How I Built This with Guy Raz - Live Episode! Black Entertainment Television: Robert Johnson

Episode Date: December 14, 2017

In 1979, Robert Johnson was a lobbyist for the burgeoning cable industry. That's when he got an idea for a channel called Black Entertainment Television. He started small, just a few hours of programming a week. But by the 1990s BET had become a cultural touchstone. In 2001, he sold BET to Viacom for $2.3 billion, making him the first African-American billionaire in US history. Recorded live in Washington, D.C. 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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I'm going to buy 20% of your company for 180, and I'm going to loan you at 320. 180, 320, there's your $500,000. Now, under that business plan, Bob, you will be 80 and I'll be 20. Is that a deal? I said, John, that's a deal. What Malone didn't know at the time, if he'd reverse the numbers and said, I'll be 80 and Bob, you'll be 20. I said, John, that's a deal.

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 this special live episode, how Bob Johnson turned a small cable channel called BET into a media empire, and from it became the first African-American billionaire in U.S. history. So when Bob Johnson came to Washington, D.C. as a young man in the early 1970s, he planned to focus on public policy, which is what he did for most of his early years.

And in the mid-1970s, Bob stumbled into a job with an obscure trade association called the National Cable Television Association. Now, these were the very, very early days of cable TV, and very few people understood the potential of this new force in TV. But Bob Johnson, he was one of those very few people. And it was while he was there when he started to dream about a black-oriented cable channel. And so at the ripe old age of 33, Bob quit his job to pursue what was then a big gamble, a channel he would call BET, and a channel that would eventually make Bob one of the most successful media entrepreneurs in America. which isn't bad for a kid who grew up in a working class home with nine brothers and sisters in Freeport, Illinois. Bob Johnson sat down with me in front of a live audience at Listener Auditorium right here in Washington, D.C. So Bob, you know, you symbolize a lot of things to, especially to folks in this city, because this is your city.

And we'll get into that. But I want to start with your childhood. most of it spent in Freeport, Illinois. This was in the 50s and 60s. First of all, what kind of place was it in the 50s and 60s? Freeport is a small town about 100 miles northwest of Chicago, Illinois. It's a rural farming community with a little bit of light industry. A town where people got along very well.

Not a lot of integration. You know, one side of the town where most of the... African-Americans live. The other side of town was the whites live. And they all sort of came together when you got to the high school and junior high. And what kind of parents were your parents? Were they strict? Were they kind of hands off?

You know, all black parents are strict. If you, you got to have a good excuse not to go to church. You had to dress neatly. And, you know, you couldn't drink. at least around the house. So that was through a thing. And what kind of student were you at school? I was, I was, turned out to be pretty smart.

And I was in an advanced English class. And I'll never forget this. I could have been, I think it was 11th grade, 12th grade. And I remember this particular person. I never forget the guy's name. The guy was Professor Antis. And one day in class, he asked everybody, how many of you are going to college?

Well, as I looked around the room, everybody who was there most of them white raised a hand. So I said, what the hell? I'm going to raise my hand, too. So I figured I could get past that day. After doing that, I said, I really got to go out and find out about college if I'm going to do this. So I went down and I found out about an application to the University of Illinois State School. And I ended up going to the University of Illinois. And I believe you studied history there, right?

I was social studies teacher education was my major and with the idea I was going to be a teacher you know I graduated from honors from the universe of Illinois and at that time the state department was looking to recruit African Americans to go into the diplomatic corps they would help pay your way to any school of international affairs that would prep you for a diplomacy and so I did that and then applied for a number of schools and got accepted at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and International Affairs. You first, I guess, came down here to get into public policy

around 1972, I think. What do you remember about Washington, D.C. at that time? Well, when I came down, remember I came down out of Princeton, so if you have an Ivy League degree, there's a network. of Ivy League graduates in Washington. And I remember meeting the lady who was the press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson. I never forget it.

She said, who do you want to work for? And I said, I wanted to work for Kennedy. Now, Kennedy doesn't pay. You don't work for Kennedy. This was Ted Kennedy. And then I said, I want to, she said, who else do you like? I like Walter Mondale. She said, oh, well, I can get you into see Mondale. So I go to see Mondale.

his office doesn't have a job. And then he says, you know what? I just know somebody who's at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Would you be interested in that? I just, you know, came down from prison. I said, sure. So I go down and the guy's looking for a public information officer to write information about programming at the various PBS stations,

the educational stations. And that was my first job as a public information officer for corporation for public broadcasting. And you must have captured the attention of people pretty quickly because within a couple of years, you were working for Walter Fontroy, who would go on to become the first D.C. delegate to Congress. No, I didn't capture anybody's attention.

What happened was, what happened was I didn't know anything about Washington. I just came down here off from Princeton. And all of a sudden, I'm working there, having a good time, and there's an election. didn't make any difference to me both, you know, white guys, so I don't care about it. And so

what I do is because I found out what Washington is like is when they change administration, some people get fired. And I started saying, well, gee, I guess I'll look around. And that's how somebody I knew referred me to the delegate from the District of Columbia, Walter Fontroy, who was a non-voting congressperson.

And so I just did what you do in Washington, when administration changes, you change jobs. And that's what I did. And that's why I ended up on Capitol Hill working as his press secretary. But at that point in your life, you were not thinking about becoming a businessman. Like if we went back to who you were when you were working for Walter Fontroy, you would not have guessed, I guess, at that point that you would go into business, would you? No, no, I didn't. I mean, to me, the only business I ever had was a paper route, and I failed at that. so I never did learn from that and another summer job I had I didn't like working for anybody else

so if I was going to be successful I'd probably have to one day work for myself so but no but when I was working as a press secretary you meet a lot of people and I was at a party I lived that time over in southwest DC so I meet this lady at this party and she's we get to talking and she said wow you'd make a good lobbyists for the cable industry. And I said, I don't know anything about cable. She said, don't worry, I didn't know anything about it when I got in it either. So I got in the cable industry and that gave me the one stripe I was missing. So I had the political stripe. I had the public affairs stripe at CPB. And it was the business stripe lobbying about for a business for deregulation. And out of that came my entree to the pioneers and the cable industry.

So you just met this woman at a party. and she said, hey, you should get involved in the cable industry. I work for this trade association. Do you want to come meet the people who work there? Yeah, I'm a pretty attractive guy. So when I was talking to her, she understood that I had some potential to be a lobbyist. What was the cable industry at that time? I mean, were there a lot of people who understood that it was going to disrupt network TV?

or did most people kind of think of it as a niche sector, you know, like a flash in the pan? The rule of thumb was from the broadcasters. Cable would erode audiences and harm over-the-air free broadcasting, which really translated it harmed their pocketbook. Then on top of that, there was the telephone companies who wanted to control cable lines getting on telephone poles because you can't get cable to a home unless it's strung up on a telephone pole. So the telephone company is in league with the broadcasters and a lot of members of Congress because if you're a congressperson, who do you turn to to get your story out, your local broadcaster?

So they had a formidable group of opposition against cable deregulation. But, you know, technology is a hard thing to keep tied down. And as satellites launched and you could beam signals across the entire country and aggregate huge audiences via cable. Over time, the argument for more content, free choice, more diversity of content particularly, won the argument with a couple of court cases. And the end result is, you see what you have now is a zillion channels of cable and digital content and broadcast is healthy, maybe not as healthy as they used to be, but still a formidable content provider. So this may be an apocryphal story,

but I've read that in 1979 you met a guy from Florida who was coming to D.C. to meet with Congress folks about an idea he had. You were a lobbyist and you came to help him. What's that story?

Is it true? No, it's true. It's not apocryphal at all. It's this guy. He wanted wanted to start a channel for the elderly. Ken Silverman. So Ken Silverman. Ken Silverman. said to me, he said, I said, let me see a proposal. He opened it up and he had this, he had this data. He said, elderly people consume certain products. Elderly people have a certain

income. Elderly people make up X percent of the population. And I said, wow, that's some good data points. And your job was to just kind of facilitate us. My job was to facilitate his access to Congress, as a lobbyist. So Ken went up and we made the introduction. For some reason, he never got his elderly channel off the grade. ground. I don't know why. But I had his information. So when I started BET, I said, black people have certain spending patterns, black people have certain shopping patterns. I just, wherever he had elderly, I just filled in black. And I just went in and took his model, and out of that came BET. Was that the genesis of the idea? This guy had this idea for an elderly channel, and you're

looking at it and you're saying, wait a minute, this applies to African Americans as well. No, that wasn't the genesis of it. You would have been thinking about this idea. That's too high-brow word for what I did. That was pure theft. Genesis would be content that was not technologically driven by satellite and cable. It would be Ebony Magazine. Because what Ebony Magazine and Jet and Essence and Black Enterprise and even Black Radio,

they told the story of Black. aspirations. They gave open to black content and information, and black radio stations play black music. So the concept or the genesis, if you will, of targeted program already existed. Yeah. You know, life or look could have started Ebony Magazine if they wanted to. They didn't want to because it was segregated or niche content. Fortune could have started Black Enterprise. They didn't want to do it because it was niche content. What I did was to take advantage of the technological change that was brought about by the launch of satellites to

allow signals to be beamed across the United States. And instead of aggregating just black households in Chicago, I could aggregate black cable households all across the continent of the United States. Because you were looking at these media organizations and you were saying, we can do this on TV. Yeah, we can do this cable. They had the business model. They sold advertising. They had readers in this case or subscribers. And they made money so that model would work if you could put together content on television but you had to aggregate a large enough audience because you couldn't compete with a local broadcast station trying to find it just in one city you had to have the whole country so you're there working for this cable

trade association this idea is starting to kind of work its way through your head were there other people who who were seeing the same opportunity that you saw at the same time Yeah, I mean, the one that's most fascinating is Ted Turner launching CNN. If you think about it, CBS with Walter Cronkite, the brand as a father of news, could have launched on cable a CBS News network instead of letting Ted do it. But they saw themselves as a 30-minute 6 p.m. period of news. They just didn't see news as a 24-hour audience product that would appeal to Americans across the country. I remember when I was talking to Ted when he was starting.

And the same thing with the guys with ESPN. NBC could have started ESPN if they wanted to, but they didn't. And I was talking to Ted, and he was pitching the idea to people about a 24-hour news network. It's a funny thing. If you go back and read some of the clips about what people were saying when Ted said he was going to do a 24-hour news, you find out people were laughing at it. So when Ted was talking about it, and I said, Ted, what happens if there's a day where there's no news? And Ted said, Bob, here's what we got.

We got a group of people. We're going to go out and start fires. And then we'll cover the fires, and then we'll have some news. So, you know, that's, but what happened is people missed out on the cable revolution. And this is something in business to do is they, you know, the old saying is that the reason the railroad companies didn't own the airlines is because the railroad companies, they thought they were in the railroad business as opposed to the passenger moving business.

I mean, everybody here in this room probably had one at times a yellow analog Sony Walkman. I bet you they're in your closet someplace. You know, they're throwing them out. Yeah. But they didn't go digital, and they lost out to Apple and the rest of history. Yeah. I want to come back to that in just a moment, but I want to ask you how you started this. I mean, you are 33. I'm assuming you didn't have a whole lot of your own money to work with. I had a paycheck, but that was about it. And I was working at the cable industry. And so I had to leave the – when I started, I had to leave the cable industry.

So I borrowed some money from a bank to start. Do you remember how much? It was probably $40,000. So you got a bank loan? Yeah. And that's not enough to start a cable television network. So what did you do? Where did you go find money?

Well, I had met, I was a lobbyist, obviously, and I met one of the board of directors of the trade association, a gentleman by the name of Dr. John Malone. And he and I became friends. And one day he said to me, he said, Bob, if you ever have an idea, come talk to me. So when I got the idea for BET, I went out and talked to John, and we're sitting in his office, and he asked me, Bob, how much does it take you to launch BET?

And I said, John, about a half a million dollars. And so Malone says to me, he said, Bob, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to buy 20% of your company for 180, and I'm going to loan you at 320. 180, 320, there's your $500,000. Now, under that business plan, Bob, you will be 80 and I'll be 20. Is that a deal? I said, John, that's a deal. What Malone didn't know at the time, if he had reversed the numbers and said, I'll be 80 and Bob, you'll be 20.

I said, John, that's a deal. Now, you've got to keep in mind, a half a million dollars to me was equal to the total GDP of everybody black in Freeport. So I got this check. I am terrified that something bad is going to have to walk out of this building and somebody's going to rob me this $500,000. Wait, he gave you, just to clarify, he gave you $500,000 like that with no due diligence, no... It took 30 minutes for him to give me this check. Why? Why would he believe, I mean...

I told you, I'm good. I even thought you. But you're a 33-year-old, I mean, you're a 33-year-old, man, with no... hadn't had any experience running out. Well, I did a survey. I remember I got on the phone and called down to a place called Anderson, Alabama. I called a barbershop in Anderson, Alabama. The shop was owned by a guy named Pink Jr. Woods. So I called in and I said, I'd like to speak to Pink Jr. And Pink Jr. got on the phone. I said, Pink. If I brought cable down to Anderson, Alabama and played Grambling football, Jackson State football, would you guys subscribe? He said, you could do that?

I said, yeah, if you could subscribe. He said, yeah, he took the phone off. He said, hey, this guy on the phone saying if he brought gambling football down, I would you subscribe? And they said, yeah. So I took that back to John Ballone. I said, John, I did a survey in the black community. And people down in Anniston, Alabama, and I assume Anniston's like other cities throughout

the South, they would subscribe. And so he said, oh. okay and he brought his lawyer in, took all off 30 minutes. He wrote me this check. And so now John gives me the check. And, you know, I got to say, John, I got to ask you a question. But I waited until I had to check first. So, you mean, I wasn't going to be stupid because I was going to get to check first. So I said, John, I've never started a business before. What advice can you give me? And John Belon said, Bob, get your revenues up, keep your costs down. That was my Harvard MBA and I was set.

In just a moment, how Bob Johnson took BET public, then private, and then eventually how it made him a very, very rich man. Stay with us. You're listening to a live recording of How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to this special live recording of how I built this from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 1980, and Bob Johnson has just taken that half a million dollars from John Malone. to launch BET. But don't get the wrong idea. In the beginning, BET wasn't actually a channel

with tons of content. In fact, the stuff it showed lasted barely longer than this podcast. It was on for two hours on a Friday and a Saturday night. That was it on the carried on one of the popular cable channels, I think USA Network. And as we started programming more and more, we started getting more hours on the USA Network. And eventually, We said we got to have our own satellite, and so we had enough capital to acquire a satellite transponder to beam our own signal. So we went from eight hours to 16 hours or 24 hours.

And what was the content that you were? The content was syndicated programming that we could buy from the studios. For cheap. Yeah. Because content, original content is expensive. Oh, no, we didn't do anything original. We, we, we, it had to be, We called it the three ends.

In the can, in the studios, or in existence. That's all it is. So a Gramley football game, they're going to play anyway, whether we show up or not with a camera. So we do football games because it was in existence. Something in the can was, you know, sitcoms, you know, good times and Sanford and son. And then in studio is you put people like we are now. All we got to do is bring in a camera.

You'd have a BET show. So the idea was to create, to offer content that wasn't going to be that expensive, but that could build an audience. Yeah, if it would get your revenues up, keep your cost down. And then when MTV refused to play or started out not playing black music videos, and the black talent wanted to have their videos shown, and I went to them and say, hey, if you keep making the videos, I'll keep putting them on. And as a result of that, we gained sort of an early franchise position in showing urban R&B African American music videos.

And all of that was free? All that content was free? Totally free. Wow. I mean, it's like you think about a company today, like a media company today, and investors want user-generated content because making content is expensive, which is why investors love YouTube, for example, or Reddit, because nobody's paying to make that. content. Yeah. If you want to look at how I became a business genius, it's not very hard. All you got to do is come up with a business where you get free music videos, cable operators pay you, and advertisers pay you. So you get paid twice for nothing. That's a pretty good deal.

You got to be real, you got to be real dumb to mess up that model. So when you started to pitch BET to advertisers in the first four or five years, were they, you know, coming to you with open arms saying, yes, we want to advertise on this channel? Not really. I mean, early on, a couple of big brands said, hey, we really reach black audiences. We want to be in touch with them.

So Pepsi Cola was an early advertiser because they soft drink appeals to that market. Same way with Anheuser-Busch, they got exclusive rights to advertise their beer. But what you call the real revenue, new generators, the package good guys, the Procton Gables, the Coal Gates and the like, they were slow to come on because they were reaching eyeballs on all the syndicated shows on network television, and so you could accumulate a lot of black eyeballs and viewership without paying for something

that was untested, unneelson measured as cable. So it was a tough argument to make, but you make the case, you say, look, you've got to reach. this audience, they consume your products, they work at your company. You do all of the do-good social selling. You know, it's just you come, yeah, I'd say within about two inches of threatening them, you know, and that if you don't do this, I'm going to tell Jesse Jackson that you're not advertising stuff like that. So over time, though, as cable beginning greater penetration, more and more programming came about, advertisers began to see the value of getting in first in advertising on BET or MTV and so on.

All right. So you are running this company and you've got some momentum. You become profitable. And in 1991, you take the company public. It becomes the first majority black-owned company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Right. No African-American had done it before on the Stock Exchange. Stock Exchange has been around almost, you know, going back to.

about the founding of the country a little bit after the Revolutionary War. And nobody had done it. And I had this notion that if you're going to be a visible African-American player in a predominant white culture, business culture, you had to do

something to get identified. And nothing could identify you more than playing at the game, you know, own a company, go public, be totally transparent in your ownership and everything about your company under rule.

and that makes you part of the old boys club. So I said, let me be the first one to do that. And that's what I did. And it made a lot of sense and it worked. Bob, one of the things that you know of and you've dealt with during your time of BET was it came under criticism. You know, it wasn't always embraced within the black community. And some African-Americans felt that it wasn't a good representation of African-American culture.

heard those criticisms in the past. Do you, did you ever feel like they were fair criticisms? No. I felt the criticisms were born out of what is in the African American community. If you think about historically the African American community, it has been a collective. It's been a collective because they've been on set by forces beyond their control. And they all, as a result of that, they have to group together. And so when you start a business, it was the preconceived notion that your business existed

to further the collective, the goal of African Americans. So if you were doing something that they felt didn't do it, say if you weren't doing black educational television, you were failing in your obligation. And so we got the brunt of every single. who wanted us to be part of that collective because we were the only one. We just happened to garner everybody's hopes, dreams, and aspirations. And then the other part of it is in black culture, because you have an obligation to be, I would say,

more protective of our flaws, you can't do anything to show our flaws. So if you show scantily clad women and videos and all kinds of gyrating and dancing, and by the way, I never made a video at all, so don't blame me for them. That was like, that is not proper depiction of our people. On the other hand, MTV could do anything. They could do, pimp my ride, pimp my sister, pimp anything you want. We couldn't do that.

If we'd done that, we would have been banished. In fact, my successor, Deborah Lee, she was picketed for a period of almost four months outside of a house where people of bullhorns, you know, taunting her because she was running BET that played music video. But Black America has always had to live in a contradiction because it is dominated by white culture. Did that criticism ever get you down, especially when you heard it from prominent African Americans? Did you ever feel, you know, sad about it? Or, you know, were you saying what you're saying now? Do you think I would be here if criticism ever got me down?

Do you think I'd be saying this if criticism ever got me down? No. All right. So you have this incredibly successful company. now a burgeoning media empire. In 1998, you decide to take it private. This is a public company. It's trade on the stock exchange. How did that happen? And why did you decide to buy it back? So to me, the answer is simple. And I'm not sure why anybody would be baffled to ask me this question, because I figured I could make more money. But you, I mean, the stock price was like 31,

and you bought it back for like double that amount, right? Now, what happened was the stock was trading at 31. We felt the stock was worth closer to 45 or 50 because we were getting a discount on the value of our shares because the stock was thinly traded. Why was it being undervalued? Because it was thinly traded. I owned a big chunk and I wasn't a seller. John Malone on a big chunk, he wasn't a seller.

So there wasn't a lot of float in the marketplace to make the stock move up and down. So what we did was we said, let's buy the stock back and take the company private. And we offered 45 bucks a share, which was a good premium to stock that had been trading consistently for three months at about 32, 33 bucks a share. The next day the stock went to 62, which proved that people said, these guys are trying to steal the company. We don't let them do it. So we ended up buying a company back at 62 bucks a share. And we kept it private. and then we sold it to Viacom for $1,262, $126 bucks this year.

You made $3 billion off that sale. That's right. In 2001, you sell the company to Viacom for $3 billion, probably close to the peak of BET's value. What was your thinking at that time? Did you think to yourself, this thing isn't going to get any more? valuable than it is now. We got to cash out. The multiple of media companies at time was a 20 times even though. Multiple. So naturally you're looking at it. You say how high can it go before either one you get more competition which drives your value down? So you look at it and you say it's

a time to sell. Plus I had a partner in John Malone had been in the company for 20 years. His only exit was a sale of the whole enterprise. So I had that obligation to him. So what did that $500,000 get John Malone? John's 180, remember the 320 and the other stuff got paid back. His 180 yielded him $770 million of Viacom stock. And, you know, and I did pretty good too. And the time was obviously impeccable because you couldn't do that today. I don't think BET is worth it for 20 times multiple today. No. At that point, you become the first African-American billionaire overnight in U.S. history.

Was that an important milestone for you? It wasn't a milestone in terms of me personally. It was a milestone in terms of achieving something that would get you the recognition and visibility that would say, if African Americans are given an opportunity, they can prove that they can generate wealth for themselves, their family, and this country. That was the point I was trying to make. The goal was to say we can play at that level

exactly like white American business people could. If you want to change the economic discrimination and income inequality between African Americans and white Americans, or minority Americans and white Americans, you've got to figure out a way to provide a flow of capital into the hands of entrepreneurs and others who are fully committed and fully capable of generating wealth. That's what I do.

So let me, so Bob, you are, to say the least, a complex person. You've got a lot of people in this crowd cheering for you when you say that. I pay for 50% of them. Okay, I got you. But you have said, and I'm quoting you, this is something you've said in the past. You said, quote, I don't want to be seen as a hero to younger people or a role model for African American youth. Do you still feel that way? I mean, I said that in the context of this, a hero or a role model for African-American kids, in my opinion, starts at home. The mother, their father, and the people who live in their next-door neighborhood.

It makes no sense to project your hero because you see them on television more often than you see your neighbor or your uncle who's going to work every day, struggling to survive. That's the real hero. is the guy Jesse Jackson just to say those people who take that early bus that's the kind of hero that they ought to focus on so that's right we just have a couple more minutes

before we have to wrap up and I want to get these two very important questions to you what did your folks I know that your mother at least your mother lived to see your incredible success you coming out of this working class home

nine brothers and sisters to becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in American history, full stop, and also among the richest. What would they have made of that? They were very regular people. You know, they didn't, you know, my mother used to say, you know, people would come up and say, I know you're proud of your son. And she, you know, the line she'd come back when I'm proud of all my children. And that was, that was, you know, that's what she would say.

And if, you know, she would have a way of bringing you down or putting you in your place. One final question for you, Bob, a question that I, listeners here and the folks in the audience will have been familiar with, a question I ask, everyone who comes to the show, how much of your success do you ascribe to your talent and your intelligence? and how much of it was just luck. 90% talent? No, no, really. Here's the thing. Every entrepreneur, every entrepreneur is lucky. You call it luck.

I call it grace of God. That's what I call it. There is no way the path that I took could have happened without that kind of guidance. and, you know, because all along the way, there were things way beyond my control. It's just simple as this. I just happened to come of age when RCA said, we're going to put a satellite in a geostationary orbit above the equator, and that satellite can beam a signal to cable head-ins all around the

country. The guys at RCA didn't call me up and say, Bob, are you ready? We're going to launch it. You know, it just. has happened, I happen to be in the right place at the right time with the right people. And some force beyond you puts you there. Bob Johnson, founder of BET. That's my conversation with Bob Johnson live right here in Washington, D.C.

at George Washington University's listener auditorium. By the way, Bob didn't stop blazing a trail after he sold BET. He went on to buy the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats and became the first African-American owner. of a major American sports franchise. Eventually, Bob sold the team to the second African-American owner in NBA history. He might have heard of him. His name is Michael Jordan. Hey, thanks for listening to this special live episode of How I Built This.

This episode was produced by Ramtin Eri, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkent, Claire Breen, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Diana Mustak. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR. Thank you.