Ari Emanuel's Autobiography

Key Takeaway

Build a daily “roll the calls” block: identify the few conversations that directly create opportunities in your work, then move from one call or outreach message to the next with no idle gap. Be persistent without being passive—follow up until you get a clear answer, while using each interaction to learn the industry, serve clients, and sharpen your pitch. High-volume, focused relationship-building compounds faster than waiting for perfect conditions.

Episode Overview

David Senra examines Ari Emanuel’s memoir, Roll the Calls, tracing how a dyslexic, relentlessly ambitious assistant became a leading Hollywood agent, founder, and dealmaker. The episode highlights Emanuel’s work ethic, obsessive learning, persistence, sales skill, willingness to embrace change, and eventual realization that achievement and rage alone do not create a sustainable life.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Ari Emanuel's Autobiography from Founders. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Every story starts with rage and every story, one way or another, ends up there. Because rage demands a response, a resolution. Rage might not solve every problem, but it sure as hell clarifies the problem. Rage brings things to a head. Why does rage get so much bad press? Why are people always telling you to keep calm, carry on, all that bullshit? That's what I would like to know. From the beginning of my career, I've come at things differently. Rage first, ask questions later. That has been my philosophy.

Rage to make them hear you. Rage to keep them honest. Rage or else you're no different from them. Ben Franklin said it best, there is no little enemy. If I've ever gotten a tattoo, I might have had that line across my knuckles. I'm a Hollywood agent. Rage is one of the occupational hazards. If I'm good at this agenting thing, and in all humility, just by the numbers, I'm damn good. Rage might be my secret sauce. Human beings want. That's what it is to be alive. Our superpower as a species is dissatisfaction.

It's how we came to dominate the planet, for better or worse. We want something we don't have. We want something we used to have. We wish we didn't have something that we can't seem to get rid of. And that leads to frustration, which leads to anxiety, which leads to rage, and finally action. Rage means shit's finally going to get done. That is an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, and one of the most entertaining autobiographies, and just frankly craziest books I've ever read.

And it's called Roll the Calls, a memoir written by Ari Emanuel. So Ari Emanuel is one of the most famous agents on the planet, and now I'd say he's much more, you'd know him more as like a founder and a deal maker. And I want to jump right into his very first job. He's 24 years old, and he's going to apply to a job listing that says you can be the assistant to talent agent Robert Lance. One of my favorite parts of this book is it almost reads like a diary.

It kind of moves through his life in a mainly chronological order, and you kind of get insight into what's going on in his mind, that he just happened to write in the book, which I heard he worked on for over a decade. So he's been working on this book for over 10 years. And the reason I think it's fascinating is he just is unbelievably honest, and there's a lot of things that happen in our heads that we don't share with other people, and I feel Ari's just like, you know what, forget it.

I'm just going to put everything, I'm just going to put it down in the book, and you can just read my innermost thoughts. So what I like about this part in his life, he's 24 years old. He applies to be the assistant to a talent agent. He doesn't even know what an agent does, and yet he will come to dominate this entire industry. And he talks about, okay, I got the job as an assistant talent agent. What does my day look like? I have no set hours.

My work day has no official start time because there's no official end time. Weekdays, weekends, late nights, I'm here in the office, and when I'm not here, I'm still sort of here because I'm on call. Whatever Robbie needs, whenever he needs it, I'm up. And so let me actually go to the very – one of my favorite quotes in the entire book is the very first quote that we see in the book, and it's from this actor, director, and producer that was alive in the late 1800s.

And it says, work, that's the true story of Hollywood, but who wants to hear it? So what's fascinating to me, and it's obvious as we go through this book, is Ari's describing his work ethic that he had the very first day he steps into this industry that, again, he's going to come to dominate. And he's like that until this day. It's like if his eyes are open, he is working. And there's a bit of an irony here because the talent agent that he is working for is essentially one of the most important talent agents in, like, literature and for authors and people in movies that want to option, like, all these novels and these books.

And one of the main themes of the book is the fact that a lot of this rage that Ari carried with him for decade after decade actually stemmed from the fact that he was dyslexic. And when he was very young, a lot of people told him, oh, you can't read, so you must be stupid. And obviously we know that's not true because you and I have covered, I don't know, there's probably at least a dozen, maybe 20 of the founders that you and I have talked about on the podcast so far that are dyslexic.

So this actually comes – this idea like, hey, I'm different, I don't fit in, winds up being fuel for a lot of these people. So he says, walking home from the office, I tell myself how crazy that I'm in charge of all these writers and books when I still can't read. He can obviously read, it's just a Greek difficulty. And so he was talking about when he got diagnosed when he was a kid by a doctor being dyslexic. He says the diagnosis was scary for my parents, but it was a huge relief for me.

Before the diagnosis, I was a bundle of self-loathing, anxiety, and rage. This is what I mean about this book is almost like you're reading, like, you know, it just talks about how unhappy he is in many parts of his life, how, you know, he can't sleep, he's going through anxiety, a lot of things that, you know, I think a ton of founders have to deal with because of the work that we do. It's just, you know, very high stress. You're taking this on, this challenge voluntarily.

And, you know, this entrepreneurial emotional rollercoaster that Marc Andreessen, who also appears later in the book, describes as like when an entrepreneur is building a company, they only ever feel two emotions, euphoria and terror, and nothing in between. And they just kind of, you know, swing from one side to the other, euphoria to terror back again. And so you see a lot of that in Ari's book. So he says before the diagnosis was a bundle of self-loathing, anxiety, and rage. After the diagnosis, same, but at least I now knew why.

I had a reason for all of my darkness. And so one of the things that a young Ari Emanuel learns from his boss, this guy named Robbie, is the importance of building your own curriculum and that you can do it in any way that you want. And so he says Robbie was the world's greatest reader. In conversation with Robbie, it emerges that he's never once been forced to read. Not only has he read all the books in his office, he's read them voluntarily for pleasure. Ari cannot believe that.

Robbie also spends part of each day keeping up a lively correspondence with geniuses around the world. Most of this is through writing letters back and forth. It seems to be his ultimate passion, the thing that gives him the most joy. So one of my favorite ideas that Ari shares later in the book is he does this later in his career. He builds his own curriculum, and the way he does it is through phone calls. And so if, you know, let's say he's interested in any subject in the world, he'll try to find and track down the world's most expert on that, call them dozens of times until he gets them on the phone, then goes, flies, meets with them, and then builds a relationship, and then essentially just is learning all day long.

Now, there's an awesome story in the book where one thing you learn about Ari, and I think it was there right from when he was a kid, is he kind of has, like, unlimited ambition. You know, he applies, he's like, doesn't even know what an agent does. Okay, well, now I'm in the game. Like, who's the best guy? Like, let me go learn from that guy. And then what is the best guy doing that – what is the best guy not doing that I think, you know, the person in this profession should do?

There's kind of no ceilings on his ambition. You see some of the deals that he does later on in the book and kind of where he's at today in his career. But this story is one of my favorite ones, so I'm just going to read huge chunks of the book to you right now. I listen in on Robby's phone calls with everyone. Robby wants me to. It's what assistants do, he explains. It's how assistants learn. Also, if a question arises, the assistant needs to run and find the answer.

I can't lie. I enjoy my role as an invisible audience while Robby woos and charms and does his schtick. Most people on the other end of the line have no idea that I'm there, taking notes on their most intimate secrets, a feeling I've never experienced, being on the inside. It is a feeling of power. Soon after I start working for Robby, he starts having regular phone calls with a dazzling movie star, a young woman. Reviewers and audiences fell in love with her, and now every director wants her in their next film.

Every agent wants to rep her. Robby just wants her. Robby would kill to rep her. She talks to Robby every day but will not formally agree to be his client. So this goes on for a while. It says gradually the conversations heat up. Robby's getting close to signing. Her name's Debra. He can tell. I think Debra can tell. And then, out of nowhere, another agent swoops in. Like a pirate, this other agent grabs Debra right out from under Robby, and for added indignity, it's the same pirate who recently stole one of Robby's biggest clients, Al Pacino.

All that work for nothing. Fuck that fucking pirate agent. I'm going to interrupt my own story. I just saw this interview that Ari did for the book. The word fuck is in this book 460 times. And when he was asked, like, why did you use that word so much? That's, you know, 460 times in your book. He says, well, it's one of the greatest words in the English language. So he says, I can see that Robby's taking it hard. Weeks later, pirate agent phones us. I put him through and listen while he grills Robby about some matter related to Pacino.

He tells Robby to send over the pertinent paperwork. Right away, Robby says, voice quivering. I've never heard anyone make anyone quiver. It embarrasses me. A voice in my head then whispers to me, maybe I should go work for the pirate agent. The pirate agent's real name is Michael Ovitz. Before we get back into this, I want to tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world.

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So I've been making podcasts on Ovitz. I think Ovitz's autobiography, Who is Michael Ovitz? is one of the best entrepreneur autobiographies ever written. And I was making episodes on him for like, I don't know, probably like five, six years before I met him. And so I was actually at breakfast with my friend Rick Gerson. And Rick's, I didn't know this, but Rick had been friends with Michael for like 25 years. And we're at breakfast and his phone is on the table and it rings. And I see it because it's right in front of me.

It says Michael Ovitz. I'm like, oh shit. Like I read his book. Like I've made podcasts about this guy. And Rick puts the phone on speakerphone. And he goes, hey Michael, I'm sitting here with my friend. You really should know him. His name is David Senderer and he does this excellent podcast called Founders. And then there's like a pause. And then Ovitz goes, I listened to four of them yesterday. And Ovitz was on like his boat in like St. Barts or something. And at the time he was listening to like the Cornelius Vanderbilt episode.

I think the Carnegie episode. And he was like listing them off. And then I wound up having dinner with him. And now I have dinner with Ovitz probably every few months. I just saw him like two weeks ago in New York. But he's a huge character in this book. Because eventually what Ari is talking about is like, well, I don't want to be – I want to work with the guy that puts the fear in everybody else. Like I don't want to be working with the guy that's going to cower.

I don't want to be on the losing team essentially. Even though Robbie did a lot of kind of mentors. Ari essentially pushes him and says, hey, you have a lot of talent. You have a lot of ambition. You need to get out of New York and go move to L.A. and build your own empire. And the first thing that Ari does, which is in the book, is, okay, who's the top? CIA is the top. I'm going there, which I think is really smart. So we pick this up where Robbie sees that this – Ari is not going to be an assistant for long.

He goes, you need to go to L.A. I'm old. A young man like you with your energy, your drive, you should be out in Hollywood. Get out there and build your own empire. Robbie is right. He's already built his empire, and it's crumbling. It's getting plundered. Barbarians aren't just at the gates. They're taking big shits on his desk. Robbie can't help me anymore. He can barely help himself. He tells me that I'm destined for big things. His destiny is in the rear view, but mine's up the road, around the bend, waiting.

He calls, and then he does a huge favor. Robbie calls his old friend, this guy named Bill Haber. Bill Haber happens to be one of the co-founders of CAA. And so he goes, flies up to California and tries to get a job. And he's going to do exactly what Ovitz did. When Ovitz started his career, he starts in the mailroom. Ari is a little bit older. Most people start in the mailroom, they're like 20, 21. I think Ari's like 26 years old at this time. But he's like, OK, I'm going to go to CAA.

I'm going to start in the mailroom. He says, Ovitz has famously said of this place, meaning CAA, we're like Studio 54. Not everyone gets in. That is a gross understatement. Nobody gets in. CAA is the epicenter of the entertainment world and represents the biggest stars and possesses all the clout. And I think at the time, Ovitz and CAA kind of essentially monopolized Hollywood. I think they represented something like 90% of all the talent, some crazy number like that. And so he applies to get a job.

There's this guy, and he calls Office Dad, which is in charge of picking the people in the mailroom. And even though Ari's smart and obviously driven, he's like, no, you can't have the job. And Ari's like, why? He's like, you're too old. And Ari's like, I'm only 26 years old. And he's like, sorry, this job's for younger people. You're too old. Get out of here. And Ari does something now that we see he does his entire career. And he's actually going to be, I'm recording a conversation with him on my new show.

I assume if you listen to this, you're already listening to my other show, which is not called Founders. It's called David Senra, where instead of me just talking about the books I read, I actually talked to some of the greatest entrepreneurs living. And so this is one of the things I want to talk to Ari about. How does this actually work? Because there's so many times in the book where Ari's MO is just like, I want something. I'm going to call the person once, twice, three, four, 15 times.

I just saw Jimmy Iovine a couple of days ago and I told him, me and Jimmy were reading the same book. Jimmy had this book with him. And Jimmy and Iovine and Ari are friends. And I was like, is he actually like this? He goes, yes, he's exactly like this. If he wants something from me, he calls me 15 times until he gets it. And so he does the same thing when he's 26 for like this shitty job in the mail room that pays nothing. He just wanted to get in the foot, in the door, in the best place possible.

This is really smart. So he says, I start pounding office dad four or five times a day I call. And then he's getting like pushed away by his assistant. No, he can't come to the phone. He said, OK, cool. So besides the messages I leave with the assistant, I began leaving recorded messages late at night. Office dad probably isn't even listening to these messages. I don't care. I keep calling. I know that sooner or later, a basic rule of human nature is going to kick in.

If you arrive at your desk every morning and find 11 messages from somebody, the same somebody who left 11 messages yesterday, you've got two options. Call the person back or call the police. And so eventually he calls him back. He says, I tell him I will give up. limb and part of my spleen to work in this goddamn mailroom. And Office Dad says, I already gave you my answer. And Ari responds, I do not accept your answer. And then, so that's the end of the conversation.

10 more days go by where Ari is calling him 10, 11 times a day. After 10 days of this onslaught, Office Dad calls. All right, all right, look, if you can get yourself to LA in one week and Ari gets a job, moves across the country to work in the mailroom, this job has no prestige, no status, and no money, and he is thrilled. And so a big part of Ari's story is, obviously, I think he became famous because he's the inspiration for the character Ari Gold, the agent in the show Entourage.

It was on HBO for a very long time. But he also comes from a family of these extreme winners. So his older brother is one of the best doctors and, I think, even a scientist in the world. And then his another older brother was chief of staff for Obama and then the mayor of Chicago. And they're a few years older. I think they're all in their 20s, maybe early 30s at the time. And he's meeting his brothers, and they're making fun of him. They're just like, you're working in the mailroom?

So he says, my older brother, Zeke, is studying to become a doctor. My next oldest brother, Ram, is getting into politics. The Emanuels have always been ruthless about achievement and success. And he said, Ari, you're crowding 30, and you're stuffing slips of papers into pigeonholes for men in fancy suits. That's really the best you can do? And his response is, all the best agents start in the mailroom. I share them, including my new bosses, the founders of CA. Even Ovitz the Great started in the mailroom.

And they said, who? I was shocked that they'd never heard of Michael Ovitz. I already can't remember a time when I didn't know who Michael Ovitz was. Guys, he's the most famous agent in the world. And then he has this great description of his first day at CA. No one gives me introductions. No one gives me a list of names. Just figure it out, asshole. That's the whole ethos of the job, of the whole agency. And one thing he learns from working at CA and then studying the history of Hollywood is like, oh, wait.

They think this is like about creatives and directors and actors. He's like, no, it's actually this town is run by salespeople. That he realizes that sales, being good at sales, is the meta skill. He says, the whole point of this place is sales. He's talking about Hollywood. The whole point of Hollywood is sales. I'm annoyed with myself for believing the myth that Hollywood is an enclave of creatives. It's that too, but it's also a nonstop sales convention. What a pleasant surprise to find Hollywood is full of people like me, salespeople.

This town was founded by salespeople. And so it goes into great detail of everything that's happening at the start of his career. I would just tell you that he keeps getting promoted and promoted and promoted. And the reason I would think he gets promoted is he's got this rule, and it's basically his ML. And so it says, OK, I got another promotion. My rule was never say no. Never say you can't do something. Say yes, and then figure it out when the time comes. And so he is working in the TV division at CA, and so he makes this his job.

He's like, OK, I'm going to learn more about this industry, the TV industry than anybody else knows. It says, colleagues inform me that there's someone else at CA whose knowledge of the TV industry is way beyond. The almighty king of TV. This guy's forgotten more than most people ever know. He's also one of CA's founders, Bill Haber. This is Robbie's friend, the guy. Remember, Ari was assistant to this guy. It's how he got the introduction to apply in the mailroom to begin with. So it's Robbie's friend.

This is who helped me get my first meeting. So I knock on Haber's door and ask him if in my free time, evenings, weekends, I might just be able to do stuff for him, to pitch in. I'm just looking to help, I say. I'm just looking to learn. And so in addition to his full-time job, he starts shadowing and spending as much time with Bill Haber as possible and trying to soak up all the knowledge. And it's just really, really smart what he does. He says, I'm trying to show him that I've been paying attention to all these weeks, that one day I sit down and I draft a white paper on the emergence of the international TV market.

I've done loads of research, combed through stacks of industry journals. I slip the white paper to Haber. Days later, he invites me to his house. I read your paper. It's very impressive. I'm going to get you promoted. I'm going to make you our next agent. And he sees this as a huge opportunity because if you study the early days of CAA, they converted what most people considered their put-down into one of their greatest strengths. And so I'll tell you more about that in one second. So he says, as long as TV, I go buck wild.

I meet writers, actors, directors. I start really figuring out the whole ballgame, who the players are, what the rules are. I start running my own game at last. When Mr. Ovitz and Ronnie Meyer and Bill Haber first broke from William Morris, they had no clients. They were working in one tiny room sitting on folding chairs. And the only talent they could attract were TV writers and actors. They became known derisively as the TV boys, but they converted that put-down into their greatest strength. Now they own TV in this town.

TV made them. It filled their first bank accounts, put gas in their first Jaguars, and fertilized the fairway-sized lawns of their first mansions. And then he talks about one of the innovations that existed before Ovitz, which is called packaging. So packaging existed before Ovitz and CAA, but Ovitz took it further and did it better. And you'll see a lot of, I think Ari does a lot of very similar things with the entire occupation of agents. He takes it farther and did it better. So Ari tells us why was packaging so important and why did it generate so much money.

Packaging works like this. Rather than negotiate one deal for one client and collect a one-time 10% commission, we bundle several clients, an actor, a director, a producer, and then sell that bundle, which we call a package, to a TV network. And then we tell them, we will forego the commission. Instead, we'll just take a tiny percentage every time this baby airs. If the show becomes a hit, airing for years, that means a steady drip of dollars. If the show becomes a classic, airing for generations, you're talking a river of cash that will flow for the rest of our natural lives.

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And so he's learning a lot about Hollywood and about the agent business at CA. He's also learning that he might not be cut out to work in a big company. He says, my brand of unfiltered honesty doesn't always play well. And yet I keep doing it. I think it's just part of his nature. And so over time, a small group of other discontents inside of CA are recruiting him and saying, hey, we can leave and start our own agency. This is exactly what Ovitz and his co-founders did, you know, maybe 20 years earlier than we were in the story.

And Ari's kind of like sharing his inner monologue as this is happening. As someone who loves agenting, who studies the craft, the history, how could I just walk away from three of the best who ever did it? These dudes have advanced doctorates in agenting. They're not good, they're great. Partly their greatness stems from an abiding sense of their own greatness. Self-belief, that's half the game in any occupation, but it's everything for an agent. So eventually he leaves Ovitz and the rest of people at CA, then now make them a target, make them an enemy.

And he describes the business in general. It's CA in particular, but the agenting business in general. I think this was a very interesting paragraph to me. Hand-to-hand combat among agents and agencies has always been a fact of life, but this thing with CA feels nastier, more dangerous. Maybe it's because there's a new energy in Hollywood. The 1980s are a huge vibe shift. Kill or be killed used to be a metaphor, but now the major agencies are animals and they're raping and pillaging each other. And so there's all this back and forth.

There's this war with CAA. They're also being recruited by a bigger agency. And there's just a lot of distractions. And I love what he does here, again, because it's like at the end of the day, all that matters is if I can be the best agent possible and I would be the best agent possible by serving the clients the best, then I'm gonna win. Like the score will take care of itself over time. And so he says, the only way to do good agency is to tune out all the extraneous noise.

And that's what I do. I keep grinding. I keep rolling the fucking calls. And sure enough, it solves everything. As hard work always does. My list grows and so does my confidence. So I didn't know what this meant. The title of the book, Roll the Calls. And he says, what am I doing here? I'm just keep rolling the fucking calls. So basically, most agents do this. I think in Ovitz's book, he said he did something like 200 to 300 calls a day, every day. Ari does the same and I think all the great agents do.

And so they have their assistant or secretary. It's like, okay, most of these calls are a minute, two minutes, three minutes. I don't wanna waste any time. So essentially, rolling the calls is like, I'm on the phone. As soon as I'm hanging up, you better have the next person waiting. Then I do that in maybe two or three minutes and then as soon as I hang up, there should be no time of me sitting around waiting for the next call. So what do you mean? So we're just gonna keep rolling the fucking calls.

And I think there's something just to this idea of whatever you do. This great quote by this guy named Les Schwab, who built one of the most valuable businesses, this tire franchise that's named after him in the Pacific Northwest. And he says, when it comes to success, it's like, whatever you do, you have to do it with gusto. It's a case of volume. You just have to do more of it than anybody else does. And I think it's really hard not to be successful in almost any endeavor.

Like if, let's say, essentially, what is an agent, right? Agent's like a salesperson. It's like the greatest salespeople ever. So if you did 300 sales calls a day, it's gonna be really hard for you not to have some level of success. You might not have, you know, not be able to monopolize Hollywood like Ovitz or have the career that Ari did, but you're probably not gonna wind up a loser if you have that kind of work ethic. I think it's really interesting. Now, another thing that was also surprising in the book is how many times he says one of the most startling or kind of like disorienting questions you can ask somebody that people are not used to being asked is, are you happy?

And you just like throw it out with no preface. And so he's asking that to other people. And in many cases, he'll be able to like recruit from other clients, from a different agency or whatever. But he starts to ask him that question to himself. He does this several times throughout the book. And so it's like, well, what's your answer to are you happy? For months, I live and work in a bubble, noticing nothing but the immediate task at hand. And then one day I feel the blinders fall away and I hear myself, ooh, this place is fucked.

With fresh eyes, I look around and realize no one's happy. Not one person. On the contrary, there's an outbreak of low-grade depression. I would have to say, after reading this memoir, reading Ovitz's, it's like, these sound like terrible way to like live a life. And so he will move from agency to agency to agency until he starts his own. And one, I think that's a sign of an entrepreneur. He's just not gonna be happy until he runs his own business. And it's like almost impossible to have a good culture when you're essentially you're going to war and combat and fighting and yelling at people.

Like the stories in the book are wild. I really hope you pick it up and read it. And if you're not gonna read it, at least buy the audio book, which I have the audio book, the Kindle, and the physical copy. I'm telling you, there's some wild stuff in the book. But at this point, he's with a bigger company called ICM. And so this is where he's like, oh, and this is after he left this other company. And he's like, oh, like, you know, I didn't realize like how unhappy I am.

Why am I so unhappy? He's just like, there's just like a terrible culture here. It says, with fresh eyes, I look around and realize no one's happy. Not one person. On the contrary, there's an outbreak of low grade depression. All I see are long faces. Why? Because culture. ICM's culture is dreck. Long before coming to ICM, I had heard the famous joke. You know what ICM stands for? I cover myself. Me first, me last, me always. I've just learned the hard way that the jokes speaks to an essential truth.

I go into a funk. I ask myself, what have I done? Why do I keep picking the wrong horse? ICM isn't set up to do good work. Day one, they tell you, here's your desk. Here's your phone. Now fuck off. And this is when he's saying, I realize I'm not happy. So he says, work has always been central to my identity, my physical and mental health. I'm also hazily aware that my anxiety isn't about work. It's about meaning. What do I want my life to mean?

I want my life to mean something. And what can it ever mean if I'm under the thumb of a bunch of dumbasses? Money matters to me as it does to everyone who grew up without it. But I'm not taking 100 spins around the fucking sun just to pile up more chips than the other guy. Money isn't the thing that makes me get up at 4 a.m. Money is all my bosses care about, yet another reason for their shitty culture. And so then we see his inner monologue.

He's like, I'm gonna quit again. And really, when he's having these conversations with himself and when you read this, it's like, oh, the solution is obvious to an outsider. It's like, you're a born entrepreneur. You need to start your own company. This feels irrational. I just got to ICM. I barely had a cup of coffee at Intertalent. Before that, I was a fleeting presence at CAA. Is there something in me that can't stand stability? Is there something about me that can't sit still? Early summer, 1994.

I rise early, do a hard workout, go to the office. Roll calls for several hours. Speak to 50 or 60 people about 50 or 60 problems. Then look up and realize I'm spent and I'm hungry. I walk down the street to the restaurant. One block east of the restaurant, I stop, wait for the light. Cars whipping by. I take note of how fast they're going. Someone could get really hurt here. At the restaurant, I sit by myself at a corner table, wolfing down my omelet while reading a script.

Half an hour later, head back to the office, thinking about a thousand things. At the same corner where I noted earlier how fast the cars were whipping by, I stop, wait for the light. When the walk sign flashes, I step off the curb and turn my head just in time to see the front grill of a black pickup. So he's gonna get hit by the car. As violently, I land on the hood of the truck and roll onto the pavement. My body bounces once with a wet.

and comes to rest in the middle of the road. I'm lying in the street bleeding out. Someone's shouting in my face. Hey man, are you okay? What the fuck? Do I look okay? The shouter is the driver of the black pickup. He sounds scared. He should be. Through gritted teeth, I tell him that I'm hurt bad, then make him a promise. If I'm ever able to move again, I'm going to fucking kill you. I'm reasonably confident that my spine is still in one piece. I'm not paralyzed.

For this, I give profound and tearful thanks, but then I can't stand up, and I descend from gratitude to regret. Berating myself for doing it wrong, by which I don't mean stepping off the curb, I mean life. So this is the fascinating part. I'm going to finish this part. Think about it. So you have this existential dread. Why do I keep moving around places? Why can I not stand still? I'm picking the wrong horse. Like what is wrong with me? Is just life just not feel right?

This is so important. He almost dies and realizes, oh, the only thing that matters is how I'm spending my time. And I'm assuming that I have more time than I do. And I don't know how much time I have because I didn't think I was going to get hit by this pickup. I wasted my one precious life. I've let other people discourage me and stop me. I've let my own anxiety control me and lead me away from my purpose. I've accepted the delusion that there's time, plenty of time.

It's so clear now. Life is not a dress rehearsal. Everyone says this, but few act on it. Opening night is right now. The curtain is already up. And so he turns the worst thing that ever happened to him into one of the best things that ever happened to him. He says, five days after the accident, I drag myself back to the office. I'm not just back in the office. I'm the first in the office every morning. I'm crying out to my assistant, roll the fucking calls.

Except my assistant isn't in yet. Over the next several months, I work harder than I've ever worked in my life while also hitting my rehab like a maniac. No more bullshit. So when he says no more bullshit, he means about he's going to start his own company. And at the exact moment that he wants to start his own company, he says, ICM offers me a long-term deal. He's crushing it. So he's bringing in so much business. I don't even think they know he wants to leave yet, but they want to prevent him from even entertaining that thought.

I can't deny that their offer is tempting. It would pay me a million dollars per year. It would enable me to get married, to start a family, to provide for that family in a big way. Take it, I tell myself in a voice that sounds a lot like my father's. Take the fucking deal. But another voice, a voice more like myself, whispers, life is not a dress rehearsal. At the next staff meeting, I look around the conference table and listen to the bosses yammering and think, not even for a million dollars.

And then we go back to his inner monologue. Again, if you feel this way, you have to take the risk. If this is the way you're talking to yourself, this is our authentic feelings and ideas and thoughts that are in your brain, you have to take the risk. You have to jump and start the company. It's going to be the biggest regret of your life if you don't. I'm burning with desire to build something of my own. The thrill of inventing something new out of thin air.

So many people don't want me to do anything. So many people don't want anyone to do anything. And all those doubters and Debbie Downers get extra loud when you're trying to be creative in a space not known for creativity. Amen. We pick a launch date, Wednesday, March 29th, 1995, my 34th birthday. And remember, he gave us a subscription of Michael Obitz's early days, his startup at CAA, just four guys in a room. This is now a description of the beginning of his new company, Four Demons, rolling calls nonstop.

I'm in the office at dawn every day and don't head home until after midnight, rolling calls constantly. So he does 300 calls a day. And then he's like, essentially burns himself out, which happens multiple times in the book. And usually, he's like, should I go to the hospital? I can't get out of bed. And so he's talking to his wife. This might be his girlfriend, but I think she turns into his wife at the time. Her name is Sarah. Says, in the morning, I tell her, take me to the ER.

I cannot move. I don't go to the hospital, but I go to bed for a week. When I finally climb out, before I stumble into the shower, I get on the scale. I've dropped 20 pounds. So he's talking about the stress. Remember, turn down a million dollars guaranteed. Could be spending a ton of money, supporting a family, not worrying about bills. He's on a shoestring budget, worried that his business is going to go out of business constantly over and over again, doing everything to survive because he's that innate desire to do something on his own, to build something out of thin air.

And it's so grueling. He pushes himself so hard. He does this for his whole life. He drops 20 pounds. And so then he talks about the early days of his company. We need to be careful. We need to watch every penny, tabulate every microsecond of cell phone usage. So some people are going to be too young for this, but I remember this. You used to buy minutes. And so there was a real cost of, it wasn't unlimited phone, unlimited data. I had 100 minutes a month or whatever, and you went over, they would tax you.

And so he's like, hey, we're on sale. We cannot afford to go over. And so from this constraint, he actually discovers what becomes his MO for the rest of his career, that he never says goodbye. He just hangs up in mid-sentence. And he started doing that because he didn't want a big cell phone bill. Each of us gets a monthly allotment of minutes from our phone carrier, and there are huge penalties for going over. Keep every call quick. We remind each other. A great exercise for honing your pitch, for getting to the point.

It's not unlike the way Ernest Hemingway learned his craft at the Kansas City Star. Firm deadlines, tight word counts, plus the star's hard-boiled rule book helped create Hemingway's singular voice. Forced to keep it short and simple, Hemingway made sparseness his art, even part of his credo. Scarcity does something similar for me. I now feel licensed to just hang up whenever, mid-thought, mid-sentence, doesn't matter, call ended. Goodbyes take time, and time is money. But what starts as a cost-saving measure quickly becomes my signature style. No long goodbyes, no goodbyes, period.

Just roll the next call. And again, there's a lot more detail in the book, but it just has to be unbelievably scrappy with the startup. They're completely underfinanced. It says new hires scream loudest when they learn of our travel policy. There is none. If I go to New York, I sleep on the floor of a friend's house. And then he just talks about his level of dedication for the fact that he would like, you know, says he compromised his own health, that his company has to be successful.

My partners have mortgaged their houses, maxed out their credit cards. They borrowed $100,000 from one friendly producer with no way of paying it back anytime soon. They brought in chairs from their garages so we have something to sit on. Someone brought in their kitchen table, and we're using it for a desk. Everyone's all in. How can I be any less? And then he's got some great stories about Hollywood history. And one of the reoccurring things that you and I talk about over and over again is that, you know, history doesn't repeat human nature does.

And, you know, in the early days of Hollywood, it was essentially like the forefront of technology. Over time, you know, you build these successful businesses. People don't like change. And his idea, and I think one of his superpowers is that he would just embrace change. He's like, you just are not fighting the future in these technological revolutions. And he says, I kind of understand people not liking change, especially technological change. I just can't understand them hiding from it. And yet, that seems to be the most common reaction to change down throughout history.

When talkies arrived, so talkies were just movies with sound, right? Before that, it was all silent movies. When talkies arrived, Hollywood thought the world was ending. And it was silent films were a gorgeous art form beloved by millions of fans and completely different from what came after. There was no gradual transformation to talkies. It was a mass extinction event, and it dislocated thousands of artists and was also completely inevitable. Pretending that it wouldn't happen, that it wasn't happening was more than just a big fat waste of time, more than a tragic waste of opportunity, more than self-sabotage.

It was stupid because every loss brings equivalent compensations. I'm a fighter. I'll fight anyone, anywhere. But the one thing I'll never fight is the future. There's a great line that Mark Zuckerberg said that the biggest risk is not taking any risk in a world that is changing really quickly. And the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks. I would have to imagine Ari agrees with that quote. And so two of the biggest acquisitions that Ari is going to do in the future, he's going to buy Vince McMahon's wrestling company and then Dana White's Ultimate Fighting Championship.

But before he buys both of them, he winds up signing them as clients. And so I like this background that he gave us about... And there's this great documentary on Netflix about Vince McMahon and just building this media empire. Essentially, well, I guess I'll just read this to you. It was all these different wrestling companies. And they were like, hey, I have wrestling in the Northeast, and I have it in the Midwest, and I have it in the South, and you're going to respect my boundaries.

And Vince is like, no, I'm not going to respect anything. I'm going to essentially cobble all these together, and I'm going to unify everything and kind of dominate this entire industry. And so at this part of the book, Vince and Ari are having a meal together. It says, 20 years ago, Vince explains, wrestling was the opposite of the talent agency game. There was no competition. Every little wrestling outfit had its regional turf, and everyone respected everyone else's turf. Vince said, fuck that. He saw cable coming, thought it was going to change the game, and that only being big would ensure his survival.

And so he devised a plan to drive his competitors out of business. He started by promoting wrestling shows everywhere, turf or no turf. He marketed nationally, built up a national profile, a national audience. And once he was big, the clear leader in the wrestling world, he leveraged his power ruthlessly. He began blackmailing cable companies. He'd mount a huge event on the same night as an event mounted by a competitor and forced a cable company to choose, me or them. It wasn't really a choice. Ultimately, if he couldn't drive a competitor out of business or steal their best talent, he'd just buy them out, fold them into his empire, and then move on to the next victim.

One day, the wrestling world woke up, and Vince McMahon was the only game in town. And then he talks about the similarities between him and Vince. We discovered that we both have trouble sleeping, that we both obsess about the future, and that we're both focused on figuring out what comes next before anyone else. And so this is when, right at this meeting, Vince agrees to sign to Endeavor. And so a few years later, Ari realizes that a very similar thing is happening in his business, and the only way that he's going to survive is to get big fast.

He says, there are 200 talent agencies operating in Hollywood, and I don't know how most keep the lights on. Yes, we're one of the biggest, one of the big five, but that's not enough. We're still not safe. Only the biggest one or two are going to survive the coming technological earthquake and mass corporate consolidation. Until we get bigger, much bigger, I cannot rest. But how can we get bigger? And until we're bigger, how can we appear bigger? I see only one solution, merge with another agency.

This is terrifying. It would expose us to a thousand unknowns. Equally terrifying is the choice. Which agency? It doesn't matter. This is very fascinating. I've talked to a few elite entrepreneurs, and I'm always curious who they go to for advice, or who they think they got the best piece of advice from, or who helps them shape their thoughts. And people that don't even know each other would say the same thing, which is David Geffen, which is really fascinating. And so Ari, in this book, when he has to make one of the biggest decisions in his life, he actually goes to David Geffen.

And what I heard about Geffen and why he's so valuable to seek counsel from is because he'll tell you the shortest path from here to there that is very common, especially because the entrepreneur is so close to their business, that you'll come in and you're like, this super complicated problem. And David Geffen just immediately gets to the heart of the issue. He's like, no, no, no, no. It's very simple. It's like, fire that guy, marry that girl, sell that business, buy this, merge here. He hones on the most important idea and tells you to ignore everything else.

So he can get you from the shortest path to here or there. And we see he does this with Ari too. I see only one solution, merge with another agency. So he's talking to David Geffen about this, but he's telling, he's like, I'm scared. This is terrifying. It's going to expose me to a thousand unknowns and then equally terrifying, I don't know which agency to merge with. David Geffen, what should I do? He says, doesn't matter, David Geffen tells me when I seek his advice. Doesn't matter?

David, what the fuck? Ari, it's like when you're in traffic. The one thing you can't do is stand still. Even if you don't know which way to go, you just have to go. Hit the gas, Ari, go. So this is in 2003, the successful completion of the merger is going to happen many, many years later. There's all these failed negotiations, start, stops. But what I thought was very interesting, what he does when he realizes merging is his only way out, he goes and he consults this Harvard Business School professor that was an expert on mergers.

And there's some interesting ideas in here that Ari gets from this professor that I want to share with you. And so they're talking, Ari and his partners are spending a few days at Harvard with the professor, and they go over everything. He understands like getting a download of talent, agency, business. And at the end, he goes, okay, well, it's just more important that you accept one basic fact about mergers. And Ari's like, okay, what's that, professor? They don't exist. There's no such thing as a merger.

Every merger is a purchase. This dream of a perfect union of two companies, of symbiotic alignment, synthesis of strategic interests and cultures is just that, a dream, a lie. It sounds great in theory, never works in practice. With every merger, there's a dominant and a submissive, an alpha and a beta, a winner and a loser. Every merger is really just one company swallowing the other. The rest is spin. So Mark Wahlberg was one of Ari's clients. Mark has this idea to sell this show about essentially loosely based on his life.

When he first moves to LA, he's got this entourage of like hometown friends, and he has already sold to HBO. Ari successfully sells to HBO. He's vaguely aware there's a character based on him, had no idea that the show was going to be a massive success, had a hard time watching the show, and then realizes, and I think one of his partners told him this early, which I think he said in another interview that he wasn't sure of, that, oh, this show being a hit and you being a character in the show is going to be phenomenal for your business.

And so this is the impact that Entourage and Ari Gold, the character Ari Gold had on the real Ari and his business. I'm asking myself all the time the same question everyone asks me. Where does Ari Gold end and where does Ari Emanuel begin? People jump on the phone with me and think they're the first to say, am I speaking to Ari Emanuel or Ari Gold? Ha ha ha. At the end of every call, meal, meeting, human interaction, people can't stop themselves. They scream, let's hug it out, bitch.

Then the strangest thing happens. While supplying Wahlberg and Piven, Jeremy Piven is the actor that plays Ari Gold, and the writers with fresh material to build their character based on me, I begin borrowing material from that character, subliminally imitating the guy who's imitating me, doing his gestures, quoting his best lines. I can't deny that the show is helping me do my job. Suddenly, people take my calls 10 times faster. They listen more closely when I speak. They sign with me at a record-breaking clip. My list explodes.

I discover that I can call call anyone now. I've always been a cold caller. I was never afraid to dial any number. But now the call always goes through. People might not want to talk to Ari Emanuel, but they sure as shit want to talk to Ari Gold. Fame brings new clout. New clout brings new business. New business brings more clout. A hit show increases my business, my visibility, my influence, and acts as a force multiplier on the power that I wield. And so one thing that reoccurs throughout the book is these conversations that Ari's having with his therapist.

He calls his therapist Dr. Calm. This is what I mean about, I think a lot of people wouldn't be comfortable. I have a lot of respect that he just puts all this crazy stuff in the book. And so he's going through, he talks about multiple times, like, why am I unhappy? I'm really successful. That success is fleeting. That he didn't understand, like, he has a goal, he gets that goal, he starts to feel great, and he feels great for like 15 minutes or a day. And then he's on to the next thing.

He's back to kind of being miserable. But the reason I bring this up is because he talks, he also tells us what his therapist tells him. And at this point, his therapist is telling him that your personality type, you actually want to be God. Like, you think you're God-like, you want to have God-like powers. Which again, I think people that feel that way certainly are less likely to admit it, you know, out loud, much less put in a book. But Ari's take on this is a little different, that he essentially just fears for the safety and survival of his company, put everything into building Endeavor.

And if it goes away, a huge part of him goes away. So he says, but Dr. Calm is wrong. I don't want to be God, I want to be safe. Endeavor isn't safe. And if Endeavor isn't safe, then I'm not safe. And so then Ari tells the story of, which is going to turn into his second biggest acquisition. This is when he's going to eventually buy the UFC for $4.2 billion. It's the Ultimate Fighting Championship run by Dana White. Dana White, one of my favorite entrepreneurs and CEOs operating today, I was lucky enough to spend time with him in person.

There is, and I've been a fan of his for years. I would watch his press conferences. It's like the same person in the press conference, the same person in person. And so Ari is a little late to the game because Dana and his partners have been slowly building this like cult-like following. And the first time Ari discovers him is he's looking at like the top ranked shows. He's like, what is this UFC stuff? He says, looking over the TV ratings, I noticed the numbers for one new show on Spike TV, something called UFC, Ultimate Fighting Championship.

It reminds me when I first noticed the ratings for Vince McMahon's wrestling show. These are serious what the fuck numbers. I had not been paying close attention to the show, and that's my bad because it's a phenomenon among a wide swath of America. I learned that the guy in charge of the UFC is someone named Dana White. I had never heard of Dana. And so he calls up Dana, gets a meeting, and then makes a big mistake in trying to sign him for the first time.

I then compare in the meeting, WWE to UFC, my biggest blunder. Like proud parents, they don't want to hear that their kid looks like somebody else's. They want to hear that their kid is singularly beautiful. Meeting over. So he thought he messed it up. And he says multiple times, like some defeats, you think you're out and like they turn you down. And then a month later, two months later, sometimes five years later, it actually turns. And like you wind up signing, you get close to deal, sign the client, whatever the case is.

So in this case, a month later, Dana calls him up, right? Dana's in New York City and wants a meeting with the head of boxing at HBO. His dream is to get the UFC on HBO, but he's been getting stonewalled for months. Ari, he says, if you can get this meeting, I'll sign with you. But the meeting has to be today. And Ari's like, today? Dana goes, today. Is this what's going to take for you to sign? Dana says, that's what it's going to take. I have so much air time on HBO right now, it's ridiculous.

So he's got Entourage, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Ali G Show. He's signed all of this. And so he calls the head of sports at HBO. I called Dana back exactly three minutes after his initial call. Head over to HBO, dude. You have a meeting. Dana's meeting with HBO does not go well. He doesn't get the deal. But Ari says, at least he made one deal today with me. I send over the agency agreement for his signature. So just like with Vince McMahon, he signs Vince McMahon first before he buys his company.

He signs Dana White eventually before he buys UFC. Now, there's a bunch of personal details I'm omitting. I mean, the book's over, I think, 400 pages. So there's a lot in here I have to omit. But this was very shocking. A stray bullet killed Ari's uncle. So Ari's father was like, I think, five years old, walking with his older brother. And it says, when he was five, my father went for a walk with his older brother, Emmanuel, and they came upon a street demonstration. They get trapped by the surging mob.

There's this outbreak. Somebody shoots a gun. A bullet bounces off the pavement and kills Emmanuel. I think he's like 10 or 11 at the time. The reason that Ari's last name is Emmanuel is because this actually happened. So it says, my father, his family, all my beloved ancestors were never the same, and they commemorated the permanent transformation by changing their last name from Aurobach to Emmanuel. I thought about this a lot growing up. One errant bullet, and now we're all Emmanuel's, and our children will be Emmanuel's, and their children.

One act of rage altering the trajectories of so many lives. And so he's also honest about the fact that his reactions to the stress severely harmed his personal relationships. It leads to the divorce from his first wife, Sarah. And he says, the lack of sleep, the gushing adrenaline, my energy runs down, my fuse gets shorter. I snap at people for the little slings. I snap at Sarah a lot. With friends and my family, my short fuse does nothing good. Aside from my full-time job, my full-time obsession, the possible merger, I feel a compulsive need to read everything.

Newspapers, magazines, trades, all of them every day, even if it takes me 10 times longer than the other guy. Which means getting up at 3 a.m., work out, shower, hustle downstairs, dig into the big reading pile, struggle with English as if it's my third language until about 6 30 a.m. Then my boys are up screaming, wrestling, searching for their sneakers. Sarah says, I'm crazy to go this hard. I would feel crazier not to. Which thing, I ask her, am I supposed to give up exactly? And then ever so gradually, I start to give her up and vice versa.

And so all of this stress goes back to the fact that he does not feel safe because Endeavor is not safe. Endeavor will not be safe until I grow big. The way I grow big is to go to this merger. The love of agenting, the dedication to agenting is the reason behind this potential merger with William Morris. Agenting is the reason behind my nightmare workouts, my ice plunges, my frantic push-ups until my arms feel like noodles. I don't do it because it feels good or because it makes my suits fit better.

I torment my body and my mind to stay alive because I have to be alive in order to be the kind of agent my clients need. And he talks about this crazy morning routine. He was so dedicated. The first thought I had about this is like, I wonder if he puts this morning routine in the book, which I guess now he's more of like an entrepreneur and agent. It's like almost described this like intense, almost ridiculous morning routine as a way to distract his competitors. Like, look, this is my morning routine.

Get my competitors doing this two-hour morning routine while instead of doing this routine that I made up, which I think is probably true, I'm just gonna be rolling calls for two hours. This is the thought I had first. The first thought I had when I read this. So let me just read this morning routine. It's hilarious to me. He says, my morning routine is essentially the same. Upon waking, I drink two bottles of mineral water, do 40 minutes of stretching. I do 10 minutes of dynamic warmups, do a regimen of extremely difficult breath work, then dive into the sauna, then 20 minutes of meditation, then 10 minutes in the ice plunge, then 20 minutes of infrared light therapy, then a protein shake with coffee and vitamins, topped off with a cup of live worms to eat the bad bacteria in my gut.

Then I go to the office, and I roll the first day's calls. On his treadmill desk, by the way. About 8.30 in the morning, I permit myself to have my first food of the day, and then I don't eat again until dinner. Both meals are vegan. And so at the same time he's trying to save his company, we have the 2008 financial crisis. It says that 2008 ends, I feel dead. I'm in a deep fatigue. There are days when I don't know how I'm going to make it to my 7 p.m.

bedtime. I worry that it's the flying. My job requires me to be on planes constantly, even when the last thing I want to be on is a plane. Fly across the country, fly across the world, sit down for a meal with some potential client or investor, then get back on the plane, stare out the window, and then take a car to a house and arrive just as my kids are going to bed. The general public doesn't understand what a huge part of the job flying has become, what a soul obliterating part, but every business traveler knows.

Each flight shortens your life by several hours. Not sure if it's the recirculated oxygen, the dehydration, the alienation, the radiation, the insomnia, the altitude, or some combination, but every time I step off a plane, I feel as if someone had taken the thread of my life and snipped off a little piece. So this deal to merge with William Morris, the first meeting they have happens I think in 2003, and the people running William Morris essentially laugh them out of the room. They're like, you're so small, we're much bigger, you're this upstart, we've been around forever, you can't buy us.

If we're going to merge, we're going to dominate you. I don't think anybody from his personality, you could see that Ari's not going to want to be dominated by anybody. And so he's essentially destabilizing his own negotiations by leaking to the press this Hollywood gossip website. And so every morning, the person, the editor of this website, he just calls her. He says, I put her at the top of my call sheet each morning and feed her a steady diet of tidbits about ongoing negotiations between Endeavor and William Morris.

My aim is to destabilize William Morris, make everyone in that building paranoid and uncomfortable. This goes on, this back and forth between them, and some of the moves he does. Probably goes on for 20 or 30 pages maybe, something like that. But what he realizes, it goes back to what the Harvard professor told him. It's like, no such thing as a merger. One company's going to swallow the others. How are you going to do this? And so eventually, he knocks out two of the people in William Morris.

He agrees to the merger, lets them pick the name, says, oh, you can be chairman, everything else. And then once he does that, he gets votes behind their back and essentially says, hey, either you, almost shivs them. So it shows up. It's like, we have the votes. We can pay you off, and you can get this care pack that's a lot of money. Or you can fight this, but you're going to wind up losing. And they didn't see it coming. And so the note I left to myself at this section is Ari makes his move.

And so he's going to knock out this guy named Wyatt and Weintraub. And I really like the way he describes this here, because he's unapologetically extreme. He goes, I hope I get out of the game before the sharks eat my legs. But I also know the odds are 50-50. All the young agents and former assistants I've ever known, if given half a chance, would do me exactly the way I did Wyatt and Weintraub. It's their job, especially if I taught them well. Circle of life in Hollywood, and nobody at any level of the food chain should ever be surprised when it's their turn.

Critics carp about the money we've spent to get rid of Wyatt and Weintraub. So costly, they say. No, actually, for the paltry sum of $44 million, which is what the buyouts are going to be, we've acquired the oldest and most prestigious talent agency in town. I wish I could say that in the wake of our glorious triumph, that I don't spend one minute thinking back to the first meeting with Wyatt and Weintraub. The laughter. They laughed at me. Ari, you buy us. I wish I could say I didn't think about it, but that would be a lie.

And so then he gets the merger. Now he's big. And then this is the reoccurring theme throughout the book, where he fights really, really hard, struggles really, really hard to accomplish something, gets his goal after a lot of blood, sweat, tears, a lot of expenditure of treasure. And he's just like, I'm not satisfied. Why do I feel like crap? He says, why do I keep assuming that getting what I desperately want will solve my problems? And so one of the people that Ari is going to meet that's going to have a huge effect on his career is this guy named Egon Durbin of Silverlake.

If you listen to the podcast I did on Michael Dell's autobiography, Play Nice But Win, Egon is the one that first approached Michael Dell with the idea of taking Dell private and then eventually take it public again. And it was interesting the way Ari meets Egon. He reads this article. So he'll read an article about somebody. He's like, oh, this person is interesting. I'll just call and try to meet them. One of the people he meets is Mark Andreessen, or he reads about is Mark Andreessen, reaches out to Mark, finds out, I think this is before Mark starts his venture capital firm, A16Z, because he says he's got, at the time, Mark has a private investment fund with Egon Durbin and Nikesh Arora.

And that meeting with Mark leads to a dinner with Egon. And he likes Egon right away. And this is what he says, I pepper him with questions, marvel at his particular style of response, quick, never condescending, effortlessly reducing each question to its basic components, then making the answer easy to grasp. This is the mark of genius. Not enough to know, you have to be able to convey. And this is when he describes what I said was one of the most interesting ideas. He's like, I'm going to build my own personal curriculum.

He calls it the Ari Emanuel Rowling School of Business and Entrepreneurship. I call lots of people for money, but never just for money. My daily phone blitz is also my private grad school. It's my MBA. It's school on my terms. No books, no tests, just voice-to-voice encounters that lead to in-person meetings, sit-downs, and friendships. And so I mentioned earlier that I think Ari had essentially no ceiling on his ambitions. But he also realizes they're going after bigger and bigger companies. He buys this company, this IMG.

He buys it for $2.4 billion when he realizes that the deals get bigger and the pressure gets more intense. And we see another nervous breakdown. The last time I was anywhere close to this exhaust, it was 1995, right after launching Endeavor. 19 years later, so much water under the bridge, and yet this feels oh so similar. Nervous breakdown with a side of deja vu, plus the most extreme case of jet lag in aviation history, plus the added strain of my marriage ending. I lie on my back for three days.

I was less immobilized after getting hit by that pickup. I'm not paralyzed, technically speaking, but I can't move. At some point, I have the thought, if I'm not dying, I can't go on like this. It's not just that I can't do everything. It's that I need to accept not being able to do everything. And then you get some of the best piece of advice. I love this section. One of my favorite parts of the book. A friend who's a multi-billionaire tells me, when you're on the field, be on the field.

But remember, you can't always be on the field. There has to be a timeout, halftime. You have to heal, recover. The show must go on, sure, but the game must stop now and then for the players to catch their breath. I absolutely love that. When you're on the field, be on the field. One of my goals this year was to try to learn how to relax. I feel real nervous, I would say, when I'm not working. But one thing I want to work on, and I haven't done it yet, I haven't succeeded yet, is learning how to relax.

But I love that idea. When you're on the field, you're on the field. But dude, you got to be able to take time off, even if for a few hours. I was talking to Mr. Beast about this, Jimmy's favorite podcast's founders. And he says that, he's like, you know, that guy pushes himself harder than almost, one of the hardest working people I know for sure, one of the most obsessive people I know for sure. But he even says, he's like, he'll feel that strain, and he goes, okay, I gotta take some time off.

But his time off, he's like, I just need half a day off. It's just an afternoon. So I just thought that was funny. So then I wanna go back to this idea of like, you know, is Ari even an agent anymore? Like, what is he building? And it goes back to just taking this business further than anybody else has, doing things that other people haven't done before. And, you know, yeah, he's still signing people, but he's also buying businesses. He's taking things public, taking things private, putting things together.

It's like much more of like a deal maker and an entrepreneur. And so he says, analyzing the agency business, we see more clearly than ever, it's got a hard ceiling, a strict limit on growth. So we start shopping for businesses that fit with our position in the world of entertainment. That means concerts, pageants, rodeos, not the things that talent agencies have traditionally bought, but the times call for something new. The times call for agents to be owners as well as representatives. People keep asking, what's the word for what you're building?

Hybrid talent event agency? New kind of media company? Maybe there isn't a word and it doesn't matter. And so now we're in January, 2016, and he's starting to hear rumors. Wait, wait, wait, the UFC might be for sale. He'd already bought WWE. And he looks at it, he goes, wait, wait, the UFC is just one big, loud, sweaty bundle of cash and upside. So he calls one of the owners, one of the Fertitta brothers, Lorenzo. He goes, he says, I dial Lorenzo. Jesus, man, do not sell to anybody without at least giving me a chance.

He won't say yes and he won't say no. He will not commit to anything. I ask him straight out, what's your dream price? Just tell me what number you see when you close your eyes. I don't know, Ari, but it starts with a fucking four. So I sit down with Egon and ask if he'd be interested in buying the UFC with me. This would be a coup, he says, given where sports rights are headed these days and where they're going to be headed. We can smell the value.

And so the deal plays out over multiple pages. Egon and I hammered together a consortium of investors to get to four billion and it hasn't been easy. This is hundreds of calls made and dozens of egos stroked. 10 days until the bids are due, 10 days of hell, 10 days of being on the phone, in the phone, sleeping with the phone, showering with the phone. Problems crop up again and again. In the end, we win the bidding war. And then somebody on his team is saying, hey, we're gonna pay too much.

And then he gets this piece of advice that I thought was hilarious. That's you're never gonna remember the extra 400 million. And so one of his partners doesn't want us to overpay. He says he doesn't want us to overpay. But again and again, I run it by Egon and he agrees with my instinct. Back when we were chasing IMG and the price jumped from one point something to more than two billion, Egon told me, you're never gonna remember the extra 400 million. Big number on paper, but in a year, it will seem minuscule compared with the gains of owning IMG.

He was right then and he's more right now. So in my final words to the buy team, you're not gonna remember any goddamn price reduction, but you're sure as hell remember fucking up this deal. Do not do it. They wind up winning the bid and he takes us into the room where it closes. You'd think there'd be a big moment, a definitive click, but deals this size for some reason, the end point actually passes like a soft breeze. The deal is done and everyone's reality is altered.

One second ago, the UFC belonged to the Fertitta brothers. Now it belongs to me. And then he repeats the same thing that happens time over and over again. The highs never last, no matter how high, they just never last. That sensational, invulnerable, able to leap tall buildings feeling, one day it just goes away. Kill yourself to reach some impossible summit, then stand before your mirror or your God and ask, really, this is it? So he's in India on a five day meditation retreat and this is what the leader tells him.

Rage has gotten you this far, which is very far indeed. And for that, you can be grateful to rage. Thank you, Mr. Rage for the wonders you perform, the miracles, but consider that rage can take you no further. Rage like everything else is subject to natural laws, laws of change. Rage has run its course. Remember how the beginning of the book started. You can't live in a world of war and anger, he says, and also in a world of beauty. You must choose. Do you want to live in a beautiful state?

Yes, then you've got to let go of rage. How? Not thinking about me, me, me. That's the cause of rage, the cause of ego. The hungriest monster is ego. Do whatever you do for the joy, the artistry, or else don't do it. Then in serenity, move on. And so then he comes back. He says, back in LA, I feel very unserene. I work on my ego. I'm not thinking about my ego, but it's hard. My ego won't leave me alone. It calls me constantly the way I call other people.

I spend weekends sitting around, staring at walls, pacing, restless, and something worse than restless. Something is working on me, something new. I can't name it. I snap my fingers. I'm lonely. So he had been divorced and just focused on work and obviously going through a lot of pain. And he winds up meeting the woman that's gonna wind up being his next wife. There's a lot of, he tells the story of how that happens in the book. And he also admits that he's kind of mellowing out.

And over time, it's actually surprising to him. This is, again, why I say the book is kind of like reading a diary. And so a lot of this book is him coming to terms with who he is and really trying to figure out how he actually wants to live life, how he can actually be happy. Is the things that used to serve him early in his career, are they still serving him now? Is the leader in India right? And so there's something really surprising. Like during the pandemic, a lot of his business is live events.

People are not having live events. They're not gathering together. And so the pandemic is destroying his business temporarily, yet he's in a new relationship and he realizes like, oh, I'm like happy. He says, the world is ending. My business is cratering and yet I'm happy. And he decides to try to do psychedelics. I think he's doing ayahuasca in this case. So he says, I've been reading about hallucinogens, how they can heal you, make you less anxious. Do they make you less ambitious too? Less angry? Maybe.

A guy I know has a guy in New Mexico, a shaman. He guides people on wild journeys using a chemical derived from the back of a toad. And so he explains this night he has where he's throwing up, he's retching and everything else. And he's trying to explain the effect, the before and after of what happened. He says, the next morning, I think of a better way to describe it. I'm a product of bad weather. Back in Chicago, those cold snowy nights, roofs covered in white, streets covered in white.

Next morning, walk outside to find the world under a vast duvet, perfect endless whiteness, everything clean and pure and quiet and calm, beautifully, wonderfully calmed down. This toad shit makes me feel as if the world's been restored to that clean, calm, pristine state, only better. Knowing this beautiful state is possible makes me calmer. I'm calmer, but not because I'm wiser or because I'm on toad. I'm calmer because I don't care as much. I'm no longer do or die about this. He's talking about taking his company public, which then he eventually takes private.

And so when the offering is a go, when it's a raging success, when we stand beside each other and ring that mythical bell at the stock exchange, I feel good, sure, but not the peak feeling I expected. Maybe because I know that the good feeling will be fleeting. So it goes back to the fact that the highs never last. At times, I wonder if the fight has gone out of me. Blissed out with Stodd, that's his new wife. Brokering peace between billionaires. Giving health tips to my former arch nemesis.

Who the fuck am I? Have I finally lost the rage? And then this continues a few pages later when the last big deal they do is they take the company private, going private will provide the validation that going public never did. The validation we deserve. When Silver Lake announces to the world that the value of Endeavor was $13 billion. A dozen years ago, we were 350 million. I look out the nearest window and sigh. That's more fucking like it. Egon calls me and says, come to Georgia.

Meet me at Augusta. We'll relax. We'll have ourselves a day. This is right before the 2024 masters. We both love that tournament. And thus it feels like the ideal place to get together, to give ourselves one small victory lap. We play the legendary course. I noticed the groundskeepers pruning a tree, trimming a green. No leaf or blade unattended. So much to be learned here about attention to detail, about hard fucking work. Suddenly, striding down the middle of the fairway, thinking about our game. It's all just a game, I think with a laugh.

And yet so much more than a game. As we walk off the 18th green, I thank Egon for his faith in me. Come on, he says, let's go have lunch. That sounds fun, but no, I've got to get back. Back? Back where? I've got to get back to LA. I've got a signing meeting this afternoon. Potential client I've been trying to sign for years. I know what he's thinking. We just won our version of the masters. Time to hit the clubhouse, hug the trophy, have a drink, take a load off.

But I've been chasing this writer director for years and I want to get his ass signed. I might not be an agent forever. I might not even be an agent for much longer, but I'm doing it now. And while I'm doing it, by God, I'm going to do it with everything I've got. What can I tell you, man? That's the job. And that is where I'll leave it. I think this book is incredible. There's so many more deals in the book. Stories with all the major players in Hollywood.

Ari is completely unfiltered. Highly, highly recommend buying the book. There's a link down below. If you buy the book using that link, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 436 books down, 1,000 to go. And I'll talk to you again soon.

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