#436 Ari Emanuel's Autobiography

David Senra (0:00)

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 talked 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 would know 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 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 gonna put everything, I'm just gonna put it down in the book, and you can just read my innermost thoughts.

So what I like with 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 to a 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 gonna come to dominate. And he's like that till 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 a 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. I can obviously read, it's just a great difficulty.