Ari Emanuel … podcast host?
After years of representing the best and brightest from the worlds of entertainment, sports, music and culture, the WME Group executive chairman and TKO Group CEO is becoming talent himself, launching a new video podcast called Rushmore.
The show, which debuts Tuesday Sep. 30, will see Emanuel and co-host Ben Persky (himself a music industry veteran) joined by titans of industry to discuss who the greatest of all time (the GOATs, if you will) are in various categories.
It is, in other words, a classic debate show, similar to what you might hope find on ESPN or TV news, reinvented for the digital age, of course, and with a bit more star power.
“People are always making these lists and having these conversations,” Emanuel tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview, framing himself and Persky as “civilians” in conversation with the experts. “You can argue with the experts, but it’s pretty hard to argue [about music] with Rick Rubin and Jimmy Iovine, or on video games with Elon [Musk] and Bobby Kotick. There’s some pretty good authority there.
“The good thing is Ben and I can get to a lot of people, and so we just did, and they said yes,” Emanuel adds.
Indeed, the preliminary guest list reads like a who’s who of media, sports, art and business, with Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Musk, Kotick, Shaquille O’Neal, Reggie Miller, Rubin, Iovine, Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jon Meacham, and Jeff Koons among the initial batch of “experts.”
Speaking of Musk, Rushmore will be an X original, meaning that it will launch exclusively on the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder’s digital platform. Emanuel is a friend of Musk’s, and the tech CEO previously served on the board of Endeavor. Emanuel’s company also invested in Twitter (as it was then called) after Musk took it private.
“We had a conversation with Elon, and he said, ‘let’s do it,’” Emanuel recalls. The initial batch of shows will have 10 episodes, with another 10 set to be released early next year.
“Ben and I talked about it, and we decided that it’s the best place where the conversation would continue, where you could have a conversation on X, we could be commenting, and that can continue on and on,” Emanuel says. “People could make their comments and make their list and talk about how bad our list was, or how good it was.”
“This conversation specifically is built for that follow up conversation that Ari is talking about,” Persky says, adding that the idea for the show came about organically as a result of their friendship.
“We were just playing this game all the time, at lunch, at dinner, non-stop,” Persky says. “We would poll a friend who was an expert, and then we were kind of like, let’s make this.”
“Ben and I have been on multiple vacations together, and we get into these conversations about the Mount Rushmore of all different topics,” Emanuel says of the show’s origins. “Finally, after a little bit, I said to him, we need to talk to an expert and get his point of view, because he thought my point of view was horrible and I thought his point of view was horrible.
“It was just a conversation, and we picked subject matters that we were interested in at the time and that we thought we had really great people that were experts to engage with, and they did, and that’s what we wanted to do, and then it just kept on snowballing.”
Rushmore won’t just share a format with with sports debate shows, it will also share some behind-the-scenes talent. Pat McAfee, whose daily show is simulcast on ESPN and who is a staple of its College GameDay, will produce the show with his team, supported by WME’s Pantheon Media Group.
“We called him, he has a pretty good sense of social and I work with him, and I said, ‘What do you think?’” Emanuel says of getting McAfee involved in the concept. “He really liked the show, Ben and I got on the phone with him and he said, ‘let me get involved in making edits.’ He did, we liked what he did, and we just said, ‘hey, do you want to get involved?’ and he goes, ‘I’d love to.’ It was that simple.”
Ultimately, the goal is to spark a conversation, and give casual fans a chance to argue with Emanuel, Persky, and some of the world’s experts in their respective fields.
“It’ll be fun, hopefully there’s an ongoing conversation, and the guests come back,” Persky says. “That’s the goal, that it’s an ongoing conversation.”
“As the world’s group chat, X is the platform for declaring & debating what truly defines greatness, which makes Rushmore a perfect fit for X Originals,” says Mitchell Smith, head of original content at X. “As someone who began their career in the WME mailroom, I have a full appreciation for the prowess of Ari Emanuel, and we couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with him and Ben Persky on their first project in front of the camera.”