The Exchanges

Q And that's not enough to start a cable television network, so what did you do? Where did you go find the money?

A 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, uh, 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, uh, when I got the idea for BET, I went out and talked to John, and we're sitting in his office, uh, and he asked me, Bob, how much does it take you to launch, uh, 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 a 180, and I'm going to loan you a three 20. One 83 20, there's your 500,000 dollars. 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 gotta keep in mind, a half a million dollars, to me, was equal to the total GDP of everybody black in Freeport.

AI assessment note: “I went out and talked to John, and we're sitting in his office”

Q 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?

A 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 that. But what I 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 lobbyist 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, uh, and it was the business stripe lobbying about for a business for deregulation. And out of that came my entree to the pioneers in the cable industry.

AI assessment note: “No, no, I didn't. I mean, to me, the only business I ever had”

Q 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, who were seeing the same opportunity that you saw at the same time?

A Yeah, I mean, the, the one that's most fascinating is, is Ted Turner launching CNN. If you think about it, uh, CBS with the Walter Cronkite, the brand, uh, 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 thirty-minute Six 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. If it's a funny thing, if you go back and read some of the clips about what people were saying when, when Ted says he's going to do a 24 hour news, you, you find out people were laughing at it. So I, so when Ted was talking about it, and I say, Ted, what happens if there's a day where there's no news? And, and Ted said, Bob, here's what we got. We got a group of people. We're gonna go out and start fires, and then we'll cover, 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. This is something in business to do is they, you know, it's the old saying is that the reason the railroad companies didn't own the airli…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I mean, the, the one that's most fascinating is, is Ted Turner launching CNN.”

Q And what, what kind of student were you at school?

A I was, uh, I was, uh, turned out to be pretty smart, and I was in an advanced English class, and I'll never forget this, and it's, I could have been, I think it was 11th grade, 12th grade, And I remember this particular professor, I never forget the guy's name, the guy was Professor Antis, and, ah, 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 their hand, so I said, what the hell, I'm gonna 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, uh, an application to the University of Illinois State School, and I ended up going to the University of Illinois.

AI assessment note: “turned out to be pretty smart, and I was in an advanced English class”

Q You, um, 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?

A Well, when I came down, remember I came down out of Princeton, so if you have a Ivy League degree, there's a, ah, a network of Ivy League graduates in Washington, and, ah, I remember meeting the lady who was the press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson. I'll never forget it. She said, who do you want to work for? And I said, I wanted to work for, ah, Kennedy. Yeah, Kennedy doesn't pay. You don't work for Kennedy. And it just, this was, this was Ted Kennedy. And then I said, I want to, she said, uh, who else do you like? I said, I like Walter Mondale. She said, oh, well, I can get you in to see Mondale. So I go to see Mondale. He, his office doesn't have a job. And then he says, uh, you know what? I just know somebody who's at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Would you be interested in that? And I just, you know, came down from business. I said, sure.

AI assessment note: “I remember meeting the lady who was the press secretary to Lady Bird Johnson.”

Q What, what was the cable industry at that time? I mean, I mean, were, 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, a, a, a niche sector, you know, like a flash in the pan?

A The, the, uh, the rule of thumb was from the broadcasters, cable would erode audiences. And harm over-the-air free broadcasting, which really translated in harm 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 cable, so the telephone companies in league with the broadcasters, uh, 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, uh, group of, uh, of opposition against cable deregulation, but, you know, technology is a hard thing to keep tied down, and as satellites, uh, 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, and broadcast is healthy, maybe not as healthy as it used to be, but still a formidable content provider.

AI assessment note: “from the broadcasters, cable would erode audiences. And harm over-the-air free broadcasting”

Q At that point, you become the first African American billionaire overnight in U.S. history. Um, was that, was that an important milestone for you?

A 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 to 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, uh, discrimination, uh, 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 and maintaining wealth. That's what I do.

AI assessment note: “It wasn't a milestone in terms of me personally. It was a milestone”

Q But you're a 33 year old, I mean, you're a 33 year old man with no, you hadn't, Had any experience running out?

A Well, I did, I did a survey. I called, 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 Junior Woods. So I called in, and I said, I'd like to speak to Pink Junior. And Pink Junior 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, we, he said, he took the phone off, he said, hey, there's a guy on the phone saying if he brought grambling football down there, would you subscribe? And they said, yeah. So I took that back to John Malone. I said, John, I did a survey in the black community. And People down in Aniston, Alabama, and I assume Aniston's like other cities throughout the South, they would subscribe. And so he, he said, okay, and he brought his lawyer in, took off 30 minutes, he wrote me this check, and so now John gives me the check. And, you know, I gotta, John, I gotta ask you a question. But I waited till I had to check first. So, I mean, I wasn't gonna be stupid, cause I was gonna get the check first. So I said, John, I've never started a business before. What advice can you give me? And, and John Malone said, Bob, get your revenues up, keep your costs down. That was …

AI assessment note: “I said, John, I've never started a business before. What advice can you give me?”