Over much of the past three decades ive been an investor. Then i started interviewing. I learned in my interviews how the leaders make it to the top. I didnt ask him how much he wanted i did not negotiate. I did no due diligence. David and how they stay there. Ariel emanuel is one of the most important figures in the entertainment history. Today he his built endeavor into one of the leading sports conglomerates of the world. I sat down to discuss the future of the industry with him. You are running a multinational multibilliondollar Sports Entertainment conglomerate. What is it like running a Multinational Company that is public, as opposed to a town agent . Ariel it is natural but it is different. Its bigger than everything i ever dreamed of. There was the portion unlike where you are dealing with investors. You are 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 they are happy. I am doing all of that, plus doing stuff for the company and making sure shareholders are happy. David quarterly earnings, that is a bit of a pain people would say. Ariel i do not really find it a pain. Someone said to me when the earnings are good it is an easy process. They have been good for five quarters now. Right now i feel good about the process. We will see maybe, i dont know where the future looks, but i have not experienced the downside of that conversation. David talk about the future of the entertainment business. Where do you think it is going . Do you think there will be movie theaters forever or everything will be streamed at some point . As someone who represents talent what are you telling talent about where they should put their efforts . Ariel when we started in 1995 everybody said there will be no more dramas or television. Here is what i would say. Distribution will change and it will expand. There will be new technology coming to our business. From movies to dvds, it keeps on expanding and that we have digital influence and so on. The theatrical business is as port as it has ever been. It made not be as much a been income earning business, but it is not going away. Anybody that says to you, i will not name names that the movie business is over are fools. The movie business is not over Television Business is not over. We have new vertical the content on gambling, social content. It is just an expanding world. I think as everybody is now on the demand side of the business fighting over distribution and content. I have made a decision and we have made a decision as a company to be on the supply side. There are very few suppliers. In the end, the brands we own whether it is the boc, all the others and the clients we represent we help them become brands and companies, they will be more valuable in the future than less valuable. As distribution expands, you have a supply side of the equation, there is very few outliers, economics improves. David during covid, the production of tv shows and movies kind of went down to almost nothing. What did a firm like yours do because you did not have a lot of representation you could do . Ariel in the first three months , most firms cut costs and people come up with people on hiatus. It was a horrible time. I dont think anybody has gone through this. By the end, we started working through it on the representation side and event side. We did about 70 , 75 of our economics even during covid. We figured it out by the end. On pvr at the time and ufc, pvr was the first port back. The head of it figured out how to do it. Dana was right behind that. He calls me up and says get me an island, i am going to put on fights. We are going. Nobody is getting laid off. He is an incredible executive. I said ok. I did not know what to do. I have seen you in abu dhabi, dune called me and says why dont you come here . We will give you an island and we will figure out economics. I called dana and said, heres the situation. He goes, we are going. We set up in abu dhabi. It is famous now. It really catapulted the sport in this horrible time. We set up fight island. The whole engine that dana runs, dana is a force of nature. We put the sport up on its feet, we flew everybody out, tested them and put the fights up. It was crazy. Todays the day you graduate from Southern New Hampshire university. Ive been waiting for this day my whole life. The fact that i get to walk across the stage and get my degree, its honestly unreal. Dont ever stop. Keep on believing in yourself. It is never too late. If youre out there to wonder if you could be an snhu graduate today is the day to find out. Visit snhu. Edu. David you are one of three very famous brothers. Your oldest brother infamous your oldest brother is a wellknown bioethicist and medical doctor on tv a lot for his views on health care. Another the ambassador to japan and previously chief of staff to president obama and the mayor of chicago. You are the youngest, is that right . Ariel my father would say, god rest his soul. David that is you yiddish for small. What is it that your parents did that produced three talented children that are in different areas of life but the have all done quite well . Ariel when we were growing up, one of the things i try to do with my kids i have four children they let us figure stuff out. They did not program us every hour what we were doing. You had to fend for yourself and figure things out. Education was crucial. If you did not perform, there was punishment. He would be grounded, there was competition of who got the better grades between the kids. With those two things my father was a workaholic, he was a pediatrician. You kind of went around with him when he went on rounds. My mothers side, she was a woman that went against the grain in the suburbs of chicago, very prominent in civil rights. Which for that period of time, 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, then gave us pretty good guard rails. David youve achieved weve achieved despite two problems that some people might say make it difficult. You were dyslexic, i guess you still have some dyslexia. You had attention deficit disorder, which some people have as well. Ariel some people would say definitely have not gotten over that. David those are things that go together, how do you overcome those and are there still challenges for you . Ariel when i was growing up, i had my mother. She made sure that i was going to graduate high school, go to college and learn how to read. The good thing about it is, i think it is a superpower now. Back then, i hated it. I remember crying every day when i had to go to the reading teacher for three hours and sit in the front window with my adhd. But now, because of the diversity in my business, the adhd enables me to move around and focus a lot on specific is mrs. The dyslexia, for whatever reason many people have different points of view on dyslexia. It enables me to think in a different way. One of the things that happens when youre dyslexic, you utilize a lot of people around you to help you learn. In business, that translated to making sure you trust a lot of people. I am not afraid of risk because i was made i went through a lot of tough times and embarrassment. Nothing shakes me up. When you are 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 youre dyslexic, you are more successful. Those are now attributes and powerful things in my life. Before, they were difficult. David you went to mcalister college, a good school but not as wellknown. Ariel i applied to amherst, which my brother went to, but did not get in. I got deferred from bowden and mcallister accepted me. David later after you graduated you became a professional racquetball player for a while . Ariel ive played racquetball for a year and a half. David is that an easy way to make money . Ariel no. I was going to go to Business School and try to get into northwestern. I realized i did not want to do that. I turned to my father who had gone to school in europe this is what is so great about my father when he was alive. He said here is a credit card and some cash, no plan. Two days later, i was in paris. He called me up eight months later, a year later and said it is time to come home. I came home, packed up my car in minnesota, moved to new york. A friend of mine at the time was working in the mailroom of William Morris and explained to me what it was. David in major Talent Agency. Ariel the one we also bought, kind of funny. I got a job working for this gentleman, older, wellestablished agent. He turned to me that she was such a wonderful man he turned to me, he was such a wonderful man. I am 84, i am not going to promote anybody. You should go to los angeles and you will make a lot of money and you will be an agent there, because i will not promote anybody. He got me an interview and he said to me he cannot say this now you are too old. I peppered him with calls, i called him three times a day every day for two weeks. He turned to me, another great man, and set on a thursday if you can be out here on monday, you have a job in the mailroom. I got out there, i bought a used car for 1500. I was in the mailroom, everybody was younger. I was off to the races. David i have often read that people work in the mailroom, what happens in a mailroom at one of these Talent Agency firms that enables you to rise up . Ariel you make copies of scripts and you drive the scripts around to clients or studio heads. You deliver paperwork everywhere, get lunches. Then you become an assistant, then an agent if you were good enough. That process of learning the town, etc. David to be an agent, you have to have clients, i assume. How do you get clients when you do not have any clients . Ariel i was promoted in the Television Department because i worked for the head of business affairs. One of the lead agents, gentleman named noah haber bill haber. I was in the office as the assistant every day for seven days, monday through sunday, doing whatever it took. They promoted me. You would go to the studios and sets were people were shooting and writers were writing and i was the writer television agent. You would read his stuff that came over and try to sign them. Even though i am dyslexic, i read a lot. Watched a lot of tv shows, saw what i liked and assigned a lot of clients that were talented and build my business. David how long before you said i should have my own company . Ariel by the time i started endeavor, i had been an agent for about 4. 5 to five years. I was looking at the world i read a book called life after television. It talked about infinite distribution. Distribution in our business was going to expand with cloud computing, etc. I brought him into speaks, nobody really understood. I talked to him after reading the book and i said you know, it is going to go from four networks to six, i am in the Television Business. The way you make money in television, you put tv packages on the air. Why would i put a package on the air you can make a lot of money for your clients and yourself and give it to them for what i thought was an ok salary . My father almost had a heart attack because they offered me a lot of money to stay, my contract was up. With three other gentlemen, i said with my clients, if we do this, we can make a lot of money because i know what i can put on the air. David where did you get the name endeavor . Ariel the four of us were sitting around trying to think of a name. One of the partners said we should think about nasa, they have great names. The first one we thought of was discovery, then we realized it crashed, so it was out. Then he says what about endeavor . We all realized that was a great image of what we wanted to create for clients. That was the name. David what year did you start endeavor . Ariel actually my birthday, march 29, 1995. David it went well from the beginning because you had clients, you bought William Moore morris. They were twice as big as you and you became ceo. David we went to see ariel we went to see another mentor person who has been unbelievable in helping my life, who became the chairman of harvard Business School. We asked him lets go over game theory of what we should do to grow and consolidate. Distribution will change the environment. We laid out over two days on a whiteboard that we should go after William Morris and try to merge. David you become the sole ceo. Now you are starting to buy companies, you bought img, a sports representation business, right . Ariel sports production events company. That is for you and i met. David that is right. You then bought ufc later . Ariel we bought pvr, ufc, a lot of stuff. David you bought ufc, you did it with the help of silver lake, a wellknown private equity firm. Did the ceo help you get this done . Ariel i was lining up people to go by img, we had that conversation. He said listen, let me invest in William Morris, then lets go after img and create a Global Platform and go from there. I said private equity will not be able to do that, he said give me three weeks and i will come back and if i can make a deal, i will. He came up, we made a great deal, great for him and us. We got img and realized everything we had done was incredible, global, unbelievable kind of building blocks. We realize that was the representation business, the service business. If we put something we owned on top of it, we could get the full leverage of the platform. I represented ufc for a number of years. They were going to sell it. We had proven we could buy a business and own it and operated. It was us against some chinese investors at the time. We secured the rights and here we are. David is there anybody today that will not return your phone calls . I assume there is no one in the world. Ariel i get a lot of people on the phone when i need to. David Ariel Emanuel is a wellknown figure in the entertainment world, but there was ariel gold, fictional character that people that was named after you. Did you like that or not . What is it like when you are more famous than your clients . Ariel at the time of the show, Mark Wahlberg is a client of mine, i did not like at the beginning. There were some things that were for sure not true, then things that i hated seeing that were true. I am not that same person anymore. Later on, a lot of people kept seeing it. It for sure a lot of doors. At the time at the end, my brother was in the white house, the show was on the air. People would pick up my phone call. David is there anybody today that will not return your phone calls . I assume there is known in the world. Ariel i get a lot of people on the phone when i need to. David in the entertainment world today, you are at the top of the totem pole. How many more years would you like to do this . Ariel here is what i would say to you. If i am not happy, if i am not still intellectually stimulated, if i am not feeling like i get up every morning i get up bright and early every morning. I do what i do every day and i am bored of it, i will not be doing it. David today you are happy and not bored. Ariel today i am really happy. I built everything i want to build, there are more dreams i have. David you are famous for being a fitness expert. Ariel this is the mens Health Version of this interview. David yes. [laughter] i can learn something. When did you decide to become so fit and were you always this way . Ariel i have always been this way. I have a certain beginning routine, vitamins and that sort of thing i do in the morning. I go to the gym, about one hour and 45 minutes to two hours. In my house i have a sauna and ice bath. I meditate. David what about eating . You are very careful, not eating a lot of hotdogs i assume. Ariel i am a vegan, i tweak it a little bit. Being 61 aea little bit of meat now. Once a quarter i do an extended fast which is probably anywhere from 6072 hours. And then every week i do a daily fast, then i eat in a six to four hour window every other day. David has anyone told you this is unusual . Ariel there is other craziness inside this i will not go into. You can imagine the conversations. About five years ago, my brother who is famous for saying he wants to die at 75 said he will live one hour longer. I said if i live one hour longer , then you never know what will happen in that hour. It is not about living, its about being healthy both emotionally and physically for as long as you live. Its an amazing thing when you show generosity of spirit to someone. And you want people to be saved and to have a better life, then you dont stop. The idea that we have saved five million peoples lives, its overwhelming. Its everything. Sonali hi, im sonali basak. This is the next big risk. Investing is a business of managing risk for the longterm. In a year where recession fears abound, a war in ukraine rages