Barry Diller: Building IAC

Success teaches you nothing, but failure sure teaches you a lot. You've worked with some of the biggest egos in Hollywood and some of the most ruthless tycoons. I'm wondering if you can spend a few minutes on the lessons you've learned about ego and power. Barry Diller is a legendary media mogul, businessman, and investor. He is the chairman and senior executive of IAC and is best known for co founding the Fox Broadcasting Company with Rupert Murdoch and leading Paramount Pictures. Over his career, he has reshaped television, film, and online media. He remains one of the most influential figures in business and entertainment today. We're certainly at the brink of the next revolution. If you were sitting in 1995 or 2000, at the beginning of the things you did not know, and there were plenty of those, there was nothing that cracked your mind and astounded you and said, oh my god. This is beyond me. This is magic. Google, over the years, was consistently, as a monopoly grew, was squeezing the people who kind of lived on as a surf on its, land. But when I found an asset that couldn't be disintermediated by search, I thought, wow. That wasn't AI. That was just the characteristics of the Internet environment. The only thing that will save us is our brands and whether our brands and the content we make resonates enough directly for people to recognize a brand and want to be brand involved rather than agnostic. I've I believe until the last breath that At 83, you chose to reveal some of the most private parts of your life, and you're a super private person. Why now? I can't do the why now. It wasn't like I chose this date or that date. It's that I had thought, that my life was a good story, and if I could tell it true, then I wanted to try and do it. So it took me an endless amount of time, basically, because I put it away for a year to come back to it and put it away for six months and then come back to it. It was only really in the last couple of years that I was, I wouldn't call it dedicated, but that I had more discipline. I never was sure I would publish it. And then I got to a point where I said, well, you know, I've done it. I've kind of told it. I got it down, so let it go. My friends told me, publish it after you're gone, after you die. And I thought, well, I ain't gonna have anything to do with that, so I'd rather have agency of my own. How does it feel to release it out loud into the world? It feels exposing. Now it's now been, like, I think, three weeks or so, so I've gotten a bit used to it. But in the first days, I thought, oh my god. What …