This is why I came. I love my name in lights out there. That's beautiful. It's great. Hi, everybody. Welcome to my neighborhood. I was going to say yes. Thank you for letting us set up 3.5 minutes to get here from my house. Yes, yeah. Oh, that's my oak tree. That is my tree. Where'd you get that? Did it for you. Oh, did it for you. Does it usually get this hot? No, this is feeling like Phoenix in here, outside. But no, it is. We don't call it the American Riviera for nothing. It really is one of the best places in the world. Spectacular, yes. Beautiful. I thought I was coming to interview you. I know. I never get intimidated, but I thought I was interviewing this woman here who is definitely a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I thought we were doing what we did in Ojai. We can do that. OK, yeah, yeah, we can go in that direction. OK, good. I thought I would see how things turn out. I thought I was interviewing you, but go ahead. Last time, last time I tried to interview Oprah, she interviewed me for about an hour. So let's see how this goes. So everybody obviously knows those highlights, Oprah, the 37,000 interviews, the empire, the influence, everything that you've done over your amazing career. But one of the things that I think people don't really know is how it all started. How did that, how did you go on this journey? How did this sort of pathway actually start? What was that thought process all those years ago when you took those first steps?
Well, I can't say that it happened by accident, but I didn't have a big vision for what it would become. I always knew, just like everyone in this room has felt for yourself at some point or another in your life, I always knew that my life would go beyond the Mississippi dirt road with no running water and electricity that I was born into with my grandmother. I had a vision or a feeling around five or six years old when my grandmother was hanging clothes out on the line and she said, 'Oprah, Gayle, you better watch me now, because one day you're going to have to learn how to do this for yourself.' And inside myself, my spirit, I heard that voice that everybody hears, that you have heard, that has led you to this room, that has led me to this room. And the voice said, 'No, don't think so, Grandma.' And I have listened to that voice my whole life, and every decision that I have made that has been profitable for me, that has been successful for me, that has brought me a greater sense of knowing in the world, has been motivated from that feeling that all of us have, and all the mistakes I've made have come from not paying attention to that feeling. And so once I started in television at 19 years old and had the feeling it was time to move from Baltimore to Chicago, even though everybody told me, except Gayle, everybody in my life said, 'You're going to fail when you go to Chicago.' But the feeling said it was time to move. And that's what I tried to offer to people, is the thing that makes us all equal. We all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences and different accesses to opportunities. But everybody has that thing that guides you forward, and as long as you lean into that. So for me, the feeling came when I was doing the talk show in Chicago, and I had brought on this guy who was crazy enough to come on with his mistress and his wife. He agreed to come on with his mistress and his wife. And it was live. Yes, television show. And it was live. And on that show, he said to the mistress, kneel to the wife. He said to his wife, 'What you don't know is that she's pregnant.' And he said that on live television, and I saw his wife's face. And that was a turning point in my career, because I said, 'I will not allow myself to have a platform where someone can be humiliated or used in that way. Again, I will never do that again.' So I went to the producers and said, 'We're not doing that anymore.' And I had just recently said to them, 'We're not doing the Ku Klux Klan anymore. We're not doing those kinds of shows anymore.' So they're like, 'Well, what are we going to do?' And I said, 'We're now going to do shows that only...' So this was the major turning point. We're only going to do shows where my intention is aligned with your intention. So don't bring me an idea unless you are clear about the intention for that idea. So that when I sit in the seat, I can find a thread of truth for myself, so that when the audience is watching me, they're watching me react to something that's real and not just something that's about a show. And that is what turned that show around. Around 1989, I stopped being a television show and started to literally say to the producers, 'We're going to use television, and we're not going to be used by television, and we're going to use it as a force for good in people's lives to show them the best of themselves, and we'll show them the best of themselves through showing other people who don't have the best of themselves.' And so that was the big turning point.
It's amazing. Amazing. And that came through, obviously, your audience, millions and millions of fans were super receptive to that. And in today's world, you get that feedback instantaneously, right? In the comments of your podcasts, all that. But back then, how did you know that you were really onto something? And you can talk about it in terms of the format, but even the medium, right, what you invented was new in terms of what was happening on broadcast. And then you went on to reinvent magazines. Obviously, now with podcasts, video podcasts, how do you know that you have something that is a fit with the audience and that actually really resonates with your fans?
Because I stopped doing autographs because I had a doctor's appointment and couldn't do them one day, and then had so much more energy because I did two shows a day all those years, and I had so much more energy, and I asked myself the important question that we all need to continually ask ourselves: what do I want? So I had been doing the thing that I thought the audience wanted, signing autographs every day, signing, never looking up, just every single, just signing. And then on the day that I had so much energy and I said, 'What do I want?' I said, 'What I really want is to find out why you came.' So I started talking to the audience after every show. And they became like, they're my own focus group. And the audience told us what they wanted. The audience told us why they had come. The audience said to us, there was a point where women would just stand up and I'd ask the question, 'So tell me about your life. What makes you happy?' Nobody could answer that question. They'd always say, 'Well, when my children or my children make me happy.' But what would make you happy? And so women started to share with me and the team after the show that something was missing in their lives, and they kept saying that they're there. 'I've done all the things, I got the degree, I married, I have the picket fence, we have the Volvo, we have all the things. But it feels like something is missing.' And so I said to producers, 'We need to figure out what that is. I think it's the same thing that's missing for myself. I think that people want a connection to something bigger than themselves. So how do we do that? How do we offer that to people in a way that they can experience through television, a connection to something that's bigger than just the show, that's bigger than just people talking?' And we started doing these little segments called 'Remembering Your Spirit.' And I remember the very first time I was talking to Caroline Myss, who wrote a book called Anatomy of the Spirit, and I was looking out in the audience and everybody was looking at me like, 'What is she talking about?' And at one point, somebody said, 'Is she talking about Jesus?' Oh, no, she's not talking about Jesus. She's talking about the fact that you have a mind. And you have a body. This is 1992. And you have a spirit. And people are like, 'Is it like your soul?' And so we started educating people about the consciousness of well-being, about what it means to take care of yourself. In 1992, when I did a show with a woman named Cheryl Richardson, who is a coach, and she asked the women in the audience, 'Where are you on the list of your things to do? Let's do a list. And where do you place yourself?' Every woman in that audience either had herself 10 on the list, or there was no room for her on the list. And when Cheryl Richardson in 1992 said, 'You need to put yourself first on the list,' they booed her. They booed her. And so this idea of training, teaching, allowing the audience to experience a new way of seeing themselves is what we did. And people started to watch because they were looking for a new way of defining themselves. And we were using a new language of offering to women opportunities to see themselves differently. And now, I think about what you're doing on YouTube, and I think about this massive opportunity to reach just millions of people in the world at one time. And I wonder for you, because I have to turn it around. I wonder for you. I wonder if the weight, if the weight of... Do you... So I felt a weight speaking to people every day. And I would sometimes be in the elevator and I'd say, 'God, speak through me, because I got a lot of crazy people and people watching all over the world who interpret whatever you say however they interpret it.' So you want to come to that with clarity. So I felt the weight of speaking to millions of people at one time. You now have the weight and responsibility of shaping culture in a way that we've never experienced before. And I'm wondering how that impacts you or how it has changed you.
Wow, yeah. I'll first, I'll say a few things. First of all, and I will attempt to answer that question. But the way, even the answer really lies in a little bit of what you said right there, Oprah, which is in terms of how you understood what the audience was getting out of what you were trying to do. You described the focus sessions right after your show, like that literally is a description of the comments that you see on the videos on your YouTube channel today. And so you invented that even before YouTube was invented. And I feel like my responsibility and our team's responsibility really is to give those types of capabilities to creators. And I've seen you interact with creators that are hanging on every one of your words because they're trying to build that authentic connection themselves. And I really do feel like our job is to build the stage. Most of the people that work for me are software engineers, AI engineers. We are not the people on the stage, like, so our job and my job and the way I think about the way it's impacted me is I have to live up to the responsibility of building the stage that over 2 billion people come to every single day, and their time is valuable. And the choices that they're making are about how they spend their day. And there are millions of people, obviously, everybody from Oprah on down, who are standing on that stage. So it's my job to make it so that what you're trying to do actually gets through and connects with that audience. I always describe what we do as the world's best connector of a creative idea or a creator with their audience, regardless of where they are in the world. And I guess the way that it's changed me is it's really, truly, genuinely humbling because it is about the culture, as you describe. Like, culture is set on YouTube every single day. We had 1.7 billion people that watched some form of soccer or football during the World Cup this summer. Victor was talking about the Artemis II launch, where millions and millions of young people watched. We watched on YouTube. YouTube? Yeah. And I think old people watched it on YouTube, too. Yeah, we did too. And I think for me, personally, speaking personally, that is truly, profoundly humbling. And I say that to my team all the time, in our darkest days when we have the biggest challenges around, challenges around what does our platform stand for, free speech versus protecting the community on our platform, those very, very difficult types of choices, because of this stage that we built, it's like a true, genuine privilege to actually get to work on that stage and to say that we created a mechanism, a platform that allows you to connect with millions and millions of people every single day is just profoundly humbling.
