Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359]

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0:25 Operate smarter and stay ahead of the curve. See what Ridgeline can unlock for your firm. Schedule a demo at ridgeline.ai. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossis.com.

1:00 Mm. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Some. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

1:23 To learn more, visit psum.vc. Mm. My guest today is Michael Ovitz. Michael is the legendary talent agent and co-founder of CAA. Or creative artists agency.

1:37 Michael started CA in nineteen seventy five and over the next twenty years. He built it into the world's most formidable talent agency. Changing Hollywood forever. The list of stars he's worked with is endless, from Meryl Streep to Steven Spielberg and David Letterman. His innovations like the creation of the package, which we discuss.

1:55 changed how the entertainment industry worked. Since leaving CAA, he has become an investor and advisor to many prominent investing firms. Most notably Andreessen Horowitz. But also including many other household names, which we discuss in this episode. I cannot remember a conversation with more great stories.

2:11 Michael's work ethic is unmatched, and when I'm with him I leave feeling both energized but also challenged. He has a unique way of setting and holding a standard, which I've s first hand. Please enjoy this great discussion with Michael Ovitz. When we first met, we talked a lot about Michael Crichton, who is an incredibly impactful person for me from afar, and I know for you up close and personal as of one of your dearest friends. He had this quote, which is that if you want to be happy, forget yourself. I love this idea. Could you describe why this is a beautiful idea? Michael was

2:46 One of the most important people that ever entered my life. His advice was always Short and poignant. He Loved

2:56 to be a contrarian on everything. We had lunch once a week for thirty years and lunch or dinner and would talk about art. I don't know if you know this, but he wrote the definitive Catalog resonne on Jasper Johns, for example. Somehow I'm not surprised at that. But isn't that amazing that he wrote short stories, he wrote novels, he wrote screenplays, and he wrote

3:21 Art critique which is really hard to do, particularly if you write it so people can actually understand it. Because most art criticism is almost incomprehensible. It's just it's just difficult to understand. And he made it simple. I would go to him with issues'cause we were not just business partners, we were friends.

3:43 I mean I'll never forget I went to him once along the lines of the quote that you mentioned and His attitude was If you can't control it, don't worry about it. And he always had these short little sayings and one time I went to him I said, You know I'm very concerned that this deal I've been working on for nine months is cratering and it was really upsetting to me'cause I'd put so much time and energy and I had so many company people involved in it.

4:11 As a team. And he looked at me, he said, Well There's always another race track. So his attitude was look, again, you can't control it. There's nothing you can do about it. Talking to him was a treat.

4:26 He always had interesting insights, but He could swivel from um Creative topics. Which are very difficult because creativity is so misunderstood. There's so many different kinds of creativity, but there's one common denominator amongst it all, which is somebody.

4:47 has an idea and they try to verbalize it or write it down. And then somebody If the creator doesn't have the money to Moving forward. They have to present it to somebody, so somebody that's listening to it

5:02 Has to be able to hear the song in their head. Or see the story in their head or Run a movie in their head that It parallels the creative idea. And a kind of interesting

5:17 Fact. to consider is that if you take A screenplay. And you give it to ten different directors. you're gonna actually end up with ten different movies.

5:28 The stories will be the same, but Each director is going to pick their own cast, each director's going to pick their own cinematographer, each director's going to pick their own production designer, each director is going to pick the The person that does the music and Everyone's different. So the films are gonna have some different look, some different feel, different pacing. The editors are all different. Michael understood that really well.

5:53 If you think about this notion of forgetting yourself, do you think the best way to do that in practice is just through action and not spending too much time sitting and thinking, but instead getting out in the world and doing things. You know, it's a very, very difficult thing to address and I'll tell you why. Michael said that as advice to other people.

6:14 But one thing about Michael is he was often in his own head and Didn't take his own advice. So there was a period of time Where I couldn't get'em to write a word for two years.

6:27 It was beyond writer's block. He just Didn't have anything. that was interesting to him, and I used to go see him And stopped by he lived near me in West LA and I'd stop by home, you know, like every other day to see him and for ten minutes and I couldn't get him. I just couldn't push him over the hill. The agents were

6:49 Basically Walking around telling people that he was burning on a original The word original could mean book, screenplay. It was amorphous by design. We didn't want anyone to think that he had writer's block or he couldn't work and So we literally would tell the community on incoming requests for his work that he was working on his own thing and on outgoing we just talk about him like he was unavailable. But the reality was he was doing nothing but eating, sleeping, and sitting around and watching TV, and he just couldn't find anything that was interesting and he was a little down in the dumps, frankly. You know, you go up and down

7:28 And It's also a kind of lonely life'cause you're You don't have anyone to interact with. And finally. I said

7:38 Let's go to breakfast one morning. I wanna get you out early and let's see if we can what we can do. And we went to breakfast at the Bel Air Hotel that we met at Like eight o'clock in the morning and we just sat and talked for about an hour, and by the way, I didn't do that a lot'cause I didn't have Time. Time was my enemy. And

7:57 If I spent forty five minutes at breakfast, that was usually enough. I don't believe That every breakfast has to be an hour, every lunch has to be two hours, and every dinner has to be three hours, and every meeting has to be an hour, that's nonsense they should go as long as they take. to get something done or accomplished,'cause in essence, that's what we're doing. But with him it was different. I could sit and yak all day and finally I said to him, I said You have to write, you you just have to do something. Let's take a rejected storyline that you had in the past.

8:29 And he had pitched me a story that he had in the past, which was really interesting. It had to do with volcanoes, which He did tons of research on everything. So if you watch some of his films, you're always educated at the beginning, think that you become an expert.

8:46 In twenty minutes on something, but he really aren't, but he's prepping, you know. And he said, Well, I had one idea, but I think I'm not sure about it. I said, What's that? He said, Well What if you had three Not stars, just three average people. Two young people and uh

9:04 Middle. Thirties person. And they get lost. In an amusement park. Off the coast of South America.

9:13 And I go, Yeah, Tony Moore, and he said And in that amusement park some scientists His bread. Prehistoric animals. And I looked at him and I said

9:26 You can't I said, Are you sick? Are you out of your mind? I said my son loves dinosaurs, my young son plays with Toys that are dinosaurs all the time. I love dinosaurs and my dad loves dinosaurs. You've just hit the entire demographic. And I said, You gotta go write this. I said like right now. And he left the hotel.

9:51 And lo and behold He calls me back about a week later, he says I have ten pages. And I said, Great, let's Just finish the book.

10:02 Let's just finish the book. And I knew to read the ten pages was irrelevant because Every Cryton idea. is an education for the first. quarter of the story.

10:15 Like in Jurassic Park. The first thing. I never thought about it that way, but it's so true. Yeah, he's kinda Teaching her how to be a pain. So many, yeah. That was his trademark, which no one ever you think about it, but you don't you don't realize it. So I said, Michael, I know what you're doing in the first ten pages. I wanna see the whole thing and I wanna see it in the next Four months, I said you can do this. And he went seven days, seven nights, and four months later called me up, said I want you to come get.

10:45 the book and I dropped by his house. I picked up a galley. I went to the office. I Went home and read it. And spent all night. Reading it and

10:55 I couldn't stop turning the pages and I call them at seven o'clock in the morning and I just said, you know You're just so full of it. Is there anything good ever that doesn't have that page turning quality? Yeah, there're certain things where they're intended to unfold slowly. Originally when I started in the business in the sixties, European films were known as

11:17 to have the camera linger on characters and scenes longer and they had a different pace. I think they closed the distance with the American films over the years. French films still did a lot of that. They're much more introspective, I think. That I think if you watch something like Terms of Endearment, for example, it's brilliantly weaved together, but it's not a fast Movie. I think a lot of it depends on the subject matter. I had a client named Dick Donner who was a brilliant director superman and the original omen, and he was a fantastic man. And he used to say to me

11:52 When you're reading something, just think there's a clock in the upper Right hand corner of the screen. So like on Omen every fifteen minutes. Some crazy thing occurred that just pulled you out of your seat. And it was like

12:08 A graph that went flat and then spiked and then came down to flat. It was called pacing. And it's something that stayed with me for my whole career. Michael was an expert at the Build.

12:22 And then it just keeps going. and he teases you in Jurassic Park when you hear the T Rex in the case. And with that big wall of wire, yeah. And Steven. The Stephen story's equally as interesting.

12:37 Steven's one of the greatest directors in the history of The cinema and I call them. That morning I guess I called him around eleven, twelve o'clock at home and I said I read something last night that just Blew me away.

12:53 And he said, Who is it and what is it? I said it's From Michael Crant. I'm not gonna tell you what it's about. I need you to read this tonight. You're the first and only person that I'm giving this to. I said, You don't have to tell me Kate Capshaw, who's fantastic, who's his wife.

13:08 I actually knew her before Steven did. She was an actress in the community and really well thought of and I said, I'll call her. So I called Kate and I said, I need permission for Steven to read tonight instead of be with the kids. And she was great. She said, Okay, sent the book over and Next morning, about seven thirty, my phone rang. Steven said, I'm in. I mean he didn't say anything, I mean

13:32 It was odd because we had no studio. We didn't have a screenplay. We didn't have a cast. We didn't have money. We had a book.

13:42 And Steven Spielberg committed to it. Good start. It was a great start. We went out and got a budget done. By Frank Marshall and Kathy Kennedy. Frank was my college roommate and he was a great producer and Kathy Rand Stevens company and got a budget. And

13:58 Steven was probably the only director that could have actually pulled this off because technology at that time wasn't our friend. To make Dinosaurs look so real. And we got a budget. We hired a writer. Michael took a stab with the writer and a script. We started to get a script.

14:16 We knew getting financing would be a negative problem, not a positive one. Negative in that there were s seven to ten financial submissions to make, but only one would get it, so you're gonna have a lot of people upset. Because it's that good. So we made a decision to go to one place, one place only, and give'em a take it or leave it in twenty four hours. So we went to universal and

14:39 I call the man who ran Universal, a guy named Sid Scheinberg, who worked ran Lou Wasserman's business and He was very close to Steven'cause he gave Steven a start in the business with a universal television movie called Duel. And they were very good friends, and I said, Sid, I've got good news and bad news for you. He said, What's the good news? And I said, The good news is we've got a Michael Crichton book, Steven Spielberg's gonna direct it. It's ready to go. We've got

15:09 A screenplay. We've got a budget. And We'd like to offer it to you first. You got a day to think about it. Frankly, I don't think there's much to think about, but I'm not running your company. And we want uh

15:22 a very unique deal on this where we're partners with the studio. And We also are gonna wanna add Schimler's list to the deal. Oh wow, interesting. So you're gonna have to do Schindler's list? He says, Okay. And he said, Is there anything else? I said, Well

15:40 Schimler's list's gonna have to be shot in black and white, and I thought he was gonna Come through the phone'cause If you did it in those days there were video cassettes. You couldn't sell a video cassette in black and white. There was no audience for it.

15:54 But it said okay and he said okay, what's the bad news? I said, We own it and you don't. He said, Okay, let's do a deal and We did a deal in twenty four hours. How many stories like that? Of that level of incredible characters and how it all came together, do you think you were a part of over the years?

16:13 It's a high bar. Luckily for me, probably more than we have time for. I may have been the luckiest person to work in the film business and television and books. than music because I caught the tail end of the

16:29 Golden years in those businesses. If I think about what defined that era for you and your success, we'll talk about all the aspects, the packaging, the stars, the era, et cetera. this idea of scale just comes up over and over and over again. I want to talk about it in the context of investing too. Why was scale and speed? And the speed to get that scale so critical to the story of CAA's success. And it seems like lots of your successes.

16:56 I'm a firm believer that scale is critical and I have a lot of friends that disagree with me and there's no right or wrong answer. There's no right or wrong answer. You look at two successful companies in the investment world, they were both of which I worked with and are phenomenal and run by really brilliant guys. If you look at Josh Cushner you've had on this podcast, and you look at Mark Anderson and Ben Horwitz.

17:24 They've both been crazy successful and one And I've worked with both sides one didn't want to scale big at the beginning, which was Josh, and he runs a very large AUM. with a very small lean staff and Mark and Ben wanted to build an institutional scale.

17:44 Which differentiated them from every other VC. As a matter of fact, the minute they opened their door. They wanted to scale. Because they want it to be different. They want to provide full services to to the community of creators.

18:01 And Josh wanted to provide service, but on a more one on one basis. So you could go to both places for financing. And you get fabulous advice, but from one place you get more singular Person advice and from another place you'd get

18:18 Teams of people that would Be specialists in every area. But to answer your question on the scale I just had this discussion with someone you and I know well together and about why scale's important versus not important. This person took the position in a meeting with me that scale is

18:39 not necessary in the investing world and he had some good points and there surely are a lot of investors course solo practitioners who are very good At it, but I said um Scale

18:53 Gives you information and knowledge is power. And if you've got multiple people that communicate by the way. And that's one thing at CA that no one could beat us on everybody knew everything about everything. 'Cause there was no politics, no one held anything back. If you positioned your associates, you shouldn't be at the company. You could position anyone you wanted except your associates and your clients.

19:18 And you did your fighting outside the firm, not inside. But if you have scale, the amount of information that we got in the fifth year versus the first year was geometric. It was to a hundredth power.'Cause you had all these men and women sitting around a table. they would share their previous day. At eight o'clock in the morning.

19:40 while other companies were still sleeping. And by nine thirty ten. Everyone had every piece of information that everyone else had. Which was great'cause we'd then go out and call everybody else's clients. Whose meetings were starting at nine thirty.

19:57 and by eleven thirty when they finished their clients had all the information from us. Which accelerated our growth curve which was a foundation. of our business, which was constant momentum. So to me, scale is information, information is knowledge, knowledge is power. And it gives you a facility to move

20:19 quickly and efficiently and with authority. Because it made no sense To be able to say to someone A made up answer. Matter of fact, we had a rule that if you don't have an answer, you say

20:32 To the client or to the person you're talking to, I do not have an answer to that. I will call you back. Which was antithetical to how I was trained in the business, which is always have an answer. When I was a young agent, the guy I worked for always had an answer and I used to listen in on his calls and half the time he was making it up. You know, and you can't do that in a business. You just can't do it. You could Probably do it in the

20:56 slower moving businesses like movies. Not in television or music. Where the businesses move they turn on a dime. But you could probably do that in the book business and in the movie business. They move very slow.

21:11 Why don't more CEOs or investors who are founders of their own firm. have effectively an agent that Do for them. what you used to do for Hollywood talent.

21:22 Over the years Starting when I am the Early nineties when I first traveled to the valley. Ninety three I called Bill Gates cold. Yeah, and I asked to see him he was fantastic and he invited me to dinner.

21:38 Up at Microsoft and I went up flew up. We had four hours with he and Steve Bomer at a sushi bar talking about A future that none of us really had our arms around, but we both decided that we both did things at some place somehow. We're gonna cross. And it was a couple of months later that I met a guy who I'm crazy about to this day named Nathan Mirvold, who was the number three Guy, the CTO of Microsoft, who looked at me one day and we were standing in a room and there was a

22:10 stereo speaker in the room and a stereo setup and he said, Michael, I just want to warn you about something and this is out of the blue. And I said, What's that, Nathan? He said, See that stereo speaker? I said, Yeah, he said, You know that music that comes out of that little Tape that's in the cassette player, I said, Yeah, he said, You're not gonna need that at some point in time. I said, So where's the music gonna come from? and he pointed to the sky.

22:35 It was one of those epiphany moments. I would have never thought of that. And here's a guy who's telling me that this is gonna happen and he's got what I call positional power. Which is he has knowledge. And he's in this field and he's got an idea. That I better pay attention to.

22:56 I was a consultant at a time for Multiple record companies. I was a consultant for Warner Records. I was a consultant for R CA and I was a consultant for Bertelsmann. And for Sony. I went and told my story that Nathan told me to all the guys that were friends that were running these businesses.

23:15 And it was interesting. The responses went from you're insane. Two It's good, but no one will ever replace ultimately, you know. packaged hardware, hard goods. And I said, look, I don't know, but I feel an obligation to be paying for it. I gotta just give you this message. And

23:36 It was interesting the guys that embraced it and the guys that didn't. And Some guys just went down with the ship. They just wouldn't let go. And other guys. Dug into it really quick.

23:49 You look at someone like Lucian Grange, who's Been brilliant at it. Navigating. the digital of it all. And then you look at other guys whose names I don't want to mention who just sat on their hands and

24:02 decided to go old school listen, a lot of studios that we work with we would advise them that in our travels in the valley, and very few people from LA went up north. And we were going up there a lot. We did a deal.

24:19 I'm Matt. Andy Grove, which was one of the highlights of my career as an agent and Andy, yeah, as you know, was one of the founders of Intel and We did the Intel CA media lab in ninety three. And

24:34 We took a room in our building and turned it into every piece of hardware that was transitioning to software and over the air transmissions and the CA building had like three giant satellite domes on it and we were on the corner of Wilshire and Santa Maga and people thought like it looked like a spaceship. And Andy said part of the deal was we'd have two CA staff there and two Intel Experts on chips and how the chips worked in the computers. And Andy to his credit.

25:10 at our suggestion made a animated short. Of how a chip works because none of us frankly understood it. You could have explained it to me till you were blue in the face. Patrick and I wouldn't have Understood what you were talking about, and Andy did a

25:25 Ninety second two minute. Animated. About how it starts. From the raw material. All the way to when it's implanted in the

25:34 computer and then what it does when it's inside. And we ran that As a loop. Continuously, and we tried to show our clients. what the future was gonna look like even though we really weren't sure. But between that and then meeting Andres and

25:51 working on Ben and Mark's board and reading the white paper and meeting guys like Teal and Reed Hoffman and Just some of the smartest people. It bookended the other smart set of people I met creatively. Sounds like The answer is

26:07 They do have agents, but the model in your case, for example, is that you become an investor. You become an investor in their investing business, in their underlying equity, if you're investing in a founder. the model's just different. You can't get a cut of projects that happen episodically and you just want to be involved in a business instead, but the agenting still works. What I failed to mention in answering your question, and I apologize, is We looked from the nineties very carefully at being agents for engineers.

26:33 That was the first thing we did. And we couldn't. figure out a financial business model because you'd get them a job. And then They'd have like a long contract and commissioning their salary.

26:48 Didn't sound appetizing at the time for the amount of work. where we made a mistake is frankly commissioning their options. Right. That would've worked. That would have worked. But who the heck knew that those options were going to explode like they did. But today I'm involved with two young guys That of a company called Human Capital. And

27:12 They started a business basically representing engineers for free. And they send those engineers to companies. to get them jobs, but what they've done that is brilliant as they Track all the engineers.

27:27 And they have recruiters at the top schools in the country. And they have the biggest Database on engineers that are starting of anybody that I know. I think the two guys are brilliant. They've got a business that no one else has, so they're now investors, but they get an inside look.

27:46 From the creators. Can you say a little bit more about this idea of positional power, understanding that a big part of that is knowledge. But it just seems like you've gravitated towards situations where you've not had to compete, like I said earlier, and I'm sure positional power and a frame is a really important strategy. So

28:04 Say as much as you can about that concept. Positional power is kind of a loose term I use to describe someone like Nathan Mirvold, he's a perfect example. He walks in a room. And there's many Dynamics to positional power.

28:19 One is You really have to have some brain power, or it's a non starter. I mean, you can't be stupid and have positional power. I guess someone once argued with me that if you were a banana country dictator you might be able to do that. You killed enough people, you might get away with it. But it's not the positional power I'm referencing. So Nathan walks in. Looks like a

28:44 CTO. Talks like a CTO. Walks like a CTO. Is the CTO of a company moving up? A mile a minute.

28:55 And when he opens his mouth really smart stuff comes out. So That's positional power at its best, because when he walks in the room He already knows that His luggage has been checked in ahead of him.

29:10 And We used to use that at the agency. In non tangible ways. So for example, this is gonna sound today's world very stupid. But when we started in seventy four

29:23 We insisted that everyone wear a suit. And all the women. We had a lot of women executives, by the way, because In those days we felt probably sixty percent of our staff were women, and we always felt that women actually had an edge against men being better agents than They could come into a room. Man walks in a room, he's got one act.

29:43 He is what he is. There's like no Changing that a woman walks in a room and she can be Tough. She can be sympathetic, she can be a mother, she can be Aggressive she could.

29:56 Get upset. She's got a toolkit that's insane. And we liked having women around, but we led by example, so All of us wore suits. And the women and men

30:09 Dressed. Every day. Yeah, and I was talking to someone about this today'cause we're here in New York and I was in a suit yesterday for a meeting I had with Allie and I told him to wear a suit, which was kinda shocking to him. I think I've seen him outside of a black t shirt. He's had a suit on the last three days.

30:26 And we were in midtown and I remember coming here in for business in the mid sixties up through the nineties. Everyone had a suit on, every woman had a very smart outfit on, and Good God, I was the only guy in Milo, Shina. Coat and tie. As a matter of fact. The guy who's having lunch with be rated me for ten minutes.

30:47 So it's a very different world today. But in those days I wanted our people to have positional power. Yeah, I look for every edge so we did multiple things. One we had a ten page bibliography of what we felt they needed to read on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Because knowledge is power we had a dress code that we never mentioned. Just led by example, we had ours which we never mention were led by example, and

31:14 The partners' cars were the first in in the morning and the last to leave. We had a thesis that you never allow anyone to buy you a meal. or let you ride on their private plane without them. You can't be bought. Small thing but a big thing. Speak statement. And we tried to take as much positional power advantage as we could out of non consequential

31:39 Items. Basically, and it worked. When you walk in a room and you're dressed Properly and the people you're negotiating with or sitting there in jeans and a T shirt or a polo shirt.

31:51 You kinda just feel better about yourself in those days. I can't say that now'cause I got thrown out of the valley for wearing a blue to my first Andrewson. Horwitz board meeting where everyone there, a friend of mine named Mike Volpe, looked at me, he said, Are you kidding? And he said, What are you what are you nuts? There was a guy in the room, one of the board members had shorts, but he had madras shorts on with a uh his name was Mike Homer, great guy.

32:17 legend in his day and He's sitting there in Madras shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, neither of which matched. And he looked at me and he said, I'm not even gonna say it. So funny. Speaking of Mark, I asked him what to talk to you about, and his response was just a day in the life. And it reminded me of a conversation you and I had where you said something like For thirty plus years you made two hundred and fifty calls a day. And I wanna talk about that day in the life and the volume of interaction that you had because it's very easy to say like get scale and

32:51 get information, but I want to make sure people understand like what that takes, like the amount of hard work that pace. the stamina, the energy that goes into that. So maybe give us a little bit of that flavor of a day in the life. Well, Petra, I think you just hit on all the keywords. I mean If someone wants to build a business to me, and I only speak for myself, everybody has their own opinion, but foundationally

33:14 Momentum is critical. Building a knowledge bank is critical, surrounding yourself with people As you recruit that can take your job is critical. Not being afraid is critical. Being on what I call positive role is critical. No negativity.

33:33 And m momentum is built By action not inaction. And that action Y one creates themselves. So we didn't have internet when we started, so we didn't have email or text.

33:47 A big thing for us in the early days was car phones, which were radio based, by the way, they weren't digitally based. You were on an open radio channel. As a matter of fact, it's One of the ways we signed a lot of clients because a couple of the agents

34:04 the more senior agents who had these radio car phones used to give up way too much information to their assistants or compatriots on an open line and we would just jot it down. Which was like to me, it was like crazy. We had one guy who had a phenomenal client list and I was twenty eight or twenty nine, and this guy I discovered every morning drove forty five minutes to his office. And every morning he'd get on the phone with his assistant and

34:35 one of his junior agents and he would go through problem areas. And I just sat in my car and took notes and started calling his clients. It was unbelievable. He gave me a roadmap. But basically If you don't have energy And you don't want to make a time commitment.

34:54 And you wanna have kind of an easier life. You shouldn't try to start a business. I don't know a founder that I've worked with anywhere. That isn't driven like the snow. And

35:07 If you can't keep that pace up for Twenty years. And I mean that. There's no business I've ever seen that can Get up and running in under seven to ten years.

35:19 I don't know why it's that number, but if you look around and start seeing when did businesses hit critical mass? It's seven to ten years and If you don't have the Energy. And the desire and that burning

35:34 Sensation in your gut. And the fear of failing. And A desire. To make it for the right reasons, and it can't just be financial, by the way. You gotta want to do something with your gains that's socially important.

35:52 That's a very important item for me. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. I've been blessed with meeting really great founders and working with some of the brightest young people in our country.

36:06 I think that if you don't want to put the time and effort in and you don't have a belief If you don't believe in your idea, don't start a business. And if you can't do momentum. I did two hundred and fifty calls a day, but I wasn't the only one. We all did. The whole business did the company, it wouldn't have worked with just me. And that's a critical distinction to make.

36:27 We had a partnership and We had a hundred and fifty agents and You have to realize what that did. You had a hundred and fifty agents in all different fields. At one point two hundred going out. Covering

36:42 The community between New York and LA in all creative areas. Everything. Taking that information Reporting it back into a meeting every single day,

36:54 Sharing it unfiltered. No cards held close to the vest. And then Doing two to three hundred calls a day. Outgoing.

37:05 And incoming, that's both. And creating this momentum. It's not stoppable and it builds on itself to the hundredth. power. So if you had two hundred agents, it builds to the two hundredth power. And one can't compete with that. It's not an accident that we ended up with the best. clientless or the most film packages or most musical tours or most books on the New York Times.

37:30 It fed on itself. And You talked about competition internally. We had a very simple thesis which was

37:41 If you have a competitive actor That you are worried about. So if you're Dustin Hoffman El Pacino and Bob De Nero, you traditionally have wanted separate agents. So when we sign Dustin

37:56 A couple years in I asked him to help us. Get Deniro and Vicino and You know, he kinda looked at me. I said, wouldn't you rather know what they're doing rather than not and they should know what you're doing. You're only an actor who can do And you're brilliant, but you can only do two things a year, maybe.

38:14 And probably knowing you, you can do one thing every three years. There's plenty to go around. But it'd be nice if you guys all work together and all of a sudden you see heat with Pacino and De Niro and Michael Mann, all three clients of the agency, had May have been doable without that, but probably a lot easier and a lot less friction. under the same roof. So our thesis was everybody should be with us, which really irritated people because that's like unholy.

38:41 But our attitude is Be in the clubhouse and Partake in the wonderful information and material that comes in for everybody and if you've got everybody you get everything.

38:54 Which Sounds pretty simple one, by the way, it is. But it was like no. Diligence and follow up. Follow up is critical. You can't in any business, even if you're building

39:10 Chips. If you don't have follow up, you're not gonna build a business. If you don't touch base with someone after You've had a first contact. Yeah, I was telling Ollie at lunch the other day. Meeting someone isn't enough.

39:24 The first meeting is easy. Anyone can get a first meeting. It's the fifth meeting. and how you're perceived that's critical and if there's no Consistency and follow up. There's no building the business and I don't care what business you're in, you've got to have follow up. In addition to your

39:41 Follow up rule. One of the other things that you listed in the book was never badmouthing the competition. Say more about The reasoning behind that. I like it on its face, but To me it made no sense because

39:54 I worked with a guy when I was twenty two years old, when I was an agent of William Morris, a manager, very famous guy, had a huge client list. And I'd sit on the phone with him and all he would do was bad mouth everyone. around him, including his partner. It was kind of a subtle bad mouth thing, you know, and I realized early on it wasn't attractive.

40:16 And it also made me think he was really insecure because I said to myself, Why is he doing this? To his own partner. He should be telling me his partner's the greatest thing since the wheel. And get me to deal with the guy so he doesn't have to take my calls. And his attitude was

40:33 He's putting everybody down. So we used to say to everyone we worked with, you don't have any Gain. of momentum in bad mouthing somebody, you kinda look weak. We didn't let anybody badmouth. movies of other agencies, directors.

40:50 Because we knew we'd end up with those directors, so it would look it would it would look stupid. And then also Who bet not somebody. It's somebody who doesn't believe in themselves and is really insecure. There's no positive Ga. to the

41:06 equation in bad mouthing somebody and I just I don't believe in it. Is there anything else that comes to mind as you think about these aspects of power and influence that were generated? Like that's a really interesting backdoor into it, because you look weak if you're bad mouthing people, which I think is totally true. Any other things like that that really define the culture at CAA that you think are most interesting? I always like to say that we were a blend Of American team sports.

41:36 Asian philosophy. And just plain old outworking everybody else. Um And then I kinda Put a dash of Alexander Dumas three musketeers on top of it all for one and one frull and Sounds trite, sounds stupid, but in nineteen seventy four it worked.

41:56 Because we did everything as a group. So when we started five of us that started the place would attend every meeting and go to every event. Then there were ten of us, then fifteen, then twenty, then thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, and like when screenings occurred, in the entertainment business, which is how movies and television shows were exposed to the community always a head of release dates.

42:22 We We're manipulative, frankly. We knew that the screen curtain went down at seven thirty. People were seated from seven to seven fifteen, non reserve seating. twelve hundred people in the auditorium. And we

42:37 Would go In groups of ten. and walk down the aisle together. And saying hello to people and No one thought much of it until

42:47 Subconsciously There was a buzz. Oh CA is here. And We did things that

42:55 Seemed. Ridiculously simple one. Faultless, frankly, but they were manipulative and creating an image for in a business that's all image. We design script covers and I as you know love art. You've been to my house and I'm quite the collector. Well, I'm I'm addicted.

43:16 I chose a primary colour for script cover red. And someone said, What are you doing that for? It's so not other people had like white mostly white, you know. And I shall tell you why it's a primary caller. It is a reactive color. If you want to have fun.

43:33 Sometime when you have nothing to do, Google the science. absolutely mesmerizing to read about the science of color and what colors stimulate subconsciously in your brain. And I said, but here's what it is. It's only gonna stimulate one thing. People are gonna see it. Okay, they said, and I said, Here's what we're gonna do. We printed a thousand old scripts of movies that had already been made and TV shows that already made we

44:00 Put'em in script covers. And I had mailroom guys go drop them off at every doctor and dentist office in Beverly Hills and Westwood. On the coffee table. They just opened the door and drop it and left. And all these people that were going to Their doctor or their dentist.

44:18 Sitting amongst time magazine. These were the times when people read magazines. Sitting amongst time and people in Newsweek. And fortune and business week. There's a CA cover with a script in it. Ubiquity. And people they would look at it and they If we just register and Then they'd say something to somebody or the image was in their head.

44:40 It was the logo on a red background. So that's what we did. Incredible. I'd love to talk about talent and your reputation for being able to not only spot talent, but do so quite quickly. Obviously you said, you know, it's the capacity to work for seven, ten, twenty years that's gonna build the great big things. But if you've got ten minutes. And you are

45:00 looking for talent or the lack thereof. What are you doing? What are you processing? What are you looking for? What are you looking to avoid? Something that would indicate maybe they're not the kind of person you want to work with. That's a good question. It's very difficult to describe it any other way than It's very much

45:18 Like collecting art. In a strange way. Everyone asks me how do I start collecting art? I'm mentoring three young people in San Francisco right now that wanna start our collection. So I A sent them a bibliography of books, a list of the top galleries and

45:34 fifty artists uh that are on the contemporary that they should look at their work. And they said, What are we doing with all this? And I said You're looking at pictures. Why are we looking at pictures? Because if the more you look at

45:49 And you can never look it enough. Your brain will automatically Automatically cognitively put a weight. Of zero to ten on anything you look at. And you're gonna remember the zero's and the tens and forget the rest, and that's all you need. Because you're gonna build what I call frame of reference on what's good and what's bad,'cause every art show

46:11 has in it by any artist, I don't care who they are. They've got maybe twelve to fifteen pictures they've worked on for the last year and Probably two of them are masterpieces. Five or six or seven of them are Somewhere.

46:26 between the best and average. And two of them should have never gone in the show. They should have been edited out of the show. And that's how you learn. taste and what works and what doesn't. And it's not dissimilar with human beings. I don't think I could have done this.

46:46 perfectly at the beginning of my career, but I was lucky enough to start in the entertainment business when I was seventeen. And I met a lot of people. And the more people you meet. The easier it is. And when you sit with someone you get certain

47:02 cues that are both social and intellectual that give you a frame of reference about drive, about emotion, about deportment, about looking at you when you talk to them about Different tiny it kinda reminds me of a Surra painting, the Sira the pointless. If you look at a two inch square of a Syrah picture, you see a bunch of points and dots. You look at a four inch square

47:32 More points than dots. Eight inch square. more points than not sixteen inch square, maybe you see a little bit of a figure. Thirty two inch were off. There's two figures sitting over there, and then as it gets bigger, the picture appears. And it pierces your eyes and the sensory perception.

47:50 puts all those dots together into something that's quite extraordinary. He was one of my favorite artists. It's the same thing with meeting with talent. And In the world I come from you get about ten minutes. To make a decision if you have time to keep going. Because if it's not something that you think is gonna work, you gotta stop it because

48:10 times your enemy in anything you do. In anything even recreation times your enemy. And you can't keep going. So I taught myself. And all of the people we work with taught themselves to kinda Look at a lot of nonverbal cues

48:27 And listen carefully to what somebody says. And you get a sense and then compare that in your cognitive scale of things other people you've talked to. So meet with a director and You wanna have an amazing Conversation about film talk to Martin Scorsese.

48:46 If you want to use Martin Scorsese's brilliance to help you pick talent, It's a fantastic tool. Because If somebody doesn't say something that has some correlation to the way he speaks.

49:01 About movies. They're missing an element that they need to have greatness. No The ratio of right to wrong is

49:12 Good. But it's not flawless. You miss people sometimes. I remember early on we made a mistake. We missed John Travolta. When we were kids.

49:23 I was twenty seven or eight, he was doing like Welcome Back Carter and He played this character, and we all thought he had one dimension. We were just Wrong. Dead wrong.

49:35 We made a mistake, and you gotta own up to it. I admit that. all the time. He's brilliant. He's a great actor. He's played a zillion characters. I was just actually watching something he did the other night with Quentin Tarantino and I've seen it ten times and there's certain scenes in there that he does that just He and Sam do these scenes together that are just absolutely

49:58 Brilliant. And We blew it. There's so much charisma.

50:05 to a great entertainer that probably blends quite a bit into founders who are marshalling resources and selling people and building a narrative Investors seem quite different. as a category of people if I think through some of the greatest investors

50:19 They're kind of nothing like some of the great founders or entertainers. What patterns have you noticed or do you look for because You've done this quite a few times. You've worked with Mark, with Josh, as you mentioned. I know you're close with Bill Ackman. You're working with Ali Ahmed now, whose name you've mentioned a few times. What are the points of pattern recognition for investors specifically, do you think, that are the same and or different than you'd be looking for in in founders or entertainers? First of all, it's all the same. Which is odd, but it's the same and it's different.

50:49 If that makes any sense too. Okay, it's different in certain categories, but it's the same underlying fundamental principles. I was once asked when I transitioned into Full time. being up in the valley, which was thanks to Two guys. More countries on her balance.

51:07 And Lorandre, who Stage an intervention with me in New York City on the Upper East Side. twenty years ago. Well basically they Invited me to dinner at six thirty and

51:20 Which is a half hour late for Herb because he you know, he likes to eat dinner at late lunch hour. He learned that from his father, who was one of my mentors. Herb the second, who I learned the investment banking business from. And Herb the third and Mark and Laura met me for dinner. I had no idea what I was going to for and Sat down and Mark just looks at me and says well

51:41 This is an intervention. I thought he was kidding. He was not kidding. He said, You are running around New York and we all think You're wasting your time. And he was brutally direct about it as only people

51:55 in the digital space can be. And he said You have to stop doing what you're doing, which is generally consulting for a lot of different businesses. I was out of the agency business. You have to move to San Francisco and you gotta get into the Investment area.

52:10 And I said. I don't know what you guys know about investing, and they both said it's very simple. You put talent together with money and got them distribution. That's what we do too. That's exactly what we do for a living. And I said, Wow, I never looked at it that way. He was a hundred percent right.

52:30 That night I um canceled everything I had the next day and the next day I flew to San Francisco and rented an apartment. And I moved up there three days a week and started and I was doing The exact same thing. than I did before exactly as predicted.

52:47 And Meeting with founders was no different than meeting with someone who wanted to be an actor, a director, or a writer. And you had Certain other criteria that were added to my

53:02 outline of what I felt was important to judge talent and to see if it was someone I wanted to work with or invest in. My investing is a bit different than a lot of other people's. I'm probably less detailed, but on diligence than I am on thinking I invest in people. If they've got a decent idea.

53:24 And I feel the founder is talented and dedicated and believes in his or her idea, I will invest in them. And I will invest If I don't like the idea sometimes. And many times I've done that and the company's failed, but the second idea's been amazing. And I've made my money back.

53:45 But it's all about the people. There's a young man that I'm very fond of in San Francisco named James Proud. And Oh, sure. I'm we had dinner with him about talking about China. And I I met him He was twenty Barely twenty.

54:05 He was twenty till he opened his mouth and the stuff that came out of it blew me away. And I invested in his first business. He was a teal fellow, which to me was a very good I take all of the Points. Like Sarah to weigh the talent and a teal fellow is a It's a good point.

54:29 Point. He had a business that I thought was interesting, but I don't invest in hardware businesses. There are too many things that can go wrong with them. And sure enough he did this business as a great product and of course it failed. He's got a business now that is so amazing.

54:46 And so smart and so important to the country, it's like he's on a mission. He's like on a mission from above to make this work and it's gonna help the country. And he's getting support from the government, which he should. He's raised a lot of money. He's hired Some of the greatest minds in the country. He's basically trying to build ships in this country and he I

55:09 Met with them and I said James. This time you've gone off the reservation, you know. I mean, do you know how hard that is? And I listened to him and Mm. Convinced me in about thirty minutes.

55:22 why this mission was important, why I had to invest, why it was gonna work and his His commitment to it was second to non idea for saying. And it's about him. He's gonna make it work. For someone like Ali benefit m both knowing him I think of him as a puzzle solver. Like he just can't get enough puzzles to try to figure out investing equations to figure out.

55:44 What does someone with that ability usually need to develop to build a great franchise or a great business since you've been a part of a number of these amazing investing franchises? So a very close friend of mine. Lives here in New York. Name Eric Lane was at lunch with me last Monday. He's the president of Tiger. Used to be a Goldman.

56:03 Fabulous guy. Had lunch with me, he said he met some young guy who's incredibly smart and has a fund and he gave him a little bit of money and Thought I should meet him'cause I love meeting young people. I mean, for me, I have no interest in spending time with anyone my age. I don't want to be around anybody my chronological age or within ten years. And I said great.

56:28 He said he's in his early thirties and he's really smart, so I Mm-hmm. We both know him. And I saw something very special in the sky in ten minutes. It didn't take me long. But on the other side, it was very clear to me that

56:45 He'd built a really interesting business. And no one knew who he was. And he was having trouble getting in certain doors and he hadn't Little credibility even though he's putting up twelve and a half percent returns for ten years and

56:59 His Deal. Investing analytic capability was Off the charts. I call'em all the time. Turn on the engine. It's the engines.

57:10 Not twelve cylinder. It's not like a F right, right. It's like five twelve cylinder engines and he's got endless energy and I saw a lot of things in him that I had when I was his age, as far as drive and desire and Not wanting to move back to the San Fernando Valley where I was raised, and I talk to him every single day through the summer. He absolutely ruined my summer. Patrick, he ruined it. It was every day an hour to two hours.

57:40 And the more I talked the more I respected his brain power. Yeah. deep dive on his business and it was really good. And it's a secret.

57:52 to miracle he raise the kind of money he did because He had no But he vouching for him. He had nobody saying, Hey, this guy's really good. No third party. And if he did it wasn't at the right

58:06 level of introduction. I started working with them about eight weeks ago on The more I work with them, the more I like what I'm doing. To me Building is the most fun. Building CA was so much more fun than getting

58:21 to the end result because once you're at the end result. You kinda feel like every day you're wired up and you walk into town and someone's gonna shoot you in the back. Yeah, yeah, it gets very defensive. It's a defensive move and I'm an offensive player. So I had long talks with him and in the last eight weeks in his inimitable ways, man, it just sucked me into spending mo most of my time. in restructuring his business and

58:48 Recruiting. Terrific investors and raising more money and exposing him to different people and I watch him sit with like I had him sit yesterday with a guy I'm crazy about named Kevin Warsh, who I have giant respect for. He's got a

59:07 What I call entry some teal Crichton style brain and He works with Standruck another who I have great respect for and I took Ollie to meet him and I was proud o' how Ollie held his own gaz against Kevin. That's not an easy task. I sometimes struggle to not only understand what he's saying, but uh, you know, hold my own. Yeah. Incredible. And he did a great job. In the spirit of the red covers on the scripts. One of the things that you read a lot about in your heyday at CA was this sort of mystique that followed you around.

59:40 And I think you even said in your book that you owned the rights to like all the photos of you. So you were this sort of like I think the word boogeyman even came up. And I'd love to hear about The difference, if any, that you cultivated between Did you cultivate a character that created that mystique because it had benefit?

59:58 Or not. And how did you do that? I find that quite attractive and interesting and quite fun, honestly. You have to understand that when I was working in the entertainment business there was No Instagram and no Facebook and no reels and no TikTok and celebrities were really celebrities.

1:00:17 I mean I had The privilege of representing Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Bob De Niro, and Meryl Streep and Bill Murray. One of the great story about the hospital. Yeah, one of the great actors and comedians of our time, John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd and

1:00:38 It's just the list was endless of who we were lucky enough to be involved with. And They were real movie stars. When you walked into a room in a restaurant With those people.

1:00:51 The restaurant just quieted down. You didn't know anything about them, but you saw their work on screen, so you kind of thought you knew them. I was having a drink with a friend Scott Wapner the other day here and I hadn't seen him in a while and we were laughing'cause I said, You know, Scott, I live with you every day so I feel like I've seen you

1:01:12 But you haven't seen me, but I'm watching. And that's the feeling. But That feeling.

1:01:21 Every one of those actors had A kind of distance from the public. So I decided the best thing we could do since we're handling confidential careers and we were gonna do the opposite of what our competition did is we're not gonna talk about them.

1:01:37 I'm just not gonna talk to the press. And I don't want anybody taking pictures of me or my kids. I don't want To be in gossip columns I just wanna be behind it and I don't wanna be in front of it.

1:01:51 And if someone wants to write something they can say whatever they want, but they're not gonna get my cooperation and We had a rule which in those days you could enforce you couldn't today. No one in the company except for our head legal counsel was allowed to talk to any reporter. We didn't wanna give background, we didn't wanna spin stories. We didn't wanna be part of that. And that's what everybody else did. kinda set us apart and by doing that it created a mistake around the company, like a cult kind of Mistake. And it was

1:02:20 defined intentionally. Like if there was a screening one of the mailroom guys or gals would Let me in the back door. And That was after we made it, by the way. That was

1:02:34 And I didn't walk in places with celebrities. No notoriety. Who is that guy? It was all about Getting people to wonder.

1:02:45 That great line of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were Newman turns to Redford and the Pinkertons are chasing them and he goes Who are those guys? So the whole idea is to get people to wag their tongues about who are those guys, how do they do what they do, why do they do what they do. And it worked to a point. I will tell you a side story that's kinda funny, as I was in an elevator with Paul Newman. We were going up to an editing bay here in San Francisco in Chelsea. It was like twenty flights up in the elevator and Paul and I had just had dinner and it's like Seven thirty and in walks some woman.

1:03:21 Some elderly lady with a shopping bag and she looks at me and she looks at Paul and she looks at Paul a second time. She looks at him and she goes. Mr. McQueen. You were so good in that movie about the fire in the buildings. And Paul looks at her. And doesn't skip a beat, he says, you know, somewhat.

1:03:41 You oughta look at that other guy, Newman. He was really good too. And the doors open. And we walk out and I just couldn't stop laughing. It was about building a mistake because It's the same reason like Mark and Ben built scale. How do you differentiate?

1:03:58 There's a hundred and Two hundred V C firms on Sandhill Road. You start up thirteen years ago and so what? Who cares if you're Mark Hendriess and Ben Horst. What have you done for me lately? And

1:04:11 Do you know how to invest. You may know how to operate a business. But do you know how to pick a business? I mean I thought they did, but Who knows? So the reality is You have to have a mystique you have to have a act, you have to have something to put forward, it just doesn't happen by accident.

1:04:27 If you've got a technology, that's great, but we don't all have code that is R I P that no one else has. We don't have that. You have an idea. So we tried that in it. Worked until it didn't. And then In retrospect, I was asked about this uh class I was teaching.

1:04:45 last year and someone asked me the same question. I said and they said, If you started the company today, would you do that? And I said, Absolutely not. I would never go near that. Not with social media or any of the tools that are out there. I said I'd probably if I started CA, which I don't think is possible, by the way, to start it today in this environment. I don't think it's doable. But

1:05:10 I said I Probably would take the Warren Buffett approach and pick up the phone and talk to anybody that called me. Which is a better way to do it because there's no secrets anymore.

1:05:23 There is no secret. There is no mistake. Everything's when you go to Google and you can find out anything you want about anybody. Does that mean that relationship becomes the most important thing? Yeah. Relationship's the most important thing anywhere in anything, whether it's personal, professional, family Servicing your life and your relationships is more important than anything. It's as important as your health because good relationships

1:05:46 Help you be healthy. But the idea of building a mistake today about a business I think is almost impossible. Because everything's an open book. I mean, my God, we didn't have A website called the glass ceiling when I started CAA no one would But we took care of our

1:06:03 People. We were very concerned about our assistants because they made up the culture of the company too. Because they were talking to people. Listen, they were talking

1:06:14 All the people we were dealing with. So if one of my assistants was talking to your assistant And your assistant gets a good feeling about it and you happen to say to your assistant Something in he or she responds to you. That response is gonna have either a positive or negative connotation. So you see how works at so many levels underneath the surface.

1:06:35 Probably the only rule that I could see working today, which would just be me as I would Not allow anyone in the theatral agency business than being social media. on anything except their family. I mean they could have a private account, but don't go posting on

1:06:53 Instagram anything, your opinion, who cares what your opinion is? I mean You may care. I marvel at People that put their opinions out there about things that Have no credibility or no position or

1:07:06 Or no intellectual capability and they put out these emotional gut wrenching opinions and I say to myself, Why? What do you think about offense in investing? One of the lovely anecdotes from the book was this idea that prior to your business, agents were really firefighters. Like they didn't know where they were gonna get called. They sort of just showed up and dealt with something. It was very reactive and you made it very proactive. Like, no, we're gonna go make things happen. Feels like most of investing is more firefighting. where to deal kind of investing in private markets where

1:07:35 Deals come across your desk, they come up a company's fundraising, you react to it, you learn quickly, you make a decision. Do you think there's more room for offense? in investing where you are an activist almost that does packaging, goes and makes things happen. I think there's room for both. I don't wait for things to cross my desk.

1:07:52 I try to keep a scorecard on One of the best experiences of my life is when Peter Thiel asked me to help Alex carp out. with Palantir and get them into a commercial business. It's not like he asked me for my coding expertise. commercial client and keep'em in business and I did. Got them their first commercial gig. in banking with JP Morgan. I spent ten years with them.

1:08:19 I keep an eye on all the palinder engineers that leave to start up businesses'cause When Stephen Cohn was interviewing them, he'd take one for every fifty he interviewed, and if they work there they've got an edge. They've got some intellectual edge. But I don't believe you wait for people to send you stuff. You gotta go out and look for it. So I do both. I can't cover everything. It's one of the reasons that I'm working with Ollie is that we've got a for the first time in years I have

1:08:47 really talented people to work with me. Because I can't do it as a solo practitioner and it wasn't as much fun anyway, so it was getting boring. You like to have someone to do a high five with if you happen to be lucky enough to make a right decision. But I think that

1:09:03 Being offensive in business is a key strategy in investing, no different than it's a key strategy point of being a founder. You can't be a defensive founder. You have to play offensive. And you have to do that also to kind of scare away the competition a little bit. It is so competitive.

1:09:22 in the technology space. The motes are never high enough. your competitors better think that you got a real lead on them and They're not quite sure what you have, but you better make a presentation that it's Maybe a little more than you do to

1:09:37 Just keep your lead. It's important. I'd love to hear a bit more about art. You said you're addicted to it. Like spotting talent, it's spotting beauty. But what about the world of art itself? has taught you other things about the world or about people

1:09:52 That you think is portable. Well, art for me is so much a part of my life because it's what I did for a living too, because Making. movies and music and the clients that I represented. They're artists too just

1:10:05 Visual artist. I once said to Morty, who I'm crazy about and have such respect for, and I said the same thing to Steven. Let's take some single frames out of some of your setups. And frame them and do an art show. We actually did one with Tim Burton. Because

1:10:22 Some of the frames are As good Is anything I've ever seen hanging on a gallery wall the way they're composed? Matter of fact, when Marty did Gangs of New York, I gave him the definitive book on Rembrandt. Because it was

1:10:38 Pictures painted. that showed how Rembrandt lit His paintings with candle light And the period Marty was doing there was a ton of Candle lighting and

1:10:51 early gas lighting, which were single source flames, and Marty's such a stickler for Perfection in what the period looks like. He's so good at it in his research is like a college professor. That he looked at this and it was like a light ball went off and that's how he lit gangs New York when there were interior scenes and there were

1:11:15 Gorgeous, but to me I got lucky, frankly, Patrick. I got interested in art very early. I never left the San Fernando Valley before I was eighteen. And when I was eighteen. I worked every day of my life and I worked every summer, but I took

1:11:31 two weeks off in the middle of the summer from my job and I drove across the country to Kinda get a sense this is between high school and college. I only took two weeks and I drove and I ended up in New York and one of the places that I went to. I had never been to a museum in my life and I went to the Museum of Modern Art. Yeah, I was eighteen years old. And I walked around.

1:11:54 And then I walked around again. And then I walked around again and I stayed there for eight hours. And I was in absolute state of shock. the things that I saw in the Perception of it for me.

1:12:06 Yeah. flooded my brain. It like pixelated my brain. I just couldn't believe what I was saying. Of all periods of our And I said, I need to understand this and I started Reading about art in my spare time.

1:12:20 When I was in college I never went to class'cause I worked sixty hours a week and I went to the first class. And the final. Yeah, I had someone taking notes for me at UCL. Never the enterprising young man. I had a job that was too good to be true. You know, I was running the tour department at twentieth century Fox had seventy five.

1:12:41 People from My college working for me and Forty five of them were attractive young women and the rest of'em were my fraternity brothers. So I I if I told you we were working, I mean we were having a blast, right? But I did go to art class'cause it was at eight o'clock in the morning and I did get Hooked into it and then

1:13:00 When I Graduated college. and went to work full time with William Morris, I started buying Prince. of artists and studying them in my spare time. And

1:13:12 When we started CA it turned out by a fluke. That it was something. All creative people were interested in oddly all directors. wanted had were influenced by some artists. I mean, I'll never forget talking to one of my clients, Stanley Kubrick.

1:13:28 Who's Visually one of the most rich directors ever. Rich and Let's talk about a guy who talked about hell nine thousand Which is Syrian steroids sixty years ago. So let's go to two thousand one Space Odyssey and look at that film, which I've done twenty times and Say how did he think of that?

1:13:47 How did he call me up? Thirty years ago and say to me. I want you to put something, Michael, in my contract so no one can Recreate any of the characters I've created. Digitally.

1:13:59 I said, What are you talking about? What do you mean? How's that even possible? I said, How is that even possible? There's no technology for it. And he said, Somebody's gonna figure it out, and we did it. We put it in his contract. Th you couldn't recreate characters and now we've seen With AI it's like All anyone's doing. But he says to me one day.

1:14:21 I was sitting with him in London at his house having a lunch and we're talking about putting together one of his movies. It was Eyes Wide Shut, and I was pitching Tom Cruise and Nicole to play the leads. They were clients. And it was sitting at a breakfast table. And he brings a book over and he says, You know I love Henri Lartigue, who is a great French photographer, he's

1:14:43 taught me so much and then it just It was very clear to me that Third. Was so important. In talking to directors.

1:14:52 Said to myself, how is it possible there's only like under ten art collectors in Hollywood? How's that? possible that that could be. There's some disconnect that I must be missing something. So I went and spent months thinking about if I was making a mistake. Because to me past this prologue so if historically no one Yeah.

1:15:12 using art as a uh foundation for parts of their business, then maybe I'm making a giant mistake and it's taking up a lot of my time and I just pushed through it. And I said, I think I'm right. And I just kept going and I just love every second of it. It's The challenge of Learning how to judge what pictures are the most beautiful things I've seen for three years, so

1:15:35 For sure. Thank you. And then I have a lot of friends that are artists, so I'm mesmerized by creative people. I can't paint, I can't draw. Can't sculpt. Can't write.

1:15:46 I can't shoot a picture properly with my iPhone. I am just a doofless about anything creative. I can read You can spot it. I can spot it, but probably one of the reasons I became an agent is I was talentless, you know, and uh sound like Rick Rubin on Sixty Minutes. I I feel that way. I just have no talent. One talent I know you have is to be fearless in confrontation. What does that mean? Talk about confrontation.

1:16:11 I think you have to tell the truth to People and it's not Pleasant. frankly, and people aren't used to when we started CA One of the things we decided to do

1:16:22 was a function as a group. Yeah. Five musketeers. And B Just tell the truth.

1:16:30 Which No one did. Everyone lied to everybody, and when you're dealing with people that are performing talent. In order to be really good, they have to be a little insecure, a little narcissistic. A little bit Bit of ego.

1:16:45 to balance the insecurity. We all have it and But it's hard to tell people with that make up the truth. And No one did, everyone would. Puff'em up, tell'em how great they were.

1:16:58 And I found that to be when I was in young agent of William Morris reprehensible. How do you call A quiet at home that is sure as movie. was fantastic when it was absolutely terrible. Why don't you to give him some Notes.

1:17:12 And just say, look, I'm not an expert, but here is a viewer. So I've always viewed myself from the day I started in the business. as the ultimate fan. So I view myself is the fan of somebody's work and fandom means you like the good and the bad. But you can give commentary about the stuff that isn't so good. And I also view myself as a normal

1:17:38 Fan. I'm a guy who goes in buys the popcorn, sits in the seat. I went to theaters every Friday night for twenty years into Westwood and stops on the way home. For an hour to see how the audience was reacting to clients of mine.

1:17:55 Movies. I remember I went to see Last of the Mohicans. And I went to see part of it.

1:18:03 I left the agency early. I really wanted to represent Michael Mann. I think he's really brilliant. He's one of the few guys that can not only tell a story but make the pictures just stunning and realistic. And he gets great act performances. So I went to see Las Ohio's and I just sat there and I didn't leave. So as two hours late as an hour late for dinner.

1:18:26 I just sat there and I Good God. And one thing came to my mind when I'm watching it is Alfred Bürstadt. Who's Alfred Bierstein is one of the great American landscape painters. Of his generation.

1:18:39 And I kept looking at this production design. I said, My God It's like a giant Alfred Birstadt painting. I called him from the car on the way home. I said I have two words to say to you and he said three words. And he said, What's that? I said, One, Alfred, two, Bierstadt, three, brilliant. And We hooked up after that, but If I didn't know art.

1:19:01 He did. Whether he used Birstein or not, it was surely some influence in the production design. So I found art to be very compelling for discussions with Creative people. What is something about you that other people believe that isn't true?

1:19:17 Well, I was incredibly controversial when I was in the agency business because I had this one for all for one attitude and it was win at all costs. And I made a lot of mistakes. When I think people would say that I was overzealous that I knocked a lot of people around, I knocked people out of things, and they're probably right. I wanted to win. I wanted our clients to win and I really felt it was important if we could do it. without lying and without doing anything immoral or illegal. Our clients had to win and we had to win. We had to be the best and

1:19:51 I'm a great believer. In excellence. And Whatever anyone does, whether they're a doctor, a lawyer, or an Indian chief, or an agent, they have to be the best. And I really

1:20:03 Strove to be the best. And I felt that anyone that worked in the company had to be the best and drove people really hard, maybe in retrospect a little too hard. starting CA today would be really difficult because to me it was a lifestyle and a religious experience. You're in or out. Because you couldn't work that way for other human beings without it.

1:20:25 I did believe that you Say the truth to your client. We are. big movie star. I don't want to say who, it's not important, giant movie star. I got a call from Sherry Lansing, who was a brilliant producer and studio executive, one of the top women in our business. And she said

1:20:44 Michael, you gotta look at this movie that you helped me put together and You'll look at the dailies, your client something's wrong. It was early on in the relationship with a client was early on in our business. I don't think we were about five or six years old and we had signed this giant movie store.

1:21:01 And I looked at the daily saying, Oh my God, they're not watchable. He looked like he was dead. On the set. called her, I said, I'm gonna take care of it. Can I do what I need to do? Can I say certain things that I don't have the authority to say? She said, Like what? I said, Can I tell them we'll shut down for three days? She said, Yeah, I'll pick insurance. She said, Say what you need to say

1:21:23 So I went to see him and I walked into the guy's trailer and he was sitting there and he said, What's up?'Cause for me to make a trip to the set unannounced was a highly unusual. He was at the lot at Paramount and I said, Look I just looked at dailies and I said, I feel like Something's going on. I don't know about. I wanna help. What can I do? He said, What's going on? And I said It'll look good.

1:21:47 You say, What do you mean I don't look good? I said, You look tired and Your eyes are half closed, then I don't think we should let those takes be used. He said, Get out of here.

1:21:58 She get out of here. Should I don't need an agent like you. I didn't know what to do, so I just Walked out and

1:22:07 Got in my car. I spent twenty minutes driving back to the office trying to think how I was gonna tell the agents. that I had just lost. A flagship client. It would have been a disaster for us because we're on a momentum roll.

1:22:23 We used to announce a movie star signing a week. With red ads. And it just put the competition away because they never knew what the Thursday nights were bad nights for our competition,'cause Fridays that we rolled out these ads every Friday. Oh incredible. Fifty weeks a year. So I get back to my office and the phone's ringing and it's the client.

1:22:45 Please come back. Drive back twenty minutes. I walk in, he doesn't say anything to me except I can't sleep. Say, Well it's a pretty simple thing to fix. I said

1:22:56 Hang out, I'm gonna and I called. an internist at U C O A'cause I was involved with the hospital and I said, I got a client who's got a sleeping issue. I need something That's strong enough to put him to sleep and light enough where he's not gonna be hung over and The guy said.

1:23:11 This is what I recommend. Put'em on the phone with me. I did We got him a prescription and he said, What are you gonna do? I said, You're gonna go out to your house at the beach and do nothing for five days. This was a Wednesday. Uh Tuesday, I said, We're gonna shut the movie down Wednesday, Thursday, Friday he thought I was like God that I could do that I had already pretty cleared it. Part of being a great agent is presenting. That you can do the impossible.

1:23:35 So I had already cleared that we could shut down and get insurance and I got him a prescription of the sleeping pills, had it picked up for him. Had a car and driver take em. to the beach and he came back Monday and the movie turned out to be fantastic and he stayed with me for twenty years. So when you say

1:23:52 Is it better to tell the truth or to lie to somebody if I would have walked in and said, Boy, your dailies look great. He would have thought I was out of my mind'cause he knew they didn't look great. But he was so upset that someone told him. 'Cause no one had ever

1:24:06 Told. Our point of view was It's just easier to Tell people the truth. One of the things that I think a lot about these days

1:24:15 is if you're lucky enough, like I think I am, you were to fall into something that you really, really deeply love doing. it becomes all consuming in an interesting way and it crowds out Everything and anything else if you let it. How did you balance

1:24:30 all of that with your family, with your friends, with your kids, with life at large. When the thing you were doing The feedback loops were so tight, it was so energizing. You were building something and working on something. I did it with mixed success.

1:24:46 Family was very important to me, but I didn't start a family'till we'd been in business four Close to ten years. Or eight years, so I got the hard part behind me. The minute we had our first kid. And I have four now the minute we had the first child.

1:25:05 I changed my hours of operation. Around their schedules. So when they slept, I worked. When they ate, I ate.

1:25:15 And I did a lot of coming home at six thirty and leaving at seven thirty. I never didn't have a dinner. I would try to get home at least two nights a week. Weekends I always worked from home. I used to work in the office on Saturday.

1:25:32 and work at home on Sunday. I worked both days of the weekend. I mean for twenty years I worked seven days, seven nights, but when I had the kids We took off Saturday and Sunday night. But we also Made a clear

1:25:47 Where we went to people's houses. that if we couldn't bring the kid we weren't coming when we sort of pioneered this thing of bringing a basket with a kid in it. putting it on the table. because we didn't wanna leave the kid at home and then as we had more kids it became easier'cause we

1:26:04 could adjust schedules. I tried like crazy to be a good father. It's really hard when you're in a service business. Sometimes I used to When the kids had athletic Games at

1:26:17 three thirty in the afternoon. I My office was ten minutes from their school max, and I would go with two cell phones and an assistant and stand on the sidelines being on the phone watching them. At least I was there. Was I as engaged as I would have liked to have been probably not. that they realize that I don't know probably The

1:26:39 hours I spent. Trying to be a good father, I thought. I did the best I could do. Was I a father that was around twenty four seven, no. I used to work really hard to not travel on weekends. I used to have to go to Japan.

1:26:54 almost once a month for a period of years. I made very clever trips that left Sunday late afternoon, so I had a weekend at home. I worked really hard To do six day weeks in a five day week? So When I was very young. As an agent.

1:27:13 I bought a very inexpensive small airplane, didn't tell anybody about it, and gave me the ability to Work. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at the agency and be involved in all the meetings that we had. And then Wednesday at five I could run to the airport. Get to New York by one.

1:27:33 Go to sleep, get up, do a breakfast. Meetings, lunch, dinner. And then leave for LA. At nine. Get home at eleven thirty.

1:27:43 And then be in the office Thursday morning and it's like no one knew. No one knew, but no one could figure out. I was doing it. Well I did it. For seventy five thousand down and six hundred thousand dollar mortgage and didn't tell anybody because at that time. Warner Brothers was passing out airplanes to people as

1:28:03 Benefits. When I started in the business the big gift Was when the studio gave a client a car. Everybody got that. Everybody got a car. It's like if you did a good job on something you got a car.

1:28:15 That moved when Steve Ross was at Warner Brothers, you got a plane ride. And then as agents we were under the gun'cause every client said Get us a free plane ride. And it became a big negotiating point. If anyone knew we were running a plane, including internally, uh it would have bankrupt us. Ah, funny thing is I had a small plane.

1:28:38 You couldn't stand up and it had no bathroom. And it couldn't make it all the way to New York. It had a stop on the way back to New York it could make it, but back from there it couldn't. I did a lot of urinating in bottles. But it was important, like we could do two sets in a day. And not have to sleep in a hotel which So if someone was working in um Colorado, yeah, it's tough to get a scheduled flight to. So we could go LA to Colorado, then Colorado to

1:29:08 Iowa to cover a movie and then back to Los Angeles all in twenty four hours. I didn't sleep a lot. But I also didn't do that on weekends so I could be with the kids. It was much easier when all three kids were in school. That I will tell you. I hope your work ethic comes back. I feel like

1:29:26 It took a pause for a while and you're starting to see shades of it again. I don't know. A lot of the businesses that I was consulting for

1:29:35 uniform complaint is the generational higher of what the expectations are of work ethic. Yeah, I can't speak to what this generation thinks. I can only speak to my generation. It's not for me to decide What it's like today.'Cause

1:29:54 I wouldn't want to build a business in today's environment. I don't want someone working with me that isn't on the program. Because At the end of the day, we spent more hours during the day with each other than we did with our significant others.

1:30:12 So it's gotta be pleasant and it's gotta be fun and it's gotta be challenging and it's gotta be energizing. You gotta every minute. Learn something different that makes you a better human being. And it sharpens your brain. Like sharpening a knife on a stone.

1:30:29 Because if you don't have a sharp brain you can't do anything. and the only thing that gives you a sharp brain is pushing through Difficult situations and education and how do you get educated? You get in the middle of a lot of complex situations, and you learn my son once asked me, Dad, how did you learn how to be an investment banker because we did

1:30:52 investment, we did advertising, we did a lot of stuff that no one had ever done before. And I said. I didn't learn it. I said I learned it on the job. Many times Herb Allen would say to me when we were selling

1:31:06 an entertainment company to another company and we did six of'em. He would say to me This is not The way to do this. This is how you have to think about this. Because I came at it with a naive point of view. I didn't go to business school. But I learned what you only had to tell me once.

1:31:23 And I figured out how to never make that mistake again. I didn't have formal education. Advertising was easier when we got asked to bid for the Coca Cola account and I had a really interesting idea, frankly, that came to me after looking at all of their work done. And it was very clear to me that we could deliver on it'cause we had our repository of creative talent.

1:31:48 By the way, thus the name creative artists. That's why we use that name. That wasn't an accident. And when I was at Sun Valley at the Allen and Company conference, this is so long ago. And I'm sitting with Roberto Boiset and Don Q. May they rest in peace, who are running the company as Dynamic duel. And Roberto's sitting at coffee with me with Herb and saying

1:32:10 They're concerned about case sales. And I'm saying, Well, you kinda should be because this Michael Jackson commercial that Pepsi's doing is Just Permeating everything culturally. And he said, Yeah, we're not Doing anything that's current or

1:32:25 Contemporary was how he phrased it. Yeah, I should look. We can do something for you, but It's gonna take enormous corporate guts to do it.

1:32:35 Because if we do it, it's gonna be pushing the edge. So he said. Come to Atlanta and meet with our twelve worldwide department heads and pitch your idea and we'll give you a very fast answer. I said, Okay, so I took they sent a plane for us. It was so cool. They sent a big plane, you could stand up in and out of the bathroom. And I chose eight agents from the business, including one of my partners, Bill Haber, who's a brilliant guy. And I chose agents from music, from movies, from television, that all represented the breadth and

1:33:08 depth of what we had. briefed everybody. We looked at every commercial they had done for the last thirty years. We looked at all their print work, all their merchandising. We really educated ourselves on To make a long story short, we went in and spent eight hours with their department. They had flown in from all over the world, so it's not like they weren't serious. We listened to what their needs were and we said We got it. We'll be back to you in fourteen days.

1:33:34 And they said okay. And we came back in fourteen days and said, You do seven commercials a year for the world. Oh And you put those commercials on every single Program whether it's late night, prime time, daytime, sports,

1:33:49 They're all the same. And they're all different demographics, so how can you do that? And they said, Well, we don't know, we've never been told not to do the And we sat down. And we created

1:34:02 A hundred Plus ideas for commercials. And we went in and we took thirty of them. And we pitched The following idea was very simple. We think you should

1:34:15 Do your commercials like a relay race. So we should do Thanksgiving commercial that's family. We should do a Christmas commercial. It's about the holiday. That was a polar verse we created, and

1:34:29 We should do Valentine's Day as love. We should do Easter as family. We should do the summer as refreshment and heat in the beach. Thanksgiving is family. And we should do thirty to thirty five commercials a year. and they should hand off to each other over the course of the year.

1:34:46 And they said, How can you produce thirty five? We have trouble with seven. We can't afford it. I said, We'll do thirty five for the price you do, so He said, We have three hundred and sixty account executives at McCann Erickson. I said good. We have me, Bill Haber, Shelley Hochran, Lynn Fink, and two people from the mail room. And they said it's not possible. I said, Well you just saw thirty five ideas, thirty ideas.

1:35:11 And what I had done is I gave our mailroom assistant And by the way, we called him a partner. We called everyone in the company a partner. There were no titles at all. He was equal to me. And I gave him two thousand dollars in cash. I said, Go to Brentano's, which was down the street from our office, and I said

1:35:29 Go buy every big art book you can get your hands on. So he did, and he came back with satchels of art books. You know, in those days they cost twenty bucks. And we went through these art books all of us, one after the other tearing pages out. For inspiration. And put them in a war room.

1:35:46 Around the room. Oh God, that's genius. We looked at them all. And we got commercialized like one of the pictures was Magreet. With the bowler hats.

1:35:57 Raining. I don't know if you've ever seen it, I know exactly. God lets rain Coca-Cola bottles. So we did a commercial. We called them a greet commercial.

1:36:08 where Coca Coca Cola bottles were raining out of the sky and we came up with this idea of putting a button on the end of every commercial, but making every commercial a small movie. So it had nothing to do with anything else. It was a non sequitur. The only thing it had to do with Coca Cola was the end, the button, and said always Coca-Cola. We called Quincy Jones, who was a close friend, and his Brilliant.

1:36:31 Brilliant. music are always ahead of us. I said, Quincy, I need Two of the best songwriters you've ever seen that no one's ever heard of. He said, For what? I said, We're gonna rewrite the Coca Cola jungle.

1:36:43 He said, Wow, that is so cool. I mean he didn't skip a beat, he sent us two guys, two young guys. They rewrote it, but they did it in six different rhythm. They did a city rhythm, an urban rhythm, country and western rhythm. Classical rhythm. A European rhythm. They did'em all for the sites. Then we went to all our clients who everyone criticized us for and said, You're gonna lose all these clients if you put'em in commercials.

1:37:10 I said, We're gonna pay'em double their rate. And they get to do this between movies. If they don't want to do it, no one's forcing them to do it. They were lined up around the block to do it because they could go pick up a couple hundred grand for working three days. So we had movie directors. Doing commercials.

1:37:26 And they did it and they got paid and they loved it. And we delivered thirty five commercials for the price of seven. We had six people working on the account. And we went They asked. because they had a forty year relationship with McCann to do what's called a shoot out.

1:37:42 And uh put ourselves up against McCann. And I said, Great, I'm happy to do it. They thought we wouldn't do it'cause we were promised the account and I

1:37:53 Didn't care. I was so confident about our product. And we took thirty five commercials. We did storyboards on every one. We did what's called a ripomatic on some of them. We had the polar bears we crit had'em all drawn out. There were six of us doing this and We went down a day early. We went and looked at the room. We did it

1:38:13 I bought everybody Armani suits, including Shelley Hochran. We all had blues Armani suits. 'Cause we had an inn with Armani'cause we'd put Sean Connery and Kevin Costner into Untouchables and we got Armani to do the close So we had an inn at Armani and he tailored all these great clothes for us. And

1:38:37 We went into Atlanta the day before. We had a s leisurely dinner. Yeah. Nice bottle of wine went to sleep. Everybody got up in the morning, went to the gym. Showed up.

1:38:49 At the Room it. fifteen to eleven for an eleven o'clock meeting with the CEO, CO, CFO, CTO, and C M O

1:38:59 of the Coca-Cola Company which was big. And there's no McCann Ericsson. We're sitting there. Very patiently, Our suits were pressed by the way. We

1:39:10 looked amazing. By the way, we looked great. We were confident we had all our stuff set up. At five after eleven in walks thirty five people wrinkled and crinkled from New York City from McCann who had taken a flight. It's seven AM out of Kennedy to get to Atlanta.

1:39:29 So they had to get up at five for four to get to the airport. They looked like they were gonna die. And there was no energy. And then the bottom line is They flipped a coin and we won and they said You wanna go first or second? They thought we'd go second,'cause that's the way you usually do this. I said, No, we're going first because I knew if we went first, that would have set up a pace they couldn't follow and

1:39:52 Len Fink went up and Shelley and they started to present Bill Haber and I introduced everything. They went up. We had one thing where a talking dog was the lead character and Len got down on all fours barking. You know, and we showed them polar bears, which they couldn't believe. That we could do animation for the price'cause All we did is outsource, which no one knew what that meant in those days. And we finished, and I'll never forget as long as I live the head of McCann was there.

1:40:20 And he was sitting to my left. My team was on my right, his team was on his left, and he wrote a handwritten note to the person sitting next to him and he stupidly let me read it. It said, We're screwed and his person got up to present and We felt horrible for her. She Stopped after one commercial.

1:40:41 And got the account of a six hundred million dollar year account. We ended up doing for them. Five hundred commercials and We made the cover of Time Magazine, we made a lot of anime on Madison Avenue. We we we did a lot of firsts.

1:41:00 It's amazing that as I thought about our conversation and made mental notes and written down notes that we barely covered any of it. Your career and life reminds me of the Churchill quote that my friend David Senner always mentions, which is always more audacity. I literally could go for five more hours. I have to say that'cause it's a testament to how many more stories and ideas there are. fortunately I have to wrap it. I always ask the same traditional closing question of everyone I talk to.

1:41:24 What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I've had a lot of kind things done for me by people both family and friends, but if you want to talk about a crossover professional and personal. There are three situations that come to mind. that are crossover professional personal'cause my whole life was a cross. Frankly, I lived my profession and So did my family, by the way.

1:41:49 They were very instrumental in any success I was lucky enough to achieve'cause they were a support base. And I think. Three things I'll give them to you, not in any order quickly. One

1:42:02 I worked. For three years to get a movie made called Rain Man that everyone passed on. And it was something that Dustin Hoffman was my first major client. And I had a huge loyalty to him, still do. He's close friend. My kids grew up with his kids. He was the motor. He wanted to do that character.

1:42:23 No one wanted to do it. We put Tom Cruise into it. Which we got criticized for Because

1:42:32 Everyone said they don't look like each other, they can't be brothers. But what they didn't realize is that autistic kids don't necessarily look like their siblings. And then we Went through four directors. We started with Marty Breast, great director, did Beverly Hills cop.

1:42:48 He couldn't do it. We actually started with Barry Levinson and then he got offered Good Morning Vietnam. We had to put him in it. So he pulled out Marty Bruce came in, he couldn't do it, gave it to Steven Spielberg, he couldn't do it. He just couldn't find a w answer for it. gave it to Sidney Pollock. This was taking months, each one.

1:43:09 This is over a three year period. gave it to Sidney Polk. He couldn't figure out how to end it by the time. We went through Sydney Barry had finished Good Morning Vietnam and we were in Aspen together at a film.

1:43:23 event and I said, You know, Barry, we ought to revisit Rainman and Dustin happened to be up there and the three of us went and had coffee. So Barry? Rereads it meets with Dustin. comes to see me the next day and says, You know, I think I've figured out how to do this'cause no one can figure it out. And I said, What's that? He said

1:43:41 There is no third act. Everyone's looking for a concluding third act. The guy's autistic. It's not gonna change. And it's just a light bulb. went off in my head. That's why he's Barry Levinson and I'm not because he figured that out and sure enough we did the movie, there was a huge New York Times article that said that I was an idiot and all the clients were gonna fire me. It was a stupid idea and It was gonna be a disaster and a movie came out.

1:44:08 open to six and a half million dollars, which was about a quarter of what a hit opened to at the time. Another article in the paper saying that I was an idiot. I pushed this picture together it was a package it was gonna fail. For the next fifty weeks I did six million dollars a week on and won six Academy Awards and I got thanked by

1:44:28 Everybody that was in the movie. at the Academy Awards in the most sincere uh giving no ego way of magical. I just thing that happened to me was simple. It's just a couple of sentences. I

1:44:43 was sitting with my family on Christmas Eve. We were in Aspen, Colorado. It was The only time of year I could relax because between the twenty fourth and the thirtieth. Nothing happened. And the phone rings at nine o'clock at night and

1:44:58 Wasn't a cell phone, it was a hard line, and I get on the phone and it's Dave Letterman. Yeah. For him. It's eleven o'clock at night. He said, I'm just sitting here

1:45:10 Sorry to bother your Christmas Eve. I just wanted to thank you. He said, You really really came through for me. I was really had a problem at NBC and they owned me and they gave the show to somebody else and it was my dream.

1:45:26 And I have my own show now on CBS and He went on for ten minutes. Yeah, it's funny, I just had dinner with him a few months ago. I can't tell how touched I was that he would take the time out that night to Just to say that. He didn't have to do that. I got paid for.

1:45:42 And The third time One of my all time favorite human beings on the planet. to this day is boomery. He's not only the most talented dramatic actor and comedy actor, but

1:45:54 He's one of the great human beings you'll ever meet, and he's smart as hell. And no one. really quite gets how well rounded it is. My first son. was very young and he's like

1:46:05 Got he probably was six, seven years old than he had. some medical issues and I found a specialist at Yale. that could help with the issue and I took'em to Yale. That city Yales and it's really Dark and dank and the hotel stinks and uh

1:46:23 The only good food is this famous pizza place and it's like We were really lonely, I was particularly, and it was really bad spending eight hours a day at Yale with the child study center. And I'm sitting in the room the second day we're there and the door knocks. And the guy says, Room service.

1:46:43 I said, I didn't order room service go away. He says room service, open the door. So I opened the door's Bill. More. With his son. Who's the age of my son?

1:46:53 With his son Homer, and Bill said, What are you doing? I said, I told you I had to take a couple of days off. He said Okay. Great. He shut the door, sat down, the boys played with each other, and he just Spent two days there with me.

1:47:07 For no reason other than that he's Bill Moran, he's an amazing man. So for him. Those kinds of people I have soft spots for, you know. I think it's an absolutely awesome. I was kinda hoping that you would close with that story just'cause it's a recognizable name, but it's just like the act, the simplicity of it. The beauty of all these stories you've told sort of weaving together in an act of kindness is an awesome place to close. Michael, I love all of our time together. I learned so much. I could go for hours. Thank you so much for your time.

1:47:33 I'm so sorry for dragging us so far over the schedule. It's my pleasure as always. Good fun and great questions and thanks a lot. If you enjoyed this episode, check out Join Colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.

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