Ben Gilbert

David Rosenthal says in 2019 Netflix paid Sony a reported sum well over 500 million dollars for five years of worldwide exclusive streaming rights to Seinfeld. Ben Gilbert says Netflix had Friends and The Office, shows he thinks became Netflix's top-viewed shows, and Netflix was losing both.

Ben Gilbert says streaming money for Seinfeld started in 2015 with a Hulu deal worth 150 million dollars over five years. David Rosenthal says in 2017 Netflix signed a personal deal to move Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee off Crackle, Sony's early in-house web streaming network, and to make two new stand-up specials. He says the first renewal of the Seinfeld streaming rights arrived in 2019. Ben Gilber

Ben Gilbert says Michael Richards' racist stand-up remarks in 2006 were a problem for the Seinfeld business. David Rosenthal says they put the business model at risk. Ben Gilbert says owners such as Castle Rock needed people to keep loving the show so the asset would keep going. Ben Gilbert says the episode could have spiraled into a boycott of Seinfeld.

Ben Gilbert says everyone had to walk a tightrope: feelings about the issue, feelings about Michael Richards as a friend, condemning words that deserved condemnation, and still preserving Seinfeld through the public-relations crisis. Ben Gilbert says the line offered in public was that a comedian on stage is not actually that person, but a

David Rosenthal closes the books on Seinfeld's first run on NBC. Ben Gilbert says to leave syndication out. David Rosenthal says NBC made about $2 billion in cumulative advertising profit from Seinfeld during its run. He says the figure vastly undercounts the actual value to NBC, because a buyer could not purchase Seinfeld alone and had to buy primetime around the show. Ben Gilbert says NBC owned nothing. The network rented it.

David Rosenthal says Castle Rock loses money on nine years of Seinfeld by design. Ben Gilbert likens the loss to the first nine years of an early stage venture portfolio, then says the likeness is not fair. He is unsure of the exact year and puts Castle Rock's syndic

Ben Gilbert says it is the taste left in people's mouths. David Rosenthal says that is why, three decades later, Netflix has paid a billion dollars over a decade to the people who own Seinfeld. David Rosenthal says the show stayed culturally relevant because Jerry Seinfeld got off the stage while the audience was still screaming. Leave then, Jerry says, and they never forget you.

David Rosenthal estimates that Jerry Seinfeld has earned somewhere around three quarters of a billion dollars from syndication sales, DVD sales, and other back-end deals over the past 30 years. David Rosenthal argues that a huge part of that value was set up and protected by the Christmas 1997 decision to end the s

David Rosenthal says Jack Welch told Jerry Seinfeld the show had not peaked. Ben Gilbert says Jerry was exhausted after 10 years on Seinfeld and felt he had not started his life. David Rosenthal says Jerry was 43. Ben Gilbert says Jerry worried the show would keep going past its peak. The only way to go out on top was to leave before the peak, because Jerry was not going to time it perfectly.

David Rosenthal says Jerry was not outright declining, but he started demurring. He told Jack he appreciated it and did not know he could keep the show going. The group told him not to decide yet. After the meal, Jack took Jerry Seinfeld to a corner, wrote on a piece of paper, and handed him a firm off

Ben Gilbert says Castle Rock sold to Ted Turner in December 93 for about $400 million. The owners got $100 million in cash, and about $300 million more went to paying off outstanding debt. Turner paid that sum out of pocket for Castle Rock, owner of a huge share of Seinfeld's profits, and the sale came before the first syndication cycle of Seinfeld.

Ben Gilbert had said it was a very good time to sell the company. David Rosenthal says Castle Rock should have waited anyway. Ben Gilbert says he is pretty sure that working through the whole waterfall shows Castle Rock made somewhere between two and two and a half billion dollars on Seinfeld syndication over the years, way more than the $400 mi

David Rosenthal says Sony, which he also calls Columbia, earned its keep on the first syndication cycle of Seinfeld. The cycle covered local broadcast affiliates only, and cable was still off limits.

David Rosenthal says Sony sold Seinfeld to a record 224 local television stations. Ben Gilbert says that is out of a thousand stations across America, one station in every market taking the exclusive local rights. David Rosenthal says the sale brought in over $500 million in revenue in a single event in 1995, for the first five-year syndication window on local affiliates alone.

David Rosenthal says stations that paid the money still got a pretty good deal. Reports showed that once Seinfeld ent

David Rosenthal calls Seinfeld the most perfect syndication show ever created. With no hugging, no learning, no character development, and no relationship development, a viewer can tune in anytime to any episode in any order and still get a full entertaining experience.

David Rosenthal says that right after the move to Thursday night, after the huge success, and after the internet starts to come online, Seinfeld hits syndication. Ben Gilbert reads Jerry Seinfeld's quote to the LA Times that the show will be in syndication next year, and that will probably help further the same way it helped Cheers. Most people are still just now discovering the show. Most of the audience watching on Thursda

David Rosenthal says that in February 1993, Seinfeld moved from Wednesday to Thursday and the ratings rose 57%. In one week it went from the 45th most popular show on television to the 5th.

David Rosenthal says a huge part of the jump was the time slot. Ben Gilbert says everyone at the network expected that a show after Cheers would get good ratings and still lose viewers on the way from Cheers to the next show. The only question was how large the drop-off would be. Ben Gilbert says Seinfeld gained audience over Cheers. It retained the Cheers audience, and new people tuned in just to see the next episode. David Rosenthal says on a first-run Thursday night it held the full lead-in. By the en

Ben Gilbert says Seinfeld episodes are not live camera switched. They are edited afterward. On a normal sitcom, actors work a proscenium stage in front of a live audience while someone at a control board calls camera A, camera B, and camera C, then cuts back for a two-shot. Seinfeld does some live switching to get a feel, but all of the real work is done afterward, which gives the show two kinds of flexibility.

The first is tighter cuts. Scenes can be shorter, so more scenes and more situational jokes fit in an episode. The second is jokes a live switch cannot tell. In the episode The Contest, the joke is a cut around each character lying in bed, either restless and unable to sleep or sleep

David Rosenthal says Seinfeld keeps the same people and the same rooms across years, and nobody grows. Jerry is always Jerry. George is always George. Elaine is always Elaine. A viewer can start on any episode. The characters never learn anything. The apartment is the same. The coffee shop is the same. Ben Gilbert says the characters stay static, vessels for humorous situations.

David Rosenthal says sitcoms before Seinfeld were dramas with jokes. Ben Gilbert says Seinfeld refuses that and builds situations that are inherently funny. David Rosenthal says the stories were almost always romantic relationships or family relationships, and the characters grew, learned, changed, and came together

Ben Gilbert says Jerry Seinfeld and Castle Rock took NBC's four-episode deal after Fox guaranteed 24 episodes. Jerry Seinfeld wanted the NBC imprimatur of a real network. Ben Gilbert says Jerry has phrased the choice as it wasn't the major leagues and he wanted to be in the majors.

Ben Gilbert says Jerry Seinfeld later said in other interviews that he and Castle Rock were looking around for other buyers because they assumed NBC was out. The assumption was fair. Fox made an offer and guaranteed 24 episodes. David Rosenthal says Fox was a startup network, not the Fox of later years and not one of the major broadcast networks in the US.

Ben Gilbert says they went with NBC's four episode deal

David Rosenthal says it is reported that Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David each own 15% of Seinfeld. He says they have all the leverage. Ben Gilbert says nobody thinks the show is going to be worth much, and there is no risk. David Rosenthal says they can take the project to any production company in Hollywood. Choosing Castle Rock lets them write the deal terms. The exact terms never come out. The only people who know are Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, Castle Rock, and Shapiro and West.

Ben Gilbert says public reporting leaves about 65% for Castle Rock. Sony owns the distribution right and usually takes 15% off the top, which dilutes everyone else. Ben Gilbert says he has seen 15 and 30, and th

Ben Gilbert says Jerry Seinfeld decided that whatever format the project took, he would play himself. He would bring his own sensibilities and his observational humor about the world, and he would not cast himself as a character super different from him. Ben Gilbert says Jerry Seinfeld was not acting, because everyone already knew Jerry Seinfeld could not act.

David Rosenthal says Roseanne Barr, the comic behind Roseanne, did the opposite. On Roseanne she played a sitcom character, not Roseanne Barr. Ben Gilbert says Jerry Seinfeld on the show lived in a little shoebox apartment, while the real Jerry Seinfeld was making a million dollars a year and flying around. The lives did not match, bu

Ben Gilbert says older houses are one reason Home Depot became so large. From 1940 to 1980 the median American home stayed about 23 years old, because new suburbs kept adding young houses. That stopped as Home Depot was getting started. The median age was about 25 by 1990, 30 by 2000, 33 by 2010, and 42 today. The company went public into a stock of houses that would only need more repairs.

The spending followed. In 1975, just before Home Depot existed, Americans spent $28 billion on residential improvements and repairs. Five years later that figure was $47 billion. Today it is $600 billion. Ben treats the aging stock as a predictable tailwind: if the median home is old now, it is older fiv

Ben Gilbert says Frank Blake called Bernie Marcus first because the stores had lost the culture Bernie built. On January 2, 2007, the board fired Bob Nardelli and named Blake, a dark-horse candidate, chief executive. Blake was a lawyer, a former Supreme Court clerk, and a GE mergers executive who had come over with Nardelli. He had not run stores. His son worked at Home Depot, so he heard what the aisles were actually like, not the headquarters version.

Bernie had left the board and did not want another GE executive in the job. Blake called anyway, then flew to Florida with Ken Langone. The first store walk Bernie took him on was at Costco, not Home Depot, because Bernie did not think the H

Ben Gilbert says the first Home Depot stores stacked empty paint cans because they could not afford a full warehouse and still needed to look like one. The first two Atlanta stores opened on June 22, 1979, inside old discount-store space. The night before, managers had the linoleum polished. Pat Farrah arrived around 4 a.m., decided a clean floor looked unused, and had Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank scuff it with forklifts. Bernie later wrote that the stores were action places, meant for people in work boots in the middle of a job.

A week before opening they also lacked merchandise. Pat borrowed about 500 empty boxes, and the crew folded them overnight so the racks looked full. He found abo

Ben Gilbert says Pat Farrah was the merchandiser Home Depot was missing, so the founders hired him instead of buying his store. While Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were still in Los Angeles, they found HomeCo, a hardware warehouse someone had already opened after seeing Price Club. It was about 130,000 square feet, larger than the 60,000-foot stores Home Depot would open, with goods stacked high and priced below what shoppers were used to. Bernie and Arthur called Ken Langone and tried to buy it.

The purchase died in due diligence. The crowds were real, but Pat was not paying suppliers and the store was headed for bankruptcy. Bernie still wanted him on the team. After the bankruptcy, Pat w

Ben Gilbert says Home Depot learned the warehouse store from Sol Price, then changed it for hardware. Bernie Marcus had visited Price in San Diego and seen Price Club, the concept that later fed into Costco. The warehouse was the store. There was no separate back room, and Price Club bought from manufacturers and sold off the pallet at a small markup. Bernie told Ken Langone that somebody would bring that idea to hardware and wipe out Handy Dan.

Hardware could not copy Price Club line for line. A strong Handy Dan did about $3 million a year. Bernie thought a warehouse could do $7 million to $9 million, with about 25,000 items in a 60,000-square-foot store instead of 8,000 items in 10,000 sq

Ben Gilbert says getting fired from Handy Dan is what created Home Depot. In January 1978 the new owner bought Ken Langone's shares and took nearly the whole company. Three months later he fired Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, and audit manager Ron Brill, using a labor-relations case as the excuse. The next day, in April 1978, Bernie flew to New York for breakfast with Ken at Peacock Alley in the Waldorf Astoria. He was 48, had no savings and no equity, and thought the case might send him to jail.

Ken told him to relax. He had just been kicked in the ass with a golden horseshoe, and they were going to start the company Bernie had already described. Months earlier, at a Handy Dan opening in Hou