LOS ANGELES — Super agent Mark Spiegler delighted a standing-room-only crowd of industry insiders with tantalizing and exemplary stories about his decades in the business, as he delivered the prestigious annual Keynote Address on Wednesday at the 2026 XBIZ Los Angeles trade show.

The format was an informal tête-à-tête conducted by fellow industry legend Holly Randall before an appreciative audience eager to learn the Gospel According to Spiegler from the man, the myth himself.

Spiegler’s fearsome reputation in the industry as a relentless champion of his highly selective roster of top earners contrasts with his equally widespread fame as an easily accessible contact for those with serious, specific questions and as a straight-shooter with an endless mental scrapbook covering the history of the adult industry going back to the “Boogie Night” days.

That encyclopedic acumen and unique, OG charm was in full display on Wednesday as Randall probed an array of FAQs about the agency side of the industry, the development of talent from starlets to supernovas  — Spiegler has seen and nurtured a huge number of the latter, including Asa Akira, Sasha Grey, Angela White, Abella Danger, Kira Noir, Riley Reid and on and on and on — the often salacious myths about his trade, and the elusive “it factor” that makes him the unquestioned It Girl spotter (and whisperer) in the business.

Of particular interest to new or experienced performers who would like to join the storied Spiegler stable was his sharing of the checklist he goes over while deciding whether the agency and a particular talent are a good match.

“It all depends if they've done porn before, or if they haven’t,” Spiegler told Randall and the audience. “For the girls who have never done porn before, and are between, let's say, 18 and 22, we actually try to talk them out of it, because it's not for everybody. A lot of times they're doing it because they want money, or they see that you can make a lot of money. But you want them to know that this is forever.”

Spiegler added that he also asks them what they think their parents will think about this unique career path.

“A, for their sake and B, I don’t want your parents coming to kill me!” he noted.

One notable exception to the “discouraging younger hopefuls” policy, Randall pointed out, turned out to be one of the biggest Spiegler Girls of them all — Millennial porn icon Sasha Grey

“I can read you her original email from when I spoke to her on the phone before I even met her,” Spiegler — a notorious archivist of industry documents, photos and videos — explained.  “I would say, she has a genius IQ, and she was very mature when I talked to her. She had just turned 18, and on the list of things she wanted to do, she had anal, DP, blowbangs! ‘Have you done all that?’ I asked. ‘No, I just turned 18 three weeks ago,’ she answered. So I said, ‘If you look like the pictures, and you do what you say you're going to do, you’ll do really well.’ And then she goes, ‘I’ll be in LA, in like two months.’ She had saved up $7,000 and got a car also, and then she called me like four weeks later, and she goes on, ‘I’m in LA, I have a place, I have a test, I'm ready to go.’”

That kind of ambition and drive, plus a relentless interest in having sex, is one of the tells of the true stars, he stressed.

“I’d say it’s maybe 50% talent, 30% luck and 20% branding,” Spiegler continued. “You want to always think of stars like Madonna or whatever — You get popular, but you've still got to be out there doing stuff all the time, all the time, all the time, to keep your name out there and stay ahead of the path. Still grinding — look at Abella or Riley Reid or any of those. They work, work, work, work. You know you can make tons of money on OnlyFans, but the ones that really make money on OnlyFans, and continuously, are the ones that have the background with all the work.”

Spiegler also noted that there's three parts to the job of porn performer.

“There's the sucking and fucking, and then there’s, 'Don't make us look bad, and don't give us something to worry about,'" he spelled out, with the “us” meaning himself and his trusty associate and right-hand agent George Jiries. “So they have to be good at their job. But then there's the ancillary stuff, if you have a problem on the set, don't complain. You call us. We do the complaining for you. Sometimes we're usually on the side of the girl, but sometimes they're wrong, too. So if you talk to us, we'll straighten stuff out for you. And that's also key to longevity — You're the talent you want to be face forward. And we look out for you.”

Besides sharing pearls of practical wisdom, the Keynote was peppered with entertaining glimpses into Spieglerworld, such as his casual remark that he has a bounty hunter on speed dial for when he loses track of a model, or needs to locate someone threatening him; stories about his legendary toilet-trained cat, and “we’re not gonna name names” gossip about former clients who strayed from the aforementioned ironclad Rules.

Prompted by Randall’s questions, Spiegler also dispelled what he called “the biggest myth about agents in the adult industry.”

“That they're having sex with the girls all the time!” he told the laughing audience. “That might be true with a couple of ones before, but I don't think people like that last. I don’t even watch their porn!”

Ultimately, Spiegler concluded, he tends to favor models who he feels are gonna go the distance.

“A lot of our girls, you notice, are smart girls. I always say ‘hot girls are hot, but smart are hotter.’ From the beginning, we try to get the girls to save their money and hopefully invest their money. Because, for all we know, next year Trump can try to outlaw porn. And even if they may not be able to, they can interfere with the industry quite a bit, and people are making a lot of money, and they can suddenly turn it off.

"I started working when I was 12, and I saved my money and invested it. And, I want the models to make enough money to where they don't have to work for anyone else ever again. That, to me, is actual freedom.”