WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the end of an empire
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Welcome to Most Innovative Companies. I'm your host, Yasmin Gagne, joined by my producer, Josh Christensen. Hey, Josh. Hey, Yas. Have you ever worked in a co-working space? No, I've never worked in a co-working space, but I've always kind of wanted to. Why? I was, I don't know. I just, I really love cold brew.

And the thought of having that on tap for the whole time. We're currently going into renovations for our offices, for Mansueto Ventures, Fast Company and Inc. offices. And I don't think we're going to get a cold brew dispenser. No, I'm sorry, but our snack game is a disaster. We've got to up that.

That's all I want. If you can give me some kind bars and cold brew, I would be all set. So if you're listening to this, Randy, who is running the renovations. No one would complain about their salaries if we had Luna bars. Exactly. That's all we need. Beanbag chairs, a ping pong table, Luna bars, and cold brew. I'll work for free. Yeah.

What about you? Have you ever worked in a co-working space? No, and some people really love the idea of making new connections and stuff, but I'm scared of talking to outside people in a non-interview situation. So I don't think it's for me. Yeah, that's kind of the social nightmare of... No, people meet me and they're like, never talk to me again. Never, never talk to me again. Please leave me alone. Yeah.

Before we go on with this show, any housekeeping? Not much housekeeping today. We are moving through our towards the end of the year here at Fast Company. So I will just say again that you should subscribe, rate, and review to our podcast. And stay tuned for more events and exciting things to come in the new year for Fast Company. But more on that down the road. Later on today's episode...

Friend of the pod and Fast Company senior staff editor Jeff Beer will be talking with culture writers Joanna Robinson and David Gonzalez about the reign of Marvel Studios. But first, WeWork is no more. So we're going to look at the rise and fall of the desk rental company and how its co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann helped drive it to bankruptcy. Here to explain what happened behind the scenes is author Reeves Weideman, joined by our very own Fast Company executive editor Mike Hoffman. Reeves, Mike, thanks so much for being here. Great to be here.

Thanks for having me. We've obviously had some big news from WeWork this week, but before we even get into that, I'm going to ask you a question that is quite difficult to answer succinctly, but... I'll try. Who is Adam Neumann?

And what is, in very broad strokes, a story of WeWork? This might not be the right direction to go in, but when you asked me who is Adam Neumann, my brain immediately went to a story I heard from a big WeWork party in the glory days at the height of things when Adam himself invited, I believe, an employee on stage to

to rap, to rap a song about WeWork. And one of the lines from this song was, Adam Neumann, he ain't human. And I think in some ways that summarizes a little bit of, there was this moment in time where he had sort of gone beyond the laws that the rest of us have to abide by in terms of our behavior, of how to

run a company and, you know, was living a life that many of us couldn't fully dream of. But beyond that, he was in many ways sort of the archetypal, crazy, successful founder of the 2010s who built this company into a $47 billion global behemoth, then fell very quickly and very fast. And he ain't human. He ain't human.

I feel like tech companies are really into bespoke rap songs written for corporate retreats. That seems to be a thing. I've thought about writing like, you know, Ben Horowitz is obsessed with rap lyrics. And I was like, if there's like a history of rap through startups or technology, you know what I mean? Like then all these companies, like I remember Beyonce got paid to perform in an Uber concert in Uber stock and sort of how both worlds work together.

There's some kind of think piece about rich white guys into rap in the startup world and what that tells us. As you alluded to, WeWork sort of had a spectacular fall. What are a few of the factors that led to that? Yeah, I mean, it's crazy to think about all this happened four years ago. I think when you talk about, you know, the fall, I mean, you know, you have to talk about the success, which is that WeWork rode this moment where people were looking for something different from offices,

where the financial markets were looking to pile money into any company that was claiming semi-credibly that they were going to grow into something huge. And in some ways, those were the seeds of its demise. I think that in particular that there was this just kind of ethos of like,

When you go back to that moment, when WeWork was successful, they made really cool offices. They were nice places to work. Sometimes they were noisy and loud and people brought their dogs in and it could be kind of annoying, but by and large, they were nice places to go and they were good at what they were doing. The trouble was that it's really hard to scale any business

It's particularly hard to scale a business that involves construction unions and things like that. Eventually, they were basically just trying to do something. It was all but impossible. And the only way, the only possibility of overcoming all of the obstacles was to have so much money that it didn't matter. Lo and behold...

They did for a while. SoftBank and Masayoshi-san infamously now poured billions and billions of dollars into this company to try to overcome all of the restrictions that everyone in the real estate business knew was happening. And then suddenly at this moment where the economy was starting to shift and where these investors were no longer willing to

to funnel money quite as much as they were going to. And then all of a sudden people find out that Adam Newman, he ain't human and he, or he is a little human and he, he, he likes weed and tequila and he's, he's kind of a little bit of a crazy guy. Then, then it all just came crashing down on this moment and all of these expectations. It was, it was almost just going to be impossible for them to meet them.

Adam Neumann might be a crazy guy, right? But he got like a $445 million buyout and the SoftBank folks kind of end up holding the bag, right? So, you know, it's interesting in a way. I kind of wonder if he would look at this as being sad that the company he built failed or if he would look at this, oh, I got paid out. It's fine.

Yeah. I mean, Adam, you know, had an ambition to be a trillionaire. So, you know, 445 million doesn't really get you there. So, you know, in some ways, I think he was someone who had, you know, he had this outsized ambition. I think this was a humbling experience for him. But yes, at the same time, he made a ton of money throughout the time he was at WeWork after.

leaving WeWork and he is someone who is still young and is still doing kind of a secretive real estate crypto, we don't totally know what it is, thing right now called flow. I always think of the water. Isn't there already a flow? Probably. He'll figure it out.

Adam will buy the other flow if there is one. He'll figure it out is maybe my favorite thing that's ever been said. It's like, oh, Adam Newman, he'll figure it out. That's great. Yeah, totally. We're all here for Adam Newman's journey. Something's going on with WeWork this week, right? It doesn't look good.

Can you both explain what's happening? Yeah, well, there have been a few moments in the last four years where it kind of it was looking bad for WeWork. And the latest one was a report in The Wall Street Journal last year that the company appears to be planning to file for bankruptcy. And we don't know exactly what shape that's going to take. We don't know exactly what the result of that will be. It is obviously not a good thing for a company to get to this point for the past few years.

They have not been paying back their lenders. They have been asking landlords for rent decreases. They have stopped paying their rent on some buildings. They have shut down other buildings. So everything is trending in a bad direction. And it does seem that whatever comes out of this week, it's just going to look very different, increasingly different from the company that Adam Neumann was running. Since Adam Neumann left, what does the staff of WeWork look like? What does the reductions look like?

I mean, you know, thousands of employees were laid off in the sort of aftermath of this. At one point, more than 10,000 employees. And then within a matter of months, almost half of them were laid off. You know, that number has continued to decrease. There have been other rounds of layoffs. They have consolidated offices. They have also sort of gotten out of every other business that they were in. The school that was launched, the We Live program.

apartment living concept, the gym, the superfood company, like all of these things have been kind of shoved aside in an attempt to make the core business work. But it's just much smaller and much different than what it looked like at the beginning. What was it like to report your book? I think there are some stories where you can't get anyone to talk. There are some stories where I can imagine there were a lot of former employees willing to talk to you.

Tell me about that. Yeah, I mean, I had it was an interesting experience because I first started reporting on WeWork for New York Magazine in the spring of 2019. And this was a moment where WeWork had announced it was going public. They just had this $47 billion valuation, this huge influx of money from SoftBank. They were riding high by all accounts. And there were some hints.

of weirdness. And as I was able to talk to employees, you started to sense that something wasn't quite what it seemed. But it was also really hard to get people to talk. Even people who were critical of the company had stock and they wanted that IPO to happen and they wanted to get some kind of payout.

And many of them believed in the company still, even ones who had saw things that they were suddenly questioning. Basically, the day after the IPO fell apart and it was clear Adam was going to be pushed out, it changed overnight. And people who would never have called me back before were suddenly eager to talk. They were upset. They were pissed off. They were disappointed. They were all of these things. They wanted to explain themselves and explain that

They were not the ones who had been crazy throughout this whole thing. So it was a real clear shift from sort of the good days to the bad days in terms of people's willingness to talk about it. One thing I wanted to ask about is, you know, some of the reporting in your book was really interesting about the composition of the workforce at WeWork.

There were a lot of people who had done funded startups before and were financially very savvy. And actually, one of the sad moments in the book is that they sort of suggested ways to structure your equity to other people within the company that turned out to not be a good bet. There were also lots of workers who worked in the WeWork facilities for whom this seemed like a real life-changing opportunity.

opportunity. It was such an interesting company to be funded at such a crazy high level. And then at the same time, to be kind of just a real estate company, that brought together a really interesting group of employees who were on this journey with Adam, which obviously was

really insane. It was one of the rare places where you could go in the 2010s if you didn't know how to code, if you weren't an engineer, but you wanted to get in on the startup boom and have some stock options that might one day buy you a house and a cool car. This was a place that you've

go to do that. And Adam was out there selling that dream. WeWork was not paying the biggest salaries out there. They were offering the stock options. And Adam was very good at convincing people. And I don't think it was a bluff. I think he believed it too, but he was convincing people that this is going to be worth it down the line. And so

So you had a lot of people in their first jobs. You had a lot of people who did not have experience in this kind of high growth startup world. You had people who came from like normal companies, old school real estate companies, financial firms, banks who were like, OK, this is my this is my chance to cash in on this.

So you had all these people coming at it from slightly different ways, different places, but all sort of fresh in a lot of ways to the kind of startup world. I want to talk about the sort of SoftBank and Masa's son of it all. I'm sort of obsessed with the part of your book where he, I think like Adam ends up in a cab with him. And after like a very short pitch, he just kind of hands him an iPad with a contract to sign. I mean, tell me about SoftBank's role in this story.

I really think in the more time has gone on, I think you have to view SoftBank as an equal contributor to both the success and the downfall of WeWork. Adam could not have pushed this company as far and as wide as he did without the backing of Masa and SoftBank.

both the money and the encouragement to be crazy. The crazy guy wins in a fight between a smart guy and a crazy guy is one of the things Masa has said to Adam and I'm sure has said to many other investors. And that was the soft bank way. And the two of them sort of made kind of just a like perfectly imperfect pair in producing both the good and bad of what happened here.

Do we think the crazy guy wins at this point? Just pulse check on everyone. What is winning in that situation? What is winning in this situation? What is winning? What's crazy in that situation? What's crazy in that situation? What's smart in this situation? It's all just ambiguous. That's true. That's true all around. Has anyone worked in a WeWork before, like for an extended period of time? No.

Because I've only been in one once for a job interview for an arts organization. Not extended, but some, yeah. I'm all for a free cold brew. Yeah, I was going to say, when I was really broke, I used to hassle my friends to let me come in and grab snacks. See, that's the direction that they should have gone in is...

They should have been a not-for-profit for poor, all-liberal arts graduates. Yeah. One of our colleagues works out of a WeWork primarily in San Francisco. And, you know, I think, like many aspects of the experience, not the least of which is, you know, if you are working from home, to go to a place that's nice, where you have colleagues, even if they're not your real colleagues, you know, people who approximate colleagues who you can chat with and maybe bounce an idea off of, or certainly, like, ask, like, hey, how does the printer work? And

You know, if you can, if you can, like, ask those questions and have like a social part of your workday that otherwise you wouldn't have because you'd be in a home office. There is a real value to that camaraderie and that sort of sense of being part of a community, especially a community where people are freelancers or working on creative projects or working on startups. You know, there's like something nice about that.

So I haven't quite brought myself to work in a WeWork and get a membership, but I have used other co-working spaces. And one of the things that WeWork should get credit for, but was also always a problem with the business model is it can be replicated. Other people can build a nice office together.

While there is a value in having a WeWork everywhere in every place around the world, there's only so many people who would really make use of that. And most people just need an office to go to every day. I went into a co-working space recently. It was a competitor of WeWork's, one of the bigger ones. It's called Industrious. It's a really nice space, much like a WeWork. And I was just kind of looking for potentially a one-person office for me to go to when I just probably not every day, but I just want to get out.

And all of those are booked because plenty of people want to go there and they have tons of big 12 person, 25 person, eight person, 40 person offices that they thought were going to be these things that they were going to rent. But that has actually now post pandemic become the much harder place to rent. And so I think all of these places are suddenly you're dealing with just a shift in the business model.

that happened completely after Adam Neumann was ousted. WeWork fell pre-pandemic. Like, it's hard to imagine what the pandemic would have done to that business.

I think you have to look at this now, like Adam Neumann and SoftBank caused the fall. Could they have navigated through the pandemic? No, I don't think so. Adam Neumann was not the leader to get you through this. What would have happened if the pandemic had not come? Was there a way to kind of land this plane post-Adam Neumann, you know, shrink it a little bit and make it more sensible?

We'll never know. I think probably the Zoomification of our lives was coming at some point, whether the pandemic or something else was bringing it. So sad in many ways, in many serious ones and other ways that we didn't get to see that play out. But it's impossible to know at this point what would have happened. What happened to Adam Neumann? What was Severin's package look like? What did he do subsequently? Tell me sort of where, you know, where he's been since your story left off. Me?

He went away. He left with hundreds of millions of dollars, something approaching a billion dollars. He laid low for a while. He was kind of bouncing as far as I was aware from, had a place in the Hamptons, went back to Israel a lot and was spending time with his family, licking his wounds, figuring out what to do next. There were always kind of rumors, you know, is he going to come back? Does he want one more shot at kind of making this thing work? As far as I was aware of

never a serious suggestion. But eventually he emerged, I guess at this point, probably sometime last year, early this year with a new company called Flow. And I had heard inklings that Adam had become interested in residential real estate after having built this company in commercial real estate. And if you go back to the history of WeWork, when they launched WeLive, which was their attempt at doing apartments,

People at WeWork are very split between it being a horrible idea that sort of distracted from the company and actually a great idea that they just didn't have the bandwidth to do because they were also running an office company. I probably lean a little towards the like,

bad idea, but I see the logic of the other explanation. Adam clearly sees apartments, residential living as a place that is ripe for disruption. I think he's probably right about that. I think as with WeWork's disruption, a lot of real estate people will say, you know, we're not idiots and we run our business as a

certain way because we've tried various things and this is what works. So good luck to you. He does have a lot of backing, Andreessen Horowitz. So I was going to ask, how do you think he got that funding? Maybe you can get Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen on next week's. I think Adam, as I kind of ended my book, while he flamed out, while WeWork flamed out in its way,

Adam is the kind of founder who gets a second chance. And to talk about the basics, he's a tall white guy who's attractive with great hair. And so those kinds of people tend to get second chances. But he's also someone who people want to place bets on.

So crazy how we immediately fell for Sam Bankman Freed afterwards. Yeah.

Tall white guy with good hair. Good. With lots of hair. Quantity over quality. Yeah, sure. I mean, I'll take whatever I can get.

I'm sure Mike feels the same way. That's right. We're talking about office space. The pandemic has obviously changed the way many of us go to the office. There are so many reports of like downtown San Francisco being kind of a wasteland. I think those are maybe overblown. But can you tell me about the impact WeWork has had on commercial real estate and also the future of it now? Yeah, I mean, well, you know, the impact has been significant. I mean, every office landlord is

now does its own version of WeWork. And the reason WeWork had some success was it was an industry sort of stuck in its ways. It was kind of just obvious what you needed to do to make a building work.

All that has changed. Now every landlord is scrambling to figure out how to keep their offices filled and occupied. When we were crashed, I think there was a lot of schadenfreude from others in the industry who had long said, you know, this isn't what it seems. They're finally getting their comeuppance. I am certain that none of them are saying that now and all of them are saying, crap, another big tenant is going away. They still have offices in

major cities all over the world, tons of offices in New York and San Francisco. If that goes away, it's just another blow to the commercial office landscape that has already gone through a lot. And so I think this can only be a bad thing for the just that sort of ecosystem going forward and is not going to help any kind of recovery. Remember when WeWork was like not charging tenants rent to get people to occupy their buildings?

I mean, that's landlords now offering sweet deals to get people in. In some ways, they were innovative on that front. It's still happening. We're going to take a quick break, followed by Jeff Beers' interview with culture writers Joanna Robinson and David Gonzalez. Dave, Joanna, thanks so much for chatting. I appreciate it. As I said, I'm in Canada, so I also was victim of the Amazon Canada completely selling out of your book. Congratulations. Well,

Well, I really enjoyed it too. The dulcet tones of Andrew Cascino wafting into my ears over the last week, which was great. It was awesome. The only disappointment was I'm used to hearing both your voices in podcasts. I was like, oh, I'm kind of hearing your voices in the reading, but you know. Oh, that's good. He did a great job, but also like when it came time to do the audio book, I don't think Joanna and I could read the book again. That makes sense. We did a lot of lost time dotting our I's, crossing our T's. I can only imagine. Yeah.

The book was amazing. I'm a fan of the MCU. I definitely have listened to you both talk about these subjects, probably with Apologies Today, more on The Ringer with House of M, House of R. R, House of R, yeah. But I'll start most broadly and just ask, how did you guys really decide to embark on a project like this?

Yeah, actually, the publisher reached out to us. Norton, our great publisher, reached out to us. And because I was an English major, I was like, Norton, they wrote all my English anthologies in college. Oh, cool. The textbook people. You know, they reached out to us in 2019 when...

A little movie called Endgame was out and a little show called Game of Thrones was wrapping up at the same time. And they asked me if I wanted to write a Game of Thrones book. And I said, no, thank you. It was just like way too soon, way too close. The feelings were just too stressed around the ending of Game of Thrones. And they're like, well, what about Marvel? That was a fascinating proposition to me. Obviously, I'd covered Marvel for a while. I got to write a cover story for Vanity Fair on Marvel. So I got to be on set for Endgame, all that sort of stuff.

I felt like I had like two thirds of the information about Marvel. And I was really curious about that other third. And then Dave and I have been working together for over a decade now. And Dave already knew way more about Marvel than I did. And so I was like, join me with my partner in crime on this and figure out the answers to all the questions unanswered about Marvel that we have. Mm-hmm.

And immediately he's like, yeah, let's do it. So, yeah, so we worked on it for nearly five years through COVID, et cetera, worked on this project and interviewed over 100 people. And I think the hardest part for us is figuring out when to end it, you know, because the Marvel story just keeps rolling forward, you know? It never ends. It's a multiverse of madness. Exactly.

Speaking of, one thing that hit me at the end of the book, really, no spoilers for any listeners, obviously read the whole book. It's amazing. Just how recent, like there's so much that happened, whether it's Iger coming back to even later, the charges against John the Majors, which is obviously a major thing leading into the next phase and sort of, I'll say the ending of the book of sort of like what now or where do things head? And I'm

loosely familiar with how books, I mean, even print magazines, it's like you have these deadlines. You guys must have been really fitting this in at the last minute. What was that part of the process like? Yeah, it was sort of a cleaning up at the end. So I think the first time we, you know, quote unquote, finish the book, I'm like, and now I'm going to go to my Wakanda forever screening and I'm never going to have to worry about any of this again.

That ended up not being true. I think Joanna very rightly was like, we need to do something about these developments. I'm kind of a more of the Marvel optimist. So I'm like, unless something big happens, and then they like fired Victoria Alonso. And I was like, all right, Joanna was right all along.

So what I'm really happy about with the book is we were able to, in 2023, go in and make sure we had those stories right. We tried to get as up to date as possible with Victoria Alonso, with Pearl Mudder, with Bob Iger coming back, with Disney Plus issues that they're having with streaming. The great thing about that was Joanna was able to get a bunch of information from reliable sources. And then the second bonus of that is as Gavin...

our third author, Gavin Edwards, was working to get the new information into the book. He has this amazing talent of being able to condense a whole bunch of information into small amounts. So we had a copy of the book that was basically already beginning to be paginated. So anything we wanted to add, we only had the blank space at the end of chapters before the beginning of the next page. And so...

Joanna would go out and get some interviews and then write a bit and then I would come and try to do a pass on it. And then we'd pass it off to Gavin. Gavin would be like, guys, still too long. So Gavin would be able to either reduce it down or make enough room so we had it in the chapter. And at first, I thought that was going to be something that ended up feeling kind of herky jerky. But as I think a benefit to being able to report something so fully, those narratives were already started in our book. So even though...

When the book ends, there's some shocking things that were new at the beginning of 2023. But even if you look at the Marvel news that's coming out now, you could see our book leading it to there. So it's kind of a great way to catch up to what's currently happening with Marvel. And I think we were able to get a lot of that right on the money.

For sure. It's also eerily familiar to the Marvel process that you chronicled quite a bit of like the reshoots and the last rejigging at the end. Speaking of that, like not to jump off at the end, but like certainly there's a lot going on now. And I would say over the last year or so, and so much of the book talks about this. There seems to be some chinks in the armor. Obviously, Joanna, you were quoted in the Variety story, I think last week. What is its biggest strength right now? And what would you say its biggest weakness is? Because I think

For so long and for so much of the book, obviously the behind the scenes really shows a lot of the tension and the ebb and flow of their entire process. But to like fans on the outside, I mean, a lot of it was like anything that brand touched was gold for so long. Right. Just wondering how you guys, after so much research and talking to so many people, how you think about where it's at right now?

The strengths and weaknesses question is interesting because my instinct to respond to both of those is the same answer. And that's sort of why Marvel feels like it's on the knife's edge, right? It could really go either way right now. I like to call this period the wobble because I just don't... I don't think... Dave and I definitely agree on this, that it's way too early to count them out. Also, they're making...

still making so much money. So it's not like they're going begging or anything like that. But, you know, definitely there is a tarnish on the brand. So I would say the greatest weakness is that reputation that you mentioned, that brand, that like Marvel Studio logo in front of something used to guarantee a certain level of quality. And now that we've seen it, yeah, I'll name and shame a few. Secret Invasion. I mean, I really didn't like the Eternals.

Like, you know, there's just like a bunch of things that have come out that you're like, okay, just because it says Marvel Studios in front of it doesn't mean it's as solid as that, you know, incredible run they had through Endgame. So that's their greatest weakness is, you know, diminish the brand. But the greatest strength is that that brand is...

that existed in the first place and the loyalty and the emotional connection that people feel to certain characters. You know, like, I think they fumbled the bag a bit with Thor Love and Thunder, but you see it in something like Guardians 3, which, let's all remind everyone, came out this year, made a ton of money. People really liked it because they were emotionally attached to these characters, to Rocket, to the whole found family of the Guardians. And yes, that's...

something that James Gunn made on his way out the door to go work for the competition over at DC, but like they still have that juice around certain characters that they do it right. I think if Wakanda Forever had that potential, it didn't, it felt a little bogged down by a bunch of other stuff they were trying to do, but like there was a lot of emotional attachment to T'Challa, to Chadwick Boseman, et cetera. So I think they do still have some characters and if

if big question mark, if they decide to bring back someone like Downey or Evans or, you know, some of these actors and some of these characters that people feel loyal to down to their core, like they've got that in their back pocket. They've got Dave likes to bring this up all the time. So I'll happily point for him. They have.

They haven't made a movie that's Avengers colon title since Endgame. They haven't made an Avengers movie since, you know, and so we don't know how that would do. They still have some kind of deal with Sony around Tom Holland as Spider-Man and people will absolutely show up for those movies. So, you know, so they have these pieces. They also have the Fantastic Four and the X-Men waiting in the wings. So I think it's foolish to count them entirely out. And they know this, that they don't have any free passes left.

And they need to really drill down on what works and not just throw whatever sticks at the wall, which is what they were doing for a time, just trying to meet the demands of Disney Plus without all those shows. One thing that I thought was, that I really enjoyed about the book, among other things, was the kind of inside baseball insights into how the entertainment industry works kind of generally, but also where Marvel's kind of was a bit of an exception. I'm thinking of just how...

seemingly ever-present WGA arbitration was about who gets credit for what and how many times that was mentioned. You guys would talk to somebody and it'd be like, eh, they're not credited about that because of X, Y, because like the sort of middleman, if you didn't start the process and you didn't end it, you're pooched basically.

And the other was the VFX business model and fixed pricing and that and how like for those listening, the idea that a VFX company could agree to a fixed price on a film or the time involved exceeds what was originally expected. The VFX company has to eat that cost. And there's, you know, an example in the book of a VFX company. I can't remember the name right now, basically going bankrupt despite winning an Oscar. I think it was for Life of Pi, like whoever the company did that or at least was threatened with it.

So it made me think you guys have written about and around the entertainment industry for years. What surprised you most in the course of reporting this book about how the MCU runs as a business and or a brand?

Yeah, I don't know if there's a huge surprise, but I had a lot of, it turns out, misconceptions when I was thinking about Marvel as a fan versus when I got down to like working them as a business. There was some early discussions about calling this book something like Fanboy because they wanted it to be about Kevin Feige, you know, sort of making geek property goods.

And Joanne and I were both like, that's A, not what the book's about. And B, that's not Kevin Feige. Kevin Feige is a good movie person first. He wants good movie franchises. He just wants to go see good movies and to make good movies. He made himself an expert in Marvel.

and is now the head person. And one of the things that surprised me as we went on, because we started with Endgame and everybody was sort of taking their victory lap, rightfully so, everyone at Marvel was taking their victory lap. And I assumed we were going to get a peek at who's the next Kevin Feige. He, at that time, was thinking about going off to make a Star Wars movie that eventually got shuffled off of his plate. But there really isn't.

There is a certain amount of magic, even though he's not the fanboy. He is the person that is able to do the alchemy of taking the monetary necessities to be a successful movie studio in Hollywood and pairing it with storytelling that can work within those monetary bounds. That's why the Marvel method allows you, like we do with our book, to change story up until the very end is because they sort of still operate on a best idea wins approach.

or best idea should win, ethos. And a lot of the wobble that we're seeing in Marvel now, that takes time. That takes time, whether it's a TV series, that takes time to whether it's a movie. If you tell Marvel they have to release three movies and four TV series every year, that still all has to bounce through Kevin Feige's alchemy machine, because there hasn't been somebody, at least according to Disney, that can provably do that. The sort of best idea wins, like the nerds are finally ascendant,

is actually a lot more about knowing which type of professional is going to do the job, and then Kevin Feige will put it all together sort of at the end, make the pieces of the puzzle fit. That was very surprising to me because when we started this as a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan,

I was just more like, let's push it for like the geekiest thing ever. The fact that we went from 2008 Iron Man and then at the end of Endgame, everybody knew who like Thanos and the Infinity Stones were is an insane instance of a brand not only doing good movie storytelling, but

but teaching you how to be loyal to the brand. And it's something they're struggling with a little bit now because I think they had a bunch of ideas and certain ones got held up with production or just didn't have enough time to fully bake before they were forced out. But we're still at a point where I'm watching Marvel teaching us new ideas. I'm watching Into the Spider-Verse do the multiverse and then Marvel realizing they could do the multiverse. And then maybe that's a way that they could solve their Jonathan Majors problem

is because they suddenly made recasting so much easier than Don Cheadle replacing Terrence Howard. So easy.

It's so funny, that quote in Tatiana Siegel's great variety piece about Marvel, where, you know, an unnamed Marvel insider or someone with knowledge says like, oh, they're so fucked, excuse my language, so effed when it comes to Kang and Jonathan Majors. And I was like, nothing could be easier than recasting that role right now, thanks to the multiverse, actually. But I love that you mentioned the WGA arbitration and the VFX industry problems that Dave is very knowledgeable and passionate about, because...

You know, Dave and I both studied film in college. Gavin is also our co-author, is also sort of like somewhat of a film historian. Like we care about comic books and superhero movies. We also care about like the long tail of this as a Hollywood story. And so what was so interesting to us as we put all the pieces together, like what is the Marvel Method?

One of the answers, you know, we get to this, I think, right in the introduction is that they lifted things from the old studio system in Hollywood, like from the very beginning of filmmaking in terms of like locking down actors for long contracts or bringing writers in house or bringing artists in house and all this sort of stuff. Like we put that together because we are film history nerds.

And then I floated that by someone who worked at Marvel and they said, oh, Kevin likes to say that all the time. He loves to say all the time that we took from the old studio system. And I was like, yes, we were on the right track. That's great. In addition to the nerdy minutiae that we also work in there from time to time, that like film history, Hollywood story stuff was really gratifying for us to be able to include. One thing that Feige relationship reminds me of and one of the things

And it's kind of like, now Feige has to sort out the current mess. And it's like, okay, here's where we're at. It reminds me of kind of founder-led brands. They come up with this magical product and maybe they don't build it, but you know, in the Steve Jobs sort of model, but like they have this aura and they have this taste and they have proven kind of discerning taste. And I don't know, do you guys find, speaking of surprises as a fan, Dave, that you were, you touched on like that all of it kind of comes through this one pinhole person? I like to call it the

Right, yeah. It seems risky. I mean, it seems risky, but it's also something they got to very gradually because initially after like Iron Man and the Hulk, Marvel Entertainment, which is the East Coast that handles the publishing, that handles the merchandise,

They got involved with something called the Creative Committee, which for a long time was at odds with what Marvel Studios on the West Coast was trying to do with Kevin Feige, which is basically make good movies. They're like, guys, we need to build to the Avengers and everybody needs to like these characters. So they see the Avengers as a sequel and Marvel Entertainment's essentially like, well, we need to make toys and bedsheets and children's underwear. So here are the characters we're interested about for that.

And it would cause all these problems. But then once they sort of get taken off of the leash around phase three of the MCU, you get things like Black Panther and Captain Marvel and both Infinity War and Endgame that are just making a billion dollars, a billion dollars. And so that's when Bob Iger is like, you know what? Maybe Kevin Feige should be in charge of all of it. And the fact that that's

still a thing, even though he's spread very thin and like we're getting movies that some people say are different quality. Joanna mentioned Thor Love and Thunder, and I did hear the critical reaction to that, but it is the most profitable Thor movie that was ever made. So there's like a certain degree where it's like, if you want to talk about the brand and the product, well,

what Kevin Feige is doing is superhuman that we haven't seen. They haven't had to do a new Coke. They haven't had to do a soft reboot yet and see how that works. We're still going on. There's still a rigid continuity. Even if you recast actors or hand off the mantle of characters like Hawkeye to completely different characters, it's,

All those characters still show up at the MCU parks in Disney, like the week that their thing airs or comes out. So the net is so tight in terms of just being able to have one person on top of everything from marketing to publishing to the movies that I'm actually surprised that he's been able to keep it together consistently.

for as long as he has, because you're absolutely right that doing the movies is a huge lift. But on top of that, just keeping the brand loyal, that underneath the Disney brand, Marvel is still viewed as its own independent brand, is incredibly valuable to anybody who cares about those companies.

In terms of things that we've been hearing just in the last week, week and a half, about this idea that Anita Acosta, the director of the Marvels movie that's opening next week, was maybe pushed out of the editing room.

I heard a rumor that she hadn't been in like the edit since March, all sorts of stuff like that. I don't know how unusual that is actually for a Marvel movie. It's just this information is starting to like leak out in a way that people are catching on. But I think that whole like Feige is actually the ultimate cut on

everything. Bring it home. Bring home the pieces. Yeah, bring home the pieces. That's one of my favorite quotes in the whole book. Bring home the pieces. They're experimenting now with like branching out of their own branding. When they put out Werewolf by Night last year, they called it a special presentation. And just when they screened the first couple episodes of Echo just last week, they're now announcing a new Marvel Studios name. I think it is called Spotlight. I forget what it's called, but it's like, don't worry about continuity with this one.

You know what I mean? Because that is answering a branding need that they have for people who feel like they are being crushed under the weight of responsibility of watching all of these TV shows and all of these movies in order to understand everything. Marvel has heard people call it homework now and are like, okay, we need to signal to them that they can watch these things without having watched everything else. So they're introducing this new kind of thing, this new branding.

And so I don't know. I mean, you're the one who works at Fast Company. I'm not. But I'm just like curious about that idea of like we had this this one logo, this one fanfare, and it got people excited and they felt like they knew what it was. And now we're experimenting with little like sub brands to see if that works better. If the main brand is bruised, maybe these little sub brands will maybe ramp people's expectations in a different direction. I don't know. It's

It's a fascinating moment to me in the literal like logo and theme music of Marvel right now. Yeah.

Well, what I find interesting about that, the spotlight kind of makes it official that the one thing they built to and was a strength of it, which was continuity and universe MCU is now sort of, oh, don't worry about that. Just this is, this is this. And I find it really interesting that this spotlight kind of makes that official in a way, in a way that was, they were trying to achieve with their marketing. Having this separate logo is an interesting sort of move to kind of make that official. Yeah.

I agree that it's a really good thing. It's based off of like a Marvel spotlight, which they did in the seventies, which like the publishing house also had this problem where it's like, people aren't buying comics that are, you know, like numbered in the hundred somethings. They don't see that as a first comic. So we got a series of Marvel spotlights. Hmm.

Those were written to be Marvel spotlights. Echo has become a Marvel spotlight that features Kingpin and Daredevil. So I'm interested to see how they make do with that brand if this is how they debut it. If going forward, there'll be things that are projects that are written specifically to be Marvel spotlights.

And the Echo project is something we've had our eye on as something we're very worried about, to be frank, for a while. The character, as she was introduced in Hawkeye, was like very intriguing to us. I think the actress is incredible. But when they announced how they were going to release Echo initially, which was over Thanksgiving as a binge drop, and then it got pushed to the new year, but still as a binge drop when they haven't done a binge drop on a Disney Plus Marvel show. To us, it feels a little bit like burying something

something that they know isn't tip top the best thing that they could possibly do. And so I wonder if the Marvel spotlight designation has anything at all to do with that. Again, I'm rooting for Echo and I'm rooting for all of these projects. So like, I hope it's phenomenal. It's just that announcement of how they were releasing it made a lot of us very worried for their own confidence in it. How optimistic are you guys about the Marvels?

Oh, gosh. Ominous silence. I was really on the optimism train for the Marvels just because I actually think I was listening to some folks talk about how they felt like it was a bit of an insult to sort of put Brie Larson or the Captain Marvel character in a team up movie when like she should have her own movie. But I actually think it's like a brilliant solution to a character that people didn't necessarily super well respond to over the course. I mean, the first Captain Marvel movie made a billion dollars, billion plus dollars. So like a lot of people saw it, a lot of people loved

it. But then they haven't like really used her since. And so as a character, I think adding certainly someone like Iman Balani who played Ms. Marvel in the Disney Plus show, having that energy bounce off of Carol Danvers, I actually think is a brilliant idea. There's a lot that I've seen in the trailer that I think is really charming and really fun.

And so I was like, what if the Marvels is good has been my attitude for, you know, even as it got delayed, like all this sort of stuff like that, like that's where I've been. And then again, you have to just sort of like read some of these tea leaves of the company's own confidence in it. They're not letting press see it until the Tuesday before the release on a Thursday. Right. So they're giving press two days to sort of get their ducks in a row before the movie itself comes out. They didn't let

the press who went to the junket and did all the interviews this past weekend. Like they had cats at the junket. That's very cute. You know what I mean? They had like, Nia DaCosta was there and Mary Lovano and like all these people were there, but they didn't let those members of the press see the movie first before they did their interviews. And they haven't done that since,

Endgame and they did that for Endgame because of secrecy, not because of anything else. But usually there's a junket screening where the press who's going to go interview gets to see the movie and they are just very worried about bad word of mouth for this movie, which is already tracking to make not very much. I'm hoping it's still fun and that I can enjoy it and champion it. But I think the narrative is

Like the die is already cast. The narrative is going to be low box office. People don't really like this movie. What do you think, Dave? I mean, you're probably right. And I agree with your tea leaves. But I do want to say that to a certain extent, they're kind of screwed unless they hit something. Basically, the only thing that's been hitting this year in terms of box office has been some sort of virality.

You Barbenheimer, you are all going to Taylor Swift with your friends. You and all your teenagers are going to Five Nights at Freddy's. Those are the things that have been generating hits at box offices. It feels like another Marvel movie, another entry in the Marvel movie. I've heard from people who have kids that like, why would they rush to go do this in the theaters when it's going to be in Disney Plus?

before there's another Marvel movie that comes out, essentially, because things have been delayed. And then just movies aren't doing well right now. It's been a bad box office for everybody without even knowing anything about the quality of

It's a huge uphill climb that I think any Marvel cinematic installment would have had trouble climbing because I think one of the reasons that Guardians 3 did so well is it was a rare Marvel movie that got to market itself as an end, like Endgame. You know, like here's a culmination for these characters, for these things. And so people were motivated to go see it in theaters. All the other Marvel entries have been here's the next chapter in Marvel and what's

what that means is you don't necessarily have to see it now. And so I think a lot of the sheen of going to see the new Marvel movie the weekend it comes out is gone both because of what the brand has done to itself and because what movies are currently going through. So it feels weird to me that not only are they not showing the Marvels, but it comes out the same day that Loki season two ends. It feels like they were just like, if we're going to have a bad press day, what if we make it the same bad press day?

And so I'll be interested to see. I'll be interested to see how it goes at the end of this week. That's interesting. And to Dave's point about box office, he's correct that Thor Love and Thunder made more money than Thor Ragnarok, but Guardians 3 did not make more money than Guardians 2. And like, this was the bedrock of Marvel when we talked to

David Maisel, who was sort of like the financial creative wizard who put together Marvel Studios in the first place, he says the idea of an MCU franchise is based on the old Hollywood math premise that he had a lot of experience in this, of a sequel to always make as much as, if not more than,

the movie that came before it, that that's just a truth of sequelizing in Hollywood, certainly at least when they started Marvel Studios. Guardians 3 is like currently sitting number four top grossing film of the year. So like it is a success by any metric. But as Marvel watches its goodwill chip away, Love and Thunder comes out in 2022. Guardians 3 comes out in 2023. And they've just lost some of that automatic buy-in for people. And I hope

to get it back because when Marvel's good, it's great. And I don't mean to like hand-crape for them. It's not all doom and gloom. How is that impacting or how is that maybe reflected in the content around the MCU or just the responses and conversations that you guys are having as creators and with other creators? Has this period we find ourselves in and the Knife's Edge period

been reflected? How has it impacted the content ecosystem around the MCU? I like you calling it content ecosystem. The phrase I used to use to describe it back when I would talk about it in terms of Game of Thrones was like cottage industry, the cottage industry that crops up around the explainer culture, right? Like for people who didn't read the books, right? For people who didn't read the Game of Thrones books or in the case of Marvel, if you don't have the decades of history with the comic books,

Let us explain it to you. We've read it. We've done it. We can tell you what the connections are, the Easter eggs that you're missing, that Ryan Airy is so good at pointing out, all that sort of stuff. What is undeniably true is that there has been a downtick in Marvel engagement on that level.

But that engagement still is massive and still exists for Star Wars in a way that I think people think it doesn't, but it definitely does. Or various things are going to come along. Dune is going to come. Like the explainer culture, I kind of thought...

explainer culture and monoculture was going to die once Endgame and Game of Thrones. And honestly, I was just sort of like, well, if I have to change jobs and go start washing dishes or something like that, I'm ready to do that. That's fine. But it's still thriving. And there will always be these franchises that

these adaptations when you know warner brothers decides as i've already announced they're going to do that they're going to reboot harry potter or when this side and the other things you know they're constant percy jackson is about to launch on disney plus and that's a series of books that a bunch of people have read and some people haven't on the one hand yes the marvel explainer culture is taking a bit of a ding right now but on the other hand i think the larger explainer culture experience is not going away what do you think dave

No, I definitely agree. And like Marvel comes along with the turn of a century and the internet and just the beginning of forget about superhero movies, franchises and IP dominating culture. If you want to talk to somebody about rings of power, you have Tolkien heads from the 60s that could still tell you about how they like figured certain shit out and war Frodo lives pins and stuff like that.

I like the way that we're able to sort of talk about it. I think there is a large diversification with Marvel, where Marvel has that type of heat, like a Lord of the Rings or like a Star Wars, where even if there wasn't new Marvel things coming out, we'd still be talking about it. And sometimes that works to their benefit that there's another show coming like Secret Invasion. We just had to wait a couple of weeks for Loki to sort of clear that bad taste out of our mouth.

But also, if you have a success like Endgame, not everybody gets a pandemic year to basically be celebrated while you're cooking up whatever the next thing is.

So I think the content culture could sort of feed back and forth. But any sort of like decline of engagement would just be because there's so much. There doesn't need to be this much. And hopefully that's something they change going forward so that some of the big hits can have legs even amongst the fandom. So even once they're out of theaters, we still want to talk about blankety blank. I think it's something that, you know, even the plot line of Loki or the emotional arc of WandaVision gave us really early on in those Disney Plus series.

And then it just got to the point where it's like, good or bad, wait two weeks, the conversation is going to completely change. And it altered the cottage industry a little bit. And to Dave's point, in terms of like the ebb and flow of content, which has been so deregulated since COVID, the COVID pause, and now we're going to enter like a strike pause. Yeah.

and the ramp up of content on the streaming wars. And so we got something like last fall, we called it Hot Nerd Autumn because it was House of the Dragon, Rings of Power. And then I believe Ms. Marvel and or She-Hulk right around the same time where I hosted podcasts

just very specifically to cover this stuff, exactly this stuff. We had to double up our episodes a week. So we were doing House of the Dragon, Rings of Power, but we couldn't cover all of She-Hulk and we couldn't cover all of Ms. Marvel. We wanted to, but we couldn't because we had to cover these other massive properties that have a lot of explaining to do, et cetera. So I think that like...

To Dave's point and something that Bob Iger himself has said is we slow down, then everything feels more special. And we can just sort of really marinate in the stories that are that special. And then things don't feel as disposable. And then you're more inclined to go to invest deeper in it because it doesn't feel like, okay, I'm just back on the wheel, back on the wheel, back on the wheel again for the next show. Absolutely. Absolutely.

admission i for that very reason and i'm a super fan we watch everything and i actually haven't started loki season two yet for that because it just feels so much there's so much to watch all across everything and it's like you know i'm gonna save it and do some and make it kind of special and like watch it on my own but it sucks because i also like explainer keeping up with the conversations and listening to you guys talk about it and ryan and about what's going on

Dave, Joanna, thanks so much for talking to me today. The book is amazing. I encourage anyone listening to get it immediately, even if you're in Canada and have to go through Amazon. Thanks so much for giving us some insights here. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Okay. We are back with Reeves Weidman and Mike Hoffman, and it's time to wrap up the show with keeping tabs. Let's start with you Reeves. Since you're our guests, what are you keeping tabs on? I'm keeping tabs on what hopefully is the impending end of the actor's strike. Um,

In Hollywood, every rumbling that I have heard, not that I have on the ground with George Clooney, but from people sort of in the entertainment business, people really think it's going to happen soon. You know, that's going to change that business in both based on what that contract looks like and suddenly with all these productions getting back up and running. So I'll be curious to just watch that from a sort of business perspective. But also, hopefully that means we all have new shows to watch, if not next week, then sometime next year.

White Lotus season three. I could have done with two fewer seasons of White Lotus, personally. I know I'm in the minority here. Shut up, Josh. I needed White Lotus.

Reeves, you're the most Hollywood guy out of the four of us here. Do you have any projects in development? Oh, you know, what does in development mean? There are a few things. I have had one story that became a TV show and there, yeah, let's say there are ongoing conversations. We'll leave it at that for now.

Mike, what are you keeping tabs on? Well, I'm going to maybe cheat a little bit and turn it back on Reeves slightly, which is we're talking to Reeves today in New York City, but most of the time he's based in Kansas City and recently wrote a piece on something that's happening in Kansas City that I don't know if you guys have heard about, but Travis Kelsey is dating Taylor Swift and she's going to a lot of games. And I'm curious, Reeves, like on the ground day to day, what is that like?

Um, you know, it's calmed down a little. The first day when she showed up was just like a frenzy. And by frenzy, you know, a frenzy in my phone, you know, because I've never gotten so many text messages and group texts just blowing up with this insane thing happening. I think it's it's weirdly settled into kind of a new normal sort of.

which is very unusual for a place like Kansas City. But, you know, she's now been to a few games. She's going on tour. So it seems like they're going to be apart for a little bit, although maybe Travis is going to join her. The Chiefs have a bye next week. So that's what we'll all be watching very closely. But I think most of all, it has been a real dose of fun and celebrity glitz and glamour in my lovely hometown that doesn't get that a lot.

You're a Chiefs fan also, right? Yes, yes, deep. And is it worth saying that Travis Kelsey, I think, broke the team's all-time receiving record in Germany the other night? He did, he did. Didn't have his best game, actually, and the Chiefs almost blew it, but he did break the record. So despite TikTokers claiming that Taylor put Travis on the map, certainly for the rest of us, he is, and certainly for me, he is one of the most important people in my life

in the category of people I've never met. Can we talk about the fact, can we briefly make a stop to say that he has recently trademarked a bunch of phrases that are rather embarrassing. He trademarked Travis Kelsey, sure. Flight 87, don't know what that means. All right, nah. Kill a Trav. And Kelsey's Crunch, that's Crunch with a K. We're all trademarked, what, last week, two weeks ago? Like, very recently. So we're in for some terrible merch. Interesting. Interesting.

It could be serial. Kelsey Crunch, yeah, is the least embarrassing of the few. Josh, what are you keeping tabs on? So, very stupid keeping tabs, but I've been keeping, well, I've been catching up on the morning show on Apple TV+. No! It's so delightfully terrible. I'm obsessed with TV representations of newsrooms and...

and journalism in general because it's always like so bad and I think like Josh which one of us is Jennifer Aniston and which one of us is um the blonde one Bradley Reese Witherspoon Reese Witherspoon yeah

Oh, man. I don't know. I think I probably fall more into the Yakko territory, which is the weatherman. Maybe not so much in the later seasons. This character takes weird turns. I don't know. It's a bizarre show. I mean, it goes completely off the rails.

I haven't even gotten to season three yet. Mike, you can be the, you can be Billy crude up. That can be pulling this, pulling the strings behind the scenes. He, he is, he's great hair. He's amazing in the show. He's such a good, he's so hot. Great. Whole career. Whole career. Super hot. Yeah. That's, that's great. Just walking around blue and naked and the watch. Uh,

Oh, I forgot about that. Okay. Yeah, it's a wild show. That's good. That's what I'm keeping tabs on. Yeah, that's what are you keeping tabs on? God, New York Magazine's cover just dropped this morning and I've not read the story yet. But their cover is about Erewhon and the business of Erewhon and how Erewhon just became this like

fancy grocery store that is known worldwide. And I'm so fascinated by it. And I really want to go and try a smoothie one day. But I'm going to pay $16 or whatever it is, or $30, I think, for some of them. What? That better be a great smoothie.

I mean, not that other smartphones. Because it's like weird collaborations. I don't know. Anyway, I can't wait to read it. I'm just so jealous it got greenlit. I'm happy it actually happened. So that's your FOMO. That's your jealousy. Yeah. Keeping tabs. Yeah. Some people are jealous about like Reeves Weidman publishing a book on WeWork and others are jealous that someone could try to cover a story about Erewhon. And that's it for Most Innovative Companies. Mike and Reeves, thank you for joining us. Thanks.

Thanks for having me. Our show is produced by Avery Miles and Blake Odom, mixed and sound designed by Nicholas Torres, and our executive producer is Josh Christensen. Remember again to subscribe, rate, and review, and we'll see you next week.