A brief meditation on loss, relativity, and the vagaries of show business.RESOURCES:Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, documentary (2021)Genius & Anxiety: How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947, by Norman Lebrecht (2019)The War Room, documentary (1993) EXTRAS:“Is San Francisco a Failed State? (And Other Questions You Shouldn’t Ask the Mayor)” by Freakonomics Radio (2025)“Ari Emanuel Is Never Indifferent,” by Freakonomics Radio (2023)
Full Episode
Life is funny. I think we all know that. And it's unpredictable. But just how unpredictable? Once in a while, something happens that is so outlandish that you never even considered it possible. Nassim Taleb calls this a black swan event. In my case, I'm going to call it... Actually, I don't know what to call it yet. Maybe you can help me name it. Let me explain.
Last Thursday, on February 13th, we were scheduled to do a live Freakonomics Radio show at the Wilshire E. Bell Theatre in Los Angeles. Now, a live show for us... We'll be right back.
It's not going to have the depth or the flow of a regular episode, but there is something thrilling about the live setting, the interviews that you're not really sure where they're going to go, the response from the audience that you can't predict. And, of course, any number of strange things that might happen when you try to do something that resembles show business. Coming into this L.A.
show, we felt pretty good. We had two excellent guests lined up. Ari Emanuel, the super agent and CEO of Endeavor, who was also the model for Ari Gold from the TV show Entourage. And we had the award winning filmmaker R.J. Cutler, who got his start on the Clinton campaign documentary The War Room.
and who's been making excellent documentaries ever since, including a recent one about Martha Stewart. We also had Luis Guerra, who composes and performs a lot of the music you hear on this show. He had put together a live band for the evening, which I was definitely looking forward to. I love... Luis and his music, and he has a network of musicians that is amazing.
Now, I'm not going to say the mood before the show was buoyant. Exactly. Los Angeles had, of course, been hit by those terrible, fatal wildfires, and now it was cold. and raining hard. When I got to the theater around 4 p.m. for soundcheck, the wind was whipping. It felt like a monsoon outside. Plus, there are jitters always with a live show.
But we were excited, and we were excited to have a sellout crowd. The soundcheck went fine, and then I rehearsed some cues with the band. They sounded great. No problems whatsoever. I I started my final prep, which mostly consists of sitting somewhere alone, going over my notes for a show like this. I write a short monologue. In this case, it was about how L.A.
and New York may look like such different places, but how they have a lot in common. They're both places where people come to invent themselves or reinvent themselves. I always think the great line from E.B. White, no one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky. And I would argue the same is very much true for Los Angeles.
So I'm going over my monologue notes, going over my notes for the Ari and RJ interviews. And then Ari arrives early. He is always early. I recently heard a story about a Zoom meeting that someone had with him that was supposed to start at 2.30 a.m. And by the time they joined at 2.30, Ari had come and gone. The meeting was over.
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