Let's talk about what an agent does. Nobody outside of your little world and maybe my little world knows they can name a single agent until you maybe. And the first time they could name an agent was when they were watching the HBO show Entourage and there was this guy Ari Gold who was filled with um not just spilcas I would say which you know ants in his pants but also an ongoing rage. You know what other class I took at Harvard? Business ethics. I don't steal other people's clients. But in your case, I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to take everyone, your B-level sitcom stars, your reality TV writers. When I'm done with you, you're going to be repping sideshow freaks. That was clearly based on you. And I want to know your relationship to Ari Gold.
Well, first of all, at the time, I never watched the show.
You say this in the book, it's very hard for me to believe.
No, it's I think I watched the first episode gave me complete anxiety and then it came on on Sunday nights. The story lines at times were way too close because it's the business and they they got that down. I had not met Jeremy Pivan and who's playing gold. who's pulling Ari Gold and he was in first of all incredibly funny had the oneliners I don't know how he did it but he captured my intona all all my attributes at the time that were good and bad and ugly.
Right. How would you describe this?
Um fast talking trying to get to some end representing your clients but also having a lot conflicts and not not only with the client situation but emotionally himself and um they're just funny.
So you didn't go through a moment of oh my god I'm I'm seeing myself portrayed on television.
I did. I like myself. I don't like myself. Yeah. Good, bad, and ugly.
All right. So th this book that you've written together with a ghost writer J.R. Moringer who worked with Prince Harry and Andre Agassi. He's the best at this in the business. We'll talk about how you work together with a ghostriter, but there's a lot of rage in this book. And at the beginning, you write this in conjunction with with JR. Every story starts with rage. And every story one way or another ends up there. And you also write rage is both catalyst and metric of desire. Now, Ari, most people talk about rage as a bad thing. You know it it are you saying it's a good thing or it's a characteristic thing of your being? Or is it a weapon that you deploy professionally?
J.R. is an incredible human being. Made the process as nervous as I was really easy and I think one of the great human beings. My life has been a situation where I had the smart brother Ezekiel Emanuel. I had the other smart brother, right? My other brother who's in politics, Rahm Emanuel. And then I was the third. And I had dyslexia, uh, ADHD. And thank God for my mother that she said, 'I don't care what all these people are saying. You're going you're reading, you're going to college, you're going to be successful.' And when you're in that situation and you're trying to find an identity amongst incredible brothers, incredible human beings and people are thinking that you're not smart. And I didn't think I wasn't smart. I just my brain functioned in a different way.
Yeah. Um, you have a chip on your shoulder. Was your father as forgiving as your mother?
My father was uh he was a tough man, a wonderful, beautiful man. And he was dyslexic and you know, he graduated number two in medical school and learned French through English that he learned when he went to Lison, Switzerland. He was an incredible human being. So when you're in that and I had finally picked the craft that I wanted to do when that aha moment happened for me which is being an agent.
No, but how did that happen?
A friend of mine, Michael Mendelson at the time was working in the mail room at William Morris in New York and I had moved back from Europe. I was my father let me go to Europe and he said to me I said, 'What are you doing?' He goes, 'Oh, I'm in the mail room of William Morris.' And I go, 'What what the is William Morris?' Cuz you know the mythical mail room is is is real. is real. And you know, being from the Midwest, not understanding how they business worked, he explained it to me and I said, you know, I think I would like that, right? Went to work for this guy, Robbie Lance, um, who had bought this company, the DU agency that I was working at, and I understood it. And then I went into the mail room of CIA and I didn't have a plan B. I had plan A. Make it.
Give me an example of how your rage showed itself professionally. You want people to fear you.
Well, we we go through the the beginning part of my business and when things weren't going my way or I had a point of view. I didn't mind announcing that this is my point of view. Most people I think don't take agency. Don't announce it. And when somebody argue in my household when you had a point of view, you had to defend. Some people think that is very aggressive. I think that's normal.
Right. You describe and and your brothers have described in interviews elsewhere the kitchen table. Uh, it sounds like the most argumentative kitchen table I've ever heard of and also loving.
Well, pretty Darwinian though. Yeah. Well, there's a tremendous amount of screaming and yelling in this book and phone calls. There are a lot of phone calls in this book because that's the lifeblood. That's how you that's how that's how it's done in the occasional lunch.
Looking back on it, because I think the portrayal here is here is what I used to be. Here is where my struggles and now I'm a much more contained guy. I got the success that I was always looking for. That's that's containedish. Contained. But when it was uncontained, was rage something that was within you and you could control and you deploy or it just came pouring out of you?
You know, when we started Endeavor, which was the agency after we left ICM, we couldn't compete financially because there was four big agencies. United Talent, ICM, William Morrison, CIA. So, we couldn't compete on price. They didn't want a newcomer. We had to compete on ideas, aggressiveness, and hard work. And when somebody tried to bully us and say, 'No,' I was okay. Like, okay, I guess we're going to tussle and I'm not just going to give in just because you're the big guy and I'm supposed to give in to you. And that happened a lot. And I was one of the guys.
When you were going too far in these tussles. What were you doing?
