The David Rubenstein Show: Ariel Emanuel

[Music] this is uh my kitchen table and also my filing system [Music] over much of the past three decades i've been an investor the highest calling of mankind i've often thought was private equity and then i started interviewing while i watch your interviews i know how to do something i've learned in doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top i asked him how much he wanted he said 250 i said fine i didn't negotiate with him and i did no due diligence do i have something i'd like to sell and how they stay there you don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world is that right arie emanuel is today one of the most important figures in the entertainment industry in the mid 1990s he started endeavour and built it into being a leading talent agency firm representing among others martin scorsese today he's built endeavor into being one of the leading entertainment and sports conglomerates in the world i sat down with ari in his offices in new york to discuss the entertainment industry and his firm's future in it [Music] so you were a talent agent for much of your professional career but now you're running a multi-national multi-billion dollar sports entertainment conglomerate so what's it like running a multi-national sports coupling company that's public as opposed to being a talent agent for me it really feels natural right now it's definitely different because it's bigger it's everything i've ever dreamed of i still do a lot of work with clients on the talent side whether it be writer director actors etc um but then there's the portion of my life where you're dealing with investors uh you're dealing with how to grow the business where you want to go a great training ground has been the talent agency business because you have to build a business for your clients you have to make sure that they're happy and now i'm doing all that plus doing stuff for the company but also making sure that the shareholders are happy so you have to deal with quarterly earnings now and that's a bit of a pain sometimes people would say i don't really find it a pain i don't know why and i guess uh john donahoe from nike said to me one time well when the earnings are good it's an easy process and they've been good for uh five quarters now um so right now i feel good about the process so we'll see maybe i don't i'm feeling good where we sit and where the future looks but i haven't experienced the downside of that conversation talk about the future of the entertainment business um where do you think it's going you think there's going to be movie theaters forever where everything will be streamed at some point and as somebody represents talent what are you telling talent about where they should be putting their efforts when we started the agency march 29 1995. you know what everybody said there's going to be no more dramas and no more television so here's what i would say to you distribution is going to change and going to expand there's going to be new technology to come into our business when the movie has happened then dvds i mean it just keeps on expanding now you have digital you have influencers et cetera the theatrical business is as important as it's ever been is it going to be a 9.3 billion dollar business no maybe it'd be an 8-bit billion business i'm not sure but it's not going away and anybody that says to you and i won't name names that says the movie business is over are fools the movie business is not over the television business not over we have new verticals which has content on gambling social content it's it is just an expanding world and so i think um as everybody's now on the demand side of the business fighting over distribution and content i've made a decision and we've made a decision as a company to be on the supply side and there's very few suppliers and um in the end the brands we own um whether it be the ufc bull riding now barrett jackson and all the other frees or the clients we represent that are we're helping them become brands and companies are going to be more valuable in the future than less valuable because as distribution expands and you have the supply side of that equation and there's very few suppliers um economics improve so during covid the production of tv shows and movies kind of went down to almost nothing so what did a firm like yours do because you didn't have a lot of representation you could do well in the first three or four months like most firms cut costs cut people uh put people you know on hiatus it was a horrible time because i had never gone through this and i don't think anybody has gone through this but the funny thing is you know by the end um we had started working through it on the representation side and the event side we did about 7d 75 of our economics even during covid we figured it out by the end on the on pbr at the time in ufc uh pbr was actually the first sportback um and the head of it sean kind of figured that out how to do it with testing etc and then dana was very quickly right behind that and dana calls me up he said get me an island i said what he said get me an island i'm going to put on fights and he was like we're going nobody's getting nose getting laid off he's he he's he's an incredible executive and i said okay you know i didn't know what to do and then as you know you know because i've seen you in in abu dhabi um how doon called me and he said cause there was rumors about this and he says why don't you come here we'll give you an island and we'll figure out economics and i called up dana and i said here's the situation here's the economics he goes we're going and we set up in abu dhabi i mean it's famous now i mean it kind of i think really catapulted the uh the sport in this horrible time we set up fight island and the that whole engine that dana runs and dana's force of nature you know we put we put the sport up on its feet and we move we flew everybody out tested him and we put the fights on it was crazy [Music] [Music] now you are one of three very famous brothers uh you're older or infamous or infamous uh your oldest brother zeke emanuel is a very well known bioethicist and medical doctor and on tv a lot for his views on health care rahm emanuel is now our ambassador to japan previously was chief of staff to president obama and also mayor of chicago and you are the youngest of the three brothers is that right in other words my father used to say god rest this whole the pitcher that's yiddish for a small yeah so uh what is it that your parents did that produced these three uh very talented children who are in different areas of life but all have done quite well well first of all i would say uh when we were growing up one of the things i try to do with my kids and i have four children is they let us figure stuff out they didn't program us every hour what we were doing you had to fend for yourself you had to figure things out and the other thing that my parents did is education was crucial um and if you didn't perform uh then there was punishment um meaning you'd be grounded you you know and there was competition of who got the better grades between the kids and so with those two things and you know my father was a workaholic he was a pediatrician uh and you kind of went around with him when he went on rounds and on my mother's side you know she was a woman that went against the grain in the suburbs of chicago was very prominent in civil rights which for that period of time was you know nobody could believe that in chicago in the suburbs so you saw two people that were willing to go out and be themselves let us be ourselves and then get gave us some pretty good guard rails now you've achieved what you've achieved despite two problems that some people would say might make it difficult one is when you're growing up you're dyslexic and i guess you still have some dyslexia yes and you had attention deficit disorder which um some people have as well maybe some people say i definitely have not gotten over that right so um okay those are things that may sometimes go together dyslexia and attention deficits order how did you overcome those and are they still challenges for you when i was growing up i had you know my mother and she made sure that i was going to graduate high school i was going to go to college and i was gonna learn how to read and the good thing about it is um i think it's a superpower now back then i hated it i mean i remember crying every day when i had to go to the reading teacher for three hours and sit in that like front window and it was horrible with my adhd and um but now because of the diversity of my business the adhd and enables me to kind of move around and focus a lot on specific businesses and and the dyslexia for whatever reason and i think money people have different points of view on dyslexia it does enable me to kind of think in a different way one of the things that happens when you're dyslexic also you utilize a lot of people around you to help you learn and in business that has translated to making sure that you trust a lot of people i'm not afraid of risk because i was made you know kind of i went through a lot of tough times reading um and embarrassment so nothing now kind of shakes me up and and then when you're running a company if you empower a lot of people to help you get to the end goal which is what you have to do when you're dyslexic you're more successful and so i mean those are now attributes and powerful things in my life before they were very difficult how did you happen to go to macalester college a very good school but not as well known as some other schools right you know i applied to amherst which my brother zeke went to i didn't get in i got deferred from bowdoin mcallister accepted me but later after you graduated you became a professional racquetball player for a while i i played racquetball for about a year and a half yeah is that an easy way to make money no i was going to go to business school try to get to northwestern and i realized you know i don't really want to do that and i turned to my father who had gone to school in in europe and he said he gave this is what's so great about my my my father when he was alive he said here's a credit card here's some cash no plan two days later i was in paris he called me up about eight months later to a year later i don't actually remember and he said it's time to come home and i came home packed up my car in minnesota moved to new york and um a friend of mine at the time uh was working in the mailroom of william morris and he explained to me what william morris was because i didn't know that there was agents or what that meant william mars being a major talent agency the one we also bought kind of funny and then i went to work in new york and got a job working for this gentleman an older kind of well-established agent by the name of robbie lance and finally he turned to me and he was such a wonderful man robbie lance and he said to me um you know i'm 84 i'm not going to promote anybody you should go to los angeles you'll make a lot of money and you'll be an agent there because i'm not going to promote anybody and so he got me an interview at caa and ray kurtzman said to me which he can't say now he goes you're too old to go into the mail room so i did what i normally do i peppered him with calls i mean i think i called him like three times a day every day for two weeks and he turned to me at the time and he was another great man and he said on a thursday and he said if you can be out here on monday you have a job in the mail room i got out there i bought a la car used car for a thousand five hundred dollars or something and i was in the mail room and everybody was younger and i was off to the races well explain this to me very often i've read that people work in the mail room um i think david geffen started the mail room barry diller started the mail room what actually happens in a mail room at one of these talent agency firms enables you to rise up you would make copies of scripts and you drive the scripts around to clients or to studio heads and you know you deliver paperwork everywhere you'd get lunches and then you'd become an assistant and then you'd become an agent if you were good enough and that process of you know learning the town and et cetera to be an agent you have to have clients i assume yes so to get clients do you have to go to lunches and dinners or how do you get clients when you don't have any clients well um i was a i was promoted in the television department because i had worked for uh the head of business affairs and then they had one of the lead agents there and also this gentleman named bill haber and i was in the office as their assistant every day for seven days you know monday through sunday um doing whatever it took and they were great teachers you know both bruce winker and bill haber they promoted me and then you would go out to the studios and go to sets where people were shooting and writers were writing and i was a writer's television agent and you would read stuff that came over to transom and you would try to sign up and um i even though i'm dyslexic i read a lot went to watch a lot of tv shows saw what i liked and signed a lot of clients that were quote unquote talented and i think they are talented and they're still talented and built my business how long before you say you know what i should have my own company um so i had been by the time i had started endeavor i think i had been an agent for about four and a half to five years um and i was looking at the the world i read this book by george gilder called life after television and it talked about infinite distribution and that distribution in our business was going to expand uh with cloud computing et cetera and i brought them in to speak that icm and nobody really understood and i talked to them after reading the book and i said you know it's going to go from four networks to six i'm in the television business the way you make money at the time in television you put tv packages on the air i've got a great client list why would i put a package on the air where you can make a lot of money for your clients and for yourself and give it to them for what i thought was a okay salary again my father almost had a heart attack because they were offering me a lot of money to stay my contract was up and i can you know with three other gentlemen we said you know i said i could with my with my clients if we do this uh we can make a lot of money because i know what i can put on the air because i've been doing it now for a long time where'd you get the name endeavor so the four of us were sitting around trying to think of a name rocks rivers whatever and one of the partners uh said well we should think about nasa they have great names so the first name we thought of was the discovery and then we realized it crashed so that was out and then he just says what about endeavor which was and we all realized that was a great kind of image of what we wanted to create for clients right and so what year did you start endeavor uh actually on my birthday march uh 29th 1995. so it went very well from the beginning because you had clients but you bought william morris correct or you merged with them quote unquote merged but they were twice as big as you and you became the ceo how did that happen about four years before that we went to see another kind of mentor a person who's completely been unbelievable in helping my life professor nitin who became the chairman of harvard business school and we asked him to kind of let's go over and i've never been to business school like game theory of what we should do to grow and kind of consolidate the business with the thesis that distribution is going to change the environment and we laid out over two days on a whiteboard that we should go after william morris and try and merge buy whatever so you you merge the company you become the socio and then you start i was patrick whites will my partner who's my partner and i became the ceos now you are uh starting to buy companies yes you bought uh img which is a entertainment there's a sports uh representation business right it's a sports production events company all right you bought that and then later you bought yours that's where you and i met right that's right and you then bought ufc later well we then bought um pbr we brought droga5 prior to that we then bought the ufc and bought some other stuff you bought ufc and you did it with the help of silver lake a well-known private equity firm and um the ceo there helped you get this done yeah i mean what what happened was i was lining up people to go buy uh img you and i had that conversation and uh he came in and he said listen let me invest in william morris endeavor and then let's go after img um and kind of create this global platform and go from there i said to him private equity's not going to be able to do that he said well give me three weeks show me your numbers and i'll come back and if i can make a deal i can make a deal and he and i known each other actually through mark andreessen he came up we made a great deal great for him great for us uh we then got img and then we realized that that was everything we had done was incredible global unbelievable kind of building blocks and we realized that was in the representation business the service business and that we if we put something that we owned on top of it that we could get the full leverage of the platform and own something and i had represented the ufc for a number of years new dana knew frank and lorenzo and then they were going to sell it and then we had proven also to egon that we could buy a business and own it and operate it with uh professional writing and then we we we were it was us against some chinese investors at the time we secured the rights and here we are for anybody today that won't return your phone calls i assume there's nobody in the world uh i get a lot of people on the phone when i need to so harry emanuel is a well-known person in the entertainment world but there was another figure named arie gold yeah who was a fictional character that many people thought was named after you uh did you like that did you not like that and what is it like when you're more famous than your clients well here's what i would say at the time of the show and mark wahlberg is a client of mine and i helped put that show together i didn't like it at the beginning because it depicted me there was some things that were for sure not true and there were some things that i hated seeing that were true um i'm not that same person anymore but later on especially after covet a lot of people kept on seeing it it's it's for sure opened a lot of doors and it and at the time at the end my brother was in the white house the show was on the air i mean i got a lot of you know people would pick up my phone call is there anybody today that won't return your phone calls i assume there's nobody in the world i get a lot of people on the phone when i need to so with the entertainment world today you're pretty much at the top of the totem pole you know everybody you have one of the best companies under you you're the ceo of it um how many more years would you like to do this well here's what i'd say to you is um if i'm not happy if i'm not still intellectually stimulated if i'm not feeling like i get up every morning and i get up bright and early every morning want to do what i do every day and and kind of do it and i'm bored of it i will not be doing it but today you're pretty happy and you're not bored today i'm really happy i built everything that i want to build there's more things i want to do and there's more dreams i have you're famous of being a fitness expert or i guess this is this is the men's health version of this interview yes i can learn i can learn something so when did you decide to become so fit and were you always this way i was i've always been this way you get up and then you go right to the gym i have a certain beginning routine of as you know vitamins and certain things i i do in the morning i go to the gym it's about an hour and 45 minutes two hours in my house i have a sauna and i have an ice bath i then do a sauna and i meditate but what about eating i mean you eat you're very careful what you you're not eating a lot of hot dogs i'm a vegan um actually i've tweaked that a little bit because i do be after being 61 i do eat a little bit of meat now once a quarter i do an extended fast which is probably anywhere from 70 to 60 to 72 hours and then every week i do a one a a daily fast and then i eat in a in a six to four hour window every other day and has anybody told you this is a little unusual to do this well you could you could imagine there's other craziness inside this which i will not go into right now you can imagine the conversations so about five years ago my brother zeke who's famous for saying that he wants to die at 75 said you'll live an hour longer i said if i live an hour longer then you never know what's going to happen in that hour it's not about living it's only about being healthy both emotionally and physically for the for as long as you live you

Channel: David Rubenstein

Views: 68,399

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: eJKEyQpx1nI

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 08 2022