Founders - #53 Who Is Michael Ovitz?

Episode Date: January 1, 2019

What I learned from reading Who Is Michael Ovitz? by Michael Ovitz. ----Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first give a gift [0:01]Michael's first jobs + finding his first love [7:02]the foul-mouthed magnates [19:49]starting at the bottom / being hungry for knowledge [24:50]I don't want to be standard in any way [32:30]the revolt begins and the founding of CAA [36:05]know the history of the industry you are in [46:30]a warning for all entrepreneurs [53:44]what influenced CAA's culture [59:27]becoming the thing you hate [1:02:10]a typical day's schedule [1:07:00]problems with co-founders [1:11:30]the fastest animal on the field [1:15:13]I was tired / The end of Michael Ovitz's time at CAA [1:19:15]Ron is gone [1:25:07]a new beginning / meeting Marc Andreessen [1:32:00]reconciliation [1:38:00] ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I always told our agents, make your clients think they're your friends, but remember that they're not. Yet it would be my clients who would stay loyal, for the most part, and my friends who would betray me. Jay Maloney, the agent I thought of as a son and as my eventual successor, would join the agency's posse of young Turks who disowned me after I left CAA. Michael Eisner, my great friend who ran Disney, would hire me as his number two, then publicly humiliate me and fire me after 14 months. And Ron Meyer, the blood brother I started CAA with, would leave to take a big job at Universal after I'd negotiated for both of us to go there and then disparage me all over town for 20 years. I made it my life's work to understand people, to grasp what made

them tick. I'd been certain that I was too wary to misplace my trust and too smart to be duped. So I'd like to think that these betrayals were random and flagrantly unwarranted and that I was the victim of some perverse instinct that destroys all human intimacy. I'd like to think that the problem was just that the tools and strategies I'd used to get to the top inevitably created resentment, even among those who shared in my success. That everyone hates a winner. That just because I sought money and power and intimidated everyone to get them, it didn't change me. But I did change, of course. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first give a gift. Ovitz. So this book is going to be probably a little different from what we normally discuss. So yeah, we're going to cover his early life. We're going to cover what made him want to become

an entrepreneur. We're going to cover some of the strategies that he used. But a lot of this book is what he's discussing here in the prologue. Mistakes. He's very honest and open about the mistakes he made. And it almost all comes down to not really business mistakes, but mistakes with people, which I find so fascinating. And I think what I'm saying now will make more sense once we get towards the end of the podcast too, and you see kind of the whole arc. Okay. So before we jump into the book, just a few things I want to go over with you. First of all, my name is David. Welcome to Founders if this is your first time listening.

The concept of this podcast is pretty straightforward. Every week, I read a biography or an autobiography of an entrepreneur, and I just share the ideas that I learned that I thought were interesting. This is not meant to be a review or a summary of the book by any means, just things that I wanted to remember for myself. So a lot of times when I remember for myself. So a lot of times when I'm reading, I make a lot of highlights and then notes as well. So then I can go back later and remember everything I learned. And if you're interested in getting this book after you

listen to this podcast, or if you want to see any of the, I think we're up to like 50 books now that we've covered so far through the podcast, a great way to do that is go to amazon.com forward slash SOP forward slash founders podcast. Not only will you see all the books I've done in the past, but you'll also see that book next week's book early because a lot of, a few of you have emailed saying you wanted to make this kind of like a book club. So that's a way to do that. The second thing is if you want to get in touch with me, this is another idea I got directly from you guys. Best way to get in touch with me is just you can find me on Twitter. It's at DavidSanra1. And I'll leave obviously the links and everything I talk about in the show notes and at founderspodcast.com. And, oh, the show also has its own Twitter feed.

And this Twitter feed, I just published quotes from past podcasts that I like or that I want to remember, and that's at founderspodcast. And last but not least, in addition to taking a lot of notes and highlights on books on entrepreneurship, I take a lot of notes and highlights on books on entrepreneurship, I take a lot of notes and highlights on podcasts about entrepreneurship, specifically directly from entrepreneurs' own brains. So if you want to get on my private email list and you want to see those notes, you can do that at foundersnotes.co. Okay. So I want to jump back into the book. And this, I think it's going to be a little bit more chaotic than our normal, like the normal podcasts that I do. And so I'm just going to jump around.

Some of these are entire stories that I found interesting and some are just random quotes or random ideas. I would say this more so than most other books is going to follow more of like a barbell effect where I'm going to spend a lot of time. Most of the podcast is going to be about his early life, then his early first few jobs, and then starting the company. And then once that gets up to be successful, I skip over a bunch of that because in general, I'm just more interested in how things are started, not how they're run once they are successful. And then we're going to get to spend a lot of time in the end of the book where he's going to deal with a lot of regrets. And like I just read in the prologue, a lot of betrayals, and there's just a lot of lessons. Mike's going to teach us a lot of lessons. I

don't have a business, but I think about he's in his seventies when he's writing this book. And I'm always fascinated by what people value and what they regret when they're near the end of their life. So we're gonna learn a lot about that today. But first, I found this few sentences in the prologue that I found, I just wanna remember. So I wanna share this with you real quick. And this is the importance of having a profound sense of belief and how you basically start,

create something from nothing. And so he's gonna use Hollywood because that's the industry that he was in. But I think this applies to nearly everything, business or otherwise. Nothing in Hollywood is anything until it's something. And the only way to make it something is with a profound display of belief. If you keep insisting that a shifting set of incoherent possibilities is a movie, it eventually becomes one. Okay, so I'm going to skip ahead and I want to just jump. I'm going to jump right into his early life, his first jobs, and then finding his first love. And this takes place over a few pages. And I think it's kind of a way to lay the foundation to kind of understand Mike

and why he is the way he is. And don't get mistaken. He's a very, very controversial figure. Okay. So it says, my dad's dream was to open his own liquor store You need to be in charge of your destiny. He drummed into me. It's no good working for somebody else While I love my father. I hated his boxed in life Like many who had grown up in hard times he feared risk My mother's mother. This is interesting. He calls her sarah This is his grandmother, but he never refers to her as that. interesting He calls her Sarah This is his grandmother But he never refers to her as that He just calls her Sarah

I don't know if we should read into that or not My mother's mother, Sarah Was a blunt-spoken widow Who lived with us for years She paid attention to me And seemed to think I was special She was my second mother And I felt horribly conflicted

When she'd tell me, you can be better than your father. Sarah kept dosing me with this poison until I was 14, when my father finally kicked her out of the house. By then, her incantations, a dark version of the immigrant's creed that in America you could be anything you want, had cast their spell. Instead of trying to emulate my father, a kind and loving man, Magritte's Creed that in America you could be anything you want, had cast their spell. Instead of trying to emulate my father, a kind and loving man, I would be what Sarah expected of me. I would succeed at all costs. She was depressed, of course, sunk in her own miseries. So I'd save her by taking extraordinary measures to reward her faith in me. So first of all,

there's a few things going on here. I like how he diagnosed, he's like, well, she's obviously miserable because she spends her entire time, and I'm skipping over a bunch of this. She just basically talks crap about everybody. She's a perpetually unhappy person, which is really weird when you factor into this is who was paying the most attention to Mike when he was younger. But also this thing, what he talks about, he's like, I'm going to, instead of being a nice and loving man, I'm going to succeed at all costs. I'll tell you right now, which was something I didn't know when I was reading these words to begin with, I'm pretty sure he almost comes out and admits as much,

but he definitely infers that this was not the right route for his life. There's a lot of darkness in this book, not only between the way these people treat each other in the industry, which is pathetic, but he says, and I'm going to read a bunch of these sections to you, but he talks about losing his humanity over and over again. And I've read a lot of autobiographies of entrepreneurs for this podcast. A lot of them are written around the same age he is,

somewhere around the 60s and 70s. You have people like Sam Walton or Phil Knight reflecting back on their lives. There's never been as much darkness as in this book. So make of that what you will. All right. So he says, now we're going to jump into some of his first jobs. And one thing I admire about Mike is he had a fantastic work ethic that you even see from a young age. He says, at nine, I got a paper route and raced my Schwinn bike through the neighborhood. Then I asked for a second route, cutting my free time to the bone. So it's funny, he mentions when he meets his wife later on that she described the way his lifestyle as squeezing the very last drop out of a tooth of toothpaste that he would he never liked to waste any time

and i'll share with you his schedule later on which is which is pretty extreme so he says i was a head shorter than my classmates and annoyingly curious so i was bullied in elementary school my father had saved me from older bullies once in the stairway of our building back in chicago but he wasn't around a recess or in the deadly hours right after school let out. When it was open season on outliers, I absolutely hated that feeling of powerlessness, of cowering and being craven and hoping just to pass unnoticed. I couldn't bear it. And we're going to see a little bit of what's interesting here is you kind of become what you hate.

And he even makes that um statement later on because he becomes somewhat of a bully somewhat of a person that's comfortable um with violence which is again something that that is left out of a lot of the books that that uh we read but we know is kind of a part of life and i again, I think it's a regret of his now. Okay, so he says, I always stood out academically, even if none of my teachers took particular notice or encouraged me. I read everything I could, but my favorites were biographies of successful men.

Andrew Carnegie, Winston Churchill, Nathan Rothschild. If anybody has a way to get in touch with Mike, you should send him the link to Founders Podcast. I also did a lot of drawing and model making. I wasn't a gifted draftsman or builder, but I'd construct model boats and planes in my room and entertain dreams of commanding flotillas and squadrons. So that's something that he puts into real life and we'll get into like how he used history and other influences to build the culture of CA, which I found particularly

fascinating. Now we're going to get into how he finds his first love. At nine, I discovered motion pictures. Four blocks from my house behind a chain link fence and a security shack sat a place of mystery. The back lot of RKO Pictures pictures the studio owned by howard hughes the first time i eluded the watchman and snuck through a hole in the fence i came upon another world mounds of lighting equipment cameras microphones cables and rows and rows upon of false of false fronted buildings from old western towns to gritty urban streets hundreds of actors and makeup cowboys indians policemen spacemen and hundreds more people in the street clothes who peered through lenses strung lights hammered and hauled and ran about until director yelled

action i was hooked my parents desperately wanted me to become a doctor, but movies became my obsession. I loved Fort Apache, I guess that's the name of a movie, an RKO western about the Calvary and a great leader who overrules an incompetent one. I became obsessed with building forts and with the Spartan idea of the phalanx, the battle formation in which you're only as strong as the guy on your left. I was also impressed by an Errol Flynn Western. There's a lot of names in the book. I'll tell you when the names are important to remember, most of them are not. And a lot of them I just straight up omit. I mean, this guy had probably 500 different names in this book. Okay, so it's an Errol Flynn Western where he drew a line in the dirt during a mutiny and said, you're either with me or against me. That formulation, you're totally in or totally out, became my mantra. It helped me enormously later and it hurt me in equal measure because it didn't allow for shades of gray. Most of life turns out to be shades of gray.

Okay, so now you're starting to see what I mean. We're still in the first chapter of the book, and you're going to see he's going to tell us these ideas that he thinks are valuable, but you're going to hear this, a lot of this, where it's like, damn, I messed up here. This is a mistake I made. I wish I didn't do that. And, you know, that's something, it's not really something you want to see in a human life. Like I think you should look up to people in the sense that you

can learn from them, but you got to apply these lessons like in your own way. And I just can't help but feel, well, right before I got to the last like two chapters of the book, I'm like, oh my God, I can't turn this into a podcast. It gets a little depressing here. I wonder if this guy is even happy. There is a better ending towards the end. He does actually find an industry that seems to be more in line with being a human and not just being a ruthless cutthroat like the Hollywood agent industry was in the 70s and 80s. Okay, and it probably still is today.

Okay, so we're still back into, he's still working during high school. He says, by then I was working eight-hour shifts as a box boy at our neighborhood Piggly Wiggly. I was working 4 p.m. until midnight, saving toward a car and college and thinking about my future. I'm skipping over this part, but he figured out a way to become student body president. And after initially failing, he learned some tricks that were basically he learned by how

to network and how to expand his circle and how to get people to like him, which is also something I found a little unbecoming because he describes himself multiple times like a chameleon. And maybe that's what you had to do in his business. I just find that people that don't have any sense of self are people I try to avoid. Being student body president made me a member of the Encino Rotary Club. So I met once a month with the Rotarians, which I guess are members of this club. They were car dealers and insurance agents who made something of themselves.

They were no smarter or more hardworking than my dad, but they had something he lacked, a college degree. That had given them options, and now they composed a local power structure. But I didn't want to just be part of a local power structure. Eight miles from where I grew up stood the mansions of Beverly Hills. I'd stare at them as we drove to family dinners. That was when I began to hate the valley. The valley is where he grew up in, the section of Los Angeles that he grew up in. Okay, so he's saying, I hate the valley, which lack museums, institutions, and a cultural center. Any real stimulus for my brain.

In the valley, people grew up carrying a football under their arms. I wish I had grown up in New York where people grew up carrying a newspaper. This grudge against my surroundings, this sense that I had been raised in the wrong nest, like a cuckoo's egg, fueled me when I began my working life. And this is, I think, really important

when you talk about the motivations, like what is the fuel that caused you to be such a driven person to want to start a company or to want to succeed in whatever endeavor? And he says, I always felt one step inferior to the people around me and one step superior. I wasn't as creative or cultured as they were, but I was a lot smarter and more hardworking

than most of them. Insecurity and ambition make a powerful cocktail. So after finding that studio by his house, he develops a way to get a job as one of the tour guides. If you go to a Hollywood set, they give tours of all the shows being produced and the soundstage and et cetera. So this is what he was doing back in, I think this is in the early 70s now. He says, he's going to make some important points here that I agree with wholeheartedly. The other guides worked from nine to six, but I came at seven each morning and stayed until nine at night. Universal owned the last full-fledged working lot,

that's the company he's working for, and I walked its 400 acres end to end, which interesting, he almost becomes the CEO of Universal about 20 years later. I read and reread and underlined my studio guide as if I were cramming for a final, writing out lists of questions for executives and technicians, and keeping a notebook full of the answers. At the end of each interview, I arranged to come back

to observe. I had carte blanche at the busiest film and television studio in the world, and I was getting paid for it. What I learned at Universal, the way glorious films blossom out of an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities, enthralls me still. So what he's talking about there is, from an outsider perspective, like the end product of what these studios are making are exciting people all over the world want to pay money to go see them. But yet if you look at it day to day, what he calls an intricate mesh of mundane practicalities,

it doesn't look like anything special is happening. But with the magic of coordinated effort and enough time, you can actually produce something magical from something that's mundane. And this is the part that I wholeheartedly agree with. And I've never heard it put this way, and I love how he discusses it. He says, I was a great guide because I believed in the product. By 18, which is his age at the time, I'd absorbed a basic rule for success.

Love what you do. And this is especially a great point. Too many people fight their job. A battle they cannot win. Okay. So during this time, he gets to observe in real life what we're kind of trying to do with the podcast. And so this, the note I left myself is the foul-mouthed magnets. And there's a lot of these guys I've heard of before, the people that started studios way back in the day. And I'll eventually get around to reading some of their biographies.

But he's interacting with them up close. And there's one in particular that he's trying to learn from. So he says, Some of us Valley kids followed the studios like boys in New York tracked the Yankees. I wasn't interested in the stars, but in the process of making pictures and in the people who were truly responsible. All the foul-mouthed magnates who founded the modern film business

were fascinating. Harry Cohn, Louis B. Meyer, Jack Warner, William Fox. But the one who interested me the most, in part because I worked at his studio and in part because he had the most far-reaching ideas, was Lou Wasserman. Okay, so this is a name you're going to have to remember. He's a really important part of this story. I'm going to talk a little bit more about him now, but he winds up hating, Lou Wasserman winds up hating Mike later on in life. Lou built the town's paramount talent agency. His rules were simple. Tend to the client, dress appropriately, divulge no information about MCA. MCA is the company that he founded. Do your homework and never leave the office without returning every phone call. Cornering the market on movie stars, Lou swung decisive leverage to the talent and their representatives and helped finish off the old studio system. Now that's an important

sentence because Mike literally does the same exact thing 20 years later. He talks about being the difference between the buyers, basically being a pain in the ass for the buyers. So the buyers are the studios and he winds up representing the sellers and increasing the prices that the sellers make. And as a consequence of that, the buyers have to pay. So this is going to make him a lot of enemies. Later, he brought the Paramount library of old films when no one thought it was worth a dime. MCA was everywhere, packaging a huge number of TV shows and taking up to 75% of their production costs. The company's reach was so vast, it became known as the octopus. It's funny, interesting

throughout. There's something about human nature that people that didn't know each other separated by vast distances and time can come up with the same ideas this idea of calling a company the octopus do you remember uh when i did the podcast on the banana king sam zamuri remember the company he started to fight uh you know the company he was fighting i think it was called united fruit i don't have it in front of me hopefully i'm remembering correctly they that's how the united fruit was described they were described as the octopus same situation for lou's company and lou stays in power for a very very long time up until i think he's in his 70s and he actually gets bought out through a deal that um mike is actually going to broker so their paths are going to cross again and at the time but what's fascinating

inspiring to me is at the time mike is working for Lou at the bottom rung. He's just somebody on Lou's lot giving guides. And he actually gives a guide to Lou and a guest one day. Okay. So something I love about Mike and a lot of these stories that we cover is a lot of them, they have traits that are very common. And so one, a lot of them start from the bottom, meaning bottom of an organization or maybe not with a lot of these stories that we cover, is a lot of them, they have traits that are very common. And so one, a lot of them start from the bottom, meaning bottom of an organization, or maybe not with a lot of resources,

and they're all really, really hungry for knowledge. And so I'm going to skip to when he has already graduated school, and he's like, okay, I need an in to the movie industry. So he decides to go work for a company that is still in existence today. It's relatively well known. It's the agency William Morris. And what's fascinating to me about having finished this book now is he starts at the bottom of William Morris, eventually works his way up to the point where he's going to gain enough confidence to go on his own.

The exact same thing happens in his company. He finds himself at the top of the industry, and then there's young, aggressive people at the bottom that are eventually, tales of oldest time, that are eventually going to want the power that Mike possesses, and they basically take it from him. Okay, but we're not there yet, so let's start when he's just at the beginning of his career. So one thing I must say, he was extremely successful at, he was in charge, eventually worked his way up and was in charge of the touring, the studio tours. He was making $600 a week, and this was in 19,

I'm sorry, I said 1970s, it was in the 1960s. So, which is a lot of money. His dad made $400 a week, and he was making this much money at like, I think 19 years old, 20 years old, something around there. And what he's going to do is rather drastic when you factor in how much money he was making. He's going to agree to get a job at $75 a week. Okay, so it says, almost everyone at William Morris started in the company's mailroom. After a year or two, trainees were sent to secretarial school for shorthand or speed writing. They came back, so now he's going to school for shorthand or speed writing. They came back.

So now he's going to describe for us the basic hierarchy, the path that you're supposed to follow if you want to succeed at this company and the path that he deliberately circumvents. They came back as agent secretary. And if they did well at that, they became an assistant, then a junior agent, and then finally a senior agent. It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing, and then finally a senior agent. It could take three years to become a junior agent and four more to start signing your own clients as a senior agent. And more than 80% of the trainees washed out along the way. The way you got ahead at WMA was nepotism. Everybody was somebody's nephew. It was an old, soft, corrupt place. I didn't know anybody, so I needed another way to stand out. I told the head of personnel, I have a proposition for you. I think I can learn all I

need to know to become an agent in 120 days. Okay, so instead of waiting three to four years, he says, I can do that in four months. If I can't, I'll give you back everything you paid me. I was aging, aging. Okay. So this word's in the book. So agenting him. So it's the, it's basically being an agent before he's an agent. I was agent, agenting. Oh my goodness. Okay. You know what I'm trying to say? And he knew it. He broke out laughing. That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. He said. But I'm going to hire you. You start Monday. Oh, I was wrong about the salary. It's actually, he said my salary would be $55 a week. So even less. Okay. I said, I'd like to start tomorrow. I showed up at seven, two hours early to learn my way around the building. So there's more of that drive and initiative. People came to rely on me. So he talks about

ingratiating himself into the structure and just going around doing favors to everybody. And as a result, he did this because then eventually what started out as something that he was doing voluntarily, he kind of understood human nature very young too. They would eventually come to rely on that and then he could use that as leverage. So they came to rely on me and raised my salary to $75 a week.

I was embarrassed by the low pay, embarrassed that I could take Judy, this is his wife, out only to cheap restaurants. But Judy gave me the line I would use later when I recruited people to entry-level jobs at CAA. You're investing in your life. I despise the mailroom, but I fell in love with the world it served. Working for William Morris was a means to an end, to get close to our creative clients, the people who did things I could not do myself. And we're going to see his, you know, he had this early ambition. He says, I aspired to build my own company someday, but that was in the distant future. And on the very next page, he does something that's really, really smart. Remember, he has this unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding the industry, the industries,

I should say, that he's operating in. So he said, remember, this is way before personal computers. We had a file room the length of a basketball court it was lined with steel cabinets the hard drives of the era all packed with 70 years worth of manila folders i viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment and then this is how again he starts doing favors for people so he can get access something he does his entire career so he says i helped the woman who ran the file room her name name's Mary. And I brought her little gifts, a box of candy or a scarf. One day I said, you know, I'd love to read some of those files. She told me to make myself at home. Within a week, she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me the key. While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary's domain each morning at 7 a.m. and every evening after work.

For 10 weeks, I made my way from A to Z through the client files and the network and studio deals. I jotted down questions for Sam Sachs, who is the head of television legal affairs, who was charmed by my interest and lent me a tape of a talk he'd given at USC on contract law and entertainment. So this is a precursor to podcast, huh? I played at a home and came back with more questions. He gave me nine more tapes.

So that's just a fascinating thing. This talk, I think this demonstrates something that I've come to know very well. It's like the value of compression. He basically learned the key ideas of 70 years of entertainment history in two and a half months. And then it didn't stop there. Okay. So this guy, Sam kind of takes him under his wing. He has this idea where he's like, okay, Sam, I know Sam's schedule because Sam is real tight with the guy running the agency

and he has the same schedule every day where he works till 6.30 and the guy that's running the agency, I forgot his name, that's not important, comes and asks him to go to dinner. So he goes to dinner and he comes back and finishes up a little work. So Mike would hang out. He'd be the only one in the office. He'd set himself up in a cubicle. So Sam would see that he's there. Then when Sam would inevitably come out of his

office, he'd be like, oh, I need help. Oh, no one's here. Can you do me a favor? And Mike's like, yeah, okay, cool. And he does this for a long time. So now he's jumped up. He surpassed everybody else he started with. And now he's basically the right hand person of the right hand of the person running the company, if that makes sense. And this greatly accelerates how fast he's able to accomplish what he wants. And there's actually a, I just worked on another podcast that I'm doing for the, the misfit feed for the people that are, that are supporting this podcast on a monthly basis. And, and it's titled, there is no speed limit.

It has nothing to do with Mike. It's somebody else that was heavily, hugely influenced on me, but I, it's funny that like, I see the same traits in Mike that you do in a lot of these entrepreneurs. So he says, after I started working for Sam,

I can see the new longterm goal. I wanted to run William Morris. So think about that. This guy has ambitions like the size of the moon. It's crazy. After seven, the reason I say that is not because that he couldn't accomplish it, but he's really young when he's doing this. He's only been, first of all, he's what, 21, 22 years old and thinking, I'm going to run this place one day, which says a little bit about his personality. But two, he's only been, first of all, he's what, 21, 22 years old, thinking I'm gonna run this place one day, which says a little bit about his personality. But two, he's only been there for a few months, and you're gonna see that now because he says, "'After seven months at William Morris, when I was 22,"

okay, there's age, "'I was promoted to junior agent, "'a title so demeaning we'd do away with it at CAA. "'My pay doubled to $150 a week. "'Though my promotion came in record time i'd missed my own deadline by three months and this sentence is i think important to understand mike because it's it feels like he's like running a race against an invisible clock he says i felt like i had to catch up before the world got away from me he He's not very satisfied. Somebody's going to be placated

easily. He does it in record time, years before most people do, and yet he's still kind of mad about it. Okay, so I'm going to skip over a lot of the stuff because it's just like BS politics at William Morris, but I want to get to the part where he makes good ideas about branding, not being standard in any way, and then we get the genesis of the thought of, hey, I could do this myself. What if I just start my own company? He's an agent right now for William Morris. He says, you need a persona as an agent, something that made you unique. I had heard that Sam Cohn, the famously rumpled New York agent, cut holes in his sweater to make them look moth-eaten.

Sam's persona was the absent-minded genius. Ron, now Ron's a very important name to remember. I referenced him at the intro. He's, I mean, he's going to call him his best friend here. He's his best friend and the person he starts the company with. And also somebody that he feels betrayed him and they didn't talk for 20 years. Okay. Sam's persona was the absent-minded genius. Ron was the best friend and confident and confidant. The I'll fix all your problems guy. I had given a lot of thought to my persona. There were three options. Number

one was a standard agent, the smoosher, the glad hander, but I didn't want to be standard in any way. Number two was Leland Hayward, an absolute gent. If a client wanted to leave, Leland would let her go without a word of protest or a hint of rancor. Everyone loved him. That was incredibly appealing. But I sensed that Leland's persona wasn't the right fit for me. Believe it or not, in those days, I was affable and considerate, with never a bad word about anyone. But you need to pick a persona you can inhabit without strain.

This kind of echoes the quote that I always talk about, that Ray Dalio talks about in his book Principles, like you have to be who you are. But you need to pick a persona you can inhabit without strain. And I knew I would do better as the opposite of Ron, as the all-business tough guy who would protect you. I could see that that's what the biggest stars and directors wanted so my persona became the all make your dreams come true guy mixed with the all fix your problems guy ron was the good cop and i was the bad um and then we're gonna so we

already see he's kind of going gravitating towards the dark side right and in this these sentences which again like a lot of this stuff is obvious in retrospect but i didn't understand it while i was reading the book and i feel that that's common for a lot like we talked about last week in the republic of t how they kept hinting dropping little hints that hey i don't like you can't make an entrepreneur you can't do the entrepreneur's job for them he's got to pick the business basically mel's advice uh to bill where there's all these hints that Mel was kind of like, hey, why are you taking so long? But now in retrospect, like you see, he's developing the seeds of a narrative. Well, Mike is doing the same thing here. So he says, underneath the roles though,

Ron and I were always more alike than even our colleagues realized and this is the sentence i mean ron's easygoing demeanor hit a personality as calculating and determined and tightly wound as mine and i'm going to share a lot of more details about that which is kind of scary uh when you think about how like how machiavellian human beings can be if i'd play by the rule i i had played by by the rules of William Morris, and so far it had worked. But I began to ask, what if? What if guys like Ron and me had more of a say? And then, what if we could run a company of our own?

So now we're going to get into the revolt. It's a group of guys all at William Morris that are perpetually dissatisfied with the leadership, the decisions they're making. They feel that the new generation, all the older generations has the power and they want to usurp that kingdom. And again, this is what do we always talk about in this podcast? The reason that I feel history is so valuable and studying and understanding is because human history doesn't repeat human nature does this exact same thing is going to happen by a group of young agents in Mike's own company to him and it's going to happen next year and 10 years from now and 100 years from now and a hundred years from now okay so um one of their guys gets fired so uh they thought this guy phil who i'm gonna skip over it because it doesn't really pertain to

our story but i just want to tell you some background real quick he got fired they didn't think it was right and um they're like hey if they're gonna fire they could fire this guy basically we're swimming naked out here they could do do that to us too. So he said, that lit the fuse. At dinner one night, Ron said, why don't we go into business for ourselves? We'll make more money, and they'll never be able to do to us what they did to Phil. Ron was persuasive, but I felt conflicted. I had more to gain by staying than Ron and more to lose by leaving. Seeing me hesitate, Ron said, you have no gamble in you.

Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice. That got me thinking. I was 27. If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over. So what he's saying is like I have a limited downside and unlimited upside here. So I waited on three points. It seemed to me that we should take advantage of the fact that we were young and aggressive. We could try out new ideas that could reshape the ways the town did business.

And so now they're generating, they're having these like secret meetings and they're coming to kind of outline what the business would look like. First, the equity had to be split evenly. Second, we had to try to get as big as we could. Third, we'd share our clients and serve them as a group. No more turf wars, no silos. At William Morris, we had many an agent who excelled at signing artists but stumbled in finding work for them. Wouldn't it be better, I said, if clients could rotate freely within our firm? We would be five musketeers, one for all and all for one. Everyone would handle everyone, and everyone would tell our clients the truth. It was standard procedure in the agency business when a client called with unpleasant news or a dangerous rumor,

I hear I'm getting fired off the film, for example, the agent would then say, don't worry, I know all about it and it's fine, even if this is the first they'd heard of it. We would pioneer the calm, no bullshit approach, saying instead, let me look into it and I'll get right back to you. We'd be better agents because we wouldn't agent you. The other thing that would differentiate us, and it was a big one, was that we would create work for our clients, not just field offers. Everyone agreed and suddenly the revolt felt real this is a genius idea they have actually on how they actually start drumming up and creating their own work and then they package like the raw materials needed for a film or tv show with the talent

needed with the directors and then sell the entire package to the movie the the movie studios. It's actually a really, really good idea. Let's see. Okay, so they jump. I'm just going to read this sentence so you understand what's happening here. And even though CAA is still around today and it winds up being a giant, giant company, I always reference that famous quote that all like all

things that are large start from small the jeff bezos quote about you know oak tree was at once an acorn so it says caa was a prototypical startup we brought in folding chairs and card tables for desks and our wives each came in one day a week to answer the phones. We had one paid assistant, a bookkeeper, and two cars among the five of us. So they're young and lean and hungry. Oh, you know what? I almost left this part out. I need to – okay, this is actually a good idea. I didn't even – that would have been a mistake. Okay. So let me read this part to you. Um, this

is, so what happens is, uh, WMA is, William Morris is really, really mad because they took not only some of their agents, but they took some of the agents, them, uh, convince some of their clients to leave W WMA for CAA. And so they said they get a cease and desist letter shortly after. This is when you start to see like a highlight of the kind of business, the industry they're in where they try to like hide who did it, but it was from a law firm that was really close to WMA. And they're saying, hey, you can't be called CAA because this other random company owns the trademark

for something called Artist Agency. And so they were called Creative Artist Agency. And they were talking about, look, this is serious trouble. Like if WMA has a lot of money, CAA has no money, if they shrugged it out in court, the fees would basically make CA go bankrupt they would basically die right right as they were being born so this is when you start to see Mike is super super aggressive which it comes with this idea and he's gonna he's gonna

bluff them he said I drained I drink I drank a glass of water and clear my throat I needed to believe in what I was about to say, and my voice absolutely could not crack. I rang Leon Kaplan, and this is the lawyer that wrote them the letter. He sounded arrogant, and why not? He pegged CAA as weak and broke and defenseless. So it's funny.

They were talking about, give you some context before we jump into this. Some of the old studios and talent agencies were being probed by the Department of Justice for monopolistic practices at the time, specifically like their contracts for TV. So he says, Mr. Kaplan, I said, we haven't met, but I know who you represent. I think you're trying to put us out of business. I think it's inappropriate and unfair, and it could be really interesting if this went to the Justice Department in the middle of their antitrust investigation. My tone was firm, but matter of fact, I went on. You can rip up this letter, and we can all be friends and forget about it. Or you can pursue it and I will call a pal of mine who happens to work at the Justice Department and I'll ask him to throw this

into the hopper and we'll see how it all sorts out. Dead silence. Then Kaplan said, what are you suggesting? It sounds like he just told you what he's suggesting. I'm suggesting you send me a handwritten letter within the next two hours of drawing the first letter. Or tomorrow morning, I'll call my friend. Then I thanked him and hung up. I gave no thought to the repercussions or to the fact that I was bluffing because we'd be out of business before the feds could get around to dealing with the call I'd never make to anyway to a friend I didn't have. So it's all a lie. I played my hand as calmly as I could and waited for the outcome. Only after I'd hung up did I realize my hands were shaking. Time crawled by. Fifteen minutes before the deadline, a messenger

arrived with a new letter from Kaplan. In the space of an afternoon, he'd moved from cease and desist to cease fire. That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us. For the rest of my time at CAA, I was a great friend and ally, but an implacable foe. When you're 28 years old and you've quit your job and there's no going back and the industry leader tries to smother your baby in its cradle, you steal up pretty fast. Kaplan's letter taught us to play hardball, and hardball we would play for the next 20 years. And this is just a random sentence that I thought was good advice on dealing with people. I believe that nobody wants to be treated just as what they are. Everyone wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are,

to become the best version of themselves. And this is a example of some great guerrilla marketing that CAA did when they basically had no money. So they need to get attention of actors and directors and writers. And this is part of their strategy about, instead of waiting for business to come along, let's make the raw goods of the business. Soon we had 80 agents sending us novels and manuscripts to be optioned by our producers and then to our screenwriters for adaptation. This is the guerrilla marketing part. After copying the scripts in bulk, we slapped on bright red covers with the white

CAA logo and planted hundreds of them with scrawled notes and scuff marks for a used look in beauty parlors, restaurants, and doctor's offices. Most had no chance of selling and we didn't leave any really important screenplays lying around, but they generated free publicity. They helped establish our brand in our race against larger but less agile firms like William Morris and International Creative Management, referred to as ICM. So that's, and then the result is in 1997, after two and a half years in which we netted nothing at all, each partner was able to make $80,000 out of our now profits. There's still five of them at this point. So slowly but surely, they're building their business, and now they're generating a profit. So at least they know they're not going to go out of business in the immediate future.

I'm going to skip ahead. I think this is extremely important. This is the value of knowing the history of the industry that you're operating in. So he says, when we launched CAA, I had started a private project, one that took me nearly 10 years to complete. And the private project was watching every film that had won one of the five big category Oscars. I discovered why Gone with the Wind had passed the test of time and how Green Was My Valley hadn't. I learned the relationship between vision and craft.

At the same time, I was boning up on the deal structure of movies and on which actors and directors had currency Film had its own language and I needed to be bilingual And Okay, so this is a really good point about how can he turn a weakness into a strength remember? There's still there's they're profitable, but there's still a tiny, tiny industry compared to some of the giants. So this is how he tried to, well, he successfully poached Dustin Hoffman. Dustin had just shot Kramer vs. Kramer, which would win him his first Oscar. But prior to that, he had a string of bombs,

and his career was in a precarious place. He was extremely picky about roles. But my pitch was much the same. We'll make sure you see everything, I said. I tried to turn a weakness, which was my experience and my small list of film clients, into a strength. He'd have my complete attention. But Dustin was harder to read. On impulse, I said said try us out and I won't charge you anything until you think I've earned it it was the only time I ever offered to take less than 10% much less work for free if word of the arrangement got out the haggling with other clients would never end but we desperately needed a top 10 film star like Dustin Hoffman I deluged him with material and signed him six months later.

So that's actually another smart tactic that he'd use. He would just, while he was trying to court potential signees, whether it be actors, directors, whatever the case is, he would just act like he's their agent already. And he'd find opportunities and he'd keep sending it to them to the point they're like, well, this guy's already working working for me i might as well just make this arrangement official which again i thought was another one of his really good ideas um and then around this time this is the vision that he's going to have for caa that he actually successfully achieves too and then this is also a

story of when he just becomes kind of like a ruthless dictator. Okay, so he says, this is the vision. I'm going to have all these people someday, meaning the entire chain, in an agency that will represent the whole food chain and flip the power from the studios to the artists. Realizing that vision took years. And so this is one of the ways

he starts to implement this vision. He has, he's like, I need directors. I don't have any directors. that vision took years. And so this is one of the ways he starts to implement this vision. He has, he's like, I need directors. I don't have any directors. So he goes right after some of the best directors. And in particular, this guy named Sidney Pollack. And he thought this guy was ripe to being picked off because he was represented by a dying breed. This old, sloppy, you know,

this agent that's just not as hungry as CIA is at the time. So it says, and this is a crazy thing about car phones that I didn't know, so we'll get there. Sidney's longtime agent was Everts Ziegler. His firm represented A-list writers and top-tier directors. I wanted them all. But he's like, how do I lure, but I don't know how to lure them away.

The unexpected answer came through my car telephone, a novelty at the time. The radio-based phone, slightly larger than a shoebox, had 11 channels. You kept pushing buttons until you found a dial tone. Busy channels were like party lines. Any subscriber could listen in. On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voice. Isn't that crazy though? You could just

hack into like it's the product was made so you could listen in on other people's conversations. On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voice that sounded like Avart Ziegler's. I pulled off the road to take notes because because Zig was discussing his star-studded list with his assistant. I clocked in at the same time the next morning, and there was Zig again, doing business while commuting. I decided to try to buy him out. To make him more receptive, to soften him up, I escalated my campaign to sign Sidney Pollack. I will kill for you, I told Sidney. All I had to sell was my passion and energy and the fact that I was 30 years younger than

Edward Ziegler. As Sidney wavered, we got screenplay after screenplay after screenplay into his hands before Zieg did. Each day, I spent up to two hours on Sidney, far more than anyone would spend on his biggest signed client. So this is even before he's getting them. day I spent up to two hours on Sydney, far more than anyone would spend on his biggest signed client. So this is even before he's getting them. And in 1981, with our courtship in its second year, so he's doing this for two years, he signed with me at last. Having dealt Zig a body blow, we offered him $750,000 for his agency, plus a lifetime royalty on his client's work.

He'd keep a piece of his business in perpetuity even if he never came to the office. After we negotiated for six months, Zig passed. But during our discussion, we discovered that Steve Roth serviced the cream of the younger clientele. So Steve is working for Zig. Steve was eager to leave. We promptly cut a deal for him to come to CAA, and that got us most of what we wanted at the price of Steve's compensation, $250,000 a year. So he got basically, instead of giving Zig $750,000 plus points on the back end in perpetuity, he's like, well, I'll just find another way. I'll just grab the guy that actually has all the value, and I'll pay him $250,000 a year.

We had to build a critical mass of our clients so we could reverse the power. This is actually important to his entire thesis behind CAA. We had to build a critical mass of clients so we could reverse the power curve from the buyers, which are the studios, to the sellers, which is us and the talent, and anyone in our way was going to get rolled over. Now you're going to see why so many people are going to wind up hating Mike.

With his core business gone, Zig sold Weber Main to ICM and he was done. The truth is that I didn't give a thought to Zig after he turned us down. You never heard that somebody was unhappy afterward. They just lost. Ron sometimes had to remind me not to roll over everyone. There are 200 of these small agencies, Ron would say, and you can't put them all out of business. They made sense to me even then, but flattening Evert Ziegler was the beginning of my Sherman-esque march to the sea. Okay, so I'm skipping ahead, and this is a gigantic warning for entrepreneurs.

This is extremely important, I think. So he's describing what his day-to-day life is at the time. He's already somewhat more successful than he was in the last few years, and he gets some advice. And most of this advice, you know, he says he ignored at his own peril. There wasn't a day when I didn't walk in the door and get hit by a rush of anxiety. What idea can I come up with today to pay the overhead? There'd be the adrenaline rush when we sent out the internal memo. Robert Redford is now a client.

15 minutes later, it was, what's next? In 1979, I was 33. Ted Ashley at Warner Brothers took me aside and said, I'm going to give you some great advice. He grinned, and knowing you, you're not going to take it. But here it is. I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success, but I would have been a lot happier.

Let me repeat that. I could have worked 10% less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success, but I would have been a lot happier. Ted was right was absolutely right on both counts it was great advice and I didn't take it I could see now that it could have worked as much as 20% less and it wouldn't have cost me if I'd

work even 10% less across 30 years that's three whole extra years of life I would have enjoyed your clients burn through your energy, your expertise, and your joy. So remember, there's a lot of darkness in here. And we're starting to see a little bit about that. So I need to lay some foundations so you understand why all of his co-founders turn against him. Eventually, at the beginning, there was five kind of equal partners. Over time, they clearly see that this guy had more drive and was a natural leader.

And so he's like, okay, well, I'm doing all the work. I'm bringing a lot more money than you guys. I work nights and weekends when you guys don't, et cetera, et cetera. So I need to renegotiate the equity. And even if all that information is true, we've seen this before.'ve talked about this like these are not usually books with the exception of who who who the people we've covered is the exception maybe david packard and bill hewlett like they just don't there's not a lot

of equality and i think just setting it up at the beginning, like the problem here that I learned from Mike is at the beginning, it's all equal. And then over time you're doing more work. Yes. So you should hypothetically get compensated. Logically, we understand that, but humans are not logical. We're, we're emotional. So you're just going to sow seeds of like distrust and like, unhappiness that you if you want to work with these people for a long time a sense of your entire life like you can't do that so um he just said hey i'm soft but firm the ownership structure of our company was way off um he's just laying out what he's doing i'm not going to read that part what he's doing what other people aren't

and so he said i said then and this is the. He says, I said that if I didn't get more than the 16.67% that each of the six partners owned, I'd have to consider other options, six partners, the person they recruited from the other firm. So he's basically giving them an ultimatum. They took the obvious point that I'd become clearly the firm's leader and I got larger allocation of shares. Professionally, mission accomplished. Emotionally, though, I had just hit the self-destruct button. Only would take 16 years to go off.

I wasn't emotionally aware enough to realize that Ron had felt slighted and that I had moved up and he didn't. So this is, remember his best friend, he called him a blood brother, the person that they, they were the first two guys that want to start the company together. So it says, oh, so then this is, so there's all this beef between Bill and Ron. Ron wants to fire Bill, who's a partner.

Mike covers Bill's saying, no, no we shouldn't and so it says um like you know i didn't the reason he's saying basically i didn't want to do is because we're succeeding right now i don't want to kick a partner out like we're successful let's just not do this so he says i didn't want to mess with our success i wanted everything to say the except the same except that i'd get more what i should have done for ron was give him some of my own allocation of shares and then figure out how to handle bill to be to really be his blood brother i should have behaved as his agent and then this is another he's he's setting us up for the the payoff at the end uh with another one of these sentences he says bill never had an inkling of Ron's animus.

I was amazed at how well Ron hid his true feelings from someone he saw every day. So what Ron is doing to Bill, Ron also does to Mike. And that's what I mean about people just being Machiavellian. I can see why it's usually just one founder at the top. And then it's just relationship relationship it's very hard and this is kind of Ron winds up being the set the for his entire life he says he's the world's best number two so he knows he couldn't be a number one in the sense of like leading the company like he needed somebody like Mike and then he I think to

this day he's still uh running the second in command at universal he's done that job for like 20 something years but it's any by his own admission this is how tricky human behavior is do you see what i'm saying here like his own admission is i'm the world's great best number two so i'm the scotty pippen to other people's michael jordans but that number two still secretly wants to be number one and he's just very macavelian with this i'm not like trying to trash the guy i don't know who he is. Like I, and in the end, like towards the end of this podcast and the end of the book,

we'll get to, you know, there's a happier ending somewhere in there, but it's just, human behavior is tricky, man. It's just tricky. I guess my point.

All right, let's move on. I don't need to keep hammering that point. I found this interesting. This is just something that's kind of like something I try to internalize for myself. It's just like you've got to be careful what you expose yourself to because inevitably the things that you expose yourself, the ideas, what you pay attention to, the people you're around,

they're just going to influence you. And they can influence you positively or negatively. So this is what influenced some of the influences that Mike adapted and used to build the culture of CAA. So he says, our corporate culture was American team sports boosterism. I don't know what that is. Mixed with Spartan military tactics, mixed with Asian philosophy, all overlaid by the community spirit of the Three Musketeers. That culture was a collective endeavor and one that hundreds of people shaped and defined

over the years. But out of all the partners, I gave the most thought to what it should be. I scraped from an eclectic variety of sources, a businessman's version of Picasso's method. From law firms, I took our phraseology. That's interesting. I don't even know if that's a real word. Ron was a partner, and so were the people in the mailroom, and also the paramount importance of confidentiality. So that's from law. Our collaborative approach came from the way Magic Johnson ran his fast break with the Lakers. He'd drive it up the middle, have an open shot, and pass it up to feed an unguarded teammate.

Who wouldn't kill to play with that point guard? At staff meetings and retreats, I began to talk about the philosophy of the Chinese general and military strategist Sun Tzu, whose art of war I'd read in college. We took his ideas on loyalty, on teamwork, and on how having complete information was the key to decision making. The book also resonated with me because it prioritized strength and toughness. Ron and Bill thought my emphasis on Sun Tzu was crazy until they realized that it worked. In truth, though, the Chinese general was always a bit of a prop. This is an interesting perspective. I've never heard this before. I never thought about it in this way, I guess I should say. It wasn't so much that what he said that inspired CAA as the idea that we, a five-year-old company, was adhering to a philosophy from 2,500 years ago.

It gave us instant roots. I was obsessed with the Spartan phalanx, the idea that you were only as strong as the colleague on your left. We'd go to meetings as a group. We'd go to screenings as a group. Walking down the aisles together half an hour early, 10 or 15 strong. on your left. We'd go to meetings as a group. We'd go to screenings as a group, walking down the aisles together half an hour early, 10 or 15 strong, a show of power. Okay. So that's the end of the beginning of the company. And they're going to use these strategies and these tactics and Mike's super, super aggressive behavior to kind of dominate the industry.

So I'm going to jump way ahead. And now I want to talk about what happens after you become the thing you hate. And now we're going to get into more about Mike's own psychology of how he runs his business and like the human elements to dealing with people. So this is how he realized, oh, crap, I became the thing I hate. And he basically, he's trying to do a favor for somebody else, and he has to roll over somebody that was nice to him, and he didn't have to roll over. Or he didn't have to do that, but he did it anyways. And then he talks about the weird thing is realizing why was she so easy to roll over?

It's not. She's a very strong, successful person. And so this is his thoughts after. It was her very agreeableness about the whole extortion process that stays with me. She was too nice. That meant that people had to be nice to us now, that we had the power to compel no part of the transaction i muscled through was about helping talented people pursue or find their vision that was his original mission statement or goal for creative for caa right it was zero creative artists and 100 agency

i had become everything i detested in the 60s when I was a bleeding heart liberal at UCLA. So he's basically becoming the very symbol of the establishment. I had become the man. This is what's weirdly refreshing about this book is he's just kind of honest about his faults. And he talks about it. He's like, I hid all this during my time. Like I couldn't show weakness. And for him to show it to us in the, um, in this book is fascinating

because it's not, it's kind of like an emotional rollercoaster reading this thing. Like, especially when you get towards the end where we're at now, where like, there's a good chunk of it where I was like, oh my God, this guy, like, I feel bad for him. And then, you know, luckily he kind of saves at the end. So this is just one sentence. But, again, I just want to bring it to our attention because I feel we're doing something wrong. We're doing something wrong when you see. I wrote the note I left on my margin on the post-it note. It says, there is that feeling again.

And let me just read this and then I'll tell you what I think we're doing wrong. The first 10 years at CAA were the best 10 years of my life. And the reason I say there's a feeling again, that like taking those all these podcasts for entrepreneurs while they're building their businesses or after they built a business, reading these books, you're not going to write a book about your business until it's already built, right? You see this thing over and over and over again. They look back longingly at the beginning when they were small, when it was just a group. They were not – they don't look back at, oh, now we're at the pinnacle of industry. I have the most power I ever had, the most success I ever had,

and now it's just kind of expanding out and continuing to dominate. It's this. Humans, for some reason, they miss this part. Listen to what he's saying. The first 10 years of CA were the best 10 years of his life. He's 70-something years old now. That's a tiny, I shouldn't say it's tiny, 10 years out of 70.

It's just like like he's not saying when i was a parent this is the best time like i shouldn't say that that's not obviously like he loves his kids it's as almost every parent does um i guess what i'm saying is like we feel the need to grow out of this when maybe staying in that for as long as possible would be better served and maybe that's just not possible because why are so many smart and successful people they grow out of that and then they look back and realize with a little bit of tinge of regret that you know constantly like growth for growth's sake and expansion for expansion's sake which is what exactly what

he does for caa did not lead michael to happier. After reading that book, that much is very clear. So I just want to, I don't know, when I see that in these books, I want to share it with you because I don't know the answer here. I'm learning this stuff at the same time you are. It's just, it's weird. There's something, and maybe it's just like our natural tendency to be nostalgic about times past but they do tend to hone in on the beginnings like oh the best time was when it was just a little group of us in a

room and like we we had you know just a handful of clients and we were doing everything together and then you know inevitably grow so large you can't do that anymore and they they don't seem to like it as much and um And we're going to talk about, so now I'm going to go into his typical day schedule and remember the schedule because eventually we're going to get to the point where he's sick of it. He's sick of himself and he's sick of what he's done.

All right, so he says, this is a typical day schedule. He says, treating my clients like family was hard on me and my actual family. I woke up at 5.45 a.m. He says, arts and I'd work myself to exhaustion. By 8 a.m. after showering, eating a fast breakfast, I'd be on the car phone en route to the office. After our morning meeting, I'd take meetings, have lunch, have a drink with a colleague and a working dinner and all in between running calls up to 300 phone conversations a day. After being a chameleon all day at work, it took me an hour or so to figure out who the fuck I was when I got

home. And all the time the phone would keep ringing, which drove Judy crazy, his wife. She would want to discuss my day to feel closer to me, but I was exhausted by my day and didn't want to talk about work in front of the kids. I wanted them to feel normal and safe. After the kids went to sleep, I worked every night, skimming through a couple of the three or four VHS cassettes I'd brought home and chipping away at the stack of screenplays. Then I'd fall asleep to Johnny Carson at midnight, and then he'd get up and do the exact same thing the very next day.

So that's kind of an untenable position to stay in for a very long time, especially as he gets older. Okay. So this is his feelings. Remember, I'm towards the end of the book. Like, I mean, I'm way past the point where CA is a startup. And this reminded me of something I took notes on with the founder of Stripe, Patrick Collison, who's a fascinating – he's got a – every time I'm able to, like, read his writing or hear him on a podcast, I try to because he's got a really interesting mind to me. And he said something that was – let me pull it up real quick. Okay, I grabbed my notes real quick. All right, so he said something that was, let me pull it up real quick. Okay, I grabbed my notes real quick.

All right, so he said something that was interesting. And he was asked a question like, what's one thing that you wish you knew? Or that you wish you knew before you started? He says what no one told him before he started. Even if the company is succeeding, things will still often not feel great. I thought if the company was succeeding, it would feel good day to day. You're always operating at the edge, but you're always operating at the edge of what you can handle and inevitably always on the cusp of feeling

like you're going to fall over, which is very strange because I think a lot of people would look at the company he's built and be like, wow, this is one massively successful internet company. It underpins so much of the internet economy. He must be just waking up feeling fantastic every day. He's saying, no, it's the opposite. I'm always pushing myself to the limit, so I'm always uncomfortable. This is Mike expressing basically the same exact thought. Each time I walked through our front door, I felt a physical chill, like the chill you felt in high school before a final exam. How much did we have to earn today to cover our costs? What if the business shifted and the money dried up?

The feeling would recede for a time once I sat down at my desk and began to work, but I carried those fears to my last day there. And again, I think that's so fascinating, the difference between our interpretation or what we're inferring from the outside to what it actually feels like. He built CAA and was widely successful after a few years. He did that job for over 20 years and he still felt like that 20 years later.

Okay. And I want to, so now we're, this is later on, this is more of like the human element, the problems he's having with his co-founder so he said one morning in 1987 ron came into my office shut the door and said i've got a problem i said shoot we've had a thousand conversations that started like that i lost a lot of money in a poker game and i can't pay up i was shocked but i said okay we'll take care of it i figured it was a hundred thousand dollars or so how much i'm not sure you'll be able to take care of it. Well, how much is it? Over $5 million. And this is the important part, not the fact that he lost that much money. But what does that mean is the implications of their relationship. As I strove to underreact,

Ron told me he'd been going to Vegas several times a week. He'd make the flight after work, play deep into the night, and grab a few hours of sleep before flying back to LA in the morning and working his ass off as usual, never missing a meeting. I was unable to process this. He must be a phenomenal poker player, I thought. He has no tells. Then again, he must be a shitty poker player because he just lost over five million dollars. My partner, my best friend, the guy I was tied to for life, clearly had an unconscious need to throw everything away we had worked for. For the next year and a half, Ron and I worked harder and harder and more closely than ever. Then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat. I skipped

over the part where they obviously help him out and they find a way to pay off his debt. Then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat So this is a year and a half later. Then one morning he closed my door, took a seat, and looked at me with a funeral expression. You're not going to believe this, he said. But another poker game, an even bigger loss this time, $6.5 million. I felt that he had smashed me with a baseball bat. Who was this man? I was deeply, deeply shaken.

Despite my 360-degree paranoia, I hadn't seen any of this coming, which scared the crap out of me. I prided myself on reading people and forecasting from subtle clues. And here, I hadn't been reading Ron Wright for 10 years. The fact was so shocking to me that I instantly tried to forget it. Skipping another couple pages. This is just real quick and something that happens throughout the book. This entire book is littered with regrets, which I think is important for us to learn from.

So hopefully we avoid that same fate. So he's looking back. This is before he even leaves CAA. He says, I would have had a much happier life if I hadn't been so determined to appear all-knowing and invulnerable. Remember that statement he said at the beginning where most of life is shades of gray? And he treated it like it was black and white. Oh, this is a great quote about, so he hires,

he has a lot of personal trainers and martial art instructors and he noticed something about people. He'd invite people he worked with, partners, clients, employees, clients employees etc over to his house every Saturday because he would go through these these workouts and something that I think is a great quote and something for us to try to adhere to our life and you don't have to apply it to working out apply it to whatever it is that you do but it's very rare in humans and he says uh talked about this guy you know come over over a few times and inevitably everybody would quit.

So he says, but he stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop. Okay, so I'm going to skip. Now I'm skipping over a huge chunk of the book again because he starts, he's perpetually dissatisfied, and I didn't know that he was kind of embarrassed to be an agent,

which we'll get to in a minute. But he starts doing these things where he's like, well, if we're packaging up deals and bringing all the talent and the raw materials for the studios to make their product he starts like why don't i learn investment banking and trying to do like he had a you know an entire network of people so he starts brokering deals for other companies to buy movie studios and and just kind of spreading out everything that caa does this actually causes a rift between him and ron because he's having to travel like uh in this case he does a deal

through uh with the one i'm about to tell you he does a deal with sony buying mca which is the the company that did i get that right yeah sony but uh which is the one that lou wasserman that the name i said you should remember earlier in the podcast. And so he's having to travel and it takes a lot of time. I'm going to tell you, I'm going to start this section off with how much money they make because it's rather impressive that he expanded out from a talent agency to do this. But it also caused a lot of rift and eventual breaking up of his partner, which we're going to get into in a minute. But I thought this is an insight into the psychology. And I don't think it's just the psychology of Mike. I think it's the psychology

of a lot of entrepreneurs. And I don't think it has to, it's a universal trait, but I've seen it pop up a lot. And it's the fastest animal on the field. So once he, Sony closes, they buy the company for $6.5 billion, which is the largest deal Mike had done up until the point in his life. And Hirata is the guy, is now paying Mike for his services. He gave me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit, $135 million. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with $60 million for CAA, which is equivalent of $110 million in today's money. It changed everything for us. In Hollywood, where people didn't know Goldman Sachs from Saks Fifth Avenue, everyone was dumbstruck that a talent agency could earn that kind of fee,

let alone arrange and execute a deal of that magnitude. Of course, my elevated profile pissed off my partners, and I began to feel that I was a hamster on a wheel. Part of me felt I was running on the wrong wheel, that I should be going into business for myself, and part of me believed that I wasn't really a hamster, but a cheetah, the fastest animal on the field. Even as everyone was telling me to slow down, I wanted to speed up. So this is something I've never run into before in reading these books,

where he actually spent 20 years building a company he didn't even really want to do. And so I'm gonna share some of these insights, but he's talking about this here. He's like, well, maybe I should just be in business for myself. Maybe I'm not a hamster. Maybe I'm a cheater. Maybe I'm a cheetah rather. Maybe I'm better than everybody else that I'm playing against. They don't know what they're talking about. Okay. So before I get there, just a little bit more darkness. Cause now, you know, he's been in business close to what? What is this?

17, 15 to 17 years. He's going to a funeral. Remember, I'm skipping over this entire part about his fallout with Mike Eisner. He leaves CIA and a deal falls through that Ron winds up taking and then the backup deal

is to become Michael Eisner's number two at Disney which only lasts like 14 months but um Mike Eisner's right-hand man dies so he's at the funeral he says when Frank Wells Eisner's beloved right-hand man died in a helicopter crash in 1994 the memorial service held at a sound stage at Warner Brothers was packed with more than a thousand devastated mourners so I need you to understand the time. This is one year before Mike is leaving CAA. So this is towards the end of his agent career. And you're going to see what the result of that is.

So Frank Wells, he had a funeral. It was packed with more than 1,000 devastated people. I tried to cheer up Frank's widow, Luann, by saying, if I died tomorrow, there'd be 25,000 people here to make sure I was dead. She laughed, which was my intent, but it was true. So he's keenly aware that he's kind of burned bridges and it's, you know, a lot of people despise him. Which again, I think, I don't think, is it, if you're, there is an element of humanity that like, you could be super successful, but if you do it so in a way where everybody hates you, I don't think, there is an element of humanity that you could be super successful, but if you do it so in a way where everybody hates you, I don't think you're going to be happy.

Okay, so this is him realizing that he's done. He's done with CAA. I never stopped loving artists in the creative process. I never lost my fascination for the magic of making something from nothing. But agenting was a young person's game. And you could run just so long and so far. At 48, having run since my first day at William Morris, I was tired. I was tired of getting up at 6 a.m. and squeezing in a workout while on the phone with your app. I was tired of rolling through 300 calls a day, talking till my throat was raw. I was tired of having lunches and dinners scheduled three months out. I was tired of flying 600 hours a year, the equivalent of one work week a month. I was tired of owning six tuxedos for the

30 obligatory events between November 1st and Christmas. I was tired of returning calls from 7 p.m., going to dinner till 10 p.m., coming home to a mountain of pink message slips, calling Japan till midnight, and starting all over again six hours later. I was tired of submerging myself, drowning myself in the lives of my clients and their families and significant others. Our clients' worries about the size of their trailers and how big their billing would be had come to seem increasingly petty. The truth is I had always disliked having to see to people's creature comforts, making sure our actors and our directors had fresh guava and the perfect nanny. You're an adult. Run your own life. And so in the midst of being tired, he also talks about the fact

that he's embarrassed to be an agent he he was looking for a lot of external validation which i think is probably a path for um unhappiness for all of us because i don't think that many people actually like achieve that calling so he's basically saying hey i'm going to go from the sell side to the buy side and he wants to run his own studio and he wants he basically wants he doesn't want to run the company he built although successful you know a couple hundred million dollars in revenue which which should be fantastic for most people but mike he has this like this well he's gonna say he's i'm looking for for respect and validation which i don't think is a good idea.

So he says, I was about to become a very wealthy man. He's in negotiations to run a couple studios. And this is fun. It's not funny. This is interesting because it falls through. When I was younger, cash was my ticket out. I'd made lots of it since. But I yearned to accumulate money, to build equity, which felt different from merely making it.

Once an agent stopped working, there was no accrued equity to fall back on. I watched the runaway growth at Microsoft, where Bill Gates had built one of the world's largest companies. Fortunes were beginning to be made off the internet. Executives I considered my peers, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, were raking in hundreds of millions in stock options. So this is before he leaves CAA to go to Disney. My appetite for corporate bucketeering grew as I worked with Herb Allen and mingled with Fortune 50 CEOs in Sun Valley.

It grew further whenever I lost an auction to an art collector with deeper resources. I wanted to play in that league too. And in truth, I had always been faintly embarrassed to be an agent. As much as CAA had professionalized our field, it would never be a noble calling. I wanted to be one of the six people who could say yes to a movie. I felt I needed the credential of a public company job. I was still looking for respect and validation. The reason I say that's not a good idea because I don't believe that you could ever fulfill that desire, the need for constant validation and respect from other people,

I think is you shouldn't play games you can't win, and that's a game you can't win. You should be doing things internally. There's nothing wrong. I just have a different perspective i'm not like it's like there's nothing really wrong if you want to play in that you want to be a fortune 50 ceo for me like i'm not i don't think size of a company is as important as like the product you make so what i mean by that like let's say you're fortune 50 ceo at the time this is in what the 80s so there's probably phil might be in there. Well, what's the product you make? You sell a product that is

addicting, unhealthy, and kills people. I don't admire that. Meanwhile, you can have a hugely massive company that builds great products. And I think the like what you should shoot for like i apple's a massive company i love their products like i don't this whole fascination with businesses is weird to me or it's just all about size um where there's nothing like size in and of itself is not a bad thing i'm not saying that by any means i'm just saying that it just depends on what your like company's made to do you could have a giant company that has a shitty product that's not you know i i don't think that's appealing okay so in between all this he's thinking he's gonna take over mca which again uh he he um brokered the deal so mca bought or excuse me sony bought mca uh and then eventually they need somebody this is a few years later so Brokered the deal, so Sony bought MCA.

And then eventually, this is a few years later, so they need somebody to run the company. He's tapping. He's doing negotiations with the family. And the family that buys it is a liquor company called Seagram's, which I think is the same company that his dad worked for, which is kind of like a small world thing um and he's he's trying to he basically negotiated for him to go over there and then for a ceo and then ron his blood brother to go as coo so he's like second in command the deal falls through and he's like okay

this isn't gonna work ron's like ron was acting as his agent during this time and he's like okay well let me give it another crack to see if we can do this. Cause I, you know, me and you both want to get out of the agent business. Let's try something new. And this is, you're going to start to see where Ron, you know, it was kind of Machiavellian. He said early in July, Ron called from New York one afternoon. Guess what? He said, I've met with Edgar. That's one of the guys that's in charge of, that owns the company that owns MCA. And there's been a change in plans. He wants me to run MCA and I think I'm going to do it. I felt completely numb, frozen with disbelief. The job on the table, chief operating officer, was one I had negotiated for Ron in my last go-round with Edgar, with one big difference.

I was out of the picture. They bring in somebody else as CEO for Ron to report to. After a long silence, when I felt that I could speak without my voice breaking, I told Ron how much I needed him, what it meant to have him by my side. I'm great at pitching even when I'm not sincere, and I was a thousand percent sincere, so it was my greatest pitch ever. I'm sure he'd be won over. What came back in a burst of rage were all of Ron's pent-up grievances. Remember how the entire book is sprinkled through? It's kind of weird that Bill worked with Ron every day and didn't know how he really felt about him or talking about how is this guy losing millions of dollars and taking trips to vegas i don't know about and etc etc so what came back in a burst of range were all

of ron's pent-up grievances how it under negotiated for him with edgar edgar and over negotiated for bill and that same guy because i'd valued them equally in my ask. How I'd made a big mistake by walking away from MCA and how it had always been all about me, never about him. How it was time to strike out on his own, to be recognized as something more than my consigliere. I tried to sell him for two more hours as the knot in my stomach swelled into my throat. Finally, my voice faltered and I gave way. His mind was made up. I felt absolutely crushed. Ron was leaving and taking the best, most human part of me with him.

I felt like I was getting divorced. so that's where they that's basically the end of so they they had a 20-year partnership let's say they're from the time these guys were in their late 20s to their late 40s they don't reconcile and i'm going to get to that part for there's a 20-year gap so you're friends for 20 years and then you're basically i mean enemies for 20 years and then you're basically, I mean, enemies for 20 years. And they do a lot of immature stuff to each other, like plant rumors about each other in the press. Ron tells Mike that he's interested in buying this house. Mike buys it first. And like they wind up, he winds up giving the, letting Mike or letting Ron by the house but it's just like a lot of immature stuff to do when you're in your 50s right um and there's all so he gets up I'm now I'm skipping over so I need to be clear with you I skipped over the whole Disney mess so he leaves CAA

the people at CAA that take over hate him so he's basically has no part of his own company he loses his best friend he goes to work for his second best friend mike eisner mike eisner winds up being a deceitful person and um basically publicly humiliating him firing him so after 14 uh months he gets fired he wants to collecting like 130 million dollars from Disney, but still, he basically has no job at this point. And now that he's out, he has no power, he starts another company, AMG, that's gonna be like management and other stuff.

It doesn't work out. He winds up losing tens of millions of dollars on that deal. So basically what I'm saying is, remember back a few minutes ago where I was like, this whole striving for the validation from other people is kind of a dead end. Well, he did that and he never got to run the public company. He never got any of that. And he lost almost everything. I mean, he's still very, very rich, but he's still not happy about this. And then now Ron and a bunch of other people in the industry,

like David Geffen and all these other people are like, you know, Mike doesn't have any power. He's weak now. So they start attacking him. They start spreading rumors about him. They trash his name. And he just does some really, really, really, he even says like, I basically, every problem I tried to solve, I now ended up making it worse, which is exact opposite of what he did to his whole career. And so we're going to see more darkness and more regrets. So now he got sick of David trying to sabotage. This is David Geffen. He got sick of him trying to sabotage his company even after AMG closes.

Like he sells off the assets and just takes the loss. And so he says, I'd even gone see david in his offices at amblin entertainment and warned him that if he didn't stay out of my affairs i'll beat the living shit out of you he didn't stay out so i vented to vanity fair and this is one of his biggest mistakes if you google his name now this comes up actually where he um he vents to vanity fairy and he says that geffen and ron and michael Michael Eisner and all these other people are part of a gay mafia. And he's just ranting and he's saying it to a reporter who then reports his words. And he says this idea was absurd and poisonous because most of the people I named were

not even gay. So he's just making a bad mistake. He's in a bad emotional spot. So he's just making a bad mistake he's in a bad emotional spot so he's just compounding his his mistakes here and then more regrets and he says i always thought it was vital to mix business and friendship i was learning painfully that it was better to keep those realms far apart business always gets personal i thought back on the career path i'd taken and realized that i would have been much happier as an artist or as an architect, happier in an arena where you don't make five new enemies every time you create something. And that's something I didn't know anything about, like the entertainment industry before this book. I can't recall anything that is.

And it just sounds like a terrible place to spend your time. So that's the negative part. I'm not going to end this on a negative part because I get to the point in the book. Now there's only a few pages left. And I was like, wow, man, this is, this is not, I just feel sad for this guy. This is terrible. Cause he said, I really do think like most people, they want to be liked, right? Well, thank God he meets somebody that I personally admire, although I'd never met, but I did a podcast on, Mark Andreessen. And Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz both talk about the influence that Mike Ovitz had on them. So we're kind of coming full circle. And so now he has a new beginning based on having dinner with Mark Andreessen. And he winds up

finding a purpose in life where he can actually succeed. He becomes a philanthropist, an investor, an advisor to entrepreneurs. So we're going to see a little bit about that here. So he has dinner and he says, partnering with Ben Horowitz, Mark imagined how startups might use business software

on the network, what people now call the cloud, instead of seeking capital and costly servers. Way ahead of the herd, he saw that everyone would soon become connected to the digital network. So he's meeting Mark after Netscape. And when him and Ben start LoudCloud, which turns into Opsware, or is it the reverse? I don't know if it's LoudCloud turns into Opsware or Opsware turns into LoudCloud, but I should know that because I did a podcast on it. Oh, LoudCloud turns into Opsware or Opsware turns into Loud Cloud, but I should know that because I did a podcast on it. Oh, Loud Cloud turns into Opsware.

Okay. So he said, when we met at an L.A. restaurant, I expected a geek from Central Casting. What I got was someone 6'5", an athletic-looking guy with a winning smile. He was hyper-articulate, insatiably curious, and voraciously well-read. He was Michael Crichton on steroids. Mark invited me north to meet with Ben Horowitz. Ben is a brilliant manager and entrepreneur in his own right and together he and Mark were a formidable team. They asked me to join the Loud Cloud Board and so

began a new chapter on my life. As Mark and Ben led me into their world, I felt like a privileged student in a graduate school of one. That may be my favorite sentence in the entire book because I think about if you could take the idea of being a privileged student in a graduate school of one, I really feel that when you're reading a book like the one I have in my hand and some of the other books that have been covered on the podcast, you're taking their entire experience, and in this case, we have 70 years of experience that Mike has in life and in business, and you're compressing it down into a few hours. And as I'm talking, I'm trying to pull up this tweet that I saw that I absolutely love and I want to remind myself and it says, a great book takes years to write, but only

hours to read. The reader nets the difference. And I think what's happening with Mike here is even though he's he's he's had tons of experience in his own life he's now being able to benefit um and start to work in an industry where Mark and Ben had been working for a long time and they understood and I just love that description I felt like a privileged student in the graduate school of one um and then a little bit I just want to include this part because it speaks about the influence that people around you have and something I discussed on the podcast, at least with Ben Horowitz, I know. So it says, in other words, they talk about they come to after they sell Opsware for $1.65 billion.

They're like, Mike's like, hey, I want to start investing, angel investing with you guys. And they're like, oh, funny you should mention that. We're actually going to do something more formal. So it says, in other words, Mark and Ben set out to be the CAA of Silicon Valley. They borrowed our roots to give themselves gravitas the same way I had borrowed from Lou Wasserman and Sun Tzu. In essence, the firm linked all the partners' networks and added specialists to strengthen the whole organism. No individual owns an account at Andreessen Horowitz. Investments are chosen by joint approval of the general partners,

with the entire staff having a say. Then the team provides in-house experts to assist its startups with recruitment, budgeting, operations, sales, publicities, IPOs, whatever an entrepreneur might need. This is exactly what Mike did to the entertainment industry 20 years prior, which was new at the time. So a few years later, about a year later, I should say, they hold an intervention for Mike at a New York restaurant.

And they're like, hey, stop messing around in L.A., come to Silicon Valley. And he said, this, Mark said, gravely is an intervention. I tense knowing what was coming. Lately, I'd been spending two days a week at Andres and Horwitz. Now it's about to be triple teamed into picking up stakes and making Northern California my base of operations.

And I'm skipping over this part, but this just made me laugh when I read it. As we rose from the table, Mark, and he was still a little unsure, but he's like, it's tough to resist heartfelt rose from the table, Mark, and he was still a little unsure, but he's like, it's tough to resist heartfelt counsel from three people you trust, especially when they're three awfully smart people.

And this part made me laugh. As we rose from the table, Mark said, Cortez, dude, his reference to the Spanish conquistador who burned his ships to prevent his crew from returning to Europe. And it made me laugh. Made me laugh too, Mike.

Okay. And then this is actually funny because I'm gonna skip over a bunch of, he describes his time since then. He's now been working in it for years, investing in all kinds of companies and helping all kinds of entrepreneurs. So he's an investor and advisor to entrepreneurs

and he talks about what his value is. He says, founders are much more interested in my mistakes, which can often be generalized to their situation than in my successes, which were often particular to the agency business. I feel I highlighted that because I feel there's a lot of useful things to learn about starting your own company and handling people

and running businesses in this book. But I do feel like that's the feeling I had. He's telling us in an honest way that he didn't have to do the mistakes he made so we can avoid them, which I think is extremely valuable. And almost done, guys. Don't worry. I know it's a long podcast, but this is a really interesting book.

It's an emotional roller coaster. If you read this book, there's going to be times where you're happy, and then you're going to be sad. But I think you can't have the yin without the yang. So that's why it's taken me so long to get through it. Okay, so here comes the reconciliation. And I actually love this idea. He said, over the years, I kept hearing that Ron was still furious at me.

Someone who was on Universal's plane, that's the company that Ron works for, He said, Everywhere I go, I keep hearing from people that are saying terrible things about me. Now think about that. They were best friends for 20 years. This is really sad. I'm sure some of your complaints are completely justified, but they can't all be because we had 25 good years together. Oh, it's 25. I was wrong about that. We were getting up there in age, and I'd like not to leave the planet with this breach between us. Somewhat to my surprise, he instantly said, I'd like that too. So they agreed to meet. After shaking hands and sizing each other up,

we made some small talk as we looked over the menus. It felt both uncomfortable and strangely warmly familiar. We left a second meeting up in the air. After pondering the problem, I called Ron and said, this is what I think is a good idea. I think it'd be best if we each had a mediator who can listen to both of us and help us interpret each other and referee if necessary. So I found a UCLA professor to mediate. Ron and I met at a coffee shop in the basement of her office, the mediator, and then went up to her office for a two-hour session, our first of three. Ron started talking and didn't stop for a half hour. He immediately acknowledged that he spent 20 years denigrating me to anyone who would listen.

He said, I was the guy taking care of the agency while you were running all around the world. You had the big profile, but I was doing all the hard work. So he's admitting that he was resentful, right? He responded that without him the business would have fallen apart when i started to explain he talked over me he wasn't going to let me express my feelings he was still the keeper of our collective emotions so the first session didn't end particularly well the second one went better with the mediator's help i got a chance to apologize and ron accepted my apology.

Then he owned up to all his rancor and sabotage, which was a form of an apology or at least of candor. Yet even as he worked to get the feelings out, I felt destroyed because Ron kept confirming my worst fears. Every time anyone in the town had struck a match of accusation against me, Ron had dumped on a truckload of gas. No one was better equipped to put you away than me, he said. I told him, Ron, you were unhappy at CAA, so you kind of shoved it to me. I apologize for missing the signs that you were unhappy, but you could have just told me. He smiled a little and said, yeah, but you didn't want to hear it. After the sessions, we began meeting for lunch. He talked about his job. I talked about how I didn't have a job.

Ron followed up. He checked in. He was courteous and thoughtful. He made me feel like I was the only thing on his mind. It was seductive, particularly as more and more time passed without strife. But a voice in my head head kept saying you were wrong about his feelings for at least 10 for the last 10 years at caa he handled you beautifully then so it makes you certain you're right now part of me wanted to believe in his sincerity and the promise of our old friendship part of me was still angry part of me felt sorry for him part of me felt sorry for both of us still we began talking three times a week easing toward a renewal of our intimacy i had missed it so and now he's going to extend this he says to somebody else he says that same reconciling impulse

made me reach out to david geffen remember that's the guy that he said he threatened to beat him up and he accused of being part of a gay mafia we met amorea in new york shook hands and had a civil lunch he told me my biggest problem with you is that i tried to be your friend and you wouldn't be friends with me the old me would have argued would have objected that that wasn't the whole story but But I just said, you're right. I was there to make peace, and David said he wanted the same. We were two guys in our 70s looking to fix what we had broken. Ronnie later told me that David didn't have anything bad to say about me afterward. That made me smile a little.

The win, nowadays, is breaking even, but I'll take it. So you're seeing a lot of personal growth from him. And this is where I'll close. And at the end of the day, it is all about the people, even for tough people like Mike that don't want to outwardly show it in private moments of reflection. And in his case, at the end of his autobiography, he admits as much. So he talks about the fact that he still owns the building the CIA was in and that he went by there the other day. Now he's over 70.

He hadn't been in the company for almost 25 years, whatever the time frame is. And he's reflecting here. And I think this is an important lesson for us to understand and kind of internalize so we don't miss out on this. The building felt drained, empty not just of the old bustle, but of the magic, the power. It felt small. It felt like your childhood house does when you go back as an adult. When we first inhabited the building, the whole mighty team of us, we were giants.

I was hit by the magnitude of what I'd done in that building, and it seemed kind of amazing. This kid from the valley, with no stature, no tenure, no network to rely on, reshaped the entertainment business. In my empty fortress, I realized that I wasn't out of the valley yet. I'm free of it in my daily life, but I'll never be free of it in my brain. You carry your origins with you. Still, those origins drove me here and built this place and attracted so many bright, funny, creative colleagues. In the silence I discovered that the only thing I really miss about the agency business was the camaraderie, my comrades and friends, and the

passionate way we spent our lives together. I miss the people. And that is where I will leave this story. If you want the full story, I'd recommend reading the book. There's a ton of interesting anecdotes all about, I mean, people you would know, famous celebrities and stuff that I left out. So before we go, I just want to remind you that I just presented this entire podcast ad-free. As a podcast fan myself, I feel that's the best experience for the listener. And then if I do the best experience for the listener, it'd be the best thing for the podcast. So this podcast is ad-free and independent, which means I rely on the support of the people who get value from this podcast. Recently, I had somebody, actually two people email me, I think it was good ideas.

They want a way to be able to support on a per podcast basis. So in other words, if you listen to this whole podcast and you thought you got value out of it, please consider, I hate using the word donate, but sending me $2. $2 is my suggested amount, but you can send whatever you want. The link is in the show notes that's available on your podcast player where you can donate right there. It's also available at founderspodcast.com by tapping on the dollar sign in the header. So that's for people that have expressed interest to basically pay for whichever podcast they really like. And so that's the option. If you want to support podcasts on a monthly basis, you can become a Misfit and you can get access to my private podcast feed, which you'll immediately unlock 17 podcasts that I've done and you'll get

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or on a monthly basis if you just want to set it up one time and forget it. Other than that, I've talked an unbelievably long time today. So I thank you very much for your support. Please tell a friend about it, about this podcast. Share it on social media if you want to.

And I will be back next week with another biography of an entrepreneur. Thank you very much. Bye.