Michael Ovitz – Reinventing Talent and Building Momentum at Treville (EP.455)

Michael Ovitz is the legendary co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, where he transformed Hollywood's talent business and built the most powerful force in entertainment. In his time at CAA, Michael shaped the trajectories of artists, filmmakers, and companies, including actors Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Bill Murray, Sylvester Stallone, and Barbra Streisand, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, author Michael Crichton, talk show host David Letterman, the Coca Cola Company, and many, many more. Michael transitioned from entertainment to investing thirty years ago, advising Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz on the creation of a16z, and most recently, partnering with Ali Hamed as Chairman of Treville Capital Group. Ali has twice been a past guest on the show, and those conversations are replayed in the feed. Our conversation begins with Michael's formative influences from his upbringing, early lessons that shaped his relentless drive, and origins of CAA. We cover his fascination with creativity, CAA's culture of empowerment, honesty, and momentum, and frameworks for building businesses, assessing talent, focusing on relationships, and learning from new industries. We then turn to Michael's recent work with Ali at Treville. We discuss the beginning of their partnership, the process of scaling, the building of momentum, and the systems that foster accountability, relentless follow-up, and refreshing of relationships. Michael closes with candid reflections on his mistakes and life lessons that continue to shape his remarkable path. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides https://twitter.com/tseides?lang=en or LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedseides/ Subscribe to the mailing list https://capitalallocators.com/ Access Transcript with Premium Membership https://capitalallocators.com/signup Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com https://thepodcastconsultant.com/)

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

• 0:01Ted Seides?

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• 0:46Ted Seides?

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• 1:29Ted Seides?

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• 2:12Ted Seides?

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• 2:57Ted Seides?

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• 3:32Ted Seides?

  Hello, I'm Ted Seides, and this is Capital Allocators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. You can join our mailing list and access premium content at capitalallocators.com.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  All opinions expressed by TED and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions in securities discussed on this podcast.

• 4:18Ted Seides?

  My guest on today's show is Michael Ovitz, legendary co-founder of Creative Arts Agency, where he transformed Hollywood's talent business and built the most powerful force in entertainment. In his time at CAA, Michael shaped the trajectories of artists, filmmakers, and companies, including actors Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Bill Murray, Sylvester Stallone, and Barbra Streisand, filmmaker Steven Spielberg, author Michael Crichton, talk show host David Letterman, The Coca-Cola Company, and many, many more. Michael transitioned from entertainment to investing 30 years ago, advising Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the creation of A16Z, and most recently partnering with Ali Hamed

• 5:02Ted Seides?

  as chairman of Trevel Capital Group. Ali has twice been a past guest on the show, and those conversations are replayed in the feed. Our conversation begins with Michael's formative influences from his upbringing, early lessons that shaped his relentless drive, and origins of CAA. We cover his fascination with creativity, CAA's culture of empowerment, honesty, and momentum, and frameworks for building businesses, assessing talent, focusing on relationships, and learning from new industries. We then turn to Michael's recent work with Ali at Trevel. We discuss the beginning of their partnership, the process of scaling, the building of momentum,

• 5:44Ted Seides?

  and the systems that foster accountability, relentless follow-up, and refreshing of relationships. Michael closes with candid reflections on his mistakes and life lessons that continue to shape his remarkable path. Before we get going, every now and then, a fan of the show asks me to share more of my investment views. I get it. I've been around the block a few times and often have something interesting on my mind. But I prefer not to insert myself in the podcast every week. There's a difference between an interview and a conversation that often gets blurred on many podcasts. Capital Allocators is an interview show. So instead of talking so much you can barely stand to hear my voice, I occasionally take a turn on the other

• 6:28Ted Seides?

  side of the mic and share it that way. I also record my blogs on the podcast, aptly named What Ted's Thinking. I'm doing more of that with shorter pieces this year. Lastly, I've come up with a new way to share more with our premium members. We've added amusing section to our weekly emails, where I'll share brief investment ideas with a high signal to noise ratio. As examples, I've written about what's really going on with endowment secondary sales and how institutions may use interval funds in the future. If you're interested in keeping up with my thoughts from the many conversations I have with investment leaders, sign up for our premium content at capitalallocators.com/premium.

• 7:11Ted Seides?

  It costs far less than a cup of coffee a day, and I'm highly confident, in a Michael Milken "highly confident" letter kind of way, that you'll return a large multiple of your investment. Thanks so much for encouraging me to share more of my investment thoughts and for supporting the show through our premium membership. Please enjoy my conversation with Michael Ovins.

• 7:35Ted Seides?

  Michael, thanks so much for joining me.

• 7:36Ted Seides?

  It's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to this.

• 7:39Ted Seides?

  Why don't you take me back to the most important influences of your growing up that led you on this path?

• 7:46Ted Seides?

  That's an interesting and complicated question.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  And I didn't realize that this was going to be a shrink session here. Oh, my dad was a psychiatrist. This all makes sense now. It's interesting, I was having this conversation. I was in London about a month ago at a business dinner with a bunch of very prominent European businessmen. And we got around to talking generally, not just about business, but one of them had just had a failure in a business that he started. He brought the subject up. He just wanted to talk about it and we all wanted to help him. And one of the things that he brought up is he asked me, how was it possible

• 8:31Speaker 03

  that American businessmen and women, including me, have done some things that are good and have failed at other things? But we just get right back up on the horse and do it again. And in Europe, if they fail, they're embarrassed and they go hide. And to wit, he was talking about moving to Switzerland. And I said to him that I don't know how you people are brought up because I'm not a European. But my family, and they had no money, no means. We lived in a $3,000 tract house with two bedrooms. And my grandmother lived with us. And my mother and my grandmother, from the day I could talk,

• 9:16Speaker 03

  told me that I could be whatever I wanted to be. But they didn't tell me once. They told me every time I saw them. And they would reinforce almost anything I did at school. Anything I did, even if I was terrible at it, it was fascinating. And I said to these guys, I don't know that that was 100% of it because I know there were other factors and. I'm pretty open about it. My dad never graduated high school. He was a very well liked man. He was socially brilliant, but from a business standpoint, he never could get it together. I think I didn't want to be that and I didn't want to stay in the San Fernando

• 9:58Speaker 03

  Valley. But what I said to these guys is in America, failure is not anything but part of the game. I had a close friend and client for 30 years named Michael Crichton, who was a huge influence on me. And he said to me, anytime I did something where it didn't work, he'd say to me, good. And I said, what do you mean, good? And his quote was, there's always another rodeo. And in America, we view failure as a stepping stone. I have failed at a number of things and it's just part of the game. It's not fun. It's not like you say, boy, I'm going to go out and start this and fail at it, or I'm going to do this

• 10:39Speaker 03

  deal and fail at it. But you don't stop. You don't move to Switzerland. You just keep going. And I think that's the big difference. And I think it's why this country, which is on a comparative basis to Europe, it's a child. We're 200 years old. And when I walk around London, there are things there that are 500 years old. It's a very different mindset. I was dealing with an art dealer there who was a friend and his business through COVID just tanked and I was talking him off the ceiling. He was going to sell the building and all the inventory and move to Spain. And I talked him out of it. And now he's flourishing

• 11:20Speaker 03

  again. But he even said to me at lunch, I can't believe you talked me into this and you were right.

• 11:28Ted Seides?

  So with that idea, that you could do anything you wanted to, at what point in time did you get interested in the entertainment world?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  That was a complete accident, frankly. I lived in a area of the San Fernando Valley where Eli Broad built with Kaufman and Broad, a zillion tract homes in the San Fernando Valley. And we had one of them. We were four blocks from the RKO studio backlot. So I would Go do my paper route after school when I was nine years old. And when I got done, I used to crawl under the fence with one of the guys that did the other route at around 5:30 during daylight savings time. And no one stopped us. We'd go watch them shoot these serial television shows in those days.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And they were in black and white on film. I got this strange education about how you actually make something and put it on film to record it for posterity. Very old fashioned technology. I'd watch the people on the set and how they interfaced and how the director would move people around. They had a person, I later learned, was a continuity master. And that person made sure that when they were done shooting that scene, that the next time they did it, it looked exactly the same. Nothing was out of place. So I learned a lot and I liked it. But I didn't like it enough to sidetrack me from being interested in science and math

• 13:04Speaker 03

  and wanting to go to medical school. That was all I cared about was getting to medical school. You failed there. How did you get from wanting to go to medical school to this world? It was really easy. When I was just about to turn 17 and Universal Studios made a decision to do a tour on their lot, which now everyone knows is so huge. And it's a tourist attraction in LA. But it was very low tech, very minimal number of people taken through the studio. They were looking for 10 tour guides, five men and five female. And I applied and I don't know how Ted, but I got the job.

• 13:47Speaker 03

  And I showed up every morning at seven in the morning. And I left there when it got dark at eight o'clock at night. I went to every department. I did 13 hours of walking. They had a makeup department. They had a prop department. They had a wardrobe department. It was the old days of filmmaking. It was the last great part of the film business. I went everywhere. I got an education in eight weeks that you couldn't buy. And it was the best eight weeks of my life. And I remember I was at UCLA and I left Universal with the guy I worked for to go start the same thing at Fox. I set up classes that were either early in the morning or late in the day.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And I'd go to the first class and then I'd go right to the studio. And I kept a suit in my car and I would change in the parking lot at UCLA, lot five. And then I'd go right to work and we built up this business there where I ended up having a hundred people working for me. And they thought I was 25 and I was 19. Guy I worked for got accepted to the Art Directors Union and quit. And here I am at 19, they made me head of the studio tour. And that was the end of medical school.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  The reason I got into the business and the reason I collect art is I am mesmerized by human beings who can make something out of nothing. Because the entertainment business or fine art, fine art, you see a white canvas. Somebody has some talent, all of a sudden something appears that's emotional or political or moving or sexual or something. It presses buttons. And I was mesmerized by creative people that would come in and pitch ideas.

• 15:37Ted Seides?

  So I want to pivot to CAA. As you got into the business, there was a very disruptive model you put in place. I'd love you to talk through what was in place in Hollywood, your insight and what you did with it.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  I was really lucky because I had that studio tour job. So I got to witness agents coming to the lot. They were well received. It was fascinating. They were well received because they were connectors. And people felt if they were nice to them, they got connected. And I watched them do other things, which is I watched them take care of people that were not the stars. They took care of everybody. My dad was a guy who took care of everyone in the neighborhood. He was in the liquor business and he was a salesman. And there's a law in the state of California in those days, don't know if it exists, that

• 16:33Speaker 03

  if a bottle breaks in a case, it's called a broken case and you can't sell it. Somehow, a lot of the cases my dad had in his trunk had broken bottles of them. And he had a stash in our garage of bottles of whiskey and vodka and gin. And he didn't drink. Every day I'd come home from school, the mailman was in the garage, there's a black and white police car out front, there's a policeman in there, there's a fireman in the garage, the milkman was in the garage. Any service person to our family got free liquor. And we were serviced like crazy. It was unbelievable. And I remembered that for some reason, it stuck with me.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  I said, what a great idea. When we started the business, we had no stature, no one knew who we were. I was 27 years old. So we decided that we'd set something up that would have a different set of parameters. Traditionally, agents basically received offers for clients and then would talk to the client and make a decision creatively and then negotiate the deal. And they didn't do much else. And I must say, I to this day am shocked at how simple some of our principles were that were surprising to the community. We made a decision, for example, to give gifts to clients for their first day of shooting something. I couldn't believe that no one ever did that.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  And I remember on a particular set, we sent not only our clients' gifts, but we sent everybody else's clients' gifts. We weren't going to wait for offers. We were going to aggressively try to put things together and package which hadn't been done. And we'd never let anything go out that wasn't surrounded with like-minded, creative people. And then there were two things we didn't allow in the company. One was politics. There are no politics in this company. It's an egalitarian group. We didn't have officers. There were no vice presidents. I didn't have a title. No one had a title. We're all agents.

• 18:45Speaker 03

  I introduced mailroom people as my partner. And it was shocking to the other executives. Another thing we did was we basically said, you cannot lie. You cannot make things up. The thing about entertainment that's fascinating is it's a business of stories. And people tend to like to make up stories. And since knowledge is power, people, if they were asked a question, would like to give an answer. And I would say over half the time, they didn't have the answer. So they made it up. And we started this tradition. If you don't have the answer, here's your statement. I don't have the answer to that. Give me some time and I'm going to call you back. Now, that sounds pretty stupidly simple, but it wasn't part of the culture.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  We did terminate two people in our history for point-blank not telling the truth. I watched it happen with one of them, and it was disgusting. Actually, rarely fired anybody. We found them other jobs so that they wouldn't be embarrassed because it was a small, knit community. We also kept a list of executives that got fired. And the executives that helped us at the first five years of the company were given priority for jobs, and we got every one of them a job. Every one who got fired, who helped us when we had nothing.

• 20:07Ted Seides?

  ¿Cómo pensaste en ayudar a las personas a encontrar un trabajo que no se ajustaba a tu cultura o que no podía cutirlo?

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Es una pregunta muy excelente, pero es una respuesta bastante simple. Nos movemos de la parte de la venta a la compra. Cuando estás en la parte de la compra, el teléfono ringing. La gente está buscando que te ayuden, les den dinero, les digan que harás su proyecto. Cuando estás en la parte de la venta, no tienes nada. Ser un vendedor en el negocio de la entretenimiento es uno de los cinco trabajos más difíciles que hay. Recuerdo que un amigo mío que estaba en la parte de la compra durante 30 años, era uno de los más poderosos en el negocio. Y al final de su carrera, corriendo un estudio grande, fue rechazado por un joven más joven. Eso sucede. Estoy sentado en mi oficina y me llama. Y me dijo: "Necesito ayuda".

• 20:59Speaker 03

  Dije: "Claro, ¿qué puedo hacer por usted?" Porque me había ayudado durante 20 años. Y me dijo: "Mi teléfono no ringing". Dijo: "No sé cómo hacer que mi teléfono ringue. No se me llama. ¿Qué hago?" Y fue fascinante. Era un joven de la parte de la compra. No era empresarial. Estaba en una gran organización que estaba estratificada. Y la gente lo llamó porque necesitaban algo de él. Cuando estaba sentado en su oficina en Beverly Hills, no un comprador con nada que ofrecer. No sabía cómo generar su negocio. No sabía qué hacer. Así que un grupo de nosotros se sentó con él e intentó educarlo en ser empresarial. Tengo una tesis sobre construir negocios. He hecho tres.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Todo se trata de crear impulso. Y se trata de un cierto tipo de comportamiento. Se trata de tener cierto tipo de experiencia. Se trata de traer a la gente que son más inteligentes que yo, lo cual es crítico, y no temerlo, pero abrazarlo. Fue uno de los marcos de CAA que hizo imposible a las personas competir con nosotros porque mi objetivo era empoderar a la gente joven. I'm doing it again at this stage of my life. My goal was not to handle every single client. I wanted to get to a point where I was peripheral in clients' lives. And I had a group of people, which I did, that went out and did all the work with these people.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  I'd bring them in and then you'd empower others to do it. I also always hired people that were smarter than me. Still do. I don't claim to be the dumbest guy. I don't claim to be the smartest guy. But I want guys that can run rings around me intellectually. Or people that could read better than me, or people that are more creative than I am. I'm a horrible painter. I'm a horrible sculptor. I can't act. I can't direct. I can barely write an email. So I'm talentless. But I admire those that can do this stuff.

• 23:06Ted Seides?

  As you extended at CA from representing agents, later you got into banking, famously advertising with Coca-Cola. How did you think about building a new business that you weren't involved in at all?

• 23:19Speaker 03

  My son, Chris, comes home and we're in this meeting and he hears names. Columbia, Sony, and he starts hearing all these things. He said, Dad, what are you doing? I said, we're gonna sell a motion picture studio to an electronics company. He said, Dad, how do you know what you're doing?

• 23:41Speaker 03

  And I looked at him and I said, Chris, I said, I'm learning as I go. Now, I was lucky. I had a guy named Herbert Allen, who is a prince among men. He just adopted me at an early age. When I had a problem, I called him and we did every deal together. Every single deal. And we basically did all the deals in Hollywood at the time. And Herb was gracious and had no ego and ran his business like we ran ours. Family business. I had a question, didn't matter how stupid it was. And man, I had some stupid questions. Herb guided me through it. We must have done a dozen mega deals together.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  I had a real, serious mentor in investment banking. But there were things I had to learn as we went. I didn't know what Hart Scott Rodino was until someone said to me, have you satisfied Hart Scott Rodino? And there was no Google. So I had to figure out what that was. And I remember calling my stockbroker at the time, asking if he knew what Hart, Scott, and Rodino were. And he joked and he said, they're a law firm. I said, that's not possible. Then he said, no, it's a law and you have to check off certain things to do it. I had no clue, but I learned I sure know what it is now.

• 25:03Ted Seides?

  How do you think about your framework for building a business?

• 25:07Speaker 03

  They're all the same. They're the same fundamentals. You find great people, you flesh out their ideas, you back them all the way, you raise money for them, you get their product going, you help them market it, you help them get sales, and you distribute it. It's that simple. They're all the same. And they all have one factor that goes through each one as a common denominator. And for me, not for anybody else, I can't speak to anybody but me. It's about the talent. The rest is irrelevant. Every business I've been involved with, so you talk about advertising.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  The minute I knew I had the Coca-Cola account, even before we closed the deal, I went out and I started looking for talent. And the only thing I know how to do is find talent. I don't know how to do anything else. I went out and I started asking a lot of questions. I don't wait for anybody to call me. I will call someone, and by the way, I don't wait for them to return my call. If I call you and you don't call me back, you'll hear from me in a couple hours and you'll hear from me 10 times till I get you on the phone. And I have no ego about it. I don't play this stupid game that a lot of my friends play. Well, I've called them. We didn't wait.

• 26:28Ted Seides?

  How did you think about assessing talent?

• 26:31Speaker 03

  It's no different. It's the same with the advertising thing. I asked 25 top people in advertising who they liked, who did what. I then reviewed a lot of ad campaigns. I found out who the hot boutique ad agencies were and then I did something else. An area I knew is marketing of movies. I knew that there was someone working at Paramount who had done one of the best ad campaigns and unique I'd ever seen. I went and recruited that woman to work for us and we didn't have the account. And then I knew that there was an agency in LA called Shyatt Day and I knew Jay Shyatt. He was a genius and he had really

• 27:14Speaker 03

  good creatives. I'd met with his head creative, Len Fink, and I convinced them to come with us. So I had a real serious advertising guy and I had a motion picture theatrical kind of advertising woman. And I wanted a woman and I wanted a man because I wanted both points of view because they interpret things differently. And the work they did was staggering.

• 27:41Ted Seides?

  As you worked your way through your career, some time later, you started getting involved in investing. I'd love to hear how that came about.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  That's another great question that I don't have a timeline answer. I started as an agent when I was 21 years old at the William Morris Agency. I learned to live a transactional life. Every minute of every day is a combination of transaction, of creativity, of interpretation of creative people's minds, of recommendations for things that might work or might not work, of how do you finance things, how do you move the ball down the field, how do you get along with people, how do you get stern with people that do something they shouldn't be doing? And there's a lot of that. And basically, how does one exist

• 28:35Speaker 03

  in a transactional world of creatives? And they're diametrically opposed to each other because creative people don't really like transactional situations. Just wanted to focus on their work. So I wanted to create seeds outside of the entertainment business. We had no New York office. Intentionally, by the way, because I had this thesis that all these companies that had multiple offices failed because the direct responsible people were not in charge at a certain geography. If one of our clients in New York, and we had 150 clients in New York, statured people,

• 29:19Speaker 03

  Dustin Hoffman, Gal Pacino, Bob De Niro, Marty Scorsese, Mike Nichols, they all lived in New York. I decided it'd be best if they could be talking to their direct people. And if they needed them physically present, they got on a plane and they were there overnight. It wasn't that complicated. It really worked. When I was in New York, I decided that I personally wanted to expand my cultural thesis. So I started collecting art and I got to know art dealers. I was invited by David Rockefeller to join the board of the Museum of Modern Art. And I started meeting investment bankers. That was a complete accident.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  I didn't know this, but in New York, it's not a one-horse town. Everybody's in a different vocation. So if I was at a dinner with someone from the Modern, one of the other trustees was giving a dinner party, there'd be a film director there, a theater director, an investment banker, a hedge fund guy. And all of a sudden, I'm meeting all these people and I'm like a kid in a candy store because they don't do what I do. And if there's anything I love, it's learning new things. I'm a voracious reader. I love technical things and I love to learn about other people's businesses because I want to see how they think.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, I find myself meeting Herb Allen, Felix Royton, and Michelle David Vey from Lazard. And I met the guys that ran Goldman Sachs. And all of a sudden, I'm having lunch with these guys and they're talking with a different vocabulary than I am. I go, wow, this is something that's interesting. And all of a sudden, I get a call from a guy named John Thornton, who was the co-president of Goldman Sachs. We hit it off. John Thornton calls me up one day and says, I've got a cable deal and our guys are crunching it. Can you look at it? Because it's your field. Man, I was in his office in a nanosecond

• 31:24Speaker 03

  and we invested in it together. And that was in the eighties. I said, I like this. I met Steve Schwartzman when he started Blackstone because Pete Peterson was on the board of MoMA. So we did the first deal together for Sony buying CBS Records because Pete was on the board of Sony and I was Mr. Morita's media advisor and Steve was partners with Pete. They had Blackstone had a tiny little office. They had very few people. This is the late eighties and what Steve's done today, I was over there last week. It's like a mega institution right now. And that's how I got into investing. I'm now going to New York

• 32:07Speaker 03

  and I'm seeing Bob De Niro for dinner and the next day I'm seeing John Thornton for lunch or Ted Forsman. He was a premier private equity guy who pioneered the concept of debt and equity when he was doing deals. And I ended up sitting on five boards for him. The only problem I ever had Ted was time. I just never had enough time. So I'm going to add a silo, which is technology. Marc Andreessen had me move to San Francisco. I had 400 meetings in a year that Marc condoned with the ecosystem of the Bay Area to get

• 32:45Speaker 03

  myself ensconced into that ecosystem. When I'm looking at startups, which I look at five a day, I am interested in the founder. Frankly, I hate to say this, but I am very open about it. I'm less interested in the idea. I want to see a passionate, smart founder who has thought through his idea, but it's all about the person. It's all about the creative person. It was no different when I started signing directors. It was no different when I saw the first episode of Saturday Night Live and I said, I've got to represent every one of those people. And we did. We represented every single person on that show.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  And everyone thought we were nuts because in those days, if you did TV, you couldn't get a movie. Early eighties, when that show came out and Lorne Michael, who's brilliant, was a variety television show producer. And he went 180 coming up with that show. And the problem with the media business was they put everything in these buckets. When I was at William Morris, one of the reasons we left is they wouldn't let television agents talk to movie agents or vice versa. There had to be a Chinese wall between them. Everyone at our place did everything. We had agents that did music, movies, and television. It just didn't matter. You had to go for the place where the talent was.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  So it's a simple, addressable issue in every silo. It's all about the talent.

• 34:19Ted Seides?

  What are the different lenses of what makes a successful talent as a creative than what you've seen, say, as a founder in tech?

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Nothing. I had founders start with an idea and usually nothing else. Let's put off to the side a technical founder who may have come up with a fabulous algorithm that no one else has, but he still has to have an idea for it. What's he gonna do with it? What's the application? Who's he gonna sell it to? They don't do these things for charity. And it's the same with a writer. Michael Crichton, sitting across from me, saying, "Two years, he couldn't work. He just was blocked." He just, all of a sudden, out of the blue, he said, "I have an old idea, but I don't think it works." What about three people? One's older, two are younger, and they're caught in an amusement park off the coast

• 35:12Speaker 03

  of South America someplace. The amusement park breeds dinosaurs. And it's like anything else, Michael. They get loose somehow, and it's havoc. He said, "What do you think?" I didn't skip a beat. I said, "Look, my son loves dinosaurs. I love dinosaurs." And Michael went and, in five months, wrote the book.

• 35:33Ted Seides?

  We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about Brookfield. Brookfield invests in the thing behind the thing behind the next big thing. Their focus across infrastructure, energy, real estate, private equity and credit is helping to build the backbone of the global economy. Brookfield combines deep operational expertise with disciplined, long-term investing, uncovering value and partnering alongside clients to shape tomorrow's economy today. Invest in the businesses that shape tomorrow. Learn how you can own what's next at Brookfield.com/own.

• 36:10Ted Seides?

  This is not an offer to sell or investment advice. Investing involves risk, including the loss of capital.

• 36:16Ted Seides?

  And now, back to the show.

• 36:20Ted Seides?

  I'd love to turn to what you've been doing recently. How did you come across Ali Hamad?

• 36:27Speaker 03

  So I collect art and people and mostly young people. I love young people. And I said on a podcast six months ago, which caused havoc in my social life that I didn't like hanging out with anyone my age. And all my friends that I've known forever wrote me vile emails. I did handle it very well by saying to each of them, you're the exception. But I just love the stimulation of young, smart people. And the good news about where I'm working now is they're all over the place. There's so much brain power and they're so full of energy and they want to succeed. And I can offer something that's helpful that comes with experience. I tell this story to young people that I got a call.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  I was living in San Francisco and I got a call from Patrick Collinson, who's one of the founders of Stripe. He and his brother, John, are two of the smartest guys I've ever met and a lot smarter than me. And my book had just come out. He asked if I could come to Stripe for lunch. I didn't know why. And I said, of course. So I drove over and I see my book sitting on the table with tons of post-its in it. And Patrick and I get trays in the commissary place and we sit down. He said, are you ready? I said, yeah, I'm hungry. And he goes, no, are you ready? I said, what, ready for what? He said, I'm gonna ask you questions. And I got quite a few. And I said, okay. I said, what kind? He said, well, I'm gonna, there's a whole series of places in your book

• 37:56Speaker 03

  where you were very open about mistakes you made. He said, I'm really interested in why you made them, how you made them, and what you might have done differently. And we spent two and a half hours or so. He didn't care about anything in the book that I did that was successful. He was not interested. I thought this was so intelligent. He wanted to analyze mistakes so that he didn't make them. And I said, wow, that's, that really hit me. To get back to Ollie, I have a very close friend named Eric Lane, who ran GSAM for a long time now. He runs Tiger. And we were having lunch about a year ago. And he knows I collect people.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  And he said, I met a young guy. He's 31. He's really smart and you ought to meet him. He said, I think it would be good for you guys to meet. I trust Eric. He's always introduced me to amazing people in finance. For 20 years, I've met some of the best people through Eric. And I went and I met Ollie and I was duly impressed. And then Ollie took a chapter out of my book and he called me every day for three months. Every single day. I must say, it kind of worked. Because each day, the conversations got longer and deeper. I called up one of the guys at Andreessen Horowitz and I said, could you send me? And they do great diligence.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  The two toughest companies you ever diligenced with all the backup. And they said, of course. I get the stuff and I tear the top sheet off, which is the company. And I keep the diligence and I send the top sheet to Ollie. I said, what do you think of this company? Within 48 hours, I got back the most unbelievable, thought-out, both deductively and inductively.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  diligence that I'd seen in a long time. So I started talking to him. He had built a really nice little credit business. But when I started Googling him, he had very few hits and no one knew who he was. And he had a terrible website. And I thought he was imminently smarter than the position he was in. He stood out to me as a great piece of talent. He was intelligent. He was personable. He was relentlessly aggressive, but yet he was crazy conservative because he comes from credit on his lens on investing. I said, wow, this guy's got all the ingredients for the secret sauce.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  So I call Ollie and I said, like to try to see if I can work with you and help you out. I said, but I want to warn you. I'm wildly opinionated. I'm a lot older than you are. I don't suffer fools well. I need the truth and I need to know everything. And I'm going to say stuff to you that is going to be borderline offensive and I'm not going to couch it in sweet terms. He said, I can take it. I said, good. Go to a place. And I gave him three names. I said, get some clothes. I said, you look like crap.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  And he did it. He didn't flinch, Ted. He didn't get upset. He just went and did it because he looked terrible. I said, you can't go in and ask people for money looking like a guy who's on the Bowery someplace, you know, looking for some gin. You can't do that. And I started working with him and I have done something for 50 years, which is every Sunday I review my calendar from the prior week and I carry forward those that I enjoyed and want to meet again. I carry forward people that I made money with. I carry forward people I learned something with and I delete people that I found irritating,

• 41:46Speaker 03

  stupid users, transactional people that were using me for something. And I always have done this. I've done it my whole life. One night, I'm sitting there on a Sunday night at my desk. It's about 9:30 and I look at my calendar and then I Go backwards and I keep going backwards. Eighty percent of what I'm doing is for Ollie and I'm not getting paid very much. I'm saying, man, this guy has sucked you into the vortex of his business. I asked myself the most important question at this stage. Am I having fun? And the answer was yes. So I called him the next morning at six in the morning. I said, I got good news and bad news. Which do you want first? He said, I want the good news. I said, great.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Good news is I'm going to take all of my venture work, all my investing, everything I do. And I'm going to toss it in with you and we're going to make a company and we're going to be partners. And it's going to be really hard for you. I said, you're going to have trouble keeping up with me, which I thought was pretty funny at the time, but it turned out to be true. And he said, God, that's amazing. That's what I want. I need to be introduced to people. You know, everybody. I said, yeah, I do. And I'm proud to introduce you, which is one of the reasons I felt I could do it. So he said, what's the bad news? I said, this is going to be very expensive for you. And he couldn't stop laughing. And that was a year ago. I will say it's more fun each week.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  I literally ran here. I was in six different meetings this morning. Two were pitches on companies, two were fundraising and two were recruitment. And those are all things I enjoy doing. I like business building and I like creating momentum around businesses. And I like the challenge every day. I have had several friends say to me, have you lost your mind? What are you doing? Why are you working? I hate golf. I do. I quit the country club I belonged to. I've never played more than nine holes of golf. It bores me to death. I love art, but I do that anyways. I like having no time. I like my time filled and I want to be challenged and more important than anything, I want to learn.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  Because that stimulates me. So Ollie became a means to an end for me. Couldn't be happier with what we're doing. We've got almost 40 people working for us now. My son just came into work in venture, which took me a year to talk him into it. He's great at it and he brought his partner with him and chucked his fund and is running that for us now. We've got fabulous young people. I think at the company, there's three people over 32 and I'm one of them. I love it.

• 44:34Ted Seides?

  When you look at that last year, from where Travel was when you got there to now, this concept of building momentum, what did you see? And what did you do when you say, "Ollie was going to have to keep up with you to get from where you were a year ago to today and forwards"?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  It's not a science. It's kind of an art form and I'm not the only person that does this. I have so many friends that are extraordinary CEOs and they create inertia around them. They do it with simple rules. It's the same common denominator for all of us. If you asked each of us how we do it, we'd all give you the same story, but with different descriptions. For example, I don't know any great executive that isn't the first person that'll jump out of the foxhole when there's a problem. So, leading has got to be done by example, not by talk. People that talk and pontificate are worthless. When we built CAA,

• 45:35Speaker 03

  one of the things we did, all of us that started it, is if we asked someone to do something, it was nothing that we wouldn't do ourselves. And at the beginning, when they didn't do it, because that's most people, they put it off. We just went in and did it. And let me tell you, that had a humongous effect on the culture. We had a system that if you and I were partners and you were an agent with me, and we had a buck slip system. There are cards with your name on it. And the system was if I wrote you a note and it was hand-delivered by someone in the mailroom on your desk, it had to be answered by the end of the day. Even if it said, "I don't have an answer yet," but you had a write on it, cross out what I wrote and write me back, "Michael, I've got it.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  You're right, you're wrong, you're this, you're that." But I had to have it back by the end of the day. And everyone had these cards in rows on their desk. So we had an infallible follow-up system. And if somebody didn't do it, I just went in and did it. And I did it quickly and seamlessly and successfully. And let me tell you, it never happened a second time. Secondly, communication can be a game of arrogance if you're not careful. It's what I said to you earlier. You call someone and you get upset they don't call you back. Doesn't bother me the slightest. I just keep calling them until they call me back. Or I go see them. I did this as a young agent.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  When I was in my twenties and I couldn't get big directors on the phone, I would just go sit out in front of their office and wait. They all had to go pee. So I would just wait and be sitting there. And then, third, I have no clock, which really irritates some people, I have to say. I like to work late after dinner. I like to get organized for the next day. I go out to dinner almost every night. I go out to lunch every day. And my kids are grown. My youngest is 22, about to be 23. My others are adults with their own kids. And my only hobby is art, and it's not a hobby, it's part of my lifestyle. I'm so deep in it, it's part of my everyday thought process. But it's not a full-time job.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  I'm not a dealer. I'm a collector. So I have plenty of time. And it could be Sunday night at 11 o'clock. If we're working together, you might hear from me. And I don't say, ever, you have to hit me right back. I always say, if it's Sunday night or Sunday, "for Monday."

• 48:07Speaker 03

  But I always like to see who hits me back and everyone does. And that's changed in our own business now in six months. The change is astronomical. There's no synaptic delay. Everything is of the moment unless it needs to be analyzed, thought out and discussed. It's still of the moment because it goes on a follow-up agenda. And systems are critical. I'm big on systems. There was no systems in our business when I got into it. And now everything is systemized on follow-up. And everyone's copied on everything. So for example, we see hundreds of tech deals to get into.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  We don't do but maybe a fraction of them. So for every hundred, we'll probably do five. And we've done 23 deals in the last five months. And we've probably seen 10 times that many. But we have a system for it. And everyone sees everything and everyone has an opinion. I am really interested and always have been in everybody's opinion because I'm not always right. I will change my point of view at the moment that someone convinces me I'm wrong. And I'll do it in front of people. I'm not bashful about it.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  When we were at the agency, if they had a logical argument that was substantiated by facts, they could change my mind.

• 49:39Ted Seides?

  What are some of the most important ways you've used systems to manage people?

• 49:44Speaker 03

  The key to a good management is accountability. Our systems are such that everyone gets follow-up notes on what they have to do and they keep their own. But at CAA, for example, our follow-up was impeccable. When we were in the investment banking business, we brought that attitude to investment banking. And our follow-up was flawless. We never made a mistake because it's rote. It's not rocket science. Anyone can be taught to follow up, yet very few people do it. Anyone can be taught to make outgoing calls and generate momentum, but very few people do it. When I started with Ollie, I did exactly what I did when Marc Andreessen had me move to San Francisco.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  I have put Ollie into over 200 meetings in the last nine months with smart people, and I've not gotten one negative back. And I'm very proud of him. He listens great. He's smart as hell. He has this extraordinary ability because he learned the credit business from the ground up. Credit guys look at things through a different lens, and they're very risk averse. He's really risk averse. Yet our venture business is like being in the Wild West because it's mostly risk because you never know. Who knows? But Ollie's taken that credit lens and put it on top

• 51:13Speaker 03

  of our venture business, and it's been incredibly helpful. And he wants to learn, and he works like I do. He's 24/7. I can get him on the phone Sunday at 11 o'clock at night, and I often do, by the way. All the things that I'm stating, Ted, are part of building momentum. It's kind of like a Sarra painting, a pointillist painting. When you look at Sarra, it's one of my all-time favorite artists. It's a bunch of dots. So if you look at an inch of it, you don't understand what you're looking at. If you look at two inches, three, four, five, and then at about a foot of it, there's a figure in there someplace. And then it starts to open up. All the things I'm saying are points on a pointillist painting.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Not one of them works on their own. They have to all be integrated. So meetings are critical. When I started with Ollie, I refreshed.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Several hundred of my financial contacts that I stayed in touch with, but not, I didn't go have a lot of meals with them. I now do meetings every day. I have three time slots for meetings for just refreshing relationships. And then I'll do stuff for people, almost anything when asked, to help them with things. One of the things we pioneered at CA was we literally serviced the clients on everything. They wanted to buy a house, we helped them. They wanted to buy a car, we knew all the dealers. They wanted to get their kids into private schools. We had contributed to the five big private schools at each level in Los Angeles,

• 52:54Speaker 03

  and happily so, by the way, because it was a double good thing. If you had a problem and needed a good doctor, I was involved with the UCLA Hospital for 20 years. I kept a list of who I thought the best specialists were. By the way, I still do, maybe because I'm a hypochondriac. I don't know. But I'm fascinated by medicine, too. So I'm fascinated by what's going on in the investment world and bioscience and spend a lot of time in it. And it's a sarah painting. All the things I'm spitting out here randomly aren't really random. They're all interconnected.

• 53:31Ted Seides?

  I'm curious, in the whole process of capital formation, I knew Ali when he was 25 billion, I think he last came on the podcast, he was 2 billion, and growing from there. You mentioned earlier that the CA days, there was an element that it was all transactional. And then there's this concept of refreshing relationships. I'm really curious what those conversations are like, so that you can turn something that maybe felt transactional at some point in time into a relationship that you can refresh on a moment's notice.

• 54:00Speaker 03

  You know, it's funny, I have this conversation with Tamara, who I live with almost every night. She taught me there are two kinds of relationships, and I never knew this. I always thought there was only one, and that was a transactional relationship. She said, you know, I come from London. We don't have transactional relationships because we don't do a lot of transactions. We have friends and they're there for you forever. And she has friends that I'm now friends with because we've been together 15 years. I'm as close to her friends as she is now. They've been friends of hers for 30 years and they don't do anything for each other. And her thesis on this is the best friend you can have is someone who's useless. And I think she's right. L A is all transactional friendship.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  They're all based on helping someone with something. And that's all I did with my life is help people. That's all I was. I was one of the great concierge doctors, concierge connectors. Cause I'm an insanely intense researcher and my friends call me to do their homework for them. And I actually enjoy it. But New York's different. It's more like London. It's still a bit transactional. But people you get friendly with here are actually your friends. Mainly because they're not all in the same business. Our friend group here, everyone does something different. It's so fantastic when we go out here because everyone at the table has a different story to tell.

• 55:29Speaker 03

  We did that in L A and still do. We mix and match people, but it's harder because there's not as many silos of activity. So the answer to your question is it's hard because if you lose touch with somebody, it's hard unless you have some history. I'm lucky in that I've got history with these people. And I probably in my old incarnation had done something for some of them at some point. They've also been incredibly gracious and lenient, but I think I never really lost touch. Cause I'm involved with MoMA. I'm here looking at art. 50% of my life was in New York. Now it's more since I partnered up with Ollie.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  But I didn't really lose touch. So I didn't have to start from the ground floor. So I had a start on a 20 story building from the 12th floor, but I had some foundational relationship.

• 56:25Ted Seides?

  When you now are meeting with people, let's say it's a pool of capital that might look at what you're doing as a potential investor. What do you think you do differently than maybe what Ali might have done before, or other people in the industry when they're trying to approach raising capital?

• 56:42Speaker 03

  I tell the people I'm meeting with that I think, I don't like the meetings to go more than 20 minutes. I tell them upfront. I don't book an hour. I like to give people back what I call bonus time, and I say that at the end of every Zoom. I don't do long phone calls, which I had to teach Ali about because he couldn't understand why he had no time, and he had no time because he was too long on each call. People want to get stuff done, and they want you to get stuff done. If I'm pitching to a pool of capital, they hear this every day, and I'm very open about it. I said this to someone on the phone. One, I know you want to see a deck. I think they're stupid. I'm happy to send it to you. I will send it to you, but you better investigate me and Ali and our partners because we're

• 57:27Speaker 03

  the ones going to be doing the work. Number two, every person in my position tells you they're the greatest thing since the wheel. It's all baloney. We're not. We're good at certain things and not so good at others, just like everybody else. I said to someone at a big foundation yesterday, we were in a giant meeting, and I think they were in a state of shock. I said, I can't believe you're sitting through this. And the guy looked at me, he said, what are you talking about? You asked for the meeting. I said, but you take these meetings every day, and everyone's doing what we're about to do, which is tell you we're unbelievably good. And it's just nonsense. You got to make a decision about us as people. And he said, that's really interesting. No one's ever said that to me before. I said, well, they've thought it. They just didn't say it. And

• 58:12Speaker 03

  I said, it's probably because they're all half my age. I've been around too long. And then, secondly, for me, it's easier, frankly. Ted, there's only one good thing about getting older, which is you've just been around a long time. In 1992, I was lucky enough to meet a guy named Andy Grove, who was the co-founder of Intel, and we created the CEA Intel Media Lab in Beverly Hills to educate the secular head in the sand entertainment business about what was coming around the corner. I think when I tell investors that we had early deals with Microsoft and Intel in the mid 90s, and I went on Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz's board in 98 or 9.

• 58:55Speaker 03

  I think that resonates because part of being a great investor is to be around these people that made that business great in the foundational time and then keep it going with the young people. And I think that is a different story.

• 59:14Ted Seides?

  In your many meetings with people gathering intelligence, as you look around corners, what do you see coming?

• 59:21Speaker 03

  I love that question because I just addressed that at dinner last night. I said to a table of people, I wish I was younger. And everyone said, yeah, sure you do. I said, but not for the reason you think. I just want to see how it all turns out. The stuff going on right now. Oh, my God. I haven't been this excited since I started CAA where I got to meet all these brilliant creative people and put their ideas together and help them form them. And I meet these young men and women. They're not, they're like 26, 7, 8, 9. They're wicked smart. They're perceptive. They're personable. And they want to change

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  the world. I remember living through all the format changes in entertainment. They changed constantly. I remember having a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Then I remember having a giant cassette player with those big, giant cassettes long before your time. And then I remember getting a smaller cassette and then a mini cassette. And then Sony came out with a video camera. And then Matsushita came out with one Panasonic. And then I saw floppy disks. And then I saw CD-ROMs. Then I saw CDs. Then I saw DVDs. And then I told three of the five record companies I consulted for that all their packaged goods were going to disappear.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  Because Nathan Myhrvold, who is the smartest guy, was employee number three at Microsoft, was CTO, said to me in a meeting one day in the 90s, Michael, see those speakers there? I said, yeah. He said, music's not going to come through those wires. And I sat there, I said, come on. And he told me why. So I went and told the three CEOs of the three record companies that I was consulting for, one fired me, one threw me out, and one thought I was smoking crack. And sure enough, look what happened. It's all comes out of the ether. I want to see the future in medicine, in science, in technology, in AI. I want to see how it turns out.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Because you could see now that the amount of creativity in technology is at an all time high.

• 1:01:40Ted Seides?

  Have you harkened back to your conversation with Patrick Collison and reflect on the mistakes you've made as you look out? Let's just focus it on what you're doing with Ali at Treble. What are the most important mistakes that you want to make sure you don't make again?

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  It's a fascinating subject to discuss because I am the world's greatest cheerleader for talent, any kind of talent. I want them to succeed. It makes me feel good. I'm probably the world's largest critic of myself. I've had the same writer put me on the cover of a magazine calling me brilliant and then four years later write an article that I'm an idiot. But I'm my own worst critic. The writer said nothing compared to what I say to myself. And one of the things I realized early on, when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz invited me to be on their board in the late 90s, I never had a mentor. I didn't have me.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Who'd been through it and was older. I had no one to say to me, don't do this, do that. And I've made a lot of mistakes. And some of them were obvious, but not to me. And I'm a horrific advisor for myself. Because I have this thing from the time I was a kid that I can do anything. And I can fix anything and I can do good. If somebody's got something that needs to be done, I can do it. And I'd say by and large, I probably do that for friends particularly. I'm in the middle of helping friends settle their divorce. Because I don't want them to go spend a zillion dollars on lawyers. And I came up with a thesis and I Henry Kissinger'd it between both of them. I enjoy doing that.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  I'm great at giving advice to other people, but when it comes to me, I sometimes miss it by a mile. So I'm not afraid of failure. I think if I had to live all over again, I would love to have a mentor that was three times my age and had been through it all before and made the mistakes and could see around corners. I've had founders say to me, they can't believe some of the advice I give them turns out to be things that they didn't think were meaningful. I had a meeting in San Francisco with two young founders, brilliant engineers, brilliant. They were like 26 or 7. They started this company and it started to take off.

• 1:04:06Speaker 03

  And I said, look, here's some things I see around the corner for you, X, Y, and Z. I was doing work for Palantir, which I still do. And I had heard from one of the senior Palantir engineers that the Nigerians were hacking American consumer companies and getting into their payment systems. This was like 12, 13 years ago. I told them about this and I said, also, you need to have relationships with people. You've got to stop just only doing email. We weren't even doing text, they were just doing email. They'd stay up all night, but they'd never talk to anybody. One day I was at my office at Andreessen Horowitz in Palo Alto. And I'm driving back to San Francisco and the phone rings. It's one of these founders, he'd never called me ever.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  I said to him in this meeting, I said, you know, when you least expect it and you think everything's amazing, you're going to walk down the stairs of this office, walk out on the street. You're going to make a left, you're going to go around the corner and a midget's going to hit you in the shins with a two by four. And you're going to bend over and go, how did this happen? It's going to happen to you. It's Sod's Law. Calls me up, he said, you remember when you told me so and so was gonna happen? And we thought you were nuts. And I said, yeah, I remember. And he said, we just got shut down. He said, we got hacked Sunday night at two in the morning when no one was paying attention. They swept all of our accounts out and we have no money from customers.

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  We're fulfilling orders, we're paying for it ourselves. Braintree shut us down. And he said, we don't know what to do. And I said, I'll take care of it. By sheer luck, I had had dinner the night before with David Marcus and he thought I was calling him to thank him for dinner. I said, I got a problem. He was running PayPal at the time. And I told him what it was. Guess what? You're in luck. I said, why? He said, I'm sitting in Chicago next to the founder of the company and I'm gonna put you on the phone with him and you tell him and we'll take care of it. He was all about relationship. I got on the phone with a guy, he couldn't have been more gracious. They put my guys back up. And to this day, those guys say to me, what else is gonna happen to us?

• 1:06:15Ted Seides?

  All right, Michael, I want to make sure I get a chance to ask you a couple of closing questions. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family?

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  It's art. I'm obsessed and I love mentoring young collectors. I have a young VC in San Francisco named Romton Nyme, who you may know, who has Abstract Ventures. He started it about six years ago. I was an early supporter of his. I think he's an amazing investor, but he came to my house and he got interested in art. And he's passionate about it and he wants to learn and we must talk four times a day about it. I couldn't be happier to see him on my phone because it's always a good feed for business and I get to talk about art. So I love art. It literally is one of the pillars of my life, along with my family. I'm a big family guy, always have been.

• 1:07:05Ted Seides?

  What's your biggest pet peeve?

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  I'm almost afraid to say I like to learn. So it's very hard for me to be in random situations and make small talk with people. I'm not big on cocktail parties. I don't like when I have to go to an event to go to the hour before. I loved it when I was an agent because I got so much done, but I never stayed for the event, so it was easy. We had a system, by the way, where there's, you know, there's two, three screenings a week of your clients' movies and the screenings always started at 7:30 and we pioneered this concept. Everyone's milling around for 45 minutes in the lobby of the theaters before. We'd send teams of agents, like 10 or 12, and they'd fan out.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  And then when the screening was ready to start, people would all file in and sit down and we waited till everyone was seated and then would go down both aisles to make a spectacle of ourselves. And then I would go take a seat in the back and the minute the lights went out, I'd left. And I could then go do a dinner. So I got a twofer in that, but I don't like doing that anymore. And I don't like small talk. I just can't stand it. I like to learn things. I want people to share things with me that they're doing, that they're passionate about.

• 1:08:24Ted Seides?

  How's your life turned out differently from how you expected it to?

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  I had a plan and it didn't work, is what it boils down to. Left CAA to go to Disney with the hopes of spending five to six years running a public company. And then I wanted to get involved in the State Department because I love negotiating and I wanted to have a job working in the State Department. I had spent a lot of time raising money for the Democratic Party and I thought by running a public company, it would give me a foundation. I had been enough as an agent. I wanted to be on the buy side and I wanted to run a profiled business. And then I wanted to go to the State Department. And I'd say, within forty eight hours of joining Disney, I knew I had made one of the great mistakes of my life.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  So when you talk about mistakes, I missed every cue. When I went over there, it was the worst, most horrific experience imaginable. I mean, they wrote a book about it called Disney Wars, and it's quite accurate. Jim Stewart is not a guy that writes things that aren't true in anything he does. And it just didn't turn out the way I thought it was going to turn out. Now, I can't complain because if I did that plan, I wouldn't be partners with Ollie right now, having the time of my life. So I got lucky in a strange way. But it was a rough road for part of it. How'd you recover from that? It's what I said to the guys in London. I made a mistake, next case. One of the great lines of all time that has always stayed with me was Barry Diller's

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  line when he went after CBS and Sumner Redstone Goddard, and he got interviewed by everybody. And Barry's incredibly smart and witty. That's why reporters love to talk to him. Instead of giving this long, windy, ridiculous, stupid excuse, he looked at these reporters, and they all printed it. He said, we lost, he won, next case. And he was right. He lost, next case. And that's how I look at my life. I've made a lot of mistakes. What am I going to do? I'm not moving to Switzerland, so I'm going to do the best I can do to start something that makes me happy and challenges me, and I get to learn something. I find myself a perpetual student, and that is where I am right now.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  I'm learning a lot, and I'm taking a lot of information from friends of mine that are in the investment world. I'm on the phone with them, constantly asking them questions. I think I've made Eric Lane crazy. He's trying to run Chase Coleman's company, and I think every time he sees my name pop up on his cellphone, he must go absolutely crazy because I'm just always asking him crazy questions. What's a mystery you wonder about? I think something that has always fascinated me is why I ended up being an agent is I find the whole concept of creating things out of thin air almost impossible to explain and articulate.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  I'll never forget, I flew to Osaka to meet with the number two guy in Matsushita. And I was so jet lagged, Ted, it was unbelievable. And they threw a dinner for me. And in those days, when the Japanese threw a dinner, they'd rent out the whole restaurant. So there was no one in the room. So there was no distraction. It was just us. And I'm like nodding off. And the guy turns to me, he said, Michael, son, in broken English, can you please explain creativity to me? And I've never forgotten that line. I think about it all the time. I was on the phone with a very brilliant young artist today. I went to see one of her paintings and I said, just how did you do that? I mean, it's like, how did you get the idea?

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  How did your brain tell your hand what to do? How did you know what color to use? It's just mesmerizes me. I just think that it's a process I'll never understand, frankly, and I'm trying to. But it keeps me getting me up in the morning.

• 1:12:19Ted Seides?

  All right, Michael, last one. What life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in your life?

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  I wish I would have met the woman I'm with right now earlier because she taught me about relationships. She's English and it's very different over there. I wish I would have learned the difference between business and personal. I melded them all together. And the weird thing is, Ted, to show you how I'm not my own best advisor, I used to preach to all of our people to not think their clients were their friends and to treat them appropriately at arm's length and don't confide in your personal life. They don't want to hear it. They may tell you they do, but they're not interested. Plus, they're paying you a lot of money. So you got to have a business relationship.

• 1:13:09Speaker 03

  I didn't follow my own advice and I got involved in all these relationships over the years that turned out to be unfulfilling. I'm not talking about creative people. Those are great. I'm just talking about with other executives and things like that. They're transactional and people you're on the other side of the fence from. People that run companies, they're not real. They're usury. And I kind of swept that under the rug. And it was really short sighted, but no one said to me, just should look at the other side of this. I had no idea. And I've changed that in my life like geometrically. In the last, I would say 20 years, it's a different lifestyle for me.

• 1:13:52Ted Seides?

  Michael, thanks so much for sharing such incredible stories and insights this path.

• 1:13:57Speaker 03

  Thanks, Tim.

• 1:13:58Ted Seides?

  Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one and see you next time.