#382 Who Is Michael Ovitz?: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood

24:51You're investing in your life. I despise the mailroom, but I fell in love with the world it served. Working for William Morris was a means to an end. Even then, you know, I think, you know, entrepreneurs for a large percentage of them, founders is like you were like this from birth. Right. And so this this this kid is 19 year old kid making no money working in a mailroom and just realized, you know, he already knew that he was going to start his company one day. He's like, I aspired to build my own company someday. And so I told you before in the past, one of my favorite talks is this talk on YouTube.

25:26It's by Bill Gurley. It's called Running Down a Dream, How to Survive and Thrive in a Career You Love. And one of the quotes, there's a bunch of great quotes in there. And he's talking about, you know, how these, you know, people achieve great things, like how they went about doing it. And he has a line in there that I think of all the time. He says, hone your craft constantly. It's extremely important to be obsessive about understanding everything you possibly can about your craft. Consider it an obligation. Hold yourself accountable. Keep learning over time. Study the history and know the pioneers.

25:52And his whole point is like, you don't have to be a genius, right? You can just go out and collect more information than anybody else does. And considering that you have the internet, you have no excuse not to make yourself a world expert in whatever field that you happen to be interested in. And Ovitz does this when he's a kid. Listen to what he does. So remember, there's no computers. We're in the 70s. So it says we had a file room. Everything that you need to know about the history of this place and the history of Hollywood is in a paper folder. So he said we had a file room the length of a basketball court.

26:23It was lined with steel cabinets, which were, he calls it, the hard drives of that era. They were all packed with 70 years worth of manila folders. I viewed those files as an encyclopedia of entertainment. I helped the woman who ran the file room, Mary. So he starts, he's agenting her, essentially. I bought her little gifts, a box of candy, a scarf. One day I said, hey, you know, I'd really love to read some of those files. She told me to make myself at home. Within a week, she was letting me stay on after she left. Then she gave me a key. While other trainees waited to be told what to do and read and learn, I entered Mary's domain each morning at seven and every evening after work.

26:59For weeks, I made my way from A to Z through the client files and the network and studio deals. I jotted down questions for Sam Sachs, the head of television's legal affairs, who is charmed by my interest and lent me a tape of a talk he gave at USC on contract law in entertainment. I watched it at home. Then I came back the next day with more questions. He gave me nine more tapes. This is also really important because the legal office is adjacent to the first floor executives. Sam Weisbord, who was the head of television worldwide and the top Morris executive in LA, passed it on his way to dinner and again when he returned.

27:37There's a lot of these people in the book that are like creatures of habit. And Ovitz will just watch you and he'll observe you. And then he realizes, okay, this guy does the same thing every day. He's going to leave the office at 630. Everybody else leaves at seven. He's going to come back a few hours later and work another, I think he works like, what did it say? Three hours. So it says the office was empty until Sam returned for dinner for another three hours to finish up. So what do you think a young Ovitz does? I planted myself at a cubicle where he could not help but notice me spreading out my files so he would see them.

28:09A week later, around 9 p .m., no one else is there. He says, can you do me a favor? We were the only two in the building. In fact, Ovis is going to wind up having this fight with David Geffen, and then they reconcile later in the book. If you read David Geffen's biography, he does this exact same thing. Exactly. Starts in the mailroom, figures a way to get a bunch of one -on -one time with the top executive, and then does whatever he needs for that person. So starting three months after my start date at William Morris, I became Sam Weisborg's guy. I worked as his after hours assistant without being asked or paid.

28:47I never went by his office without ducking my head in to see what he might need. So he says service organizations live or die by time management. I lined up all the memos on Sam's desk by priority. So he's organizing his workflow. Then he would do very humble things. It's like, I'm not, I don't have an ego attached here. I'm going to serve you in any way possible. I would keep his refrigerator stock. I would call stockbrokers and ask for tips on stocks that Sam should buy or sell. In short, I made myself indispensable. And then the book is full of lines. I don't think need any further explanation.

29:19He says, I didn't want to be standard in any way. So he develops a bunch of relationships with all the young agents of William Morris. And they're looking around and they're like, these guys are old and soft and lazy. And we are young and energetic and hungry. and they begin to ask themselves, what if guys like Ron and me had more of a say? And then that leads them to further questioning. He's like, well, what if we could run a company on our own? And so they're going to wind up leading a revolt and they're going to leave William Morris and they're going to start CAA. And keep in mind, and part of it is because they were also underpaid.

29:57This is a big mistake. I think it's come up on a bunch of the podcasts recently. it's like overpay for talent because it's it's it's almost impossible to overpay for talent and in this case in 1973 um ovates brings in two million dollars for the firm and they pay him 400 bucks a week and they're like oh you did a great job thanks for that two million here's a 7500 bonus so they're working way harder they're making a ton of money for the old you know soft people and they're not getting compensated so what do you think's gonna happen this is human nature is like screw you guys i'm gonna do this on my own so they're having uh him and ron are having dinner and they're really starting to have discussions like why don't we go into business for ourselves we'll make more money we'll have more control and the guy that ovates was helping the sam weisberg was next in line for the presidency so ovates has like well i could stay it like what if i i might want to stay here because i'll be me i can be maybe the number two guy to the guy running the company and here's the thing that that ovates will repeat over and over again in the book And it's obvious if you read the book and you talk to him, he's just not meant to be a number two.

31:01And so they're having this conversation with him and his future co -founder, Ron. And he's like, well, I had more to gain by staying than Ron and more to lose by leaving. And says, seeing me hesitate, Ron said, you have no gamble in you. Sometimes you have to step up and roll the dice. That got me thinking. I was 27. If we busted in three years, I could land a new job and start over. So even though they don't have a bunch of money, they get together. I think there's five of them. And they're going to start CAA. And they lay out. So Obitz from the very beginning lays out a bunch of points that he thinks is very important.

31:34One, we should all have even equity. Two, we need to get big fast. Three, we need to share all of our clients and serve them as a group. No, he didn't want any turf wars. He didn't want any silos. There would be at other agencies, all the agents kind of work for one agency, but they really work for themselves. And he's like, we need to, that causes all kinds of internal conflict. In fact, you know, I had a strange thought when I got to this part about, hey, no turf wars, no silos. We're going to serve them as a group. I'm thinking about doing an episode. I read a biography on Genghis Khan. I've watched a bunch of documentaries and a bunch of podcasts on him.

32:08And so I might do that. But one of the things that Genghis Khan, he was a really brilliant creator of states and management structures. And one thing that he would do over and over again that you see is he was really important to him to reduce internal conflict. And so even if something, even if there was like a practice that was something going on in a culture for a long period of time, like they would kidnap your enemy's women, for example, he would outlaw that because his whole point was just like, well, you kidnap somebody else's, you know, family member, they're going to seek retribution.

32:39And then when they get retribution, their family members are going to seek retribution. And there's going to be retribution from retribution to retribution. And so like we're going to outlaw this because we need to reduce internal conflict. And so that was like one of Khan's major principles, like reduce internal conflict. You see the same thing right at the get go with Ovitz. Number four, tell the truth. So this is something I talked to him at dinner about. He really values friends that tell the truth, his friends that are able to tell the truth. Obviously, he's famous and well -known. If you want, you could build people around you and you'll never hear anything bad.

33:15And I think a lot of people make the mistake of doing that. the great founders that we've seen over and over again in history, Sam Walton, Jim Casey, Steve Jobs, they want to be told the truth. They respect you more if you push back at them. And I think the bad founders or the bad executives just surround themselves with sycophants. And then that may work for a little bit, but it always ends terribly. So number four, tell the truth. And number five, this is really one of the most innovative things that Ovitz does is he's going to create opportunities, not just wait around for it. So other agents, they'd field offers.

33:48And he's like, why are we just fielding offers? Like, why aren't we the ones creating opportunities and then going on and try to sell them on behalf of our clients? And they really like differentiate themselves around that idea. Like, we're going to come up with ideas and we're going to put that together for you. And like, we're essentially going to serve you. And he actually recruits a lot of clients. He starts working for people that he wants to be clients that have never signed with them. And what he'll do is he'll just bring them a great opportunity. And then that leads them. He comes to them with an opportunity.

34:18They're like, this opportunity is great. Great. Do you want me to represent you? That's a much easier sell. So we see that CAA has very humble beginnings. They're in debt. They wind up putting up homes as collateral. And it says CAA was a prototypical startup. We bought them folding chairs and card tables for desks. And our wives each came in one day a week to answer the phones. We had one assistant, a bookkeeper. And right away, they have to deal with one, everybody around them doubting them. You're not going to succeed. The people that stayed at William Morris said, hey, just so you know, we have like a bet at the office that you guys are going to be out of business within six months.

34:52And then they, they WMA threatens a lawsuit and tries to destroy CAA before they get going. And so this is Ovitz's response. And they were terrified. You know, they're, they're, they're late twenties and they They get this letter from one of the most powerful attorneys in Hollywood saying, you know, essentially we're going to just crush you. And Ovis' response here is fascinating. He goes, my one play, A Long Shot, was try to intimidate my old boss. From working for Sam, I knew the Department of Justice was probing William Morris for monopolistic practices. So he calls up the attorney, okay? He goes, I rang up Leon Kaplan.

35:30He sounded arrogant. And why not? He pegged CAA as weak, broke, and defenseless. Mr. Kaplan, I said, we haven't met, but I know who you represent. I think you're trying to put us out of business, and I think it's inappropriate and unfair, and it could be really interesting if this went to the Justice Department in the middle of their antitrust investigation. My tone was firm, but matter of a fact. I continued, you can rip up this letter, and we can all be friends and forget about it. Or you can pursue it, and I will call a pal of mine who works at Justice, the Justice Department. And I'll ask him to throw this in the hopper and we'll see how this sorts out.

36:06And so the lawyer and WMA back off. And I think it's probably obvious, but like Ovis didn't have a friend in the Justice Department. He was bluffing. But this is the punchline, the important part. That day forged our siege mentality. To defend our tiny position, we unleashed hell on anyone who crossed us. For the rest of my time at CAA, I was a great friend and ally, but an implacable foe. When you're 28 years old and you've quit your job and there's no going back and then the industry leader tries to smother your baby in its cradle you steal up pretty fast kaplan's letter taught us to play hardball and hardball we would play for the next 20 years so when you're not making any money you don't have a lot of money you're in debt what what option do you have in your startup there's one option you got to get to the money fast or you're going to die and so what they do is they go to kind of the so there's like a there's like a films and movies is obviously, you know, the most prestigious aspect of the business, uh, can be the most lucrative, but they start in TV, which was, you know, way less prestigious because it pays really fast.

37:09It's actually really, really interesting. Needing clients fast to pay rent. We focus on TV writers and actors, two reliable sources of income in TV. The talent got paid every Thursday. So the agents did too. Then he talks about what he was like at 28. He's like this today. Every waking hour was a working hour. This is a very scrappy startup. It says, we didn't even have expense accounts. We paid for everything ourselves and deducted it from our individual taxes. And this is the part of the book where I just feel it's full of just really interesting ideas on, you know, really scrapping resourceful ideas to build your company.

37:42One thing that's very obvious is Ovitz was ahead of his time in a lot of things. He's very ahead of time what's about to happen here because what he's about to tell this actress, actors, athletes, all think like this today. And he's saying, you know, you're a great actress. You should be doing more. You should have bigger roles. And he goes, seeing her skeptical expression, I jumped in and said, take off your actress hat for a moment and pretend that you're a small corporation. This is what I mean by that. All these athletes. And if you look at like a lot of athletes, movie stars, you know, people that are in different domains outside of like typical business people, you'll see in their bios, it'll be, they'll say like founder.

38:20So they definitely think about themselves as like a small, in many cases, like they could be multi -billion dollar corporations, but they think like this now. They definitely weren't thinking back then. And he says to this actress, what can you do to increase your bottom line and control the direction of your future growth? You need to take control of your projects and get involved in developing them. Now, this second part that he tells her is just great advice for dealing with people. I believe that nobody wants to be treated just as they are. Everybody wants to feel encouraged to become even more than they are, to become the best versions of themselves.

38:50So then the third thing that jumped out on me on this page is, again, this belief comes before ability. I used to have this thing that pop up in all the books that I read in the early days of founders. It's like critics don't know shit. And it's just everybody around Ovid's like, you can't do that. That's impossible. That'll never happen. You're not going to get that person. You can't do that. And so they're talking about like, yeah, we might be like these little guys doing TV. We might not have no money. No one knows us. And he says, I plan on representing movie stars. and the response to this person they're talking about is like you'll never get them they're locked up by the big boys and ovates's response here is perfect he goes i'm going to represent them all i'm going to get them all and i think it's very important don't ever let somebody else tell you what you're going to do or you're capable of how the hell would they even know another way you got to find another another route in and so okay it's really hard you know obviously film is highly competitive this guy just said all the the great actors and directors are locked up by the big boys.

39:46Okay. So how can I break into movies? He says, we break into film by taking books and scripts and treatments to prospective clients. So he finds, he winds up reading and I think New York Magazine hears about this, this legendary literary agent named Mort Janklow. And he goes, okay, I'm going to call him up. And again, this is just so ovates. I'm going to, I'm going to call him. It took 10 days for me to get him on the phone to ask if I could see him. I flew to New York at a cost that made my stomach twitch. Remember they have no money at this time. So he says, I laid out our book first strategy.

40:17I'd asked to call him every Thursday at 10 a .m. in case he had something for us. Mort could set his watch by my calls. I kept at it for a year every week, no matter what, before he gave us a novel. So the first thing he gives him, gives him this novel, Chiefs. They actually sell that and turn it into a very successful miniseries on CBS. Mort was ecstatic. So what happens? You just made me more money. You brought me an opportunity. People love that. So now we start sending Ovitz and other people to say, hey, a bunch of manuscripts for some of his more commercial writers that should be easier to turn into miniseries, movies, things like that.

40:55And then you see this guerrilla marketing tactic that they had. They take these scripts and these manuscripts and they – well, I'll just read this to you. Soon we had 80 agents sending us novels and manuscript to be optioned by our producers and then our screenwriters for adaptation. After copying the scripts in bulk, we slapped on bright red covers with white CIA logo and planted hundreds of them in beauty parlors, restaurants and doctors offices. They generated free publicity. They helped establish our brand and our race against larger but less agile firms. Now, talks about the insane amount of pressure he's under.

41:31They don't make any money, I think, for the first three years. and then on the third year, each partner is able to take $80 ,000 out in profits. Remember, we're in the 70s, so he's like, holy shit. So he says, all I could think about was money. Obviously, if you grew up with no money, you'd feel that way forever. And so he says, I was hell -bent on making enough money so I'd never have to go back to the valley. Starts making a little bit of money, this feeling. I double underline, this is so important. This is Judy and I moved from Sherman Oaks to Brentwood, trading in our $75 ,000 house for one that costs $650 ,000.

42:06I'd wake up and think, my God, I live in Brentwood. So he's starting to build up a little momentum here. People are noticing how resourceful they are, how hungry they are. Think about the contrast. It's going to be obvious. The success is going to come later, right? But the score will take care of itself. You're going to notice, if you know the industry, how are the old Saji guys at WME doing? right uh william morris or wma sorry and how what are these like young guys that are on it every day they're being super resourceful in it's ca doing and so he says in late 1976 opportunity had come knocking in the form of 52 year old marty bomb he was an agent with his own shop okay he had a really good list of clients but he worked by himself so this is marty felt lonely and he wanted to join us we decided to make him a full one six partner and never regretted it.

42:55He gave us a big foot in the door in films. His clients made CAA a contender and he's going to lead them to their big, their first big payday. So Marty sense sets of it's up with James Clavel, who's the writer of the series show gun. Show gun has just been remade recently. I watched it. I enjoyed it, but obvious is the one that gets it. This is, you know, three decades ago, four decades ago, maybe, maybe four and a half decades ago. And he gets it made and it becomes one of the most watched miniseries of all time. So I'm going to skip over and we get to the punchline. And James is ecstatic at what Obitz was able to do.

43:32So the author, James Clavel, says, hey, can you come meet me? He sits down. Obitz sits down. James hands him an envelope. And he says he opens it, found a check with a dizzying number of zeros made out to CAA. One million dollar commission, which would be about three million in today's money. even more today because the book is almost 10 years old. Shogun had, this is the important part. I think you and I have been talking about this over and over again the last few weeks, how many of these people were able to build empires, in many cases, billion dollar empires off of opportunity hiding in plain sight.

44:08Shogun, it's not like the CIA was the first company to see Shogun. And Ovis says this over and over again, he takes things that other people pass on and turns them into phenomenal successes. Shogun had languished at William Morris for three years. CA got it made. Nevermind that the deal almost fell apart 20 times. Deals always almost fall apart 20 times. That was the first time we took a client's farfetched dream and made it come true. So he's doing the best with every opportunity in front of him, but he still has his long -term plan. He's like, I want to have the best directors. I want to have the best actors.

44:40So he winds up making a list of all the best directors that he wants to represent one day. And he says, I was dreaming, though my dream would eventually come to pass. And so he winds up, some of these people are like Morton Suersace and Stanley Kubrick. And one advantage that he did, right? Think about like, I've done a bunch of podcasts on directors like Christopher Nolan, Tarantino, Spielberg, George Lucas. They're all the same in the sense that they have this encyclopedic knowledge of film history in their head. And what Ovitz realized is like, oh, I need to get that in my head. So then I have, I can be able to relate to them and understand them and talk to them about this.

45:15So what does he do? Know the history of the industry. And right. I was beginning to believe that I can converse with those guys because when we launched CIA, I had started a private project, one that took me 10 years of watching every film that had won one of the big five Oscar, big five category Oscars. I discovered why Gone with the Wind had passed the test of time and how green was my valley hadn't. I learned the relationship between vision and craft. Film had its own language and I needed to be bilingual. So you keep pointing this out because it's like it's just he does he's willing to put in the effort and do the research and do the time.

45:48How many other people let's say you're another agent on another uh your direct competitor of Ovid at this time. How many of them do you actually think did that? I'd be surprised if there's another one and if they're it's certainly not what more than one percent of his competitors So you're already knocking out 99 % of the people. It's probably 0 .5 % if you really think about human nature. It's fascinating that you can still just get an advantage just by collecting more information. Another thing. I love this idea. I've already talked about it. Do the job before you're hired. So one of the guys that he wanted to represent that was on his list of directors was a guy named Steve Gordon.

46:24So one way he would do, he says, we would poach people by assumption. we would behave as if we were the client's agent already and make their dreams happy and then they would sign and so he winds up getting a script uh attaching steve gordon to the script and selling it to united artists as if steve gordon agreed to that and then they ordered the movie with steve attached to direct and then steve was very happy because the deal think about it you show up at his door the deal's done like hey i know you wanted this movie guess what i just sold sold it to this studio and you're the director so this was actually a surprising thing and something that uh i actually asked him about at dinner too because it's obvious in this book like he's heartbroken and devastated by two of his closest friends and business partners uh betray him and yet i i have a bunch of mutual people that i know that know of it's uh i know what he's working on now and i know what he's been doing the last few years and i just asked him like how the hell because i'm like a very untrusting person and like one of my closest friends and advisor says like my biggest problem is that i keep everybody at arm's length away and i could actually like damage where where i'm trying to go in life uh it's like a very interesting piece of feedback but and so one thing i was curious for myself was just like you know read your book you're these guys ripped your heart out you know and ovus is not going to say that he was like blameless too you know how do you continue to build relationships after that happened to you, you considered these two people literally your two best friends in the world.

47:56And he made a great point. He's like, you know, I've been betrayed by like three people in my life out of what? A thousand. It just didn't happen. Like, you can't live your life like that. What he was telling me is like, you just can't live your life like that because, you know, it's three out of a thousand. So I think it would be surprising to you how trusting a person he is. And you see this here where he would sign, quote unquote, sign clients and he never at, he never papers anything. And he goes, I never asked them to sign a letter of engagement. I thought written agreements were overrated.

48:27And he goes, and I think they're downright counterproductive. And there was another benefit of this with no papers to renew. Our clients had no anniversary to jog them into thinking about leaving us. Very interesting insight there, but he mentioned that over and over again, just not needing to paper anything. And just, you know, working with people with just a, basically a verbal and a handshake agreement. this is where he's starting to pick up strength and you see he's just a conqueror and he knows he's a conqueror. He says this is really the vision and the beginning of him just completely rolling over everyone.

48:56And he says a vision of my future came over me. I'm going to have all of these people someday in an agency that will represent the whole food chain and flip the power from the studios to the artists. Again, belief comes before ability. He had that belief. He did not have the ability to do that yet. So he's figuring out how to do it. Even then I had the odd feeling that Sidney Polak, which is a legendary director, would be the master key, realizing this vision would take years. So he discovers that this is one of the wildest parts of the book. So Sidney's longtime agent with this guy named Evarts Ziegler, we're going to call him Zig because I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing his name correctly.

49:32So Zig represented a bunch of A -list writers and he had a bunch of top tier directors, but he's getting old and a little lazy and not with the times. And so he goes, I want them all, but how do I lure them away? The unexpected answer came through my car telephone, which was a novelty at the time. The radio -based phone, slightly larger than the shoebox, had 11 channels. You would keep pushing buttons until you found a dial tone. Busy channels were like party lines. Any subscriber could listen in. On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voice. That's so wild that you're using a car phone and it's like a party line.

50:04And me and you were having a conversation. And then if you just happen to get on that same channel. You're just listening in. I guess it's like kind of like CB radio, right? Where truck drivers is the same way. So they're like party lines. Any subscriber could listen in. On my way to the office one morning, I heard a voice that sounded like Zig's. I pulled off the road to take notes because Zig was discussing his star -studded client list with his assistant. I clocked in at the same time the next morning and there was Zig again doing business while commuting. He sounded old and forlorn at a time when we were swarming potential clients.

50:37And so he also has a tiny business in the sense that he doesn't have a lot of help where, you know, Ovid's like building an army. OK. And so Zig has just like one assistant and a junior partner. And so he says, I decided to try to buy him out to make him more receptive to soften him up. I escalated my campaign again to sign Sidney Pollack. I'll kill for you. I told Sidney. All I had to sell was my passion and energy and the fact that I was 30 years younger than Zig. As Sidney wavered, we got screenplay after screenplay into his hands before Zig did. Each day, I spent up to two hours on Sid, on Sidney, rather, excuse me, far more than anyone who spent on his biggest signed client.

51:16So this is actions expressed priority. He's telling you with his actions what's important. I'm gonna get this guy. In 1981, with our courtship in a second year, remember he started, I think the very first page, he calls himself the Terminator. and so in my mind i i have that scene where like they just keep shooting he just keeps coming and keeps coming and keeps coming i i just feel that that's how ovus was like uh definitely in this situation and many others uh so he's like okay i'm gonna spend two hours a day it's gonna take me two years and i'm gonna i'm just gonna out hustle your agent and show you that like i'm obviously better than that uh so he signs with us after he signs with us at last having dealt zig Zig, a body blow.

51:56We offered him $750 ,000 for his agency plus a lifetime royalty on his client's work. He'd keep a piece of his business in perpetuity, even if he never came to the office. Zig passed. But during our discussions, we discovered that Steve Roth, the only other partner, his junior partner, right, is the one who was actually servicing their best clients and that Steve was eager to leave. We promptly cut a deal for him to come to CAA that got us most of what we wanted. And all we had to pay Steve was $250 ,000 a year. Way better, cheaper than paying Zig $750 ,000. And then this just, again, more Terminator -like, I'm going to roll over everyone.

52:32Anyone in our way was going to get rolled over with the core. His core business gone. Zig sold what remained to ICM and he was done. The truth is that I didn't give a thought to Zig after he turned us down. You never heard that someone was unhappy afterward. They just lost. But flattening Zig was the beginning of my Sherman -esque march to the sea. So in this book, Ovitz will also talk about people that he admired or people he would learn from. And one of the guys was Ted Ashley. And Ted Ashley was actually one of the few people that actually started his own agency at a younger age than Ovitz did.

53:07I think Ted was 23 when he started his agency. And Ted gives him a warning. And I actually asked Ovitz about this at dinner. And he still believes this is true, but he said not on the rise. So I'll explain what that means in one second. There wasn't a day where I didn't walk in the door and get hit by a rush of anxiety. What idea can I come up with today to pay the overhead? There'd be the adrenaline rush when we sent out the internal memo. Robert Redford is now a CAA client. 15 minutes later, it was what's next. In 1979, when I was 33, Ted Ashley at Warner Brothers took me aside and said, I'm going to give you some great advice.

53:44And knowing you, you're not going to take it. But here it is. I could have worked 10 % less and it wouldn't have made a difference in my professional success but I would have been a lot happier Ted was absolutely right on both accounts it was great advice and I didn't take it I see now that I could have worked as much as 20 % less and it wouldn't have cost me if I worked even 10 % less across 30 years that's three extra whole years of life that I would have enjoyed. And so when I asked him about that, he's like, yeah, that's definitely still true. Now, on his rise, he probably couldn't work 10 % less because you see that was one of his edge.

54:26But within 10 years, when they have, you know, they're solidified, their momentum's kind of going, he could have easily worked 10 % less. So again, great advice from Ted Ashley, advice that a young Mike Ovitz did not take, and advice that Mike Ovitz of today still believes is true. So again, I think I keep repeating this. Autobiographies are super important. You know, James Dyson's autobiography, Phil Knight, this biography. They're just really important because it's Sam Walton's. They just lay out exactly, you know, it's a wise older man looking back at with a lot of wisdom. And I think, you know, for the cost of what, 15 bucks, 20 bucks, you could probably get this book for.

55:06And 20 hours of your time, you're not going to read. You don't have to read it like I do. If you can see, like, I marked this thing up. So it takes a ton of time. you know i'm doing like arts and crafts over here but yeah if you're just reading without doing all that like it's just it's just a no -brainer i think so remember he talks about there's just like a lot of co -founder conflict and him not realizing people you can damage a person's relationship but they won't say anything to you not everybody's that direct and so what is happening is like he's bringing in so much business he's taking on so much more work he's an undeniable It was his idea to have even equity, but he's undeniably the more important and the more productive partner.

55:44And so he's like, listen, I need to get more than 16 .67%. And if I don't, I have to consider my other options. And even if logically your partner can see that and can believe that there's like an emotional component to this, you just see it over and over again, where they feel that the other person is not valuing them enough. everybody is going to feel this way. It doesn't matter if you can logically lay this out. This is an emotional decision. And so they agreed with him. Hey, you're obviously the firm's leader. They wind up getting a larger allocation of shares. But he realizes they didn't want to do this.

56:23And so he says, professionally, mission accomplished. Emotionally, though, I had just hit the self -destruct button. Only it would take 16 years to go off. And now here's also another warning. He's got to mediate all these disagreements between other partners. And so his partner's Ron, which is like his best friend, is just like lighting him up about, let's get rid of Bill. Bill shouldn't have equity either. He's not doing anything. And yet, Ovitz is observing that Bill doesn't have any idea. This is Bill never had an inkling of Ron's animus. Now, keep that in mind because Ron's going to hide it from Ovitz too.

56:58This is really important. Like if somebody just, if you observe somebody doing something to another person, you have to think like, they likely will turn around and do it to you. And so he's like, wait, Bill doesn't even know how Ron feels. And he goes, I was amazed at how well Ron hit his true feelings from somebody that he saw every day. I've been having conversations with founders more and more. And I think something that's not discussed enough is, yeah, especially with serial entrepreneurs, like they start one company to sell it. They start another company, they sell it. And then the third company, they're kind of like you you you get this feeling it's like oh it's like i could do this over and over again i'm like i'm just fantastic at this and then like the third company like fails completely and in some cases i was just talking to another one today where their last success was what 10 years ago and that was rather shocking and so i think ovitz is really wise to realize like part of the reason he was able to make so much money is one he was very innovative he was doing things that other agents were and we're about to get that.

57:56But he's at the right time. And he says, we're lucky to work. We were lucky to work in a golden age of commercial film. People went to the local theater three times a month. Piracy had yet to explode. There's really no internet and cable was in its infancy. So before technology really fragmented attention, it made it much more difficult to make money in movies. Like he's at the right place at the right time. Really reminds me of like newspapers before the internet and i would say like telegraph after the railroads but before the telephone and so you just you find these periods and usually don't last that long where you just can extract and make so much more money than if you were 10 years later or 15 years later or in some cases five years later so one of the ideas was he's going to innovate just like his the his the person he patterned himself off of lou wasserman and so one one thing he does is like he's just going to design the whole package and he's going to bring it to the studio he's essentially going to do their work for them.

58:50We've grown so big enough that we were able to package movies with multiple clients, which was a common practice in television, but not in film. Nobody was doing this in film. CAA was the first to orchestrate the entire development process. We took an idea, which was like a yet to be published bestseller, a magazine article in some cases, or even a news story and turned it into a script and shoehorned as many artists into the project as we could. The process fattened our commissions and spared the studios the headache and expense sense of development so there's actually an interesting idea i learned from george clooney of all uh surprisingly it's really what's what's happening here is like the studios they have a problem they want a movie that they can sell and in the past like they had to do all this work and ovitz found it easier it's like like you have a problem i'm going to present myself as the solution and so there's a line uh where george clooney realizes he was like not having any success becoming an actor until he had this like slight change in his framing.

59:48George Clooney's luck changed when he realized that the audition is a problem for the people giving the audition. They want to find an actor for the role. If I present myself as the solution to your problem, rather than the person dying for your approval, it will increase my chance for success. And so what is this idea? It's like this process fattened our commissions and spared the studios the headaches and expense of development because I'm going to do the work for them. Essentially, I become the solution to your problem. Here is just one example of the financial outcome that just way, he's going to make way more money than other agencies.

1:00:22He's like, you just realize that packaging everything is just much more lucrative. And again, this is something he does over and over again throughout the book. He's really great at expanding the revenue opportunities of his existing profession. And this partly, I think, would tie directly to his personality. He's just never satisfied with the status quo, which he just said, oh yeah, I wanted Robert Redford for years. I signed him. 15 minutes later, I was like, what's next? So Ghostbusters is one of the movies he did this with. And this is the result. Ghostbusters became the second biggest film of the year, grossing more than $295 million.

1:00:50As our clients collectively got 30 % of the gross and they get 10 % of that. So that means CAA gets 3 % of the gross. Over the years, as TV and VHS revenues came in, we made more than $30 million from that movie alone. Another great idea. And And yeah, again, I just got done saying like I did a bunch of episodes on directors. I think filmmakers are fascinating. I think there's a lot of insights for entrepreneurs and filmmakers. One of the people that he wanted to sign, it was on his list forever and he winds up signing is Martin Scorsese. I realized my oversight, I haven't even done an episode on Scorsese, so I need to do one.

1:01:27But he talks about, and I'm just going to, I just found this part interesting that anytime you find, and I've seen this with like Bill Belichick, like you see us with coaches sometimes with filmmakers, you know, with tennis players, with anybody that Kobe Bryant was like this. You talk to them about what you think you understand, which is the game that they dedicate their life to, whether it's film or business, John Malone and cable was like this. The list just goes on and on and on. Obviously, Munger and Buffett are like this. And you just understand like what you're seeing is not what they're seeing.

1:01:56They have such an advanced understanding of what's happening. You can just learn a lot if you can actually sit there and do this with them. And so it says, I read all the great books on Hollywood's history and seen every Oscar winning film going back to 1929, but I didn't get movies until I started watching them with Marty, Martin Sorsese in the late eighties. So they wind up living, they both had an apartment in New York in the same building. So when he would get in from, Ovis was flying from LA and he'd get in. And if Marty was there, he would just go drop his bags off and then knock on Marty's door.

1:02:27They'd grab some food and they'd sit in front of whatever was playing on his projector. And he says, Marty was a walking film encyclopedia. There was nothing better than walking into a dark room with a projector flickering, showing an old movie I'd never heard of, but that one day might influence Marty's own work. So the analogy between filmmakers and entrepreneurs is obvious, right? Tarantino, when I did Tarantino or Spielberg, they'd watch these videos and these movies and, you know, they would take literally a scene verbatim or an idea of verbatim from something from like you know the 1940s and they put it in a movie in like 1990 it's just remarkable and ovic just picked up on it he's like wait he's like watching these old films on you know in his new york apartment on a projector and there's he why is he doing that why are we reading these biographies why are you listening to this podcast because you're hoping to find an idea that one monday might influence your own work it's the exact same thing i love this.

1:03:21I absolutely love this. And so as the years go by, you start to see this like intense pace, this insane schedule really takes a toll on him. So I actually want to give you an idea of like what a typical day schedule was like. And then the trade -off that he's making with his family. And again, this is again, why autobiographies are so important. Yet treating my clients like family was hard on me and my actual family. I was waking up at 5 .45 AM. 15 minutes later, I'd be riding the bike in the gym and making calls to Europe, skimming five newspapers, marking articles for my assistants to strip out and distribute to the firm.

1:03:51After 40 minutes on the bike, I'd do 30 or 40 minutes of martial arts, working myself to exhaustion. By 8 a .m., after showering and eating a fast breakfast, I'd be on the car phone en route to the office. After a morning meeting, I'd take meetings, have lunch, a drink with a colleague, and a working dinner, all in between running calls, up to 300 phone calls a day. After being a chameleon all day at work, it took me an hour or so to figure out who the fuck I was when I got home. And all the time, the phone would keep ringing, which drove Judy crazy. She would want to discuss my day to feel closer to me, but I was exhausted by my day.

1:04:23And I didn't want to talk about work in front of the kids. I wanted them to feel normal and safe. After the kids went to sleep, I worked every night skimming through three or four VHS cassettes I'd brought home and chipping away at the stack of screenplays. Then I'd fall asleep to Johnny Carson at midnight and do it all over again the next day. My kids viewed my world less as something to aspire to than as something to lure me away from. They often noticed that though I was playing with them when they were young or asking about their days when they were older, that my attention was elsewhere. Could you please come back to reality, they'd say, or just earth to dad.

1:04:58I used the car as a place to return phone calls, viewing travel time as dead time. They, quite rightly, viewed it as family time, and they'd regularly disconnect me or grab the phone from my hand. And so I'm sure, you know, he's not alone with the same problem. I have it as well. You might as well. I do. So like I find my mind wandering right back to work or whatever I'm thinking about when I'm playing, especially with like my son, because he's so he's still so small. And the best piece of advice I ever heard about this is when that happens, you picture yourself as you 30 years into the future as that person.

1:05:38And you know that person 30 years into the future would give anything in the world to be able to go back in time and play with your four -year -old one more time. And so I try to, like, snap myself out of that. It's like, got to stop doing that. You know, when he has his own life, his own wife and kids and everything else, I'm going to miss this so much. The good times are now. I have to, like, focus on that. I think that's, like, really good advice. goes back to just the euphoria and terror that entrepreneurs feel. And unfortunately, as founders know, sometimes you just feel terror for no reason at all.

1:06:19And Ovid talks about this, like this is just constant pressure. My evenings and Saturday mornings were swallowed by the demands of a growing service organization, from tax planning and pensions to training programs, human resources and legal and accounting all reported to me. Each time I walked through our front door, I felt a physical chill like the chill you felt in high school before a final exam. How much did we have to earn today to cover our costs and overhead? What if the business shifted and the money dried up? The feeling would recede for a time once I sat down at my desk and began to work, but I carried those fears to my last day there.

1:06:54So then one of the most surprising parts of the book is just this insane co -founder conflict craziness. So one morning, 1987, Ron comes into my office, shuts the door and says, I've got a problem. I said, shoot, we've had a thousand conversations that started like that. I lost a lot of money in a poker game and I can't pay up. I was shocked, but I said, okay, we'll take care of it. I figured it was like $100 ,000 or so. How much? I'm not sure you'll be able to take care of it. How much is it? Over $5 million. Ron told me he'd been going to Vegas several times a week. He'd make the flight after work, play deep into the night, and grab a few hours of sleep before flying back to LA in the morning and working his ass off as usual, never missing a meeting.

1:07:34I was unable to process this. My partner, my best friend, the guy I was tied to for life, clearly had an unconscious need to throw away everything that we had worked for. So the company winds up lending him a little bit of money. He was saying over and over again, don't worry, it's never going to happen again. For the next year and a half, Ron and I worked harder and more closely than ever. Then one morning, he closed my door, took a seat, and looked at me with a funeral expression. You're not going to believe this, he said. But another poker game and an even bigger loss this time. $6 .5 million.

1:08:04I felt that he'd smashed me with a baseball bat. Who was this man? I was deeply, deeply shaken. Despite my 360 degree paranoia, I hadn't seen any of this coming, which scared the crap out of me. I prided myself on reading people and forecasting from subtle clues. And here, I hadn't been reading Ron right for 10 years. That fact was so shocking to me that I instantly try to forget it. I couldn't though. And from then on, I was constantly worried that Ron would take the agency down. And then there's just several great lines. I really feel like this is sage advice for entrepreneurs. I would have been much happier if I hadn't been so determined to appear all knowing and invulnerable.

1:08:47I think it's great advice. One thing I asked Michael at dinner, and I asked everybody that I come in contact with, very curious, like who's the smartest person you know and like what's the best business you know and one of the people he said was the smartest people he ever met was Michael Crichton and actually after that I went and looked for biographies on him I couldn't find any I might figure out another way maybe I can do like a long form article I think he's a fascinating person and I'd like to to like learn spend like a week studying him in detail one because Ovitz you know said he's met a ton of people and Michael Crichton's like top three smartest person he ever met.

1:09:25But also that was very fascinating how he writes. So in the book says, uh, after putting off writing as long as possible, he went at 18 hours a day, seven days a week until he was done. And he wrote Jurassic Park that way. And so I looked up on a line. This is from, uh, Michael's Crichton's Wikipedia page says Crichton was a workaholic. When drafting a novel, he would typically take him six or seven weeks. Crichton withdrew completely to follow what he called a structured approach of ritualistic self -denial. As he neared writing the end of each book, he would rise increasingly early each day, meaning that he would sleep for less than four hours by going to bed at 10 p .m.

1:10:06and waking up at 2 a .m. And as a sign that he was probably not the easiest person to deal with, you want a hint? He was married five times. So usually, I've seen that a couple of times in these books. I think the episode I did on James Cameron might be the best single episode I've ever made. And, you know, you can read between the lines in the opening of that episode. It talks about, he moved to New Zealand with his fifth wife. And then everything you hear about him after that, I think is not surprising. It kind of fits into that context. This might be my favorite quote in the book. And me and Michael talked about this at dinner.

1:10:44He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication, and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop. So I mentioned a few times that he's constantly, you know, rethinking. He kind of didn't believe like, oh, I'm not. Remember, he says, I didn't want to live my father's boxed in life. Some of his partners would do this. Other agents, they kind of like, oh, this is what an Asian does. And we're just going to build this imaginary box around what an Asian does. And Ovis is like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'll just find opportunities and do that. So he gets his first exposure to corporate M &A.

1:11:17And it's actually with Sony and Kia Marita. Akio's a really fascinating guy. I'm going to do another episode on him. I think I read his autobiography a long time ago called Made in Japan. I think it's episode 102. And I found him because both Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos talked about patterning and learning ideas from Akio that they used in Amazon and Apple. And Ovid says something really smart here. He's trying to help Sony buy CBS records. And he's not technically signed up to represent anybody. so he finds Akio's autobiography called Made in Japan and he reads it and he says I was the only person I knew with a copy of his book and it served me well and so he says I wasn't representing CBS or Sony I just put myself in the middle of the situation I was a connector it's what I did all day and so he realizes there's a lot of like if you if you think of everything and like kind of don't think of what's actually taking place but the idea behind it like I always say I turn everything into an abstraction he does the same thing where he's like well I'm connecting actors and directors to people making movies.

1:12:15You know, it's not that different from Sony wants to buy a record label or Sony wants to buy a movie studio. Like, okay, I can just connect these people too. Sony winds up buying this for like $2 billion. This is the important part, is not that the actual sale went down. It's what Ovitz learned from this. And so he says, after this first exposure to corporate mergers, I made a list of all the MMA specialists. So he goes and tries to find the best people at this. He starts calling them, try to build relations with them. And he goes, I met with them to learn their craft. It struck me that it wasn't that different from assembling a movie package.

1:12:46You had to put all the elements together first, get the buyer and seller in sync, and then strike a price. And so his idea, he goes back to his partners, and a lot of them don't want him doing this. Again, they want to kind of keep him boxed in. And he's like, well, if we become deal advisors, it would put more distance between us and other agencies and bring in larger fees. So one of these people he builds a relationship with is Herb Allen II of Allen & Company. Herb Allen had invited Ovitz to the very first annual Sun Valley Conference, which still goes on today. And he gives this great description of Herb Allen, builds a relationship with him.

1:13:21And he says, he rose before 5 a .m., had dinner at 6 p .m. sharp, and was in bed by 9 p .m. One time I was at his Wyoming ranch when a phone call made me a half hour late to the cookhouse. Three courses were lined up in my plate setting. Herb looked at me and said, when I say six, I mean six. He was smiling, but I took his point.

1:14:01And so being involved in these M &A deals, observing them, seeing the huge checks being written, he's like oh this is i find this essentially more interesting than agent work and it says part the line here it says part of me had begun to view cia as a stepping stone highly suspect that that was you know probably the case the whole time i think if you've he says you know i pattern myself to lou wasserman like lou didn't stay an agent he ran a studio i think oh that was like the likely outcome or maybe the idea that ovates had but in the book he says the sony experience taught me how much i like the suspense of the acquisition game the stakes and the strategies dealing with leaders who supervised empires.

1:14:37I set my sights on building CAA into the McKinsey of the entertainment industry, the indispensable advisor. I couldn't wait to broker a big transaction of my own. And so that big deal that he's talking about, he's eventually, Ovis is going to help Panasonic buy MCA Universal for $6 .5 billion. Okay. Now, before that happens, this is another idea, like the good ones know more. So the founder of Panasonic was this guy named Kano Suki Matsushita, he realizes that, hey, Kanesuki, he actually wrote 44 different books. And so he goes and he buys all the books and reads all the books that the Panasonic founder had written.

1:15:19Then he says, I spent hours in electronic stores eyeballing all of their product lines. I acquired the company's giant wholesale catalog and I honed in on video and audio equipment. Soon I could tell you to the last pixel how Panasonic's best big screen TV stacked up against Sony. So again, I keep saying, you know, that example that he started in the mailroom, maybe even started when he was nine years old, reading the biographies of these great men and continues over and over again. He prepares himself by just accumulating as much information and context and background as possible. Now, there is an idea that I think might be related to today as well.

1:15:55So his, you know, Lou Wasserman is much older. And what's happening is Ovis is pushing up the price to how much movie studios have to buy. Because if you own 75 % of the market, you package everything together, I'm making up these numbers. But let's say you used to be able to do the movie for a million and now it's 5 million. It's a substantial amount, maybe 10 million. It's a lot larger amount. I think it's very common. It's like your industry was valued at one way for a very long time. And you came up and you kind of dominated that. And now you see this huge step up and you're like, oh, that's like a bubble.

1:16:29I'll just sit on the side and wait it out. Maybe, but maybe it's not a bubble. And you're starting to see that, you know, I think present day, it's obvious, like with, with some of the value valuations of these companies, some of the huge rounds that are being done. And so I just think there's like, there's a, there's like analogy here. I don't know if it's, you know, I'm not, I have no idea what things are worth. I just think it's fascinating that somebody that lived and literally got to the top of their profession called this wrong. And so this will make sense in one second. Essentially, Lou passed on movies that seemed too expensive, but that bubble lasted 15 years and it outlasted Luke's career.

1:17:08So it says, when we founded CAA, Luke Wasserman's MCA Universal was a power in film and dominant in television. Then the inconceivable happened. The last mogul got old. As the cost of making movies soared in the 1980s and large part due to us, Universal hunkered down. Despite the runaway success of George Lucas's Star Wars, the studio passed on Raiders of the Lost Ark when Lucas's lawyer demanded a 50 -50 split. Paramount scooped up the movie on those terms and they made a killing. Lou chose to ride out the bubble and pass on deals that he deemed inflated. But that bubble lasted 15 years. Universal, the fabled octopus, had crawled under a rock.

1:17:50So once Ovitz helps Panasonic buy MCA Universal for $6 .5 billion, he gets his check. The people from Panasonic Give him this giant check. Says, see, they handed me a colossal check to distribute as I saw fit. $135 million. After paying the bankers and all the consultants, I was left with $60 million for CAA, which would be about $110 million today. It changed everything for us. In Hollywood, people didn't know the difference between Goldman Sachs and Saks Fifth Avenue. Everyone was dumbstruck that a talent agency could earn that kind of fee, let alone arrange and execute a deal of that magnitude.

1:18:24Of course, my elevated profile pissed off my partners, and I began to feel that I was a hamster on a wheel. Part of me felt I was running on the wrong wheel, that I should be going into business for myself. And part of me believed that I wasn't really a hamster, but a cheetah, the fastest animal in the field. Even as everyone was telling me to slow down, I wanted to speed up. And so he doesn't just stop at, hey, I'm going to do M &A for giant corporations. He's like, I can do ads for you too. So he strikes a deal with Coca -Cola. And again, I got to point this out because this is another, he's applying the same approach to a different domain.

1:19:02Everything he does is like this. When he's going to pitch them on, I can do advertising better and cheaper than these big, stodgy, old, corrupt advertising agencies that are paying millions and millions and millions of dollars to Coca -Cola. What does he do? We comb through every single Coca -Cola ad and commercial since 1955. And he looks at this, this is a great line. You know, it's not very complicated and you could know this from your own taste. He says, advertising wasn't subatomic physics. Make commercials fun to watch and viewers would embrace them. And so he pitches them on something that no other talent agency was doing.

1:19:36He's like, hey, we're going to be your consultant on advertising. We're going to make the ads. We're not going to charge like we're going to any of our costs. Like we're not going to increase that cost, but you're going to pay us a consultancy fee. Coke agrees to pay CAA a consultancy fee of a million dollars a month plus expenses and costs. These ads do so well that they wind up sending them a check. I think they try to pay him like an extra like $10 million and he sends the check back. I'll find the exact line. Yeah. It says they sent me a check for 10 million for the ads. I returned the check with a post -it note attached.

1:20:10Hey, let's discuss this. We did. And they went up talking to the people at Coca -Cola. I was friendly but unrelenting. And they finally sent me a new check for $31 million. And so he's drastically expanding, you know, what agents do. He's making way more money than anybody else. But he's also realizing, you know, he wants, he's draining them. He's just like pushing, burning himself to the last, like burning the candle at both ends. And he wants to build up equity. Like what happens when he stops working? You know, like he's making these big deals, but then the money just stops. and he's really just unbelievably tired.

1:20:45And I think this goes on for a while, but I think these few paragraphs is just great writing and gives you a sense of like what was going on in his life and why he was eventually gonna have to make a change. And eventually like there's just no way he could stay at CAA forever. Aging was a young person's game and you could run just so long and so far. At 48 years old, having run since my first day at William Morris, I was tired. I was tired of getting up at 6 a .m. and squeezing in a workout while on the phone with Europe. I was tired of rolling through 300 calls a day. Talking till my throat was raw.

1:21:15I was tired of having lunches and dinners scheduled three months out. I was tired of flying 600 hours a year. I was tired of owning six tuxedos for the 30 obligatory events between November 1st and Christmas. I was tired of returning calls till 7 p .m., going to dinner till 10, coming home to a mountain of pink message slips, calling Japan till midnight, and starting all over six hours later. I was tired of submerging myself, drowning myself in the lives of my clients and their families and significant others. Our clients' worries about the size of their trailers and how big their billing would be had come to be seen as increasingly petty to me.

1:21:52The truth is, I'd always disliked having to see after people's creature comforts, making sure our actors and directors had fresh guava and the perfect nanny. You're an adult. Run your own life. And then on top of that, he says, I yearn to build equity. Once an agent stopped working, there was no more accrued equity to fall back on. Executives I considered as my peers, Michael Eisner, Barry Diller, were raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in stock options. I wanted to play in that league too. And in truth, I'd always been faintly embarrassed to be an agent. As much as CAA had professionalized our field, it would never be a noble calling.

1:22:32I wanted to be one of the six people who could say yes to a movie without scrounging to assemble all of the elements ahead of time. So he almost leaves CAA to run MCA Universal. And Ron, his best friend and partner, was kind of acting as his agent through the whole process. They get to the end and Ovitz realizes that he's not too sure about the relationship with the owners and it's too big of a chance. So he decides to not take the job. And his friend and partner arrives at the exact opposite conclusion. So this is where they complete. This is a co -founder breakup where he breaks up with his co -founder.

1:23:17Says Ron called me one day. Guess what? I met with Edgar and has been a change in plans. He wants me to run MCA and I think I'm going to do it. I felt completely numb, frozen with disbelief. The job on the table, chief operating officer, was one I'd negotiated for Ron in my last go -round with Edgar with one big difference. I was out of the picture. So they're going to bring in somebody. Ovitz was going to be the COO or CEO, and Ron was going to be the COO. And then they decided to ditch Ovitz, and then they bring in this other guy named Frank as the COO that Ron's going to report to. After a long silence, when I felt I could speak without my voice breaking, I told Ron how much I needed him, what it meant to me to have him at my side.

1:23:53what came back in a burst of rage were all of Ron's pent up grievances remember when Ovid said earlier that he had set off this emotional time bomb it just took 16 years to explode this is what he was talking about what came back in a burst of rage were all of Ron's pent up grievances how I had made a big mistake by walking away from MCA how it had always been all about me never about him how it was time to strike out on his own to be recognized as something more than my consigliere I tried to sell him for two hours as the knot in my stomach swelled into my throat. Finally, my voice faltered and I gave way.

1:24:30His mind was made up. I felt absolutely crushed. Ron was leaving. It felt like I was getting divorced. So what he realizes is there's no way he's going to stay at CAA without Ron. His heart's not in any ways. He knows he's not going to stay there forever. They wind up selling CAA to the Young Turks. I think for like a token amount. I don't even know if they say the amount in the book. And the opportunity he left for was, okay, Ron was his first best friend. His second best friend was Michael Eisner. And Michael had been trying to recruit him to come to Disney and be his number two. And then Ovitz realizes he's just not meant to be a number two.

1:25:09But the reason I want to bring this up is because there was... Ovitz is talking about all these signs that he ignored because of his personal relationship and the way that he thought like Michael would treat him. And what you realize, we talked about this in the Jerry Jones episode, there's some people that just are not, they're not the sharing type, right? And Jerry Jones wasn't like that. And everybody around him knew that. And they would tell you, like if you're gonna come in here and you're gonna be his coach, like you're a clear number two. We're like Jimmy Johnson, even though they were old friends, he wanted like equal billing.

1:25:42And Jones shows that he wasn't down with that because he fired him right after he won the Super Bowl. And who he replaced him for, Barry Switzer was very comfortable being a number two. That was going to be a conflict, you know, with these two personality types. And there was also signs that Ovitz ignored. He talks about one here. This move came with risks. I knew how Michael treated his deputies. One of Eisner's closest friends had told me flatly, Michael is incapable of sharing with anyone. But I believe that I was immune to Michael's rages and suspicions. After Ron, he was my next best friend.

1:26:17but even before he officially takes the job, like it keeps shifting of who's reporting to, who's reporting to him. And it's just like, he's not listening to his intuition. And so there's this like weird thing that happens with Eisner and Ovitz and a few Disney executives at Eisner's house before the announcement takes place. And Ovitz calls his wife and he says, Michael just threw me under the bus. No matter what I do, I'm going to fail in this job. I think I just made the biggest mistake of my career. Eisner says almost the exact same thing. He's actually working with this guy that I think was like writing a book on him.

1:26:56And when, you know, Ovis like slept on it for a day and then he calls even after he told his wife that. And he's like, OK, I'm going to take the job. It says minutes after I called him following my meeting with my brain trust to say I was in. He told this author exactly what I told my wife the night before, that he just made the biggest mistake of his life. He wondered if he could take his offer back. I wish he had. and so Ovitz is only going to last 14 months at Disney and again he does what he always does he's like let's buy this company let's innovate over here let's try to do something different and Eisner would tell him that's the stupidest idea I ever heard he'd block him over and over again he just felt very uncomfortable by you know trying to share the spotlight by any means with Ovitz and he winds up being fired by Eisner and so in September 1996 a Disney executive comes into Ovitz's office says Michael doesn't want you at the company anymore.

1:27:45Go tell Michael to come tell me myself himself. I said after 20 something year relationship with my so -called friend, I thought I deserved to be fired face to face. Michael didn't appear. He had volunteered to throw the party for my 50th birthday that December. Three days before my birthday, Michael summoned me to sign off on my resignation, which he said was by mutual consent, which obviously it wasn't. And then this is, it gets really crazy. He said he still wanted to stay friends and he wanted to host my party, a bizarrely crazy idea that wouldn't happen, of course, but one that was quintessential Eisner.

1:28:1920 years later, I still have no interest in ever sitting down with him again. I was living with Eisner and furious at myself. I felt awful, worthless, and an utter failure. And so after he leaves Disney, you could guess like what he did next. He didn't have to work for money anymore. Didn't have to work for money for a long time. Yet he just like go back to the first page of the book where he's like the Terminator. This is something we talked about at dinner. The fact that he's still very driven. He's still like, I think all of us, you need to have something to push forward, something to improve, something to focus your energy, your life energy on.

1:28:59And so after he leaves Disney, starts a bunch of other companies, starts to really get interested and spend a lot of time in Silicon Valley, invest in technology companies, help several venture capital firms. You can watch the interviews that he's been doing lately, talking about helping scale and build investment companies to this day. But I think the best way to end is on what I think is one of the most important lessons in the book. And it's actually found on the last two pages because he built this phenomenal headquarters for CAA. And he just wound up holding onto it and keeping it, you know, decades after he had left CAA.

1:29:37And so he ends this book in a really, frankly, beautiful way, where he's touring this old building that is now empty. Sony had leased it from him for like 20 years. And he's walking around and he's looking back on his life. He says, I was hit by the magnitude of what I had done in that building. And it seemed kind of amazing. This kid from the valley with no stature, no tenure, no network to rely on, reshaping the entertainment business. In my empty fortress, I realized that I wasn't out of the valley yet. I'm free of it in my daily life and in my bank account, but I'll never be free of it in my brain.

1:30:16You carry your origins with you. Still, those origins drove me here and built this place and attracted so many bright, funny, and creative colleagues. In the silence, I discovered that the only thing I really miss about the agency business was the camaraderie, my comrades and friends, and the passionate way we spend our lives together. I miss the people. And so I think that closing lesson, like it's all about the people. And the best way I describe about this is like one of your missions in life comes from Charlie Munger. You should be building, your goal is to build a seamless web of deserved trust and work with those people and do life with those people for the rest of your life.

1:31:00It is all about the people. And that is where I will leave it for the full story. Highly, highly, highly recommend buying this autobiography. It's one of the best autobiographies. If you buy the book using the link, it's in the show notes below and also available in your podcast player and at founderspodcast .com. You'll be supporting the podcast at the same time. That is 382 books down, 1 ,000 to go, and I'll talk to you again soon.