The Press Box - Everybody’s Going to Substack. Plus, Journalist Reeves Wiedeman on WeWork.

Episode Date: November 16, 2020

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker discuss Matt Yglesias’s announcement that he will no longer be writing for Vox but will be publishing his writing in Substack (1:45). They then write their own 2020 campaign retrospective, recounting the chain of events leading up to the election (22:10). Then New York Magazine editor and author Reeves Wiedeman joins to discuss the fall of WeWork and Adam Neumann (47:18). Plus, The Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, we're going to talk about how journalists are leaving their jobs for substack. What I want to know is, if you were to do such a thing, what would you name your substack? I think what you mean to ask is like what wrestling term would I, would I like, would I like, you know, employ to try to sound like it was a bigger, the subject was bigger than pro wrestling. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe the Bunkhouse brawl. Do you like? Is that? Yeah, I was kind of thinking of the masked mag.

The mask mag is good. I like that. I like that. We could always go with Shoemaker's Mark, which I think I've suggested on this show before. If the shoemaker fits. I'm not going to do a bad name pun. I just can't do it. After all the bad name puns we've talked about on this show.

In my case, I think the life of Brian is completely overworked at this point. But maybe. I don't know. Maybe there's a niche for Kurdistan that still could be out there. Should we go with that? Yeah, let's do it. That sounds fantastic. Coming up on today's show, look ma I'm going to Substack.

David and I pre-write the 2020 presidential campaign books. Plus Reeves Weidman talks about billion-dollar loser. All that more on the press box, a part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers, Brian Curtis, and David Shoemaker here. David, let's begin with a little tempest last week in Journalismville. Matt Iglesias, politics writer and co-founder of Vox, announced that he would no longer be writing for Vox.com. No, he didn't get poached by the New York Times.

That's every other politics writer, you know. Instead, Iglesias left Vox because of what he called, quote, inherent tension between my status as a co-founder of the site and my desire to be a fiercely independent and at times contentious voice. So now his written work will be on Substack. His newsletter is going to be called Slow Boring. He tweeted, I'm looking forward to really telling everyone what's on my mind to an even greater extent than I do now. Matt Iglesias and everyone else is going to Substack. Seems like a fun place to go. Oh, do you have an announcement too?

Wow. Took me back there for a second. It's always, I mean, it's, you know, it's always the ones you most expect, I guess. And I don't mean that as necessarily, like, is an implicit insult. It is a very interesting way to go, although, I don't know. I mean, what do you think about this? I don't even, I don't even, like, I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about this movement. As I thought about this, I think there's three reasons people are doing this.

And often people are picking more than one of these things. there's the ideological stuff, which we'll get into in a moment. There's a very basic journalism tenet of, I don't want to be told what to do anymore. And then there's the economy sucks and I need a job. And I don't want to leave journalism. So I'm going to go to Substack and try to make my way for as long as I can. Aglazias is clearly number one or number two on that list. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of. different reasons that people do this. And I don't think it's, we can, I mean, we're talking about it, like people are committing some sin or committing to some monastic life or something. I mean, it really is just a different platform, right? I mean, one of the people on the list that, that, you know, is brought up a lot that we'll discuss is Andrew Sullivan, right? Sure. And we were, we were Chris Almeda's age when Andrew Sullivan left his platform. Well, he was originally at the Atlantic, then went to the Daily Beast. And I believe at that point went,

solo. And when he went solo, it had a little bit of the ring of what people are doing now, right? He was still publishing the same blog he was publishing before. But it was react, but the reaction to his decision to basically own his own little, plan his own flag and a little piece of dirt in the internet and saying, and saying like, you know, I can, I can make more money doing this myself and figuring out a way to sell ads and, you know, figuring out a way to monetize it and to pay, paying a small staff. I mean, it seemed revolutionary at the time, right? And now the idea that a voice that big could start a functional website, I mean, we're employed by one, right?

I mean, it's like the idea that you could go it alone about the backing of the New York Times. I mean, Vox.com was functionally, you know, a sully dish or a ringer for political news. You know, when Ezra Klein and Iglesias and everybody else decided to start it, right? and I think that, I mean, there's a little bit of a conceptual tension between starting your own website and starting a newsletter, right? I mean, I think the newsletter terminology, I think sets a lot of people back. But again, and it's not that much different than when, to take another example, when people started stopping writing and started podcasting, right? I mean, no, it's, it's just a, what's different about substack is that the terminology is sort of retro as opposed to futuristic, right? Yeah, and just as a PS on the podcasting part, Iglesias is still going to be hosting Vox's policy podcast, The Weeds.

And I had a friend text me over the weekend to say, writers now quit their print jobs, but they never quit their podcasts. Mm-hmm. Like John Dickerson is a correspondent for 60 minutes and he's still doing a Slate podcast. He's like two jobs removed from Slate or three jobs removed from Slate. Yeah, I mean, it's, yeah. But you never quit the podcast. That's funny and probably says something about the times we live in. Let's dive into Matt's decision here for a second.

Earlier this year, Iglesias signed the notorious letter about free speech in Harper's. Emily Vanderwerf, Vox's TV critic, wrote to Vox editors that his signature made her feel less safe at Vox, because she is trans and the letter was signed by transphobic figures like J.K. Rolling and contain, quote, dog whistles towards anti-trans positions, end quote. She also posted her note to Twitter. When asked about that, Iglesias told the Atlantic last week, something we've seen in a lot of organizations is increasing sensitivity about language and what people say. It's a damaging trend in media in particular because it is an industry that's about ideas. And if you treat disagreement as a source of harm or personal safety, then it's very challenging to do good work. So clearly part of his reason for leaving is that, right?

I don't, I don't, I don't, I want to be in an environment where that episode is not going to happen to me again, at least from a coworker. I'm going to go there and I will be able to do what I want. and that's that. Yeah. I mean, Iglesias is an incredibly smart writer. And actually, I mean, and does not write from, I mean, talking in the weeds, I'm getting it in the terminology weeds here. I read a lot of what he writes and, you know, appreciate the sort of intellectual rigor of most of it.

He doesn't write from, I wouldn't say he writes from a position of privilege, But I think that the, that the, I don't know, I feel like that the reaction, that reaction to the reaction from Emily Vanderurf was, was you, it's this sort of reaction that, that you hear a lot from people who are in a position of privilege, the people that are, that are in a position to, to, to, to be offended by the offense that their subordinates take. I mean, it's obviously not A to B. Madaglacius wasn't running a medium. Empire 30 years ago, but it's the sort of thing you hear from people who are hearing the reactions of their employees for the first time, right? And I think that this is a case where obviously there's, this was a, there's a lot packed into this specific instance. And it's not, I don't know if it's really worth our time breaking it down now. I don't know if we'd reach any like better end point than the one, you know, than the, the point we're already at. But I don't, if this is, if this is all it took for someone to walk away from their job, that's a little bit disheartening.

But again, if this is a situation where he felt or was indeed pressured to do something that he, you know, pressured to walk away from his job, then that's disheartening from the other side, right? Well, let's then consider reason number two for going to Substack, which, again, these do not have to be exclusive categories. Reason number two is I'd rather just do what I want to do and not have an editor telling me not to do something. Glenn Greenwald, to name a very prominent example, left The Intercept, a publication he founded in late October. He published this 4,000-word substag post complaining that editors the intercept had attempted to censor a piece that contained inflammatory information about Joe Biden. And then in response, Intercept editor Betsy Reid wrote, Glenn demands the absolute right to determine what he will publish. she believes that anyone who disagrees with him is corrupt,

and anyone who presumes to edit his words is a censor. She also added this line. We have the greatest respect for the journalist Glenn Greenwald used to be. That was a big moment on Twitter. Also, you sent me this tweet from the nation's jeet here. He tweeted this, Too big to edit is a real problem in literary world. Star writers start writing longer, more sprawling,

ill-conceived and undisciplined works Stephen King, James Elroy, J.K. Rowling. Now also a problem in journalism. The word I would dispute there is now. We didn't invent too big to edit in the

substack era. Like, you know, we took the time machine back to the Esquire office in the 60s. There's no way someone was telling Norman Mailer to cut several thousand words from his piece. Or saying, you know what, you didn't really prove this. Take it back and do another draft. That was not happening. So I don't think that's really new. And I think in the old days,

what you would probably do is just go off and say, you know what? I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm going to go write books. I'm going to write books. I'm going to find the publisher who's going to let me say what I want to say. And I'm going to go do that and not mess with the rigors of daily journalism anymore. Now, it's a substack. I think there's a lot of truth to that. I mean, I do, I mean, you and I used to joke about, or, you know, our point of reference for a lot of things in this conversation was Stephen King writing in the New Yorker, right? I mean, Stephen King could write, was he was a different writer when he would just do a shots and murmurs thing for the New Yorker or whatever because he would presumably be heavily edited, right? Maybe he wasn't. Maybe that was Stephen King writing to a different audience.

But, yeah, I mean, too big to edit is a real thing, but you're right. It's always been a real thing. Now, I don't know. I mean, Madaglady's you specifically said he doesn't have any unorthodox opinions. about editors, about the editorial process, and he's, you know, thanked all of his editors on there. It's maybe not, I mean, it's not specifically, I mean, this is such a varied situation. But no one's making the case that it's specifically the Greenwald situation of I'm turning in things that are getting rejected by substance, right?

It's not necessarily being chopped a number of people want to write words and words and words. I'm not sure what editor is really, I mean, especially in an online format, is really cutting an established writer for word count right now, regardless of whether or not, I mean, maybe if they just feel like it's necessary, but, you know, the more time you spend on a web page, presumably, the better, you know, it's not like we're trying to get,

we're trying to, you know, we only have X number of columns in the magazine this month to fill. But there is, you know, there is also the issue of having deadlines, you know, I mean, there's a subject comes up and it's like, well, Iglesias or whoever is our guy that writes on that subject, or person who writes on that subject.

so you get called in the action. Maybe that's not a schedule you want anymore. But, I mean, there is a lot of, I don't, it doesn't have to be one thing, I guess my point is, to feel like there is sort of an, like, and a sort of amorphous pressure that comes with a job that maybe you just want to not do anymore. And it is worth noting that we talk about Iglesias and Greenwald.

There's some other people who fit this on this list. When you were a, when you were a founder of a successful or, or a successful website or a site that has been purchased for a lot of money, you might look at your checkbook at the end of every year and just say, there's diminishing returns in me actually doing my job, right? Like, I've made my money off of this. And I make, and the podcast is,

you know, I see the podcast checks coming in every week, but like, here's my salary. Now, if I just stop doing this and just found another way to get paid for doing this chunk, I mean, maybe it's a,

I mean, maybe there's a financial incentive, too. It doesn't have to just be some political stance. you know. Yeah. And to your point about the gradations in editing, there is the one extreme example of anybody who dares edit me as a sensor and an enemy of truth. There's another kind of I got tired of editing because I just want to wake up today and do whatever I want to do.

I just want to be my own boss, right? Those can be within the same large category, but can be completely different things. And anybody who has the second one, I wouldn't blame at all. I should add here that Glacius wrote a bunch of columns for me when I was an editor at The Daily Beast. He took as far as I can tell. And I used to have the exact minute figure written down because he did this one time.

But it was, I want to say it was like less than 30 minutes to write a column. And I mean a full-blown column. And maybe it was 15 minutes. I don't want to put a world record on him. But it was unbelievable. And it would come in. I'd be like, yeah, it looks good. Here we go.

Let's put it up on the website. So that's a guy that churns out words. It's incredibly fast. And so I doubt it, you know, like you said, it's a problem of, oh, I don't, somebody's telling me what to do. Matt's a incredibly fast writer. But there are some gradations. Also, we'll add.

When we talk about the third category of going to substack here, I find all of this a lot less interesting than people who are going to substack because they don't have a job. Yeah. And they need to make ends meet. And they don't want to leave journalism. Mm-hmm. So they go there, try to find a small number of people who will fund their journalism and sort of fund their existence. So they are able to stay in the game.

Yeah. Well, this is actually the more interesting part of it, right? I mean, certainly the big names going there are the headlines, but people who are carving out little niches for themselves or who are forced into this sort of independent journalism by the, you know, incredible shrinking. journalism industry. You know, there's a lot of big success stories, right? And there's also a lot of ways in which this sort of... I mean, this is sort of like what the athletic promised us,

but under like the umbrella of this gigantic corporation, right? It's just this sort of micro-targeted writing that's going to find its audience. But this is a direct, like, consumer-to-creator relationship. And... Yeah, but this can also be weird. The athletic isn't one. weird.

Substack, you can follow your muse. Oh, yeah. You know, the athletic is, yes, we are micro-targeting

people who are interested in like hockey prospects. But that's probably mostly, most of the time going to be fairly conventional writing about a niche topic. Whereas I feel a lot of people in Substack are like,

here's the piece I really want to write. Here's the way I really want to try to write a weekly newsletter or column or however you want to, whatever you want to call it. And I'm going to, to find just enough people to pay for it that I can keep going and keep doing it. And hopefully the world gets better. Because as we point, a lot of the people we've talked about in this, in Philadelphia of the last couple months, they're going to be fine.

You know, they've got options. And they'll be fine. And if it doesn't work out with substack, they'll go do books, so they'll go get another media gig or whatever because they've got an audience. But it's people who are trying to build that career that are more interesting to me. Yeah, for sure. I mean, listen, the, the, the, the, there's always going to be a sort of slow food, sort of, you know, small version of, you know, publishing that's, you know, and the, the, the market will change. The format will change, right? You mentioned book writing earlier. I mean, there's a, how many people have we known over the years that were writing books as a means of sustenance, but just sort of barely getting by, right? I mean, it's just, it's, it's not like every book contract is a million dollars. Um, there's a, there's many different versions of this just on substance. you know, I mean, and, and, I don't know, I mean, I think that it is as sort of salacious or, I mean, that's not even the right word because it's also publishing centric, but it's sort of interesting as some of the big names going there are. Yeah, it's, it's a, it is a very interesting story.

It's a very, it's an interesting world. And in some ways, it's a really attractive world, right? I mean, it's just sort of taking the, I mentioned Andrew Sullivan earlier. years and years ago, I remember I went on a vacation to a beach that did not have internet access. The house we were staying didn't have internet access. And this was at a time where that was unusual but not unheard of. And I had to go every day to get my internet fix. I would go to the local coffee shop slash taxidermy shop slash flower shop. This was a thing because it was a relatively small town.

Where were you, by the way? small town in South Carolina and and and I would pay I would get like the free internet access they had there I would just open up like 10 web pages and the daily dish was one of them and just you would just open the page and then go home

and I would read the blogs at my leisure over the course of the day right I didn't have any means of reading the new things but I would just yeah just scroll forever and whatever version of the internet explorer I was on them it didn't like force reload so I would lose everything like I would be worried about happening now

But and that was you know that felt a little bit archaic even at the time But there was a sort of sense that you could just sort of read 24 hours worth of Andrew Sullivan content or of whatever Basketball blog I was on then content wrestling whatever and just sort of absorb it slowly throughout the course of the day Without the kind of tension of being on Twitter whatever other social media and just like feeling like you're sprinting to catch up with the conversation all day and there is a sort of I think that to me and probably do a lot of people is the part of what's attractive about the substack format, right? That it just seems a little bit more

just a tiny bit, even though it's a newsletter with a date on it, it's a tiny bit more considered and a tiny bit more timeless, right? Or unmoored from that second in time. Yep. And I think that's a signal beyond whatever politics are implicit and moving to this format.

All right, David, let's do the Overwork, Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. Did you see the picture on Twitter of a truck, David, that had wrecked on the highway and there were books scattered all over the media in there? No, I totally missed this. Someone said, and I emphasize said, because I could not confirm this, that these were all copies of Roge's The Soros. It is Rojays, isn't it?

Not Rodgits? Rojays Thesaurus. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, days, etc., etc. Thanks to Michael Love, Bill, Will Bisbee, Ian Day Martino, and James Fraser. I want to reemphasize. I do not know that those were actually thesoruses, but.

Good joke anyway. A couple of items, David, from Donald Trump's post-election slog. The New York Times as Maggie Haberman reports, quote, Trump has put Rudy Giuliani in charge of his campaign lawsuits related to the outcome of the election, as well as all public communications related to them. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, Trump has conceded the election. Thanks to Eric Whitley.

Did you love that Twitter bit over the weekend where Trump was just bellowing on and on and accidentally conceded. He's like the only reason Biden won was, oh, whoops. Did I say that? They're like three tweets afterward trying to clean it up. I mean, Biden won in the eyes of the corrupt media, of course. Biden didn't actually win. It was great.

Trump should have his own substack. He could clear all this up. Finally, David, an item from a Democratic election lawyer. Quote, Trump and his allies are now 0 and 10 in post-election court cases. O-N-10 in post-election court cases. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. The thing is, with that record,

Trump could still win the NFC East. Thanks to a whole bunch of people. If you made us feel slightly better about the Dallas Cowboys, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook, dumb.

In the next few months, we're going to get a number of books about the 2020 campaign. We know New York Magazine's, Olivia Nuzzi and Politico's Ryan Liza have one coming out next March. Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin in the New York Times have one slated for 2022. But you and I didn't want to wait. So we're going to attempt to pre-write a 2020 campaign book.

Now, before we dive in, I just want to say, I really enjoy the inside the campaign book way more than I enjoy the inside the season with a football team or baseball team book. if you told me you need to read this book about inside the season with the Kansas City Chiefs, I'd be like, do I have to? But just about any campaign book I will read. And I don't know if the difference is that the stakes are obviously so much bigger with the campaign book or if it just delivers the goods more because there are so many consultants and other people involved in the writing of it.

Do you have a theory for why one sounds so much? more enticing than the other? Well, I mean, I don't know if this is the answer that you're looking for. The inside the season with the team book is a little bit, I mean, that shelf is a little bit watered down, right? It's not the same as, not every book is, you know, paper lion. And, and, you know, it's, it's a good pitch. I'll put it this way. When you pitch a book on being embedded with a team for a season, anything's possible. When it actually comes time to kind of crash the book out, you might not have the goods. I think with the presidential campaign, well, there's going to be goods, right? I mean, the, the narrative is going to be there. You just have to do the reporting.

And yeah, I mean, by the time that we're, I mean, at this point, at this moment in time, obviously that's an incredibly interesting thing. There's also the sense that, like, there's so many people that you could talk to. I mean, if you wrote, if James Harden got traded to the, to the Brooklyn Nets tomorrow and you had James Hardin on the record, you had that, you know, you had all the people, you probably wouldn't get that much real good stuff. I mean, there's a good chance you wouldn't get that much real good stuff, even if you had all the contacts, because people keep themselves. And there's only a limited number of people that are going to talk. And it really affects people's continued employment. But you have so many

people who are connected to these campaigns with so many different access to grind and so many different motives for future employment and whatever else, that there's a potential, not a potential. The ability to get good content is just so much greater. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. First thing we need for our 2020 campaign book is a really good opening scene. So how about this?

August 2017, Joe Biden is watching the neo-Nazis protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Oh. And he resolves right then that he, is going to run for president. Maybe he turns to Jill or maybe he calls up a long time advisor like Ted Kaufman and says, this isn't right.

This is about the soul of America. I got to run. How about that for an opening scene? That's a great. I mean, listen, if the book is, if the overall narrative is about the triumph of Joe Biden, then I think that's,

that's a great, you know, if the book's going to end with, and looking to the sky and starting his plans for the presidency, I think that's the right way to begin. I think that the other, maybe that's chapter one, but there's a brief preface, a brief introduction that in like, italicized text, which everyone knows that I actually hate,

we have a brief, we flash back to Trump's acquittal. Like if there's just a little bit of the, because, and let that sort of seed the narrative of how things were going, well, in a certain direction. that Biden thought he had to get us back from. See, I thought you were going to go for the, like, three paragraphs in I tell of one of Biden's conversations with Boe toward the end, where Bo really didn't want him to run for president. Because that's another place this book could start, by the way.

We know he visited Bo's grave after being declared the winner of the election, right? Like, there's a sort of narrative symmetry there, too. Yeah. That could absolutely work. Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, I think that from a, from a story, the risk of, getting too earnest about this. From a storytelling perspective, the bow stuff is going to be significant without having to

force it. I don't think too much. So I don't think I would go there at the very beginning. But that is, but that is going to, that is going to be right there. It's going to be omnipresent. There's a little bit of a narrative challenge in our 2020 campaign book. There was a lot of crazy news in this campaign, not least the deadly pandemic that descended on the world.

But Biden never really trailed. Trump in the polls. I don't think he's trailed Trump in reputable polls since 2015. So there's not an obvious game change moment. So what do we do about that? How do we create tension here? That's a really interesting question. If it were, if it were more specifically about the polls, you might, I mean, you could actually get into the weeds. I mean, my head immediately goes to some sort of postmodern or science fictional can see where you look at the fact that the polls were wrong at the end or you look at how wrong they were and sort of work you know you could almost like footnote every mention of the polls throughout about how about you know how often it ended up being

also you know the knowledge that this is going to end up at a you know counting a matter of what 50 or 60,000 votes in four states, you know, that that was going to be the margin, you can almost throw the polls out from the beginning, right? Or at least always, you got to frame them in that way. But you're right. I mean, who was at the point out just last night? I mean, if we had seen Biden up by 70,000 votes in Pennsylvania on election night, we'd be in a much different place, both psychologically and historically right now, right? So it's, it's one of those things. It's like Bush versus Gore, where you look back and realize that the polls were, you know, the polls were fine or closer to fine than I think a lot of people give him credit for.

You know, the way that history has evolved, certainly, you know, shades are a view of that. But you're right. I mean, Biden was, Biden came out in the lead and ended up winning by, at least, you know, in the national vote about what he was projected to win by. Yeah, even 2012, which was pretty much over an early. summer when Obama made Mitt Romney the Bain guy. Obama still blew that first debate. And the polls moved after that. And that really in, as a matter of fact, in one of the game change books, I remember that

was the thing. Everybody Obama freaked out. Obama World freaked out. And how could he just go in and mail in a debate performance and stuff like that? We don't quite have that here. I do however, David, have a bunch of story beats. I want to throw a bite. Let's do it.

Because I feel these are all be scenes, right? very sceny kind of chapters that occur through the book. Yeah. You got to hang every chapter on a moment in time. We think about Biden versus Trump, but don't sleep on the tension of the Democratic primary. Oh, of course not. Remember Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?

Well, I mean, you could remember a lot more people than that. Those stages were, I mean, just the fact that there were more people on those stages than social distancing would presently allow, you know, at the early stage of those of those of that primary season. Yeah, there, there are, and listen, some of the most compelling people in the, in this campaign book are going to be the dropouts, the Pete Buttigieg is, the better war rourkes, Elizabeth Warren. I mean, these are some of the most, I mean, and that's obviously setting aside Bernie Sanders because he's going to kind of play a role in it, but yeah.

Remember when Julian Castro had that moment where he seemed to be bringing up Biden's sort of advanced age in the debate? Can you see a campaign book where you have that scene? And then you have one of Biden's advisors standing off stage and secretly admitting that he was worried about the same thing. Oh, yes. Right when that happens that that spoke to a lot of Biden donors or something. Well, is he right? Is Biden really ready to withstand the rigors of a campaign? I could totally see that.

Mm-hmm. I think one of the currencies of these books is what the candidates really thought about each other. So what Warren and Bernie really thought about each other is fascinating. What Biden really thought about each other is really fascinating. And then, you know, characters on down the line, Buttigieg, right? What everyone thought of Pete Buttigieg. And the way he ran his primary campaign, that's gold if you can get that. Yeah, for sure.

I mean, I think in some ways you kind of have to get it. I mean, you will get somebody saying something that will contribute to this, you know, I mean, that content will be there, whether or not it's the be all end all sort of version of this or whether or not it's even true. you're going to get some opinions or some second degree opinions between the candidates. And that brings me to another point, which is these books are always told through the eyes or almost always through the eyes of people that work on the campaigns rather than the candidates themselves, right? They are almost always the heroes of these books because reporters are depending on them for information. So also, what did a candidate staff think about him or her? that's a fascinating question.

What were their secret doubts? The Trump one is going to be just an absolute bonanza since Trump seemingly fired half the people that would be talking for this book or demoted them or something. Well, and I think that's where the Biden campaign staff is really going to have to come in really going to be interesting because if you just revisit the conversations

we've had on this podcast over the past year plus or whatever, I mean, so much of the Democratic primary occurred in Joe Biden's shadow, but, you know, his absence, right? I mean, he was, he spent the first, he spent the real formative, the formative parts of the Democratic primary weighing whether or not to get in, you know, and in retrospect, you can see the sort of deliberation in it. I mean, the deliberateness in it. But, you know, there were all those rumors about his decision-making process before he got in. And, and the people

close to him are the only ones that are going to really be able to say what's going on while all these other characters are filling the stage. A couple of other story beats, Boudidja, wins the delegate count in the Iowa caucuses, but doesn't win because it takes several days to figure it out. Yeah. And doesn't get the bump. That's good. That's good copy. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina representative endorsing Biden and saving his ass when it looked like he was just going to get completely thumped in the Democratic primary. We now know that he did that actually months earlier, but didn't announce it until this dramatic moment right before the primary.

Love to read about that. The Trump coronavirus. briefings in the spring, seem like a natural topic? Well, I think that you kind of go, I mean, I think you can cover the primaries kind of through South Carolina, whether South Carolina is its own chapter, yes. But I think right, I mean, that was what February, that was the last day of February, right? So that was right at that point is when you pivot hard to COVID. Because Trump, what, first addressed the nation on checks notes, March 11. So like, just a week and a half after the South Carolina primary. And at that point, it's sort of just, that's the, that is the only narrative that

really matters. Bernie Sanders dropped out a month later because of coronavirus. There's really nothing else. There was just not going to be another moment that mattered in the campaign as much as what was happening in reality, right? Trump's politics, Trump's, you're right, is press conferences, everything else. I'm sure there'll be a little like Cuomo parallel, even in the campaign book, which will take you in a nice little sidebar, nice tango. in. But Trump's, but, but I think part of what's interesting about this book in general, what this is a narrative in general, it's so real to me right now, is that Trump, every, every chapter, Trump is campaigning against somebody else, right? I mean, Trump was campaigning

against, against, you know, Pete Buttigieg in the primaries against Elizabeth Warren through most of the primary season, just kind of talking about Bernie Sanders like he hoped he was there, but there was a lot of tension in that direction. He was campaigning against Andrew Cuomo through, you know, through much of March and April. And then at the end, obviously, he wanted Bernie. He wanted Kamala Harris to be people who they weren't. He painted them as these hard lefty, you know, Antifa supporters or whatever. But sort of tracking Trump's eye or Trump's, you know, whatever he was targeting, I think is an interesting kind of sub-narrative here, too.

Absolutely. And I was going to go there next. Trump gassing the protesters near the White House on June 1st and then holding up the Bible outside the church. obvious scene for a book like this and certainly done as you point out through the viewpoint of why Donald Trump did that on that particular day what he would what had happened to lead him to that point that's a fascinating fascinating place to go yeah I mean the the the George Floyd inspired protests that swept the country are the you know then that's the next that's the next beat right the next really big beat obviously Trump's you know at the time it felt like gassing the

protesters, like so much it happened already by that point, but that really is the moment, right? I mean, just like, like I said, I mean, Trump, I'm looking at my timeline here. Trump first addressed the nation, you know, gave that fireside chat, whatever thing about coronavirus on what I just say, March 11th. And it was in a month and a half later that he made that in just like mind-boggling bleach comment, right? So there was so much Trump nonsense before he said drink bleach, but the drinking bleach kind of embodies

the whole thing, right? So that's backtracking a little bit. Similar thing about the George Floyd protest, this gassing the protesters was just that was the moment that really everything coalesced, you know? Another set piece in the same vein, Trump's June 20th rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which marked

his defiance of the virus. It was half full, Herman Kane died after that rally. And then Brad Parscale, who was Trump's initial campaign manager, was fired and partly connected to events like that. That certainly would be part of this. Also, David, point you to the crazy first yelling debate. That's an obvious scene, especially, again, to your point of, like, what was Donald

Trump thinking going into that debate? Why was that the strategy? You know, we know his contempt for Joe Biden, his contempt for democracy, et cetera, et cetera. But why did, why was that manifested through yelling and interrupting through the entire debate? I genuinely don't know that I quite understand that and kind of want to understand that in campaign book. I think so. I mean, I agree. I agree.

There's a couple of beats before the debate. And I think that, I mean, obviously, there's going to be a lot of anything you can get from Trump's mindset. And there will be many conflicting accounts, I'm sure. through a lot of this would be just incredibly compelling. So the first debate was what? Oh, that was the end of September. Right before that, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Oh, God.

I can't believe I forgot that. So that's got to be. And then at some, at that point, Kamala Harris is already on the ticket, too. Hold on, scrolling backwards here. August, August 11th, she joined the ticket. So, I mean, obviously Kamala Harris gets her chapter and becomes sort of increasingly important. as the campaign goes on in a lot of ways. But the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg for, you know, all it, I don't know how much it amounted to. I don't know how many votes that pulled in one

direction or the other. But that was certainly a huge moment, a huge kind of set piece for the book. And I forgot that earlier, too, the mending of the relationship between Biden and Harris after their debate confrontation. Obviously, that's a big part of this book too. And by the way, implicit, I mean, the specter behind all of that, obviously, is, is president. President Barack Obama, who has close relationships with both of them or is big fans of both of them. And to what degree he was really a part of Biden's brain trust, I think is really intriguing as well. Yeah. And that's another one of what Obama really thought of Joe Biden is a fascinating question. One, Alex Thompson came on this podcast to talk about.

Trump getting coronavirus, needless to say, election night becoming election week. and Trump, David, raging in silence, anyway, can't you see that being a great sort of final couple of chapters of the book? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that judging by, if assume, I mean, I don't know that my opinion on the Trump presidency or campaign or just era is going to change

between now and our, whatever the publisher sets is their due date for this. But it does seem like, you know, the longer we spend with Donald Trump, the more that our sort of preconceptions, a lot of them bear out to be true. And I think that the, entire narrative kind of start to finish in this is it was one thing four years ago to channel

the Trump the enthusiasm for Trump the Trump wave to sort of say we're going to figure out the best way to sort of polish this and write it to the finish line right it's another thing to try to run a quote unquote conventional campaign based around it and I think what you see is a lot of people just trying to manage Trump I mean you talked about the the Oklahoma rally right I mean it was that I mean, the real stories of that, really matter are the lies that Brad Parzcal and everybody else were telling Trump on the way in about, you know, about what the crowd size is going to be,

about how problematic coronavirus is going to be, about, you know, and then, of course, when they got kind of outwitted by K-pop stands on TikTok or whatever, I mean, there were all these sort of, just the ineptitude of the campaign, you know, balanced against Trump's unrealistic expectations and how much he's a cause of his campaign's own ineptitude.

When you get to the end, as you were just discussing, You know, when he gets coronavirus, he's bristling against his own advisors. You know, I mean, he's doing, he's kind of doing everything that they're telling him not to do. And maybe he was his best campaign consultant. That's always his contention. But certainly, the sources that you're going to get on the record are probably going to have a different opinion of that. Or off the record, sorry, you're going to have a different opinion of that. I feel like we know a lot about Donald Trump's day-to-day existence, thanks to great reporting of people like Olivia Nuzzi.

I feel I almost know nothing about Joe Biden's day-to-day existence during this campaign. Well, he was hiding in a basement, I think. Yeah, but don't you want to know what was going on in the basement? Yeah. And what was going on in his house? Like, I just don't feel, and maybe he's just such a straightforward dude that there's not just a lot of, you know, sort of nuance there. But that is something I would love for one of these books to fill in. Like, what was Joe Biden like during those months?

months and months when we barely saw him on the stump. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of, I mean, if you give, if you end up, I mean, if you give Biden all the credit in the world, the Biden campaign, all the credit in the world, there's still a lot of sort of poker in this whole thing, right? I mean, that they decided to stand Pat for months with the expectation that Trump was going to bust or, you know, whatever. I mean, they had a better hand.

I don't even know what the right metaphor is. But I mean, it was a really risky decision, even if it was the most deliberate and most ingenious decision that they could have made. So knowing what was going on there, again, even if they knew what they were doing, even if they were confident they were doing the right thing, those had to be some of the most tension-filled conversations.

You know, to meet with your campaign staff and just be like, all right, are we all, we're all in agreement that we're gonna do nothing? Okay, so we're gonna meet back here tomorrow and say the same thing, okay. call a lid, yeah. I think you solved the narrative tension problem. I think it's that, right?

And you remember they were questioned by no less than David Axelrod and David Pluff for that, which apparently really enraged Biden world. And they not only didn't send Joe Biden out to, they only kept Biden in the basement, so to speak, they didn't do door knocking and other basic sort of rights of campaigning. And that scared the hell out of a lot of Democrats. That's a good piece of narrative tension. I'd say the other one if there's another one is when the protest started, remember Donald Trump is doing everything he can to conflate Joe Biden's position with the position of some random guy Donald Trump saw on television who was, you know, doing something on TV. And Biden gate went and gave that big speech where he said, rioting is not protesting, looting is not protesting, setting fires is not protesting, none of this is protesting.

a big set piece speech in Pittsburgh, which was attempting to head off any, hey, Donald Trump would try to make out of that and try to confuse people. And by the way, I mean, this goes back to what we were just talking about. But I think there is some, I mean, there may have been a real power to that speech, partly because it wasn't one of a hundred Joe Biden speeches. I think we talked about this in the show, but like, you know, the sort of steady procession of like, here's my speech on foreign policy. Here's my speech on, you know, building highways. Here's my speech on workers' rights. You know, like in a traditional campaign, there are several of these big speeches. I remember Trump sort of willfully or not kind of did a bunch of, it gave some of these speeches four years ago and then always went off the rails and that became its own little news cycle.

But we, you know, we didn't see that much of Biden. So maybe when he made that speech, that made it more potent. I also had a friend who I was hashing us over with tell me. He goes, there's definitely going to be a mandatory sentence in all these, or maybe a chapter that begins from the moment Donald Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in 2015. Oh, yes. That sentence will appear in every single 2020 campaign book. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I don't know there's any way to avoid that sort of, I mean, listen, some of these sentences are going to write themselves.

Also, I think from the department of that's too obvious not to do it. I mean, doesn't every chapter just start with a Trump tweet as the sort of the sort of introductory, like the monogram of the chapter? Mm-hmm. That's good. A little chapterhead thing there. And then, I mean, I think that, yeah, I mean, a lot of this is going to be, a lot of what these books do, they do inform you a lot of everything that you didn't know and you get to see behind the scenes. But they also reinforce, they also remind you of the things that you knew and sort of enjoy it or the, you know, the moments and, you know, the moments. time that that that you recall and explain why they're you know why they're why they're why they're more

important than you knew or you know give you a chance to sort of laugh at them because you didn't get to enjoy it the first time around because it was so tension filled oh we can laugh again at the events of 2020 presidential campaign which seems so terrifying in the moment but what it was the last thing I mean listen we can talk about this forever we got to give this book a name right I mean right after the on the election night or election night podcast I suggested shenanigans. I don't know. I mean, just after that,

after Trump was, you know, claiming after his speech, whenever that was. But I don't know. I mean, what is the moment in this? Is this, what if you,

if someone was running a campaign book, what is it, is it called, is it too close to call? Is it, is it something with, is it a coronavirus thing? Is it,

is it just, you know, do we put Biden v. Trump at the top? I mean, like, like, what is that? Yeah. That's definitely in there.

I mean, shenanigans is good. I mean, shenanigans feels like a sort of comic romp. Like, you know, Jake Tapper would have written before he became a TV guy

through the election. Trumpisms. We're going to work out. Any suggestions for the title of the 2020 campaign book? Write us at the press box pod. We would love to get them. David's special guest on this edition of the show,

Reeves Whiteman. We always look forward to seeing his byline in New York magazine about all kinds of subjects. He's written a book about WeWork. You don't know anything about WeWork, Digger, David. No, I definitely don't get emails from them every day. No, no, you don't.

Here's Reeves Whiteman. They don't pay you extra to report on startups, but maybe they should. Because for his new book, Reeves Whiteman spent the last 18 months documenting a businessman's love of tequila shots, pondering the mysteries of Kabbalah, and quoting proclamations like I'm competing against work. All of that is in his new book, Billion Dollar Loser, the Epic Rise and Fall of WeWork, which is so good, I gobbled it down in 24 hours this weekend. Reeves is here to talk about it. Thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you for having me, Brian. So when I heard you were doing a book, I thought,

is it going to be about that haunted house in New Jersey, wrote about in New York Magazine? Is it going to be about the failed vacation mecca Tulum? Why did you pick WeWork for the book? Well, we still haven't figured out who the watcher is in New Jersey. And I do, I get that question a lot. And I do want to assure everyone who read that story that once I know, the rest of the world will know. Yeah, I mean, I had, was not expecting when I wrote this story for New York Magazine to turn this into a book. There have been opportunities at various points to pursue something. It's never quite made sense.

When I first wrote about WeWork in the spring of 2019, things were still like kind of flying high for the company. And it really wasn't until things collapsed very swiftly that it felt like it was a pretty wild ride to be able to document and then be kind of a story that seemed to have a little bit of significance beyond all the tequila shots as kind of the era of the Adam Neumann. when WeWork story came to an end alongside sort of what felt like kind of maybe the final gasps of sort of this era of sort of startup excess that WeWork was a part of. Little did I know that a pandemic would come along and really put an end to all of that. But that was at least the thinking last fall. So by that point you have a rise, you have a fall. And then as you say, you have this bigger story of what the hell happened in the 2010s

with startup culture and unicorn culture, as we call it. Yeah, and that had been kind of what I had spent the last few years reporting on. I used to be a sports reporter way back in a previous life. I know. God, you got out of that racket. No, thank goodness. I am very relieved not to be a sports writer these days, I think especially so. But, you know, it was sort of a not entirely intentional transition for.

me from doing a lot of sports writing to writing about these kind of crazy, uh, fast-growing startups from, from Uber to rap genius to vice media and eventually WeWork that kind of became sort of my, my beat over the past few years. So WeWork was started in 2010 by Adam Newman, who was this self-created businessman. What was the vision Newman was selling and why was it so potent at that period of time? Yeah. I mean, you know, it's interesting to think about this moment sort of now, but this was just after the financial crisis, you know, everything was kind of shifting and changing. People had been getting laid off from their jobs. People were kind of sick and tired of working for big corporations that had just, some of whom had just kind of blown up the economy.

So there was this very appealing sort of sales pitch of like, you know, go out on your own, be a freelancer, start a company. This was kind of the early days of this startup boom. And we'll take care of the space. Come, come work in this well-designed loft space in lower Manhattan. We'll have good coffee. We'll have beer. You'll meet all your neighbors. And your day at work will be fun. And I think, especially in the early days of WeWork, that was true. Like, it was kind of the cool place to go work or to go visit your friends who had office space there. So, you know, that was kind of the sort of big picture sort of sexy appeal of the company. And that's a lot of the The basics was, we'll give you a flexible lease.

If you want to get out of it tomorrow, you can, which was not what you could get anywhere else. And is something people would even be more interested in now, I suspect. But those were the two basic pitches, is flexibility and the beer keg, where you can meet a bunch of new friends. The first we work space is at 154 Grand Street in Soho. we just, what did that space look like? Yeah, I wouldn't visit it about a year ago.

I mean, it's a very narrow, you know, kind of Soho brick building. The elevator, you know, I think we put this stat in the book, but literally to get up six floors, it took something like 52 seconds. Like it was just this old, old building. You know, they had to clear out what was basically kind of like a Craigslist hotel off-the-market apartments before then. And what they did is they took this space and they put these glass cubes that have kind of become now sort of the signature we work space and kind of a signature part of the sort of new office landscape over the decade. And it was just kind of these row after row after row of of these glass boxes that were practical in some ways. The idea was we have this brick building.

It does have windows, but it's not like a big glass office tower. And we want to give people some combination of light and privacy. So that's what they were there for. And then it was otherwise just kind of narrow hallways and not a drop ceiling. You just see like the wiring going through the ceiling and all around the building. So really kind of unfinished sort of a DIY kind of aesthetic, which was also pretty popular at the time. Yeah, you had this great line. The exposed brick and 100-year-old floorboards were aesthetic kitty litter for a newly displaced workforce,

skeptical of artifice and craving authenticity. Yeah, people wanted it. It was, it was cool. And it's, it's easy to kind of like, kind of take a dump on the company now, given what happened. But, but very early on, they tapped into it. And a key part of the whole thing was branding. And that was a key part of the company's rise in a variety of ways. And they sort of latch them on to something that people really wanted. Part of the fun here, it seems to me, is discovering and then describing WeWork's corporate culture. What was that culture life? What was that culture like. I mean, the shorthand people would use was that it was a little bit of a cult.

And that's something that, you know, again, is kind of repeated as I've written about these companies. They have this charismatic founder in Adam Newman. You get the, there were sort of, there were kind of two groups of people who came to WeWork. There were obviously, well, I guess one group was sort of the friends and family of Adam Newman, which is how any of these companies gets off the ground. There were young college, just out of college, sort of young workers who, this was kind of great to go to a company where

the founders up there on the one hand telling you, we're changing the world, we're changing the world. This was at a time when millennials, young people really wanted their work to have some kind of meaning and purpose to it. And then at the same time, he's serving tequila shots and giving out stock options, all of which, if you're a young employee, you're not totally sure that this isn't normal, that not every company is like this. And then on the flip side, especially as the company grew, you had kind of a group of people who joined the company in the middle of their careers in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and they were bored. They were in jobs that were kind of ho-hum. They'd gotten to a point in their career. And they were not people who were in the tech world,

where you could join one of these unicorns. And then suddenly here's a company in real estate where everyone looks like they're having a good time, the chance to get rich off of these stock options that just keep getting more and more valuable was there. And so all of this was sort of appealing to that group of people as well. And so both of those groups kind of got in there and the cult aspect sort of what people described to me over and over

was you would get there for a year, months and it would be the time of your life. And then at some point, whether it was because you were working 80, 90 hours a week or because suddenly Adam said something that was like a little crazier than what you were used to, you sort of started to realize that maybe something was a miss here. Was it the cult-like properties of the company? Did that make you decide to call him Adam in the book more than Newman? Yeah, well, we did think about that. Yeah, you're the first person to ask about that. We did decide to call him by his first name because everyone at the company did. It wasn't like he was Mr. Newman or whatever, but it was just kind of a company where whether you were a

community manager at the bottom of the chain or you were one of his executives, he was Adam. And it was just kind of a one name, you know, share or Ronaldo kind of thing. Two New York Times reviews made this point and I completely felt the same way as I was reading the book, which is you could have hit the reader with a lot of Newman absurdity from page one, but it really felt like you had your foot halfway down on the gas pedal, and you were ladling that out. What was the thinking and parceling out all the very, very odd details of him and his wife? Yeah, I think there's two parts of it. One is kind of like, and this is definitely a case where, like, reality is stranger than fiction, and you don't need to exaggerate it, I don't think. You can kind of just let Adam do the talking and you don't

need a lot of editorializing for me, I think, to sort of understand what's going on. I think the other part of it, which I do think is crucial to understanding the story, is Adam was saying pretty crazy things from the beginning, and you could kind of unfurl that from the get-go and sort of think, oh, this thing was a joke from the beginning. But he built a company that was theoretically worth $47 billion that raised $10 billion from some of the smartest investors in the world that expanded all over the world. And I do think there is a certain amount of credit due. And there's a certain way where you can read, I think, part of this book and kind of see it as a little bit of a how-to. I don't think, I don't want people

to do that. But I do think there's a level at which Adam was successful for a long time. And you do have to acknowledge kind of why that worked in order to then explain kind of how things went awry and where the craziness became a bit too much by the end. You nodded that a little bit in the last chapter, because I feel people are going to read this book like they watched the movie Scarface. You're saying, this is a cautionary tale, but somebody's going to read this, but this is an aspirational tale because he got a lot of people to give him billions and billions of dollars.

How does that make you feel as an author? It makes me, I mean, I spent some time thinking about this, especially once the pandemic happened, and it really felt like this era was over. and we're about to start a new one. We're about to start a new one in the same way that we came out of the financial crisis. There will be sort of new Adam Newman's

in various fields starting new companies. What I hope they take out of this is a recognition that yes, and we quoted some people in the book. Like, you know, everyone who runs a startup wants to get rich. We have different levels and some people, maybe one way

to think about how to shoot for your, goals is like, do you really need to be a billionaire? Wouldn't it be okay to be a hundred millionaire? Do you need to get into not only office space, but also starting an elementary school and opening a gym and having a wave pool arm of your business? Like, that there, you know, we want to be ambitious and there's ways in which that's an important part of any company. But I think there's also, there has to be a sort of recognition that if you pursue that kind of world-spanning growth. There are many more, there are only so many tales of Adam Neumans, of a total collapse. There are only so many tales of Jeff Bezos's who actually do it. There's a lot

of other tales of people who just kind of flame out. And I just hope people sort of take at least some of that lesson that there's a lot of ways this can go wrong with pretty stark consequences. So we've all been reading a lot about business people like Elizabeth Holmes. And when you read about her, there's this B story that shows how the journalists were taken in by her just like the investors. Sure. As you put together the book, how did you find reporters covered the WeWorks story, especially early on? Yeah, I think that is a key part of this. There are, I should say, up front, there were a lot of reporters who did really great work.

I think Elliot Brown at the Wall Street Journal has covered this story for a long time and critically and did the best that he could to sort of get into the finance of it. Bloomberg has done some great reporting along the way as well. And I came into this story relatively late. I do think there's another part of any of these companies where you, on the way up, WeWork was the disruptor. Wework was doing something new.

There is a part of the media ecosystem that just loves someone who is claiming to do something differently. They love a character like Adam, who, yes, is a little bit crazy. but when you're on the way up, that's an asset, not a liability. And I don't think this is one of those situations where you blame the media for this, but it certainly could have been more critical along the way. And I think it's worth sort of thinking about in what ways we have kind of pumped up both these founders

who seem like once in a generation visionaries, who we sort of want to believe are changing these various industries. and a certain amount of skepticism, I think, in the way that we cover those companies would be a good thing. And Newman had a good sense of what the media wanted out of a character like him?

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, you know, I only met him once, but he was clearly just the type of person who he never quite answered my questions. He answered the question the way he wanted to answer it. He knew how to sort of dominate a room. You know, I talked to executives who had,

Adam had this tick. He was constantly holding meetings in cars and on his private jet with his executives and overlapping meetings, kind of like any classic executive. And several told me about sitting in the back of his Maybach while he would be talking to some reporter somewhere. And it was clear they were just kind of eating it up. And so he was just clearly someone who could charm all kinds of people and journalists as much as he, as investors or anyone else. So you published your first story about this in June 2019. Yep. The headline, the very good headline, I should add.

It was the I and we. Congrats to whomever wrote that one. It wasn't me, but I was very happy with it, and we thought about it as the book title, but it's pretty clever. And what was Newman's reaction to that story? Don't know. Never got word from him. They fought, they being WeWork, fought very tooth and nail leading up to that,

claiming certain things that we were reporting weren't true or weren't the full context or whatever. They fought pretty hard and then we didn't hear much afterwards. And, you know, I mean, that headline was, it was there because we didn't go into this story thinking Adam was the story. We thought WeWork was the story. It was suddenly this company was growing so big. And then there was just no way to separate the good stuff and the bad stuff about WeWork from Adam, the titular. I and we. So you fight them tooth and nail over these various details or they're pushing back on it. And then the story comes out and then a few months later you get to do this where you go back

to them and it's like, well, I don't know how you felt about that story, but now I'm doing a whole book about you guys. Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, you know, I went back and wrote a second piece sort of after the IPO as the IPO was collapsing after Adam was ousted. It was sort of night and day in some ways in getting people. to talk to me. Suddenly people who were very resistant to put stories on the record were pissed off that they weren't getting the big payday that they thought. They were annoyed with Adam.

They weren't as scared as they were and they were more willing to talk. And that went for all kinds of people within WeWork and outside the company. I don't think WeWork was for, well, I was the least of their concerns in the fall. But certainly like there is, there is, And to go back to sort of the earlier point, it is really hard reporting on these companies when they're on the way up. No one is incentivized to talk about them in a negative way for a variety of reasons. And unfortunately, it becomes easier to tell all these stories once there are some dense in the armor and things sort of start to take a down swing. It's hard because they're private, so it's hard to look under the hood. And I think you've mentioned this in the book, too.

People were happy at that early stage to talk to you about WeWorks culture, which they thought was broken in some way. But they still all expected to get paid. So they didn't have a lot of incentive to tell you, hey, this is not, you know, the money is not adding up here. Yeah, you know, they would be happy to tell me the stories about this is, you know, there's a lot of, I'm surprised how many tequila shots I've been asked to take while I've been at this company, but getting at the actual numbers.

And even people who were skeptical and had reason were willing to express some kind of skepticism, if they were within the company, they didn't want to. They didn't, you know, they were kind of like, let's get to this finish line. Let me go get whatever my payday is going to be. And I just don't, I don't want to risk that. Here's a practical question. How do you write a book in 18 months? Well, not a lot of sleep or socializing.

The good news is that of having to do this in the forced isolation of quarantine. is that I didn't have many excuses for other things that I would be doing. So it was not easy and very stressful at various points, but the secret to doing it is being willing to stare at your laptop for very long stretches of time. One more question on Newman, when we talk about this thin line between hero and villain, do you have a sense at this point whether he considers himself a failure or a success? I mean, that's sort of, yeah, one of these tensions where we don't know exactly how much money he got away with after leaving the company, but it's going to be hundreds of millions of dollars. He built a thing that everybody knows about for better or worse. I do get the sense that he recognized how that things went wrong and that he was in some way responsible for that. I don't think he would go so far to say that he is a failure. The company still exists.

It may or may not survive the pandemic, just like everyone else, may or may not survive this. But I don't think he would see himself as a failure. I do think he would see some lessons learned. And I do think he's going to get another chance to do something. I don't know exactly when it's going to happen. I think he probably needs to lay low for a little bit, but I suspect there's going to be people willing to back a tall and charismatic

man trying to do something again once he decides to. I can't imagine such a thing happening in tech world or even tech journalism for that matter. Yeah, there's, I mean, you know, Adam being 6'5 and his co-founder being a 6-8 former college basketball player at the University of Oregon, I think are not insignificant parts in this story. Early in your career, you're in fact checker at the New Yorker. Yeah. that's a popular starting place.

Did you have a plan to get out of the fact-checking pit when you were there? I don't know if I had a plan. You know, I got there, but in some ways, I guess a plan sort of developed. You know, I had come there as I mentioned, kind of as a sports writer early in my career. And so I kind of carved out a little bit of a spot doing sports and writing. I actually started, I think my first piece I ever wrote for, you know, New Yorker.com back when it was only sort of a bare bones website was going and cover the Yankees World Series in 2009 and just asking if I could go do it. And from there, it kind of spiraled into

me doing more kind of sports stuff for the website and eventually kind of getting into the magazine doing that. So it was, I was at that point sort of interested in writing about other things, but I definitely saw sports as a path for me to kind of get into the magazine. And it was how I, I frankly, I think got my fact-checking job because there are a lot of extremely smart people in that department with advanced degrees and who speak multiple languages. But if you don't know what a three-two count in baseball is, and Roger Angel has that in his story, it's going to take you a long time to figure that out. Oh, I've been making a living off that for years. Let me tell you. They don't teach you that at the Ivy's.

It's true. Exactly. You got to go to a state school to get that kind of education. I always like to ask journalists as they're coming up, who their guy or gal was that they looked at and said, I might not want to be exactly like them, but I want to be as good as them. Dwight Garner gave me Edwin Pope of the Miami Herald somewhat unexpectedly last week. Who was your guy or gal? You know, an interesting sort of, I grew up in Kansas City,

and the two columnists of the Kansas City Star when I was growing up were Joe Posnansky and Jason Whitlock. Jason Whitlock, I loved to read back when he was. was flowing, throwing various flames at the Kansas City Chiefs when they were not very good in the 90s. I didn't necessarily want to be Jason. I did sort of gravitate more towards Pazanansky writing about the glories of the game and the sort of wonderful characters.

So those were sort of when I was young, those were the people I wanted to be, and that was the job I wanted, you know, when I was sort of graduating school in the 2000s, when that was still kind of a dream. And I sort of, just as I entered the working world, those jobs really started to kind of dry up. So my dream had to shift a little bit.

You published a piece last week about the internecine battles of the New York Times, which I wanted to ask you about since we are nominally a media podcast. Yeah, let's do it. A reporter put it to you like this. The fundamental schism at the Times is institutionalist, versus insurrectionist. Yep. What do those two terms mean

in terms of a newspaper, like the Times? Yeah, I think the institutionalist, I mean, the Times is an institution, you know, in the same way at the Metropolitan Museum is an institution or Harvard is an institution. It is just this kind of old guard place that has sort of a position in our society

and serves a function that we all sort of vaguely are aware of, and there are people that want to protect that. And that for the Times is that the Times is the paper of record. The Times is the place for objective journalism, nonpartisan, down the middle reporting. And there are people there who have long felt very protective of that as various changes have happened. Resisting a website, resisting reporters having Twitter feeds. and then sort of, you know, more recently in the last few years, resisting the impulse to be part of the resistance to Donald Trump, essentially. And there have been, you know, various calls, often, frankly, from outside the building for the times to be more oppositional at this sort of particular moment in history that just feels unprecedented.

There are people who very strongly feel that the Times should not do that. There's another group, and, you know, the insurrectionists, as this reporter put it, it's not necessarily sort of along ideological lines. And that's, I think, a lot of the talk has been, and even some of the talk after the article came out was sort of, oh, there's this group of just young, kind of woke ideologues there who are trying to push particular agendas. Whereas I think, in some ways, what's happened is you just have a sort of group of people who are less beholden to the institution. They do share some of the values. They don't share the same sort of training that has traditionally gone into being at the Times,

which is you went to journalism school and then you worked at the Kansas Star and then the Chicago Tribune and then eventually got to the Times. They're coming to the paper from all kinds of different places, whether that's digital outlets or not even or advocacy journalism or just kind of different places. And then all the tech people who've joined the company as well. So, and they just, you know, as kind of one of them put it to me, it wasn't their dream to work there since they were a kid. And they don't necessarily think that they're going to work there forever. And they don't see the New York Times as their sort of project of protecting it. And so while they are respectful and obviously love the paper in all kinds of ways, they're not going to sort of look the other way if they feel like some of the things the paper has traditionally done don't necessarily serve what it's doing now. this cultural schism is incredibly fascinating to media reporters to anybody who doesn't work at the Times but reads at times.

Did you get a sense when you're doing this piece how big a problem the people that run the paper consider this to be versus all the other things they're dealing with? There's a lot of things they're dealing with. The good news for the New York Times, unlike a lot of media outlets, is they are doing very well financially. They have more subscribers than ever. They have more cash than ever. So there is a sense that what they're doing is working. I think figuring out what the time should be in the Trump era has been very difficult in all kinds of ways. And setting that just general daily difficulty of how do we cover a president and an administration that is doing things we've never seen before.

I do think they take this very seriously. And I think the sort of thrust of the piece is that all these things are very complicated. And it is something that a lot of media organizations are doing with down to the granular level of of Slack. And how do we all communicate to each other on Slack when suddenly Dean Beké, the executive editor of the paper, is in the same Slack channel as an app developer who's working on the crossword app. And they're sort of talking to each other and trying to come to some consensus of what the times

is. So I do think the powers of B, I mean, I know this from talking to them, that they take this very seriously, I don't know that they, I don't think they know all the solutions at this point. But I do think, especially, you know, in a post-Trump world, whenever that is, there will be some time where they're going to have to kind of do some soul-searching and figure out how exactly to solve some of these things. Speaking of post-Trump, for the last four years, it felt like the New York Times hired literally every reporter, especially in Washington.

least the ones that didn't go to the Atlantic. A friend of mine just the other day just told me they just got hired. So it's still happening. Do they have a sense that they can continue to go forward at this level of staffing post-Trump? We've gotten spoiled, right? There's just tons of news. It's all day. There's more than enough for everybody to cover.

Can they be this big after Donald Trump leaves office if he leaves office? I think they can. And there is a level at which they, have benefited, as I think we say in the piece, more than maybe, it's hard to think of many companies that have benefited more from the Trump era. That being said, we are currently living through a global pandemic. We just had a horrible fire season that we've all forgotten about that will probably be back. Climate change is not going away. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not going away, clearly in one way or another. And so I do think that for better or worse,

as much as we all might like to have a slow news cycle. I think that's going to continue. And what The Times has really done is taken whatever sort of Trump bump they got. And they've really consolidated it into being the paper of record on everything from not just politics, but the environment. It's the place you turn to, you know, along with others, obviously. But for your new, your coronavirus news, they do good sports coverage. They do good arts coverage.

A big crossword app, again, has. has a crossword and cooking apps have more than a million subscribers alone paying subscribers. So they have successfully sort of expanded into all these other areas. And I do think that, you know, I don't know how much more they're going to grow because the paper is bigger than it's ever been just in terms of staffing. But I do think that people are going to continue to turn to the times for more and more, more and more things. All right, Reeves Whiteman's book is Billion Dollar Loser.

The Epic Rise and Fall of Wework will anxiously await the fall. follow up on the haunted house in New Jersey as soon as you do some more reporting. As soon as we solve it, I'll get working on it. Thanks for coming out of the press box, Reeves. Thanks, Brian. All right, it's time for David Shoemaker. Guesses the strain pun headline. All right.

Thursday's headline about cooking chickens in a yellow stone hot springs was a foul of the law. We thought our listeners could do better, and they did, David. We got votes for sinner-sinner chicken dinner. It's pretty great. And most wonderfully, from both Nim and Gautus Nixon, foul boil, foul boil. Process that in your head and you will realize it's genius. Today's headline comes from Aaron Watman. What?

The Aaron Watman? Our old pal Aaron Watman. Oh, my God. It's from the New York Times. It's a piece about data science coming to high school football. since there is only one cut and paste headline for any high school football story, that's all I'm going to tell you. What was the New York Times' strain pun headline? Is it Friday night lights?

Is that where I'm going with this? Yeah. Friday night. Friday Friday. God, save her. Science. Friday night. Data.

Let's say rhymes with lights. dead tight guys fights fights bites maybe kind of an older word for computers an older term you would think

for computers and data like something from the 80s bites bites bites Friday night b y b yt yes Friday night bites is correct amazing

he is david chumaker i'm bright kirtis researched by chris almeda production magic by erika cervantes Thursday we're going to talk about barack Obama's new 700 plus page memoir

our pal Claire McNier is here to talk about Jeopardy, plus of course more lukewarm takes on the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.