Michael Ovitz, Creative Artists Agency (CAA)

Michael Ovitz is the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency (CAA), one of the most powerful and influential talent agencies in Hollywood history, built on a revolutionary approach to representation that fundamentally transformed the entertainment industry. He is an entertainment executive and dealmaker widely regarded as one of the most formidable operators in Hollywood. During his time leading CAA, Ovitz represented virtually every major star, including Tom Cruise, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Steven Spielberg, David Letterman, Barbra Streisand and many more. Starting as a mailroom trainee in the 1960s and reshaping the power dynamics of the entire industry by the 1980s, he became known for his relentless strategic thinking, his creation of the "packaging" model that bundled talent for studios, and his ability to orchestrate deals of unprecedented scale and complexity. He built a reputation in entertainment circles through his fierce intelligence, relentless work ethic and his ability to build CAA into what many called "the most powerful company in Hollywood." His major accomplishments include co-founding CAA in 1975 in an audacious break from the establishment, pioneering the packaging system that gave agents unprecedented leverage over studios, orchestrating landmark deals including the sale of Columbia Pictures to Sony, serving as President of The Walt Disney Company and building CAA into a multi-billion dollar enterprise that expanded far beyond traditional talent representation into sports, consulting and global entertainment infrastructure. Read the episode show notes at davidsenra.com. Made possible by Ramp: ⁠https://ramp.com⁠ HubSpot: ⁠https://hubspot.com⁠ Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/senra Chapters (00:00:00) Introduction (00:00:09) The Genius of Marc Andreessen (00:03:03) The Art of Conversation and Adaptability (00:04:00) The Evolution of Cloud Computing (00:05:38) The Power of Co-Founder Relationships (00:09:01) The Importance of Personal Growth and Drive (00:13:39) The Rockefeller Connection (00:30:37) The Nobu and Wolfgang Puck Stories (00:37:31) The Art of Spotting Talent (00:44:58) Starting Out in a Competitive Environment (00:46:39) Early Lessons in Business and Teamwork (00:48:09) The Importance of Knowledge and Curiosity (00:51:25) The Impact of Technology on Learning (00:57:35) Building Relationships and Integrity in Business (01:01:13) The Role of History and Transparency in Success (01:07:17) The Power of Big Thinking and Disruption (01:26:25) The Influence of Art and Culture on Business (01:27:45) The Coke Commercial Revolution (01:28:38) The $3 Million Check Incident (01:31:29) Mentorship and Integrity (01:32:52) Self-Reflection and Personal Growth (01:34:56) The Power of Perseverance (01:38:31) The Drive for Success (01:43:19) Enduring Ambition and Curiosity (02:00:40) A Tribute to Michael Crichton (02:06:58) Closing Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Senra?

  Michael, muchas gracias por hacer esto. Siempre es un placer pasar más tiempo contigo. Algunos de mis pastores de dinners han estado con usted. Quiero empezar con algo que usted dijo antes de grabar que me hizo reír. Dijo que Marc Andreessen asusta a la mierda de usted. ¿Por qué dijo eso?

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Hablar con él es como hacer un examen. Es como estar en la escuela secundaria y hacer un examen o una final en la universidad. CAA conversación. Tiene la habilidad más extraordinaria de analizar, de recordar información, de organizarla mientras piensa y habla. Probablemente haya tres procesos diferentes en su cerebro simultáneamente mientras habla. Su recuerdo, nunca he visto algo así. Todo lo que lee. En los viejos días, cuando iba a reunirme con él sobre temas de la junta, siempre tenía que estudiar muy cuidadosamente lo que iba a hablar. Y digo esto de la manera más amorosa.

• 1:03Speaker 01

  Es el tipo más terrible. Y ha crecido y ha prosperado. Y es uno de los seres humanos más inteligentes que he conocido en toda mi vida.

• 1:16David Senra?

  ¿Cree que su recuerdo viene de la naturaleza? Pensé que tenía un gran recuerdo. He visto todas sus entrevistas, las conversaciones que hemos tenido. Tiene este conocimiento enciclopedico, especialmente sobre el trabajo que hacía en la CIA. Pero siento que la forma en que lo describiría es que tiene que trabajar mucho más duro.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Creo que hay ciertos seres humanos que tienen una fortaleza de procesamiento ininteligible que es más grande que los demás. Creo que todos tenemos una fortaleza de procesamiento, pero es una cuestión de grados. Y dentro de la fortaleza de procesamiento, hay silos específicos en los que cada uno de nosotros está en el mejor o está en el mediocre o no es tan bueno. Con Marc y Michael Crichton y Peter Thiel y bastantes de los top personas creativas y top personas en la tecnología tienen esta habilidad de procesar información a una velocidad ultra rápida.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  And it's foundationally set in the ability to recall information that they have inventoried. And it's very hard to do, especially in the world of technology where you're touching constantly new ideas. So everything's different. And yes, there's some through line, but each business that's being started has a different conceit. And then on top of it, these guys, I find them fascinating for another reason. They're really nice people. Even though they have an intellectual superiority, they don't laud it over you. And they're chameleon.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  They kind of adjust to the level that they're talking to.

• 3:03David Senra?

  Say more about that.

• 3:04Speaker 01

  As an agent, I had to ratchet my discussions up or down based on whether it was a creative discussion, a self-help discussion for a client or for a buyer. Because we did a lot of counseling for buyers because it was a good way to build a bridge to them and be able to have access. Ratcheting up or down based on mood, based on what you read at the moment and what your frame of reference about the person is. But you can't talk to everybody the same way. One has to make a quick, well, let me rephrase, at least for me.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  I can't speak for anybody else. And I know Mark does this too. You kind of look at who you're talking to and then decide just how deep are you going to go and go how far. I mean, when I was on the board of Mark's first company, LoudCloud, they were dealing in an area that frankly, I really at the beginning in 1999 didn't understand it because they were talking about the cloud. I don't think anybody we were selling to understood what the cloud really was. It was this amorphous idea of storing data off-site.

• 4:22David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Not in a machine, but in a machine, but not a machine that's with you. It's a machine that's in the ether, but there is no real machine in the ether. So you're thinking about all this and we're building a business around it. And I watched Mark handle and Ben Horowitz. Ben is the most practical, brilliant guy I've ever met. Ben Horowitz.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  Is not only really, really smart. When you talk to him, you get the sense you're talking to the guy next door who's smart, but he doesn't make it ultra clear that he's smarter than you are. So it's very, very gracious, warm and accommodating. Or if he wants to make a point, or if he's being a disciplinarian, he can change his level. I've watched him get angry at someone and turn into an absolute, you know, person of strength and movement and aggressive that you wouldn't know normally because he's very, very even tempered.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  But all these guys, sitting in meetings with Ben and Mark, for example, is fantastic because they play off each other. They've been together, they're friends, I guess, 35 years.

• 5:38David Senra?

  I'm glad you brought that up because I've been thinking about the co-founder relationship recently. In many cases, you know, I've read almost 400 biographies of history case entrepreneurs so far. I would say that like most co-founder relationships are actually tenuous or it seems to be like one main guy. Even if they start the company with multiple people, it's like usually really one person. And I think I've just finished reading about what may be the greatest co-founder relationship in history. It's the Michelin Brothers who in the late 1800s take over a failing family factory in a remote part of France. The younger brother's in his late twenties, the older brother's in his late thirties. They build, they essentially from almost scratch or even from like a negative position because the factory is almost bankrupt. They build a family dynasty that lasts 100 years.

• 6:20David Senra?

  The company 130 years later is still prospering, still one of the best tire companies in the world. And they did it by division of responsibilities, which kind of reminded me of what you were just saying about Mark and Ben, where the younger brother made the product and the older brother sold the product. They just happened to be the best in the world at both of those things and coming together, they ran the company until they both died. You know, they had a partnership for 45 years. What is it that you see when you observe Mark and Ben together that you thought they had a complementary skill set?

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, the obvious, when I first met them 25 years ago, they could finish each other's sentences before they started that business because they had worked together before and they're friends. I think at the underlying foundation of partnerships in any business, there's got to be a respect for their business acumen. There has to be complementary personalities. They can't both be the same. And there has to be complementary temperament. And there has to be a shared vision. And that's hard to find. And as you kind of hinted at, you saw two successful founders with the Michelin Brothers.

• 7:34David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  I can name you too many co-founded businesses where always one of the founders ends up getting pushed out.

• 7:46David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And...

• 7:47David Senra?

  I would say that's, based on the reading I've done, more like, the more likely outcome.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  I don't want to put a percentage in because I honestly don't know. But if you asked me off the top of my head, I'd say 90%. It's very hard to have two strong founders that share a singular vision, like you talked about the Michelin Brothers, and that have a division of responsibilities. It's very difficult. But Mark and Ben, for example, Mark knows everything that's going on in the company, but Ben operates it. And Mark's very comfortable with that. And Mark has phenomenal instincts about companies, and so does Ben. Ben also comes at looking at a business as a guy who's operated multiple businesses and sold businesses.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Very hard to find leaders who understand principles of business, how to execute them, how to handle people, how to be a leader, how to get along with your co-founder, how to have an intellectual process to support your vision and how to unfold your vision. And while you're doing that, to be open-minded. That's really difficult. At CAA, I...

• 9:04Speaker 01

  Spent an enormous amount of time making sure that the executives in the company were stable in their personal lives, their professional lives, not in any order, by the way, in their growth, their profile.

• 9:22David Senra?

  You did this through one on ones with them?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I had a system that was pretty random, frankly, but I did a, and I wrote about this, we discussed it last time, I did a, when I was in town, which I tried to be in town four days, three to four days a week, but I traveled to New York every week, to Japan once a month and to Europe once a month, and, but I did, I decided to do everything short. So if I went to New York, I would go for one day, but I'd get in that one day, breakfast, lunch, drinks, dinner, meetings in between, and after dinner, fly back to LA and pick up the time, and then make it into the office the next day so I could get what I called a six day week.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And I got the idea from my college roommate who gave me as a gift, a Joe clock, which had 25 hours and it had a one, it had zero through 25.

• 10:20David Senra?

  I spent a lot of time with Michael Ovitz, and one thing that is obvious when you study his career is that Ovitz made working with the very best people a priority. People like Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Michael Crichton, Marc Andreessen, and the founder of Nobu. Ovitz knew, just like Steve Jobs knew, that you always bet on talent. In fact, Steve Jobs has this great quote where he said, "You must find the extraordinary people. A small team of A players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players." And so you must build a team that pursues the A players. And that is exactly what Ramp has done. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Ramp has the most talented technical team in their industry. Becoming an engineer at Ramp is nearly impossible.

• 11:03David Senra?

  In the last 12 months, Ramp has hired only 0.23% of the people that applied. That means when you use Ramp, you now have top tier technical talent and some of the best AI engineers. On the planet, working on your behalf 24/7 to automate and improve all of your business's financial operations. And they do this on a single platform. Ramp gives your business fully programmable corporate credit cards for your entire team, automated expense reporting, bill payments, accounting and more, all in one place. The longer you use Ramp, the more efficient your company becomes. This is important because as Sam Walton said in his autobiography, "You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation, or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient."

• 11:48David Senra?

  Ramp helps you run an efficient organization. I run my business on Ramp and so do most of the other top founders and CEOs I know. I hear from people that listen to this podcast every day that have switched to Ramp and rave about the quality of the product. In fact, Matt Paulson, the founder of Marketbe, just sent me a message. He said that Ramp had helped him cut $420,000 in monthly expenses. Make sure you go to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save both time and money. That is ramp.com. This is what I was trying to tell people, like since we've become friends. Obviously, you're a legend, people love your book. And they're like, "How's Ovid?" I'm like, "You ever heard any of my episodes on Rockefeller?" He's like the Terminator.

• 12:31David Senra?

  One of my favorite stories of Rockefeller is, obviously, in the very beginning of the oil industry, he's there at the ground floor. Like people, one of the things they miss when they analyze this company is just how well-funded he was. He was relentless at raising money and he went into every single battle they had with his competitors with the biggest war chest by far. And any biography on Rockefeller, it'd be written about. And what I loved about Rockefeller, you have a little bit of this in you, where he would go to every single bank or any partner and he'd be like, "I need money. I would like to borrow money." And obviously, he tells them why. They say, "No." He goes, "That's fine." Gets up, not... Mad, upset, he said something in there, it's like, it made no difference to me. I'm just one step closer to getting what I actually want. So that person said, no, I go to the next one and do another meeting.

• 13:16David Senra?

  And then I get money. Okay, good. Now I go to the next one and he just set it up all day long until he comp like, basically set his schedule up where every single hour of the day was going to be dedicated to this task. And then, once the task is done, then what else is on the next task? And I'll do the exact same thing, just absolutely relentless, like almost, they said he went about his business like a farmer plows a field.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'll tell you a story that I told 500 guests at a party I held for the MoMA Board of Trustees at our home, at Tamara's and my home. When David, the last couple of years of David's life, we hosted all the trustees in Los Angeles for the annual meeting and we gave a dinner. And we invited a lot of people from politics, from entertainment and from the museum and gallery world. And I told this story because David had just passed away and I told it because his son was there. I never went to an art museum and you know I love art.

• 14:18David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  You've been to the house and you know that I'm absolutely certifiably insane and should probably be put in an institution, but I love it.

• 14:27David Senra?

  You were commenting on the chairs.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Well, because I just love aesthetics.

• 14:31David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 14:32Speaker 01

  And I learned that from my directors in the seventies. They would look at things and everything they looked at showed up in a movie someday. So they registered everything and I learned to register. But I never went to an art museum till I was 18. Now, think about that and think about your being at my home with 300 pieces of art hanging, right? And

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I went to New York for four days because that's all I had off. I'd never been, I left L.A., I was working full-time. I was 18 years old. And I worked because I needed to, because my family unfortunately didn't really have the means to support me. Which, by the way, turned out to be helpful in my later life oddly.

• 15:17David Senra?

  Why do you think it's helpful?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Because it gave me a sense of drive, ambition, and a goal-oriented thinking that any of my friends that didn't grow up like that sort of either, it was binary. They either had it or they didn't have it. And most of the time, they didn't have it. But some of them did, by the way. But I spent, when I was in New York, I had four days. And I had all these things mapped out to see, I'd done all this homework. I needed to see the Village. I wanted to go to Soho. I wanted to go to art galleries. I wanted to go to their 10 museums. I wanted to go to all of them. Of course, I over, my appetite's always, you know, bigger than my stomach. So I went to MoMA. I left six hours later.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  And I went back the next day, and I went back the third day. It absolutely changed my life. And I then remember sitting in my office at CAA and my, this is probably 15, 16 years later, and I'm telling this story, and David Rockefeller's sitting in the front, at the front table at this dinner for 500 people. And the phone, my assistant buzzes in and says, and I had a phone assistant, one for incoming and one for outgoing calls. So the incoming assistant says, "Michael, Mr. Rockefeller for you." And I didn't skip a beat, and I said, "Tell Bill Murray I'll call him back."

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Because Bill used to call under different names all the time. And he could get away with it most of the time. So I'm in the middle of something crazy, and Bill would give a name that he knew I had to pick up. And I love the guy to this day. He's one of the greatest human beings on the planet.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  A guy who I will, I will be loyal to till the day I die. For a whole series of reasons, which I'm happy to come back to. So my assistant said, it's David Rockefeller. I said, tell Bill I'll call him back. She says, no, I think it really is Mr. Rockefeller. It's his assistant. And her name's Marnie and she wants you to, Mr. Rockefeller's trying to reach you. I said, look, it's not David Rockefeller. You know, it's Bill. Just get a number. I'll call him back. She said, okay.

• 17:34David Senra?

  Why would it be so unbelievable that Rockefeller was calling you at that time in your career?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Because I'm a guy in LA with a beginning art collection, basically. No real cultural profile. And this is David Rockefeller. I mean, he's a legend in the world. Of business and culture. His mother started MoMA. I mean, if you read the book Picasso's War, which is fascinating, I told you about it at dinner. It talks about the Rock, about Abby Rockefeller and the women that started MoMA. There were three women that started the museum in the 30s. And David grew up around art. I grew up around nothing. It's like I was in the San Fernando Valley and wasteland.

• 18:22David Senra?

  One of my favorite parts of your book is that, that exact line where you're like, I could see. The problem is that not only where I grew up and what like you were very aware because you could see where you want it. You knew where you were, but you could see the mansions of Beverly Hills. You could see the Brentwood.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Well, we went over the hill every weekend to Westwood.

• 18:42David Senra?

  That part of your book, I absolutely love where you're having initial success. Nowhere near what's going to come in the future, but enough to buy your first house in Brentwood. And you wake up and I'm getting goosebumps thinking about this because I've had a couple of experiences like that in my life. We're like, I can't believe I, in your book, you say, I can't believe I live in Brentwood.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Listen, I still have those feelings at this stage of my life. Tamara and I were talking about this the other night. It happened in New York. Not, it was a few days around our dinner. And we were walking around looking at art. And we looked at each other and it was a weekend. It was a Sunday, actually. And we said, wow, we have an amazing life. We were talking about looking at art and then we're gonna be going on vacation in Europe. And I get to be with my grandkids and her daughter and my kids. And I said, we're just really, really lucky. But the Rockefeller thing was luck. I didn't think he knew me, so I thought it was a joke.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And I had a lot of times clients calling saying they were people that they weren't because they thought it was funny. And they were pretty good at the imitations. Anyways, I called back and sure enough, it was David Rockefeller. And I got on the phone and he said, I would like to meet you. And I said, sure, but why? And he said, he said, what do you mean, why? I said, because I'm in L.A. I'm in the entertainment business. We are in culture, but a very different kind than you. And I have, I'm a giant admirer of everything you've done.

• 20:16David Senra?

  How old were you when this is taking place? You'd already founded CAA, right?

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Probably about forty.

• 20:21David Senra?

  Okay.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Thirty-eight, forty.

• 20:23David Senra?

  Ten years into CAA or so, okay.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  But anyways, to make a long story short. I said, I'm in New York every week. I'll come meet you. He said, no, I wanna come meet you. And then I was floored because I go to New York every week. And I told him that the second time. He said, no, I see you're building a building with I.M. Pay. You've got a painting by Roy Lichtenstein. He said, these are very interesting choices for someone your age in California. And he wasn't like, he wasn't denigrating California, but he was kinda making it clear. We were one of the very first, not the first, but one of the very first.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Architecturally inspired buildings with a top American architect in Los Angeles. It wasn't a thing to do, architecture of note in Los Angeles. And before I chose IMP, I spent a lot of time and I researched all the top architects in the world and made that decision. And to this day, I'm thrilled that I had that relationship. But David came out, we hit it off. In my office, he asked me to go on the board. I became the youngest board member on the board. And the second time they had someone that young. I think Ron Lauder was younger than me when he went on. And we built a relationship and I learned so much.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  But here's the point to your point that you just made about David Rockefeller doing things without doing them. It's kind of like that famous Bruce Lee line about punching without punching, which I've never forgotten because it's simple but apocryphal. And David raised all the money by himself to build the new museum. And he took me out to dinner after I was a trustee. And we spent three hours talking about politics, art, people, things that had happened in

• 22:32Speaker 01

  his life, travel, his 10,000 index card file, because there were no, there wasn't a computer. So every time he met someone, if he met David Senra, he put your name and contact on a three by five card under S, alphabetized. And he was so proud of it, it was in his office. And he said to me, nothing about giving money, not one word.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  And as we're leaving, I said to him, how's the fundraising going? He said, really good. I'm getting a lot of support. I'll talk to you soon. And I made a donation that was a lot larger than I thought I would. He never asked me to make a donation. And then I found out later, he had that same meeting with every trustee. He didn't ask one for a dime.

• 23:28David Senra?

  So is this just like black belt level sales?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  This is as good as I've ever seen. And by the way, hard to explain this to you because I'm a salesman and-

• 23:39David Senra?

  Maybe the best in the world?

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Well, I'm a salesperson. I don't know if I'm the best, but I'm fairly good at it.

• 23:45David Senra?

  I had dinner with Mark Andreessen. Jared, our mutual friend Jared Kushner invited me to go to dinner with Mark. And I asked him about you because I was going to meet you. And as we said, the best in the world.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Well, Mark's prejudice because I'm crazy about Mark and I consider him family. But I think the idea of having that kind of restraint, I'm not, I don't think I could have.

• 24:11David Senra?

  I wouldn't even think to do that.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  No, because I would have had to at the end, say something to feel I'd accomplished my intention in the mission. He didn't say a word and he didn't even come close to it. It's like, it's almost like you want to contribute, great. You don't, that's okay too. But he never said the word contribute. He never talked about money. He talked about the architecture, but he talked about where to hang the collection. He talked about other things in the world, but three hours, not a word. Not one word.

• 24:44David Senra?

  He was how much older than you? A couple of decades?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Oh, God, David, God, we just celebrated his hunt. He died at, he was probably twice my age.

• 24:57David Senra?

  See, and you're, let's say you're 40 at the time, he's 80. This is something I'm-

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I'm guessing, I don't know.

• 25:02David Senra?

  Yeah, we don't need the exact number, but it's not like an older brother. It's like a father.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  No, he took me to one of the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, the two of us. It's one of the greatest nights of my life. You talk about pinching yourself. I'm in his limo with him driving to the airport, in his plane, in his car.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  To the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was just he and I, walking in. He knew every single person in the room, and if he didn't, they knew him. And I'm sitting there, I'm like, it's hard to impress me, I hate to say, because I travel around and I've met a lot of people. Just knocked my socks off. He knew everyone in the room. And sitting at his table that night was an experience to behold, because everyone came up to pay their respects to him. And it was such an eye-opening experience. And he was always even, and always the same polite guy to everybody. Even people that we knew he didn't care for.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  He had a very, very short attention span for people with no integrity. Because his integrity was so high, it was like a learning experience for me. But I got to be pretty good friends with him. And every lunch, dinner, or outing with him was a graduate course in something.

• 26:33David Senra?

  This is an incredible opportunity. So like, sometimes I feel like, almost like a bit of a middle child. Because of the work I do on founders, I get to meet world-class entrepreneurs, I get to go spend time with them, have dinner. Many of them are much older. And then I also talk to like, younger entrepreneurs. And the advice, to the degree that they ask me, that I'd give to younger entrepreneurs, like, try to spend time. Like, if Dave Rockefeller was, let's say, 80 years old at this point, he's not twice as smart, and twice as experienced as like, a 40-year-old. It's an uneven distribution. He's like 10x. Because of this idea, it's like, how many, he's seen every deal, he's met every person, he's just had so much more time to observe, like, what actually takes place in the world. He's read a lot more, he's had all this experience. It's like, and you can, you know, I feel this way when we've had these three-hour dinners in New York.

• 27:18David Senra?

  It's like, man, the amount of information I learned from you in three hours, it's not like a person that's half your age. We can spend the exact same amount of time together, right? It's just you have so much more lived experience.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  But it's my thesis about frame of reference. This old saying that people always say, as you get older, "I wish I knew then what I do now," happens to be 1,000% accurate, and I'll tell you why. You just said it, David. Longevity...

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Automatically promotes more meetings, human interactions and experiences. That in itself creates more frame of reference. The more frame of reference you have, the more experienced you are to make difficult decisions because you've seen outcomes. I was on the phone last night with one of my kids on a personal matter that she was having. And I explained that I was thinking about her situation. And the benefit that I have that she or the person she's having the problem with doesn't

• 28:33Speaker 01

  have is that I've seen the movie before. I've either packaged the movie, seen the movie, read the script that never got made. I've seen it fictionally done, non-fictionally done, done as a documentary, done based on historical fact, done based on someone's biography. I've just been around too long. Therefore, I know what silo her situation fits into. And I said to her, you cannot see what I can see. And I said, you're gonna get off the phone and you're gonna go, Dad is really a jerk. Because I'm not preaching to you, but you have to understand, I've just seen it.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  And I have, and I know exactly what's going on. And I see it from both sides, by the way. But it's all about frame of reference. And I do wish that I had, when I started the agency, the knowledge bank of experiences that I have now. I wish when I started collecting art, I had the knowledge bank of frame of reference of pieces of art that I have now.

• 29:41David Senra?

  Well, your frame of reference from people specifically is very interesting to me. Because think about how, like, one of the things I want to talk to you about, it's okay, it's very obvious, like, you know, I have a few obsessions. One of my obsessions is people that get to the very top of their profession. I don't even care what the profession is. It could be building CAA, it could be a basketball player, it could be a sushi chef, it doesn't matter. I'm obsessed with people that become the best in the world at what they do. And I was thinking about you. Not only did you become the best in the world at what you did, but you worked with, competed against, built relationships with countless other people that were also the best in the world at what they did. And I was very curious, and you know, I kind of study this on founders. It's like you've met these people, you interact with them, compete against them. I read about them.

• 30:24David Senra?

  And I was very curious if you could describe the one common trait. What do you think is the most important common trait for the people that you observe that are best in the world at what they do? Yourself included.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  Well, let me give you an example, a practical one.

• 30:37David Senra?

  Okay.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  So two weeks ago, I'm having lunch with a friend of mine at Nobu. And in walks Nobu, who's my exact age, who was, when I met him, had just opened a sushi bar on La Cienega Boulevard called Matsuhisa. And I remember meeting him because I would go sometimes for business or occasionally by myself. Because the one great lesson I learned very early on going to Japan is the best place in the world to eat if you're alone is at a sushi bar. Because you could actually not feel uncomfortable doing that.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  And I met Nobu when he was, he was his own. He was the chef, the manager, the menu planner. He did, it was just him and two other guys and his wife. That was Nobu's start. Now you look at what Nobu's got right now. Nobu has an empire. I don't know how many restaurants he got there all over the world. He's got hotels. He's got bottled and packaged goods. He's got everything. I would imagine he's got a billion dollar empire. When I met Nobu, I took note. I said, this guy's got something special. I didn't quite know what it was.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  But several years later, I introduced Nobu to Bob De Niro. And he and Nobu started the present business with a sushi restaurant called Nobu, not Matsuhisa, which was fascinating that he didn't try to. Take his personal brand and put it with Bob. He took his first name. They opened the first Nobu in New York in Tribeca, which was no man's land at the time. But Bobby had a hunch because he was developing property in Tribeca. And he was a huge believer when everyone around him was negative and advised him against it.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  And he convinced Nobu to open there. It became an instant hit. And they have this amazing business right now. I had this hunch about Nobu. I had this hunch about Wolfgang Puck. When I met him the first time, he was in his twenties. Austrian guy. I said, this guy not only is a great chef, but like Nobu, he had a fantastic personality. Why is it I went to out to every meal of my life as an agent for my whole life? I went out every night and every lunch. And I picked those two guys frame of reference because I knew in interacting with them, they had something special.

• 33:30David Senra?

  Is this an intuition that you have? Or is this something concrete you picked up about their personality or the way they push their work?

• 33:35Speaker 01

  No, it's like the general thesis for me. And I use it to this day. I use it in my tech investing and have since 1992. I use it in finding clients. I used it in building careers. I used it in making relationships. I'm interested in growth, personal growth. I'm interested in being the best at whatever I get into, to the point of it probably not being healthy. I'm interested in excellence.

• 34:03David Senra?

  Okay, we got to talk about that.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  I am interested in excellence and will go to almost any end. It's not immoral or illegal to achieve it for myself and everyone that's around me.

• 34:15David Senra?

  Is it excellence for the sake of excellence? Like, what is driving you?

• 34:18Speaker 01

  I meet people, okay? And I, within 10 minutes, my brain automatically scans whatever is coming to me. And it compares them. To people in their silo, to people outside their silo, to people with personality traits that are similar, it compares all the positives and negatives. It's the same thing when I collect art. When young men or women that I mentor in collecting art want that, they ask me, what should they read? I say, nothing. I said, start looking at images and bookmark whatever you like and then come back to it a couple of days later, see if you still like it.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  I look to this day, probably at 200 images a day. I looked at 10 this morning before I came over here at 7 o'clock this morning of a painting show in London. And the reason I do it is the more images I can put in my head, it's kind of primitive AI in a strange way, because I'm like machine learning and my brain's the machine. I tell all my AI guys and gals, who are all much younger than me, except for a couple guys at Stanford that I work with that are professors, that are actually, I guess they're in their 50s and 60s. There's a thing they call ML, which is machine learning, and I call it ML moron learning.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  So I asked them to explain my version of ML when we're doing a complicated AI deal together. But I have kind of a personal AI that I've created that ticks off all these boxes automatically. I told you when I met you, you're very good at interviewing. You keep a conversation going, you know what to ask. What you did on tomorrow's book is insane. You read a book and in 50 minutes or 50, 60, it's condensed into the most salient points. And you know, you met her only socially. Yeah. It's not possible unless you have a talent. So why? Perception is additive. I thought you had talent. Then you prove it over and over.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I listened to the, to your, I told you, I went back and I've listened to every one you've done.

• 36:35David Senra?

  Yeah, I appreciate that.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  You don't have to appreciate it. I got a master's degree in people I never heard of.

• 36:40David Senra?

  So I should bring this up. The first time we ever talked and it was just pure chance is we share a mutual friend in Rick Gerson.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:48David Senra?

  And I'm having breakfast with Rick and you guys have been friends for like 25 years.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:52David Senra?

  And me and Rick are real close friends in the last few years. And we're at breakfast and his phone's on the table. And it rings and I'm like, oh shit, that's Michael Ovitz. Like, you know, cause I'd read your book already. Like I obviously knew who you were, but we had never spoken. And then he, he picks it up on speakerphone and Rick's been hugely supportive. And he tries to like push my podcast on everybody in the world and he's very successful doing so. And then he goes, hey, I'm sitting here with, you might know who he is. His name's David Center. He does this podcast called Founders. There's a, there's, and you're on your boat in St. Bart's, I think. And there's like a brief pause. He goes, I listened to four of them yesterday. And he started rattling off the ones you were, the Cornelius Vanderbilt and everything else. I heard you talk with our mutual friend, Patrick, about this where you're like, hey, I like collecting art and people. I have a frame of reference because I've met so many people.

• 37:37David Senra?

  The more people you meet, the more you can, the more benchmark you have to compare people to. So when you met Nobu, so when I hear this, it almost sounds like it happens like automatically. It's just a part of your brain where it's like.

• 37:50Speaker 01

  It's an auto response.

• 37:51David Senra?

  Yeah. So you can't even say what it is about that person.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I could say Nobu was personable. He was amazing chef. He made things that I'd never had before outside of the United States. I've had it, but not inside the.

• 38:04David Senra?

  His actual work.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  His technical skill.

• 38:07David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  In cooking, Japanese cuisine was the best I'd ever had.

• 38:15David Senra?

  And this is happening in like a strip mall?

• 38:17Speaker 01

  No, no, he was on Los Angeles Boulevard in an old restaurant, an old building.

• 38:21David Senra?

  Yeah. So like not a.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  No, it wasn't anything special. It was just him.

• 38:26David Senra?

  But you saw.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  Well, here, this out, he filled the room. He filled the room.

• 38:34David Senra?

  His personality, what do you mean?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  He filled the room. When you were there, you knew it was his place. You knew he was a sensei. You knew he was the master chef. You wanted to sit in front of him, those four coveted seats. You wanted to talk to him because he was interesting. He had it all. Wolfgang Puck saw him at his first restaurant in the United States. He was in his twenties. He was the chef at Ma Maisonne, which is no longer in existence, that only Hollywood could endorse. Plastic patio furniture in a parking lot with a kitchen in a one-bedroom apartment at the back of it.

• 39:15David Senra?

  And you could see it even then, though?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:17David Senra?

  Same thing, it's like this.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Wolfgang would walk out, go table to table, and you fell in love with this guy.

• 39:23David Senra?

  So you're talking about his charisma and energy?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Everything. This is like 1980, something, 81. And Wolfgang's walking around asking everyone at every table and remembering their name and being gracious and being... And the food, while you're eating this amazing food like we'd never eaten before. There was no such thing as California cuisine. Clean food with a French kind of flair, but it wasn't full of butter and oil. It was great. And you couldn't get a seat there. It was hysterical. The popularity of this place with a zero economic investment in infrastructure, right? But the food was to die for. And Wolfgang, you wanted to be his friend. So when he did Spago, it was...

• 40:10Speaker 01

  I just gave him a quote for his book because I recognized this immediately. I went to Spago four nights a week up on Sunset. And I finally looked at Wolf. I said, "We got to put you on television." And I just wrote this little story for his book. I said, "I'm bringing the president of ABC for dinner, and I want you to just go crazy. I want you to pretend you're at Beaumont where he trained in France and do that kind of dinner and whip out the best wines that aren't on the list. And I want to get this guy in your corner." Wolfgang served a dinner that night. We spent three hours eating. There must have been 15 courses. One was better than the next.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  He personally brought stuff over. He hung out at the table. He talked. He was charming. He was, you know, he was... He was just Wolfgang. And you loved him, you wanted to hug him. But the food was great, too. And I got the president of ABC to sign on a napkin a contract for a week's work on Good Morning America as an audition to replace Julia Childs. And the guy signed it, and he dated it. And I took the napkin. He also had a lot to drink. And the next day-

• 41:32David Senra?

  Is that a key?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And the next day, he called me. And he said, "I can't thank you enough. It was the most extraordinary dinner." He said, "I have a slight recollection that I signed something. What did I sign?" I said, "Oh, you signed a contract to put Wolf on, our chef that you met, the little Austrian guy who's so cute. To put him on Good Morning America, try him out." He said, "I can't do that." I said, "Well, you made a deal, and you're a man of high integrity." So he said, "I didn't make a deal. What do you talk about?" I said, "I'm gonna send one of our assistants over with the contract. And you take a look, and then you call me and tell me if you made a contract or not." So we take the napkin and pin it to someone's shirt. Okay?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Put a sport coat on him. Arrange with the president of ABC's assistant to walk him right into the office. He walks in. The guy looks at him. He opens his coat. It was all in huge print. And he sees his signature. My guy closes his coat and runs out the door. And I get it, my phone rings 10 seconds later. He said, "I guess I signed a deal, didn't I?" And he put him on. And he's still on.

• 42:46David Senra?

  The best leaders in business are able to spot patterns. But you can't spot patterns if you can't see your data. And most businesses are only using 20% of their data because 80% of your customer intelligence is invisible, hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. Unless you have HubSpot. HubSpot is where all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. Because when you know more, you grow more. And that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

• 43:17David Senra?

  I feel like you operate much more on intuition. Like you spend an enormous amount of time like preparing. Like one of my favorite stories in your book, and I tried to do the exact same thing in my career, it's like, okay, I'm gonna start in the mailroom. Well, guess what? I'm gonna go down to the file cabinets. You see this huge room that contains 70 years of history on Hollywood, and I'm gonna show up two hours early, and I'm gonna read, then I'm gonna work a full day, then I'm gonna go back there at night and keep reading. I'm gonna work my way through in a very Rockefeller-esque way of just like plowing a field till I get to the end, and then I use this enormous research and base of knowledge you have, and then you combine it with these experiments and the frame of reference that we just talked about. And then when you make decisions, it's almost like it's not even analytical, it's like some

• 44:00David Senra?

  kind of intuition that you're having where it's like, this guy's special, I have this guy who has power to make this guy's career better, I just need to put these two together, let's go ahead and just write this out on a napkin. Like, there is almost no time to analyze. Am I getting this wrong?

• 44:13Speaker 01

  No, but David, I'm gonna put the question to you. You get a job in the mailroom, you have no family connection, you get it on your own. It's a three-year training program, you're in the mailroom, you have a college degree, you are not stupid. What's the alternative?

• 44:36David Senra?

  No, I think this is why we get along, we've been able to build a friendship, because like, this is exactly what I've done with founders. It's like, I did not come from money. I'm the first person in my family, everybody's like, oh, you're the first person to graduate college. I'm the first person to graduate high school. My parents were incapable of even graduating high school.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  But I had the same thing, and the reason I say what else is the choice? There's no choice. So I either became more knowledgeable than the 20 other, they were all men, no, yeah, it was all men in that pledge class, and that, they did a, like, three, two times a year, they started a group in the mailroom of like 20, 25 people. I think when I started, there were 20 or 25, I don't remember, but the point is, it's 1969, I'm 21 years old.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  I graduated UCLA in three years while working at Fox, 60 hours a week, loving every second of it. Drop out of pre-med to finish degrees in psychology and business. Look for the job that I think can educate me the fastest in a business that's all about nepotism and relationship, and I don't have any. How do I distinguish myself differently from the 20 or 25 other pledges in what I call the pledge class? Because that's what we were. And it became pretty simply apparent to me very quickly. Everyone showed up exactly what time they were told to, which was 9 o'clock for a 9:30

• 46:14Speaker 01

  start. Everyone showed up, except me. I showed up at 6:30. And no one was in. I had the run of the place. So I said to myself, I'm going to learn everything I can faster than anyone else, and I'm never going to share with anyone what I'm doing. Let them all fend for themselves. Which, by the way, turned out to be good for me, because it was antithetical to my thesis on building a business, which is you share everything with everybody. And I learned that by not sharing. All these other people got killed by me.

• 46:55Speaker 01

  And if I'm running a business and those people are all working for me, I needed to do the opposite. I needed to include everybody in everything, have tons of meetings, tons of sharing, no egos, no politics. Everybody has to pull for the larger boat. You can't be in your own rowboat. You've got to be on the big boat, and you've got to make sure it's all moving.

• 47:22David Senra?

  When you're on the same team, but the other 19 people in this group, you looked at them as competitors?

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. My job was to eradicate every one of them. I didn't want any of them to shine.

• 47:32David Senra?

  And so the idea there was, hey, I think you said this in your book, you're like, I don't know if I'm smarter than them, but I know for damn sure that I'm working harder.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, there were several people, David, that I was not smarter than. They had unbelievable educations. Well, a couple of them had Ivy League educations. I couldn't even get into an Ivy League school. The fact is that...

• 47:53Speaker 01

  I was in a competitive environment, in a competitive business, William Morris, and a competitive arena, which is the entertainment business. It's dog-eat-dog. And it had been like that since it started. It never changed. I read everything at my hands-on about the golden years of the movie business. And I used it for CA when we started in 1974. I made up a bibliography. And here's the books you need. I have used-

• 48:25David Senra?

  Who did you give the bibliography to?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Every one of us that were working together.

• 48:29David Senra?

  So you guys had a shared base of knowledge? You insisted on a shared base of knowledge with your team?

• 48:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:32David Senra?

  Okay.

• 48:32Speaker 01

  And our group knew history. And the reason that became important, and everyone thought, oh, who cares? It's because when you start talking to filmmakers in those days, and they start talking about Frank Capra, or David Lean, or Howard Hawks, or Willy Wyler, or Michael Curtiz, who all made some of the great black and white movies of our time, if you don't know what they did, how can you talk to a filmmaker? How do you do it? You can't. How did we sign every director in the business? We spoke their language.

• 49:11David Senra?

  I've read and done episodes on, I don't know, half a dozen. I'm obsessed with directors and filmmakers. I think the analogy between a filmmaker and an entrepreneur is like so clear-cut. It's very obvious. But like from George Lucas to Steven Spielberg, to Quentin Tarantino, to Christopher Nolan, every single one I've read a biography of, they have this encyclopedic knowledge of film history in their head. There's a great line on this, one of my favorite maxims I learned from Charlie Munger, which is why he was so obsessed with reading and studying business history, and human history as well, is he says that learning from history is a form of leverage.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  Well, it's what I've always said, knowledge is power. And if you have practical knowledge combined with research knowledge, combined with intellectual knowledge, combined with a giant education about things that you dig into, and you understand how to have a deep curiosity about everything, and I mean everything, you have an edge that cannot be beaten. I have, sitting on my desk-

• 50:22Speaker 01

  Probably 20 notes about things that I have seen on the internet, on Instagram, on perplexity, on OpenAI, on Google, that have come up in other searches. So I saw a new set of headphones that were wildly differently designed. And I looked it up, printed out the page on it, put it in my pile to research. And every night when I am on my computer, I take a deep dive on the moment of what's interesting to me. I love cars.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  I love mechanical watches because some of them have, you know, a thousand parts and it's this big. I love gadgets. I love, I love hi-fi. I just, I can't begin, I love art.

• 51:18David Senra?

  Did you have the curiosity even at that age, when you first started in the mailroom?

• 51:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:22David Senra?

  You had to, because like you wouldn't have read through all that.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  But you know what I didn't have?

• 51:25David Senra?

  What?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I didn't have a computer. And that changed my life.

• 51:29David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  That changed my life. I've talked to Ben Horowitz about this a thousand times. The computer changed my life because I live on it. And it's not because I need to, it's because I want to. If you put me in a room with a computer 24 hours with no sleep, I would do it. Matter of fact, tomorrow has to pull me off the computer and gets angry at me because I learn so much every day. I just, when my friends want to buy something, they call me because I've already looked at it. So if they want to buy a car, and I'm not being facetious, and I enjoy doing it, and it's rare they ask me about a car I don't know about. I mean, when I was at CAA before a computer,

• 52:13Speaker 01

  I had a reading list for all the agents and all the mailroom people.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  I subscribe personally to 210 magazines. I didn't read everyone. Don't, I don't think I did for a second. But I flipped the pages. So I had Car and Driver, Road and Track, Automobile, and I'm missing one, Motor Trend. All four. Why? I wanted to see what everyone wrote. I didn't read detailed articles. I'd always read the headline, look at the pictures, read the first paragraph. If I loved an article and wanted to go further, tore it out, put it in a pile for Sunday. Every day. And I had Ladies' Home Journal, Vogue, McCall's, Mademoiselle. Why did I read women's magazines?

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Because the stylists in those magazines are six months ahead of the curve. They have to see out. I live with a fashion person, you know?

• 53:13David Senra?

  Yeah, Tamara.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  She knows every season before something comes out. "Oh, Michael, you know, something's back." Wow, come on. Three months later, we're in a place at a dinner and somebody's wearing baggy jeans when everyone else was wearing tight jeans. And she calls it. And those stylists gave me a foundation to talk to our actresses and to talk to their stylists. Not that I needed to go deep, I didn't. When I met Paul Newman cold, I knew there was only one thing he was interested in. He loved racing cars. Made a movie about it. That was his hobby. I had been reading about cars my whole life.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  We talked for three hours in Westport, Connecticut about cars. We never talked about his career the first time I met him.

• 54:05David Senra?

  I think there's a line here that I always think about. The most interesting people are the most interested. It doesn't, it doesn't matter to me. It's like, I don't really even care what is the source of your obsession. I just like that you're obsessed with something and you go deep on there. I do have a, um... What I would say, kind of a selfish question for you. So I was listening to Michael Dell on a podcast and he's got great energy. And the interviewer was asking, he's like, well, when you were starting Dell, like, how many hours did you work? And he goes, all of them. And then I read Jensen Huang's biography and he's like, listen, there's not a day that goes by that I don't work. When I'm not working, I'm thinking about working. Working is relaxing for me. In your book, you had this line that when you were building your company,

• 54:50David Senra?

  that every waking hour was a working hour, which is a great line. So I see this reappear over and over again. Like, you know, we're absolutely obsessed with what we're doing. So it's very hard to pull us away from what we love to do. But there is something that I want to ask you selfishly. You also say that if you could have worked 10% less, it wouldn't have made a difference in your professional success, but you would have been a lot happier. So how should I be thinking about the contrast between these two statements?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Well, it's simple. I am a curious person, as you know, like you are. You're always looking to learn. That's why listening to founders for me before I met you was a must. I discovered it by accident. And then Rick just went in like a bulldozer, you know, to make sure I met you. He must have sent, you know, he sent us 20 texts to get us together. And then he wouldn't give me your contact because he wanted to be the point of contact. Do you remember that?

• 55:41David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  He wouldn't put us together. He wanted to be the one to do it. So that 10%, I would have loved to have been able to do homework.

• 55:52David Senra?

  To me, that's working too, though. It's like professional research. You know, like, think about when you're William Morris, the two and a half hours you get to at 6:30 in the morning, you're doing all your reading, you're working a full day, and then you're doing it again. To me, those two, the bookends to your days, just a form of professional research, which also could be considered working.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  To me, the dichotomy and difference is that I'm not working to a financial goal. I'm working for self-enrichment, which itself becomes a financial product. Because if I make myself wiser, better, more informed...

• 56:29Speaker 01

  A candidate that can give other humans that have a problem advice. Look, we all have problems. I learned this when I was 18. When I was working at Fox, everybody had a problem. It became very clear to me. It's why I became an agent. Because I didn't need a skill set other than intelligence, persuasion, intensity, and curiosity. But I didn't have to know how to make anything because I'm not capable of it. I'm talentless. I can't write. I can't act. I can't sculpt. I can't paint. I can't direct. I frankly invest off people, not off all these insane rules

• 57:13Speaker 01

  that a lot of my friends that are venture capitalists put up. These kind of guardrails that they won't go outside of. I've never seen a guardrail. I don't try to jump. And I think that's the worst thing you can do because creative people have no guardrails. But for me, I realized everybody wants to have enough counsel. I will tell you, for me, someone asked me in another podcast, who was my, Michael Ovitz, who was my advisor? I said, I didn't have one, and I wish I did. Because I've saved a lot of people, a lot of aggravation that I went through.

• 57:58Speaker 01

  And I went through it because I didn't have anyone like me to bounce things off of that had seen the movie before.

• 58:05David Senra?

  You didn't have it at the time you were building CA. But do you have that, did you have it after? And do you have it now?

• 58:10Speaker 01

  I do have certain people now. But it's not any one person like I am. I am an advisor to a lot of people that would shock people. And I do it because, one, I'm friends with them. Two, I learn from them. Three, I enjoy it. Four, I'm like a protective mother of my friends. I will, I have a very binary point of view about relationships. I'm not interested in any relationships in the middle. I'm interested in-

• 58:43David Senra?

  What's the binary?

• 58:44Speaker 01

  It's-

• 58:46Speaker 01

  From a movie I saw when I was a kid that was made in the 40s with Errol Flynn, where he drew a sword in the sand and said to his troops, "You're on one side of this line or the other, make up your mind." So, that's me, friend or foe. You know, I'm like the world's best friend for people and I'm probably not a great enemy.

• 59:09David Senra?

  I would not want you as an enemy.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  So, no, because I'm very dogmatic in my support of people.

• 59:15David Senra?

  Methodical. I think if I made an enemy of you, you'd wake up every day, "How to destroy me."

• 59:20Speaker 01

  By the way, I don't have that kind of time and frankly, at this stage in my life, I don't have that energy for that.

• 59:25David Senra?

  But you did for a few decades.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Oh, I did for a long time. I was a guy who could tell you people that 30 years earlier did something I didn't think was right. I'm a big believer in people need to have integrity and they need to keep their word. And the reason is, is when we were starting CA and we had no money, nothing, we didn't even have a lawyer, so we were making tens of hundreds of deals with no contracts. So, people had to keep their word, David. And it was very tough when you had no leverage and someone didn't keep their word. And unfortunately, in the entertainment business, there's kind of a gradation of lying.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  The most lies when we started were in the movie business because it takes three years to make a movie. So, you had a long time to tell different stories. The second area was music. People really didn't tell the truth in music. They still to this day don't. It's like...

• 1:00:25David Senra?

  It's a dirty business.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  It's a dirty business. Brilliant business and tough to do. But like, I'm friends with a guy I have so much respect for, Lucian Grange. This guy has more integrity than anybody I've ever met. He's got Rockefeller integrity. He just calls it as he sees it. He's transparent, he's open. He knows how to build a business. He understands talent, he understands how to read a balance sheet. He's one of the old guard guys. Diller was like that. Diller understood people, Diller could read a balance sheet. And Diller, like a few of us, could read a script and play the movie in his head. Not a lot of people could do that. If they did, there'd be a lot more successful companies and successful people. You could count on two hands the number of people in my day that could do that. And...

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  When you're in the television business, there's no lying because you make these shows every week. So you have no time to fabricate a story and set up a ruse. And what we started at CA, which was so simple. Everyone says, oh, it's so revolutionary. No lying. If you don't have an answer, if David Sandler calls you and he asks you a question and you do not have an answer, here's your answer. I don't know, I'm gonna call you back. That was unheard of in 1974. Because everyone felt they had to make up an answer to show they were in the know. My point of view was, why do that? Then you gotta remember something is that's a story that you made up.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  And it's so easy to trap people that lie because they never get the story right twice. And we took notes on everything ad nauseam. Everybody took notes on everything. Every staff meeting, we had, we had a scribe taking notes for follow-up. Follow-up was the key to everything. You didn't even have to be smart, you had to have good follow-up. If you followed up, it kinda gave you an extra point on the smart side of the scale. So for me, it's all about truth. It's all about transparency. I was on the phone this morning. I got on the phone at 6:30 this morning, working on a deal I'm putting together.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  The guy that gave us the idea, who is in another company and is not the head guy at the company, he's number three. There's a founder, a CEO, and this guy who's the COO. The COO is younger, half the age of the founder and really bright. Came up with an idea, told my young partner, who you know, who's 32, which I partnered with intentionally because I wanted a young partner, period. And called him, gave him an idea, my partner immediately put him with me. I spent an hour with him five days ago.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  I then went and spent an hour with the guy he works for.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  I then had multiple calls with both of them separately. And then I called the guy who started it this morning at 6:30 in the morning. He's on the East Coast to give him a 100% update of every conversation. So he didn't feel left out. Did I need to do that? Most people would say no. I would say yes. He's now up to speed. He's supportive and they're setting up a meeting for me with their founder. Because they're comfortable. They're not getting cut out.

• 1:04:01David Senra?

  So this is a relentless follow up?

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  Relentless. And I made the extra call. And my partner, my young partner, saw all this unfold and fell right in step with it and handled it brilliantly. That makes me feel fantastic. Fantastic. Because he's going to be here long after me and he carries on the torch. You know, look, the guys that I left CA to, some of them I get along with great. Some of them don't like me and I understand that because they'd like me to have died. Because my shadow hung over them. And we always want to kill the father and I get it.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, I 50 years later, I think I did something right. Because the place is still functioning and it's still number one. So that's the biggest market share and it's still the most influential company.

• 1:04:56David Senra?

  This is what I try to tell other founders too. It's just like, you guys are obsessed with these startups. Like, the goal should be to build an enduring company that lasts

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  It's got to be.

• 1:05:05David Senra?

  Five decades now.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  But you have to be selfless to do that, David. It's like what you're doing. You need volume. I told you this. You need IP. You need to expose people that are under exposed. Expose people that are over exposed and rein them in so that for the audience. So they get their essence. Listen, when I listen to your, this is going to sound really stupid to you, but I never claimed to be the smartest guy in the room or the dumbest. I'm sort of in the middle. When I listen to the Vanderbilt podcast you did, now he's dead. So you did a podcast based on a book you wrote. I read the same book, but I hadn't read it for 20 years. And I maybe less, I don't remember. But you took all the saline points out of it.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  You hit a point, which to use a minor point. And to me, said a lot about the time and the person. You told a story of how he was in a buggy, thinking about sailing ships versus steamships. And that he knew he had to make a big move. And it was really dangerous. Cause they didn't know if the steamship technology really worked. But he had to sell all his sailing ships to raise the money. And he was kind of absent minded and stopped. Uh, he was on his buggy. I, I don't remember the exact story, but he stopped and somebody kind of attacked him or something.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  And he got out of the buggy and he beat the guy up. And that story resonated with me. Because I respected the guy's brain for what he built. I respected the guy's brain based on my, your podcast for his foresight. And he did it not once, which for me is the key.

• 1:06:57David Senra?

  He rode multiple successful technological ways.

• 1:07:01Speaker 01

  Railroads when the boats became.

• 1:07:03David Senra?

  It's very hard for a company and a person to disrupt themselves. Say, hey, I got really wealthy, you know, and essentially, you know, faring people.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  And now I gotta get rid of it.

• 1:07:14David Senra?

  Exactly. And especially when your point about the technology was interesting because yeah, we, we, we might have a debate. Should we adopt this new AI technology, this new software? That technology was killing people, people, the steamship technology, like it kept blowing up. So you'd have these explosions. They knew that's where it was going to go because you needed powered, you know, sailing.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you didn't know if it worked.

• 1:07:33David Senra?

  And that's the crazy thing is like, no, I'm gonna. Disrupt myself, get rid of the business that made me wealthy at the time.

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  He was one of the first disruptors, and he did it with railroads. He realized he couldn't deliver inland with a boat.

• 1:07:47David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Which sounds pretty simple.

• 1:07:49David Senra?

  He realized his business was transportation, not sailing. And when you think about what is your true business, it's not sailing. It's like, I just want to move people and goods from point A to point B, and how do I do that?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  But here's the point of your story, to me, only me, this shows you, me was as opposed to anyone else. And I don't know who else would think this, maybe they would, maybe they wouldn't, I don't really care. Here's a guy who had foresight, commitment, and courage. He wasn't afraid. Fear is the killer and enemy of business. Fear is the thing that kills business. And we had a period in this country where people were scared to death to do things. Every single time I had an idea, I told this story to somebody yesterday. At a, at a meeting I was at.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Every idea I ever had or developed that someone else gave me, somebody told me it wouldn't work. That, and gave me all the articulate reasons, and it was always more than one person. You can't start an agency at 26. There are 180 of them, and you'll never make it. It's too competitive, you need too much money to do it. You won't get the big clients, you'll never sign movie stars.

• 1:09:10David Senra?

  Oh no, I'm glad you said that. That's one of my favorite parts of your book, because again, when I'm reading a book, I actually see some of the scene, like, like, you know, a book is essentially a movie for the mind, right? You have to come up with the visuals yourself. And there's this line in your book where they're like, you know, like, hey, I'm planning on signing a movie, the big movie stars. You're like, they're locked up, you'll never get them. And you said, I'll get all of them. And I don't know if you did this, but literally what I just did, lean forward.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  No, I did.

• 1:09:35David Senra?

  Like, just like, I will get all of them.

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I remember the guy I said it to, he was a successful agent. He handled about 500 top writers in television, but never steered out of TV. If I had his business, and I told him this in that meeting, which is what stimulated his comment, I would have signed every movie writer.

• 1:09:56David Senra?

  This is why I don't think your assessment, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way. Obviously, you know it wouldn't disrespect you intentionally. It's like, I do think you're creative. You were saying, oh, I don't have any talent. I'm not creative. And like this idea where you just said something about like, hey, I don't even see guardrails. And if you put a guardrail in front of me, I'm going to hop over that. If you look at where you took, there's a note from a friend of ours. Ovid's didn't look at the existing agency business as the boundary of his opportunity. He decided on his own what he wanted to do, and then he did it. And he talks about the flywheel that you built up, like this huge density of talent. You said, hey, I can actually control, like I can control the supply, and I could actually just create the entire package instead of just handling this like one little silo. That's creativity.

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Not really, but I understand. It's creative business, but it's not. It's, we call it creative artist for a reason. Marty Scorsese, in his brain, can cut a movie while he's shooting one camera at a time. I asked, why do we have, how many cameras have you got? I learned that from Marty. I learned so much about movies from Marty that when I gave him an award in New York 25 years ago, I learned so much from that guy. I said in front of 1,500 people that when I met Marty in 79, and he was in a bit of trouble, not creatively, but financially, and he wasn't getting the movies made he wanted to make,

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  he became like a student of business. 10 years later, he was the teacher and I was the student. And I learned so much from him. But he has the ability to look at this setup here and cut it in his head and know where. He used to take his scripts, and on the left-hand page that's blank, he'd stick draw the scene and put little dots where the camera was going. And if you look at his camera work and the way his scenes are put together and the way he and Thelma, who cuts his movies, the amount of precision and handwork, it's genius. I can't do that. But what I can do is smell things that I think work.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  There was a period in the 80s where it became very clear in the mid 80s that the studios were in financial trouble. And it started for me when Universal stock traded to a point where the book value of the market cap of the company was the value of the real estate in Burbank.

• 1:12:25David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  And a guy named Steinberg, Saul Steinberg, started buying up shares and threatening to overtake the company. It became very clear to me. A number of opportunities were available to me and CIA.

• 1:12:38David Senra?

  That's an act of creativity. When you realize that Japanese was just a new form of bank for the studios.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Well, but I'd been going to meet them because they were dominating industry in the 80s, if you recall. They were making all the gadgets.

• 1:12:52David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  And I was fascinated by Akio Morita, and I read his biography.

• 1:12:57David Senra?

  That, one of my favorite books.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:13:00David Senra?

  The idea that that guy, that they could start Sony, right? Right after World War II, the Americans occupied Tokyo. They start Sony in a bombed-out department stores because, you know, there's just, I think they lost, 66% of the population in Tokyo had left, right? There, most of the structures were either destroyed or they were severely like damaged. The very first office of Sony, which is going to come, you know, become this massive conglomerate, they had to have umbrellas at their desk when they founded Sony. And these, they're like young kids. I think Akio was like 25 at the time, and his co-founder is a little older, maybe he's like 32. And they'd have umbrellas on their desk because when it rained at work, their papers would get wet.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  In 1951, starting in 50, when the war wounds were still fresh, if you lost someone in the Bataan Death March or in World War II to a Japanese soldier or a German soldier, you didn't forget it by 1950. Akio Morita moved his entire family to New York City.

• 1:14:03David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  You want to talk about courage? When I talk about Vanderbilt getting out of the buggy and defending himself, he didn't have any security. He did it on his own. You want to talk about courage?

• 1:14:15David Senra?

  Let's talk about Akio because this is something I wanted to talk about when we were at dinner and I forgot because I'd just finished rereading his book. And one of the most remarkable things in the book is, you know, remember Akio came from, he was, his family had a saki, a family saki business that was 300 years old. His life had essentially a path set out for him. I think he was going to be the 16th firstborn male heir to take over the business. And he's like, I'm not interested in this. I'm obsessed with electronics. He was into physics. He was in engineering. He loved technology. And him and his co-founder go and meet his dad. And they're like, hey. And he's like, I really think if it would be okay with you, your son comes and helps me build this company that's going to turn into Sony.

• 1:15:00David Senra?

  And what was remarkable about this is his dad's like, well, I had a plan for my son's life, but go, and he tells his son, but go do what you're going to do because if I know you, you're going to do what you want to do anyways.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Very wise man.

• 1:15:13David Senra?

  Spoke how, think about how, he knew who his son was.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  My dad was like that and had no high school education. He had a way with words that was extraordinary. He had great common sense. And Morita had a father who let him go with no guilt. But he had something else that I was very impressed by. When I was advising him, he told me a story at dinner one night that just I'll never forget to this day. The man who became his number two was named Noria Oga. And Noria Oga, I said to Mr. Morita at dinner, can you please tell me the story of how you found him? And he said, Michael, I didn't find him.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  He found me. I said, what happened? He said Sony released their first reel to reel tape recorder. You know this story?

• 1:16:11David Senra?

  Yes, it's hire a paid critic.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Oga was in college. He was a senior. He was getting ready to look for a job. He went and auditioned at a store, the reel to reel. We couldn't afford it. He wrote a 10-page, handwritten, single-spaced letter to Morita, critiquing the reel-to-reel, ripping it to smithereens. Morita made all the changes and offered Oga a job and moved him through the company like a hot knife through butter.

• 1:16:47David Senra?

  And he eventually becomes president of Sony.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  President of Sony.

• 1:16:50David Senra?

  Akio said something very fascinating. He's like, listen, just like a ballet dancer needs a mirror, right? We needed an aural mirror where this guy had a refined sense of music and hearing that I lacked. And so instead of being, oh, upset, like, you're trashing the product that I made, he took the 10-page document, he's like, oh, these are actually good ideas. We need to work with this guy.

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  But think about what you just said. Instead of rejecting it or getting upset or saying, what does he know? He's a senior in college. He took the whole thing and used it. It's like, I was very lucky, by the way. You want to talk about luck? I lived in a building in New York that was, I set up because I'd come in at all hours of the night because I never wanted to be out of LA more than one day and one night or two nights, I mean. And living above me was Marty Scorsese, and above him was Nori Oga.

• 1:17:43David Senra?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  So I would go visit them at night because I'd finished working in New York at, usually about 9:00, because that's 6:00 in LA. Sometimes 9:30, and I'd always have dinner at around 10:00, unless I had a client dinner, which was always at 8:00. And then I'd go see Marty. And he'd, every night, watches a movie, every single night. And sometimes if I didn't get dinner, I'd bring takeout food upstairs and listen to him and ask him questions. And it was like taking a master's degree in film. And it's where I learned, he knew every old director. I mean, every director he respected. I learned about a guy like Michael Powell, who did The Red Shoes.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And no one knows about that movie to this day. And it was the most influential director on Marty imaginable. And I learned to be able to talk to Stanley Kubrick. He never had an agent except me. And I could talk to him because Marty... Basically educated me and I did a lot of reading and I knew about those old directors. And I had all of our people trained in the history of film and the history of television. I bought every book that was published. For example, they had these big coffee table books on all the studios, but dozens of them so our agents could just look through the pictures. I bought a book, I'll never forget, The History of the Emmys.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  And it listed, this is pre-computer, all the Emmy awards from the first Emmy broadcast. History of the Academy Awards. I made our people watch every film in the history of the Academy Awards that won Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Writer, and Best Movie. Now, they didn't have to watch every bit of it because some of them were really slow. But they got familiar with who were these actors? Who's Gary Cooper? Who's Robert Mitchum? Who's Lana Turner? Who are these people? And what did they contribute? And by doing that, our people were so fluent in their business. They could talk television, they could talk movies, they could talk music.

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  They knew history because past is prologue. If you know history, you pretty much can predict the future.

• 1:20:02David Senra?

  I read something Jeff Bezos said that changed my perspective on the importance of high-quality sleep. He said that he makes sure he gets eight hours of sleep a night. And as a result, his mood, his energy, and his decision-making is improved. His point was that you get paid to make high-quality decisions and you can't do that if you're sleeping terribly. And the product that has made the biggest impact on my quality sleep for years is Eight Sleep. I'm lucky enough to be friends with the founder of Eight Sleep, Mateo, and we live in the same city. A few months after I started using my Eight Sleep, I randomly ran into Mateo at a restaurant. I was with some friends and I went over to say hi. When I got back to my table, my friend asked me who I was talking to. I said, "That's Mateo, the founder of Eight Sleep." And my friend replied, "He looks like he gets good sleep.

• 1:20:45David Senra?

  Mateo is living and breathing his product." I have never had the ability to change the temperature of my bed before I had an Eight Sleep. I had no idea how much that That would improve the quality of my sleep. I keep my 8Sleep ice cold. It's cold before I get into bed. So I fall asleep faster and wake up less during the night. That feature alone is worth 10 times the price. There are very few no-brainer investments in life, and I believe that 8Sleep is one of them. That is why elite founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have all said publicly that they use 8Sleep. I would recommend getting the Pod 5, which is their newest generation of their signature product. It is a smart mattress cover that you place right on top of your existing mattress, and it is next-level sleep technology. It automatically regulates your body temperature

• 1:21:29David Senra?

  throughout the night independently for each side of the bed. The result? Up to one full hour of additional quality sleep per night. Make the no-brainer investment in your sleep by going to 8sleep.com/cenra and use the code CENRA to get up to $700 off. This is 8Sleep's biggest sale of the year, and it goes from now until December 1st. You can try your 8Sleep mattress cover for up to 30 days at home and return it if you don't like it. But I'm confident that you will love it. I would never let anyone take my 8Sleep from me. So make sure you get your own at 8sleep.com/cenra. If you reach the top of your profession, you could be a tennis player, a sushi chef, an entrepreneur, a film director. They all have this encyclopedic knowledge of their industry in their head

• 1:22:14David Senra?

  that they can draw on at any time. Let me give you an example tied to Marita, because it kills me when I talk to founders, young founders now. They don't even know who this guy was. And I was like, you should study. You should read about him. I'm like, oh, why? Well, Steve Jobs built Apple, right? He was obsessed with Marita. Jeff Bezos built Amazon. They literally will talk. If you read their biographies, you listen to their interviews, they will talk about the things they spent... Why would they fly to Japan and want to go meet them and spend time with them and read their books and study them? It's like, this guy obviously had genius ideas. And one of the ideas that Bezos says that he used at the very beginning of Amazon that he learned from Marita was the importance of having a goal and a mission bigger than yourself. And so, Marita's point was, it's not, hey, we're going to build the best technology, and we're going to sell it. We're going to get rich. His point was, at the time,

• 1:22:59David Senra?

  Japanese products were thought of to be inferior, shitty, copy

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  By the way, they were.

• 1:23:06David Senra?

  Exactly, and he wasn't.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  And he faced it.

• 1:23:09David Senra?

  And so his point was, he goes, we're not gonna be, this is the genius thing that he did. We're not gonna make Sony known for high-quality products. We're gonna make Japan known for high-quality products.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  Big thinker, big thinker. I remember sitting with him and I told him that in 1961, my father gave me a gift of a transistor radio, and it had to be David, eight inches high, three inches thick, and it was a portable, and it was made in Japan. The Americans invented the transistor and licensed it to Japan, to Sony for $25,000. The Americans invented the reel-to-reel tape recorder at Ampex, as you know, we've discussed this. It was invented by a bunch of engineers to be able to record pornography, because they were using 8mm kinescope to do that, and it was inconvenient. You know, oddly, porn drives a lot of technology in the old days.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  But it's all about thinking big, it's about doing things that are unexpected. It's about, when you say to someone, I think I want to save Universal and sell it to money that is not in the country, so there's nothing they can do to take it.

• 1:24:23David Senra?

  Yeah, you can't move the, your point was like, you can't move the studio.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  I got criticized, cover of Newsweek, when I sold Columbia Pictures to Mr. Morita, which was part of the strategy, because I had sold him with Pete Peterson and Steve Schwarzman, because Pete was on the board, and Steve had just started Blackstone, was brilliant, and we sold Columbia Records to Sony first, which paved the way for Columbia Studios. It was CBS Records, actually, not Columbia. And for me, it served multiple purposes.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  Uh, one, it kept these legacy businesses right where they needed to be. Two, Japan was cheap financing because they had cheap money and tons of it. And three, having a 75% market share of the talent, for me, wasn't enough. Which people thought I was crazy because no one had ever gotten over 25. We had 46 of the top 50 grossing filmmakers in the world.

• 1:25:32David Senra?

  That's nuts.

• 1:25:33Speaker 01

  And to me, I missed because I wanted 50. Because it gave me even more leverage for our clients. But I wanted the leverage with the buyer, too. So if I sold the studio to a Japanese company that no one had a relationship but me and my staff, then CA moved another notch up in the ecosystem. So by the time we got done, we had sold Columbia, Universal, got financing for Warner's, where they were in trouble when Steve Ross was alive, and sold MGM and saved it when the accountants wanted to plow it under. And every time I went to do that, I was criticized.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  When I said I wanted to do advertising because we had the skill set to under, we understood culture, that was our job. Why did I look at these magazines? Want to understand culture. Why did I read? Why did I collect art? When I started collecting art, people thought I was crazy, except the directors. When the directors came for dinner, they were mesmerized by the art. And why? Because you take, as I said, David Lynch, who I did a show for, Tim Burton, we did an art show, or Marty Scorsese, we did an art show in New York. Take some of the frames out of their movies.

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  And make them, reproduce them, mount them, frame them in an art frame, and hang them on a museum wall, you have a piece of art. It's just different source.

• 1:27:08David Senra?

  It's moving art.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yes, and it's the same thing. Common denominator. People don't see past their nose. So what we try to do is train people to look further out. How do you get to the next step? Why did we do advertising? One, because I thought we could do it. Two, we had a better idea, which we did. Three, all our clients had downtime. So everyone said, oh, movie directors don't do advertising. Well, that's complete utter nonsense. They want to make money when they're not doing anything, and they get to work five days and make a million dollars. So they all did it, and all the other agents that criticized us

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  looked just pitifully stupid because they not only did it, they enjoyed it. Coke was doing six commercials a year for the same budget. We did 35 for the same budget. And we got Quincy Jones to redo their theme song. And we changed their saying for the time, which was always Coke is what we came up with. Quincy did a theme song in six beats. He did it in urban, he did it in rural, I mean, in city. He did it in country and western. He did it in classical, and we used it all over the world.

• 1:28:31David Senra?

  There's something tactical about the Coke deal that I was thinking of when I was reading your book. You knocked it out of the park with them. They even told you how happy they were. And yet, they sent you a check. And I can't remember what the check. I think they sent you like a $3 million.

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  No, no, they sent me a check for a commercial. We did a black and white commercial. A guy who just passed away named Len Fink, who I stole from Jay Shiat, who was a genius advertising guy in L.A. Shiat Day, they were amazing. And what did I do? I reviewed who was amazing. I found the guy, and I went and got him. And everyone was shocked that I got him. And I got him before we got the deal. So that I got him and a woman named Shelley Hockren, who did the most brilliant ad campaign ever at Paramount for Warren Beatty's movie Reds. It was just genius.

• 1:29:17David Senra?

  But they send you a check.

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  They sent me a check. We did a black and white commercial. They sent me a check. You're right, it was for uh, three million dollars.

• 1:29:27David Senra?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  No, it was three million. They sent the check for three million for the cost of the commercial.

• 1:29:31David Senra?

  Okay.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  I sent it back intentionally, telling them the commercial cost thirty thousand dollars. And that they misread the invoice. Cause they thought I made a mistake on the invoice, not me, our accounting guys. Cause we billed for thirty thousand. They said we-

• 1:29:47David Senra?

  Yeah, you, that was one of your deals, like you're not gonna, you're not gonna charge more than-

• 1:29:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we never, they said we never had a commercial for less than three million. So we were thrilled and we thought you made a mistake and we trust you, so we sent you the money. Sent it back, sent the check back void. Cause we, I said, we did it on a Apple two, Len Fink did the commercial on a Apple two E computer. The first computer Steve Jobs came out with. And we did it in black and white. And they didn't wanna take the check back. And that gave me the opening I wanted.

• 1:30:20David Senra?

  Okay, explain that to me.

• 1:30:21Speaker 01

  I said to them, we don't want you to overpay anyone except us. You're not gonna overpay for commercials, but you gotta pay us. And by that time, we had delivered the polar bears, which they're still using. Forty years later, think about that. We delivered three hundred and fifty commercials over our tenure with them. No one's ever done that. Madison Avenue got paranoid.

• 1:30:47David Senra?

  But what was the difference, Eugene? What they, what they wanted to pay you and what you eventually were evaluating your own work at?

• 1:30:53Speaker 01

  It was huge.

• 1:30:54David Senra?

  So how do you get them from, and-

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Well, no, the, what they were paying for was a commercial.

• 1:30:58David Senra?

  Yeah, but I remember in the book, like, you essentially got them to pay what they, whatever, whatever the number was they were trying to settle up on. What they actually settled up on was considerably larger.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Because I, I basically said, there's not much to talk about. It's all visually available. You, you ran the thirty-five commercials.

• 1:31:20Speaker 01

  And I suggested they do them in the theater in their building on Fifth Avenue, Fifth and 55th where Allen and Company is. And I said, "Run." And it's Herb Allen who got me into this.

• 1:31:33David Senra?

  Which is also your mentor, Herb Allen II, right?

• 1:31:35Speaker 01

  The best, the best man on the planet. You want to talk about integrity? I sat in his office where Sumner Redstone sent him a check for a million dollars rather than complete hiring him as the banker when he bought Paramount because Herb was the banker of record and somehow got pushed out of it. And as Herb's talking to me, sitting where you're sitting, he took scissors out of his desk and while he's talking to me, he starts cutting up the check and he cut it in the finest pieces he could. And then he took it on the desk and he put it in the envelope that Sumner sent it in and sent it back to him by messenger. This guy had the highest integrity I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Never lied, never wanted publicity, didn't want to be in the limelight, did every deal with me and I learned everything. Everyone said, "How'd you..." My son said, "How'd you learn how to be an investment banker?" I said, "I did it and Herb Allen made sure I didn't make any mistakes." And, but you know, we talked about mentors before. Tamara said to me the most interesting thing. She said, "You give so many people good advice." She said, "You only give bad advice to one person."

• 1:32:45David Senra?

  Yourself?

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:47David Senra?

  Interesting.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  And it's true. I've made some of the worst decisions imaginable because I've had no one like me to talk to.

• 1:32:54David Senra?

  When's the last time you made a bad decision?

• 1:32:56Speaker 01

  Well, I make bad decisions on a regular basis. I mean, they're not...

• 1:33:02David Senra?

  A consequential one, though.

• 1:33:03Speaker 01

  Well, consequential's a different story. I mean, I made some, I made some bad decisions in parts of my career where I could have done things differently. It's a whole other podcast. But, you know, it's interesting. Patrick Collinson, who I have amazing respect for.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  I got a call from him when my book, six months after my book came out, three months, I don't remember. I was in, I lived in San Francisco. He said, "What are you doing for lunch this week?" And we made a lunch date. I went to the office. I sat down with my tray and his commissary. My book's sitting right there with like 90 or 100 yellow post-its in it. I know the... And I said, "You know this story." No, no, I do the same thing with my books. You've seen them. And I said, Patrick sits down. He said, "Are you ready?" I said, "Yeah, I'm starving." He goes, "No, no, no, no. See your book?" I said, "Yeah." He says, "I have a lot of questions." I said, "Oh, sure, anything." He said, "No, I want to know. I've marked every place you made a mistake. I want you to tell me why you made the mistake, what the options were, and what drove you to the decision." And I looked at him and I said,

• 1:34:06Speaker 01

  and I'm saying to myself, "Wow, this kid's special." Then I said to myself, I said to Patrick, I said, "And what about the things I did right?" He said, "Who cares?" He said, "That's expected." [laughing] So he went through for two and a half hours, every mistake I made in the book, not in the book, but I made in my career. Yeah. And I said, I walked out of there with such respect for this guy, that he took that time to do that in a business that has nothing to do with his, but everything to do with it. Because as you and I said at dinner, every single business has the same parameters. When we talked earlier, when we started this discussion, I talked about

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  how I was aware of what people that worked for me or with me, because I called everyone a partner, no matter what their interest in the business was. I called mailroom people partners. I would go around and do the rounds, the rounds I learned from being involved with the UCLA Medical Center. I was a doctor. And at 10:30 and 4:30, I went around the building and it took me 20 minutes and I looked in people's offices. And if I saw a weird face, or a weird voice inflection when they said hello, or anything that tipped me off, I asked them to come see me. I had an open door from 7 to 7:45 every night before I went to dinner.

• 1:35:28Speaker 01

  I asked them to come see me and every single time there was a problem and 90% of the problems were personal. The 10% business problems were easy to fix. The personal problems took a lot of time. If you want to put that kind of time in, you get loyalty. We didn't lose an agent in the whole time I was at CA, not one.

• 1:35:45David Senra?

  Yeah, that's that's.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  Well, people, we we paid people fairly. We paid them ahead of their market price. Everyone participated and everyone was protecting each other. We didn't talk badly about people. We protected each other. If studios tried to roll over one of our people, we'd all get behind that person and make the studio miserable. And we set our, we elevated ourselves to a position, treat us nicely and our clients will in turn do the things you need them to do. You'll pay them for it, by the way, and you'll probably pay them more than you're going to pay through other agencies. Listen, when Mike Nichols, when I signed Mike Nichols from, he was one of the last

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  people we took from ICM and his agent, he'd been with him for 25 years. Mike Nichols' price, because he was put in with our clients, you know, Oliver Stone, Barry Levinson, Ron Howard, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, Marty Scorsese, everybody, his price went up $2 million because he fit into a higher strata price with us than with anybody else. And yes, when asked if we price fixed, I say no and yes. We demanded for the AAA clients AAA pricing and you couldn't price one less than the other.

• 1:37:09David Senra?

  So you apply that same idea that you were using for filmmakers to your work with Coca-Cola then?

• 1:37:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. And I also did what I told you personally, volume, Coke. Why did I do 35 commercials instead of six? Easier to do six. Did 35 because we ran it. The idea I had, which they bought, which Herb Allen arranged at Sun Valley to meet with the the team of Goisetta and Kio, the CEO and the COO, was let's do a relay race. Let's have Coke thought of 365 days a year. How do we do that? Well, it's simple. Christmas, we do something about the cold and about Santa Claus, which was a Coke creation in the 30s. Let's go to Valentine's, they love. These are what the commercial bases are on.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Then we're gonna go into Easter, family, summer, thirst, heat, beach. Then we're gonna go to the fall. What is it? It's back to school. Everybody's kids go back to school. Then we're gonna go to Thanksgiving. We're back at family. And then we're gonna roll right into Christmas. So we're gonna do commercials specific to those seasons, rather than six commercials that play in every silo of television. How do you put a commercial on Saturday Night Live? That you put on a daytime soap opera? That you put on Seinfeld? You can't do that. And we didn't. All our commercials were demographically tailored. And it killed it. We made the cover of Time Magazine.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  And I go back to what I said to you before. Everyone told me we would fail. Everyone said it's a stupid idea. Everyone said your clients are gonna get upset.

• 1:38:50David Senra?

  When did you build the self-confidence to not listen to people? It annoys me. I see this in every single one of these biographies I read where it's like, don't ever let somebody else tell you what you're capable of.

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  I had this discussion.

• 1:39:02David Senra?

  But you need self-confidence to ignore that information. So like, when did you, or that critique or that advice? At what age? Did you have that when you were in high school? Did you have that before you found a C A?

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  I wrote about this in my book. This self-confidence appeared when I lost the ninth grade election for class president. And I did a complete postmortem on myself, who my friend group was and why I lost. Because I didn't want to be a loser. I thought it was, and it was a, it was a apocryphal moment for me. And I worked for two years to build different social constituency. And I went out of my way to make different friends in different areas of the, I had a 3,800 kid high school. So running for an office there was a big deal because everybody voted. And you had to speak to the entire school in three different assemblies because that's all they could get into the gym.

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  And it was critical. I practiced public speaking when I was in the 10th grade and 11th grade. And I won student body vice president, then I won student body president by wide margins because I really worked it, no different than I worked any business I've been in. And I realized, and I said this to someone this morning on this call about this deal I'm doing, the young guy who's the number three who started it, said to me, I've never seen anyone move so fast from idea to execution of putting it together. And I said, because if you move slow, it doesn't go together.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  And he said, you seem very confident about this idea. And I said, yes, I'm very confident about it because I see it crystal clear in its entirety. And I, he said, I'm not sure that our, you know, that I'm confident about you meeting our founder, because you've probably heard a lot of nasty things about him. I said, I've heard a ton of things, some good, some bad, but I really don't care. And he said, why do you not care? I said, because I'll make my own judgment. I said, I'm very good with people.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  I will know if what I've heard is true, false, or just baloney. And I said, frankly, if you want to know the truth over my career, if you believed everything everyone said, I'd be a miserable failure and drummed out of life, you know? Because anyone who is confident, aggressive, has ideas, wants to push the envelope, is put down.

• 1:41:46David Senra?

  Yeah. Jeff Bezos has a great line on this, like, if you don't want to be criticized, if you can't take being criticized, then you can't take doing anything, you can't do anything.

• 1:41:52Speaker 01

  I'm going to leave you with a line that I, I used when I was 17 years old and gave a speech when I ran for student body president, because when I was student body vice president, I usurped the president's duties and he was badmouthing me like crazy. And it was working pretty good because I was having a run for my money. And I said to the students, all 4,000 of them, I'd rather be a do something president who's done something to be criticized than a do nothing president whom no one can criticize.

• 1:42:23David Senra?

  Yeah, that's a great line.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  And that got me the election.

• 1:42:26David Senra?

  I want to ask you a question because you've mentioned it a few times where...

• 1:42:32David Senra?

  Your appetite is essentially insatiable. So you had, you know, 46 out of the top 50 highest grossing film, like the best talent. Then you had 75% market share in all of Hollywood. There's this great book, one of the most important books I've ever read. It was published in like 1957. It's called The Mind of Napoleon.

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  You got me into this.

• 1:42:50David Senra?

  Yeah, it's very hard to find books.

• 1:42:51Speaker 01

  No kidding.

• 1:42:52David Senra?

  I have friends that have paid a thousand, $2,000 for the book, and I think it's worth it. Where it's essentially 300 pages of Napoleon in his own words. And there's something that when I hear you speak, reminds me of Napoleon where he said, you know, essentially his ambition grew with his success. And he says it in French, but you can, the translation is appetite comes with eating. You know, for excessively ambitious driven people, it's not like, oh, I ate, so I'm full. It's like, no, I've eaten and the more I eat, the more I want to eat.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  But that's 100% accurate. Listen, I, one of my clients who I'm crazy about, Francis Ford Coppola, wrote a screenplay that one of my clients that I was also crazy about, who passed away, named Franklin J. Shaffner, directed, it was called Patton. I am a voracious reader on anything about military leaders. I've read about Patton, I've read about Omar Bradley, I've read about Dwight D. Eisenhower as military leaders. Blows my mind. When everyone said to Patton, you can't do this, he said, okay. He said, you're right. And he just went and did it.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  How did he get his army to march double the amount of the standard army march, supply them, feed them, and not irritate them? Because he was a leader and he had guts and he wasn't afraid and people couldn't stand him. Not his people, though. Not his people. So for me, if my people support me, I'm fine. What other people say, I don't really care. I don't think about it. I get asked this question every single day of my life. I am, Tamara calls me the truth teller because I say the truth. I said it to you.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  I gave you my best advice of what I thought you should do. I may not be right. No, I may not be, I may be.

• 1:44:47David Senra?

  No, the funny part about that is, so, you know, I, one thing is that, when I asked you earlier, it's like, hey, if you think about the people that are best in the world or what they do, if you, if like one trait, think about all the people you met that are the best in the world to you, you became the best in the world to you, what is the most, single most important trait that you've observed across all these people? My answer to that question would be focus. And so like, I'm insanely focused on just podcasting and I only think about it, that's basically all I think about all day long. And when we had that very intense three hour dinner, 20 minutes of it was you explaining, this is what I would do if you were, if I was you.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  But that's to just push you.

• 1:45:21David Senra?

  But the good, the interesting part was, as you are, as I told you, is like, the advice you had for me, I had already put into, it wasn't public, so you didn't know this, put into motion. I was like, it's pretty impressive that you can come from outside of something I think about all the time and you nailed the single best opportunity.

• 1:45:36Speaker 01

  That's the only talent I have.

• 1:45:37David Senra?

  It's not the only talent.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  No, I have the ability to think out of the box on any business.

• 1:45:44David Senra?

  Which is creative.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  No, I'm not gonna argue with you. I have the ability to think out of the box on any business, even though if I don't know the business, because I have this thesis and I've said it 100 times to you and to everybody else, every business is the same. Now, the details are different, right? But the businesses, the blocking and tackling is all the same. And it's always about momentum and focus and loyalty and aggressive control of marketplace and monopoly. Monopoly, I'm a monopolist. If we were gonna build a business, you have to be number one and you have to have the lion's share of what you're doing.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  Or the lion's share of opportunities of what you do if you pass, for fundamental reasons, that's good too. But you can't do anything halfway. It's crazy. This I learned as a kid. There's nothing, like when I had a paper route at nine, I realized I had enough time to do three paper routes. And I went and, under another name, got the other two. Because the guy delivering the bulk of papers thought he was delivering to three different people and he thought, no one could do all three and I figured out I could do it. And then I hired someone to help me when it became an issue. So it's always about thinking the next step.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  It's a great Bruce Lee line, which I showed you a few. If this is where you want to punch, this is not the target. This is the target back here, and you punch through. That sounds stupidly, naively, innocently, kind of elementary. But if you think about the broader ramification of that, it's a foundation of business. And those are all things that I think are important. You talked about Michael Dell. I saw Michael Dell at a conference in Aspen last year. That guy's still working every hour of the day.

• 1:47:46David Senra?

  He's a remarkable person. He started his company at 18. He's in his 60s, has no desire at all to stop.

• 1:47:52Speaker 01

  But that's my point.

• 1:47:53David Senra?

  You know, he had a paper route, too. But he figured out this crazy, in his own way, of how to maximize how many subscriptions he could sell. And he realized that if you were either... There's two people that bought newspaper subscriptions in Texas. Texas has a much higher rate than the general population, which is newlyweds and people that moved. And so he's like, hey, all that information is public in Texas. He went down to the courthouse, brought a computer, right? His Apple II computer. And he just had them pull, give me a list of all the people that are married, just recently married, and all the people who have recently moved. It's just like, that, doing that at 12, he was 12 years old.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  But think about what you just said. Detail, right? Drive, ambition, don't give up, just keep going. You know, I had a dinner in London. I don't remember if I told you this story recently, that with a friend of tomorrow's, who's a businessman, and five guys in business asked to have a dinner with me because they want to understand why are American businessmen so successful on a comparative basis broadly to other people around the world? Why are they so successful? And there's a lot of reasons. But we sat down at the table, very formal, everybody in suits. The five guys were in their 50s.

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  They all were pretty successful, except one, who opened the dinner. And...

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Said, I'm, he started the dinner and said, I'm moving to Stade from London. Oh, I said, taxes? He said, no.

• 1:49:28David Senra?

  Skiing?

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  So I said, you, no, that was the question I said, first question in front of everybody before we ordered. Do you like to ski? He said, no.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  I said, what happened? He said, my business bank went bankrupt. I said, okay. You don't like to ski. You're leaving London, you're going to Stade and it's not a tax problem. And your business failed. I said, so what? He said, what do you mean, so what? I said, failure is a part of life. In America, failure is a badge of honor. It means you tried. You get back up on your horse and you try it again. I failed at a number of things. Doesn't stop me. And all of a sudden, the meeting was pretty much over because I said to him, we don't need to talk about this anymore. There is no such thing as failure. It doesn't exist. You cannot give up. And by the time we got done with dinner, he was not going to move to Stade and ultimately

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  did not and is working on a new business.

• 1:50:27David Senra?

  I'm glad you brought that up because one of the things, there's one of my favorite lines, so you know this, like I take, every book I read, right? I try to distill it down to like the 10 most important sentences in the book. And one of them for you was, this is completely, I ship it of all of context because I think if you just read the sentence, you'll understand why this sentence is important. So I'm not even talking about what's happening in the book, but this is the sentence I wrote down. He stopped because it was hard. It required discipline, dedication and hours and hours of time. Everyone stopped. I didn't stop. It's one of my 10 favorite sentences in your book. My question to you is how much of your success do you attribute to just pure endurance or pure perseverance?

• 1:51:11Speaker 01

  I mean, to me, it's just part of a fabric of me. And I'm not suggesting I live the right kind of life. It's good for me. I want to stay edgy. I want to stay with young people. Most of my relationships now are with young people. I learn, I, I, I feel I get up in the morning. I have a purpose.

• 1:51:30David Senra?

  When you were building CAA though, you were under enormous amounts of stress. There was there, and you had this crazy schedule that you detail in your book, you know, essentially on 20, 20 hours a day, 200 phone calls, 300 phone calls a day. When was there ever a time where you almost quit?

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  No. A failure is not an option when you come from where I came from.

• 1:51:54David Senra?

  But even after you were already wealthy, you weren't working for money.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  It's not about money.

• 1:51:57David Senra?

  Yeah, you weren't working for money.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  It's about a whole series of other things. And when you grew up in the San Fernando Valley and your father makes about 300 bucks a week on a good week, and you don't get any allowance, and you have to have a paper route at nine to be able to go buy an ice cream, and you're also saving for a car because when you're 16, you know your dad can't afford it. Failure is not an option. It's binary. There's no option. Success or death. It's like, what are you gonna do? You don't have any choice. I don't want to go back to the Valley. It's the most scary thought in my life.

• 1:52:35David Senra?

  Do you think that still drives you? Like, you're so... I know you're intelligent enough to realize that would never possibly happen, but I can't help but notice that you still don't let your foot off the gas.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  That's not the reason. I like it. I love the action. I love meeting people. I love learning. I love being focused. I like to get into new things.

• 1:52:56David Senra?

  So when did your motivation come from, I'm obsessed with this, I love this? Because at the beginning, it was, I don't want to be a loser.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04David Senra?

  Right? So when did that switch from, I am terrified, to wind up like, you said in your book, you felt like you were born in the wrong nest, like a cuckoo bird, right? It's like, I'm not in the right situation for what I feel my life should be.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Well, I always say I should have grown up on the East Coast.

• 1:53:20David Senra?

  Why?

• 1:53:21Speaker 01

  Because it's a very different environment. It's a creative environment in L.A., or it used to be, not much anymore as it should be. But New York was about multi-different businesses and culture and art, film, music, finance.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Advertising, everything was in New York when I was a kid.

• 1:53:43David Senra?

  Let's go to New York in one second, but this, it went from, I, this can't be my life. It's like the way I described, this can't be my life is a very powerful motivator in your early life. Now it has switched to, I'm obsessed with this. I don't ever even think of retirement. I'm constantly like inspired every day. I want to like create new things. So when did that switch in your life happen though? When did it come from like, almost like a negative motivation to a positive one?

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  You mean as far as gaining the confidence to try to do?

• 1:54:11David Senra?

  I don't even know if it's confidence. It's just like your source of, your inner, this inner desire to win, this burning desire to achieve mission success. And it's very obvious in your early life, right? The source of that was an unhappiness, a deep unhappiness with your present station in life. Now eventually that drives you so much that you, it almost, I would say caused a lot of people's success. Now you're not, you're not worried about ever going back to the valley. And now you've transferred, the source of your motivation and your drive every day is like, oh, I just like, I'm a creative person.

• 1:54:42Speaker 01

  I, it's a really smart question and I've got to answer it. And it kind of brings me full circle here. I say this to certain people I'm close to, which is, there are parts of me that still live in the valley that I'll never forget my whole life. And it's going to sound crazy, stupid, but I find myself sometimes. I remember when I was a kid and my dad was a liquor salesman and his, some of his accounts were restaurants.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  So he used to take us to early bird dinners because he would get a, a discount on the dinner before six o'clock. And we'd go at 5:50 to a restaurant that I thought was fancy, that had full three course meals for $4.95, $5.95, think about that. And he'd order one drink, which he never drank, he just nursed it because it was his product. And we were not allowed to order lobster or steak or anything over a certain price on the menu. And.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  I was saying to Tamara the other day occasionally that I slide back into that, which is weird because I don't even look at checks anymore. You know, when they come, I mean, we had dinner together, you saw that, I just signed the check. But sometimes I find myself looking at a menu and automatically glancing to the price. For no reason, by the way, I don't care.

• 1:56:21David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  But I, I, it's my childhood and I think it overwhelms me sometimes, which I find a positive, by the way, because I still feel like winning and I still feel like competing and I still feel like bringing, right now, my mission's to bring young people along and to do well and to make change and to be charitable and to help young people not make the mistakes I made. And I'm enjoying it and it just, that flame's not going out.

• 1:56:53David Senra?

  It doesn't sound silly nor stupid to me at all. I, I keep saying this over and over again, I feel I just tell the same story every week because the same personality type just reappears over and over again throughout history, this entrepreneurial, super-driven, type A personality type, obviously you have it, I think I have it as well. And it's, it's separated by time in which they lived, they live in different parts of the world, they work in different industries, and yet that same personality type, it's the same way I feel, I just, my, my older brother called me and, you know, it's like very hard to get time with me because I work seven days a week, like my eyes are open, I'm thinking about work. And he's just like, why are you working so hard? And I was like, I guess like, look up and down our family tree.

• 1:57:38David Senra?

  He's just like, nothing but losers on both sides. And what I feel I'm doing is, it makes no, it's not logical.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  David, think about this. I wouldn't be here if we weren't like-minded. Doesn't matter what we do.

• 1:57:50David Senra?

  Yeah, it's the first thing you said to me when we sat down the very first.

• 1:57:52Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have been friends with you, I wouldn't be interested because there's no common denominator.

• 1:57:57David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:57Speaker 01

  There's no hook for a foundation for the relationship.

• 1:58:00David Senra?

  So, again, a lot of these questions are selfish because I use this format to like, learn directly from you. One of my favorite things, obviously, we spend summers in Malibu. When you're in Malibu, for July 4th is a very important holiday to me. My dad's a Cuban immigrant. I'm hugely pro-capitalistic and hugely pro-American. And you can't do fireworks here because of all the fires. So I've tried to figure out a way to celebrate America during July 4th for my daughter. And so what I do is, at first, I made her do this, and now she doesn't. And I made her watch Hamilton, the musical, on Disney+. And there's a, now she likes, she knows all the songs. She went to go see it on Broadway, and she likes the soundtrack and everything else.

• 1:58:42David Senra?

  But one of my favorite, probably, there's two of my favorite songs in Hamilton. It's like, one of them is "Nonstop," which talks about volume, which, I mean, you talk about over and over again. Just a guy, just wouldn't stop. He wouldn't stop writing. He's awake, he's writing, he's trying to get his ideas out there. But the other thing is just the fact that he understood, is, you know, same state, same situation. Poor orphaned kid comes to America. He's like, didn't matter, he's the right hand of George Washington. He's the first Treasury Secretary. He was impossible to satiate. It was impossible. What he understood about himself is like, I will never be satisfied. I'm gonna ask you this question. I think I already know the answer, because we've talked enough. I just don't think there is even, that even registers with you. It's like, you will never be satisfied.

• 1:59:24David Senra?

  You don't look at it as, there's like, there's no end to your ambition or what you want to do in this world.

• 1:59:30Speaker 01

  I'm gonna give you a simple answer. I don't want it to...

• 1:59:36David Senra?

  What do you mean?

• 1:59:37Speaker 01

  I don't want there to be an end to ambition, or enthusiasm, or curiosity, or the things that drive me. To help people, to be an advisor to people. I don't get paid for being an advisor. You didn't pay me for having dinner with you. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, I paid for it.

• 1:59:57David Senra?

  I offer.

• 1:59:59Speaker 01

  Now that I think about it, I paid for dinner twice. Okay? In any case, I want that life, or I wouldn't do it, believe me.

• 2:00:08David Senra?

  Yeah, I just read your friend Barry Diller's autobiography, which is really interesting. And he has a line in there, you know, they're just like, I don't even, I don't think about retirement. I'm not interested in, he goes, I wake up every day and have ideas.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's how I feel.

• 2:00:19David Senra?

  Okay, so I'm going to change gears about what we were talking about real quick, because there's one thing on the list that I absolutely have to get to, and I want to get to. This is probably the last thing we talk about. I want you to tell me about, we talked a lot about people that have a lot of charisma, a lot of intelligence. I love what you wrote in your book about your friendship, your deep friendship, your life. You know, it sounds like multiple decade friendship with Michael Crichton.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Thirty years.

• 2:00:40David Senra?

  What can you tell me about your relationship with Michael Crichton?

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  Certain people have touched my life in a very unique way. Ben Horwitz and Mark Andreessen in 99 put me on their board. And I never met either of them, and they had the confidence in me to go into a business that I told them I knew nothing about. I mean, I had some experience in tech from 92 with my Andy Grove Intel CAA deal, meeting Gates in 93, but, you know, nothing like they did. They grew up in Silicon Valley. That was a huge life change for me.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  Michael Crichton was one of these guys that at the beginning I just needed to sign as a client to be on the roster. And after two or three meetings, I just said, my God, this man is so special. He was not just intelligent to a degree I'd never seen at that time. This is 1979. He was thoughtful. He was ahead of everybody in his thinking. He was talking about computers in the early 80s. He was an Apple fellow when it was, no one knew what the hell that was.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  He traveled extensively and wrote articles about it, but kept notes on everything he did. And he loved art. He wrote the definitive textbook on Jasper Johns. To this day, it's the definitive book. And I talked to him every day of my life, seven days a week. Seven days a week. And if I didn't talk to him, it was odd and I missed it. I would talk to him no matter where I was. I could be in Japan, I could be in Europe, I could be in New York, didn't make any difference to me. And sometimes the conversations were short, sometimes they were long. I enjoyed every second of it.

• 2:02:41Speaker 01

  Going on vacation with him was a lesson in curiosity. The guy kept notes on everything he saw. So I remember we were in the Caribbean together. He kept notes on everything that he saw, and it all ended up in movies. And I value loyalty as a very important point for me in a relationship. Every problem I had or every success, he was there for me. I remember I made a couple of huge mistakes, and he said to me, um, something I've never forgotten, he said, "Forget it, there's always another rodeo." That's his line to me. And he's turned out to be right.

• 2:03:26Speaker 01

  I miss him every day of my life. His book stands at on my desk, and a small, personal, collected by him, Frank Stella drawing that he gave me as a gift, is in a place, I see it every single night before I go to sleep. And I love this guy. He, I was devastated when he passed away. Devastated. Because he passed away young, didn't have to, uh, it was his own fault, I think.

• 2:04:00David Senra?

  What happened?

• 2:04:01Speaker 01

  Well, he was a doctor, you know, a medical doctor. So I personally, I could be wrong, I don't know it for a fact. I think he kind of overdid the chemo, and I think that killed him. That's my guess. Or it's caused something to happen, but I don't know the facts, by the way, that are lost to me that was devastating. And I remember the night. Did his wife call me because it was the night that Obama, I think, won the election. It was that night. I'm not sure. Some event happened and I was in the backseat of a car and I got the call and I was devastated. But for me, mega influence on my life, mega

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  loyal friend through thick and thin. Didn't matter what I did, he didn't judge me.

• 2:04:48David Senra?

  And he had this extreme, I think I learned this from you, he had extreme work habits where he wouldn't write every day, but when he wrote, he would write for like-

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had all my writers, and we had 400 of them, we had different work ethic and different schedules. So James Glavell, who wrote Shogun and Taipan, he would write every day from seven in the morning till 12:30, hell or high water, six days a week. And at 12:30, he went to lunch and he didn't work until the next morning. And he did 10 pages a day. That's what he did. So you could almost tell when he was going to be done. And his books ran about 1,200 pages. Michael hated writing. He'd rather do thinking. And he waited for deadlines. And he wrote Jurassic Park in five months. Because he wrote 20 hours

• 2:05:40Speaker 01

  a day, six days, seven days a week, because it was due. And he just waited.

• 2:05:49David Senra?

  What do you think's the most important thing you learned from him?

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  From him? Oh, unequivocally, curiosity about everything. Guy was curious about everything, every day of his life. And loyalty, integrity, how to create things out of nothing. What a mind that can think forward and backward. So in other words, he did movies like The Great Train Robbery, 1850s with Sean Connery, and movies like Andromeda Strain about the future and his thought process, and then straight-

• 2:06:34Speaker 01

  Popcorn entertainment based on science that really isn't science, Jurassic Park. But when you read the book, the first third of the book, you're being educated without you knowing about paleontology, and you actually think you understand it and that you have a PhD in it. It was genius, Woody, to. So then when you, it gets, when the movie breaks loose, you actually think you understand what you're saying. It's amazing. He was a genius.

• 2:07:00David Senra?

  relentless curiosity. That's a great place to close. Michael, thank you very much for doing this.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 2:07:05David Senra?

  Absolutely. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders.