Aspire with Emma Grede - From Video Store to Netflix Co-CEO, Ted Sarandos

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

From a video rental store to a corner office at Netflix. Emma sits down with Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos as he reveals how he built one of the most influential companies in the world — and the leadership lessons he’s learned along the way.   You’ll hear Ted’s insights on:   Taking bold risks and trusting your gut Making the toughest decisions as a leader Why values and vision matter more than algorithms How to keep innovating even when you’re on top   Ted’s story is a masterclass in leadership, resilience, and ambition for anyone looking to grow in their career or business. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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share it with you. Start with yourself. My debut book is available now. Visit emigre.com to purchase the book, also available on Amazon, your favorite audio platforms and all good bookshops. What if the kid behind the counter at the video store became the man who rewrote Hollywood? Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, is getting real about what it takes to climb from nowhere to the top of the entertainment industry. How do you know when to double down and when to walk away? How do you trust your gut when the data says otherwise? And how do you keep innovating when you're already on top? Ted Sarandos, thank you so. so much for being here today on The Espy Podcast. Thank you for having me. I'm really,

really happy to have you. I mean, I have to say when I read everything about you, I mean, I'm already unbelievably impressed by you, but I think the reason why listeners of this show will die when they hear your story is because, first of all, you don't have a typical story. You don't have a typical resume. And in my most English girl way, I'm going to say it like this and hope it's not offensive. But you started your career. in a video rental situation type of career. It is true. And now you run one of the most important companies in entertainment.

And it's just so unbelievably mesmerizing to me how you've made that journey. And I think so inspiring to people that perhaps come from, you know, it's like you're a college dropout, your father was an electrician, you're nothing that, you know, I expected. It's not the normal bad. And I was like, this is so inspiring. so incredible. But I think it is really inspiring to people because, again, a lot of us aspire to a career in entertainment and you have one of the most impressive ones. So I guess my question,

really, to you is I want you to take me back to you being a kid. What do you think ultimately in your childhood would tell me that you were going to have the type of career that you have today? I don't know there was like an actual flashpoint that was, oh, that's what I'm going to do because growing up, I always wanted to be a journalist. Like the first thing I remember wanting to be as a reporter. I always thought they were heroic people. They thought it was what a great job this must be. So I was like editor of the high school newspaper and for a couple years of my community college newspaper. And I went to community college. Yeah, two years of community college. Did not get that degree either. It's all right. Well, I spent the whole time working

on the newspaper. Yeah. There you go. But then I was kind of getting to this point where I was going to try to go to university. I applied for us, going to applying for a scholarship. I had to pay for my own school. I was putting together all my clippings, and I realized I wasn't a very good writer. And no one ever told me. You're like, that part. Yeah. So I'm reading it. I'm like, wow, if I didn't write this, I probably wouldn't keep reading this.

Fair. So I just like, and I was my part-time job while I was doing all this was working in the video store. So that for me, the epiphany was, I wasn't that I was going to be in entertainment, just that I was not going to be a journalist. Sometimes that process of elimination is a good thing, too, though, right? You're like, okay, definitely not that. I just wish I had to learn it sooner. How old are you at this point?

19, 20 years old. And what's your family background? Tell us a bit about... I can tell you, back to the other, like, why entertainment? So for me, you know, you're a product of your parents for better or worse, right? And my parents were very young, so they had four kids in their 20s. Oh, wow. My dad, you mentioned was an electrician, hardworking guy.

My mom stayed home to raise the kids. And because it's really like young parents, they were like, it was chaotic in my house all the time. So we didn't have bedtime. We didn't have structure and things. Where are you in the four? I have three older sisters. Right. I have a younger brother, Joey, who passed away a few years ago.

I'm so sorry. Thank you. Thank you. But in the house, like I said, my parents, and I used to be very angry about it, you know, to be honest with you that why were my parents more traditional? I didn't, they make sure I did my homework. Parents can't win.

Whatever they do. If you've got the traditional ones, you don't want them. If you don't, you're like, I want to go to, I want a bedtime. But I just came to realize that they were just kids. They didn't know any better. And they, so when they're in their 40s, they were kind of recaptured their 20s. Because if you have to get that stuff out of your system at some point. So anyway, so that for me, I had this, my, I would go visit my mom's mom, my grandmother.

I called her nanny at her house. And she loved entertainment. She had the National Enquirer and all People magazine, all those things out all the time. When I would stay up late anyway, I would sit up with her and watch the Tonight Show, Johnny Carson. Amazing. And she would always talk about celebrities. in on a first name basis. It wasn't,

it was Johnny. Oh, did you believe Johnny last night? And there was, I remember one point, I don't remember who did what to who, but it was like, oh,

did you hear what Mack did to Glenn? I go, Oh, Mac Davis and Glenn Campbell. Your friends, I've got it. So, yeah, exactly. And so,

and what I did find was that it was a very, like when I would go to my grandma's to visit, it was an escape from the chaos at our house. Yeah. So for me, I always had these really positive connections to television and to entertainment and do celebrity. That's so interesting.

So somewhere in the calm of going to your nannies, you found a love of entertainment, but it was also like a space where you were away from the chaoticness of what you knew to be held. So I think when you're raised, you're going to either grow up to be just like you were raised or the polar opposite.

And I went polar opposite. I didn't want to have a chaotic life. And for me, like even a bit about not having dinner time and bedtime and all this thing. You wanted the stability. Yeah, and TV had. had a structure. Yes.

Happy Days was on at 7 o'clock and Channel 3 every Tuesday night. So you didn't have to, it was very structured. Television was very structured. Happy days. I used to love that show. That was huge in England as well. Just so crazy. So you go on the journey of trying to become, well, not really trying to become a journalist,

but you're fancying journalism. You realize you're not a fantastic rider. At what point does it become clear that entertainment is a career? And talk to me about that kind of initial stint in the video rental space. So working in these stores, it was a part-time gig. It was early in the whole life cycle of video stores. It was before Blockbuster, there was these mom and pop independent stores. It was the second store in the state of Arizona that opened up.

It was called Arizona Video Cassettes West. That's a good time. It's got everything in the title. It's all on the title. You know exactly where you are and what you're going there for. Even though the region. It's on the West party. And also.

Not marketing genius there. I thought it was great about the guy who owned the place, Dale Mason. but I liked about it. It was aspirational right away. He called it west because he knew there'd be a north and the south and an east. There you go. There you go. He had dreams.

He had dreams. Good old Dale. Do you still know him now? Yeah, I haven't talked to him quite a while, but I do stay in touch. And what was your role? What were you doing? Like, well, he, so I, this was like a serendipitous thing. My young crazy parents, my mom, I always thought, and I thought we were poor.

And it turns out my mom was just really bad with money. Because my dad made. There's a difference. Yeah. My dad made money and she just blew it. Wow. And we always had, like, we may not have the electricity and the gas on at the same time. We might get evicted from the house, but we had a VCR before anyone else did, like that kind of thing.

What was she doing with the money? Just like that. There's extravagances that we couldn't afford. So she had, we had a VCR. And then this video store opens around the corner from our house. So I could walk there. And I used to go in and meet, I met this guy, Dale, who owned the store. And we would talk about movies.

I love movies. we just talked about movies all the time. And being a journalism student in Arizona, you were aware of Spike Lee and John Sales and these things. But there was no place to see those movies in Arizona at the time before the video stories. So for me, it's like I thought this was like almost like one of those aha moments in life. And so Dale said, you know, do you need a job? I needed a job.

So I got a job. And then I went to him after I had this epiphany about not being a journalist and said, I don't think I'm going to be a journalist. I'm not going to go to university. and I need some time to figure out my next act. And he said, oh, good. We need someone. Yeah, because he had opened a bunch of stores.

In the meantime, you know, over the couple of years, and he wanted somebody to kind of take him over for him so he could spend some time with his kids and his wife. And he just gave me the keys to this multi-store chain with no real experience or, you know, basically he's learning. I looked at it like an MBA course and film school all wrapped up. Even at that time, you do. Yeah, yeah.

Because at that time, you know, the video stores were empty all day. Yeah. And then for two hours, they'd be jammed, and then you'd close and close and clean up. And all day when the things were empty, we'd watch movies. I'd watch every movie in the store. So, like, I just got a real grounding in the things you would learn at film school, and how movies talk to one another. And if you like this, you're going to like this.

All those things, I didn't know it in the moment that it was preparing me for what I'm going to do right next. But it really was, for sure. So I had this kid with no business experience, negotiating leases, and doing the programming and the marketing, hiring and firing. the employees, paying the taxes. Oh my good. It really was. It was like a business MBA.

And Dale took a big chance on a young kid who just he trusted. Did you have a vision for your career at that point? No. Nothing. You were like just in the here and now. I'm not going to be a journalist. How can I do the thing that I love? And I really did love.

I didn't realize even that there was a business to get these movies. So my next step was to go from running the stores to working for the distributor who sold the movies to the stores. And how important do you think it is for people to really understand a career like from the trenches? Because it seems like, I mean, you literally started right at the bottom. I mean, it's the version of the work in the mallroom, whatever that is. Yeah. But you want to be, to me, it's like the best part of that was I was in direct contact with the end user.

So the people would come in, excited to watch the movie, and then they would return it and tell me if they liked it or not. I mean, I really was a full circle contact with the end user. And that's what I think really prepared me for everything I do now. It's interesting because I feel like so much of your career has been about the end user, the customer, the data, really understanding that, but you had an early purview on all of that stuff. And so you knew it was important before we spoke about it.

For sure. I used to marvel at how long it would take for people to decide what movie to rent. Right? You'd walk around, you read all the boxes. You've been there for hours. Right, longer than you'd watch. And then I finally started asking people, and they would tell me all.

these different stories about how important the choice was. Like, I don't, I don't, either I don't have a lot of money, so this is a big deal for me. Yeah. I don't have a lot of time, so I don't want to watch a bad movie. I'm trying to avoid wasting my time. Or the one that always surprised me was I'm picking it out for my family or my friends, and it really, it says a lot about me. Yes. So I want people to respect my choice. Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. I spent so much time in the video shop as a kid. And it was like such a treat. My mum would say, because there's four of us, and she'd pick which one of us was going with her.

And it was like, that was a really big deal. You'd get to go because you were deciding on the weekend. Like, how was our weekend going to start, right? And it's like this big decision. And I was obsessed with, you know, because back then it was videos. And I had all the Disney movies, and they had these like holograms on them. And for me, it's like I just wanted all the holograms stacked up next to each other.

And so it's interesting how formative those memories are on what that time does for you, but you really took it as an education in entertainment at that time and an education in customer behavior. And I don't know how deliberate it was. You know what I mean? Part of me, I think, was I was just curious. And the other part was I think I was trying to figure out.

I didn't know how I was going to go from Phoenix, Arizona, to Hollywood at all, just geographically, and alone professionally. Did you have anxiety about your career at that point? Probably not, because I really was enjoying it so much. I didn't really think about where it was going to go next. I just said at that time, I was just really enjoying it. One of those things where I was almost shocked that this was a job.

Yeah, I can't believe somebody's given me these cases. So fast forward to me, so you joined Netflix in 2000. And in 2000, it was still a DVD by mail service. So you talked to me just about that time where you were at. Like, how did you even make that association? So I went from the stores. Arizona Video Cassette to Us became super-stableness. our video. Same, same, same, just better name, better name. And then,

not quite blockbuster though, was it? Not quite blockbuster, but then went from there to a company called East Texas distributing. There's this pattern here. There is clearly. This is the company that sold the movies to all the stores. Right. And then I did a very brief step back at a regional chain called West Coast Video. And that's when I came to find out about Netflix. I found out about it first from I opened a DVD player. And there was a card in there for a company called Netflix where you could get to, you know, and that's a 10 free rentals with this card.

It was a sample thing. And I remember distinctly seeing it thinking, oh, that's cool. And just putting it aside. And then I get a call from a friend of Reed Hastings, who was the founder of Netflix, who said he would like to meet me. Did you know Reed was? I did not know he was at that point. But I knew what Netflix was as a company, but I didn't understand why he wanted to meet me yet.

I had done a deal while I was at West Coast Video Rev Sharing with Warner Brothers and Sony. It was the first kind of deal of its kind. It got, you know, into a trade magazine and read read about it. And he said, I need that deal because at that time, Netflix was growing very fast. And we could. Great next stage, right. Yes. So how do I, you know, it's basically just to help fund the growth of the company,

revenue sharing would be a good thing. And he didn't really know anybody in distribution or in, in Hollywood. So he called and asked if I'd go out and meet him. My very first e-commerce transaction was buying that plane ticket. No, it was not. Yeah. No, it was not. So you weren't quite like a.

digital whiz at that point. You weren't thinking about that. It was a movie guy. Yeah. Even then, I remember walking into the lobby at the office at Netflix, and there was mountains and mountains of boxes. I'm like, what is all this? The receptionist says, oh, these are all the people who work here just ordering their stuff

online, like drugstore.com and razorblade.com and people were just living their life online already, which was a complete, like, that was my introduction to this idea. Wow, you were like, I did not know about this. Yeah. This is not how I'm living my life, right? Not at all, not at all. And it's crazy to think that that was only 25 years ago. Yeah.

Right. Like, it's just a whole different world now, completely. So this year, you have been at Netflix for 25 years. And it's a lifetime in a company. But I really want to understand what did those early days look like? And how did you even begin to think about transitioning yourself from being like a video store guy into being a tech guy, an entertainment guy, and being, you know, having this position at Netflix? I think some part of the curiosity that even I could have just went to work behind the counter

of the store, checked out the movies and went home, and I thought about it again. But I think all of that has kind of helped, for me, in how to better understand people and what jobs they have and what do they do that contributes to this success of the company and how passionate are they about doing this? And are these the best people for doing this job? Are people in the right roles? You know, we're almost all. It's all about casting in so many ways.

We couldn't afford to have an LA office back then at the early days of Netflix. So I worked in my bedroom a couple days a week, and I would go up to Silicon Valley a couple days a week. And I was sitting in the cubes in between all the engineers. And they would hear me yelling on the phone because I was like used to being alone. So making a lot of noise and disrupting. And they would like to work very quietly. So they would hear the kind of workings of the business a little bit. And I would be very curious about it.

They were doing. They were very curious what I was doing. We kept each other kind of curious about the business and informed each other about that both the tech and the entertainment part. of the business kind of intersected. And you were brought in to do exactly what? I was the vice president of product, and so that was basically had to get the inventory.

Basically, we were buying movies, by the way, on DVD from Walmart when I first joined the company. So people would go to Best Buy and buy inventory. That is wild. My goal, when I came in, it was to get direct with the studios of the movies, and then eventually does develop business plans with them like our revsher.

Did you see the vision really clearly? When you first sat down with Reed, like just thinking about what, Netflix is today, was that like mapped out and there was this huge giant vision and you got that? Or are you just like, I'm going to take a chance on what this is right now? Honestly, it sounded nuts to me. It did. So, yeah, Reed, I never met anyone like him.

He had such a clear vision for the future that was not rooted in any current reality. You know what I mean? Normally you can see a little sample. Yeah, it's going to be like that. And for Reid, it was, no, all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. Now, at this time, no entertainment came into the home on the internet. It was too slow and too expensive. And he said, to go from that, I mean, he took this all the way to the end.

He goes, no, in fact, if you think you're still going to be getting your entertainment on cable, you shouldn't, not only don't take this job, don't buy my stock when I go public. Wow. Wow. That is crazy. It was the ultimate contrarian thesis, right? Yeah. And those are the big wins whenever they were.

Those are the really big wins. So he laid this out. I didn't, I wasn't even sure I believed them, to be honest. with you. But I thought that this guy is, this is the kind of person who changes the world in some dimension. And you knew that. Yeah, for sure. So what did your early days look like? You're on the phone. You're doing these big deals with the studios. So the interesting thing is I think the entertainment business is there's a lot of people who want to be in the business, as you mentioned earlier. But finding out the people who want to work in it is really important. I think that's the beauty of

the kind of going to the mail room for the people who want to do it. Because you have to struggle, you know. You do have to struggle. Yeah. And that's the way you kind of separate the folks. want to be in it, the people want to work in it. And for me, it was, I've also come to understand that this is really a trust business. You know, people are very, they do not want to make a bad call on their watch. So the more you know them, the better. So it's like a relationship business. Very much relationship. And I, and I knew all the people who were running home entertainment at that time because my days in the video store, they used to come in and sell me movies. Like, so the guy who would become the head of Disney at that time, but Bob Cheapag used to sell,

VHS movies to me out of a book. That is wild. So you kind of, so you got to know these people in a way that, that was very helpful, that you say, hey, if I'm going to do something that's a risk. Yeah. I'll take a risk with someone I know and trust. But I imagine because obviously what you were doing before was very traditional. And you essentially were bringing something very new to all of these, you know, to all of these guys.

So I wonder what rules did you have to rewrite and what kind of behaviors did you have to throw out entirely? because it was a whole new world what you were doing. Well, one for sure was, is you had to be very transparent. Right. So if there was any thing that was going to surprise anybody, give him a heads up. Because if you're the new character, if you're doing things that are different than everybody else, you've got to give a lot of people to understand that they are, people are very nervous about, you know, making that bad call with the new guy who's unproven and all those things.

So really being unbelievably accessible and transparent. Is that who you are anyway, do you think? I think ultimately it is quite came naturally to me when I saw it coming. I could relate to the fact that someone who's investing into a career doesn't want to shoot themselves in the foot. Yes, totally. And you can avoid that by just saying, hey, here's something that's going to happen. You're going to read about it, whatever it is. And just here's what's going on.

So if you get asked. And it just developed that happen very early. And you developed that over and over. Yes, of course. I mean, they had to because you were doing things that nobody had done before. And so they had to take bets. It's pretty unintuitive. I mean, it's hard.

for people to imagine now how big Blockbuster was at that time. So if anyone had an idea that they were going to take on Blockbuster, that seemed insane. They were the biggest entertainment brand in the world. That's crazy to think about. Yeah, I mean, we can't even fathom that now because they're completely gone now? Or am I completely gone? There's one novelty store. I think it's like an Airbnb where you can go sleep in the video store.

That's crazy. Having worked in a video store, it's like being a blacksmith. That's like a job that just does not exist anymore. It's just totally, totally gone. But you must have been doing something tremendously right to rise through the ranks of this company at that time. And I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit for anybody that's listening that is part of, you know, a very high growth company or a company that's really going places. What did you do not just to survive, but to really scale yourself as it was all happening? Back in that middle where I worked in the distribution company at ETD, there was a guy.

So my life, by the way, was kind of peppered with these inspiring non-transference. traditional mentors. Lucky you. And I don't even know that they knew that they were mentoring. You know what I mean? But they would say these very poignant things that were very useful always if you listen. You have to listen. You have to listen.

So Ron Eisenberg was the CEO of East Texas Distributing. What was interesting about entertainment distribution is you have, basically all of your customers you sell to. And you need to have all the studios to be able to sell them. So he would always say to me, he goes, well, you've got customers on one hand and suppliers on the other, just kiss every ass presented. That was his comment. That's amazing.

Because you have to make sure that you're taking care of two constituencies all the time that have very different agendas. Right. So the idea that, you know, you can't just go to work and do one thing every day is you're trying to keep these people satisfied and these people pleased all the time, which I think embedded that kind of customer first mode to me. And the difference between video distributors wasn't much. You know what I mean?

It was they bought from the company and the person that they trusted and liked. And that was that. That was that. That was that. So it was just about just trust. That's so interesting. I mean, it's so interesting to me. Aw. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari.

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company to like a closer model of how we see Netflix today? Like what happened? So again, And the reason I think we made it is because it was always in the plan. It's called Netflix, not MailFlix or DVD Netflix even. And it was always in the vision that this would be a digital distribution company. Read described Netflix to me in 1999 almost exactly like it is right now. It's unfathomable to think about. Because at that point, as you said, you weren't even using the internet as we do today. You weren't ordering things like we do.

The idea that you would just sit in your living room and scroll like that. It wasn't a thing. To the TV is something we completely take for granted. What that. Yeah. That. And so this whole notion of it, we were talking about downloading instead of streaming back then because there was no concept even of streaming back again.

Of course. So when we think about that, that's the only thing that never really connected about the plan was how are you going to manage all these files and all that kind of stuff? And then streaming goes, ah, streaming. Streaming is going to solve that. So we don't even manage anything. I'm interested, Ted, because you were like such an entertainment guy. The digital piece was like a learning curve for you.

You didn't understand that. Like how much did you get yourself involved? Understanding that was the future. You could see this blueprint that Reader kind of, you know, said, this is where we're going. Did you immediately, like, try to start understanding what the engineers sitting next to you were doing? Yeah, gradually. I felt like I just learned as much as I needed to get my deals done, first of all,

and to get these, you know, to deliver on the things that we were promising. Because I can imagine you would be sitting there thinking, oh, my goodness, there's this whole part of this company that I don't really understand or I need to learn. and otherwise I'll be left out of it. I just wonder, was there any part of that? Almost immediately. And the bigger part for me was actually understanding the tech culture.

Very different culture. Very different. At one point, there was an early, early executive staff meeting. And one of the guys who was our head of product at that time said to me, I forgot what he said even, but it sounded a little loaded, you know. So afterwards, I asked somebody on the way out, and I said, hey, you know what he said that? What do you think he meant?

And he goes, oh, no, no, no, no. He's incapable of saying anything but exactly. what he means. He means exactly what he said. It's not coded. It's just a tech guy. It's just a tech. 100%. And I did find every once in a while with that same guy, he would say to me when sometimes I'd be asking for something and I'm trying to get his buy-in on something. And he would repeat back to me and not a lot. And I would leave and thinking... He's understood it. We got it. Yeah. No problem.

He was just taking it all in. And he was acknowledging that he heard me. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And then he'd go home and think about it for 24 hours. And he'd come back and have the most remarkable insight and question that I thought we were all settled. And every once in a while he would unearth something that made what we just talked about impossible. That's just insight. Yeah. So it was a very, the company, the art of the company always from the beginning was kind of managing both. Yeah.

And it's an art, right? Because, I mean, seemingly these two industries between tech and entertainment are very, very differently. And I think so much of the success has been how those two things have been interwoven and the understand. between the two, but what did you do in the beginning? Remember in those early days of tech with the entertainment business, very few companies, very few tech companies have successful entertainment plays or the other way around either. And I think a lot of that is because you try to jam the culture on each other. And I knew early on that we couldn't do that.

And read, recognized it right away too. So one of those days in the history of Netflix, I wanted everyone up there to know what happened in L.A. So I had everybody come down from Los Gatos to L.A. We toured the Warner Brothers studio, and I rented the improv. And I had Naomi Odenkirk, who's Bob's, Odin Kirk's wife, who was a talent booker in those days, book 10 great comedians. And they came and saw showbiz. Wow. And they had a real, and they went back home and they talked about it for a year.

Yeah. And it was part of the, you know, early formations of the company. And I remember I used to really love to hear the engineers talk about the experience of having men. Now, that night at the improv, it was Zach Alvinakis, Sarah Silberman. Wow. He was Patton Oswald. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

So they really had an experience that night. And was that something that worked both ways? Because you're really talking about building influence and credibility between the two teams. Did it work both ways that you had to show the entertainment folks how to have more understanding of the digital? side of the business too. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and we really had to do this idea was, don't spend all your energy trying to figure out how to code, figure out how to talk to the coders to give what you need and vice versa. The biggest goal for me was, if you're an engineer at Netflix, you work at the greatest tech company on the planet. And if you are an

entertainment executive Netflix, you work at the greatest entertainment company. End off. And you're both right. Yeah, you're both correct. And it turned out that you were right about that. They really did. And they really did. And they really did put a lot of energy. behind it. And this was in the days, in the early days of the tech entertainment, tension, was that the tech companies would fly to L.A. for the day, and they'd hire a legal team and an agent, and they'd go in and talk to the studios with the lawyer and an agent, and then he'd write a very big check, and they'd leave. And they didn't know that the studios were laughing, you know, when they laughed. And I would tell Rie, I'd go, we're not doing that.

That is not what we're doing. I'm not going to move up here. I'm going to stay here. My kids are going to go to school with their kids, and we're going to... And that's just that. Did you ever feel like an outsider? Because you don't come from the studio system or from film school. So was there a part of you that was like, I'm an outsider in this business too? For sure. But I think it's probably my personality generally.

When I was growing up my sister, the neighbor we lived in, my two oldest sisters, Kathy and Jean, got into a thing with us, a gang of girls at school. And when my parents went to the school to try to solve the problem,

they said, she should probably transfer schools. It was a violent neighborhood where we were living. And so we switched schools when I was in junior high school. So all my friends went to one high school and I went to a new high school and I didn't know anybody.

My friends, if you look back now, all this kind of stereotype high school clicks, I had friends from all the clicks. Like I didn't have one specific one. So I was never really an outsider, but I didn't feel like I was narrowly rooted in any one thing. So I thought Netflix suited me quite well in that way. Definitely.

I feel like your story is so much about taking like unconventional bets in some ways. And I wonder how you've learned to kind of double down and really trust your instincts in your life, in your career. I don't know where it came from, but this notion of risk reward has kind of been my guiding life. If the prize

is big enough, you should take pretty unreasonable risk. If it isn't, don't put things in jeopardy. But in the case of like original programming, it's probably the one thing that Reed didn't, he and I did not agree on or that he didn't see as part of the vision at the beginning. And for me, it was,

inevitability. You know, no network or no entertainment brand didn't have its own programming. Right. So at the time, I think Debris was trying to solve a different problem, which is, and he was smart. That's the problem that we needed to solve first. And then the original programming was kind of the icing on the cake. And original program was your thing. That was something that you were like taking the, or you were at the helm of, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. And for me, it did not feel like a monumental bet. I really told when we... I mean, but it was a monumental bet, right? When you look at what you've done and like that. Couldn't afford it for sure. So it was risky in that way. There's that.

But I did tell Reid afterwards because we made the deal and I told him about it and he said, why would you, you know, that's a big risk. Why would you do this? And I said, it's a risk reward. I said, if you've got, if this does not work, we will have overspent dramatically on one show. Yeah. We do it all the time. I go, if it does work, it will fundamentally change the course of the business.

And he said, that totally makes sense. And we never talked about it again. I mean, I want to get into the. original programming thing because it obviously has been so seismic and touched so many of our lives. But do you have any sort of beliefs or mental frameworks for when you're making those really big decisions that you go back to, like time and time again? I mean, I think at the end of the day, when you hear, I don't hear as many of the pitches as I used to. Very few actually now. But it's what I think is interesting is that it's the same

fundamental question about every show you're going to do. Like, is this a world that people want to spend time in, are these people that I care about what happens to them? And do I want to stick around to see how it ends? You know, and you can't feel so simple. At the end of the day, I think that's true across whatever it is. And then, you know, getting to the kind of essence of what the show is or what it's about, or who's going to be in it, all those things, of course matter because it's all about execution. But it all starts with a great idea. And if you can think about how many things, how many times was something a really bad idea, but executed so well that it worked. Pretty rare.

No. Yeah. Doesn't happen. So I was thinking in the entertainment world, you think something like Avatar might be one of those things that wasn't a great idea. It was basically the Fern Gulley was the same idea. Yeah, you could argue that. Mesmerizing. Yes.

But it turned out that way. As big as the budget for Titanic was, maybe that wasn't a great idea. Yeah, pretty depressing story. But yes, it really worked out. A Titanic movie. Exactly. True. But I think they're rare.

They're rare. So when you hear a good idea. man, you better focus on the execution of that idea because they're so rare. And if you get them both, if you get the great idea and the great execution, you've got a monster. You got a monster. So talk to me about original programming at Netflix. How did it come around? What is your part in that?

And what does that look like today? Because we all know the unbelievable success that you've had with original programming. So it was, we were buying licensing for, you know, just streaming rights for, and there was a movie. One thing we did not have was new movies. Back then, the paid TV deals would lock up movies for years. So basically, you couldn't license a movie that played in the theater for a service like Netflix for 10 years after it. So we were always constantly, anytime a movie was in the wild, which would happen every once in a while, we would take the meeting and try to do it. So we licensed the movie, Pan's Labyrinth, just happened to be the pay TV rights weren't tied up.

Lavien Rose was one. So this company who had the rights to Bruno, which is a Sacha Baron-Baron movie, came in to pitch it, you know, know, did we want to buy the rights? And then on the way out the door, they just mentioned, hey, we're making a series of the British House of Cards, but set in Washington, D.C., do you guys want to hear the pitch? And I said, what do we want to tell me more about that? Because I love the British House of Cards. Yeah, so it's so Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are going to star in it. David Fincher, it's going to direct television for the first time. So I said, so we started talking about it after they left. And I said, wow, like,

What is, and this is where a little bit of data you looked at and going in and said, you know, people seem to really, people love Kevin Spacey movies. Like, how do they perform on Netflix? How about David Fincher movies? How about movies? How about movies? About politics? So you're looking at all this swirl of things thinking, if it's well done, it's kind of a real audience. But there was no original programming at that time at Netflix. So how did you even have the remit to Greenlight something like that? Because I imagine it was so expensive. Well, I think it was a $100 million investment for sure. But it was one of these things for us at the time. my remit was let's get programming on Netflix so people watch it. And the more we can grow the streaming, the more we could prove out the model, both for consumers and for the suppliers too.

For me, we had done this deal with stars programming, so we got the stars programming the same time. It was on TV. It was a hack of the system. It wasn't any genius move. But this one was, well, this is a show that will be the hottest package in television this year. HBO wants it, AMC wants it, FX, everyone wanted it. And I said, so why would they sell it to us?

We've never done this before. And I said, we have to figure out what is, there's a thousand reasons to say no, what's the one path to yes. What'd you come up with? It was, give them a two-season order with no note, but promised them no creative interference. Oh.

So at that time, that's big. It was big. That's big. If you're David Fincher, you're like, I'll take that. At the time, it would be very rare to even go direct to series, let alone, you know, a two-season pickup. So they knew.

So an even bigger bet then? It was a big, yeah, it was very big. But I do think it was no, that was the clearing price for us. Nobody would sell good things to us that way. We might got lucky. Fair enough. Yeah. So we had to really change the algebra.

We had to figure out what is our path in when we have really nothing but promise. And obviously, we all know how that turned out, incredibly unbelievably successful. But was that the thing that then changed everything in terms of like programming at Netflix? That meant that you had the remit to go. I think what it did was unlocked. again, possibility. Right.

You say, well, we need more of that. We need those ones that work. And we had a great, look at, I also think it's really lucky that we had such a great first set of releases. Yes. Rested Development reboot. Crazy. House of Cards.

Orange is the new black. We did Lillehammer, which was this kind of funky thing that turned out to be really important to the company's future growth. Right. Which was a show that was made in Norway. I didn't see that one. Oh, it was, so basically it really was the first launch of an original show on Netflix. After we did that deal for House of Cards, people in town heard about it. And I got a call from

an agent said, Stevie Van Zand would like to talk to you. And I said, oh, my God, I love the East Tree Band. It's to be great. So I take the call from Stevie. He's so funny and so cool. And he said, I'm in Norway. I came over to produce an album. And these people brought me a script. And it's this really crazy show called Lillehammer about a mobster who's in witness relocation in Lilliehammer in Norway. And he basically mobs up this little town in Norway. And he's a lot like the character he played in the Sopranos. So I just, I go, well, can you send me a script or something? He goes, I'll send you the whole show. We already shot it. He goes, I just need to make some money so I can put some music in the show. So you got to see the whole show. So I got to see the whole show.

And it was a slam duck. We bought it on the site. So that was our first launch. And it was now one of those things that has become a bit of a superpower for us is being able to produce local language content, you know, and find a global audience for it. And we got their first taste of it. And then it's also, because we had the whole show done, we put it all up at once. So it started the kind of all at once. It started the mixed language, international production for the US, all these different things that are so important to our business. No, and so important to your business. And it seems to me like you have this wonderful ability to be both like a friend and a supporter to the creative, but also have this executive

language and the executive prowess. How have you been able to walk that line? Who taught you that? That's a really big thing. And I think it's something that a lot of people really struggle with. Usually you're like one or the other. I love the talent. I really love and I totally respect what they do.

I totally respect how difficult it is. Back to my Phoenix day is the drinking age in Arizona was 19. Oh. Which means that you could get away with it when you're about 17. I always forget that it's 21 in America. I come from a place where it's 16. So I'm like, 19. What?

So I didn't like, so my friends, you know, they all like to go into the bars and that kind of stuff. And I didn't like, I didn't dance. So I'd go to the comedy club. And in the 80s, in Phoenix, there was like a comedy boom. And all these great, incredible talent would come to Phoenix. So that gave me kind of an early touch into kind of that culture.

Got to know some of them. And it would hear them tell the stories about how they did a pilot. And they would get these notes on their pilot about like not, not whether or not the joke was funny or not, but whether I should be wearing a blue shirt or a red shirt, all this kind of arbitrary things. And I figured that early on that very creative people need protectors. They need someone to help them clear the deck of all that noise

so that they can do the best work of their life. And you think Netflix has taken that on as a like a corporate disposition, like we will be the friend of the creator? Yeah, and not to the point that it's a bad business. But I think that there's ways to make sure that you're meeting the needs of everybody all the time. So we had this kind of advantage in this creative interference model, which was I didn't have any people. So I had no one to interfere with you. So it's that. But it gave us the ability to say if you give people the right people, the tools they need to do

the best work of their life, they want to please. They want to please the audience. They want to please you. They want to do the best work of their life. So how do you decipher who's the right people? Who do you bet on? Some of its intuition. Right. A lot of it's track record. You know, people mistake track record and data. Like data is a bad thing and track record's a great thing. But track record and data are the exact same thing. So you've got somebody who, you know, it shouldn't be a big deal to take a risk about Martin Scorsese

making a great mob movie. So we make the Irishman. It didn't feel like a big swing at all. No, right. It was expensive. It's sometimes like the most obvious things. I read something the other day where it was like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and it was like their ability to hire the best CEOs for their companies over

and over and over again. And somebody asked them at one shareholder's meeting, like, how'd you do that? And they said, you know, we just look for somebody who has done the exact same job somewhere else similar and had an incredible result. And I was like, yeah, it's so obvious. But yeah, that'll do it. But that's essentially what you were doing. You were backing the best in class talent and you were getting out of their way. Get out of their way. And that's the way. And that was the thing that won them over. That's the only thing that was standing in the way. Because at the time, I couldn't deliver. I could deliver, I could deliver, I could compete with the money, but I couldn't deliver the audience yet, which I think is ultimately the most important part is you have to be able to deliver the audience. So how did you do

that? But how did you do that in the early days? And how did you know? Because again, we're talking about seismic shifts in the way people consume entertainment, the way we use technology. How have you been able to stay clear-headed and focused in a time where so much was changing? Well, I think the discipline function is you have to spend proportionally. to help people watch. Right. Now, do it wisely. You could do it all day.

You know, you make too many bad bets and you're out of the business. So the goal here is to keep doing it all, to do it in a way that we can keep doing it all day. So to do that, you have to make these very wise decisions. And sometimes you have to say, have the discipline to say no, even if you love it, even if you love the person, because there just is not a business solution to it. So I think there's always this idea that there is that art and commerce are somehow in conflict with each other. And I actually don't think they are at all. I think they enable each other.

They give each other a reason. So for me, it's like I can read a script and say, this is a beautiful piece of art. It's just not a piece of business. And I don't want to see this movie. I just don't want to fund it. Fair. You're like, that's just not for me.

You've said that great storytelling isn't built by algorithms, but by passion and risk. And so I guess for somebody, not just in this field, but in any field, how do you learn to trust your instincts in a data-driven world? Well, first, I think data-informed intuition is a winning formula. Data-informed intuition.

Yeah, so you have intuition, and you can back it up or you can challenge it with data all day long. How do you make sure that the two, like, that one doesn't impede on the other? Do you let yourself, like, feel what you think about something and then look at the data, or are you letting the data inform how you feel? As animals, we have this confirmation bias, we have to be very careful of. Very. Not looking for the data to confirm our intuition.

but just saying actually the opposite. You know, it's kind of one of our core culture of things at Netflix is farming for dissent. What does that mean? Go out and look for people to disagree with you. Oh, I love that. Yeah. Yeah. Farm for dissent.

And in this case. That's an amazing way to say it, farming for dissent. Yeah. And I think for the, when you're looking for data, don't look for data to back up your intuition. Look for data to challenge your intuition. And then you feel much better about the decision when you're done, if you really have done that honestly with yourself.

It's so hard for people to do. And I thought, I heard a great thing. I think what Jeff Bezos said it one time he said, if your intuition and the data don't match, you might be asking the wrong question. So it's not that the, yeah, don't question the intuition or the day. Question the question.

And it's so true after I read that. Yeah, that's really, that's really true. You're asking the wrong thing. Yeah. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon.

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They won't pee on your carpet. Book your deep clean now at stanleysteamer.com. Do you have, I just wonder like you as in Ted the businessman, do you have non-negotiables in the way that you think about like your business, your life, your rituals, like are there things that you think this like enables me to do what I do and be good at what I do? I don't know that in life today that you can have non-negotiables.

I mean, I think you have to figure out how to meet people where they are. And what chances are you willing to take and which ones are you not? I think it's important, but I also think that it can narrow your choices a lot. And sometimes the biggest cost in business you have is lack of choice. So for me, it's like before you have a non-negotiable, you should have exhausted every other path to get there. You better have exhausted. And that's the beautiful thing, because the most,

successful you are, the more choices you have. Yeah, I mean, that's... You've got a lot of choices now, Ted. And interestingly, I think when companies get big, people get scared. And they try to protect, you know, when you're in the best shape of your life, that's when you should be able to take, you know, to try the hard thing. So how do you keep... Typically, I think that's when people try to avoid.

No, of course it is. But in a massive company like you are, how do you keep the spirit of where you started and leading with, you know, intuition? Like if you've got all of these people, how do you... ingrain that in everyone around you. You have to celebrate wins and you have to demystify losses. Like, you can't have this like mythological fear of losing. Talk about when things wipe out.

Like, talk about them really open and candidly. Even jab people a little bit like, what were you thinking? Can you do that to yourself? You can. Yeah, for sure. And I do it myself. What was I thinking? I say that all the time.

So, but I do think it's one of those things where, again, it's back to risk reward. Like there's things in your business that if they're catastrophic, you should absolutely be very careful all the time and don't, you know, take very calculated moves only. If it's catastrophic, if the outcome's catastrophic. Yes. Most decisions are not. And I think we tend to think of almost every decision as a catastrophic, you know, outcome when most of them really aren't. So understanding the difference is really, really important. And like I said, demystify, celebrate when people took a big bet and missed. Didn't wipe out anybody. It didn't change the outcome of the business much. We learned something. Let's not, you know, let's not make the same mistake a thousand

times, but go ahead and make a thousand mistakes over your life, you know. And obviously, I feel like Netflix's biggest gambols have really paid off, but is there one risk that still really haunts you? That haunting is not a good example. I never do want to, I don't feel haunted by, I never want to forget. There was a, when we did the, the split of streaming and DVD by mail, It's called Quixter. We formed a new company. And the ultimate thing was the decision was totally sound. Like, we had to do that.

It was existential if we didn't at some point monetize streaming. So it was definitely the right thing to do. We had a miscalculation in the consumer reaction. Right. For a company that is very focused on the consumer, we missed the idea that people who were not directly impacted by a change would be upset by it. You mean like people that weren't even your customers. No, somebody, so basically if you were only taking DVDs or you're only streaming,

you actually got a price decrease in one case and nothing in the other. But if you were doing both, you got basically a gigantic price increase. Got it. And so if your next door neighbor got a big price increase and you didn't, they were still mad at you. You were pissed. Yeah. You were still pissed. Yeah, fair.

So, and that was a big, that was a miss. That's how we miscalculated, you know, the churn impact from that. But I look back at that, I think, you know, again, the haunting is don't forget about all the different aspects of consumer satisfaction. Yeah, and that's really hard to do when you're in it like you guys are in it because you were trying to make a big change, which ultimately paid off. And if we just had known the number, I think we might have ultimately done exactly the same thing. Yeah, you would have just digested it differently.

100%. 100% and prepared people for it different. Yes, yes, exactly. Do you think about Netflix as something that saved Hollywood or ruined it? Well, look, a self-serving answer. I think it's saving. Because here's what a lot of people get wrapped up in the idea of how things used to be.

Yeah. And there's something to that. There's something great about what. What inspired me to do what I'm doing now is that stuff that I watched when I was young. Yes. So are we making things like that anymore, you know, those kind of, so that's something to it for sure.

But old habits. And arguably, I mean, like, you really are. Like, I look at the stranger things that my son, who's 11 just showed me. I never watched it the first time around. I'm like in season three watching it with my 11-year-old. And it's like watching my childhood. I feel like I'm watching E.T. or something like so nostalgic and so beautiful. And I feel like that's the difference because at Netflix, the stuff is like so much quality to it.

This is what we try. I mean, I tried to, like I said, that thing that inspired me, are we doing that for people today? And the big part of that is, have you developed a model that ensures that movies get made and that movies get watched? Yeah. That's what matters. So for me, it's like the art form is above the distribution. platform or above the business model. But the art form to me, there is no business model without the art form and vice versa. So for me, it's like, yeah, if people now would like to stay home and watch movies on Friday night instead of going to the theater, let's meet the customer where they are and make great movies for them. And that to me, when you say say, say we're ruined, you know,

people who, very narrowly people say, you know, my movie theater, you know, may have closed down. It wasn't because of Netflix. It was like. Behavior changed. Yeah. Behavior just changed. It was inevitable. Yeah, and we have uncovered and discovered and honed a business model that ensures the long-lasting, you know, a long-lasting life for filmmakers and for film lovers. That's great news. It's great news. Do you think, I mean, does streaming just survive now? And if it doesn't, like, what is next? Well, I think, though, I don't know that there's an internet level disruption coming in distribution over the next decade.

I mean, the internet was a pretty seismic shift, shifting things. There'll be changes in creativity, I think, and how things get made, I think will be, which will be very interesting. You know, AI certainly being part of it, but also, you know, how AI creates the tools that we use to tell stories even better. Like all those things, there'll be a lot of that kind of disruption that'll go on over the next couple of years. But I don't see a internet level disruption in the kind of distribution business. You don't, because you don't think that AI is coming to completely, like, do something that we don't even understand just yet. I think it's creating tools for filmmakers that empower them to tell stories they never could tell before. And there's nothing in those tools that concerns you that we get rid of like so, you know, because, again, I'm watching, you know, the battle with various different, you know, entertainers with their name, image and likeness and the worries around things like that.

Is that something that is worrying to you or you just think it's all about progress? No, I think reading I used to have this argument about whether or not I thought that in some ways, the word. world was better when Walter Cronkite was the source of truth. Yeah. Because I think having a source of truth was a good thing. It was very helpful for all of us. Even if it was wrong. Yeah.

No, no, no. But, you know, there were great things about it. And then, you know, then you think of all the things that have progressed because we traded that in for the internet and for lots of sources of you. And you figure out the truth, that kind of thing. And so there's an underlying piece to any kind of progress. people, if you're riding your horse around, you probably didn't want them at the cars to scare your horse on the road.

Fair enough. As all those kind of things that happen, you have to make those tradeouts all the time. But don't let it stand in the way. Don't let the possibility of a downside take away the probability of an upside. And that's what I think is happening with the cost of productions getting so high that you look at some of these film, you know, like, is it ever a good business to make a three or four hundred million-dollar movie?

If the monetization model isn't moving faster. And these tools can do a very similar thing. Yes. for a more controllable price. Yeah, I mean, and seemingly, I think it's really interesting because we talk about, you know, Netflix's competition as being other streamers or studios, but, you know, I think about YouTube, for example, right?

YouTube is where if you're my 11-year-old and my 8-year-old, they're glued to YouTube for as long as I will allow them to be there, which is not very long. But, you know, when you think about what's happening on a platform like that where it's user-generated content, that has actually costing absolutely nothing and kind of this endless, unlimited watch time. How are you thinking about that part of the business?

Think about every innovation since you and I were born. Television, pay television, BCRs, DVD players, the internet, the smartphone, the iPad, through all of those changes. Professional storytelling has been a remarkably resilient business. Yes. Right? I mean, the actual hours of consumption of television are pretty flat. Are they?

Oh, yeah, for sure. You think they would crater, right? Yeah. Through all this. But they actually maintained. And I feel like there's the positive that comes from all that activity on YouTube, which is it's a promotional vehicle for a lot of long-form storytelling that people like to have. And then there's this other place where it kind of meets in the middle,

where creators have a lot more opportunity and access to break through because the cost of production is literally in your pocket right now. Literally. And you can end distribution as possible too, right? You never even leave it. house. So that's a very, it's unbelievable for creators to be discovered and figure out, you know, then how do they go on to tell the stories that we talk about 50 years from now? Exactly. And so I think it's a great area of opportunity. And I think the YouTube is a complimentary

in many ways, competitive in some ways, of course, because it's TV time. But most, for the most part, it's a great vehicle for discovering new talent, for promoting existing stories. And on the side, it's also created its own form of entertainment. So what do you think that Netflix has that YouTube doesn't then the other way around? Well, one is that for a creator, we can do the monetization and share in the financial risk to tell more ambitious stories. So in that way, it's all basically you bring the project and we'll share in the rewards. For us, it's like we can share in some of the financial risk and enable more, perhaps more aspirational, more ambitious storytelling. Yeah.

Well, I feel like you're doing something. many different things. We spoke a bit earlier about the exploration with video podcasts. I'm very lucky that I know all about Miss Rachel because I have two, three year old. So that's a part of my life every day. But also, you know, I had Megan Duchess of Sussex on this podcast. And she spoke a lot about the type of partnership that you've done with her, which is like outside of the show, as ever brand. So is that the type of, I'm just trying to think about the mix and the various different parts of the business? Is that more of the direction that you'll go in that we're set you apart from the other platforms?

Yeah, look, I think what we have is cultural relevance. YouTube does too, but I would say that we have cultural relevance in a way that most outlets do not, that when you go to a dinner party and someone says, oh, my God, did you see, the chances are they have Netflix and they can go home and put you play and watch it. That's a very big thing. And in fact, I think one thing we learned early with Megan, she has a remarkable influence. Remarkable. Remarkable.

So when we did the documentary on her and Harry, when we ran the trailer, announcing it. People, hundreds of people, broke down every frame of the trailer. And we note it. We're seeing this on a micro level right now. And the $20 shoes that she got from the village that was making these shoes sold out all over the world.

And the $1,500 blanket that was on the chair sold out all over the world. There's some power. That's some influence. She has incredible power and influence you could put. And I think that, so that for me, it's like, okay, well, how do we, How can we enable this to be a more holistic thing? Yes. So that's what that relationship.

But I mean, the consumer products business is a very different thing, right? For you guys to go from having the data and understanding that a trailer with those two can do those type of numbers and then have the commercial impact to actually starting a brand, a physical consumer product. And by the documentary itself was also one of the most watched documentaries we've ever read. Wow. So it was successful in every, by every measure. Now, I don't think that you can have a consumer business, a consumer products business, if you don't have a great entertainment business.

So that's got to come first. It's got to come first. It's one of funny thing. I don't think much about legacy. You don't? No, no, no, for sure not. For the company and for yourself or just for yourself? For the company, for yourself.

Yeah, but for yourself. Yeah. So company 100%. But I think about... That's so interesting for someone like you. Well, you know what? I read a lot about the history of our business. There's a guy William Paley from CBS,

who very few people, know what he is or what he did. And he changed everything about television. He took CBS from radio to television, from syndication to owner-operated, you know, channels to creating content for the channels out there, understanding that we can't sell advertising unless people are watching our shows. We had to make great shows. Created the format of color television, basically, that became pale that you probably used

outside of the U.S. But that was all started to see. I'll start by William Paley. So anyone who thinks that anyone's going to, if they don't remember who William Paley, they're not going to remember who I am. You're realistic. Fair enough. I'm realistic. Don't think about things like on those terms, but think about things like how do you enable things to go to the next level.

If you're thinking about legacy, you're probably get more nervous about risk and you definitely probably get your eye off the prize, which is, again, back to the end user. Yes. These people, they've got to be entertained. They've got to love what they're watching. They won't watch ads if they're not. they won't buy products if they're not. They won't stay a subscriber if they're not. So at the end of the day, the whole thing is how do you bring incredible entertainment

to people at scale? When we have 700 million people who watch Netflix all the time. It's just wild. Everyone's taste is so remarkably different. Everyone's taste is so different. Yeah. And so, yeah. But it's interesting to me because I heard that you kind of set your sights on this one trillion

dollar valuation, which is by 2030. Am I right in that? That's not the goal. Okay. Like a possible outcome if we do everything else really well. That's the idea is I think when we think about how do we continue to grow the business on the trajectory we've been growing on. And we're so under-penetrated around the world. It's very possible that we continue to grow on that as long as we execute.

So what are the key strategic moves, but also what are the like leadership principles that are going to get Netflix to the next? Because you're a huge, huge part of that. So how do you think about getting to the next milestone for the business? Well, the core thing is that, you know, our current size and our current membership base and our current engagement, we're about 5% of consumer spending on the things that we do. We're about 10% of TV time in our most mature markets. So we've got, as long as we can win those moments of truth, we have the movie that you're

dying to see, the TV show you can't, you have to stay up one more hour, watch one more episode before you go to bed. As long as we continue to do that at the rate that we're doing and just constantly improve on it, we've got to. got so much room to grow that. I mean, imagine when we said double, we double our, the base, or double the revenue, double the engagement, you're talking about, you're still in the kind of low double digits in terms of market share. This is a very big market. We're very good at it, but we have to keep being very good at it to keep ahead of everybody else. And kind of,

how do you kind of beat yourself? Yeah, and how do we focus on that all the time? How do we be better than Netflix from last year? You know, they read used always tell us, you know, we sucked today compared to what we're going to be tomorrow. So you keep perspective. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank.

So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night's day anywhere? Anywhere. What about fancy places like the canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton Honors, baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries? Like the Conrad in Tulum? Hilton honors baby.

What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 9,000 properties? When you want points that can take you anywhere, any time, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now. What do you think that it takes, and this is more of a personal question, to lead a company from like a DVD, mailer company, which is what Netflix was, to the kind of trillion-dollar dream of the future?

So I'll tell you, this is back to that early 1999 meeting with Reed, he said something that now in hindsight was very telling, which was that I'm going to build a company that's going to be around way after me. So what he said in that explicitly was there was going to be a succession. This company was going to be around longer than Reed. So he started thinking about succession a long time before he actually moved on. And he brought me on as a co-CEO, which is on her. heard of for a founder to bring in a co-CEO. And what he was doing back then was, I think, trying to prove to himself and to the board and to me that this was a good model.

And a company that we, he and I had this kind of unofficial, you know, way of separating the entertainment, the tech side of the business and focusing on those two things. That was never really written in a job description or anything. But that this was a great way to do this and have a successful succession. which would be required if I'm going to have a company that's going to be ran after me. Right. So, I mean, he's a genius in that way and he's incredibly generous. The fact that I exist makes no sense, really, in a way that you'd have to have a CEO with

lack of ego to have, you know, the voice and the face of the company so often be someone other than the founding CEO. He was 100% totally committed to the success of the business. And he understood human nature enough to know that it would take proving. So he set off on this plan to have a succession and to create this co-CEO model. And I don't think the co-CEO model is for everybody. No. But for our business, it works really well.

And Greg and I have this relationship similar to what Reid and I had in that our focus is on our deep expertise and our deep passion. And our deep passion. Yes. And we defer to each other in those things that are, what are the things that you know more than I do and you're more passionate about it than I am. But that solves all the jump balls, which was my biggest concern about it, CEOs down the road would be, well, what do you do when you disagree? Totally. So do you do when you disagree?

Well, that's it. You defer to each other in the areas of expertise and passion. And then you support each and you support each other. No matter what. And I think that that's been so important. And you say, how do you keep doing this? Yeah. I think it's a great example.

Like last week, I was in, in Madrid at our 10th anniversary event with all of our talent and the media and the government in Spain. And Greg was in the UK at the Wall Street Journal Conference. So somehow the CEO of Netflix was in two plays at once. It makes it impossible. Kind of amazing. It brings a whole new meaning to divide and conquer. If you go to try it.

You have to have two people who respect each other, who like each other, who complement, whose skill sets complement each other. I would say this with a complete confidence that I don't want Greg to go away so I can be the CEO and he doesn't want me to go away so he can be the CEO. I never want to read to go anywhere. So you have to have people like that who mostly are concerned with the success of the business and the welfare of the business. over their own title or position or career directory.

And what happens with Reid now? Do you still speak to him? Because obviously he's such a visionary and such an incredible guy. All the time. You still have that connectivity around the business. Yeah, it's a great, like for us, it's a great safety net. It's a great thing. Hey, we're thinking about this.

What do you think about this? I mean, we'd all take a little conversation with Reid about anything, wouldn't we? 100%. The idea that you get to do about his baby is, yeah. The real inspiration. Who else have you had in your career that? like a mentor or somebody that's been important to you as you've kind of been in this unbelievable career that you've had for the last 30 years.

The thing you said about people who've done it before and people, I mean, it's a real feat to have achieved some of the things that one of the great luxuries of my job is I've had the opportunity to meet, in some cases, really get to know all my heroes. Like there's, I don't think of anybody yet really that I haven't met yet that I really want to or that I feel like, oh, my God, I care. How lucky. And I've taken something from all of those relationships over the years. And, you know, they're by definition.

They're older than I am, which is at some point I realized to myself, wow, these my heroes are going to lose them. So when Norman Lear passed, for me, this was like a source of great inspiration. Creative inspiration, business inspiration, understood storytelling, understood the audience. And also was just, like, a spiritually sensitive. centered person, you know, and he would make you think bigger than yourself and whatever challenges you might be having right now. We'd sit down to dinner and almost every single time, he would say

the same thing. Imagine how many things had to happen for you and I to be sitting right here, right now, every single time. And so, and I knew we're going to lose Norman at some point. He was, you know, he's a hundred years old. But for me, it was one of my great mentors and heroes that I got incredible experience of spending time with. Recently, I met Dick Van Dyke. Oh, my goodness, you did? Yeah. And the reason, by the way...

I'm such a huge Dick Van Dyke fan. I can't even tell you. So when I used... But I told you, my parents would let me stay up on that watching TV. What did I watch? Well, you had the Dick Van Dyke show. Jack Benny, Burns and Allen. I love Lucy.

And so I've seen every episode of Dick Van Dyke 100. I never got the chance to meet him. And I went out to see him in Malibu. You did? Is he in Malibu? He's amazing. He's amazing. You might find me walking around trying to find him.

I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I've watched Mary Poppins just because of Dick Bander. I mean, I was just obsessed. I was obsessed with his body movements and the way he had this terrible accident. Yes, no, he doesn't. From Mary Poppins from Disneyland that they were going to, and they did a remodel or something he wanted to do. Insane. It's in his living room. That's a lot to live with.

That's a real lot to live with. And on business side, Bob Daly, who worked for Bill Paley. That's all I know so much about Bill Paley is from Bob Daly. You know, to understand here's the guy who basically, by there's a movie of the week, like that, to me, it's like that's, you know, the guy put movies on television. So how have you, what did you do to cultivate those relationships? Because again, you were operating in a totally different time, in a totally different, you know, like Netflix was doing stuff that nobody else had done before. So how did you speak to those guys and make it make sense for where you were? I think early on, I mean, I'm a fan.

At the core, I'm a fan. I think they were used to talking to a fan. And so that was a big part of it. And I think, again, I have this mixed memories of my parents because young and chaotic and all those things were all true. But also, they created these amazing opportunities that shaped who I am. Yes. When I was like 10 years old, my parents would go to Las Vegas for Labor Day weekend. And I would get dropped off at the Sands Hotel for the Jerry Lewis Telethon.

And I would go and watch the show live and then go. back and you get in line and you go back through for 24 hours, 10 years old, alone in Las Vegas, going to this thing. Now, because of that, I saw John Carson, I saw George Burns. I saw all these people that had such an enormous influence on my life and what I wanted to do and that encouraged, that built my passion for entertainment in so many ways, that because of my parents being kind of reckless, it exposed me to things that I wouldn't have otherwise ever had the opportunity to see and know.

So when I talked to, it was like I'm a bit of an old soul in that way. I could talk to them, I could talk to him about, because I have a deep knowledge of not just their work, but what was going on in the world when they were doing that work. So to me, that's the most valuable thing you can have is a mentor and people who gone ahead of you and have done it at a level that you can only dream of. That you're going to only dream of. I want to talk to you a little bit about family because you have a wonderful wife who I know very well and you've got kids. And obviously, you've built this career. How do you think about your family and what you've been able to do and put all of those things together?

What does that look like for you? It's interesting, Nicole, our coming together was so, now you look at it and go, of course these two came together, you know? It didn't make any... It seems so obvious to me. It didn't make any sense at the time, but boy, it does now. And I just remember when I first met her, I couldn't take my eyes off her end,

both because she's beautiful, but also this energy that she had. But also, I mean, to be quite honest, for a guy like you from where you were from, you kind of married like a Hollywood princess or something. I don't know how to describe it, but she's like Hollywood royalty. 100%. And the fact, I didn't even know who she was at the time, which is... You didn't know who she was? When we met, I did not know who she was.

I did not know her family. So I know the story because I've asked Nicole, you met at an Obama fundraiser. You were very late. I was very late. You got told you were late. The first words to me were you are late. That seems just like Nicole.

I watched her work play this room that she put together, coordinating people. You go there, you go there. If you want to meet the senator, he's not coming to your table, he's going to that table. And I'm like, who is this? Who is this woman? Yeah. That night after the event, we went, we had dinner. We spoke for three straight hours.

And we were married eight months later. That's crazy. That's crazy. And I'm pretty sure you must have been quite close to her family too. Very. And loved her father and her mother. and her brother out. I mean, and for those that don't know, just, I mean, just to talk about Nicole's father just for a second.

Clarence Avon is one of the most important people in the history of show business. And people think they simple, they boil it down to say, you know, the godfather of black music. It wasn't just music. It was everything. I mean, he got Muhammad Ali a TV special on ABC and negotiated, which changed the whole trajectory of his personality. Yeah. And Nicole grew up around that. I mean, she grew up right at the.

These people who I dreamed about meeting when I was a kid, They were at Nicole's house every day. Yes. And for her, it was almost like, well, like, she couldn't understand why people were so excited that Harry was at their house, but it was very Belafonte. She's like, yeah, yeah, of him. Yeah, and every kid has Muhammad Ali doing magic tricks at their birthday party, don't they?

So, but what was really great about it for me at the time, too, was meeting, getting to know Clarence and getting to know more about him and someone who understood what I was doing. Yes. My parents, unfortunately, did not really understand, you know, my business. And listen, nobody can. but somebody like that must have been incredibly... Incredibly important.

I guess important to you. 100%. I mean, this guy was like the consummate deal maker. Yes. And he would, and I would, making complex deals, like very complex deals. And we'd walk through something he did in the 60s, in the 70s or the 80s, that had incredible similarities. In fact, I think it was a big inspiration for me around why you take care of talent.

Because they need to. They need to be able to focus on creation. They can't do that if they're worried about getting crushed on a deal. And they've got to have people to have their back. So all these things, I think, is why he was so respected and so love. I didn't know his story, which at the end, it was a ridiculous. I didn't know his story. Yeah. No, it's like more, I mean, again, I watched the documentary and like, Nicole made this great documentary called The Black Godfather. I mean, it's so, it was such a great documentary. But again, I don't think I knew, I don't know, an eighth of anything that was in there.

It was really surprising. We're a product of our parents. Yes, we are. For better or worse. And, you know, for Nicole, she got the, the better of both of her parents, which is amazing. I think growing up in that house prepared for the life that we live in so many ways. No, no doubt. And I told you, you know, her mother, Jacqueline, not only was like just a role model of elegance, but also like she, when she got into something, she got in deep. Just that in a cup. And you may have, I'm sure you heard of the story, but the spinoff from Bridgeton, Queen Charlotte, you know, because mother Jacqueline was an enormous history.

buff and we thought it was very important to make sure her kids understood black history. So Queen Charlotte, obviously, black royalty. She tells me one day you should have it. Someone should make a movie about Queen Charlotte. And I go, no, we did. She's a character on Bridgeton. And she goes, no, no, the real Queen Charlotte. So she goes, disappears down the hall.

She comes back with a stack of books and two handwritten letters that Queen Charlotte herself had written that she bought it auction years ago. Are you kidding? And she goes, get educated on Queen Charlotte. It hands me the stack. And you're like, okay, I will. I went home and did what I should do. I read those books.

I read those letters. And I called Shonda Rhymes. And I said, Shonda, this character, now that you've introduced her to the world, someone's going to make this movie. Yes. You should do it. It needs to be you. She goes, let me talk.

Send me what she said. I sent it to her. She's called me the next day. Says, we're doing this. Obsessed. So that's why Shonda dedicated the first episode to Jackie. As she should. Yeah.

So beautiful. I love that. All right, so my one last question before I move you to Rapid Fire, I just want to understand in terms of your kids, what do you think, given everything you know, what are you teaching your own children about their careers, about business, about what's important? Like, what are the lessons that you've learned that you really want to pass on?

So my daughter, Sarah, as a producer, who just had her first film as a producer into the Tribeca and South by South. Are you very proud? Very proud. My son is an editor. He's very talented. He knew at 12 years old he wanted to be an editor. He and his buddies had a YouTube channel and used to cut videos.

And my daughter wasn't sure. She kind of fell into it a little bit. She moved to New York. Her first job in New York was a PA on Uncut Gems for 824. So basically with two brilliant indie directors, the Sapti brothers, making an indie film in New York in October. This is hard work. I said if you come through that,

and you still want to do this, you've found something. And she came out of it on fire. And so she's been working her way through networking. And, you know, she's someone who can solve him with any problem on a set. She's very impressive that way. And Tony, like I said, is a very gifted editor. He went to Chapman for film school. He went a very different route.

Sarah did it kind of on the job. Tony went to school and networked that way. The one thing I try to impress on both of them, even though they're taking very different approaches. is to be dependable. Probably the most important thing in any job, in any role, is that you can be dependent on. Show up when you're supposed to show up.

Be the one that people can count on to do whatever it is. And that you'll do that to get to the next place all the time. Being dependable is so important. It's probably a lost art in some ways. Because I think there's a certain entitlement to us to younger generations that get lost in that thing, like you owe it to the world to show up. You owe it to the world to show up. You owe it to yourself.

Yeah. You know, I mean, that's what people really, really forget. It's, I love that. No, what, it's so funny, that's not an answer that people give be dependable. Yeah. Pretty simple. It'll get you pretty far. It'll get you in the rooms that you probably wouldn't have gotten into before.

And I think it'll have, you'll be high on the list when people are thinking about the next one. Yeah, it's a really true one. Thank you for that. I love it. All right. onto the rapid fire, we'll go quick. So first thing you do when you wake up in the morning and the last thing at night. I'm watching something just before I go to bed.

I mean, I watch a lot of movies and television, not just Netflix, but all the competition too. So I'm sure at the end of the night, I mostly want. But the literal unsexy thing I do is take my dogs out to go to the bathroom. There you go. That'll do. And then I wake up and feed them. I'm happy to know that to you.

Because I can't see Nicole in whatever, Kaftan, she. She's like wearing, doing the dogs. Very elegantly doing the dogs. She is very elegantly doing the dogs. I am begrudging to doing the dogs. Fair. Okay. There you go.

What are you currently aspiring for in your business life? I think it's amazing to me that 26, you know, I'm into the 26 year at Netflix. I still get out of bed like it's day one. It's so exciting for me still. And the challenges of the business are big and evolving. There's not, I haven't had two years of net in the 25 that ever, that it felt the same. So, so lucky. Yeah, and I just want to keep pushing the business to keep the spirit of that alive and pushing into the next thing all the time.

So that that hardcore contrarian bet that we are, are we still doing that? And what are you aspiring for in your personal life? I don't know. I just, I turned 60 this year. Congratulations. Thank you for getting there, I guess. Yeah. And I really don't have regrets, you know, but I.

Nice. And my goal is that I maintain. that. I don't want to have regrets. I did tell the kids, I got back to advice for the kids, I told both Tony and Sarah, my only regret really from as a young man was that I didn't spend a couple of years in New York in my 20s. I mean, New York and your 20s, that's a vibe. Yeah. And they said, they didn't really understand it. Like what line? You're like, you guys go do it. And I said, yeah, because I go by. Go do that. You will tolerate how crazy. It'll be an adventure in your 20s. It may not be in your 30s and 40s

when you have other responsibilities. No, but New York, London, like a proper city like that in your 20s, nothing can beat it. And Sarah just turned 30 and she's been living in New York. Now she's been there for years. She loves it. She's a New Yorker. There you go. It wasn't for Tony.

Tony decided not to take me up on that. Listen, one out of two is not bad. I would be happy. I'd be happy with that. But I think about my path. That's the one thing I wish I'd have done. Yeah. That's not a bad to happen.

That would be all right. You can go and spend, you know, your 70s in New York. It's always out of it. It's also an adventure. It's also a rager. What is a book that changed your life? There's a book that Joe Franklin, who was a local New York television guy, wrote called The History of Comedy. And it was, I stole it from the school library in high school.

And it was, because I couldn't stop reading. I read it over and over again. And it's all about comedy and comedians and the evolution from Rodville to radio to television to film. And I'm sure I have the book still. It still has the El Hamer High School. school stamp on the inside. It probably does. You're a real comedy person, aren't you? I mean, one of my favorite things that happens in LA is like the Netflix comedy. What do you call it? Netflix is a joke. Netflix is a joke. I mean, I literally, that's my week. I just go to a show

every single night and think it's one of the best things that happens in the city. It's the most fun. Yeah, so yeah, comedy has been the root of a lot of this stuff because to me, it's always been a challenge business environment of comedians. And then the idea that, you know, think about somebody like Lauren Michaels, who I think has been the most influential person in the history of common. No doubt. And I don't think anyone will ever be more influential than him. I mean, probably not. How do you do that, that body of work and that legacy and those. The number of careers, the number of hours of television and film. And so I think about all those things that, again, back to rooted in comedy, his book right now is phenomenal, Lauren.

I'd like to read that book. It's a great book. I mean, yeah, he's so incredible. What is something that you valued when you were starting out that you know long a value. Hmm. That's a great good. I would say a really valued sleep, but more than I do now, it seems backwards. It does think backwards, but I love that. You know what it was?

Because I didn't sleep a lot. I never was. I was always like a five-hour sleeper. So every once in a while, you'd get like an eight-hour stretch of sleep. You'd like, oh, my God, that was the best. But I feel like I'm a little backwards on that. That'll work. And what is something that you value now that you didn't back then?

Time. Time. No doubt. Yeah. I think, yeah, it's finite, you know. Mm-hmm. And it just. Well, this time has been amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Love speaking to you. This is great. Thanks. If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform.

While you're there, give us a review and a five-star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend who'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emmer Greed is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Greed. Our executive producers are Corrine Gilliard Fisher, Derek Brown and me. Our executive producers from Odyssey on Maddie Sprung Kaiser, Leah Reese Dennis, Asha Saluja and Jenna Weiss Berman. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Shultz. Angela Paluso is our Booker, Original Music by Charles Black. Video production by Evan Cox, Kurt Courtney, Andrew Steele, Carlos Delgado and Arnie Agassi.

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