MasterClass Launches Its First Podcast, 'Other People's Business,' With Martha Stewart as Debut Guest

MasterClass is getting into the podcast business. The streaming education platform announced Tuesday, in a launch release distributed via PRNewswire, that it has launched "Other People's Business" — its first-ever podcast, a weekly audio-and-video series hosted by founder and CEO David Rogier. The show takes the company's core playbook — learn from the best — and turns it sideways: instead of lessons, Rogier gets underneath a business to find out how the money moves, how decisions get made, and what's really going on.

The thesis, in the company's words: every episode digs into an industry — hip-hop and poker, storytelling and weddings, professional sports and the weight-loss-drug market — until the machinery shows. "Every episode feels like a conversation you weren't supposed to hear," MasterClass said in the launch announcement. And Rogier's positioning is refreshingly honest: he isn't the expert on any of this. He's the curious one who spent more than a decade building relationships with accomplished people and learned which questions to ask. "Whenever I don't understand how something works, I want to find the person who does and ask the questions people usually don't ask," Rogier said. "The real answer is almost always more interesting than the official story. That's the show."

The debut episode, out now, stars Martha Stewart on the business of influence — and it's a shrewd pick for a launch. Stewart built one of the first true lifestyle empires, starting with her 1982 book Entertaining in the early 1980s, and she's previously appeared on MasterClass itself with a program called "Think Like a Boss, Live Like a Legend." In the premiere, she walks Rogier through the whole arc, according to People: becoming the first self-made female billionaire in the U.S., once earning $6 million for a single day's work on a commercial, the unlikely Snoop Dogg partnership that introduced both stars to new audiences — and losing nearly $1 billion.

Stewart doesn't hedge about the low point. "I fell in a hole, and I lost about $1 billion," she said in the episode's trailer, as reported by People, referring to the legal problems that led to her spending five months in prison in 2004 after an insider trading scandal — she was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction, and two counts of lying to federal investigators. "The lawyers took me to the cleaners, and they were horrible," she told Rogier, adding that she'll be discussing the experience in her forthcoming autobiography. Asked why she doesn't have a private jet like some of her peers — Kim Kardashian, she notes, flies around in a G5 — Stewart's answer is disarmingly blunt: she lost the money. Then the kicker: "But I'm back. I mean, I'm pretty good."

The episode is also full of Stewart being Stewart. In the podcast trailer, she said her Kmart partnership was clearing "$65,000,000 a year in royalties" — a reminder of just how big the Martha Stewart machine got at its peak, according to People. On the influencer economy, she's characteristically unsentimental: "You can be an influencer, but if you're not making money at it, you're not really an influencer. You have to make money." She also told Rogier about the real economics of celebrity fashion-show appearances — roughly $40,000 worth of clothes given to her to wear to a runway show, which she gets to keep. And yes, she confirms that Kim Kardashian has called her for advice — "but she doesn't need my advice," she told Rogier. "That group is really, really good, and I really admire it."

What's coming next is where the show's ambitions get clear. The guest list, detailed in the PRNewswire-distributed launch announcement, reads like a syllabus for how power actually works: Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer on the mechanics of power — including how people gain influence, leverage status and convert it into money, with figures from Donald Trump to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Stewart herself as case studies; former FBI hostage negotiator Chris Voss on crisis negotiation; PwC consumer markets leader Ali Furman and Jefferies analyst Sheila Kahyaoglu on the GLP-1 weight-loss-drug market; pastor and church economics author Mark DeYmaz on megachurches; professional poker player Daniel Negreanu on poker; plus Malcolm Gladwell and DJ Drama on storytelling and hip-hop. It's a deliberately eclectic lineup — the point isn't the vertical, it's the question underneath every vertical: how does the money actually work here?

And that's the bigger story. The education-platform-to-podcast move is part of a broader land grab happening across the creator economy: the same companies that spent a decade building subscription video catalogs are now chasing the one format where attention still compounds — the long-form interview. MasterClass has spent years and hundreds of millions building a library of celebrity courses; a weekly podcast hosted by its founder is the cheapest possible way to extend that brand into a medium where the company previously had no presence. It's also the most on-brand move available: the company's entire pitch is access to the world's best, and Rogier personally has a decade of conversations with accomplished people banked. The show just turns the camera on the asker.

The crowded-podcast objection writes itself, of course — everyone with a Rolodex has a show now. But "Other People's Business" has a real thesis, according to its own framing, and that's rarer than it should be. Most celebrity interview shows are vibes; this one is explicitly about the machinery — money, power, decision-making — and Rogier's framing as the professional question-asker gives it a spine that the standard "two famous people chat" format lacks. Whether it works will come down to execution: does Rogier actually ask the uncomfortable questions, or does access soften the edges? The Stewart episode suggests the former — those billion-dollar-loss and lawyers-took-me-to-the-cleaners moments don't come out of a puff piece.

Stewart, at 85, is also the perfect inaugural guest for reasons beyond the numbers. She is, as MasterClass puts it, the original influencer — she built the modern lifestyle-influencer economy four decades before it had a name, lost nearly everything, and rebuilt it. "My philosophy has always been: if I'm going to work hard, I want to be paid," she said in the premiere. For a show about how business really works underneath, that's as good a mission statement as anything in the trailer. New episodes land weekly, in audio and video. Browse Previously's podcast library for more shows worth your queue — and see how another production outfit is building its own podcast slate in this week's podcast-industry push.