More new Oprah & Eckhart on the mysterious Oprah Soul Series!

Why do we say mysterious? Because there seems to be some intentional "sins of omission" about these videos from Oprah's XM radio interviews and we are starting to think it is intentional.

After all, she built a Monday night audience of hundreds of thousands. Now she wants to take that new web-only audience & re-disperse them back into her radio & TV demographic. Makes sense considering the investment she made on her free 10 weeks of webcasts.

The omissions are the nondisclosure of the length of segments from the radio interviews (which will be made available tonight), & the time that they were recorded.

When was tonight's interview with Eckhart recorded?.... Before, during, or after Oprah's webcast series with him? Eckhart did a series of guest appearances on the Oprah TV show late in 2007. And Oprah did mention on one of the webcasts that "this conversation with Eckhart will continue at XM radio", implying that both of them will walk over to the XM recording facility right after the webcast.

But as broadcast professionals, we have been given a clue. The pictures of Eckhart used for the guest line-up preview for Oprah's Soul Series shows Tolle wearing headphones. All radio shows require the use of headphones so that you can hear how you sound on the microphone. Neither Oprah nor her guest Dr. Bolton wore headphones in the video for the last 2 weeks. This leads us to believe that the Eckhart interview was conducted some time before the Harpo team decided to use these videos as part of the Soul Series webcast.

As we talked about last week, the absence of headphones makes folks look more attractive & natural on TV. If they really need to hear themselves, hidden wireless headphones inside the ear have been invented. All this to say that we are certain these Soul Series Eckhart interviews were NOT done after the webinar.

Oprah-Eckhart is only for Midlifers? Well, "If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?"

When Tom Ewell had his midlife crisis with Marilyn Monroe in the 1955 film The Seven Year Itch, he was 35 years old. That's because life-expectancy was much lower back then. Now mid-lifers are age 40 & up!

Those of us who are children of the 60's expected the Oprah-Eckhart predominant demographic to be 45 and older.

Instead, teenagers as young as 13 have called into the show along with a lot of folks in their 20's & 30's with careers & young kids. We were wondering if the Harpo Production team that preps and screens every call-in was skewing the numbers by cherry-picking younger callers to make it appear that this material appeals to a broader demographic.

Not so! In a thread on the Oprah message boards called "POLL; If you don't mind me asking, how old are you?" over 3,000 volunteered their age.

Only 2% are in their 70's -- even though retirement and grown children make them the perfect spiritual seeker candidate. Only 5% are in their 60's, the official Baby Boomers born after WWII. 31% are in their 50's -- the largest and most expected segment. Yet, 2% more of the Oprah-Eckhart students are in their 30's (26%) than are in their 40's (24%) with a shocking 11% studying the book while in their formative 20's.

For those of us who are now retiring from the job market & looking forward to more grandchildren, this is good news indeed for the prospects of the next generations!

You'll see this in all the segments, including the most recent, Chapter 5.