"Tom Freston"

24:57had it and had never even seen it. So we knew if we could get people, these people, to call their cable companies and demand their MTV, you could eventually force these people to put us on. And that really worked. That's cool. With videos now having kind of cycled, I mean, they still sort of exist, but my God, you guys, you birthed it and it cycled into like just such a phenomenon, the whole, the addition of videos to the whole music industry. And now it's sort of settled into a place of sort of a sidecar kind of thing. What do you feel that the music video has, what positive of it has remained in the music industry?

25:38Has it been additive? Yeah, you know, music videos are still popular. They don't exist on MTV. That's become sort of a reality show channel. And they make as many music videos today as they used to. A lot of them are made more economically. But, you know, you can get them all on the Internet, on YouTube or on Vivo, and you get them on demand. So you don't have to sit around watching some channel to wait to see Nirvana. you can just click on it and watch it right away so that sort of killed the mtv linear network model you guys would uh at the end of every video you'd you put the name of the song the album the band and the director yeah and it you guys launched a bunch of really incredible directors into the film industry yeah you know the whole there was a whole bunch of them and there was a whole issue after after a couple of years a director said hey how come our names aren't on there we want to get some credit yeah yeah and uh yeah david fincher too david fincher was a great russell mcagey there was a spike jones i mean lots of people came up that way when you when the the i just we'll talk about mtv ending in just a minute but the initial um like the launch the logo of the rocket taking off uh is that that was the first image ever right yes of mtv and was that just what it is which is like we're launching a new show.

27:08Well, we didn't have any money, and we realized that all this NASA footage was public domain. So we could rip off NASA and man's greatest moment and kind of make it our own. Yeah, yeah. So we got it for free. Oh, that's great. And the logo that everybody loved and became iconic, we got that for$1 ,000 from some guys town. Wow, wow. Try back. And it was sort of a kind of, you guys, I'm sure we're kind of tongue-in-cheek, how grandiose this whole thing is going to be. We're putting our flag on the moon, and yeah, here comes something cute. Yeah, that was it. We're going to rip off man's greatest moment, and it's going to put our flag there.

27:44That's amazing. Tom, what was the moment you guys realized that you had really broken through? I mean, there were so many, I remember as a kid, you know, there were like, when the Thriller video hit, it was just everywhere. It was like so... Top of the hour, every hour. Was there a moment for you where you went like, holy shit, we really got something here. We're shifting culture. Yeah, it was a slow build. You know, it took us a while to get to New York and L.A. where people could see us and then they could talk about us in the media. But then, I mean, two things. One was Thriller, Michael Jackson, Beat It.

28:15And people say, oh, big artists are making videos with big production budgets and they're irresistible. And John Landis directing that. And the second thing was Live Aid. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Live Aid. Live Aid, you know, ABC said we'll run, Bob Geldof came to that. ABC said we'll run three hours of it, sort of a highlight show. We said, hey, man, we'll run the whole thing for 16 hours. We got nothing else to do. So it was like the biggest show ever, and that really, really legitimized us. Wow. Yeah, there was nowhere else to see your favorite artist, really, unless you bought a ticket to a concert.

28:49Right. It was the only channel that you could see these people. And the VJs were cool, too. Remember, like, Mark Goodman and Martha Quinn. Martha Quinn. You know, people forget, but for its day, it wasn't like a flying car stuff or anything, but MTV really was revolutionary. It was a whole new visual language for people. Of course, we've gone so far past that now, but it was sort of a groundbreaker in that way. Did you guys end up having all these, you got to know a lot of artists too through this. I mean, at first you guys were trying to launch and get them to do stuff, and then there must have been the tipping point where they're just coming at you, and all the artists are whining and dining you guys, right?

29:29Sending you Rolexes and stuff. I didn't get any Rolexes. Yeah, okay. I got a Timex. No, but I mean, it was true. We used to get like four or five videos a week. Then we were getting 50 or 60. And so there was record companies set up whole departments just to service MTV. Yeah, I'll bet you guys were a real bell of the ball. all these record label heads were probably working you guys like they used to work radio stations, right? Where they would ask for certain placement of certain videos at certain days and times, maybe? Yeah, yeah. We were the biggest radio station in the nation. Yeah, right.

30:10And it didn't always bring out the best in some of the people at MTV, you know, when you had that kind of power. And what did you think or feel when just recently they announced it's no longer right well they announced that in the uk for a bunch of channels that just play music videos and the mtv channel that just plays reality shows right you know which really bugs me but whatever that's still there but i you know it needed to die a death because it can't exist really and be a business if it when you're competing with all these videos on the internet and it's not like you have exclusive videos that the people that the internet doesn't have i mean there's no business there it's not going to grow i do think that the new the ellisons and paramount have a chance to really reimagine what mtv could be digitally and uh and figure out because figure out a way to put together something more interesting than's out there now which is a There's a lot of sort of siloed, algorithm-driven.

31:15Yeah, well, those fast channels, if you want a fast channel, you could just pick your favorite artist like Taylor Swift and just click on her and just watch all her videos. All her stuff and one-stop shopping. So speaking of which, so you're at MTV, and then you guys decide to, then you have a bunch of other things that I mentioned in the intro. Nickelodeon, VH1, and Comedy Central. And this is great. So Comedy Central ends up becoming this huge thing, but the way it started was kind of in response to what somebody else was doing. I love this story. Walk us through that a little bit, how Comedy Central came to be.

31:52Okay, I was having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper to say that HBO's just announced they're going to do a comedy channel. They're going to call it The Comedy Channel. And we went, oh, wow, they're getting into our business. They were the pay TV people. We were like the little low-rent basic people. We said, well, that means they're going to get in our business. They have a lot of money. They have all these, do all these big stand-up shows with Robin Williams and everything. What are we going to do? I said, well, we're going to announce our own comedy channel the same day.

32:22Let's announce we're doing one too because then we'll be in every article that's ever written about that their competitor is also doing a comedy channel. And you have no idea for it. We wouldn't have a name or anything. But we had this thing called Nick at Night. and we would take like old TV shows and repurpose them and repackage them and everything. And so at the worst comes the worst, we can do like a version of that, but let's put our hat in the ring. And so we had a big battle with them for a couple of years and finally we merged and it became Comedy Central. But, and they, because I thought if this worked for them, then they'd launch a movie channel, a music channel and a kid's channel as well and be head-to-head competitors with a lot more money than us.

33:03So you basically start it, you hear our competitors are starting a comedy channel. And in that moment you go, let's announce it. So anytime they get mentioned, we get mentioned and we don't even have a product yet. Right. And you said, and you were like, and I remember reading in the book, you were like, you said to Frank Biondi, right? Who you worked with over there. And you said to him, you're like, look, it'll buy us a couple of days. And then by the time we have to make the actual announcement, we'll have time to come up with a name and what we're going to do. Is that true? Yeah, he was, I put him on the speakerphone to my staff, and he says, yeah, because he had been, he had left HBO, and he did not have a great relationship with Michael Fuchs, who said he was like the king of, this was his baby.

33:46So Frank was all in, you know, fighting like tooth and nail against, we were like a guerrilla operation, fighting against HBO. And I think HBO couldn't believe, you know, that we did as well as we did. It was all in smoke and mirrors. And so when did you come up with the name? How did you come up with programming and the whole thing for the channel? Well, initially we called it like the two days later was we called it Ha, the TV comedy channel. It was Ha! with an exclamation point. Sure, sure. You know, and we had a great logo. and it was TV comedy because what they were doing was just, they were going to rip like funny scenes out of, you know, TV shows and movies and some stand-up guys in front of brick walls and just put them together and they didn't have like their equivalent of VJs.

34:37It would be like an MTV model. But, you know, we didn't think that would work. We actually had tried that once. So we thought, well, we'll just run comedy shows. So I did things to create headlines. I hired Fred Silverman who programmed to all the big networks at one time. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and we licensed stuff from Norman Lear and we just would continue to throw out announcements. So we've got Saturday Night Live, the original five years of that, 75 to 80. And we built up a decent show and then when we merged, we had to come up with the name, Us and HBO and Comedy Central was the name.

35:17And then the turning point for Comedy Central in your book that you describe, is what really set you guys off was when you hired Jon Stewart. Is that right? We had hired Jon Stewart before. He was on MTV in the late 80s, early 90s. He had a show called The Jon Stewart Show. Yeah, I remember that. It ran for a while. So Jon was sort of in the stable. We never found him. And we actually had a guy named Craig Claiborne on The Daily Show first, who was a different type of guy. And then we replaced him with Jon Stewart. And Jon's vision was, look, let's just not do pop culture stuff. Why don't we take a crack at the news?

35:55I'll be a fake newsman. Yeah. And he got his voice doing that and just got better and better. I mean, I just watched, you know, he's on every Monday night again still. He's so brilliant. He should run for president. Perfect. But what came out of that was we had Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Bill Maher was on our channel first, Dave Chappelle. I mean, it was a good launching place for young talent. Jimmy Kimmel had The Man Show. You may remember that. Yeah, I remember that. I mean, Tom, you think about, you name these people, all these people, musical artists, comedic voices, brilliant voices who came up under sort of the umbrella of stuff that you did.

36:38Do you ever, do you get a little satisfaction when you watch people now all these years later like, yeah, I was right about all of this? Yeah, and in truth, I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't the person who like picked everybody, but we had a great team there. And we were always looking for edgy new talent that was coming up and get them, you know, get them young. And then they'd leave us like Bill Maher was on Politically Incorrect. And then ABC hired him and then they fired him and he ended up at HBO. And his show now is spectacular. And so you see now the front line of people who were sort of like the resistance almost politically.

37:13It's all these comedians. And they all, so many of them had their roots with us, although they had been in other places for a while. Colbert, Kimmel, Marr, and so on. And Steve Carell, too. And Carell. Steve Carell. Yeah. So then, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Well, I was going to say, so then, because I want to get into all the one stuff, you know, God, we don't have enough time for everything. Time, your life is too full. So while you're at Viacom, you become CEO of Viacom ultimately, and you work for a guy called Sumner Redstone, which was a difficult boss to serve. Is that a good way to put it?

37:55That's very fair, yes. He fired every CEO, including me. Including you. And so you knew, so he hires you as CEO, and that means what? That means your days are numbered, basically. How long till I get fired? But the thing is, he always liked to fire people on holiday weekends. So, like, he fired Frank Biondi on the 4th of July. He fired Mel Karmazin, like, on Memorial Day, and I got it on Labor Day. So if you could make it through the summer season, pretty much you had another year of good times ahead. Wow. And one of the reasons, one of the things that, I know there are a lot of issues, and you talk about it in the book, but you and I have talked about this before.

38:36It's widely known. There was a thing called, one of the first social media sites out, there was a thing called MySpace. And it was up for grabs. And he wanted it. I'm still on it. I'm still on it. Right? Sean's still on it. It's his main source of communication. So he wanted MySpace and so did News Corp. Right? Is that fair? Well, Sumner had never heard of MySpace. He didn't hear about it until he found out that Rupert bought it. And then he found out we'd been kicking the tires, and we never made a bid to buy it. But Rupert bought it, and he went on the covers of all these trade magazines as the new media visionary, and that really annoyed Sumner.

39:21Yeah. And he bought it for$560 million. I'll just say, ultimately, Rupert sold it for$30 million. Wow. I'm still waiting for a thank you note. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was one of the reasons he cited for firing me. Right, one of the reasons, which is you did him such a favor. And the other thing was you early on saw the power, the potential maybe of YouTube. Is that true? Yeah. YouTube kind of took away all of MTV's mojo ultimately. I mean, who could have imagined what YouTube's become today? If you check out YouTube TV and everything, it's amazing. And it's been around forever, and they still say it's the, quote, future.

40:05But how would you – if Alien landed on the earth, and you're trying to explain what YouTube is or was in its inception, how would you describe it? Is it just a free sort of destination for user-generated videos? You just kind of upload anything you want, and it's just a gathering place for all that? Is that what YouTube brilliant is core is? That's what it was initially, and that was like 2005. They launched it, and it was initially anybody could upload anything, and kids could comment on it, and you could send stuff. It was a form of social media, person-to-person, and that was a whole new idea.

40:45And then like SNL would put up like some stuff like with Andy Samberg. I'm trying to think some of – they would – media companies would use it as sort of a promotional vehicle, So they started to get more promotional content on there. And then they've just... And did you want to buy it? Did you saw... We thought this is a whole new thing. And the world is going in this, you know, we had the TV revolution. Now we got this digital revolution. And then this digital revolution, this social media thing where people can communicate directly with each other. And people like us aren't gatekeepers anymore.

41:21You know, we thought, how do we get in on this? You know, you got to own a platform. and we made a I wanted to make a bid on it but it was difficult for a company like us I mean ultimately Google bought it for 1.6 billion the Viacom board thought it was a copyright infringement machine it would make us liable for lots of lawsuits and ultimately after I left they sued them for a billion dollars and lost 10 years later but no one could have imagined what YouTube was able to morph into Right. You know, which is... But you did see that there was the potential. Even though you didn't know exactly what it would become, imagine how different the world would have looked had Viacom purchased.

42:07I mean, for$1.6 billion is right now the deal of the century. They're worth almost$600 billion YouTube. Wow, that's unbelievable. I mean, I could buy all the media companies a couple times over. Wow. And then... $600 billion. On the side of that, you also helped these guys start Vice Media as well, right? You were instrumental in getting— I worked with Vice for a bunch of years, yeah. Yeah, that was a wild ride. Yeah. That's another fun. That was a lot of fun, too, though. Yeah, yeah. And it crashed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still around, though, isn't it? No? It's barely around. They have a little studio operation.

42:44You know, they kind of imploded a bit. You know, they had a great run when they had that HBO series on that really kind of made them famous. They had a whole suite of YouTube channels. After all of these successes, does any part of you still want to be involved in media? You know, I'm happy now. I'm not in it. I mean, it seems like a lot of the fun's been taken out of it. A lot of the money's been taken out. You look at these companies that are sort of stripped down and are forced to consolidate. You know, I came up, it was a more optimistic time. things were moving in an upward direction. Things were ascendant.

43:26Now it's like, well, I have to tell you guys, you're all in Hollywood. You know what the situation is. Barely, Tom. Barely. We'll be right back.

43:40And now back to the show. It does seem like, though, that we are at a bit of an inflection point that's not too dissimilar from sort of the launch of something like a YouTube where were it not for the invention of the internet and then the personal communication device, those two things together were the necessary components that make up a YouTube. Now we've got something similar perhaps in AI and its ability to be transformative and create these new platforms or entertainment options that we have no idea about. Some ideas are scary. Some ideas are interesting. But maybe we're at another kind of launch moment.

44:33I'm sure you've done, I'm sure you read very interesting books and niche articles and periodicals and things like that. Does it not hold some kind of interest to you, sort of this moment of pioneering maybe? Yeah, and the whole AI thing is sort of daunting. On one hand, you've got people saying that it's going to create these machines, they're going to kill us all. And on the other hand, it's going to open up this great new world and it's going to put, and someone else say, yeah, it's going to put 20 % unemployment on the board. But it seems like the big brains like you are really the only people that are uniquely qualified to really kind of cut through all that and say, yeah, it could be this, it could be that.

45:14But it also can be steered and can only be really properly steered by somebody that has a combination of your creative acumen and your business acumen and your time in the industry. So are you not interested or excited to kind of grandfather some of that in there? I'm sort of following it all. It's not that there's not a lot of smart people involved. You know, these AI guys from, you know, you always say, well, they're from up north. And you can see the battle in Hollywood. They need the media savvy too, though. Yeah. They're not this media savvy, but, you know, they're going to create new media.

45:51Yeah, I'm curious and I'm watching. And it's – they're just – the amount of money that's being invested is just mind-boggling. But they need someone like you to steer it, though. You got – you know, put your hand up. I might have to come off the bench. Come on. Get in there. Wait, Tom. Tom, speaking of coming off the bench, if you were 26-year-old Tom Preston today and you were just coming back from being off the grid for a couple of years and you were going to start in this world today, what would you launch? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good question. Well, you know, I'd want to do something that I really like, so I'd probably find my way somehow to the entertainment media business.

46:30You know, I'm probably there and say, well, now, I mean, to your point, it is sort of in an inflection point. And you'd want to align yourself with someone who's smart. That's a business that's a send-it. So if you get in it and you choose the right place and they got the right plan, you're likely to be able to move up. And I don't know which place that is, but that's probably where I would gravitate. And I feel confident that they're going to figure this out somehow. Yeah, they have to. In a way that doesn't put everybody out of work in the entertainment business. Yeah. But I just heard something today.

47:07they have Channel 4 and the UK has these newscasters that are AI generated that sound exactly like... No way. Really? Exactly like it could be one of you guys. Well, yeah, Sean's got wires coming out of him. Well, it sounds like you are satisfied for sure with your accomplishments as well you should be. And so have you given yourself a chance to sit back and look at that guy who went off to India and Afghanistan and started in advertising and got his MBA and all that stuff? And have you landed at a spot that is satisfying to you given where you started, your frustrations early on? And it seems like you managed to create a space for yourself that combined all the things that you loved and that you were good at.

48:11Well, I kind of went full circle. I mean, if I look at my life in chapters, the chapter now I do a lot of not-for-profit work. For like 18 years, I've been working with Bono. I support chair this thing to one campaign that really focuses on extreme poverty, infectious disease in Africa. Okay. And I find that very satisfying work. You know, we have Red. You're probably familiar with some Red. stuff with the Apple and everything. And that's interesting. Keeps your arm into the private sector. But, you know, and it gives me a chance to really explore Africa a bit more, which I also enjoy. But so I'm sort of in that phase of life, I guess you could say.

48:49I'm, you know, it's not like giving back, but I enjoy this kind of work and I like being an observer of what's going on in the media and entertainment business. Well, you also, it is giving back and you did start you know you started a media company in afghanistan which still exists today yeah i did that i went back to afghanistan for 10 years until the taliban arrived and built up a tv network there which was fascinating that's great and and not and not not not not that not for profit but meaning like you did that as it's not like that that was like going to be a huge uh windfall it was more it was sort of giving back to a place that you you really loved and you described the people especially early on in the 70s when you first got there and what a wonderful place Afghanistan was.

49:34And now you've got these people who are there sort of holding the line, still doing it, right? Still broadcasting. And in that time, I remember you would take young people who were there who were working for the company and send them over here and do semesters working at USC media school and stuff and give them and educate them. And I mean, that was a real thing that you did for a long time. Yeah. I mean, I never escaped my fascination with Afghanistan. And it gets a bad rap these days, admittedly, but they're wonderful people. And I was lured back there to start this TV net station, which became very powerful.

50:12And in terms, I thought it was a way to, you know, help change society, connect Afghans to each other, to the outside world for the first time for, you know, women, liberate women. Just seeing a man and a woman newscaster side by side sends a huge signal. Wow. We brought music back after the Taliban had outlawed everything. So we brought back music with the arts. And it's still running, the network? Well, it's been, you know, we've now had, we had like 250 advertisers. It was, now we're down to one. Wow. And it's energy drinks like Red Bull kind of stuff. That's what they have there because there's no alcohol.

50:48But we've now switched into doing programming for school for women. So we're doing educational programming. And instead of advertisers, we're funded by people like Gates and other foundations, Malala Foundation. Oh, that's great. And we are making these episodes in Afghanistan inexpensively. We have a diaspora group of Afghan educators that helped develop the curriculum. And so it's just kind of keeping people employed in this very difficult time. But these programs for educating women are now allowed? Yes, because we've picked sort of non-ideological subjects like mathematics, physics, things like that.

51:25Got it. And so they're allowing it, yes. And there's a whole sort of digital part to it as well. It's just awful what's going on there. Yeah, for sure. This way the business stays alive and you can employ 500 people and women have basically been erased from public spaces in Afghanistan. And they're not even allowed to talk when they're in public. Yeah, just awful. And so women who used to be able, in that 20-year interval when we were there, which we blew, but people went to school, became parliamentarians, became lawyers, became – now they're just extremely depressed and at home. Man, Tom, you really – What a life, man.

52:11I know. What a life, dude. And you've done it all. I mean, you do this kind of stuff, and you help start MTV, and you have a clothing company, and you're smuggling clothes across the thing. Network Ha, and you talk in the book, you take Sumner Redstone to a sex club. Right. In Thailand, which you talk about in the book. That's crazy. I implore you to read this book. Is that true? Yes, yes, I did. That's crazy. Just give us a little taste, not too much of a taste. You don't want the full taste. But I kept telling him, you've got to come to Asia. We've got MTV in India. We've got it in China and Taiwan.

52:52We've got it in Indonesia. It's like the great market. We were still really positive about how we could do in Asia. And he had never really been. And then he called me up to his office one day. And he says, I've made up my mind. I'd like to finally come to Asia with you. I go, where do you want to go? He goes, I want to go to Bangkok. I go, we don't really have any business in Bangkok. You know, that's like one place that there's a company there that's going to lay cable, but they haven't started yet. But he wanted to go to Bangkok, and then he told me quietly he'd like to go to some sex clubs.

53:25Oh, my God. You know, I had to go do some advance work to get him in a sex club. I wasn't really, I'd been to Bangkok before a bunch of times, but I was not an expert on the sex club front, which is quite a scene there. One of the most interesting things is that, you know, it's become, because of the Vietnam War, it's become like the commercial sex capital of the world. And they have plane loads of Japanese and German men that come in to run wild in the various red light districts. And I'm thinking, wait, those were the two Axis powers. Right. And now they're invading Bangkok. But I took Sumner to a, I did my job as a loyal employee and shepherded him around.

54:12You had to take your boss, you describe it, and you guys go into a room and this couple are lowered on a motorcycle having actual sex on the motorcycle. And you're there with your boss and then he looks at you kind of like, we're good now. And you just let yourself out, right? Well, no, I had to take him to another club after that. Yeah, but the interesting thing about that club was it was just filled with, like, regular people, Thai people and everything. And you hear this roar and a motorcycle slowly comes down to a small Harley and there's this couple on there and they're naked and they're all greased up and they're doing it and the guy's revving the engine.

54:44Oh, my God. And after a while, after a while, the people in the bar, the locals, they're not even looking. You know, it's like people are fornicating on a motorcycle two feet over your head. Yeah, we got it. Would you like another beer? I said that amazing. So then they got pulled back up into the ceiling. Yeah. And then you got, I mean, you did everything you talk about. I mean, you literally, people go like, from here to Timbuktu. You literally went to Timbuktu. I want to end on you, the time you went to the music festival. I remember when you and Jimmy were going to go, you were talking about it.

55:17And you guys, you and Jimmy Buffett went to this music festival, right? It's a festival in the desert, out in the middle of the Sahara. Yeah. So how did, talk about your journey. Burning Man with people on camels. It was like the local Toreg people would come. It would be like, we love West African music, so I got a few other people, Chris Blackwell, my friend Bill Flanagan. We flew to Bamako, the capital of Mali, and then we got a plane. We took the Jimmy Jet. We flew to Timbuktu, and we landed in the Timbuktu airport. People, there's nothing there. There's no planes there. People are just running at our plane trying to sell us daggers, you know?

56:00And it was like you're in the middle of nowhere. It's like a town in the desert. And we had to drive a bunch of hours from there to get to the festival. And you had your own security with you and a driver. Talk about that. Yeah. We had one security guy from Bamako, and then we had another guy. And then when we got to Timbuktu, we got to find a guy who knows how to get there. So we need a local guy who can find his way to the festival. So we hire this guy and we set out one morning to go to the festival. And we're winding our way through the sand dunes and going and going and going. After about four or five hours, the security guy goes, stop, stop.

56:42And he gabs the local guy and gets them out and they start screaming at each other. We don't know what's going on. Then he puts the guy in a headlight, takes out a gun, sticks it to his head. He says, I'm going to kill this motherfucker. Because he is taking us. We're going in the wrong direction. and he was taking us to an Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was kidnapping tourists in that area. And like there was just over the border in Mauritania there, there was a Germans they'd been holding for a year. We were on our way there. And he said, I'm going to, and I'm a little bit buzzed and I'm looking at this.

57:14I'm going, Jesus Christ, man. I mean, I just came out in the desert to hear some music and now I'm going to witness a murder. And I got a turban on my head. Jesus. So Jimmy said, let the guy free. We just leave him in the desert, and we picked up like a guy who was a hitchhiker. He had a cell phone with a Bob Marley ringtone, and that was enough. He said he knew how to get to the festival, so we put him on board, and off we went. You know, you could just watch MTV. You don't have to go across that. It's unbelievable. Man, what a life. It sounded like a good idea. Yeah. Well, good news for if you're like me or you finish listening to this guy talk and you're envious that you have not lived a life even halfway as interesting as him.

58:01The good news is we've got a book to read about it. Yeah. So thank you for writing that. Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu on sale as of November 18th from the great Tom Fresson. Proof that there's a big world out there. Get out into it, which I say all the time. And boy, did you do that. Yeah. You are an inspiration to a lot of people, including me. You always have been. You're a great dude. And honestly, I read this book. Just I devoured it. It's so good. So, Tom, thank you, man, for taking... This has been a long time coming. I'm so psyched that you came on today. Yeah, thank you, Will.

58:36Thank all of you. It's great to chat with you guys. I'm a regular fan. Yeah, nice meeting you, Tom. Love the podcast. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to us. Thank you. The great Tom Freston, you guys. Take care. Thank you. Bye, guys. Bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye, pal. Oh, boy. I'm uplifted and also depressed at the same time. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how I feel. I know. I'm like, wow. Fuck. You know, there was a time when like, I think I've probably told this boring story before, but you know, when my career was, you know, in a real dry place. No, talk about that. I thought about going down to the Tom Bradley terminal here in LAX, the International Terminal, and just picking a destination up on the board and just...

59:22I love that. Just going there and starting over. You can still do that. Well, I got the wife and the kids, and it's a little awkward now. No, but you can just get up and go somewhere. It's called deserting your family now. I was like 23, 24. I was like Tom's age, and I was like, let me just start over somewhere else where fucking being on entertainment tonight isn't the end-all be-all. Yeah, right. So I'm certainly not, you know, boo-hoo, you know, your life turned out so shitty. No, I'm very, very grateful. But man, you listen to that, I just don't know if you, I was going to say you can't have both, but he seems to have had both.

59:59Like he went, he did that, he came back and he was still a part of, you know, mainstream society. And not only that, Jay, what's cool is he took all of that, that sort of, that wanderlust as you described, and he took all those experiences and he brought it into that environment. And that's what set him apart and still sets him apart. He's like, he has such a broad worldview. He also had, like he said, 18 years of school. So then he was like, anything is, I just got to get out. Like, you know, like I've just been reading books for 18 years. And it changes what you use as your sort of baseline norms that you think that you can, and so you come back and you're affected by these experiences.

1:00:36You're like, no, well, why don't we just do this? You know, if you think about it, like he does all this stuff that maybe being out in the world he might not have had. But then he's like, yeah, we're MTV. we're going to start this and we're going to start this comedy channel. It's like a drug. It's like it changes your mind. And like, oh, YouTube, let's buy that. And everybody's like, no, Tom, no. I wonder if doing it at that age, though, is much more meaningful and significant than doing it, let's say, maybe after Maple goes to college, Amanda and I take off and we start doing all this traveling.

1:01:08Are we too set in our ways then at that age? No. At 60, going around and like, can you really be affected as much? Well, there's one way to find out. Just do it. Just do it. I think, honestly. But what if it turns out, yeah, no, it was a waste of time. You're already stuck in your ways and now you're 70. But at least it's worth going to try to find it. And I would say, like, you hear that. It makes me want to say to my own kids and to my younger self and to anybody if you're under 30 or 40, whatever it is, whoever you are, put your phone down and get out in the world. You know, that's kind of, it makes you just think like, just get out there and I'm sure people will be rolling their eyes.

1:01:48Don't put it down before you get a smartless mobile plan. Switch to smartless mobile and get a good plan. Yeah. And then 10 gigs for 10 bucks. Yeah. Right. But it is true. It is true, yeah. Go out and have a rich life and Jay, you were saying to him like, do you have this moment now looking back where you feel a sense of satisfaction? Like, yeah, think of the stuff and the people he's met. Like, even now he'll be like, if you follow him on Instagram and he'll be like, you know, I'm in Albania. I mean, some, like, Gord, I'm talking to the prime minister, and I'm doing this and that, and he's just, you know.

1:02:20I didn't even, is he married? He has a longtime partner, Carrie, who's amazing. Yeah. Okay, so he's not still going around solo, bopping around. No, no, no, no, but she's a good friend and an awesome person in her own right. That's great. Just amazing, yeah. And he's just, but he's always, he's just interested. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the key. You got to stay curious and interested the whole time. But it seems like everybody that was around them had such fun. And I had fun today with all of you. And I think a good time was had by all.

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