I make the same wish every year: for it to be warm on Halloween night.  October can be a pretty warm month at times but for some reason October 31st at night is destined to be cold AF forever.  The one night of the year where you’re willingly going to spend time outside for an extended period of time tends to be the one night where you need to layer up immensely.  Which didn’t help me much in my costume...

I remember I had to Google Slenderman just to get an understanding of who/what he actually is when I bought this costume.  I still haven’t watched the movie.  It turns out the character was created within a Photoshop contest, which later became an internet meme and then a movie - basically the typical way films are brought to life these days.  But that’s all I know, I’d say I do the character a bit of justice though, no?

That all said, you know when your hands get so cold that when you try to warm them up it actually hurts your fingers more and there’s this period of time where you kind of just have to let them warm up naturally as they tingle and sting?  That was my hands after scaring kids in the street for a good half hour.  Given how tight the costume is the best you can do is Uniqlo Heattech underneath.  

Slenderman season is over.  It’s now the obvious transition into Heattech season.  

This week's issue is a 3 minute read:

💰️ Suing the beast

🎵 If you can’t beat em, join em…with AI

🎴 Chief what now??

Mark, Tom, and Travis are back one more time

If you grew up in the late 90’s / early 2000’s...scratch that.  If you liked any form of rock music in the late 90’s / early 2000’s...scratch that.  If you paid attention to anything besides the nightly news in the late 90’s / early 2000’s then you probably saw Blink-182 somewhere on TV or heard them somewhere on the radio.  From leading the soundtracks for both American Pie and American Pie 2 to headlining The Warped Tour, Blink-182 was the punk rock band if not just the band that everyone knew.  

And then they broke up, released side projects (that were fairly decent), got back together again in 2009 to release an album in 2011 followed by an EP in 2012.  But honestly, by the time they got back together the first time, it felt like the world kinda moved on.  By 2011 the early millennial crowd that all wore their hats sideways with a random skate tee and baggy jeans (myself included) had all grown up into young professionals, with possibly a more mature taste in music?  Either way I know I stopped paying attention to what Blink was doing at that point.

UNTIL NOW.

Mark, Tom, and Travis got back together for a second official time and released what Mark is saying is their best album ever. 

Frankly, I kind of agree!  It’s got notes from all the Blink eras - from their pure punk Dude Ranch era, to their poppy punk Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, to the grungey emo sounds of their self titled album, Blink-182.  Heck, I even hear a bit of Boxcar Racer which was a pleasant surprise.  Fun fact: Boxcar Racer was the first concert I ever went to where I learned the hard way NOT to go to the front of the mosh pit as people continuously crowd surfed on my head.

If you are or you were a fan of Blink-182 then you will absolutely like this album - I’ve listened to it back to front at least 3 times in the past week so far. No seriously, it’s really really good.

And here’s the American Pie scene I’m sure you were thinking of just because…

WeWork ain’t working

I feel like I’ve used this title before, haven’t I👆️ ?

In the not so surprising news this week reports came out that WeWork is planning on filing for bankruptcy as the co-working space company - they’re not a tech company as much as Adam Neumann claimed them to be - is now worth just $60M, down from its 2019 valuation of $47B.  In a world where office space has become a commodity and empty offices are still a thing, WeWork’s $13B in leases seems like the antithesis of what a business would want to be holding on to at the moment.

The irony of it all is once the pandemic hit, no one wanted be in an office permanently.  WeWork’s business model was predicated on the fact that people wanted flexible office space and they were the provider to make this happen.  So how did America’s hottest startup in 2019 turn into a shell of itself 4 years later?  Basically that $13B worth of leases. 

It doesn’t take a real estate guru to realize that when you lock yourself in for 15 years but you only lock in your clients, sometimes month over month, and then you do this multiple times over around the world, that you’re creating a giant risk that either ultimately makes you or breaks you.  

Now just because WeWork files for bankruptcy does not mean the company will be completely gone.  Since it will most likely be filing for chapter 11 protection, this will give it a chance to hold off payments to creditors and sort out what the heck it’s going to do - which will most likely be writing off a ton of the leases it currently holds.  This all said, coming out of the pandemic, we were supposed to see a much more hybrid approach to office space usage - perhaps WeWork will still have it’s moment in the Son. 

(Masayoshi Son was the investor who basically gave WeWork the billions it had way back when - now my joke makes sense as well as the subtitle to this issue...I feel like I need a video game instruction manual to explain what I write sometimes 😅 )

SBF IS GUILTY

In a case and verdict that would make Chuck Rhoades so proud, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty yesterday of all 7 charges against him which culminated from him paying off the debts of his girlfriend’s “research” hedge fund thing, bankrolling risky investments (he wanted in on Elon’s purchase of Twitter), buying insane properties, and donating hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties.  

Just as billionaire Michael Prince on Billions was taken down this past week in the series finale (amazing show, semi-predictable series finale...but still GREAT show), SBF has also officially been taken down as well. Good - let someone else start the next billion dollar crypto scam…what? You don’t think there isn’t one out there already? Oh just you wait!

I get the vibe that creating and running FTX was a fantasy land for SBF answering the question, if you could do whatever you want with billions of dollars and not get caught, what would you do? 

As always, reality catches up with all of us eventually.

I feel like there’s a Taylor Swift song in there somewhere.