{"slug":"founder-caa-michael-ovitz-i-just-knew-i-was-goin","show_id":"davidsenra","title":"Founder of CAA Michael Ovitz: \"I Just Knew I Was Going to Outwork Every One of Them\"","display_title":null,"title_orig":"David Senra × Michael Ovitz","dek":"Michael Ovitz and Bill Ackman have made a “very well financed” offer to take Universal Music private, conditioned on Lucian Grainge continuing to run the company, with Ovitz as chair supporting technology and AI. The proposal follows UMG trading “like, you know, 10 points under the IPO price” despite Grainge growing it “geometrically every year,” while family control and unresolved AI monetization remain key risks.","lang":"EN","date":"2026-08-09","published_at":"2026-08-09T12:00:17+00:00","duration_min":67,"source_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHh03lzOJz0","source_label":"YouTube","rss_url":null,"youtube_id":"SHh03lzOJz0","youtube_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHh03lzOJz0","thumbnail_url":null,"chips":["person:David Senra","person:Michael Ovitz"],"provenance":[["SOURCE","YouTube captions"],["SYNTH","claude-fable-5"],["CLEAN","gpt-5.6-luna"],["VERIFY","gpt-5.6-luna"],["PARTICIPANTS","gpt-5.6-luna"],["TRANSLATE","gpt-5.6-luna"]],"title_alt":"CAA创始人 Michael Ovitz：“我早就知道，自己会比他们每一个人都更拼命”","display_title_alt":null,"dek_alt":"Michael Ovitz与Bill Ackman提出“资金实力非常雄厚”的要约，拟将环球音乐私有化，由Lucian Grainge继续掌舵，Ovitz任董事长负责科技与AI。UMG股价较IPO低约10个点，尽管公司“每年以几何级速度”增长；交易取决于家族控股，AI变现模式仍未解决。","lang_alt":"ZH","tldr_md":"- **Ovitz confirms he and Bill Ackman — friends for 33 years — have made a public, \"very well financed\" offer to take Universal Music private, with Lucian Grainge running the show as \"a condition precedent to the deal.\"** The trigger: UMG stock \"crept down to like, you know, 10 points under the IPO price\" even as Grainge grows the company \"geometrically every year\" — so Ovitz told Ackman, \"Let's take it private,\" friendly-only, with Ovitz as chair supporting Grainge on tech and AI. \"Whether we get it or not, I have no idea. It's frankly up to one shareholder... one family that controls 28% of the stock.\"\n- **The underlying music thesis is that music sits at the foundation of everything digital in the AI era — games, film, TV, image capture — and that \"music is never going away.\"** He flags Suno and Udio \"taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it,\" but pointedly refuses to say how labels will monetize AI training: it's \"a very difficult problem that right now is under analysis by all the music companies.\" His company thesis: without someone who understands talent running the company, \"that company is going to die.\"\n- **At the busiest point of his life, Ovitz says AI makes today more exciting than \"the entertainment sweet spot of the late '70s through the end of the '90s.\" His evidence is speed: Max Levchin once told him a day off felt like missing a week, and now \"if I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed 3 months\"; a researcher friend got \"results in 9 months on a cancer cure\" from a post-AI trial versus 5-10 years for the four started pre-AI.**\n- **\"We all had to be specialists until AI.** Now, we're all generalists\" — though he says his own generalist nature is not caused by AI: \"I've been like this my whole life.\" AI gives people like him more leverage. Prepping for Matsushita (with $15-20B of balance-sheet liquidity in the late '80s) took four weeks of stockbrokers' offices, libraries, and a physical 10-K; for his two current transactions, he spent six-seven hours down a rabbit hole on three AI platforms and now works across consumer, defense, medicine, and biopharma — fields he's \"totally unqualified for.\"\n- **His competitive doctrine is monopoly, not competition: \"Competition is for losers because you're competing with yourself, basically.\"** When four agency partners said they would never represent movie stars and one called him arrogant for saying CAA would have them all, his reply was \"I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm going to outwork every one of them\" — then he mailed them the torn-out Variety full-page ad for every star signed, weekly, for 10 years. The goal: \"blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply, and as brutally as we can.\"\n- **CAA's culture came from Magic Johnson's showtime fast break — \"I didn't care who scored.** I just wanted a score\" — plus radical idea intake: 200 chairs tied in a circle every 90 days, 30 seconds each, no passing. A mailroom guy pitched a cable idea and was \"promoted on the spot to Asia.\" Counter-example: the NCAA playoff he and Phil Knight pitched to 150 college presidents 40 years ago — rejected, validated by a 500-page report, adopted 30 years later; \"the amount of money they left on the table was frightening.\"\n- **The cross-domain success trait: protect the vision, but hold ground only until proven wrong.** He watched \"Martin Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room like he was a toothpick\" over dumb notes, and calls Steve Jobs's intransigence plus willingness to be talked out of it if he agreed \"the best trait any businessman can have.\" On losses, Barry Diller's six words govern: \"He won, we lost. Next case.\"\n","digest_md":"### 1. Busier than ever: AI makes today beat entertainment's golden age\n- Ovitz's opening claim, unhedged: \"It's the most exciting time I've ever seen in my entire life. And that includes the entertainment sweet spot of the late '70s through the end of the '90s... pre-streaming.\" He started working in technology in '92 while still at Sierra and hasn't stopped: \"I literally can't wait\" to get up in the morning.\n- The acceleration, via Max Levchin (Affirm, PayPal): a couple of years ago a day off felt like missing a week; recently, \"If I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed 3 months.\" His most concrete proof point is a cancer-researcher friend running five trials — the four started pre-AI are 5-10 years in the making; the one started post-AI produced \"results in 9 months on a cancer cure.\"\n- His memorable description of learning from younger people: \"Consider me Dracula for the brain\" — the Dracula conceit of eternal youth, applied to gray matter. He hedges the enthusiasm once: \"there's a ton of potential downside and I like to not forget that... On the other hand, I feel the upside far outweighs the downside.\"\n\n### 2. \"We all had to be specialists until AI. Now, we're all generalists\"\n- The '70s-'90s were exciting for creating software of the moment — film, tape, music, books — but on ancient mediums. Ovitz now works in consumer products, high-tech, defense, medicine, and biopharma — \"things that I'm totally unqualified for. I don't code\" — while AI lets him build vocabulary \"really fast\" to follow brilliant young minds. He separately says this generalist disposition is not due to AI: \"I've been like this my whole life.\"\n- The before/after he keeps returning to: prepping to meet Matsushita's C-suite in Hawaii — a company with an unheard-of $15-20B of liquidity in the late '80s — required four weeks of analog work: a stockbroker's office, the library, a physical 10-K. For his two current transactions, he spent six-seven hours over two days down a rabbit hole on three AI platforms.\n- The generational version: his 10-year-old grandson at Alpha School in New York (he has \"unbelievable respect\" for Joe Lomonaco) — two hours a day of hard study off an iPad, and in six months \"he's a different kid. Can't wait to go to school.\"\n\n### 3. The basics of business are identical everywhere — and he refuses a label\n- On his role: \"I don't want to be typecast.\" His generation were specialists — one vocation within film, TV, books; today \"you have to be a generalist,\" unless you're a deep scientist \"founding Palantir or Anthropic.\" Project selection isn't agonized over: \"the choices almost get made by themselves\" — is it interesting, will it stand the test of time, can it be built, financed, distributed? \"I collect art and people.\"\n- His unifying claim: the blocking-and-tackling of business is the same in every field. A film is packaged around talent; \"talent, creator, engineer, same thing.\" Entertainment financing maps to venture capital, distribution to a DSP, then marketing, profit, culture, and building something that lasts beyond you. The proof he cites: CAA, started 1974, \"is as strong today as it was when I was there... 50 years in business proves that it works.\"\n- A buried lesson in the Japan years: friends would return from one great Japan meeting saying \"I'm going to close,\" and he'd laugh — \"call me in a year and let me know how you're doing. None of them closed anything.\" He spent a year cultivating relationships before getting a single assignment, reflecting what he described as traditional Japanese executives' slow-to-trust culture.\n\n### 4. \"I just knew I was going to outwork every one of them\"\n- The 1974 origin story: a close William Morris friend over coffee — \"So good that you're starting this business. In a year you'll be looking for a job... There's almost 200 agencies out there.\" Then four partners of a leading TV literary agency said, \"We'll never represent any movie stars.\" When Ovitz answered, \"We're going to have all of them,\" one called him arrogant. His reply: \"I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm going to outwork every one of them.\" Every weekly movie-star signing got a full red-page Variety ad — which he tore out and mailed to those four men for the next 10 years.\n- On Peter Thiel's Stanford monopoly lectures: \"He's spot on... Competition is for losers because you're competing with yourself, basically. That's how I view it.\" Hence the time discipline Senra witnessed on the plane: minimal calls, meals, and Zooms — \"what law is there on the planet that says a Zoom has to be an hour?... I do them in 20 minutes.\"\n- The unapologetic frame: \"business is a competitive, cutthroat sport. Now I'm not saying you do anything immoral or illegal\" — but the point is \"to blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply, and as brutally as we can... until they can't see straight.\"\n\n### 5. Egoless winning: Magic Johnson's fast break, Phil Knight, and the playoff money left on the table\n- The lesson that built CAA came from Magic Johnson, whose business he helped start: on the showtime fast break, \"he had no goal except to score. And he didn't care who got that ball in the basket.\" Translated: \"I didn't care who scored. I just wanted a score\" — and if a task was slow, Ovitz or a department head did it themselves by 5:00 \"to prove a point.\"\n- On Phil Knight — with whom CAA had a joint venture through Nike: \"the most competitive businessman alive, bar none.\" Senra's corroboration from a Jordan biography: someone at Nike warned that if Jordan betrayed Knight, \"he will chase you to the ends of the earth.\" Ovitz's mock protest — threatening to end the podcast for not being named among the most competitive — is half a joke.\n- The best specimen of institutional blindness: 40 years ago he and Knight plotted an NCAA College Football Playoff in Beaverton, got an audience via UCLA chancellor Chuck Young, and pitched 150 NCAA presidents in Kansas City with a dual video presentation — to a room that wasn't listening. The NCAA commissioned a ~500-page report that \"came to exactly what we told them,\" then did the playoff 30 years later. \"The amount of money they left on the table was frightening.\"\n\n### 6. The hard side of creative genius is vision-protection — and it's the same instinct in founders\n- Creatives have \"a much harder side than people tend to imagine,\" and it exists to protect the vision: he watched \"Martin Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room like he was a toothpick\" over \"the dumbest notes imaginable\" — his verdict: the producer shouldn't have been in the editing room, and \"nobody should be giving Marty notes about the core of his film... It's a joke.\"\n- The Rain Man example, as told: Dustin Hoffman couldn't find the character in the first week; Barry Levinson had the patience to let him — \"which is hard because you're losing money every day\" — then found the balance of improvisation versus script. \"The movie's perfect. Perfect from beginning to end.\"\n- Senra bridged this to founders with the framing that \"the founder is the guardian of the company's soul.\" Ovitz then described Josh Kushner as unchanged since Harvard Business School — \"will hold his ground, but... he'll yield his position if you can talk him out of it\" — and Steve Jobs, whom he consulted for on Pixar: \"completely intransigent on things, yet you could talk him out of it if he agreed... The best trait any businessman can have.\"\n\n### 7. Ideas from anybody, and never look back\n- CAA's mechanism: every 90 days, 200 people in a circle with chairs literally tied together — no way out, everyone pitches 30 seconds, no passing, and Ovitz coaxed the silent ones. \"A mailroom guy pitched an idea about cable. We promoted him on the spot to Asia. On the spot. It was that good.\"\n- His theory of originality is appropriation: \"Some of the greatest ideas I've ever had, I've stolen or appropriated from other people\" — like Picasso's bull sculpture welded from bicycle handlebars and a seat, and Picasso's early faces drawn from the 50 African masks he bought for 4 or 5 francs at Paris fairs.\n- On losses, Barry Diller's six words after losing a bid to Sumner Redstone: \"He won, we lost. Next case.\" Ovitz is \"so upset\" with friends who dwell on lost deals — and turns his own record into product: \"I've made every mistake in business you can make... My goal is to use that to prevent my young people from making further mistakes.\"\n\n### 8. The Universal Music take-private — and the AI precedents from Jurassic Park to Beijing\n- The deal, as he tells it: after a discussion with 33-year friend Bill Ackman about his UMG position, Ovitz noticed the stock \"crept down to like 10 points under the IPO price\" while Lucian Grainge grows the company \"geometrically every year\" — \"I said to Bill, 'Let's take it private.'\" Friendly only (\"Bill has done both\"), a public letter with money terms on the table, Grainge running the show as \"a condition precedent,\" Ovitz as chair helping on tech and AI. \"We're waiting for an answer... It's frankly up to one shareholder... one family that controls 28% of the stock.\"\n- The thesis stack: without a talent person running an entertainment company, \"that company is going to die\"; music is \"at the foundation of so many things that are digitally based\"; and Suno and Udio are already \"taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it.\" On how labels monetize AI, a deliberate non-answer: \"a very difficult problem that right now is under analysis by all the music companies.\" His analogue: the 1996 U.S. trade delegation he joined after being appointed by President Clinton, traveling to Beijing with 20 businesspeople and Bush 41 over China's pirated videocassette movies and television shows — then the world's largest producer of pirated tape — where he sat with Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji.\n- On technology serving story, the Jurassic Park case: he told Michael Crichton \"you don't need a big star cuz the dinosaur's the star,\" and only one human could realize it — Spielberg, who \"called me the next day, said, 'I'm in,'\" then integrated CGI with filmed dinosaur parts so it wouldn't \"look like an early Godzilla movie.\" Against Ed Catmull's ~4-minutes-of-CGI figure relayed by Senra: \"I believe there's more than 4 minutes.\"\n- The closing worry is cultural amnesia: at a film class, no hands went up for David Lean, Frank Capra, William Wyler, or Michael Curtiz — \"there's no respect for the foundation of the film business\" — contrasted with artist Cecily Brown's knowledge of the chain of influence through Lucian Freud. His summation: \"most great art is derived from other art... knowledge is power.\"\n","transcript_md":"David Senra\n\nIt's good to see you again.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nThanks for having me again.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI've seen you since yesterday. [Laughter] Well, let's start there. Why did you tell me yesterday that you're busier today, at this point in your life, than you've ever been?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nGreat question. As I said to you yesterday—and you know I'm busy because you saw it; you got to look at it—first of all, let me apologize for being horrible company to you.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou weren't. It was amazing. We should tell the people watching and listening to this that I flew back from New York to Los Angeles with you on your plane. You had texted me the night before, and you were like, “Just a warning: I'm going to be horrible company because I'm going to work all the way through.” So, we sat next to each other and, essentially, before we took off, started working. We flew, landed, and you were still working. You were like, “Hey, I'm not getting off the plane in case you want to leave.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI was on a Zoom.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, exactly.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo, it was awesome. You weren't horrible company at all.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNo, I said to you, I enjoy it, which is the problem. It's like the ultimate stimulus-response.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy is the fact that you love working a problem?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWell, it's not a problem for me. I think it's a problem for people that I'm close to who would like me to work less. I don't agree with that. I am busier than I've ever been in my life. I actually said to Tamara the other night, she would probably like me to work a little bit less.\n\nIt's the most exciting time I've ever seen in my entire life. That includes the entertainment sweet spot of the late '70s through the end of the '90s, which was the last great period in the film business and television business, pre-streaming, obviously. I thought I was in heaven in those years with respect to the amount of things that could be created out of thin air.\n\nToday—and for the last—I started working in technology in '92 while I was still at Sierra. It's now '26, and I'm still doing it. I can't wait to get up in the morning. I literally can't wait.\n\nI am privileged to be able to work with some of the smartest men and women I've ever met in my life. They're all young, they're all out to do something special, and they're motivated by all the right things. Every day when I'm in a meeting with these people, I learn something.\n\nSo, I get discovery. I get education. I get my brain stretched. I get to watch things I've always watched creatively get created out of thin air. I get to listen to the presentation and get challenged about whether I should get involved or not. I do everything I can to spread myself around enough so I can get all the food for thought that's possible.\n\nThat drives me. It's that discovery process that drives me. It's not a FOMO process, frankly. It's very interesting in technology. I was talking to Ben Horowitz about this. It's a learning curve that gives you a stimulation from having seen and heard something that you didn't know.\n\nBut that stimulation then turns into a form of joy: you've made yourself a better person off of someone else's knowledge base. I said the other day to one of my young mentees, “Consider me Dracula for the brain.”\n\nThe original Dracula—the conceit of the story, the book; forget that there was no movie in those days—was this constant quest for eternal youth. You suck a young person's blood, and it makes you young. I like to view myself in the same way, except in the gray-matter area. I'm really interested in what the thought process is.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy do you think today is more exciting for you than even the '70s, '80s, and '90s?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nBecause in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, we were dealing with mediums that had been around for a long time. The exciting part was the creation of the software of the moment, which was film or videotape or music or books.\n\nIt was fantastic to read Michael Crichton's rough draft of Jurassic Park. It was a thrill, but it was a book, and there have been books since the invention of the printing press—actually, since prior to that, handwritten.\n\nBut now change is so dramatic that it's almost frightening. Max Levchin, who was the founder of Affirm and PayPal—and I think you know Max—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI know of him. I've never met him, though.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI thought you should have him do the show. He's brilliant and a great guy. He said to me a couple of years ago—we were at a dinner—and he said, “You know, if I take a day off from work, I come back and I feel like I've missed a week.”\n\nThen I saw him recently at the Allen & Company conference. I reminded him of it, and he said, “If I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed 3 months.” Everyone thinks that way.\n\nAI is so fast, and the speed of change means that the benefits to anything that we do are extraordinary. There's a ton of potential downside, and I like to not forget that. I think we have to be very responsible with it. On the other hand, I feel the upside far outweighs the downside.\n\nI was at a dinner with a friend of mine who's a research scientist working on cancer cures, and I said, “How are the 5 trials going?” He said, “I can't believe what's happened.”\n\nI said, “What?” To set the stage, it takes a long time to get from stage 1, which involves mice or other types of animals, to stage 3, which involves human trials. It could be 5 or 10 years sometimes.\n\nHe said, “I have 5 trials going. 4 were started pre-AI. They're from 5 to 10 years in the making. I started 1 after AI, and I've gotten results in 9 months on a cancer cure.” Think about the ramifications of that and what it means for our society.\n\nI was in a meeting last week in New York, and 2 young engineers told me they had discovered that a friend of theirs was working, all because of AI, on a cure to stimulate the retinal nerve if your vision is going bad. I mean, it's every day. It's every day something different.\n\nAnd here's the real answer to your question: we all had to be specialists until AI.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMhm.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNow we're all generalists. So, I get to work in consumer products, in high tech, in defense, in medicine, and in biopharma. I get to be involved in all these things that I'm totally unqualified for.\n\nI don't code. I'm not a scientist who can sit and understand the vocabulary of science, but I can learn about it really fast and have enough vocabulary to understand what these brilliant young minds are creating.\n\nThis creativity is the same as the entertainment creativity, but at a wildly different degree of difficulty and level. It's not even close.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, what is the role that you're playing in the projects that you're pursuing right now?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI will basically do whatever is needed to help form these businesses. The reality of business, which very few people really grasp, is that the basics of business, no matter what the field is, are exactly the same. The blocking-and-tackling parts are the same.\n\nAs pointed out to me, a film or television show or a book or a song is packaged around talent. Talent—creator, engineer, same thing. Talent needs someone to help execute. An engineer needs people around them to help get the business in line and organized, coded—whatever they need done.\n\nThe creative person making the entertainment then has to get financing. The engineer or founder of a company needs venture capital. With the entertainment maker, he then has to get distribution. A founder has his product, and he's got to find a DSP or someone else to distribute his work, or just take it on his own on the internet.\n\nEither way, both also need marketing. How do you put the name into the ether? And then how do you sell the product? How do you make a profit? How do you build a culture? How do you build something that lasts beyond you?\n\nWe started CAA in 1974. In 2026, it's as strong today as it was when I was there because we set a business model in place that has stood the test of time. The people who took it over followed the trajectory of where they needed to take the business and kept the same values and principles.\n\nAt the end of the day, it's binary. It either works or it doesn't. 50 years in business proves that it works.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, let's go back. You have a million different things you could work on, and you have very limited time. You're ruthlessly efficient, which is what I saw on the plane yesterday and what I kind of guessed from our multiple conversations. How do you choose which projects to do right now and how you're going to spend your time?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nChoices are made for me. I don't have to make the choice.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat does that mean?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nIt means that the degree of interest is proportional to the individual who's telling me about it.\n\nWhether it’s an investor, a founder, a shareholder, or a venture capitalist.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo are you saying you just follow your intense curiosity? What do you mean by that?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWell, I follow my curiosity. I want to see everything. I can’t do everything. There are also a lot of things I don’t want to do. There are a lot of ideas that don’t interest me, but I like meeting the people.\n\nThat’s what I like. As you know, I collect art and people. I love art, and I love meeting smart people. That drives me. The choices almost get made by themselves: Is it interesting? Will it stand the test of time? Can it be built? Can it be financed? Can it be distributed? All the basics of business have to be overlaid on any of these ideas.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo do you consider yourself more like an investor or a partner? How do you think about yourself when you’re working on a project?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI want to not be categorized. I don’t want a label.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAll right, you’ve got to say more about that.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI’m glad you’re laughing at me, David, and I’m glad you feel comfortable that you can laugh at me.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI’m not laughing at you. I just love this stuff.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nDavid, if I were younger, I’d leap out of my seat and throttle you.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI have no doubt of that.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI’m too old.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo, you might be able to throttle me. We’re going to come back to this line of questioning, but you came up to the house just now and said, “Hey, sorry again for being horrible company yesterday.”\n\nI said, “Bullshit, Michael.” You were an excellent example of the fact that you’re maybe 35 years older than I am, and I was actually inspired by how efficient and relentless you are with your work ethic. I thought, “Oh, I thought I was working hard. This guy should not be outworking me.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nAs I said to you, I love working. I love learning. I love working.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI love you, so of course I would not be laughing at you. What do you mean you don’t want to be categorized?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI don’t want to be typecast. I said this to a young founder yesterday: When I grew up in the business world, we were basically specialists.\n\nIf you were in the entertainment business, you chose a vocation in film. There were subdivisions of film. There was animation, there were documentaries, there were action pictures, and there were comedies. You did one of those things, or you did television, or you wrote books, or you were a producer, or you were a director. You had one vocation in a larger field.\n\nToday, there’s no such thing. Today, you have to be a generalist. You have to know a little bit about everything. Unless you’re a deep scientist and you’re founding Palantir, Anthropic, or one of these businesses that require extraordinary brain-compute power, then you are a specialist. But in the world I live in, I want to be a generalist. I’m not capable of being a specialist.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow much of this is tied to the advancements that we’ve seen in AI?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNone. I’ve been like this my whole life.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nBut people like you now almost have superpowers and even more leverage because of AI. Is that the way you look at it?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nAbsolutely.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOkay.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nAbsolutely. Look, I have it sitting on my phone. It’s insane how many times I go to my phone and go to Claude, OpenAI, or Google to get answers. I ask them things and get a deep dive in a nanosecond.\n\nI was looking at my grandson, who’s 10 years old and going to school at a special school in New York called the Alpha School.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nOh, Joe Lomonaco.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI just spent a bunch of time with Joe 2 weeks ago.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI have unbelievable respect for that man and what he’s doing. My grandson—my oldest son’s first son, Chris’s son; you know Chris—is 10 years old. He’s been in that school since last September, and in 6 months he’s a different kid.\n\nHe can’t wait to go to school. I don’t have to ask him to do his homework. He’s given unbelievable responsibilities. This is all set up by using AI to teach them. They do 2 hours a day of hard study off an iPad, and he’s as fluent in knowledge now as he’s ever been—and he’s 10.\n\nWhen I was called to fly to Hawaii to meet with the senior C-suite executives from Matsushita Electric, one of the largest companies in Japan, the company had $15 billion to $20 billion of liquidity on its balance sheet. That was unheard of in the late ’80s. I had to figure out how to learn about the company. I had to go to a stockbroker’s office, go to the library, and use all analog tools. I had to get a physical copy of their 10-K.\n\nToday, doing the same kind of work—as you know, I’m in the middle of 2 transactions right now, one public and one not—I went down a rabbit hole on 3 AI platforms. I spent 6 or 7 hours on 2 different days. I had so much information that I needed to add to my instinctual information because I’d been around that business for so long.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhich would have taken you, in the ’80s, when you were going to Hawaii, how long?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI needed 4 weeks to prepare for the meeting in Hawaii. I put it off for 4 weeks for 2 reasons.\n\nOne, culturally, when asked in those days—not today, but by traditional Japanese executives—your response had to be slow and measured. As a matter of fact, I got asked for a meeting by a Japanese company and spent 3 weeks putting them off because that kind of works for them. It’s their culture. They’re very slow to trust.\n\nAs a matter of fact, I used to crack up. In the early ’80s, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine would go and come back and call me. They’d say, “My God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I’m going to close.” I’d start laughing, and they’d say, “What are you laughing at?” I’d say, “Call me in a year and let me know how you’re doing.”\n\nNone of them closed anything. I spent a year cultivating relationships before I even got an assignment. But the amount of time it took me to learn about those individual companies—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou spent a year cultivating relationships before you even got an assignment. What made you take an interest in Japan?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI’ve always been interested in Asia—Japan and China. I became interested in Japan in high school because I had a lot of Japanese American friends. When I would go to their homes for dinner, I was blown away by the cultural difference.\n\nI remember, this was 50 years ago, so there was a different ethos at the time and a different feeling about—\n\nDavid Senra\n\nJapanese-American relations after World War II.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nCorrect. Okay. Did you read Phil Knight’s book, Shoe Dog?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt’s the same thing. His idea was, “Hey, we’re going to try to disrupt the German athletic shoe companies with their Japanese competitors.” He got a lot of pushback because of the tension between America and Japan at the time.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYou know, I had a joint venture with Phil. I’m crazy about him.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nI didn’t know this.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nOh, yeah. I did when I was at CAA. We had Nike, and CAA had a joint venture. In fact, Phil Knight and I had one of the greatest experiences in my business career.\n\nThe 2 of us decided that there should be an NCAA College Football Playoff. I remember, this was 40 years ago. We met at his place in Beaverton and plotted out this whole strategy. We put an entire visual and written presentation together.\n\nI was fortunate because I was very close to the chancellor of UCLA, since I was chairman of the UCLA Medical Center. His name was Chuck Young. He passed away recently. Great guy. He was very influential in the college president world.\n\nI convinced him to get Phil and me an audience at their meeting in Kansas City. Here’s a guy who’s running Nike—and I mean running it—and here’s a guy who’s running a very successful entertainment business. We made an amazing video that showed all of our stars and all of the athletes who were under contract to Nike.\n\nWe were on a stage in front of 150 NCAA presidents, and we showed that we could have made all the schools millions of dollars in revenue at the time if we had just done a playoff rather than chosen bowl games with random people.\n\nWe rehearsed what we were going to do. We had a fantastic dual presentation. We ran our video, and we both got up to the rostrum on each side of the screen. That’s how we decided to start the presentation.\n\nWe started pitching. We’re both not bad at that, the 2 of us, and he’s particularly good. We looked at each other and realized no one was listening to us. They were having conversations at the tables. They were at round tables instead of sitting in rows of chairs.\n\nThen we ran another video, and I walked over to him and said, “This is not going well. We’ve got to start winging it.” We did, and we left. They ultimately said they didn’t want to do it. They told us they wanted to commission a report, which they did. It ran about 500 pages, and the conclusion they came to was exactly what we told them.\n\nNow, 30 years later, they decided to do it. The amount of money they left on the table was frightening. We both learned a really good lesson from that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHow competitive is Phil Knight?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nPhil Knight is the most competitive businessman alive, bar none. I’m crazy about that guy. I have such respect for him. He took a standard item—these shoes—and changed the world with them.\n\nIf you go back to the beginning, when he did Tiger, which was a Japanese shoe—\n\nThat's where he started when he and Penny, his wife, were selling these things out of the trunk of their car.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nThe soles were flat, and they weren't really comfortable. They were made for running because of his track coach, Bill Bowerman.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd his co-founder, yeah.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah. But all of a sudden, they get cushier, the heels get higher, and they're in colors. I love going online and doing the customization thing. I just think it's the most fun thing imaginable.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe reason I ask is because, out of all the people I've read about for my other podcast, Founders, the most ruthlessly competitive, I'd put Michael Jordan up there. I think Larry Ellison and young Bill Gates definitely are like this. But Michael Jordan is open about it. He's just like, “I don't have a gambling problem. I have a competition problem.”\n\nKobe would tell stories about it. He's like, “Michael Jordan's my older brother. I'm competitive when it comes to basketball. Michael's competitive with everything.” Who can eat a salad the fastest? He's just got an addiction to competition.\n\nAnd yet, I was reading this obscure biography of Michael Jordan. I think it was written before he retired. They were talking about his history. This is after Michael had signed with Nike, and within the first few years there was immediate success. But then there was this guy who got in Michael Jordan's ear to maybe convince him to launch with somebody else.\n\nThey had a meeting where somebody at Nike warned them. They were like, “You don't understand. Phil Knight is the most competitive person on the planet. If you do this and betray him, he will chase you to the ends of the earth.” I just remember reading that book, and I'm like, “They're saying this to one of the most competitive people? No, you think Michael Jordan's competitive? You haven't seen anything with this guy.”\n\nThe reason I think it's funny is because in Shoe Dog, obviously his autobiography, he's like, “Yeah, I'm a pretty competitive fellow.” I'm like, “That might be an understatement.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI have to say, David, I'm thinking right now about ending the podcast because I really am upset that you didn't name me as one of the most competitive people you've met.\n\nDavid Senra\n\n[laughter]\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNo, look, at the end of the day, let's be straight about it. It's not politically correct, but business is a competitive, cutthroat sport. I'm not saying you do anything immoral or illegal, and you have to have guidelines. But if you're not willing to get out there and do what Magic Johnson did on the court or Michael Jordan or any of the greats.\n\nI learned it from Irvin, whom I am crazy about and whose business I helped start. I only mention it because he's been kind to me beyond belief in his autobiography and everything else. He came to me and said, “Look, I want to be in business.” No other athletes at that time said that. They did their service, and at 35 they were done.\n\nErvin said, “When I'm done, I want to be able to be a businessman,” and we went and set that course. What I learned from Ervin was an extraordinary lesson that helped me build CAA. When he was doing the fast break down that court, which was referred to as Showtime, he had no goal except to score.\n\nHe didn't care who got that ball in the basket. It just had to get in there. You had 4 guys, 2 and 2, running down that court, or 3 and 1, with him carrying that ball, and he'd move down that court. He would pick whoever he thought could make that shot, and he had no ego about it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo how do you get that idea at CAA?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nBecause it was about winning at the end of the day. It's about competition. It's about not having an ego about it. One of the great things we did at CAA is I didn't care who scored. I just wanted a score.\n\nWhen we asked people to do things at CAA, even the youngest people, we never asked them to do anything we wouldn't do ourselves. If they were slow on it, I went and did it to prove a point. I can't tell you how many times a week, in a morning meeting, I asked someone to do something, or one of the department heads asked someone to do something. If it didn't get done by 5:00, one of us did it.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThis is why yesterday was so important, because it's one thing—we've obviously built a friendship. We've had countless dinners. We've spent a lot of time talking. I've read your book 3 times.\n\nI had this thought, and we're going to go in a weird direction. I had dinner with Charlie Munger when he was 99 years old, okay? Anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline, right? You just—it's going to happen.\n\nI'm sitting across from this guy, and all I remember is that I have to work hard when I'm reading books. I highlight everything, I take notes, and I reread them. People are like, “You have such a good memory.” I'm like, “I read the thing. I read my notes 10 times. This is not—I don't have a good memory.”\n\nAnd yet, I would ask Charlie—he was sitting in front of his bookshelf behind him. I'd see a book that he'd recommend reading one time and I'd read, and I'm like, “Oh, Charlie, tell me about this biography of Henry Kaiser behind you.” He would rattle off the businesses he built, the revenue of the companies, what happened to each company, and what happened to his business partners.\n\nThen, after we went from his library to go to dinner, I was like, “Hey, do you mind if I go through your bookshelf?” He's like, “Go ahead.” I'm assuming I pick up the book, probably covered in notes. Nothing. Completely empty. He would maybe have 1 or 2 notes in pencil in the margin.\n\nWhen I realized that, I thought, “My God, imagine what his mind was like when he was 45 or 65. That is who you're competing against.” I thought about that yesterday. I've obviously read about your work ethic—we've talked about it—but then to also see it, even though you're 6 decades into your career, I was like, “Oh, there are different levels to this.”\n\nIt's a fundamental difference between reading about something and then observing it. I want to tie this together. I wasn't expecting to go in on your competitive drive. When you jumped into the agent business in the very beginning, was it obvious that you were going to be able to outwork everybody else around you? Was it obvious to you at that time?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nIt was obvious to me, but no one else. Everyone said we were going to fail. One of my closest friends I worked with at William Morris said something to me in 1974 that I have not forgotten since he said it to me. It's something I will never forget, and it turned out to be such a fantastic stimulant for me to this day.\n\nWe were sitting together and having a coffee. He said to me, “So good that you're starting this business. In a year, you'll be looking for a job.”\n\nI said, “Really? And what makes you think that?”\n\nHe said, “Oh, you're going to fail.”\n\nI said, “Really?”\n\nHe said, “Yes. You can't make it. There's almost 200 agencies out there. You're not going to compete with the big ones.”\n\nThe second incident was within 6 months of that. A leading TV literary agency, run by the best friend of one of our guys, met with us about the thought of merging. That would give us what we needed, which were writers, because they're the fount of packaging, right?\n\nThe 4 partners of that agency said, “You know, we'll never represent any movie stars.” I looked at them and said, “Why do you say that?”\n\nThey said, “You'll never get them.”\n\nI said, “We're going to have all of them.”\n\nOne of them said, “You're just so arrogant.”\n\nI said, “I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm going to outwork every one of them.”\n\nEvery time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety. This is when there were no computers. People actually read. I took one out every Friday. Every time we signed a movie star, I took that ad, tore it, and put it in an envelope to those 4 guys. I did it for the next 10 years.\n\nNow, competition? Love it. Monopoly? Absolutely love it. I love Peter Thiel's monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot-on.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nHe says, “Competition is for losers.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYou see, it is for losers because you're competing with yourself, basically. That's how I view it. I'm not competing with anybody else.\n\nThat's why I keep my calls to a minimum, my Zooms to a minimum, and my meals to a minimum of time devoted to them. When someone says to me, “I have to take an hour Zoom,” I laugh at them. I say, “What law is there on the planet that says a Zoom has to be an hour?” Frankly, if you get free Zoom, they cut you off at 45 minutes.\n\nI said, “So what rule is it that it has to be an hour?” I don’t know. I do them in 20 minutes. I just don’t believe it. If we’re in the middle of a critical diligence item or somebody’s trying to explain something really complicated, okay, I get that.\n\nBut the concept, for example, of our meetings—let’s just fill the hour even if we have nothing to say—I don’t want any small talk. It’s not social time. I’d love to hear about your kids, but I’d like to hear that over dinner or lunch. I’m not interested. Let’s get down to what we’re doing. What are we doing? We’re trying to build a business. We’re trying to market that business, and we’re trying to blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply, and as brutally as we can.\n\nThe idea is to keep it going until they can’t see straight. To do it any other way makes no sense to me. Now, by the way, there are people who have done it without that thesis. But it’s not a thesis I subscribe to.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThere are people who have done it without this ruthless competitive drive, you mean?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYeah. By the way, I’m excluding creative people, because creative people have a hard and a soft side. They have a much harder side than people tend to imagine or think. But they have a very soft side because they’re very sensitive. It’s that sensitivity and perceptual ability tied together that creates images or words.\n\nBut they also have a very hard side. I’ve watched Martin Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room like he was a toothpick over a movie he was doing, where Harvey was giving him the dumbest notes imaginable.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nImagine thinking you could be in a position to give Scorsese notes on a movie.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nThat’s the whole point, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve been in rooms with megafilmmakers because we had all of them. At one time, CAA represented all the top 50-grossing Variety box-office filmmakers. We had 46, and I was upset because I didn’t have all of them. There were 4 I couldn’t get, and it really upset me. It gnawed at me my whole career there.\n\nBut I find that notes are good if you give them and then let somebody do what they want to do. They know better. On timing and other things like that, that’s a different story. But nobody should be giving Marty notes about the core of his film, the conceit of a character, or where he’s putting the camera. It’s a joke. It really is a joke.\n\nI mean, the man’s seen every movie ever made. He has an encyclopedic knowledge. It’s interesting: he’s like Charlie Munger, but he doesn’t do that for a living. There are people who are gifted in their recall. I’m not one of those people. You just said you’re not. I really have to struggle with the memory that I need to keep in place for what I do.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nTell me more about the hard side of some of these creative geniuses that you work with. What do you think is driving their need to be hard? Is it just that they’re disagreeable when it comes to their craft?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNot at all. I think they’re protecting their vision. I think filmmakers have a very clear vision of what they want to achieve. I think sometimes they lose their way, but they get it back.\n\nI had a situation with Barry Levinson, Dustin Hoffman, and Tom Cruise on Rain Man, where Dustin couldn’t find the character in the first week. I think Barry got very frustrated because a lot of the movie was not scripted. A lot of it was done in the moment.\n\nI think the movie benefited from this problem at the beginning because Dustin found the character, and Barry had the patience to let him do it, which is hard because you’re losing money every day. Everyone forgets that. Then Barry found a balance between improvisation and script, and the movie’s perfect—perfect from beginning to end.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, bring me back to the meeting between Scorsese and Weinstein. That’s why the hard side of him came out, because he was protecting his vision?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWell, Marty had a point of view that was right. That’s why I ended that meeting pretty fast. First of all, he shouldn’t have been in the editing room. It’s okay for Marty’s agents to be in the editing room, but not the producer, unless the producer is someone incredibly close to him with whom he’s done multiple movies.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou’ve been around a lot of founders. Isn’t that same instinct to protect the vision that Marty had in that situation? Isn’t it the exact same thing that they’re doing with the company?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nIt’s the denominator of anyone who’s successful. I think we’re talking about all the things that make people successful in any vocation: dedication, work ethic, intelligence, curiosity, protecting the vision, finding things that give you food for thought for the vision, and inventorying them in your head. Let them marinate, because if they stay in your head, that means you’re onto something.\n\nIt’s no different than the way I collect art. I collect art contextually, which is to say I see as many images as I can. My brain takes in what I like and rejects what I don’t over time. That’s how I collect. So, it’s a foundational issue of context, and I think filmmakers do the same thing.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, you spent a bunch of time with Josh Kushner, especially at the beginning of Thrive. I just had some time with him, and a large part of our discussion was really just about his vision. From hearing him speak and listening to him map all his thoughts out, it was, like you said, protecting the vision is an interesting way to think about it. That’s the way I thought about it.\n\nI read this biography of a guy who was an engineer and started Harman Kardon, the high-end audio equipment company.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nSidney Harman?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, exactly.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nHe was a guy I knew well.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, he’s got a great book. I think the autobiography is called Mind Your Business.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI’ve read it. He was an amazing man. I’m an audiophile, and he at one time made the greatest speakers. They were called Infinity IRS 1Bs, and they were 4 towers, not 2.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt doesn’t surprise me that he was able to build the best product in the category he competed in. He describes his philosophy in that book, but what I’m hearing from the experience that you’ve had with some of these creative geniuses, and from some of the conversations I have with these founders, is that he put it the best way: the founder is the guardian of the company’s soul.\n\nI was listening to Josh speak during our conversation, and I was like, “Oh, he’s guarding the company’s soul. He wants to make sure there’s a soul inside of Thrive.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI met Josh when he was at Harvard Business School. Jared, his brother, was a friend of mine and asked me to help him with Josh. Josh, while he was in business school, had a very valuable game company, and Jared asked me to help him with it.\n\nJosh then was exactly the same as the Josh today. There’s no difference. He’s wildly smart, very loyal, low-key, thoughtful, highly intelligent, and very easy to talk to. He’ll hold his ground, but what makes him fantastic is that he’ll yield his position if you can talk him out of it.\n\nI love people who hold their ground until you prove them wrong.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, I would say, since you just made this connection with the whole theme of this conversation we’re having right now, we’re really just talking about traits of people who are successful, regardless of the domain they choose to operate in.\n\nThat’s something that recurs in all these biographies. It’s like, “I don’t care if the idea’s not mine. I just want to win.” So, if you can push back on me and say, “No, David, you’re wrong about XYZ,” which has happened several times, especially with my approach to podcasting over the years, it might take me a while, but then I’ll eventually flip. And I think you see that commonality.\n\nI think of Steve Jobs. I just finished rereading Make Something Wonderful, which is a book put out by his widow. It’s an excellent book. But there are a ton of examples in that case where he had thought X and was really adamant about it.\n\nThen he would test this. It’s something like—what do dolphins have? Echolocation? He would throw out an idea, and sometimes he didn’t even believe in that idea, but he would throw it out because he wanted a reaction back. The information would come back to him almost like sonar, like whatever dolphins have. Then he’d think about it for a little bit, and he’d wind up changing his mind.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI consulted for years for him on Pixar when he first had the idea. It was some of the best times I ever had because he was whip-smart, had an unbelievable memory, was totally unstoppable with an idea, and could be completely intransigent on things. Yet you could talk him out of it if he agreed. That’s the best trait any businessman can have.\n\nWhen I ran CAA, I had a very simple thesis: I’d take ideas from anybody. No idea is stupid, because a bad idea may stimulate a good idea. And I want to hear from young people. I’m not interested so much in the opinions on new things from older people, but from older people I want their wisdom spread all over it.\n\nWe had a setup where every 90 days we put 200 people in a circle with their chairs tied to each other, and everybody had 30 seconds to pitch an idea. You couldn’t pass. We had a mailroom guy pitch an idea about cable. We promoted him on the spot to Asia. On the spot. It was that good.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nExplain these 200 chairs tied together.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWhat I came up with was this concept for meetings, and we did it at all our retreats, where everyone sat in a circle or an oval. As we grew, it went from a circle to an oval because the geometry didn’t work, and we made everybody’s chairs touch.\n\nThere was no way out of the circle or oval. That was done intentionally. If you wanted to get out, you had to push your chair back, and you could see the hole as big as it could be.\n\nWe would meet with that as a foundation: everyone was participating. I ran it, and I would sit there and call on people who didn't say anything and coax them to say things. Some people were upset, but everyone came around, and they'd thank me for pushing them out of their holes. People need to learn how to communicate in groups, but the people who run those groups have to learn how to listen and how to get ideas from people.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nAnd so you literally developed a mechanism where every single person in the company, down to the people working in the mailroom, could pitch an idea directly to the founder.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nEveryone who was a senior executive in the company was there. Everybody was there. The whole concept was, “We want to hear from you.” I started the first meeting by saying, “No idea's too dumb. I want to hear everything.” Over my career, some of the greatest ideas I've ever had, I've stolen or appropriated from other people.\n\nAs you know, I'm a mega Picasso fan. The guy appropriated everything. One of his most famous sculptures has bull horns, which are handlebars from a bicycle that he saw with a seat welded together.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nDidn't he have that quote that Steve Jobs would repeat, that “Good artists copy, great artists steal”? I think that's Picasso, right?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI don't know, but it sounds about right. But Steve Jobs, for example, had a vision about computerized animation that Disney didn't share. They were wrong; he was right. That's it.\n\nYou know, it's Barry Diller's famous line, which I will never forget and still use all the time. He competed to buy CBS, I think, or Paramount—I don't remember which one—but Sumner Redstone got both of them somehow. When Barry was asked by the press what he thought after he lost, he looked at them and said, “He won, we lost. Next case.”\n\nThat says it all to me. It was so brilliant: “He won, we lost. Next case.” He's right: 6 words. You can't look back.\n\nI am so upset with friends of mine who try to do deals that I consult on, and they make a mistake or lose it, and then they dwell on it. It's dumb. It's not going to change. What are you looking back for? I don't like to look backward. I think you have to always look forward.\n\nThere are people who totally disagree with me, but I'm a forward-looking person. If I've made a mistake, God only knows. I think one of the reasons founders talk to me is that I can tell them things they're going to do wrong because I've done it all. I've made every mistake in business you can make. I've had some wins, too, but I've made a lot of mistakes. My goal is to use that to prevent my young people from making further mistakes, because they're all going to be the same.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt's unbelievably valuable if they can learn from other people's experiences. I think that's one of the things I get most out of our conversations.\n\nI also like that you are unapologetically extreme. You don't hide the fact that you are an extreme personality, that you were when you were younger and still are to this day. You just threatened to jump out of the chair and, I think, throttle me—that's the word that you used.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nTrying to be polite.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat's really polite.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nBut I did say I'm too old to do that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThat's fine. I wouldn't even fight back. That's fine. I have too much respect for you. Tell me about this deal that we can talk about. I know you have a few deals going on.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nOne I can't talk about.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYeah, exactly. So, tell me about the one that you can't talk about.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWell, it's public. I can say that Bill Ackman and I have been friends for 33 years. We had a discussion about his position in Universal Music. We were kicking it around. He was a large shareholder and was on the board.\n\nI like Lucian Grainge a lot because he's a talent guy. My thesis about all these companies is, if you don't have someone who understands talent running the company, you can always get an operator. If you don't have someone who understands talent, that company is going to die.\n\nLucian's really good, but Lucian's growing the company geometrically every year, signing every artist. Publishing is great, and the stock keeps going up. It crept down to, like, 10 points under the IPO price, and I said to Bill, “Let's take it private.” He loved the idea.\n\nA number of things occurred. I told him we couldn't do it unless it was friendly, because Bill has done both. Bill's very smart—really smart—and very direct, which is what I like about him, because, as you know, I love your opinions because you tell me what you think.\n\nWe did some diligence and met with Lucian to see if he'd be interested if we did do something. We gave him a 41,000-foot overview and made it very clear that a condition precedent to the deal would be his running the show. We would support it. I would become chair and support him, particularly in the tech and AI area, which he's very attuned to but could use some help with.\n\nIn his job, there's not enough hours in the day. There just aren't. You think about the amount of time he has to spend internally, externally, with talent, in studios. It's just endless. It's an impossible job. It's so difficult, and he does it brilliantly.\n\nWe sent the letter to the board. We did it publicly, so there's no secret. There's nothing nefarious; no one's going behind anybody's back. We put the money terms right on the table. We're very well financed. We made a very handsome offer, and we're waiting for an answer.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nSo, we talked about the opportunity cost of your time and picking which project to dedicate your attention and resources to. Why did you choose to do this?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI think music is a critical component going forward in the new Internet era, particularly with AI. We've seen it with what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own—even 10 seconds of it—and constructing custom-made songs. Music is never going away.\n\nI think the advent of Daniel Ek's Spotify, which he developed in a garage in Stockholm, Sweden, is a game changer. I think music is at the foundation of so many things that are digitally based, from games to movies, television, AI, and all of the image capturing that's done.\n\nDon't you find it fascinating that on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, for almost everything you see, someone chooses music to go behind it? It's part of our culture worldwide. It's not country by country. There's a common denominator of British and American music around the world.\n\nIt's a door opener; it's something everyone can hear and relate to, even if they don't speak the same language. So, I love the idea. I love Bill's financing capability. I love Lucian's management and talent expertise, and I like the fact that I grew up in that business.\n\nMy first job was in the music business. I started a music division at CAA that to this day is the tops. I think it's a lot of complementary factors. Whether we get it or not, I have no idea. It's frankly up to 1 shareholder, and that's 1 family that controls 28% of the stock.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhat do you think would be the effect of AI beyond the music industry? I talked to Jimmy Iovine about this. I still don't understand. He texted me about this 2 days ago, and I'm reading through this. I still don't understand what he means, so I'll see him when he gets back.\n\nIf Universal Music Group has, I think, the largest music category in the world, right? AI is not going anywhere. He said that people are already taking and training new songs based on other people's ownership. Is the idea that the record labels could do that themselves? Or are you saying that's going to be a huge potential future income stream?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI'm not going to say anything about it because I think it's a very difficult problem that right now is under analysis by all the music companies.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIs there anything analogous that you've experienced in other forms of entertainment from the past?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nOh, yeah. I was appointed to a U.S. trade delegation in 1996 by President Clinton. I was a large fundraiser for him. I went to Beijing with 20 businesspeople and President Bush 41 to try to get them to stop pirating videocassette movies and television shows.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThe Chinese?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nYes. They were the largest producer of pirated tape in the world. We went over, and I spent a week there. It was a fascinating week. I got to sit with Jiang Zemin, who was the chairman of the party. I guess they don't call him the prime minister.\n\nHe was the chairman. Zhu Rongji, who was the brilliant financial former mayor of Shanghai, did all the financial architecture for what you're now seeing—getting China into the 20th century and the 21st century. We had round after round of meetings, and President Bush was incredibly popular there because he had been ambassador to China. He was very well-liked.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou don't have to comment on this if you don't want to, but something just came to mind because I just had a conversation with Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. I would have to imagine you and Bill Ackman are doing this because you think AI could be a massive advantage and a tailwind to the music industry.\n\nThe reason I bring this up is because, throughout his entire career, Ed's whole goal was to take the latest technology and apply it to storytelling and animation, right? With the stated goal—\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nHe did.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhich he did, obviously, with Toy Story. I have this guy who works with me on my other podcast, Founders. His name is Maxim. He's a young filmmaker. I flew him over from England to go to this recording with Ed Catmull because Maxim wants to make films.\n\nThis is one of the best filmmakers of all time, or someone who built one of the best companies that made the best films of all time. Maybe that shocked him. Ed, Maxim, and I were talking before we started recording, and I asked him, “How do you know? He's obviously pro-AI. He's pro-technology.”\n\nHe said Ed Catmull was just like Walt Disney. He called Walt Disney a technologist. He's like, “Go through Walt Disney's career. He always embraced the latest technology in service of telling a better story or completing the project in a better way, whatever he was working on.”\n\nI said, “Ed, when do you think we're going to see the first phenomenal, full-length, completely AI-generated movie?” And he's just like, “There's a better question that you're not asking.”\n\nI bring this up because you were best friends with Michael Crichton. He says, “There is a line of demarcation in our industry: pre-Jurassic Park and post-Jurassic Park.” Once Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park, the entire movie industry was changed forever.\n\nPart of that was obviously CGI—the dinosaurs. He's like, “How many minutes of CGI dinosaurs are in that movie?” I was like, “I don't know. I've seen the movie a million times since I was a kid. Maybe 20.” I think the answer is 4 minutes.\n\nHis point was, “You can use the technology; it's powerful even if you use it for a short amount of time.”\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nNo.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nIt could be 10 seconds in a 3-minute song, or 6 minutes in a 2-hour movie.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nWhen I put Jurassic Park together and read the book, I said a couple of things to Michael. One, it's brilliant and everyone loves dinosaurs. Two, you don't need a big star because the dinosaur's the star, which was important financially. And three, there's only 1 human on the planet who could turn this into a movie, and if he doesn't want to do it, we can't do it. It was Steven.\n\nI sent the book to Steven. He called me the next day and said, “I'm in.”\n\nI believe there are more than 4 minutes. What Steven managed to do was, for the times he used the dinosaurs, make them look real. The biggest fear for that movie was, can you make them look real? Steven said he could do it, and I knew he could do it, and he did it.\n\nEveryone was scared to death that it would look like an early Godzilla movie, where it was just so obvious what it was. Steven integrated the CGI and the actual dinosaur parts that he made and shot. There was a head, there was part of a body—you didn't see the whole thing. He did it brilliantly, but he got them to look really real.\n\nHe researched who could do it. They tested and tested and tested, and they got it done.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWhy do you think Steven Spielberg was the only person? Was he a singular character?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nSteven had the ability to understand the storytelling side, the casting side, and, most importantly, the technical side. In those days, not everybody had that. Remember, that was in the '90s. Not everybody had the ability to use technical things. James Cameron did; Steven did. Not every director could do that.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nWas he like a Walt Disney kind of character, too, where, throughout his entire career, he was trying to embrace the latest technology that would help him build something?\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nSteven knew more about everything. Marty, Steven, and Stanley Kubrick, to me, knew more about film, filmmaking, film history, and respect for film.\n\nI put together a group for film preservation around Marty, and it was Marty, Steven, Sydney Francis Coppola, and Stanley Kubrick, all clients of mine. That's what they were into. They were real, real people about film.\n\nWhen I go to speak at a film school these days, I get very nervous. I'm particularly nervous around my 24-year-old daughter, Minty, and her friends, who I'm crazy about. When they talk about old movies, it stops at 1990.\n\nI did a film class where I didn't even introduce myself. I had 2 classes merged together, and I was asked to do this. I said, “Does anybody here know David Lean?” No hands. “Anybody here know Frank Capra? Anybody here know William Wyler? Anybody here know Michael Curtiz?” I kept going, too.\n\nThose were movie directors from the '40s, mostly the '40s and '50s, who made some of the greatest films of all time: Lawrence of Arabia, which Spielberg would rewatch every year when he was learning to make films. I still watch it, too.\n\nIn fact, one of my best, most cherished gifts from Marty is the original, full-length, uncut version of Lawrence of Arabia on a giant video disc that they stopped making machines for. I thank God I still have one. Do you remember those, the big ones before the little ones came?\n\nDavid Senra\n\nNo, this is before my time.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nOh, I keep forgetting you're a child.\n\nIn any case, there's no respect for the foundation of the film business, in my opinion. It's really interesting. As an art collector, I had dinner the other night with Cecily Brown, who's one of my favorite contemporary artists. She talks about artists of the past with great respect and unbelievable knowledge.\n\nShe pointed to an artist for me to look at when we were at dinner the other night. She started talking about Lucian Freud, who's an amazing artist. This artist was influenced by Freud. She knew the whole chain. Most great art is derived from other art, you know?\n\nI have a fantastic Mark Rothko painting at my house. He's an LA artist, a very gifted guy. There are 2 faces in it that are right out of African masks and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nYou wouldn't know what you're looking at unless you had the background that comes from all the time and effort you've put into understanding art and all the history of art.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nAs I said to you before, knowledge is power. I have a room in my house that has probably 25 African antiquities and 3 Picassos, all of which came out of those antiquities.\n\nBetween 1850 and 1900, the Catholic missionaries were tossed out of West Africa, Nigeria, which had a whole series of regions of tribal art. They were reliquary figures; they were religious figures. They took them all with them when they were thrown out—to Paris and Brussels.\n\nThat's why one of the biggest museums of African art is in Paris, because they came back in the early 1900s. When they ran out of money, they put these masks in little weekend fairs that they had on the river on the Left Bank, and they sold them for 4 or 5 francs.\n\nPicasso bought 50 of them. There are pictures of his studio in Mougins with these masks everywhere. If you look at his early art, all the faces are African masks.\n\nPhil Knight and I tried to do a project to take a portable show to inner cities, to show that relationship as a point of pride in what your culture did. Some of my African art is as good as some of the European art from the same period. It's that good.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nMichael, what I love about our conversations is that no matter what I prompt you with, you can come up with these incredible stories, and I never know the direction that we're going to go in. I really appreciate you taking the time and doing this again with me.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nI enjoy talking to you, as you know, except when I'm on the plane working.\n\nDavid Senra\n\nThanks. I'll see you again soon.\n\nMichael Ovitz\n\nOkay.","tldr_md_alt":"- **Ovitz确认，他与相识33年的 Bill Ackman 已经公开提出以“资金实力非常雄厚”为支撑的要约，拟将 Universal Music 私有化，而由 Lucian Grainge 继续掌舵是“交易的先决条件”。** 触发点在于，UMG股价一路“跌到比IPO发行价低了大约10个点”，但 Grainge 仍在“每年以几何级速度”做大公司，于是 Ovitz 对 Ackman 说：“我们把它私有化吧。”这只会是一笔友好交易；Ovitz 将担任董事长，在科技和AI方面支持 Grainge。“能不能拿下，我完全不知道。说到底取决于1位股东……1个控制着28%股份的家族。”\n- **核心音乐投资逻辑是：在AI时代，音乐位于一切数字内容的底层——游戏、电影、电视和图像采集——而且“音乐永远不会消失”。** 他点名 Suno 和 Udio 正在“拿走别人拥有的IP，哪怕只有10秒”，但拒绝回答唱片公司将如何从AI训练中变现，只说这是“一个非常棘手的问题，目前所有音乐公司都在分析”。他的公司经营判断是：如果没有真正懂人才的人掌舵一家娱乐公司，“这家公司就会死掉”。\n- **在人生最忙碌的阶段，Ovitz说，AI让今天比“70年代末至90年代末的娱乐黄金窗口”更令人兴奋。** 他的证据是速度：Max Levchin 曾告诉他，休息1天就像错过1周；而现在“如果我今天休息1天，就感觉自己错过了3个月”。1位研究癌症的朋友在AI出现后启动的试验，9个月就拿到了癌症治疗方案的“结果”，而此前启动的4项试验都要做5-10年。\n- **“在AI之前，我们都只能做专才；现在，我们都是通才。”** 不过，他说自己的通才属性并非AI造成的：“我这辈子一直都是这样。”AI只是让这类人拥有更大的杠杆。上世纪80年代末，为准备与 Matsushita 会面——当时公司账上有150亿-200亿美元流动性——他花了4周跑股票经纪商办公室、图书馆，查阅纸质10-K；而为眼下的2笔交易，他在2天内花6-7小时沉浸式使用3个AI平台，如今横跨消费品、国防、医学和生物制药等“自己完全没有资格涉足”的领域。\n- **他的竞争准则不是竞争，而是垄断：“竞争是失败者的游戏，因为你基本上是在和自己竞争。”** 1974年，4位头部电视文学经纪公司的合伙人说他们永远不会代理电影明星，其中1人还说 Ovitz 狂妄；他的回答是：“我一点也不狂妄。只是我知道自己会比他们每一个人都更拼命。”随后10年里，每周有明星签约，他就把当天《Variety》的整版红色广告撕下来寄给那4个人。目标是“尽快、干净、简单、残酷地把竞争对手甩开”。\n- **CAA的文化来自 Magic Johnson 的 Showtime 快攻：“我不在乎谁得分，我只想拿到分数。”** 再加上对激进想法的制度化接纳：每90天，200人坐在一圈、椅子彼此系住，每人30秒发言，不能跳过。1位收发室员工提出有线电视创意，随后“当场晋升去负责亚洲业务”。反例是他与 Phil Knight 在40年前向150位大学校长推销的 NCAA 季后赛：对方拒绝后委托撰写了一份500页报告，结论与他们完全一致，却直到30年后才落地；“他们留在桌面上的钱，数额令人恐惧。”\n- **跨领域成功的共同特质，是守住愿景，但只坚持到被证明错误为止。** 他见过 Martin Scorsese 因为一些愚蠢意见，在房间里把 Harvey Weinstein 拆得“像一根牙签”；他认为 Steve Jobs 一方面极其坚持，另一方面只要你能说服他同意，就会改变立场，这是“商人能拥有的最佳特质”。至于失败，Barry Diller 的6个英文词概括了一切：“他赢了，我们输了。下一个案子。”","digest_md_alt":"### 1. 比任何时候都更忙：AI让当下胜过娱乐黄金时代\n- Ovitz开场就给出毫不保留的判断：“这是我这辈子见过最令人兴奋的时代。包括70年代末至90年代末、流媒体出现之前的娱乐黄金窗口……”他在1992年、还在 Sierra 任职时就开始做科技，此后从未停下：“我每天早上真的迫不及待地想起床。”\n- 加速感来自 Max Levchin（Affirm、PayPal）：几年前，休息1天还只是像错过1周；最近则变成“如果我今天休息1天，就感觉自己错过了3个月”。最具体的证据来自1位研究癌症的朋友：他同时推进5项试验，其中4项在AI出现前启动，已经筹备了5-10年；唯一1项在AI出现后启动的试验，9个月就拿到了“癌症治疗方案的结果”。\n- 他形容自己向年轻人学习时说：“把我当成大脑领域的 Dracula。”这是借 Dracula 的永生设定，指代大脑的持续年轻。他也唯一一次主动给热情踩刹车：“下行风险非常大，我不想忘记这一点……但另一方面，我觉得上行空间远远超过下行风险。”\n\n### 2. “在AI之前，我们都只能做专才；现在，我们都是通才”\n- 70年代至90年代的兴奋，来自创造当时最前沿的软件——电影、磁带、音乐、书籍——但它们依附的仍是古老媒介。如今 Ovitz 同时涉足消费品、高科技、国防、医学和生物制药，“这些事情我完全没有资格做。我不会写代码”；AI则让他能够“非常快地”建立词汇体系，跟上那些才华横溢的年轻人。他另行强调，自己的通才倾向并不是AI带来的：“我这辈子一直都是这样。”\n- 他反复回到一个前后对比：准备去夏威夷见 Matsushita 高管时，这家公司在上世纪80年代末拥有外界难以想象的150亿-200亿美元流动性；他需要做4周模拟式准备，跑股票经纪商办公室、图书馆，找1份纸质10-K。为了眼下的2笔交易，他只花了2天、总计6-7小时，在3个AI平台上一路钻研。\n- 代际变化则体现在他的10岁孙子身上：孙子在纽约的 Alpha School 就读，而 Ovitz 对 Joe Lomonaco “无比敬重”。孩子每天通过 iPad 进行2小时高强度学习，6个月后“已经完全是另1个孩子。现在他迫不及待想去上学”。\n\n### 3. 商业基本功在所有行业都一样，而他拒绝被贴标签\n- 谈到自己的角色，Ovitz说：“我不想被定型。”他那一代人是专才——在电影、电视、书籍行业里各自守着1种职业；而今天“你必须是通才”，除非你是创办 Palantir 或 Anthropic 的那类深度科学家。项目选择也不需要反复纠结：“选择几乎会自己做出来。”关键问题是：有不有趣，能否经受时间考验，能不能建成、融资、分发？“我收藏艺术，也收藏人才。”\n- 他认为商业的基本功在每个行业都一样。电影围绕人才完成包装；“人才、创作者、工程师，本质上是同1回事。”娱乐业的融资对应风险投资，分发对应 DSP，之后是营销、利润、文化，以及打造能在创始人离场后继续存在的东西。他引用 CAA 作为证明：CAA成立于1974年，“今天和我在那里的时候一样强……50年的经营史已经证明这套方法有效。”\n- 日本经历里还有1个容易被忽略的教训：朋友们从1次很棒的日本会面回来，都会说“我要成交了”，他只会笑着回答：“1年后再打电话告诉我进展吧。”结果没有1个人真正成交。他花了1年培养关系，才拿到第1笔委托，这反映了他所描述的传统日本高管文化：建立信任的速度很慢。\n\n### 4. “我早就知道，自己会比他们每一个人都更拼命”\n- 故事始于1974年：William Morris 的1位亲密朋友在咖啡馆对他说：“你创办这家公司太好了。1年后你就会开始找工作……外面有将近200家经纪公司。”随后，1家领先电视文学经纪公司的4位合伙人告诉他：“我们永远不会代理任何电影明星。”Ovitz回答：“我们会把他们全部签下来。”其中1人说他狂妄，他回道：“我一点也不狂妄。只是我知道自己会比他们每一个人都更拼命。”此后10年，每签下1位电影明星，他都会登出1整版红色《Variety》广告，撕下来寄给那4个人。\n- 对 Peter Thiel 在 Stanford 的垄断课，Ovitz评价：“他说得完全对……竞争是失败者的游戏，因为你基本上是在和自己竞争。这就是我的看法。”因此，Senra 曾在飞机上见到他严格压缩时间：电话、吃饭和 Zoom 都尽量精简——“地球上哪条法律规定 Zoom 必须开1小时？……我都在20分钟内结束。”\n- 他的框架毫不掩饰：“商业是一项竞争激烈、你死我活的运动。当然，我不是说你可以做不道德或违法的事。”但目标就是“尽快、干净、简单、残酷地把竞争对手甩开……直到他们连方向都看不清”。\n\n### 5. 无我式取胜：Magic Johnson 的快攻、Phil Knight，以及被留在桌面上的季后赛收入\n- CAA的创建经验来自 Magic Johnson，而 Ovitz 曾帮助他创办公司：在 Showtime 快攻中，“他唯一的目标就是得分。他不在乎是谁把球送进篮筐。”Ovitz将其转化为：“我不在乎谁得分，我只想拿到分数。”如果某项工作推进太慢，他或部门负责人就会在5:00前亲自完成，“以此证明问题”。\n- 对于与 CAA 通过 Nike 建立合资关系的 Phil Knight，他的评价是：“世上最具竞争力的商人，无人能比。”Senra 还从1本 Jordan 传记中找到旁证：Nike 内部有人警告，如果 Jordan 背叛 Knight，“他会追你到天涯海角”。Ovitz随后半开玩笑地抗议，称如果自己没被列为最具竞争力的人，就要结束这档播客。\n- 最典型的机构性失明发生在40年前：Ovitz与 Knight 在 Beaverton 筹划 NCAA 大学橄榄球季后赛，通过 UCLA 校长 Chuck Young 获得引荐，随后在 Kansas City 向150位 NCAA 校长做双视频演示，但整个房间根本没有在听。NCAA 委托撰写了一份约500页的报告，结论“与我们告诉他们的完全一样”，却在30年后才真正推出季后赛。“他们留在桌面上的钱，数额令人恐惧。”\n\n### 6. 创意天才的强硬一面，是保护愿景；创始人的本能也一样\n- 创作者身上“比人们通常想象的更强硬的一面”，其功能就是保护愿景。Ovitz 见过 Martin Scorsese 因为“想象力最差的意见”，在房间里把 Harvey Weinstein 拆得“像一根牙签”。他的结论是：制片人不该待在剪辑室里，“没人应该对 Marty 电影的核心部分指手画脚……这简直是个笑话”。\n- 他讲到《Rain Man》时说，Dustin Hoffman 在第1周找不到角色感觉；Barry Levinson 有耐心让他继续寻找——尽管“你每天都在亏钱”，随后才找到即兴表演与剧本之间的平衡。“这部电影完美无缺，从头到尾都完美。”\n- Senra 将这个话题引向创始人，称“创始人是公司灵魂的守护者”。Ovitz随后描述 Josh Kushner：他从 Harvard Business School 毕业至今没有改变，“会守住自己的立场，但如果你能说服他，他也会让出立场”。他还谈到自己曾在 Pixar 事务上为 Steve Jobs 提供咨询：Jobs “在某些事情上完全不妥协，但如果你能让他认同，也可以说服他改变……这是商人能拥有的最佳特质”。\n\n### 7. 任何人的想法都要听，然后永远别回头\n- CAA的制度是：每90天，200人围成一圈，椅子真的彼此系在一起，没人能离场；每个人发言30秒，不能跳过，Ovitz还会鼓励那些沉默的人开口。“1个收发室员工提出了1个有线电视创意。我们当场把他晋升到亚洲地区。当场。这个想法太好了。”\n- 他对原创的理解是挪用：“我最伟大的某些想法，都是从别人那里偷来或挪用来的。”他举了 Picasso 的例子：用自行车车把和车座焊成公牛雕塑；早期人物面孔则来自他在巴黎集市上以4或5法郎买下的50个非洲面具。\n- 在1次输给 Sumner Redstone 的竞标后，Barry Diller 用6个英文词总结失败：“他赢了，我们输了。下一个案子。”Ovitz 对那些反复纠缠于败局的朋友“非常生气”，并把自己的失败经历转化为产品：“我犯过商业上能犯的每一种错误……我的目标，是用这些经历阻止年轻人继续犯错。”\n\n### 8. Universal Music 私有化，以及从《Jurassic Park》到北京的AI先例\n- 这笔交易的来龙去脉是：Ovitz 与相识33年的 Bill Ackman 讨论后者持有的 UMG 仓位时，注意到股价“跌到比IPO发行价低了大约10个点”，但 Lucian Grainge 仍在“每年以几何级速度”做大公司，于是他说：“Bill，我们把它私有化吧。”交易只会是友好的——“Bill两种交易都做过”——目前已公开发函，报价资金条件摆在桌面上；Grainge 继续掌舵是“交易的先决条件”，Ovitz则担任董事长，协助科技与AI事务。“我们在等答复……说到底取决于1位股东……1个控制着28%股份的家族。”\n- 逻辑链条包括：没有真正懂人才的人经营娱乐公司，“这家公司就会死掉”；音乐“位于许多数字化事物的底层”；而 Suno 和 Udio 已经在“拿走别人拥有的IP，哪怕只有10秒”。至于唱片公司如何从AI中变现，他刻意不作回答：“这是1个非常棘手的问题，目前所有音乐公司都在分析。”他的历史类比是1996年：被 President Clinton 任命后，他加入美国贸易代表团，带着20位商人和 Bush 41 前往北京，讨论中国盗版电影和电视录像带的问题；当时中国是全球最大的盗版录像带生产地，他曾与 Jiang Zemin 和 Zhu Rongji 同桌会面。\n- 技术服务于故事的经典案例是《Jurassic Park》：他告诉 Michael Crichton，“不需要大明星，因为恐龙才是明星”，而唯一能实现这个想法的人是 Spielberg。Spielberg 第二天就打电话说：“我加入。”随后他把CGI与实拍的恐龙部分结合起来，避免成片“看起来像早期的《Godzilla》”。针对 Senra 转述的 Ed Catmull 关于全片约4分钟CGI的说法，Ovitz表示：“我相信不止4分钟。”\n- 最后的担忧是文化失忆：在1堂电影课上，没有人举手回答 David Lean、Frank Capra、William Wyler 或 Michael Curtiz；“人们不尊重电影业的根基。”与之相对的是艺术家 Cecily Brown，她清楚艺术影响如何一路传承至 Lucian Freud。Ovitz总结道：“大多数伟大的艺术都源自其他艺术……知识就是力量。”","shows":{"name":"David Senra","hosts":"David Senra"}}