Barry Diller

mail room at the William Morris Talent Agency. Diller was soon hired as an assistant to Helton Rule, who became president of ABC and promoted Diller device president of Development, setting him on a path to success in the media industry. Diller recently sat down with Carlisle Group co founder David Rubinstein. They spoke on David Rubinstein's Bloomberg television program Peer to Peer Conversations. So, Barry, you have had a very unusual career.

Let me try to explain this. Many people, Okay, so many people have built media companies and then sometimes they've run them. And a few other people have built um internet companies and sometimes they run them. What was it about your abilities you think to be able to do both? I think probably it's probably like a couple of things. I mean, one is curiosity. I probably a more curious than those people who have been on one side or the other. I'm let me say I'm sloppily curious on

the And the other thing is it's about editorship. I mean I think that certainly in media businesses, which is where you are choosing from, I'll do this or I won't do that. True editorship. You did very well in television, very well in movies. How did you gravitate towards the Internet? Well, it started because I, first of all, I don't really

like repeating myself. I've been in the movie and television business for twenty years, kind of running multiple like movie and television operations, and when I left, First of all, my biggest issue was I didn't want to work for anyone anymore because I'd been a corporatis, I'd always worked for a company, and I got to a point when I was forty nine when I said, I really, you either kind of are or you're not, and I want to be not having anyone, so to speak, thumb on

my neck. Also, I wanted to see if I could create something that was really my own. Another way of saying this at least the way I would maybe say, and maybe I had the same view myself. If they could do this, why can't I do that? And you didn't have that, you know, I mean because I really I never really I've always kind of acted out of more insecurity than security. And I probably didn't think that the people. I mean, I thought a lot of the people I worked for were idiots, But in the main

I certainly didn't think that. In fact, oh I could do that. The question for me was could I do that. Let's go back through how are your career unfolded before we go to what you're doing today. So you grew up in Beverly Hills and you went to college initially at U c l A. You know, it's a bit of a fake out, and I've never absolutely clarified it. I mean, it's it that I went to u c l A for about three weeks, um three weeks. What did your parents say when you dropped out? Nothing more

than they said before it, after it, or during. My parents were the most laise fair of parents, and they did not really have a point of view other than they probably assumed that they just support me for the rest of my life. So we're your parents wealthy fairly Yeah, so what did you do? Hibernated for a while. I knew where my interest was pulling me. My interest was pulling me into entertainment. I'd always been fascinated by it.

That was obviously a lot around me. My parents, my best friends and their parents were most sleep in various forms of the entertainment business. So it was it was the allure. But I had no clue how to get there. I mean, there's no starting jobs. So I called my best friend's father, Danny Thomas, who was a famous comedian of the time on television Star and I so I started William Morris in the mail room. What do you

actually do in the mail room? Because I never could figure out how you can be in the mail room and then you wind up being a CEO. I didn't do what most people do in the mail room. What most people do in the mail room is they really they want to make contacts, They want to network with people, they want to meet people, and through that networking, if they impress people, they'll probably get a job or Usually

people in the mail room wanted to be agents. The last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was be an agent. I read the file room of William Morris for almost three years and essentially the history of the entertainment business from A to Z, and that was that was my school. And then how do you break out of the mail room to get into a real job. So what happened serendipity. Most of my career

is some cross between serendipity and curiosity. Anyway, I had met a middle level executive at ABC named Leonard Goldberg. He was a New York executive moving to Los Angeles to become the vice president of Current Programming, a kind of like very middle level job. But I thought he was really smart and I I didn't really have some yen for television particularly, but you know, I was sparky and I was interested. I knew I couldn't stay at William Morris any longer, so he asked me to be

his assistant. I said yes. The day that I left William Morris and was going to start at ABC, they fired the TSAR of ABC Programming and they reached down and they picked my guy, Leonard Goldberg, to be head of programming. So I went from this little tiny thing to moving to New York to becoming the assistant to the head of programming at ABC, and within six months I was kind of okay running the program department on your way, and eventually you became the president of ABC Television.

Right well, the entertainment part, entertainment part, and you invented something that was novel at the time, called the Movie

of the Week. We had the idea of saying, well, rather than buying mostly bad movies and putting on continually intelligence series that tend to fail, why don't we see if we could make a movie every week, And we chose this ninety minute form rather than two hours, and so we we It was very ambitious because it hadn't been done before, and everybody thought they would fail because that was not the diet of television at the time. And as most things, you know what everybody thinks it's

going to fail, it worked. It worked. So you're doing very well. And you're in your mid thirties. If that no, I'm thirty. I was just thirty two, a right, thirty two, but you're pretending you're thirty three or something, or thirty four is you're you know, if you want to exaggerate how old because you're so young, right, No, I love being young. I hate being now, you know the ideas. Now I've gone from the youngest person in the room to the oldest person, and I know this pheno a

bad transition. I mean, I know it. Yeah, I know. Anyway, I was thirty two, all right, So you're thirty two years old and you're getting a lot of attention. So then I guess somebody called you up and said, would you like to run Paramount Pictures? Is that how it happened? Charlie Bluedorn, who had gotten to know very early, like when I was like a year or two at ABC, he had just bought Paramount. At the time, Paramount had been failing, which is how why he and how he

bought it. And he wanted to sell these movies to television, old movies from Paramounts library, all of which were terrible, and I gave him a very hard time. He liked that. We got began a relationship, and some years later he kept off wanting me to come to Paramount, and I didn't want to go. I really didn't want to leave ABC particularly, But finally he said, all right, I'm gonna make you chairman and chief executive of Paramount. I said, Charlie,

I have no experience in the movie business. Yes, we've made seventy five movies for television, but are you you really want to make me chief executive? He said yes, and I said, actually, kind of reluctantly, I went to Leonard Goldensons, the founder of ABC, and I told him. I said, I told him about this, and he said, well, you have to go. And I said really, and it's true. I know it sounds quite crackers, but that is what happened. Now, when you're running Paramount, you produced some of the most

famous movies in American history. First, we failed because actually believe that in order to figure stuff out, you're going to make a mess. So what did you make a mess up? We made a series of awful movies. But I was learning the movie business. We were in last place, and I was kind of on fumes at that time and saying to Charlie, you know, maybe this hasn't worked out. But we were in that two years we were laying

really good development tracks for the future. So when it turned, which it did in the third year of Paramount, when we went literally from six to first place, Uh, it was a big big dramatic terms. Some of the ones that I remember were very big hits. Raiders of the Lost Arc. Did you know that was going to be great from the beginning? Yeah, okay, that doesn't It's rare that you really know from the beginning. But when if you if you read, do you remember seeing Red as

a lost ars? Okay, so you remember the opening scene when he goes to the tomb and then the big ball that Okay, that was about twelve pages of the script. By the way, I finished that twelve page the script saying if we can shoot this, this is going to be fantastic. Of course it will cost more than any movie ever made because of whatever whatever. But that script rarely, I mean, it's happened ten times. Maybe when you finished that script you said smash. But you also did television production,

and as I remember, you had cheers. Is that one of yours? Cheers? And shoppy days, Happy days, la Vernon Shirley. You're doing great job. People are telling you're great. And then all of a sudden you left Paramount to run twenty century Fox, and Rupert Murdoch came in. And at the same time, I'd always been interested in the idea

of a fourth network, and so uh again. Serendipitously, John Clue owned a group of television stations called Metromedia, and he was passing through Los Angeles and I said, uh, to Rupert, why don't we buy his television stations and start a fourth network? And Rupert the greatest player, gambler, but on strong instinct with nothing to back it up, but thinking this was a good idea, I said yes. I said yes. I said they're going to cost a billion,

two million dollars. He said that's okay, And not more than an hour later we shook hands with John Klugey and buying his television stations. So you haven't have that. You're building the fourth network. And you did, and people thought you were crazy. You did it the best position it is for people to think you're crazy. So that's the great good luck. And then you decide to leave. Yes, what I got to the point and I said, you know, I've certainly been successful. Uh, but none of this is mine,

and I mean, and nothing is ever yours. But it wasn't. It was. And I went to Rupert and I said, I want to be a principal, and Rupert could be the greatest good service. He said, there's only one principle in this company. It's so very nice that you want to be, but that's reality. And I went away thinking, oh my god, what a terrible thing, what a terrible harsh thing to be told. Now I have to actually either decide that I'm going to act on it or not.

So I left. You've been successful everything you've touched. Now you have to start your own business. You don't know which. I've been unsuccessful at each step of the way. It started off very un In the end, each one worked, they worked out. So you decide you're going to change your life, become a principal. But your problem is you

don't know what you want to be a principle. Of the things that people wanted me to do, of course, was to run a movie company, take a job chief executive job in this part of the entertain and that part of the and all of that stuff I had really no interest in. So you started to buy, um, some things. My wife had gone to a place called QVC.

Your wife's Diane on first heard, and she's a designer, and she went to QVC on the because they had wanted her to sell close on QVC and she said, you have to go and see what this thing is. It's the most amazing thing. So I go there Westchester, Pennsylvania, and I see in a you know, ten ft square uh hundred ft square stage, the use of computers and television sets and telephones, and me, who only knew about screens being used for narrative, I saw screens being used

for something else. There were it was interactive. There was a computer screen that when they offered a product, you would see the calls would be on this computer screen, seeing them rise and fall and rise and fall and rise and fall. And the whole thing was this very early kind of convergence. And again, my only thing about screens was storytelling, and here was another use of a screen,

and it intrigued me. And then again serendipity. I'm having lunch with Ralph and Brian Roberts, who own Comcast Home Comcast which owned and they wanted me to do a production company. And I was still bored with this lunch. I thought, when is it gonna be over? I can go home, And as you do in those kinds of situations, I didn't want them to talk anymore about trying to learn me into this thing. So I said to Ralph Roberts,

tell me your story. He tells me the story, and in the story he's telling me how we started this thing called QVC. I said, stop, tell me more about QVC. He starts telling me more about QVC, drawing him out and drawing him out, and uh. And I said to him, what's gonna What are you gonna do with QVC? Said, well, the founder is going to retire. I said, really, I said, is he What is he going to do? He said, well, he's gonna sell his I said, could I buy his interest?

Ralph said yes. I walked out of the Four Seasons Hotel knowing what I was going to do. I went to QVC, took an interest in it, and that was three years. Again, there's a primitive convergence of these computers and telephones, and that was three years before the Internet really started for normal foot So it was luck and circumstances. At that point. People had said, Barry Diller, who has been a big guest, They said I was Then they

said I was crazy, and he's a low rand. They were sure I was crazy, low rank QBC, what is he? Where is he going? And went to west Chester Pennsylvanu. We will never hear about him again. Okay. So QVC you had a stake in it. Ultimately you grew it. You started buying Internet related companies, things that sold things over the internet, Ticketmaster or things like that, and then you put him into a company called I A C. Did you know at the time each of these would

probably work? Oh no, of course you didn't. So by the way, many of them didn't. But the most successful of them is that Expedia is that the biggest, is probably the biggest, but you know they they they range from live Nation, Ticketmaster, uh, match dot com. So you own this company and it's now become a very big public company. Roughly two million dollars is put in to buy the company's initial that you started with, and today that's worth fifty seven billion dollars more or less. So

that's pretty good. As I think I've mentioned, your stock is up this year. So how are you going to top all that? In the business world? You can't do much better than you've done. Find something else to fail at first? Today? Uh, the internet, UM is still very much part of our lives. What about television and and UM Motion Picture? Do you think they'll continue to be

important parts of our lives. I think the movie business is over as a really cultural institution of of any great value, because the movie business is now about primarily it's about making sequels and big, huge, mega movies that are more marketing things than anything else. So I think movies have very much receded. I think television is, of course, as we all know, it's having a great period because

of the incredible optionality in television and the craft. Are you worried that four or five technology companies can control our culture and our our lives so much or you're not worried about that. No, I am worried about that. I've always thought concentration, too much concentration is bad, and that goes against the consolidating principles which are forcing consolidation everywhere, and we'll continue to and I think that's not a good thing. But you expect the movie companys and television

companies were ultimately bought by these big technology companies. I'm not so sure they'll buy them. I think they'll actually

supersede them. I mean, the thing is that, uh that the two companies that are that are really dominating right now are Netflix, grown totally outside of the infrastructure of the entertainment business and Amazon and which whose business model is absolutely antithetical in a way to what the business model of entertainment has been, which is you put on a show and people like it, and the audience comes

and they pay you. Their business model is to sell subscriptions to prime and just as a subsidiary, they give you good stuff on the side. It's worked out pretty well. Yeah, you've spent a lot of time on philanthropy recently. You're you committed to the Giving Pledge that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates developed and you're one of the original signers of it. Uh. And one of your philanthropies in New

York is something called high Line. What the high Line was was an elevated railroad track that hadn't been used for probably fifty years. So what we did. It took ten years. We created this elevated park. We thought the first year we'd have three hundred and fifty I think it was three people. Three million came the first year and last year seven million. So it's been this right, it's been a very successful thing. So that prompted you to say, well, if I did this, maybe I could

do something else even stupider. It happened this way. They came and said that they were going to tear down a pier because it was falling apart, and uh, would I'd be interested in building a new pier? And I said, well, not if it's a peer. What you're planning to do is boring. But if I could be ambitious about it, about maybe building an actual island in the park that's not shaped like a pier, if you're up. If you're

up for that, I'm up for it. And of course we started with m you know, kind of a narrower vision, and like all crazy projects, it's all right, boom and people can go there, and yes, it's a The idea is that, you know, there's I love public art. The idea of making a public space. I think it's great. So it is a park for people. It's also a

performance center. Do we pull it off? Okay? It's almost like walking on the You get to it by two bridges, and walking to the bridge, you'll leave this city of concrete and mostly concrete and stir and all this stuff, and you'll go to Oz and what's it going to be called? Pre not Diller part No, you don't want that. No, So today, if you were starting your career all over again, what would you go and what area would you go into it? I have no idea. I mean, I think

I've never really had a goal. I've never I mean, I've never said I want to be that. So to me, it was whatever I was curious about. Now. One of the things I'd like to ask people about his leadership, what do you think the skills are that you had as a leader? Probably, uh, kind of often blind willfulness, I think will uh some energy to propel it. But the stronger the will I think, the more I think that that at least allows people to follow. If you were to say today what you're most proud of what

you have achieved with your life, what would you say? Uh? Probably probably my marriage. Okay, so you got married in two thousand and one one and to a very famous fashion designer. Does she give you fashion advice and addressing you or not? Really take a look? No, well I don't, I don't know. But do you give her advice on internet? Reality of things? Her instincts transcend fashion, and so anything that comes up her instincts are pretty damn good. And

so I listen and she occasionally listens to me. Okay, so you have a very happy life. I'm so lucky. Well say thank you. That's what I do all the time. Congratulations for what you've achieved, and thank you very much for your time, pleasure,