How I Built This with Guy Raz - Discovery Channel and Curiosity Stream: John Hendricks

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

In the 1980s—the early days of cable television—John Hendricks got stuck on an idea he couldn't shake: to create a channel that would teach people cool things in an entertaining way. In college he had seen hours of documentaries on history, science, and outer space; and he figured if he was interested in them, others would be too. So around the age of 30, he left a comfortable consulting business to begin a delicate juggling act: leasing a satellite, licensing content, and wooing cable distributors, all the while pounding the pavement to finance it all. Today, Discovery reaches more than 400 million homes around the world, and John is still in the content business, having launched Curiosity Stream in 2015. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better your home might be worth more than you think find out how much at a Airbnb.ca slash host i remember we had a meeting you know we told her to bring your ideas and so we were just going around the room it was the classic what if me what if we did this

and this young programmer Steve Cheskin, and he said, what if? He said, you know how independent TV stations have like Marilyn Monroe Week or John Wayne Week? He says, so they have theme weeks. And he just blurred out. He said, what if we had Shark Week? And we kind of all said, yeah, you know, they all kind of looked at me. And I said, I think it's a great idea. The idea was as simple as that, but as profound as that, you know.

From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how John Hendrix broke into the cable industry with no money, no content, and no carrier, launched Discovery Channel, and grew it into one of the best-known brands on television. About seven or eight years ago, I interviewed the writer Elizabeth Gilbert on another show. I was doing at the time. The theme of the conversation was passion, as in follow your passion. It's advice many of us have heard before, especially when we're trying to figure out what to do with our lives. Just follow your passion, someone will say. Anyway, Elizabeth Gilbert kind of blew that

whole show apart when she stated, in no uncertain terms, that for lots of people, that idea is horrible. in part because some of us may not have a passion that is remotely connected to making a living. And some people, well, they don't have any passions at all. And that's okay. So instead, and I will never forget this, because this might rank among the best pieces of advice I've ever heard on one of my shows, Elizabeth Gilbert recommended not to follow your passion, but to follow your curiosity. And that is precisely what our guest today, John Hendricks, did. He was and is an intensely curious person, the kind of person who would pour through volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica as a kid. He loved science documentaries that aired on public television, shows about the Earth and outer space and history. In the early 1980s, John was working as a consultant helping universities write grant proposals. It was around this time that cable television was just starting to take off.

The early stations are ones we know today, CNN, MTV, HBO, ESPN, and John Hendrix, ever curious, started to wonder, what about a station that was all about knowledge, a channel that could produce and distribute the kinds of science documentaries he loved? Now, trying to launch a cable channel today is daunting. But back in 1982, when John first had the idea, it seemed insurmountable unless you were well-connected and had access to lots of capital. Just to get your signal onto a satellite cost upwards of $350,000 a month. And that's after the millions of dollars it would take to generate the content.

But at the time, John had neither the connections nor the money. He had no background in the broadcast industry and had never produced any content in his life. And yet, he set out over the next four years to convince investors, satellite companies, content providers, and cable distributors pretty much all at the same time, that they should take a risk on him and his idea, an idea to build a cable network called Discovery. Today, the Discovery Channel is among the most watched cable networks. It reaches hundreds of millions of people around the world and is single-handedly responsible for making sharks one of the biggest draws on television. But as you will hear, the road to getting there was a slog. And in 1986, Discovery was literally days away from collapsing under the weight of mounting debt. But before any of that happened, John was.

was growing up in Huntsville, Alabama, in the 1950s and 60s. His dad was a home builder and his mom worked as an accountant. For college, John went to the University of Alabama, where he majored in history. For me, I mean, I just felt like, you know, you're going to be in college for four years. Why not read about things you're interested in? And I was always interested in history. You know, by the time you're a senior, you need to, of course, pick your major, European, ancient history. So mine was kind of a hybrid of American history in the history of science and technology.

So I read that while you're in college, you had a job in like the AV Center. And one of the things that you had to do was to get films for professors. You could get them like these sort of 16 millimeter documentaries or films that they were going to show in their classrooms, which clearly was going to plant a seat in your head. Yeah, it did. I just became aware of all these documentaries from. the BBC from Encyclopedia Britannica films, Time Life Films, and many others, that made a big impression on me.

And I just had this simple thought, so I must have been all of 21 years old. But my thought was, why can't this be on television? And from that, I made two phone calls, one to a local broadcast station, and they were just definitely not interested. And there was, cable was around. So this would have been,

probably around 1970, or 73. But cable was really a community antenna. There were a lot of places in America that couldn't receive a good broadcast signal. Either they were down in the hollows

or they were in urban areas where large buildings would block that. And so there were cable operators and in Alabama there was the teleprompter cable system. I think it was the general manager I actually talked to. He said, son, this is a good idea,

but you've got to understand we can't by law provide any content other than the retransmission of broadcast signals. Wow. That's what cable did. It just retransmitted whatever was already being broadcast. Exactly. Cable was literally a cable that enabled people to see existing television if their antennas couldn't get the broadcast. Exactly. Yeah.

It was a large community antenna. Yeah. C-A-TV. And then from that community antenna, they would string coaxial cable to people's households. To their homes. Yeah. Yeah.

You actually, while you were in college, you did a research project for the, I guess, for the Tennessee Valley Authority. And it actually got published, which I guess kind of led to your first job after you graduated at the University of Alabama. They hired you and sent you to Washington, D.C., right? Yeah. So the fact that the Tennessee Valley Authority published my research. paper that I did that summer. I was a published author. I mean, it was registered in the Library of Congress, for example. And so it got the attention of the president of the university. And he wanted someone to go to Washington, write grant proposals, and bring back money to the university.

Huh. I know, I'm sort of fast forward here for a little bit, John, because I know that that job, you did that for a brief stint, and then you essentially did the same thing at the University of Maryland, because you were already in the area. And then that led you to start. you're basically your own consulting gig or business where you were you were helping other nonprofits and colleges write their own grant proposals right that's right and i think it was around that time this is the late 70s like maybe 78 79 uh when you also met your wife right the the woman who would become your wife marine yeah so we dated and then we married in 1981 and the two of you met i know that you called it a restaurant but it was really a bar yeah

Yeah, it was a disco in Washington. It was called the apple tree. They served food there. So, you know, when I called my mother, my religious mom and she says, where did you meet her? I said, I met her at a restaurant. Right. From what I understand, in your first meeting with Maureen, her pickup line was,

I work on acoustic propagation loss models. That's right. Which you thought was fascinating. Which was, yeah, which was, and I knew a little bit about that. I mean, that was kind of surprised. I don't even know what that is, but you. Okay. Yeah.

And so I said, so you work on submarines. And she said, yes. I mean, she worked for the Office of Naval Research. And it was just fascinating. All right. So you guys are together. You are working full time on your consulting business. And this is probably a good business.

Like, I imagine was your ambition to kind of grow this consulting business out and maybe make that, your life's work? Yeah, it was. I mean, I had big plans for what that could become. So I started down that path, but I also had these local Washington, D.C. area groups that I was meeting with. And then one in particular got me off thinking about television. And I think if you ask any entrepreneur why they do something, it's typically because they become passionate about an idea or something at some point in their life that they can't let go. It turns into kind of a healthy obsession, as I like to call it. And I certainly started my focus on television.

Television, you know, television, of course, is important to all of us. But I think for me, you know, growing up, being able to connect to someone like a Walter Cronkite. Yeah. And Walter Cronkite in particular was kind of, well, he was an idol of mine. I mean, you know, we were like many families. We got our news from CBS and Walter Cronkine every evening. But he went further. He loved science and technology and space.

And so he did a number of series that I just relished every episode. He did, You Are There, which was interesting. He pretended, what if you were there at the signing of the Declaration of Independence or you were there at certain historical moments. And for me, it was that same question. Why can't there be more of this? Okay. There are now starting to be some bright spots on.

broadcasting. And so my question is, you know, was, why can't there be more of this? Were you following the developments in the cable industry? Or were you just kind of a passive consumer of that news? Like Ted Turner founded CNN, I think, in 1980. You know, HBO had been founded already in the early 70s. Was it something you were paying attention to or not really? No, I wasn't, you know, particularly studying, you know, the development of cable. There was a day, though in 1975. I'd been at the University of Maryland for a little, you know, a few months, I think. And a headline above the fold was the Supreme Court decided that the FCC restrictions that prevented the creation of cable networks was not constitutional. And the

Supreme Court held that anybody who wanted to start a cable network was a First Amendment speaker. And so that was this ruling. And for me, it connected again back when that question I asked that cable operator back when I was in college. And by that time, by the time the court hearing, the ruling happened, you know, HBO was up and it was just sweeping the country. The cable industry likes to call that era the era of truck chasers. People would see a cable truck come through the community and they would chase it to say,

when can I get cable? But what they wanted was HBO. I mean, just the thought of having a different movie every night at 8 o'clock that you could watch was revolutionary. All right. So you've got the consulting business. And mainly what you were doing, you were doing work for hospitals, universities, helping them kind of, you know, find funding. But I guess you had a one of your, somebody approached you to work with them. And it was a theology professor who worked at an American.

University who was looking for help to get a television series that he'd worked on to get it like wider distribution. First of all, before we talk about the series, why would he have come to you when this was not your kind of in your wheelhouse? Well, it was because initially he was trying to raise money to support his television efforts, his broadcast effort. So it was a guy fellow named Ed Balman. And what he was trying to do was to do was to to help Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, to understand one another. So he created a series called The Children of Abraham. And lo and behold, the ABC affiliate in Washington agreed to provide him the studio space at no charge and support him.

And so these telecast occurred on Sunday mornings, very, very thoughtful. So he asked me if I could help them in. fundraising. But then they said, could we get this more widely distributed in the country? And so then that's when I started researching in earnest. Could this be on public television? And then by that time, there was enough cable channels that had started. By that time, there was a cable news network. You know, there was a sports network, ESPN that started in 79. And there were plans for music television, MTV. And so that's the development. Why isn't there a cable?

First I was thinking, why isn't there an educational channel where this could easily play on? And then there wasn't one. And then you start spiraling into this. There's not one. Why is there not one? How could you start one? And then that started the process. So you start to go down a rabbit hole.

Who did you first talk to about this idea? Well, the very first person, was my wife Maureen. So she like me, we loved great documentaries. And I said, what if there was a channel that was dedicated to great documentaries? And she said, well, that's a great idea. And then she kind of paused and she said, well, this is such a great idea. Why didn't Ted Turner think about it?

Yeah, right. And it was a good question. It was, you know, Ted was focused on what he was doing because he loves documentaries. You know, I've since, you know, being in the business got to know Ted quite well. And he always thought it was such a mistake of him because he did have the idea for a news network. He just didn't go that next step of, well, what about, you know, long-form news and documentaries? And I'm glad he didn't. So the origination of that idea specifically now about a channel was in around February of 82.

And by that September, I had incorporated it. You literally incorporated, I mean, well, so you filed documents for an LLC, which would be to start a cable network. Yeah, it was actually a company. I was incorporated what I didn't know exactly what the brand name was going to be. So I called it Cable Educational Network, Inc. Did you talk to anybody? Did you reach out to any professionals in the industry to find out, like, is this even possible?

How do you do this? Yeah. So, I mean, in that particular time frame, it was mainly researching and reading. Yeah. Just like how do you create a channel? Right. You know, okay, I knew the basics. You have to uplink a signal to satellite.

There's 24 transponders on a communication satellite, each one processing 6 megahertz of spectrum. Each corresponds to a channel. So you can have 24 channels up on a satellite. And so I thought, if you're going to be successful, I wanted to find out where is CNN, where is HBO? Yeah. I want to be on the same satellite. How much would that cost? But there was a time that a little later on that I was really going to people in the industry.

And I started with Winfield Kelly, who was the general manager of the cable system there in Prince George's County, Maryland. Which is where you were living. Which was where I was living. Right. You know, talk to him about it. And he liked it. He thought that was a great idea. And he said, you know, let me help.

Let me set you up with a meeting with his, the parent. corporation of the cable system. And he set me up with a meeting. And it was, everybody was encouraging. So I think people who are successful in business, they're kind of naturally curious people. And so I think when, when I saw anybody I talked to, if they could see themselves using the service, then I could get to a yes. Presumably, you knew that there was all this content out there that maybe you could, you could capture. But, I mean, as you were doing the research and building a business plan, what did you find out about documentaries in general? How did you know there was a market for them?

Yeah, there had been a number of polls on television, research, consumer research. And so I knew there was an appetite for it. There were the great experiences that we were all seeing with Carl Sagan and what he was doing on Cosmos. PBS had wonderful success with Kenneth Clark's series on civilization. I think, you know, there's 25 to 40% of humanity that's deeply curious. They really want to know, where do we come from? You know, how is our future going to be shaped by our past? Where are we in the universe, for example?

So it's that audience, which had been largely neglected by what a lot of people had called lowest common denominator programming on the commercial networks. Yeah. And so there was a wealth of programming, you know, in comedy and entertainment. because that appealed to 60, 70, 80% of the people, but not a lot of content for the 40%. Here's what I'm wondering about, John. I mean, you start to really do a deep dive into this world while also running your consulting business. So this is presumably like occupying your nights and weekends, this kind of obsession.

You are working on a business plan. You were like early 30s, I think you're 30 or 31 at this point. And in your business plan, from what I've read, you determined that in order to launch this cable channel that, you know, right now you'd call it, what was it called? Cable Educational Network, Inc. But in order to launch it, you would need $25 million, which I understand in television terms is nothing, but that sounded like a lot of money. I mean, you were not an independently wealthy person. You'd not come from family wealth.

You had a decent consulting business. when you came up with that figure, I mean, how were you not intimidated and overwhelmed by that prospect? Well, it was extremely intimidating. I mean, just doing the research, it was clear that I would have an expense rate of at least a million a month. Okay. And a big portion of that was the satellite transponder and uplink, which, as I recall, was around $330,000, $340,000 a month. You had to pay $300, just to rent this satellite transponder. transponder? Yes, just a lease. And so as soon as you make a call to RCA, Ameriom at the time, or

Westinghouse, that owned, these are the satellite owners. Yes. For them, it's about a $250 million investment to build and launch a satellite. Yeah. And so when I called Westinghouse, they were eager for me to be successful. So not only were they calling me every month, have you made any progress, raising money, figuring out the business plan. And so the more experts I talked to it, became a little more real because I knew there was a satellite transponder that I could lease. You could rent. It was leased. Westing says, we'll hold this for you until you get your money ready.

That way then I could talk to investors. And the first question is, how are you going to do this? And I said, well, I have the satellite pathway. We know that it'll reach at least 22 million of the 26 million cable households. You know, so I started to have these details, you know, of the business. But you're right. I knew we would need a minimum of $25 million, a little over, say, two years of operations. I mean, you are, there are a lot of moving parts with this idea that you had.

You had to get on a satellite, which was going to be really expensive. You had to source content, which, I mean, you knew, for example, that the content side was relatively easy because you'd worked in the university library as a student, and you knew that there were all these documentaries. just sitting on shelves gathering dust. So, you know, that's another challenge, but probably less challenging than the satellite. And then you had to have a revenue model. I mean, while you were building this business plan and talking about it with your wife, was there ever a point where she was like, this just seems like it doesn't, it's so complicated to make this happen.

Like, are we really sure we want to go into this? Yeah, I mean, there's always times you have doubts. And there's some moments in times when you, you know, get almost in a crisis mode about, you know, the financial underpinnings of whatever your venture is going to be. But I was just always grounded and had confidence if we could just get on satellite, people would respond favorably to it. And that was just my mission. What will it take? But you outlined, I mean, it was a puzzle. You know, it was a puzzle.

When we come back in just a moment, how one of the biggest pieces, in that puzzle, a $6 million investment in John's new channel slips through the cracks at the 11th hour. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1982, and John Hendricks is basically going through the checklist of all the things he is going to need to start his new cable channel. First you have to have the distribution infrastructure, which is the satellites, and I talked to Westinghouse, and I saw, okay, that's a solvable problem with money. Right. Okay, so the money is the problem.

Then you say, well, even if you have the greatest idea you think and you can put it on satellite, will cable operators actually carry it? And so that's when I would make phone calls. I would call cable operators. And they were all supportive, but then they would always be a challenge. It would be something like John, we love this idea, but we don't have any money to pay for it or regulated. And so maybe someday, and they were all kind of pinning their hopes on the Cable Act of 1984. And they felt like if that passed, then perhaps it would unlock a nickel or a dime per month per subscriber. And that would be an important revenue stream.

So this is important to explain because obviously not everyone knows about this, but before 1984, cable was highly regulated in what the providers could charge to subscribers. We should also mention that this was a time when there were like hundreds of cable distributors and operators, right? It wasn't like today where you've got mass consolidation and just a few big regional players or national players. It was like hundreds like all over the country, right? Yes. So there's the big, at the time, Comcast was not the biggest case. cable operator. It was a company called TCI, Telecommunications, Inc. And they had all of about

4 million subscribers, but it was clear they were going to be up to 6 and maybe even 10 million subscribers. But this was the time, as you said, there were literally thousands of small cable systems sprinkled all across America. And, you know, their capital investment was fairly low. They had to get some invest in dishes. Each one pointed to us communication satellite that had 24 channels, you know, capture that image, put it into what they called their head-in center. And from there, they would boost the signal and get it out to the subscribers. And they would literally lay down cable in their region. Literally lay down cable.

And they had to face a number of hurdles. As you can imagine, cities didn't want a second pole system, right, you know, because there were telephone poles. Right. And so there was actually a pole attachment law where cable operators had the right to attach to a telephone calls to get their signal. This is like the early railroads where every tiny railroad, you know, parts of railroad systems were owned by different people because they would lay down the track. Right. And some of these tracks weren't compatible, right? They had like different gauge sizes. I mean, that's what cable was like in the early 80s. You just had these small little operators who paid to lay down the cable.

It was their region. And they decided what was going to go on their channel. So you would basically, the challenge you had was you had to get onto channels. It's like having a product and trying to get into every convenience store in America, like having a iced tea and calling every convenience store in America to get on their shelves. I mean, that seems like an overwhelming challenge to overcome. Yeah. And then in our industry, I mean, you mentioned that, you know, developing of the business. business plan, which means the business model. And so in the early days of cable, it was quickly

kind of determined there would be two business models. One was a model which HBO and later Showtime adopted, which was selling direct to consumer, say for $8 a month, you can subscribe to HBO. And the revenue from that subscriber would be split. With the operator. Yeah, 50% of the cable operator, the distributor and 50% to the national source like a content provider like HBO. The other was the route that Ted Turner went, which was building a channel that would get widely distributed and you could charge advertising. And then what Ted Turner and others like ESPN, who many times had to launch without charging the cable operator any fee, they all clung to the hope that someday the cable operator could

charge what the market would bear. They might increase their rates from $16 a month for cable service to $18, but they would add on two or three services. And that's where we saw an opportunity that at some point we could get a nickel or a dime that the cable operator would pay. When you can multiply a dime times four million homes a month, all of a sudden you have a decent revenue stream to help pay your... To help keep the business going. Exactly. But the idea was you'd go to an operator and say, hey, look, you guys need content.

We make great content. Here you go. And you would essentially offer it to them for free. Yeah. We'll be free for two years. But in the third year, you will agree to pay us a nickel if you have the freedom to do so through deregulation. Got it. Got it.

So we were really rooting for deregulation. Right. All right. So you got huge challenges to overcome in this business model. And you, but you decide this is, I'm going to pursue this thing and I need to raise money. And so when you went down to, I guess you were connected with these folks from store communications in Fort Lauderdale, which was at the time a fairly sizable cable operator, presumably you went down to them looking to see if they might give you some seed money to start this up. Yeah. And were you looking for $25 million at that point? No, at that point, it was just like I was trying to see if they might be a prospect to be part of a consortium or a group of investors. Right. It turned out they weren't a good prospect, but they were very helpful. They had a very bright marketing team that was set in on the meeting and, you know, said, you've got to decide what do you want to be? Do you want to be a premium service?

Do you want to be a basic only service and just live on advertising? And you've got to pick a name that's better than cable educational network and say, I know, I know, I know. So it was kind of a key moment on the plane ride on the way home. I remember just writing down names. And by the end of that trip, I had Monday morning, that was on a Friday. And on Monday morning, I had picked the name Discovery. I had kind of started thinking about discovery, but there was a number of prospects. I mean, I love the word explore, curiosity, wonder.

this something bright and uplifted. I knew I didn't want to go with something that the consumer didn't immediately understand. I felt like Nickelodeon, for example, it doesn't really in a vacuum when it was first introduced, what is Nickelodeon? Now, later we all now know, it's a children's channel. But I wanted to be fairly simple,

like cable news network, you knew exactly what that was when Ted started it. So, you know, the discovery channel, I felt people would understand. understand what that is. All right, but what I'm trying to understand here, John, and this is a sort of early 1983 now, and this is, this idea is now, it being in your head for about nine months. You still haven't raised a dime at this point. No, no. And you're pitching, right? You're pitching people and and the other, you know, the building blocks of this, we kind of covered several of them,

but this other question about advertising. It kind of looked on PBS, who's sponsoring? Cosmos. I remember making a call early on to General Motors, and they were kind enough to say, well, that's handled by our agency. And so I got in touch with the agency, that agency, for General Motors. And so they said, this is an intriguing idea. But they said, John, for us to advertise in earnest, you know, you need distribution in at least 15 million households. And, you know, ask why. They said, well, that's the minimum number of households that Nielsen needs to actually issue a ratings report. So that was an initial threshold. So how long would I have to spend money at a million dollars a month before we could reach 15 million homes?

Because that would have been the first time we could actually have meaningful advertising revenue. Okay, so clearly, and not to be blunt about it, I guess I should be blunt, but at this point, you don't have a whole lot to work with, right? I mean, you don't have any advertisers, you don't have any investors, you don't have a distributor. What about the content piece? Were you at least like starting to reach out to like producers and content providers to get some of their programming? Yes. By that time, I had, you know, kind of a preliminary contract in the development of the BBC. So I knew what a large body of 500 hours of content would cost.

What would it cost? Oh, actually fairly affordable. So a documentary that the BBC would have spent $100,000 to $250,000 on, I could really license for only $1,000 an hour. Wow. And so, and again, for them, it's just found money. Just because at that time, they weren't being repurposed. There was no other distribution. There was no market for it.

So here's this guy from America who's offering $500,000 to pay for each year. We pay that amount each year to license it. And so for them, well, that's another two or three great documentaries we could do. But in some ways that year, right, because you're financing this through presumably your consulting work. And really, there wasn't. much to finance, but you were kind of building, and I hope this doesn't sound disrespectful, John, because I'm absolutely just blown away by your audacity. You were kind of building a house of cards here because on the one hand, you were going to the BBC and saying, hey, you know,

let's work on a $500,000 contract. You're going to Westinghouse or whoever the satellite company was and you're saying, yeah, let's talk about this deal. Meantime, you didn't have any money to do these deals. So were you telling these potential partners, listen, I got to raise the money, but this is sort of the deal I'm thinking of? Yeah, you have to do everything. I mean, everything has to be transparent.

So it's contingent. You know, so when you talk to the BBC is like, you know, this is my plan, and it's contingent upon financing. And, you know, part of that financing is going to be contingent upon if I can get letters of intent to carry the service from distributors. And did you get those letters?

Yes. And so, you know, all of this is building throughout, you know, 83. And then by December of 84, it was clear. I'd talked to enough investment bankers. I was getting close, closer to one investment banker. And here were the conditions that they would invest. They said, John, if you can furnish this evidence that you can get distribution. If you furnish this evidence through a contingent contract that you can get content. And we can see that advertising. would be interested. Then we'll invest. And by the way, these are investment banks in New York, right, that you're going to? Yes. And because this is really before the time of venture capital, which really kind of explode in the last 20 years. This is early 80s. How did you even get meetings? I mean, you were not a media mogul.

Like, how did you even get into the door? Because I think you went and met with, like, Merrill Lynch and old school walls. Yeah, there was a number of like Oppenheimer, you know, for example. Yeah, how did you even get into the door? It's an overused word, but it's called networking. But it's as simple as asking friends, right, in context, people who might know. And every entrepreneur, you have to have a tolerance for hearing no. How do you have that?

How did you have, because you were 30, 30, 30, 31, you had a kid at this point. You have to be so confident that you know more than the person who's telling you no. Right. And so you have confidence in your research. You have confidence in all that background of conversations you've had with cable operators, with content providers. And you just have to say, I am working on these conditions. And I know. But there's that ultimate confidence that I had that if I can just put this on satellite, people are going to respond favorably.

Right. And you had real evidence. I mean, you had, like, ratings from television networks that showed when they aired documentaries or when PBS aired documentaries on science, the ratings went up. Yeah. But you have setback. You do have setbacks. There are several moments like that.

And, you know, one of my heroes was Walter Cronkite. And when he stepped down from the anchors chair for CBS Evening News, it was kind of on a promise that CBS would invest in a series for him called Universe that he would air every Tuesday night. And lo and behold, right in the middle of my fundraising for Discovery Channel. CBS canceled Walter Cronkites universe. They canceled this to basically signaling that no this actually there is no market for this. Exactly. And one person pointed out, well, what makes this fellow Hendricks think that he can make documentaries work on television when CBS just canceled Walter Cronkite Universe series? Yeah. And that is, that's a great question. And so I kind of knew the answer. and I got in touch with Walter Cronkite.

You actually reached out to Walter Cronkite and said, hey, can I meet with you? Yes, yeah. He was one of the most famous people in America at that point. Exactly. So, you know, I guess my telephone skills were a little bit good by this time. And the person who answered that phone, I'll never forget her, never forget her name. Blanche Lafitte.

I just love that name. Well, she was his personal assistant. Wow. And I said, I would love to have an opportunity to talk to Mr. Cronkite about a cable channel devoted to documentaries. I think he might have an interest in it. And she said, well, write me a letter, no more than one page. And so I did. And then, law of the whole, it was like maybe the end of the following week.

The phone rang in my house, early one morning, it was about 8.30. and there was that voice at the other end of the other end of the line. Walter Kronkites. It was funny because he called me Mr. Hendricks. He says, Mr. Hendricks, I just read your letter and I'm very intrigued. And it was like unbelievable to me. And at first I thought, wait a minute, there's some people who know that I'm trying to reach Walter Kronkite. You thought they were pulling your chain there.

Yeah, yeah. But it was clear. It was him. And he couldn't have been nicer. And he said, you want to come up here? and I'll tell you the whole story about what I've done in nonfiction television. And I was on a train, I think, within the week and found myself meeting with Walter Cronkite. And you got him, and this is something that's really amazing I read, which is every time you met with people, whether it was like potential advertisers or Walter Cronkite, you got him to write you a letter basically endorsing your idea, not even committing to it or anything, just saying, hey, I'm Walter Cronkite, this is a great idea.

Yes. And you would show those letters to investors? Yep. All right. So, 1984, you are really trying to raise money. And I read it at a certain point, you were offering as much as like 40% of the business for $5 million. Yeah. Yeah.

It was clear. I wasn't, and I knew it was going to have to be more equity sold than that because after consulting with Allen and company, and they're really bright, and we had kind of investors lined up where we could see maybe two million, which is like two months. And by the way, Alan and company, just to clarify, is an investment bank that you were working with to get funding, right? Yes. And so we thought, you know, the first stage would be we could maybe within the first year, you know, the first six months, raised five million, but show some success and then raise maybe another five or six million.

But it was clear the fundraising couldn't be in one fell swoop of 25 million. That was just unrealistic. But everybody felt, you know, this is a gamble. And the earliest gamble was the riskiest gamble. We closed on our very first round of financing was $2 million. That was extremely, extremely risky. All right. So 1984, there's this trade show in Anaheim, California.

And you've got a booth there for. for Discovery Channel, but you didn't have any content yet that you could show people, but I guess at this show, you had worked on like a sizzle reel? Yes, and so when cable operators would come to our booth,

we would show them that, and they said, this looks interesting, and they would give me a verbal, but I knew I needed something more than a verbal. But Westinghouse, anxious to lease a transponder for the satellite. 300,000, yeah, the satellite transponder, said, John, you know, we'll donate. We will give you the use of the satellite for a week.

For free? For free. In exchange for what they're doing? In exchange, if you can get to raise the money, we want to be your satellite provider. Wow. They said to you, give us content and we'll give you a week's free. We'll be new content. Yeah, so we put up a sneak preview, what I call it a sneak preview week.

Basically, you got content and you bundled it up into a week's worth of programming, and this Westinghouse satellite beamed it out. But basically all that did was enable cable companies to see the feed. They were not broadcasting it. They just had the ability to see what this satellite was sending out. So in other words, you could have, in theory, made, I don't know, a thousand video cassettes. and sent them each a video cassette. Yeah. This was a very efficient way to distribute.

This is an efficient way for people to see it, right? That's right. And what was on it, by the way? What were you showing? It was science and technology. There was some sample content that by that time the BBC had cleared some rights to allow us to uplink some content. Again, knowing that if it was successful, then I would have the $500,000 for the first. payment to BBC.

Everybody was incented to making this a success by this time. Yeah. All right. Here's what I'm trying to figure out. The time frame is crazy to me because I think by the spring of 85, you managed, this is now a year and a half in of just pounding the pavement, trying to raise money. You get the commitments that you need. And so the investors come in and they make an investment led by Allen and company.

And you raised like $5 million. Yeah. But, you know, you got to dig down, you know, how much money can you possibly put into the venture? And I didn't have a lot. And so, you know, we were in risk of, you know, our American Express card being canceled. We used American Express, my American Express card to pay so many expenses. Yeah. And, you know, I had just some people who were working for me.

And there was a guy who had recently retired from CompSat General. And he surprised me one day with a $50,000 check, which was all the money in the world. Yeah, I bet. But what I'm trying to understand, John, is the devil, with television, the devil is in the details. It's like, you know, for example, you know, the shows had to be 52 minutes or 55 minutes. And the edits had to be exactly right to hit the posts and all those things. How are you able to source the people who knew how to do that stuff? Yeah. So you pointed out a difficult phase for every entrepreneur, and that is that phase between the time you have the idea, you've got the plan, you've got the elements together, and you can see that this will lead to months later a successful fundraising effort. For us, it was the $5 million. Where do you operate? What funds? Because I needed staff. You know, I needed staff. People who knew how to run a television network.

network. Exactly. And so, you know, I recruited a guy who was head of the radio television and film department at the University of Maryland. Wow. You know, he knew all about how to do a television station. And I was just so fortunate in that I had access to a major university a few miles away. For them, this was a gold mine of internship opportunities for some of their students to come over and edit films and to meet that clock. As you said, you have. have to create your model clock. And so things had to be edited down very crisply so that they could be loaded into the at the master control facility. And then the clock would start and each item would play in sequence. All right. So it's June 17, 1985, which is the day you actually

launch where the Discovery Channel is going out. It's going to be sent out to the public. Yes. And I think I think on that day you had close to to 20 employees, you had roughly, I think, $5 million of runway. And by the way, on that first day, how many people in America could actually see the programming? Yeah. So on that day, we didn't know exactly. Later, we learned about 156,000 households. Had access to it.

Yeah, had access on that very first day. How would they know about it? I mean, did you get a lot of media attention? Was there? How would just a random person... Not that much media attention. So the cable operators would promote what they were going to add. So a number of cable operators started in their what we call bill stuffers.

And so at that time, people would get their cable bill monthly. Oh, in the mail. Yep. In the mail. And in that, there would be some promotion. Here's a new movie that's coming up next month on HBO. And by the way, we're launching headline news from CNN. We're launching, you know, the discovery.

channel. And then you learn if they stayed for at least six minutes, then it would count as a viewer. Wow. It is amazing that people found out about things through the mail, through bills that they received. Like, I can't even remember the last time I opened my mailbox today, right? Yeah, I don't even know if I have a mailbox, actually. I don't think I'd do. But from what I understand, you start to hear from viewers pretty quickly, right? They started to, like, write in and write to the cable operators and say, hey, this is great stuff. Yeah, it was quite comical. So we launched, I think it like at noon, something like that on June 17th.

And within just, I mean, 10 or 15 minutes, the phone was ringing. We were in a conference room, and the main kind of reception area was just outside. It was so small. I had like 19 people. The phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing. and our staff person who was supposed to answer the phone was in watching Discovery Channel with us. We said, go get the phone.

And then she came back and she said, it's a teacher in Kansas, and she wants to know if she can record this and use it in the classroom. It was a show that was on called Iceberg Alley. And we all looked at each other as like, I don't think we have the education rights to use for public exhibition in a classroom.

Tell her we don't have the rights, but we're working on it. Yeah. And to be clear, you were not a production business. You were not in the business of producing original content. You were licensing content only. You know, my dream was, you know, once we got to break even, and then we could then start investing in our own content. So that if we made, had positive cash flow of $5 million, we could reinvest that in content. But at this point, I know you had five or six months of runway, right, when you launch in June. That means, with $5 million, that means, that means, It's going to be gone. Yeah, by November, your money is going to run out. So I have to imagine you are hustling.

And from what I understand, you get connected with a firm or company called the Chronicle Publishing Company. And they're led at the time by a guy named, I think, Leo Hinderie. And they say, hey, yeah, we're going to come in and make an investment. What was the investment that they agreed to give you? Yeah, it was the entire next. round. We thought that we could perhaps raise six million. And we knew that would get us to mid-next year. And then maybe by that time, you know, we would be in, you know, let's say 10 million households. Right. And have some advertising revenue. And Chronicle was going to cover the whole round.

They pledged $6 million. They're going to give you $6 million. And it was more or less, in your mind, a done deal. Like you were not worried about covering because you, I think you had like, you owed millions of dollars to vendors, right? To the BBC and to the satellite people. Yeah. By this time, we were asking the BBC to be patient for the next payment for us. We, Allen and Company and I in late 1985 had a heart-to-heart meeting with Westinghouse and said, you know what, we're not going to pay our satellite bill for the next three months. That's about a million dollars, and we'll offer you stock in Discovery Channel in lieu of that. I mean, they were very resistant, but in the end, to be supportive, they

grudgingly took stock. Right. Now, that $1 million, I think, turned in later to be like $65 million. Nice. You know, so it ended up being a good investment. But it was very, very difficult time. I can't explain. And then, you know, when you hear an investment banker and the.

client themselves saying we're in. Then you're, yeah. It is, it's not done. Nothing's done until people say the check clears the mail and you get to closing date. But they set up a closing date. This is supposed to be in what, end of January, 86? End of January of 86. And we had really counted on that.

And it was absolutely devastating when Leo let his bankers know the board did not. in the end, approved the investment. So wait a minute. You get a call one day from who telling you, oh, you know, that's that $6 million, you're not going to get it? Yes, it's closing day. I mean, this is-closing day. The day you're supposed to close. You get a call saying, actually, this is not closing.

This is, it was on a Tuesday. I was down at our lawyer's office, Dick Croats from Allen & Company had taken the train down the night before. So he was there for closing. This is when monies was going to be wired to the account. And then we heard, I think it was around 11 or 1130, Alan and company got a call from EF. Hutton. They were mortified. And EF. Hutton was representing Chronicle. So basically, your bankers and lawyers got a call from their bankers and lawyers?

Yes. They just said, we can't believe this has happened. But the board at the Chronicle has turned down this investment. Wow. We thought we had an approval there that was absolutely devastating. So you presumably at this point have to face your staff because you are not imagine you're not sure whether you guys are going to survive. Or maybe you're sure that you're not going to survive. Yeah, my wife calls it Black Tuesday.

And it was. I think of all the days discovery, it was the darkest. When we come back in just a moment, how John finally gets the money he needs and how with a little help from Soviet television, he starts to turn Discovery around. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1985. Just months after John has launched Discovery Channel, he's run out of money in the only perspective. investment he had has just fallen through. And so the only option at that point, work the phones. And it's like, you know, calling the BBC. You know, that check we were going to get out to you tomorrow.

We're not going to get out to you. You know, then the investment banker was like, you know, we don't know what we're going to do. But we will try to think of something. And so what they thought of, the banker that I was most closely working with at Allen and company, one of his colleagues, was a guy named Paul Gould. And Paul Gould was very close to John Malone. And we should make it clear. John Malone is like a legendary figure in cable, Liberty Media, and the head of TCI at the time, the cable operator. Yeah, I mean, John Malone is, you know,

he's a strategic pioneer in the cable industry on the distribution side. And then later, really on the content side, he had seen promotions about Discovery Channel. And that kind of was the phone call that said, save the day. All right. So in the kind of 11th hour, right, there's like a Hail Mary throne to John Malone. Because from what I understand, you had investors basically saying you got to get ready to go into bankruptcy. But you were, you were not prepared to do that. You still thought we got to five by five. There's got to be away. There's got to be away.

There's got to be away. But when it was the first Hail Mary, you know, typically there might be four or five Hail Mary's throne. It was actually the first one, and it connected. And, you know, John was immediately supportive. John said, we can't let anything happen to Discovery. And this was probably on Thursday. So there was Black Tuesday, and I think by Thursday, I was in a meeting in a hotel. I mean, this was a bizarre era.

I mean, they actually wired $500,000 to our accounts at Discovery. Wow. And that was a godsend. And so, and then it was like, okay, let's, how do we raise the next round of financing? And it was clear with, with TCI's leadership that maybe we could get $20 million and actually complete the financing for discovery. What's so confounding to me, right, is that you were literally days away from having to shut this thing down. You had creditors kind of asking for, you know, you couldn't pay your people. And then John Malone comes in and gives you half a million dollars.

Presumably, he did not know that you were in financial straits. So this was not known to anybody. No, it wasn't. And John didn't want to be due all of it, you know, because the first question, how much money do you need? And it was still, well, a total of $25 million. We've raised five, but we need 20. And John didn't see TCI doing all 20. He just said, you know, it would be stronger if we created a group, a partnership,

a group of investors from the cable industry that maybe each put in five million. And so we began to think about, you know, four large, multi-system cable operators that would come in. Comcast, Continental, Cox, Newhouse family. And, of course, TCI. And then John was very close to a friend of his in Denver. Gene Schneider who ran United Cable, which ultimately merged it with the United Artist to become United Artists Cable. And you did raise, you did raise the money. I mean, it's amazing because like in February of 86, you were out for the count. By the summer of 86, you had raised $20 million. How, by the way, I have to imagine that you had to give up a substantial amount of your own ownership of the company you started. Yeah, and I gladly did it. I mean, for me,

And what I've learned is, if you think too much about your equity piece or how much money you're going to make, I just don't know that many successful entrepreneurs who are so money-focused. I think if you focus on your mission, then all of that's secondary. And yeah, so for me, it was that moment in time when I incorporated when I had 100% equity, and then you get diluted down and diluted down. I think after that, I think it was around maybe around 7%. And then, you know, for the longest period, I was at 4%. After, you know, I sold some shares.

You, all right. So now you've got the money to keep you afloat. But you're still, I mean, right, you still have to become profitable. So where was your revenue coming from in 1986? Did you start to get some of that, some of the money from the cable operators, that, that five cents or 10 cents per subscriber? Yes. I was lucky. And then the Cable Act of 1984 actually passed.

And it allowed the cable operators to actually increase their rates dependent on just what the market would bear. And so we would offer our service free, you know, until January of 87, at which point we would pay cable operators to pay a nickel. And then that would grow over the contract period to 10 cents per subscriber per month. So with that five or ten cents per subscriber, that was enough to just keep the business going. It wasn't enough to make it profitable yet, but just you had to also have advertising revenue. Yeah.

So you'll remember we've talked about the burn rate or the monthly expenses being a million a month. So if you have distributors representing 10 million households and they're paying you a nickel, then that's $500,000 a month. if they're paying you a dime, then that's a million dollars a month. So we knew just by our contracts, break-even was going to occur sometime in 1987. In other words, there would be that magic month, and it actually did occur. I think it was August of 1987 when our monthly revenue exceeded our monthly expenses. And that's a great period for any entrepreneur. Then you know you have the business model in place.

And then when you look at growth and distribution, we saw when we cross, cost 15 million, we had all these advertisers that we'll be glad to advertise on Discovery Channel and make it part of our cable bond. And you, I mean, the programming that you were airing, I mean, it was like, you know, you would have documentaries, right, that you would air. And then you would, I think one, like, at one point, you just played, you just broadcast hours of television from the Soviet Union. that was like, oh, was it translated in real time? Yeah, it's always somebody, you know, I didn't have the idea. A fellow in New York had started tracking Soviet television signals with a satellite dish. And so Columbia University, the Russian Studies Department, was using it in the classroom.

And he said, would you like to put this on the Discovery Channel? And it was the oddest type. But, you know, you're trying to get publicity and everywhere you can. I thought, an attention. And it was immediately intriguing because I asked for what's on Russian television. And he said, it's just every kind of thing. We have game shows. They have morning children's show.

And then, you know, when I saw some tapes of it, I said, this would be fascinating. But we, you know, we would have to interpret it. But as with anything, with any idea, there's a lot of hurdles. And this one was the, our state department said it wasn't legal that we couldn't, you know, intercept a foreign satellite and take that signal and display it into American television households, that that was illegal. It had to go legally through the NELSAT television satellites parked over the Atlantic Ocean, for example. So we had to work that out and actually get a legal signal through the NLSAT system, but that's what we did. We put on a week's worth of Soviet television every night.

It's amazing. I mean, you've got a lot of publicity. Johnny Carson, who was the most famous person in the U.S., was like talked about on a show. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. To have Johnny Carson talk about Russian programming on the Discovery Channel and make jokes about it, you know. And it was terrific. He did that, I think, three nights running. And what great publicity that was. All right. So you start to really find your audience. And you were reaching, I think, already 30, potentially 30 million households by June of 88. That doesn't mean 30 million people. watching you. But really, I think the turning point, if I'm not mistaken, was sharks when you

started to talk about or air things about sharks. Is that fair to say? Yeah. That time frame, we were just doing some novel things that are live from Russia. Certainly. And so we had a, I remember we had a meeting at the Hay Adams Hotel, which was kind of fancy for us. And we had, you know, the whole executive staff and the programming staff. So it wasn't a big group. I would think there was probably around 20 in the room. And we were just, you know, we told her, bring your ideas. And so we were just going around the room.

It was the classic, what if me, what if we did this? And this young programmer, Steve Cheskin, and he said, what if? He said, you know how independent TV stations have like Marilyn Monroe Week or John Wayne week where the movies five o'clock every day. He says, so they have theme weeks. He said, and he just blurt out. He said, what if we had shark week? And it was the idea was as simple as that, but as profound as that, you know. And we kind of all said, yeah, you know, they all kind of looked at me and I said, I think it's a great idea. And, you know, before that meeting ending, we said, that's one idea we want to implement. And so that was the origin of shark week. And I think it is,

the longest running television series event in television history right now. It's the longest one that's being maintained. John, the story of discovery in the 90s and the 2000s is well known. It's now a huge, enormous player in the media world. You are no longer sort of affiliated with Discovery today, right? I mean, you obviously ran it and continued to run it. And continued to run into the 2000s and or the chairman for some time. But just to be clear, you're not associated with it at all today, right? Yeah. Discovery kind of entered a phase of stability in 1988 and then just a consistent growth

and acquiring other networks, the learning channel and starting animal planet. But here's what I want to ask you a broader question about the evolution of discovery because it really was when you started it and when you ran it, it was like a slightly commercial version of PBS. It was great content that was also good for you, right? And it sort of proved the model that you could do both things. Like, I don't know, like a milkshake made with agave instead of cane syrup, you know. It was delicious and a little bit healthier than what was being offered on mainstream network TV.

But a little bit more fun than, let's say, PBS. But over time, Discovery did and does today aired a lot more like reality type TV stuff, stuff that really was cheap to produce but got a lot of audience ratings. And I wonder if over time you think that it kind of strayed from the vision you had initially. Yeah, and I think it's clear to viewers the evolution. And it was kind of, you know, forced partially by just the raw economics of people's viewing taste in the majority. At some point, you know, management starts looking at the revenue model. And it just became irresistible as people initially saw that, well, gee, if we put on, you know, at History Channel, you know, Pawn Stars, it gets a little more rating than the history of the, so, you know, a history.

series, for example. And I remember the bittersweet moments, you know, when the ratings came in on Honey Boo Boo, but in the back of my mind, it was like, you know, that's not the kind of content that I get enthusiastic about. And it's certainly not the kind of content that drove me to start discovery. And so, you know, for us, I think the pinnacle of discovery, at least in mission, being through the mission was when we co-produced planet Earth. Yeah. Which we start, yeah, which was wonderful. I mean, we started that project in two. 2002 and had it finished for airing in 2007. And for me, that's the essence of discovery. I don't know. I mean, I wonder whether you can really blame programmers at discovery, right?

I mean, it's a company that has to be sustainable, that has to make money, and PBS doesn't, right? PBS and PR, they don't have to worry about shareholders or revenue because they're nonprofits and they're bringing in money from, but they still need to be sustainable to pay their employees, but not, quite in the same way as discovery. So it's kind of hard to blame Discovery's programmers for going where the audience wants. Or can you? Can we? No, you know, for me, I mean, I was on the board, you know, for all those years. And I supported, because you're right. I mean, you have to have a sustainable organization.

And when you have a little over half of your revenues from advertising, it drives you to certain decisions. And so, you know, for me, my mind just started to wonder of like, like, well, is there another model for this type of content? You decided in 2015 to, I guess, kind of go back to your original roots. You launched a venture called CuriosityStream, which is essentially a version of your, I think your original version of Vision of Discovery, which is great educational content, but that would be available on demand through smartphones and then other, you know, other, other, other formats.

Yeah, it's back to kind of the original mission, which is I try to stay away from the word educational because that, you know, kind of brings up eat your spinach kind of TV. So, you know, what is, is there nonfiction content that's entertaining and enlightening? What was becoming clear to me is that something magic was happening in 2007 with the launch of Netflix. What Netflix did was the same concept that HBO did. Yeah. Take great movies.

rather than create a linear channel feed, which is what HBO did. Netflix says no, you can watch all movies, but you can watch what you want to watch when you have the time to watch it. So it's that ultimate control when you turn on the TV at night at 814 of being able to pull up something

that you want to watch for the next hour or two. And so I felt I could do the same thing that Netflix did for movies in the world of nonfiction content. And so you can probably guess my first call, it was to the BBC. So when we launched CuriosityStream with, you know, well over 100 titles, great content from the BBC and other providers. And you are, it is a publicly traded company. Yes.

Yes. It's a different story, right? Obviously, curiosity stream because it's, the risk is different. And by that point, I mean, to be frank, you were, you know, wealthy beyond. your needs and beyond generations. So your sort of personal risk was somewhat lower, but still, I imagine it's a challenging business, right? I mean, you've got to, at the end of the day, you've got to get people to subscribe. Yeah. It's risky. I mean, you know, again, you have to have the financing in place. You have to have the delivery infrastructure. So in the case of streaming,

you don't need, you know, international satellite infrastructure of 30 satellites, transpondent, to get your signal across the globe. It's a little bit easier, but it's still complicated. Yeah. But we're, again, we're very, very encouraged that, you know, we now are collecting payment, you know, from 20 million households. And that's around the world. So we have been global from the start. I wonder, I mean, we were 31, 30 years old.

He had this really bold idea and a vision. And it was just at the, this nascent industry, it was at the beginnings of what would become such a powerful and important industry, the cable industry, which has gone through major and is going through major disruptions today with streaming and, you know, cord cutting. When do you think about all of the things that happened, all the things that had to go right for this to work, all those moments where all the puzzle pieces, because this is a very complex business, how much of your success do you attribute to how hard you worked and how smart you guys were and how much do you tribute to luck. Well, I think a lot of people have read Malcolm Gladwell's book where he talks about

the 10,000 hours. And I really believe that I look at anybody I've ever talked to, whether it's Ted Turner, Elon Musk, or anybody, they've put in so much labor and effort. And it really is 10,000 hours or more if you just counted up. And one time when his book came out, I said, yeah, I did that and more. But you've got to count on, you know, 10% luck. Things just lining up. You know, we talked about one of them today, you know, at the darkest hour, just the luck of just calling the right person. And that right person responding favorably, I'm talking to John Malone, you know, without John Malone, without those four cable operators stepping up when they did, I don't know if there would be a discovery channel today. I would have worked hard,

you know, to find other routes. I think I might have found them. It might have been more difficult. But again, I think it was just a good fortune of knowing the right people at the right time. That's John Hendricks, founder of Discovery. And by the way, despite the notoriety of Shark Week, those programs don't even rank among the five highest rated in Discovery's history. The network has had the most success with shows like moonshiners about illegal moonshine producers and Amish Mafia, a documentary about Amish vigilantees.

in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. But the highest rated show of all time on Discovery? The deadliest catch. The show about life aboard fishing boats in the Bering Sea during Alaska's king crab season. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please do follow us on your podcast app so you always have the latest episode downloaded. If you want to contact us, our email address is hibt at npr.org. If you want to follow us on Twitter,

Our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. Our Instagram account is at How I Built This NPR and mine is at guy.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. It was edited by Neba Grant with research help from Claire Murashima. Our production staff includes Casey Herman, Julia Carney, Elaine Coates, Farah Safari, Liz Metzker, Harrison V.J. Choi and Catherine Seifer. Our intern is Margaret Serino. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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