← David Senra
David Senra
Michael Ovitz, Co-founder of CAA
01:06:38
Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
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- [00:03]
A
It's good to see you again. Thanks for doing this again.
- [00:04]
B
Yeah, that's great. I haven't seen you since yesterday.
- [00:07]
A
Well, we'll start there. Why did you tell me yesterday that you're busier today at this point in your life than you've ever been?
- [00:14]
B
Great question. As I said to you yesterday, and you know, I'm busy because you saw, you got to look at it and first of all, let me apologize for being horrible company to you.
- [00:28]
A
You weren't. It was amazing.
- [00:29]
B
We had.
- [00:29]
A
We. I guess we should tell the people watching and listening to this that I flew back from New York to LA with you on your plane and you had texted me the night before. You're like, just a warning. I'm going to be horrible company because I'm going to work all the way through. And so what you did, we sat next to each other and you essentially, before we took off, started working. We flew, landed, and then you were still working. You're like, hey, I'm not getting off the plane in case you want to leave.
- [00:50]
B
I was on a zoom.
- [00:51]
A
Yeah, exactly. No, it was awesome. You weren't a horrible company at all.
- [00:54]
B
No, I. I said to you, I, I enjoy it, which is the problem. It's like the ultimate stimulus response.
- [01:02]
A
Why is the fact that you love working a problem?
- [01:05]
B
Well, it's not a problem for me. I think it's a problem for people that I'm close to that would like me to work less. I don't agree with that. And I am busier than I've ever been in my life. I. I actually said to Tamara the other night, who'd probably like me to work a little bit less. It's the most exciting time I've ever seen in my entire life. And that includes the entertainment sweet spot of the late 70s through the end of the 90s, which was the last great period in the film business and television business. Pre screaming, obviously. I thought I was in heaven in those years with respect to the amount of things that could be created out of thin air today. And for the last. I started in 92, working in technology while I was still at CAA. It's now 26. I'm still doing it. I can't wait to get up in the morning. I literally can't wait. I am privileged to be able to work with some of the smartest men and women I've ever met in my life. They're all young, they are all out to do something special. They're motivated by all the right things, and every day When I'm in a meeting with these people, I learn something. So I get discovery, I get education, I get my brain stretched. I get to watch things like I've always watched, creatively created out of thin air. I get to listen to the presentation, get challenged about whether I should get involved or not. And I do everything I can to spread myself around enough so I can get all the food for thought that's possible, because that drives me. It's that discovery process that drives me. And it's not a FOMO process. Frankly, it's very interesting in technology. I was talking to Ben Horwitz about this. It's a learning curve that gives you a stimulation that you have seen and heard something that you didn't know, but. But that stimulation then turns into a form of joy that you've made yourself a better person off of someone else's knowledge base. And I said the other day to one of my young mentees, I said, consider me Dracula for the brain. And the original Dracula, the conceit of the story. The book. Forget there was no movie in those days. The book was this constant quest for eternal youth. And, you know, you suck a young person's blood and it makes you young. I like to view myself as in the same way, except in the gray matter area. I'm really interested in what the thought process is.
- [04:27]
A
Why do you think today is more exciting for you than even the 70s, 80s, and the 90s?
- [04:32]
B
Because in the 70s, 80s, AND 90s, we were dealing with mediums that had been around for a long time. The exciting part was the creation of the software of the moment, which was film or videotape or music or books. It was fantastic to read Michael Crichton's rough draft of Jurassic Park. It was a thrill, but it was a book. And there have been books since the invention of the printing press. Actually, since prior, because it was handwritten. But now change is so dramatic that it's almost frightening. Max Levchin, who was the founder of a firm and PayPal, and I think, you know Max.
- [05:23]
A
I know of him. I've never met him.
- [05:24]
B
No, I thought you should have him do the show. He's brilliant and a great guy. He said to me a couple years ago, we were at a dinner, and he said, you know, if I take a day off from work, I come back and I feel like I've missed a week. And then I saw him recently at the Allen Conference, and he said I reminded him of it, and he said, if I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed three months. And everyone thinks that way. AI is so fast. And as far as the speed of change that the benefits are to anything that we do is extraordinary. Now there's a ton of potential downside, and I like to not forget that. I think we have to be very responsible with it. On the other hand, I feel the upside far outweighs the downside. Was at a dinner with a friend of mine who's a research scientist working on cancer cures, and I said, how's the five trials going? He said, I can't believe what's happened. And I said, what? And as you know, to set the stage, it takes a long time to get from stage one, which are mice or other types of animals, to stage three, which are human trials. It could be five, it could be 10 years sometimes. He said, I have five trials going. Four were started pre AI. They're from five to 10 years in the making. I started one post AI and I've gotten results in nine months on a cancer cure. Think about the ramification of that and what it means for our society. I was at a meeting last week in New York and two young engineers told me they had discovered a friend of theirs is working, all because of AI on a cure to stimulate the retinal nerve. If your vision is going bad, I mean, it's every day. It's every day something different. And here's the real answer to your question. We all had to be specialists until AI. Now we're all generalists. So I get to work in consumer products, in high tech, in defense, in medicine, in biopharma. I get to be involved in all these things that I'm totally unqualified for. I don't code. I'm not a scientist that can sit in, understand the vocabulary of science, but I can learn about it really fast and have enough vocabulary to understand what these brilliant young minds are creating. So this creativity is the same as the entertainment creativity, but at a wildly different degree of difficulty and level up. It's not even close.
- [08:45]
A
So what is the role that you're playing in the projects that you're pursuing right now?
- [08:49]
B
I will basically do whatever is needed to help form these businesses. And the reality of business, which very few people really grasp, is that the basics of business, no matter what the field is, are exactly the same. The blocking and tackling parts are the same. So as pointed out to me, a film or a television show or a book or a song is packaged around talent. Talent, creator, engineer, same thing. Talent needs someone to help execute. Engineer needs people around them to help get the business in line and organized, coded, whatever they need done. The creative person making the entertainment then has to get financing. The engineer or founder of a company needs venture capital. With the entertainment maker, he then has to get distribution. Founder has his product, he's got to find a DSP or someone else to distribute his work or just take it on his own on the Internet. Either way, both also need marketing. How do you put the name into the ether and then how do you sell the product? How do you make a profit? How do you build a culture? How do you build something that lasts beyond you? We started CA in 1974, in 2026. It's as strong today as it was when I was there. Because we set a business model in place that has stood the test of time and the guys that took it over followed the trajectory of where they needed to take the business and kept the same values and principles. And at the end of the day, it's binary. It either works or it doesn't. 50 years in business proves that it works.
- [11:02]
A
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- [12:23]
B
Choices make them are made for me. I Don't have to make the choice.
- [12:27]
A
What does that mean?
- [12:28]
B
It means that the degree of interest is proportional to the individual that's telling me about it, whether it's an investor, a founder, shareholder, venture capital.
- [12:42]
A
So you're just saying you just follow your. Your intense curiosity. What do you mean by that?
- [12:46]
B
Well, I follow my curiosity. I want to see everything. Okay, I can't do everything.
- [12:50]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [12:51]
B
And also, there's a lot of things I don't want to do. There's a lot of ideas that don't interest me. But I like meeting the people. That's what I like. As you know, I collect art and people. I love art, and I love to meet smart people, and that drives me. But the choices almost, David, get made by themselves. Is it interesting? Will it stand the test of time? Can it be built? Can it be financed? Can it be distributed? All the basics of business have to be overlaid on any of these ideas.
- [13:26]
A
So do you consider yourself more like an investor, a partner? Like, how do you. Like, how do you think about yourself when you're working?
- [13:33]
B
I work overtime to not be categorized. I don't want to label. All right?
- [13:39]
A
You gotta say more about that.
- [13:40]
B
I'm glad you're laughing at me, David. And I'm glad you feel comfortable that you could laugh at me.
- [13:45]
A
I'm not laughing at you. You're just. I love the stuff, David.
- [13:47]
B
If I was younger, I'd leap out of my seat and throttle it.
- [13:51]
A
I have no doubt of that.
- [13:52]
B
I'm too old.
- [13:54]
A
No, you might be able to throttle me. I'm gonna. We're gonna come back to this line of questioning, but you came up to the house just now, and you're like, hey, sorry again for being, you know, horrible company yesterday. I go, bullshit, Michael. I go, you were an excellent example of the fact that, you know, you're maybe 35 years older than I am. And I was actually inspired by how efficient and how relentless you are with your work ethic. I was like, oh, I thought I was working hard, like I should be. This guy should not be outworking me.
- [14:20]
B
As I said to you, I love working. I love learning. I love working.
- [14:24]
A
I love you. So, of course, would not be laughing at you. What do you mean? You don't want to be categorized?
- [14:28]
B
I don't want to be typecast, okay? And I said this to a young founder yesterday. When I grew up in the business world, we were basically specialists. So if you were in the entertainment business, you chose a vocation in film. There were subdivisions of film. There was animation. There were documentaries, there were long. There were action pictures, there were comedies. You did one of those things or you did television, or you wrote books, or you were a producer or you were a director. You had one vocation in a larger field. Today, there's no such thing. Today you have to be a generalist. You have to know a little bit about everything. And then unless you're a deep scientist and you're founding Palantir or Anthropic or one of these businesses that require extraordinary brain compute power, then you are a specialist. But in the world I live in, I want to be a generalist. I'm not capable of being a specialist.
- [15:42]
A
How much of this is tied to the advancements that we've seen in AI?
- [15:46]
B
None.
- [15:47]
A
Okay, so this was your.
- [15:48]
B
I've been like this my whole life.
- [15:50]
A
But then people like you are now almost have superpowers and more, even more additional leverage because of AI. Is that the way you look at it?
- [15:56]
B
Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Look, I have it sitting on my phone. It's insane how many times I go to my phone and go to Claude or OpenAI or Google to get answers on things and get a deep dive in a nanosecond. I was looking at my grandson who's 10 years old and he's going to school at a special school in New York called the Alpha School, which is. Oh, Joe Lamont.
- [16:21]
A
Yeah, I just spent a bunch of time with Joe two weeks ago.
- [16:24]
B
I have unbelievable respect for that man, that he's doing what he's doing. My grandson, my oldest son's first son, Chris's son, You know, Chris is 10 years old. He's been in that school since last September. And in six months he's a different kid. He can't wait to go to school. Don't have to ask him to do his homework. He is given unbelievable responsibilities. This is all set up by using AI to teach them. They do two hours a day of hard study off an iPad. And he's as fluent now in knowledge as he's ever been. And he's 10. When I got called to fly to Hawaii to meet with the senior C suite executives from Matsushita Electric, one of the largest companies in Japan that at the time had 15 to 20 billion dollars of liquidity on their balance sheet. Unheard of in the late 80s, I had to figure out how to learn about the company. I had to go to a stockbroker's office, I had to go to the library. I had to use all analog tools. I had to get a Physical copy of their 10k today, doing the same kind of work. As you know, I'm in the middle of two transactions right now, which are public. I mean, one's public, one's not. I went down a rabbit hole on three AI platforms. I spent six, seven hours, two different days. I had so much information that I needed to add to my instinctual information because I'd been around that business so long.
- [18:26]
A
Which would have taken you in the 80s at the time you're going to Hawaii, how long?
- [18:30]
B
I needed four weeks to prep for the meeting in Hawaii. I put it off for four weeks. I put it off for two reasons. One, culturally, when asked in those days, I'm not talking about today, but by traditional Japanese executives. Your response has to be slow and measured. As a matter of fact, I got asked for a meeting by a Japanese company and spent three weeks putting them off because. And that kind of works for them. It's their culture. They're very slow to trust. As a matter of fact, I used to crack up one. In the early 80s, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine were going and they'd come back and they'd call me and they'd say, my God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I'm going to close. And I'd start laughing, and they would say, what are you laughing at? And I'd say, well, call me in a year and let me know how you're doing. None of them closed anything. I spent a year cultivating relationships before I even got an assignment. But the amount of time it took me to learn about those individual companies.
- [19:40]
A
You spent a year cultivating relationships before you even got an assignment?
- [19:43]
B
Yeah.
- [19:43]
A
What made you take an interest in Japan?
- [19:46]
B
I've always been interested in Asia. Always. I'm interested in Japan and China. Have been since I started an interest in Japan in high school because I had a lot of Japanese American friends. And when I would go to their homes for dinner, I was blown away by the difference culturally. I remember this is 50 years ago. So you had a different. A different ethos at the time and a different feeling about between the Japanese
- [20:26]
A
and American relations post World War II.
- [20:28]
B
Yeah, correct. Okay.
- [20:29]
A
He read Phil Knight's book, Shoe Dog. Yeah, same thing. His idea was like, hey, we're going to sell Jack. We're going to try to disrupt the German athletic shoes with Japanese, their Japanese competitors. And he got a lot of pushback because of the essentially tension between America and Japan at the time.
- [20:44]
B
You know, I had a joint venture With Phil. I'm crazy about him. He's one of you.
- [20:48]
A
I didn't know this.
- [20:48]
B
Oh, yeah, I did. When I was at ca, we had Nike and CA had a joint venture. Matter of fact, Phil Knight and I had the of the greatest experiences in my business career. The two of us decided that there should be a NC2, a college football playoff. I remember this is 40 years ago. So we met up at his place in Beaverton and we plotted out this whole strategy and we put an entire visual and written presentation together. And I was fortunate because I was very close to the Chancellor of UCLA because I was chairman of the UCLA Medical Center. And his name was Chuck Young. He passed away recently. Great guy. And he was very influential in the college president world. And I convinced him to get Phil and I an audience at their meeting in Kansas City. And here's a guy who's running Nike and with. I mean, running it. And here's a guy who's running a very successful entertainment business. And we did an amazing video that showed all of our stars and all of the athletes that were under contract to Nike. And we were on a stage in front of 150 NC2A presidents. And we showed that we could have made all the schools at the time millions of dollars of revenue if we just did a playoff. Rather than chose bowl games with random people. We rehearsed what we were going to do. We had a fantastic dual presentation. We ran our video. We both got up to the rostrum on each side of the screen. That's how we decided to start to present. And we started pitching. And we're both not bad at that, the two of us. And he's particularly good. And we look at each other and we realize no one's listening to us. They're like, having conversations. They're at round tables instead of chairs. And then we ran another video. And then I walked over to him and I said, this is not going well. We got to start to wing it. And we did, and we left. And they ultimately said they didn't want to do it. They told us they wanted to commission a report, which they did. It ran about 500 pages. And the conclusion they came to was exactly what we told them. And now they, 30 years later, they decided to do it. So the amount of money they left on the table was frightening. We both learned a really good lesson from that.
- [23:42]
A
So how competitive is Phil Knight?
- [23:46]
B
Phil Knight is the most competitive businessman alive. And bar none, I'm crazy about that guy. I have such respect for him. He took A standard item, these shoes. And he changed the world with them. If you go back to the beginning when he did Tiger, which was a Japanese shoe, it's where he started when he and Penny, his wife, were selling these things out of the trunk of their car. The soles were flat and they weren't really comfortable. They were made for running because of
- [24:22]
A
his track coach, Bill Bowerman, and his co founder.
- [24:25]
B
Yeah, yeah. But all of a sudden, they get cushier, the heels get higher, they're in colors. I love going online and doing the customization thing. I just think it's the most fun thing imaginable.
- [24:40]
A
The reason I ask is because out of all the people I've read for my other podcast founders, the most ruthlessly competitive, I put, like, Michael Jordan up there. I think Larry Ellison Young, Bill Gates definitely like this. But Michael Jordan is open. And he's just like, I don't have a gambling problem. I have a competition problem.
- [24:57]
B
Problem.
- [24:57]
A
And Kobe would tell stories about. He's like, Kobe's like, you know, Michael Jordan's my older brother. I'm competitive. When it comes to basketball, Michael's competitive with everything. Like, who can eat the salad the fastest or just. He's just got an addiction to competition. And yet I was reading this obscure biography of Michael Jordan. I think it was written before he retired. And they were talking about in the history. This is after he, Michael, signed to Nike, and within the first few years, immediate success. But then there's this guy that got in Michael Jordan's ear to maybe convince him to go and, like, launch with somebody else. And they had a meeting where essentially somebody in Nike warned them. They're like, you don't understand. Phil Knight is the most competitive person on the planet. If you do this and you betray him, like, he will chase you to the ends of the earth. And I just remember reading that book and like, they're saying this to one of the most competitive people, are saying, no, you think Michael Jordan's competitive. You haven't seen anything with this guy. And the reason I think it's funny is because in Shoe Dog, obviously autobiography, he's like, yeah, I'm a pretty competitive fellow. I'm like, that might be an understatement.
- [25:59]
B
I have to say, David, I'm thinking right now about ending the podcast because I really am upset that you didn't name me as one of the most competitive people you've met. No, look, at the end of the day, let's be straight out about it. It's not politically correct, but business is a competitive cutthroat sport. Now I'm not saying you do anything immoral or illegal and you have to have guidelines, but if you're not willing to get out there and do what Magic Johnson did on the court or Michael Jordan or any of the greats. I learned it from Irvin. Irvin, who I am crazy about, who I helped start his business career. I only mention it because he's been kind to me beyond belief in his autobiography and everything else. He came to me and said, look, I want to be in business. No other athletes at that time said that. And they did their service and 35 they were done. Irvin said, when I'm done, I want to be able to be a businessman. And we went and set that course. What I learned from Irvin was an extraordinary lesson that helped me build caa, which was when he was doing the fast break, which was referred to as Showtime, down that court, he had no goal except to score. And he didn't care who got that ball in the basket. It just had to get in there and you had four guys, two and two running down that quarter, three and one with him carrying that ball and he'd move down that court, he would pick whoever he thought could make that shot. And he had no ego about it.
- [27:45]
A
So how'd you use that idea at?
- [27:46]
B
Cause it was about winning. At the end of the day, it's about competition, it's about not having an ego about it. One of the great things we did at CA is I didn't care who scored, I just wanted a score. And when we asked people to do things at ca, even the youngest people, we never asked them to do anything we wouldn't do ourselves. And if they were slow on it, I went and did it to prove a point. I can't tell you how many times a week in a morning meeting where I asked someone to do something or one of the department heads asked someone to do something and it didn't get done by five o', clock, one of us did it.
- [28:29]
A
I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book. Zero to one. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places. And they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what Applovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers inside mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full screen video ads that are Watched for an average of 35 seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. And you, you can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal and Applovin achieves it. There's no complex setup, no expertise needed, and Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, have scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increased their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com that's apple.com. this is why yesterday was so important. Because it's, it's one thing, like, we've obviously built a friendship. We've had countless dinners. We spent a lot of time talking. I've read your book like three times. I, I had this thought, we're going to go in a weird direction. I had dinner with Charlie Munger when he was 99 years old. Okay? And anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline, right? It's going to happen. And I'm sitting across from this guy and all I remember is like, I have to work hard when I'm like reading books and like, I highlight everything, I take notes, I reread them. People like you have such a good memories. Like, I read the thing. I read my notes 10 times. I don't have a good memory. And yet I would ask Charlie, he was sitting in front of his bookshelf behind him, and I'd see a book that, you know, he'd recommend reading one time and I had read and I'm like, oh, Charlie, tell me about this biography of Henry Kaiser behind you. And he would rattle off the businesses he built, the revenue of the companies. What happened to that company, how many? What happened to his business partners? And then after we went from his library to go to dinner, I was like, hey, do you mind if I go through a bookshelf?
- [30:44]
B
He's like, go ahead.
- [30:44]
A
I'm assuming I pick up the book probably covered in notes, nothing, completely empty. Maybe one or two notes in pencil in the margin. And when I realized it's like, my God, imag what his brain was like, his mind was like when he was 45 or 65. And that is who you're competing against. I thought about that yesterday because obviously you understood and read about your work ethic. We've talked about it. But then to also see it even, you know, you're six decades into your career. And I was like, oh, there's like different levels to this. It's like a fundamental difference between, like, reading about something and then observing it. So I want to tie this together like I was expecting you on your competitive drive. When you jumped into the agent business in the very beginning, was it obvious that you were just going to be able to outwork everybody else around you? Was it obvious to you?
- [31:32]
B
It was obvious to me, but no one else. Everyone said we were going to fail. One of my closest friends I worked with at William Morris said something to me I have not forgotten since. He said it to me in 1974. It's something I will never forget. In turned out to be such a fantastic stimulant for me to this day. We were sitting together, we were having a coffee. He said to me, so good that you're starting this business in a year, you'll be looking for a job. I said, really? And what makes you think that? He said, oh, you're going to fail. I said, really? He said, yes. You can't make it. There's almost 200 agencies out there. You're not going to compete with the big ones. Second incident. Within six months of that, a leading TV literary agency run by the best friend of one of our guys. We met with the thought of merging, which would give us what we needed, which were writers, because they're the font of packaging. Right in the meeting, and I told you this story before, so I want to say it fast and not repeat it in detail. The four partners of that agency said, you know, we'll never represent any movie stars. And I looked at them, I said, why do you say that? And said, you'll never get them. I said, we're going to have all of them. And he said, you're just so arrogant. I said, I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm going to outwork every one of them. Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety. This is when there was no computers. People actually read and took out every Friday every time we signed a movie star. I took that ad, tore it, put in an envelope to those four guys, and I did it for the next 10 years. Now, competition. Love it. Monopoly. Absolutely love it. There's no room for competition. I love Peter Thiel's Monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot on.
- [33:54]
A
He says, competition is for losers.
- [33:56]
B
It is for losers because you're competing with yourself. Basically, that's how I view it. I'm not competing with anybody else. It's why I keep my calls to a minimum, my zooms to a minimum, my meals to a minimum of time devoted. When someone says to me, I have to take an hour zoom, I kind of laugh at them. I said, what law is there on the planet that says zoom has to be an hour? I said, frankly, if you get free zoom, they cut you off in 45 minutes. I said, so what rule is it that has to be an hour? Oh, I don't know. I do them in 20 minutes. I just don't believe it. If we're in the middle of a critical diligence item or somebody's trying to explain something really complicated. Okay, I get that. But concept, for example, of our meetings. Let's just fill the hour even if we have nothing to say. I don't want any small talk. It's not social time. I'd love to hear about your kids, but I'd like to hear that over dinner or lunch. I'm not interested. Let's get down to what we're doing. What are we doing? We're trying to build a business. We're trying to market that business. And we're trying to blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply and as brutally as we can. Because the idea is to keep it going until they can't see straight. And to do it any other way makes no sense to me. Now, by the way, there are people that have done it without that thesis. But it's not a thesis I subscribe to.
- [35:32]
A
There are people that have done it without this ruthless competitive drive. You mean.
- [35:35]
B
Yeah, they've. By the way, and I'm excluding creative people because creative people have a hard and a soft side. They have a much harder side than people tend to imagine or think. But they have a very soft side because they're very sensitive. It's that sensitivity and perceptual ability tied together that creates images or words. But they also have a very hard side. I've watched Marty Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room like he was a toothpick over a movie that he was doing where Harvey was giving him the dumbest notes imaginable.
- [36:14]
A
Imagine thinking you could be in a position to give Scorsese notes on a movie.
- [36:17]
B
Well, that's the whole point, isn't it? Listen, I've been in rooms with mega filmmakers because we had all of them at1time.ca represent of the top 50 grossing variety box office filmmakers. We had 46, 46. And I was Upset because I didn't have all of them. There were four I couldn't get. And it really upset me. And it gnawed at me my whole career there. But I find it. Notes are good. If you give them and then let somebody do what they want to do, they know better. Now on timing and other things like that, that's a different story. But nobody should be giving Marty notes about the core of his film or the conceit of a character or where he's putting the camera. You know, it's a joke. It really is a joke. I mean, the man's seen every movie ever made. He has an encyclopedic knowledge and it's interesting. He's like Charlie Munger, but he's not. Doesn't do that for a living. There are people that are gifted in their recall. I'm not one of those people. You just said you're not. I really have to struggle with memory that I need to keep in place for what I do.
- [37:51]
A
Tell me more about this hard side of some of these creative geniuses that you worked with. What do you think is driving their need to be hard? So just that they're disagreeable when it comes to the craft?
- [38:04]
B
Not at all. Not at all. I think they are protecting their vision. I think filmmakers have a very clear vision of what they want to achieve. I think sometimes they lose their way, but they get it back. I had a situation with Barry Levinson and Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise on Rain man where Dustin couldn't find a character in the first week. And I think Barry got very frustrated because the movie was. A lot of it was not scripted. A lot of it was done in the moment. I think that the movie benefited from this problem at the beginning because Dustin found the character. Barry had the patience to let him do it. Which is hard because you're losing money every day. Everyone forgets that. And then Barry found a balance of improvisation versus script. And the movie's perfect. Perfect from beginning to end.
- [39:10]
A
So bring me back to the meeting between Scorsese and Weinstein. That's why the hard side of him came out, because he was protecting his vision.
- [39:17]
B
Well, Marty had a point of view that was right. That's why I ended that meeting pretty fast. First of all, he shouldn't have been in the editing room. It's okay for Marty's agents to be in the editing room, but not the producer. Unless the producer. Someone incredibly close to him where they've done multiple movies together.
- [39:36]
A
You've been around a lot of founders. Isn't that same instinct to protect the vision that Marty had in that situation, isn't it the exact same thing that they're doing?
- [39:43]
B
I think it's a common denominator of anyone who's successful. I think we're talking about all the things that make people successful in any vocation. Dedication, work ethic, intelligence, curiosity. Protect the vision. Find things that give you food for the thought, for the vision. Inventory them in your head, let them marinate. Because if they stay in your head, that means you're onto something. It's no different than the way I collect art. I collect art contextually, which is I see as many images as I can. My brain takes in what I like, rejects what I don't over time, and that's how I collect. So it's a foundational issue of context. And I think filmmakers do the same thing.
- [40:37]
A
Yeah, you've spent a bunch of time with Josh Kushner. I know. Especially at the beginning of Thrive, I just spent some time with him, and a large part of our discussion was really just like, about his vision. And from hearing him speak and just listening to him kind of map his thoughts out. It was like you said, protecting the vision is an interesting way to think about it. The way I thought about it, I read this biography of this guy. He was an engineer, started Harman Kardon, the high end audio equipment, and when
- [41:02]
B
I was Sidney Harmon.
- [41:03]
A
Yeah, exactly.
- [41:04]
B
He was a guy I knew well.
- [41:06]
A
Yeah, he's got a great book. I think the autobiography is called Mind you'd Business.
- [41:09]
B
I've read it. He was an amazing man, and I'm an audiophile. And he at one time made the greatest speakers. They were called infinity IRS 1B's, and they were four towers, not two.
- [41:27]
A
It doesn't surprise me that he was able to build the best product in the category that he competed in. He describes his philosophy in that book. But what I'm hearing from the experience that you've had with some of these creative geniuses, some of the conversations I have with these founders, he put it the best way. He's like, the founder is the guardian of the company's soul. And I was listening to Josh speak during our conversation. I was like, oh, he's guarding the company's soul. He wants to make sure there's a soul inside of Thrive.
- [41:53]
B
I met Josh when he was at Harvard Business School. Jared, his brother, was a friend of mine and asked me to help him with Josh in Harvard Business School. Had a very valuable gaming company while he was in school. And Jared asked me to help him with it. Josh, then is exactly the same as the Josh today. There's no difference. Wildly smart, very loyal, low key, thoughtful, highly intelligent and very easy to talk to. And will hold his ground. But what makes him fantastic is he'll yield his position if you can talk him out of it. I love people that hold their ground until you prove them wrong.
- [42:46]
A
Yeah, I would say since you just made. You kind of connected this whole theme of this conversation we're having right now. It's like we're really just talking about the traits of people who are successful regardless of the domain they choose to operate in. And that's something that reoccurs in all these biographies. I don't care if the idea is not mine. I just want to win. And so if you can push back on me and say no, David, you're wrong about xyz, which has happened several times, especially with my approach to podcasting over the years. I'll be. It might take me a while, but then I'll eventually flip. And I think you see that common. I think of like Steve Jobs. I just finished rereading Make Something Wonderful, which is this book put out by his widow. It's an excellent book, but there's a ton of examples in that case where it's just like he had thought X and he was really adamant about thought X. And then he would test this. They said it's something like what dolphins have, like echolocation. He would throw out an idea and sometimes he didn't even believe in that idea, but he would throw it out and just because he wanted a reaction back. And then the information comes back to almost like sonar, like whatever dolphins have. And then he'd think about it for a little bit and then he'd wind up changing his mind.
- [43:47]
B
I consulted for years for him on Pixar when he first had the idea, and it was some of the best times I ever had because he's whip smart. Unbelievable memory, Totally unstoppable with an idea and could take completely intrinsic positions on things. And actually you could talk him out of it if he agreed. The best trait any businessman can have. When I ran caa, I had a very simple thesis. I'll take ideas from anybody. No idea is stupid because a bad idea may stimulate a good idea. And I want to hear from young people. I'm not interested so much in the opinions on new things from the older people, but from the older people. I want their wisdom to be spread all over it. We had a setup where every 90 days we put 200 people in a circle with their chairs tied to each other, and everybody had 30 seconds to pitch an ID and you couldn't pass. We had a mailroom guy pitch an idea about cable. We promoted him on the spot to Asia on the spot. It was that Good.
- [45:06]
A
Explain this. 200 chairs tied together.
- [45:08]
B
What I came up with was this concept for meetings, and we did it at all our retreats, where everyone sat in a circle or an oval. As we grew, it went from a circle to an oval because the geometry didn't work. And we made everybody's chairs touched. There was no way out of the circle or oval. That was done intentionally. And if you wanted to get out, you had to push your chair back, and you could see the hole as big as could be. We would meet with that as a foundation that everyone was participating. And I ran it, and I would sit there and I'd call people that didn't say anything, and it coaxed them to say things. Some people were upset, but everyone came around in the end. Thank you for pushing me out of my hole. And people need to learn how to communicate in groups, but the people that run those groups have to learn how to listen and learn how to get ideas from people.
- [46:09]
A
And so you literally developed a mechanism where every single person in the company, down to the people working in the mailroom, could pitch an idea directly to
- [46:15]
B
the founder, to everyone that was a senior executive in the company. We were all there. Everybody was there. The whole concept was, we want to hear from you. I started the first meeting with saying, no idea is too dumb. I want to hear everything. Over my career, some of the greatest ideas I've ever had or stolen or appropriated have been from other people. And as you know, I'm a mega Picasso fan of all my art. The guy appropriated everything. One of his most famous sculptures of bullhorns, which is handlebars from a bicycle that he saw with a seat welded together.
- [47:03]
A
Didn't he have that quote that Steve Jobs would repeat that good artists copy, great artists steal? I think that's Picasso, right?
- [47:09]
B
I don't know, but it sounds about right. But Steve, for example, had a vision about computerized animation that Disney didn't share. They were wrong. He was right. That's it. You know, it's Barry Diller's famous line, which I will never forget and still use all the time. He competed to buy cbs, I think, or Paramount, I don't remember which one. But Sumner Redstone got both of them somehow. And when Barry was asked by the press for, you know, what did he think he lost? He looked at him and he said, he won, we lost. Next case. Which is like says it all to me. Was so brilliant. He won, we lost. Next case. He's right. Six words. You can't look back. I am so upset when friends of mine that try to do deals that I consult on and they make a mistake or they lose it and then they dwell on it. It's dumb. It's not going to change. So what are you looking back for? I don't like to look backwards. I think you have to always look forward. There are people who totally disagree with me, but I'm a forward looking person. If I've made a mistake and God only knows. I think one of the reasons founders talk to me is that I can tell them things they're going to do wrong. Because I've done it all. I've made every mistake in business you can make. I've had some wins too, but I've made a lot of mistakes. My goal is to use that to prevent my young people from making further mistakes because they're all going to be the same.
- [48:50]
A
It's unbelievably valuable if they can learn from other people's experiences. I think that's one of the things I get most out of our conversations. I also like that you are unapologetically extreme. You don't hide the fact that you are an extreme personality that you were when you were younger. You start to this day, you just threatened to jump out of the chair and I think throttle me is the
- [49:06]
B
word that you use. I was trying to be polite.
- [49:08]
A
That's really polite.
- [49:09]
B
But I did say I'm too old to do.
- [49:11]
A
That's fine. I wouldn't even fight back. That's fine. I have too much respect for you. Tell me about this deal that we can talk about. I know you have a few deals going on once. A few are not one I can't talk about. Exactly. So tell me about the one that you can talk about.
- [49:22]
B
Well, it's public. I can say that. Bill Ackman and I have been friends for 33 years. Had a discussion about his position in Universal Music. We were kicking it around. He was a large shareholder, was on the board. I like Lucian Grange a lot because he's a talent guy. And my thesis about all these companies. If you don't have someone that understands talent running the company because you can always get an operator. If you don't have someone who understands talent, that company is going to die. And Lucian's really good. But Lucian's growing the company geometrically every year, signing every artist. Publishing is great and the stock keeps going down. And it crept down to like 10 points under the IPO price. And I said to Bill, let's take it private. And he loved the idea. And a number of things occurred. I told him we couldn't do it unless it was friendly, because Bill has done both. Bill's very smart. I mean, really smart and very direct, which is what I like about him. Because, as you know, I like. I love your opinions because you tell me what you think. And we did some diligence, met with Lucien to see if he'd be interested if we did do something. Gave him a 41,000 foot overview, made it very clear that a condition proceeding to the deal would be his running the show. We would support it. I would become chair and support him, and particularly in the tech and AI area, which he's very attuned to, but could use some help. You know, in his job, there's not enough hours in the day. There just aren't. You think about the amount of time he has to spend internally, externally, with talent in studios. It's just endless. It's an impossible job. It's like so difficult. And he does it brilliantly. And we sent the letter. We did it publicly. So there's no secret, there's nothing nefarious. No one's going behind anybody's back. Put the money terms right on the table. We're very well financed, made a very handsome deal offer, and we're waiting for an answer.
- [51:46]
A
Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade, and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players, which is why top companies like ramp, Shopify, 11 Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deal. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deal after using their product. And what they discovered is that Deal is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world. So you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deal can give your company. He said, we built 11 labs to break down language and communication barriers with deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere. We can accelerate Our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today that by going to deal.comsenra that is deal.comsenra. so we talked about the opportunity cost of your time and picking which project to dedicate your attention to your resources to. Why did you choose to do this?
- [53:09]
B
I think music is a critical component going forward in the new Internet era, particularly with AI. We've seen it what's going on with Suno and Udio where they're taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it and constructing custom made songs. Music is never going away. I think the advent of Daniel X Spotify, which he developed in a garage in Sweden, in Stockholm, is a game changer. And I think that music's at the foundation of so many things that are digitally based, from games to movies, television, AI, all of the image capturing that's done. Don't you find it fascinating that on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, almost everything you see, someone chooses music to go behind it. It's part of our culture worldwide, not it's not country by country. There's a common denominator of British and American music around the world and it's a door opener. It's something everyone can hear and relate to, even if they don't speak the same language. So I love the idea. I love the Bill's financing capability, I love Lucien's management and talent expertise. And I like the fact that I grew up in that business. My first job was in the music business. Started a music division at CA that to this day is the tops. I think it's a lot of complementary factors. Whether we get it or not, I have no idea. It's frankly up to one shareholder and that's one family that controls 28% of the stock.
- [55:03]
A
What do you think would the effect of AI be on the music industry? So I talked to Jimmy Iovine about this. I still don't understand. He texted me about this like two days ago. And I'm reading through this. I still don't understand what he means. So I'll see him when he gets back. But if Universal Music Group has, I think it's the largest music category in the world, right? AI is not going anywhere. You said people are already taking and training new songs based on other people's ownership. Is the idea that the record labels could do that themselves or you're saying that's going to be a huge potential future income stream?
- [55:37]
B
I'm not going to say anything about it because I think it's a very difficult problem that right now is under analysis by all the music companies.
- [55:45]
A
Is there anything analogous that you've experienced in other forms of entertainment from the past?
- [55:50]
B
Oh, yeah. I was appointed to a U.S. trade delegation in 1996 by President Clinton. I was a large fundraiser for him. And I went to Beijing with 20 business people, President Bush 41, to try to get them to stop pirating video cassette movies and television shows.
- [56:14]
A
The Chinese, yes.
- [56:15]
B
They were the largest producer of pirated tape in the world. And we went over. I spent a week there. It was a fascinating week. I got to sit with Chung Zemin, who was the Prime Minister, the chairman of the party and the. I guess they don't call him the prime minister. He was the chairman Zhu Gongzi, who was the brilliant financial former mayor of Shanghai who did all the financial architecture for what you're now seeing of getting China into the 20th century, 21st century. And we had round and round of meeting and President Bush was incredibly popular there because when he was ambassador to China and he was very well liked.
- [57:08]
A
You don't have to comment on this if you don't want to, but something just came to mind because I just had a conversation with Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, and I would have to imagine you and Bill Ackman are doing this because you think AI could be a massive advantage and tailwind to the music industry. The reason I bring this up is because Ed was constantly. His entire career, his whole goal was to take the latest technology and apply it to storytelling and animation. Right. With the stated goal, which he did, stated goal of making the world's first feature length animated computer animated movie, which he did with obviously with Toy Story. We brought. I have this guy that works with me on my other podcast founders. His name's Maxim. He's a young filmmaker. I flew him over from England to go to this recording with Ed Cavill because Maxim wants to make film, make films. This is one of the best filmmakers of all time. Or built one of the best companies that made the best films of all time. Maybe talk to him and me, him and Maxim were talking before we started recording and I asked him, I was like, how, you know, he's obviously pro AI. He's pro technologies. Like you cannot get Ed Catmull. That is, he's like just like Walt Disney. He called Walt Disney a technologist and he's like, go through Walt Disney's career. He always embraced the latest technology in service of telling the better story or completing the project in a better way than whatever he's working on. And I go, ed, when do you think we're going to see the first, like just phenomenal, full length, completely AI generated movie? And he's just like, there's a better question that you're not asking. And I bring this up because you were best friends with Michael Crichton. And he says there was a line of demarcation in our industry pre Jurassic park and post Jurassic Park. Like once Steven Spielberg made Jurassic park, the entire movie industry was changed forever. And part of that was obviously CGI of the dinosaurs. And he's like, how many minutes of CGI dinosaurs are in that movie? And I was like, I don't know. I've seen the movie a million times since I was a kid. I was like, I don't know, like 20. And I think the answer is like four minutes. And his point was like, you can even use the technology is even powerful even if you use it for a short amount. It could be 10 seconds in a 3 minute song or 6 minutes in a 2 hour movie.
- [59:13]
B
When I put Jurassic park together and I read the book, I said to Michael a couple of things. I said, one, it's brilliant and everyone loves dinosaurs. Two, you don't need a big star because the dinosaur is the star, which was important financially. And three, there's only one human on the planet that could realize this into a movie. And if he doesn't want to do it, we can't do it. And it was Steven sent the book to Stephen, called me the next day, said I'm in. I believe there's more than four minutes. What Stephen managed to do is for the times he used the dinosaurs, the biggest fear for that movie was, can you make them look real? And Stephen said he could do it. And I knew he could do it. And he did it. Everyone was scared to death that he would look like an early Godzilla movie, you know, and where it was just so obvious of what it was. Stephen integrated the CGI and the actual dinosaur parts that he made and shot. There was a head, there was, you know, part of a body that he didn't see the whole thing. He did it brilliantly, but he got them to look really real. He researched who could do it. They tested and tested and tested and they got it done.
- [60:40]
A
Why do you think Steven Spielberg was the only person? Was he a singular character?
- [60:44]
B
Steven had the ability to understand the storytelling side, the casting side, and most importantly, the technical side. In those days, not everybody had that. Remember that was in the 90s. Not everybody had the ability to use technical things. Jim Cameron did, Steven did. Not every director could do that.
- [61:11]
A
And so was he like a Walt Disney kind of character too? Where he was throughout his entire career trying to embrace the latest technology that would help him build.
- [61:18]
B
Stephen knew more about everything. He and Morty, Marty, Stephen and Stanley Kubrick to me knew more about film filmmaking, film history, respect for film. I put together a group for film preservation around Marty. And it was Marty, Stephen, Sidney Pollack, Francis Copeland, Stanley Kubrick, all clients of ours, of mine. And that's what they were into. They were real, real people about film. You know, when I go to speak at a film school these days, I get very nervous. I'm particularly nervous around my 24 year old daughter, Minty. Her friends who I'm crazy about when they talk about old movies. It stops at 1990, you know. And I did a film class where I started. I didn't even introduce myself. I had two classes merged together. I was asked to do this. I said, who's David? Anybody here know David Lean? No Hands. Anybody here know Frank Capra? Anybody here know Willie Willman? Anybody here know Michael Curtiz? I kept going too. Those were move directors from the 40s, mostly 40s and 50s that made some of the greatest films of all time. Lawrence of Arabia, which Spielberg would rewatch
- [62:46]
A
every year when he was learning to make films too.
- [62:49]
B
I still watch it. Matter of fact, one of my best, most cherished gifts from Marty is the original, the full length, uncut version of Lawrence of Arabia on a giant video disc that they stopped making machines for. I thank God still have one. Do you remember those? The big ones before the little ones came?
- [63:11]
A
No, this is before my time.
- [63:12]
B
Oh, I keep forgetting you're a child. In any case, the. There's no respect for the foundation of the film business in my opinion. It's really interesting as an art collector. I had dinner the other night with Cecily Brown, who's one of my favorite contemporary artists. She talks about artists of the past with great respect and unbelievable knowledge. So she pointed to an artist for me to look at when we were at dinner the other night and she started talking about Lucian Freud, who's an amazing artist. This artist was influenced by Freud. She knew the whole chain. And most great art is derived from other art. You know, I have a fantastic Marc Rochan painting at my house. He's a LA artist, very gifted guy. There's two faces in it that are right out of African Mass and Picasso's Mademoiselle d'. Avignon.
- [64:21]
A
You wouldn't know what you're looking at unless you had that background of all the time and effort you've put into just understanding art and all the history of art.
- [64:29]
B
As I said to you before, knowledge is power. So I have a room in my house that has probably 25 African antiquities, three Picassos, all of which came out of those antiquities because 50 years before the turn of the century, between 1850 and 1900, the Catholic missionaries were tossed out of Western Africa, Nigeria, which had a whole series of regions of tribal art. And they were relinquish figures, they were religious figures. They took them all with them when they were thrown out to Paris and Brussels. It's why one of the biggest museums of African art is in Paris, because they came back in the early 1900s when they ran out of money. They put these masks in the weekend little fairs that they had on the river on the Left bank, and they sold them for four or five flanks. Picasso bought 50 of them. And there are pictures of his studio in Mougon with these masks everywhere. If you look at his early or all the faces are African masks. And you know, it's funny. Phil Knight and I tried to do a project to take do a portable show for inner cities to show that relationship for a point of pride of where your culture, what your culture did. Some of my African art is as good as some of the European art in the same period. It's that good.
- [65:59]
A
Michael, what I love about our conversations is no matter what I prompt you with, you can come up with these incredible stories and I never know the direction that we're going to go in. I really appreciate you taking the time and doing this again with me.
- [66:10]
B
I enjoy talking to you, as you know, except when I'm on the plane working.
- [66:14]
A
Thanks. I'll see you again soon.
- [66:15]
B
Okay.
- [66:16]
A
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.