Michael Ovitz on Power, Dealmaking, and Building CAA

Michael Ovitz

It's a really great question, and I'm not sure, frankly. One of the things is, I love the internet and I love being on my computer to the point where my significant other wants to kill me sometimes, because I just love surfing through the internet and going down rabbit holes.

First of all, David Geffen, Barry Diller and I are very dissimilar human beings, but we do share a couple of very similar traits. All three of us cut our teeth in the early years in the entertainment business. All three of us have voracious appetites for learning, and all three of us have a voracious appetite to read. David and Barry are two of the smartest guys I know, and they're on top of everything. If you talk to them, it's extraordinary how well read they are. These guys didn't go to college. They're better read than most PhDs I know in any field. And we all three demonstrated that as mailroom employees, where we knew the quickest path was education.

I have a thing I always say to people who work with me: knowledge is power. And it works for you and against you. It works for you if you embrace it, use it, read, and try to index it in your head for context. It works against you if it turns you into a lawyer, into lying. When I started at CAA in '74, it became very clear to me that lying was an industrial problem in the entertainment business. Everybody didn't tell the truth. One of the reasons they didn't tell the truth is that — they didn't know the term "knowledge is power", but they knew it innately — they felt they had to have an answer. So you could call up an agent and ask them a question, and they felt this necessity to have an answer. By doing that, more than half the time they'd make it up.

So we started some very simple rules, which in retrospect I'm shocked how revolutionary they were, but they were simple. To me it was simpleton logic. Don't lie. If you don't have an answer, here's your answer: 'Tell you what, Shane, I'm going to get back to you, because I don't know the answer to that question, but I'm going to find out.' That's highly acceptable. In the entertainment business, everybody knows everything. It's not possible, by the way. Not possible.

Michael Ovitz

I think people want to show they're in the know. And I think it's just very fine to show that you're not, and that you want to find out.

Michael Ovitz

The second thing we did was insist on teamwork, which was shocking to everybody, because for 75 years it had been one client, one agent, and we would not allow that. All of our clients had multiple agents, so they could talk to a lot of different people. In the years I was at CAA, we never lost a client. The reason was, if they tired of one person, they'd go to the next, but everyone was up to speed — up to the minute on their career. Our inner-office rule was you had to answer your associates first, before the clients, before the buyers. We were all basically empowered by each other. If you look at it, the permutation of that thesis is to the hundredth power. You can't beat it.

And it's one of the reasons we attracted most of the major working talent. We didn't have any ego about who handled whom. We didn't have any ego about passing information. We didn't have any ego about anything, because the clients were in the ego business, not us. They had egos — not on their own; it was imputed to them because they were movie stars. And one of the most difficult things in the world to do, besides being a physicist or a surgeon, is being an actor or a director or a writer. Writers — it's a lonely vocation. You're by yourself, usually. You've got to create out of thin air. I find artists in the same boat: painters, sculptors. I'm wildly impressed by the fact that they create things out of nothing. That's why I love art. Directors make 300 decisions a day. Little things — if the glass on the table's in the wrong place for the second shot, your mistake is noted for posterity. People love to catch it.

As an actor — I remember once sitting with Paul Newman, who was the loveliest man and wanted so hard to be normal. He really wanted to be one of the guys. He took up racing, and at the track he was not Paul Newman the movie star, he was Paul Newman the guy. I used to go with him to races and we'd race go-karts together. I was with him one night in Westport, Connecticut, where he lived, at a local restaurant. He hated when people came up to him while he was eating. He was really cool about signing autographs any other time. I'm shooing people away, and I said, 'Paul, I've got to ask you a question. You're fun to be with. You're no different than any of my other friends. You just happen to be a lot better looking, and you can act, which none of us can. How do you take it, with everyone telling you you're the greatest thing since the invention of the wheel?' He looked at me and said, 'Michael, you know what? I don't believe any of it. But after a certain amount of time it starts to get to you, and you start to think maybe.' It's a tough gig.

Michael Ovitz

The first place everybody goes wrong is they start to believe things that aren't true. People tend to deceive themselves. I find that to be a common denominator across every kind of industry. It happens everywhere. If you start believing that you're better than others, or that your press is accurate — good or bad — or that you're superior in any way. We're all humans and we all have different skill sets. Some athletes are just better than others, but that doesn't make them better people. Sometimes it makes them worse people, actually.

It's very easy to slip up in Hollywood in many directions. You can slip up in the relationship area, in the ego area, in believing you're something you're not, in just simple mistakes in daily life that others might not make in different vocations. Hollywood's also an incredibly social event. Everything's a social event. I always felt Hollywood was manufactured for people who had no significant others, no children, no home, no family — nothing except maybe a two-bedroom apartment — because they could go out 365 nights a year and find companionship with others in the same boat. You can't find that in most vocations.

Michael Ovitz

Everyone had to be incredibly well read. People were not allowed to recommend roles or material they didn't believe in. That was a big downfall of the agency business for all the years I was in it before — people would take a flyer to try to convince you of something they didn't believe in. That's a real weak link in the chain. We didn't have any of that. You had to have a passion for what you were doing. I had an open-door policy: Friday afternoons, anyone could come in and give me something to read. But since I could only read a certain number of scripts on a weekend, they had to be incredibly passionate about it.

I remember a young agent we had, Amy Grossman — a literary agent, and she was terrific. She came in one afternoon and said, 'I've read something you've got to read.' I gave everybody two minutes to sell it to me. By the way, I do the same thing in my tech investing right now: if you can't tell me what your business is about in 20 seconds, you should not do your business — because how are you going to market it to the world? I'm not talking about the technical algorithms of AI, I'm talking about what does it do? She said, 'Your client Robert Towne, one of the great writers in the movie business — he wrote Chinatown and Cinderella Liberty and some of the best scripts ever written — I just read a script by his brother, Roger Towne, that deserves attention by this company, by CAA.'

Our company worked as a group. If you brought a script in and a couple of the senior people read it and endorsed it, it got a lot of attention. It had to be good, because we put a lot of assets on it. At the end of the day, all we have is our time, and you run out of time very fast. In the agency business we were like one-armed wallpaper hangers — there's just no time. She said, 'Here's what the script is about. It's about a guy who's washed up and comes back to a professional baseball team, an older baseball player, and it's his journey.' I got a little tingle on that. I'd also indexed in my head that our client Robert Redford was looking for a baseball movie. So I took the script home, read it, and called her the minute I finished. I said, 'This is a great film. Needs some work, but a great film. And I have a great idea of how to put it together — I'm going to tell you, and tell me honestly what you think.' Because we were about directness and honesty and truth. That was critical to us. Tell your clients the truth. People in the entertainment business were always lied to. I'd see agents tell their clients — where they'd just seen dailies that were no good and needed to be reshot — 'Oh, you look great.' Tell them what they want to hear. We never did that. Ever.

Michael Ovitz

No, you just say it. And you know what? It's interesting — they appreciate it. I want to be told the truth. In any case, I said to Amy: we have a director, one of my very first clients as a writer, Barry Levinson. I signed him as a comedy writer when I saw him on a local television show in 1969. He had an eye and a lust for the business, he was smart and visual, and I knew he had something in him. We put his first movie together, called Diner — a huge success with an all-unknown cast that proved to be up-and-coming young stars, which meant he had an eye. I knew Redford wanted to do a baseball movie. I also knew the odds of Redford working with a second-time director, after working with greats like Sydney Pollack, were that he probably wouldn't do it. But I decided to put myself and the company behind it. I sent Bob the script and Barry the script simultaneously, which was unusual — usually you build a package one element at a time. They both responded positively.

I called Bob and said, 'I'd like to bring Barry to see you up at Sundance, but I want to warn you, he's only done one movie — but I have a strong belief in this guy.' To Bob's credit, because he founded Sundance and liked experimental films and young people, he said, 'Let me meet him. No commitments, but I'll meet him.' I remember taking my son Chris, who was about six or seven, up to Sundance with me and Barry. We sat with Bob in the Sundance Lodge, they really hit it off, and we packaged The Natural that day, right there. Then we put Kim Basinger, Wilford Brimley and Glenn Close — three other clients — in, we got it financed, and the rest is history. It was a huge hit.

Michael Ovitz

Over the years, as a person in the business of giving advice — even though I'm not an agent anymore, I still find myself doing it constantly, daily, for friends or former clients or people I'm in business with looking for another point of view — I get that call. In the course of those discussions, people's first complaint is usually about an associate, then about a deal gone wrong, and then about not liking their job. I'm a huge believer that you have to do what you love doing. Right now I'm doing something I can't wait to get up every morning for. If you can't feel that way, you shouldn't do the job, or you should look for another, or you should ask yourself why you're not happy in the job if you were at one time. There's a whole pilot's checklist to look at if that's the case. It's important, because if you're fighting going to work during the day, you're not going to perform to your capacity or potential.

Michael Ovitz

You're not going to stand out. At the end of the day, that's what it's all about — excellence and standing out and doing good things and helping people. You can't do any of that if you're personally unhappy. You have a non-starter on your hands.

Michael Ovitz

Well, I love people, so that's one thing. Two, I'm very efficient with my communications. I collect art and people — those are the two things I collect. Art is easy, because it's static: you can look at it, you can make a decision. People are as fascinating, probably more fascinating, but it takes a lot of time. And I put that time in if I really feel the relationship is a two-way street.

Michael Ovitz

My thesis on investing, my thesis on hiring people, and my thesis on how I reach out in my life is predicated on how I feel — in the first case about the founder, in the second about the people I meet. I like to meet interesting people, and I'm very lucky in that I get to meet some of the most interesting people in the world, from all walks of life, in every profession.

When I was in the agency business in the '70s, I realised the entertainment business was a closed-end ecosystem. Everything was about the entertainment business. There was no life outside it. Very few people had other interests other than content. Very few collected art. Very few talked at dinner about anything except entertainment, and a little about politics, but mostly gossip — about clients and about who made what trouble someone was in. All things I found absolutely uninteresting. So I made it a point to take myself away from the business: go to New York every single week, build a presence in the art community, the theatre community, part of the intellectual community, because I didn't want to be one of those one-horse people. I always admired people who had great depth and breadth and could talk about many things, and I practised what I preached.

At the agency in '74 we had a 200-line bibliography of monthly magazines and books to look at, and they weren't in a singular space. I was a magazine junkie. You probably aren't aware of this, but there wasn't always an internet — did you know that?

Michael Ovitz

I used to get over 200 magazines a month at my office or house or both. Every single day I'd thumb through 10 or 15 of them, tear out things I needed to read in depth. Those were the days of long form, not short form like today, where no one has any attention span. It was a time to learn a little bit about everything, and it kept proving itself to me over and over again. The reason I did it at first was practical: our agents needed to be fluent in multiple disciplines, to talk to different people with different interests. So when I met Paul Newman, it was very easy to engage with him, because I subscribed to Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Automobile and one other car magazine. I'd looked at them and I was really deeply into automobiles, but more in the aesthetic sense — I didn't really know how they worked. But when I met Paul, that's the first thing he wanted to talk about. We laid some common denominator together. I'd preach that to the staff: you need to stay on top of multi-disciplinary careers, functions, interests and hobbies, so you have something to talk about.

I read Scientific American, not diligently, but I read the headlines, looked at the opening five paragraphs of an article to get a sense of it. Everything you needed in those days in a detailed article was in the opening and the closing, when you get down to it. I was interested in medicine, so I read the New England Journal of Medicine. I worked very hard to raise money for the UCLA Medical Center — I was chairman of the hospital for many years. I had to look at the New England Journal of Medicine to talk to the 20 department heads. When I brought I.M. Pei to design and build the UCLA Medical Center after the earthquake, I needed a fluent understanding of other architects so I could give context, and of the 20 department heads who were the tops of their field. I didn't learn how to perform a procedure, but I got some vocabulary and could stay in a conversation for a period of time.

Michael Ovitz

First of all, I believed all the publicity I got, both good and bad, was nonsense. The same people who said good things about me later would write bad things, then good things, then bad things. None of it fazed me, frankly.

Michael Ovitz

Yeah, I read it, because I wanted context. But I thought those power lists they developed in the entertainment business were sheer nonsense, because there's no such thing as power. It doesn't exist. When people would say this one's the second most, or the tenth most, or you're the most powerful — it's all nonsense, because power is an ephemeral thing. It's fleeting and it doesn't last. If you don't believe that, take a look at anyone who's had it. It's like a lease. It has a closed end, and never a good one. So I never believed in it. I believed in my family — my nuclear family, my three kids — and my business family. That was my life. I protected both with privacy. We were very private at home. There were no pictures of my kids anywhere. I wouldn't allow pictures of them taken. I didn't like anyone at the agency talking to the press, giving trash about stuff.

We had another rule: it was inappropriate to badmouth non-clients' product, because that was an age-old trick in the entertainment business — try to start a drum roll of negativity. When I was 22 I met a manager, quite successful, and I liked him a lot, but he had a horrible habit of badmouthing everybody. Six months in, it became clear he did that because he was insecure. In a meeting, he thought it made himself look better, when in reality it made him look really weak and unappreciative. I remember sitting in his office while he was badmouthing his partner, who actually was a nice guy — not the sharpest tool in the shed, but a very nice guy who didn't deserve it. So at our place you weren't allowed to badmouth anybody. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say it. If you've got a problem, take them into their office, shut the door, let it out, fight it out, then shake hands — but don't drag it on. It doesn't make any sense.

Michael Ovitz

You can count on them saying something negative about you, even if there's nothing negative to say. Some people exist in a sea of negativity. I tried to set a stage for us to exist in a sea of positiveness — not to badmouth people, and just, as I say, to be more English.

Michael Ovitz

Investing is very simple for me. I've been investing in tech since 1993, full-time since 2001. I transitioned out of the media business around 2003 or '04 — I sold every asset I had and went full-time into tech investing and tech consulting, and nothing changed for me. Founders need to be passionate. They need to be deep into their idea. They need to have a lot of ideas about what they want to do with their idea. They need to be connected to people who can help them get it started. They have to be open to critique. They can't be arrogant — it's critical they're not arrogant. I find arrogant founders have a tendency to fail more than non-arrogant ones. They have to have the ability to tell you their ideas in succinct ways, and they have to be really enthusiastic.

It's funny — when you're a director interviewing an actor, you're looking for the same things. The only difference is a Martin Scorsese, who I have unbelievable respect for and who taught me most of what I know about the movie business, said to me, 'I'm always looking at their eyes.' I'm not looking at that when I'm interviewing a founder — they're not actors, and I don't want them to be. But other than that, the packaging of a film or a television show or a record or a book is no different than the packaging of an idea for a digital company. It's all the same. The founder is the creator, the VCs are the money in tech, the studio or distributor is the money in the entertainment business, and then you go to marketing. Both need to be marketed, you've got to find a distributor, and you've got to give them both advice. It's very much the same. Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen pointed that out to me in 1999. They both looked at me and said, 'You do exactly what we do.' That was an epiphany moment for me.

Michael Ovitz

I got a cold call from a mutual friend of ours, Ron Conway — great investor, fabulous human being, one of the nicest men on the planet, well-loved up in San Francisco. We knew each other through UCLA, because he had a kid down there and I was running the board at the hospital. He said, 'I've got a guy I want you to meet.' I said, 'Who's that?' He said, 'Marc Andreessen.' I said, 'Who is it?' He said, 'He's really smart. You're going to really like him. He wants to meet you.' I said, 'Why would he want to meet me? What do I have to offer this guy?' He said, 'Shut up and just meet the guy.' Ron was that kind of guy. If he said meet him, I'm going to meet him. That's continued in my life: if people I respect say meet the guy — even if I don't want to — I will do it. It just worked for me on a company we announced last week that we incubated, where I met someone I refused to meet but someone I respect said I'd better.

Andreessen came down to meet me, picked a restaurant, and I budgeted an hour, because I thought it was a complete waste of my time. He came in a pair of striped shorts and a kind of flower Hawaiian shirt. I'd never seen that look in Hollywood. We sat down and started talking, and we spent three hours together. I was mesmerised by this guy. Then he had me meet Ben, and I was mesmerised by him. They were extraordinary people in a world I didn't know existed, and they asked me to go on the board of this new company. I asked what it did, and they told me, and I said, 'I don't understand.' I really didn't understand it at the time. This was 1999 — they'd developed a cloud. I couldn't understand what they were talking about. Where is it? How do you plug it in? Where does it get power? What is it? And they'd thought this through in 1999. They developed a company called Loudcloud. Then they said, 'We'd like you on the board.' I said, 'Guys, I'm really enjoying talking to you, but I'm an idiot about this stuff. I don't even understand what product we're selling.' To their credit, they said, 'We want someone who's not beholden to anyone in Silicon Valley, someone who thinks out of the box, and someone who's fearless at going up against the other people on the board.' I said, 'Okay, I can do that.' And I did it.

Michael Ovitz

It's funny, Shane — I don't know if that's good or bad, by the way. To this day I haven't decided. I was discussing it yesterday with Tamara, the woman I'm with. She's English and very elegant and charming and mannered. I'm not English. Some days I can be charming, some days I can be not charming and tough. She doesn't like confrontation, but will do it if pushed. For me, it's a tool in the toolkit. That's all it is. I do a lot of things for friends in trouble, because I've been viewed by a lot of my friends as the world's best friend and the world's worst enemy — because I'm just black-and-white loyal. It's the way I've been my whole life. I'm very loyal to my friends, to my family, and to people who have done things for me.

At CAA, we kept a list of every single executive who helped us in the first three to five years and then had trouble. We got everyone a job. If we couldn't get them a job, we made sure they had money, because they helped us when we had nothing. There were a lot of people on the list, because the entertainment business is not good to elderly people. It's not Japan. It doesn't have a good memory. And we did.

Michael Ovitz

I don't share it much. At one time I think we had close to 400 people on a list who were either fired, weren't working, or fell on hard times. There was a writer on the list who was about as important a writer as there was in the television business in the '60s. We'd asked him, when he was really important, to write an episode of a half-hour comedy for a client we'd just signed who really needed the job, and he did it. Twenty years later the guy called me and said, very simply, that he'd hit a dead end. He couldn't get a job anywhere. He was older, very nice, but he'd timed out — his style was gone. In a staff meeting, I told everyone this story. I said, 'We're going to legislate a job for this guy. This is not just giving him a check. He needs his dignity back.' In two weeks we got him a job. That was our duty, not our choice. And yeah, there was some confrontation, because people tried to blow us off the phone saying they wouldn't do it, and we used a confrontational tactic to get him the job.

So you have to ask yourself: what's more important? Some people say confrontation's horrible. I have a lot of friends who won't get into a confrontation. I'm in the school that occasionally it's necessary. When you're confronted, I don't think any of us has a choice but to respond. You can't just let it go. You can't let people walk all over you or your clients.

Michael Ovitz

I wasn't going to win any popularity contest, but I'll tell you what I said to people: I didn't go into business to win a popularity contest, I went into business to win. And I'm a monopolist. I believe in Peter Thiel's theory on monopoly. I don't believe you should have competition. They have to be eliminated. That's the American way, in my opinion. Everyone says there's always room for competition. I don't think there's any room for competition. I don't want anyone to be as good as us. I want us to be the best. If you want to have a second or third choice, that's okay, but we're the first choice. So we had to be the best. I wasn't running for high school president — I'd already done that, and I won it at a 4,000-kid high school. I don't think I was made president because I was popular; I was made president because I got stuff done, and people knew that. Ask me to do something, I'll get it done. When I need something done, I ask the busiest person I know, because they'll get it done. Ask someone with too much time, it never gets done.

Michael Ovitz

When people help you — and it wasn't in the long-term culture of the entertainment business; short-term, it's a transactional friendship business. Are these people really your friends? I'm not so sure. But while they can help you, they're your friends. If someone helped us get started — and we started from scratch, on card tables, with no money; we ran out of money the third week we were in business, and we got sued by our former employer and didn't even have money to defend ourselves, I had to handle that without a lawyer — you have to reach out and help people. Here's a guy who helped us when we needed it, and 10 years later he can't get a job and doesn't feel too good about himself. Time passed him by. That happens to all of us. But unless you stay current — that's my thesis. As long as I'm learning and consulting for young founders, I'm going to stay current, because I learn something every single day. I can't wait to get up in the morning. I meet with the most interesting humans on the planet, and I get pitched ideas by young entrepreneurs that make me really believe in this country. I am not worried about foreign competition. China may have robots that are great, but we've got people who are unbelievably smart, and our system just works really well.

Michael Ovitz

I was in London with Tamara — she's English, from London — and a group of businessmen asked to have a roundtable session with me, because one of their friends was having a problem. The subject fascinated me, and it's why I took the lunch. The subject was: why are American business people so much better than everyone else in the world? That was the second time in my life I'd been approached with that question. The other time was in Japan, where I'd go once a month to deal with the Japanese companies I consulted for.

The guy who set up the lunch posed the question to the table, and I asked each guy what he did. We went around the table, and I saved the last guy till the end, because I'd been briefed on him. He said, 'My name's so-and-so, I was in this business, and this is what I did.' I said, 'And what are you doing now?' He said, 'Well, I'm moving to Aspen.' I said, 'Oh, you like to ski?' He said, 'No, I don't like skiing particularly.' I said, 'You have kids?' 'Yeah, I'm going to put them in school there.' 'Where have you lived the last 20 years?' 'London.' 'Why are you leaving?' 'Well, my business just went under.' I said, 'Oh, okay. And why are you leaving?' 'Well, I'm done.' 'What do you mean, you're done?' 'Well, I'm so embarrassed. We went bankrupt, and I had to fire like 800 people.' I said, 'Yeah, so what?' He said, 'What do you mean, so what?' I said, 'So what? You went bankrupt. You didn't do it on purpose, did you?' He said, 'No, we had a bad business cycle. One of our products fell off a cliff. We had a great product, but we didn't back it up. We made some fundamental mistakes. So I want to get out of the city, I'm kind of embarrassed.'

I said, 'Well, our lunch is over.' Everyone said, 'What are you talking about? We haven't even gotten served.' I said, 'You asked me, why are American businessmen and women better than others? We just got a demonstration of it. Failure in American society is a badge of honour. We all fail. I've failed in a lot of things. You fail, Shane — you just get back up on your horse and keep riding. I've had tons of failures, but it doesn't stop me from trying to be great again.' By the time I got done, this guy got all pumped up, actually cancelled his move, and went and started another business — because he'd thought people were talking about him. I said, 'They're talking about everybody. If they can see a weak spot, it makes them feel better to badmouth you. What's that got to do with you? Let them say whatever they want. Just prove them wrong.'

Michael Crichton was one of my closest friends until he passed away. We talked every day of the week, seven days a week, and he gave me the best advice. Every time I made a mistake or got some bad publicity, he'd call and make light of it. He'd always say, 'Just remember something, Michael.' I said, 'What?' He said, 'There's always another rodeo.' I said, 'Really? Since when are you a cowboy?' He said, 'Trust me. You did that, it didn't work. Next case.' I believed him, and I've lived that my whole life.

Michael Ovitz

He was the smartest person until I met Marc Andreessen. Then I had the greatest lunch of my life, where I put them in a room with me, one on each end of the table and me in the middle, and I felt like I was at Wimbledon or the US Open. I never sat through three hours like that in my life. It was an intellectual sword fight that was so cool. And they both loved it. Both incredibly well read, both with extraordinary recall, both curious about everything. They share these traits. They're the same people in that way.

Michael Ovitz

There are two things that drive me. One is my five grandchildren, who I'm in love with — I just love hanging out with them. And my four kids: two boys, two girls. They've grown into just amazing human beings, and they're parenting so much better than I did, frankly.

Michael Ovitz

Because they're just better with their kids than I was with them. I came from a household post–World War II, with a very strict father, and parenting in the '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s was very different than parenting today. I see it with my kids, how they handle their children, and they're doing a great job — just different than the way I did it.

The other thing that's important to me is that I can't wait to get up in the morning and meet a founder who's, say, developed a submarine that has no crew and has stealth defence capabilities for the country. Or I've got a young guy — I've already done one company with him and I'm doing another. His name's Nima Ghamsari. I met him 17 years ago; he was assigned to me at Palantir, when I was one of the advisers to Alex Karp, who's a brilliant guy. I was introduced to Palantir by Peter Thiel, who'd invested a lot of money in it, and there was no income. He asked me to help monetise it, which shows you don't have to be totally technical to be in the tech world. Nima was assigned to me to answer technical questions, because he was a genius engineer. We started a company together — he had an idea that he could put a company together called Blend, now public, that does mortgages on your phone in under 10 clicks. Now he's come up with another idea. I got him all the funding, including from us, I'm doing the marketing, he's hired the right engineers, and it's a total incubation. I can't tell you how much fun it is, and how much I'm learning, because I'm not an engineer, but I love the idea and I can help in the non-technical stuff that's critical: what are the nuts and bolts of building a business, how do you build a culture, how do you write a budget, how do you market the product, how do you make sales, who do you hire, who do you hire as your first 10 employees.

These are young people, and I've learned something fascinating: this generation in tech, they just want to know. They don't want to know what you've done that's great — they want to know what you failed at, and how to avoid it. It's so fantastic that the way they think is counterintuitive.

Michael Ovitz

When I published my book, I got a call from Patrick Collison at Stripe. I think the Collison brothers are two of the smartest guys in the business. Patrick invited me to lunch. I went over, sat down at a picnic table after going through the cafeteria line, and he said, 'Are you ready?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm hungry.' Then I saw my book sitting there with a zillion Post-its sticking out of it. He said, 'Okay, let's start.' I said, 'What are we starting?' He said, 'I have marked every place in your book where you said you made a mistake. I want to know the conditions you were under when you made the decision, what you might have done differently, and what would have happened if you'd done it differently.' We sat there for three hours. What I realised is he didn't care about any of the good things I did, or the things that turned out successful or revolutionary in entertainment. No interest. He wanted to know the mistakes, so he wouldn't make them. That to me was not smart — it was wise. That was a grade above normal.

Michael Ovitz

I could just pick one? You've got 20 hours? I've made so many mistakes — in my business life, in my personal life, in my art collecting. That's why I did that lunch in London, because it hasn't stopped me. I don't look back. It's history. I build on it. There are a lot of cultures that don't believe in that, and we're not one of them. We're 200 years old here. We live in what I think is the greatest country in the history of mankind, and it's all about what you can do — pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, don't give up, create that momentum. It's okay to be competitive. It's okay to be in a capitalist system.

Michael Ovitz

I got into a huge argument with a friend of my daughter's — I shouldn't talk about this on your podcast, but — she's a rising young executive at Vogue, 23, following in her mother's footsteps. A great kid: sophisticated, smart, personable, sensitive. I make it a policy never to discuss politics at the dinner table, because I always get in trouble. One of her friends said to the table that he'd decided to support the mayoral candidate who happens to be a socialist — some people think he's a communist, I'm not sure which. I've seen a lot of information on him, because I'm fascinated by this dynamic, and I've listened to all his campaign promises. I'm not a socialist. I believe in charity toward helping people, and I do a lot of that. But I believe capitalists create jobs, and that creates a system. I said to the guy, 'What school did you go to?' He named a big fancy Ivy League school, probably one I couldn't get into. I said, 'Did you take any history?' He said, 'Yes, quite a bit.' I said, 'Great. Can you name me one system in the last 2,000 years that has worked that's not capitalism? Socialism, communism, dictator — just name me one you learned at your Ivy League school.' Dead silence, because there isn't one. Dictators can have long runs, some longer than others, but at the end they all lose. Autocrats all lose. Democratic capitalist societies win. Will we go up and down? Absolutely. But is this the best system? Unequivocally. Is it good to have a socialist? I don't think so. We've seen that movie before, and it doesn't work.

Michael Ovitz

The roots of woke culture had some merit — the roots. Then, like anything else in West Los Angeles, they carried it too far. Instead of letting it go from one side of the metronome to the middle, they took it all the way to the other side. I think it contributed to the demise of the content business in Hollywood right now. I think the content business is in the worst place it's ever been, and this forced wokeness has not been productive. At the beginning the ideas were wonderful — I don't think people should be predatory on each other, and that's the history of the entertainment business; it needed to stop. But once it was made known, it didn't need to keep going, and it did. It forced bad creative decisions. It forced our audiences, who don't all think that way, to go narrow on us and to not want to see the things we did. Things the liberal left in Hollywood think are fantastic may not work for the other half of the country. When I grew up, we made movies everyone wanted to watch. We didn't care what your political persuasion was. When we did Ghostbusters, I don't care if you're a liberal or a conservative — we just want you to laugh. When we did Casino or Goodfellas with Marty, not interested in your politics; we just want you to watch the movie and enjoy it. So we didn't enter political discussions. I didn't even allow political discussions in meetings. I didn't want to get involved with our clients' politics.

Michael Ovitz

It's a great question, because I just had this debate at lunch today. The answer is: I don't ever, in technology, count anything out. So could it happen? Absolutely, because the technology is actually there to do it. Netflix has already done experiments where you change the ending — here are four different endings, you put your own ending on the film. But the reality of all this we see a little bit now in AI. When you go to the AI websites, I think the different AI companies have the personalities of the engineers programming them, and you see that bias in the information you're given. You sure saw it in the early days.

Michael Ovitz

I think they just do a better job of hiding it now, but I think it's still there.

Michael Ovitz

I don't. I'm overwhelmed. I have, in my office in New York, my office at home, my office on Madison Avenue, stacks of articles to read — treatises and thought pieces. I'm on the Council on Foreign Relations; I never get to finish the monthly as much as I want to. I've got articles from The Atlantic stripped out of the magazine sitting in a pile. I'm overwhelmed with information, and I love discovery, so there's just not enough hours in the day. I've got a horrible habit of wanting to start going down rabbit holes late at night. You learn that from your young engineers, because they stay up all night — but then they go to sleep, and I stay up all night and don't. That's pretty taxing.

Michael Ovitz

Yeah, I'm a very early riser, and I do my best thinking in the morning. My very best thinking.

Michael Ovitz

It's the same every day of my life, seven days a week. I get up — if I'm in New York it's harder, because I have to take our dog around the block or we have an accident in the apartment; if I'm in LA we just open the door, saves me 10 minutes. I come back, get his food, get something to drink for myself, and then I sit down at my desk and read the same things every single morning.

Michael Ovitz

The first thing I read, believe it or not, is the New York Post. I read it because I love the way they report the news. It's short. I can get a snapshot of what's going on very quickly. I think Keith Poole's an amazing editor — he's English, very smart — and they have some very good reporters. I get it short and fast, get a few laughs, and don't spend a lot of time on it. Then I go right to TechCrunch. I read two or three tech websites that give me information about what's going on. I like to read The Information — I think Jessica Lessin's really smart. Then I scan the headlines of the Drudge Report — takes me two minutes, because I like to see their point of view, since it's so different than mine. I always like to be balanced. When I watch the news with Tamara, we watch three news sources instead of one. We won't watch one. We'll watch CNN, Fox and Sky News, because you can have the same news and a different spin on all three, so we get the most neutral spin — I guess out of Sky News. Then I jump right into the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, LA Times and Washington Post, and I go right through those like a hot knife through butter, digitally.

Michael Ovitz

I'm looking for headlines, and I'm looking for pictures, because they often wouldn't appear if the editor didn't want them there. I like to look through the lens the editor does. Editors of newspapers and magazines are much smarter and wiser than they're given credit for, because they tell you what's important — by placement in the publication, by a bigger headline, a sub-headline, a picture. You can programme yourself for that. They're like tells. That's all they are. And they educate me. Someone asked me if I thought journalism would be dead. I said, 'No, just the opposite. I think branded journalism is more important than ever.' The most important people on the planet are journalists and editors. They feed us our menu, in a strange way. I don't agree with people who sit and read things cover to cover, because you can't equally weight everything between the covers. It's not possible.

Michael Ovitz

I couldn't agree with him more. I have zero interest in anybody's opinion, unless it's an op-ed piece — then I know it's an opinion, and that's okay, because I've looked for it. I don't want an opinion in a factual news piece. I'm not interested in what somebody thinks when they're writing about something that's happened in the Middle East, that it's not this, it's not that. Do I agree with them? Sometimes no, sometimes yes. But I don't want the writer's opinion.

Michael Ovitz

Exactly what it says. Mediocrity, to me, is a disease you have to get rid of at all costs. I can't stand talking to people who suffer from that disease, who have no interest. Sometimes you sit blindly next to someone at a dinner party and try to talk to them, and they have no interest in anything, and I just can't deal with it — because I want to be challenged. I want to be pushed. I want to be asked questions. I want to be told I'm wrong. I wanted that kid at that dinner, in front of the other 10 young people, my daughter's friends, to defend his position. But in one sentence, he couldn't. It was indefensible. I wanted to argue with him in front of everybody.

I'm a huge hater of communism. It's never worked. I've read Marx, I've read Lenin. It all sounds great in theory, but it doesn't work. It's like anything else: not all doctors are as good as each other. Some are just more gifted. Some are better surgeons, some better diagnosticians. Some know more about your intestines than your heart. Sometimes you need a specialist. There's no such thing as egalitarian in anything. Some of my teachers in high school were better than others — they just were. They were more interesting, they did stuff that was different. Leaders — some of them are more interesting than others. We've got horrible leadership in Los Angeles right now. We had that fire. A woman is our mayor who is very nice, but she has no idea what she's doing. She's never run a business, and she's running a budget of one of the biggest corporations in the country — it's called LA. It's the same with New York: we've got a guy running for mayor here who's never had a job.

My thesis, which I bring up everywhere I go, is that if you're going to run in this country for mayor, governor, president or vice president, you'd better have five years of having run a business — any kind of business. You could have a mom-and-pop store with five employees, but something with a balance sheet, sales, marketing, a healthcare plan. You've got to know how to do it. We have a mayor in LA who is not getting anything fixed, and it's not that she doesn't want to — she doesn't know how to. And the city rejected a guy who ran for mayor who was a businessman, maybe because he was too rich or his suits were too expensive, but the guy was head of the police commission.

Michael Ovitz

I walk around London, I don't feel safe, because the government there is taking the police off the street. I walk around New York, I feel great, because there's a lot of police out. The police are the most maligned service people in the world. Who wants that job? What a terrible job. And we get these men and women who do it. Do they make mistakes? Yeah. But are the mistakes worth throwing out the whole system? I don't think so.

Michael Ovitz

I love Mike Bloomberg as a person and as a mayor. Mike Bloomberg got stuff done. He built a business from scratch — I met him when he first started it. Truth be known, he was fired from Salomon Brothers and started what's one of the biggest and best creative businesses in the country. He came into the city with the same passion, ethos and organisation. You talk about momentum — Mike Bloomberg got stuff done, and he didn't stand on ceremony. Even things he couldn't get through, he paid for himself. You felt safe in the city. You knew Bloomberg had the police's back. I think Jessica Tisch has done a phenomenal job here. There are those who say she comes from a wealthy family — well, I say, who cares? She's been amazing. And the fact that this current candidate hasn't even talked about whether he'd keep her or not, and that he wants to defund the police and turn this place into chaos — I don't get it. I can't see the logic. I don't care how charismatic he is. It doesn't make sense to me.

Michael Ovitz

I think momentum is like a train coming out of a station. It doesn't happen instantaneously. You have to build it. It's a conscious building-block game. It's like when you were a kid and you had blocks to build — you have to have a foundation before you can build the house. Bloomberg did it. It didn't all happen the first six months; it literally took time to get up to speed, and he did it. But the key is he didn't stop till he left. When you're building momentum, you cannot quit. That's the counterargument to when we talked about cutting back: when you're building momentum, you don't want to stop, even for 10% of your time.

Michael Ovitz

It's a fascinating question. I was actually thinking about that, because my grandson started a new school here in Tribeca yesterday, called the Alpha School. It's a completely different angle on education. I really liked what I saw. A lot of it's practical learning, learning with things you're interested in. I just believe that in one's life you have to be on a constant and progressive learning curve — period — about anything.

I was up in the Valley once with Max Levchin, a great guy, co-founder of PayPal. We were going to have coffee, and he said, 'Come with me,' and took me to the coffee room, and proceeded to spend 10 minutes explaining how to brew the perfect cup of coffee. I realised it was so fantastic. He'd studied it all — he knew exactly what to do when, how to roast the coffee, how to grind it, what kind of water to use, all stuff none of us think about. I said to myself, that's a metaphor for life, making a cup of coffee. It's kind of like a Japanese tea ceremony. He took all the components apart, isolated them, and then put them into a fluid movement.

Michael Ovitz

Momentum to me is the single most important thing in anything we do. It's important in life, to keep the momentum of your interests and your family. In business, if you don't have momentum, you have no business. In sports, momentum changes second-place teams to first-place teams. Momentum may be one of the most underutilised, most critical things in life.

Michael Ovitz

I don't think getting momentum is a science. It's more an art form. Momentum is about extraordinarily hard, industrious work. It's about deeply educating yourself in your field, deeply educating yourself in the peripheries of your field, knowing who your competitors are. How do you recruit people who are really good that aren't on your side of the ledger? I don't think a meeting went by in any business I've ever been in where I didn't ask the people around the table: who have you seen out there that's good? Who beat you last week, or yesterday, or today? Who's standing out? We recruited some of our best executives that way — I'd say 80% of our executives. We either grew them inside or recruited them from the competition, because they had our standards and were at the wrong place in our mind.

Michael Ovitz

It's tough. It's a controversial subject. There are those who feel leverage is critical in business, and those who feel leverage is really nasty. I come down on leverage as a very important principle of building a business, because if you have leverage, you can deliver for your client or your product. You need leverage in marketing. You need leverage when you're selling people. You need leverage when you're packaging content. You need leverage to negotiate. The connotation of leverage as a bad thing — I'm not sure it's so bad.

Michael Ovitz

You could say that about anything. To me, packaging is a sine qua non of life. I package everything in my life. I put elements together constantly. I just put a business together by combining two disparate elements, and it turned out to be a business from something that wasn't. It's no different than packaging a television show. When Michael Crichton gave me the book of Jurassic Park, I put the right director with it — Steven Spielberg, there was no second choice.

A friend of mine who I have unbelievable respect for, a professor of AI at Stanford named Chris Ré, called me and said, 'Michael, I've got a friend who's also a professor at Stanford, really bright guy, and I want you to meet him. He's got really interesting technology but is having some trouble getting it off the ground.' I said, 'Okay, Chris, what is it?' He said, 'He's got an NFT company.' I said, 'Chris, I'm not interested.' He said, 'Why is that?' I said, 'I don't like NFTs. I'm an art collector, I'm not an NFT collector.' They were hot at one time. He said, 'I'm asking you, from me to you — please meet him.' The answer was instantaneously yes, without hesitation. A guy of that stature asked me to meet with someone — like when Ron Conway asked me to meet Andreessen. I didn't know why, I didn't know anything about clouds or technology.

So I meet with Dr Walter De Brouwer, a Stanford AI professor, and he's got an NFT company. We're 15 minutes into the call, and all I can do is think about how to end it, because time is my enemy. Time is the only thing in my life I'm concerned about, because at some point you run out of it — and I love my life right now, I'm in the best place I've ever been, mostly because I'm on the most epic learning curve imaginable. Anyway, a light bulb went off in my head when he described the technology. He mentioned he watermarked these NFTs with neural fingerprinting, and I didn't skip a beat. I said, 'Can you do that with songs?' He said, 'Oh, that's elementary.' I thought it was such a great answer, because it was such a put-down of me, and it was perfect — he has a PhD and I have nothing. What a course-corrector. Because I'm sitting there trying to figure out how to get off the phone, and this guy makes the ultimate statement: something I couldn't get to first base on, he thinks is elementary.

I said, 'Okay, we're in a new business. Assuming you can do this—' He said, 'Trust me, I can do this.' I said, 'We're in a new business. Fold up the old company. Let's hire new engineers. We are now in the business of protecting intellectual property rights.' Then I said, 'Can you do this for video?' 'Elementary.' 'Can you do this for athletic games?' 'Elementary.' We started a business. I've spent most of my career in media fighting intellectual property theft. In '96 I led a trade delegation for President Clinton to Beijing. I met with the premier of China, Jiang Zemin, and Zhu Rongji, the number two, the head of finance, because they were making videotapes from people holding up video cameras in theatres. They were killing the business, stealing records, duplicating tapes. I went with 20 mega business people to lead the delegation, and we got nowhere. And here I am on the phone with a PhD from Stanford telling me he's solved the problem.

We put the company together. I called Sir Lucian Grainge, who runs Universal, and said, 'Lucian, how long have you and I been working on IP theft?' He said, 'Our whole lives.' I said, 'I think I have the answer.' He said, 'Tell me, show me.' I did. He said, 'I'm in.' Now Universal, and then Dennis Kooker and Rob Stringer at Sony — so we have the two biggest music companies, and we're watermarking songs, and we'll go live very shortly. Next we do streaming, then film, then athletic games. I was on the phone with one of the heads of the Premier League in London — he called me because I know one of the owners — and said, 'We hear you have some technology that can help us.' I said, 'Why do you need help?', because I was curious. He said, 'Hard to believe, but we have over 30 teams, and 750,000 illegal downloads every team, every game.' I said, 'How's that possible?' He said, 'You could literally go on Google and find out how to get around paying for a sporting event, with very simple instructions.' I was kind of shocked, frankly, and the use case for what we have fits all of it.

Michael Ovitz

It's a simple answer, because I think about it so much. I could have cut back 10% of my business time — where I did nothing but business — and let momentum carry it forward, and other people who worked with me, and used that 10% for my family, for my art collecting, for reading, for other things that were important to me.

Michael Ovitz

I think you're 100% right, and that's the stopper. But the reality is there are ways of doing it. I now book out my free time on my own calendar, and it's there, and it doesn't get booked over. There's a negative in that: as a successful businessperson, you're feeding on the dopamine of getting all these wonderful things done, and because you're on a roll and have momentum, you can get so much more done that you want to do it every second of the day. But you have to be mature enough to look at it and say, maybe I'll cut 2% back at the beginning and do X, Y and Z. It's hard, because it's a conflicted scenario in your own head.

Michael Ovitz

It's not complicated. Trust to me is the most important thing between human beings. I've been very vociferous about this. It's happened to me a couple of times in my life — I don't handle betrayal well. I'm not talking about boyfriend-girlfriend, I'm talking about in business. I don't handle betrayal well. I don't think there's any justification for it under any condition, and I react very badly to it.

Michael Ovitz

Yeah. Or being set up for something to fail, or being lied to and then walking into a trap. We've seen all the plots on television, Shane — I can give you 20 shows to watch. But I'm not talking about male-female betrayal, couples betrayal.

Michael Ovitz

You can't stain everyone with the same brush. You have to get back up on your feet, like I told you about the guy in London. You've got to suck it up, get dressed, go out to the playing field in your uniform, get the ball and run with it. It's not easy, because your legs aren't quite as sure as they were before, but you've got to do it. As it's happened to me a few times in my life, I've gotten a little more sensitive to the people I trust.

Michael Ovitz

Oh, I got very defensive. It took me a long time to get that armour off.

Michael Ovitz

I don't know. Everyone has different interpretations of it, and it's unique to each human being. I think, because of how I was raised, it became a very important thing to me.

Michael Ovitz

It's not a singular definition for me. I have a very broad definition of what success is. Success to me is having an amazing family, because at the end of the day, that's your legacy — nothing else, unless you're Jonas Salk, and there's one of those for every hundred million people. It's having had a great run in your life in education. It's having learned so much more than you ever thought you'd learn. It's building something from scratch, which is why I started working again. I love building things. Someone asked me why I'm working at this stage of my life, and I looked at them like there was something wrong with them, because how could they even ask me that? Then they said, 'Well, what's the most fun time of your life?' I said, 'Building businesses that I started from scratch.' I'm doing it again — I'm a year in with a couple of young partners. I've got a young guy named Ali Hamed with me, who's 32 or 33 now, and my son, who joined me — it took me 10 years to convince him, he didn't want to do it — and his partner, Alex. It's fun to build.

Then success to me is what I find at the Thanksgiving dinner table in this country. I don't even know if you have Thanksgiving in Canada.

Michael Ovitz

It's my favourite holiday of the year — more than any other. More than birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkah, anything, because it's all about your family. It's not about forced gift-giving. I don't have to go buy a gift because it's Christmas. You just sit at the table and you're happy to be there, and there's no pressure. To me it's the most important holiday of the year.

But success is all those things. Success is having accomplished something — it's not definitionally a thing, but it can be. I was very proud when I contributed to the UCLA Medical Center being built. I was very proud when I got I.M. Pei to build that, and our building for CAA. I'm very proud when I built one of my houses from scratch. I'm very proud sometimes when I buy a piece of art that has a huge impact on my life, where someone's really connected with me. Success has a lot of parameters. It's not a single thing. When people say, 'This is my definition of success,' and give me a one-word definition, I can't cope with that, because it's just not the case for me.

Michael Ovitz

It's a lot of things that add up. To me, success is a great Seurat painting. Seurat was the great pointillist. If you looked at an inch of his work, they were all dots — you look at an inch, you don't see anything. Two inches, nothing. Three, nothing. Four, maybe an appendage of something. Six, maybe a limb, a plant. Ten, oh, there's a face. When it gets to be three feet by two feet, you see an entire picture in front of your eyes. That to me is the definition of success: our lives are made up of a lot of little dots, and when they tell the right picture, you hit it.

Michael Ovitz

Thank you for having me. It was great.