Tom Freston - Co-creator of MTV

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1:29We have Paul McCartney, Tina Fey, David Beckham, Mel Brooks, Austin Butler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and many, many more telling their stories through the lens of food. Order now, Ruthie's Table 4.com slash book. Ruthie's Table 4, presented by Sky. I was on this rampage to get MTV everywhere. So I was heading to Cuba. We go and we meet people at the cult, you know, this guy who ran the Minister of Culture. He was like a Beatles freak. I always remember that. As we're leaving, he says, would you guys want to meet the big guy? The big guy being Fidel Castro. When we go to meet him, we pull in on these two old convertibles.

2:11He's standing on the steps of the palace. And I'm thinking, wow, there he is, man. He's a figure from history. It's Fidel Castro. We tried to kill this guy so many times. What's he going to say to us? What's going to be his opener? And he goes, which one of you makes The Sopranos? He says, that's my favorite television show. Some weeks ago, messages started arriving on my phone saying, Ruthie, Tom Freston is in London. you must meet because I know you're going to love him. Just hours before he was leaving to go back to LA, I walked into a room full of people and there he was. Immediately we started talking about Unplugged, his brilliant new memoir.

2:53It's the story of an incredible man who hitchhiked across the Sahara, lived in Kabul, spearheaded the rise of MTV, and amazingly had lunch with Fidel Castro. And today, here we are, me in London, him in Montecito. I agree with my friends. I think I'm going to love him. I hope so. I'm not. I think we will, because I loved your book. And you did go to the restaurant with the McCartneys, didn't you, the night before? Yeah, I had dinner with Paul and Nancy the night before. Tell me what was food like growing up with your family. Tell me about your family. Well, we were sort of plebeian in a way. I mean, it was the early, I was, when I grew up, it was like the 50s.

3:36And my mom was not a really sophisticated chef. We ate kind of simple food. We had to eat fish on Fridays. Our pasta was Franco-American spaghetti. My family was Catholic. And so they didn't. They were Catholic, yes. We had fish on Friday. We had fish on Fridays. And we would have, pasta to me then was Franco-American spaghetti in a can. In a can, yeah. We had frozen vegetables, which they thought that was one of the greatest inventions of all time, spring beans and whatnot. One of the things I love when it came around in the mid-50s was the Swanson TV dinners, you know, where you got the dinner on the aluminum tray and you had a little dessert in the middle with the turkey and the stuffing.

4:19And that was a highlight for my brother and I. Would that be a special treat? Would you have it around the dining room table? No, that would be basically if my mom and dad were going out, they'd set up these little TV trays in front of the television. And we'd each get one and we'd sit there and watch television and eat the frozen food right off the, I mean, eat the TV dinner. You know, so the food was pretty basic. My dad worked at a paper company, so we used to get free lunch bags so I could take a fresh lunch bag to school every day, you know, cheese sandwiches and so forth. I thought it was very moving, your description of your father coming back from the war, clearly damaged by the experience.

5:07Probably now there would be a lot more understanding of what that was like for somebody to come back from the war. What was your describing? Well, you know, it's easy to forget now. But World War II was brutal. And he was in the Navy, and he used to drive one of those landing crafts that would go up on the beaches, and the front door would come down, and all the soldiers would run off. They were invading some Japanese island, and half of them would be killed, like, in the first five minutes. So he did that for a while. He was in Saipan and some big battles, and then he had what they called then shell shock.

5:42He was, you know, mid-20s. He did. I know. And all his friends, they were all that whole generation. They'd already been through the Depression, and then they had this horror in both theaters, in Europe and in the Pacific. When did he get back from the war? He didn't really want to go anywhere. He was just happy. We had moved out to these suburbs. He had these friends. He was like in public relations. It was like madmen. There was a group of madmen, cartoonists and animators. And he just loved not going anywhere. and he loved a good martini. Yeah. And he could milk a martini for an hour or so easily.

6:22Did they entertain or have friends over? Oh, yes. It was a lot of entertaining, a lot of cigarette smoking and cocktailing and the kind of thing you see in any movie about the 50s now. It was a hubbub. So you left this home of kind of restrictions and eating meals at a certain time or a certain day. Was that suddenly, was there another world out there? Or did you feel? Yeah, I left at 17 to go to a college in Vermont. I never really came home again for any length of time. And I had only been in really New York and Connecticut. I'd been in two states. I hadn't really been anywhere. And I discovered the joys of being independent.

7:02I learned how to hitchhike. That was fantastic, where I realized I could go anywhere just using my thumb and experience this freedom of travel. and meet people in their cars. That was exciting. I graduated in 1967. So I'm like one of the earliest baby boomers. And someone said, Hey, man, you're gonna go to be in Vietnam in six months, you got to you got to figure out, you know, you got to go to graduate school. And I said, Well, I don't want to be a doctor or a lawyer. And then someone said, Well, you should go to business school. I didn't even know there was such a thing. Get an MBA. I didn't know that I said, yeah, OK.

7:41So I applied and I wanted to get out of Vermont. So I went to NYU and I got there in the fall of 67. And that was a whole eureka moment for me, you know, coming out of the sticks and living in the village. And it was sort of the nexus of the counter burgeoning counterculture. I had this amazing book given to me the other day, which is a book called New York. Have you seen it? It's called New York 62 to 64. You just think what happened in those two years. Our president was assassinated, the Warhol factory, the kind of liberation of women. There was so many just in those two years. And that went through the whole 60s.

8:22And then 67, that was a tumultuous time, an amazing time. Yeah. I mean, so many social movements in play. And I felt like I was in the middle of things, you know, between Berkeley and San Francisco and Greenwich Village. I mean, those were sort of the two capitals of the counterculture. So everything was sort of happening there first. And I was, I had a front row seat. I had an apartment. I split an apartment with this guy I knew. And we had, it was$90 a month. We call it the Roach Motel. I was right around the corner from the original raised pizza two slices and a coke for 60 cents you know that many ways that was that was a nice quick dinner what was your first trip that you did take in terms of an adventure when I was in college I remember going to Bermuda you know I got a thing saying hey if you get 10 people to go to Bermuda we'll give you a free trip this is spring break like 1965 I was that first time I ever saw a palm tree I was freaking out this is just Bermuda.

9:26And that kind of whet my appetite. But when I was in an ad agency, they assigned me to, I worked for an ad agency and I was on the fast track. They assigned me to Charmin toilet paper. And I said, oh, that's best bad news. I can't be selling toilet paper. And a girlfriend, an old girlfriend who was living in Paris called me and said, oh, you can't do that. Quit your job immediately. Come with me. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert. I was on a plane a week later. You quit. You just quit your job. What happened to the toilet paper advertising without you? Well, they went on. They were selling Charmin toilet paper, and they're still selling it.

10:03But years later, I met Mr. Whipple, who was the character in all their TV ads. I met him because we had licensed some of his commercials for a thing called TV Land, a network. And I introduced myself to him. I said, you know, you changed my life, Mr. Whipple. And he said, well, I don't hear that very often. I said, well, you know, when I found out I was going to be working with you making toilet paper commercials, I quit. And I ended up in Indian Afghanistan for eight years. Wow. You flew to Paris and then you went down into the Sahara through Morocco? Went down through France, Spain, into the bottom of Morocco and then across the Sahara.

10:41And then, you know, ended up on a beach in what was in the Spanish Sahara and got on a freighter to the Canary Islands. And then Suzanne, my girlfriend, she had to go back. And I kept going for like 10 months. And I met somebody who said, you know, you should go to India. So I did that. And when I went into Afghanistan and India, I was just transfixed. What you're talking about is traveling as a way of life. of saying this is my day, this is what, you know. And a friend of mine who lived in Paris once said to me, the really good thing about being a foreign in another country is you don't have to do anything and you're still creative, you know, just by living in a foreign country, what that does, the language, the food.

11:28I loved it. You know, when you don't know where you are, you pay a lot more attention to things. And time seems to slow down. And, you know, I've always had this lure for the exotic and the difference and anything that takes me out of familiarity. So traveling is sort of all about that, particularly if you're going to some place for the first time. I was trying to figure out what the hell am I going to do with my life? I knew that I didn't like the corporate job of being in an advertising agency. I wanted to do something creative. I didn't wasn't sure what it was. And then I had this eureka moment when I was in India that I could I had met this woman who was making clothing.

12:09And I said, I could start a business here and live here. I wanted to get a house in India. I wanted to live in a house in India and soak it all in. But I was in New Delhi and then I started another business in Kabul in Afghanistan. And this is clothing. What were the clothes? Because you describe you talk about a lot about the clothes and the business, but you don't tell. I don't know what the clothes look like. We were higher end. I mean, I decided if we could be on the sidelines and make higher quality clothes, more what they would call in those days contemporary clothes, higher, we would sell to Bloomingdale's or Bendale's.

12:44And we would be in Vogue magazine and it would be a higher margin business, not mass produced kind of stuff you'd see coming out of Morocco. And anybody had that sort of boho flowing look that's still popular today, you know. and I didn't know anything about this business, but I learned quickly and I knew business and, you know, it became very successful rather than something that just sustained me so I could support myself. It became a big business. We had, we had some, we used to sell drawstring pants. We were the king of drawstring pants, like 40 colors. And these were really soft fabrics. People ate them up sold hundreds of thousands of pears I became like a millionaire in my 20s who designed them did you have a designer designer her name was Jill Lumpkin who I knew she was actually my waitress when I worked at the lamppost in Martha's Vineyard and I realized we got to be like a rock band we got to write our own you know got to write your own songs We've got to make our own designs.

13:49So I hired her and I said, come to Indian Afghanistan and be a designer for us. She came there and it just like she was totally at home. We spent seven years together, her and I, never romantically, but we had the best time. We'd go places together. We had a lot of success. She's still there. Do you remember the food that you were having in India? Yeah, we had I had a chef at a house. and a chef and you know i could eat indian food every day of the week you know i was in heaven the other food i loved was the afghan food it's sort of a cross between indian and persian food it has some of the elegance of persian food and some of the spice intensity from india and you know the centerpiece is these rice kualos with carrots and raisins and the basmati rice and they would put lamb in there or chicken in there that was and they made these dumplings called ashak which were also in like these yogurt sauces.

14:48They would cook things like pumpkin. It was hard to get great Afghan food because you really needed to get it in someone's house, sort of an upper middle class or upper class household. And you could get it in. It's still hard in the States now. There's hardly any Afghan restaurants around, like in New York there used to be. But I love that Afghan food. And then Indian food, you know, all the different curries, vindaloo's. I love raita, you know, kebabs, samosas, all the sort of the basically India's greatest hits. We would have it every night and every afternoon. How did you leave India to go to Afghanistan?

15:31Well, I would go back and forth between them. I had a different enterprise in both countries. We were doing the same thing, but with different people making different clothes, using different fabrics. I loved Afghanistan. People were wonderful. And it was like you had stepped outside of the modern world when I lived there. When people think of Afghanistan these days, they just think of a nation that's at war with each other, which they've been 40 plus years. But when I arrived there, it was at the tail end of what Afghans would say was the golden age. They had had 60 years of peace. And they were excited to be beginning to join the modern world.

16:11I mean, there were hardly any cars. You would travel on horse and buggies. There was no advertising. I mean, and it was beautifully exotic and they had great landscapes. The people were very friendly. You never felt in danger. And I would meet the most interesting Westerners there. And it was like a wonderful thing, but it all sort of went south. It all went south. And it's really a shame. I don't know as if they'll ever get it back.

17:06after such a defining moment in his career. It's easy to look at somebody and be like, your life must be so sick. Man, you have no f***ing clue. Talking about the mental illness stuff, it used to be this thing that I was ashamed of. I'm just now trying to unwind this idea that I have to be unhealthy physically or in pain in some emotional way in my life to create good music. If someone says that I did a good job, I'm like, yeah, I'm good. Someone says that I suck, I'm like, f***, I suck. Getting to talk about this is not common for me. Right now, I need it more than ever. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:47I didn't know that you started in Afghanistan. I was in Afghanistan, and then my business, that whole business I had in Afghanistan and media got, you know, got closed down between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, and then Jimmy Carter, the president, he put an embargo on Indian clothing. So I was, I had built a little empire, made a pile of money, and then I ended up busted up and, you know, deep in debt. And I went back to New York. I was 33 and I had to start over again. And that's when I met your pal, Bob Pittman, who hired me. When I got back, I said, I can't do this. I need a new line of work.

18:30So the other thing, but what did I love? The other thing I love was music, rock and roll music. And I read an article by a guy who was Bob's boss saying we wanted to start a video. Cable TV was just starting in the States. We wanted to start a cable channel, you know, consisting of music videos, which I thought that was the greatest idea. I had seen music videos when I'd be in Europe in the summer times. And I got an interview with this guy, John Lack. He said, we're looking for people with no experience in television. and then he passed me on to Bob I said I'm perfect we didn't even have television where I've been living and Bob I think part of him thought I was a hashi smuggler so he hired me but we had hired he'd assembled this great group of oddballs and eccentrics and no one knew what they were doing and we were tasked with sort of coming up with this thing and getting it off the ground and launching it so it was a it was you know very fortuitous This was 1980, 1981.

19:29You started MTV. Was it that? Yeah, there was a team of like seven or eight of us. Then it quickly, you know, we were like the crusaders for it. And I stayed for 26 years doing that. And we, of course, we had Comedy Central and, you know, the whole thing took it worldwide. You know, all the time I had spent out of the country gave me the confidence that we could probably be one of the first international television. networks in england and everywhere they were you know deregulating media and all of a sudden you had cable and satellite channels popping up you've done what you think now what you were doing then could you start something like mtv with another person two other people with an idea and then create it i don't know right now do you feel oh i don't think so the whole thing you know that we We were the tip of the spear for the, you know, that what we call then was the TV revolution where people would have more choice for what they wanted to watch.

20:31I mean, there was CNN started around then, ESPN. And it was really basic. We thought this was the, we thought, it's hard to imagine now, but we thought this was spectacularly modern. This was a sign of a new age. It wasn't like a flying car, but this was going to be the future. And then, you know, more and more channels until we have now, we have like, you could watch anything you want on any device you want. And it's hard to break in because you have these big companies now who have grown and they're sort of, they're not gatekeepers in one sense, but it's hard to come up with a new idea that someone hasn't thought of already.

21:11We were like on virgin territory. And it must have been such fun to be with musicians, to be with people making music. It was a dream for me. It was a dream to be around any kind of creative group of people, but particularly musicians. And I knew my music. At one point, we were going out of business. We were running out of money. because the cable operators wouldn't put us on, the advertisers wouldn't, nothing was working. But we knew one thing, which was the few people who got us loved it. So we thought we're going to force people to carry us, to distribute us. I want my MTV campaign. And I was the marketing guy in my job.

21:58This fellow, Les Garland, his job was to see if he could get Mick Jagger to say yes. That was, if we once we got a big guy, everybody else would fall into this place. And then so I drew the David Bowie card and I called his manager, this woman, Coco, and she said, well, David's skiing in Stad. Let me see what he says. So she calls me back and says, David would love to do the commercial, but you'll have to go to Stad. So, you know, take a 35 millimeter crew. We got on a plane to Zurich, take a train to Stad and And we meet him and he's in great shape. It was sort of his let's dance era. Very blonde and thin and couldn't have been friendlier.

22:36And he did four or five takes. He knew what he wanted to do. And then he says, hey, who wants to go skiing? He couldn't have been friendlier. And then at the end he goes, hey, Tom, would you like to take a sauna with me tonight at the Palace Hotel? Kind of wrap off, top off the day. And I'm thinking to myself, yeah. I mean, I don't get starstruck much, but, you know, my heroes were always like the Beatles and Bowie. So I go, yeah, yeah, let me do that. So I went back to our hotel where the crew was, which was like a youth hostel kind of thing. And I said, David Bowie's invited me to take a sauna with him at the hotel.

23:13I'll see you losers later. So I went there and, you know, go to the spa, meet David. And then we go into the sauna. there's only one other person in there and it's Paul McCartney. I'm thinking, how did I end up in the sauna of the stars? So everyone couldn't be nicer. David in particular, very personal. He really wanted to know, what do you read? What do you do? What is MTV? Tell us about it. So I've dined out on that story for a while. That was good fun. And the other person that I was intrigued in the book, of course, I don't think I know anyone who actually had lunch. with Fidel Castro. So, of course, I'd be really interested to know what you ate for lunch in Cuba, but I'm sure you have other parts of that story you'd rather tell.

24:02Well, that's a good question. Yeah, you know, I got really, I was on this rampage to get MTV everywhere. And now we could go anywhere, but we couldn't put it in Cuba. But once the Berlin Wall fell and communism kind of deteriorated, Cuba was like the last, Fidel Castro was the last communist standing. But the music scene there, I think 40 % of their economy deteriorated. The music was really great. And you remember Buena Vista Social Club and all that kind of Cuban music. And it was really sweeping. I wanted to get down there and make some connections and see if I could do some deals, we get some music out there that we could put on our international network.

24:43So I got this fellow who got me wired. You could get this kind of visa and so forth for cultural exchange. And then so I was heading to Cuba. And then I told my friend Brian Grazer, who's a Hollywood producer, I was going and he told someone who told someone else. Next thing I know, I got Graydon and Les Moonves and all these people. So this is not what I had imagined. I'm taking this group of like little media moguls to a communist country I've never been to. And But anyway, we go and we meet people at the cult. You know, this guy who ran the minister of culture, he was like a Beatles freak. I always remember that.

25:26He had a mullet haircut, you know, and he just wanted to talk about the Beatles. And anyway, we have a meeting at the ministry. And he says at the end of the meeting, as we're leaving, he says, would you guys want to meet the big guy? You know, the big guy being Fidel Castro said, well, yeah, OK, he'd love to meet you. They were talking to this or something. so that night says well we'll go to this bar and he'd like to meet you around midnight because he's talking to these school teachers and you know we go and then we're wait we're in this bar and it's like this disco music and people are drinking and uh it says he's going to call on a pay phone because they don't use even burner phones his all the people around castro because they were afraid to be traced so i finally he comes in he goes he's called he's on a telephone outside a pay phone outside the bar and we go out there and he says what's too late why don't they all come to lunch tomorrow ask me if they want to come to lunch at the palace so we okay we go to the palace and our convertibles old 50s convertibles and we have about an hour of cocktails in this fancy hall with waiters and white trays of daiqueries and mojitos and whatnot and then we go in for lunch and we spent five and a half hours having lunch with him i sat next to him Was he wearing his fatigues?

26:46Was he wearing? Not on his fatigues, but he was wearing Nike sneakers with them, you know. When we met him, by the way, this is funny. When we go to meet him, we pull in on these two old convertibles. He's standing on the steps of the palace. And I'm thinking, wow, there he is, man. He's a figure from history. It's Fidel Castro. We've tried to kill this guy so many times, you know. What's he going to say to us? What's going to be his opener? And he goes, which one of you makes the Sopranos? Sopranos. He says, that's my favorite television show. I said, that was a hell of an icebreaker. So this guy, Brad Gray, raises his hand.

27:20He goes, that's me. So he's thinking maybe Castro doesn't like gangsters. He's going to kill everything. But he says, oh, that's my favorite show. He's the only HBO subscriber in the country. But anyway, he served us this amazing meal and they just kept putting out, you know, all the whole Cuban dishes, you know, rice and beans, rice and beans. And And a lot of, you know, sort of sauteed vegetable, a lot of chicken. And it was like huge portions, although he hardly ate anything. He told me he still worked out on a treadmill. And, you know, he worked out, you know, he was probably in his mid-70s then.

27:57This was 2001, way back there. He was very much alive and vibrant. And in the end, they wheeled out a big tray, a big thing came in. First of all, he would wheel out this wine rack. Who wants to drink wine? He had a little Algerian wine and Chilean wine. So we got pretty buzzy. And then he wheeled out another table who was filled with boxes of his favorite cigars, which he signed all of them. And then he, you know, then Sky came in, who's a photographer who travels with him. And he was selling photos. This is like meeting a band after a concert where they're signing their CDs. And, you know, it was a bit of a frenzy there.

28:36Everybody wanted to get Fidel Castro's autograph on this. And I stole this. I don't remember I stole his place card. It said, El Comandante El Jefe Fidel Castro. That was, I sat right to his right for five and a half hours. And he would just go on and on. And he had this translator who would be about a half a sentence behind him. But he was a bit of a blowhard. A friend of mine went to Cuba and was in Nevada. And he was describing how he got up in the morning. And he was kind of getting dressed, putting on his suit and tie, whatever. and Castro was on you know on the television giving a speech and then he came back six hours later and he was still on television giving the speech you know he did talk for a long time.

29:22Yeah he was sort of Trumpian in that way you know he just regularly speaks for three or four hours.