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- [00:00]
Michael Ovitz
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.
- [00:16]
Shane Parrish
You had a front row seat to Hollywood for a long time. Where did people go wrong?
- [00:21]
Michael Ovitz
I thought these power lists 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.
- [00:50]
Shane Parrish
I think that's the most beautiful answer I've heard in 200 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?
- [01:20]
Michael Ovitz
Well, I don't. You know, it's a really great question. I'm not sure, frankly, because one of my. I love the Internet and I love being on my computer to the point where my significant other 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 cut our teeth in the early years in the entertainment business. All three of us have voracious appetites for learning, and all three of us have 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 read than most PhDs that I know in any field. And secondly, we 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 you 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 in 74, it became very clear to me that lying was a industrial problem in the entertainment business. 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, Shane, I'm going to get back to you because I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm going to find out. That's highly acceptable entertainment business. Everybody knows everything. They know everything. It's not possible, by the way. Not possible.
- [04:12]
Shane Parrish
It's the same inside most organizations. Everybody will make up an answer on the fly.
- [04:17]
Michael Ovitz
Well, I think people want to show that they're in the know, 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 75 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. Our 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 if you look at it, the permutation of that thesis is to the hundredth power. You can't beat it. And by the way, it's one of the reasons we attracted most of the major working talent. 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 they have, I think, one of the most difficult things in the world to do, besides being a physicist or a brain surgeon or any kind of surgeon, I think as being an actor or a director or a writer. 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 got to create out of thin air. I find artists in the same boat. Painters, sculptors. 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 300 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. And you always read about mistakes in 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 star. He was Paul Newman the guy. And I used to go with him 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 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. And I think it's a tough gig, really do maybe.
- [08:18]
Shane Parrish
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?
- [08:27]
Michael Ovitz
Well, 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 are 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 believing you're something that you're not. You can slip up in just simple mistakes in daily life that others might not make in different vocations. Hollywood's also an incredibly social event. Everything's a social event. 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 because they could go out 365 nights a year and find companionship with others in the same boat and do something. You can't find that in most vocations.
- [10:17]
Shane Parrish
I want to come back to CAA and some of the simple rules that you had. So you had teamwork and you had tell the truth. What are the other ones?
- [10:23]
Michael Ovitz
Everyone had to be incredibly well read. 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 into me one afternoon and 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 in 20 seconds, you should not do your business because how are you going to market it to the world you've got? And I'm not talking about that, technical algorithms of AI, 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 Chinatown and Cinderella, Liberty and Tarzan and some of the best scripts ever written in. In the community. I just read a script by his brother, Roger Towne, that deserves attention by this company, by ca. Because 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, 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 movie. 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 film. Needs some work, but great film. And I said, I know, I have a great idea of how to put it together. And I said, I'm going to tell you and tell me honestly what you think. Because 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 where. They had just seen dailies where they were no good and something was wrong and they needed to be reshot. They'd say, oh, you look great. Tell them what they want to hear. We never did that, ever.
- [14:09]
Shane Parrish
Is there an art to telling people the truth, especially when there's ego involved?
- [14:13]
Michael Ovitz
No, it's just. You just say it. And you know what? It's interesting. They appreciate it. I want to be told the truth. But in any case, I said to Amy, 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 1980, 69. 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 worked 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 myself 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. And 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, and liked experimental films and young people, he said, let me meet him. No gear, no commitments, but I'll meet him. So I remember taking my son Chris, who at the time was about, I don't know, six, seven years old, up to Sundance with me and Barry and we went and sat with Bob in the Sundance Lodge and they really hit it off. And we packaged the Natural that day right there. Then we put Kim Basinger and Bill Brimley, Henkel and Close, three other clients in and then we got it financed and the rest is history. It was a huge hit.
- [16:44]
Shane Parrish
One of the quotes that I loved in your book was don't fight your job. Can you unpack that for me?
- [16:50]
Michael Ovitz
Well, I mean, over the years, as a person who's in the business of giving advice, which 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 looking for another point of view, I get that call. And in the course of those discussions, more likely than not, people are. Their first complaint is usually about an associate, then about a deal gone 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 pilot's 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 going to perform to your capacity or potential and you're not going to be exceptional, well, you're not going to 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.
- [18:28]
Shane Parrish
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?
- [18:35]
Michael Ovitz
Well, I love people, so that's one thing. Two, I'm very efficient with my communications. I also basically 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 if I really feel that the relationship's a two way street.
- [19:16]
Shane Parrish
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- [20:55]
Michael Ovitz
Well, it's interesting. 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 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 70s, 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 to take myself away from the business, go to New York every single week, build a presence in the art community, in the theater community, in 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 74 a 200 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. And I was a magazine junkie. I don't know if you know this, but you probably aren't aware of this. But there wasn't always an Internet. Did you know that?
- [23:43]
Shane Parrish
No.
- [23:45]
Michael Ovitz
And I used to get over 200 magazines a month at my office or house or both. And every single day I'd thumb through 10 or 15 of them and I'd. 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 or except in the New Yorker, in the Atlantic are. Or an in depth piece and, you know, the Post or the Times. 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 for me to engage with him because I subscribed to Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Automobile and one other car mag is 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 laid 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. You know, I read Scientific American, 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 was interested in medicine, so I read the New England Journal of Medicine. I worked 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 20 department heads. When I brought Im Pei 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 20 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 could kind of stay up into a conversation for a period of time.
- [26:47]
Shane Parrish
At the height of CAA, you guys had 70% 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?
- [26:58]
Michael Ovitz
Well, you know, first of all, I believed that all the publicity that I got, both good and bad, was nonsense. Same people that said good things about me later would write bad things about me, and then they'd write good things, then bad things. None of it fazed me, frankly.
- [27:20]
Shane Parrish
Did you read it?
- [27:21]
Michael Ovitz
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 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 badmouth 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 22, I met a manager who was quite successful in the business. I liked him a lot, but he had a horrible habit of badmouthing everybody. And it became clear to me six months into the relationship that he did that because he was insecure. In a meeting he thought it made himself look better, when in reality it made him look really weak and unappreciative. I remember sitting with him in his office and he was badmouthing 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 them 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.
- [29:54]
Shane Parrish
Always. You know, when I'm on the receiving end of this and somebody's 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.
- [30:04]
Michael Ovitz
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, 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.
- [30:27]
Shane Parrish
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 spend time with them?
- [30:43]
Michael Ovitz
Well, investing is very simple for me. I've been investing in tech now since 1993 and full time since 2001. And I transitioned out of the media business in about, oh, 2003 or 4. I sold every asset that I had and I went full time into tech investing and tech consulting. And nothing changed for me. Nothing changed for me.
- [31:15]
Shane Parrish
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?
- [31:23]
Michael Ovitz
It's pretty simple actually. Founders need to be 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. They have to be really enthusiastic. And it's funny, when you're a director and you're interviewing an actor or an actress, you're kind of looking for the same things. The only difference is when you're looking at 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 kind of not looking at that when I'm interviewing a founder. But they're not actors, right? And I don't want them to be. But other than that, the packaging of a film or a television show or a 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 is the creator, the VCs, the money in tech, the studio or the distributor, the money in 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. Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen pointed that out to me in 1999. They both looked at me and Said, you do exactly what we do. And that was like an epiphany moment for me. With M O Stash a taco in one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back. Nice. Get up to 5% cash back with Venmo stash on your favorite brands when you pay with your Venmo debit card. From takeout to ride shares, entertainment and more. Pick a bundle with your go tos and start earning cash back at those brands. Earn more cash when you do more with stash. Venmo stash terms and Exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo me stashterms.
- [33:58]
Shane Parrish
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.
- [34:06]
Michael Ovitz
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 UCLA because he was. He had a kid down there. And we had. 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, marc 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 said, 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, has 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 him. But Andreessen 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 a kind of flower Hawaiian shirt. And I had never seen that look in Hollywood. But 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 1999. They developed a cloud. I couldn't understand what they were talking about. Where is it? How do you plug it in? Where does it get power? What is it? And they had thought this through in 1999, and they developed a company called Loud Cloud. And then they said to me, we'd like you on the board. And I said, guys, 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 beholden to anyone in Silicon Valley, someone who thinks 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.
- [37:15]
Shane Parrish
Where does that fearlessness come from? You have never seemed to shy away from confrontation.
- [37:22]
Michael Ovitz
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 with Tomorrow, the woman that I am with, and she's English and very elegant and charming and very mannered. I'm not English. Days I can be charming. Days I can be not charming and tough. We're talking about confrontation. So she doesn't like it, but will do it if pushed. 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 the 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 them 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 elderly people. It's not Japan, and it's not. It doesn't have a good memory. And we did.
- [39:08]
Shane Parrish
That's an incredible. I've never heard that before.
- [39:10]
Michael Ovitz
Well, don't share it much, but we had at one time. I think we had at one time close to 400 people on a list that were either fired, 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 60s. And we had 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 job. And he did it. And 20 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, anyplace. And he was older and he was very nice, but he timed out. His kind of style was gone. And in a staff meeting, I told everyone this story that I just told you. I said, we're going to legislate a job for this guy. This is not just giving him a check. He needs his dignity back. And we went out and in 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 them 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, 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.
- [41:16]
Shane Parrish
That's an incredible story. Do you think that makes you a hard target?
- [41:22]
Michael Ovitz
Oh, I was. I wasn't going to win any popularity contest. 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 4,000 kid high school. I was president. I don't think I was made president because I was popular, frankly. I was made president because 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 ask the busiest person I know to do it because they'll get it done. Ask someone with too much time, it never gets done.
- [42:42]
Shane Parrish
That's so true. I've been thinking a lot about the coming back to the dignity thing for a second and allowing people to keep their dignity.
- [42:51]
Michael Ovitz
Well, when people help you and it wasn't in the long term culture of the entertainment business, short term, it's trying, you know, the entertainment is a transactional friendship business. Are these people really your friends? I'm not so sure. You know, 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 10 years later he's, he can't get a job and he doesn't feel too good about himself, you know, time passed him 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 going to 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 get pitched ideas by young entrepreneurs that make me really believe in this country. You know, I am not worried about foreign competition. 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. I was in London with Tamara. She's English from London. And a group of businessmen asked to have a roundtable session with me because they. 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 lunch for me. And the subject fascinated me. And it's why I took the lunch. 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 in media and in consumer businesses. And we went to the lunch, and the guy who set up the lunch opened the meeting and posed 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 saved him till the end, he said, my name's so and so. And I was in this business, and this is what I did. And I said, and what are you doing now? He said, well, I'm moving to Staad. I said, oh, you like to ski, huh? And he was in his mid-40s, late-40s, 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 going to put them in school there. I said, and where have you lived the last 20 years? In London. I said, why are you 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 800 people or something. I said, yeah, so what? He said, what do you mean, so what? I said, so what? You went bankrupt. You didn't do it on purpose, did you? He said, no, we had a bad business cycle. One of our products fell off a cliff. We had a great product, but we didn't back it up. We made some fundamental mistakes. He said, so I want to get out of the city. I'm kind of embarrassed. I said, well, our lunch is over. And everyone said, what are you talking? We haven't even gotten served. I said, well, you asked me, why are American businessmen and women better than others? And I said, we just got a 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 riding. I've had tons of failures, but doesn't stop me from trying to be great 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 badmouth you. But what does that got to do with you? What do you care? Let them say whatever they want. Just prove them wrong. And bottom line, failure is part of. You know. Michael Crichton was one of my closest friends in my life 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'd always said to me, just remember something. 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 did that. It didn't work. Next case. And I believed him. And I lived that life my whole life.
- [49:00]
Shane Parrish
Are there any other lessons you learned from Michael Crichton? You said, I think in the past that he was the smartest person you knew.
- [49:06]
Michael Ovitz
Well, he was the smartest person I knew until I met Marc Andreessen. 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 that was so cool. It was unbelievable. And they both loved it. It was unreal. Both incredibly well read, both recall. That's extraordinary. Both widely read, which is insane. 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 25 years ago and 20 years ago. And they're both deeply read. They are both curious about everything. It's unbelievable. They share these traits. They're the same people in that way.
- [50:16]
Shane Parrish
What drives you today?
- [50:19]
Michael Ovitz
Oh, only one thing. There are two things that drive me. One are my five grandchildren who I'm in love with and I love, I just love hanging out with them. My four kids who are. I have two boys, two girls, they're. They've grown into just amazing human beings. And they're parenting so much better than I did, frankly, it's unbelievable.
- [50:48]
Shane Parrish
How can you say that though, if your kids turned into amazing human beings?
- [50:52]
Michael Ovitz
Because they're just better with their kids than I was with them. Because I came from a household post World War II with a very strict father and I. Parenting in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s 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 stealth or. 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 Nima Gamzari. I met him 17 years ago. He was assigned to me at Palantir when I was one of the advisors to Alex Karp, who's a brilliant guy. I was introduced to him by Peter Thiel, who had invested 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 Nima was assigned to me to answer technical questions because he was a genius engineer. We started a company together. He had an idea that he could put a company together called Blend, it's now public, that does mortgages on your phone in under 10 clicks. Now he came up with another idea. I just got him all the funding, including from us, and I'm doing the marketing and he's hired the right engineers and it's a 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, how do you. 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 10 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 job generation in tech, they just want to know. They don't want to know what you've done that's great. They want to know what you failed at and how to avoid is so fantastic that the way they think is so counterintuitive.
- [53:38]
Shane Parrish
What would be an example of that?
- [53:40]
Michael Ovitz
An 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. And 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. I said, oh, okay. And he said, I want to 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 kind of revolutionary in the entertainment. Wasn't interested, no interest, wouldn't know the mistakes, so he wouldn't make them. That to me, was not smart, it was wise. That was a grade above normal.
- [54:57]
Shane Parrish
What's an example of a mistake you made that we can learn from? Just pick one.
- [55:02]
Michael Ovitz
You got 20 hours. I can tell you I got all.
- [55:04]
Shane Parrish
The time in the.
- [55:05]
Michael Ovitz
I've made so many mistakes in, in my business life, in my personal life, in my art collecting. And that's why I did that, 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 200 years old here. We live in what I think is 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 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. She's a rising young executive at Vogue. She's 23, 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 because 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, 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. I've seen a lot of information on him because 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 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, and 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 system in the last 2,000 years that has worked that's not capitalism, socialism, communism, dictators, anything? Yeah, just name me one that you learned at your Ivy League school? Dead silence. Because there isn't one. 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, that movie before, and it doesn't work.
- [58:22]
Shane Parrish
How do you think that woke culture has influenced not only universities, which you're seeing firsthand, but also, like, film and tv?
- [58:31]
Michael Ovitz
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 forced wokeness 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. Things that 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 Goodfellows 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.
- [60:31]
Shane Parrish
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 political dispositions and what I know about you. I'm going to give you this version. And my political dispositions and what I know about you. I'm going to give you a slightly different version.
- [60:53]
Michael Ovitz
You know, it's a. It's a great question because I just had this debate at lunch today. I'll give you the analogy. First of all, the answer is I. I don't ever, in technology, count anything out. So could it happen? Absolutely. Because the technology is actually there to do it. Netflix has already done experiments with you. Change the ending. Here's, you know, four different endings. You put that, your own ending on the film. But I think that the reality of all of this we see a little bit now in AI. 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.
- [61:56]
Shane Parrish
Oh, definitely. I think they just do a better job of hiding it now.
- [61:59]
Michael Ovitz
But I think it's still there.
- [62:02]
Shane Parrish
How do you manage to Keep up with the information flow. How do you prioritize?
- [62:05]
Michael Ovitz
I don't. I don't. I'm overwhelmed.
- [62:08]
Shane Parrish
Do you have.
- [62:09]
Michael Ovitz
I have. In my office right now. Here in New York. Yeah. My office at a 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 got articles from the Atlantic stripped out of the magazine, sitting in a pile. I'm overwhelmed with information, and I. 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 because 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.
- [63:03]
Shane Parrish
Are you an early riser, too?
- [63:05]
Michael Ovitz
Yeah, I am. I'm a very early riser. And I do my best thinking in the morning. My very best thinking in the morning.
- [63:12]
Shane Parrish
What's your routine after you get out of bed?
- [63:15]
Michael Ovitz
It's the same every day of my life. Seven days a week. I get up. If I'm here, it's easier. I mean, harder because 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 10 minutes. I come right back. I get his food, I get something to drink for myself, and then I sit down at my desk and I read the same things every single morning.
- [63:55]
Shane Parrish
What are those things?
- [63:56]
Michael Ovitz
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 because there's nothing long, you know, So I can do it in very short time frame. I then go right to TechCrunch. 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. I read Believe it or Not. I scan the headlines of the Drudge Report. Takes me two minutes, because I like to see their point of view because 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 because 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. And then I jump right into 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.
- [65:35]
Shane Parrish
Digitally, what are you looking for when you're, you're skimming?
- [65:38]
Michael Ovitz
I'm looking for headlines. I'm looking for pictures because they often wouldn't appear if the editor didn't. 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 kind of tell you what's important. They tell you by the placement in the publication. They tell you if there's a bigger headline, a sub headline and a picture, you can program yourself for that. So those are things I tend to notice for first. I like those tells and 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 is 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.
- [66:54]
Shane Parrish
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 he basically ignores the opinion of the writer.
- [67:11]
Michael Ovitz
I couldn't agree with them more. I have zero interest in anybody's opinion unless it's an op ed piece, then I know it's an opinion. And that's okay because I've looked for it. 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 Mideast, 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.
- [67:42]
Shane Parrish
There's a quote in your book, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but it basically says, mediocrity is invisible until passion shines a light on it. What did you mean by that?
- [67:51]
Michael Ovitz
Exactly what it says. First of all, mediocrity to me is a disease that you have to get rid of at all costs. I can't stand talking to people that sort of 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 10 young people, my daughter's friends, to defend his position. 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 him in front of everybody.
- [68:42]
Shane Parrish
I will say, if you're going to go socialist, I much prefer the New York path of you go from capitalism to extreme socialism. Because I feel like the system will reject that versus Canada, which is a slow march into kind of socialism.
- [68:59]
Michael Ovitz
Yeah, 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 Marx, I've read Lenin. 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. 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. 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 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 going to 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, something sales, marketing, healthcare plan. You got to 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, that 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 a defund the police campaign. I walk around London, I don't feel safe because the government there is taking the police off the street. I walk around New York, I feel great. I feel great because there's a lot of police out. The police are the most maligned service people in the world. Who wants that job? What a terrible job. And we get these men and women that do it. Hey, did they make mistakes? Yeah. But are the mistakes worth throwing out the whole system? I don't think so. I don't think so.
- [72:02]
Shane Parrish
I liked 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.
- [72:12]
Michael Ovitz
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. Mike Bloomberg, truth be known, was fired from Solomon Brothers and started what'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 going to come up 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? 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 just can't see the logic. I don't care how charismatic is. It doesn't make any sense to me.
- [73:33]
Shane Parrish
Do you think if somebody like Mike Bloomberg comes in, it seems from the outside, 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?
- [73:57]
Michael Ovitz
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 until 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 want to stop. Even for 10% of your time, you don't want to stop.
- [74:44]
Shane Parrish
I'm curious, if you were putting together a business education, what would be on the curriculum?
- [74:52]
Michael Ovitz
It's a fascinating question. I was actually thinking about that because my grandson started a new school here in Tribeca yesterday that's called the Alpha School. And it's a completely different angle on education. I really like what I saw. And a lot of it's practical learning. A lot of it's learning 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 Levchin is a great guy. Founded a firm and PayPal Co founded PayPal. And I remember sitting in his office we were going to have coffee. He said, come with me. And he took me to the coffee room and then proceeded to spend 10 minutes explaining to me how you brew the perfect cup of coffee. And I realized 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 kind of like a Japanese tea ceremony. He took all the components apart and isolated them and then put them into a fluid movement.
- [76:26]
Shane Parrish
That's incredible. I love coffee too, so I could relate to that.
- [76:30]
Michael Ovitz
ABC's David Muir, the most trusted anchor in America, the most watched and anchor in America. Thank you for making World News Tonight with David Muir the number one newscast in America. Most trusted, most watched. David Muir on abc.
- [76:45]
Shane Parrish
How do you think about momentum?
- [76:46]
Michael Ovitz
Momentum to me is the single most important thing in, in anything we do.
- [76:51]
Shane Parrish
Double click on.
- [76:52]
Michael Ovitz
It's important in, 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 underutilized, most critical thing in life.
- [77:14]
Shane Parrish
If you were trying to teach somebody how to get momentum, what would you tell them?
- [77:19]
Michael Ovitz
I don't think getting momentum is a science. It's more an art form. 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 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 recruited, I'd say, 80% of our executives like that. We either grew them inside or recruited them from the competition because they had our standards and they were at the wrong place in our mind.
- [78:19]
Shane Parrish
How do you think about leverage?
- [78:22]
Michael Ovitz
Well, it's tough. It's a controversial subject. There are those who feel leverage is critical in business, and there are those that feel leverage is really nasty. 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 connotation of. Leverage is a bad thing, and I'm not sure it's so bad.
- [79:02]
Shane Parrish
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 otherwise been a success?
- [79:12]
Michael Ovitz
Well, you could say that about anything. To me, packaging is a sine quinon of life. Life. I package everything in my life. I put elements together constantly. I just put a business together by combining 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 when Michael Crichton gave me the book of Jurassic Park, I put the right director with it, Steven Spieler. There was no second choice. A 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 a 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 is it? He said, well, he's got a NFT company. I 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 an NFT collector. And they were hot at 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. I didn't know why he wanted to meet with me. I didn't know anything about clouds or technology. So I meet with a guy, Dr. Walter Debre, Stanford AI professor, and he's got an NFT company. We're 15 minutes into the call, and all I can do is think about how do I end this? Because it's. Time is my enemy. Time is the only thing in my life I am concerned about, because 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 because I'm on the Most epic learning curve imaginable. Anyways, I don't know what happened, Shane, but a light bulb went off in my head when he described the technology and what it does. He mentioned to me in the course of it that he watermarked with neural fingerprinting, these NFTs. And I didn't skip a beat. I don't know what came over me. I said, can you do that with songs? And he said, oh, that's elementary. Which I thought was such a great answer because it was such a put down of me and it was so perfect because he has a PhD and I have nothing. So you know what, a course corrector, right? Because I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to get off the phone and this guy just makes the ultimate statement that 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, let's hire new engineers. We are now in the business of protecting intellectual property rights. And then I said, can you do this for video? He said, 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. In 96, I led a trade delegation for President Clinton to Beijing. I met with the Premier of China, Jiang Zemin, and Zhu Rongji, the number two, the head of finance, because they were making videotapes from people holding up video cameras in theaters and they were killing the business and they were stealing records and they were duplicating tapes. And I went with 20 mega business people to lead the 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 IP theft? And he said, 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 Dennis Coker and Rob Stringer at Sony. So we have the two biggest music companies and we're watermarking songs and we will go live very shortly. Next thing we do is streaming. We'll do film, we will do athletic games. I had no idea. I was on the phone with one of the heads of the Premier League in London and 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? Because I was curious. He said, hard to believe, but we have over 30 teams. We have 750,000 illegal downloads, every team, every game. I said, how's that possible? He said, you could literally go on to Google and find out how to get around paying for a sporting event with very simple instructions. I was kind of shocked, frankly. And the use case for what we have fits all of this.
- [85:29]
Shane Parrish
I want to 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?
- [85:40]
Michael Ovitz
Well, that's a good question. It's a simple answer. Because I think about it so much. I could have cut back 10% 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 10% of my time for my family, for my art, collecting, for reading, for other things that were important to me.
- [86:07]
Shane Parrish
Do you think that's true? Because I always wonder with this, in hindsight, you're looking back and you're like, sure, I could have gave up 10 or 20% of my time and had the same result. But it's who you were as a person that gave you that extra 10 or 20%.
- [86:22]
Michael Ovitz
And I think you're 100% 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. It doesn't get booked. There's a negative in that, as 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 2% 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.
- [87:13]
Shane Parrish
Head when you take meetings, when people recommend them. It sounds 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.
- [87:27]
Michael Ovitz
Yeah. I mean, it's not complicated. Trust to me, is the most important, important thing between human beings. And I have, and I've been very vociferous about this, and it's happened to me a couple of 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 well. I don't think that there's any justification for it under any condition. And I, I react very badly to it.
- [88:06]
Shane Parrish
By betrayal, you mean malicious intent?
- [88:09]
Michael Ovitz
Yeah, yeah. Or being set up for something to fail or being lied to and then walking into a trap. I mean, we've seen all the plots in on television. You know, Shane there, I can give you 20 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, now you've had people close.
- [88:35]
Shane Parrish
To you betray you. Like, 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?
- [88:43]
Michael Ovitz
Well, you can't. You can't, you know, stain everyone with the same brush. So you have to kind of get back up on your feet like I told you about the guy in London. And you got to go back and you gotta kind of 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.
- [89:27]
Shane Parrish
Do you find you put on more armor after that happens and, like, keep you.
- [89:31]
Michael Ovitz
Oh, I got very defensive. Yeah. Took me a long time to get that armor off.
- [89:38]
Shane Parrish
Does that happen with everybody or just.
- [89:40]
Michael Ovitz
The person I know? 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 very important thing to me.
- [90:00]
Shane Parrish
I think that's a great place to end this. We always end with the same question, which is, what is success for you?
- [90:07]
Michael Ovitz
It's a. It's not a singular definition. For me, I have a very broad, broad definition of what success is. Success to me is having an amazing family, because at the end of the day, that's your legacy, nothing else. Unless you're Jonas Salk. You know, there's one of those for every 100 million people. It's having had a great Run in your life, in education, it's having learned so much more than you ever thought you'd learn. 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 I've got a young guy named Ali Hamed with me who's 30 now. He's 32 or 3. And I've got my son who joined me. It took me 10 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 in this country. I don't even know if you have Thanksgiving in Canada.
- [91:49]
Shane Parrish
We do.
- [91:49]
Michael Ovitz
We do. It's on Monday, so we. It's my favorite holiday of the year. It's more favorite than any other holiday 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 because it's Christmas.
- [92:13]
Shane Parrish
Yeah.
- [92:13]
Michael Ovitz
It's just, you sit at the table and you're just happy to be there and there's no pressure. I just love Thanksgiving. To me, it's the most important holiday of the year.
- [92:26]
Shane Parrish
I love that.
- [92:27]
Michael Ovitz
But success is all those things. And success is having accomplished something, you know, and it's not definitionally a thing, but it can be. I was very proud when I contributed to the UCLA Medical center being built. I was very proud when I got IM Pei to build that. And our building for ca. I 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, where someone's really connected with me. 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, you know, a one word definition, I can't cope with that because it's just not the case for me.
- [93:31]
Shane Parrish
It's multifaceted.
- [93:32]
Michael Ovitz
Yeah. It's a lot of things that add up. And it's to me, success is a great Seurat painting. Seurat was the great pointillist. 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 4ft or 3ft by 2ft, you see an entire picture in front of your eyes. And that to me is the definition of success, is that our lives are made up of a lot of little dots. And when they tell the right picture, you hit it.
- [94:29]
Shane Parrish
I think that's the most beautiful answer I've heard in 200 and some episodes. I appreciate that. Thank you so much.
- [94:35]
Michael Ovitz
Thank you for having me coming on.
- [94:37]
Shane Parrish
Michael.
- [94:38]
Michael Ovitz
Thanks Was great.