IAC and Expedia chairman Barry Diller joins Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer to discuss what went into building Little Island in Manhattan as well as how his businesses Expedia and InterActiveCorp have fared during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Video Transcript

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ANDY SERWER: I'm here with Barry Diller, Chairman of IAC and Expedia, former CEO of Paramount and Fox. And he is the impresario, I guess, behind an incredible new park in New York City called Little Island. Barry, great to see you. And you were just telling me about how Little island compares to some of the other projects you've done in your illustrious career.

BARRY DILLER: Well, yeah, thank you for those words. But no, it's different than making movies and television where, at least my experience is that, from the script to actually getting it on screen, whatever your greatest hopes were, they usually are a little less than they were at the very beginning, most of the time. With this Little island project, for me, from the very beginning-- and I had hoped that, I mean, I use this word icon, and I probably shouldn't, that we could build something that was an icon, visually, on the waterfront of New York. It has turned out far better than I had hoped.

ANDY SERWER: It's been open, I guess, about two months.

BARRY DILLER: I just saw this morning, Andy, that we passed 500,000 people in six and a half weeks, which is quite remarkable.

ANDY SERWER: That is amazing. And there's people lining up to get in because it [INAUDIBLE]. But do you feel like-- it already feels like it's become a part of an established part of the city. And what kind of reception has it received? How would you say it's been?

BARRY DILLER: I mean, there certainly are people-- very few, thankfully-- who are negative about it. And they are negative about it partly because they think, why should a benefactor be able to build something like this on public space, et cetera? Or they say, what will happen to this in 50 years? There was one recommendation that after 20 years, it should be torn down, and the water should then be returned to kayakers and such.

My response to that is, you know, there's, I don't know, 100 and some odd miles of the Hudson River. I think the kayakers got a lot of places to go. But overwhelmingly, it has been positive, both in terms of people talking about it, architecturally, as being exciting, and whimsical, and interesting, and all of that. The public performances that we have done, we decided in the first year that, instead of doing just a few to teeth to see how we would work out, we would just pile it on. We're doing 500 performances between June 10 and September.

All of these performances so far-- and we're just beginning with it-- have been incredibly well-received. So it's truly been great. You know, I got nothing other than happiness.

ANDY SERWER: The park's opening has coincided with the city's reopening, right?

BARRY DILLER: I did not plan this.

ANDY SERWER: Yeah, it's serendipitous. But is it part of bringing the city back?

BARRY DILLER: It seems like it. I can just tell you, having been there endless amount of times since we opened, that just the look on people's faces as they cross the bridge-- you know, they cross Manhattan, all of its complications, and difficulties, and stimulus, and all of that. And they go over to our little Oz, their faces just light up so. It does seem to me that there is this-- and it may be momentary, probably momentary-- that the exuberance coming out of people being able to just go to a public place without masks, without social distancing is euphoric. So pretty good so far.

ANDY SERWER: And the peak has an endowment, right? So it's not like you just built it and then the city has to support it, right?

BARRY DILLER: Oh, no. We have said that-- it's not really an endowment-- we have said that our foundation will support the maintenance of the park for 20 years.

ANDY SERWER: Right. Do you have a favorite part of the park, Barry?

BARRY DILLER: No. Honestly, what I find is in walking around-- and I've done it a lot, to say the least-- is I am constantly discovering new little angles in places that I hadn't seen before. Because when we designed it, we wanted-- because it's all winding things and whatever-- we designed it so that whenever you turn your view, there would be some surprise or something that was different from turning the other way. And so I'm still discovering.

ANDY SERWER: Well, it has these hills. It's kind of like you're in a fairy tale park, and maybe like one of those castles in Germany, you almost think you're going to come to, right? Talk to us about that design.

BARRY DILLER: I mean, the first thing is I wanted something that was not some cookie-cutter pier or park. So I was ambitious, me and my colleagues were ambitious about what it would look like. And we wanted something that was surprising. We wanted something that was whimsical. We wanted it to be friendly. We didn't want it to be pretentious. And out of that cauldron came these designs by Thomas Heatherwick, which after refining and whatever, allowed us, I think, to create something that is unique. I mean, it may not be to everyone's taste. But certainly, it ain't easy for you to say, oh, this is just like that.

ANDY SERWER: Right. And I talked to you about this for years as you were building it. And I remember you were like putting your head in your hands at this point. There was a lot of headaches.

BARRY DILLER: It was difficult.

ANDY SERWER: Were there times when you thought it would never happen?

BARRY DILLER: Absolutely, yes. I mean, there was a time when, because of litigation by these dissidents who were mostly saying that the American eel, the reason we shouldn't build this island is because the American Eagle eel needs sunlight. To which I did respond that, well, tell the eel to go a block north, or south, or east, or west because there's plenty of places, whatever, whatever. But that got so contentious that we actually abandoned the project for about two months. And I thought it was all over. But the governor, actually, in this case, the governor really saved it.

ANDY SERWER: How is your business doing? How's IAC doing in terms of responding or coming back from COVID, et cetera.

BARRY DILLER: Well, I'll start with our travel business Expedia, which is doing extremely well, as you would imagine, given that travel is just emerging-- US travel, not so much international and. And IAC's businesses are all doing extremely well. We have not had the-- I don't think we'll have it for some time-- the issue of everybody coming back and therefore not using internet services. Most of our companies are virtual and based on internet protocols. And that usage is still as high as it was, I think, during the pandemic, so all well.

ANDY SERWER: You're back in the office, you told me. What about everyone else? Our people, do they have to come in?

BARRY DILLER: We are going to say-- I don't know if we said it yet, actually. I think we'll say by Labor Day that everybody has to be in the office. Now, we will have some-- I don't like this concept of saying three days in, two days out, which is what a lot of tech companies are doing. I think that it should primarily be you work from the office. There are certain job classifications, certain tasks, that you can do from home. And we're perfectly OK for that to happen. But as a primary rule, we want people to be vaccinated and we want them in the office.

ANDY SERWER: You recently praised President Biden's executive order cracking down on anti-competitive practices taken by monopolies. Does that order go far enough?

BARRY DILLER: No, but I think legislation will. I suspect, in this next year, that we will have legislation that that puts appropriate regulation on the monopoly, the mostly monopoly companies that function intact.

ANDY SERWER: A question about movies. You recently said the rise of streaming has hurt the quality of movies and that the word movie doesn't even have any meaning anymore. What do you mean by that? And does that mean movie theaters will die out?

BARRY DILLER: You know, sometimes my words out of context-- well, everybody's words out of context-- but even within context, they produce a lot of noise. What I said is, to me, it's quite simple, which is there's no question that the word movie is no longer what it was three, five years ago. God knows it not what it was 10 years ago. Streaming has vagued out the meaning of what is a movie. And as far as theatrical distribution or movies in theaters, I think it was probably inevitable, but one of the things that pandemic, without question, affected office work and work, in general, as well as not being able to go to movie theaters or anything theaters.

I think there will be movie theaters. But I do not think that the steady diet of, let's say, going to the movies is going to last much into the future. It will be sensible for big-budget movies that have lots of effects, and have sound, and all of those things, or have community experiences that just can't be duplicated in the home. As far as everything else, I don't think people are going to be going. As far as that what we have thought to be just movies, I think they won't be in theaters. And I think they will, again, the very word movie, or Hollywood, or whatever is fast disappearing.

ANDY SERWER: Let me ask you a big-picture question, Barry. How are you feeling right now about our country, and the economy, COVID, all those things right now?

BARRY DILLER: That is too big, so I'll just riff for a second yes. It's probably totally worthless. Despite new cases I do think that, at least in the minds of most people, COVID is over. And I don't think that, in the United States at least, people are going to tolerate many restrictions on into the future. Again, that's supposing we don't get some disastrous uptick. So I think it's a period of reentry for everyone. And it's short-term effects on the economy are positive.

What will happen in a couple of years, I can't say. But the economy is hot almost everywhere. Inflation is coming, I think, without question. Its severity, I wouldn't begin to predict, but it will come. I don't think-- although, you know, I don't really know-- but my sense is that everybody who says it will be short-lived, I think is probably possibly wrong. And I think that year two, year three is going to have some serious consequences. The next year or two, all sailing. But after that, big issues.

ANDY SERWER: All right, Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and Expedia, thanks for your time.

BARRY DILLER: Pleasure, Andy. Bye, bye.