Founder of CAA Michael Ovitz: "I Just Knew I Was Going to Outwork Every One of Them"

It's good to see you again.

Thanks for having me again.

I've seen you since yesterday. [Laughter] Well, let's start there. Why did you tell me yesterday that you're busier today, at this point in your life, than you've ever been?

Great question. As I said to you yesterday—and you know I'm busy because you saw it; you got to look at it—first of all, let me apologize for being horrible company to you.

You weren't. It was amazing. We should tell the people watching and listening to this that I flew back from New York to Los Angeles with you on your plane. You had texted me the night before, and you were like, “Just a warning: I'm going to be horrible company because I'm going to work all the way through.” So, we sat next to each other and, essentially, before we took off, started working. We flew, landed, and you were still working. You were like, “Hey, I'm not getting off the plane in case you want to leave.”

I was on a Zoom.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

No, it was awesome. You weren't horrible company at all.

No, I said to you, I enjoy it, which is the problem. It's like the ultimate stimulus-response.

Why is the fact that you love working a problem?

Well, it's not a problem for me. I think it's a problem for people that I'm close to who would like me to work less. I don't agree with that. I am busier than I've ever been in my life. I actually said to Tamara the other night, she would probably like me to work a little bit less.

It's the most exciting time I've ever seen in my entire life. That includes the entertainment sweet spot of the late '70s through the end of the '90s, which was the last great period in the film business and television business, pre-streaming, obviously. I thought I was in heaven in those years with respect to the amount of things that could be created out of thin air.

Today—and for the last—I started working in technology in '92 while I was still at Sierra. It's now '26, and I'm still doing it. I can't wait to get up in the morning. I literally can't wait.

I am privileged to be able to work with some of the smartest men and women I've ever met in my life. They're all young, they're all out to do something special, and they're motivated by all the right things. Every day when I'm in a meeting with these people, I learn something.

So, I get discovery. I get education. I get my brain stretched. I get to watch things I've always watched creatively get created out of thin air. I get to listen to the presentation and get challenged about whether I should get involved or not. I do everything I can to spread myself around enough so I can get all the food for thought that's possible.

That drives me. It's that discovery process that drives me. It's not a FOMO process, frankly. It's very interesting in technology. I was talking to Ben Horowitz about this. It's a learning curve that gives you a stimulation from having seen and heard something that you didn't know.

But that stimulation then turns into a form of joy: you've made yourself a better person off of someone else's knowledge base. I said the other day to one of my young mentees, “Consider me Dracula for the brain.”

The original Dracula—the conceit of the story, the book; forget that there was no movie in those days—was this constant quest for eternal youth. You suck a young person's blood, and it makes you young. I like to view myself in the same way, except in the gray-matter area. I'm really interested in what the thought process is.

Why do you think today is more exciting for you than even the '70s, '80s, and '90s?

Because in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, we were dealing with mediums that had been around for a long time. The exciting part was the creation of the software of the moment, which was film or videotape or music or books.

It was fantastic to read Michael Crichton's rough draft of Jurassic Park. It was a thrill, but it was a book, and there have been books since the invention of the printing press—actually, since prior to that, handwritten.

But now change is so dramatic that it's almost frightening. Max Levchin, who was the founder of Affirm and PayPal—and I think you know Max—

I know of him. I've never met him, though.

I thought you should have him do the show. He's brilliant and a great guy. He said to me a couple of years ago—we were at a dinner—and he said, “You know, if I take a day off from work, I come back and I feel like I've missed a week.”

Then I saw him recently at the Allen & Company conference. I reminded him of it, and he said, “If I take a day off now, I feel like I've missed 3 months.” Everyone thinks that way.

AI is so fast, and the speed of change means that the benefits to anything that we do are extraordinary. There's a ton of potential downside, and I like to not forget that. I think we have to be very responsible with it. On the other hand, I feel the upside far outweighs the downside.

I was at a dinner with a friend of mine who's a research scientist working on cancer cures, and I said, “How are the 5 trials going?” He said, “I can't believe what's happened.”

I said, “What?” To set the stage, it takes a long time to get from stage 1, which involves mice or other types of animals, to stage 3, which involves human trials. It could be 5 or 10 years sometimes.

He said, “I have 5 trials going. 4 were started pre-AI. They're from 5 to 10 years in the making. I started 1 after AI, and I've gotten results in 9 months on a cancer cure.” Think about the ramifications of that and what it means for our society.

I was in a meeting last week in New York, and 2 young engineers told me they had discovered that a friend of theirs was working, all because of AI, on a cure to stimulate the retinal nerve if your vision is going bad. I mean, it's every day. It's every day something different.

And here's the real answer to your question: we all had to be specialists until AI.

Mhm.

Now we're all generalists. So, I get to work in consumer products, in high tech, in defense, in medicine, and in biopharma. I get to be involved in all these things that I'm totally unqualified for.

I don't code. I'm not a scientist who can sit and understand the vocabulary of science, but I can learn about it really fast and have enough vocabulary to understand what these brilliant young minds are creating.

This creativity is the same as the entertainment creativity, but at a wildly different degree of difficulty and level. It's not even close.

So, what is the role that you're playing in the projects that you're pursuing right now?

I will basically do whatever is needed to help form these businesses. The reality of business, which very few people really grasp, is that the basics of business, no matter what the field is, are exactly the same. The blocking-and-tackling parts are the same.

As pointed out to me, a film or television show or a book or a song is packaged around talent. Talent—creator, engineer, same thing. Talent needs someone to help execute. An engineer needs people around them to help get the business in line and organized, coded—whatever they need done.

The creative person making the entertainment then has to get financing. The engineer or founder of a company needs venture capital. With the entertainment maker, he then has to get distribution. A founder has his product, and he's got to find a DSP or someone else to distribute his work, or just take it on his own on the internet.

Either way, both also need marketing. How do you put the name into the ether? And then how do you sell the product? How do you make a profit? How do you build a culture? How do you build something that lasts beyond you?

We started CAA in 1974. In 2026, it's as strong today as it was when I was there because we set a business model in place that has stood the test of time. The people who took it over followed the trajectory of where they needed to take the business and kept the same values and principles.

At the end of the day, it's binary. It either works or it doesn't. 50 years in business proves that it works.

So, let's go back. You have a million different things you could work on, and you have very limited time. You're ruthlessly efficient, which is what I saw on the plane yesterday and what I kind of guessed from our multiple conversations. How do you choose which projects to do right now and how you're going to spend your time?

Choices are made for me. I don't have to make the choice.

What does that mean?

It means that the degree of interest is proportional to the individual who's telling me about it.

Whether it’s an investor, a founder, a shareholder, or a venture capitalist.

So are you saying you just follow your intense curiosity? What do you mean by that?

Well, I follow my curiosity. I want to see everything. I can’t do everything. There are also a lot of things I don’t want to do. There are a lot of ideas that don’t interest me, but I like meeting the people.

That’s what I like. As you know, I collect art and people. I love art, and I love meeting smart people. That drives me. The choices almost get made by themselves: Is it interesting? Will it stand the test of time? Can it be built? Can it be financed? Can it be distributed? All the basics of business have to be overlaid on any of these ideas.

So do you consider yourself more like an investor or a partner? How do you think about yourself when you’re working on a project?

I want to not be categorized. I don’t want a label.

All right, you’ve got to say more about that.

I’m glad you’re laughing at me, David, and I’m glad you feel comfortable that you can laugh at me.

I’m not laughing at you. I just love this stuff.

David, if I were younger, I’d leap out of my seat and throttle you.

I have no doubt of that.

I’m too old.

No, you might be able to throttle me. We’re going to come back to this line of questioning, but you came up to the house just now and said, “Hey, sorry again for being horrible company yesterday.”

I said, “Bullshit, Michael.” You were an excellent example of the fact that you’re maybe 35 years older than I am, and I was actually inspired by how efficient and relentless you are with your work ethic. I thought, “Oh, I thought I was working hard. This guy should not be outworking me.”

As I said to you, I love working. I love learning. I love working.

I love you, so of course I would not be laughing at you. What do you mean you don’t want to be categorized?

I don’t want to be typecast. I said this to a young founder yesterday: When I grew up in the business world, we were basically specialists.

If you were in the entertainment business, you chose a vocation in film. There were subdivisions of film. There was animation, there were documentaries, there were action pictures, and there were comedies. You did one of those things, or you did television, or you wrote books, or you were a producer, or you were a director. You had one vocation in a larger field.

Today, there’s no such thing. Today, you have to be a generalist. You have to know a little bit about everything. Unless you’re a deep scientist and you’re founding Palantir, Anthropic, or one of these businesses that require extraordinary brain-compute power, then you are a specialist. But in the world I live in, I want to be a generalist. I’m not capable of being a specialist.

How much of this is tied to the advancements that we’ve seen in AI?

None. I’ve been like this my whole life.

But people like you now almost have superpowers and even more leverage because of AI. Is that the way you look at it?

Absolutely.

Okay.

Absolutely. Look, I have it sitting on my phone. It’s insane how many times I go to my phone and go to Claude, OpenAI, or Google to get answers. I ask them things and get a deep dive in a nanosecond.

I was looking at my grandson, who’s 10 years old and going to school at a special school in New York called the Alpha School.

Oh, Joe Lomonaco.

Yeah.

I just spent a bunch of time with Joe 2 weeks ago.

I have unbelievable respect for that man and what he’s doing. My grandson—my oldest son’s first son, Chris’s son; you know Chris—is 10 years old. He’s been in that school since last September, and in 6 months he’s a different kid.

He can’t wait to go to school. I don’t have to ask him to do his homework. He’s given unbelievable responsibilities. This is all set up by using AI to teach them. They do 2 hours a day of hard study off an iPad, and he’s as fluent in knowledge now as he’s ever been—and he’s 10.

When I was called to fly to Hawaii to meet with the senior C-suite executives from Matsushita Electric, one of the largest companies in Japan, the company had $15 billion to $20 billion of liquidity on its balance sheet. That was unheard of in the late ’80s. I had to figure out how to learn about the company. I had to go to a stockbroker’s office, go to the library, and use all analog tools. I had to get a physical copy of their 10-K.

Today, doing the same kind of work—as you know, I’m in the middle of 2 transactions right now, one public and one not—I went down a rabbit hole on 3 AI platforms. I spent 6 or 7 hours on 2 different days. I had so much information that I needed to add to my instinctual information because I’d been around that business for so long.

Which would have taken you, in the ’80s, when you were going to Hawaii, how long?

I needed 4 weeks to prepare for the meeting in Hawaii. I put it off for 4 weeks for 2 reasons.

One, culturally, when asked in those days—not today, but by traditional Japanese executives—your response had to be slow and measured. As a matter of fact, I got asked for a meeting by a Japanese company and spent 3 weeks putting them off because that kind of works for them. It’s their culture. They’re very slow to trust.

As a matter of fact, I used to crack up. In the early ’80s, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine would go and come back and call me. They’d say, “My God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I’m going to close.” I’d start laughing, and they’d say, “What are you laughing at?” I’d say, “Call me in a year and let me know how you’re doing.”

None of them closed anything. I spent a year cultivating relationships before I even got an assignment. But the amount of time it took me to learn about those individual companies—

You spent a year cultivating relationships before you even got an assignment. What made you take an interest in Japan?

I’ve always been interested in Asia—Japan and China. I became interested in Japan in high school because I had a lot of Japanese American friends. When I would go to their homes for dinner, I was blown away by the cultural difference.

I remember, this was 50 years ago, so there was a different ethos at the time and a different feeling about—

Japanese-American relations after World War II.

Yeah.

Correct. Okay. Did you read Phil Knight’s book, Shoe Dog?

Yeah.

It’s the same thing. His idea was, “Hey, we’re going to try to disrupt the German athletic shoe companies with their Japanese competitors.” He got a lot of pushback because of the tension between America and Japan at the time.

You know, I had a joint venture with Phil. I’m crazy about him.

I didn’t know this.

Oh, yeah. I did when I was at CAA. We had Nike, and CAA had a joint venture. In fact, Phil Knight and I had one of the greatest experiences in my business career.

The 2 of us decided that there should be an NCAA College Football Playoff. I remember, this was 40 years ago. We met at his place in Beaverton and plotted out this whole strategy. We put an entire visual and written presentation together.

I was fortunate because I was very close to the chancellor of UCLA, since I was chairman of the UCLA Medical Center. His name was Chuck Young. He passed away recently. Great guy. He was very influential in the college president world.

I convinced him to get Phil and me an audience at their meeting in Kansas City. Here’s a guy who’s running Nike—and I mean running it—and here’s a guy who’s running a very successful entertainment business. We made an amazing video that showed all of our stars and all of the athletes who were under contract to Nike.

We were on a stage in front of 150 NCAA presidents, and we showed that we could have made all the schools millions of dollars in revenue at the time if we had just done a playoff rather than chosen bowl games with random people.

We rehearsed what we were going to do. We had a fantastic dual presentation. We ran our video, and we both got up to the rostrum on each side of the screen. That’s how we decided to start the presentation.

We started pitching. We’re both not bad at that, the 2 of us, and he’s particularly good. We looked at each other and realized no one was listening to us. They were having conversations at the tables. They were at round tables instead of sitting in rows of chairs.

Then we ran another video, and I walked over to him and said, “This is not going well. We’ve got to start winging it.” We did, and we left. They ultimately said they didn’t want to do it. They told us they wanted to commission a report, which they did. It ran about 500 pages, and the conclusion they came to was exactly what we told them.

Now, 30 years later, they decided to do it. The amount of money they left on the table was frightening. We both learned a really good lesson from that.

How competitive is Phil Knight?

Phil Knight is the most competitive businessman alive, bar none. I’m crazy about that guy. I have such respect for him. He took a standard item—these shoes—and changed the world with them.

If you go back to the beginning, when he did Tiger, which was a Japanese shoe—

That's where he started when he and Penny, his wife, were selling these things out of the trunk of their car.

Yeah.

The soles were flat, and they weren't really comfortable. They were made for running because of his track coach, Bill Bowerman.

And his co-founder, yeah.

Yeah. But all of a sudden, they get cushier, the heels get higher, and they're in colors. I love going online and doing the customization thing. I just think it's the most fun thing imaginable.

The reason I ask is because, out of all the people I've read about for my other podcast, Founders, the most ruthlessly competitive, I'd put Michael Jordan up there. I think Larry Ellison and young Bill Gates definitely are like this. But Michael Jordan is open about it. He's just like, “I don't have a gambling problem. I have a competition problem.”

Kobe would tell stories about it. He's like, “Michael Jordan's my older brother. I'm competitive when it comes to basketball. Michael's competitive with everything.” Who can eat a salad the fastest? He's just got an addiction to competition.

And yet, I was reading this obscure biography of Michael Jordan. I think it was written before he retired. They were talking about his history. This is after Michael had signed with Nike, and within the first few years there was immediate success. But then there was this guy who got in Michael Jordan's ear to maybe convince him to launch with somebody else.

They had a meeting where somebody at Nike warned them. They were like, “You don't understand. Phil Knight is the most competitive person on the planet. If you do this and betray him, he will chase you to the ends of the earth.” I just remember reading that book, and I'm like, “They're saying this to one of the most competitive people? No, you think Michael Jordan's competitive? You haven't seen anything with this guy.”

The reason I think it's funny is because in Shoe Dog, obviously his autobiography, he's like, “Yeah, I'm a pretty competitive fellow.” I'm like, “That might be an understatement.”

I have to say, David, I'm thinking right now about ending the podcast because I really am upset that you didn't name me as one of the most competitive people you've met.

[laughter]

No, look, at the end of the day, let's be straight about it. It's not politically correct, but business is a competitive, cutthroat sport. I'm not saying you do anything immoral or illegal, and you have to have guidelines. But if you're not willing to get out there and do what Magic Johnson did on the court or Michael Jordan or any of the greats.

I learned it from Irvin, whom I am crazy about and whose business I helped start. I only mention it because he's been kind to me beyond belief in his autobiography and everything else. He came to me and said, “Look, I want to be in business.” No other athletes at that time said that. They did their service, and at 35 they were done.

Ervin said, “When I'm done, I want to be able to be a businessman,” and we went and set that course. What I learned from Ervin was an extraordinary lesson that helped me build CAA. When he was doing the fast break down that court, which was referred to as Showtime, he had no goal except to score.

He didn't care who got that ball in the basket. It just had to get in there. You had 4 guys, 2 and 2, running down that court, or 3 and 1, with him carrying that ball, and he'd move down that court. He would pick whoever he thought could make that shot, and he had no ego about it.

So how do you get that idea at CAA?

Because it was about winning at the end of the day. It's about competition. It's about not having an ego about it. One of the great things we did at CAA is I didn't care who scored. I just wanted a score.

When we asked people to do things at CAA, even the youngest people, we never asked them to do anything we wouldn't do ourselves. If they were slow on it, I went and did it to prove a point. I can't tell you how many times a week, in a morning meeting, I asked someone to do something, or one of the department heads asked someone to do something. If it didn't get done by 5:00, one of us did it.

This is why yesterday was so important, because it's one thing—we've obviously built a friendship. We've had countless dinners. We've spent a lot of time talking. I've read your book 3 times.

I had this thought, and we're going to go in a weird direction. I had dinner with Charlie Munger when he was 99 years old, okay? Anybody at 99 is going to have some level of cognitive decline, right? You just—it's going to happen.

I'm sitting across from this guy, and all I remember is that I have to work hard when I'm reading books. I highlight everything, I take notes, and I reread them. People are like, “You have such a good memory.” I'm like, “I read the thing. I read my notes 10 times. This is not—I don't have a good memory.”

And yet, I would ask Charlie—he was sitting in front of his bookshelf behind him. I'd see a book that he'd recommend reading one time and I'd read, and I'm like, “Oh, Charlie, tell me about this biography of Henry Kaiser behind you.” He would rattle off the businesses he built, the revenue of the companies, what happened to each company, and what happened to his business partners.

Then, after we went from his library to go to dinner, I was like, “Hey, do you mind if I go through your bookshelf?” He's like, “Go ahead.” I'm assuming I pick up the book, probably covered in notes. Nothing. Completely empty. He would maybe have 1 or 2 notes in pencil in the margin.

When I realized that, I thought, “My God, imagine what his mind was like when he was 45 or 65. That is who you're competing against.” I thought about that yesterday. I've obviously read about your work ethic—we've talked about it—but then to also see it, even though you're 6 decades into your career, I was like, “Oh, there are different levels to this.”

It's a fundamental difference between reading about something and then observing it. I want to tie this together. I wasn't expecting to go in on your competitive drive. When you jumped into the agent business in the very beginning, was it obvious that you were going to be able to outwork everybody else around you? Was it obvious to you at that time?

It was obvious to me, but no one else. Everyone said we were going to fail. One of my closest friends I worked with at William Morris said something to me in 1974 that I have not forgotten since he said it to me. It's something I will never forget, and it turned out to be such a fantastic stimulant for me to this day.

We were sitting together and having a coffee. He said to me, “So good that you're starting this business. In a year, you'll be looking for a job.”

I said, “Really? And what makes you think that?”

He said, “Oh, you're going to fail.”

I said, “Really?”

He said, “Yes. You can't make it. There's almost 200 agencies out there. You're not going to compete with the big ones.”

The second incident was within 6 months of that. A leading TV literary agency, run by the best friend of one of our guys, met with us about the thought of merging. That would give us what we needed, which were writers, because they're the fount of packaging, right?

The 4 partners of that agency said, “You know, we'll never represent any movie stars.” I looked at them and said, “Why do you say that?”

They said, “You'll never get them.”

I said, “We're going to have all of them.”

One of them said, “You're just so arrogant.”

I said, “I'm not arrogant at all, actually. I just know I'm going to outwork every one of them.”

Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety. This is when there were no computers. People actually read. I took one out every Friday. Every time we signed a movie star, I took that ad, tore it, and put it in an envelope to those 4 guys. I did it for the next 10 years.

Now, competition? Love it. Monopoly? Absolutely love it. I love Peter Thiel's monopoly lectures at Stanford. He's spot-on.

He says, “Competition is for losers.”

You see, it is for losers because you're competing with yourself, basically. That's how I view it. I'm not competing with anybody else.

That's why I keep my calls to a minimum, my Zooms to a minimum, and my meals to a minimum of time devoted to them. When someone says to me, “I have to take an hour Zoom,” I laugh at them. I say, “What law is there on the planet that says a Zoom has to be an hour?” Frankly, if you get free Zoom, they cut you off at 45 minutes.

I said, “So what rule is it that it has to be an hour?” I don’t know. I do them in 20 minutes. I just don’t believe it. If we’re in the middle of a critical diligence item or somebody’s trying to explain something really complicated, okay, I get that.

But the concept, for example, of our meetings—let’s just fill the hour even if we have nothing to say—I don’t want any small talk. It’s not social time. I’d love to hear about your kids, but I’d like to hear that over dinner or lunch. I’m not interested. Let’s get down to what we’re doing. What are we doing? We’re trying to build a business. We’re trying to market that business, and we’re trying to blow out the competition as fast, as cleanly, as simply, and as brutally as we can.

The idea is to keep it going until they can’t see straight. To do it any other way makes no sense to me. Now, by the way, there are people who have done it without that thesis. But it’s not a thesis I subscribe to.

There are people who have done it without this ruthless competitive drive, you mean?

Yeah. By the way, I’m excluding creative people, because creative people have a hard and a soft side. They have a much harder side than people tend to imagine or think. But they have a very soft side because they’re very sensitive. It’s that sensitivity and perceptual ability tied together that creates images or words.

But they also have a very hard side. I’ve watched Martin Scorsese take Harvey Weinstein apart in a room like he was a toothpick over a movie he was doing, where Harvey was giving him the dumbest notes imaginable.

Imagine thinking you could be in a position to give Scorsese notes on a movie.

That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Listen, I’ve been in rooms with megafilmmakers because we had all of them. At one time, CAA represented all the top 50-grossing Variety box-office filmmakers. We had 46, and I was upset because I didn’t have all of them. There were 4 I couldn’t get, and it really upset me. It gnawed at me my whole career there.

But I find that notes are good if you give them and then let somebody do what they want to do. They know better. On timing and other things like that, that’s a different story. But nobody should be giving Marty notes about the core of his film, the conceit of a character, or where he’s putting the camera. It’s a joke. It really is a joke.

I mean, the man’s seen every movie ever made. He has an encyclopedic knowledge. It’s interesting: he’s like Charlie Munger, but he doesn’t do that for a living. There are people who are gifted in their recall. I’m not one of those people. You just said you’re not. I really have to struggle with the memory that I need to keep in place for what I do.

Tell me more about the hard side of some of these creative geniuses that you work with. What do you think is driving their need to be hard? Is it just that they’re disagreeable when it comes to their craft?

Not at all. I think they’re protecting their vision. I think filmmakers have a very clear vision of what they want to achieve. I think sometimes they lose their way, but they get it back.

I had a situation with Barry Levinson, Dustin Hoffman, and Tom Cruise on Rain Man, where Dustin couldn’t find the character in the first week. I think Barry got very frustrated because a lot of the movie was not scripted. A lot of it was done in the moment.

I think the movie benefited from this problem at the beginning because Dustin found the character, and Barry had the patience to let him do it, which is hard because you’re losing money every day. Everyone forgets that. Then Barry found a balance between improvisation and script, and the movie’s perfect—perfect from beginning to end.

So, bring me back to the meeting between Scorsese and Weinstein. That’s why the hard side of him came out, because he was protecting his vision?

Well, Marty had a point of view that was right. That’s why I ended that meeting pretty fast. First of all, he shouldn’t have been in the editing room. It’s okay for Marty’s agents to be in the editing room, but not the producer, unless the producer is someone incredibly close to him with whom he’s done multiple movies.

You’ve been around a lot of founders. Isn’t that same instinct to protect the vision that Marty had in that situation? Isn’t it the exact same thing that they’re doing with the company?

It’s the denominator of anyone who’s successful. I think we’re talking about all the things that make people successful in any vocation: dedication, work ethic, intelligence, curiosity, protecting the vision, finding things that give you food for thought for the vision, and inventorying them in your head. Let them marinate, because if they stay in your head, that means you’re onto something.

It’s no different than the way I collect art. I collect art contextually, which is to say I see as many images as I can. My brain takes in what I like and rejects what I don’t over time. That’s how I collect. So, it’s a foundational issue of context, and I think filmmakers do the same thing.

Yeah, you spent a bunch of time with Josh Kushner, especially at the beginning of Thrive. I just had some time with him, and a large part of our discussion was really just about his vision. From hearing him speak and listening to him map all his thoughts out, it was, like you said, protecting the vision is an interesting way to think about it. That’s the way I thought about it.

I read this biography of a guy who was an engineer and started Harman Kardon, the high-end audio equipment company.

Sidney Harman?

Yeah, exactly.

He was a guy I knew well.

Yeah, he’s got a great book. I think the autobiography is called Mind Your Business.

I’ve read it. He was an amazing man. I’m an audiophile, and he at one time made the greatest speakers. They were called Infinity IRS 1Bs, and they were 4 towers, not 2.

It doesn’t surprise me that he was able to build the best product in the category he competed in. He describes his philosophy in that book, but what I’m hearing from the experience that you’ve had with some of these creative geniuses, and from some of the conversations I have with these founders, is that he put it the best way: the founder is the guardian of the company’s soul.

I was listening to Josh speak during our conversation, and I was like, “Oh, he’s guarding the company’s soul. He wants to make sure there’s a soul inside of Thrive.”

I met Josh when he was at Harvard Business School. Jared, his brother, was a friend of mine and asked me to help him with Josh. Josh, while he was in business school, had a very valuable game company, and Jared asked me to help him with it.

Josh then was exactly the same as the Josh today. There’s no difference. He’s wildly smart, very loyal, low-key, thoughtful, highly intelligent, and very easy to talk to. He’ll hold his ground, but what makes him fantastic is that he’ll yield his position if you can talk him out of it.

I love people who hold their ground until you prove them wrong.

Yeah, I would say, since you just made this connection with the whole theme of this conversation we’re having right now, we’re really just talking about traits of people who are successful, regardless of the domain they choose to operate in.

That’s something that recurs in all these biographies. It’s like, “I don’t care if the idea’s not mine. I just want to win.” So, if you can push back on me and say, “No, David, you’re wrong about XYZ,” which has happened several times, especially with my approach to podcasting over the years, it might take me a while, but then I’ll eventually flip. And I think you see that commonality.

I think of Steve Jobs. I just finished rereading Make Something Wonderful, which is a book put out by his widow. It’s an excellent book. But there are a ton of examples in that case where he had thought X and was really adamant about it.

Then he would test this. It’s something like—what do dolphins have? Echolocation? He would throw out an idea, and sometimes he didn’t even believe in that idea, but he would throw it out because he wanted a reaction back. The information would come back to him almost like sonar, like whatever dolphins have. Then he’d think about it for a little bit, and he’d wind up changing his mind.

I consulted for years for him on Pixar when he first had the idea. It was some of the best times I ever had because he was whip-smart, had an unbelievable memory, was totally unstoppable with an idea, and could be completely intransigent on things. Yet you could talk him out of it if he agreed. That’s the best trait any businessman can have.

When I ran CAA, I had a very simple thesis: I’d take ideas from anybody. No idea is stupid, because a bad idea may stimulate a good idea. And I want to hear from young people. I’m not interested so much in the opinions on new things from older people, but from older people I want their wisdom spread all over it.

We had a setup where every 90 days we put 200 people in a circle with their chairs tied to each other, and everybody had 30 seconds to pitch an idea. You couldn’t pass. We had a mailroom guy pitch an idea about cable. We promoted him on the spot to Asia. On the spot. It was that good.

Explain these 200 chairs tied together.

What I came up with was this concept for meetings, and we did it at all our retreats, where everyone sat in a circle or an oval. As we grew, it went from a circle to an oval because the geometry didn’t work, and we made everybody’s chairs touch.

There was no way out of the circle or oval. That was done intentionally. If you wanted to get out, you had to push your chair back, and you could see the hole as big as it could be.

We would meet with that as a foundation: everyone was participating. I ran it, and I would sit there and call on people who didn't say anything and coax them to say things. Some people were upset, but everyone came around, and they'd thank me for pushing them out of their holes. People need to learn how to communicate in groups, but the people who run those groups have to learn how to listen and how to get ideas from people.

And so you literally developed a mechanism where every single person in the company, down to the people working in the mailroom, could pitch an idea directly to the founder.

Everyone who was a senior executive in the company was there. Everybody was there. The whole concept was, “We want to hear from you.” I started the first meeting by saying, “No idea's too dumb. I want to hear everything.” Over my career, some of the greatest ideas I've ever had, I've stolen or appropriated from other people.

As you know, I'm a mega Picasso fan. The guy appropriated everything. One of his most famous sculptures has bull horns, which are handlebars from a bicycle that he saw with a seat welded together.

Didn't he have that quote that Steve Jobs would repeat, that “Good artists copy, great artists steal”? I think that's Picasso, right?

I don't know, but it sounds about right. But Steve Jobs, for example, had a vision about computerized animation that Disney didn't share. They were wrong; he was right. That's it.

You know, it's Barry Diller's famous line, which I will never forget and still use all the time. He competed to buy CBS, I think, or Paramount—I don't remember which one—but Sumner Redstone got both of them somehow. When Barry was asked by the press what he thought after he lost, he looked at them and said, “He won, we lost. Next case.”

That says it all to me. It was so brilliant: “He won, we lost. Next case.” He's right: 6 words. You can't look back.

I am so upset with friends of mine who try to do deals that I consult on, and they make a mistake or lose it, and then they dwell on it. It's dumb. It's not going to change. What are you looking back for? I don't like to look backward. I think you have to always look forward.

There are people who totally disagree with me, but I'm a forward-looking person. If I've made a mistake, God only knows. I think one of the reasons founders talk to me is that I can tell them things they're going to do wrong because I've done it all. I've made every mistake in business you can make. I've had some wins, too, but I've made a lot of mistakes. My goal is to use that to prevent my young people from making further mistakes, because they're all going to be the same.

It's unbelievably valuable if they can learn from other people's experiences. I think that's one of the things I get most out of our conversations.

I also like that you are unapologetically extreme. You don't hide the fact that you are an extreme personality, that you were when you were younger and still are to this day. You just threatened to jump out of the chair and, I think, throttle me—that's the word that you used.

Trying to be polite.

That's really polite.

But I did say I'm too old to do that.

That's fine. I wouldn't even fight back. That's fine. I have too much respect for you. Tell me about this deal that we can talk about. I know you have a few deals going on.

One I can't talk about.

Yeah, exactly. So, tell me about the one that you can't talk about.

Well, it's public. I can say that Bill Ackman and I have been friends for 33 years. We had a discussion about his position in Universal Music. We were kicking it around. He was a large shareholder and was on the board.

I like Lucian Grainge a lot because he's a talent guy. My thesis about all these companies is, if you don't have someone who understands talent running the company, you can always get an operator. If you don't have someone who understands talent, that company is going to die.

Lucian's really good, but Lucian's growing the company geometrically every year, signing every artist. Publishing is great, and the stock keeps going up. It crept down to, like, 10 points under the IPO price, and I said to Bill, “Let's take it private.” He loved the idea.

A number of things occurred. I told him we couldn't do it unless it was friendly, because Bill has done both. Bill's very smart—really smart—and very direct, which is what I like about him, because, as you know, I love your opinions because you tell me what you think.

We did some diligence and met with Lucian to see if he'd be interested if we did do something. We gave him a 41,000-foot overview and made it very clear that a condition precedent to the deal would be his running the show. We would support it. I would become chair and support him, particularly in the tech and AI area, which he's very attuned to but could use some help with.

In his job, there's not enough hours in the day. There just aren't. You think about the amount of time he has to spend internally, externally, with talent, in studios. It's just endless. It's an impossible job. It's so difficult, and he does it brilliantly.

We sent the letter to the board. We did it publicly, so there's no secret. There's nothing nefarious; no one's going behind anybody's back. We put the money terms right on the table. We're very well financed. We made a very handsome offer, and we're waiting for an answer.

So, we talked about the opportunity cost of your time and picking which project to dedicate your attention and resources to. Why did you choose to do this?

I think music is a critical component going forward in the new Internet era, particularly with AI. We've seen it with what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own—even 10 seconds of it—and constructing custom-made songs. Music is never going away.

I think the advent of Daniel Ek's Spotify, which he developed in a garage in Stockholm, Sweden, is a game changer. I think music is at the foundation of so many things that are digitally based, from games to movies, television, AI, and all of the image capturing that's done.

Don't you find it fascinating that on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, for almost everything you see, someone chooses music to go behind it? It's part of our culture worldwide. It's not country by country. There's a common denominator of British and American music around the world.

It's a door opener; it's something everyone can hear and relate to, even if they don't speak the same language. So, I love the idea. I love Bill's financing capability. I love Lucian's management and talent expertise, and I like the fact that I grew up in that business.

My first job was in the music business. I started a music division at CAA that to this day is the tops. I think it's a lot of complementary factors. Whether we get it or not, I have no idea. It's frankly up to 1 shareholder, and that's 1 family that controls 28% of the stock.

What do you think would be the effect of AI beyond the music industry? I talked to Jimmy Iovine about this. I still don't understand. He texted me about this 2 days ago, and I'm reading through this. I still don't understand what he means, so I'll see him when he gets back.

If Universal Music Group has, I think, the largest music category in the world, right? AI is not going anywhere. He said that people are already taking and training new songs based on other people's ownership. Is the idea that the record labels could do that themselves? Or are you saying that's going to be a huge potential future income stream?

I'm not going to say anything about it because I think it's a very difficult problem that right now is under analysis by all the music companies.

Is there anything analogous that you've experienced in other forms of entertainment from the past?

Oh, yeah. I was appointed to a U.S. trade delegation in 1996 by President Clinton. I was a large fundraiser for him. I went to Beijing with 20 businesspeople and President Bush 41 to try to get them to stop pirating videocassette movies and television shows.

The Chinese?

Yes. They were the largest producer of pirated tape in the world. We went over, and I spent a week there. It was a fascinating week. I got to sit with Jiang Zemin, who was the chairman of the party. I guess they don't call him the prime minister.

He was the chairman. Zhu Rongji, who was the brilliant financial former mayor of Shanghai, did all the financial architecture for what you're now seeing—getting China into the 20th century and the 21st century. We had round after round of meetings, and President Bush was incredibly popular there because he had been ambassador to China. He was very well-liked.

You don't have to comment on this if you don't want to, but something just came to mind because I just had a conversation with Ed Catmull, the founder of Pixar. I would have to imagine you and Bill Ackman are doing this because you think AI could be a massive advantage and a tailwind to the music industry.

The reason I bring this up is because, throughout his entire career, Ed's whole goal was to take the latest technology and apply it to storytelling and animation, right? With the stated goal—

He did.

Which he did, obviously, with Toy Story. I have this guy who works with me on my other podcast, Founders. His name is Maxim. He's a young filmmaker. I flew him over from England to go to this recording with Ed Catmull because Maxim wants to make films.

This is one of the best filmmakers of all time, or someone who built one of the best companies that made the best films of all time. Maybe that shocked him. Ed, Maxim, and I were talking before we started recording, and I asked him, “How do you know? He's obviously pro-AI. He's pro-technology.”

He said Ed Catmull was just like Walt Disney. He called Walt Disney a technologist. He's like, “Go through Walt Disney's career. He always embraced the latest technology in service of telling a better story or completing the project in a better way, whatever he was working on.”

I said, “Ed, when do you think we're going to see the first phenomenal, full-length, completely AI-generated movie?” And he's just like, “There's a better question that you're not asking.”

I bring this up because you were best friends with Michael Crichton. He says, “There is a line of demarcation in our industry: pre-Jurassic Park and post-Jurassic Park.” Once Steven Spielberg made Jurassic Park, the entire movie industry was changed forever.

Part of that was obviously CGI—the dinosaurs. He's like, “How many minutes of CGI dinosaurs are in that movie?” I was like, “I don't know. I've seen the movie a million times since I was a kid. Maybe 20.” I think the answer is 4 minutes.

His point was, “You can use the technology; it's powerful even if you use it for a short amount of time.”

No.

It could be 10 seconds in a 3-minute song, or 6 minutes in a 2-hour movie.

When I put Jurassic Park together and read the book, I said a couple of things to Michael. One, it's brilliant and everyone loves dinosaurs. Two, you don't need a big star because the dinosaur's the star, which was important financially. And three, there's only 1 human on the planet who could turn this into a movie, and if he doesn't want to do it, we can't do it. It was Steven.

I sent the book to Steven. He called me the next day and said, “I'm in.”

I believe there are more than 4 minutes. What Steven managed to do was, for the times he used the dinosaurs, make them look real. The biggest fear for that movie was, can you make them look real? Steven said he could do it, and I knew he could do it, and he did it.

Everyone was scared to death that it would look like an early Godzilla movie, where it was just so obvious what it was. Steven integrated the CGI and the actual dinosaur parts that he made and shot. There was a head, there was part of a body—you didn't see the whole thing. He did it brilliantly, but he got them to look really real.

He researched who could do it. They tested and tested and tested, and they got it done.

Why do you think Steven Spielberg was the only person? Was he a singular character?

Steven had the ability to understand the storytelling side, the casting side, and, most importantly, the technical side. In those days, not everybody had that. Remember, that was in the '90s. Not everybody had the ability to use technical things. James Cameron did; Steven did. Not every director could do that.

Was he like a Walt Disney kind of character, too, where, throughout his entire career, he was trying to embrace the latest technology that would help him build something?

Steven knew more about everything. Marty, Steven, and Stanley Kubrick, to me, knew more about film, filmmaking, film history, and respect for film.

I put together a group for film preservation around Marty, and it was Marty, Steven, Sydney Francis Coppola, and Stanley Kubrick, all clients of mine. That's what they were into. They were real, real people about film.

When I go to speak at a film school these days, I get very nervous. I'm particularly nervous around my 24-year-old daughter, Minty, and her friends, who I'm crazy about. When they talk about old movies, it stops at 1990.

I did a film class where I didn't even introduce myself. I had 2 classes merged together, and I was asked to do this. I said, “Does anybody here know David Lean?” No hands. “Anybody here know Frank Capra? Anybody here know William Wyler? Anybody here know Michael Curtiz?” I kept going, too.

Those were movie directors from the '40s, mostly the '40s and '50s, who made some of the greatest films of all time: Lawrence of Arabia, which Spielberg would rewatch every year when he was learning to make films. I still watch it, too.

In fact, one of my best, most cherished gifts from Marty is the original, full-length, uncut version of Lawrence of Arabia on a giant video disc that they stopped making machines for. I thank God I still have one. Do you remember those, the big ones before the little ones came?

No, this is before my time.

Oh, I keep forgetting you're a child.

In any case, there's no respect for the foundation of the film business, in my opinion. It's really interesting. As an art collector, I had dinner the other night with Cecily Brown, who's one of my favorite contemporary artists. She talks about artists of the past with great respect and unbelievable knowledge.

She pointed to an artist for me to look at when we were at dinner the other night. She started talking about Lucian Freud, who's an amazing artist. This artist was influenced by Freud. She knew the whole chain. Most great art is derived from other art, you know?

I have a fantastic Mark Rothko painting at my house. He's an LA artist, a very gifted guy. There are 2 faces in it that are right out of African masks and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

You wouldn't know what you're looking at unless you had the background that comes from all the time and effort you've put into understanding art and all the history of art.

As I said to you before, knowledge is power. I have a room in my house that has probably 25 African antiquities and 3 Picassos, all of which came out of those antiquities.

Between 1850 and 1900, the Catholic missionaries were tossed out of West Africa, Nigeria, which had a whole series of regions of tribal art. They were reliquary figures; they were religious figures. They took them all with them when they were thrown out—to Paris and Brussels.

That's why one of the biggest museums of African art is in Paris, because they came back in the early 1900s. When they ran out of money, they put these masks in little weekend fairs that they had on the river on the Left Bank, and they sold them for 4 or 5 francs.

Picasso bought 50 of them. There are pictures of his studio in Mougins with these masks everywhere. If you look at his early art, all the faces are African masks.

Phil Knight and I tried to do a project to take a portable show to inner cities, to show that relationship as a point of pride in what your culture did. Some of my African art is as good as some of the European art from the same period. It's that good.

Michael, what I love about our conversations is that no matter what I prompt you with, you can come up with these incredible stories, and I never know the direction that we're going to go in. I really appreciate you taking the time and doing this again with me.

I enjoy talking to you, as you know, except when I'm on the plane working.

Thanks. I'll see you again soon.

Okay.