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

Barry Diller, a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment and also the chairman and senior executive of IAC, joins Scott to discuss his origin story, the current state of media and streaming, and his new book, Who Knew. Help us plan for the future of The Prof G Pod by filling out a brief survey: voxmedia.com/survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01Speaker 02

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• 1:31Scott Galloway?

  Episode 352. 352 is the area code serving Northern Florida. 1952, the contraceptive pill was introduced. What does MAGA use for contraception? Their personality. Yeah, I said it. And by the way, if you're going to fill my comments up with how I have Trump Derangement Syndrome, just look at what's going on with the fascist movement in Los Angeles. And if you unsubscribe, I promise to send you a full refund.

• 2:05Scott Galloway?

  Welcome to the 352nd episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? I am back in London. I went London, Paris, Paris, Miami, Miami, New York for a couple days, then to Detroit for Summit, and then back home. The highlight was I did this thing called the Faina Rumble, where they set it up like a boxing tournament. And it's sort of a debate. The audience asks questions, you have a minute to respond, then the other person responds, and then at the end of the fight, the audience decides who won the bout. And I debated a guy named Shermichael Singleton, who's a fairly well-known conservative who's on CNN a lot. I would describe him as sort of a Romney or Bush conservative in that

• 2:47Scott Galloway?

  he isn't fucking crazy, and is pretty thoughtful. I was really impressed with him. He's a really young man, a 34-year-old. But I went into this, I agreed to do this because my buddy wanted to do it and asked me to commit, because, you know, kind of a big deal. And then I find out I'm going up against some young Republican, and it's like, okay, I'm fucked. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. He's a really impressive kid. Came back to London last night to find out that my hometown of Los Angeles is being occupied by the National Guard. The last time I happened, or last time I happened, I was actually in Los Angeles. I had returned home from business school. Was it business school? I think it was business school. And I was living with my mom, and we live in a suburb of Los Angeles, Westwood,

• 3:28Scott Galloway?

  right behind UCLA. And I came home, and on every corner, there were two young men that looked 17 and fatigues with M15, stuff they called the semi-automatic that they used to carry way back when. And it was very odd and very strange, and a very dark moment for us. But this was back when people were being pulled out of their cars, beaten up, bricks being thrown, people were killed. And my understanding is, having spoken to several people who live in Los Angeles, most of my college friends are still there, there really isn't anything going on that would, that would in any way indicate a need for this type of brute federal force. I think this is, when you think about what you want to do in your own household, as you get older, a little bit more mature,

• 4:13Scott Galloway?

  Or as the man of the household, I think your job is oftentimes to deescalate. And that is, I do that a lot in confrontations in my house and my company. And that is I try and deescalate the situation such that, because what happens when you get to a certain point, people start saying things or doing things that is difficult to take back. It just makes a bad situation much worse. And if you think about it, the whole point, or one of the wonderful things about being a president and having a huge military and a bully pulpit, that's the biggest platform in the world arguably, is you can kind of be the master deescalator. That's kind of your job. We're called on to try and create peace and deescalate. And this is a perfect example of doing exactly the opposite. This is setting up a confrontation. This is incendiary, it's inflaming emotions.

• 4:58Scott Galloway?

  You're supposed to only send in the National Guard. And by the way, he's allowed to do this under Title 11. He's supposed to be able to use federal resources to ensure that people's work gets done. But it's almost always the governor requested a natural disaster or when things get out of control, as they did in 1992. But this is just setting up a confrontation. I don't, you know, I have a bias here, but I believe that ultimately Governor Newsom is going to come out of this probably looking pretty good because I think he's been forcefully yet dignified. And he's sort of setting up the national stage of Trump versus Newsom, which I think will ultimately end up being kind of J.D. Vance versus Newsom. I think Newsom has stronger prospects to get the Democratic nomination than people like. Why?

• 5:38Scott Galloway?

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

• 6:22Scott Galloway?

  The thing is, we think of ourselves, we're so narcissistic and think of America as such a big, powerful, you know, and we're right, such an unbelievably huge, dramatic icon center of the universe that if America were to go out of business or end, it would go down with a bang. I don't think that's true. I think America goes out of business with a whimper. And that is, this is a step towards that. This is a confrontation between the federal government and a politically opposition, oppositional governor in a liberal state. Trump is not going to send federal troops into a red state. He's already, they've already are trying to demonize Governor Walz in Minnesota. Basically, he's deciding to weaponize the federal government to go after his, what

• 7:04Scott Galloway?

  he perceives as his political enemies, or to distract from other things. I have this big, beautiful tax bill, which is just a giant fucking transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, from the young to the old, from the future to the past. Anyway, this is how America ends. And I think, again, it's with a whimper. And that is, there's a confrontation. I don't know if it results in violence or not, but maybe Governor Newsom says, we're no longer going to send our tax revenue back to the federal government. We're just going to hold on to it. That ends up in another confrontation. There is an election. So you could now see states that have economies the size of a European nation decide, no, we're no longer signed up for the federal government or what the people have decided on the Democratic or the Republican side.

• 7:47Scott Galloway?

  And we have a series of small nation states. California is a tech-centered economy that does a lot of business with Asia. The South is, or Texas would be, a oil and gas-centered economy doing a lot of business with the Gulf, if you will, or overseas, or whoever needs oil. The Midwest, a manufacturing economy, doing a lot of business with Canada. And I could see the East Coast breaking into its own fiefdom, where it's mostly about trade with Europe and finance and financial services. And this is the new disunited states of America. And how does America come to an end? Not with a bang, but with a whimper.

• 8:27Scott Galloway?

  That was somber, wasn't it? Wasn't that light and cheery? Wasn't that, aren't I just a little bucket of sunshine today? Anyways, in today's episode, we speak with Barry Diller, a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment, and the chairman and senior executive of I S C. We discuss with Barry his origin story, the current state of media and streaming, and his new book, Who Knew?, out now. But I really enjoyed Barry Diller. He was a media mogul when I was in college. This guy, as you'll hear, he was doing, he was in charge of movie of the week. And if you're my age, you remember that when he was in his early twenties. Anyways, with that, here's our conversation with Barry Diller.

• 9:08Scott Galloway?

  Barry, where does this podcast find you?

• 9:10Speaker 04

  I'm in my New York office.

• 9:12Scott Galloway?

  Is that the big sales?

• 9:14Speaker 04

  Yes, it's the sailcloth, Frank Gehry building.

• 9:17Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's a beautiful building. I've done several events there. So let's bust right into this. I want to get your origin story. I remember being, I remember my senior year at UCLA, I had a job selling insurance and I wanted to break into media. And I had a friend named Tom Noonan and he worked for you, like two levels down, or he knew you. You were already kind of a master of the universe then.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  But what, is this like ancient history we're doing here? Like, is this like 1912?

• 9:45Scott Galloway?

  No, this is like 1987. I think you were at Fox.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  1987, I was at Fox.

• 9:51Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, so I would just love to get your origin story and how you ended up in, as a fairly young man, kind of being a captain of media industry. Like, give us the origin story, Barry Diller.

• 10:03Speaker 04

  Let's do when I kind of went to work, since I had no seeming ambition until I walked into the William Morris Agency as a mail boy, basically, although I never really delivered mail. And I ended up reading The File Room. And at that time, file rooms were, this was a huge room with big file cabinets. And in it was basically the history of the entertainment business. So I found a way not to deliver mail or do what the other guys were doing, which were trying to be agents, which I never wanted to be. And I basically read the entire file room. And that was the most fortuitous thing, because I got the entire, I mean, William Morris had been in business then for

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Uh, seventy years or something and it represented almost everyone. So it had all the history. So I read the life of Elvis Presley. I read the, I mean, it was just incredible pacing. And then I got serendipitously lucky in that they want to throw me out of William Morris because I never wanted to be an agent and they only did these male boy things in order to turn people into productive uh agents and I was never going to be that. And I'd finished kind of the file room and I think they were getting ready to throw me out. And luckily I took the only job that I was offered, which was to be the assistant to what I

• 11:32Speaker 04

  thought was a middle level A job at ABC uh in Los Angeles in what was called current programming. And the day that I accepted that job, they fired the czar of ABC and they reached down and they picked my guy. So instead of being the assistant to this West Coast person, I moved to New York to be the assistant to the head of the network. And within six months, I was kind of running the program department. So there you go. That was at age twenty-three.

• 12:02Scott Galloway?

  There's something that clearly came from your even earlier than that. What influences growing up gave you that type of drive, that type of creativity? Like when you look back on your childhood and how you were raised, is there's anything or people that stand out?

• 12:16Speaker 04

  I think that all of the things that were enormously enormous difficulties for me, all those kind of insecurities, inadequacies, uh, feeling that I had no self, that I didn't deserve to, for all sorts of excuses, sexual confusion and stuff. And one big secret, which if you have one big secret and it's an overwhelming one, it tends to let all the other risks reduce in size. So you can take these giant risks because the big risk is just obliterating everything else. So that's, that's in a way, not that God knows I wanted it, but.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  It allowed me to take risks everywhere else. My family never thought that I would actually ever work and they were had resources enough that it didn't really matter. But I had no seeming ambition up until the age of really nineteen. And I didn't really want to go to school and I was kind of just hibernating. But once I found, actually, when I walked into that William Morris Agency, because I'd always been interested in the entertainment business. When I walked in and I started reading about that world, uh, that just drew me like a, like the fiercest magnet. And that ignited this, I don't know where that ambition was,

• 13:42Speaker 04

  but it was certainly born of not feeling that there was any self or that I, that, that I deserved any self. And therefore that fuel, that was just big fuel for me.

• 13:56Scott Galloway?

  You said something off mic, I was saying, I, I wanted to talk more about business because everyone's focused on other parts of the book. But you said that your quote unquote secret, and I assume that's your sexuality you're talking about.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 14:10Scott Galloway?

  Well, let me ask you this. If you were a twenties, something executive in today's Hollywood, which is much more accepting of people's sexual orientation, do you not think you'd be as successful as you were?

• 14:23Speaker 04

  God, I don't have a clue. I think, well, no, I, I think I would not have, I definitely think that the tools that I developed out of all of these seeming disadvantages absolutely did propel me for sure. If I didn't have those, I'd probably be a ribbon clerk.

• 14:44Scott Galloway?

  There's this term trad dad, traditional dads who are a little bit harsher and, you know, are not sitting kids down and asking them, you know, how this made them feel. What I knew of you back in the eighties was you were like the trad manager. People were scared of you. You had a reputation for not suffering fools, that you were a hard ass. One, is that accurate? And two, what can you tell us about how your management approach has, if at all, how it's evolved as you've gotten older?

• 15:18Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, it is true. I mean, first of all, I have this voice and that voice is a bit intimidating to begin with. And then in all these, because I'm so indirect in everything else in my life, I'm so direct in anything relating to business. I am direct. I say exactly, exactly. I say what I think without kind of fear or favor. And I like creative conflict. I like argument. I like the whole concept of arguing things out of passion because all I care about is instinct. And in order to hear the truth of something, you gotta push through and you've gotta get, all right, what does that person really believe? And taking out of those kind of

• 16:02Speaker 04

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

• 16:47Speaker 04

  another company. So for a couple of years, I hired every, first of all, I did every job and I hired every single person up to the point when we had, I don't know, hundreds and thousands of employees in that group. So when you learn, the luckiest thing anyone can get is to start something where you get to learn every job. Because in learning every job and in then hiring the people and doing all that, you actually learn to manage because you are so on the original ground of things. And I think that is incredibly productive. Now, I evolved out of that.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  In my mid twenties, because by my late twenties, I was supervising a rather large organization. And then at thirty two, I became chair on a Paramount, which is a whole other kind of management process of learning how to be in a movie business where nobody from television had been in one before and they didn't like those people. I don't know about the evolution. I'm still, I hope, I still bring that that same uh tool making, which is to create situations where you have opinion argued about whether

• 18:08Speaker 04

  it's a new business idea or a company to acquire or anything else. I hope I still have that very tough process of trying to find what is at the heart root of an idea to determine whether it's worth pursuing.

• 18:25Scott Galloway?

  So I can't help but wax nostalgic here. So I was raised by a single immigrant mother and our, we didn't see each other much during the week. Um, she was a secretary and but we always made, uh, we had a date, a standing date on Tuesday nights. You know what we did?

• 18:41Speaker 04

  Oh, seven thirty, movie of the week.

• 18:44Scott Galloway?

  ABC movie of the week. And it was a standing thing and my mom would make me loaf. Um, getting emotional thinking about it. And my three favorites, people don't realize about like how creative to create a breakthrough in that show. And I assume you're involved in all three of these things. One, Duel, Steven Spielberg's first, first thing I can remember. Two, in my opinion, Billy Dee Williams' best movie, Brian Song.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  By far.

• 19:13Scott Galloway?

  And then the most underrated, it was a movie of the week, but it turned into a show, which I think was one of the most underrated shows of the seventies that I did never, I never missed an episode, The Night Stalker. Remember that with Darren McGavin?

• 19:25Speaker 04

  Are you kidding? I mean, I, uh, first of all, those three, there's one, there's a fourth called That Certain Summer, which was at, at probably of all the.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  God, what did we make? I say we probably made three hundred and fifty individual movies of the week during that five year, seven year period. And Certain Summer was my favorite for a lot of reasons. It was about, it was the first dramatic depiction of homosexuality on broadcast television. And it was a lovely story about, uh, uh, about two men's relationship and him having to tell, one of them having to tell his son about his life. And Night Stalker, I got this book that somebody sent me that I respected. And it was about two hundred pages long. I read it and I said, oh, my God, a vampire in Las Vegas.

• 20:21Speaker 04

  What could be a better idea or a better place for a vampire to go than Las Vegas, which is open twenty four hours a day, et cetera, is the definition of a night city. And I read it, I literally read this story pages in three hours and ordered up the movie. And right when the, when that movie was finished, it was so good that my colleagues at ABC said, this is a theatrical movie. Let's release this in theaters. We'll make a fortune. And I said, no, you crazy? This is, this is what we do. This is a movie of the week. That's where it's going. That's where it belongs. And of course, it then spawned a series, et cetera. And Brian Song, I don't know that you can do better for sure. I mean, yeah, you pick some good ones.

• 21:06Scott Galloway?

  What other things early in your career sort of got you to the next level, if you will?

• 21:11Speaker 04

  Well, I would say that, I mean, it was definitely, I mean, movie of the week was, again, I'm twenty three or four. And so my twenties were just dominated for five years by this. And, and then at the end of that, because after we'd made these movies, I was kind of used to the process, to say the least. And I thought that, you know, there were books that were made into movies, but big sprawling epic novels, you can't tell that story in two hours, really. And I thought, Told you it has all this time, so why not do long, long form, which we called the novel for television, which evolved into the mini series, which we all live with today for sure in streaming.

• 21:54Speaker 04

  And that created like the next bump because that was this out of nowhere, huge success. So I had these two seminal. Of thrusts really early and I don't know it was that because it was a confluence of other events that landed me at Paramount and the movie business at also a really young age and I was always the youngest and now I'm always the oldest.

• 22:23Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, it's weird. I often say I used to walk into every room, be the youngest. Now I walk into every room and I'm the oldest. I was never the same age. Just goes so fast. What so you you're sort of a decathlete in terms of different types of content. You started in TV and then to transition to movies. How is that different? Or what what skills? Is it the same skills? Or did you need to develop different management and different capital allocation skills?

• 22:48Speaker 04

  It's the same toolset, I'd say, but it's applied to totally different organizations. The movie business, you know, television, if you didn't get it delivered on seven at seven thirty on a Tuesday night, you know, the screen went dark. In the movie business, if you didn't make a movie, nobody knew, nobody cared. So the rhythms are just so completely different. And the industry, movie industry, at its height of snobism, I don't think it's diverted that much today from what it was then in terms of looking down on almost all other forms. Though now with the world, so I don't know even what the

• 23:31Speaker 04

  definition of a movie is anymore, given the Netflix them of life. But the movie companies in the this is in the seventies dominated world culture to such an extent. And so and you only did we never made we Paramount made probably fewer movies than most other companies, other studios, of which there were five dominant ones. We made maybe fifteen to eighteen movies a year. Other people made twenty five to thirty. So you know, that's kind of putting your tent up and taking it down every month or so. It's a completely different rhythm.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  And I had, first of all, the movie people peed on people from television. So I had like the good and the bad of people so discounting saying, well, I'd be thrown out soon because a television person could never succeed in the exalted movie world.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  And so they kind of left me alone for a couple of years where I figured out how to make the company run the way I was comfortable with. And that was a very, very hard time where I certainly failed first because I believe almost everything I've ever done, you kind of, at least in my mind, fail first before you succeed. And so it was a completely different process that I had to adapt to. I was using all the same basically toolkit of, in my case, which was developing material rather than buying packages with made up, you know, made to form directors, actors, writers, et cetera, that were given to studios by agencies.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  I wanted to develop, I've always thought it was my first thing of developing material. So I wanted to develop material. That takes a long time to do, but that process has never changed for me.

• 25:28Scott Galloway?

  So while you're there, I just want to review this. You decided to go back to TV and essentially started the Fox Television Network where Married with Children and The Simpsons were sort of the pillars there. Talk about, why did you go back to TV? And tell us a little bit about those two shows because I, someone told me The Simpsons is the most profitable TV show in history.

• 25:51Speaker 04

  That is true. Well, back into TV, when I left Paramount to go to Fox, I tried to start a, a, a fourth network. There were at that time, three networks, which got a hundred percent of viewing. There wasn't cable. I mean, cable was just getting a better signal. Uh, and so three networks dominated everything. And I thought I had thought over the years that while they started out with different personalities. By the eighties, they all talked, looked and acted alike. And I thought, well, that's interesting. There's room for, I mean, maybe room for an alternative to that. So.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  When I got to Fox and their confluence against serendipitous events, I was able to get a bunch of television stations. That we could buy and start this fourth network. And in the beginning, you know, we didn't find our vein until I got a script called Not the Cosby's. And now, Not the Cosby's means Bill Cosby's show was number one on television, had been for many years. And so when I saw the title, Not the Cosby's, I was, oh, that's like a interesting. And, uh, it was an anti-establishment family, which we later called, uh, Married with Children. And that, I knew we'd struck the vein.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  And shortly thereafter, uh, we had had a show called Tracy Ullman. And in it were these interstitials that Matt Groening did with his character, The Simpsons and Jim Brooks. Great director who made Terms of Endearment, et cetera, et cetera. Said, who produced Tracy Ullman's show, said, I think we could make this into a series. And I said, yes, absolutely. Now, at that time. Because animation took six months and whatever we had to commit to thirteen episodes without making quote pilot, et cetera. So it was a big commitment. We did it and made the thirteen episodes. And we hadn't scheduled yet. And the first episode came back again, like six, eight months later.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  And we had this viewing and actually Jim Brooks's little bungalow on the Fox lot. And I brought the sales department, some other, like twelve people. It was one of those screenings where Jim Brooks and I are the only people laughing. And when you're laughing at material that you've already seen before, you're really doing it to try and get other people to laugh. So it's like overperformance. And there Jim and I are hucking it up, stone-faced every other person in the room. We walk out with my group out of the bungalow back up to our offices. And these guys said, well, can't air that.

• 28:39Speaker 04

  I mean, a cartoon? And I thought, as Jim did, this is great. Of course, we scheduled it from the first hour of the first day. It was a smash hit. It's still going now, well, certainly decades, 30 years later. But because of syndication and because of streaming and because of all this, now it's owned by Disney. There's no question that as a single entertainment product, it is the most profitable in history.

• 29:11Scott Galloway?

  We'll be right back after a quick break.

• 29:18Scott Galloway?

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• 30:03Scott Galloway?

  You can download the Built app and join the membership for where you live at joinbuilt.com/prog. That's J O I N B I L T dot com slash prop G. Use our link so they know we sent you.

• 30:18Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 31:03Scott Galloway?

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• 31:24Scott Galloway?

  Support for the show comes from Vanta. As AI adoption grows, so does your company's security risks and requirements. New frameworks, audits, and vendors keep piling on, but your team isn't getting any bigger. Most compliance tools promise automation, but you're really stuck doing all the work by hand, chasing screenshots, validating controls, and playing catch-up when audit season comes around again. Vanta works differently. The Regentic Trust platform is built to scale with you, not slow you down. With over 1,400 automated tests across 400-plus integrations, Vanta collects evidence and monitors your controls year-round, cutting your audit prep by 82%. Plus, you can access the Vanta agent everywhere you work, whether your team is in Vanta every day or living in tools including Claude or Cursor. Want proof?

• 32:09Scott Galloway?

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• 32:34Scott Galloway?

  So you then were able to pivot or evolve into online or e-commerce. What was the motivation there and what kind of, what inspired you to get involved in sort of the digital world?

• 32:48Speaker 04

  What happened was after I left Fox, I wanted to be independent. I wanted my own store. I wanted, I'd always worked for companies. I was the definition of a corporatist and I was 49 years old and I thought, well, if I don't strike out, so to speak, for independence, I never will. And I didn't like that idea that I never would. And that kind of forced me out of Fox. And I had no clue what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was not what I'd done before. I didn't want to run movie companies anymore. I'd run two and a couple of people asked me if I would do that. And I said, no, and I didn't want to, I didn't want to be in the, I certainly didn't want to be in the production business, that that was kind of boring.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  But I had no, all I did is I created a vacuum. I like said, okay, I'm going to go drive across the country and wait for something. And again, serendipity, my wife, she's in the fashion business, called me and said, you have to come go see this QVC, this home shopping channel, because I'm thinking of going on it to offer my design clothes. And she said, it's just interesting, just go see it. So I wasn't doing anything. So I went to Westchester, Pennsylvania. And I got, again, you know, I had this probably single epiphany, which is I saw screens being used for something other than to tell stories.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  Now, I knew, God knows, screens tell stories, but I didn't know anything else. I didn't know a screen could be interactive. And there I am at QVC and I'm watching telephones and televisions and computers being used in this primitive convergence. And it struck me, I mean, it just like banged at me of, wow. Now, I didn't, this is 1993, two years before the internet really started being used by common folk. And I thought, wow. But I didn't think what was going to happen. I just knew it was going to change things and I was fascinated with it. And then again, I've used this word serendipity, but it is the leit motive of my life.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  A couple of months later, I was offered to buy QVC. And I did it. And so by the time the internet came along from this primitive convergence now two years later, I had kind of in my fingertips, an understanding of that world. And so when, when that happened, we were able to start all these businesses, the internet business, Expedia and Match and all these things that came along. Cause I was kind of present at the creation of this radical transformation into the digital age. I didn't plan it. I never actually planned anything.

• 35:39Speaker 04

  But once I saw it, I was just, again, drawn like a magnet to it. And that's what got it started. And then it just went from there.

• 35:50Scott Galloway?

  You have a reputation for mentoring and developing or maturing a lot of pretty impressive executives ranging from Strauss Zelnick to Dara Khosrowshahi at Uber, Don Steele. One of my investors, Tim Armstrong, speaks very highly of you. I'm curious, when you see someone, what attributes in them or signals tell you this person is worth making an investment in and this person could, could play a really important role? What, what do you spot in people and think this person's a comer?

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Spark, energy, edge, being alive to the moment. And that's all I need. I don't like education, unless there, you know, toolsets you need to do a specific task, but education doesn't impress me. Certainly, MBAs don't impress me. I think they're overeducated or narrowly overeducated. And I just look for somebody who's got some spark and edge. Doesn't have to have an original mind. It just has, has to have a live mind and be open to possibilities and be curious. If I see that.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  That's enough to start and every one of the people you mentioned, almost everyone that's come into my life in that way, usually comes in at the juniorist of levels. Uh, and then, and you see that little spark or whatever it is. And, uh, I, I don't like, I think mentoring is a, it's cut into official. Like choose your mentee or whatever, all that stuff. I, I think it's a little high flown, but I think if you get people at the earliest age and they get into your environment and you can bash around with them in different roles that they could play. And then they grow up within the organization.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  They just get big dosages of everything and some it takes and some it doesn't.

• 37:59Scott Galloway?

  I'm curious what you think if, when you look at the media world right now, are there any kind of specific trends that pop out to you and any thoughts on, say you're coming out and you want to be the next Barry Diller, where do you think the puck is headed?

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Well, I have no clue where it's headed really. I mean, I, I, well, I can, a couple of things, maybe. I mean, if I was starting today, I would look for things that can't be disintermediated. Because I think the changes that are afoot are gonna, things have been, as you know, internet has disintermediated lots of stuff. AI is going to put that to G-force power. Uh, so if I were, again, mine wasn't, my own experience, all I got is my own experience. I was drawn to stuff. I didn't suss out, oh, entertainment business looks like it has this or that quality about it. I was just fascinated by it. I think you think, what fascinates you?

• 38:57Speaker 04

  What are you interested, what are you curious about? And then just get on the broad path of it somehow, just start. However, whatever door you have to bash through or whatever you have to do, uh, just get on the main path of whatever intrigues you and. It will take you or not, but it'll it'll take you where we're supposed to go. As against the dopes, particularly entertainment businesses who say, I want to run a studio. Anyone who says that to me, I would throw out of my office. I mean, that's like such an idiot goal. I think, look, if you want to be a doctor, yeah, you gotta have a goal. You gotta get a degree or other things.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  But if those aren't necessary, then early age goal stuff is really stupid. You should only be governed by what you're curious about and get in the lane.

• 39:54Scott Galloway?

  In terms of the media ecosystem right now, you've you've actually, I think some of the stuff I read, you've called for antitrust. Do you think the ecosystem is too concentrated right now?

• 40:03Speaker 04

  Oh, you mean the lawsuits against Google and?

• 40:06Scott Galloway?

  Yeah, Alphabet.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  I don't know how practical it is. Look, I think with Google, Google, the thing is, Google was and is currently, but my my little currently is on the head of a little pin because that's changing. Google is an absolute monopoly. No question. You lived as a serf in their land if you had anything internet or traffic oriented that you needed for your services or products. A total monopoly. I think that's just about to change. Now, maybe their Gemini will take over search just like their Google took over search 20 years ago. I doubt it.

• 40:53Speaker 04

  I don't think the chances are great. So it seems awfully late. Maybe you need most antitrust stuff does come late of this kind. So I don't know if that how what sense that makes. And as for separating Instagram or WhatsApp and trying to get them, I mean, it's also, I I think the basis of that doesn't make any sense. I don't think that they are anti-competitive. I at the heart of that meta lawsuit doesn't make any total sense to me. But, okay, all of that, I think that what is happening on the eve of today, in the next

• 41:32Speaker 04

  year or two, is there's going to be so much diversity in AI empowered stuff that I think these. Tech monopolies, except for Apple, which is not a monopoly, but is the greatest business. As you know, the iPhone business and its walled circle. I don't know how you do better than that, that ecosystem. But I don't think these companies are gonna, these companies probably, because they're so big and so profitable that offshoots of them, look, Google has YouTube, which is a giant.

• 42:15Speaker 04

  People don't realize how powerful YouTube is. YouTube is probably going to be worth more than Google search in a while because I don't see that getting disintermediated. So anyway, I'm long-winded about this. I don't think that the breakup, I think it's the breakup of these things is so late in the game that they're going to get competed with vociferously by everything else coming from AI.

• 42:44Scott Galloway?

  You mentioned YouTube, which is a good segue into the streaming wars. When you look at Netflix and all the other players, I think of it as Netflix and the seven dwarves. Any predictions or any feel for how that might shake out?

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Five years ago, I said Netflix won. Everybody get over it. Please don't try, don't over invest to try and become or compete against Netflix. You cannot do it. They lead in every respect, not only the movie business, but certainly the television business. In every respect, they are dominant. They set the rules and everybody else abides by those rules. Doesn't mean that there aren't other companies that can be successful with their streaming. If they scale it down, what their cost going into it. And they make good programming because in the end, entertainment is a business of hits, world of hits.

• 43:40Speaker 04

  And you can do it at a lesser scale than Netflix and succeed very nicely. You can just never be ever be number one or have big growth that the growth of those movie companies subsumed everything else that came along for 70 years. They are being have been subsumed now by huge tech companies that have a different business model than they do, that they can never compete with. So all those companies that have been around for 100 years, they're just going to be smaller enterprises with great with not without great growth prospects, but they'll be okay.

• 44:16Scott Galloway?

  There's a lot of you see all these TikToks about people saying that, you know, Hollywood is under such especially production. The production is way down in LA. And then everyone's asking for tax credits to make it more competitive. And I think Netflix now spends more than half of its content budget overseas. Do you think that Hollywood is to the entertainment industry what Detroit was to the automotive industry? Is this cyclical or structural?

• 44:42Speaker 04

  Hollywood hedge money is gone forever again. Hollywood now is dominated by Netflix, a tech company. Amazon, a tech company with completely different business model than anybody in the entertainment business could have ever conceived of, which is, we don't care if you watch this stuff really, or then if it's, you know, we don't need really hits. We need you to join Prime and we're going to give you this stuff in the front of the store, you know, the in order to get you in the store of Prime. How do you compete with that? It's not possible. And then there's of course, Apple and its efforts in in programming. So tech are now the overlords.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Hollywood is, I'm not saying it's culturally irrelevant because a lot of stuff gets created there or is organized there. Whether it's shot there or shot someplace else is somewhat irrelevant. Though I think it's very relevant to the craft, all of whom live in LA. And I think. L.A. County, L.A. City, California State has been so frigging dumb in not offering the kinds of production, below the line incentives that every other state and country has offered that has pulled the centrality of just making this stuff away from the place that's got all the craft expertise. Kind of crazy, but there it is. Certainly tariffs

• 46:11Speaker 04

  aren't going to help that. That's brainless. It's just a completely different system now than what it was for, you know, dominated again for close to 100 years by just a handful of companies that subsumed almost everything that came along technically until Netflix busted the apple. We'll be right back.

• 46:43Speaker 00

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• 48:54Scott Galloway?

  We're back with more from Barry Diller. So just, I want to, in our remaining time here, I want to switch to stuff that's more personal. You've had, what I would argue, from at least an exterior perspective, is a very successful partnership with your wife. You guys have been together, married for two and a half decades, but together for five decades? Is that right?

• 49:16Speaker 04

  Except for an interregnum period when I was sent off to the wilderness, which lasted almost about 10 years. But yes, we are, it's almost 50 years.

• 49:26Scott Galloway?

  You're two kids, I'm friends or friendly with Alex. My sense is you have a really good relationship with them. What advice would you have for husbands and for dads around fostering and cultivating strong relationships with your partner and your kids?

• 49:44Speaker 04

  I don't know. I guess be engaged or whatever. I don't, I'm not really very good at advice. I think, I just think, again, if you're lucky enough that, and luck is a part of it, and of course, there's other stuff in there, but luck is a real part of what is the result. Of a child that gets to be, let's see, a semi adult in their teens or post teens or twenties, whatever in their kind of development period. And you know, if they come out of that as responsible, whatever your definition of responsible is, if they're responsible and and you're engaged with them.

• 50:26Speaker 04

  I I it's really not me. You know what? As I think about it, it's not me. It's Dion, my wife. I don't know. I've never seen anyone else's relationship with their children, which is like that. It is, it's not the old Elaine May, Mike Nichols thing of, you know, of guilt and calling, quote, your mother. This family talks to each other every day and multiple times a day. And none of it is effortful. It's effortless. And that's just the children and and the grandchildren, much younger, obviously, but the children are,

• 51:10Speaker 04

  it's their, everybody's life is kind of intertwined. There's no, you know, I'm I'm marveling. People say, well, I haven't talked to my mother or father in two weeks, or I call them every Thursday or whatever, something like that, formalized. Could not be further than the truth. I just think, I don't got no advice here. I just think if you're lucky enough to have that kind of easy is not the world for, but natural engagement and enfoldment, that good things happen.

• 51:39Scott Galloway?

  So you're eighty three. You've checked a lot of boxes. Like, what boxes are left for you? Like, do you have, when you think about your purpose and what's left for you and what you really, what you want to accomplish, you haven't accomplished? What what what is that or those things?

• 51:54Speaker 04

  I don't think it's accomplishment. I never thought about accomplishments in that sense. I I think it's, am I still curious? I'm still responsible for two public companies, probably three, actually, now. Uh, and.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  As long as I'm curious about them, then I will have something to contribute. And that kind of goes on, just like a clock that doesn't stop, or Energizer Bunny that you can't turn off. And that's just the nice, that's just nature. But what I do think about is, and I don't think of, I hate that word legacy anyways. I think it's stupid, but uh, what I want to do, I like public art and public places. And I've been lucky enough to be involved in a few of those. And I want to do as many more of those as I can, right? Cause I, I think there are very few people who have the resources and the will or desire to do that.

• 52:53Speaker 04

  And since I got that, then I think it'd be criminal for me not to spend uh, those resources and my own juice to create more, more public places and public art. Cause I marvel at what has been created by others and who, and lives for hundreds of years and you come upon it and you say, how the hell, how the hell did they decide to do Central Park? You know, how did they, how did they, whatever it is, any place that there is anything that is of a, you know, a public institution.

• 53:32Scott Galloway?

  Barry Diller is a businessman known for his influential roles in media and entertainment. He's the chairman and senior executive of IAC. His new book, Who Knew, is out now. He joins us from his office in Manhattan. Barry, I, I've only had one dinner with you, but I think everybody, everybody just wants to be Barry Diller. You just have a certain.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  Good luck to you.

• 53:54Scott Galloway?

  You, you just have a certain fearlessness about you that I think we're all drawn to, both professionally and personally. Really appreciate you coming on the show.

• 54:09Scott Galloway?

  This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Box Media Podcast Network. Stay tuned for next week's conversation episode featuring one of my favorites and a real role model for me, Sam Harris.

• 54:30Speaker 06

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• 55:00Speaker 07

  This podcast is supported by Anthropic, the public benefit corporation behind Claude. Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claude.ai/spotify.