Share Coke with Will & Friends: Who Raised 13+ Billion to Buy Paramount & All They Got Was a Podcast

Michael Vonn co-founded the media company FAME in the 1990s alongside Oscar-winning producer John Daly (The Last Emperor, Platoon). Michael often calls himself “the most famous unknown person in the world.” I can semi-relate. I’ve always believed life is a series of mirrors—young and old—each of us playing a character in the Creator’s larger story. Michael is one of those mirrors I was clearly mea...

When I was staying on and off in Marina del Rey with a friend in Marina Del Rey, I spent a lot of time working out of the Coffee Bean near the AMC 6 theater. It’s one of the few spots with outlets—and interestingly, it’s the same theater Dean Hadley, who attended Piney Woods School, grew up going to, and the same theater I saw Spiderman : Across The Spider-verse, (see Nick episode for the spiderwe...

This is Elsa. I met her during the past year I was displaced in Los Angeles—after raising billions of dollars to attempt to acquire Paramount, believing with everything in me that the path I was on was divinely guided, and then losing everything when the Paramount acquisition didn’t happen. What I thought was the end of something turned out to be the beginning of something far more important. Meet...

Met Nick at around 3am, sitting outside a Denny’s in Westwood. He’s a displaced veteran who turns wire and mesh into spiderwebs. Real ones. Detailed ones. And if you know me, you know spiderwebs mean something. My ex-fiancée has a diagram tattooed on her back—an invisible map where everything is connected. So when I see webs show up in my life, I take notice. To me, it’s always been a reminder tha...

As a born-and-bred New Yorker (from Long Beach), Vito DeCandia was literally brought up in a pizzeria. He was stretching dough by the age of 12. His lifetime of baking eventually led him to the West Coast, where his wife was from. Two years ago, he opened  ⁠Angel City Pizza⁠  in Venice, where he continues to make what he knows: NYC style slices, squares, and even Grandmas! For Vito, pizza is more...

John Watzke is the owner of the  ⁠Ocala Drive-In Theater⁠ , which he restored and reopened in 2011 after finding it vacant in 2010. Coming from a family with a long history in the movie business, Watzke runs the drive-in as a passion project, showing movies seven days a week and also hosting other events like concerts and graduations. At one time, thousands of drive-ins dotted the country. Today t...

Iranian Immigrant Tommy Bina and his family have been the owners of The Canyon Country Store for the last 40 years, also known as Love Street. Tommy has been the gatekeeper to the legacy of the counterculture era of music that was birthed at the store in the late 1960's by Jim Morrison and The Doors, Momma Cass of the Mommas & Poppa's, Crosby Stills & Nash, and many other iconic ac...