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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I'm sitting with one of the smartest human beings I've ever talked to. Now, bear in mind, my best friend at the time was a guy named Michael Crichton. You can't get any smarter than that or more curious or more interesting to sit around. I'm sitting with his match, maybe better. And three and a half hours went by in five minutes. And he said at the end, he said, would you like to join my board?
And I said, why? I'm a raving idiot compared to you. And I don't know anything about technology. He said, that's exactly what I want on my board. I want someone who's not afraid to stand up to all these tech geeks that are on my board.
For me, time's the foundation of everything. Then relationship, because I can't get the relationship without the time. If I make a mistake, when I met you, I didn't know if I wanted to do your podcast. I didn't know you. We have a mutual friend who raves about you, but that's not enough for me because I may not agree with his perspective. And that happens to me a lot.
People will call me and say, can you meet with so-and-so? And it's not that I don't respect their perspective. It's just I have a different one. For me... Time's my enemy, and it's been that way since I was a kid. It's got nothing to do with my age, chronologically. I remember being in high school, and I was running for student body president of a 4,000-kid high school.
And there weren't enough hours in the day for me to do what I felt I needed to do. I had to pander to so many constituencies that no one else... I had to develop constituencies from groups that everyone had ignored. No one ever went and spoke to the chess club at my high school. Because I was in high school in the 60s. And if you weren't an athlete, you were nothing. Your brain worked against you.
If you were an intellect, they thought you were an idiot. It was the 60s in the San Fernando Valley. If you didn't have athletic prowess or some kind of unbelievable talent, skill set in something like you were a great auto mechanic and you could fix a 57 Chevy up. Something that demonstrated to a working class community that you had something special.
So I went to all the clubs that were kind of persona non grata to build a constituency outside of what everyone called the normal people, who frankly turned out to be abnormal. They all peaked when they graduated high school. All of them. We had three teams, all city, number one. We had nine of 11 players on our football team make all-city first string.
One made it for five years in the pros and then got injured. The rest disappeared. Disappeared. They peaked. So for me, it was about careful with the time, careful on acceleration, careful on de-acceleration, meeting people, that would enrich my life intellectually, emotionally, and financially. And it's important to add all three.
I'm a capitalist and I get into these huge arguments with people that are more social leaning because it doesn't work. And we've seen that over and over again. And it's the capitalists that drive the foundation of giving They make jobs. Look, they don't do everything right. They do a lot of stuff wrong. Believe me, everybody does, me included.
But by and large, it's a better system than Marxism or just being a pure, you know, socialist. I think our system's better than the Chinese system. You know, you've got 50 million communists controlling a billion, 400 million people. That doesn't smell right to me. I had lunch yesterday with a guy who's very smart named Steve Radner.
And I was commenting about what an amazingly great mayor Mike Bloomberg was, even though he got in by accident, because he was a business guy. And he thought about everything in terms of getting it done and how do you do it? What's the path of least resistance? What's best for everybody?
You're not going to get it right for everybody, but if you can get it right for most of the people, but how do you do that? You have to have a business background. So I said to him at lunch yesterday,
I think that in order to run for governor or mayor of any city or state or president of the United States or vice president of the United States, you have to have had five years of business experience. You have to show on your LinkedIn that you ran a business, period.
And that you had employees and you had healthcare problems and people had deaths in the family and they needed days off and somebody was getting a divorce and you had to balance budgets and you had to find where to raise money. These are all things that are critical to running a business, which is a city or a state or a country.
Yeah, I must say he's one of my heroes. Steve, I met Steve in the 80s, and he was at Lehman Brothers. Very smart guy, very motivated, wanted to do something special. He and his mentor, Pete Peterson, and Pete was on the board of Momo with me. We got involved very early together because Pete was on the board of Sony. And I was Akio Morita, the founder of Sony's personal media advisor.
And I got that position because he made a decision that he had better technology with the Betamax videotape than Matsushita, also known as Panasonic, had with VHS. And he did. His tech was better, but they beat him. They killed him. They killed him for two reasons. One, he had a max running time of two hours. There's no movie that automatically stops at two hours.
Sometimes they're 1.50, but most of the time they're 2.10. So people couldn't record movies, which is all they used those machines for. Oddly, they were all invented by an American company called Ampex, and they were invented for a reason that you'll never guess. They were invented by a bunch of engineers at Ampex in the United States to record pornography.
It always comes back to that and pizza technology. Technology is all about porn and pizza and Diet Coke. But they sold the rights and Sony bought them. And he said, we sat for hours in Tokyo. How do I avoid this? I said, you have one shot. You can control the content. And I said, it's a tough shot because it's not profitable. but no one's going to beat you in technology if you combine the two.
So Pete was his board member, and they revered Pete, revered him. So I came to, I put Morita together in my home with Kirk Kerkorian, who owned MGM. And the three of us met for three hours discussing Sony buying MGM. And at the meeting, Morita did something genius. He brought a box, about six inches square, and he put it on the coffee table and he let it sit there.
And you could see Kirk just staring over at this box. It was so Japanese. And finally, Kirk says, he says, I can't take it anymore. What's in that box? Morita said, the future. He opens the box and it's a handheld videotape recorder, this big, like four inches big. with a little mini tape in it. And Kirk played with it, used it, it was simple to use, videoed the whole meeting. And at the end,
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