Yahoo News Ari Emanuel Talks Yoga, Anger and Whether He Enjoyed ‘Entourage’: “That Show Gave Me Anxiety”
Ari Emanuel sat for a wide-ranging conversation on the podcast On Purpose with Jay Shetty, covering everything from the secrets of success and overcoming fear to the concept of legacy and staying open to risks. Entourage fans may also be stoked to know that the Endeavor CEO opened up about how he really feels about inspiring the over-the-top character played by Jeremy Piven, über agent Ari Gold.
“There [were] aspects to that character, 100 percent true,” Emanuel explains to Shetty, who is a client of Endeavor-owned WME. “I was very aggressive. When we started the business, we couldn’t compete on price because commissions were commissions. There were five other big players and we just had to, one, be more creative, and two, more aggressive and fight. So, yeah, that was true to form. Not all of it but in the surrounding.”
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Shetty then asked what the experience was like for Emanuel to see parts of himself reflected back on screen. “To be candid, that show gave me anxiety,” he admits. “So, I didn’t watch a lot.”
Shetty mentioned how the HBO series, which wrapped up its run in 2011, was rediscovered by audiences during the pandemic. On the same note, Emanuel said he fielded calls from “guys I know” with kids who started watching in college. One presumably mentioned the episode that found Ari Gold using a paintball gun around the office. “I didn’t do that,” said Emanuel (who called it a squirt gun during the podcast).
Emanuel tells Shetty that one of the keys to success is simple: Show up. “There’s a voice saying, you mean I gotta get on that plane for 16 hours? I gotta just go have a lunch and I gotta fly back from China? I don’t want to do that,” he explained, adding that he’s learned to counter that voice by just showing up. “No, I’m getting on the plane and showing up. That’s part of growing up and being successful. A lot of people are too lazy to fight that voice, and over time when you get older, you don’t want to fight the voice … as you get older, that voice takes over more and more. ‘No, don’t get up at 5 o’clock and work out.’ ‘No, don’t do this.’ I do it. I don’t care. As soon as that voice turns on, I say, ‘I’m doing this.'”
When asked about risks, Emanuel said that he still gets amped up over structuring major deals, including those he steered Endeavor through, including the acquisitions of UFC and IMG. “I mean, I got really sick doing the UFC deal, IMG moving to London — not great for four months when we took over,” he said. “I’m not nervous about those things. I don’t know why. It’s just my upbringing, you know, things I went through that I could get over. Working hard, showing up, getting on that plane for the lunch in China and then flying back after the lunch. That’s kind of how I operate my life.”
Emanuel touches on one hot-button issue of the moment: artificial intelligence. Speaking about the industry, he says, “We’re going to go through a whole iteration right now with AI that — I don’t know what it’s going to do — but it’s going to transfer our business, I think, in a good way,” says Emanuel, who also says there will soon be a push to a four-day work week. “I think people are going to have more free time than ever. They’re going to want movies, they’re going to want entertainment. They’re gonna need more.”
He also credits the power of yoga for helping him reach a healthy state of mind. “After you get to a certain point, if you stay with anger, resentment and fear, you can only get to a certain point in your life. Once you make the transition that you know something [will] never gonna get me over the hump, you have to go a little deeper — and that’s scary,” Emanuel said. “When you sit in yoga, I don’t know what it is, it just opens up things to come to you and the process to come to you. I don’t know when it really happened — probably 12, 15 years ago — that I was on this journey of kind of finding out. I don’t want to be the guy who, when somebody says something, I go to Code Red. That’s not healthy. That’s way too much energy.”
Shetty asked Emanuel to explain the difference “in success and happiness or success and contentment.” His reply: “I was never content before — probably the first 20 years of business. I was going to prove everybody wrong. I was going to prove to myself that I wasn’t stupid. I was just running hard. When I say this word, that doesn’t mean that I’m not in business. I’m content. And all of the things that I thought about, wanted to accomplish and how I saw the world, kind of played out. I’m a really lucky guy. I’m comfortable that I’m not stupid, and I got a lot more I want to accomplish because I want to accomplish it, not to get the stack any bigger. I’m happy doing that.”
View the conversation in full below.
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