Ambition, Media, and What’s Left of Hollywood — with Barry Diller

0:27Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned and folded, so you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you, like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique. Fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.

1:11So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give fresh perspective on everything. From wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com Episode 352. 352 is the area code serving Northern Florida. In 1952, the contraceptive pill was introduced. What does MAGA use for contraception? Their personality. Yeah, I said it. And by the way, if you're going to fill my comments up with how I have Trump derangement syndrome, just look at what's going on with the fascist movement in Los Angeles.

1:52us. And if you unsubscribe, I promise to send you a full refund. Go, go, go!

2:06Welcome to the 350-second episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I am back in London. I went London, Paris, Paris, Miami, Miami, New York for a couple days, then to Detroit for Summit, and then back home. The highlight was I did this thing called the Faena Rumble, where they set it up like a boxing tournament. And it's sort of a debate. The audience asks questions. You have a minute to respond. Then the other person responds. And then at the end of the fight, the audience decides who won the bout. And I debated a guy named Shermichael Singleton, who's a fairly well-known conservative who's on CNN a lot.

2:45I would describe him as sort of a Romney or Bush conservative in that he isn't fucking crazy and is pretty thoughtful. I was really impressed with him. He's a really young man, a 34-year-old. But I went into this. I agreed to do this because my buddy wanted to do it and asked me to commit because, you know, kind of a big deal. And then I find out I'm going up against some young Republican and it's like, okay, I'm fucked. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. He's a really impressive kid. Came back to London last night to find out that my hometown of Los Angeles is being occupied by the National Guard.

3:16The last time I happened, or last time I happened, I was actually in Los Angeles. I had returned home from business school. Was it business school? I think it was business school. And I was living with my mom, and we live in a suburb of Los Angeles, Westwood, right behind UCLA. And I came home, and on every corner, there were two young men that looked 17 and fatigued with M15s. They called the semi-automatic that they used to carry way back when. And it was very odd and very strange and a very dark moment for us. But this was back when people were being pulled out of their cars, beaten up, bricks being thrown, people were killed.

3:52And my understanding is having spoken to several people who live in Los Angeles, most of my college friends are still there. There really isn't anything going on that would in any way indicate a need for this type of brute federal force. I think this is, when you think about what you want to do in your own household as you get older, a little bit more mature, or as the man of the household, I think your job is oftentimes to de-escalate. And that is, I do that a lot in confrontations in my house and my company, and that is I try and de-escalate the situation such that, because what happens when you get to a certain point, people start saying things or doing things that is difficult to take back, and just makes a bad situation much worse.

4:33And if you think about it, the whole point or one of the wonderful things about being a president and having a huge military and a bully pulpit that's the biggest platform in the world, arguably, is you can kind of be the master de-escalator. That's kind of your job. We're called on to try and create peace and de-escalate. And this is a perfect example of doing exactly the opposite. This is setting up a confrontation. This is incendiary. It's inflaming emotions. You're supposed to only send in the National Guard And by the way, he's allowed to do this under Title 11. He's supposed to be able to use federal resources to ensure that people's work gets done.

5:06But it's almost always the governor requested a natural disaster when things get out of control, as they did in 1992. But this is just setting up a confrontation. I don't, you know, I have a bias here, but I believe that ultimately Governor Newsom is going to come out of this probably looking pretty good because I think he's been forceful yet dignified. And he's sort of setting up the national stage of Trump versus Newsom, which I think will ultimately end up being kind of J.D. Vance versus Newsom. I think Newsom has stronger prospects to get the Democratic nomination than people like. Why? I think the nation is exceptionally luxist and that he just looks very presidential.

5:44I also think he has a good story to tell. Fourth largest economy in the world for all the shitposting from VCs who leave to get tax status in Florida and then move back. California's created more tax revenue. It's a net contributor. It gives, I believe,$80 billion or sends$80 billion back to the federal government, whereas a lot of these red states take money. For example, Texas, I think, takes about$70 billion. But what is the danger here? I'd like to think I'm hoping things are going to maintain civility and deescalate and that the president will do his fucking job. But I've always thought that I've always kind of, you know, I'm definitely a glass half empty kind of person.

6:18So what could go wrong here? How does America end? How does America end? And the thing is, we think of ourselves, we're so narcissistic and think of America as such a big, powerful, you know, and we're right, such an unbelievably huge, dramatic icon center of the universe that if America were to go out of business or end, it would go down with a bang. I don't think that's true. I think America goes out of business with a whimper. And that is, this is a step towards that. This is a confrontation between the federal government and a politically oppositional governor in a liberal state. Trump is not going to send federal troops into a red state.

6:57They already are trying to demonize Governor Walz in Minnesota. Basically, he's deciding to weaponize the federal government to go after what he perceives as his political enemies or to distract from other things. This big, beautiful tax bill, which is just a giant fucking transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, from the future to the past. Anyway, this is how America ends. And I think, again, it's with a it's with a whimper. And that is there's a confrontation. I don't know if it results in violence or not, but maybe Governor Newsom says we're no longer going to send our tax revenue back to the federal government.

7:32We're just going to hold on to it. That ends up in another confrontation. There is an election. So you can now see states that have economies the size of a European nation decide, no, we're no longer signed up for the federal government or what the people have decided on the Democratic or the Republican side. And we have a series of small nation states. California is a tech-centered economy that does a lot of business with Asia. The South is, or Texas would be, a oil and gas-centered economy doing a lot of business with the Gulf, if you will, or overseas or whoever needs oil. the Midwest manufacturing economy doing a lot of business with Canada.

8:10And I could see the East Coast breaking into its own fiefdom where it's mostly about trade with Europe and finance and financial services. And this is the new disunited states of America. And how does America come to an end? Not with a bang, but with a whimper. That was somber, wasn't it? Wasn't that light and cheery? Wasn't that, aren't I just a little bucket of sunshine today? Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Barry Diller, a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment and the chairman and senior executive of IIC. We discuss with Barry his origin story, the current state of media and streaming, and his new book, Who Knew?

8:46out now. But I really enjoyed Barry Diller. He was a media mogul when I was in college. This guy, as you'll hear, he was in charge of Movie of the Week. And if you're my age, you remember that when he was in his early 20s. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Barry Diller.

9:08Barry, where does this podcast find you? I'm in my New York office. Is that the big sales? Yes, it's the Sale Cloth, Frank Gehry Building. Yeah, it's a beautiful building. I've done several events there. So let's bust right into this. I want to get your origin story. I remember my senior year at UCLA, I had a job selling insurance, and I wanted to break into media. And I had a friend named Tom Noonan. and he worked for you like two levels down or he knew you, you were already kind of a master of the universe then. But is this like ancient history we're doing here? Like, is this like 1912? No, this is like 1987.

9:48I think you were at Fox. 1987, I was at Fox. Yeah, so I would just love to get your origin story and how you ended up as a fairly young man kind of being a captain of media industry. Give us the origin story. Barry Diller? Let's do when I kind of went to work, since I had no seeming ambition until I walked into the William Morris Agency as a mailboy, basically, although I never really delivered mail. And I ended up reading the file room. And at that time, file rooms were, this was a huge room with big file cabinets. And in it was basically the history of the entertainment business. So I found a way not to deliver mail or do what the other guys were doing, which were trying to be agents, which I never wanted to be.

10:38And I basically read the entire file room. And that was the most fortuitous thing because I got the entire, I mean, William Morris had been in business then for 70 years or something, and it represented almost everyone. So it had all the history. So I read The Life of Elvis Presley. I mean, it was just incredible basing. And then I got serendipitously lucky in that they were going to throw me out of William Morris because I never wanted to be an agent. And they only did these mailboy things in order to turn people into productive agents. And I was never going to be that. And I'd finished kind of the file room.

11:22And I think they were getting ready to throw me out. And luckily, I took the only job that I was offered, which was to be the assistant to what I thought was a middle-level job at ABC in Los Angeles in what was called current programming. And the day that I accepted that job, they fired the czar of ABC, and they reached out and they picked my guy. So instead of being the assistant to this West Coast person, I moved to New York to be the assistant to the head of the network. And within six months, I was kind of running the program department. So there you go. That was at age 23. There's something that clearly came from your even earlier than that.

12:06What influences growing up gave you that type of drive, that type of creativity? Like when you look back on your childhood and how you were raised, is there anything or people that stand out? I think that all of the things that were enormous difficulties for me, all those kind of insecurities, inadequacies, feeling that I had no self, that I didn't deserve to, all sorts of excuses, sexual confusion and stuff. and One Big Secret, which if you have one big secret and it's an overwhelming one, it tends to let all the other risks reduce in size. So you can take these giant risks because the big risk is just obliviating everything else.

12:53So that's, in a way, not that God knows I wanted it, but it allowed me to take risks everywhere else. My family never thought that I would actually ever work, and they had resources enough that it didn't really matter. But I had no seeming ambition up until the age of really 19, and I didn't really want to go to school, and I was kind of just hibernating. But once I found, actually, when I walked into that William Morris agency, because I'd always been interested in the entertainment business. When I walked in and I started reading about that world, that just drew me like the fiercest magnet. And that ignited this, I don't know where that ambition was, but it was certainly born of not feeling that there was any self or that I deserved any self.

13:52And therefore, that fuel, that was just big fuel for me. You said something off mic, I was saying, I wanted to talk more about business because everyone's focused on other parts of the book. But you said that you're quote-unquote secret, and I assume that's your sexuality you're talking about. Well, let me ask you this. If you were a 20-something executive in today's Hollywood, which is much more accepting of people's sexual orientation, do you not think you'd be as successful as you were? God, I don't have a clue. I think, no, I think I would not have, I definitely think that the tools that I developed out of all of these seeming disadvantages absolutely did propel me, for sure.

14:40If I didn't have those, I'd probably be a ribbon clerk. There's this term trad dad, traditional dads who are a little bit harsher and, you know, are not sitting kids down and asking them, you know, how this made them feel. What I knew of you back in the 80s was you were like the trad manager. People were scared of you. You had a reputation for not suffering fools, that you were a hard ass. One, is that accurate? And two, what can you tell us about how your management approach has, if at all, how it's evolved as you've gotten older? Well, yeah, it is true. I mean, first of all, I have this voice, and that voice is a bit intimidating.

15:24to begin with. And then in all these, because I'm so indirect in everything else in my life, I'm so direct in anything relating to business. I am direct. I say exactly, exactly. I say what I think without kind of fear or favor. And I like creative conflict. I like argument. I like the whole concept of arguing things out of passion because all I care about is instinct. And in order to hear the truth of something, you've got to push through and you've got to get, all right, what does that person really believe? And taking out of those kind of clanging discussions, you hear a truth and you can pull it.

16:07When I notice somebody's like, I'm comfortable, I say, look, this isn't for you. You don't like this environment. And whether it threatens you or does this to you is of no matter, except I don't want anyone in it who isn't accepting of the challenge of that kind of cauldron. I just think it's the most productive way to manage. The other thing is that, and it's long gone for me now, but I think the best way to learn to be a manager and evolve into that is, And I got very lucky because at 24 and a half, something like that, I started this project called Movie of the Week where I got to build my own company inside another company.

16:49So for a couple of years, I hired every, first of all, I did every job and I hired every single person up to the point when we had, I don't know, hundreds and thousands of employees in that group. so when you learn the luckiest thing anyone can get is to start something where you get to learn every job because in learning every job and in then hiring the people and doing all that you actually learn to manage because you are so on the original ground of things and i think that is incredibly productive now i evolved out of that in my mid-20s because by my late 20s i was supervising a rather large organization.

17:37And then at 32, I became chairman of Paramount, which is a whole other kind of management of learning how to be in a movie business where nobody from television had been in one before and they didn't like those people. I don't know about the evolution. I'm still, I hope, I still bring that same tool making, which is to create situations where you have opinion argued about whether it's a new business idea or a company to acquire or anything else. I hope I still have that very tough process of trying to find what is at the heart root of an idea to determine whether it's worth pursuing. So I can't help but wax nostalgic here.

18:28So I was raised by a single immigrant mother and we didn't see each other much during the week. She was a secretary. But we always made, we had a date, a standing date on Tuesday nights. You know what we did? Oh, 7.30, movie of the week. ABC movie of the week. And it was a standing thing and my mom would make me loaf and getting emotional just thinking about it. And my three favorites. People don't realize how to create a breakthrough in that show, and I assume you're involved in all three of these things. One, Duel, Steven Spielberg's first thing, I remember. Two, in my opinion, Billy Dee Williams' best movie, Brian Song.

19:12By far. And then the most underrated, it was a movie of the week, but it turned into a show which I think was one of the most underrated shows of the 70s that I never miss an episode, The Night Stalker. Remember that with Darren McGavin? Are you kidding? I mean, first of all, those three, there's a fourth called That Certain Summer, which was probably all the—what did we make? I'd say we probably made 350 individual movies of the week during that five-year, seven-year period. and certain summer was my favorite for a lot of reasons it was about it was the first dramatic depiction of homosexuality on broadcast television and it was a lovely story about uh uh about two men's relationship and him having to tell one of them having to tell his son about his life and night stalker i got this book that somebody sent me that i respected and it was about 200 pages long.

20:17I've read it and I said, oh my God, a vampire in Las Vegas. What could be a better idea or a better place for a vampire to go than Las Vegas, which is open 24 hours a day, et cetera, is the definition of a night city. And I read it, literally I read those 200 pages in three hours and ordered up the movie. And when that movie was finished, it was so good that my colleagues at ABC see, said, this is a theatrical movie. Let's release this in theaters. We'll make a fortune. And I said, no, are you crazy? This is, this is what we do. This is a movie of the week. That's where it's going. That's where it belongs.

20:57And of course it then spawned a series, et cetera. And Brian's song, I don't know that you can do better for sure. I mean, yeah, you pick some good ones. What other things early in your career sort of got you to the next level, if you will? Well, I would say that, I mean, it was definitely, I mean, Movie of the Week was, again, I'm 23 or 4. And so my 20s were just dominated for five years by this. And then at the end of that, because after we'd made these movies, I was kind of used to the process, to say the least. and I thought that, you know, there were books that were made into movies, but big, sprawling, epic novels, you can't tell that story in two hours, really.

21:41And I thought, television has all this time, so why not do long, long form, which we called the novel for television, which evolved into the miniseries, which we all live with today, for sure, in streaming. and that created like the next bump because that was this out of nowhere huge success. So I had these two seminal thrusts really early and I don't know it was that because it was a confluence of other events that landed me at Paramount and the movie business at also a really young age and I was always the youngest and now I'm always the oldest. Yeah it's weird. I often say I used to walk into every room and be the youngest, and I walk into every room when I'm the oldest.

22:29I was never the same age. Just go so fast. So you're sort of a decathlete in terms of different types of content. You started in TV and then you transitioned to movies. How is that different? Or what skills? Is it the same skills, or did you need to develop different management and different capital allocation skills? it's the same tool set i'd say but it's applied to totally different organizations though the movie business you know television if you uh didn't get it delivered on seven at 7 30 on a tuesday night you know the screen went dark in the movie business if you didn't make a movie nobody knew nobody cared so the rhythms are just so completely different and the industry movie industry at its height of snobbism.

23:20I don't think it's diverted that much today from what it was then in terms of looking down on almost all other forms. Though now the world is so, I don't know even what the definition of a movie is anymore given the Netflix-dom of life. But the movie companies, this is in the 70s, dominated world culture to such an extent. uh and so and you only did we never made we paramount made probably fewer movies than most other companies other studios of which there were five dominant ones we made maybe 15 to 18 movies a year other people made 25 to 30 so you know that's kind of putting your tent up and taking it down every month or so it's a completely different rhythm and i had first of all the movie people peed on people from television so i had like the good and the bad of people so discounting saying well i'd be thrown out soon because a television person could never succeed in the exalted movie world uh and so they kind of left me alone for a couple of years where I figured out how to make the company run the way I was comfortable with.

24:41And that was a very, very hard time where I certainly failed first because I believe almost everything I've ever done, you kind of, at least in my mind, fail first before you succeed. And so it was a completely different process that I had to adapt to. I was using the same, basically, toolkit of, in my case, which was developing material rather than buying packages made up, you know, made to form directors, actors, writers, etc., that were given to studios by agencies. I wanted to develop. I've always thought it was my first thing of developing material. So I wanted to develop material. That takes a long time to do.

25:23But that process has never changed for me. So while you're there, I just want to review this. You decided to go back to TV and essentially started the Fox Television Network, where Married with Children and The Simpsons were sort of the pillars there. Why did you go back to TV and tell us a little bit about those two shows? Because someone told me The Simpsons is the most profitable TV show in history. That is true. Well, back in the TV, when I left Paramount to go to Fox, I tried to start a fourth network. There were at that time three networks, which got 100 % of the viewing. There wasn't cable.

26:05I mean, cable was just getting a better signal. And so three networks dominated everything. And I had thought over the years that while they started out with different personalities, by the 80s, they all talked, looked, and acted alike. And I thought, well, that's interesting. There's room for, I mean, maybe room for an alternative to that. So when I got to Fox and their confluence against serendipitous events, I was able to get a bunch of television stations that we could buy and start this fourth network. And in the beginning, you know, we didn't find our vein until I got a script called Not the Cosbys.

26:52Now, Not the Cosbys means Bill Cosby's show was number one on television, had been for many years. And so when I saw the title Not the Cosbys, I was, oh, that's like interesting. And it was an anti-establishment family, which we later called Married with Children. And that, I knew we'd struck the vein. And shortly thereafter, we had had a show called Tracy Ullman. and in it were these interstitials that Matt Groening did with his character, The Simpsons. And Jim Brooks, great director who made terms of Endearment, et cetera, et cetera, said, who produced Tracy Allman's show, said, I think we could make this into a series.

27:35And I said, yes, absolutely. Now, at that time, because animation took six months and whatever, we had to commit to 13 episodes without making, quote, pilot, et cetera. So it was a big commitment. and we did it and made the 13 episodes. And we hadn't scheduled yet. And the first episode came back again like six, eight months later. And we had this viewing and actually Jim Brooks' little bungalow on the Fox lot. And I brought the sales department and some other, like 12 people. It was one of those screenings where Jim Brooks and I are the only people laughing. And when you're laughing at material that you've already seen before, you're really doing it to try and get other people to laugh.

28:22So it's like over-performance. And there Jim and I are hooking it up, stone-faced every other person in the room. We walk out with my group out of the bungalow back up to our offices. And these guys said, well, can't air that. I mean, a cartoon? And I thought, as Jim did, this is great. Of course, we scheduled it. From the first hour of the first day, it was a smash hit. It's still going now, well, certainly decades, 30 years later. But because of syndication and because of streaming and because of all this, now it's owned by Disney. There's no question that as a single entertainment product, it is the most profitable in history.