Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Barry Diller:

I was able to take risks that other people wouldn’t take because I had one big risk, one huge fear, one big anvil over my head, so it obliterated others, where to me, business risks were meaningless. I couldn’t care less about business risk.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Barry Diller, whether you’re familiar with his name or not, you’re certainly familiar with his work. Diller is one of America’s most successful businessmen. Having launched ABC TV’s Movie of the Week at 27, becoming CEO of Paramount Pictures at 32 and launching the Fox TV Network at 44. Diller greenlit a seemingly infinite number of fan favorites, including the film’s Saturday Night Fever, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Home Alone, and the popular TV shows, The Simpsons Married with Children, Cops, and Roots. I assure you, the list goes on and on.

He’s the founder and chairman of IAC, which now houses popular brands including Match, Tinder and Expedia. Diller is also a brilliant writer. His new memoir titled, Who Knew, is an Intimate Exploration of his life, love, and career. He joins me this week to talk about it all, plus what he thinks about the new tech-controlled media industry, choosing instinct over data and why he likes conflict. Then I’ll answer questions about the difference between justice and revenge, and also Trump’s attempts to shut down the Department of Education. That’s coming up, stay tuned. Barry Diller greenlit some of the most popular movies and shows to ever hit our screens. Now he’s talking about his own life. Barry Diller, welcome to the show. It’s a treat to have you.

Barry Diller:

Thank you, happy to be here.

Preet Bharara:

Congratulations on the book. Barry Diller, Who Knew. So it’s a very personal book.

Barry Diller:

Yes. I know. I didn’t really didn’t realize that it was going to be “personal”, so personal. No, I mean I thought, it’s a good story, I hope I can tell it and I hope I can tell it true. But until it came out, I did not realize the extent of that, but I’m getting used to it.

Preet Bharara:

It was published a few weeks ago, so I have the benefit of getting you a little bit later in the rollout. Are you surprised by the reaction? Has the reaction been… What has it been?

Barry Diller:

Yeah, I was surprised.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, how so?

Barry Diller:

I’m surprised… Well, listen, I don’t get people calling me up and telling me how much they hate it, so I don’t know about that part. But the reactions of people are… I don’t know what’s so surprising to me, but they’re very emotional and it’s not just one sentence. I get lots of paragraphs about what it means to them and all sorts of things I just never would’ve contemplated. It certainly made me happy and feeling somewhat odd that it has affected people in the way it seems to have affected at least, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of people who’ve written to me.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s not the kind of book that someone expects from, I don’t know what you want to call yourself? A tycoon, a mogul,-

Barry Diller:

Yeah, a whatever, a whatever.

Preet Bharara:

… a successful business person, I think you say and others have said that typically those memoirs, fairly late in life, are self-tributes. Certainly you’ve had success, but you talk about a lot of vulnerabilities and secrets, which I think is surprising to folks, so-

Barry Diller:

I guess so. I don’t know, I thought… Yeah, well, I think it’s different. Most of the people who write these books who are in the world of business as against, let’s call it the arts, they’re relatively promotional. And I don’t mean that they’re just egoistic. I mean, they’re done to teach people what a lot of these books about business people are, “Well, I did it this way so you can think about doing it this way.” And I got nothing to teach anyone, and I had no interest really in doing and writing a book saying, “Well, here are some tips to be whatever,” since, I don’t know, I don’t trust such tips. But anyway, I just thought, it’s a good story, so tell it. And I guess that’s why it’s different than most of the others.

Preet Bharara:

So one of many arresting passages that I know has been quoted before in some of these talks you’ve done, but you talk about being at sleepaway camp.

Barry Diller:

Ah, yes.

Preet Bharara:

And this is early on, this is on page 11.

Barry Diller:

I did get into it early.

Preet Bharara:

And you were lonely, you were lonely… Barry Diller used to get lonely, “In desperation I called my mother and begged her to come pick me up and she didn’t come.” And then you write, “Then it got dark and I knew she wasn’t going to come.” And then you write, “I gave up on my mother that night. There would be no rescue. There was no one to protect me. I knew then that I was on my own. A very scary thing for this 7-year-old.” That’s a pretty heavy revelation at age seven.

Barry Diller:

Well, like many things, I’m sure for all of us, there are these snapshots of memory that are literally snapshots where you can actually picture the moment. And I, many, many years later, during all those years, also, every once in a while I could recall that exact moment because I think it’s the moment where I turned to self-reliance or I turned, self-reliance, I turned independent because there were only two things I thought I could do… Well, who knows what I thought I could do, but it seems like there were two ways, one was to collapse entirely and the other was to say, “All right, I’m on my own, now what?” I guess I chose now what.

Preet Bharara:

You also talk about your relationship with your older brother.

Barry Diller:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And some of this, you say that you had blotted out. Was the process of writing the book one where you wrote down things that have been on your mind for a long time? Or was there a process of excavation and re-remembering things?

Barry Diller:

I think mostly the latter, but I was surprised that when I started I thought, I do not have a single memory in my… I mean, exaggerated for effect, I don’t have any memories back whenever to be able to tell a story. And oddly, I found, I don’t know, it’s true for other people that as soon as I got back in the arena of whatever the time period was, memories just came back to me. And the more that I pulled a thread, the more other threads came to be pulled. And I was really surprised that I remembered so much about so much.

Preet Bharara:

Was that therapeutic?

Barry Diller:

Sure. I don’t know about therapeutic, what it was more than I think anything is that I very rarely live in the moment. I don’t tend to fully enjoy or feel bad about the moment. So going back and going through this and writing it down, I was able to live in the moment, but decades later and that was great, mostly.

Preet Bharara:

Were there painful memories to relive or did you find yourself thinking-

Barry Diller:

No.

Preet Bharara:

They were not painful? That might be surprising to some people?

Barry Diller:

Not at all. The difficulties that I went through, mostly as I wrote about the way I grew up and all of those and all my other little difficulties. The more I actually had empathy for myself, the more I… And it wasn’t painful, it was, how did I deal with this? And in most cases I dealt with it in a healthy way. Although the times they were painful when I went through them, for sure, of course it was. But writing about it made it better somehow.

Preet Bharara:

Did you not allow yourself to have self-empathy before the writing of this book?

Barry Diller:

I would say, I don’t know, maybe occasionally, but unlikely. Yeah, I think so.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think you could have written this book 20 years ago?

Barry Diller:

I don’t know. Probably. I mean, yeah, actually I think that if I had to write it again, I would’ve ended it with my leaving, to write about, leaving Fox and building a life in the internet. I probably would’ve ended it at Fox because for a couple of reasons. One, by the time I, because I wrote it consecutively, so by the time I got to that period, it was a lot of years later of picking the book up and putting it down and doing all this undisciplined writer work. And when I got past Fox, I kind of wanted to get through it to the end. And also the internet years were just so ridiculously successful that there wasn’t… Well, there was some drama, there’s always drama. There wasn’t the same kind of convulsive drama of the first two acts. And I think I probably would’ve been better to end it there and then someday written the so to speak, last act.

Preet Bharara:

An epilogue.

Barry Diller:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

You’re a maker of iconic TV shows, films. You invented the movie of the week, which I remember from a long while ago. Would your life make a good movie?

Barry Diller:

No, I doubt it. I mean…

Preet Bharara:

But you say it’s a good story, why?

Barry Diller:

It’s a good story. So okay, maybe it would. It’s a good story, but… Here’s the reason why, to make it a really good story would’ve ended in some tragedy. And since thank God so far it hasn’t, I don’t want to do the bad luck here, but since it hasn’t, I don’t think it’s got a great ending.

Preet Bharara:

Wait a minute. In

Barry Diller:

Purely dramatic

Preet Bharara:

Terms, I’m going to argue with you on that. Oh, please. I’m just trying to think quickly if there have been… If all very good movies about actual figures who lived end in some tragedy, some end in triumph, do they not? You ride off into the sunset, Barry, with your revelations and your secrets happily worn on your sleeve?

Barry Diller:

Yes, but I don’t know. I certainly, I’ve been asked to participate in making a documentary of the book and I’ve chosen not to. So maybe I’m bleeding that into the whole thing.

Preet Bharara:

I think you’ve got a… So who would play you?

Barry Diller:

Oh God, don’t even go there.

Preet Bharara:

All right, we’ll come back to that. So one of the things obviously that’s very personal that you write about in the book that’s gotten perhaps outsized attention, I wonder what you think about this, is your sexuality.

Barry Diller:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

And you write this, which is again, fairly arresting, you said, you could have declared your sexuality, but you didn’t. Instead, you said, “You wanted, needed to adopt my own personal bill of rights. I would live with silence, but not with hypocrisy. I would never pose or pretend, I wouldn’t do a single thing to make anyone believe I was living a heterosexual life.” It sounds less like a bill of rights than sort of 10 Commandments for yourself, can you… Because it doesn’t sound very liberating, which the Bill of Rights is supposed to be, speaking as a lawyer for a moment.

Barry Diller:

True, true.

Preet Bharara:

And you go on and you talk about other rules. Why did you adopt that list of requirements?

Barry Diller:

It was difficult enough in those times, and I did not want to lead a pretend life. And so I absolutely thought and resolved that I would do certain things and not do other things in order… I’m sure I’ve been it at times in certain things I guess, although if I’m aware of it, I will stamp it out. Of all the stuff, not of all, probably, but I don’t like hypocrisy. And I knew that I would be miserable if I had to pretend. And so I thought, “All right, how am I going to navigate this?” And so I didn’t, don’t know that I ever actually said these are “rules”, but they certainly were rules I adhered to, and I did it because it was my navigation in order to be reasonably okay during this period. That’s why I decided to do it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. And these challenges you had a couple of which we’ve discussed, would you say that you were successful in spite of them or because of them?

Barry Diller:

I absolutely think, and I spent some time on this, I do, which is that the things that I had to go through, the difficulties that I had to go through became in odd ways the tools for me to actually succeed. For instance, I had to, I thought I wanted to please my mother in a certain way, and I figured out how to do that. And so when I was in my late teens, early 20s or whatever, I mean, certainly at that time I was able to particularly please people. I was able to take risks that other people wouldn’t take because I had one big risk, one huge fear, one big anvil over my head. So it obliterated others, where to me, business risks were meaningless. I couldn’t care less about business risks. And so for sure those… I mean, there are certainly things that in the development that hindered me or whatever, but actually I can’t think of them. Mostly the things that I had to go through that were difficult, somehow my biology picked them up and turned them into assets.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I mean, you said in an interview recently that, “Fear of being found out was such an obliterating fear that I wasn’t afraid of anything else.”

Barry Diller:

Yeah. That’s true.

Preet Bharara:

Which is a lesson for people, even though this book is not one of lessons, as you’ve already said. Does it ever occur to you, and I think I know the answer to this, having spoken to you only for 15 minutes, that it would’ve been better and easier for you in your life to have been born later, where this fear of discovery may not have been as difficult as it was in the ’50s?

Barry Diller:

Yeah, for certainly in some ways there’s been so much progress about this, about sexuality, acceptance thereof, et cetera. And yet, as I said, and I do think, I’ve said to my friends and family, particularly as I watch my son with his children and how there is such a difference, because my family is so demonstrative and so incredibly engaged with each other on a daily, if not almost hourly basis, that if I were his son, I’d probably end up being a shoe clerk at Macy’s. I’d be so healthy.

Preet Bharara:

Do you tell him that?

Barry Diller:

Of course I do.

Preet Bharara:

How are we supposed to train our children today to both be successful and also not to have too much pain, Barry?

Barry Diller:

Yeah, I don’t really have the answer to that. I mean, because the children and grandchildren mostly, although I’ve, yeah, I’ve been in there and I’ve certainly affected their environment up and down, but it’s their mother, my wife, whose manner with her children is just so unique. And they are, the children, now the grandchildren are all ages, but two of them are in their early 20s, so we can judge the responsible adults, but the children in their early 50s, they’re just so, not only well with each other, but truly responsible citizens. Now, this whole thing of does it kill ambition or not kill ambition? I don’t think it’s in growing up wealthy or not so much as it is in whether the environment is secure. I don’t think wealth does it, I do think environment does it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I mean there’s this paradox of wanting your children to succeed, but also not have to bear undue hardships. In other words, going back to the story we began the interview with, you would want your grandchild to be rescued at camp by your son and by your daughter-in-law, would you not?

Barry Diller:

I would, of course I would. I wouldn’t want that for anyone. Whatever the good results you might pull out of that thorn. Yeah, for sure. But again, it’s all so, to the situation, to the child, to so many other things clanging around in the environment. And again, I think so much for me, it has to do with biology.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, that’s fair. So somebody who does not know much about your life and has not read your book and is hearing us talk about your sexuality, and then you mentioned your wife, Diane von Furstenberg, talk about your marriage and how that makes sense to somebody in the way you did in the book.

Barry Diller:

Well, that makes sense.

Preet Bharara:

That would be an indelicate question, other than the fact that you’ve written this book and you’ve talked about it at some length.

Barry Diller:

No, no. I did not expect that I would… I don’t know, I never really thought about being in a relationship with a man or a woman basically until I was… I don’t know if I ever thought about it actually and made that demarcation line. But when Diane and I met, actually the second time we met, it was, as the French say, a coup de feu, meaning it was immediate, explosive, natural, and thoughtless. And I didn’t question it. I kind of smiled at it, but I didn’t question, I didn’t say… But of course it surprised lots of people and it continues to surprise people and they don’t really understand it. And I do certainly talk about how certainly it is the relationship in my life, but while in certain respects it has some uniqueness about it, in many other respects, it’s as garden common variety as a flower.

Preet Bharara:

Well, there are lots of different kinds of flowers. There’s lots of different kinds of lives. You write in a way that I think is helpful to people. Again, once again, maybe by accident, you’re teaching people lessons in this book about simultaneously having lots of securities and great confidence. Is that the right winning mixture for successful people, or have you met people who are just undyingly confident and who succeed?

Barry Diller:

Oh, yes.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. I don’t those people.

Barry Diller:

Many, many, many.

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know-

Barry Diller:

No?

Preet Bharara:

But are they really-

Barry Diller:

Certainly.

Preet Bharara:

And will we find out that they had insecurities too when they write their books?

Barry Diller:

Well, I think you find out people have some insecurities somewhere, supposedly so. But I have met, and I’ve always been of course astounded at them, so I maybe have not put them under that deep a microscope, but I have studied them in a way. And yes, there are people who have natural confidence and it is… And when it is, I mean, overconfidence or over aggressiveness or whatever is irritating, but natural, easy confidence that is not designed to impress anyone, that just is that, of course, I’ve seen it so many times, it’s not really that rare, but yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Would you rather be that person?

Barry Diller:

No. No. For all of it, I have no desire to be anybody else. I’ve lived too long.

Preet Bharara:

But you, once upon a time, did you have a desire to be someone else?

Barry Diller:

No, never. I mean, I never had a desire to be me, but I certainly didn’t –

Preet Bharara:

Well, now I’m confused. You had no desire to be anyone else. You didn’t have a desire to be you, it is what… My favorite philosophical phrase has become, it’s a tautology, it is what it is. As I get older, I think, it is what it is explains a lot of things.

Barry Diller:

Yes, I think that is definitely true. Look, when I see, see that pure nice confidence, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m envious of it, or jealous of it. I’m just wildly impressed by it.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Barry Diller after this. So you say you have these insecurities. Would the people who have worked for you over the years say that they have sensed that or not?

Barry Diller:

Probably not.

Preet Bharara:

Probably not.

Barry Diller:

Probably not.

Preet Bharara:

I go back to my theory that maybe some of these other people that are impressive to us compartmentalize. And that’s the thing I wanted to talk to you about because you talk a lot about compartmentalizing, which is a fascinating psychological subject. Is that a coping mechanism or is that a recipe for success, or it just is what it is?

Barry Diller:

I think it’s probably both things. And definitely, again, of course it is what it is. But I had no choice, if I hadn’t compartmentalized, I do think it’s an absolute savior, and I think your inability to do so is really bad luck, or whatever. Because I needed to do that, because I could never keep my life together if I wasn’t able to put things in different boxes and seal them off from one another, I certainly couldn’t squeeze out any kind of decent life if I had not been able to do that. I overdid it as I think happens, and it has sometimes very bad consequences because at some point the inability to compartmentalize in certain things falls apart, they clang against each other and produce some difficult things that you have to go through. But the ability to do so, particularly when you’re very young and you don’t have the tools and you don’t have so much other things. I mean, I don’t think I compartmentalize much now, but yeah, it was survival for me.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting because there’s a lot of criticism about young people. I’m in the middle age, so I’m neither young nor particularly old, but you hear these stories of something bad happens in the world and students get excused from taking their exams. Do we need to be teaching children, it’s not the sexiest word in the world, should we be teaching young people to compartmentalize or does that go against natural biology and our understanding of how we’re supposed to be whole humans?

Barry Diller:

I don’t know about teaching. I think that’d be a tough lesson to “teach”. I think when you have conflicts, I think you either develop that naturally. I don’t know that… Now listen, it’s possibly true. I did not go into psychoanalysis, psych work until I was 19 and had a kind of classic nervous breakdown. But if I had gone when I was seven or eight, who knows what would’ve happened. Maybe it would be healthy for children in… I mean, of course it’s probably healthy, although I don’t know enough about this, so I’m just talking babble.

Preet Bharara:

I think you know a lot about this, whether or not you’ve written it down or not. You mentioned in the book, and you just mentioned in the interview that one of the things you were really good at is making people feel good about themselves, pleasing them, seducing them, I think is a word that you used when you were young, people in positions of authority, people who you reported to. So you have been a person in authority for a long time. And when you see people who have that skill that you had, do you think to yourselves, “Oh, there’s a young whippersnapper after my own heart.” Do you think, “Well, that guy’s full of shit because I know that because I was a bullshitter seducer myself,” something in between? And be aware that many, many of your employees may listen to this and we’ll take some lessons from what you now say.

Barry Diller:

What do I think about that? And is that… Am I less or easily or whatever seducible In those circumstances? I’m probably less. I think it’s… In those areas, I’m kind of a tough nut to crack. And-

Preet Bharara:

Is that because you know better, because you know better, because you were-

Barry Diller:

I don’t know if it’s because I know better or maybe I just resent it or whatever. But what impresses me, I’m impressed by people who have spark and energy, whether they’re trying to impress me or not. I mean, I’m only interested in working with people who have at least those two ingredients and those two ingredients along with at least a serviceable brain are enough for me.

Preet Bharara:

What about temperament? Are you suspicious of people or do not have an affinity for people who have an even temperament?

Barry Diller:

Interestingly, I have one person in a senior role in one of our companies that does have it, and it’s boring. And-

Preet Bharara:

Are you going to name him or her on the show?

Barry Diller:

Yeah, there’s no chance. And I’m working on it. But look, I like conflict.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, you say that. You say that.

Barry Diller:

I enjoy, that for me is getting to the truth of things. For me, it’s enjoyable. I like loud argument. I like to see sparks. Actually, that’s what I listen for. And so when I see someone who has none, I just probably have no interest in them. I mean it’s just a-.

Preet Bharara:

You’re just bored.

Barry Diller:

Yeah, [inaudible 00:28:45].

Preet Bharara:

You’re allowed not to be… Look, an important part of life I’ve discovered as I’m roaring on into my middle age is you have the right not to be bored. That would be my bill of rights, the right not to be bored, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Barry Diller:

I’ve always been impressed by my friend, he is my friend, but I shouldn’t be claiming it, but Warren Buffett decided early in his life, well, he who hates conflict and doesn’t want to be around unpleasant people at all, has said very clearly that he’s very astute and uncompromising in deciding who he wants to be with or not.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, life is short.

Barry Diller:

I think that’s pretty good. I don’t think I got that so much.

Preet Bharara:

But on this conflict point, I want to stick with this because I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I have said on this podcast before that as I age, I’m not against conflict. My entire career, by definition as a lawyer and an advocate and as a prosecutor is built on confrontation and on the adversary setup of our legal system and getting up and literally for a living, arguing against other people and I do that now, but it depends on what the thing is. And I quote from Keanu Reeves, noted philosopher, king of our generation, who said something like, “I’ve reached the point in my life where if somebody comes up to me and says two plus two is five, I’m like, that’s wonderful. That’s great. Knock yourself out.” Do you have a reaction to that? Because that’s the kind of conflict I don’t need in my life. I don’t need to argue with people who think two plus two is five. Maybe that’s different, maybe you have enough of a group of intelligent people-

Barry Diller:

No, I do think though, when you’re in discussions… Yes, now and throughout, I guess a lot of the conflict I’ve been clanging happily has been about, it’s been primarily editorial matters and making television and films and projects where editorial is so important and where you listen for a truth that you hear out of somebody’s passion. And the same is true in pure business arguments. Certainly it’s not true in math. Arguing against physics is idiotic, and who would want to spend a second doing it, but arguing over anything else? Yeah, that’s juicy.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. There’s something else that you prize, you write in your book, “Instinct is what I prize, not research or data.” Although you just said you don’t want to argue with physics, is it because the nature of your work, arts and other things are not a science, that instinct?

Barry Diller:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Barry Diller:

Yeah, for sure. Meaning, data cannot tell you the future, certainly in editorial matters or in business matters, it can’t. Rarely can it tell you the future, it’s almost-

Preet Bharara:

It’s not irrelevant. But it’s not irrelevant, is it? Isn’t it part of the mix?

Barry Diller:

I say it’s a small part of the mix, at least in my experience. The truth is the more certainly on business, but forget the decision of whether you want the plot to go left, right, or whatever, or you deem this worthy or unworthy in terms of narrative, in business terms, which is why I’m not thrilled too much with overly trained MBAs, I have found that more and more and more data and information actually gives you more and more reasons not to do something.

And when the things that you’re doing, if they’re utterly predictive, they probably have been done before and then you’re just repeating, and that bores me. But if you’re trying to figure out whether you should buy a company. Let’s do it in terms of just buying or not buying an asset, too much data often kills it. I mean, I’m sometimes in these discussions where I say, “My instinct about this idea, despite you all, is still strong.” And when I have done that, it has been good that I’ve done that. And many of the things that I did people said would fail and I had a strong instinct that they wouldn’t. Now, by the way, some of course did fail, but more didn’t than did. And more data, at least in my experience, would’ve killed them.

Preet Bharara:

Are there particular projects, television, film, something in the entertainment world that you are especially proud of having green lighted?

Barry Diller:

Oh God, yes. Many.

Preet Bharara:

A lot. Probably a lot.

Barry Diller:

Yeah, a lot. A lot, a lot.

Preet Bharara:

Name a few with humility.

Barry Diller:

A few. Well, all right, I could go ones that are seminal, let’s say, was a television series called Roots.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, of course.

Barry Diller:

Which was really the first time a Black experience in history had been… I mean certainly in dramatic terms or in, certainly been written about, but in films, I mean this was 11 nights, two hours a night for 11 days.

Preet Bharara:

In what year? In what year?

Barry Diller:

’75, something like that.

Preet Bharara:

So I was seven or eight years old, and I remember that all anyone talked about, all anyone talked about-

Barry Diller:

For months.

Preet Bharara:

… was Roots. We don’t have that experience anymore.

Barry Diller:

No, because there’s too much things. And it’s one of the sad things of making content, a horrible word, but there it is, making content now is that it comes and goes without much of a flash. And when we, during the, this is the ’70s and ’80s, when you had either a series or a show or a movie that really resonated, it would go on for months and it was in the culture. And now, rarely, rarely. Hamilton, is it a good example of something that got in the culture, but how rare is that now? It just doesn’t happen that often.

Preet Bharara:

It’s very rare. But I wanted to go back to the green lighting of the show, of Roots. Were people arguing against it because it had not been done before? There wouldn’t be an audience for it?

Barry Diller:

Well, no, no.

Preet Bharara:

What was the data showing? Was there a data argument against it?

Barry Diller:

No, there was no… What happened was really quite simple. We had started what came to be known as the mini-series at the time, I called it the novel for television because I thought long stories, why shouldn’t you use… Television time is unlimited, why shouldn’t you tell a long story? Why are you crunching this stuff into two hours? And so we started that and it was extremely successful. We’d done like two or three projects. The last one was Rich Man, Poor Man, which was a huge success.

Anyway, Alex Haley and David Wolper, producer, Alex Haley, a writer, came into my office and he told me the story that he was writing then, he was writing his novel. And I mean, who knows, 20 minutes, an hour, not that long, I said, “I want to do this. Let’s just do this.” And so we committed that day while he was writing the novel to write scripts somewhat, not totally concurrently. And there was never a question. No, there was no data, there was no nothing. It was just the essence of a great idea. And so there was nobody-

Preet Bharara:

And you said yes.

Barry Diller:

And at that time, for a long time, I had the ability, because we had been successful, I could basically do what I wanted. I didn’t have to ask anyone.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a pretty special privilege that you had.

Barry Diller:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that when you would green light a project, were you thinking more about the writing than about what the casting would be like or who the director would be?

Barry Diller:

Yes. Yes, always.

Preet Bharara:

One of my favorite people in the world, and I think this gets referenced in your book, William Goldman who once said-

Barry Diller:

Nobody knows nothing.

Preet Bharara:

… a famous screenwriter, “Nobody knows anything.” So he seems to be a proponent of your view that the data doesn’t tell you a whole hell of a lot.

Barry Diller:

It can’t.

Preet Bharara:

How are we doing in the writing of our art today?

Barry Diller:

Not great, it seems. I’m not a student of, excuse me, of exactly why. I do think that the media is just so different. There’s so many options today, et cetera. But I grew up as I think you must have with reading great books. And I don’t mean great books of Herman Melville or Mark Twain or people long gone or Shakespeare, I mean every year there’d be four or five great books I read. I rarely read… I mean, I read enjoyable books or informative books or stuff, I miss great books. I miss.. Yeah, there’s some decent television. Television has always had qualitatively better than the movie business, and if you take just averages in terms of the work. But yeah, I think, look, I grew up during a time when there was no such thing as franchises or sequels, I don’t really like them. I find them very unsatisfying. And that’s so much money, that all of the money, big money, goes into them as against original stuff is disheartening.

Preet Bharara:

If you were the head of a movie studio, what would you be making?

Barry Diller:

Oh, I don’t, it’s like… What I would do is-

Preet Bharara:

Give some advice, some advice.

Barry Diller:

No, no, no, there’s no advice there to give anyone. What I would do… I mean, what we did is you referenced this about the written material, we developed lots of projects. We had 80 to a hundred projects in various stages of written development, script development, pipeline development, etc. And our ratio was pretty high, meaning from that, how many films would we get out of that floating development list. I think that’s just a good process. I don’t think it’s utilized much now. Mostly these are, not mostly, but a lot of these are packages rather than developed material that you work on until you think it’s ready and then you go find a director or actors to do it and crews to actually shoot the thing. I like that process better, but maybe produce the same stuff, I don’t know.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve used the phrase, the end of Hollywood, and you’ve talked about streamers and you’ve used the term, and I’m going to hang it around your neck, Barry.

Barry Diller:

Oh no, it’s fine. I’m not against it. I’m just-

Preet Bharara:

Tech overlords, the tech overlords, who are they and should they be overthrown?

Barry Diller:

Oh, I wasn’t… Yeah, sure, overthrown. I’m not leading an insurrection. And the reason I kind of ugh at it is that, as a lot of people say, “Well, how dare you… Hollywood made you,” whatever. What I’m saying is the hegemony that these major studios, these five basically, once six, but these five major companies had for 75 years, where they really did control almost all forms of media. They subsumed whatever technology came along. They bought television networks, bought cable systems, they got into video cassettes, et cetera, and directly. So anything that came along, they subsumed up until Netflix and then Amazon and Apple and those three companies have, I don’t know, a hundred times plus the resources that any of these Hollywood companies had and they have taken over. It’s not that these other companies can’t function, their growth is relatively circumscribed and their hegemony is completely gone. Netflix sets the day and will set the day tomorrow, they have won. No one, I believe, unless they do something catastrophically stupid, no one will displace them.

And yes, of course, I think, of course, I said it probably earlier, not so of course-y, but when all you do is make movies and that’s at your throat every day, the difficulty and then the joy of doing it and the difficulty of doing it, and that’s what you do, I think you tend to do better than when it is the 47th, 56th line item in your income statement. And more importantly, where Amazon, not that they don’t, of course they want to do good work, but Amazon is in the business of getting you to subscribe to Prime and if you do that, they give you some content. But their business model is not whether the individual movie or television show you see is any good or not, it’s whether you buy more Amazon products. No business model in the entertainment is going to compete with that. So I just think that the business model is so different and now that these very fragile development systems are controlled by technology, it’s a huge change. There’s a huge difference than what they used to be.

Preet Bharara:

And evolving still. You’re invocation of Amazon. I’m going to use as a terrible segue to talk about another business success that you had, which was believing in the idea that people would want to buy stuff on television, which is both quaint and novel as we think back on it. My parents were hooked on it. I think my dad began his, for whatever it’s worth, he was a practicing pediatrician and bought a few stocks, from time to time, he bought Home Shopping Network, that may have put us through college.

Barry Diller:

Yeah, it was incredibly success-

Preet Bharara:

Incredibly successful.

Barry Diller:

At one point it was the most successful company on the stock exchange.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So why is that and how did you see that? A lot of data probably, right?

Barry Diller:

Ha, ha, ha. No, actually, what happened was serendipity. My wife said, “You’ve got to go,” this is in ’92. “You’ve got to go to Westchester, Pennsylvania and seek this QVC home shopping channel,” because she was thinking of selling clothes on it. And so I was in my interregnum after having left Fox and not knowing what I wanted to do. So I went and I saw convergence, this is primitive, this is ’92 before, three years before the internet. I saw this primitive convergence of televisions and telephones and computers working together, and me who’d only understood how screens were used to tell stories, I thought, “Wow, this primitive interactivity, this is an epiphany for me.” And then I was lucky enough to get to buy it a month later, two months later actually, and plow myself into it and get some fluency so that by the time the internet was used by normal people, I was ready to, as they say, go.

Preet Bharara:

So I’m going to ask you to connect two dots so we can come up with the unified field theory of Barry Diller. What is the connectivity, if anything, between, and maybe this is insulting to both institutions, of buying QVC and green lighting Roots? The same man did both of those things.

Barry Diller:

Curiosity. The only thing I can tell you is curiosity. I have, again, I didn’t do anything to get it, but I got it and I am curious about many different things. And that I do use primitive instinct to guide me. So if my curiosity excites me about something, I rarely can turn away from it.

Preet Bharara:

Any other examples of that?

Barry Diller:

Starting Fox broadcasting when everybody thought that the three networks were enough and I thought there should be an alternative to the three, so it goes on and on.

Preet Bharara:

These qualities that have made you a multi-act success, compartmentalizing instinct, are most of these things innate or can they be developed like a muscle, like curiosity for example?

Barry Diller:

The only thing… No, I think it’s innate, I really believe, and people yell at me for this and who like taking pride in stuff-

Preet Bharara:

Incurious people probably yell at you.

Barry Diller:

No, but they say, “No,” this is the Republican, so to speak, of the ability to… You’re able to create anything and make anything happen and you don’t need any help from anybody or any other stuff is to me, just garbage. I think it’s biology and I don’t think people should take pride in their, in many things people take, I think ridiculous pride in. And so I think that’s probably why I so much believe, yeah, I’m lucky that I have curiosity. I do think the only thing that you can do if you first believe in instincts is you’ve got to, this is something I think you can do, keep yourself naive. Cynicism destroys everything, it certainly destroys instinct. And so if you can wash your… Every day, try and wash your, be naive, wash your instincts clean, be fresh and open. Ah, that’s the best prescription.

Preet Bharara:

I dream of things that never were and ask why not. I’m glad to have you on the show. Barry Diller, the book is Who Knew. It’s not what you think. Pick it up. Pick it up, not that you need my help to hawk your book buy-

Barry Diller:

Well, thank you. Thank you, though.

Preet Bharara:

… but people should read this book. I think it is an arresting book.

Barry Diller:

Thank you, and I’ve enjoyed talking to you, so thank you.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you so much. Thanks, Barry. Take care.

Barry Diller:

All right, bye-bye.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Barry Diller continues from members of the CAFE Insider community to try out the membership head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider. Stay tuned, after the break, I’ll answer your questions about the difference between justice and revenge and also Trump’s attempts to shut down the Department of Education.

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in an email from John. He writes, “I recently listened to James Kimmel, author of The Science of Revenge, discuss the idea of revenge as a form of psychological addiction. It made me reflect on how often people confuse revenge with justice. Preet often speaks about justice in a positive principled way, but Kimmel’s perspective highlighted how easily the concept of justice can be distorted to justify acts of personal a vengeance. I’d be interested to hear Preet explore this distinction more deeply. How can we as a society more clearly differentiate between the legitimate pursuit of justice and the emotional drive for revenge?”

John, that’s a very thoughtful and profound and deep question and one that I’ve sort of thought about on and off over the years, not only as a lawyer, but also as a consumer of popular culture, of movies, film, TV, et cetera. So you’re absolutely right that justice and revenge are often confused and used interchangeably, and that’s true not just in popular culture, but sometimes even in public discourse and policy. But it’s a really important distinction, as you get at, and one that really gets to the heart of what it means to live in a society governed by the rule of law rather than emotion and feeling.

So let me begin this way, revenge is personal, it’s emotional, it’s reactive. Justice on the other hand is principled, impartial, and deliberate. Revenge may feel good, but justice is supposed to make things right. Where does revenge come from? It kind of emerges from a sense of injury, moral injury. You wronged me, so I must retaliate. Often, by the way, disproportionately, as the author of the book you mentioned suggests, it can feel gratifying in the short term, but it can be deeply corrosive in the long term. Among other things, it escalates cycles of violence, it narrows perspective. It is a cause also of blood feuds and honor killings.

So in the case of individuals, justice in the rule of law, those principles don’t allow people to take the law into their own hands. We are not a system of vigilantes in this country, nor in most countries. Revenge, by the way, can also get things wrong. Vengeance can be blinding, and revenge can be disproportionate. Justice on the other hand, is not about satisfying some personal need, it’s about applying principles that protect everybody, including people we dislike, and of course, people who have wronged us.

One of the great challenges for a prosecutor or for any person in a position of authority is to avoid feeling personal rage and importing that rage into decisions about punishment. It’s true of judges also, of course. That’s why we have procedures, checks, rules of evidence. That’s also why we don’t let victims decide the sentence. They’re allowed to speak and give statements, but it’s the judge, not the victims who decide. It’s one reason why we say justice is blind. The system isn’t perfect, but those principles exist precisely to restrain the human urge for vengeance.

Not to go off on a tangent, but I was speaking recently somewhere about something or another, and for whatever reason, I gave my ranking of the three most compelling storylines that we have in culture and in literature and in film. And you may disagree with this, and if you do, I want to hear from you. I suggested that the third most compelling storyline is the love story. The second most compelling storyline is the story of redemption. But the first and most compelling storyline in popular culture, film, literature to my mind is the revenge story. Just think of Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2, all the John Wick movies, the much acclaimed, The Revenant, and a million other stories and storylines that must be familiar to all of you. The revenge story is deeply compelling and often emotionally satisfying, but it is not justice.

So I’m sorry I don’t have more time to answer at greater length. This really thought-provoking question you’ve asked. I wonder what you think of my answer, and I wonder what the rest of you think about the difference and distinction between revenge and justice. Are they separate and distinct concepts? Do they overlap with each other? Should one be taken into account when you’re thinking about the other or not? So send your questions and your comments on this point to letters@cafe.com.

This question comes in an email from Bruce, “Recently, President Trump issued an executive order to the Secretary of Education to shut down the Department of Education. Is it legal for Trump to shutter the Department of Education without congressional approval?” Well, Bruce, that’s a great question and one that a lot of people have been asking. As you probably know, the Department of Education was created by Congress, and so only Congress has the actual authority to dissolve it. Republicans though have been attempting to do just that since its inception. By way of background, the Department of Education was established by the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979, towards the end of the Carter administration. Its primary responsibilities have included managing student loans and grants, funding programs to support students with disabilities and people living in poverty and enforcing civil rights laws that prohibit race and sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools and a lot of other things too.

Conservatives have opposed the department from the start. As far back as 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned on a promise to eliminate that department and restore local control of public schools. His efforts were directed at Congress for the reasons I already stated. But Reagan was not successful because Democrats controlled the House of Representatives and blocked any dismantling of the Department of Education. Fast-forward to Donald Trump who was revived this effort accusing the Department of Education of promoting what he describes as radical anti-American ideologies. So Bruce, as you mentioned, Trump issued an executive order aimed at closing that department. However, it’s notable that the order is carefully worded implicitly recognizing that the Executive Branch cannot fully dismantle the department without congressional authorization. Specifically, the order instructs the Secretary of Education to, “Take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” That’s some qualifier.

The administration meanwhile has laid off nearly half of the department’s workforce. These layoffs, as you may have read, were initially challenged in court, but the Supreme Court in a decision on its shadow docket recently allowed them to proceed. The Trump administration has also frozen nearly $7 billion in federal education funding and announced plans to transfer critical department programs such as the management of student loans to other federal departments. So it seems that Trump is attempting to circumvent the need for Congressional approval by simply significantly reducing the size and scope of the Department of Education rather than shutting it down entirely. And that’s an approach that’s already impacting public schools. One school superintendent was quoted in the New York Times saying that, “People at the DOE don’t answer the phones anymore, and they have just stopped responding to emails.” We, of course, will continue to keep an eye out for new legal developments. Stay tuned. But one thing I can say is, as is proven by this example, you don’t have to literally shutter the department to effectively shutter the department.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Barry Diller. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at @PreetBharara with the #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on Bluesky, or you can call and leave me a message at 833-997-7338. That’s 833-99-PREET. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The Deputy editor is Celine Rohr. The editorial producers are Noa Azulai and Jake Kaplan. The associate producer is Claudia Hernández. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Nat Weiner and Liana Greenway. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. As always, stay tuned.