Acquired - Oprah (Harpo Studios)

0:00Did you see the, I think this was a tweet, is it Tom Marillo that has a, you got off to go to Harvard? Yeah. Actually I did. Really good. So good. Welcome to season six, episode eight, the season finale of acquired the podcast about great technology companies and the stories behind them. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today we are covering an incredible entrepreneur.

0:40Oprah Winfrey and her company Harpo Studios. Oprah is a fixture of American life entering the home of tens of millions of Americans through their television set every day at 4pm for the 25 year run of her show.

0:59But it is the unique story of her business decisions, how she created her brand across her show, a magazine, a cable channel, and more, how she controlled every detail and grew from TV personality to business mogul that we're going to cover today. She is the first black female billionaire and perhaps most relevant to the acquired audience. She really invented the idea of what we today call an influencer.

1:25If you watch a YouTuber, TikToker, have ever bought a product that an internet personality recommended, or even more abstractly, you like thinking about how social platforms are transforming the consumer economy, you really have Oprah to thank for paving the way.

1:40I don't know if you saw I was watching the David Dobrik YouTube a little bit ago where he and his crew took around L.A. and tossed out like you know gifts to I was tossing out like PS4s and cell phones and Xboxes and then like tossing out like $10,000 checks and stuff but it's like yeah I guess you did it first. Yeah. You get a car. You get a car. You get a car. Oh, we will get into it. Oh yeah. As always if you love acquired and you want more you can become an acquired limited partner.

2:10Our most recent episode was the first in a mini series that we were calling Venture Capital Fundamentals. We kicked off the six part series with a deep dive on sourcing, how different firms do it, why it's important, and the different schools of thought around the topic. So if you want to join, you can get access by clicking the link in the show notes or going to glow.fm slash acquired and all subscriptions come with a seven day free trial. And we have a big announcement.

2:38about the LP program coming later in the show. So we're gonna, we put a little box on everybody's chair who's listening. Don't shake it. We're all gonna open it at the same time. We do have an announcement in the middle of the show. Stay tuned. The more you learn about Oprah, the more that you learn that as a media personality or a media, I guess that's the right way to phrase it, there's nothing you can do that Oprah hasn't already done. Literally nothing. Yep. All right, listeners.

3:06Now is a great time to talk about a new partner of ours here on Acquired, LaGora, the agentic operating system that is redefining how the world's best legal teams work. Yup, it's sort of obvious that AI is going to completely change the legal industry. I bet most of you listening have dropped a contract into some sort of AI chatbot out there. LaGora took that insight and asked the question, what if you really built something with that power from the ground up for the legal industry?

3:34So the founders did exactly what great founders do. Operate with obsessive customer focus. They embedded inside a massive law firm for months. They sat with the lawyers just watching how the work really gets done. And that's how you get features that customers love like tabular review where you.

3:53drop in a folder of hundreds of contracts, and it pulls every key term into a grid a lawyer can actually work with. Lugora's bet here is interesting. Since it lets each lawyer handle more complexity, any given person can increase the quality of their work and do higher value work, and this means that the pie can grow even as each individual task takes less time.

4:13And they recently launched LaGora agent offering greater intelligence and performance. The agent lets lawyers set an objective. Then it can handle the planning and the execution and delivery of the final product. Legal teams get to maintain full control and transparency since they're still involved where judgment is required. And LaGora works where you already work. You can use it within Microsoft Word while redlining or drafting the early LaGora numbers essentially.

4:41speak for themselves. When they have a head-to-head pilot with their top competitor, they win 70% of the time. Legora now has over a hundred thousand lawyers on the platform from 1200 legal teams in 50 countries. And crazily, they went from one million to a hundred million in ARR in about 18 months. Truly insane numbers. And that is the real test.

5:05Plenty of things demo well, but the question is whether a busy associate actually reaches for it during crunch time, or whether a partner trusts it before going into a conversation with a major client. If your legal team wants to check it out, whether you're a law firm or you're in house at a company, you can learn more at logora.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. All right, David. Now over to you to take us into the story of Oprah and the company that she founded that's behind it all, Harpo Studios.

5:35Well, one disclaimer before we get going is anytime we're talking about Oprah, there is way too much to cover in one podcast episode, let alone one podcast, let alone one show. I mean, we're talking about a woman who owns her own cable network, you know, gets presidents elected. So we can't cover it all here. We're going to be covering her origin story and the business behind her, but two fantastic sources if you want more Oprah and who doesn't want more Oprah that you should go check out. One is the local Chicago NPR affiliate WBZ did a great podcast a couple years ago. The Gen White did called Making Oprah. It's a three-part series with a few bonus episodes. Definitely go check that out. They interview Oprah. They interview Phil Donut. It's great. And the other one is a number of years ago Kitty Kelly wrote a

6:27unauthorized biography of Oprah, which is extremely well researched, controversial in many ways, but also forms a lot of the facts and bases for this. So definitely go read that if you want a long, deep picture of Oprah Winfrey. Or should I say, Orpa Gail Winfrey, because that is the child that was born on January 29th, 1954 in Casillasco, Mississippi.

6:54Yeah, it wasn't something like people mispronounced her name. And so she just said ask, grew it and changed it when she was younger. Yeah. So Orpa is a biblical character in the book of Ruth. That was Oprah's name. But yeah, people is not a common name, mispronounced it. You know, read it incorrectly and just started calling her Oprah or Oprah when she was young and it's stuck. Wow.

7:17Yeah, history could have been different indeed indeed. What would have happened otherwise? So everybody knows Oprah, right? And some people may have a sense of her story that Got her to become Oprah that we know her today, but I think a lot of people don't I didn't before researching this and this is just like You know, this is up there with Andy Grove story of just such an incredible incredible triad over adversity to entrepreneurial success. So When Oprah was born in 1954, in Mississippi, in the deep south, she was born to a single teenage mother, Vernida Lee, who was a housemaid. Her mother and the family believed that Oprah's father, Orpa's father, was a man named Vernon Winfrey, and he believed that too.

8:04It's actually extremely unlikely that biologically he was her father because he was on active military duty nine months before Oprah was born, but it is definitely true that he wasn't and is a father to her in every other sense of the word. So after giving birth, Vernida actually left Mississippi when Orpo was very, very young, Orpo who already then had been started, people were starting to call her Oprah, was raised by her grandmother until she was six years old.

8:33her grandmother taught her to read and started taking her to church. And even like at like two, three years old Oprah was like already, you know, she loved the stage. People nicknamed her the preacher at church because she would recite Bible verses for the congregation even as a tiny little child. That would that would go on to become a big theme in her life a little later.

8:55But then in age six, her mother was living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin at that point in time, had had another daughter, a half sister to Oprah named Patricia. And she sent back on Mississippi and said, you know, I'm ready to be a mother, send Oprah. And I'm going to raise these two girls together. Patricia, very sadly, would die from a jug overdose at age 43. So Oprah goes to Milwaukee, lives with her mother for a while.

9:23while she's there for Nita has another daughter who she puts up for adoption that over wouldn't even know about until like only a couple of years ago they were reunited and a son named Jeffrey who would later die in the AIDS epidemic so just terrible terrible tragedy But following this family and we haven't even gotten started yet. Oprah shuttle kind of back and forth from Milwaukee to Nashville where Vernon had moved and Vernon had settled down there and he had married a woman named Zelma Myers and he was working at Vanderbilt University as a janitor. They had been trying to have their own children but we're not able to. So loved when Oprah would come to visit and then at each

10:05nine. So between six and nine she kind of shuffles back and forth between at age nine though she goes to live somewhat more permanently in Milwaukee. And that's where she talks about one night she was watching the Ed Sullivan show on the television in her mother's department. And Diana Ross and the Supremes were on. And this was like, this was a huge moment. I mean, you know, the Beatles of course been a bit on Ed Sullivan, but like, to have a Motown group in African American group of black group. And a group of black women on the Ed Sullivan show Sunday night, prime time was was a huge moment. So Oprah says, I stopped wanting to be white when I was 10 years old. And I saw Diana Ross in the Supreme's perform on the Ed Sullivan show. These are her words. I was watching television on the Linoleum floor in my mother's apartment. I'll never forget it.

10:57It was the first time I had seen ever seen a colored person wearing diamonds that I knew were real. I wanted to be Diana Ross. I had to be Diana Ross. Wow. Yeah. It's so interesting how in so many of these stories you can sort of pinpoint a moment in someone's life where it started to click for them, where like a key piece of who they would become, you know, snapped into place in their motivation. You can sort of understand from there. Yeah. Hey listeners.

11:27Quick warning that the next segment contains a high-level description of trauma and sexual assault that Oprah experienced. If you or someone within earshot wants to avoid that, you should skip ahead about seven minutes from now. Thanks. Unfortunately, though, so that was a great, great moment that would become a driving force in Oprah to this day. Unfortunately, right around that same time, there was a terrible moment that would also set her down a path that Fortunately, she steered back from, but she was right around that same time when she was nine years old. She was raped in Milwaukee by a 19-year-old cousin. As you can imagine, completely shattering this nine-year-old to be raped and exposed to everything at that age. She started spiraling, she started.

12:18Drinking she started running away. She started having sex regularly. Also, she's nine. Like what does spiraling even mean for it? Right. It's heartbreaking. Totally, totally heartbreaking. The family doesn't understand and it's terrible. And I think a lot of the family didn't believe her right when she later would tell people about this that, you know, it got swept under the rug. Yeah. She's spoken a lot about this and can't even imagine when she's 14 she this has been going on for five years she's been molested abused by several members of the family at this point and others she runs away from home in Milwaukee and Aritha Franklin was in town in Milwaukee giving a concert and she sees her in a limo and Oprah

13:12runs up to her in the limo and starts sweet talking Aretha and says you know she's from I think she says she's from Ohio makes up some story needs like bus fare to get home or something and Aretha gives her a $100 bill. And Oprah of course that goes and like rents a hotel room for the week and supposedly when Verona finally finds her she calls up Vernon and says I can't I can't deal with this with this girl anymore. You need to take her and take her.

13:39permanently. That's the last time she spends in Milwaukee. And this ends up being, you know, thanks to Arita and Arita will come back later in the story. Probably that just the best thing that ever ever happened to Oprah. She goes to live with Vernon and Zelma. They instill strict discipline and try and straighten her out. They require to go in addition to going to school. She's a sophomore in high school, require her to go to the library and write a book report for them every week in addition to her schoolwork. Oprah.

14:08You don't kind of chase under this, and you know, it's not a happy end. And she's particularly not happy because she has a she has a secret, which is that she is pregnant. And she tries to hide it from her family. She goes to East Nashville High, the first class to integrate the school. It had been an all-way school before that class. Oh, I didn't realize that. Yeah, crazy. She tries to hide it from everybody. She kind of, you know, soaks in the back of the classroom and then a couple of months go by and that winter, Zelma kind of figures out what's going on. And I know Chris, you know, getting

14:43Bigger of course than Kenola long ahead. It says Elma takes her to the doctor, forces her to come to a doctor's appointment. Of course, you know, confirms that she's pregnant and Oprah says later, having to go home and tell my father was the hardest thing I ever did. I wanted to kill myself. Oh, I can't imagine. So through all of this, Oprah ends up going into labor two months early. She has a son, baby boy is born in February 1969. Oprah had just turned 15.

15:11And because the baby was born so early and you know at that time so didn't have the care that Primes have today the baby ended up dying a month later in the hospital and So sad so sad and I mean just looking at this six-year span we've covered a lot of people on the show who have overcome adversity Oprah's story is Almost incomparable in the the amount of trauma that she went through in those six years You know, we've said a couple times the phrase you and I both said it. I think I can't even imagine it's so It's so far outside the lived experience that I've had and I'd imagine the same for many of our listeners that it requires like a different set of words than I really have for this and in doing the research for this episode it is truly

16:07unbelievable and just an unbelievable story of character and willpower and who Oprah is as a human, that she was able to become who she became after going through all of this terrible, terrible events. Yeah. And you know, the only thing I can, the story that we've told on the show that I think can even come somewhat close is Andy Groves' story, you know, living through the Holocaust.

16:35You know, the just heartbreaking thing about Oprah's story here is like, this still happens. You know, this happened for so many people and this still happens. Yeah, David, you touch on something important there. These are manifestations of systemic problems, of racism, oppression, and also of violence against women. I mean, it's not just one story about getting a bad luck at the draw here. Yeah. So the pregnancy and The baby and the baby dying was a total family secret. Vernon and Zelma knew, and no, but nobody else knew the family kept it completely hidden. Didn't tell anybody until 1990. So many, many years later, well after seven years into her show.

17:20Yeah, you know, when it came out and Oprah finally talked about it, this is actually Vernon, you know, has a quote, this is in the Kitty Kelley book. He says that when it happened, he said to Oprah, quoting here, this is your second chance. We were prepared, Zelma and I, to take this baby and to let you continue your schooling, but God has chosen to take this baby. And so I think God is giving you a second chance. And if I were you, I would use it. Whoa. Yeah. That's hardcore.

17:49That is hardcore heavy stuff. But that is exactly what Oprah does. So she goes back to school. She takes like a week off. We're now in, you know, late winter of her sophomore year in high school. And she just completely, completely reinvents herself. She says this is a quote from her. I went back to school and not a soul knew nobody. Otherwise, I never would have had this life that I've had. So she goes back and she's completely different. She tells Everybody that she's gonna be a movie star and she's gonna be famous and so she marches into Her English teachers class and you know tells her this their English teacher says, okay, you know great. I'll I'll encourage you and and so she gives Oprah answers is her to a book of poetry by James Weldon Johnson called gods trombones eight Negro sermons in verse Oprah loves these this book these poems she starts doing

18:46kind of dramatic readings of them in the community and in churches around the city and she kind of starts becoming a local celebrity like her readings of these you know and again nobody knows her secrets right but like for a 15 year old like just incredible oration and she has this deep you know Oprah voice already we all know now and so she ends up kind of through doing this She gets the chance to travel to Los Angeles and read for other Black Church groups in L.A.

19:17And as she's doing, she's 15 years old. She visits the Hollywood walk of fame. And and Vernon says when she when she came back, she told Vernon, daddy, I got down on my knees there and I ran my hand along all those stars on the street. And I said to myself, one day, I'm going to put my own star among these stars. One day I can buy any star I want. Yeah. Can buy the whole walk. I get into the.

19:40encouragement of her English teacher. I think she joins what was then called the National Forensics League at school. It's now the National Speech and Debate Association. And she starts giving orations and speeches at educational contests locally and then around the state. She starts winning these competitions. Then she starts competing nationally. She's traveling all over the country. Winning competition. She goes to Philadelphia. She wins a major competition there.

20:06she ends up, I think the next year, maybe, I don't know if it was probably the next year her junior year, she gets elected as vice president of the class. So the first black class officer, remember the high school just integrated the year before and she gets.

20:19elected most popular in the school. And then her senior year in 1971, she gets selected as the White House. This is kind of crazy. The Richard Nixon White House at the time held this thing called the White House Conference on Children and Youth. It took place in Colorado. And they selected high schoolers. Yeah. So Oprah on the back of this, she gets back to Nashville.

20:44And she ends up participating in the Marcha Dimes, you know, March fundraiser. And she goes to one of the DJs at the local Black radio station, getting John Heidelberg at WVOL and asked him to sponsor. She's like, you know, hey, I mean, who's got a platform that's going to get, you know, my name out to a lot of people get it get sponsors here, you know, well, with the radio station DJ. So when he's talking to her, he's like, you know, you've got a really Great voice. You should do radio. Yeah, you should do radio. You should have podcast. And so he kind of tells a bunch of his colleagues like, hey, this young girl is like, you know,

21:28She's pretty impressive, so she comes back, she does the thing, you know, comes back to collect the sponsorship after the March and he and a bunch of other folks at the radio station, like, hey, why don't you make a demo tape? And so they like have her make a tape, they cut a tape there and while she's there. And then they... Well, this she at this point, because this is like her first broadcast journalism for a, right? I think she's 17 at this point. Okay. And does she...

21:52I mean, I'm asking you as if you're like an Oprah scholar. But like, do you know, is she any inclination of what she wanted to do with her life at this point? Like, was, would she have seen this as like, this is my end, this is my opportunity? Yeah, totally. Like, she, she wanted to be, she was like, you know, she was telling everybody it's cool. There was, um, This might have been as part of the, you know, voting for most popular, whatever, like, there's a survey in school, you know, what do you want to be when you grow up and her answer is famous. And, you know, she'd seen the stars on the on the walk of fame and, you know, one of them. So they first give her a job just working part time in the studio. And then they give her a show. So she gets a rate like a real honest to God radio show as a senior in high school.

22:36She graduates. She enrolls locally in Nashville at Tennessee State University for college. It's a historically by university in Nashville. College is like, of course, she's super smart. She loves reading as we'll come up later and education and you know, she cares about college and Vernon and Zelma really care about her getting a college degree. But really, she just wants to focus on the show. So she doesn't live on campus. She doesn't live at home. She's making money from the show. She moves out. She gets an apartment in town.

23:02She starts to keep up in her, up in her sights, setting them even higher. She decides she wants to get into TV. And Legend has it that, so she must have been either Freshman or probably sophomore in college at this point. Legend has it that she interviews Jesse Jackson on the radio show. Jesse Jackson must have been pretty young at this point too. Yeah. But already very famous. And apparently after the interview, Oprah says this later, he tells her he says, You have the gift. Wow. Yeah. And this is why it's 70, 1973 and she wouldn't have her own, she wouldn't start what we know as the Oprah Winfrey show till 83 ish. So it's a decade. This is, no, this, this would have been like 70 or 71. Wow. So yeah, we're like way, way pressure. Apparently Jesse Jackson called it first. So kind of on the back of that, she sets her sights on, on TV.

23:59And everybody at the radio station is super supportive. They know she's she's going places. So it also does cable exist yet. Like TV at this point is is like they're just the broadcast networks, right? Yeah, cables like starting to become a cable was started. I think we talked about this on the ESPN episode. It was really for rural areas that couldn't get broadcast reception at this point in time. Right. That they would like relay the broadcast.

24:27Retran signals over satellite they'd bounce off the satellites down to the ground tower and then use the cable to distribute just the Yeah, yeah, okay, and I think what did ESPN start? It was a few years later, but it was in the seventies. Yeah, so yeah and Ted Turner is starting to think about cable networks, but this is still like We're even still pre, like in terms of the types of programming, like SNL wouldn't start until 75. So we're, you know, we're in kind of the, we're closer to Ed Sullivan than we are to ESPN. And also, this is super important because of all this.

25:03it's the local affiliates of the big national broadcast stations that that's the that is what people think of when they think of TV and specifically they think of the evening news like the evening TV news that is the you know crown jewel you know you think the top of TV that's what you think and that's what operas thinking I don't know how much of this was a calculated plan no No, I go for a little bit bicariously now. I suspect it was. In 1972, she enters, she's a college student at a TSU. She enters the Miss Black Nashville beauty pageant. She's beauty pageant. She's like, you know, Miss America style stuff, you know, with like talent, you know, all this all the stuff. She wins that. And then she enters Miss Black Tennessee. She wins that. She becomes Miss Black Tennessee. She goes to the Miss Black America overall thing.

25:52Places like like also how horrible is it that there's misblack Tennessee totally not just like totally I mean, yeah, I mean how like let's pop up another level and generally condemn the beauty pageant industry, but then the racist part like yes But good for Oprah for using that as a platform totally used it as a stepping stone she she ends up like like I don't know, like 43rd out of 50 in the US in the national competition, but it doesn't matter. She gets back after that to Nashville and her radio station call at this point. So she's kind of proven that she's like, you know, she has some credentials of like looks in addition to voice and employees in front of, you know, people. So her radio station colleagues call up the local CBS affiliate in Nashville WLAC and tell them like, like,

26:42You got to hire this girl. You got a, she's, you know, she's, her calling is beyond radio. And one playbook theme that I'll pull forward here is like, the thing to keep in mind with every step of the way for Oprah is the default pick for whatever she was trying to achieve would not have been her. It would have been an all likelihood of white male. And so she always had to do a non-traditional thing.

27:09to give herself a platform at a credential for a reason why she would be the obvious choice over the default choice. And this is a great example of her creativity and her drive to go and acquire whatever credential or whatever leverage she needed to in order to go and become the person that gets that next spot.

27:30Yeah, yeah. And her just continue, you know, at every step of her career, she's always thinking about the next step. And she doesn't in such a way, like, you know, that's not like you could be super view that as super cunning and conniving. Right. It's not conniving. It's done with poise. Yeah. Like everybody knows it. Like she's, she's super upfront. She's like, I want the star on the Hall of Fame. They don't walk with it. Like I want to own it, you know? So WLAC brings her on.

27:59They hire her, she becomes the first black woman on television in Nashville. I think in all of Tennessee, but to definitely in Nashville, all while she's still in college, by the way, and she comes on board as a reporter for the news. So not an anchor, but a field reporter. Turns out, what among Oprah's many, many great strengths being a news reporter turns out is not one of them, which she will freely admit. So she's not a super great reporter, but people love her, like she's got, she's got the gift when she's on camera. Certainly nobody looks like her on television, but you know, nobody sounds like her either. She just talks like she's, you think of TV news reporters, you think of like stiff like it over here. Right. She's, she's relatable, she's authentic, she's powerful. Exactly. Yeah. She's one of the audience. And so she ends up, the station, she's like,

28:55People love her. She gets promoted to be an anchor on the evening news. You don't do it so good at being a reporter. You should come be the anchor. Stop this reporting stuff.

29:06Very quickly after that, she gets recruited to move to Baltimore and take the co-anchor job on the evening news next to Jerry Turner, who was like a total legend at WJZ in Baltimore. The reason she does it, she makes the move, is A, Baltimore's a much bigger media market than Nashville period, but also WJZ is the number one station, and this is the number one evening news. Remember, evening news, crown jewel of...

29:31affiliate TV stations of TV. Oh, I see an increment. I'm familiar. Exactly. Exactly. If you've seen an increment, you know exactly how this works. So Jerry is Will Farrell basically. So Oprah drops out a TSU and makes them move up to up to Baltimore. So she gets there and probably predictably she and Jerry don't get along or see eye to eye on on the style. I mean, he's like, you know, super old school Edward Murrow style like, because the news and she's Oprah. And that could work great. But in this case, it doesn't work super great. So a few months in, she gets demoted. She has multi-year contract with the station. So they can't fire her. But she gets demoted from the co-anchor spot. She gets

30:21put in the slot as the weekend features reporter. Um, I don't know much about TV, but that doesn't sound good. Yeah. So the assignments, um, she gets her stuff like she covers, um, the cockatoo's birthday party at the zoo, uh, like, yeah, yeah, pretty, um, pretty, pretty rough. I mean, for somebody as ambitious as over, overcome, overcome, everything she's overcome. And then just had this like, shooting star ascent from high school junior to co-anchor next to Jerry in a huge medium market on the number one station in just a couple of years. This is a pretty big blow, but also Oprah is not deterred, especially after everything she's been through in life. This isn't gonna stop her.

31:10Rolls-up her sleeves and get to work and she's like I'm gonna be the best damn, you know weekend features reported. Talk to birthday party reporter. There is exactly like you know the and the seeds of the Oprah Winfrey show are so unright there You know we're joking but but kind of true she does that for a couple years and then gets The next big break when the station decides that they're going to start doing a morning talk show after the news. They're inspired by Phil Donnichew, who's been around for many years at this point, but is taking office of Phil from a house from Cleveland, actually originally, so he started. Then he had moved to Chicago to a big market doing his talk show in Chicago. It started getting national syndication and it becomes

32:00A major phenomenon like this whole new category, you know used to be the daytime talk show that was not a thing until it was not a thing It was like it was so what it used to be before down here was you had the morning news and then during the day you had just all you know syndicated like wheel of fortune like game shows down here has this great quote in in the WBZ podcast with Gen White. I can't remember exactly what he says, but it's like, you know, he's kind of making fun of like, you know, it was all like, come on down and click, click, click, you know, you have to do. Like that was, you give it the, yeah, exactly. That was, that was daytime TV. So he introduces this talk show format and people love it.

32:40And we should say these these daytime TV syndicated game shows had massive audience like those things were cash cows when they got syndicated and I think At this time it was wheel of fortune, but not yet jeopardy if I'm remembering right and like those were huge syndication deals totally and I can't remember when the price is right started but Right that time that kind of stuff But I think it was it wasn't that this stuff was like that compelling it was just they like A lot of people, particularly suburban housewives, watched TV during the day. They were gonna watch whatever was on. This was what was on. It wasn't that it was good. Right. And so when Donnie just shows up and they're like, oh wow, this is like actually speaking to us. This is good. We'll watch this instead. And I think you just said there, David. I think it's really important to drill home for everyone. We live in a pretty male dominated work culture and society now. Then in the 70s,

33:37Basically dad went to work and mom stayed home and and like daytime TV was for mom to watch whatever mom was gonna watch That's like a really important thing to understand about the sort of kindling that was there for this this fire that Oprah would create totally Well, I think it was super interesting to pull forward a bit is that was true But also there were a lot of jobs. There were a lot of places that were workplaces where there were men and women that had TVs on during the day. Like, think about like, you know, the auto mechanic shop or like, you know, anyway, you name it a 7-11. Like, I remember not too much.

34:18After this time, you know, when I was growing up and I was a little kid, my parents were both lawyers. They had their own firm and did Westchester, Pennsylvania and during the summers, they'd just bring me along to the firm, stick me in the back office with a TV and be like, you know, entertain yourself. What would I do? I watched Oprah all day like and fill. Well, yeah, I mean, like the TV, you know, now we all have our cell phones and you know, that's what like the mid 90s.

34:46Yeah, this would have been, no, this would have been even earlier, like late 80s, early 90s. Dude, it's so funny. I was going to say, it's a side from our story, but I was going to say, I've never actually watched an episode of Oprah. Like, I've watched a bunch for this episode. But before this, like, the things I knew about Oprah are like through my grandma, because she was a huge, I think my grandma may have watched every episode, or through headlines. And like, through the things you know about Oprah, because they were major pop culture moments, but like, I feel like we have way more credibility now that you've actually. Yeah, watching the show. I grew up watching a lot of Oprah in the summers and at all these shows, Mori, you know, like, but I think that was the point was that like to again pull forward to influencers and what would this would become with YouTube and the internet and TikTok and everything is like, everybody wants to watch something during the day, no matter what you're doing. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to tell you about a longtime friend of the show, Vanta.

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37:27So what was Donahue doing? What was his show? So that's what so what Donahue was doing was covering subjects in a talk show format and interview talk show format That were he and his producers were mostly women thought would be appealing to suburban housewives So unlike a game show or something like that what they really tried to do was think like okay, well like what is on these folks minds?

37:52and what would they like to hear about, what kind of questions would they ask if they were asking the guests, these questions, and then they would put these folks in the audience, and then he would go around on the microphone. He was the first one to do this, and the audience would be like, you, you know, audience member, ask the question, what do you think? And he would have celebrity guests on, right? Yep, total. Well, celebrity guests, and I think he had the first, I believe this is right. I think he had the first openly gay person on TV to talk about.

38:21being gay. You know, this is like, we're talking this happened in the 60s. So this is the kind of stuff that he was doing, just like human interest type stories in addition to celebrities. And this genre kind of evolved like out of morning news, right? Like Donnie Hugh, Donnie Hugh show was an AM, like a 10 AM or 11 AM show, right? Yep, it was to follow the news. Got it. So the idea was, you know, again, we're in 60s America, like dad goes to work, kids go to school, mom is now watching.

38:51TV, that was the idea for Donahue. So anyway, it took off in Baltimore. The station decided, hey, we should also, lots of local stations were saying, we need our own morning talk show. So they decided to start a show called People Are Talking, which is an amazing name for a talk show. Somebody bring that back. Totally. That should be a YouTube TikTok channel. People are talking. And so they tap Oprah too. They have the perfect...

39:19Host there, they tap Oprah to host it. Amazingly Oprah initially doesn't want to do it because remember, like the evening news slot, anchoring the evening news, that is like, that is what being a star means. That's the like the definition of the top. And she's like, what is this? I don't know, daytime TV. You guys already shoved me over to the covering zoos. Like, what are you putting me on now? You try to, you know, push me even lower on the totem pole, but they convince her to do it. So she does it. And like, she does the first show. And she's like, oh.

39:48I was born to do this. This is great. And people love it. And so within, you know, months, weeks, people are talking becomes bigger than Donahue in Baltimore. So it's only, it's only local. It's not syndicated yet. It's just in the Baltimore market, but it's competing same time slot as the Donahue show. And she's beating him. He's the king of, king of morning talk.

40:13And so eventually this starts to get noticed in the media world, and eventually people are talking gets a deal for national syndication. And the idea is it's going to go up and compete against down to you, but it only gets into 17 markets and it kind of flops nationally. I don't know exactly why. I don't know if it was maybe like two parochial to Baltimore or just what, but it doesn't work in this syndication deal gets canceled.

40:38So, help us understand what is a syndication deal? What does that mean? How do you get syndicated to other markets? What companies are involved? What economics look like? Yeah. The biggest syndicator at this point in time is a company called King World. And I don't know if people are talking with syndicated through King World or another company, but basically these groups of which King World is the largest.

41:02are just media rights distribution companies. So they would go around pick up shows which all shows at this point in time were being produced locally by local TV stations in any given market around the country. Pick up shows that they thought had potential and then do a licensing deal with them to then re re syndicate those shows out to other local TV stations around the country.

41:26And that's even like the way it would have worked for like a game show. Like they would develop the game show and add a local station for a local market. And then a syndicator would come and say, Hey, we think this has national appeal. And they would go get it in all the other markets, even though you're still making it there in Baltimore or Chicago or wherever. Yeah. And so King World had Wheel of Fortune, they had jeopardy in all these shows. Now what's interesting is is this seems so crazy today. I didn't even realize this growing up. But you think of, you know, your local TV station like you know, I don't know in Philadelphia where I was growing up, it was the channel three was the CBS affiliate. You think of it as like, oh, there's CBS, there's ABC, there's NBC, the big broadcast networks. Those stations are independent businesses. They affiliate with the big broadcast networks, but that's really essentially only for prime time TV, you know, kind of seven PM to 10 PM per day. 20 hours a day. Yeah, they're producing all their own stuff.

42:25they're an independent business, and so to fill a lot of those hours, they'd work with these syndicators like King World to bring in syndicated shows. So all this is happening outside of ABC, NBC, CBS, you know, they don't really care what their affiliates are doing during the rest of the non-prime time hours, and all that business is separate. Yeah. And the interesting thing about these syndicators too that I didn't really realize is since they're...

42:49They're getting to participate in the upside of the success. So at least the way all their deals tend to start, or at least at this time tend to start, was either in a rev-share or profit-sharing deal. So they would come to you. They would say, right now you're only getting to address Baltimore. We think you could play in these 17 markets. We're going to take some cut. And I think the cut's very wildly. So I can't describe the prototypical deal. But we're going to take some cut of the Add dollars that come in from whatever those TV networks in Houston and Phoenix and Cleveland are able to sort of generate. And then we're going to give the rest to you.

43:29station, who owns the rights to a show, you're like, great, it's all upside, like anything additional you can get is is new marginal revenue doesn't cost me anything, take whatever percentage you feel you need. And of course, it's not that that cordial, but you can see why there's these revenue share or profit share agreements that sort of get worked out to do that. So being a syndicator, if you get a hit, can be enormously lucrative. Yeah, I mean, I think it's been you may know the detailed economics of these types of arrangements better than me. But I think it's kind of inspired by and very similar to like the book publishing industry. Another industry we're going to bring up in a minute where author writes a book that's a fixed cost investment on the part of the author. In this case, it's local TV station produces a show, produces the content that's fixed cost investment. And then you work with a publisher to distribute that around the country or the world.

44:24And then you share some portion of the revenue from that. Yep. And much like the book publishing industry, the syndication sort of evolves into a guaranteed advance or a guaranteed upfront where they say, look, we think this thing is going to do so well. We're going to give you a big chunk of that upfront. And then when the number sort of hits the part that we've already given you, when the then you'll sort of get to participate in this percent of the revenue above that. And so it can start to look really lucrative for you as a creator because the syndicator will fund the creation of your show on an ongoing basis. And so you can sort of see already the incentives of a syndicator are to lock in a deal as long as possible at the most favorable economics and the incentives of a creator are either to get as much upfront as possible in sort of an advance.

45:16or to make the deal as short as possible so that if you start to get leverage by being really popular, then you can go back to your syndicator and go, you need me more than I need you. We'll see how that's all sort of plays out. Specifically, keep the right to your content. So that'll come in one sec. So, okay, all this is going on, even though people are talking fails on national syndication, Oprah's still a big star in Baltimore.

45:43Then in 1983 is when the big, big, big break comes. So one of the producers on at the station in Baltimore and on people are talking is a woman named, was a woman named Debbie Demayo. And Debbie had moved to Chicago a little bit earlier and joined the local ABC affiliate in Chicago WLS, which was owned by...

46:05Capital cities which will make all a long time acquired listeners and capital allocation fans smile yeah, and so so Debbie's a producer now if you're digging these 70s TV references go listen to ESPN episode because I think we probably did a much deeper dive on how the industry dynamics of that worked then yeah Debbie's now working at WLS in Chicago and they have their own morning talk show AM Chicago and one of the co-hosts two co-hosts one of the co-hosts leaves and Debbie goes to her boss and says, you gotta get Oprah out here. Oprah's ready for a bigger stage. Oprah's gonna be the perfect show. She's gonna be perfect for Chicago. We gotta lure her away from Baltimore. So at the time, the station had a new boss, who is Debbie's boss, a man named Dennis Swanson.

46:55He was there because WLS had been kind of in the dumps, who was like, I think it was lowest among all the local affiliates in ratings in Chicago. And he had been installed by capital cities, which owned the station, to fix it. And of course capital cities run by top Murphy and Dan Burke, master capital allocators, Warren Buffett calls them the greatest, greatest operating duo of all time, I think.

47:23Yeah, and famously very decentralized. So install someone, let them run the TV station. We'll get out of their way. Yeah, okay. So Dennis is new. He's there to fix it. And he says, you know, he hears Debbie's pitch. He says, okay, great. Like, let's get her out here. Let's, let's, let's, we'll set up. We'll do a trial run. We'll bring her on the set of AM Chicago. I'll watch her. We'll watch her. Do a show and we'll see you soon.

47:47She flies out. I think it's like on a Saturday, right? They're like, we're just going to pretend that it's a real episode, but it's not going anywhere. We're just going to watch it inside the stadium. Yeah, it's a mock episode. Yep. So she flies out, she does it, and Swanson's blown away. He's like, okay, this is not only is Oprah an amazing talent.

48:04But he's like, this is the king. Now, remember, Donahue is the OG, you know, the king of Morning Talk. He's recording in Chicago at WGN is his, you know, where he's producing Donahue and then being syndicated nationally. So he's, he's there across the street. And he's like, this is how we're going to be Donahue. We're not going to out Donahue, Donahue. We're going to zig where he's zagging. We're going to bring in Oprah. We're going to bring in a black woman to host this immediately. He takes, he takes Oprah upstairs to his office after the mock show. And he says, uh, He offers her the job on the spot, $200,000 salary, way more than she's making in Baltimore. Says, you gotta do it. I want you to start now. And Fabes Leopor says, well, do you have any concerns? Dennis says, no. She says, you know I'm black. And Dennis says, yeah, I can see that. And then she says, and you know I'm overweight. And Dennis says, so am I. And so are many Americans.

48:59If we do this, I don't want you to change a thing. No makeover, no diet, no new hairdo. Like, you are America. That's the whole point. So she's like, okay. So she signs the deal. Dennis calls up the capital city's brass and they're like, you sure about this one? And he's like, no, trust me. This is gonna work. You know your job is on the line too with these decisions you make. Yep. Yep. Remember, he's like, he was there specifically to fix the station.

49:28And he says, no, no, no, trust me, this is gonna work. And of course it does. So Oprah makes them move out to Chicago and they debut the show in January 1984. It is instant success. Like literally instant overnight. And this is, this is AM Chicago is the show. AM Chicago is the show.

49:46The whole station on the back of this new revitalized AM Chicago without roasting it goes from last in the market to first in the market half of Chicago literally half of the residents of Chicago start watching AM Chicago every day so not just women like like half of the city and remember Donahue is recording in the same city so she's completely destroying Donahue is one thing to out Donahue Donahue only in Baltimore but I mean, to be scooped to one local market and be Donahue's market and out Donahue, Donahue. That's a big deal. Huge, huge deal. So, a couple of things happen on the back of this. One, Tom and Dan and Capital City are like,

50:26Dennis job well done. We are going to promote you get promoted up to ABC because my capital cities had acquired ABC at this point. Mino Swallow's Whale was the headline that we talked about on the ESPN episode. We're going to promote you up to to ABC to the national broadcasting part of the business. You're going to run a big chunk of that. He ends up running ABC sports where he inherits as a direct report. Bob Iger. No way. Yep.

50:52Yeah, that's awesome. This is that awesome and Bob writes in in right of a lifetime that At first when Dennis came so Dennis was like this outsider from like he never made the collection. This is the same Dennis same Dennis So he comes in Bob. I've been working in a bc sports under root knowledge Dennis comes in and Bob's like super skin Bob actually is about to leave he gets a job offer to go join a talent agency. He's gonna leave quick capital cities and an ABC And then he meets with Dennis and Dennis is like, no, don't do that. Like, I'm going to promote you. And so Dennis then promotes Bob to take over all of ABC entertainment. He moves out to Hollywood. Then he becomes COO of all of cap cities. And then of course, the Disney merger and, you know, all of that right. And Dennis has the magic touch. Totally. I suppose like the he's a good picker.

51:45is a good identifier of talent. That is for sure. Yeah, literally Bob was about to quit cap cities and go have this whole different life until he met Dennis. It's also, here's another good tech theme. Let's pivot away from Iger for a second and back to Oprah. What a contrarian bet to bet on Oprah. It takes probably a lot of guts. He promoted super underrepresented minority person to take a huge bet.

52:15put I don't know how much of his career on the line, but some amount of his credibility, maybe all of his credibility on the line. And what he was doing there, like nobody should applaud him for altruism. It was like a self-serving investment. It was a sort of non-consensus bet that he was making and saying, like by doing something, other people aren't doing here that I think is awesome, like we're all gonna go be super successful. And he was right. And like, especially in this moment that we're in now, let that be the message that by doing something non-consensus and by zigging where others are zagging, you can be an enormously profitable. Yeah, I mean, this was such a classic acquired. Car is driving towards the cliff, pull the ebrake spin around because the station was in the dumps. One approach to fixing it could have been like, okay, well, we're going to do operational efficiency, which, you know,

53:09Dennis did too. And we're going to like step by step, you know, go, but he was like, okay, what's something like a big splash we can make? Here is the king of daytime TV filled down here across the street. I'm going to bring in, you know, this super negative, we're going to be David against Goliath here. And like we're going to throw a different playing field, complete on a totally different playing field. And like he she and and they dethroned Donut you in like a week It's crazy. So the other thing that happens so Debbie De Mayo becomes gets promoted be executive producer of the show They expand the show from 30 minutes AM Chicago to 60 minutes of full hour. They rename it to the Oprah Winfrey show Let's be let's be honest about what this is what the draw is here Kind of on the back of all this Oprah

53:57Says, you know what, I need a new agent. I need a real agent here. I forget who the agent was before. Here's the story here and this is from a great Forbes article. So WLS had been paying Oprah $2.38 a year. So she got $2.30 that first year and then it was going to go up by $30,000 each year in her four-year contract. And this is from the Forbes story. As she tells it, she was pleased at first but then began having second thoughts. Three separate ABC people stopped me to tell me what a great guy my agent was. Win for your calls. And that didn't make sense to me.

54:29Why were people going out of their way to praise the fellow? Winfrey's natural skepticism was aroused. She sacked the agent. She replaced him with a Chicago lawyer named Jeffrey Jacobs. I'd heard Jeff is a piranha. She says of her choice. I like that. Piranha is good. Oh boy. I didn't find that. That is amazing. It's a great observation. Like if people who you were just negotiating against are praising your agent, like you got had.

54:58Yeah, you need a new agent. Oh, yeah. So great. Well, Jeff, um, uh, Jeff and Oprah would be business partners for about 20 years. He both negotiates a much, much, much better deal for her and brings her international syndication and everything. But two things happen in the, in the next year or so, that completely. And where are we? This is 1984 here. 1984, 85. And that completely changed Oprah's mindset about what her goals are. So Jeff, when he comes on board, he, he says like, look, I'm going to get you a much better deal with, you know, much better with the salary with with WLS and all that. And like, you know, great. We'll do, we'll do good. But. And he does. It was like a hundred times more like he was getting her first year salary in the like 30 million category. That was once, that was once national syndication started. Okay. Sorry. So I think I don't know exactly what it was with.

55:56uh, when she was just, when it was just a him Chicago, but certainly more. So he convinces her like, you got to think about your career, not just like, you don't want to just be talent. Like, I can negotiate deals for you as talent, you know, all you want, but that's not interesting. What matters is not how much you make. It's how much you keep. Don't pieces is equivalent. Don't be talent for higher own yourself. Don't take a salary. Take a piece of the action. So that's, you know, bumping around in Oprah's, Oprah's mind. Then The other big thing that happens in this time is Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple is being made into a huge film event with Stephen Spielberg as the director and he's going through casting and Quincy Jones has signed on to the project as a producer and is doing the music and Quincy tells Stephen, hey

56:50You might want to look into this rising star, this rising star TV personality, in Chicago, who I think would be perfect to play Sophia in the movie. And so Spielberg meets Oprah, and of course, rest his history there. It's natural, so Oprah plays Sophia in the color purple, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. But the thing that happens around all this is Quincy takes Oprah under his wing.

57:18And introduces her, brings her out to Hollywood, introduces her to all the real power brokers in Hollywood. And she realizes through this, through his advice and seeing all this, that like the way you get really powerful isn't to be a movie star.

57:33It's to own the production. It's to be an owner. And that's the same thing that Jacobs had been effectively telling her. Like, so don't, you know, the new star is like, yeah, yeah, okay, I'm gonna get my star on Hollywood Boulevard, but literally I'm gonna own the Boulevard. Like, that's how you make the real money and get the real power.

57:49And this permeates her thinking for the rest of her life. Like, now we can sort of see everything set in motion where everything for Oprah becomes about control, only doing things what she wants, doing things on her terms, doing things that feel authentic to her, never... I mean, we start to wait into a different category here of her obsession and not violating her.

58:08relationship in her bond with the audience, but it's all sort of tied into this thing, same thing where now the important thing to her is that she's in the driver's seat, not that she can go make that next, you know, tranche of guaranteed money, you know, it's really about ownership. And it actually reminds me of another episode we did, David with, uh, uh, recode, when we had Cara Swisher on, you know, Cara talked about how her deal with the Wall Street Journal was, hey, look, we're going to do all things digital, Walt and I and he's an employee and that's all good, but I'm coming on contract.

58:37Walt and I own all things digital. You can contract with us for us to have that be a part of your publication for a period of time, but that's a thing that I own. I don't work for you. It's a I think an interesting parallel because it allowed her then to go and do recode and sort of take the the the band with her and and have that control. You know, this is, this is the path. This is the way you become an entrepreneur in the, in the media world. And it certainly carries much more risk than like a guaranteed, absolutely, all repayment from whatever big media company. But, um, you know, well, as we'll see with Oprah, I think she's very glad she took this path. And not to mention, you need demonstrated success in order to pull this off in your negotiation because you need the leverage to

59:19be able to say like, it's, look, it's frankly, it's worth it for your business to have me. And this is the way in which you get to have me as a part of your, your publication. Yeah. So while all this is happening, Kingworld, you don't remember people are talking back and Baltimore failed on national syndication. Well, you know, they're, they're not blind to what's happening in Chicago now. So they come to WLS and Oprah and they say, hey, we're going to take this, we're going to take the Oprah Winfrey show.

59:49national syndicated in a big way, not 17 markets, 138 markets. And did she only do the Oprah Winfrey show for one season in Chicago before King World was like, and time to go national? The first national show was September 1986. So I think it was two years, two seasons in, I don't know if it was AM Chicago, it was probably maybe one season AM Chicago, then the Oprah Winfrey show just in Chicago.

1:00:14and then national. So she actually leaves filming for a week from the color purple, tells Spielberg, hey, I gotta go negotiate my national syndication deal. And he's like, oh, okay, you know. And so then it all hits. Like, color purple comes out at Christmas 1985. It's huge. It gets 11 Academy Award nominations. Oprah is going on all the, she's going on the tonight show. She's getting magazine covers. She's promoting the film.

1:00:41But she's also promoting her show, which is about to become a national show. And she starts to realize, hey, this is a virtuous cycle. So on September 8th, 1986, the first national show is broadcast. Actually, well, before that, I came out of this before or after. She does an interview with Bill Zemi, which was intended to be for Vanity Fair as part of this slick publicity run and Tina Brown who was then the editor of Vanity Fair in what would start a feud between her and Oprah that but I think last to this day, killed it. The interview ended up appearing in spy magazine instead. And in this interview, she said, she said to Bill, she said, I intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul. So like, she's, the mindset has taken. Oh, and I use the word mogul in the intras. Like, oh, is it fair to call, you know, would she like that? I didn't realize she actually used the word. That's a word. So she's pressing the advantage. September 8, 1986, the first national show, first national Oprah went for show.

1:01:49Heirs and 138 markets and on the WBEZ podcast, I think it's Debbie De Mayo tells the story of they tried to get Don Johnson from Miami Vice as the guest. But couldn't get him. But couldn't get him was so amazing. Yeah, they've only they had. Yeah, this is on the great podcast that David mentioned at the top of the show. There's a great discussion of sort of the culture of the Oberlin Free Show at this point.

1:02:14it's effectively for scrappy women in a room coming up with stories making phone calls, hustling and like doing just heroic effort to put together an hour of TV every day. You know, you can imagine what The Oprah Winfrey Show turned into, hundreds and hundreds of people and producers and just, you know, massive staff to be able to pull off these gambits that they did.

1:02:37At this point, it was, you know, it was a startup. It was incredibly scrappy and to be able to on the one hand, you're like, there are 138 markets. How can they possibly not get Don Johnson to come on the show? I mean, they're just hustlers and they only have the track record of being a local show before this. Yeah. Well, and so here's this actually is the other piece to the magic that I think then, you know, Oprah had the gift, right? And that got her to this point. And she now has the Aim for the mogul mindset. That's the second piece. I think the third piece of the magic that makes Oprah Oprah and leads to all of this is She didn't get down Johnson as the guest instead her guest on that first show was an author named Margaret Ken who'd written a book called how to marry the man of your choice And I'm gonna read or I'm gonna read in a sec the verbatim Oprah's Opening cold opening to the first national show but keep in mind as I'm saying this like

1:03:33What Oprah is and like who she is here and how she's coming across. So she's this is the opening of the show. I'm Oprah Winfrey and welcome to the now to the first national Oprah Winfrey show. And yes, it screams it. It's like, you know, the classic Oprah. And she says, there has been this next line. There's been so much hoopla about this premiere show that it's enough to give a girl hives. I mean, I've got them right now under my armpits.

1:03:56One thing I've learned is that no matter how far down you go, and I tell you, I've been down on my knees with the best of you. No matter how low you feel, this show always allows people, hopefully, to understand the power they have to change their own lives. Now, I don't have a lot of problems in my life. I have to tell you, things are going pretty good for me right now. But two things have bugged me for years. The first, my thighs. The second, my love life. And then she introduces.

1:04:22Mark. Okay, so just think about that. The WBC podcast talks about this. The target audience is Susie. So they identify Susie as this mythical... Also, is this the first persona? Startups are obsessed with persona development now. They actually named a false audience member Susie.

1:04:42And like had that as a persona that was like check against. It's like it's like Amazon where like the empty seat in the room for the customer. It's like the empty seat in the producers room for Susie. Like what is Susie? You want to know Susie is a suburban mom. And so they're always asking themselves like, what is who is Susie? Who are Susie's friends? What does Susie relate to? What is Susie? What are the questions Susie wants to ask? And like, compare that opening from Oprah to to Donekyu to the evening news to anything that's to pay no.

1:05:09the wheel of fortune, anything that's on TV right now. Susie's their friend. It's just so unbelievably authentic. It's so different than what you're hearing on TV and it's wildly produced in any other daytime slot at this point, especially in the prime time slot. Nobody's talking about hives under their arms or their thighs or like this is like the very first time that the vast majority of viewers are seeing Oprah and they're having this really intimate relationship with her. Yeah, so two years later, in 1988, the highest rated most watched Oprah show episode in the history of the Oprah Winfrey show. Have it in 1988. It was not Tom Cruise jumping on the couch. It was not you've got a car. It was an episode called Diet Dreams where Oprah had lost 67 pounds on a diet. She did it with a product called Optifast.

1:06:03just talks about it on the show mostly the fasting and when she occasionally did eat it was up to fast exactly super not healthy we'll talk about all that in a sec but it was crazy like literally 44 million people watch this show and then the like the the big you know over the top moment in the show was halfway through she brings out a wagon with 67 pounds of animal fat on it to say like this is I was carrying this around like you know it's got even it's laughable and very problematic in a lot of ways thinking about it now, but think back like this is this she was a friend she was like celebrate like I just went on this diet. I lost all this weight like that right here. I am in my size 10 jeans. I feel like feeling so good and I want to celebrate you know with my friends yeah and 44 million people watched it so crazy so so crazy so she starts you know they they start getting letters from people from all the way that's a live number like

1:07:00Yeah, like let's not, there was no DVR, there was no YouTube, so like 44 million people tuned to that hour to watch that concurrently. It's like nowadays, like, you know, probably the Tom Cruise jumping on the couch clip has over 44 million views. I would guess on YouTube these days, but like, that's over 15 years. This is 44 million people. Think about America. What does America have population wise at that point? Maybe like 320 million people. No, let's not.

1:07:30Like less than 300 at that point. Yeah. So what is that like one? Holy six or six of America, the US tuned in to watch that episode simultaneously. Unbelievable. And like, this isn't the Super Bowl. This is a daytime talk show about a woman who lost weight. Like, but And by 1988, it wasn't just a woman who lost weight, it was our Oprah. It was our person and this personal quest that she's been on that she's sharing with us. Yeah. And I think that's the thing like, obviously there's a lot this problematic and like terrible and like a gaukish about that. It's super complicated, but it's real. Like that's the thing. It's real. And that's who Oprah is.

1:08:22Well, let's let's touch on that now because I think Oprah has some quotes looking back on this that are worth mentioning. And the top one is I actually thought at that time that being thin made me better. And she talks about that she really regrets that she calls it a mistake. She calls it hard to watch. And she says you can see that my ego is on flamboyant display. I've had to pay the price for that moment over and over. And I literally handed the world on a fat wagon platter the story.

1:08:50this, you know, I'm editorializing this really buzzy story of, is she fat, is she thin? And of course, like, you know, she's a person. So she's gonna, I don't know if struggle with this is the right word but fluctuate or, you know, she gains weight, she loses weight. But the fact that she introduced it in such a big public way, it's that story that people want to write about in the tabloids over and over and over again every time her weight changes, you know.

1:09:17she gave them, as she says, on a platter. And it's a tough thing to tie sort of your self-worth in your physical appearance like that. And I think, you know, that this is young Oprah sort of flexing in a little bit. Like, look what I can do. Look how awesome I am. And all power, too, if you're doing something that is incredibly difficult. But, like, I think the sort of older, wiser, Oprah later looks back and is just clearly so bummed that she opened up in that particular way.

1:09:46But 100%. Let's also be honest, too. I mean, Oprah has I think we hopefully described here as like an exceedingly once in a generation sharp media business woman. Yeah. And she certainly knew that by doing this, she was going to get these ratings. She was going to get, you know, by handing the media this story.

1:10:09while certainly painful now that like she just guaranteed the next 20 years of headlines about about Oprah's weight. Again, super terrible and problematic in lots of ways, but Oprah's in the headlines. She, Oprah knows what we'll play. Yeah. So on the back of that, it was actually was a little before in...

1:10:291987, I believe, was the last year of the original contract with King World. I think it was originally two-year contract, or maybe it was a three-year and it went into 88, but they negotiated it in 87. She earned $31 million in royalties and salary from the King World contract in 1987. And that's when she and Jacob's decided, all right, it's time to put the mogul plan into action.

1:10:54Yeah, because I mean think about when she was just employed by the station she was making 200k then she got I don't know how much more but hundreds of thousands of dollars more with a better agent When it was still just the station the syndication deal obviously that's when you get those one maybe even two orders of magnitude Jump into this 31 million that year from being in a hundred and however many markets So what next? Yeah, so what next is All right, it's time to own the production. It's time to start a company. It's time to build a studio. So they buy the show from WLS. They buy the Oprah Winfrey show or at least the rights to it. They negotiate directly with King World. They invest $16 million of Oprah's own money to build a state of the art production studio in Chicago. And they're going to produce and they're going to make not only the Oprah Winfrey show, but a lot

1:11:51more media content, too, and they're gonna sell it. $16 million of her own money. And this isn't the Oprah we know today that has over $2.5 billion. This is Oprah that for the very first time last year made $30 million, but she just knows the trajectory that she's on. So she's like, you know what, let's put it all back in. Let's buy this thing, let's own this thing, let's build this thing. So this is when they found Harpo Media. So Harpo, of course, is Oprah. Both Oprah backwards.

1:12:20and the husband of Sophia's character in the color purple. And so they found Harpo Media and Oprah owns 80% of it. Jacob zones 10% and Kingworld gets an equity stake of 10% as well as part of this negotiation. And in doing so, Oprah becomes The first black woman and only the third woman ever to own a production studio. So like, yeah, remember, this is the power broker, you know, club of the media industry. So the first two before her, the first two women before her were Mary Pickford and Lucille Ball. But both of them, of course, owned their studios with their husbands, you know, Lucy and Ricky. Oprah is the first woman that is solely independently doing this first black woman period. There's no board, Oprah controls everything. And again, they start

1:13:08pumping out other content. So the first other project besides the Oprah Winfrey show. It's called The Women of Brewster Place. And it's a made for TV movie. They know their audience, right? And so kind of just like the, you know, Dennis and, you know, back in the day, the original like having angling that this is going to work. They have an angling that a made for TV movie targeted at women is going to work.

1:13:30They pitch it to the networks, the networks don't want it. They want to air this in prime time on the big broadcast networks. The networks don't want it. Oprah basically forces ABC, she has this relationship with ABC and CapCities. I think Bob Heiger might have been running ABC Entertainment at this point. So basically, Forrest is Bob to, if he was, to take it.

1:13:49They run it kind of like, all right, we're doing this to a piece, Oprah. It becomes the second highest rated TV movie ever. So like, it turns out, maybe for TV, we like, I don't know how many people watch the Hallmark channel. Like, it's a good idea or the, or the own Oprah, or lifetime or lifetime. Like, yeah, this is a good idea. And this is, this is the, you know, of the things we're going to keep coming back to for, for Oprah. She's got an eye for what's going to work. Like, she knows what we'll play. She knows her audience.

1:14:19audience. She knows America as an audience. And we're going to keep touching on control. We're going to keep touching on her drive to be big. But there's this obviously has this gift of how to speak to people, but she has a real gift for just knowing what will land and how big it will be.

1:14:38Yeah. So, okay, so this is the first one. So, what does she do then to build on that? What does she know? It's going to resonate. So, Harpo trademarks, the slogan, live your best life. They start selling like notebooks, candles, scented candles with live your best life. And, you know, sold by Harpo, like they're getting, you know, it's like the Disney flywheel here, like all within Harpo. This is great. She writes an autobiography. And by all accounts, she actually wrote this autobiography. And she had a deal with, uh, publishing house to publish it. And then, like, Oprah's such a genius. She decides at the last minute, she can't publish, it's gonna be too painful to my family. And so, like, that just generates more media for her than, like, if she had actually published it, it was the most anticipated book of, like, the century. And then she didn't publish it, which just made the myth even stronger. And so then, as a consolation prize, she says to the canoff, okay, well, like, I didn't do this, but

1:15:35I'll do a cookbook with you. And so she they publish a book called In the Kitchen with Rosie. Rosie is her personal chef. And I'm pretty sure it becomes the fastest and biggest selling cookbook of all time. Amazing. And it's especially amazing because Oprah is not even like her brand around that point isn't even like I know food. Like there's no like it just happens to be that. Well, there is the whole diet thing and like You know, I think she has the time with Weight Watchers at this point. Right, right, right. But the whole like Rachel Ray relationship hadn't begun yet, right? No, that hadn't begun yet. So then I think it was one of her producer, Dallas McGee, comes up with the idea in 1996, a few years later of, well, okay, so this cookbook thing works and she's always had authors on the show and she recommends their books.

1:16:27leads to like a lot of sales. And people used to joke that where Oprah held the book was an indication of what the sales were going to be. If it was in her lap, it was a dud. If it was like at her waist, it was like, okay, if she held it up by her face, then what if she holds it up sort of like a Bible? Yeah, exactly. Like, oh, God. That's not go there. You know, then it was going to be the sale too. You had to. They had the idea on the show, well, what if we launch?

1:16:54a book club. So in September 1996, they launched Oprah's book club with Tony Morrison's Song of Solomon as the first book and the idea is they're gonna announce a book, give the audience a month to read it, and then they do an episode with the author. So that year, they...

1:17:10our response directly responsible and they do special opera book club additions to the book for $130 million in book sales in literary fiction in 1996 which is many more times sales than the entire genre category had had like in the years before just like such a brilliant business idea so pause announcement for the LP program this is our big reveal We're going to launch the acquired book club. So it's going to be part of the LP program. The first book is going to be Hamilton Helmer's seven powers. Of course, we already have the episode with the author done. Like doing this episode, we just realized why it's crazy that we haven't done this for acquired. In fact, we already have a book club channel that we just haven't sort of like used in the Slack for an organized way, but you could run a way worse playbook than just copying Oprah over and over and over again in later decades in different modalities. Well, we'll talk about that in.

1:18:04playbook, but yeah, acquired book club. It's happening. So here is how it's going to work. Ben and I are going to choose a book. Time interval TBD could be every month, could be every six weeks. We're going to work that out as we go along. And then depending on the availability of the author, we are going to do either one or both of an LP episode with the author discussing the book and a LP Zoom discussion.

1:18:33with all of ULP's, potentially with the author, if she or he is willing to join us. We are also gonna give all LPs access to Ben and my notes on the book. Our notes on seven powers are already ready to go as soon as we figure out the right vehicle to get that out to everyone. So we'll be prettier than others. Exactly, exactly. And then Ben mentioned the book club channel in Slack that has been sitting there for a while. We're gonna repurpose that for use of ongoing discussion of our book club books. Yes, we are very excited to dive in. And we are going to borrow from Oprah in more ways than one. So at the beginning of this episode, David mentioned that you have a box underneath your seat, pick that up and gaze inside. If you have been considering becoming an LP, but haven't yet, well, inside that box, should you sign up is a copy of seven powers by Hamilton Helmer with a little note from David and I.

1:19:30and just want to send that out to new LPs as a thank you and welcome to the book club and that will be going out to our next 100 LP subscribers. We also know that lots of you have been LPs for a long time and so we are also going to go back through and pick 100 of our existing LPs to send copies of the book to as a thank you. So keep an eye out for an email if you're an existing LP or a new LP joining. And if you live in the US, we'll be sending you an actual copy and outside the US. We'll send you a digital copy. So we're excited and we hope you'll join us. Yeah, we hope you will. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to thank our longtime friend of the show service. Now, if you are running a large enterprise, AI agents are likely spread across every team and deploying them is no longer the hard part.

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1:21:42So if you're trying to turn AI ambition into real business outcomes and make it work safely, securely at scale, go check out servicenow.com slash acquired and tell them that Ben and David sent you. Okay, back to the regularly scheduled show in progress. The other thing that they launched in 1996 made that this is future acquired, maybe come Christmas time around Thanksgiving. We'll do this is Oprah's favorite things. Oh my God. So I did not realize did you know, Ben, that, um, remember Uggs boots?

1:22:11The furry. I learned this in the research that Oprah was the queen maker of that. Oprah made hugs. She had some hugs, she loved them, and then that year, so by the way, the way that Oprah's favorite things work, I think it's the first episode of each season.

1:22:29It might be I think they switched around when they did sometimes they did around Thanksgiving right before Christmas shopping sometimes it was September with the first episode of the season Like the car thing the car gave away was not random like it was part of a series of things that she started where it was like When I have an idea of a thing that I love that I want to give to my audience like pajamas for example like we will We will just give them the the audience because I want them to enjoy it and Ugg Boots were one of those. Ugg Boots amazing. So we have Oprah to thank. And for people to understand the impact of that, this got dubbed the Oprah effect, the combination of this and the book club, it's almost like the Steve Jobs reality distortion field. Like the Oprah effect is when Oprah sort of endorses something and then massive sales come out of that. The book club in particular,

1:23:19She did 70 books over the 15 years of doing this, so the 15 of the 25 years of the show. In total, there were 55 million copies sold after Oprah recommended it. So, you know, averaging close to a million purchases per book that she recommends. So, obviously, it would spike it to the top of the New York Times best seller. Obviously, it would make it basically the number one book that year. You know, most people read a book a year, and for a lot of people, Like that was just the book that Oprah recommended every year and so the way they that a lot of sort of analysts have sort of Worked it out is when Oprah decides to endorse something that increases the number of people who will do that thing by a million The going back to the cookbook with Knapp they I don't remember the exact numbers, but the story is they were like yeah, we're gonna print like 50,000 copies or something like or 100,000 copies and I was like

1:24:17That's not enough, that's crazy. We printed the Julia Talon cookbook and that's only ever sold 300,000 copies or something. Oprah said, yeah, you're going to have to 10X your production on this. This is a good place is any to talk about not only the Oprah effect, but really what did her audience look like and try and contextualize those numbers a little bit. At this time that we're currently in in the story in the early 90s, Oprah would draw 12 to 13 million concurrent viewers every single day to her 4 p.m. show astounding That's like 5% of America at that point in time. Yeah, and if you look at over the course of a week the number of unique viewers who would turn it tune into one of her show would be 40 to 50 million So her audience her weekly effectively weekly active users or weekly audience was

1:25:12like 40 to 50 million people. Now, there were spikes where, and we'll talk about this in a moment, but like the, she interviewed Michael Jackson in a very famous interview the first time he had been interviewed for 14 years. She did it on site at Neverland Ranch. That actually got 90 million viewers. And at any given time during the broadcast, it was 62 million concurrent. Yeah. Which was, I believe it was, it was either though, largest or maybe it's the largest interview in television history. Yeah, but I think it was the largest it may have been the largest non super bowl television event in history to freaking wild. So the the comparison that I want to make here just to like really drive this home is so people talk a lot about like

1:26:02the incredible amount of attention and users and watch it on views on YouTube, or the incredible amount of people who watch eSports or video games. Like, let's not even take that weekly viewer number of 40 to 50 and just look at the sort of like concurrence on a single show on an average weekday at 4pm. So like 13 million people.

1:26:25The largest concurrent number on Twitch ever has been when Drake and Ninja played Fortnite and that was 700,000 concurrent. So there was like this perfect moment in history where the internet wasn't a thing yet, so you didn't have...

1:26:45the massive sort of fragmentation of all the different creators who would rise up that you could watch. So there was a very constrained set of who the creators were. Oprah had this really magical personality and this really magical ability to relate with the audience. And the way that we were in this syndication era, so you actually could reach a national audience. It was like she shot the gap, she had the right talent and she shot the gap where there was a constraint set of creators, but you could reach a national audience and just had way more influence and way more sort of ability to gather people concurrently than on a regular basis than anyone would ever have ever again. It is, it's amazing today for...

1:27:27Influencers, media properties and everything. In many ways, it's so much better. There's so many more opportunities. There's Twitch, there's YouTube, there's TikTok, there's Twitter, there's podcasts, there's everything. There's blogs, there's email and these letters. Oprah only had appointment television. But because of that, there's all so such a cacophony of content out there. Oprah had this moment where she had the stage basically all to herself. I mean, yeah, there was Jerry Springer and there was Don Hewin on the bed like, you know, okay.

1:27:55she had a handful of maybe competitors, many of which she ended up co-opting and you know, we'll get into in a sec. Dr. Phil, Rachel Ray, Dr. Oz, these all become Harpo productions. Yeah. There's no one thing that you can attribute it to, but certainly a driving factor in what helped was the fact that...

1:28:16What she valued over anything else was authenticity and the the trust with her audience and so she would never do anything that she felt would Violate her code or what she felt like people would want to watch on an enduring basis She would never wait too far into the waters of the sort of trashy TV even though it could bring immediate rating She felt like that wasn't the thing for the 25-year friendship that she wanted to have with frankly the women of America. And that ability to constantly say no, there's this wonderful David Carr article in The New York Times, you know, Reston P's David Carr, a triumph of avoiding the traps. And it's really about how it's all the things that Oprah didn't do. And the thing she said no to in the way she stayed sort of true to herself and true to her audience that really let her keep that for so long. Yeah. So

1:29:12In 1999, a couple of things happened in 1999, 2000. Oprah renews its time as up for renegotiations renewal for Harpo and the Kingworld deal. They renew it for 130 million a year, or what works out to 130 million a year, but in the revenue sharing. Plus, now Harpo gets equity in Kingworld. Remember, Kingworld got equity in Harpo originally. Harpo gets equity in Kingworld as part of this deal.

1:29:39That year later that year CBS acquires King World for two and a half billion dollars Oprah and Harpo make a hundred million dollars on that deal In months and that I wonder if it was actually with that capital that she then started buying and bringing in other shows into the Harpo Networks of Rachel Ray Dr. Phil Dr. Oz many of which she had kind of made them originally as guests on Oprah show They bring and start producing those shows and owning them as part of Harpo and then the next big thing is it launches in 2000 they partner with Hearst and they launch oh magazine becomes the largest most successful magazine launch in history 2.5 million copies circulation right off the bat brings in 140 million dollars in circulation plus advertising revenue in the first year that empire just

1:30:29keeps on growing. A couple of years later, she does deal with serious XM. Getting back to the radio roots does a three year, $55 million contract to bring Oprah and friends as a channel on serious XM. That was the next piece of the empire. In large part, this is harvesting. She can't build a bigger audience unless she goes global or unless she decides that we want to start bringing more, frankly, more man into the percentage of people who are watching my show all the time. Like, she already addresses the women and some of the men of America. And so at this point, it's about harvesting that audience and end.

1:31:09what you can basically do is see her for a long time say nope my show is the only way that I reach people and then her realizing oh people will pay me for little pieces of all this stuff and I can carve off well Oprah and friends is a thing but it's only audio and it's a different type of content and you know you start to see this sort of like What deals can I cut in what different ways across what channel to reach what segments of my audience and what different meteorites can I own and monetize those so they yeah, we cannot talk about this too the other thing in the mid 2000s that she just nails is like She just reaches the apex of her powers as the like celebrity confessional and we got to talk about 2005 Tom Cruise got it to be homes You seem really just

1:31:58overcome with love. This is a whole new time. This is a different time. Yeah. Oh, man. Amazing. So fun to watch on YouTube. But that's actually, again, Oprah to kind of be him. I don't know how much this was intentional, but this kind of stuff that she starts doing on the show, it's perfect for the internet. The old shows were like, it was the whole show. It was the build up to the wagon of fat, you know, all that kind of stuff. But now it's like, you get these moments, get these clips, and then they're going to be posted and reshared and reposted on the internet. The rise of Oprah and the dominance of Oprah couldn't have and fortunately for her didn't happen in the internet world, but she did adapt to the internet world very well, particularly with all these different sort of meteorites and her later launching Oprah.com and some more stuff we'll talk about, but the way that she changed the content, I think is exactly as you point out, David, just perfect for these shorter YouTube clips and hasn't gotten as short as TikTok yet.

1:32:55But the like the older episodes it would be a whole like her most busy shows would be a whole hour long narrative arc. So the fat wagon or when she literally moved her show to that terrible racist county where she actually relocated the whole show and did an hour long show with an audience of mostly white supremacists who were like explaining to her why they needed to be this all white community. It's an hour of one single topic that's gut wrenching. She would later have neo-nazis on the show. I mean, she would have this hour long block of television that makes you feel a certain way for an hour that was perfect for then and is not perfect for now. And you're right. This Tom Cruise clip, like, I mean, you can even just pick three seconds, wind it back and forth over and over again, turn it into a gif. And like, that's the content. And I think that you're right. She's very adaptable. So kind of, you know,

1:33:49on this going out on top. So she decides that the 25th season of the show is going to be the last and then she's going to fully transition into mogul status and she's working on a big deal, which we'll talk about in a second. In the second, the last season of the show, I think this is best, most perfectly encapsulated with, to kick off the season premiere and the 24th season, they have the Black Eyed Peas come to Chicago, do it. They go out to our event and they do, this is when Flashmob's internet Flashmob is where I think they do a Flashmob dance.

1:34:16They do a special version of I got a feeling with new lyrics just for Oprah. Yeah, I feel like I am rewrote the lyrics. Yep. And they get, you know, 20,000, 30,000 people to come to Miracle Mile in Chicago, they close down the streets, they do this thing, and then.

1:34:34Everybody does a choreographed flash dance in the middle, and it's like the most perfect three-minute YouTube thing you can ever imagine. Well Lincoln and the show notes, Oprah doesn't know. It's incredible. She is somehow, they told 30,000 people something that in Chicago, that Oprah didn't know. And they actually pulled off, like, shocking her. The most telling quote that she has is, you know, when they do close down the streets of the Miracle Mile and everything, she asks one of her producers, are the black eyed peas really big enough to sort of close down, you know, close down the streets of Chicago. And her producers are like looking back and are, yeah, I think they are. And it's just because she doesn't actually know what the real reason for closing it down, it's, it's, it's very cool. Well, the hard is, yeah, the black eyed peas maybe Oprah is definitely big enough to close down. So the show ends and it's 25 season in 2010.

1:35:32They do a two-part finale. They have, you know, everybody, everybody who's anybody is part of it. Will Smith, Madonna, Michael Jordan, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise of course is back. Sans Katie Holmes, I think at this point. And as part of it, Aretha Franklin makes it back all those years after the $100 bill given out the windows. Things amazing grace in the, I think it was the last episode was just Oprah in the studio, but the second the last was in the United Center. Yeah.

1:36:00Pretty amazing. So that's the wrap on Oprah, the media personality, but the deal she's working on is, so she had been an investor, Harpo had been an investor in the cable network, oxygen media. That gets sold to NBC Universal in 2007. I assume with some of the proceeds from that, she then does a deal with discovery in 2008, the Discovery Channel, to turn the Discovery Health channel, which was struggling.

1:36:29into the Oprah Winfrey Network and the idea is it's going to be a 50-50JV. Oprah's everything she had been all the assets she'd been contributing to Oxygen. Now, I'm going to move over. It's going to be her own channel, 50-50JV with Discovery. I believe in 2017, I think Discovery bought out half of Oprah's stakes. They now own about 73-74% and Harpo owns the rest. The plan is they're going to launch in January 2011.

1:36:52because the King World CBS distribution rights for the Oprah Winfrey show ran through May 2011. So they're going to launch into January and then by the second half of the year, they'll be able to be running reruns of the Oprah Winfrey show, along with Dr. Phil and Rachel Ray and everything. The channel actually struggles for a couple of years after they launch it. But then again, Oprah Hartfo, the tuned in. Yeah. And let's talk about the channel struggling because what that was is Again pulling forward a playbook thing, but we've talked a lot about this notion of a direct relationship with your audience. Oprah may have been able to reach all those people.

1:37:25But she didn't actually, it's not like she'd email addresses or phone numbers for them. They watched channels that she was on. And when she moved over to a new channel, like a Joe Rogan or a lot of, like we're seeing it unfold and podcasting now, like she isn't necessarily having an ability to reach out to all those people and say, hey, come on over. And so the first year is very disappointing in the amount of people she can actually reach because, and I think she has talked about this, she underestimated the power of habit.

1:37:50they were used to turning on ABC at 4 p.m. and just kind of see in her. And sex whatever. Yeah. Yeah. That's such a good point. I hadn't thought about that. That's such a good point. The other problem is, is yeah, they've got the Oprah reruns, but there's no new Oprah show, right? Like there's no reason to tune in. But in 2012, they signed a production deal. Harper does with Tyler Perry to bring over some of his existing TV series that he's been working on, and also produced some new TV series for own. And own is the Oprah Winfrey Network? The Oprah Winfrey Network, yep, with rebranded Discovery Health. And that, I think, kind of saves the network. So the haves and the have-nots, Tyler Perry's, the haves and the have-nots, become a huge hit, along with other series that both where existing come over and new ones are loving him as wrong, the pains for better or worse.

1:38:45His empire and that kind of content starts a whole new generation of folks watching, uh, watching own. This is still starting to play out, but the, uh, the final ultimate media mogul moment, which we're going to smile and laugh about here is, uh, Oprah.

1:39:06makes it on stage at an Apple Keynote event. Possibly the worst Apple Keynote. Oh, possibly the worst. Yeah, what's the deal with Apple look like? So it's still sort of playing out. I think it was more of an announcement vaporware than anything else in 2018, but she entered into a harbour, entered into a unique, quote unquote, unique multi-year content partnership with Apple. That would consist of the idea is they're going to bring back Oprah's book club as part of iBooks.

1:39:34It is an Oprah's book club on Oprah.com now she has like a smaller version of it that's continued. Yeah, I don't know what ultimately happened with that, but they're also going to be Oprah interviews on on Apple TV plus she was going to conduct interviews. So that has been part of it. I don't think that partnership has played out as as intended with the. It's been two years or a year and a half. Yeah. The other thing is like that would have to be a special carve out because she is under exclusive on screen appearance, I think, and maybe it's only for terrestrial TV. Yeah, it must be not streaming. But yeah, she's exclusively on screen with the Oprah Winfrey network as part of the discovery relationship these days. Yeah, to kind of wrap it up here in the history and facts, Oprah achieved her goal. So today, Forbes ranks Oprah as the sixth wealthiest black person in the world.

1:40:33the wealthiest black woman and the 10th wealthiest self-made woman in the world. And the crazy thing is we'll get into this in a sec, but I think the way Forbes values her wealth is dramatically undervaluing her. So I suspect it's actually a lot higher than that.

1:40:50So there's an interesting thing where in 2009 it was estimated that she was worth 2.3 billion and it's sort of easy to understand how she got there where she basically had this ramp from making 35 million and 1988 all the way up to making like 200 plus million dollars a year by 2008 and you know that was just every time she got to renegotiate a deal a little bit more in her favor her audience continued to grow until it plateaued in the late 90s But then she sort of got better and better terms each time all the way until the show ended and so we can sort of see like what's that's kind of easy to understand how she slash harpo accumulated over two billion dollars what's not as clear is in all these deals that she's doing now a lot almost all of them are are possible to know the terms other than the discovery deal

1:41:39And so in the last 10 years, like, you don't really know. And Forbes certainly doesn't know exactly how to estimate Harpo's enterprise value for Oprah's net worth. So we're still sort of in this same mid two's number that I think we saw in the methodology for Forbes. They said they added up all the after tax profit cash flow to Oprah that they suspect that they Estimate Oprah had gotten from Harpo over the last 20, 30 years. Well, that doesn't make any sense. Anybody who knows how to value businesses is you value them based on the discounted stream of future cash flows. So all that to say, there are all these properties now that Harpo has their hands in including a massive cable network of which they own 25%. Also in 2015, Weight Watchers, the company was struggling. Do you find this been? Yeah.

1:42:36She bought, didn't Oprah buy 10% when it was really struggling at nice terms. Like $30 million, yep. But then she was like, oh, I'm gonna be a brand ambassador. Yeah. And so then...

1:42:48In large part, due to her becoming a brand ambassador, like her leveraging herself, she massively grew the value of that company. Massively, it's estimated to be worth about half a billion dollars. Now, that stake alone that she paid 30 million dollars four or five years ago. We don't have the time to do the investment banking style, some of the part's valuation analysis on Harpo and the Oprah empire, but there's no way that it's only two and a half billion dollars.

1:43:14way more than that. I mean imagine if like, you know, let's just think back to our, I think this episode belongs in the whole broadly affiliated Disney saga because of all the ABC and CapCities connections here. But when we were talking about, you know, the Marvel deal, the Lucasfilm deal, the Pixar deal, all these companies that Disney bought, if Disney were to buy Harpo, and that is not a crazy idea that Disney should buy Harpo at some point, especially as Oprah, you know.

1:43:40It becomes older. There's no way with all the assets. I mean, think about what they paid for. Let's just take Lucasfilm, right? They bought Lucasfilm, which was essentially the Star Wars franchise, the Indiana Jones franchise, and ILM for... He can no new films in development. Yeah, no new films in development. No, yeah. Just the IP. Three, was it like 3.6-step deal billion? Something like that. Something like that. Now, like in Harpo, right? You've got...

1:44:04All the library of these rights to all of these shows, right? Now imagine Disney Plus, like how valuable is the entire library of the Oprah Winfrey show? Not to mention Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Rachel Ray, all this stuff. Is that all on YouTube? Right now, like all the old Oprah shows? I don't know. What's the back catalog of the Oprah Winfrey show worth? That's a good question. I mean, like...

1:44:30Clearly, the back catalog of something like friends is worth a lot of these days. No, that's a sitcom, not a talk show, but like, I think a lot of people would like to watch the back catalog. There's at least 30 or 40 episodes that must still get a lot of views. Yeah. And then there's all the streaming rates and YouTube rates and everything associated with that. Then you've got stuff like, oh, the magazine and all that stuff. Then you've got all the new content that Harpo is producing, like, Tyler Perry's content out there.

1:44:59then you've got the stake in the cable network itself, which is extremely valuable. Yeah, like this is a, this is a many billions more than two and a half billion dollar deal if Disney or somebody else comes along and buys Harpo. Yeah, some other interesting as we tie up our sort of history and facts here, Oprah by the numbers stats here. Over the 25 seasons, they, the show received over 20 million letters.

1:45:27So like lots of different ways to gauge fandom here, but like 20 million and they're not you know, this is like page views not unique users but like 20 million times people were Strong enough fans to write a letter in like an interesting way to think about this is like if her reach was 50 million people You sort of assume like I don't know one or two percent of your fans could be super fans I think a lot more than one or two percent of her reach or super fans. Yeah, I mean 20 million YouTube comments would be a lot. Imagine like the barrier to actually like writing a little letter and mailing it like yeah. Yeah, it's crazy. I guess the point that I want to drive home here is yeah, she had reach, but like she had really intense, intense fandom at that point and still today. The other place I want to take this that we didn't touch in history in facts and I just want to plan a little seed with people. So Oprah.

1:46:27Based on her ability to compel people, you know, not through strong, you know, I need you to go do this, but just by saying it's what she's doing. If she says I'm reading this book, and I think it's good, and a million people go read the book, or, you know, I'm wearing these pajamas, and I think they're good, and a million people go by the pajamas. Well, she, at some point, said, you know, this person Barack Obama is truly inspiring to me.

1:46:51There are many research analysts who say that he got a million votes in a very tight election that can be credited to Oprah. And there's a whole story that we don't have time to go into around Oprah, you know, not wanting to be political and not wanting to have either candidate on the show from the the 2008 election. But, you know, her early friendship, long before he was running for president with Barack Obama, definitely led to a lot of people feeling strongly about him that otherwise wouldn't have.

1:47:21Well, that is a whole nother podcast worth of content for another show I've not to do. But this is an example that a small one. Oprah had never had political gas on her show before the 2000 election. And then she had. In which she gave equal air time. One episode did Bush and Gore. One episode to Bush and Gore. Before those episodes, Gore was leading Bush by 10 points in the polls. And they came on, Gore did like.

1:47:46fine was kind of stiff. Bush comes on and he like gives Oprah a big kiss. He gives pralines to like the whole audience like he, he crushed it like he did great. 11 points swing. Bush goes from 10 points behind in the national polls to one point ahead just on the back of the Oprah appearance. Pretty amazing. Yeah.

1:48:07All right, let's move into analysis. As we analyze here, the crux of the whole thing that we are going to, because obviously like this isn't a classic acquired episode where Facebook buys Instagram and we value, if that was a good use of capital, the transaction that we're going to analyze here is Oprah spending the 16 million of her own money to buy out the rights to produce her own show and own everything outright, of course, with the 10% for King World and the 10% for Jeffrey Jacobs.

1:48:34and what that ultimately turned into. And obviously we're going to be pretty favorable here, but that's how we're going to sort of think about dimensionalizing what we're analyzing. So we talked about kind of rather than doing narratives or acquisition category, since there's no acquisition, but what like category is actually a good one? And maybe specifically a tweek on category in honor of our book club in Hamilton Helmer and seven powers is, let's talk about what's the power for Oprah and Harper? Like, what's the defensibility?

1:49:03Maybe especially in this new influencer world that we live in, where she's not the only influencer out there. The question is, would Harpo have the majority of its future economics if not for the relationship between tens of millions of Americans and Oprah that comes from the past? I'm tempted to say that the biggest value driver for Harpo is continuing to monetize a relationship between Oprah the human and a third of America or a quarter of America. We can talk about sort of what power that fits into, but you have these other properties that aren't Oprah specific like Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil and Rachel Ray, but they're still Oprah brand kind of right. I think the main value driver here is people trusting Oprah and wanting to continue that relationship. Here's an interesting question.

1:50:00is that relationship with Oprah? Because I totally agree with you, that trust, that relationship with the concept of Oprah that so many, not just Americans, but people all around the world have now. Does Oprah need to be alive for that to be the case? Like, clearly Walt Disney doesn't need to be alive for, you know, for me to want to fly to Disneyland several times a year. Right. Now, of course, that's different. Like Mickey Mouse doesn't die. You know, it's like, so it's a, it's different.

1:50:29It will be interesting, you know, hopefully Oprah will be with us for many, many, many years to come. Well, let's, let's take mortality out of the equation and let's just say whether she's in the equation or not. So like, could she sell Harpo for five to $10 billion? And you don't have the rights to me anymore. I'm just gonna be on promised land, my ranch in, by the way, promised land. I can't resist. In Montecito is one of if not the probably like top five or 10 highest valued real estate properties in the world. Well, five mile long driveway. It's yeah, amazing. You know, who else has a place in Montecito's Jeff Jacobs? I think he has like a $16 million more modest estate. And you're buying more modest to stay. I mean, yeah, understatement of the century. So on that though, I think what's interesting and

1:51:26with what Harpo and Oprah and with Own and the discovery deal have done in the last since ending the show is I actually think it's a lot more viable that the value of Harpo continues without Oprah being actively involved now then that would have been 10 years ago because let's just look at Own the network. You know, it's not really just Oprah's properties that are driving that anymore. It's Tyler Perry's properties that are driving it. Well, I guess that's probably the biggest one. I was going to say, oh, the magazine, and then there's more than that. I haven't spent enough time with the magazine to know how much of it is Oprah these days versus other stuff. On like the Oprah one, for sure, where you did. Yeah, it has good circulation for a magazine, but it's, you know, diminimous relative to like modern internet properties. So I guess what I'm going to say here is if I was to apply Hamilton Helmer power, I guess it would be a cornered resource where Oprah is the cornered resource. And we'll get to this in grading, but like,

1:52:19Harpo is worth a crap ton with Oprah, and I think a lot, lot, lot less without her. Yeah. I think that's about you. Interestingly though, I was also going to say cornered resource. I think back free this era in the older era of the Oprah Winfrey show and the early days of Harpo, it was two cornered resources. It was Oprah, but it was also the syndicated distribution deals.

1:52:44that were a cornered resource, because it's not like there could have been another Oprah out there. There probably weren't other people who were just talented at Oprah. But unlike today where anybody can turn their selfie camera on, back then it was such a barrier to entry to have those distribution deals in place that nobody could compete with. Yeah. And you bring up this other concept too, David, of like...

1:53:04And this exists within influencers today. There's a network effect within audience. So there really is a critical mass thing that happens where if you could watch Oprah that was doing all the exact same things that Oprah was doing, or you could watch someone identical to Oprah that no one's ever heard of and your friends weren't talking about.

1:53:23and other people wouldn't be reading those books and other people wouldn't be buying those products, but still had the same charisma, amazing guess. You just would never watch that one because you want to be a part of the cultural zeitgeist that Oprah is creating. In some ways, it's an audience network effect. The obvious modern day analogy to all this is the Kardashian empire, right? With the Kardashian West empire now combined. And actually, there's also this kind of federation and the way influencers work today is it's not just one person it's this like it's a crew right so you got Kim you got Kanye you got Kylie you know like Kylie's got her cosmetics brand and Kim's now doing a podcast with Spotify all right we'll talk more about this in playbook and to come but yeah I think there's really something to this audience network but it's now like a federated network across influencers that's true yeah

1:54:16Yeah, you have to imagine there's audience overlap between Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz, Rachel Ray, like in the different jobs to be done in a shared audience by each of those creators in the same way that yeah, there's like influencer cadres that each serve a different job to be done.

1:54:34for a same person in the audience. And if you can successfully build that, which, you know, you got to think Oprah is on our way too, but if you can successfully build that, then that's how Oprah can sort of make her exit from it and it retain value on its own. Okay, let's go to what would have happened otherwise. So like what if Oprah didn't spend 16 million and kept working for WLS? Like, I mean, first of all, she just, She might have stayed as important in the cultural zeitgeist but I think it's telling this is also in the podcast you reference at the top of the show that Oprah felt like she was doing wrong by other people at the station by being so successful so when she would see people in the elevator and all their shows were fine but not nationally syndicated and she was queen of television it created cultural problems at the station so like

1:55:29She talks about how she felt that she needed to bring the Oprah show into its own physical space just to detangle from all the existing incentives that existed for everyone else in the building. The easy thing to say is she never would have become the mogul with the power that she has today. And that's really what she wanted. So she probably wouldn't have felt that she was doing right by herself. But it's also hard to guess what the unintended side effects were.

1:55:58of staying in that, in that station. I have to imagine that if we were to ask Oprah this question, it would be like, well, like, everything is so much better in mind, but like, I can't imagine she regrets that decision one I owed. But I think a lot of that though is just like her own, like you were saying, her own ambition. Like, the alternative universe is she looks like what most movie stars look like is talent, you know? Yeah, maybe they have their own production.

1:56:27quote-unquote production studios, but they're not really like doing that. They get an executive producer credit for that. Right, exactly. That's just like forgetting some extra points on the deal. Really, they're just talent and not entrepreneurs. Oprah have decided to become an entrepreneur. Yep. That's a great way to put it.

1:56:47Okay, playbooks. So for folks who are new to the show in this section, we basically say, look, if someone wanted to do something like this, what's the playbook that they should run? Not to say anybody could duplicate literally anything that we cover on the show, but like, what are the themes that we notice that led to their ability to pull this off?

1:57:03And David, the first one that obviously comes to mind that we've mentioned three times now in the show is she really was the first influencer invented a lot of these strategies. And there's a big one that we didn't touch on yet, that I was shocked in when I did the research. And I shouldn't have been shocked, but I was. And that is the car giveaway where she gave away How many? 260, 276 cars totaling eight million dollars and they were Pontiac G6's. I don't know in my head they were now that's not what they were but that is what she gave away. I thought this whole like Oprah's giveaways thing is she's so rich. She doesn't need to be rich. She doesn't care about being rich. She loves her audience so she buys some things. That's not at all what happened. Pontiac gave the dollars that Pontiac, yeah Pontiac.

1:57:51spend all the money. And they were like, this is well worth it for our advertising. Are you kidding me? How many cars? It took us, it took us some effort to get them up from 25 cars all the way up to the 276 by their producers. But like, this was Oprah being like, wait a minute, I can give stuff away that other people pay for. And I think like that is a thing that you see across the whole YouTube ecosystem now of sort of sponsored products. And Mark has just did a sponsored video with Buick, right? Like we didn't give the Buick away, but like he did an unboxing of a Buick and like, yeah, that's the legacy of Oprah right there. Right. So I just wanted listeners to know that Oprah didn't actually buy all those Pontiacs that Pontiac did it. And you know, I have to imagine that was like you can buy one Super Bowl ad slot for a million bucks or you can

1:58:47by eight and have us all still talking about you get a car, you get a car, you get a car. So legendary ad deals. The way to think about that. And at the end of the day, all those audience members got the cars. You know, like they still depict because it was a gift that paid taxes on it's complicated, but so they could get the net cash or they could get the car and pay the taxes anyway. That's neat. They're going to there. Okay, for Playbook though. So I think I want to let's spend a sec and talk about, okay, super clear analogy as we've talked about all along between Oprah being the first influencer now into modern influencers like we just mentioned Marquez and KBHD and all these youtubers and then you've got the Kardashian West empire out there you've got George Clooney and Casa Migos with his tequila brand like well let's talk about what are the things that are different now it's different in that you don't need the distribution deals there's no buried entry you can just

1:59:40throw up a podcast feed, you can throw up a YouTube video, you can jump on TikTok. You don't have to cut the deals, but you do still need to spend something to get distribution. And it might be spending on honing the content, but you do have to, I mean, everybody, even though your stuff's freely available, you have to figure out a way to make it occur to people that they should watch. That's what I was getting to is like, you can, the gatekeepers are gone. But long live the gatekeepers, right? And the gatekeeper being like, you got to rise above the noise and create something compelling that's going to get people's attention and be worth watching amongst the sea of all the content out there. Yeah, the gatekeeper is a lack of scarcity. Like now that there are no gatekeepers, there's millions of people, hundreds of millions of people creating content. The interesting thing to observe here is for the influencers who do rise above the fray, you see them cutting traditional

2:00:34distribution deals because they say, gosh, I have lots of money. Can I just pay you to distribute my content? And so that when you sort of see the influencers emerging from YouTube and going on to more classic mediums, the ability to sort of buy and bulk and have predictable economics is still still beneficial. Yeah. Okay. Two, two quick things I want to say. One is what you talked about with the cars. I just want to label that as a playbook theme, which is for this type of business, for an influencer business, like monetizing Your product recommendations and average like the kind of native advertise like this is the first native advertising that happened and like that is a Great business bottle for for this type of business the other thing about How this is all evolved with the internet is you know Bentopso is written about this ad nauseam so we won't belabor the point but is Like Oprah worked and over could be the best like she was mainstream she peeled to

2:01:31Certainly, just about every woman in America, but lots of men too, like massive big wide lands. Now, you don't have to do that with the internet. You can aggregate an itch audience. So, like, you can have influencers in business technology like them, like us, you know? Like, you can have influencers in. I was really hoping to get through this whole thing without you ever labeling us an influencer.

2:01:55Okay, we got it to stop. Talk about it. No, but you're right. If you think about the ways that influencers monetize, yeah, there's the sort of native advertising paid placement type of thing. There's the notion that you're going to create really intense fandom within a niche, which she just had a freaking huge niche. And there weren't a lot of other people competing. So the niche was women.

2:02:22Yeah. And so, you know, she's able then to carve that up audience up as more channels emerge into more niche down versions and then monetize them each in a different way through the magazine, through the website, through YouTube views, through whatever else. Yeah, those are good, good, good themes. Nobody was ever going to make a nationally syndicated television show about like the business of technology in 1986. Like, but now the internet. The way that I labeled this theme is she had the perfect timing where you could reach a national audience, but everyone couldn't reach a national audience. And this could never happen again. Like you can never reach an audience this wide rise up this quickly and have the intense type of fandom that she had ever again. The

2:03:13Another one that I just really want to call out is the benefits of a zero marginal cost business. So from a Forbes profile that is linked in our show notes, we have the 1994 economics of the Oprah Winfrey show, where let's see, the show grossed $196 million. Harpo was paid $100 million of that, so we sort of know what the revshare looked like with King World.

2:03:38Oprah made 74 million of that 100 personally. So already by 94 she was making 74 million dollars a year. Let's pop back up to that gross revenue number. 196 million. Show only costs 30 million to produce. Wow. That's some good EBITDA margins right there. So what is that? It's a 85%. Is that right? The 85% EBITDA margin? I guess it depends what you say production costs are.

2:04:06if that's a gross margin or if that's a net margin. But in either case, an 85% margin is amazing. And the takeaway here is, if you run a business where your costs are fixed to the type of content or software or whatever you create, and then your audience scales completely independent of that. So for every additional person she added that watched the show, she got, you know, one person's worth of revenue but it didn't cost an additional dollar to get that person like holy crap that's a good business and so it's interesting that they were able to produce something with four people that then scaled up to you know hundreds of people to produce it but still their audience was so big that it massively out ran the revenue massively out ran the cost of the show. This was the whole thesis of technology and software adventure capital up until

2:05:02People started realizing that, oh, you can also build tech-enabled businesses with lower gross margins in the real world, which of course you can. But it's a very different business than the, you know, this is why the media and technology businesses are so linked is they are zero marginal cost businesses. And when they scale, they just create beautiful, beautiful businesses in economics. Yeah. Also, let me revisit that and say, I think this is a gross margin because at the very least the Oprah has to pay herself out and that's going to eat into the EBITDA margin.

2:05:31Gotta pay the mortgage on the promised land. That's right. So the amazing economics of a media business, if done correctly, where you have sort of much like a software business, a peer software business, capped fixed costs and potentially unlimited or zero marginal costs created unlimited upside. Tom Murphy and Dan Burke, a capital cities were among the first to realize this. Indeed. Well.

2:05:58I think good time to move into value creation and value capture. So Oprah created a ton of value in the world, managed to capture a lot of it. Let's talk about if what she did was good for the world. And this is something we started doing after our Uber lift episodes. Oprah, pretty undeniably is good for the world. Like it's hard to find an area where you're like, gosh, Oprah, making all this money, it was actually bad for the world that she was in business. The interesting question that I'm sort of noodling on is You know, she's got billions of dollars now. And a lot of it's tied up in Harpo. It's not like she has kids. So what's she gonna do with all that money? She's donated a lot to charity. She probably will continue to donate hundreds of millions of not billions more. But it's actually an interesting question to say, well, what will be Oprah's legacy? Yeah. Well, it actually it ties into I hadn't thought about this until 15 minutes ago in the show. But it's directly tied into what happens to Harpo.

2:06:57in the future. At some point, there needs to be a home for Harpo, especially because of this. Like, there's an Oprah doesn't have any biological errors right now, or she could designate other errors, but that's 80% of Harpo, the ownership, like it needs to go somewhere, so like Disney needs to buy, like somebody needs to buy it or store it or something. So I think this actually points to...

2:07:24At some point in time in the next, you know, years to decades, I think we're gonna see a Lucasfilm Marvel-type deal for- For sure, whether with Disney or somebody else. We almost have to. Still doesn't answer the question, though, of like, what does Oprah do with all the money? So we know she is not signed the Giving Pledge, I believe, but she did attend the first Giving Pledge dinner, and certainly giving away most of the money. A lot of money over there.

2:07:54And it's interesting because we don't take this angle with other companies. When we did our Amazon episode, we didn't end on, what will Jeff Bezos do with those money? But no other company is so intrinsically tied to a person that we've ever covered. In the owner's demonstration, Amazon's public company is 80% not owned by Jeff Bezos. All right, listeners. Now is a great time to talk about one of our favorite companies, Statsig.

2:08:24Yes, there is a reason why the best product teams rely on Statsig, whether they are iterating on their core product features or shipping AI-powered experiences at scale. Yep. In the crazy speed of today's AI world, shipping fast is just table stakes now. It's basically trivial to build and deploy your app constantly.

2:08:45The real advantage is how quickly you learn what changes actually created value for customers. And how fast you can use that signal to guide what you shipped next. This is where Statsig comes in. It brings experimentation, feature flags, and product analytics into one unified system so teams can ship safely, test rigorously, and directly link what they changed to how users actually behaved. So if you want to make learning your competitive advantage, whether you're building new AI experiences, or just evolving your existing core product, go to statsig.com slash acquired to get started. All right, well, let's move on to grading. So for again, folks who are newer to the show, we basically grade how good of a use of capital was it for big code of buy a little code and compared to everything else they could have done with it in this one work rating, how good of a use of $16 million was it for oh, prior to buy out the rights to a show? Like, I don't know if it's an ARNA plus.

2:09:37What's the, like on an absolute dollar return, it can't possibly be an A plus, but on a multiple perspective, it might be up there. It's clearly either an A or an A plus. We can't decide which until a transaction, like we just talked about happened. And then once that happens, then we can say like, okay, $16 million back in 1988, I think it was right. What's the IRR on that from that point in time to the 80% of the value that Oprah realizes from the sale of?

2:10:07of Harpo if and when that should happen. Yep, but the bottom line is it's incredibly hard to find a better use of $16 million than she did in 1986. I mean, she created a compounding machine with Harpo. I mean, that's what you're trying to do when you're creating businesses, a cash flow compounding machine and she's done that and did, you know, got her, uh, got her the promise land, literally got her to the promise land. For sure. All right, Carvouts.

2:10:35Carvots so mine I have been reading this perhaps we've been in just like 80s 90s moments here like this is this is so great. I'm loving it. I've been reading the dark tower series by Stephen King which I always thought of Stephen King as like 90s horror author dark towers. He's it's like it's amazing. It's basically Intentionally, but unintentionally, you know, this is his attempt at like an American Lord of the Rings it like kind of fits The bill like it's excellent. I'm about two-thirds of the way through it. It's like probably eight nine thousand pages in total, but just like so so good. It's about Roland the Gunslinger and many many other characters along the way, but highly recommend. Nice. Stephen King's also a great follow on Twitter. He's got some some fire takes.

2:11:26Mine's quick and it's only gonna be quick because if I say too much it would spoil it. For people who listen to reply all, I'm going back and listening to some of the most popular episodes that I've never heard. If you haven't listened to reply all and you like this show, I bet you'd really like that show. Episodes 102 and 103, long distance, parts 1 and 2, starts with the host getting a phone call from a 1-800 number that he thinks is trying to scam him.

2:11:54And he picks it up and rolls with it. And it goes to like an unbelievable place that you would never guess over the course of the two episodes. And it is totally thrilling. So for those who have listened to it, I'm sure you're nodding along right now and enjoyed it. And for those who haven't, go check it out. Can't wait. Awesome. Well, we are, we are landing the plane. We're bringing home audience. We hope that you live your best life.

2:12:19If you have some time, I think five to ten minutes, we would deeply appreciate you filling out the acquired survey. We do this about once a year to get a sense of how we should make the show better and really what you like about it, what you don't, what we can change and who you are. And if you aren't subscribed...

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