The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Ambition, Media, and What’s Left of Hollywood — with Barry Diller

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Barry Diller, a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment and also the chairman and senior executive of IAC, joins Scott to discuss his origin story, the current state of media and streaming, and his new book, Who Knew. Help us plan for the future of The Prof G Pod by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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What does MAGA use for contraception? Their personality. Yeah, I said it. And by the way, if you're going to fill my comments up with how I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, just look at what's going on with the fascist movement in Los Angeles. And if you unsubscribe, I promise to send you a full refund. Welcome to the 350 second episode of the Prop Gpod. What's happening? I am back in London.

I went London, Paris, Paris, Miami, Miami, New York for a couple of days, then to Detroit for Summit, and then back home. The highlight was I did this thing called the Fianna Rumble, where they set it up like a boxing tournament, and it's sort of a debate. The audience asks questions, you have a minute to respond, then the other person responds, and then at the end of the fight,

the audience decides who won the bout. And I debated a guy named Sher Michael Singleton, who's a fairly well-known conservative who's on CNN a lot. I would describe him as sort of a Romney or Bush conservative in that he isn't fucking crazy and is pretty thoughtful. I was really impressed with him. He's a really young man, a 34-year-old. But I went into this. I agreed to do this because my buddy wanted to do it and asked me to commit, because, you know, kind of a big deal. And then I find out I'm going up against some young Republican

and it's like, okay, I'm fucked. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. He's a really impressive kid. Came back to London last night to find out that my hometown of Los Angeles is being occupied by the National Guard. The last time I happened, or last time I happened, I was actually in Los Angeles.

I had returned home from business school. Was it business school? I think it was business school. And I was living with my mom, and we live in a suburb of Los Angeles Westwood right behind UCLA. And I came home, and on every corner, there were two young men that looked 17 and fatigued with M15, something called the semi-automatic that they used to carry way back when.

It was very odd and very strange and a very dark moment for us. But this was back when people were being pulled out of their cars, beaten up, bricks being thrown, people were killed. My understanding is having spoken to several people who live in Los Angeles, most of my college friends are still there, there really isn't anything going on that would in any way indicate a need

for this type of brute federal force. I think this is, when you think about what you wanna do in your own household as you get older, a little bit more mature, or as the man of the household, I think your job is oftentimes to deescalate. And that is, I do that a lot in confrontations in my house and my company, and that is I try and deescalate the situation such that,

because what happens when you get to a certain point, people start saying things or doing things that is difficult to take back and just makes a bad situation much worse. And if you think about it, the whole point, or one of the wonderful things about being a president, having a huge military and a bully pulpit that's the biggest platform in the world, arguably,

is you can kind of be the master de-escalator. That's kind of your job. We're called on to try and create peace and de-escalate. And this is a perfect example of doing exactly the opposite. This is setting up a confrontation. This is incendiary. It's inflaming emotions. You're supposed to only send in the National Guard.

And by the way, he's allowed to do this under Title XI. He's supposed to be able to use federal resources to ensure that people's work gets done. But it's almost always the governor requested a natural disaster when things get out of control, as they did in 1992. But this is just setting up a confrontation. I don't, I have a bias here, but I believe that ultimately, Governor Newsom is going to come out of this

probably looking pretty good because I think he's been forcefully dignified. And he's sort of setting up the national stage of Trump versus Newsom, which I think will ultimately end up being kind of JD Vance versus Newsom. I think Newsom has stronger prospects to get the Democratic nomination than people like. Why? I think the nation is exceptionally looks-ist and that he just looks very presidential. I think Elson Nguyen has a good story to tell, fourth largest economy in the world for all the shitposting from VCs who leave to get tax status in Florida and then move back. California has created more tax revenue.

It's a net contributor. It gives, I believe, $80 billion or sends 80 billion back to the federal government, whereas a lot of these red states take money, for example, Texas, I think takes about 70 billion. But what is the danger here? I'd like to think I'm hoping things are going to maintain civility and de escalate, and that the president will do his fucking job. But I've always thought that I've always kind of, you of, I'm definitely a glass half empty kind of person.

So what could go wrong here? How does America end? How does America end? The thing is, we think of ourselves, we're so narcissistic and think of America as such a big, powerful, and we're right, such an unbelievably huge, dramatic icon center of the universe

that if America were to go out of business or end, it would go down with a bang. I don't think that's true. I think America goes out of business with a whimper. And that is, this is a step towards that. This is a confrontation between the federal government and a politically oppositional governor in a liberal state. Trump is not going to send federal troops into a red state. He's already they've already are trying to demonize Governor Walz in Minnesota Basically, he's deciding to weaponize the federal government to go after his what he perceives This is political enemies or to distract from other things. I have this big beautiful tax bill, which is just a giant fucking transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich from the young to the old from the

giant fucking transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, from the future to the past. Anyway, this is how America ends. And I think again, it's with a whimper. And that is, there's a confrontation, I don't know if it results in violence or not, but maybe Governor Newsom says, we're no longer going to send our tax revenue back to the federal government. We're just going to hold on to it. That ends up in another confrontation. There is an election. So you can now see states that have economies the size of a European nation decide, no, we're no longer signed up for the federal government or what the people have decided on the Democratic or the Republican side. And we have a series of small nation states. California is a tech-centered economy that

does a lot of business with Asia. The South is, or Texas would be, a oil and gas-centered economy doing a lot of business with the Gulf, if you will, or overseas, or whoever needs oil. The Midwest, a manufacturing economy doing a lot of business with Canada. And I could see the East Coast breaking into its own fiefdom where it's mostly about trade with Europe and finance and financial services. And this is the new disunited States of America. And how does America come to an end? Not with a bang, but with a whimper. That was somber, wasn't it?

Wasn't that light and cheery? Wasn't that, aren't I just a little bucket of sunshine today? Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Barry Diller, a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment and the chairman and senior executive of ISC. We discuss with Barry his origin story, the current state of media and streaming

and his new book, Who Knew, out now. But I really enjoyed Barry Diller. He was a media mogul when I was in college. This guy, as you'll hear, he was doing, he was in charge of Movie of the Week. And if you're my age, you remember that when he was in his early 20s. as you'll hear, he was in charge of movie of the week, and if you're my age, you'll remember that when he was in his early 20s. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation

with Barry Diller. Barry, where does this podcast find you? I'm in my New York office. Is that the big sales? Yes, it's the sale cloth Frank Gehry building. Yeah, it's a beautiful building. I've done several events there. So let's just write into this.

I wanna get your origin story. I remember being, I remember my senior year at UCLA, I had a job selling insurance and I wanted to break into media and I had a friend named Tom Noonan and he worked for you, like two levels down, or he knew you. You were already kind of a master of the universe then.

But what, is this like ancient history we're doing here? Like, is this like 1912? When was this? No, this is like 1987. I think you were at Fox. 1987, I was at Fox. Yeah, so I would just love to get your origin story and how you ended up in up as a fairly young man,

kind of being a captain of media industry. Like give us the origin story, Barry Diller. Let's do when I kind of went to work, since I had no seeming ambition until I walked into the William Morris Agency as a mail boy, basically, although I never really delivered mail, and I ended up reading the file room. And at that time, file rooms were, this was a huge room with big file cabinets,

and in it was basically the history of the entertainment business. So I found a way not to deliver mail or do what the other guys were doing, which were trying to be agents, which I never wanted to be. And I basically read the entire file room. And that was the most fortuitous thing because I got the entire, I mean, William Worse had been in business then for 70 years or something. And it represented almost everyone.

So it had all the history. So I read The Life of Elvis Presley. I read the, I mean, it was just an incredible basing. And then I got serendipitously lucky in that they wouldn't throw me out of William Morris because I never wanted to be an agent. And they only did these male boy things in order to turn people into productive agents. And I was never going to be an agent and they only did these male boy things in order to turn people into productive agents. And I was never going to be that. And I'd finished kind of the file room and I think they were getting ready to throw me out. And luckily I took the only job that

I was offered, which was to be the assistant to what I thought was a middle level job at ABC in Los Angeles in what was called current programming. And the day that I accepted that job, they fired the czar of ABC and they reached out and they picked my guy. So instead of being the assistant to this West Coast person, I moved to New York to be the assistant to the head of the network. And within six months I was kind of running the program department. So there you go.

That was at age 23. There's something that clearly came from your, even earlier than that. What influences growing up gave you that type of drive, that type of creativity? Like, when you look back on your childhood and how you were raised, is there anything or people that stand out? And when you look back on your childhood and how you were raised, is there anything or people that stand out? I think that all of the things that were enormously, enormous difficulties for me, all those kinds of insecurities,

inadequacies, a feeling that I had no self, that I didn't deserve to all sorts of excuses, sexual confusion and stuff. And one big secret, which if you have one big secret and it's an overwhelming one, it tends to let all the other risks reduce in size. So you can take these giant risks because the big risk is just obliviating everything else. So that's in a way, not that God knows I wanted it,

but it allowed me to take risks everywhere else. My family never thought that I would actually ever work and they had resources enough that it didn't really matter. But I had no seeming ambition up until the age of really 19. And I didn't really want to go to school. And I was kind of just hibernating. But once I found actually when I walked into that William Morris agency, because I'd always been interested in the entertainment business,

when I walked in and I started reading about that world, that just drew me like the fiercest magnet. And that ignited this, I don't know where that ambition was, but it was certainly born of not feeling that there was any self or that I deserved any self. And therefore that fuel, that was just big fuel for me. You said something off mic, I was saying I wanted to talk more about business because everyone's focused on other parts of the book. But you said that you're quote unquote secret and I assume that's your sexuality you're talking about. Well, let me ask you this, if you were a 20s

something executive in today's Hollywood, which is much more accepting of people's sexual orientation, do you not think you'd be as successful as you were? God, I don't have a clue. I think, no, I think I would not have, I definitely think that the tools that I developed out of all of these seeming disadvantages absolutely did propel me, for sure. If I didn't have those, I'd probably be a ribbon clerk. There's this term trad dad, traditional dads who are a little bit harsher and are not sitting kids down and asking them how this made them feel. What I knew of you back in the 80s was you were like the trad manager.

People were scared of you. You had a reputation for not suffering fools, that you were a hard ass. One, is that accurate? And two, what can you tell us about how your management approach has, if at all, how it's evolved as you've gotten older? Well, yeah, it is true. I mean, first of all, I have this voice and that voice is a bit intimidating to begin

with. And then in all these, because I'm so indirect in everything else in my life, I'm so direct in anything relating to business. I am direct. I say exactly, exactly. I say what I think without kind of fear or favor and I like creative conflict. I like argument. I like the whole concept of arguing things out of passion because all I care about is instinct and in order to hear the truth of something you

got to push through and you've got to get to, all right, what does that person really believe? And taking out of those kind of clanging discussions, you hear a truth and you can pull it. When I notice somebody's like, I'm comfortable, I say, look, this isn't for you. You don't like this environment. And whether it threatens you or does this to you is of no matter except I don't want anyone in it who isn't accepting of the challenge of that kind of cauldron. I just think it's the most productive way to manage. The other thing is that, and it's long gone for me now, but I think the best way to learn to be a manager and evolve into that is, and I got very lucky because at 24 and a half, something like that, I started this project called I hired every single person up to the point when we had

I don't know hundreds and thousands of employees in that group So when you learn the luckiest thing anyone can get is to start something Where you get to learn every job because in learning every job and in then hiring the people and doing all that you actually learn to manage because you are so on the original ground of things and I think that is incredibly productive now I evolved out of that in my mid-20s because by my late 20s I was supervising a rather large organization. And then at 32, I became chair on a paramount, which is a whole other kind of management process of learning how to be in a movie business where nobody from television had been in one

before and they didn't like those people. I don't know about the evolution. I'm still, I hope, I still bring that that same Tool making which is to create situations where you have opinion argued about whether it's a new business idea or a company to acquire or anything else. I Hope I still have that very tough process of trying to find what is at the heart root of an idea to determine whether it's worth pursuing.

I can't help but wax nostalgic here. I was raised by a single immigrant mother and we didn't see each other much during the week. She was a secretary. We had always made, we had a date, a standing date on Tuesday nights, you know what we did? Oh, 7.30, movie of the week. ABC movie of the week. And it was a standing thing and my mom would make me loaf

and getting emotional just thinking about it. And my three favorites. People don't realize how great a breakthrough in that show. And I assume you're involved in all three of these things. One, dual, Steven Spielberg's first thing I remember. Two, in my opinion, Billy Dee Williams' best movie, Brian Song. By far.

And then the most underrated, it was a movie of the week, but it turned into a show, which I think. And then the most underrated, it was a movie of the week, but it turned into a show, which I think was one of the most underrated shows of the 70s that I never missed an episode, The Night Stalker, remember that with Darren McGavin? Are you kidding? I mean, first of all, those three,

there's a fourth called That Certain Summer, which was probably all the, what did we make? I say we probably made 350 individual movies of the week during that five year, seven year period. And Certain Summer was my favorite for a lot of reasons. It was the first dramatic depiction of homosexuality on broadcast television. And it was a lovely story about two men's relationship and him having to tell, one of them having to tell his son about his life. Night Stalker, I got this book that somebody sent me

that I respected and it was about 200 pages long. I read it and I said, oh my God, a vampire in Las Vegas. What could be a better idea or a better place for a vampire to go than Las Vegas, which is open 24 hours a day, et cetera, is the definition of a night city. And I read it, literally I read the story pages in three hours and ordered up the movie.

When that movie was finished, it was so good that my colleagues at ABC said, this is a theatrical movie, let's release this in theaters, we'll make a fortune. I said, are you crazy? This is what we do. This is a movie of the week.

That's where it's going, that's where it it belongs and of course it then spawned the series etc and Brian song I don't know if you can do better for sure I mean yeah you pick some good ones what other things early in your career sort of got you to the next level if you will well I would say that I mean say that, I mean, it was definitely, I mean, movie of the week was, again, I'm 23 or 24. And so my 20s were just dominated for five years by this. And then at the end of that, because after we'd made these movies, I was kind of used to the process to say the least.

And I thought that, you know, there were books that were made into movies, but big sprawling epic novels. You can't tell that story in two hours really. I thought Tuglin has all this time, so why not do long, long form which we called the novel for television, which evolved into the mini series which we all live with today for sure in streaming. That created like the next bump because that was this out of nowhere huge success.

I had these two seminal thrusts really early. I don't know what was that because it was the confluence of other events that landed me at Paramount and the movie business at also a really young age. And I was always the youngest, and now I'm always the oldest. Yeah, it's weird. I often say, I used to walk into every room

and be the youngest, and I walk into every room and I'm the oldest, I was never the same age. Just goes so fast. So you're sort of a decathlete in terms of different types of content. You started in TV and then you transitioned to movies. How is that different? Or what, what skills? Is it the same skills? Or did you need to develop

different management and different capital allocation skills? It's the same tool set, I'd say, but it's applied to totally different organizations, though, The movie business, television, if you didn't get it delivered at 7.30 on a Tuesday night, the screen went dark. In the movie business, if you didn't make a movie, nobody knew, nobody cared.

So the rhythms are just so completely different, and the movie industry at its height of snobism, I don't think it's diverted that much today from what it was then in terms of looking down on almost all other forms. Though now the world is so, I don't know even what the definition of a movie is anymore given the Netflixdom of life.

But the movie companies, this is in the 70s, dominated world culture to such an extent. And so, and you only did, we never made, we Paramount made probably fewer movies than most other companies, other studios, of which there were five dominant ones we made maybe 15 to 18 movies a year other people make twenty five to thirty. So you know that's kind of putting your tent up and taking it down every month or so it's completely different rhythm. It's a completely different rhythm. And I had, first of all, the movie people peed on people from television.

So I had like the good and the bad of people. So discounting saying, well, I'd be thrown out soon because a television person could never succeed in the exalted movie world. And so they kind of left me alone for a couple of years where I figured out how to make the company run the way I was comfortable with. And that was a very, very hard time where I certainly failed first because I believe almost everything I've ever done, you kind of, at least in my mind, fail first before you succeed. And so it was

a completely different process that I had to adapt to. I was using the same basically toolkit of, in my case, which was developing material rather than buying packages to form directors, actors, writers, etc. that were given to studios by agencies. I've always thought, it was my first thing of developing material. So I wanted to develop material,

that takes a long time to do, but that process has never changed for me. So while you're there, I just wanna review this, you decided to go back to TV and essentially started the Fox Television television network where Married with Children and The Simpsons were sort of the pillars there. Talk about, why did you go back to TV and tell us a little bit about those two shows

because someone told me The Simpsons is the most profitable TV show in history. That is true. Well, back in the TV, when I left Paramount to go to Fox, I tried to start a fourth network. There were at that time three networks which got 100% of the viewing. There wasn't cable. I mean, cable was just getting a better signal. And so three networks dominated everything. And I thought I had thought over the years that while they started out with different personalities by the 80s they all talked looked and acted like and I thought well that's interesting there's room for I mean maybe room for an alternative

to that so when I got to Fox and their confluence against their indifference events, I was able to get a bunch of television stations that we could buy and start this fourth network. And in the beginning, you know, we didn't find our vein until I got a script called Not the Cosby's. Now, Not the Cosby's means Bill Cosby show was number one on television, had been for many years. And so when I saw the title Not the Cosby's, I was like, oh, that's like interesting. And it was an anti-establishment family, which we later called Married with Children. And that, I knew we'd struck the vein. And shortly thereafter, we had had a show called Tracy Allman,

and in it were these interstitials that Matt Groening did with his character The Simpsons, and Jim Brooks, great director who made Terms of Endearment, etc., etc., said, who produced Tracy Allman's show, said, I think we could make this into a series. And I said, yes, absolutely. Now at that time, because animation took six months and whatever we had to commit to 13 episodes without making quote pilot, etc.

So it was a big commitment. We did it and made the 13 episodes. We hadn't scheduled yet and the first episode came back again like six, eight months later. And we had this viewing and actually Jim Brooks's little bungalow on the Fox lot. And I brought the sales department, some other like 12 people. There's one of those screenings where Jim Brooks and I are the only people laughing. And when you're laughing at material that you've already seen before,

you're really doing it to try and get other people to laugh. So it's like over performance. And there Jim and I are hooking it up, stone-faced every other person in the room. We walk out with my group out of the bungalow back up to our offices. And these guys said, well, can't air that. I mean, a cartoon. And I thought as Jen did, this is great.

Of course, we scheduled it from the first hour of the first day. It was a smash hit. It's still going now. Well, certainly decades, 30 years later. But because of syndication and because of streaming and because of all this, now it's owned by Disney, there's no question that as a single entertainment product, it is the most profitable in history.

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This season Zimmer speaks to some of the most respected scientists in the field of longevity research about what old age could look like in the future. Humans are already living longer than ever thanks to advances like vaccines, antibiotics and clean water. And with the incredible progress being made in treating deadly conditions including heart disease and cancer, mortality rates for each have dropped by double digits. Now science is tackling a new challenge, curing aging itself. Will new breakthroughs add even more years to our lives?

Can older brains be rewired to function like younger ones? And which so-called biohacks actually work? Join Carl Zimmer as he investigates what current science is claiming about longevity and gets to the bottom of what's unbelievable and what's actually possible. You can find the world as you'll know it, the future of aging, wherever you get your podcast or you can listen at avanteen.org slash podcast. That's A-V-E-N-T-I-N-E dot org slash podcast. So you then were able to pivot or evolve

into online or e-commerce. What was the motivation there and what kind of, what inspired you to get involved in sort of the digital world? What happened was after I left Fox, I wanted to be independent. I wanted my own store. I wanted, I'd always worked for companies.

I was the definition of a corporatist. And I was 49 years old. And I thought, well, if I don't strike out, so to speak, for independence, I never will. And I didn't like that idea that I never would. And that kind of forced me out of Fox. And I had no clue what I want to do. All I wanted to do was not what I'd done before.

I didn't want to run movie companies anymore. I'd run two. And a couple of people asked me if I would do that. And I said no and I didn't want to I didn't want to be in the I think he didn't want to be in the production business and I was kind of boring but I had no I all I did is I created a vacuum I like said okay I'm going to go drive across the country and wait for something and again serendipity, my wife, she's in the fashion business, called me and said, you have to come go see this QVC, this home shopping channel, because I'm thinking of going on to offer my design clothes. And she said, just interesting, just go see it. So I wasn't

doing anything. So I went to Westchester, Pennsylvania. And I got, again, you know, I had this probably single epiphany, which is I saw screens being used for something other than to tell stories. Now I knew, God knows, screens tell stories, but I didn't know anything else. I didn't know a screen could be interactive. And there I am at QDC and I'm watching telephones and televisions and computers being used in this primitive convergence. And it struck me.

I mean, it just like banged at me of, wow. Now I didn't, this is 1993, two years before the internet really started being used by common folk. And I thought, wow, but I didn't think what was going to happen. I just knew it was going to change things and I was fascinated with it. And then again, I've used this word serendipity, but it is the leitmotif of my life. A couple of months later, I was offered to buy QVC and I did it. And so by the time the internet came along from this primitive convergence now two years later, I had kind of in my

fingertips an understanding of that world. And so when that happened, we were able to start all these businesses, the internet business, Expedia and Match and all these things that came internet business, Expedia and Match, and all these things that came along. Cause I was kind of present at the creation of this radical transformation into the digital age. I didn't plan it. I never actually planned anything, but once I saw it, I was just, again,

drawn like a magnet to it and that's what got it started. And then it just went from there. You have a reputation for mentoring and developing or maturing a lot of pretty impressive executives ranging from Strauss-Velnack to Dara Kosswoschai at Uber, Don Steele. One of my investors, Tim Armstrong, speaks very highly of you.

I'm curious, when you see someone, what attributes in them or signals tell you this person is worth making an investment in and this person could play a really important role? What do you spot in people and think this person's a comer? Spark, energy, edge, being alive to the moment and that's all I need. I don't like education unless they're you know tool sets you need to do a specific task but education doesn't impress me. Certainly MBAs don't impress me. I think they're over-educated or narrowly over-educated. And I just look for somebody who's got

some spark and edge. Doesn't have to have an original mind. It just has to have a live mind and be open to possibilities and be curious. If I see that, that's enough to start. And every one of the people you mentioned, almost everyone that's come into my life in that way, usually comes in at the juniorest of levels. And then and you see that little spark or whatever it is. I think mentoring is cut into official. Choose your Mentory or whatever all that stuff. I think it's a little high flown. But I think if you get people at the earliest age and they get into your environment and you can bash around with them in different roles that they could play. And then they grow up within the organization.

They just get big dosages of everything, and some it takes and some it doesn't. I'm curious what you think. If when you look at the media world right now, are there any kind of specific trends that pop out to you and any thoughts on say you're coming out and you want to be the next Barry Diller? Where do you think the puck is headed? Well, I have no clue where it's headed really. I mean, I can, a couple of things maybe.

I mean, if I was starting today, I would look for things that can't be disintermediated because I think the changes that are afoot are going to, things have you know internet is this intermediate lots of stuff AI is going to put that to G force power so If I were again Mine wasn't My own experience. All I got is my own experience. I was drawn to stuff. I didn't suss out, oh, entertainment business looks like it has this or that quality about it. I was just fascinated by it.

I think you think, what fascinates you? What are you interested, what are you curious about? And then just get on the broad path of it somehow. Just start. However, whatever door you have to bash through or whatever you have to do just get on the main path of whatever intrigues you and it will take you or not but it'll it'll take you where we're supposed to go as against the dopes particularly entertainment business who, I want to run a studio.

Anyone who says that to me, I would throw out of my office. That's such an idiot goal. I think, look, if you want to be a doctor, yeah, you got to have a goal. You got to get a degree or other things. But if those aren't necessary, then early age goal stuff is really stupid. You should only be governed by what you're curious about and get in the lane. In terms of the media ecosystem right now, you've actually, I think some of the stuff I read, you've called for antitrust. Do you think the ecosystem is too concentrated right now?

Oh, you mean the lawsuits against Google and, and, uh, I don't know how practical it is. Look, I think with Google, Google, the thing is Google was and is currently, but by bike little currently is on the head of a little pin cause that's changing. Google was an absolute monopoly. No question. You lived as a serf in their land if you had anything internet or traffic oriented that you needed for your services or products. A total monopoly. I think that's just about to change. Now, maybe their Gemini will take over search

just like their Google took over search 20 years ago. I doubt it. I don't think the chances are great. So it seems awfully late. Maybe you need, most antitrust stuff does come late of this kind. So I don't know what sense that makes. And as for separating

Instagram or WhatsApp and trying to get them, I mean, it's also, I think the basis of that doesn't make any sense. I don't think that they are anti-competitive. At the heart of that meta lawsuit doesn't make any total sense to me, But okay, all of that. I think that what is happening on the eve of today, in the next year or two, is there's going to be so much diversity in AI empowered stuff, that I think these tech monopolies, except for Apple, which is not a monopoly, but is the greatest business, as you know, the iPhone business and its walled circle. I don't know how you do better than that ecosystem. But I don't think these companies

are going to... these companies probably because they're so big and so profitable These companies probably, because they're so big and so profitable that offshoots of them... Look, Google has YouTube which is a giant... People don't realize how powerful YouTube is. YouTube is probably worth more than Google search in a while, because I don't see that getting disintermediated. So anyway, I'm long-winded about this. I don't think that the breakup, I think it's the breakup of these things

is so late in the game that they're gonna get competed with vociferously by everything else coming from AI. You mentioned YouTube, which is a good segue into the streaming wars. When you look at Netflix and all the other players, I think of it as Netflix and the seven dwarves. Any predictions or any feel for how that might shake out?

Five years ago, I said Netflix won. Everybody get over it. Please don't try. Don't over-invest to try and become or compete against Netflix. You cannot do it. They lead in every respect, not only the movie business, but certainly the television business. In every respect. They are dominant.

They set the rules and everybody else abides by those rules. Doesn't mean that there aren't other companies that can be successful with their streaming if they scale it down, what their costs going into it, and they make good programming. Because in the end, entertainment is a business of hits, world of hits, and you can do it at a lesser scale than Netflix and succeed very nicely. You can just never be number one or have big growth that the growth of those movie companies subsumed everything else that came along for 70 years. They have been subsumed now by huge tech companies that have different business models than they

do that they can never compete with. So all those companies that have been around for a hundred years, they're just going to be smaller enterprises without great growth prospects, but they'll be okay. Pete Slauson There's a lot of, you see all these TikToks about people saying that, you know, Hollywood is under, especially production, that production is way down in LA, and that everyone's asking for tax credits to make it more competitive. And I think Netflix now spends more than half

of its content budget overseas. Do you think that Hollywood is to the entertainment industry what Detroit was to the automotive industry? Is this cyclical or structural? Hollywood hedge money is gone forever. Again, Hollywood now is dominated by Netflix, tech company, Amazon, a tech company with completely different business model

than anybody in the entertainment business could have ever conceived of, which is we don't care if you watch this stuff really, or then if it's, we don't need really hits. We need you to join Prime and we're going to give you this stuff in the front of the store in order to get you in the store of Prime. How do you compete with that? It's not possible. And then there's, of course, Apple and its efforts in programming.

So tech are now the overlords. Hollywood is, I'm not saying it's culturally irrelevant because a lot of stuff gets created there or is organized there whether it's shot there or shot someplace else is somewhat irrelevant. Though I think it's very relevant to the crafts all of whom live in LA. And I think LA County, LA City, California State has been so friggin dumb in not offering the kinds of production below the line incentives that every other state and country has offered that has pulled the centrality of just making this stuff away from the place that's got all the craft expertise. Kind of crazy, but there it is. Certainly tariffs aren't gonna help that. That's brainless. It's just a completely

different system now than what it was for, you know, dominated again for close to a hundred years by just a handful of companies that subsumed almost everything that came along technically until Netflix busted the apple. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Mercury, the banking product that feels extraordinary to use.

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So head to cvs.com slash vaccines to book your vaccines or you can stop by your local CVS pharmacy today. We're back with more from Barry Diller. So just I want to in our remaining time here, I want to switch to stuff that's more personal. You've had what I would argue from at least an exterior perspective is a very successful partnership with your wife. You guys have been together, married for two and a half decades, but together for five decades, is that right?

And except for an interregnum period when I was sent off to the wilderness, which lasted almost about 10 years. But yes, we are, it's almost 50 years. You're two kids, I'm friends or friendly with Alex. My sense is you have a really good relationship with them. What advice would you have for husbands and for dads around fostering and cultivating strong relationships

with your partner and your kids? I don't know, I guess be engaged or whatever. I don't, I'm not really very good at advice, I think. I just think again, if you're lucky enough that, and luck is a part of it, and of course, there's other stuff in there, but luck is a real part of what is the result of a child that gets to be, let's see, a semi-adult in their teens or post-teens or 20s, whatever, in their kind of development period. And, you know, if they come out of that as responsible, whatever your definition of responsible is, if they're responsible and you're engaged with them,

it's really not me. You know what, as I think about it, it's not me. It's Dion, my wife. I don't know. I've never seen anyone else's relationship with their children, which is like that. It is, it's not the old Elaine May, Mike Nichols thing of, you know, of guilt and calling, quote, your mother. This family talks to each other every day and multiple times a day and none of it is effortful. It's effortless and that's just the children and and the grandchildren much younger obviously but the children are, everybody's life is kind of intertwined.

There's no, you know, I'm marveled, people say, well, I haven't talked to my mother or father in two weeks, or I call them every Thursday or whatever, something like that, formalized. Could not be further than the truth. I just think, I don't got no advice here, I just think if you're lucky enough to have that kind of,

easy is not the word for it, but natural engagement and enfoldment, that good things happen. So you're 83, you've checked a lot of boxes. What boxes are left for you? Like, do you have, when you think about your purpose and what's left for you and what you really, what you want to accomplish you haven't accomplished, what is that or those things? I don't think it's accomplished. I never thought about accomplishments in that sense. I think it's,

am I still curious? I'm still responsible for two public companies, probably three actually now. and he's probably three actually now. And as long as I'm curious about them, then I will have something to contribute. And that kind of goes on just like a clock that doesn't stop or energize or bunny that you can't turn off. And that's just nature. But what I do think about is, and I don't think of, I hate that word legacy anyway, so I think it's stupid,

but what I want to do, I like public art and public places. And I've been lucky enough to be involved in a few of those. And I wanna do as many more of those as I can. Because I think there are very few people who have the resources and the will or desire to do that. Since I got that, then I think it'd be criminal for me not to spend those resources and my own juice to create more public places and public art, because I marvel at what has been created by others and lives for hundreds of years,

and you come upon it and you say, how the hell did they decide to do Central Park? How did they, whatever it is, any place that there is anything that is of a, you know, a public institution. Barry Diller is a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment. He's the chairman and senior executive of IAC. His new book, Who Knew is out now. He joins us from his office in Manhattan. Barry,

I've only had one dinner with you, but I think everybody, everybody just wants to be Barry Diller. You just have a certain- Put luck to it. Yeah, that's true. You just have a certain fearlessness about you that I think we're all drawn to, both professionally and personally.

Really appreciate you coming on the show. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Proficy Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network. Stay tuned for next week's conversation episode featuring one of my favorites and a real role model for me, Sam Harris. It's been reported that 1 in 4 people experience sensory sensitivities, making everyday experiences like a trip to the dentist especially difficult. In fact, 26% of sensory-sensitive individuals avoid dental visits entirely. In Sensory Overload, a new documentary produced as part of Sensodyne's Sensory Inclusion

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