Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - Former WWE President: The Hard Decisions That Built a Global Media Business | George Barrios | E161

Episode Date: June 2, 2026

Despite his high intelligence, George Barrios nearly flunked out of both high school and college, drifting without discipline or direction. Realizing talent alone wouldn’t build the future he wanted, he cleaned up his act, became obsessive about preparation, and built a reputation for solving hard problems others avoided. That approach helped him rise through HBO and Time Warner before transforming WWE into a global media powerhouse. In this episode, George joins Ilana to share the habits that accelerated his career, the tough leadership decisions behind WWE’s growth, and the mindset shifts that helped him reinvent himself under pressure. George Barrios is the former Co-President and CFO of WWE, where he helped transform the company into a global entertainment business. He is the founder of ISOS Capital, an investment and advisory firm focused on sports, media, and technology. In this episode, Ilana and George will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (08:48) When Talent Turned Into Self-Sabotage (13:12) The Turning Point: Meeting His Wife at UConn (15:49) Fake It Till You Make It: Learning on the Job  (23:17) Creating Opportunities After Rejection (33:31) Driving Digital Growth at The New York Times (39:38) Making Painful Decisions Under Pressure (44:14) Transforming WWE into a Global Media Business (50:35) The Fallout With Vince McMahon and WWE Exit (59:27) Writing His Book and Sharing Hard Lessons (01:05:52) Q&A: How Do I Open Doors in a Crowded Market? George Barrios is a former Fortune 500 executive and the founder of ISOS Capital, an investment firm focused on global opportunities in sports, media, and technology. He previously served as Co-President and CFO of WWE and held leadership roles at The New York Times, HBO, and Praxair, building a track record in strategy, operations, and financial leadership. His new book, Sometimes Wrong but Never in Doubt, shares the lessons behind his unconventional path to success. Connect with George: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/georgebarrios/  Resources Mentioned: George’s Book, Sometimes Wrong but Never in Doubt: How a Cuban Kid from Queens Transformed WWE: https://www.amazon.com/Sometimes-Wrong-but-Never-Doubt-ebook/dp/B0G4N4T9XV The World is Flat: The Globalized World in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Friedman: https://www.amazon.in/dp/0141034890  Tony Khan: Building AEW into a Billion-Dollar Brand and Competing with Wrestling Giants: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqqfg-ysj0M  Leap Academy: Ready to make the LEAP in your career? There is a NEW WAY for professionals to fast-track their careers and leap to bigger opportunities.  Check out our free training today at https://bit.ly/leap--free-training

As a CFO at WWE, you also needed to do a really big transition, right? I remember telling Vince, we are no more sports entertainment. He got angry. That was his big thing. We are now going to talk about WWE as a live content powerhouse. The board meeting ends. Vince calls me, say, hey, can you come upstairs for a minute? He looks at me, he goes, this isn't working.

So let's end it. The stock the next day drops by almost 40% in one day overnight. George Various helped transform WWE from a wrestling company into a global sports and entertainment powerhouse worth over $5 billion. Sometimes wrong, but never in doubt. It's not arrogance. It's having the confidence and the conviction

that comes from the preparation, from the work. If you're going to tackle big problems, the bad news is there is going to be a lot of pain involved. You start basing in HBO, right? How did you get in? And what did it change? You have got to do shit that makes a difference. You don't wait for anybody to open a door.

You smash it down. The only way to succeed in business is... Welcome to the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan Show. I'm so glad you're here. In the Leap Academy podcast, I get to speak to the biggest leaders of our time about their career, how they got where they are today, the challenges, the failures, and countless lessons.

So lean in. This episode is going to be amazing. I'm in a mission to help millions reinvent their career and leap into their full potential, land their dream roles, fast track to leadership, jump to entrepreneurship, or build portfolio careers. This is what we do in our Leap Academy programs for individuals and teams. And with this podcast, we can give this career blueprint for free to tens of millions. So please help my mission by sharing this with every single person you know, because this show has the power to change countess.

of lives. Deal? Okay, so let's dive in. George Barrios helped transform WWE from a wrestling company into a global sports and entertainment powerhouse worth over $5 billion. He also served in leadership roles in the New York Times, the prex era, and Time Warner's and HBO. In his upcoming book, sometimes wrong, but never in doubt, tells his beautiful story of how acute kid from the Queens who nearly flunked high school transform WWE. I'm so excited for this conversation. Welcome, George. Thank you.

And by the way, in the intro, you could also add that I almost flunked college as well. So it was a series of almost flunking. Oh, we're going to dive into that. And it's going to be so fun. And I actually just alluded to it. In fact, in episode 106, I spoke to Tony Kahn about building AEW. into a billion-dollar brand and competing with the wrestling giants. And he actually mentions WWE quite a bit.

So for you wrestling fans, go check this episode, 106 out. You're going to love it. And reminder, end of the conversation. I actually pick a question from the Leap Academy with Ilana Golan YouTube channel. So first of all, go get your questions there. So you have a chance to be the lucky one that we're going to answer their question. And today I will answer a beautiful. beautiful, beautiful question from James about how do you open doors in a very crowded market?

So if you're searching for your next role or looking for clients, still to the end, it's going to be so cool. Doors, let's dive in. Yeah, absolutely. So take me back in time to you son of a Cuban immigrants, settled in a small apartment, Queens, New York. What is your childhood like? I still have fun memories of the apartment I grew up. So it's Flushing Queens, so a mile from what is now City Field, where the New York Mets play was then Shea Stadium. It was on the corner of Union and Roosevelt, up about a block from Main Street where you'd catch the train. It was the last stop on the seven line. So you'd go, you'd take the seven line from flushing, and the last stop on the other side was Times Square. And my apartment, the building running right behind it was the Long Island. railroad, right across the street was a firehouse. And we were very, very close, as you can imagine, if you know, New York, to LaGuardia. So my cousin and I would suntan on the roof, a sixth floor

building on the roof, which is as crazy as you'd imagine. But you would see as the plane flew. You could almost, it felt like you could reach out and touch it, like you could see the rivets on the bottom of the plane. So I grew up in this cacophony of fire engines, railroads, planes, planes, And I still remember flipping forward, our first house with my wife, and I can tell you that story. We bought a house in Newtown, Connecticut, the middle of nowhere. And I still remember the first night there. I couldn't sleep because the crickets. I was like, oh, my God.

And my wife, who knew where I had grown up said, are you kidding me? You know, you grew up in that. But anyway, that was the building. That was the location. Flushing was a hodgepodge of different nationalities and races. So I didn't have a huge Latino population. We had some black population. And then you had Eastern European.

So it was this hodgepodge of tribes. That's how I grew up. Mom and dad had emigrated from Cuba. You know, they were in their late 30s when they came. My mom was 40 when I was born. So she had me late in life. This is my dad's third marriage. He always said it, but it was his best.

But he had been a political prisoner under Castro. So he had escaped through the revolution. That's another story. my mom and her family had come over. So that was us in the same building were two of her sisters, my grandfather, and my cousin who's like my brother. So we grew up in the same building. So there was four of them. There was the three of us. And not too far away and closer to then Shea Stadium in Elmhurst was another of my mom's sisters who had four children over her own. So it was a pretty nuclear family in both terms. Nuclear meaning close and then nuclear meaning,

explosive. My wife, first time we met in college, she comes home for Thanksgiving. I'm 19. She's 18. And there's all those people I mentioned. Now I'm, you know, 18 or 19. My cousin brother's 18, 19. The cousins are about five to 10 years older and the aunts. And they're all talking. And my wife goes, why are they all screaming? What are they mad about? I said, yeah, they're not mad. That's just talking. I'm the quiet one. You know, in my family, I was viewed as the introvert. I was the The quiet one, and the rest of my family was insanity. That's how I grew up, and we didn't have a lot of money because they had left everything behind. My mom, she had been a college professor in Cuba, which if you think about it, that would have been in the 50s, late 40s, early 50s.

So for a woman, you know, that was kind of a different career. Yeah. Yeah. My aunt, her sister was a lawyer at the local Coca-Cola brewering company. They'd come over. Her sister ended up getting her Ph.D. and teaching how to I own a college. my mom got her master's, but was working at Woolworths down the street on the corner while getting that. So she went from being this educated woman to starting all over at late 30s, early 40s. My dad had grown up poor, eighth grade education, and had worked his way up to be the number two guy in the National Union, the CETA in Cuba.

It was kind of like the teamsters. So as like my mom said, she lived in a nice middle class family when she met my father in his 40s. He had two cars, two chauffeurs, was traveling to New York City, the big gold watch. So he had made, he was self-made. He had made it. But again, he too had to start over. So he came here, nothing, got an associate's degree because he wanted some level of education. He hadn't had one growing up, but he was an autodidact.

He went to work at double-day publishing in their IT group, and this was when IT were massive machines, right? And I remember him taking me in to see the office, and he would manage. He'd work nights. My mom worked in the day. He worked nights because the room ran 24-7 and they didn't want to have a babysitter. So they decided to do that. So I was lucky. We didn't have a lot, but I had that.

I had a great family. So that was great. That was so funny. Was there a decline then? Yeah. The decline was parting in girls. You know, there was a point where I hit puberty. I hit it early being Latino, you know.

I had a mustache that probably was almost, I don't have that. thick of mustache now, and it was probably not that far off when I was 12. Yeah, so it was a little drinking, a little drugs, and wasting time with girls. And so, yeah, unfortunately, that period, which I make it sound benign, probably started around ninth grade and lasted, you know, about my second or third year in college. So it was during that time. And there's an element to, you know, I have a disagreeable nature. And so, you know, I don't like people to, telling me what to do. And obviously you're in school. There's a structure around that. I also probably there's a little arrogance, especially about the intellect. And so there was a part of me that said,

why am I listening to these people, the teachers? They're telling me what to do, which I don't want to do. A, B, why do I need their imprimatur? I'm smarter than any one of them. So screw it. So I would do no work at school in high school, but I'd work my ass off, you know, again, this is a hundred years ago, they wouldn't check. One of my cousins married a Spaniard who opened a restaurant. I started working the summers, busing tables at 13, and would work my ass off. He said the best work I remember him saying, I cried because he was telling my daughter many years later, I was not in a year shop, but I walked by. And he said, your father at 13 was the hardest working person I ever saw. So there wasn't a laziness. There was more a rebelliousness, I think, and wanting to spend

time parting as opposed to studying. And yeah, so that it went down, you know, it was not good. So it was a precipitous decline. It wasn't a slow decay. It was just like puberty off the charts. And then on the other end, people asked like what flipped it. And it really was I met my wife. Not that I stopped the parting, but I stopped the chasing girls. And, you know, and then at some point it was just like, I don't want to blow this. So I have to get serious about my life. So yeah. So let's talk about this for a second. I think you also, talk about the University of Connecticut that made a big impact for you. And in fact, I think you're appointed by the government Lamont to the University of Connecticut Board of Trustee, right? So

why do you think it was so profound? I know. I still remember they inducted me into the Business School Hall of Fame. And look, as much as I love Yukon, it's not like the Harvard Business School Hall of Fame. But I remember at the speech that I gave when they induct me, I said, I have to be the only member who was not allowed into the business school, right? So I applied to the business school and was rejected because I was flunking out. I went back and got my MBA at Yukon, which is why I was in there. But I said, I've got to be the only person that actually wasn't let in the business school. And everybody kind of, there was this nervous chuckle in the room. And yeah, I just recently was appointed a trustee, which is great. But yeah, it was life changing on a personal level way.

It was great education, but I met my wife, Carol. I'll tell you a story how I got there first. So back to the high school. So I'm flunking out. The school, I had gotten a perfect score on the SATs, a 1600, which I took half drunk. So the school knows that I'm a smart kid. So they pass me along. You know, and my mom is there. And I think as a favor of her, they probably deep down felt like they weren't doing anything wrong. Instead of F's, I'll get a C minus or D plus and, you know, an F here or whatever. But anyway, I graduate. But I'm not going to college. For no other reason. that I'm like, why am I going to go to college? I don't want to do that. I'm hanging out partying and I got a girlfriend here. I'm not doing that. My mom goes, look, that's great. I'm moving back. She had lost her job by that point of the school. School was shrinking, you know, Catholic school. She goes, I'm going back to Queens from Connecticut. And there's no room for you. So I'll figure out how to pay college. But if you're not coming, then you have to go get your own place in it. So I said, okay, then that's what I'm doing. She, unbeknownst to me,

fills out the Yukon application. And again, with my terrible grades, but I get in because of the SAT scores. And so she comes day and says, I get it. I left that part out. And I said, well, I'm not going. And see, that's when she tells me, well, all right, then you're not going. Then you've got to go get a job because I don't have the money. And I knew that at that point.

And I still remember pulling into the campus and the little Toyota Corolla. And there are pastures. I mean, it's bucolic. It's beautiful. But again, from my eyes at that point, it's cows. around. I remember going, what am I, you know, what is it? Where did I go? So anyway, we unpack, and unlike when I took my girls to college, that it's a full day unpacking, for mine, it was a radio and like a duffel bag, right? That was what I packed to go to college. So the unpacking took like five

minutes. Go in. My mom's like, all right, you know, they wouldn't even go out to lunch or anything. It was just like, hey, I got to get back home, her and my cousin leave. And I was like, Jesus, and I'm now all alone in this weird place. But sophomore year, you know, and this is where really like kind of the story takes a turn for the good. I've lived on the third floor of this dorm, McConaughey. They were reshifting stuff around, so they moved all the guys on the third floor to the fourth floor other dorms if you wanted to because they were making the third floor

a women's floor. So sophomore year comes around. We're now in the fourth floor with my roommate who had been there with me the year before, and we're like, hey, there's a room, now a floor. full of girls 20 feet away, freshman girls primarily. Let's go downstairs. So yeah, so he and I go downstairs. He was a funny guy. And so I was like the straight man to his, you know, and he was the charmer. We're literally walking down the hallway, poking her heads in in every room saying hi, right? I mean, literally walking down and like if there was an attraction, you'd stop a little bit

longer. If it wasn't your type, you'd just keep walking. But then, you know, we get it. I think it was room 307, I think. You know, there's Carol, my wife, 18, she's got her friend. Somebody said love at first sight. It's, you know, when you're 19, it's lust at first sight, but I was smitten. The second I saw her, I turn on the charm. I go from like the straight guy to, you know, like pushing my buddy back. Yeah. But anyway, I met her then. You know, we began dating shortly thereafter. And that's incredible. So at some point, you start basically in HBO, right? And you kind of mention how would change your business philosophy. Like, how did you get in?

And what did it change for you? I graduate in 1987. That's how old I am. I decide because Carol's a year behind me, so she's still there. And buddies and other friends, I'm 16. Most of them are still there. So I go, you know what? I'm going to keep going to school.

Graduate my MBA. I think, hey, I got an MBA. It's a big deal. I can just go get a job. Yeah, this will be easy. Well, of course, I'm sending applications out. Nothing's coming my way. So my first job that I guess, it's not HBO, it's a Cap Cities ABC that then became part of Disney.

At that point, it was a standalone and had a publishing division called Fairchild Publications. I interview there, and I ended up getting the job, and I still remember it was such a wonderful guy. One of the nicest people I've ever worked with, and we're doing in the interview. It's my first interview. He's great, and he asked me, you know, Excel was new, kind of new back then, right? And so not everybody knew. He's like, do you know how to use Excel? and I'm like, oh, yeah, I had no idea how to use it. But I tell him, and he goes, can you program

macros? I said, macros. Yeah, of course. Of course, who does it? You can't program. I have no idea what he's talking about. So I get the job, but now I have a problem because a big part of it, you know, it's a business analyst strategy. Yeah, you got to know how to use this stuff and I don't know how to use it. And by the way, again, in the age of the dinosaurs, there is no computer at home, right? I went to this bookstore. I had bought an Excel manual. It was, you know, three inches thick. It was like a computer manual. And I would spend the rest of the night there. You know, everybody would lead around six. I was there until 12. I was living with my mom trying to save money, living now back in Queens. And she's like, what are you doing? She thought I was out parting, but she realized that I was coming home, not drunk, you know, that I was coming home. And then I was getting back up at, you know, sending them more. So I taught myself Excel. And then the little capstone on that. that. I use this stuff going to say, if you want to be successful, you got to, you have to do shit. You have got to do shit that makes a difference. And your question of, you know, how do you break in? You don't wait for anybody to open a door. You smash it down. If you wait for people

to open doors for you, you're going to be waiting. Maybe you get lucky. But in my view, you don't wait for anything. You smash the door down. And so create your own luck. Exactly. Yeah, always. So what are the, you? things there. It's my first job. I've now taught myself Excel. And pretty soon I'm like, well, shit, I learned it within a month. So I was like, this is okay. It's not hard. Within three or four months, I was better than everybody there. So I'm like, all right, now there was part of the job was every month when the numbers all closed, you know, and it wasn't just the revenues and profits. It was also all the different sales number, all that stuff that executives needed

to see. Part of the job was to accumulate all this information. and put it in a way that these people could then read it. And it would take about a week, right? Because these numbers, yeah, it's a hundred years ago. And you'd have to do and you'd have to copy and paste and you'd have to read and blah, blah, blah, but all this shit. Okay, that was part of the job. Well, I learned Excel. And back to the question about macros, I learned how to do that, which is basically a way you program within Excel. But in essence, I write a program that ties Excel to the system, right, that is spitting all this stuff out in these ugly formats. but I actually write the code to take the system.

And now when the system closes on the end of the month, all these reports, and there's like 30 of them, are done instantly. So one month, the reports go out. But now it's a week before they usually go out. So my boss's phone starts ringing, right? Because the CEO, the CFO are like, what the fuck is this? What shit are you sending around? And this is Mario, such a sweetheart.

And he's like, you know, oh, my God, what did George do? And so he comes and talks to me. And he's like, what did you do? You sent out and everybody's now confused. I'm like, oh, no. I go, those are the numbers from last month. He goes, they can't be. They closed last night.

And I go, no, and I showed him what I did. And I'm like, no, I built the program. It sits it. I go, I don't have to touch it anymore. It's just done. So he kind of takes a deep breath. Two hours later, the CEO of the business unit, the guy who runs the whole thing. I can't remember his last name.

I could see him calls. And Mario comes in and says, and he called him Mr. Whatever it was. It was Phil. But it was like really formal. Mr. Blow wants to see you. And I'm like, oh, shit. And I'm like, about what? And it's like, I think it's about the thing.

And I'm like, but you explain it. I'm like, you explain to him. Yeah, but all right. So he comes, he talks to me. I go to his office. Really nice. He just begins to ask me questions. Like, what did you do?

do. I explain it. He doesn't really understand. He goes, why did you do it? I said, well, because it's a waste of time. If I'm just sitting there doing that, now I can get to doing what, you know, the rest of my job, which is interpreting all that stuff and helping the people who are out selling ads or selling do their job. And he listens politely. It's great. The long story short, next day, I'm promoted immediately, right? Another job. I'm now Mario's peer. And he's like, Hey, you know, and he was, again, kindest guy. But it gets to that whole thing of if you wait for somebody to give you the opportunity, you know, maybe it'll come, maybe not.

Take it. And I want to say one more thing for people listening because I think there's this myth around that we see on social media and it always looks so easy for everybody else, right? They all sit on the beach and the millions somehow pile up, the opportunities pile up. Like you're just, and all you need to do is, you know, slurp mochitos on the beach. And I think that the truth is, at least for me, and it sounds like for you, is that I can just outwork anyone. Like, I'm just going to outwork.

And guess what? When I outwork anybody, suddenly I become lucky. But it's like we create our own luck by working hard, by open opportunities. You know, I tell my daughter's this, you know, and they think sometimes I get the feeling they think business is an evil word. I go, you know, the only way to succeed in business is to solve people. problems. I mean, it starts with the customer. Whatever product or you're selling, you've got to solve someone's problem. That's the only way to make money. Yeah. And the bigger the problem, the more you're

going to make. So let's solve some big problems. That's exactly. By the way, if you want to say, you know, somebody said in a review once, people will follow George into burning buildings. The problem is you can't keep him out of the burning buildings. But part of it is that is the attraction of big problems. But that's to the customer. But let's say you're starting your career and you're not yet at the customer or you're in marketing or finance, wherever you are that you're not touching the customer yet. There are problems inside. So I always tell people, find the problems, solve the problem. Like you said, this is not rocket science. It's not quantum mechanics. It's not building LLMs. You know, business is addition and subtraction and being able to

write a little bit. And it's like, find the problems and then work your ass to solve them and you'll do well. That is a fact. That's a summary. That's it. If you want, like my secret is, I tell people, find the hardest problem to solve. You know, find the hardest problem to solve and say, I'm going to solve that. And you start with your boss's problems, right? Your boss, you know, my boss is trying to get more throughput of all his staff and helping people, but we're spending a week doing this other shit. Well, guess not? Now he got promoted too. right? I mean, he got that story three months later. Why? Because, hey, you're hiring smart people we're going to promote you. So find the problem. We need to pause for a super brief break. And while we do,

take a moment and share this episode with every single person who may be inspired by this, because this information can truly change your life and theirs. Now, I want to check in with you. Yes, you. Are you driven, but maybe feeling stuck in your career or a fraction of who you know you could be? Do you secretly feel you should have been further along in your income, influence, or impact? Do you ever wonder how to create not just a paycheck, but the life you want with a paycheck, the thought leadership, the legacy, the freedom? Because that was me, and that's exactly why I created the Leap Academy program, which already changed thousands of careers in lives. Look, getting intentional and strategic with your career is now more important than ever. The

skills for success have changed. AQ, adaptability, reinventing and leaping are today the most important skills for the future of work. Building portfolio careers, multiple streams of income and ventures are no longer a nice to have. It's a must have, but no one is teaching this except for us in Leap Academy. So if you want more from your career in life, go to leapacademy.com slash training. Check out this completely free training about ways to fast-track your career, and you'll even be able to book a completely free strategy call with my team. That's leapacademy.com slash training. Too many people finish their workday, feeling frustrated, drain, and unfulfilled. The good news is it doesn't have to be that way, and you don't need necessarily a new job to fix it.

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that you're good at everything. It's about knowing where you're truly gifted. So take the Working Genius Assessment today, get 20% off with a code leap at workinggenius.com. That's working genius.com. You'll be glad you did. So tell me about HBO.

Yeah, so, you know, doing good. I'm there less than a year, though. And another part of it, This is temperament. I would never say, hey, do this. It's my temperament, though. I need new challenges. It's like they promoted me. That's great. The problems aren't big enough. And also at that point, frankly, Alana, you know, and I tell people, it's not a good thing, but it was mine. I was very motivated by money. Pleasing the teacher did not motivate me. The reason I busted my ass working at the restaurant was because I wanted to make money. That motivated me. And at this point of my career,

I still remember, I was making $25,000. Remember everybody, inflation. That's more, but it still wasn't a lot, even back then. But anyway, I wanted to make more money. So I'm like, all right, I'm looking around. Again, this is ancient times. So you're reading the job listings. Separate from that, out one night, somebody from high school randomly run into her.

She works in the HR group at Time Warner, which is the parent company of HBO. And I'm like, wow, that would be awesome. So I start looking now when I'm looking through the classifieds for Time Warner jobs, right? Because I've got this in at HR. I find one. It's in their strategy group. I ended up being a CFO, as you know, I'm like, I'm reluctant CFO. When I took my, I hated accounting.

I thought it was the biggest bore in the world. I still remember accounting. My only time I took an accounting class was getting my MBA because you had to. I still remember going, this tedium is. beyond other than one day was when the professors talked about break-even analysis, which really isn't an accounting concept. And I was like, ooh, that sounds interesting. But all these debits and credits.

But anyway, I end up getting a CPA and being a CFO. But at that point, it's not what I wanted to do. There's an opening in the strategy group. And I'm like, oh, I want that. That's what I want. I want to go in strategy. And, you know, Time Warner, HBO was cool. So I call her up.

And I tell her, she's like, yeah, that's. sorry, but those we recruit on campus, and I go, I don't remember you seeing you at Yukon. She's like, yeah, we don't recruit at Yukon. And I'm like, well, where do you recruit? You know, Harvard, Wharton, Princeton. I was like, you have got to get me in there. And she's like, George, I can. You know, I mean, like that is the guy who runs it is from, I think it was a Wharton guy.

He goes, but that's all they want for that job. He goes, but we've got multiple jobs in the accounting group, in the finance group. I could get you that. I was like, yeah, I don't want that. Week passes, maybe two weeks, I don't know exactly. She calls me, and she goes, hey, I was talking to her. She was talking to her boss, and I told her, this is a smart guy. We should get, okay, so gets me in to the interview.

And then I go and I meet somebody I learned a lot from. And so it's within Time Warner, HBO is this guy, he's at that point I think he's the director of VP of the Strap Planning Group. Eric Levin, serious guy, like a very serious guy, very different personality than mine. He's sitting, looking at me. The interview starts, you know, and he's kind of flipping down. You could tell he's looking for my resume and a pile, and he goes, Chicago, right? I was like, no, Queens. And he looks up, and he goes, what? I go, I don't, I'm not from Chicago. He goes, no, I meant University of Chicago. That's where you went to school. And I said,

No. Oh, he goes, I thought you were Chicago. Where? And I go, Connecticut. He looks at me blank face. I go university of Connecticut. He like, and you could tell. I mean, his face goes like to like, what the fuck am I doing talking to this guy? So he looks at me. He said, yeah, look, I think there's been a mistake. And he's, you know, he doesn't want to say we only hire Ivy League, but he's searching and he can't help. He doesn't know what else to say. And he goes, yeah, you know, here for this role, you know, we have a very, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. including blah, blah, blah, blah, Ivy League. And I go from, like, scared, right, because I could tell this thing is unwinding to livid. I can feel my ears. My business partner says something, when I get gone, my ears turn red. And I could feel them turning red. And I go, now, as part of this, they had made you take, what was an IQ exam. I had to take one that day before I was in the interview. There was a personality one. There was a cognitive one. Right. So now I'm sitting with the guy and he says that now I'm pissed. And so I look at it.

Now I'm looking straight at him. I'm not, you know, alerting my, I'm looking straight at him. I said, you know what? Why don't you call downstairs and see how I scored on that test? If it's not the highest mark that you've ever had here, then I'll leave. But if it is the highest mark, we at least finish the interview. And he looks at me, kind of nods. And you can tell you, he was a, again, thoughtful guy.

He picks up the phone, calls down, puts the phone back, you know, how's that? And then the interview continues. Right. Wow. Yeah. So good. Yeah. And so that was a great job. I learned so much from him. Like, you know, one of the things, you know, we'll get to where the title of the book comes from. But the thing I learned from Eric was preparation. Because I remember, you know, a big part of the job is you're analyzing the business. You're trying to find new ways, you know, new strategies, blah, blah. And you're presenting that. You know, you're going to the CEO or you're going to the time warning. or corporate office to talk about, here's what we want to do. So that was his job. That's what he did. Helped to find new business opportunity.

It was amazing at it. But I still remember, let's say the thing we had put together to wherever it was going, our CEO or the time it was it was about 50 pages. Let's say it was 50 pages. It was about that, you know, the presentation. He has me and others like me working around the clock to get that done. And not only to produce that, to produce separately about. a 300-page document around every single permutation that any way you could look at the questions

we were looking at, he was going to look at. So he wasn't just going to pick away and say, oh, this is what we're going to do. Let's do the work here. He was going to look at everything and do this massive amount of work. And I remember going, this seems like a waste as we're doing it. Because if we're going to do this, why are we doing all this work on this other thing? And he was kind enough to explain why. I guess he thought, hey, look, this guy might amount to some. So you'd explain why, because you can't be sure this option is the best if you haven't looked at every other option with the same attention to detail. And it gets back to what we were talking about before, this outworking, this immense amount of preparation

that then gives you the confidence, right? So when we talk about sometimes wrong but never in doubt, it's not arrogance. It's having the confidence and the conviction that comes from the preparation, from the work. And then that allows you to push through. Because back to what we were saying before, if you're going to tackle big problems, the bad news is there is going to be a lot of pain involved. Big problems do not get solved easily. There is a lot, a lot of pain. It's reputational pain. People will laugh at you. It's intellectual pain. You'll get stuck. Things will seem wrong. So there's a lot of pain involved. And the only way that I found, there may be other ways, but the only way that I've found

to be willing to endure the pain that comes from tackling big problems is that I've done so much work getting ready that I have what is an unlimited supply of confidence. Now, I'm sometimes wrong, but I don't have doubt at that moment in time because I've done the work. And then, look, have I changed my mind? Of course I've changed my mind. There are times you learn new things. But that point of the only way to push through is you've got to have confidence.

If you have doubt, you'll give up because hard things test that. Hard things test the confidence. And so anyway, I would say I was lucky. You know, I've been lucky a lot. I've tried to sabotage myself throughout my life, but I've been lucky. I had great parents who love me. I got good genes. I then worked for people like Eric's right from the get-go where I got to see.

and said, yeah, I'm taking that with me. Yeah, that's the other thing I've told people. I'm like, I'm not a big fan of the whole mentor-mente thing for a variety of reasons that I could talk about. My view is there's an unlimited number of both positive and negative role models all around you. And what you should do is, I think it was Picasso said it,

Steve Jobs ripped them off too, is, you know, good artists borrow, great artists steal. So what you want to do is look at, the good stuff around you from multiple play, not one person, not one mentor, look everywhere. And the stuff that you think you believe in, then take that and steal it. And what stealing it means is you make it your own. That's what that phrase really means. When you borrow something, you haven't made it your own. You understand it at a really superficial level and you have it really, really digested it. When you steal something, you've made it your own. And there is an

unlimited amount of good things to steal. So that's why I always go, mentors are great. I get that. But man, again, it's like if you're waiting for somebody to grab you and take your hand and then slowly shepherd you, and that sounds nice, you know, good luck with that. Again, take it into your own hands and find role models and they're everywhere. But yeah, the HBO was great. And I've worked in different industries. That was one of the ones, somewhat like wrestling a little bit different, that everybody was fascinated. You mentioned Praxair. Maybe we'll talk about that later. I go to Prax Air. Nobody gives a shit about chemicals, right?

I mean, it's like you're at a dinner party and you start talking about that. Everybody is going like, oh, yeah, look. But you're at HBO and you're saying, oh, yeah, you know, Don King was in the other day because we're going to show the Mike Tyson fight or Madonna was in the office. And then, you know, I wrote the elevator with her, which I did. All of that happened, right? And it's, yeah, everybody gets a kick of it. But, yeah, HBO's great.

I actually do want to fast forward to, like, I think the New York Times, there were actually some pivotal moments that made. do because we talked about decisions. And the truth is, I think the biggest difference between the most successful leaders of our time and the people that don't make it is how many decisions they can make and how fast. I really think that at the end of the day, it's really about decisions. And I think not making decisions is a decision, right? It's a decision to stay stuck and we sometimes don't realize it. But tell me about that situation. New York Times, a pivotal moment, and you decide to go offshore completely against, I think, most typical thing.

So take me there for a second. Yeah, I end up at the New York Times, which in itself is a story, is like, why are you going into newspapers? Somebody had mentioned to the then, I think, CFO, you know, hey, if you guys are looking for change agents, which they really weren't. Everybody always says they want a change agent. They really don't. You're too disruptive.

But anyway, I got the job. So I'm there. And I'm actually in one of their business units. So I ended up being the treasurer of the New York Times company. But at this time, I'm in their Boston division. It's about a billion dollars in revenue. It's a decent-sized business. I won't bore you with the economics of newspapers, not of news, but of newspapers.

But, you know, heavily unionized business, something that is underutilized from a capacity standpoint. You know, the printing presses only run a third of the time. There's a lot of structural things. But when you're a monopoly, as they were in advertising, you know, that's before the internet. You can charge a lot of money. And so all that shit doesn't matter. Internet comes. It is changing stuff rapidly.

That business is getting, you could see it happening. And of course, the senior leadership is saying, oh, no, you know, this is cyclical. It'll change. We've been through. And I'm like, yeah, you're insane. I still at a meeting, debate with the then CEO of the entire company. We're in a big boardroom.

You know, we're the division presenting or something. By this time, now time's coming. I got a laptop. And the guys, you know, CEOs, I make a statement about how the classified business is done. It is dead. And what we're seeing here is the zombie corpse that still exists. Now, that business is still generating hundreds of millions of dollars. And he looks at me and he's a funny guy.

And he's like, oh, I guess so I'm going to have to go into our classified and put an ad in for a new CFO of the division. It's like, well, I'll tell you what. If you do that, I'll have to find a job. So he has the newspaper right in front of it. I'm like, and I have the laptop. I'm like, why don't you look for a CFO job, and I will too? And I type in CFO and 100 things come up on my laptop. I go, I found 100 jobs.

How many have you found? Wow. And I go, you think that's going to be this? This business is dead and we have to figure out. But anyway, I'm there. World is changing. We're doing all this stuff. Because of the cost structure and the unionization,

you have this inability to right-size the business to what's happening. And so all that's happening is the profits and the cash flow are bleeding. I go on vacation with Carol. And I always brought books to read. You know, at that point, unfortunately, I wasn't reading as many books because I was reading so much for business that that was all I read, right? White papers, reports, all I said. So the vacation was night.

I read a book. And I brought The World Is Flat by Tom Friedman. And there, Tom Friedman is talking what, you know, today we call offshoring, but, you know, basically saying, hey, look. the digitization of information is enabling that type of work to be done anywhere. And because the world is different and then different economic developments, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you can do stuff anywhere in the world, including in places where it's a lot less expensive to do it.

And so I am fascinated by that. I'm like, oh, my God, it's the first time that's really sunk into my concert. So I get back from vacation. I go to the CEO of the business unit, and I tell them, I think we should figure out a way where we take a lot of this, back office work we do, that is we're spending way too much money. We have way more people than we need here. We're paying them way more than the work is worth. And he's like, yeah, well, how are we going to do that? I'm like, we're going to move it to India. And he looks at me like, I could have just told him,

we're going to move it to Mars, and I found somebody up there to do it. And so I explained to him, you know, I said, look, I read the book. And Tom Friedman was a New York Times guy, you know, I read the book, and this is what we're doing. He's like, well, what could we do there? I'm like, well, look at all the shit that we do here that's computer. It's all of that. So he, you know, I doesn't believe it, but he allows me to buy a ticket to Bangalore, India. And I spend a week, I fly to India alone, right, because nobody else was going to go.

So I fly for that first flight, I fly to India. You know, and I found one of these offshoring companies, right? that did this. I had looked them up and they invited me. So, well, we'll show you. I remember the guy saying, Alcoa, big giant company, they have their entire operation here and we'll show you that. We'll show you how it works. So I go there. I'm like, yeah, and wow. So come back. And you know, you fast forward. It was, you know, back to big problems and big opportunities. Now, I get people hear that and go, shit. So basically you spent your time trying to find ways to get rid of employees. And, you know, it's hard. Because that's true.

I mean, I can lie about that and say that's, but that is, that was the outcome. And it's the cliche, but I always tell people, if you actually look at it underneath, I really think about it, if a business stops trying to figure out a way to grow, eventually it stops growing, it plateaus, and then it dies. And then everybody goes home. Everybody goes home. And people go, oh, yeah, that's a cliche. You're just saying that.

And all you care about is your bonus and blah, blah, blah, blah, that shit. And look, some truth to all. all of that, but there's the underlying reality that if people are doing something better than you aren't, you will eventually lose. That's it, whether you like it or not, that's what the free market is. We talk about it in Leap Academy actually all the time, because, you know, if you want to help two, three people a year, you can do it for free, you can help them over a coffee shop, you can do whatever you want. But if you want to create a machine that changes lives or you want to create a business there needs to be a sustainable aspect.

And by the way, the beautiful thing, then it pays more families. It helps more clients. Like, we can go on and on. The ripple of that actually creates this mega thing, but it has to be sustainable. If it's not sustainable, we all go home. We all go home.

It's back to the same lesson all the time, right? It keeps coming back to find the big problem, figure out how you think you can solve it, and then take the initiative. and be ready because I got to tell it. I still remember when we told our business unit staff, right, it was the Boston Globe, right? And so we got to tell people we're doing this.

And we used to have these, I think it was every month, they'd have a meeting, all hands meeting. We had a nice auditorium in the building, in the office building. People would come. And, you know, you'd do kind of a monthly, hey, this is what's going on, business update, blah, blah, blah. They would have, it would be half full. when we were going to tell people about this, because now everybody knows what's happening,

every seat taken, the aisle's going up the auditorium people, because everybody's like, holy shit. Were you scared? Well, here's what happens. It was supposed to have been three of us presenting, right? CEO, CFO, me, a couple others. Nobody wants to do it. And remember, it's a news business.

There's a whole hundreds of people who are going to write negatively about this, and they have the power of the pen, right? And you're in charge, you're being dragged through the mud publicly. So, but it's like, hey, yeah, no, I think you know it better, George. I think you should do this. I was like, okay, great. So yeah, and was I scared? Yeah, it was terrible. Ultimately, it's back to what we were saying. And then, you know, you could disagree with me, but you can't tell me what I believe. And I believe that if that business didn't figure out a way, whether was that or something else, a way to change itself, it literally was at risk of going away. It was back to that boardroom with the classifieds.

That business did go away. But it was throughout the entirety of their business models. Like, if you don't change it, everybody's going to go home. And you know, and you believe in a journalistic mission. Well, there's not going to be any money to pay anybody to do it. So in any of it, but yeah, it was petrifying. It wasn't scary. It was petrifying.

Speaking in front of crowds is difficult, right? For all of us, you always get nervous. Crowds at, hey, you? Exactly. Speaking a bunch of people literally, there's not one person in that room who likes what you're saying. Not one. But I, you know, I learned something through that too. People respect the truth. People respect people who will look them in the eye and tell them uncomfortable things. Do it with dignity, right? You don't insult anybody. You don't belittle them, you know, but you look them in the eye and you tell them the truth. This is what we're doing. You don't sugarcoat it. I've learned that lesson many times is if you're honest and direct people respect it. And too, George says what he does and does what he says. That has been consistent from everyone. And that was an early lesson of that because in that moment when it was like, hey, you know, maybe, yeah,

maybe we shouldn't all do it. Let's just Georgia, because he really knows it and everybody's going to have questions. Why should we be up there? We're just going to make it worse. Let George, I remember, like I was sitting thinking there, you know, I'm not doing it. You know, there was that crossed my mind. I am not, I'm not doing it.

And then I said, no, you know, first of all, I was like, I have to. You know, it's my job. I have to. But it was probably one of the first times, the most intense time, let's say that, where I was delivering super bad news to a group of people. And I still remember, though, even with that, that process, I mean, we ended up doing it, that, you know, even people who weren't happy about it, said, you know, again, you did it with dignity. And, you know, a lot of times people get kind of, you know, the person making decision is talks about what things in a way that they think the person wants to hear, right?

And which usually it's obfuscating, right? It's like, oh, yeah, no, don't worry. But that, yeah, yeah. And then that I found people really don't like because then they don't respect you. Then they don't like the thing you're doing. And then they're saying, this person's lying to me. And now I can't really trust what they say. So, yeah, it was another lesson.

But let's go with there for a second. And so as a CFO at WWE, you also needed to do a really big transition, right? Because it was a wrestling entertainment. It was such a great story. Yeah. So I joined in 2008, CFO. A few months later, Michelle Wilson joins as a CMO. Her and I become co-presidents much later run the company for the better part of our tenure there.

You know, we were there together for 12 years. But yeah, we joined, you know, and it's a good business. So it's a good business. It's healthy. Vince had really built a, it really built a culture. And you talk about work ethic, some of the best work ethic that I've ever seen culturally, right? I've seen great work ethic, but kind of threw out. I always used to say, WWW was filled with craftsmen and women, crafts women and craftsmen,

because you had a lot of people who loved what they did, whatever, not wrestling necessarily, what they did. And so it was a great business. But you had this thought of it should be bigger. and because, you know, there's so much energy, it's, there's people outside the country that watch it. Yeah, Michelle and I, you know, it's one of those things we both felt the same way. And we said, but it's back to doing the work. But how do we know?

We feel that. We can kind of see it in the event. So in any event, you know, long story short, we go and do first party consumer and I, consumer research and 18 markets, including India, places that almost impossible to do research. So we're doing it because we really want to understand our fan base, the size, the affinity, the intensity. Again, back, if we're going to do something big, we want to have that courage. So we do an immense amount of where I drove the consulting companies who were using bananas. They're like, we've never done this. We've never been asked to go this deep.

Well, you're doing it now. And as that is happening, you know, the big unlock in Atlanta and today seems like, oh, yeah, like all great ideas. People go, yeah, of course. The business model of the company was to say we have this live content that we're showing matches every week, four hours of matches every week, 200 hours a year. This is what we're going to do. We're going to give that away to ABC, NBC, USA, they're going to show that. And then we'll sell T-shirts and tickets to the events and toys to kids because everybody's getting to watch this. It's great. It's the old, where are those, the infomercial model is great. So we're looking at, I'm like, well, hold on a second. Live content is incredibly valuable. How valuable is it? Well, actually, when you start, we started talking to it was, it was like, people couldn't really describe where the value came from. I would say, well, look, how come, you know, the NBA is making this much money? We're beating them every night. Like, why? Oh, well, that's, they're a sport, George. We're wrestling. They're a sport. It's different. Okay. First,

principles, what are we really doing here? What are people actually buying? They're not buying a sport. They're not buying somebody throwing a ball. What they're buying is people coming in to watch that thing at a given point in time, not asynchronously at a given point in time, live. Well, what is live content worth? Well, people start throwing a number. I'm like, yeah, no, but how should we think about this? How about this? How about if we took every eyeball and divided it by how much, a network is paying the NFL, the NBA, baseball, and seeing how much they're paying for an eyeball. Maybe that's the way you should think about this.

And we did that. And lo and behold, what you see is that the price that was being paid per eyeball for every piece of live content was pretty close. Even for things like the Oscars. Now, some had more eyeballs, right? The NFL had more eyeballs, the NBA. Some had more hours.

MBA has hundreds of hours. the Oscars has three, but that price, and we're like, well, hold on a second. Let's look at ours. Holy shit. All these other people are getting a dollar an eyeball. We're getting seven cents. We should be getting that. We changed how we talked about the company. I remember telling Vince, we are no more fucking sports entertainment. He got angry. That was his big thing. We're not wrestling with sports entertainment. I'm like, we are live. That is all we are. And that's Michelle and I have a 300-page playbook of what we did there, but one of it was the B-to-BPR of we are now going to talk about WWE as a live content powerhouse. We find out that one of the biggest audiences we have, back

to that research, is in India. We drop and put people on the ground in India, and we're going to now do the same thing, not have the events there, but position the kind of little by little by little, yeah, and then, you know, the end result is a $9 billion company. But along the way, back to the pain, there were failures. I still remember in 2014, one of our contracts, our big contract in the United States was up. Investors were like, well, you know, the strategy you guys have, when that contract comes up, it's going to be greater. Well, the contract was good. It was a lot better than we had, but probably not as good as people had wanted it. Back to that dollar versus 10 cents, maybe we got from a 10 to 20 cents. There's like the stock plummets. And I'm sitting there.

After, you know, we had announced a deal. I'm sitting there. You know, you see it in the post market. You know, it's crippling. Wake up the next morning at 3 or 4 a.m. go to look at the pre-market. It's worse. And I'm thinking, Jesus Christ, you know, the worst business day of my life. I still remember Vince called me. And this was not a morning person. Calls me at like 6.37 in the morning. I'm already at the office. He just said, hey, he goes, it's going to be okay. He goes, we're going to get through this. He goes, what you guys have built. He goes, we're going to get there. And it ended up, he was right. And, you know, that next contract four years later exploded. The stock, you know, went to $100. I think when I started, it was around $10. You know, a few years after

we left, we came back. We had left to then do our own thing. Vince asked us to come back to then end up, you know, merging the company with UFC and valuing WW, you know, almost 10 billion. Incredible. And maybe take me to another hard moment, I think, maybe 2020. I think in January 30. Yeah. It's like, yes, it's in detail in the book. But earlier in the year before, so in July, August of 19, you know, Michelle and I had gone and talked to Vince and said, look, we want to go do our own thing. You know, everything was riding high. The company was in great shape. And, you know, NARV was like, hey, we're going to go do something else. We've been here 12 years. I told you before. It's the longest time I'd ever been. It's not in my DNA. You know, I am by

temperament. I like new things. So it was just time to go. That was the thought. You know, we don't want to be co-presidents. We want to go be CEOs. Each one of us wants to go be CEO and run our own thing. And that's what we're going to do as much as we like working together. So we go tell Vince, super emotional. And this July, we're in his office. What I thought would have been a 10-15-minute meeting with then follow-ups, you know, because we just say, look, we'll announce that we're leaving.

We'll have a six-month plan. It'll be cool. It'll be nice and, you know, very professional. It'll be fine, you know, and it'll all be great. You know, he gets choked up in the meeting. We're there, again, for a couple of hours. He's crying. Then I'm crying.

I'm a big crier. Michelle's crying. You know, we're all, like, sitting in there. He's like, you can't. You guys. this, you know, I still remember. I get choked up. I've read my manuscript 30 times. I get, I cry just rereading it every time because he says to me, you know, he goes, I've spent 30 years pulling everyone with me. He goes, the last 10, you two have pulled me. Tears in his eyes.

He's like, don't leave. Michelle and I leave his office. And she goes, look, let's do what we said we're going to do. And I was like, Michelle, I go, I think we should stay. I'm like, he wants us to stay. He said he's open to changing some, you know, the shit that really doesn't matter, the titles. At some point, I remember I won't find anything that. I mean, he goes, George, what? You know, Vince never curses. So I would have said, why the fuck? He goes, why do you care about the title that much? He goes, have you ever said we need to do something that we haven't done? I'm like, no. He goes, so you have what you need. Why does that matter? And I said to him, well, why does it matter that much to you. And he chuckled. But anyway, we're walking out. I go, Michelle, we should do it.

So in any event, we go back and, you know, a week later and say, let's see if we can find a way. And we begin talking. Long story short, we spend a few months, a couple months doing that. That process hardens the heart. You know, now you're a little bit pissed. You know, he starts getting pissed because I think then he starts feeling like, hey, these guys are, they're trying to throw me out, which wasn't the case. You know, in fact, I told him the archetype exists out there. Look what Larry Ellison did at Oracle. He became the CTO. Look what Bill Gates did at Microsoft.

He became the... So he stayed with the product and handed off the... I go, it's the same thing. I mean, it'll be fun. Anyway, on all of our parts, hearts hardened during that process. So there's a point there within a couple of months that I'm like, all right, I'm done. Done, done. But now I'm stuck between earnings calls and we're going to be laying out the next five-year

plan. I got to stay through that. Michelle, we got to, all right, we're going to work. We'll do that. And then afterward, that's it. Okay, so that becomes the plan. And now we're not particularly nice to each other during that period, right? Everybody gets very cold, you know, right?

It goes from being laughing to, and I'm a, you know, I'm a fun guy. You know, I like to laugh. But when I'm not happy, you know it. I'm also the world's worst poker player. He knows I'm not happy. I remember one time he's like, so what do you think about? This was now in December. he said, what do you think? I'm like, I haven't decided. And he said, you know, he said

something like, George, I made you rich. I said, Vince, you didn't make me, you didn't do shit. You paid me well, right? But the only reason that I have the money that I have is because I never sold a share of stock. You know, it was somewhat rude, you know, I was angry. So, yeah, fast forward. We have our board meeting. And this was, you know, the board meeting where we were talking about the annual plan, the strategic plan, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's, you know, it's, a shitty vibe in the room. You know, I'm not happy. Michelle's not happy.

Vince isn't happy. Everybody can feel it. An hour after the meeting, the board meeting ends, Vince calls me, say, hey, you got to, can you come upstairs for a minute? I'm like, yeah, sure. It's like, go to his office. He looks at me, he goes, and this isn't working. And I'm like, yeah, you're right.

He goes, so let's end it. And I'm like, okay. He goes, but now. I go, like, now, now? Yeah. I go, Vince, that's not a good idea. You know, that is not going to go over well. with anybody, business partners, staff, investors.

And he's like, yeah, George, he goes, you know my motto. He goes, once you make a decision. And he's right. Actually, he is right on this. He goes, you got to pull the bandaid off. And I said, well, Vince, look, there's a way to pull the bandaid off. But for external purposes, look, and I tell him right there, I go, I can leave today. So we can do that.

And by the way, that's great because I don't want to be here right now either. But we tell people that we're consulting for six months or whatever, whatever you say. He has the same conversation with Shell, so yeah, we leave. I mean, fire. I literally escorted out, which he later admitted shouldn't have done that. The guy who had known for 10 years who ran security had tears in his eyes as he's walking out with me. And he's like, George, I'm so, I'm like, don't worry about it. Like, I get it.

You know, there's a process here. But in any event. So it's humiliating. You know, it's humiliating. I called Carol. We popped a bottle of champagne when I got home. I took. I flew down to Miami.

and, you know, Cuban. So I go to the center, visit family, friends down there, actually had a, instead of dealing with an earnings call. But yeah, so anyway, it gets announced that night. The stock the next day drops by almost 40% in one day overnight once it's announced that we're leaving. Jim Kramer on CNBC that morning goes, yeah, I don't know. He goes, I thought Barrios was doing a great job.

Yeah, I remember I was on the make-o-wish board then. and we had just hired Richard Davis to be the CEO. Richard Davis is the famous CEO of U.S. Bank. I mean, he's a legend. So the fact that I'm on the board, he's CEO is a little somewhat of a joke. You know, I mean, he's Richard Davis. But he calls me, he goes, well, George, you know, life is like that. And I go, yeah, I know he goes, and for what it's worth, you now know exactly how much you're worth.

And I'm like, what do you mean? And he's like, well, by my math, I have to, you know, $3.2 billion. because it was the drop in the stock price, right? And I was like, yeah, I was like, I never thought about it that way or whatever the number was. It was a good one. And it cheered me up in that moment, right? It was like, it got me a smile. But yeah, and then, you know, and if, you know, in the prologue of the book, I start with the call from Vince two years later, a year and a half later, you know, saying, hey, I'm going to do one last big thing.

And I still remember, again, I get choked that he goes, and he realized, you know, it was tough for him to make that call. He goes, I need the A team. I'm only going to do this once, and I need the A team. Will you come back? And, of course, we went back. And it was great because I know, no matter how many people I had told that I just told you, they didn't believe it. You know, they thought, I just fired you.

They didn't believe all the back and forth that I mentioned. They didn't believe that ultimately it was I had quit six months earlier. But I think when that came out, you know, there is, look, selfishly, there was a little bit of validation that to everybody say, like, hey, I told it that was. And by the way, six months after he did fire us, We picked up the phone, called them and said, hey, and this is the middle of COVID, you know, June of 2020, and said, let's have dinner. Now, Vince likes to work, right?

He does not like to go to dinner or lunches or hobnob. He likes to work and work out, you know, and train, like he said. Those are the two things he likes to do. So we call him, hey, you want to grab dinner and just catch up? He goes, I'd love to, just like that. So Michelle's, you know, we have him on speaker, and she's like, oh. So the three of us out go to dinner. So I always tell people it really wasn't, it had hardened, but there was never any deep bad

blood. There was a lot of respect. I have a general philosophy is, you know, life is, it's a movie. It's not a picture. And I think sometimes people can make the mistake of taking a photo of a moment and saying that's everything. And it isn't. Life is, it's going on and on.

You got to look at the whole thing. And that movie, the WW movie was the best movie, professional movie of my life. I think it's a great story. generally. It's like one of the great business stories. It didn't have what we thought was the ending in January 2020. It wasn't perfect, but it ended up actually being the perfect penultimate moment, right? And that we got back. So, yeah, but it was great. So why the book? The genesis of a book was, you know, Jose Marti, which was the Cuban patriot during the independence movement from Spain in the late 1800s and who I heard about as a kid all the time.

and from my father. And he had a saying, it might be apocryphal, but you know, he had a saying that's attributed to him that, you know, every man should have a child, plant a tree, and write a book.

So that had always been in my head, you know, and I love, you know, I'm a voracious reader. I'm a pretty good writer. I've written a ton for business. I always say, you know, the stuff that people haven't read

that I just write, you know, to my, it's how I think. I always tell people, writing is the process by which you realize you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. So when people ask me, why are you making me write this, this thing? And you're asking because you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. And I need you to write your thoughts

down so you clarify them so then you can explain it to me. So I wanted to write a book. I wasn't sure it's going to be about. And by the way, on the other two things, I say, I can prove I've got three children. So I check that. The plant a tree, my wife, Carol, would say, you've never planted a tree. I go, care, you've planted a ton, and I have at least on occasion been around and moved some dirt. So I'm taking credit for that. Carol just wrote a book, by the way. Great historical fiction. It's published story on the story of her paternal grandmother was the daughter of indentured servants from India.

She grew up in the West Indies. Carol wrote a book called Mahala. Carol Barrios. Amazing. I would read it. It's better than mine. Read the book. But anyway, I said, I want to write this book.

What am I going to write about? Maybe it's going to be a pure technical business book. You know, maybe it'll be the playbook that Michelle and I developed together. And then slowly I said, you know, a lot of the lessons that really are what made a difference for me were picked up throughout life. You know, it wasn't just the last 12 years of WWE. And there was a lot, you know, we haven't talked a lot about them. There was a lot of fuckups all in the way. We almost talked about failing out, but I had others.

And that's how you learn, you know, it's in any event. I finally said, hey, now I'm going to write a book. I probably spent about 1,000 hours because I tried to track how much time. But that 1,000 hours was spread over five years because, first of all, it's hard. As many books as there are on writing, and there's some really great one. But there's no blueprint. Like, I'm like, you know, I'm a blueprint. I'm like, all right, what are the stuff?

There really aren't. So I had to read a lot of shit on how to write and then come up with my own process. But anyway, I decided to do that and then doing it, I started going through my mind of all the memories, right? I began cataloging them, creating outlines of them around that. And, you know, there was a lot of ones that hurt a lot that, frankly, I hadn't thought about. And back to my saying, which I've used a lot on other people, writing is the process by which

you realize you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. is I realize that a lot of the stuff that I mythologize about myself, well, maybe really weren't true. There were a lot of mistakes, a lot of self-inflicted injuries, a lot of pain that writing was helpful, you know, to get out there. And it actually clarified in my own mind a little bit more about who I am, what kind of leader I am. So it ended up being a labor of love doing it. But the saying, again, I don't know who said it, but nobody likes writing. Everyone loves having written. I think there's a lot of truth to that. There's an immense pride in having written. The writing part is, it's a journey. Yeah, it's a muscle. Painful. It's a muscle. But look, I said, I may write another one.

Ultimately, it was enjoyable enough. I may do another one. Wow. That's incredible, George. So where do they find you? I mean, we'll have the book when it's coming out and all of this. Just for what I do, you know, today I'm a sports investor and advisor on the board. of Global Sport Group, which is CBC's sports investment platforms. We spent a lot of time doing that. It's a lot of time speaking at conferences. So I'll be doing that. I'll be doing a road show here for the book once it's published on June 2nd.

Obviously, you can pre-order now on Amazon. But yeah, so I'm out and about, and it'll be up on the webpage, on the website. Oh, so fun. So maybe last words, George, we always kind of asked, like, if you were meeting, yourself in one of the harder moments of your life, what would you wish you told yourself? The thing I wish I would have done earlier in life, I wish I would have been more thoughtful in understanding myself. I've come to become a big believer in personality assessments and just anything that helps you really think about who you are, what excites you, what you don't

like what you're not good at. The type I am is I think I'm good at everything. So it takes energy and thought to prove to myself, you really aren't, and learn that. I think that's helped as I've done more of that throughout my life. And now I've done it a lot. And I think I have a pretty good, you know, pretty self-aware. I wish I would have done that earlier. I think it would have prevented some mistakes. It would have probably found some better, some other opportunities. and it probably, you know, probably would have done less self-damage. So that would be the advice. I love that.

And I'll just say because we deal with reinvention, which is essentially all the time, re-look at yourself, learn to yourself as much as possible, and channel it to the right areas. One of the things that I realized is that a jar cannot read its own label. It takes time and it takes other perspective. But once you find it, you actually have a lot of peace in yourself. It's less about ego. It's more about conviction in every conversation, and it's amazing. That's well said.

So good. George, it was so fun to have you on the show. I told you before first podcast, so I can't believe we've been talking for an hour and 40 minutes. You're amazing. So I could see why you're so successful. You made it more fun than I thought, you know, I knew it was going to be fun. I didn't expect it to be this much fun. But you're terrific.

So thank you. Thank you for sharing your amazing story, George. Hey, I super hope you enjoyed this show. As a reminder, if you're a wrestling fan, you have to check out episode 106 because we spoke to Tony Kahn about building AEW, and he mentions WWE so many times, so I think it's going to be so, so fun for you.

And we had a beautiful question from James on our YouTube channel. So check it out. Leap Academy with Ilan O'Lagan YouTube. Put your questions there so that we can choose you and bring your question here. And James asked about how do you open doors in a crowded market,

which is such a great question because it is really, really crowded right now, and it's super hard to rise above the noise. And one of the key things in a crowded market is, first of all, that you're going to need to be better at packaging yourself, your skills, your expertise as a category of one. Because the problem is that we try to become too general, and two average, and the average is invisible in today's world. So first of all, really think about all the things that make you unique in category one, because that's what makes you special. The other thing is

how do you open doors in a very strategic way? We talked about in this episode, but also think about other episodes, the hook story offer. Catch it with a very strong hook, create just enough story to open the door and to have a very specific ask and give so that somebody actually wants to help you. And the other thing that I will say is when you are trying to be specific about opening doors, at the end of the day, it's not going to be, all these opportunities are not going to come from a job word. Every single episode that we had until today, every single leader has opened all their doors with the hidden market. So lean into the hidden market, build an authority that opens these doors. that brings these opportunities to you according to what you want to be known for

and be top of mind according to what it is that you want to be known for. And if you're going to build that kind of level of authority, you're going to start having a lot more opportunities that come your way, but also the doors will flung open easier. So category of one, open doors, build authority, and I'll see you in the next episode. Share this with somebody that needs to see this today. Remember this episode, it's not just for you and me.

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