David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…That’s true, yeah. You have to imagine there is an audience overlap between Dr. Phil, Dr. Ross, Rachel Ray. The different jobs to be done in a shared audience by each of those creators in the same way that there are influencer cadres that each serve a different job to be done for the same person in the audience. You got to think Oprah is on her way, too, but if you can successfully build that, then that’s how Oprah can make her exit from it and it retains value on its own. Let’s go to what would’ve happened otherwise. What if Oprah didn’t spend $16 million and kept working for WLS? First of all, she might have stayed as important in the cultural zeitgeist, but I think it’s telling this is also in the podcast you referenced at the top of the show that Oprah felt like she was doing wrong by other people at the station by being so successful. When she would see people in the elevator and all their shows were fine but not nationally syndicated and she was the queen of television, it created cultural problems at the station. She 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. That’s really what she wanted. 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 of staying in that station. I have to imagine that if we would ask Oprah this question it would be like everything is so much better. I can’t imagine she regrets that decision one iota. I think a lot of that, though, is just her own ambition. The alternative universe is she looks like what most movie stars looked like, is talent. Yeah, maybe they have their own “production studio” but they’re not really doing the... They’re getting the executive producer credit for fun.…

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