Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Peter Chernin - Betting on Passion - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 263]

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

My guest today is Peter Chernin, who’s had a Hall of Fame career in the entertainment business. Peter ran News Corp and Fox for fifteen years between 1996 and 2009 before co-founding The Chernin Group, which has become one of the leading investment firms in the consumer space. Along the way, he has also produced a number of blockbuster films, including Titanic, Avatar, The Greatest Showman, and The Planet of the Apes Trilogy. Please enjoy this wonderful discussion with Peter Chernin.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus has built the most extensive primary information platform available for investors. With Tegus, you can learn everything you’d want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to instantly access more than 20,000 calls on Affirm, Teladoc, Roblox, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Visit tegus.co/patrick to learn more.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Levels. As one of their early access members, Levels was one of the most interesting products I've ever used. Levels is attempting to make continuous glucose monitoring mainstream by using real-time biosensors to see how food affects your health. Using Levels made me realize how little we understand about what's happening in our bodies. And it was the only product that ever made me willing to log food. If you want early access to become a Member of their private Beta, (the waitlist is currently at 150K+ people), use this link – levels.link/PATRICK   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:03:06] - [First question] - Business and investing lessons from producing Titanic and Avatar [00:06:44] - Defining great content and why James Cameron’s franchises have done so well [00:10:26] - Contributing factors to box-office domination of pre-existing franchises [00:12:56] - Tailwinds in his earlier career and identifying them in time to get behind change [00:16:07] - Identifying Showcase was a subscription business early on, unlike broadcast businesses [00:19:40] - Signals of passion and how powerful niche audiences can be  [00:23:24] - What a phony aggregator is and the slow dissolution of the middle market [00:27:01] - The era of unbundling and direct relationships with superfans [00:30:27] - Lessons learned from building Hulu [00:34:29] - Working with Rupert Murdoch and qualities that separate him from the crowd [00:37:07] - Defining what bravery means in a businesses sense [00:39:22] - A movie he’s made in the past decade that he’s most proud of [00:43:27] - The keys to being an effective partner to creative individuals [00:49:53] - What exists today that may change the future landscape of media writ large [00:52:19] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

This episode of Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Teegas. I started hearing about Teegas when several of my close professional investor friends sent me passages or ideas they'd found on the Teegas platform. Conducting effective primary research shouldn't take weeks. It should take hours. Searching for answers shouldn't be lengthy, cumbersome process. It should be easy and nearly immediate. Expert calls should not cost $1,000. Teaguez solves these problems and makes primary research faster and better for professional investors. Tecis has built the most extensive primary primary information platform available for all investors. With TIGIS, you can learn everything you'd want to know about a company in an on-demand digital platform. Investors share their expert calls, allowing others to

instantly access more than 10,000 calls on Square, Snowflake, or almost any company of interest. All you have to do is log in. Still want to do your own calls, Tegas has a solution. Experts that are just as good or better than what you'd find on other networks for just $300 per call, not the $1,000 or more that others charge. If you're curious about Tegas, top performing investment manager you can think of. They're probably already a TIGA's customer and they'll point you in the right direction because customers, myself included, love Tegas. Visit tigas.co to learn more. This episode of Invest Like the Best is brought to you by Levels. As one of their early access members, Levels was one of the most interesting products I've used. Levels is attempting to make continuous glucose monitoring mainstream by using real-time biosensors to see how food

affects your health. Using Levels made me realize how little we understand about what's happening inside our bodies. And it was the only product that has ever made me willing to log food. If you want early access to become a member of their private beta, where the waitlist is currently 150,000 people, use this link, levels.link slash Patrick. Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest like the best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes,

and other resources to keep learning at join colossus.com. Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaunacy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaunacy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaunice asset management may be. maintain positions and the securities discussed in this podcast.

My guest today is Peter Chernin, who has had a Hall of Fame career in the entertainment business. Peter ran News Corp and Fox for 15 years between 1996 and 2009 before co-founding the Churning Group, which has become one of the leading investment firms in the consumer space. Along the way, he has also produced a number of blockbuster films, including Titanic, Avatar, The Greatest Showman, and the Planet of the Apes trilogy. Please enjoy this wonderful discussion with Peter Turner. So Peter, thanks so much for doing this with me. I thought an interesting place to start, given the wide birth of your career would be with two movies that everyone would be familiar with, those being Titanic and Avatar. It would be interesting to hear, obviously, James Cameron, behind both of them, how Titanic first came to be or that partnership came to be.

But what business and even investing lessons, if you think about the movie as a huge allay of capital to earn a return, what business and investing lessons stand out from the production of those two movies? Titanic was infinitely more influential because it was much more problematic. I was at a different stage of my career. It had a huge impact on teaching things, et cetera, and was the nightmare of all nightmares. Whereas by the time we got to Avatar, I lived through it. Trust me, still really challenging, but it wasn't as challenging. I had an insane amount of confidence driven by Titanic. So the Titanic background is I had been made head of the movie studio when I was, I don't know, 41, I think. I had no background in movies. I was a television guy.

And we had an overall deal with Jim Hammond at the studio. And he's already made Terminator 1 and 2 and nailing him. So he was a big important guy. I didn't know what I was doing, by the way. I was completely trying to learn on the job really quickly. And I had no one to really help me. And I was the chairman and CEO, so it was incumbent upon me to figure it out quickly. Probably in the first three months or so I was there, Jim brought in True Lies.

And it was great script, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then the biggest movie star in the world. Jim Cameron arguably is good a director in the world. And I sort of said to myself, wow, this is easy. I'm good at this job. It's a piece of cake. And I love the script and blah, blah, blah. I greenlit that movie, you know, which is essentially saying I said yes to it. I don't know, probably about $85 million budget, which was probably either the highest

or certainly the top two or three most expensive movies ever made at that point. But it was fine. And we ran into what at the time seemed like really big budget problems at the beginning. He had a $15 million budget problem early on. And I freaked out. I didn't know what to do. And I had a really meaningful conversation with Jim at that point where I was, by the way, winging it.

but the gist of it was, I basically said, look, you're potentially incompetent. I don't believe that's true. You're potentially just set out to the fraud, so I don't believe that's true. What seems more likely to be true is that you are having problems and that you have a knee-jerk paranoia about sharing those problems with the studio. Let me be clear, if you share your problems with me, I'll be the best part you've ever had. And if you don't, this is going to get really ugly. Somehow that conversation was a real breakthrough for both of us.

We sat down over the course of that weekend and got the perfect conversation that you want to have with somebody creative where he said, look, I can cut this and say a million dollars here. I can cut this and do this. I can shoot this slightly differently. But then he'd say, I will kill you before I change this scene. I would run over my mother. So we probably got eight or nine of the $15 million back. It was a real seminal experience.

you want directors who feel incredibly strong about stuff, and you also want directors who are collaborative. And Jim was near perfect in that sense. There was things he said, I can't change this. It's going to ruin the money, and I will never do it. And there are other things. He'd say, look, I can shoot this slightly different. I can get three-cours and million dollars out of here. And so we forged a really good relationship out of that. What, if anything, do you think, unites his movies in terms of what defines great content? It just seems unquestionably True Lies, Avatar, Titanic. These are enormous original works that weren't derived from books necessarily or source material like so many of the Marvel movies and the last decade's been all sequels.

What did those experiences with him teach you about what it means to be great content in the first place? Why did those things so take off, do you think? First of all, True Lies actually was a remake of a small French movie. So there was some source material there. first and foremost genius. That's what unites him. He's just a genius to dig a little deeper. I think he is an extraordinarily humanistic storyteller. So I think these stories have great heroes, real heroic journeys that you want to follow, generally big underdogs and situations, really strong female characters. I think weirdly one of the things Jim regularly gets underestimated about, or people have forgotten. Jim is, historically always been one of the best writers in Hollywood, extraordinarily gifted writer and just a really human storyteller. So I think that unites them.

It's almost impossible to get bored in a Jim Cameron movie because, and a lot of people look at him as such a spectacle director, but he's just so human. Give you a good example, the lead in Avatar, the guy who ultimately puts on the suit and travels, we were probably on our fourth or fifth draft of the script where Jim came and said, I have a really good idea. I want to change him to a man who is a quadriplegic. Think about that opening scene where he puts on the suit and goes and runs across the field.

It's just so insanely human and compelling. And you just have this enormous sense of what this means to that character emotionally. That's some kind of weird level of genius. So there's that on that side, and then he's just technologically adept as anyone I've ever met, is constantly pushing the boundaries of filmmaking from a technological point of view. One of the things, and I'll come back and talk about the Titanic experience, which is where we started, but one of the things that I really thought about significantly both in Titanic and Avatar, was it, if you look back over history, the number one movie of all time tends to be at that

given moment the movie which has pushed spectacle and effects furthest. So whether that was gone with the wind, in those days, was then probably Jaws and Star Wars, Jurassic Park at one point, because you get this phenomenon of wonder. What you're hoping for is been coming out of the theater in the same, oh my God, I can't believe what I just saw. And then I figured, oh, my God, I've got to go see that. And that's part of what gave me the confidence to greenlight these movies that were extraordinary numbers. Both Titanic and Avatar, when they were made, were the most expensive movies ever made. But I sort of felt in the case of Titanic that effects previously had been used in the service of fantasy, outer space, dinosaurs coming to life, et cetera, and that no one had ever seen stable the

art, special effects, to try and recreate something realistic. And I felt that that would be compelling in Titanic. And then in Avatar, what I felt was like there had been a bunch of okay 3D movies, but no one had ever fully explored and realized the ultimate potential in 3D. And I had great confidence that Jim could do that. One of the defining characteristics of, say, the last 10 years has been the dominance of series and sequels at the box office. Obviously, you've bucked this trend, making movies like Ford versus Ferrari and other more original first of their kinds. And I know that's something that you pride yourself on as a producer. What do you think is behind that change and that trend towards box office dominance in the movie industry by already familiar characters, movies, franchises?

I would say one is just caution. People were afraid to make big original things. Ironically, those big franchise, I guess you'd say the three biggest franchises out there, which are Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Now Avatar, all three of those franchises originated in Fox. Lucasfilm, Cooley, before I was there. But we made the first modern-day Marvel movie. We made the first X-Men movie in 2001, long before Disney bought the company,

before Spider-Man before. So at the end of the day, if you're willing to take risks, you can ultimately create more economic value by building new franchises than just continuing to milk them. But if you're cautious and running what's seemingly a pure rational business

and trying to eliminate risk in that business, so you make lots of sequels and franchise movies and remix because it's a safer bet. They're less risky. They are pre-marketing. etc. I think from a corporate side, some of it is just good cautious business. Some of it, in my opinion, is excessive cautious business. And unfortunately, you are in a creative

business, which means you are supposed to create things. I think people should take bigger risks. Part of your job in there is to manage risk and figure out a way to do it in a rational way, because you can create real economic value. The second piece is clearly and particularly at Marvel, from an audience point of view, they have done an amazing job of sort of tapping into appealing characters and probably even more

so appealing mythologies and building out those mythologies. And so the combination of the appeal of those mythologies with state of the art special effects and spectacle seems to be working, not seems it clearly is working and as clearly

appealing to audiences. Whether I personally assume nothing works for but I've been proved wrong in the past and we'll see. If you take your career as sort of the through line, it seems as though you've always had this deep felt sense of where the tailwinds are and maybe where the winds are shifting and you making changes in your career accordingly to get back behind the tailwinds. How would you describe the tailwinds of the first chunk of your career,

maybe up through the founding of the turning group and but shifting in your personal focus? What did those tailwinds feel like and what were the winds of change that caused you to sort of move to the next chapter. I'm not sure I'm all that brilliant at identifying tailwinds. I was probably 70% luck. Certainly in the early stages of my career, most of it was luck, certainly up until I became head of the movie studio from 92 to 96. I'm not sure I was overwhelmingly smart at identifying tailwinds. I happen to have been the benefit of extraordinary tailwinds. Look back and think about the traditional media business through that period of time. You just had these constant explosions, which you had this explosion in package goods advertising,

which drove the traditional broadcast industry through the 80s, I guess I would say. You then have in the mid 80s, early to mid 80s through the next 30 years. You had a trillion dollars, half a trillion dollars of cable money coming into the business. And so that was this extraordinary tale one for the media. business up until five, ten years ago, and you can see the, see the debate, but maybe, arguably the greatest tail wound of all time. You then had this explosion of international, this ability for American content to be monetized all over the world. That was hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars over the 80s, 90s, early on. You had several hundred billion dollars

of DVD money coming to business. So there was this long period of time. Pretty much through the 2008 recession where technology, globalization, growth of U.S. consumer economy all resulted in this wild tailwinds for the media business. I did have some force I did get into the cable business in the early 80s. So I guess I was intrigued by that. But a lot of it, I was just the beneficiary level. I do have one, I don't know if it's a skill set, but one thing which certainly defines me. which is I both get bored and I'm really interested in what's new.

It just fascinates me what's new and what's coming. So I was working for one of the, it was my first job in Hollywood and I was working for one of the biggest traditional television producers. It was my first job. And I was offered a job at this sort of upstart thing called Showtime, which half of my friends hadn't heard of. And it just seemed super interesting to me. And all my friends said, oh, it's insane.

How could you leave the broadcast business? That's all bullshit. It's crummy, blah, blah, la, la. And that turned out to have been arguably the defining move of my career because it taught me a bunch of things which came to define the media business over the next 25, 30 years. I'm happy to elaborate on what that is, if you'd like. Yeah, that would be great. I mean, I think those early lessons then can inform a lot of the other topics that we'll touch on.

So, yeah, please do. What that taught me, what I came to, realized pretty quickly in that job was that we were subscription business. We were tiny subscription business. We probably had, I don't know, 15, 29 subscribers when I joined. And we were growing by two to 300,000 subs a month. Business was great. What I realized somewhere in the first several months, you know, when I was hired its head of original programming was the, wait a second. We are not in the mass market business in the ways that the broadcast networks are. You know, the broadcast networks up until that pine had been defined by, there was a very

famous acronym, arguably the single best television programmer of all time was a guy named Fred Silverman, was the only person to have run all three traditional broadcast networks. He ran CBS, ABC, and NBC. And he coined this acronym, probably in the late 70s or it's called LOP, least objectionable programming. His thought was, if you only have three choices, there's only three networks, the person who has the least objectionable program is going to win. And that was really the way broadcast television worked, is you really wanted to not offend people and not annoy people and not turn anybody off.

And so I got to showtembert this tiny little platform, and I woke up Monday and said, wait a second, this is exactly the opposite. I'm in the opposite business. I'm in the noise business. And I had this mental image of what I really wanted to do was come up with content that was so noisy that someone would say, oh, you've got to watch this thing, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And they're friends who are, well, what is that? And they say, well, it's a comedy brother.

And they'd say, well, I've never heard them. And then they would say, well, it's on showtime. And they'd say, what's showtime? And they'd say, well, it's a subscription service. And then they would go sign up. And I sort of woke up and said, I'm in the business of making noise. I'm in an attention getting business. I'm not in this defense business.

And I believe that that has characterized every single thing that has gone on with entertainment and a lot of technology over, because this is a broad general statement, but nobody obviously can tell you exactly what technology leads to. But in general, it leads to two things from a consumer perspective.

It leads to more choice and more control. You end up having what becomes near infinite, ubiquitous choice and you end up having the ability to do what you want when you want to do how you want to do. And in that world, noise and attention getting is really, really important because you've got to break through and grab people's attention, not because I'm so smart, but I was lucky enough to learn that lesson at showtime in the mid-80s. It's 100% the reason and why, you know, I went from there to go become the head of the Fox Network in the very early days. And the Fox Network exploded because we had these very conservative, staid competitors in ABC, NBC, CBS,

and all we did was programmed to get attention. So we did The Simpsons. We did anything color. We did cops. We did 90210.1. We did Married with Children. And they were the opposite of state broadcast shows. And what it taught me is that the safe competitor can always be taken down by the person who's

wanting to take bigger risks and be noisier. We'll come back to this era, but just to zoom all the way to the present, it seems like so much of what you just described defines TCGs investing activities that the content heavy businesses that you've backed are incredibly niche and specific. Maybe noisy is not still the right word, but something like that. they appeal to a very, very specific subgenre or community or whatever. If you zoom all the way back now to today, how is that played out in your investing? For those that are less familiar with TCG, maybe just say a word on an example or two of

that thesis you learned at Showtime applied in 2022. Easy analogy is to substitute the word passion for noise. Not trying to do these broad generic appeal stuff. You're trying to do things that people feel really passionate about. So if you look at various businesses of ours, whether it's food 52, whether it's meat eater, whether it's Rstal Sports, Golden Auctions, etc. These are all things that people feel really passionate about. And I think if you look at content-heavy businesses, those are all content-heavy businesses,

they have generally, crunchy roll is a good example, which was an early investment of ours. They've generally done wildly better than the boxes, the bus fees. By the way, I'm not trying to put anybody down, but the sort of broader internet content businesses, because we have hugely passionate audiences. When we start evaluating these kinds of things, we are looking for signals of passion. And among those signals that we tend to look at is, while we have advertising lines and those businesses, none of them are advertising dependent. One of the early signals we look for is there an indication that people are willing to

pay for something, whether that's a subscription in the case of Crunchy Rule, whether that's pots and pans and cookmen in the case of Food 52, whether that's a lot of merch, case of Barstool, et cetera, because it's a real signal of passion. And so I think there's a real analogy and a real through line from this idea of making noise at Showtime to betting on passion. If you look at what's happened to the world over those past 20 or 30 years, the broadcast networks back in the 70s 80s, is we're surviving on what I would characterize the middle, stuff that was inoffensive to the largest number of people. What's happened is the middle in every single business is gone, gone, forever, and the world is split into two things, these gigantic events, the Marvel

movies, the Super Bowl, the Grammys, the Beatles documentary, whatever those things are, Hamilton, where technology enables those events. Technology is largely super-turb. charge those events. They've enabled you to deliver them to people all over the world. And then the second thing which happened is technology is enabled niche passions. And if you think about yourself as a consumer of entertainment, a consumer of anything, you gravitate towards those two things. You will say, I want to be part of that big event. I want to watch the Super Bowl. I want to watch the new Marvel movie. I'd have to go see Hamilton from New York. Or you want to indulge your greatest passions. I love knitting or I love hunting or I love high quality watches. You know,

Houdinke is another portfolio company of ours. And I want to really dive down the rabbit hole of those things that I'm passionate about. And the last thing you ever want to do is spend time on something that feels generic and safe in the middle because you don't need to anymore. You either want to be part of those big global vets or you want to indulge your own specific passions. And the last thing and this life is to be wasting time in the middle. Do you think that that basically applies everywhere in business? I remember this distinctly, this term you used the first time we ever talked, you hold it phony aggregators, which I think is maybe another way of saying the middle.

Maybe eBay is an example of a phony aggregator and more niche-specific marketplaces like stockax or goat are like the business equivalent of the media examples that you've just given. Is that kind of what you mean by phony aggregator? I guess I'd say it this way. In Web 2.0, late 1.0 or early 2.0, aggregation became a huge phenomenon because you could use technology to bring a whole bunch of things together. I believe that what has happened since then is as technology, really, this is really probably mostly 1.0 or 2.0.

As technology is advanced, people can discover whatever they want. So to use eBay example, and I'm not. calling them phony, but people who are really into sneakers can go to goat. People are really into trading cards can go to golden auctions and collectors universe. And people have the navigation skills, the passion, the tools to go really deep in those things they want. Aggregation would seem revelatory when it first started in almost every technology. Over time, we're thin because you are depending upon casualness and technology disintermediates a lot of casualness. Clearly the best example of that.

Two really good examples of it, which we spend a lot of time thinking about. One is clearly the cable universe. When all of us first got cable in the 80s and 90s, you would come home and go, oh my God, there's 100 channels. It's Nirvana. I can't believe that progress, the Jetsons, we're living in an amazing world, et cetera. But 20 years later, you go, well, I've never watched country television. I've never watched court TV.

The average American one in its heyday watch 12 to 13 cable channels, and they had two or 300. And so you begin to realize, well, I'm paying for all this aggregation. I don't really care about. And I'm smart enough to figure out how to get to this movie or this sporting event or this news channel, whatever it is. So that's a good example. The other great example of it is the shopping mall.

Shopping mall was seen probably back in the fifth. I guess, I don't know when they exactly started, 50s, I guess, 50s, 60s. The shopping malls seemed like, oh, my God, this is heaven. Well, I can't believe that there are 150 stores in this place and that I can go buy clothes. I could go by sporting equipment. I can go buy electronics. I can go buy anything. It's amazing.

You cut to that now, it just seems really middle. It's not the best clothes. It's not the best sporting goods. It's not the best sneakers. It's not the best electronics. Consumers have moved on. from those sorts of things. It's a really broad, stupid thesis, but it goes back to that notion of technology gives you choice and control. It used to be that the only place you can get any choice

to go to a shopping mall, you were happy with the 100 stores that were there. You wake up today, you can click on Amazon basically purchase every single thing that's ever been made. And when you want it and get it delivered, you don't have to drive, you don't have to navigate your way through the mall and get it to deliver. So this notion of choice and control is, you know, is inexorable. It's this sort of ongoing march, and it definitively changes consumer behavior and generally drives out the middle and drives out aggregators which seem revelatory at the beginning because progress, technological advancement tends to really impact those things. I think it was Jim Barksdale that said there's two ways to make money in business bundling and

unbundling. And it seems like a lot of what you've described is a great era of unbundling and direct relationship with super fans. That has been what technology has enabled, certainly in media, but in these other examples as well. I know you've talked to my partners, Jesse Jacobs and Mike Kearns. When we started TCG, we spent a lot of time trying to think about, I'm a big believer that the best way to be smart is differentiate yourself. It's really hard to be smart if you're doing the same thing everybody else is doing. It's much easier to be smart if you're really coming up with a differentiated point of view. And what are the best of you? And what are you? our point of view, really spent a lot of time talking about this in the early days, was that

we felt like these bundles were going to get disaggregated, and we felt that consumers were going to start doing everything directly with brands that they cared about. And we felt on top of that, this had started in the media business probably first. I would argue the first place, we had had such experience in it. I'd argue the first place that happened was the record business. The record album was one of the great phony aggregations of all time, which is you were interested in buying one song and you had to buy an album with 12 songs for $15. And you saw that as soon as first Napster, but then as soon as they were legitimate places, where you could buy that one song for a buck, people went early on iTunes and then it went even once in further, the subscription services. But people go, why would I ever buy 12 songs that I don't want when I just want this one son? I'll pay a dollar for it.

And in the media business, we lived through that. When I was at News Cor, we were the largest newspaper publisher in the world. Newspaper, perfect aggregator. You, back in from probably what the late 1700s through 2000, you would get thrown on your doorstep in the morning, an aggregation of international news, national news, sports, entertainment, business, a bunch of things, and all thrown together. And then you woke up because of technology.

the internet said, wait a second. Some people said, I'm interested in business. All I'm interested in the sports. I'm just going to go find the sports news I want. And other people said, you know, I'm not interested in a superficial view of international news. I'm going to dig deep into the economist or whatever that is. You saw the newspaper and the newspaper business got completely destroyed because of classified ads. So the newspaper business was being driven by economically being driven a little bit by subscriptions.

Broad national advertising, which as things became more special, they said, I don't need to advertise poorly there, and primarily classified ads. And so the classified ad business disappeared because of eBay for goods, because of the job sites, because of the car sites, etc. We had been witnessed to that, and then I was witnessing the early days of the disaggregation of the video business. We had launched Hulu. I had launched Hulu with Jeff Zucker. NBC, we launched it together in 2007, I think. We had already witnessed these things. And so when we started TCG, we had a view of these trends were going to happen everywhere, and we could really do well participating in this direct-to-consumer economy.

And that's really what all of our investments are. You brought up Hulu, which is such an interesting thing to have observed and been a part of creating and growing, I'm sure, is that an unusual ownership in corporate history where it's both a technology innovation in a lot of the ways you've described, but also sort of like a strange story in many ways. What lessons do you take from that episode? I'm sure there are positive and negative ones. This is in many ways self-serving, but I think it's been wildly mismanaged. When we started it, and Jeff Zucker, who's now the head of CNN, was a wonderful partner. We had this vision that it seemed clear to me that our content was all going to be on the internet.

And then I had two second posts. And by the way, Netflix haven't launched yet when Jeff and I were doing all this work. We had two broad thoughts. Number one was I had spent a lot of time thinking about piracy back from the days when I was running the movie business. What I sort of learned over time was I became clear that where piracy thrives is where goods and services aren't available in, the form that people want and also aren't available at the price people want. And if you can make things available in the form people want, in their home, on screen in their home, and at a price it seemed reasonable, you won't destroy piracy, but 80 whatever percent of it will go away because

most people will participate in legitimate forms of business. And so I was concerned about if we didn't get our stuff onto the web, somebody who's going to steal it. And I kept looking at the record business, an example. And then the second thing, that I felt was you had watched 20 years earlier, maybe 30 years earlier. HBO had built this great business then, basically from licensing our movies. It seemed clear to me that someone was going to build a service, someone was going to use our content, and I didn't want it to be a third party. I wanted us to own it.

And so that's sort of with the impetus behind it. Every single person in my company and at NBC hated it. every single one. The advertising people would say you're going to kill my rage, you're destroying my advertising. The broadcast people would say, oh my God, you can't give our broadcast shows, can't put them on a digital platform three days later and destroy our broadcast business. The cable people said the same thing to destroy our cable people. The syndication people will never sell anything in syndication again. And what I kept saying to him is, you know what, shut up and go back to your office. Your job is not to protect your business because you can't

protect your businesses. Your job is to maximize your business if you're running syndication, if you're running ad sales. My job is to build newer businesses faster than the old ones decay. I'm not going to not innovate in this area in the order to protect these other old businesses. And Jeff had exactly the same fights at NBC. We both left at almost exactly the same time. I think I left a little bit ahead of him. But we both left, because I remember he left as soon as Comcast bought. Comcast did the deal for NBC three months after I left. So we probably left a year later. And as soon as we both left, both of those companies started listening to the people who were trying to protect their business. So they would dramatically increase the ad load. They started holding back high quality content. And I would argue that it is they started going out of the way or to frustrate Jason Kyler, who was our CEO. And I would argue it's one of the great, business debacles of modern time because that thing was 100x better content than Netflix did, launched within a year of each other. We had 100x better content. And Netflix today is a

200 plus billion dollar company. And Fox ended up being sold years ago for $70 million. And I don't believe they were well managed. I think it's a great example of the dangers of traditional businesses trying to protect themselves. What an incredible episode around creative destruction, disruptive innovation, and such a neat story. If you think back even before that to working with Rupert Murdoch at News Corp and Fox and everywhere, what most stands out in memory that made him most distinctive relative to other media leaders?

We just look at it numbers alone, like compounding shareholder value, for example, just sort of dominate relative to other leaders? What was most distinctive that made that possible in your experience with him? There were a number of factors. He was the single gravest person I ever met while embracing of risk. He was the most determined person I ever met. I was actually hired at Fox by Barry Diller. I love Barry. Barry was great to me. And the whole key to Barry is really challenges you. And so you spend a lot of time arguing with Barry. I remember, I was having one argument with him once. And I said, oh, my God, you are the most willful

fucking guy I've ever met in my life. You are so, so will. And he said, stop right there. Rupert is. And I said, you know what? You're probably right. Rupert taught me, so he taught me really, the bravest person I know in business.

And that was a great experience to be next to him. He is so determined. And that was a great experience, which is, if you put your head down, you will get almost everything right. If you're paying attention, if you're humble, if you're constantly correcting, you'll get almost everything right

unless you run out of capital. As long as you, A, don't run out of capital and B, keep trying to figure it out, you'll win. You look at virtually every business we started at Fox and we started most of those businesses. We would do a certain amount of half-ass business planning, which is what you're supposed to do.

We'd launch them, and then we would start changing. a week later. We go, okay, these eight things didn't work. We should probably do less of that. This thing worked a little. This thing really worked. Let's do more of that. And you just keep evolving and getting it right. Rupert's incredibly true. That's a really valuable thing. He is infinitely curious. He's relentlessly curious about where the world is going. That was a really valuable thing. And then I guess the final thing is that had a huge advantage over everybody else in industry, which is he was international. He came out of Australia and then anyone in the U.S. and so in a period of time where the business went from being a U.S. cottage business to being a

global business, he had a huge head start because he understood that already. It's a fascinating leadership style. And the word bravery really stands out there. Is there an episode that stands out in memory that would bring that word to life? I'm kind of curious what that word bravery means in a business context. I'm not sure this episode, but you think about some of the things we did. The Fox Network, the greatest triopoly in human history, was the three broadcast networks. It seemed like an act of insanity to try and take them on. When he launched Fox News against CNN, CNN was the dominant, dominant, dominant thing.

That seemed insane. When we launched Fox Sports to try and win the NFL away from the broadcast networks and take on ESPN, that seemed insane. launching B-Sky B to take on the BBC of all places. It's a government monopoly. Almost every one of those big initiatives was an act in wild bravery. And the other thing that is was remarkable about Rupert is that if he didn't like you, it was kind of a nightmare. That's sort of that's different than most people. He was just a little bit more overt about it.

But if he liked you, Rupert was willing to get people more autonomy than anybody. to rubricate me insane amounts of autonomy. And by the way, when he picked me to be president of the company, I was a creative guy. Up until three years ago,

I'd never even run a business. I was just running creative things. I'd actually run the movie studio. So that was your real business. But then he basically said, I want you to run the whole company. I'd never been to business school. I'd never taken a business course.

But I also think that's an example of whether or not there was a good decision or not. Others would have to judge. But I think his view was, at its core, this is a creative business. We are making creative products. And I can find people to run the business side. But if our product isn't great, we're doomed.

And if our product is great, we'll find plenty of good accounts to run the other parts of it. And I think in some ways, that's a mirror of his background, which is, you know, at his core, he's a journalist. Look, he's clearly a very bright businessman. But I think at his core, he had a view of the quality of my personal. product, the quality of my front page is going to determine my success. Again, looking at your story, maybe at your core, at least part of your core, you're a filmmaker. If you look at what you've continued to do, even as you changed from one career into TCG in all the interesting ways we've talked about and technology affecting everything,

you've continued to make really interesting movies. I remember you saying something to me one time, which was in the movie business, you have to, I think you said, divine the zeitgeist a few years ahead of time and then launch something into that emerging zeitgeist, which probably makes you a great investor too. Is there, let's say, in the last 10 or 15 years, movie that you've made that you're most proud of and why? First of all, let me just refer to it to it. I believe it's exactly the same thing in an investor. I think both of them you are trying, and that is exactly the term of this. You're trying to divine the zeitgeist in the world's public two, three years out when the movie is going to come out. And I think investing is the same kind of curiosity. You're trying

and divine where people's needs are, where people's desires are, where people's frustrations are, and try and invest against it. The movies, first of all, they're all my children and some of us. Some of them are probably better children than others, but in terms of movies, but I'll give you a couple of examples that I'm really proud. I'm incredibly proud of those Planet of the Eighth movies. I made three of them. I think they are both big event spectacles, but I think they're extremely well done, really smart,

have something to say, pretty extraordinary technological achievement. So I'm very proud of those. I'm very proud of, you know, movie like Hidden Figures, which I think is an important and meaningful story. And if you have the ability to tell a story like that, you can really have an impact on the world. That's meaningful. Really proud of something like greatest showman, which I've produced,

just because brought such extraordinary joy to people. I'm insanely proud of Ford versus Ferrari, just because I think it's an amazingly crafted movie. It's as well-made a movie as I've seen in decades. Great storytelling, beautiful, it was shot, exciting, emotional, funny, incredibly well-acted, really good. But I'm also proud of, you know,

I made these three little horror movies last year. And by the way, I don't like horror movies. They scare me. Me too. I'm not proud of them in that sense, but an executive who worked for us named Corey Adel, and came to Geno Topping and I, Geno runs the movie company, and said, I want to make these Fear Street movies.

I grew up on these Fear Street books, sold 100 million copies of Fear Street books. I grew up on them. You know, I want to make one of them like, great. Go wild, have fun. Jenno and I were talking. I said, you know what, I have an idea. Why don't we make three of them at once? And why don't we release them two weeks apart?

And what I was thinking was, A, if it's such a big franchise, it's economically viable to make three more ones. But I was really interested in trying to shake up the way movies get released because I felt like people had become accustomed to binging everything. And I felt it was a way to really eventize these movies. We ended up doing really innovative storytelling. You know, the first movie took place in the 90s. And they are traditional horror movies, quite well made, by the way, among the best reviewed horror movies in years. But first movie took place in the 90s.

You get to the end. You think the killer's got in and the killer comes back. And then all of a sudden, the characters realize, oh, in order that somebody says to him who would survive this, going for. You know, really understand this. You've got to go back to summer camp in the 1970s. And so the second movie takes place in the 1970s. And then you get to the end of that. They still haven't solved it.

Ultimately, we realized that, wow, this curse started in the 1660s. And so the third movie takes place half in 60s. 16, 66, and then goes back to the 90s to finish. And I'm really proud of it in the sense that it was innovative. I'm not the best judge. How it is is a horror movie per se, because I get scared, but I'm really proud of its innovation because I care about that stuff. I have an obligation to innovate and to take chances and to be bold, to be great. You've probably worked with more high-profile creative people, certainly in the movie business, but maybe just real large than just about anybody across your career.

What would you say the keys are to being an effective partner to genius, talented, creative people? I've given a lot of thought because in any of those jobs, you are a business person trying to manage creativity. And it's a bit of an oxymoron managing creativity because creativity is messy and divine and all those sorts of things. and businesses measured and predictable and all of those sorts of things. And yet that is what you're doing in one of the best, you're trying to manage creativity. It's not necessarily the key, but it's the thing that I think is most helpful to think about

in terms of managing creativity. I don't think most people realize how terrifying and vulnerable it is to be creative. If you think about it, when anything you think about a writer, a writer goes and sits alone, in a room and poor sweat and it was the old red smith or whatever it was, saying, you know, what's the act of the same type of hair, too, blood comes out of your forehead. It's incredibly challenging and painful and lonely. And then you turn it over something like, oh, that sucks. I don't like that, you know, I don't like that character. And, you know, and it's heartbreaking.

It's really vulnerable. Think about an actor. It's the most vulnerable thing on earth. You're trying to inhabit another character. She looks fat. I don't like him. I don't like why he smiles. So think about directing, which is arguably the most complex single activity. I don't think most people think about.

It is weirdly the closest thing to being God. Because you think about a big film maker, you are literally making thousands of world-building decisions every day. You're saying, I don't like where that button is. I don't like the color of the shawl. I don't like where her hair is falling in that shot. I don't like the emotion there.

I don't like the angle of the sunlight there. It's too shadowy here. I don't like that car in the background. That period thing doesn't look realistic. That's not the way outer space would work. It's an insane amount of art direction decisions and music decisions, costume decisions, writing decisions, emotional acting decisions. And there are thousands of them coming out to you.

Hundreds of minute that you are individual. individual creatives you have to make. And the movie comes down because that sucked. That wasn't very good. That was boring. And so it is an insanely vulnerable, personally risky activity. And your single biggest job as a manager of those people is to create a place where they feel safe. Because you want them to take chances.

The worst art is the stuff that's lame and safe. The best art is the stuff that's really bold and risky. And your job is to create an environment way they can do that without bankrupting a company. And it's a real challenge. And we have to really think about how do you manage those two things. And it goes back full circle to that first initial conversation I had with Jim Cameron was so meaningful. I sort of locked into a way of encouraging him to be great and trying to get a way to get him to work with me to not be great at infinite cost. And he was phenomenal.

He was the best partner ever. I remember talking to, I think it was Mike Kerns, was the first person to introduce me to the idea of just all these great companies you've cited, Crunchyroll, Houdinke, Barstool, whatever it is. Just don't meddle with the creative people. Like, create that space around them, try to help them manage everything but that. But for God's sake, don't be the person saying, you know, that's no good or, you know, I don't like that idea, let them do their thing. I guess I would say a different version of that is I believe your job both is a big executive, you know, when I was running Fox and I had 30 or 40. different companies reporting to me or in a TCG situation where we have three or four portfolio companies is you have three roles to play and meddling and managing the business is not one of them. One role is just people hiring and firing people, finding the best team. If you have a real problem, you've got to step up and deal with it. But that's job number one. Job number two, and most of the job is just strategy, just talking about strategy.

And then job number three is you're there to roll up your sleeves when you can be helpful, either because there's a problem or there's an opportunity. And they say, did you call so and so? Or could you help me solve this problem? But your job is not to run the business and to tell them how to run the business. And I think I would like to believe we're good at that in TCG. And Mike and Jesse are extraordinarily good. Because I'll give you the flip side of being an entrepreneur or a creative.

The two things that we have that they don't have to offer are we have objectivity. if you're an entrepreneur's business, you're locked in your head, basically, thinking about that business 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And there are times when it's very helpful to have someone say, I don't get that homepage. I'm not telling you you, but I'm telling you as a user, that doesn't really work for me. It's the same thing, you know, you'll say to a script, look,

this character, I'm not quite sure of what you're trying to do. And it's generally those conversations, those objective conversations are better posed as questions. They're not, you're a fucking idiot. that doesn't work. It's more like, I don't get this. And that kind of objectivity is really valuable to a creator or an entrepreneur because by definition, you're so deeply in it, you don't have that kind of objectivity. And then the second thing that hopefully you bring in both the investment sense and in the creative sense is you bring some marketplace knowledge.

The marketplace won't pay for that or something like that just came out or there's another movie with that exact plot line or there's no reason they should know. And you bring that knowledge. Those are your main values in this. And other than that, in both cases, you are trying to create support systems and help them with strategy, because that is where objectivity and market voice knowledge comes in, and help them with support. Shouldn't be doing this thinking you know their business better than them or micromanaging

their business because it's fucking annoying. And they're killing themselves seven days a week, hundreds of hours a week out. My second to last question for you is about just the future of, I guess, media writ large, specifically around technology, so much about what you've done is, like you said, you're easily bored and curious about the next enabling platform, technology, whatever it might be. Is there anything out there today that you see as potentially filling that role and changing the landscape yet again? I believe on the one hand that traditional forms that have enormous staying power, the movie,

the TV show. Storytelling, gaming. People want to play games. People want to hear stories. People want to laugh. People want to be excited. So that part's not going to change it. The tools in which you can do those

and the delivery mechanisms will constantly change. Those are ongoing and you better be relentless about thinking about how do I use the tools to tell stories even more excited than you create games even more excitedly. How do I use delivery technology to? to give people more choice and more control, better experience. I do think in terms of pie in the sky, I do think that God strike me dead for saying this, but Web 3 interactivity is a sort of new vocabulary of expression and sort of that kind of interactivity.

And I have no idea where it goes, but as it relates to both gaming and humans interacting with artificial and virtual. environmental environments. We're just about to throw the first pitch of the first in it. People infinitely smarter than me really were, but it's certainly fascinating. We're not trying to do Web 3 spec of investing. We're not a crypto investor or any of that stuff. We are looking at consumer businesses built on the blockchain. We're investor in DACA labs. We're investing in Zed run, investor in OpenC, which are all our attempt to try and understand how consumers are going to interact in these new protocols. And that's we believe our skill set.

We believe we understand technology and we're interested in technology and how to use it as enabling things. But we really believe our expertise is consumers. And it's what Mike and Jesse and I wake up every morning and think about. And it is hopefully what we offer to our entrepreneurs and our portfolio companies as guys

who are relentless focus on consumers and who can try and help them maximize their reach and their interactions with consumers. Peter, I've had an incredible amount of fun learning from you and from your team, say, over the last year, as I've gotten to know the group. I've learned a huge amount of lessons, and I think so many of these things are media-centric, but very broadly applicable in the world that we live in today. I really appreciate your time.

I ask everybody the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? My wife marrying me. We're probably just going out with me. From the business perspective, I've been insanely fortunate and been given remarkable opportunities by Rupert, by Barry, by people, by filmmakers and entrepreneurs. The thing that sticks with my mind is, I think when I was 24 years old or something, I was a complete knucklehead. I was an English major. I was an English major at Berkeley in the early 70s, so I wasn't particularly career-oriented.

What I love to do is rebook. So I always do just read books. And so I got out of college and said, well, I guess I'd better go find a job. And, you know, I had no overwhelming ambition or direction. I saw back to our conversation about the classifieds, I saw an ad in the newspaper for a publicity job at a book publisher. That sounds great. I had to read books, signed the paper. I'm great.

I wanted a job as a publicist. And the president of the company, this was Warner Books, was a publicity executive. I was a junior publicity person. The president of company was a gentleman named Howard Kaczynski, who was probably 32 years old. So he was a young guy, and this was mid-70s. And I saw him in the hall after I'd been in two or three weeks. He goes, hey, Peter, baby, what's happening, man? And I'm like, well, not much, sir.

What's happening with you? What are you doing? What are you doing? I know. He says, let me give you some books to read. And he gave me four or five books. Company was considering. By the way, there's a good lesson.

I went home and read them that night. And I came back the next day and said, okay, I read these, here's what I thought about him, by the line. That's great, that's great. Let me do some more. And I spent the next four or five months, I would read six or eight books a week on the side beyond my regular job for him and tell him what I thought about him.

After six months there, he said, you know, what do you want to do? And I said, well, I'd like to be an editor, which is all you ever want to do. If you're in book publishing, you want to be an editor. In journalism, you want to be a journalist issue. In a movie business, you want to be a creator. So I said, I want to be another. And he said, okay, you're an editor. Just that, let me give you some books to read my second week on the job, a guy he didn't know,

and gave me a chance to do that for three or four months and gave me a chance to prove myself was an insane opportunity and an act of genuine kindness. It's funny that just yesterday, someone went and listened to all 300 of these answers and he's a data scientist and categorized them. And the top two things were thanking a spouse and thanking someone. someone that took a chance on them. So it's just so interesting to me that that's what pops to people's minds. And it's probably a user's manual for paying it forward. You know, find a great spouse and take bets on people. Seems like a good policy. Absolutely is a good policy. Find a good spouse is a no-brainer

because it's hands down the most important. I met my wife when I was 25 and you can meet someone that you want to spend 50 years with change enormously. It's both an act of wild serendipid luck some kind of judgment in there somewhere and kindness on their part. But the flip side is the opportunity to pay it forward and take chances on people. That's the only thing that's interesting. The only thing is interesting. By the way, it's the only way to manage one of these companies is to take chances on young people. Because it goes back to that middle thing I was talking about earlier, which is the odds that you could hire a superstar with vast experience for any job or 1%. Because you can't get them out of their existing job. The companies that work for generally,

aren't that stupid. Assume you can't do that. Then you get to two choices for filling a job, which is you can either hire someone who's not a superstar with lots of experience, or you can take a chance on someone on their way up. Every single time have to do the latter because you're structuring for greatness. That's all you care about is greatness. You don't get greatness by hiring someone mediocre with a lot of experience. You get safety, but you don't get greatness. You get greatness by taking chances on their people on their way up. And unfortunately, you make mistakes and you've got to get rid of mistakes. And then you better really nurture the ones that are good. What a incredible closing thought. Peter, this has been so much fun. Thanks again

for your time. I really enjoyed it, Patrick. Congratulations on what's a great podcast. So I love listening to you guys. If you enjoy this episode, check out join colossus.com. There you'll find every episode of this podcast complete with transcripts, show notes, and resources to keep learning. You can also sign up for our newsletter, Colossus Weekly, where we condense episodes to the big ideas, quotations, and more, as well as share the best content we find on the internet every week.