Michael Ovitz

speaker

1,371 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 3 Feb

Michael Ovitz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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The Knowledge Project · Michael Ovitz: The Psychology of Power · 3 Feb 2026 podcast

So all the things that are written are, except in the New Yorker and the Atlantic or an in-depth piece in, you know, the Post or the Times.

But it was a time to learn a little bit about everything.

And it kept proving itself to me over and over again.

And the reason I did it at first was practical.

Our agents needed to be able to be facile in multiple disciplines to talk to different people who all had different interests.

So when I met Paul Newman, it was very easy for me to engage with him because I subscribed to Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Automobile.com.

And one other car mag is a car and driver, I may have said that.

And I'd looked at them and I was really deeply into automobiles, but more in the aesthetic sense.

I really didn't know much how they worked.

But when I met Paul, it was the first thing he wanted to talk about.

We laid some common denominator together.

And I would preach that to the staff, that you need to stay on top of multidisciplinary careers, functions, and interests, and hobbies, so you have something to talk about.

You know, I read Scientific America, not diligently, but I read the headlines, looked at the

you know the opening five paragraphs of an article to get a sense of it everything you needed in those days by the way in a detailed article was in the opening and the closing when you get down to it and i wanted i was interested in medicine so i read the new england journal of medicine i you know worked very hard to raise money for the ucla medical center i was the chairman of the hospital for many years

I had to look at the New England Journal of Medicine to talk to the 20 department heads.

When I brought IM Pei to design and build the UCLA Medical Center after the earthquake, I needed to have a fluent understanding of other architects so I could give context.

And of the 20 department heads who were the tops of the top in their particular field.

Now, look, I didn't learn anything.

how to perform a procedure medically, but I at least got some vocabulary and I could kind of stay up into a conversation for a period of time.

Well,

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