The Ryen Russillo Podcast - QB Career Over/Unders, Jonathan Vilma, Plus WeWork With Authors Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

Episode Date: October 6, 2021

Russillo and Ceruti predict the trajectories of a few young quarterbacks by comparing them to veteran QBs (i.e., Baker Mayfield and Alex Smith) (1:08). Then Ryen talks with Super Bowl champion and Fox NFL analyst Jonathan Vilma about the Giants' overtime win over the Saints, expectations for the Chargers after beating the Raiders on Monday night, Myles Garrett's dominance on the defensive side of the ball, Vilma's Urban Meyer conspiracy theory, and more (15:40). Next, Ryen talks with journalists Maureen Farrell and Eliot Brown about their book, 'The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion' (48:20), before Ryen answers some listener-submitted Life Advice questions (1:23:10). Host: Ryen Russillo Guests: Jonathan Vilma, Eliot Brown, and Maureen Farrell Producers: Kyle Crichton and Steve Ceruti Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, everybody? I'm J.J. John G. Stramski. And I'm Jason Goff, and if you haven't heard, the ringer has gone local. I'm bringing the fire, I'm bringing the rain from the Big Apple with my show, New York, New York. And I'm repping Chi-Town with my new show, The Full Goal on all things Chicago. We've got episodes three nights a week with all the reaction of the local teams and guests. Plus bonus episodes around all the big games and storylines. So whether you're uptown, downtown, in the burbs, or a transplant, make sure you follow New York, New York, and the full go on Spotify

or wherever you get your podcasts. One month in, we're going to talk with Jonathan Vilma Fox. He did the Giants and Saints game, but we're also going to talk a little bit about Urban Meyer and what that is like in the locker room. Good stories out of that. We got a new game from Cerruti, quarterback career over-unders, and WeWork.

It's a company you've probably seen wherever you're walking in a major city, but there's a book about the place, and let's just say it was an awesome book, and we've got both authors on and life advice as always before we talk to Vilma this is Cerruti's idea and I love it now back in the old radio show days we did a segment with NBA players where it was like Chris Paul Dwight Howard it was the best players in the league and it was when they were still like in their primes this is pre Dwight in the Orlando disaster and all that stuff so you think about the players going back

I don't know seven eight years Mello would have been one of them Derek Rose and we did an over under on how many NBA championship rings each of those guys would have so you'd set the number at a half for somebody but if somebody was like really good you may say LeBron like we'll set it at two and a half like can he get three more rings and maybe after the first or second one

they do one because I don't remember the exact year that we did it. But when you're doing it in that time, you know, you always are kind of thinking more positively about the player. So when we say like half a ring for Chris Paul, and at that point, I'm like, well, he's going to get one at some point. Now, Dwight ended up getting his,

but there's a bit of a stipulation in it where you'd say you kind of have to be one of the main guys. You can't like show up at the end, where if you had a half and said Mello over, if he gets one with the lake this year that's not really the exercise but the point of it is is that we were always so positive all the time and when i go back and think about the names and how we set the over unders almost everybody went under so you have an idea that we're going to do with young quarterbacks right now and instead of rings

which would be really probably a waste of time and And who knows, this might end up being a waste of time, but I love the idea. So you'd give me the idea and then we're going to run through the young quarterbacks and kind of use how we're making this the same thing. Yeah, basically, I've got seven guys that, you know, we've seen a couple of rookies, but most of them are second or third year players who I think we kind of think we know who they are. And I'm going to give you a player, a real life comp. So either a current other quarterback or like a guy that played in the past. And you tell me whether or not if this guy has that career,

whether or not that's a success or a failure. Yeah, right. So it's kind of like, all right, the rookies we don't know enough about. So for a couple of the rookies, it'll be an absurd exercise. And the fun part will be to revisit this, whether it's the end of the season or even later beyond. Because that's when you're really like, wow, we actually thought that. Because in the moment, my guess will be the reaction to this is that I'm too negative. Or excuse me, not that I'm too negative in that the audience will be like, no way, that guy's going to be way better than that.

And I'm going to be kind of like, no, that'd actually be pretty good. So I don't know if that's actually negative or positive. So whatever. Let's just go to it. We've got seven guys here. All right. First one, Baker Mayfield. My comp for him, his career comp, Alex Smith.

Success or failure? Well, we all know that I'm not the biggest Alex Smith guy. But Alex Smith is still good enough to be a starter in this league for a long time. Took three teams to the playoffs. I think the comp is like, if you've got players around him, he can be good. But if you don't, he can't be good. He can't carry you. I always think quarterbacks are a bit like dating, where if you're New England, your standard is a lot higher than, say, Chicago. You know, Chicago just loves somebody to play the position for a bunch of years in a row.

If he's great, great. But, you know, Chicago is the guy in the relationship that's like my ex does meth and pawn my car. And New England is the guy in the relationship being like, yeah, you know, my last my last girlfriend, you know, was a dancer in Majorca. And, you know, we used to travel the world together, you know, so like his his standard is different. So for Cleveland to have an Alex Smith and if that's Baker. Now, see, I know exactly what everybody's going to say. Well, Baker, number one pick like no way that would you know, Baker's been bad this year. Last year, it felt like he was starting to turn things around a little bit.

It's only a month in. I'm not now going to say that he's bad. I have no idea what you're supposed to do with that contract because really it's a matter of timing and not even who you are. Anytime anybody gets mad about the quarterback contracts and what a guy is or isn't getting, it's like, I don't know. If he's the most recent to sign, he's going to be a starter

for the next five years or projected that. He's usually going to get a super contract and you're allowed to discount it down. I would say if Baker ends up being Alex Smith, that's actually a success. I'm serious. I know most people would be like,

that'd be a huge disappointment. I think it's a success. I think people in Cleveland are going to tell you that that's too low, but I think most people around the league would say, yeah, I don't know, because you're right. He's not even a top-half quarterback. I don't even think he's close to that right now. Cleveland right now is 15th and third down percent conversion, again

a month in. They were 8th last year. He was 10th in QBR last season. QBR does a decent job with it. He's 26th. We'll see how the rest of the year goes. I know that's not what Browns fans want because I would argue that yes, Alex Smith

got teams in the playoffs. He also got benched twice by guys. If Cleveland could upgrade, they would upgrade, but fans want because I would argue that yes Alex Smith got teams in the playoffs he also got benched twice you know by guys like you know you don't draft Cleveland could upgrade they would upgrade but you know I mean like it's the same way for Alex Smith Alex Smith got upgraded because they had Patrick Holmes and Colin Kaepernick and they were clearly better quarterback options available if Cleveland had that in the building

they would upgrade but that they're kind of stuck with him right now he's the best they could do no but they're probably going to pay him and then they're not going to take a guy in the first round immediately. That's what happened to Alex Smith. I would say success because if you're Cleveland, it's not about we need a top five guy. If Baker's good enough to be the starter for 10 years, that might be the best you can do with him. I still think it's a little early this season to start looking at these numbers and write them off, but it just hasn't been good.

It hasn't been good at least for this year. All right, next one. What if Tua Tungvaluwa had Jay Cutler's career? That was his peak. Are you serious? I'd take it right now. Okay. And I was not the biggest Cutler guy when he was in Chicago. Towards the end, I think I started to become more of a Cutler guy as it got worse because I just go, this guy's getting destroyed back there.

Destroyed. And we can talk about, oh, he had a million different coordinators. Usually, the reason you have a million different coordinators is the quarterback's not working out. So I went from believing in Cutler to going, this is too many mistakes, to then having sympathy for him because I thought he was going to die in a game. Tua started 11 of 20 games for Miami. We still don't have enough. The early returns are not good. I thought he was going to die in a game. Tua started 11 of 20 games for Miami. We still don't have enough. The early returns are not good.

We can chalk up last season to COVID and everything. Okay, that's fine. I'll let you use it as an excuse. He got knocked out real early in the second game here. If he could beat Cutler, that's a win because the start of the Tua story is a really bad few chapters. It's not great. That was actually probably one of the hardest ones that I to nail down

a comparison for because I love that. It doesn't look good, but and people don't like Cutler, but Cutler was actually OK. He was an OK. I mean, you know, he's OK numbers

and both of them are kind of flashy. I mean, these aren't like I'm not trying to do comps as far as like how they play, like exactly their style of play. It's more of like where they were in the league

and their standing as far as like, you know, you know, tiers of where they are in the league. But I'm with you. I think that would be a success too. Next one. This is my favorite one. This is the one that made me think of this entire segment.

Mac Jones, Kirk Cousins. I swear, I think you're picking every guy. I think you're messing with me more on this than anything else. If Mac Jones is Kirk Cousins, that's a win. It's a win. Okay? Because my default is 50% of the first rounders suck. All right? Like all these guys

that we're talking about, half of them are going to be on a different team and then never start for anyone else. Unless we get really, really lucky. The numbers don't always have to work out that way, but that's the way they do work out. As much as I don't like Kirk Cousins, and he limits you in some of those moments, the third and seven and longer,

and I've got to go ahead and look it up because I was looking up Lamar's stuff. His numbers on that are terrible on pass attempts. I think he's two for 20 on third, seven, and more, but it hasn't really mattered because they're winning games and they could be undefeated. So when I look at Cousins' numbers, we all know how i feel about him on you know the short of the sticks i wish somebody would keep track of short of the sticks on third and fourth down short of the sticks and

a guy that you're throwing to that has two defenders on him like not hey short of the sticks make a move and and it's yak here it's short of the sticks and you have no chance, but here's the ball. Carr had a couple of those on Monday night too. Kirk Cousins is still good enough. If you're Mac Jones, that works out. Now, every New England fan is going to say,

absolutely not. I'm totally wrong about this because your standard, again, you had the girlfriend in Mallorca, all right? Not the meth addict. No offense, respectfully. All right. Not the meth addict. No offense. Respectfully.

All right. Next one. Daniel Jones. Ryan Fitzpatrick. Oh, man. Three weeks ago, I would have said, yeah, great. But who is Ryan Fitzpatrick?

He is somebody that puts up numbers certain weeks because no one gives less of a fuck about a challenged completion. That's the Ryan Fitzpatrick story. That's why he has these massive peaks and valleys throughout one season because he's just going to get out there and sling it.

He doesn't care. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And everybody moves on from him. If five teams have moved on from you, that tells me in the building when they're breaking down the film, they're like, we have to do better than this. Now, having said all that, as much as I may be down on Daniel Jones and I'm having an open mind over these last few weeks, that's not going to be good enough for Daniel Jones, even though he may end up being the kind of guy that people bring in and be like, oh, we can fix him. You know, the Darnold thing alone

may open up the door for more and more people going, you know, and that's kind of the Tannehill thing. Who knows what happens with Darnold the rest of the year, but it's just kind of weird. It's like, hey, we have a guy in the building, but we took him high and he hasn't been good for three or four years, but we don't want to be embarrassed, so we'll just keep him around. I don't know if that's how the Daniel Jones thing will break out. Just the last three weeks alone should make everybody feel better, but I think you have to be better than a journeyman guy that comes in when you have injury problems, basically, is who Fitzpatrick is.

What if I bumped it up another level? What if I said Teddy Bridgewater? I'm actually not quite sure how different Teddy Bridgewater and Fitzpatrick are. I think Teddy goes between underrated and overrated every month for me because there's some numbers you dig in and you're like, Teddy, that's great. I actually think that Teddy and Fitzpatrick are very similar as far as when you have Daniel Jones, even if he ends up being the 20th best quarterback,

let's say that, 20th best. That's not what you're hoping for if you're a Giants fan. The problem with being the 20th best quarterback let's say that 20th best all right that's not what you're hoping for if you're a Giants fan the problem with being the 20th best and then getting that second contract is you go we can do better than 20th best like you always want to upgrade that even if it's better than the third you should just go to the draft at that point like what's the point of having that guy I'd rather be bad to be honest with you I'd rather be bad and try to get another bite at the apple with the draft um that's that's why you're a hinky guy yeah you're a hinky guy you'd be like trust the process let's go You bring in Peyton Hillis to play quarterback and be like, what are you talking about? The thing with Daniel Jones, though, is I could see him starting for like half a dozen teams, but he's never going to be the guy.

He's always just a guy for teams that don't have quarterbacks. All right. Next one. Justin Fields. Ryan Tannehill. It's so early on Fields. I mean, we're talking about two games here. Tannehill's a weird one because the numbers are massive.

Nobody would ever confuse him with a top five quarterback. Hasn't been great this year. Whatever. I'm not going to start worrying about it. The first week of October. That's not enough. That's not enough. So that would be...

Did you have any other ones for fields? I feel like this one's out too obvious, but Cam Newton. All right. The, the exercise remember isn't, Hey, do you get to a Superbowl and he wins MVP?

It's does he have Cam Newton's career? Cam's career is complicated. It's a really peak outlier year surrounded by a lot of other years where I just don't think he was as good as people made him out to be because physically we were so impressed with him. Fields being Cam Newton, the passer and decision maker and the lack of

adjustments and reads at the line and Cam now has admitted this stuff that most of us saw for a long time that there were real limitations with him running your offense. I'd rather be Tannehill even though I not like the biggest Tannehill guy than Cam. And I think most again, I feel like this entire exercise was setting myself up to be disagreed with by the majority. It's too early on him. So I got two left.

Let's do this. Let's do these quick. Justin Herbert. Now, this one, everybody's really high on Justin Herbert. So maybe mine is too low here. What if he has Matt Stafford's career? The Stafford thing, I think we're going to learn this year.

And we're seeing now with the McVay partnership that the lack of the team successor Stafford had much more to do with the Detroit franchise than it did Stafford. It just did. So the ability to play the position, the numbers are going to be a little skewed because we're still going to be talking about the next era here that Herbert's in, and that's why it was tougher to go through and look at some of these guys.

But the hope for Herbert is that he could be in the conversation as best quarterback in the NFL. And talent-wise, I think we thought of that at Stafford. But if Stafford were truly that, then I think he would have carried that franchise a little bit more. So I'd say that's a disappointment based on projections because Herbert is screaming towards Tier 1, which he might already be in right now.

And even if the biggest Stafford fan was on the podcast, when you compare him to his contemporaries, even if you were the most positive ever on Stafford fan was on the podcast. When you compare him to his contemporaries, even if you were the most positive ever on Stafford, you weren't sitting there calling him Drew Brees or Russell Wilson or Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers. So I think that's below the expectations or what you should hope for, for Herbert. Let me bump it up then really quickly.

Andrew Luck. Better. He has to be better because luck, luck got a, I'm a huge Andrew Luck fan. He carried a team as a rookie like few rookies have ever done considering what was around him. Part of his retiring was getting his ass kicked because they did such a bad

job around him. But he did, because he was getting his ass kicked, get a little turnover happy. I think Herbert, the way this is starting off, the hope is that he's going to be better than both of those guys. Okay. Last one, Joe Burrow, Carson Palmer, pre-knee injury. A little Bengals action for you. I like it.

If Burrow ends up being pre-knee injury Carson Palmer, that's a win. But again, I think people will say, oh, that's not enough. He was third best quarterback in the league before the injury. No, that's prime. Carson Palmer was a really, really good quarterback. All right, I like that. Hit us up, and we won't read your tweets.

Jonathan Vilma, Fox Sports, joins us. Okay, you had the Giants win at New Orleans, one of your old stomps there in the 5-0-4. That game was not what I expected. It was at least early on. So give us your perspective. You called that Giants come back, win that thing in overtime. Yeah, the first thing obvious is the Saints didn't finish.

But I give a lot of credit to the Giants. They played very clean football. One turnover at the end of the half for Daniel Jones. Other than that, he literally carved up that same secondary. And he did it with, you know, names that weren't expected. You know, Kadarius Toney. You look at Darius Slayton being out, Sterling Shepard being out.

But Kenny Galladay stepped up as well. And then you had Colin Johnson stepping up. So, you know, this is a team that all of a sudden people are saying, well, why don't you open up the offense? Why don't you open up the offense? Jason Garrett did a phenomenal job of mixing in the run. First, he had those guys out on the perimeter, Kadarius Tony giving them wide receiver screens. And then all of a sudden, he started going over the top. He started lighting up the secondary for the Saints. So I'd say offensively, it was very encouraging to see what the wide receivers are able to do and how they were able to produce.

It was extremely encouraging to see Daniel Jones in full control, mastery of that offense. I didn't say mastery of the defense, mastery of that offense. I didn't say mastery of the defense, mastery of his offense. He knows exactly where the guys are, where they're supposed to be. He was checking in and out. So that's very encouraging. And then you look at Saquon Barkley. Now he's starting to come alive again. And it took a few games, as expected, to finally have his mental matchup with his physical. And now he's not thinking about, oh, how much pressure can I put on my knee? He's just going.

And he looked really, really good. So this is a team, a Giants team, that they're not good enough to have a bunch of errors and win, but they are good enough to play really clean football and win games. Yeah, the Daniel Jones thing, we touched on it earlier this week,

and I've not been a fan. The numbers would back it up, but he's had some moments this year. He's been clean with the turnovers since the opening week. He has a really weird home-road split where it seems like he's a completely different guy on the road, and I think the question is,

you go into this year with Jones, is that you're hoping at the end of the year to have an answer to, can this guy actually be like a starter? And I'm not talking about being a top 10 quarterback, but do we have somebody here with this investment? Do we get this to a second contract? It's still kind of early. I'm obviously still hesitant. I think the fact that there's any hope is just a positive alone. Where are you at with him as far as like actually being a guy for the Giants in the future? You know, Ryan, I was very down on him when he was turning the ball over.

And that comes from playing. It was always whoever turns the ball over the most, more than likely is going to lose the game. And so we were of the mindset when I played with the Saints, don't beat yourselves. Don't turn the ball over. Don't have these horrible penalties, unforced errors. And Daniel Jones, he was literally a turnover waiting to happen. He was a turnover machine. And it was like, if I had played against this guy, we wouldn't do anything

different. We'd just wait for him to throw us one. He reminded me of Jake Cutler when Jake Cutler would just literally hand you interception. It was like, you get an interception, you get an interception, you get an interception, right? And then, of course, he finds himself out of the league. So I thought he was going down that path. And because he has really been, whether it's him or the coaching staff or both, it has to be a combination. They have really had him protecting the football.

And because he can protect the football now and he doesn't turn the football over, he gives them a chance. That's first and foremost. He gives them a chance. Now, is he a second contract quarterback? Well, let's put a couple of these games together. And I'm not saying he has to throw for 400 yards every time. We're not looking for Kyler Murray type player. What we're looking for is someone that they're going to stuff the box

with the run game and stop Saquon. So we're going to go over the top and we're going to get you out of that defense. And until you do that, we have a quarterback that's good enough to hurt you. And I think he's evolving to that. I really do. Like watching, I was fortunate to cover the last two games of the Giants. He played a good Atlanta Falcons defense. They had just been roasted by Tampa Bay. You knew they were coming in to play hard. Whether they were going to play good football or not, they're going to come and play hard. And he did well against them. Second week, goes against the Saints. Good defense. You're talking about

Marshawn Lattimore, Malcolm Jenkins, Demario Davis. These are all pro bowlers. Cameron Jordan. All pro bowlers on that Saints defense. And he lit them up. So I think he has something. Let's see the consistency now. Let's see if that comes to fruition.

I think I'd push back on that Atlanta defense a little bit there, though. In what way? That they're not a good defense? No. I think they suck on defense. Okay. Well, that may be true. That may be true.

But what I know is when you get embarrassed, forget as a player, just as a man, right? You get embarrassed for 48 points that the Bucks rolled on them. Everyone's talking about how terrible you are. You know the next week, whether you're good or not, just as a man, you're going to come back and you're going to play. You're going to play hard. So I knew going into that Giants game, you say they suck. I will be more politically correct that they have areas to improve upon. Okay.

All right. Yeah. Look, you can't say on the broadcast they suck. You've got production meetings with these guys. I get the whole deal. I would say – They have areas to improve upon. Yeah.

I don't know. But I didn't know they were going to come play hard. Yeah. Okay. All right. One last thing on this because you are close to the Saints. I imagine it's a little different for you when you're back in the building and the actions you have.

The week one win against Green Bay is a fluke. I'm not saying the Saints aren't good because I still do like their defense, but they're throwing it less than every other team in the league. If you look at your pass-run splits and percentage, they're last by a pretty good chunk. What is Peyton doing with an offense here where it looked like week one,

Seamus is going to be going to the Pro Bowl, and now we're like, oh, this is the part that's a little frustrating, and the way that they're just deciding that they want to be a run-first team, which is not what we see in the league. Yeah, he's buying time. You're Sean Peyton.

Let's look at who is Seamus Winston throwing the ball to. And before we even go there, let's look at Seamus Winston in the past when he has throwing the ball to? And before we even go there, let's look at Jameis Winston in the past when he has thrown the ball too many times. More than likely, bad things start to happen. So do you want a guy, if you're a real coach, Sean Payne's a real coach. I have a lot of respect for him. Do you want to put a guy in a position to fail, which is what happened with the Bucs when he was throwing the ball 40 times a game?

It would give you a 300-yard performance, but it would either be three TDs or three interceptions with that 300-yard performance. So if I'm Sean, which I respect a lot, I'm not going to put this guy in a position to throw the ball 40 times a game and then lose because he's turned the ball over three interceptions, whatever it is. One, that costs the team. Two, that breaks his confidence. You need this guy to have his confidence to be in a leadership position and lead this team. So you have one of the best players in Alvin Kamara. Love, love watching him. You have three, four possibly pro bowlers up front on the offensive line, and a couple of them are injured. Then you got Mike Thomas on the outside, who whenever he gets healthy, he'll be a force.

So right now he's buying time. Wait for his offensive lineman to get healthy. Wait for Mike Thomas to get back. The defense we know is stellar. They had a bad day. They had a bad day, everyone. It happens. More times than not, they play really good defense.

Just patience, man. That's the way I look at it. Just be patient. The good thing is that the division, no one's running away with it. You're only a couple games out. Maybe you can easily get that back midseason and you go on a winning streak.

Let's talk Chargers. Nice win where they look like the dominant team. The Raiders get back into it. Then Herbert just clamps it down. We know defensively if they're healthy, they're really good. They never seem to be because they have high-level defensive players. We know they've invested in the offensive line, which was an issue. I know Mike Williams isn't going to be anybody's top receiver,

but I think he just has moments. Look, I'm not saying he's even Keenan Allen, but I like their weapons. And then you add in Herbert, who I think you see, hey, these are the things that are kind of hard to figure out how it's going to work on Sundays, and in this case, Monday, when it's like we need you to lock that safety and make a throw. We need you to answer, convert third downs in a way that Baker isn't, say, right now for Cleveland.

If I say the Chargers are coming out of the AFC, how much pushback do you have to that kind of statement? Well, when you say coming out of the AFC as in AFC... Super Bowl. Wow. I'm not sure I'm there yet. I mean, I really don't like doing that against the Chiefs

even though their defense is worse than Atlanta's arguably, but... You're worse than Atlanta's, arguably. You aren't enrolled today, Ryan. They gave up 32 to Philly, man. I mean, come on. I'm just simply asking it in kind of an open-ended thing. I wouldn't say after a month

they're coming out. You get a lot of pushback because there's a Buffalo team and there's a Bills Mafia that is just chomping at the bits to get back to the playoffs and show what they really are and who they really are. You can't overlook Buffalo.

I don't care the competition. The way that they dominate is just freaking phenomenal. These are NFL players, right? This is best of the best. I don't care if Houston has, you know, 1AA players. It's the best of the best 1AA players that they have playing, and Buffalo is just dominating.

They dominated the Dolphins the same way. That's a really good team, man. I'm not being dismissive of Buffalo at all. Baltimore is sitting there at 3-1. I don't know if anybody realizes that Cincinnati is 3-1 through all this. I'm just taking the temperature early October for saying, what if I'm telling you the Chargers are coming out of the AFC? I'm still scared to death of the Chiefs.

I don't care. We saw last year they were a bad defensive team. The more I think about it, Ryan, I would give you more and more pushback. The game is fresh on my mind yesterday, and they look good. They look dominant. And then I started thinking about some of the other teams across the AFC, and I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute.

Wait a minute. I'd give you more pushback, man. There are too many good teams to just say that they would come out. You know what? I would make the argument they only go in as a wild card. So they're going to be on the road if they're going to come out the AFC. Chiefs are still going to win that division. And they're going to be a wild card.

Hey, so are you seeing enough? Because we did this thing on Monday that I think is always really important. You look at some of the statistics and you'll be like, oh my God, Carolina came to that Dallas game as the best statistical defense in the league. I don't think any of us believe that. Buffalo's numbers now after the new week has been calculated. Some of the numbers that they have defensively as a team, they are so far and away.

They're like 30 points better in some metrics than the number two defense, which might be the Saints. But then when you look at Buffalo's schedule and you say, okay, wait a minute, they played the Steelers, who got seven in that game on a special teams on top of everything else. The Dolphins in a two-a-game, where I think that's when he got knocked out.

Washington and then the Texans. They are putting it on teams, but can you see enough from them where you go, I don't care that it's the schedule, the fact that they are dominating the way they are defensively, which was a question mark off the last year, that you feel better about it? Yeah, I do feel better about it.

That was the point I was making, Ryan, that, okay, the competition isn't good. The way that they're kicking their ass, though, that's what it is. I have to remind anyone that's listening. The NFL is the best of the best of the best football players in the world. So when Buffalo comes into town and beats the snot out of you 40 to nothing, I don't care what team the Texans put out there. I know for a fact it's the best of the best of the best in the world right now, and they are smacking them.

So when they beat teams like that, resounding victories, that tells me, one, they're really good. On a negative, are they peaking too soon? Oof, that would be my only concern. Are you peaking too soon or possibly a little overconfident? Time will tell. The Texans are a good example of did they come out of the tunnel going, hey, we got a chance. They beat Jacksonville. We knew Jacksonville was going to be terrible.

They're competitive with the Browns, and then they get smoked by Carolina and the 40-0 of their bills. I'm like, this isn't a Houston Texans segment, Jonathan, but it's almost like, wait, should we think that much less of the Jags, potentially, and should we reevaluate who the Browns are? But defensively, what the Browns did in that game against, did you get to see any of the Minnesota stuff?

Did you see any of the Miles Garrett stuff? No. Because there's some Miles Garrett film that exists where you think it's fake remember christian mccaffrey when his agent did the shuttle video and then we realized the bottom line on espn was going as fast as like a cartoon yeah like you guys you guys sped this up a little bit not the mccaffrey's not really fast and quick and all that kind of stuff but garrett i don't know how long the list is other than Aaron Donald and maybe even Ramsey. How many guys defensively are ahead of Garrett? I think that's it. You nailed it.

Ramsey, Donald. Bosa? No. No? I go Garrett. I go Garrett. Garrett, I like Bosa. I like both Bos actually but garrett

he's dominant in the run and the past he he's just a force a force to be reckoned with all right you know what because i mentioned the jags i have to ask you about the urban meyer situation we saw him in a video this week sorry man um there was there's a girl basically grinding on his thigh he said people were asking him to come out to dance floor his apology was kind of weird yeah everything about him so far has been weird but go ahead right okay so then we have the news today that was being re-evaluated you knew he wasn't going to get fired for cause and then he wasn't going to get paid it's kind of like how that world works like that wasn't going to happen. But now all the stuff creeping out of the locker room

is no one has any respect for him. They're all laughing. I don't think, I've seen some other pro players, former players say we always at least had respect for our coaches. I don't believe that for a second. How would you handle this if you were on the Jags right now? On the Jags is what? Player, front office?

Player. Let's go player first. You're a player, you're coach, you're 0-4. He's a legendary college guy. I know how you NFL guys can be protective and think no one could ever figure it out on Sundays. And look, there's plenty of evidence that guys haven't figured it out. Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that, right?

No, no doubt. And there's evidence that you're right about it, too. I just don't think it's impossible for a guy to go ahead and do it. So my question would be, how would you guys be, give me the real way you guys in the locker room would be talking about your coach who's married. We saw a video of a girl grinding on him and he has to apologize to all of you. And you're also on four on top of everything else.

All right. So it's, I'm going to layer it, right? If I am a bubble player, I'm not saying shit. I am going to get up early. I'm going to get my ass to work and I'm going to practice my butt off and make sure that I'm still on this team come the following Monday. So I'm not saying anything. If I am paid and I am already checked out, 0-4 already checked out, I mean, I'm cracking jokes all day long, right? Like that's what we do in the locker room, crack jokes. That's frankly what I miss the most about playing, cracking all the jokes, right? Coaches, everybody, everyone's lives, everyone's life.

Now, if I am a leader and a captain and I'm really trying to right this ship, I'm going to have maybe one big joke in front of everybody and Urban's just going to have to laugh it off. And then we got to move on because at the end of it all, I would be pissed that I'm on four

and I can't stand it. And we need to figure out how to win and stop talking about my coach because players play. All right. Really good answer. Really good answer. That's the first part. That's as honest as it gets, Ryan.

As honest as it gets. Because I would say if this is the worst thing that Urban has done as far as like a coach and whatever his family thing, like I still think it's awkward that reporters could be like, hey, how did you handle this with your family? That's a weird question. I think it was staged. If you want to know the truth, I think it was staged.

Go ahead, conspiracy. Okay, just tell me this. How is it that you are... USC, they've come calling, and we know you've entertained those calls. You are struggling right now from all reports to forget when a game, just rally your team, right? And that's the first thing as a coach. You don't have these guys motivated to not rally. So what do you do to get out of there? You make yourself look like you're expendable, right? And you say, all right, we're 0-4. And then you start looking at, wait, why is Urban Meyer at a bar and not

going back with his team to try and get this figured out? Hmm, okay. Then it's like, all right, all these random girls just so happen to come up to Urban Meyer like he's freaking Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio. Let's just figure this out for a second. Why are all these women coming up to him? And then how do you have all these awesome angles, three, four different angles of him grinding up on a girl, messing with her butt, whatever else was going on. I'm just like, you know, there's a lot going on for just a simple guy at a bar for this not to be staged. And it backfired. They didn't fire him. I should have said backfired, no pun intended, but they didn't fire him. And I just think that more nonsense like this is going to come out until he gets fired. I honestly believe I think this was staged all the way.

And look at the way he exited Florida. Look at the way he exited Ohio State. All of these things where, oh, I'm so I'm so ill. I got to leave Florida. Boom. Ohio State. Here I come. Oh, I just I can't do it anymore.

I'll stay. OK. Oh, you know, a little cushiony job at Fox, and then now all of a sudden, boom, I'm over here at the NFL. You know, just his resume tells me that that thing was staged. Wow, I did not expect this. So it sounds like, Vilma, you're prepping us since it didn't work for an Urban Meyer sex tape. Is that what you're saying?

Ew, gross. I would never prep anybody for anything that disgusting. Well, okay. The fact that he didn't get on the plane and go back with the team, that is fairly unheard of. I've never heard of that. Never heard of that. I've never heard of a head coach going back.

As a matter of fact, I'll give you examples of Sean Payton. He would come back with the team. And then if he had to fly out, he would fly out quietly. No one knew. Do what you need to do and then come back. You don't just, oh, oh, you guys go and I'm going to stay right here. And oh, by the way, I'm going to be at the bar. Come on.

Come on. No, no, by the way, I'm going to be at the bar? Come on. Come on. No, no, no, no, no. Just to give a little bit more context to it, though, it was Urban's restaurant in Columbus. So I don't care if you're 98. If you're a guy who won a national title at Ohio State and you're at a bar, people are going to come up to you and girls are going to come up to you.

I mean, it's just the way it works. I've seen stuff in the South where I was like, what? And they're like, oh, he returned a touchdown against Ole Miss in 1962. And I was like, Jesus, all right, okay. I'd also add this, that of all the things I've heard head coaches doing that I would say would be frowned upon in a family therapy session, this isn't even close to being the worst. And you guys as athletes all know that.

You know what your coach's deal is, or we know who's real and who's fake. And if it's the way Urban talks to players, that's the bigger problem. That it's 0-4, that he doesn't have a winning track record in the NFL. Those are the issues. Those are the reasons why a locker room checks out on you, not because they saw you having a girl dance on you. And that's, I think, the emphasis of the story when it's really about those other things.

1000%. That's why I said it was staged, because the only person that's going to care is the owner, right? And the optics. And how does it look? And so the only person that's going to be like really frowning on Urban Meyer about what he did is going to be the guy that has the ability to hire or fire him. That's why it had to be staged. And then, oh, by the way, you said it's his bar. He owns it. If I own a bar in Columbus, Ohio, where everyone knows who I am.

Your bar would do awful in Columbus. If it was Jonathan Vilma's Pine House, it wouldn't do well. I'm sure it would. I'm sure it would be burned down within hours. But if I'm him, of all the places to be at my own bar or restaurant, am I really going to be in the most visible spot where everyone can see me grinding with a girl come on no stop it stop it i know there's a back room somewhere where you can do whatever he wants and no one's going to say anything yeah but you know dry storage i don't know i don't know if

that makes sense and again he the grinding part will probably be both it would seem like a a very lukewarm participant in a lap dance but anyway everybody's seen the video now at this point okay uh what other nfl stuff do we need to get to because i i want you to kind of steer it because i don't know every tape that you've been able to break down is there something you've seen on tape now that we haven't touched on that you think is an important thing for us to think about like that seed that gets planted in your head you used to do this all the time with us in college at espn we really know what i'm seeing something that's happening right now it may mean something it may mean nothing but i'm seeing it is there anything like that

you know for for good stuff i'm seeing a real change in the change in the landscape of the NFL. And I'm watching the NFC West, the AFC West. They are by far the two most dominant divisions in football right now. And what I'm seeing, the way that they play, if you look at the players that they have, they're all fast as hell. It's one. Two, very mobile at the players that they have, they're all fast as hell. It's one. Two, very mobile at the quarterback positions.

And if not mobile like Kyler Murray mobile, they're elusive in the pocket. I love the fact that each of those teams, I've talked to McVay, I've talked to Pete Carroll. They are always player first. It's not about their scheme. It's about their players. And I think there's a lot to be taken from young and old coaches. Pete Carroll's old as hell. Sean McVay's young as hell. The understanding what makes a team go and makes a team click. And they are, I mean, they are doing a phenomenal job out West. And I say that because you have coaches across the landscape that they think it's about scheme and they need to stop that because it's not about their scheme. They're not reinventing the wheel.

It's about the players. That's what I've seen so far from a high level. You give me a couple of weeks, I'll start telling you about some players that they're going to be pro bowlers, all pro, that we don't really talk about. Early on in your career with the Jets, you went through some QBs there. And I'm looking at the first four years, you had Pennington, then he was out, Brooks Bollinger, Testa Birdie. Then Chad came back. And then it was Chad and Kellen Clemens.

And I know Chad always had a hard time staying healthy. It's not the same as what's going on with fields in Chicago. But it's that part of the inside of this world that I always want to learn more about. What goes on? Let me just ask it this way. Did you feel like in all those years, it's three of those four where you were kind of going back and forth, and again, some of it was injury determined,

but where you felt like the staff was going with the right guy or going with the wrong guy? Is there a good story in there that's either we understood why the coach was making the decision, or in this case, something comparable to what we have with Nagy. We were like, why do you keep doing this with the field storyline? No, they were doing the right thing. As much as I would want to go against Mangini at that time,

Chad was on the field who he played or started. It made sense. On the field, who he played or started, it made sense. What I didn't like was Mangini at times, he would go out of his way to be a jerk when it wasn't necessary. For example, you lose a game. We lost a game. We all know it's because Chadad's arm was it just wasn't there yet right and he had let's i'm just throwing it out there make an example let's say he had like 200 yards passing and he just couldn't throw the out route or something like that we all know what the issue is we we know what the big reason is why we lost. He's not the only reason. Defensively, we did some things

and messed up. But there's no point now in coming back on a Monday or Wednesday meeting and in the team meeting showing all the throws that Chad didn't make. Like, dude, what are you doing? So stuff like that, I didn't agree with at all. And I can equate it. I'm saying that because I can equate it to Nagy in the sense that I could definitely see him doing that with the quarterback, these leadership positions, where it's like, dude, we don't need this right now. We need to figure out how to win the next game. We don't need you to point out the obvious of what's going on. And to your point, why are you doing it? We don't get you to point out the obvious of what's going on and to your point why are you doing it like what we don't get it doesn't make sense yeah that's worse than a lap dance i think 100 100 when when everybody's in the building going like what like i had an open mind on the

naggy fields thing only for the sake of like what if fields actually isn't ready i don't know one likes naggy naggy's done nothing to get the benefit of the doubt, but what if he's actually right? And they're like, Hey, we just don't think he's that ready. And then there was the first game was a disaster for a million different reasons.

But then again, yes, it was Detroit, but Bill laser calls a better game. And then Nagy was like insufferable, like couldn't actually give him credit. Like who cares about the coaching press conference? Who gets credit for it?

Most guys give credit away like stuff they don't even care about in those moments. And Nagy actually still couldn't do it in an insignificant moment. Yeah, I think it's insecurity, to be quite honest. You start to, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I know that you may feel like you're losing your value as a head coach, right? And if that's the scenario, that kind of tells you what position he may be in right now

with the team and with the organization. Now, again, I don't know, but that's the only time you do stuff like that. It's just really weird, really strange. Very, and you're right, though. The instinct is survival, and he's going, I'm probably going to get fired anyway, so why am I going to advertise that this guy's way better

at calling plays than I am? But it just, no one believes you, and it actually ends up looking even worse, even though you're in survival mode. I had to follow up on Mangini there. Did you end up getting to like him later on? Because I didn't like him when I didn't know him, and once I got to know him, I actually loved the guy.

So you know what's interesting? Mangini to this day I thought was one of the smartest coaches I had. No joke. Where Mangini went wrong was he tried to be like Bill Belichick instead of trying to be like Eric Mangini.

And players, we see through that. We're with you 16 hours a day, every day during the season. Be you. And if you can't be you, then we can't. That's where you start losing respect for guys and checking out because you can't be you.

How do you expect us to be real with you? And that was really my only issue with Mangini was that he just wasn't real, man. Just keep it 100 all the time. We can respect that. But as far as a person, I thought he was a good person outside of football.

But X's and O's, I thought he was super smart. He had one of the best defensive calls against Tom Brady in 2006. We went up there on the road, beat them in Foxborough. And I'll never forget that he had this defense design. It was the first time I saw Tom Brady look at a defense and not know what it was and where to go with the football. So we ended up winning that game.

What'd you do? What'd you do that was so special? It was basically, so Mangino's great at situational football. And it was a point in the game where there was, I believe, let's call it 20-some seconds left. And they needed to get in the field goal range to kick a field goal, to tie it, to win it, whatever it was. And we had a defense where instead of putting anybody in the middle of the field, we put everybody on the sideline. We put everybody like within three yards of the sideline stacked at every level. So one person was about three yards from the sideline. The next person was about eight yards.

The next person was about 15 yards. And we did it on both sides of the field. And then we had one middle field safety just in case, you know, they throw something in the middle. And so I'll never forget, Brady comes out, he looks, he knows he needs to throw to the sideline to stop the clock. And he sees all of us

already standing there. And he's just like, what the hell is this? And so he couldn't check. He just looked. He hikes the ball and just stood like a statue, had nowhere to go with the football. That was the first and only time i ever ran that defense in my whole career

against the best of all time and that was the first time i ever heard a coach even implement that that defense and then let alone run it actually run it it was phenomenal absolutely phenomenal so extremely smart guy had a lot of respect for him just not when it came to him being himself yeah and he admitted as much too and i'm glad i got to know him because when i saw him i was still living in boston at the time when i was like what the hell is he doing with these pressers and then i had a friend who grew up with him was like you know honestly he's he's a great guy you'd like him and i was like you're gonna be kidding me and they were like he thinks he kind of has to do it this way

because that's the way he learned it. But you can't be Bill unless you're Bill. You just can't. In a weird way, personality-wise, I don't know why you would want to other than the fact that it's worked. That's cool. I always like checking in with you on that stuff.

Hey, who do you have this week for Fox? I have a good one. I got Packers at Bengals. Okay. All right. One o'clock Eastern, Vilma on the call every week. So you can check them out.

Fox on NFL. All right. We'll talk to you again soon, man. Thank you. All right, bro. Have a good one, Ryan. We work as a company that went from renting desks

to a $47 billion valuation in a record amount of time. And that's not how the story ends. The book is The Cult of We, Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, who join us now. Elliot with Wall Street Journal. Maureen is now with The New York Times, so congratulations. And we're going to talk about this book that blew me away, couldn't put it down, The Cult of We. All right, so let's start here. Who is Adam?

Who was Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork? What's the back story so that we understand the rest of the timeline? Adam Neumann was an entrepreneur. He immigrated from Israel back right around 2001. He started a few businesses. One of them was making baby clothes with knee pads on them. It was a company called Crawlers. He dropped out of Baruch College while studying to go really all in on this crawlers business. He had a few other failed ventures

and eventually landed on this idea for WeWork. He teamed up with an architect. landed on this idea for WeWork. He teamed up with an architect and they created this business that was essentially subleasing office space and renting it out. He's completely charismatic, his long dark black hair is very tall, completely wild and crazy, I think, in many ways, but immediately captivating as an entrepreneur the minute you meet him, which led him to build this company and get money from billions and billions from people around the world. Yeah, I think he's one of the world's best salesmen, at least for the perspective of fundraising, which is a lot of what WeWork's business is. So he raised for a simple real estate company that lost a dollar for every dollar it took in. except for Uber or in the US except for Uber to build what was briefly the country's most valuable startup that really was just the sort of paper mache house of cards to mix metaphors.

Yeah. No, that's a good setup because his salesmanship is incredible. I went back and watched some of his conferences after I read the book and you're like, I get it. And I think he had a look. I think the accent helped. I think that he was considered this rockstar founder, which I think VC firms, they seem to be just hypnotized by some of this stuff instead of being straightforward. While the rest of the people who have the same kind of business plan were like, what the hell are they doing? Why does everybody think this company is worth so much more? And they positioned themselves as a tech company. They raised billions very early on.

And then it became about more rounds, more funding, a bunch of banks that wanted to get in on this stuff. But what were some of the early signs? And feel free to pick as many as you like here, guys, that he was full of shit. What were some of the early signs where you're like, wait a minute, even though everybody's in on this company, this isn't a great sign. First of all, I love the Tesla pitch. The Tesla pitch is like him in just the quickest story. So if you want to share that one or any other ones that you have, I know there's a lot to choose from. Yeah, the Tesla one is really fun.

So basically, he had long been telling staff how much he admired Elon Musk. And at one point, he told Forbes, like, if I ever meet him, I'm going to pitch him on WeWork on Mars. And so then he actually managed to get an audience while he was in LA and goes to meet him. And Adam is always keeping people really late to wait around and running late to meetings. And so Elon does the same thing to him.

He finally gets this very brief window and pitches, he's like, this is what Adam relays to his staff later on. He's like, I pitched him on telling him that the hard part wasn't going to be getting to Mars. It was going to be building community once you get there. And then Elon comes back to me. He's like, no, you idiot. The hard part is getting to Mars. And so he was very sort of crestfallen by this. And, you know, I think his wife told him that really Elon put him in this place. And then there's the other one, Marine, where this is later in the book, but it also speaks to kind of his mindset as he meets with the founder of Airbnb. And he's like, let's do 10,000 properties.

Let's build this community. And the guy's like, actually, 10,000 is like a waste of our time. Like the amount of listings we have, that doesn't mean anything. And then he comes back. He's like, let's do 10 million. And it was just like, it wasn't even, there was no plan. It was just, oh, this guy dumped on my idea. Well, I'll just raise it by this many factors. And now he's going to want to do it. And they were like, who are you? What are you talking about? And the simple math with that example, it was too small. And then Brian Chesky evidently was like,

okay, that's like a trillion dollars or something, like a hundred billion dollars based on like the trillion. It was a trillion. Okay. Based on the very simple math of what that would cost. Like you're completely nuts. I think one of the other things that offended me that was far less damaging is that when he got into surfing, he hired jet skis so he didn't have

to paddle. And for the big wave guys out there, they're like, Hey, Rosillo, everybody does that. No, I get it. I get it. But he was doing it just a random session in the afternoon. He would have jet skis, pull them out where nobody else would do that kind of thing. I always thought that that was a bad sign. Okay. So here's the thing is that he's saying their tech, they have an app that doesn't work. It sounds like they just did a really good job decorating these office buildings and had fancier coffee and beer taps and told everybody it was like, you know, it's a great line. Like some of his marketing and, and lines for the stuff that he would say, like we were the first physical social network. And you're like, wow, that sounds really good.

I mean, some of the T-shirts and built by and all that stuff in this culture. But I mean, it's not, it's at this point, though, it is working, even though clearly the way you title the book, you're like, it's leaning towards this kind of cultish vibe. And it certainly isn't tech as the other people are screaming into the air going, this is a real estate company and these margins don't exist. Yeah. Uh, I think he, you know, we, we were shocked at how sort of easy it was. Uh, you know, I think when we, cause we were reporting on this for, for years for the journal and, and, and, you know, a ton at the, the, the kind of crash in

2019. And we'd always wondered, surely it must be more complicated than it looks. And surely it wasn't just him saying, oh, this is a tech company in a 15-minute meeting and somebody giving him $4 billion. But then when we actually looked, there wasn't much more to it. So one of the famous scenes is that he meets with Masayoshi Son,

the chairman and CEO of SoftBank, which, you know, had a lot of money from the Saudis. And Masa had just raised $45 billion from the Saudis to spend on tech. And then he meets with Adam for a 12-minute walkthrough of WeWork's headquarters. And then this is on a pit stop on the way Masa is going to visit the president-elect at Trump Tower. And so then they get in the car and go up to Trump Tower. And in that car ride, they hashed out a $4 billion deal, which is the second largest investment in a startup ever. And so that, to us, then what happened is SoftBank actually did due diligence. And there are people looking at it. They're like, not only is this a real estate company,

we've already looked at it before and we've passed. But then that makes its way back up to Masa and he said, no, I want to do this. So yeah, I think it was all a lot of kind of as obvious as it seemed, as dumb as it seemed. And that was really shocking to us because like these people are throwing around more money

than sort of has ever been thrown around before in this sport. And Maureen, let's focus again just so people understand is that Massasson, I don't even know what his deal is other than he just – I think this is from the outside. You guys cover it. So those of us on the outside are like, so wait, what happens? This guy picks bad stocks and Alibaba's like his one win and so then the saudis give him 45 billion dollars and then he meets and goes to we work for 12 fucking minutes and then gets in a car and they're writing out like it's like he's getting a cocktail waitress's phone number on a napkin and they're like let's do this many and no let's do this many and then there's

another version of the book it's like let's do a trillion dude and he's like yeah you know what it'll remind me of was the scene in boogie nights where heather graham and julianne moore are doing coke and just coming up with the worst ideas ever like that's that scene is what i think of marine when i think of of masa son and and adam newman being like this, because the thing is, is it keeps working. It keeps working. So you have one person who's kind of delusional talking to somebody else who just is just as delusional.

Yet these guys are making some of the biggest financial decisions in the history of investing. I love that comparison to that scene because it did like, it was almost unimaginable as you say, like just the sheer speed of everything. And it was, and it goes back to, I mean, you're asking about Masa. Exactly. He did get a lot of bad bets. He spent money in crazy ways. If they blew up, he invested a lot during the.com boom and then bust. He like lost, he was the richest man in the world and many lost more money than anybody um but alibaba he made a bet he said he liked the like glimmer in jack ma the ceo and founder of alibaba's eyes he said um and it became the best investment of all time it's you know

almost like throwing darts at the wall and he gets like a bullseye or two in it. But with this, exactly the speed and the speed, like you said, of convincing the Saudis, he decides he wants to build the biggest fund in the world. And the Saudis want to invest outside of their country and invest in tech. So within a 45-minute meeting, Massa has with the then-Deputy Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, he gets a $45 billion commitment. Everything is like speed and these ridiculous numbers of these sort of men with giant checkbooks.

That was like a theme throughout the whole story of WeWork. It's sort of a, that was like a theme throughout the whole story of WeWork. And that part of it too, like it, it, when Michael Lewis wrote Liar's Poker, he was, you know, when he thought he basically was kind of like, I don't know, it was like discouraging the next wave of, of potential bankers from wanting to get into it. And instead everybody read the book and hit him up for a job. And if you're in the VC world, like you read this book and you're like,

Hey, when can we go to Saudi Arabia and pitch these guys? Cause they just gave. And I understand like the, there's going to be people listening to this, be like, Hey guys, like that's the whole point is you miss on 20 and you hit one.

Like you can't, you can't hold us to that kind of standard, but it's very clear that Masa's son, his, his, his work, the groundwork, that level, like he would just be like, Hey, like you can't you can't hold us to that kind of standard but it's very clear that masasan his his his work the groundwork that level like he would just be like hey i like the look of this person i like what's in there i like and that's what adam newman was great at so you know it's almost all going to work which is what's crazy about this story is that you know adam's going to get

this funding he's going to get billions from masasan who is going to buy back the early rounds of investors so all those guys are going to make this money. They don't have to go public because clearly Adam didn't want to until he had to, which we'll get to. And yet once they finally started looking at it, and I think the number is from 2018 to 2019, March 18, March 19, the company lost $219,000 every hour of each day because they were trying to expand to raise the valuation and keep Masa's son's funds going and then to hopefully get that second fund that he wanted. And yet this still almost all worked and probably would have if it weren't for the SoftBank investments and some other things not working out, correct?

So yeah, Masa and Adam were close to being sort of partners in the future of WeWork and doing this $20 billion deal. And the interesting thing is actually for as insane as the original investment in the Saudis made, the 45 billion in 45 minutes, they were the ones who got really spooked about putting so much money into we work and they said you know we wanted to invest outside we have a ton of money in real estate we wanted you to put money in tech like we put some money already into it like we're not putting another 10 billion dollars into this company it's a real estate company so they pulled the plug on so he couldn't invest with the vision fund so masa had to kind of spend SoftBank's money.

But yeah, then they did another IPO with Tank. The sort of global tech market got really hit. And as you said, it was like, really, I mean, they've been working on this deal for months and months. And right before the Christmas holiday of 2018, they got sort of a verbal, okay, like this is a done deal. And on Christmas Eve, Masa called them and told them, sorry, we just can't go through with it. Right. And so Elliot, that basically seems like it sets the stage for the IPO, which I think a lot of listeners are like, oh yeah, I remember like something happened with those guys. What happened with the IPO, the IPO doc and the people that, you know, and you tell a great story in the documentary that I've seen where you were like hiking in Europe and you started reading their filing and you were like, wait, what?

And I don't think most of us wouldn't understand what was so offensive. But take us through that part of the story here where now all of this stuff that you uncover in the book starts to become public for the first time. starts to become public for the first time. Yeah. So they had, you know, after they run out of fish in the sea to fund them privately, they realized they need to go to the public markets to get money because they're spending,

they continue to spend $2 for every dollar they take in. So you need billions of dollars at this point. And so they need to sort of write a document to the world saying, here's the business, here's what it is, and here's what our mission is. And it turns out that 10 years into the business, nine years into the business, they still didn't even really have... Adam couldn't really define what it was. It was very easy for him to do these in-person meetings where he just talked about the future. But when you actually... And that's one in a document you filed to the public, you can't talk about the future. You have to talk about what you've done.

And so that became very difficult for him because they hadn't done very much. They just spent $2 for every dollar they'd taken in. So then they also layer on all this sort of mystical woo-woo language. And so this was the influence of Adam's wife, Rebecca. They dedicate the document, the S-1, to the energy of we. And their new mission statement is to elevate the world's consciousness. This is an office space subleasing company. And Rebecca, Adam's wife, spends hours or days pouring through photos. And they have a photographer get in a helicopter to take a photo of a rainforest that the Newmans saved in Latin America. They put it on the back cover.

And at some point she wants to put something about saving the whales in there. And so I think people sort of see this. And then you layer on that plus the losses, plus Adam's conflicts, which are just sort of this mounting, you bad governance that showed as a real dumpster fire, where he's leasing buildings to WeWork that he owns. He took out hundreds of millions of dollars. He bought a jet with the company's money. And then he sold the word. This is sort of the, but the most significant. By the way, when he bought, he bought it, what, a $60 million jet.

And part of it is that he said it's because he was tall and flying commercial was. In fairness, he is tall. The poor guy was so tall that it just, it had to be done. Six, five, no one, no one one six anyone six four or above just can't fly commercial yeah he had been flying private for for years and causing all sorts of problems with these these private jet companies that would rent it to him and they actually kept getting mad because there are numerous incidents of the jet companies getting upset because they were spitting tequila on each other and getting sick all throughout the cabin was one email.

Another one got mad because he ripped down a credenza, someone on the flight ripped down a credenza multiple times and they kept having to take the jets out of service. There were spills. So he bought his own jet with WeWork's money. And so everyone sees this. Actually, the jet wasn't disclosed so that people had to read the Wall Street Journal.

But, and then, you know Then these things kind of add up together and people look at this thing and there's just absolutely no magic to it at all. Yeah, I was in Europe hiking and thankfully Maureen was stateside having to work.

Yeah, I saw the Scott Galloway part. For those that know, he's in the financial world as a commentator essentially i mean i know he does more than that author and everything else but um he was he basically was like it was like reading somebody who had taken mushrooms and decided to file this this report and that's some of the stuff that you know we haven't even really touched on in all the different directions i can go in this book is that I start to have a real hard time with, I don't like frauds. I don't like frauds that are also arrogant on top of everything else. And Adam had this vibe where the balls to stand in front of all

these other founders at these summits, at these tech conferences and be like, okay, your company's worth this and your company's worth this, but what are you doing to change the world? And in every turn, he's a total hypocrite. He's cashing in on stocks when nobody else can. He's borrowing against his position, which again, is not unheard of. And if banks want his business, especially his IPO business, they're going to hand him the best mortgages and loans he could ever possibly want. But he's got hundreds of millions of dollars of what property he's got you know some of the stuff that he's doing on the stock you know again it's it's not even like they're just shares that he owns that aren't cashed out that he's cashing out to live this lifestyle and he's and he's saying

like you know i hope to one day each year take on world hunger and then the next summit he'll be like i want to end orphans you know and then and then he was like i want to be president of the world and then he's like i hope i'm in a position in a couple years to to solve you know hopefully like when there's middle east strife they can just call me up and i can work it out and it's like like anyone who's ever had any coverage of the middle east is like hey you think a guy who rents desks is probably fucking figure this out for all these countries is there any way that guy could help um is he really this arrogant did he really believe this stuff or was this just him buying into his own thing because if you're him you're going hey whatever i'm doing it's working it's working and the the ipo doc was like the

first wake-up call it's like no no it doesn't work this way. So I guess I'm always trying to figure out with his character, like how much did he believe his own bullshit? I think he believed a lot of it. I think some of it was like, hey, I said all this and I did it and it keeps working. But I think he did like the, you know, the narcissism, the megalomania. I mean, as you said i mean you you lay it out really well it just kept on getting like bigger and more and more insane i mean to the idea of middle east peace um one of his like very senior people well after this whole thing imploded i remember like sort of saying ha ha ha like he used to talk about this right he's like

he did but you know if you really think about it if anyone could do it like i really think adam it's not crazy to think that he could do that it's like like i couldn't even believe the words came out like now whether right and so that's something that i think needs this isn't a man acting alone this is this is him there isn't like you know there doesn't feel like there's a lieutenant necessarily but the board approved all the stuff that he did and i know in the ipo doc and you guys push back on it i think i don't know i don't know i don't i don't want to get in your own heads on this but like him having 20 votes per share so that no matter what he was going to run this

company like if i were a founder and if i can get away with it i would do it i would ask for it and and he got it and then they were like look you can't do it this way now um but he was he just had this i would say what thousands of employees that bought into all of this stuff that it wasn't just a saying on the t-shirt that they actually were as they say in the doc, like raising the consciousness. I mean, it's just, it sounds like a made up book title of like a book that would be the worst title ever, you know, like, like me, myself and me, you know, like my story or, you know what I mean? Like all, all of the sayings and stuff like these, everybody was on board and maybe they were just on board because they thought you're going to get shares at some point when it went public and it was like, why not? I don't know. I think that's one of our

sort of theories as to how, like one of the central questions that we have is like, and hopefully the book sort of answered is, is, um, how can smart people do so many sort of dumb things here? Uh, and because people often bring up Theranos, but that's a very different situation in that that was sort of unsophisticated investors like, you know, Betsy DeVos and Henry Kissinger putting money into a tech company that they didn't know anything about. Here you have some of the more sophisticated investors in the world, Harvard, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Benchmark Capital in BC, J.P. Morgan, Golden Sacks. I mean, you know, a ton of them. And they all were blinded by this. And, you know, I think, yeah,

it's sort of this question of, can people self-rationalize anything to themselves? And my answer these days is yes. I didn't think that before, but it's very easy to sort of have your mind melt, apparently, and just look at something as worth 20 times more than it is actually worth because a few other people said the same thing. And then at some point, I think to the, like what you were saying about just people like getting shares,

I think the extent that some people had wake up calls, it was like, why say anything now? Let's just just ride this out and get our riches. The pot of gold is waiting with this IPO. So whether it was bankers at JP Morgan that were going to get huge fees, sure,

Adam's insane. This IPO document's insane. But whatever, he's going to fire us if we push back. So let it go. Actually, that happened at the board level. So there were actual conversations at the board, which Adam did control effectively, but they would never vote against him anyway,

even though they had autonomous votes. But they were saying sort of toward the end, realizing like, wow, we continue to lose a lot of money here. Maybe we should be pushing back on, and he continues to do things like buy wave pool companies and jets, even though we tell him not to. Maybe we should be harder back on. And he continues to do things like buy wave pool companies and jets, even though we tell him not to, um, maybe we should, you know, be harder on him. And their conclusion was, well, we just need to get them to the public markets because that will bring him discipline in a way that he won't listen to us. Um, and I think that, you know,

up until then they'd sort of rationalized by like, well, the stock just keeps going up and my investment keeps getting better. Yeah. Right. Cause every time, I mean, the jumps in valuation are unheard of. I mean, and that is usually a pretty good sign. You're like, why is this worth $6 billion more this week than it was last week? And then now it's up another $10 billion. And then he would just go to the next round of funding and people would do it. And look, Goldman is supposed to be the standard. And I'm not close to being versed enough in the world to know the difference. I could pick any bank if I wanted to and go, okay, why would you guys do that? You guys are idiots. But like even going back to Billion Dollar Whale and the Malaysian Fund and Goldman's involvement with

that. And you're actually, if you hold Goldman shares, you're going, oh no, is this going to hurt the stock price? Well, no, it did nothing. And Goldman's share price is absurd. And they were going to lead the charge on this. And they knew they had to act it out with Newman to get the IPO business. So that's another part of this that I don't think people understand is you can tell him the truth of what he's really worth, but then you may not get the transaction. So you have to basically lie to him to get the transaction and then talk him down from the lies and the pitch. And so everybody's kind of complicit. And I think it kind of jumps to this, like it can't all be full of shit, right? Like

the VC world can't all be like this because then nothing like clearly things work and we're enamored with the failures, you know, which maybe is just the entertainment value that we get out of it. Um, but can you help me understand, like clearly enough of this world still works despite so many headlines. It seemed to be, how come all these smart people keep doing these things that don't make any sense? Like, do you just go out there and start pitching stuff and then people give you money? Because that sounds like, and I think there's actually like a rush of people that are like, I don't even know what business I want to run. I just want to be a founder and live the lifestyle. Yeah.

I mean, I think what it, what it ultimately comes down to, I mean, there's so, what they're looking for is this like visionary founder that's going to like buck the system, totally like upend the whole industry and make, you know, the next Uber or the next Airbnb. And like, there is a sense that you have to put your money behind. So being kind of crazy is a good thing. There are these things that they look for. And Adam sort of got a chance to morph to himself. I mean, he was that person anyway. But essentially, the model of the industry is like, it's kind of masa. And obviously, he did this to the most extreme version. But the best VC firms, you put money into 10 companies, you get 2 home runs that turn

into maybe not $100 billion companies, but they turn into... You put $10, $100 million, they turn into $10 billion companies. And that wipes out all... I mean, you go so far beyond all your other losses. So it's a gambling industry. million dollars, they turn into $10 billion companies. And that wipes out all... You go so far beyond all your other losses. So it's a gambling industry. You're willing to take big bets on founders. It does seem like... I think Adam Neumann shows just how out of control it's gotten. But the crazy thing is, they're still minting big wins, too.

And a lot of these wins are still wiping other things out. If you had a bet on Airbnb early, I mean, look at where it's gone. You could take a few examples. Yeah, I think one common thing we've seen is, and who knows, because the markets are pretty frothy today for these types of companies again. But a lot of the stuff that kind of seemed absurd ended up being absurd. And so if you look at things that worked, it was largely software companies. And Airbnb at the end of the day really is just sort of like a travel booking website.

So they weren't spending money to lease apartments. They were letting other people do that. And then they just took a cut. Whereas companies like WeWork that are literally leasing buildings, they haven't done as well. Companies like Uber, which I think did well for the super early VCs, has seen its valuation be flat since 2015, or share price. And so that's an extremely expensive business where they have to essentially bribe people to drive for them. So I don't know.

I think it's the business software companies are the ones that have ended up generally doing the best, which is kind of what you'd expect from tech investors as opposed to putting money into scooters or mattresses. Okay, two things that I want to hit on. What would Adam say? I don't know. Have you talked to Adam? Have you guys had any correspondence? What would he say to all of this? I mean, I guess we could guess, but is there one part of this that he's pushed back on the most with you? We have not gotten a lot of pushback.

I mean, we we really hope to interview him. He declined ultimately to sit for the interview. He knew all the questions we were having, you know, through a PR representative. We haven't heard very much of it. I mean, I can you can imagine like he's just telling. I mean, what we hear is he's, you know, telling his next story. Like he's just telling, I mean, what we hear is he's, you know, telling his next story. We hear constantly, like he's working on his next act, whether it's, you know, all these different businesses he's going to fund.

I mean, he's a, he's a, not just a paper billionaire anymore. I mean, he's, he got a huge payout as this company crumbled. So how did he do, by the way, can you hit on those numbers? So everybody understands what happened here with him because his exit may have been humiliating, but it still worked out. Right. Sure. Yeah. It was unbelievable. I'll just say part one, the company, the IPO gets called off and all of a sudden, right away, it's like this company could actually go bankrupt. They were pitching it. It was going to be like a hundred billion. Bankers were saying, oh, you could be like a hundred billion dollar company.

IPO gets called off because the market's too scared of adam newman as the ceo they need money so desperately we find out that they're going to run out of the ipo's called off in september they're on track to run out of money by like before thanksgiving they don't even have enough money to pay for layoffs so there's this huge push to save the company as quickly as possible. They get SoftBank to write a big check to take over the company. And as part of that, they give Adam a package at that time that was essentially valued at $1.7 billion. And that includes a four-year non-compete. They pay $185 million to like help them and not start his own company.

It's like a consulting fee. It's he can sell his shares. They sort of renegotiate a loan, like hundreds of millions in a loan. And the whole package is around that size. And this is essentially all to get him to give up control of the company. That's what he promises. And then the numbers, and I think you know this better than me,

by the next year, they're involved in litigation. SoftBank's trying to renege on some of this. And actually, Adam winds up getting even more money than this insane package. Yeah, I think the basic lesson is you can build a company that burns through $10 billion of investors' money. And they use, I think, $11 or $12-ish billion to build a company worth $8 billion. And yet, you can still leave a billionaire. And so, for entrepreneurs watching from a side, aspiring entrepreneurs, it's actually a great template if your goal is to get absurdly wealthy. I'm not sure what lessons there are for society in that.

But it's not a very comforting tale that you can essentially just convince the world of something that isn't. Have thousands of people lose their jobs and you leave extremely wealthy. Yeah, I mean, I guess the lesson is that if you're the founder and it's still going to be a company that survives and I, you know, there's, there's whatever you want to say about him. And it's not like any of us have complimented him for 30 minutes is that that's, that's the way it works. And it sucks. I'm not, I'm not saying, Hey, I think that's great. And it sucks for all these employees, thousands of employees. And like some of the original first hires are watching this guy buy house after house, take out loan against eight of them.

And, and, and, and they're like, wait, when do we get to do this stuff? And he's, and he's talking about how you're raising consciousness and changing the world and all this stuff. And it's like, no, actually you're just like everybody else. You're just selfish. Like you just, you're selfish and you did. Now I, did you have more on that Elliot? Cause I have one final thought. I just want to emphasize the, um, irony of, of building a company called we, but he, he, he ended up being like by

far the most selfish person I've ever come across in reporting. Yeah. And that's, that was another thing that I loved is that he had this one pitch where he was like, you know, it's the iPhone. It's the iPad. It's the iMac. We are we. And it was like, is that clever or is that stupid? And it's like, I don't know. I guess it's working.

And you're right. It wasn't we. It was I. He was as much about I as you could possibly be. Now, to be fair to WeWork work the signs are still out any major city that you're driving through you see them they did a complete overhaul they had to pay him to go out um there's still something it feels like the bones of of this company are still worth something salvageable so to be fair to the you know because if you read the book you're like oh they're the

worst um what's fair to say about what this company is now post-ad? It's a real estate company. I mean, they've shed all these ancillary businesses that seem kind of crazy and didn't seem like a good fit, whether it's like the education or the wave pool. They sold the jet. Yeah, they hired a real estate CEO and they've survived the pandemic, which is a feat. You know, it's like we all left offices. They made it through then. I think the future of it is very unclear.

I mean, it could, we could, and I don't think we quite know. I mean, do people, do big companies scale back their office footprint and put a big chunk of their employees into WeWorks and let them kind of come and go or not. I don't know. I think the future has yet to be written. The one thing we know is it's going to be a real estate company and it's just not going to be quite as interesting going forward, but it'll be a going concern most likely that could do pretty well it's going public uh this month you can buy shares and we work on uh you know you can trade them in your uh your account yeah i mean look the first thing people would say is you know well wait a minute and it's like well you know this is that's not what the company is now this is now being established as they kind of know who they are

they look in the mirror and they see the truth and for the longest time they didn didn't. And so, uh, I think that's the way you kind of have to look at this company as almost, you'd almost think there'd be value in not having the same name, you know, go a little Don Draper on him and just, you know, change, change the deal up because anybody that reads the book is going to go, wait, you know, why would I want to invest in this? And I, you know, I know a couple of people that work for the company and they're just like, look, man, yes, the book is not great, but you know, we, we are not that company anymore. Like we know who we are. And I was like, all right, whatever. Tremendous work. I hope you guys are getting all the praise you deserve on this one. I can't imagine the amount of research and time that goes into something, but just know that a lot of people appreciate it. And I was one of them. Nicole Tui, Elliot Brown, Marine Farrell. Thanks for your time. Thank you so much for having us. You want details?

Bye. I drive a Ferrari three 55 cabriolet. What's up? I have a ridiculous house in the South fork. I have every toy you can possibly imagine. And best of all kids, I am liquid. So now you know what's possible. Let me tell you can possibly imagine. And best of all, kids, I am liquid. So now you know what's possible.

Let me tell you what's required. Okay, let's do some life advice here. Life advice are at gmail.com. I'm going to bring this one up because I had this happen to me sort of as well today. As I'm on the road. All right, our guy's checking in from, we're not going to say where. He's 65230, mostly dad bod. His cleaning jerk is 170, his snatch is 110. Thanks for that. But there's a reason he did that. Something happened to me tonight at the gym. I need to know if I handled it correctly. A little background. The gym I go to is also where I work. It's a large facility for the military, open to the public. He's not military. I'm currently covering maternity leave and working from home, but working three to four, working out three or four times a week and having to occasionally go in for my current position. I'm frequently at this gym and very familiar with the entire facility and

the regular users. I am into Olympic lifting. I guess I'm the equivalent of a streetball version of Olympic lifting. I've never been coached, but I've developed some proficiency. I entered CrossFit lifting room and place. Oh, okay. All right. So we're in it. Now we're in it. So he goes into the CrossFit area where he works out at this military facility. He put his shoes, snap clips, water bottle keys besides the usual rack that he uses. He pulled out one of the good bars and set it in the rack on the J cups. He grabs a bench. He puts that beside the rack. He also put the plates that he was going to use around the rack area. So he took the plates off and then put them around the squat rack.

At the time, there were probably two other people using stuff in the room. I proceeded to leave the room for a basketball court to begin my warm-up. It consisted of mobility and band work, finished off some light pitching of a lacrosse ball, helps keep my back loose. I probably returned to the CrossFit lifting room after 10 to 15 minutes. Upon entering the room, there were now six people present, two regulars, one of which is also an Olympic lifter using a rack, who I haven't spoken to prior to last night. Two randoms doing bicep curls on the benches, two juice monkeys, definitely not military, who were using my rack. Needless to say, when I saw my rack had been taken, I was livid.

It appeared as though the one juice monkey was training the second one. They were doing bench press and the bar completely loaded. More on this later. I walked over to the far side of my rack and began gathering my items. The trainer juice monkey was training the second one. They were doing bench press and the bar completely loaded. More on this later. I walked over to the far side of my rack and began gathering my items. The trainer juice monkey said something to me. It was a little tricky to hear as my headphones in. Oh, he's listening to Steve Smith. Thank you.

Some of the effect of a quote. Oh, were you using this rack? I quickly snapped back. Yes, but just stay there. I decided that response to the best course of action instead of making them move. During my rest breaks and my workout, I tend to observe what others are doing in the room. Every time the one juice monkey would go to do his bench set, the spring clip would pop off the bar and the end plate would wobble a little bit. It seemed a bit dangerous, especially considering the other juice monkey was more interested in taking photos and videos of the maxed out bar.

It was then that I realized the bar was maxed with 10-pound plates. So I counted the plates and found were found out there was a hundred pounds aside. So, um, we're talking two 45. So instead of putting on 45s and a 10, they put on a bunch of tens to make it look like it was a ton of weight. All right. Well, that's not great. Side note, my foul mood was somewhat broken after hearing about your duck photo. All right. Well, glad we could help after they completed their workout, they cleaned up their weights, but left the bench and plates that I'd originally put out on that rack. Not surprising. And I thought about pulling the staff card and telling them to clean it up, but thought that that would be a bit much of a dick move. Instead, they left and I finished my workout. As I was putting my weights away, the other regular Olympic lifter looked over at me and I removed my headphones. We had a discussion about the two. What was going on? I told the other guy about being torn. I had a handle having my rack taken and whether I should have made them move. He told me that he would

definitely made them move and have to relocate all of their 10-pound plates. So this is where I need help. Did I handle this the best way I should or should I have made them move? And he sent me a picture of what his setup is, which is really important to this whole thing. So it's the rack. He's got the

bench over there and he has all these plates around. There's six plates on the ground around a rack. All right, here's the problem. You sound like a really nice guy. You set up everything, put all your shit down and you left for 10 or 15 minutes. So I just don't have a ton of sympathy for you. I don't. Because if the gym were busy and you showed up and you saw this rack not being used with shit everywhere for 10 or 15 minutes and somebody claims it like it's a dinner reservation, that's just not the way it works. Again, I was in a new place the other day. The squat rack was taken. The Smith machine was taken. There were plates out by the Smith machine that the person was clearly doing some sort of extension stuff where their toes were on the plates. And then that's how they're using the

Smith machine. And then the leg press on top of that was all fucking loaded up with four plates on each side and then i realized it was like some girl that's like the only attractive girl at the gym so no one ever gives her a hard time about leaving her shit everywhere and because i saw it and i was like you gotta be kidding me with this and then i was in there this morning and then lo and behold it was the exact same deal i think she does legs six days a week again it's not my home gym i don't know much about it but i realized that all these guys are like, whatever we'd like looking at her. So no one says anything to her, but I'd like to interview someone who, but I don't know how we could ever do it where it would work where someone is like, Hey, we want to have somebody on who

leaves shit around all the time, never puts their stuff back. We just want to understand you want to get in your head because it's so easy to clean up after yourself. And yet some of you refuse to do it. Like you think it's your world. So I don't think that's necessarily your deal here. And I'll admit the Olympic lifting stuff, that protocol is a little different than what I'm used to in just sort of normal gyms. But I'll also explain it this way. Like I had a buddy, they got a college thread. He's an active guy. He doesn't lift a lot. I think he was away. This is pre COVID. He was away working. So he's staying at a hotel. And he was like, Ursula, what's the call here? He goes, I went down to the gym in the hotel. There was one squat rack. It was actually a pretty decent hotel gym. And there was a guy that had just started. And I was like, you know, maybe I'll do a little legs here and do some squats. And the guy had just gotten started. And I said, hey, you know, how many more do you have to go? And the guy goes like, I'm going to be here for a little bit, you know, 10 minutes or so, which actually isn't very long in the Olympic world. And my friend was like, he wouldn't let me work in. I was like, wait,

what'd you do? He goes, I just asked, Hey, do you mind if I work in? And he said, no, he's like, can you believe that? I was like, yeah, actually I can. I go, you just don't, if you're not working out with the other person protocol is that, you know, squat rack guys usually just don't let somebody else work in that they don't know. I mean, somebody might, but somebody saying no to you in that, that instance, isn't all that rare. And he couldn't believe it, right? He couldn't believe it. And I go, this is another one of those cases where, and I don't know if this is specific to this country, but we do this a lot where we tell the people that are doing the thing that live in that world. The people that aren't from the outside always tell the people on the inside, like, oh, you're doing it wrong

or something else is wrong. The best equivalent I can come up with is whenever I read something about ESPN or something that happened, because I still have enough friends. I talk to people about stuff that happens and I'll read something and be like, that's not what happened. That's not how you would handle it. That's the wrong take. Like that's completely wrong. And then if I say to somebody, yeah, that's not really how it works. And they'd be like, well, they should do it this way. I'm like, yeah, but that's not what happens. Like, yeah, but they should like, okay, cool. I walked around there for 15 years. You've been there zero days, but you're going to tell me. So my buddy asking about squat rack, I was like, yeah, it's just not the way it works. And he was like, well, that's stupid. That's wrong. I was like, yeah, but you're the one that's wrong. And you're used 10 pound plates that whole deal I just don't know what gym where it's cool if it's

now busy and stuff is taken up where you're allowed to just put all your shit down and then nobody's allowed to use that rack again how would you feel if there was an empty rack with stuff everywhere and no one had used it for 10 to 15 minutes I would say in the future do your band work ahead of time and then go over to the rack I think you already

know that but Again, I don't know. I don't go to any of these crossfit spots So I I don't know if that's cool I mean some people just take forever in the racks. It sucks, but I don't think you're allowed to just set up and then not be bad Because that's what sucks about people just putting stuff down like that because you never quite know and then if you get sick of it You're like, all right. Hey, i'm going to move some stuff. And then the person shows up like, I can't believe you moved it. It's like, well, I can't believe you were gone.

So Kyle, anything on that? Yeah. I mean, it seems like he's creating like a force field around this thing. Like almost like it's like bait car or something like you're begging. Like how long can I leave and see if somebody is going to get in this car or not? Like, I don't know. Isn't that one of the most coveted things? I mean, I'm not a huge lifter, but every time I would go to a gym, I feel like there's always like two out of the three benches are in rotation. If not, there's somebody waiting. Right. So it's like definitely, definitely a hot commodity, but more like real, like relatable to my life. It's sort of like a bar stool. Like the bar is getting a little packed. This was like a week and a half ago. The bar was getting a little packed right next to Pantages

there, big theater. It let out. And I went and I burned down a red outside and I put the coaster on top of my beer, just like you're supposed to. And I came back and I was gone for like five minutes, but whatever. The bar was starting to get a little packed. I noticed it. Then I came back in and these two girls were sitting in my seat and she's looking at me. She didn't even move my drink. She's like, Oh, did you want your seat back? And initially I said, yes. And then I just kind of looked around and I saw there was a, you know, a different seat, not where I was sitting, but over there. And I was like, you know what? I'll just move. It's okay. Like she clearly knew that my stuff was there. It didn't matter. It was a public seat at the bar.

There's only so many. And then I just went and kind of went to the curl rack, if you will, and just sat over at the end of the bar instead. I know that I could have made a stink about it, but I know I really didn't have a total claim to anything. It's a public thing. Yeah. She was on your squat rack and then you decided to do a little thigh blasting because it was

open because nobody ever uses that. Yeah, and like 10 and five minutes is different than 15. So, I mean, it's really like I just ran to go fill up my water at the water fountain and then somebody's like sitting on my thing. A good bartender does a better job making sure that doesn't happen, by the way. Yeah, dark room would have never happened, but frolic room, I'm still kind of feeling things up. Yeah, you'll get there, buddy. I believe that. And by the way, she knew exactly what she was doing.

That's one of the male-f female things where women get away with that and they always know what they're doing because they just know that most of us are going to be like all right whatever um especially if she's attractive she's like i've been doing this my whole life getting away with shit yeah she wasn't and i actually did want to make her get up but um i i looked around i saw there was one because with frolic room it's's like a small bar, no windows. There's probably about 15 seats at the bar. And then there's the seats around the walls, which has like a small little bar like that you can rest your elbows on. But that's it. And there's like you're facing the wall and I never want to be there.

That's like you're in fucking timeout. So like it's actually it was actually the stakes were kind of high and there was luckily one seat. But I was going to be like I was ready to say like,, I do want it back, and we'll see what happens. But when I saw the one seat, I changed my game up. But for a solid 10 seconds there, I was like, yeah, what are you going to do when I say I do want my seat back? Do this. It would have been hilarious, too.

Her friend was sitting there, and then you get up, and then her friend stayed there, and you were like, huh, she's going to beat, huh? And she's like, what? Um, here's the, how about we just do this, put frolic room on notice. And this is your warning. Next time Kyle goes to crank down a dart,

you know, within a reasonable amount of time, five minutes is fine. We expect to see to be there when he comes back. It's never longer than five minutes. And the other problem is they have the steel, the stools with like the rounded bottoms. So it's not like you can kind of push it up against the bar and then people

will really get the idea. Like if your drink's covered with a coaster, that's one thing. I mean, you would think everyone knows, but if the seat is also cocked, you know, leaned up against the bar,

you should also, you should pretty much know, but it would be kind of dangerous because it's got one of those rounded bottoms. So it could just really fall and hurt someone. So it wasn't really an option. Final email here because this is going to be quick.

6'5", 225, 10% body fat. Congrats. I'm 31 and recently engaged to a girl who's extremely out of my league. I know the stats above don't seem that bad, but I do check the other important relationship boxes. Good job, loyal, trustworthy, but to be frank, I'm pretty unfortunate looking. They make matters worse. He's bald. So there you go. Or about to be. So he's telling us he's not hot and his hair isn't great, but he's a pretty

good sized guy. My question is how to deal with a massive difference in looks. I know a lot of guys would say, quote, be happy and enjoy it, but it's hard when the other guy checks out my girl. All right. So this is out kicking your coverage is what our guy is saying here. So he's, he's 31. He's not hot. And apparently his fiance is. He goes, when every other guy checks her out, I feel as if they're judging me and her because of the difference and want to take their shot with her. I get guys who are going to check her out simply because she's attractive and has nothing to do with me, but it's become difficult to enjoy that out with her. In your head, you size up every guy you come across like you want to fight him. I know confidence is a huge factor in these situations.

Working out gives me a short-term boost of it, but it isn't a permanent solution. I should also mention the issues. They're not with my fiance because she doesn't reciprocate the looks and I trust her fully. Any advice for us guys who've outkicked their coverage? Yeah. Find something else to fucking complain about. All right.

This is like writing in and saying, Hey, I'm rich, but I'm running out of things to buy. We can't help you because you don't need any. Be happy. It's the only advice that I can give you. Word. I'm in the same situation, way out of my league, but we've been going strong now for a couple of years.

And I just like whenever it happened, like we're in LA, there's always dudes like standing on a sidewalk, like selling hoodies. And they're like, oh, you should come be with me. And then I'll just make a joke to her as we walk away that that guy's selling hoodies. Like, just be funny in those moments when you're feeling insecure. I imagine if you're ugly, you're probably pretty funny. Yeah. And would you want it to be the other way around? Like, would you want, you know, people to be like, wow, you're so much hotter than your

significant other? Probably not. So like, you got a maid here. You're fine. But I need more on Kyle and these random people that just talk shit to you on the side of the road, telling you that you're not hot and that your girlfriend's way hotter than you are. I mean, there's really not much else to say. It just kind of follows us everywhere. You know, luckily she's busy. She works a lot and I'm busy. So it doesn't happen all the time. Happened a lot more pre-pandemic.

But, um, you know, I'm just, I know, I know what, where I shine and that's like being tall and being funny, not necessarily being, um, you know, rock solid and, um, and the best fashion or anything. So I just, I know my lane and I pick my shots. I don't think you're unattractive. I think you're a bad dresser. I didn't say, I didn't say, yeah, exactly. Exactly. But I think that's your choice and you give great advice on any potential criminal situation. Um, So I kind of more fascinated with the dynamic of the hoodie salesman just shooting their shot all the time. Cause you're not small.

Yeah. But you know, Melrose, those guys have guns and knives and it's like, it's not even like, not even that it comes down to that. It's just almost like a throwaway line. It's almost like a threat.

Like he's throwing that line to 300 people and for weeks it's not working and then maybe one time he'll get somebody who's like just not just like walking with a friend and it's not a boyfriend and like i don't know if it ever works for that guy but you know i just say he's like the return on investment there he is chumming the waters it's not even more likely to get fought than you are to actually have you know change the girl's mind about who she should be with yeah but they're usually in a group of one or two guys and it's just like maybe they're actually looking for the fight even who knows who knows but you know we just walk away and then and then i say the joke to her i don't say the joke in front of the crazy guy selling

hoodies i just i say it to her like you know and we all know too if the knife is the knife is over three inches the rule is that you have to i'm out over three inches right yeah we gotta we gotta bounce um would you say you've been going strong though for a couple years because didn't you don't you guys constantly break up so super volatile in the beginning super volatile and i made the mistake i was like watching football with bill and i would just kind of tell him on the weekends like oh yeah you know i've been bouncing around for a while and now i found this one i read like she's the hottest girls ever talked to me. And then I'd be like, oh shit. It's like after a Friday or Saturday night, I'd be like, oh dude, you won't believe it. And then we record the podcast on Monday and he talks about it. And I was like, oh, wait a second. I didn't know.

So then that became like a, an episodic thing when I was just kind of telling my uncle who was like my only family out here, what was going on so it took me a little while to realize what was happening and then i was like well i guess it would maybe hurt the ratings if i if i stopped so i just kind of let it go but she doesn't know to this day that it was a whole thing so but i mean that was now we've been three plus years without a breakup so oh well that's great news all right great way to end the podcast. Um, okay.

Good stuff, everybody. Thanks to Kyle and Steve, the Ryan Rosillo podcast. Check us out every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We get the NBA season starting.

Uh, we may even do a little baseball. We're, we're TBD. We'll see how that goes. All right. Please subscribe. Spotify.

Ring. Talk to you soon. you