Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cca865282a6a1100

I didn't go into business to win a popularity contest. I went into business to win. You know, when Michael Crichton gave me
The book.
of Jurassic Park.
I put the right director with it, Steven Spieler, there was no second choice.
You've had a front row seat to Hollywood for a long time.
Where did people go wrong? I thought these powerless
that they developed in the entertainment business were just sheer nonsense.
It's an ephemeral thing, power, and it's fleeting.
And it doesn't last.
And if you don't believe that, take a look at anyone that's had it. It's like
A lease it has a closed end.
And never a good one.
I have been viewed by a lot of my friends as the world's best friend and the world's worst enemy. Success to me.
Is
I think that's the most beautiful answer I've heard in two hundred and some episodes.
One of the things that I admire about you is your voracious appetite for learning.
And you started in the William Morris file room and you had access to all these, but it was like you, David Geffen.
Barry Diller.
All the same sort of path in the file room reading the history.
What's the modern equivalent of that, do you think, for people out there wanting to get ahead at work? Well, I don't I you know, it's a really great question. I'm not sure, frankly, because
One of my
I I love the internet and I love being on my computer to the point where
Um
Yeah.
Wants to kill me sometimes because I just
love surfing through the internet and going down rabbit holes.
First of all there's a
David Geffen and Barry Diller and I are very dissimilar human beings, but we do share a couple of very similar traits, all three of us.
cut our teeth in the early years, uh in the entertainment business.
All three of us have voracious appetites.
for learning and all three of us have a voracious appetite to read.
David and Barry are two of the smartest guys that I know. And
They're on top of everything if you talk to them.
You know
It's extraordinary how well read they are. These guys didn't go to college.
They're better red than most.
PhDs that I know in any field.
And secondly, we've all three demonstrated that as mailroom employees where we knew the quickest path was education.
I have a thing I always say to people that work with me, knowledge is power.
And it works for you and against you.
And it works for ya.
If you embrace it, use it, read.
And try to index it in your head for context.
works against you if it turns you into a lawyer.
And lying is a
When I started CA and
seventy four it became very clear to me that lying was a
industrial problem.
In the entertainment business.
P everybody didn't tell the truth. One of the reasons they
Did not tell the truth.
is since they didn't know the term knowledge is power, but they
knew it innately that they had to have an answer.
So you could call up an agent.
And ask them a question.
They felt this necessity to have an answer.
And by doing that
They'd sometimes
More than half the time make it up.
So we started some very simple rules.
Which
I was shocked in retrospect how revolutionary they were.
But they were simple.
To me it was like
Simpleton.
Logic. Don't lie.
If you don't have an answer, here's your answer.
Tell you what, Shreyn, I'm gonna get back to you.
'Cause I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm gonna find out. That's highly acceptable.
Entertainment business, everybody knows everything.
They know everything. It's not possible, by the way.
Not possible. It's the same inside most organizations. Everybody will make up an answer on the fly and well, I think people want to show that they're
In the no.
And I think it's just very fine to show that you're not.
And that you want to find out.
And then the second thing we did was insist on teamwork.
Which was shocking to everybody because in
You know, for seventy five years it was one client, one agent.
And we would not allow that.
All of our clients had multiple agents so they could talk to a lot of different people.
In the years I was at CA we never lost a client, and the reason was if they tired of one person they'd go to the next. But everyone was up to speed.
I mean up to the minute on their career.
And uh
inner office rule was you had to answer your associates first.
Before the clients, before the buyers.
And we were all basically empowered by each other and it
If you look at it
The permutation of that
Thesis is to the hundredth power.
You can't beat it.
And by the way.
S one of the reasons we attracted
Most of the major working television.
We didn't have any ego about who handled who. We didn't have any ego about passing information. We didn't have any ego about anything.
Because
The clients were in the ego business, not us. They had egos not
On their own. It was imputed to them because they were movie stars.
And I think
I think they have
I think one of the most difficult things
In the world to do.
Besides being
Yeah.
physicist or a brain surgeon
Yeah.
A s any kind of surgeon.
I think it's being an actor or a director.
Or writer.
Uh writers are it's a lonely sport.
It's a lonely vocation.
You're by yourself usually. Some have partners, most don't.
And you gotta create out of thin air.
Um I find artists in the same boat.
Painters.
Sculptors.
They I'm I'm wildly
Impressed.
By the fact that
They create things out of nothing.
I love it. That's why I love art. That they can create something that's either pleasing or challenging.
Directors.
Make three hundred
Decisions a day.
And just little things like if the glass on the table's in the wrong place for the second shot.
Your mistake is noted for posterity.
Yeah. And you always read about mistakes and content. People love to catch it.
And as an actor, I remember once
sitting with Paul Newman, who was the loveliest man and
Wanted so hard to be normal.
He really wanted to be one of the guys. He took up racing and he was
When he was at the track he was not
Paul Newman, the movie story is Paul Newman, the guy.
And I used to go with them all the time to races and we used to go race go karts together.
And I was with him one night in Westport, Connecticut, where he lived, and we were at a local restaurant and
He hated when people came up to him while he was eating. He didn't care any other time. He was really cool about signing autographs. And I'm shooing people away and I said, Paul.
I gotta ask you a question. You're the you're fun to be with.
You're no different than any of my other friends. You just happen to be a lot better looking.
And you can act, which none of us can.
How is it that
How do you take it with everyone telling you you're the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel? You have the best eyes, you're this, you're that.
And he looked at me and said, Michael, you know what? I don't believe any of it.
But after a certain amount of time it starts to get to you and you start to think.
Maybe.
You know.
And I think it's a tough gig.
Really do.
Is
Maybe let's invert this question a little bit. You've had a front row seat to Hollywood for a long time.
Where do people go wrong?
What are they? I think the first place everybody goes wrong is they start to believe
Things that aren't true.
People tend to deceive themselves. I find that to be a common denominator amongst everybody across every
kind of industry. It happens everywhere. If you start
believing that you're better than others or that you're
Press is accurate, good or bad, or that
You
or superior in any way. We're all humans, and we all have
different skill sets. Now some athletes are just better than others.
But that doesn't make them better people.
Sometimes it makes them worse people, actually. And
I think
It's very easy to slip up.
In Hollywood in many directions. You can slip up
in the relationship area, you can slip up in the ego area, you can slip up in
uh believing you're something that you're not
You can slip up in
uh just simple mistakes.
in daily life that
Others might not make
in different vocations.
Uh Hollywood's also an incredibly social
event. Everything's a social event.
Yeah.
I always felt that Hollywood was
manufactured for people that had
No significant others.
No children.
No home.
No family.
Nothing except maybe a two bedroom apartment.'Cause they could go out
three hundred and sixty five nights a year and fine companionship.
with others in the same boat and do something.
You can't.
Find that in most vocations.
What are the I wanna come back to CIA and some of the simple rules that you had. So you had teamwork and you had tell the truth. What are the other ones?
Everyone had to be incredibly well read.
Um
People were not allowed to recommend
rules or material that they didn't believe in. That was a big downfall of the agency business for all the years I was in it before.
Which is people would take a flyer.
to try to get you convinced of something they didn't believe in. That's a real weak link in the chain. We didn't have any of that.
You had to have a passion for what you were doing. I had an open door policy Friday afternoons. Anyone could come in and give me something to read, but since I could only read
A certain number of scripts on a weekend.
They had to be incredibly passionate about it.
And
You know, I remember
a young agent we had named Amy Grossman, she was a literary agent and she was terrific and
She came in to me one afternoon said I've read something you've got to read.
And I said okay and I gave everybody like two minutes to sell it to me because
And by the way, I do the same thing in my tech investing right now. If you can't tell me what your business is about and
twenty seconds you should not do your business because how you gonna
marketed to
The world
You've got to and I'm not talking about that technical algorithms of A I'm talking about
What does it do?
And she walked in, she said, Your client Bob Town.
who was one of the great writers in the in the movie business, wrote um
Uh Chinatown and
Cinderella Liberty and uh
Tarzan and some of the best scripts ever written in
in the community.
I just read a script by his brother, Roger Town.

deserves attention by this company, by CA.
'Cause our company worked as a group, so if you brought a script in
And then a couple of the senior people read it and endorsed it.
it got a lot of attention. So it had to be good because we put a lot of assets on it. And at the end of the day, all we have is our time.
And you run out of time very fast. I mean in the
Agency business, we were like one arm wallpaper hangers.
You know, I mean there's just no time.
And
She said, Here's what the script is about.
And she said it's about a guy who's washed up
And comes back.

to a professional baseball team. He's a washed up baseball player.
And at a later age he comes back.
And it's his journey.
I got a little tingle on that.
And I also had indexed in my head that our client Robert Redford was looking
For a baseball mover.

So I took the script home, I read it and
I called her the minute I finished.
I said this is a great
Film.
Great.
Need some work, but
Great film. And I said I know
I have a great idea of how to put it together.
And I I said, W I'm gonna tell you and tell me honestly what you think,'cause we were about directness and honesty and truth. That was critical to us.
Tell your clients the truth.
People in the entertainment business.
were just always lied to.
We would have I would see agents tell or their clients that they had just seen
A film that was
Yeah.
Or they had just seen dailies where they were no good.
And something was wrong and it and they needed to be reshot, they'd say, Oh, you look great.
Tell'em what they want to hear. We never did that ever.
Is there an art to telling people the truth?
Especially when there's ego involved. No.
It's just
You just say it.
And they you know what it's interesting.
They appreciate it.
I wanna be told the truth.
But in any case I said they aim a
We have a director we represent.
was one of my very first clients as a writer. His name is Barry Levinson and
I signed him as a comedy writer when I saw him on
A local television show in nineteen
Sixty nine and
But he had an eye and he had a lust for the business.
And he was smart.
And he was visual.
And I knew
That he had something in him.
And we put his first movie together called Diner.

And it was a huge success.
With all unknown cast.
That proved to be
All up and coming young stars, which means he had an eye.
And I knew Redford wanted to do a baseball movie.
I also knew the odds of Redford working with a second time director.
After having work with some of the greats like Sidney Pollock and
you know, some of the best directors around that he
Probably wouldn't do it.
But I decided to put my
Self and the company behind it and I
sent Bob the script and I sent Barry the script.
Both of them simultaneously, which was unusual, by the way. Usually you build a package one element at a time.
And they both responded positively, and I called Bob and I said, I'd like to bring Barry
to see you up at sundance.
He's and what I said, but I want to warn you he's only done one movie, but I have a strong belief in this guy. And to Bob's credit.
Because Bob was the founder of Sundance.
And liked.
Experimental films and young people.
He said, Let me meet him.
No guarante no commitments, but
I'll meet him.
So I remember taking my son Chris, who at the time was about
I don't six, seven years old up to Sundance with me.
And Barry.
And we went and sat with Bob in the Sundance Lodge.
Yeah.
They really hit it off.
And we packaged the natural that day right there.
Then we put uh
Kim Basinger and Bill Bromley, and Glenn Close, three other clients in.
And then we got it financed and it the rest is history. It was a huge hit.
One of the quotes that I loved
In your book was Don't Fight Your Job. Can you unpack that for me?
Well, I I mean over the years I as a

business of giving advice when she
Even though I'm not an agent anymore, I still find myself doing that constantly on a daily basis for people that are friends or former
clients or people I'm in business with.
uh looking for another point of view, I get that call. And in the course of those discussions I'll
More likely than not.
People are
Their first complaint is usually about an associate
Then about a deal.
Going wrong.
And then about not liking their job.
And I'm a huge believer that you have to do what you love doing.
I mean, right now I'm doing something, I can't wait to get up every morning, so
If you can't feel that way, you shouldn't do the job.
Or you should look for another job.
Or you should ask yourself why you're not happy in the job if you were at one time. So there's a whole
There's a whole pilots checklist to look at.
if that's the case. And it's important because if you're fighting going to work during the day.
You're not gonna perform to your capacity or potential.
And you're not going to be exceptional.
Well, you're not gonna you're not gonna stand out and at the end of the day
That's what it's all about is excellence and standing out and doing good things and helping people and you can't do any of that if you're personally unhappy.
You have a non starter on your hands.
You're one of the people I know with probably the most relationships. How do you manage and keep in contact with so many people?
Well, I love people, so that's one thing. Two
I'm very uh efficient with my communications.
Um I also
Basically
Uh
I collect art.
And people.
Those are the two things I collect.
And art is easy because it's static. You can look at it, you can make a decision. People
is
As fascinating, probably more fascinating.
But takes a lot.
Of time.
And I put that time in.
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Mm.
What do you look for with people when you're hiring people like you guys hired uh CEO for the MOMA?
How did you go about doing that?
Yeah.
It's interesting. Mo my thesis
on investing, for example, my thesis on
Hiring people.
And kind of my thesis on how I
Reach out in my life to other people is predicated.
On how I feel.
Well in the first case about the founder.
And in the second case
About people that I meet.
And
I
like to meet interesting people, and I am very lucky.
very lucky in that I get
to meet some of the most interesting people in the world.
from all walks of life in every profession.
You know, when I was in the agency business in the seventies.
I realized that the entertainment business was a closed end ecosystem.
And basically
Everything was about the entertainment business. There was no life outside the entertainment business. There were very
few people with other interests other than content.
There were very few people that collected art in the entertainment business.
There were very few people that talked at dinner.
About anything except entertainment and a little tiny bit about politics.
But it was mostly about gossip and about
you know, clients and about
Who made what?
How much trouble someone was in.
All things that I found absolutely
Uninteresting.
And I made it a point that
To take myself.
Айфром бізнес.
Go to New York.
Every single week.
Build a presence
In the art community.
in the theater community.
Yeah.
part of the intellectual community.
Because I didn't want to be
One of those.
Kind of.
One horse people.
I
Always admired people that had
great depth and breadth and could talk about many things. And I practiced what I preached. We had at the agency in seventy four
A two hundred
single line list
Bibliography.
Of monthly magazines and books to look at.
Because and they weren't
In a singular
Space.
And I had
At one time I was a magazine junkie.
I don't know if you know this, but the you probably aren't aware of this, but there wasn't always an internet. Did you know that? No. And I used to get
over two hundred magazines.
A month.
At my office.
Or house or both.
And every single day I'd thumb through ten or
fifteen of them and I'd p I'd tear out
Things I needed to read in depth.
Those were the days of long form, not short form, like today, where no one has any attention span. So all the things that are written are except in the New York or in the Atlantic or
Or an in depth piece and you know, the post or the times it but

It was a time to
learn a little bit about everything.
And
It kept proving itself to me over and over again.
And the reason I did it at first was practical.
Our agents needed to be able to be facile.
in multiple disciplines to talk to different people who all had different interests.
So when I met Paul Newman
It was very easy to engage with him.
Because I subscribe to car and driver, motor trend, automobile.
And one other
CarMag as a car and driver. I may have said that, but
And I'd looked at them and I was really
deeply into automobiles.
But more in the aesthetic sense, I really didn't know much how they worked.
But when I met Paul was the first thing he wanted to talk about. We
lead some common denominator together.
And I would
Preach that to the staff.
That you need to stay
On top of multidisciplinary
careers functions and interests and hobbies.
So you have something to talk about.
Um
You know, I read Scientific America, not
Diligently, but I
Read the headlines, looked at
You know, the opening five paragraphs of
an article to get a sense of it. Everything it needed in those days, by the way.
in a detailed article was in the opening and the closing when you get down to it. And
I wanted
I was interested in medicine, so I read the New England Journal of Medicine. I
you know, work very hard to raise money for the UCLA Medical Center. I was the chairman of the hospital for many years.
I had to
look at the New England Journal of Medicine to talk to the d twenty department heads
When I brought I am pay to design and build the UCLA Medical Center after the earthquake.
I needed to have a fluent
understanding of other architects so I could give context.
And of the twenty department heads who were the tops of the top.
in their particular field. Now look.
I didn't learn.
how to perform a procedure medically, but I at least got some vocabulary and
I get kind of stay up.
into a conversation for a period of time.
At the height of
CAA, you guys had seventy percent of the market, I think, if I remember correctly. How did you stay grounded? What specific things did you do to not let that go to your head?
Well
You know, first of all
I believe that
All the publicity that I got, both good and bad, was nonsense.
Same people that put
said good things about me, later would write bad things about me, and then they'd write good things on bad things.
None of it fazed me, frankly. Um
Did you read it?
Yeah, I read it because I wanted to have context. But
I thought these powerless
that they developed in the entertainment business were just sheer nonsense.
Because there's no such thing as power, it doesn't exist.
And when people would say this one's the second most or the tenth most or
You're the most powerful
It's all nonsense because
It's an ephemeral thing power and it's fleeting.
And it doesn't last.
And if you don't believe that, take a look at anyone that's had it. It's you it it's like
A lease it has a closed end and never a good one.
So
I never believed in it. I believed in my family.
Which composed of my nuclear family.
My three kids.
And my business family. That was my life.
I believed in that and
I protected both with privacy.
We were very private at home. There were no pictures of my kids anywhere.
I wouldn't allow pictures of them taken.
I
didn't like anyone at the agency talking to the press.
Giving trash about
Stuff.
We did have another rule that it was inappropriate.
To bad mouth.
non clients product because that was a
Age old trick in the entertainment business try to start a
drum roll of negativity.
And when I was twenty two.
I met a manager.
who was quite successful in the business.
I liked them a lot.
But he had a horrible habit of bad mouthing everybody.
And it became clear to me.
Six months into the relationship.
That he did that because he was insecure in the media. He thought
It made himself look better.
When in reality it made him look really
Week and
Unapreciative?
I remember sitting with him in his office.
And he was bad mouthing his partner, who actually was a nice guy, not the sharpest tool in the shed, but a very nice guy.
Didn't deserve that.
So we wouldn't
You
At our place you weren't allowed to badmouth anybody. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it. And if you got a problem,
Take'em in their office, shut the door.
And let it out.
And fight it out.
And then shake hands, but don't
Drag it on.
It doesn't make any sense.
I always uh you know, when I'm on the receiving end of this and somebody saying something negative about somebody else, I'm always wondering, like, what are they saying about me? You know, like
There's no discretion there. Well you can count on them saying something negative about you, even if there's nothing negative to say.
Some people exist
in a sea of negativity. We were w I tried to set a
stage for us to exist in a sea of positiveness and not to badmouth people and just try to
As I say, be more English.
Um so one of the traits that you look for just coming back out of this rabbit hole we get into was sort of
voracious reading and learning and always curious. What are the other things that stand out that you're looking for in people, whether you invest in them or just want to spend time with them?
Well investing.
is very simple for me. I've been investing in tech now since
nineteen ninety three and full time since two thousand and one.
And I transitioned out of the media business in about oh
Two thousand and three or four I sold every
Asset that I had.
And I went full time into tech investing and tech consulting.
Yeah.
Nothing changed for me.
Nothing changed for me. So what are the attributes you're looking for in founders that you would look for in anybody else? What what indicators are there that somebody is likely to be successful? It's pretty simple, actually. Founders need to be uh
Passionate.
They need to be deep into their idea. They need to have a lot of ideas about what they want to do with their idea.
They need to be connected to people that can help them get their ideas started.
They have to be open to critique.
They can't be arrogant. It's critical they're not arrogant.
I find that arrogant founders have a tendency to fail more than non-arrogant founders.
They have to have the ability to tell you their ideas in succinct
Ways.
It has to be really enthusiastic.
And it's funny, when you're a director and you're interviewing an actor or an actress, you're kinda looking for
the same things. The only difference is
When you're looking at uh
uh Marty Scorsese, who I have unbelievable respect for
taught me most about the movie business that I know.
And
Said to me, I'm always looking at their eyes.
I'm kinda not looking at that when I'm interviewing a founder, but they're not actors, right? And I don't want them to be. Yeah. But other than that, the packaging
Of a film or a television show.
Mm.
Record or a book.
Is no different.
than the packaging of an idea for a digital company.
for a company in technology.
It's all the same.
The founder's the creator.
The
VCs the money and tech.
the studio or the distributor of the money and
the entertainment business. And then you go to the marketing. They both need to be marketed. And you gotta find a distributor.
And you gotta give them both advice.
It's very much the same.
Uh Ben Horwitz and Mark Anderson pointed that out to me in nineteen ninety nine.
They both looked at me and said, You do exactly
What we do.
And
That was like an epiphany moment for me.

I love the first meeting you had with Andreessen where he showed up and asked you to be on the board. Maybe you can tell that story.
Well, I got a cold call from a mutual friend of ours, Ron Conway.
Great investor, fabulous human being.
One of the nicest men on the planet.
great well loved up in San Francisco and
We knew each other through U C O A because he was he had a kid down there and we had uh I was
You know, running the board at the hospital.
And we had had some contact on some personal issues.
And he said, I've got a guy I want you to meet and I said, Who's that? He said, Mark Andreessen. I said, Who is it?

He said, Well he's
Really smart.
You're gonna really like him. He wants to meet you. And of course I said, Why would he want to meet me? What do I have to offer this guy?
He should
Shut up and just meet the guy. And I said, Okay,'cause Ron was that kind of guy. If he said meet him, I'm gonna meet him.
And that, by the way, is continued in my life. If people I respect
Say to me.
Meet the guy.
Even if I don't want to or the gal, I will do it.
And it just worked for me on a company, which we can talk about later, that we just announced last week that we incubated where I met someone that I refused to meet, but someone I respect said, You better meet'em.
But
And Treason
came down to meet me and he picked a restaurant someplace and I budgeted an hour for the meeting because I thought it was a complete waste of my time.
And he came in a pair of shorts.
That were striped with.
Kind of flower Hawaiian shirt.
And um
I had never seen that look in Hollywood, but he we sat down and we started talking.
We spent three hours together.
I was mesmerized by this guy.
And then he had me meet Ben and I was mesmerized by him.
They were extraordinary people.
Who were in a world I didn't know existed.
And they asked me to go on the board of this new company.
And I asked them what it did and they told me and I said, I don't understand.
I really didn't understand it at the time. The reason I didn't understand it, this is nineteen ninety nine.
They developed a cloud.
Mm-hmm.
I I couldn't understand what they were talking about.
Where is it?
Where how do you plug it in? Where does it get power? What is it?
And they had thought this through in nineteen
Ninety nine. Oh my god. And they developed a company called Loudclock.
Yeah.
And
Then
They said to me we'd like you on the board.
And I said,
Yeah, I'm really enjoying talking to you guys.
But I'm an idiot about this stuff. What do you want me on the board for? I don't even understand what product we're selling at this company.
And to their credit, they said we want someone
Who's not beholding to anyone in Silicon Valley.
Someone who think out of the box.
And someone who's fearless at going up against
The other people on the board.
And
I said, Okay.
I can do that.
And I did it.
Where does that fearlessness come from?
You you have never seemed to shy away from confrontation.
You know it's funny.
Shane, I don't know if that's good or bad, by the way. I have to this day haven't decided. It's funny that you asked that question because I was
discussing it yesterday, uh with tomorrow, the woman that uh
I am with and uh she's English and very uh
elegant and charming and uh very mannered.
Uh I'm not English. Um
Days I can be charming, days I can be
Not charming and tough.
Um, we're talking about
Confrontation.
So she
Doesn't like it, but will do it if pushed.
Uh for me it's a tool in the toolkit.
That's all it is.
I do a lot of things for friends of mine that are in trouble because
I
Have been viewed by a lot of my friends as the world's best friend and the world's worst enemy.
Because I'm just black and white loyal.
It's
The way I've been my whole life.
I'm very loyal to my friends, to my family.
And to people that have done things for me. You know, at CA we kept a list.
Of every single executive.
That helped us in the first three or five years.
That then had trouble.
And we got everyone a job.
And if we couldn't get'em a job, we made sure they had money.
Because they helped us when we had nothing.
And boy, there were a lot of people on the list because
The entertainment business is not good to the elderly.
people, it's not Japan, and it's not
Uh it doesn't have a good memory.
And we did.
That's an incredible I've never heard that before. Well, don't share it much, but
We had at one time.

I think we had at one time close to four hundred people on a list that
were either fired or weren't working or fell on hard times.
There was a writer.
that we had on the list that was
about as important a writer as there was in the television business in the sixties.
And
We're asked.
him when he was really important to write an episode.
of a half hour comedy for a client.
that we had just signed that really needed the g the job.
And he did it.
And twenty years later.
The guy called me and he said
Very simply that he had hit a dead end.
He couldn't get a job.
Anywhere, any place.
And he was older and he was very nice, but he timed out his kind of style.
Was gone.
And um
In a staff meeting, I
Told everyone this story that I just told you.
I said, We're gonna legislate a job for this guy. This is not just giving him a check.
He needs his dignity back.
And we went out and and
Two weeks we got him a job.
And that was our
Duty.
That wasn't our choice.
And yeah, in that was some confrontation because people tried to blow us off the phone saying they wouldn't do it. And we used the confrontational tactic.
to get'em the job. So you have to say to yourself, What's more important?

Some people will say confrontation's horrible I have a
Lot of friends that
won't get into a confrontation and
I'm in the school that occasionally it's necessary when indeed you're confronted with
I don't think any of us have any choice.
But to respond.
You can't
Just let it go. You can't let people walk all over you or your clients.
That's an incredible story.
Do you think that makes you a hard target?
Oh, I was
I wasn't gonna win any popularity on this, but I will tell you what I said to people.
I wasn't I didn't
go into business to win a popularity contest.
I went into business to win.
And I'm a monopolist. I believe in Peter Thiel's theory on monopoly.
I don't believe that you should have competition.
They have to be eliminated.
That's the American way, in my opinion.
Everyone says there's always room for competition. I don't think there's any room for competition. I don't want anyone to be as good as us. I want us to be the best.
If you want to have a second or third choice, that's okay, but we're the first choice.
So we had to be the best.
And I don't I didn't
I wasn't running for high school.
president, you know, I had already done that. I won that.
At a four thousand kid high school I was president.
I don't think I was made president'cause I was popular, frankly, I was made president'cause I got stuff done.
And people knew that. I've been that way my whole life.
You ask me to do something?
I'll get it done. When I need something done.
I asked the busiest person I know to do it.
'Cause they'll get it done.
Ask someone with too much time it never gets done.
That's so true.
I I've been thinking a lot about the
Coming back to the dignity thing for a second and allowing people to keep their dignity.
Well when people help you and it wasn't in
the long term culture of the entertainment business. Short term, it's try you know
The entertainment's a transactional friendship. Are these people really your friends?
I'm not so sure.
Yeah, but
While they can help you, they're your friends.
But if someone helped us get started, and we started from scratch.
On card tables.
With no money.
We ran out of money the third week we were in business and we got sued by
Our former employer.
And we didn't even have money to defend ourselves. I had to handle that without a lawyer.
You have to reach out and you have to help people. Here's a guy who helped us when we needed it, and ten years later he's
He can't get a job and
He doesn't feel too good about himself.
Um
You know, time passed'em by. That happens to all of us.
You know?
But unless you stay current.
See, that's my thesis.
As long as I'm learning
And consulting for young
Founders.
I'm gonna stay current.
Because I learn something every day.
Every single day.
I can't wait to get up in the morning. I meet
with the most interesting humans on the planet.
Every day I f get pitched ideas.
by young entrepreneurs.
Did make me really believe in this country.
You know, I am not worried about foreign competition.
Uh yeah, China may have robots that are great, but we got people that are unbelievably smart and
Our system.
Just works really well.
You know, I was um
I was in London.
with tomorrow, she's English from London and a group of businessmen asked to have a
round table session with me'cause they
A f one of their friends.
was having a problem and one of the friends in their friend group knew me pretty well or knew tomorrow.
And they set up a a lunch for me.
And
The subject fascinated me and it's why I took the launch.
It was a subject of the lunch was why are American business people
So much better than everyone else in the world. Why is that?
And that was the second time in my life.
That I'd been approached with that question.
The other time was in Japan when I would go there once a month to deal with all the Japanese companies that I consulted for and
In media.
And in uh consumer businesses.
And we went to the lunch and the guy
Who set up the launch opened the meeting.
and pose the question to the table.
And I asked each guy what they did, and we went around the table and when we got to the last guy.
Which I knew.
what he did because I had been briefed and I was saved him till the end.
He said my name so and so and uh
I was in this business and this is what I did and I sit in
What are you doing now? He said, Well, I'm moving to Stad.
I said, Oh, you like to ski, huh?
And he was in his
Mid forties, late forties, I think. I don't remember.
And he said, No, I don't like skiing particularly.
I said, You have kids? He said, Yeah, I'm gonna put them in school there.
I said, and where have you lived the last twenty years in London?
And while you're leaving.
He said, Well, my business just went under.
I said, Oh, okay.
And
Why are you leaving?
He said, Well, I'm done.
I said, What do you mean you're done? He said, Well, I'm so embarrassed we went bankrupt.
And he said I had to fire like eight hundred people or something.
I said, Yeah, so what?
He said, Well, he means so what?
I said, so what? You went bankrupt.
You didn't do it on purpose, did you? You said no, we had a bad business cycle.
Арпронов Арпродакс фел офа клиф.
We had a great product, but we didn't back it up. We made some fundamental mistakes.
He said, So I I wanna get out of the city. I I'm kind of embarrassed.
I said, Well, our dinner our lunch is over.
And everyone said, What are you talking about? We haven't even gotten served. I said, Well you asked me why are American businessmen and women better
The
Others.
And I said, We just gotta
Demonstration of it.
failure in American society is a badge of honor.
We all fail. I've failed in a lot of things.
You fail, Shane, you just get back up on your horse.
And you keep writing.
I've had tons of failures.
But doesn't stop me from trying to be greater again.
And
This guy by the time I got done.
got all pumped up and actually canceled his move.
And went and started another business.
Because he thought that he was
Walking around people were talking about him.
And I said, Yeah, they're talking about everybody.
Because if they can see a weak spot
It makes them feel better to bad mouth you, but what has that got to do with you? What do you care?
Let'em say whatever they want, just prove'em wrong.
And bottom line, failure is part
You know, Michael Crichton was one of my closest friends in my life till the till he passed away. We talked
Every day of the week.
Seven days a week.
And he gave me the best advice. He said, You know
Every time I made a mistake.
Or I got some bad publicity or something, he'd call me.
And he'd make light out of it.
And he always said to me, Just remember something, Michael. I said, What? He said, There's always another rodeo.
I said, Really?
I said, Since when are you a cowboy? And he said, Trust me.
You but you did that, it didn't work, next case.
And I believed him and I lived that life my whole life. Are there any other lessons you learned from Michael Carton? You said I think in the past that he was the smartest person you knew?
Well, he was the smartest person until I met Mark Anderson. And then I had the greatest lunch of my life where I put them in a room with me, and I put one on each end of the table and me in the middle, and I felt like I was at Wimbledon or the US open. I never sat through three hours like that in my life. This was a
Intellectual sword fight.
It was so cool. It was unbelievable.
And they both loved it.
It was unreal.
Both incredibly well read.
Both.
f recall that's
Uh extraordinary.
Both.
Um
widely read, which is insane.
Yeah.
And
I learned a lot from those guys even at that part of my life which was my mid part of my life which
God, this was
Twenty five years ago and twenty years ago and
They're both deeply red.
They are both curious about everything.
It's unbelievable they share these
traits they're the same people in that way.
What drives you today?
Oh oh only one thing. There are two things that drive me.
Oh.
one or my five grandchildren who I'm in love with and I love
Um
I just love hanging out with them.
My four kids who are I've two boys, two girls, they're
You've grown into
Just amazing human beings.
And their parenting so much better than I did, frankly.
How can you say that though if your kids turned into amazing human beings because they're just better with their kids than I was with them. Because I came
from a household post World War Two.
With
A very strict father, and I
Paranting in the fifties, sixties,
Seventies, eighties.
was very different than parenting today.
I see it with my kids, how they handle their children.
And they're doing a great job. Just different than the way I did it.
But
The other thing that's important to me
Is I can't wait to get up in the morning and
Meet with a founder who's just
You know, developed a
submarine that has no crew that has
defense capabilities for the country and
You can't see it, it's stuff.
Yeah.
I've got a young guy I've done
I've already done one company with him, I'm doing another one. His name's Nemo Gamzari, I met him.
Seventeen years ago he was assigned to me at Palantir when I was one of the advisors to Alex Carp, who's a brilliant guy.
I was introduced to him by Peter Tielhood, invest a lot of money in Palantir and there was no income. He asked me to help monetize it.
Which shows that you don't have to be totally technical to be in the tech world.
And Nemo was assigned to me to answer technical questions'cause he was a genius engineer.
We started a company together. He had an idea that he could put a company together.
uh called blend that's now public that does mortgages on your phone.
In under ten clicks.
Now he came up with another idea. I just got him all the funding, including from us and
Uh, where I'm doing the marketing and he's hired
the right engineers and
It's a f
Total incubation.
I can't tell you how much fun it is, and I can't tell you how much I'm learning.
Because I'm not an engineer, but I love the idea.
And I can help in the non-technical stuff that's critical to, you know, howdy what are the nuts and bolts of building a business.
How do you build a culture?
How do you write a budget?
You know, how do you market the product, how do you make sales, who do you hire to do sales, who do you hire to be your early ten employees, you know? There's so many things to be done, and these are young people that
I've learned something fascinating, which is this generation in tech.
They just wanna know.
They don't wanna know what you've done that's great. They wanna know what you've failed at and how to avoid it.
It is so fantastic.
The the way they think is so counterintuitive.
What would be an example of that?
Example of that is I got a call year five years ago when I published my book from Patrick Collinson at Stripe. And I think the Collinson brothers are two of the smartest guys in the business.
And Patrick invited me to lunch. I went over and I sit down at a picnic table.
After going through the cafeteria line, he said, Are you ready? I said, Yeah, I'm hungry. And I see my book sitting there with
A zillion post-its sticking out of it.
He said, Okay, let's start.
I said, What are we starting? He said.
I have marked every place in your book where you said you made a mistake.
Mm. I said, Oh, okay.
And he said, I wanna know the conditions.
That you were under when you made the decision.
What you might have done differently.
And what would have happened if you did it differently?
And we sat there for three hours.
And
What I realized is he didn't care about any of the good things I did or any of the things that turned out to be successful or
kinda revolutionary in the entertainment. Wasn't interested.
No interest.
Wouldn't know the mistake, so he wouldn't make'em.
That to me.
Was not smart.
It was wise.
That was a grade above
Normal.
What's an example of a mistake you made that we can learn from
Just pick one. You got twenty hours, I can tell you I've I got all the time in the world. I've made so many mistakes in in my
business life and my personal life.
In my art collecting.
And that's why I did that din that lunch in London.
Because it hasn't stopped me.
I don't look back. It's history. I don't look back.
I build on it.
And there are a lot of cultures.
That don't believe in that and we're not one of them.
You know, we're two hundred years old here.
We live in what I think's the greatest country in the history of mankind.
And
It's all about
What you can do and
Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, don't give up.
You know, create that momentum. It's okay to be competitive.
It's okay to be in a capitalist system.
I I must say I marvel
I got into a huge I shouldn't talk about this on your podcast, but I got into a
huge argument with a friend of my daughter's
Um, she's a rising young executive at Vogue, she's twenty three, following in her mother's footsteps. She's a
Great kid and
Sophisticated and smart and
personable and sensitive. She's got all the stuff.
One of her friends
made a comment and I make it a policy never to discuss politics at the dinner table,'cause I always get in trouble. And one of her friends
Said to me said to the table.
that he had decided to support.
the mayoral candidate who happens to be a socialist.
Mm.
And some people think he's a communist. I'm not sure which he is. I don't know. I've seen a lot of
His uh
I've seen a lot of information on'cause I'm fascinated by this dynamic.
And
I've listened to all of his campaign promises.
And I'm not a socialist. I believe in charity toward helping people, and I do a lot of that.
But I believe that capitalists create jobs and
And that creates a system. And I said to the guy, What school did you go to?
And he named a big fancy Ivy League school one, probably one I couldn't get into, and I said, Well
Did you take any history? He said, Yes, quite a bit. I said, Great.
I said, can you name me one sister?
In the last two thousand years.
That has worked.
That's not capitalism.
Socialism, communism, dictators. Yeah. Just name me one.
But you
learned at your Ivy League school.
Dead silence.
Because there isn't one.
Any you know, dictators can have long runs.
Some longer than others, but at the end they all lose.
Autocrats all lose.
And
Democratic capitalist societies.
Win.
Now will we go up and down? Absolutely.
But
Is this the best system? Unequivocally.
Is it good to have a socialist? I don't think so.
We've seen that party bo that movie before and it doesn't work.
How do you think that woke culture has influenced
Not only universities, which you're you're seeing firsthand, but also like film and TV and
Well I think that
Look.
The roots of woke culture had some merit.
The roots. And then like anything else in
West Los Angeles, they just carried it too far.
They took it.
Instead of letting it go from one side of the metronome to the middle.
They took it all the way to the other side.
And I think it contributed to the
demise of the content business in
Hollywood right now, I think the content business is in the worst place it's ever been.
And I think this
Форст вокнес.
has not been productive. I think at the beginning the ideas were wonderful.
I don't think that
People should be predatory on each other.
By the way, that's the history of the entertainment business. It needed to stop.
You know, it needed to stop.
But once it was made known, it didn't need to keep going.
And
It did, and I think it forced
Bad creative decision.
And it forced
Our audiences who don't all think that way.
to go narrow on us and
To not want to see the things that we did.

The liberal left in Hollywood think
are fantastic may not work for the other half of the country.
When I grew up we made movies that everyone wanted to watch. We didn't care what your political persuasion was. When we did Ghostbusters, I don't care if you're a liberal or a conservative
We just want you to laugh.
You know, meatball stripes.
When we did casino or good fellows.
With Marty.
Not interested in your politics. We just want you to watch the movie and enjoy it.
So we didn't enter political discussions. I didn't even allow political discussions
to take place in meetings. I didn't want
To get involved with our clients politics.
Do you think there's a world in the future where you and I are watching the same show?
And the actual show is different, even though we think we're watching the same show.
With content on demand and AI and it goes
your uh your political dispositions and what I know about you, I'm gonna give you this version and my political dispositions and what I know about you, I'm gonna give you a slightly different version. You know it's a f
It's a great question'cause I just had this debate at lunch today.
Um
I'll give you the analogy. First of all the answers I I don't ever in technology count anything out.
So could it happen? Absolutely, because the technology's actually there to do it. Netflix is already
uh done experiments with you change the ending.
Here's
You know
four different endings, you put the your own ending on the film.
But
I think that
The
Reality.
Of
All of this we see a little bit now in AI.
Mm.
I think when you go to the AI
Websites.
Think the different AI companies have the personalities of the
engineers that are
Programming them.
And I think you see that bias in the information you're given. You sure saw it in the early days. Oh, definitely. I think they just do a better job of hiding it. But I think it's still there.
How do you manage to keep up with the information flow? How do you prioritize?
I don't I'm overwhelmed.
Do you have uh I have in my office right now here in New York.
Yeah, my office at home in my office in the in on Madison Avenue.
stacks of articles to read and treatises and
thought pieces. I'm on the Council of Foreign Relations. I never get to finish the monthly.
As much as I want to. I I I got articles from the Atlantic.
stripped out of the magazine sitting in a pile. I'm overwhelmed with information and
Um
Yeah.
I love discovery, so
There's just not enough hours in the day, and I've got a horrible habit.
Of wanting to start going down rabbit holes late at night.
And you learn that from your young engineers'cause they stay up all night.
But then they go to sleep.
And I stay up all night, I don't go to sleep. That's pretty taxing.
Are you an early riser too? Yeah, I am. I'm a very early riser and I do my best thinking in the morning.
My very best thing in the morning. What's your routine after you get out of bed?
Um it's the same every day in my life, seven days a week. I uh get up.
Um
If I'm
Here it's easier, I mean harder'cause I have to take our dog
around the block, or we have an accident in the apartment.
If I'm in LA
We just open the door. It's a lot easier. Saves me ten minutes.
Uh I come right back.
I get.
His food.
I guess something
to drink for myself, and then I sit down at my desk.
Um
I read.
The same things every single morning.
What are those things? First thing I read, believe it or not, is the New York Post.
I read the New York Post because I love
the way they report the news. It's short. I can get a snapshot of what's going on very quickly.
I think Keith Poole's an amazing editor. He's English. He's very smart. They have some very good reporters.
And I get it short and fast.
And then I get a few laughs.
And I don't spend a lot of time on it'cause there's nothing long.
You know.
So I can do it in
very short time frame.
I then go right.
to tech crunch.
I read.
two or three tech websites that give me information about what's going on.
I like to read the information. I think Jessica Lesson's really smart.
And then I um
I read, believe it or not, I scan the headlines of the Drudge Report. Takes me two minutes,'cause I like to see their point of view,'cause it's so different than mine.
I always like to be balanced so when I watch news tomorrow and I watch three news sources.
Instead of one.
We won't watch one news source.
So we'll watch.
CNN Fox and Sky News.
'Cause you can have the same news report, which you do daily, and a different spin on all three.
So I don't agree with any of the three. So I guess we get the most neutral spin out of Sky News.
Um and then I
jump right into
uh the Financial Times Wall Street Journal
The New York Times, the LA Times, and the Washington Post.
And I
Go right through those like a hot knife through a butter.
Digitally.
What are you looking for when you're you're skimming? I'm looking for
Headlines
I'm looking for
Pictures because they often wouldn't appear if the editor didn't I'm I like to look through the lens that the editor does. Editors of
Newspapers and magazines are really much smarter.
And wiser than they're given credit for because
They kinda
Tell you what's important.
They tell you by the placement in the publication.
They tell you if there's a bigger headline, a subheadline, and a picture. You can program yourself for that. So those are things I tend to notice first.
And uh they're it's like, you know.
They're tells, that's all they are. And they educate me. And I'm I you know, someone asked me if
I thought that
You know, journalism would be dead. I said no, just the opposite. I think branded journalism's more important than ever. The most important people on the planet are journalists and editors. They kind of feed us.
our menu.
In a strange way.
I don't agree with people that sit and read things cover to cover because
You can't
equally weight everything between the covers.
It's not possible. It's stupid, frankly.
One of the most interesting answers I've heard to that question is Warren Buffett. And he says when he's reading, he's not reading for your opinion, he's reading for the facts.
So he's reading to collect factual information and formulate his own opinion.
But yeah, he basically ignores the opinion of the writer. I couldn't agree with them more. I have zero interest in anybody's opinion unless it's an op ed based.
Then I know it's an opinion and that's okay'cause I've looked for
I don't want an opinion in a factual news piece.
I'm not interested in what
You know, somebody thinks
when they're writing about something that's happened.
in the Mid East that it's not this, it's not that. There's reasons for all of it. Do I agree with them? No.
Or sometimes yes, but I don't want the writer's opinion.
There's a quote in your book and I'm gonna paraphrase here, but it basically says mediocrity is invisible until passion shines a light on it.
What did you mean by that?
Exactly what it says.
Um, first of all, mediocrity

Is a disease that you have to get rid of.
At all costs.
I can't stand talking to people that suffer from that disease where they have no interest.
You know, sometimes you sit blindly next to someone at a dinner party and you try to talk to them and
They have no interest in anything, and I just can't deal with it.
Because I want to be challenged. I want to be pushed.
I want to be asked questions, I want to be told I'm wrong.
I wanted that kid at that dinner in front of the other ten young people.
My daughter's friends
To defend his position.
Mm. But what happened is in one sentence that I gave him he couldn't defend it.
It was indefensible.
But I wanted to argue with them in front of everybody.
I will say if you're you're going to go socialist, I much prefer the New York path of like you go from capitalism to extreme socialism because I feel like the system will reject that versus Canada, which is like a slow march into kind of socialism.
Yeah, I
I have a problem with it at any level because I think one thing leads to the next. I'm a huge hater of communism.
It's never worked. I've read Mark's, I've read Lennon.
You know, it all sounds great in theory, but it doesn't work.
Just it's like anything else. Not all doctors are as good as each other. Some are just more gifted, some are better surgeons, some are better diagnosticians, some know more about
your intestines than they do about your heart.
Sometimes you need a specialist
It's there's no such thing as egalitarian in anything. Some of my teachers
In high school were better than others. They just were. They were more interesting. They did stuff that was different.
You know
Leaders or some of them are more interesting than others, you know?
We've got horrible leadership in in Los Angeles right now. We had that fire.
You know a woman who's our mayor who is very nice, but she has no idea what she's doing. She's never run a business.
And she's running a budget of one of the biggest corporations in the country. It's called LA. You know, it's the same with New York.
We've got a guy running for mayor here who's never run a he's never had a job.
He's never had a job.
My thesis, which a lot of
people in discussions and I bring it up everywhere I go.
I feel that if you're gonna run in this country for mayor, governor
President or Vice President, you better have five years of having run a business.
Any kind of business.
You could have a
mom and pop store with five employees.
But something with a balance sheet, sales, marketing, healthcare plan.
You gotta know how to do it. We have a mayor in LA.
That is
Not getting anything fixed.
And it's not
She doesn't know how to.
She doesn't know how to.
And the city rejected a guy that ran for mayor.
There was a businessman.
Because maybe he was too rich or his suits were too expensive, or
But the guy was head of the police commission. It's like
We were talking at dinner last night in this city.
I can't understand.
Any city.
That has a defund the police.
Oh yeah, that's it. A deep fund the pleasure campaign. Yeah.
I walk around London, I don't feel safe.
Yeah.
is taking the police off the street.
I walk around New York, I feel great.
I feel great.
Because there's a lot of place out.
The police are the most
Maligned service people in the world.
Who wants that job?
What a terrible job. And they we get these
Men and women that do it, hey, do they make mistakes?
Yeah, but are the mistakes worth
Throwing out the whole system? I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I liked uh Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor of New York. I loved the fact whether you agree with his politics or not, I love the fact that somebody so experienced and so successful in business
Came in.
You know what? I love Mike Bloomberg.
As a person and as a mayor.
Mike Bloomberg got stuff done. Mike Bloomberg built a business from scratch.
I met him when he first started that business, right? Bloomberg.
Truth be known, was fired from Solomon brothers.
And startup that's one of the biggest and best creative businesses in the country.
He comes into the city with the same
passion, ethos, and organization. You talk about momentum.
Mike Bloomberg got stuff done in this city and he didn't stand on ceremony.
And even things that he couldn't get through he paid for himself.
And you felt safe in the city.
You didn't feel like
somebody was gonna come up and and rob you because you knew Bloomberg had the police's back
And this concept, I think Jessica Tisch has done a
Phenomenal job here.
You know, there are those that say she comes from a wealthy family. Well, I say, Who cares? Yeah. You know, she's been amazing.
And the fact that this current candidate
hasn't even talked about whether he'd keep her or not. And that he wants to defund the police.
And turn this place into chaos.
I don't get it.
I d I just can't see the logic.
I don't care how charismatic is
It doesn't make any sense to me.
Do you think if somebody like Mike Bloomberg comes in, it seems from the outside
uh at least from my perspective, he's immediately successful when he comes in. Like the momentum builds right away.
And I'm curious as to other aspects of life. Like, do you think if something works, it tends to work right away and you can feel it, you can see it, and the momentum's building, or is it a slow process where it's like, give me more time, give me more time. I think momentum's like a train coming out of a station.
It doesn't happen instantaneously, you have to build it. It's a conscious building block.
Game.
It's like when you were a kid you had blocks to build.
You have to have foundation before you can build the house.
And Bloomberg did it. It didn't all happen the first six months. It was a
It literally took time to get up to speed.
And he did it.
But the key is he didn't stop.
Pill he left.
And
When you're building momentum, you cannot quit.
And that's the counter problem counter argument to when we talked.
About cutting back.
When you're building momentum you don't wanna stop even for
Ten percent of your time. You don't want to stop.
I'm curious if you were putting together a business education, what would be on the curriculum?
It's a fascinating question, um
I was actually thinking about that'cause my grandson started a new school here.
En Tribeca t yesterday that's called the Alpha School and
It's a completely different
Um
angle on education, I really like what I saw.
And a lot of it's practical learning. A lot of it's
Learning by th with things you're interested in.
And
I just believe
That in one's life they have to be on a
constant and progressive learning curve.
Period.
About anything.
I was up in the valley once and Max Levchen is a great guy, founded a firm in Paybell, co-founder Paybell.
And I remember sitting in his office, we were gonna have coffee, so come with me and he took me to the
Coffee room.
And then proceeded to spend ten minutes explaining to me how you brew the perfect.
Cup of coffee.
And I realised
It was so fantastic. He had studied it all.
He knew exactly what to do when, how to roast the coffee, how to grind it, where to put it in, what kind of water to use. All stuff that none of us think about.
And I said to myself, that is a metaphor for life, making a cup of coffee. It's kinda like a Japanese tea ceremony.
He took all the components apart and isolated them and then put them into a fluid movement.
That's incredible. I love coffee too, so I I could relate to that.
How do you think about momentum? Momentum to me is the single most important thing in in
Anything we do.
Double click on the side.
in life to keep momentum going of your interests and your family
In business, if you don't have momentum, you have no business.
In sports momentum changes.
Second place teams to first place teams.
Momentum may be one of the most
underutiled most critical thing in life.
If you were trying to teach somebody how to get momentum.
What would you tell them?
I don't think getting momentum is a science, it's more an art form.
Yeah.
I think that momentum is about extraordinarily hard industrious work. It's about deeply educating yourself in your field.
Deeply educating yourself in the peripheries of your field.
knowing who your competitors are.
How do you
uh recruit people that are
Really good that aren't on your side of the ledger.
I don't think a meeting went by in any business I've ever been in where I don't ask the people around the table.
Who've you seen out there that's good?
Who beat you?
Last week or yesterday or today.
Who's standing out? We recruited.
Some of our best executives.
That way.
Matter of fact, we were recruited, I'd say.
eighty percent of our executives are like that. We either grew'em inside
Or recruited'em from the competition because they
Had our standards.
And they were at the wrong place in our mind.
How do you think about leverage?
Well, it's tough. It's a controversial subject.
Um there are those who feel leverage is critical in business and there are those that feel leverage
is really nasty.
Um, I come down on leverage.
As a very important
principle of building a business.
Because if you have leverage you can deliver for your client or your product.
And you need leverage in marketing, you need leverage when you're selling people, you need leverage when you're packaging content, you need leverage to negotiate. Leverage is a
Connotational leverage isn't a is a bad thing.
And I'm not sure it's so bad.
How do you think about packaging?
And how important is packaging to a movie's success? Are there movies that
were packaged poorly, but should have like otherwise been a success. Well you could say that about anything. To me, packaging is a sinequinon of life.
Uh I package everything in my life.
I put elements together.
Constantly. I
I I just put a
A
business together by combining
uh two disparate elements and it turned out to be a business from something that wasn't a business. It's no different than packaging a television show when I told you.
You know, when Michael Crichton gave me
The book.
of Jurassic Park.
I put the right director with it, Steven Spieler, there was no second choice. Um
A fr friend of mine who I have unbelievable respect for professor of AI at Stanford named Chris Ray.
Calls me up and said
Michael, I got a friend who's also professor at Stanford.
Really bright guy.
And I want you to meet him and he's got
really interesting technology, but he's having some trouble.
Getting it off the ground. And I said, Okay, Chris, what
What is it? He said, Well he's got a
N F T company said, Chris, I'm not interested.
And he said, Why is that I don't like NFTs?
I just don't like
I'm an art collector, I'm not a NFT collector.
And th they were hot at
Yep. One time.
He said, I'm asking you
From me to you, please, meet him. The answer was instantaneously yes.
Wasn't a hesitation.
Guy of that stature asked me to meet with someone?
Like when Ron Conway asked me to be with Andreessen, it I didn't know why he wanted to be with me.
I didn't know anything about clouds or technology.
So I meet with a guy
Doctor Walter De Bruer.
Stanford AI professor.
And he's got an NFT company.
We're fifteen minutes into the call and all I can do is think about how do I end this because it's
Times my enemy.
Time.
Is the only thing in my life I am concerned about'cause at some point you run out of it and
I love
I love my life right now.
And
I'm in the best place I've ever been in.
And it's mostly'cause I'm on the most epic learning curve imaginable.
Anyways I
Don't know what happened, Shane, but
A light bulb off of my head when he described the technology and what it does.
He mentioned to me in the course of it.
that he m watermarked
With neural fingerprinting.
These NFTs.
And I didn't skip a beat.
I don't know what
Came over and I
I say, can you do that with songs?
And he said.
Oh, that's elementary. Which I thought was
Such a great answer'cause it
Was such a put down of me.
And it was so perfect because he has a PhD and I have nothing. So what a
What a coarse corrector, right?'Cause I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to get off the phone and this guy just makes the ultimate statement that's something that I couldn't get to first base on he thinks is elementary. I said, Okay.
We're in a new business.
I said, Assuming you can do this, he says, Trust me I can do this.
I said we're in a new business.
Fold up the old company?
Лет''хар нерви.
We are now in the business of protecting intellectual property rights.
And then I say, Can you do this for video?
He shouldn't.
Elementary.
I said can you do this for
Athletic games.
Elementary.
We started a business.
I have spent
Most of my career in media
Fighting.
Intellectual property theft.
Yeah.
In ninety six, I led a trade delegation for President Clinton to Beijing and
I met
With
The premier of China?
Chang Zi Min and
Zhouang Ji, the number two, the head of finance.
Because they were making video tapes.
From people holding up video cameras in theaters.
Yeah.
And they were killing the business. And they were stealing records and they were
Duplicating tapes and
I made I went with
twenty mega business people to lead the d delegation. We got nowhere.
And here I am on the phone.
With a PhD from Stanford.
Telling me
That he solved the problem.
And we put this company together and
I called up Sir Lucian Grange, who runs Universal.
And I said, Lucian, how long have you and I been working on
You know, I P theft and he said f our whole lives.
I said I think I have the answer. He said
Tell me, show me.
I did.
He said, I'm in.
And now universal and then uh
Dennis Coker and
Rob Stringer, it's so name.
So we have the two biggest music companies and we're watermarking
Change.
And we will go live very shortly.
Next thing we do is
Uh streaming.
We'll do film.
We will do
Uh athletic games. I I had no idea I was on the phone with
One of the heads of the Premier League in London.
And he s he called me because I know one of the owners and he said
We hear you have some technology that
Can help us. I said, Well why do you need help?
'Cause I was curious.
He said hard to believe, but we have over thirty teams.
We've seven hundred and fifty thousand illegal downloads every team, every game.
I said, How's that possible?
Go on.
to Google and find out how to get around paying for a sporting event with very simple instructions.
Mm.
I was kind of shocked.
Frankly.
And the
Use case for what we have fits all of this.
I wanna come back to something you said about time management. What would you go back and tell your younger self?
What do you wish you knew when you were younger about managing your time or prioritization that you know now?
Well it's a good question. It's a simple answer because I think about it so much. I
I could have
cut back ten percent of my business.
Time.
Where I did nothing but business.
And let momentum carry it forward and other people that worked with me.
And use that ten percent of my time for my family, for my art collecting.
For reading.
for other things that were important to me.
Do you think that's true?'Cause I always wonder w with this in hindsight, you're looking back and you're like, sure, I could have gave up ten or twenty percent of my time and had the same result, but
It's who you were as a person that gave you that extra ten or twenty percent. And and I think you're a hundred percent right, and that's the stopper.
But
The reality is there's ways of doing it. Like I now book out my free time on my own calendar. And I just it's there and it's not y it doesn't get booked.
There's a negative
In there is a
successful business person where you're feeding on the dopamine of
getting all these wonderful things done and
Because you're on this roll and you have momentum, you can get so much more done.
That you want to do it every second of the day.
But you have to be mature enough to look at it and say
Maybe I'll just cut two percent back at the beginning.
And do X, Y, and Z.
And it's hard because you get
It's a conflicted
Scenario in your own head.
When you take meetings when people recommend them, it sound like what I hear when you're saying that is I trust this person. So by proxy I trust the person I'm meeting with. How important is trust? And maybe you can spend just a few minutes sort of Yeah, I mean it's not complicated. Trust to me is the most important
Thing.
between human beings and I have and I've been very vociferous about this
And it's happened to me.
uh a couple times in my life
I don't handle betrayal well.
And I'm not talking about boyfriend, girlfriend, I'm talking about in business.
I don't handle betrayal while I
Don't.
Think.
That there's any justification for it under any condition.
And I I
React very badly to it.
By betrayal you mean malicious intent.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
being set up for something to fail or
Oh being lied to.
And then walking into a trap. I mean, we've seen all the plots and
On television, you know, Shander.
I can give you twenty shows to watch, but it's
It's
I'm not talking about male female betrayal or male
I'm not talking about couples betrayal, you know?
No, you've had people close to you betray you. Like how how do you
What do you do in that moment? Like how do you bounce back from that?
How do you trust other people after that? Well you can't
You can't
You know, stain everyone with the same brush.
So you have to kinda get back up on your feet like I told you about the guy in London.
And you gotta go back and you gotta
I know.
Suck it up and
Get dressed and
Go out to the playing field in your uniform.
and get the ball and run with it again. Not easy because your legs
Aren't quite as sure.
As they were before, but you gotta do it. And probably as it's happened to me.
A few times in my life I've gotten
A little more sensitive to the people.
That I trust.
Do you find you put on more armor after that happens and like keep your own. Oh, I got very defensive.
Yeah.
Took me
A long time to get that armor off.
Does that happen with everybody or just the person? Everyone.
Everyone has different
interpretations of it and everyone it's unique to each human being.
I
I think
Because of how I was raised that it became a
a very important thing to me.
I I think that's a great place to end this. We always end with the same question, which is what is success for you?
It's a it's not a singular definition for me. I have a very broad
Um
definition of what success is. Success to me
is having an amazing family'cause at the end of the day that's your legacy.
Nothing else.
Unless you're
Jonas Sulk, you know, there's
One of those for every
Hundred million people.
Um
It's having a
Had a great
run in your life in education.
It's having learned so much more than you ever thought you'd learn.
Yeah, it's
building something from scratch, which is why I started working again. I love building things
Someone asked me why I'm working at this stage of my life.
And I looked at them like there was something wrong with them because how could they even ask me the question?
But they then said well what's the most
Fun time of your life, I said.
building businesses that I
Started from scratch. I'm doing it again.
I'm a year in with a couple of young partners and
We
You know, I've got
young guy named Ali Hamad with me who's
thirty, now he's thirty two or three, and I've got my son
uh who joined me. It took me ten years to convince him to do that. He didn't want to do it, but
I've got his partner, Alex, with me and
It's fun to build.
And then success to me.
Is
I find success defined
At the Thanksgiving dinner table.
Mm.
in this country. I don't even know if you have Thanksgiving in Canada. We do. We do. It's on Monday. So we
We
It's my favorite holiday of the year. It's more favorite than any other holiday, birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkah, anything.
Because
It's all about your family. It's not about giving forced gift giving.
I don't have to go buy a gift'cause it's Christmas. Yeah.
It's
Just you sit at the table and you're just
Happy to be there.
And there's no pressure.
Yeah, I just love Thanksgiving.
To me it's the most important holiday of the year.
I love that. But success is all those things.
And success is having
accomplish something.
You know
And it's not definitionally
A thing.
But it can be.
I was very proud.
When I contributed to the U CLA Medical Center being built, I was very proud.
When I got I am pay to build that and are building a for CA.
Very proud when I built one of my houses from scratch, you know, that I could do I'm very proud sometimes when I buy
A piece of art that has
A huge, huge
impact on my life for someone's really
Connected with me.
Um
Success has a lot of parameters. It's not a single
thing and when people say that to me like
This is my definition of success, and they give me a
You know, a one
Word.
Definition. I can't cope with that because it's just not the case for me. It's multifaceted. Yeah, it's a lot of things that add up.
And it's
То мій сексе.
Is it
Great Sirah painting.
Sarah was the great pointalist.
So if you looked at
An inch of his work.
They were all dots. You look at an inch, you don't see anything.
Two inches you don't see anything. Three, nothing, four.
Maybe you see an appendage or something.
Six, maybe something, a limb.
A plant?
Ten?
Oh, there's a face.
Then when it gets to be four feet or three feet by two feet, you see an entire picture in front of your eyes.
And that to me
Is
The definition of success.
Is it our lives are made up
Of a lot of little dots.
And when they tell the right picture.
You hit it.
I think that's the most beautiful answer I've heard in two hundred and some episodes.
I appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me. Coming on, Michael. Thanks. It was great.