Barry Diller: Building IAC

0:00Success teaches you nothing, but failure sure teaches you a lot. You've worked with some of the biggest egos in Hollywood and some of the most ruthless tycoons. I'm wondering if you can spend a few minutes on the lessons you've learned about ego and power. Barry Diller is a legendary media mogul, businessman, and investor. He is the chairman and senior executive of IAC and is best known for co-founding the Fox Broadcasting Company with Rupert Murdoch and leading Paramount Pictures. Over his career, he has reshaped television, film, and online media. He remains one of the most influential figures in business and entertainment today.

0:38We're certainly at the brink of the next revolution. If you were sitting in 1995 or 2000, at the beginning of the things you did not know, and there were plenty of those, there was nothing that cracked your mind and astounded you and said, oh my God, this is beyond me. This is magic. Google, over the years, was consistently, as Monopoly grew, was squeezing the people who kind of lived as a surf on its land. But when I found an asset that couldn't be disintermediated by search, I thought, wow, that wasn't AI. That was just the characteristics of the Internet environment. The only thing that will save us is our brands and whether our brands and the content we make resonates enough directly for people to recognize a brand and want to be brand involved rather than agnostic.

1:36I believe until the last breath that...

1:47that. At 83, you chose to reveal some of those private parts of your life, and you're a super private person. Why now? I can't do the why now. It wasn't like I chose this date or that date. It's that I had thought that my life was a good story, and if I could tell it true, then I wanted to try and do it. So it took me an endless amount of time, basically because I put it away for a year and come back to it and put it away for six months and then come back to it. It was only really in the last couple of years that I was, I wouldn't call it dedicated, but that I had more discipline. I never was sure I would publish it.

2:27And then I got to a point where I said, you know, I've done it. I've kind of told it. I got it down. So let it go. My friends told me, publish it after you're gone, after you die. And I thought, well, I ain't going to have anything to do with that. So I'd rather have agency of my own. How does it feel to release it out loud into the world? It feels exposing. Now it's now been like, I think three weeks or so. So I've gotten a bit used to it. But in the first days I thought, oh my God, what the hell have I done here? I think the first day or the second day, I did a, I think it was a live interview on CBS Sunday morning.

3:08And I know it wasn't live, it was taped, but it was, it went out like right away. And, and I thought, and I'm being asked all these very personal questions. And I thought, you know, do I throw down this little microphone and stalk out? What do I do? And I thought, you know what, I've done it. So just go answer the questions and get on with it. And kind of once I did that, I relaxed in it a bit. Now I'm kind of used to the exposure. But yeah, I wrote a personal book. One of the stories that really stood out for me was as a child, you gave up on your mother while you were at sleepaway camp and you were sitting waiting for her to pick you up.

3:45That seemed to be such a defining moment for you. And it led to this craving of independence and non-reliance on other people. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah, I don't think it was a craving. It was a necessity. I knew at that moment, and it was a stark flash, you know, those snapshots you have that you capture and they're always with you the rest of your life. And I have that snapshot of me in that moment. And I thought, I'm the only one to protect me. So I have no choice. That's what I felt. How old were you? Can you recount this story? I was eight, and I went to camp, and I was not very happy there.

4:27I mean, a lot of children go to camp and have this, but mine was kind of acute. And my mother promised she would come, and she didn't. This was not horrendous child neglect or anything of that sort. My parents were perfectly nice. They just were clueless about children. They really, they'd never been parented. Their parents had never been parented. And so they had no vocabulary for it. And so she wasn't really there to protect me. And that scared me. I can relate to that a lot. And then you sort of had to develop your own independence from that moment on. I had no choice. And I think it's in biology.

5:07My biology is very strong and my biology saved me. I had to be independent, and so I was. I don't claim it as, you know, something to be prideful about. It's just I was lucky. One of the ideas that stood out in your book as well was fake it until you make it and how that was crucial to your success. You've had these moments in your career where you sort of believed in yourself almost despite any tangible evidence to indicate that you could do something. And one of the first moments was at ABC and convincing Mr. Goldenson to let you create original programming for TV. I'd love for you to explore this idea, especially considering I've also heard you in interviews say that you never had any confidence.

5:52I never had a sense of self because I didn't think I deserved a sense of self. And so I never could claim that. I never thought of that. And I didn't have the kind of early, buoyant confidence that I saw around me and that has always attracted me. I'm always attracted to people who are natively confident. I don't know how the hell the stars or their biology or their environment put that together for them. And I see people walking down the street and I can see their confidence. And I like think, oh my God, I wish I had ever had that. But then if I'd had that, I'd probably end up being a shoe clerk at Macy's.

6:30So I think that that lack of a sense of self Oddly, it enabled me in the earliest part of my career to please others to such an extent that it got me going. And once I got going, I just kept going. And I think that that, in a sense, lack of confidence, a lack of sense of self, wanted, propelled me to count as much as I could in the eyes of others. You said that you were sort of an unambitious teen. What changed? Was there a defining moment where you sort of like... I had no ambition. My family didn't think much, but whatever they thought, somewhat unexpressed, but coming out from them as an environment, my family had resources.

7:17And so I think they thought, well, they'd be supporting me. I never really have a job. I didn't want to go to school. I didn't want to go to college. I didn't want to do much of anything. I was hibernating for a good long time. But I'd always had this interest in the entertainment, in the world of entertainment. I grew up around it. Most of my friends' parents were in the entertainment business in one form or the other. And so I was just pulled by it. It was a tractor beam that always drove me or intrigued me. And when I finally thought, you know, I really am 19. I don't want to go to school, but I've got to do something.

7:55I mean, I was basically staying up nights and sleeping most days. And I thought, well, you know, I would like to learn about the entertainment business. And I thought there are these talent agencies, William Morris, probably at that time the most famous number one agency. And they had a mail room where they, so to speak, trained people to be agents. I didn't want to be an agent. I thought I'd never be an agent. That was ridiculous. us talk about if you don't have a sense of self, how can you represent others? How can you ever have the confidence to go sell somebody that you're going to take care of their lives?

8:32But I thought I could go and learn. And I essentially went there. And at that time, there were big file rooms, paper file rooms. And I read the entire file room. And they had had the history of the entertainment business for 70 years. And so what incredible luck for someone who wanted to learn stuff. And I did. I was insatiable about learning. And that literally from one day to the next lit a fire of ambition and purposefulness. I love the idea of sort of dark hours and sort of hours learning and preparing that other people could do but didn't do. And you sort of alluded to the fact that nobody wanted that job downstairs in the room.

9:22It was just you. Yep. I was really lucky because all the people who were in the mailroom, well, they just wanted to get to be agents. Since I didn't want to be an agent, I took the job no one else wanted. They all wanted to go, in that horrible word, network around, meet people, press people, do whatever. I went to the dungeon and had this job that allowed me basically almost the entire day to read. And that's what I did for three years until I think they were on the verge of throwing me out. You said you never had a goal and that's sort of what allowed you to do that. They all wanted to be agents, so they were working towards that.

10:04Can you go a little bit deeper on that? Look, if you want to be a doctor, yes, that's a goal. and you've got to go do step, step, step, step to get there. There are roles like that. But if you have a specific craft or something, you can name that craft as a goal and train for it or do whatever you have to do for it. I've never had any goals. I had the goal that I wanted to count and I had the goal that I was fascinated by the entertainment business. I don't like it when people come in to the early stages of a broad, general entertainment career and say, I want to run a studio or things like that.

10:42I think whatever your interest is, you just get on the broad path, whatever door you got to bang to get in there, you get on the broad path and everything else takes care of itself. You don't have to say, I want to be this or I want to be that. And I've always mistrusted that. I was thinking about this as I was reading that in your book. And the thing that came to me was sort of people look at jobs as stepping stones, It's sort of, you know, this is temporary until I get the job I want. I want to be an agent's assistant until I'm the agent. But then they're never fully present in the job. They're never just.

11:15Yeah. I mean, listen, maybe it might work for some, I guess. My observation is it doesn't really work. What works is if you get lucky enough to get a position that you don't have experience for, that you haven't mastered, and then you just go about doing it. the sparks you set off naturally impress others and lead. They drag you to the next step. You don't have to do much of anything. And I think when you do too many things, you see people whose naked ambition is so structured. And so people who say, well, I need to go out and network. And I hear that and I think, oh, you fools. I mean, what are you talking about?

12:00You don't really need to do that. It's this kind of pro forma thinking of the things you should do, the steps you should take. It really is far more naturalistic than that. Do you remember the first person who had expectations of you? Yes. At one point, one of the things of progress in that mailroom environment is you work on an agent's desk as his assistant secretary at that time, an assistant. I was very lucky that the person my second time I did it was for someone who did take an interest in me and was kind of the first person where I could see you know I know what I'm doing for him and I know how effective I am for him by the way it's not like he ever said it to me particularly but I could feel it and know it and that he had confidence in me gave me the imagery of confidence in myself.

13:00And that was probably the first time. So he believed in you more than you believed in yourself. Well, I had no belief in myself. So, I mean, and I'm not exaggerating this just for whatever, for drama purposes, but I didn't have any belief in myself. But I don't even know if I now have much belief in myself. I know how absurd that probably is to say, but it's, but I can only reflect on my own dim inner rings. I think that there's no doubt that his confidence in me spurred me on for sure. I don't know that ever made me feel confident, but it sure spurred me on. I just wanted to please him more, and I did.

13:39I was the best little assistant the world had ever created. You've worked with some of the biggest egos in Hollywood and some of the most ruthless tycoons. I'm wondering if you can spend a few minutes on the lessons you've learned about ego and power. I'm direct and I'm sincere and often quite blunt. That, in a way, does make people maybe trust you. I'm generally very trusting. I don't start out untrusting. I start out trusting. And you have to do a lot to break that trust. So I think that that ability to initially trust and people realize that I am trusting them and I don't say, oh, this is a very precious thing.

14:26Please don't screw this up. Of course, I've been in situations where it's been misplaced to say the least. You can't be in business as long as I have to not have your trust broken a lot of times. The great thing is I can't really remember and I don't have any vengeance. And that's, again, just luck. It's not something I would take pride in. The one great thing about the entertainment business has been, in many ways, demonstrations of various excessive personality. In order to get something done or to be distinguishable from the next person, excessiveness is not a bad quality. And also, if you're trying to convince people of things, you've probably got to have either forceful personality, forceful something.

15:12uh that's just whether you got it or you don't got it and today there is less of it than there was when i was kind of growing up in it where there was just outsized personalities that if you're interested in entertainment this is you've read about for a hundred years uh that kind of created the business the motion picture business in particular uh it's it's now a completely different dynamic, but those outsized personalities were thrilling to be around. Are you struggling to manage your projects at work using lots of different tools for communication, task management, and scheduling? It doesn't have to be this hard.

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17:51Speeds may slow about 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com for details. What's changed, do you think? Well, I think the most dramatic change is that the entertainment business, let's say the motion picture business, was kind of encased in its own world. During its greatest years of development, that was what these companies did. They just made movies, the great movies of the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and some in the 90s. And there's still some good movies made, I'm not saying that. But they were worlds unto themselves. They were important worlds because those movies were exported to the world and became the export of American culture to the world.

18:41In movies, it was probably the most extraordinary movement dominating almost every country in the world from the inception of the motion picture business. and as time went on they started doing television and then they own cable networks and television networks etc and as they diversified movies not kind of somewhat down the ladder of importance to these places I think that has an effect on the work itself when the senior most person wakes up every morning and worries about what's going to happen with the movie they're making and how it's doing and all of that, the care and feeding of it, is far different than it being number 87 in the priorities of a large conglomerated company.

19:32But the most profound took place with streaming when technology essentially overtook the entire ecosystem of the manufacture of television and movies. And so where these pure entertainment companies, by the way, to some degree, it's the furthest you could ever go to say the difference between instinct and ones and zeros or technology, which is, as we know, quite fact-based and numerical as to making any content is instinctive. distinctive. And those tech companies essentially have now taken over the old hegemony of, quote, Hollywood. And now Netflix and Apple and Amazon, I mean, just take one part of it, if you want to know the distinction, where if you make content, the test of it is how many people watch it, want it, go to a movie theater, buy a ticket, do whatever.

20:40So you're in direct relationship to the reaction to that thing that you made. If you're Amazon and your main business is subscriptions in Prime and you offer content as kind of the thing in the front of the store to get people to come in, you're so far away. It's a different business model. It's no longer based upon, oh, I love that program. I love that movie. I pay my money. I react to it. And the reaction is to the people who made it. In this case, that's not the business model. So it's a completely different environment than it was. Now, I'm not saying it can't produce good things. Good things do get produced and they will continue to be, but the environment and the process is different.

21:31And I think probably just pound for pound. Well, I can say this about it because I can't. Yes, I can, but it's boring to say, God, it was so much better eight years, 10 years, 20, 30 years ago in terms of making stuff. It used to be for sure up until recently, it was fun. You had fun doing it. You did it. You set up your tent every couple of months or month or two. You have a movie come out and you all run towards figuring out how to make it, make it work, et cetera, et cetera. And then your next excitement was the next movie and you lived in that environment. And if the movie was good, it lasted for a while.

22:18Things now go so quickly. So it is not a process today where most people in it will say they're having a good time. It's just so fractionated now that, and it goes so quickly that the great thrills of making great programs is kind of gone. Do you think it's too numbers driven? I mean, you mentioned instinct as a deciding factor. You used to decide on instinct and, you know, other people would bring numbers. And I think one of your quotes, if I remember correctly, was numbers can tell you what has happened in the past, but they won't tell you what's happened in the future. but everything is sort of analytical these days.

22:55Netflix can see the exact moment somebody stopped watching a show. So when they're doing programming, they think about this. And do you think it's getting too formulaic and too data-driven? Well, I don't think algorithms can help here. None of us know what's going to happen with the dreaded wonderful word AI. But I don't think that predictive research is certainly in the arena of content worthless. It cannot tell you anything of real value in making a forward decision. It's just not possible. And yet, everybody wants it to be possible. Why? Why? Because making instinctive decisions is living with great insecurity.

23:47There's no way to be secure when you're making decisions based on instinct. If I can get more comfort by using this piece of data or that piece of data to quote, help me, lovely, but it's a delusion. It's almost like hiding, you know, the safety in the numbers. I wasn't wrong. The numbers were wrong and you can absolve yourself from responsibility in a way. You can only do that for so long because in the end, uh, your work will get you good or bad. And there's nothing you could, you can't hide. That's the, the thing that I will always love about that world is you're, you're out there with whatever you've made, you've put together, whatever role you played in it.

24:39And there's no hiding. It's there for people to see and react to, and they will react. Is there any particular failure that stands out in your mind as like, oh, I learned a lot from that one, or it was more impactful than the other ones? If you are in the work of making things, content, you're going to have a good amount of failure. It's not possible otherwise. Now, I've been lucky. I won't say it's luck. That isn't luck. But I've had enough successes to balance the failures and probably have had a better average, let's call it, of that. But every failure in some way ought to teach you something.

25:24And success teaches you nothing. But failure sure teaches you a lot. Are there lessons that you've sort of been taught multiple times from failure that you're sort of like, I keep running into that, but it's a different version of the same problem? The most important thing and the thing that I have been reminded of continuously is to keep scrubbing my instincts clean, as it were. Every time I've made a decision out of cynicism, I wouldn't say every time because sometimes probably it has worked, but there's a continual theme of cynical decision making that is poor. So being naive, not being cynical, being able to not let life experience, so to speak, infect your basic instinct, your ability to know a good idea from a bad idea.

26:16That has been, if anything, the thing that constantly I've had to work at. Because as you gain experience, the natural tendency is to be cynical or is to be sophisticated, is to know things. And it's something that I've just learned to fight against, not always successfully. How do you maintain that beginner's mindset, though? Like, what are the things that you do to approach things that way? I wish I could give you a prescription for this. I think probably the best way I can say it is hold on to naivete. Do not let the fact that you are, of course, learning things and learning is, of course, how could you say it's anything but good.

26:56But living in an environment where the corrosiveness of the day grinds at you and makes you worriedly cynical and all of that is just something you've got to fight against. that that's the best prescription, but that's all I got. You mentioned AI. I want to come back to that in a second. You've lived through major technological disruptions from cable to TV, to home video, to theaters becoming less important. And now we have the internet and we have AI here. I'm wondering if you can spend a few beats on AI and tell me about how you see that not only impacting the media and film business, but also maybe double click on how you think it's going to impact the website and travel and all of these other things that you're involved in.

27:48Off the content business into the worlds that I've been in for the last 25 or so years, which is the worlds of internet tech life with Expedia and dozens and dozens of other websites, sites, commerce sites, et cetera. And I was very lucky. I got to participate in that revolution, which started really around 95 when the internet started to get used by ordinary folk. And I was there in that period and able to have this wonderful field kind of open there just for the, so to speak, grabbing and learning. And that was definitely a radical transformation. civilization were certainly at the brink of the next revolution.

28:34If you were sitting in 1995 or 2000 at the beginning of the things you did not know, and there were plenty of those, there was nothing that cracked your mind and astounded you and said, oh my God, this is beyond me. This is magic. You could master it. It wasn't hard to master. AI, will it master us? Certainly in some cases it probably will. The first time I used chat GPT, which was before it was released, and I thought, well, this is frigging magic. And we're past that very early stage. We're into the great unknown here. It's going to have profound effect. I don't know to what exact extent. I know that for my businesses, we are racing and we've been doing this for years and anyone in business has been using machine learning for a decade or more.