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…e we go. Alright, alright, alright. I'm using the starter word I always use. Great. Which I'm sure two-thirds of the room uses. Alright. How'd you do? And that sucked. That really sucked. Sorry. Okay. I'm going to go to another word that I told myself I was going to use if you made me do this. Great. Oh, that's a tough draw. And then I'm going to go to a word. Let's see if it's the right number of letters that gets at how I feel about this. Hey. Alright. We'll start giving you some hints. It is a person's last name who is arguably the founder of a company of one of our... Of the company. Of the company. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Okay. It is one of the world's largest... It's nice. Yeah, keep going, keep going. It's the predecessor company of one of the world's largest retailers. Is that the name? I think you just gave it to me. Hold on. Oh. I would never have gotten that. I would never have gotten that without the. We had to work. Okay. Can we just say go me on gripe? Yeah. Nice. That really helped. All right. All right, everyone. Meredith Kopit Levy. Lots of fun. Thank you. So fun. So much fun. You guys are terrific. Thank you so much. Terrific. That was fun. Great to see Meredith tonight. It was. It was also really great of the New York Times company to make a whirl for us. Great to get some Acquired trivia in there. Speaking of Acquired trivia, before we bring out our next guest, we want to play a little game of our own here with some audience participation. We have a question for all of you here tonight. See if we can stump folks in the audience. What is the most listened-to episode in Acquired's history? In our 10-year history? Which episode? Feel free to shout out your answer. Oh, great. I'm looking for someone I know. Is that Christina Cacioppo? Hi, Ben. Hi, David. Hey, Christina. Great to see you. For anyone who doesn't know, Christina is the co-founder of Vanta and, I think, a nine-year listener of Acquired. Yeah. Oh, gee, thank you. All right, Christina, see if I can earn my stripes. Is it the Hermes episode? Ooh, that is a very good guess. Definitely up there, but it is not currently in the number one spot. Do we have other folks who might want to guess? Let's see. There's a hand. Is that Ben Clymer? Hey, guys. Hey, Ben. Good to see you. You too, guys. Happy to be here. All right, Ben, for anybody who doesn't know, is indispensable on the Rolex episode. He's the founder of Hodinkee. He's a world expert on watches. Good to see you, Ben. Thank you, guys. Thank you. It's got to be Rolex, right? It's very close. Very close. Neck and neck. Ben? I don't think so. I think it's the episode that I was in. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I think it's Starbucks. So far. Wait, wait, wait. Who is that? Is that Jamie saying "so far"? Jamie, we'll be reporting numbers to you tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not competitive or anything. All right. Well, Howard. So far. Wait, wait, wait. Who is that? Is that Jamie saying "so far"? Jamie, we'll be reporting numbers to you tomorrow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're not competitive or anything. All right. Well, Howard. the Starbucks episode where Howard was a guest, with 1.3 million downloads. Give it up for Howard Schultz, everyone! We'll ask the same question next year and, we'll see. All right, our final guest for the evening is a CEO who, despite us having not yet covered his current company on Acquired, I think, over the course of his over 60-year career, has led more companies in and around the Acquired universe than just about any other human being in history. We've got Fox, Fox, ABC, Paramount, Expedia, Tinder, and Match.com. Yep. QVC and the Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster, Ticketmaster. I mean, this list goes on and on! He's also one of New York's most legendary citizens who, along with his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, has given so much to this city, including the High Line and most recently, the Little Island. Please welcome the Chairman of IAC, the one and only Barry Diller! Thank you, Barry. Great to see you. Why did she get a pillow and I don't? She asked for one. She asked for one. Do you want one? It'll be on my rider next time. I think your rider was water. Yeah, that's it. You drove yourself here tonight, is that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I did. Wow. I drive everywhere in New York. How did you find parking? I just find some empty space. No, no, it's not really. It usually has a fire hydrant or other barriers, and I scoop myself in. I guess, if you give an island to New York, then do you get to... Do you get a special parking station? No, no, no. I get tickets. I get those tickets. Oh, well, very good. Someday I'll pay for them. I think you have had one of the most incredible careers in American history. I mean, you have touched the lives of every single person in this room. You recently wrote your memoir, Who Knew, which is excellent. The first chapter of your career was in Hollywood. When you started in 1961 in the mailroom at William Morris, this was still like old Hollywood, the studio system. What was it like back then? Feels like 1861, but when I think of it now, I mean, we did have typewriters, and there was some tech involved. But it was a time when there were a lot of bigger-than-life personalities. The kind of old moguls that founded Hollywood were still kind of on their last feebleish legs, but I still got to know a few of them. And so, Wasserman, Sid Sheinberg? Well, yeah, even old Darryl Zanuck, who founded 20th Century Fox. I met him a few blocks down the road when he was in his dotage. He had this huge, 20-foot cigar. And I sat in a Fox theater projection, which had 500 seats. I was at ABC, a young executive, and I was buying movies to show on television. Zanuck had all of these girlfriends that he could only keep as girlfriends so long as he put them in these rotten, horrible Fox movies. The only way he could put them in these Fox movies was if I would buy them. So, oh, great. There I sat with Darryl Zanuck and his smoking cigar, with me watching a scene from the most awful movie you could ever imagine. ld put them in these Fox movies was if I would buy them. So, oh, great. There I sat with Darryl Zanuck and his smoking cigar, with me watching a scene from the most awful movie you could ever imagine. So, yeah, I got those guys. Wow. As I was reading your book and thinking about your career, you're one of these rare people that started in media and was successful in media and then jumped and became even more successful in technology. I mean, that's a very rare chasm. It's an odd passage. Yeah. And when we say you started in media, you started in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency, which is not a thing in tech at all. Tech doesn't have mailrooms. There ain't no mailrooms left anywhere at this time. Well, probably not. But the great thing it had was a file room. There weren't actually digital files; it was a big room with physical files—yeah, physical, big, you know, I don't know, file cabinets, like 50 of them. And I basically read from A to Z. I read the entire file room, starting when I was 19 until I was 22. So, because William Morris was the oldest and biggest talent agency, having been in business 70 years, I had the entire history of the entertainment business that I got to read. How could you do better than that? This is like you had the email archives of all the executives, right? Hollywood, but not email. It wasn't emails. There were no emails. There was no such thing as emails. There was no 'e.' There was mail. And so it jumped out at me as I was reading the book, because it felt like the thing that David and I have stumbled on with Acquired is: immerse yourself in a massive amount of primary research. The human brain is good at finding patterns in that. And it seems like you learned the entertainment business the same way. You just let all these messages and files wash over you until it kind of clicked: "I understand the way this industry works." Is that right? Well, yeah, I got to read literally the history of Elvis Presley from the moment he recorded his first song through his entire career, and every other person in the entire spectrum of entertainment. So you can't get a better foundation. It depends, of course, what you use it for. There's no school you could go to that would ever teach you that. Yeah. So your next chapter after William Morris Agency is ABC. Yes. And you're working. This era, the '60s and '70s, ABC was this crazy talent magnet for a lot of people. Think of Rune Arledge, Bob Iger. What made ABC this? ABC was the number three... There were three networks. They had 100% of the viewing, about 100 million people, never divided equally by three. ABC was the youngest, actually, at that time, probably by 20 years or so, and it was the least established. So it was run like a candy store. If you wanted responsibility, you could just take it, and you could do new things or things that were deemed very risky, because you had to take chances to get yourself landed. So it was also, again, serendipitously, the greatest luck you could have: to be a 23-year-old vice president. At 23, I was a vice president. No, that's really unfair. That even makes it worse. I was at 25 and a half. Okay, okay, okay.…

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