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

Episode Date: September 21, 2021

Randall Kaplan is joined by Ben Sherwood to discuss what is missing from the conversations and books on excellence. They discuss pursuing your dreams when the odds are overwhelmingly against you, the murder of journalist David Kaplan while Ben was sitting next to him in a car during the Bosnia-Herzegovina conflict, canceling the hit sitcom Roseanne in 2018 when he was in charge of ABC Television, moving from coast to coast several times to pursue professional opportunities balances against personal and family needs, and much more.Topics include:Explaining why love is the greatest motivator. Learning guiding principles for making career decisions. Becoming a Rhode Scholar.  Admiring Robert Iger, former long-time CEO of Disney.  Starting Mojo, Ben’s newest business venture. Learning the significance of patience and self-forgiveness in our pursuit of excellence.  Explaining the value of kindness and generosity.  Understanding the meaning of what it means to live your deepest questions in life. And other topics…Ben Sherwood is an award-winning journalist, the former executive producer of Good Morning America, the former president of ABC News and CEO of Disney-ABC Television Group, and the former Co-Chair Hulu. He is also the author of four best-selling novels and a non-fiction book titled The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science That Could Save Your Life.  Ben is also the founder of MOJO, a coaching app for parents designed to revitalize youth sports.Sponsors:Sandee | Bliss: BeachesWant to Connect? Reach out to us online!Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

The goal should not necessarily be to try something new with the intention of being the very best in the world, but instead almost answer the question, I want to go try that, can I be excellent at it? No one's really going to ever be able to answer the question about what the right choice is for you. No one's ever going to be able to tell you which is the right path or should you stay with this career or switch. To the extent you can, go live the question. And in the course of living that question, you can find some of the answers. Welcome to In Search of Excellence, our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be, to learn, educate, and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential. It's about

planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication, and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face in our lives. Achieving excellence is our goal, and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings, and we all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. Today, my guest is my great friend, Ben Sherwood. Ben is the former executive producer of Good Morning America, my guest is my great friend, Ben Sherwood. Ben is the former executive producer of Good Morning America, the former president of ABC News, the former president of

Disney ABC television group, the former co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, and the former co-chair of Hulu and A&E Networks. At Disney and ABC, he managed a $12 billion business with 12,000 employees, and he was responsible for the creation of more than 24,000 hours of original content every year. Ben is also the author of four critically acclaimed bestselling books. He is currently the founder and CEO of Mojo, a new and exciting venture-backed startup that helps parents coach their young children in various sports. Ben, welcome to In Search of Excellence. Thank you for the invitation, Randy. I always start out my podcast with family, and I do that because for nearly all of us, we're a product of our surroundings and upbringing, and that starts with our parents.

I think it's every parent's goal to be great role models for their kids, and part of that is trying to teach us from a young age to excel and be the best that we can be. So what were your parents like, Ben, and did they instill these kinds of values in you? First of all, it's a pleasure to be here. I could go on for quite a while about Dee and Dick Sherwood, my mom and dad, my late parents. Both of them were loving, supportive, and believed in our potential, my big sister and I. And I would say that they're distinguishing traits. My father was a towering figure in Los Angeles. He was 6'4". He was a lawyer. He went to Yale, Harvard Law School, was a clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter on the Supreme Court, a brilliant legal mind, and a builder of many of the civic institutions in Los Angeles,

the LA County Museum, the Center Theater Group downtown. So he was a larger than life figure. And he was someone who set very high standards for us, even though he never put any pressure whatsoever. Just hugely influential person who believed in our potential and wanted us to reach it. He was someone who, while he went into the law, really wanted to be a diplomat, wanted to be an academic, or wanted to be in politics or in journalism. And so he, to a certain extent, pushed me and my sister in the directions that he did not pursue because of his own parents. His father had dropped out of high school. His father had been a businessman. His father insisted that his son, Dick, become a professional. And so I think that what's interesting is that we all in some way act out our own childhoods on our own kids, as you say in your question. And our father pushed us hard

toward careers in public service or trying to make a difference in the world. My mother was a professional volunteer and a homemaker, unbelievably involved in our lives. And she was the kind of mom who made every opportunity available to us, believed in us enormously and pushed us to pursue our individual passions. A home filled with love, a home filled with very high standards and a home filled with a sense that whatever we set our minds to, our parents are going to encourage us to pursue. It makes a huge difference in your confidence and everything else.

You're being well-adjusted when you have parents giving you that kind of loving, supportive family. So you have awesome parents, but what kind of kid were you? I mean, kids love to have fun. So let's start there. I was a pretty serious kid, I would say. I used to play in the neighborhood with my neighbor, Wendy Bartosh, who was my best friend when I was really little.

I was afraid of the ball when it came to team sports. So I played Little League and I played AYSO soccer, but I always just tried to disappear. I wanted to be invisible. And I think that I was interested in the things the kids are interested in. I was interested in magic as a boy. And in fact, I earned my spending money as a kid by doing birthday party magic shows for kids in the neighborhood. I ended up quitting the stage and magic after one birthday party at Mary Bing's house. When a grownup in the background, a woman named Olive Barrett, who was one of the leading women of Los Angeles, started heckling me and shouting how I was doing my tricks. And I stormed off the

stage and never returned. And I would say that as a kid, I was pretty studious. I took my schoolwork pretty seriously. And I ended up in high school spending a lot of time in debate, which was really one of my passions. And that turned me into a very argumentative young man and pretty aggressive in arguments. And I think many of my personality defects are a function of the fact that at an early age, I learned to argue and debate with everybody on every topic and take any side of any issue and go for the kill. And so I've spent much of my life trying to recover from the experience of becoming a pretty successful debater in high school. I don't think you know this, but my son, Charlie, is a magician. He used to be much more into it. He would do tricks. You know what it's

like. You would wow people, but you learn a great ability to tell a story and become a good public speaker. Did you feel that as well? Because to get that at a young age is really invaluable. I love magic because I think that there's the element of surprise, there's the element of wonder. And you're right, patter is the key to a good magic trick. Basically, there's probably only 10 or 20 really great card tricks and 10 or 20 great coin tricks and everything else is a version of those core 10 or 20 tricks and everything else is kind of the pattern the story you tell with that trick and i had a great time making up my own stories

for each of the tricks even though they were sort of familiar i would get the trick at the magic store in hollywood i'd bring it home I would read the patter that was recommended that came with the trick. And then part of my thing was to try to come up with my own story, my own version of why I was doing this trick and sort of my own little surprises with it. Yeah. So you mentioned you were a studious kid. Did that mean you had a good work ethic? You came home, you open up the books and you start to finish. You'd be up late on the books. And when did you start thinking about your future? Did it come when you were a young teenager? Did it come later as you got into college? In terms of work ethic, I think our family,

we were all pretty hard workers. And I was somebody who always wanted to be ahead. I never liked that feeling that I was either behind or it was the last minute or I had to kind of stay up all night. So I was the kind of person who was always planning ahead. I don't know why, but I'm just somebody who wanted to be organized a few days before something was due or start studying for a test a few days before I needed to. In fact, I never pulled an all-nighter in college until the last couple of weeks of college when we had to print out our senior theses or dissertations. And there I stayed up all night, a couple nights printing out my friend's dissertations because I had finished mine ahead of time. And so I was just kind of running the printer to make sure that everybody got theirs in on time too. That's when I stayed up all night.

That's actually when I stayed up the latest was to help my friends get through. In terms of thinking about the future, look, I have an older sister who's five years older, Liz. And I think that she's a classic first child, incredibly smart, incredibly driven, really close friend, protective of her little brother. When we were kids, we'd spend summers together in different places and she would always look out for me and protect me. I worshiped her as a kid and I followed five years behind her. And so I think that as my sister got older, I began to watch her and the things that she was doing. And she's the one who really started me out thinking about what was going to come because off she went to college when I was starting high school and she was in college when I was in high school. And then when I got to college, she was off in graduate school

and I began to think about that step. And then when she went to work right after graduate school, I was in graduate school and starting to think about what to do next. And so I think that my big sister is a big reason that I thought about the future. And then my mom and dad, they were always asking questions, not about putting pressure on, but just always asking questions about and introducing us to interesting people and pointing out interesting directions that you could take your life. There are a lot of people listening and watching who have kids and you have two teenage boys. What's your best advice to parents on how to motivate their kids to be the best they can be and live up to their potential? And in your view, is there any particular age that parents should make a conscious effort

to focus on this if it's not innate for somebody? I have a lot of humility about parenting in these questions, Randy, and I wish I could offer some great advice or wisdom. I think there are two parts to it. One, I hope that I married very well in the sense that I married a very grounded, very thoughtful, very loving person who does not put pressure on our kids, does not drive them hard. She listens incredibly carefully to them and she surrounds them with a sense of love and everything's going to be okay. And so I think in a certain sense, I don't know the secret of driving your kids, of getting your kids to be motivated,

of inspiring your kids to perform or to excel. I think that a home filled with love and a sense of belief and the sense of belief in their potential and their abilities is a really important piece of that. I also think, frankly, that a lot of the techniques that I've seen used by my friends and sometimes that I have resorted to myself are counterproductive. That is putting pressure on your kid to perform, putting pressure on a kid to achieve. I, for instance, made the terrible mistake of making it clear to my sons that I love chess and that I hope that they would play chess. I bought them chess sets. I bought them Dodgers chess sets when we lived in New York. I bought them New York Yankees chess sets. I bought them Simpsons chess sets. I bought them 25 different chess sets. The more I pushed,

the less interested they were. And the result was that neither of my boys plays chess, to my disappointment. However, they took up all kinds of activities and interests that are of zero interest to me. And all I've tried to do is encourage them with everything I've got to pursue the things that they love. So one of my sons likes to play the drums. He's playing the drums. He's working on the drums. He's doing that on his own. I have very little involvement with that. I have very little visibility into his drumming, but it's something that gives him a lot of pleasure. Same with sports. As I said before, I was afraid of the ball, wanted to be invisible on the field, but both of my boys love to play sports. A lot of that comes from their mother. And so we've encouraged them with

everything we've got to play sports. And I've actually coached four different sports. I'm not qualified in any of them, but I wanted to be out there on the field with them and to encourage them. So I read soccer for dummies. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and I have done everything I could to be relevant and to encourage them in the things that they want to do. You're an incredible parent. I know Karen is as well. I see you outside playing with your kids. I think it's awesome. And I do hear him playing the drums as well. As you may know, I play the drums also. And once in a while, I keep the windows open just to get some fresh air in there. But it's very, very cool. I want to talk about the meaning and importance of education now. My dad said something to me when I was in the eighth grade. He said that the most important investment in someone's future is to get the best education possible. Do you agree with that? 100%. I think that if there's anything that we can give our kids, and if there's anything that

we should save for and everything that we should fight for, it's an education for our children. And I was incredibly fortunate to have a fantastic education. My parents guided me on that journey, and it's something that I think makes the biggest difference. If you have the chance to have great teachers, if you have the chance to push yourself, challenge yourself, if you have the chance to discover the things that you're interested in with those great teachers, all kinds of things are possible. And I think that in a sense, it's a working hard keeps options open. And that's the one thing that I would say that I've said to my sons. And it's something that my parents said to me, which is that the reason for working hard

is that the harder you work, the more options you have in terms of your education. And the more options you have in terms of your education, that means the more options you have ultimately in life. And so I think that without question, education is the thing that opens the most doors. And as part of education, I would say that for me, language was something that was really interesting and writing. So as part of education, I think that writing is one of those unbelievably important tools sometimes neglected. But writing is the thing that, of course, we use so frequently in so many parts of our lives. And so writing as it relates to education is another area that I think is super important. You're an incredible student.

I'm gonna just have to go on for a minute or two here about how good you were. You graduated from the prestigious Harvard Westlake School in Los Angeles. Then you go to Harvard where you're Phi Beta Kappa. And for those people who don't know what Phi Beta Kappa is, it's the oldest, most prestigious honor society in the United States.

It's typically awarded to top 1% to 3% of the student body. It's something you don't apply for. They find you. So you're in the top 1% of 1%ers, and that's pretty rarefied error. Most people could never do that in a billion years, no matter how hard we try. So how did you do that? Is it because you're naturally gifted and that school came easy to you or were you the hardest worker or a little bit of both? I got to tell you, along the way, I've met so many people much, much smarter, much more

talented, much more gifted. I just worked my ass off. I just worked hard. And a lot of weekends, a lot of nights in the library and grinding away. I'd say that I wish it were some special brains or gift. I was a grinder. And I've actually felt that way career wise too. I work super hard and have grinded away. I think I had a few advantages, but I tried to make the most of those advantages with hard work. We share that DNA. I'm a complete grinder, and I had this mentality called philo, first in, last out. I'd sit in the law library when I was a freshman, sophomore, and junior in college, and I was there until 10 o'clock on a Tuesday, Thursday night when I had nothing going on. Very interesting. There were 10 of us there. We all got to know each other very, very well.

And we've all done pretty well in our careers. And it really does speak to work ethic. I think, for me, work ethic is the most important element to our success, not only in our professional life, but in our personal lives as well. I'll just say, Randy, you set a high bar for work ethic. I see you working hard. I see you exercising hard. I see you exercising hard. I see you parenting hard.

You go all out in everything that you do. So I think that you've got the work ethic thing down. Thank you. I appreciate that very much, especially coming from you. When you get to Harvard, is it your goal to be at the top of the class? I mean, that's really hard to do. And that's quite a goal to set for yourself. You know, I didn't think about it that way. When I got there, I was pretty intimidated.

And it's a big class, I don't know, 1,400, 1,600 kids. And I just tried to do what my dad always told me to do, which was to march to your own drummer and to do your own thing. And so I didn't really have an ambition. I actually don't even know if I was at the top of my class or near the top of my class. Yes, in my senior year, I was chosen for the Phi Beta Kappa group, but man, I was grinding away and I was not aware of where I was in the class or how I was doing. I was just trying to do my best. And so I didn't set that as a goal. I just wanted to make the most of the experience, most of every class. I happen to pick classes pretty well. I love the classes that I took.

I love my major. I actually created kind of my own major, which was a combination of government and history. And I ended up taking a year off during college to spend time in North Carolina, where I worked for a little newspaper. And that's where I also did research for my senior thesis. And so when you love it the way I loved a lot of the things that I was doing, I was able to work really hard. And then at the end, I was actually kind of surprised when it turned out the way it did. It turned out pretty well. Just to be clear, Phi Beta Kappa is top

1% to 5%. It's typically top 1% to 3%. So you're being a little humble. But then you become a Rhodes Scholar. So tell us about that, what it is, and how that came about. That's a fellowship to England for two years, typically, or three years in some cases. And that came about, as I mentioned earlier, my big sister Liz, five years older, was a Rhodes Scholar in 1981, and off she went to England. And it was something that was just on my radar as a long shot when you graduate from college, that there are these fellowships where you can go to England, you can travel around the world on a Fulbright fellowship. My father had been something called a Sheldon Traveling Fellow when

he graduated from law school. He got to travel around the world for a year with my mom and study legal institutions and the law in different countries, which was for young graduates of law school. And so I always had in my mind that when I finished college, that I would love to try to apply for some fellowship and get to go overseas and have some international experience. And so I had a big stack of different fellowships to apply for. And I applied for a whole bunch of them. And one of them, the Rhodes, there are 32 Rhodes Scholars selected every year in the United States. And I applied from California, which is a big competitive state.

And I thought there was very little chance that family would get two Rhodes Scholarships, let alone one. And I still applied. And during the interviewing process, both at the California level and then at the regional level, there are multiple stages to the process. At both levels, I got grilled by the committees about why one family should get two of these fellowships. Shouldn't they be spread out more? And I can't remember exactly my arguments or my debating, but I did my very best to say that these should be given out on merit. And here's why I

think I could make a lot out of an experience in England and in Oxford. And I was lucky that I got one. So off I went and I spent three incredible years at Magdalen College, which is one of the old colleges in Oxford. And I did two different academic programs. First was a program in the history of the British Empire in Commonwealth, where I was focused mainly on Africa and India. And then I did a second program in development economics, both of them master's degrees. And the development economics story, really the history of developing countries, takes off when the British Empire ends in the 50s or 60s, when decolonization happened in India, broke free, and when African countries broke free of the imperial chains.

And those countries then became developing countries. And the modern history of those countries is really about development economics, how those countries have tried to pick themselves up. Just to put some details on how difficult it is to get a Rhodes Scholar, there's 32 of them that get thousands of applications. And the acceptance rate at Harvard is 5.6%. But the acceptance rate to be a Rhodes Scholar, once you get the letter and you apply, is seven-tenths of 1%. So you said you didn't think you were going to get it and you applied. What do you say to people who want to get ahead, but when they look at something that's really hard to get and they know the numbers, like there's 200 applicants for one job and they say,

F that, why bother? I have no chance. I got the Rhodes Scholar letter too, please apply. I was Phi Beta Kappa. And I said to myself, there's no way on earth I'm going to get this. I'm not going to waste my time. It requires an enormous amount of work. So that's what I did. I said, I've got no shot. I'm not doing it. I'm not even going to try to do it. But what do you say to people when the odds are so great that they just say, not going to even try? So a couple of things. First of all, I never knew those statistics. I'd never known the percentage chance of getting a Rhodes Scholarship. That's news to me. So you taught me something today, Randy. And I'm relieved to know that the reason you know the Phi Beta Kappa numbers is because you are Phi Beta Kappa. Because I didn't know those statistics either. I wasn't aware of

them. I'm not being modest. I just didn't know the chances. Here's how I think about it. I think about it a little bit of the reason why I always play the Powerball lottery when the pot goes over $100 million. I do the same thing, by the way. I always buy a ticket. And the reason I buy a ticket is that old phrase from some ad in New York, which is, you can't win if you don't play. And I remember being in New York and seeing these ads that would basically say that, hey, if you don't throw your hat in the ring, you can't win. And so my view was with something like a fellowship or something like a job, you work your hardest, you do your best, you make your best case, you put your application in, you do everything you've got to figure out a way.

And if you're lucky, good things happen. And if you're not, life's going to be just fine. You're going to be okay. You're going to figure something else out. Worst thing that happens is that you've spent a bunch of time thinking about what you want to do with your life. And maybe you've convinced yourself that you want to go to England and you want to spend a few years at an old university where it's really rainy and it's really cold, but you've persuaded yourself you want to do that. And there are lots of ways to go to England and go to one of those universities

that don't involve the Rhodes Scholarship. You may not get a Rhodes Scholarship. Maybe there's another fellowship that you can go on. Maybe if you can't get a fellowship, maybe there's another way you can show up there and do that work. And so I think that for me, it reminds me actually of a question that I was asked during my Rhodes interview. I haven't thought about this probably in 35 years, but I remember during the California Rhodes interview, there was this, actually it was the regional interview, and there was this guy from Arizona. He was a Rhodes Scholar many years earlier. I'm sure he was younger then than I am today, but he seemed like an old, impossible dude who was bent on messing me up. And he asked me a question. He said, in one of your essays, you mentioned that you are a supporter of gun control. I have a question for you, a principal question. He said, if you knew that

supporting gun control would mean that you would lose an election for office, would you change your position on gun control? And I asked him, what are the chances of losing? Is it a 100% chance or is it a 99% chance? Which is the percentage? I just needed to know the percentage. And he said, 100%. And I said, well, if it's 100%, I'd change my position. But if it's 99%, I wouldn't change my position. And he jumped up from his chair and was on top of me. Why?

Why? And I said, well, if you know 100%, you're going to lose and you're not going to have a chance to persuade anybody of anything, then why hold that position if it's going to doom you to defeat? But if you have a 1% chance of winning, if you stick to that position, then I would fight like hell for that position. I think it's the same thing with applying for things that seem out of reach. If you're told 100% never going to happen, you can't get it, then it's a waste of time. But if you've got a 1% chance of making it happen, that seems good enough to me. One out of 100, go for it.

You talk about the mega lottery like you. First, I don't gamble. I go to Las Vegas and I watch people. It's not fun for me to lose money. I work hard for my money. It's just not fun for me. I do play the roulette wheel. I give myself $100 and then I'm done. I play the lottery. And of course, there are no winners in Brentwood or in West LA. So I usually drive someplace that is far away from here. It seems like there are no winners here.

Something interesting, and I know we're moving off topic for a second. The winner of the billion and a half dollar lottery came from a ticket in Novi, Michigan. I was actually, I was there at that Kroger a few months before moving my daughter into college. We shopped there at the market. It's about 20 minutes from campus. The winner has not claimed the prize yet. Is that incredible? I mean, that ticket could be

lost somewhere. But they've got a year. They're probably sitting there someplace completely freaking out and trying to figure out... Because I play fairly regularly when the pot gets over 100 million. I think about that question about whether you wait 364 days until the last possible day to go in there or whether you go in there right until the last possible day to go in there, or whether you go in there right away, claim it, and go start figuring out what you're going to do with it. But I would think that would be pretty overwhelming. And notice how I knew it was Michigan because I was tracking that one. It's interesting. You'd have to keep that thing in a safe place, in a bank safe deposit vault somewhere. But that's just a lot of money

in a four by three inch piece of paper to just take a risk. Something could happen to it. I mean, I think I'd call my lawyers, I'd hire the Brinks truck or some security force, and I'd head down there just to make sure it's off my plate. I think in Michigan too, you can keep your name confidential. I'm pretty sure about that. So there's no risk of public mayhem. So you're a great student, but many people aren't a great student. So if you can't get a good education or an education at all, like so many people, what's your advice to them? I think life is an education. And if you can't go to a particular institution or go pursue a particular path,

one of my great mentors and one of my role models was Tom Brokaw. I worked for Tom at NBC News for about five years. And Tom liked to tease me all the time that he was a C student from South Dakota who had gone to the University of Iowa. And he liked to keep track of all the C students in the world who ruled the world. And he liked to keep track of all the C students in the world who ruled the world. And he liked to keep track of all the people who hadn't finished high school and hadn't finished college who had succeeded. Peter Jennings, the great anchorman from Canada and ABC News, actually never finished high school. Brian Williams, the anchorman from NBC News, did not finish American University. Tom used to keep a list

and would always... In fact, he even wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times about how all these pointy heads and all these Ivy League guys and women who have 4.0 grade point averages, they don't know much. Life teaches you a lot more. If you grew up in South Dakota and you made your way across the country to LA and then to Washington and then to Rockefeller Center, things turn out just fine. And I tend to believe all those things, including that book by Frank Bruni about where you go isn't who you are, that all that stuff matters, but it's not dispositive in terms of where you end up in life and how successful you are. I think about a couple of things. I think about my friend Ray Kethledge, who's one of my closest friends. At some point, he was the youngest U.S. appeals court

judge in the country. He was the two-time candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. I think he was the frontrunner going in before Justice Kavanaugh got the position. But I saw a TED Talk he did recently, and I didn't know this. And he talks about, he's one of the most brilliant people that I know. He clerked for Justice White on the U.S. Supreme Court. He said in his podcast, he got a 2.01 grade point his first year at Michigan, and then he had like a 2.14 his second year at Michigan. So pretty remarkable stuff. I agree. You don't have to be a great student, and we hear so many times the A students work for the C students, and I've seen that a lot in my life and career, and I know you have as well. I just want to comment on your sister and the

Rhodes Scholarship. And this is just rarefied air. You're the only brother-sister pair of Rhodes Scholars in the history of the Rhodes Scholarship, which started in 1902. I mean, the only ones. That's just insane. You see it with professional athletes. I think of Peyton and Eli Manning, TJ and JJ Watt, Del Curry and Steph Curry, but the only ones in history. I mean, how does that even happen? Luck. Not luck. There's no chance that's luck.

Luck. No way. I got to point something else out. Important historical fact. Men were only eligible for the Rhodes Scholarship for the first 77 years of the scholarship, or 75 years. Women only became eligible in the 1970s. So my sister was among the first women to become eligible in 1981. And so I just want to point out that, yes, thank you for that. And I'd say that my mom was extremely proud and my mom was quick to tell a lot of people about this news, but it was,

there had been brothers before, there had been this news. But there had been brothers before. There had been fathers and sons. There had been actually fathers and daughters. I think technically, maybe we're the first brother and sister. I'm sure there have been some since. So I'm just trying to put that into historical perspective. Yeah. I met your mom at a Mark Selwyn art gallery opening.

I said, oh, Ben's my neighbor and he's my friend. And I didn't know you were a Rhodes Scholar, but she was the one who actually told me and filled me in. And she was pretty damn proud, Ben. That's for sure. All right, we're going to talk about your professional career now. We've gone through the rockstar academic career and we've talked about the value in education

and building block to excellence. And here's the map. You work hard in high school to get into good college, and you want to do well to get a good job when you graduate. And now it's time for the real world to begin. So we're going to walk through your remarkable career, news, television, writing as an entrepreneur. We're going to go through them one by one. But let's start with your first job. You're 21 years old. You graduate from Harvard. And what's the plan? The plan was I finished college and then I finished graduate school in England. And my first job job, I had internships along the way. I had internships in college. I went to New York and worked at CBS News. I went to Washington and

worked at the LA Times. I went to North Carolina and worked for the Raleigh News and Observer. So I had summer internships, but my first job job when I got out of school, I had to decide, and I had a big choice was between print journalism and television journalism. And I spent an endless amount of time torturing my friends and mentors about, should I go toward print? Say the New York Times, Wall Street Journal is the dream. LA Times where I had worked. Should you go in that direction or should you go toward television? CBS News at the time was sort of the gold standard, BBC News, NBC News in that direction. CNN was just getting started. And in the end, I chose television. And then I tried to figure out the best possible place to go. I thought I was going to go to CBS News. And at the last second, I switched directions and I ended up going to ABC News where I began as an associate producer in 1989 in August on a brand new program that was debuting that month called Primetime Live with Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson. And I was an

associate producer in the investigative unit at Primetime Live. Were you accepted to every job you applied for? I mean, that's an incredible resume. You have the academics, you have the internships. Was it 100% acceptance rate when you're looking for these jobs? I cannot remember the acceptance rate, but I can tell you it was not 100% because the fact was I had no relevant job experience. I had a couple of master's degrees in British imperial history and development economics, but I'd never really spent much time in an edit room. I'd never spent much time shooting video. I'd never spent much time out on the streets doing TV reports. And so I had certain limitations. I had some clips.

I had written articles for newspapers and I had done a bunch of journalism in print. But no, I got turned down all over the place. I got rejected all over the place for jobs. But I did have a couple of opportunities. I had an opportunity at CBS. I had an opportunity at ABC. I had to choose between those two. And what I can remember very vividly, I had been an intern at CBS Evening News with Dan Rather in the summer of 1983. That was an

amazing experience. I loved it. And twice during that internship, two times, I came in early every morning. I followed your mantra and I got in first. I was there. I turned the lights on in the newsroom in the morning and I got there super early because I wanted to read all the newspapers and prepare and be ready. But I also got there early because I had been told that Dan Rather came to work early some mornings to work on his Royal Typewriter and do his correspondence. And twice that summer, Dan came in early. And twice that summer, I had the privilege of getting to talk to Dan just in the newsroom all by ourselves. And we talked for 10 I had the privilege of getting to talk to Dan just in the newsroom all by ourselves. And we talked for 10 or 15 minutes before he would go about his business.

But those were kind of one-on-one moments with the anchorman of the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite's successor. It was thrilling for me to get to spend 10, 20 minutes with the great man and just talk to him about what he was doing and what he thought of the news and to get to know him a little bit. On the day that I was appointed many, many years later, president of ABC News in 2010, I remember my new admin came into my office at ABC headquarters on 66th Street in Manhattan and brought me an envelope. And in that envelope, there was a handwritten note and it had been messengered over and I opened it. Luke Gromen, The very first piece of correspondence I opened when I had been appointed president of ABC News was from Dan Rather. And it was a simple note that said,

I always knew this day would come. I just hoped it would be at CBS News. Congratulations. And that's the kind of guy he was, remembering an intern 30 years earlier, and also the kind of guy he was to remember those morning conversations before dawn with just an intern sitting there in the dark, a couple of lights on in a newsroom, so excited to be there, so excited to be part of CBS News, so excited to be in the middle of the action and broadcasting. And he was a wonderful mentor and a friend. I disappointed him when I chose ABC over CBS News when I took that job in 1989.

And he sort of needling me a little bit 30 years later when I ended up running that organization. How inspiring is that? But think about the reward for the hard work, getting in early and being the first one there. I mean, there's so many great lessons that come out of being there first. I mean, how many times do you tell people you want to get ahead, you work hard? It's fine to be an A. Okay, you can do really well being an A. It's great to be an A plus, all right? You're in the rarefied area. But how about A triple plus? That really means every single day you're the first one there. It could be four in the morning, whatever your job is, and you're the last one to leave, which typically you've worked in very high demanding jobs. You're talking about midnight or one in the morning regularly for long periods of

time. Yeah. Another mentor and an incredible boss who I had the good luck to work with, jumping ahead. I worked with him for 10 years, Bob Iger at Disney. Bob famously gets up somewhere around four to 4.30 every morning. He goes and tortures himself on one of these crazy exercise contraptions, the VersaClimber, and does 45 minutes on a VersaClimber. I couldn't do two minutes on a VersaClimber right now. You, Randy, given your fitness level, could probably do 30, but I don't know if you could do 45 minutes to an hour on a Versaclimber the way Bob does listening to music. And then off he goes, and he's the first guy at Disney. He's there before 7 a.m. most mornings.

And I think he's been doing that for around 45 years. He is the human embodiment of an executive who works harder and puts in more hours. And quiet time is so important to him. Some of those early morning hours before everybody shows up, before the action begins, that quiet time in the morning to think, to read, to think about the world, to think about the day, to develop a plan for the day. That's why I love going in early. Those mornings at CBS, when I was getting started and all those early mornings ever since, I love that quiet time to get prepared, to get ready. That's before you start getting hit in the face and hit in the head all day by all the

different things that happen at work. I've read a lot about Bob. I knew what time he wakes up. He's actually on Masterclass. He talks about this a little bit on Masterclass, so he talks about this a little bit on Masterclass, but I've read a whole bunch about it throughout the years. Just think about if you're at Disney and you're 21 years old or 23 years old, you know his schedule, you know what time he gets into the office. Why wouldn't you just wait one day, not stalk him, but just wait and say, hi, I'm Randy Kaplan. I love working here. I was wondering if you had 15 minutes for a cup of coffee. What's the likelihood he's going to say yes to that? Hi.

Very high. Very high. That's who he is. And let's just say when I was working for him, I came in running his news division in New York. I knew that at any hour of the day or night, he could call. And at any hour of the day or night, he could call and want to know what's going on. And part of the fun of working for him, I mean, it was really fun. I loved it. Was that any hour of the day or night, your boss can call and want to talk about the news, can want to talk about books, can want to talk about music, can want to talk about history. It was a blast. And you had to be on your toes. And one of the

things I miss about the company, I left a couple of years ago. One of the things I miss is that daily interaction with somebody who gets up earlier, reads more, thinks harder, looks further, talks to more people, is just more engaged than anybody that I've ever worked with or worked for. And he really set an unbelievable example. And I think that each of us, in terms of that work ethic, I think that each of us can aspire to that. And I think you're right. One of the things that's amazing about him is that when you get into the cafeteria at ABC with Bob, where he came up 45 years ago and started as a stagehand. He still knows the people who are working as stagehands and he still knows them by their

names. He knows their parents. He knows their kids. And he's risen all the way up from stagehand managing the stages of ABC all the way to chairman of the Walt Disney Company. But when he's back there, he still has time in the cafeteria line and sitting in the cafeteria to chat with all these people he began with 45 years ago. That's an amazing thing. And that's why I think to your point, you probably couldn't get to him now because of security and you probably couldn't get to him now because of the way he gets into the building, and you probably couldn't get to him now because of the elevators and the way the system works. But if you happened upon him someplace in town, and you said, I read your book, I'm a huge fan, I think the mentorship means a lot to him. And he is really interested

in mentoring young people and helping people find their way. I saw him probably, well, I've seen him a couple of times. I saw him on vacation. We were in Hawaii together, staying at the same place. I mentioned at that time I was renting a house right up the street. I've known Willow for a few years before, his wife, Willow Bay, before. Actually, she had just met him and was dating him. And someone introduced me to Willow, and she called me to ask what's Los Angeles like. And she's a very, very nice woman, as you well know. She's awesome. And I saw him on vacation. He was very, very nice, friendly. We talked a whole, you know, very down-to-earth guy. And he was in great shape, by the way. He'd made me look like I needed to work out a little bit more.

And I did see him at the Brentwood Country Mart, which, as you know, is a local hangout for people. You go there, you see a lot of people who you know. You've been there a million times. We've been there a million times. And there were a number of people who went up to him. He's sort of like a star, right? I mean, you're chairman of the Walt Disney Company and CEO.

Everyone knows who you are. And he shook everyone's hand. He talked to them. He was in no rush to leave. It really says a lot about someone's character and making time for people and never forgetting where you came from. That definitely comes through about him. He never forgets where he came from.

He never forgets the journey. As he said in his book, he calls it the ride of a lifetime. He's had an amazing ride. And we should all be so lucky that when we're 70, we have that level of fitness and that level of strength. He is incredibly fit. So I want to go back. You said you applied for a bunch of jobs.

And you seem like before that, you really hadn't been rejected from a whole lot. Getting to Harvard is really hard to do. You do well there, Rhodes Scholar, you're in there. But how did you face rejection in some of these jobs? So let me just disabuse you of sort of the premise of the question, which is I've faced all kinds of rejection all the way along. Everybody does. Nobody gets by in life without rejection. I got more rejection all the way along, starting with youth sports and high school sports and all kinds of things. And so I would just say that part of growth and part of what I think that we all want in our kids is we want them to learn to fail and we want them to learn to get knocked down and to pick themselves back up. And so I would just say that I sort of challenged the premise of the question about how,

look how it was so easy and smooth. I got knocked down all over the place and picked myself up. And it's nice to kind of focus on all the successes, but I had plenty of rejections. So when I got rejected for jobs, it hurt. I wondered what was wrong with me. I wondered whether or not I didn't measure up to say the New York Times. And I thought, okay, I just got to keep going. And that's one of the things that I think is true today, which is that some of the people who are

the most successful are the ones who are unbelievably persistent. Look at Joe Biden, president of the United States, 77 years old, now 78. There's a guy who ran for president a few different times, was sort of humiliated and disgraced in the 80s when he ran for president, when he was nailed for plagiarism of Neil Kinnock's speech and he dropped out of the race. There's a guy who had to step aside for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to let her run, even though he'd just been vice president for eight years, had to step aside for Hillary Clinton in 2016 to let her run, even though he'd just been vice president for eight years, had to step aside and let her go. And now he finishes fifth place in Iowa, fourth place in New Hampshire. One year ago, he was finished heading into South Carolina,

where James Clyburn bops him on the head. Next thing you know, he wins the nomination. Next thing you know, he wins more votes than any president in the history of the United States. Next thing you know, he's president. He's sitting there. One year ago, he was heading to a retirement home in Delaware to tell stories for the rest of his life. And now he's president of the United States. So I just have to say that the story of the unstoppable force, the only successful man, the person who wins at everything, there are all the places where people get knocked down, not least by life. Look at Joe Biden and his personal misfortunes from losing his wife at an early age to losing his son. I would say that as

we look across my 57 years, it was a hugely, hugely traumatic event when one of my colleagues was killed in Yugoslavia, former Yugoslavia, when we were there on an assignment for ABC News. Losing a parent as I did when I was 29, when my dad was 64, an incredible blow. Losing my mother a couple of years ago. These things, these personal things that happen are the kinds of huge knocks and setbacks that are just part of a life story. So I'm challenging your premise a little bit by saying that I think that all of your listeners know that even people who seem outwardly to have had so much success, they've gotten hit hard, knocked down all kinds of times.

Fair enough. And thank you for clarifying that. That's very helpful. I think the lesson there is you have to pick yourself up no matter how many times you get knocked down. You have to keep going. It's sort of like a golf shot. You have to forget about your last bad shot and each next hit is a new hit. It has nothing to do with the last one. There's a Japanese saying that I tried out on my son once and he looked at me, he's got a math brain and he thought that doesn't make mathematical sense. But I think there's a Japanese saying that's something like, knock down seven times, get up eight. And he said, I don't think the math works out,

but I understand what you're trying to say. He's smart, just like his dad. But let's talk about your first job. So you get promoted to associate producer and then a producer. And what did you do when you got promoted? What advice do you have for people starting their careers when they get their first jobs? Well, I think that when I was promoted to producer at ABC News, it happened pretty quick. And I think that lots of good things happened. And I was really, really driven hard to work hard and move fast. And I think that at the time, I was maybe a little bit less mature. I hadn't met Karen yet.

I hadn't gotten married. I hadn't become a father yet. And I was moving so fast that I didn't totally understand all of the benefits of how if you want to go fast, you go alone. If you want to go far, you go together, that old saying. And I had not really understood all of the advantages and the benefits of collaboration and cooperation. And so I'd say that one of my observations about young people with early promotions, what I would consider to be a young person's mistake is that it's all you and that you're going to carry yourself all the way and that you're going to get it done by yourself. And I think that I didn't understand that. I stumbled a bunch. I think that I did not

accomplish what I wanted to accomplish because I was thinking that I could do it all by myself and I would be able to navigate all by myself. And in fact, it takes a lot more people, especially in the television business, but for that matter, any line of work to get where you want to go. It really involves understanding how to work with teams, how to understand to work with people above you, next to you, and below you. And that's a big piece of success in that first job is understanding how to work in an environment together with others. And I had a lot to learn. At some point, you're with an ABC News team in Sarajevo. One minute, you're in New York doing the news. The next moment, you're traveling to Sarajevo to cover just a brutal Bosnian Civil War.

As we think about reaching our potential to be the best that we could be and doing everything we can to get ahead, we're sometimes asked to do things that are not in our comfort zone. In the case of reporters, that often means going to dangerous places in the world. Were you going out to cover the Bosnian civil war

to see what it was like as a journalist to be on the front lines and get a firsthand experience of war? Or were you going because you thought you needed it to get ahead? Or because your bosses told you that you're going and you didn't really have a choice? I'm ashamed to say it was my idea. And I'm ashamed to say that it was a stupid idea. With the benefit of hindsight, we really probably never should have been there for that particular story. It was a story about an American businessman named Milan Panic, who was in former Yugoslavia, who was trying to save the country as the prime minister of that country, an American businessman trying to save the country from this terrible civil war.

We went to do a profile of him, which seemed like a good idea at the time, but it ended up costing the life of a 45-year-old producer named David Kaplan, who was Sam Donaldson's producer for many years. They had covered wars together before. They had been in all kinds of hotspots together. Sam was the anchorman of Primetime Live and was the longtime White House correspondent, famous for shouting questions at Ronald Reagan, hold on, Mr. President, was his signature line. And we ended up landing in Sarajevo on a military plane, and we ended up separating into different vehicles. Sam went in an armored personnel carrier with Ponich up ahead, and we went behind in a VW minivan, thin skin, no armor. And David chose not to wear a flak jacket, a bulletproof vest.

They had been supplied to us. I had one on, but Sam and David chose not to wear them. It was a very hot day in August of 1992 in an area of Sarajevo called Sniper Alley, which was well known for being very dangerous where different sides, the Bosnians and the Serbs, would shoot at each other in this area with snipers with deadly accuracy. We heard a loud noise and David was shot and killed by a sniper. Bullet came through the back door of the VW, through the back seat, through him, and then lodged in the driver's seat. We moved as quickly as we could to get to a French combat hospital that was located in the

basement of the post office building where French surgeons worked on David and transfused a lot of blood and they could not revive him. And afterwards, a French surgeon said that even if he had been injured right in front of a hospital in New York City, he would not have lived because the bullet that pierced his back and went through his body severed the artery that branches right into the lungs. And so it was not a survivable injury. And it was a brutal day and we all feared for our lives that moment. And it was traumatic, obviously, coming back for the family. And to this day, I always think in August about his wife and his parents and his siblings and his nieces and nephews and the incredible loss on that day. For a story about an American businessman trying to help a country and was

it worth it? And I think in the end, it wasn't worth it. It was a terrible loss and it was misguided. Why did we go? We went because that's what journalists do. They go places and they go to dangerous places. And why do we go? We thought we had a really good story.

And I think that as I moved on in my career in journalism, I was 29 at the time. As I moved on in my career in journalism, I was always the person who would ask more questions than anybody else about, should we go forward into that situation? Does the risk reward ratio work out? And I think that many of my colleagues at ABC News would tell you that when I ended up running Good Morning America, or when I ended up running ABC News, I was the guy who interrogated our teams as they were heading into Syria or interrogated our teams as they were heading into Tahrir Square in Egypt during the Arab Spring. I spent so much time interrogating our teams about the rewards versus the risks. And we thought through the risks because I had seen at a young age firsthand

what happens. It's not make-believe, it's real. Those bullets are real. Real things happen and real lives can be upended by a certain decision. How traumatic. I'm sorry that that happened. Did you come home right after that? We came straight back. We were on the air that Thursday night doing the hardest piece of journalism and report that we've ever been involved in, any of us. We had to go on the air the night that David was killed by the sniper. And when we were finished the next morning, we didn't sleep that night. The next morning, we flew back to the United States and I took an extended leave from ABC. And Rune Arledge, the then president of ABC, was generous with me at the time. And I didn't know him and had never actually met him before.

But he and the news organization arranged for me to get some help here in Los Angeles with an expert at UCLA, who was one of the world's leading authorities on helping people with non-Vietnam post-traumatic stress. And so I spent some time working with him on some of the memories of that experience and trying to deal with them. And I'm grateful to Rune and to ABC for having given me that time to work through what was a harrowing experience. David and I were sitting shoulder to shoulder in the backseat of that vehicle. David and I were right next to each other when that bullet came through the back of the car. But for a few inches, that bullet was in me.

I was told later by one of the war crimes investigators who looked into a lot of these events in Sniper Alley, there had been a bounty that had been put on journalists' heads. And if you were a sniper who killed a journalist, you got an extra bounty, you got extra money. And our van was marked TV, meaning you knew that we were journalists, we were TV, and the van clearly indicated we were television. And so some sniper out there made the decision to take that shot. There were three of us sitting in a row in the back seat. There was a guy who worked for the prime minister. There was David in the middle, and then I was on the side. I remember distinctly getting into the van, thinking that David was in the seat that probably would be the safest, because I thought that if we were shot at, we would be shot through the side windows because a CNN photographer named Margaret Moth

had been shot through the side window and shot in the face and her jaw had been shot off. She had survived, but had experienced terrible injury before we had gone there. And it was fresh in my mind as we went into the city, into Sarajevo through Sniper Alley, that those bullets could come in through the side windows. It never occurred to me they could come in from behind. But I was told by a war crimes investigator that a lot of the shots actually came from behind because if you're shooting at a vehicle moving away from you and you want to hit something, if you aim for the middle, if the vehicle moves right or left, if the wind gusts right or left, if you aim for the middle, you're going to hit something right or left. You'll hit somebody.

And so the thinking was that best shot was to shoot in the middle. And then you'd hit something on either side if you didn't get the guy in the middle. And so that was a very traumatic experience, traumatic for the family, traumatic for ABC, traumatic for our family. And it took quite a while to get through it. I'm very sorry you went through that. And I'm very sorry to his family. And I'm glad it didn't hit you and that you're here today. Appreciate your kind words about it and very thoughtful of you to think about the family because I never think about that ordeal without thinking about the Kaplan family and the trauma to the Kaplan family. An unbelievable loss of their beloved David and a wonderful, wonderful man who was out

shopping for a new dog with his wife that weekend when we got the call that we were heading into Sarajevo and we all took off for the airport to fly first to Albania and then into Sarajevo. I want to move on and just talk about the rest of your career. You're at ABC News for four years. Things are going well. You've been promoted a few times. Then you say, see you later, New York. I'm out of here and I'm moving to LA to be a writer. What was up with that? Why did you leave? Was being a writer part of the master plan to write novels? So what happened afterwards was about six or seven months after that, my father actually died very suddenly from a brain hemorrhage. He was 64 years old. He was in very good health. And so it was a terrible loss, unexpected. And so between the episode in Sarajevo and my father's sudden and

untimely death, I didn't just sort of quit and move back to LA to become a writer. To be perfectly honest, I left ABC to come home to Los Angeles to help my mother through a very difficult time and also to help myself. I justified it that I was moving back to LA where I wanted to be closer to my mom and to make sure that she was okay after losing the love of her life, her childhood sweetheart. But I really was also trying to protect and take care of myself after both what had happened in Yugoslavia and the loss of this towering figure I described earlier, my wonderful father, Dick Sherwood, who was this incredibly important person in our lives. And when he suddenly left us, I felt pretty lost. And I

came home to LA where I'd grown up and I moved back into my childhood home with my mother. And I actually lived at home with my mom for the next four or five years. You wrote two books, Red Mercury and The Man Who Ate the 747, both bestsellers. You're living in LA, and then you move back to New York. You mentioned Tom Brokaw. You work for NBC Nightly News. Tom is then the number one news anchor in the United States. You're at NBC for five years, and then you did it again. You leave New York, you move back to LA for two years, and you write two more books, both of those bestsellers as well. And then after two years in LA, you move back to New York again, where you get to be the executive producer of Good Morning America. And as you said, at some point after that, you get promoted to

president of ABC News. That is a tremendous amount of crisscrossing. What's that all about? I just want to point out there are a couple of things that got smushed in there that I wouldn't want anybody to believe. That's exactly how things unfolded. But what's going on there is the following. What's going on there is I fell in love with Karen in 2001, right around September 11th, 9-11.

We had an amazing date on September 10th, 2001. We were out until late at night. And the next morning I went into NBC Nightly News where I worked and September 11th was underway. And while I was at the Starbucks downstairs in Rock Center, the first plane hit the first tower. And Karen and I fell in love and we started to have a family. And then our lives just sort of pulled us in a couple of different directions. She's from Los Angeles too. And we began to make some decisions that were about having kids and about aging parents and wanting to be closer to aging parents. And so part of it was family driven as we moved back and forth across the coasts in and out of jobs. And some of it also was a function of curiosity and my own desire to test myself and challenge myself a sudden, I get the call to go back to New York to run ABC News as the president of

that organization. And you can't turn that down. That's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So we moved back. So combination of family and curiosity and interesting career challenges. Are these opportunities where recruiters call you up one day and say, hey, Ben, I have an opportunity for you? And you say, cool, talk to me. And is it your advice to follow where the opportunities take you? You like New York, but it may mean uprooting your family. And what if the opportunity is in a rural part of Nebraska and you have no interest in going there? Well, I love Nebraska. I wrote the manual at the 747 that was set in a rural part of Nebraska, and you have no interest in going there? Well, I love Nebraska. I wrote the man who ate the 747 that was set in a small town in Nebraska. So you pick the one state, Randy, which is very good. You pick the one state where rural Nebraska is actually where the 747 crashes, and that's where a man eats that airplane to prove his love

for a girl. So I would just say if it was Nebraska, go to Nebraska. The Cornhusker State's fantastic. For recruiters calling, yes, recruiters call. Friends call. Friends talk about different opportunities that are around. Friends say, hey, you should put your hand up for this. Hey, maybe you want to put your hand up for that. And typically, my answer is always go where your curiosity takes you. And I'm very, very lucky.

My wife loves New York. Karen lights up the second we hit the Triborough, now Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Second she sees that skyline, her face changes. I call it New York face because she's just so happy in New York City. It's where we have a lot of friends and it's where she loves to be. And so it's not hard to get her to move to New York. Although I think now with boys who are teenagers, I think it would be impossible to move to New York because our boys love Los Angeles. And I think they're very committed to being here. But with Karen being game for adventure, we've had a chance to go back and forth a few times. I think in terms of advice for people, especially if you're lucky in

a situation where you are in a marriage or a relationship where you have that flexibility and can move, I was always somebody who would go anywhere to do anything to have a great life experience. My friend Bruce Feiler, who's a New York Times bestselling writer, talks about being an experientialist, that his profession, his career is as an experientialist. And I sort of love that word because I too have pursued all kinds of experiences, not so much a career as a set of experiences that end up becoming a career. As you're noting, as you sort of trace this line, I've done journalism, I've written books. One of those books was turned into a movie. I tried to start

a website based upon one of my books about survivorship. I'm now doing something entrepreneurial, just new experiences that answer my curiosity and my questions. I've mentored a lot of people over the years. I know you have too. And one of the biggest issues they worry about is whether they should stay in one career, even if they're not happy. And this podcast, the theme of it is how to be excellent, be the best you can be and reach your potential. I think it's really hard to be excellent at something and reach your potential if you're not happy. I'm sure you know many people who are in good jobs are not happy. I have many, many friends like this. I'm sure you do as well. What's your advice to people who want to start over and do something new and are worried they're starting late and they're never going to be the best that they can be in that new

profession? Very incisive question. Very hard question to answer since every situation is different and everybody's different. But I'd say there are a few principles. Principle number one is if you're fortunate to be able to start over, if you have the security and you have the ability to change directions, don't waste another second. And I say the if there is an important qualification. I was lucky when I married Karen.

My wife is a movie and television producer who's had a lot of success at a very early age. And so I was always very fortunate that she was the smart, successful one in our family. And we haven't really talked about all of her achievements and her success and her drive and her motivation, but because of her considerable success and because of her considerable accomplishments in her career, we always had, we had kind of a safety net. She's somebody who everybody wants to work with and everybody wants to make movies with and everybody wants to make television with and so no matter how

hard i fail karen's always going to be the one who is sort of the safety net in this family and so in our marriage we've gone back and forth a little bit where karen's had a crazy big job and i've had one and we go back and forth and trade it a little bit where Karen's had a crazy big job and I've had one. And we go back and forth and trade it a little bit along the way. And so I do want to emphasize that if you have the security and you have the flexibility to switch and do something that you're passionate about, go for it and don't waste another second. On the go for it and don't waste another second piece of it, I'll give you my perspective there. I tried being a full-time novelist for a short period of time. I discovered a few things about being a full-time novelist.

Number one, it was torture. And number two, our family would probably starve if I were the sole breadwinner because that wasn't going to work out the way I would want to take care of my family. And so I tried it for a brief period of time. I found it to be agony just about every day. I found rejection to be very painful. And I found that the ability to pay our bills was going to be seriously tested. And so I did not become a full-time novelist for very long. And so again, I had the flexibility and the luxury of getting to try it for a brief period of time. I could see that it wasn't going to work out. I gathered the data and I answered

the question, okay, full-time novelist, not the right path for me. And I've tried a few other things like that along the way, and I've ruled those things out as well. And so I think that the goal should not necessarily be to try something new with the intention of being the very best in the world. I'm going to go pursue that path and I'm going to be the world champion. But instead, almost answer the question, I've always been drawn to that other thing. I've always wondered what that would be like. I want to go try that. Can I be excellent at it? Worth answering that question. Even if I'm excellent at it, will I accomplish all the things that I want to accomplish? Or are there so many other excellent people at it that I might not be able to get where

I want to go? But I think that's all kind of what I would say is gathering data, living the questions. There's a phrase I've used with young people for a number of years, which is one of my favorite phrases from the letters to a young poet, Renner Rilke's letters to a young poet, Rilke's letters to a young poet, in which he says that, paraphrasing, you ask a lot of questions. I don't have all the answers. The best thing I can tell you is go live the questions. And in living the questions, you may get yourself closer to these hard questions, the answers to the questions that you've been asking me. And I sort of feel that way when it comes to career and to success. Live the questions. No one's really going to ever be able to answer the question about what the right choice is for

you. No one's ever going to be able to tell you which is the right job or which is the right path or should you stay with this career or switch. To the extent you can, go live the question. And in the course of living that question, you can find some of the answers. There are so many more things about your amazing career that we could talk about. I'm going to blow through a lot of them quickly and just list them. I think our listeners and viewers would want to know. You're the executive producer of Good Morning America. And after, I think it was 852 weeks of being less than the number one show, I think that Today Show had been number one for that period of time, that 16 years. Under your leadership, you took over the top rated show. You took it to the top rated show. You become president of ABC News. Disney owns ABC. I think most people know that. And over the next few years, you're promoted again and again. You're

president of Disney ABC Television Group, co-chairman of Disney Media Networks, co-chairman of Hulu, co-chairman of A&E Networks. At this point, you're managing a $12 billion business with 12,000 employees. And you're responsible for creating 24,000 hours of original content every year. I mean, that's a shit ton of responsibility. Talk to us about that. I mean, you got to be thinking, I mean, was this the dream? Was this what you were shooting for when you graduated and thought, I'm at the top of my career? Could it get any better than this? The answer to that is no. I didn't know that job even existed. And I didn't even know that job existed really until around five years before I got that job. My dream from earliest days in college and graduate school was to be

the president of CBS News someday. That was a reach beyond all reaches. I didn't think that was even going to be possible. That was my fantasy. That was the job that I thought would be the greatest job in the world. And when I was appointed president of ABC News, one of my college buddies sent me a note that said, close, but no cigar in terms of having gotten to the job, but missed the network. I would say that the way you just described the job, it sounds kind of overwhelming. It was, I got to do that role for five years. It was an amazing experience every day, working for Bob Iger, working with all the presidents of all those different businesses that you just described, learning new things every

day, learning new things about kids programming, learning new things about streaming at Hulu. Disney Channels was the kids programming piece, learning things about millennial programming at Freeform, which is the millennial network at Disney. I learned something new every day overseeing the own television stations of Walt Disney Company. That's eight stations, eight of the biggest markets in the United States, including WABC in New York and KABC here in Los Angeles, KGO in San Francisco. So I loved it. New challenges every day, new puzzles, new problems. And it was a lot of different, big range every single day.

And I would be in total candor. Some of it I was really ready for in the sense that I was prepared. I had experience that was relevant. And some of it I was learning while I was doing it. And I had great teachers. In particular, I'd note that a brilliant executive named Gary Marsh was my teacher about kids programming because that's an area that I had no experience in, even though I was overseeing the Disney channels around the world. That's the Disney TV channels all over the world in more than a hundred countries and hundreds of millions of families watching

them around the world. But Gary Marsh gave me an incredible masterclass almost every day in how to think about the children's audience, how to program for kids, how to create great programming for kids. And so in a way, while I was overseeing it all, Gary was really my teacher and my boss. And he's a remarkable executive and a wonderful friend. Let's talk about Roseanne, one of the most successful sitcoms of all time, on for nine seasons, number one show, one or two years, top four show in six of those years. Disney decides to bring it back in 2018. It's a hit. 18 million viewers right out of the gate. What happened?

So we had this thought that in the post-Trump world, there was an opportunity to do programming that would appeal to families between the coasts that reflected what working families in America were experiencing and thinking. And Roseanne, who had done all kinds of crazy things since leaving television, came to us with a proposal that she wanted to bring Roseanne back and that she would give up her Twitter account and she would give up her place in the culture wars. And she would do a show that spoke to working class families across the country about real issues and that she wanted to redeem herself, that she was done fighting in all kinds of crazy culture wars and calling people names and doing all kinds of stuff. She really wanted to do a television show

to redeem herself and to speak to the middle of America that she felt had been left behind by liberal programming and kind of coastal programming on the coasts. And so with the promise that she would give up Twitter and she would give up social media and the promise that she would just focus on the show, we let her loose. And Tom Warner was the producer of that show and a good friend. And off they went. And man, did they nail it. They did an incredible series of shows. And Roseanne, the character, resonated with America. And it was the number one show on ABC the first time in 24 years that ABC had a number one television show. And the audience loved it. The problem was that Roseanne did not uphold her part of the bargain of staying away from Twitter and staying away from the culture wars. And one morning, I woke up at 6.30 in the morning with a text from

a friend, an agent at CIA who was at the airport, who texted me, what the hell are you going to do about Roseanne? I didn't know what he was talking about because when I looked through my email, there was nothing there about Roseanne. When I did a quick Google search, there was nothing about Roseanne. I couldn't tell what he was talking about. And then I checked Twitter and I immediately knew what he was talking about. And I sent an email to my boss, Bob Iger, immediately saying that what's happened is abhorrent, despicable. And what Roseanne had done was that we have a serious problem and that what Roseanne had done was unconscionable. She had sent a tweet out that attacked Valerie Jarrett for, it was a racist anti-Muslim tweet that attacked Valerie Jarrett and made a bunch

of terrible, said a bunch of terrible things in 42 characters or 42 letters, I want to say, terrible things about Valerie Jarrett, who was the advisor to Barack Obama. And in the course of the next couple of hours, we huddled. I talked with Roseanne and her team about this, and we decided that the show was over, the show was canceled, and Roseanne would not be part of the ABC television network anymore. And I had the distinction of being one of the first executives, or perhaps one of the only executives, along with Bob Iger and Channing Dgey, who was the president of ABC Entertainment at the time, through one of the only executive teams that has ever greenlit a number one television show in

America and then canceled a number one television show in America all in the space of about 18 months. And it was tough, but it was absolutely clear it was the right thing to do. She did not belong on ABC's airwaves. What she said was unconscionable. It was not funny. It was not a joke. It was not some sort of lapse. It was bad. And we took swift action. And I think that one of the things that was about Disney and about Bob Iger in those situations is that he's quite fearless. And there was no discussion about any of this fearless. And there was no discussion about any of this with lawyers. There was no discussion about any of this with our advertising team. There was no discussion about this in terms of the consequences. There was just a conversation

about right and wrong. And it was really clear right away that the right thing to do was to put an end to this, stop it, shut it down, over, And no looking back, which we haven't. You wrote a great memo. I'm going to read it quickly. It says, Team, much has been said and written about yesterday's decision to cancel the Roseanne show. In the end, it came down to doing what's right and upholding our values of inclusion, tolerance, and civility.

Not enough, however, has been said about the many men and women who poured their hearts and lives into the show and were just getting started on next season. We're so sorry they were swept up in all of this and we give thanks for all the remarkable talents. Wish them well and hope to find another way to work together down the road. The last 24 hours have also been a powerful reminder of the importance of words in everything we do online and on the air and the responsibility of using social media and all of our programs and platforms with careful thought, decency, and consideration. Today, we move forward together full speed. There's a lot there, a lot of great lessons there. We don't have time for them all,

but if you could just comment briefly on the power of words and what they mean to you, and maybe just a couple of brief lessons here, because I know we're tight on time and I want to cover just a couple more things. Look, it was a firestorm. It was front page news. It was cable television news. It was all over CNN, Fox, every place. It was a big story. Roseanne Barr canceled and this tweet. And the thing I felt in all of it was there were hundreds of people who worked on that show who were victims of this terrible tweet. And they were doing a good job. They were true to the mission of the show. The show was wonderful and gave voice to so many people and was funny and was wonderful satire. And the Roseanne character delivered on exactly what she had promised, which was to get people thinking through humor about the fact that

America's families are divided right now. America's families are divided between right and left. America's families are on all sides. America's families are divided between right and left. America's families are on all sides. Some supported Hillary Clinton. Some supported Donald Trump. You could say the same thing about some support Joe Biden, some support Donald Trump. And this was a comedy aimed at all of them. And there were hundreds of people who were now shut down and lost their livelihoods because of this one tweet.

And I felt in that moment, there was an important thing to say to all of them, which is that we thank you and we're sorry that this has happened. And we hope we can work with you again. And sure enough, we found a way to do it with a show called The Conners, which was basically the Roseanne show without Roseanne. So it was everybody but Roseanne came back and the show is still on the air and is very successful. So those people came back to work once Roseanne was out of the picture. And I thought there was an important message to say to all of the people of the Disney or when you're angry at someone online, think again, because it has real consequences. It has consequences for you professionally. It has consequences for the people around you. It has consequences for the reputation of the

organization. And that we really should think hard about what we say, especially when we occupy positions of responsibility, both in culture or within an organization. You're at Disney for another year. And then in March of 2019, Disney acquires the entertainment assets of 21st Century Fox. And Dana Walden is there, and she's also a rock star in her own right. She's running that division, and she's brought in to run Disney's TV division. By the way, I've known her for 14 years. Our kids went to school together.

I think she's just awesome. At one point, I read in the Wall Street Journal that you were a possible successor to Bob Iger. And when she came in, you left. Was it your goal to be the CEO of Disney? Were you disappointed that Dana came in and took over? So just a little technicality there, just to be clear. My successor is a guy named Peter Rice. Peter Rice runs the Disney television group that I ran. So in terms of level and in terms of the person who took my job, Peter, who was Dana's boss

at Fox, came over and Peter runs the whole Disney ABC television group now. It's now been renamed Disney television. And Dana works for him. And Dana runs the ABC television group within the larger Disney television properties. I've known Dana since high school. She went to the sister school, Westlake at the time. I went to Harvard Boys School. Those schools have since been merged.

And I've known her since I was a teenager. And I have very high regard for Dana. And she's a remarkable talent. And when she came over, I wasn't surprised. Part of the reason to buy Fox was they've got such great talent between Dana and John Landgraf, who runs FX, and there are people around the world. They've got terrific talent at that company. And I understood that. I never really thought seriously about being the CEO of the Walt Disney Company, as I told you a few minutes ago. I didn't even know about the job running the

Disney television group. My goal had always been to run a news division. I was lucky to get to run the television group. And then with some success at the television group, I read some of the same articles that you're talking about where I was on a list of people who might someday succeed, Bob. But I never really had my eye on that. I will tell you that when I left the Walt Disney Company, I had thought that I would be staying there until the end of 2021 when my contract expires. But when the merger took place, I learned after believing that I was going to be staying on for some time, I learned that Peter and his team, so Peter Rice

in my role, Dana, John Landgraf, and many others were coming over in the television group. David Collum We talked about that and some other opportunities. But in the end, I concluded that my amazing and extremely rewarding run of the company was over and that it was time for me to do something else and to pursue my curiosity and to live some new questions. And so without any hesitation, I thank the company. I thank Bob. I feel nothing but gratitude to him and to everybody at Disney for the amazing experiences that I had. And I packed up and I moved on and I started something brand new. I went from the world's largest and most successful media company in the world to start something from scratch, from 200,000 employees around the world working for Disney to a company just me, myself, and I sitting here at this desk to build something from scratch. And that was my goal. My goal was to start a new business, to build a new brand, to start something completely

new. And I hope we get to talk about that a little bit. Right now, tell us about Mojo. So when I left the company, I had to ask myself the question, after you've had these opportunities and an amazing experience, what do you do next? And one option would be to go work for another big media company. And there are plenty of those out there and there are plenty of jobs that need to be done. But I've always felt the pull, back to some of our talk at the beginning, I've always felt the pull of family. And I've also always felt the joy of youth sports, being there with my kids over the

last 12 years on the playing fields back East and here in Los Angeles. And so I took everything I learned at Disney, everything I learned at ABC, everything I learned as a journalist, everything I learned at Disney channels, everything I learned at Hulu. And I wrapped all of it up into an idea to help bring the magic back to youth sports. Because in my view, youth sports is broken. Coaching kids is too hard. It's too stressful. It's too intimidating. The resources are hard to find. And there are millions of families across the United States and around the world, 500 million in fact, who have kids who play organized sports. And I set about to build the world's first family sports brand for kids between the ages

of four and 14, when about 80% of the coaches are moms and dads, and most of them don't know what they're doing, to bring the joy back to youth sports, to make coaching easier and more enjoyable for moms and dads, to make playing more fun for kids, and to make the whole experience more magical for the family. And that's what I set out to do. And I hired an amazing co-founder named Reed Schaffner, who's a brilliant technologist. And we have got 14 people now working for us. We launched a couple of weeks ago in the app store. We've got customers literally across the United States now and around the world,

as far away as New Zealand, who are using the Mojo app, which I can explain. And we're on our way to building this new business. Let's explain the app. So the app is, you go to the app store, you download Mojo Coaching or Mojo Sports, you download the app. And basically, our job is to make everything easier when it comes to coaching a team. And we begin with soccer, and we'll scale this app over time to include basketball and baseball and flag football and all the major sports the kids play in the US and around the world. And our goal is just to make coaching a team of four-year-olds, eight-year-olds, 12-year-olds, anywhere in that age group, make that experience easier and stress

free for you. So with a few questions that you answer, we deliver your first practice. Boom, right there. All the activities laid out, short, high quality videos produced by the best producers in Los Angeles, Mandalay Sports Media. They won an Emmy award for their Michael Jordan documentary. They made the videos and you can watch in minute 32 minute little videos, how to organize an activity for four year olds or eight year olds, what to look for in that activity, how to help the kids get better. So even if you don't know anything about soccer, or even if you've played soccer your whole life, we've got you covered depending upon your experience level and your kid's age and their experience level. We've got you covered for a whole season of soccer.

Plus, all the other stuff you need to know when you're coaching kids, like what's going on inside the mind of a five-year-old, what happens when you lose your temper and you yell for the first time, how to get a kid out of a tree because kids like to climb trees at practice if their kid, their trees around, how to come up with out of a tree, because kids like to climb trees at practice if their tree's around, how to come up with a great name for the team that your kids will love and that you can live with. We've got everything you need, every resource you need to help you on the journey when your kids are between the ages of four and 14 and playing youth sports. I love the idea. I know you're going to be uber successful there. I want

to switch gears now and dive a little deeper into our search for excellence and talk about personalities and how important a good personality is to get ahead. You're a very nice guy. You're a humble guy. You're a genuine guy. I remember being on vacation and Lanai and Robin Richards, the host of Good Morning America, sitting next to me on the beach. We start chatting for a bit, and I mentioned you're a friend, and she went on and on and on about how nice of a guy you are. You have the gene. You're not only nice, you're a very caring guy. In our search for excellence, how important is it to be a nice person? I'm not sure where this comes from, but there's a saying out there that nice guys finish last. Look, Randy, we are neighbors. You're a great neighbor. You're so important on our block.

You look out for everybody who's here. You're always there for everybody, no matter who they are, no matter how old they are. You're the guy who is fighting for our street and for your neighbors and to make this a better place to live. And so we're all lucky to live near you and you're a special guy and you're a special neighbor. I think that there's a book by a professor at University of Pennsylvania, Adam Grant, called Giving and Taking, in which he surprises you with the research that usually we think that people who are takers in life, gimme, gimme, gimme, they go farther. So at work, that guy, totally selfish, all about himself, he's going to get farther than I because he's always about himself. And they're givers and they're takers. And in Adam Grant's book, they're traders. And traders are people who are totally transactional. You give me one thing,

I'll give you one thing. And what Adam Grant says, as you know, in that book is that it turns out that it's the givers who go the farthest. The generosity, that real interest in your colleagues, that giving more than you take back, those people end up being more successful. They end up being happier. They end up going farther. And what I would say is, nice of you to say, I don't know if I'm really a nice guy. I certainly felt, I made plenty of mistakes when I was younger. I think I made plenty of mistakes where I was taking too much when I was younger and not giving as much. But I do think that getting knocked down a few times in life, I do think that marrying well, I do think that fatherhood, and I do think that a little bit of maturity leads you to learn that if you end up on the side of giving more than you take, how much have

you given today? How much have you helped somebody else? How much have you looked out for somebody else? I think that Adam Grant's formula is right, which is that you get a lot more out of life when you are given and things turn out better when you try to end up on the generous side. And so I think that in terms of excellence and in terms of the pursuit of excellence, I think that people, I tried to allude to this a little bit earlier. I think that the young person's mistake is to think that it's all on them, that it's all about them, that it's all about what they do. It's all about how much they lift. It's all about how much they accomplish. And I think that one of the things that comes with

a little bit of wisdom and a little bit of experience and some hard knocks and maybe some setbacks, that it really ends up being about how you treat other people, how carefully you listen to other people, how much you do for other people, how much you help other people succeed. And by helping other people succeed, you can find more success yourself. I think the intangibles are so important. Not only the tangible things, the work ethic, the good habits, but the intangibles are important. I know you used to make happy birthday calls to your employees at ABC. I mean, phone rings and your name lights up. Oh, Ben Sherwood's calling. I think a lot of people are like, oh shit, what did I do? And then there you are. Happy birthday, Bob. Happy birthday, Sheila.

What's your view on this? And who taught you how to do this? It's such an effective thing to motivate people and to get ahead. I like birthdays. And long before Facebook, long before 57 different apps tell you whose birthday it is, or social feeds tell you whose birthday it is, or bots tell you whose birthday it is, I was always keeping track in my calendar of people's birthdays. And I love birthdays. I love my own birthday. I have fun on my birthday. I have high expectations for what we're going to do on my birthday. And I think that everybody else should be celebrated. I keep a bottle of champagne in the refrigerator always. I'm not

a big drinker, but I also feel like life knocks you down enough times that you should always pop the cork and find reasons to celebrate. And so birthdays are a great reason to celebrate. There's never enough ice cream in the world. And so when somebody's birthday would happen at ABC or at Disney, I always went out of my way to celebrate making the phone call, that extra phone call. I don't know. I think it just comes from a place of seeing people, acknowledging them, letting them know that they're special, that they mean something to you. And I think that I used to tweet happy birthday when I ended up at Disney Television Group with 12,000 people in the company. That was a lot every day because it turns out the 12,000 people, that's a lot of

tweets every day to wish people birthday. And one of the agents at CAA, one of my buddies used to call me and joke that to the outside world, it seems that all I do all day is sit there tweeting happy birthday to people because it takes a long time. And I had to tell him that in fact, secretly that we had a system where that happened automatically and that I was not actually spending every minute of the day, but it mattered to me. And in fact, I can't tell you the number of times I'd get in the elevator at ABC or at the cafeteria and someone would walk up kind of shyly and say, hey, I just wanted to say thank you for that birthday tweet. That meant a lot. And what's your name, John? What part of the company do you work in? I work in engineering.

How long have you been at the company? 17 years. It's nice to know you. It's nice to meet you. It's nice to hope you had a good birthday. It's just a way to connect. And I think that one of the great pieces of wisdom that I got a long time ago from a very, very wise man,

total name drop here, but I can't resist. Diane Sawyer's husband, Mike Nichols, the great director, brilliant Mike Nichols, winner of Tonys and Academy Awards and Grammys and directed The Graduate, which is I think one of the things everybody knows him most for, but so many other things that he created. I once asked him what was his secret of directing Julia Roberts and directing Emma Thompson and directing Meryl Streep and doing this unbelievable work. And what was his secret of success? How did he motivate people? How did he get the most out of people? And he said two things. He said, love is the only thing that works.

And by the way, some of the people that he's worked with are not especially lovable, but he would always try to find something in them that he loved because love really works in terms of getting people and inspiring them to peak performance. The other thing that he said is the famous words at the end of E.M. Forster's Howard's End when he said, only connect. And only connect is a powerful idea in terms of the thing that we should all strive to do. Work harder, grind more, come in early. All those things are tactics. But in terms of the big idea, the big thing, only connect. Make connections to people. Listen to them. Understand them. Really see them. Connection is the thing that really works the best in terms of life, relationships, marriage, parenting. And it turns out it's the thing that really works the best in terms of life, relationships, marriage, parenting,

and it turns out it's the thing that really works in work. We're almost done. You've been so generous with your time. I know we've gone over what you have. I just want to cover a couple more things. We'll be very quick. I'm going to make a statement and then I'd like you to react to it. Okay.

Are you ready? When you're great at something, great things happen to you. Kind of true, kind of false. I think that when you're great at something, great things can happen if you're also lucky, if you're also in the right place at the right time, if you can stay out of your own way, if there are lots of ifs. So I think that it's hard for great things to happen to you if you aren't great at something, but it's easy for not great things to happen to you even if you are great at something, if you see what I mean. That is, I think that being really good, working hard is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient

condition for great things to happen. Philanthropy. When I think about being the best that I can be and living up to my own potential, a huge part of me wants to give back to others less fortunate and try to make a positive, impactful difference in their lives.

You're involved with a lot of things I know and you've been giving back for a long time. How important to you is giving back for your sense of accomplishment and where is that on you're in search of excellence to be the best that you can possibly be? Top of the list. I think that doing well means doing good. I think that to make a difference, success has got to involve helping people who are less fortunate. So in this new company that we started, Mojo,

one of our founding principles is that we are here to help level the playing field between haves and have-nots. There is huge inequality in youth sports. There is a huge divide between families with resources and families that don't. Two-thirds of the families that have money play sports in the United States and kids play all the way through high school. Only a third of the families without money in the United States get to play sports. That's not right. So one of our founding principles, the very beginning of this company was that we can only do well as a company if we do good and make sure that everyone has access to the best coaching and the best resource. And that's why we've made Mojo free for anybody to use. There is a Mojo Plus that you can buy for $19.99 a year that has

additional features, but we think baseline, everybody should have access to the very best coaching in the world, the very best tools and resources. And that's part of a core philosophy that you cannot succeed unless you are doing good and making the world a better place. That's another reason why we've launched Mojo in partnership with Coaching Corps, which is a wonderful nonprofit, sort of like a Peace Corps for coaches in the United States with 10,000 coaches who volunteer in low-income areas to help kids play sports. And we're putting Mojo Plus, the preferred, the premium version of Mojo in the hands of all the coaches at Coaching core across the country to help them get the best resources they can possibly have. So I'm with you, Randy. I think that giving back is an important piece of success. And I also think back to Adam Grant's book,

which is called Give and Take. By the way, I had the title wrong, Give and Take. Giving is an incredibly important piece of the success and excellence formula. Walk us through a day in the life of Ben Sherwood. I read something back when you were at ABC News, I think, crazy hours. What are they today? I know you're successful. I'm sure you've made money. You have two teenagers. You're a family man. I see you outside playing hoops with your kids all the time. What's the day in the life? I'm sure people want to know. What does Ben do? It's an unpredictable schedule. We have young kids, but I don't sleep very much, to the annoyance of my wife, but I typically get up super early

before the sun rises and start reading and checking in on the world because I still have that news bug and I still love knowing what's happening everywhere. I start reading early. I exercise early. And then I usually am at my desk. I try to make breakfast for my boys for school. I try to be there for them in the morning and hear what's going on with their days and find out what they're doing. Sometimes drive someone to the bus, sometimes drive someone to school. I try to be there for them in the morning and hear what's going on with their days and find out what they're doing. Sometimes drive someone to the bus, sometimes drive someone to

school. In this case, escort them to their respective rooms where they go to school during the pandemic. I make sure they've got breakfast, take the dog outside to go to the bathroom. And then I usually try to get to my desk by 8.30. That doesn't mean I haven't started working before 8.30, but usually I'm at the desk by 8.30. And then it's just a wild day of all the things that happen when you're doing a startup. Punctuated by, I have got the printer in my office. And so I'm the printing press for a 10th grader and a fourth grader. And also for my wife who is making television shows. And sometimes there's a break to go outside and kick the soccer ball. Sometimes there's a break to go outside and shoot baskets. And by the end of the

day, we're outside playing hoops or playing soccer or going to practice. And then usually there's family dinner. And then there's usually another few hours of reading, work, writing, thinking, hanging out with my wife. When do you put the phone down? Never. I would say that that is my greatest flaw. Among many flaws, my greatest flaw is that I have a very hard time putting it down ever. And it's the first thing I look at in the morning. It's the last thing I look at at night.

It is the definition of addiction. I really have a hard time putting it down. I think that my wife fought for about 10 years to get me to put down the devices. And I think she finally just gave up. I try to manage it around dinner time. I try to manage it around kid time. I try to manage it around Karen time, but it's never very far away from me. And as she would point out, it's not like I work in the news business anymore.

It's not like I'm overseeing a company with 12,000 people where at any moment something can happen. It's not. But I am. I admit to it. I have a problem. It's not, but I am. I admit to it. I have a problem. I need to deal with my problem. My problem is my phone. Let's go to phone therapy together. Madison and Karen can hang out and complain about us, and you and I will go to phone anonymous. This has been an incredible conversation,

Ben. And before we finish, I want to ask if you have any other advice for our listeners and viewers in search of excellence, ways that we can live up to our potential to be the best that we can be. I have one last thought. Thank you for this conversation. I did not know that we would cover so much ground and I'm somewhat embarrassed for having talked for such a long period about myself. And as you know me, I'd love to turn the tables on you and maybe we'll do a podcast where I get to ask you questions for 90 minutes and I get to probe and peel the onion and ask you the questions. So if you ever want to turn this around, please let's flip it around and I will do that. I have one thought to leave you with and leave your listeners with, which is I think that

the thing that is missing in the books about excellence, in the writing about excellence, in the pursuit of excellence, is a very important idea, which is to go easy on yourself, to be patient, to not be punishing, that those who seek excellence have a voice in their heads that is relentless, that is merciless, that can be cruel. And I think that one of the things that I've learned with time and maybe with some success is that that voice can be very, very destructive and that that voice, that relentlessness, that constant striving can be ultimately counterproductive and that sometimes the pursuit of excellence requires a little bit of self-awareness and a bit of kindness to oneself and kindness to the people around you because that quest, that sometimes insatiable quest, can be very, very hard and even unhealthy. And so one of my thoughts, especially when I'm around young people who drive themselves hard or mid-career people who are

driving themselves unbelievably hard, or even advanced stage careers driving themselves so hard is go easy on yourself. It's okay. You're going to end up where you're going to end up. You're going to achieve what you're meant to achieve. The road will take you where you are supposed to go. But if you aren't easy on yourself, if you don't go easier on yourself sometimes and take care of yourself, you're in for trouble. I love ending on that. I mean, that is just perfect. I really want to thank you for sharing your incredible story with us, your life story, your professional story. It is truly, truly inspiring. Good luck with Mojo. I know you're going to crush it.

Thanks, Randy. See you in the neighborhood. Bye.