Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), former Disney CEO Michael Eisner joins Zibby to discuss and celebrate the 20th anniversary edition of CAMP: Life, Leadership, and Why You Never Stop Paddling. Michael reflects on his life-shaping experiences as a camper and counselor at Keewadyn, a Vermont camp that four generations of his family have attended for 100 years. He delves into the lessons of teamwork, resilience, leadership, and creativity learned in the wilderness that echoed throughout his remarkable career at ABC, Paramount, Disney, and beyond. 

Transcript:

Zibby: Hi, I am Zibby Owens. Thanks for listening to Totally Booked the show where I get to talk to all my favorite authors, and you get to hear from them too. Today I am so excited to be talking to Michael Eisner. I'll read you a little bit about him now. Michael d Eisner has been a leader in the entertainment industry for more than half a century.

Beginning his career at a B, C, becoming president of p Paramount Pictures in 1976, and then chairman and chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company in 1984. Serving in the role for the next 21 years. In 2005, Eisner founded to Tornante, an entertainment company that today owns Port Smith.

Football club and has a large and growing television division. He and his wife Jane, founded the Eisner Foundation in 1996. His book is Camp Life Leadership and why you should You Never Stop Pad, welcome. 

Michael: Thank you.

Zibby: Camp, this is amazing. Thank you for taking us into your whole experience, you, the multi-generational camp of your family and reminding us about the joys of being outdoors and being in a found community. So thank you. 

Michael: I appreciate being here. A lot of people have gone to camp. A lot of people feel love of it, youthful strength, growth and all that, and I just thought.

This would be a good subject to go back and think about. And my kids, my grandchildren, my father, my grandfather, we've all been in this oldest camp going to this oldest camp in the world, but certainly in America. And it just seemed like it was important. And I'm not sure why. I still don't know why.

I hear a lot of. I've been involved with children's programming at a, B, C, and obviously at Disney. I hear a lot of, read a lot of about childhood education, creativity, things you've talked about a lot. And I go back and think about what it was in my childhood that I gravitated toward creativity toward leadership.

God knows what why, what does a canoe trip have to do with that? What does free time have to do with that? And I think it has a lot to do with it. So I found myself, actually, I'd done some other books one with a co-writer, which I thought. Was somewhat mediocre. I'm used to being an editor and demanding perfection, whether it's movies or television or publishing.

And I did a book with a co-writer of Esteem, and I thought it was okay, but then. 

Zibby: What did everybody else think? 

Michael: It got. 

Zibby: Okay, nevermind. Moving on. 

Michael: No. 

Zibby: It, it actually Keep going. Keep going. 

Michael: No, it actually got good reviews. Not great reviews. Not horrible reviews, which is the worst place to. 

Zibby: But it got reviews.

Michael: Yeah, but that's the worst place to be in entertainment is in the middle. If somebody tells you that movie is awful, it's awful. If somebody tell you that movie is fantastic, you run to it. If somebody says That movie was okay, was good, not so good. That's I felt that, so when I decided that I wanted to write this book about camp, I asked friends of mine I wanna find somebody that is not famous to work with.

I wanna find somebody where this would be an exciting project for them. And I wanted to have a contest. And so all my friends, people at Disney and other places had. Tentacles to, to schools so forth. And I read about, I don't know how I'm getting into this, has nothing That's okay. Yeah, it, there's a little bit to do with the book.

That's fine. Because Aaron Coh has helped me write this book, and I found Aaron by reading an essay he wrote about going to a Met game at Harvard, going to a Met game for his birthday since he was like. Five years old every year, and it was so well written and so insightful about a little thing going to a Met game on a birthday that was the guy.

And so Aaron spent a lot of time at Den. Aaron became practically a camper. He wasn't that much older than the campers and the staff, and we had a good time doing this. And there was a lot of history there. A lot of things were unique, a lot of tripping in the wilderness, self-reliance a lot of wilderness thing kind of things.

Going through big headwinds and canoes, long hiking trips, sleeping in a wet from the rain to make it clear. Sleeping bags.

Zibby: Okay. 

Michael: And what did that teach you and what did you learn and did you think you were learning anything, which of course you didn't? And I just was something I wanted to do.

And then 17, 15 years later, we started publishing company at Disney called Hyperion. And I get a call from a daughter of a staff member I'd had when I was 10. Now 

Zibby: Steph May a counselor. 

Michael: 70. Yeah. Counselor. In key way. EC language term. Yeah. 

Zibby: Yes. Which I now speak thanks to the book. 

Michael: We have our own language.

Zibby: Yes. Thank..

Michael: Which has been adapted since becomes it, you can't use some of the words that you use then that had Native American connotations, trump would actually let you go back? Probably. But forget that. Why did I say that? I'm in trouble and I have him five minutes into this and I'm already in trouble anyway, so I got this call from this daughter of this staff man, who I remembered from 70 years earlier, and she sent me a picture and there was a picture of me with three of the kids in a tent. And this staff man who looked like he was James Dean, I remembered that she said he is written 16 books. This man, and nobody has read one, not one, even his family, and he now read the year starting this publishing company called Hyperion.

Would you read a book? I said, absolutely. I said, send me a couple. And they never came, ever. And I forgot about it. Now we're 20 years later, 30 years later. And the other daughter calls me and says, dad, he's now 89, and he thinks it would be time for you to maybe read a book. I said, what happened the last 20 or 30 years?

He was embarrassed. He knew you were busy, whatever. So I said, send me a book. Just one. Send me one book. He sends me a book called Cat the game. And I assumed it would be awful, like all unsolicited material is I was shocked. It wasn't on, free line paper written in handwriting. It was actually typed, not computer, but typed and I read it and I could not put it down.

It was fantastic. So I thought, oh, I just wanna be nice to this camp, this counselor of mine. So I gave it to my wife, said, you read this. And she confirmed, as she has done over some 50 odd years that I'm either completely nuts or on the right track. She said it's very good. So I called back and said, we'll make it.

And he said, what do you mean? You'll make it? I said, yeah I'll buy the book. We then went and wrote eight scripts to be serialized event television series. It's a, I won't go through the whole thing, but it's an epic story involved a lot of the Japanese in the internment camp and Vietnam and Indochina and, helicopters.

So I couldn't put it down as I said. So we've now written the eight scripts. Were ready to get into the process of having somebody agree with me. It was easier when I was the boss, but maybe I can still get him to agree with me. And we're on track. And then I get a call that he's gonna be 90 something and he's got a birthday and I go to meet him.

No, I haven't seen him since I'm 10. And if you've seen Dead Poet Society, which it's been in my mind since we made it, because at camp there are always pictures from 19 23, 19 34 from my father, from all the other people at this camp, and they all look, vital and athletic and in the in, in the most important youth of their life and now they're not.

And I was obsessed with that and we made  Dead Poet Society. So I've been obsessed with this idea of. 

Zibby: My, one of my favorite movies. 

Michael: You liked it? 

Zibby: Oh my god. One of my favorites. 

Michael: The whole idea of seize the Day, do it while You're, you can. And so we came to the conclusion that we would do this. And so I wanted to meet him and we drove up the coast of California and we met him.

He left a a urgent care, not urgent care senior care. We had lunch and it was great. He remembered everything. He was the most, I heard from the camp later that he was the best storyteller they'd ever had at the camp around campfires. And he was he was he flew helicopters. He was in Vietnam, he was everything.

He now wants to build a pyramid in Texas at 95. So we then took a picture at the end and he had the paddle. Which helped him stand actually that age, the same paddle that he decorated in the picture from 1950. So all of that came together and when somebody called me and said, would you do a reissue of the book?

'cause camps like it, I dunno. They do. And because of this guy, and I wanna write about this, I made that the epilogue of the new edition. So that drove me into going back to camp. Now, I do have grandchildren at the camp and I still go there and the son of the owner of the camp who went to camp with my father still runs it.

So there's a lot of emotion in this camp. My parents had a house in Vermont. We always went to them before we went to camp. We always stopped at McDonald's for the last meal. It's part of my DNA, so I wrote it and I enjoy, by the way. I really enjoyed that. I've spent most of my career writing emails before that memos annual reports.

I wrote, I guess 20 some odd years of annual reports at Disney. Never the way an annual report had ever been written before. One of 'em. I finally, my mother told me, you write about your family, you write about your father, you write about your grandparents, you write about camp In the annual report, you've never written about me.

So the next year's annual report, my mother was all through it. So I liked the process and I've learned a lot by doing it with other people. I've learned about doing it myself. Again, I. I was an English major, but I never took a writing course, so I'm pretty good in punctuation 'cause I learned that from Alan Stevenson on 78th Street.

So I, I know where the commas go, but I have no idea, whether they're past tense or current. Present tense. When you write, I can't, I'm actually writing. Which I know is not about this a novel, which I'm having a good time. I can't remember the names of my characters. Yeah. I'll write on a in February, when I get back to it in April, I have to go back and read what the characters' names are, where they're from.

It's hard. 

Zibby: I have the same thing. 

Michael: It is much easier being an editor. 

Zibby: Yeah. Or writing about your own life. 

Michael: Yeah, and also you can say to whomever you're dealing with a director, a producer, a writer. It's good, bad. I'm bored. It's not funny. It's not sad. I have no emotion. When you write yourself, you turn to your wife and you say, is it sad?

Is it funny? Is there any emotion? It's very different being an editor, which is what my life was about, whether it was a theme park or whether it was a movie or a television show or now a, a soccer team in Europe or whatever. That's easy. Compared to actually doing it. I had many meetings with comedy writers doing, half hour TV shows for a, B, C or whatever.

And I would say, this isn't funny. And then the writer would say how do I make it funny? And I would say if I could make it funny, I wouldn't be doing the job I'm doing. I'd be doing the job you are doing. That's the big money being the writer, royalties and all that. Not that I had a rough time, but anyway.

Zibby: Anyway I wasn't gonna say anything. It's fine. It's all good. 

Michael: I didn't come from Connecticut to go back to. Anyway, nevermind. I'm not in his book.

The so that's the, that's how I got into it. I don't know. 

Zibby: Amazing. 

Michael: You asked me one question I went on forever, but. 

Zibby: That's great. That's great. Would you mind if I read a little bit from the end of it about the importance of, to keep paddling and all of that? Is that okay? Sure. Because I do think that whether you go to camp or you don't go to camp or any of it, the message you have and the joy and the things you've learned are applicable to anyone in any circumstance.

Through these messages. So you wrote, we all paddle through pleasures in our lives, marriage success, and children, and we all paddle through some storm through storms as well, facing economic difficulties, fighting off adversities, stumbling through unpleasant relationships, struggling with disease, moving on from deaths in our families, how we deal with these kinds of disruptions in life, how we find the strength to get through those times, how we persevere.

It's all a mark of who a person is and a person finds their oars, their tool to paddle through it all early on during early childhood development in their formative days. Early education and early play is important, and there's no better place to acquire and develop the tools to fend off the hard times than summer camp.

Sure. Camp is not the only way to find one's path in life, but for me, it provided tools that have been homed by generations of campers, including my father, my sons Pepe and Q. And now in the years since the summer, I reconnected with camp, my five out of nine grandchildren who have gone to Key Waydon and Ska Dewin.

Amazing. 

Michael: It's true. I wrote it so I think it's true. Now. The thing is that you learn several things. You learn teamwork and you lead learn leadership when you are on a trip. And Ki Wayne does is mostly about wilderness tripping, although they do have tennis and all that stuff, and you're. In a canoe and their headwinds, and it's five o'clock and you're trying to get to a campsite.

And at the campsite you gotta pitch the tent, make the dinner, get the firewood and all that stuff, and clean up. And you say to your staff, and there are only two staff how far? And they say two miles. And you know it's five and you just keep paddling and you get there. And when you get there. You have to work as a team.

There are eight kids, four on most trips. Four groups of two and two. Initially when you get to the campsite, pitch the tents, other two and their team get the firewood. Another two make the dinner and the last two clean up. And if it's not all working and there's one kid who's, homesick happens to other things like that, not feeling well. It all falls apart. And you learn at camp without knowing you're learning it, that you gotta work together. And you also learn, and maybe it's genetic, maybe it's not, I don't know. There are some people that are born as leaders that are, that they like doing that.

They like telling other people what to do and that other people that are followers, but they all are part of a team so you learn that. You also learn when you get to a river after a rainstorm in the middle of nowhere, how are you gonna cross the river? 'cause you have to cross the river. And that's not paddling, but that's getting across. You have to learn. I can remember in the Adirondacks once there were so many black flies that we ate our dinner lying in the river with just our heads so we could breathe. So we could eat. So we weren't eating alive. That's a good reason to move to California, by the way. Those are, they're not there.

So I do think. There are a lot of kids that prefer, the baseball and the tennis and the capture the flag. But they still each month do one trip. And there are a lot of kids that just like the tripping better. But all in all, you're away from home many times for the first time. You don't have your parents today, they don't have their cell phones.

And you persevere. And the one thing I heard earlier in one of your interviews is at this camp there is a lot of free time. And in the free time you make your friends, you do all these free time kinds of things. You, there's a creativity that is created because it's free time.

Most of the stuff is coordinated.

There is a schedule, but the free time is important anyway. I enjoyed it. I will say that when I dunno if you ever saw Dinner, the movie Dinner where part of the movie was with a spouse trying to find out whether you were compatible and going to a sporting event. So I did two things with my wife who's there, and it is 58 years later.

The camping I did the baseball thing. I took her to a Yankee game and figured that we were gonna be sports fanatics together, and she did the crossword puzzles during the entire game, and I knew that was hopeless, but I decided we'd go on a camping trip. This is before we were married. I thought, now this is gonna be romantic.

I would say that was a third of my motive growing to two thirds. But anyway, that was my motive. And so we went up to camp to, and I got the backpack. I went to Abercrombie and Fish and got the reflector oven to make the silver cake, which I was pretty good at. And we took off in the Adirondacks and forget the fact of the first two days going through the mud and up those ladders and she was carrying 30 pounds and complaining not too much. And the third day, I won't go on too long, we got accosted by a bear and we spent eight hours literally thinking we were gonna die. And we connected with two guys. We met on the trail and we finally joined together in a lean to with no front.

So there were three of us and her and we went to bed as soon as it got dark and the bear kept going around the lean to at. At one point the bear was in the lean to, I had my eyes closed. Jane was the farthest left, then me, then the two guys. And the bear was in the lean too, and I heard my eyes were closed and I heard sniffing like a dog, but it was like in super sound.

It was like a giant, and the bear was trying to get the food, which we tied to the roof, and he was right above me. The guy next to me takes a hatchet and I'm thinking, this is not a good idea. So I stopped that. The big guy. Really big guy was asleep. He couldn't handle it at all. I was petrified. It happened.

It went on well. Also, at certain points we had to walk. We all got four, got together and had to walk around if we had to do what you have to do in the wilderness. So I'm with my fiance that's not so romantic, right? So the whole thing is like not great. She stayed up all night. Banging pots and pans, keeping the fire going, keeping the bear away.

Agreed in the morning to walk out nine miles. I wouldn't throw out the reflector oven. I wouldn't throw out the backpack. She kept saying, why are you saving this? 'cause I just bought it at Abercrombie and Fish and visit. And that solidified our relationship. I knew there is no storm that I couldn't paddle through as long as she was in the bow or the stern.

So that, that is part of my campaign experience and it's all true. Jane? All of it. Yes. I exaggerated a little bit in the book, but it's true what I said today. 

Zibby: Actually, you wrote so beautifully about your wife in the book all throughout, it's really quite heartwarming and really a role model. What is the secret to longevity of a marriage. 

Michael: Guy who knows I don't paddling?

No. And we've had, when you're. When you're working in the media, I'm sure it's true. When you're working anywhere, there are people that are rooting for you. There are people that are rooting you ground so they can take your office. There are competitors, there are people that are not always completely honest.

And it's good to have somebody with you who can keep keep you. Focused and not let those things drive you crazy. 'cause those are the kinds of things that you do have to paddle through. And even though a lot of people have very successful lives, they've been successful in business, they have good families and all that, there are interruptions that are difficult to handle and you just have to keep going.

You were talking on another interview about what is true and what isn't true in a book. Which I thought was interesting. All of your interviews are interesting, but I was thinking everything in my book is true except one thing. My best friend, actually, he is deceased, but his wife is here. We grew up together. We went to camp together. We I went one year before he did, and. I was a big shock 'cause I'd done it one year before he did because his mother wouldn't let him go. 'cause his father died in World War II and she wanted him home. Finally, we talked him into it and the way we talked him into it was that we were gonna go to the reunion at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn, where Key Waydon had its reunion. So I am 10 or nine or 10, something like that. He's one year older and I take him to reunion. And we go in and there are all these kids around and we go into the banquet hall and they do the song before breakfast and I'm singing wildly, but it's not familiar, but I'm still singing.

They then have a prayer, which I don't remember them being a prayer. And we sit down and we're this, and the next thing I know the, the director of the camp comes in and pulls us out. I'm at the wrong reunion. I take him to the wrong reunion and I'm so proud. Anyway, we went to camp together for a long time.

I was a pretty good tennis player at that age. He was too. But as I grew taller, I grew more awkward. So my tennis started to fail. He grew better. So we played in the tennis tournament, we got in the finals of the tennis tournament for the whole camp. And I was ahead way ahead and blew it. And he won.

And in the book. I couldn't really remember the story accurately. I think it was an honest mistake in the book I won and he said to me, Michael, you did not win. And I said, John, when you write a book, you can win. So that was the one thing that was not true. 

Zibby: Michael, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for being here and thank you for camp.