Kind: captions
Language: en
one doesn't
get to a place of success
without having made mistakes
one of my closest friends
passed away
about nine years ago michael crichton
the great author used to always say to
me there's always another race truck
there's always another game so take your
game and ratchet it down just to drop
and you're going to have another game
and he was right
i didn't listen to that to me winning
was everything
hey everybody welcome to impact theory
our goal with this show and company is
to introduce you to the people and ideas
that will help you actually execute on
your dreams
all right today's guest is one of the
most legendary entrepreneurs in the
history of the media industry the iconic
co-founder of caa he and his partners
turned a small handful of clients a
couple of folding tables and a pittance
in startup capital into the world's most
dominant talent agency just 10 years
after opening for business they had
roughly 70 market share in an industry
that was almost 100 years old during his
tenure he was often referred to as the
most powerful man in hollywood and he
represented some of the most enduring
names in entertainment including steven
spielberg tom cruise martin scorsese
sylvester stallone dustin hoffman and
barbra streisand through tenacity
brilliant tactics an aggressive
unbridled enthusiasm for the sport of
business he helped create some of the
most culture defining movies of the 20th
century including jurassic park rain man
tootsie back to the future the karate
kid ghostbusters and many
many more one of the first to realize
that content is king even outside of
hollywood he was instrumental in
brokering mega deals with multinational
corporations such as coca-cola sony
matsushita electric etc and since moving
on from the entertainment industry he
has introduced his innovative approach
to deal making and storytelling to
silicon valley to tremendous effect
billionaire and famous uber investor
mark andreessen referred to him as a key
advisor to andreessen horowitz and he
has advised many other prominent people
in the tech world including tony bates
the president of skype and brian chesky
ceo of airbnb
so please
help me in welcoming one of the top 200
art collectors in the world silicon
valley vc and author of the captivating
memoir who is michael ovitz the man
himself michael ovitz
thank you so much for being here must
have worked hard with my mother on that
intro she was amazingly helpful by the
way so you'll have to thank her
um truly what i was saying off camera is
is really sincere what came to define my
childhood were the movies in that list
it's pretty extraordinary what you were
able to accomplish but it's all the more
impressive given that your story starts
just sort of plainly in the valley and i
want to talk about starting from the
bottom how did you
a have the audacity to pursue what you
did and then b tactically what did you
do to actually learn
so i first of all i consider myself
incredibly lucky to be here sitting with
a fellow entrepreneur who founded a
company
from scratch and uh went through all of
the
ups downs trials and tribulations to get
it to work and what most people don't
realize is for every success story
there's probably 10 000
failures maybe more frankly so
it's really a pleasure to be here and
thank you for having me
uh from
i was just a very lucky young guy
frankly i grew up in a family that was
wildly supportive i had terrific parents
we had a really good upbringing grew up
in a really kind of upper lower lower
middle class area in the san fernando
valley
uh
i think the key for me was
as a young kid i was always told that i
could do
whatever i want to do be whatever i
wanted to be as long as i studied hard
and worked hard
and those two
um
those two issues
were really at the foundation of my
young life
and then i also had something else come
into being which is
four blocks from our house was the rko
studios that howard hughes owned
and in those days there was no such
thing as security there was
no such thing as not being able to go
where you wanted to go
we didn't have terrorist activity we
didn't have people questioning everybody
every second and his kids when we were
done with our paper routes at the end of
the day
especially at daylight savings time we
would go over at the end of the day and
sneak under the fence and kind of watch
them shoot until we got thrown off the
lot
and i kind of got the bug at a very
young age i was nine years old when that
started happening and it went all the
way through into my early teen years and
that coupled with my
nuclear family and
the surrounding that i had also going to
public school there was no such thing as
private school unless you were a
a delinquent in those days
not the way my kids grew up but it's it
was a different world private schools
were for kids that were
you know didn't go to school or had
problems and i had a really strong
foundation and i decided
there were two paths in life there was
one path which was to just sort of float
with it and there was another path to be
aggressive and try to make something of
yourself and do something that would put
you in a position to be able to do
something else to be able to do
something else to do something else
yeah the level of aggression seemed to
start quite early for you i remember
hearing a story about even your paper
route you were trying to like do in
record time so that you had time to like
really push yourself forward when did
that like real drive for advancement
start
well it's really interesting
the
a lot of individuals and when you and i
were talking earlier talk about what are
your reasons for getting into business
why'd you start your company
and money was low on your priority list
i grew up in a very very um non-affluent
section of the valley
money was very high on my priority list
but not for reasons one might think
it was more for advancement and for
the ability to put oneself into a better
place and again this is the 50s and 60s
in los angeles it was a different time
so you can imagine how there was a big
desire to be able to pull oneself up by
one zone bootstraps and make something
of themselves so
i tried really hard to do that and
aggression
aggressive activity was very much a part
of the way i grew up in my neighborhood
there were different kinds of aggression
there was mental physical mostly
physical where i grew up
and one had to deal with it
yeah one of the stories that you talked
about with getting bullied i thought
that you handled it so interestingly and
i'd be curious to know if your son had
been in that same situation what advice
you would have given him so
you get in a fight with a bully decide
you're gonna stand up for yourself and
he just beats the daylights out of you
and then where'd you go from there
well i remember it like it was yesterday
which it's so interesting in our lives
there are seminal moments that we
remember all the way back to childhood
and i remember
this incident happening where it
happened how it happened
i literally can picture it in my mind
and
i made a decision at the time
if you can't beat them you should try to
join them
you know because i couldn't beat this
guy was a head bigger than me i also
couldn't show that i was afraid of the
guy so i had to take the beating
and afterwards i went up to him and
talked to him a bit and
we ended up
becoming friends it was a slow route but
at the end
we actually ended up being fairly good
friends from that
very strange beginning
and that strategy of being able to
befriend people on sort of any
um
whether they were good for you a natural
connection or not the ability to connect
with them i'm assuming is something that
played pretty heavily as you advanced up
in hollywood
well i i started in hollywood when i was
17 at universal studios i was a tour
guide
we learned very quickly that the
customer is always right
at the end of the day it's no matter
what happens uh
the customer is always right there's a
story in the book
of when michelin connery shawn's wife
ran out of gas in a rental car and
called my office very upset that the car
was stalled in the northern part of the
valley somewhere between warner brothers
and columbia pictures
and
had no clue that it had run out of gas
but it was my fault that it ran out of
gas so we dispatched one of our mail
room personnel over and they brought
some gas and a new car so the customer
is always right we i figured that out
really early it didn't make a lot of
sense to go against the grain
particularly starting out
at a low level in the entertainment
business and also in dealing with the
people there i learned very early that
it was easier to deal with them in a
very specific way which was just giving
since you were trying to take you had to
give a lot and a lot of times you'd run
into people that were just stressed out
of their minds as you can well imagine
with your
uh having been in your own business and
also in
the entertainment business people get
very very stressed very easily
everything's personal everything so one
had to learn at 17
when to back off when to try to get more
information
for me information and knowledge were
the key to everything
i'm glad you brought that up so speaking
of knowledge being the key talk to me
about the key to the file room this was
and put it in context of where you were
at the time how new you were to wma um
this story
feels like one of those legendary
stories that literally they teach you
about in film school and you hear about
your climb it's pretty extraordinary to
read in your book
so i
i went into the fire room by accident i
was delivering mail i was in the mail
room when i went and applied for a job
of william morris i
am always
even at that stage of my life
looking for something that
differentiates me
i find it kind of interesting because
now i work up in in the valley up
between san francisco and san jose and
the key word up there is disrupt
disruption it's just the word that you
hear every day and it's fantastic
because
you have all these young people up there
who come in and they're brilliant
and they want to change the way the
status quo is in every single business
and they don't take no for an answer
and that's the way it was for me 50
years ago when i started there's no such
thing as a no until you get a yes and
i wanted to differentiate myself so when
i went in for my interview
there's a three-year training program
and i said to the head of the
human resources at the time that i could
do their whole program in 10 weeks and
it was actually an incredibly stupid
thing to say you know because it wasn't
really possible but i was looking for
something that was so outrageous
to disrupt that moment and it did
because the guy
just wheeled back in his roller chair
and just fell off laughing he thought it
was the funniest thing he'd ever heard
because here's this guy who's 21 years
old just graduated from college i'm
wearing a suit that looked like i was
working for the fbi
you know my pants were up to my knees i
had shoes on you could water ski in
a reptile and a button-down shirt
and
this guy's laughing at me so i figured
one of two things it's binary either
i've made my point
and i'm going to get in because i had no
connections
or
i'm going to get thrown out of here
really fast
so it's like 50 50 and he said you know
what i'm going to let you have this job
by the way i offered to give my salary
back if i couldn't learn everything
there was to learn about show business
in 10 weeks
and i got in and i discovered very
quickly that it was all about knowledge
knowledge was power in that place
service business dealing with people you
had to know something
but the key was two things one
get the information faster than anyone
in the
20 person mail room class that i started
and could get
and b how do you apply that information
to move yourself through a system huddy
and noticed
and i figured out pretty quickly from
delivering mail that everything was in
the central file room there was no
computers everything was written on
paper and filed away for a hundred years
of history of that company
and i basically
took a page out of my dad's book who was
a liquor salesman and
used to give away
broken cases of liquor to the local
police and fire and service people so we
got great service even as a lower middle
class family
and i brought a little gift for the head
of the file room
and work didn't work didn't worked it
until she and she was the nicest lady
and she had this kind of grandmotherly
thing
and we hit it off and she wore this file
key around her neck and it was the key
to the file room to the whole room
because none of the drawers were locked
in those days
and i got her to give me a copy of the
key and i went in every night when
everyone else went home when i just
started reading started at a and ended
in z
that
that part of the story to me is so
incredible so i want to paint a little
context for people so you've got that
whatever 20 25 people all starting at
the same time some of them probably had
connections which is how they got in the
door
but in terms you said it was like on
page two or three of the book you said
you have to work long hard and smart and
i say the same thing and i always get
pushback on the long and i've never
understood that because people say well
if i'm working hard and smart why do i
have to work long hours and your story i
think exemplifies what happened when you
started working longer hours than
everybody else
well you become a fixture for starters
you get recognized by people that you're
there they don't quite know who you are
what you're doing there but
when you're there at seven in the
morning for what's called a nine o'clock
call time
and everyone else scrolls in and i know
you've been there for two hours
let's not forget that many of the
executives were coming in at 7 30 or 8
o'clock in the morning to get the jump
on their day
those were motivated smart people as
well so in order
to meet those people
if you're sitting outside their offices
randomly
and they want help with something
they're not bashful to ask their agents
so they will ask and then you have your
opportunity to deliver and it's all
about getting asked which is the key and
then delivering
delivering an answer and that's what i
did and then i'd stay later
i discovered totally by accident that
the head of the company
left the office every night at 6 45
to go to dinner with the founder of the
company they were both on the first
floor
and i realized that every night he came
back at 8 30 from dinner and spent two
hours at the office getting caught up on
mail and paperwork which you never as an
executive have time to do during the day
no one does it's even today trying to do
email in the course of a business day
you do the best you can do but it's
usually done
at odd hours i i think it's a fair
statement to me
and i went in and i position myself so
the two executives the founder and the
president would see me every night when
they went out so at seven o'clock
everyone from the mail room went home
i went and sat at the front desk by the
front door where they passed by every
night and
when they came back
i was still sitting there
and i will never forget i can remember
this like it was yesterday
about five or six nights in
it's about
9 30 at night and the president of the
company
comes out of his office walks up to me
and says can you xerox this for me
that was all he said and i said of
course i went
i xeroxed the material from i brought it
back i put it in a pretty folder did
everything i could to
kiss up properly
and laid it on his desk and
then sat in his office
and he said yes and i said what else can
i do for you
and he said well you could do this and
then i did that and then i came back
these are stupid things and they're
minor but minor things can be major they
remind me of a syrah painting sarah was
a pointless
and he made paintings with a million
dots
and if you looked at a square inch it
looked like nothing you looked at three
square inches nothing
maybe if you got the six square six
inches by six inches you start to see
something so i realized this guy was a
health freak and stocked
juices and special kind of in those days
whatever the health drink of the 60s was
in those days
i don't i don't i i think
it was early for this
but i mean i do have to take a moment
and tell you
that i live on these things that's class
birthday cake my favorite
i'll put it right here
so
i i saw what he had and
the next morning before i came in i went
to the farmer's market not the
supermarket i got up at six o'clock in
the morning to get there i bought him
all these fresh squeezed juices and all
this stuff
and i put it all in as a refrigerator
and when he went in
he i could see his face he was in a
state of shock because he called me and
he said what is what is this you know is
it edible you know it's like i'm not
trying to kill you
uh and that was the beginning then i got
the break of breaks his
assistant his secretary and admin got
sick
and she had the flu
and he made a request for me to sit on
his desk
and within 90 days after that i became
his full-time assistant so
at 22 i was the assistant to the
president of
the most important theatrical agency in
the business and it gave me a i was
sitting on mount olympus
i read every piece of his mail i had
already read all the files i knew what
was going on with every client i knew
what was going on administratively i was
like a trusted member of the inside team
and i i
worked
i don't i didn't sleep much in those
days i worked seven days a week
every hour that i could work i was
available to this guy
24 7. it didn't matter what time he
called me i didn't care as a matter of
fact i went overboard to encourage him
to call me
at seven a.m on a saturday morning when
he went out to do his five mile walk to
call me i wanted him to think that i was
there and reliable
i really hope everyone listens to that
story because it you say it's really
simple and it is it's deadly simple but
it is exactly how people get ahead and i
was admittedly armed with your story um
but when i first got into being an
entrepreneur i forced my wife to pick an
apartment that was no more than seven
minutes from both of the guys that were
the partners that hired me for that
exact reason
i wanted to make sure if they called me
at 2am on a saturday i could be to their
house in five minutes or less
and
we actually would go to an apartment
baby do you like it yes i like it and
then we'd get in the car and we time it
and see like how long it took to get to
each partner's house
and
when i think about the people like even
in this company that are really gonna
succeed it's the ones that i see
calculating like that they're not
they're not trying to go you haven't
compensated me for that so i'm not going
to do it they go i know where i'm trying
to get and i know what i have to do to
get there
and it's pretty extraordinary when
people are willing to go to that length
how long was this after until they made
you uh an agent
so i was in the mail for under a hundred
days that that's pure insanity the norm
is what a year to two years the norm in
those days was two to three years yeah
that's and then it was a year to three
years on a desk and the desk was
critical because the only way you could
learn that business
and had been
going on since the 20s
is listening in on calls and doing
things under the supervision of the
person you were working for there were
no handbooks there was nothing to read
there was no
way of learning how it was to
communicate and deal make and
how do you learn creativity you know how
do you learn
you know how to put something together
you have personal taste
you look and see what other people like
you try to combine those things but how
do you create that instinct that
works intellectually and with your gut
steven spielberg didn't read a book how
to direct
he went out and did it made some
mistakes made some brilliant things
figured it out and then just kept
growing and growing and growing as by
the way with most creative people it's
trial and error it's just trial and
error and that's how it was for me it
was no different
so going back to that hustle and just
doing whatever it took filling the
refrigerator being there calls at 7 a.m
on a saturday
what are the traits of success if you
were going to tell somebody what to
cultivate in themselves or what to look
for in an upcoming um agent somebody
who's in that program what are the
traits that you look for
the the the
factors that
i looked for all the way up to my
retirement in 2001
was
i want someone who
is kindly aggressive and there's i i
qualify that
because there are times in my career
when i was overly aggressive and i
regret it and i write about a lot about
it in the book
but i want someone who knows how to be
aggressive but also has some style but
what i look for and still do i look for
people that are curious
i look for people that are
entrepreneurial
i look for people that are self-reliant
i look for people that have an
aggressive tendency and don't put things
off until tomorrow when they can get
them done today
i look for people that don't think about
ours
and that they're just there
i look for people who don't complain
but
the basic foundation of what i look for
is someone who wants to make something
of themselves
better than where they started
they want to be somebody they have a
reason for i have a friend who's
uh
i have one friend whose father was very
very
poor
and he
is running a giant company right now and
his reason
was that he just didn't want to be his
father he wanted to be successful was
critical to him but i have a friend
whose father is incredibly well off and
very well regarded
that friend's also very successful
he wanted to show his father that he
could do it everybody has their own
reason for why they want to do something
other people like you want to have an
impact on
what is done in society and how do you
do that
so maybe it has less to do with some
paternal issue has more to do with some
desire that came out of some other part
of your life but we all have these
issues and these reasons that drive us
forward
by the way those same issues and demons
drive us backwards as well
there are times in my life where i
remember some of those things that were
helping me get ahead
slowed me up and got in my way and
tripped me up big time and
2020 you know hindsight is 20 20 vision
and it's always great to be the
quarterback when you're looking at the
game films
but when you're in the game it's a
different story
yeah that's that's so powerful and you
know looking at the trajectory of of
your career of anyone who's been
incredibly successful and
really trying to understand you talked
about this in the book and this may have
been one of the most just like deeply
fascinating parts to me was you said
there was this sort of magic line that
you crossed where i was being aggressive
and it was building this business and
i'm sitting there going oh my god like
what you built is so crazy like
really think about it you must have
internalized this in a way but
i really want the audience to really
internalize going from
you were in your 20s you were in an
industry at that time that was about 75
years old and then within 10 years you
have 70 market share
it it's it's so outrageous as to like
almost to defy logic and so i'm like
okay i get it like all these aggressive
techniques are awesome but now with the
hindsight you were able to see but at
some point it started to become the
thing that was holding me back how do
people avoid that like
one i
i was
i played a secret fantasy i'm just going
to confess where you asked me because i
do a lot of research and i always love
when people give me a little test to see
where i'm at i thought it would be fun
if you said well what do you think about
the end of the book just to see if i
read all the way through
and my answer was going to be i don't
think you've written the end of the book
yet and i'm utterly fascinated by the
fact that you
are still so engaged in what you're
doing in silicon valley so i look at a
man so i i want to live forever so i
always look at people like in the
hey i think we can push death off for a
really long time so it comes down to a
matter of like what energizes you so i
see you as somebody who's still
energized who's clearly still
contributing in silicon valley in a
pretty significant way so how how do you
take that now knowing where it tripped
you up knowing that it did work
sometimes that there are times you have
to be aggressive but there's also times
where you have to back off how do you
play that now or how do you advise
others to play that
so that's a it's a really good question
and it's a theme that's been laced
through my life it
one doesn't
get to a place of success
without having made mistakes
one of my closest friends
passed away
about nine years ago michael crichton
the great author used to always say to
me there's always another race track
there's always another game so take your
game and ratchet it down just a drop
and you're going to have another game
and he was right
i didn't listen to that to me winning
was everything
it was important to win i felt losing
was a weak
a point of weak character and it was
critical to win it was critical to have
momentum it was critical to thrust
forward at all times it was critical to
move
that wedge forward and to not stop
and i felt we had to have 100 market
share
i felt we needed shelf space you know
you go into a supermarket
who's got the most shelf space in the
soft drink aisle those are the big guys
and i felt we needed shelf space
i totally get that
i want to go back to this notion of not
just learning but really applying what
you learn
so you start in the file room you just
go in a to z but now i'm assuming you
have probably a better path so one how
do you approach learning now like when
you went to silicon valley and were a
new entrant into just really learning
about the raw technology how do you and
this is i'm asking on the behalf of the
people watching this this is one thing i
know they all struggle with i have this
interest but i feel so hopelessly lost
it is so big and i don't know where to
start
and then once you get on the train of
learning how do you see those
opportunities to use it well learning to
me
is strictly a frame of reference
knowledge is power and i believe i will
never know what i need to know i really
believe that
i am a voracious reader of everything i
just i like to know i like frame of
reference i felt it was important in the
business that i was in to be able to
talk to everybody
about something that was interesting to
them that's a big menu
so when you're talking to paul newman
who races cars
you better have read
you know car and driver motor trend
automobile
or at least flip through them
but then when you're going to go talk to
somebody else
who's interested in tennis you better
know who the
who just won
the grand slam you've got to have some
wide sense of not so deep but peripheral
information but i tried to then go
deeper reading files from a to z gave me
an immediate deal reference so that was
off my plate you could come to me as the
host of a new show say i want to put
this show together here's what it's
about i want to make it about
social change and how people impact each
other and
i want to get to the widest audience i
had all that frame of reference in my
head from seeing
what was done in the past
and then innovating what could be done
in the now and then thinking a little
bit about the future how do we disrupt i
remember
my
one you know my partner and best friend
ron meyer
at the time
we were sitting on a saturday with
a young agent we had worked with william
morrison we had just quit
and
he said to the two of us he said you
know you guys are crazy
and ron looked at him and i looked at
him what do you mean we're crazy you're
starting this business you're going to
fail
you're going to fail you're going to end
up looking for a job as a casting
director
which was a job that failed agents would
take uh there were great casting
directors and then there were failed
agents that were casting directors so it
was a it was a connotation of negativity
and
we looked at him and ronnie said to him
you know
if you were doing what we did maybe
you'd fail
and i looked at them and i said we're
not going to fail there was no way we
could fail because there was no
alternative but to succeed we didn't
have an alternative we didn't have any
money
we started the business with a
hundred thousand dollar credit line
which we paid off 12 weeks after we
started
we had nothing to fall back on none of
us had well-to-do families
none of us had put any money away
none of us were in a position where if
we didn't make this work that we could
go with our hat in our hand to someone
and say oh will you morris will you take
us back and then we also knew going to
another agency at that time we would
have been tainted twice once for leaving
william morrison once for failing in our
own business
yeah i love that
so
it would be insane not to talk to the
man
famous for his negotiating abilities to
find out what is the art of the
negotiation how did you
pull some of those deals off i mean it's
in the book you've detailed it which by
the way the book is phenomenal it's so
cool the way that it goes into the
detail on this stuff
but how a how you yeah how did you
become so unflappable let's start with
that like there were times where it's
just like everything was crashing down
and it was only because you could stay
cool to that process that you would
actually get across the finish line and
then
b like what is the if you had to give it
sort of one overarching idea what is it
that
one needs to cultivate to get a deal
done
well first of all you have to listen
and my dad used to say to me when i was
a kid you have two ears in one mouth so
you should listen two times more than
you talk
and i would never forgot that oddly
enough kind of dopey simple
advice
but i also knew that there were a lot of
hysterics in the entertainment business
i saw that from the time i was a kid 17.
i remember working at the studio and
seeing people screaming at each other
over creative arguments and
arguments over
dressing rooms and
titles and who got a script first and
a seat in the commissary that seat's
better than my say
ego
and i made a decision that i wasn't
going to have an ego at the beginning
now by the way that change
that change and success does that to you
but
made a decision that i was going to try
to be
completely above all of these problems
and as the problems came to me
to just kind of fend them off and
redirect them to either other people or
to back onto the people if i didn't do
that i probably would have had a
coronary early on because as i say in
the book
you're dealing in a business where
people just come to you they shake your
hand while they're hugging you like we
did at the beginning of the show they
stick a spigot in your stomach
twist it in and then they turn it on all
the way and they take everything out of
you that they can
and
i understand that by the way i do it
i think that it's really critical
in a deal process to know your players i
think it's critical to stay above the
fray
i think it's critical to not get caught
up in the emotion of it all at the end
of the day we're not curing cancer we're
trying to make a deal
you know i spent years as the chairman
of the ucla medical center and
raising money to build the hospital
that's important work
that's important work what those people
do over there
being in the agency business was not
important work it was a living and i
always looked at it that way
getting certain movies made that's a
different story getting gandhi made was
important work had a big message it was
important getting certain comedies made
was important work because it made
people
feel good
but by and large a career in the
entertainment business was not
saving someone's life it just wasn't and
i was very realistic about that
you were insanely busy probably still
are
you had kids
why'd you start practicing martial arts
it set up my day i got all my aggression
out in the morning
i
came into work as zen-like as you could
be because i had
just blown through every piece of
physical
power in my body and felt good about it
gotten a great sweat got my heart rate
up
felt really good about how i felt
physically and frankly it
turned out to be a twofer for me because
not only did i get great exercise
when japan took off
in the late 70s and into the mid 80s
i had spent so much time studying the
far east japan and china that
when westerners were going to do
business in asia
i was so comfortable there it was
beyond explanation to anyone i just i
knew how to sit i knew how to stand i
know how to present a card i knew when
to bring a gift when not to bring in a
gift i knew not to ask people about
whether they're sick or not or what the
reason is i knew what i was supposed to
do and not do that turned out to be just
insane look that was not by design just
insane look
so the
weird thing that i didn't even connect
until we were midway through this
interview i studied aikido for a while
and it's because of you
so
this is a true statement if you hadn't
gotten into aikido i never would have
gotten into aikido because
you find a trainer that comes to your
house a guy named steven seagal and he
starts training you finally confesses
that he wants to be an actor and i think
you're lying to something like of course
you want to be an actor you're here at
seven in the morning teaching me
um and you put them on screen
my dad and i the first thing that we
ever really bonded over because i hated
cars he loved cars but we both love
steven seagal movies and so then i
became absolutely obsessed with that and
aikido and that notion of the reversal
of energy
and also he just looked so cool to me
like it was just the coolest thing ever
um
that's yeah because of that that's too
funny well i hope it was a good
experience it was amazing i actually
loved it um it unfortunately for me
revealed
something so you talk about um sean
connery getting his wrist broken i think
was it by seagal yeah so um
and i got a wrist sprain doing that in
college and i was like two i was too
weak at the time to do it and so you and
i had to learn maybe very different
lessons i wasn't bullied as a kid so i
didn't have to learn i wasn't forced to
learn it young i didn't find out until
later that i was really weak
and so and i mean emotionally weak i was
unprepared to face the challenge of
being hurt and so that was in business
toughened me up
and it's interesting because my wife the
one complaint that she has of what
business has done to me is she has to
remind me now to soften up in fact this
was not a segue that i planned but
vulnerability is something that you
talked in the book and i think people
would be people that
knew you at the height of caa would
never expect to hear you talk about
vulnerability they would not expect to
hear you talk about how we all create
personas and that you'd gotten somewhat
trapped in the persona of the ultra
aggressive when it all cost guy
what have you learned about
vulnerability well first of all i felt
vulnerability was a crime
in my day
i thought showing any vulnerability
would kill
anything we were doing as a whole as a
group not just me i was the head of the
business
i had a partner who was very vulnerable
and that was the act that we put
together
you know we were good cop bad cop i
wasn't the bad cop when we started the
business weirdly going through william
morris i was the ultra good cop
that's what was interesting
but we made a decision to do that when
we flipped the business from tv into
movies in the late 70s
because it was a business that
necessitated toughness not the creative
side but just the whole business of
putting a movie together
so i felt being vulnerable was a
negative and i couldn't look vulnerable
in front of the people i was leading
it's easy to look backwards it's not
easy to look forwards
as i got to the tail end of what i was
doing it became very clear to me that i
had overstepped
and that i could have cut back a bit
and opened the kimono just a drop and i
didn't i regret it but i've learned also
you can't go backwards you can't
there's no such thing as going backwards
and doing it again what i did worked
and it would not work today it wouldn't
work today under any condition
we couldn't start that business today
the way it is we'd have to reimagine it
completely
so where does vulnerability play in are
there things that you think that it
gives people
like now in their general life is it
something a willingness to even if it's
just a one person to open up to connect
you referring to now bringing it out at
this point in my life yeah like where
you definitely seem pretty um open and i
would say vulnerable i don't know if
it's a word you're comfortable with but
i don't know that i'd ever be
comfortable with a word but it's factual
i've made a decision in my life
you know i'm at a stage in my life i'm
not at the beginning of my life not at
the beginning of my career i'm at the
end and
i want to leave the planet a little
better than when i came on if i could
learn a lesson
during the course of it and i've learned
many that's probably one of them it's no
crime and being vulnerable with people
everybody has an issue by the way the
reason that i wasn't vulnerable is i
knew everybody else was because all
humans are to be humanist to air and to
errors to be vulnerable and i knew that
and i took advantage of it now is that
right or wrong i can make that argument
both ways
i can make the argument that it's wrong
because if everyone's vulnerable then i
should be too and i can make the
argument that it's right because it
worked
and we took that business faster than
anyone in history had taken
no one has taken
a business from a standing start
with five people and no clients
and no office
to the position of dominance that that
company had
now is it because i wasn't vulnerable i
don't know maybe maybe not i'll never
know
i do know that was the act that was
chosen at that time and it was conscious
this was not an accident it was
completely thought through and it was
conscious
would i do it again that way absolutely
not
but we're in a different time
that makes sense all right my final
question is what is the impact that you
want to have on the world
well i don't know it's what i want to
have it's probably what i did have i
think i had
some really positive things and i think
i had some things that weren't so
positive on the positive side
i'm very proud of the work i did at ucla
with the hospital raising money to build
the hospital i'm very proud of a lot of
the research that i have endowed i'm
very proud of the kids that i've left on
the planet i got four amazing kids and i
have to tell you that's not easy so i'm
i'm very proud of of each of them
and as far as impact
short of someone
i you know i read a lot of biographies
and i marvel
at the ends of the biographies like i i
love the
biography of churchill who is
a man who couldn't be more complicated
he makes me look like a symbol
and i look at him and i go my god this
man saved england by sheer will while he
was depressed 50 of the time with what
he called the black dog
and at the end they drove him out
so when you talk about impact
i don't know what it means i honestly
don't know what it means i think you can
have impact and still be driven out
i think you cannot have impact and be
then have impact and i think it's all
timing i have friends who have passed
who've had more impact in their passing
than they had when they were alive
and i have friends that had it when they
were alive and when they passed people
have forgotten about them i was talking
with tomorrow my fiance about
a couple friends of ours had passed away
in the last couple years and they
couldn't have had higher profiles we
never hear their names anymore yet they
did some great things
and then i hear names of other people
who did very little but they left
certain tools in place to have big
impact so i'm giving you a non-answer to
a very good question it works for me
michael thank you so much for being on
the show that was incredible
all right yours guys i'm telling you
right now if any of you have any
interest in being successful the first
30 minutes of that interview is your
road map i didn't want to breathe i
didn't want to interrupt him i'm telling
you go back and watch it it it is the
road map to being successful that's what
you have to do and his is the tale of
somebody who comes from nowhere but
decides what he wants to be and then
asks himself no what's it going
to take and then he executes against it
he just literally step by step goes
about doing the things that he has to do
in order to get where he wants to go and
look he's very open it's a complicated
story there's no question but what he
achieved is just mathematically
unparalleled it is absolutely
extraordinary and to me it is the
classic case of going in working hard
working smart and working longer hours
and figuring out that knowledge and
figuring out how to use it that's the
key man hear that in the story figure
out what you need to know know more
about it than anybody else it's the
nugget of advice that my own
father-in-law gave me which i ignored
for three years much to my shame but i
have finally embraced it
and once i did that that's how i was
able to take off as an entrepreneur
because all of a sudden i had a need to
know more about what was being talked
about than anyone else in the room and
all of a sudden
as michael said i had more power than
anyone else in the room
so re-watch that one over and over and
over and be sure to buy the book who is
michael ovitz i'm telling you it's
awesome it is very rare that i take the
time to read a book word for word all
the way through but this one i read word
for word it is fantastic all right if
you haven't already be sure to subscribe
and until next time my friends be
legendary take care
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