Jim Berk

>> Hello.

[ Applause ]

Thank you for joining us this afternoon at the Valley Performing Arts Center. We are very pleased today to partner with the Mike Curb College of Arts, Media, and Communication for today's Commerce of Creativity Distinguished Speaker series. There's a few people I want to quickly introduce. They are folks who make events like this possible. The Dean of the Mike Curb College, Jay Kvapil. The Vice-President of advancement for CSUN, Rob Gunsalus. And the gentleman who I was going to call the "The Brainchild" of the Commerce of Creativity Distinguished Speaker series, but I was told he should be called "The Co-Brainchild" ... which is a new phrase. The co-brainchild is Tom White. So thank you to those gentlemen for making this afternoon possible.

[ Applause ]

The Commerce of Creativity Distinguished Speaker series exemplifies individuals who engage in impactful communication and artful business and through that really changed the world and personally, I can think of few individuals who exemplify those qualities more than CSUN alum Jim Berk. It is true and has been said amongst my friends that one of the things that makes me a boring person maybe to some folks is I love to stay home on a weekend and watch a documentary film. It really is, it is. I'm a huge fan of all of Participant Media's documentary films, for example, and I think I've seen almost their entire catalog. So, in having the opportunity today to introduce the gentleman who made so much of those films, it's a great pleasure to tell you a little bit about him before that chapter in his life. Jim Berk was born and was a resident of the San Fernando Valley, of course, he was a CSUN alum where he received a BA in music. Immediately after leaving CSUN, he became an LAUSD music teacher and then became the youngest principal at 29 years old ever in the history of the Los Angeles Unified School District. After being an educator, in a way, Jim continued to educate but in a very different manner. He went on to become the, at the helm of a number of important media companies which eventually landed him as the CEO of Participant Media. Participant Media is and I'm going quote a global entertainment company "focusing on socially relevant content in film, television, publishing and online media" and, as I said, I think I've seen their entire catalog but a few of the films that you may know Participant Media for best are, of course this year's Oscar winner for best documentary "Citizenfour." The very first Participate film I saw I think was "Goodnight and Good Luck", no actually "Inconvenient Truth" was the first. "Goodnight and Good Luck" came after that and if you've never heard the soundtrack for "Goodnight and Good Luck" by the way I'd highly recommend it, it's a great soundtrack. It's always in my car. And other films like "Lincoln" and "The Help", so in the world of impactful communication and artful business it's my great pleasure to welcome to VPAC and CSUN, Jim Berk.

[ Applause ]

>> Thank you.

[ Applause ]

Thank you. Thanks a lot. Good afternoon everybody. How are you?

>> Good.

>> You there? Good, good, good. We'll try to make this a little bit more interactive if that's okay with you and maybe even a little bit more casual if we could. My name is Jim Berk, as [inaudible] was so nice to mention and I'm very pleased to be here and thought we'd just spend a little time kind of hang out a bit talking a little bit really about disruption and uncertainty and they're kind of the hallmarks of the media landscape right now. They're actually some of the attributes that define millennials which is most of the people in the audience and actually described my career in some ways too when we talk about disruption and uncertainty. So, in thinking about how best to approach this conversation, I thought it might be illustrative to go through my career in the context of why I made the choices that I've made and how each experience prepared and paved the way for the next one. Then I thought we'd just spend a little time and touch on the current state of disruption of media technology, music, film, the social impact area, television, digital and arts education and look at the mega trends and how they're impacting the way they are to create a distributed, consumed and taught. And then finally, really how does this all apply to you? You're entering a workforce in the next 5 years, so really what does this all mean in the world that you inhabit? But, before we jump into this I thought that we'd, you know, I'd start with a little bit of a disclaimer by quoting a gentleman named William Goldman who is a very big film critic and writer in the film business and he wrote a quote that became famous and was actually used by a lot of people throughout the years, which simply says "Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows first certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and if you're lucky an educated one." So, I like this quote for today because it applies to everything I'm about to say. What you're going to hear is a world view based on my experience. None of it, some it or a lot of it might provide fodder for a thought for you, so please take whatever feels right to heart and feel free to forget all the rest. You really want to just customize what I'm saying to really apply to your particular life cause you'll find out as we talk a little bit about my path everybody's is quite different and mine was a bit unique, as aforementioned I have a BA from CSUN and also from CSUN I have a California teaching credential; this is true but the way I came to CSUN was a bit unconventional and actually started what would say a different and unique path. I was a proud band geek. I was at Birmingham High School for any of you who are Valley kids.

>> Yeah!

>> Oh, there we go. Alright we got a, we used to be called Birmingham Braves and they don't allow that to it anymore, that's not socially correct but like many kids in the valley I went to UCLA actually. That was the school I started and even though; I loved the music and like many Jewish kids I was going to be a lawyer cause that's what Jewish kids in the valley did pretty much back then. And a, you know, UCLA had a good music department but it had a great law school, but during my freshman year I was, realized I was always happy when I was playing music in a band or leading a band and I also realized that I had this epiphany that teachers are, at least to me, were really cool people and I decided to become a teacher. I remember when I told my mother, you know, I said "Listen, I'm going to become a teacher" and, you know, she said only one thing, "Do you know how much teachers make?" And I said, "Yes." I had no idea by the way, I said, "Of course I do!" you know and she said well, "Good luck to you then" you know and so went to UCLA to the school, the undergraduate school of education and said, "Look I want to be a music teacher. I'm really excited about this." This is great, you can become an ethnomusicologist major, you know, or world music and you'll finish your bachelor and then you'll take another 2 year program after that and there's no way to accelerate it and this is the process and you'll go through this process. And I realized that in order to move quicker that I would have to change things up and look at different alternatives and that's where Northridge came into the picture. So, it was my first counterintuitive decision to leave UCLA where I was on a partial music scholarship planning to become a lawyer and make a make a good living and instead to transfer to CSUN to do a combined BA in music and teaching credential which is usually, you know, a 4 to 6 year program but I wanted to do in 3 years. Now, on paper UCLA might have been the "better school" but for me, CSUN was the best school to study music. It had a better music department, it had a more customized program for me that would allow me to become a teacher faster and give me the training that I needed. But, there was one downside to going to Northridge at that time. Now, on the hallowed grounds where this gorgeous auditorium sits was a very, very important piece of grass. It was a piece of grass used by the music department because it was the practice field for the Mighty Matador Marching Band which was a 180 piece marching band that would play for the Matador football team which had maybe 80 people at the games at Devonshire Downs. Nobody wanted to be in the Matador Marching Band. We didn't even wear uniforms. But it was a requirement at that time in the music department to be in the band, so the Matador Marching Band consisted of people probably doing inappropriate thing before the game; going to the game and walking out in the middle of the field and then playing the hell out of some really great jazz charts, you know, for as I said a 100 people in the stands. It was a, just a, you know, just something we had to take on as a responsibility. I'm pleased to say this auditorium now since that and will guarantee that there will never be a Matador Marching Band which is a good thing, so you want that. It was not a high point for the UCLA, for the CSUN music department but, so here we are at CSUN. I'm excited, I'm maybe you can tell a little bit of a hyper kid, I'm organized, I'm proactive, I'm upbeat, I'm making friends with the professors, I'm a little energetic which is code for probably annoying and it was a, you know, but it was a big change going from one school to the other but it didn't matter I had a great time. I immediately became friendly with 3 of the trumpet players. I was a trumpet player, so 4 trumpet players, bad combination. Rented a house in the area like probably many of you've done, you know, rented a van like many of you do. The guys strong-armed me out of the van which was in my name, you know, left me last, move their stuff into the house first. I was really pissed. First day, got there finally got the van, went to get my stuff, got there, drove up, fire engines out front, they had burnt the house to the ground. So, it was electrical wiring issue, they didn't do it but and everyone was fine, the house was not. I kind of laughed my ass off because sometimes I've learned finishing last is really finishing first, it just depends on the circumstances and the outlook. But seriously, what mattered about my time here was that I developed a close relationship with a few professors and created work opportunities outside of school that I knew would prepare me for what I wanted to do. Now, I didn't make any money in most of those work opportunities. I got little stipends. I became the assistant band director at Kennedy High School nearby and then I was an assistant band director of the LA City Marching Band which basically meant I ran and got lunch for the other band directors and got to do some of the breakout sectional rehearsals. But, my relationship with those teachers, my experience with those programs and my relationship with the professors like Professor Delward [assumed spelling] and the dean of the music school at the time, these gave me a profile internally within the school and it also gave me a profile externally. I didn't realize what I was doing at the time, but those things led to me getting an inside track to a job offer for a school in LA Unified School District before I graduated and so, I realized that this was a critical first step. Opportunities are created when you place yourself in positions in which you can be on the radar and you have advocates out there in the marketplace advocating for you. I call them champions. You need champions who believe in you and will block and tackle cause everybody needs that support at some point. Anybody who says they did it on their own is full of it, okay, you always need somebody out there in the marketplace who's going to help you and as I said, Bod Delward, the dean of the school, a couple of the professors here, these people are the ones who were my champions and got me my first spot. So, when I graduated I headed off to become the new instrumental music teacher at Carson High School in South Los Angeles. And Carson is a real working class community. It has a proud tradition for one of the finest football teams in the country, 20,000 people would show up to the football games and no tradition for instrumental music. In fact, the prior music teacher who I was taking over for had left a year earlier after all the instruments and most of the band uniforms had been stolen and sold off. There was one music class run by the choir teacher who was threatening to quite if he had to lower himself to teach instrumental music again and that was the program I walked into. Now, looking back I was ignorant and naÔve about the conditions of the program but I had, I realized I had two things going for me. First, I believed in my ability to perform cause I had done all of those hours with those outside activities and I actually had listened to the classes at Northridge that really were teaching me the skillset that I needed to actually be able to be a teacher of music and I also had a champion. This school was assistant principal, she believed in the school, the kids and the potential of the program and for me and I loved being a teacher. It was amazing, amazing fulfilling job. I couldn't wait to go to work. Weekends were a drag for me. Just to get through the weekends to get back to school on a Monday and I was completely obsessed with teaching and in 5 years the kids and I we built Carson to be one of the top 5 programs in the state and one of the most highly regarded ones in terms of recognition, awards and 4 time LAC champs and it was a great wonderful program. Kids traveling who had never traveled before doing amazing things and keeping their grades up, so you know, I realized who needed to become a lawyer. I was now earning as a teacher $9761 per year and, but I also got another $1730 what was called Teacher Urban Incentive Pay which we called Compat Pay cause it was pay for teachers to teach in certain schools that they couldn't get teachers to teach at. But again, as I said I didn't notice any of that and off we went. I had a great time, fantastic experience and you know when you're young you don't worry as much about money and actually that matters because it really does figure itself out in success, you know, when you're successful the money follows and more than enough that you'll be very happy with. If you focus on it in the early years you tend to lose sight of what really matters and in so being the teacher was the first of many of what I call my favorite jobs I had that I never thought about leaving. But I was asked after about 5 years to create a magnet school at a high school that they were rumored to be closing. Now, the assistant principal I had mentioned that was my champion at Carson became the principal at this high school and this high school was Hamilton High School in West Los Angeles and we got a Yankee over there, maybe. And they wanted to create a fame school like that one in LaGuardia School for the arts in New York, they wanted to create that version here in Los Angeles and have some magnets and, you know, I had this great position at, excuse me, at Carson and great job security and I was, you know, a bit of a man on campus there but it, and it was extremely bittersweet to leave but I had the opportunity to lead the creation of a new school that would expand region impact and that was compelling, it stirred something in me about wanting to have a larger impact. So, I went to Hamilton and convinced some amazing music teachers to join with me and we wrote the curriculum, hired teachers and I set out to recruit the first class, the class of what would become the Hamilton Academy of Music. Now, most of the music teachers across the school district were against the school and there was some really good reasons as a whole intellectual discussion about magnets and whether they are brain-drains and pull people from one school to the other but at the time when all these music programs were closing and collapsing at the school district, this was a way to try to provide access to a quality music program for many schools that didn't have them. But the junior high school teachers wanted nothing to do with it and refused to give the kids applications, so I drove many times with my wife, at the time we were just married, and I drove to every one of the 72 junior high schools in Los Angeles Unified School District at the time and spent a half a day making presentations to all the performance groups. Now, to get on campus it took directive from the deputy superintendent of magnets a really great guy name Ted Alexander and he, that allowed me to get onto the campuses and he was, again, definitely a champion; I talk about these champions and it'll be constant throughout my conversation with you today and he was champion at that time and we opened! With 425 students who quickly grew to a 1000 students and they had about 2500 applicants, kids who got on the bus at 5:50 in the morning and got home at 6:50-6:30-7 O'clock at night and they went to school until 4:30 pm every day before the after school activities started. And they had to take theory, music, history, piano, 2 performance ensembles each semester as well as a full college prep academic load. We had 17 performance groups, 97% graduation rate, 98% matriculation to college rate but the interesting thing is most of the kids who went there did not want to study music in college, but music was the thing that made them want to go to school. It was the thread, it was the important thing to them and that's why they were willing to go to a school like that, it distinguished them and it was getting them access and entre into really great universities and what's exciting for me is the school 28 years later still exist and is going strong. I'll be there next week with a couple of the guys from Red Hot Chili Peppers and some record executives to actually pick the winners for what will be the 4 year scholarships that will be awarded to a half a dozen kids at the school, so it's really exciting that they're, that school all these years still goes on. And you'll find as you go through your career something that's really compelling and exciting and powerful is not when something falters when you leave but when something actually grows and expands and continues to flourish. It makes you feel really good about the work and the time that you've spent. So, 3 years later at Hamilton Academy of Music my champion, that principal retired and that was an issue for me because that person, Betty [inaudible] gave me the latitude trust and support to lead the magnet program. So, rather than work for a new principal which wasn't really appealing to me or leave which was another opportunity and just go work at another music magnet somewhere, I did what I thought was something a little bit unconventional at the time and probably could be quite humiliating, I applied to be the principal. Now, my passion is music and this was my first step leaving music and moving away from a direct connection to it but I thought I could have a chance to make a greater impact by running the institution that housed the program of the program itself and that, again, was appealing to me so at that time, you know, to be a principal in a public school district like Los Angeles you had to have to a master's degree and a public administrator's credential which I earned while I was teaching at Carson going to night school and summer school and weekends. And you would then have to take this 3 part principal exam. It was a massive program at the time. It included a mock interview with retired principals who played angry parents, lawyers and district officials who would try to trip you up as you were taped in this one hour conversation, meeting that you have with these people to see how you would handle it and then you were put at a desk with an in-basket and you had 3 hours to go through a paper in-basket or what would be an email basket now, and you had to handwrite all the memos and the responses to what all the problems from a teacher who hit a kid to a parent who had complained about this and you had to prioritize what were the important things and what would you do. What agency would you go to? How would you handle this? And then you had to take a multiple choice test on state law, administrative law it was a 300 question test and so then it went to committee, they review the results and then 20 people would be put on it in a list and if you're on the list then you could get selected to be a principal at a high school. So, the challenges for me were 2fold, one my age. I was, aforementioned I was 29, 28 actually when I applied and the average age of a principal at the school district at that time was a little under 60 years old. So, it was definitely an issue and also the established principals and music administrators thought I had not paid my dues, that I was just some young kid up-star, you know, trying to gain the system and move ahead and I remember being told, "You don't understand how the system works, just do your job and in 10-15 years you can reconsider but you have to wait, you have to take your place in line." And I remember talking to one of my champions, you know, and as I mentioned I had a few in the district and a couple board members [inaudible], Mark Slavkin [assumed spelling], and Deputy Superintendent Ted Alexander, and [inaudible] Thompson, and [foreign name] and these folks and a couple warned me that I would absolutely have very little chance of making the cut cause there were going to be 600 plus applicants. But, they said you know, why not try it? It's good practice and I figured kind of the first time what have I got to lose and kind of that question has become a hallmark for me of a question I ask myself a lot of times moving forward and I thought what do I have to lose so I'll make a fool of myself, so I won't make a list, I'll waste some time but it's an opportunity I had to see and so I, you know, risking rejection was worth it. I made the list and became the principal at Hamilton High School. So, it was really cool to become the youngest principal, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever. It didn't, that's not what mattered. What did matter was I really didn't have a lot of the experience in district bureaucracy and politics. And so there was a deep learning curve that was, you know, I had to really get around pretty quickly but on the other hand that ignorance really worked in my favor because I didn't understand a lot of that and I spent most of my time focusing on what many of the educators in the room know is a child-centered approach which is whatever decision you make you make it on what's in the best interest of the child, so it's not what's in the best interest of the teacher, the administrators, the school, the community, the district it's what's in the best interest of the child and that's kind of that filter that you work through. That became kind of a filter that I used in every single job and one of the things I should mention that most of what I learned in terms of leadership and running companies and some have been as large as, you know, about 10,000 employees, I learned as a teacher. I actually learned that skillset as a teacher and we'll touch a little bit later on. So, the, I had a blast at Hamilton. Great school, 2500 students, the school here was rumored to be closed it was, you know, busting at the seams, they're bringing you know, bungalows on the campus to just keep up with the growth in enrollment and scores were going up and it was a top performing school again and it was fantastic, and I'm a tenured principal, so I could be at Hamilton for the rest of my life. I had a guaranteed job in a great school. I had the master key, better yet the whole little pull chain and the keys I could go anywhere it was great. And, you know, I'd be crazy to leave something that fantastic and I never even thought about doing that, you know, the school, the teacher, everything was an amazing opportunity but an opportunity evolved which really evolved over a couple of years which led to, again, another very bittersweet difficult decision and that was with the Grammys. Now, the Grammys and Hamilton Academy of Music, the magnet partnered to create a new program that created called Grammy in the Schools. And this where professionals from the community would come in and spend a day teaching seminars, master classes, you've all been to some of these probably at schools to see the different versions of them and they conducted ensembles at the end of the day and the record company executives came in and kids were assigned to labels and got managers and it was a really kind of a big event and the program spread to dozens of cities across the country and still goes on at the Grammys today. And the head of the Grammys at the time, the chairman I would meet and we'd visit, you know, come to the school and he'd take me to lunch and he became one of these champions; somebody who was just a very much in my corner. And I liked to go lunch with him because I usually ate in the teacher's cafeteria, so instead having a grilled cheese soaked in butter, I was able to go one of these nicer restaurants like people in the entertainment business go to and we'd go to this nice restaurant and he'd tell me about the vision and the dream of the academy and all the things he wanted to do, the Recording Academy and I'd say thanks for lunch and he's say "Why don't you come and join us?" I'd say, "No, I got the coolest job in the world." And this went on for over 2 years. So, we then had a Grammy in the schools and went to lunch one day and Mike said, "Do me a favor, you're the officer on 7 in the morning, yeah?" I said, "Yeah, around that time." He said, "Well, just get there 15 minutes early, go the fax machine which what the students don't know is a fax machine is where you put a piece of paper into something and the modem dials, anyway. So, I go the fax machine and he says, "I'm going to send you an offer. Just look at it. Just, you'll be flattered. Don't worry about it. You'll just be flattered. It's a nice thing." And I said, "Okay" and when I got to work the next morning, didn't think twice about it, go to the fax machine, piece of paper came up, my green, you know, Chief Executive of the Grant and National Academy of Arts and Sciences, his stationary there was nothing on it, it was blank. So, I called Mike up and said, "Hey, Mike you know there's nothing on the piece of paper. Were you trying to send me something?" He goes, "Yeah, I sent it to you. That's my offer." And I said, "Well, there's nothing on it." He said, "I know. Go home tonight, talk to your wife and write down what it would take for you to go there." And I went, "Okay" and using my great intellect and experience my wife and I sat down and we were like, we were excited and we were like, we're going to, I said "We're going to ask for like $30,000 more a year and a car allowance and a 3 year contract" and we were, I mean, you know we didn't have to ask anybody's advice we were smart than anybody out there. We'd do this stuff and he would never agree to something like this not in a million years. And, you know, this was lavish, this was crazy. Now, remember my form of reference was public education, you know, and so we sent it back. He said send it to him the next morning, I sent him it the next morning and a minute later came back with his signature across it. And immediately I learned a valuable lesson, which is one do your research and never ever, ever negotiate against yourself which is what had did. He later reminded me that, you know, he would have paid much more but I didn't know what private sector market rates were and I should have never made the first offer, I should have let him make the first offer. But, the reality is it wasn't about money, what was happening was it, what convinced me to walk away was this idea of, you know, remember this tenure, a wonderful position, amazing opportunity, a job I didn't want to leave but the Grammys, I had a chance to do what I was doing at Hammy, Hamilton for music and expanded it to a national level and that's what was exciting to me. I mean, we could become an advocacy organization for music education, musicians, increase funding, changing laws, protecting programming. I mean, looking back I realized that that was the opportunity that fed my desire to play in a bigger field and have a wider impact. And so, again very bittersweet but I took the job and I thought this would be a real exciting opportunity to maybe it's not safe; what did I have to lose? I had a lot to lose. I had an amazing position but what did I really have to lose? Could I go back and be a teacher? Could I go back and be a principal? Maybe not there but I had the experience, I had the expertise, I had the reputation, so I would lose the comfort but I would take a shot at something that might provide me with a greater opportunity. And so, I went over to NARAS, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, NARAS the Grammys to become the founding executive director for what is now the Grammy Foundation of MisiCares Foundation and lead all their national education and professional development programming. And I still remember I was driving; so I lived in, Hamilton High School is in Beverlywood, Cheviot Hills area. I live right in Cheviot Hills at the time, a mile from the school. So, really in the middle of the community and we drove to the temporary offices. I drove the first day which were in Burbank, in beautiful downtown Burbank and I was put in a leftover office cause they were moving to nice offices in West L.A. but it would be about 8 months, so here I go I drive there in my new BMW cause I got a car allowance and I park in my little space, it's all new to me, and have a nice meeting with the guy who hired me and then was shown up to another floor to an empty office with 2 people in it with a temp assistant, rental furniture and 1 program manager and I that morning [inaudible] and that was it. And I sat there in this spare office and said, "I'm the biggest f-ing idiot that ever lived." This was a huge mistake and why would I ever leave something as amazing as Hamilton? And I remember I left the office for lunch and instead of going to eat I took a walk and called my wife and said, "I really screwed up big time." You know, and there's no way to get my principal job back. They were already searching for another principal and she reminded me that you make your opportunities and helped me refocus and not of what I gave up but to embrace the uncertainty of what would be and this concept of uncertainty is a really, it's going to be a thread that's going to live in very much in your lives as you look at your own careers because it really, it's not a bad thing, it's actually a very good exciting thing and I also realized that at that point that negativity brings on negative results, so I know it sounds corny to say that but it actually for me, for my type of personality, that mattered. I can't be a pessimist, I have to be an optimist because I believe that I'm thinking and went back to the office, looked at a blank whitboard and said, "Okay, I have the coolest opportunity the world." I don't know if believed it but I said it. I said it out loud that I, and we, I started to lay-out what it could look like to create programs that would impact a lot of music students across the country and learn a new area of business. And I knew I'd have access to people, institutions, professionals I would never have had at Hamilton. And it would open me up to a wider world outside of just this one bubble, so in the subsequent months identified a few championships, created this blueprint and then hit the road to the chapters across the country and sponsors to get support to underwrite this and it turned out to be a wonderful job and critical to what would come next. So, there everything's going great, having a wonderful time and I was recruited from the Grammys to become the global president and CEO for Hard Rock CafÈ international. Now, this was a big and very unconventional opportunity for me. I would have never thought of myself as a viable candidate to run a global restaurant company and I mean the only thing I knew about food was I really liked to eat it, you know, other than that I mean I had no experience whatsoever and, but I subsequently learned that the chairman of the parent company which is called Rhine Group a big entertainment company with film and odia and cinemas and Pinewood Studios and, you know, very footsy which is top 100 companies in the London stock exchange. I said, I learned that what attracted them to me was my background to music. It was the music that they were after, it was the idea of being around a big brand like the Grammys and they wanted move Hard Rock which was having some trouble back towards it's branded roots and to really try to turn the business around. I hit off with the chairman of the parent company who, again, became a champion and this champion is what really is that throw line all the way through this it really matters. So, my wife and I along with our 2 young daughters packed up the house and we moved from the city we loved Los Angeles to the cultural Capitol of the Unite States. We moved to Orlando. So, given that I, you know, didn't have any relationships in Orlando, any connections in Orlando, any experience in the restaurant business, I realized that I needed to enter this job with a couple things. First a really big sense of humility and I did this as something as a really good organizer a writer says named Richard Covey and I said, "I'm going to first seek to understand and then be a understood." And it even started with pulling a shift every month at the cafes, so what I would do is I would fly once a month to London for the parent company executive board meetings, you'd dress up on black tie after being in a suit all day, go to the board dinner, get back at 10 O'clock to the hotel, put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, get to the Hard Rock on old Park Lane in London at about 11 O'clock, pull a 4-hour shift with 2-hour cleanup at the cafÈ, so I might be a host, expo, busboy, cook. I was not allowed to bartend too often because I over-poured the drinks and screwed up the liquor costs, but you know merch sales and then go out to the pub with the employees for till 2-3, for 2 to 3 hours afterwards and I did this every month all the way through the half a decade I was at Hard Rock and it was important because I needed to get a sense of what it was like to be on the frontline. I needed to understand what it was. It couldn't be paper. It couldn't be, it couldn't be a presentation. It couldn't be a book I read. I really needed to log those hours like in a wonderful book called "Outliers" where you, you know, you have to, you have to log those 10,000 hours. You have to spend the time actually doing the work to actually understand what something's like from the, like and have that sense of empathy. And, you know, second I realized that the same leadership skills as I said that I had in these other businesses from being a teacher and at Hamilton as a principal and then the Academy, really applied to every business and so I had a sense of confidence that it really was the same thing. I'm talking about the ability to learn, assess, organize, implement, and lead. And so, you know, I applied that skillset to Hard Rock and we went back to food made onsite rather than brought in frozen. We increased quality, we lowered prices, we added back you know a busboys to improve the service, we established volunteer programs at every cafÈ to live the mottos of "love all, serve all and all as one" and a host of other improvements, you know, that we the team that we all came up with together when they felt empowered. In over 5 years we built this company and a half a billion dollar restaurant and merchandise company with operations in 29 countries and hotels, casinos, live performance venues around the world which ultimately was sold for almost a billion dollars and continues to do well to this day. So, Hard Rock CafÈ was totally the best job every, I mean, it was sex, drugs, rock and roll without the sex and drugs but it was just the rock and roll but it was a great music job and I had a great, great time and amazing people and I never, ever, this one for sure, I know I kept saying it, I have no credibility, I was never going to leave that job. And a head owner approached me do, do this on occasion, approached me at becoming a presidency over a company I had never heard of but it was a New York stock exchange publically listed hotel and vacation ownership company. In fact, it was the largest one in the world and I thanked him and said I'm not interested. Don't even bother sending materials and why would anybody [inaudible] to leave Hard Rock CafÈ? And 2 weeks later he called the house again to make kind of that last ditch, "Are you really sure, I just wanted to check with you." I wasn't home. He got my wife. And my wife said, "Oh! Of course. Send over the materials. He'd be happy to look at them." And that night we were packing for that evening to, we were going to Bali for the opening of the Hard Rock Hotel in Bali on Kuta Beach and she said, "Oh, you have these materials to look over on the plane, they sent them over. I told them that you'd want to see them." And she said to me, "What have you got to lose?" Threw my own question in my face and there is an important lesson here and if you don't know this, if you're not, you know, connected to a partner or a spouse yet, you'll learn this. They're always right even when they're wrong they're always right. But seriously I have to tell you, there is a lesson here and that is when there's somebody who generally cares about you in your life, doesn't have to be a spouse or partner, but is not emotionally connected to you to what it is that you're looking at they have that little bit of distance. They can look at things differently than you might look at them. And they have the ability to see a bigger picture that you might not see. I rejected that opportunity out of hand. I had no interest in that. My wife saw an opportunity for me to have a larger leadership role and maybe expand my horizon and thought that maybe I wouldn't want to be 25 years as the CEO if Hard Rock CafÈ and that this could be an interesting opportunity. She didn't know, but she thought it was worth at least looking at and I realized that I had this great gig but this could be a really, really cool thing. I would learn the film business because I had a big film piece. I would learn, you know, the theme park and business and I would learn the hospitality business and I could run a public company versus a division of a larger company which I what I was doing now, so again, a few months later after a bittersweet farewell I went to Fairfield and found that a different business models sparked some different things inside you and I really enjoyed the business elements. I enjoyed the company and great champions on the board and we ultimately sold the company for close to a billion dollars to a company called Cendant which was a big New York hospitality company and the company continues to do really well to this day. So, after the sale of Fairfield I was approached to run a segment of a private equity firm called Griffin Colleges and, again, it exposed me to a different business environment but it's a whole different world private equity. It's fascinating. That's a whole other presentation with folks in business, but suffice to say I enjoyed the transactions and learning that new market segment and we ultimately merged that company to another company and when that was announced I was approached by a headhunter to me a guy by the name of Jeff Skoll. Now, Jeff was the first employee in the present of eBay. He made billions and he left and he decided to focus the rest of his life on, and most of his wealth on positive social change. Now, I had not heard of Jeff to be honest and before we met I was intrigued but also a little bit suspect because most people don't come to Hollywood to make films, to make socially relevant movies and, you know, so I wondered a bit but midway through our first meeting I realized that his intentions were authentic. He really wanted to disrupt the conventional wisdom and view about art and commerce and use media as an agent for social change. So, he talked about a double bottom line, social impact and financial sustainability and this to me sparked a real interest. It was a very compelling vision. However, the division was also a bit daunting, I mean, making a bad movie is really, really hard; just getting a movie made is really, really hard. Making a good movie is even harder. Making a good socially relevant film, is damn near impossible and then but making a good socially relevant financially successful slate of films, you know, is kind of borderline crazy, you know, but he was up for this and he believed in it because he had an interest that was really beyond just making money. So, I was sold and Jeff proved himself to be a champion from the first days. And when I joined we had 20 employees and the company had been around for about 18 months, 2 years and Participant had now today, you know, and I left just a few weeks ago has a little over 220 employees and a TV channel called Pivot in some 48 million homes cable TV channel and it's been part of over 60 feature films and a social impact website called takepart.com and it's impacting millions of people in a way that they live their lives and it's having a profound effect on the world around us. So, it was really interesting. One of the things that really came clear during my almost 9 years at Participant was that it would set it apart was its authenticity, its clarity of purpose and its market position. They've established themselves as a trusted source for socially relevant content. People clearly understood their product, socially relevant content and they lead the segment of socially relevant content, so it was great to help Jeff see that vision and be part of that vision and with a great management team and I had no doubt over the next 10 years as they now moved to their next phase and expanded it will be every bit as successful as the first. Like every job, leaving is very bittersweet and difficult but as I said after almost 9 years for me, the timing was right for a change. I'm now where I want to build something that doesn't even exist yet. Haven't even been thought of in which I'm the owner as opposed to working for somebody else but that's where I am on my career track and the thing that excites me, and again, what do I figure? What have I got to lose? So, for those in the audience who maybe don't have your career sorted out or your job and thinking about starting a career, we're kind of in a sense in the same boat right now. You know, we're kind of thinking about creating what's next. You don't find what's next, you have to create what's next and you have to create those opportunities and that's what excites me about this continuous state of disruption that exists in the media landscape in the media world itself. Traditional systems for the creation and distribution of entertainment which a lot of people call IP, intellectual property are shifting dramatically due to technology and the growth of global markets. Shifting in a way that has never been seen before, just in film for example. It used to be that 70% of the theatrical revenue of a film was generated in the U.S. and 30% was generated from international sources. It's flipped now and it's heading to 80/20. Domestic box office is pretty much flat year on year, and by the way, the reason it's even flat and will continue to be that way is because unlike the music business what has the film business done? Your theaters which were single theaters, mono sound moved to stereo sound, what happened? Dolby, DHX, stadium seating, reserved seats, gourmet food, bigger screens, 3D, all these things kept changing the music experience. What happened to the CD market at the same time? Fifteen ninety-five, 1695, 1795, 1895 nothing changed. The products stayed the same. The experience stayed the same. That's why music keeps you [inaudible] music do well but the market, the distribution market collapsed and we'll talk just a little bit about that. So, you've got a solid, stable theatrical market but you've got this growing robust international market. Now, in the television world your have cable viewership is dropping and I mean dropping. All the indicators are showing that. If I asked all the students that here how many of you have cable versus how many of you are over the top which means you're unhooked to a linear cable channel network, you know, you're getting your stuff through Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, illegal, what, you know, here you are, excuse me, you are finding ways to get their product in a different manner than the traditional system. So, you've got this viewership dropping and but yet in the DVD and CD the other ancillary methods in which content was distributed, collapsing but something weird is happening juxtaposed against that you're watching more content than you ever watched in your life. So, the systems, the traditional systems for distribution are imploding, collapsing, disappearing with a couple exceptions, theatrical, stable, live music stable because people always will want at collective viewing experience and you've got these traditional systems of distribution of IP of content disappearing and the emerging stuff that's coming up isn't replacing it a revenue model. That's the disruption that you're seeing and that's, you know, it's fascinating cause we're talking about watching more content ever than any time in history. I mean, television in a midst of a golden age, right? In my day we didn't have that and you can play that game and you'd hear about all these things, they were on 20, 30, 40 year cycles for change and certain ways technology in consumption was happening. Now, it's condensed, it's under 10 years. If you're in you're in 20s which most of are, except for a few people in the second row in the center but I won't say who, not my wife that I can tell you but she's in her 20s. They, you know, their, you know, you're growing up, they grew in a different world than you. When you were a, you know, 10 years difference so we're talking about a younger brother or sister or somebody you know who's 10 different, you know what? Here are things you didn't have they have with growing up. You didn't have Netflix growing up. Netflix was around, does anyone know when Netflix was formed? It was 2007, you know, Facebook 2004; Netflix was a DVD mailer company who was insane to try to do streaming. Ask them what percentage of their business is DVD, you know, distribution remember through the mail getting those DVDs, it's virtually nothing. iPhones 2007. iPad 2010 these are all things that kids who are 10 or 12 years are growing up with now, you'd have to say well in my day we didn't have these things. That's the condense that's happened. That's what so amazing and I can go on and on and on, it's crazy. I mean Uber, you know, you didn't have Uber; when I was a kid in high school we didn't have Uber, you know, I mean it's a completely different world, so this constant disruption of the marketplace has had a lot of impact on your generation and that's, as I said, most of you and there's a lot of you by the way more than just in the room right now. There's actually a 100 million in the United States and you're the largest and arguably most influential generation on the planet right now. But you're also the hardest to understand, you know, you kind of, it's interesting cause you've shaped by both opportunity and crisis; 9/11, climate change, safety concerns, but at the same time, opportunity. Companies that didn't exist worth billions of dollars, people becoming billionaires in a year, 18 months, 2 years. Silicon Valley is an industry think of what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. But you're also highly cared for your parents which is interesting versus generationally it was more like get out there on your own, there's a little bit more of comfortable hugging going on. I don't know if this will make you happy or freak you out but a little over 70% of you, so think about how many that means in this room in this age group who live at home on and off until your late 20s, but on the other hand you like your parents, so it's not about getting out the house as quickly as I can. You're comfortable going home to be able to save money to be able to go out, so again, it's different; different generation. You're the first generation in the history of the world to leisure-like publically. Nobody else does what you do. You develop manager identities online happily revealing all the details about yourself and you like to explore independently but you just like labels and you don't trust people as much and unlike other generation before you, you're open to changing jobs. You don't look at tenure or the concept of one job, one company as the most important professional goal but given where you are today, I think the most important identifier of your age group is you defining success differently than other generations. You want authentic experiences that in to work for companies you actually like and trust or you just prefer to start your own and not be bothered with conventional business. So, you want success more on your own terms and while you like nice things, it's not about having the biggest home. You're the first generation that not only says, I don't believe I will do as well as my parents, I don't really care. I don't need 2000 square feet more than they have. Now, remember this is, these are generalities so don't apply as I said they don't apply to everybody in the room, they don't have to do with people who are first generation, graduating college all different dynamics impact this. But as a total generation, these are kind of the large megatrends within this group and it's interesting because you're getting more of a sense of balance of life, it's about having, it's not about having nice things, you want them, but it's also about having nice things and having a nice life. So, I think it's, I think this constant disruption in the media business landscape is really fertile environment for your career that really will be a bit unconventional, nonlinear and unknown. More like mine than you would have planned. More difficult to really say, I know exactly what I'm going to do for my entire life. So, for those of you who kind of think that you know what you're going to do for the rest of your life, most likely you're not going to be doing it. And that's good. I think it's good. I think it's exciting. I think it's a, it's an excitement you should embrace cause otherwise you'll end up in the fetal position under your bed in the morning and the reality is you need to embrace that uncertainty and embrace the excitement of the ability that I can, you know, I have the ability to shift and create my own opportunities which will then allow me to prove myself which will then lead to more opportunities created and I don't have to worry about well if I do this for 2 years and then move over here for 3 years and then go up here this year and join that organization and do this. All that kind of goes by the wayside. Now what I do is just focus on what I'm doing and for those of you who don't know yet, it's even better news cause you don't have to worry about it. That's not what really matters right now. What you have to do is throw yourself in to what it is you're doing so that you can distinguish yourself and create those opportunities, so I think either way you're life is going to progress pretty nicely if you do something that you're willing to dedicate yourself to completely. If you go back to what would have made me probably an okay lawyer but I think, you know, and I think there's a few kids at Carson would say so a pretty damn good music teacher was the fact that I just wanted to do that more than anything in the world and that's what I lived and breathed and I threw myself into that and that's the opportunity that led to the next thing, so I don't think it really matters what the job is, I think you have to approach whatever you do with that type of passion bordering on an obsession. Now, if you do this you'll be successful because you had to create those opportunities that you never thought possible but they organically reveal themselves. You have to put the, you know, the chart down that says if I do A, B will happen. This is not a 1 plus 1 equals 2 type of situation. You don't do certain things that lead to another. You have to just focus in it and then leave yourself open for these other opportunities to reveal themselves and you need your champions. You've got to have your champions. I will also tell you that your college degree matters because it gets you in the door. It used to be that your college degree a good job out of school. College degree doesn't get a good job out of school. A college degree gets you a job and it might be $12 an hour, you know, I have 2 daughters, one graduates goes to law school, UCLA Law School, makes a lot of money, first year lawyer, comes home and says great job, great company, I'd kill myself if I have to stay here for 30 years, you know. And [inaudible] comes home and relaxed by going, okay I'll do this for 3 years and then I'm going to do this and maybe I'm going to sign up for the Hilary Clinton campaign or I'm going to do this, you know, and it's like whatever just get it out, just put, but don't worry about it, talk about it but just throw yourself into the job and so she's doing that but her release valve is knowing that even if she did, she doesn't have to think about doing it. I needed the opposite. I said I could do this forever. She works from, again, the generational shift of millennials I don't have to. My other one who works at CA in the music division, you know, just wants to be around music. That's all. And her degree got her a $12 job, $12 an hour job. That by the way, she had to fight about a 150 other candidates for. So, that's what your degree gets you. It might get you a $12 job but don't get lost in the dollars, you're just trying to get in the game, into somewhere that you can throw yourself into and go crazy and the when you go crazy on it you find those couple champions along the way and you don't worry about what's going to come of it, those opportunities then reveal themselves. I also, that's why by the way every job; I wasn't kidding when I said it was the best job I ever had. It really was. At that moment, at that time, for me, it was the best job I ever had and when I ask myself what have I got to lose, one of the questions that always came to the back of my mind was is could I say that about that job if I didn't do this other thing? And as much as it was easier to say, that's really what drove me forward. So, I have to tell you don't get ahead yourself, don't worry about 5, 10, 20 all that will work. I could have never planned anything but being a teacher, that's the only thing I planned. Everything else just revealed itself, I'm that way right now. I literally appoint where I'm daydreaming and excited about what's next. I mean I can't sleep at night excited. In a way, I hadn't been frankly prior to this new stage in my life because I don't know what's it's going to be. Is it going to a technology company? Is it going to be a music company? Is it going to be a film company? Is it going to be a digital company? Is it going to be in distribution? Is it going to be in creation of it? Am I going to take a small, you know, startup and grow that fast? Am I going to find something that's broken that I'm going to jump into and take that? You know, I know it won't be just doing a conventional CEO job, I've done that for 20 years. It's going to be something that's going to drive this kind of organic interest. And by the way when I say no it's not going to be something, don't believe what I'm saying because I don't really know, but right now this is what's exciting me. This is that whiteboard that's going on in my head and the craziness and the, you know, the need to just, you know, jog and run and think about and do these things and because I'm excited about that and that's where already stuff is starting to happen, you know, and that's what gets me excited. That's when I can't sleep and can't wait for it to happen. So, just recognize this one last thing, you know, you have to imagine yourself; you just got on a rollercoaster, doesn't matter whether you like them or not, you're on it okay, and you have no idea you only see the track goes down and you see kind of a little thing over here and little over here, you have no idea where it's going. You don't know what's going on, it's a rollercoaster at night. It's a rollercoaster at night with no lights. Alright. Alright! And you don't even know how long it is and you don't know what's going to happen but you can't get off. You're stuck, you're in the seat, it's already going tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, it's already going up the first ramp thing, right? So, you have no choice, you're buckled in so all you can do is you can dig in, grit your teeth, be angry, frustrated, you know, throw up, blackout, do all those things or you have to basically just throw your hand in the air, start screaming and enjoy the ride cause really at the end of the day, what do you got to lose? So, thanks everybody. I really appreciate it.

[ Applause ]

>> Cool. So, this is a great opportunity now to have a little bit of dialogue and ask Jim some questions and I saw a bunch of people writing down things so maybe those are questions and it would be great help if you could do 2 things, stand up, say your question loudly I'll repeat it and if you end with a question like with your voice going up that's great too because that give Jim something to actually answer. So, sometimes that happens too, right? So, we'll start over here.

>> Hi, my name is Eric I'm a jazz major here. Thank you for coming in and talking. You talked a lot about your successes and opportunities that came to you but I feel like you didn't talk a lot about conflict that came up in your life. Can you speak to how, cause you this mindset where you're just like, gone and one but can you, how do you deal with conflict?

>> Yeah, you know, it's really interesting cause it's funny when, my career has been a continuous flow of conflict and challenges. Everybody's is I think. It really gets to the heart to kind of how you look at them and this is my coping mechanism it just fits with my personality which is when something comes up I turn around and look at it from the context of like, okay, A this is not good; like take Hard Rock for example. You know, the company that was so cool to jump into, the great opportunity to run a restaurant company was a company that was down 24% in sales, that was kind of imploding. It was a broken brand and it was a case of having to restructure management team, do a massive amount of reorganization within the company and to fight a very strong headwind of bad press and people dismissing the entire segment of this kind of a theme dining piece. You know, what I tend to do from the way I post things is to take a look at these things and say, okay how am I going to, how am I, you know, what can I do with this? What, this is exciting. God, it's down 24%. You realize that's an opportunity. How do we change that course? So, the negativity existed. Every business, every situation has challenges. It's just I looked at it as a way of an opportunity. You know, I was a trumpet player; trumpet player since 7th grade and I was good trumpet player, you know, fortunately they didn't record your senior recitals here back then and you'd hear I was a good trumpet player, I wasn't a great trumpet player. I wasn't going to ever be, you know, that great trumpet player. That was a challenge. That was a frustration but rather than say, damn I'm not going to do this and be the burnt out teacher, it was like okay wait a minute I've got the basics of this, I like the music part of it but what, you know, how do I feed into that? What really drive me? Well, I like being the guy in charge. I like being the guy going, you know, I like that guy and so that became, you know, using something that was a setback or a challenge or a defeat so to speak, of that moment of recognizing after all those hours in the basement over there that I was not going to be that guy, I was going to be the guy in the B jazz band, I was never going to be the guy in the A jazz band that, you know, I was going to be a journeyman trumpet player that that wasn't enough and so rather than say, well you know that bullshit of those who can't do teach, you know, it was like now wait a minute, that's not, that's a challenge for me so I'm going to redefine and relook at how I then repositioned that. So, and this occurs, you know, every single business, every single work opportunity you're in you're going to be met with problems. You're going to be met with people who don't like your personality, don't like your style, don't like your operating method, don't like the choices that you've made, you know, I at one company I tried desperately; I tried this thing called well consensus, consensus management. Consensus management is you sit around a table and with your senior team and you say we're going to decide everything together so there's total buy-in. I think the school district tried this, so shared decision-making or something or school-based management or it was the big fad and so it made its way into private companies. So, I thought this sounded great, I'm going to do this. It was a complete cluster. I mean it was a disaster, you know, because the idea was at the end of the day people want discussion, they want to heard, they want to be empowered, they need to be accountable but they need decisions made and you recognize that when you're in a positon of leadership in any situation you're going to be making decisions that other people are not going to enjoy as much and that just, again, it just comes with the turf and, you know, I will tell you the more you move out of a group position into a leadership position it can be a department chair, it could be in charge of 2 people, you're, the dynamics of that relationship changes and you have to accept that. What you have with somebody as a colleague, I don't care if you're in the band and the person becomes the drum major of the band. I don't care if you're working with somebody side-by-side and they become a manager and you don't, the dynamics change. When you become a CEO the dynamics dramatically change and the people who are around you can be your confidants, they can be colleagues, they can be partners but at the end of the day you're kind of out there on your own; that is one of the probably more challenging things.

>> I wonder what a consensus-based marching band would be like? Really the question is are there specific things from being a musician and a music teacher and leading a marching band that you think about daily as specific sort of skills or things that you refer to?

>> Well, you know, really well it goes to the reason why I kept going back to the music piece which applies to everything in the teaching piece, if you think of what you're doing as a musician, you're an individual waning to express yourself but doing it in the context of a large organization. So, you have to figure out how to play along with, still distinguish yourself but you're actually working some large goal of creating in this particular case art, creative expression. So, you're doing that within the framework that has bureaucracy, that has personality issues and everything else and you're trying to figure out how do I establish myself and do that within the context of that organization? So, I have to present leadership skills, I have to present organizational skills, I have to understand what I'm doing, I have to have expertise to do it and I have to be willing to, as I said, seek to understand them and be understood. So, you know, I think that being, you know, going back to it and it's not about the classes themselves, it's about being a musician and being a teacher. The actual vocation, those 2 vocations, I think have had more of an impact on me personally in whatever success I've had has occurred because of those 2 experiences. They teach you how to organize views. They teach you a goal. They also teach you that you can't make people do things. When you come up in the public sector and teachers are tenured for life and kids have a right to go to a school, you are not in a position, I don't care if you're the principal, I don't care if you're the superintendent to go you do this or else, or else what? The average tenure of a principal is 3 years. Teachers have been there 15-20 years, they just wait till the flavor of the month passes, you know, the next one. So, you have to figure out a way to lead but in a way that also empowers people to believe that you're going to be part of some larger vision; that's why when I talked about the things that occurred at these companies whether it be Participant or anything else, they were not, it was not me, I'm up being a mouthpiece for this but this was not about me, this was about some really talented people who got together and agreed on a singular plan, off of a singular vision, founder's vision; executives then empowered to create the plan in alignment with the founder and then execute on that plan and that's what we did and then when you do that and you're all marching to the same step forgive the pun. You know, you end up being able to get from point A to point B.

>> Good afternoon, Colby [inaudible] marketing major. With the rise of streaming both On Demand and live and the Internet nowadays and this variance of dark fiber, what are your concerns or where do you see the future of Internet service providers and the entertainment industry going?

>> Well, you know the interesting thing is, the question is there was a very distinguished man in the entertainment business who was talking about the future of media and he said, you know I'm really excited about the next 10 years, you know, what's going to happen in 10 years? I said, "Oh, really what you do you think, like which emerging technologies are you exciting about?" And he goes, "No, no, I don't know what it is cause they don't exist yet." You know but companies today are just vessels for what is going to emerge that's going to disrupt and change everything that we don't even know exists, I mean, you have to almost adopt an approach like, you know, Steve Jobs who says that, you know, I believe that there'll be a computer on every desk. You know, this idea of when other people said there would never be [inaudible] beyond businesses. This, you're in a world now where you don't think about cable linear companies actually controlling bandwidth. How far are we from the world in which Internet access really is a global right, it's a human right, you're accessed to an Internet no longer become something that's controlled for the regulatory standpoint, that becomes free and it's, and the commodity then just becomes what programs and what's your access points, so what I believe we're going to seeing is, it's interesting all of the technology changes that seem to be happening are more advanced technology to do what? To do things simpler. Uber is advanced technology to do what? To do something simpler. I don't have to pay, I just press one button, you know, cause the credit card is already in there. I have a record it's, you know, I have a way to judge a person and a way to judge me, it's I've simplified. Why do people go on Amazon and say well that's the best price. They didn't go on the web, they go on Amazon. Why? Because Amazon has made it easy. They said you do this, get your Prime, you do this, you get your free shipping, you do this, oh and here's a bunch of movies with Amazon Prime too, and we'll get you streamed. We want to be your total source provider. So, I think the interesting thing that's going to be happening, the battle is going to be the guys who own the pipes, the big, what they call MVPDs, the big, you know, Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, AT and T, Cox, Charter, these folks they are trying to hold on to a linear distribution system. Think of pipes in the ground. The guys who are going over the air Google, you know, folks like that Facebook, what they're trying to do is they're trying to say you don't need to go that way anymore, we'll be your total service provider. We'll provide your world. We'll do all that for you and that's why, I don't know if any of you are following it at all, you know, all this stuff about not only transmission rights but more important than that, about access to Internet what's going on in regulatory control. These things matter to you a lot because it could sound very, very sexy to say this is great I'll pay 29.95, I'll go to my Time Warner and I'll pay $80 and screw all of you in the audience, I'm going to go at 200 MBs, I'm going to faster than all of you and you guys can move to the slow lane, I'll be in the carpool lane but the carpool lane won't be something better for the environment or try to improve a thing, it'll be because I just paid more money. So, I think that's going to be the epic battle. Transmission is going to around, who's going to control that bandwidth compression because the rest of it the app stuff that's just going to keep evolving at a rapid rate, and again, the best example in recent years is to look at somebody like Netflix, you know, and I know it's the most visible one but think of the bravery and the brilliance and probably well, they'll probably go read back then what was the stupidity at the times; when you think of somebody who basically had control over the top way to distribute these DVDs, these CDs through a mailing system and basically said I'm going to replace myself. I'm going to compete with myself and I'm going to come up with a technology that people aren't even ready to handle yet cause I know when they make the flip whether it's generational or older, they won't even know how to do the other. I mean they won't even want to go back to the other and so when that technology occurs then everybody else jumps along because when Netflix came onboard suddenly Apple TV became important because I want a way to get my stuff thrown to my TV set and suddenly when Netflix came onboard and I want to watch the British version of Shameless versus the U.S version of Shameless, now I can go do that because they'll carry stuff in a deeper way that I can discover for money and just one other thing I want to address which is fascinating to watch what's going right now in the battle between the traditional cable companies MVPDs and these what we call the new providers, you know, like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu right now you can prove that watching something, binge watching something that is on a restricted, and MVPD cable company, take let's take Portlandia. Portlandia's viewership was here at this many homes and then people got to watch the first season, binged watched on Netflix prior to the new season starting on IFC, so what, or Sundance, is Sundance or IFC, by the way there's a good point in that the fact that we don't even know what channels things are on, the IP isn't the carrier, the IP is the content itself that's what matters. But, the reality is they went dramatically higher. Why did they go dramatically higher? Because people got to test the series on their own; get hooked on it on their own and then were caught up and they wanted then to just Net and keep up with the series from that point. So, you've got the advancers, the people who are going to watch Downton Abbey illegally when it's on in Britain then you've got the people who will wait and watch it all the way through you know as I happens and then you got those who will say, I'll wait till it's done and I'll catch it on the flip side watch it all at once and be back in place. So, I think that's the fascinating demographic right now. The pull of urgency with the fact that I will not let you tell me what to watch. What's a successful show right now? They do live plus 3, L plus 3 or L plus 7, 3 days or 7 days which it means I've DVR'd it and then I've watched it within 3 days, they count that as watching like live; live plus 3 days, live plus 7 days. They were live then they went to live plus 3 now they're going to live plus 7 which matters for advertisers. So, what happened is, you know, you've got this L7 going on which is now what the rating system they're using to look at this stuff, so a successful show will have 17 million homes watch it which is fantastic but if you go back to Norman Lear and All in the Family everybody watched, 50 plus million people watched at 8 O'clock on a Monday night to find out what Archie Bunker was going to do. That's how centralized. The, it was the networks controlled what you watched, how you watched, when you watch it. It's now completely disaggregated and flipped itself on tier and now the consumer controls what's watched, how it's watched, and when it's watched. So, anything that's going to bring more control the consumer is going to win and the one thing the cable companies are realizing now and they're smarter than the record companies in my opinion and it's that opinion, and the reason I say that is the record companies; I was at the Grammys at the time that this went on. What did they do? Do you remember? Some of you, you know, who may be studied; do you remember what they did when people started downloading on Napster? They started suing people. They decided in conjunction with the IAA that they were going to sue individual users who downloaded stuff, they were going to chase the consumer. But the root problem was that consumer was going, you paid $300 million to that artist you got to get it back that and all your marketing money, you put an album out, you charge me $20, it has 11, 12, 13 songs on it, you restrict it from me and so I've lost that price valuation. I'm out of here. I'll just take it this way and they completely lost the idea that other people were involved in the making of that music and there were royalties attached to it and that there was a whole intellectual property right system and they lost that battle. They have never really recovered from that. You're seeing the beginning of that in cable because how many of you are paying $180 a month for that full boat cable? You're not. You're bundling, how many of you are, have a landline? Yeah, just a few and usually you know in, and you know, when most of them have it? They have it because if they've Internet you get a cheaper price if they're forced to get their phone for a year and I went through this and with my daughter and they took, she got a cheaper price and refused to even buy the phone to plug in the thing for, I'm like well keep it for emergencies like what if there's an earthquake? She's like, that's, I'm not, no way all the calls are telemarketers, you know, so she refused to plug in the phone and then cancelled it after a year. I mean that's literally what we're talking about. There was a world in which everybody had an AOL address. They would never lose that market positon, you know, that's how quickly things are flipped and there is no safe position anymore in the distribution of stuff. It's about making something complex easier. That's why the watch, the Apple watch is going to be very interesting. Is it cool and fun or is it going to actually make something easier? And if it's not going to make my life easier it's going to only be, only the techie's are going to like it.

>> One more question, yep.

>> Hello, my name's Tim and I graduated from, I graduated from here in 1973 [inaudible] fellow champion. Professor [inaudible] at history of jazz class. I lectured on early jazz in his class 10 years but I want to talk about is overcoming [inaudible] obstacle. If you have a champion they can help you. I lectured in his class for 10 years. I like early jazz. My main goal, I wanted to have an early jazz radio show. I kept going to the radio station, KCSN year after year. They laughed at me. Well, you want to play this music? Why [inaudible] after me after so many years and they said you'll never have a radio show here. I [inaudible], he said Tim why didn't you tell me that? You've helped me for years, he strong-armed me. He said the head of the radio station doesn't make the decision. He said I've been here longer [inaudible] university. He said I'll go over his head and I got my radio show for 6 years.

>> That's great.

>> Did you ever think since you were in the music department I also lectured in Jerold Wilson's [assumed spelling] class.

>> Yeah. I did Jerold Wilson.

>> I lectured in his class all on early jazz and [inaudible].

>> And I was probably in your class.

>> Okay.

>> From Jerold Wilson I learned how to do 6 Por Ti at 5 Por Ti, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

>> Is there a question? Cause I think we have time for one more question, yep.

[ Inaudible ]

>> You know, right now I'm not trying to do anything.

>> Oh, okay.

>> Right now I'm. No, but right now what I'm doing is seeking to understand. You know, I'm in the mode where it's, you know, one thing you find that when you're, you know, and this goes to the, I've tried to use different moments, snapshots throughout my life just to illustrate some different points and one of them when I talked about my wife and looking at something with distance, you know, when you're in very close to something, you know, and Participants was a labor of love, as I said you know, 8 poignant years and an amazing company and just extraordinary people and, you know, I'll always have big love for the company and enormous respect for Jeff and what's he doing. You're in it, you're in, you're in front of it and what you have to do is you have to pull away, you have to find some distance from something, so that's it's kind of like the fog lifting and you see what's around you because the way you judge the world based on visibility of a half a mile can be dramatically different than the way you judge the world with higher visibility, so right now as what happens with folks who are journeymen executives, you know, when you leave one place a bunch of calls come in and incoming calls from headhunters and private equity money and all this type of stuff about what you want to do and if you want to be working tomorrow you can do that, you know, in some kind of really fun cool stuff, but you have to do is take a step back and take a breath and take a look around and go okay now, what do you want to do for the next 10 years? What's the next really exciting thing? When you look at that checklist of different things, what's the thing that will have me not want to just go spend summers in Italy but just like be in that 24/7? Can't wait for the, forget the weekends I want to be doing that, that's what I want to and it's got to be something that powerful that you want to leave your wife and your kids and, you know, and control over your life and so I think the big realization for me is what's exciting which I have not done cause I've always been an executive with sometimes stock and things like that and, you know, I think the idea of being in an ownership position is a different dynamic and I'm always searching for that different dynamic, so I think if you ask me today what excites me, it's that. If we bump into each other a week from now or 2 weeks from now or 3 weeks from now or a month now, you know, I might say I want to wear a cream colored suit and, you know, and work in a gorgeous auditorium, you know, in other words. You know, in other words you just, you know, it reveals itself and right now I've, what I've learned, the one thing I've learned and it is something you learn, you know, it kind of hits you, if you do something enough times, you know, you finally realize that this is the case; I've learned at this moment this is one where you really get to kind of just smile and feel really good and enjoy this kind of moment where all the possibilities exist where it's, today's Thursday and I can decide I'm going to start, I'm leaving tomorrow to go start my own company and on Friday I've decided I'm going to go do a private equity run with a group over there, on Saturday I'm buying a vill in Tuscany and I'm not ever working again and on Sunday; in other words, right now I'm in that mode where I'm just looking at these, all these things flashing and enjoying the uncertainty. I'm enjoying the opportunity and you wait for it, God that's really great, that's really great boy you'd be crazy [inaudible] to that. Oh, my God that, I don't know what it is, that one and it might not, it probably won't be about money and won't be about, it'll be just that's it, that's the thing, that's what I want to do, that's, I was here, I've been put on the earth for that thing and that's what you feel like when these opportunities come up and so that's kind of the uncertainty that I'm in right now and I'm just embracing it and loving it.

>> And perhaps [inaudible] something you'll want to disrupt when you enter the next.

>> Yeah. Mainly the house right now, my wife can throw me out at some point, so.

>> I'm going to call to the stage the dean of the Mike Curb College Jay Kvapil who will wrap up the afternoon for us. Okay.

[ Applause ]

>> Jim. I have something here for you.

>> Oh. I was getting off stage.

>> A token of our appreciation but first I want to tell you a little story. We share something in common. Graduated from high school, went to college, thought we were going to law school. I was, studied English and philosophy so that it would by entry to law school and along the way I fell into the arts, in my case the visual arts. My parents weren't so happy about it but I said this is what I'm going to do. Forward 40 years later, and I've had a lot of my career under my belt and I'm having a glass of wine with my dad, 98 years old one night and it's just after dinner and he says, "You know, Jay" and it tips is glass to me and says, "I'm really glad you didn't become a lawyer."

>> Wow.

>> So.

>> Very cool.

>> From one non-lawyer to another lawyer I want to say we're very glad you didn't become a lawyer and you did what you did cause it helped change the world in lots of ways. So, a round of applause for a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful lecture.

>> Thank you.

>> And a token of our appreciation would you open it and?

>> Oh, sure. Yeah.

>> There you go.

>> Oh, it's beautiful. Thank you. That's lovely. Thanks.

>> Thank you very much Jim.

>> Thank you.

[ Applause ]