Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Fred Rosen

Transcript

Fred Rosen · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: My guest today is the one and only Mr Ticketmaster
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Fred Rosen. Fred, how did you first get involved with Ticketmaster? Serendipity,
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: which is always something that people forget about. Um. I
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: was practicing law and in the mid seventies I had
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: represented somebody who was in the ticket business or trying
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: to get in the ticket business and got nowhere. And
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: there was an attorney. We were in a suite of
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: My firm was us. We had a small firm, and
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: we were in a suite of attorneys, and a lawyer
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: called me who was on the other end of the floor,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: and he said, there's a guy who wants to go
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: into ticketing. Why don't you come talk him out of it?
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: And I went and met him. Oh, I met We
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: we met on the phone and he said, gee, you
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: know more about this than I do. Are you open
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: to coming to Chicago? And that gentleman's name was Bert Canner.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: And as a result of that, I became special counsel
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: to Ticketmaster and six or seven or eight other companies
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: because he would make investments between three and five million
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: dollars in these various companies. And this was early night.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: I couldn't tell you the month, whether it was February
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: or March. And then in the spring of eight two,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: company was running out of money A little bit slower,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: A little bit slower. So you were based in New
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: York and then you moved to Chicago. No, I never
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: moved to Chicago. I was I lived in New York
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: and I had clients all over the country and Bert
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: was a client in Chicago. Okay, where did Burke get
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: his money? Bert was a very successful attorney who represented
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: a lot of people, um wealthy people, and invented tax shelters,
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: and he was a pretty smart guy, was a tax attorney.
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: So he put together a group who invested probably in
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: at least ten companies more than I represented. And he
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: would put in seed money or venture capital money in
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: the late seventies and early eighties. And how many of
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: these companies other than Ticketmaster were in the entertainment sphere. None. Okay,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: So now it's the spring of eighty two, he's running
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: out of money. Pick up the narrative. He says he's
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: going to close it and he doesn't want to fund
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: it anymore. And I said to him, um, I don't
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: think you should do that. Let me see if I
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: can go raise the money UH and buy it UM
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: and put together a group to buy it UM. And
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: subsequently we talked to a bunch of venture capital people
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: and we were going to raise four million dollars and
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: we had commitments for three and we had met j
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: Pritzker who said, if you can raise the other three,
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: I'll put in the last million. And then at I
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: Double AM in Milwaukee and two, which was July, I
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: believe I was in Milwaukee, and he said to me, UM,
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: why don't you come down and spend the afternoon with me?
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: He lived in Winnetka, Okay. For those who were not savvy,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: the I double a F Is that a union? I presume? No? No,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: The I double AM was the industry where you'd have UM.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: It was a convention, sorry about that, where UM people
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: who did seating, food service, ticketing. It was basically the
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: industry around arenas and stadiums. Okay, just one step before
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: we go there, we'll continue. What was the status of
• 3:58
  Speaker 1: ticket Master when it was seemed to be running out
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: of money. UM it owns losing a couple of million
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: a year. It owned UM small pieces of different operating systems,
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: and in March or April of that year, I signed
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: a letter of intent with the Chicago White Sox that
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: basically required three things Bob, One that we'd have a
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: data center up in Chicago by the fall of eighty two.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Two as we tell him who the outlets would be,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: and three as we get the company financed. So let's
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: go back to Milwaukee. You're trying to raise the three
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: to get the one from Pritsker. Continue, I have commitments
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: for the three, and Pritsker says, come see me. So
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: I go see him, and we spend four hours together
• 4:52
  Speaker 1: and he says to me, why don't I just do
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: this myself? And that's how it stored it. Okay, So
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: the other people who assembled the three, they were fine
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: to walk away because it was a long shot in
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: their minds. We paid him a fee, as I recall,
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: we paid them a walk away fee. No papers were signed.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: These were all verbal commitments. Okay. So when does he
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: invest is for? And what ownership position do you get
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: when he invests for? Um, we've never discussed that publicly,
• 5:25
  Speaker 1: and I'm not gonna do that now what the ownership
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: position was, but um, he invested it, I believe in
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: September of eighty two. And you did get an ownership piece, Yes,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: I did. There were only two owners of the company,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: he and I. Okay, so now you're running again. Tell
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: me what happens. That'll take two hours. Um. We right
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: a business plan that's gonna be Chicago in New York,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: and we opened in Chicago in the fall of that year.
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: We have outlets. Said, of course, for those of you
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: who don't remember, there were outlets before the internet. Those
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: stores physical locations and a phone room. And the outlets
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: were in sports Mark, which was a sporting goods store,
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: Rose Records, and Carson Perry Scott. And we had both
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: baseball teams, the White Sox and Cubs. And we had
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: a deal with the big concert promoter, which was jam Um.
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: And we were talking to everybody, okay, just before that,
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: who were they using previously, Well, everybody was using ticket Tron. Okay.
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: Ticket Tron was was the you know, main player at
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: the time. And our business plan was to open in
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: New York and there was six major clients in New York.
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: There was Madison Square Garden, the Meadowlands, Nassau Coliseum, one
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: of the theater group's legitimate theater, and then both baseball teams, uh,
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: the Yankees and the Mets. And and to open you
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: would need four of the six if you had any
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: chance of making money. And interestingly enough, although we never
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: got them as a client, then we could have gotten
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: the Mets. We did have NASA Coliseum, Uh, but we
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: didn't weren't making much headway in the fall of a
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: D two and into the winter of a D two.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: So um I would say at that time we had
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: a foothold in Chicago, difficult to get arrested in New York,
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: and we just kept knocking on doors. Okay, just to
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: be clear for the other many people who were not
• 7:44
  Speaker 1: alive unlike you and me in that era, what was
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: your pitch to these companies? What differentiated Ticketmaster from ticket
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: toront or any other service you'll find the shocking. My
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: basic theory for going into this was ticket Mester had
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: an operating system that was basically an inventory control system.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: It was season tickets, group tickets, single tickets on one
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: integrated system ticketsry and had two boxes one boxers the
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: season tickets, one box was for single tickets, and as
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: hard as that is to believe Bob, the boxes didn't
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: talk to each other, so you end up having to
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: manually put stuff together for the teams. And what started
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: all this is when I was talking to this gentleman
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: at the Chicago White Sox. I said, how many tickets
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: did you sell last night? And he said, well, we
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: can give you an estimate, he said, because he said,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: because it doesn't always tie out, and you know, not
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: being computer literate and not being sophisticated in terms of
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: how things work, I assumed that people would say, Wow,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: I have this computer system that can now do this
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: integration of all everything under one roof, and that would
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: be meaningful. And I was only wrong. That was not
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: That was not exactly what happened. It was okay for
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the baseball teams, but not necessarily for the arenas. So okay,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: you're talking. We're still in eighty two, and you're telling
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: me what happens right now, we're losing money. And I
• 9:20
  Speaker 1: get a call in December um from I can't remember
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: exactly who called me, but they said Steve Wozniak. As
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: you may recall who was Steve Jobs partner when they
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: started Apple. This was this is pretty close to the conversation. Um, Steve,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak hates tike Atron because there were a lot
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: of counterfeits last year at a thing called the US Festival.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: I'm not sure you even remember that. Believe me, I
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: remember it, do you? It was San Bernardino in that
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Glenn Helen and Helen Reginald Park, right, okay, And so
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: there was gonna be three days at Glenn Helen Regional
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: Park and then the following weekend was gonna be like
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: Country and so it's sort of like the fore runner
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: coach for for Coachella, but it had nothing to do
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: with coach, not not even the slightest. So they called
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: me up in New York and they go, um, Wasniak
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: hates ticketron. They want you to do the ticketing. And
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: then I talking to a guy named John Ruby, who
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: you may remember work for Barry Faye, and Barry Faye
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: was getting the acts, uh, none of which I knew. Um,
• 10:31
  Speaker 1: and they said you gotta come to California and I went, uh,
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: that would be a no. Um. You know, I don't
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: know anybody in California. I don't even know what California
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: is all about. And um, they said, no, you gotta come.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: So they kept calling and then Jerry Seltzer, who you
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: may remember from Bass, was somebody who we had started
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: talking to. And Jerry said, look, we could go to California.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: We could we could open in l A. I can
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: send some people down from UM northern California. And there
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: was a phone room in New York called charge It,
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: which we initially took out the California and then throughout UM.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: But you know, they kept pushing me to come, and
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: so I flew out to California in January of and
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: knew nobody, and I'm meeting these different people and I'm
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: totally confused, and I'm showing up in three piece suits
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: and smoking, so you know, it's the New York thing,
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: New York cigars, you know, cigars and the whole silliness
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: of that. And they say to me, look, will you
• 11:42
  Speaker 1: guarantee the drop count if we give you the tickets, And,
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: not knowing what the drop count was, I said sure
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: because I had no idea what that meant. But the
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: drop count was basically, if the tickets at the floor,
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: you pay for them, okay. And then they kept pushing
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: on me to come, and I met Um Terry Bassett
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: and Bob Gettys and um you know some other people.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: But I was gonna basically outsource the whole thing. I
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: personally was not going to come to California. Uh. We
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: were gonna bring people down from northern California and from
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: New York. And what I figured is this UM wasn
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: was gonna spend a million dollars advertising on this. It
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: was a free play. And they said, can you set
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: up fifty hard ticket outlets? So this is what happened.
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: In the months of January and February. We found a
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: space in Korea Town in a company that a company
• 12:40
  Speaker 1: named Rexon went out of business. It's amazing how I
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: remember all this stuff. And they had a data center
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: and we signed two leases, one for six months and
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: one for five years because we didn't know if it
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: would work. And I put up fifty grand for six months,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: and I could have walked if it didn't work. And
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: I figured, if they spend a million dollars advertising, maybe
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: we can get a foothold. I wouldn't know one client
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: from another at all. In in uh in l A.
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: Now middle of February, I meet Terry Bassett and Getty's
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and Dad that people run an avalon which you well know.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: And and this was even before I met Brian Murphy,
• 13:23
  Speaker 1: and basically, um, I tell him what we're gonna do.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: And we we had a meeting at the Old Holiday
• 13:30
  Speaker 1: Inn on the four oh five. We had breakfast, and
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: I go back to New York and I've got everybody
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: coming to l A. And Terry Bassett, who should rest
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: in peace. I met him once. This is what I
• 13:42
  Speaker 1: mean about serendipity in life. And Terry calls me. I've
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: got lud dick Stein coming from Dallas. I've got Jerry
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: and his people coming from Northern California. I've got guys
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: coming from New York. We're gonna have it had to
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: go on sale April one. The guys at sport Mark
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: agreed to do this from Chicago to l A. And
• 14:02
  Speaker 1: then the guys from sport Mart introduced me to Music Plus,
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: and Lou Fogelman at Music Plus said, okay, I'll become
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: hard at ticket outlets for you. And I set up
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: fifty hard ticket outlets, which, when you think about that,
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: is semi insane. And Terry Bastard calls me up and says, listen,
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: this will not work unless you come to California. Now
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: I'm a New York I I go, what are you
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: talking about? He said, you need to come to California.
• 14:34
  Speaker 1: I go, Terry, I met you once I got all
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: these people coming. He said, Fred, if you don't come,
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: this will fail. I'm getting killed everywhere else. I'm losing
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: money in Chicago. I can't get arrested in New York.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: And I figured what the hell? And I rent the
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: house for six months and bring my family out to
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: California in late March of eighty three and walk into
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the office April one and sit down with some of
• 15:03
  Speaker 1: the people who were there and promptly fire them and
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: say you'll be leaving. And um, that was the beginning.
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: So how did it play out with US Festival? Well,
• 15:18
  Speaker 1: the U S Festival plays out as follows. There's a
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: lot of advertisement going on. You've got Avalon. I proceed
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: to sign contracts with Irvy Meadows, Avalon, Long Beach Arena,
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: a couple of small venues, and then this is what happens.
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: That's totally strange. Oh, we also put Return of the
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: Jedi on sale um in advance and wind up selling
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: fifty tickets. That was a Jerry Seltzer idea, and I said,
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: who's gonna buy movie tickets? I mean, I'm from New York.
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: I never thought of any of that as real as real.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: And we wind up and and Fox gets man at
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: us because we announced were selling movie tickets. You know,
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: they have their home market. And anyway, it was sort
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: of a camp. It was a mess on some level,
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: but interesting. And so the Forum, UM, the l A
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Forum has a contract with Tigatron, which was an exclusive contract,
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: and that's gonna come up UM in September one of
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: and I meet Lou Bamister, who was the president of
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: the Forum UM, and we start to negotiate, and candidly, Bob,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: I thought we were a stalking horse. So when you
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: think you're not, you have no shot. And I've said
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: this before, when you think you have no shot to win,
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: you kind of negotiate a certain way. And you know,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: my view was they had a long term relationship. UM.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: At that time, I did not have Claire Claire Rothman,
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: who was really a brilliant woman and the first really
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: strong woman who ran in arena in America, UM, who
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: was not too anxious to see us, And UM, I
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: never thought we had a shot and one of the
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: things I said to lou was, look, you need to
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: let me know by June whether or not, um we
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: can do this now. Part of what you want to
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: know is where did the economics come from. Early on,
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: I learned that people were not gonna switch just on
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: the basis you had a better system. But they all
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: wanted to charge your dollar, and I said, I'm not
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: doing that. All you do is complain that you don't
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: have new equipment. You complain the equipment doesn't work, You
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: complain you don't have the software you need. It has
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: to be that I can make a profit. And then
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: they go, well, if you do that, then I should
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: get this. And then finally it came to me where
• 17:53
  Speaker 1: I staid, look, I need this to make money. If
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: you want a quarter of fifty cents that gets added
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: to what I make. And that was the negotiation. And
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: then on June Louke called me and I take bad
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: news better standing up. So I had just come back
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: from a meeting and my assistant says Mr Bammis is
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: on the phone, and I pick up the phone and
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: I'm standing and lu says, we're close, but we're not there.
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: And I went, you need to hold on because now
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: like my heart is coming. I mean, you can't see
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: this in terms of how you knew me when we
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: got bigger. This was the beginning. This was something where
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: you knew if this happened, this was going to change
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: the world. And I don't say that lightly. I meant
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: it seriously. Because the Forum was one of the two
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: or three what I call even though it was local building,
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: had a national presence. So Lou says to me, look,
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: we're close, but we're not there. I need a sweetener.
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: And and we were both going to a charity event
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: that night, and I was going back to New York
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: the next day, and I said, I tell you what,
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: why don't you think about what you want and if
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: that makes sense, will make a deal. Because I'm out
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: of ideas. My my brain is gone. I don't have
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: anything I can tell you. And while I'm driving home
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: to change that for that night, it throwns on me,
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: that's a pretty stupid way to handle that. You better
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: come up with this solution, because this solution could be
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: he'd like the whole company. So I um came up
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: with a solution and we I got to the charity
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: event and I take him up on the side and
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: we're having a cocktail and I say to him, what
• 19:42
  Speaker 1: do you think about this? And he says, well, that
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: sounds interesting. Let me think about it. Now. Picture this
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: the next morning. This will tell you more about Lou bound,
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: this gentleman, than anything I could say. I get on
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: a plane in the morning, I fly to New York.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: I have a car picked me up and take me
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: out to a home in West Hampton. I'm not in
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: the house. Ten minutes in the phone rings. It's Lou fred.
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: I just want you to know you got the deal.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Have a great July fourth weekend. I wanted to make
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: you feel good about this. That was Lou. Now. A
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: couple of days later after the holiday, wait wait wait
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: wait wait wait wait, you left out a couple of things. Hey,
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: what was Ticketran's deal? Be what was the sweetener? Money?
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Money in the money in the form of what it
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: was rebates. But then also I agreed to do a
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: lot of software programming to him for no money. I
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: would just do all the software programming. And then what
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: what what? What? What was Ticketron's usual deal? You want
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: to know the truth. Ticketron was so stupid. I looked
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: at some of their contracts. They would give a rebate
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: of a penny or two pennies after you reach a
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: certain him. They saw themselves as a utility, not as
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: a marketing company. All the checks came out of New York.
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: There was no regional banking um. They they they saw
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: themselves basically as a utility. And I saw us I
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: as a marketing company. Because if you go back to
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: some of the history, which you probably remember, ticket Tron
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: would get allocations. They didn't get the whole house now
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: for him. They had the whole house, but there so
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: you'd go to a baseball game and there'd be empty
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: sections and then a ticket Trons section. And I remember
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: walking into one baseball team with with the new owners,
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: and the ticket manager said to me, oh, you're with
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: the ticket company. I'm working on ticket trans allocation. They
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: pissed me off, so I'm gonna give them bad seats.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: I didn't say a word, and I walked out of
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: the room with the two guys, and I go I
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: thought the object was to sell tickets to the fans,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: not whether or not you pissed them off. Right, say said,
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: don't worry about it. Were firing him, and they did.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: The end of the year. But the point was that
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: ticket tron never saw themselves as a business. It was
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: owned by Control Data UM. The people who owned it
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: didn't understand the business they were in UM. And I
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: remember when I'd be in a meeting in Houston where
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: we owned like seven or eight percent of the company,
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: and it was a partnership of the Summit, the Astrodome Pace,
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: Angelo Dross who owned the Spurs, and Ticketmaster, five partners,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: all of whom at that time hated each other and
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: required unanimous consent to do anything, which means, of course
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: nothing got done. So I'm sitting in the room and
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: they had a dent in the inventory, and within a
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: year they had six because they started giving ticket try
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: on allocations because they everybody was mad at Ticketmaster for
• 22:58
  Speaker 1: whatever the reason. I had nothing to do with that.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: I didn't run it. And this was the thing that
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: was really interesting to me. I said to them, why
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: is there a dollar service charge on afforded dollar ticket?
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: And they said, because we have five dollar tickets And
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: I said, yeah, but a afforded dollar ticket could have
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: a two dollar service charge and a five dollar ticket
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: could have a dollar And they said, you can't do that,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: and that was my famous line was that like one
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: of the tablets, Moses dropped. And some of them found
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: it funny and some of them didn't. But the point was,
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: as I subsequently learned, the way the system was written,
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: you could only have one service charge on an event,
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: couldn't have multiple service charges. You couldn't have multiple service
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: charges in the marketplace. And in a world of self deprecation,
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: this was common sense to me. I didn't understand why
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: this thing happened. And then on top of everything else,
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: I'm looking at their numbers. They've lost the inventory in
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: those His prime was so they borrowed the money at
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: twenty two and they're cash flowing money and they're complaining,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: and I'm sitting there thinking, you know, there's a business here.
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to look at this as a business, but
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: there's a business. And the thing it needs follows is One,
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: you need multiple service charges to you need to have
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: multiple service charges on the same event. Three, it's not
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: a democracy. You have to make this where you have
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: total control of sitting in a room, and you've got
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: to be an All good negotiations are driven by if
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: you can't leave the table, don't sit at the table. Okay,
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: so you make the deal with the Forum. Pick up there.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: Here's what happens the following week. I get a call
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: on Monday. This is the week after he's told me
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: we're going to do the deal, and a guy calls
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: me from our office and says, we have a problem.
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: And I said, what's a problem. He said, Lou wants
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: to talk to you. That could mean anything. So I
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: call up Blue and Lu says, Tikatron is not giving
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: us the sixty day cancelation provision. They're gonna be out
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: of here in ten days. They're not gonna honor it.
• 25:16
  Speaker 1: Can you put me up in ten days? And being
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: the moron I am, and went, of course, without truly
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: understanding what that means. And um, he said, Look, and
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: I'll never forget what he said. He said, if I
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: had any doubt before, I have no doubt. Now, no
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: one's gonna muscle me and tell me what to do.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Take a tron did a real New York in your
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: face move. Nobody knows this, Bob, I've never told this
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: story publicly. That's really true. So now I called my
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: guys and go, okay, we need a phone line into
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: the Forum. So they called me back and say, okay,
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: they're gonna put him in on Thursday. On on Tuesday
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: afternoon or Wednesday morning, I get a call going they
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: said they can't put it in for two months now.
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: I'm sure you know I've occasionally raised my voice and
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: let's just say I blew a fit at peg Bell
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: and they agreed to put in one line on Friday.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: And I had a guy who was really smart who
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: built a black box and we ran the whole Forum
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: box office of one line, one telephone line. And I
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: said to Lou, look, I'm coming back this week, and
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: Luke said, no, you're not. You have you a vacation.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: You need to come back Monday, which is like the
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: tenth of the eleven And on the sevent the Journey
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: sale was going on sale. A Journey concert was going
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: on sale. And so I fly back on Monday. On Tuesday,
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, we send them the contract. On on Wednesday,
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: I mean the offices of the Forum, which is down stairs. Upstairs,
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: they're moving in equipment and training people and Lou and I,
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: because we don't have time, I'm marking up the contract
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: I gave them. And that's the contract we signed and
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: then here's the best part. Because they were all chicken
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: scratches and we didn't know what they meant. Louis this,
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: lou is a total gentleman. So Louid called me up
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: and go what does this mean? I go, I don't know.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: He says, what what do you think it means? I said,
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: it means whatever you wanted to meet. He said, well
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: that might be fair, and I go, Loo, listen to me.
• 27:33
  Speaker 1: Whatever you needed to mean. It means let's not waste
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: time with contracts. Just tell me what you need, will
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: take care of it. And then, of course I never
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: lost the Forum as a client, obviously, because if you've
• 27:44
  Speaker 1: you've built those kinds of relationships. So the concert goes
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: on sale on Monday, and then the whole country finds
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: out that Tikatron pulled out, you know, in ten days,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: you know, and didn't give them on at the sixty
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: day notice, and obviously that became a marketing um benefit um.
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: And then about two months later, there was a regional
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: convention on the West coast, like the I Double Lamb
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: and which was national that I went to. This was local,
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: This was the whole West coast, and I figured take
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: a tron would get up and they would apologize for
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: their behavior and say, the industry is important. We're not
• 28:26
  Speaker 1: going anywhere. We made a mistake because they bet. We
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: couldn't put them up, and they didn't say a word.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: And I said to my guys, we own this industry.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: Or when I say we own it, we will. We
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: will put them out of business. They're too stupid for words.
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: And I said it will take time. But what they
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: should have stood up with this group of people is
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: we're sorry, we care about you. We did the wrong thing.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: We should have stepped up, and they didn't do that.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: And it went around the country. And then what it
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: also did is it gave me name recognition for people
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: to talk to me. And that's the beginning. That was
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: really the beginning. Okay, so from the very big the
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: big differentiator from the consumer end was the Ticketmaster. You
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: could choose your seat. Was that a feature from day one? Yes?
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Best available seat. I mean one of the things we
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: said is we have ticket centers, not remote outlets. And
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: a remote outlet men a remote seat. Listen. We made
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: all this stuff up as we went along, but the
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: point was you had the whole inventory of what went
• 29:37
  Speaker 1: on sale, whatever, the building gave you. So an exclusive
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: is not what everybody thinks. And exclusive is the buildings
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: decide what they're gonna put on sale. Ticketmaster doesn't decide that.
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: The buildings decide that. So in the forum, where it
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: was twenty seats US Senate Terrorists, senate Terrorists was equivalent
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: to season tickets because they didn't have suites. So you'd
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: get anyway from ten to twelve thousand tickets on a concert,
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: not twenty. And when people would talk about exclusives, and
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: it was one of the things that I think, um
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: as people learned, it was not what it meant. Exclusive
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: in the world meant wow, you got every ticket, Well
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: you don't. And the truth is that everything in an
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: arena is exclusive, whether it's food service, whether it's parking,
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: whether it's you're a concessionaire in the building. And the
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: way I saw the business was it was no different
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: than a food concession. The public paid for that. If
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: you're going to create outlets and phones that make it
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: easy for the public not to go, you're entitled to
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: get paid. And to me, that's why we called it
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: a convenience charge. And what people never understood is the
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: public was never our client, our client with the arenas
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: and theaters and stadiums, and you serve the public because
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: underneath it was this, because this is something you need
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: to know in the sense of the way you you've
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: written over the list forty years. Every arena manage is
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: concerned about the team. Every arena manager is concerned about
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: family shows. You know what. Arena managers were never concerned
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: about rock and roll orphans. People would come in and
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: trash the buildings or they would come in and it
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: wasn't a business the way it was. And here's the part.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: When I got into business, sev of all tickets for
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: shows was sold at the box office. And my bet was,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: if I can create an outlet system that you can
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: put in logo slicks with a with a phone number,
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: that nobody would go to the box office. That in
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: the end, because no box office is near where anybody
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: else is, and who the hell wants to camp out.
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: So the perspective was that was the bet I made.
• 31:59
  Speaker 1: I could have been wrong. I mean, there was no
• 32:02
  Speaker 1: guarantee I was right. Was that. Look, if you create
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: an outlets system where everybody has access to the same
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: inventory when it goes on sale, including what's at the
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: box office because take Atron in some instances would all
• 32:16
  Speaker 1: their outlets weren't open, all their alice weren't open store hours,
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: all their outlets weren't open on the day's shows, one
• 32:21
  Speaker 1: on sale. I can take you through ten things take
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: Atron didn't do, and I wasn't gonna do any of them.
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: And at the beginning, when we were losing money, and
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: people said, well, we'll give you an allocation, and I went, no, No,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: it has to be best available seat, because if I
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: can't sell best available seat, I'm another version of them,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: and I'd rather go down with the ship than than
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: build a business on the wrong level. They failed at this,
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: and I can't tell you how many times I sat
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: it at at in a in a negotiation where people said,
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: we'll give you an allocation and I go find it. Well,
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: that's very nice, We're not taking it. We're just not
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: gonna take it. Okay. At this point in time, is
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: Ticketmaster your full time job? Are you still practicing law
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: in other areas with other clients? No? No, No. In
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: two in September, when he funded, I left my practice
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: and became CEO of the company. That's what I did, right, Okay,
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: So you get the Forum. That's the first turning point,
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: and that of course is mostly concerts. Whatever did you
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: get the sports teams at the everything? Everything? Okay? So
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: how did you ultimately gain market share? Well, you started
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: talking to people. So we started talking to Universal, we
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: started talking to the Hollywood Bawl, we started talking to
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: I have to tell you, to be fair, a lot
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: of those brain cells died. But we started talking to everybody.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: And Jerry Seltza had a theory because I only wanted
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: to deal with the big venues, and he said, no,
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: you gotta deal with the clubs too. So we dealt
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: with the small clubs, we dealt with the medium sized clubs,
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: and we dealt with and Be and he was right.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: And then we dealt with the arenas, and uh, you know,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Universal came, the Hollywood Bowl came, Irvine Meadows was already
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: along for the ride. And then you have to understand something.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: I didn't know anything. I'm a lawyer, what do I
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: know about running a business. So you wake up one
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: morning and you took yourself into this, right, I mean
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: you're there. And to be clear, because you asked the
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: question about Jay Jay was j Prisker was both a
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: mentor and like a second day to me, it's important
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: that I say that. So when we when when he
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: was gonna put up the money, I served up the
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: employment contract that UM I was gonna do with these
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: um UM venture capitalists. And then his lawyers get involved,
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: and I called him up because they, you know, they
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: looked it tough and I don't want to deal with that.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: And I called J up and I said, you know
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: what I feel like. I'm sitting in a closet with
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: no windows. The fact that you think I could use
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: an employment contract against you when I'm sitting here trying
• 35:11
  Speaker 1: to figure out how to make money UM and make
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: this company work. I can't wrap my head around. So
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: I'll make you the following deal. You know what it says.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: I know what it says. And we lived on a
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: handshake for twelve years. There was never a piece of paper. Wow,
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: So so you know, so the dynamic was that we
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: were we became very close. He wouldn't fire me, I
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: wouldn't quit. We had some interesting moments, but the truth
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: was it was a handshake. And if Jay was not
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: my partner and he owned more than I did. To
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: be clear, UM the company would have failed because private
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: equity guys worried too much. Jay only cared about one thing.
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: As long as you were honest. He didn't care. And
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: you know, people would call him up and go, you know,
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: Frit's pissing me off, and go, well, you have to
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: talk to Fred. That was the kind of owner he was,
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: and that was the kind of partner he was. It's
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: even better way to put it. And so in eight three,
• 36:13
  Speaker 1: I'm I'm, you know, doing stuff you know, and I
• 36:18
  Speaker 1: don't know anything. So I think, you know, I got
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: an interesting idea. I'm gonna have a meeting every day
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: at eight o'clock and everybody's gonna tell me what they
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: did the day before. And people would come in at
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: eight o'clock and I would tell everybody, look, even if
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: you're installing machines, you're in marketing. Because they don't meet me,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: they meet you. You have to think about who what
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: you are and then come back and tell me what
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: they say. And during that year I learned everything that
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: was to learn. Well, let's put it like this, the
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: basis of the business, where the money was, how everything
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: I did, every job, how everything worked, what I was
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: asking people to do, what counted what didn't count. And
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: you'll find the shocking because I never wrote anything. Everybody
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: knows that was a big joke with me. Every morning
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: I woke up, took out a yellow pad, wrote fifty
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: forty to fifty things I wanted to do, and ripped
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: up the sheet, and then in my mind during the
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: day I crossed things off and the next day I
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: would start again. I worked from the time I woke
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: up until I couldn't see anymore. But I'm useless after
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: eight thirty or nine o'clock at night. So it was
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: like you had to have dinner, but I was. I
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: knew every place way to get breakfast at five thirty
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: in the morning. That's what I learned. And look, you
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: pay a price for that. And you know, Bob, because
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: in the early years, as we started to grow, we
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: took a lot of criticism, and a lot of it
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: was directed at me. But it was okay for the
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: following reason. Nobody cares about a computerized ticketing company. Why
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: would you care? And I made a real decision at
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: the beginning that I would take the heat for everybody
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: and make it personal because then if you put a
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: face to it, right, what it does is people start
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: to pay attention. And you know in the end there
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: were acquisitions. UM. You know, UM. I'll answer the questions
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: you want to ask. But the point was it was
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: all strategic and if I had not learned to do
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: every job in the company, we would have failed because
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: you can't scale, you can't grow, you can't evolve unless
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: you understand when you're taking a start up. And I
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: knew changing the rules, changing the economics was different. And
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: the other thing that everybody wanted to do is this.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: These are two things I did in contracts that nobody
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: pays any attention to. One is, UM, I wouldn't sign
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: a one year deal. I had no interest in signing
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: a one year deal. Waste of time because then you're
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: always under the gun. The second thing is on three
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: and five year contracts, I mostly wanted five, and I
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: took three. In some cases, raisors were built into the
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: contract see Tickettron in their contracts said raises are mutual.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: And in talking to a lot of the building managers,
• 39:09
  Speaker 1: they would go about a month before we would have
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: to have this discussion. I would pick a fight and
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: then tell them they couldn't raise it, and they'd laugh.
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: They thought it was funny, and I went, that's stupid.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: So when when I started to build in raises, they said, well,
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: you can't have a raise every year. I said, what
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: if you're sharing it? Well, that's different. And so so
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: all the stuff that you used to rail about or
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: that people would write about, it was all organized and
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: so they have well Ticketmaster can do what they want. No,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: we can't. Everything was in a contract. The thing is
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: what I took out of it was that we don't
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: have to go back and negotiate every year. And because
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: it was automatic, there was no discussion. It was just easy.
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: You got it done and people were like wow. And
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: then they go, well it's not my fault, it's his,
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: and they call you over, well how do you feel
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: about that? And you're going, okay, fine, next you know.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, at the height of all these controversies, they
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: had me setting the price of every ticket in the country.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: Damn me setting the price of every service. Everything was
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: in a contract, Everything was negotiated. Everything was there in
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: black and white, and I went, why are we different
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: than a food service? And then I realized one thing
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: really early on. No arena is open three sixty five
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: days a year. No stadium is open three sixty five
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: days a year. Do you know the only vendor that
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: operates three and sixty five days a year the ticket company.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: When you're home at Christmas watching a show or a
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: sporting event, there's someone in the box office. That means
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: someone's in the data center. So the whole dynamic of
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: how you were looking at this business, and I will
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: tell you this, the systems didn't work. This was the
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: Forum's definition of default. You need to be down for
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: more than an hour, and then you needed to be
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: down for more than an hour twice, and that counted
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: one event of default. And yet to have four events
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: of default in a quarter to be in default, so
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: that was eight hours. So they go, well, you're only
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: down for fifteen minutes. That doesn't count. By the end
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: of the third year, if we went down twenty minutes
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: in a year, people were nuts. And part of the reason,
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: and I'll say this later, you know when you ask
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: in the last you know, um Taylor Swift, mess Siki
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: had five shows at the Brooklyn Arena and they blew
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: up and you know that they lost that contract. Here's
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: the reason why Ticketmaster continues to be dominant more than
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: any other reason and why no one can scale, no
• 41:54
  Speaker 1: one will give them the ability to make the mistakes
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: we did. In the first three years, people compared us
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: to ticket Tron and ticket Trunk was terrible, outages, couldn't
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: find them, difficult, difficult, systems slow, not connected. During that period,
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: we made a lot of mistakes, make no bones about it.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: We blew up. I can't tell you how many times.
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: But here's the difference. When people left ticket Tron to
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: go to ticket Master was walking off a curb. For
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: people to leave Ticketmaster today, you gotta jump out of
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: a third of what stirring window because no system can
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: scale and no one will give them the opportunity to
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: make the mistakes Ticketmaster hat. In other words, we we
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: had that freedom because the competition was awful. It was terrible.
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: And then what happened is we got bigger and you
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: kept evolving your system. And I'm talking about the sixteen
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: years I was there, not I can't talk about what
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: came afterwards. Every time we made major system up grades,
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: we'd go to a C market or a B market
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: and say, listen, we've got these new um improvements, but
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: we you know, we gotta debug it, and so we
• 43:11
  Speaker 1: debug it in some region, and we'd pay the buildings,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: or we'd give them certain benefits that other buildings wouldn't have. Well,
• 43:18
  Speaker 1: we had a chance to test it. So when people
• 43:20
  Speaker 1: sit in the room and go, I don't understand why
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: I take a master's dominant the dominant because it works
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: better than anybody else. And nobody's got the freedom to
• 43:28
  Speaker 1: scale because nobody, nobody's willing to take the mistakes that
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: we made that we had between eighty two and eight
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: five and eighties six. You follow what I'm saying, Let
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: me just ask you a question. The modern ney Uh
• 43:44
  Speaker 1: paradigm of giving of paying the arena or venue for
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: an exclusive contract, how did that come about? At the beginning,
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't do it unless I could take an exclusive
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: that That was the first contract I own. No, the
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: reverse where the ticket company pays the venue. From the beginning,
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: it came from me. It came because I watched the
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: food concession has pay the building. I watched the parking
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: concession has pay the building. I watched everybody paying the building. Well,
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: just because I know, so if the food concession or
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: wants to the food concession, they pay X amount of
• 44:25
  Speaker 1: dollars right up front. Well, they do two things. They
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: put in all the equipment right and and they either well,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: we didn't pay anybody up front for five or six years.
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: That that's a misnomer. That may have been even longer
• 44:38
  Speaker 1: than that. People got revenue streams from day one. But
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: but but advances we didn't make. But the food companies
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: started making advances. And you're a concessionaire in the building.
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: So I didn't invent that. I just took it from
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: another pot and said, okay, we can do that. Um.
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: One of the things that we did it was, um,
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: people always came to us for money because we were
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: the bank. I mean fundamentally were the bank. We had
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: the ticket money. But but before I go there, let
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: me let me add the follow it. Of all the
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: criticisms you've heard of Ticketmaster and anybody more wired than
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: you are, I don't know they hear anybody ever say
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: they didn't get an order that was honest. Anybody say
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: they didn't get all their money. See, nobody wants to talk.
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: Nobody wants to talk about that. They had a real
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: manifest I had one broke. One promoter in Europe said
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: I'll never use your system. It's too accurate actually said that.
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we cleaned up an industry that
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: nobody wants to pay attention to rose, that that didn't
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: exist on manifests, orders, that that people didn't get paid on.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: We would never There are two things to know of
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: how I looked at the business. One two things people
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: have sense of humor about. One is money. The second
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: is systems. You can't be a day later a dollar
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: short and you're some better work. Everything else is marketing.
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: Everything everything else is marketing. And so the impact of
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: what what we did was we would give people money
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: and you know, and pay them weekly. And then somewhere
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: along the line, I can't I don't even remember the
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: building we did it with, somebody said I need money.
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: What else was new? And by the way, the music business,
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: you well know is what's mine is mine and what
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: yours was we're going to negotiate for. And one of
• 46:31
  Speaker 1: the early negotiations was, well, if you charge three dollars
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: on my twenty dollar ticket, then I should charge twenty three.
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: And I go, well, in charge twenty three, and they go,
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: what are you going to charge? I said three. I said.
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: What you need to understand is this The system works
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: you don't complain about getting paid, you don't complain about
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: the audience, you don't complain. You're looking for the money.
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: You're not getting the money from New Jersey because I
• 46:54
  Speaker 1: had regional banks in five or six places. And here's
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: what nobody pays attention to, which will get too later
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: with Tikotron. From day one being a lawyer, there were
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: two kinds of accounts I had. So if I took
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: in a hundred and ten dollars that went into a
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: client account, ten dollars went into my account and the
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: hundred dollars stayed in the client account. And as we
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: got bigger and became a borrowing company, the banks could
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: not have access to our client accounts. But every company
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: I bought, including ticket Tron, was in the client accounts.
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: And on closing on Tikatron, they wrote us a check,
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: not the other way around, because they were using everybody's
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: money to operate. We didn't do that, and I didn't
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: do that from day one, even when I was losing money.
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: So in the in the world of people not knowing
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: and paying attention, that was real. We we ran our
• 47:49
  Speaker 1: business clean. And the reason that over the years under
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: my watch, why the government never did anything. And I
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: always respect the fact that government could do anything they want.
• 47:59
  Speaker 1: Is no company. It was like going to the practologists.
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: Everyone looked at us and they went through the company
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: and they went through how we did our business. And
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: you know what, you're not a clean business, a totally clean, absolute,
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: you know, honest business, where the money was, how the
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: money was handled, who got paid. There isn't one promoter
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: who can sit in the room and go, oh, I
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: didn't get my money, or Fred took my We didn't
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: do any of that. And nobody wants to pay any
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: attention to that when they write it. And you think
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: of all those little ticket companies that weren't broke, and
• 48:31
  Speaker 1: the reason we bought Tickettron is they were in the
• 48:35
  Speaker 1: client accounts to the tune of north to fourteen million dollars.
• 48:38
  Speaker 1: And the reason I bought them was if they went broke,
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: every single governmental agency would talk about how you're gonna
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: handle the money, and I didn't want that. It was
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: cheaper to buy it and just you know, let them
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: pay it and make everything right. And here's the thing
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: that was interesting. We paid the little guys because right
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: away because live hand to mouth. But the big arenas.
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: The numbers were so screwed up. I didn't pay anybody
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: in America for four weeks on the big arenas. And
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: they called me up and said, Fred, are we good?
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Are you good for the money? I said, I give
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: you my word, we're good for the money. You cannot
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: comprehend how screwed up these books are. And when we
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: make the settlement, if you think there's any discrepancy, you
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: know how to find me, pick up the phone and
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: we'll solve anything. No one's gonna take one dollar from
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: you or one penny from you that doesn't belong. And
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: everybody waited four weeks until we could put the numbers together.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: Nobody screamed and yelled. Nobody went. I would get calls.
• 49:37
  Speaker 1: Do I have your word? I you got my word?
• 49:41
  Speaker 1: And you know none of that got written. But the
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: point is that's what having integrity and honesty and being
• 49:48
  Speaker 1: open about with the industry. And you know, okay, just
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: to be very clear, you took four weeks to pay.
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: As years went by, it wasn't four weeks. No, you
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: got paid every week. Okay, next thing, because the public
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: is always concerned about this, especially today when gigs are
• 50:16
  Speaker 1: put on sale, a year in advance. You take the
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: money and you pay the buildings once a week. You
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: don't hold the money. Money goes to the money goes
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: to the arenas once a week. And we had a rule.
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: We had I had a rule. So when I didn't
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: pay the buildings for four weeks, it was because I
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: couldn't put the numbers together. And then they went back
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: to being paid on a weekly basis. The point is this,
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: even ticket trans clients knew how screwed up they were.
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: It wasn't only us. They knew how screwed up they were.
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: And the way we would do our business is this.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: You'd get paid for Monday through Sunday, you get a
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: wire transfer on Wednesday at Thursday of the following week,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: and buildings like the Forum in the meadow Lands and
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: United States, all those buildings got paid. And today you know,
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: Live Nation puts stuff on sale a year in advance,
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: they get paid. I mean it's you're not you're not
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: holding on to that money. The day of holding on
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: money for float is gone. But that was gone under
• 51:13
  Speaker 1: my watch. Okay. And a little bit slower, why exactly
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: did you buy ticket tron Because if they if they
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: closed and filed bankruptcy. The public would have been stuck
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: for eighteen million dollars, and that meant that would have
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: been investigations that would have meant, how do you hold
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: the money? How do you do this? And I chose
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: to say, better we buy them and make everybody right,
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: then spend time in forty states explaining to people what's
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: going on. I did it to protect the industry. I
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: really did it to protect the industry and protect myself,
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: totally clear. Let's jump forward to Pearl Jam in nineties.
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: I knew you were going to do that. Wait wait, wait, wait,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: give me your side of the story. There is no side.
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: What happened was this? The Pearl Jam's story started with
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: a guy whose name you know, but I'm not gonna
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: do that. Who the Sting called me up and said,
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: Sting is gonna do one show at the will Turn Theater.
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: Do you remember that? Does that even doing? And okay,
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: so how are we going to do that? I said, Well,
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: the fairest way to do it is to do phones only. Um,
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: you know, I forget what he was going to charge
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: a ticket? Will do three dollars and we'll do We'll
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: make sure no one gets two tickets. It will be
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: two tickets. I'll make sure that we cross reference credit cards,
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: addresses and all the stuff that goes with that, and
• 52:51
  Speaker 1: we'll do it that way. Because the demand was twenty
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: of those, you know, the will turn was eighteen hundred seats.
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: I can't even remember whatever, and so so we agreed
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: and that's how it worked. And then the same person
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: called me on Pearl Jam he was gonna do the
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: show at the Orpheum Theater in Boston. I said, well,
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: we can't do the show with the outlets. That's gonna
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: be a war. I mean, you could sell ten of those.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: I said, are you open to doing the same thing
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: we did? Was sting, and he said yes, And so
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: it was like an eighteen dollar ticket and three dollars
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: on the phone and the next thing I know, and
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: I know you'll find the shocking as I was blindsided.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: No one talked to me, no one said a word
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: to me, and then this whole ship storm started and
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: I was caught unaware, and I was amazed that the
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: band got involved. I mean, I didn't even know three
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: quarters of the stuff that subsequently came out later for real,
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: and I mean, it's none of it made any sense.
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: And I found out that the guy who was behind
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: all that I was trying to get himself into the
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: ticket business and he had a willing group of guys
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: who look I think Pearl Jam's a really great band,
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: and I think they walked into a controversy they didn't understand.
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: And I would say for six months we got our
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: head handed to us. They were uh. And it led
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: to a Department of Justice investigation and twenty eight attorney generals.
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: And the only thing I've ever said about that is
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: I was glad the system work because everybody left we
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: signed nothing. The more facts they found, um, the more
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: they understood that what they were told with two different things.
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: And then um, um, Sherry Washerman and maybe it was
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: pearl Off, I can't remember, asked us, asked me to
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: have a meeting with um Kelly Curtis at the old
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: Nico Hotel in Los Angeles, you know the one on
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: less Jennaga. Of course that's a manager of Pearl Jam
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: for those who don't know. Yeah, And and I meet Kelly,
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: and Kelly was the Pearl Jam was was in in
• 55:11
  Speaker 1: of Washington, d C. The month before doing a benefit
• 55:14
  Speaker 1: concert for Gloria steinhum and she gets on stage and says,
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: you know, I'm all full lower tickets. I called her
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: because I've given her money. And I go, Gloria, before
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: you walk into this, why don't you know the facts.
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: And I said, you know what you're being told is
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: not true. And I sat with Kelly and I said, look,
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: I give myself a D minus vow. I handled it
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: last year. This was a I was blindsided. I was defensive,
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: and I didn't understand a lot. I couldn't understand where
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: it came from. I mean, I was shocked. And I said,
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: but look, it's time to move on. Do a benefit concert.
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: What you want to do is going to be a
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: nightmare and a disaster. I will give a hunt represented
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: the service charge to any charity you want, but this
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: ends now. And he said to me, we're gonna change
• 56:11
  Speaker 1: the whole concert business. And I said to him, let
• 56:15
  Speaker 1: me explain the reality. I'm a lot smarter this year
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: than I was last year. You've got four kids who
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: are millionaires. I got five thousand people who worked for
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: me phone rooms, who are minorities, who welfare mothers, who
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: you know, need the gig. And we do a lot
• 56:35
  Speaker 1: of work in the inner cities and we take care
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: of a lot of different people. You're not gonna win.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: I know what the game is now, You're not gonna win.
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: Go your tour is going to be a disaster. Don't
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: do it. He's no, We're gonna change the world. It
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: blew up. I've read pieces that I helped blow it up.
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: I had as much to blowing to. I had as
• 57:00
  Speaker 1: much to do blowing it up as you did. We
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: stayed away from it intentionally because it would fall back
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: on us. And you know, in the end, they never
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: should have done what they did. And here's the part
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: that was crazy, because you will appreciate this. No other
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: group joined them. And it wasn't because we had power.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: It was because people talk to us. So you know
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: Ian McKellan and Fugazi. Fugazi had five dollar tickets. A
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: year before the Pearl Jam thing. He placed some building
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: in Chicago and they put a three dollar service charge
• 57:34
  Speaker 1: on it, and he blew a fit. And I read
• 57:38
  Speaker 1: it about it one of the trade magazines and I said,
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: he's right. So I said to one of the guys
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: that golden voice, can you connect me with him? I
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: spoke to him and I said First of all, let
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: me apologize, because if you're doing five dollar tickets, you
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: care about your craft and you care about your fans.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: So you tell me what's a fast service charge? He said,
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: A dollar? I said, line, you got it on all
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: your shows. I'll let everybody know. And what about the phones?
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: He says, I don't care about that. You can judge
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: two or three dollars because nobody buys my phone. Fine.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: Three months later he blows another fit because you know buildings,
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: you know if it's five dollars in advance and seven
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: dollars at the door. And he blames us for the
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: two dollars. And I call him up and I go
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: I he said, I know it wasn't you. It wasn't you.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: You've been a really straight up guy. It will not
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: happen again. Fine, stunt Temple pilots, I made a deal
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: um rage against the machine. I mean deals with everybody
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: who talked to me. You know when they when they
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: when they talk to us about stunt temble polish, is
• 58:41
  Speaker 1: I got an I've got an elevator of of of prices.
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: Can you move some of the stuff to the higher
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: prices and reduced the lower prices of course, common sense
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: did it for all these acts, which is why no
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: one joined them, and they're sitting there by themselves. And
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: there's one I want to get in. Tim Collins, as
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: you know, testified at the hearings, manager VERYL. Smith, Manager
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: Arrass Smith. And a year later he comes to see
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: me and he apologizes because he won't admit it. He said,
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: I was just trying to be cool. I know you
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: won't hold it against me, and I go, life moves on. Look,
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: no one showed up for this except them, and I
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: think they would take an advantage of I think they
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: didn't quite understand what they were walking into, and they
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: self destructed on their own. It's nothing I'm particularly feel
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: good about or bad about, um. But in the end
• 59:39
  Speaker 1: everybody left, the government left, the Attorney General's left, and
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the class action lossuits a roll bullshit anyway. So the
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: dynamic for all of that is that's the truth. Okay, okay,
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: let's move on from there. How does Prince tur decide
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: to get out? No, he didn't decide. I decided. We
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: were sitting in a room it was and I said, Jay,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: we're doing really great, and you know I love you.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: But there are two choices you know, I want to
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: put some money away and or go public. And Jay
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: didn't want to go public. And he said, what do
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: you think the company's worth? And I told him and
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: he said, you'll never get that. And in the space
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: of thirty days we had five bids for more than
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: I said. And then it took a year, and then
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: Paul Allen ultimately bought the company for the company forty
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: million dollars. But it was really Jay would never have
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: sold it, Bob, But you know, Jay, it was a
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: billionaire before they were billionaires. And I had always worked
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: since I was sixteen, and I wanted to put away
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: a chunk of money, which I think is fair. I'm
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: entitled to it. I did it. And and when when
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 1: Paul bought the company, he said and and and j
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: said to me, look, I don't want you to negotiate
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: you a deal until I have our deal, which is
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: basically the price of the company. So they agree on
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: a price, and then Paul comes to me and I
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: tell him what I want and he basically says, you're
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: out of your mind. And I go, fine, then I'll
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: give you a one year deal and I'll leave. I
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: was happy to go. I mean I've been working since
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: I was a kid. My dad died at fifty two.
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: That always sits in the back of your mind. Um,
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: I was sixty years old. And I said, I'll give
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: you a one year transition, okay, um, whatever you want.
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: You can fill in a number. I don't care. And
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 1: he came back to me and said, no, I want
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: to I want you to stay. And then he went
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: to Jay and said, I understand you're the only person
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: who has moral suasion on Fred. And Jay said that's true.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: I do. Went very close, and he said I need
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: your help, and Jay said, Paul, let me explain this.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: I can't help you. Fred said he'd stay out of
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: the deal for us, and I told him I'd stay
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: out of the deal for him, So I can't help
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: you with that. You're gonna have to figure it out.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 1: And Paul did call me a couple of days later
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: and he and he goes like this, Okay, you can
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: have your deal, and I said, and he was not
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: happy about it, and I said, well, I gotta think
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: about it now because I didn't think you were going
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: to do it. But I'll call you back in a
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: couple of days. And he said, well, I'm not giving
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: you more. I said, I didn't ask for more. I
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: actually thought I was getting out those are you know,
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: those are stories that aren't written anywhere, Bob Okay. So
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 1: what was it like working for Paul Allen? Paul was
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: a strange guy. Um, I didn't understand client relationships. Um.
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: For the most part, he did not engage. UM. You know,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: we had the controversies with Microsoft at the time. He
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: left me alone to a great extent. Um. But when
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: we were when we were going from information on the
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: internet to doing transactions, my level of concerning with some
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: kid in Peoria, We've got seven thousand tickets for you too,
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: and I wanted to make sure we had all the
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: firewalls appropriate. And I think he took it as a
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: level of disobedience, like, you know, you need to do
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: what I want. And I go, well, I can't do
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: what you want if I put clients in jeopardy. These
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: these are people I have relationships with, These are people
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: that I have obligations too. He didn't understand any of that.
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: He just thought I was being difficult. And I acknowledge
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: I'm difficult, but it wasn't difficult without a reason. And
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: then I said finally, Okay, we'll do it in the Northwest.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 1: And the first guy who used the service was a
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: guy from Tumwa to Washington. I still remember this. So
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: somebody comes, somebody O and go. Somebody brought one ticket
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 1: for a baseball game. I said, we'll call him up
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: and ask him why they did it. And the guy said,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: I don't like talking to people and I don't like
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: talking to you. I should have put that up on
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: the wall. I mean, because that was the beginning. And
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: then we took it across the country. And you know,
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 1: when we we were probably the first company to make
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 1: money on the internet for real. Okay, how does uh
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: it transfer to Barry Diller? When Barry came? Uh? Barry,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: it's very smart. Barry is a really smart financial engineer.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: And my contract had a year left. Well, let's talk
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: about the sale first. How I went from Paul Allen
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: to Barry Diller. He he did that deal and he
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: didn't consult me truth just because you know the numbers
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: did did Was it a good investment for Paul Allen? Um?
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: It was close. I think Paul was frustrated on some
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: levels on this UM and so when he sold it
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: to Diller, you know, a lot of people try to
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: get me to say you can stay, and I really,
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: Barry's the guy wants total control and he's entitled to it. Um.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: And I never worked for anybody, so I knew at
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: some point I was going to leave. And then once
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 1: um he came to the rest of the company, I
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: basically left. Um. You know, we had a what I
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: would call a purely professional, at times strained relationship, but
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 1: he never interfered with what I was doing. But look,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: it's his company, and when it was his company, it
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: wasn't my company anymore. And UM, you know, where I
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: had had ultimate freedom to do what I want, I
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 1: didn't have that any you know, even though he said,
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: you know, he said, we're being very careful about your contract.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: We want to make sure we don't because we know
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: you have total control. But in the end, Barry's Barry
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: is a brilliant financial engineer. Aaron looked, the guys made
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: a billion dollars. You gotta give him credit. And he
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: he knows how to buy these companies. And I'm not
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: gonna say anything negative about him, even though you know,
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: he's not somebody that he and I became friends. UM,
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: and the I have great respect for him, and you
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: gotta make your It was my journey, and I figured
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: the journey ended. So just to be clear, how long
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: did you work with Barry? Maybe a year, maybe less? Okay,
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 1: Now I realize you leave there in the nineties and
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 1: there's been evolution since then. But you are certainly a
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: student of the game. So we have fees, whatever we
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: label them, forget it. When you were involved, how were
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: the fees created in terms of the amount and how
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: were they divvied up. That's a question with no answer
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: because it was a case by a spasis. Okay, then
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 1: let me ask you this. So you're getting fees. Some
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: goes to the building, some goes to ticket master. How
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: long was it before someone to the promoter on at
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: the beginning, See here's how it worked. The promoters often
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: took you into the building, no matter where you are
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: in the country, So you'd make you deal with the building,
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: and then they'd say, listen, we got to take care
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: of the promoter, and we'd add that on. And then
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: one of the things that changing the phones. This is
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: really interesting. None of the acts wanted to pay the
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: credit card charge, so that got added to the phone
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: to start with, which everybody got confused about. Okay, just
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: to be very interesting, you're doing incredible volume. What percentage
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: you paying for the credit card MX was in the threes.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: The the into into bank rate was really less than two.
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: You know, you could figure out the margins between point
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: and a half and a point eight. But you also
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 1: had to recognize that you also ate all the chargebacks.
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: And there was one of your growth volume was fraud um,
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: which you ate the buildings didn't need it. You ate
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: it um for expensive tickets um, the ones that were
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: over a thousand dollars. And there were some events that
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 1: were I made people signed stuff before I send it
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: to him. We had a form that we would fax
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: to them and they would sign it because it made
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: it harder to charge it back. Um. You know, that's
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: just the course of doing business. You just build that
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: into the dynamic. Okay, I interrupted you. You were talking
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 1: about the accident. Want to eat the charge? Keep going?
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: And then and then there was another thing I had separate.
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: This changed after I left. The outlet was less than
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 1: the phones because you've built all that into the phone charge.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 1: And then when I left, they decided to just yank
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: make the service charge the same as the outlets and
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: the phones, and so they started to take credit cards
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: at the outlets. Um, it's just the course of doing business.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 1: And you know the outlets, the the acts would call
• 1:09:23
  Speaker 1: you up with the manager would call you up and go, look,
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: I know you've got this three percent charge for credit card.
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: How do you feel about moving it to the public
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: And I went, okay, you know, the level of innocence
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: in all this is nonsense. So the promoters often took
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: you in the building and you'd make the deal with
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: the building. And sometimes the buildings let the promoter and
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: on a fee, and sometimes they didn't. Most of the
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: time they did. Um and I. And you know, you
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: became the bank. You were the accounting system for everybody.
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: And one of my favorite stories is I was talking
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: to some building in the South and I'm talking to
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: the guy and and it sounds like, you know, it
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 1: sounds like a dog died. He said, ah, you know,
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: this was when there were more municipal buildings than private buildings.
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: And he goes, I gotta go tell the mayor I
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: gave up the rent. I go, how much was I go?
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: How much is the rent? He's just fifteen grand? I said,
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: I'll give it to you. He said, how are you
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: going to give it to me? He said, I said,
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: I'm just there had three dollars to the service. George,
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: I know what's going on. I'll give you your money.
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: Whether it was fifteen or twenty grand I can't remember,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: and I'll keep the rest. He's a great idea. Then
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: what would happen is the music writer would call him
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: up after the show went on sound and go, how
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 1: come the service chargers will hire it for this event?
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: And the building manager go, gotta keep an eye on
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: those people in Los Angeles. So you know it was
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: Kabuki Theater, and Bob, you were around, you saw that.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: You know the criticism we got from new music writers.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 1: You know what the building managers said. But not one
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: building did we lose. And no one connected the fact
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: of saying, wait a minute, if they're doing all these
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: things without all these people knowing, and they're complaining about it,
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: why aren't they throwing them out or suing them? But
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: everybody was part of the process, and I took the
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: heat for everybody because look, the fact is, this is
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: what I really believed, and it's my mantra from day one.
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: No one pays more for a ticket than they want.
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 1: And I want you to think about something that's different.
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: I sometimes walk into arenas and I'd look up in
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: the in the nosebleed sections less ten rows. Or you
• 1:11:33
  Speaker 1: go into a stadium it's cold, people sitting there without shirts,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: it's raining. Why do people do that? Because it's emotion.
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 1: You cannot regulate emotion. So think of this the Bolstead Act,
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: which was for those of you who don't remember when
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: prohibition that failed the war on drugs. In my mind,
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 1: there's a failure gambling. You know now that you've got
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 1: all these draft kings and everything else. That's side of
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: leaves some of the balloon app But people will play
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: numbers in the fifties because you can't stop people from
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: doing emotional things. And he has the problem. Tickets are emotional.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: I need to be in the building. It has nothing
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 1: to do with logic. And you can't regulate emotion. So
• 1:12:17
  Speaker 1: here's what really happened and what destroyed the business market.
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: I leave StubHub comes along the guys that wait, wait
• 1:12:25
  Speaker 1: before you go to StubHub. When did the acts start
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: getting pieces of the fees? Not while I was there? Okay, okay, stubbub.
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: There was one that did that was the Rolling Stones.
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: Michael Michael Cole and I made that deal, which is
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: really funny because we make the deal was sitting at
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: a restaurant. We don't have paper or a pen. I
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: got a white napkin. We put a cross on the napkin,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: did service charges for the whole country, and settled a
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: hundred million dollars on a napkin. None of that would
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: happen today. There'd be four lawyers involved in every we
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: shook hands. That was the relationship we had. So when
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: I left, you know, we did all in ticketing in
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: ninety four with a couple of acts and everything. We're
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: hiding the service charges now All in Ticketing is the
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: Flavord jure. It's hysterical to me because nothing changes. Let's
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: be clearer though, for people that don't know the number
• 1:13:23
  Speaker 1: one people who don't want all in Ticketing mean, it's
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 1: not the ticketing company, it's the acts, correct, because they
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: today everybody's got a piece of everybody, right, And the
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: truth is that when you look at some of these
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: crazy numbers, the acts ticketmasters, probably I would think this,
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: and I'm not sure, but I would guess Ticketmaster getting
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: a flat fee plus the credit card. Everything else above
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: that flat fee is going somewhere else. And basically Ticketmasters
• 1:13:53
  Speaker 1: a collection agency. That's what they are. So when the President,
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: God bless them, says, you know, we're gonna look at
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: ticketing and we're the airlines the hotels, well, every airline
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: gets the ticketing fee. Every hotel gets a hundred percent
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 1: of their ticketing fee. And by the way, when I
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: did my um my appearance in front of Congress, John
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: Conyor said, I went to Pine Knob and I paid
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: a two dollars ticketing fee. And I don't know why
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: I would pay a service charge if I go to
• 1:14:22
  Speaker 1: the box office, So I send one of my people
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: to find out what that's about. That was a facility fee,
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: and the facility fee ticket mess that doesn't get but
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: a facility fee was created to the act one share
• 1:14:33
  Speaker 1: in that money, which you will know right. So the dynamic,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: the dynamic for all of this was some level of
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: kabuki theater and some level of saying, listen, you need
• 1:14:47
  Speaker 1: to understand because I remember when Bruce Springsteen paid five
• 1:14:52
  Speaker 1: shows at the Sports Arena. The front rows, okay, the
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: front rows eighteen dollars the least rows eighteen dollars, And
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: they go, how come they're scalping? Going on? You go, hello,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: so so wait, we scrambled the rows out. There are
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 1: things I never forget. We scrambled the rows. Did'd be
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: these scalpers standing outside Music Plus and they you know,
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 1: this young lady walks out and he says, where you're sitting?
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 1: She's his second row, third night. He's just too how
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 1: many tickets you haves for whatever? It was two or
• 1:15:24
  Speaker 1: fifty dollars a ticket No. Five of ticket No. Seven, fifty,
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: last and final offer. She took the money, then got
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: back online and probably complained about my service charge. The
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: point the point is you can't regulate this, and what
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: StubHub came along, you had scalping laws. So I'll give
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: you a couple of anecdotes, because I know you're like anecdotes.
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: When I left, the Grateful Dead always had their tickets,
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: and they had their fan club and so on. But
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 1: the acts generally couldn't take their tickets, and when I left,
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 1: they got threatened, and so they gave every act ten
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: percent of their tickets for their fan club. Now Mary
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: Jane or Jim Jones in any part of this country.
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: Now have four tickets in the first ten rows, and
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 1: stuff up comes along, peer to peer. They sell two
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: tickets and pay for and pay for for. Then they go, wait,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: I can sell forth tickets and pay the rent. Now,
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: who is the government gonna sue Mary Jane Jim John.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: They're not gonna do any of that. So all the
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: scalping laws get eviscerated. And what happens is everybody says,
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: I don't understand why tickets cost so much, because the
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: public decides what they want. And here is the thing
• 1:16:34
  Speaker 1: that's really important. And I use this as an example.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: A week before the Taylor Swift of situation, the Phillies
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 1: are a month the Phillies were in the playoffs, and
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: the Philadelphia papers are talking about the fact of isn't
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: it wonderful that that the secondary market now is it's
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: such a hot game. It's a thousand dollars a ticket,
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: batch of honor, badge of honor. Is the Taylor Swift.
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 1: The world is coming to an end. And by the way, also,
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: I'm not gonna get into what the government can do
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: and can't do. But they're not interested in sports tickets
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 1: they're not interested in any other tickets but concert tickets.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 1: And from the days that I was doing this stuff,
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 1: the concert ticket market is not a market that fits
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: in the antitrust loss because in the end, what percentage
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: of the concert market is of all the tickets sold
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 1: in America very small. When you add up all the
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: league's and everything else, you go, we're only doing music tickets,
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: and only doing music tickets before acts. Hello, Garth Brooks
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: took the took the wind out of the sales by
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: playing more dates, and he and he released it. She
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: knew what she was doing. It was a no lose situation.
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: Anybody with a brain would not have put all that
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: stuff on sale at one time. And and her view
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: of the world was, look, if it blows up, I'll
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 1: take credit and you'll will throw you under the US.
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: And if it doesn't blow up, it comes out great.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: So when when I did a sing in an interview,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: I go, I don't understand. Ticketmaster took in five hundred
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: million dollars in one day. How many companies can take
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: in five million? Amazon, brokerage firms, banks, most companies, airlines can't,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: hotels can't, I said, And she's gonna make more than
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: three hundred million dollars and everybody's walking around going it's
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: a failure. The failure is they should have had circuit
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 1: breakers that when you got that many calls or attempts,
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: so that you just shut it off. The Martin Stock
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 1: Market does it. Bank? You can't do a run on banks.
• 1:18:40
  Speaker 1: But ticketing lives in this magical world where everybody thinks
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: you're entitled to go to a concert. And by the way,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: which which is not a joke, this is not the
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: first time this happened. When when the Spice Girls were
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: at the height of their power, they did one show
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: in Madison Square Garden. I old various government officials and said,
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: please come down and watch the sale. Because of the
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: twelve thousand tickets that we're gonna be made available, I
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 1: think we had eight. So you got to try and
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: not do a four minute sale because the world's gonna
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: come to an end. So I go, can you come
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 1: down and watch the sales so you can see what
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: we do and make it a end. They go, when
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 1: is this sale? They go Saturday? They go, I don't
• 1:19:21
  Speaker 1: work on Saturday. So needless to say, on Tuesday, there's
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 1: a big press conference, right of we're gonna find that
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: way the tickets are because the kids are crying. Then
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: there was a situation in eighty nine. I can't remember, well,
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: the first Cubs night game is gonna go on sale,
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 1: and we agree it will be phones only, two tickets
• 1:19:42
  Speaker 1: of person. So I take my kids out for I scream,
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 1: I live in California. I come back. Phone rings, guys
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: on the phone high, this is somebody from Station one.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: I Q, how does it feel to take down the
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: whole phone system in Chicago? I go, what are you
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: talking about? Well, there's no one with thirty five million
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: attempts in the first two minutes, and it blew up
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: the phone system. You know, you gotta get smarter. You
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 1: gotta get smarter about this stuff. But it feeds into
• 1:20:09
  Speaker 1: the emotion instead of the logic, and we're in the
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: we're in the emotion part, not the logic part. I mean,
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: I just saw the government threatened Ticketmaster that if they
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 1: screw up the Beyonce sale, hey go back and do
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 1: mail order. You know, I mean, you you want to,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: It's crazy. Okay, let's go a little bit slower though.
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: You're out, and then you get back in without box.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: Tell me that experience. Well, it was short mistake I
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 1: made with that was I thought people would be more
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: receptive doing white labels, and I was wrong. And ultimately,
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 1: I mean I owned a piece which I sold back
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: to a g um. It was an interesting dynamic. Uh,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 1: but I was wrong about that, and it's hard to
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: go back home again. Um. The people, Well, what Ticketmaster
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: was allowing people to do is they could put their
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: name and they could do the things they needed. And
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 1: I misread the situation. So that lasted about a year
• 1:21:11
  Speaker 1: and then we all agreed that there was a smart
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: thing to do and just stop it. And basically, since
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: a g has carried such a big weight, um, it's
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: really the deal never should have been done. It was
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: my fault on a certain level. And and basically they're
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: in control of their own ticketing now, which works for them,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: and they're doing fairly well. Okay, let's talk about Ticketmaster today.
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: You haven't involved for the neccess of twenty years. What
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: is different to your knowledge about the system today from
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: when you ran it. Well, I think the system works,
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: It's evolved pretty well. I think part of the problem
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 1: is that the company on some levels become the phone company.
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: I don't think they've done a good job explaining what
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: they do and how they do it. And I think
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: some of the combination. You know, you can read it
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: any way you want. I think it's pretty efficient. I
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: think most clients are pretty happy with it. Um it's thankless.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 1: Every arena manager knows that ticketing is thankless. So the
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: thing I find most humorous today is there are five
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: or six people involved in the solar system. You have
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: the active managers, their agents. You have the arena, right,
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: so that's four or five people, or the stadium and
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: the promoter. And somehow, no matter what happens when all
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: this stuff gets rid, it's only Ticketmaster's fault. Like you
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 1: know this, this big overarching company controls everything, which is absurd,
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 1: and and I think they've done a good job taking it.
• 1:22:51
  Speaker 1: I think you know what's what's amazing to me is
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 1: I've been gone twenty five years and people still come back.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: And you said, Mr Ticketmaster, it's spent faceless for years,
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 1: and so people go back to the people who found it.
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: And I would tell you this. A lot of people
• 1:23:07
  Speaker 1: told me at the beginning that ticketing wasn't in business,
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: and I thought they were crazy. I thought there was
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 1: stone cold crazy. So the way that ticket masters run today,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: and to the degree you study it, do you believe
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 1: that the fees, although they're negotiated, forget the fact that
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: they're not included, do you find them more exorbitant than
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: when you were involved? That's natural evolution. Everything close more. Okay,
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 1: let's talk specifically about what went down. So we know
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: that Live Nation was it was allowed to merge with
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: ticket Masters. That's in the rear view mirror. You're an attorney,
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: so you understand these issues. The issue reformed. Okay, so
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: so am I? Uh? But do you believe this is
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: just us talking? You know, because it doesn't hold any weight.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 1: Do you believe the ticket Master is a monopoly? No,
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: so just explain why. Look if Ticketmaster didn't exist and
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: we called it Bob lefts, it's tickets they hey, you too?
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 1: After a year, the solar system is you're set up
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: to be the strong man. It's the way the word
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: the world works. And what people can't get through their
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: head is this. It doesn't make a difference how many
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: ticket companies are. It makes a difference how many tickets
• 1:24:40
  Speaker 1: you have and what the demand is. It's a supply
• 1:24:42
  Speaker 1: and demand curve, and so if you had forty ticket companies,
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: none of these prices would be any different at the
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: beginning because it's the demand. And ultimately, look, I'm not
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 1: going to appine on whether because I don't know what
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: Live Nation it's done for the last ten years, that
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 1: would make them different when both companies, when when that
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 1: merger was allowed, both companies stocks were in the crapper.
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: They were both about a buck or two bucks. Nobody
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 1: saw them as a goliath, and the world evolved, you know,
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 1: so you gotta put on the glasses to see it
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: the way it is today. But having said that, which
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: is not a joke, I don't know exactly. I don't
• 1:25:28
  Speaker 1: know whether you can call him. I mean they used
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: to call Ticketmaster monopoly by itself without Live Nation. I mean,
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: how many times did I hear that? I, Bob, as
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: I recall it. Maybe in the nineties you might have
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: said that too about us. So you know, the truth
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: is that I don't know the answer to that question
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 1: from a legal perspective, because part of the problem that
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: you have is let's talk about let me talk about
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: Ticketmaster and monopolies, because that I can talk about you
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: have an exclusive. The problem is there's no guarantee from
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 1: the venue how many tickets you get, No guarantee in
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 1: the number of shows, no guarantee of the number of tickets,
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: no guarantee about anything. But everybody was shocked about that.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: So they go, well, how do you know you're gonna
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: get tickets? You go because they got death service. Okay,
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: so they gotta pay. We think they're gonna have shows.
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: But there isn't one contract that I wrote. And I
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: can't tell you whether that's changed, but there wasn't one
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: contract that I wrote that anywhere was there a guarantee
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 1: of the number of shows, number of tickets, um, number
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: of events. What you did is you took a statistical
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: analysis of the building the last five years and kind
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: of plugged it in and came up with a model.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: And I remember one of the great funny lines of life,
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: which is sort of a digression, but it's sets the point.
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 1: There was a big stadium show and the Attorney General
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: of that subpoena in US and they said, we want
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: a list of all the people who bought the tickets.
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 1: So I go to that we I went to that meeting,
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 1: and we had given them the number of the people
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: who bought tickets by phone, but not at the outlets.
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: And the woman says, why don't we have the names
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 1: of the people bought tickets and at the outlets? And
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: I went, because we don't live in Russia. But but
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: but here's my question, why are you calling me? Why
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: don't you call the broker's And she went, we don't
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: know how to find them. I said, you have an assistant,
• 1:27:34
  Speaker 1: Go yeah, I said, bring me the Yellow Pages, forty
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 1: pages of brokers. I go, Look, I'm tired of always
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: been the whipping boy for this business. Here's my private
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: phone number in the office. Here's the name of my assistant.
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: You have any questions, you call us. I am not
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: responsible for where these tickets go. I try as much
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: as I can. And we went through crossing out same address,
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: credit card numbers that you multiple events. We did about
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 1: ten things that we could do. But if, but if
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: a broker has got forty different credit cards with forty
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: different addresses, how the hell are we gonna know what
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: that is? And to me, at the way, the way
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: I see it is, nobody wants to know the truth
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: because the narrative doesn't the truth doesn't fit the narrative
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: well articulated, but just speculating. Because you have more background
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: in this than almost anybody. Some people say, by virtue
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: of their market share, ticket Masters inherently a monopoly. Now
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: what I tell these people is there are antitrust laws.
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: We presently have an FTC that is very aggressive. But
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: if we determine that it is a monopoly, what is
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: the sou They has to have a remedy, and the
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: remedy is going to be worse. I haven't to agree
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: with you. The reality is this, if they split it up,
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: which I don't think they can't. I mean they have
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: that they can do whatever they want. Whoever replaced this
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: ticket mask is gonna have the same issue after two years.
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 1: You know when when I'm very circumspect about my meeting
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: with the government, and if you and I know you
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: know this, You've never seen anything written by those meetings
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: because I just say the system worked, but there are
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: a few things I can share. And then and one
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: of the questions is why can't they be multiple ticket
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: companies in the building? And I said, how many operating
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: systems do you have in your computer? And they said one?
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: And I go, how many inventory control systems? Are there
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 1: in a supermarket one and I go, why is this
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: different than an inventory control system? That's all it is.
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: And the thing you'll eLearn is this Ticketmaster is no
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: different than Time Life, the eight number, except if you
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: touch entertainment, you are entertainment. And the truth of the
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: matter is if people didn't pay and there you well
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: you was, you was know as much as anybody more.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 1: Events don't sell out. There's always tickets available. There are
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: always tickets that show up twenty four or forty eight
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 1: hours because nobody knows the configuration of the stage. It's
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: just that, because all of this is controlled by emotion
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: instead of logic. Right, A suite at the Super Bowl
• 1:30:41
  Speaker 1: last year in l A went for two million dollars.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: I didn't hear anybody complaining, right, I don't understand. Garth
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: Brooks played more shows Broadway. This is interesting because of
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: friends of mine. I still go to Broadway shows. And
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: you know, you know enough of the stories about me
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 1: that I really went of concerts. And when I helped
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: my wife get tickets, I told her I will help
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: me get tickets. But I don't go. You know, It's
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: like that's not my jones, it's not what I you know,
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 1: But the reality is people sit in the last ten
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: rows because of the need to be in the building
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: service charges. There is a reflection of what people think
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: a fair market is. No more, no less. You don't
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 1: want to go, don't pay it. And here's the thing
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 1: that was shocking to me. About ten years ago, when
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 1: the Rolling Stones were at the Hollywood Bowl, I got
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: a call. I still get calls some people who still
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 1: think I have something to do with the company, which
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 1: I find frightening. Um they said, did you see what
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: the Rolling Stone? This is the Wilshire Journal. Did you
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: see what the Rolling what the Rolling Stones charged at
• 1:31:57
  Speaker 1: the Hollywood Ball? I went, yeahs the ticket? Well didn't
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: you think that was excessive? I said, well we went.
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 1: I mean I bought two tickets. It was what it
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: cost and my wife wanted to go, so we went.
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: But here's my question. Assume that you're not a trust
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: fund baby and assumed that working for the journal provides
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: your income. When you go by a Lamborghini showroom, do
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: you have the need to throw a brick through a
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: window because you can't afford it? What's the difference? Where
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: is it written that popular music requires everybody have a
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: right to go see it. Now, I know that's heresy.
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: Go to the clubs, go go to the small venues.
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: Guess what. Why is an artist not a brand? Why
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 1: is an artist not worth the same thing as a
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: floor seat at a Laker or a Nick or Chicago
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: Bulls game. If they choose, that's what they're worth. That's
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: what the cost is. But people lose their mind because
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: it's it's it's music. No one loses their mind in sports.
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: No one loses their mind in boxing. By the way,
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 1: I heard a story the two front row seats for boxing,
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: one for half a million dollars each for some fight.
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 1: No one's forcing anybody to pay these prices, right, And
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: and the great thing is you don't have to go.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: And and if if you don't go, and you're not selling,
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: I mean, no one's gonna pay two dollars to hear
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: you and I sing you go Bob and Fred the
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: Great duet when you pay two dollars to see it, No,
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: probably not so so the dynamic. Look. I don't want
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: to say it's all bullshit because that will only make
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 1: everybody crazier. But the truth is, wake up in the morning.
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: No one pays more for a ticket than they want.
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: If an artist is like Garth Brooks, they're gonna do
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: everything they can to play as many shows as they
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: can to take care of their people. How come that works?
• 1:33:57
  Speaker 1: Pearl Jam did this whole thing with with certain into
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: seats you know where your name is on it, and
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: and people did that. You know what. My view of
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: all this is, this is where I get in trouble.
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: You know, you sell it, it's gone, Stop worrying about it, right,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: price it the way you want. And the answer is
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: I remember we were doing golden circles and I pushed
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: for that and someone said to me, well, how do
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: you know when the golden circle ends? And I said, look,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: roe A is a hundred dollars, Rosie is fifty. So
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: they said, well, where does the golden circle end? I said,
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: when you right out of people buying. If it goes
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: to Rosie, that's the golden circle. Here go. What if
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: it stops at roe M I said, then you move
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: Rosie up and moved them back until they meet, and
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: they go, can you do that? And I went, it's
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: a computer. I mean. The point is, if I did anything,
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: I made this a business, and it was always a
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: business because the scalpers knew it was a business. What's
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: your view on scalpers? Some provide a service, some don't.
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: They exist because there are always people with too much
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: money who don't pay attention to when tickets go on sale,
• 1:35:30
  Speaker 1: and we'll pay whatever the market will bear. UM. I
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: think stuff Hub is fine. I think the secondary market
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: is fine because in the end, no one's forced to
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: pay that. Um. It's driven by emotion. It's clearly better
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: than it used to be because I think the acts.
• 1:35:48
  Speaker 1: Let's put it like this, there was some acts that
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: I knew in the nineties where you could get pneumonia
• 1:35:53
  Speaker 1: from the from the draft created by the tickets going
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: out the side. Now you know, it's it's more of
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: a business, and I don't judge the morality of it.
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: I never made money from it. And Ticketmaster when I
• 1:36:08
  Speaker 1: ran it was against scalping and we did what was
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 1: necessary to protect it. But at the end of the day,
• 1:36:16
  Speaker 1: you know, going a restaurant today, everything course more. What
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: used to be X is now X plus Y. Go
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: to a hotel over Chris, you know makes me crazy.
• 1:36:27
  Speaker 1: People go out to dinner, it's a hundred dollars, but
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: the ticket should only be seventy. Well, but here's the point.
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 1: I used to have this argument. Why is Bruce Springsteen
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: less than the four seats of the Lakers. He puts
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: on a three hour show. He leaves himself out there
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 1: for the fans. When he did Broadway at seven fifty
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: dollars a ticket, you know, that was very limited, but
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: he did it. I know the deal he had, but
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: good for him. And you know, in the last show
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: he talked about the fact that he charged more and
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: everybody went nuts, but there was still half the tickets
• 1:37:04
  Speaker 1: at popular prices. They just moved the seats to where
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: they were. And here's the problem. You know this, you
• 1:37:12
  Speaker 1: can't argue with a lack of logic because it's all
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: driven by emotion. When emotion is involved, people kill people
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: over love, people kill people over you know, over stupid things.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: Where emotion gets involved. This is just tickets. It's just tickets.
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I know that that artist is
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: a good my homies, Hey ticketmaster, Well, really that's the
• 1:37:36
  Speaker 1: best song you can write for real. I'm sure I'll
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: get a lot of ugly mail like that. Let me
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: let me share this with you, because this is a
• 1:37:44
  Speaker 1: great story. I was living in Beverly Hills in those days,
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: and a woman writes me a four page single space letter.
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: She lives in San Diego. She bought foot tickets to
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: the Forum. She cannot understand why she paid sixteen dollars
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: four dollars a ticket when all it did was come
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 1: out of the machine. Now, one of the things I
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: used to do was called the ten worth letters I
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: get every month. And since she wrote me at home,
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: I thought I could call her on Sunday. What the
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 1: hell you know? Like, why not? Right? So I got
• 1:38:15
  Speaker 1: Mrs Jones, I got your letter. You really should not
• 1:38:18
  Speaker 1: be this upset. I really feel badly. What I would
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: like you to do. What I'm gonna do tomorrow when
• 1:38:24
  Speaker 1: I go in the office is I'm going to send
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: you your sixteen dollars back. She says, that's really nice
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: of you. That's four page single space. I didn't kill
• 1:38:34
  Speaker 1: little Lindbergh, baby, I didn't blow up to Hindenburg, and
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: I'm sure I didn't think the Titanic. But I said,
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: I need you to do one thing for me. She says,
• 1:38:41
  Speaker 1: what's that? I said, never use my service again. And
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: if you drive to the Forum, there's no service charge,
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: and she went, but that's not convenient and they'll take
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: a lot of time. And I went, uh huh, and
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: it was like the epiphany hitter, and she went, never mind, Sorry,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 1: I sorry, I wrote, sorry to forget it. Don't give
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: me back my money. I'm really sorry. I never thought
• 1:39:06
  Speaker 1: of it like that. Well, nobody thinks a bit like that.
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: They go, it just comes out of the machine. Well,
• 1:39:12
  Speaker 1: who does the money, who does the audits, who does
• 1:39:15
  Speaker 1: the season tickets, the single tickets, who provides the equipment,
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 1: who does the software program? There's like a hundred things
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: that the public NEBI sees. But you know what they
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: do see They see the name on it. And and
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: I know this for a fact. Um near the end
• 1:39:31
  Speaker 1: of running Ticketmaster, I wound up having a meeting with
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: the l A. Times, and I wound up with the publisher,
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: the editor and the head of calendar. There's a guy
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 1: named John Lindsay. I don't know if you ever came
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: across him, and you know, okay, he was the head
• 1:39:47
  Speaker 1: of Callen. So basically, I said, you guys have had
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 1: a heart on from us from the beginning, and I
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: don't get it. And I said, John, you won't even
• 1:39:55
  Speaker 1: sit in a room with me and meet tell me
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: why you hate my company. I just want to know.
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: And you know, the publishers said, is he is he
• 1:40:04
  Speaker 1: making this up in one of the vice Uh ed,
• 1:40:07
  Speaker 1: it is, no read the stuff we wrote. It's true.
• 1:40:10
  Speaker 1: And Lindsey looked at me and he said, you charge
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: a service charge. I said, that's the reason for all
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: the negative you charge for ads. Tell me how I
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 1: make money if I don't charge a service charge? Where
• 1:40:26
  Speaker 1: is my revenue? How do I do the things I
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 1: do without that? And he sat there like a bear,
• 1:40:33
  Speaker 1: you know, like wrapped in like a figure eight. That's
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 1: why he handed the company because we charge a service charge,
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: and no company that charges a service charge in America
• 1:40:43
  Speaker 1: is ever gonna be perceived as a decent or. I
• 1:40:46
  Speaker 1: use a friendly company. So if you if you buy
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: a coach ticket, hopefully you land. If you're in the
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: last row coach and not the first row, you land
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: the same time as everybody. Nobody thinks about that. But
• 1:40:57
  Speaker 1: if you go to a stadium in arena and you
• 1:41:00
  Speaker 1: it in a bad seat, it's never the band, it's
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: never the promoter, it's never the building. It's only the
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 1: ticket company. Like you live in this vacuum where you're
• 1:41:09
  Speaker 1: responsible for all this. Do you know how you deal
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: with it? You shut it out, you turn off you're
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 1: hearing it, You walk away and you go listen. You
• 1:41:18
  Speaker 1: have the right not to go. And it's that simple.
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 1: And the answer is the reason the prices have gotten
• 1:41:27
  Speaker 1: where they are is because that's what they're worth. If
• 1:41:30
  Speaker 1: you analyze that and analyze those tickets next to sports tickets,
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 1: no different, it's no different. Let's just talk, as I say,
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: you haven't been in the business for a while, but
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: do you think there needs to be any changes of
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: any type? You know, not only with a government, etcetera.
• 1:41:48
  Speaker 1: If we I stop my fingers, you're running any running
• 1:41:51
  Speaker 1: ticket master or another ticket company today, do you think
• 1:41:55
  Speaker 1: they're doing something that you could improve upon? They could
• 1:41:59
  Speaker 1: they could make it more transparent in terms of letting
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: people know what they do. In other words, I don't
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: think they do a good job. They do a lot
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: of things well, but I don't think they that that
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: they like the Bill of Rights. You don't set the
• 1:42:21
  Speaker 1: ticket prices, you don't determine how many tickets go on sale.
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: There's a whole host of things that need to get
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: burned into people's consciousness that isn't there. And and the
• 1:42:35
  Speaker 1: thing is that if one building manager told me about
• 1:42:38
  Speaker 1: right before I left, he said, you know, if you
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: didn't if you didn't exist, we have to invent you.
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: Because what what ticket Tron did. Ticket Tron was terrible
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 1: and didn't understand the role they played um and and
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: by being charging a dollar, they fundamentally gave up um
• 1:43:02
  Speaker 1: how do I put it, They gave up their right
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: to have a role in the business. You operate in
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: a solar system, so one of the things you know
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 1: you for you would forget this. But you know, you
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 1: have various promoters in the towns in a city who
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: weach hated each other, and go, we're putting these three
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: events on sale on Saturday. No you're not. That is
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 1: not happening. You're the traffic cop. Okay. I think where
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: Live Nation got in trouble is because they were a
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: promoter and they want to protect the act. They didn't
• 1:43:37
  Speaker 1: put their foot down and say we're not putting all
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: the shows on sale. I think that's where they had
• 1:43:41
  Speaker 1: a conflict. I would have stopped it. I said, there's
• 1:43:44
  Speaker 1: not a goddamn way I'm gonna do that, and I
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 1: would have put in circuit breakers. Where will you get
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: that many attempts shut the system down? Shut it down.
• 1:43:54
  Speaker 1: Say listen, we're not gonna sit here all day. We're
• 1:43:56
  Speaker 1: gonna spoon feed this. What I would have done differently,
• 1:44:01
  Speaker 1: not that anybody cares, is I would have said, Okay,
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: for five days, we're gonna open this up to everybody.
• 1:44:10
  Speaker 1: Send in your name, you can buy two tickets, and
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: then you spin it out so you get rid of
• 1:44:17
  Speaker 1: all the duplicates, the ones that aren't in the whatever,
• 1:44:20
  Speaker 1: verified fan program, and all that other stuff, and then
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: create a random program and then notified people. Two days later,
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: you have two tickets, you have three tickets, you have
• 1:44:29
  Speaker 1: four tickets. You do that. I would have done that.
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: I mean, basically, it's okay to be the whipping boy
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: for some stuff. It's not okay to be the whipping
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: boy for other stuff. You know, where you basically sit
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: in the room and say, listen, it has to be orderly.
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: We cannot allow Yeah, I'll give you a perfect example.
• 1:44:49
  Speaker 1: And I know you heard some of these stories. We
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: got into it with a grateful debt. I always allowed
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: them two um, because of the relationships with everybody would
• 1:45:02
  Speaker 1: they would take a number of tickets for their fan club,
• 1:45:05
  Speaker 1: whether it be arenas or stadiums or emphatheute of all places.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: All been in New York the Knickerbocker Arena. They took
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: the ticket some idiotic amount. People line up and there
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: was a riot because there was no tickets. So who
• 1:45:21
  Speaker 1: gets blamed? Me? All right, So I tell everybody the
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: grateful dead can no longer have any tickets, period. Shut
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 1: it off. Now, those idiots Bud Nick and that group
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 1: who wrote ticket Masses, which is a nice fictionalized account
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 1: of that meeting. Um John Prisker who's Jay's soon sets
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: up a meeting with me and some of their people,
• 1:45:46
  Speaker 1: and we're in this meeting in San Francisco, and of
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: course the initial meeting is we're gonna sue your for
• 1:45:50
  Speaker 1: anti trust. Look at some point my eyes glaze over,
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: because after you've been suited enough, it's like, okay, great,
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: can we talk about something else? And I go, let
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: me ask you a question. I have nothing but respect
• 1:46:03
  Speaker 1: for who you guys are and who the band is.
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: You put on a great show. Remember, we're also living
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: at the time of guns and refunds, where you know
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: whether they show up, whether they refined. I mean, you
• 1:46:14
  Speaker 1: guys really care about the fans. But here's what I
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: cannot do. I cannot let you trash my outlets for
• 1:46:23
  Speaker 1: one day. For the other three sixty four can't do it.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: The people who are standing online mean as much as
• 1:46:30
  Speaker 1: your people and your you know, in your fan club,
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: and we've got to find an effective way that enables
• 1:46:38
  Speaker 1: both to be satisfied, because if you trash my outlets,
• 1:46:41
  Speaker 1: then I don't have a business the other three and
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: no band can do that. That's not allowed. And the
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: rest of the meeting after they went through death threats
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 1: and I went, okay, great, you know, like I haven't
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: seen them before. Let's figure it out. And we figured
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: out numbers for amphitheaters, arenas and stadiums. And they said,
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 1: if we don't sell them, can we give them back?
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: And I said, of course you can, and you know what,
• 1:47:04
  Speaker 1: we shook hands and we lived like that until Jerry
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 1: Garcia died and no one complained. But I stood up
• 1:47:11
  Speaker 1: for the people who stand online, and I stood up
• 1:47:15
  Speaker 1: for having a business. And in the end it gets
• 1:47:18
  Speaker 1: written that I'm an asshole because I said, you can't
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: have the ticket in other words, nobody wants to understand
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: what's underneath it. Nobody wants to understand the granularity of
• 1:47:27
  Speaker 1: how you run these things. And I think what's important
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: to understand is this. I knew what I was walking
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 1: into over the first five It took me a while,
• 1:47:38
  Speaker 1: but once I understood what it was, I never thought
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: it was thankless. I thought it was really funny. And
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 1: what was shocking to me is that the height of
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: the Pearl Jam thing, which I must tell you probably
• 1:47:47
  Speaker 1: took ten years of my life. Our sales went up,
• 1:47:50
  Speaker 1: not down. It wasn't like Thailan at all. When people
• 1:47:52
  Speaker 1: went away, most people didn't even understand what this is
• 1:47:55
  Speaker 1: all about, because it was insane. And in the end,
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: my view of that, and I don't mind saying, is
• 1:48:03
  Speaker 1: I feel badly it happened. I wish I could have
• 1:48:05
  Speaker 1: sat with other with people who weren't told lies, who
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: represented the band, and and I think um um stump.
• 1:48:14
  Speaker 1: Pilot's manager Steve wrote something on one of you, on
• 1:48:18
  Speaker 1: one of your blocks, saying, I, I what's what's his
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: last name? You know, Steve Simon, No, I don't remember.
• 1:48:28
  Speaker 1: You caught me off guard, Okay, he said, Look, I
• 1:48:31
  Speaker 1: I went and so forred and we solved everything in
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: fifteen minutes. And he said, nobody else came to look
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: if anybody talk to me. Common sense was eight percent
• 1:48:40
  Speaker 1: of all this stuff. It's not rocket science, it's common sense.
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: And then you gotta put in the emotion which leaves
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: the planet, because then it's like the world is coming
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 1: to an end and you can get congressional hearings. This
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: is this is true Gary Condor who ran the pro
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: Jam hearings. Steve Stewart, the Garry Condent ran the Projam hearings,
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 1: and you may remember him from the Chandra Levy best right.
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 1: So I went to see him a year after the
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: hearings and about two months before the government left, and
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: this is what he said to me, you're ready. This
• 1:49:17
  Speaker 1: worked that great. I got a lot of good publicity.
• 1:49:21
  Speaker 1: Everybody found no way minute, it gets better. Every everyone
• 1:49:24
  Speaker 1: found that you're a good company. And I'm having a
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: fundraising next week. Can you give me five hundred dollars?
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: And I gave him five hundred dollars because I wanted
• 1:49:33
  Speaker 1: my name to be there that I took the five dollars.
• 1:49:38
  Speaker 1: If you live in the Maelstrom, you know there's partly
• 1:49:44
  Speaker 1: a bunker mentality. And then there's also this absurdity that says,
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: what is it that people don't get? You can't build
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: an arena at seven miles long and ten ten rows
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: can't do that. And when it comes to concert take
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: it's for very few shows the world loses their mind.
• 1:50:04
  Speaker 1: Nobody complains about clubs. Nobody complains about the two and
• 1:50:07
  Speaker 1: three and five thousands, you know, cedars, Nobody complains about
• 1:50:11
  Speaker 1: a lot of this arena acts that don't sell out.
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: But you've got a few of these mega stars that
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 1: are quite remarkable, that are amazingly talented, that lift the
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: spirits of people, and and and I'm fascinated by that
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: and appreciative of that um. And when it comes to
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: ticket pricing, I don't get why there's a difference. The
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: hippie hippies are over. I mean, you charge more for
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: Christmas than you do the rest of the year. You know,
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: I I I can't, I don't I say it The
• 1:50:52
  Speaker 1: following in a reel, This is Fred rosen Line. The
• 1:50:56
  Speaker 1: people who stolen music found out they couldn't steal the
• 1:50:58
  Speaker 1: concert ticket, and since then life has not been the same.
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: Let's switch gears a little bit. So what's your life
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: about now? Hey, I'm seventy nine. Man, I'm having a
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: good time. You know, we travel. I just took my
• 1:51:11
  Speaker 1: son to askpen for five days. Um, we'll travel in
• 1:51:16
  Speaker 1: the summer. We're going to Caribbean in a couple of weeks. UM.
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: I do some community stuff to help people. I got
• 1:51:23
  Speaker 1: on a plane to chase deal. Um, not in ticketing.
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: I don't think it will happen. Um, And I keep
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: myself occupied. Look, we're blessed. We have amazing lives. When
• 1:51:40
  Speaker 1: you see what goes on in the world, we worked
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: really hard. I'm shocked. I'm shocked by a couple of things,
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: Bob that you'll find interesting. I'm shocked at the model
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: I created forty years ago. It is still the model.
• 1:51:54
  Speaker 1: The numbers are different, but it's still the model. I'm
• 1:51:58
  Speaker 1: shocked that people remember my name live in l a
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: name who was on a comedy, who was on a
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: sitcom ten years ago. If you can't remember any of
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: that or fifteen years ago, no matter what happens, people
• 1:52:11
  Speaker 1: still identify me with the company, even though I have
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: nothing to do with it. Um. What's remarkable. I always
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: described myself as this I'm an idiot savant about tickets.
• 1:52:25
  Speaker 1: I can't explain this whole business came out of my head.
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: I do not understand why. I have sometimes thought about it,
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: and I'm I'm going to write something for my family,
• 1:52:37
  Speaker 1: basically the beginning, not not a book. I won't write
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 1: a book because there are too many stories where you
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: would hurt people, and I don't want to hurt people.
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: That's not what this is about. But I want to
• 1:52:48
  Speaker 1: write something, a memoir from my family, about how all this.
• 1:52:52
  Speaker 1: You know, I told you you you got bis and
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: pieces of it because we only have two hours. But
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: but how it all happened, all of its serendipity, serendipity
• 1:53:02
  Speaker 1: that I was in the office that night where that
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: lawyer would not have called me if I wasn't in
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: the office, serendipity that Steve Wozniak didn't want to use
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: ticket Tron and said, listen, you come out to l A.
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna spend a million dollars to do this. Who
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: would think that serendipity, that ticket Tron would be so
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: stupid as to walk away from the forum and not
• 1:53:24
  Speaker 1: honor an agreement. And then the thing that killed Tickettron
• 1:53:29
  Speaker 1: more than anything else. This was the knife in the coffin.
• 1:53:34
  Speaker 1: They were doing four shows at the coliseum. Do you
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: remember that, Yeah, okay, So for whatever reason, they went
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: to Tickettron, who had an exclusive contract at the building,
• 1:53:46
  Speaker 1: and they said, we don't we don't think you can
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: sell the four shows. You gotta give two shows to Ticketmaster.
• 1:53:53
  Speaker 1: So I go down to the meeting and and they go,
• 1:53:58
  Speaker 1: we're gonna flip a coin. Who does one, two and
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: four and one and one and three? And I go,
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: it's their building, give them whatever they want. So they
• 1:54:07
  Speaker 1: do one in three, we do two and four. By
• 1:54:09
  Speaker 1: two o'clock in the afternoon, all the tickets we have
• 1:54:12
  Speaker 1: are gone and ticket Tron still has basically fifty of
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 1: each show. So with turning people away, So the following week,
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: I go, we can't do this. So I call the
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 1: colliseum and said, go to ticket Tron and tell them
• 1:54:27
  Speaker 1: the following tell them to give us an allocation. I
• 1:54:31
  Speaker 1: will give them a hundred other than two dollars a ticket,
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 1: I'll give him a hundred percent of the money above that,
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 1: and at the outlet they gotta pay the outlet was
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 1: sent or a dollar, and then they can have the
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: rest I won't make any money, but we shouldn't turn
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 1: anybody away. Well, guess what happens. Ticket tron couldn't sell it.
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: I mean, in the world of being smart, it turned
• 1:54:53
  Speaker 1: out even better than I thought. It went across the country.
• 1:54:55
  Speaker 1: The Ticketmaster has so little their tickets. And that was
• 1:54:59
  Speaker 1: the end. It was the beginning of the end. And
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 1: then when Ogden and a poland who's you know and
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: what the company? They had a guy go around the
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: country and he went like this, I'm much nicer than Fred. Well,
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: apparently everybody was much nicer than me in the eighties
• 1:55:16
  Speaker 1: and nineties. And they said, I'm much nicer than Fred.
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: And we're gonna lower the service charge. And they said, okay, great,
• 1:55:23
  Speaker 1: how much do we get. They go, well, if Fred's
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: giving you a half a million, we'll have to give
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: you a two hundred thousand, you know, or less. And
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: they would go, a son, we have death service to
• 1:55:33
  Speaker 1: pay Fred's fine. So if you'd like that, Um, that
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: ain't gonna work. And when we sat with the government,
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 1: we said to them, look, if you own a building
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: to beat Ticketmaster, you have to pay more. So if
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 1: TM is paying five dred, you gotta pay seven fifty.
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: Now what happens to the price to the public, and
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: the room looked around. When it goes up and go right,
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: competition forces prices up, not down, because no one's taken less.
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: And that was like this amazing epiphany which you can't
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: find in any other business. But when food services take over,
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: the food goes up, the hot dogs go up, the
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: beer goes up. You know, you can't walk away from
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: all that. And I can't tell you that when I
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 1: created this model that was in my head, but the
• 1:56:24
  Speaker 1: Bible it was clearly a byproduct of the model because
• 1:56:27
  Speaker 1: I made it early on that I would take the
• 1:56:31
  Speaker 1: heat for the buildings, and every building manager who would
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 1: throw me under a bus would call me up the
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: next thing go you don't mind, do you No, that's fine,
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: not a problem, and they go, thank you, thank you.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: Because to me, if I could make those guys heroes,
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 1: I had a business. And that's why in sixteen years
• 1:56:52
  Speaker 1: that I ran the company, I never lost the client.
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: And and I think it was it was a you know, look,
• 1:56:59
  Speaker 1: you know enough to know that guys like me create issues.
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: I had great friends and I had great enemies. It's
• 1:57:06
  Speaker 1: kind of the way it works. And there were people
• 1:57:08
  Speaker 1: who thought I was too tough, and then people thought
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: I was too mean, and then were other people thought
• 1:57:12
  Speaker 1: I was a pretty good guy, and and set them
• 1:57:15
  Speaker 1: up and I made a lot of people a lot
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 1: of money. I cleaned up the ticket distribution business. I
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: made it so that people could trust audits. I made
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: it so that acts got their money. I made it
• 1:57:26
  Speaker 1: so that that at the end of the day, you
• 1:57:31
  Speaker 1: got a ticket, it was a legitimate ticket. It wasn't
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: a counterfeit ticket. It was a real ticket, whether it
• 1:57:36
  Speaker 1: was you know now it's on your phone whatever. But
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: the point is, we made a real business out of
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 1: this when there was none and no one thought it was.
• 1:57:46
  Speaker 1: And I'm proud of that. I'm proud that. I'm serious
• 1:57:49
  Speaker 1: that I'm proud that anybody remembers my name. And you know,
• 1:57:54
  Speaker 1: it's an interesting legacy, um because nobody wants to learn.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: Nobody is happy with the truth. So when you're not
• 1:58:02
  Speaker 1: happy with the truth, you keep finding things that kind
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: of shade the truth. But there's nothing, there's none of that.
• 1:58:09
  Speaker 1: I mean, someone wrote some s whole article about Bert
• 1:58:13
  Speaker 1: can Are being involved and some of the people Bert
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: was involved with, and Bert was going from I mean nobody.
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: You you know the article I'm talking about, it's not
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: they made They made that crap up. We cleaned up
• 1:58:26
  Speaker 1: the business. Okay, do you miss the action? I missed
• 1:58:32
  Speaker 1: the peak. Let's put it like this. You know I
• 1:58:36
  Speaker 1: was dormant for a long time and I missed the
• 1:58:39
  Speaker 1: peat when I saw that I missed the people. At
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: some point, Um, you get tired of the same fight,
• 1:58:46
  Speaker 1: if you know what I mean. And I think when
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 1: I left I had enough. All Right, this is kind
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 1: of fascinating to me because I go to sleep I
• 1:58:53
  Speaker 1: almost any sleepover. This is kind of it's kind of
• 1:58:55
  Speaker 1: funny for me. And you get it's like a reset
• 1:58:58
  Speaker 1: that everybody remembers you did this right, you know where
• 1:59:01
  Speaker 1: you know? People now want to make a documentary. I
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 1: don't know if I'm gonna let him do it. But
• 1:59:06
  Speaker 1: the point is, Um, there's an energy that I had
• 1:59:13
  Speaker 1: in this business that I never had in any other business.
• 1:59:17
  Speaker 1: And the people I some night when we're not recording,
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: I'll get you salters and eye and I'll tell you
• 1:59:24
  Speaker 1: stories that even you would laugh at because I knew
• 1:59:27
  Speaker 1: all these guys and and the real you know, everything
• 1:59:30
  Speaker 1: I told you on this is true. But you know,
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: before the Internet, i'd get a hundred hundred and fifty
• 1:59:37
  Speaker 1: calls a day. I took care of everybody. I made
• 1:59:41
  Speaker 1: sure that everybody was taken care of. And when people
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: would say, you know what, why are they so strong relationships?
• 1:59:50
  Speaker 1: You build relationships and sometimes you'd fall on your sword
• 1:59:54
  Speaker 1: or sometimes you help somebody out, I would tell you this,
• 1:59:58
  Speaker 1: this is this is no joke. Paul to Let and
• 2:00:01
  Speaker 1: his partner, the guy who died I forget his name,
• 2:00:04
  Speaker 1: two young kids, and they were always what I always remember,
• 2:00:07
  Speaker 1: those little ads in the l A times for social distortion.
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 1: That was what I remember, because they would do all
• 2:00:11
  Speaker 1: those other times and we would pay them after the acts.
• 2:00:15
  Speaker 1: And then the only two kids, they came to me,
• 2:00:20
  Speaker 1: this is way before. I mean, these kids have done
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 1: you know, post done brilliantly. And they came and sat
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: in my office and said, it's really hard for us
• 2:00:30
  Speaker 1: because we live hand to mouth, and we were wondering
• 2:00:35
  Speaker 1: if we could get a line with you. And I
• 2:00:39
  Speaker 1: liked them. They worked hard, they did their shows. We'd
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: always pay them, you know, so they could do it.
• 2:00:45
  Speaker 1: And I said, how much of the line do you need?
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 1: I think there was fifty or a hundred grand. Then
• 2:00:49
  Speaker 1: I gave him a line. Only people I ever did
• 2:00:52
  Speaker 1: that too, and it was me. I mean I did
• 2:00:55
  Speaker 1: so many things for people that nobody begins to know,
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 1: because if people knew that, you know, part of the
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 1: reputation I had kept people away and made you in
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: a place where you couldn't be every place. And I
• 2:01:11
  Speaker 1: would tell my people, look, I'm the toughest person you're
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 1: gonna live within a day. So if you sit in
• 2:01:16
  Speaker 1: the room and somebody's giving you a hard time to say,
• 2:01:18
  Speaker 1: you're gonna get me on the phone, nobody's gonn want
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 1: to talk to and look, I'm telling you the truth.
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 1: This is how how else can you build a company
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: I started with When I left there with five thousand,
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 1: I had people everywhere. And the thing is this, you
• 2:01:35
  Speaker 1: had a reputation that your word was your bond. You
• 2:01:40
  Speaker 1: ran a clean company, You didn't screw around. And by
• 2:01:43
  Speaker 1: the way, you know this, I didn't hang out. You know,
• 2:01:45
  Speaker 1: I was never backstage, you know I was That was
• 2:01:48
  Speaker 1: not who I was. I mean, I fell asleep when
• 2:01:51
  Speaker 1: the tenth of the joke was how many times I
• 2:01:52
  Speaker 1: fell asleep when I did go to events, But That's
• 2:01:57
  Speaker 1: how I conducted myself. Where where I found this out
• 2:02:01
  Speaker 1: later about the government. One of my lawyers was who
• 2:02:06
  Speaker 1: was a great lawyer, was in Washington, And you know,
• 2:02:10
  Speaker 1: I started with nothing. You know, when we were losing
• 2:02:13
  Speaker 1: two million dollars, I didn't go screaming to the government
• 2:02:15
  Speaker 1: the ticket transcot monopolies. Everybody told me I was wrong.
• 2:02:18
  Speaker 1: I was gonna lose. And this is what they said.
• 2:02:23
  Speaker 1: We didn't think he was that smart. Oh, that's what
• 2:02:27
  Speaker 1: they said. We didn't think he was that smart. You see,
• 2:02:29
  Speaker 1: because if you're a wise ass and you saw those
• 2:02:32
  Speaker 1: idiot comments I make, if I don't sell every ticket
• 2:02:34
  Speaker 1: in America, I can't sleep. I mean, I would just
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 1: say stupid, outrageous stuff. But I cared about what I did.
• 2:02:42
  Speaker 1: I really did care about what I did, and I
• 2:02:44
  Speaker 1: cared about taking care of the people who worked for
• 2:02:47
  Speaker 1: me and taking care of um my clients. And I'm
• 2:02:50
  Speaker 1: gonna tell you two stories that that I think are
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: really important that nobody will ever talk about Ticketmaster. I
• 2:02:58
  Speaker 1: promoted a guy in three from thirty two to thirty
• 2:03:01
  Speaker 1: five thousand dollars make him head of operations, not that
• 2:03:05
  Speaker 1: I knew what an operation was. At that time, I
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: was trying to figure it out, and he came in
• 2:03:08
  Speaker 1: my office and he said, I don't think I can
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: take the job because you're gonna find out I'm gay
• 2:03:14
  Speaker 1: and I want to make a hundred thousand dollars a
• 2:03:16
  Speaker 1: year and I'll never get it here, although I do
• 2:03:19
  Speaker 1: think you're gonna build a big company. And I looked
• 2:03:22
  Speaker 1: at him and said, what has any of that got
• 2:03:24
  Speaker 1: to do with your ability? He said, well, nothing. I said,
• 2:03:27
  Speaker 1: to get the funk out of my office. I don't
• 2:03:29
  Speaker 1: need to hear I don't need to hear this. You'll
• 2:03:31
  Speaker 1: be judged on who you are anyway. Fast forward. Because
• 2:03:36
  Speaker 1: I didn't care about that, and I built a really
• 2:03:39
  Speaker 1: diverse company. And Larry will tell you that we had
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: everybody in the company. About a third of my senior
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: workforce was gay. And in ninety two, when Calendar actually
• 2:03:49
  Speaker 1: meant something m c A. It was a big story
• 2:03:52
  Speaker 1: in Calendar about domestic partner insurance. And because I felt
• 2:03:57
  Speaker 1: that human capital was the most important capital that you
• 2:04:00
  Speaker 1: can have, and that I would tell people look in
• 2:04:04
  Speaker 1: the mirror, because everything you get from life is looking
• 2:04:06
  Speaker 1: in the mirror. Good, better, and different. I read this story,
• 2:04:09
  Speaker 1: I call my the people. I know what m c A,
• 2:04:11
  Speaker 1: and I go, would you share that information with my people?
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: And they went yes. And I called this gentleman in
• 2:04:18
  Speaker 1: my office two and said, this is a really great idea.
• 2:04:23
  Speaker 1: We should do this for all people on two conditions.
• 2:04:27
  Speaker 1: He said, what are they? I said one, I've spent
• 2:04:29
  Speaker 1: as much time as I'm going to spend on this.
• 2:04:33
  Speaker 1: This is now in your bailiwick. All I want to
• 2:04:36
  Speaker 1: know is what it costs, and I'll do it, and
• 2:04:38
  Speaker 1: the cost will not I just want to know what
• 2:04:40
  Speaker 1: it's gonna cost me, and I'll do it. And we
• 2:04:41
  Speaker 1: put it in ninety two because you can you follow
• 2:04:47
  Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Yes, but let me ask you why
• 2:04:49
  Speaker 1: to switch it to one thing? What about anti Semitism today? Awful?
• 2:04:55
  Speaker 1: But I was the only Jewish guy in my company
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 1: for ten years for real. Um, Well, you talked about
• 2:05:01
  Speaker 1: the government and you said they didn't take you seriously.
• 2:05:05
  Speaker 1: Do you think that was partially because you're Jewish? Well
• 2:05:09
  Speaker 1: think about this. You're in New York, you're ethnic, you're
• 2:05:14
  Speaker 1: a lawyer, and you're living in l A. And that's
• 2:05:15
  Speaker 1: four out of three strikes. And you went around America
• 2:05:18
  Speaker 1: and took care of it, you know, and built a business.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: I think anti Semitism today is I would say this,
• 2:05:25
  Speaker 1: the pilot light of hate is always on. I think
• 2:05:28
  Speaker 1: Trump turned it up to a full flame. I look
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 1: at people like Kanye and this other twenty four year
• 2:05:36
  Speaker 1: old moron. You know there's a place for them to talk. Um,
• 2:05:42
  Speaker 1: It's always there under the surface. I have not encountered
• 2:05:47
  Speaker 1: a lot of it in my life, fortunately, not directly. Anyway,
• 2:05:51
  Speaker 1: I think it's awful because I think part of what
• 2:05:54
  Speaker 1: America is about. I think some of it's driven by religion.
• 2:05:57
  Speaker 1: America has evolved because it's free him of and firm religion.
• 2:06:02
  Speaker 1: And I think Bob, to be fair, Jews are easy
• 2:06:05
  Speaker 1: to blame when you when you run out of everything else,
• 2:06:07
  Speaker 1: who do you blame? You blame the Jews. It becomes this,
• 2:06:09
  Speaker 1: you know, interesting dynamic. Um. I think the president and
• 2:06:14
  Speaker 1: I think, um, the various organizations are doing what they can.
• 2:06:19
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it's peaked, but I think it's close.
• 2:06:23
  Speaker 1: I think in the end, when I look at anti
• 2:06:26
  Speaker 1: Asian stuff, I can't comprehend it. I can't comprehend what
• 2:06:31
  Speaker 1: the cops are doing. On some level, I think, I
• 2:06:35
  Speaker 1: think what COVID did is by locking everybody up for
• 2:06:39
  Speaker 1: two years. It's like rats in a maze, and so
• 2:06:43
  Speaker 1: there's this dynamic of this frustration that gets filled out. UM.
• 2:06:49
  Speaker 1: My hope is it goes back to where it was.
• 2:06:53
  Speaker 1: I think people are a lot more proactive about dealing
• 2:06:56
  Speaker 1: with it. I hate the fact it's on campuses. UM.
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: I hate the fact that young people think that that's
• 2:07:03
  Speaker 1: the way to behave They have always been lunatics in
• 2:07:06
  Speaker 1: this country of the far right, UM, and the far
• 2:07:09
  Speaker 1: left is no fan either. I mean, it's like when
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 1: I watch some of the anti Israel stuff from some
• 2:07:14
  Speaker 1: of these people, and I go, so, let me ask
• 2:07:16
  Speaker 1: you a question. How would you feel if the people
• 2:07:19
  Speaker 1: in Mexico We're gonna start lobbying bonds. It's not like
• 2:07:21
  Speaker 1: Hamas hasn't had a million ways to make peace, but
• 2:07:24
  Speaker 1: their whole goal is, Okay, we have to eradicate Israel,
• 2:07:27
  Speaker 1: which is not gonna happen. My view of how to
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: I have actually a view of how to make peace
• 2:07:32
  Speaker 1: in the Middle East, which is by it, but underneath
• 2:07:36
  Speaker 1: it is it bothers me that it exists. I'm troubled
• 2:07:42
  Speaker 1: by it. UM. I've been to Auschwitz My wife and
• 2:07:47
  Speaker 1: I have been at Auschwitz. We've been at various places.
• 2:07:49
  Speaker 1: That place. You can't even describe it as evil because
• 2:07:54
  Speaker 1: it's a level beyond the evil and dastardly and mean.
• 2:07:58
  Speaker 1: And I always think the thing that's most interes thing
• 2:08:00
  Speaker 1: about that is they knew how crazy they were, which
• 2:08:03
  Speaker 1: is why they all left to go to whether they
• 2:08:04
  Speaker 1: all try to escape, because they knew that what they
• 2:08:07
  Speaker 1: were doing was wrong, and a Western civilization doing that shocking,
• 2:08:12
  Speaker 1: but and and appalling, um and you know, frightening. So
• 2:08:19
  Speaker 1: I hope the more we focus on anti Semitism, um,
• 2:08:26
  Speaker 1: that it lessens and goes back to where it was.
• 2:08:28
  Speaker 1: I cannot see it getting much beyond where it is now. Um.
• 2:08:36
  Speaker 1: And you know, I have levels of nervousness by who
• 2:08:39
  Speaker 1: gets elected. I mean, the ultimate line was ghosts are
• 2:08:43
  Speaker 1: throwing Omar off the committee because she made anti Israel statements.
• 2:08:47
  Speaker 1: This moron actually went to a pro Nazi rally. I mean,
• 2:08:52
  Speaker 1: you know, you can't, you can't wrap your head around
• 2:08:54
  Speaker 1: stuff like this. And my view has always been to
• 2:09:00
  Speaker 1: be tolerant and let people be who they are. And
• 2:09:05
  Speaker 1: I look at religion in the following way. If it
• 2:09:09
  Speaker 1: gives you comfort, I'm all for it, don't inflict it
• 2:09:12
  Speaker 1: on me. And if it's if it's violent or nationalistic
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 1: or creates hatred of another race or nationality, I can't
• 2:09:22
  Speaker 1: deal with that. In the same way I told you
• 2:09:24
  Speaker 1: the third about a gay guy. We had this young
• 2:09:27
  Speaker 1: African American come into my office in three and he goes,
• 2:09:31
  Speaker 1: do you know Peter Schwartz? And I he was a
• 2:09:34
  Speaker 1: guy fixed machines, And I go, why would I know
• 2:09:37
  Speaker 1: Peter Schwartz? And he said, well, he's Jewish. I got
• 2:09:40
  Speaker 1: there's five thousand Jews in l A. Do you know
• 2:09:43
  Speaker 1: every black person? He goes, well, no, but I thought
• 2:09:46
  Speaker 1: all the Jews knew each other, And go, okay, you
• 2:09:48
  Speaker 1: need to have a seat at the table. But that's
• 2:09:52
  Speaker 1: life experiences. Man. It's like, you know, like wow, um,
• 2:09:57
  Speaker 1: and what my hope is this? You'll find this funny.
• 2:10:03
  Speaker 1: All work, to me is spiritual and holy, not holy
• 2:10:08
  Speaker 1: in the religious sense. But if you do something and
• 2:10:11
  Speaker 1: you work at it and you want to be the
• 2:10:13
  Speaker 1: best at it, that's great. Some of us are fortunate
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 1: and have evolved. Some of us are fortunate where we've
• 2:10:21
  Speaker 1: had careers and been successful economically. But if you're a
• 2:10:26
  Speaker 1: bus driver. That's that's honest work. Be the best bus
• 2:10:29
  Speaker 1: driver if you're I mean, I'm not judgmental about stuff
• 2:10:33
  Speaker 1: like that, because to me, what counts as human capital.
• 2:10:37
  Speaker 1: And one of the things I'm proud of st the
• 2:10:39
  Speaker 1: ticketmaster is and Larry will tell you this. I took
• 2:10:43
  Speaker 1: fifty people who started with me between thirty and fifty grand.
• 2:10:47
  Speaker 1: They didn't go to the best colleges. I didn't have
• 2:10:49
  Speaker 1: an NBA in the company for ten years. I made
• 2:10:52
  Speaker 1: him all millionaires. That to me, because they all became
• 2:10:57
  Speaker 1: more than they thought they would be. And these the stories,
• 2:11:00
  Speaker 1: you know, you got me in this place that I'm
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 1: not gonna be in a newspaper article that I'm not
• 2:11:05
  Speaker 1: going to talk about because I'm too busy being Darth Vader.
• 2:11:07
  Speaker 1: And I think people pay. The loyalty I got was
• 2:11:13
  Speaker 1: because of the loyalty I gave and I protected my people.
• 2:11:17
  Speaker 1: And there was a story I won't tell you the
• 2:11:19
  Speaker 1: building where a guy walked into my office and he
• 2:11:22
  Speaker 1: was almost crying, and I said, why are you crying?
• 2:11:25
  Speaker 1: He said, because so and so beat me up. And
• 2:11:27
  Speaker 1: he said, you sold him a bill of goods. And
• 2:11:30
  Speaker 1: I called the guy who ran the building, and I
• 2:11:32
  Speaker 1: went to see him the next day and I threw
• 2:11:33
  Speaker 1: the contract on the table. I said, rip it up.
• 2:11:37
  Speaker 1: You can't beat up my people. You can beat me up,
• 2:11:40
  Speaker 1: you can't beat them up. And if you think I
• 2:11:42
  Speaker 1: sold you a bill of goods, I'll stay till you
• 2:11:44
  Speaker 1: find another ticket company. But you cannot behave like that
• 2:11:47
  Speaker 1: because I won't tolerate it. And you know, he said, no,
• 2:11:51
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to get you another client. But the point was.
• 2:11:55
  Speaker 1: The point was people saw I stood up for them,
• 2:12:00
  Speaker 1: and when you stand up for people, they will do
• 2:12:04
  Speaker 1: amazing things for you if you give them loyalty. You know.
• 2:12:08
  Speaker 1: It's like I spoke to a group of people and
• 2:12:09
  Speaker 1: I said, your generation talks about quiet quitting. My generation
• 2:12:13
  Speaker 1: talked about quiet firing. You gotta do your job. You
• 2:12:16
  Speaker 1: need to show that you have ambition, otherwise ten years
• 2:12:20
  Speaker 1: from now you'll be in the same place. I'm not
• 2:12:23
  Speaker 1: known Fred. I think we're gonna leave it there for today.
• 2:12:27
  Speaker 1: We could certainly go on and I would enjoy it,
• 2:12:30
  Speaker 1: but I'm gonna give the audience a break. I want
• 2:12:34
  Speaker 1: to thank you so much for being so honest and
• 2:12:36
  Speaker 1: forthright and explaining all this to some people who don't
• 2:12:39
  Speaker 1: want to hear it, but there you go. Well, let
• 2:12:43
  Speaker 1: me say thank you for giving me the opportunity to
• 2:12:46
  Speaker 1: do it um and let me answer the questions openly.
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: And you know, after all these years, it's nice to
• 2:12:54
  Speaker 1: put a face to the person, and you know, we
• 2:12:57
  Speaker 1: both evolved and the truth is, you know, the truth is.
• 2:13:02
  Speaker 1: Guess what, Let everybody live a long time, Let everybody
• 2:13:06
  Speaker 1: be happy. I know that sounds kind of weird. And
• 2:13:09
  Speaker 1: the answers, man, it's only a ticket. Can we just
• 2:13:11
  Speaker 1: get on with life? I mean, really, it's a ticket.
• 2:13:15
  Speaker 1: And it's like, it's so insane when you watch this stuff,
• 2:13:21
  Speaker 1: and oh, I gotta I gotta share one anecdote with you,
• 2:13:24
  Speaker 1: one more anecdote, which you love. So there was this
• 2:13:27
  Speaker 1: class action lawsuit because we didn't get back service Georges.
• 2:13:32
  Speaker 1: And there were two lawyers. I'm not gonna tell you
• 2:13:34
  Speaker 1: where because you would know, you would know the situation.
• 2:13:37
  Speaker 1: But we gave back the money. There's ten people in
• 2:13:39
  Speaker 1: the room and I'm paying for everybody, you know, the building,
• 2:13:43
  Speaker 1: the promoter, everybody's got lawyers. And these two guys go
• 2:13:46
  Speaker 1: on for about fifteen minutes about how I basically ruined
• 2:13:49
  Speaker 1: the world by not giving back service charges. So when
• 2:13:53
  Speaker 1: they finished, I took a toy ambulance out of my
• 2:13:56
  Speaker 1: pocket and I've rolled it down the conference table and
• 2:14:00
  Speaker 1: they said, what's this and I said something for you
• 2:14:01
  Speaker 1: to run behind. You guys are so full of crap
• 2:14:05
  Speaker 1: it's unbelievable. They started screaming, and I said, tell you
• 2:14:08
  Speaker 1: what I'm gonna do. Tell you what I'm gonna do.
• 2:14:12
  Speaker 1: I'm gonna give a hundred thousand dollars to the school
• 2:14:14
  Speaker 1: system grand the year for four years. You have exactly
• 2:14:20
  Speaker 1: five minutes to take the deal, otherwise I'm gonna leave,
• 2:14:23
  Speaker 1: in which case, all these lawyers you can go sue
• 2:14:26
  Speaker 1: me and I'll just pay the money in legal fees.
• 2:14:28
  Speaker 1: But here's the deal. Because I think you're such monumental asses.
• 2:14:33
  Speaker 1: You can make the press conference that I gave the
• 2:14:35
  Speaker 1: hundred grand, but you know what your fear is zero.
• 2:14:38
  Speaker 1: You've got five minutes to accept it because I'm going
• 2:14:40
  Speaker 1: back to l A. And they took the deal, Bob
• 2:14:43
  Speaker 1: being thank you, Fred. Until next time, it's Bob left
• 2:14:48
  Speaker 1: Sex