Pod Insights Aspire with Emma Grede From Video Store to Netflix Co-CEO, Ted Sarandos About this episode From a video rental store to a corner office at Netflix. Emma sits down with Netflix Co-CEO Ted Sarandos as he reveals how he built one of the most influential companies in the world — and the leadership lessons he’s learned along the way.
You’ll hear Ted’s insights on:
Taking bold risks and trusting your gut
Making the toughest decisions as a leader
Why values and vision matter more than algorithms
How to keep innovating even when you’re on top
Ted’s story is a masterclass in leadership, resilience, and ambition for anyone looking to grow in their career or business.
Transcript 19,039 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:10 Emma Grede? What if the kid behind the counter at the video store became the man who rewrote Hollywood? Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-CEO, is getting real about what it takes to climb from nowhere to the top of the entertainment industry. How do you know when to double down and when to walk away? How do you trust your gut when the data says otherwise? And how do you keep innovating when you're already on top?
0:36 Emma Grede? We spend a lot of time thinking about how to get more value out of the things we buy. But one of the biggest payments most people make every month is for housing. And historically, that's been left out of the rewards conversation. That's why Bilt is such an interesting concept. As a Bilt member, you can earn points on your housing payments, whether you rent or own. And those points can be redeemed towards things like flights, hotels, Lyft rides, Amazon.com purchases, and even future housing payments. And the membership goes beyond your housing payments. You can link any credit card or debit card to the Bilt app and earn points on eligible purchases at participating restaurants and other businesses in your neighborhood. The app also has a neighborhood concierge that can help you book a fitness class, make
1:20 Emma Grede? a dinner reservation, or schedule a Lyft while automatically applying your member benefits. Download the Bilt app and join the membership for where you live at joinbilt.com/emma. That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash emma. Use our link so they know we sent you.
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2:40 Emma Grede? Ted Sarandos, thank you so much for being here today on the Aspire Podcast.
2:44 Speaker 02 Thank you for having me.
2:44 Emma Grede? I'm really, really happy to have you. I mean, I have to say, when I read everything about you, I mean, I'm already unbelievably impressed by you. But I think the reason why listeners of this show will die when they hear your story is because, first of all, you don't have a typical story, you don't have a typical resume. And in my most English girl way, I'm going to say it like this and hope it's not offensive. But you started your career in a video rental situation type of career.
3:15 Speaker 02 That is true.
3:15 Emma Grede? And now you run one of the most important companies in entertainment. And it's just so unbelievably mesmerizing to me how you've made that journey. And I think so inspiring to people that perhaps come from, you know, it's like you're a college dropout. Your father was an electrician, you're nothing that, you know, I expected.
3:37 Speaker 02 It's not the normal path.
3:38 Emma Grede? And I was like, this is so inspiring, this is so incredible. But I think it is really inspiring to people because again, a lot of us aspire to a career in entertainment. And you have one of the most impressive ones. So I guess my question really to you is, I want you to take me back to you being a kid. What do you think ultimately in your childhood would tell me that you were going to have the type of career that you have today?
4:03 Speaker 02 I don't know if there's like an actual flashpoint that was, oh, that's what I'm going to do. Because growing up, I always wanted to be a journalist. Like the first thing I remember wanting to be is a reporter. I always thought they were heroic people, they thought it was a, what a great job this must be. So I was like editor of the high school newspaper and for a couple of years of my community college newspaper and.
4:24 Emma Grede? You went to community college?
4:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, two years of community college, did not get that degree either.
4:29 Emma Grede? It's alright.
4:30 Speaker 02 Well, I spent the whole time working on the newspaper.
4:32 Emma Grede? Yeah, there you go.
4:33 Speaker 02 But then I was kind of getting to this point where I was gonna try to go to university. I applied for a, I was applying for a scholarship.
4:39 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
4:39 Speaker 02 So I had to pay for my own school. I was putting together all my clippings and I realized I wasn't a very good writer. And no one ever told me, so.
4:47 Emma Grede? You're like, that part.
4:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, so I'm reading it, I'm like, wow, if I didn't write this, I probably wouldn't keep reading this.
4:53 Emma Grede? Fair.
4:53 Speaker 02 So I just like, and I, and that was my part time job while I was doing all this was working in the video store. So that for me, that epiphany was, I wasn't, wasn't that I was gonna be in entertainment, just that I was not going to be a journalist.
5:05 Emma Grede? Sometimes that process of elimination is a good thing too, though, right? You're like, okay, definitely not that.
5:10 Speaker 02 I just wish I'd have learned it sooner.
5:12 Emma Grede? How old are you at this point?
5:13 Speaker 02 Nineteen, twenty years old.
5:14 Emma Grede? And what's your family background? Tell us a bit about.
5:17 Speaker 02 I can tell you, but back to the other, like, why entertainment?
5:19 Emma Grede? Yeah.
5:20 Speaker 02 So for me, you know, you're, you're a product of your parents, for better or worse, right? And my parents were very young, uh, so they had four kids in their twenties.
5:30 Emma Grede? Oh, wow.
5:30 Speaker 02 My dad, you've mentioned, was an electrician, hardworking guy. My mom stayed home to raise the kids. And because his were like young parents, they were like, it was, it was chaotic in my house all the time. So, like, we didn't have bedtime, we didn't have structured things that parents.
5:43 Emma Grede? Where are you in the four?
5:44 Speaker 02 I have three older sisters and I have a younger brother, Joey, who passed away a few years ago.
5:48 Emma Grede? I'm so sorry.
5:49 Speaker 02 Thank you, thank you. But in the house, like I said, my parent, and I, I used to be very angry about it, you know, to be honest with you, that why weren't my parents more traditional? I didn't, they make sure I did my homework, what did?
5:59 Emma Grede? Parents can't win, whatever they do. If you've got the traditional ones, you don't want them. If you don't, you're like, I wanna go to, I wanna bedtime.
6:07 Speaker 02 But I just came to realize that they were just kids, they didn't know any better and they.
6:11 Emma Grede? No doubt.
6:11 Speaker 02 So when they're in their forties, they were kind of recapture their twenties, because if you, you have to get that stuff out of your system at some point. So anyway, so that, for me, I had this, my, I would go visit my mom's mom, my grandmother, I called her nanny, at her house, and she loved entertainment. She had the National Enquirer and all People Magazine, all those things out, out all the time. When I would stay up late anyway, I would sit up with her and watch The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson.
6:36 Emma Grede? Amazing.
6:37 Speaker 02 And she would always talk about. Celebrities in on a first name basis, but it wasn't.
6:42 Emma Grede? Johnny.
6:44 Speaker 02 Oh, can you believe Johnny last night? And there was, I remember one point, I don't remember who did what to who, but it was like, oh, did you hear what Mac did to Glenn?
6:52 Emma Grede? What?
6:53 Speaker 02 Oh, Mac Davis and Glenn Campbell.
6:55 Emma Grede? Your friends, I've got it.
6:56 Speaker 02 So, yeah, exactly. And so, and what I did find was that it was a very, like, when I would go to my grandma's to visit, it was an escape from the chaos at our house.
7:05 Emma Grede? Yeah.
7:05 Speaker 02 So for me, I always had these really positive connections to television and to entertainment and to celebrities.
7:11 Emma Grede? That's so interesting. So somewhere in the calm of going to your nannies, you found a love of entertainment, but it was also like a, a space where you were away from the chaoticness of what you knew to be.
7:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. So I think when you're raised, you're going to either grow up to be just like you were raised or the polar opposite. And I went polar opposite.
7:29 Emma Grede? Yeah.
7:30 Speaker 02 I didn't want to have a chaotic life. I want, and, and for me, like even that bit about not having a dinnertime and bedtime and all those things.
7:37 Emma Grede? You wanted the stability.
7:38 Speaker 02 Yeah, and TV had a structure.
7:40 Emma Grede? Yes.
7:41 Speaker 02 Happy Days was on at seven o'clock on channel three every Tuesday night. All right. So you didn't have to, it was, it was very structured. Television was very structured.
7:48 Emma Grede? Happy Days, I used to love that show. That was huge in England as well. Just so crazy. So you go on the journey of trying to become, well, not really trying to become a journalist, but you, you're fancying journalism. You realize you're not a fantastic writer. At what point does it become clear that entertainment is a career? And talk to me about that kind of initial stint in the video rental space.
8:08 Speaker 02 So working in these stores, it was a part-time gig. It was early in the whole life cycle of video stores. It was before Blockbusters, there was this, these mom and pop independent stores. It was the second store in the state of Arizona that opened up. It was called Arizona Video Cassettes West. Now, that's a good.
8:24 Emma Grede? Catchy name.
8:25 Speaker 02 It's got everything in the title. It's all on the title.
8:27 Emma Grede? You know exactly where you are and what you're going there for.
8:30 Speaker 02 Even though the region, it's on the west.
8:32 Emma Grede? Exactly.
8:33 Speaker 02 And it's, and also.
8:34 Emma Grede? Not marketing genius.
8:35 Speaker 02 What I thought was great about the guy, the guy who owned the place, Dale Mason. What I liked about it, it was aspirational right away. He called it west because he knew there'd be a north and a south and an east.
8:43 Emma Grede? There you go. There you go. He had dreams.
8:45 Speaker 02 He had dreams.
8:45 Emma Grede? Good old Dale. Do you still know him now?
8:48 Speaker 02 Yeah, I haven't talked to him in quite a while, but I do stay in touch.
8:50 Emma Grede? And what was your role? What were you doing? Like?
8:52 Speaker 02 Well, he, so I, this was like a serendipitous thing. My, my young, crazy parents, my mom, I, I always thought, I always thought we were poor. And it turns out my mom was just really bad with money. Cause my dad.
9:06 Emma Grede? There's a difference.
9:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, my dad made money and she just blew it.
9:10 Emma Grede? Wow.
9:10 Speaker 02 And we always had like, we may not have the electricity and the gas on at the same time. We might get evicted from the house, but we had a VCR before anyone else did, like that kind of thing.
9:21 Emma Grede? What was she doing with the money?
9:22 Speaker 02 Just like that, there's extravagances that we couldn't afford. So she had, we had a VCR and then this video store opens around the corner from our house. So I could walk there and I used to go in and I met this guy Dale who owned the store. And we would talk about movies. I love movies and we just talked about movies all the time. And being a journalism student in Arizona, you were aware of Spike Lee and John Sales and these things. But, but there was no place to see those movies in Arizona at the time before the video stores. So for me, it's like, I, I thought this was like, uh, almost like one of those aha moments in life. And then, and so Dale said, you know, do you need a job? I needed a job, so I got a job. And then I went to him after I had this epiphany about not being a journalist and said, I don't think I'm going to be a journalist. I'm not going to go to university.
10:07 Speaker 02 And I need some time to figure out my next act. And he said, oh, good.
10:11 Emma Grede? We need someone.
10:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, cause he had opened a bunch of stores in the meantime, you know, over that couple of years. And he wanted somebody to kind of take him over for him so he could spend some time with his kids and his wife. And he just gave me the keys to this multi-store chain with no real experience or, uh, you know, basically he's learning. I looked at it like an MBA course and film school all wrapped up.
10:30 Emma Grede? Even at that time.
10:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, because at that time, you know, the video stores were empty all day.
10:35 Emma Grede? Yeah.
10:35 Speaker 02 And then for two hours they'd be jammed and then you load, they close and clean up. And all day when those things were empty, we'd watch movies. I'd, I'd watch every movie in the store. So like, I just got a real grounding in the things you would learn at film school. And how movies talk to one another and if you like this, you're going to like this. All those things, I didn't know in the moment that it was preparing me for what I'm going to do right, you know, next, but it really was for sure. So I had this kid with no business experience negotiating leases and doing the programming and the marketing, hiring and firing the employees, paying the taxes and.
11:07 Emma Grede? Oh my goodness, it really was. It was like a business MBA.
11:10 Speaker 02 And Dale took a big chance on a young kid who just he trusted, so.
11:14 Emma Grede? Did you, um, did you have a vision for your career at that point?
11:17 Speaker 02 No.
11:18 Emma Grede? Nothing?
11:18 Speaker 02 No.
11:19 Emma Grede? You were like just in the here and now?
11:20 Speaker 02 Not gonna be a journalist. How can I do the thing that I love and I did, I really did love. I didn't realize even that there was a business to get these movies. So my next step was to go from running the stores to working for the distributor who sold the movies to the stores.
11:35 Emma Grede? And how important do you think it is for people to really understand a career like from the trenches? Cause it seems like, I mean, you literally started right at the bottom.
11:44 Speaker 02 I mean, it's the version of the working in the mailroom, whatever that is. Yeah. Yeah, but you wanna be, to me, it's like the best part of that was I was in direct contact with the end user. So the people would come in excited to watch the movie and then they would return it and tell me if they liked it or not. I mean, I really was a full circle contact with the end user. And that, that's what I think really prepared me for everything I do now.
12:06 Emma Grede? It's interesting because I feel like so much of your career has been about the end user, the customer, the data, really understanding that. But you had an early purview on all of that stuff. And so you knew it was important before we spoke about it.
12:20 Speaker 02 For sure. I used to marvel at how long it would take for people to decide what movie to rent. Right? You'd walk around, you'd read all the boxes.
12:28 Emma Grede? You've been there for hours.
12:29 Speaker 02 Longer than you'd watch. And then I, I finally started asking people and they would tell me all these different stories about how, how important the choice was. Like, I don't, I don't, either I don't have a lot of money, so this is a big deal for me.
12:41 Emma Grede? Yeah.
12:41 Speaker 02 I don't have a lot of time, so I don't wanna watch a bad movie. I'm trying to avoid wasting my time. Or the one that always surprised me was I'm picking it out for my family or my friends and it really, it says a lot about me.
12:53 Emma Grede? Yes.
12:54 Speaker 02 So I want people to respect my choice.
12:56 Emma Grede? Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting. I spent so much time in the video shop in, as a kid. And it was like such a treat. My mom would say like she, cause there's four of us and she'd pick which one of us was going with that. And it was like, that was a really big deal. You'd get to go, cause you were deciding on the weekend. Like, how was our weekend going to start, right? And it's like this big decision and I was obsessed with. You know, cause back then it was videos and I had all the Disney movies and they had these like holograms on them. And for me, it's like, I just wanted all the holograms stacked up next to each other. And so it's interesting how formative those memories are and what that time does for you. But you, you really took it as a, an education in entertainment at that time and an education in customer behavior.
13:38 Speaker 02 I don't know how deliberate it was, you know what I mean? Part of me, I think, was probably just curious. And the other part was, I think I was trying to figure out, I didn't know how in, I was gonna go from Phoenix, Arizona to, to Hollywood at all, just geographically, let alone professionally.
13:53 Emma Grede? Did you have anxiety about your career at that point?
13:56 Speaker 02 Probably not, because I really was enjoying it so much. I didn't really think about where I was gonna go next. I just, at that time, I was just really enjoying it. And I could, one of those things where I was almost shocked that, that this was a job.
14:08 Emma Grede? Yeah, you were like, I can't believe somebody's giving me these keys. So, fast forward to me, so you joined Netflix in two thousand and in two thousand, it was still a DVD by mail service. So will you talk to me just about that time where you were at? Like, how did you even make that association?
14:25 Speaker 02 So I went from the stores, Arizona Video Cassette West became Superstar Video, same, same, just better name, better name.
14:32 Emma Grede? Not quite blockbuster though, was it?
14:36 Speaker 02 Uh, but then went from there to a company called East Texas Distributing. There's a pattern here.
14:40 Emma Grede? There is, clearly.
14:41 Speaker 02 This is the company that sold the movies to all the stores.
14:43 Emma Grede? Right.
14:44 Speaker 02 And then I did a very brief stint back at a re- a regional chain called West Coast Video. And that's when I came to find out about Netflix. I found out about it first from, I opened a DVD player and there was a card in there for a company called Netflix, where you could get ten free rentals with this card. It was a sample thing. And I read, I remember distinctly seeing it, thinking, oh, that's cool. And just putting it aside. And then I get a call from a, a friend of Reed Hastings, who was the founder of Netflix, who said, um, he would like to meet me.
15:15 Emma Grede? Did you know who Reed was?
15:16 Speaker 02 I, I did not know who he was at that point, but I knew, uh, I knew what Netflix was as a company, but I didn't understand why he wanted to meet me yet. I had done a deal, I was at West Coast Video, to do video rev sharing. With Warner Brothers and Sony, it was the first kind of deal of its kind. It got, you know, into a trade magazine and Reid read about it and he said, I need that deal. Because at that time Netflix was growing very fast and we couldn't.
15:39 Emma Grede? Great next stage, right?
15:39 Speaker 02 We couldn't afford the inventory.
15:40 Emma Grede? Yes, yeah.
15:41 Speaker 02 So how do I, you know, it's basically just to help fund the growth of the company, revenue sharing would be a good thing. And he didn't really know anybody in in distribution or in in Hollywood. So he called and asked if I'd go out and meet him. My very first e-commerce transaction was buying that plane ticket.
15:56 Emma Grede? No, it was not.
15:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
15:57 Emma Grede? No, it was not. So you weren't quite like a digital whiz at that point. You weren't, you weren't thinking about that.
16:01 Speaker 02 I was a video store guy. I was a movie guy, yeah. Even then, I remember walking into the lobby at the, at the office at Netflix. And there was mountains and mountains of boxes. I'm like, what is all this? The receptionist says, oh, these are all the people who work here, just ordering their stuff online, like drugstore.com and razorblade.com. And people just living their life online already, which is was a complete, like, that was my introduction to this idea.
16:26 Emma Grede? Wow, you were like, I did not know about this.
16:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:28 Emma Grede? This is not how I'm living my life.
16:29 Speaker 02 Not at all, not at all.
16:30 Emma Grede? Very, and it's crazy to think that that was only twenty five years ago.
16:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:34 Emma Grede? Right? Like, it's just a whole different world now, completely. So this year, you've been at Netflix for twenty five years.
16:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
16:43 Emma Grede? And it's a, it's a lifetime in a company. But I really want to understand, what did those early days look like? And how did you even begin to think about transitioning yourself from being like a, a video store guy? Into being a tech guy, an entertainment guy, and being, you know, having this position at Netflix?
16:59 Speaker 02 I think some part of the curiosity that even, I could have just went to work behind the counter of the store, checked out the movies and went home and I thought about it again. But I think all of that has kind of helped in for me in how to better understand people and what jobs they have. And what do they do that contributes to this success of the company? And how passionate are they about doing this? And are these the best people for doing this job? Are they, are people in the right roles? You know, that's, we're almost all, it's all about casting in so many ways. We didn't, we couldn't afford to have an LA office back then, at the early days of Netflix. So I worked in my bedroom a couple of days a week and I would go up to Silicon Valley a couple of days a week. And I was sitting in the cubes in between all the engineers. And they would hear me yelling on the phone because I was like used to being alone.
17:41 Speaker 02 Yet so they go making a lot of noise and disrupting it and they would like to work very quietly. So they uh but they would hear the kind of workings of the business a little bit. And I would be very curious about what they were doing. They were very curious what I was doing. We kept each other kind of curious about the business and informed each other about that both the how the tech and the entertainment part of the business kind of intersected.
18:01 Emma Grede? And you were brought in to do exactly what?
18:03 Speaker 02 I was the vice president of product and so that was basically had to get the inventory. Basically, we were buying movies, by the way, on DVD from Walmart when I first joined the company. So we were just people go to Best Buy and buy inventory.
18:15 Emma Grede? That is why.
18:16 Speaker 02 My goal when I came in, it was to get direct with the studios.
18:19 Emma Grede? Yes.
18:19 Speaker 02 Movies and then eventually to develop business plans with them like our rev share.
18:23 Emma Grede? Did you see the vision really clearly when you first sat down with Reed? Like just thinking about what Netflix is today, was that like mapped out? And there was this huge giant vision and you got that or are you just like, I'm gonna take a chance on what this is right now?
18:37 Speaker 02 Honestly, it sounded nuts to me. So yeah, Reed, I never met anyone like him. He had such a clear vision for the future that was not rooted in any current reality. You know what I mean? Normally you can see a little sample of something.
18:51 Emma Grede? Yeah, totally.
18:52 Speaker 02 It's gonna be like that. And for Reed, it was no, all entertainment is gonna come into the home on the internet. Now, this time, no entertainment came into the home on the internet. It was too slow and too expensive. And he said, and he would to go from that, I mean, he took us all the way to the end. He goes, no, in fact, if you think you're still gonna be getting your entertainment on cable, you shouldn't not only don't take this job, don't buy my stock when I go public.
19:14 Emma Grede? Wow, wow, that is crazy.
19:17 Speaker 02 It was the ultimate contrarian thesis, right?
19:20 Emma Grede? Yeah.
19:20 Speaker 02 And those are the big wins whenever they were.
19:22 Emma Grede? Those are the really big wins.
19:23 Speaker 02 So he laid this out. I didn't, I wasn't even sure I believed them, to be honest with you. But I thought that this guy is, this is the kind of person who changes the world in some dimension.
19:33 Emma Grede? And you knew that?
19:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure.
19:34 Emma Grede? So what did your early days look like? You're on the phone, you're doing these big deals with the studios.
19:39 Speaker 02 So the interesting thing is, I think the entertainment business is, there's a lot of people who want to be in the business, as you mentioned earlier. But finding out the people who want to work in it is really important. I think that's the beauty of the kind of going to the mailroom for the people who want to do it.
19:51 Emma Grede? Yes.
19:52 Speaker 02 Because you have to struggle, you know?
19:53 Emma Grede? You do have to struggle.
19:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, and and that's the way you kind of separate the folks who want to be in it and the people who want to work in it. And for me, it was, I've also come to understand that this is really a trust business.
20:04 Emma Grede? Hmm.
20:04 Speaker 02 You know, people are very, they do not want to make a bad call on their watch. So the better, the more you know them, the better.
20:11 Emma Grede? So it's like a relationship business, is what you mean?
20:13 Speaker 02 Very much a relationship business. And I, and I knew all the people who were running home entertainment at that time because of my days in the video store. They used to come in and sell me movies like so the guy who would become the head of Disney at that time, but Bob Chapek used to sell VHS movies to me out of a book.
20:29 Emma Grede? That is wild.
20:30 Speaker 02 So you kind of, so you got to know these people in a way that that was very helpful. That you say, hey, if I'm going to do something that's a risk.
20:36 Emma Grede? Yeah.
20:37 Speaker 02 I'll take a risk with someone I know and trust.
20:39 Emma Grede? But I imagine because obviously what you, what you were doing before was very traditional. And you essentially were bringing something very new to all of these, you know, to all of these guys. So I wonder what rules did you have to rewrite? And what, what kind of behaviors did you have to throw out entirely? Because it was a whole new world, what you were doing.
20:58 Speaker 02 Well, one for sure was, is you had to be very transparent.
21:02 Emma Grede? Right.
21:02 Speaker 02 So if there was anything that was going to surprise anybody, give them a heads up.
21:07 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
21:07 Speaker 02 Because if you're, if you're the new character, if you're doing things that are different than everybody else, you've got to give a lot of people to understand that they are, people are very nervous about, you know, making that bad call with the new guy who's unproven and all those things. So really being unbelievably accessible and transparent above.
21:24 Emma Grede? Is that who you are anyway, do you think?
21:26 Speaker 02 I, I think ultimately it is.
21:28 Emma Grede? Yeah.
21:28 Speaker 02 It came naturally to me when I saw it coming. I just, I, I could relate to the fact that someone who's investing into a career doesn't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
21:37 Emma Grede? Yes, totally.
21:38 Speaker 02 And avoid that by just saying, hey, here's something that's going to happen. You're going to read about it, whatever it is, and, and just here's what, here's what's going on. So if you get asked, and it just developed that habit very early.
21:47 Emma Grede? And you developed that over and over.
21:49 Speaker 02 Bets on us.
21:49 Emma Grede? Yes, of course. I mean, I mean, they had to because you were doing things that nobody had done before. And so they had to take bets.
21:55 Speaker 02 Unintuitive. I mean, it, it's hard for people to imagine now how big Blockbuster was at that time. So if anyone had an idea that they were going to take on Blockbuster, that seemed insane. They were the biggest entertainment brand in the world.
22:06 Emma Grede? That's crazy to think about. Yeah, I mean, we can't, we can't even fathom that now because they're completely gone now, or am I?
22:12 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's one, there's one novelty store. I think it's like an Airbnb. We can go sleep in the video store.
22:18 Emma Grede? That's crazy.
22:20 Speaker 02 Having worked in a video store, it's like being a blacksmith. It's like a job that just does not exist anymore.
22:24 Emma Grede? It's just totally, totally gone. But you must have been doing something tremendously right to rise through the ranks of this company at that time. And I wonder if you can speak to that a little bit for anybody that's listening that is part of, you know, a very high gross company or a company that's really going places. What did you do not just to survive, but to really scale yourself as it was all happening?
22:47 Speaker 02 Back in that middle where I worked in the distribution company at E T D, there was a guy. So my, my life, by the way, was kind of peppered with these inspiring non-traditional mentors.
22:58 Emma Grede? Lucky you.
22:58 Speaker 02 And I don't, I don't even know that they knew that they were mentoring, you know what I mean? But they, but they would say these very poignant things that were very useful. Always, if you listen, you have to listen.
23:08 Emma Grede? You have to listen.
23:09 Speaker 02 So Ron Eisenberg was the CEO of East Texas Distributing. What was interesting about entertainment distribution is you have, you basically all of your customers you sell to, and you need to have all the studios to, to be able to sell them. So he would always say to me, he goes, well, you've got customers on one hand and suppliers on the other. Just kiss every ass presented. That was his, that was his comment. So.
23:30 Emma Grede? That's amazing.
23:30 Speaker 02 Cause you have to make sure that you're taking care of two constituencies all the time that have very different agendas.
23:37 Emma Grede? Right.
23:38 Speaker 02 So the idea that, you know, you can't just go to work and do one thing every day is you're trying, you have to keep these people satisfied and these people pleased all the time, which I think embedded that kind of customer first.
23:48 Emma Grede? Yes.
23:48 Speaker 02 Mode to me. And, and the difference between the video distributors wasn't much. You know what I mean?
23:54 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
23:55 Speaker 02 It was they, they bought from the company and the person that they trusted and liked.
23:58 Emma Grede? And that was that.
23:59 Speaker 02 That was that.
23:59 Emma Grede? That was that.
24:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:00 Emma Grede? So it was just about just trust.
24:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
24:03 Emma Grede? That's so interesting. I mean, it's so interesting to me.
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25:02 Emma Grede? So when did you start to transition in that company to like a closer model of how we see Netflix today? Like, what happened?
25:11 Speaker 02 So again, the reason I think we made it is because it was always in the plan. It's called Netflix, not Mailflicks or DVD Flicks even. And it was always in the vision that this would be a digital distribution company.
25:22 Emma Grede? Right.
25:22 Speaker 02 Reed described Netflix to me in 1999 almost exactly like it is right now. I mean...
25:28 Emma Grede? It's unfathomable to think about. Because at that point, as you said, you weren't even using the internet as we do today. You weren't ordering things like we do. The idea that you would just like sit in your
25:38 Speaker 02 Even just get in the internet.
25:39 Emma Grede? Living room and scroll like that. It wasn't a thing.
25:41 Speaker 02 Getting into the TV is something we completely take for granted now, but it didn't even exist. And so this whole notion of it, we were talking about downloading instead of streaming back then, because there was no concept even of streaming back then.
25:52 Emma Grede? Right, of course.
25:52 Speaker 02 So when we think about that, that's the only thing that ever really connected about the plan was, how are you going to manage all these files and all that kind of stuff? And then streaming goes, ah, streaming, streaming's going to solve that. So we don't even manage.
26:03 Emma Grede? I'm interested Ted, because you were like such an entertainment guy. The digital piece was like a learning curve for you. You didn't understand that. Like, how much did you get yourself involved, understanding that was the future? You could see this blueprint that that reader had kind of, you know, said, this is where we're going. Did you immediately like try to start understanding what the engineers sitting next to you were doing?
26:23 Speaker 02 Yeah, gradually.
26:24 Emma Grede? Right.
26:24 Speaker 02 Because I feel like I just learned as much as I needed.
26:27 Emma Grede? Okay.
26:28 Speaker 02 To get my deals done, first of all, and to get these, you know, to deliver on the things that we were promising.
26:33 Emma Grede? Because I can imagine you would be sitting there thinking, oh, my goodness, there's this whole part of this company that I don't really understand, or I need to learn, otherwise I'll be left out of it. I just wonder was there any part of that?
26:42 Speaker 02 Almost immediately. And the bigger part for me was actually understanding the tech culture.
26:47 Emma Grede? Very different culture.
26:48 Speaker 02 Very different. And at one point, there was an early, early executive staff meeting. And one of the guys who was our head of product at that time said to me, I forgot what he said even, but I, it sounded a little loaded, you know? So afterwards, I asked somebody on the way out, I said, hey, you know, when he said that, what do you think he meant? And he goes, oh, no, no, no, he is incapable of saying anything but exactly what he means.
27:10 Emma Grede? Exactly.
27:10 Speaker 02 He means exactly what he said. He go, oh.
27:13 Emma Grede? It's not, it's not coded. It's just a tech guy. It's just a tech guy.
27:16 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. And I did find every once in a while with that same guy, he would say to me when sometimes I'd be asking for something and I'm trying to get his buy-in on something. And he would repeat back to me and nod a lot. And I would leave thinking.
27:29 Emma Grede? He's understood it.
27:30 Speaker 02 We got it.
27:30 Emma Grede? Yeah, no problem.
27:31 Speaker 02 He was just taking it all in. And he was acknowledging that he heard me. Mm hmm, mm hmm. And then he'd go home and think about it for 24 hours.
27:39 Emma Grede? Wow.
27:39 Speaker 02 And he'd come back and have the most remarkable insight and question that I thought we were all settled. And every once in a while, he would unearth something that made what we just talked about impossible.
27:49 Emma Grede? That's just insane.
27:50 Speaker 02 It was, yeah. So it was a very, the company, the art of the company always from the beginning was kind of managing both.
27:56 Emma Grede? Yeah, and it's an art, right? Because the, I mean, seemingly these two industries between tech and entertainment are very, very differently. And I think so much of the success has been how those two things have been interwoven and the understanding between the two. But what did you do in the beginning?
28:12 Speaker 02 Remember those early days of tech with the entertainment business? Very few companies, there are very few tech companies have successful entertainment plays or the other way around either. And I think a lot of that is because as you try to jam the culture on each other. And I knew early on that we couldn't do that and Reid recognized it right away, too. So one of those days in the history of Netflix, I wanted everyone up there to know what happened in L.A. So I had everybody from come down from Los from Los Catos to L.A. We toured the Warner Brothers studio and we I rented the improv. And and I had Naomi Odenkirk, who's Bob's Odenkirk's wife, who was a talent booker in those days, booked ten great comedians and they came and saw Showbiz.
28:56 Emma Grede? Wow.
28:57 Speaker 02 And they had a real and they went back home and they talked about it for a year.
29:00 Emma Grede? Yeah.
29:00 Speaker 02 And it was part of the, you know, early formations of the company. And I used to I remember I used to really love to hear the engineers talk about the experience of having. Now, that night at the improv, it was Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Silverman.
29:13 Emma Grede? Wow.
29:14 Speaker 02 It was Patton Oswalt.
29:15 Emma Grede? Unbelievable, unbelievable.
29:17 Speaker 02 All killers. So they really had an experience that night.
29:19 Emma Grede? And was that something that worked both ways because you're really talking about building influence and credibility between the two like between the two teams? Did it work both ways that you had to show the entertainment folks how to have more understanding of the digital side of the business too?
29:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. I mean, and and we really had to do is had this this idea was don't spend all your energy trying to figure out how to code, figure out how to talk to the coders to get what you need and and vice versa. The biggest goal for me was if you're an engineer at Netflix, you work at the greatest tech company on the planet. If you are an entertainment executive at Netflix, you work at the greatest entertainment company.
29:54 Emma Grede? End of.
29:54 Speaker 02 And you're both right.
29:56 Emma Grede? Yeah, you're both correct. And it turned out that you were right about that. They really did.
30:00 Speaker 02 And we really.
30:00 Emma Grede? And they really do.
30:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we really did put a lot of energy behind it. And this was in the days in the early days of the tech entertainment tension was that the tech companies would fly to L.A. for the day and they'd hire a legal team and an agent. And they'd go in and talk to the studios with the lawyer and an agent. And then you write a very big check and they'd leave. And they didn't know that the studios were laughing, you know, when they laugh. And I would tell Reid, I go, we're not doing that.
30:23 Emma Grede? That is not what we're doing.
30:24 Speaker 02 I'm not going to move up here. I'm going to stay here. My kids are going to go to school with their kids and we're gonna.
30:29 Emma Grede? And that's just that. Did you ever feel like an outsider? Because you don't come from the studio system or from film school. So was there a part of you that was like, I'm an outsider in this business too?
30:38 Speaker 02 For sure, but I think it's probably my personality generally. When I was growing up, my my sis, the neighborhood we lived in, my two oldest sisters, Kathy and Jean, got into a thing with us, a gang of girls at at school. And when my parents went to the school to try to solve the problem, they said, she should probably transfer schools. It was that it was a violent neighborhood where we were living. And so my we switched schools when I was in junior high school. So all my friends went to one high school and I went to a new high school and I didn't know anybody. My friends, if you look back now, all this kind of stereotype of high school cliques, I had friends from all the cliques, like I'd never, I didn't have one specific one. So I was never really an outsider, but I didn't, I didn't feel like I was narrowly rooted in any one thing.
31:23 Speaker 02 So I thought Netflix suited me quite well in that way.
31:26 Emma Grede? Definitely. I feel like your story is so much about taking like unconventional bets in some ways. And I wonder how how you've learned to kind of double down and really trust your instincts in your life and your career.
31:40 Speaker 02 I don't know where it came from, but this notion of risk reward has kind of been my guiding light. Like if the prize is big enough, you should take pretty unreasonable risk. If it isn't, don't, but don't put things in jeopardy. But in the case of like original programming, it's probably the one thing that Reed didn't, he and I did not agree on, or that he didn't see as part of the vision at the beginning. And for me, it was an inevitability. You know, no network or no entertainment brand didn't have its own programming.
32:07 Emma Grede? Right.
32:07 Speaker 02 So at the time, I think Reed was trying to solve a different problem, which is, and he was smart. That's what, that's the problem that we needed to solve first. And then the original programming was kind of the icing on the cake.
32:17 Emma Grede? And original program was your thing. That was something that you were like taking that, or you were at the helm of.
32:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. And for me, it did not feel like a monumental bet. I really told, and we.
32:28 Emma Grede? I mean, but it was a monumental bet, right? When you look at what you've done and like the.
32:32 Speaker 02 Couldn't afford it for sure. So risky in that way. There's that. But I did tell Reed afterwards, because we made the deal and I told him about it. And he said, why would you, you know, that's a big risk, why would you do this? And I said, it's a risk reward. I said, if you've got, if this does not work, we will have overspent dramatically on one show.
32:50 Emma Grede? Yeah.
32:50 Speaker 02 We do it all the time. I go, if it does work, it will fundamentally change the course of the business. And he said, that totally makes sense. And we never talked about it again.
32:59 Emma Grede? I mean, I want to get into this original programming thing because it obviously has been so seismic and touched so many of our lives. But do you have any sort of beliefs or mental frameworks for when you're making those really big decisions that you go back to like time and time again?
33:13 Speaker 02 I mean, I think at the end of the day, when you, when you hear, I don't hear as many of the pitches as I used to, very few actually now. But it's what I think is interesting is, is it's the same fundamental question about every show you're gonna do, like, is this a world that people want to spend time in? Are these people that I care about, what happens to them? And do I, do I want to stick around to see how it ends? You know, and you could-
33:36 Emma Grede? Kind of feels so simple, right?
33:38 Speaker 02 At the end of the day, I think that's true across whatever it is. And then, you know, getting to the kind of essence of what the show is or what it's about, or who's gonna be in it, all those things of course matter because it's all about execution. But it all starts with a great idea. And if you can think about how many things, how many times was something a really bad idea, but executed so well that it worked? Pretty, very rare.
33:58 Emma Grede? No.
33:59 Speaker 02 Yeah.
33:59 Emma Grede? Doesn't happen.
34:00 Speaker 02 I, I, so I, I was thinking in the entertainment world, you'd think something like Avatar might be one of those things that wasn't a great idea, was basically the Fern Gully was the same idea.
34:09 Emma Grede? Yeah, you could, yeah, you could argue that.
34:11 Speaker 02 But the execution was so seismic.
34:12 Emma Grede? Mesmerizing, yes, that it turned out that way.
34:14 Speaker 02 As big as the budget for Titanic was, maybe that wasn't a great idea, but the execution-
34:18 Emma Grede? Pretty depressing story, but yes, it really worked out.
34:21 Speaker 02 You've already got a Titanic movie, yeah.
34:22 Emma Grede? Exactly, true.
34:23 Speaker 02 But I think they're rare, they're rare. So, real, when you hear a good idea, man, you better focus on the execution of that idea because they're so rare. And if you get them both, if you get the great idea and the great execution, you've got a monster.
34:35 Emma Grede? You've got a monster. So, talk to me about original programming at Netflix. How did it come around? What is your part in that? And what does that look like today? Because we all know the- Unbelievable success that you've had with original programming.
34:47 Speaker 02 So it was, we were buying licensing.
34:50 Emma Grede? Yeah.
34:50 Speaker 02 You know, just streaming rights for, um, and there was a movie, one thing we did not have was new movies. Back then, the pay TV deals would lock up movies for years. So basically you couldn't license a movie that played in the theater for a service like Netflix for 10 years after.
35:05 Emma Grede? Oh, wow.
35:06 Speaker 02 So we were always constantly, anytime a movie was in the wild, which would happen every once in a while, we would take the meeting and try to do it. So we licensed the movie, uh, Pan's Labyrinth. This happened to be, the pay TV rights weren't tied up. Uh, La Vie en Rose was one. So this company who had the rights to Bruno, which is a Sacha Baron Cohen movie, came in to pitch it, you know, that we want to buy the rights. And then on the way out the door, they just mentioned, hey, we're making a series of the British House of Cards, but set in Washington DC. Do you, do you guys want to hear the pitch? And, and I said, what, what, tell me more about that. And, cause I loved the British.
35:41 Emma Grede? It was so good.
35:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
35:42 Emma Grede? I mean, it was so good.
35:43 Speaker 02 And he said, uh, uh, yeah, so it's Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright are going to star in it. David Fincher is going to direct television for the first time. So I said, so we started talking about it after they left and I said, wow, like what is, and this is where a little bit of data you looked at and go in and said, you know, people seem to really, people love Kevin Spacey movies. They're like, how do they perform on Netflix? How about David Fincher movies? How about movies about politics, about all this? So you're looking at all this swirl of things thinking, if it's well done, this could have a real audience.
36:12 Emma Grede? But there was no original programming at that time at Netflix. So how did you even have the remit to Greenlight, something like that? Cause I imagine it was so expensive.
36:19 Speaker 02 Well, I think it was, it was a hundred million dollar investment for sure. But it was one of these things for us at the time. My remit was let's get programming on Netflix so people could watch. And we're, is the more we can grow the streaming, the more we could prove out the, you know, the model, both for consumers and for the suppliers too. For me is like, we had done some, this deal with Starz programming. So we got the Starz program in the same time it was on TV. It was a hack of the system. It wasn't, you know, any genius move. But this one was, well, this is a show that will be the hottest package in television this year. HBO wants it, AMC wants it, FX, everyone wanted it. And, and I said, so why would they sell it to us? We've never done this before. And I said, we have to figure out what is, there's a thousand reasons to say no. What's the one path to yes?
37:03 Emma Grede? What'd you come up with?
37:04 Speaker 02 It was I give them a two season order with no notes, but promise them no creative interference.
37:10 Emma Grede? Oh.
37:10 Speaker 02 So at that time.
37:11 Emma Grede? That's big.
37:12 Speaker 02 It was big at that time.
37:13 Emma Grede? That's big. If you're David Fincher, you're like, I'll ta- I'll take that.
37:15 Speaker 02 At the time, it would be very rare to even go direct to series, let alone, you know, a two season pickup. So they knew.
37:21 Emma Grede? So an even bigger bet then?
37:23 Speaker 02 It was a big, yeah, it was very big. And but I do think it was no, that was the clearing price for us. No- nobody would sell good things to us that way. We might got lucky.
37:31 Emma Grede? Fair enough. Yeah.
37:32 Speaker 02 So we had to really change the algebra here. We had to figure out how, what is our path in when we have really nothing but promise?
37:39 Emma Grede? And obviously, we all know how that turned out. We're incredibly, unbelievably successful. But was that the, was that the thing that then changed everything in terms of like programming at Netflix? That meant that you had the remit to go?
37:51 Speaker 02 I think it, what it did was unlock, again, possibility.
37:54 Emma Grede? Right.
37:55 Speaker 02 You say, well, if that, we need more of that, that work. We need those ones that work. And we had a great, look, I also think it's really lucky that we had such a great first set of releases.
38:05 Emma Grede? Yes.
38:06 Speaker 02 Rested Development reboot.
38:07 Emma Grede? Crazy.
38:07 Speaker 02 House of Cards, Orange is the New Black. Uh, we did Lilyhammer, which was this kind of funky thing that turned out to be really important to the company's future growth.
38:15 Emma Grede? Right.
38:16 Speaker 02 Which was a show that was made in Norway.
38:18 Emma Grede? I didn't see that one.
38:19 Speaker 02 Oh, it was, so basically, it really was the first launch of an original show on Netflix. After we did that deal for House of Cards, people in town heard about it.
38:28 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
38:28 Speaker 02 And I got a call from an agent, said Stevie Van Zandt would like to talk to you. And I said, oh, my God, I love the East Street Band. This would be great. So I take the call from Stevie. He's so funny and so cool. And he said, I'm in Norway. I'm, I came over to produce an album. And these people brought me a script. And it's this really crazy show called Lilyhammer about a mobster who's in witness relocation in Lilyhammer, Norway. And he basically mobs up this little town in Norway. And he's a lot like the character he played in The Sopranos. So I just, I go, well, can you send me a script or something? He goes, I'll send you the whole show. We already shot it. He goes, I just need to make some money so I can put some music in the show.
39:04 Emma Grede? So you got to see the whole show?
39:06 Speaker 02 So I got to see the whole show. It was a slam dunk. We bought it on the, on the, on site. So, so that was our first launch. And it was now one of those things that has become a bit of a superpower for us.
39:15 Emma Grede? Yes.
39:15 Speaker 02 Being able to produce local language content, you know, and find a global audience for it. And we got their first taste of it. And then it's also because we had the whole show done. We put it all up at once. So it started the kind of all at once. It started the mixed language.
39:29 Emma Grede? Yeah.
39:29 Speaker 02 International production for the US. All of these different things that are so important to our business today.
39:33 Emma Grede? No, and so important to your business. And it seems to me like you have this wonderful ability to to be both like a friend and a supporter to the creative, but also have this executive language and the executive prowess. How have you been able to walk that line? Who taught you that? Like, how? I just, that's a really big thing. And I think it's something that a lot of people really struggle with. Usually you're like one or the other.
39:58 Speaker 02 I love the talent. I really love, I can totally respect what they do. I totally respect how difficult it is. Back to my Phoenix days, the drinking age in Arizona was nineteen.
40:08 Emma Grede? Oh.
40:09 Speaker 02 And which means that you could get away with it when you're about seventeen.
40:12 Emma Grede? I always forget that it's twenty one in America. I come from a place where it's sixteen. So I'm like nineteen. What?
40:18 Speaker 02 So I didn't like, so my friends, you know, they all like to go into the bars and I didn't like, I didn't dance. So I'd go to the comedy club. And in the eighties in Phoenix, there was like this comedy boom and all this great, incredible talent would come to Phoenix. So that gave me kind of an early touch into kind of
40:35 Emma Grede? Yeah.
40:36 Speaker 02 that culture. Got to know some of them and I would hear them tell the stories about how they did a pilot and they would get these notes on their pilot about like not whether or not the joke was funny or not, but whether I should be wearing a blue shirt or a red shirt, all this kind of arbitrary thing. And I figured that early on that creative, very creative people need protectors. They need someone to help them clear the deck of all that noise so that they can do the best work of their life.
41:02 Emma Grede? And you think Netflix has taken that on as a, like a corporate disposition, like we will be the friend of the creator?
41:09 Speaker 02 Yeah. And not to the point that it's a bad business.
41:11 Emma Grede? Mm hmm. Of course.
41:12 Speaker 02 There's ways to make sure that you're meeting the needs of everybody all the time. So we had this kind of advantage in this creative interference model, which was I didn't have any people. So I had no one to interfere with you. And so
41:23 Emma Grede? There's that.
41:26 Speaker 02 But it gave us the ability to say if you give people, the right people, the tools they need to do the best work of their life, they want to please. They want to please the audience. They want to please you. They want to do the best work of their life.
41:37 Emma Grede? So how do you decipher who's the right people? Who do you bet on?
41:40 Speaker 02 Some of it's intuition.
41:42 Emma Grede? Right.
41:42 Speaker 02 A lot of it's track record. You know, people mistake track record and data, like data is a bad thing and track record is a great thing. But track record and data are the exact same thing. So you've got somebody who, you know, it shouldn't be a big deal. Do you take a risk about Martin Scorsese making a great mob movie? So we make, made The Irishman. It didn't feel like a big swing at all.
42:03 Emma Grede? No, right.
42:03 Speaker 02 It was expensive.
42:04 Emma Grede? Sometimes like the most obvious things, I read something the other day where it was like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger and it was like their, their ability to hire the best CEOs for their companies over and over again. And somebody asked them at one shareholders meeting, like, how'd you do that? And they said, you know, we just look for somebody who has done the exact same job somewhere else similar and had an incredible result. And I was like, yeah, it's so obvious, but yeah, that'll do it. But that's essentially what you were doing. You were backing the best in class talent and you were getting out of their way.
42:35 Speaker 02 Getting out of their way. And that's the, and that was the thing that won them over. That's the only thing that was standing in the way. Because at the time I couldn't deliver, I could deliver, I could compete with the money, but I couldn't deliver the audience yet. Which I think is ultimately the most important part is you have to be able to deliver the audience.
42:50 Emma Grede? So how did you, but how did you do that in the early days? And how did you know? Because again, we're talking about seismic shifts in the way people consume entertainment, the way we use technology. How have you been able to stay clear headed and focused in a time where so much was changing?
43:07 Speaker 02 Well, I think the, the discipline function is you have to spend proportionally to help people watch.
43:13 Emma Grede? Right.
43:14 Speaker 02 Now, do it wisely. You could do it all day. You know, you make too many bad bets and you're
43:18 Emma Grede? You're out of business.
43:20 Speaker 02 You're out of the business. So the goal here is to keep doing it all to do it in a way that we can keep doing it all day. So to do that, you have to make these very wise decisions. And sometimes you have to say, have the discipline to say no, even if you love it, even if you love the person, because there just is not a business solution to it. So I think there's always this idea that there is that art and commerce are somehow in conflict with each other. And I actually don't think they are at all. I think they enable each other. They give each other a reason. So for me, it's like there, I can read a script and say, this is a beautiful piece of art.
43:52 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
43:52 Speaker 02 It's just not a piece of business. And I don't want to see this movie. I just don't want to fund it.
43:57 Emma Grede? There. You're like, that's just not for me. You've said that great storytelling isn't built by algorithms, but by passion and risk. And so I guess for somebody not just in this field, but for any, in any field, how do you learn to trust your instincts in a data driven world?
44:14 Speaker 02 Well, first, I think data informed intuition is a real, is a winning formula.
44:19 Emma Grede? Data informed intuition.
44:20 Speaker 02 So you have intuition, but and you can back it up or you can challenge it with data all day long.
44:26 Emma Grede? How do you make sure that the two, like that one doesn't impede on the other? Do you, do you let yourself like feel what you think about something and then look at the data? Or are you letting the data inform how you feel?
44:36 Speaker 02 As animals, we have this confirmation bias we have to be very careful of.
44:39 Emma Grede? Very.
44:40 Speaker 02 Not looking for the data to confirm our intuition, but just saying, actually the opposite. You know, it's kind of one of our core culture things at Netflix is farming for dissent.
44:48 Emma Grede? What does that mean?
44:49 Speaker 02 You go out and look for people to disagree with you.
44:52 Emma Grede? Oh, I love that. Yes.
44:53 Speaker 02 Farm for dissent. And in this case.
44:56 Emma Grede? That's an amazing way to say it. Farming for dissent.
44:58 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I think for, for the, when you're looking for data, don't look for data to back up your intuition. Look for data to challenge your intuition. And then you feel much better about the decision when you're done. If you've really have done that honestly with yourself.
45:09 Emma Grede? It's so hard for people to do.
45:11 Speaker 02 And I thought, I heard a great thing. I think it was Jeff Bezos said it one time. He said, right? If your intuition and the data don't match, you might be asking the wrong question. So it's not that the, yeah, don't, don't question the intuition or the data.
45:23 Emma Grede? Question the question.
45:24 Speaker 02 Question the question. And it's so true. After I read that.
45:27 Emma Grede? Yeah, that's really, that's really true. You're asking the wrong thing.
45:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
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47:55 Emma Grede? Do you have, I just wonder, like you as in Ted the businessman, do you have non-negotiables in the way that you think about like your business, your life, your rituals, like are there things that you think this like enables me to do what I do and be good at what I do?
48:11 Speaker 02 I don't know that in life today that you can have non-negotiables. I mean, I think you have to figure out how to meet people where they are. And what chances are you willing to take and which ones are you not? I think it's important, but I also think that you can, it can narrow your, your choices a lot. And sometimes the biggest cost in business you have is lack of choice. So for me, it's like before you have a non-negotiable, you should have exhausted every other path to get there.
48:39 Emma Grede? You better have exhausted. And that's the beautiful thing because the more successful you are, the more choices you have.
48:43 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, that's.
48:45 Emma Grede? You've got a lot of choices now, Ted.
48:47 Speaker 02 And interestingly, I think when people, companies get big, people get scared and they really, they try to protect, you know, they, when you're in the best shape of your life, that's when you should be able to take, you know, to try the hard thing.
48:58 Emma Grede? So how do you keep?
48:59 Speaker 02 I think that's when people try to avoid.
49:00 Emma Grede? No, of course, of course it is. But in a massive company like you are, how do you keep the spirit of where you started? And leading with, you know, intuition, like if you've got all of these people, how do you engrain that in everyone around you?
49:14 Speaker 02 You have to celebrate wins and you have to demystify losses. Like you can't have this like mythological fear of losing. Talk about when things wipe out, like talk about them really openly and candidly. Even jab people a little bit like, what were you thinking?
49:28 Emma Grede? Can you do that to yourselves? You can?
49:31 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And I do it myself, like what was I thinking? I say that all the time.
49:36 Speaker 02 But I do think it's one of those things where again, it's back to risk reward. Like there's things about in your business that, if they're catastrophic. You should absolutely be very careful.
49:46 Emma Grede? Yes.
49:47 Speaker 02 All the time. And don't, you know, take very calculated moves only. If it's catastrophic, if the outcome's catastrophic.
49:53 Emma Grede? Yes.
49:54 Speaker 02 Most decisions are not. And I think we tend to think of almost every decision as a catastrophic, you know, outcome. When most of them really aren't. So, understanding the difference is really, really important. And like I said, demystify, celebrate when people took a big bet and missed. Didn't wipe out anybody, it didn't change the outcome of the business much. We learned something, let's not, you know, let's not make the same mistake a thousand times. But go ahead and make a thousand mistakes over your life, you know?
50:20 Emma Grede? And obviously, I feel like Netflix's biggest gambles have really paid off. But is there one risk that still really haunts you?
50:28 Speaker 02 Haunting is not a good example, but I never want to, I don't feel haunted by it, I never want to forget. There was a, when we did the, the split of streaming and DVD by mail, it's called Quickster, we formed a new company. And the ultimate thing was, the decision was totally sound. Like, we had to do that. It was a, it was existential if we didn't at some point monetize streaming.
50:49 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
50:50 Speaker 02 So it was definitely the right thing to do. We missed, we had a miscalculation in the consumer reaction.
50:56 Emma Grede? Right.
50:57 Speaker 02 For a company that is very focused on the consumer. We missed the idea that people who were not directly impacted by a change would be upset by it. Because, because.
51:07 Emma Grede? You mean like people that weren't even your customers?
51:09 Speaker 02 No, uh, no, somebody, so basically if you were only taking DVDs, you're only streaming. You actually got a price decrease in one case and nothing in the other. But if you were doing both, you got a basically a gigantic price increase.
51:21 Emma Grede? Got it.
51:22 Speaker 02 And so if your next door neighbor got a big price increase and you didn't, they were still mad at you.
51:27 Emma Grede? You were pissed, yeah.
51:28 Speaker 02 They were still pissed.
51:28 Emma Grede? Yeah, fair.
51:29 Speaker 02 So, and that was a big, that was a miss, that's how we miscalculated, you know, the churn impact from that. But I look back at that and think, you know, again, the haunting is, don't forget about all the different aspects of consumer satisfaction.
51:41 Emma Grede? Yeah, and that's really hard to do when you're in it, like you guys are in it, because you were trying to make a big, your big change, which ultimately paid off.
51:48 Speaker 02 And if we had just had known the number, I think we might have ultimately done exactly the same thing.
51:52 Emma Grede? Yeah, you would have just digested it differently.
51:54 Speaker 02 Come a hundred percent.
51:54 Emma Grede? Hundred percent.
51:55 Speaker 02 And prepared people for a different.
51:56 Emma Grede? Yes, yes, exactly. Do you think about Netflix as something that saved Hollywood or ruined it?
52:03 Speaker 02 Well, look, self-serving answer, I think it's saving. Because here's what I do, here's what I, a lot of people get wrapped up in the idea of how things used to be.
52:11 Emma Grede? Yeah.
52:11 Speaker 02 And there's something to that. There is something great about them. What inspired me to do what I'm doing now is that stuff that I watched when I was young.
52:18 Emma Grede? Yes.
52:18 Speaker 02 So are we making things like that anymore? You know, those kind of things. So there's something to it for sure. But old habits.
52:23 Emma Grede? And arguably, I mean, like, you really are. Like, I look at Stranger Things that my son, who's eleven, just showed me. I never watched it the first time around. I'm like in season three, watching it with my eleven-year-old. And it is like watching my childhood. I feel like I'm watching E.T. or something like so nostalgic and so beautiful. And I feel like that's the difference. Because at Netflix, the the stuff is like so, like it's so much quality to it.
52:45 Speaker 02 This is what we try, I mean, I tried to, like I said, that thing that inspired me, are we doing that for people today?
52:51 Emma Grede? Hmm.
52:51 Speaker 02 And the big part of that is, have you developed a model that ensures that movies get made? And that movies get watched?
52:59 Emma Grede? Yeah.
53:00 Speaker 02 That's what matters. So for me, it's like the the art form is above the distribution platform or above the the business model. But the art, the art form, to me, there is no business model without the art form and vice versa. So for me, it's like, yeah, if people now would like to stay home and watch movies on Friday night instead of going to the theater, let's meet the customer where they are and make great movies for them. And that to me, then when you say, say we're ruined.
53:21 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
53:22 Speaker 02 You know, people who, in a very, very narrowly, people say, you know, my movie theater didn't, you know, may have closed down. It wasn't because of Netflix, it was because people like.
53:30 Emma Grede? Behavior changed, yeah.
53:31 Speaker 02 Behavior changed.
53:31 Emma Grede? Behavior just changed. It was inevitable.
53:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we would have, we have uncovered and discovered and honed a business model that ensures the long-lasting, you know, and a long-lasting life for filmmakers.
53:44 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
53:44 Speaker 02 And for film lovers, that's great news.
53:46 Emma Grede? That's great news. Do you think, I mean, does streaming just survive now? And if, and if it doesn't, like, what is next?
53:53 Speaker 02 Well, I I think, though, I don't know that there's a internet-level disruption coming in distribution over the next decade. I mean, the internet was a pretty seismic shift, shifting things. There'll be changes in creativity, I think, and how things get made. I think will be, which will be very interesting. You know, A.I. certainly being part of it. But also, you know, how A.I. Creates the tools that we use to tell stories even better. Like all those things, there's there'll be a lot of that kind of disruption that'll go on over the next couple of years. But I don't see a internet level disruption in the kind of distribution business.
54:25 Emma Grede? You don't because you don't think that AI is coming to completely like do something that we don't even understand just yet.
54:30 Speaker 02 I think it's creating tools for filmmakers that empower them to tell ways to tell stories they never could tell before.
54:36 Emma Grede? And there's nothing in those tools that concerns you that we get rid of like, you know, because again, I'm watching, you know, the the battle with various different, you know, entertainers with their name, image and likeness and the worries around things like that. Is that something that is worrying to you or you just think it's all about progress?
54:53 Speaker 02 No, I think, reading, I used to have this argument about whether or not I thought that in some ways the world was better when Walter Cronkite was the source of truth. You know, and
55:06 Emma Grede? Yeah.
55:07 Speaker 02 Because I think having a source of truth was a good thing.
55:10 Emma Grede? It was very helpful for all of us.
55:11 Speaker 02 Wrong, even if it was wrong about that.
55:13 Emma Grede? No, no, but you know, there were great things about it.
55:15 Speaker 02 And then, you know, then you think of all the the things that have progressed because we traded that in for the internet.
55:22 Emma Grede? Yeah.
55:22 Speaker 02 For lots of sources, you figure out the truth, that kind of thing. And so there's an underlying piece to any kind of progress. People, if you're riding your horse around, you probably didn't want them at the cars to scare your horse on the road.
55:33 Emma Grede? Fair enough.
55:33 Speaker 02 There's all those kinds of things that happen. You have to make those trade offs all the time, but don't let it stand in the way. Don't let the possibility of a downside take away the probability of an upside. You know, and that's what I think is happening with the cost of productions getting so high. That you look at some of these film, you know, like, is it ever a good business to make a three or four hundred million dollar movie? If the monetization model isn't moving faster and these tools can do a very similar thing.
55:57 Emma Grede? Yes.
55:57 Speaker 02 For a more controllable price.
55:59 Emma Grede? Yeah, I mean, and seemingly, I think it's really interesting because we talk about, you know, Netflix's competition as being other streamers or studios, but you know, I think about YouTube, for example, right? YouTube is where if if you're my eleven year old or my eight year old, they're glued to YouTube for as long as I will allow them to be there, which is not very long. Um, but you know, when you think about what's happening on a platform like that where it's user generated content that is actually costing absolutely nothing and kind of this endless, unlimited watch time, how are you thinking about that part of the business?
56:31 Speaker 02 Think about every innovation since you and I were born, television. Pay television, VCRs, DVD players, the internet, the smartphone, the iPad. Through all of those changes, professional storytelling has been a remarkably resilient business. You know, the, the, right?
56:51 Emma Grede? Yes.
56:51 Speaker 02 The actual hours of consumption of television are pretty flat. They're pretty.
56:55 Emma Grede? Are they?
56:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. You'd think they would crater, right?
56:58 Emma Grede? Yeah.
56:58 Speaker 02 Through all this, but they actually maintained. And I feel like there's the positive that comes from all that activity on YouTube, which is it's a promotional vehicle for a lot of long form storytelling that people like to have. And then there's this other place where it kind of meets in the middle, where creators have a little, have a lot more opportunity and access to break through because the cost of production is literally in your pocket right now.
57:20 Emma Grede? Literally.
57:20 Speaker 02 And you can, and, and distribution is possible too, right? From, you never, you never even leave your house. So that's a very, that's unbelievable for creators to be discovered and figure out, you know, then, then how do they go on to tell the stories that we talk about 50 years from now?
57:34 Emma Grede? Exactly.
57:35 Speaker 02 And so I think it's a great area of opportunity. And I think the YouTube is a complementary in many ways, competitive in some ways, of course, because it's TV time. But most, for the most part, it's a great vehicle for discovering the talent, for promoting existing stories. And it's, and on the side, it's also created its own form of entertainment.
57:54 Emma Grede? So what do you think that Netflix has that YouTube doesn't then, the other way around?
57:58 Speaker 02 Well, one is that we, with a, for a creator, we can do the monetization and share in the financial risk to tell more ambitious stories. So in that way, it's all basically you, you bring the project, the project and we'll share in the, in the rewards. For us, it's like we can share in some of the financial risk and enable more, perhaps more aspirational, more ambitious storytelling.
58:21 Emma Grede? Yeah, well, I feel like you're doing so many different things. We spoke a bit earlier about the exploration with video podcasts. I'm very lucky that I know all about Miss Rachel because I have a two, three year old. So that's a part of my life every day. But also, you know, I had Meghan, Duchess of Sussex on this podcast. And she spoke a lot about the type of partnership that you've done with her, which is like outside of the, outside of the show, the as ever brand. So is that the type of? I'm just trying to think about the the mix and the various different parts of the business. Is that more of the direction that you'll go in that will set you apart from the other platforms?
58:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, look, I think what we have is cultural relevance. YouTube does too, but I would say that we have cultural relevance in a way that most outlets do not. That when you go to a dinner party and someone says, oh, my God, did you see? The chances are they have Netflix and they can go home and play and watch it.
59:08 Emma Grede? Yep.
59:09 Speaker 02 That's a very big thing. And in fact, I think one thing we learned early with with Megan, she has remarkable influence.
59:16 Emma Grede? Remarkable.
59:17 Speaker 02 Remarkable. So when we did the documentary on her and Harry, when we ran the trailer announcing it, people, hundreds of people broke down every frame of the trailer and would.
59:30 Emma Grede? We note it, we're seeing this on a on a micro level right now.
59:34 Speaker 02 And the $20 shoes that she got from, you know, from the village that was making these shoes, sold out all over the world. And the $1,500 blanket that was on the chair sold out all over the world.
59:45 Emma Grede? Some power, that's some influence.
59:46 Speaker 02 Incredible power and influence you could put. And I and I think that so that for me, it's like, OK, well, how do we? How can we enable this to be some more holistic thing?
59:55 Emma Grede? Yes.
59:56 Speaker 02 So that's what that relationship.
59:57 Emma Grede? But I mean, the consumer products business is a very different thing, right? For you guys to go from having the data and understanding that a trailer with those two can do those type of numbers and then have the commercial impact to actually starting a brand, a physical consumer product.
1:00:12 Speaker 02 Was also one of the most watched documentaries we've ever read.
1:00:14 Emma Grede? Wow.
1:00:15 Speaker 02 So it was very, it was successful in every by every measure. Now, I don't think that you can have a consumer business, a consumer products business, if you don't have a great entertainment business. So that's got to come first.
1:00:25 Emma Grede? It's got to come first.
1:00:26 Speaker 02 It's one of the funny thing, I don't, I don't think much about legacy about.
1:00:31 Emma Grede? You don't?
1:00:32 Speaker 02 No, no, no, for sure not.
1:00:33 Emma Grede? For the company and for yourself or just for yourself?
1:00:36 Speaker 02 For sure.
1:00:36 Emma Grede? Yeah, but for yourself.
1:00:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. So company a hundred percent. But I think.
1:00:40 Emma Grede? That's so interesting for someone like you.
1:00:42 Speaker 02 Well, you know what? I read a lot about the history of our business. There's a guy, William Paley from CBS, who very few people.
1:00:51 Speaker 02 Know what he is or what he did. And he changed everything about. He took CBS from radio to television, from syndication to owner operated chat channels, to creating content for the channels out there, or understanding that we can't sell advertising unless people are watching our shows, we have to make great shows. Created the format of color television, basically, that became pale, that you probably use it in outside of the US. But it was, that was all started, see, all started by William Paley. So anyone who thinks that anyone's gonna, if they don't remember who William Paley is, they're not gonna remember who I am.
1:01:25 Emma Grede? You're realistic, fair enough.
1:01:27 Speaker 02 I'm realistic. So don't think about things like on those terms, but think about things like, how do you enable things to go to the next level? If you're thinking about legacy, you probably get more nervous about risk, and you definitely probably get your eye off the prize, which is, again, back to the end user.
1:01:44 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:01:44 Speaker 02 These people, they've got to be entertained. They've got to love what they're watching. They won't watch ads if they're not, they won't buy products if they're not, they won't stay a subscriber if they're not. So at the end of the day, the whole thing is, how do you bring incredible entertainment to people at scale? When we have 700 million people who watch Netflix all the time.
1:02:04 Emma Grede? It's just wild.
1:02:05 Speaker 02 Everyone's taste is so remarkably different.
1:02:07 Emma Grede? Everyone's taste is so different.
1:02:08 Speaker 02 So much stuff.
1:02:09 Emma Grede? But it's interesting to me, because I heard that you kind of set your sights on this $1 trillion valuation, which is by 2030, am I right in that?
1:02:18 Speaker 02 That's not the goal.
1:02:19 Emma Grede? Okay.
1:02:20 Speaker 02 I was like, that's a possible outcome if we do everything else really well. That's the, that's the idea, is I think when we think about, how do we continue to grow the business on the trajectory we've been growing on? And we're so underpenetrated around the world, it's very possible that we continue to grow on that, as long as we execute.
1:02:35 Emma Grede? So what are the key strategic moves, but also what are the like, leadership principles that are gonna get Netflix to the next? Because you're a huge, huge part of that. So how do you think about getting to the next milestone for the business?
1:02:48 Speaker 02 Well, the core thing is, is that, you know, at our current size and our current membership base and our current engagement, we're about 5% of consumer spending on the things that we do. We're about 10% of TV time in our most mature markets. So we've got, as long as we can win those moments of truth. We have the movie that you're dying to see, the TV show you can't. You have to stay up one more hour, watch one more episode before you go to bed. As long as we continue to do that at the rate that we're doing and just constantly improve on it. We've got so much room to grow that. I mean, imagine when we said double, we double our, the base or double the revenue, double the engagement. You're talking about, you're still in the kind of low double digits in terms of market share.
1:03:32 Speaker 02 This is a very big market. We're very good at it, but we have to keep being very good at it to keep ahead of everybody else. And kind of, how do you kind of beat yourself?
1:03:41 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:03:41 Speaker 02 Because we focus on that all the time. How do we be better than Netflix from last year? You know, Reid used to always tell us, you know, we suck today compared to what we're going to be tomorrow. So, yeah, to keep perspective.
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1:05:34 Emma Grede? What do you think that it takes, and this is more of a personal question, to lead a company from like a DVD mailer company, which is what Netflix was, to the kind of trillion dollar dream of the future?
1:05:45 Speaker 02 So I'll tell you, this is back to that early 1999 meeting with Reed. He said something that now in hindsight was very telling, which was that I'm going to build a company that's going to be around way after me. So what he said in that explicitly was there was going to be a succession. This company was going to be around longer than Reed. So he started thinking about succession a long time before he actually moved on. And he brought me on as a co-CEO, which is unheard of for a founder to bring on a co-CEO, bring in a co-CEO. And what he was doing back then was, I think, trying to prove to himself and to the board and to me that this was a good model.
1:06:29 Speaker 02 And a company that we, he and I had this kind of unofficial, you know, way of separating the entertainment and the tech side of the business and focusing on those two things. That was never really written in a job description or anything, but that this was a great way to do this and have a successful succession, which would be required if I'm going to have a company that's going to be around after me. So I mean, he's a genius in that way and he's incredibly generous. The fact that I exist makes no sense really in a way. You'd have to have a CEO with a lack of ego to have, you know, the voice and the face of the company so often be someone other than the founding CEO. He was 100% totally committed to the success of the business.
1:07:11 Speaker 02 And he understood human nature enough to know that it would take proving. So he set off on this plan to have a succession and to create this co-CEO model. And I don't think the co-CEO model is for everybody.
1:07:22 Emma Grede? No.
1:07:22 Speaker 02 But for our business, it works really well. And Greg and I have this relationship similar to what Reid and I had in that our focus is on our deep expertise.
1:07:32 Emma Grede? Expertise.
1:07:32 Speaker 02 And our deep passion.
1:07:33 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:07:33 Speaker 02 And we defer to each other in those things that are, what are the things that you know more than I do? And you're more passionate about it than I am. But that solves all the jump balls, which was my biggest concern about co-CEOs down the road would be, well, what do you do when you disagree?
1:07:47 Emma Grede? Totally. What do you do when you disagree?
1:07:49 Speaker 02 Well, that's it. You defer to each other in the areas of expertise and passion. And then you support each, and you support each other.
1:07:54 Emma Grede? No matter what.
1:07:55 Speaker 02 No matter what. And I think that that's been so important. And you'd say, how do you, how do you keep doing this?
1:07:59 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:08:00 Speaker 02 I think it's a great example, like last week, I was in, in Madrid at our 10th anniversary event with all of our talent and the media and the government in Spain. And Greg was in the UK at the Wall Street Journal conference. So somehow the CEO of Netflix was in two places at once. It's a big, big surprise.
1:08:18 Emma Grede? Kind of amazing. It brings a whole new meaning to divide and conquer.
1:08:22 Speaker 02 To try it.
1:08:22 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:08:23 Speaker 02 You have to have two people who respect each other.
1:08:25 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:08:25 Speaker 02 Who like each other, who complement, who skill sets complement each other. I, I would say this with a complete confidence that I don't want Greg to go away so I can be the CEO. And he doesn't want me to go away so he can be the CEO. I never wanted Reid to go anywhere. So you have to have people like that who mostly are concerned with the success of the business and the welfare of the business over their own title or position or here, or career trajectory.
1:08:47 Emma Grede? And, and what happens with Reid now? Do you still speak to him? Because obviously he's such a visionary and such an incredible guy.
1:08:54 Speaker 02 All the time.
1:08:54 Emma Grede? You've still had that connectivity to, around the business.
1:08:57 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a great, like for us, it's, it's a great safety net. It's a great thing, hey, we're thinking about this, what do you think about this?
1:09:03 Emma Grede? I mean, well, we'd, we'd all take a little conversation with Reid about anything, wouldn't we?
1:09:07 Speaker 02 A hundred percent.
1:09:08 Emma Grede? The idea that you get to do it about his baby is, yeah. Who else have you had in your career, like a mentor or somebody that's been important to you as you've kind of been in this unbelievable career that you've had for the last 30 years?
1:09:21 Speaker 02 The thing you said about people who've done it before and people, I mean, it's a real feat to have achieved some of the things that I, one of the great luxuries of my job is I've had the opportunity to meet, in some cases really get to know all my heroes. Like there's, I don't, I don't think of anybody yet really that. I haven't met yet that I really want to, or that I feel like, oh my God.
1:09:44 Emma Grede? How lucky.
1:09:45 Speaker 02 And I've taken something from all of those relationships over the years. And, you know, they're by definition, they're older than I am, which was at some point I realized to myself, wow, these, my heroes, I'm gonna lose them. So when Norman Lear passed, for me, this was like a source of great inspiration.
1:10:04 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:10:04 Speaker 02 Creative inspiration, business inspiration, understood storytelling, understood the audience. And also was just like a spiritually centered person, you know, and he would make you think bigger than yourself and whatever challenges you might be having right now. We'd sit down to dinner and almost every single time he would say the same thing. Imagine how many things had to happen for you and I to be sitting right here, right now. Every single time.
1:10:29 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:10:30 Speaker 02 And so, and I knew I was, we're gonna lose Norman at some point. He was, you know, he's a hundred years old, but I was, but for me, it was one of the, one of my great mentors and heroes that I got incredible experience of spending time with. Recently, I met Dick Van Dyke.
1:10:46 Emma Grede? Oh, my goodness, you did?
1:10:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:10:47 Emma Grede? And the reason why the way. I'm such a huge Dick Van Dyke fan, I can't even tell you.
1:10:51 Speaker 02 So when I used, I told you my parents would let me stay up all night watching TV. What did I watch?
1:10:55 Emma Grede? Well, you had the Dick Van Dyke show.
1:10:57 Speaker 02 Jack Benny, Burns and Allen, I Love Lucy. And so I've seen every episode of Dick Van Dyke a hundred times. I never got the chance to meet him and I went out to see him in Malibu.
1:11:05 Emma Grede? You did?
1:11:05 Speaker 02 I sat for a couple of hours.
1:11:06 Emma Grede? Is he in Malibu?
1:11:07 Speaker 02 He's amazing, yes. He's amazing.
1:11:09 Emma Grede? You might find me walking around trying to find him. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times I've watched Mary Poppins, just because of Dick Van Dyke. I mean, I just, I was just obsessed. I was obsessed with his body movements and the way he had this terrible accent.
1:11:22 Speaker 02 Mary Poppins.
1:11:23 Emma Grede? Yes, no, he doesn't.
1:11:24 Speaker 02 From Mary Poppins from Disneyland, that they were gonna, when they did a remodel or something, he wanted.
1:11:28 Emma Grede? Insane.
1:11:29 Speaker 02 It's in his living room.
1:11:31 Emma Grede? That's a lot to live with. That's a real lot to live with.
1:11:33 Speaker 02 And then on business side, the Bob Daley who worked for, for, for Bill Paley. That's all I know so much about Bill Paley, from Bob Daley. You know, to understand, here's the guy who basically, why there's a movie of the week, like that. To me, it's like, that's, you know, the guy who put movies on television.
1:11:47 Emma Grede? So how have you, what did you do to cultivate those relationships? Because again, you were operating in a totally different time, in a totally different, you know, like Netflix was doing stuff that nobody else had done before. So how did you speak to those guys and make it make sense for where you were?
1:12:03 Speaker 02 I, I think early on, I mean, I'm a fan. At the core, I'm a fan. I think they're used to talking to a fan. And so that was a big part of it. And I think, again, I have this mixed memories of my parents because young and chaotic and all those things were all true. But also, they created these amazing opportunities that shaped who I am.
1:12:23 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:12:24 Speaker 02 When I was like 10 years old, my parents would go to Las Vegas for Labor Day weekend. And I would get dropped off at the Sands Hotel for the Jerry Lewis telethon. And I would go and watch the show live and then go back and you get in line and you go back through for 24 hours, 10 years old, alone in Las Vegas, going to this thing. Now, because of that, I saw John Carson, I saw George Burns, I saw all these people that had such an enormous influence on my life and what I wanted to do and that encouraged, that built my passion for entertainment in so many ways. That because of my parents being kind of reckless, it exposed me to things that I wouldn't have otherwise ever had the opportunity to see and know. So when I talked to, it was like I'm a bit of an old soul in a way.
1:13:08 Speaker 02 So when I talked to them, I could talk to them about, because I have a deep knowledge of not just their work, but what was going on in the world when they were doing that work. So to me, that's the most valuable thing you could have is mentor and people who've gone ahead of you and have done it at a level that you can only dream of.
1:13:26 Emma Grede? That you can only dream of. I want to talk to you a little bit about family because you have a wonderful wife who I know very well, and you've got kids. And obviously, you've built this career. How do you think about your family and what you've been able to do and put all of those things together? What does that look like to you?
1:13:44 Speaker 02 It's interesting, Nicole, our coming together was so... Now you look at it and go, of course, these two came together, you know? It didn't make any-
1:13:53 Emma Grede? It seemed so obvious to me.
1:13:55 Speaker 02 It didn't make any sense at the time, but boy, it does now. And I just remember when I first met her, I couldn't take my eyes off her and both because she's beautiful, but also this energy that she had.
1:14:05 Emma Grede? But also, I mean, to be quite honest, for a guy like you, from where you were from, you kind of married like a Hollywood princess or something. I don't know how to describe it, but she's like Hollywood royalty.
1:14:15 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. And I, in fact, I didn't even know who she was at the time.
1:14:19 Emma Grede? You didn't know who she was?
1:14:20 Speaker 02 When we met, I did not know who she was. I did not know her family.
1:14:24 Emma Grede? So I know the story because I've asked Nicole, you met at an Obama fundraiser. You were very late.
1:14:28 Speaker 02 I was very late.
1:14:29 Emma Grede? You got told you were late.
1:14:30 Speaker 02 First words to me were, you are late.
1:14:32 Emma Grede? That, that seems just like Nicole.
1:14:34 Speaker 02 I watched her work, play this room, you know, that she put together. Coordinating people, you go there, you go there. If you want to meet the senator, he's not coming to your table, he's going to that table. And I'm like, who is this?
1:14:46 Emma Grede? Who is this woman?
1:14:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, that night after the event, we went, we had dinner, we spoke for three straight hours. And we were married eight months later.
1:14:54 Emma Grede? That's crazy. That's crazy. And I'm pretty sure you must have been quite close to her family too.
1:15:00 Speaker 02 Very. And loved her, loved her father and her mother and her brother.
1:15:05 Emma Grede? I mean, for those that don't know, just, I mean, just to talk about Nicole's father just for a second.
1:15:10 Speaker 02 Clarence Avon is one of the most important people in the history of show business. And people think, they simple, they boil it down to say, you know, the.
1:15:17 Emma Grede? Godfather, yeah, Godfather of black music.
1:15:20 Speaker 02 It wasn't just music, it was everything. And he got Muhammad Ali a TV special on ABC and negotiated, which changed the whole trajectory of who, of his personality.
1:15:28 Emma Grede? Yeah. And Nicole grew up around that. I mean, she grew up right at the.
1:15:32 Speaker 02 These people who I dreamed about meeting when I was a kid, they were at Nicole's house every day.
1:15:35 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:15:36 Speaker 02 And for her, it was almost like, oh, like she couldn't understand why people were so excited that Harry was at their house, but it was Harry Belafonte.
1:15:43 Emma Grede? She's like, oh, him.
1:15:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, or who, and every kid has Muhammad Ali doing magic tricks at their birthday party, don't they? So, but, but what was really great about it for me at the time too, was meeting, getting to know Clarence and getting to know more about him and someone who understood what I was doing.
1:15:59 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:16:00 Speaker 02 My parents unfortunately did not really understand, you know, my business.
1:16:03 Emma Grede? And listen, nobody can, but somebody like that must have been incredibly.
1:16:06 Speaker 02 Incredibly important.
1:16:07 Emma Grede? I guess important to you.
1:16:08 Speaker 02 Hundred percent. I mean, a real, I mean, this guy was like the consummate deal maker.
1:16:12 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:16:12 Speaker 02 And he would, and I would, making complex deals, like very complex deals. And we'd got, walked through something he did. In the sixties, in the seventies, in the eighties, that had incredible similarities. He in fact, I think was a big inspiration for me around why you take care of talent. Because they need to, they they need to be able to focus on creation. And they can't do that if they're worried about getting crushed on a deal. And they've got to have people have to have their back. So all all these things, I think, is why why he was so respected and so loved. I didn't know his story, which again, it was a ridiculous, I didn't know his story.
1:16:45 Emma Grede? Yeah, no, like more, I mean, again, I watched the documentary and like.
1:16:49 Speaker 02 Nicole made this great documentary called The Black Godfather.
1:16:51 Emma Grede? I mean, it's so, it was such a great documentary. But again, I don't think I knew, I don't know, an eighth of anything that was in there. It was really surprising.
1:16:59 Speaker 02 We're a product of our parents.
1:17:00 Emma Grede? Yes, we are.
1:17:01 Speaker 02 And, you know, for Nicole, she got the the better of both of her parents, which was amazing. I think growing up in that house prepared for the life that we live.
1:17:09 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:17:09 Speaker 02 In so many ways.
1:17:10 Emma Grede? No, no doubt.
1:17:11 Speaker 02 And I told you, you know, her mother, Jacqueline, not only was like just a a role model of elegance and but also like she, when she got into something, she got in deep.
1:17:22 Emma Grede? Just that Nicole.
1:17:23 Speaker 02 And you may have, you've been treated her the story, but but the spin off from from Bridgerton, Queen Charlotte. You know, Nicole's mother, Jacqueline, was a enormous history buff. And was very, thought it was very important to make sure her kids understood black history.
1:17:38 Emma Grede? Mm hmm.
1:17:39 Speaker 02 So Queen Charlotte, obviously, black royalty. She told me one day, you should have a, someone should make a movie about Queen Charlotte. And I go, no, we did, it's on, she's a character on Bridgerton. And she goes, no, no, the real Queen Charlotte. So she goes, disappears down the hall. She comes back with a stack of books and two handwritten letters that Queen Charlotte herself had written that she bought at auction years ago.
1:18:00 Emma Grede? Are you kidding?
1:18:01 Speaker 02 Get educated on Queen Charlotte, and hands me the stack.
1:18:04 Emma Grede? And you're like, okay, I will.
1:18:05 Speaker 02 I went home and did what I should do. I read those books, I read those letters. And I called Shonda Rhimes and I said, Shonda, this character, now that you've introduced her to the world, someone's gonna make this movie.
1:18:17 Emma Grede? Yes.
1:18:17 Speaker 02 You should do it.
1:18:18 Emma Grede? It needs to be you.
1:18:19 Speaker 02 She she goes, let me talk, and you send me what you send me what she said. I sent it to her. She's called me the next day, says, we're doing this.
1:18:25 Emma Grede? Obsessed.
1:18:26 Speaker 02 So that's why Chonda dedicated the first episode to Jackie.
1:18:30 Emma Grede? As she should.
1:18:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:31 Emma Grede? So beautiful.
1:18:32 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:18:32 Emma Grede? I love that. All right, so my one last question before I move you to rapid fire. I just want to understand, in terms of your kids, what do you think, given everything you know? What are you teaching your own children about their careers, about business, about what's important? Like, what are the lessons that you've learned that you really want to pass on?
1:18:53 Speaker 02 So my daughter Sarah is a producer, who's just had her first film as a producer into the Tribeca and South by Southwest.
1:19:00 Emma Grede? Are you very proud, Ted?
1:19:01 Speaker 02 Very proud, very proud. My son is an editor, he's very talented. He knew at 12 years old he wanted to be an editor. He and his buddies had a YouTube channel and used to cut videos. And my daughter wasn't sure. She, this was, she kind of fell into it a little bit. She moved to New York. Her first job in New York was a P A on Uncut Gems for eight twenty four. You know, so basically with two brilliant indie directors, the Saffy Brothers, making an indie film in New York in October. This is hard work. I said, if you, if you come through that and you still want to do this, you've found something. And she came out of it on fire. And so she's been working her way through and networking and, you know, she, she's someone who can solve and was any problem on a set. She's very impressive that way.
1:19:44 Speaker 02 And Tony, like I said, is a very, very gifted editor. He went to Charle, went to Chapman for film school. He went a very different route, Sarah went. Sarah did it kind of on the job. Tony went to school and networked that way. The one thing I try to impress on both of them, even though they're taking very different approaches, is to be dependable. Probably the most important thing in any job, in any role, is that you can be depended on. Show, show up when you're supposed to show up. Be the one that people can count on to do whatever it is. And that you'll do that to get to the next place all the time. Being dependable is so important. It's probably a lost art in some ways.
1:20:24 Speaker 02 Because I think there's a certain entitlement to us, to younger generations that get lost in that thing. Like you owe it to the world to show up.
1:20:32 Emma Grede? You owe it to the world to show up. You owe it to yourself.
1:20:36 Speaker 02 Yeah.
1:20:36 Emma Grede? You know, I think that's what people really, really forget. It's, I love that. No, it's so funny, that's not an answer that people give, be dependable.
1:20:45 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, it'll get you pretty far. It'll get you far, it'll get you into rooms that you probably wouldn't have gotten into before. And I think it'll have, you'll be high on the list when people are thinking about the next one.
1:20:57 Emma Grede? Yeah, it's a really true one. Thank you for that, I love it. All right, on to the rapid fire, we'll go quick. So, first thing you do when you wake up in the morning and the last thing at night?
1:21:06 Speaker 02 I'm watching something just before I go to bed. I mean, I watch, I watch a lot of movies and television, not just Netflix, but all the competition too. So I'm sure at the end of the night, I mostly watch. But the literal unsexy thing I do is take my dogs out to go to the bathroom.
1:21:20 Emma Grede? There you go, that'll do.
1:21:22 Speaker 02 And then, and then I wake up and feed them.
1:21:25 Emma Grede? I'm happy to know that's you. Because I can't, I can't see Nicole in whatever caftanage she's like, wearing, doing the dogs.
1:21:33 Speaker 02 Very elegantly doing the dogs. She is doing, she is very elegantly doing the dogs. I am begrudgingly doing the dogs.
1:21:38 Emma Grede? Okay, there you go. What are you currently aspiring for in your business life?
1:21:43 Speaker 02 I think it's amazing to me that 26, you know, I'm into the 26 year at Netflix. I still get out of bed like it's day one. It's so exciting for me still. And the challenges of the business are big and evolving. There's not, I don't, I haven't had two years of net in the 25 that ever, that have felt the same.
1:22:01 Emma Grede? That's so lucky.
1:22:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I just want to keep pushing the business to keep the spirit of that alive and pushing into the next thing all the time. So that hardcore contrarian bet that we are, are we still doing that? Are we still doing that?
1:22:14 Emma Grede? And what are you aspiring for in your personal life?
1:22:17 Speaker 02 I don't know, I just, I turn 60 this year.
1:22:19 Emma Grede? Congratulations.
1:22:20 Speaker 02 Thank you for getting there, I guess.
1:22:23 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:22:24 Speaker 02 And I, I really, I don't have regrets, you know, but I, and my goal is that I maintain that. I don't want to have regrets. I did tell the kids, I got back to advice for the kids. I told both Tony and Sarah, my only regret really in, as a young man, was that I didn't spend a couple of years in New York in my twenties.
1:22:44 Emma Grede? I mean, New York in your twenties, that's a vibe.
1:22:46 Speaker 02 Right?
1:22:46 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:22:46 Speaker 02 And they said, they didn't really understand it, like what?
1:22:49 Emma Grede? You guys go do it.
1:22:50 Speaker 02 And I said, yeah, because I go by.
1:22:51 Emma Grede? Go do that.
1:22:51 Speaker 02 Yeah, but you will tolerate how crazy it's, it'll be an adventure in your twenties. It may not be in your thirties and forties, but you have other responsibilities.
1:23:00 Emma Grede? No, but, but New York, London, like a proper city like that in your twenties, nothing can beat it.
1:23:05 Speaker 02 And Sarah just turned thirty and she's been living in New York now. She, she's been there for years and she loves it. She's a New Yorker.
1:23:10 Emma Grede? There you go.
1:23:11 Speaker 02 If it wasn't for Tony, Tony decided not to take me up on that.
1:23:14 Emma Grede? Listen, one out of two is not bad. I would be happy, I'd be happy with that.
1:23:17 Speaker 02 But I think about my path, that's the one thing I wish I'd have done.
1:23:20 Emma Grede? Yeah, that's not a bad regret to have. That'll be all right. You can go and spend, you know, your seventies in New York.
1:23:27 Emma Grede? It's always out there. You could be a raider.
1:23:29 Speaker 02 It's also an adventure.
1:23:31 Emma Grede? And what is a book that changed your life?
1:23:34 Speaker 02 There's a book that Joe Franklin, who was a local New York television guy, wrote called The History of Comedy. And it was, I stole it from the school library in high school. And it was, because I couldn't stop reading, I read it, read it over and over again. And it's all about comedy comedians and the evolution from Roddville to radio to television to film. And I'm sure I have the book still. It still has the Al Hamra High School stamp on the inside.
1:24:01 Emma Grede? It probably does.
1:24:02 Speaker 02 I wonder what the.
1:24:03 Emma Grede? You're a real comedy person, aren't you? I mean, one of my favorite things that happens in L A is like the Netflix comedy. What do you call it?
1:24:09 Speaker 02 Netflix is a joke.
1:24:10 Emma Grede? Netflix is a joke. I mean, I literally, that's my week. I just go to a show every single night. I think it's the, one of the best things that happens in the city. It's the most fun.
1:24:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. So, yeah, comedy has been the root of a lot of this stuff because to me, that's always been a challenge, business environment comedians. And then the idea that, you know, think about somebody like, like Lorne Michaels, who I think has been the most influential person in the history of comedy.
1:24:31 Emma Grede? No doubt.
1:24:32 Speaker 02 And I don't think anyone will ever be more influential than him.
1:24:34 Emma Grede? I mean, probably not. How do you do that, that, that body of work and that legacy and those?
1:24:39 Speaker 02 Career is the number of hours of television and film.
1:24:42 Emma Grede? Yeah.
1:24:42 Speaker 02 And so I, so I think about all those things that, that, again, back to root it in comedy. I mean, his, his book right now is phenomenal, Lorne.
1:24:49 Emma Grede? I'd like to read that book.
1:24:50 Speaker 02 It's a great book.
1:24:50 Emma Grede? I mean, yeah, he's so incredible. What is something that you valued when you were starting out that you no longer value?
1:24:58 Speaker 02 Hmm, that's a great, I would say I really valued sleep, but more than I do now. It seems backwards.
1:25:06 Emma Grede? It does seem backwards, but I love that.
1:25:08 Speaker 02 You know what it was? Because I didn't sleep a lot, I never was, I was always like a five hour sleeper. So every once in a while, you'd get like a, an eight hour stretch of sleep and you're like, oh my God, that was the best. But I, I feel like I'm a little backwards on that now.
1:25:21 Emma Grede? That'll work. And, and what is something that you value now that you didn't back then?
1:25:26 Speaker 02 Time. Time.
1:25:29 Emma Grede? No doubt.
1:25:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's finite, you know?
1:25:33 Emma Grede? Mm hmm. And it just, well, this time has been amazing. Thank you so much.
1:25:37 Speaker 02 Thank you.
1:25:37 Emma Grede? Love speaking to you.
1:25:38 Speaker 02 This is great. Thanks.
1:25:44 Emma Grede? If you're loving this podcast, be sure to click follow on your favorite listening platform. While you're there, give us a review and a five star rating and share an episode you loved with a friend. We'll be so grateful. Aspire with Emma Grede is presented by Odyssey. I'm your host, Emma Grede. Our executive producers are Corinne, Gilliard Fisher, Derek Brown, and me. Our executive producers from Odyssey are Maddie Sprung Kaiser, Leah Reese Dennis, Asha Saluja, and Jenna Weiss-Berman. Stephen Key is our senior producer. Sound design and engineering by Bill Schultz. Angela Peluso is our booker. Original music by Charles Black. Video production by Evan Cox, Kirk Courtney, Andrew Steele, Carlos Delgado, and
1:26:25 Emma Grede? Arnie Agassi. Social media by Olivia Holman. Special thanks to Brittany Smith, Sydney Ford, my teams at The Lead Company, and WME. Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Hillary Schuff, Eric Donnelly, Kate Hutchinson Rose, Tim Meekle, Sean Cherry, and Lauren Viera. If you have questions for me, you can DM me at aspirewithemmagreed. Grede is spelled G R E D E. That's aspire, A S P I R E with M A Grede. Or you can submit a question to me on my website, emmagreed.me.
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