David Senra - Michael Ovitz, Creative Artists Agency (CAA)

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the entertainment industry. He is an entertainment executive and dealmaker widely regarded as one of the most formidable operators in Hollywood. During his time leading CAA, Ovitz represented virtually every major star, including Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, David Letterman, Barbra Streisand and many more. Starting as a mailroom trainee in the 1960s and reshaping the power dynamics of the entire industry by the 1980s, he became known for his relentless strategic thinking, his creation of the "packaging" model that bundled talent for studios, and his ability to orchestrate deals of unprecedented scale and complexity. He built a reputation in entertainment circles through his fierce intelligence, relentless work ethic and his ability to build CAA into what many called "the most powerful company in Hollywood." His major accomplishments include co-founding CAA in 1975 in an audacious break from the establishment, pioneering the packaging system that gave agents unprecedented leverage over studios, orchestrating landmark deals including the sale of Columbia Pictures to Sony, serving as President of The Walt Disney Company and building CAA into a multi-billion dollar enterprise that expanded far beyond traditional talent representation into sports, consulting and global entertainment infrastructure. Read the episode show notes at davidsenra.com. Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com⁠ Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction (00:00:09) The Genius of Marc Andreessen (00:03:03) The Art of Conversation and Adaptability (00:04:00) The Evolution of Cloud Computing (00:05:38) The Power of Co-Founder Relationships (00:09:01) The Importance of Personal Growth and Drive (00:13:39) The Rockefeller Connection (00:30:37) The Nobu and Wolfgang Puck Stories (00:37:31) The Art of Spotting Talent (00:44:58) Starting Out in a Competitive Environment (00:46:39) Early Lessons in Business and Teamwork (00:48:09) The Importance of Knowledge and Curiosity (00:51:25) The Impact of Technology on Learning (00:57:35) Building Relationships and Integrity in Business (01:01:13) The Role of History and Transparency in Success (01:07:17) The Power of Big Thinking and Disruption (01:26:25) The Influence of Art and Culture on Business (01:27:45) The Coke Commercial Revolution (01:28:38) The $3 Million Check Incident (01:31:29) Mentorship and Integrity (01:32:52) Self-Reflection and Personal Growth (01:34:56) The Power of Perseverance (01:38:31) The Drive for Success (01:43:19) Enduring Ambition and Curiosity (02:00:40) A Tribute to Michael Crichton (02:06:58) Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael, thank you very much for doing this. Always a pleasure to spend more time with you. It's been some of my favorite past few dinners have been with you. I want to actually start with something that you just said before we were recording that made me laugh out loud, that you said that Mark Andreessen scares the crap out of you. Why did you say that? Talking to him is like taking a test. It's like being in high school and taking an exam or a final in college every conversation.

He's got the most extraordinary ability to analyze. to recall information, to organize it as he's thinking and speaking. There's probably three different processes going on in his brain simultaneously while he's talking. His recalls, I've never seen anything like it, everything he reads. In the old days when I was going to meet with him over board issues, I always had a study up very carefully on what we were going to talk about. And I say this in the most loving way. He's the most horrific guy.

And he's grown and he's prospered. And he's one of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my entire life. So you think his recall comes naturally where I thought you have great recall. I've watched like all your interviews, the conversations we've had. You do have this like encyclopedic knowledge, especially about the work you were doing at CIA. But I feel like the way you would describe it is that you have to work a lot harder. I think there are certain human beings that are gifted with some raw innate processing power that is just greater than others. I think we all have processing power, but it's a question of degrees.

And then within the processing power, there's specific silos that each of us either excel at or average at or not as good as with Mark and Michael Crichton and Peter Thiel. and quite a few of the top people in creative and top people in tech have this ability to process information at a very ultra-rapid speed. And it's foundationally set in the ability to recall information that they have inventoried. And it's very hard to do, especially in the world of technology

where you're touching constantly new ideas. So everything's different. And yes, there's some through line, but each business that's being started has a different conceit. And then on top of it, these guys, I find them fascinating for another reason. They're really nice people.

Even though they have an intellectual superiority, they don't laud it over you. and they're chameleon. They kind of adjust to the level that they're talking to. Say more about that. As an agent, I had to ratchet my discussions up or down based on whether it was a creative discussion, a self-help discussion for a client or for a buyer,

because we did a lot of counseling for buyers because it was a good way to build a bridge to them and be able to have access. Ratcheting up or down based on mood, based on what you read at the moment and what your frame of reference about the person is. But you can't talk to everybody the same way. One has to make a quick, well, let me rephrase, at least for me. I can't speak for anybody else. And I know Mark does this too.

You kind of look at who you're talking. to and then decide just how deeper are you going to go and go how far? I mean, when I was on the board of Mark's first company, LoudCloud, they were dealing in an area that, frankly, I really at the beginning in 1999 didn't understand it because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what the cloud really was. It was this amorphous idea of storing data off-site, not in a machine,

but in a machine but not a machine that's with you. It's a machine that's in the ether, but there is no real machine in the ether. So you're thinking about all this, and we're building a business around it, and I watched Mark Handel and Ben Horowitz. Ben is the most practical, brilliant guy I've ever met. Ben Horowitz is not only really, really smart.

When you talk to him, you get the sense you're talking to the guy next door who's smart, but he doesn't make it. ultra-clear that he's smarter than you are. So it's very, very gracious, warm, and accommodating. Or if he wants to make a point, or if he's being a disciplinarian, he can change his level. I've watched him get angry at someone and turn into an absolute, you know, person of strength and movement and aggressive that you wouldn't know normally because he's very, very even tempered.

But all these guys sitting in meetings with Ben and Mark, for example, is fantastic because they play off each other. They've been together. They're friends, I guess, 35 years. I'm glad you brought that up because I've been thinking about

the co-founder relationship recently. In many cases, you know, I've read almost 400 biographies of history of entrepreneurs so far. I would say that, like, most co-founder relationships are actually tenuous or it seems to be like one main guy, even if they start the company with multiple people, it's like usually really one person.

And I think I've just finished reading about what may be the greatest co-founder relationship in history. It's the Michelin brothers who in the late 1800s take over a failing family factory in a remote part of France. The younger brothers in his late 20s, the older brothers in his late 30s, they build, essentially from almost scratch or even from like a negative position

because the factory is almost bankrupt. They build a family dynasty. the last 100 years. The company, 130 years later, is still prospering, still one of the best tire companies in the world. And they did it by a division of responsibilities, which kind of reminded me of what you were just saying about Mark and Ben, where the younger brother made the product

and the older brother sold the product. They just happened to be the best in the world at both of those things. And coming together, they ran the company until they both died. They had a partnership for 45 years. What is it that you see when you observed, Mark and Ben together that you thought they had a complementary skill set? Well, first of all, the obvious, when I first met them 25 years ago, they could finish each other sentences before they started that business because they had worked together before

and they're friends. I think at the underlying foundation of partnerships in any business, there's got to be a respect for their business acumen. There has to be complementary personalities. They can't both be the same. And there has to be. to be complimentary temperament, and there has to be a shared vision. And that's hard to find. And as you kind of hinted at, you saw two successful founders with the Michelin brothers. I can name you too many co-founded businesses where always one of the founders ends up getting pushed out.

And I would say that's based on the reading I've done more like the more likely outcome. I don't want to put a percentage there because I honestly don't know. But if you asked me off the top of my head, I'd say 90%. It's very hard to have two strong founders that share a singular vision like you talk about the Michelin Brothers and that have a division of responsibilities. It's very difficult. But Mark and Ben, for example, Mark knows everything that's going on. the company, but Ben operates it, and Mark's very comfortable with that. And Mark has phenomenal instincts about companies, and so does Ben. Ben also comes at looking at a business as a guy who's

operated multiple businesses and sold businesses. Very hard to find leaders who understand principles of business, how to execute them, how to handle people, how to be a leader, how to get along with your co-founder, how to have an intellectual process to support your vision and how to unfold your vision, and while you're doing that, to be open-minded. That's really difficult. At CAI, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that the executives in the company were stable in their personal lives, their professional lives, not in any order, by the way, in their growth, their profile.

You did this through one-on-ones with them? I had a system that was pretty random, frankly, but I did a, and I wrote about this, we discussed it last time. I did a, when I was in town, which I tried to be in town four days, three to four days a week, but I traveled to New York every week to Japan once a month, month and to Europe once a month. But I decided to do everything short. So if I went to New York,

I would go for one day. But I'd get in that one day breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, meetings in between. And after dinner, fly back to L.A. and pick up the time and then make it into the office the next day so I could get what I called a six-day week. And I got the idea from my college roommate who gave me as a gift, a Joe clock, which had 25 hours, and it had a one, it had zero through 25. I spent a lot of time with Michael Ovitz, and one thing that is obvious when you study his career is that Ovitz made working with the very best people a priority. People like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Michael Crichton, Mark Andreson, and the founder of Nobu. Ovitz knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs has this great quote where he said, you must find,

the extraordinary people. A small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. And so you must build a team that pursues the A players. And that is exactly what Ramp has done. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last 12 months, Ramp has hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf 24-7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations, and they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business fully programmable corporate credit cards for your

entire team, automated expense reporting, bill payments, accounting, and more all in one place. The longer use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because, as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, you can make a... lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient. Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and COs I know. I hear from people that listen to this podcast every day that have switched to Ramp and rave about the quality of the product. In fact, Matt Poulson, the founder of MarketBe, just sent me a message. He said that Ramp had helped

him cut $420,000 in monthly expenses. Make sure you go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save both time and money. That is ramp.com. You have, this is why I was trying to tell people, like, since we've become friends, obviously you're a legend, people love your book, and they're like, like, how's Ovitz? I'm like, you ever heard any of my episodes on Rockefeller? It's like, he's like the Terminator.

We're like, one of my favorite stories of Rockefeller is, obviously, like, in the very beginning of the oil industry, they were there at the ground floor. Like, people, one of the things they miss when they analyze his company is just how well funded he was. He was relentless at raising money and he went into every single battle they had with his competitors with the biggest war chest by far. And any biography on Rockefeller, it'd be written about.

And what I loved about Rockefeller, you have a little bit of this in you, where he would go to every single bank or any partner and he'd be like, I need money. I would like to borrow money. And obviously he tells him why. They say no, he goes, that's fine. gets up, not mad, upset. He said something in there is just like, it made no difference to me. I'm just one step closer to getting what I actually want.

So that person said, no, I go to the next one and do another meeting. And then I get money. Okay, good. Now I go to the next one. And he just set it up all day long until he, like basically set his schedule up where every single hour of the day was going to be dedicated to this task. And then once the task is done, then what else is on the next task? And I'll do the exact same thing. just absolutely relentless.

Like almost, they said he went about his business like a farmer plows of field. Yeah. So I'll tell you a story that I told 500 guests at a party I held for the Moment Board of Trustees at our home, at Tamar's in my home. When David, the last couple years of David's life, we hosted all the trustees in Los Angeles

for the annual meeting and we gave a dinner. And we invited a lot of people from politics. from entertainment and from the museum and gallery world. And I told this story because David had just passed away, and I told it because his son was there. I never went to an art museum, and you know I love art. You've been to the house, and you know that I'm absolutely certifiably insane and should probably be put in an institution.

But I love it. You were commenting on the chairs before. Because I just love aesthetics. And I learned that. from my directors in the 70s. They would look at things and everything they looked at showed up in a movie someday. So they registered everything,

and I learned to register. But I never went to an art museum until I was 18. Now think about that, and think about Europe being at my home with 300 pieces of art hanging, right? And I went to New York for four days because that's all I had off. I'd never been. I left L.A. I was working full-time. I was 18 years old, and I worked because I needed to because my family, unfortunately, didn't really have the means to support me, which, by the way, turned out to be helpful in my later life, oddly.

Why do you think it's helpful? Because it gave me a sense of drive, ambition, and a goal-oriented thinking that any of my friends that didn't grow up like that sort of either, it was binary, they either had it or they didn't have it. and most of the time they didn't have it. But some of them did, by the way. But I spent, when I was in New York, I had four days, and I had all these things mapped out to see. I'd done all this homework. I needed to see the village.

I wanted to go to Soho. I wanted to go to art galleries. I wanted to go to their 10 museums. I wanted to go to all of them. Of course, I over, my appetite's always, you know, bigger than my stomach. So I went to MoMA. I left six hours later. And I went back the next day,

And I went back the third day. It absolutely changed my life. And I then remember sitting in my office at CAA and my, this is probably 15, 16 years later. And I'm telling this story, and David Rockefeller sitting in the front at the front table at this dinner for 500 people. And the phone, my assistant buzzes in and says, and I had a phone assistant, one for incoming and one. for outgoing calls. So the incoming assistant says, Michael, Mr. Rockefeller for you.

And I didn't skip a beat, and I said, tell Bill Murray, I'll call him back. Because Bill used to call under different names all the time. And he could get away with it most of the time. So I'm in the middle of something crazy. And Bill would give a name

that he knew I had to pick up. And I love the guy to this day. He's one of the greatest human beings. beings on the planet, a guy who I will, I will be loyal to till the day I die for a whole series of reasons, which I'm happy to come back to. So my assistant said, it's David Rockefeller. I said, tell Bill I'll call him back. She says, no, I think it really is Mr. Rockefeller. It's his assistant, and her name's Marnie, and she wants you to, Mr. Rockefeller's trying to reach you. I said, look, it's not David Rockefeller. You know it's Bill.

Just get a number. I'll call him back. She said, okay. Why would it be so unbelievable that Rockefeller was calling you at that time in your career? Because I'm a guy in L.A. with a beginning art collection, basically, no real cultural profile. And this is David Rockefeller. I mean, he's a legend in the world of business and culture. His mother started MoMA.

I mean, if you read the book, Picasso's War, which is fascinating. I told you about it at dinner. It talks about Abby Rockefeller and the women that started MoMA. There were three women that started the museum in the 30s. And David grew up around art. I grew up around nothing. It's like I was in the San Fernando Valley and wasteland.

One of my favorite parts of your book is that exact line where you're like, I could see. The problem is that not only where I grew up And what, like, you were very aware because you could see where you wanted, you knew where you were, but you could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. You could see the Brentwood.

Well, we went over the hill every weekend to Westwood. That part of your book, absolutely love where you're having initial success, nowhere near what's going to come in the future, but enough to buy your first house in Brentwood. And you wake up, and I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this, because I've had a couple experiences like that in my life. We're like, I can't believe.

In your book, he said, I can't believe I live in Brentwood. Listen, I still have those feelings at this stage of my life. Tamara and I were talking about this the other night. It happened in New York. It was a few days around our dinner, and we were walking around looking at art. And we looked at each other, and it was a weekend.

It was a Sunday, actually. And we said, wow, we have an amazing life. We were talking about looking at art, and then we're going to be going on vacation. in Europe and I get to be with my grandkids and her daughter and my kids. And I said, we're just really, really lucky. But the Rockefeller thing was, look, I didn't think he knew me. So I thought it was a joke.

And I had a lot of times clients calling, saying they were people that they weren't because they thought it was funny. And they were pretty good at the imitations. Anyways, I called back, and sure enough, it was David Rockefeller. Got out of the phone and he said, I would like to meet you. And I said, sure, but why? And he said, what do you mean why? I said, because I'm in L.A.

I'm in the entertainment business. We are in culture, but a very different kind than you. And I'm a giant admirer of everything you've done. How old were you when this is taking place? You had already found it CIA, right? Probably about 40. Okay. 38, 40.

10 years into CIA or so. Okay. But anyways, to make a long story short, I said I'm in New York every week. I'll come meet you. He said, no, I want to come meet you. And then I was floored because I go to New York every week. And I told him that the second time.

He said, no, I see you're building a building with I.M. Pay. You've got a painting by Roy Lichtenstein. He said, these are very interesting choices for someone your age in California. And he wasn't like, he wasn't dentists. but he was kind of making it clear. We were one of the very first, not the first, but one of the very first architecturally inspired buildings

with a top American architect in Los Angeles. It wasn't a thing to do architecture of note in Los Angeles. And before I chose IMPAY, I spent a lot of time and I researched all the top architects in the world and made that decision. And to this day, I'm thrilled that I had that relationship. But David came out, we hit it off.

In my office, he asked me to go on the board. I became the youngest board member on the board. And the second time if they had someone that young. I think Ron Lauder was younger than me when he went on. And we built a relationship and I learned so much, but here's the point to your point that you just made about David Rockefeller doing things without doing them. It's kind of like that famous Bruce Lee line about punching without punching, which I've never forgotten because it's simple but apocryphal.

And David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum. And he took me out to dinner after I was a trustee, and we spent three hours talking about. politics, art, people, things that had happened in his life, travel, his 10,000 index card file, because there wasn't a computer. So every time he met someone, if he met David Senra, he put your name and contact on a three-by-five card under S, alphabetized. And he was so proud of it. It was in his office. And he said to me, nothing about giving money, not one word. And as we're leaving, I said to him,

how's the fundraising going? He said, really good, I'm getting a lot of support. I'll talk to you soon. And I made a donation that was a lot larger than I thought I would. He never asked me to make a donation. And then I found out later, he had that same meeting with every trustee. He didn't ask one for a dime. So is this just like black belt level sales? This is as good as I've ever seen. And by the way, hard to explain this to it because I'm a salesman.

Maybe the best in the world. Well, I'm a salesperson. I don't know if I'm the best, but I'm fairly good at it. I had dinner with Mark Andreessen. Our mutual friend Jared Kushner invited me to go to dinner with Mark. And I asked them about you because I was going to meet you. And as we said, best in the world. Well, Mark's prejudice because I'm crazy about Mark and I consider him family. But I think the idea of having that kind of restraint, I don't think I could have. I wouldn't even think to do that.

No, because I would have had to at the end say something to feel I'd accomplished my intention in the mission. He didn't say a word. And he didn't even come close to it. It's almost like you want to contribute great. You don't. That's okay, too. But he never said the word contribute.

He never talked about money. He talked about the architecture, but he talked about where to hang the collection. He talked about other things in the world, but three hours, not a word, not one word. He was how much older than you? A couple decades? Oh, God, David. God, we just celebrated his hunt. He died at it.

He was probably twice my age. See, and you're, let's say you're 40 at the time, he's 80. This is something- I'm guessing, I don't know why. Yeah, we don't need the exact number, but it's not like an older brother. It's like a father. No, he took me to one of the White House Correspondents' Dinner in Washington, the two of us. It's one of the greatest nights in my life.

You talk about pinching yourself. I'm in his limo with him driving to the airport, in his plane, in his car to the White House Correspondents dinner. It was just he and I walking in. He knew every single person in the room. And if he didn't, they knew him. And I'm sitting there. I'm like, it's hard to impress me, I hate to say, because I travel around and I've met a lot

of people. This knocked my socks off. He knew everyone in the room. And sitting at his table that night was. an experience to behold because everyone came up to pay their respects to him. And it was such an eye-opening experience. And he was always even and always the same polite guy to everybody. Even people that we knew he didn't care for.

He had a very, very short attention span for people with no integrity. Because his integrity was so high. It was like a learning experience for me. But I got to be pretty good friends with him. And every lunch, dinner or outing with him was a graduate course in something. This is an incredible opportunity. So, like, sometimes I feel like almost like a bit of a middle child because because of the work I do on founders, I get to meet world-class entrepreneurs. I get to go spend time with them, have dinner.

Many of them are much older. And then I also talk to, like, younger entrepreneurs. And the advice to the degree that they asked me that I'd give to younger entrepreneurs, like, try to spend. time. Like if David Rockefeller was, let's say, 80 years old at this point, he's not twice as smart and twice as this experience is like a 40-year-old. It's an uneven distribution. He's like 10x because of this idea is like how many he's seen every deal. He's met every person. He's just had so much more time to observe like what actually takes place in the world. He's read a lot more. He's had all this experience. It's like, and you can, you know, I feel this way when we've had

these three-hour dinners in New York. It's like, man, the amount of information I learned from you in three hours, it's not like a person that's half your age. We can't spend the exact same amount of time together, right? It's just you just have so much more lived experience. But it's my thesis about frame of reference. This old saying that people always say, as you get older, I wish I knew then what I do now, happens to be thousand percent accurate,

and I'll tell you why. You just said it, David. Longevity automatically promote, more meetings, human interactions, and experiences. That in itself creates more frame of reference. The more frame of reference you have, the more experienced you are to make difficult decisions because you've seen outcomes.

I was on the phone last night with one of my kids on a personal matter that she was having and I explained that I was saying that I was saying I was thinking about her situation, and the benefit that I have that she or the person she's having the problem with doesn't have is that I've seen the movie before. I've either packaged the movie, seen the movie, read the script that never got made. I've seen it fictually done, non-fictionally done, done as a documentary, done based on. on historical fact, done based on someone's biography. I've just been around too long.

Therefore, I know what silo her situation fits into. And I said to her, you cannot see what I can see. And I said, you're going to get off the phone and you're going to go, that is really a jerk. Because I'm not preaching to you, but you have to understand. I've just seen it. And I have. And I know exactly what's going on.

And I see it from both sides, by the way. But it's all about frame of reference. And I do wish that I had, when I started the agency, the knowledge bank of experiences that I have now. I wish when I started collecting art, I had the knowledge bank of frame of reference of pieces of art that I have now. But your frame of reference from people specifically is very interesting to me. Because think about how, like, one of the things I want to talk to you about, it's okay, it's very obvious. Like, you know, I have a few obsessions. One of my obsessions is people that get to the very top of the profession.

I don't even care what the profession is. It could be building CAA. It could be a basketball player. It could be a sushi chef. It doesn't matter. I'm obsessed with people that become the best in the world of what they do. And I was thinking about you, not only did you become the best in the world that you did, but you worked with, competed against, built relationships with countless other people

that were also the best in the world at what they did. And I was very curious, and I kind of study this on founders. It's just like, you've met these people, you interact with them, compete against them. I read about them. And I was very curious if you could describe the one common trait, what do you think is the most important common trait for the people that are best in the world of what they do, yourself included? Well, let me give you an example, a practical one. Okay. So two weeks ago, I'm having lunch with a friend of mine at Noble and in walks Noble.

who's my exact age, who was, when I met him, had just opened a sushi bar on La Sienna Boulevard called Matsuhisa. And I remember meeting him because I would go sometimes for business or occasionally by myself, because the one great lesson I learned very early on going to Japan is the best place in the world to eat if you're alone, is that a sushi bar? because you could actually not feel uncomfortable doing that.

And I met Nobu, when he was his own, he was the chef, the manager, the menu planner. He was just him. And two other guys and his wife, that was Nobu's start. Now, you look at what Nobu's got right now. Nobu has an empire. I don't know how many restaurants I got there all over the world. He's got hotels. he's got bottled and packaged goods.

He's got everything. I would imagine he's got a billion-dollar empire. When I met Nobu, I took note. I said this guy's got something special. I didn't quite know what it was. But several years later, I introduced Nobo to Bob De Niro. And he and Novo started the present business with a sushi restaurant.

called Nobu, not Matsuhusa, which was fascinating, that he didn't try to take his personal brand and put it with Bob. He took his first name. They opened the first Nobu in New York in Tribeca, which was no man's land at the time. But Bobby had a hunch because he was developing property in Tribeca, and he was a huge believer when everyone around him was negative and advised him against it. And he convinced Nobu'd open there. It became an instant hit.

And they have this amazing business right now. I had this hunch about Nobu. I had this hunch about Wolfgang Puck. When I met him the first time, he was in his 20s. Austrian guy, I said this guy, not only is a great chef, But like nobody had a fantastic personality. Why is it? I went to every meal of my life as an agent for my whole life.

I went out every night and every lunch. And I picked those two guys, frame of reference, because I knew in interacting with them, they had something special. Is this an intuition that you have, or is this something concrete you picked up about their personality or the way they pushed their work? No, it's like the general.

thesis for me, and I use it to this day, I use it in my tech investing and have since 1992. I used it in finding clients. I used it in building careers. I used it in making relationships. I'm interested in growth, personal growth. I'm interested in being the best at whatever I get into, to the point of it probably not being healthy. I'm interested in excellence. Okay. We got to talk about that. And I am interested in excellent. and will go to almost any end that's not immoral or illegal to achieve it for myself

and everyone that's around me. Is it excellence for the sake of excellence? Like, what is driving you? I meet people, okay, and I, within 10 minutes, my brain automatically scans whatever is coming to me, and it compares them

to people in their silo, to people outside their silo, to people with personality, traits that are similar, it compares all the positive and negatives. It's the same thing when I collect art. When young men or women that I mentor in collecting art, they ask me, what should they read? I say nothing. I said, start looking at images and bookmark whatever you like and then come back to it a couple of days later, see if you still like it. I look to this day probably at 200 images a day. I looked at 10 this morning before I came over here at 7 o'clock this morning of a painting show in London.

And the reason I do it is the more images I can put in my head, it's kind of primitive AI in a strange way. Because I'm like machine learning and my brain's the machine. I tell all my AI guys and gals who are all much younger than me, except for a couple guys at Stanford that I work with that are professors that are actually, I guess they're in their 50s and 60s. there's a thing they call ML, which is machine learning, and I call it ML moron learning. So I asked them to explain my version of ML when we're doing a complicated AI deal together. But I have kind of a personal AI that I've created

that ticks off all these boxes automatically. I told you when I met you, you're very good at interviewing. You keep a conversation going. know what to ask. What you did on Tomorrow's book is insane. You read a book, and in 50 minutes or 50, 60, it's condensed into the most salient points, and you matter only socially. It's not possible unless you have a talent.

So my perception is additive. I thought you had talent. Then you prove it over and over. I listened to your, I told you, I went back and I've listened to every one you've done. I appreciate that. You don't have to appreciate it. I got a master's degree in people I never heard of. So I should bring this up the first time we ever talked,

and it was just pure chance is we share a mutual friend in Rick Gerson. Yeah. And I'm having breakfast of Rick, and you guys have been friends for like 25 years. Right. And me and Rick are real close friends in the last few years, and we're at breakfast, and his phone's on the table. And it rings. And I'm like, oh, shit, that's Michael Ovitz.

Like, you know, because I'd read your book already. Like, I obviously knew who you were. but we had never spoken. And then he picks it up on speakerphone and Rick's been hugely supportive and he tries to like push my podcasts on everybody in the world and he's very successful doing so.

And then he goes, hey, I'm sitting here with, you might know who he is. His name's David Senator. He does this podcast called Founders. There's a, there's a, and you're on your boat in the same parts, I think. And there's like a brief pause. He goes, I listened to four of them yesterday.

And you start rattling off the one you were in Cornineas Vanderbilt and everything else. I heard you talk with our mutual friend Patrick about this where you're like, hey, I like collecting art and people. I have a frame of reference because I've met so many people. The more people you meet, the more you can, the more benchmark you have to compare people to.

So when you met Nobu, so when I hear this, it almost sounds like it happens like automatically, just a part of your brain where it's like. It's an auto response. Yeah. So you can't even say what it is about that person. Well, no, I could say Nobu was personable. He was amazing chef. He made things that I'd never had before outside of the United States.

I've had it, but not inside the. His actual work. His technical skill in cooking, Japanese cuisine was the best I'd ever had. And this is happening in like a strip mall. No, no, he was on Los Angeles Boulevard in an old restaurant, an old building. Yeah, so like, not a... No, it wasn't anything special. It was just him.

But you stole... Well, here, this out. He filled the room. He filled the room. His personality? He filled the room. When you were there, you knew it was his place. You knew he was a sensei.

You knew he was the master chef. You wanted to sit in front of him, those four coveted seats. You wanted to talk to him because he was interesting. He had it all. Wolfgang Puck saw him at his first restaurant in the United States. He was in his 20s. He was the chef at Ma Maison. which is no longer in existence,

that only Hollywood could endorse plastic patio furniture in a parking lot with a kitchen in a one-bedroom apartment at the back of it. And you could see it even then, though. Yeah. Same thing. It's like this curve. Wolfgang would walk out, go table to table, and you fell in love with this guy. So he thought it was like his charisma and energy?

Everything. This is like 1980-something, 81. And Wolfgang's walking around asking everyone at every table, and remembering their name, and being gracious, and being, and the food while you're eating this amazing food like we'd never eaten before, there was no such thing as California cuisine, clean food with a French kind of flare, but it wasn't full of butter and oil. It was great. And you couldn't get a seat there.

It was hysterical that the popularity of this place with a zero economic investment in infrastructure. right? But the food was to die for, and Wolfgang, you wanted to be his friend. So when he did Spago, it was, I just gave him a quote for his book because I recognized this immediately. I went to Spago four nights a week up on sunset. And I finally looked at Wolf. I said, we got to put you on television. And I just wrote this little story for his book. I said, I'm bringing the president of ABC for dinner. and I want you to just go crazy. I want you to pretend you're at Beaumaneer where he trained in France

and do that kind of dinner and whip out the best wines that aren't on the list. And I want to get this guy in your corner. Wolfgang served at dinner that night. We spent three hours eating. There must have been 15 courses. One was better than next. He personally brought stuff over.

He hung out at the table. He talked. He was charming. He was, you know, he was just Wolfgang. And you loved him. He wanted to hug him. But the food was great, too. And I got the president of ABC to sign on a napkin, a contract for a week's work on Good Morning America as an audition to replace Julia Childs.

And the guy signed it. And he dated it. And I took the napkin. He also had a lot to drink. And the next day... Is that a key? And the next day he called me. And he said, I can't thank you enough.

It was the most extraordinary dinner. He said, I have a slight recollection that I signed something. What did I sign? I said, oh, you signed a contract to put Wolf on our chef that you met, the little Austrian guy who is so cute. To put him on Good Morning America

and try him out. He said, I can't do that. I said, well, you made a deal and you were a man of high integrity. So he said, I didn't make a deal. What do you talk about? I said, I'm going to send one of our assistants over with the contract, and you take a look, and then you call me and tell me if you made a contract or not. So we take the napkin and pin it to someone's shirt, okay, put a sport coat on them, arrange with the president of ABC's assistant to walk him right into the office.

He walks in. The guy looks at him. He opens his coat. It was all in huge print. And he sees his signature. My guy closes his coat and runs out the door. And I get my phone rings 10 seconds later. He said, I guess I signed a deal, didn't I?

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I feel like you operate much more on intuition. Like you spend an enormous amount of time, like preparing. Like one of my favorite stories in your book, and I try to do the exact same thing in my career. It's like, okay, I'm gonna start in the mail room. Well, guess what? I'm gonna go down to the file cabinets. You see this huge room. I contain 70 years of history on Hollywood,

and I'm gonna show up two hours early, and I'm gonna read, then I'm gonna work a full day, and I'm gonna go back there at night and keep reading. I'm gonna work my way through in a very Rockefeller-esque way of just plowing a field till I get to the end, and then it uses enormous research and base of knowledge you have, and then you combine it with these experiments,

and the frame of reference that we just talked about. And then when you make decisions, it's almost like it's not even analytical. It's like some kind of intuition that you're having where it's like this guy's special. I have this guy who has power to make this guy's career better. I just need to put these two together. Let's go ahead and just write this out on a napkin. Like there is almost no time to analyze. Am I getting this wrong?

No, but David, I'm going to put the question to you. You get a job in the mailroom. You have no family connection. You get it on your own. It's a three-year training program. You're in the mailroom. You have a college degree. You are not stupid.

What's the alternative? No, I think this is why we've got along. We've been to build a friendship because, like, I've, this is exactly what I've done with founders. This is like, I did not come for money. I'm the first person in my family. Everybody's like, oh, you're the first person to graduate college. I'm the first person to graduate high school. My parents were incapable of even graduate.

graduating high school. But I had the same thing. And the reason I say, what else is the choice? There's no choice. So I either became more knowledgeable than the 20 other, there were all men. No, yeah, it was all men in that pledge class. And they did like three, two times a year, they started a group in the mail room of like 20, 25 people. I think when I started there were 20 or 25.

I don't remember. But the point is, it's 1969. I'm 21 years old. I graduated UCLA in three years while working at Fox, 60 hours a week, loving every second of it, drop out of pre-med to finish degrees in psychology and business, look for the job that I think can educate me the fastest in a business that's all about nepotism and relationship and I don't have any. How do I distinguish myself differently

from the 20 or 25 other pledges in what I call the pledge class? Because that's what we were. And it became pretty simply apparent to me very quickly. Everyone showed up exactly what time they were told to, which was 9 o'clock for a 9.30 start. Everyone showed up except me. I showed up at 6.30.

and no one was in. I had the run of the place. So I said to myself, I'm going to learn everything I can, faster than anyone else, and I'm never going to share with anyone what I'm doing. Let them all fend for themselves, which, by the way, turned out to be good for me

because it was antithetical to my thesis on building a business, which is you share everything with everybody, and I learned that by not sharing all these other people got killed by me. And if I'm running a business and those people are all working for me, I needed to do the opposite. I needed to include everybody and everything. I have tons of meetings, tons of sharing, no egos, no politics. Everybody has to pull for the larger boat.

You can't be in your own role. boat, you've got to be on the big boat, and you got to make sure it's all moving. When you're on the same team, but the other 19 people in this group, you looked at them as competitors? Absolutely. My job was to eradicate every one of them. I didn't want any of them to shine. And so the idea there was, hey, I think you said this in your book.

You're like, I don't know if I'm smarter than them, but I know for damn sure that I'm working harder. Well, there were several people, David, there. I was not smarter than. They had unbelievable educations. A couple of them had Ivy League educations. I couldn't even get into an Ivy League school. The fact is that I was in a competitive environment,

in a competitive business, William Morris, and a competitive arena, which is the entertainment business. It's dog-eat-dog, and it had been like that since it started. It never changed. I read everything at my hands-on about the golden years of the movie business, and I used it for C-E-E-Sodews. when we started in 1974, I made up a bibliography.

And here's the books you need. I have used... Who did you give the bibliography, too? Every one of us that were working together. So you guys had a shared base of knowledge. You insisted on a shared base of knowledge to your team. Yeah.

Okay. And our group, new history, and the reason that became important, and everyone thought, oh, who cares? It's because when you start talking to filmmakers in those days, and they start talking about Frank Kavanaugh, or David Lean or Howard Hawks or Willie Weiler

or Michael Curtiz, who all made some of the great black and white movies of our time. If you don't know what they did, how can you talk to a filmmaker? How do you do it? You can't. How did we sign every director in the business? We spoke their language. I've read and done episodes on, I don't know, half a dozen.

I'm obsessed with directors and filmmakers. and filmmakers. I think the analogy between a filmmaker and an entrepreneur is so clear-cut, it's very obvious. But like from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg to Quentin Tarantino to Christopher Nolan, every single one I've read a biography of, they have this encyclopedic knowledge of film history in their head. There's a great line up on this. One of my favorite maxims I learned from Charlie Munger, which is why he was so obsessed with reading and studying business history and human history as well, is he says that learning from history is a form of leverage. Well, it's what I've always said knowledge is power.

And if you have practical knowledge combined with research knowledge combined with intellectual knowledge combined with a giant education about things that you dig into, and you understand how to have a deep curiosity about everything, and I mean everything. you have an edge that cannot be beaten. I have sitting on my desk probably 20 notes about things that I have seen on the Internet, on Instagram, on perplexity, on OpenAI, on Google, that have come up in other searches. So I saw a new set of headphones that were wildly differently designed. And I looked it up, printed out the page on it, put it in my pile to research. And every night when I am on my computer, I take a deep dive on the moment of what's interesting to me. I love cars. I love mechanical watches because some of them have.

you know, a thousand parts and it's this big. I love gadgets. I love hi-fi. I just, I can't begin, I love art. Did you have the curiosity even at that age when you first started in the mailroom? You had to, because, like, you wouldn't have read through all that. But you know what I didn't have?

What? I didn't have a computer. And that changed my life. Yeah. That changed my life. I've talked to Ben Horowitz about this a thousand times. The computer changed my life because I live on it, and it's not because I need to, it's because I want to.

If you put me in a room with a computer 24 hours with no sleep, I would do it. Matter of fact, tomorrow has to pull me off the computer and gets angry at me because I learn so much every day. I just, when my friends want to buy something, they call me, because I've already looked at it. So if they want to buy a car, and I'm not being facetious, and I enjoy doing it, And it's rare they asked me about a car I don't know about. I mean, when I was at CIA before a computer, I had a reading list for all the agents and all the mailroom people.

I subscribed personally to 210 magazines. I didn't read everyone. Don't think I did for a second. But I flipped the pages. So I had car and driver, road and track, automobile, and I'm missing one. motor trend, all four. Why? I want to see what everyone wrote. I didn't read detailed articles. I'd always read the headline, look at the pictures, read the first paragraph. If I loved an article and

wanted to go further, tore it out, put it in a pile for Sunday, every day. And I had ladies' home journal, Vogue, McCalls, Mademoiselle. Why did I read women's magazines? Because the stylists and those magazines are six months ahead of the curve. They have to see out. I live with a fashion person, you know. Yeah, Tamara. She knows every season before something comes out. Oh, Michael, you know, something's back.

Wow, come on. Three months later, we're in a place at a dinner and somebody's wearing baggy jeans when everyone else was wearing tight jeans. And she calls it. And those stylists gave me a foundation to talk to our actresses and to talk to their stylist.

Not that I needed to go deep, I didn't. When I met Paul Newman cold, I knew there was only one thing he was interested in. He loved racing cars, made a movie about it. That was his hobby. I had been reading about cars my whole life. We talked for three hours

in Westport, Connecticut. about cars. We never talked about his career the first time I met him. I think there's a line here that I always think about, the most interesting people or the most interested. It doesn't matter to me. It's like, I don't really even care what is the source of your obsession. I just like that you're obsessed with something and you go deep on there. I do have a, what I would say, kind of a selfish question for you. So I was listening to Michael Dell on a podcast, and he's got great energy. And the interviewer was asking, It was like, well, when you were starting Dell, like, how many hours did you work?

And he goes, all of them. And then I read Jensen Wong's biography, and he's like, listen, there's not a day that goes by that I don't work. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me. In your book, you had this line that when you were building your company that every waking hour was a working hour, which is a great line. So I see this reappear over and over again. Like, you know, we're absolutely obsessed with what we're doing. so it's very hard to pull us away from what we love to do.

But there is something that I want to ask you selfishly. You also say that if you could have worked 10% less, it wouldn't have made a difference in your professional success, but you would have been a lot happier. So how should I be thinking about the contrast between these two statements? Well, it's simple. I am a curious person, as you know, like you are.

You're always looking to learn. That's why listening to founders for me before I met you was a must. I discovered it by accident. And then Rick just went in like a bulldozer, you know, to make sure I met you. He must have sent, you know, he sent us 20 texts to get us together. And then he wouldn't give me your contact because he wanted to be the point of contact. Do you remember that? Yeah.

He wouldn't put us together. He wanted to be the one to do it. So that 10%, I would have loved to have been able to do homework. To me, that's working too, though. It's like professional research. You know, like, think about when you're William Morris, the two and a half hours you get to at 6.30 in the morning, you're doing all your reading. You're working a full day. And then you're doing it again. To me, those two, the book ends to your day is just a form of professional research,

which also could be considered working. To me, the dichotomy and difference is that I'm not working to a financial goal. I'm working for self-enrichment, which itself becomes a financial product. Because if I make myself wiser, better, more informed, a candidate that can give other humans that have a problem advice. Look, we all have problems. I learned this when I was 18. When I was working at Fox, everybody had a problem. It became very clear to me.

It's why I became an agent. Because I didn't need a skill set other than intelligence, persuasion, intensity. and curiosity, but it didn't have to know how to make anything because I'm not capable of it. I'm talentless. I can't write, I can't act, I can't sculpt, I can't paint, I can't direct. I frankly invest off people, not off all these insane rules that a lot of my friends that are venture capitalists put up these kind of guard rails that they won't go outside of. I've never seen a guardrail.

I don't try to jump. And I think that's the worst thing you can do because creative people have no guardrails. But for me, I realized everybody wants to have enough counsel. I will tell you, for me, someone asked me in another podcast, who was my Michael Ovitz, who was my advisor? I said, I didn't have one, and I wish I did, because I've saved a lot of people,

a lot of aggravation that I went through. And I went through it because I didn't have anyone like me to bounce things off of that had seen the movie before. You didn't have it at the time you were building CA, but did you have it after and do you have it now? I do have certain people now, but it's not any one person like I am. I am an advisor to a lot of people that would shock people.

And I do it because one, I'm friends with them. Two, I learn from them. Three, I enjoy it. Four, I'm like a protective mother of my friends. I have a very binary point of view about relationships. I'm not interested in any relationships in the middle. I'm interested in...

What's the binary? It's from a movie I saw when I was a kid that was made in the 40s with Earl Flynn, where he drew a sword in the sand. and said to his troops, you're on one side of this line or the other make up your mind. So that's me, friend or foe. You know, I'm like the world's best friend for people, and I'm probably not a great enemy. I would not want you as an enemy. No, because I'm very dogmatic in my support of people.

Methodical. I think if I made an enemy of you, you'd wake up every day. By the way, I don't have that kind of time. And frankly, at this stage, I'm not. my life, I don't have that energy for that. But you did for a few decades. Oh, I did for a long time. I was a guy who could tell you people that 30 years earlier did something I didn't think was right.

I'm a big believer in people need to have integrity and they need to keep their word. And the reason is when we were starting CA and we had no money, nothing, we didn't even have a lawyer. So we were making tens of hundreds of deals with no contracts. So people had to keep their word, David. And it was very tough when you had no leverage and someone didn't keep their word. And unfortunately, in the entertainment business, there's kind of a gradation of lying. The most lies when we started were in the movie business because it takes three years to make a movie. So you had a long time to tell different stories.

The second area was music. People really didn't tell the truth in music. They still, to this day, don't. It's like... It's a dirty business. It's a dirty business. Brilliant business and tough to do. I'm friends with a guy.

I have so much respect for, Lucian Grange. This guy has more integrity than anybody else ever met. He's got Rockefeller integrity. He just calls it as he sees it. He's transparent. He's open. He knows how to build a business. He understands talent.

He understands how to work. read a balance sheet. He's one of the old guard guys. Diller was like that. Diller understood people. Diller could read a balance sheet. And Diller, like a few of us, could read a script and play the movie in his head. Not a lot of people could do that if they did. There'd be a lot more successful companies and successful people. You could count on two hands the number of people in my day that could do that. And when you're in the television business, there's no lying. because you make these shows every week. So you have no time to fabricate a story and set up a ruse.

And what we started at CA, which was so simple, everyone says, oh, it's so revolutionary. No line. If you don't have an answer, if David Senra calls you, and he asks you a question, and you do not have an answer, here's your answer. I don't know I'm going to call you back. That was unheard of in 1974,

because everyone felt they had to make up an answer to show they were in the no. My point of view was, why do that? Then you've got to remember something that's a story that you made up. And it's so easy to trap people that lie because they never get the story right twice. And we took notes on everything ad nauseum.

Everybody took notes on everything. Every staff meeting we had a scribe taking notes for follow-up. Follow-up was the key to everything. You didn't even have to be smart. you had to have good follow-up. If you followed up, it kind of gave an extra point on the smart side of the scale. So for me, it's all about truth.

It's all about transparency. I was on the phone this morning. I got on the phone 6.30 this morning working on a deal I'm putting together. The guy that gave us the idea who is in another company and is not the... the head guy at the company, he's number three. There's a founder, a CEO, and this guy who's a CEO. The CEO is younger, half the age of the founder and really bright, came up with an idea, told my young partner, who you know, who's 32,

which I partnered with intentionally because I wanted a young partner, period, and called him, gave an idea, my partner immediately put him with me. I spent an hour with him five days ago. I then went and spent an hour with the guy he works for. I then had multiple calls with both of them, separately, and then I called the guy who started it this morning at 6.30 in the morning.

He's on the East Coast. to give him a 100% update of every conversation so he didn't feel left out. Did I need to do that? Most people would say no. I would say yes. He's now up to speed. He's supportive.

And they're setting up a meeting for me with their founder. Because they're comfortable. They're not getting cut out. So this is a relentless follow-up. Relentless. And I made the extra call. And my partner, my young partner,

saw all this unfold and fell right in step with it and handled it brilliantly. That makes me feel fantastic, fantastic, because he's going to be here long after me, and he carries on the torch. You know, look, the guys that I left CA to, some of them I get along with great, some of them don't like me, and I understand that because they'd like me to have died, because my shadow hung over them. And we always want to kill the father, and I get it. At the end of the day, 50 years later,

I think I did something right because the place is still functioning and it's still number one. So that's the biggest market share. And it's still the most influential company. This is why I try to tell other founders, too. It's just like, you guys are obsessed with these startups. Like, the goal should be to build an enduring company that lasts.

It's got a bit. Five decades. But you have to be selfless to do that, David. It's like what you're doing. You need volume, I told you this. You need IP. You need to expose people that are under-exposed, expose people that are overexposed and rein them in

so that for the audience, so they get their essence. Listen, when I listen to your, this is going to sound really stupid to you, but I never claim to be the smartest guy in the room or the dumbest I'm sort of in the middle. When I listen to the Vanderbilt podcast you did, now he's dead. So you did a podcast based on a book you read. I read the same book, but I hadn't read it for 20 years.

And maybe less, I don't remember. But you took all the salient points out of it. You hit a point which to use a minor point, and to me said a lot about the time and the person. you told a story of how he was in a buggy thinking about sailing ships versus steamships and that he knew he had to make a big move and it was really dangerous because they didn't know if the steamship technology really worked

but he had to sell all his sailing ships to raise the money and he was kind of absent-minded and stopped he was on his buggy I don't remember the exact story But he stopped and somebody kind of attacked him or something. And he got out of the buggy and he beat the guy up. And that story resonated with me because I respected the guy's brain for what he'd built.

I respected the guy's brain based on your podcast for his foresight. And he did it not once, which for me is the key. He wrote multiple successful. technological ways. Railroads, when the boats became. It's very hard for a company and a person to disrupt themselves, to say, hey, I got really wealthy, you know, and essentially, you know, faring people. And now I got to get rid of it.

Exactly. And especially when your point about the technology was interesting, because, yeah, we might have a debate. Should we adopt this new AI technology, this new software? That technology was killing people. People, the steamship technology, it kept blowing up. So you'd have these explosions. They knew that's where it was going to go

because you needed powered, you know, sailing. Yeah, but you didn't know if it worked. That's the crazy thing. It's like, no, I'm going to disrupt myself, get rid of the business that made me wealthy at a time. He was one of the first disruptors, and he did it with railroads. He realized he couldn't deliver inland with a boat.

Yes. Which sounds pretty simple. He realized his business of transportation, not sailing. And when you think about what is your true business, it's not sailing. It's like, I just want to move people in goods from point A to point B and how do I do that? But here's the point of your story.

To me, only me. This shows you me as opposed to anyone else, and I don't know who else would think this. Maybe they would. Maybe they wouldn't. I don't really care. Here's a guy who had foresight, commitment, and courage.

He wasn't afraid. Fear is the killer, an enemy of business. Fear is the thing that kills business. And we had a period in this country where people were scared to death to do things. Every single time I had an idea, I told this story to somebody yesterday at a meeting I was at. Every idea I ever had or developed that someone else gave me, somebody told me it wouldn't work and gave me all the articulate reasons. And it was always more than one person.

You can't start an agency at 26. There are 180 of them, and you'll never make it. It's too competitive. You need too much money to do it. You won't get the big clients. You'll never sign movies. I'm glad you just said that that's one of my favorite parts of your book. Because, again, when I'm reading a book, I actually see some of the scenes.

Like, you know, a book is essentially a movie for the mind, right? You have to come up with the visuals yourself. And there's this line in your book where they're like, you're like, hey, I'm planning on signing a movie. the big movie stars. You're like, they're locked up, you'll never get them. And you said, I'll get all of them. And I don't know if you did this, but literally what I just did, lean forward. No, I did.

Like, just lean forward. I remember the guy I said it to. All of them. I remember the guy I said it to. He was a successful agent. He handled about 500 top writers in television, but never steered out of TV. If I had his business, and I told him this in that meeting, which is what stimulated his comment, I would have signed every movie writer.

This is why I don't think your assessment, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, obviously, you know it wouldn't disrespect you intentionally. It's like, I do think you're creative. You're saying, oh, I don't have any talent. I'm not creative. And like this idea where you just said something about like, hey, I don't even see guardrails. And if you put a guardrail in front of me, I'm going to hop over that. If you look at where you took, there's a note from a friend of ours, Ovitz didn't look at the existing H&D business as the boundary of his opportunity. He decided on his own what he wanted to do, and then he did it.

And he talks about the flywheel that you built up, like this huge density of talent. And you said, hey, I can actually control the supply. And I can actually just create the entire package instead of just handling this like one little silo. That's creativity. Not really. But I understand. It's creative business. But it's not, we called a creative artist for a reason.

Marty Scorsese in his brain can cut a movie while he's shooting one camera at a time. I asked, why do we have? have, how many cameras have you got? I learned that from Marty. I learned so much about movies for Marty that when I gave him an award in New York 25 years ago, I learned so much from that guy. I said in front of 1,500 people

that when I met Marty in 79 and he was in a bit of trouble, not creatively, but financially, and he wasn't getting the movies made he wanted to make. He became like a student of business. Ten years later, he was the teacher and I was the student, and I learned so much from him. But he has the ability to look at this setup here

and cut it in his head and nowhere. He used to take his scripts, and on the left-hand page that's blank, he'd stick-draw the scene and put little dots where the camera was going. And if you look at his camera work in it, the way his scenes are put together, and the way he and Thelma, who cuts his movies,

the amount of precision and handwork, it's genius. I can't do that. But what I can do is smell things that I think work. There was a period in the 80s where it became very clear in the mid-80s that the studios were in financial trouble. And it started for me when Universal stock traded to a point where the book value of the market cap of the company was the value of the real estate in Burbank.

Yeah. And a guy named Steinberg, Saul Steinberg, started buying up shares and threatening to overtake the company. It became very clear to me. A number of opportunities were available to me and CIA. That's an act of creativity. When you realized that the Japanese

was just a new form of bank for the studios. Well, but I'd been going to meet them because they were dominating industry in the 80s, if you recall. They were making all the gadgets. And I was fascinated by Akio Morita, and I read his biography. One of my favorite books. It's unbelievable.

The idea that that guy, that they could start Sony, right, right after World War II, Americans occupied Tokyo. They start Sony in a bombed-out department stores. Because, you know, there's just, I think they lost 66% of the population in Tokyo had left, right? Most of the structures were either destroyed it, or they were severe. really like damage. The very first office of Sony, which is going to come, you know, become this massive conglomerate, they had to have umbrellas at their desk when they founded Sony.

And these, they're like young kids. I think Okieo was like 25 at the time and his co-founder was a little older, maybe he was like 32. And they'd have umbrellas on the desk because when it rained at work, their papers would get wet. In 1951, starting in 50, when the war wounds were still fresh, if you lost someone in the Batan death march or... in World War II to a Japanese soldier or a German soldier. You didn't forget it by 1950.

Akio Marita moved his entire family to New York City. Yeah. You want to talk about courage. When I talk about Vanderbilt getting out of the buggy and defending himself, he didn't have any security. He did it on his own. You want to talk about courage. Let's talk about Akio, because this is something I wanted to talk about when we were at dinner, and I forgot because I'd just finished rereading his book.

and one of the most remarkable things in the book is, you know, remember, Akio came from, he was, his family had a sake, a family sake business. So it was 300 years old. His life had essentially a path set out for him. I think he was going to be the 16th firstborn male heir to take over the business. And he's like, I'm not interested in this. I'm obsessed with electronics. He was into physics. He was in engineering. He loved technology. And him and his co-founder, go and meet his dad. And they're like, hey, and he's like, I really think if it would be okay with you, your son comes and helps me build this company, it's going to turn into Sony. And what was remarkable about this is his dad's like, well, I had a plan for my son's life, but go, and he

tells the son, but go do what you're going to do because if I know you, you're going to do what you want to do anyways. Very wise man. Spoke how, think about how he knew who his son was. My dad was like that and had no high school education. He had a way, with words that was extraordinary. He had great common sense. And Morita had a father who let him go with no guilt, but he had something else that I was very impressed by. When I was advising him, he told me a story at dinner one night

that just I'll never forget to this day. The man who became his number two was named Noria, Oga. And Noria Oga, I said to Mr. Morita at dinner, can you please tell me this story of how you found him? And he said, Michael, I didn't find him. He found me. I said, what happened? He said, Sony released their first reel-to-reel tape recorder. You know this story? Yes. It's hire a paid critic. Oga was in college. He was a senior. He was getting ready to look for a job. He went, and auditioned at a store the reel-to-reel.

We couldn't afford it. He wrote a 10-page, handwritten single-space letter to Morita critiquing the reel-to-reel, ripping it to smithereans. Morita made all the changes and offered Oga a job and moved him through the company like a hot knife through butter. And he eventually becomes president of Sony. I mean, Akio said something very fascinating. He's like, listen, just like a ballet dancer needs a mirror, right?

We needed an oral mirror where this guy had a refined sense of music and hearing that I lacked. And so instead of being, oh, upset, like, you're trashing the product that I made. He took the 10-page document. He's like, oh, these are actually good ideas. We need to work with this guy. But think about what you just said. Instead of rejecting it or getting upset or saying, what does he know? He's a senior in college.

he took the whole thing and used it. It's like, I was very lucky, by the way. You want to talk about luck. I lived in a building in New York that I set up because I'd come in at all hours of the night because I never wanted to be out of L.A. More than one day and one night or two nights, I'm in. And living above me was Marty Scorsese.

And above him was Norioca. Oh, wow. So I would go visit them at night. Because I'd finish working in New York at usually about nine, because that's six in L.A. Sometimes 9.30, and I'd always have dinner at around 10. And unless I had a client dinner, which was always at 8. And then I'd go see Marty. And he every night watches a movie, every single night.

And sometimes if I didn't get dinner, I'd bring takeout food upstairs and listen to him and ask him questions. and it was like taking a master's degree in film. And it's where I learned he knew every old director. I mean, every director he respected. I learned about a guy like Michael Powell who did The Red Shoes. And no one knows about that movie to this day. And it was the most influential director on Marty imaginable. And I learned to be able to talk to Stanley Kubrick.

He never had an agent except me. And I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me, and I did a lot of reading, and I knew about those old directors, and I had all of our people trained in the history of film and the history of television. I bought every book that was published. For example, they had these big coffee table books on all the studios, bought dozens of them so our agents could just look through the pictures. I bought a book, I'll never forget, the history of the Emmys, and it listed,

This is pre-computer, all the Emmy Awards from the first Emmy broadcast, History of the Academy Awards. I made our people watch every film in the History of the Academy Awards that won Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Movie. Now, they didn't have to watch every bit of it because some of them were really slow. But they got familiar with who were these actors. Who's Gary Cooper? Who's Robert Mitchum?

Who's Lana Turner? Who are these people? and what did they contribute? And by doing that, our people were so fluent in their business. They could talk television, they could talk movies, they could talk music, they knew history because past is prologue. If you know history, you pretty much can predict the future. I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high quality

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they all have this encyclopedic knowledge of their industry in their head that they can draw in at any time. Let me give you an example tied to Marita because like it kills me when I talk to founders, young founders now, they don't even know who this guy was. And I was like, you should study, you should read about it.

I'm like, oh, why? Well, Steve Jobs built Apple, right? He was obsessed Marita. Jeff Bezos built Amazon. They literally will talk. If you read their biographies, you listen to their interviews, they will talk about the things they spent,

why would they fly to Japan? and want to go meet them and spend time with them and read their books and study them. It's like this guy obviously had genius ideas. And one of the ideas that Bezos says that he used at the very beginning of Amazon that he learned from Marita was the importance of having a goal and a mission bigger than yourself. And so Marita's point was it's not, hey, we're going to build the best technology and we're going to sell it. We're going to get rich. His point was at the time, Japanese products were thought of to be inferior, shitty, copycat products. By the way, they were.

They were. Exactly, and he wasn't... And he faced it. And so his point was, he goes, we're not going to be... This is the genius thing that he did. We're not going to make Sony known for high-quality products. We're going to make Japan known for high-quality products.

Big thinker. Big thinker. I remember sitting with him, and I told him that in 1961, my father gave me a gift of a transistor radio, and it had to be, David, eight inches high, three inches thick, and it was a portable. And it was made... in Japan.

The Americans invented the transistor and licensed it to Japan to Sony for $25,000. The Americans invented the reel-to-reel tape recorder at Ampex. As you know, we've discussed this. It was invented by a bunch of engineers to be able to record pornography. They were using 8 millimeter kinescope to do that, and it was inconvenient. You know, oddly, porn drives a lot of technology in the old days. it's all about thinking big. It's about doing things that are unexpected.

It's about when you say to someone, I think I want to save Universal and sell it to money that is not in the country so there's nothing they can do to take it. You can't move the studio. You can't move the studio. I got criticized. Cover of Newsweek

when I sold Columbia Pictures to tell Mr. Marita, which was part of the... strategy because I had sold him with Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman because he was on the board. And Steve had just started Blackstone was brilliant. And we sold Columbia records to Sony First, which paved the way for Columbia Studios. It was CBS Records, actually, not Columbia. And for me, it served multiple purposes. one, it kept these legacy businesses right where they needed to be.

Two, Japan was cheap financing because they had cheap money and tons of it. And three, having a 75% market share of the talent for me wasn't enough, which people thought I was crazy because no one had ever gotten over 25. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world. That's nuts. And to me, I missed because I wanted 50, because it gave me even more leverage for our clients. But I wanted the leverage with the buyer, too.

So if I sold the studio to a Japanese company that no one had a relationship but me and my staff, then CA moved another notch up in the ecosystem. So by the time we got done, we had sold Colombia, universal. got financing for Warners where they were in trouble when Steve Ross was alive and sold MGM and saved it when the accountants wanted to plow it under. And every time I went to do that, I was criticized. When I said I wanted to do advertising because we had the skill set to understand, we understood culture.

That was our job. Why did I look at these magazines? I want to understand culture. Why did I read? Why did I collect art? when I started collecting art, people thought I was crazy, except the directors. When the directors came for dinner, they were mesmerized by the art. And why?

Because you take, as I said that, David Lynch, who I did a show for, Tim Burton, we did an art show, or Marty Scorsese, we did an art show in New York. Take some of the frames out of their movies and make them, reproduce them, mount them, frame them in an art frame and hang them on a museum wall, you have a piece of art. It's just different sources. It's moving art. Yes, and it's the same thing.

Common denominator. People don't see past their nose. So what we try to do is train people to look further out. How do you get to the next step? Why did we do advertising? One, because I thought we could do it. Two, we had a better idea, which we did.

three, all our clients had downtime. So everyone said, oh, movie directors don't do advertising. Well, that's complete, utter nonsense. They want to make money when they're not doing anything, and they get to work five days and make a million dollars. So they all did it, and all the other agents that criticize us looked just pitifully stupid because they not only did it, they enjoyed it. Coke was doing six commercials a year.

for the same budget, we did 35 for the same budget. And we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song. And we changed their saying for the time, which was always Coke, is what we came up with. Quincy did a theme song in six beats. He did it in urban, he did it in rural. I mean, in city, he did it in country and western. He did it in Classical, and we used it all over the world. There's something tactical about the Coke deal that I was thinking of when I was reading your book.

You knocked it out of the park with them. They even told you how happy they were, and yet they sent you a check. And I can't remember what the check. I think they sent you like a $3 million. No, no, they sent me a check for a commercial. We did a black and white commercial, a guy who just passed away named Len Fink, who I stole from Jay Shiat, who was a genius advertising guy in L.A. shy at day. They were amazing. And what did I do? I reviewed who was amazing. I found the guy

and I went and got him. And everyone was shocked that I got him. And I got him before we got the deal so that I got him and a woman named Shelley Hockren who did the most brilliant ad campaign ever at Paramount for Warren Beatty's movie Reds. It was just genius. But they send you a check. They send me a check. We did a black and white commercial. They sent me a check. You're right. It was for three $3 million. Something like that. No, it was $3 million. They sent the check for $3 million for the cost of the commercial.

Okay. I sent it back intentionally telling them the commercial cost $30,000 and that they misread the invoice because they thought I made a mistake on the invoice, not me, our accounting guys, because we built for $30,000. They said we've- Yeah, that was one of your deal. We never had- You're not going to charge more than- We never, they said we never had a commercial for less than $3 million, so we were thrilled

and we thought you made a mistake and we trust you, so we sent you the money. Send it back, sent the checkback void. Because I said we did it on an Apple 2, Len Fink, did the commercial on an Apple 2E computer. The first computer, Steve Jobs, came out with, and we did it in black and white, and they didn't want to take the check back.

And that gave me the opening I wanted. Okay, explain that to me. I said to them, we don't want you to overpay anyone except us. You're not going to overpay for commercials, but you've got to pay us. And by that time, we had delivered the polar bears, which they're still using, 40 years later. Think about that. We delivered 350 commercials over our tenure with them.

No one's ever done that. Madison Avenue got paranoid. But what was the difference between what they wanted to pay you and what you eventually were valuing your own work at. It was huge. So how do you get them from? Well, no, what they were paying for was a commercial. Yeah, but I remember in the book,

like, you essentially got them to pay. Whatever the number was they were trying to settle up on, what they actually settled up on was considerably larger. Because I basically said there's not much to talk about. It's all visually available. You ran the 35 commercials, and I suggest that they do them in the theater in their building on Fifth Avenue,

fifth and 55th where Allen and company is. And I said, run, and it's Herb Allen, who got me into this. Which is also your mentor. Herb Allen the second, right? The best, the best man on the planet. You want to talk about integrity? I sat in his office

where Sumner Redstone sent him a check for a million dollars rather than complete hiring him as the banker when he bought Paramount, because Herb was the banker of record and somehow got pushed out of it. And as Herb's talking to me, sitting where you're sitting, he took it scissors out of his desk,

and while he's talking about, he starts cutting up the check. And he cut it in the finest pieces he could, and then he took it on the desk, and he put it in the envelope that Sumner sent it in, and sent it back to him by Messenger. This guy had the highest integrity

I've ever seen in my life. Never lied, never wanted publicity, didn't want to be in the limelight, did every deal with me, and I learned everything. Everyone said, my son said, how'd you learn how to be an investment beggar? I said, I did it,

and Herb Allen made sure I didn't make any mistakes. But, you know, we talked about mentors before. Tomorrow said to me the most interesting thing. She said, you give so many of people a good advice. She said, you only give bad advice to one person. Yourself? Yes. Interesting.

And it's true. I've made some of the worst decisions imaginable because I've had no one like me to talk to. When's the last time you made a bad decision? Well, I make bad decisions on a regular basis. I mean, they're not. A consequential one, though. Well, consequential is a different story. I mean, I made some bad decisions in parts of my career where I could have done things differently.

It's a whole other podcast. But, you know, it's interesting. Patrick Collinson, who I have amazing respect for. I got a call from him when my book, six months after my book came out, three months, I don't remember. I lived in San Francisco. He said, what are you doing for lunch this week? And we made a lunch date. I went to the office.

I sat down with my tray and his commissary. My book's sitting right there with like 90 or 100 post, yellow post it. And I said, you know this story. No, no, I do the same thing with my books. You see them. Patrick sits down and he said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm starving. He goes, no, no, no, no.

See your book? I said, yeah, he says, I have a lot of questions. I said, oh, sure, anything. He said, no, I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake. I want you to tell me why you made the mistake, what the options were, and what drove you to the decision? And I looked at him, and I said, and I'm saying to myself, wow, this kid's special.

Then I said to myself, I said to Patrick, I said, and what about the things I did right? He said, who cares? He said, that's expected. So he went through for two and a half hours every mistake I made in the book, not in the book that I made in my career. And I said I walked out of there with such respect for this guy that he took that time to do that in a business that has nothing to do with his but everything to do with it because, as you and I said at dinner,

every single business has the same parameters. When we talked earlier, when we started this discussion, I talked about how I was aware of what people that worked for me or with me, because I called everyone a partner no matter what their interest in the business was. I called mailroom people partners. I would go around and do the rounds, the rounds I learned from being involved with the UCLA Medical Center. I was a doctor, and at 10.30 and 4.30, I went around the building and took me 20 minutes, and I looked in people's offices, and if I saw a weird face or a weird face, or a woman, you know,

weird voice inflection when they said hello or anything that tipped me off. I asked them to come see me. I had an open door from 7 to 745 every night before I went to dinner. I asked them to come see me and every single time there was a problem and 90% of the problems were personal. The 10% business problems were easy to fix. The personal problems took a lot of time. If you want to put that kind of time and you get loyalty, we didn't lose an agent and the whole time I was at CA, not one. Yeah, that's, that's down. Well, people, we paid people fairly. We paid them ahead of their market price.

Everyone participated. Everyone was protecting each other. We didn't talk badly about people. We protected each other. If studios try to roll over one of our people, we'd all get behind that person and make the studio miserable. And we set our, we elevated ourselves to a position, treat us nicely, and our clients will, in turn,

do the things you need them to do. You'll pay them for it, by the way, and you'll probably pay them more than you're going to pay through other agencies. Listen, when Mike Nichols, when I signed Mike Nichols from, he was one of the last people we took from ICM, and his agent, he'd been with him for 25 years, Mike Nichols' price, because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg, Marty, Scorsese, everybody. His price went up $2 million because he fit into

a higher strata price with us than with anybody else. And yes, when asked if we price fix, I say no one yes. We demanded for the AAA clients AAA pricing, and you couldn't price one less than the other. So you applied that same idea

that you were using for filmmakers to your work with Coca-Cola then? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I also did what I told you personally, volume, Coke. Why did I do 35 commercials instead of six? Easier to do six. Did 35 because we ran it.

The idea I had, which they bought, which Herb Allen arranged at Sun Valley to meet with the team of Goizetta and Keough, the COO and the COO, was let's do a relay race. Let's have Coke thought of 365 days a year. How do we do that? Well, it's simple. Christmas, we do. something about the cold and about Santa Claus, which was a Coke creation in the 30s.

Let's go to Valentine's Day, love. These are what the commercial bases are on. Then we're going to go into Easter family, summer, thirst, heat, beach. Then we're going to go to the fall. What is it? It's back to school. Everybody's kids go back to school. Then we're going to go to Thanksgiving. We're back at family. And then we're going to roll right into Christmas. So we're going to do commercials specific to those seasons rather than six commercials that play in every silo of television. How do you put a commercial on Saturday Night Live that you put on a daytime soap opera that you put on Seinfeld?

You can't do that. And we didn't. All our commercials were demographically tailored, and it killed it. We made the cover of Time magazine. And I go back to what I said to you before, everyone told me we would fail. Everyone said it's a stupid idea. Everyone said your clients are going to get upset.

When did you build the self-confidence to not listen to people? It annoys me. I see this in every single one of these biographies I read where it's like, don't ever let somebody else tell you what you're capable of. I had this discussion. But you need self-confidence to ignore that information. So like when did you, or that critique or that advice, at what age? Did you have that when you were in high school? Did you have that before C.E.

I wrote about this in my book. This self-confidence appeared when I lost the ninth grade election for class president. And I did a complete post-mortem on myself, who my friend group was and why I lost, because I didn't want to be a loser. I thought it was, and it was an, it was a apocryphal moment for me. And I worked for two years to build different social constituency. And I went out of my way to make different friends in different areas of the... I had a 3,800 kid high school. So running for an office, there was a big deal because everybody voted.

And you had to speak to the entire school in three different assemblies because that's all they could get into the gym. And it was critical. I practiced public speaking when I was in the 10th grade and 11th grade. And I won student body vice president, then I won student body president by wide margins because I really worked it, no different than I worked any business I've been in. And I realized, and I said this to someone this morning on this call about this deal I'm doing, the young guy who's the number three who started it, said to me, I've never seen anyone move so fast from idea to execution.

of putting it together. And I said, because if you move slow, it doesn't go together. And he said, you seem very confident about this idea. And I said, yes, I'm very confident about it because I see it crystal clear in its entirety. And he said, I'm not sure that our, you know, that I'm confident about you meeting our founder, because you've probably heard a lot of nasty things about them.

I said, I've heard a ton of things, some good, some bad, but I really don't care. And he said, why do you not care? I said, because I'll make my own judgment. I said, I'm very good with people. I will know if what I've heard is true, false, or just baloney. And I said, frankly, if you want to know the truth over my career, if you believed everything everyone said, I'd be a miserable failure. drummed out of life, you know, because anyone who is confident, aggressive, has ideas,

wants to push the envelope is put down. Yeah, Jeff Bezos has a great line on this. It's like, if you don't want to be criticized, if you can't take being criticized and you can't take doing anything, you can't do anything. I'm going to leave you with a line that I used when I was 17 years old and gave a speech when I ran for student body president because when a student body vice president, I usurp the president's duties, and he was badmothing me like crazy. And it was working pretty good because I was having a run for my money.

And I said to the students, all 4,000 of them, I'd rather be a do-something president who's done something to be criticized than a do-nothing president whom no one can criticize. Yeah, that's a great law. And that got me the election. I want to ask you a question because you've mentioned it a few times where your appetite is essentially insatiable. So you had 46 at the top 50 highest grossing film, like the best talent.

Then you had 75% market sharing all of Hollywood. There's this great book. One of the most important books I've ever read, it was published in like 1957. It's called The Mind of Napoleon. You got me into this. Yeah, it's very hard to find books. I have friends that have paid $1,000, $2,000 for the book, and I think it's worth it, where it's essentially 300 pages of Napoleon in his own words.

And there's something that when I hear you speak reminds me in Napoleon where he said, you know, essentially his ambition grew with his success. And he says it in French, but you can, the translation is, appetite comes with eating. You know, for excessively ambitious driven people, it's not like, oh, I ate, so I'm full. It's like, no, I've eaten. And the more I eat, the more I want to eat. But that's 100% accurate. Listen, I, one of my clients, who I'm crazy about Francis Ford Coppola wrote a screenplay that one of my clients, that I was also crazy about who passed away

named Franklin J. Schaffner directed. It was called Patton. I am a voracious reader on anything about military leaders. I've read about Patton. I've read about Omar Bradley. I've read about Dwight D. Eisenhower as military leaders. Blows my mind. When everyone said to Patton, you can't do this,

he said, okay, you're right. And he just went and did it. How did he get his... Army to march double the amount of the standard Army march, supply them, feed them, and not irritate them. Because he was a leader and he had guts and he wasn't afraid and people couldn't stand them. Not his people though, not his people. So for me, if my people support me, I'm fine.

What other people say, I don't really care. I don't think about it. I get asked this question every single day of my life. I am, tomorrow calls me the truth teller because I say the truth. I said it to you. I gave you my best advice of what I thought you should do. I may not be right. No, I may not be.

No, the funny part about that is so, you know, one thing is that, when I asked you earlier, is like, hey, if you think about the people that are best in the world or what they do, if, like, one trait, think about all the people you, you, you, you met that are the best of the world to do, you became the best in the world to do, what is the single most important trait that you've observed across all these people? My answer to that question would be focus. And so, like, I'm insanely focused on just podcasting, and I only think about it. That's basically all I think about all day long.

And when we had that very intense three hour of dinner, 20 minutes of it was you explaining, this is what I would do if I was you. But that's just push you. But the good, the interesting part was, as I told you, is like, the advice you had for me, I had already put into, it wasn't public, so you didn't know this, put into motion. I was like, it's pretty impressive that you can come from outside of something I think about all the time,

and you nailed the single best opportunity. But that's the only talent I have. That's my point. No, I have the ability to think out of the box on any business. Which is creative. No, I'm not going to argue with you. I have the ability to think out of the box on any business, even though if I don't know the business,

because I have this thesis, and I've said it 100 times to you and to everybody else, Every business is same. Now, the details are different, right, but the businesses, the blocking and tackling is all the same. And it's always about momentum and focus and loyalty and aggressive control of marketplace and monopoly. Monopoly. I'm a monopolist. If we were going to build a business, you have to be number one, and you have to have the lion's share of what you're doing.

or the lion's share of opportunities of what you do if you pass for fundamental reasons, that's good too. But you can't do anything halfway. It's crazy. This I learned as a kid. There's nothing. Like when I had a paper route at nine, I realized I had enough time to do three paper routes, and I went under another name, got the other two. Because the guy delivering the bulk of papers thought he was.

delivering to three different people, and he thought, no one could do all three, and I figured out I could do it. And then I hired someone to help me when it became an issue. So it's always about thinking the next step. It's a great Bruce Lee line, which I showed you a few. If this is where you want to punch, this is not the target. This is the target back here, and you punch through. That sounds stupidly, naively, innocently, kind of elementary. But if you think about the broader ramification about that, it's a foundation of business. And those are all things that I think are important. You talked about Michael Dell. I saw Michael Dell at a conference in Aspen last year. That guy's still working every hour of the day. He's a remarkable person.

He started his company 18. He's in his 60s. Has no desire at all. But that's my point. You know, he had a paper route, too. But he figured out this crazy in his own way of how to maximize how many subscriptions he could sell. And he realized that if you were either, there's two people that bought newspaper subscriptions in Texas. Texas is a much higher rate than the general population, which is newlyweds and people that moved. And so he's like, hey, all that information is public in Texas. He went down to the courthouse, brought a computer, right?

It's an Apple II computer. and you just had them pull, give me a list of all the people that were married, just recently married, and all the people were recently moved. Just like doing that at 12, he was 12 years old. Think about what you just said. Detail, right? Drive, ambition, don't give up. Just keep going.

You know, I had a dinner in London. I don't remember if I told you this story recently, that with a friend of tomorrow's who's a businessman and five guys in business. asked to have a dinner with me because they want to understand why are American businessmen so successful on a comparative basis broadly to other people around the world? Why are they so successful? And there's a lot of reasons, but we sat down at the table, very formal, everybody in suits. The five guys were in their 50s.

They all were pretty successful except one, who opened the dinner. and said, he started the dinner, and said, I'm moving to Stad from London. Oh, I said taxes. He said, no. Skiing? So I said, no, that was the question I said. First question in front of everybody before we ordered,

do you like to ski? He said, no. I said, what happened? He said, my business bank went bankrupt. I said, okay, you don't like to ski. you're leaving London, you're going to Stod, and it's not a tax problem, and your business realized, so what? He said, what do you mean, so what?

I said, failure is a part of life. In America, failure is a badge of honor. It means you tried. You get back up on your horse and you try it again. I failed at a number of things. It doesn't stop me. And all of a sudden, the meeting was pretty much over because I said, damn, we don't need to talk about this anymore.

There is no such thing as failure. It doesn't exist. You cannot give up. And by the time we got done with dinner, he was not going to move to Stod and ultimately did not and is working on a new business. I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things, there's one of my favorite lines. So you know this. Like I take every book I read, right? I try to distill it down to like the 10 most important sentences in the book.

And one of them for you was this is completely, I strip it all of context. because I think if you just read the sentence, you'll understand why the sentence is important. So I'm not even talking about what's happening in the book, but this is the sentence I wrote down. He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped.

I didn't stop. It's one of my 10 favorite sentences in your book. My question to you is, how much of your success do you attribute to just pure endurance or pure perseverance? I mean, to me, it's just part of a fabric of me. And I'm not suggesting I live the first. right kind of life. It's good for me. I want to stay edgy. I want to stay with young people.

Most of my relationships now are with young people. I learn. I feel I get up in the morning. I have a purpose. When you were building CAA, though, you were under enormous amounts of stress. And you had this crazy schedule that you detail in your book, you know, essentially on it 20 hours a day, 200 phone calls, 300 phone calls a day. When was there ever a time where you almost quit. No. A failure is not an option when you come from where I came from. But even after you were already wealthy, you weren't working for money.

It's not about money. Yeah, you weren't working for money. It's about a whole series of other things. And when you grew up in the San Fernando Valley and your father makes about 300 bucks a week on a good week, and you don't get any allowance and you have to have a paper out at nine to be able to go buy an ice cream. And you're also saving for a car because when you're 16, you know, your dad can't. afforded. Failure is not an option. It's binary. There's no option. Success or death. It's like, what are you going to do? It's, it's, you don't have any choice. I don't want to go back to the

valley. There's the most scary thought in my life. Do you think that still drives you, like, you're so, you, I know you're intelligent enough to realize that would never possibly happen, but I can't help but notice that, like, you still don't let your foot off the gas. That's not the reason. I like it. I love the action. I love meeting people. I love learning. I love being focused. I like to get into new things. So when did your your motivation come from? I'm obsessed with this. I love this because at the beginning it was I don't want to be a loser. Yeah. Right. So when did that switch from I am terrified to wind up? Like I, you said in your book, like I felt you felt like you were born in like the wrong nest, like a cuckoo bird, right? It's like I'm not in the right situation for what I feel my life should be.

Well, I always say I should have grown up on the East Coast. Why? Because it's a very different environment. It's a creative environment in L.A. Or it used to be not much anymore as it should be. But New York was about multi-different businesses and culture and art, film, music, finance, advertising, everything was in New York when I was a kid. Let's go to New York in one second. But this, it went from, I...

This can't be my life is like the way I described. This can't be my life is a very powerful motivator in your early life. Now it has switched to I'm obsessed with this. I don't ever even think of retirement. I'm constantly like inspired every day. I want to like create new things. So when did that switch in your life happen though? When did it come from like almost like a negative motivation to a positive one?

You mean as far as gaining the confidence to try to do? I don't even know if it's confidence. It's just like your source of your inner, this inner desire to win. this burning desire to achieve mission success. And it's very obvious in your early life, right? The source of that was an unhappiness, a deep unhappiness with your present station in life. Now, eventually that drives you so much that you,

almost, I would say, caused of a lot of people's success. Now you're not worried about ever going back to the valley, and now you've trans, the source of your motivation and your drive every day is like, oh, I just, like, I'm a completely justice. It's a really smart question. And I've got to answer it. And it kind of brings me full circle here. I say this to certain people I'm close to, which is,

there are parts of me that still live in the valley that I'll never forget my whole life. And it's going to sound crazy, stupid, but I find myself sometimes. I remember when I was a kid, And my dad was a liquor salesman, and some of his accounts were restaurants. So he used to take us to early bird dinners because he would get a discount on the dinner before 6 o'clock. And we'd go at 5.50 to a restaurant that I thought was fancy that had full three-course meals for 495, 595. Think about that.

And he'd order one drink, which he never drank. He just nursed it because it was his product. And we were not allowed to order lobster or steak or anything over a certain price on the menu. And I was saying to tomorrow the other day, occasionally, that I slide back into that, which is weird because I don't even look at checks anymore. You know, when they come. I mean, we had dinner together. You saw that. I just signed the check.

But sometimes I find myself looking at a menu and automatically glancing. to the price. For no reason, by the way, I don't care. But it's my childhood, and I think it overwhelms me sometimes, which I find a positive, by the way, because I still feel like winning and I still feel like competing and I still feel like bringing up. Right now my mission is to bring young people along and to do well and to make change and to be charitable and to help young people not, make the mistakes I made and I'm enjoying it and it just that flame's not going out. It doesn't sound silly nor stupid to me at all. I keep saying this over and over again.

I feel I just tell the same story every week because the same personality type just reappears over and over again throughout history. This entrepreneurial, super driven type A personality type, obviously you have it. I think I have it as well. And it's separated by time in which they lived. lived, they live in different parts of the world, they work in different industries. And yet that same personality type, it's the same way I feel. I just, my older brother called me.

And, you know, it's like very hard to get time with me because I work seven days a week. Like my eyes are open. I'm thinking about work. And he's just like, why are you working so hard? And I was like, look up and down our family treat. It's just like nothing but losers on both sides. And what I feel I'm doing is, it makes no, it's not logical. David, think about this.

I wouldn't be here if we weren't like-minded. It doesn't matter what we... Yeah, it's the first thing you said to me when we sat down the very first. I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have been friends with you. I wouldn't be interested because there's no common denominator. Yeah. There's no hook for a foundation for the relationship.

So, again, a lot of these questions are selfish because I use this format to like learn directly from you. One of my favorite things, obviously we spend summers in Malibu. When you're in Malibu, for July 4th is a very important holiday to me. My dad's a Cuban immigrant. I'm, you know, hugely pro-capitalistic and hugely pro-American. And you can't do fireworks here because of all the fires. So I've tried to figure out a way to celebrate America during July 4th for my daughter. And so what I do is, like, at first I made her do this and now she doesn't earn.

I made her watch Hamilton, the musical on, like, Disney Plus. And there's a, now she knows all the songs. She went to go see it on Broadway and she likes the soundtrack and everything else. But one of my favorite, probably, there's two of my favorite songs in Hamilton. It's like one of them is nonstop, which talks about volume, which means you talk about over and over, around, just the guy just wouldn't stop. He wouldn't stop writing. He's awake.

He's writing. He's trying to get his ideas out there. But the other thing is just the fact that he understood is, you know, same situation. Poor orphan kid comes to America. He's like, didn't matter. He's the right hand of George Washington. He's the first Treasury Secretary. He was impossible to satiate.

it was impossible. What he understood about himself is like, I will never be satisfied. I'm going to ask you this question. I think I already know the answer because we've talked enough. I just don't think there is even,

that even registers with you. It's like you will never be satisfied. You don't look at it as there's like, there's no end to your ambition or what you want to do in this world. I'm going to give you a simple answer. I don't want it to. What do you mean?

I don't want there to be an end to, ambition or enthusiasm or curiosity or the things that drive me to help people to be an advisor to people. I don't get paid for being an advisor. You didn't pay me for having dinner with you. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I paid for dinner. I offer it. Now that I think about I paid for dinner twice. In any case, I want that life or I wouldn't do it. Believe me. I just read your friend Barry Diller's autobiography, which is really interesting, and he has a line in there. You know, they're just like, I don't even, I don't think about retirement.

I'm not interested in. He goes, I wake up every day and have ideas. Well, that's how I feel. Okay, so I'm going to change gears about what we were talking about real quick, because there's one thing on the list that I absolutely have to get to and I want to get to. This is probably the last thing we talk about. I want you to tell me about, we talked a lot about people that have a lot of charisma, a lot of intelligence. I love what you wrote in your book about your friendship, your deep friendship, your life, you know, Sounds like multiple-decade friendship with Michael Craigney.

30 years. What can you tell me about your relationship with Michael Graydon? Certain people have touched my life in a very unique way. Ben Horowitz and Mark Andreessen in 99 put me on their board, and I never met either of them, and they had the confidence in me. To go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about. I mean, I had some experience in tech from 92 with my Andy Grove Intel CAA deal.

meeting Gates in 93, but, you know, nothing like they did. They grew up in Silicon Valley. That was a huge life change for me. Michael Crichton was one of these guys that at the beginning I just needed to sign as a client to be on the roster. And after two or three meetings, I just said, my God, this man is so special. He was not just intelligent to a degree I'd never seen at that time. This is 1979. He was thoughtful.

He was ahead of everybody in his thinking. He was talking about computers in the early 80s. He was an Apple fellow when it was. No one knew what the hell that was. He traveled extensively and wrote articles about it, but kept notes on everything he did. And he loved art. He wrote the definitive textbook on Jasper Johns.

To this day, it's the definitive book. And I talk to him every day of my life seven days a week. Seven days a week. And if I didn't talk to him, it was odd, and I missed it. I would talk to him no matter where I was. I could be in Japan. I could be in Europe. I could be in New York.

make any difference to me. And sometimes the conversations were short, sometimes they were long. I enjoyed every second of it. Going on vacation with him was a lesson in curiosity. The guy kept notes on everything he saw. So I remember we were in the Caribbean together. He kept notes on everything that he saw, and that all ended up in movies. And I value loyalty as a very important point. for me in a relationship. Every problem I had or every success, he was there for me. I remember I made a couple of huge mistakes, and he said to me something I've never forgotten.

He said, forget it. There's always another rodeo. That's his line to me. And he's turned out to be right. I miss him every day of my life. His book stands on my desk and a small, personal collected by him, Frank Stella, drawing that he gave me as a gift.

He's in a place I see it every single night before I go to sleep. And I love this guy. He, I was devastated when he passed away. Devastated, because he passed away young. Didn't have to, it was his own fault, I think. What happened? Well, he was a doctor, you know, a medical doctor.

So I personally, I could be wrong, I don't know it for a fact. I think he kind of overdid the chemo, and I think that killed him. That's my guess. Or it's caused something to happen, but I don't know the facts, by the way, that a loss to me that was devastating. And I remember the night that his wife called me because it was the night that Obama, I think, won the election. It was that night. I'm not sure. Some event happened, and I was in the backseat of the car.

I got the call and I was devastated. But for me, mega influence on my life, mega loyal friend through thick and thin. Didn't matter what I did. He didn't judge me. And he had this extreme, I think I learned this from you. He had extreme work habits where he wouldn't write every day, but when he wrote, he would write for like this.

Yeah, I had all my writers, and we had 400 of them. We had different work ethic and different schedule. So James Clavel, who wrote show then and Taipan, he would write every day from seven in the morning till 1230, hell or high water, six days a week. And at 1230, he went to lunch, and he didn't work until the next morning. And he did 10 pages a day. That's what he did. So you could almost tell when he was going to be done. And his books ran about 1,200 pages. Michael hated writing. He'd rather do thinking, and he waited for deadlines. And he wrote Jurassic Park in five months

because he wrote 20 hours a day, six days, seven days a week, because it was due, and he just waited. What do you think is the most important thing you learned from him? From him? Oh, unequivocally curiosity about everything. A guy was curious about everything, every day of his life. And loyalty, integrity, how to create things out of nothing. What a mind that can think forward and backward.

So in other words, he did movies like The Great Train Robbery, 1850s with Sean Connery, and movies like Andromeda Stry. about the future and his thought process, and then straight popcorn entertainment based on science that really isn't science, Jurassic Park. But when you read the book, the first third of the book, you're being educated without you knowing about paleontology and you actually think you understand it.

And they'd have a PhD and it was genius, what you did. So then when you, it gets, when the movie breaks loose, you actually think you understand what you're saying. It's amazing. He was a genius. Relentless curiosity. That's a great place to close. Michael, thank you very much for doing this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Absolutely.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast founders for almost a decade. I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.