Michael Ovitz - Knowledge Is Power - [Invest Like the Best, EP.359]

27:50Right. That would have worked. That would have worked. But who the heck knew that those options were going to explode like they did? But today, I'm involved with two young guys that have a company called Human Capital. And they started a business basically representing engineers for free. And they send those engineers to companies to get them jobs. But what they've done that is brilliant is they track all the engineers. and they have recruiters at the top schools in the country. And they have the biggest database on engineers that are starting of anybody that I know. I think the two guys are brilliant.

28:34They've got a business that no one else has. So they're now investors, but they get an inside look from the creators. Can you say a little bit more about this idea of positional power, understanding that a big part of that is knowledge, but it just seems like you gravitated towards situations where you've not had to compete, like I said earlier, and I'm sure positional power in a frame is a really important strategy. So say as much as you can about that concept. Positional power is kind of a loose term I use to describe someone like Nathan Mirvold. He's a perfect example. He walks in a room and there's many dynamics to positional power.

29:13One is you really have to have some brain power or it's a non-starter. I mean, you can't be stupid and have positional power. I guess someone once argued with me that if you were a banana country dictator, you might be able to do that. You killed enough people, you might get away with it. But it's not the positional power I'm referencing. So Nathan walks in, looks like a CTO, talks like a CTO, walks like a CTO, is the CTO of a company moving up a mile a minute. And when he opens his mouth, really smart stuff comes out. So that's positional power at its best, because when he walks in the room, he already knows his luggage has been checked in ahead of him.

30:04And we used to use that at the agency in non-tangible ways. So, for example, this is going to sound today's world very stupid, but when we started in 74, we insisted that everyone wear a suit and all the women. We had a lot of women executives, by the way, because in those days, we felt probably 60 % of our staff were women. And we always felt that women actually had an edge against men being better agents. They could come into a room. Man walks in a room. He's got one act. He is what he is. There's like no changing that. A woman walks in a room and she can be tough. She can be sympathetic. She can be a mother.

30:47She can be aggressive. so she could get upset. She's got a toolkit that's insane. And we liked having women around, but we led by example. So all of us wore suits and the women and men dressed every day. And I was talking to someone about this today because we're here in New York and I was in a suit yesterday for a meeting I had with Ali and I told him to wear a suit, which was kind of shocking to him. I think I've seen him outside of a black t-shirt. Yeah. He's had a suit on the last three days. And we were in Midtown. And I remember coming here in for business in the mid-60s up through the 90s.

31:27Everyone had a suit on. Every woman had a very smart outfit on. And good God, I was the only guy in Milos in a coat and tie. As a matter of fact, the guy I was having lunch with berated me for 10 minutes. So it's a very different world today. But in those days, I wanted our people to have positional power. And I looked for every edge. So we did multiple things. One, we had a 10-page bibliography of what we felt they needed to read on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Because knowledge is power. We had a dress code that we never mentioned, just led by example. We had hours, which we never mentioned, were led by example.

32:08The partners' cars were the first in in the morning and the last to leave. We had a thesis that you never allow anyone to buy you a meal or let you ride on their private plane without them. You can't be bought. Small thing, but a big thing. It's a big statement. And we tried to take as much positional power advantage as we could out of non-consequential items, basically. And it worked. When you walk in a room and you're dressed properly and the people you're negotiating with or sitting there in jeans and a t-shirt or a polo shirt, you kind of just feel better about yourself in those days. I can't say that now because I got thrown out of the valley for wearing a blue suit to my first Andreessen Horowitz board meeting where everyone there, a friend of my name, Mike Volpe, looked at me and said, are you kidding?

33:01And he said, what are you nuts? There was a guy in the room, one of the board members had shorts. He had Madras shorts on. with a, uh, his name was Mike Homer, great guy, legend in his day. And he's sitting there in madras shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, neither of which matched. And he looked at me and he said, I'm not even going to say it. So funny. Speaking of Mark, I asked him what to talk to you about. And his response was just a day in the life. And it reminded me of a conversation you and I had, where you said something like for 30 plus years, you made 250 calls a day. And I want to talk about that day in the life and the volume of interaction that you had, because it's very easy to say, like, get scale and get information.

33:46But I want to make sure people understand, like, what that takes, like the amount of hard work, the pace, the stamina, the energy that goes into that. So maybe give us a little bit of that flavor of a day in the life. Well, Patrick, I think you just hit on all the keywords. I mean, if someone wants to build a business, to me, and I only speak for myself, everybody has their own opinion, but foundationally, momentum is critical. Building a knowledge bank is critical. Surrounding yourself with people as you recruit that can take your job is critical. Not being afraid is critical. Being on what I call a positive role is critical.

34:25No negativity. And momentum is built by action, not inaction. And that action, And one creates themselves. So we didn't have internet when we started, so we didn't have email or text. A big thing for us in the early days was car phones, which were radio-based, by the way. They weren't digitally based. You were on an open radio channel. As a matter of fact, it's one of the ways we signed a lot of clients because a couple of the agents, the more senior agents who had these radio car phones used to give up way too much information to their assistants or compatriots on an open line. And we would just jot it down, which was like, to me, it was like crazy.

35:13We had one guy who had a phenomenal client list and I was 28 or 29. And this guy I discovered every morning drove 45 minutes to his office. and every morning he'd get on the phone with his assistant and one of his junior agents and he would go through problem areas and I just sat in my car and took notes and started calling his clients. It was unbelievable. He gave me a roadmap. But basically, if you don't have energy and you don't want to make a time commitment and you want to have kind of an easier life, you shouldn't try to start a business. I don't know a founder that I've worked with anywhere that isn't driven like the snow.

36:00And if you can't keep that pace up for 20 years, and I mean that, there's no business I've ever seen that can get up and running in under seven to 10 years. I don't know why it's that number. But if you look around and start seeing when businesses hit critical mass, it's seven to 10 years. And if you don't have the energy and the desire and that burning sensation in your gut and the fear of failing and a desire to make it for the right reasons, and it can't just be financial, by the way, you got to want to do something with your gains that's socially important. That's a very important item for me.

36:49Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. I've been blessed with meeting really great founders and working with some of the brightest young people in our country. I think that if you don't want to put the time and effort in and you don't have a belief, if you don't believe in your idea, don't start a business. And if you can't do momentum. I did 250 calls a day, but I wasn't the only one. We all did. The whole business did. The company, it wouldn't have worked with just me. And that's a critical distinction to make. We had a partnership and we had 150 agents. And you have to realize what that did.

37:28You had 150 agents in all different fields at 1.200 going out, covering the community between New York and LA. in all creative areas, everything, taking that information, reporting it back into a meeting every single day, sharing it unfiltered, no cards held close to the vest, and then doing 200 to 300 calls a day, outgoing and incoming, that's both, and creating this momentum, it's not stoppable, and it builds on itself to the hundredth power. So if you had 200 agents, it builds to the 200th power and one can't compete with that. It's not an accident that we ended up with the best client lists or the most film packages or most musical tours or most books on the New York Times bestseller list each week.

38:26It fed on itself. And you talked about competition internally. Internally, we had a very simple thesis, which was, if you have a competitive actor that you are worried about. So if you're Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Bob De Niro, you traditionally have wanted separate agents. So when we signed Dustin a couple years in, I asked him to help us get De Niro and Pacino. And, you know, he kind of looked at me. I said, wouldn't you rather know what they're doing rather than not? and they should know what you're doing. You're only an actor who can do, and you're brilliant, but you can only do two things a year maybe.

39:08And probably knowing you, you can do one thing every three years. There's plenty to go around. But it'd be nice if you guys all worked together and all of a sudden you see heat with Pacino and De Niro and Michael Mann, all three clients of the agency. May have been doable without that, but probably a lot easier and a lot less friction under the same roof. So our thesis was everybody should be with us, which really irritated people because that's like unholy. But our attitude is be in the clubhouse and partake in the wonderful information and material that comes in for everybody. And if you've got everybody, you get everything, which sounds pretty simple.

39:50And by the way, it is. But it was like no one takes all those calls. It takes momentum and heat and diligence and follow-up. Follow-up is critical. You can't in any business, even if you're building chips, if you don't have follow-up, you're not going to build a business. If you don't touch base with someone after you've had a first contact, you know, I was telling Ollie at lunch the other day, meeting someone isn't enough. The first meeting is easy. Anyone can get a first meeting. It's the fifth meeting and how you're perceived that's critical. And if there's no consistency and follow-up, there's no building the business.

40:30And I don't care what business you're in. You've got to have follow-up. In addition to your follow-up rule, one of the other things that you listed in the book was never bad-mouthing the competition. Say more about the reasoning behind that. I like it on its face, but. To me, it made no sense because I worked with a guy when I was 22 years old, when I was an agent of William Morris, a manager, a very famous guy, had a huge client list. And I'd sit on the phone with him and all he would do was bad mouth everyone around him, including his partner. It was kind of a subtle bad mouth thing, you know, and I realized early on it wasn't attractive.

41:10and it also made me think he was really insecure because I said to him, I said, why is he doing this to his own partner? He should be telling me his partner is the greatest thing since the wheel and get me to deal with the guy so he doesn't have to take my coals. And his attitude was, he was putting everybody down. So we used to say to everyone we worked with, you don't have any gain of momentum in badmouthing somebody. You kind of look weak. we didn't let anybody bad mouth movies of other agencies directors because we knew we'd end up with those directors so it would look long game it would look stupid and then also who bad mouth somebody it's somebody who doesn't believe in themselves and is really insecure there's no positive gain to the equation in bad mouthing somebody and i just a nice way to think about I don't believe in it.

42:05Is there anything else that comes to mind as you think about these aspects of power and influence that were generated? Like, that's a really interesting backdoor into it because you look weak if you're badmouthing people, which I think is totally true. Any other things like that that really defined the culture at CAA that you think are most interesting? I always like to say that we were a blend of American team sports, Asian philosophy, and just plain old outworking everybody else. And then I kind of put a dash of Alexander Dumas' Three Musketeers on top of it all for one and one for all. sounds trite, sounds stupid, but in 1974, it worked because we did everything as a group.

42:53So when we started, five of us that started the place would attend every meeting and go to every event. Then there were 10 of us, then 15, then 20, then 30, 40, 50, 60. And like when screenings occurred in the entertainment business, which is how movies and television shows were exposed to the community always ahead of release dates. We were manipulative, frankly. We knew that the screen curtain went down at 7.30. People were seated from 7 to 7.15, non-reserved seating, 1 ,200 people in the auditorium. And we would go in groups of 10 and walk down the aisle together and saying hello to people.

43:38And no one thought much of it until subconsciously there was a buzz. Oh, CA's here. And we did things that seemed ridiculously simple and thoughtless, frankly, but they were manipulative and created an image in a business that's all image. We designed script covers, and I, as you know, love art. You've been to my house, and I'm— Quite the collector. Well, I'm addicted, you know, and I chose a primary color for a script cover, red. And someone said, what are you doing that for? It's so not, other people had like mostly white, you know. And I'll tell you why it's a primary color. It is a reactive color.

44:26If you want to have fun sometime when you have nothing to do, Google the science of color. It's absolutely mesmerizing to read about the science of color and what colors stimulate subconsciously in your brain. And I said, but here's what it is. It's only going to stimulate one thing. People are going to see it. Okay, they said. And I said, here's what we're going to do. We printed a thousand old scripts of movies that had already been made and TV shows that had already been made. And we put them in script covers. And I had mailroom guys go drop them off at every doctor and dentist's office in Beverly Hills and Westwood on the coffee table.

45:04They just opened the door and dropped it and left. And all these people that were going to their doctor or their dentist sitting amongst Time magazine. These were the times when people read magazines sitting amongst Time and people in Newsweek and Fortune and Businessweek. There's a CA cover with a script in it. Ubiquity. And people, they would look at it and they would just register and then they'd say something to somebody or the image was in their head. It was the logo on a red background. So that's what we did. Incredible. I'd love to talk about talent and your reputation for being able to not only spot talent, but do so quite quickly.

45:44Obviously, you said, you know, it's the capacity to work for 7, 10, 20 years that's going to build the great big things. But if you've got 10 minutes to meet with somebody and you are looking for talent or the lack thereof, what are you doing? What are you processing? What are you looking for? What are you looking to avoid? Something that would indicate maybe they're not the kind of person you want to look at. Yeah, that's a good question. It's very difficult to describe it any other way than it's very much like collecting art in a strange way. Everyone asks me, how do I start collecting art? I'm mentoring three young people in San Francisco right now that want to start art collection.

46:23So I sent them a bibliography of books, a list of the top galleries, and 50 artists that are on the contemporary that they should look at their work. And they said, what are we doing with all this? And I said, you're looking at pictures. Why are we looking at pictures? Because if the more you look at and you can never look at enough, your brain will automatically, automatically, cognitively put a weight of zero to 10 on anything you look at. And you're going to remember the zeros and the tens and forget the rest. And that's all you need because you're going to build what I call frame of reference on what's good and what's bad because every art show has in it by any artist, I don't care who they are.

47:08They've got maybe 12 to 15 pictures they've worked on for the last year, and probably two of them are masterpieces. Five or six or seven of them are somewhere between the best and average, and two of them should have never gone in the show. They should have been edited out of the show. And that's how you learn taste and what works and what doesn't. And And it's not dissimilar with human beings. I don't think I could have done this perfectly at the beginning of my career, but I was lucky enough to start in the entertainment business when I was 17. And I met a lot of people. And the more people you meet, the easier it is.

47:53And when you sit with someone, you get certain cues that are both social and intellectual that give you a frame of reference about drive, about emotion, about deportment, about looking at you when you talk to them, about different tiny, it kind of reminds me of a Seurat painting, the Seurat, the pointillist. If you look at a two-inch square of a Seurat picture, you see a bunch of points and dots. You look at a four-inch square, more points and dots, eight-inch square, more points than not. 16-inch square, maybe you see a little bit of a figure. 32-inch square, ah, there's two figures sitting over there.

48:37And then as it gets bigger, the picture appears. And it pierces your eyes and the sensory perception puts all those dots together into something that's quite extraordinary. He was one of my favorite artists. It's the same thing with meeting with talent. And in the world I come from, you get about 10 minutes to make a decision if you have time to keep going. Because if it's not something that you think is going to work, you got to stop it because time's your enemy in anything you do, in anything, even recreation, time's your enemy. And you can't keep going. So I taught myself and all of the people we work with taught themselves to kind of look at a lot of nonverbal cues and listen carefully to what somebody says and you get a sense and then compare that in your cognitive scale of things other people you've talked to so meet with a director and you want to have an amazing conversation about film talk to martin scorsese if you want to use martin Scorsese's brilliance to help you pick talent, it's a fantastic tool.

49:48Because if somebody doesn't say something that has some correlation to the way he speaks about movies, they're missing an element that they need to have greatness. Now, the ratio of right to wrong is good, but it's not flawless. You miss people sometimes. I remember early on, we made a mistake. We missed John Travolta when we were kids. I was 27 or 8. He was doing like, welcome back, Cotter. And he played this character and we all thought he had one dimension. We were just wrong. We were just dead wrong. We made a mistake and you got to own up to it. I admit that all the time. He's brilliant. He's a great actor.

50:36He's played a zillion characters. I was just actually watching something he did the other night with Quentin Tarantino, and I've seen it 10 times, and there's certain scenes in there that he does that just, he and Sam do these scenes together that are just absolutely brilliant, and we blew it. There's so much charisma of a certain type to a great entertainer that probably blends quite a bit into founders who are marshalling resources and selling people and building a narrative. Investors seem quite different as a category of people. I think through some of the greatest investors, they're kind of nothing like some of the great founders or entertainers.

51:17What patterns have you noticed or do you look for? Because you've done this quite a few times. You've worked with Mark, with Josh, as you mentioned. I know you're close with Bill Ackman. You're working with Ali Hamed now, whose name you've mentioned a few times. What are the points of pattern recognition for investors specifically, do you think, that are the same and or different than you'd be looking for in founders or entertainers? First of all, it's all the same, which is odd, but it's the same and it's different, if that makes any sense to. Okay, it's different in certain categories, but it's the same underlying fundamental principles.

51:51I was once asked when I transitioned into full-time being up in the Valley, which was thanks to two guys, Mark Andreessen and Herb Allen and Laura Andreessen, who staged an intervention with me in New York City on the Upper East Side 20 years ago. Well, basically, they invited me to dinner at 6.30, which is a half hour late for Herb because he likes to eat dinner at late lunch hour. He learned that from his father, who was one of my mentors, Herb II, who I learned the investment banking business from. And Herb III and Mark and Laura met me for dinner. I had no idea what I was going for, and sat down, and Mark just looks at me and says, well, this is an intervention.

52:37I thought he was kidding. He was not kidding. He said, you are running around New York, and we all think that you're wasting your time. And he was brutally direct about it, as only people in the digital space can be. And he said, you have to stop doing what you're doing, which is generally consulting for a lot of different businesses. I was out of the agency business. And you have to move to San Francisco, and you've got to get into the investment area. And I said, I don't know what you guys know about investing. And they both said, it's very simple. You put talent together with money and got them distribution.

53:15That's what we do, too. And he said, that's exactly what we do for a living. And I said, wow, I never looked at it that way. He was 100 % right. That night, I canceled everything. I had the next day and the next day I flew to San Francisco and rented an apartment. And I moved up there three days a week and started. And I was doing the exact same thing that I did before, exactly as predicted. And meeting with founders was no different than meeting with someone who wanted to be an actor, a director, or a writer. and you had certain other criteria that were added to my outline of what I felt was important to judge talent and see if it was someone I wanted to work with or invest in.

54:03My investing is a bit different than a lot of other people's. I'm probably less detailed on diligence than I am on thinking I invest in people. If they've got a decent idea and I feel the founder is talented and dedicated and believes in his or her idea, I will invest in them. And I will invest if I don't like the idea sometimes. And many times I've done that and the company's failed, but the second idea has been amazing and I've made my money back, but it's all about the people. As a young man, that I'm very fond of in San Francisco named James Proud. Oh, sure. We had dinner with him talking about China.

54:50And I met him. He was 20. Barely 20. Barely 20, and he looked like he was 15. And he was 20 until he opened his mouth. And the stuff that came out of it blew me away, and I invested in his first business. He was a Teal Fellow, which to me was very good. I take all of the points like Sarah to weigh the talent and a teal fellow is a good point for me. It doesn't always mean it's perfect, but it's a very good point. He had a business that I thought was interesting, but I don't invest in hardware businesses. There are too many things that can go wrong with him. And sure enough, he did this business as a great product.

55:35And of course it failed. He's got a business now that is so amazing. and so smart and so important to the country. It's like he's on a mission. He's like on a mission from above to make this work and it's going to help the country. And he's getting support from the government, which he should. He's raised a lot of money. He's hired some of the greatest minds in the country. He's basically trying to build ships in this country. And I met with him and I said, James, this time you've gone off the reservation. I mean, do you know how hard that is? And I listened to him and he convinced me in about 30 minutes why this mission was important, why I had to invest, why it was going to work.

56:21And his commitment to it was second to none, I'd ever say. And it's about him. He's going to make it work. For someone like Ali, benefit both knowing him, I think of him as a puzzle solver. Like he just can't get enough puzzles to try to figure out investing equations to figure out. What does someone with that ability usually need to develop to build a great franchise or a great business since you've been a part of a number of these amazing investing franchises? So a very close friend of mine lives here in New York. Named Eric Lane was at lunch with me last Monday. He's the president of Tiger.

56:56He used to be a Goldman. Fabulous guy. At lunch with me, he said he met some young guy who is incredibly smart and has a fund and he gave him a little bit of money. and thought I should meet him because I love meeting young people. I mean, for me, I have no interest in spending time with anyone my age. I don't want to be around anybody my chronological age or within 10 years. And I said, great. He said he's in his early 30s and he's really smart. So I met him. We both know him. And I saw something very special in this guy in 10 minutes. It didn't take me long. But on the other side, it was very clear to me that he'd built a really interesting business and no one knew who he was.

57:43And he was having trouble getting in certain doors and he had little credibility, even though he's putting up 12 and a half percent returns for 10 years. And his deal investing analytical capability was off the charts. I call him all the time to Turn on the engine. It's the engines, not 12. So it's not like a Ferrari. It's like five 12 cylinder engines and he's got endless energy. And I saw a lot of things in him that I had when I was his age, as far as drive and desire and not wanting to move back to the San Fernando Valley where I was raised. And I talked to him every single day through the summer.

58:27He absolutely ruined my summer. he just patrick he ruined it it was every day an hour to two hours and the more i talked the more i respected his brain power and i did a deep dive on his business and it was really good and it's a secret it's a miracle he raised the kind of money he did because he had no buddy vouching for him he had nobody saying hey this guy's really good no third party and if he did, it wasn't at the right level of introduction. I started working with them about eight weeks ago, and the more I work with them, the more I like what I'm doing. To me, building is the most fun. Building CAA was so much more fun than getting to the end result, because once you're at the end result, you kind of feel like every day you're Wyatt Earp, and you walk into town, and someone's going to shoot you in the back.

59:25Yeah, it gets very defensive. It's a defensive move and I'm an offensive player. So I had long talks with him and in the last eight weeks in his inimitable way, he's managed to suck me into spending most of my time in restructuring his business and recruiting terrific investors and raising more money and exposing him to different people. and I watch him sit with, like I had him sit yesterday with a guy I'm crazy about named Kevin Warsh, who I have giant respect for. He's got a, what I call Andreessen, Teal Crichton-style brain, and he works with Stan Druckenmiller, who I have great respect for, and I took Ali to meet him, and I was proud of how Ali held his own, because against Kevin, that's not an easy task.

1:00:16I sometimes struggle to not only understand what he's saying, but hold my own. Yeah, incredible. And he did a great job. In the spirit of the red covers on the scripts, one of the things that you read a lot about in your heyday at CAA was this sort of mystique that followed you around. And I think you even said in your book that you owned the rights to all the photos of you. So you were this sort of like, I think the word boogeyman even came up. And I'd love to hear about the difference, if any, that you cultivated between, did you cultivate a character that created that mystique because it had benefit or not?

1:00:53And how did you do that? I find that quite attractive and interesting and quite fun, honestly. You have to understand that when I was working in the entertainment business, there was no Instagram and no Facebook and no reels and no TikTok. And celebrities were really celebrities. I mean, I had the privilege of representing Paul Newman and Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Bob De Niro and Meryl Streep and Bill Murray. One of the great. I have to have you tell that story about the hospital. Yeah. one of the great actors and comedians of our time, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. And it's just the list was endless of who we were lucky enough to be involved with.

1:01:37And they were real movie stars. When you walked into a room in a restaurant with those people, the restaurant just quieted down. You didn't know anything about them, but you saw their work on screen. So you kind of thought you knew him. I was having a drink with a friend, Scott Wapner, the other day here, and I hadn't seen him in a while. And we were laughing because I said, you know, Scott, I live with you every day. So I feel like I've seen you, but you haven't seen me, but I'm watching. And that's the feeling. But that feeling wasn't allowed to occur in my day because every one of those actors had a kind of distance from the public.

1:02:21So I decided the best thing we could do since we're handling confidential careers and we were going to do the opposite of what our competition did is we're not going to talk about them. I'm just not going to talk to the press. And I don't want anybody taking pictures of me or my kids. I don't want to be in gossip columns. I just want to be behind it, and I don't want to be in front of it. And if someone wants to write something, they can say whatever they want, but they're not going to get my cooperation. And we had a rule, which in those days you can enforce. You couldn't today. No one in the company except for our head legal counsel was allowed to talk to any reporter.

1:03:00We didn't want to give background. We didn't want to spin stories. We didn't want to be part of that. And that's what everybody else did. It kind of set us apart. And by doing that, it created a mystique around the company, like a cult kind of mystique. And it was defined intentionally. Like if there was a screening, one of the mailroom guys or gals would let me in the back door. And that was after we made it, by the way. That was 10 years to get to that point. And I didn't walk in places with celebrities, no notoriety. Who is that guy? it was all about getting people to wonder that great line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid where Newman turns to Redford and the Pinkertons are chasing them.

1:03:47And he goes, who are those guys? So the whole idea is to get people to wag their tongues about who are those guys? How do they do what they do? Why do they do what they do? And it worked to a point. I will tell you a side story that's kind of funny. As I was in an elevator with Paul Newman, And we were going up to an editing bay here in San Francisco in Chelsea. It was like 20 flights up in the elevator. And Paul and I had just had dinner. And it's like 730. And in walks some woman, some elderly lady with a shopping bag. And she looks at me. And she looks at Paul. And she looks at Paul a second time.

1:04:21She looks at him. And she goes, Mr. McQueen, you were so good in that movie about the fire in the buildings. And Paul looks at her and doesn't skip a beat. he says, you know, somewhat. You ought to look at that other guy, Newman. He was really good, too. And the doors open and we walk out and I just couldn't stop laughing. It was about building a mystique because it's the same reason like Mark and Ben built scale. How do you differentiate? There's 100 and 200, 100 VC firms on Sand Hill Road. You start up 13 years ago and so what? Who cares if you're Mark Andreessen and Ben Hortz? What have you done for me lately.

1:05:05And do you know how to invest? You may know how to operate a business, but do you know how to pick a business? I mean, I thought they did, but who knows? So the reality is you have to have a mystique. You have to have an act. You have to have something to put forward. It just doesn't happen by accident. If you've got a technology, that's great, but we don't all have code that is RIP that no one else has. We don't have that. You have an idea. So we tried that and it worked until it didn't. And then in retrospect, I was asked about this class I was teaching last year and someone asked me the same question.

1:05:42And they said, if you started the company today, would you do that? And I said, absolutely not. I would never go near that, not with social media or any of the tools that are out there. I said, I'd probably, if I started CAA, which I don't think is possible by the way to start it, today. In this environment, I don't think it's doable. But I said, I probably would take the Warren Buffett approach and pick up the phone and talk to anybody that called me, which is a better way to do it because there's no secrets anymore. There is no secret. There is no mistake. Everything's when you go to Google and you can find out anything you want about anybody.

1:06:24Does that mean that relationship becomes the most important thing? Yeah. Relationship is the most important thing anywhere and anything, whether it's personal, professional, family. Servicing your life and your relationships is more important than anything. It's as important as your health because good relationships help you be healthy. But the idea of building a mystique today about a business, I think is almost impossible because everything's an open book. I mean, my God, we didn't have a website called The Glass Ceiling when I started CAA, no one would. But we took care of our people. We were very concerned about our assistants because they made up the culture of the company too, because they were talking to people.

1:07:05Listen, they were talking to all the assistants of all the people we were dealing with. So if one of my assistants was talking to your assistant and your assistant gets a good feeling about it, and you happen to say to your assistant something and he or she responds to you, that response is going to have either a positive or negative connotation. So you see how it works at so many levels underneath the surface. Probably the only rule that I could see working today, which would just be me, is I would not allow anyone in the theatrical agency business to be in social media on anything except their family.

1:07:43I mean, they could have a private account, but don't go posting on Instagram anything. Your opinion, who cares what your opinion is? I mean, you may care. I marvel at people that put their opinions out there about things that have no credibility or no position or no intellectual capability. And they put out these emotional gut-wrenching opinions. And I say to them, I say, why? What do you think about offense in investing? One of the lovely anecdotes from the book was this idea that prior to your business, agents were really firefighters. They didn't know where they were going to get called, they sort of just showed up and dealt with something.

1:08:19It was very reactive and you made it very proactive. Like, no, we're going to go make things happen. It feels like most of investing is more firefighting where it's a deal kind of investing in private markets where deals come across your desk, they come up with companies fundraising, you react to it, you learn quickly, you make a decision. Do you think there's more room for offense in investing where you are an activist almost that does packaging, goes and makes things happen? I think there's room for both. I don't wait for things to cross my desk. I try to keep a scorecard on one of the best experiences of my life is when Peter Thiel asked me to help Alex Karp out with Palantir and get them into a commercial business.

1:08:56It's not like he asked me for my coding expertise. I didn't really understand what they were doing, frankly, but I could sell the company to a commercial client and keep them in business. And I did. Got them their first commercial gig in banking with JP Morgan. I spent 10 years with them. I keep an eye on all the Palantir engineers that leave to start up businesses because when Stephen Cohn was interviewing them, he'd take one for every 50 interviewed. And if they work there, they've got an edge. They've got some intellectual edge, but I don't believe you wait for people to send you stuff. You got to go out and look for it.

1:09:32So I do both. I can't cover everything. It's one of the reasons that I'm working with Ollie is that we've got for the first time in years, I have really talented people to work with me because I can't do it as a solo practitioner. And it wasn't as much fun anyways. It was getting boring. You'd like to have someone to do a high five with if you happen to be lucky enough to make a right decision. But I think that being offensive in business is a key strategy in investing, no different than it's a key strategy point of being a founder. You can't be a defensive founder. You have to play offensive and you have to do that also to kind of scare away the competition a little bit.

1:10:14It is so competitive in the technology space. The moats are never high enough. Your competitors better think that you got a real lead on them and they're not quite sure what you have, but you better make a presentation that it's maybe a little more than you do to just keep your lead. It's important. I'd love to hear a bit more about art. You said you're addicted to it. Like spotting talent, it's spotting beauty. But what about the world of art itself has taught you other things about the world or about people that you think is portable? Well, art for me is so much a part of my life because it's what I did for a living too, because making movies and music and the clients that I represented, they're artists too, just visual artists.

1:11:01I once said to Marty, who I'm crazy about and have such respect for. And I said the same thing to Stephen. Let's take some single frames out of some of your setups and frame them and do an art show. We actually did one with Tim Burton because some of the frames are as good as anything I've ever seen hanging on a gallery wall the way they're composed. Matter of fact, when Marty did Gangs of New York, I gave him the definitive book on Rembrandt because it was pictures painted that showed how Rembrandt lit his paintings with candlelight. And the period Marty was doing, there was a ton of candlelighting and early gas lighting, which were single source flames.

1:11:49And Marty's such a stickler for perfection in what the period looks like. He's so good at it. His research is like a college professor. that he looked at this and it was like a light bulb went off. And that's how he lit Gangs of New York when they were interior scenes and they're gorgeous. But to me, I got lucky, frankly, Patrick. I got interested in art very early. I never left the San Fernando Valley before I was 18. And when I was 18, I worked every day of my life and I worked every summer. But I took two weeks off in the middle of the summer from my job. and I drove across the country to kind of get a sense.

1:12:33This was between high school and college. I only took two weeks and I drove and I ended up in New York and one of the places that I went to, I had never been to a museum in my life and I went to the Museum of Modern Art and I was 18 years old and I walked around and then I walked around again and then I walked around again and I stayed there for eight hours and I was in absolute state of shock. The things that I saw and the perception of it for me. It flooded my brain. It like pixelated my brain. I just couldn't believe what I was saying of all periods of art. And I said, I need to understand this.

1:13:11And I started reading about art in my spare time. When I was in college, I never went to class because I worked 60 hours a week and I went to the first class and the final. And I had someone taking notes for me at uc ever the enterprising young man i had a job that was too good to be true you know i was running the tour department at 20th century fox i had 75 people from my college working for me and 45 of them were attractive young women and the rest of them were my fraternity brothers if i told you we were working i mean we were having a blast right but i did go to art class because it was at eight o 'clock in the morning and I did get hooked into it.

1:13:54And then when I graduated college and went to work full-time at William Morris, I started buying prints of artists and studying them in my spare time. And when we started CA, it turned out by a fluke that it was something all creative people were interested in. Oddly, all directors wanted, were influenced by some artists. I mean, I'll never forget talking to one of my clients, Stanley Kubrick, who's visually one of the most rich directors ever. Rich. And let's talk about a guy who talked about Hal 9000, which is Siri on steroids 60 years ago. So let's go to 2001 Space Odyssey and look at that film, which I've done 20 times and say, how did he think of that?

1:14:41How did he call me up 30 years ago and say to me, I want you to put something, Michael, in my contracts that no one can recreate any of the characters I've created digitally? I said, what are you talking about? I said, what do you mean? How's that even possible? It's like Nathan Birvall again, coming from the sky. I said, how is that even possible? There's no technology for it. And he said, somebody's going to figure it out. And we did it. We put it in his contract. You couldn't recreate characters. And now we've seen with AI, it's like all anyone's doing. But he says to me one day, I was sitting with him in London at his house having a lunch, and we were talking about putting together one of his movies.

1:15:22It was Eyes Wide Shut, and I was pitching Tom Cruise and Nicole to play the leads. They were clients. And we're sitting at his breakfast table, and he brings a book over, and he says, you know, I love Henri Lartigue, who is a great French photographer. He's taught me so much. And then it just was very clear to me that art was so important in talking to directors. I said to myself, how is it possible there's only like under 10 art collectors in Hollywood? How's that possible that that could be? There's some disconnect that I must be missing something. So I went and spent months thinking about if I was making a mistake.

1:16:01because to me past this prologue so if historically no one is using art as a foundation for parts of their business then maybe I'm making a giant mistake and it's taking up a lot of my time and I just pushed through it and I said I think I'm right and I just kept going and I just love every second of it it's the challenge of learning how to judge what pictures are some of the most beautiful things I've seen or through you. So for sure. Thank you. And then I have a lot of friends that are artists. I'm mesmerized by creative people. I can't paint. I can't draw, can't sculpt, can't write. I can't shoot a picture properly with my iPhone.

1:16:43I am just a doofless about anything creative. I can read. You can spot it. I can spot it. But probably one of the reasons I became an agent is I was talentless. You sound like Rick Rubin on 60 Minutes. I feel that way. I just have no talent. One talent I know you have is to be fearless in confrontation. What does that mean? Talk about confrontation. I think you have to tell the truth to people and it's not pleasant, frankly, and people aren't useful. When we started CAA, one of the things we decided to do was A, function as a group, the five musketeers, and B, just tell the truth, which no one did.

1:17:26Everyone lied to everybody. And when you're dealing with people that are performing talent, in order to be really good, they have to be a little insecure, a little narcissistic, a little bit of ego to balance the insecurity. We all have it. And it's hard to tell people what that make up the truth. And no one did. Everyone would puff them up and tell them how great they were. And I found that to be, when I was a young agent of William Morris, reprehensible. How do you call a client and tell them that his show or his movie was fantastic when it was absolutely terrible? Why don't you give them some notes and just say, look, I'm not an expert, but here is a viewer.

1:18:10So I've always viewed myself from the day I started in the business as the ultimate fan. So I view myself as the fan of somebody's work. And fandom means you like the good and the bad, but you can give commentary about the stuff that isn't so good. And I also view myself as a normal fan. I'm a guy who goes in, buys the popcorn, sits in the seat. I went to theaters every Friday night for 20 years into Westwood and stopped on the way home for an hour to see how the audience was reacting to clients of mine movies. I remember I went to see Last of the Mohicans, and I went to see part of it. I left the agency early.

1:18:59I really wanted to represent Michael Mann. I think he's really brilliant. He's one of the few guys that can not only tell a story, but make the pictures just stunning and realistic. And he gets great acting performances. So I went to see Last Nohiggas, and I just sat there, and I didn't leave. So I was two hours late. I was an hour late for dinner. I just sat there. Good God. And one thing came to my mind when I'm watching it. It is Alfred Bierstadt, who's Alfred Bierstadt is one of the great American landscape painters of his generation. And I kept looking at this production design, I said, my God, it's like a giant Alfred Bierstadt painting.

1:19:40I called him from the car on the way home. I said, I have two words to say to you. And he said, three words. And he said, what's that? I said, one, Alfred, two, Bierstadt, three, brilliant. And we hooked up after that. But if I didn't know art, he did. Whether he used Bierstadt or not, it was surely some influence in the production design. So I found art to be very compelling for discussions with creative people. What is something about you that other people believe that isn't true? Well, I was incredibly controversial when I was in the agency business because I had this one for all for one attitude and it was win at all costs.

1:20:20And I made a lot of mistakes when I think people would say that I was overzealous, that I knocked a lot of people around. I knocked people out of things and they're probably right. I wanted to win. I wanted our clients to win. And I really felt it was important if we could do it without lying and without doing anything immoral or illegal. Our clients had to win and we had to win. We had to be the best. And I'm a great believer in excellence. And whatever anyone does, whether they're a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief or an agent, they have to be the best. I really strove to be the best and I felt that anyone who worked in the company had to be the best and drove people really hard maybe in retrospect a little too hard starting CA today would be really difficult because to me it was a lifestyle and a religious experience that you're in or out because you couldn't work that way for other human beings without it I did believe that you say the truth to your client.

1:21:23We had a big movie star. I don't want to say who. It's not important. Giant movie star. I got a call from Sherry Lansing, who was a brilliant producer and studio executive, one of the top women in our business. And she said, Michael, you got to look at this movie that you helped me put together. And you got to look at the dailies, your client, something's wrong. It was early on in the relationship with the client. It was early on in our business. I don't think we were but five or six years old and we had signed this giant movie star. And I looked at the dailies and I, oh my God, they're not watchable.

1:22:00He looked like he was dead on the set. Called her. I said, I'm going to take care of it. Can I do what I need to do? Can I say certain things that I don't have the authority to say? She said, like what? I said, can I tell them we'll shut down for three days? She said, yeah, I'll take insurance. She said, say what you need to say. So I went to see him and I walked into the guy's trailer and he was sitting there. He said, what's up? Because for me to make a trip to the set unannounced was highly unusual. He was at the lot at Paramount and I said, look, I just looked at dailies and I said, I feel like something's going on.

1:22:35I don't know about, I want to help. What can I do? He said, what's going on? And I said, you don't look good. He said, what do you mean? I don't look good. I said, you look tired and your eyes are half closed and I don't think we should let those takes be used. He said, get out of here. I said, get out of here. He said, I don't need an agent like you. I didn't know what to do. So I just walked out and got in my car. I spent 20 minutes driving back to the office trying to think how I was going to tell the agents that I had just lost a flagship client, it would have been a disaster for us because we were on a momentum roll.

1:23:17We used to announce a movie star signing a week with red ads, and it just put the competition away because they never knew what their Thursday nights were bad nights for our competition because Fridays that we rolled out these ads every Friday, 50 weeks a year. So I get back to my office and the phone ringing, it's the client. please come back drive back 20 minutes i walk in he doesn't say anything to me except i can't sleep i said well it's a pretty simple thing to fix i said hang out i'm gonna and i called an internist at ucla because i was involved with the hospital and i said i got a client who's got a sleeping issue i need something that's strong enough to put him to sleep and light enough where he's not going to be hung over and the guy said this is what i'd recommend put him on the phone with me.

1:24:08I did. We got him a prescription. He said, what are you going to do? I said, you're going to go out to your house at the beach and do nothing for five days. This was a Wednesday, Tuesday. I said, we're going to shut the movie down Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. He thought I was like, God, that I could do that. I had already pretty clear that part of being a great agent is presenting that you can do the impossible. So I had already cleared that we could shut down and get insurance. And I got him a prescription of the sleeping pills, had it picked up for him, had a car and driver take him to the beach.

1:24:41And he came back Monday and the movie turned out to be fantastic. And he stayed with me for 20 years. So when you say, is it better to tell the truth or to lie to somebody, if I would have walked in and said, boy, your dailies look great. He would have thought I was out of my mind because he knew they didn't look great. But he was so upset that someone told them because no one had ever told them. Our point of view was, it's just easier to tell people the truth. One of the things that I think a lot about these days is if you're lucky enough, like I think I am, you were to fall into something that you really, really deeply love doing.

1:25:15It becomes all consuming in an interesting way and it crowds out everything and anything else if you let it. How did you balance all of that with your family, with your friends, with your kids, with life writ large, when the thing you were doing, the feedback loops were so tight, it was so energizing, you were building something and working on something? I did it with mixed success. Family was very important to me, but I didn't start a family till we'd been in business for close to 10 years or eight years. So I got the hard part behind me. The minute we had our first kid, and I have four now, the minute we had the first child, I changed my hours of operation around their schedules.

1:26:04So when they slept, I worked. When they ate, I ate. And I did a lot of coming home at 6.30 and leaving at 7.30. I never didn't have a dinner. I would try to get home at least two nights a week. Weekends, I always worked from home. I used to work in the office on Saturday and work at home on Sunday. I worked both days of the weekend. I mean, for 20 years, I worked seven days, seven nights. But when I had the kids, we took off Saturday and Sunday night. But we also made it clear when we went to people's houses that if we couldn't bring the kid, we weren't coming. When we sort of pioneered this thing of bringing a basket with a kid in it, putting it on the table because we didn't want to leave the kid at home.

1:26:56And then as we had more kids, it became easier because we could adjust schedules. I tried like crazy to be a good father. It's really hard when you're in a service business. Sometimes I used to, when the kids had athletic games at 3.30 in the afternoon, my office was 10 minutes from their school max, and I would go with two cell phones and an assistant and stand on the sidelines being on the phone watching them. At least I was there. Was I as engaged as I would have liked to have been? Probably not. Did they realize that? I don't know. Probably the hours I spent trying to be a good father. I thought I did the best I could do.

1:27:39Was I a father that was around 24-7? No. I always still work really hard to not travel on weekends. I used to have to go to Japan almost once a month for a period of years. I made very clever trips that left Sunday late afternoon, so I had a weekend at home. I worked really hard to do six-day weeks in a five-day week. So when I was very young as an agent, I bought a very inexpensive small airplane, didn't tell anybody about it and gave me the ability to work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at the agency and be involved in all the meetings that we had. And then Wednesday at five, I could run to the airport, get to New York by one, go to sleep, get up, do a breakfast, meetings, lunch, dinner, and then leave for LA at nine, get home at 1130 and then be in the office Thursday morning.

1:28:40And it's like no one, No one knew. No one knew, but no one could figure out how you were doing it. I was doing it. Well, I did it for$75 ,000 down and$600 ,000 mortgage and didn't tell anybody because at that time, Warner Brothers was passing out airplanes to people as benefits. When I started in the business, the big gift was when the studio gave a client a car. Everybody got that. Everybody got a car. It's like if you did a good job on something, you got a car. that moved when Steve Ross was at Warner Brothers. You got a plane ride. And then as agents, we were under the gun because every client said, get us a free plane ride.

1:29:20And it became a big negotiating point. If anyone knew we were running a plane, including internally, it would have bankrupt us. The funny thing is I had a small plane. You couldn't stand up and it had no bathroom and it couldn't make it all the way to New York. It had a stop on the way back to New York. It could make it, but back from New York, it couldn't. I did a lot of urinating in bottles, but it was important. We could do two sets in a day and not have to sleep in a hotel. So if someone was working in Colorado, it's tough to get a scheduled flight to. So we could go LA to Colorado, then Colorado to Iowa to cover a movie, and then back to Los Angeles all in 24 hours.

1:30:08I didn't sleep a lot, but I also didn't do that on weekends so I could be with the kids. It was much easier when all three kids were in school. That I will tell you. I hope your work ethic comes back. I feel like it took a pause for a while and you're starting to see shades of it again. I don't know. A lot of the businesses that I was consulting for The uniform complaint is the generational hire of what the expectations are of work ethic. And I can't speak to what this generation thinks. I can only speak to my generation. It's not for me to decide what it's like today because I wouldn't want to build a business in today's environment.

1:30:50And I don't want someone working with me that isn't on the program because at the end of the day, we spend more hours during the day with each other than we did with our significant others. So it's got to be pleasant and it's got to be fun and it's got to be challenging and it's got to be energizing. You got to every minute learn something different that makes you a better human being and that sharpens your brain like sharpening a knife on a stone. Because if you don't have a sharp brain, you can't do anything. And the only thing that gives you a sharp brain is pushing through difficult situations and education.

1:31:34And how do you get educated? You get in the middle of a lot of complex situations and you learn. My son once asked me, Dad, how did you learn how to be an investment banker? Because we did investment. We did advertising. We did a lot of stuff that no one had ever done before. And I said, I didn't learn it. I said, I learned it on the job. Many times Herb Allen would say to me when we were selling an entertainment company to another company, and we did six of them, he would say to me, this is not the way to do this. This is how you have to think about this. Because I came at it with a naive point of view.

1:32:13I didn't go to business school. But I learned what you only had to tell me once. And I figured out how to never make that mistake again. I didn't have formal education. Advertising was easier when we got asked to bid for the Coca-Cola account. I had a really interesting idea, frankly, that came to me after looking at all of their work. and it was very clear to me that we could deliver on it because we had a repository of creative talent. By the way, thus the name Creative Artists, that's why we used that name. That wasn't an accident. And when I was at Sun Valley at the Allen & Company conference, this is so long ago, and I'm sitting with Roberto Goizet and Don Keo, may they rest in peace, who were running the company as dynamic duo, and Roberto's sitting at coffee with me with Herb been saying they're concerned about case sales.

1:33:06And I'm saying, well, you kind of should be, because this Michael Jackson commercial that Pepsi's doing is just permeating everything culturally. And he said, yeah, we're not doing anything that's current or contemporary, was how he phrased it. And I said, look, we can do something for you, but it's going to take enormous corporate guts to do it, because if we do it, it's going to be pushing the edge. So he said, come to Atlanta and meet with our 12 worldwide department heads and pitch your idea, and we'll give you a very fast answer. I said, okay. So I took, they sent a plane for us. It was so cool.

1:33:45They sent a big plane. You could stand up in and out of a bathroom. You didn't have to pee in a bottle. You can't have a bathroom. And I chose eight agents from the business, including one of my partners, Bill Haber, who's a brilliant guy. and I chose agents from music, from movies, from television that all represented the breadth and depth of what we had. Briefed everybody. We looked at every commercial they had done for the last 30 years. We looked at all their print work, all their merchandising. We really educated ourselves. And to make a long story short, we went in and spent eight hours with their departments that they had flown in from all over the world.

1:34:20So it's not like they weren't serious. is we listened to what their needs were and we said, we got it. We'll be back to you in 14 days. And they said, okay. And we came back in 14 days and said, you do seven commercials a year for the world all. And you put those commercials on every single program, whether it's late night, primetime, daytime, sports, they're all the same and they're all different demographics. So how can you do that? And they said, well, we don't know. We've never been told not to do that. And we sat down and we created a hundred plus ideas for commercials. And we went in and we took 30 of them and we pitched the following idea.

1:35:06It was very simple. We think you should do your commercials like a relay race. So we should do Thanksgiving commercial that's family. We should do Christmas commercial. It's about the holiday. That was a polar bears we created. And we should do Valentine's Day as love. We should do Easter as family. We should do the summer as refreshment and heat in the beach. Thanksgiving as family. And we should do 30 to 35 commercials a year. And they should hand off to each other over the course of the year. And they said, how can you produce 35? We have trouble with seven. We can't afford it. I said, we'll do 35 for the price you do some.

1:35:48He said, we have 360 account executives at McCann Erickson. I said, good. We have me, Bill Haber, Shelley Hocker and Len Fink, and two people from the mailroom. And they said, it's not possible. I said, well, you just saw 35 ideas, 30 ideas. And what I had done is I gave our mailroom assistant, and by the way, we called him a partner. We called everyone in the company a partner. There were no titles at all. He was equal to me. And I gave him$2 ,000 in cash. I said, go to Brentano's, which was down the street from our office. And I said, go buy every big art book you can get your hands on. So he did.

1:36:26And he came back with satchels of art books. You know, in those days, they cost 20 bucks. And we went through these art books, all of us, one after the other tearing pages out for inspiration and put them in a war room around the room. Oh, God, that's genius. And we looked at them all and we got commercialized. Like one of the pictures was Magritte with the bowler hats raining. I don't know if you've ever seen it. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. So we said, God, let's rain Coca-Cola bottles. So we did a commercial. We called the Magritte commercial where Coca-Cola bottles were raining out of the sky.

1:37:05And we came up with this idea of putting a button on the end of every commercial, but making every commercial a small movie. So it had nothing to do with anything else. It was a non sequitur. The only thing it had to do with Coca-Cola was the end, the button and said, always Coca-Cola. We called Quincy Jones, who was a close friend and his brilliant, brilliant music guy, always ahead of his time. I said, Quincy, I need two of the best songwriters you've ever seen that no one's ever heard of. He said, for what? I said, we're going to rewrite the Coca-Cola jingle. He said, wow, that is so cool. I mean, even Skip Abiti sent us two guys, two young guys.

1:37:43They rewrote it, but they did it in six different rhythms. They did a city rhythm, an urban rhythm, country and Western rhythm, classical rhythm, a European rhythm. They did them all for the sites. Then we went to all our clients who everyone criticized this for and said, you're going to lose all these clients if you put them in commercials. I said, we're going to pay them double their rate. And they get to do this between movies. If they don't want to do it, no one's forcing them to do it. They were lined up around the block to do it because they could go pick up a couple hundred grand for working three days.

1:38:17So we had movie directors doing commercials and they did it and they got paid and they loved it. And we delivered 35 commercials for the price of seven. We had six people working on the account and we went, they asked us because they had a 40 year relationship with McCann to do what's called a shootout and to put ourselves up against McCann. And I said, great, I'm happy to do it. They thought we wouldn't do it because we were promised the account and I didn't care. I was so confident about our product. And we took 35 commercials. We did storyboards on every one. We did what's called a rip-o-matic on some of them.

1:38:57We had the polar bears we created, had them all drawn out. There were six of us doing this. And we went down a day early. We went and looked at the room. We did it entertainment style. We looked at the room. We changed the seating around. I bought everybody Armani suits, including Shelley Hockren. We all had blue Armani suits because we had an in with Armani because we put Sean Connery and Kevin Costner into Untouchables and we got Armani to do the clothes. So we had an inn at Armani and he tailored all these great clothes for us. And we went into Atlanta the day before. We had a leisurely dinner, nice bottle of wine, went to sleep.

1:39:39Everybody got up in the morning, went to the gym, showed up at the room at 15 to 11 for an 11 o 'clock meeting with the CEO, CO, CFO, CTO, and CMO of the Coca-Cola company, which was big. And there's no McCann Erickson. We're sitting there very patiently. Our suits were pressed, by the way. We looked amazing. By the way, we looked great. We were confident. We had all our stuff set up. At five after 11, in walks, 35 people wrinkled and crinkled from New York City, from McCann, who had taken a flight at 7 a.m. out of Kennedy to get to Atlanta. So they had to get up at 5 or 4 to get to the airport.

1:40:27They looked like they were going to die, and there was no energy. And then the bottom line is they flipped a coin, and we won. And they said, you want to go first or second? They thought we'd go second, because that's the way you usually do this. I said, no, we're going first, because I knew if we went first, that would set up a pace they couldn't follow. And Len Fink went up in Shelley and they started to present. Bill Haver and I introduced everything. They went up. We had one thing where a talking dog was the lead character and Len got down on all fours barking, you know, and we showed them polar bears, which they couldn't believe that we could do animation for the price because all we did is outsource, which no one knew what that meant in those days.

1:41:08And we finished. And I'll never forget as long as I live, the head of McCann was there and he was sitting to my left. My team was on my right. His team was on his left. And he wrote a handwritten note to the person sitting next to him. And he stupidly let me read it and said, we're screwed. And his person got up to present and we felt horrible for her. She stopped after one commercial and got the account. It was$600 million a year account. We ended up doing for them 500 commercials. And we made the cover of Time Magazine. We made a lot of enemies on Madison Avenue. We did a lot of firsts. It's amazing that as I thought about our conversation and made mental notes and written down notes that we barely covered any of it.

1:42:01Your career and life reminds me of the Churchill quote that my friend David Senner always mentions, which is always more audacity. I literally could go for five more hours. I have to say that because it's a testament to how many more stories and ideas there are. Unfortunately, I have to wrap it. I always ask the same traditional closing question of everyone I talk to. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I've had a lot of kind things done for me by people, both family and friends. But if you want to talk about a crossover, professional and personal, there are three situations that come to mind that are crossover, professional, personal, because my whole life was a crossover.

1:42:37It was a crossover. They were very instrumental in any success I was lucky enough to achieve because they were a support base. And I think three things I'll give them to you, not in any order quickly. One, I worked for three years to get a movie made called Rain Man that everyone passed on. And it was something that Dustin Hoffman was my first major client. And I had a huge loyalty to him, still do. He's a close friend. My kids grew up with his kids. He was the motor. He wanted to do that character. No one wanted to do it. We put Tom Cruise into it, which we got criticized for because everyone said they don't look like each other.

1:43:28They can't be brothers. but what they didn't realize is that autistic kids don't necessarily look like their siblings and then we went through four directors we started with marty brist great director did beverly hills cop he couldn't do it we actually started with barry levinson and then he got offered good morning vietnam we had to put a minute so he pulled out marty brist came in he couldn't do it gave it to steven spielberg he couldn't do it he just couldn't find an answer for it, gave it to Sidney Pollack. This was taking months, each one. This is over a three-year period. Gave it to Sidney Pollack.

1:44:06He couldn't figure out how to end it. By the time we went through Sidney, Barry had finished Good Morning Vietnam, and we were in Aspen together at a film event. And I said, you know, Barry, we ought to revisit Rain Man. And Dustin happened to be up there and three of us went and had coffee. So Barry rereads that meets with Dustin comes to see me the next day and says, you know, I think I've figured out how to do this because no one could figure it out. And I said, what's that? He said, there is no third act. Everyone's looking for a concluding third act. The guy's autistic. It's not going to change.

1:44:42And it's just a light bulb went off in my head. That's why he's Barry Levinson and I'm not because he figured that out. And sure enough, we did the movie. There was a huge New York Times article that said that I was an idiot and all the clients were going to fire me. It was a stupid idea and it was going to be a disaster. And the movie came out, opened to$6.5 million, which was about a quarter of what a hit opened to at the time. Another article in the paper saying that I was an idiot. I pushed this picture together. It was a package. It was going to fail. So for the next 50 weeks, I did$6 million a weekend and won six Academy Awards.

1:45:20And I got thanked by everybody that was in the movie at the Academy Awards in the most sincere, giving, no ego way imaginable. I just was very touched. The second thing that happened to me was simple. It's a couple sentences. I was sitting with my family on Christmas Eve. We were in Aspen, Colorado. I thought, oh, it was the only time of year I could relax because between the 24th and the 30th, nothing happened. And the phone rings. It's 9 o 'clock at night. And it wasn't a cell phone. It was the hard line. And I get on the phone, and it's Dave Letterman. And for him, it's 11 o 'clock at night.

1:46:02He said, I'm just sitting here. Sorry to bother your Christmas Eve. I just want to thank you. he said you really really came through for me i was really had a problem at nbc and they owned me and they gave the show to somebody else and it was my dream and i have my own show now on cbs and he went on for 10 minutes and it's funny i just had dinner with him a few months ago i can't tell you how touched i was that he would take the time at that night just to say that he didn't have to do that. I got paid for it. And the third time, one of my all-time favorite human beings on the planet to this day is Bill Murray.

1:46:43He's not only the most talented dramatic actor and comedy actor, he's one of the great human beings you'll ever meet, and he's smart as hell. And no one really quite gets how well-rounded he is. My first son was very young, and he was like, God, he probably He was six, seven years old, and he had some medical issues. And I found a specialist at Yale that could help with the issue, and I took him to Yale. That city, Yale's, and it's really dark and dank, and the hotel stinks. And the only good food is this famous pizza place. And it's like we were really lonely. I was particularly. And it was really bad spending eight hours a day at Yale at the Child Study Center.

1:47:30and I'm sitting in the room the second day we're there and the door knocks. And the guy says, room service. I said, I didn't order room service. Go away. He says, room service. Open the door. So I opened the door. It's Bill Murray with his son, who is the age of my son, with his son, Homer. And Bill said, what are you doing? I said, I told you I had to take a couple of days off. He said, okay, great. He shut the door, sat down. The boys played with each other, and he just spent two days there with me for no reason other than that he's Bill Moran. He's an amazing man. So for him, those kinds of people I have soft spots for, you know?

1:48:10I think it's absolutely awesome. I was kind of hoping that you would close with that story just because it's a recognizable name, but it's just like the act, the simplicity of it. The beauty of all these stories you've told sort of weaving together in an act of kindness is an awesome place to close. Michael, I love all of our time together. I learned so much. I could go for hours. Thank you so much for your time. I'm so sorry for dragging you so far over. It's my pleasure. It's all mine. It's good fun and great questions. And thanks a lot. If you enjoyed this episode, check out joincolossus.com.

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