My favorite book about Hollywood is a Mel Gussow book called Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking, which if you haven't read it, put it in audio. Put it in audio. You're going to understand why I think this is the best one since that one.
Hello, dear listeners. On today's episode of You Are What You Read, we are so thrilled to welcome Ari Emanuel to the podcast with his New York Times best-selling blockbuster memoir, Roll the Calls. Ari Emanuel is one of Hollywood's most accomplished, feared, and I'm going to say this, hilarious dealmakers who has some stuff he wants to get off his chest. You might also remember Ari's brother, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, who came on the podcast with his fabulous book, Eat Your Ice Cream.
Ari Emanuel is the CEO and executive chair of TKO. He's also the executive chairman of the WME Group and he is the founder and principal investor of Mari, M-A. Since co-founding the Endeavor Talent Agency in 1995, Ari Emanuel has repeatedly transformed the business of entertainment, merging the William Morris Agency and his Endeavor Agency to form the global enterprise WME, acquiring IMG and UFC, and ultimately bringing WWE and UFC together to form the sports powerhouse TKO. Oh, that's a lot of letters, but it's a lot of merging and it's a lot of powerhouse corporations based in Beverly Hills. Ari Emanuel continues to build across ventures that include the global events and experiences company Mari and the Las Vegas Raiders.
As Hollywood's best-known super agent and the inspiration for the Ari Gold character in the classic TV drama Entourage, he's paid to speak for his A-list clients, not himself. Now, for the first time on the pages of this memoir, the agent, the mogul, the ferocious power broker actually steps up and tells his own story and speaks for himself about himself and about the game of life in Roll the Calls. Ladies and gentlemen, I am so happy to introduce the great Ari Emanuel. Now, we're going to roll the interview.
I don't know if I adore you as much as Zeke. You know, Zeke's been on the show. He raves about the show. That's why I didn't know anything about it. And he told me I have to do it. And I said, "Great. Anything to beat you on selling books." I said, "Talk."
Well, you're doing really great and congratulations on the New York Times bestseller list because we know that's a bear, and you're on it two weeks in a row, which is incredible. Okay. So, let's start with this because I know you, I remember back in the early days with Nancy Josephson.
We tried to do a project with Michael Patrick King. I don't know if you remember that. And Joan Cusack.
Oh my god, that is so long ago.
Okay, that's so... Well, it was.
Michael called me even though I don't represent him anymore and he had just started. He had gone crazy on the book. He called me because we're best friends and we talk every morning and I told him and he's in love with it. But you know what's really beautiful about this book for starters is it's a great collaboration with Mr. Moringer who I think is brilliant.
Have you read any of his other... what, the Agassi book?
Yeah, I read Agassi. Agassi is like, it's required reading.
Yours is one of the most satisfying life arcs because I learned so much about what you actually do. And I learned that you had a horrible obstacle, which I didn't know. Dyslexia, which by the way, Ari, most of the brilliant people in the world that I know have it.
Well, you're sounding like my mom when I was growing up. Just to make me feel good, to keep me positive, she would mention all the people that had dyslexia. And she was an incredible woman. Tough as hell. Didn't give you a break.
Let you go through hardship as much as that was hardship for her. But she knew coming out of it that would give you a lot of tools to succeed. And for a woman back in the 70s to do that, you know, late 60s, early 70s, to see that, and now people have a lot more tools and, you know, Lindamood-Bell, other things, you know, she just figured it out somehow and she just was never going to take a no, which also teaches you a bunch of things.
Incredible woman. And I love your father. Your father's a warrior. He was a doctor. I know you do a lot of good, but there's something in the way you were raised that it can't just be about the deal in front of you. There's something bigger at play.
I don't know if when you did the interview with Zeke, you know, they would always say you got to leave, try and leave this world in a better place. And for sure it's easier to see with what Zeke does for a living and what Rahm is attempting to do and has done as a politician.
Always do better for society, for kids, for people.
Mine is if you bring... I think art, and art is a movie, art is a television, art is a book, art is music, art is all the things, what you do. I think you enable people to come together, have conversations, and that's only a good thing. So that's one of the things they instilled in us to kind of try to achieve, in addition to hard work and standing up for yourself and having agency.
Yeah. So, but he was incredible. He was incredible in that, you know, he was an immigrant.
Yeah. He came from Palestine before Israel was Israel.
And learned French through Hebrew and English, and then was dyslexic, and then learned French through his broken English, and then came to the States later after meeting my mom falling asleep on a gurney. They get engaged and, I mean, they were married 50 plus years and he was a workaholic and just a beautiful man. And he always, when he would take us around on his, you know, he would go around with students from Northwestern and he would take us around and he would ask them, you know, they'd be sitting around a patient, he'd give them all the data about the patient and then he'd ask them questions and then, you know, he'd be running down the hall and, you know, Zeke and myself and Rahm were trying to catch up to him and he goes, "No common sense. No common sense." Like, and he would, you know, or he'd say, you know, that one had common sense. Here's what, you know, not trying to push us to be doctors, just, hey, you need common sense. Here's what the common sense is, to give us examples of how to think about stuff and just be like, boil it down, like you don't have to get cute. And how he taught his students his work ethic. You know, he would be on call all night, get up at 6:00.
Run to the office and then come back. I mean, he just... I think kids learn these things. Hopefully in the book you get it, and I hope I've done it to my kids, and I think my brothers have done it to their kids. By osmosis, they see kind of how you represent things, what you stand up for, your work ethic. I think that just gets seeped into their cells and then they take it and do it their way. And hopefully that's what I've done with my companies, and I'm hoping this thing gives parents a guide for if you have a kid that has dyslexia or other things, and young people, like, here's my version of what it takes. You're going to have to do your own version.
But you're going to have to have agency and you're going to have to fight through hard things. It's not a straight line, right? I didn't have a plan B. I only had plan A. Plan A was I have to make it in the agency business. I think now sometimes kids have plan A, plan B, plan C. I mean, I don't know what you know.
But the number one rule is to get up early in the morning, which is what you do, and work your ass off. Like, work your ass off no matter what. It starts with the bagel runs, then it turns into running the mailroom.
Yeah. And don't complicate... I mean.
I would say the following, looking back when we were in it, it was a crazy story. I mean, it was a jumble of mess. Coming now, looking after getting this book done, you're like, not that bad. You know, at the beginning you're like, "Oh my god," and everything's up and down, and now looking back at it, it kind of took its shape and it was fine. It kind of... like it was a nice... it created a nice cake.
But Ari, you shaped the industry to you. It's a book about, in a sense, it's a book about how you got into the agency business and show business. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But it's so much more than that. It's about how your personal approach to business changed the business.
Well, I don't think I'm being sweet. What is it? Three or four questions.
Here's what it is. I don't think I'm okay taking a stand, looking at things, talking to a lot of people, seeing where the business is going. When we bought IMG, people wrote the craziest price of all time. Egon Durban, our financial partner and our partner, said at the time when we were bidding against Peter Guber, and Peter Guber was at a billion nine, his group, I think he was with Carlyle, and Egon said, "We're in the meeting." And there was ups and downs in our meeting and he says, "Let's..." because they really didn't want us. And Egon said, "Let's bid 2.4 billion dollars." And I said, "That's $500 million above." And Mark Shapiro was going crazy and we were all like, this is... and he made like the most prescient thought. He goes, "We're then not going to be in a negotiation. They're going to take it off the table and you will never remember that $500 million." Now, at the time, first deal that I was involved in at this size, I mean, we had taken over William Morris, but that was only $44 million. And you're like, "Holy fuck." And he was 110% right. I was not even close to how smart he was about seeing the table. And it just happened. And that then permitted, I mean, William Morris permitted Egon. Egon permitted IMG. And then that just permitted all the little cubes to be in place to be able to own an asset and see where sports rights were going to be going in 2016 with streaming and everything else.
And then also people said we were crazy at the UFC for 4.2 billion with all the stuff going on. Those two deals were the two cheapest deals in sports and Egon was right. It's like, and we knew that we had to own something on top of this service business. And that was just a conversation that Egon and I had and we went for it in the face of Brexit, a, you know, difficult sport that people didn't really understand.
Okay. But Ari, it starts with you as a wrestler. It starts with you as a wrestler. That's the sport, you know. That's wrestling against the world. That's what I'm trying to get to. This is why this book is so freaking brilliant because you might be talking about wrestling, but it's really about life and business and acquiring and how you then serve.
You're fighting against everybody telling you why you shouldn't do something. I mean, you see it with your life. Hopefully, it gives people agency to say, even though people are saying, "No, no, no," I believe in this and I'm going to go for it. Yeah. And here's what it takes to go for it. Here's my vision of what it... Everybody's got it their own. It's easy to say no. Hard to say yes and do the work to make yes come to a realization. And hard... easy to always blame other people and not take responsibility for your screw-ups. Easy. I think the only way, and I've done a lot of screw-ups. Hopefully I point them out in the book. When you point out the failures and you decide, I haven't always learned from them. I keep on making some stupid mistakes, but you learn from your mistakes. That's the way you actually can. People say it all the time. The only time I've learned something is when I make a mistake. Well, you have to really look at that mistake. Have really smart people around you to say, here's where we screwed up. Be able to have that, hear that. It's not enjoyable hearing your fuck-ups and how badly you did and why you did it badly and it's just, it's personal, but you have to do it if you're going to get better. Even though people say, "I've learned most when I make mistakes," to really understand it, you got to really accept it from people around you. And have that ugly conversation.
No, it's not. But the ugly conversation is one thing, but then actually inculcating the change.
And making... and oh my god, that is so hard.
You know, one of the things though that's good about dyslexia, and I've said this a couple times, you know, it does let you be a free thinker. The other thing it does is because you have to rely on people to help you. So it did help in business because you rely on people to help you that are better than you, that do better things than you, that have different thought processes, and you're comfortable in that. So that's why Egon's incredible. That's why Mark Shapiro is incredible. My partnership with Patrick was incredible because there was pros and cons to each one of us.
Ari, can you take us through the rage? You always have, in every chapter of this book, there's an adversary and we, the reader, meet the adversary. We know who they are. You tell us. And then to watch you basically discombobulate and dismember your adversaries could sometimes be hilarious. But when things went wrong, I really felt it for you. Like you couldn't get out of bed at a certain point because you're... you know, talk about the importance of, even if it's imaginary, the adversary really gets your engine going. So here's how I... let me just say this. Cormac McCarthy said, you know, rage is for the things that you think you can change. The rest is just, I think he said guilt, you know, or if you're fighting the establishment, of course they don't want you to succeed. So, and if you're competitive, which I am, I'm not the most competitive, but I'm very competitive. Right? There's a lot of competitive people in there that are really successful in business. You got to do battle and you can't... you got to get your organization not to bend to their will.
You've got to lead in that conversation.
And you've got to be willing to take the fight to them.
I was comfortable in every one of those situations because of how my mom brought us up. Civil rights movement, fighting the AMA with my dad, all the things that I was taught. And so when somebody said, you know, got nervous about doing some stuff or battling people or really powerful people, it's like, they're not putting food on my table for my kids. The only person that's going to do that is the people around the room. And it's going to take this fight. So get ready. Kind of buckle up. As Bette Davis said in All About Eve, buckle up. It's about to be a bumpy ride.
Okay. So, there is a notion in this book that the core of who you are is that you represent artists, writers, actors, producers, directors.
Let me say something. Dana White is an artist. What he does is incredible. When I represented him, what he's created and being able to create a sport out of a combat business, nobody else has done. Representing people and bringing as much thought protection in business for their lives is the job of an agent slash businessman with partners. And yeah, I mean, I think... well, that's the core, that's the core of the business and I see your vision all the time at play in how I'm treated. So, which is very interesting because we always... we push a little harder. We do an Ari. Is that the best we can do here? Can we do a little better here? Can you think creatively or is there a different way to do it? Can we make this bigger or how can we do that? And that you have to feel like you could pick up the phone and call the people that represent you from the artist side and that they get it and they did get your vision. And so that I really felt, man, is that an achievement.
Well, here's what I would say to that. We were four guys, five guys like very quickly when Phil Raskin joined us, an incredible agent, and we had nothing. It was four major agencies. We were the upstart. We had gotten a lot of press that all of a sudden put us on the map very quickly by ICM. Incredible that they did that for us. And you had to be an entrepreneur. And I think as opposed to people that took over businesses that entrepreneurs had started and didn't have, I don't think had the entrepreneurial spirit in them, that entrepreneurial spirit still is in the veins of this place. And that means you have to be constantly creative and constantly pushing all the edges for your clients. And be collaborative because your ideas are not the only ideas. Other people might have other ideas. I was sitting with Shawn Levy yesterday for a drink and he's in the middle of a situation at Disney and other places. And I talked to his group of people here and I gave him two ideas and he said, "Nobody said that to me." And then I called the team. I said, "Here's the two ideas that I talked to him about. I'm not sure they're possible, but if they are, I think they changed his life." And that's one, everybody being comfortable that any idea is a great idea, but two, let's just be creative about what is possible.
Right, right, right. Okay. So, you're a young guy. You got your friends.
