For the first time in her life, Geraldine Laybourne is unemployed. Last month, she left Oxygen Media, the women-centric cable television and internet operation she co-founded nine years ago with Oprah Winfrey and Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen, the major investor who forced Oxygen's sale last fall to NBC Universal for $925 million. At the moment, Laybourne and her husband, Kit, are traveling abroad, recharging their batteries, and figuring out the future.

Laybourne—who started her career teaching at a progressive private school and eventually reinvented the Nickelodeon TV network—gave Portfolio.com a guided tour of the changing media landscape in an exclusive interview. The new world of media, it turns out, is a very scary place.

Lloyd Grove: So how do you feel?

Geraldine Laybourne: I feel fine. I don't really feel relieved. And I don't really feel scared. And I don't really feel sad. I just feel like, Wow, something else is going to happen soon. And our plan is to travel. My husband is taking a sabbatical.
 
L.G.: He's an animator, right?
 
G.L.: He's a teacher and a writer and an animator and a producer. He teaches at the New School [in New York City]. And so it's great. It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We both worked hard for 36, 37 years, so that's fine. But I'm not retiring. I've just been on vacation. Today is my first back-in-the-city day.
 
L.G.: I see. When was your last day at the office?
 
G.L.: December 21.

L.G.: So you're going to smell the flowers.
 
G.L.: I want to just have some new input. You know, you get on a treadmill with the juice of business and excitement of building stuff, and I just want to observe and take things in. So we're going to places we've never been—Bhutan, India, Africa, the Amazon.
 
L.G.: Excellent. So tell me, what's that like? You know, you built this company from scratch, and it's been almost 10 years.
 
G.L.: We raised money at the end of '98, and it took nine years.
 
L.G.: And there was a bright spotlight on it from the very beginning.
 
G.L.: Microscope.
 
L.G.: A microscope. And there were endless things written about it. What's your perspective on all that? It was quite hard to begin with.
 
G.L.: Everything is hard in the media business. And whether you're in a big, cushy company or an entrepreneur, it's all hard. We do it because we love it and we love the challenge. And the payoff is so fabulous, if it works. And I've been on a pretty rough uphill climb with Nickelodeon. So I was no stranger to how you build something from scratch, with not many resources. With Oxygen, we had more financial resources than we had with Nickelodeon, but there were a lot of things that we were missing. We didn't have any cross-promotion. We didn't have any of the infrastructure of a good company. I called Bill Roskin, who is the head of administration for Viacom, right after I started Oxygen, and I said, "I want to have lunch with you, and I want to apologize because I never appreciated what you did for me. I never appreciated the fact that you always arranged for me to have space, that you negotiated the leases, that you had benefit plans." Starting a company from scratch, you have to do everything.
 
L.G.: Did you buy the lunch, Gerry?
 
G.L.: I did buy the lunch.
 
L.G.: And did Paul Allen pay for it?
 
G.L.: No. You know, Paul Allen did fine on Oxygen, I think, in the end.
 
L.G.: He did, because unless I'm mistaken or I misread something, he put in about $200 million.
 
G.L.: You know, because we're a private company, we don't really disclose.
 
L.G.: You don't have to. But you can, you know.

 
G.L.: I know. He did fine. And he was a great investor. He invested in three separate rounds.
 
L.G.: And had AOL in there.
 
G.L.: [AOL executive] Bob Pittman was one of the first people to really give us support, and he contributed three websites. And we had [AOL executive] Barry Schuler on our board, who is a fabulous guy. It was an interesting beginning, because our intent was to be the first converged network. And we had this vision of using the internet and television and building it right from the beginning. And now some of our ideas seem more reasonable. At the time, they were kind of shocking to people. Investors at the time, in late '98, only wanted to invest in new-media companies. So they were very skeptical. They weren't very enthusiastic about doing a television network.
 
L.G.: Right. So you felt you had to have the internet piece.
 
G.L.: Well, I was excited about the internet. And my partners, Carsey-Werner, were excited about having a television network. So it was kind of perfect.
 
L.G.: What was Oprah excited about?
 
G.L.: She was excited about the idea that women were going to own and operate a television network. She was an investor right until the end. She was more actively involved from the very beginning. And that was when Oprah didn't have a magazine, when Oprah didn't have an empire, when Oprah only had a daily talk show. And her choices about how she's going to spend her time are exactly right. She had this empire to run. She had schools in Africa to build. So she decided to just stay on as an investor.... Everybody stayed in-no, that's not true. One company, LVMH [the French holding company for Louis Vuitton and other luxury brands], got out when we changed strategy from being an internet company to a television company.
 
L.G.: When did that happen?
 
G.L.: The end of 2001. Around that time, it was just clear that you could not make money as a content company on the internet. And we had raised a certain amount of money, and we needed to find a way to get to profitability. And so we relied on what we knew how to do-which was to create a television network that could get profitable. We were profitable by the end of 2004. And so, you know, it was very painful for me. We hired 700 people in one year, and that is too hard to do when you're a small company. And in the first set of layoffs, you can kind of figure out, we'll just get rid of the problems. Then, as you go on and you're letting go of more people-one of the toughest things for me was letting go of a high-performance team in San Francisco, the Thrive Group. The greatest people in the world. They did everything we asked and more. They achieved everything that we asked and more.

L.G.: What were they doing for you?
 
G.L.: They ran a site called ThriveOnline, when it was an integrated health site. And they loved the brand. They were dedicated people. They were fun to work with. They had a real team. But there was no economic model for it. Now, of course, there is. And you kind of wish, Oh man, could we have just hung in there? But I think we made the right decision.

L.G.: When you started this out, what were the broadband capabilities like? Could you watch television on the internet very easily?
 
G.L.: People had dialup. We did some great creative. We really did. We did a thing called The Ruth Truth. Juliana Tatlock produced that—avant-garde, wonderful stuff. Deep Creek used that silhouette animation that iPod has now made famous. But this was way before the iPod thing, and we tried. However, we could use flash animation to make it interesting-looking but not kill the speeds. So anyway, it was a very exciting time in the earlier days. And then we had to contract, and we had to be focused.
 
L.G.: And you had what, 200 people?
 
G.L.: Two hundred fifty. And we had a nice, profitable business.
 
L.G.: I've seen where you've said that if you had it to do all over again, No. 1, you would have done it in secret, right? You would have launched in secret-maybe a softer launch?

G.L.: Usually I say, if you get a choice to do it the way we did with Nickelodeon, where nobody knew anything about what we were doing, or the way we did it with Oxygen, do it the Nickelodeon way. But honest to God, we didn't have any choice. You know, once you get Oprah Winfrey involved in something that you're doing, you just lose control. We hardly ever granted interviews, but we were raising money. We needed publicity.
 
L.G.: Obviously, this was when the internet boom was happening, and people were talking about conservative valuations of the company being $1.5 billion before it even started producing anything.
 
G.L.: Well, look at where we are today.
 
L.G.: Almost a billion.
 
G.L.: Yeah, but look at what's happened in the world of entertainment. And look at the value of Google. And look at the value of Facebook. What is it worth—more than Ford Motor Co.?

L.G.: Well, according to the Microsoft investment, Facebook is worth $15 billion. I don't know what Ford Motor Co. is worth. Google, of course, its market cap is what-$200 billion or some crazy thing like that?
 
G.L.: So, you know, we did the right thing. We became the last analog channel. In fact, when we started, we joked that we'd be the last analog channel. We are the last analog channel. Ask any cable operator. There will be no more channels that get to 74 million homes. That's it. The door is shut. None of the big entertainment companies during the last nine years has built anything that's gotten to 74 million homes. Nothing. So I feel really good about it.
 
L.G.: What would be some of the lessons that you've learned from this journey?
 
G.L.: That focus is important. And for us to build a brand in a new medium—when we didn't have a brand in another medium—was too hard. And even when we were doing it, it was like, Man, if we had already built the television brand, this would not be so hard. But we were trying to build in two media simultaneously, and the two cultures were completely different. Now it's not so much. Now everybody's facile on the computer. Everybody communicates by email. But in those days, if you can remember back to those ancient days-
 
L.G.: I do remember the dialup. And I remember the mid-'90s is when I started using email, I think.
 
G.L.: I remember making a speech in a 1992, or a '93 budget presentation, about how my husband had discovered email, and it was the next best thing to sex. At which point it got misquoted as my husband saying it was better than sex—just to clear that up. But in any case, the technology folks on the internet side lived a different way from the television folks. They wanted to only communicate by email. They did not want any face-to-face communications. They put the most contentious things in emails, which is horrifying to me. It's like, Can't you pick up the phone and call somebody instead of copying 55 people? And I would have to institute rules like, "You may not put contentious things in email" and "We're going to be a civil company." And compensation was very different. The internet folks wanted stock, and the television people wanted salary. There were just so many different cultural things that we had to balance at once. So I would say that's the main lesson from it all. You know, my years in this business have been very consistent—about how you build a brand, how you listen to your consumers, how you bring them into the process. And there are so many more parallels behind what I learned at Nickelodeon and what I learned at Oxygen then dissimilarities.

L.G.: At the end of your tenure there, you had 270,000 prime-time weekday viewers, pretty much? You were in 74 million homes, and it was still analog, right?
 
G.L.: It's largely analog.... We built slower than other people because we wanted to get to the largest number of people. Many people who were starting cable networks in the late '90s took digital carriage. So those networks will never get to full distribution. We were very careful to not do deals where we were just offering digital. So we hung out there. We knew that if we just took digital, we'd never get to people.
 
L.G.: What happened with that model where you were asking the cable systems to pay you for them to carry you?
 
G.L.: Everybody gets paid. In the very beginning, because the cable operators wanted to wire America, they agreed to pay license fees to networks like Nickelodeon and MTV. And so those networks would have dual revenue streams-which meant that you could really afford to put some original programming on. So we started out with a model that we would get paid a license fee. Yes, cable operators were balking, because they saw their programming expenses going way up because of a few networks that were charging enormous amounts of money, like ESPN. But it's common practice that you get paid a fee in the cable universe. And we again hung out there to get the fee when I was at Disney—I went from Nickelodeon to Disney.
 
L.G.: Two unhappy years at Disney.
 
G.L.: Two spectacular years at Disney, where I learned a tremendous amount. And I have a tremendous amount of friends that I met there. But it was not for me. It was a mismatch. I had no idea what kind of an entrepreneur I was. I'd only had one real job, Nickelodeon. And the way that Viacom operated was a very sink-or-swim kind of philosophy. If you did well, Hey, be my guest! Keep on building! The number of questions I got asked when I was at Viacom, I think, was four questions the whole time I was there—because we always overdelivered. We had a 40 percent profit margin with 36 percent growth every year. So what question would you ask? Disney was the opposite. Disney had an army of strategic planners who had no real operational experience. And they felt like you could really determine a business through analysis and that numbers would really tell you what you should do. And that's how you should run your business. To me, strategic planning should be owned by the business head and not by a separate department that's a penal institution. There's a wonderful book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink. I think it's a wonderful book because he validates things that I've thought for a long time.

L.G.: You don't need a lot of strategic planning to make a decision.
 
G.L.: Your gut is often better without a lot of analysis than it is with. You can prove anything through analysis.

 
L.G.: Is that the Disney that Robert Iger is now presiding over?
 
G.L.: I have no idea. My guess is it's changed, because Bob was bristling with it just the way I was.
 
L.G.: Because your frustration was, you had these great ideas and they'd never be implemented.
 
G.L.: The first thing that Bob did was disband strategic planning. I think he put it in the divisions. So I would say that's pretty good proof that he's doing things a different way. And by the way, Michael Eisner's gut was very good about things. I wish he had been more comfortable with that route, instead of feeling the need for all this analysis. But my point about Disney was, I was hired to go and start some new things there—to start ABC News, to start an educational channel for kids, and to help Lifetime and get Lifetime on an original programming track.
 
L.G.: Was that always a joint venture with Hearst?
 
G.L.: Yes, and to get the Disney Channel into being a television channel, because it was really a repository for odd things. You walked into that scheduling room the first day and just scratched your head. It was like, "Whoa!" In all fairness, it was a pay channel. The philosophy of a pay channel is, Make sure that you're satisfying some of your customers some of the time so that they don't churn you. And so it's different from a basic cable channel, where you're trying to actually get ratings and viewers on a consistent basis. So scheduling things was loopy. But look at the Disney Channel now. They did a terrific job of rebuilding that into a very, very, very impressive performer. So, anyway, inside this company, I must have come up with eight to 10 different business plans. And it was literally impossible to get a brand-new franchise built within one of these big companies, because they had lost quarterly earnings. The investment was anywhere from $600 million to a billion for ABC News—I can't remember what it was, but it was on the top end—and you just couldn't make that kind of investment inside a big entertainment company. So I always found it ironic that it was easier to raise money on the outside of a big entertainment company, even though I'd had a perfect track record and my team had a perfect track record. It was easier to do it outside with investors, because you could do different things. You could offer warrants to cable operators. We had things to play with.

L.G.: Why was the culture at Viacom different? Was it Sumner Redstone?
 
G.L.: The culture at Viacom was different. Remember that the Disney company really began as a brand—as a one-brand company—and that it had a spectacular brand and a spectacular track record. Viacom was a portfolio company that really was just a series of acquisitions. It was a beautiful series of acquisitions, but it wasn't one person's vision. There was no Walt Disney at Viacom.
 
L.G.: So each unit had its own culture?
 
G.L.: Each unit had its own culture. [Chairwoman of ClubMom ] Sara Levinson—who was at the time the president of MTV—joked that she had gotten sick one day and she actually threw up on the elevator. And when it stopped on the MTV floor, everybody ran and went, "Ewwww!" When it stopped on the Nickelodeon floor, everybody ran to help her. You know, it's just that different kind of culture.
 
L.G.: At MTV, they ran away. And at Nickelodeon, they ran to help her.
 
G.L.: Yeah, there were distinct cultures within VH1, MTV-
 
L.G.:So basically, you established the culture there, where people cleaned up elevator vomit.
 
G.L.: That's right, and we slimed people too.
 
L.G.: You had this substance called Gak?
 
G.L.: Gak was a beautiful invention. Gak was a radical invention, because we had a joint venture with Mattel toys. And the toy industry has always treated girl toys and boy toys completely differently. In the toy industry, if you think about what toys there are, it's a pretty sexist world. So Gak was the first time there was a toy marketed to boys and girls. And it was the centerpiece of an activity, our "activity set" of toys.
 
L.G.: Well, there used to be something called Silly Putty. Was that marketed to boys?
 
G.L.: Silly Putty, honestly, is a novelty item. It still exists. I'm sure you can find 20 other examples too, with my claim about "first." But, honestly, it was hard to even have a conversation with a toy company. Because they just said, "Oh, we have to put you in the girls' toys," or "We have to put you in the boys' toys." But we really developed something that was a very successful business.
 
L.G.: Gak.
 
G.L.: Gak.
 
L.G.: And what was the theory behind getting people to sort of handle this stuff in meetings? People fiddling with Gak while they're having business meetings. Was that a novelty or was that serious?

 
G.L.: We honestly did a lot of playing at Nickelodeon. And my theory was, Boy, if you want to be something that's important to kids, you better understand them. You better think like them. And you better play. We had kids around all the time. We put our studio in the middle of Orlando, Florida-kid mecca. At one point, we had too many meetings-people were getting way too serious—and I instituted recess. And every day at 3 o'clock, you were not allowed to be in your office. You had to be in the hall. You could be accessible. It sounds idiotic now, but it was a good thing to do. Because the message was, "Do not book yourself in meetings."
 
L.G.: Was that drawing on your teaching background?
 
G.L.: You bet. In fact, my entire management philosophy is based on my experience as a teacher. I was involved in open education, which is all about individualized instruction. And the purpose that you go into the classroom with is to figure out what is good in each one of these kids. It's not so remedial as a lot of education. And so, as a manager, that's what I get my joy out of-finding out how great an Andi Bernstein is. Or a Geoffrey Darby [both Oxygen executives]. Or an Anne Sweeney [Disney executive].
 
L.G.: Did they ever treat you like a substitute teacher?
 
G.L.: You know, they've treated me really well.
 
L.G.: So they were never overly unruly?
 
G.L.: Honestly, I've had nothing but great experiences with my teams. I get a kick out of them. And I think that pays forward.
 
L.G.: You've written some—and I'm sure thought a lot—about the role of women in corporate America. How has it changed since you came up and ran Nickelodeon, and moved to Disney, then started your own company?
 
G.L.: Well, the main way that it's changed is that I'm no longer the only woman in the room. In the early days, I was literally the only woman in the room. And now you see women at all levels of business. And I feel like I was incredibly lucky. Because even in the '80s, when there were books written on how we were supposed to act and how we were supposed to dress and how we were supposed to talk, I never had to do any of that. I just figured, You know what? I'm me. And I'm a much better me than anybody else. And if I try to be something I'm not, I'm not going to succeed. I can't be a man. I'm going to do a lousy job at being a man. And so I've always been tremendously comfortable about what I bring to business, about how my brain works. And the more I understand about women's brains, the better. And there's lots of exciting research. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers, is wonderful on this subject. We have a different brain structure. Men have a bigger brain. But women have more prefrontal cortex, so we make connections differently. And if we think about how men and women operate in the world, it makes all kinds of sense. You know, my husband likes to concentrate on one thing. He wants to get it done, and he wants to get to the finish line, and he wants to block everything else out. Women don't do that. They have all these things they have to tend as they go along. And so, in business, if you can unlock the combination of male and female brains, that is the best teaching advantage you can possibly have. When you're only looking toward one thing, you miss a whole lot on the side. And if you don't have that drive and focus on the female side, you miss a lot. So what's different today? I think young women coming up are much more independent. They expect things to be open to them. They don't have a chip on their shoulder. It's exciting. They're optimistic. They don't particularly see their difference. And they don't feel like they have to change or fit in. They don't have to wear bow ties. And they don't have to talk in sports analogies.

L.G.: Oxygen is a company that's largely for women, obviously.

G.L.: We had about 70 percent women.
 
L.G.: How did that manifest itself in the corporate culture?
 
G.L.: Well, I've always had the same exact balance. You know, at Nickelodeon we had 70 percent too. And I think probably because it was about kids. People are helpful. People are supportive.

L.G.: And that, obviously, was the tone that you set as the C.E.O. But there are cases in corporate culture where women sort of work against each other—you know, the "mean girls" grown up.

G.L.: Yeah, there were lots of mean girls in the fifth grade. And they grow out of it.
 
L.G.: One hopes. Sometimes they don't.

 
G.L.: Sometimes they don't. But honestly, if you talk to people who are 10 years older than I am, who really did suffer from "mean girl" phenomenon in business, there's only going to be one allowed. And so they kicked the ladder down behind them. And that kind of got to be a media stereotype. I created a thing called Mentor's Walk about three years ago, with Andi Bernstein, and it was based on my own personal practice of walking. This morning, I walked with a young woman who has a corporate-communications company and wants to get into doing reality TV. So it's a good way for me to get exercise, not have a meal, and help the next generation coming along. So we created a national movement to show the media—women helping each other. Not that I think women don't help each other. But I think that the media like to believe that they don't help each other. And so, you know, we've been on Good Morning America, been all over the country. The excitement and level of energy in the room with, you know, fantastic people, from [Oxygen co-founder] Marcy Carsey to Meryl Streep to [fashion designer] Diane von Furstenberg, everybody goes. If you want to participate and help, my experience is that women do help each other. And I see more and more of that. At MTV Networks, we had an alliance from the very beginning that we were going to make sure we got heard. There's a phenomenon that women will say something in a room, and nobody will acknowledge it. And 10 minutes later, a man will say back the same thing, and everybody says, "Oh, that's a great idea." But we never let that happen. If Sara Levinson said something, I would repeat it if I felt she wasn't heard. And then when somebody would take credit for her idea 10 minutes later, I said, "Good for you, supporting Sara!" And honestly, their behavior is what we have to change. But what was interesting to me is that first I started just looking out for the women. And then I started looking out around the table, and I said, You know what? There are some loudmouths in this room-the alpha people, whether they're male or female, who have an opinion about everything and who hardly ever have all of the information. And there are a lot of people in this room, men and women, whose voices need to be heard. So how can I help them be heard? And that, honestly, is, I think, where I come out. How do we get each person contributing what they have to contribute? And how do we really listen to them? Because the paternalistic way of doing business—the command-and-control "I'm the decider"—those days are over. If you think you're going to be the decider in business, with all the complications and permutations-

L.G.: Then you're probably in your seventies or eighties and running a large media company.
 
G.L.: Yes. Well, one of my most exciting things is, last year, we were going back into the internet, and I decided that I wanted to really understand technology better. And so instead of going outside our company and just either acquiring something, or just getting consultants or getting outside experts, I went inside my company. And I took 30 people and put them in three different teams and gave them a special assignment to look at different fields. One was games and shopping-we thought shopping was a game-relationships was another, and search was another. And so they came from all parts of the company. Within about a month, we had a fair amount of information that was enough to get us brainstorming about what we could do. And we had our technology folks act as facilitators because they were the only trained facilitators. And through that, I really got to know them and decided that I really wanted to understand agile management—which is a very interesting way of managing. It's a very formal discipline that allows the team to own the work. And what happens in software development is that you can give an assignment to a software-development team, and then six months later, they deliver what the assignment was. And you look at it and say, "Oh no, that's not what I wanted." In agile management, you work on a two-week cycle. You're working. You have a "scrum master." You have priorities set. You agree on what the priorities are in the meeting. You review the priorities. You evaluate where you are, and you move to the next step. So in a year, where I'm C.E.O. of the company, every two weeks we had a meeting—and I missed one meeting. I loved those meetings because I was learning something completely new. These guys were owning something that we really wanted to do. My feeling about software development is that women are buying 70 percent of all electronics, all software, all everything. And people aren't thinking about the way their brains work. The software developers are thinking about building features and making it fancy and loading it up. And they're not really thinking about how it works with peoples' lives. And the software developers are all men and maybe 1 percent women.

L.G.: What would Larry Summers say about that? [Summers  resigned as president of Harvard University in 2006 after, among other politically incorrect episodes, he suggested that more men than women entered science and engineering because of innate abilities or preferences.]
 
G.L.: I have no idea, but he's wrong. So I gave them the challenge. And I came to them and I said, "Here's what our prefrontal cortex is all about." And they went off-and they were all men at the time, though they did end up hiring two women—and they went home, and they studied their wives and sisters and mothers. And they came back after the weekend and they said, "Okay, you're right. Women do think differently. We get it. Give us a week and we will come up with a vision." So a week later, they came up with a vision that somebody should build. And it was so perfect for the integration of peoples' lives. And what was really moving about it was, they put themselves—these young men with young families—they put themselves right in the equation with their wives, which I thought was really the hope of the future. And they did develop a piece of software called Ript. It's Ript.com. We couldn't build this whole vision—we were an entertainment company—but we could build one piece of it, which was based on the way women consume media. When we read a magazine, we rip things out—we pile them. We maybe do something about it, maybe not. But when you think about your life on a computer, for a woman it's endless visual puzzles—putting together vacations, putting together a wedding, a redecoration of the home, an outfit. So we created Ript, so you can now rip images from the Web. It piles it up, hovers on your computer, you double-click it, and it gives you a work surface. You can array it as a collage and send it to your spouse or your friend. And it retains the original source, so you can go right back to it and order it or do whatever you want to do. But it's just a great result from opening up. And the developers will tell you the same thing: "Wow, let us think about this differently, because audience is something we need to know about."

L.G.: Now, you have also weighed in on something somebody wrote for the New York Times, John Tierney, who wrote a column about how women don't like to compete. And his theory was based on some study.
 
G.L.: Well, that was some asinine thing.
 
L.G.: In the cutthroat competition of the media world, how do women compete?
 
G.L.: Basically, just fine. Well, for us to win, everybody has to win. For my husband, he is not happy when we play Scrabble unless he wins. For me, I'm really happy if we both play well. I really am. I have to play well. I have to do well. But I don't actually have to see blood to be happy. And I think that's the biggest difference. It's not about somebody else losing. That's not important to us. What's important is, We serve our consumers. We create something good and fun. We're listening to them. [Laybourne's husband, Kit, comes in the door.] Hi. I just told about how you like to win at Scrabble. [Kit Laybourne: I love to win at Scrabble!]

L.G.: Well I'm sure [Senator] Hillary Clinton will take that to heart when she confronts losing the New Hampshire primary. As long as [Senator] Barack Obama wins, it's fine, you know. [Clinton won the New Hampshire primary.]
 
G.L.: You know, she's running for president of the United States, which is the top job in this world. And that's one of the tough things for her. She's spectacular. I've known her since 1992 or '91, and she cares about the issues that I care about. She's unbelievably thoughtful. It's no secret I'm a big Democrat and I give money.
 
L.G.: Have you been raising money for her as well?
 
G.L.: Yeah.
 
L.G.: You went out to Iowa [where Obama won and Clinton came in third]. She could've used you some more out there.
 
G.L.: Yeah, but she's caught in a place where she has to act tough. She can't just truly be herself. I think it's a really tough spot. To me, she's a perfect candidate because she's been through adversity. Who has been through more adversity than she has? No one. I like somebody who's been through adversity. And then there's my own interactions with her. I was lobbying her with another cable person on an issue that was tremendously important to us. And we're big Democratic donors. And you would think that she would just say, "Thanks so much for coming to see me" and "When will we get together again?" And instead, she said, "You know what? You're wrong, and I want to help you. You're not seeing this the way my constituents are seeing this." And I just was tremendously impressed. She didn't need to do that. She used her brain and her knowledge of her consumers to try and help us come up with a better position. And I thought that was great. But anyway, I think she would make a terrific president. I think this is a very tough step for women. And I think it's one of the most important things for our country, because we are 68th in the world in terms of women participation in politics, both behind Rwanda and Sierra Leone.
 
L.G.: By "participation," you mean ...
 
G.L.: Running for office. And that is something that I will spend a lot of time on, helping get us beyond the 20 percent tipping point that we need to get beyond in Congress. We're only at 16 percent, and we have a long way to go.
 
L.G.: Well Gerry, you have a little break here. What about you?
 
G.L.: No. I am going to do what I can to make sure the next generation gets its shot.
 
L.G.: But has the thought occurred to you that you have a tremendous record of accomplishment in business, and you've done this last thing for the last nine years, and you've been working, as you pointed out, for 36 years straight. Why not do a little public service now?
 
G.L.: I'm going to do a lot of public service.
 
L.G.: You're not going to run? I mean, if Hillary makes it—this is a real hypothetical—then there's an open Senate seat, for instance.

G.L.: Not that! [Laughs.] Just don't mention it around my husband. I used to joke about when I was going to run for Senate from North Dakota because my family is very plugged in in North Dakota. Very, very plugged in. My grandmother was the head of the Republican Party. Then my aunt was the head of the Republican Party. And my cousin is the attorney general. And another cousin is the head of the state senate, the majority leader of the senate. So if you need anything in North Dakota, please.

L.G.: But you're from New Jersey, right?
 
G.L.: I summered in North Dakota. I come from two low-self-esteem states. I think it sets you up well for the entertainment business.
 
L.G.: It's scary out there. You have a guy, Jeff Bewkes, who just took over Time Warner, and the stock is now $2 lower than when his position was announced.
 
G.L.: Yeah, it is scary out there. And I come from a place where small is beautiful. And I don't think that anybody in the big entertainment companies could have done what we did with Oxygen. But on the other hand, for me, to see Oxygen really thrive and continue to build, it needed cross-promotion. It needed a big media company to take it to the next level.
 
L.G.: Do you think G.E. will hold on to NBC Universal?
 
G.L.: I don't know. I think Jeffrey Immelt [C.E.O. of General Electric] is pretty interested in it right now.... I don't have any crystal ball into that. I think it's hard to give up on. What would be more exciting to you: plastics or entertainment? I think Jeff Immelt's pretty interested in this.

L.G.: What do you think can be done with a company like Time Warner? Is it fixable? I mean, do you think about problems like that? Do you ever game those out and brainstorm in the privacy of your own home, when you're not playing Scrabble?
 
G.L.: I do a little bit. When you think about the brands that Time Warner has, it's just the most wonderful collection of brands. And I think sometimes those big companies just get top-heavy-and so I would follow the Viacom model more.

L.G.: Where each unit is sort of an independent operator?
 
G.L.: Mmm hmm.
 
L.G.: Although they split up, hoping to raise the shareholder value. And that hasn't done a whole hell of a lot for them, has it?
 
G.L.: I think on the CBS side, it has, ironically. And I think it was a smart move. I'm not sure. I don't know—honestly, you have to be in these places to really feel why they did things.
 
L.G.: Right. When you look at the media and entertainment environment, what do you think about it? Do you see some trends coming?
 
G.L.: I'm worried. I'm very worried right now with the writers strike—and not just because both my kids are writers in Los Angeles. My daughter, Emmy, writes independent stuff, and she was a performer. And Sam wrote on Arrested Development, and now he's on Aliens in America, which is a wonderful show. And now he's walking a picket line-and not happily, because he loved his show. That's hard, but I worry about this great industry. It's one of our best exports, and we do a very good job of producing really high-quality, and a lot of, entertainment. And can something happen like what happened to the music industry? It's scary for me. There is a definite hierarchy of entertainment. We need the movie industry to be strong, to flow through television. We need broadcast television to be strong, to flow through cable. We need all these aspects to be strong. And you go through something like the writers strike-it's like, Oh, man, are we going to think that the only kind of television people will watch is reality television? That, to me, will be the beginning of the end of a very good economic life cycle.
 
L.G.: Would you entertain the writers' demands if you were in your former position at either Oxygen or, for that matter, Nickelodeon?
 
G.L.: Well, I think their concerns are valid, because they want to know what their place is in this new media world. And they're really asking the studios to figure out how this is going to work. And they don't want to be in a position that the music industry was in, where technology took over and basically took the bottom out of the market. So I would listen to the writers. I would try to figure it out. But I think it's part of a bigger problem. How are the economics of this new media world going to work? I don't want to sound like Three Blind Mice—remember that book [Ken Auletta's chronicle of the travails of ABC, NBC, and CBS]? Basically, here you have these three broadcast networks that really did not see cable becoming what it became. And they came very late to the party. And they did it through acquisitions. I don't want to sound like that. But I worry about the old media. And we need the old media as part of the mix.
 
L.G.: What do you think's going to happen with the Fox Business Network? I mean, 6,000 viewers! Can you empathize with Roger Ailes? And CNBC has been snickering at them-at least as their public attitude-and it's very embarrassing.
 
G.L.: It takes a while. And you can snicker all you want, but Roger Ailes is a fantastic brand builder. He did a fantastic job at Fox News, and he will do another fantastic job. It takes time. Snicker early, because that's going to be your only opportunity around Roger Ailes.
 
L.G.: And the regulatory environment? You have [chairman] Kevin Martin over there at the F.C.C.
 
G.L.: I've spent a good deal of time with Kevin Martin and the F.C.C. Kevin Martin just plain does not like cable. I don't know what it is exactly. He came in, and he had this idea to have a family tier. And we basically told him, "A family tier won't work. We've been offering families the ability to lock out objectionable programming. We make it available for free. We make it available easily. And we don't think a family tier will work." "That doesn't matter. We still want you to do the family tier." Okay, we did the family tier. And guess what? It didn't work. Then he was annoyed. In some ways, he would like to go back to the 1950s. He would like to have three networks that have Leave It to Beaver on it, but that's not where our country is. That's not what people want to watch. I don't know how much I want to say here.
 
L.G.: Say as much as you like. I've read a blog you've written about him-some nightmare you had about à la carte [allowing cable consumers to cherry-pick and pay only for the stations they prefer].
 
G.L.: I think his solution to everything is à la carte.
 
L.G.: But what about the argument that I noticed a commenter articulated on your blog, saying, "Gerry, I am a consumer advocate in support of à la carte. Here's why: As a consumer, I want to pay for what I want. When I go to the market for a gallon of milk, I'm not required to buy a loaf of bread and a bunch of bananas too," and he goes on. Why should he? These are for-profit companies. Why should he subsidize stuff he doesn't want?
 
G.L.: Well, it's a funny argument because there would never be an independent opportunity for Oxygen if à la carte were in place, because you cannot make it based on having to market to individuals to get them to subscribe to your channel. Basically, you would have to go from spending 20 percent of your money on marketing and 80 percent on programming to flipping that. You don't spend 80 percent on marketing. So it would be very bad for quality programming. It would be very bad for any program. And it's an economic system that has worked well for the American consumer, because we have a lot of choice, so that you can have your ESPN or your MTV or your Nickelodeon or C-Span or Oxygen. But if you had an à la carte system, you'd go back to three networks. You'd have all general-entertainment networks. Everybody would try to get the broadest numbers that they could. And they'd all run reruns. They'd all be little Nick at Nites. It's a terrible outcome. And people would end up paying more for less.

L.G.: Now, after you go to all these fabulous places, are you going to do another startup? Or are you going to be in, sort of, philanthropy?
 
G.L.: It's hard for me to imagine not being in business. I've always been involved in philanthropy, and I'm on the Vassar board. I love that, and I'll always be involved in it. But it's hard for me to believe I wouldn't do another business thing.

L.G.: You're 16 years younger than Rupert Murdoch. He's still starting up things left and right.
 
G.L.: Yeah, I've got a lot of energy.