Adam Neumann and WeWork exemplify the danger of granting "lunatic grifters" authority over global systems, as their cult-like tactics involving consciousness-altering drugs and billions in losses fueled delusions like becoming a trillionaire. The episode details how Neumann's self-dealing, including a $740 million personal loan and a failed $1.5 billion severance package after stepping down, exposed a Ponzi structure reliant on leasing deals rather than profit. Ultimately, this narrative warns that society's conflation of wealth with competence allows such figures to destabilize economies, echoing historical collapses where imaginary value caused real harm. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Women Take Matters Into Their Own Hands00:02:47
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespiece and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots five, City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
What?
Still in Chicago.
Meet me.
This is the part two of our episode on Adam Neumann and we work.
I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards podcast.
Bad people.
Talk about them.
Introduced poorly.
My guests in part two, as with part one, are Dan and Jordan.
The Forgotten Tragedy of Roller Coasters00:02:21
That's me.
I pointed at the wrong ones of you.
Don't worry about it.
But I know which ones you are.
Should I do the bit?
Robert?
What?
Robert?
What?
I don't understand the bit.
Never mind.
It's the beginning.
It's the opening bit.
Never mind.
Okay.
Yeah.
Jordan.
Oh, right.
Where you ask a question.
You can ask.
That would be interesting.
You can get a question now.
In their podcast.
I have planned several questions in the podcast.
We've done 400 episodes.
Hey, Robert, do you like music?
Yeah.
In the podcast that these two do, where they talk a little bit about Alex Jones, Jordan, who normally is the person who comes in cold, asks Dan a question at the start.
And I guess, yeah, hit me up with a question.
Yeah, man.
Oh, man.
Now I'm on the spot.
Let's see.
Robert, have you any experience with roller coasters?
What's your style on roller coasters?
I've only ever loved one roller coaster, Jordan.
And it wasn't a roller coaster.
Robert is married to this.
It was a virtual reality sort of experience and six flags over Texas.
Is this outside of Dallas?
A little bit.
A little bit.
You were like an F-16 pilot breaking the sound barrier.
Love it.
It was very cool.
Not really a roller coaster.
I don't really like roller coasters.
I've been on a number of them.
It's fine.
It's just not my thing.
Okay.
But I liked that ride, and then six flags took it away from you specifically.
One day.
The fuck out.
One day I will take vengeance on you.
Okay.
You're obviously.
And that is, I want to clarify, that is absolutely a terroristic threat.
One day they're going to wake up and it's only going to be five flags.
God damn it.
Yeah.
I'm going to take at least 18% of those flags.
I don't know how to do that percentage.
It's hard.
Something along those lines.
Roughs for me.
Within the ballpark.
And my answer is I liked that one, Mr. Toad's Wild Ride thing, that Wind in the Willows.
That book about a frog that gets drunk against Texas.
Ooh, and the Brayer Rabbit run.
I love that one both before and then in a different way after I realized how racist.
It was from Song of the South.
Yeah.
It was a real...
Before it was just like, this is a fun ride.
I'm seven.
And after it was like, really?
Backwards Into Being A Cult Leader00:09:49
Really?
Still, it is 2004.
That's Splash Mountain, right?
Isn't it that's the one that has the Brayer Rabbit?
Because at the end of it, you go over the waterfall.
And they killed that guy.
Yeah, I think so.
And there's so much to unpack about Splash Mountain.
I mean, it has that Song of the South connection to it.
There's also like a tradition of people flashing on the way down.
Like for kids, there's a lot.
There's a lot going on.
A lot going on.
Very complicated.
Disney parks in general.
My favorite was the Velveteen Rabbit.
I mean, you go up and you just stay down after that.
My favorite's the Velveteen Dream, Wrestler Fantasy.
I think they should have a Velveteen Rabbit ride where they just take something the children love individually and destroy it in front of them.
Less of a ride and more of child abuse.
But I'll be right back.
That's the only way you become real.
That's the only way you become real.
If it were Adam, it would be a bottle of tequila.
Yes.
Thank you for bringing it back to Adam Neumann.
That's a great transition.
Very smooth.
So we ended the last episode with WeWork nearing its height, 2016, 2017, where a lot of money just gets this in flush $4.4 billion of fucking cash, which they used to make Adam's dumbest dreams come true.
Does he double back to the baby clothes?
In a way.
Now.
Well, it was right after Trump got elected, so he just changed it to the KKK crawlers.
It did have a K.
Now, before we get into all that, what he did with all this VC money, I want to start this episode by talking a little bit about cults some more.
Now, WeWork has been described by a number of former employees as cult-like, and Neumann has been described as a cult leader.
Former employees often call his personal charisma almost intoxicating.
One former executive said, if you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general.
Another recalled, his sense of himself is beyond human.
When you're in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything.
There are certainly cult-like tactics at use in WeWork.
Cults endeavor to separate their members from the wider world and the friends and family they have outside the cult.
And you could argue that things like thank God it's Monday and mandatory after-hours fun events fulfill that role.
They also rely on consciousness alteration drugs.
This is all stuff we've talked about, keeping people tired, exhausted, fucked up.
And of course, the fact that I will note, in a point of fairness, that the fact that Adam himself was often one of the drunkest people in the company makes this a little bit less manipulative.
It's just sort of like he kind of just digs that stuff.
Yeah, it would be a much clearer red flag if he was not drinking and handing out alcohol.
That would be beyond a red flag.
Yeah, yeah, that would be deliberately rugging his employees.
Backwards into being a cult leader.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's more complicated than just he's a cult leader, but he uses a lot of those tactics clearly.
Maybe just sort of, you get the feeling with him that it's a lot of it's not as much intentional as it is like instinctive.
Yeah.
Um, which I guess is how we get our first cult.
Some people just know how to do that.
Yeah, no, my family was in a cult whenever I was born.
So I know all of the tricks and all of the ways that you get kind of accidentally swept up and all of that shit.
And then next thing you know, everybody's wearing the same clothes.
Dancing around a fire to journey.
Yeah.
Tragic.
That's just the drain.
Everybody's circles.
Although people should consider joining the cult that I'm going to start.
Is that right?
Where do you go?
Oh, yeah.
Where do you go?
Give me the elevator pitch.
We're people to talk in elevators.
I mean, it's a mix of people gifting me with large amounts of machetes.
Great.
Getting really high and shoving Adam Neumann off of buildings.
It's going to be a good cult.
Oh, I was just contemplating that there's a shelf life to this thing as there's one Adam Neumann.
There is.
There is.
We'll find out.
The great thing about shoving people off of buildings is there's always more people in more buildings.
That's true.
Or you can just keep shoving, which is our motto.
Just keep shoving.
Just keep shoving.
Is there going to be a Brigham Young to this Adam Neumann WeWork situation?
Maybe.
We haven't.
Like, actual time hasn't really hit that point yet, so I can't say.
Now, if we're going to compare Neumann to a cult leader and WeWork during Cult, Keith Ranieri's Nexium cult might be the best one to reference.
Listeners to part three of our series on Keith Ranieri and Nexium will recall that he hosted a yearly event called Vanguard Week, where followers from all over the globe would fly in to celebrate Keith's birthday.
In the same vein, WeWork had Summer Camp, an annual event where employees would gather, celebrate, and network.
Here's the New York Times talking about this fun set of days.
All kinds of activities were offered.
Yoga, axe throwing, leaf printing, a drum circle, along with entertainment by an expensive array of visiting performers.
The chain smokers once played and received WeWork stock as part of their fee, while The Weekend was flown in from Toronto by a helicopter.
Tenacious We, an employee band, has also performed.
Sounds insufferable.
That's terrible.
I don't even want to see the real version.
It was just so much everything, one former executive said.
Alcohol, drugs.
There was not a lot of food.
That was the only thing there wasn't a lot of.
Anything that would bulwark you against the alcohol and the drugs.
Yeah.
I'm super high already, but I'm very hungry.
I'm going to eat all of these mushrooms.
Yeah.
Just for sustenance.
That has happened to me once, and I.
It's not a great food.
No, nor is it a great idea.
As you were describing that festival, I did point at you very aggressively because they kind of almost swung you with the axe throwing, didn't they?
Look, my cult would indeed center around lots of drugs, throwing axes, dancing around fires.
The weekend.
Well, that song often, actually, I do quite like.
This cult sounds suspiciously like the great outdoor games.
No, no, no, no.
There's no games.
I feel like adding an element of competition to throwing sharp objects at inert things cheapens it.
That's fair.
You're just throwing axes and knives for the joy of throwing sharp things at wooden things.
You don't want to roll.
That's all it's about.
The purity of the world.
The purity of the exact work.
Exactly.
Now, Summer Camp included educational interludes, like speeches from quantum physicist Michael Brooks, alongside beer pong and dancing to electronic music.
And in the midst of these days-long buccanals, to employees plied with drugs, limitless alcohol, little food, and less sleep, Adam Neumann would preach his gospel.
In a 2013 summer camp, he took to the stage to say, I think the thing that all of us know is that if you want to succeed in this world, you have to build something that has intention.
Every one of us is here because it has meaning, because we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place.
And we want to make money doing it.
The crowd reportedly broke into wild cheers at this.
One former senior executive who was there later recalled, so many of the people were young and had never worked in a real company.
They bought all of it.
I realized after I got there, it was a cult.
Now, Summer Camp started as an event on the land of some of Neumann's friends, but in 2017, it moved to the English countryside.
Using some of the billions of new money pumped in via SoftBank's $4.4 billion infusion, they flew employees in from all around the world.
Attendees reported that they were allowed to walk up to the bar and ask for multiple entire bottles of wine at once.
People played Edward 40 hands with fancy bottles of rosé, which is what I would do.
Yeah.
That part sounds great.
That's your god-given dude.
When you realize the liquor is free and expensive and they'll just hand you bottles, that's what you do.
Have you ever done that?
Tape 40s to your hands?
Yeah.
The worst thing I've done in fucking Ljubljana, Slovenia, was you can buy two liters of wine in a gigantic juice box for about a dollar and a half.
And you mix it with equal parts Pepsi.
And it is the worst idea.
Doesn't sound good idea.
Terrible.
Do you duct tape those to your hands?
I know.
We just drank.
I blacked out throwing an empty bottle on top of a stranger's roof.
And I came to alone without any of my friends near me receiving a falafel from somebody, having already paid with my phone gone, nine in the morning, like eight hours later.
Just the first time, only time that's ever happened.
We're just like, I black out and I come back in the middle of a transaction.
Yeah.
And you could won the friendship contest, I assume.
I had no, I was alone.
I had lost the friendship contest.
The prize was a falafel.
I did that once.
I taped duct tape 40s to my hands.
Oh, good Edward 40 hands, just not wine.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
It's terrible because you eventually have to pee.
Yeah, and steel reserve isn't something anyone should drink two of.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
Yeah.
Me and my buddies also had a thing we did called Freedom 40s.
That was you have to chug a 40 in nine minutes and 11 seconds or else the terrorists win.
It's shockingly hard to do.
Because 40s are ghastly.
Yeah.
That's literally the best way to forget.
Yeah.
Now, one employee later told the New York Times that she realized it was time to quit WeWork when she woke up in a teepee at summer camp to find one of her colleagues outside pissing on her tent.
That employee later told New York Magazine, talk to any community manager under 24 and it's the greatest weekend of your life.
But I am not here to get peed on.
Now, I'm going to quote one more time from that New York magazine article discussing the 2018 summer camp, which, spoilers, would prove to be the last one.
Vulnerable Employees And Inflated Confidence00:03:50
At last year's event, according to Report in Property Magazine, a British real estate publication, Norman sat on stage next to his wife and McKelvey as the crowd sang, Oleo Leo Le.
A WeWork employee from India started chanting, let's go, WeWork, let's go.
While another from California screamed, you're changing the world, Adam.
We love you.
Augusto Contreras, a WeWork employee from Mexico City, proposed to his girlfriend next to a dodgeball tournament.
I felt like I was surrounded by my extended family, he told the company blog.
He had been at WeWork for seven months.
So they find the people who are vulnerable to this.
Right.
And they're very vulnerable to it.
When you said that it was the last one, I expected that story to be something like really tragic or like fire festivally, but that just was just like a corporal did perform there, though.
You're sucking in people who need what this pretends to provide.
Yeah.
It doesn't really provide it, but that's coming later.
Now, that fast company article I've quoted from a couple of times in this episode was released in 2016, and it provides even more detail on the profoundly culty way that Adam presented himself at company events.
Quote: A Beatles chorus bounces off the bare concrete walls of what was once JP Morgan's headquarters.
Come together right now.
The nearly 1,000 chattering WeWork employees who fill the event space look toward the stage, expecting CEO Adam Neumann to appear from the wings at any second.
Instead, he sprints down the center aisle and giddy conversations evolve into a cheer.
When John Lennon trills over me, Neumann leaps onto the stage, sticking the landing.
So, this is the way this guy's presenting himself to his employees, and it kind of seems like a lot of them eat it up.
Yeah.
Wall Street has already come out by this time.
Yeah, they should know better.
They should know better, right?
But people never learn about this.
So many movies about this.
I mean, World War II came out, and we all know what happened in 2016.
So, have you ever watched the presentations that MLMs, like the multi-level marketing?
Yeah, yeah.
This is exactly similar.
I've watched a number of those seminars and the gatherings that they do.
And that has all of those signs.
I try to repeat frequently that I think everybody has a kind of grift that they're vulnerable to.
No matter how smart, because it has nothing to do with intelligence.
It has everything to do with the fact that everybody has needs and particularly secret needs that even they don't know how to voice a lot of the time.
And if someone other than you, particularly predators, what they're good at is seeing things in others that they don't see in themselves, but that are present, if they're able to pick that out, they'll get you.
It doesn't matter how smart and well-read you are, they'll get you.
We all have a thing.
And Adam found a group of people who, I think, were raised on stories like Apple's, you know, the history of the Apple Corps, the Google Corporation, these companies that like changed the world and had these grand visions and like these legendary leaders.
And everybody got super fucking rich, too.
And Adam knew how to create the feeling that that's what was going on here.
It wasn't.
It was just leasing office space.
It wasn't literally like Google.
That is like a revolution.
We organize the world's information.
Apple, we changed the fundamentally the way that daily life exists for billions of people.
Those are companies where you really can't oversell at least the impact of what's happening.
These people are leasing office space.
But he's made it feel like that.
Yeah, but there's kids.
That is part of why it felt like that.
It is like he watched that Apple commercial where the hammer is thrown into the giant screen and all the drones are there.
And he was like, what if I made all those drones?
Those guys were super cool.
Yeah, that seems like that's the thing I want to be.
Drones, Hammers, And Revolutionary Ideas00:06:21
I don't want to throw a hammer in.
Shit, everything will fall down.
It'll be terrible.
It's hard for me not to think that none of this would be possible without Booz.
It's not for nothing that alcohol is in every story you read about WeWork.
It really seems very way to have achieved the inflated sense of self-confidence that was clearly a major aspect of this would have been to give everyone free guns, which is how my cult's going to work.
I thought it was machetes.
Machetes don't do it enough, man.
It's really, it's got to be an AK-47.
I understand.
Now that makes you feel like a revolutionary like holding a Kalashnikov.
That's what I hear.
And then we're going to shove people off of buildings.
Adam Neumann at first.
From each according to the bullets they have to each according to the bullets they deserve.
Yeah, that's actually really good.
I should also abstain from this bit.
And here's our special third guest, FBI agent Don Chicago's.
There's actually a lot more than one of you.
Okay.
Not fans.
No.
And they have deep dish pizza.
I refuse to try it.
That's fine.
Yeah, you're fine.
Yeah, don't worry about it.
Everyone I know from Chicago has said that.
It's fine.
Only people not from Chicago are like, oh, you got to try the DC pizza.
We're all fine with it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, fight Cali Max.
It's not as good as Tech Max.
Say it.
I lived in both.
Fair enough.
Not nearly as good.
I have no dog in the pizza fight.
You know, speaking of dog fights.
Not speaking of dog fights.
It's the beginning to worsen.
Speaking of dog fights, you know who would never train dogs to fight.
Who is that?
Michael Vick?
At one point, you probably would assume he wouldn't.
When he was five, six.
Sure.
And like a five-year-old Michael Vick.
Someone who is incapable of hosting dog fights is the sponsors of this show.
Silky.
One of the better ad transitions on this series.
Off we go.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Ellen Scraps.
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
What did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Shots Fired At City Hall In 200300:13:56
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Oh, what I loved about those products and services was that none of them were for dog fights.
That's true.
It's true.
Sometimes you just can't abandon the dog fight, Vic, when you should.
No, it's hard to.
It's hard to abandon a dog fight.
It's also rare these days for me to guest on a podcast that isn't sponsored by a dogfighting group.
It is.
It is.
Well, and I just should say, if you use the promo code Bastards, you get access to the 24-hour streaming dog fights.
All the best dog fights.
We got Chihuahuas.
And all the saber metrics about like the wins over with dog fighting league.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So, now, shortly after Adam Neumann founded WeWork, he'd made what seemed to be at the time an impossible promise that his company would one day beat out JP Morgan and become the largest private office tenant in the city of New York.
Given that New York is New York, that's a pretty huge deal.
So JP Morgan was prior the most office space.
The gigantic bank worth all of the money in the world.
So saying I'm going to beat them, that's a big, that's a big thing to hit.
But in 2018, this dream became a reality.
WeWork now leased 5 million square feet over 50 locations across the city.
Still not making money, correct?
Not a profit.
They're making money.
But not net.
Not net.
Yeah.
Now, those locations, as we got into a little bit, were leased with venture capital money, not actual profits made by the company.
And those offices were kept full due to free rent offers and lease buyouts, which is not a strategy that can continue forever.
Man, you could just give people homes.
You could give people homes for less than a month.
This would make more sense.
It does feel like people talk about like we can't afford universal health care.
And then it's like, how much money did we work blow through?
It's just blew it up.
Like even outside of how much money did we spend on the F-35, which is actually vastly higher.
Yeah, sure.
But still.
And if he housed people instead of all these offices, those people would get tons of booze.
Yep.
Yep.
They'd be drunk as shit.
Now, SoftBank's massive investments seemed to confirm Adam's grand boast about the importance of his company, and his ego swelled consequently.
He started talking to colleagues about his desire for eternal life.
Oh, no.
This is like moon base all over again.
This is where it begins.
This is where Dan's ears perk up.
He invested in life biosciences, a life extension startup to further this end.
The company mission is to create a future where age-related decline is not a fact of life.
Adam increasingly threw out wild ideas for ways WeWork could expand to areas well outside of its wheelhouse.
Sometime after 2017, he started talking about starting an airline called WeFly.
But this type of shit where you look in history and you're like, how is it that people got sold on fucking alchemy and the philosopher's stone and eternal life?
And then you look at that guy and you're like, there's rich assholes.
They're still doing it.
Yeah, they're still doing it.
In fairness, WeFly kind of like.
It's a good name.
It's a fine enough name for an airline.
It's just like, what's your experience?
Renting buildings to companies.
What do you want to do?
Run an airline.
What is an airplane but an office?
A sky office.
Yeah, exactly.
That is actually where these episodes were written.
Exactly, Robert.
The WOW Airlines in Iceland that used to exist.
The World of Warcraft airlines.
And there was Wiz Air, which is the worst airline.
They started, it's like a bike share company, and their next move is like, I think we'll run an airline.
Turns out those skills do not translate.
Translate.
Weird.
Wow.
Now, Adam increasingly threw out wild ideas for ways WeWork could expand into areas.
Well, outside.
Oh, right.
I read that a little bit.
Oh, yeah.
So WeFly is one.
There was also talk of We Sale and something called We Sleep, which I have no idea what that was supposed to be.
He briefly discussed.
Yeah, maybe mattresses, maybe like a sleep lab.
He briefly discussed his ambition to become Israel's prime minister before amending that to say that if he ran for any office, it would be for president of the world.
That's an awful lot of people.
Cool.
Part of how you know this was a little bit culty is that if my boss, this podcast, Jack O'Brien, someone I have great respect for.
I've worked with him 11, 12 years now, the vast majority, basically all of my working life.
If he told me seriously that if he ever ran for office, it would be for president of the world and it wasn't like a bad joke, I would just start punching.
And I love Jack.
But that's what you do.
When you care about someone and they say shit, you just start hitting them.
It's a mentality that needs to be gone from.
It needs to be hit.
Yeah.
You just don't do that.
Especially when it's paired with like, I'm trying to put money into life extension technology and hopefully forever and be president of the world.
I'm going to hit you with this brick.
Like, this is what needs to happen now.
You have become a problem, and I have a visceral response to that.
You can be president of the world with one eye.
You will not have both of your eyes while you do it.
I will make sure of that.
I think it is inevitable that if there is a president of the world, they will have one eye.
But there will be an eye patch situation.
Because it'll be a dystopian, like, water world type of.
Yeah.
I was going with D-Boy from Friday, the president of the world in Fifth Element.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's a great president.
That's the one that I'm all about.
I will say, as an anarchist, I have a lot of different, conflicting, always-shifting ideas about how I think the world ought to be.
One thing I'm certain of is that based on my ideology, if I ever think someone might become the president of the world, I'm going to try to hit him with a brick.
I think that's fair.
Although I also think that...
I'm going to try to brick him.
I think that anytime you hear someone say, like, I want to be president of the world, like, what scares me about that is not the possibility they'll become president of the world.
It's just what that implies about their mentality.
It's the ego.
Yeah.
It's like, because it's like, this is trouble.
Like, I would have a very negative reaction to somebody who was like, I'm going to be president.
Yeah.
Because that's a bad thing to want to be.
But somebody wants to be president of the world.
That's a bricking.
Yeah.
That's a bricking.
It's dubious.
It's a big mentality.
Yeah.
I mean, the truth is the only people that should be in power are the people who don't want to be in power, and that's why we're fucked.
Now, all of this we've been talking about for several minutes now was a paragraph, and I haven't read the last sentence.
And it's the most insufferable sentence.
Mike down, Jordan.
In the 2018 summer camp, Adam Neumann promised that WeWork would solve the problem of children without parents and then eradicate world hunger.
We're going to kill children without parents.
Just start dancing orphans.
They shan't be hungry then.
WeWork's value soared past 10 billion, then past 20 billion.
Adam Neumann was now, on paper at least, a billionaire himself.
So there was no indication of how he planned to solve those problems.
No, none whatsoever.
Well, a little bit.
We'll get to that a little bit.
We'll get to that a little bit.
I just put a medium post right after Elizabeth Warren and made a white paper.
You know, he actually, if he had, that would have been more thought than I think he gave to it.
Yeah, that sounds right.
Yeah.
He immediately started bragging after becoming a billionaire, again, on paper, that his personal goal was to become the world's first trillionaire.
Do we not have one?
Brick him.
Brick him good.
No.
No, we don't have one.
Oh, no, we're not.
Jeff Bezos is like, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates are like at $120 million, something like that.
That's not even all that close to a trillion.
I have so little interest in money stuff that I just assumed we had a couple.
I feel like it is a matter of the survival of civilization level importance that we not let anyone reach that level.
Yeah, I feel like it's a matter of survival that we don't allow billionaires to exist until we leave that.
We've got to stop that, too.
That's got to go.
Yeah, that's a brickin'.
If you want to be a trillionaire, that's a brickin'.
I see a shirt in your future.
That's a brickin'.
That's a brickin'.
You want to be true?
I'm gonna hit you with a brick.
I just gotta do it.
If you were a stand-up comedian touring the Midwest, you would sell a lot of that's a brickin' shirt.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, the reality of Adam's wealth was less impressive.
He made millions as WeWork CEO, because that's what CEOs do.
And he made millions more from having the company lease from properties he owned.
But he also had borrowed more than $740 million against his stock in the company, a thing that is legal for some reason.
He sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of his own shares.
This was often done in a very shady fashion.
For example, in 2015, he sold tens of millions of dollars worth of shares.
Then he had the company launch a stock buyback program to buy employee shares of stock.
The buyback program offered employees a per-share price that was markedly lower than what Neumann had been paid for his stock.
And since Adam's stock sales weren't public, WeWork's employees didn't realize they were being screwed to subsidize Adam's lifestyle.
Man, I feel like all those guys who are like, okay, here's what we'll do to increase productivity.
Create a cult and fuck over everybody we work with could really be served by like reading all the literature where they're like, if you pay people a living wage and give them benefits and give them time off, they will work more for you on their own.
Jordan, that is not how you become president of the world.
It's definitely not.
You know who you become president of the world?
Crazy shit.
It's racism.
It's racism.
Oh, no.
Now, because it's the world, it's a number of different racisms because you've got to be able to get Mexicans, Tibetans.
You got to really all over the world racism.
Like really religion and then move to race.
That's my advice.
But even then, you've got to be.
We might see it in our lifetimes.
And I'm really, I'm really curious.
Yeah, I'm really curious to see whether or not it's a racism or a religious bigotry thing.
Well, no, just which one, which playing to which sort of bigotry wins, you know?
Because I feel like it'll be one president who's like, fuck all these different individual races that I've calculated will maximize my vote.
And one president will be like, fuck this specific race.
So it'll be like a focus-tested racism versus instinctual racism.
I mean, it's actually going to come down to Hillary versus Trump again.
Very frustratingly.
The MPAA has to review what type of racism in a bunch of focus groups.
Yeah, gotcha.
Now, during this time, Adam and Rebecca bought a $90 million collection of homes around the world, including a 60-acre estate in Westchester County.
See those kids made it.
That marriage worked.
It dude.
I expected a divorce by now.
You know, it's weird.
When you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it's easy to stay married.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which really speaks to how unpleasant Jeff Bezos's marriage must have been.
Anyway, I'm not going to comment on that anymore.
Yeah, they had a $21 million mansion in the Bay Area with a room shaped like a guitar.
They hired several nannies for their children, two personal assistants, and a chef.
Even as much money as Adam was worth, his spending was incredibly excessive.
And so was WeWorks spending.
While Adam's craziest ideas, like establishing an airline, never went into production, the company did embark on a number of side hustles at his direction.
They created We Live, essentially a very expensive apartment complex with no privacy.
Adam said this would drive suicide rates down because no one feels alone.
Elevator talk.
Getting really uncomfortable.
But that is kind of the natural progression.
If they're like making this company, if it is company towns, yeah.
Yeah, you've created this, like, this is the workspace we now own.
Why wouldn't you then get into like, now we're getting into your living?
Yeah, I tried to create a workspace/slash living space, so why not just create a living space/slash workspace?
They also created a gym.
I think it was called We Rise.
That should be their bakery.
That should be their bakery.
I know, I know.
Missed opportunities.
And then they created Wegrow.
This was a school that Adam hoped would eventually expand into a project to house all the world's orphans.
Jesus.
Adam said this fucking sentence, you guys.
Adam said of Wegrow's plan to save the orphans, we want to solve this problem and give them a new family, the WeWork family.
I'm speechless.
That's terrifying.
What if what kind of person says that?
A crazy, like a just a straight-up insane person.
Yeah.
I wonder if there was a moment.
I wonder this, because this is the question, like in the movie of this dude's life, does he have that scarface moment where it's like you can see him just go past that point, and it's like, everything past this is just going to be insane.
It was probably that night on the roof.
It was that night on the roof, maybe.
What do you mean?
The Dignity Of The Presidency Collapses00:02:42
I can get people to do anything if they'll drink this poop beer.
Could be.
We start with the thing on the roof and then.
Oh, this is going to be an insufferable movie, isn't it?
That makes him into like a cool guy.
There'll be another social network.
I want to do it like Wall Street, but it turns out that even when you satirize these evil people, people are going to be like, there should be a law that when you do a movie like Wolf of Wall Street, there needs to be a seven-minute scene wherein the character shits himself.
Yeah.
Really unbecoming.
Yeah.
Just make him embarrassing.
And make it uncomfortable for the audience.
You know, it should be hard to get over that hump.
You should expect it to be over like three minutes in, and then it just kills me.
And not like funny, not like the vomiting scene in Team America, like just bad.
Just a bad thing to be a part of.
Yeah.
Because it happened.
I feel like that's a regulation we could pass.
I think so.
I think so.
It's bipartisan appeal.
The movie shitting bill has passed through both houses and is now on the president's desk.
He was reportedly unable to sign today as he was too busy chopping off his enormous poop so that it could flush in less than 10 flushes.
That did happen.
That's just part of politics in America.
You can't remove that from the history books.
It's where we live now.
Yeah.
Amazing.
It's going to be really funny if we get past, as a nation, him being in office and don't collapse into a civil war, to hear people talk about the dignity of the presidency again.
Like, really, it's going to be like, I hope I get to be on TV at some point when that happens and just be like, what?
What is left?
Did you hear the poop speech?
I mean, historically, the dignity of the presidency was lost, you know, I guess after Andrew.
It was always an illusion.
Even Jackson presented himself in a stately manner and stuff.
Like a six-foot-tall wheel of cheese is where I get off board on the dignity of the president.
Ah, that's the best thing he did.
I feel like that's different than accusing everyone else in the country of needing 15 flushes to get their poop down the toilet.
And everyone listening knowing you couldn't get a poop down the toilet.
Could you, the president?
You told on yourself there with this speech.
No one else is having trouble with this.
Here I am having pooped for four days and it takes 10 flushes.
Yeah, I mean, you can say that the office is undignified historically forever, but I think there is a value to a shared illusion.
Shared Illusions Among Rich People00:10:46
Yeah.
And that's kind of gone.
There's a value, but it's not a good or a bad thing.
It's just a value in the same way.
An AR-15 has a value.
Yeah.
Now, when we last, before we went on this aggression, I'd said that Adam wanted to solve the problem of parentless children and give them a new family.
That's why we went on the digression because that's fucking crazy.
It is.
It's a nuts fucking sentence.
That's crazy.
Now, before WeWork could house the world's orphans, though.
We're going to put them on trains.
Nobody's ever done this before, and we'll send it all the way across the nation.
You know, it's better than that.
It's better than that, but dumber.
We train.
In order to make We Grow get to the point where it could house all of the world's orphans, it was going to start as a luxury boutique school for the children of rich people, charging the very wealthy in New York City $36,000 to $42,000 a year to educate their small children.
Well, this seems like the opposite.
So we're going to solve the world's homeless orphan problem by making it impossible for them to afford with Waldorf education.
I imagine him flying down to a group of Syrian refugees fleeing a barrel bombing in Idlib and putting a hand on one of their shoulders and saying, in like 20 years when the cost comes down, we'll take care of you.
Oh, yeah.
Right now, no way.
For now, it's just Sean Penn's kids.
And they're getting a great education.
Absolutely.
I believe.
Do you know who Sean Penn is?
Oh, you're dead.
Sorry about that.
Now, We Grow was Rebecca Neumann's project, his wife.
She'd been a core part of WeWork from the beginning, of course.
In 2017, the company had hired Soul Cycle founder Julie Rice as their chief brand officer.
But when Rebecca came back from maternity leave later that year, she decided she wanted the title for herself and took it.
So Julie had to quit.
Okay, according to WeWork's established business practices, she should have been fired.
Yeah.
And demoted.
I'm disappointed by this.
She was.
That's what happens through that.
Because she was originally the chief brand officer, right?
Yeah, yeah.
But then Rebecca got it.
Yeah.
Well, they support this decision, apparently.
Rebecca is somewhat famous among WeWorkers for firing people she met and got bad vibes from.
One example is a mechanic for the company Gulfstream Private Jet, who was shit canned because Rebecca, quote, didn't like his energy.
So she's the kind of person we are all like.
Now, obviously, she was the perfect person to design a brand new school from the ground up.
Rebecca, of course, had no relevant experience in education.
And also, what if children and running a school?
What if these kids have bad vibes?
Well, then you just kill them.
You throw them off the top of that building.
That's real trouble for someone who's like so ish.
Always thought what was missing from public education was more capriciousness.
Yeah, and good vibes.
Yeah, good vibes.
Yeah, she had nowhere else in experience, but she didn't think that really mattered.
She told interviewers that her vision for WeGrow was a new conscious, entrepreneurial school committed to unleashing every child's superpowers.
At the school's opening, she reportedly stated, In my book, there's no reason why children in elementary schools can't be launching their own businesses.
Labor laws?
Not if they're running shit, Jordan.
I mean, if you're like, I'm going to hire a bunch of eight-year-olds to work in this coal mine, if you want to do a school where you're like, hey, it's cool to do a lemonade stand and learn some lessons from it, I don't know how, I'm not going to die on that hill arguing against that, but it sounds like that's not what she's talking about.
No, no, she wants them making their own we.
Didn't the Olson twins even wait until they were 18 to start their fashion brand or whatever?
I think they did.
And I think that maybe working their entire childhood had some negative mental health implications, but I don't want to speak for them.
It's telling that kind of the best case scenario for children who work a lot as children is Macaulay Colkin.
Yeah.
Well, his best role was in Party Monster, which I'm sure has to do with the power.
He's fucking awesome in Parliament.
He doesn't bring any parts of his real life.
Yeah.
He's great in Party Monster.
I like Macaulay Colkin, and I'm glad he made it out.
He's also good and saved.
He's also good and saved.
It's tough, is what I'm saying, being a child who works heavily as a child.
Maybe it's not good for children.
Maybe children shouldn't work a lot.
Give me the backing of thousands upon thousands of psychological studies, and then I will listen.
You know what psychologically would be awesome for kids in school fucking looking at payroll inventory.
Because it's like you talk about like child actors and actresses.
Obviously, a lot of them have very negative experiences.
It's a damaging thing, which is why we have so much respect for Daniel Radcliffe's parents who are like, no, we're not going to let our kid move to fucking Los Angeles.
Like you either film it and you like, we're just not going to put him through that.
It's tough.
It does things to them.
And they're not in charge.
They actually have a lot of people there to support them.
And it still is very difficult to deal with healthily.
Having a kid managing payroll, having a kid managing debt and like venture capital.
And like, what a bad idea.
It seems like woefully stupid.
Now, WeGrow launched in the fall of 2018.
It was housed in WeWork's headquarters.
Problems immediately cropped up due to the fact that Rebecca and her colleagues had failed to anticipate minor details like paying the school security guards.
HR had apparently forgotten to add them to payroll.
So this was an immediate bump in the lug.
Sometimes you don't pay the people, the little people.
When you're trying to start a school for entrepreneurs, sure, you're gonna make mistakes that entrepreneurs shouldn't make it.
To be fair, under no circumstances, should not make.
To be fair, a second grader was in charge of HR.
Yeah.
And security.
Yeah.
Yeah, so these things will happen.
It's a learning experience.
Other problems.
Other problems came as a result of Becca's own peculiar preferences.
She made a rule that parents were allowed to wait in the school lounge to pick up children, but nannies had to wait outside in the vestibule.
This was reportedly because Rebecca didn't want her own children's nannies to enter the school.
One person close to the school told interviewers the whole thing was about her and what was right for her children.
Right, right, right.
Yeah.
What if I made a school based on Downton Habby?
Gotcha.
Yeah.
Rebecca herself told Fast Company something similar.
She claimed that the inspiration for We Grow had come when she and Adam were looking for fancy rich people schools for their five kids.
And quote, we couldn't find the school that we felt would nurture growth.
These children come into the world.
They are very evolved.
They are very special.
They're spiritual.
They're all natural entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians.
And then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system.
Boy, this sounds familiar.
I can't think of anybody that's not.
This is very reminiscent of a lot of the extreme right homeschool kind of there's some aspects of a lot of different things in that.
Now like everything else the Normans embarked on, We Grow put style before substance.
The school was designed by a famous architect and featured a vertical garden and whatever acoustic clouds are on the ceiling.
WeWork bought an alternative college startup, Mission U, in order to hire a COO for WeGrow, who presumably knew something about teaching kids.
Curriculum included classes on mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and farming.
All meals were vegetarian.
I don't have any problem with the last two parts.
I just include them for context.
Mindfulness and meditation?
Yeah.
Maybe not a great idea for teaching kids.
I don't know.
Nine-year-olds love to quiet and cold spaces.
That's what they're for.
We'll talk about mindfulness in another episode.
As WeWork matured doing mindfulness this week.
Fuck that shit.
Wonderful takes down meditation.
Don't think.
I wouldn't have lit nearly as many fires as I've lit in my life if I thought.
Right.
And I've learned so much from those fires.
What happens when insulation catches on fire?
What happens when drywall catches on fire?
What happens when shingles catch on fire?
Basically, what happens when people catch on fire?
All lessons I wouldn't have had if I'd thought more.
That's a good point.
Thank you.
All right.
I retract.
I retract my support of meditation.
As WeWork matured and started expanding into every conceivable realm, Adam began to revamp his ideas about the We generation.
He modified this to what he called me plus WeWork.
There we go.
That's what I was waiting for.
I literally was about to say that he's going to say it's the me generation, but never mind.
You're not going to be plus Pepsi.
He explained at a WeWork summit, quote, on one hand, you want to be your own person, have your own goals.
And on the other hand, you understand that being a part of something greater than yourself is an amazing opportunity and actually makes you stronger.
Now, Adam had earlier claimed that WeWork's multi-billion dollar valuation was much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue, pointing out that his real estate leasing business was not a real estate business, but instead a community company.
We're not selling office space.
We're selling community.
It's amazing that.
The thing that can't be sold.
Rich people are always telling us that it's just not about money, Robert.
It's only about money for, again, people who will die immediately without a little bit more of it.
Right, but we can put them on trains and solve homelessness or some shit.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I've noticed at this point, like, there's been literally no conversation at all about like people having good experiences in WeWork offices.
Or like that actual community that he intends to build actually.
There's a lot of turnover.
It's not like early Apple where it's like people stay for fucking ever.
Or a lot of stuff you hear about early Google.
There's a ton of turnover.
But he's not even talking about this like great thing that he's bringing into the world being about the employees of WeWork.
It's the people who rent the office space.
And it's always vague and undefined ideas in the community too, because it's not real.
He's again, he's selling this to the bosses.
But I mean, in reality, if you're living, if you're working at a WeWork space, it's just a very mundane office space.
Yeah, like if you're working at WeWork, slightly better interior design, you know?
I worked at a shared office space for a while, and it was just, it was fine.
Everybody was there.
I could never, like, I don't know.
Selling Vague Ideas To Office Renters00:04:52
I can't be productive in a space where I can't wander around shirtless with an AR-15 strapped to my chest.
We all have our process.
Strapped or taped?
Strapped.
No, I have a very nice sling.
Now, several.
You know who doesn't sell slings for AR-15s?
Maybe.
Yet.
Although we're courting them.
Yes.
The products and services that sponsored this show.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice in selling spread.
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's docks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged you.
A victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
The Meat Eating Ponzi Scheme Unraveled00:16:09
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're talking about a thing that we won't talk about after.
This will be a mystery for the nine of you who are listening after that digression about dog fighting.
Strangely enough, Michael Vick is still listening.
Michael Vick, big supporter of the podcast.
Really huge into the podcast.
And you know what?
I support north of 60% of what he's done with his life.
A lot of passes.
A lot of passes.
We're good.
A lot of runs.
Paid his rent on time for a spell.
He was a good football player.
I don't know anything about Michael Vick other than the dog fighting.
And football.
Those are the only two things I know.
I don't know anything about the football.
I know he was a footballer, but I don't know.
I can't analyze him at all.
He was pretty good.
He's run for more than 100 yards.
Okay, never mind.
Sorry.
So he was good.
He was good at the balls.
Oh, he was very good at the balls.
Okay, that's good.
That's good.
Well, no, because of the dog fighting.
But now I understand more.
Now, Adam Neumann's most constant refrain when he talked about WeWork to his employees was this.
And this is a quote.
We are here in order to change the world.
Nothing less than that interests me.
And for a while, it seemed like that really might be happening.
By 2018, WeWork had 466,000 members working out of 485 locations in more than 100 cities in 28 countries.
It had more than doubled its revenue every year of its existence.
Not only was it Manhattan's largest tenant, but in central London, it controlled more space than anyone but the British government.
So this is like, like, you can't overstate like how much this company fucking expands, right?
All right.
Well, chances are if you own anything in London, you're an evil person.
Yes.
Including the British government.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It seems to be all the metrics of success are all just sort of geographical and not based on actually profiting anything.
Just based on, and they don't own these buildings.
They're leasing them.
Yeah.
They're leasing them.
So even though even the geographical brag is kind of a liability.
Yeah.
It seems like you can't be the most profitable company if you're essentially a middleman.
Seems like that shouldn't be possible, huh?
Seems like you're almost offering nothing.
Yeah.
Just in the way of getting a thing.
I wonder if this will ever crash and burn on a page or two.
No, I'm pretty sure.
I'm pretty sure it's going to go crazy.
As the summer of 2018 rolled on, there were increasing signs of trouble within the company.
One warning came out of what could be plausibly described as Adam's good intentions.
His desire to ban the eating of meat.
Or at least the subsidizing of the eating of meat by his company.
By exchanging it for tequila.
From the Wall Street Journal.
When Mr. Neumann announced in July 2018 via video call from Israel that the company was banning meat, executives in New York were caught off guard.
With little explanation from Mr. Neumann, a group huddled around to determine a rationale.
They settled on sustainability and the mechanics of what would be banned and how.
They determined employees couldn't expense meals with meat, but that they could eat it in company offices so long as the company didn't pay.
Former employees say they have since seen Mr. Neumann eat meat.
So he gets a hair up his ass that eating meat is bad.
Fine.
I'm even down with the idea of a big company being like, we're not going to use company money to support the eating of meat anymore.
Fine.
Yeah, the defining characteristic of the aristocracy is caprice.
Yeah, exactly.
The important thing here is not the meat thing.
It's the idea that this guy has an idea and now what is a multi-billion dollar company changes, has to change on a dime.
And that's not good.
But I honestly think he's not going far enough.
Like still letting people eat meat in the office.
Still letting people eat.
Yeah, I don't know if you can legally do that, to be honest.
Yeah, it'd probably be true.
I don't know if you could legally stop people on their lunch breaks from eating whatever they wanted.
Back when I worked at Groupon, people would microwave fish stuff.
And that would just be a complete disaster.
Differ, but you couldn't stop them from eating fish.
You just can't microwave it.
Man, I'd like to.
You know what's fun about laws in America is technically a lot of things you can't do, but you just do it and people won't bother you.
That is true.
And I have a story to tell you about a machete and a Nap the bomb.
But when WeWork prepared to go public, they basically bribed the major exchanges by promising to list on them if they would ban meat and single-use plastics from their cafeterias.
The president of the New York Stock Exchange agreed to cut out plastics but refused to remove meat.
NASDAQ turned them down but offered to create a new index, the We50, of companies committed to sustainability.
So that's okay.
You're a big hating on plastic fisheries.
I'm not against that.
That's fine.
I'm absolutely fine with that, but with this dude, that's like, and we're going to take the money we save from that and invest it in fracking.
Like this dude's fucked up.
Like I have no trust in him.
Yeah, and it's more of a like he agrees to cut that requirement out if they create a NASDAQ index about sustainable companies named after WeWork.
He's got to cut it out with the Wii stuff.
Yeah.
I'm a big fan of them.
Essentially extorting people for climate justice.
That's fine, I guess.
So, WeWork had gotten off the ground at this point and secured major investments because of its charismatic founder.
But now that the company had matured into a multi-billion dollar enterprise, it was still run as an extension of the personal will of Adam Neumann.
In November of 2018, Adam showed up late and profoundly hung over to a meeting with Khaldun Khalifa al-Mubarak, the CEO and managing director of the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Abu Dhabi.
This was a critical meeting.
WeWork was on track to lose hundreds of millions of dollars that year, and Mubarak had gotten nervous about all of the money that he had gambled on the company's success.
Adam's job at this meeting was to reassure Mubarak.
The fact that WeWork's CEO couldn't stay sober long enough to take a meeting worth potentially billions of dollars rightfully angered the board.
Well, that'll happen.
That'll happen.
That'll happen.
Neumann couldn't have cared less.
In the summer of 2018, he'd worked out a deal with Masayoshi and SoftBank to sell the bulk of WeWork's stock to that company for $16 billion.
To be honest, this is the only relatable thing that I've heard about this channel.
Showing up to a meeting hungover?
Too hungover, even though it's a really important thing.
I've never been sober in a meeting.
Finally, I'm like, all right, I get this guy a little bit at least.
But it is like, you know, I'm going to be honest.
If there were billions of dollars on the line, I'd probably show up sober to the meeting.
Probably.
I got a self-destructive streak.
I think I would, I think part of me would really want to tank this meeting on an important level, which is why I would never have the meeting.
I would sit staring at the bottle, but thinking about all of the explosives that the billions of dollars, militias.
I feel like buildings to toss people off.
Absolutely.
I'd just be sitting in a meeting just being like, I'm like the only person right now who has a chance to assassinate you.
Should I do this?
Should I do this?
If you had a billion-dollar meeting tomorrow, you'd show up drunk as shit or hungover.
But if you had to go through all the steps that this dude has had to go through to get there, there's a decent chance by then you'd be like, all right, I'm going to take this seriously.
I'm going to do this, take it seriously, this thing that, like, the thing that I've built for 10 years.
You would become acclimated to the culture building.
If you had a critical meeting about your book, you would probably force yourself to be in the kind of mind state to deal with like a publisher.
Yeah, I would hope so.
You would hope so.
And if you didn't.
But I have yet to prove that.
That's true.
That's true.
And if you didn't, that's a bad sign.
That's a bad sign.
If you want to become president of the world, I feel like that's okay, though, right?
Robert, where's that brick?
Give me that brick.
That's an okay ambition, right?
Okay.
This is Chicago.
There should be bricks.
Oh, everywhere.
City of bricks.
Yeah.
That's our nickname.
Now, so yeah, Neumann had worked out a plan with Masayoshi in 2018 to sell the bulk of WeWork stock for $16 billion to SoftBank.
Now, Vanity to Fair says that this was Neumann's escape plan.
Quote, he and his investors would be insanely rich.
This was a pivotal moment, a former WeWork executive recalled.
Adam was acting like the SoftBank deal was done and we would be flush with cash.
So he was planning on, again, like cashing out and escaping, which kind of hints to the fact that he doesn't believe any of this.
He was just trying to get a big enough investment that he could get the fuck out.
That's the thing that these guys, like every time we go through a story about these types of guys, their one failing is they take the grift too far and they don't know when to just bail.
Like with the guy we talk about, with Alex Jones.
He should have just bailed a while back.
He nailed his grift.
He got what he needed.
Could have walked away with a net worth five to ten million dollars.
Way more than that.
Yeah.
I'm saying, yeah, minimum.
Yeah.
After the election, probably could have.
Yeah.
Like at a great golden parachute.
They're not capable.
Get out and they just don't do it.
None of them are as smart.
None of them are as smart as Tom from MySpace.
No.
Right.
Cash out $600 million, doesn't destroy democracy, goes and retires.
I got nothing against Tom.
Did he cash out for $600 million?
Yeah, he did great.
Good on Tom.
And you know what he didn't destroy?
Democracy.
Yeah, anything.
He provided bands a way to share their mediocre music files.
Yeah, nobody's ever been like, oh man, MySpace really facilitated the Uber genocide.
Nobody hates Tom.
He's rich as shit and it's fine.
You know what, though?
You know what though?
Almost everybody who was on MySpace, who was old enough to have been on it, has a negative opinion of him because you were forced to be his friend.
And we should forgive him for that.
He's like the elevator of the bank.
You know what?
I'll go about and say, the only cool person worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
Tom.
Tom.
Tommy.
Tommy, Tame.
Tame.
So he's got this soft bank deal.
Doesn't matter that he shows up, hungover to a meeting with the head of the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund.
But then that soft bank deal for $16 billion falls through.
Oh, no.
Because people other than Masayoshi-san took a look at the company financials and decided that WeWork, which was losing at this point billions of dollars a year, maybe wasn't the best way to invest $16 billion.
Masayoshi agreed to invest another $2 billion, but at the rate WeWork burned through, which is still like...
This is why I say two things.
Money isn't real and it's dumb as shit.
Listen, your company's fucked.
Here's $2 billion.
Here's $2 billion.
I was about to be like, this is what happens when you have a group of people around you who is willing to say no to you.
And then it was like, oh, it's only $2 billion.
I was like, never mind.
Fuck this guy.
Yeah, fuck this guy.
He's stupid.
Eat them all.
So, at the rate WeWork burned through cash, $2 billion brought the company eight months, something like that.
Eight, nine months.
They lost $1.3 billion in the first six months of this year.
$2 billion buys you eight months?
That's insane.
Eight, nine.
I'm not going to do the exact same thing.
It's a lot of leases.
They lost $1.3 billion in six months.
So 8, 9 months seems fair.
Yeah, it's absurd.
And less than Uber loses.
Yeah.
Now, it's all like real estate expenses, right?
Like, it's got to be a lot of fun.
Yeah, so it's fucking leases.
Yeah.
He's paying leases so other people will pay him lease.
And he's giving them free rent.
In order to suck them in.
Yeah.
Lure them in.
But he just keeps giving free rents.
They just keep moving around business.
It's a terrible business.
It's a great con.
Yeah.
That's a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah.
Basically, yeah, essentially.
In every way but the legal way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Which is the best kind of Ponzi scheme.
Yeah.
It seems like there should be a legal problem.
It does seem like he should be fired out of a catapult for his crime.
Now, so again, the $2 billion just gave WeWork months of breathing room, not what they really needed.
And so Adam started to get desperate for more funding.
And I'm going to quote again from Vanity Fair.
So he started dogfighting.
See, you're trying to speak.
And this is where our sponsor, Dog Fighter, without an E, comes into the product.
Use code bastards on Dog Fighter, and you'll get.
All right, I'm going to quote from Vanity Fair.
According to sources, he pitched Apple CFO Luca Maestri on doing a deal with WeWork.
It's unclear why Apple would want to invest in WeWork, and not surprisingly, the company passed.
Neumann went to Google and proposed a partnership.
They too passed.
Neumann batted around other investment ideas.
He earlier discussed buying Slack.
He sat there saying, what companies can we buy?
Maybe we should buy Slack, a former executive recalled.
When Neumann returned to WeWork's New York headquarters later that winter, he seemed desperate.
He barked orders and haphazardly reorganized divisions, at one point having as many as 20 direct reports, according to a former WeWork executive.
Masa said we're going to be a trillion-dollar company, he shouted, according to a former executive who heard it.
You're thinking billions and we should be thinking trillions.
You people need to be better than you are.
Neumann seemed shocked by the scale of WeWork's losses.
Sources say he tangled with WeWork's then CFO Artie Menson over the cash squeeze.
Menson declined to comment, but a former senior executive said Neumann drove the decision-making.
Nothing could happen without Adam.
Former executives said Neumann often reacted poorly.
You don't bring bad news to the cult leader, one said.
Whoa.
I've never heard that before.
No, but someone's making that pretty blow.
More than one.
Yeah.
It's like that old phrase, kill the messenger.
That's the idea, right?
I guess.
That's the way in that you succeed.
It's one of those things where Steve Jobs is a guy I come back to a lot because he had a lot of this in him.
But he also had, I guess it's a difference of both Neumann and Jobs have this kind of deep understanding of the human psyche that allows them to manipulate people in a profound way.
Jobs uses it to figure out something people want that they don't know they want and then deliver it and create, changes the entire world.
The smartphone.
He knew before anyone else what exactly everyone in the world wanted to carry in their pocket and would addict them and everything.
And he was right.
Yeah.
Neumann knows how to manipulate people, uses it to get billions of dollars of investment, but provides nothing.
And I'm not going to say what Jobs provided is a net good, obviously, because the smartphone's fucking complicated as shit in terms of that.
But at least it's a thing.
It's more than a moment.
You can't argue with it.
It's not a Ponzi scheme.
It exists.
It's maybe like heroin, but it's not a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah.
This guy, there's just a lot of ideas.
Yeah.
And mostly the idea of how to convince investors.
Yeah.
He's a mangalomaniac.
Yeah.
Still, there were bright spots for WeWork in 2018.
Earlier in that year, J.P. Morgan had led a $700 million bond offering for WeWork.
While Adam's charisma had started to fail with Masayoshi, it worked on JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon.
Jamie Dimon is a profound piece of shit, one of the architects of the 2008 financial crash.
So I assume he went to jail for his participation.
No, of course not.
No, he's a CEO.
Because I received specifically that we held those people accountable to make sure that it would never happen again.
No, he went to jail for the eventual dogfighting ring he ran with Neumann.
And that's when Michael Pick took over.
Jamie Demon's Bank had a Diamond Bank handed Adam a $100 million personal loan and a $500 million personal credit line.
That's not that much for him, though, right?
Like based on the money.
Well, sure, but like you were saying like $2 billion.
He was worth $4 billion at this point on paper.
Right.
But he's also got $750 million that he owes the company.
Right.
Jared Kushner And The Dogfighting Ring00:14:39
Yeah.
That's tough.
Yep.
I feel bad, like, just being broke way better.
But you're rich, way better than that.
When you're that broke, it comes back around to rich.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, that's the way it works for some reason.
I played a sim game.
I remember when I was in my early teens that was essentially creating an apartment building.
Sim Tower.
Sim Tower.
Absolutely.
I remember that so clearly, and I was really good at it.
And I feel like I would run WeWork a lot better than that if I just had a Sim Sim.
Well, because you wouldn't try to make it everything.
You would try to run a very simple company that leases office space to people that need it, which is fine.
Knowing Jordan, he'd put a movie theater in the basement where you're supposed to put parking.
No, but you do remove the fire escapes because that shit's expensive.
Yeah.
Can't afford that.
No, and the extinguishers, detectors.
Buildings don't catch on fire.
If I know one thing about Chicago history, it's that fires never happen.
It's all a myth.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It's all a lie.
Every smoke detector is definitely real and hooked up all the time.
I guarantee it.
Now, Adam was heard to brag to people that Jamie Dimon, one of the architects, again, of the financial crash, was now his personal banker and might soon leave J.P. Morgan to run Adam's family investment office.
Speaking of family, Adam had started bragging that his children would follow him as the leadership of WeWork.
And speaking of unfathomable nepotism, let's talk a little bit more about Adam's relationship to Jared Kushner.
They hung out at that fire.
They hung out a lot.
Oh, God.
See, it turns out that the Neumans and the Kush clan are actually very close friends.
Don't call them that.
That is what they are.
Did Betsy Davos work with WeWork?
They did body shots.
What the fuck is going on?
Is all evil surrounded by itself?
Eric Prince ran security at the schools.
Yeah.
And also did body shots.
Yeah.
And Ceausescu came back to life just to run things.
Now, Jared clearly believed in Adam's promised ability to change the world.
In the summer of 2018, WeWork executives rather suddenly learned that Adam had been drafted by Kushner to work on Jay Kush's Mideast Peace Plan.
Don't call him Neumann Kush.
I will.
Neumann had put WeWork's director of development, Ronnie Behar, on the task of finding an advertising firm to put together a video for Kushner about how an economically revitalized West Bank in Gaza might look.
I am never, I'm never, ever envious of their money.
I don't want a...
I don't even understand a billion dollars.
But the confidence that it takes, the ridiculous, insane confidence that it takes for you to be a shitty WeWork CEO and be like, I think, you know what?
I'm going to solve Middle East for the CEO of the United States.
That's an office leasing company and the son of a man who went to prison for real estate scams.
Yeah, to sit down together and be like, you know, this thousand, this conflict.
I think we can do it.
We can deal with this shit.
I think we can bang it out in four years.
All I can think of is like, do they like like each other?
I think so.
I do think they did.
I think that's why he gets this task.
Part of me wonders if they're even capable of liking each other, you know?
Seems like each would know that the other is a fraud, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
I don't think so.
No?
I think Trump maybe does.
I don't think, I don't know how much he believes in himself, but I think Kushner is just that deluded and dumb and has always been rich and totally special.
And I think Neumann might actually know he's a con artist.
I really, I go back and forth on the guy.
I think Kushner really is genuine about his beliefs.
I just think he's stupid as shit.
No, I think Trump is so analogous to Alex Jones that it's insane.
Like that idea of you waffling back and forth.
Like, is this guy stupid?
Does he know?
Is he insane?
What is he doing?
Yeah, and I don't waffle on Kushner.
I think he's just never not been rich and has no concept of reality.
I think that about Kushner and a lot of people around him.
I don't know.
Adam might be in the same boat or he might be like a literal sociopath.
I really don't know with Adam, but I think Kushner is just completely out of out of reality.
So sources close to Adam Neumann tend to credit the $4.4 billion infusion of soft bank cash with inflating Adam's ego beyond the realm of sanity.
How could it not?
No, that is fair.
Like, of course that would break you.
If I got $4.4 billion, I would have a thousand tanks tomorrow.
I hate Journey, and I would make people dance around a fire journey if someone was in the middle of the day.
Of course you would.
Who wouldn't?
It is the equivalent of giving someone a mental illness to give them that much money.
It's terrible for you.
There's a lot of data on that.
Yeah, the Money in the International Success of WeWork got him sit-down meetings with world leaders discussing the refugee crisis and problems of peace and war with people like the president of Canada.
Okay, so what he does is lease space.
Yeah.
And now he is working with world leaders.
Yes.
On, I assume the thing that he is an expert at, leasing space.
Solving the refugee crisis.
Okay, that's very different.
No, nope, same.
Not the same thing.
See, the reason all those people are leaving Syria, not enough leases.
Bashar al-Assad reduced the number of leases.
You're right.
You're right.
Respect my argument.
Assad's big thing was like, there's no office space.
Hates leases.
He only gassed non-leased space.
Now, one former executive claims when Adam got in front of world leaders, it was like he started thinking he was one.
And I'd like to quote now from a particularly batshit insane Gizmato article, which covers Adam's ambitions as a global peacemaker.
And this might be the most diluted paragraph anyone's ever written.
The paragraph itself is not diluted, but what it's about is so diluted, I can't fucking describe it.
I will shit in BB's mouth right now.
Is that the sentence?
No, but you should put down your mic.
Okay, okay.
In conversations with people inside and outside the company, Neumann's pronouncements became wilder.
He told one investor that he'd convinced Rahm Emmanuel to run for president in 2020 on the WeWork agenda.
Emmanuel did not respond to a request for comment.
Neumann told colleagues that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes, according to a source.
In another meeting, Neumann said three people were going to save the world: Bin Salman, Jared Kushner, and Neumann.
Shortly after the news broke in October 2018 that Saudi agents tortured dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and carved his body with a bone saw, likely on order from the Crown Prince himself, Neumann told George W. Bush's former national security advisor Stephen Hadley that everything could be worked out if bin Salman had the right mentor.
Confused, Hadley asked who that person might be.
According to a source familiar with the meeting, Neumann paused for a moment and said, Me, your boy.
There it is.
You are on a special level of diluted.
George W. Bush's former national security advisor is like, this guy's a fucking idiot.
I only killed hundreds of millions of people.
Well, hundreds of thousands.
This guy is fucking nuts.
Honestly, I believe that ROM part, though.
Yeah, I totally believe that.
Yeah, that's within the realm of believable.
We work agenda.
Within the realm of believability.
He wanted to be Ben Salman's mentor.
That dude, terrible guy, but not an idiot, would shit him out.
Like...
Adam spent the first half of 2019 preparing for WeWork's long-awaited IPO.
In the startup world, initial public offerings are the stuff of legend.
When Apple went public, it created hundreds of millionaires in a matter of minutes.
Even the secretary got rich.
Google's IPO brought even more multi-millionaires into the world.
Employees of WeWork clearly expected their IPO would bring the same windfall.
CEO Adam Neumann showed no outward signs of worry.
His company had been valued at $47 billion earlier in the year, a fact that he hoped would bring even more VC money in and ideally convince SoftBank that WeWork was safe to keep pumping money into.
And hope it would convince any of my not convinced listeners, money isn't real and is dumb as shit.
What kind of person is $47 billion?
$47 billion.
Half a piece of business.
That's an insane number.
It's idiotic.
It is an idiotic number.
Yeah.
12,000 people who I don't know what they're doing.
Picking lamps?
Sure.
Stock in the cakes.
The entire system is built by them.
Yeah.
And I.
But there has to be some grunt worker at one of these at Moody's or whatever who's just like, they're not worth this much, guys.
And then that time they're like, eh, fucking we'll put a price.
I think all of the grunt workers are like, yeah, this grift ain't gonna last long.
Yeah.
But I'm gonna get my $19 an hour while I can.
Look at these assholes.
Yeah.
So the reality of WeWork's success was less attractive than the $47 billion valuation.
By 2019, more than $12 billion of venture capital and debt had been pumped into the company and lost.
And while it's true that WeWork's revenue had doubled every year and also lost hundreds of millions of dollars per year and eventually billions of dollars per year, and there were no signs of this trend debating.
On September 18th, 2019, the Wall Street Journal published a massive expose on WeWork, revealing details about its toxic internal culture and, more worryingly to the suits, details about Adam's own self-dealing.
The report, based in part on the August filing his employees had made to the SEC as part of the IPO process, revealed that Adam had taken out more than $740 million in personal loans on his company's stock.
Since Adam was dyslexic, he had to have his advisors brief him on the revelations in the story.
While he huddled with his people to work out a response to the damning article, investors and board members called for him to step down.
Adam was initially defiant, telling one colleague, I'm never not going to be CEO.
But that was not in his hands anymore.
WeWork's CFO held a conference call with the board of directors and said that Adam had to step down.
Jamie Diamond soon joined the consensus, arguing that WeWork would never get investors to pump in more money while Neumann was CEO.
The company that had been worth $47 billion mere weeks ago now teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
In the end, Adam stepped down.
His wife was forced to leave the company too.
But don't worry about them.
They walked away with a severance package worth roughly $1.5 billion.
And she's still a licensed yogi.
And a licensed yogi still.
Was she licensed or was she certified?
Excuse me.
It's a very different.
Who's the licensing board for yogis?
I mean, she knows the Dalai Lama.
She was at his birthday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Masayoshi-san agreed to pump another $9.5 billion into WeWork as a rescue package.
All talk of exponential growth and world conquest were gone, though.
We Grow was shuttered suddenly, leaving dozens of wealthy parents with no fancy school to send their children to.
Many were presumably forced to go with.
Avert your eyes, gentlemen.
Public schools.
Since the best private schools all have long waiting lists.
4,000 employees, one-third of WeWork's workforce, were laid off.
More layoffs are likely to come.
And that is, more or less, where things stand now.
Adam Neumann vaporized more than $10.5 billion, stole another $1.5 billion, put thousands of people out of jobs, and raised the costs of real estate in cities throughout the globe.
Yeah, that's a little side effect of this that gets sort of under-recognized.
Well, the part where he's like, I'll pay double for this.
Yeah, yeah.
That is an issue.
It's like, even as this collapses, all the people who would have used the space or were using it before, now it might be prohibitive for them.
That's something I would say.
Or the landlords are going to collapse, which isn't my primary worry.
But still, compared to him, people who operated reasonably legitimate businesses, it's just a lot of human shrapnel in the wake of this.
But he's got a billion and a half dollars.
Good for him.
No, not, no, not good for him.
No, no, bad, bad.
Yeah, pretty bad.
So, Jordan, I want to tell you about a dream I have.
It's a dream of a group of people, a group of human beings, pushing for their greatest potential, vibrating off of one another.
Positive, positive, positive vibrations.
Maybe machetes are like machetes.
We got machetes.
Okay.
We're all drunk.
Really drunk.
So far.
And we're just shoving Neumann's off of buildings.
Just right off the top.
Maybe a Kushner or two.
Right.
Now, I have a personal sense of morality that I believe for crew.
You'll learn to subsume that to the group.
I really think I can just let that go for a little while.
There you go.
I feel like a temporary suspension of morality is fine when it comes to the market.
Now, we all gotta shave our heads.
We live in yurts.
These are all key aspects.
Do I get to push him myself?
Yes.
What if I were to tell you you'll get a cubicle on Mars?
On Mars?
Oh, yeah, this ends in Mars.
Come on, quick question.
Yeah.
Oxygen.
No.
Okay.
But you won't need it by the time we get there.
Yeah.
The kegs provide the oxygen.
I'll take the deal.
So, gentlemen, this is the Adam Neumann story.
An asshole who did nothing but scam people.
It fell apart pretty recently, it seems like.
Yeah, just within the last couple of weeks.
I do like his meteoric rise and fall to only having $1.5 billion.
Really attractive.
We should subsidize an extra couple billion for him.
Yeah, absolutely.
Where's Masayoshi with that $16 billion, huh?
He only gave nine at the 12-11.
I've got something to sell him.
And it's called regular leasing.
And it's like, Masayoshi, the whole reason he has all that money is that he invested a bunch of money in Alibaba back when it was tiny.
Scams That End On Mars00:05:45
And it was one of the biggest things ever.
But clearly, he's a dumb guy who got lucky once.
Oh, I'd tell him that to his face.
I think you're dumb.
I don't think you're very smart.
You got taken in by this shit.
Let's crowd fund an opportunity for Robert to tell him to his face he's dumb.
More people need to do that to these people.
I watched a documentary recently.
I was in Amsterdam, and I had an opportunity to attend a movie at the documentary festival that they hold there.
And it was a documentary about the World Economic Forum in Davos.
And it was the kind of thing where, as I was giving it, we found out that I think Klaus Schwab, the guy who founded it, was like three rows behind us in the room and stuff.
They did a Q ⁇ A with him afterwards.
But this documentary, which will be, I think, out for the general public soon, is very much worth watching.
And it's about behind the scenes at Davos is the first one that's been able to do that.
So it's really a lot of interesting stuff.
A lot of kind of like you get a feel for these people as human beings and what they actually believe.
I wish they aren't.
I mean, they are.
That's the problem.
So there's a great moment in it where the head of Greenpeace confronts Jair Bolsonaro in a soiree sort of thing about ostensibly, like she's talking about the whole thing about how she wants to confront him and these other people with their damage to the climate.
And she gets a chance to.
And she basically says like, well, you know, we're looking at what you're going to do to the Amazon.
Like everybody's watching.
And then walks away.
And Jerry clearly doesn't give a shit.
Like doesn't have the least impact on her.
And all of her friends are like, I can't believe how brave you are.
You're so brave.
You did this great thing.
And like, that's the fucking problem.
Like, if you go up to Jair Bolsonaro and you don't have a lining of questioning that's going to make him awkward, bottle him.
Hit him in the face with a bottle.
Nobody does that to these people.
Nobody bottles them.
Nobody bottles these people.
That is true.
I will back you up that no one does do that.
What do y'all think at the end of this?
I don't know.
It's interesting.
Whenever you hear a story like this about somebody who there's a real, like, not terrible, I mean, he's got a billion dollars.
Although that is terrible.
But like whenever there's a big fall, it's just so clear over and over.
Like there's so many times at which there should have been like, hey, you said you wanted fucking offices on Mars.
Yeah, shut up.
You want to be president of the world.
There's like indications along the way that someone should have stepped in.
And we have a system that's based on no one ever stepping in.
Yeah.
Like as long as the pretense is there and the appearances of, you know, like this is moving in the right direction.
People are profiting off it.
There's no incentive to be like, hey, you seem like you're acting out here.
There's something you're acting out that we should probably Deal with.
Yeah.
We just let it happen and then it just plays its course and everyone gets hurt.
That's how I feel anyway.
The way I view it is because I'm trying to exist in the present without losing my mind.
So the way I view it tends towards like trying to find a historical context to all of this stuff.
And these types of lunatic grifters have been around since the fucking beginning.
It's only the scale that has gotten larger.
So I never know if this shared imaginary idea of $47 billion, which just doesn't exist.
No, it's just imaginary.
It's just fantasy.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's not like that's too much different from so many, you know, like obviously the 1929 stock exchange crash because all of that shit was imaginary too.
Go back further and you get to so many different times the economy collapsed in London because that was all imaginary too.
Like all of this shit.
And the only thing that's changed though is that now a company like WeWork is influencing some dumb guy who invested in Alibaba along with NBS and now he's given power to help solve the Middle East peace crisis.
He seems qualified.
You know, like it used to be.
He's a financial guy just fucked up.
The people in the financial world died, not like fucking the entirety of Alice stuff.
Part of the problem with our system is that if you're good at one thing and that one thing allows you to make money, then we decide you're good at everything because money is really the only thing that matters.
So if you're good at money, you get to control healthcare.
You get to control foreign policy.
You get to pick where the army guys go.
I mean, how different is it like the idea that this guy is having conversations about foreign policy?
How different is it than Trump was a landlord and is now president?
How different is it than a king?
Yeah.
This guy's parents were the king, so now he's in charge of the army.
Yeah.
And what was the original reality show but the royalty?
It's 15% smarter than a monarchy, but not a lot.
No.
The original reality show might have been royalty, but the one that'll change the game is you getting tricked by every cult leader in the world.
I really want to.
That would be a great.
I want to find out.
It's one of those like, I want to test myself against the best.
You'd fail every time.
Yeah, that's the problem.
You just need to reduce those people.
I want to enter the draft via pushing them off of buildings.
Okay, here's my new pitch, right?
Okay.
If I don't get taken in by the cult leader, I get all of their money and power.
Let's raise the stakes for both of us.
You can't have their power because you're constitutionally incapable from doing the emotional equivalent of raping people, which is what cult leaders do.
Right.
And their money isn't real.
Yeah.
Sometimes it is.
That is true.
Sometimes it is.
Ron Hubbard And Real Lucra00:03:57
L. Ron Hubbard's.
That shit was real.
That motherfucker had real lucra.
It's rolling the dice.
He owed it all to somebody else.
He just kept it.
And tricked them into giving him tax exempt status.
Ugh.
None of these guys are as good as LRH.
He successfully.
Poor one out for one of the real ones.
The realist one.
What was it?
Operation White's White Cat?
Oh, Snow White.
Snow White.
I was more a fan of the time he made his own private Navy.
Yeah.
For 10 years.
God, I love L. Ron Hubbard.
You can't not love the guy.
To the Admiral.
To the Admiral.
Commodore.
Commodore.
I love Andy Daly as L. Ron Hubbard, and L. Ron Hubbard should burn in hell twice.
We're going to end this episode, ignoring Jordan's statement.
Fair.
With a statement of our undying love to L. Ron Hubbard.
Stop it.
And some plugs for your pluggables.
We do a podcast called Knowledge Fight about Alex Jones.
We put out too much content.
People can find it by Googling KnowledgeFight.com is our website.
And we're on iTunes and all that stuff.
On Twitter, it's at knowledge underscore fight.
And I am Jordan.
I am a comedian.
Still, technically speaking, I am not busy.
So go ahead and book me for GoToBed Jordan.
He's available for any dates in Gnome, Alaska.
Absolutely.
Gnome is high on my list.
I will also do corporate gigs exclusively.
Only Gnome.
Only GNOME.
There's a WeWork in Game.
There's a WeWork in Gnome.
Okay, well, then we'll work for WeWork for, I guess, twice the cost of a normal comedian.
We riff.
But you got to send him up.
You got to send him up double economy class.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's twice his economy.
Thanks for having us.
This has been a lot of fun.
Yeah, this has been fantastic.
And it's a pleasure to meet you in real life human person.
Well, thanks for inviting me to your wonderful city, Chicago.
The city that sleeps occasionally.
Never.
Is often awake.
Slightly broad shoulders, but not very.
The city of angels that is regularly awake, but often asleep with broad shoulders and also an apple that is large and windy.
The city of grandfathered in 4 a.m. bars, I feel like, is what we should be known as.
Yeah, that's a good nickname.
Oh, that's true here, huh?
Yeah.
There's grandfathered in 5 a.m. bars.
I completely changed my opinion of your city based on that knowledge.
I was going to just slander it for years after this.
But now that I know that.
No, there's a bar near my place that is apparently so old they open at 9 a.m.
It's against the law to sell alcohol before 11, but if you've just been around long enough, all bets are off.
Oh, beautiful for space.
Every time I know.
Well, I'm Robert Evans.
This has been Behind the Bastards.
BehindtheBastards.com sources.
BastardsPod, Twitter, Instagram.
I am on Instagram at that iWrite.
Okay.
Continue listening to this podcast.
Listen to Knowledge Fight.
It's what I listen to when I'm at the gym, when I'm driving, when I'm masturbating shamefully in someone else's kitchen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Knowledge Fight.
The podcast for all those moments.
That's what we set out to be.
Also, there's t-shirts on TeePublic for my show.
And coming soon.
I forgot what the t-shirt was.
I thought you're going to make a masturbation, Joe.
No.
Knowledge fight.
If you accidentally catch yourself in the mirror, don't look.
Bye.
Knowledge Fight And Upcoming Merch00:02:27
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Goespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political, that may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.