Michael Ovitz, Co-founder of CAA

**David Senra** (0:02)
It's good to see you again.

**Michael Ovitz** (0:03)
Thanks for doing this again. Yeah, it's great. I haven't seen you since yesterday.

**David Senra** (0:06)
Well, we'll start there. Why did you tell me yesterday that you're busier today at this point in your life than you've ever been?

**Michael Ovitz** (0:13)
Great question, as I said to you yesterday, and you know I'm busy because you saw, you got to look at it. And first of all, let me apologize for being a horrible company to you.

**David Senra** (0:27)
You are. It was amazing.
I guess we should tell the people watching and listening to this that I flew back from New York to LA with you on your plane, and you had texted me the night before, you're like, just a warning, I'm going to be a horrible company because I'm going to work all the way through. And so what you did is you sat next to each other and you essentially, before we took off, started working, we flew, landed, and then you were still working. You're like, hey, I'm not getting off the plane in case you want to leave.

**Michael Ovitz** (0:50)
I was on a Zoom.

**David Senra** (0:51)
Yeah, exactly. No, it was awesome. You weren't a horrible company at all.

**Michael Ovitz** (0:54)
No, I said to you, I enjoy it, which is the problem. It's like the ultimate stimulus response.

**David Senra** (1:02)
Why is the fact that you love working a problem?

**Michael Ovitz** (1:05)
Well, it's not a problem for me. I think it's a problem for people that I'm close to that would like me to work less. I don't agree with that. And I am busier than I've ever been in my life. I actually said to Tamara the other night, would probably like me to work a little bit less. It's the most exciting time I've ever seen in my entire life. And that includes the entertainment sweet spot of the late 70s through the end of the 90s, which was the last great period in the film business and television business, pre-streaming, obviously. I thought I was in heaven in those years with respect to the amount of things that could be created out of thin air.
Today, and for the last, I started in 92 working in technology while I was still at CAA. It's now 26
I'm still doing it. I can't wait to get up in the morning. I literally can't wait. I am privileged to be able to work with some of the smartest men and women I've ever met in my life. They're all young. They're all out to do something special. They're motivated by all the right things. And every day when I'm in a meeting with these people, I learn something. So, I get discovery. I get education. I get my brain stretched.
I get to watch things like I've always watched creatively, created out of thin air. I get to listen to the presentation, get challenged about whether I should get involved or not.
And I do everything I can to spread myself around enough so I can get all the food for thought that's possible. Because that drives me. It's that discovery process that drives me. And it's not a FOMO process, frankly. It's very interesting in technology.
I was talking to Ben Horowitz about this. It's a learning curve that gives you a stimulation that you have seen, heard and heard something that you didn't know. But that stimulation then turns into a form of joy that you've made yourself a better person off of someone else's knowledge base. And I said the other day to one of my young mentees, I said, consider me Dracula for the brain. And, you know, the original Dracula, the conceit of the story, the book, forget there was no movie in those days, the book was this constant quest for eternal youth. And, you know, you suck a young person's blood and it makes you young. I like to view myself as in the same way except in the gray matter area. I'm really interested in what the thought process is.

**David Senra** (4:27)
Why do you think today is more exciting for you than even the 70s, 80s and the 90s?

**Michael Ovitz** (4:32)
Because in the 70s, 80s and 90s we were dealing with mediums that had been around for a long time. The exciting part was the creation of the software of the moment, which was film or videotape or music or books. It was fantastic to read Michael Crichton's rough draft of Jurassic Park. It was a thrill, but it was a book, and there have been books since the invention of the printing press, actually since prior, because they're handwritten. But now, change is so dramatic that it's almost frightening.