The Best Advice Ever for Succeeding In Record Time | Michael Ovitz on Impact Theory

One doesn't get to a place of success without having made mistakes. One of my closest friends passed away about nine years ago. Michael Krytner, the great author, used to always say to me, there's always another racetrack, there's always another game. So take your game and ratchet it down just a drop and you're going to have another game. And he was right. I didn't listen to that. To me, winning was everything.

Hey everybody. Welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.

Alright?

Today's guest is one of the most legendary entrepreneurs in the history of the media industry. The iconic co founder of caa. He and his partners turned a small handful of clients, a couple of folding tables and a pittance in startup capital into the world's most dominant talent agency. Just 10 years after opening for business, they had roughly 70% market share in an industry that was almost 100 years old. During his tenure, he was often referred to as the most powerful man in Hollywood. And he represented some of the most enduring names in entertainment, including Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, Martin Scorsese, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. Through tenacity, brilliant tactics and aggressive unbridled enthusiasm for the sport of business, he helped create some of the most culture defining movies of the 20th century, including Jurassic Park, Rain Man, Tootsie, Back to the Future, the Karate Kid, Ghostbusters and many, many more. One of the first to realize that content is king even outside of Hollywood. He was instrumental in brokering megadeals with multinational corporations such as Coca Cola, Sony, Matsushita Electric, et cetera. And since moving on from the entertainment industry, he has introd his innovative approach to deal making and storytelling to Silicon Valley to tremendous effect. Billionaire and famous Uber investor Marc Andreessen referred to him as a key advisor to Andreessen Horowitz. And he has advised many other prominent people in the tech world, including Tony Bates, the president of Skype, and Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb. So please help me in welcoming one of the top 200 art collectors in the world, Silicon Valley VC and author of the captivating memoir, who is Michael Ovitz, the man himself. Michael Ovitz, thank you so much for being here.

Must have worked hard with my mother on that intro.

She was amazingly helpful by the way, so you'll have to thank her. Truly, what I was saying off camera is really sincere. What, what came to define my childhood were the movies in that list. It's pretty extraordinary what you were able to accomplish, but it's all the more impressive given that your story starts just sort of plainly in the Valley. And I want to talk about starting from the bottom. How did you, A, have the audacity to pursue what you did, and then, B, tactically, what did you do to actually learn?

So, first of all, I consider myself incredibly lucky to be here, sitting with a fellow entrepreneur who founded a company from scratch and went through all of the ups, downs, trials and tribulations to get it to work. And what most people don't realize is for every success story, there's probably 10,000 failures, maybe more, frankly. So it's really a pleasure to be here, and thank you for having me. Thank you for being here. I was just a very lucky young guy, frankly. I grew up in a family that was wildly supportive. I had terrific parents. We had a really good upbringing. Grew up in a really kind of upper, lower, lower middle class area in the San Fernando Valley. I think the key for me was as a young kid, I was always told that I could do whatever I wanted to do, be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I studied hard and worked hard. And those two. Those two issues were really at the foundation of my young life. And then I also had something else come into being, which is four blocks from our house was the RKO studios that Howard Hughes owned. And in those days, there was no such thing as security. There was no such thing as not being able to go where you wanted to go. We didn't have terrorist activity. We didn't have people questioning everybody every second. And as kids, when we were done with our paper routes at the end of the day, especially at daylight savings time, we would go over at the end of the day and sneak under the fence and kind of watch them shoot until we got thrown off the lot. And I kind of got the bug at a very young age. I was nine years old when that started happening. And it went all the way through into my early teen years. And that coupled with my nuclear family and the surrounding that I had, also going to public school. There was no such thing as private school unless you were a delinquent in those days. Not the way my kids grew up, but it was a different world. Private schools were for kids that were, you know, didn't go to school or had problems. And I had a really strong foundation. And I decided there were two paths in life. There was one path, which was to just sort of float with it, and there was another path to be aggressive and try to make something of yourself and do something that would put you in a position to be able to do something else. To be able to do something else. To do something else, yeah.

The level of aggression seemed to start quite early for you. I remember hearing a story about even your paper route you were trying to like do in record time so that you had time to like really push yourself forward. When did that real drive for advancement start?

Well, it's really interesting. A lot of individuals and when you and I were talking earlier, talk about what are your reasons for getting into business, why'd you start your company? And money was low on your priority list. I grew up in a very, very non affluent section of the Valley. Money was very high on my priority list, but not for reasons one might think. It was more for advancement and for the ability to put oneself into a better place. And again, this is the 50s and 60s in Los Angeles. It was a different time. So you can imagine how there was a big desire to be able to pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps and make something of themselves. So I tried really hard to do that. And aggression, aggressive activity was very much a part of the way I grew up in my neighborhood. There were different kinds of aggression. There was mental, physical, mostly physical where I grew up. And one had to deal with it. Yeah.

One of the stories that you talked about with getting bullied, I thought you handled it so interestingly. And I'd be curious to know if your son had been in that same situation, what advice you would have given him. So you get in a fight with a bully, decide you're going to stand up for yourself, and he just beats the daylights out of you. And then where'd you go from there?

Well, I remember like it was yesterday, which it's so interesting. In our lives there are seminal moments that we remember all the way back to childhood. And I remember this incident happening, where it happened, how it happened. I literally can picture it in my mind. And I made a decision at the time, if you can't beat him, you should try to join him. Because I couldn't beat this guy. He was a head bigger than me. Couldn't show that I was afraid of the guy, so I had to take the beating. And afterwards I went up to him and talked to him a bit and we ended up becoming friends. It was a slow route, but at the end we actually ended up being fairly good friends from that very strange beginning.

That strategy of being able to befriend people on sort of any. Whether they were good for you. A natural connection or not. The ability to connect with them, I'm assuming, is something that played pretty heavily as you advanced up in Hollywood.

Well, I started in Hollywood when I was 17 at Universal Studios. I was a tour guide. We learned very quickly that the customer is always right. At the end of the day, no matter what happens, the customer is always right. There's a story in the book of when Michelin Connery, Sean's wife, ran out of gas in a rental car and called my office very upset that the car was stalled in the northern part of the Valley, somewhere between Warner Brothers and Columbia Pictures, and had no clue that it had run out of gas. But it was my fault that it ran out of gas. So we dispatched one of our mailroom personnel over and they brought some gas and a new car. So the customer's always right. I figured that out really early. It didn't make a lot of sense to go against the grain, particularly starting out at a low level in the entertainment business and also in dealing with the people there. I learned very early that it was easier to deal with them in a very specific way, which was just giving. Since you were trying to take, you had to give a lot. And a lot of times you'd run into people that were just stressed out of their minds. As you can well imagine, with your having been in your own business and also in the entertainment business, people get very, very stressed very easily. Everything's personal, everything. So one had to learn at 17 when to back off, when to try to get more information. For me, information and knowledge were the key to everything.

I'm glad you brought that up. So speaking of knowledge being the key, talk to me about the key to the file room. This was. And put it in context of where you were at the time, how new you were to W. This story feels like one of those legendary stories that literally they teach you about in film school and you hear about your climb. It was pretty extraordinary to read in your book.

So I went into the file room by accident. I was delivering mail. I was in the mail room when I went and applied for a job at William Morris. I am always, even at that stage of my life, looking for something that differentiates me. I. I find it kind of interesting because now I work up in the Valley, up between San Francisco and San Jose, and the key word up there is disrupt, disruption. It's just the word that you hear every day. And it's fantastic because you have all these young people up there who come in and they're brilliant. And they want to change the way the status quo is in every single business. And they don't take no for an answer. And that's the way it was for me 50 years ago when I started. There's no such thing as a no until you get a yes. And I wanted to differentiate myself. So when I went in for my interview, there's a three year training program and I said to the head of the human resources at the time that I could do their whole program in 10 weeks. And it was actually an incredibly stupid thing to say because it wasn't really possible. But I was looking for something that was so outrageous to disrupt that moment. And it did. Because the guy just wheeled back in his roller chair and just fell off laughing. He thought was the funniest thing he'd ever heard. Because here's this guy who's 21 years old, just graduated from college. I'm wearing a suit that looked like I was working for the FBI. You know, my pants were up to my knees, I had shoes on you could water ski in a reptile and a button down shirt and this guy's laughing at me. So I figured one of two things, it's binary. Either I've made my point and I'm going to get in because I had no connections or I'm going to get thrown out of here really fast. So it's like 50, 50. And he said, you know what, I'm going to let you have this job. By the way, I offered to give my salary back if I couldn't learn everything there was to learn about show business in 10 weeks. And I got in and I discovered very quickly that it was all about knowledge. Knowledge was power in that place, service business, dealing with people, you had to know something. But the key was two things. One, get the information faster than anyone in the 20 person mailroom class that I started in could get. And B, how do you apply that information to move yourself through a system? How do you get noticed? And I figured out pretty quickly from delivering mail that everything was in the central file room. There was no computers, everything was written on paper and filed away for 100 years of history of that company. And I basically took a page out of my dad's book who was a liquor salesman and used to give away broken cases of liquor to the local police and fire and service people. So we got great service even as a lower middle class family. And I brought a little gift for the head of the file room and worked it and worked it and worked it until she and she was the nicest lady and she had this kind of grandmotherly thing. And we hit it off and she wore this file key around her neck. And it was the key to the file room, to the whole room, because none of the drawers were locked in those days. And I got her to give me a copy of the key. And I went in every night when everyone else went home and I just started reading. Started at A and ended at Z.

That part of the story to me is so incredible, I want to paint a little context for people. So you've got the, whatever, 20, 25 people, all starting at the same time. Some of them probably had connections, which is how they got in the door. But in terms you said it was like on page two or three of the book you said, you have to work long, hard and smart. And I say the same thing. And I always get pushback on the long. And I've never understood that because people say, well, if I'm working hard and smart, why do I have to work long hours? And your story, I think, exemplifies what happened when you started working longer hours than everybody else.

Well, you become a fixture, for starters. You get recognized by people that you're there. They don't quite know who you are, what you're doing there. But when you're there at 7 in the morning for what's called a 9 o' clock call time, and everyone else strolls in at 9, you've been there for two hours. Let's not forget that many of the executives were coming in at 7:30 or 8:00 clock in the morning to get the jump on their day. Those were motivated, smart people as well. So in order to meet those people, if you're sitting outside their offices randomly and they want help with something, they're not bashful to ask their agents. So they will ask. And then you have your opportunity to deliver. And it's all about getting asked, which is the key, and then delivering, delivering an answer. And that's what I did. And then I'd stay. Later I discovered totally by accident that the head of the company left the office every night at 6:45 to go to dinner with the founder of the company. They were both on the first floor. And I realized that every night he came back at 8:30 from dinner and spent two hours at the office getting caught up on mail and paperwork, which you never as an executive have time to do during the day. No one does. Even today, trying to do email in the course of a business day, you do the best you can do. But it's usually done at odd hours I think is a fair statement to make. And I went in and I positioned myself so the two executives, the founder and the president would see me every night when they went out. So at 7 o' clock everyone from the mailroom went home. I went and sat at the front desk by the front door where they passed by every night. And when they came back I was still sitting there. And I will never forget. I can remember this like it was yesterday. About five or six nights in. It's about 9:30 at night and the president of the company comes out of his office, walks up to me and says, can you Xerox this for me? That was all he said. And I said, of course. I went, I xeroxed the material from him, I brought it back, I put it in a pretty folder, did everything I could to kiss up properly and laid it on his desk and then sat in his office. And he said yes. And I said, what else can I do for you? And he said, well, you could do this. And then I did that and then I came back. These are stupid things and they're minor, but minor things can be major. They remind me of a Seurat painting. Seurat was a pointillist and he made paintings with a million dots. And if you looked at a square inch, it looked like nothing. You looked at three square inches, nothing. Maybe if you got to six squares, six inches by six inches, you start to see something. So I realized this guy was a health freak and stocked juices and special kind of in those days, whatever the health drink of the 60s was in those days. I don't, I don't. I think it was early for this, my man. I do have to take a moment and tell you that I live on these things.

That's class.

That's class. Birthday cake, my favorite. I'll put it right here. So I saw what he had and the next morning before I came in, I went to the farmer's market, not the supermarket. I got up at six o' clock in the morning to get there. I bought him all these fresh squeezed juices and all this stuff and I put it all in as a refrigerator. And when he went in, I could see his face. He was in a state of shock because he called me in, he said, what is this? Is it edible? It's like, I'm not trying to kill you. And that was the beginning. Then I got the break of breaks. His assistant, his secretary at admin got sick and she had the flu and he made a request for me to sit on his desk and within 90 days after that, I became his full time assistant. So at 22, I was the assistant of the president of the most important theatrical agency in the business. And it gave me a. I was sitting on Mount Olympus. I read every piece of his mail. I had already read all the files. I knew what was going on with every client. I knew what was going on administratively. I was like a trusted member of the inside team. And I worked. I didn't sleep much in those days. I worked seven days a week, every hour that I could work. I was available to this guy 24 7. It didn't matter what time he called me, I didn't care. As a matter of fact, I went overboard to encourage him to call me at 7am on a Saturday morning when he went out to do his five mile walk, to call me. I wanted him to think that I was there and reliable.

I really hope everyone listens to that story because you say it's really simple and it is. It's deadly simple, but it is exactly how people get ahead. And I was admittedly armed with your story. But when I first got into being an entrepreneur, I forced my wife to pick an apartment that was no more than seven minutes from both of the guys that were the partners that hired me for that exact reason. I wanted to make sure if they called me at 2am on a Saturday, I could be to their house in five minutes or less and we actually would go to an apartment. Baby, do you like it? Yes, I like it. And then we'd get in the car and we'd time it and see like how long it took to get to each partner's house. And when I think about the people, like even in this company that are really gonna succeed, it's the ones that I see calculating like that they're not trying to go. You haven't compensated me for that, so I'm not gonna do it. They go, I know where I'm trying to get and I know what I have to do to get there. And it's pretty extraordinary when people are willing to go to that length. How long was this after. Till they made you an agent?

So I was in the mailroom for under 100 days.

That's pure insanity. The norm is what, a year to two years?

The norm in those days was two to three years.

Yeah, that's.

And then it was a year to three years on a desk. And the desk was critical because the only way you could learn that business and it had been going on since the 20s is listening in on calls and doing things under the supervision of the person you were working for. There were no handbooks, there was nothing to read. There was no way of learning how it was to communicate and deal, make. And how do you learn creativity? How do you learn how to put something together? You have personal taste, you look and see what other people like. You try to combine those things. But how do you create that instinct that works intellectually and with your gut? Steven Spielberg didn't read a book how to direct. He went out and did it, made some mistakes, made some brilliant things, figured it out and then just kept growing and growing and growing. As by the way, with most creative people, it's trial and error. It's just trial and error. And that's how it was for me. It was no different.

So going back to that hustle and just doing whatever it took, filling the refrigerator, being there calls at 7am on a Saturday. What are the traits of success? If you were going to tell somebody what to cultivate in themselves or what to look for in an upcoming agent, somebody who's in that program, what are the traits that you look for?

The factors that I looked for all the way up to my retirement in 2001 was I want someone who is kindly, aggressive. And I qualify that because there were times in my career when I was overly aggressive and I regret it and I write a lot about it in the book. But I want someone who knows how to be aggressive but also has some style. But what I look for and still do, I look for people that are curious. I look for people that are entrepreneurial. I look for people that are self reliant. I look for people that have an aggressive tendency and don't put things off till tomorrow when they can get them done today. I look for people that don't think about hours and that they're just there. I look for people who don't complain. But the basic foundation of what I look for is someone who wants to make something of themselves better than where they started. They want to be somebody they have a reason for. I have a friend who's. I have one friend whose father was very, very poor and he is running a giant company right now. And his reason was that he just didn't want to be his father. He wanted to be successful, was critical to him. But I have a friend whose father is incredibly well off and very well regarded. That friend's also very successful. He wanted to show his father that he could do it. Everybody has their own reason for why they want to do something. Other people like you want to have an impact on what is done in society and how do you do that? So maybe it has less to do with some paternal issue, has more to do with some desire that came out of some other part of your life. But we all have these issues and these reasons that drive us forward. By the way, those same issues and demons drive us backwards as well. There are times in my life where I remember some of those things that were helping me get ahead slowed me up and got in my way and tripped me up big time. And 2020, you know, hindsight is 2020 vision. And it's always great to be the quarterback when you're looking at the game films, but when you're in the game, it's a different story.

Yeah, that's so powerful. And looking at the trajectory of your career of anyone who's been incredibly successful and really trying to understand. You talked about this in the book, and this may have been one of the most just like deeply fascinating parts to me was you said there was this sort of magic line that you crossed where I was being aggressive and it was building this business. And I'm sitting there going, oh, my God, what you built is so crazy. Like, really think about it. You must have internalized this in a way. But I really want the audience to really internalize, going from, you were in your 20s. You were in an industry at that time that was about 75 years old. And then within 10 years, you have 70% market share. It's so outrageous as to almost to defy logic. And so I'm like, okay, I get it. All these aggressive techniques are awesome. But now with the hindsight, you were able to see. But at some point, it started to become the thing that was holding me back. How do people avoid that? Like, one, I played a secret fantasy. I'm just going to confess where you asked me, because I do a lot of research, and I always love it when people give me a little test to see where I'm at. And I thought it would be fun if you said, well, what'd you think about the end of the book? Just to see if I read all the way through. And my answer was going to be, I don't think you've written the end of the book yet. And I'm utterly fascinated by the fact that you are still so engaged in what you're doing in Silicon Valley. So I look at a man, so I want to live forever. So I always look at people like in the, hey, I Think we can push death off for a really long time. So it comes down to a matter of, like, what energizes you. So I see you as somebody who's still energized, who's clearly still contributing in Silicon Valley in a pretty significant way. So how do you take that now, knowing where it tripped you up, knowing that it did work? Sometimes, that there are times you have to be aggressive, but there's also times where you have to back off. How do you play that now? Or how do you advise others to play that?

So that's a really good question. And it's a theme that's been laced through my life. One doesn't get to a place of success without having made mistakes. One of my closest friends passed away about nine years ago. Michael Crichton, the great author, used to always say to me, there's always another racetrack, there's always another game. So take your game and ratchet it down just a drop and you're going to have another game. And he was right. I didn't listen to that. To me, winning was everything. It was important to win. I felt losing was a weak, a point of weak character. And it was critical to win. It was critical to have momentum. It was critical to thrust forward at all times. It was critical to move that wedge forward and to not stop. And I felt we had to have 100% market share. I felt we needed shelf space. You know, you go into a supermarket, who's got the most shelf space in the soft drink aisle? Those are the big guys. And I felt we needed shelf space.

I totally get that. I want to go back to this notion of not just learning, but really applying what you learn. So you start in the file room, you just go in A to Z. But now I'm assuming you have probably a better path. So, one, how do you approach learning now? Like when you went to Silicon Valley and were a new entrant into just really learning about the raw technology, how do you, and this is, I'm asking on the behalf of the people watching this, this is one thing I know they all struggle with. I have this interest, but I feel so, so hopelessly lost. It is so big and I don't know where to start. And then once you get on the train of learning, how do you see those opportunities to use it?

Well, learning to me is strictly a frame of reference. Knowledge is power. And I believe I will never know what I need to know. I really believe that. I am a voracious reader of everything. I just, I like to Know, I like frame of reference. I felt it was important in the business that I was in to be able to talk to everybody about something that was interesting to them. That's a big menu. So when you're talking to Paul Newman who races cars, you better have read Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Automobile, or at least flip through them. But then when you're going to go talk to somebody else who's interested in tennis, you better know who the who just won the Grand Slam. You've got to have some wide sense of not so deep, but peripheral information. But I tried to then go deeper. Reading files from A to Z gave me an immediate deal reference. So that was off my plate. You could come to me as the host of a new show, say, I want to put this show together. Here's what it's about. I want to make it about social change and how people impact each other. And I want to get to the widest audience. I had all that frame of reference in my head from seeing what was done in the past and then innovating what could be done in the now, and then thinking a little bit about the future. How do we disrupt? I remember my partner and best friend Ron Meyer. At the time, we were sitting on a Saturday with a young agent we had worked with at William Morrison. We had just quit and he said to the two of us, he said, you know, you guys are crazy. And Ron looked at him and I looked at him, what do you mean we're crazy? You're starting this business, you're going to fail. You're going to fail. You're going to end up looking for a job as a casting director, which was a job that failed agents would take. There were great casting directors and then there were failed agents that were casting director. So it was a connotation of negativity. And we looked at him and Ronnie said to him, you know, if you were doing what we did, maybe you'd fail. And I looked at him and I said, we're not going to fail. There was no way we could fail because there was no alternative but to succeed. We didn't have an alternative. We didn't have any money. We started the business with a hundred thousand dollar credit line which we paid off 12 weeks after we started. We had nothing to fall back on. None of us had well to do families, none of us had put any money away. None of us were in a position where if we didn't make this work that we could go with our hat in our hand to someone and say, oh, William, Morris, will you take us back? And then we also knew going to another agency at that time, we would have been tainted twice. Once for leaving William Morris and once for failing in our own business.

Yeah, I love that. So it would be insane not to talk to the man famous for his negotiating abilities to find out what is the art of the negotiation. How did you pull some of those deals off? I mean, it's in the book. You detail it. Which, by the way, the book is phenomenal. It's so cool the way that it goes into the detail on this stuff. But how, A, how did you become so unflappable? Let's start with that. Like, there were times where it's just like everything was crashing down. And it was only because you could stay cool through that process that you would actually get across the finish line. And then, B, what is the. If you had to give it sort of one overarching idea, what is it that one needs to cultivate to get a deal done?

Well, first of all, you have to listen. And my dad used to say to me when I was a kid, you have two ears and one mouth, so you should listen two times more than you talk. And I never forgot that, oddly enough, kind of dopey, simple advice. But I also knew that there were a lot of hysterics in the entertainment business. I saw that from the time I was a kid, 17. I remember working at the studio and seeing people screaming at each other over creative arguments and arguments over dressing rooms and titles and who got a script first and a seat in the commissary. That seat's better than my seat. Ego. And I made a decision that I wasn't going to have an ego at the beginning. Now, by the way, that changed. That changed. And success does that to you. But made a decision that I was going to try to be completely above all of these problems. And as the problems came to me, to just kind of fend them off and redirect them to either other people or to back onto the people. If I didn't do that, I probably would have had a coronary early on. Because, as I say in the book, you're dealing in a business where people just come to you. They shake your hand while they're hugging you, like we did at the beginning of the show. They stick a spigot in your stomach, twist it in, and then they turn it on all the way, and they take everything out of you that they can. And I understand that by the way I do it. I think that it's really Critical in a deal process to know your players. I think it's critical to stay above the fray. I think it's critical to not get caught up in the emotion of it all. At the end of the day, we're not curing cancer. We're trying to make a deal. You know, I spent years as the chairman of the UCLA Medical center and raising money to build the hospital. That's important work. That's important work. What those people do over there. Being in the agency business was not important work. It was living. And I always looked at it that way. Getting certain movies made, that's a different story. Getting Gandhi made was important work. Had a big message. It was important. Getting certain comedies made was important work because it made people feel good. But by and large, a career in the entertainment business was not saving someone's life. It just wasn't. And I was very realistic about that.

You were insanely busy, probably still are. You had kids. Why did you start practicing martial arts?

It set up my day. I got all my aggression out in the morning. I came into work as Zen like as you could be, because I had just blown through every piece of physical power in my body and felt good about it, got in a great sweat, got my heart rate up, felt really good about how I felt physically. And frankly, it turned out to be a twofer for me, because not only did I get great exercise when Japan took off in the late 70s and into the mid-80s, I had spent so much time studying the Far East, Japan and China that when Westerners were going to do business in Asia, I was so comfortable there. It was beyond explanation to anyone. I just. I knew how to sit, I knew how to stand. I knew how to present a card. I knew when to bring a gift, when not to bring a gift. I knew not to ask people about whether they're sick or not or what the reason is. I knew what I was supposed to do and not do. That turned out to be just insane luck. That was not by design, just insane luck.

So the weird thing that I didn't even connect until we were midway through this interview. I studied aikido for a while, and it's because of you. So this is a true statement. If you hadn't gotten into aikido, I never would have gotten into aikido. Because you find a trainer that comes to your house, a guy named Steven Seagal, and he starts training you, finally confesses that he wants to be an actor. And I think your line was something like, of course you want to be an actor. You're here at seven in the morning teaching me. And you put him on screen. My dad and I, the first thing that we ever really bonded over because I hated cars. He loved cars. But we both love Steven Seagal movies. And so then I became absolutely obsessed with that and Aikido and that notion of the reversal of energy. And also, he just looked so cool to me. Like, it was just the coolest thing ever.

So.

Yeah, because of that.

That's too funny. Well, I hope it was a good experience.

It was amazing. I actually loved, unfortunately for me, revealed something. So you talk about Sean Connery getting his wrist broken, I think. Was it by Seagal? Yeah, so. And I got a wrist sprain doing that in college. And I was like, too. I was too weak at the time to do it. And so it was you. And I had to learn maybe very different lessons. I wasn't bullied as a kid, so I didn't have to learn. I wasn't forced to learn it young. I didn't find out till later that I was really weak. And I mean emotionally weak. I was unprepared to face the challenge of being hurt. And so that was in business, toughened me up. And it's interesting because my wife, the one complaint that she has of what business has done to me is she has to remind me now to soften up. In fact, this was not a segue that I planned. But vulnerability is something that you talked in the book. And I think people would be. People that knew you at the height of CAA would never expect to hear you talk about vulnerability. They would not expect to hear you talk about how we all create Personas and that you'd gotten somewhat trapped in the Persona of the ultra aggressive win at all cost guy. What have you learned about vulnerability?

Well, first of all, I felt vulnerability was a crime in my day. I thought showing any vulnerability would kill anything we were doing as a whole, as a group. Not just me. I was the head of the business. I had a partner who was very vulnerable. And that was the act that we put together. You know, we were good cop, bad cop. I wasn't the bad cop. When we started the business, weirdly going through William Morris, I was the ultra good cop. That's what was interesting. But we made a decision to do that when we flipped the business from TV into movies in the late 70s because it was a business that necessitated toughness. Not the creative side, but just the whole business of putting a movie together. So I felt being vulnerable was a negative and I couldn't look vulnerable in front of the people I was leading. It's easy to look backwards. It's not easy to look forwards. As I got to the tail end of what I was doing, it became very clear to me that I had overstepped and that I could have cut back a bit and opened the kimono just a drop, and I didn't. I regret it. But I've learned also, you can't go backwards. You can't. There's no such thing as going backwards and doing it again. What I did worked, and it would not work today. It wouldn't work today under any condition. We couldn't start that business today the way it is. We'd have to reimagine it completely.

So where does vulnerability play in? Are there things that you think that it gives people, like now in their general life? Is it something. A willingness to. Even if it's just a one person to open up, to connect.

You referring to now bringing it out at this point in my life.

Yeah. Like where you definitely seem pretty open. And I would say vulnerable. I don't know if it's a word you're comfortable with, but I don't know.

That I'd ever be comfortable with a word, but it's factual. I've made a decision in my life. You know, I'm at a stage in my life. I'm not at the beginning of my life, not at the beginning of my career. I'm at the end. And I want to leave the planet a little better than when I came on. If I could learn a lesson during the course of it, and I've learned many, that's probably one of them. There's no crime in being vulnerable with people. Everybody has an issue. By the way, the reason that I wasn't vulnerable is I knew everybody else was. Because all humans are. To be human is to err, and to err is to be vulnerable. And I knew that, and I took advantage of it. Now, is that right or wrong? I can make that argument both ways. I can make the argument that it's wrong because if everyone's vulnerable, then I should be too. And I can make the argument that it's right because it worked. And we took that business faster than anyone in history had taken. No one has taken a business from a standing start with five people and no clients and no office, to the position of dominance that that company had. Now, is it because I wasn't vulnerable? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. I'll never know. I do know that was the act that was chosen at that time, and it was conscious. This was not an accident. It was completely thought through and it was conscious. Would I do it again that way? Absolutely not. But we're in a different time. That makes sense.

All right, my final question is, what is the impact that you want to.

Have on the world? Well, I don't know. It's what I want to have. It's probably what I did have. I think I had some really positive things, and I think I had some things that weren't so positive. On the positive side, I'm very proud of the work I did at UCLA with the hospital, raising money to build the hospital. I'm very proud of a lot of the research that I have endowed. I'm very proud of the kids that I've left on the planet. I got four amazing kids, and I have to tell you, that's not easy. So I'm very proud of each of them. And as far as impact, short of someone you know, I read a lot of biographies, and I marvel at the ends of the biographies. Like, I love the biography of Churchill, who is a man who couldn't be more complicated. He makes me look like a simpleton. And I look at him and I go, my God, this man saved England by sheer will while he was depressed for 50% of the time with what he called the black dog. And at the end, they drove him out. So when you talk about impact, I don't know what it means. I honestly don't know what it means. I think you can have impact and still be driven out. I think you cannot have impact and have impact. And I think it's all timing. I have friends who have passed who've had more impact in their passing than they had when they were alive. And I have friends that had it when they were alive. And when they pass, people have forgotten about them. I was talking with tomorrow, my fiance about a couple friends of ours that passed away in the last couple of years, and they couldn't have had higher profiles. We never hear their names anymore, yet they did some great things. And then I hear names of other people who did very little, but they left certain tools in place to have big impact. So I'm giving you a non answer to a very good question.

It works for me. Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. That was incredible. All right, yours, guys. I'm telling you right now, if any of you have any interest in being successful, the first 30 minutes of that interview is your roadmap. I didn't want to breathe. I Didn't want to interrupt them. I'm telling you, go back and watch is the roadmap to being successful. That's what you have to do. And his is the tale of somebody who comes from nowhere. But Dec decides what he wants to be and then asks himself, no bullshit, what's it gonna take? And then he executes against it. He just literally step by step goes about doing the things that he has to do in order to get where he wants to go. And look, he's very open. It's a complicated story, there's no question. But what he achieved is just mathematically unparalleled. It is absolutely extraordinary. And to me, it is the classic case of going in, working hard, working smart, and working longer hours and figuring out that knowledge and figuring out how to use it. That's the key, man. Hear that in the story. Figure out what you need to know. Know more about it than anybody else. It's the nugget of advice that my own father in law gave me, which I ignored for three years, much to my shame, but I have finally embraced it. And once I did that, that's how I was able to take off as an entrepreneur. Because all of a sudden I had a need to know more about what was being talked about than anyone else in the room. And all of a sudden, as Michael said, I had more power than anyone else in the room. So rewatch that one over and over and over and be sure to buy the book. Who is Michael Ovitz? I'm telling you, it's awesome. It is very rare that I take the time to read a book word for word all the way through, but this one I read word for word. It is fantastic. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.