Barry Diller - Building An Entertainment Empire - [Invest Like the Best, EP.441]

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/6df5ffa971c7345e

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Guest today is Barry Diller.
Gary is the former CEO of Paramount Pictures, Fox Broadcasting, and the founder of IAC.
He has been at the center of every major media transformation over the past five decades.
From creating the movie of the week format to building the fourth broadcast network to investing in a hundred and fifty plus internet era companies.
In this conversation, Barry reveals his philosophy of creative conflict.
pushing smart, opinionated people past their endurance point to generate breakthrough ideas.
He also shares stories of working alongside media titans like group of Murdoch and Bill Gates.
We discuss his current portfolio strategy, innovation and media.
And how personal struggles can become professional superpowers.
Please enjoy my great conversation with Barry Diller.
When I ask around about you, as I've done the last couple of days, lots of mutual friends, the word that comes up in every single conversation is curiosity.
Insatiable curiosity, maybe is the term that people use.
And I love the part in your book about the time in the William Morris file room reading everything you possibly could.
Where did the spark come from? Is it just innate in you? Has it always been this curiosity, I absolutely believe is innate.
People could try. Oh, make me curious.
So much to me is about biology and not necessarily
Willful direction.
But
The idea that
You can pull it from some place.
I've always been innately
Curious. Not voraciously or crazily, just generally.
Luckily, my curiosity is not
Like I wanna understand.
How?
Unwinged butterflies metastasize.
My curiosity
is in more general interest areas.
They've somehow resonated in other parts of
productive life. What did you discover in the file room that got you going?
I had always been interested in the entertainment business, so that's why I went there because
I was nineteen years old, no one was gonna pay attention to me, so I thought where can I go?
It was kind of a mail room.
Concept.
Which they
Brought in young
Supposedly.
Sparky people.
and train them to be quote agents. I had no interest in being an agent.
I would never
Ever
think I would be qualified to do that kind of thing or really have any interest. But
What I was interested in is the entertainment business and at the time William Morris
Agency was seventy years old.
And it was the leading agency, so it had the history.

File rule.
And I got lucky enough.
To be able to wangle my way.
To basically read it from a
To that.
And in there
I just read the entire place. What was it about entertainment that captivated you? It seems like that was the AI of its day, all the top talent.
In a little bit
Town.
Beverly Hills.
Yeah.
Омост Овмадз пари.
were involved in entertainment in one form or the other. My parents were involved in it.
Construction and
Building and finance things like that.
other world from entertainment.
And I was just always drawn to it, always fascinated.
I was interested in the people they led.
Definitely interesting.
I was also interested in the mechanics of it.
I was drawn to that.
In the earliest days when you knew you did not want to be an agent, but rather create things.
There was this confrontation in your book. I think you're twenty three years old with Charles Blue Dorn. Can you talk about that fight that you had over something?
After I leave William Morris and I go to A B C and I'm twenty three years old.
A B C at the time, there were only three networks and they had a hundred percent of the view, and each of these networks are very powerful.
But ABC was kind of run like a candy store because it was the youngest of the three networks.
It hadn't yet bureaucratized itself.
If you wanted responsibility it was there and anyway, so I'm in the
program department.
And no one else was doing it. So my responsibility
was to buy movies from
uh major studio producers of movies
at the time to put on television'cause that was a a big diet.
of television watching then was to watch theatrical movies on television.
Charlie Bluedorn, this great industrialist of the sixties and seventies.
had bought Paramount.
In order to justify his purchase.
He wanted to sell all their old Turkey movies.
He convinced the chairman of ABC.
in a meeting where he couldn't wait to get rid of the mad Austrian Charlie Blutorn.
So
Buy all these movies and the chairman

I was the only one on the
Floor at the time.
And said okay, you do this.
I told Mr. Bluthorn.
After he would thought.
He clenched his
deal to save his purchase of Paramount Pictures.
And I said, I'm not buying any of these movies. They're all turkeys and I'm not doing it.
And he fumed at the ears and
Out of that we found a way
For us to buy some of the movies and him to create new movies and to finance the new movies.
So he got intrigued with me.
That episode did you discover a fearlessness in yourself?
I had this one big fear about sexuality.
That obliterated all other fears.
It turned out.
I had no fear of business situations. I had this big fear.
And that
Made me take on weaponized you. Everything else absolutely. It was a secret weapon.
Wasn't
A thrill to go through and I'm not so sure I would advise it, but it was
Fodder for me, so
When I came up against this.
Very powerful.
And
Some people are quietly
Demonstratively.
Not
At face power. He was
Powerful in all ways.
And combustible.
Charlie was quite young.
Yeah.
Biggest
conglomerate of the time.
Late sixties, seventies.
He was probably forty or something.
An old man to me.
I found that I could
Argue with him.
Wasn't afraid of it.
Everybody else was petrified. We're gonna talk about the decades more of that to come, but
When I read your book, I was captivated and amazed by
How clearly you described things in your early life.
That so impacted you.
The two that stood out to me were
I went to camp and I was
horribly homesick when I went to camp as a kid. I could just remember quaking going to it.
And you tell this story about wanting your mom to pick you up and her not showing up.
And then everything with your brother and the way that you described these two events, it just blew my face off that you were willing to be this honest in the book.
But also in a way that so many people that have read the book that I've talked to
Got them talking about
their shit when they were young. It's going to be quite amazing to me.
The reason I wrote the book is because I thought this is a good story.
I've been telling stories all my life.
I thought it's good story if I can tell it true.
And then I thought well
Do I want to?
And then I thought well
If I'm gonna do it.
Why would I not want to.
That would be crazy.
So that's what I set out to do. What's really surprised me is how
It seems to have emotionally resonated with so many people in ways I would have never expected.
Can you talk about what happened in that camping incident and with your brother and the impact that those two things had on you?
I was at
This camp and I was
Seven eight?
I didn't want to be there.
The only person
in my dysfunction family that I thought I could have any dependents on was my mother.
So I certainly couldn't depend on my father and my brother was a
Sadist Monster.
I said, Come and get me.
And she said, Okay, I will come and get you.
It is a describable scene of sitting
part to the entrance of the campground.
Near it.
Pre stump.
And waiting hours for my mother to come and rescue me.
And the weighting of it.
became this bitter, sad, sweet moment of me saying
I cannot depend upon my mother.
Which meant I can't depend upon anyone.
Other than myself.
And it was
A resolve that from that moment on.
I would force
The world around me.
That I was dependent on no one.
Which was
Yeah.
That
Age.
Harsh, but it was a
Truly revelatory.
Moment.
Of
Being my own savior.
How did the need for control evolve across the rest of your life?
I've thought a lot about that.
I'm not really not that introspective, but in writing this book I had to go through a lot about that.
Because I had no control.
Over the biggest
Issue of my life which was
Mike.
emerging and confusing sexuality.
And of course what I wanted to do is control it.
I wanna say no.
Turn it this way, instead of that way.
I want that. I want this.
I think
We all have stuff that we would like to control and find
Are either ability to control it.
Or not.
Now many things have come up. You can control them.
So
Out of that.
Desperation.
To control the uncontrollable.
Everything else.
In my life.
That I could control.
I'd want to sure try.
Is that
Gone down at all? You've been so successful in so many ways. It's the same as always.
Oh, I think it's great even worse.
Or more
How does that manifest today?
I was reading about the
original moment of insight around QB C and the two way interactivity.
You were with probably Sam around the time of Chat GPT.
Very luckily because Sam Altman was on the board of one of our companies, Expedia.
Definitely earlier than most.
He showed me the magic.
Which was to me magic.
The first thing he did.
Is
He said to chat GPT.
Tell me.
The biography of Barry Diller in Shakespeare.
Sonnet.
And in a millisecond.

iPhone comes.
Fuck.
But I had a little prep about what he was doing.
But it was friggin' magic.
And I
Just was done.
How did the two compare? Did it feel of an order of magnitude even greater than the QBC moment of the greatest epiphany was
I'd only known screens.
Movie screens, television screens.
To be a
Narrative.
formats meaning that we were passive. They told you stories. That's what screens did.
I went to QVC.
And I saw these primitively interactive screens.
That
You weren't passive with. You said I like that product, you
At the time.
bunch of phone codes and
You ordered it up and
Televisions and computers.
Tract it?
And I thought, wow, screens can be used for something other than passive experience, narrative.
Now this is in ninety two, so it's three years before the internet gets used by people.
Of course I didn't see that, but what I saw was interactivity in screens and I was
Dumbstruck by it.
Because that wasn't magic.
Chat GPT to me was magic.
This was
Pragmatic.
And I
For
I don't know how, but this is going to change things.
So much of
Life is circumstance and
Serendipity moment and whatever.
By the time the internet comes along, three years later, I had some fluency.
about it. So I was able to make it productive.
I wanna flesh out some of these components of what I'll call
the Barry Diller model for approaching the world, not that it's formulaic at all.
But
Some concepts like creative conflict, maybe starting with that, and your love of creative conflict.
Talk to me about what that means and how it manifests and why it's so valuable.
I
Discovered fairly early.
That's
The best
Organizational process.
Was to get
Smart snappy people in a room.
Who have opinion.
And get them clanging against each other.
With their opinion.
And out of that conflict,'cause that can be conflicting,'cause people will say, Well, I think this about that, and then somebody says, No, I think that about that, or you're a dope about this, or
Oh, that's an interesting insight or whatever, whatever. So
The more that conflict forges
Hearing interesting things.
If you're a good listener and I'm lucky I can listen.
I can pick out of it a truth or a something that I can
Roll with.
Makes sense to me.
I can say Wow.
Huh.
That's a good idea.
'cause I'm always searching for
An idea.
And the definition to me
of an idea. Is it a good idea or a bad idea? And that's obviously editorializing
By instinct.
No, I have always thought
That the best
Arranging room for that.
Is
A group of people
P
are in conflict with each other.
usually past their point of endurance, meaning
The longer you push it, I found over time.
That
When you push people somewhat past their endurance
When they say, Oh please can I go home?
And you won't let them go home?
Interesting things happen after that.
The notion of spark and edge being things that you were searching for in the people that might be in that room really interested me.
Spark, I think I understand. How would you think about edge? What was an edgy person
Ed G, someone who
Some coarseness, а на номіс.
in a pejorative sense. I mean
Like I don't know, scratch paper that
creates a spark.
Somebody who's got
Some
I wouldn't call it original thought or whatever.
But someone who's
Wielding
To be on
The edge of things rather than the common center of things.
Is that related to this notion of discontented and willful that you've talked a lot about?
Robert Woodruff.
What's that?
Chairman of Coca Cola Company.
And it's great formative years.
Wasn't obvious to me when I heard it.
Many decades ago.
Probably forties, fifties, sixties.
He said only give me the discontented.
Those are the people I want in our organization. And it
So resonated with me.
That yes, of course.
And I think if I had grown up in a different environment
And I wasn't in this
dysfunctional environment that I was in.
with all these other issues.
I'd probably end up a shoe clerk.
And that's not the thing.
A little more interesting this way. Is there a room of creative conflict that most stands out in your memory?
Where some idea came out of it.
Oh no, it just
My life.
If you think about this notion of instinct, acting on instinct and not based on data or research or things like this.
Why is that proven so powerful to you rather than the alternative? Because I think
If you say relative to data.
And research.
It's good, of course, when there's a factual base.
That
Research of course can give you
Deepest draft of that factual base.
But when you're dealing with editorial matters or new ideas or things that aren't yet.
There's no research that can help or guide you can only mislead you.
Because it will essentially tell you.
What the past
factual base.
as delivered to you
Which has no relevance.
Two
A fresh
Idea.
All it can do.
Is say, Well, here's why it won't work.
That's all it can really based upon this, that, and the other thing.
It ain't never gonna tell you why it will or should work'cause it's not.
knowable it's not researchable.
It's purely.
Instinctive.
If that's the realm in which you want to live.
Then
You really have to try very hard to keep those instincts of yours as fresh and clean as you can, which means
You have to fight cynicism.
You have to fight being
Sophisticated.
You have to hold on.
to a certain form, even if you make it up of naivete.
Because it's only when you're in that state.
That
Your instincts can be applied.
to determining what is something interesting or not interesting.
One of the things I loved
hearing the story was how once you decided to do something, you would drill
All the way down to like
bedrock foundation and the essence of something, and then build back up from that understanding.
There are really people so much smarter than me.
Who get stuff so much quicker.
For me
It's not like I want to.
I have to go all the way down because until I can get
To the first little building block.
I don't understand it.
And there are some areas that even if I try now, certain obvious areas that
I just don't have the capacity.
But in the areas that I lived in
I had to break everything down.
Two
It's base block DNA.
Where I could have
Um
Basis understanding. Just tell me
Yes, okay.
Two
Plus two.
is four.
I gotta get down to those basics.
Before I can figure out
A very complex transaction.
If you give it to me midway
Or two thirds the way.
All the house names people use to confuse people with everything.
You never get to understanding, and I can tell you actually.
My first revelations was this is
This is when I'm
My
Late twenties, early thirties.
And I had at the time a business manager.
And I had some capital and he would
Be investing it in like real estate transactions.
He would come into my office every four or six months, whatever, and he would go through stuff and I was so bored with it'cause I didn't understand the fuck up what he was talking about.
And he would give me this thing about this deal and whatever.
And I would just basically
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And a couple of years later.
He's doing it to me, and I thought
I'm really a total bimbo.
I said
I want to understand this transaction.
I said so
Let me now understand it.
And I forced him.
To explain it.
From the very
Base of it.
And he got about
Halfway through it and I said.
This is stupid and I'm not.
doing it and I fired him and it was my revelation.
Which is not that I didn't really know it.
That's the only way I can function.
If you think back to the entertainment days at Par Mount and Fox.
You're part of so many of them. What innovation stands out as the thing you're most proud of to the extent you are proud of something?
I was very lucky the first
real responsibility that I had.
Was
to make these original movies every week called the movie of the week, which
Change television at this time. I'm twenty five.
Everyone thought this.
project would fail and it was my project.
It was an original concept.
The risks were very high.
And because everybody thought it would fail, I got to do it myself.
I built up the fluency to do it and then we did it and then it succeeded giantly.
Is there any better feeling than owning something end to end like that?
It was fantastic because
I can drill to the moment.
Yeah, at that time.
You get ratings, which was the
initial scorecard you got for whether you were succeeding or failing.
And at that time they came overnight, like at seven in the morning.
I kinda stead up all night to wait.
For this rating, and when I heard it in my ear.
It was so big.
That
It was like
Oh my freaking god.
We did it.
And that was
Fantastic.
Do you remember how many people it was?
Do you remember the state? Yes, yeah, I do. It was
Thirty four point something.
So I call it thirty five.
Rating now this means.
That there were a hundred million households.
And this meant that thirty million households were watching this one.
Little program. Which does not happen today.
I mean yes actually
You'll get
I guess someone watched TikTok.
Well do that, but that's
Incredibly rare.
A movie every week seems logistically impossible.
about that kind of thing. We made it
Twenty five the first year.
Forty or so the next year, and by the third year, we're making seventy-five of these a year. You think people should do more of that to set impossible.
Goals and then
Driving the constraint.
The world will only handle so many.
I like to zoom to the Fox days.
What was it like?
Working with Murdoch when he f was facing
hard challenges.
Well, he always faced hard challenges'cause he threw everything onto the middle of the table in order
To challenge those challenges.
He did it in Australia, he did it in the UK, and then he did it in the US.
The biggest risk taker.
I've known.
And he was a
hard ask risk taker who would curmudgeonly
A portion risk, whatever and
Gruoling go through it.
Ruper was a joyous
And is still ninety four, a joyocker.
And I was lucky enough, and again, all my wife's serendipity and circumstance and moment.
That
When I met Rupert, which is when he bought an interest in the company that I just become
The CEO of Twentieth Century Fox.
And I had always wanted to start a fourth network'cause I thought the three networks were boring.
And I thought there ought to be an alternative to them.
And got the opportunity.
And literally.
In about
An hour.
That's less.
Realistically.
I told him the concept of
Doing it for threw.
And he said.
Great.
I said, What do you mean, great? He said.
Do it.
I said, Well we have to buy these stations it'll cost a billion
One fifty.
And then it'll cost I don't know, a hundred and fifty, two hundred. And he said
Do it. What could be better?
There was a moment when the Simpsons and Home Alone together
effectively saved his bacon. That's true.
What was going on then? Why was there so much risk? Why did those things happen?
A gambler.
industrial gambler and someone who
keeps trying to change things. Murdoch.
had overextended himself.
Because he had taken on a huge amount of debt.
To start satellite.
Broadcasting in the UK.
He'd taken on debt to buy
T V Guide.
Which at the time was like America's Bible.
Now, of course kind of irrelevant.
And he paid three billion dollars for it.
Which ended up some years later to be relatively worthless.
So he had overextended himself in the banks.
Didn't want to renew.
It literally was the renewal
Of
his entire loan package and there were fifty banks, I think.
That were involved all over the world.
And some of them had very little exposure.
Big bank, big exposure all said yes.
But
The smaller ones.
Said no you're
Too much of a gambler. It's too dodgy.
And we're not gonna renew. And it
Literally for about
A year it teetered.
On
whether or not they'd renew these loans.
And since there was not more credit.
And because of the

Cash.
became extremely important.
Literally to keep the lights on.
Fan.
Which was this giant hit at the time.
and poured cash into the company.
At that time.
We were
Very cash positive, Fox.
It wasn't Simpsons yet, Simpsons.
later delivered huge returns.
But it was the cash basically from home alone.
The cap.
the company from
Going.
Dark.
Before
You could refinance.
Yes.
Long package.
Which took place about a year later. What was he like in that
Current
I have so much admiration for Rupert.
I have some
Issues that are not admirable about
His conservativism.
But
During that period.
He never complained.
Um
suffered enormously, but his character was that he would not show it.
And he wouldn't complain and he wouldn't blame others.
Took full responsibility for
Yes, no favors, yes, no whatever.
And that's a great demonstration of character. How much did he care about money as like a motivator?
He adds better than I do.
For me
Part of the fun of being in the movie business is
I love process.
Another difference between us is he don't like process. He wants
Basically
He has an idea. He wants to get to the conclusion of the idea.
So we can move on to the next idea.
I love process. So you make a movie
It's not an easy.

Usually when it's more difficult, the movies come out better.
A happy set is a boring set.
When you make a movie
in olden times before streaming.
You open it on a Friday night.
And
By Saturday, Sunday
This is again before a lot of
predictive stuff comes along that can tell you
What the end gross is gonna be.
You literally understand every theater.
In the US, and you get one by one.
The results from
these theaters as to how it's doing on its first showing, its second showing, its third showing.
That process
Which either your
building yourself into a success, into a hit movie because
People are going to see it.
Or not.
That's a iterative processy thing.
I love that.
The rhythm of it.
was worth the candle of making the film.
I can't remember one of the early days of Fox with Rupert.
I think we were talking on a Sunday of some movie.
I was die hard.
And I'm getting these hourly figures, whatever, and I think of course, how's it doing? And I said, Well, it's doing really well.
They said, all right, well so
It's doing this.
How much will it make?
I said, What do you mean I'm a toolmaker?
Well no, let's take the
Data of this and the data of that.
And multiply it by whatever and
What will be the final?
Amount that it'll make.
And it was like
Fuck if I know. I don't want to know right now.
I want to enjoy the process of learning about it.
as actual human people are coursing through and sitting in those seats.
All he wanted to know.
Give me the final amount so I can take that amount and invest it somewhere else.
Did you ever care about money?
Is that ever a motivator? Never, ever, ever.
I mean I'm an odd character, obviously,'cause there are definitely some of us. Although
Weirdly, people who have grown up with wealth
They seem to be very concentrated on wealth and money means a lot to them, even if they've got it.
In my case
Because
It was never an issue to me.
I never
Cared about it.
I had no practical necessity.
Since it never mattered to me.
Now do I
Like it.
Yeah, sure.
But
I know.
nominal interest in it.
It's never been a marker for me.
At the end of your executive run in entertainment.
Your fifty ish or so in the early nineteen nineties.
And there's this amazing line in the book that said you're thinking about
wanting to own and control the next thing to be independent.
And there's a line, either I am or I'm not.
Just incredibly simple.
What was that leap like?
Maybe more interesting.
Is that
I was very successful.
It been very successful in multiple iterations of it.
But I'd always worked for companies. I was a corporatist. I worked for the mother church.
I don't know why.
And when you do that
I think if you're a good employee.
You think it's yours.
Dumm.
Do have an illusion that
Oh, it's mine.
It is an illusion.
It is not.
Clearly yours.
That illusion.
Can be alive forever and who cares, it's nice.
Nothing.
Bad about it in any way.
For me, when I
Realize
That it wasn't mine.
But I
Acted like it was mine.
I thought
Well
Am I capable?
of actually
Having something
There really is mine.
That is independent.
of the mother church of the corporation.
Over a period of time, I didn't want to leave Fox. I was doing very well. I was very happy it was challenged, was still doing interesting stuff.
But
I thought
I'm either capable of being independent or I'm not.
I got this
Yeah.
Of
This binary. You either are
Or you're not.
And I couldn't
Turn away from it.
As much as I tried.
I don't know how much I really tried, but as much as
Ideas or
Convictions do dissipate.
Yeah.
You are or you're not.
I could not accept that I wasn't.
I didn't want to go, but once I realised
This binary you are or you not, it forced me
Into action I did not want to take.
And then everyone hated K V C, right? Oh yes. Well then but then of course
I did.
Leave.
And I left.
By design with
A blank piece of paper'cause I didn't want to repeat myself.
And then I did go to Q V C, which everyone thought I was insane.
This next chapter you described as being an internet opportunist, not visionary. You did something like a hundred and fifty
Deals, investments.
Coming out of QVC.
I wanna hear about like how the hell you managed to do all those deals.
But starting with QVC.
What was so hard about it and the home shopping network, which followed soon thereafter.
What was the getting the flywheel going? It wasn't hard.
Oddly.
We created this business model.
Nothing with me is ever full blown at the first hour of the first day.
But we created this conglomerate that was an anti conglomerate because we've spun off eleven public companies over the
Last I don't know, fifteen or so years.
It was very iterative.
Again.
Lucky
In that
I had this primitive understanding of convergence.
And
The coming of the internet.
The internet came in ninety five.
There were so many possibilities.
So many ideas.
The good from the bad.
And we
Pick more good than bad.
And they just came one after the other.
The ground was just so fertile.
That was the
Second revolution and now we're embarking on the third revolution.
If you wanna be an AI opportunist is the lesson from that chapter that you should
Do a lot of things.
A bias to action and to say yes rather than be nitpicky about it.
About what you do.
We were very picky.
Because
Unlike most people at the time.
Who just start getting attention, meaning
Almost everyone
Wanted to go after volume in a balls.
Exactly.
More eyeballs you could aggregate.
at a dis economic cost.
Often.
We thought no, we treat revenue importantly.
As against expenses. And so we didn't do those
Web vanity.
Things that were good, but very much before their times and not
Simply.
Aggregation of eyeballs.
I would approach this next super period.
In the same way, which would make me very wary.
Of
What now seems to be
The Kats Meow which is
Huge expenditures.
In areas in which there is
No known revenue.
Or no big revenue to relate to
Hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.
Tell me how?
Actually is going to return now. Of course some of it will.
But I would be
dodgy about that.
In this chapter in the nineties, a whole new cast of characters enters the scene. There is this amazing Larry Ellison interview on Charlie Rose, where he quotes you talking about Bill Gates.
Which I found from like way, way back when.
It was around the whole ticket master thing, which relates certainly to the AI copyright stuff today, kind of a similar episode history repeating.
And you said something very funny which was
He's young, he's mean, and he's not tired.
All of those things definitely
Word true.
Actually
That's not fair to Bill, who I
Like very much.
And I respect a great deal.
Usually I think people do not.
Grow.
Gates has grown enormously in so many areas.
Empathy.
But
He was mean.
And relentless.
But he is no longer that.
He's a solid citizen.
Of today and tomorrow. Did you ever see anyone more competitive and aggressive than him in his heyday?
Unlikely.
At that time he was
Truly ferocious.
And he understood leverage.
Anybody who's
In any world.
Of
Commanding.
Revolutionizing
A world which
Gates certainly did.
It's got that quality.
Many people would love to be the person that you were in the internet era for this AI era. You did these hundred and fifty deals.
What was that process? What was the team like that found them? How much of it did you just do yourself?
We never had a lot of people, but we had a lot of stimulants. And anybody who had an idea was a good idea.
You can't
Do good ideas until
You ratchet through a lot of rotten ideas.
And I've always thought you gotta tolerate
Stupidity.
Because
In any kind of argument about
What to do, what not to do, future whatever.
You gotta be stupid before you're smart.
You gotta go through that process of
Allowing
Dumb stuff to come out.
'Cause in the dumb stuff alongside of it is some little smart thing.
If you can
Tease that one out.
And act on it.
You got a shot.
Was there a defining early transaction other than QBC and HSN in those days?
That you think back on.
Or the early obvious ones now?
Match.com.
personals.
Which
was something at that time.
That was
So early stage.
And so primitive.
Again, just a good idea.
And there were
Play around it who
We had kind of rejected, but then we came on this tiny little company.
Texas Club Match dot com and we bought it and then it just spawned everything.
If you start in a good arena.
one thing spawns the next thing and out of
Match came.
All sorts of different
personal's brands and then
It got to a large category and then along came.
Tinder.
Just definition of an idea.
But
With no investment? I don't know. I think the investment in
Tinder was
Nickels, but
Absolutely virally.
Just shot to the skies.
You've got this interesting setup with IAC now. You've spun out all these businesses. You've been this amazing capital allocator. One thing that's so remarkable is
Buffett's observed this lots of times. Usually
Amazing executives get to the promised land, which is tons of free cash flow they can do something with, and now they have to be an allocated and they stink at it.
And you had the opposite experience, arguably a better allocator even than executive. You're an allocator, again, it's amazing that you're still doing this through IAC.
How do you think about that job in this world? I think I'm no longer qualified for it.
I think I'm irrelevant to it.
Why?
'Cause I don't want to do it anymore.
I have this whole thing about
Dodging every aspect of
Age and
thinking about it and conceptualizing, which I think is horrible a thing to do. So I
Stay where away from it.
But the one thing I am aware of for me
Is that
This next period
I still have a lot of curiosity.
But
This
World we're entering.
Is
Too much.
For my curiosity load.
to relate to.
I don't think I've ever conceptualized that.
By the way, this is why
One of the things that interests me we bought twenty four percent of MGM.
And
Why does that appeal to me? Because you can't disintermediate it. Because
You give me any
A I equation
Irrelevant.
to this no one's gonna get
Between
Going to
An MGM resort.
particularly Las Vegas, in which we have a huge
share of Las Vegas. We have eleven properties in Las Vegas.
No tech is getting between that and a human.
It's like the Flintstones. I'm going back to the dark ages.
But
That to me because everything else in the world that I see.
is able to be disintermediated by this, that, and the other thing.
That isn't.
And so it fascinates me.
Certainly I understand how a visit to a place, a concert, something live and in person.
What about betting though? Polymarket and Calci and these markets, people are glued to their phones, ten million dollar valuation today or yesterday.
Do you think that's a major threat to MGM?
No.
No, no, no. Because people want to go.
People wanna go.
Gambling part of it.
It's certainly an important part of the revenue, but it's not the most important part.
The thing is we have these resorts that
If you just look at the depth and breadth in Las Vegas.
We have four hundred and ninety restaurants. We have a hundred and twenty five performance venues.
From twenty five thousand seats down to a few thousand seats.
We have so many ideas of things and places to do and to go and to be and to enjoy and to entertain.
All of those things. Yeah, gaming's over here.
But
That's the
plotting and pleasure of it.
The other person that I would argue
built the modern media world with you is John Malone.
Who just came out with a book as well.
What was it like?
Being
Around him.
I talk to John frequently.
He is still the smartest one in the room. There's just no question.
Johnson's engineer by training.
But
He has such
Pure
ability to analyze almost any situation
Because he brings this engineer's frame.
with an absolute
Ground understanding.
of every technological possibility that could
possibly happen and he can mix all that.
Both horizontally and vertically.
When you're talking to him.
It's really you're talking to a master
Craftsman.
What did Lou Wasserman teach you about negotiation?
Lou Wasserman was the
legendary chairman of MCA, which started a Stalin agency and became
Universal Studios and other kinds of things.
I grew up
with his daughter as my friend and so I knew very young. But then when I was in my twenties and negotiating movies
I went to h his office to
close one deal and I
Said to him.
Of the sixty some odd units we were buying.
'Cause we were paying a big price. I said, Can you just give us one less
And he just looked at me and said, No.
And I said, What do you mean no? And he said, No.
He kinda said, That's it and we got up and walked to the door and he said to me, So let me tell you something.
You said.
When you're in a negotiation
You better be prepared.
If I say no.
To blow the deal.
Or you're never gonna get what you want.
It was the greatest lesson.
In leverage.
And in
organizing in your brain how far you're prepared to go.
Then you must figure that out up front.
You draw a line.
And you must demonstrate beyond that line you will never go.
That's how
I learned to negotiate.
How did you produce so many people that have gone on to great things? Eisner, Dara, Dillers, Killers, and I think I then produce them.
They grow up in your environment.
I like environments where
In all those cases.
Just like me.
I was totally unprepared.
And I had no reason for anyone to give me any responsibility because I had no experience about anything.
But I got dropped in the deep end of the water and I figured out how to swim.
I like
People.
Coming into any
Orbit of mine.
Without any experience particularly.
Without any necessary expertise, without having been quote made.
And then you give people more responsibility than they qualify for.
Because in that
Forge.
You find out who
Swims and who
Doesn't.
And if you have that kind of environment
Out of it's gonna come
Pretty good people.
What made Eisner so explosive?
Michael is
This big
Cookie cocky guy.
His brain is so creative, and his mind is so fertile.
The just outspin stuff faster than his mouth can
Do it.
Stuff comes out, that's goofy.
But
The next thing is absolutely brilliant.
It's actual original thought.
And he is capable of that.
I lost track of The Simpsons before, which I think is the most profitable show maybe ever in history.
Longest running.
Well, it's that, but it's also probably the single most
Profitable.
Entertainment.
product ever invented.
What was it like at its origin?
Oh, it's origin everybody thought it was stupid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they thought it was stupid because there's a cartoon?
Well, because yes, the last cartoon of the Flintstones before was like I don't know, twenty, thirty years before we put the Simpsons on. So
Are you crazy? You're gonna do a half hour
cartoon about these characters, the Simpsons.
The first screening we had was with a bunch of suits.
Executives from Fox.
And they said, Well, you can't put this thing on the air, I mean you must be
Nuts.
You just like that.
Well Jim Brooks who is the
creative force of the sound along with Matt Groening.
And I
We're in the screening.
When you're making
things and particularly comedies.
And you're in a room with other people.
And you're involved in the making of a thing.
You laugh harder.
at things you wanting to create laughter so that other people will laugh.
So you're overengaged?
Jim and I are laughing. We by the way had long stopped laughing at this stuff'cause we'd seen it a hundred times.
And we're laughing to create with these twelve suits some laughter in the room, and they're just
Stolid hunks, not even moving.
It was so sad.
And afterwards they said.
We're not successful enough to just write this off. I don't know what you're gonna do with this. Surely they can't put it on the air. And of course
Like many things from the first hour of the first day.
That went on the air. It was a smash.
It's been running ever since and most profitable thing ever.
Through the lens of the Simpsons, how do you think about the world of entertainment today? It just seems like nothing like that will ever happen again.
I don't know that that's true.
by then there's some cable networks around had gotten successful, but
That was a time when there were fewer options.
There were still reasonable number of options.
Today the options are so unlimited. There's just so much out there, whether
Your time is spent on TikTok or Insta.
Or watching
television programs and
Streamers and this and that.
Yeah.
Optionality is so much.
The record keeping.
If you make
An entertainment product.
movie or television series.
The amount of people who see it.
Is your revenue stream, but there are your reaction. Go back to the olden times of
Today's times fairly, but in theaters people coming into the
place sitting in seats and they like it and they pay their money and whatever, and you see them and they leave and they come and they leave and they come.
How do you deal with
When the business model instead
Of being
The audience reaction to it.
Is
To take a subscription to Prime.
Whose business model is to get you to buy products on Amazon.
Where they offer you on a side.
Amazing movies. Movies and television programs.
They could not care less.
Whether one person or nine billion people see it.
It's just whether or not
We get more prime subscriptions.
Or the Apple environment.
Which is keep you in the
closed circle of apple rather than any one thing. So if you're a maker of these things, or if you're in the vineyard
Of trying to create this stuff.
It's just dismaying that the business models
Are just so vastly different.
It's not the best environment for making work.
If you add Netflix into that.
Category.
Hollywood is irrelevant.
Worse than that.
And people yell at me for saying that.
First of all, it used to be that all these companies did.
Was
Make
movies and television shows from the top of their executives to the bottom.
Now
Making the product is the sixty eighth or seventy eighth
division inside
Very large enterprises.
It's just so down on the totem pole.
Of stuff.
As an organizing
Process the fun of it is gone.
Is glamour gone too?
never gone. It's just now in other areas.
Where is Glamor?
Where it was.
Now it's dispersed, of course. Now it's probably an Instagram.
It's the whole hegemony.
Has now
Bin transferred.
to the world of big tech.
Is this gonna be true? This is the probably biggest question of AI.
Because it is possible.
that our entire worlds will be subsum by
further advances AI advances of big tech.
In which case in the end will all be a simulation anyway, and
As one of my friends said, will maybe have a happy ending.
I saw these amazing photo spread from Sun Valley in the nineties when entertainment was in its
Complete descendants and blooming.
You've been to these conferences your whole life.
Does it now just feel like that center of gravity is entirely shifted to tech?
And the entertainment people are.
And after thought.
They are, it is true.
The cultural stuff aside.
And maybe it's just an old dog talking, but
The fact that it has dispersed so
There's just
So much now.
There's so much optionality.
That
Everything comes and goes so quickly.
Used to be
There was a cultural event.
Take
One of the great cultural events.
Which was roots.
Which
Was the seminal

Forty five, fifty percent of the population of this country.
And lived in the cultural environment for months.
You do good work today, it's here today, it's gone the next hour.
I wanna go back to the Flintstones portfolio. So you got MGM.
Dot dash Meredith was just renamed people.
Talk about that business and print media.
How have you made this a strong it feels like an anachronism and yet it's a really strong business.
How did you do that?
Well, we're doing it, I hope. I spent actually just before I got here.
A really great
Two hours worth.
One of our magazines is Travel Eisure.
Which
Is
Doing extremely well.
And yet
What's happening with Google is just
It is going.
They say it goes slow and then it goes fast. It's going fast.
Do you depend on your life traffic from Google, from search?
You're gonna be
Close to extinct, if that's what you do.
And that's it.
Huge.
Yeah, but directly to the question.
We're talking about
This one magazine of ours doing very well is a million
Subscriptions.
Extremely strong digital life.
But nevertheless.
It's got this.
Google Paradox, hardly.
Which is
Direct searches are
Going.
So I said to the
Creative people.
Don't you have to kind of invert your business?
You create content from people magazine to food and wine.
All these areas is incredible.
Gold mine of
content of ideas and subject areas, et cetera.
And you publish them in both print.
And
Ten million.
Copies.
A year.
Slover print business.
Big digital business.
And it is there.
Doing really well at it, certainly far better than our competition.
I said.
Back up four years ago.
Five years ago.
And you're a traveling leisure.
So you know something about the travel business, and you know that it'll work.
How come you didn't create white lotus?
How come it didn't come out of you?

What would have happened?
If it did come out of here.
And there's no reason it didn't other than you have not inverted your business.
We own food and wine.
If you're in the food and wine.
Business.
And you know a lot about that. You know where trends are and you know what's happening.
How come you didn't do casamios?
If you think about our businesses that way.
You succeed and fail.
But you'll come up with hundreds of things to pursue.
that if some of them work out, you built a giant company.
So the media becomes the marketing.
Exactly right.
For the product.
Two closing questions for you.
At the end of the book.
There's this beautiful line where you got money and fame and all that good stuff.
But your life has mostly been about building and building and building.
And then
Your family built you into something resembling a person, quite a powerful closing line.
What constituted that? What did your family do to
Tell you what.
They defined me.
They became
The fabric of my life.
They became the reason.
My children, grandchildren.
Soon great grandchildren.
That's the fabric of my life.
I didn't seek it.
C certainly I did seek it in some way because I got it.
But
Without it, I just be pathetic and lonely.
Closing question I ask everybody is the same.
What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?
The kindest thing
Anyone has done for me.
is to give me the security that they love me.
Beautiful.
Barry, thanks for doing this.
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