ROLL THE CALLS

Roll the Calls (Knopf, 2026) is Ari Emanuel's memoir, written with J.R. Moehringer. It follows him from a CAA mailroom job to building Endeavor into a representation and sports-entertainment empire. Underneath the score-settling and all-caps rage, secondhand coverage turns up a working playbook: relentless phone volume, refusing to hear no, taking work nobody assigned, restructuring how deals pay out, and buying businesses whose leaders he already represented. Reviewers warn that the abrasiveness and grudges crowd out the insight.

Work the phones

1. Run a continuous call queue. Keep someone whose only job is to have the next call ready the instant you hang up, so no dead air separates conversations. Elite agents made 200-300 calls a day, each one to two minutes. At that volume, in a sales business, failure becomes structurally hard. (source, source)
2. Outlast a single no with repeated same-day contact. Told at 26 he was too old for a mailroom slot, he called the hiring manager four or five times a day and left late-night messages until he was hired roughly ten days later. A stack of messages forces a choice, he figured: call back or call the police. He won Larry David as a client the same way. (source, source, source)
3. Say yes first, work out the logistics later. He treated never-say-no as a rule, accepting tasks before he knew how he would deliver them and solving execution when the deadline arrived. (source)
4. Take the unglamorous work and the unassigned work. Mailroom errands, copying runs and twice-daily script deliveries built the relationships that launched his career, he says. He got noticed by volunteering unpaid weekend hours for a CAA co-founder and writing an unsolicited analysis of the international TV market. (source, source)
5. Package instead of chasing single commissions. Bundle an actor, director and producer as one offering and sell the set to a network, trading the one-time 10% fee for a small ongoing share of every airing. A flop costs nothing extra. A long-running hit pays for decades. (source, source)
6. Win the person before the asset. He signed Dana White and Vince McMahon as individual clients years before acquiring UFC and WWE. His opening move in a client relationship is blunt: ask whether the person is happy, because almost nobody says yes. (source, source)
7. Treat a merger as a purchase, not a partnership, and keep moving. His takeaway from a business-school professor was that every merger is one company swallowing the other, with a winner and a loser and spin covering the rest. David Geffen's advice: standing still is the one thing you cannot do, even when you don't know which way to go. (source, source)
8. Break a stalled negotiation with asymmetric moves. During the William Morris talks he leaked details to a gossip outlet to destabilize the other side. Then he gave away the name and the chairman title to close, quietly lined up votes behind the scenes, and bought out objecting partners to secure the outcome. (source, source)
9. Use low-status entry work to build a network, and put in hours rivals won't. He woke at 4 a.m., worked through family vacations, and moved on opportunities while competitors weren't watching. He also frames loyalty as binary: he stays a ride-or-die ally unless he feels betrayed. (source, source)
10. Treat anger as a tool with a target, but count the cost. He argues rage may not solve a problem yet it clarifies one, and credits his dyslexia and ADHD with giving the drive direction. The price is documented too: 20 pounds lost to launch stress, and his own admission that the wins never lasted. Kirkus finds the abrasiveness exhausting. (source, source)