It is Wednesday, September 30th. Spend any time in Hollywood and you'll quickly discover Ari Emanuel is one of the better arguers in town. I've certainly had my share of arguments with him over the years, including on this show. Now, he's on a press tour because he just added author to his various titles. Remember, he's the executive chairman of WME Group, the talent agency, where he still represents clients like Mark Wahlberg and Tyler Perry and Dwayne Johnson. He's also the CEO and executive chair of TKO Group, owner of the UFC and World Wrestling Entertainment. And he's the founder and principal investor of Mari, an investment firm for live events that he started with his partner Mark Shapiro. Get it? Mark and Ari. Mari.
Ari's one of the few true characters left in town. So much so that he still gets mileage out of Entourage, a show that he claims he hated when it aired, but admits it helped him get his calls returned. And now with Roll the Calls, his long-awaited and very good memoir that he co-wrote with J.R. Moringer, he's not holding back very much.
He goes after moguls like Barry Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg and his own former partner, Patrick Whitesell, who he says he will never speak to again. Yesterday, I went over to the WME headquarters in Beverly Hills for my own private slice of the press tour, and I found him typically in feisty form.
He had some choice words for Bryan Lourd, his decades-long rival at CAA, who he says is a sociopath. CAA declined to comment on that one, as well as this moment in Hollywood, his former clients David Ellison and Donald Trump, his buddy Elon, and of course, the future of entertainment.
And of course that time that he capitalized on David O. Russell calling CAA a cunt in a phone call and Ari put up billboards all over town with C as the CAA logo. That was a fun day when that happened. We also did a lightning round. Some fun questions there.
Usual disclosure when I talk about WME: the agency does represent Puck for various deals, but they do not represent me personally. Okay. Today it's a supersized episode: the Ari Emanuel book and the Ari Emanuel experience, from The Ringer and Puck. I'm Matt Belloni and this is The Town.
All right, we are here with Ari Emanuel. I'm not going to go through your titles.
Can I ask a question? Why when we talk in person is the voice here and then we go on the podcast it goes up?
I don't know. It's... it's not like I try.
Okay, go on. Why when you're talking to an executive on the phone does your voice go to 11 when we are talking? 11? It goes to 15.
Exactly. We're going to get to that.
Exactly. All right. So, you have many titles. We're not going to list them here.
You have written a very entertaining vanity memoir. I read a lot of vanity memoirs. Your vanity memoir is very good. You've done a lot of media for this. So a lot of people have asked you already why you wrote this book and you have a nice answer about helping people who are coming up —
You just... you just built it up negative, like I'm selling.
No, no, okay, well, but there has been a reaction to your press tour within the community, and I think that...
No, not necessarily — you're selling a book — but people have said that this creation, Ari the super agent, the guy who makes 300 phone calls a day, the guy who screams on the phone, this is a creation that you have essentially branded because it helps you, and that you — there's a million agents that make 300 phone calls a day,
And there's a million agents that are willing to go to 11 on the phone,
But that you have successfully branded — the TV show helped, and you acknowledge in the book that the TV show helped — but that this isn't the real you.
I don't know. That's the question.
You just wrote a book about yourself.
Do you believe that is the real you?
Here's the great thing: you and I have a relationship. I say to you all the time, you have to do your job. You have to write what you write. I never complain about what you write.
I don't... Actually, one of the things you say to me, I appreciate that.
Okay. So, most people have very thin skin when you write about them. You do not.
I'm at a place where rage, finding identity, a bunch of stuff happened. I've changed. But I still do my shtick. I call people. It's gotten a lot easier.
But there's a lot of people probably that do their own version of what they are.
You wouldn't plaster the town with CUNT signs. You wouldn't give... Would you do that now? You wouldn't give a quote to a newspaper saying —
You wouldn't give a quote to a newspaper today saying, 'We fight and we [__]'?
That was a period of time I probably shouldn't have done that. But if you're asking me if I would, I don't know, it was 15 years ago. Redo CAA.
It's more true now than it's ever been.
Yeah. All right. The other thing that people have talked to me about: you specifically do not mention Bryan Lourd, the head of CAA, in your book, and you have said the reason is because you're beyond him and you don't want to talk about him anymore. You famously have had a feud with him for 30 years.
Let's just be very clear: I think he's a bad parent.
I'll tell you exactly what that means. He's run that place longer than Mike, Ronnie, and Bill Haber ran that place.
Yes. We've handed this business over, being there to support Richard White and Christian Mirhead.
And they are going to live and die by how they operate. I'm here to support them. He has taken money out, created debt,
I've taken a lot of money out of this company, but I have not drained the inheritance of the economics of these people. Okay.
I think I'm right here.
And paid himself through taxes. He doesn't have a formula to pay his employees properly. There's some [__] up formula.
They have a challenge getting their equity out of the company. There's a lawsuit involving the Range people right now —
And there's no heir apparent. They haven't enabled any heir apparent. You have to fail to understand what you did wrong. He's holding on because he was not creative about what the company could do. All he cared about is filling his pockets and Kevin's pockets.
He's an agent. He's the most powerful agent. Patrick and I actually made sure that people made a lot of money and that there was a path for people to grow and take over the business. And I think that's being a good parent. And that's just my opinion. You can't point to anything that is new, inventive, or supportive of the associates as it relates to the company.
The company has grown significantly. Can I tell you what people have suggested to me? What is really going on?
It's grown significantly because the buying community has spent more money.
Fantastic. And I guess that's an incredible feat. Okay. Well, they have a pretty impressive collection of stars. And some people believe that the reason you didn't mention him and the reason that you're sort of trying to distance yourself is that you are acknowledging he won the agency business.
He has completely lost the agency.
He won the agency business. Don't jump across and strangle me, but this is the theory: he has the best clients, and you saw that coming and said, 'I got to do something else.'
That is 100% not true. And I would never come across and strangle you. Okay? So, at the end of the day, I would put our list of writers, directors, actors, musicians, book people, theater people against theirs any day.
He's done nothing. And let me just tell you something: I'm still in the agency business.
Okay? And I don't know what he's done to reinvent the business or create new opportunities. He has followed as opposed to led.
Yeah. Well, they have a pretty diversified business. They have an investment bank. Their clients seem happy for the most part.
They started that business years before he did. Like, now they're discovering creators. I get it. [__] what a [__] [__].
But I don't want to... I don't want to litigate this, but —
But you're saying things that are such [__] — like, he hasn't led once. Oh, he acquired ICM only 15 years after Patrick and I did. Oh, he started a merchant bank only 12 years after Patrick and I did it. Shut the [__] up.
Okay. You also claim that Brian is a sociopath. Why do you say that? My theory on you two — I've said this to you before — is that the difference between you and Bryan Lourd is that you stab people in the front, he stabs people in the back. You're both agents. You're both —
Well, why is he a sociopath?
Maybe that wasn't the right word.
Okay. I don't even care about the guy.
Well, clearly you care enough to call him a sociopath.
At the end of the day, when they weren't getting into power after they got rid of Lee Gabler and Jack Rapaport, they had to — they made a deal with the devil. They represented Harvey. They did whatever they could do because they were taking over the agency, and Harvey was the man making incredible movies, and they got in business.
Here's what I'd say: take that word out of it. Sociopath. They made a deal with the devil. The devil being Harvey Weinstein.
Yeah. And they knew what was going on.
So there is a lawsuit. They knew exactly what you know. What's shocking is all these clients that we have to believe the victim, and now the victim has come forward and certain people at that agency with Me Too and etc. are not believing the victim.
I don't want... I don't want to get into that.
Oh, now this is something you don't want to get into. I don't want to litigate whether Brian Lord knew —
Litigate all the other... You'll litigate a word. Keep on going.
I don't want to litigate whether Brian Lord knew that he was sending clients in to meet with Harvey under negative situations.
You're going to have a case. What's shocking is clients who sit there and at other times have said you have to believe the victim in this situation have not come out and said we have to believe the victim. It's interesting to me. It's just an interesting fact.
Do you use that to try to lure clients from them?
I don't. I just think it's an interesting observation.
Okay, that is — just for clarity, that's the Julia Ormond case. You can Google that if you're interested. All right. So, enough about CAA. I want to talk more about some of the other things closer to home for you. You choose in the book to go out —
I thought we were not talking about the book.
We are talking a little bit about the book, but what I meant was I want to talk more about it any way you want.
I do love the competitiveness of this conversation.
It's always a pleasure.
Yeah. So, you choose to go after Patrick Whitesell, your former partner, your partner for many years — in this book.
You said a lot of nice things about him.
Let me just tell you something, and I'll say them here: We were Batman and Robin. Sometime he was Batman, I was Robin. Sometime I was Batman, he was Rob. He was and is an incredible agent.
But then you say he can't do it. He can't keep up. I'm not sure why. The day-to-day, he just doesn't seem as interested. And then you say once you fall out with him and he has left the company, once it's finally done, 'Patrick and I will never speak again. We'll never need to speak again, this life or the next.'
Well, here's what I would say: we changed from an agency —
Which, trust me, he verbally slapped me in the face and said, 'We're doing the William Morris.' Without him, I'm not sure I would have done it. And took that place over, did everything, and we were incredible together. The company changed from a representation business into an operating business. We had two businesses —
Yeah. We own the UFC. We own bull riding. We had operating businesses for whatever reason. Those are things that I did. He had businesses that ended up doing what they did. We don't have to litigate that right now. The value in the representation business and in the operating business — the operating business had really great value. You can see what has transpired. A lot of it I did with Mark and structurally and with Egon, and he was the chairman of Endeavor, which had William Morris and a bunch of the events. If at the agency he thought there was a better way to do stuff, he was the chairman, and he should have said something.
The great thing about his comments in your column was he actually admitted a company I started five years before he joined the agency. He had a new idea. He did say he went behind my back, tried to take over the agency behind my back.
Okay. He didn't say that. He said that he talked to Egon, your mutual partner, and that other than what you say in the book, it seems like that is the key element. So he went around you to your partner, and you didn't like that, so you kicked him out.
So there was an agreement to do what we did. We spun out UFC. We operated a public company in Endeavor and realized we were only getting value for —
The stock was not doing well.
Only getting value for the UFC portion of it. And we all agreed we're going to do this LBO. If at any point in time in that year he said, 'Hey, I think we should be doing this' — you're the chairman, you're supposedly the agent — of course we would have changed if he would have come into my office. We all agreed on the process.
And then he changed — if he had had a different method to sign new clients, which he had not done in a number of years except for maybe some football people — meaning writer-director. He's one of the greatest agents of all time, probably on Mount Rushmore. Has represented incredible, like, incredible. We would have done it if he would have come into my office and said to me, 'Hey, you know, it's been a lot of years. I really want to jump back in, and I want to do this. Can we do it together at WME or Endeavor?' After that many years, of course, I would have had to say yes.
But what he said to me is, 'No, you're over there. I figure this out, and XYZ is going to back me.' It's not true. And you're out. Well, first of all, I started the agency. Second of all, from my perspective, he wasn't around, had not done that. So you did try to double-cross me and knife me in the back. And I don't know, I just could. And with what happened at UFC creating TKO, he's going to make a lot of money. I didn't think I deserved to be knifed in the back.
You guys had a nice run, though, for a long time, where him being good cop, you being crazy guy, bad cop, worked very well for you.
It was Batman and Robin. It was incredible. So, let's just be very clear: Lew Wasserman had Jules Stein. Mike had Ronnie and Bill Haber. Patrick and I had each other. It was an incredible run. I couldn't have gotten to where I got — I don't think he could have gotten to where he got — without each other.
Fantastic. I mean, some in the community think that you leverage people until they are no longer useful to you, and then you push them aside.
Okay. Not true. What am I supposed to answer for that question for other people? I don't think —
You can say it's not true.
I don't think it is true. In fact, my leverage made him a lot of money. It's great. I'm happy, actually.
And he's also still involved in the company. That's the interesting thing. He's on Michael B. Jordan. He's on Shawn Levy. He's on a number of pretty major WME clients. How does that work?
I guess it's working well.
Okay. But you don't talk. Yet you represent the same client.
There's other people that talk. There's other people. I just actually hung up with Shawn Levy. There's other people directly related to people, as Shawn knows, and we just had this conversation. 'I always love your advice. Next time I'm in town, let's go get some coffee.' I said, 'If I'm in New York, I'll...' Yeah, great.
Okay. What do you say to people that think that agents should be behind the scenes? That you're too out there?
I don't care. I don't give a [__] what they say.
No, but what do the clients say? Have you lost clients because you are outspoken or a public person?
No. Have I lost clients because of that?
Yeah, that's the question.
A client has never said to you, 'I don't want my agent writing a book'?
Or, 'I don't want my agent writing a New York Times op-ed about Israel'?
Okay. I agree with you. I think there's a certain type of client that likes that, that feels protected.
I don't know, but I've not had that feedback. Maybe other people have, but it's not happened to me.
