Speaker 1: Over his long career, Barry Diller is founded and led
Speaker 1: some of the most influential media companies in America, creating
Speaker 1: the Fox Broadcasting Company, running Paramount Pictures, and more recently
Speaker 1: leading Interactive Corps as it grows into a multibillion dollar
Speaker 1: internet company. But when Diller dropped out of u c
Speaker 1: l A just after one semester, his future success was
Speaker 1: far from secure. As he went to work in the
Speaker 1: mail room at the William Morris Talent Agency. Diller was
Speaker 1: soon hired as an assistant to Helton Rule, who became
Speaker 1: president of ABC and promoted Diller device president of Development,
Speaker 1: setting him on a path to success in the media industry.
Speaker 1: Diller recently sat down with Carlisle Group co founder David Rubinstein.
Speaker 1: They spoke on David Rubinstein's Bloomberg television program Peer to
Speaker 1: Peer Conversations. So, Barry, you have had a very unusual career.
Speaker 1: Let me try to explain this. Many people, Okay, so
Speaker 1: many people have built media companies and then sometimes they've
Speaker 1: run them. And a few other people have built um
Speaker 1: internet companies and sometimes they run them. What was it
Speaker 1: about your abilities you think to be able to do both?
Speaker 1: I think probably it's probably like a couple of things.
Speaker 1: I mean, one is curiosity. I probably a more curious
Speaker 1: than those people who have been on one side or
Speaker 1: the other. I'm let me say I'm sloppily curious on
Speaker 1: the And the other thing is it's about editorship. I
Speaker 1: mean I think that certainly in media businesses, which is
Speaker 1: where you are choosing from, I'll do this or I
Speaker 1: won't do that. True editorship. You did very well in television,
Speaker 1: very well in movies. How did you gravitate towards the Internet? Well,
Speaker 1: it started because I, first of all, I don't really
Speaker 1: like repeating myself. I've been in the movie and television
Speaker 1: business for twenty years, kind of running multiple like movie
Speaker 1: and television operations, and when I left, First of all,
Speaker 1: my biggest issue was I didn't want to work for
Speaker 1: anyone anymore because I'd been a corporatis, I'd always worked
Speaker 1: for a company, and I got to a point when
Speaker 1: I was forty nine when I said, I really, you
Speaker 1: either kind of are or you're not, and I want
Speaker 1: to be not having anyone, so to speak, thumb on
Speaker 1: my neck. Also, I wanted to see if I could
Speaker 1: create something that was really my own. Another way of
Speaker 1: saying this at least the way I would maybe say,
Speaker 1: and maybe I had the same view myself. If they
Speaker 1: could do this, why can't I do that? And you
Speaker 1: didn't have that, you know, I mean because I really
Speaker 1: I never really I've always kind of acted out of
Speaker 1: more insecurity than security. And I probably didn't think that
Speaker 1: the people. I mean, I thought a lot of the
Speaker 1: people I worked for were idiots, But in the main
Speaker 1: I certainly didn't think that. In fact, oh I could
Speaker 1: do that. The question for me was could I do that.
Speaker 1: Let's go back through how are your career unfolded before
Speaker 1: we go to what you're doing today. So you grew
Speaker 1: up in Beverly Hills and you went to college initially
Speaker 1: at U c l A. You know, it's a bit
Speaker 1: of a fake out, and I've never absolutely clarified it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it that I went to u c
Speaker 1: l A for about three weeks, um three weeks. What
Speaker 1: did your parents say when you dropped out? Nothing more
Speaker 1: than they said before it, after it, or during. My
Speaker 1: parents were the most laise fair of parents, and they
Speaker 1: did not really have a point of view other than
Speaker 1: they probably assumed that they just support me for the
Speaker 1: rest of my life. So we're your parents wealthy fairly Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what did you do? Hibernated for a while. I
Speaker 1: knew where my interest was pulling me. My interest was
Speaker 1: pulling me into entertainment. I'd always been fascinated by it.
Speaker 1: That was obviously a lot around me. My parents, my
Speaker 1: best friends and their parents were most sleep in various
Speaker 1: forms of the entertainment business. So it was it was
Speaker 1: the allure. But I had no clue how to get there.
Speaker 1: I mean, there's no starting jobs. So I called my
Speaker 1: best friend's father, Danny Thomas, who was a famous comedian
Speaker 1: of the time on television Star and I so I
Speaker 1: started William Morris in the mail room. What do you
Speaker 1: actually do in the mail room? Because I never could
Speaker 1: figure out how you can be in the mail room
Speaker 1: and then you wind up being a CEO. I didn't
Speaker 1: do what most people do in the mail room. What
Speaker 1: most people do in the mail room is they really
Speaker 1: they want to make contacts, They want to network with people,
Speaker 1: they want to meet people, and through that networking, if
Speaker 1: they impress people, they'll probably get a job or Usually
Speaker 1: people in the mail room wanted to be agents. The
Speaker 1: last thing in the world I ever wanted to do
Speaker 1: was be an agent. I read the file room of
Speaker 1: William Morris for almost three years and essentially the history
Speaker 1: of the entertainment business from A to Z, and that
Speaker 1: was that was my school. And then how do you
Speaker 1: break out of the mail room to get into a
Speaker 1: real job. So what happened serendipity. Most of my career
Speaker 1: is some cross between serendipity and curiosity. Anyway, I had
Speaker 1: met a middle level executive at ABC named Leonard Goldberg.
Speaker 1: He was a New York executive moving to Los Angeles
Speaker 1: to become the vice president of Current Programming, a kind
Speaker 1: of like very middle level job. But I thought he
Speaker 1: was really smart and I I didn't really have some
Speaker 1: yen for television particularly, but you know, I was sparky
Speaker 1: and I was interested. I knew I couldn't stay at
Speaker 1: William Morris any longer, so he asked me to be
Speaker 1: his assistant. I said yes. The day that I left
Speaker 1: William Morris and was going to start at ABC, they
Speaker 1: fired the TSAR of ABC Programming and they reached down
Speaker 1: and they picked my guy, Leonard Goldberg, to be head
Speaker 1: of programming. So I went from this little tiny thing
Speaker 1: to moving to New York to becoming the assistant to
Speaker 1: the head of programming at ABC, and within six months
Speaker 1: I was kind of okay running the program department on
Speaker 1: your way, and eventually you became the president of ABC Television.
Speaker 1: Right well, the entertainment part, entertainment part, and you invented
Speaker 1: something that was novel at the time, called the Movie
Speaker 1: of the Week. We had the idea of saying, well,
Speaker 1: rather than buying mostly bad movies and putting on continually
Speaker 1: intelligence series that tend to fail, why don't we see
Speaker 1: if we could make a movie every week, And we
Speaker 1: chose this ninety minute form rather than two hours, and
Speaker 1: so we we It was very ambitious because it hadn't
Speaker 1: been done before, and everybody thought they would fail because
Speaker 1: that was not the diet of television at the time.
Speaker 1: And as most things, you know what everybody thinks it's
Speaker 1: going to fail, it worked. It worked. So you're doing
Speaker 1: very well. And you're in your mid thirties. If that no,
Speaker 1: I'm thirty. I was just thirty two, a right, thirty two,
Speaker 1: but you're pretending you're thirty three or something, or thirty
Speaker 1: four is you're you know, if you want to exaggerate
Speaker 1: how old because you're so young, right, No, I love
Speaker 1: being young. I hate being now, you know the ideas.
Speaker 1: Now I've gone from the youngest person in the room
Speaker 1: to the oldest person, and I know this pheno a
Speaker 1: bad transition. I mean, I know it. Yeah, I know. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I was thirty two, all right, So you're thirty two
Speaker 1: years old and you're getting a lot of attention. So
Speaker 1: then I guess somebody called you up and said, would
Speaker 1: you like to run Paramount Pictures? Is that how it happened?
Speaker 1: Charlie Bluedorn, who had gotten to know very early, like
Speaker 1: when I was like a year or two at ABC,
Speaker 1: he had just bought Paramount. At the time, Paramount had
Speaker 1: been failing, which is how why he and how he
Speaker 1: bought it. And he wanted to sell these movies to television,
Speaker 1: old movies from Paramounts library, all of which were terrible,
Speaker 1: and I gave him a very hard time. He liked that.
Speaker 1: We got began a relationship, and some years later he
Speaker 1: kept off wanting me to come to Paramount, and I
Speaker 1: didn't want to go. I really didn't want to leave
Speaker 1: ABC particularly, But finally he said, all right, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: make you chairman and chief executive of Paramount. I said, Charlie,
Speaker 1: I have no experience in the movie business. Yes, we've
Speaker 1: made seventy five movies for television, but are you you
Speaker 1: really want to make me chief executive? He said yes,
Speaker 1: and I said, actually, kind of reluctantly, I went to
Speaker 1: Leonard Goldensons, the founder of ABC, and I told him.
Speaker 1: I said, I told him about this, and he said, well,
Speaker 1: you have to go. And I said really, and it's true.
Speaker 1: I know it sounds quite crackers, but that is what happened. Now,
Speaker 1: when you're running Paramount, you produced some of the most
Speaker 1: famous movies in American history. First, we failed because actually
Speaker 1: believe that in order to figure stuff out, you're going
Speaker 1: to make a mess. So what did you make a
Speaker 1: mess up? We made a series of awful movies. But
Speaker 1: I was learning the movie business. We were in last place,
Speaker 1: and I was kind of on fumes at that time
Speaker 1: and saying to Charlie, you know, maybe this hasn't worked out.
Speaker 1: But we were in that two years we were laying
Speaker 1: really good development tracks for the future. So when it turned,
Speaker 1: which it did in the third year of Paramount, when
Speaker 1: we went literally from six to first place, Uh, it
Speaker 1: was a big big dramatic terms. Some of the ones
Speaker 1: that I remember were very big hits. Raiders of the
Speaker 1: Lost Arc. Did you know that was going to be
Speaker 1: great from the beginning? Yeah, okay, that doesn't It's rare
Speaker 1: that you really know from the beginning. But when if
Speaker 1: you if you read, do you remember seeing Red as
Speaker 1: a lost ars? Okay, so you remember the opening scene
Speaker 1: when he goes to the tomb and then the big
Speaker 1: ball that Okay, that was about twelve pages of the script.
Speaker 1: By the way, I finished that twelve page the script
Speaker 1: saying if we can shoot this, this is going to
Speaker 1: be fantastic. Of course it will cost more than any
Speaker 1: movie ever made because of whatever whatever. But that script rarely,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's happened ten times. Maybe when you finished
Speaker 1: that script you said smash. But you also did television production,
Speaker 1: and as I remember, you had cheers. Is that one
Speaker 1: of yours? Cheers? And shoppy days, Happy days, la Vernon Shirley.
Speaker 1: You're doing great job. People are telling you're great. And
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden you left Paramount to run
Speaker 1: twenty century Fox, and Rupert Murdoch came in. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, I'd always been interested in the idea
Speaker 1: of a fourth network, and so uh again. Serendipitously, John
Speaker 1: Clue owned a group of television stations called Metromedia, and
Speaker 1: he was passing through Los Angeles and I said, uh,
Speaker 1: to Rupert, why don't we buy his television stations and
Speaker 1: start a fourth network? And Rupert the greatest player, gambler,
Speaker 1: but on strong instinct with nothing to back it up,
Speaker 1: but thinking this was a good idea, I said yes.
Speaker 1: I said yes. I said they're going to cost a billion,
Speaker 1: two million dollars. He said that's okay, And not more
Speaker 1: than an hour later we shook hands with John Klugey
Speaker 1: and buying his television stations. So you haven't have that.
Speaker 1: You're building the fourth network. And you did, and people
Speaker 1: thought you were crazy. You did it the best position
Speaker 1: it is for people to think you're crazy. So that's
Speaker 1: the great good luck. And then you decide to leave. Yes,
Speaker 1: what I got to the point and I said, you know,
Speaker 1: I've certainly been successful. Uh, but none of this is mine,
Speaker 1: and I mean, and nothing is ever yours. But it wasn't.
Speaker 1: It was. And I went to Rupert and I said,
Speaker 1: I want to be a principal, and Rupert could be
Speaker 1: the greatest good service. He said, there's only one principle
Speaker 1: in this company. It's so very nice that you want
Speaker 1: to be, but that's reality. And I went away thinking,
Speaker 1: oh my god, what a terrible thing, what a terrible
Speaker 1: harsh thing to be told. Now I have to actually
Speaker 1: either decide that I'm going to act on it or not.
Speaker 1: So I left. You've been successful everything you've touched. Now
Speaker 1: you have to start your own business. You don't know which.
Speaker 1: I've been unsuccessful at each step of the way. It
Speaker 1: started off very un In the end, each one worked,
Speaker 1: they worked out. So you decide you're going to change
Speaker 1: your life, become a principal. But your problem is you
Speaker 1: don't know what you want to be a principle. Of
Speaker 1: the things that people wanted me to do, of course,
Speaker 1: was to run a movie company, take a job chief
Speaker 1: executive job in this part of the entertain and that
Speaker 1: part of the and all of that stuff I had
Speaker 1: really no interest in. So you started to buy, um,
Speaker 1: some things. My wife had gone to a place called QVC.
Speaker 1: Your wife's Diane on first heard, and she's a designer,
Speaker 1: and she went to QVC on the because they had
Speaker 1: wanted her to sell close on QVC and she said,
Speaker 1: you have to go and see what this thing is.
Speaker 1: It's the most amazing thing. So I go there Westchester, Pennsylvania,
Speaker 1: and I see in a you know, ten ft square
Speaker 1: uh hundred ft square stage, the use of computers and
Speaker 1: television sets and telephones, and me, who only knew about
Speaker 1: screens being used for narrative, I saw screens being used
Speaker 1: for something else. There were it was interactive. There was
Speaker 1: a computer screen that when they offered a product, you
Speaker 1: would see the calls would be on this computer screen,
Speaker 1: seeing them rise and fall and rise and fall and
Speaker 1: rise and fall. And the whole thing was this very
Speaker 1: early kind of convergence. And again, my only thing about
Speaker 1: screens was storytelling, and here was another use of a screen,
Speaker 1: and it intrigued me. And then again serendipity. I'm having
Speaker 1: lunch with Ralph and Brian Roberts, who own Comcast Home
Speaker 1: Comcast which owned and they wanted me to do a
Speaker 1: production company. And I was still bored with this lunch.
Speaker 1: I thought, when is it gonna be over? I can
Speaker 1: go home, And as you do in those kinds of situations,
Speaker 1: I didn't want them to talk anymore about trying to
Speaker 1: learn me into this thing. So I said to Ralph Roberts,
Speaker 1: tell me your story. He tells me the story, and
Speaker 1: in the story he's telling me how we started this
Speaker 1: thing called QVC. I said, stop, tell me more about QVC.
Speaker 1: He starts telling me more about QVC, drawing him out
Speaker 1: and drawing him out, and uh. And I said to him,
Speaker 1: what's gonna What are you gonna do with QVC? Said, well,
Speaker 1: the founder is going to retire. I said, really, I said,
Speaker 1: is he What is he going to do? He said, well,
Speaker 1: he's gonna sell his I said, could I buy his interest?
Speaker 1: Ralph said yes. I walked out of the Four Seasons
Speaker 1: Hotel knowing what I was going to do. I went
Speaker 1: to QVC, took an interest in it, and that was
Speaker 1: three years. Again, there's a primitive convergence of these computers
Speaker 1: and telephones, and that was three years before the Internet
Speaker 1: really started for normal foot So it was luck and circumstances.
Speaker 1: At that point. People had said, Barry Diller, who has
Speaker 1: been a big guest, They said I was Then they
Speaker 1: said I was crazy, and he's a low rand. They
Speaker 1: were sure I was crazy, low rank QBC, what is he?
Speaker 1: Where is he going? And went to west Chester Pennsylvanu.
Speaker 1: We will never hear about him again. Okay. So QVC
Speaker 1: you had a stake in it. Ultimately you grew it.
Speaker 1: You started buying Internet related companies, things that sold things
Speaker 1: over the internet, Ticketmaster or things like that, and then
Speaker 1: you put him into a company called I A C.
Speaker 1: Did you know at the time each of these would
Speaker 1: probably work? Oh no, of course you didn't. So by
Speaker 1: the way, many of them didn't. But the most successful
Speaker 1: of them is that Expedia is that the biggest, is
Speaker 1: probably the biggest, but you know they they they range
Speaker 1: from live Nation, Ticketmaster, uh, match dot com. So you
Speaker 1: own this company and it's now become a very big
Speaker 1: public company. Roughly two million dollars is put in to
Speaker 1: buy the company's initial that you started with, and today
Speaker 1: that's worth fifty seven billion dollars more or less. So
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. As I think I've mentioned, your stock
Speaker 1: is up this year. So how are you going to
Speaker 1: top all that? In the business world? You can't do
Speaker 1: much better than you've done. Find something else to fail
Speaker 1: at first? Today? Uh, the internet, UM is still very
Speaker 1: much part of our lives. What about television and and
Speaker 1: UM Motion Picture? Do you think they'll continue to be
Speaker 1: important parts of our lives. I think the movie business
Speaker 1: is over as a really cultural institution of of any
Speaker 1: great value, because the movie business is now about primarily
Speaker 1: it's about making sequels and big, huge, mega movies that
Speaker 1: are more marketing things than anything else. So I think
Speaker 1: movies have very much receded. I think television is, of course,
Speaker 1: as we all know, it's having a great period because
Speaker 1: of the incredible optionality in television and the craft. Are
Speaker 1: you worried that four or five technology companies can control
Speaker 1: our culture and our our lives so much or you're
Speaker 1: not worried about that. No, I am worried about that.
Speaker 1: I've always thought concentration, too much concentration is bad, and
Speaker 1: that goes against the consolidating principles which are forcing consolidation everywhere,
Speaker 1: and we'll continue to and I think that's not a
Speaker 1: good thing. But you expect the movie companys and television
Speaker 1: companies were ultimately bought by these big technology companies. I'm
Speaker 1: not so sure they'll buy them. I think they'll actually
Speaker 1: supersede them. I mean, the thing is that, uh that
Speaker 1: the two companies that are that are really dominating right
Speaker 1: now are Netflix, grown totally outside of the infrastructure of
Speaker 1: the entertainment business and Amazon and which whose business model
Speaker 1: is absolutely antithetical in a way to what the business
Speaker 1: model of entertainment has been, which is you put on
Speaker 1: a show and people like it, and the audience comes
Speaker 1: and they pay you. Their business model is to sell
Speaker 1: subscriptions to prime and just as a subsidiary, they give
Speaker 1: you good stuff on the side. It's worked out pretty well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've spent a lot of time on philanthropy recently. You're
Speaker 1: you committed to the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and
Speaker 1: Bill Gates developed and you're one of the original signers
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. And one of your philanthropies in New
Speaker 1: York is something called high Line. What the high Line
Speaker 1: was was an elevated railroad track that hadn't been used
Speaker 1: for probably fifty years. So what we did. It took
Speaker 1: ten years. We created this elevated park. We thought the
Speaker 1: first year we'd have three hundred and fifty I think
Speaker 1: it was three people. Three million came the first year
Speaker 1: and last year seven million. So it's been this right,
Speaker 1: it's been a very successful thing. So that prompted you
Speaker 1: to say, well, if I did this, maybe I could
Speaker 1: do something else even stupider. It happened this way. They
Speaker 1: came and said that they were going to tear down
Speaker 1: a pier because it was falling apart, and uh, would
Speaker 1: I'd be interested in building a new pier? And I said, well,
Speaker 1: not if it's a peer. What you're planning to do
Speaker 1: is boring. But if I could be ambitious about it,
Speaker 1: about maybe building an actual island in the park that's
Speaker 1: not shaped like a pier, if you're up. If you're
Speaker 1: up for that, I'm up for it. And of course
Speaker 1: we started with m you know, kind of a narrower vision,
Speaker 1: and like all crazy projects, it's all right, boom and
Speaker 1: people can go there, and yes, it's a The idea
Speaker 1: is that, you know, there's I love public art. The
Speaker 1: idea of making a public space. I think it's great.
Speaker 1: So it is a park for people. It's also a
Speaker 1: performance center. Do we pull it off? Okay? It's almost
Speaker 1: like walking on the You get to it by two bridges,
Speaker 1: and walking to the bridge, you'll leave this city of
Speaker 1: concrete and mostly concrete and stir and all this stuff,
Speaker 1: and you'll go to Oz and what's it going to
Speaker 1: be called? Pre not Diller part No, you don't want that. No,
Speaker 1: So today, if you were starting your career all over again,
Speaker 1: what would you go and what area would you go
Speaker 1: into it? I have no idea. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: I've never really had a goal. I've never I mean,
Speaker 1: I've never said I want to be that. So to me,
Speaker 1: it was whatever I was curious about. Now. One of
Speaker 1: the things I'd like to ask people about his leadership,
Speaker 1: what do you think the skills are that you had
Speaker 1: as a leader? Probably, uh, kind of often blind willfulness,
Speaker 1: I think will uh some energy to propel it. But
Speaker 1: the stronger the will I think, the more I think
Speaker 1: that that at least allows people to follow. If you
Speaker 1: were to say today what you're most proud of what
Speaker 1: you have achieved with your life, what would you say? Uh?
Speaker 1: Probably probably my marriage. Okay, so you got married in
Speaker 1: two thousand and one one and to a very famous
Speaker 1: fashion designer. Does she give you fashion advice and addressing
Speaker 1: you or not? Really take a look? No, well I don't,
Speaker 1: I don't know. But do you give her advice on internet?
Speaker 1: Reality of things? Her instincts transcend fashion, and so anything
Speaker 1: that comes up her instincts are pretty damn good. And
Speaker 1: so I listen and she occasionally listens to me. Okay,
Speaker 1: so you have a very happy life. I'm so lucky.
Speaker 1: Well say thank you. That's what I do all the time.
Speaker 1: Congratulations for what you've achieved, and thank you very much
Speaker 1: for your time, pleasure,