Hi, I'm Zivie Owens, and you're listening to the Webby-nominated podcast, Moms

don't have time to read books. Thanks so much to my latest sponsor, the Mermaidpillow

Company, Mermaidpillow.com. They make these amazing pillows with

sequins on the back and positive messages on the front and they now even make custom

pillows and blankets. It's an amazing company and if you enter the code Zibbi, ZIBBI, you will get

10% off, which is super cool. So please check them out, Mermaidpillowco.com. I'm really excited to be interviewing Richard Kirshenbaum today. He is an ad man, author and entrepreneur. His latest book, Rouge, A Novel of Beauty and Rivalry, has already been optioned by Sony Pictures. He also wrote a book called Isn't That Rich, Life Among the 1%. Based on his columns for the New York Observer. It's sold to ABC Studios.

He also wrote, Under the Radar, Talking to Today's Cynical Consumer, Closing the Deal, Two Married Guys Revealed the Dirty Truth to Getting Your Man to Commit, and Mad Boy Beyond Mad Men.

And he's an accomplished playwright. He founded Cursion Bound and Partners Ad Agency when

he was just 26 years old and is currently the CEO and founder of NSG slash SWAT, a high-profile

boutique branding agency. He is also the co-founder of Blackwell Fine, Jamaican rum. Richard

co-founded SWAT equity, which invests in emerging consumer brands. A graduate of Syracuse University, he currently lives in New York with his wife and three children. Welcome, Richard. And moms don't have time to read books. Thanks so much for coming. I'm so delighted. It's so nice to be here. Oh. In your amazing library, by the way. And this is like really sort of a mitzvah that you're doing by being here on a Friday afternoon in June. So I'm particularly grateful that you made the time for this.

I'm so happy to be here.

So your latest book is called Rouge, a novel of beauty and rivalry, which was really just delicious and wonderful.

Tell me about what inspired you to write Rouge and what it's about.

Well, Rouge is really about the women who created the cosmetic industry.

The first multi-billion dollar category founded primarily by women.

And I have to tell you that I was surprised that there wasn't really a major novel about the book before, you know, and I being an ad man and having run everything from Avon to Revlon, you know, as accounts, and having worked with many, many, many well-known female entrepreneurs, I thought this was the book that I needed to write. It's really an homage to all the amazing female entrepreneurs who founded this incredible category. Amazing. But why now? Why this book right now in your life? What made you do it? What made you say, okay, this is the story. I really want to tell it, and I've got to get this one out. It's about growth, and it's about evolution. I had a column that I was writing for the New York Observer, which got a lot of attention. It was called Isn't That Rich, Life Among the 1%. And I wrote that for a number of years, and it turned into a book, and the book got sold to ABC. It was a book of essays, but I always wanted to do a novel,

and I always wanted to do a novel of the ilk that I grew up with, you know, with these

amazing authors like Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz and Dominic Dunn and Truman Capote

and, you know, Philip Roth and all these people, I mean, they're all very different,

but those were books you couldn't put down. And I love to read. I'm a voracious reader,

but people aren't writing those kind of books today as much anymore, you know. And so I really,

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