The Exchanges

Q at least from my perspective, he's immediately successful when he comes in, like the momentum builds right away. And I'm curious as to other aspects of life, like, do you think if something works, it tends to work right away, and you can feel it, you can see it, and the momentum's building, or is it a slow process where it's like, give me more time, give me more time?

A I think momentum's like a train coming out of a station. It doesn't happen instantaneously. You have to build it. It's a conscious building block game. It's like when you were a kid, you had blocks to build. You have to have foundation before you can build the house. And Bloomberg did it. It didn't all happen the first six months. It was a, it literally took time to get up to speed. And he did it. But the key is he didn't stop until he left. And when you're building momentum, you cannot quit. And that's the counter problem, counter argument to when we talked about cutting back. When you're building momentum, you don't want to stop even for 10% of your time.

AI assessment note: “I think momentum's like a train coming out of a station. It doesn't happen instantaneously.”

Q What are, I want to come back to CIA and some of the simple rules that you had. So you had teamwork and you had tell the truth. What are the other ones?

A Everyone had to be incredibly well read. Um, People were not allowed to recommend rules or material that they didn't believe in. That was a big downfall of the agency business for all the years I was in it before, which is people would take a flyer to try to get you convinced of something they didn't believe in. That's a real weak link in the chain. We didn't have any of that. You had to have a passion for what you were doing. I had an open door policy Friday afternoons. Anyone could come in and give me something to read, but since I could only read a certain number of scripts on a weekend, they had to be incredibly passionate about it, and, you know, I remember a young agent we had named Amy Grossman. She was a literary agent, and she was terrific, and She came in to me one afternoon and said, I've read something you've got to read. And I said, okay. And I gave everybody like two minutes to sell it to me because, and by the way, I do the same thing in my tech investing right now. If you can't tell me what your business is about in 20 seconds, you should not do your business because how are you going to market it to the world? You've got, and I'm not talking about that technical algorithms of AI. I'm talking about What does it do? And she walked in, she said, your client, Bob Towne, who was one of the great writers in the, in the movie business, wrote, um, uh, Chinatown and Cin…

AI assessment note: “Everyone had to be incredibly well read. Um, People were not allowed to recommend”

Q So what are the attributes you're looking for in founders that you would look for in anybody else? What, what indicators are there that somebody is likely to be successful?

A It's pretty simple, actually. Founders need to be, uh, passionate. They need to They need to have a lot of ideas about what they want to do with their idea. They need to be connected to people that can help them get their ideas started. They have to be open to critique. They can't be arrogant. It's critical they're not arrogant. I find that arrogant founders have a tendency to fail more than non arrogant founders. They have to have the ability to tell you their ideas in succinct ways. They have to be really enthusiastic. And it's funny, when you're a director and you're interviewing an actor or an actress, you're kind of looking for the same things. The only difference is when you're looking at, uh, uh, Marty Scorsese, who I have unbelievable respect for, taught me most about the movie business that I know, and said to me, I'm always looking at their eyes. I'm kind of not looking at that when I'm interviewing a founder, but they're not actors, right? And I don't want them to be.

AI assessment note: “Founders need to be, uh, passionate. They need to They need to have a lot”

Q If you were trying to teach somebody how to get momentum, what would you tell them?

A I don't think getting momentum is a science. It's more an art form. I think that momentum is about extraordinarily hard, industrious work. It's about deeply educating yourself in your field, deeply educating yourself in the peripheries of your field, knowing who your competitors are, How do you recruit people that are really good that aren't on your side of the ledger? I don't think a meeting went by in any business I've ever been in where I don't ask the people around the table, who have you seen out there that's good? Who beat you last week or yesterday or today? Who's standing out? We recruited some of our best executives that way. Matter of fact, we recruited, I'd say, 80% of our executives like that. We either groom inside or recruited them from the competition because they had our standards and they were at the wrong place in our mind.

AI assessment note: “I think that momentum is about extraordinarily hard, industrious work.”

Q One of the quotes that I loved in your book was, don't fight your job. Can you unpack that for me?

A Well, I, I mean, over the years, I, as a person who's in the business of giving advice, which even though I'm not an agent anymore, I still find myself doing that constantly on a daily basis for people that are friends or former clients or people I'm in business with. Uh, looking for another point of view, I get that call. And in the course of those discussions, more likely than not, people are, their first complaint is usually about an associate, then about a deal gone wrong, and then about not liking their job. And I'm a huge believer that you have to do what you love doing. I mean, right now I'm doing something I can't wait to get up every morning, so if you can't feel that way, you shouldn't do the job, or you should look for another job, or you should ask yourself why you're not happy in the job if you were at one time, so there's a whole, there's a whole pilot's checklist to look at if that's the case, and it's important because if you're fighting going to work during the day, you're not going to perform to your capacity or potential.

AI assessment note: “if you're fighting going to work during the day, you're not going to perform”

Q I think that's a great place to end this. We always end with the same question, which is what is success for you?

A It's a, it's not a singular definition for me. I have a very broad, um, definition of what success is. Success to me is having an amazing family, because at the end of the day, that's your legacy, nothing else, unless you're Jonas Salk. You know, there's one of those for every hundred million people, um, It's having had a great run in your life in education. It's having learned so much more than you ever thought you'd learn. It's building something from scratch, which is why I started working again. I love building things. Someone asked me why I'm working at this stage of my life. And I looked at them like there was something wrong with them, because how could they even ask me the question? But they then said, well, what's the most fun time of your life? I said, building businesses that I started from scratch. I'm doing it again. I'm a year in with a couple of young partners, and we, you know, I've got a young guy named Ali Hamad with me, who's 30, now he's 32 or three, and I've got my son, Uh, who joined me. It took me 10 years to convince him to do that. He didn't want to do it, but I've got his partner Alex with me, and it's fun to build. And then success to me Is, I find success defined at the Thanksgiving dinner table in this country. I don't even know if you have Thanksgiving in Canada. We do, we do.

AI assessment note: “Success to me is having an amazing family, because at the end of the day”

Q Is there an art to telling people the truth, especially when there's ego involved?

A No, it's just, you just say it, and they, you know what, it's interesting. They appreciate it. I want to be told the truth, but in any case, I said to Amy, we have a director we represent, was one of my very first clients as a writer. His name is Barry Levinson, and I signed him as a comedy writer when I saw him on a local television show in 1969, and, but he had an eye, and he had a lust for the business, and he was smart, and he was visual, and I knew that he had something in him, and we put his first movie together called Diner, and it was a huge success with all unknown cast that proved to be All up-and-coming young stars, which means he had an eye. And I knew Redford wanted to do a baseball movie. I also knew the odds of Redford working with a second-time director after having worked with some of the greats like Sidney Pollack and You know, some of the best directors around that he probably wouldn't do it, but I decided to put my self and the company behind it, and I sent Bob the script, and I sent Barry the script, both of them simultaneously, which was unusual, by the way. Usually you build a package one element at a time. And they both responded positively, and I called Bob and I said, I'd like to bring Barry to see you up at Sundance. And I said, but I want to warn you, he's only done one movie, but I have a strong belief in this guy. And to Bob's credit, because Bob w…

AI assessment note: “No, it's just, you just say it, and they, you know what, it's interesting.”

Q Is, maybe let's invert this question a little bit. You've had a front row seat to Hollywood for a long time. Where do people go wrong?

A Well, I think the first place everybody goes wrong is they start to believe things that aren't true. People tend to deceive themselves. I find that to be a common denominator amongst everybody across every kind of industry. It happens everywhere. If you start believing that you're better than others, or that your press is accurate, good or bad, or that You are superior in any way. We're all humans, and we all have different skill sets. Now, some athletes are just better than others, but that doesn't make them better people. Sometimes it makes them worse people, actually, and I think it's very easy to slip up in Hollywood in many directions. You can slip up in the relationship area. You can slip up in the ego area. You can slip up in,

AI assessment note: “the first place everybody goes wrong is they start to believe things that aren't true.”

Q How can you say that, though, if your kids turned into amazing human beings?

A Because they're just better with their kids than I was with them. Because I came from a household post-World War II, With a very strict father, and I, parenting in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, was very different than parenting today. I see it with my kids, how they handle their children, and they're doing a great job, just different than the way I did it. But the other thing that's important to me, Is I can't wait to get up in the morning and meet with a founder who's just, you know, developed a submarine that has no crew that has defense capabilities for the country, and you can't see it, it's stealth. Or, I've got a young guy, I've done, I've already done one company with him, I'm doing another one. His name's Nima Gumsari , I met him. 17 years ago, he was assigned to me at Palantir when I was one of the advisors to Alex Karp, who's a brilliant guy. I was introduced to him by Peter Thiel who had invested a lot of money in Palantir and there was no income. He asked me to help monetize it, which shows that you don't have to be totally technical to be in the tech world. And Nima was assigned to me to answer technical questions because he was a genius engineer. We started a company together. He had an idea that he could put a company together, uh, called Blend. It's now public that does mortgages on your phone. In under 10 clicks. Now he came up with another idea. I…

AI assessment note: “Because they're just better with their kids than I was with them.”

Q attention stay directed towards what matters. What stood out to me most is the community. High quality people who are intentional and serious about building something real. If you're ready to approach dating the same way you approach the rest of your life, What do you look for with people when you're hiring people like you guys hired a CEO for the MoMA? How did you go about doing that?

A Well, it's interesting. My, my thesis On investing, for example, my thesis on hiring people, And kind of my thesis on how I reach out in my life to other people is predicated on how I feel in the first case about the founder, and in the second case about people that I meet, and I like to meet interesting people, and I am very lucky Very lucky in that I get to meet some of the most interesting people in the world from all walks of life in every profession. You know, when I was in the agency business in the seventies, I realized that the entertainment business was a closed end ecosystem. And basically everything was about the entertainment business. There was no life outside the entertainment business. There were very few people with other interests other than content. There were very few people that collected art in the entertainment business. There were very few people that talked at dinner about anything except entertainment and a little tiny bit about politics. But it was mostly about gossip and about, you know, clients and about Who made what? How much trouble someone was in? All things that I found absolutely uninteresting, and I made it a point to take myself away from the business, go to New York every single week, Build a presence in the art community, in the theater community, in part of the intellectual community, because I didn't want to be one of those kind of one-ho…

AI assessment note: “I always admired people that had great depth and breadth and could talk about many things”

Q There's a quote in your book, and I'm going to paraphrase here, but it basically says, mediocrity is invisible until passion shines a light on it. What did you mean by that?

A Exactly what it says. Um, first of all, mediocrity to me is a disease that you have to get rid of at all costs. I can't stand talking to people that suffer from that disease where they have no interest. You know, sometimes you sit blindly next to someone at a dinner party and you try to talk to them. They have no interest in anything, and I just can't deal with it, because I want to be challenged. I want to be pushed. I want to be asked questions. I want to be told I'm wrong. I wanted that kid at that dinner in front of the other 10 young people, my daughter's friends, to defend his position. But what happened is, in one sentence that I gave him, he couldn't defend it. It was indefensible. But I wanted to argue with them in front of everybody.

AI assessment note: “mediocrity to me is a disease that you have to get rid of”

Q Are there any other lessons you learned from Michael Crichton? You said, I think, in the past that he was the smartest person you knew.

A Well, he was the smartest person I knew until I met Marc Andreessen, and then I had the greatest lunch of my life where I put them in a room with me, and I put one on each end of the table and me in the middle, and I felt like I was at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. I never sat through three hours like that in my life. This was a Intellectual sword fight that was so cool, it was unbelievable, and they both loved it. It was unreal, both incredibly well read, both recall that's extraordinary, both, um, widely read, which is insane, and I learned a lot from those guys, even at that part of my life, which was my mid part of my life, which, God, this was 25 years ago and 20 years ago, and they're both deeply read. They are both curious about everything. It's unbelievable. They share these traits. They're the same people in that way.

AI assessment note: “Well, he was the smartest person I knew until I met Marc Andreessen”

Q Where does that fearlessness come from? You have never seemed to shy away from confrontation.

A You know, it's funny, Shane, I don't know if that's good or bad, by the way. I haven't, to this day, haven't decided. It's funny that you asked that question, because I was discussing it yesterday, uh, with Tamara, the woman that, uh, I am with, and, uh, she's English, and very, uh, elegant, and charming, and, uh, very manner, Not English. Um, days I can be charming, days I can be not charming and tough. Um, we're talking about confrontation. So she doesn't like it, but will do it if pushed. Uh, for me, it's a tool in the toolkit. That's all it is. I do a lot of things for friends of mine that are in trouble because I have been viewed by a lot of my friends as the world's best friend and the world's worst enemy, because I'm just black and white loyal. It's the way I've been my whole life. I'm very loyal to my friends, to my family, and to people that have done things for me. You know, at CA we kept a list of every single executive That helped us in the first three or five years that then had trouble, and we got everyone a job, and if we couldn't get them a job, we made sure they had money. Because they helped us when we had nothing, and boy, there were a lot of people on the list because the entertainment business is not good to elderly people, it's not Japan, and it's not, ah, it doesn't have a good memory, and we did.

AI assessment note: “for me, it's a tool in the toolkit. That's all it is.”

Q How do you think about packaging, and how important is packaging to a movie's success? Are there movies that were packaged poorly, but should have, like, otherwise been a success?

A Well, you could say that about anything. To me, packaging is a sine qua non of life. Uh, I package everything in my life. I put elements together. Constantly. I, I, I just put a, a business together by combining Uh, two disparate elements, and it turned out to be a business from something that wasn't a business. It's no different than packaging a television show when I told you, you know, when Michael Crichton gave me the book of Jurassic Park, I put the right director with it, Steven Spielberg. There was no second choice. Um, a friend of mine who I have unbelievable respect for, professor of AI at Stanford named Chris Ray, calls me up and said, Michael, I got a friend who's also a professor at Stanford. Really bright guy. And I want you to meet him. And he's got really interesting technology, but he's having some trouble getting it off the ground. And I said, okay, Chris, what, what is it? He said, well, he's got a NFT company. I said, Chris, I'm not interested. And he said, why is that? I don't like NFTs. I just don't like, I'm an art collector. I'm not a NFT collector. And they were hot at one time. He said, I'm asking you from me to you, please meet him. The answer was instantaneously yes. Wasn't a hesitation. Guy of that stature asks me to meet with someone. Like when Ron Conway asked me to with Andreessen, I didn't know why he wanted to meet with me. I didn't know anythin…

AI assessment note: “To me, packaging is a sine qua non of life. Uh, I package everything”

Q That's an incredible story. Do you think that makes you a hard target?

A Oh, I was, I wasn't going to win any popularity contest, but I will tell you what I said to people. I wasn't, I didn't, Go into business to win a popularity contest. I went into business to win. And I'm a monopolist. I believe in Peter Thiel's theory on monopoly. I don't believe that you should have competition. They have to be eliminated. That's the American way, in my opinion. Everyone says there's always room for competition. I don't think there's any room for competition. I don't want anyone to be as good as us. I want us to be the best. If you want to have a second or third choice, that's okay, but we're the first choice. So we had to be the best. And I don't, I didn't, I wasn't running for high school president. You know, I had already done that. I won that. At a 4000 kid high school, I was president. I don't think I was made president because I was popular, frankly. I was made president because I got stuff done, and people knew that. I've been that way my whole life. You ask me to do something, I'll get it done. When I need something done, I ask the busiest person I know to do it, because they'll get it done. Ask someone with too much time, it never gets done.

AI assessment note: “I wasn't, I didn't, Go into business to win a popularity contest.”

Q I'm curious if you were putting together a business education, what would be on the curriculum?

A It's a fascinating question. Um, I was actually thinking about that because my grandson started a new school here in Tribeca yesterday that's called the Alpha School, and it's a completely different, um, angle on education. I really like what I saw. And a lot of it's practical learning. A lot of it's learning by, with things you're interested in. And, um, I just believe That in one's life, they have to be on a constant and progressive learning curve, period, about anything. I was up in the valley once, and Max Levchin is a great guy, founded Affirm and PayPal, co-founded PayPal. And I remember sitting in his office, we were gonna have coffee, he said, come with me, and he took me to the coffee room, and then proceeded to spend 10 minutes explaining to me how you brew the perfect cup of coffee. And I realized it was so fantastic. He had studied it all. He knew exactly what to do, when, how to roast the coffee, how to grind it, where to put it in, what kind of water to use, all stuff that none of us think about. And I said to myself, that is a metaphor for life, making a cup of coffee. It's kind of like a Japanese tea ceremony. He took all the components apart and isolated them, and then put them into a fluid movement.

AI assessment note: “my grandson started a new school here in Tribeca yesterday that's called the Alpha”