The legend I don't sing that lately the legend Michael Obitz is in the building arguably one of the most successful talent agents ever He rose from working in a mailroom to become a super agent representing some of Hollywood's biggest stars one doesn't Get to a place of success without having made mistakes People say all kinds of things about him really really all kinds of things about him We went out to win and when you go out to win you make certain sacrifices We were tough and we were aggressive and I had a philosophy of win at all costs when we did The cost was huge rise or fall On our own deeds our own brains our own willpower It's no crime and being vulnerable with people everybody has an issue I want to leave the planet a little better than when I came on please join us in welcoming Michael Obitz Wow Thank you so much Michael All right, we have We have been trying to make this happen for three years.

You're a hard one to get a hold of yeah If you don't know Michael You shouldn't be here Michael Co-founded CAA and his book is fantastic by the way. Yeah, who is Mike Ovitz? Yeah, it's such it's such a read you could just skim through it by like read right through it because it goes by so fast It's incredible in 1975 where You know, Michael is really known for transforming Hollywood and transforming the media business one of the big innovations of many in Michaels career has been the the innovation of packaging which really changed the power dynamics and the trajectory of How content was made in Hollywood?

Michael's had we were just talking about this kind of three careers Both as the founder of CAA and then later a partnership with Andy Grove in 1993 where you formed the CAA Intel Media Lab and really tried to bring technology to Hollywood and then later joined up with Marc Andreessen and have helped Marc and Ben since then scale up Andreessen Horowitz and really change how Silicon Valley operates and It's just an incredible Reinvention story but one where it seems you've brought a similar sort of set of innovations in all three phases maybe you can tell us a little bit about those three major transitions and the you know, the the way that you kind of made the decision to kind of reinvent yourself and Bring technology and media together.

Well, first of all Thank you for having me. I I'm honored to be here. I Must say I've been going up to the valley since 1992 Probably hard for most of you in the audience to believe this, but I'm much older than all the guys up here and these are four of the not just the smartest but the most effective Men that I've met up in the valley with respect to what they do how they do it And then lastly I have tried since they started the all-in Podcasts I have applied 15 times to be a bestie And I have been rejected by one of the four up here which I will not say which one But we all want to have what they have and I was saying to David in the Backstage, it's so fantastic how they've set something up.

That is so interesting to listen to to learn from Even to push up against you don't have to agree with it, which is what I like about it But to hear it from something we all want in our lives Which is close friends where you can say whatever you want as a matter of fact some of the stuff they say to David I find offensive, but So back to the question, um, I have an insatiable appetite for information and for Trying to stay up With things that are current I started in the entertainment business when I was 17 years old, believe it or not I was the first tour guide at Universal Studios.

They had hired five men and five women and I really learned so much about the media business and and how They made entertainment Because Universal was in every area in film television music books everything and it's all the same by the way It's just different Iterations of it. It's all made to entertain people and I got the bug.

I went to UCLA Took me three years to get out of there I couldn't get out of there fast enough, but I went to the first class and the last class that's why when I was here I got really scared because I Kind of missed the classes in between because I worked full-time at 20th Century Fox and just had a blast And then I went into the agency business in my early 20s.

I was at Universal as a tour guide. I saw these men And women dressed really well being received well by everybody on the studio lots and I I said, well, that's interesting What do they do? I found out they were agents and I realized I could get a very wide education and I've always been interested in Making myself smarter about things because I'm not I don't have the gift that a couple of these guys up here do which is For all of them, which is raw intelligence.

I've I've got Uneducated intelligence. I have to really work at it and I really enjoyed That time and and getting into it We broke off when I was 26 a bunch of us for a whole series of reasons from the William Morris ages He started CA with a very simple thesis which was that we were going to do something as a team rather than individually and It just worked really well artists enjoyed having a group of Individuals to talk to which is not dissimilar to what these four guys have accomplished Artists liked being surrounded by multiple people with different skill sets.

So that worked really well in 1992 You could smell in LA Something going on up north but the thing about Los Angeles and the inner and particularly the entertainment Community is it's an incredibly Siloed community. They don't accept people very well from the outside Which by the way makes it very inbred and it's not particularly wise It may be smart for the moment, but it's not wise So I started going up to San Francisco to see what was going on up there and then in the middle of 92 I called cold Bill Gates and It wasn't the Microsoft of today.

It was a small company and I went up and met with Bill and Then he introduced we talked for four hours about where My business and his business could converge and the only thing I will tell you is neither of us had any idea But it was the start of a discussion Bill introduced me to a man named Nathan Myrvold who I'm still friendly with today who was the first CTO of Microsoft and I was an advisor to Three of the four major record labels and I remember being at one of the music labels that had 25% market share and there were stereo speakers in there and Nathan had said to me I can't explain this to you, but Music's gonna come from up there.

I had no idea what he was talking about and I advised all four companies that something was happening and that hard goods weren't gonna be able to be sold and I got fired by one of them. I Got thrown out by the other three. They thought that Nathan was crazy They didn't understand what Microsoft was and they had no interest in computers or anything Digital and then from there.

I went and met Andy Grove. We started a dialogue and we brought Every conceivable piece of hardware and software Available to Los Angeles put it in our Beverly Hills building The top of the building had like eight dishes on it it looked like we were going to take off and We invited everyone from the entertainment business to come in and see and test all this To wrap this up It was a great thing and a sad thing We knew something was coming.

We had no idea what but the business did what it always does it put its head in the sand and no one looked to San Francisco and Today when I meet with people in the business It's interesting when I explain to them how? Streaming has basically changed the legacy business forever, and it will never change again And it's all because everyone that we worked with refused to embrace Change which to me is Sort of the mantra of my life.

I want to change I've changed my life personally I've changed careers three different times It's all about learning and about pushing yourself and it wasn't just media because you were very early to helping Company like like Palantir as an example. It's not just hey Michael Ovitz is a Hollywood guy or a media guy You were an advisor to a pure tech company.

Yeah, can you tell us a little bit about what you did with Palantir? And how you got involved in what role you played? so in 99 a Young man named Mark Andreessen who happened to have been on the cover of Time magazine Barefooted which I thought was really weird and He called me cold.

I didn't know who he was frankly. I had heard of him I had heard of him because we were doing work for Jim Clark who Mark was in business with and He had a company that was very close to the media business at the time I guess you could say was a pre Adobe type business and I Met with Mark and I can't explain to you what happened, but we went to a lunch that was going to take an hour I'm not long on lunches I don't do one hour zoom and I hate long calls because you can't get anything done So I thought we were going to be an hour.

We were four and a half hours and at the end of that He said well you come on the my board with Ben Horowitz. We're starting a company called loud cloud and I said explain it to me and he did and I had no clue what he was talking about.

I Just didn't understand it He said all this data is going up in the sky and all I could think of was Nathan telling me that about music And I said well now two smart guys really smart guys a lot smarter than me are talking about what's going on up there So I went on Mark's board I'm still involved with them 25 years later and Mark basically introduced me to Everyone up in the valley Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Mark Zuckerberg everybody that he dealt with and One of the guys he introduced me to was Peter Thiel who I just had dinner with last weekend is one of the smartest guys I've ever met and He put a ton of his own money into Palantir.

He had no investors. He had a small investment from DARPA. I Had no clue what they did, but he called me up. He said can you help me? because we are In business with the US government and they don't pay very well and that I could empathize with They they take a lot of money in tax, but they don't pay very well And I said, what do you want me to do?

Because you know my coding is a bit limited and He said I want you to help get come up set up a commercial business. So without going through a long boring story After Peter got a dozen phone calls being criticized for bringing me in to do this Which he actually enjoyed by the way, which is what I love about him I met with Alex Karp for three months in his office I was living in San Francisco three days a week and I looked at everything they were doing they only had at the time about 25 30 engineers and Came up with some ideas starting with three silos narrowed it to advertising health care and finance got rid of the two of them quickly because finance was a no-brainer the whole world had gone under with the mortgage crisis and Palantir actually had an algorithm that you could plug an address of a house into it and they did this after I asked them to you could plug an address of a house and it scraped a Million data points within one mile of the house how many kids were leaving private school?

how many hamburgers were sold how many dry cleaning stores closed it was like a brief in a nanosecond of the economy and JP Morgan couldn't offer mortgage for the life of them if they wanted to because They had local branch managers who loved their jobs. All the mortgages were underwater.

They didn't want to make a decision We put Palantir online They got permission to plug the address in and whatever the bid-ask came up. They get close We promised we deliver in 90 days. I always over I always under promise and over deliver and We delivered in 55 days and we saved them a hundred and fifty million dollars to the bottom line in that 55 day period and That became a request from them.

The only problem they had is they forgot To make a deal with me for the software so they had this unbelievable result and no deal and They offered I think two million for a One-year license for five years and I called Peter and he was just dancing on his desk He couldn't believe it and I said I turned it down so He said You've lost your mind and started yelling at me as only and in a nice way and I said just give me 15 days I used to be an agent and he said okay in any case 15 days later They came back and they made a deal that was many many multiples of that price and they became the first of the commercial business at Palantir and then And now today their business As it was just added to the S&P sorry, they were just that yesterday and they 60/40 I'd say commercial versus Government government Michael.

Can we talk a little bit about the movie business the entertainment business? We were just watching all this generative AI and I got the sense you were looking at it With either anger contempt or sadness You've made such amazing or you know, it orchestrates such amazing seminal works During peak cinema something Friedberg Sachs and I grew up in Defined, you know a lot of the way we look at art and now it feels like it's lost in many ways I'm curious when you see people making things with generative AI What happens to your heart and to your mind?

It's a great question Jason and I'll tell you why first of all Streaming is basically destroyed the legacy business. You've probably all seen in the press What's going on with Paramount where the Ellison's have purchased the company at a price? That's probably 20% of what it used to be It was one of the great seven horsemen of the entertainment business business I was talking to David about and Jason earlier There's the entertainment business went from a you get paid upfront and then you get a piece of the profits So since streamings come you get paid up front There are no profits your products in the ether your books in the ether your songs in the ether Music is a little better because thanks to Daniel Eck.

Everybody gets a royalty, but it's very different than it used to be So streaming has destroyed The business that I grew up and it's why I wanted to get out of the entertainment business. You could see it coming secondly, I Think that the if you look past that and you look to AI right now It's bittersweet The things that can be done are mind-boggling.

We just saw a slight example I'm involved with a company out of Germany with three Young PhDs from the University of Heidelberg. They have just released their first product Of text-to-video. I've never seen anything like this in my life visually You can say what you want and it shows up and I mean, it's perfect The technology is staggering and I've seen every one of them for obvious reasons the people that work in this community and 250,000 people in Los Angeles make their living in the media business They are all afraid of one thing and that is are they going to have a job or be able to work?

So if you talk to a production designer the man or woman who comes up and draws and designs every shot so they can light it and figure out continuity and Who's wearing what and what they're gonna shoot so they can get their two minutes of film in? 12 hours because that's what you get you work to 12 hours a day.

You get two minutes of usable footage. I Am working on a project right now with Netflix and a production designer I am