Tom Freston

23:33And one of the tips was look for companies that are ascendant, that are likely to be on a curve of getting higher because mobility would be good. So I see this interview in Billboard by a guy saying, we're going to start this video music channel. This is in 79. And the inspiration to look for these things is from this self-help book that you just happened to see in a bookstore window and pick up. I said, well, I need a little career advice here. You know, I'm thinking because people were thinking, where have you been for eight years, man? You've been running around Asia in flip-flops. And you're back here.

24:05Meanwhile, all these people that I knew, they'd all gone on in their lives, married, kids and everything. I'm 33. So I see this interview. My brother knows a guy who works there in this small embryonic company. They had just started Nickelodeon and the movie channel. And I get an interview. And the guy says, we're looking for people with no experience in television. Because we're starting a revolution here. We can't afford to pay people who, you know, from NBC or ABC. This is 1980 now. So I said, I don't know, have any experience with television? Where I was living for eight years, I didn't even have television.

24:41So in the case, I'm an entrepreneur. I knew my music inside out. I can operate on a low level. I'm entrepreneurial. I show them this business that I had built, and I would be in Vogue and Mademoiselle and all these magazine articles. And Bob Pittman said to me, he's putting together a team of eight people. He says, what were you doing? Are you smuggling hashish? And I go, not really. Not really. That means you were. He goes, you're hired. So I got hired to be like the marketing guy of a team of eight that had to put the whole idea of MTV together and get it on the air like an eight or nine month show.

25:19Was that the first time you met Pittman? Yeah. He was 26. I was 33. I was the only guy over 30 on this group. I mean, we were all crusaders. But you had the credentials. I had credentials. You were a smuggler. Yeah. He thought that was a cool thing. You know, you were a real smuggler. And I'm thinking, well, I wasn't really a big dope smuggler. I had a substantial business. But hey, if that's what lights your light up, that's fine. Go ahead and think it. Yeah. Who was that first cast of characters? You might know John Sykes. Of course. Yeah. I'm still friends with him. There was a woman named Gail Sparrow.

25:54Yeah, God, you were in there early yourself. Gail Sparrow, who I love, she passed recently. Carolyn Baker. I think she's passed. There was a guy named Steve Casey. He was out of the radio world. There was a bunch of radio guys. And there was Robert Morton. You must know Morty. The day we went on the air, he quit to go. He says, I'm out of here. He got us up with our studio and everything. He says, I did my job. I'm going to go work for this guy who's starring a TV show. It's in development at NBC named David Letterman. So Morty just did that for years. Now he's selling real estate in Malibu. Wow.

26:27He's great. But anyway, that was the original group. And, you know, we all were making no money. We all worked out of a hotel room. We just ate pizza, hung out, and it was day and night. It was like, it was a classic startup. How long was it from that until something hit the air? Nine months. Oh. Fred Seibert was the other one. He was the key guy. He was our creative director. And we decided we wanted to look on, like, anything else that had ever been made. and we would try and grab our energy from the downtown New York art scene and the downtown New York music scene. The music videos had not been seen by most Americans.

27:03It was a new thing. I mean, there were clubs downtown like the Ritz that would play music videos. And we tried to garner some of that energy and positioning ourselves as sort of this underground force that's really different. Now, it's hard, but if you go back and think it wasn't flying car stuff, But back in 1981, 82, the idea of cable and something like MTV was pretty radical. People would look at it and go, what is this? It wasn't so long that there were just three networks and they were all pretty much the same. Yeah, and they were all playing love boat. And so now cable's starting. So you have CNN and ESPN.

27:41You have these networks. These were the new things, the narrow cast. We're going to do one thing all the time for a single audience, not for everybody. And there were maybe 70 or 80 channels then, you think? No, there was 25. Oh, 25 at first. It was really started small. Then the big thing was in the mid 80s, it went up to 54. And then said, one day, we're going to have 100 channels. Someone said there was a song. Someone had about 500 channels. But now, of course, that whole monoculture and gatekeeper thing where editors and programmers had all this control, has all dissolved and gone away because of digital and social media, et cetera.

28:18But anyway, so I was there for the heyday. The 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s were like the heydays of the cable TV revolution, which then became the digital revolution. Did MTV start national or no? Yeah, because we would bounce off a satellite so the whole country, you could get it. The problem was the cable operators, they had to agree to carry us and pay us 10 cents, but no one wanted to do that. There was only a few places where we did it. So for a couple of years, we ran along with only 2 million subscribers. Where were the places? Middle America. Like Tulsa would be our biggest system, 100 ,000 homes.

28:54Des Moines, Wichita, Syracuse, New York, nothing in any of the big markets, New York or LA. It's interesting because of the downtown nature of the programming, to end up in Middle America was probably a bit of a stretch for Middle America, don't you think? It was. It seems like. It really was a stretch. I mean, we didn't get in any of the big cities because they didn't have cable. The cable guys hadn't come yet. You know, they hadn't built out the cable systems. But in these middle America systems, they had cable largely for reception purposes because there was bad reception, distant signals. We can amp it up.

29:28And so when we hit Tulsa, it was like a bomb went off. And no one in New York or L.A. ever felt it. It was like a neutron bomb. But I did because I was the marketing guy and I would go to these towns. And I can remember just showing up at the airport to rent a car, and I had an MTV button on it. And the lady behind the counter goes, wow, where did you get that? I said, how do you know about MTV? He says, everybody knows about MTV. It's been here a month and a half now. It's all anyone talks about. And then I remember going to a radio station. They were telling me how much more easy it is for them to play new music.

30:02And then he takes me to a bar. It's like a sports bar, and there's a TV on. It's like a Trinitron. and they're all watching MTV in this bar like it's a Knicks game or something. And I was just standing there trembling. I'm thinking no one else at the company knows this is happening. Nobody gets it at home. No one feels the vibe. I'm actually in a market where this is really going on. And so people were going in asking for haircuts like some of these bands from England. We had a lot of indie bands. The early days of MTV were all these lo-fi videos and it was fun. It was Devo. And so ultimately, we were going out of business and we had to get these cable operators who were older guys, didn't want to pay us the money.

30:45And they thought that we were sort of a tool of the devil in a way, some of them. Wow. And that's how the I Want My MTV campaign came along. So let's, there's one group that likes us. The record companies didn't like us. The advertisers didn't like us. And the cable guys didn't like us. But who liked us were the fans, the music fans. and let's have them call their cable company and say, I want my MTV. It's a great campaign. It started in the 50s. There was a campaign called I Want My Mapo. And that idea, there was this guy, George Lois, who was this crazy advertising guy, the Madison, the Madden.

31:22Brilliant guy. Yeah. He did the covers of Esquire magazine. He did the head covers for Esquire. Yeah, George was a character. I used to go down to his house. He'd like wake up at three in the morning. He'd have like four hours sleep a night. He had a whole other life from like three to seven. You know, it was a guy who lived a long time. He was this foul-mouthed Greek dude, very funny. So he just said, hey, fuck these cable operators. We brought him in with this guy named Dale Pond. You guys are getting nowhere being next to the cable operator. Fuck them. I want my MTV. Let's get the world's biggest rock stars to validate this.

31:54And let's put a campaign together. And let's roll in these markets. And let's advertise at really high levels like it's a blockbuster film that's coming. Wow. And these cable operators are going to surrender quickly, put up the white flag, and add MTV to their cable lineups like that. So we had to— It happens. You need—who we get? Because he had done it with MAPO. He'd done it with Wilt Chamberlain and Mickey Mantle, all these big sports stars. Yeah. So he says, you got to get fucking Mick Jagger. He's the biggest star of the world. So me and Sykes and this guy, Les Garland, we all—Less got Mick Jagger.

32:24Sykes had to get Pete Townsend. I had to get David Bowie. And we all went out to get these guys. And sure enough, I did these things for a couple of years. We would add a million subscribers a month for two years. Wow. And we got fully distributed. And it was go to the fans. Yeah. How long did it take? Took a couple of years to ramp up to like big distribution. We knew it was just a question of time. We can only do so many markets at once. And once it got started, it was like, you know, and then we had, you know, things like Live Aid came along and music videos became a thing. So, yeah, it was fun.

32:59Why do you think record companies didn't like MTV, considering they would pay people to play music on radio? You would think, Rick. You'd think this is the best promotion. The promotion guys loved us. Yeah. But the lawyers, who you've seen, remember how the lawyers jumped in front of digital when that came around with everything? You know, they didn't want to give us music videos for free. And we said, look, these are like three-minute commercials for your records. And they didn't want to do deals with us. Ultimately, they had to because the artists wanted to do it. And the promotion guys, the record, and they knew it sold a lot of records.

33:37I mean, those were the days where you could sell millions of records. You'd think that would be what they would want, the record companies. Well, you know, the business affairs and record companies historically have been like the department of no. Yeah. After Napster, there was all these other people who came out with digital ideas. Their strategy was to shut them all down. Now, it's going to be interesting to see how they deal with AI. It's like the next turn of the screw. But finally, we ended up paying the record companies money in the end. But in the beginning, we didn't. They thought we were building a business on their backs because we were so successful.

34:11And we also had Nickelodeon and Comedy Central and all these other networks. They said, you're playing our music and you're worth all this money on Wall Street. And we're just some bupkis record company. We're like a distributor. That's not right. I'm going to get all the, Bob Morgato told me, who ran Warner Electra Asylum at one point, drove it into the wall. I'm going to get all the record companies together and we're going to take you down. Wow. Which he never did. Eventually the record companies got wise. The iPod came along and iTunes came along and now they're making money again. But they're always looking around the corner because AI is coming down the pike.

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36:26After the I Want My MTV campaign, what would you say the next big breakthrough for MTV was? The biggest one was Live Aid. Geldof came around, said, we're going to do this show. It's going to be in Wembley, and it's going to be in Philly, and we're going to have this big lineup. We're going to raise this money for Ethiopia. There's this famine going on, and see if you'd like to carry it. Well, we've got nothing else to do. I mean, of course we'll do it. We'd love to. A music channel. It's a big concert. They said, well, you know, we'd already done this deal with ABC. They only wanted a three-hour highlight show.

37:00I said, well, we'll run the whole thing. Great. So that was a big thing, and that kind of elevated us again. And then it was like Michael Jackson, Thriller, Beat It, all those. The music videos got better. And then after Live Aid happened, next thing you know, we're on the cover of Newsweek and Time Magazine. And then we kept going and trying to reinvent it and tooled it up. We brought hip-hop on. Yo, MTV Raps. Yo, MTV Raps. I mean, back then, BLS wasn't playing it. Nobody was playing it. Nobody was playing it. We said, well, we'll play it. You must have known Ted and Peter Doherty. Yeah, I knew them well.

37:37So they cooked up a little pilot. They put it on and got huge ratings, just with no promotion. It wasn't the highest rated music album. It was the only place you could hear hip-hop music. And we were putting it in people's living rooms in Des Moines and Middle America, and they had never seen anything like it. So it brought a whole new cast of characters into our life. And a whole new music thing kind of got started. And it was so fun. And it was, I mean, the whole thing, it could crystallize into the Walk This Way video. So that kind of sanctified hip hop for the rock audience, the young rock audience, who in many ways, people just never look back again.

38:13And then, you know, I was very instrumental in the international rollout of MTV because in the late 80s, we saw that countries were loosening up and allowing cable and satellite to happen. And even in England, they had no music shows. They just had the BBC pretty much, barely just started with Channel 4. So we took MTV around the world. We had 50 different versions of it in different languages around the world. And for me, that was a lot of fun. And for me, it was easy because I had that international experience way back. So what I found was that my earlier life of working in hardscrabble, king of the road, kind of menial labor jobs, going to business school, and then working in Asia for eight years, it was a perfect setup for me to work for an eccentric media organization that wanted to be sort of left of center.

39:08I don't mean politically, but, you know, sort of and experimental and open to take chances and willing to improvise and just kind of work off by the seat of our pants. So for me, it was a perfect destination. It was all the things I loved was in that job, animation, film, music, video, international travel, working with a lot of odd people, building relationships with people that the record labels or with artists. It was a lot of fun. How would you describe the qualities of the most creative people you've come in contact with over the course of your life? Curiosity. They were good editors. They had good instincts.

39:50They trusted them. They were maniacally obsessed with the space they were in. They were also good people pickers. One thing I found is in a creative organization, if you pick any organization, I guess, if you pick a bad person, they're going to pick other bad people. And next thing you know, without you knowing it, you're deconstructing your own organization. I always wanted the main aptitude of our little enterprise, which we called MTV Networks, to be creativity. So I would put always a creative person in charge of the network rather than a salesperson, which was a traditional way. because I wanted people to know that that is what we aspire to be.

40:36We are about creativity. We're kind of making our own road and we're improvising. We're going to take risks. And if we get the creative process right and we can connect with whoever we're trying to connect with, all the things in our business that need to happen will fall into place if we're successful. So that was sort of a guiding principle of mine. I had people like Judy McGrath. She was wonderful in every way, shape, or form as a creative executive. And also, she had hands-on skills. So she'd always say, we have to continue to hire the aberrant ones, because that's where we're going to get our ideas from.

41:14They're going to come from the street. We're dealing in popular culture. These ideas are coming off the bottom. Doug Herzog was another example. He came to work for us when he was 23 at MTV, and then he ended up running Comedy Central sort of in his prime when we were running John and Stephen Colbert and everybody. and John Sykes. He took what had been a sort of fowl running VH1 and brought in Bill Flanagan and we did like Behind the Music. We did 120 of those and we had a whole bunch of series, pop-up video and got VH1 into a viable business. And then there was Nickelodeon. We used the same strategy there, which was we want to be the Disney of the 90s.

41:50We want to be cool. We're going to find animators who don't work in the Hollywood animation system of Hanna-Barbera but have characters living in their heads. We're going to build an animation facility and then we're going to plug them into it so they can just think and do it and we can run out what they have conceptualized. So you look at SpongeBob and Rugrats, we go Ren and Stimpy and we had quite a hit parade that came out of Nick. And then you look at Beavis and Butthead with Mike Judge. I mean, we had people who were good. To be a good executive, you needed to have good instincts in hiring people and picking material.

42:24You need to be a bit of a diplomat. You had to have a sense of good strategy and a bit of emotional intelligence. How different would you say the culture of MTV was from CBS, let's say, just to pick another network? Hugely different. We were much younger. I mean, I'd say in our prime there, I mean, the average age was probably low 30s, high 20s. We had the worst dressed group of people going in and out of any Manhattan office building you could imagine. Yeah. People thinking, what's going on? Not a lot of suits. No suits. The only dress code rule we had was no frontal nudity. This was an era where at CBS, you had to wear a suit and a tie.

43:07There was many layers of management. We try to keep things really flat so we could move quickly. Something doesn't work. We'll fix it or throw it out and we'll move on and do something else because none of the things we would do really involved an absolute amount, a huge amount of money. So we could afford to just throw something out and just keep working. If something doesn't work, no one's going to hold it against us. The idea that we would be experimental is not something you would see at a broadcast network, which had, in fairness to them, they had a big legacy business, and they couldn't just operate sort of like we did off the cuff and improvise so much because they had to keep their business growing up year by year.

43:47And if they had things that worked, they had to continue to build on those and very strategically build another one. So they were a lot more deliberate. I'd say we had more of a bebop culture, and they were more like a classical orchestra. Tell me about the state of music video when MTV started. There were not loads of videos yet, were there? No, they were mostly made in Europe because in Europe, there was no real form of commercial radio to play your record. And the only way you need to get on top of the pops in the UK or something. So people would make music videos and they would play them in record stores.

44:20That's where I first came across them. I spent one summer in Berlin. I had a girlfriend and when she'd go to work, I'd go to the local record store where you could actually get a record and go into a booth and play it. See if you like it. But they also had a little TV, little tiny TV. So they play these music videos. And I go, I go, wow, that is pretty amazing. You know, they do this because it was sort of a whole new video vocabulary, new video style. In the early days, they were more fun, lo-fi, people experimental. You know, nothing was really awfully sophisticated, but at their heart, they were fun.

44:55No one was making like dark music videos. There was like Duran Duran's running around some boat with a bunch of pretty girls. Or you had Devo going around saying whip it and whipping people's skirts off. I mean, it was really just low key. Some people were serious about it early on, like David Bowie. I mean, he really saw himself as a video artist also. But in the early days, it was cheap, and we only went on the air with 160 videos. They largely came out of the UK. Independent labels would have them. So it wasn't music that was already really popular on the radio for the most part. No, these were bands that had...

45:31It was alternative music. It was alternative music by alternative bands, and there was no radio over there. But it wasn't popular on the radio here, no, because we were, it was like AOR radio, this format of, they're still banging the classic rock. They weren't calling it classic rock yet because it wasn't yet classic, but it was that same group of artists. Yeah. Fleetwood Mac, Stones, Beatles, et cetera. Whereas these new bands, they got categorized in the early 80s as new wave. They'd be maybe on college radio. That would be the domain of college radio. That's who we were playing, yes. But it turned out that with videos, they could tap into a mainstream or a larger audience because when people see a video that they like, they get familiar with the music more quickly.

46:14And next thing you know, they're humming something by Crowded House, and they're going to buy the record. So the whole process of the music video could telescope the familiarity period to get people to ultimately go out and buy the record. How would you say music video changed the music business? It changed it in good and bad ways. It made the era of the international superstar possible, even the domestic superstar possible. It made sub-genres of music like alternative and heavy metal and hip-hop. It allowed them to elevate and become more national and move out of that sort of marginal space into becoming a more broad appeal kind of music form.

46:57It made image more important in some cases than the music. I mean, you look at Milli Vanilli, there's the classic cases, Vanilla Ice. You know, video was just one more thing you could do wrong. But there were, you know, you had Madonna and people who looked at it as an art form that would complement their music and help them build the image that they wanted for themselves in a way that they thought was smart. Do you think Prince or Madonna or Michael Jackson would have become who they were without MTV? This sounds arrogant, but I think MTV helped them become bigger faster, without a doubt. Those are all real artists, and you're not going to knock them down.

47:39And if there wasn't a music video, they would find other ways to get popular. But MTV and music videos was a way to kind of help short-circuit the system and the path to superstardom. What was the first non-music show on MTV? me well at one point in the mid 80s we decided we got to kind of change things up a bit and the first real show i just was remote control there was a guy named joe davola i don't know if you knew joe yeah and they made a thing in somebody's basement so let's do a quiz show you know and adam sandler got his start there and we made it for like 10 to 15 000 an episode that was a big hit.

48:20And people said, what are you doing that for? That has nothing to do with music, but it got good ratings. I mean, then the creative cadre at MTV was always looking to be more ambitious. They said, well, let's not just play music videos. Let's do other things. And meanwhile, Fox had launched the Fox Network, which was a broadcast network, a fourth one that was targeting younger people. They had Melrose Place. They had a couple of these soap operas. We said, well, maybe we can do a form of soap opera. So we developed, they developed this thing and they brought it to me. And I said, you know, we can't do this.

48:53It requires a lot of writers. We just don't have that kind of money. So I went back to John, Boona Murray was the production company. And we came back and he said, we got another idea. We're really good at post-production. Why don't we rent a loft in Soho, put like eight or nine kids in there and we'll just have cameras going and then we'll assemble it afterwards into this episodic television series. We'll call it the real world. It was the first real reality show series. And that didn't come about because of some brainstorm. Let's invent a new genre. It was like we were just too cheap to hire writers, and we thought of another way to do this.

49:28And it turned out to be a whole new genre for the whole television industry, which plagues us to this day. When was the Osbournes in the story? The Osbournes started in, like, I'd say 1990, and that was really classic. Brian Graydon was in a car with, we were shooting something with Ozzy and Sharon. And he said something, oh, Sharon, your life is crazy. He says, you know, if you had a camera crew following me around, you wouldn't fucking believe what my life is. So I was like, well, okay, let's do it. So that, that was like a one minute pitch, a 15 second pitch. So that became the first celebrity reality show.

50:06And that was a big hit. And then I remember you used to do big events around spring break that were kind of a big deal. Yes, we found out that when we decided to shake things up around 86, 87, I had Pittman on the way out because he left and appointed me president. He said, well, let's set up a bunch of groups to figure out where do we go from here? I was convinced we had to continue to reinvent ourselves and reimagine ourselves. We can't just play music videos back to back with a couple of tour dates. We could be more substantive and we could grow this business if we do other things. And let's get out of the studio because they're just cooped up in there.

50:42Let's go to events and tag on to events. Let's do spring break. And we would do a whole bunch of spring break. You just pick places where kids would go. Yeah. And kids, what we found out was kids love to see themselves on camera. Hence, that sort of led to the reality show appeal. You know, we would get all these bands. Mr. and Mr. would come and people would play at spring break. And we'd never be invited back. I mean, we did Daytona Beach. They would pay us money to come and set up. And the city fathers would throw us out. and then we'd go to some other town. And, you know, we were gradually being banned in all these towns, but other towns kept thinking, well, we'll give it a try.

51:16So it was liberating for people to get out of the studio and for us to do these types of things. And it was good for the production people because they got really good at this. We were really good at putting on events. I mean, the Video Music Awards, the movie awards, all these types of shows would be also... The Video Music Awards could bring in$75 million in one night. How did the VMAs come to be? In 1984, we said, we're doing all right now. Let's see if we can create a show that sort of puts music videos on a stage and sort of, maybe we do something that's the antithesis of the Grammys, which at that point in time was a very stale show.

51:54And let's make it irreverent. And our first one was in Radio City Music Hall in 1984 with Dan Aykroyd and Bette Midler were the hosts. And that's when Madonna came out and did Like a Virgin. Amazing. We'd always have these sort of seminal moments at the shows. And so it became really popular. And it was good because, again, it was our people became more proficient producers. Why did Pittman decide to leave MTV? We had tried to do a leveraged buyout in the last days. We tried to buy the company ourselves because we were owned by Warner Communications and American Express. American Express wanted out.

52:30Warner Communications was suffering because of the Atari debacle. They had to sell stuff. So they wanted to sell us. So we said, well, we'll sell it to us. So we got involved with Teddy Forceman of Forceman Little trying to do a leveraged buyout. This is 1986. And then instead, Steve Ross decided to sell it to these fellows who had a company called Viacom. Why did he decide that? Because they wanted to pay a few dollars more. I see. He got on a helicopter in New York City. And when he got off in East Hampton, he had changed his mind. And that said - He had told you he would sell it to you first?

53:03We were close. I mean, and Bob was kind of doing the deal. So this was Bob's deal. I see. And it was like, okay, fuck this. Everyone was thinking maybe the blooms off the rose at MTV. I'm going to get out of here. So John Sykes left, Les Garland left, a lot of the original people left. But before Pittman left, he made me president. And I'm thinking, hey, I just got out of Afghanistan and India for eight years. This is a good idea. I'm going to see if we can, I'm going to stay here. Keep it alive. Keep it alive. I mean, we're going to have another incarnation. We're just getting warmed up. But the problem was we had these owners who were really kind of old school, and they were not fun.

53:42What was Viacom's business at that time? At that time, they owned a series of TV stations. They were formed because they had the spinoff from CBS. They had all the syndicated library from CBS. Government mandated that. So they had bought Showtime. Then they had about a million cable subscribers in various small cable systems. They had a few radio stations, a few television stations, but they were not from our world. They didn't get us. So they came in and they didn't last long. I was made president and the guy didn't like, he said, you need a co-president to help you. They came out to see us. We were having a management retreat in Gurney's and Montauk.

54:21Rather than tell us, we're really happy to own you. You've built this great thing. We see this great future for you. We know you have a lot of stock options, and our lawyers tell us we don't have to pay them off. That was the only silver lining of this deal. This is what they told us. And by the way, you spend too much money running your operation. These guys were sort of penny pinchers. So they were displaced by Sumner Redstone. How soon? Within a year. Wow. Bob Pittman called me up one day. He'd already left, and he said, listen, I just met this billionaire Sumner Redstone. He's at the Carlisle Hotel.

54:55He's trying to buy Viacom. He thinks the guys running it are running it into the ground. He's this crusty guy, and he needs this inside information. I had been told a week earlier that if any of us got caught talking to him, we'd be fired. But I was ready to sort of leave myself. They were making my life miserable. So I snuck into the Carlisle Hotel with Jerry Laybourne, who ran Nick, and we saw him and gave him the whole pitch that we had given these guys, saying that there's a whole world that's opening up and we could be like the leader in kids, teens, and young adult programming and cable and satellite by investing money in this and taking it somewhere.

55:33Great. We can do films and this, that, and the other thing. And I basically, I was trying to sell a company we didn't own to a man we didn't know, thinking that maybe this guy is better than these guys. So who knows? We have nothing to lose. So he ended up stepping up and buying Viacom in a big, famous takeover battle in the late 80s. And I became sort of Sumner's golden boy in a way. What was your relationship with him like? One of the first things he did when he got the company was hire this guy, Frank Biondi, who kind of beat HBO, who became my, he was the CEO of Viacomp. Sumner was sort of the chairman.

56:10And Sumner for the first few years would defer to Frank. I got to learn how the whole business were because now I'm on like the operating committee. And I loved Frank, but Frank got fired because he was getting credit for making a lot of good moves and Sumner wasn't getting, he's sort of Trumpy, wasn't getting the kind of credit he felt he deserved. So he fired Frank and he said, I'm going to have two other guys run it and report to me. What did Frank do after? Frank got a job, worked for Universal. He became a CEO out there and he did a bunch of other things. He ended up living next to O.J. Simpson.

56:44That's what I always remember. That's my main takeaway. But I love Frank. I love this wife. It seems crazy that something's working and growing and taking that apart. It's just a wild idea. Ego. It's all about ego. And you can be predisposed not to like somebody because you think they're taking some of this sunshine away from you. And you overlook the fact that. It's his sunshine. He owns it. Yeah. Yeah. Right. You're petty. You want to get credit for everything. But Frank ran us with a real. light hand. I was there for 67 quarters when I was like the head of MTV networks. Every quarter, we were up what they would say on Wall Street, double digits.

57:25So we were the least of their problems. So they kind of left us alone. Sumner had meanwhile acquired Paramount Pictures. We had a seat at the Hollywood table. Then he went out and acquired CBS. What was Sumner doing before all this? He ran drive-in movie theaters. He was a theater exhibitor. Started with a handful of drive-ins and then moved in into, you know, he became a pretty national amusements. Some of the nicer movie theaters in the country. You know, he was 65 when he bought Viacom. He wanted to become a Hollywood player and build an entertainment conglomerate at that age, which at that point in time, I thought, wow, man, that's old.

58:00Little did I know. But he was very tenacious and litigious and he was always nice to me. I realized that people who tried to really get close to him ultimately would leave early. They would not last. So I just was in my own little environment. We were in a different building and I would endear myself to him like, hey, we're going to do a Unplugged with Tony Bennett, your pal, you know, from your era. So, you know, he got to meet Tony Bennett. He just loved that kind of stuff. Tell me more about Unplugged. That was a great series. What was the first one? Do you remember? The first one was like, we were, we were going to Bon Jovi book to do a video music awards at the Universal Amphitheater.

58:42And then John said, well, you know, a couple of guys in a band can't make it. It's just me and Richie. And then I think it was Alex Coletti. I don't know if you know Alex. Great guy. He said, well, look, we'll have a B stage out there. Why don't you and Richie come out and play acoustically? It was huge. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the show. Because we were at the height of all this, not heavy metal, but I mean, it was all those bands with the W Warrant and Winger and all this kind of hair, the hair band era. It's like, let's bring the temperature down. Let's do something a little more authentic that has some credibility, stuff that we like.

59:16So we did one with Paul McCartney and we did hundreds of them. That became a real hit to the point where Eric Clapton's Unplugged sold 25 million records. Yeah. Tears in Heaven. Tears in Heaven. And Bob Dylan did it. I think there was a great Neil Young one. Neil Young. They did one at the Ed Sullivan Theater. This is before Colbert took it over. They really rolled out the carpet and did a great job. And he had that band playing with him. And then they decided, they got back and looked at it and said, we must have been a little kooky or something. We're going to redo it. So they redid it in LA.

59:47I remember going to both tapings. I was a big Neil Young fan. Yeah, he had a great one. And then one of the best ones was Nirvana, of course, with Kurt. That was one of the epic ones. There was, you know, so many of them were great. And I keep wondering why they weren't playing them. I mean, you know, the Paramount people, they changed their name to Paramount. and MTV, they just, things all stayed on shelves. They didn't play any music. All the music people there left. They stopped playing music. It was just a bunch of C-level reality shows. It had no vibe and it had no reason to exist. And they just kind of disbanded it.

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1:02:02Do you know how the Dire Straits song, Money for Nothing, came about? Yes, I have a good story about that in the book. Tell me. That was like the gift that kept giving. Mark Knopfler wrote it sort of as a takedown of MTV. He was in a TV store and look at these yo-yos. That's the way they do it. Money for nothing, chicks for free. So he wrote this song. Sarcastic song. Sarcastic song, like we couldn't care less. But it turned out he gets Sting to do the chorus, and it became an international hit. Now, this was the era in 1985 of the international supergroups, international pop stars. Be famous everywhere.

1:02:43This is before a lot of these countries had their own local stars to deal with. So everywhere you would go, this song was there. So when I would go to countries in Asia or in Europe, they knew about MTV from this song. We were very happy to have that song, but it was started as a takedown, yeah. That's great. I love it when songs take on a life of their own that no one can guess or control. When it even reverses its original mission, it's just such a great joke. Well, this was a great example of that, a reverse its original mission. Rather than knocking MTV and people going, oh, screw that, it was like, well, where do I get it?

1:03:21Yeah, we became the calling card of MTV. It's amazing. Tell me more about some of the early creative choices in the look and feel of the network. Yeah, we wanted it to look unlike anything else. And we wanted to draw from the sort of, you'd say that mashup of punk and graffiti and everything that was going down in art down in the early 80s. In fact, we even had Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel do art breaks for us. but we wanted to draw from that talent pool. We wanted to use full cell animation. Just the logo itself, we thought, made a great statement. We developed that logo, and we decided it's going to be a container, and we're going to fill it up and change it all the time.

1:04:03It's not going to be static. It's going to break all the rules of logo making that had ever existed. It would always change. In turn, it became one of the most famous logos of all time. So that was sort of a signature that let you know this was not like, you know, a normal kind of television network. And then we would try and just do really odd things that kind of worked as non-sequitur. So in terms of the style, the content, it was like we would do strange, offbeat, funny things. We'd try to have a sense of humor about us. We could make fun of ourselves. and it was effective because people people love that you if you've talked to people to this day they would say oh what i liked about mtv especially in its early incarnation was a lot of the funny animated stuff they would put up between the videos and the promos that we do we would have something like hey kids don't watch that watch this i mean it'd be simple little things and we just throw them in there and was it was really effective because we were even though we were working out of a midtown office building.

1:05:05We were trying to draw from that downtown, vibrant collision of all that stuff that was going on. Tell me about the idea of having VJs. Was that always there from the beginning? It was. You know, a lot of the early MTV people came from radio. Bob Pittman among them. They had DJs. So they were DJs, VJs. They were sort of a traffic cop. That was the original role was seen for them to be sort of like a traffic op. That was, this is, talk a little bit about this, talk a little about that. But it didn't really work as well as it did on a radio station because in a radio station, a DJ is sort of there in real time.

1:05:43He could take all calls from the audience. Here you're taping stuff out of sequence that's going to be dropped in. You're not actually doing it, but we hired a cross section of people to be the VJs. And it was felt, put a human face on the network. We needed to have another form to bolster our identity. VJs came and went, and we had incredible music DJs like Mark Goodman came out of the DJ world and others. At one point, I remember we even hired Frankie Crocker to work on VH1 and Don Imus, who were big radio guys. Was it obvious that you were going to be the guy to run MTV for the long haul, or was that not the case early on?

1:06:25yeah after Bob left I was like the guy and I did that for 17 years but then as the business got bigger and we launched like Comedy Central and TV Land and other networks and got another business I became sort of the head of MTV Network so I wasn't really running MTV per se I had brought in Judy McGrath and she was running MTV and then also VH1 was under her umbrella and a couple of other things, some of our digital enterprises. So I was, and that was probably somewhere in the 90s. So my hands-on role as we got to be bigger and bigger was less and less. Was the corporate job as much fun as the hands getting dirty job?

1:07:05No. The corporate job at MTV Networks was good because I was really dealing with all of our networks. But when I got the corporate job, when Sumner Redstone fired Mel Karmazin, he made Les Moonves and I co-presidents of the company. And that meant I was really in a whole other world. I was not going to deal with Wall Street guys. I was going to deal with bankers. I was going to deal with - It was a full corporate job. It was a full kind of corporate job. I still had my people reporting to me and I loved them and I still would go to shows. But I wasn't in there like I was and it wasn't as much fun.

1:07:44But I figured, hey, I'll give this a shot. I can learn a new trick or two. And I did. But then we split up the company into two pieces and I became the CEO of just Viacom and Les became the CEO of CBS Inc., two companies. Why did that happen? Our stock had stalled. We were like in now the mid 2000, 2005. And what was happening was that Apple and Yahoo and all of these digital companies were ascendant and they were really making a dent in our business. We were now called Legacy Media. And we really had to figure out a way to compete in this world. And at one point, Sumner said, well, look, we're going to cut this company in half.

1:08:25And we have the growth companies, which was MTV Networks, BET, Music Publishing, a couple of other things. And you'll be that because we're going to grow and we're going to morph into digital. And then the other part of the company, which was assembled over the years, included Simon and Schuster and Showtime and stuff that wasn't really growing fast. So there's two categories to stock, the value stocks that just throw off money and then the growth stocks. So they said the best way to do this, because buyers are confused, this was bullshit sold to us by investment bankers, was make two companies.

1:09:01It was the exact wrong thing to do at the exact wrong time because at that time, other companies were doubling up. They're figuring, I'm going to make my business, whatever legacy business I'm in, I'm going to make it bigger. Look at Disney. Bob Iger went out and bought Lucasfilm. He bought Pixar. He bought Marvel. I know we're content makers, but let's just be better at that. We're not going to get into social media. We're not going to do these kind of things. And that turned out to be a better strategy, which was to bulk up rather than to kind of slim down. But that was the pitch of it. That was the pitch.

1:09:31The same guys who collected a lot of fees assembling this conglomerate. Like, what do you got a movie studio for that's not going to grow? What do you got Simon & Schuster for? That's not going to grow. But they were sold as good things to buy at the time. They were blue chip companies as well, weren't they? They were blue chip companies, but they weren't... Fast growth. They weren't fast growing like these digital guys. And we were never going to catch up to these digital guys. But Sumner was a man who was obsessed not so much about the operations of his company and how it worked the way that, say, Rupert Murdoch, his arch nemesis, would.

1:10:06He was obsessed with the stock price because that would bring his net worth up. And they told him that the way the stock price is going to rise is if you disassociate yourself with these value-driven companies whose stocks aren't going high. So he was sold a bill of goods and followed it through. And there were people on my team who said, well, I think we'd be better off that way because it's kind of messy dealing with Les Moonves' guys because we got to agree on certain things. We can't move fast. And let's just be on our own track, if you will. So then what was under your world at that time?

1:10:44Famous Music Publishing, MTV Networks, which was MTV, Nickelodeon, Nick at Night, Comedy Central, the whole international enterprise. We had a big consumer products business. We bought some digital websites. But it was mostly MTV Networks, Famous Music, and BET. How did BET get in the picture? BET was bought by Mel. Mel Carmazin bought it for$3 billion in the early 90s because Bob Johnson wanted to get out. And Mel said, well, listen, this is a good business. It could be doing better. I could buy it and fit it in with the other basic cable networks I have because it's a good fit. We could eliminate some jobs in the back office.

1:11:22Sort of a classic consolidation play. And that's how BET came to be. So Bob wrote off with a good payout. And Deborah Lee came in to run it. What was the story of Comedy Central? How did that come to be? We were having a staff meeting one day and someone slips me a piece of paper that says HBO is announcing a basic cable comedy channel called the Comedy Channel. They're announcing this today. And I go, oh, man, that's bad news. HBO was like the most funded. They had an army of Ivy League educated people all over the country running around with cable systems. They did all these comedy specials with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams and so forth.

1:12:05And they're getting in the basic cable business, which is a very different business from the pay cable business. And if this works, they're going to come after us with a music channel and a kids channel because we were making loads of money. And they were looking for a way to grow their business. So within a couple of minutes, there was a fellow named Fred Seibert. We talked. He says, well, let's announce the comedy channel. I said, you know, if we announce a comedy channel today, the day of their release, we will be in every press release as a competitor to them. so they won't be able to say they're the first ones and they have a clear runway.

1:12:38Wow. We could throw a monkey wrench into their plans. We need to do it today. We don't have to have everything lined up, but we can just leak it and put it out there. And by the end of the week, we'll have a name, we'll have a format, and we can talk some kind of bullshit with mirrors and things. So I called my boss and put him on the speakerphone, Frank Biondi, who had been fired by Michael Fuchs. And this comedy channel was his brainchild. and Frank Frank remembered and I said Frank I'm here with my team I'm going to put you on the box you know talk to them we think that the entrance of your pal Michael Fuchs and HBO into our business is treacherous they've announced this thing and what we want to do is announce our own thing even though we have no idea what it is but let's get in the game let's put our hat in the ring and he goes do it so we did it and so this began what people would call the comedy wars and they said well their idea was to rip funny clips from stand-up sitcoms movies and kind of run it like mtv where you'd have a comedy jockey whatever they would call it and it would be sort of a random thing like what we did with music but we had tried that on vh1 we knew it didn't work so we had that you know kind of tucked away in our brain and i said you know we also had a thing called nick at night which was we took a lot of old line sitcoms and stuff and kind of sex them up and I watched it some brilliant, you know, we did a lot of fun animation and stuff in between it.

1:14:02So that's what we decided to do. We would be a T we, we call ourselves ha the TV comedy network. I went out, we got the Mary Tyler Moore library. We did deals with like Brian Grazer and Ron Howard at imagine we did deals with Rob Reiner and Castle Rock. And I hired Fred Silverman who was the big programmer of the big three networks, a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it look like we were really doing something, even though we weren't going to go on the air for another year and a half. We announced advertiser deals with advertisers we had. So the bottom line was none of the cable operators would take either of us because we were the two big cable programming companies and they didn't want to piss us either one off.

1:14:42So we were all sitting there with these ideas and HBO had launched, but no subscribers, sort of like what MTV was going through in the early 80s. So at the end of the day, after we each spent hundreds of millions of dollars, Frank and Michael Fuchs called it a truce. And they said, why are you going to do a deal with John Malone for half of your company to get distribution? We should just be doing this together. Let's put our hatchets away and go at it. So we can announce a new Comedy Central. So the day before it was going to be announced, Frank calls me up and says, well, I got But interesting piece of news.

1:15:18Michael Fuchs says that before we consume the deal, he doesn't want you to be at the press conference. He doesn't want you in the room. So I have obviously annoyed him. And I said, well, that's like a first grader. That's bullshit. I run the division. I'm in charge of it. I can't be in the room. And he goes, well, you know, I want to get the deal done. And it's no big deal. Let's just get it over with. So, you know, I squaddled and that's what happened. And so we started Comedy Central. And then a couple of years later, Fuchs was gone and called it then Comedy Central. And, you know, we had a few things there that put us on the radar.

1:15:54Matt and Trey, South Park, which Doug Herzog did, that was like a three-minute pitch. That became a big hit show for us. So it took a big hit that even though we had six episodes, millions of people signed up for Comedy Central just to see that. Those six episodes. Yeah. That was it. Yes. And then we started The Daily Show. And we had this guy, Craig Kilborn, for two years. Les Moonves hired him away to be late night on CBS. And we got Jon Stewart, who we'd worked with before. And Jon's idea was, let's do a show on political humor. And people were saying, I don't know, you know, political humor.

1:16:28But we're a creator-based company. Let's see what Jon has up his sleeve. And it turned out it was The Daily Show and this incarnation that's run like dozens of Emmys and everything like that. and spawned Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell and John Oliver and this whole cast of characters and now inhabit television and a bunch of other places. And then HBO sold their half to us, so we owned all of it. Yeah, Comedy Central was a lot of fun. Yeah. Bill Maher started his career there. Jimmy Kimmel started his career there. Dave Chappelle. He started with the Chappelle show on Comedy Central. So again, sort of like MTV, a good eye for emerging talent and a willingness to stick with that talent and let them perform and we'll be the beneficiaries, hopefully, of what they're doing.

1:17:16And I love that also started as we don't want the competition taking this space. So we'll just throw our hats in the ring and it turns into this juggernaut. Yeah, worth billions of dollars. And it turned out, you know, we didn't have any idea what it would be. You can't really know in advance. Yeah. But you just make the best choice you can in the moment. Let's improvise, use our instincts, let's put our hat in the game. What's the worst thing that could happen? We fail, we pull out. We were good at hiding our bluff.

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1:20:04Tell me about writing the book. I never thought I'd ever write a book, but I had written a bunch of magazine articles I like to write. So I said, well, I don't want to make this a business book. You know, that's kind of boring, but let me just find a series of stories that's to make it more of an adventure book. that covers a little bit of my young life, but then a lot about my business in Asia and my travel experiences and adventures and what sort of made me and what my values became to be. And then the MTV networks and Viacom piece, and then I get fired and I go off and I go back to Afghanistan for 12 more years.

1:20:40Really? Yes. I went back for 12 more years to work at a TV network. This fellow I had met in my last years of Viacom, this incredible guy, He's still one of my best friends. He grew up in Australia. He was an Afghan. His father had been ambassador to Saad Massani. His father had been ambassador to Japan. And when the communist coup happened in 78, he was a young kid living in Japan. They got put out on the street. They were like homeless, homeless Afghan diplomats. And then they went to Australia, grew up, went to college. He went back to Afghanistan and got a license to open a radio station. Then he got a license to run a TV station.

1:21:17He knew nothing about any of this. Meanwhile, he got in touch with me because his girlfriend heard that there was some guy at MTV who used to have a clothing business in Afghanistan, and she was starting one. So she wanted to meet me, and I couldn't wait to meet her because I hadn't talked to anybody from that country in years. And she said at one point, well, you've got to meet my boyfriend. He's the Rupert Murdoch of Afghanistan, at which point I like coughed up my Pellegrino. I go, what? Yes, he's starting the first TV network there. So we became fast friends. And when I got fired from Viacom by Redstone, after Bono called me, he called me, he said, come back to Afghanistan.

1:21:55And I'm thinking Perfect Circle. I started my career there. I left because of a coup and the communists. I went into a media business, learned it, and now I'm getting cashiered again. And what better to go back to a country that I love and help people there? because this enterprise did more to change the attitudes of Afghans than all the$2 trillion we wasted. You know, connect Afghans to each other for the first time, connect them to the outside world. Let's help socialize them and do things. And we had versions of The Daily Show, a big news operation. So I love going back there. I mean, I wouldn't be there all the time, but I would get four trips a year.

1:22:35I remember telling my wife, Kathy, I said, I'm so happy. I'm working with Saad now. I'm on the board. I'm mentoring people. I'm a consultant. and I get four free trips to Afghanistan. And she goes, what's second prize, five free trips? But I was back there in my element. So rather than take another big job at a big company that's going to pay me boatloads of money, I said, if I follow my spirit, I want to go back there. I mean, Kabul was so changed and they had been through this 40 years of war and the Taliban and so forth. And then we also started business in Yemen. We started a business in Ethiopia.

1:23:12which I loved because the music scene in Ethiopia was fantastic. And there was no war going on there, so I really liked going there. At one point, I had even a satellite network going into Iran. That's amazing. Why did you get fired from MTV? Sumner hired me to be the CEO of Viacom, and I was for eight months because he was upset that I did not buy MySpace. Our big challenge in the mid-2000s was the paradigm has changed totally now. We have things like YouTube where people can upload, share, and comment and have a peer-to-peer relationship. The gatekeeper status of what we used to do is over. If people want to see, say, a music video, they can just watch Nirvana with their mouse.

1:23:54They don't have to wait for it to come around on a linear network. So how do we get into this new action? Well, we met with Mark Zuckerberg. We were the first people to make a bid for Facebook. He came in to see us in 2005. We bid$1.8 billion. Can you imagine that? That's like walking around money for him. Of course, he turned us down. And then MySpace had been out there. We had looked at it and kicked the tires. We weren't convinced we were going to buy it. But Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it over a weekend when I was in Hawaii with my family. And he bought it with no due diligence. He thought that MySpace was the future.

1:24:27Social media was the future. He was right. But when they bought it, they just junked it up with advertising. And the whole thing fell apart. He sold it for$35 million. But Sumner was upset. He had never even heard of MySpace. But he heard that Rupert Murdoch, his archenemy, bought it. And I had been looking at it and didn't buy it. And Rupert's now on the cover of all these magazines as some kind of digital genius. And he isn't. And plus he had his estate lawyer, Philippe Dumas, was very eager to have my job, as it turns out. That was running Paramount also, Paramount Pictures. What was that like?

1:24:59That was interesting. You know, I had to hire a new studio head. And we had been a producer there. We had made like 40 movies under the guidance of Sherry Lansing, who was at Paramount. But when Don Dolgen left, Sherry became the head of Paramount reporting to me. I loved Sherry, but she decided she was going to leave. So I had to find out who else I was going to hire. I also had to figure out, how do I learn the movie business? I'm like a table guy. And Bob Daly from Warner Brothers, when he was with Terry Semmel, they ran Warner Brothers Pictures for decades. They were the kings of Hollywood.

1:25:35They tried to hire me to run the Warner Music Group. So I had a relationship with them. I didn't take that job. So I asked Bob Daly if he would be my mentor and teach me the business. So I would always spend the summers in our offices in L.A. So I would go over from my Santa Monica office to his house in Bel Air. And he was like the Bob Daly film school, P &Ls, financing, international distribution. So I kind of got smart, smart enough to pretend I knew the business. And then it turns out I had to hire a new studio head. And I thought that the culture at Paramount could use some upgrading. It was a bit old school.

1:26:10So I was in Beirut one day trying to sell MTV to people there to do a Middle Eastern version of it with someone. And I had been out all night with a horrible hangover. And David Geffen calls me from Hollywood. And I'm like looking out my window, squinting at the Mediterranean. And he says, I got the perfect guy to run Paramount. I go, good. I need it. We've been interviewing people, but none of them, all the people I wanted, like Stacey Snyder, were under contract. I need somebody. He says, we have to get someone from outside the business. We're not going to get a former studio head. Brad Gray.

1:26:46Brad Gray ran Grylstein Gray. He was at the peak of his power. Sopranos, Bill Marsho. So I had several meetings with Brad. He made a good case. I would sneak over and meet him at his house in the Palisades. I had to meet Sumner. I had to meet Bob Daly. Bob gave him the thumbs up. So I went with Brad. And Brad became the new studio head. Brad was an ambitious guy, and he kept that ambition kind of quiet. He had impeccable credentials from a distance. But just as he's getting into the job, this Pelicano scandal reared its head. And he had two front page stories about how he had hired Anthony Pelicano for Gary Shandling and some other things.

1:27:27He didn't look good. He looked like he was a part of a nasty story, which really kind of got him off to the wrong foot in Hollywood. On the other hand, we decided we needed to scale up. We needed more movies in the pipeline and we could buy the DreamWorks library. They had a library of 60 films, Apollo 13, a bunch of good films. Good films. Yeah. And it was Geffen and Kassenberg and Spielberg. I knew Geffen really well. I knew Kastenberg very well. He was like our biggest client for years with DreamWorks Animation. But we ended up buying DreamWorks and putting it together with Paramount, which I thought was brilliant.

1:28:02And that's when I got fired, right after that happened. And then when I left, that relationship, which I had such high hopes for, kind of fell apart because Brad did things that were annoying and pissed off David and Steven Spielberg. and they eventually bought their way out of it. And Philippe Dumont, my successor, kind of said, you know, if DreamWorks leaves, they don't matter to us. That's not the kind of thing you want to say in Hollywood. No. But this is not my problem anymore, because I have fled the coop. Did your relationship with Sumner continue after you left? He fired me on a Labor Day weekend.

1:28:41He liked to fire people on holiday weekends. He fired Frank on a Fourth of July. He fired Mel on a Memorial Day. I used to say, if I can make it through Labor Day, I'm good for another year. But sure enough, he called me on Labor Day. I had been playing tennis up in Malibu. And I came back. I had all these messages on my machine like, where the fuck are you? But anyway, I went over there. I knew I was going to get fired because I called the head of lawyer who worked for me at general counsel. He said, well, you better call Sumner. He's looking for you. I can say, I can see so. Yeah. I said, is this the ultimate conversation, Mike?

1:29:17he goes well i'll leave it up to sumner so i knew then i was getting fired yeah so he told me uh i've got bad news for you and me sit down on an ottoman across from him in his in his franklin canyon home and the bad news is the board wants me to fire you and i just got up and left that was it and i didn't see him for years until i saw him at a restaurant and he came over and grabbed me at the shoulders and i said hello but then i never really had a relationship with him after that I couldn't believe that would happen. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Yeah. Now I'm off on another chapter.

1:29:52Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. It seems like each of the things that maybe seemed like didn't go well always led to something more interesting after. Which leaves me to be blindly ambitious about some other thing going wrong. I've been very blessed to be born at the right time when kind of figure you win the birth lottery being born in the United States in the middle of the 20th century as a white guy. Did you learn about yourself at all through writing the book? Yeah. Tell me about that. I had always been going so fast, Rick. I never really had time to pull back and look. I wasn't stripping things out.

1:30:26And I realized this all seemed like it was almost part of a master plan. Everything kind of led perfectly from one thing to another with the timing being right. And the values that I developed and learned in these early years when I was either sort of king of the road, bartending around, or working and living in really tumultuous Asia in those years, really equipped me really well when paired up with my passion for music and whatnot, for my job at MTV Networks and Viacom. And then when I left, I thought I'd rather than take a big job at another company, I'd do a bunch of things with people that I liked.

1:31:03And I did a thing with Oprah. Bono called me to run the One campaign in Red, and that got me back into Africa, which I love to do. And I had been really affected by extreme poverty in my years in Asia. And so I was really excited to do that. I've been the board chair there for 18 years. I went back to Afghanistan for 12 years. So the Taliban sort of put a video out about me and I said it wasn't safe to go back. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. Well, they said I was the teacher of Sad Mosseini, who runs this godless bunch of television networks. and I was a CIA spy in Afghanistan in the 70s, which I said I should not, probably shouldn't go back for a while.

1:31:48When are expertise and experience negatives? I think they could be negatives when you're dealing with a new thing. If you're dealing with something that could be new and innovative, you might bring a little too much of that with you that could cloud your ideas. That's why John Lack said to me, we're looking for people with no experience in television. Yeah. Let's hire a bunch of people who have no idea what they're doing, who are smart and entrepreneurial. And if you have too much expertise and experience, you could get a little full of yourself anyway. Think you know something. Yeah, you lose your humility.

1:32:26It's dangerous. How would you compare MTV to Sesame Street?

1:32:33Well, they both went after discrete audiences, and that's all they did. I mean, for kids. And Sesame Street was distinctly pro-social on top of being really cleverly animated. We did a Sesame Street deal in Afghanistan. I didn't know that. Yeah, we got the Sesame Street thing. We did a whole version in Farsi. That's great. And we had to add a couple of other characters. We couldn't keep the count because in Afghanistan, they don't like vampires. But they were self-contained creative units. So they were quite similar. They created most of their programming themselves. In the case of MTV, yes, we licensed music videos, but the bulk of the other stuff we did ourselves.

1:33:16And we relied on a cast of characters, and we were on for long periods of time. And I feel like there's some parallel there in just how new Sesame Street was when it came out and how new MTV was when it came out. And they were both doing things in a new way and both had this meteoric rise. In both cases, you would say, why didn't someone think of that earlier? Yeah. That's an obvious thing. Tell me the difference between entrepreneurs, which you were before you got into corporate life, and the mentality of the corporate people. Entrepreneurs will look for openings, will move quickly, do not thrive well in really structured organizations.

1:34:00They're generally good at people picking and they have a lot of energy. Whereas if you're in a big corporation, you're not necessarily a cog in a machine. It depends how the corporation's set up. But it's a less lively life and it's more procedural and more drawn out. Things don't move as fast. Something's in development or we're going to put it in turnaround or let me ask so-and-so. Let's have a meeting. There's a lot of meetings when you're in a corporate life. Where if you're around entrepreneurs, they don't like a lot of meetings. If they have them, they want them to be quick. And it sounds like the example of throwing your hat in the ring for comedy was not a typical corporate move.

1:34:39No, and we always was conscious of that. Like, how do we maintain, be a spry entrepreneurial company that can improvise and take risks and not be something stuck in its past? Let's continue to reinvent whatever we're doing and let's just try new things. Let's take risks. And let's not be a stodgy old company. Let's not have a dress code. Let's not do a lot of things that regular companies do. If we have a Christmas party, let's make it really wild. Tell me about Vice. Ah, Vice. When I was the CEO of Viacom, Spike Jones came to me with two guys from Vice, Shane Smith and Eddie Moretti. And Spike, who I loved, was a great source.

1:35:23He brought us the Jackass Gang way back. He loved all these kind of genre magazines and marginal people and looking around. So he thought the Vice guys were great. And they were at the time trying to do a deal with MTV for some kind of digital thing. And they were having troubles. And they thought that the MTV guys didn't get it. So they went to Spike. And Spike said, well, look, maybe let me get you a meeting with Tom. Maybe we can break the log jam. So they come into my office. And they sit down. They tell me what they're doing. And Spike said, you know, these guys are like the truffle pigs of cool.

1:35:59They're on the edge. They're doing stuff nobody else is doing. They have their eye out. They're entrepreneurs. They built a business. They want to migrate it up to a bigger level. And Shane got up and made a presentation. He said, you know, we're all the trouble spots. We think that the birth of YouTube is the biggest thing to happen. This is like the same year YouTube debuted. You know, they're going to need content. And I'm thinking in the back of my head, well, I need content. I need someone who can make content for me that's compelling and doesn't cost a fortune. I mean, the people at MTV now, some of them have agents.

1:36:32It's really gotten inflated and bureaucratized in a way. So these guys were raw entrepreneurs. They operated lean. They were doing things in places I really cared about. So they said, we got a video we'll show you. So they showed me this video. And on the cover of the video was an Afghan truck. The video consisted of three segments they had done. They had gone to this border town between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which used to sell all opium and hashish and now sells weapons. And they're in there shooting off AK-47s and doing all this gonzo stuff, dressed up like Afghans. And I'm thinking, this is hilarious.

1:37:09And then they go to Chernobyl and they're going to go around looking for werewolves with weapons. This is before the Ukraine war, obviously. Yeah. And they have cocktails with them. And then they have one about like we're visiting pygmies in the Congo. I go, this is weird stuff. So, okay, let's do a separate deal on your video business. We'll call it VBS.TV. That would be it. And you keep your magazine business as it is. I said, we would fund it. And I did it. And then I got fired. So I'm gone. They didn't get along at all with my successor. Shane is a character. Meanwhile, in 2009, three years after I left, I get a text from Shane.

1:37:48He goes, Tommy Gunn, he used to call me. We need to have some drinks. Meet me in Williamsburg. So I'm like, I go over and meet him in Williamsburg. I said, what has happened since we last chatted? They've built a business. They built a suite of digital channels. They're getting millions of views. They have a library of the weirdest stuff you can imagine. He was with Eddie Moretti again. And when I came into the bar, it was like I had three shots of tequila in front of me. It was at a place in Williamsburg. He goes, say hello to your three little friends. Drink those and we'll talk. So it was that kind of night.

1:38:20And then I remember they took me to a restaurant. And then next thing, they threw me into a black car. We go to the box. Everybody at the box, you would think the president of the United States showed up. I'm thinking, who are these guys, man? So anyway, well, we're trying to really amp up the business now. Why don't you come on board, help us raise some money? And I got them involved with this company, Rain. I got them like$20,$30 million from Rain. And they put me on the board, made me an advisor. And I said, this is fun. This reminds me of me in the old days. This really reminded me of the day where Shane was surrounded by all these bearded guys living in these warehouses in Brooklyn.

1:38:57They all had the Gold Vice ring. So I really enjoyed it. They wanted to start a TV network, which I told them was a mistake. Shane was a hard person to be a mentor to. He's an amazing salesperson, but he was transfixed with doing deals. Deals, deals, deals, deals, deals. I mean, we had deals with News Corporation. We had deals with Disney. I mean, A &E invested, all these Silicon Valley people invested. People kept investing money in this thing. And he huffed and puffed it and blew it up like no one else could have. But then they had an opportunity to sell it to Disney, and they blew it. Then for more money, they did a deal with TPG, this really tough-as-nails private equity company.

1:39:37And they basically borrowed a lot of money that they said was an investment, but they had to pay at a high interest rate. And it kind of put the company into a death spiral. and people began to leave and it was not a happy ending. But you were attracted to getting back to the counterculture. Exactly. And not getting back to it, but doing a good job at it. Look, Shane, for all his faults, he had an amazing amount of good points. I mean, he really wanted to inform a younger generation about what was going on in the rest of the world that they had largely ignored. This was a part of the world that I was heavily emotionally invested in and had spent time in.

1:40:12I had him get the deal at HBO went and took him to Plepler and Plepler signed him up, brought in Fareez-Akari, brought in Bill Maher. And that really put him on the map. And that was one of the most popular shows on HBO. Yeah. And we ran it for six years. Then we got Josh Strangle to come in and be the producer. He's great too. Josh is great. So all of this was going great until there was just an over-ask, an over-focus on deals. And all of a sudden we're not operating like an entrepreneurial outfit. It's like a thing where we're pissing away a lot of money, wasting a lot of time, spending money on things you shouldn't be spending money on.

1:40:45And someone wants to buy you and you over negotiate it and goodbye. But it was a fun ride. I bet. I mean, a lot of billions of dollars were lost. How does corporate culture eventually undermine successful creative ventures? It does if the corporate culture is the wrong culture. You know, your corporate culture, if it's one that stays nimble and respects creativity and isn't involved in just trying to grow a tree to the sky. And if you have a healthy culture and in that company are a lot of creative people and there's a line outside your door of young people who want to come work there, you've got a culture that can continue to work.

1:41:26The problem has been, there's companies that existed like that, which you saw a lot of in the record business. You had a lot of these independent labels like Island and A &M And they all got gobbled up into these roll-ups. So now when we started MTV, there was 40 record company sellers, two and a half. I don't think that's been good for creativity because everybody now is facing this thing about earnings. Our earnings have to be up there. We can't have a lot of mistakes. Puts a lot of pressure on people, which causes people to slow down. A lot of the creative cultures kind of tended to fade away because the places that had them that we knew got assimilated into larger public companies where all of a sudden you're playing now by public company rules.

1:42:11Absolutely. And it sounds like you were lucky that over the years, even in your corporate situations, there'd be someone like Frank Biondi that you resonated with and they allowed you to do your thing. Right. Because two things would happen. Like Frank was a good and smart guy and he knew we were doing something he didn't fully understand, but it was working. And it was the same with Mel Carmazin, who had a reputation as a really hard-ass business guy running radio stations. But he also kind of let us go with a light hand. Even if you're delivering good results, there's a probability that you're going to get a boss who says, well, I want to get in there and roll up my sleeves.

1:42:47That's sort of what happened when I left. I'm going to roll up my sleeves and see, do we really need Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart? Do we really need two of those guys? You start hearing stuff like that, and you know everybody's going to leave. Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young. I guess I didn't believe when I was young that the world was going to change the way it has. I was unable to foresee some of the big geopolitical shifts and things. I think part of that was just that I was young. I didn't believe that you could get a job in the entertainment business and have such fun.

1:43:24I didn't believe that I could have a career that actually would be fun and adventurous. I always thought that growing up and getting out of school and getting a grown-up job was going to consign me to a life of conformity and being the organization man. It wouldn't be as joyful. But it turned out that wasn't true.

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1:45:24Thank you.