Adam Neumann: The Real Story Behind WeWork, A $4 Billion Cab Ride, And Surviving A $460 Million Debt

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Adam Neumann recounts the dramatic rise and fall of WeWork, detailing the psychological impact of losing a multi-billion dollar empire. He s

Key takeaways

• Adam Neumann experienced a rapid collapse from 13,000 employees to just three in a single week.
• His wife, Rebecca, played a pivotal role in shifting his focus from material accumulation to spiritual fulfillment via Kabbalah.

Main topics

• The WeWork collapse and ego trap
• Childhood trauma and resilience

Notable quotes

The darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn.

Conclusion

A powerful narrative on transforming catastrophic failure into a found

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I went from 13,000 employees to three employees in Speaker 1 (0:02) one week. WeWork was one of Speaker 2 (0:04) the Speaker 1 (0:04) fastest physical global growth the world's ever seen. But everything went wrong. We lost everything. At 2019, we were publicly filed as S1. Company valued at around $47 billion. The S1 showed some losses, $3 billion in the past three years. Also, the S1 revealed, when you were CEO, that you'd also trademarked the word We and sold it back to the company. That's not true. People sometimes think I was fired because the Wall Street Journal said so. Not true. I wanted to hear directly from you, what happened? You really want to go there? Speaker 2 (0:29) I'm happy to. The floor is yours. So in WeWork, the business grew faster than I could grow. And every step I take, suddenly the ego starts coming up. Oh, 20 billion valuation, billion valuation in Japan. On top of that, 5 billion valuation in China. It suddenly became about the money. I forgot what we were all about. And when I lost it, everybody lost it. And the next thing is we found ourselves being forced to go public. when we weren't Speaker 1 (0:55) ready. Then you resigned as CEO of WeWork after the IPO didn't pan out. So I stepped down out of choice. And a Speaker 2 (1:02) second after I did it, we got stabbed in the back. And the only lesson there, if you're going to stab the king, kill. If Speaker 1 (1:08) you're not going to kill, Speaker 2 (1:08) I'm going to come back again. Speaker 1 (1:09) Why did you make that choice to go back into business again? Because you had money from the reports, almost a billion dollars. You know how hard it is. I now realize that in WeWork, Speaker 2 (1:17) I did a lot more things right than wrong. A Speaker 1 (1:19) lot more, not Speaker 2 (1:20) like 10 % more, like 95%. Some of what I'm saying is hard for you to fully hone in on. But all these founders you spoke to, all this, I don't think they shared this label. So let's talk about it. So first. Speaker 1 (1:32) Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so... so, so much. Speaker 1 (2:11) Adam Newman, I've had the privilege of getting to know you briefly over the last couple of months, and it struck me almost immediately that you are unlike almost any other founder or CEO or really person I think I've ever met. There's a depth to you and a philosophy and a perspective that is just incredibly rare. My question to you is, for you to be an anomaly, if we accept that, Speaker 1 (2:40) Am I right in thinking that you had some sort of anomalous early origin story? What is that story that shaped this man that sat in front of me? You know, Speaker 2 (2:52) for me first, when I get to know someone in the beginning and they say, where is it coming from? Who are you? I usually start the same. First of all, I'm a husband. It's my first job, what I'm most proud of. Then I'm a father. I'm a father of six. Then I'm a friend. Friendships are very important for me. And after that, I'm an entrepreneur. I think each one of us has a... Speaker 2 (3:18) phenomenal soul, I think it's perfect. And I think what really we see when we look at people is the distance between where we think they're holding to where their potential is. And I think it's that gap between those two things that actually defines a person. And for me, throughout my life, sometimes out of my control when I was young, and sometimes with my control when I got Speaker 1 (3:39) older, I've always been striving to close that gap. So you talk about Not having control. Your early context is quite unstable from what I read because your mother suffered from bipolar. Can you bring me into that world so I can understand like the sort of context that Adam was raised? Happily. So we'll start like every story has Speaker 2 (3:57) two sides to it. My mom and my father are both doctors. And growing up, I always saw both of them taking care of the patients. And it would feel sometimes like the patients came ahead of us. So for example, my sister and I, we were never sick. No matter how sick we were, we'd look at the man, she was an oncologist. And she would say, my patients are sicker, go to school. And that was sort of the beginning of it. When I was in the second grade, my parents got a divorce. It was very difficult for my mom and she needed a change of scenery. So Speaker 1 (4:27) we actually moved to the United States. You know this photo here? I do. And this one here, you've got a kid. This is you as a child that is beaming with a smile, sort of ear to ear. Often when I see photos like that, my... My curiosity is what you can't see and what that young kid, that young boy there is not saying, but what he's feeling underneath all of those emotions. Speaker 2 (4:51) What I could tell you is I think for me, I think the challenge started in that. So we talked about my mother being bipolar. I only observed my mother's moods when we moved to the United States. There was no one around. It was only my mom and my sister and I. And all day she would work with the patients, and at night at 8 p.m. she would come home, and all hell would break loose. And I remember, there are many stories, but I remember this. She would tell my sister and I we had to wash the dishes. That was our one chore. And we wouldn't, no matter what, because kids sometimes rebel by action when they can't rebel by words. And she would come home, you didn't wash the dishes, and she would take the dishes and throw them on the floor. And then she would cry and start cleaning the dishes and mopping them. And it was every night ended with some version of action like that. And for two years, I remember how crazy my sister and I thought the whole experience was. And we didn't have any friends who were sharing that experience. Until one day she bought this nice set of dishes. And she comes home again to throw the dishes. And we know that she's only throwing the cheap dishes. She's not throwing the ones that she liked. Which gave us a little hint that maybe there's a little more control over what's happening than this out of control situation. So if I had to guess what was happening with these kids, because now in hindsight I know my mom and my dad very well, probably there was a lot of arguing in the house. Probably as a kid, because I now see my kids that are very young, I'm sure a child finds it very confusing when the parents are not aligned as a team. Because as a child, all you have to lean on are your parents. But I think the most important thing to say... Speaker 2 (6:29) If my mom wasn't the way she was, and if I didn't go through all those challenges that I went through growing up, and I went through a lot. We're talking about bipolar. There's a lot that comes with it. And we could go deeper or less, but almost every single thing, if you took a piece of paper and you had to do a checkmark for every bad thing you think can happen to a little boy, you get to checkmark with me almost all of them, including the really bad ones that we don't like to talk about. As bad as that was, when I was 22, 23, I remember being very angry about my childhood. Only when I met Rebecca, my then-girlfriend to then-wife, she very quickly introduced me to a spiritual practice. The way she introduced me, by the way, was after a week of dating, she came to me and she goes, look, you're really nice, you have a lot of potential, but you're not the guy for me. I was very surprised at the time. I was living in New York. My sister was the supermodel. We were hanging out. I thought a lot of myself. And I said, what do you mean I'm not the guy for you? He said, well, you don't have a spiritual bend. You're very focused on material things. You want to be successful, but you're not actually understanding the game of life. The guy I'm interested in is going to want true happiness and true fulfillment. And true happiness and true fulfillment does not come from material things. It was so different from anything anyone has ever told me that instead of running away or doing this or doing that, I thought for a second. I said, well, how would one come? to explore this spiritual life that you're talking about. And she said, well, you need a practice. And for me, that practice started being Kabbalah, but for all of us, there can be different practices. The thing I learned very quickly in the practice is the difference between meant to be and free choice. Speaker 2 (8:12) I think a lot of people don't understand it, but how can there be, we talk a lot about in spiritual about it's meant to be and there's free choice. How could there be free choice and things be meant to be at the same time? The way I explain it is you get to a fork in your life and you choose left over right and everything works out, meant to be. You get to that same fork and you choose right and you crash on your face horribly. Everybody's watching. And you stop and you actually learn lessons from it. And you take accountability. And you say, you know what? Whatever happened to me happened for a reason, and I'm going to learn from it. I'm going to be stronger. almost like a sword that's getting forged. And the more times you hit it and the more hit you put on it, the stronger it gets. And then you learn those lessons and you go back into the game of life and you apply that in again. Suddenly you take the catastrophe or the tragedy or the curse and you make it into a blessing. You turn it into a made-to-be. When the world did crash on me as an adult, it was nothing. compared to what I had to deal with as a child. I was like, it's okay. I have a wife, I have kids, I have close friends. We'll take a deep breath and we'll start from scratch again. And that kind of fortitude, I think regretfully, comes through going through very difficult things. So if you're listening to this right now and you're going through something really difficult and it feels dark, I encourage you to remember that the darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn. Speaker 1 (9:39) I feel like there's things in your early context that you haven't shared before. Because you said there's things that we don't usually share. Not publicly, but meaning I have in front of, so Speaker 2 (9:50) I used to share everything in front of our employees that we work. So there's things I shared in front of 10,000 people. I'm not sure it ever made it to the press. Speaker 1 (9:57) What is missing? You really want to go there? I'm happy to. If you're happy to, I'm happy to. Speaker 2 (10:04) I'll share two things that I'm not sure, but maybe could be helpful for other people that are going through similar things. Speaker 1 (10:13) So the Speaker 2 (10:14) hitting and stuff. So when someone's bipolar, by the way, they get very angry or very happy very fast. When they're happy, they're the happiest. You have fun and everything's amazing. And my mom would play games with us and it was phenomenal. Speaker 2 (10:30) Also, and that I think happens a lot with bipolar, there's the suicide threats. And then there's one thing when you threaten to, so again, if you're two children and your only parent threatens to commit suicide. Speaker 2 (10:42) who's going to take care of you? What is going to happen if suddenly that happens? And I have a lot of memories, but one that just came back to me not too long ago. We were in the kibbutz, which is where we're living after we came back from the U.S. My mom wanted us to have a special experience, so we went to this community where everybody shares a lot of things together. It's also the beginning of why I love communities. And we get into this big fight, and my mom basically says she's going to kill herself, and she takes the knife. And I remember she's holding this huge knife. I'm like, no, no, don't do it. And I remember, I just remember feeling that I have to stop it, that it is up to me. And if I don't stop it, then she's going to kill herself right there in front, my sister and I. So I grabbed the knife and we're fighting left and right. And my sister is sitting right there and she's crying and she's crying. Speaker 2 (11:35) And I'm Noah, and she's saying yes, and the whole thing is so crazy. How old were you? Twelve at that moment. That's one. There's more if you want to go deeper, but that was one. I invite you to go deeper. I was in between second grade to fourth grade, and I was sexually... I think it was molested, by an older than a teenager. So she was at least six or seven years older than me. This one, I didn't even know that what was happening was wrong. And many years later, Rebecca and I are in the Hamptons, and somehow the story comes up, and she goes, Adam, you understand that this is not normal for a child at that age. And I didn't even fully understand. And that taught me. Speaker 2 (12:41) That explained to me a lot about children. And again, we go back to the responsibility of parents and the responsibility of society to take care of the children and schools to understand what's happening. And whenever we see anyone, we are so good at walking into a room, seeing someone else and judging. Oh, they're not acting the way I would act. They're not acting right. They're not speaking right. Everybody's so busy judging everybody. I want to encourage every single person next time you're about to judge. You don't know who that person is. You do not know where they come from. You do not know what happened to them as a kid. God forbid they were molested. God forbid they dealt with all these things. You don't know where they started. You only know where you see them now. And it could be that if you really got to know them and you'd have known the distance they went from here to here, Speaker 2 (13:30) you would have been extremely impressed with them and you would have not measured them that way. And this is why I think it's so important for all of us when we walk into rooms to really go after unity. You and I can say the same sentence in a way that tears people apart or brings people together. It takes more effort to speak in a way that brings us together. But if we don't start acting like this, if we keep dividing and keep Speaker 1 (13:57) splitting, I'm worried. Speaker 2 (14:01) It Speaker 1 (14:01) sounds like as an adult, you've been able to understand that early experience and sort of create a new sort of perspective or lens on what happened to you and what it means. And as you said, you know, you've orientated it around the fact that it's happened for a reason, or at least there's something to have learned from it. Was that always the case? I sometimes reflect on my own experience and think that for the first season of my life, I was dragged. And then at some point, I like got hold of the steering wheel and I was able to like drive. And one of them was like sort of unconscious and the other one was more in sort of intentional and thoughtful. And I'm wondering through your early teens and twenties, whether you had the wisdom and the perspective that you have now on your early experiences and how that's evolved over time. Speaker 2 (14:44) I probably went to sleep crying every single night for probably until I was 14 or 15. And I remember, and if you ask my sister, what would I say? I completely forgot. She said, I told her that one day I'll become very successful and will take care of us. That was what I used to say. I literally didn't remember. This is something she told me. Speaker 2 (15:09) I think that's how I interpreted that control and how I'm going to fix all these challenges that I had. But we launched a school, Rebecca and I. More Rebecca, I hope. It's a fifth school. In the school, we teach kids how to be connected to themselves, how to be part of something greater than themselves. If someone just taught me this as a kid, and I would have understood then that there's this bigger picture, I think I would have been able to handle it a lot better and skip the challenging years faster. move faster into the point where I realize that I don't control what happens, but I can control how I react to it. So back to your point of driving. Are you driving? Speaker 1 (15:51) I don't know. Now you question it, I'm questioning myself. I would Speaker 2 (15:54) question it. My follow-up question Speaker 1 (15:56) to Speaker 2 (15:56) you would be, how Speaker 1 (15:57) do Speaker 2 (15:57) you Speaker 1 (15:57) define success? My definition of success these days, it's funny, I was thinking about it this morning when I got on the lift on my way here. I thought, do you know what it was? Because my fiancée turned to me this weekend and she went, Stephen, I think you have enough now. And then she paused and then she retracted the statement. But it got me thinking about what enough is. And actually, I thought, well, it's the motion forward. in the pursuit of goals that matter to me, that are challenging, surrounded by people, that is the success. And that's like a daily thing. There's no podium in this game that I'm playing. Speaker 2 (16:29) By Speaker 1 (16:29) the way, Speaker 2 (16:29) when she said she thinks you have enough, was she referring to material things? Speaker 1 (16:33) Yes. Speaker 2 (16:35) I think society has taught us that once we gain that success, once we gain those material things, we get to this number, suddenly that hole that we all fill inside of us will be full. Now, I know it's very hard to hear, especially for people who haven't gotten there yet. Like, oh yeah, you got there already, so now you're saying it. I'm only going to share with you what I have learned. And from all the most successful people that I know, and I'm lucky to know quite a lot of them, I have not seen one that got happy or fulfilled from attaining a number or a material thing. I don't believe that's how the game of life works. So when your fiance said, it's not like her because I think she's more on the spiritual side. Speaker 1 (17:17) Tell Speaker 2 (17:17) her that I said, I'm surprised she said that. I think she had something deeper to say and she was holding back. When she said, I think you have enough, I would really go back to redefining success. So back to that, I'll tell you how I define it in a second. But I think if we can agree on the definition of success, then we can start having a discussion of, A, are we there and are we headed there? And B, how do we do better to get there? And if we agree on our definition of success, then now we can start working together towards the same goal. If one of us defines success by making the most money and the other person defines success by being the most fulfilled, the most happy, the most light that they can be, then... Playing two different games. What's Speaker 1 (17:57) your definition? Speaker 2 (17:59) When you're at your deathbed and you're one minute before it's all going to go and you know you're out of time, all you have left is the love that surrounds you at that moment, your children, your grandchildren, your friends, your friends' children, all the love that surrounds you at that moment and all the love that you have cultivated for your entire life. And I think it's that love which then moves on to whatever it is that happens after. So my definition of success is in that last moment, right before you go, how do you feel? Do you feel full and surrounded by love and like life has been this amazing journey? Or is there regret or is there this? And I'll tell you the one thing that happens right before we pass away, the ego goes away completely. No more secrets. And again, in the spiritual study, you say, what's the definition of hell back to how we started this? You get to see, you get to glimpse for a second. The ultimate potential that your soul had, how perfect it was and how high you could have gone, and where you really got to. And the distance between those two, that's hell. Speaker 1 (19:08) When you were 31 years old in 2010, and you sat down with your partner, Miguel. Miguel McKelvey. And you made this sketch on a whiteboard for WeWork. If I'd asked you then what your definition of success was, would you have turned to me and said love, or would you have said something else? I believe I would have said something else. So my big Speaker 2 (19:27) shift is when I met my wife. So by this point of this picture that you're showing me, I was four years into Rebecca teaching me about the game of life. So I'm starting to advance. I can tell you what I was thinking. It wouldn't have been love, but it would have been we. And the point about Christmas was called, if you look at that picture, it's going to say we work, we live, we give, we share. I don't remember. I haven't seen it for like 10 years. It was never about desks and chairs. It was always about creating a world where people make a life and not just a living. It was about something Speaker 1 (19:57) greater than ourselves. If we just jump sort of backwards in time from that day by about 10 years, if I had asked you what you want to be when you're older, what would you have said? At 21? 21. It's embarrassing. Speaker 2 (20:08) I'll tell you if it's embarrassing. I'm embarrassed. Amazing. Great. Tell me. Speaker 1 (20:12) I'm embarrassed for my 21-year-old self. What did you want to be? A billionaire. You wanted to be a billionaire at 21? I did, regretfully. Why? I thought Speaker 2 (20:20) that making the money is going to compensate. I thought I was going to fill that hole for my childhood. Speaker 1 (20:27) What about at 16, if I'd asked you? Speaker 2 (20:28) I think I said millionaire then. I don't think I knew the word millionaire at 16. I think the numbers were because the world changed. But I thought that making money was going to fill that hole from the childhood that back then seemed very difficult and very aggressive and very, with all these negative words that we can use about difficult and abusive childhoods. And I thought that making money would solve it. But then I did three businesses afterwards who did not succeed until I met Rebecca. And Rebecca was like, you're chasing money. You will never have it. And even if you get it, it will never make you happy. You will never have it. And she said, chasing money is like chasing cool. You're cool. You're just like that. I don't think you're working too hard on that. Thank you so much. You don't like putting on shoes. I don't Speaker 1 (21:12) like Speaker 2 (21:12) putting on shoes. It's all good. So she said, you're chasing money. It doesn't work like that. It's also like chasing a girl. You really want someone. You have to take a deep breath. But she said to me, even if you were to get money the way you're chasing it, it not only will not fulfill you, it will be negative for you. So I said, well, what should I do? She said, well, you're a very talented individual. You should figure out what your superpower is. It's the first time I've heard anyone use the word superpower. She goes, you need to take your superpower. You need to connect it to something that's really meaningful for the world. Something you're passionate about, but something that can make a difference. And to bring those two things together and to only focus on making that a reality. Speaker 2 (21:52) employees will want to work with a company that's doing that. Investors want to invest in a company that's doing that. And consumers want to buy from a company that's doing that. The rest will follow. Then she said, success, the way you define it then, that money success you think is it, will fall on you from the sky more than you can ever imagine. I was like, I want to marry this Speaker 1 (22:10) woman. I proposed three months after we met. And the idea of we was central to this drawing that I had in front of me, which is... A drawing you did on a whiteboard when you were 31 years old, 2010, with your partner Miguel after selling your company, I think Speaker 2 (22:24) it Speaker 1 (22:24) was called Green Desk? Green Desk. You sold it for how much? It wasn't like a... 1 Speaker 2 (22:27) .5 million. Okay. There were three Speaker 1 (22:28) partners. So we each got half a million, half a million, half a million. But our Speaker 2 (22:32) partner didn't want to pay us the whole amount up front. So he only gave us $300,000. The rest was installment over four years for Miguel and I. And I remember telling Miguel, Miguel, you keep the money because I'll waste it. First time I ever made money. You keep the money because I will waste it and we'll keep it for our next business. And the way the universe works, by the way, the universe speaks to us. Designs start happening and you sort of one thing leads to another. It's almost serendipity. Our first WeWork building, to get the building, the landlord wouldn't give it to us unless we gave a check of exactly $300,000. The same $300,000 that was sitting in Miguel's account. It went from there to there and WeWork was created. So tell me what that is. Okay, we're in Green Desk. Just to remind everybody what Green Desk is, Green Desk was created in May of 2008. The world was crashing. That was the downturn. And before it started, Miguel and I got to know each other. He was an architect and I had a baby clothing company. And we're in the same building. My roommate introduced us and we would just talk about doing great things. And there was a landlord there. And every day he would see me, he goes, Adam, your baby clothing company sucks. And I said, Mr. Gottman, why do you say that? He said, well, my wife, we have eight kids. She loves buying baby clothes. She didn't once buy from you. I don't know how you pay me rent. Your baby clothes suck. And I would say, well, Mr. Gottman, you own all this real estate around here. He goes, yes, I do. I said, your real estate sucks. He goes, why do you say that? I said, it's all empty. And we would do that for four months, back and forth. One day he looks at me and goes, Adam, if I... gave you one of my buildings. You Speaker 1 (24:07) keep saying that it sucks. What would Speaker 2 (24:08) you do with it? So he takes me upstairs and he shows me this beautiful floor plate. And I said to him, how much did you get in rent? He goes, $5,000 a month. I said, well, it's empty, but let's say you would get $5,000. I said, look, I'm a small business. I don't need this much. Let's divide it to 15 small places, spaces. We'll charge $1,000 each. We'll put a receptionist. We'll pay the receptionist $2,500. We'll get $15,000. That will leave us with $12,500. you will get 7 500 and we'll get the difference And he was like, let me think about it. He calls me the next day. He goes, I love it. But instead of one floor, take the whole building. It had five floors. We'll put the receptionist downstairs so we can share the expenses. It will be even better. And we put five ads on Craigslist. We launched Green Desk. It was 92 % full within a week. Started cash flowing positive, which was a new thing for me because this was my fourth business. Never had cash flow positive. Cash flowing positive within a month and became very successful very fast. After about six, maybe 12 months, we started thinking bigger, Miguel and I. We said, we'll take GreenDisk National. We went to our landlord, said, I'm not interested. We asked for $20 million. We said, we'll split the business 50-50. He wasn't interested. So we started, and very soon after, he said, I'll buy it from you. And we started planning this. And you drew this on a whiteboard. Miguel drew this on the wall, not even a whiteboard. The walls were made of glass. This was drawn on the glass. So all of our walls in GreenDisk were also whiteboards. because everybody was about creating and inventing. And what you see here is that social life, commercial, friends is here. This proves the fact, Ben Horowitz, in the interview that you saw, he did with me in the podcast, he says to me, Adam, you've always had one idea. And then at the end, the apologist said, Adam, I didn't mean to say you only have one idea. Of course you have all these ideas. I said, Ben, you're right. This is not that different from what flow is. This is all about the friends and all about the living and all about the working, life essentials. Well, I haven't seen this for a long time. FinTech, travel, Speaker 1 (26:08) everything in between. So for anyone that's watching, listening and can't see, it's a circle that has lots of circles in it. And it says all the little circles are like travel, health, social life, friends, co-work, co-worker supporters, life essentials, work rituals. Work Speaker 2 (26:29) rituals. I can read it better than me, but that makes sense. And this was the idea for WeWork. This is the idea for WeWork. So sometimes people said, oh, you grew out of desks and chairs. You shouldn't have gone to all these categories. The idea started, this was before there was one desk. Speaker 1 (26:44) What is the essence of this? Speaker 2 (26:45) We wanted to make a world, at least in our opinion, that really needed community. This was to deliver on a mission of create a world where people make a life and not just a living. This was a full lifestyle, life circle. And it was very aspirational. And it's how, by the way, for any one of our listeners or your listeners that is starting a business, start with a vision. dream as high as you can go all the way to the stars because if you don't shoot for the stars you're never going to get to the moon go far Speaker 1 (27:19) Then Speaker 2 (27:19) take a deep breath and Speaker 1 (27:21) go back to basics. Speaker 2 (27:22) What do I need to do first? What do I need to do second? What do I need to do third? The secret of life and entrepreneurship is to be able to be in both places at the same time. On the one hand, I'm going to go so far. On the other hand, I'm just starting, so I better roll up my sleeves and get the broom and start brooming. It's both of them. I need to go knock on doors. I need to go meet people. I need to do whatever work needs to be done at the beginning Speaker 1 (27:44) to get the business started. Let's talk about both then. you've got the trenches and then you've got, let's say the clouds or the moon as you refer to it. Why is it important to dream big? Why is the scale and the size of the dream important? So I believe... Speaker 2 (28:00) It's the secret of manifestation. So when people ask me, Adam, what is the secret of manifestation? How do you make something out of nothing? I think the order is, first you have to believe. If you and I have a big idea, first we have to believe it. Then, that takes time to believe. True belief, by the way, do you know when belief is measured? Speaker 1 (28:19) No. Speaker 2 (28:19) When it's really tough. Belief is not measured on everything. So I remember this, and I've shared this story before, but your audience is so wide that I'm sure a lot of them haven't heard it. Speaker 2 (28:31) And when right after the whole explosion of WeWork occurred, and it was like five days in, and the whole thing was crashing on us, and there's a million articles, and the whole thing is happening. My spiritual teacher, who I haven't spoken at this point almost for two years after I studied with him for eight years, calls me, said, Adam, how are you doing? I said, I'm not doing so well right now. It's crazy. He said, oh, great. That's why I called you. I said, why did you call me? His name is Eitan. I said, Eitan, why didn't you call me? He said, I called you to make sure that you remembered the two things we learned for eight years. I said, Eitan, we didn't learn two things for eight years. We studied twice a week. We learned endless things. He goes, no, you missed it. We learned two things. I said, please remind me. He goes, one was love thy neighbor as yourself, and the rest is commentary. It took a second for it. I said, let's talk about this for a second. What does love thy neighbor as yourself mean to you? Speaker 2 (29:30) Such a famous saying. We've heard it so many times. Speaker 1 (29:33) When I think about it, the way that I understand it is to have empathy and compassion for all of the complexities, both the good, the bad, the indifferent, and that which you don't understand, which is like how I would treat myself. Like I understand that I'm a complex person and that I'm multifaceted and imperfect and that I have strengths and weaknesses and I'm okay with all of it. And in others, we're less okay with all of it. Speaker 2 (29:58) Beautiful. Let's say it a little bit different words, but I was right on. Love the neighbor as yourself means that you first have to love yourself. To love yourself, you have to acknowledge not only the great strength that you have, that you love, you must acknowledge your weaknesses, your failures, your mistakes. And the only way you can love yourself after all of those is if you're able to forgive yourself. So the true secret of loving oneself is to forgive yourself, to not carry guilt, to really be able to know that all of these are lessons for you to grow and change and go to your next level from. Back to the sword analogy. You're a sword and you're getting forged and every single time you get hit, you just get stronger. Once you feel that and you're able to love yourself, then you're able to love everybody else. That was the first thing he told me we learned. The second thing he said to me... which we said before, is I want to remind you that the darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn. Belief is not measured when everything is going up and everybody's telling you what a genius you are and everybody wants to be your friend and everybody wants to be your investor. Belief is measured when it's all crashing, when even your friends are questioning you, when the phone is not ringing. And if a person is able to have true belief then, And he says to me, if you're going to be able to take this experience and really hold your belief, hold your positivity, hold your happiness, be the person I know you can be, you can't imagine what the future stores for you. Speaker 1 (31:19) What did you believe in, in your hardest moment? In God, and in myself, Speaker 2 (31:27) in my wife, in my kids, and in the fact that even though I don't know at this moment why this thing happened, I am going to be stronger for it. And I remember that morning, this phone call was late at night. The next morning at 6 a.m., I walked down to my three, I went from 13,000 employees to three employees in one week. I walked down to the three employees who were my partners in the family office, not even employees, partners. I walked down to them and I'm smiling. They're stressed out. We would meet every day at 6 a.m. We're done. We're bankrupt. It's finished. They only joined me. Three months before they came to manage what they thought was a $5 to $10 billion family office, and they're dealing with negative $400 million compounding interest, full bankruptcy situation. And I thought about them all my, not all, a lot of friends that I had that were really there with me and enjoyed with me and grew with me and made money with me. When I really needed that one small moment, a lot of them weren't there. And these three almost strangers who I didn't really know were standing right there by my side. And they see me smiling and say, Adam, why are you smiling? They're like, they thought I really lost my mind. It was done. And I said, I'm smiling because I remember that the darkest moment of the night is a second before dawn. And I remember that belief is actually measured when things are difficult, not when everything is working. And I believe, and I know it's going to work out, and I don't know how, and I don't know why, but this is all going to work out for the best. And we're going to learn a lot from this, and it will actually prepare us when a real difficulty happens, so we're ready to go and deal with it. And about 10 days later... We started coming out of it in a very positive way. Speaker 1 (33:04) I want to go to the top of the story, because I really want to walk through some of the key moments. But I noticed your energy shift a little bit when you started describing those three people. Here's another thing that I've learned. If you know, Evan, you're facing this as we speak right now. I bet you have lots of friends. Speaker 1 (33:20) I bet you have not. That's Speaker 2 (33:21) how you Speaker 1 (33:21) define friends. Exactly. Well, I'll tell you a secret about them, and Speaker 2 (33:25) I'm sorry to say that. We're only going to know which one of them are your friend and which ones are not if, God forbid, you crash and you actually need them. And then I can also tell you if you're going to crash or not. If you go big enough, really, really big, you crash. Whenever Santa says, oh, Adam, it's never going to happen to me. My ego is never going to get the best of me. I'm never, I'm always going to stay in control. I have young, successful people like to say that to me. I say, oh, you haven't gone big enough. Because if you really, really, that's part of the definition of going really, really big. Life is