading through them this morning. So Billion Dollar Loser,

this is the new book that can take and get on Amazon or where local bookstores are sold. Tell us what this book is about. Who's Adam Newman for those people who aren't familiar with the WeWork experience or story? Sure. So the short version is Adam Newman moved to New York. He's born in Israel and moved in his 20s to New York City, like many people, and tried to become an entrepreneur. He started a few businesses. One was in the baby clothes industry. Another was a collapsible heel for women. And so he was kind of trying everything. And he eventually met an architect named Miguel McKelvey. And the two of them opened what at the time was not exactly a new concept, but was somewhat unusual. The idea was flexible office space. Kind of co-working was one way of looking at it. But

what WeWork sort of did was they weren't having these big open tables that some people think about with co-working. It was these sort of little glass cubes. They would take kind of a loft building and cut it up into smaller offices and rent it out. And for a while, it was wildly successful. You know, these kinds of offices with communal spaces and good coffee and a sense of community were something that people wanted. And eventually, over basically the span of the next decade, after the company started in 2010, it grew all over the world in pretty much any major city you could name, both in the U and abroad. And it expanded into all kinds of different businesses, some of which were sort of related to offices, some of which weren't. And all of that kind of led up to this point in 2019, where the company tried to go public. And as we note in the title of the book, it was sort of a pretty spectacular failure for a for a variety of reasons. And, and, and for better or worse, you know, Adam, Adam Newman was, was the key to all of that. He was the one who kind of led the company on the way up. And then a lot of the, the issues on the way down were, were tied to him as well. I mean, spectacular losses for investors like SoftBank

and I think largely, mostly SoftBank, really. Yeah. You know, it's one of these funny things that a lot of the early investors in the company did well. You know, if you got into WeWork in the beginning, as the company rose along the way and you were able to sell shares, as new investors came in, you did okay. It wasn't the bonanza that everyone was kind of hoping for once the IPO came, but you did all right. With SoftBank, they have invested more than $10 billion into WeWork. The company was at one point theoretically valued at $47 billion. It's now valued somewhere around $3 billion. So it is not a good thing to put in that much money into a company that is worth significantly less than that.

You should sell it to Trump. Maybe you could go the other way. It was valued more than SpaceX and I think another company I read. Yeah. at one point in 2019 when it was going public, it was the most valuable private company in America. You know, it was up there with the Ubers and the Lyfts and the Airbnbs and the SpaceXs of the world. And the interesting part about this all is that they seem to have hijacked, and correct me if I'm wrong, they hijacked that whole glory days that was going on in the tech industry in Silicon Valley of disruption

and we're going to change things. And a lot of it was just spinning new ideas. In fact, if you look at a lot of great companies that came out of that era, and even losers, a lot of them were just Craigslist features, like a segment of Craigslist where Uber and everything else. But what was interesting about them is they took a really placid concept of just commercial real estate, office leasing, and they tried to spin it into this sort of software thing. Is that correct? Yeah, that was part of the story at various points. And pretty

early on, Adam Newman started talking about WeWork not as a real estate company, but as a physical social network was the idea that he sort of talked about. And, you know, the basic concept was we have all these buildings early on, they're all over New York, and then eventually they're all over the world. And we want to try to connect them the way people are connected on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever it might be. You know, the the tricky part is, the company tried at various points to sort of build some kind of technological underpinning to what was ultimately a real estate business, where they they lease space and people paid rent. And they never quite figured out what was going to be sort of the like key crucial tech innovation that they had. There were, you know,

little things here and there, and it was certainly a tech forward company, but ultimately at the end of the day, you couldn't get around the fact that they were in the business of leasing real estate. Yeah. Just old world real estate. You know, I mean, when I had my companies, very large, you know, we'd have to go buy an office, sign a three-year lease and stuff. So you were tied to it, man. You had to be in it. And so it seems like what they did is they really hijacked the, or hijacked, took advantage of the gig economy or people that work from homes. I've worked from homes since 2004. And, you know, they made it so that, you know,

the people that don't like working at home or they got kids or different things going on at home, they can go to WeWork space and they don't have to pay the exorbitant things or the massive contracts and stuff. Yeah, it was like largely a real estate thing. And so this guy is quite extraordinary. He's a character beyond characters when it really comes down to it. In fact, I'm not sure, well, you may have a better

knowledge studying of what's, what the, what, what the comparisons he might have, but what, what brought you to the book and made you want to write about it? Yeah, I think a couple of things. I mean, Adam is obviously a very compelling character and a compelling figure, and I think that what I was interested in is that both he and the company itself sort of could stand in for a lot of what happened in the broader economy over the past decade.

And that was this sort of era of kind of startup excess. Venture capital, you know, it was just a sort of venture capital bonanza. There was more money floating around this sort of ecosystem than there ever had been, sort of enabling companies like this to grow really quickly, to, you know, grow in kind of all kinds of directions. You know, by the end of sort of Adam Newman's time at WeWork, he had pushed the company into opening apartments. They had an elementary school. They were operating a gym. He had invested in a wave pool company to sort of enable surfing without an ocean. So there were all kinds of crazy things that he dreamed up and

tried to do with the money he had. And so in some ways, it's kind of a classic tale of ambition and sort of there's an Icarus element to all of this, but for him in particular. But more generally, it felt like he and the company sort of stood in for a lot of things that were happening. And these guys built a company with a lot of booze. My friend Dan Lyons wrote a book about the craziness of Silicon Valley, the stories. I mean, you have employees that are running around with carts of alcohol throughout you know, just drinking, partying, you know, who needs a 20 seater, uh, foosball table, right? You know, you need to have that a 20 person foosball table. And a lot of it, you know, is in the same era that gave us, uh, Elizabeth Holmes

with Theranos and that whole nightmare. Um, so, uh, give us some in-depth stories about, about the book. I mean, a lot of it seems really alcohol. I don't know if drugs are involved, but there seems to be a lot of alcohol fueled stuff, just excess of, of craziness, what this guy was about. Yeah. You know, we work was a company for, for young people in a lot of ways. And, and, um, that was for the employees and also the people who worked there. And so, you know, a lot of employees would talk about, you know, they were coming out of college, college experiences and suddenly getting into, you know, they were entering the workforce. And WeWork was a place that sort of recreated that experience in some ways. You know, they were working long hours.

The people they worked with became their friends. You had parties. You had these kind of weekend company retreats. Summer camp was sort of the famous one that WeWork had. They were just essentially parties. And, you know, I think in a vacuum, certainly with everything else that went wrong with the company, it now looks silly and extravagant. You know, at the time it was part of the sales pitch. It was part of the reason you wanted to work at a company like this. It was a company that worked hard and played hard.

And for people who joined, we work as members and had offices there. The offices were fun, you know. I mean, as long as everyone's sort of responsible about it, it's kind of a nice thing to have a beer keg in your office and be able to go, you know, just grab a beer with a friend at the end of the day. So, um, you know, there, there was a lot that was appealing about that. And then of course, you know, but there's a lot that's dangerous about that. I mean, you know, having, having free flowing open bars, um, is, is maybe a thing of, of the past for a lot of corporations now. And, and WeWork sort of certainly leaned into that for a long time.

Yeah. Maybe the New Yorker can see if they can come up with a bar system. I think in Utah, when I had my, I had like a small bar in my office and it was like illegal, I think at the time in the nineties to have a, just for me to have alcohol in the office. I mean, it's certainly different when i moved to california and i was like what this is legal here but i guess it makes sense but then then it's also weird the hours they keep and when they sell booze like in vegas you could

buy anything 24 7 um so uh you cover in the book the whole span the creation creation, his rise, would you call this a semi-biography? Yeah, I think the book starts with his childhood in Israel. And there's a lot of elements in his childhood that led to WeWork. We talked to people who knew him as a teenager, and he you know, he was the same kind of brash, cocky, confident person that he was much later. And, you know, we would talk to his high school driving instructor, who remembered him as just kind of this sort of wild guy who, and he said this, you know, somewhat admiringly, he said of Adam, you know, he's either going to become a millionaire, or he's going to jail. There was no in between, you know, between those two things. One, in one way or another, he was just going to be the kind of person who, who got

himself into something. And, and it was sort of, it would kind of remain to be seen sort of what happened. And then, you know, Adam often cited his childhood and the way he grew up. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, which is this sort of community-filled setting. And he talked about that as sort of the inspiration for WeWork in some ways. And so I think, again, it's kind of hard to separate him from the company because everything good and bad about it sort of flowed from him and who he is. And so they built this company that's extraordinarily overvalued, correct? I mean, just the, I mean, and they're selling it with, I remember what was

going on and still goes on today, not so much with the coronavirus because a lot of VCs have pulled back. But, you know, the Bill joke was like of uh vcs have pulled back uh but you know the bill joke was like the the less slides you have in your presentation the better like the more the money and and they're just these vcs are just like throwing money at these guys and and then uh like you say it goes to where um and and you outline in the book like some of the extraordinary stuff the the i mean he's he's buying stuff and leasing it back to the company and they're just it's just it's kind of i i guess you could call it corruption would it be corruption some of the different things they were engaged in you know i i mean i think there's certainly things that happened that, sorry, I've got a phone going

off here. You know, it was a family business. I mean, Adam owned the business. His good friend Miguel was his partner. He often said, you know, I am WeWork, WeWork is me. Like there was something he said. And it's complicated. I mean, one thing about real estate is, is, you know, Adam

Newman was, was far from the only person in the real estate world who engaged in some level of self-dealing. That's just kind of, you know, par for the course. And, and a lot of people would kind of say to me, you know, in the real estate world, there's a lot worse people than Adam Newman. And, and, and so, you know, plenty of obvious examples. And, and so I think, you know, um, there, there, there are plenty of ways you can kind of critique the company on that front. I think ultimately it's just when you get that much money sort of sloshing around and, and, um, it's just going to lead, lead to problems.

And so in the book, you tell a lot of these stories, this is crazy stories and then they go up to, and then they go up to, you know, once you, once you, you know, run for public money. And that's why actually some companies don't go for, to put themselves on the market because they really don't want anybody poking around the books. And, and they find they're just extraordinarily overvalued and they start finding all these different things on the books and going, what the hell is going on? Tell us a little bit about how that whole thing comes off the rails. Yeah, it's a very different thing raising money from private investors.

You know, private investors, venture capitalists are looking for the next big thing. They're not looking, in most cases, for nice little businesses. They want businesses that can become the next Facebook or Airbnb or Uber or Google. So it was, you know, Adam was very good at pitching to that group of investors and pitching them his vision for what WeWork was going to become. Once you go public, you know, it's much more about the numbers. You're dealing with pension funds and mutual funds who are by nature just more conservative investors. And so at that point, WeWork was still making a bunch of money. They doubled the amount of revenue they were bringing in every year, but they were having trouble getting their costs under control. And the impulse at the company had

been to grow, grow, grow as fast as they could. And it wasn't totally clear that that growth was sort of making it easier to make money the way a tech company, you know, the classic idea is network effects. The bigger you get, the more beneficial your company is to everyone who uses it. And then the more ways present themselves for you to be able to make money from that. WeWork never really had that. It was at its core still a business

about renting out space to people. And so once the books were open and it was clear that the company hadn't sort of figured out this kind of holy grail of, as one employee put it to me, of figuring out how to make this more of a tech company. It just, you know, those kind of more conservative investors were just less interested and less willing to go along with the story that Adam was telling. And SoftBank had just buried it with money. And I think they'd take up a majority position, if I recall correctly.

Not quite. They had thought about it. At one point, SoftBank had thought about taking basically half the company. They would basically be Adam and Masayoshi-san owning the company. But ultimately, that deal kind of fell apart and was sort of a precursor to some of the IPO trouble. But SoftBank,

yes, had poured a huge amount of money into the company. And if I recall rightly, you'll have to correct me because it's starting to come back to me more as we're talking about it. But there was something about their revenue booking and their invoicing where they were like advancing themselves on the books, like the next year's worth of rentals or something like there was something going on with that. It was like really extraordinary when I read it because I did the accounting for our companies too. I read it and just went, that's extraordinary. Yeah. They, you know, they, they sort of, the simple way to think about it is they kind of streamlined their lease costs.

They streamlined? Yeah. I mean, and there's an argument. Look, there's an argument for it. And there are people who will say that it's not the craziest idea. In some ways, it was a branding problem. You know, they called it community adjusted EBITDA was the metric they used. And it was kind of this metric that they sort of made up out of thin air, at least the name. And it fed some of the craziness that people, you know, sort of the craziness that was already there about the company. It sort of added to that. Yeah, it was extraordinary.

I mean, we saw stuff like that. I remember reading decades ago when Blockbuster was doing some sort of overpricing for their videos and they were doing like an extraordinary measurement of value of like 24 years for a video that they would buy or depreciate there was something like really cookie uh but yeah I mean you can get away with I guess a lot of stuff the IRS lets you um or or you know if investors are fine then nobody asks any questions but it was really weird how here they were going public, there was the big PR push, and then it just comes apart.

Like within, I don't know, two weeks or a month, it just goes right off the rails as soon as people start looking at the books. Yeah, it was six weeks or so from publishing the paperwork to the IPO being pulled and Adam Neumann being asked to step down. It was pretty remarkable. And then I think you've covered the fallout in the book too as well because he had some golden parachute contracts and some other things. How did that turn out? It's complicated. He left the company.

He was sort of pushed out of the company with basically a billion dollar exit package. There was a consulting fee that was there. He was going to be able to sell a huge portion of his stock in the company. And yeah, at the time, this was at a moment when the company was going to have to lay a bunch of people off and, and the valuation was tumbling and people looked sort of askance at it for kind of obvious reasons. Since then, you know,

a lot has happened, obviously the pandemic has, has sort of taken over everything and made commercial office space and even more tricky proposition as a business. And SoftBank this spring, basically, they were the ones paying Adam all this money. And they basically claimed that for a variety of reasons, WeWork and Adam had sort of reneged on certain parts of the deal. And so the long story short is that it's tied up with the lawyers right now. And it's sort of reneged on on certain parts of the deal and and so the long story short is that it's it's tied up with the lawyers right now and it's sort of unclear you know when exactly or or what exactly um adam will end up getting me and all my tech friends because i i always ran companies with my own money we built multi-million dollar companies but you know when we were small and

starting out we sweat equity and stuff but we always had to make a profit because it was our money. And there was a certain point we could have took investors on, but then you got to start beholding to them, and I enjoyed what I did. But these guys, they run the worst company, the most overvalued thing and he still walks away from with a billion dollars and i remember we were all sitting around going shit why do we bother running a company but but it's extraordinary what did you learn writing the book was there any that was there any stories that stuck out to you that were like what the hell or what anything that you took away from the book that a lot of readers are probably going to learn about?

Yeah, I think with the WeWork story, I mean, we've touched on it. You know, once people looked at the numbers, it seems sort of obvious, but the numbers were there all along. And for those who were looking at it, for the investors, obviously it didn't have total visibility on everything, but they knew enough. And there were various points in the company's history when they, you know, investors, executives would take a look at the numbers and, you know, your traditional kind of MBA program stance would suggest one kind of decision. And people would do the opposite. You know,

there was a story where Benchmark, one of the first investors in the company, you know, they were skeptical of it already. They're a tech investor and this was a real estate company. And in this first pitch meeting, one of the partners just found an error in WeWork's model and, and they decided to invest anyway. And they decided to invest in this vision and, and sort of a feeling that, that there was something about the company and something about Adam that was going to lead them to success, even if the numbers didn't totally make sense. So, you know, it was surprising to me how many times in the WeWork story things like that happened where the numbers said one thing and people, you know, for one reason or another went with their gut or a certain feeling or just a faith kind of blind faith in in adam uh hoping that it would work out and a lot of people don't realize that aren't in the tech industry or the vc industry the reason why these things are able to keep going the theranos is the we works uh and uh in fact i was just thinking about uh rap genius co-founder uh

babad mahogany i don't know if you remember him i'm not sure i'm pronouncing his name correctly but he had that extraordinary flame out and i think rap genius was a little overvalued at this time but he was one of those extravagant crazy dudes that that eventually ended up shooting himself in the own uh and uh but what a lot of these guys they do you know around a round b there's well sometimes there's, well, sometimes there's C round, round A, B, C, D, usually by D, they're starting to sell it to private groups or C, they're starting to sell it to private groups and Morgan Stanley. And, and, and then of coursewater and other people invest in these places. And then, you know, when they resell it on the next round or they bring in other investors, they'll sell their stock at much more. And sometimes they'll take out larger positions and keep smaller.

And so they're making money as they go through the rounds and stuff. So sometimes if they see something extraordinary like that or they see errors and stuff, they kind of go, we need to get off that bus a little bit more on the next round. But since they're selling at a higher value, sometimes an extraordinary amount of what they paid on an exponential, they can go, we clawed back our initial investment and made a little bit of profit for the pool, and then we can keep in there and see if it goes. It's really an interesting business in the VC thing.

So do you, do you get into in the book is I think you just started a new company recently, didn't he? Or invested in a new company? He's invested in a new company. Yeah. I mean, in a new kind of real estate company. I guess if you, I guess if he's got money, he'll take it, but. Yes. You know, he's, he's got a lot of money now and, and he does have some cred in, in kind of the startup world. You know, he's, he's got a lot of money now and, and he, he does have some cred in, in kind of the startup world. I mean, he built WeWork into what it was before it

all kind of flamed out. Yeah. So I, I imagine you reached out to him and his people, uh, at, at, uh, to comment on the book. Did he input at all? Yeah, we, you know, I interviewed Adam last year, sort of when things were still flying high. Um, and, and, you know, throughout, throughout the process of writing the book, we reached out to him and, and, you know, tried to sort of check various things with his team. He's as mentioned, kind of tied up with, with lawyers right now. So there's only so much he's sort of able to say publicly, but you know, we certainly tried to get his input.

It's a crazy story. I mean, we just, I mean, we just always kind of gave up, uh, we work the side eye in the tech business where like, what the hell are you doing? Are you doing commercial real estate? Like, uh, I mean, you, you're renting buildings. I mean, that's basically, and the depreciation and you can get good depreciation on, on buildings, but you know, usually the game is like what we see, what a lot of people are seeing. I mean, I've done this forever. I mean how you work depreciation, you try and bury your, your, your revenues and you try and create losses. And you can with depreciation because depreciation really isn't a real thing in

a physical sense sort of way. But, but to see them in it and stuff like that, what are some of the other aspects of the book that you think are important for readers to tune into? I'm curious to see what the next generation of startup founders will take from this. On the one hand, you can read this book as Adam was a big success for a long time and the way that he talked about the company and pushed the company was a key part of his success. On the other hand, the growth at all costs, the expansion into different industries,

I think really sent the company over the rails. So as we're entering this kind of new, hopefully at some point of post-pandemic era, there will be these kind of new founders rising up and, and trying to build these giant companies. And it'll be interesting to see what lessons, if any, they've learned from,

um, from sort of Adams, uh, troubles and, and the sort of stumbles that other companies have had as well. I think my understanding is they put a lot of kibosh on some of these partying and drinking and, and some of the Me Too movement did some of that where, you know, the sexism and then the sexual harassment that was going on in some companies. The tech business kind of went through a little bit of that during the Me Too era. And then these things, the Theranos, the Rap Geniuses, the New York thing,

hopefully it's making people really think about what's going on, the booming thing. And we seem to have reached an era where, I don't know, maybe there'll be more technology coming out of more technological advances. They usually come out after these recessions. VCs are usually in the wings waiting after recessions of what we're going to go through here because usually there's some sort of new explosive thing. I mean, last round 2008,

we saw Twitter and Facebook and everything else. Uh, but yeah, commercial real estate, I would, I don't know where commercial real estate is going. My prediction is going to be that is that we're going to, people are going to get used to working from home and living from home and

they're going to expect from employers. And, uh, once we've broken this mold and gone to what i've been used to and a lot of people from the geek economy used to um you know there it is uh it uh exceptional book oh the reason i was leading with that uh one thing on sexual harassment too was there's a lot of crazy party stories in here. I mean, you got stories of where they trashed like an employee entertainment room and they don't know who it is.

Turns out, you know, it's just these booze fests of craziness. Yeah, and it, you know, as with a lot of companies like this or any company, that leads to problems. And they existed at WeWork, you know, maybe more than some, but I don't even know if it was exceptional and unfortunate and we've just sort of now come to learn. You know, what was unfortunate for WeWork, doubly so, is that the company sort of claimed to be building a better world, to be building better office spaces. and it, you know, it turned out that they had kind of many of the same issues that, that other companies had once you have a, again, sort of an

open bar in the middle of the office. And I think, correct me if I'm wrong, he was just like a lot of these guys, like the Thronos gal, Rap Genius, a lot of these people that go off the extreme deep end, they really think they're the next Steve Jobs. Like literally, they think they are the next Steve Jobs. Is that correct? Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, if you're an ambitious startup founder, who else would you want to want to be? And, you know, I think there's certainly become these kind of delusions of grandeur and people try to learn from them. I mean, there was certainly a way in which Adam Newman could have been sort of the next generation of that in some ways. And so we definitely have sort of come out of an era where I think, you know, people wanted to be the next Steve Jobs, next Jeff Bezos, you know, next Mark Zuckerberg, maybe. But, you know, I think one

thing we've also learned is kind of the pitfalls of those kinds of people, you know, we've, I think one thing we've also learned is, is kind of the pitfalls of those kinds of people, you know, Steve Jobs was a was extremely demanding boss, and in some ways, a really difficult boss. And, and, and, and so, you know, we're, we're, I think startup founders have to ask themselves all these questions of what's worth it. Is it worth it to sort of ruin your employees' lives or trample over whatever norms there might be in the pursuit of your vision? In some cases, they seem to believe that's true, but in other cases, I think it gets people into trouble. Yeah, it definitely does. And that whole mystique of it, you know, Elizabeth Holmes was one

who she actually wore a turtleneck and I think the same style of pants or something of her color. I don't know, it was like, they're trying to copy the whole genre of that thing. To me, it's just the insanity of it and watching all that go on. And that's what a lot of this it's just the insanity of it and watching all that go on and that's what a lot of this book displays is the insanity of silicon valley and how crazy it gets

and and there is that creative side but i've worked with a lot of ceos that that they're they're so creative but there's like this this damage fallout of radiation nuclear crap that's just building and following them you're just like how do they always keep one step ahead of that thing i mean anybody who knew um steve jobs especially privately he's an incredible dick he was an asshole i mean he was just awful my friend andy who worked on the on the original iphone building the iphone who's on the team i mean he he threatened to destroy his family. I mean, you know, the craziness.

I think Andy's been in a few different films talking about it. But it's just insane some of the things that you see these guys going on about and what they're doing. And so – sorry about that. It looks like I've got to edit that out uh the google alarm went off um so anything more uh you want to tell us about the book before we go out no you know i i mean i i hope that it's uh it's it's a useful guide to both sort of what happened to this company and adam newman and and then also a useful guide to to the era that we're sort of coming out with this kind of era of startup excess with all these different figures and companies that we've talked about. I think they, you know, they all interplay with WeWork in one

way or another. And, and I think, you know, hopefully would, will people take away from the book? Yeah, there's a lot of fun and crazy stories. There's a lot of tequila, there's a little bit of marijuana. And, but I, But I think there's also some really kind of serious and interesting questions to be asked about what we should expect from these companies and these founders. So yeah, just thanks for having me. And I really hope people enjoy the book and find some useful lessons in it. I think it's going to be an entertaining book too, because some of the stories in it, oh god uh so uh thanks for coming on the show we certainly appreciate it bud thanks for being here thanks for having me chris thank you

uh thanks my audience for tuning in be sure check out his book the epic rise and spectacular fall of adam newman and we work a billion dollar loser you know one question if you don't mind me throwing you a uh a thing, why did you decide to call it loser? Because I thought that was kind of a bit pokey. Yeah, I mean, you know, there's sort of two reasons. One, you know, Adam, he got out with a billion dollar exit package, despite the fact that the company had sort of failed in its most crucial moment. And then, you know, more broadly to the point we were talking about, they, you know, this was a company that lost billions of dollars, much like other companies in the pursuit of growth over the

past decade. So we thought it was fitting both in a small and specific way and then getting at some of the more general themes that we were interested in.'re interested in. Check out the book, guys. You can go to amazon.com and you can check out Reeves on his website, reevesweidman.net. And that's a good place. And of course, all the different places that he writes for. Any other plugs you want to throw in? No, I hope people pick up the book and wherever books are sold and I hope they enjoy it. There you go, guys. To my audience,

be sure to follow us on the cvpn.com or Chris Voss podcast center.com. You go to youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss to see the, see the video version of this. Stay safe, register to vote, get out there and vote. And we'll see you guys next time.