失敗は選択肢にない——CAA共同創業者マイケル・オービッツ

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

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. And

I don't want to put a percentage on because I honestly don't know, but if you asked me off the top of my head, I'd say 90%. Um, it's very hard to have two strong founders that share a singular vision, like you talk about the Michelin brothers, and that have a division of responsibilities. It's very difficult. Um, but Mark and Ben, for example, Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it. And Mark's very comfortable with that. And Mark has phenomenal instincts about uh companies, and so does Ben. Uh, Ben also comes at looking at a business as a guy who's operated multiple businesses and sold businesses. very hard to find leaders who understand principles of business, how to execute them, how to handle people, how to be a leader, how to get along with your co-founder, how to have a intellectual process to support your vision and how to unfold your vision and while you're doing that to be open-minded. That's really difficult. At CA, I spent an enormous amount of time making sure that the executives in the company were stable in their personal lives, their professional lives, not in any order, by the way, in their growth, uh, their profile. You did this through one-on ones with them.

but I'd get in that one day breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, meetings in between. and after dinner, fly back to LA and pick up the time and then make it into the office the next day so I could get what I called a 6- day weekend. I got the idea from my college roommate who gave me as a gift a joke clock which had 25 hours in it and it had a one it had zero through 25.

Yeah. So, I'll tell you a story that I told 500 guests at a party I held for the moment board of trustees at our home at Tomorrow's My Home. uh when David 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 and we invited a lot of people from politics from entertainment and from the museum and gallery world and I told this story cuz David had just passed away and I told it because his son was there. Um I never went to an art museum and you know I love art. Yeah,

You were commenting on the chairs before.

from my directors in the 70s.

with 300 pieces of art hanging. Right.

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

Because it gave me a a sense of drive, ambition, and a goal oriented thinking that any of my friends that didn't grow up like that sort of either it was binary. They either had it or they didn't have it. And most of the time they didn't have it. Um, but some of them did, by the way. But I spent when I was in New York, I had four days and I had all these things mapped out to see I'd done all this homework. I needed to see the village. I wanted to go to Soho. I wanted to go to art galleries. I wanted to go to their 10 museums. I wanted to go to all of them. Of course, I over my appetite's always, you know, bigger than my stomach. Uh, so I went to Mo. I left six hours later and I went back the next day and I went back the third day. It absolutely changed my life. And I then remember sitting in my office at CA and my this is probably 15 16 years later and I'm telling this story and David Rockefeller sitting in the front at the front table at this dinner for 500 people and the phone my assistant buzzes in and says and I had a phone assistant one for incoming and one for outgoing calls. So the incoming assistant said it's Michael Mr. Rockefeller for you. And I didn't skip a beat and I said, "Tell Bill Murray, I'll call him back." Because Bill used to call under different names all the time. And he could get away with it most of the time. So I'm in the middle of something crazy. And Bill would give a name that he knew I had to pick up. And I love the guy to this day. He's one of the greatest human beings on the planet. Um, a guy who I will I will be loyal to till the day I die. Um, for a whole series of reasons which I'm happy to come back to. So, my assistant said, "It's David Rockefeller." I said, "Tell Bill, I'll call him back." She says, "No, I think it really is Mr. Rockefeller. It's his assistant and her name's Mary and she wants you to Mr. Rockefeller is trying to reach you." I said, "Look, it's not David Rockefeller. You know it's Bill. Just get a number. I'll call him back." She said, "Okay."

Because I'm a guy in LA with a beginning art collection basically. No real cultural profile. And this is David Rockefeller. I mean, he's a legend in the world of business and culture. his mother started MoMA. I mean, if you read the book Picasso's War, which is fascinating. I told you about it at dinner. Uh, it talks about the rock about Abby Rockefeller and the women that started MoMA. There were three women that started the museum in the 30s and David grew up around art. I grew up around nothing, you know. It's like I was in the San Frernando Valley and wasteland. One of my favorite parts of your book is that that exact line where you're like I could see the problem is that not only where I grew up and what like you were very aware because you could see where you wanted you knew where you were but you could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. You could see the Brentwood.

Listen I still have those feelings at this stage of my life. Tomorrow and I were talking about this the other night. It happened in New York, not it was a few days around our dinner

How old were you when this is taking place? You had already founded CIA, right?

Okay. So

10 years into CIA or so. Okay.

It's kind of like that famous uh Bruce Lee line about punching without punching, which I've never forgotten because it's simple but apocryphal. And David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum. And 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, his 10,000 index card file because there were no there wasn't a computer. So every time he met someone, if he met David Senra, he put your name and contact on a 3x5 card under S.

Alphabetized. And he was so proud of it. It was in his office. And he said to me, "Nothing about giving money. Not one word." And as we're 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." And I made a donation. Uh that was a lot larger than I thought I would. He never asked me to make a donation. And then I found out later he had that same meeting with every trustee. He didn't ask one for a dime.

This is as good as I've ever seen. And by the way, hard to explain this to because I'm a salesman and

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

Well, Mark's prejudice because I'm crazy about Mark and I consider him family. But I think the idea of having that kind of restraint, I'm not I don't think I could have

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

See, and you're let's say you're 40 at the time. He's 80. This is something

Yeah. We don't need the exact number, but it's it's not like an older brother. It's like a father. No, he took me to um one of the u the White House correspondents dinner in uh Washington. The two of us was one of the greatest nights of my life. I'm You 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.

This knocked my socks off. He knew everyone in the room. And sitting at his table that night was an experience to behold cuz everyone came up to pay their respects to him. And it was such an eyeopening experience. And he was always even and always the same polite guy to everybody, even people that we knew he didn't care for. He had a very, very short attention span for people with no integrity because his integrity was so high. It was like a learning experience for me. But it I got to be pretty good friends with him. every lunch, dinner or outing with him was a a graduate course in something.

It's my it's my thesis about frame of reference. This old saying that people always say as you get older, I wish I knew then what I do now happens to be a thousand% 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 frame of reference. The more frame of reference you have, the more experienced you are to make difficult decisions because you've seen outcomes. I was on the phone last night um with one of my kids on a um personal matter that she was having and I explained that I was thinking about her situation and the benefit that I have that she or the person she's having the problem with doesn't have is that I've seen the movie before.

But your frame of reference from people specifically is very interesting to me because think about how like one of the things I wanted to talk to you about it's okay it it's very obvious like you know I have a few obsessions. One of my obsessions is people that get to the very top of the profession. I don't even care what the profession is. It could be building CIA. It could be a basketball player. It could be a sushi chef. It doesn't matter. I'm obsessed with people that become the best in the world at what they do. And 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, built relationships with countless other people that were also the best in the world at what they did. And I was very curious and you know I kind of study this on founders just like you've met these people you interact with them compete against them I read about them and I was very curious if you could describe the one common trait the one what do you think is the most important common trait for the people that you observe that are best in the world at what they do yourself included.

So, two weeks ago I'm having lunch with a friend of mine at NOBO um and in walks NOU who's my exact age who was when I met him had just opened a sushi bar on Lassi Boulevard called Matsuhisa. And I remember meeting him because I would go sometimes for business or occasionally by myself because the one great lesson I learned very early on going to Japan is the best place in the world to eat if you're alone is at a sushi bar because you can actually not feel uncomfortable doing that. And I met Noble when he was the he was his own he was the chef, the manager, the menu planner. He did. He was just him and two other guys and his wife. That was Nou Stark. Now you look at what Nou's got right now. Nou has an empire. I don't know how many restaurants I got. They're all over the world. He's got hotels. He's got bottled and packaged goods. He's got everything. I would imagine he's got a billion dollar empire. When I met Nou, I took note. I said, "This guy's got something special." I didn't quite know what it was. But several years later, I introduced NOBO to Bob Dairo. And he and Noubo started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nou, not Matsuhisa, which was fascinating that he didn't try to take his personal brand and put it with Bob. He took the his first name. They opened the first Nou in New York in Tribeca, which was no man's land at the time. But Bobby had a hunch because he was developing property in Tribeca and he was a a huge believer when everyone around him was negative and advised him against it and he convinced Nobody opener. It became an instant hit and they have this amazing business right now. I had this hunch about Noo. I had this hunch about Wolf Gang Puck when I met him the first time. He was a in his 20s Austrian guy. I said, "This guy not only is a great chef, but like no, he had a fantastic personality. Why is it I went to out to every meal of my life as an agent for my whole life? I went out every night and every lunch and I picked those two guys frame of reference because I knew in interacting with them they had something special.

No, it's like the general thesis for me and I use it to this day. I use it in my tech investing and have since 1992. I use it in finding clients. I used it in building careers. I used it in making relationships. I'm interested in growth, personal growth. I'm interested in being the best at whatever I get into to the point of it probably not being healthy. I'm interested in excellence. Okay,

I am interested in excellence and will go to almost any end that's not immoral or illegal to achieve it for myself and everyone that's around me. Is it excellence for the sake of excellence? Like what is driving you?

I tell all my AI guys and gals who are all much younger than me except for a couple guys at Stanford that I work with that are professors that are actually I guess they're in their 50s and 60s. Um, there's a thing they call ML, which is machine learning, and I call it ML learning. So, I asked them to explain my version of ML when we're doing a complicated AI deal together. But I have kind of a personal AI that I've created that ticks off all these boxes automatically. I told you when I met you, you're very good at interviewing. You keep a conversation going. You know what to ask. You what you did on tomorrow's book is insane. You read a book and in 50 minutes or 50 60

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

It's not possible unless you have a talent. So my

Yeah, I appreciate that.

The So, I should bring this up. The first time we ever talked and it was just h pure chance is we share a mutual friend in Rick Gerson and I'm having breakfast with Rick and you guys have been friends for like 25 years, right? And me and Rick are real close friends in the last few years and we're at breakfast and his phone's on the table and it rings and I'm like, "Oh that's Michael Oitz." Like, you know, cuz I'd read your book already. Like I obviously knew who you were, but we had never spoken. And then he he picks it up on speakerphone and Rick's been hugely supportive and he tries to like push my podcast on everybody in the world and he's very successful doing so. And then he goes, "Hey, I'm sitting here with you might know who he is. His name's David Center. He does this podcast called Founders. There's a there's and you were on your boat in St. Barts I think and uh there's like a brief pause. He goes I listened to four of them yesterday and you start rattling off the one you corny as Vanderbilt and everything else. I heard you talk with our mutual friend Patrick about this where you're like hey I like collecting art and people I have a frame of reference because I've met so many people. The more people you meet the more you can the more benchmark you have to compare people to. So when you met Nou so when I hear this it almost sounds like it happens like automatically. just a part of your brain where it's like

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

his actual work,

Yeah.

And this is happening in like a strip mall. No, no, he was on Los Saniago Boulevard in an old uh restaurant, an old building.

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

Well, here this out. He filled the room.

He filled the room. When you were there, you knew it was his place. You knew he was a sensei. You knew he was the master chef. You wanted to sit in front of him. those four coveted seats. You wanted to talk to him cuz he was interesting. He had it all. Wolf Gang Puck saw him at the at uh his first restaurant in the United States. He was in his 20s. He was the chef at Mame Zone, which is no longer in existence. That only Hollywood could endorse. plastic patio furniture in a parking lot with a kitchen in a one-bedroom apartment at the back of it.

Yeah. I Wolf Gang

Wolf Gang would walk out, go table to table and you fell in love with this guy's like his charisma energy,

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

and the next day he called me and he said, "I can't thank you enough." It was the most extraordinary dinner. He said, "I have a slight recollection that I signed something. What did I sign?" I said, "Oh, you signed a contract to put Wolf on our chef that you met the little Austrian guy who was so cute to put him 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 and you take a look and then you call me and tell me if you made a contract or not." So, we take the napkin and pin it to someone's shirt. Okay? Put a sport coat on him, arrange with the president of ABC's assistant to walk him right into the office. He walks in, the guy looks at him. He opens his coat. It was all in huge print. And he sees his signature. My guy closes his coat and runs out the door. And I get a my phone rings 10 seconds later. He said, "I guess I signed a deal, didn't I?" And he put him on and he's still on. The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com. I feel like you operate much more on intuition. like you you spend an an enormous amount of time like preparing like one of my favorite stories in your book and I try to do the exact same thing in in my career. It's like, okay, I'm going to start in the the mail room. Well, guess what? I'm going to go down to the file cabinets, this 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. Then I'm going to go back there at night and and keep reading. I'm going to work my way through in a very Rockefelleresque way of just like plowing a field till I get to the end. And then they use this enormous research and base of knowledge you have and then you combine it with these experiments and the the the frame of reference that we just talked about. And then when you make decisions, it's almost like it's not even analytical. It's like 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 two together. Let's go ahead and just write this out on a napkin. Like there is almost no time to analyze. Am I getting this wrong?

there's no choice. So I either became more knowledgeable than the 20 other uh they were all men. No. Yeah. It was all men in that pledge class. And that they did a like three two times a year they started a a group in the mail room of like 20 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 UCLA in three years while working at Fox 60 hours a week loving every second of it. drop out of premed to finish degrees in psychology and business. Look for the job that I think can educate me the fastest in a business that's all about nepotism and relationship and I don't have any. How do I distinguish myself differently from the 20 or 25 other pledges in what I call the pledge class? Because that's what we were. And it became pretty simply apparent to me very quickly. Everyone showed up exactly what time they were told to, which was 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 to 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 gonna 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 you share everything with everybody. And I learned that by not sharing, all these other people got killed by me. And if I'm running a business and those people are all working for me, I needed to do the opposite. I needed to include everybody in everything. Have tons of meetings, tons of sharing, no egos, no politics. Everybody has to pull for the larger boat. You can't be in your own rowboat. You got to be on the big boat and you got to make sure it's all moving.

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

Well, there were several people, David, there 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 um I was in a competitive environment in a competitive business William Morris and a competitive um arena which is the entertainment business. It's doggy dog and it been like that since it started. It never changed. I read everything, got my hands on about the golden years of the movie business and I used it for CA when we started in 1974. I made up a bibliography and here's the books you need. I have used

Every one of us that were working together.

And our group knew history. And the reason that became important and everyone thought, "Oh, who cares is cuz when you start talking to filmmakers in those days and they start talking about Frank Capra or David Lean or Howard Hawks or Willie Wiler or Michael Curtis 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.

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

You had to cuz like you wouldn't have read all that.

What?

And that changed my life.

Yeah. Tamara,

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

It doesn't It doesn't matter. to me it's like I don't really even care what is the source of your obsession. I just like that you're obsessed with something and you go deep on there. I do have a um what I would say kind of a selfish question for you. So I was listening to Michael Dell on a podcast and he's got great energy and the the the interviewer was asking like well when you were starting Dell like how many hours did you work and he goes all of them. And then I read Jensen Wong's biography and he's like, "Listen, there's not a day that goes by that I don't work. Uh when I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me." In your book, you had this line that when you were building your company that every waking hour was a working hour, which is a great line. So I see this reappear over and over again like, you know, we're absolutely obsessed with what we're doing. So it's really hard to pull us away from from what we love to do. But there is something that I want to ask you selfishly. You also say that if you could have worked 10% less, it wouldn't have made a difference in your professional success, but you would have been a lot happier. So, how should I be thinking about the contrast between these two statements?

He wouldn't put us together. He wanted to be the one to do it.

To me, that's a that's working too though. It's like professional research, you know, like think about your your when you're William Morris, the two and a half hours you get there at 6:30 in the morning, you're doing all your reading, you're working a full day and then you're doing it again. To me, those two the book ends to your day is just a form of professional research, which also could be

You didn't have it at the time you were building CA but do you have that? Did you have it after and do you have it now?

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

methodical. I think if I made an enemy of you, you'd wake up every day. 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.

tell you people that 30 years earlier did something I didn't think was right. I'm a big um believer in people need to have integrity and they need to keep their word. And the reason is when we were starting CA and we had no money, nothing. We didn't even have a lawyer. So we were making tens of hundreds of deals with no contracts. So people had to keep their word, David. And it was very tough when you had no leverage and someone didn't keep their word. And unfortunately in the entertainment business there's kind of a gradation of lying. The most lies in the 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 like

It's a dirty business. Um brilliant business and tough to do. But like I I'm friends with a guy I have the so much respect for, Lucian Grange. 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. You could count on two hands the number of people in my day that 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 c f fabricate a story and set up a roose. And what we started at CA which was so simple everyone says oh it's so revolutionary. No lying. If you don't have an answer if David Senra calls you and he asks you a question and you do not have an answer here's your answer. I don't know. I'm 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 no. My point of view was why do that? Then you got to remember something is that's a story that you made up. And it's so easy to trap people that lie because they never get the story right twice. And we took notes on everything. Adnauseium. Everybody took notes on everything. Every staff meeting we had that we had a scribe taking notes for followup. Follow-up was the key to everything. You didn't even have to be smart. You had to have good followup. if you followed up, it kind of gave that extra point on the smart side of the scale. So for me, it's all about truth. It's all about transparency. I was on the phone this morning. I I got on the phone 6:30 this morning working on a deal I'm putting together. the guy that gave us the idea who is in another company and is not the head guy at the company. He's number three. There's a founder, a CEO, and this guy who's the COO. The COO is younger, half the age of the founder and really bright. Came up with an idea. told my young partner, who you know who's 32, which I partnered with intentionally because I wanted a young partner, period, and called him, gave him an idea. My partner immediately put him with me. I spent an hour with him 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 and then I called the guy who started it this morning at 6:30 in the morning. He's on the East Coast to give 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.

Relentless. And I made the extra call and my partner, my young partner, saw all this unfold and fell right in step with it and handled it brilliantly. That's makes me feel fantastic. Fantastic. because he's going to be here long after me and he carries on the torch. You know, look, the guys that I left CA to, some of them I get along with great. Some of them don't like me and I understand that because they'd like me to have died because my shadow hung over them and we always want to kill the father and I get it. At the end of the day, I 50 years later, I think I did something right because the place is still functioning and it's still number one, still has the biggest market share, and it's still the most influential company.

five decades now.

And he was kind of absent-minded and stopped.

He wrote multiple successful technological roads when the boats became

and now I got to get rid of it

Yeah. But you didn't know if it worked.

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

Which sounds pretty simple.

But here's the point of your story. To me, only me. This shows you me, which as opposed to anyone else. And I don't know who else would think this. Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't. I don't really care. Here's a guy who had foresight, commitment, and courage. He wasn't afraid. Fear is the killer and enemy of business. Fear is the thing that kills business. And we had a period in this country where people were scared to death to do things. Every single time I had an idea, I told this story to somebody yesterday. Uh at a at a meeting I was at, every idea I ever had or developed that someone else gave me, somebody told me it wouldn't work. that and gave me all the articulated 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 star.

All of them.

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

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

Well, but I'd been going to meet them because they were dominating industry in the 80s. If you recall, they were making all the gadgets and I was fascinated by Akio Marita and I read his biography

It's unbelievable.

in 1951 starting in when the war wounds were still fresh. If you lost someone in the Batan Death March or in World War II to a Japanese soldier or a German soldier, you didn't forget it by 1950. Ako Marita moved his entire family to New York City.

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 I wanted to talk about when we were at dinner and I forgot because I just finished rereading his book and one of the most remarkable things in the book is you know remember Akio uh came from he was his family had a saki a family saki business 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 uh interested in this. I'm obsessed with electronics. He was he was into physics. He was in engineering. He loved technology. And him and his co-founder go and meet his dad. And they're like, "Hey." And he's like, "I really think if it would be okay with you, your son comes and helps me build this company. It's going to turn into Sony." And what was remarkable about this is his dad's like, "Well, I had a plan for my son's life, but go and he tells his son, but go do what you're going to do because I if I know you, you're going to do what you want to do anyways." very wise man

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 just I'll never forget to this day. The man who became his number two was named Noria Oga. And Noria Oga, I said to Mr. Morita at dinner, can 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 realtore tape recorder. You know this story?

Oga was in college.

and he eventually becomes president. Ao said something very fascinating. And he's like, "Listen, just like a ba ballet dancer needs a mirror, right? We needed an oral mirror where this guy had a refined sense of music and hearing that I lacked." And so instead of being, "Oh, upset like you're trashing the product that I made." He took the 10-page document like, "Oh, this is these are actually good ideas. We need to work."

Oh wow. So, I would go visit them at night because I'd finish working in New York at usually about 9 because that's 6:00 in LA, sometimes 9:30, and I'd always have dinner at around 10:00 and unless I had a client dinner, which was always at 8. And then I'd go see Marty and he'd every night watches a movie every single night. And sometimes if I didn't get dinner, I'd bring takeout food upstairs and listen to him and ask him questions. And it was like taking a master's degree in film. And it's where I learned he knew every old director. I mean, every director he respected. I learned about a guy like Michael Powell who did the Red Shoes and how no one knows about that movie to this day. And it was the most influential director on Marty imaginable. And I learned to be able to talk to Stanley Kubri. He never had an agent except me. And I could talk to him because Marty basically educated me. And I did a lot of reading and I knew about those old directors. And 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. bought dozens of them so our agents could just look through the pictures. I bought a book, I'll never forget, the history of the Emmys and it listed, this is precomputer, all the Emmy Awards from the first Emmy broadcast. 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. Now, they didn't have to watch every bit of it because some of them were really slow, but they got familiar with who were these actors, who's Gary Cooper, who's Robert Mitchum, who's Lana Turner, who are these people, and what did they contribute? And by doing that, our people were so fluent in their business. They could talk television, they could talk movies, they could talk music. They they knew history because past is prologue. If you know history, you pretty much can predict the future.

By the way, they were and he wasn't

And so his point was he goes, "We're not going to be this is the genius thing that he did. We're not gonna make Sony known for high quality products. We're gonna make Japan known for high quality products.

Yeah. You can't move the Your point was like you can't move the studio. I got criticized cover of Newsweek when I sold u uh Columbia pictures to Mr. Marita which was part of the strategy cuz I had sold him uh with Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman because he was on the board and Steve had just started Blackstone and was brilliant and we sold uh Colombia Records to Sony first which paved the way for Colombia Studios. It was CBS records actually, not Colombia. And for me, it served multiple purposes. Uh, one, it kept these legacy businesses right where they needed to be. Two, Japan was cheap financing cuz they had cheap money and tons of it. And three, having a 75% market share of the talent for me wasn't enough, which people thought I was crazy because no one had ever gotten over 25. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world.

And to me, I missed because I wanted 50 because it gave me even more leverage for our clients. But I wanted the leverage with the buyer, too. So if I sold the studio to a Japanese company that no one had a relationship but me and my staff, then CA moved another notch up in the ecosystem. So by the time we got done, we had sold Colombia, Universal, got financing for Warers where they were in trouble when Steve Ross was alive and sold MGM and saved it when the accountants wanted to plow it under. And 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 un we understood culture. That was our job. Why did I look at these magazines? I want to understand culture. Why did I read? Why did I collect art? When I started collecting art, people thought I was crazy except the directors. When the directors came for dinner, they were mesmerized by the art. And why? Because you take, as I said, that David Lynch, who I did a show for, Tim Burton, we did an art show, or Marty Scorsesei, we did an art show in New York. take some of the frames out of their movies and make them, reproduce them, mount them, frame them in an art frame and hang them on a museum wall. You have a piece of art. It's just different source.

Yes. And it's the same thing. Common denominator. People don't see past their nose. So what we try to do is train people to look further out. How do you get to the next step? Why did we do advertising? One, because I thought we could do it. Two, we had a better idea, which we did. Three, all our clients had downtime. So everyone said, "Oh, movie directors don't do advertising." Well, that's complete utter nonsense. They want to make money when they're not doing anything and they get to work 5 days and make a million dollars. So they all did it and all the other agents that criticized us looked just pitifully stupid because they not only did it, they enjoyed it. Ko was doing six commercials a year for the same budget. We did 35 for the same budget and we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song and we changed their their uh saying for the time which was always coke is what we came up with. Quincy did a theme song in six beats. He did it in urban, he did it in rural, he I mean in city, he did it in country and western. He did it in classical and we used it all over the world.

No, no, they sent me a check for a commercial we did. We did a black and white commercial. A guy who just passed away named Len Frink who I stole from Jay Shy who was a genius advertising guy in LA. shy at day. They were amazing. And what did I do? I reviewed who was amazing. I found the guy and I went and

But they send you a check.

Okay.

Yeah, you that was one of your deals like you're not going to you're not going to charge more than

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 got to pay us." And 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 what they wanted to pay you and what you eventually were valuing your own work at?

So how do you get them from and

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

which is also your mentor Herb Allen the second right

yourself."

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.

Well, I make bad decisions on a regular basis. I mean, they

Well, consequential is a different story. I mean, I made some I made some bad decisions in parts of my career where I could have done things differently. It's a whole another podcast. But, uh, you know, it's interesting. Patrick Collinsson, who I have amazing respect for. I got a call from him when my book six months after my book came out, three months, I don't remember. I was in I lived in San Francisco. He said, "What are you doing for lunch this week?" And we made a lunch date. I went to the office. I sat down with my tray in his commissary. My book sitting right there with like 90 or 100 post yellow postits in it.

And I said, "You know this story?"

And I said, I walked out of there with such respect for this guy that he took that time to do that in a business that has nothing to do with his, but everything to do with it. Because as you and I said at dinner, every single business has the same parameters. When we talked earlier when we started this discussion, I talked about how I was aware of what people that worked for me or with me because I called everyone a partner no matter what their interest in the business was. I called mail room people partners. I would go around and do the rounds. The rounds I learned from being involved with the UCLA Medical Center. I was a doctor. And at 10:30 and 4:30, I went around the building and took me 20 minutes and I looked in people's offices and if I saw a weird face or a weird voice inflection when they said hello or anything that tipped me off, I asked them to come see me. I had an open door from 7 to 7:45 every night before I went to dinner. I asked them to come see me. And 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 CA. Not one.

Well, people we 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. And we set our we elevated ourselves to a position, treat us nicely, and our clients will in turn do the things you need them to do. You'll pay them for it by the way, and you'll probably pay them more than you're going to pay through other agencies. Listen, when Mike Nichols, when I signed Mike Nichols from he was one of the last people we took from ICM and his agent, he'd been with him for 25 years. Mike Nichols Price because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levenson, Ron Howard, Stanley Cubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody. his price 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, um we demanded for the AAA clients AAA pricing and you couldn't price one less than the other.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I also did what I told you personally. Volume coke. Why did I do 35 commercials instead of six? Easier to do six.

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

I wrote about this in my book. This self-confidence appeared when I lost the ninth grade election for class president. And I did a complete 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 and it was an it was a apocryphal moment for me and I worked for two years to build different social con constituency and I went out of my way to make different friends in different areas of the I had a 3,800 kid high school so running for an office there was a big deal cuz everybody voted and you had to speak to the entire school in three different assemblies cuz that's all they could get into the gym. And it was critical. I practiced public speaking when I was in the 10th grade and 11th grade. And I won student body vice president, then I won student body president by wide margins because I really worked it. No different than I worked any business I've been in. And I realized, and I said this to someone this morning on this call about this deal I'm doing, the young guy who's the number three who started it said to me, I've never seen anyone move so fast from idea to execution of putting it together. And I said, cuz if you move slow, it doesn't go together. And he said, you seem very confident about this idea. And I said, "Yes, I'm very confident about it because I see it crystal clear in its entirety." And I he said, "I'm not sure that our you know that I'm confident about you meeting our founder because you've probably heard a lot of nasty things about him." I said, "I've heard a ton of things, some good, some bad, but I really don't care." And he said, 'Why do you not care?' I said, 'Because I'll make my own judgment.' I said, 'I'm very good with people. I will know if what I've heard is true, false, or just bologoney. And I said, frankly, if you want to know the truth over my career, if you believed everything everyone said, I'd be a miserable failure and drumed out of life. You know, because anyone who is confident, aggressive, has ideas, wants to push the envelope is put down.

Yeah, that's a great line.

I want to ask you a question because you've mentioned a few times where your appetite is essentially insatiable. So you had, you know, 46 out of the top 50 highest grossing film uh like 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 like 1957. It's called The Mind of Napoleon.

there's something that when when I hear you speak reminds me Napoleon where he said you know essentially his ambition grew with his success and he says it in French but it you can the translation is appetite comes with eating you know 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 But that's 100% accurate. Listen, I one of my clients went crazy about, Francis Ford Copel wrote a screenplay that one of my clients that I was also crazy about who passed away named Franklin J. Shaft directed. It was called Patton. I am a voracious reader on anything about military leaders. I've read about Patton. I've read about Omar Bradley. I've read about Dwight D. Eisenhower as military leaders. Blows my mind when everyone said to Patton, "You can't do this." He said, "Okay." 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? Cuz he was a leader and he had guts and he wasn't afraid. and people couldn't stand him. Not his people though. Not his people. So for me, if my people support me, I'm fine. What other people say, I don't really care. I don't think about it. I get asked this question every single day of my life. I am tomorrow calls me the truth teller because I say the truth. I said it to you. I gave you my best advice of what I thought you should do. I may not be right. No, you

But that's to just push you.

That's the only talent I have. That's

No I I have the ability to think out of the box on any business which is creative. No, not going to argue with you. I have the ability to think out of the box on any business. Even though if I don't know the business because I have this thesis and I've said it a hundred times to you and to everybody else, every business the same.

He's remarkable person. He started his company 18. He's in his 60s. Has no desire at all. But that's, you know, he had to paper out, too. But he and but he figured out this crazy in his own way of how to maximize how many subscriptions he could sell. And he realized that if you were either there's two people that bought uh newspaper subscriptions in Texas, Texas has a much higher rate than the general population, which is newlyweds and people that moved. And so he's like, "Hey, all that information is public in Texas." He went down to the courthouse, brought a computer, right? his his Apple 2 computer and he just had them pull give me a list of all the people that are married just recently married and all the people recently moved just like that doing that at 12 he was 12 years old

skiing."

I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things uh there's one of my favorite lines. So you know this like I take every book I read, right? I try to distill it down to like the 10 most important sentences in the book and one of them for you was this completely I strip it of all of context because I think if you just read the sentence you'll understand why the sentence is important. So I'm not even talking about what's happening in the book but this is the sentence I wrote down. He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop. It's one of my 10 favorite senses in your book. My question to you is how much of your success do you attribute to just pure endurance or pure perseverance?

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

About money. It's about a whole series of other things. And when you grow up in the San Franando Valley and your father makes about 300 bucks a week on a good week and you don't get any allowance and you have to have a paper out at 9 to be able to go buy an ice cream and you're also saving for a car cuz when you're 16, you know, your dad can't afford it. Um, failure is not an option. It's binary. There's no option. Success or death. It's like what are you going to do? It's it's you don't have any choice. I don't want to go back to the valley. This the most scary thought of my life.

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 I like to get into new things. So when did your your motivation come from I'm obsessed with this, I love this. Because at the beginning it was I don't want to be a loser.

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

Why?

Let's go to New York in one second. But this it went from I this can't be my life is like the way I describe this can't be my life is a very powerful motivator in 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 like in inspired every day. I want to like create new things. So when did that switch in your life happen though? When did it come from like almost like a negative uh motivation to a positive one?

I don't even know if it's confidence. It's just like your your source of your inner this inner desire to win this burning desire to 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. Now eventually that drives you so much that you it almost I would say caused of a lot of people's success. Now you're not you're not worried about ever going back to the valley and now you've trans the source of your motivation and your drive every day is like oh I just like I'm a

yeah,

It doesn't sound silly nor stupid to me at all. I I keep saying this over and over again. I feel I just tell the same story every week because the same personality type just reappears over and over again throughout history. This entrepreneurial superdriven type A personality type. Obviously you have it. I think I have it as well. And it's it it's separated by time in which they lived. They live in different parts of the world. they uh work in different industries and yet that same personality type. It's the same way I feel. I just uh my my older brother called me and you know it's like very hard to get time with me because I work seven days a week like my eyes are open. I'm thinking about work and he's just like why are you working so hard and I was like it's like look up and down our family tree. He's like nothing but losers on both sides and what I feel I'm doing is it makes no it's not logical.

Yeah, that's the first thing you said to me when we sat down.

I So the Again, a lot of these questions are selfish cuz I I use this format to like learn directly from you. One of my favorite things obviously we spend summers in in Malibu. When you're in Malibu for July 4th is very important holiday to me. My dad's a Cuban immigrant. I'm, you know, hugely pro- capitalistic and hugely pro-American and you can't do um fireworks here because of all the fires. So, I try to figure out a way to celebrate America during July 4th for my daughter. And so, what I do is like at first I made her do this and now she does her own. I made her uh watch Hamilton the musical on like Disney Plus. And there's a there's a now she'll like she knows all the songs and she went to go see it on Broadway and she likes the soundtrack and everything else. But one of my favorite probably my there's two two of my favorite songs in Hamilton. It's like one of them is non-stop which talks about volume which mean you talk about over and over again just the guy just wouldn't stop. He wouldn't stop writing. If he's awake, he's writing. He's trying to get his ideas out there. But the other thing is just the fact that he understood as, you know, same situation. Poor orphan kid comes to America. He's like, didn't matter. He's the right hand of George Washington. He's the first Treasury Secretary. He he's was impossible to satiate. It was impossible. What he understood about himself is like, I will never be satisfied. I 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 there is even that even registers with you. It's like you will never be satisfied. You don't look at it as there's like there's no end to your ambition or the what you want to do in this world.

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 adviser to people. I don't get paid for being an adviser. You didn't pay me for having dinner with you. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I paid for dinner.

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

Okay. So, I'm going to change gears about what we were talking about real quick because there's one thing on the list that I absolutely have to uh get to and I want to get to. This is probably the last thing we talked about. I want you to tell me about we talked a lot about people that have a lot of charisma, a lot of intelligence. I loved what you wrote in your book about your friendship, your deep friendship, your life. You sounds like multiple decade friendship with Michael Craig.

What can you tell me about your relationship with Michael?

What happened?

Yeah. I had all my writers and we had 400 of them had different work ethic and different schedules. So James Clell who wrote Chauvin in Taipan um he would write every day from 7 in the morning till 12:30 hell or high water 6 days a week. And at 12:30 he went to lunch and he didn't work until the next morning and he did 10 pages a day. That's what he did. So you could almost tell when he was going to be done and his books ran about 1,200 pages. Michael hated writing. He rather do thinking and he waited for deadlines and he wrote Jurassic Park in five months because he wrote 20 hours a day, 6 days, 7 days a week cuz it was due and he just waited.

From him? Oh, unequivocally curiosity about everything. guy was curious about everything every day of his life and uh loyalty, integrity, how to create things out of nothing. What a what a mind that can think forward and backward. So in other words, he did movies like The Great Train Robbery 18 1850s with Shan Connory and movies like Andromeda Strain about the future and his thought process and then straight popcorn entertainment based on science that really isn't science. Jurassic Park. But when you read the book, the first third of the book, you're being educated without you knowing about paleontology. and you actually think you understand it and that you have a PhD in it. It was genius. What do you do? So then when you it gets a when the movie breaks loose, you actually think you understand what you're saying. It's amazing. He was a genius.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody.