CAA Co-founder Michael Ovitz: Failure Is Not an Option

Michael, thank you very much for doing this. Always a pleasure to spend more time with you. Some of my favorite dinners have been with you. I want to start with something you just said before we were recording that made me laugh out loud: You said that Marc Andreessen scares the crap out of you. Why did you say that?

Talking to him is like taking a test. It's like being in high school and taking an exam, or taking a final in college, in every conversation. He's got the most extraordinary ability to analyze, recall information, and organize it as he's thinking and speaking. There's probably 3 different processes going on in his brain simultaneously while he's talking. His recall—I’ve never seen anything like it.

Everything he reads, he remembers. 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 we were going to talk about. I say this in the most loving way: He's the most terrific guy, and he's grown and prospered. He's one of the smartest human beings I've ever met in my entire life.

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

I think there are certain human beings who are gifted with some raw, innate processing power that is just greater than others. I think we all have processing power, but it's a question of degrees. Within that processing power, there are specific silos that each of us either excels at, is average at, or isn't as good at.

With Marc, Michael Crichton, Peter Thiel, and quite a few of the top people in creative fields and technology, I find this ability to process information at an ultra-rapid speed. It's fundamentally based on the ability to recall information that they've inventoried. And it's very hard to do, especially in the world of technology, where you're constantly touching new ideas, so everything's different. Yes, there's some through line, but each business that's being started has a different conceit.

Mm-hmm.

On top of that, I find these guys fascinating for another reason: They're really nice people. Even though they have an intellectual superiority, they don't lord it over you. They're chameleons; they adjust to the level at which they're talking.

Say more about that.

As an agent, I had to ratchet my discussions up or down based on whether it was a creative discussion, a self-help discussion for a client, or a discussion for a buyer. We did a lot of counseling for buyers because it was a good way to build a bridge to them and gain access.

That meant ratcheting up or down based on mood, what you read at the moment, and your frame of reference about the person. You can't talk to everybody the same way. At least for me, I can't speak for anybody else, and I know Marc does this too: You look at who you're talking to and then decide just how deep you're going to go and how far.

When I was on the board of Marc's first company, Loudcloud, they were dealing in an area that, frankly, at the beginning in 1999, I didn't really understand 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 offsite—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.

Yeah.

I watched Marc handle it, and Ben Horowitz—Ben is the most practical, brilliant guy I've ever met. Ben Horowitz is not only really smart; when you talk to him, you get the sense that you're talking to the guy next door who's smart. He doesn't make it ultra-clear that he's smarter than you are, so he's very, very gracious, warm, and accommodating.

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 turn into an absolute person of strength, movement, and aggression that you wouldn't know normally, because he's very even-tempered.

But sitting in meetings with Ben and Marc, for example, is fantastic because they play off each other. They've been together—they're friends—for, I guess, 35 years.

I'm glad you brought that up because I've been thinking about the co-founder relationship recently. I've read almost 400 biographies of historically successful entrepreneurs so far. I would say that most co-founder relationships are actually tenuous; it seems to be one main guy. Even if they start the company with multiple people, it's usually really one person.

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 took over a failing family factory in a remote part of France. The younger brother was in his late 20s, and the older brother was in his late 30s. They built, essentially from almost scratch—or even from a negative position, because the factory was almost bankrupt—a family dynasty that lasted 100 years.

The company, 130 years later, is still prospering and is still one of the best tire companies in the world. They did it through a division of responsibilities, which reminded me of what you were just saying about Marc and Ben: 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 by coming together, they ran the company until they both died. They had a partnership for 45 years.

What did you see when you observed Marc and Ben together that made you think they had a complementary skill set?

Well, first of all, the obvious thing when I first met them 25 years ago was that they could finish each other's sentences before they started that business, because they had worked together before and were friends.

I think at the underlying foundation of partnerships in any business, there has to be respect for their business acumen, complementary personalities, complementary temperament, and a shared vision. That's hard to find. As you hinted at, you saw 2 successful founders with the Michelin brothers.

Yeah.

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

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

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

Yeah.

—but if you asked me off the top of my head, I'd say 90%. It's very hard to have 2 strong founders who share a singular vision, like you talked about the Michelin brothers, and who have a division of responsibilities. It's very difficult.

But Marc and Ben, for example, Marc knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it, and Marc is very comfortable with that. Marc has phenomenal instincts about companies, and so does Ben. Ben also approaches a business as someone who's operated multiple businesses and sold businesses.

It's very hard to find leaders who understand the 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 an intellectual process to support your vision, and how to unfold your vision. While you're doing that, you have to be open-minded. That's really difficult.

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

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

I had a system that was pretty random, frankly. I wrote about this; we discussed it last time when I was in town. I tried to be in town 3–4 days a week, but I traveled to New York every week, to Japan once a month, and to Europe once a month.

I decided to do everything short. If I went to New York, I would go for 1 day. But in that 1 day, I would have breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, and meetings in between. After dinner, I would fly back to Los Angeles and make it into the office the next day so I could get what I called a 6-day week.

I got the idea from my college roommate, who gave me a joke clock as a gift. It had 25 hours in it. It had a 1—

Yeah.

—it had 0 through 25.

This is what I was trying to tell people since we've become friends. Obviously, you're a legend, people love your book, and they're like, “How's Ovitz?” I'm like, “You ever heard any of my episodes on Rockefeller?”

No.

“The Terminator,” where one of my favorite stories of Rockefeller is obviously in the very beginning of the oil industry, there at the ground floor. One of the things they miss when they analyze his company is just how well-funded he was. 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 far. In any biography on Rockefeller, it'd be written about.

And what I loved about Rockefeller—you have a little bit of this in you—was that he would go to every single bank or any partner, and he'd be like, “I need money. I would like to borrow money.” And obviously, he tells them why. They say, “No,” and he goes, “That's fine,” gets up, not mad or upset. He says something in there just like, “It made no difference to me. I'm just one step closer to getting what I actually want.”

So that person says 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.” He just 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, what's the next task? I'll do the exact same thing. Just absolutely relentless. They said he went about his business like a farmer plows a field.

Yeah. So I'll tell you a story that I told 500 guests at a party I held for the MoMA Board of Trustees at our home, at Tamara's and my home. In the last couple years of David's life, we hosted all the trustees in Los Angeles for the annual meeting, and we gave a dinner. We invited a lot of people from politics, entertainment, and the museum and gallery world. I told this story because David had just passed away, and I told it because his son was there.

I never went to an art museum, and you know I love art.

Yeah.

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.

You were commenting on the chairs before.

Well, because I just love aesthetics.

Yeah.

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

Mm-hmm.

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

Yeah.

So they registered everything, and I learned to register. But I never went to an art museum till I was 18. Now, think about that and think about you being at my home with 300 pieces of art hanging, right?

Mm-hmm.

I went to New York for 4 days, because that's all I had off. I'd never been. I left L.A. I was working full-time. I was 18 years old, and I worked because I needed to, because my family, unfortunately, didn't really have the means to support me. That, by the way, turned out to be helpful in my later life, oddly.

Why do you think it's helpful?

Because it gave me a sense of drive, ambition, and goal-oriented thinking. Any of my friends that didn't grow up like that sort of either had it or they didn't have it. Most of the time, they didn't have it. But some of them did, by the way.

When I was in New York, I had 4 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 the 10 museums. I wanted to go to all of them.

Yeah.

My appetite's always bigger than my stomach. So I went to MoMA. I left 6 hours later. 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, probably 15 or 16 years later, and I'm telling this story, and David Rockefeller's sitting at the front table at this dinner for 500 people. Then the phone buzzes, and my assistant says—and I had a phone assistant, one for incoming and one for outgoing calls. The incoming assistant says, “Michael, Mr. Rockefeller for you.”

I didn't skip a beat, and I said, “Tell Bill Murray I'll call him back.” Bill used to call under different names all the time, and he could get away with it most of the time. He would give a name that he knew I had to pick up. I love the guy to this day. He's one of the greatest human beings on the planet. He's a guy who I will be loyal to till the day I die, 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 that I'll call him back.”

She says, “No, I think it really is Mr. Rockefeller. It's his assistant, and her name's Marnie, and she wants you to—Mr. Rockefeller's trying to reach you.”

I said, “Look, it's not David Rockefeller. You know it's Bill. Just get a number, and I'll call him back.”

She said, “Okay.”

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

Because I'm a guy in L.A. with a beginning art collection, basically no real cultural profile. This is David Rockefeller. He's a legend in the world of business and culture. His mother started MoMA.

If you read the book “Picasso's War,” which is fascinating—I told you about it at dinner—it talks about the Rockefellers, about Abby Rockefeller, and the women that started MoMA. There were 3 women that started the museum in the '30s. David grew up around art. I grew up around nothing.

Yeah.

It's like I was in the San Fernando Valley and a wasteland.

One of my favorite parts of your book is that exact line, where you're like, “I could see the problem was not only where I grew up, but what I was very aware of: I could see where I wanted to be. I knew where I was, but I could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. I could see Brentwood.”

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

That part of your book I absolutely love, where you're having initial success—nowhere near what's going to come in the future, but enough to buy your first house in Brentwood—and you wake up. I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this, because I've had a couple experiences like that in my life, where you're like, “I can't believe...” In your book, you said, “I can't believe I live in Brentwood.”

Listen, I still have those feelings at this stage of my life. Tamara and I were talking about this the other night. It happened in New York. It was a few days around our dinner.

We were walking around looking at art, and we looked at each other. It was a weekend. It was a Sunday, actually. We said, “Wow, we have an amazing life.” We were talking about looking at art, and then we're going to be going on vacation in Europe, and I get to be with my grandkids and her daughter and my kids. I said, “We're just really, really lucky.”

But the Rockefeller thing was luck. I didn't think he knew me, so I thought it was a joke, and I had a lot of clients calling, saying they were people that they weren't, because they thought it was funny.

Yeah.

They were pretty good at the imitations. Anyway, I called back, and sure enough, it was David Rockefeller. He got on the phone and said, “I would like to meet you.”

I said, “Sure, but why?”

And he said, “What do you mean, why?”

I said, “Because I'm in L.A. I'm in the entertainment business. We are in a culture, but a very different kind than you.”

Yeah.

“And I'm a giant admirer of everything you've done.”

How old were you when this was taking place? You had already founded CAA, right?

Probably about 40.

Okay, so you're—

38, 40.

—10 years into CAA or so.

Yeah. But anyway, to make a long story short, I said, “I'm in New York every week. I'll come meet you.”

He said, “No, I want to come meet you.”

Then I was floored, because I go to New York every week. I told him that the second time. He said, “No, I see you're building a building with I. M. Pei. You've got a painting by Roy Lichtenstein.”

He said, “These are very interesting choices for someone your age in California.” He wasn't denigrating California, but he was making it clear that we were one of the very first—not the first, but one of the very first—architecturally inspired buildings with a top American architect in Los Angeles. It wasn't a thing to do architecture of note in Los Angeles.

Before I chose I. M. Pei, I spent a lot of time researching all the top architects in the world and made that decision. To this day, I'm thrilled that I had that relationship.

But David came out. We hit it off. In my office, he asked me to go on the board. I became the youngest board member on the board. I think it was the second time that they had someone that young. I think Ron Lauder was younger than me when he went on. We built a relationship, and I learned so much.

But here's the point, to your point that you just made, about David Rockefeller doing things without doing them.

Mm-hmm.

It's kind of like that famous Bruce Lee line about punching without punching.

Mm-hmm.

Which I've never forgotten, because it's simple but apocryphal. David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum. He took me out to dinner after I was a trustee, and we spent 3 hours talking about politics, art, people, things that had happened in his life, travel, and his 10,000-index-card file.

There wasn't a computer, so every time he met someone—if he met David Senra, for example—he put your name and contact information on a 3-by-5 card under S, alphabetized. He was so proud of it. It was in his office. He said nothing to me about giving money—not 1 word.

As we were leaving, I said to him, “How’s the fundraising going?” He said, “Really good. I’m getting a lot of support. I’ll talk to you soon.” I made a donation that was a lot larger than I thought I would. He never asked me to make a donation.

Then I found out later that he had the same meeting with every trustee. He didn’t ask 1 of them for a dime.

So is this just black-belt-level sales? This is as good as I’ve ever seen. By the way, it’s hard to explain this to you because I’m a salesman and—maybe the best in the world?

Well, I’m a salesperson. I don’t know if I’m the best, but I’m fairly good at it.

Yeah. I had dinner with Marc Andreessen. Jared Kushner, our mutual friend, invited me to go to dinner with Marc, and I asked him about you because I was going to meet you. As we said, “The best in the world.” I’m prejudiced because I’m crazy about Marc and I consider him family.

But I think the idea of having that kind of restraint—I don’t think I could have—

I wouldn’t even think to do that.

Yeah.

No, because I would have had to, at the end, say something to feel I’d accomplished my intention, my mission. He didn’t say a word, and he didn’t even come close to it. It’s almost like, “You want to contribute? Great. You don’t? That’s okay, too.” But he never said the word “contribute.” He never talked about money.

He talked about the architecture, but he talked about where to hang the collection. He talked about other things in the world, but for 3 hours, not a word. Not 1 word.

He was how much older than you? A couple of decades?

Oh, God. David, God, we just celebrated his hun-- He died at, it's going to he was probably twice my age.

Let’s say you’re 40 at the time and he’s 80. This is something—

I’m guessing. I don’t know why.

Yeah, we don’t need an exact number.

Yeah, but it’s not like an older brother. It’s like a father.

No, he took me to one of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, the 2 of us. It was 1 of the greatest nights of my life. Talk about pinching yourself: I’m in his limo with him, driving to the airport, in his plane, in his car, to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. It was just he and I walking in.

He knew every single person in the room, and if he didn’t, they knew him.

Mm-hmm.

I’m sitting there thinking, “It’s hard to impress me,” I hate to say, because I travel around and I’ve met a lot of people.

Yeah.

He just knocked my socks off. He knew everyone in the room. Sitting at his table that night was an experience to behold, because everyone came up to pay their respects to him. It was such an eye-opening experience, and he was always even and always the same polite guy to everybody—even people we knew he didn’t care for.

He had a very short attention span for people with no integrity, because his integrity was so high. It was like a learning experience for me. I got to be pretty good friends with him, and every lunch, dinner, or outing with him was a graduate course in something.

This is just an incredible opportunity, so sometimes I feel almost like a bit of a middle child because of the work I do on Founders. I get to meet world-class entrepreneurs, spend time with them, and have dinner with them. Many of them are much older. Then I also talk to younger entrepreneurs, and the advice I give to younger entrepreneurs, to the degree that they ask me, is: try to spend time with people who have more lived experience.

If David Rockefeller was, let’s say, 80 years old at this point, he’s not twice as smart and twice as experienced as a 40-year-old. It’s an uneven distribution. He’s like 10 times as smart and experienced, because of this idea of how many—he’s seen every deal, he’s met every person, and he’s just had so much more time to observe what actually takes place in the world.

He’s read a lot more. He’s had all this experience. I feel this way when we’ve had these 3-hour dinners in New York. The amount of information I learn from you in 3 hours—it’s not like a person who’s half your age. We could have spent the exact same amount of time together. You just have so much more lived experience.

But it’s my thesis about frame of reference. This old saying that people always repeat as they get older—“I wish I knew then what I know now”—happens to be 100% accurate, and I’ll tell you why.

You just said it, David. Longevity automatically promotes more meetings, human interactions, and experiences. That in itself creates more frames of reference. The more frames of reference you have, the more experienced you are at making difficult decisions, because you’ve seen outcomes.

I was on the phone last night with 1 of my kids about a personal matter she was having, and I explained the benefit I have that she—or the person she was having the problem with—doesn’t have: I’ve seen the movie before.

Mm-hmm.

I’ve either packaged the movie, seen the movie, or read the script that never got made. I’ve seen it fictionally, nonfictionally, as a documentary, based on historical fact, and based on someone’s biography. I’ve just been around too long.

Therefore, I know what silo her situation fits into, and I said to her, “You cannot see what I can see.” I said, “You’re going to get off the phone and you’re going to go, ‘Dad is really a jerk.’”

I’m not preaching to you, but you have to understand: I’ve seen it, I know exactly what’s going on, and I see it from both sides, by the way. It’s all about frame of reference.

I do wish that, when I started the agency, I had the knowledge bank of experiences that I have now. I wish that when I started collecting art, I had the knowledge bank and frame of reference for the pieces of art that I have now.

Your frame of reference from people specifically is very interesting to me. Think about 1 of the things I wanted to talk to you about. It’s very obvious that I have a few obsessions.

1 of my obsessions is people who get to the very top of their profession. I don’t even care what the profession is. It could be building CAA, being a basketball player, or being a sushi chef. It doesn’t matter. I’m obsessed with people who become the best in the world at what they do.

I was thinking about you. Not only did you become the best in the world at what you did, but you worked with, competed against, and built relationships with countless other people who were also the best in the world at what they did. I study this on Founders, and I was very curious: you met these people, interacted with them, and competed against them. I read about them.

Could you describe the 1 common trait—the most important common trait—for the people you observed who were the best in the world at what they did, yourself included?

Well, let me give you a practical example.

Okay.

2 weeks ago, I was having lunch with a friend of mine at Nobu, and in walks Nobu, who is my exact age. When I met him, he had just opened a sushi bar on La Cienega Boulevard called Matsuhisa.

I remember meeting him because I would go there sometimes for business or occasionally by myself. The 1 great lesson I learned very early on from going to Japan is that the best place in the world to eat if you’re alone is a sushi bar, because you don’t feel uncomfortable doing that.

I met Nobu when he was on his own. He was the chef, the manager, and the menu planner. It was just him, 2 other guys, and his wife. That was Nobu’s start.

Now, you look at what Nobu has right now. Nobu has an empire. I don’t know how many restaurants they have; they’re all over the world. He has hotels, bottled and packaged goods—he has everything. I would imagine he has 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.

Several years later, I introduced Nobu to Robert De Niro, and he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu, not Matsuhisa. It was fascinating that he didn’t try to take his personal brand and put it with Bob. He took 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 huge believer when everyone around him was negative and advised him against it. 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 in his 20s, an Austrian guy. I said, “This guy not only is a great chef, but, like Nobu, he had a fantastic personality.”

Why is it that I went 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 2 guys?

Frame of reference.

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

No, it’s the general thesis for me, and I use it to this day. I use it in my tech investing and have since 1992.

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 that it probably isn't healthy. I'm interested in excellence.

Oh, we've got to talk about that.

And I am interested in excellence—

Keep going.

—and will go to almost any end that's not immoral or illegal to achieve it for myself and everyone that's around me.

Is it excellence for the sake of excellence? What is driving you?

I meet people. Within 10 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 positives and negatives. It's the same thing when I collect art.

When young men or women that I mentor in collecting art want that, they ask me what they should read. I say, "Nothing. Start looking at images and bookmark whatever you like, and then come back to it a couple of days later to see if you still like it." I look, to this day, at probably 200 images a day. I looked at 10 this morning before I came over here at 7:00 this morning, at 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, because I'm machine learning—

Yeah.

—and my brain's the machine. I tell all my AI guys and girls, who are all much younger than me except for a couple of guys at Stanford that I work with who are professors. I guess they're in their 50s and 60s. There's a thing they call ML, which is machine learning, and I call it ML, moron learning. I ask them to explain my version of ML when we're doing a complicated AI deal together.

Mm-hmm.

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. What you did on Tamara's book is insane. You read a book, and in 50 minutes or 60—

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah, I appreciate that.

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

So, I should bring this up. The first time we ever talked—and it was just pure chance—was because we share a mutual friend in Rick Gerson.

Yeah.

I'm having breakfast with Rick, and you guys have been friends for 25 years.

Right.

Rick and I have been real close friends in the last few years. We're at breakfast, and his phone is on the table. It rings, and I think, "Oh, shit, that's Michael Ovitz." Because I had read your book already. I obviously knew who you were, but we had never spoken.

Then he picks it up on speakerphone, and Rick's been hugely supportive. He tries to push my podcast on everybody in the world, and he's very successful doing so. And then 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.'"

You're on your boat in St. Barts, I think, and there's a brief pause, and you go, "I listened to 4 of them yesterday." And you start rattling off the Cornelius Vanderbilt one and everything else.

I heard you talk with our mutual friend Patrick about this, where you said, "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 benchmarks you have to compare people to." So, when you met Nobu, when I hear this, it almost sounds like it happens automatically, just a part of your brain—

It's an auto-response.

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

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

His actual work.

His technical skill—

Yeah.

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

And this is happening in a strip mall.

No, no, he was on La Cienega Boulevard in an old restaurant, an old building he had bought.

Yeah, so, not a—

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

But you saw—

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

His personality? What do you mean?

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 4 coveted seats. You wanted to talk to him because he was interesting. He had it all.

And you could see it even then, though?

Yeah. Wolfgang—

Same thing? It's this charisma—

Wolfgang would walk out, go table to table, and you fell in love with this guy. This is 1980-something—'81. Wolfgang was the chef at Ma Maison, which is no longer in existence, a restaurant that only Hollywood could endorse: plastic patio furniture in a parking lot, with a kitchen in a 1-bedroom apartment at the back of it.

He would walk around asking everyone at every table their name, remembering their name, and being gracious. And the food, while you're eating this amazing food like we'd never eaten before—there was no such thing as California cuisine. It was clean food with a French flair, but it wasn't full of butter and oil. It was great.

You couldn't get a seat there. It was hysterical, the popularity of this place with a zero economic investment in infrastructure, right? But the food was to die for, and Wolfgang—you wanted to be his friend.

So, you're talking about his charisma and energy?

Everything. This was 1980-something—'81. Wolfgang was walking around asking everyone at every table, remembering their name, and being gracious. And the food, while you're eating this amazing food like we'd never eaten before, there was no such thing as California cuisine. It was clean food with a French flair, but it wasn't full of butter and oil. It was great. You couldn't get a seat there.

It was hysterical, the popularity of this place with a zero economic investment in infrastructure, right? But the food was to die for. And Wolfgang—you wanted to be his friend.

When he did Spago, I just gave him a quote for his book. I went to Spago 4 nights a week up on Sunset, and I finally looked at Wolf and said, "We've got to put you on television." I 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 Baumanière," where you trained in France, "and do that kind of dinner, and whip out the best wines that aren't on the list. I want to get this guy in your corner."

Wolfgang served a dinner that night. We spent 3 hours eating. There must have been 15 courses. One was better than the next. He personally brought stuff over. He hung out at the table. He talked, he was charming, he was just Wolfgang, and you loved him. You wanted to hug him. But the food was great too.

I got the president of ABC to sign, on a napkin, a contract for a week's work on "Good Morning America"—

Yeah.

—as an audition to replace Julia Child. The guy signed it, and he dated it, and I took the napkin. He also had a lot to drink.

Is that a key?

The next day, he called me and 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, our chef that you met, the little Austrian guy who is so cute, on 'Good Morning America' and try him out."

He said, "I can't do that."

I said, "Well, you made a deal, and you're a man of high integrity."

So, he said, "I didn't make a deal. What are you talking about?"

I said, "I'm going to send one of our assistants over with the contract. You take a look, and then you call me and tell me if you made a contract or not."

We took the napkin and pinned it to someone's shirt. We put a sport coat on him and arranged with the president of ABC's assistant to walk him right into the office. He walked in, the guy looked at him, and he opened his coat. It was all in huge print. He saw the signature. My guy closed his coat and ran out the door.

My phone rang 10 seconds later. He said, "I guess I signed a deal, didn't I?" And he put him on. And he's still on.

I feel like you operate much more on intuition. You spent an enormous amount of time preparing. One of my favorite stories in your book—and I try to do the exact same thing in my career—is: "Okay, I'm going to start in the mail room. Well, guess what? I'm going to go down to the file cabinets. It's this huge room that contains 70 years of history on Hollywood, and I'm going to show up 2 hours early, and I'm going to read. Then I'm going to work a full day, and then I'm going to go back there at night and keep reading. I'm going to work my way through in a very Rockefeller-esque way of just plowing a field until I get to the end."

And then you use this enormous research and base of knowledge you have, and you combine it with these experiments and the frame of reference that we just talked about. Then, when you make decisions, it's almost like it's not even analytical. It's some kind of intuition that you're having where it's like, "This guy's special. I have this guy who has power to make this guy's career better. I just need to put these 2 together. Let's go ahead and just write this out on a napkin."

There's almost no time to analyze. Am I getting this wrong?

No, but David, I'm going to put the question to you. You get a job in the mail room.

You have no family connection. You get it on your own. It's a 3-year training program. You're in the mail room, and you have a college degree. You are not stupid. What's the alternative?

No, I think this is why we get along and why we've been able to build a friendship, because this is exactly what I've done with “Founders.” I did not come from money. Everybody's like, “Oh, you're the first person to graduate college.” I'm the first person in my family to graduate high school. My parents were incapable of even graduating high school.

But I had the same thing, and the reason I say, “What else is the choice?” is that there's no choice. So I either became more knowledgeable than the 20 other people. They were all men in that pledge class. They started a group in the mail room 2 times a year, with 20 or 25 people. I think when I started, there were 20 or 25. I don't remember.

But the point is, it's 1969. I'm 21 years old. I graduated from UCLA in 3 years while working at Fox 60 hours a week, loving every second of it. I dropped out of pre-med to finish degrees in psychology and business. I looked for the job that I thought could educate me the fastest in a business that was all about nepotism and relationships, and I didn't have any.

How do I distinguish myself from the 20 or 25 other pledges in what I call the pledge class? Because that's what we were. It became pretty apparent to me very quickly. Everyone showed up at exactly the time they were told to, which was 9:00 for a 9:30 start. Everyone showed up except me. I showed up at 6:30, and no one was in. I had the run of the place.

So I said to myself, “I'm going to learn everything I can faster than anyone else, and I'm never going to share with anyone what I'm doing.” Let them all fend for themselves. Which, by the way, turned out to be good for me, because it was antithetical to my thesis on building a business, which is that you share everything with everybody.

I learned that by not sharing, all these other people got killed by me. 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, and have 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.

Well, you're on the same team, but the other 19 people in this group—you looked at them as competitors?

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

The idea there was—I think you said this in your book—“I don't know if I'm smarter than them, but I know for damn sure that I'm working harder.”

Well, there were several people, David, who I was not smarter than. They had unbelievable educations. A couple of them had Ivy League educations. I couldn't even get into an Ivy League school.

The fact is that I was in a competitive environment, at a competitive business, William Morris, and in a competitive arena, which is the entertainment business. It's dog-eat-dog. It had been like that since it started. It never changed.

I read everything I could get my hands on about the golden years of the movie business, and I used it for CAA when we started in 1974. I made up a bibliography: “Here are the books you need.”

Who did you give the bibliography to?

Every one of us who were working together.

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

Yeah.

Okay.

Our group knew history, and the reason that became important, even though everyone thought, “Oh, who cares?” was that when you started talking to filmmakers in those days, they started talking about Frank Capra, David Lean, Howard Hawks, William 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.

I've read and done episodes on half a dozen directors and filmmakers. I'm obsessed with directors and filmmakers. I think the analogy between a filmmaker and an entrepreneur is so clear-cut, it's very obvious. From George Lucas to Steven Spielberg to Quentin Tarantino to Christopher Nolan, every single one I've read a biography of has this encyclopedic knowledge of film history in their head.

There's a great line on this—one of my favorite maxims I learned from Charlie Munger—which is why he was so obsessed with reading and studying business history and human history as well. He says that learning from history is a form of leverage.

Well, it's what I've always said: Knowledge is power. If you have practical knowledge combined with research knowledge, combined with 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 an edge that cannot be beaten.

I have, sitting on my desk, probably 20 notes about things that I have seen on the internet, on Instagram, on Perplexity, on OpenAI, and 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, and put it in my pile to research. Every night when I'm on my computer, I take a deep dive into whatever's interesting to me.

I love cars. I love mechanical watches because some of them have 1,000 parts, and they're this big. I love gadgets. I love hi-fi. I love art.

Did you have that curiosity even at that age, when you first started in the mail room?

Yes. But you know what I didn't have? I didn't have a computer.

What?

I didn't have a computer.

Okay.

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 because I want to. If you put me in a room with a computer for 24 hours with no sleep, I would do it.

As a matter of fact, Tamara has to pull me off the computer and gets angry at me because I learn so much every day. When my friends want to buy something, they call me because I've already looked at it. If they want to buy a car—and I'm not being facetious—I enjoy doing it, and it's rare that they ask me about a car I don't know about.

When I was at CAA, before computers, I had a reading list for all the agents and all the mail room people. I subscribed personally to 210 magazines. I didn't read every one. Don't think I did for a second. But I flipped through the pages, so I had “Car and Driver,” “Road & Track,” “Automobile,” and “Motor Trend.” All 4.

Why? I wanted to see what everyone wrote. I didn't read detailed articles. I'd always read the headline, look at the pictures, and read the first paragraph. If I loved an article and wanted to go further, I tore it out and put it in a pile for Sunday. Every day.

I had “Ladies' Home Journal,” “Vogue,” “McCall's,” and “Mademoiselle.” Why did I read women's magazines? Because the stylists in those magazines are 6 months ahead of the curve. They have to see out. I live with a fashion person, you know.

Yeah, Tamara. She knows every season before something comes out.

“Oh, Michael, you know? Something's back.” “Wow, come on.” Three months later, we're at a dinner, and somebody's wearing baggy jeans when everyone else was wearing tight jeans, and she calls it.

Mm-hmm.

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. He made a movie about it. That was his hobby. I had been reading about cars my whole life. We talked for 3 hours in Westport, Connecticut, about cars. We never talked about his career the first time I met him.

I think there's a line here that I always think about: The most interesting people are the most interested.

Absolutely.

It doesn't matter. To me, I don't really even care what the source of your obsession is; I just like that you're obsessed with something and go deep on it.

I do have what I would say is a selfish question for you. I was listening to Michael Dell on a podcast. He's got great energy, and the interviewer asked him, “When you were starting Dell, how many hours did you work?” He goes, “All of them.”

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. 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, every waking hour was a working hour, which is a great line. I see this reappear over and over again. We're absolutely obsessed with what we're doing, so it's very hard to pull us away from what we love to do.

But there is something I want to ask you selfishly: You also say that if you could've worked 10% less, it wouldn't have made a difference in your professional success, but you would've been a lot happier. How should I be thinking about the contrast between these 2 statements?

Well, it's simple. I am a curious person, as you know, and you are, too. 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 to make sure I met you. He must've sent us 20 texts—

Yeah.

—to get us together. And then he wouldn't give me your contact because he wanted to be the point of contact.

Do you remember that?

Yeah. He wouldn't put us together. He wanted to be the one to do it. So, that 10%, I would've loved to have been able to do homework.

To me, that's working, too. It's like professional research. Think about when you're at William Morris: the 2.5 hours, getting there at 6:30 in the morning, doing all your reading, working a full day, and then doing it again. To me, those two bookends to your day are a form of professional research, which also could be considered working.

Yeah, but to me, the dichotomy and difference is that I'm not working to a financial goal. I'm working for self-enrichment, which itself becomes a financial product, because if I make myself wiser, better, and more informed, I'm a candidate who can give other humans who have a problem advice.

Look, we all have problems. I learned this when I was 18. 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, because 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, and I can't direct. I frankly invest off people, not off all these insane rules that a lot of my friends who are venture capitalists put up—these kinds of guardrails that they won't go outside of. I've never seen a guardrail I don't try to jump.

And I think that's the worst thing you can do, because creative people have no guardrails. But for me, I realized everybody wants to have enough counsel. Someone asked me on another podcast who my Michael Ovitz was, who my advisor was. 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. I went through it because I didn't have anyone like me to bounce things off of who had seen the movie before.

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

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. I do it because, one, I'm friends with them; two, I learn from them; three, I enjoy it; and four, I'm like a protective mother of my friends.

I have a very binary point of view about relationships. I'm not interested in any relationships in the middle. I'm interested in—

What's the binary?

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. I'm like the world's best friend for people, and I'm probably not a great enemy.

I would not want you as an enemy.

You know? So, no, because I'm very dogmatic in my support of people.

Methodical. I think if I made an enemy of you, you'd wake up every day figuring out how to destroy me.

By the way, I don't have that kind of time, and frankly, at this stage of my life, I don't have that energy for that.

But you did for a few decades.

Oh, I did for a long time.

Yeah.

I was a guy who could tell you about people who, 30 years earlier, had done something I didn't think was right. I'm a big believer that people need to have integrity, and they need to keep their word.

The reason is that when we were starting CAA and had no money—nothing—we didn't even have a lawyer. So, we were making tens or hundreds of deals with no contracts. People had to keep their word, David. It was very tough when you had no leverage and someone didn't keep their word.

Unfortunately, in the entertainment business, there's kind of a gradation of lying. The most lies, when we started, were in the movie business, because it takes 3 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 a dirty business. Brilliant business and tough to do.

But I'm friends with a guy I have 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 people.

Mm-hmm.

You could count on 2 hands the number of people in my day who could do that. And when you're in the television business, there's no lying, because you make these shows every week. So, you have no time to fabricate a story and set up a ruse.

What we started at CAA 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 asks you a question and you do not have an answer, here's your answer: “I don't know. I'm going to call you back.”

That was unheard of in 1974, 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've got to remember the story that you made up. And it's so easy to trap people who lie, because they never get the story right twice.

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 kind of gave you an extra point on the smart side of the scale. So, for me, it's all about truth and transparency.

I was on the phone this morning. I got on the phone at 6:30 this morning, working on a deal I'm putting together. The guy who gave us the idea is in another company and is not the head guy at the company. He's number 3. 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. He came up with an idea and told my young partner, whom you know, who's 32. I partnered with him intentionally because I wanted a young partner, period. My partner called him, gave him an idea, and immediately put him with me.

I spent an hour with him 5 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. Then I called the guy who started it this morning at 6:30. He's on the East Coast, and I gave him a 100% 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.

So, this is relentless follow-up?

Relentless. And I made the extra call. My partner, my young partner, saw all this unfold, fell right in step with it, and handled it brilliantly. That makes me feel fantastic. Fantastic. Because he's going to be here long after me, and he carries on the torch.

Look, the guys that I left CAA to—some of them I get along with great, and some of them don't like me. I understand that, because they'd like me to have died, because my shadow hung over them. And we always want to kill the father. I get it.

At the end of the day, 50 years later, I think I did something right, because the place is still functioning. It's still number 1, still has the biggest market share, and it's still the most influential company.

This is what I try to tell other founders, too. You guys are obsessed with these startups. The goal should be to build an enduring company that lasts 5 decades now.

It's got to. It's got to.

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 intellectual property. You need to expose people who are underexposed, expose people who are overexposed, and rein them in for the audience so they get their essence.

Listen, when I listened to your Vanderbilt podcast—you know, this is going to 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 podcast you did, now he's dead, so you did a podcast based on a book you read.

I read the same book, but I hadn't read it for 20 years—maybe less; I don't remember. But you took all the salient points out of it. You hit a point which, to use a minor point, said a lot about the time and the person.

You told a story about how he was in a buggy thinking about sailing ships versus steamships, and that he knew he had to make a big move. 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—

Yeah.

—the money. He was kind of absent-minded and stopped. He was on his buggy. I don't remember the exact story.

Yeah.

But he stopped, and somebody attacked him or something. He got out of the buggy, and he beat the guy up.

Yeah, he did.

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 your podcast, for his foresight. And he did it not once, which, for me, is the key. He wrote multiple successful technological waves: railroads when the boats became—

Yes. It's very hard for a company and a person to disrupt themselves, to say, “Hey, I got really wealthy,” essentially ferrying people—

And now I got to get rid of it.

Exactly. And especially your point about the technology was interesting because, yeah, we might have a debate: should we adopt this new AI technology or this new software? Technology was killing people.

People—the steamship technology—kept blowing up. So you'd have these explosions. They knew that's where it was going to go because you needed powered sailing.

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

Then that's the crazy thing: no, I'm going to disrupt myself and get rid of the business that made me wealthy at the time. He was one of the first disruptors, and he did it with railroads.

He realized he couldn't deliver inland with a boat.

Yes. But—

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

But here's the point of your story. To me, only me, this shows you and me, 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 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. They gave me all the articulate reasons, and it was always more than one person: “You can't start an agency at 26. There are 180 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.”

Oh, no. I'm glad you 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. You know, a book is essentially a movie for the mind, right? You have to come up with the visuals yourself.

And there's this line in your book where they're like—and you're like, “Hey, I'm planning on signing the big movie stars.” And they'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 was lean forward.

No, I did. I did. I leaned forward and was like, “I will get all of them.” I remember the guy I said it to. He was a successful agent. He handled about 500 top writers in television, but never steered out of 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.

This is why I don't think your assessment is accurate. And I don't mean this in a disrespectful way. Obviously, you know I wouldn't disrespect you intentionally. I do think you're creative. You're saying, “Oh, I don't have any talent. I'm not creative.” This idea where you just said something about, “Hey, I don't even see guardrails, and if you put a guardrail in front of me, I'm going to hop over that.”

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, this huge density of talent. And you said, “Hey, I can control the supply, and I can actually just create the entire package, instead of just handling this like one little silo.” That's creativity.

Not really, but I understand. It's a creative business, but we called it Creative Artists Agency for a reason. Marty Scorsese, in his brain, can cut a movie while he's shooting with one camera at a time. I asked, “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 25 years ago, I said in front of 1,500 people that when I met Marty in '79, he was in a bit of trouble—not creatively, but financially—and he wasn't getting the movies made that 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. He used to take his scripts, and on the left-hand page, which was blank, he'd stick-draw the scene and put little dots where the camera was going. If you look at his camera work, the way his scenes are put together, and the way he and Thelma, who cuts his movies, work, the amount of precision and handwork is 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 when it became very clear, in the mid-'80s, that the studios were in financial trouble. It started for me when Universal stock traded to a point where the market cap of the company was the value of the real estate in Burbank.

Yeah.

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

That's an act of creativity: when you realize that the Japanese were just a new form of bank for the studios.

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

Yeah.

And I was fascinated by Akio Morita, and I read his biography. One of my favorite books.

It's unbelievable.

The idea that they could start Sony right after World War II, when the Americans had occupied Tokyo. They started Sony in a bombed-out department store because—I think 66% of the population in Tokyo had left, right? Most of the structures were either destroyed or severely damaged.

The very first office of Sony, which was going to become this massive conglomerate, had to have umbrellas at their desks when they founded Sony, and they were young kids. I think Akio was 25 at the time, and his co-founder was a little older. Maybe he was 32. They had umbrellas on their desks because when it rained at work, their papers would get wet.

Starting in 1950, when the war wounds were still fresh, if you lost someone in the Bataan Death March or in World War II to a Japanese soldier or a German soldier, you didn't forget it by 1950.

Akio Morita moved his entire family to New York City.

Yeah.

You want to talk about courage? When I talk about Vanderbilt getting out of the buggy and defending himself, he didn't have any security. He did it on his own. You want to talk about courage? Let's talk about Akio, because this is something I wanted to talk about when we were at dinner, and I forgot because I'd just finished rereading his book.

And one of the most remarkable things in the book is—remember, Akio came from a family sake business that was 300 years old. His life had essentially a path set out for him. I think he was going to be the 16th firstborn male heir to take over the business, and he's like, “I'm not interested in this. I'm obsessed with electronics.” He was into physics, he was into engineering, and he loved technology.

He and his co-founder went and met his dad, and they were like, “Hey, I really think—if it'd be okay with you, your son comes and helps me build this company that's going to turn into Sony.” What was remarkable about this is that his dad was like, “Well, I had a plan for my son's life.” And he tells his son, “But go do what you're going to do, because if I know you, you're going to do what you want to do anyway.”

Very wise man. He knew who his son was.

My dad was like that and had no high school education. He had a way with words that was extraordinary. He had great common sense. And Morita had a father who let him go with no guilt, but he had something else that I was very impressed by.

When I was advising him, he told me a story at dinner one night that I'll never forget to this day. The man who became his number two was named Norio Ohga. And Norio Ohga—I said to Mr. Morita at dinner, “Could you please tell me the story of how you found him?” And he said, “Michael, I didn't find him. He found me.”

I said, “What happened?” He said, “Sony released their first reel-to-reel tape recorder.” You know this story?

Yes. “Hire a paid critic.”

Ohga was in college. He was a senior. He was getting ready to look for a job. He went and auditioned the reel-to-reel at a store. He couldn't afford it. He wrote a 10-page, handwritten, single-spaced letter to Morita critiquing the reel-to-reel, ripping it to smithereens.

Morita made all the changes, offered Ohga a job, and moved him through the company like a hot knife through butter. He eventually became president of Sony.

President of Sony.

Akio said something that's very fascinating. He's like, “Listen, just like a ballet dancer needs a mirror, right? We needed an aural mirror, where this guy had a refined sense of music and hearing that I lacked.”

But think about what you just said.

Instead of rejecting it or getting upset or saying, “What does he know? He's a senior in college?” he took the whole thing and used it. I was very lucky, by the way. You want to talk about luck? I lived in a building in New York that I set up because I'd come in at all hours of the night. I never wanted to be out of L.A. more than one day and one night—or two nights, I meant.

Living above me was Martin Scorsese, and above him was Norio Ohga.

Oh, wow.

So I would go visit them at night, because I'd finish working in New York usually about 9:00, since that's 6:00 in L.A.

Sometimes 9:30, and I'd always have dinner at around 10:00, unless I had a client dinner, which was always at 8:00. Then I'd go see Marty.

He'd watch a movie every night. Every single night. Sometimes, if I didn't get dinner, I'd bring takeout food upstairs, listen to him, and ask him questions. It was like taking a master's degree in film.

It's where I learned that he knew every old director—every director he respected. I learned about a guy like Michael Powell, who did The Red Shoes, and no one knows about that movie to this day. He was the most influential director on Marty imaginable.

I learned to be able to talk to Stanley Kubrick. He never had an agent except me, and I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me. I did a lot of reading, and I knew about those old directors. I had all of our people trained in the history of film and the history of television.

I bought every book that was published. For example, they had these big coffee-table books on all the studios. I bought dozens of them so our agents could just look through the pictures. I bought a book—I’ll never forget it—The History of the Emmys, and it listed, pre-computer, all the Emmy Awards from the first Emmy broadcast.

There was also a history of the Academy Awards. I made our people watch every film in the history of the Academy Awards that won Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Movie. They didn’t have to watch every bit of it because some of them were really slow, but they got familiar with who these actors were: Who’s Gary Cooper? Who’s Robert Mitchum? Who’s Lana Turner? Who are these people, and what did they contribute?

By doing that, our people became so fluent in their business. They could talk television, they could talk movies, and they could talk music. They knew history because the past is prologue. If you know history, you pretty much can predict the future.

If you reach the top of your profession, you could be a tennis player, a sushi chef, an entrepreneur, or a film director. They all have this encyclopedic knowledge of their industry in their head that they can draw on at any time.

Let me give you an example tied to Morita, because it kills me when I talk to young founders now. They don’t even know who this guy was, and I’m like, “You should study him. You should read about him.” They’re like, “Oh, why?”

Well, Steve Jobs built Apple, right? He was obsessed with Morita. Jeff Bezos built Amazon. If you read their biographies and listen to their interviews, they’ll talk about why they flew to Japan to meet him, spend time with him, read his books, and study him. This guy obviously had genius ideas.

One of the ideas Bezos says he used at the very beginning of Amazon, which he learned from Morita, was the importance of having a goal and a mission bigger than yourself. Morita’s point was, it’s not, “Hey, we’re going to build the best technology, and we’re going to sell it, and we’re going to get rich.” His point was that, at the time, Japanese products were thought of as inferior, shitty, copycat products.

By the way, they were.

Exactly, and he wasn’t—

They were, and he faced it.

And so his point was, he goes, “We’re not going to be…” This is the genius thing that he did: “We’re not going to make Sony known for high-quality products. We’re going to make Japan known for high-quality products.”

Big thinker. Big thinker. Big thinker. I remember sitting with him, and I told him that in 1961, my father gave me a gift of a transistor radio. It had to be, David, 8 inches high and 3 inches thick. It was portable, and it was made in Japan.

The Americans invented the transistor and licensed it to Japan, to Sony, for $25,000. The Americans invented the reel-to-reel tape recorder at Ampex. As you know, we’ve discussed this. It was invented by a bunch of engineers to be able to record pornography because they were using an 8-millimeter kinescope to do that, and it was inconvenient. Oddly, porn drove a lot of technology in the old days.

But it’s all about thinking big. It’s about doing things that are unexpected. It’s about when you say to someone, “I think I want to save Universal and sell it to money that is not in the country, so there’s nothing they can do to take it.”

Yeah.

Your point was like, “Can’t move the studio.”

“You can’t move the studio.”

I got criticized on the cover of Newsweek when I sold Columbia Pictures to Mr. Morita, which was part of the strategy. I had sold it with Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman, because he was on the board. Steve had just started Blackstone and was brilliant.

We sold Columbia Records to Sony first, which paved the way for Columbia Studios. It was CBS Records, actually, now Columbia. For me, it served multiple purposes. One, it kept these legacy businesses right where they needed to be. Two, Japan was cheap financing because they had cheap money and tons of it.

Three, having a 75% market share of the talent, for me, wasn’t enough, which people thought was crazy because no one had ever gotten over 25%. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world. That’s nuts. To me, I missed it because I wanted 50, because it gave me even more leverage for our clients.

But I wanted the leverage with the buyer, too. If I sold the studio to a Japanese company that no one had a relationship with except me and my staff, then CAA moved another notch up in the ecosystem.

By the time we got done, we had sold Columbia and Universal, gotten financing for Warner Bros. when they were in trouble and Steve Ross was alive, and sold MGM and saved it when the accountants wanted to plow it under. Every time I went to do that, I was criticized.

When I said I wanted to do advertising, because we had the skill set to do it—we understood culture; that was our job—people questioned it. Why did I look at these magazines? I wanted 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 some of the frames out of their movies and reproduce them, mount them, frame them in an art frame, and hang them on a museum wall. You have a piece of art. It’s just a different source.

It’s moving art.

Yes, and it’s the same thing. Common denominator. People don’t see past their nose.

What we tried to do was train people to look further out. How do you get to the next step? Why did we do advertising? One, because I thought we could do it. Two, we had a better idea, which we did. Three, all our clients had downtime.

Everyone said, “Oh, movie directors don’t do advertising.” Well, that’s complete and utter nonsense. They want to make money when they’re not doing anything, and they get to work 5 days and make $1 million.

Yeah.

So they all did it, and all the other agents who criticized us looked pitifully stupid because they not only did it, they enjoyed it.

Coke was doing 6 commercials a year. For the same budget, we did 35. For the same budget. We got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song, and we changed their saying at the time to “Always Coke,” which is what we came up with.

Quincy did a theme song in 6 beats. He did it in urban, he did it in country and western, he did it in classical, and we used it all over the world.

There’s something tactical about the Coke deal that I was thinking of when I was reading your book. You knocked it out of the park with them. They even told you how happy they were, and yet they sent you a check. I can’t remember what the check was. I think they sent you something like a $3 million check.

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

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

Yeah.

But they sent me a check. We did a black-and-white commercial, and they sent me a check.

Something like that, yeah.

No, it was $3 million.

Okay.

They sent the check for $3 million for the cost of the commercial.

Okay.

I sent it back, intentionally telling them the commercial cost $30,000 and that they had misread the invoice, because they thought I had made a mistake on the invoice. Not me—our accounting guys—because we billed for $30,000.

Yeah, that was one of your deals.

We never had a commercial for less than $3 million, so we were thrilled, and we thought you had made a mistake. We trusted you, so we sent you the money.

Yeah.

Okay. They sent the check for $3 million because they thought we had made a mistake. I sent it back. I sent the check back void, because I said, “We did it on an Apple IIe.” Len Fink did the commercial on an Apple IIe computer, the first computer Steve Jobs came out with. We did it in black and white, and they didn’t want to take the check back. That gave me the opening I wanted.

Okay, explain that to me.

I said to them, “We don’t want you to overpay anyone except us. You’re not going to overpay for commercials, but you’ve got to pay us.” By that time, we had delivered the polar bears, which they’re still using 40 years later. Think about that. We delivered 350 commercials over our tenure with them. No one’s ever done that. Madison Avenue got paranoid.

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

It was huge. It was huge.

But I remember in the book, you essentially got them to pay—whatever the number was they were trying to settle up on, what they actually settled up on was considerably larger.

Because I basically said, “There’s not much to talk about. It’s all visually available.” You ran the 35 commercials, and I suggested they do them in the theater in their building on Fifth Avenue, Fifth and 55th, where Allen & Company is. It was Herb Allen who got me into this.

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

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 $1 million 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.

As Herb was talking to me, sitting where you’re sitting, he took a pair of scissors out of his desk and started cutting up the check. He cut it into the finest pieces that he could. Then he put it in the envelope that Sumner had sent it in and sent it back to him by messenger.

This guy had the highest integrity I’ve ever seen in my life. He never lied, never wanted publicity, and didn’t want to be in the limelight. He did every deal with me, and I learned everything. 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.”

But you know, we talked about mentors before. Tamara said the most interesting thing to me. She said, “You give so many people good advice.” She said, “You only give bad advice to 1 person.”

Yourself?

Yes.

Interesting.

And it’s true. I’ve made some of the worst decisions imaginable because I’ve had no one like me to talk to.

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

Well, I make bad decisions on a regular basis.

A consequential one, though.

Well, consequential is a different story. I made some bad decisions in parts of my career where I could have done things differently. That’s a whole other podcast.

But you know what’s interesting? Patrick Collinson, whom I have amazing respect for, called me about 6 months after my book came out. Or 3 months—I don’t remember. I lived in San Francisco. He said, “What are you doing for lunch this week?” Then we made a lunch date.

I went to the office and sat down with my tray in his commissary. My book was sitting right there with 90 or 100 yellow Post-it notes in it.

Yeah, I know those.

And I said—You know this story.

I do. I do the same thing with my books. You’ve seen them.

Patrick sat down. He said, “Are you ready?” I said, “Yeah, I’m starving.” He goes, “No, 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.”

I looked at him and said to myself, “Wow, this kid’s special.” Then I said to Patrick, “What about the things I did right?” He said, “Who cares?” He said, “That’s expected.”

So he went through, for 2½ hours, every mistake I made—

Yeah.

—not in the book, but in my career.

Yeah.

And 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 the people who worked for me or with me, because I called everyone a partner, no matter what their interest in the 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. At 10:30 and 4:30, I went around the building, and it took me 20 minutes. 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 7:00 to 7:45 every night before I went to dinner. I asked them to come see me. Every single time, there was a problem, and 90% of the problems were personal. The 10% 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 1.

Yeah, that’s nuts.

Well, we paid people fairly. We paid them ahead of their market price. Everyone participated. Everyone was protecting each other. We didn’t talk badly about people. We protected each other.

If studios tried to roll over one of our people, we’d all get behind that person and make the studio miserable. We elevated ourselves to a position where we said, “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. You’ll probably pay them more than you’re going to pay through other agencies.

Listen, when I signed Mike Nichols from ICM, he was one of the last people we took from ICM. He’d been with his agent for 25 years. Mike Nichols’s price, because he was put in with our clients—Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody—went up $2 million, 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. We demanded triple-A pricing for the triple-A clients. You couldn’t price 1 less than the other.

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

Absolutely. Absolutely. I also did what I told you personally: volume. Coke—why did I do 35 commercials instead of 6? It’s easier to do 6.

Mm-hmm.

I did 35 because we’d run it. The idea I had, which they bought, and which Herb Allen arranged at Sun Valley when I met with the team of Goizueta and Keough, the CEO and the COO, was, “Let’s do a relay race. Let’s have Coke thought of 365 days a year.”

How do we do that? Well, it’s simple. At 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 commercials are based on.

Then we’re going to go into Easter: family. Summer: thirst, heat, beach. Then we’re going to go to the fall. What is it? It’s back to school. Everybody’s kids go back to school. Then we’re going to go to Thanksgiving; we’re back to family. Then we’re going to roll right into Christmas.

So we’re going to do our commercials specific to those seasons, rather than 6 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 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. 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 going to get upset.”

When did you build the self-confidence to not listen to people? 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.” But you need self-confidence to ignore that information—that critique or that advice. When did you develop that? At what age? Did you have that when you were in high school? Did you have that before you founded CAA?

I wrote about this in my book. This self-confidence appeared when I lost the 9th-grade election for class president, and I did a complete post-mortem on myself—who my friend group was and why I lost—because I didn’t want to be a loser. I thought it was an apocryphal moment for me.

I worked for 2 years to build different social constituencies, and I went out of my way to make different friends in different areas. I had a 3,800-student high school, so running for an office there was a big deal because everybody voted. You had to speak to the entire school in 3 different assemblies because that’s all they could get into the gym.

It was critical. I practiced public speaking when I was in the 10th and 11th grades. I won student body vice president, and 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.

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 3 person and started it said to me, “I’ve never seen anyone move so fast from idea to execution of putting it together.” And I said, “Because if you move slowly, it doesn’t go together.”

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.” He said, “I’m not sure 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 and some bad, but I really don’t care.” He said, “Why do you not care?” I said, “Because I’ll make my own judgment. I’m very good with people. I will know if what I’ve heard is true, false, or just baloney.”

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. Anyone who is confident, aggressive, has ideas, or wants to push the envelope is put down.

Yeah. Jeff Bezos has a great line on this. He’s like, “Well, if you don’t want to be criticized, if you can’t take being criticized, then you can’t do anything.”

I’m going to leave you with a line that I used when I was 17 years old and gave a speech when I ran for student body president. When I was student body vice president, I usurped the president’s duties, and he was badmouthing me like crazy. It was working pretty well because I was having a run for my money.

I said to the students—all 4,000 of them—“I’d rather be a do-something president who’s done something to be criticized than a do-nothing president whom no one can criticize.”

Yeah, that’s a great line.

And that got me the election.

I want to ask you a question because you’ve mentioned a few times where your appetite is essentially insatiable. You had 46 of the top 50 highest-grossing films and the best talent. Then you had 75% 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 1957. It’s called “The Mind of Napoleon.”

You got me into this.

Yeah, it’s a very hard-to-find book.

No kidding.

I have friends who have paid $1,000 or $2,000 for the book, and I think it’s worth it. It’s essentially 300 pages of Napoleon in his own words. There’s something that, when I hear you speak, reminds me of Napoleon. He said, essentially, that his ambition grew with his success. He says it in French, but the translation is, “Appetite comes with eating.”

For excessively ambitious, driven people, it’s not like, “Oh, I ate, so I’m full.” It’s like, “No, I’ve eaten, and the more I eat, the more I want to eat.”

But that’s 100% accurate. Listen, one of my clients, whom I’m crazy about, Francis Ford Coppola, wrote a screenplay that one of my clients, whom I was also crazy about and who passed away, named Franklin J. Schaffner, directed. It was called “Patton.”

I am a voracious reader of anything about military leaders. I’ve read about Patton, Omar Bradley, and Dwight D. Eisenhower as military leaders. It 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 his army to march double the amount of the standard army march, supply them, feed them, and not irritate them? Because he was a leader, he had guts, and he wasn’t afraid. People couldn’t stand him. Not his people, though. Not his people.

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 about what I thought you should do. I may not be right. I may be.

No, the funny part about that is, when I asked you earlier, I said, “Hey, if you think about the people who are the best in the world at what they do—think about all the people you’ve met who are the best in the world at what they do—you became the best in the world at what you do. What is the single most important trait that you’ve observed across all these people?”

My answer to that question would be focus. I’m insanely focused on just podcasting, and I only think about it. That’s basically all I think about all day long.

When we had that very intense 3-hour dinner, 20 minutes of it was you explaining, “This is what I would do if I was you.”

But that’s just to push you.

But the interesting part was, as I told you, the advice you had for me—I had already put it into motion. It wasn’t public, so you didn’t know this, but I had already put it into motion. I was like, “It’s pretty impressive that you can come from outside with something I think about all the time, and you nailed the single best opportunity.”

But that’s the only talent I have. That’s my point.

That’s not the only talent you have.

No, I have the ability to think outside the box on any business.

Which is creative.

I’m not going to argue with you. I have the ability to think outside the box on any business, even if I don’t know the business, because I have this thesis, and I’ve said it 100 times to you and to everybody else: every business is the same.

Now, the details are different, right? But the businesses—the blocking and tackling—are all the same.

Yeah.

And it’s always about momentum, focus, loyalty, and aggressive control of the marketplace and monopoly. Monopoly. I’m a monopolist.

If we were going to build a business, you have to be number 1, and you have to have the lion’s share of what you’re doing, or the lion’s share of opportunities in what you do. If you pass for fundamental reasons, that’s good too. But you can’t do anything halfway. It’s crazy.

I learned this as a kid. When I had a paper route at 9, I realized that I had enough time to do 3 paper routes, and I went and, under another name, got the other 2. The guy delivering the bulk of the papers thought he was delivering to 3 different people. He thought no one could do all 3, and I figured out I could do it. Then I hired someone to help me when it became an issue.

It’s always about thinking of the next step. It’s a great Bruce Lee line, which I showed you a few weeks ago: “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 elementary, but if you think about the broader ramifications of that, it’s a foundation of business. Those are all things that I think are important.

But that’s my point. You know, Michael Dell had a paper route too. He figured out this crazy way, in his own way, of maximizing how many subscriptions he could sell. He realized that there were 2 groups of people who bought newspaper subscriptions in Texas. Texas has a much higher rate than the general population of newlyweds and people who moved.

He thought, “All that information is public in Texas.” He went down to the courthouse, brought his Apple II computer, and just had them pull a list of all the people who had recently gotten married and all the people who had recently moved. He was doing that at 12.

He was 12 years old.

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 recently with a friend of Tamara’s who’s a businessman, and 5 guys in business asked to have dinner with me because they wanted to understand why American businessmen are so successful, on a comparative basis, broadly, to other people around the world. Why are they so successful?

There are a lot of reasons, but we sat down at the table—very formal, everybody in suits. The 5 guys were in their 50s. They all were pretty successful except 1, who opened the dinner and said, “I’m moving to Gstaad from London.”

Oh, taxes?

He said, “No.”

Skiing?

So I said, “Do you like skiing?” No, that was the first question I asked, 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 Gstaad, 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. It doesn’t stop me.”

All of a sudden, the meeting was pretty much over, 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.” By the time we got done with dinner, he was not going to move to Gstaad, and ultimately did not. He is working on a new business.

I’m glad you brought that up, because one of the things—one of my favorite lines, so you know this: I take every book I read and try to distill it down to the 10 most important sentences in the book. One of them for you was—I stripped it completely of all context, because I think if you just read the sentence, you’ll understand why it’s important. 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 10 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?

To me, it’s just part of the fabric of me. I’m not suggesting I live the right kind of life. It’s good for me. I want to stay edgy. I want to stay with young people. Most of my relationships now are with young people. I learn. I feel. I get up in the morning, and I have a purpose.

When you were building CAA, though, you were under enormous amounts of stress. You had this crazy schedule that you detail in your book, essentially at it 20 hours a day, making 200 phone calls, 300 phone calls a day. Was there ever a time when you almost quit?

No. Failure is not an option when you come from where I came from.

But even after you were already wealthy, you weren’t working for money.

It’s not about money.

Yeah, you weren’t working for money.

It’s about a whole series of other things. When you grow up in the San Fernando Valley, and your father makes about $300 a week on a good week, and you don’t get any allowance, and you have to have a paper route at 9 to be able to go buy an ice cream, and you’re also saving for a car because when you’re 16, you know your dad can’t afford it, failure is not an option. It’s binary. There’s no option: success or death. What are you going to do? You don’t have any choice. I don’t want to go back to the Valley. It’s the scariest thought of my life.

Do you think that still drives you? You’re intelligent enough to realize that would never possibly happen, but I can’t help but notice that you still don’t let your foot off the gas.

That’s not the reason. I like it. I love the action. I love meeting people. I love learning. I love being focused. I like to get into new things.

So when did your motivation become, “I’m obsessed with this; I love this”? Because at the beginning, it was, “I don’t want to be a loser.”

Yeah.

Right? So when did that switch from, “I am terrified to wind up like”—you said in your book you felt like you were born in the wrong nest, like a cuckoo bird, right? It was, “I’m not in the right situation for what I feel my life should be.”

Well, I always say I should have grown up on the East Coast.

Why?

Because it’s a very different environment. It’s a creative environment in L.A.—or it used to be, not much anymore, as it should be—but New York was about multiple different businesses and culture, art, film, music, finance, and advertising. Everything was in New York when I was a kid.

Let’s go to New York in one second, but it went from, “This can’t be my life,” is the way I describe it. “This can’t be my life” is a very powerful motivator in your early life. Now it has switched to, “I’m obsessed with this. I don’t ever even think of retirement. I’m constantly inspired every day. I want to create new things.” So when did that switch in your life happen? When did it go from almost a negative motivation to a positive one?

You mean as far as gaining the confidence to try to do it?

I don’t even know if it’s confidence. It’s this inner desire to win, this burning desire to achieve mission success, and that’s very obvious in your early life, right? The source of that was an unhappiness, a deep unhappiness with your present station in life. Eventually, that drives you so much that it almost, I would say, caused a lot of people’s success. Now you’re not worried about ever going back to the Valley, and the source of your motivation and your drive every day is, “I’m completely obsessed with this.”

So it’s a really smart question, and I’ve got to answer it. It kind of brings me full circle here. I say this to certain people I’m close to: There are parts of me that still live in the Valley that I’ll never forget my whole life. It’s going to sound crazy stupid, but I remember when I was a kid and my dad was a liquor salesman, and some of his accounts were restaurants.

He used to take us to early-bird dinners because he would get a discount on the dinner before 6:00. We’d go at 5:50 to a restaurant that I thought was fancy, that had full three-course meals for $4.95 or $5.95. Think about that. He’d order 1 drink, which he never drank. He just nursed it because it was his product. We were not allowed to order lobster, steak, or anything over a certain price on the menu.

I was saying to Tamara the other day that occasionally I slide back into that. It’s weird, because I don’t even look at checks anymore when they come. We had dinner together. You saw that. I just sign the check. But sometimes I find myself looking at a menu and automatically glancing at the price, for no reason. I don’t care.

Yeah.

But it’s my childhood, and I think it overwhelms me sometimes, which I find positive, by the way, because I still feel like winning, and I still feel like competing. Right now, my mission is to bring young people along, to do well, to make change, to be charitable, and to help young people not make the mistakes I made. I’m enjoying it, and that flame is not going out.

It doesn’t sound silly or stupid to me at all. I keep saying this over and over again. I feel like I just tell the same story every week, because the same personality type just reappears over and over again throughout history: this entrepreneurial, super-driven, Type A personality type. Obviously, you have it. I think I have it as well.

It’s separated by the time in which they lived. They live in different parts of the world. They work in different industries. And yet that same personality type—it’s the same way I feel. My older brother called me, and it’s very hard to get time with me because I work 7 days a week. My eyes are open, and I’m thinking about work.

He’s just like, “Why are you working so hard?” And I was like, “Because, look up and down our family tree. It’s nothing but losers on both sides.”

It’s not logical. But David, think about this: I wouldn’t be here if we weren’t like-minded. It doesn’t matter what we do.

Yeah, it’s the first thing you said to me when we sat down for the very first time.

I wouldn’t be here.

Yeah.

I wouldn’t have been friends with you. I wouldn’t be interested, because there’s no common denominator. There’s no hook for a foundation for the relationship.

Yeah. So again, a lot of these questions are selfish, because I use this format to learn directly from you. One of my favorite things—obviously, we spend summers in Malibu. July 4th is a very important holiday to me. My dad’s a Cuban immigrant. I’m hugely pro-capitalistic and hugely pro-American.

You can’t do fireworks here because of all the fires, so I’ve tried to figure out a way to celebrate America during July 4th for my daughter. At first I made her do this, and now she does it on her own: I made her watch Hamilton, the musical, on Disney+. Now she knows all the songs. She went to see it on Broadway, and she likes the soundtrack and everything else.

There are 2 of my favorite songs in Hamilton. One of them is “Non-Stop,” which talks about volume, which you and I talk about over and over again. The guy just wouldn’t stop. If he’s awake, he’s writing; he’s trying to get his ideas out there.

But the other thing is the fact that he understood—is the same situation. A poor orphan kid comes to America, and he says, “It didn’t matter.” He’s the right hand of George Washington. He’s the first Treasury Secretary. He was impossible to satiate. It was impossible. What he understood about himself was, “I will never be satisfied.”

I’m going to ask you this question. I think I already know the answer because we’ve talked enough. I just don’t think that even registers with you. It’s like, you will never be satisfied. You don’t look at it as—there’s no end to your ambition or what you want to do in this world.

I’m going to give you a simple answer: I don’t want it to.

What do you mean?

I don’t want there to be an end to ambition, or enthusiasm, or curiosity, or the things that drive me to help people, to be an advisor to people.

I don't get paid for being an advisor. You didn't pay me for having dinner with you.

I offered.

Now that I think about it, I paid for dinner twice. In any case, I want that life, or I wouldn't do it. Believe me.

I just read your friend Barry Diller's autobiography, which is really interesting, and he has a line in there. He's just like, “I don't think about retirement. I'm not interested in it.” He goes, “I wake up every day and have ideas.”

Yeah, well, that's how I feel.

I'm going to change gears from what we were talking about real quick, because there's one thing on the list that I absolutely have to get to. This will probably be the last thing we talk about. We talked a lot about people who have a lot of charisma and a lot of intelligence. I love what you wrote in your book about your deep friendship with Michael Crichton. It sounds like you had a friendship with Michael Crichton that lasted multiple decades.

30 years.

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

Certain people have touched my life in a very unique way. Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen, in 1999, put me on their board, and I never met either of them. They had the confidence in me to go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about.

I had some experience in tech from 1992, with my Andy Grove–Intel CAA deal, and meeting Bill Gates in 1993. But nothing like they did. They grew up in Silicon Valley. That was a huge life change for me.

Michael Crichton was one of these guys that, at the beginning, I just needed to sign him as a client to be on the roster. After 2 or 3 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 and ahead of everybody in his thinking.

He was talking about computers in the early 1980s. He was an Apple Fellow when no one knew what the hell that was. He traveled extensively and wrote articles about it, but kept notes on everything he did. He loved art. He wrote the definitive textbook on Jasper Johns. To this day, it's the definitive book.

I talked to him every day of my life, 7 days a week. 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, Europe, or New York; it didn't make any difference to me. Sometimes the conversations were short, and sometimes they were long. I enjoyed every second of it.

Going on vacation with him was a lesson in curiosity. I remember we were in the Caribbean together. He kept notes on everything that he saw, and it all ended up in movies.

I value loyalty as a very important point 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 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 on my desk, and a small, personal Frank Stella drawing that he had collected, which he gave me as a gift, is in a place where I see it every single night before I go to sleep. I love this guy. I was devastated when he passed away because he passed away young; he didn't have to.

It was his own fault, I think.

What happened?

He was a doctor, a medical doctor. I could be wrong; I don't know it for a fact, but I think he kind of overdid the chemo, and I think that killed him. That's my guess. Or it caused something to happen, but I don't know the facts, by the way.

But it was a loss to me that was devastating. I remember the night that his wife called me, because it was the night that Obama, I think, won the election. It was that night. I'm not sure. Some event happened, and I was in the back seat of the car. I got the call, and I was devastated.

For me, he was a mega influence on my life, a mega-loyal friend through thick and thin. It didn't matter what I did; he didn't judge me.

He had extreme work habits. I think I learned this from you. He wouldn't write every day.

Yeah. I had all my writers, and we had 400 of them. We had different work ethics and different schedules.

James Clavell, who wrote “Shōgun” and “Tai-Pan,” would write every day from 7:00 in the morning until 12:30, come hell or high water, 6 days a week. At 12:30, he went to lunch, and he didn't work until the next morning. He did 10 pages a day. That's what he did. You could almost tell when he was going to be done. His books ran about 1,200 pages.

Michael hated writing. He'd rather think, and he waited for deadlines. He wrote “Jurassic Park” in 5 months because he wrote 20 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week. It was due, and he just waited.

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

From him? Oh, unequivocally: curiosity about everything. The guy was curious about everything, every day of his life. Loyalty, integrity, and how to create things out of nothing. He had a mind that could think forward and backward.

In other words, he did movies like “The Great Train Robbery,” set in the 1850s with Sean Connery, and movies like “The Andromeda Strain” about the future and his thought process, and then straight popcorn entertainment based on science that really isn't science: “Jurassic Park.”

When you read the book, in the first third, you're being educated about paleontology without knowing it. You actually think you understand it, and they give a PhD in it. It was genius what he did. So then, when the movie breaks loose, you actually think you understand what you're seeing. It's amazing. He was a genius.

Relentless curiosity. That's a great place to close. Michael, thank you very much for doing this.

Thank you, thank you.

Thank you to everybody.

Absolutely.