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Ben Sherwood: Living Life’s Deepest Questions | E09 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Ben Sherwood: The goal should not necessarily be to try something new with the intention of being the very best in the world, but instead almost answer the question. I want to go try that, can I be excellent at it?
• 0:08
  Ben Sherwood: No one's really going to ever be able to answer the question about what the right choice is for you. No one's ever going to be able to tell you which is the right path, or should you stay with this career switch? To the extent you can go live the question, and in the course of living that question, you can find some of the answers.
• 0:27
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to In Search of Excellence, our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be to learn, educate and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves, and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face in our lives. Achieving Excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. And we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. Today, my guest is my great friend Ben Sherwood. Ben is the former executive producer of Good Morning America, the former president of ABC News, the former president of Disney ABC Television Group, the former co chairman of Disney media networks and the former co chair of Hulu and Andy networks. at Disney and ABC, he managed a $12 billion business with 12,000 employees and he was responsible for the creation of more than 24,000 hours of original content every year. Ben is also the author of four critically acclaimed best selling books. He is currently the founder and CEO of mojo, a new and exciting venture backed startup that helps parents coach their young children and various sports.
• 1:44
  Randall Kaplan: Ben, welcome to a Search of Excellence.
• 1:46
  Ben Sherwood: Thank you for the invitation, Randy.
• 1:48
  Randall Kaplan: I always start out my podcast with family. And I do that because for nearly all of us were a product of our surroundings and upbringing. And that starts with our parents. I think it's every parent's goal to be great role models for their kids. And part of that is trying to teach us from a young age to excel and be the best that we can be. So what were your parents like Bannon? Did they instill these kinds of values in you?
• 2:09
  Ben Sherwood: First of all, it's a pleasure to be here. I could go on for quite a while about de Indyk, Sherwood my mom and dad, my late parents, both of them were loving, supportive and believed in our potential my big sister and I and I would say that their distinguishing traits. My father was a towering figure in Los Angeles. He was six, four. He was a lawyer. He went to Yale Harvard Law School was clerked for justice Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, brilliant legal mind, and a builder of many of the civic institutions in Los Angeles, the LA County Museum, the Center Theatre Group downtown. So he was a larger than life figure.
• 2:49
  Ben Sherwood: And he was someone who set very high standards for us, even though he never put any pressure whatsoever, just hugely influential person who believed in our potential and wanted us to reach it. He was someone who, while he went into the law, really wanted to be a diplomat, wanted to be an academic or wanted to be in politics, at or in journalism. And so he, to a certain extent, pushed me and my sister in the directions that he did not pursue because of his own parents, his father had dropped out of high school, his father had been a businessman, his father insisted that his son dec, become a professional. And so I think that what's interesting is that we all in some way act out our own childhoods on our own kids, as you say in your question. And our father pushed us hard toward careers in public service or trying to make a difference in the world. My mother was a professional volunteer, and a homemaker unbelievably involved in our lives. And she was the kind of mom who made every opportunity available to us believed in us enormously and pushed us to pursue our individual passions, a home filled with love, a home filled with very high standards, and a home filled with a sense that whatever we set our minds to our parents are going to encourage us to pursue
• 4:09
  Randall Kaplan: makes a huge difference in your confidence and everything else. You're being well adjusted when you have parents giving you that kind of loving, supportive family. So you have awesome parents, but what kind of kid were you? I mean, kids love to have fun. So let's start there.
• 4:26
  Ben Sherwood: I was a pretty serious kid, I would say, I used to play in the neighborhood with my neighbor, Wendy bar Tosh, who was my best friend when I was really little. I was afraid of the ball when it came to team sports. So I played little league and I played I was so soccer but I always just tried to disappear. I wanted to be invisible. And I think that I was interested in the things that kids are interested in. I was interested in magic as a boy. And in fact, I earn my spending money as a kid by doing birthday party magic shows for kids in the neighborhood. I ended up quitting the stage magic after one birthday party at Mary Bings house. Why? and grown up in the background a woman named Oliver Barron, who is one of the leading women of Los Angeles started heckling me and shouting how I was doing my trucks. And I stormed off the stage and never returned. And I would say that as a kid, I was pretty studious. I took my schoolwork pretty seriously. And I ended up in high school spending a lot of time in debate, which was really one of my passions. And that turned me into a very argumentative young man, and pretty aggressive in arguments. And I think many of my personality defects are a function of the fact that at an early age, I earned to argue, and debate with everybody on every topic can take any side of any issue and go for the kill.
• 5:38
  Ben Sherwood: And so I've spent much of my life trying to recover from the experience of becoming a pretty successful debater in high school.
• 5:49
  Randall Kaplan: I don't think you notice, but my son, Charlie, is a magician, he used to be much more into it, he would do tricks. You know what it's like?
• 5:57
  Randall Kaplan: You would wow people. But you learn a great ability to tell a story and become a good public speaker, did you feel that as well, because to get that at a young age is really invaluable.
• 6:10
  Ben Sherwood: I love magic, because I think that there's the element of surprise, there's the element of wonder. And your right patter is the key to a good magic trick. Basically, there's probably only 10 or 20 Really great card tricks and 10 or 20, great coin tricks, and everything else is a version of those core 10 or 20 tricks. And everything else is kind of the pattern of the story you tell with that truck. And I had a great time making up my own stories for each of the trucks even though they were sort of familiar, I would get the truck at the magic Store in Hollywood.
• 6:41
  Ben Sherwood: I'd bring it home I would read the pattern that was recommended that came with the truck. And then part of my my thing was to try to come up with my own story. My own version of why I was doing the strike and sort of my own little surprises were that you mentioned
• 6:56
  Randall Kaplan: you were a studious kid. Did that mean you had a good work ethic you came home, you open up the books and you start to finish you'd be up late on the books or and when did you start thinking about your future than a con when you are a young teenager did accom later, as you got into college,
• 7:14
  Ben Sherwood: terms of work ethic, I think our family we were all pretty hard workers and I was somebody who always wanted to be ahead. I never liked that feeling that I was either behind or it was the last minute or I had to kind of stay up all night. So I was I was the kind of person who was always planning ahead. I don't know why. But I'm just somebody who wanted to be organized a few days before something was due or start studying for a test a few days before I needed to I fact I never pulled an all nighter in college until the last couple of weeks of college when we had to print out our senior theses or dissertations. And there, I stayed up all night a couple nights printing out my friend's dissertations because I had finished mine ahead of time. And so I was just kind of running the printer to make sure that everybody got theirs. And on time too. That's when I stayed up all night. That's actually when I stayed up the latest was to help my friends get through in terms of thinking about the future. Look, I have an older sister who's five years older Liz. And I think that she's a classic first child, incredibly smart, incredibly driven, really close friend protective of her little brother, when we were kids, we'd spend summers together in different places.
• 8:24
  Ben Sherwood: And she would always look out for me and protect me. I worshipped her as a kid. And I followed five years behind her.
• 8:31
  Ben Sherwood: And so I think that as my sister got older, I began to watch her and the things that she was doing. And she's the one who really started me out thinking about what was going to come because off she went to college, when I was starting high school and she was in college when I was in high school. And then when I got to college, she was off in graduate school. And I began to think about that step.
• 8:48
  Ben Sherwood: And then when she went to work, right after graduate school, I was in graduate school and starting to think about what to do next. And so I think that my big sister is a big reason that I thought about the future. And then my mom and dad, they were always asking questions, not about putting pressure on but just always asking questions about and introducing us to interesting people and pointing out interesting directions that you could take your life. There
• 9:13
  Randall Kaplan: are a lot of people listening and watching who have kids and you have two teenage boys. What's your best advice to parents on how to motivate their kids to be the best they can be and live up to their potential? And in your view? Is there any particular age that parents should make a conscious effort to focus on this if it's not innate? For somebody
• 9:32
  Ben Sherwood: have a lot of humility about parenting in these questions, Randy, and I wish I could offer some great advice or wisdom. I think that I think there are two parts to it.
• 9:40
  Ben Sherwood: One, I hope that I'm married very well in the sense that I married a very grounded, very thoughtful, very loving person who does not put pressure on our kids does not drive them hard.
• 9:56
  Ben Sherwood: She listens incredibly carefully to them, and she surrounds them with have a sense of love and everything's gonna be okay. And so I think in a certain sense, I don't know the the secret of driving your kids of getting your kids to be motivated of getting of inspiring your kids to perform or to excel. I think that a home filled with love and a sense of belief. And the sense of belief in their potential and their abilities is a really important piece of that. I also think, frankly, that a lot of the techniques that I've seen used by my friends, and sometimes that I have resorted to myself, are counterproductive, that is putting pressure on your kid to perform putting pressure on a kid to achieve. I, for instance, made the terrible mistake of making it clear to my sons that I love chess, and that I hope that they would play chess, I bought them chess sets, I bought them Dodgers chess sets, when we lived in New York, I bought them New York Yankees chess sets, I bought them Simpsons chess sets, I bought them 25 Different chess sets, the more I pushed, the less interested they were. And the result was is that neither of my boys plays chess, to my disappointment. However, they took up all kinds of activities and interests that are of zero interest to me. And all I've tried to do is encourage them with everything, I've got to pursue the things that they love. So one of my son's likes to play the drums, he's playing the drums, he's working on the drums, he's doing that on his own, I have very little involvement with that I have very little visibility into his drumming, but it's something that gives him a lot of pleasure. Same with sports. As I said before, I was afraid of the ball wanted to be invisible on the field. But both of my boys love to play sports. A lot of that comes from their mother.
• 11:33
  Ben Sherwood: And so we've encouraged them with everything, we've got to play sports, and I've actually coached for different sports, not qualified in any of them.
• 11:38
  Ben Sherwood: But I wanted to be out there on the field with them and to encourage them. So I read soccer for Dummies, I watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I have done everything I could to be relevant and to encourage them and the things that they want to want to do.
• 11:52
  Randall Kaplan: You're an incredible parent, I know Karen is as well, I see you outside playing with your kids, I think it's awesome. And I do hear him playing the drums as well. As you may know, I play the drums also. And once in a while I keep the windows open, just get some fresh air in there. But it's very, very cool. I want to talk about the meaning and importance of education. Now my dad said something to me when I was in the eighth grade, he said that the most important investment in someone's future is to get the best education possible. Do you agree with that?
• 12:24
  Ben Sherwood: 100% I think that there is if there's anything that we can give our kids, and if there's anything that we should save for and everything that we should should fight for.
• 12:34
  Ben Sherwood: It's an education for our children. And I was incredibly fortunate to fantastic education, my parents guided me on that journey. And it's something that I think makes the biggest difference. If you have the chance to have great teachers, if you have the chance to push yourself, challenge yourself, if you have the chance to discover the things you're interested in with those great teachers, all kinds of things are possible. And I think that, in a sense, it's a working hard, keeps options open. And that's the one thing that I would say that I've said to my sons, and it's something that my parents said to me, which is that the reason for working hard is that the harder you work, the more options you have in terms of your education. And the more options you have in terms of your education, that means the more options you have ultimately in life. And so I think that without question, education is the thing that opens the most doors. And as part of education, I would say that, but for me language was something that was really interesting and writing.
• 13:30
  Ben Sherwood: So as part of education, I think that writing is one of those unbelievably important tools sometimes neglected. But writing is the thing that of course we use so frequently and in so many parts of our lives. And so writing as it relates to education is another area that I think is super important.
• 13:47
  Randall Kaplan: You are an incredible student, I'm gonna just have to go on for a minute or two here about how good you are you graduated from the prestigious Harvard Westlake School in Los Angeles. Then you go to Harvard, where you're Phi Beta Kappa. And for those people who don't know what Phi Beta Kappa is, it's the oldest, most prestigious honor society in the United States, it's typically awarded to top one to 3% of the student body. It's something you don't apply for they find you.
• 14:14
  Randall Kaplan: So you're in the top 1% of one percenters and that's pretty rarefied air. Most people could never do that in a billion years, no matter how hard we try. So how did you do that? Is it because you're naturally gifted and that school came easy to you? Or were you the hardest worker a little bit of both?
• 14:30
  Ben Sherwood: I gotta tell you along the way. I've met so many people much, much smarter, much more talented, much more gifted.
• 14:37
  Ben Sherwood: I just worked my ass off. I just worked hard. And a lot of weekends, a lot of nights in the library and grinding away. I'd say that I wish it were were searched some some special brains or gift. It's I was a grinder and I've actually felt that way career wise too. I just I work super hard and have grinded away. You know, I think I had a few of them. adages but I tried to make the most of those advantages by with hard work.
• 15:57
  Randall Kaplan: We share that DNA, I'm a complete grinder. And I had this mentality called FIFO. First in last out, I'd sit in a law library. When I was a freshman, sophomore, junior in college, and I was there till 10 o'clock on a Tuesday, Thursday night, when I had nothing going on. Very interesting. There are 10 of us there, we all got to know each other very, very well.
• 16:17
  Randall Kaplan: And it's, we've all done pretty well in our careers. And it really does speak to work ethic.
• 16:21
  Randall Kaplan: I think, for me, work ethic is the most important element to our success, not only in our professional life, but in our personal lives as well.
• 16:31
  Ben Sherwood: I was just getting ready, you set a high bar for work ethic, I see you working hard, I see you exercising hard, I see you parenting hard, you go all out and everything that you do. So I think that you've got the work ethic thing down.
• 16:45
  Randall Kaplan: Thank you, I appreciate that very much, especially coming from you. When you get to Harvard, is it your goal to be at the top of a class. I mean, that's, that's really hard to do. And that's quite a goal to set for yourself.
• 16:58
  Ben Sherwood: You know, I didn't think about it that way. When I got there, I was pretty intimidated. And it's, you know, big class, I don't know, 1400 1600 kids. And I just tried to do what my dad always told me to do, which is to marched your own drummer, and to do your own thing. And so I didn't really have an ambition. I actually don't even know if I was at the top of my class or getting near the top of my class. Yes, in my senior year, I was chosen for the Phi Beta Kappa group. But man, I was grinding away and I was not aware of where I was in the class or how I was doing, I was just trying to do my best.
• 17:30
  Ben Sherwood: And so I didn't set that as a goal. I just, I just wanted to make the most of, of the experience, most of every class, I happen to have picked classes pretty well. I love the classes that I took, I love my major, I actually created kind of my own major, which was a combination of government, and history. And I ended up taking a year off during college to spend time in North Carolina, where I worked for a little newspaper. And that's where I also did research for my senior thesis. And so when you love it, the way I loved a lot of the things that I was doing, I was able to work really hard and and then at the end, I was actually kind of surprised when it turned out the way it did. It turned out pretty well. Just to
• 18:10
  Randall Kaplan: be clear, Phi Beta Kappa as top 1% to 5% is typically a top one to 3%. So you're being a little humble.
• 18:18
  Randall Kaplan: But then you become a Rhodes Scholar. So tell us about that what it is and how that came about. That's
• 18:23
  Ben Sherwood: a fellowship to England for two years, typically or three years in some cases.
• 18:26
  Ben Sherwood: And that came about, as I mentioned earlier, my big sister, Liz, five years older, was a Rhodes Scholar in 1981.
• 18:34
  Ben Sherwood: And off she went to England. And it was something that was just on my radar as as a long shot.
• 18:43
  Ben Sherwood: When you graduate from college, that there are these fellowships where you can go to England, you can travel around the world on a Fulbright Fellowship, my father had been something called a Sheldon travelling fellow when he graduated from law school, he got to travel around the world for a year with my mom and study legal institutions and the law in different countries, which was for young graduates of law school. And so I always had in my mind that when I finished college that I would love to try to apply for some fellowship and get to go overseas and have some international experience. And so I had a big stack of different fellowships to apply for. And I applied for a whole bunch of them. And one of them the Rhodes, there are 32 Rhodes Scholars selected every year in the United States. And I applied from California, which is a big competitive state. And I thought there was very little chance that family would get two Rhodes scholarships, let alone one and I still applied and during the interviewing process, both at the California level and then at the regional level, there are multiple stages to the process.
• 19:46
  Ben Sherwood: at both levels, I got grilled by the committees about why one family should get two of these fellowships, shouldn't they be spread out more? And I can't remember exactly my arguments or my debating, but I did my very best to say that these should be given out on merit. And here's why I think I could make a lot out of an experience in England, and in Oxford, and I was lucky that I got one. So off I went I spent three incredible years at maudlin College, which is one of the old colleges in Oxford, and I did two different academic programs. First was a program in the history of the British Empire and Commonwealth where I was focused mainly mainly on Africa and India. And then I did a second program in development economics, both of the master's degrees. And the development economics story, really, the history of developing countries takes off when the British Empire ends in the 50s or 60s when decolonization happened in India, broke free. And when African countries broke free of the Imperial chains, and those countries then became developing countries and Modern History of those countries is really about development economics, how those countries have tried to pick themselves up.
• 20:57
  Randall Kaplan: Just to put some details on how difficult it is to get a Rhodes Scholar, there's 32 of them, they get 1000s of applications and the acceptance rate at Harvard is 5.6%. But the acceptance rate to be a Rhodes Scholar once you get the letter and you apply as seven tenths of 1%. So you said you didn't think you were going to get it and you applied? What do you say to people who want to get ahead, but then look at something that's really hard to get. And they know the numbers like there's 200 applicants for one job and they say, half that why bother? I have no chance, I got the Rhodes Scholar letter to please apply. I was Phi Beta Kappa. And I said to myself, There's no way on earth, I'm going to get this, I'm not going to waste my time. It requires an enormous amount of work. So that's what I did. I said, I've got no shot. I'm not doing it.
• 21:44
  Randall Kaplan: I'm not even going to try to do it. But what do you say to people find the odds are so great, that they just say, not going to even try?
• 21:52
  Ben Sherwood: So a couple things. First of all, I never knew those statistics, I had never known the percentage chance of getting Rhodes scholarship. That's news to me.
• 22:02
  Ben Sherwood: So you taught me something today, Randy. And I'm relieved to know that the reason you know the phi bat Phi Beta Kappa numbers is because you are Phi Beta Kappa. Because I didn't know those statistics either. I wasn't aware of them. I'm not being modest. I just I just didn't know the chances. Here's how I think about it, I think about it. A little bit of the reason why I always play the Powerball lottery, when the when the pot goes over $100 million.
• 22:25
  Randall Kaplan: I do the same thing. By the way,
• 22:27
  Ben Sherwood: I always buy a ticket. And the reason I buy a ticket is that old phrase from some ad in New York, which is you can't win if you don't play.
• 22:33
  Ben Sherwood: And I remember being in New York and seeing these ads that would basically say that, hey, if you don't throw your hat in the ring, you can't win. And so my view was with something like a fellowship or something like a job, you work your hardest, you do your best, you make your best case, you put your application in, you do everything, you've got to figure out a way. And then if you're lucky, good things happen. And if you're not, life's gonna be just fine, you're gonna be okay, you're gonna, you're gonna figure something else out. Worst thing that happens is that you've spent a bunch of time thinking about what you want to do with your life. And maybe you've convinced yourself that you want to go to England and you want to spend a few years at an old university, where it's really rainy, and it's really cold. But you've persuaded yourself, you want to do that. And there are lots of ways to go to England and go to one of those universities that don't involve the Rhodes Scholarship. I mean, I get a road scholarship, maybe there's another fellowship that you can go on. Maybe if you can't get a fellowship, maybe there's another way you can show up there and, and do that work.
• 23:36
  Ben Sherwood: And so I think that for me, it reminds me actually of a question that I was asked during my Rhodes interview, I haven't thought about this probably in 35 years. But I remember during the California Rhodes interview, there was this, actually, it was the regional interview, and there was this guy from Arizona.
• 23:53
  Ben Sherwood: He was a Rhodes Scholar many years earlier. I'm sure he was younger than than I am today.
• 23:57
  Ben Sherwood: But he seemed like an old, impossible dude, who was bent on messing me up. And he asked me a question. He said, in one of your essays, you mentioned that you are a supporter of gun control. I have a question for you. A principle question. He said, If you knew that supporting gun control, would mean that you would lose an election for office, would you change your position on gun control? And I asked him, What are the chances of losing? Is it 100% chance? Or is it a 99% chance, which is the percentage I just needed to know the percentage? And he said, 100%?
• 24:39
  Ben Sherwood: And I said, Well, if it's 100%, I changed my position. But if it's 99%, I wouldn't change my position. And he jumped up from his chair. It was on top of me, why, why? And I said, Well, if you know, 100%, you're going to lose, and you're not going to have a chance to persuade anybody. If anything, then why hold that position if it's going to doom you to defeat, but if you have a if there's you have a 1% chance of winning. If you stick to that position, then I would fight like hell for that position. I think it's the same thing with applying for things that seem out of reach. If you're told 100% Never gonna happen. You can't get it, then it's a waste of time. But if you've got a 1% chance of making it happen, that seems good enough to me, one out of 100 Go for it.
• 25:25
  Randall Kaplan: You know you talk about the mega lottery, like you. First I don't gamble.
• 25:28
  Randall Kaplan: I go to Las Vegas, and I watch people it's not fun for me to lose money. I I work hard for my money. It's just not fun for me.
• 25:37
  Randall Kaplan: I do play the roulette wheel. I give myself $100 And then I'm done. I play the lottery and of course, there are no winners in Brentwood or in West LA. So I usually drive someplace that is far away from here. It seems like there are No. Winners hear something interesting. And I know we're moving off topic for a second, the winner of the billion and a half dollar lottery came from a ticket in Novi Michigan, I was actually I was there at that Kroger a few months before moving my daughter into college, we shot there at the market, it's about 20 minutes from campus, the winner has not claimed the prize yet.
• 26:13
  Randall Kaplan: Is that incredible? I mean, that ticket could be lost somewhere.
• 26:20
  Ben Sherwood: But they've got a year, they're probably sitting there someplace completely freaking out. And trying to figure out, because I play fairly regularly, when the pot gets over 100 million, I think about that question about whether you wait 364 days, until the last possible day to go in there or whether you go in there right away, claim it and go start figuring out what you're going to do with it. But I would think that would be pretty overwhelming. And notice how I knew it was Michigan because I was tracking that one.
• 26:46
  Randall Kaplan: It's interesting, you'd have to keep that thing in a safe place, in a bank safe deposit vault somewhere. But that's just a lot of money in a four by three inch piece of paper to just take a risk, something could happen to it. I mean, I think I would, I think I'd call my lawyers, I'd hire the Brinks truck or some security for us. And I'd head down there just to make sure it's off my plate. I think in Michigan, too, you can keep your name confidential. I'm pretty sure about that. So there's no risk of public mayhem. So you're a great student, but many people aren't a great student. So if you can't get a good education or an education at all, like so many people, what's your advice to them?
• 27:26
  Ben Sherwood: I think life is an education. And if you can't go to a if you can't go to a particular institution, or go pursue a particular path, one of my great mentors, and one of my role models was Tom Brokaw. I worked for a time at NBC News for about five years. And Tom liked to tease me all the time that he was a C student from South Dakota, who had gone to the University of Iowa. And he liked to keep track of all the C students in the world who ruled the world. And he likes to keep track of all the people who hadn't finished high school and hadn't finished college who had succeeded Peter Jennings the great Anchorman from from Canada and ABC News, actually never finished high school. Brian Williams, the anchorman from NBC News, did not finish American University. And Tom used to keep a list and would always in fact, he even wrote an op ed piece in The New York Times, about how all these pointy heads and all these Ivy League guys and women who have 4.0 grade point averages, they don't know much.
• 28:29
  Ben Sherwood: Life teaches you a lot more. And if you grew up in South Dakota, and you made your way across the country to LA and then to Washington and then to Rockefeller Center. things turn out just fine. And I I tend to believe all those things, including that book by Frank Bruni, about where you go isn't who you are, that all that stuff matters, but it's not dispositive in terms of where you end up in life and how successful you are.
• 28:57
  Randall Kaplan: I think about a couple of things. I think about my friend, Ray Catholic, he was one of my closest friends. At some point. He was the youngest us Appeals Court judge in the country. He was the two time candidate for the US Supreme Court. I think he was the front runner going in before. Justice Cavanaugh got the position. But I saw a TED talk he did recently and I didn't know this. And he talks about he's one of the most brilliant people that I know. He clerked for Justice White on the US Supreme Court. He sent his podcast, he got a 2.01 grade point, his first year at Michigan. And then he had like a 2.1 for his second year at Michigan. So pretty remarkable stuff. I agree. You don't have to be a great student. And we hear so many times the a student's work for the C students. And I've seen that a lot in my life and career and I know you have as well. I just want to comment on your sister and the Rhodes Scholarship. And this is just rarefied air.
• 30:01
  Randall Kaplan: You're the only brother sister pair of Rhodes scholars in the history of the Rhodes Scholarship, which started in 1902. I mean, the only ones That's just insane. You know, you see with professional athletes, I think of Peyton and Eli Manning, TJ and JJ Watt, tell curry and Steph Curry, but the only ones in history. I mean, how does that even happen?
• 30:21
  Randall Kaplan: Look, and I also want to lotto chance as luck. No luck. No way.
• 30:27
  Ben Sherwood: I gotta point something else out important, important historical fact. Men were only eligible for the Rhodes Scholarship for the first 77 years and the scholarship for 75 years. Women only became eligible in the 1970s. So my sister was among the first women to become eligible in 1981. And so I just want to point out that yes, thank you for that. And I'd say that my mom was extremely proud. And my mom was quite could tell a lot of people about this this news, but it was there had been brothers before there had been Yeah, there had been fathers and sons there had been actually fathers and daughters.
• 31:03
  Ben Sherwood: I think technically, maybe were the first brother and sister.
• 31:06
  Ben Sherwood: I'm sure there have been some sense. So I'm just I'm just trying to put that into historical perspective.
• 31:11
  Randall Kaplan: Yeah, I met your mom at a mark Selwyn art gallery opening. I said, Oh, Ben's my neighbor. And he's my friend.
• 31:19
  Randall Kaplan: And I didn't know you were a Rhodes Scholar. But she was the one who actually told me that film. And she was pretty damn proud, man. That's, that's for sure. All right, we're gonna talk about your professional career. Now we've gone through the Rockstar academic career.
• 31:31
  Randall Kaplan: And we've talked about the valuing education and building block to excellence. And here's the map, you work hard in high school, getting into good college, and you want to get do all to get a good job when you graduate. And now it's time for the real world to begin. So we're going to walk through your remarkable career, news, television writing as an entrepreneur, and we're gonna go through them one by one. But let's start with your first job.
• 31:54
  Randall Kaplan: You're 21 years old, you graduated from Harvard, and what's the plan?
• 31:59
  Ben Sherwood: The plan was I finished college and then I finished graduate school in England. And my first job job, I had internships. Along the way.
• 32:05
  Ben Sherwood: I had internships in college, I went to New York and worked at CBS News. I went to Washington and worked at the LA Times. I worked went to North Carolina and worked for the Raleigh news and observer. So I had summer internships. But my first job job when I got out of school, I had to decide and I had big choice was between print journalism and television journalism. And I spent an endless amount of time torturing my friends and mentors about should I go toward print? Say the New York Times Wall Street Journal is the dream, LA Times where I'd work. Should you go in that direction? Or should you go to our television, CBS News at the time was sort of the gold standard. ABC News, NBC News in that direction. CNN was just getting started. And in the end, I chose television. And then I tried to figure out the best possible place to go, I thought I was gonna go to CBS News. And at the last second, I switched directions. And I ended up going to ABC News, where I began as an associate producer in 1989. In August on a brand new program that was debuting that month, called primetime live with Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson and I was an associate producer in the investigative unit at primetime life,
• 33:21
  Randall Kaplan: where you accepted to every job you applied for I mean, that's an incredible resume. You have the academics, you have the internships was it 100% acceptance rate when you're looking for these jobs?
• 33:34
  Ben Sherwood: I cannot remember the the acceptance rate, but I can tell you it was not 100% Because the fact was, I had no relevant job experience. I had a couple master's degrees in British imperial history and development economics. But I had never really spent much time in an edit room. I'd never spent much time shooting video, I'd never spent much time out on the streets, doing TV reports. And so I had certain limitations. I had some clips, I had written articles for newspapers, and I had done a bunch of journalism in print. But no, I got turned down all over the place. I got rejected all over the place for jobs. But I did have a couple of opportunities. I had an opportunity at CBS had an opportunity to ABC, I had to choose between those two. And what I can remember very vividly, I had been an intern at CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, in the summer of 1983.
• 34:19
  Ben Sherwood: That was an amazing experience.
• 34:23
  Ben Sherwood: I loved it. And twice during that internship two times. I came in early every morning, I followed your mantra. And I got in first I was there. I turned the lights on in the newsroom in the morning. And I got there super early because I wanted to read all the newspapers and prepare and be ready. But I also got there early because I had been told to Dan Rather, came to work early some mornings to work on his royal typewriter and do his correspondence. And twice that summer. Dan came in early and twice that summer, I had the privilege of getting to talk to Dan, just in the newsroom all by ourselves. And we talked for 10 or 15 minutes before he would go about his business. But those were kind of one on one moments with the anchorman of the CBS Evening News. Walter Cronkite successor was thrilling for me to get to spend 1020 minutes with the great man and just talk to him about what he was doing and what he thought of the news and, and to get to know him a little bit on the day that I was appointed many, many years later President of ABC News in 2010. I remember my new admin came into my office at ABC headquarters on 66th Street in Manhattan and brought me an envelope. And in that envelope, there was a handwritten note and it had been messengered over and I opened it. The very first piece of correspondence I opened when I had been appointed President of ABC News was from Dan Rather.
• 35:47
  Ben Sherwood: And it was a simple note. It said, I always knew this day was would come. I just hoped it would be at CBS News, congratulations. And that's the kind of guy he was remembering an intern 30 years earlier. And also the kind of guy he was to sort of remember those morning conversations before dawn with just an intern, sitting there in the dark couple lights on in the newsroom. So excited to be there. So excited to be part of CBS News. So excited to be in the middle of the action in broadcasting. And it was, you know, he's, he's a was a wonderful mentor and an a friend. I disappointed him when I chose ABC over CBS News when I took that job in 1989. And he sort of needling me a little bit 30 years later, when I ended up running that organization.
• 36:41
  Randall Kaplan: How inspiring is that? But think about for reward for the hard work getting in early and being the first one there. I mean, there's so many great lessons that come out of being there first. I mean, how many times you tell people, you want to get ahead, you work hard. It's fine to be an A, okay, you can do really well being an A, it's great to be an A plus, all right, you're in the rarefied air. But how about a triple plus, that really means every single day, you're the first one there. It could be four in the morning, whatever your job is, and you're the last one to leave, which typically, you've worked in very high demanding jobs. You're talking about midnight or one in the morning regularly for long periods of time.
• 37:22
  Ben Sherwood: Yeah, my another mentor and an incredible boss, who I had the good luck to work with jumping ahead. That worked with him for 10 years Bob Iger at Disney. Bob famously gets up somewhere around four to 430.
• 37:32
  Ben Sherwood: Every morning, he goes and tortures himself on one of these crazy exercise contraptions the Versa climber and does 45 minutes on a Versa climber. I couldn't do two minutes on a Versa climber right now you Randy, given your fitness level could probably do 30. But I don't know if you could, I don't know if you could do 45 minutes to an hour on a Versa climber the way Bob does listening to music, and then off he goes. And he's the first guy at Disney.
• 38:01
  Ben Sherwood: He's there. He's there before 7am Most mornings. And I think he's been doing that for around 45 years. He is the human embodiment of an executive who works harder, and puts in more hours and quiet time is so important to him. Some of those early morning hours before everybody shows up before the action begins. that quiet time in the morning to think, to read, to think about the world to think about the day to develop a plan for the day.
• 38:31
  Ben Sherwood: That's why I love going in early those mornings at CBS when I was getting started and all those early mornings ever since. I love that quiet time to sort of get prepared to get ready. And that's before you started getting hit in the face and hitting the head all day by all the different things that happen at work.
• 38:50
  Randall Kaplan: So I read a lot about Bob, I knew what time he wakes up. He's actually on masterclass. So he talks about this a little bit on masterclass, but I've read a whole bunch whole bunch about it throughout the years. Just think about if you're a Disney and you're 21 years old, or 23 years old, you know his schedule, you know what time it gets into the office? Why wouldn't you just wait one day not stalk him? But just wait and say Hi, I'm Randy Kaplan. I love working here. I was wondering if you had 15 minutes for a cup of coffee?
• 39:24
  Randall Kaplan: What's the likelihood he's gonna say yes to that? high, very high,
• 39:29
  Ben Sherwood: very high. That's who he is. And let's just say when I was working for EMI came in running his news division in New York, I knew that at any hour of the day or night, he could call. And at any hour of the day or night he could call and want to know what's going on. And part of the fun of working for him. I mean, it was really fun. I loved it was that any dour the day or night your boss can call and want to talk about the news can want to talk about books can want to talk about music and want to talk about history. It was blast and you had to be on your toes. And one of the things I miss about the company I left a couple of years ago, one of the things I miss is that daily interaction with somebody who gets up earlier, reads more thinks harder, looks further talks to more people is just more engaged than anybody that I've ever worked with or worked for. And he really set an unbelievable example. And I think that each of us in terms of that work ethic, I think that each of us can aspire to that. And I think you're right. One of the things that's amazing about him is that when you get into the cafeteria, at ABC, with Bob, where he came up 45 years ago and started as a stagehand. He still knows the people who are working on stage hands, and still he still knows them by their names. He knows their parents. He knows their kids, and he's grizzled all the way up from stage and me Managing the stages of ABC all the way to Chairman of the of the Walt Disney Company. But when he's back there, he still has time in the cafeteria line sitting in the cafeteria to chat with all these people he began with 45 years ago. That's an amazing thing. And that's why I think to your point, you probably couldn't get to him now because of security. And you probably couldn't get to him now, because of the way he gets into the building. And you probably couldn't get to him now because of the elevators and the way the system works. But if you happen upon him someplace in town, and you said, I read your book, I'm a huge fan. I think the mentorship means a lot to him. And he is really interested in mentoring young people and helping people find their way.
• 41:33
  Randall Kaplan: I saw him probably buy a SIM a couple of times, I've saw him on vacation.
• 41:36
  Randall Kaplan: We're in Hawaii together, staying at the same place. I mentioned at that time I had was renting a house right up the street. I've known Willow for few years before his wife will obey before actually, she had just met him and was dating him and someone introduced me to Willow. And she called me to ask what's Los Angeles, like, and she's a very, very nice woman, as you will know, she's awesome.
• 42:05
  Randall Kaplan: And I saw him on vacation. He was very, very nice, friendly.
• 42:09
  Randall Kaplan: We talked a whole you know, very down Earth guy, and he was in great shape. By the way, he'd made me look like I needed to get to work out a little bit more. And I did see him at the Brentwood country Mart, which is, you know, as a local hangout for people through you go there, you see a lot of people who, you know, you've been there a million times, we've been there a million times. And there are a number of people who went up to him. He's sort of like a star, right? I mean, you're chairman of the Walt Disney Company and CEO, everyone knows who you are.
• 42:39
  Randall Kaplan: And he shook everyone's hand, he talked to them, he was in no rush to leave. It really says a lot about someone's character, and making time for people and never forgetting where you came from.
• 42:49
  Ben Sherwood: He's that's definitely comes through about him. He has, he never forgets where he came from. He never forgets the journey. As you said in his book, he calls it the ride of a lifetime. Is that an amazing ride? And we should all be so lucky that when we're 70, we have that level of fitness and that level of strength to us incredibly fit.
• 43:08
  Randall Kaplan: So I want to go back, you said you applied for a bunch of jobs. And you seem like before that you really hadn't been rejected from a whole lot.
• 43:15
  Randall Kaplan: Getting to Harvard really hard to do you do well there Rhodes Scholar, you're in there, but how did you face rejection and some of these jobs?
• 43:25
  Ben Sherwood: So let me just just disabuse you of sort of the premise of the question, which is I've Okay, all kinds of rejection, all the way along, everybody does. Nobody gets by in life without rejection, I got more rejection, all the way along, starting with youth sports and high school sports, and all kinds of things. And so I would just say that part of growth, and part of what I think that we all want in our kids is we want them to learn to fail, and we want them to learn to get knocked down and to pick themselves back up. And so I would just say that, that I sort of challenged the premise of the question about how, look how it was so easy and smooth, I got knocked down all all over the place and pick myself up. And it's nice to kind of focus on all the successes, but I had plenty of plenty of rejections.
• 44:10
  Ben Sherwood: So when I got rejected for jobs, it hurt. I wondered what was wrong with me, I wondered whether or not I didn't measure up to say, The New York Times.
• 44:20
  Ben Sherwood: And I thought, Okay, I just gotta keep going. And that's one of the things that I think is true today, which is that some of the people who are the most successful are the ones who are unbelievably persistent. Look at Joe Biden, President of the United States, 77 years old now.
• 44:34
  Ben Sherwood: 78. There's a guy who ran for president a few different times, was sort of humiliated and disgraced in the 80s when he ran for president when he was nailed for plagiarism of Neil Kinnock speech, and he dropped out of the race. There is a guy who had to step aside for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to let her run even though he just been vice president for eight years, had to step aside and let her go.
• 45:01
  Ben Sherwood: And now he finishes fifth place in Iowa, fourth place in New Hampshire, one year ago. One year ago, he was finished heading into South Carolina, where James Clyburn bops him on the head. Next thing you know, he wins the nomination. Next thing you know, he wins more votes than any president in the history of the United States.
• 45:23
  Ben Sherwood: Next thing you know, he's president, he's sitting there one year ago, he was heading to a retirement home in Delaware to tell stories for the rest of his life. And now he's president of the United States. So I just I just have to say that the story of kind of the unstoppable force the only successful man the person who wins that everything, there are all the places where people get knocked down, not least by life. Look at Joe Biden and his Personal misfortunes from losing his wife at an early age to losing his son. You know, I would say that as we look across my 57 years, it was a hugely, hugely traumatic event when one of my colleagues was killed in Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia when we were there on an assignment for ABC News, losing a parent as I did when I was 29, when my dad was 64, incredible blow, losing my mother a couple years ago, these things, these personal things that happen are the kinds of huge knocks and setbacks that that are just part of the life story. So I'm challenging your premise a little bit by saying that I think that all of your listeners know that even even people who seem outwardly to have had so much success they've gotten, they've gotten hit hard, knocked down all kinds of times.
• 46:42
  Randall Kaplan: Fair enough. And thank you for clarifying that.
• 46:44
  Randall Kaplan: That's, that's very helpful, I think the lesson there is you have to pick yourself up no matter how many times you get knocked down, you have to, you have to keep going. It's sort of like a golf shot, you have to forget about your last bad shot.
• 46:56
  Randall Kaplan: And each next hit is a new hit, has nothing to do with the last one.
• 47:00
  Ben Sherwood: There was a Japanese saying that I tried out at my son once and he looked at me, he's got a math brain. And he thought that doesn't make mathematical sense. But I think there's a Japanese sent saying that something like knocked down seven times get up eight. And he said, I don't think the math works out. But I understand what you're trying to say.
• 47:18
  Randall Kaplan: He's smart, just like his dad. But let's talk about your first job. So you get promoted to associate producer and then a producer. And what did you do when you got promoted? What advice do you have for people starting their careers when they get their first jobs?
• 47:32
  Ben Sherwood: Well, I think that when I was promoted to producer at ABC News, it happened pretty quick. And I think that lots of good things happened. And I was really, really driven hard to work hard and move fast. And I think that at the time, I was maybe a little bit less mature, I hadn't met Karen yet I hadn't gotten married, I hadn't become a father yet. And I was moving so fast, that I didn't totally understand all of the all of the benefits of how if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far you go together. That old saying and I had not really understood all of the advantages and the benefits of collaboration and cooperation.
• 48:10
  Ben Sherwood: And so I'd say that one of the one of my observations about young people with early promotions, what I would consider to be a young person's mistake is that it's all you and that you're gonna, you're gonna carry yourself all the way that you're gonna get it done by yourself. And I think that I didn't understand that. I stumbled a bunch, I think that I did not accomplish what I wanted to accomplish, because I was thinking that I could do it all by myself. And I would be able to sort of navigate all by myself. And in fact, it takes a lot more people, especially in television, business, but for that matter, any line of work, to get where you want to go, it really involves understanding how to work with teams how to understand work with, with people above you, next to you, and below you. And that's a big piece of success. And that first job is understanding how to work in an environment together with others, and I had a lot to learn. At some
• 49:04
  Randall Kaplan: point, you're with an ABC News team in Sarajevo one minute, you're in New York doing the news, the next moment you're traveling this area, Sarajevo, to cover just a brutal Bosnian Civil War, as we think about reaching our potential to be the best that we can be, and doing everything we can to get ahead. We're sometimes asked to do things that are not in our comfort zone. In the case of reporters, that often means going to dangerous places in the world.
• 49:30
  Randall Kaplan: Were you going out to cover the Bosnian Civil War to see what it was like as a journalist to be on the front lines and get a first hand experience of war?
• 49:36
  Randall Kaplan: Are you going because you thought you needed it to get ahead? Or because your bosses told you that you're going and you didn't really have a choice.
• 49:46
  Ben Sherwood: I'm ashamed to say it was my idea. And I'm ashamed to say that it was a stupid idea. With the benefit of hindsight, we really probably never should have been there for that particular story. It was a story about an American businessman named Milan Panitch, who was in former Yugoslavia who was trying to save the country as the prime minister of that country, an American businessman trying to save the country from this terrible civil war. And we went to do a profile of him which seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ended up costing the life of a 45 year old producer named David Kaplan, who was Sam Donaldson's producer for many years they had covered wars together before they had been in all kinds of hotspots together. Sam was the anchorman of primetime live and was the longtime White House correspondent famous for shouting questions at Ronald Reagan. Hold on mr. president was his signature line. And we ended up landing in Sarajevo on a military plane, and we ended up separating into different vehicles. Sam went in an armored personnel carrier with Panitch up ahead and we He went behind in a VW minivan, thin skin no armor. And David chose not to wear a flak jacket a bulletproof vest they had been supplied to us I had one on, but Sam and David chose not to wear them was a very hot day in August of 1992. In an area of Sarajevo called sniper alley, which was well known for being very dangerous, where different sides the Bosnians and the Serbs would shoot at each other in this area with snipers with deadly accuracy. We heard a loud noise and and David was shot and killed by a sniper bullet came through the back door of the VW through the back seat through him and then lodged in the driver's seat. We moved as quickly as we could to get to a French combat hospital that was located in the basement of the post office building, where French surgeons worked on David has been transfused a lot of blood, and they could not revive him. And afterwards, a French surgeon said that even if he had been injured right in front of a hospital, in New York City, he would not have lived because the bullet that pierced his back and went through his body severed the artery that branches right into the lungs. And so it was not a survivable injury. And it was a brutal day. And we all feared for our lives that moment, and it was traumatic, obviously, coming back for the family. And to this day, I always think in August about his wife and his parents and his siblings and his nieces and nephews, and the incredible loss on that day for a story about a American businessman trying to help a country. And was it worth it? And I think in the end, it wasn't worth it. It was a terrible loss, and it was misguided. Why did we go we went because that's what journalists do. They go places, and they go to dangerous places. And why do we go we thought we had a really good story. And I think that as I moved on in my career in journalism, I was 29. At the time, as I moved on in my career in journalism, I was always the person who would ask more questions than anybody else about should we go forward into that situation? Does the risk reward ratio work out? And I think that many of my colleagues at ABC News would tell you that when I ended up running Good Morning, America, or when I ended up running ABC News, I was the guy who interrogated our teams as they were heading into Syria or interrogated our teams as they were heading into Tahrir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring. I spent so much time interrogating our teams about the rewards versus the risks.
• 53:33
  Ben Sherwood: And we thought through the risks, because I had seen at a young age firsthand what happens. It's not make believe it's real. Those bullets are real, real things happen and real lives can be up ended by a certain decision.
• 53:48
  Randall Kaplan: How traumatic I'm sorry that that happened.
• 53:51
  Randall Kaplan: Did you come home right after that?
• 53:54
  Ben Sherwood: We came straight back. We were on the air that Thursday night, doing the hardest piece of journalism and report that we've ever been involved in any of us. We had to go on the air that night that David was killed by the sniper.
• 54:07
  Ben Sherwood: And when we were finished the next morning, we didn't sleep that night. The next morning, we flew back to the United States.
• 54:13
  Ben Sherwood: And I took an extended leave from ABC and Roone Arledge, the then president of ABC was generous with me at the time.
• 54:22
  Ben Sherwood: And I didn't know him and had never actually met him before.
• 54:25
  Ben Sherwood: But he and the news organization arranged for me to get some help here in Los Angeles with an expert at UCLA who is one of the world's leading authorities on helping people with non Vietnam post traumatic stress. And so I spent some time working with him on some of the memories of that experience and tried to deal with him and I am grateful to Rouen and into ABC for having given me that time to work through what was a harrowing experience. David and I were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the backseat of that vehicle.
• 54:53
  Ben Sherwood: David and I were right next to each other when that bullet came through the the back of the car and but for, you know, a few inches that bullet was in me. I was told later by one of the war crimes investigators who looked into a lot of these events in sniper alley, there had been a bounty that had been put on journalists heads. And if you were a sniper who killed a journalist, you got an extra bounty, you got extra money. And our van was marked TV meaning you knew that we were journalists, we were TV and Van clearly indicated we were television. And so some sniper out there made the decision to take that shot. There were three of us sitting in a row in the backseat. There was a guy who worked for the Prime Minister, there was David in the middle and then I was on the side. I remember distinctly getting into the van. Thinking that David was in the seat that probably would be the safest because I thought that if we were shot thought that we would be shot through the side windows because a CNN photographer named Margaret moth had been shot through the side window and shot in the face and her jaw had been shot off. She had survived but experienced terrible injury before we had gone there. And I was it was fresh in my mind as we went into the city in this area go through sniper rally that those bullets could come in through the side windows, it never occurred to me they come in from behind. But I was told by a war crimes investigator that a lot of the shots actually came from behind because if you're shooting at a vehicle moving away from you, and you want to hit something, if you aim for the middle, if the vehicle moves right or left, if the wind gusts right or left, if you aim for the middle, you're gonna hit something right or left, you'll hit somebody.
• 56:38
  Ben Sherwood: And so the thinking was, is that best shot was to shoot in the middle. And then you'd hit something on either side if you didn't get the guy in the middle. And so that was a very traumatic experience, traumatic for the family, traumatic for ABC traumatic for, for our family, and it took quite a while to get through it.
• 57:00
  Randall Kaplan: I'm very sorry, went through that. And I'm very sorry to his family. And I'm glad it didn't hit you. And that you're you're here today.
• 57:11
  Ben Sherwood: Appreciate your kind words about it. And very thoughtful of you to think about the family because I never think about that that ordeal without thinking about the Kaplan family and the the trauma to the Kaplan family, an unbelievable loss of their beloved David and a wonderful, wonderful man who was out shopping for a new dog with his wife that weekend when we got the call that we were heading into Sarajevo. And we all took off at the airport to fly first Albania and then in this area them.
• 57:40
  Randall Kaplan: I want to move on and just talk about the rest of your career. You're at ABC News for four years things are going well. You've been promoted a few times. Now you say See you later in New York. I'm out of here and I'm moving to LA to be a writer. What What was up with that? Why did you leave was being a writer, part of the master plan to write novels.
• 58:00
  Ben Sherwood: So what happened afterwards was about six or seven months after that my father actually died very suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. He was 64 years old, he was in very good health. And so it was a terrible loss, unexpected. And so between the episode and Sarajevo and my father's sudden and untimely death, I didn't just sort of quit and move back to LA to become a writer. To be perfectly honest, I left ABC to come home to Los Angeles to help my mother through a very difficult time.
• 58:31
  Ben Sherwood: And also, to help myself. I justified it that I was moving back to LA where I wanted to be closer to my mom and to make sure that she was okay after losing the love of her life, her childhood sweetheart. But I really was also trying to protect and take care of myself after both what had happened in Yugoslavia. And the loss of this, this towering figure I described earlier, my wonderful father Jake Sherwood who was this incredibly important, important person in our lives.
• 58:58
  Ben Sherwood: And when he suddenly left us, I felt pretty lost. And I came home to LA where I'd grown up and I moved back into my childhood home with my mother.
• 59:09
  Ben Sherwood: And I actually lived at home with my mom for the next four, four or five years. You wrote
• 59:15
  Randall Kaplan: two books read Mercury and the man who ate the 747. Both bestsellers. You're living in LA. And then you move back to New York. You mentioned Tom Brokaw, you work for NBC Nightly News. Tom has been the number one news anchor in the United States, or at NBC for five years. And then you did it again. You live in New York, you moved back to LA for two years.
• 59:39
  Randall Kaplan: And you write two more books, both of those bestsellers as well. And then after two years in LA, you moved back to New York again, where you get to be the executive producer of Good Morning America. And as you said at some point after that you get promoted to President of ABC News. That is a tremendous amount of criss crossing. What's that all about?
• 1:00:00
  Ben Sherwood: I just want to point out there a couple things that got squished in there that I would, I wouldn't want anybody to leave. That's exactly how things unfolded. But what's going on there is the following what's going on there as I fell in love with Karen, in 2001, right around September 11 911.
• 1:00:15
  Ben Sherwood: We had our amazing date on September 10 2001. And we were out till late at night. And the next morning I went into NBC Nightly News where I worked and September 11 was underway. While I was at the Starbucks downstairs and Rock Center. The first plane hit the first tower.
• 1:00:33
  Ben Sherwood: And Karen I fell in love and we started to have a family and then our lives just sort of pulled us in a couple of different directions. She's from Los Angeles too. And we began to make some decisions that were about having kids and about aging parents and wanting to be closer to aging pets. And so part of it was family driven as we move back and forth across the coasts in and out of jobs.
• 1:00:58
  Ben Sherwood: And some of it also was a function of curiosity and my own desire to test myself and challenge myself and so, got a job a Good Morning America that was really exciting for a few years, and very challenging. And then we had a reason to come back to Los Angeles because our aging parents were having issues and we wanted to be closer to them. Then all of a sudden, I get the call to go back to New York, to run ABC News as the president of that organization and you can't turn that down.
• 1:01:23
  Ben Sherwood: That's, that's a once in a lifetime opportunity. So we moved back. So combination of family and curiosity and interesting career challenges are these opportunities
• 1:01:34
  Randall Kaplan: where recruiters clap one day and say, Hey, Ben, I have an opportunity for you.
• 1:01:37
  Randall Kaplan: You say, Cool, talk to me. And is it your advice to follow where the opportunities take you? You like New York, but it may mean uprooting your family.
• 1:01:50
  Randall Kaplan: And what are the opportunities in a rural part of Nebraska? You have no interest in going there.
• 1:01:55
  Ben Sherwood: Well, I love Nebraska I wrote the manual at the 747 and that was set in a small town in Nebraska. So you pick the one state Randy which is which is very good. You pick the one state where rural Nebraska is actually where the 747 crashes. And that's where a man eats that airplane to prove his love for a girl. So I I would just say if it was Nebraska, go to Nebraska the Cornhusker states, fantastic for recruiters calling as recruiters call friends call. friends talk about different opportunities that are around friends say hey, you should put your hand up for this. Hey, maybe you want to put your hand up for that. And typically my my answer is always go where your curiosity takes you. And I'm very, very lucky.
• 1:02:39
  Ben Sherwood: My wife loves New York. Karen lights up the second we hit the Triborough. Now Robert F Kennedy bridge second, she sees that skyline. Her face changes, I call it New York face because she's just so happy in New York City, where we have a lot of friends. And that's where she loves to be. And so it's not hard to get her to move to New York. Although I think now with boys were teenagers, I think it would be impossible to move to New York because our boys love Los Angeles. And I think they're very committed to being here.
• 1:03:06
  Ben Sherwood: But with Karen being game for, for adventure, we've had a chance to go back and forth a few times. I think in terms of advice for people, especially if you're if you're lucky in a situation where you you're in a in a marriage or a relationship where you have that flexibility and can move. I was always somebody who would go anywhere to do anything to have a great life experience. My friend Bruce Feiler, who's a New York Times bestselling writer, talks about being an experiential list, that his profession his career is as an experiential list. And I sort of love that word. Because I, I too, have pursued all kinds of experiences, not so much a career as a set of experiences that ended up becoming a career, as you're noting, as you sort of traced this line. I've done journalism, I've written books, some of those, one of those books was turned into a movie, I started, I tried to start a website based upon one of my books about survivorship, now doing something entrepreneurial, just new experiences that answer my curiosity, and my questions.
• 1:04:07
  Randall Kaplan: I've mentored a lot of people over the years, I know you have to and one of the biggest issues they worry about is whether they should stay on one career, even if they're not happy. And this podcast, the theme of it is how to be excellent. Be the best you can be and reach your potential. I think it's really hard to be excellent at something and reach your potential if you're not happy. I'm sure you know many people who are in good jobs are not happy. I have many, many friends like this. I'm sure you do as well. What's your advice to people who want to start over and do something new, and are worried that starting late and they're never going to be the best that they can be in that new profession?
• 1:04:44
  Ben Sherwood: Very incisive question, very hard question to answer. Since every situation is different, and everybody's different. But I I'd say there are a few principles. Principle number one is if you're if you're fortunate to be able to start over if you have the security, and you have the ability to change directions.
• 1:05:02
  Ben Sherwood: Don't waste another second. And I say if the if there is an important qualification, I was lucky when I married Karen, my wife is a movie and television producer who has had a lot of success at a very early age. And so I was always very fortunate that she was the smart successful one in our family.
• 1:05:21
  Ben Sherwood: And we haven't really talked about all of her achievements and her success and her drive and her motivation. But because of her considerable success, and because of her considerable accomplishments in her career, we always had we had a kind of a safety net. She's somebody who everybody wants to work with, and everybody wants to make movies with and everybody wants to make television with. And so no matter how hard I fail, Karen's always going to be the one who is sort of a safety net in this family. And so in our marriage, we've done some back and forth a little bit where Karen's had a crazy big job. And I've had one. And we go back and forth and trade it a little bit along the way. And so I do want to emphasize that if if you have the security and you have the flexibility to switch and do something that you're passionate about, go for it. And Don't waste another second on there, go for it. And Don't waste another second piece of it. I'll give you my perspective there. I tried being a full time novelist for a short period of time, I discovered a full a few things about being a full time novelist, number one, it was torture. And number two, our family would probably starve if I were the sole breadwinner, because that wasn't going to that wasn't going to quite work out the way I would want to take care of my family. And so I tried it for a brief period of time, I found it to be agony, just about every day, I found rejection to be very painful.
• 1:06:42
  Ben Sherwood: And I found that the ability to pay our bills was going to be seriously tested. And so I did not become a full time novelist for very long. And so again, I had the flexibility and the luxury of getting to try it. For a brief period of time, I could see that it wasn't going to work out I gathered the data and I answered the question, okay, full time novelist, not the right path for me. And I've tried a few other things like that along the way. And I've ruled those things out as well.
• 1:07:08
  Ben Sherwood: And so I think that the goal should not necessarily be to try something new with the intention of being the very best in the world. I'm gonna go pursue that path, and I'm going to be the world champion, but instead almost answer the question. I've always been drawn to that other thing. I've always wondered what that would be like, I want to go try that. Can I be excellent at it? worth answering that question? If even if I'm excellent at it, will I accomplish all the things that I want to accomplish? Or are there so many other excellent people at it that I might not be able to get where I want to go? But I think that's all kind of what I would say is gathering data, getting the living the questions. There's a phrase I've used with young people for a number of years, which is one of my favorite phrases from from the Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer what replicas, Letters to a Young Poet in which he says that paraphrasing, you ask a lot of questions. I don't have all the answers, the best thing I can tell you is go live with the questions. And in living the questions, you may get yourself closer to these hard, hard questions, the answers to the questions that you've been asking me. And I sort of feel that way when it comes to career and to to success, live the questions, no one's really going to ever be able to answer the question about what the right choice is for you. No one's ever going to be able to tell you which is the right job or which is the right path, or should you stay with this career switch? To the extent you can go live the question and in the course of living that question, you can find some of the answers.
• 1:08:40
  Randall Kaplan: There are so many more things about your amazing career that we could talk about, I'm going to blow through a lot of them quickly and just list them I think our listeners and viewers would want to know, you're the executive producer of Good Morning America. And after it was 852 weeks of being less than the number one show, I think that today's show had been number one for that period of time, that 16 years. Under your leadership.
• 1:09:07
  Randall Kaplan: You You took over the top rated show, you took it to the top rated show you become president of ABC News. Disney owns ABC, I think most people know that. And over the next few years, you're promoted again and again. You're president of Disney ABC Television Group, co chairman of Disney media networks, co chairman of Hulu, co chairman of a&e networks. At this point, you're managing a $12 billion business with 12,000 employees.
• 1:09:34
  Randall Kaplan: You're responsible for creating 24,000 hours of original content every year. I mean, that's, that's a shit ton of responsibility. Talk to us about I mean, you gotta be thinking. I mean, was this the dream? Was this what you were shooting for when you graduated and thought I meant I'm at the top of my career, could it get any better than this?
• 1:09:55
  Ben Sherwood: The answer to that is no. I didn't know that job even existed. And I didn't even know that job existed. Really didn't tell around five years before I got that job. My dream from earliest days in college and graduate school was to be the president of CBS News Sunday. Like that was a reach beyond all reaches, I didn't think that was even going to be possible. That was my fantasy.
• 1:10:18
  Ben Sherwood: That was the job that I thought would be the greatest job in the world. And when I was appointed President of ABC News, one of my college buddies sent me a note that said close but no cigar in terms of having missed Miss gotten to gotten to the job but but missed missed an hour. I would say that the way you just described the job. It sounds kind of overwhelming. It was I got to do that role for five years. It was an amazing experience every day working for Bob Iger working with all the presidents of all those different businesses that you just described. learning new things every day learning new things about kids programming new learning new things about streaming at Hulu. Disney channels was the kid's programming piece learning things about millennial programming and freeform, which is the millennial network at Disney. I learned something new every day overseeing the own television stations of the Walt Disney Company. That's eight stations, eight of the biggest markets in the United States, including W ABC in New York and KBC here in Los Angeles, kgL in San Francisco. So I loved it, new challenges every day, new puzzles, new problems. And there was a lot of a lot of different big rains every single day. And I would be in total candor, some of it I was really ready for in the sense that I was prepared I had experienced that was relevant. And some of it I was learning while I was doing it.
• 1:11:38
  Ben Sherwood: And I had great teachers. In particular, I'd note that a brilliant executive named Gary Marsh was my teacher about kids programming, because that's an area that I had no experience in, even though I was overseeing the Disney channels around the world. That's the Disney TV channels all over the world and 100 more than 100 countries and hundreds of millions of families watching them around the world.
• 1:11:57
  Ben Sherwood: But Gary Marsh gave me an incredible, masterclass almost every day in how to think about the children's audience how to program for kids how to create great programming for kids. And so in a way while I was, you know, overseeing it all dairy was really my teacher and my boss. And he's, he's an remarkable executive and a wonderful friend.
• 1:12:18
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about Roseanne, one of the most successful sitcoms of all time.
• 1:12:21
  Randall Kaplan: On for nine seasons. Number one show one or two years top four show and six of those years, Disney decides to bring it back and 2018 It's a hit 80 million viewers right out of the gate.
• 1:12:37
  Randall Kaplan: What happened.
• 1:12:41
  Ben Sherwood: So we had this thought that in the post Trump world, there was an opportunity to do programming that would appeal to families between the coasts that reflected what working families in America were experiencing and thinking. And Roseanne, who had done all kinds of crazy things since leaving television came to us with a proposal that she wanted to bring Roseanne back and that she would give up her Twitter account. And she would give up her place in the culture wars.
• 1:13:10
  Ben Sherwood: And she would do a show that spoke to working class families across the country about real issues, and that she wanted to redeem herself that she was done. She was done fighting and all kinds of crazy culture wars and calling people names and doing all kinds of stuff she really wanted to. She really wanted to do a television show, to redeem herself and to speak to sort of middle of America that she felt had been left behind by liberal programming and kind of coastal programming on the coasts. And so with the promise that she would give up Twitter, and she would give up social media and the promise that she would just focus on the show, we let her loose, and Tom Warner was the producer of that show and a good friend. And off they went. And man did they nail it. They did an incredible series of shows and Roseanne the character resonated with America. And it was the number one show on ABC the first time in 24 years that ABC had a number one television show, and the audience loved it. The problem was that Roseanne did not uphold her part of the bargain of staying away from Twitter and staying away from the culture wars. And one morning, I woke up at 630 in the morning with a text from a friend, an agent at CAA who was at the airport who texted me what the hell are you going to do about Roseanne? I didn't know what he was talking about.
• 1:14:29
  Ben Sherwood: Because when I looked through my email, there was nothing there about Roseanne when I did a quick Google search, there was nothing about Roseanne couldn't tell what he was talking about.
• 1:14:35
  Ben Sherwood: And then I checked Twitter and I immediately knew what he was talking about. And I sent an email to my boss Bob Iger, immediately saying that what's happened is abhorrent, despicable and what Roseanne had done was that we have a serious problem and that what Roseanne had done was unconscionable she had sent a tweet out that attacked Valerie Jarrett for was a racist, anti Muslim tweet that attacked Valerie Jarrett and made a bunch of terrible set a bunch of terrible things in 42 characters or 42 letters, I want to say terrible things about Valerie Jarrett, who was the advisor to Barack Obama. And in the course of the next couple of hours, we huddled, I talked with Roseanne and her team about this. And we decided that the show was over. The show was canceled and Roseanne would not be part of the ABC television network anymore. And I had the distinction of being one of the first executives or perhaps one of the only executives along with Bob Iger and Channing Dungy, who is the president of ABC Entertainment at the time, through one of the only executive teams has ever greenlit a number one television show in America and then canceled a number one television show in America, all in the space of about 18 months. And it was tough, but it was absolutely clear it was the right thing to do. She did not belong on ABCs.
• 1:15:54
  Ben Sherwood: airwaves, what she said was unconscionable. It was not funny. It was not a, it's not a joke. It was not some sort of lapse. It was bad. And we took swift action. And I think that one of the things that was about Disney and about Bob Iger in those situations is that he's quite fearless. And there was no discussion about any of this with lawyers. There was no discussion about any of this with our advertising team, there was no discussion about this. In terms of kind of the consequences, there was just a conversation about right and wrong. And it was really clear right away that the right thing to do is to put an end to this, stop it, shut it down, over and no looking back, which we haven't.
• 1:16:37
  Randall Kaplan: You wrote a great memo, I'm gonna read it quickly. It says T Much has been said and written about yesterday decision to cancel the Roseanne show. In the end, it came down to doing what's right and upholding our values of inclusion, tolerance and civility. Not enough, however, has been said about the many men and women who poured their hearts and lives into the show.
• 1:16:55
  Randall Kaplan: And we're just getting started on next season. We're so sorry, they were swept up in all of this. And we give thanks for all the remarkable talents, wish them well and hope to find another way to work together down the road. The last 24 hours have also been a powerful reminder of the importance of words in everything we do online and on the air, and the responsibility of using social media and all of our programs and platforms with careful thought, decency and consideration. Today, we move forward together full speed.
• 1:17:23
  Randall Kaplan: There's a lot there are a lot of great lessons there. We don't have time for them all. But you could just comment briefly on the power of words and what they mean to you. And it may be just a couple of brief lessons here, because I know we're tight on time. And I want to cover just a couple more things.
• 1:17:43
  Ben Sherwood: Look, it was a firestorm. It was front page news. It was cable television news. It was all over CNN Fox everyplace. It was a big story.
• 1:17:52
  Ben Sherwood: Roseanne Barr canceled and this tweet. And the thing I felt in all of it was there were hundreds of people who worked on that show who were victims of this terrible tweet. And they had, they were doing a good job.
• 1:18:13
  Ben Sherwood: They were true to the mission of the show. The show was wonderful, and gave voice to so many people and was funny, and was wonderful satire. And the Roseanne character delivered on exactly what she had promised, which is to get people thinking through humor about the fact that America's families are divided right now. America's families are divided between right and left America's families are on all sides. Some supported Hillary Clinton, some supported, Donald Trump could say the same thing about some support Joe Biden, some support Donald Trump, and this is a comedy aimed at all of them. And there were hundreds of people who were now shut down and lost their livelihoods because of this one tweet. And I felt in that moment, there was an important thing to say to all of them, which is that we thank you. And we're sorry that this has happened. And we hope we can work with you again. And sure enough, we found a way to do it with a show called The Connors which was basically the Roseanne show without Roseanne. So is everybody but Roseanne came back and show is still on the air and is very successful. So those people came back to work once Roseanne was out of the picture.
• 1:19:20
  Ben Sherwood: And I thought there was an important message to say to all of the people of the Disney ABC Television Group, which was every word you say matters. And when you're just think you're tweeting in the middle of the night, or when you're angry at someone online. Think think again, because it has real consequences. It has consequences for you professionally, it has consequences for the people around you. It has consequences for the reputation of the organization, and that we really should think hard about what we say especially when we occupy positions of responsibility both in culture or within an organization.
• 1:19:57
  Randall Kaplan: You're at Disney for another year. And then in March of 2019 Disney acquires the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox, and Dana Walden is there and she's also a rock star in her own right. She's running that division, and she's brought in to run Disney TV division. By the way, I've known her for 14 years our kids went to school together. I think she's just awesome. At one point, I read in The Wall Street Journal that you are possible successor to Bob Iger. And when she came in, you laughed. Was it your goal to be the CEO of Disney and were you disappointed that Dana came in and took over?
• 1:20:35
  Ben Sherwood: So just a little technicality there? Just to be clear, my successor is a guy named Peter rice. Peter Reiss runs the Disney Television Group that I ran. So terms of the level and in terms of the person who took my job. Peter, who was Dana's boss at Fox came over And Peter runs the whole Disney ABC Television Group now it's now been renamed Disney Television.
• 1:20:57
  Ben Sherwood: And Dana works for him. And Dana runs the ABC Television Group.
• 1:21:01
  Ben Sherwood: Within the larger Disney Television properties. I've known Dana since high school.
• 1:21:04
  Ben Sherwood: She went to the sister school Westlake at the time, I went to Harvard boy school, those schools have since been merged.
• 1:21:10
  Ben Sherwood: And I've known her since I was since since I was a teenager.
• 1:21:13
  Ben Sherwood: And I have very high regard for Dana. And she's a remarkable talent. And when she came over, I wasn't surprised. Part of the reason to buy Fox was they've got such great talent between Dana and John Landgraf, who runs FX and there are people around the world. It's a terrific, they've got terrific talent at that company. And I understood that I never really thought seriously about being the CEO of The Walt Disney Company. As I told you a few minutes ago, I didn't even know about the job running the Disney Television Group. My goal had always been to run a news division, I was lucky to get to run the Television Group. And then with some success at the television group, I read some of the same articles that you're talking about where I was on a list of people who might someday succeed, Bob, but I never really had my eye on that. I will tell you that when I left the Walt Disney Company, I had thought that I would be staying there until the end of 2021 When my contract expires. But when the merger took place, I learned after believing that I was going to be staying on for some time, I learned that Peter and his team, so Peter rice in my role, Dana, John Landgraf, and many others were coming over in a Television Group, there was some discussion about my taking on a different role of the company, a role that would be created to oversee some of the nonfiction properties at the company. And we talked about that and some other opportunities. But in the end, I concluded that my amazing and extremely rewarding run of the company was was over, and that it was time for me to do something else and to pursue my curiosity and to live some new questions. And so without any hesitation, I thank the company, I thank Bob, I feel nothing but gratitude to him and to everybody at Disney for the amazing experiences that I had.
• 1:22:56
  Ben Sherwood: And I packed up and I moved on, and I started something brand new. I went from the world's largest and most successful media company in the world to start start something from scratch, from 200,000 employees around the world working for Disney, to accompany just me myself and I sitting here at this desk to build something from scratch. And that was my goal. My goal was to start a new business to build a new brand to start something completely new.
• 1:23:23
  Ben Sherwood: And I hope we get to talk to that about that a little
• 1:23:26
  Randall Kaplan: bit. Right now tell us about Mojo.
• 1:23:29
  Ben Sherwood: So when I left the company, I had to ask myself the question after you've had the the these opportunities, an amazing experience, what do you do next. And one option would be to go work for another big media company. And there are plenty of those out there. And there are plenty of jobs that that need to be done. But I've always felt the pull back to some of our talk at the beginning. I've always felt the pull of family and I've also always felt the joy of youth sports being there with my kids over the last 12 years on the playing fields back east and here in Los Angeles.
• 1:23:58
  Ben Sherwood: And so I took everything I learned at Disney everything I learned at ABC everything I learned as a journalist, everything I learned at Disney Channel's everything I learned at Hulu. And I wrapped all of it up into an idea to help bring the magic back to youth sports because in my view, youth sports is broken coaching kids is too hard, too stressful. It's too intimidating. The resources are hard to find. And there are millions of families across the United States and around the world. 500 million, in fact, who have kids who play organized sports, and I set about to build the world's first family sports brand. For kids between the ages of four and 14, when about 80% of the coaches are moms and dads and most of them don't know what they're doing, to bring the joy back to you sports to make coaching easier and more enjoyable for moms and dads to make playing more fun for kids to make the whole experience more magical for the family. And that's what I set out to do. And I hired an amazing co founder named Reed Schaffner, who's a brilliant technologist. And we have got 14 People now working for us we launched a couple of weeks ago, in the App Store.
• 1:25:07
  Ben Sherwood: We've got customers literally across the United States now and around the world as far away as New Zealand who are using the Mojo app, which I can explain.
• 1:25:18
  Ben Sherwood: And we're on our way to the building this building this new business. Let's explain the app.
• 1:25:22
  Ben Sherwood: So the app is go to the App Store, you download Mojo coaching or Mojo sports you download the app. And basically our job is to make everything easier when it comes to coaching a team and we begin with soccer.
• 1:25:38
  Ben Sherwood: And we'll scale this app over time to include basketball and baseball and flag football and all the major sports that kids play in the US and around the world. And our goal is just to make coaching a team of four year old as eight year olds, 12 year olds, anywhere in that age group, make that experience easier and stress free for you.
• 1:25:56
  Ben Sherwood: So with a few questions that you answer, we deliver your first practice, boom, right there. All the activities laid out short, high quality videos produced by the best producers in Los Angeles, Mandalay sports media.
• 1:26:13
  Ben Sherwood: They won an Emmy Award for their Michael Jordan documentary, they made the videos. And you can watch in minute 32 minute, little videos, how to organize an activity for four year olds or eight year olds, what to look for in that activity, how to help the kids get better. So even if you don't know anything about soccer, or even if you've played soccer your whole life, we've got you covered. Depending upon your experience level and your kids age and their experience level, we've got you covered for a whole season of soccer plus, all the other stuff you need to know when you're coaching kids like what's going on inside the mind of a five year old. What happens when you lose your temper and you yell for the first time how to get a kid out of a tree because kids like to climb trees at practice, if their kid their trees around, how to come up with a great name for the team that your kids will love and that you can live with.
• 1:27:03
  Ben Sherwood: We've got everything you need every resource you need to help you on the journey. When your kids are between the ages of four and 14. And playing youth sports.
• 1:27:14
  Randall Kaplan: I love the idea.
• 1:27:14
  Randall Kaplan: I know you're gonna be uber successful there. I want to switch gears now and dive a little deeper into our search for excellence and talk about personalities. And how important a good personality is to get ahead. You're a very nice guy.
• 1:27:26
  Randall Kaplan: You're a humble guy. You're a genuine guy. I remember being on vacation and Lanai and Robin Richards the host of Good Morning America is sitting next to me on the beach. We started chatting for a bit. And I mentioned your friend and she went on and on and on about how nice of a guy you are. You have the gene, you're not only nice, you're very caring guy in our search for excellence. How important is it to be a nice person. I'm not sure where this comes from. But there's a saying out there that nice guys finish last.
• 1:27:57
  Ben Sherwood: Look, Randy, we are neighbors, we you're a great neighbor, you're so important on our block, you look out for everybody who's here. You're always there for everybody, no matter who they are, no matter how old they are. You're the guy who is fighting for our street and for your neighbors and to make this a better place to live. And so we're all lucky to live near you. And you're you're a special guy and you're a special neighbor. I think that there's a book by professor at University of Pennsylvania, Adam Grant called giving and taking in which he surprises you with the research that usually we think that people who are takers in life, gimme, gimme, gimme, they go farther. So at work that guy totally selfish all about himself. He's gonna get farther than I if because he is always about himself. And they're givers. And they're takers in an Adam grants book. They're traders. And traders are people who are totally transactional.
• 1:28:58
  Ben Sherwood: You give me one thing, I'll give you one thing. And what Adam Grant says is, you know, in that book is that it turns out that it's the givers who got to go the farthest. That generosity, that real interest in your colleagues, that giving more than you take back. Those people end up being more successful, they end up being happier, they end up going farther. And what I would say is nice of you to say I don't know if I'm really a nice guy, or I certainly I certainly I certainly felt, you know, I made plenty of mistakes.
• 1:29:31
  Ben Sherwood: When I was younger, I think I made plenty of mistakes where I was taking too much when I was younger, and not giving as much.
• 1:29:37
  Ben Sherwood: But I do think that getting knocked down a few times in life. I do think that marrying Well, I do think that fatherhood. And I do think that a little bit of maturity leads you to learn that if you end up on the side of giving more than you take, how much have you given today? How much have you helped somebody else? How much have you looked out for somebody else? I think that Adam grants formula is right, which is that you get a lot more out of life when you are given. And things turn out better when you when you try to end up on the generous side. And so I think that in terms of excellence and in terms of the pursuit of excellence. I think that people I tried to allude to this a little bit earlier. I think that the young person's mistake is to think that it's all on them, that it's all about them that it's all about what they do.
• 1:30:25
  Ben Sherwood: It's all about how much they lift. It's all about how much they accomplish. And I think that one of the things that comes with a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of experience and some hard knocks and maybe some setbacks, that it really ends up being about how you treat other people. How carefully you listen to other people, how much you do for other people how much you help other people succeed. And by helping other people succeed.
• 1:30:46
  Ben Sherwood: You can find more success yourself.
• 1:30:49
  Randall Kaplan: I think the intangibles are so important not only The tangible things that work ethic the good habits, but the intangibles are important. I know you used to make happy birthday calls to your employees at ABC, phone rings, and your name lines up a bencher was calling I think a lot of people are like, oh shit, what did I do? And then there you are.
• 1:31:10
  Randall Kaplan: Happy birthday, Bob. Happy birthday, Sheila, what's your view on this and who taught you how to do this, it's such an effective thing to motivate people. And to get ahead.
• 1:31:22
  Ben Sherwood: I like birthdays.
• 1:31:22
  Ben Sherwood: And long before Facebook. Long before 57 different apps tell you whose birthday it is, or social feeds tell you whose birthday it is, or bots tell us birthdays. I always always keeping track in my calendar of people's birthdays. And I love birthdays, I love my own birthday. Have fun on my birthday. I have high expectations for what we're going to do on my birthday. And I think that everybody else should be celebrated. I keep a bottle of champagne. In the refrigerator. Always. I'm not a big drinker. But I also feel like life knocks you down enough times that you should always pop open a cork of pop the cork, and find reasons to celebrate. And so birthdays are a great reason to celebrate. There's no, there's never enough ice cream in the world. And so when when somebody's birthday would happen at ABC or a Disney always went out of my way to celebrate making the phone call that extra phone call. I don't know, I think it just comes from a place of seeing people acknowledging them, letting them know that they're special that they mean something to you. And, you know, I think that I used to tweet, happy birthday, when I ended up at Disney Television Group with 12,000 people in the company.
• 1:32:30
  Ben Sherwood: That was a lot every day because it turns out the 12,000 people that's a lot of tweets every day to wish people birthday. And one of the agents at CAA one of my buddies used to call me and joke that like, to the outside world, it seems that all I do all day is sit there tweeting Happy Birthday to people because it takes a long time. And I had to tell him that in fact secretly that we had a system where that happens sort of automatically, and that I was not actually spending every minute of the day. But it mattered to me. And in fact, I can't tell you the number of times I get in the elevator at ABC or at the cafeteria. And someone would walk up kind of shyly and say, Hey, I just wanted to say thank you for that birthday tweet that meant a lot. And what's your name? John, what part of the company do you work in? I work in engineering. How long have you been at the company? 17 years. It's nice to know you.
• 1:33:18
  Ben Sherwood: Nice to meet you. It's nice to you know, hope you had a good birthday. Just a way to connect.
• 1:33:24
  Ben Sherwood: And I think that one of the great pieces of wisdom that I got a long time ago from a very, very wise man. Total name dropped here. But I can't resist Diane Sawyer is husband Mike Nichols, the great director, brilliant Mike Nichols, winner of Tony's and Academy Awards, and Grammys and directed the graduate which is I think one of the things that everybody knows him most for but so many other things that he created. I once asked him what was his secret of directing Julia Roberts and directing Emma Thompson and directing Meryl Streep and doing this unbelievable work? And what was his secret of success? How did he motivate people? How did he get the most out of people?
• 1:34:05
  Ben Sherwood: And he said two things. He said Love is the only thing that works. And by the way, some of the people that he's worked with are not especially lovable, but he would always try to find something that he loved. Because love really works in terms of getting people and inspiring them to peak performance. The other thing that he said is the famous words at the end of em Forster's Howards End, when he said, only connect. And only Connect is a powerful idea in terms of the thing that we should all strive to do. Work harder, grind more come in early. All those things are tactics. But in terms of the big idea, the big thing, only connect, make connections to people, listen to them, understand them really see them.
• 1:34:51
  Ben Sherwood: Connection is the thing that really works the best in terms of life, relationships, marriage, parenting, and it turns out is the thing that really works and work.
• 1:35:02
  Randall Kaplan: We're almost done. You've been so generous with your time I know we've gone over what you have, I just want to cover a couple more things will be very quick. I want to make a statement. And then I'd like you to react to it. Okay, are you ready? When you're graded, something great things happen to you.
• 1:35:17
  Ben Sherwood: Kind of true kind of false. I think that when you're great at something, great things can happen. If you're also lucky. If you're also in the right place at the right time. If you can stay out of your own way if there are lots of ifs. So I think that it's hard for great things to happen to you if you aren't great at something. But it's easy for not great things to happen to you.
• 1:35:41
  Ben Sherwood: Even if you are great at something if you see what I mean. That is I think it'd be being really good. Working hard is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition. And for great things to happen,
• 1:35:54
  Randall Kaplan: philanthropy, when I think about being the best that I can be, and living up to my own potential, a huge part of me wants to give back to others less fortunate, and trying to make a positive, impactful difference in their lives. You're involved with a lot of things I know and you've been giving back for a long time. How important to you is giving back for your sense of accomplishment and whereas that on, you're in Search of Excellence, to be the best that you can possibly be?
• 1:36:22
  Ben Sherwood: Top of the list, I think that doing well means doing good. I think that to make a difference. Success is got to involve helping people who are less fortunate. So in this new company that we started Mojo, one of our founding principles is that we are here to help level the playing field between haves and have nots, there is huge inequality in youth sports, there is a huge divide between families with resources and families that don't, two thirds of the families that have money play sports in the United States, and kids play all the way through high school, only a third of the families without money in the United States get to play sports. That's not right. So one of our founding principles, the very beginning of this company was that we can only do well as a company if we do good and make sure that everyone has access to the best coaching and the best resource.
• 1:37:10
  Ben Sherwood: And that's why we've made Mojo free for anybody to use. There is a mojo plus that you can buy for 9099 a year that has additional features. But we think baseline everybody should have access to the very best coaching in the world, the very best tools and resources. And that's part of a core philosophy that you cannot succeed unless you are doing good and making the world a better place. That's another reason why we've launched Mojo in partnership with coaching core, which is the wonderful nonprofits sort of like a Peace Corps for coaches in the United States with 10,000 coaches who volunteer in low income areas to help kids play sports, and we're putting Mojo plus the preferred the premium version of mojo in the hands of all the coaches at coaching core across the country, to help them get the best resources they can possibly have. So I I'm with you, Randy, I think that the Giving back is an important piece of success. And I also think back to Adam grants book, which is called give and take, by the way I had the title wrong, give and take. Giving is an incredibly important piece of the success and excellence formula.
• 1:38:19
  Randall Kaplan: Walk us through a day in the life of Ben Sherwood I read something back when you were at ABC News, I think crazy hours what what are they today I know you're you're successful. I'm sure you've made money. You have two teenagers, your family man, I see you outside playing hoops with your kids all the time. But what's the day in the life? Sure people want to know what, what has been due.
• 1:38:47
  Ben Sherwood: It's an unpredictable schedule. We have young kids, but I don't sleep very much to the annoyance of my wife. But I typically get up super early before the sunrise is and start reading and checking in on the world because I still have that news bug and I still love knowing what's happening everywhere. I start reading early, I exercise early.
• 1:39:08
  Ben Sherwood: And then I usually am at my desk. I try to make breakfast for my boys for school, I try to be there for them in the morning and hear what's going on with their days and find out what they're doing sometimes drive someone to the bus sometimes drive someone to school, in this case, escort them to their respective rooms where they go to school during the pandemic.
• 1:39:26
  Ben Sherwood: And make sure they've got breakfast, take the dog outside to go to the bathroom. And then I usually try to get to my desk by 830. That doesn't mean I haven't started working before 830. But usually I'm at the desk by 830. And then it's just a wild day of all the things that happen when you're doing a startup punctuated by I have got the printer in my office. And so I'm the printing press for 10th grader and a fourth grader and also for my wife who is making television shows. And sometimes there's a break to go outside and kick the soccer ball.
• 1:39:57
  Ben Sherwood: Sometimes there's a break to go outside and shoot baskets. And by the end of the day, we're outside playing hoops or playing soccer or going to practice. And then usually there's family dinner. And then there's usually another few hours of reading, work, writing, thinking, hanging out with my wife.
• 1:40:16
  Randall Kaplan: When do you put the phone down?
• 1:40:18
  Ben Sherwood: Never. I would say that that is my greatest flaw.
• 1:40:21
  Ben Sherwood: Among many flaws. My greatest flaw is that I have a very hard time putting it down ever. And it's the first thing I look at in the morning. It's the last thing I look at at night. It is the definition of addiction. I really have a hard time putting it down. I think that my wife fought for about 10 years to get me to put down the devices and I think she finally just gave up.
• 1:40:40
  Ben Sherwood: I try to manage it around dinnertime I try to manage around 10 time I try to manage around Karen time but it's never very far away from me. And if she would point out it's not like I work in the news business anymore. It's not like I'm overseeing a company with 12,000 people where at any moment something can happen. It's not.
• 1:40:54
  Ben Sherwood: But I am, I admit to it, I have a problem, I need to deal with my problem. My problem is my phone.
• 1:41:02
  Randall Kaplan: Let's go to phone therapy together, Madison and Karen can hang out and complain about us. And you and I will go to phone anonymous. It's been incredible conversation, Ben. And before we finish, I want to ask if you have any other advice for our listeners and viewers In Search of Excellence, that we can ways that we can live up to our potential and be the best that we can be.
• 1:41:23
  Ben Sherwood: I have one last thought, thank you for this conversation, did not know that we would cover so much ground and I'm somewhat embarrassed for having talked for such a long period about myself. And and I would, as you know me, I'd love to turn the tables on you. And maybe we'll do a podcast where I get to ask you questions for 90 minutes. And I get to probe and peel the onion and ask you the questions. So if you ever want to turn this around, please, let's flip it around. And I will do that. I have one thought to leave you with and leave your listeners with. Because I think that the thing that is missing in the, in the books about excellence in the in the writing about excellence in the pursuit of excellence is a very important idea, which is to go easy on yourself, to be patient, to not be punishing, that those who seek excellence have a voice in their heads. That is relentless, that is merciless, that can be cruel. And I think that one of the things that I've learned with time and maybe with some success, is that that voice can be very, very destructive in that that voice that relentlessness, that constant striving can be ultimately counterproductive. And that sometimes the pursuit of excellence requires a little bit of self awareness and a bit of kindness to oneself and kindness to the people around you.
• 1:42:48
  Ben Sherwood: Because that quest that sometimes insatiable quest can be very, very hard, and even unhealthy. And so one of my thoughts, especially when I'm around young people who drive themselves hard or mid career, people who are driving themselves unbelievably hard or even advanced age, careers driving themselves so hard, is go easy on yourself. It's okay, you're going to end up or you're going to end up you're going to achieve what you're meant to achieve. The road will take you where you are supposed to go.
• 1:43:22
  Ben Sherwood: But if you aren't easy on yourself, if you don't go easy on you're easier on yourself sometimes and take care of yourself. You're in for trouble.
• 1:43:31
  Randall Kaplan: I love anything on that. I mean that is just perfect. I really want to thank you You're for sharing your incredible story. With us your life story. Your professional story is truly truly inspiring.
• 1:43:41
  Randall Kaplan: Good luck with mojo. I know you're gonna crush it.
• 1:43:47
  Ben Sherwood: Thanks, Randy. See you in the neighborhood.