My Conversation With Michael Ovitz, Co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA) | David Senra

1. 0:00 – 0:09

   Introduction

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [upbeat music] Michael, thank you very much for doing this. Always a pleasure to spend more time with you. Uh, it's been some of my favorite past few dinners have been with you.

2. 0:09 – 3:03

   The Genius of Marc Andreessen

   1. DSDavid Senra0:09

      I wanna actually start with something that you just said before we were recording that I-- that made me laugh out loud, that you said that, uh, Marc Andreessen scares the crap out of you. [chuckles] Why'd you say that?

   2. MOMichael Ovitz0:18

      Talking to him is like taking a test. It's like being in high school and taking an exam or a final in college, every conversation. He's got the most extraordinary ability to analyze, to recall information, to organize it as he's thinking and speaking. There's probably three different processes going on-

   3. DSDavid Senra0:43

      Mm-hmm

   4. MOMichael Ovitz0:43

      ... in his brain simultaneously while he's talking. His recalls, I've never seen anything like it. Everything he reads-- In the old days, when I was going to meet with him over board issues, I always had to study up very carefully on what [chuckles] we were gonna talk about. But, uh, and I say this in the most loving way: he's the most terrific guy, and, uh, he's grown, and he's prospered, and he's, uh, one of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my entire life.

   5. DSDavid Senra1:16

      So you think his recall is-- comes naturally, where you-- I thought you had great recall. I've watched, like, all your interviews, the conversations we've had. You do have this, like, encyclopedic knowledge, especially about the work you were doing at CAA. But I feel like the way you would describe it is that you have to work a lot harder.

   6. MOMichael Ovitz1:31

      I think there are certain human beings that are gifted with some raw, innate, uh, processing power that is just greater than others. I think, I think we all have processing power, but it's a question of degrees. And then within the processing power, there's specific silos that each of us either excel at or are average at or not as good as. Uh, with Marc and, uh, Michael Crichton and Peter Thiel and, uh, quite a few of the top people in creative and top people in tech have this ability to process information at a very ultra-rapid speed, and it's foundationally set in the ability to recall information that they have inventoried. And it's very hard to do, especially in the world of technology, where you're touching constantly new ideas, so everything's different. And yes, there's some through line, but each business that's being started has a different conceit.

   7. DSDavid Senra2:43

      Mm-hmm.

   8. MOMichael Ovitz2:44

      And then on top of it, these guys, I find them fascinating for another reason. They're really nice people. Even though they have an intellectual superiority, they don't laud it over you, and they're chameleon. They kind of adjust to the level that they're talking

3. 3:03 – 4:00

   The Art of Conversation and Adaptability

   1. MOMichael Ovitz3:03

      to.

   2. DSDavid Senra3:03

      Say more about that.

   3. MOMichael Ovitz3:04

      As an agent, I had to ratchet my discussions up or down based on whether it was a creative discussion, a, uh, a self-help discussion for a client or for a buyer, because we did a lot of counseling for buyers, 'cause it was a good way to build a, a bridge to them and be able to have access. Uh, ratcheting up or down based on mood, based on what you read at the moment and what your frame of reference about the person is. But you can't talk to everybody the same way. One has to make a quick... Well, let me rephrase. At least for me-

   4. DSDavid Senra3:48

      Mm-hmm

   5. MOMichael Ovitz3:48

      ... I can't speak for anybody else, and I know Marc does this, too. You kind of, um, look at who you're talking to and then decide just how deep are you gonna go and go how far.

4. 4:00 – 5:38

   The Evolution of Cloud Computing

   1. MOMichael Ovitz4:00

      I mean, when I was on the board of Marc's first company, um, LoudCloud, they were dealing in an area that, frankly, I really, at the beginning, in nineteen ninety-nine, didn't understand it, because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what the cloud really was. It was this amorphous idea of storing data off-site-

   2. DSDavid Senra4:23

      Yeah

   3. MOMichael Ovitz4:23

      ... not in a machine, but in a machine, but not a machine that's with you. It's a machine that's in the ether, but there is no real machine in the ether. So you're thinking about all this, and we're building a business around it, and I watched Marc handle-- and Ben Horowitz. Ben is the most practical, brilliant guy I've ever met. Ben Horowitz is not only really, really smart, when you talk to him, you get the sense you're talking to the guy next door who's smart, but he doesn't make it ultra-clear that he's smarter than you are, so it's very, very, uh, gracious, warm, and accommodating. Or if he wants to make a point, or if he's being a disciplinarian, he can change his level. I've watched him get angry at someone and, and turn into an absolute, you know, person of, of strength and movement and aggressive that you wouldn't know normally because he's very, very even-tempered. But all these guys, uh, sitting in meetings with Ben and Marc, for example, is fantastic because they play off each other. They've been together, they're friends, I guess, thirty-five

5. 5:38 – 9:01

   The Power of Co-Founder Relationships

   1. MOMichael Ovitz5:38

      years.

   2. DSDavid Senra5:38

      I'm glad you brought that up because I've been thinking about-... the co-founder relationship rec- recently, in many cases, you know, I've read almost four hundred biographies of history's case entrepreneurs so far. I would say that, like, most co-founder relationships are actually tenuous, or it seems to be, like, one main guy, even if they start the company with multiple people, it's like usually one-- really one person. And I think I've just finished reading about what may be the greatest co-founder relationship in history. It's the Michelin brothers, who, in the late 1800s, take over a failing family factory in a remote part of France. The younger brother's in his late twenties, the older brother's in his late thirties. They build, they, they essentially from almost scratch or even from, like, a negative position because the factory is almost bankrupt, they build a family dynasty that lasts a hundred years. The company, a hundred and thirty years later, is still prospering, still one of the best tire companies in the world, and they did it by division of responsibilities, which kind of rec-- uh, reminded me of what you were just saying about Mark and Ben, where the younger brother made the product and the older brother sold the product. They just happened to be the best in the world at both of those things, and coming together, they, they ran the company until they both died. You know, forty-- they had a part- a partnership for forty- f- forty-five years. What is it that you see when you observed Mark and Ben together that you thought they had a complementary skill set?

   3. MOMichael Ovitz6:53

      Well, first of all, the obvious, when I first met them twenty-five years ago, they could finish each other's sentences before they started that business because they had worked together before, and they're friends. I think at the underlying foundation of partnerships in any business, there's got to be a respect for their business acumen, there has to be complementary personalities, they can't both be the same, and there has to be complementary temperament, and there has to be a shared vision, and that's hard to find. And as you kind of hinted at, you saw two successful founders with the Michelin brothers.

   4. DSDavid Senra7:34

      Yeah.

   5. MOMichael Ovitz7:34

      I can name you too many co-founded businesses where always one of the founders ends up getting pushed out.

   6. DSDavid Senra7:46

      Yeah.

   7. MOMichael Ovitz7:47

      And-

   8. DSDavid Senra7:47

      I would say that's, based on the reading I've done, more like, the more likely outcome.

   9. MOMichael Ovitz7:52

      I don't want to put a percentage on it because I honestly don't know-

   10. DSDavid Senra7:55

       Yeah

   11. MOMichael Ovitz7:55

       ... but if you asked me off the top of my head, I'd say ninety percent. Um, it's very hard to have two strong founders that share a singular vision, like you talked about the Michelin brothers-

   12. DSDavid Senra8:07

       Mm-hmm

   13. MOMichael Ovitz8:08

       ... and that have a division of responsibilities. It's very difficult. Um, but Mark and Ben, for example, Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it, and Mark's very comfortable with that. And Mark has phenomenal instincts about, uh, companies, and so does Ben. Uh, Ben also comes at looking at a business as a guy who's operated multiple businesses and sold businesses. Very hard to find leaders who understand principles of business, how to execute them, how to handle people, how to be a leader, how to get along with your co-founder, how to have a intellectual process to support your vision and how to unfold your vision, and while you're doing that, to be open-minded. That's really difficult.

6. 9:01 – 13:39

   The Importance of Personal Growth and Drive

   1. MOMichael Ovitz9:01

      At CAA, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that the executives in the company were stable in their personal lives, their professional lives, not in any order, by the way, in their growth, uh, their profile.

   2. DSDavid Senra9:22

      You did this through one-on-ones with them?

   3. MOMichael Ovitz9:24

      I had a system that was, um, pretty random, frankly, but I did a... And I wrote about this. We discussed it last time. I did a, a-- when I was in town, which I tried to be in town four days, three to four days a week, but I traveled to New York every week, to Japan once a month, and to Europe once a month, and but I did-- I, I decided to do everything short. So if I went to New York, I would go for one day.

   4. DSDavid Senra9:53

      Mm-hmm.

   5. MOMichael Ovitz9:54

      But I'd get in that one day, breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, meetings in between, and after dinner, fly back to LA and pick up the time and then make it into the office the next day so I could get what I called a six-day week. And I got the idea from my college roommate, who gave me as a gift, a joke clock, which had twenty-five hours, [chuckles] and, and it had a one-

   6. DSDavid Senra10:18

      Yeah.

   7. MOMichael Ovitz10:19

      It had zero through twenty-five.

   8. DSDavid Senra10:22

      I spent a lot of time with Michael Ovitz, and one thing that is obvious when you study his career is that Ovitz made working with the very best people a priority. People like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Michael Crichton, Marc Andreessen, and the founder of Nobu. Ovitz knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs has this great quote where he said, "You must find the extraordinary people. A small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. And so you must build a team that pursues the A players." And that is exactly what Ramp has done. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible. In the last twelve months, Ramp has hired only point two three percent of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top-tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers on the planet working on your behalf twenty-four seven to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations, and they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business fully programmable corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, bill payments, accounting, and more, all in one place. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient." Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I run my business on Ramp, and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know. I hear from people that listen to this podcast every day that have switched to Ramp and rave about the quality of the product. In fact, Matt Poulsen, the founder of Marketbeat, just sent me a message, and he said that Ramp had helped him cut four hundred and twenty thousand dollars in monthly expenses. Make sure you go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save both time and money. That is ramp.com.... you, you have-- this is what I was trying to tell people, like, since we've become friends. They-- obviously, you're a legend, people love your book, and they're like, "Well, like, w- how is Ovitz?" I'm like, "You ever heard any of my episodes on Rockefeller?" [chuckles] It's like-

   9. MOMichael Ovitz12:30

      Yeah.

   10. DSDavid Senra12:30

       ... he's like the Terminator, where, like, one of my favorite stories of Rockefeller is obviously, like, in the very beginning of the oil industry, he's there at the ground floor. Like, people, one of the things they miss when they analyze this company is just how well-funded he was. He r- he was relentless at raising money, and he went into every single battle that he had with his competitors with the biggest war chest by f- by far. In any biography on Rockefeller, it'd be written about. And what I loved about Rockefeller is that you have a little bit th- this in you, where he would go to every single bank or any s- partner, and he'd be like: "I need money. I would like to borrow money." And obviously, he tells them why. They say, "No," he goes, "That's fine," gets up, not mad, upset. He, he says something in there. It's like, "It made no difference to me. I'm just one step closer to getting what I actually want. So that person said, 'No,' I go to the next one and do another meeting, and then I get money. 'Okay, good. Now I go to the next one.'" And he just set it up all day long until he comp-- like, basically, he set his schedule up where every single hour of the day was going to be dedicated to this task, and then once the task is done, then what else is on the, the next task, and I'll do the exact same thing. Just absolutely relentless, like almost... They said he went about his business like a farmer plows a field.

   11. MOMichael Ovitz13:38

       Yeah.

7. 13:39 – 30:37

   The Rockefeller Connection

   1. MOMichael Ovitz13:39

      So I'll tell you a story that I told five hundred guests at a party I held for the MoMA board of trustees at our home, at Tamara's and my home. Uh, when David-- the last couple of years of David's life, we hosted all the trustees in Los Angeles for the annual meeting, and we gave a dinner, and we invited a lot of people from politics, from entertainment, and from the museum and gallery world. And I told this story 'cause David had just passed away, and I told it 'cause his son was there. Um, I never went to an art museum, and you know I love art.

   2. DSDavid Senra14:18

      Yeah. [chuckles]

   3. MOMichael Ovitz14:19

      You've been to the house, and you know that I'm absolutely, certifiably insane and should probably be put in an institution, but I love it.

   4. DSDavid Senra14:27

      You were commenting on the chairs before. [chuckles]

   5. MOMichael Ovitz14:29

      Well, because I, I just love aesthetics.

   6. DSDavid Senra14:31

      Yeah.

   7. MOMichael Ovitz14:32

      And I learned that from my directors i- in the '70s.

   8. DSDavid Senra14:37

      Mm-hmm.

   9. MOMichael Ovitz14:37

      They would look at things, and everything they looked at showed up in a movie [chuckles] someday.

   10. DSDavid Senra14:43

       Yeah.

   11. MOMichael Ovitz14:43

       So they registered everything, and I learned to register. But I never went to an art museum till I was eighteen. Now, think about that, and think about you being at my home-

   12. DSDavid Senra14:52

       Mm

   13. MOMichael Ovitz14:53

       ... with three hundred pieces of art hanging, right?

   14. DSDavid Senra14:55

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MOMichael Ovitz14:56

       And I went to New York for four days 'cause that's all I had off. I'd never been. I left LA. I was working full time. I was eighteen years old, and I worked 'cause I needed to, 'cause my family, unfortunately, didn't really have the means to support me, which, by the way, turned out to be helpful in my later life, oddly.

   16. DSDavid Senra15:17

       Why do you think it's helpful?

   17. MOMichael Ovitz15:17

       Because it gave me a, a sense of drive, ambition, and a goal-oriented thinking that any of my friends that didn't grow up like that sort of either... It was binary: they either had it, or they didn't have it, and most of the time they didn't have it. Um, but some of them did, by the way. But I spent-- when I was in New York, I had four days, and I had all these things mapped out to see. I'd done all this homework. I needed to see the village. I wanted to go to Soho. I wanted to go to art galleries. I wanted to go to-- there are ten museums. I wanted to go to all of them. Of course, I over-- my appetite's always, you know, bigger-

   18. DSDavid Senra15:54

       Yeah

   19. MOMichael Ovitz15:54

       ... than my stomach. Uh, so I went to MoMA. I left six hours later, and I went back the next day, and I went back the third day. It absolutely changed my life. And I then remember sitting in my office at CAA, and my-- this is probably fifteen, sixteen years later, and I'm telling this story, and David Rockefeller is sitting in the front, at the front table at this dinner for five hundred people. And the phone, my assistant buzzes in and says... And I had a phone assistant, one for incoming and one for outgoing calls. So the incoming assistant says, "Michael, Mr. Rockefeller for you." And I didn't skip a beat, and I said, "Tell Bill Murray I'll call him back."

   20. DSDavid Senra16:42

       [chuckles]

   21. MOMichael Ovitz16:42

       Because Bill used to call under different names all the time, and he could get away with it most of the time. So I'm in the middle of something crazy, and Bill would give a name that he knew I had to pick up.

   22. DSDavid Senra16:57

       [chuckles]

   23. MOMichael Ovitz16:57

       And I love the guy to this day. He's one of the greatest human beings on the planet, um, a guy who I will, uh, I will be loyal to till the day I die, um, for a whole series of reasons, which I'm happy to come back to. So my assistant said, "It's David Rockefeller." I said, "Tell Bill I'll call him back." She says, "No, I think it really is Mr. Rockefeller. It's his assistant, and her name's Marni, and she wants you to-- Mr. Rockefeller is trying to reach you." I said, "Look, it's not David Rockefeller. You know it's Bill. Just get a number. I'll call him back." She said, "Okay."

   24. DSDavid Senra17:34

       Why would it be so unbelievable that Rockefeller was calling you at that time in your career?

   25. MOMichael Ovitz17:37

       Because I'm a guy in LA with a beginning art collection, basically, no real cultural profile, and this is David Rockefeller. I mean, he's a legend in the world i-- of business and culture. His mother started MoMA. I mean, if you read the book Picasso's War, which is fascinating, I told you about it at dinner-

   26. DSDavid Senra18:03

       Mm

   27. MOMichael Ovitz18:04

       ... uh, it talks about the Rock- about Abby Rockefeller and the women that started MoMA. There were three women that started the museum in the '30s, and David grew up around art. I grew up around nothing. [chuckles] You know, it's like I was in the San Fernando Valley in wasteland.

   28. DSDavid Senra18:22

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

   29. MOMichael Ovitz18:39

       Well, we went over the hill every weekend to Westwood.

   30. DSDavid Senra18:42

       That part of your book I absolutely love, where you're, you're having initial success, nowhere near what's gonna come in the future, but enough to buy your first house in Brentwood. And you wake up, and I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this 'cause I've had a couple experiences like that in my life, where you're like: I can't believe I-- i- i- in your book, you said, "I can't believe I live in Brentwood."
8. 30:37 – 37:31

   The Nobu and Wolfgang Puck Stories

   1. MOMichael Ovitz30:37

      one.

   2. DSDavid Senra30:37

      Okay.

   3. MOMichael Ovitz30:38

      So two weeks ago, I'm having lunch with a friend of mine.... at Nobu, um, and in walks Nobu, [chuckles] who's my exact age, who was, when I met him, had just opened a sushi bar on La Cienega Boulevard called Matsuhisa. And I remember meeting him 'cause I would go sometimes for business or occasionally by myself, because the one great lesson I learned very early on going to Japan is, the best place in the world to eat if you're alone is at a sushi bar, [chuckles] because you could actually not feel uncomfortable doing that. And I met Nobu when he was the l- he was his own-- He was the chef, the manager, the menu planner. He did-- It was just him, and two other guys, and his wife. That was Nobu's start. Now, you look at what Nobu's got right now. Nobu has an empire. I don't know how many restaurants he got. They're all over the world. He's got hotels, he's got bottled and packaged goods, he's got everything. I, I would imagine he's got a billion-dollar empire. When I met Nobu, I took note. I said, "This guy's got something special." I didn't quite know what it was, but several years later, I introduced Nobu to Bob De Niro, and he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu, not Matsuhisa, which was fascinating, that he didn't try to take his personal brand and put it with Bob. He took the, his first name. They opened the first Nobu in New York, in Tribeca, which was no man's land at the time. But Bobby had a hunch because he was developing property in Tribeca, and he was a, a huge believer when everyone around him was negative and advised him against it. And he convinced Nobu to open there. It became an instant hit, and they have this amazing business right now. I had this hunch about Nobu. I had this hunch about Wolfgang Puck when I met him the first time. He was, like, in his twenties, Austrian guy. I said, "This guy not only ca-- is a great chef, but like Nobu, he had a fantastic personality." Why is it I went to out-- to every meal of my life as an agent for my whole life, I went out every night and every lunch, and I picked those two guys? Frame of reference, because I knew in interacting with them, they had something special.

   4. DSDavid Senra33:30

      Is this an intuition that you have, or is this something concrete you've picked up about their personality or the way they approach their work?

   5. MOMichael Ovitz33:35

      No, it's like the general thesis for me, and I use it to this day. I use it in my tech investing and have since nineteen ninety-two. I used it in finding clients. I used it in building careers. I used it in making relationships. I'm interested in growth, personal growth. I'm interested in being the best at whatever I get into, to the point of it probably not being healthy. I'm interested in excellence.

   6. DSDavid Senra34:03

      Okay, we gotta talk about that. Keep going. [chuckles]

   7. MOMichael Ovitz34:05

      And I am interested in excellence and will go to almost any end that's not immoral or illegal to achieve it for myself and everyone that's around me.

   8. DSDavid Senra34:15

      Is it excellence for the sake of excellence? Like, what is driving you?

   9. MOMichael Ovitz34:18

      I meet people, okay? And I-- within ten minutes, my brain automatically scans whatever is coming to me, and it compares them to people in their silo, to people outside their silo, to people with personality traits that are similar. It compares all the positive and negatives. It's the same thing when I collect art. When young, uh, men or women that I mentor in collecting art want that-- They ask me, "What should they read?" I say: "Nothing." I said, "Start looking at images and bookmark whatever you like, and then come back to it a couple of days later, see if you still like it." I look, to this day, probably at two hundred images a day. I looked at ten this morning before I came over here, at seven o'clock this morning, of a painting show in London. And the reason I do it is, the more images I can put in my head... It's kind of primitive AI in a strange way, 'cause I'm like machine learning-

   10. DSDavid Senra35:21

       Yeah

   11. MOMichael Ovitz35:21

       ... and my brain's the machine. I tell all my AI guys and gals, who are all much younger than me, except for a couple guys at Stanford that I work with that are professors, that are actually, I guess they're in their fifties and sixties. Um, there's a thing they call ML, which is machine learning, and I call it ML, mor- moron learning. [chuckles] So I ask them to explain my version of ML when we're doing a complicated AI deal together.

   12. DSDavid Senra35:52

       Mm-hmm.

   13. MOMichael Ovitz35:52

       But I have kind of a personal AI that I've created that ticks off all these boxes automatically. I told you when I met you, you're very good at interviewing. You keep a conversation going. You know what to ask. You, uh, what you did on Tamara's book is insane. You read a book, and in fifty minutes or fifty, sixty-

   14. DSDavid Senra36:14

       Yeah

   15. MOMichael Ovitz36:14

       ... it's condensed into the most salient points, and you know, you met her only socially.

   16. DSDavid Senra36:20

       Yeah.

   17. MOMichael Ovitz36:20

       It's not possible unless you have a talent. So my-... perception is additive. I thought you had talent, then you prove it over and over. I listen to the, to your-- I told you I went back and I've listened to every one you've done.

   18. DSDavid Senra36:35

       Yeah, I appreciate that.

   19. MOMichael Ovitz36:36

       You don't have to appreciate it. I got a master's degree in people I never heard of.

   20. DSDavid Senra36:40

       The, so I should bring this up, the first time we ever talked, and it was just ha- [chuckles] pure chance, is we share a mutual friend in Rick Gerson.

   21. MOMichael Ovitz36:48

       Yeah.

   22. DSDavid Senra36:48

       And I'm having breakfast with Rick, and you guys have been friends for, like, twenty-five years.

   23. MOMichael Ovitz36:52

       Right.

   24. DSDavid Senra36:52

       And me and Rick are real close friends in the last few years, and we're at, at breakfast, and his phone's on the table, [laughing] and it rings. And I'm like, "Oh, shit! That's Michael Ovitz." Like, you know, 'cause I'd read your book already. Like, I obviously knew who you were, but we had never spoken. And then he, he picks it up on speakerphone, and Rick's been hugely supportive, and he tries to, like, push my podcast on everybody in the world, and he's very [chuckles] successful at doing so. And he goes, "Hey, I'm sitting here with... You might know who he is. His name's David Senra. He does this podcast called Founders. There's a, there's..." And you're on your boat in St. Barts, I think. And, uh, there's, like, a brief pause. He goes, "I listened to four of them yesterday." [laughing]

   25. MOMichael Ovitz37:27

       [laughing]

   26. DSDavid Senra37:27

       And he started rattling off the ones you were with Cornelius Vanderbilt and everything else.

9. 37:31 – 44:58

   The Art of Spotting Talent

   1. DSDavid Senra37:31

      I heard you talk with our mutual friend Patrick about this, where you're like: Hey, I like collecting art and people. I have a frame of reference because I've met so many people. The more people you meet, the more you can-- the more benchmark you have to compare people to. So when you met Nobu, i- i- i- so the, to... When I hear this, it almost sounds like it happens, like, automatically. Just a part of your brain where it's like-

   2. MOMichael Ovitz37:50

      It's, it's an auto response.

   3. DSDavid Senra37:51

      Yeah. So you, you can't even say what it is about that person?

   4. MOMichael Ovitz37:53

      Oh, no, I could say. Nobu was personable. He was amazing chef. He made things that I'd never had before. Outside of the United States, I've had it, but not inside the-

   5. DSDavid Senra38:04

      The te- the, yeah, his actual work.

   6. MOMichael Ovitz38:06

      His technical skill-

   7. DSDavid Senra38:07

      Yeah

   8. MOMichael Ovitz38:08

      ... in cooking Japanese cuisine was the best I'd ever had.

   9. DSDavid Senra38:15

      And this is happening in, like, a strip mall?

   10. MOMichael Ovitz38:17

       No, no. He was on La Cienega Boulevard in an old, uh, restaurant, an old building he-

   11. DSDavid Senra38:22

       Yeah, so, like, i- not a-

   12. MOMichael Ovitz38:23

       It wasn't... No, it wasn't anything special. It was just him.

   13. DSDavid Senra38:26

       But you saw-

   14. MOMichael Ovitz38:27

       Well, hear this out. He filled the room. He filled the room, and-

   15. DSDavid Senra38:34

       His personality? What do you mean?

   16. MOMichael Ovitz38:35

       Yes, he filled the room. When you were there, you knew it was his place. You knew he was a sensei. You knew he was the master chef. You wanted to sit in front of him, those four coveted seats. You wanted to talk to him 'cause he was interesting. He had it all. Wolfgang Puck saw him at the, at, uh, his first restaurant in the United States. He was in his twenties. He was the chef at Ma Maison, which is no longer in existence, that only Hollywood could endorse. Plastic patio furniture in a parking lot with a kitchen in a one-bedroom apartment at the back of it.

   17. DSDavid Senra39:16

       And you could see it even then, though?

   18. MOMichael Ovitz39:17

       Yeah. I... Wolfgang-

   19. DSDavid Senra39:18

       Same thing, it's like this-

   20. MOMichael Ovitz39:19

       Wolfgang would walk out, go table to table, and you fell in love with this guy.

   21. DSDavid Senra39:23

       So it was, like, his charisma and energy?

   22. MOMichael Ovitz39:25

       Everything. This is, like, nineteen eighty something, eighty-one, and Wolfgang's walking around asking everyone at every table, and remembering their name, and being gracious, and being... And the food, while you're eating this amazing food like we'd never eaten before, there was no such thing as California cuisine. Clean food with a French kind of flair, but it wasn't full of butter and oil. It was great. And you couldn't get a seat there. It was hysterical that the, the, the popularity of this place with a zero economic [chuckles] investment in infrastructure, right? But the food was to die for, and Wolfgang, you wanted to be his friend. So when he did Spago, it was... I just gave him a quote for his book 'cause I recognized this immediately. I went to Spago four nights a week up on Sunset, and I finally looked at Wolf. I said, "We gotta put you on television." And I just wrote this little story for his book. I said: I'm bringing the president of ABC for dinner, and I want you to just go crazy. I want you to pretend you're at Boulud Mirée, where he trained in the sou- in France, and do that kind of dinner and whip out the best wines that aren't on the list, and I want to get this guy in your corner. That-- Wolfgang served a dinner that night. We spent three hours eating. There must have been fifteen courses. One was better than the next. He personally brought stuff over. He hung out at the table. He talked. He, he's charming. He was... You know, he was, he was just Wolfgang. He, and you loved him. You wanted to hug him, but the food was great, too. And I got the president of ABC to sign on a napkin, a contract-

   23. DSDavid Senra41:18

       [chuckles]

   24. MOMichael Ovitz41:18

       ... for a week's work on Good Morning America-

   25. DSDavid Senra41:22

       Yeah

   26. MOMichael Ovitz41:22

       ... as an audition to replace Julia Childs, and the guy signed it, and he dated it, and I took the napkin. He also had a lot to drink, and the next day-

   27. DSDavid Senra41:33

       Is that a key? [chuckles]

   28. MOMichael Ovitz41:34

       And the next day, he called me and he said, "I can't thank you enough. It was the most extraordinary dinner." He said, "I have a slight recollection that I signed something. What did I sign?" I said, "Oh, you signed a contract to put Wolf on, our chef that you met, the little Austrian guy who is so cute, to put him on Good Morning America and try him out." He said, "Oh, I can't do that." I said, "Well, you made a deal, and you're a man of high integrity."

   29. DSDavid Senra42:00

       [laughing]

   30. MOMichael Ovitz42:00

       So he said, "I didn't make a deal. What are you talking about?" I said, "I'm gonna send one of our assistants over with the contract, and you take a look, and then you call me and tell me if you made a contract or not." So we take the napkin and pin it to someone's shirt.
10. 44:58 – 46:39

    Starting Out in a Competitive Environment

    1. MOMichael Ovitz44:58

       the choice?"

    2. DSDavid Senra44:58

       No, I, I-

    3. MOMichael Ovitz44:59

       There's no choice.

    4. DSDavid Senra45:00

       I-

    5. MOMichael Ovitz45:00

       So I either became more knowledgeable than the twenty other, uh... They were all men. No. Yeah, it was all men in that pledge class and that they did a, like, three, two times a year, they started a, a group in the mailroom of, like, twenty, twenty-five people. I think when I started, there were twenty or twenty-five. I don't remember, but the point is, it's nineteen sixty-nine. I'm twenty-one years old. I graduated UCLA in three years while working at Fox, sixty hours a week, loving every second of it, drop out of pre-med to finish degrees in psychology and business, look for the job that I think can educate me the fastest in a business that's all about nepotism and relationship, and I don't have any. How do I distinguish myself differently from the twenty or twenty-five other pledges in what I call the pledge class? 'Cause that's what we were. And it became pretty simply apparent to me very quickly. Everyone showed up exactly what time they were told to, which was nine o'clock for a nine thirty start. Everyone showed up except me. I showed up at six thirty, and no one was in. I had the run of the place. So I said to myself: "I'm gonna learn everything I can faster than anyone else, and I'm never gonna share with anyone what I'm doing. Let them all fend for themselves,"

11. 46:39 – 48:09

    Early Lessons in Business and Teamwork

    1. MOMichael Ovitz46:39

       which, by the way, turned out to be good for me because it was antithetical to my thesis on building a business, which is you share everything with everybody, and I learned that. By not sharing, all these other people got killed by me, and if I'm running a business and those people are all working for me, I needed to do the opposite. I needed to include everybody in everything, have tons of meetings, tons of sharing, no egos, no politics. Everybody has to pull for the larger boat. You can't be in your own rowboat. You've got to be on the big boat, and you've got to make sure it's all moving.

    2. DSDavid Senra47:22

       When you're on the same team, but the other nineteen people in this group, you looked at them as competitors?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz47:27

       Absolutely. My job was to eradicate every one of them. I didn't want any of them to shine.

    4. DSDavid Senra47:32

       And so the idea there was, "Hey," I think you said this in your book, you're like, "I, I don't know if I'm smarter than them, but I know for damn sure that I'm working harder."

    5. MOMichael Ovitz47:39

       Well, there were several people, David, there I was not smarter than. They had unbelievable educations. Well, a couple of them had Ivy League educations. I couldn't even get into an Ivy League school. The fact is that, um, I was in a competitive environment, in a competitive business, William Morris, and a competitive, um, arena, which is the entertainment business. It's dog eat dog, and it had been like that since it started. It never changed.

12. 48:09 – 51:25

    The Importance of Knowledge and Curiosity

    1. MOMichael Ovitz48:09

       I read everything I get my hands on about the golden years of the movie business, and I used it for CAA when we started in nineteen seventy-four. I made up a bibliography, and here's the books you need. I have used-

    2. DSDavid Senra48:25

       Who did you give the bibliography to?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz48:26

       Every one of us that were working together.

    4. DSDavid Senra48:29

       So you guys had a shared base of knowledge. You insisted on a shared base of knowledge with your-

    5. MOMichael Ovitz48:31

       Yeah

    6. DSDavid Senra48:32

       ... your team. Okay.

    7. MOMichael Ovitz48:32

       And our group knew history, and the reason that became important, and everyone thought, "Oh, who cares?" is 'cause when you start talking to filmmakers-... in those days, and they start talking about Frank Capra or David Lean or Howard Hawks or Willie Wyler or Michael Curtiz, who all made some of the great black and white movies of our time. If you don't know what they did, how can you talk to a filmmaker? How do you do it? You can't. How did we sign every director in the business? We spoke their language.

    8. DSDavid Senra49:11

       I've read and done episodes on, I don't know, half a dozen-- I'm obsessed with directors and filmmakers. I think the analogy between a filmmaker and an entrepreneur is, like, so clear-cut, it's very obvious. But, like, from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg, to, uh, Quentin Tarantino, to Christopher Nolan, every single one I've read a biography of, they have this encyclopedic knowledge of film history in their head. There's a great line up on this. One of my favorite maxims I learned from Charlie Munger, which is why he was so obsessed with reading and, and studying business history and human history as well, is he says that, "Learning from history is a form of leverage."

    9. MOMichael Ovitz49:43

       Well, see, it's what I've always said, knowledge is power, and the-- if you have and practical knowledge combined with research knowledge, combined with, uh, intellectual knowledge, combined with a giant education about things that you dig into, and you understand how to have a deep curiosity about everything, and I mean everything, you have the, an edge that cannot be beaten. I have sitting on my desk probably twenty notes about things that I have seen on the internet, on Instagram, on, uh, Perplexity, on OpenAI, on Google, that have come up in other searches. So I saw a new set of headphones that were wildly differently designed, and I looked it up, printed out the page on it, put it in my pile to research. And every night when I am on my computer, I take a deep dive on the moment of what's interesting to me. I love cars. I love mechanical watches because some of them have, you know, a thousand parts, and it's this big. I, I love gadgets. I love, uh, I love hi-fi. I, I just-- I can't begin... I love art.

    10. DSDavid Senra51:18

        Did you have the curiosity even at that age when you first started in the mailroom?

    11. MOMichael Ovitz51:22

        Yes.

    12. DSDavid Senra51:22

        You had to, 'cause, like-

    13. MOMichael Ovitz51:22

        Yeah

    14. DSDavid Senra51:23

        ... you wouldn't have read through all that.

    15. MOMichael Ovitz51:24

        But I didn't have-- But you know what I didn't have?

13. 51:25 – 57:35

    The Impact of Technology on Learning

    1. DSDavid Senra51:25

       What?

    2. MOMichael Ovitz51:25

       I didn't have a computer.

    3. DSDavid Senra51:26

       [chuckles]

    4. MOMichael Ovitz51:27

       And that changed my life.

    5. DSDavid Senra51:29

       Yeah.

    6. MOMichael Ovitz51:29

       That changed my life. I've talked to Ben Horowitz about this a thousand times. The computer changed my life because I live on it, and it's not because I need to, it's 'cause I want to. If you put me in a room with a computer twenty-four hours with no sleep, I would do it. Matter of fact, Tamara has to pull me off the computer and gets angry at me because I learn so much every day. I just-- When my friends wanna buy something, they call me 'cause I've already looked at it. So if they wanna buy a car, and I'm not being facetious, and I enjoy doing it, and it's rare they ask me about a car I don't know about. I mean, when I was at CAA before a computer, I had a reading list for all the agents and all the mailroom people. I subscribed personally to two hundred and ten magazines. I didn't read every one. Don't, uh, don't think I did for a second, but I flipped the pages. So I had Car and Driver, Road & Track, Automobile, and, um, I'm missing one, MotorTrend. All four. Why? I wanted to see what everyone wrote. I didn't read detailed articles. I'd always read the headline, look at the pictures, read the first paragraph. If I loved an article and wanted to go further, tore it out, put it in a pile for Sunday, every day. And I had Ladies Home Journal, Vogue, McCall's, uh, Mademoiselle. Why did I read women's magazines? Because the stylists in those magazines are six months ahead of the curve. They have to see out. I live with a fashion person, you know.

    7. DSDavid Senra53:13

       Yeah, Tamara.

    8. MOMichael Ovitz53:14

       She knows every season before something comes out. "Oh, Michael, you know, sh- uh, something's back." "Wow! Come on." Three months later, we're in a place at a dinner, and somebody's wearing baggy jeans-

    9. DSDavid Senra53:32

       Mm-hmm

    10. MOMichael Ovitz53:33

        ... when everyone else was wearing tight jeans, and she calls it. And those stylists gave me a foundation to talk to our actresses and to talk to their stylists. Not that I needed to go deep, I didn't. When I met Paul Newman cold, I knew there was only one thing he was interested in. He loved racing cars, made a movie about it. That was his hobby. I had been reading about cars my whole life. We talked for three hours in Westport, Connecticut, about cars. We never talked about his career the first time I met him.

    11. DSDavid Senra54:05

        I think there's a line here that I always think about, "The most interesting people are the most interested." It doesn't ma-

    12. MOMichael Ovitz54:11

        Absolutely

    13. DSDavid Senra54:11

        ... It doesn't matter, to me, it's like I don't really even care what is the source of your obsession. I just like that you're obsessed with something, and you go deep on there. I do have a, um, what I would say, kind of a selfish question for you. So I was listening to Michael Dell on a podcast, and he's got great energy, and the, the, the interviewer was asking him, he's like: "Well, when you were starting Dell, like, how many hours did you work?" And he goes, "All of them." [chuckles] And then I read Jensen Huang's biography, and he's like: "Listen, there's not a day that goes by that I don't work. Uh, when I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me." In your book, you had this line that when you were building your company, that every waking hour-... was a working hour, which is a great line. So I see this reappear over and over again. Like, we, you know, we're, we're absolutely obsessed with what we're doing, so it's very hard to pull us away from it, from what we love to do. But there is something that I want to ask you selfishly. So you also say that if you could have worked ten percent less, it wouldn't have made a difference in your professional success, but you would have been a lot happier. So how should I be thinking about the contrast between these two statements?

    14. MOMichael Ovitz55:17

        Well, it's simple. I am a curious person, as you know, like you are. You're always looking to learn. That's why listening to founders, for me, before I met you, was a must. I discovered it by accident, and then Rick just went in like a bulldozer-

    15. DSDavid Senra55:30

        Yeah [chuckles]

    16. MOMichael Ovitz55:31

        ... you know, to make sure I met you. He must have sent-- You know, he sent us twenty texts-

    17. DSDavid Senra55:35

        Yeah

    18. MOMichael Ovitz55:35

        -to get us together, and then he wouldn't give me your contact 'cause he wanted to be-

    19. DSDavid Senra55:39

        [chuckles]

    20. MOMichael Ovitz55:39

        -the point of contact. Do you remember that?

    21. DSDavid Senra55:41

        Yeah.

    22. MOMichael Ovitz55:41

        He wouldn't put us together.

    23. DSDavid Senra55:42

        [chuckles]

    24. MOMichael Ovitz55:42

        He wanted to be the one to do it. So that ten percent, I would have loved to have been able to do homework.

    25. DSDavid Senra55:52

        To me, that's a, that's working too, though. It's like professional research.

    26. MOMichael Ovitz55:55

        Yeah.

    27. DSDavid Senra55:55

        You know, like, w- think about your, your, when you're William Morris, the two and a half hours you get there at six thirty in the morning, you're doing all your reading, you're working a full da- day, and then you're doing it again. To me, those two, the bookends to your day, is just a form of professional research, which also could be-

    28. MOMichael Ovitz56:09

        Yeah, but that-

    29. DSDavid Senra56:10

        -considered working.

    30. MOMichael Ovitz56:10

        To me, to me, the dichotomy and difference is that I'm not working to a financial goal, I'm working for self-enrichment, which p- itself becomes a financial product. Because if I make myself wiser, better, more informed, a, a candidate that can give other humans that have a problem advice... Look, we all have problems. I learned this when I was eighteen. When I was working at Fox, everybody had a problem. It became very clear to me. It's why I became an agent, because I didn't need a skill set other than intelligence, persuasion, intensity, and curiosity, but I didn't have to know how to make anything 'cause I'm not capable of it. I'm talentless. I can't write, I can't act, I can't sculpt, I can't paint, I can't direct. I frankly invest off people, not off all these insane rules that a lot of my friends that are venture capitalists put up, these kind of, uh, r- guardrails that they won't go outside of. I've never seen a guardrail I don't try to jump.
14. 57:35 – 1:01:13

    Building Relationships and Integrity in Business

    1. MOMichael Ovitz57:35

       But for me, I realized everybody wants to have enough counsel. I, I will tell you, for me, someone asked me in a, in another podcast, w- who was my Michael Ovitz, who was my advisor? I said, "I didn't have one, and I wish I did," because I've saved a lot of people a lot of aggravation that I went through, and I went through it 'cause I didn't have anyone like me to bounce things off of that had seen the movie before.

    2. DSDavid Senra58:06

       You didn't have it at the time you were building CAA, but do you have that-- did you have it after, and do you have it now?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz58:10

       I do have certain people now, but it's not any one person like I am. I am an advisor to a lot of people that would shock people, and I do it because, one, I'm friends with them; two, I learn from them; three, I enjoy it; four, I'm like a protective mother of my friends. I will-- I have a very binary point of view about relationships. Uh, I'm not interested in any relationships in the middle. I'm interested in-

    4. DSDavid Senra58:43

       What's the binary?

    5. MOMichael Ovitz58:44

       It's from a movie I saw when I was a kid that was made in the '40s with Errol Flynn, where he drew a sword in the sand and said to his troops, "You're on one side of this line or the other, make up your mind." So that's me, friend or foe. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm like the world's best friend for people, and I'm probably not a great enemy.

    6. DSDavid Senra59:10

       [chuckles] I would-

    7. MOMichael Ovitz59:10

       You know

    8. DSDavid Senra59:10

       ... I would not want you as an enemy. [chuckles]

    9. MOMichael Ovitz59:11

       So, no, 'cause I'm very dogmatic in my support of people.

    10. DSDavid Senra59:15

        Methodical.

    11. MOMichael Ovitz59:16

        Yeah.

    12. DSDavid Senra59:16

        I think if I made an enemy of you, you'd wake up every day- [chuckles]

    13. MOMichael Ovitz59:19

        Oh, I don't-

    14. DSDavid Senra59:19

        ... you're out to destroy me.

    15. MOMichael Ovitz59:20

        By the way, I don't have that kind of time, and frankly-

    16. DSDavid Senra59:22

        [chuckles]

    17. MOMichael Ovitz59:22

        -at this stage of my life, I don't have that energy for that.

    18. DSDavid Senra59:25

        But you did for a few decades.

    19. MOMichael Ovitz59:26

        Oh, I did, for a long time.

    20. DSDavid Senra59:27

        Yeah.

    21. MOMichael Ovitz59:28

        I was a guy who could tell you people that thirty years earlier did something I didn't think was right. I'm a big, um, believer in people need to have integrity, and they need to keep their word. And the reason is, is when we were starting CAA, and we had no money, nothing, we didn't even have a lawyer, so we were making tens of hundreds of deals with no contract. So people had to keep their word, David, and it was very tough when you had no leverage and someone didn't keep their word. And unfortunately, in the entertainment business, there's kind of a gradation of lying. The most lies is in the-- when we started, were in the movie business because it takes three years to make a movie, so you had a long time to tell different stories. The second area was music. People really didn't tell the truth in music. They still to this day, don't. It's like-

    22. DSDavid Senra1:00:25

        It's a dirty business.

    23. MOMichael Ovitz1:00:26

        It's a dirty business. Um, brilliant business and tough to do. But like I, I'm friends with a guy I have the, so much respect for, Lucian Grainge. This guy has more integrity than anybody I've ever met. He's got Rockefeller integrity. He just calls it as he sees it. He's transparent, he's open. He knows how to build a business. He understands talent. He understands how to read a balance sheet. He's one of the old guard guys. Diller was like that. Diller understood people. Diller could read a balance sheet, and Diller, like a few of us, could read a script and play the movie in his head.... not a lot of people could do that. If they did, there'd be a lot more successful companies and successful-

    24. DSDavid Senra1:01:06

        Mm.

    25. MOMichael Ovitz1:01:07

        -people. You could count on two hands the number of people in my day that could do that. And

15. 1:01:13 – 1:07:17

    The Role of History and Transparency in Success

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:01:13

       when you're in the television business, there's no lying because you make these shows every week, so you have no time to cr- fabricate a story and set up a ruse. And what we started at CAA, which was so simple, everyone says, "Oh, it's so revolutionary." No lying. If you don't have an answer, if David Senra calls you, and he asks you a question, and you do not have an answer, here's your answer: "I don't know. I'm gonna call you back." That was unheard of in nineteen seventy-four because everyone felt they had to make up an answer to show they were in the know. My point of view was, why do that? Then you gotta remember something is-- that's a story that you made up, and it's so easy to trap people that lie because they never get the story right twice. And we took notes on everything ad nauseam. Everybody took notes on everything. Every staff meeting we had, we had a scribe taking notes for follow-up. Follow-up was the key to everything. You didn't even have to be smart, you had to have good follow-up. If you followed up, it kinda gave you an extra point on the smart side of the scale. So for me, it's all about truth, it's all about transparency. I was on the phone this morning. I s-- I got on the phone at six thirty this morning, working on a deal I'm putting together. The guy that s- gave us the idea, who is in another company and is not a- the head guy at the company, he's number three. There's a founder, a CEO, and this guy, who's the COO. The COO is younger, half the age of the founder, and really bright. Came up with an idea, told my young partner, who you know, who's thirty-two, which I partnered with intentionally because I wanted a young partner, period. And called him, gave him an idea. My partner immediately put him with me. I spent an hour with him five days ago. I then went and spent an hour with the guy he works for. I then had multiple calls with both of them separately, and then I called the guy who started it this morning at six thirty in the morning, he's on the East Coast, to give him a one hundred percent update of every conversation so he didn't feel left out. Did I need to do that? Most people would say no. I would say yes. He's now up to speed, he's supportive, and they're setting up a meeting for me with their founder because they're comfortable. They're not getting cut out.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:04:01

       So this is a relentless follow-up?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:04:03

       Relentless. And I made the extra call, and my partner, my young partner, saw all this unfold and fell right in step with it and handled it brilliantly. That's makes me feel fantastic. Fantastic! Because he's gonna be here long after me, and he carries on the torch. You know, look, the guys that I left CAA to, some of them I get along with great, some of them don't like me, and I understand that because they'd like me to have died because my shadow hung over them, and you- we always wanna kill the father, and I get it. At the end of the day, I-- fifty years later, I think I did something right because the place is still functioning, and it's still number one, still has the biggest market share, and it's still the most influential company.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:04:56

       This is what I try to tell other founders, too. It's just like, you guys are obsessed with these startups. Like, the goal should be to build an enduring company that lasts.

    5. MOMichael Ovitz1:05:04

       It's gotta last. It's gotta last.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:05:05

       Five decades now.

    7. MOMichael Ovitz1:05:07

       But you have to be selfless to do that, David. It's like what you're doing. You need volume. I told you this. You need IP. You need to expose people that are underexposed, expose people that are overexposed and rein them in, so that for the audience, so they get out their essence. Listen, when I listen to your... This is gonna sound really stupid to you, but I never claimed to be the smartest guy in the room or the dumbest. I'm sort of in the middle. When I listened to the Vanderbilt, uh, podcast you did-- now he's dead, so you did a podcast based on a book he wrote. I read the same book, but I hadn't read it for twenty years, and I-- maybe less, I don't remember. But you took all the salient points out of it. You hit a point, which, to you, is a minor point, and to me, said a lot about the time and the person. You told a story of how he was in a buggy, thinking about sailing ships versus steamships, and that he knew he had to make a big move, and it was really dangerous because they didn't know if the steamship technology really worked, but he had to sell all his sailing ships to raise the money.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:06:22

       Yeah.

    9. MOMichael Ovitz1:06:22

       And he was kinda absentminded and stopped. Uh, he was on his buggy... I, I, don't remember the exact story.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:06:30

        Yeah.

    11. MOMichael Ovitz1:06:30

        But he stopped, and somebody kind of attacked him or something, and he got out of the buggy, and he beat the guy up. [chuckles]

    12. DSDavid Senra1:06:38

        [chuckles] Yeah.

    13. MOMichael Ovitz1:06:39

        And that story resonated with me because I respected the guy's brain for what he'd built. I respected the guy's brain based on my-- your podcast for his foresight, and he did it not once, which for me, is the key. He-

    14. DSDavid Senra1:06:58

        He wrote multiple successful technological railroads.

    15. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:01

        Rails-

    16. DSDavid Senra1:07:01

        Yes

    17. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:01

        ... when the boats became-

    18. DSDavid Senra1:07:02

        It, it's very hard for a, a company and a person to-... disrupt themselves, say, "Hey, I got really wealthy," you know, and essentially, you know, ferrying people-

    19. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:13

        And now I gotta get rid of it.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:07:14

        Exactly. And especially when your point about the technology was interesting, because,

16. 1:07:17 – 1:26:25

    The Power of Big Thinking and Disruption

    1. DSDavid Senra1:07:17

       yeah, we're, we, we, we might have a debate, should we adopt this new AI technology or this new software? That technology was killing people. People, the steamship technology, like, it kept blowing up. So you'd have these explosions. They knew that's where it was gonna go because you needed powered, you know, sailing.

    2. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:32

       Yeah, but you didn't know if it worked.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:07:34

       That's the crazy thing, is like, "No, I'm gonna disrupt myself, get rid of the business that made me wealthy at the time."

    4. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:39

       He was one of the first disruptors, and he did it with railroads. He realized he couldn't deliver inland with a boat-

    5. DSDavid Senra1:07:47

       Yes

    6. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:48

       ... which sounds pretty simple.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:07:49

       He, he realized his business was transportation, not-

    8. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:52

       Yes

    9. DSDavid Senra1:07:52

       ... sailing.

    10. MOMichael Ovitz1:07:53

        But-

    11. DSDavid Senra1:07:53

        And when you think about what is your true business, it's not sailing. It's like, I just wanna move people and goods from point A to point B, and how do I do that?

    12. MOMichael Ovitz1:08:01

        But here's the point of your story. To me, only me, this shows you, me, which as opposed to anyone else, and I don't know who else would think this, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, I don't really care. Here's a guy who had foresight, commitment, and courage. He wasn't afraid. Fear is the killer and enemy of business. Fear is the thing that kills business, and we had a period in this country where people were scared to death to do things. Every single time I had an idea... I told this story to somebody yesterday, uh, at a, at a meeting I was at. Every idea I ever had or developed that someone else gave me, somebody told me it wouldn't work. That, and gave me all the articulate reasons, and it was always more than one person. "You can't start an agency at twenty-six. There are a hundred and eighty of them, and you'll never make it. It's too competitive. You need too much money to do it. You won't get the big clients. You'll never sign movie stars."

    13. DSDavid Senra1:09:10

        Oh, no, I'm glad you just said that. That's one of my favorite parts of your book, because, again, when I'm reading a book, I actually see some of the scenes. Like, I, I, like, y- you know, a book is essentially a movie for the mind, right? You have to come up with the, the visuals yourself, and there's this line in your book where they're like, you're like: "Hey, I'm planning on, uh, signing a movie, the big movie stars." You're like: "They're locked up. You'll never get them." And you said, "I'll get all of them." And I don't know if you did this, but literally what I just did, lean forward-

    14. MOMichael Ovitz1:09:35

        No, I did

    15. DSDavid Senra1:09:35

        ... like, just lean forward.

    16. MOMichael Ovitz1:09:36

        I did.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:09:36

        Like, "I will get-

    18. MOMichael Ovitz1:09:36

        I remember the guy I said it to

    19. DSDavid Senra1:09:38

        ... all of them."

    20. MOMichael Ovitz1:09:39

        I remember the guy I said it to. He was a successful agent. He handled about five hundred top writers in television but never stared out a TV. If I had his business, and I told him this in that meeting, which is what stimulated his comment, I would have signed every movie writer.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:09:56

        This is why I don't think your assessment, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, obviously, you know I wouldn't disrespect you intentionally. It's like, I do think you're creative. You're saying, "Oh, I don't have any talent. I'm not creative." And, uh, w- like, this idea where you just said something about like: "Hey, I don't, I don't even see guardrails, and if you put a guardrail in front of me, I'm gonna hop over that." If you look at where you took... Th- there's a note from a friend of ours. "Ovitz didn't look at the existing agency business as the boundary of his opportunity. He decided on his own what he wanted to do, and then he did it." And he talks about the flywheel that you built up, like this huge density of talent, and you said, "Hey, I can actually control sup- like, I can control the supply, and I can actually just create the entire package, instead of just handling this, like, one little silo."

    22. MOMichael Ovitz1:10:37

        Well-

    23. DSDavid Senra1:10:38

        That's creativity.

    24. MOMichael Ovitz1:10:39

        Not really, but I underst- it's creative business, but it's not... It's-- We called it Creative Artists for a reason. Marty Scorsese, in his brain, can cut a movie while he's shooting one camera at a time. I asked, "Why do we have-- How many cameras have you got?" I learned that from Marty. I learned so much about movies from Marty, that when I gave him an award in New York twenty-five years ago, I learned so much from that guy. I said in front of fifteen hundred people that when I met Marty in 'seventy-nine, and he was in a bit of trouble, not creatively, but financially, and he wasn't getting the movies made he wanted to make, he became like a student of business. Ten years later, he was the teacher, and I was the student, and I learned so much from him. But he has the ability to look at this setup here and cut it in his head and know where... He used to take his scripts, and on the left-hand page that's blank, he'd stick draw the scene and put little dots where the camera was going. And if you look at his camera work and it, the way his scenes are put together and the way he and Thelma, who cuts his movies, the amount of precision and handwork, it's genius. I can't do that, but what I can do is smell things that I think work. There was a period in the '80s where it became very clear, in the mid-'80s, that the studios were in financial trouble, and it started for me when Universal stock traded to a point where the book value of the c- the market cap of the company was the value of the real estate in Burbank.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:12:25

        Yeah.

    26. MOMichael Ovitz1:12:26

        And a guy named Steinberg, Saul Steinberg, started buying up shares and threatening to overtake the company. It became very clear to me a number of opportunities were available to me and CAA.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:12:38

        That's an act of creativity. When you realized that the Japanese was just a new form of bank for the studios.

    28. MOMichael Ovitz1:12:44

        Well, but I'd been going to meet them because they were dominating industry in the '80s, if you recall. They were making all the gadgets-

    29. DSDavid Senra1:12:52

        Yeah

    30. MOMichael Ovitz1:12:53

        ... and I was fascinated by Akio Morita, and I read his biography.
17. 1:26:25 – 1:27:45

    The Influence of Art and Culture on Business

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:26:25

       Why did I look at these magazines? I want to understand culture. Why did I read? Why did I collect art? When I started collecting art, people thought I was crazy, except the directors. When the directors came for dinner, they were mesmerized by the art. And why? Because you take, as I said to David Lynch, who I did a show for, Tim Burton, we did an art show, or Marty Scorsese, we did an art show in New York. Take some of the frames out of their movies and make them reproduce them, mount them, frame them in a, an art frame, and hang them on a museum wall, you have a piece of art. It's just different source.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:27:08

       It's moving art.

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:27:09

       Yes, and it's the same thing. Common denominator. People don't see past their nose. So what we try to do is train people to look further out. How do you get to the next step? Why did we do advertising? One, 'cause I thought we could do it. Two, we had a better idea, which we did. Three, all our clients had downtime, so everyone said, "Oh, movie directors don't do advertising." Well, that's complete, utter nonsense! They want to make money when they're not doing anything, and they get to work five days and make a million dollars.

18. 1:27:45 – 1:28:38

    The Coke Commercial Revolution

    1. DSDavid Senra1:27:45

       [chuckles]

    2. MOMichael Ovitz1:27:45

       So they all did it, and all the other agents that criticized us looked just pitifully stupid because they not only did it, they enjoyed it. Coke was doing six commercials a year. For the same budget, we did thirty-five, for the same budget, and we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song, and we changed their, their, uh, saying for the time, which was, "Always Coke," is what we came up with. Quincy did a theme song in six beats. He did it in urban, he did it in rural, he-- I mean, in city, he did it in country and western, he did it in classical, and we used it all over the world.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:28:31

       There's something tactical about the Coke deal that I was thinking of when I was reading your book. Y- you knocked it out of the park with

19. 1:28:38 – 1:31:29

    The $3 Million Check Incident

    1. DSDavid Senra1:28:38

       them. They were-- They, they even told you how happy they were, and yet they sent you a check, and I can't remember the, the, what the check-- I think they sent you, like, a three million dollar-

    2. MOMichael Ovitz1:28:45

       No, no, they sent me a check for a commercial we did. We did a black-and-white commercial. A guy who just passed away named Len Fink, who I stole from Jay Chiat, who was a genius advertising guy in LA. Chiat Day, they were amazing.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:28:58

       Yeah.

    4. MOMichael Ovitz1:28:59

       And what did I do? I reviewed who was amazing. I found the, the guy, and I went and got him.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:29:03

       Yeah.

    6. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:04

       And everyone was shocked that I got him, and I got him before we got the deal, so that I got him and a woman named Shelley Hockrin, who did the most brilliant ad campaign ever at Paramount for Warren Beatty's movie, Reds. It was just genius.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:29:17

       But they send you a check.

    8. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:18

       They send me a check. We did a black-and-white commercial. They send me a check. You're right, it was for, uh-

    9. DSDavid Senra1:29:26

       It was like-

    10. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:26

        ... three million dollars.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:29:27

        Something like that, yeah.

    12. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:27

        No, it was three million.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:29:28

        Okay.

    14. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:28

        They sent the check for three million for the cost of the commercial.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:29:32

        Okay.

    16. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:33

        I sent it back w- intentionally, telling them the commercial cost thirty thousand dollars and that they misread the invoice, 'cause they thought I made a mistake on the invoice, not me, our accounting guys, 'cause we billed for thirty thousand. They said we-

    17. DSDavid Senra1:29:47

        Yeah, you-- That was one of your deals-

    18. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:48

        We never had a-

    19. DSDavid Senra1:29:48

        ... like, you're not gonna, you're not gonna charge more than-

    20. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:50

        Yeah

    21. DSDavid Senra1:29:50

        Okay.

    22. MOMichael Ovitz1:29:50

        We never-- They said, "We never had a commercial for less than three million, so we were thrilled, and we thought you made a mistake, and we trust you, so we sent you the money." "Send it back." Sent the check back void, 'cause we-- I said, "We did it on a Apple 2..." Len Fink did the commercial on a Apple 2E computer, the first computer Steve Jobs came out with, and we did it in black and white, and they didn't want to take the check back, and that gave me the opening I wanted.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:30:20

        Okay, explain that to me.

    24. MOMichael Ovitz1:30:21

        I said to them, "We don't want you to overpay anyone except us." [chuckles]

    25. DSDavid Senra1:30:27

        [chuckles]

    26. MOMichael Ovitz1:30:27

        "You're not gonna overpay for commercials, but you gotta pay us." And by that time, we had delivered the polar bears, which they're still using forty years later. Think about that. We delivered three hundred and fifty commercials over our tenure with them. No one's ever done that. Madison Avenue got paranoid.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:30:47

        But what was the difference between what they, what they wanted to pay you and what you eventually were valuing your own work at?

    28. MOMichael Ovitz1:30:53

        It was huge. It was huge.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:30:54

        So how do you get them from an-

    30. MOMichael Ovitz1:30:56

        Well, no, the f-- what they were paying for-
20. 1:31:29 – 1:32:52

    Mentorship and Integrity

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:31:29

       "Run..." And it's Herb Allen who got me into this.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:31:33

       Which is also your mentor, Herb Allen II, right?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:31:35

       The best. The best man on the planet. You want to talk about integrity?... I sat in his office where Sumner Redstone sent him a check for a million dollars rather than complete hiring him as the banker when he bought Paramount, because Herb was the banker of record and somehow got pushed out of it. And as Herb's talking to me, sitting where you're sitting, he took out scissors out of his desk and he's-- while he's talking to me, he starts cutting up the check, and he cut it in the finest pieces he could, and then he took it on the desk and he put it in the envelope that Sumner sent it in-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:32:12

       [chuckles]

    5. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:13

       - and sent it back to him by messenger. This guy had the highest integrity I've ever seen in my life. Never lied, never wanted publicity, didn't want to be in the limelight. Did every deal with me, and I learned everything. Everyone said, "How'd you..." My son said, "How'd you learn how to be an investment banker?" I said, "I did it, and Herb Allen made sure I didn't make any mistakes."

    6. DSDavid Senra1:32:33

       [chuckles]

    7. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:34

       And but, w- you know, we talked about mentors before. Tamara said to me the most interesting thing. She said, "You give so many of people a good advice." She said, "You only give bad advice to one person."

    8. DSDavid Senra1:32:46

       Yourself?

    9. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:46

       Yes.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:32:47

        Interesting.

    11. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:48

        And it's true. I've made some of the worst decisions imaginable

21. 1:32:52 – 1:34:56

    Self-Reflection and Personal Growth

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:52

       because I've had no one like me to talk to.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:32:54

       When's the last time you made a bad decision?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:32:56

       [sighs] Well, I make bad decisions on a regular basis. I mean, they, they're not-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:33:02

       A consequential one, though.

    5. MOMichael Ovitz1:33:03

       Well, consequential is a different story. I mean, I made some c- I made some bad decisions in parts of my career where I could have done things differently. It's a whole another podcast. But, uh, you know, it's interesting, Patrick Collinson, who I have amazing respect for, I got a call from him when my book... ah, six months after my book came out, three months, I don't remember. I was in-- I lived in San Francisco. He said, "What are you doing for lunch this week?" And, and we made a lunch date. I went to the office, I sat down with my tray in his commissary, my book sitting right there with, like, ninety or a hundred post- yellow Post-Its in it.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:33:40

       Yeah, I know the [chuckles] -

    7. MOMichael Ovitz1:33:41

       And I said... You know this story.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:33:42

       I know. No, no, I do the same thing with my books.

    9. MOMichael Ovitz1:33:44

       And I, I said to-

    10. DSDavid Senra1:33:44

        You've seen them.

    11. MOMichael Ovitz1:33:45

        P- I-- Patrick sits down, he said: "Are you ready?" I said, "Yeah, I'm starving." He goes, "No, no, no, no. See your book?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "I have a lot of questions." I said, "Oh, sure, anything." He said, "No, I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake. I want you to tell me why you made the mistake, what the options were, and what drove you to the decision." And I looked at him, and I said-- and I'm saying to myself: "Wow, this kid's special." Then I said to myself, I said to Patrick, I said: "And what about the things I did right?" He said: "Who cares?" He said: "That's expected." [laughing]

    12. DSDavid Senra1:34:19

        [laughing]

    13. MOMichael Ovitz1:34:20

        So he went through for two and a half hours, every mistake I made in the book. Not in the book-

    14. DSDavid Senra1:34:25

        Yeah

    15. MOMichael Ovitz1:34:25

        ... that I made in my career.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:34:26

        Yeah.

    17. MOMichael Ovitz1:34:26

        And I said, I walked out of there with such respect for this guy, that he took that time to do that in a business that has nothing to do with his, but everything to do with it, because as you and I said at dinner, every single business has the same parameters. When we talked earlier, when we started this discussion, I talked about how I was aware of what people that worked for me or with me, because I called everyone a partner, no matter what their interest in the

22. 1:34:56 – 1:38:31

    The Power of Perseverance

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:34:56

       business was. I called mailroom people partners. I would go around and do the rounds, the rounds I learned from being involved with the UCLA Medical Center. I was a doctor, and at ten thirty and four thirty, I went around the building, and took me twenty minutes, and I looked in people's offices, and if I saw a weird face or a weird voice inflection when they said hello, or anything that tipped me off, I asked them to come see me. I had an open door from seven to seven forty-five every night before I went to dinner. I asked them to come see me, and every single time there was a problem, and ninety percent of the problems were personal. The ten percent business problems were easy to fix. The personal problems took a lot of time. If you want to put that kind of time in, you get loyalty. We didn't lose an agent in the whole time I was at CAA, not one.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:35:45

       Yeah, that's, that's nuts.

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:35:46

       Well, people, we, we paid people fairly. We paid them ahead of their market price. Everyone participated, and everyone was protecting each other. We didn't talk badly about people. We protected each other. If studios tried to r- roll over one of our people, we'd all get behind that person and make the studio miserable. And we set our- we elevated ourselves to a position, treat us nicely, and our clients will, in turn, do the things you need them to do. You'll pay them for it, by the way, and you'll probably pay them more than you're going to pay through other agencies. Listen, when Mike Nichols- when I signed Mike Nichols from... He was one of the last people we took from ICM and his agent. He'd been with him for twenty-five years. Mike Nichols' price, because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody, his price went up two million dollars because he fit into a higher strata price with us than with anybody else. And yes, when asked if we price fix, I say no and yes. Um, we ex- demanded for the triple A clients, triple A pricing, and you couldn't price one less than the other.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:37:08

       So you applied that same idea that you were using for filmmakers to your work with Coca-Cola, then?

    5. MOMichael Ovitz1:37:13

       Absolutely. Absolutely. And I also did what I told you personally, volume. Coke, why did I do thirty-five promotions instead of six? Easier to do six.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:37:23

       Mm-hmm.

    7. MOMichael Ovitz1:37:24

       Did thirty-five because we ran it. The idea I had, which they bought, which Herb Allen arranged at Sun Valley to meet with the, the team of Goizueta and Keogh, the CEO and the COO, was, "Let's do a relay race. Let's have Coke thought of three hundred and sixty-five days a year. How do we do that?" Well, it's simple. Christmas?... we do something about the cold and about Santa Claus, which was a Coke creation in the '30s. Let's go to Valentine's Day, love. These are what the commercial bases are on. Then we're gonna go into Easter, family, summer, thirst, heat, beach. Then we're gonna go to the fall. What is it? It's back to school. Everybody's kids go back to school. Then we're gonna go to Thanksgiving, we're back at family, and then we're gonna roll right into Christmas. So we're gonna do a, ah, commercials specific to those seasons rather than six commercials that play in every silo of television. How do you put a commercial on Saturday Night Live that you put on a daytime soap opera, that you put on

23. 1:38:31 – 1:43:19

    The Drive for Success

    1. MOMichael Ovitz1:38:31

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

    2. DSDavid Senra1:38:51

       Wh- when did you build the self-confidence to not listen to people? I, I, i- it annoys me. I see this in every single one of these biographies I read, where it's like, "Don't ever let somebody else tell you what you're capable of."

    3. MOMichael Ovitz1:39:01

       I had this discussion-

    4. DSDavid Senra1:39:02

       But you need self-confidence to ignore that information. So, like, when did you... Or that, that, that cri- critique or that advice, at what age? Did you have that when you were in high school? Did you have that before C- you found CAA?

    5. MOMichael Ovitz1:39:13

       I wrote about this in my book. This self-confidence appeared when I lost the ninth grade election for class president, and I did a complete postmortem on myself, who my friend group was, and why I lost, 'cause I didn't want to be a loser. I thought it was... And it was an, a, it was a apocryphal moment for me, and I worked for two years to build different social cons- constituency, and I went out of my way to make different friends in different areas of the- I had a three thousand eight hundred-kid high school, so running for an office there was a big deal 'cause everybody voted. And you had to speak to the entire school in three different assemblies, 'cause that's all that could get into the gym, and it was critical. I practiced public speaking when I was in the tenth grade and eleventh grade, and I won student body vice president, then I won student body president by wide margins because I really worked it, no different than I worked any business I've been in. And I realized, and I said this to someone this morning on this call about this deal I'm doing, the young guy who's the number three who started it said to me, "I've never s- seen anyone move so fast from idea to execution of putting it together." And I said, " 'Cause if you move slow, it doesn't go together." And he said, "You seem very confident about this idea." And I said, "Yes, I'm very confident about it, because I see it crystal clear in its entirety." And I- he said, "I'm not sure that our, you know- that I'm confident about you meeting our founder, because you've probably heard a lot of nasty things about him." I said, "I've heard a ton of things, some good, some bad, but I really don't care." And he said, "Why do you not care?" I said, "Because I'll make my own judgment." I said, "I'm very good with people. I will know if what I've heard is true, false, or just baloney." And I said, "Frankly, if you want to know the truth, over my career, if you believed everything everyone said, I'd be a miserable failure and drummed out of life," you know? Because anyone who is confident, aggressive, has ideas, wants to push the envelope, is put down.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:41:46

       Yeah. Jeff Bezos has a great line on this. It's like, well, if you don't want to be criticized, if you can't take being criticized and you can't take doing any- you can't do anything.

    7. MOMichael Ovitz1:41:52

       I'm gonna leave you with a, a line that I, I used when I was seventeen years old and gave a speech when I ran for student body president, 'cause when I was student body vice president, I usurped the president's duties, and he was bad-mouthing me like crazy. And it was working pretty good, because I was having a run for my money. And I said to the students, all four thousand of them, "I'd rather be a do-something president who's done something to be criticized than a do-nothing president who no one can criticize."

    8. DSDavid Senra1:42:24

       Yeah, that's a great line.

    9. MOMichael Ovitz1:42:25

       And that got me the election.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:42:27

        I want to ask you a question, 'cause you've mentioned a few times where your appetite is essentially insatiable. So you had, you know, forty-six out of the top fifty highest grossing film, uh, like, the best talent. Then you had seventy-five percent market share in all of Hollywood. There's this great book, one of the most important books I've ever read. It was published in, like, nineteen fifty-seven. It's called The Mind of Napoleon.

    11. MOMichael Ovitz1:42:49

        You got me into this.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:42:50

        Yeah, it's, it's a very hard-to-find book-

    13. MOMichael Ovitz1:42:51

        No kidding.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:42:51

        So I got... I have friends that have paid a thousand, two thousand dollars for the book, and I think it's worth it, where it's essentially three hundred pages of Napoleon in his own words, and there's something that you- when, when I hear you speak, reminds me of Napoleon, where he said, you know, essentially, his ambition grew with his success. And he says it in French, but it, it, you can... The translation is, "Appetite comes with eating." You know, it, for exce- excessively ambition-driven people, it's not like, "Oh, I ate, so I'm

24. 1:43:19 – 2:00:40

    Enduring Ambition and Curiosity

    1. DSDavid Senra1:43:19

       full." It's like, "No, I've eaten, and the more I eat, the more I want to eat."

    2. MOMichael Ovitz1:43:21

       But that's a hundred percent accurate. Listen, I- one of my clients who I'm crazy about, Francis Ford Coppola, wrote a screenplay that one of my clients that I was also crazy about, who passed away, named Franklin J. Schaffner, directed. It was called Patton. I am a voracious reader on anything about military leaders. I've read about Patton, I've read about Omar Bradley, I've read about Dwight D. Eisenhower as military leaders.... blows my mind. When everyone said to Patton, "You can't do this," he said, "Okay." He said, "You're right," and he just went and did it. How did he get th- his army to march double the amount of the standard army march, supply them, feed them, and not irritate them? 'Cause he was a leader, and he had guts, and he wasn't afraid, and people couldn't stand him. Not his people, though, not his people. So for me, if my people support me, I'm fine. What other people say, I don't really care. I don't think about it. I get asked this question every single day of my life. I am- Tamara calls me the truth teller because I say the truth. I said it to you. I gave you my best advice of what I thought you should do. I may not be right.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:44:45

       Well, you [chuckles] -

    4. MOMichael Ovitz1:44:45

       No, I may not be, I may be.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:44:47

       No, the funny part about that is so, you know, I- I... one of, one of the things that-- so when I asked you earlier, I was like, "Hey, if you think about the people that are best in the world at what they do, if you-- if, like, one trait... think about all the people you, you met that are the best in the world at what they do, th- you've become the best in the world at what you do, what is the most-- single most important trait that you've observed across all these people?" My answer to that question would be focus. And so, like, I'm insanely focused on just podcasting, and I only think about it... That's basically all I think about all day long, and when we had that in- very intense three-hour dinner, twenty minutes of it was you explaining, "This is what I would do if you were-- if I was you."

    6. MOMichael Ovitz1:45:20

       But that's to just push you.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:45:21

       But the good-- the interesting part was, as you already-- as I told you, I was like, I, I... The advice you had for me, I had already put into-- you didn't-- it wasn't public, so you didn't know this, put into motion. I was like, "It's pretty impressive that you can come from outside of something I think about all the time, and you nailed the single best opportunity."

    8. MOMichael Ovitz1:45:36

       But that's not-- that's the only talent I have. That's my point.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:45:38

       That's not the only talent you have. [chuckles]

    10. MOMichael Ovitz1:45:39

        No, I, I have the ability to think out of the box on any business-

    11. DSDavid Senra1:45:43

        Which is creative.

    12. MOMichael Ovitz1:45:44

        No, I mean, [chuckles] I'm not gonna argue with you.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:45:47

        [chuckles]

    14. MOMichael Ovitz1:45:47

        I have the ability to think out of the box on any business, even though if I don't know the business, because I have this thesis, and I've said it a hundred times to you and to everybody else: every business is the same. Now, the details are different-

    15. DSDavid Senra1:46:01

        Right

    16. MOMichael Ovitz1:46:01

        ... but the business is, the blocking and tackling is all the same.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:46:05

        Yeah. I-

    18. MOMichael Ovitz1:46:05

        And it's always about momentum, and focus, and loyalty, and aggressive, uh, control of marketplace and monopoly. Monopoly. I'm a monopolist. If we were gonna build a business, you have to be number one, and you have to have the lion's share of what you're doing, or the lion's share of opportunities of what you do. If you pass for fundamental reasons, that's good, too. But you can't do anything halfway. It's crazy. This I learned as a kid. There's nothing... Like, when I had a paper route at nine, I realized I had enough time to do three paper routes, and I went and s- under another name, got the other two. Because the guy delivering the bulk of papers thought he was delivering to three different people, and he thought no one could do all three, and I figured out I could do it. And then I hired someone to help me when it became an issue. So it's always about thinking the next step. It's a great Bruce Lee line, which I showed you a few: "If this is where you want to punch, this is not the target. This is the target back here, and you punch through." That sounds stupidly, naively, innocently kind of elementary.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:47:31

        Mm-hmm.

    20. MOMichael Ovitz1:47:31

        But if you think about the broader ramification about that, it's a foundation of business, and those are all things that I think are important. You talked about Michael Dell. I saw Michael Dell at a conference in Aspen last year. That guy's still working every hour of the day.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:47:46

        He's a remarkable person. He started his company at eighteen. He's in his sixties, has no desire at all to stop.

    22. MOMichael Ovitz1:47:52

        But that's my point.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:47:53

        You know, he had a paper route, too.

    24. MOMichael Ovitz1:47:55

        I-

    25. DSDavid Senra1:47:55

        But he... And but he figured out this crazy, in his own way, of how to maximize how many subscriptions he could sell, and he realized that if you were either-- there's two people that bought n- uh, newspaper subscriptions in Texas. Texas has a much higher rate than the, the general population, which is newlyweds and people that moved. And so he's like, "Hey, all that information is public in Texas." He went down to the courthouse, brought a computer, right, his, his Apple II computer, and he just had them pull, "Give me a list of all the people that are married, just recently married, and all the people who have recently moved." Just like th- th- that, doing that at twelve. He was twelve years old.

    26. MOMichael Ovitz1:48:30

        But think about what you just said. Detail, right? Drive, ambition, don't give up, just keep going. You know, I had a dinner in London, um, I don't remember if I told you this story recently, that with a friend of Tamara's, who's a businessman, and five guys in business asked to have a dinner with me because they want to understand why are American businessmen so successful on a comparative basis, broadly to other people around the world. Why are they so successful? And there's a lot of reasons, but the-- we sat down at the table, very formal, everybody in suits. The five guys were in their fifties. They all were pretty successful, except one, who opened the l- the dinner and said, "I'm..." He started the dinner and said, "I'm moving to Gstaad from London." "Oh," I said, "taxes?" He said, "No."

    27. DSDavid Senra1:49:28

        Skiing? [chuckles]

    28. MOMichael Ovitz1:49:29

        So I said, "Do you like..." No, that was the question I said, first question, in front of everybody, before we ordered: "Do you like to ski?" He said, "No." I said, "What happened?" He said, "My business bank went bankrupt." I said, "Okay, you don't like to ski-... You're leaving London, you're going to Staad, and it's not a tax problem, and your business failed. I said, "So what?" He said, "What do you mean, so what?" I said, "Failure is a part of life. In America, failure is a badge of honor. It means you tried. You get back up on your horse and you try it again. I've failed at a number of things. Doesn't stop me." And all of a sudden, the meeting was pretty much over [chuckles] because I said to him, "We don't need to talk about this anymore. There is no such thing as failure. It doesn't exist. You cannot give up." And by the time we got done with dinner, he was not gonna move to Staad, and ultimately did not, and is working on a new business.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:50:27

        I'm glad you brought that up, because one of the things, uh, there's-- one of my favorite lines, so you know this, like, I take every book I read, right? I try to distill it down to, like, the ten most important sentences in the book, and one of them for you was... This is completely re- I strip it of all context, because I think if you just li- read the sentence, you'll understand why this sentence is important. So I'm not even talking about what's happening in the book, but this is the sentence I wrote down: "He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop." It's one of my ten favorite sentences in your book. My question to you is, how much of your success do you attribute to just pure endurance or pure perseverance?

    30. MOMichael Ovitz1:51:11

        I mean, to me, it's just part of a fabric of me, and I'm not suggesting I live the right kind of life. It's good for me. I wanna stay edgy. I wanna stay with young people. Most of my relationships now are with young people. I learn, I, I, I feel I get up in the morning, I have a purpose.
25. 2:00:40 – 2:06:58

    A Tribute to Michael Crichton

    1. MOMichael Ovitz2:00:40

       Thirty years.

    2. DSDavid Senra2:00:40

       What can you tell me about your relationship with, with Michael Crichton?

    3. MOMichael Ovitz2:00:43

       Um, certain people have touched my life in a very unique way. Um, Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen in '99 put me on their board, and I never met either of them, and they had the confidence in me to go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about. I mean, I had some experience in tech from '92 with my Andy Grove Intel CAA deal, meeting Gates in '93, but, you know, nothing like they did. They grew up in Silicon Valley. That was a huge, uh, life change for me. Uh, Michael Crichton was one of these guys that at the beginning, I just needed to sign as a client to be on the roster, and after two or three meetings, I just said, "My God, this man is so special." He was not just intelligent to a degree I'd never seen at that time. This is 1979. He was thoughtful. He was ahead of everybody in his thinking. He was talking about computers in the early '80s. He was an Apple Fellow when it was... No one knew what the hell that was.... He traveled extensively and wrote articles about it, but kept notes on everything he did, and he loved art. He wrote the definitive textbook on Jasper Johns. To this day, it's the definitive book. And I talked to him every day of my life, seven days a week. Seven days a week, and if I didn't talk to him, it was odd, and I missed it. I would talk to him no matter where I was. I could be in Japan, I could be in Europe, I could be in New York, didn't make any difference to me. And sometimes the conversations were short, sometimes they were long. I enjoyed every second of it. Going on vacation with him was a, a lesson in curiosity. The guy kept notes on everything he saw. So I remember we were in the Caribbean together. He kept notes on everything that he saw, and it all ended up in movies. And I value loyalty, uh, as a very important point for me in a relationship. Every problem I had or every success, he was there for me. I remember I made a couple of huge mistakes, and he said to me, um, something I've never forgotten. He said, "Forget it. There's always another rodeo." That's his line to me, and he's turned out to be right. I miss him every day of my life. His book stands and on my desk and a, a small, personal, collected by him, uh, Frank Stella drawing that he gave me as a gift, uh, is in a place I see it every single night before I go to sleep. And I loved this guy. He-- Um, I was devastated when he passed away. Devastated, uh, 'cause he passed away young. Did- didn't have to. Uh, it was his own fault, uh, I think.

    4. DSDavid Senra2:04:01

       What happened?

    5. MOMichael Ovitz2:04:01

       Well, he was a doctor, you know, a medical doctor, so I personally... I could be wrong. I don't know it for a fact. I think he kind of overdid the chemo, and I think that killed him. That's my guess, or it's caused something to happen, but I don't know the facts, by the way. But a loss to me that was devastating, and I remember the night that his wife called me because it was the night that Obama, uh, I think, won the election. It was that night. I'm not sure. Some, some event happened, and I was in the backseat of a car, and I got the call, and I was devastated. But for me, mega influence on my life, uh, mega, uh, loyal friend through thick and thin. Didn't matter what I did, he didn't judge me.

    6. DSDavid Senra2:04:48

       And he had these, this extreme-- I think I learned this from you. He had extreme work habits, where w- he wouldn't write every day, but when he wrote, he would write for, like-

    7. MOMichael Ovitz2:04:57

       Yeah, I had all my writers, and we had four hundred of them, we had different work ethic and different schedules. So James Clavell, who wrote Shōgun and Taipan, um, he would write every day from seven in the morning till twelve thirty, hell or high water, six days a week, and at twelve thirty, he went to lunch, and he didn't work until the next morning, and he did ten pages a day. That's what he did. So you could almost tell when he was gonna be done, and his books ran about twelve hundred pages. Michael hated writing. He rather do thinking, and he waited for deadlines, and he wrote Jurassic Park in five months because he wrote twenty hours a day, six days, seven days a week, 'cause it was due, and he just waited.

    8. DSDavid Senra2:05:49

       What do you think is the most important thing you learned from him?

    9. MOMichael Ovitz2:05:52

       From him? Oh, unequivocally, curiosity about everything. Guy was curious about everything, every day of his life, and, uh, loyalty, integrity, how to create things out of nothing. What a, what a mind that can think forward and backward. So in other words, he did movies like The Great Train Robbery, eight- eighteen fifties with Sean Connery, and movies like Andromeda Strain about the future and his thought process, and then straight popcorn entertainment based on science that really isn't science, Jurassic Park. But when you read the book, the first third of the book, you're being educated without you knowing about paleontology, and you actually think you understand it, and they give a PhD, and it was genius what he did. So then when you-- it gets l-- When the movie breaks loose, you actually think you understand [chuckles] what you're seeing.

26. 2:06:58 – 2:07:25

    Closing Thoughts

    1. MOMichael Ovitz2:06:58

       It's amazing. He was a genius.

    2. DSDavid Senra2:07:00

       Relentless curiosity. That's a great place to close.

    3. MOMichael Ovitz2:07:02

       Right.

    4. DSDavid Senra2:07:02

       Michael, thank you very much for doing this.

    5. MOMichael Ovitz2:07:03

       Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

    6. DSDavid Senra2:07:06

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

Episode duration: 2:07:25