A Talent for Talent: Ari Emanuel in Conversation with Jeff Weiner

Ladies and gentleman, please welcome the CEO of the Churchill Club, Karen Tucker. KAREN TUCKER: Hello there and welcome to our program. My name is Karen Tucker, and I am CEO and a board member at the Churchill Club, and tonight's program is called "A Talent for Talent," and those of us in the room tonight are in for a treat. We have with us Ari Emanuel of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment, Jeff Weiner of Linked In, a conversation with Kara Swisher of AllThingsD. Before we invite our distinguished speakers and moderators to the stage, I want to acknowledge our program sponsors. They are Hill and Nolton and Wharton University of Pennsylvania and San Francisco. We greatly appreciate their support. So, please join me in thanking our two generous sponsors. And I also want to specially thank Janice Duo for her amazing help for bringing this program into being. A couple of brief announcements if I may: Wednesday, July 27, we present a breakfast program called "Information Overload 2.0" with Jonathan Spiro of BASICS, and Derek Dean of the Exeter Group, and a conversation with Dave Meale. And then on August 3rd, we present "Inside Google's Search Office, an evening with three of the key people there, and they are going to be in conversation with Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land. A couple of dates to save if you can: the evening of September 15, we present the first annual Churchill Club Awards to acknowledge exemplary achievements in the areas of innovation, social benefit, collaboration, and mentorship. Four essential ingredients in our innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley, or any innovation ecosystem around the globe. And September 16, it's a day-long conference called "Igniting Innovation and Mastering Change." Both of these two outstanding events are presented on the occasion of our 25th-anniversary celebration year. You'll find Twitter codes in your printed programs, and if you're tweeting, please do use # Churchill Club. And my final announcement: tonight's program is being live-streamed on Fora.tv, and will be available on demand after tonight. So please pass that information along to your followers, so they can access tonight's program as well. It is now my pleasure to bring up Mr. Steve Bengsten, Chairman of the Board of the Churchill Club and managing director of Emerging Company Services at PWC. STEVE BENGSTEN: Thanks Karen. I'm thrilled to introduce our speakers tonight. Ari Emanuel is the co-CEO and director of William Morris Endeavor Entertainment Agency one of the world's top global talent agencies who represent such diverse clients as Michael Moore, Martin Scorcese, World Wrestling Entertainment, Michael Douglass, Charlise Theron, and Mark Wahlberg. Ari is also cofounder of the Reign Group, a boutique bank whose private equity fund investors include Facebook founding president Sean Parker and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Ari's been ranked number four on the Entertainment Weekly "Smartest People in Hollywood" list and also serves as the basis for the character Ari Gold on HBO's hot hit series "Entourage." Jeff Weiner is the CEO of Linked In, a company you may have heard of lately. The web's largest network of professionals has become a top resource for companies to connect with a talent pool in virtually every industry around the world. Under Jeff's watch, Linked In's membership has increased from 33,000,000 to over 100,000,000 members. How many of you people here are a member of Linked In? A high percentage of the population. ????? hiring solutions are used by 73 of the fortune companies ????. And its site is currently adding more than one member a second. A thousand one, a thousand two . . . two new members tonight. Jeff is a graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, who by sheer coincidence is one of our sponsors tonight. Our moderator, Kara Swisher, writes a popular Boom Town blog All Things Digital website, allthingsd.com, which she runs with Walt Mossberg. Together they produce the unique and influential technology conference "All Things Digital." Kara is also the author of two books about AOL. Please welcome Ari Emanuel, Jeff Weiner, and Kara Swisher. KARA SWISHER: You're in the middle. No, you're in the middle. No, no, no. Hey. Who's in charge here? I know you can boss around those celebrities in Hollywood, but here it's . . . . ARI EMANUEL: I wish. I wish. KARA SWISHER: Yeah. You know I just tweeted that I was really glad to be up here with Crockett and Stubbs. Tubbs. Tubbs, that's a better name for you. So we're going to talk tonight about a lot of things. These guys are incredibly entertaining and a lot of fun. We're going to talk about various things that are going on. But I just want to start . . . . I really hope that you get back together with Mrs. Ari on this season. I'm really upset. ARI EMANUEL: Well, I'm really sad, actually that it's the last season. KARA SWISHER: I know. ARI EMANUEL: Um. Actually, tomorrow after this, I'm flying into .... and hopefully after this season we can get the movie done, which .... KARA SWISHER: Are you representing everybody in this? ARI EMANUEL: Uh, I represent Doug Allen; I represent Mark Wahlberg; I represent Steve Levenson (?); I represent some of the other actors. You know, that's just enough, right? KARA SWISHER: Yeah. Exactly. So you not only star in the thing, you also....The thing is about talent as a brand. Let's start talking about that idea. It's unusual to put you two together, so I want to understand. What was . . . Jeff, you organized this. Why bring together you and Ari? Its kind of Linked In and Hollywood. ARI EMANUEL: Yeah, why Jeff? JEFF WEINER: So, It's actually pretty straightforward. So, I guess the Churchill Club reached out to Shannon, who did an amazing job of helping organize this thing. We were talking a little bit about ideas, and I said "what are some examples of previous events?" and she said Eric Schmidt interviewed James Cameron, and Reed Hastings was up here with Michael Eisner, and so it sounded like a good combination of Silicon Valley and Hollywood that made for an interesting event. And we're to a some extent very largely focused on talent, connecting opportunity with scale. And Ari is about as good as they get when it comes to the world of talent. And also remember that last year at Web 2.0 that John Betel had hosted Ari for dinner, and when I did the event the next day, he actually referred back to it as I was describing a little bit of what Linked In does. So that was how we got Ari, and we thinking about a moderator, and, of course, you're the best. KARA SWISHER: Right, right, right. And you know I had to stop my phone hacking just for tonight. We're a News Corp Company. I'm so proud this week. JEFF WEINER (?): Are you proud? KARA SWISHER: Not in the least, but I have to say I've gotten from every internet mogul now I've gotten emails, starting with Jerry Yang, your old boss. Now I know how you get all your scoops. I know. I was like "thank you, nice shot". JEFF WEINER: So what do you think is going to happen tomorrow? KARA SWISHER: Uh, I don't know. That's a good question. Rupert and James Murdoch are going to testify. It could be a disaster. It could be a giant British twit fest. Who knows what's going to happen there. Um, I don't know. But not pretty. Not pretty I think. JEFF WEINER: That's part of the cost of that . . . is that people who had nothing to do with it actually took a huge hit. KARA SWISHER: Yep. Talking about brand. JEFF WEINER: Innocent journalists, innocent people getting their phones hacked. KARA SWISHER: I'm not really innocent, but, yes, in this case it's true. But lets talk about talent as a brand. Let's talk about ?. But anyway I do not phone hack, and I don't know how to, but I'd love to know how they did it. Let's talk about the idea of what brand is now today. So why don't you start Ari. Brand was something that you knew, that you guys knew well in Hollywood and how to build it. How do you look at a brand today, and what does it mean in Hollywood? ARI EMANUEL: Let me go back a little bit. So, one of the reasons I started Endeavor was that in 1991 when I was at ICM, I brought, and I've said this on occasion, I brought George Guilder out to speak at ICM. And at the time, I think it was in 1990 maybe late 1980s. He wrote a book "Life after Television." In that he started talking about 10,000 channels and infinite distribution and that you know there'd be more need for content, and the people who create content, and that they would be the asset, not distribution. And that got me thinking, after reading that, and he came to speak, and I said to myself "I think that's right." There were big rumors about two new networks starting in Hollywood. I was at the time, I'd been an agent actually before we started Endeavor for four years, and I had a pretty good television business. And, um, I said "you know something, let's just go for it, see what happens. I believe if we can build a brand and our clients? the brands, they're going to be more valuable over time." We started the agency, the WB started, and UPN started at the time. And in 1995, pricing for writers, which is the core of the television business, and we started with a television agency with a little bit of motion picture, um. Fox put up 120 million dollars for overall deals for writers to kind of like the old Hollywood system collect a bunch of writers to create for television because now there were six places . . . there really was no cable at the time. And Disney put up the same amount of money. So within two months of us opening up the agency, we had covered our nut. Then as we progressed, cable exploded; it just kept on going, and we now see where distribution is in the entertainment business. One of the reasons we did the merger was we thought we needed more areas of people creating content, and that there was going to be more need for content in multiple distribution areas. And, actually, ???? who we met, we were talking about an author who we were representing who wrote on business, possibly creating content for Linked In. And to think that that would be a conversation in Southern California, a conversation that we would be having, as content for them was kind of bizarre. KARA SWISHER: So the idea is that the talent is important, not the distribution. ARI EMANUEL: He has distribution. He has an audience. I have a client writing about business philosophy and business techniques, and that was a good thing for him. And to kind of put those things together was actually after that first time I met you through Lloyd. He started talking about the business, and we started talking about this concept of maybe we could create some content for his audience. Cut to we do the merger, so we have authors now, we have music, we have books, we have theater, we have a bunch of other things, and we have four pieces to our business. We have the investment group; we're building a marketing group which also we've introduced to Linked In. We're not doing something. And then we have what I would define as a digital strategy, and that's the kind of four legs of our stool. The guys that invest in media; we have offices here in Silicon Valley, so we get insight in kind of what traditional media is doing, what kind of people in Silicon Valley are doing. We have offices in Beijing and that area, so we get a bunch of insight for the agency there. The agency is, you know it does the normal you know TV shows, movies, we're pretty good at that stuff, and music and books. And that's really the engine that enables everything else, and then we licensed our ... in the social area, we licensed our, we created a business opportunity with a gentleman named Oliver Luckett who left Disney and created this company called Digisend. He created this company called the Audience. We gave him a license that we're working with him, and we thought about from the day we merged that our clients touch about we thought about 200,000,000 people on the social graph. Well it turns out probably we touch probably about a billion two. KARA SWISHER: And about half that is Kim Kardashian. ARI EMANUEL: Right. Right. KARA SWISHER: Don't laugh. That girl is smart as .... ARI EMANUEL: And we now have just finished the first, Oliver has just finished the first Beta test with 50 clients. We're at about 200,000,000 people on Facebook, and we're going to be building KARA SWISHER: Start to be doing. So it's a critical part of building steps in Hollywood. ARI EMANUEL: If we can figure out what the formula is, we're going to be hopefully building channels with Google, and then we have the building of a marketing business that folds into that and other initiatives we have. So that's our business. KARA SWISHER: So, Jeff. When you think about this idea of ..... you started off in Hollywood, correct? You had a career. You would work with Terry Semel and some others in the entertainment business a little bit. How do you look at this shift in Hollywood? Because initially Hollywood was very reticent to be involved. Do you think of yourself as a content distributor? talent finder? JEFF WEINER: That's certainly part of it. I think it's multifaceted for Linked In. We think of ourselves first and foremost as a platform. We're trying to create as much value as we can for the membership. And so going back to the original point, the original question, on talent as a brand. You know the cornerstone of our offering is the profile. The profile enables any professional anywhere in the world to essentially create their own brand by completing the profile and being able to express their experiences, their skills. I think most importantly, peoples' ambitions. And once that profile is complete, as long as it's relevant and up-to-date, it's going to get search-engine optimized, which means that when people do a search, for you or people like you with your skill sets, on say Google or Bing or Yahoo, your profile is going to show up near the top of the results. And in an age where search has that kind of value, that's an incredibly powerful dynamic, and there is a very virtuous cycle that takes root there because the more opportunities that accrue to you because of that, the more people begin to engage with Linked In. And the reason they're completing their profiles, unlike a resume, which you update only when you're looking for work, is because they know opportunity will come their way. They know they're in a better position to stay in touch with former colleagues, current colleagues, business contacts, and the value it accrues to them as a result. The sharing of information, the sharing of knowledge, of ideas, best-demonstrated practices, business intelligence, competitive intelligence. And so in a sense, that's all content. And so the content that is rooted within this platform will ultimately create value for people who are willing to share their identity and build out their networks. And in a sense build their professional brand. KARA SWISHER: So when you say it's content, what kind of content would you call it? It's information about someone. Remember that old . . . . ARI EMANUEL: Yeah, but you're defining content the way . . . . KARA SWISHER: I'm wondering ARI EMANUEL: You're defining content as I think. I definitely don't want to put words in your mouth. But you're defining content as a TV, a book, what we would consider traditional content. Right, and I always, I believe that that is content. But what he is defining also is content. It's just for its platform content, right? As for my son, Noah, which I say to people, things he pulls up and shows me that he thinks is funny is a form of content for his generation on YouTube. That's content, right? For them. KARA SWISHER: Right. I do want to talk about the changing idea because (?) is rooted in a very organized set of content. ARI EMANUEL: Sometimes. KARA SWISHER: Or it's content of people that's been well known. What I want to get to with Jeff is like what is that content to you? JEFF WEINER: It's all content. I think a profile is content. I think a status update is content. Certainly when you share a news headline that you think is interesting, that is content, not just the link itself, but obviously the news article. The discussions taking place notice how I didn't bite there the discussions taking place within groups is content. Clearly. It's all content. Anything taking can help create value, anything that is a mechanism through which people can better learn, can better communicate. All of that stuff becomes content. In Ari's world, historically, it was the way in which people used discretionary time to become entertained. In your world it's the way people are informed. In our world, it's the way people become more productive and more successful. I think at the end of the day it comes back to context. It's always about context. KARA SWISHER: Context. Within your situations. So when you have an author coming to Linked In. Like he brings an author to you, which is a very traditional .... ARI EMANUEL: Every idea I've brought in, he's rejected. JEFF WEINER: Tell him to keep on trying. KARA SWISHER: Okay. JEFF WEINER: For the record, not true. I think he's got amazing ideas. KARA SWISHER: Is that true. Because a lot of people talk about Facebook and you all becoming content distributors. Like you becoming a very powerful way for people to find out about traditional content and all kinds of content. Do you see that as your role or just JEFF WEINER: We're a platform. We enable value to accrue to our membership in any way that enables our membership to become more productive and successful. If you are trying to . . . ARI EMANUEL: I assume also that you want to become more sticky. That they spend more time. JEFF WEINER: Yeah, but at the end of the day, we're not about passing time; we're about enabling people to save time. So it's not necessarily a mechanism, it's not an ultimate objective for us is to get people spending as much time as possible. I think engagement, more engagement is better than less because it's a proxy for value creation. The fact that we're delivering a relevant experience for the end user. KARA SWISHER: Right, but you don't see yourself as using like let's say all the Tony Robbins' lectures, all the JEFF WEINER: It might not be Tony Robbins, but when Ari first came out, we were talking about the importance of leadership. And that's what he was referring to earlier. And I thought it was a fantastic fit and a fantastic idea. It wasn't about the content; it was about the business model. That's the whole difference. Which is the way in which these platforms are fundamentally transforming the way value is extracted explicitly not implicitly for the member but how the intellectual property owner of a leadership series would extract value from our platform. And that's where things got interesting. It wasn't about whether or not there was a great fit for our platform in his content. That's an absolute no brainer. As a matter of fact, stick the two of us in a room with a white board: we'll fill it with ideas in which we can create value for our membership and value for his clients. The question is what's the business model surrounding this stuff. Do you want it to be closed, highly proprietary, and in theory highly economic to the intellectual property owner. Or, do you want it to be massively open and viral, where the economic value might not be as explicit, but you can build an enormous brands, you can build enormous audiences that can later be monetized through all these mechanisms? These are some of the discussions ARI EMANUEL: You're always afraid to use free, um....I'm not trying to be Ari Gold here. There was a phrase you used about giving it away for free for a period of time. Freemium, right. And that's a very hard concept for Southern Californians. A lot of freemiums have sprouted very big businesses here, right? I'm... I have ... I do believe that the more distribution, the more people who see it, there is some long pale to it. I just can't figure out if that's going to pay for the kids' college. KARA SWISHER: Right, right. But that's an interesting concept because the idea is that there are a lot of ? services who do well up here for themselves, but not for you. So we've had that discussion before. The idea of who has the power in this relationship. How do you look at that now. Given that change. ARI EMANUEL: Well first of all, I'm glad that it's not a complete . . . and I've been talking about this at a lot of these 2.0s . . . this kind of European three-strike rule, right, and we've now implemented here, not because they really care about the content. I think the people kind of downloading things and stealing things have been clogging up the syst em and costing them money and realize the network's been affected by it. So, therefore it's in their best interest to start restricting this. And I've had this fight with Barry Diller on one panel at the Milken Conference where he said, "How can you find out?" Well, if you can find out when people are doing pornography or other things, you can find out when somebody's stealing a piece of content. Um, there's got to be a way that we can coexist, where we believe that people up here can make money on their platforms, or sell hardware, but also we make a living, right? Now, is Jeff Buckis right about his model, right, which he's trying to implement? I'm not sure, but there's too many smart people in the room for us not to figure out . . . cause eventually um with all this distribution, they become less important without great content. But if we can't pay for the content, then you're not going to have anything to put up on your system. KARA SWISHER: But Jeff's talking about a different kind of content that isn't created. It's interesting. ARI EMANUEL: But when he's talking about putting our author on his system. KARA SWISHER: Right. ARI EMANUEL: And giving it away for free, there's no way.... we couldn't figure out the monetization that kind of satisfied the author, right. Not that the whole concept wasn't the right concept, cause it actually was. It was a whole leadership thing leading into conferences and etcetera, but I was talking more on other form, not his specific form of content. JEFF WEINER: Well, what was interesting, Kara, I think you find it interesting and this is what the industry needs to really grapple with and ultimately successfully navigate. In this case, the author philosophically felt that what he had written and what he had created were worth something. And he could not get his arms around freemium. So it was never the intention to offer this for free in perpetuity. It was the intention to take a subcomponent of the overall archive to create a mechanism through which we could make that as viral as possible. KARA SWISHER: Interesting. JEFF WEINER: And then get people to pay for going much deeper with that concept. But even the idea of giving a bit of it away for free devalued in his mind what he does. KARA SWISHER: So, when you're dealing with talent in Hollywood, how do they look at it? Because they do like to get paid down there. It's sort of like, I always think of them, you know, when I talk to Hollywood people, they're always like "Can I get paid up front?" and here it's a little bit different. ARI EMANUEL: I think that's actually changed. I think the economics over the last couple of years in the movie business and in the television business have kind of changed that relationship. i do believe that from where/how things were being monetized or lack of monetization, whatever you want to call it, to now there's a big kind of....people are getting closer to trying to figure out and trying to work with each other and trying to figure it out. But I do believe that there has to be some sort of economic exchange, one of ideas, and two of formulas so everybody gets the benefit of what their platforms and their content create. KARA SWISHER: So what do you think is promising? is it just NetFlix handing you a giant $100,000,000 check to you clients and the studios. Or is it something else? When you have a Hollywood star, a person, whether it's a star or a it's book or something like that, how do you approach those people [INDECIPHERABLE PART] Anyway, so how do you approach when you have a, when you're presented with all of these various ways to do their career, how do you advise them now, besides just getting the movie, getting the show? ARI EMANUEL: Well, it's different. When you're dealing with an actor it's different, when you're dealing with the creator of a television show, it's different. When you're dealing with you know a company like the U or C who we represent or the WWE or Hasbro, they're ....that's why we created a company with four legs. Some clients, like Aaron Sorkin, he's got a show on HBO, all he cares about is writing that show. He's one of the greatest writers. He just wants to stay in the agency and do that. Some clients like Hasbro and all these others want to use all aspects of the agency. So for them, we're doing a fund, a film fund for them. We're doing stuff in digital with them. You know, we're doing books with them. We're working with them on how to handle their cable channel, and then we're dealing with the internet. Same stuff with U of C. So some clients go wide, and some clients just go deep in certain areas. KARA SWISHER: Do you want all your clients to go wider in in the internet and in the digital space, or not? Do you feel like ARI EMANUEL: I think all of them have to because as um I'll give you a ?. Taylor Laughtner (?). He's got this new movie coming out, Lion's Gate, right? KARA SWISHER: This is the Werewolf on Twilight, right? ARI EMANUEL: Not that movie, but another movie. So they're gonna put up a website, and there's gonna be 8,000 people who visit the website, and his social presenceI think there's about 15,000,000 people on Facebook.At the time, he didn't think he was on Facebook. There was 350 sites that were Taylor Laughtner sites. We condensed them; there's approximately 15, 000,000 people, and now, when Lion's Gate wants to get to his fans, they're going to pay Taylor Laughtner to get to his fans not just a website that gets 8,000 people. So it's important as Taylor Laughtner moves through his career to control that conversation with his audience and with his fans, so that he can have a conversation. We're starting. The audience is programming his social presence, and that he can take throughout his career. And there won't be these kinds of peaks and valleys, where he can kind of have a steady thing. And whether it be his relationship with brands or whether its his relationship with movies and television. Whatever ielse he does in media. And that for us is an important tool that we're providing for our clients that's not only a marketing tool but also a conversation to constantly have with his audience, that he can constantly have and get the message out that he wants to. And that's going to hopefully go across all our clients. KARA SWISHER: So he owns his audience rather than the studio ever ARI EMANUEL: Right. And they have no way to do that. The only way to do that is through him. And he does not know how to program it. I think we've found the right people who do know how to program it. So, right now with only 40 of our clients or 50 of our clients, we reach like 240,000,000 people on Facebook. That's a nice little number, worth something I think for the clients. So that's how we're doing it. KARA SWISHER: So how do you decide that's worth something? That he has 15,000,000 people that's one thing, but getting people to go to the movies. I just don't ARI EMANUEL: I think over time we're going to find out now what that worth . . . whether we can affect the movie business or television shows or his relationship with marketing companies. We're going to find out what the value is. I think it's pretty valuable. KARA SWISHER: And what do you do on those social network sites? is it just like chest pictures of him? Cause that's what I'm thinking of: chest pictures. ARI EMANUEL: Really? KARA SWISHER: Yeah. For some reason they're running Twilight on every cable show right now. Like all of them. All I'm saying is chest. ARI EMANUEL: Over the next three months, there's a program of how he'll get the message out about the show and what he's doing. We have programmed kind of his almost it's a magazine calendar of his kind of what will come out on his Facebook page. KARA SWISHER: So Jeff, do you think you can create, you talk yourself about a platform a lot, so that you don't care what happens on it, or do you think you create things on it. Not just stars, but the idea of personalities. Do you see that as something Linked In is doing? I mean Facebook is sort of doing it by accident in many ways. So does YouTube; it just sort of happens depending on what people do. How do you look at that idea? Do you create talent in that regard? JEFF WEINER: I guess in part, yeah. The definition of platform is really an enabling capability. So it's not by accident when someone becomes famous on a Facebook or a YouTube because that's really the intention of those platforms. The same could be said of Twitter, generating millions upon millions of followers. I think on Linked In people do have that opportunity to showcase their knowledge about a particular subject matter, become the expert, and be able to communicate best demonstrated practices within a particular area. I think ultimately it's really about how each individual member wants to create value out of the network. In listening to Ari, one thing is interesting to me. is the fact that each of our individual, professional members to some extent is replicating what you're doing with your talent, just on a much smaller scale. It's not about generating 15,000,000 followers on Facebook or Twitter and then signing on a movie deal or a television deal, etcetera. ARI EMANUEL: If you have any, I want to represent them. JEFF WEINER: Okay. It most definitely is about people being able to create more value by virtue of becoming connected with others, of becoming increasing followed by others, by getting their brand out there. Their experience is their skill sets, their knowledge base, and in building those connections, creating opportunities. It's not dissimilar in any way, shape, or form. It's just much higher profile in Ari's world. KARA SWISHER: And no chest pictures, except some people. But what would that be? Someone settling themselves in video? What do people use now in order to sell themselves? Cause that's what you're talking about. JEFF WEINER: It's not so much about explicitly selling yourself although you certainly can. I'm reminded of the example of an entrepeneur in the Netherlands who when the I-phone first came out, his battery kept running out, like a lot of folks, and he went onto a group within Linked In, and he started talking about whether other people were experiencing the same problem, and it turned out that he was clearly not alone. He found out from another group that there was a Chinese manufacturer who was starting to make add-ons that would provide additional battery life. And he connected with that company and he started distributing that product and started using his connections on Linked In to market the effort. So he essentially built the company. He wasn't selling himself, and he didn't start by selling anything, but he was able to identify an opportunity and leverage his network to create value. KARA SWISHER AND ARI EMANUEL: That's great. JEFF WEINER: We hear stories like that all the time. At a start up in Ireland, the founder needed to raise an angel fund, and so went onto Linked In, thinking he'd target a few thousand dollars, and less than two weeks later, his entire network had provided him the funds. There was a student who had just graduated from film school, you'll want to represent her, in New York. She wrote me a letter, I'd never met her, to say she got financing for her first film soon after graduating as a result of her connections on Linked In. Folks are not necessarily explicitly selling themselves, but it's the power of the network and the opportunities it creates where we see that kind of value being generated. ARI EMANUEL: Cool. KARA SWISHER: And in terms of .... do you see yourself doing more of that? Is that what you're there for, or is it just continuing to create a platform for resumes and job finds. JEFF WEINER: It's hardly about resumes. It's mostly about your identity. And I don't think it's about your identity in and of itself. It's about your identity and what happens as a result of sharing your identity. As the web has evolved, I'm being reminded of that cartoon in the New Yorker, it's really old. It's back when the web first started to proliferate, it was on the Internet, nobody knew how to turn it off. And you could say that was the era of the portal. You know, companies like Yahoo were organizing the world's information via the Internet, and then along came Google, and started indexing mass amounts of content. It went from the portal to the search engine. And now we've got these social platforms, and for these social platforms to work, they're anchored by identity. So now, that same dog probably has a Linked In profile; he's wearing a tie, and he's looking for commercial gigs, and Ari's representing him or her, and he's on Twitter, who let the dogs out, whatever. That identity is at the core of the value that is being created through these social platforms. And the value prop goes well beyond that. It's about connecting with others; it's about building your networks, and it's ultimately about sharing. It's ultimately about sharing information, knowledge, information, ideas, opinions. it's about the way we work; it's about the way we play; it's about the way we learn. It's fundamentally about the way we live. KARA SWISHER: So how many of these can exist? Now we now have Google plus now on top of Twitter, on top of Linked In on top of Facebook on top of blank blank, not MySpace anymore. That's gone, thankfully. JEFF WEINER: I think it's a great question, and I think you know Kara's ARI EMANUEL: Do you think it's enough? KARA SWISHER: I don't know. Yeah. JEFF WEINER: Are you asking about my perspective? KARA SWISHER: What do you think? You don't really care what I think. What do you think? ARI EMANUEL: I don't know. I mean a client, Justin Timberlake went into it. KARA SWISHER: It's kind of stunt casting ARI EMANUEL: I'm gonna hear about what the vision is. KARA SWISHER: Right. Because he has all that free time to work on a formula. I used to cover all the celebrities going into the internet space and so far it's 0 for 10. JEFF WEINER: You just answered part of the answer to your question, which was "he has a lot of free time," KARA SWISHER: He doesn't. I was being facetious. JEFF WEINER: He doesn't. So I would venture to say no one in this audience today has a lot of free time, and I think the short answer to your question is how many of these can we utilize is not that many more when it comes to these social platforms because unlike say a social platform in television, which as you know coexists. I'm sure the agency spends a lot of time trying to think about that interaction. You don't see a lot of people using Twitter while they're using Facebook or using Facebook which they're using Linked In. And so I think the addition of Google Plus, if it continues the current momentum that it's generated, it makes what was a very understandable landscape, you use Linked In for your relevant professional services and Facebook for family and friends and Twitter to microcast or broadcast. You introduce a Google Plus, and all the sudden people start to say "okay, where am I going to spend that next minute or hour of my discretionary time." And at some point, we just don't have any more time, so we have to make choices. KARA SWISHER: So how do you look at it when you see all these ? 'cause Google Plus is really quite an amalgam of all of them of all of these things. I was going to make a joke in my column today .... ARI EMANUEL: I look at it as following . . . right now they're Facebook, Google Plus, FourSquare, you can keep on going. Eventually, the good thing is I look at it as to distinguish themselves they're gonna have to have something on them that actually makes people KARA SWISHER: So they have to come to you. ARI EMANUEL: They have to come to me. JEFF WEINER: It all comes back to Ari. ARI EMANUEL: I'm actually, over time, you know, fucking a with leverage. I'm dangerous. So I'm not sure if I'll be around. I'm hoping, but eventually they're going to need something that's going to distinguish themselves to get people to sign up and use the system, right? Amazon paid, was it Lady Gaga or KARA SWISHER: No, it was Zinga. ARI EMANUEL: Both actually. How much did Amazon pay Lady Gaga to get people there, and I think they paid her a dollar and the value of the customer was five dollars. So that's where, I think, this is going to have to be. Because as these things, and I don't believe it's going to stop even though it's only a limited amount of time that people can spend between video games and that these people are going to need content and whatever we define the content as. And then hopefully we have a big enough platform of content that they need or that we can manufacture or come up with ideas for them to create content. JEFF WEINER: This goes back to some extent to its identity as content, and everyone will recall, you know, Twitter was doing well, but it wasn't until after ? starting using it and developed that very clever competition with CNN that Twitter exploded. It's absolutely extraordinary growth. You could say the same thing, you know Kara, when Google Plus first launched, we started thinking about how long it's going to take before a celebrity. . . and speaking Lady Gaga--is it Lady Gaga and YouTube? God. So, you can play that game. It should be a drinking game by the way where if someone can figure out the talent you don't represent, they got to do a shot. You wouldn't be drinking much. You're pretty safe. Lady Gaga appeared with Marissa Meyers on stage at Google, and they did an amazing job hosting her. I'm sure you saw that. The footage that they rolled out; you see the power of Google as a platform, and then you see what historically has been all about machine learning algorithms become very human, very social, and it was all about the zeitgeist. You know it's not going to take much to start to leverage that kind of celebrity and that kind of content into a platform like that which has absolutely extraordinary scale. KARA SWISHER: Except who pays who in those scenarios? Do you get paid for bringing interest into it, correct? You provide interest ARI EMANUEL: That's my conclusion. I might be wrong. But we'll see. Here's the great thing: with the audience, with Open Sky, a bunch of the stuff we're doing in our digital .... you know, we're making a bet that there's great platforms that exist. And our API will sit on top of it. We don't have to recreate baseball or Google Plus. All we have to do is make sure that what we're creating kind of can sit on top and use the platforms to the advantage of our clients and hopefully for the platform. KARA SWISHER: So, what works best now for you from Hollywood's perspective? What is important to Hollywood at this moment of these platforms? ARI EMANUEL: I think for the first time we're worrying about how to utilize them, right? I don't think there's a lot of guys who can program them well, right? So I think Demand Media did their version with Google, right. I think Disney did a pretty good job at they went from I think 395,000 page views on Facebook too to I think they're up to now about 194,000,000. There's not a lot of people that program these things well. I think we're in business with a couple different groups that do that well. We'll see. That's one of our big initiatives. You know Sean Parker said to me, he goes, "just do as many things as you can in a social space with your clients because they hit more than anybody else on those things. And monetize that relationship at every point." That's what we're trying to do. KARA SWISHER: Right. So you'll try it. You're promiscuous. So you'll do anything. Yes, ok. Almost anything. What doesn't, what hasn't worked because Hollywood's been trying various things to get into it ARI EMANUEL: We've only been at it for two years, so we have you know KARA SWISHER: In the social space. What else is important when you think about talent in the digital space for you? Is Apple a critical partner for you? Is um ARI EMANUEL: Yeah. And our music space and our book space. You know we're gonna, listen, we have a book business right now that for the first year was just performing okay. Now, actually, for the first time because of the E-book it's actually starting to wrap in a really good way, so we're thinking about do we take a big swing at the plate here and figure out what to do. We'll utilize all of our relationships, and say call on people to think about . . . we're the largest literary agency in the world. I think we publish 225 best sellers a year, and we have a hundred year old back list. What we do with that maybe nothing for a little bit maybe something. That's kind of the next initiative of where we're gonna try and play. KARA SWISHER: You've kind of done a good choice. Didn't Borders announce today that they're closing down all their stores. ARI EMANUEL: Yeah. So we're gonna figure out over the next little bit of time how we can get into that space in a different way potentially, how we can partner in a different way. We don't have the answer yet; we're just starting to think about it. KARA SWISHER: Do you imagine doing a Linked In imprint? ARI EMANUEL: He keeps on rejecting me and not wanting to pay for anything. It's a joke. KARA SWISHER: It's freemium. It's freemium. You will have a lot of people calling. ARI EMANUEL: Hey listen. We do have a lot of business authors, so they're definitely . . . . one of the things we've been talking about besides this freemium, we were talking about .... we have a lecture series, and we were talking about trying to have a lecture series put together with Linked In and we're trying to figure that out and about leadership, and about business opportunities for their members and bringing things to that organization that actually they don't have right now. KARA SWISHER: So is that, Jeff, is that really good for him or is it just good for Linked in? Content has been very good for Google but not necessarily for the content owners kind of thing. Google's gotten a mass of the benefit from being able to index and sell back information about the content. Is this a good relationship for you more than them? I mean, if you're being honest, I mean like it's great for you to get all these authors. ARI EMANUEL: You can lie. I don't mind. JEFF WEINER: It really goes back to what we were talking about earlier. It's going to come down to the model. I mean it's not a clear-cut case because we have the distribution that these deals are going to happen. If they're not sustainable over time, and if more importantly the interests aren't aligned then they're not going to happen. They're certainly not going to happen through legal mechanisms. I mean if people start scraping or doing things wearing a black hat or doing things that they're not supposed to be doing--violating the rights of intellectual property owners, you have a whole separate set of issues, but you know when you ask "is this going to be good for Linked In, is it going to be good for Ari's clientele, and the agency" just picking up on the example he was providing, our membership would love access to videos of leaders and their discussions and how to inspire people and how to build great businesses and all the things that they've learned over time. So one of the things I guess we're going to brainstorm with the audience, one of the things we were kicking around was essentially creating a TED for leadership for business leadership. He's got a lot of the content; we have the audience and a platform, and something like that wouldn't just exist online, it would exist offline as well. You could start doing events and conferences, and we invite you to come moderate and conduct panels. KARA SWISHER: For free, right? Freemium. JEFF WEINER: Well, we're helping to build your brand, Kara. How do you feel? I just had one of the scariest moments in my career having the two of you up on a panel gang up against me would not be a good thing. KARA SWISHER: Ari and I always get paid. JEFF WEINER: Listen, at the end of the day, I don't think any social platform KARA SWISHER: And, by the way, thank you for the D fee that you pay. Anyway, go ahead. JEFF WEINER: Exactly. So, if something's worth it, somebody's willing to pay. ARI EMANUEL: Also, you know, listen, to defend him a little bit, you know they were at the early stage. They have a brand that they have to build, they have certain things that they were doing, and still have to do for a very early company, so over time, what their audience is going to demand is going to change, offerings, you know, over time it's going to adapt, and they're going to require different things and their audience is going to require. That's when you can play with these models in a different way. It's pretty early for them to ... more valuable than anything is the brand of Linked In right now than anything else that .... anything else you would probably do would hurt the economics behind that, so give him a little bit of leeway. KARA SWISHER: All right. Jeff did advise me to put all of D for free on the web at one point though. ARI EMANUEL: So you know at one point, I came here last time we spoke, can I explain it? JEFF WEINER: By the way, this is why I had a moderator, so we could avoid this. ARI EMANUEL: We were talking about the Huffington Post and how, you started talking about at one spectrum was Yahoo, another spectrum was, I think you put Google at the other spectrum. JEFF WEINER: The search operating system, the social operating system, the media operating system. ARI EMANUEL: And then you said the next big company, and one of the companies you thought at the time, they hadn't sold was Huffington Post because they incorporated all the social aspects and search or search modelization I think you said and that a company that could do that would be really, really valuable. So first, did you think that Huff Post was right to sell, and now that Huff Post is sold who do you think, if you still believe that, who do you think is that company out there that could get that kind of JEFF WEINER: Status position to .... okay.... for some context, great memory so Ari and I were brainstorming a little bit about the future of digital media and I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this, the two of you, essentially he was talking about a continuum that has existed for some time now where on the one end of the continuum you have a search engine like Google which creates relevancy through search algorithms and machine learning at scale, and it historically was all about that. And at the other end of the continuum you have these social platforms, and when we were originally talking about this years ago before I met Ari to tell you how dated this was, MySpace was the example, and of course today it's Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, etcetera. And for those companies, the organization of information was historically, exclusively based on who you know. All of it was based on who you know. And then in the middle, this is while I was at Yahoo, we were thinking about this. In the middle was a company like Yahoo that programmed its home page based on editors and curators, and at the time it wasn't leveraging machine money or relevancy and creating content optimization to figure out the best content to get in front of you at the right time. And it wasn't really leveraging its implicit social graph which was its address book and its instant messaging buddy list, but it did do an incredible job of editing and trying to figure out what people wanted to see. And that's why the Yahoo home page to this day has hundreds of millions of users every month, and Yahoo to this day has over 600,000,000 users. And so what I was talking about with Ari was the fact that what I believe to be the leading digital media company of the 21st century was going to be able to integrate these three dimensions seamlessly and in a way that had never been done before because what is interesting is that historically the way these companies grew and created value was through essentially through a sole focus on that competency. And once you create a culture around a singular competency it becomes very challenging to expand that, but yet there's no question that media, digital media once media becomes digital it needs to be optimized through machine learning and algorithms. It needs to be social to enjoy the kind of viral distribution that's possible now, and it needs to be curated because we're all becoming completely overwhelmed by all the information out there. And, at the time, I was suggesting Huff Po was doing this. Just a lot of people didn't realize that they'd invested and built out this really wonderful infrastructure to optimize content. So you could literally if you were on the Huff Po homepage long enough you'd see the headline changing for the same story, or you'd see the image changing for the same story. They were AP texting. KARA SWISHER: Well, I'd say other people's stories, but go ahead. They did a beautiful job. JEFF WEINERER: Okay. So, they were amazing at it. And they were leveraging things like Facebook, Connect, and Twitter, and Linked In within a professional context to enable that context to be shared and go viral, and of course the great competency of Huff Po, no matter of how critical some would be of where they got their content. Their editors did an incredible job at figuring out what people want to read and when and then creating the right headline. And that is a real art. And so the Huff Po was doing this, not on the same scale as say a Yahoo, but they were doing it, and they were doing it real well. And by the way, they've continued that torrid growth trajectory. I mean they're still hitting all time highs in terms of unique users, and I thought it was a very, very interesting play for Tim and for AOL. ARI EMANUEL: So you thought it was a good sale? JEFF WEINER: Oh, that was the buy not the sale. So you're asking about the sale. I'd be interested, if I had a chance to talk to Ariana, I'd ask her why she didn't think she could go independently because of the momentum that was in the business. Now that said, I think Tim would be the first to point out a lot of the growth since the acquisition is because they're so deeply integrated into AOL's homepage. KARA SWISHER: Right, right. JEFF WEINER: So that was the plan the entire time. KARA SWISHER: Plus he's giving her a blank check to do whatever she wants, and I don't believe her board was allowing her to do that. JEFF WEINER: That may be the case. That may be the answer. ARI EMANUEL: So now, looking out. What company, now that Huff Po is gone, is best positioned to capture that vision? JEFF WEINER: It's a fantastic question, so I think interestingly enough all three companies that I would have used, all three segments, are increasingly converging, which was to some extent what one could predict. So, Google is clearly becoming more social. When we had this discussion, Google Plus didn't exist. Google's clearly becoming more social. They've always this extraordinary ability to deliver relevancy based on algorithms and machinery. And what will be interesting is to see whether or not they start to do curation. And you can see some of the recent success of YouTube, which is another runaway success over time. YouTube's homepage is increasingly programmed. ARI EMANUEL: But well they're now starting a bunch of channels. So they will start curating. KARA SWISHER: So how do you look at a YouTube when they're starting to do that? ARI EMANUEL: That's the huge push because, you know, as search we still have the economics for display is actually growing in importance for them, and also in economics for the advertisers. I think that's why they're making their big push at YouTube plus what you're talking about. KARA SWISHER: So how do you look at a YouTube when they're trying to do something. It's been a long time.... ARI EMANUEL: We're going to try a couple with them. KARA SWISHER: So what would you try? Taylor Laughtner channel, of course. ARI EMANUEL: Well, we have about, we presented them with about 4 or 5 different ideas. There's a meeting going to be happening with us and them at the end of this month. KARA SWISHER: Can you talk to me about one idea? ARI EMANUEL: No. I'm not going to do that. And, um, we'll then see 'cause we're going to try a couple with them and see. KARA SWISHER: But can you tell the nature of....I'm just curious. Is it around brands or starts? You can have a Kristen Stewart .... listen to me, you can have a Kristen Stewart shouting channel. She could do all her pouting. I would watch a Kristen Stewart pouting channel. ARI EMANUEL: You should go pitch it. JEFF WEINER: Speaking of the future of YouTube. It will be interesting to see whether or not there will be some discussion that Google's for sale, and I may have read this on your site, then Google's rumored to be looking at it, Yahoo's rumored to be looking at it. And getting back to Ari's question: Yahoo is still very much in that mix. Yahoo has curation and editorial capabilities as a competency. They always.... ARI EMANUEL: Haven't they been losing a little bit in their audience? JEFF WEINER: It's still massive scale. You're still talking north of 600,000,000 ?, and have had historically in the search team people who understood how to optimize content. It was historically done for search, but easily could have been leveraged in content. And one thing that people don't talk about with regard to Yahoo, believe it or not, it's one of the fastest growing apps on Facebook. No one's talking about that, and I think that's very much .... KARA SWISHER: That's mostly because Yahoo doesn't talk about it. JEFF WEINER: Well, you know, it's funny you mention that because I was talking about this earlier with somebody. Did you see right around the time of the Royal wedding, Yahoo KARA SWISHER: They did a great job. JEFF WEINER: Actually, that was a story on your site. They announced that they hired the managing editor from the Huff Po. That's right, Jay. And that was in the same release as the fact that they'd achieved an all-time record in terms of live event coverage with the Royal wedding. Part of that was Osama bin Laden, part of that was the earthquake in Japan. When Yahoo can stick to what it does best, original content, unique editorial voice, huge live events that nobody else can cover, that's still the place that people turn on the internet for that shared communal experience of what's happening in the world at scale. They'll turn to Twitter for the microcasting to see what people are sharing. They'll turn to Facebook to see that in people's feeds. ARI EMANUEL: You know what that reminded me a little bit of ? You know when there's a big news event in television, you turn on CNN, and you can tell right away, when there's a wedding, big news event, something, something, you hit CNN. And then, after that event's over, you move on. Same thing with Yahoo. Now, they do still have 600,000,000 people unlike CNN, but they haven't then past that been able to keep that momentum even though they still have a lot of people. They do have great curation and everything else. So is it Zinga that goes in there and gives them ..... I mean what happens with that company? KARA SWISHER: Oh, excellent question. Thank you Ari. ARI EMANUEL: No problem. I've read a lot of your stuff. KARA SWISHER: Really. Oh good. You just read two of my stories. JEFF WEINER: I'm learning from the master. You said Yahoo had to buy Google. KARA SWISHER: Today, I wrote a story saying they have to buy it. JEFF WEINER: And the rationale? KARA SWISHER: Because that's what they do. I think I agree with you. I think they're spending all their time pretending they're competing with Google, which is laughable because it just is, and they should be. There's nobody in the media space as good as they had been, and so they spend their time stubbing their toe and driving themselves into a wall on a daily basis on things they're going to fail at. So I said this is something they're good at, and they've refused to engage in it, which is fascinating. ARI EMANUEL: And you don't think that after Zinga goes public, and then .... KARA SWISHER: What? ARI EMANUEL: and Yahoo get together, and he kind of, you know KARA SWISHER: No. Okay, but okay, sure. Why not? But what I'm asking the idea of what he's talking about is that what happens to media distribution going forward? I mean how do you look at.... You must be thinking about this because you don't want to just be on social networks. Do you see that of the only way of you getting.... ARI EMANUEL: No, no, no. I mean I, we're hopefully going to do 3, 4, 5, 6 different channels with them. We have other .... we're doing stuff in social, we're doing stuff in games, and so for gaming area. We're doing stuff in shopping on line and stuff like that. So we're in multiple different places. We're going to take up multiple different shots. I just was wondering this because when you think about it, what's that best company out there, and it could be Google 'cause now with Google Plus. JEFF WEINER: It could be Google. It could be Yahoo. Finish the continuum and Facebook, it was recently, this wasn't also in your blog, was it? and Facebook was going to be doing news. They're working with a bunch of news partners. They've been very explicit about the fact that they believe social can transform various industries, and one that they're keenly interested in is media and entertainment, and certainly music is something they're going to be delivering more of. They've been delivering filmed entertainment now. And I think you're going to start to see a lot more of that, so as Facebook starts to think about certainly categorization at the very least, I'm not going to go as far as saying curation, but if they were to go that path and start thinking about curation and editorial, how do you aggregate the best experiences? They've clearly got the largest social graph, and there's a lot of optimization that takes place behind the scenes on Facebook. You know your feed Facebook, companies like Linked In, Twitter, ultimately, we're trying to create as much relevancy as possible for machine learning. So, there's this convergence taking place. KARA SWISHER: So, in that question, we'll get to that question and then take some questions from the audience. What is Hollywood in 5 years, and what is the social networks in 5 years? What do you see it being? ARI EMANUEL: Well, I think there's going to be movies, television, the music and books KARA SWISHER: And you're going to insist on putting everything in 3D, right? ARI EMANUEL: No. And that will be what it will be, and there will be more distribution than there's ever been, right. And the economics are tough in the movie business right now; the television business is actually really good. The music touring business ..... I actually think the music business of selling music is going to get better. KARA SWISHER: It couldn't get worse. ARI EMANUEL: Or stabilized. And the book business will be fine. If you think there will be .... we're going to have to migrate into more social games, more kind of understanding how to program in these other platforms and what the definition of that programming means. And we're going to have to get better at it if we're going to survive because there's only .... it's a limited pool. KARA SWISHER: So what company are you most interested in cozying up to? ARI EMANUEL: That's a good question. I'm not interested in cozying up to any company. KARA SWISHER: Okay. JEFF WEINER: If you could only pick one company, you have a .... now it's my turn. Here we go. This is fun. So, you're scheduling a trip up to Silicon Valley, and you have an all day, and you're going to meet with all these companies. It turns out one of your most important clients says "Ari, we've got something we need to work on. Please come back as soon as possible." So you're like okay, you only have time for one meeting. KARA SWISHER: What's your most important? JEFF WEINER: Who do you take that meeting with? ARI EMANUEL: You. Come on, his parents are here. What do you think I'm going to do? KARA SWISHER: And you could include Amazon and NetFlix. JEFF WEINER: Yeah. We can spend a lot of time on the social platforms.... we decide what platforms you have. These digital distribution players. The Apples, the NetFlix. KARA SWISHER: Who are you doing the meeting with? ARI EMANUEL: It'll probably be Facebook. KARA SWISHER: And Hollywood, where do you go? JEFF WEINER: Oh, seriously? That's easy. ARI EMANUEL: Thank God. JEFF WEINER: His parents are in the audience. KARA SWISHER: I really want to meet your parents. Questions from the audience. Right back there. Right there. Oh, there isn't one yet. First question. Q1: Hey. How's it going? This one's for Ari. What's the best advice you've ever received about the industry that you've carried forth in all that you've done? ARI EMANUEL: When I was an assistant for this very old agent in New York by the name of Rob Elance, and at the time I was making copies of Amadeus, and like a shmuck I didn't all the notes from Milos Foreman and Peter Schafner, and I didn't copy them in. And he was a really great....he started me in the business, and he said to me, you know, "the only way you get your phone calls returned is that you have to represent really great people. Everything else doesn't matter." And for my specific business, um, you know that is a very crucial . . . .and then David Geffen said to me something which I've never forgotten: "Just make sure you stay in traffic. Cause if you stay in traffic long enough, then you have enough business, and you're gonna get hit, and something great is going to happen." And the third thing is KARA SWISHER: You mean physically hit with a car? ARI EMANUEL: Which has happened to me. KARA SWISHER: This shocks me. ARI EMANUEL: You know, I don't remember who said it, but I think now, more than ever, great ideas or great voices are more important than ever because they distinguish in this kind of spread, and those three things are the kind of things I think about a lot. KARA SWISHER: So, you're talking about talent. ARI EMANUEL: You know it used to be said in the music business, you have to have great ears because then you can know a great song or for whatever reason I've had the opportunity and I can identify great writers, and I think I can identify something that a lot of people kind of for whatever reason when I see it I can say, "you know that's something that's interesting to a lot of people." That's going to become more important than ever. So those three things are things that I have found have enabled me to become successful and I think about a lot. KARA SWISHER: You're talking about quality. ARI EMANUEL: Or what you perceive to be quality. JEFF WEINER: Two quick thoughts, following up actually on Ari's response. One is the third thing that Ari mentioned. Thomas Friedman would characterize the sane imagination as the only thing that cannot be commoditized. And increasingly, that will drive the global economy. But it's funny when you asked about the best advice he received in terms of Hollywood because the best advice I received with regard to my career was while I was in Hollywood, and it was about the convergence of technology and entertainment or media, and it was the book Being Digital by Nicholas Negreponte. And in the very beginning of the book, he wrote a line that changed my life, so I joined Warner Brothers Corporate Development Department in September of 1994. ARI EMANUEL: So what was the line? JEFF WEINER: And it was everything that can be converted from an atom to a bit will be. And that was before the web had really become mainstream. I had just started in the Corp Dev group. I was the youngest person. I was the only analyst in the group. And the guy who had created the Corporate Development Division believed that Warner Brothers needed an interactive department, and that would be divided between Warner Brothers online CD-Roms, which was the big one, and out of home interactive entertainment. And I had just gone on and gotten my first AOL account a few months prior to that, so I volunteered after reading this book to help out with the online portion that was kind of an afterthought. And so I wrote the business plan for it that was online in December of 1994 as a result of that line in that book. KARA SWISHER: I'm going to give mine from my grandparents. One was my grandfather used to always say, it's a similar thing to what he's saying, my grandfather used to always say "intelligence has its limitations, but stupidity is infinite." And the second one is from my grandmother, who when I wouldn't visit her, saying I was a very , very busy person down at the Washington Post, she said "the graveyards are full of indispensable people," so I always remember that. Next question. Thank you. Q2: I guess this is kind of leveraged off your point that you can't encode taste. In both your cases, you kind of make a living by trying to figure out what's going to happen next. You know either in how you organize a company or how you spot a talent. Not a major talent, but who's coming up. You know, what's going to be good down the road. What do you think . . . . in you case, you know, both organizing companies strategically and inside Linked In, figuring out where the job's going to come from. What do you think you can teach each other about that? ARI EMANUEL: About trend spotting? Q2: Well about trend spotting, figuring out what's coming next, how to spot an obscure talent that's going to be great. What do you see and do that you tell him and vice versa? ARI EMANUEL; You know the funny thing is, I always wonder because up in Silicon Valley, you know, they have put into algorithms human nature, or they attempt constantly put into algorithms how we act, and I was always wondering whether you could identify or predict talent through some something KARA SWISHER: Data. ARI EMANUEL: And I don't know if that's if you could predict Larry David you know. I just I don't think you can do it. I don't think you could do that either. But I do think that what they do better than we do is the thought process of say less people touching something. We actually need more people touching it because we believe that there's more ideas when people get into a room and start thinking about creatively what needs to happen. I question that at times because in our business there's this phrase called the green light committees in the movie business, and I've never known anything anything great that comes out of a committee, but I do think that we do kind of have to get better at less people touching stuff and figuring out how to communicate better with not just being in groups. And we probably can learn that through being up here more. KARA SWISHER: But you're talking about instinct versus . . . ARI EMANUEL: Yeah. When we go into a meeting, we're talking about a movie, we're talking about a tv show, we're talking about what writers should do, what directors should do. You know, there's a lot of swirl that goes on, and then you come up with this idea. And it happens at the agency, it happens at the movie companies, at the studios, record companies. And maybe less would be more in that situation, which I think at least I believe that happens up here. And I think we probably could learn from that a little bit more kind of using data better. We don't use it very well. I don't think down in KARA SWISHER: Meaning you can't use ARI EMANUEL: We don't organize it that way. KARA SWISHER: Could you predict a hit from data? Snakes on a Plane for example. ARI EMANUEL: I don't know if you could, but the problem is we're not organized in that thought process to even extract the right data to even be able to analyze it to see if you could do it. And I think we're trying to get better at it. Maybe some people have done it, but I think that's where we could probably use what he does. JEFF WEINER: So I have a three-part answer, and to give you an indication of why Ari is as successful as he is the last part of his answer is the first part of my answer, which was data and the use of data. Whereas he said you couldn't have discovered Larry David using an algorithm, you certainly could have tracked his initial resonance with an audience leveraging data. And there's....he's all over it. There is an infrastructure that exists now. There is more real time data available, extraordinarily valuable data available to us than at any time in human history, and it's just a question of how you make use of it. And making sure, and this is the second part of the answer, making sure that you have the right talent. And with regard to data and understanding the data and understanding the insights and the predictive analysis, it's about data scientists, who have become, at least in Silicon Valley, the new search engineer. There's an awful lot of demand for data scientists; there's not a lot of supply. And so . . . . ARI EMANUEL: They are mainly mathematicians. JEFF WEINER: Math and statistics, and in this day and age, computer science, a whole range of skills, and by the way, that's the science of it. There's also an art to it, which is like anything else in life, having a gut and being able to know where to look and how to make connections across disciplinary connections and a whole host of other KARA SWISHER: Let me throw something out, we interviewed Steve Levitan at D last year, year before last, and he was talking about how he uses Twitter, and he was saying most of the stuff is useless to him as a creator of a huge hit television that remains a hit television show, and he said the way he uses Twitter for example, is he watches how the jokes work. They watch it while the show is on, and then they know what jokes work with people, and that's how they use it. And it's not in anything . . . he said he wouldn't change anything based on ARI EMANUEL: I'm not actually talking about that, but there is so much information now and comics going up on YouTube, and our ability to track it and understand the data, we don't yet do a very good job of it. KARA SWISHER: Or you can get the wrong information. ARI EMANUEL: We just don't....we're not compiling it properly or we're not looking at it properly, you know. We're still looking at Nielsen ratings. I mean, you know, 3-day, 7-day, I mean it's just insanity. JEFF WEINER: That's part of what a great data scientist does or anyone who's utilizing the data is able to filter out the signal from the noise. And you'll get a false positive or false negative. You can go down a huge rathole tying to pursue that insight of what's going on, and the best will say "that's not worth pursuing." So certainly the way in which we leverage data and the infrastructures to support how we can leverage data, the talent to do it, that's the second part to the answer, which is the talent. And that's where we started tonight's discussion, and it's a little bit different in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. But at the end of the day, it's about talent. And so I know that I'm only as good as the talent that I surround myself with and very thankfully we've been able to build a truly world-class team at Linked In, and it's something I've learned over the years in terms of the talent I look for in Silicon Valley. You know in baseball, there's the 5-tool player? And I've kind of constructed a similar analogue in tech circles and what we do, which is 5 tools that you look for. And you don't have to find someone who's got all five. If someone's really good at any one of these things, it's valuable. That's how you build a team, but if you can start to cull together people who have skills on multiple dimensions across these five, you're in a really good position. It's technology vision, the ability to understand where the world is moving going forward, and how technology will ultimately enable that vision to manifest; it's about product sensibility, so you understand where the unmet needs are in a market place in society, and you can actually manifest that technology in ways that create value; it's about business acumen because you could build the world's greatest product, but if it doesn't have a sustainable business model, it's not going to get you very far; it's about the ability to evangelize and inspire others to come follow you because oftentimes your vision of the way the world will evolve is going to fight conventional wisdom, and you're going to need to spend a lot of time and energy convincing others to follow you. And fifth, and perhaps the most important, is resourcefulness because no matter how good of an evangelist you are, you may at times be unable to convince people that your way is the right way. And so you have to be prepared to role up your sleeve and just get it done. KARA SWISHER: I thought you were going to say luck, but .... over here. Q3: I have a question for Jeff. Jeff, do you have a new initiative going for nonprofits. Can you tell me how that started and where you hope it goes. JEFF WEINER: Sure. So I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to specifically, but we've got a couple of things in the works. One, and I think the most basic and perhaps the most powerful, is just adding a volunteer field to the Linked In profile, and this hasn't rolled out broadly yet, but it's something that we're starting to phase in, and we were talking earlier about identify and professional brands. And a huge part of one's professional identity, at least a lot of the people I've had the privilege of working with, is how they give back and how they make a difference and how they leverage their skills and their experiences to give back to their communities. And, I think, this goes back to being a platform. We're increasingly in a position where we can help connect people with the right skills and, more importantly, the interest in making a difference and giving back with the right philanthropic entity or the right philanthropic initiative or the right individual, an underprivileged individual who would never have access to the right mentorship to be able to become an entreppeneur, and so we're in the process, longer term, of building on a market place to connect our professional membership with those philanthropic opportunities and that begins with something as simple as indicating on your profile the kind of volunteer work you want to do. By industry (?) the volunteer work you've already done. Because when somebody else visits your profile and they see what you're doing, they may be inspired to do the same; at the click of a button they can get involved themselves. KARA SWISHER: Interesting. Next question. Right here. Q4: Ari is what NetFlix is doing with some of their algorithms the kind of stuff would be useful to people in Hollywood trying to make decisions about television and movie programming? ARI EMANUEL: You know, I think, the algorithms that Apple is doing or Amazon is doing to tell you what else you would like are all great, but they're great for them. What I'm talking about is you know MGM has got x amount of movies in their library, thousands of movies. They don't know which movies should be remade if they're going to make a remake movie. We have no idea what movies are going to work and not work and why we're doing them. We do them now based on what we think the international value is of a movie star or x, y, z. We have not kind of cultivated what the audience wants and why they want it at all. We've not extracted . . . . you know most data is going to give you a guide, it's not going to give you the answer. We have not done any of that. And that's what I'm talking about. Kind of beforehand not after we've made it. And I think that's the problem with .... and I don't even know if it's a problem. That's what we need to get better at. And there is just general instinct to it, and if you could put in an equation then everybody would do it, but I think that's where we should.... we could maybe be able to get better, and that's where probably Northern California could help us. The algorithms that they're doing are really kind of data mining for what else you would like to upsell you some other stuff. It's like direct marketing with a little bit of .... KARA SWISHER: Can you imagine being able to make the perfect movie before . . . . like this ARI EMANUEL: No, no, no. All I'm saying is the following: one of the things that we do now is we do remakes, right? And why we do remakes is so subjective to that head of the studio or that head of the network. KARA SWISHER: Just go, Gilligan's Island ARI EMANUEL: So I think there's probably, there might be a better way to do that. We're still using Nielsen. In this day and age. It's insanity. KARA SWISHER: What I'm curious is how do you make decisions like that, just spray and pray? ARI EMANUEL: Yeah. There's a lot of spray and pray. JEFF WEINER: But you're also leveraging information. You're leveraging expertise. At the end of the day, though, when you said it's a problem, then you corrected yourself, I was going to say that's the magic; that's the art, the art and the science, and it works in both directions. ARI EMANUEL: I agree. But I mean . . . the question . . . I'm not even sure there's an answer to this, right. But I'd like to go through a more rigorous process, and maybe we come out the other end and we say "hey, it's ?". JEFF WEINER: At the very least though, it can help cull down the opportunities, right? Filter some of the things. But we were talking about this before we came on stage tonight. We were just catching up on pop culture, and we were talking a little bit about the voice. So the fact that the voice was as successful as it was--the voice is a singing competition, and there are some heads going up and down, but had you predicted the world needed another singing competition after American Idol and after ARI EMANUEL: X-Factor is coming out JEFF WEINER: X-Factor coming out, and then you've got, what's the one with the Glee Clubs. KARA SWISHER: Glee Project ARI EMANUEL: Project Glee JEFF WEINER: Sing or something like that. No one would have been able to predict that the world needed yet another singing competition, but the magic of what happens and the magic of what Ari does and his team does and the people in Hollywood do--they bring people together in certain environments, and they allow things to happen in a way that could never have been predicted. In this particular case, KARA SWISHER: Although that was still a formula, Crazy Lady, JEFF WEINER: It may have started as a formula, but you would never have predicted the emotional resonance between the judges and the kids who were singing. And we were talking a little about that. Unless the lead singer from The Room 5 is just an absolute brilliant actor as well as being a brilliant singer, he very clearly became attached and moved and inspired by the kids that he was mentoring. This thing was true for all the judges. That's the part that no algorithm could ever in a million years predict. The judges of that show could never have predicted that they'd get that attached in light of their lives and their celebrity. And that's the magic of what Ari does. That's the magic of Hollywood. KARA SWISHER: So, essentially you're saying that you don't know what's going to happen. They just put it up there. JEFF WEINER: They do. But Mark Burdett, the producer ARI EMANUEL: You know, he's an incredible producer. He did an amazing job on that show, right. That he figured out a formula that he thought would get to this emotional resonance at the end. JEFF WEINER: Who knew? KARA SWISHER: Which was instinct, which was what you're talking about. ARI EMANUEL: Yeah. It's what he does for a living. KARA SWISHER: Right, right. Q5: One of the nice things about Linked In is just the transparency of professional talent all around the world, and I'm just wondering about the Hollywood talent business. When is it going to become more transparent? Ari, you're not on Linked In, and I think that your firm and the other JEFF WEINER: Tell him man. Tell him to get on there. Please ARI EMANUEL: I'm not getting on there Q5: Your firm and the other Hollywood talent firms, your websites have less information than the CIA website. Just wondering when it's going to become more transparent. ARI EMANUEL: Why? Q5: Why wouldn't you want people to know about your company and your talent? ARI EMANUEL: Why? Why do I need to have that happen? Is that important to you? Q5: I'm not trying to attack you. KARA SWISHER: No. He gets that. ARI EMANUEL: What do I get out of it that you have to know who I represent. What is the big deal? Do you think.... if something good could come out of it, which we are actually I'm actually doing, but what would you want to see/learn/know about? Q5: Everything. ARI EMANUEL: Why? Q5: Because people want.... who do you represent? ARI EMANUEL: Why? KARA SWISHER: He just wants to know. ARI EMANUEL: No, I'm serious. Why do you care as long as you get to see Curb Your Enthusiasm, as long as you get to see Aaron Sorkin's next show. What do you care? What do you care? Q5: Maybe we can influence it. ARI EMANUEL: I don't need your influence. I've got my mother. I don't need anybody else. No I don't. KARA SWISHER: I think he's saying , I think he's saying in a very nice way ARI EMANUEL: You don't get the right to have my .... I'm not asking you for your information. Stop asking me for mine. Stop asking. KARA SWISHER: I think what he's saying is that he doesn't want to share his information with you. ARI EMANUEL: But I don't know why I have to. Not everything should be shared. KARA SWISHER: Or perhaps anything. ARI EMANUEL: If somebody wants to share their live, their information, go with god. I don't have to; it's not required that I have to do that, so I'm not going to fucking do it. KARA SWISHER: Translation: Ari does not care what the fuck you think. ARI EMANUEL: No. I do, but I don't know why. You haven't told me there's some great need KARA SWISHER: You know why? You're endlessly fascinating. We can't get enough of you. ARI EMANUEL: It's not about me. They want to know about my clients. It's not KARA SWISHER: It's you though. They want to know about you. You're like Beeber, but you're withholding. Beeber gives everything. Anyway. JEFF WEINER: I was thinking about a conversation we had KARA SWISHER: I don't think we could take you sharing, frankly. Let's get to another question. Q6: Hi. I think I just saw an episode from Entourage just now. This is a question for both Ari and for Jeff. You deal with talent on two different levels. What advice would you give to a person who is trying to, who has talent, who has the skills, but is trying to reinvent themselves? JEFF WEINER: Yeah, I'd say start with, you already established a key condition to in my opinion to ultimately realizing your objectives or your career path, and that's the skills. I say ultimately you need two things to be successful, and one is skill, and the other is passion. And I think oftentimes people will optimize for one or the other. You can optimize for skill and be pretty unhappy. You hear all the time about people who were earning big incomes, but they're doing something that they don't love at all. Conversely, you can have people chasing windmills. They love something in particular, but they don't have the core skill set. So for someone who's got the skills, but they want to reinvent themselves, I guess my first question would be, what exactly are they reinventing? If they have the skills, are they going down a path that they weren't comfortable with for some reason? Have they lost the passion for what they're doing? Do they want to cultivate different skills in areas that they're passionate about? If you stick to those two things, if you stick to what you're passionate about and what you're skilled at, I think ultimately, the doors start to open. And I think things manifest in ways implicit and explicit. I also think, by the way, in this day and age, I'm not just saying this because I work at Linked In, but I think ultimately, leveraging your network, your connections becomes absolutely fundamental to getting your foot in the door. Whether that's a company that ultimately you want to work for. Whether or not that's a piece of information or knowledge that you need and can benefit from. I think trying to go it alone in this day and age is virtually impossible given how interdependent and networked and global the world has become. So I'd start there, optimize for skills, optimize for passion, and make sure that you are surrounding yourself with the right people. ARI EMANUEL; In our cases, when a client has a desire to kind of move into another area, it's just how we kind of get them there, and all the learning we give them. So if a client wants to become a writer, become a director, become a motion picture writer, become a television writer or from just a general writer become an author, it's just how we move them how we introduce them to those things. Ask any question you want sir. Knock yourself out. Please ask. Cause you were interrupting, and why don't you just ask your question. What would you like to ask? Q7: My question is this: the program that 3 or 4 years ago [IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR THIS!] Q7: So the question. Jesus Christ. KARA SWISHER: All right. Ask the question. I want you to ask the question. Go ahead. Q7: I've got to formulate it. KARA SWISHER: I understand that,but there's lots of people that want to ask questions. Just ask it. Q7: The question is this: in the context of you guys. In the context of Doug Englehart, what has been accomplished? And what remains to be done? Thank you. JEFF WEINER: What hasn't been accomplished? What has been accomplished and what remains to be done? In what context. Just broadly speaking. I think it's like a Rohrshach test. Q7: The content, the technology, the science, the consumer ARI EMANUEL: A lot. Next question. JEFF WEINER: So wait. I'll actually I'll take a stab at it. I'll take a stab at it. So, what has been accomplished is we have built infrastructure that connects hundreds of millions of people will ultimately connect billions of people around the world in miliseconds, and the cost of building those connections, the cost of building those networks and those relationships, the cost of managing those relationships is next to nothing. And so as a result, we're all far more connected than we've ever been. So that's what we have accomplished, briefly, and what still remains to be done is to create far more compassion in the world as the result of those connections. But thank you for the question. Q8: Hi. I actually want to go back to this gentleman's question because I got excited quite a bit. I'm trying to look for synergy between entertainment and Linked In, and I'm going to ask a specific quesiton. So Mark Wahlberg. So you're right, we're not that interested in seeing your profile in Linked In or your company's web page, and we're interested in Mark Wahlberg and other celebrities because ?????? So I'm curious to hear Jeff, what is your valued proposition to have people like Mark and other celebrities that Ari represents, to have them have profiles on Linked In and be present on Linked In. JEFF WEINER: Fantastic question. So, the reason, all joking aside, that Ari's not on Linked In, is something I hear from time to time from other people in his position. Positions of great influence, positions of great success, and that is that Linked In can become asymmetrical. There are a lot more people that want things from Ari than Ari needs from those people. Ari is a shining example of what Linked In is all about. We want to empower people to become more like Ari in the best of ways. So everyone here, not necessarily dropping F-bombs and things like that, but everyone here knows who Ari is. His identity has been well established. That's not the case with the vast, vast majority of professionals in the world. Two, Ari probably has one of the all-time great rolodexes, certainly in Hollywood. And if he needs something from somebody, he knows exactly where to find it. And that's three, the ability to tap and access information and knowledge that's going to help him to be more productive and successful. That last dimension is why he's Ari. He's got the knowledge, and if he doesn't have it in his head, he's certainly knows the people who are going to be able to get it for him. So we're trying to empower everyone, everyone, all 640,000,000 professionals in the world. There are 3.3 billion people in the global workforce. We're trying to empower everyone of them to be more like Ari. KARA SWISHER: 3.3 billion people who don't want to eventually share with anybody, correct? JEFF WEINER: No. We want to create economic opportunity. What Ari wants is for there to be reciprocal value. He's actually been saying it the whole time, right? He spoke against freemium if there's no premium in the freemium, right. So, he'll use Linked In when Linked In can create as much value for him as he can create for the platform. That's all we ask of anybody. So one quick way we do that for someone like Ari is connect him with other people similar to Ari. Other CEOs, other people within the tech community that I think could create a lot of value. KARA SWISHER: Obvious benefits. JEFF WEINER: It's symmetrical value versus asymmetrical value. For people like Mark Wahlberg, Mark is a really interesting choice because Mark has gone so far beyond just being an actor. He's now an incredibly successful producer, probably a great mentor, but he's now a really successful businessman. There's probably people within the Hollywood community for whom that's still an objective. So joining Linked In, building their networks, enables them to be more like Mark and more like Ari. KARA SWISHER: Or they could just tweet. Go ahead. Q9: So building on the previous question of career advice, one of the topics that was covered or highlighted in the program was aggressive career strategies. What are your thoughts on that? Or what was it that you wanted to share with us, both Jeff and Ari. ARI EMANUEL: Aggressive career KARA SWISHER: Aggressive career strategies is what I think it said in the program. JEFF WEINER: We both know a little something about that. ARI EMANUEL: Well, you know, um uh I have no idea what my mother fed me or my brothers, but listen, here's the only thing I would say to you. I love what I do. I wake up every morning, I go to sleep every night, I think about it in every part of my relationships, right, and I love I still love the movie business, I love books, I love going to the theater. I mean I love what we do. And I think the great thing about what we do right now is that it's ever expanding. Because of this relationship I would never have had a relationship with Facebook or Google. And kind of it's endless. And the other thing is it's every time I go into either creating a movie or a tv show it's like starting a business, and I love that about it. And I also love the ability to use this business for social good, and the only reason I am agressive at it is I still actually believe in my clients and I love what they stand for and what they're saying. I think if I wasn't in this business, I'm not sure I would be as aggressive. I don't think I would not be aggressive but not to the drive that I am in this business. So I've been an agent now for 22 years. I never thought I would be this long. And to be candid, the .... I think it's only getting better because of everything that we're talking about right now--all the different platforms and distribution. In all the right ways as much as I kind of the bravado of saying I'll have a lot of leverage. Because I love that my clients are saying something that's important. So for me the reason I'm still aggressive is because I love it, and I still love every aspect of it. I still love learning from it. So I think the most important thing is that you've got to go as like....this is what I tell my three boys, and it's what my father said to me and my mother said to me, you've got to go into something that you love. And I think that's the same thing for my brothers. My brother Rahm loved politics, and every aspect of politics. And my brother Zeke loved medicine, and every aspect about medicine. And I think it's shown by their success, and I think he'll talk about why he's aggressive and what he does, but I think it has to start with something that you love and that you care about and that you want to do well in. JEFF WEINER: I think the short answer is it really starts with ultimately knowing what it is that you want to accomplish. And it's against that objective that you start to direct the passion and the skill that both Ari and I've been talking about tonight. And it's always surprising to me that when you sit down with somebody and ask them what it is that they ultimately want to accomplish, how often somebody won't be able to answer the question because they've gone down a path in life that's become far more opportunistic than they may have ultimately anticipated. They get a promotion here, someone offers them more money over there, and pretty soon they're doing something that wasn't necessarily part of the game plan, but it is what it is. So for me, the best career strategy starts with that simple question. And it's a question I ask every single interview candidate that is interested in working at LInked In, which is ultimately "what is it that you want to accomplish? What's the dream?" And it starts there. And once you understand that and you identify the things you're most passionate about and the things you are best at, you'll be amazed at the extent to which it begins to manifest itself. And that's exactly what you were just describing. It's exactly what you were describing with your brothers. That's exactly how my career has unfolded as well. KARA SWISHER: Very briefly, would either of you do something else? What would you do if there wasn't this? ... you dreamed to be a ballet dancer, what? what? ARI EMANUEL: I've actually . . . . You know something? Because we started the Merchant Bank and now we're doing the digital, I kind of have the canvas that I want. JEFF WEINER: I've told my team this; they've heard it from me before, but there's not a single other job I'd rather do in the world. KARA SWISHER: Really? JEFF WEINER: Really. KARA SWISHER: Interesting. ARI WEINER: Used to be in my business, you'd start as an agent, you'd want to become head of a studio, you'd want to become head of a network. I've had those opportunities, don't want them. KARA SWISHER: Yeah. I saw that on the show. That was a great episode. So last question, very last question. I'm glad you didn't take the job. Q10: My question is about innovation. So Linked In Labs is an incubator and you focus on the data to influence understanding users and product development, so what's a really data driven, interesting data driven project coming out of Linked In Labs that influences what you do corporate? And for Ari, how do you incubate ARI EMANUEL: You don't have to ask me a question. Q10: No it's okay. It's a two-part question. How do you just in general incubate creativity and innovation through your employees and the companies? JEFF WEINER: Yeah. I'd love to hear how you innovate. So for us, seriously, I think that's a cool question for him how he innovates the industry. For Linked In, I can't unfortunately mention the things that we haven't launched yet. We want that to be a surprise, but I can point to a couple of things that we've been very excited about. And one was the visualization of your professional graph on Linked In. At the click of a button, we can act. The ways in which those clusters are interconnected. Your former colleagues, your current colleagues, the migration over time of people from one cluster to another, so that's proven to be really interesting. I think for the biggest reason of all is because of the power in the data. It's a visualization of what we've been talking about tonight in terms of how valuable data can be. It's one thing to say it; it's another thing to see it. And you're starting to see this pretty material proliferation of infographics on the web, and I think we've just scratched the surface. How we make data interesting and insightful and most importantly easy to consume, and along those lines, something that we've just now started to roll out, which I mentioned in passing, I mentioned.... ARI EMANUEL: What tool do you use for that? JEFF WEINER: The data visualization? It's proprietary tools. Some of it was open source, and then we added a proprietary layer on top, and that comes back to world class talent. Our data scientists came up with that, and it's brilliant stuff. The other example I'll give you in terms of leveraging data and practical application. When I was at school, when I was at Wharton undergrad, Wharton had a wonderful career center. I'm sure it still does, and to start to apply for jobs, you went down, you trekked down to the career center, you busted out this 3-ring binder that was this thick that had like coffee stains; it was ripped up. Sorry Wharton, it's true. And if you started thumbing through that to look for the kids of companies you'd be interested in potentially working for, then you'd go back up to your room, you'd pick a stock piece of paper, you'd create a resume, you'd get all of your closest friends to edit the resume, then you'd go back to the career center, you'd drop it into slots of the companies you were interested in working for, and then you'd wait for them to get back to you. Wharton undergrad would post a list of the interview schedule. You may be on it; you may not be on it. You interview, and hopefully get a job. Today we've got tools that will enable you to go online onto Linked In, and you'll be able to see the career path of every alumni who went to your school, by year of graduation, where they currently are, what companies they work for, how they got there, what they studied, and how you're connected to them. So at the click of a button, you can get your foot in the door at those companies. You can connect with a new mentor, and then, ultimately, we want to enable you to click one button and apply for the job, without ever having to touch a piece of paper. So stay tuned for things like that. ARI EMANUEL: We don't do anything like that. I mean, shit that's KARA FISHER: He goes to lunch at the Polo Lounge. You go to lunch, run into Mark Wahlberg. ARI EMANUEL: Well, I talked about some of the stuff we're doing on the digital side, but you know really what we're doing right now is most of our stuff comes from the assistants in a weird way, for all the new ideas that we're looking for. So once a month there's a bunch of us, so once a month, and we started this in the book area, they run the meeting. They talk about all the interesting things out there and all the things that are happening that kind of that none of us old time fogies would know about, and now that's happening throughout the company. And there's a bunch of other stuff that we're doing. But I don't like to share information, so that's one thing that we're doing that's actually been very, very helpful. Kind of one it's ? talent, two it's showing us sites and people that we've taken from the web, and we've sold books with them, and we've sold tv shows, so those are some of the things we're doing. KARA SWISHER: Have you had one successful really you consider successful television show from the internet or movie or? ARI EMANUEL: We sold, what was that one about the family photos? We sold that as a book, and now we're selling as a reality show. KARA SWISHER: Anything big that you've seen yet? ARI EMANUEL: I think that's pretty big. What's your definition? KARA SWISHER: Huge. I don't know. ARI EMANUEL: No. Not yet. KARA SWISHER: That one about the blue people. On those news corp ads. I'm drawing a blank. Titanic, that's a big one. Something like that. Nothing yet? ARI EMANUEL: No. no. Thank you everybody. KARA SWISHER: Thank you so much. STEVE BENGSTEN?: On behalf of the Churchill Club, and our audience, Ari, Jeff, and Kara thanks so much for spending our evening with us. This has been memorable and inspiring, and I just wanted to clarify, we've not paid anyone or hacked any phones tonight. Thanks again to Hill & Noll and the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and San Francisco for their support. And thank you very much for being a great audience. Drive safely. Good night.