Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the Accelerated Degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, CSU’s executive MBA program. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on the show, we have Charlie Ebersol with Infinite Athlete. Welcome.

Charlie Ebersol: Thank you. It’s nice to be here. Thanks, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Infinite Athlete.

Charlie Ebersol: Well, I sold Infinite Athlete about six months ago in October. And we’re we’re now part of a larger organization called Exos, which is the largest performance company in the world. What Infinite Athlete was focused on is building the technological infrastructure for the biggest sports leagues around the world, the NFL and the Premier League and other leagues like that. And now we’re focused on growing that to gyms and performance and health across all the commercial sectors. So businesses, healthcare, etc..

Lee Kantor: So what was kind of the the deliverable to these leagues?

Charlie Ebersol: Well, one of the biggest problems that.

Charlie Ebersol: Really any industry has with sports uniquely has is that you have a lot of disparate data sources that are being operated by third parties. And so in the case of a sports league, you have the broadcast company that’s got a certain number of cameras in the stadium, and then you’ve got your teams have cameras and you’ve got security cameras, and you have player tracking systems like radar and lidar and UWB chips, ultra wideband chips the players wear on them. And all of those systems work asynchronously. And so ten years ago, I started a football league with the NFL not eight years ago called the AAF. And at the AAF, we built a system that synchronized all of those disparate data sources into one thing, one single source. And when that league went away, I got a call from my friends at the National Football League and they asked if we could take our learnings from the AAF and build a universal solution for them. And so we started building a system that we called Tempus Ex Machina or Time from the machine. And what that really did is it allowed them to have any type of technical system running simultaneously. And we would tie those systems together so that people could build on top of them. The best commercial example of something like this, existing somewhere else, is 15 years ago, Google built something called Google Maps, which, for those of you old enough as I am and I imagine you may be, they remember things like MapQuest and Garmin navigation systems.

Charlie Ebersol: Most people thought that the reason Google started Google Maps was for that solution was to compete with them. But really what Google was building was a synchronized map and GPS system that companies could build on top of. So they built the Google Maps and then companies that got invented around that time, like Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp invented the company Uber. And the only reason they were able to launch Uber is because they could license access to Google’s mapping system and then build Uber on top of it. So Google made hundreds of billions of dollars off of that business. They make more than $1 trillion a year off of that business, synchronizing maps so that people can build companies on top of them. And so we did the same thing for sports. And so now a lot of the technologies that are built around player health and safety and replay and rules, etc., across all kinds of different sports are built because they have access to this foundational software and hardware that we, we built and distributed across the major sports leagues.

Lee Kantor: So now because of you, we’re going to know if a person really went across the goal line or the first downs, really a first down.

Charlie Ebersol: Uh, well, definitely not because of me. It’s because of much, much, much smarter engineers, um, that, that actually come up with those solutions. But, uh, I would say theoretically that is correct. I look forward to seeing it in action this year and seeing how it plays out.

Lee Kantor: So are they. I mean, it sounds like they’re okay with putting all these trackers on the people, but are they hesitant to put it on the ball?

Charlie Ebersol: No, it’s on the ball. The tracker. The NFL has had as an example, and this is true for a lot of the NFL has had a tracker on the ball for 12 years, give or take. And they’ve had. Same with the players on the chips. Um what we what we really were focused on is how do you make that, uh, data sync exactly right. With what’s happening on the field and what’s happening in the camera and what’s happening in all the other technologies. Because, for example, at a Premier League soccer match, they have chips on the ball, they have chips on the players, they have radar tracking the ball speed. They have lidar, which is what’s on like a, um, like a Waymo vehicle tracking player movement. And then they’ve got computer vision running. All of those systems are completely different. What are called codecs. They’re, they’re, they’re, um, sync. The code comes in at a different pace and in a different language. And so by building a synchronization system, smart engineers could take the best parts of all of those different streams and then build solutions across them. And really what I do like, I mean, look, I’m, I’m a non-technical CEO. Like I, I don’t build technical solutions. My job is to, um, successfully fundraise and successfully bring commercial partners in and then bring the right smart people together and create a sandbox that they can play inside of and be protected inside of. And so when we sold Infinite Athlete and I also am an investor, so I was the first investor and I’m an a board member. I am a board member at the at tomorrow’s sports, which does the TGL and does flag football. I’ve sort of taken the learnings of the companies that I’ve started and started applying them to my partnerships where I. One of my skill sets is fundraising. One of my skill sets is bringing good people together and protecting them. And so that’s really become my primary focus in this approach.

Lee Kantor: And then, um, now you’re trying to take what, uh, was being done at the highest sports levels and then kind of trickle it down everywhere.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah. I mean, like, yes. And, and I think what you see there, and this is really what Exos has done very expertly is Exos for the last 20 years has taken has used sports as a place to battlefield test the best techniques and products and services and then bring them to the masses. Um, now I think what we’re doing is doing the same thing, but with software and AI, so that you can scale that across tens, if not hundreds of millions of people instead of having to do it on a 1 to 1 basis.

Lee Kantor: So now getting back to your superpowers of fundraising and bringing the right people together, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned in that regard of, of what makes a person good at that, and what are the qualities you look for when you’re putting a team together.

Charlie Ebersol: Well, fundraising, the number one quality in fundraising is, uh, is not being afraid of rejection and embracing the fact that you’re going to get rejected 99 times out of 100. And then the second most important thing in fundraising is asking questions and listening. Um, whenever people ask me for advice on how to go out and raise money and I’ve raised, you know, something like 450 or $500 million across my last couple of companies. Um, what I tell them is that every pitch meeting should start with asking questions. Um, so if you go into an investor, your first question should be, so what do you look for when you’re looking to invest? And what are your, you know, key requirements or what are the never going to happens or, and really listening to what their answers are and really trying to piece together what it is and then understanding that you need a lot of reps, like, um, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are not the two best offensive players in Major League Baseball because they don’t take a thousand pitches a week in batting practice. That’s why they are. And so I think that what I encourage people to do is to get out and have as many meetings as possible and start asking and operating from a position of when someone says no, find out why they say no. So you can start to adapt and understand where you are short and where maybe where you have a shortcoming, or where it wasn’t a good fit for that investor, and then applying that the right way.

Lee Kantor: Are you when you’re having those kind of conversations, it sounds like you’re vetting them as much as they’re vetting you.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah. Well, I.

Charlie Ebersol: There’s a great Danny DeVito quote that says, if you have one script, you take it. If you get two scripts, you take the better one. And when you’re trying to make a movie, and I think the same is true with investors. My my rule of thumb with investors is, in an ideal world, if you have choice, the investor’s money should be the least important thing they’re giving you. Like you, you should be seeking investors. Like, for example, I was very, very fortunate in my last company, Infinite Athlete, that my very first investor was Andreessen Horowitz, because Andreessen Horowitz is it’s obviously a great brand name investor, but more importantly, they have an entire infrastructure of human resources and lawyers and intellectual property attorneys and accountants. So when you get $10 million from them, for example, to start a company, they really show you what to do with that, because I think people grossly underestimate how complex it is to start a business wisely. Um, which is one of the, I mean, you know, it’s funny, one of my focuses these days, I have a seven year old daughter and a four year old daughter.

Charlie Ebersol: One of my focus is that they have a lot of interest in, you know, I’m an entrepreneur. My wife is also an entrepreneur. She. She is the founder CEO of the largest beauty booking website in the United States. And so they see us working on business a lot. So they ask a lot of business questions. And one of the things I’m focused on right now is how do we educate kids on what home economics was 30 years ago in high school? How do we bring that education to entrepreneurship so that kids understand what it is to make money? Because I think AI above everything else, AI is going to disrupt the out of coming out of high school or coming out of college and getting a first job. And I think the number of people who need to understand how to go create their first job and start their first business is important. And a lot of that is about just understanding what are the key tentpoles to being able to start something, because it’s a lot less complicated now than it ever was before.

Lee Kantor: And like you were saying earlier with the baseball players getting reps is important. And why not get reps when you’re young, when there’s no stakes as opposed to I.

Charlie Ebersol: I recommend to every parent I know to. There’s a board game that I tell everyone to buy. Do you remember the book? Um. Rich dad, poor dad. Yeah. Okay. So he created a board game called Cash Flow. And I tell every parent that they should. That’s the board game. They should play with their kids once they get to like, 5 or 6 years old. And the basic premise is, it looks like it kind of looks a little bit like the game of life and monopoly had, uh, like a baby, but it teaches you the concepts of assets and liabilities. And I’m constantly shocked when I talk to 22 year old kids that are playing for jobs, to work at my companies, or 35 year old people who are going out to start their own companies, that people don’t fundamentally understand the difference between an asset and a liability, or, you know, how to build a P and L, and a lot of that, to your point is just I started my first company when I was 12 and it was a magazine and my parents made me, you know, um, pay them back for the paper and the ink and these things. When I was first starting the company, I was fortunate the company became very successful, but I learned at a very early age that there’s a cost to starting a business and how that works. And so when my daughter started her cotton candy sales business last summer, I rented her the cotton candy machine against her profits. And so she was like, oh, I made $60. I was like, well, actually, you know, the cost of the cotton. You know, that basic understanding and then doing that 25 times so that by the time you get ready to start your real business, whatever that is, you really understand it. I think that’s wildly under taught and trying to figure out how to bring that to the education system is kind of becoming a pet hobby of mine.

Lee Kantor: Yeah. One of my pet peeves is, especially this time of year when you have the Girl Scout cookie sales, which to me is the easiest sale. Like that’s. That’s a great way to introduce selling to a child. But then when you have the parents bringing in the sheets to their work to get the their friends to buy it, you’re defeating the whole purpose of the exercise. It isn’t to sell the most cookies, it’s to get the kid comfortable selling anything.

Charlie Ebersol: 100%, 100%. And also ultimately, look, you asked me a question a little while ago about what I look for when I’m bringing people together. Um, I believe fundamentally that the key is that you got to find people that all want to row in the same direction. And you similar to what we were talking about with reps before you, you got to put in the reps of hiring people and then recognizing when someone’s not a good fit and moving on from those people as quickly as possible so that you can understand what the team dynamic and culture looks like. To your point about, um, the Girl Scouts. The entire point of the Girl Scouts is about building self-reliance and self-assuredness. And to your point about sales. Sales is about getting set. Getting a lot of no’s like that is really the key to sales is you’ve got to just, you know, I tell almost anyone who wants to start a business, I say that they should go do some sort of cold calling business for 3 to 6 months right out of college. Because if you can get good at that, if you can get good at, you’ve got two seconds at the beginning of a phone call to get somebody to like at least have the conversation with you, you’re going to be able to do just about anything in sales. And I’m always dumbfounded by the people who show up and are like, oh, I worked in sales. And then you realize they really didn’t. They either existed in a sales system that was completely built for them, or they never actually interact. They were sending emails or, or some sort of like passive interaction. And a lot of it is because things like the popcorn for the Boy Scouts and the cookies for the Girl Scouts are basically become parent, uh, homework assignments.

Lee Kantor: Right? Which defeats the purpose of the exercise entirely. They miss the point. The, the point is to get the kid comfortable in those situations, not to have them avoid being in those situations.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah. And that, by the way, when I look, I started, like I said, I started my first company when I was 12. I’ve had employees since I was probably 13. I don’t think I hired my first employee in the first year, but but around the time I was 13, I’ve had employees working for me. And one of the things that I am always surprised by, and I had to learn this lesson the hard way was I. My instinct was always like, I don’t ask anyone to do anything I haven’t done or I wouldn’t be willing to do. And it has taken me 20 plus years of running companies with employees to understand that that is actually not a great leadership dynamic. You want people to see that you’re committed to the company and you’re passionate and you’re hard working. But actually, you want to find people who can do things you can’t do. Those are the people you. Those are the people you should be hiring is the people who do things you can’t do, or the people who are doing things that you shouldn’t be doing. And in either case, you doing that job inherently is defeating the purpose of the exercise. And I am constantly shocked by the number of founders that I know that, you know, every decision runs through me.

Charlie Ebersol: It’s like, that’s a terrible way to run a business. Like you want you want to take the American military approach to the special forces, which is we’re going to train you to the best of our ability. We’re going to give you the right equipment. We’re going to give you the right team around you. And then we expect you to understand that the outcome is the requirement of the mission and that you follow these sort of ground rules, but you don’t need to keep coming back to us and asking for permission to do every step like that defeats the concept of asymmetric warfare. And yet constantly I’m seeing companies where every decision runs through the founder. And it’s I’m just like, not only are you never going to scale, when are you ever going to sleep? Like, what’s the point of making all the money or doing all the hard work if you can’t have dinner with your kids every night at, you know, 5:00 or take them to school every morning, or not have to have your phone out at 8:00 at night. I think those fallacies of leadership lead to terrible cultures inside of companies.

Lee Kantor: Now, why do you think that is, is that a fear thing? Is that an ego thing? Like what? What would keep a person, you know, having their fingers in every pot if they know the outcome that they desire is to, you know, build an empire.

Charlie Ebersol: I don’t think people realize, well, here’s what I’ll tell you. This might be less true now because of all the political stuff that’s tied to him. But I would say for the better part of the last 15 years, the most celebrated modern business person is Elon Musk. And all of the stories of Elon Musk are he slept on the floor of his factory. And he, you know, willed these companies into existence. And those things are true, but they really miss the point of Elon Musk, which is Elon is running 5 or 6 companies right now, and he has extraordinary CEOs running every one of those companies. And I assure you, Elon is not having conversations about, uh, vacation policy at any of the companies or making decisions about what vendor they’re using to bring in food for the people that work at his headquarters in Austin or whatever. He understands the delegation is so that he can maintain 80 to 90% of his brain. I had an amazing mentor tell me once that the job of a CEO is to hire people that are ten times smarter than they are, and have them solve every problem the company, and that the only job the CEO has after he hires those people is to solve the problems that those people can’t solve.

Charlie Ebersol: So it’s like you hire the smartest people you know and have them solve everything they can, and then they come to you with the problems because the problems they can’t solve generally are not like science problems. They are 300 zero foot, uh, command decisions that have to be made. And the mistake I see so many founders make is that they think that brute force and I just, I work harder and I go longer. You know, the, the adage of work smarter, not harder is so true and yet totally ignored by the vast majority of founders that I see when I hire people, I say, I’m hiring you and I’m paying you, and I fully expect you’re going to make a bunch of mistakes. I just expect you won’t make the same mistake twice. But I don’t want you thinking that I’m going to be upset at you for making a mistake, for trying hard. Um, because I don’t want to be. I don’t want that person trying to clear everything with me because they need to cover their CYA.

Lee Kantor: Right. But don’t you think that that’s where kind of startup and technology firms have such an edge over maybe more established 100 year old firms where they just have so much bureaucracy built in and there are so many kind of stagnant systems that they they give lip service to trust and vulnerability and risk. But anybody who does that and fails is fired or displaced.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah, 100%. But it’s also why I think you’re going to see over, I think, the next 50 years of businesses in America or in the, in the, in the capitalistic society. I think you’re going to see are going to be a much higher, a much higher rate of evolution that you’re going to see the General Electric’s of the world grow to a point and then get broken up, and that you’re going to see these upstarts come and take them down. I mean, if you look at what’s happening in Hollywood, if you look at what’s happening in technology, I mean, look, I keep pointing at, uh, anthropic because Google is. A million times bigger than anthropic is. And they have all of the information. They have all of the ad data. They have all the user data, they have all the YouTube data, they have all the ad and Android data. And yet anthropic, the, uh, Claude’s revenue is dwarfing OpenAI and Gemini. Uh, and OpenAI has all of Microsoft’s data. And yet anthropic is dwarfing. And it’s because, uh, the younger, hungrier, smaller, nimble company that can sort of like move and make moves is extreme is way more effective. I mean, all you have to do is look at the fact that meta had to buy Manus to get their AI platform up. Microsoft had to basically buy OpenAI. Um, Google is the only one that built it from the inside out with Gemini, and they’re all playing catch up to a company that 18 months ago, I think was doing like 5 billion annualized revenue, and now they’re going to do like 5 billion a week or something like that. Um, this year it’s, it’s, it’s astounding.

Lee Kantor: But is it sustainable? Like, you see that there’s in China, there’s companies that are obviously not as, um, innovative, but they’re, you know, playing catch up pretty quickly and at such a less cost that, um, you know, they become an issue also. Yeah, the fast, the fast followers in this world when things are moving this fast is not the worst place to be.

Charlie Ebersol: No, not at all. I think the challenge is that, to your point, I think the bigger companies are going to have a really hard time competing with them. I mean, SpaceX is the best example. Could you imagine what would happen if Boeing blew up one rocket on the rocket pad, let alone nine? Like they’re a publicly traded company?

Lee Kantor: Right.

Charlie Ebersol: Would end. Space blows up a $100 million rocket like every four weeks. You know what I mean? Like they’re but they understand fundamentally, they come from. We forget, I think, that we as leaders constantly forget that the era of innovation in America, which to a huge degree was the 50s and the 60s, which got us to the moon. So much of that innovation that that allowed us to, to put somebody on the moon in the late 60s. So much of that was a function of the fact that you had a bunch of 20 year old something kids, which was basically what NASA was. Nasa was a bunch of 20 year olds with, you know, all being led around by Wernher von Braun. That these 20 year old kids were willing to risk everything and try new things and challenge all of our understandings to sort of reach for the stars. And then I think what happened was we codified that concept as like our national ideology in the in the 70s and the 80s. And there was obviously a lot of countercultural pushback, but then we monetized it in the 80s without actually building the businesses anymore. And so, you know, we had to fight in the in the 80s and the 90s because Japan was out innovating us. And then in the early 2000, San Francisco and really the state of California basically started out innovating the rest of the planet.

Charlie Ebersol: And then I think what we’re seeing now is we’re in this new wave where China is. I think China is massively out innovating us right now. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg because they really do keep so much of that internal, um, in terms of how they’re doing development. And I think a lot of that is because we, to your point about the really to go back to the Girl Scout cookies, like there’s a lot of back slapping about, like we’re selling a lot of cookies and there’s not a lot of questioning, like who’s actually making the cookies and who’s actually selling them. And I think that you’re seeing that across the economy. And so these small, I think our, our, our salvation as a country has always been at the hands of, uh, iconoclastic, idiosyncratic, idiosyncratic founders, you know, the, the, uh, the JP Morgan’s and the Walt Disney’s and the Steve Jobs and, you know, Dario at anthropic, etc., and not the, um, financial engineers. Um, and I think what you’re seeing is you’re seeing the separation at cloud, for example, from open AI because it’s, it’s the meritocracy actually works when it comes to that type of, of innovation.

Lee Kantor: Now let’s shift gears to entertainment. I know you have a background in that, and I’m really curious about your take on the speed in which AI is, um, is touching that world and the, uh, the fact that so many of the creatives just abhor Just the word AI. Um. How are you gonna like, what’s your, your take? If you were to look at a crystal ball on, on what that’s going to look like, um, down the road.

Charlie Ebersol: There’s a great quote by the doctor who runs the University of Colorado’s medical program. He’s got 11,000 something doctors under his stead. And he said in a quote, I literally just heard this today. He said in a quote, AI will not replace doctors, but it will replace doctors who don’t understand AI. And I think that that is probably the best answer for the entertainment business is people who AI is not going to replace Tom cruise, but you. If you want to succeed in entertainment, you have got to figure out how to use AI. Because AI is a tool. Ai is a. There’s a lot being said for like people talking about agentic And. It’s gonna it’s gonna take over, you know, all this other stuff, which, you know, look, that may be true. I can’t think of another time in the history of the universe where a superior intellect didn’t supplant the inferior intellect. But we’re not there yet. Like AI for the next ten years is an exceptionally good, um, data retrieval device, I think. And executor. But ultimately, you know, is it going to write a symphony? Is it gonna write? Um.

Lee Kantor: Well, it’s writing a lot of songs that are in Spotify top 100.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah. But they’re not. Yeah. But they’re not net new. Like when you think about transfer, when you think about music, there’s the, there’s the great speech in, uh, The Devil Wears Prada, the first one where Meryl Streep where where Anne Hathaway sort of scoffs at her choosing between two blue belts. Right? Yeah. And she scoffs her and she gives her this speech about you don’t know what went into this, but you think you made a choice, but you didn’t make a choice, right? We made that choice for you seven years ago, and then you picked it out of the bargain. You know, a basket. Similarly with AI, it’s like you have transformational artists. Like when you think about the, the, the advent of hip hop, um, that was a net new piece of art that then defined the whole next generation. And you’ve had these sort of touchstone moments that have changed the way we think about things. When you think about like, you know, how modern art works, etc., they, they require like Christopher Nolan, AI is not making a Christopher Nolan movie like inception until someone has made something like inception. And then AI will iterate on top of that. And I think what you’re going to find is the artists who figure out how to utilize their creative mind, the the spark of life that makes the human spirit that causes artists to be able to create what they create. When, when an artist figures out how to use AI to supercharge that concept, you’re going to get net new pieces of art, which then AI will obviously, to your point, be a fast follow on and build on. But evolution comes from innovation, and innovation has to be an individual. It’s an individual experiment. Experiment.

Lee Kantor: But how do you see the entertainment world kind of adjusting to the new reality of our attention being so fragmented? Um, like there’s no, it’s not a monoculture anymore. There’s not kind of the, um, water cooler. Talk about the Seinfeld finale. Like I don’t, you know, you’re watching things that I never heard of. I’m watching things you’ve never heard of. And there’s not kind of that common language. And it’s so fragmented. How does an individual artist, you know, monetize their work? Uh, in a world I know there’s a lot more opportunity. Um, but there’s going to be a lot more opportunity than making a lot less than they did previously.

Charlie Ebersol: Well, there’s two points here, I think that I don’t see it as the death of content. And creativity I see is the death of old, of the old school way of doing it, where you had gatekeepers like Mr. Beast could not exist.

Lee Kantor: Right back in the day. Look, the irate dogs guy couldn’t exist. I mean, there’s, there’s people that have niches that have figured out how to monetize it. But when everybody’s attention is so, um, is, is just built on just these little mini things. Like there’s a whole industry now of just those vertical phone serials that AI is cranking out scripts for that are, you know, 100 episodes. And then people are paying a little bit for each one just to know what happens next. Like there’s new industries happening in entertainment. It just as an artist, how are they like, are you going to have to be your own kind of production company and distribution company in order to, to make it in, uh, as a creator nowadays.

Charlie Ebersol: I think you have the ability to be that, but I don’t think you have to be that. I mean, I think the reality is, um, 150 million Americans tuned in to watch Bad Bunny together and.

Lee Kantor: Right. But that’s one singular thing, like most.

Charlie Ebersol: But I don’t think, but but but Lee, I don’t think that that’s. I can probably name a half a dozen TV shows and I say TV with air quotes because the how you consume them is probably different now with respect to streaming and phones and iPads and all this other stuff. But there are there have been massive cultural touchstones. I mean, if I have to hear the, uh, demon Hunter. The K-pop demon Hunter song. One more time. Um, I’m gonna lose my mind, but I’m in good company. There’s half a billion people listening to that, you know, stream that stream that show on Netflix. I think that you still have mega, mega content moments. But I also think that what’s happening now is the number of people being served by content now is higher than it has ever been in history. And that is because we can serve bespoke content to so many of them. So if you have a niche that you’re interested in, where you where it used to be that you would have to go find, you know, there was a comic book series when I was a kid called spawn that was only sold in certain comic books. It eventually got made into a movie because the fans found it, and they went to the Newbury Comics of Boston and all these other places to find the comic book, and it turned into something.

Charlie Ebersol: But I think if you looked at the gross number of people who ever read the spawn comic book, it was probably hundreds of thousands of people today. To your point, there are there are people that are doing garage laboratory experiments on YouTube that are doing 30 million views. I think that the scale is completely different. I also think that we what what basically happened in my mind is that we democratized access to excuse me, we democratize access and ability to create and distribute content. And then we empowered every human being in the world to carry around Steve Jobs, you know, internet communication device, so that now every single person with access to electricity has access to every single piece of content that has ever been created in human history. And so now I think what you’re seeing is a shift in the ideology of content commercialization and content distribution, but you’re not seeing the death of mega content because the reality is human beings are communal in inherently. And so, I mean, look, they are a hail project. Hail Mary did box office numbers that were in line with the box office of pre-pandemic numbers. That’s because people are looking for an excuse. They’re going to do it for Chris Nolan again, with with with Troy or not Troy. Um, the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Lee Kantor: Odyssey.

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah, the Odyssey. So I think they still exist. I just think that people are being served at an individual level now too. And so it seems like it’s less, but the reality is there are more people watching things. When my dad retired in 2011, The New York Times said that he produced eight of the ten most watched events in the history of the world. Like he produced the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics and the Atlanta Olympics and Super Bowls and all this other stuff. And I think that all eight things that he produced by audience were have been have been dwarfed by internet only videos now in terms of now. His was a concurrent audience, which I think he’s probably still safely in the top 25. But if you think about it, Justin Bieber’s videos are doing a billion, a billion, five views, which is, you know, inconceivable 15 years ago.

Lee Kantor: Right. Well, you mentioned the, um, K-pop demon Hunter thing. Uh, how much money would that person if that was released? And it even got to the point of where it is today. How much more money would that have been to the creators and the participants of that if it was, you know, ten years beforehand? I mean, they would have made lots more money. You think they would have gotten screwed there first?

Charlie Ebersol: Yeah, it was their first project. They would have gotten a terrible record deal. Ask Miley Cyrus how much money she made on Hannah Montana. Like that was a blowout runaway hit. Or asked the High School Musical kids how much they made on that. Those guys were under Disney contracts. They made, you know, whatever Disney scale was at the time. They didn’t own the music. I mean, Hannah Montana, the, the, the Masters and the recordings of those songs are actually owned by Disney. Like they are written by the Disney Corporation. So I in reality, I think those people probably make more money now because unlike 15 years ago, there’s a whole apparatus where those three women who wrote the songs and sang the songs, all this other stuff, can now go online, become famous and have live shows that are outside of Netflix’s reach. And so Netflix has to pay them so much more money to do what they do.

Lee Kantor: So that would would that be your recommendation? If you’re an artist nowadays, a creator is to just kind of choose yourself and build your own following an audience, and then that’ll make you more money over the long run, as opposed to an actor that maybe got residuals back in the day if they were on a sitcom somewhere.

Charlie Ebersol: Well, yeah, that’s exactly my advice I had in my career in the last 15 years. I had the number one show on CNBC. I had the number one show on TNT. I had the number one show on Netflix for a period of time and all these different places and meaning a show I created that I put on television that aired multiple seasons in those in those shows cases. And I would have made infinitely more money if I had produced any of those shows today on YouTube.

Lee Kantor: So that’s the lesson, is choose yourself and build a team around you.

Charlie Ebersol: That is always my advice. My advice is always be an entrepreneur and build it yourself. Because the worst thing that can happen is you fail. The best thing that can happen is you have economic and you have emotional freedom, which I don’t know that there’s really a price tag on. And if you want to make money, anyone can make money. There’s a thousand ways to make money. Making money on your own is always better than making it for someone else.

Lee Kantor: Well, Charlie, it’s been a joy chatting with you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Um, now that you’re, uh, I guess is your. What’s the best way to get a hold of you? Or do you want people to get Ahold of you? Um, what is the, uh, the best way to connect with you?

Charlie Ebersol: Um, I’m at Charlie Ebersol on Instagram and I tell people if they want to try to connect or reach out, that that is always the best way to send me a note and connect.

Lee Kantor: Well, congratulations on all the success and thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Charlie Ebersol: Hey Lee, thank you so much for taking the time means the world.

Lee Kantor: All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.