November 25, 2025 • 40 mins
Tom Freston’s resume is real, but reads like fiction: he served cocktails in the Caribbean, created a fashion brand in India, co-founded MTV, became CEO of Viacom… and after he was unceremoniously fired, he helped launch a TV network in Afghanistan and became an advocate for global health initiatives. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s written an extraordinary memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu. So today Tom sits down with Mango to talk about some of those adventures, including the time he ended up in a sauna with David Bowie and Paul McCartney, how The Real World came to be, and why he believes TV can change the world.
Buy Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, or request it at your local bookstore or library!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey there are podcast listeners.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I'm Monga's starticular ak Mango, and Will is off today.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
But I've gotten an incredible treat for you. If you've
listened to the show, you know how much I loved
Nickelodeon as a kid. My friends and I in third
grade used to practice for Doubledare every day in the summer,
just waiting for the execs to call spoiler alert. They
never did, but I love the way Nickelodeon felt like
(00:52):
it was talking to me and really providing this channel
for me.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And then years later it was the same with MTV
and then Comedy Central, and weirdly enough, these channels were
something that I thought a lot about when Will and
I founded Mental Flaws years and years ago. Anyway, the
reason I am telling you any of this is that
for today's show, I am interviewing the wonderful Tom Freston,
(01:18):
one of the co founders of a scrappy little TV
channel called MTV, which grew into a massive, massive bohemo.
From MTV, he became president of MTV Networks, guiding Nickelodeon
VH one, Comedy Central, TV Land and all these other
channels through incredible eras of creativity. He is such a
(01:40):
hero to me. Then he became CEO Viacom. But the
truth is, none of this is the most interesting stuff
about him. After college, he hitchhiked across northern Africa. He
spent years in India running a clothing company. He even
helped launch a media network in Afghanistan. He is a
world traveler, a philanthropist, and best of all, he is
(02:03):
an incredible, incredible storyteller. So I was really excited when
he agreed to sit down with me and talk about
his new book. It's called Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbucktoo.
It is so good, such a wonderful read, and we're
going to talk about it here. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So I'm here with Tom Preston, author of Unplugged Adventures
from MTV to Timbuck two. It's out now. It is
an extraordinary book. I've got to say, this book reminded
me of two books I really love. One is The
Man Who Time Forgot and another one called Barbarian Days.
And Barbarian Days is about like surfing and chasing this
(03:05):
high of travel in a way. And the Man who
Time Forgot is about britt Hadden, who was the co
founder of Time magazine, and the way that they were
just so creative and inventive in the way they started
that magazine and so like, there's something about both of
those that really was inspiring to me. But first I
want to start with just who this book is made
out to. It's made out to your brother and your sons.
(03:26):
Can you tell me about why you dedicated to them?
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Well, I love my sons, that's obvious and it would
be true for any father. And my dear brother who
was my only sibling. He was a couple of years
younger than me. He helped me out a lot in life,
and he had a tragic death this last winter in
the Caribbean. He fell down a flight of stairs. I mean,
you never know when it hits you, and kind of
went into a coma and never came out.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
And what do you want your sons to know from
this book about your life?
Speaker 4 (03:53):
That their life is full of possibility, that they don't
have to be trapped into one thing. They can change
lines and find things that are maybe suited for them.
This is a time of great change in the employment area,
and a lot of businesses that have sort of lost
their luster, new ones that are emerging, and they should
not be afraid to start different chapters in their lives.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I love that, you know. I love openings of books.
And the opening to your book starts with the chainsaw,
which is just such an incredible image. Can you can
you talk a little bit about why you started your
book there?
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Well, I started my book because the opening scene is
me getting fired after you know, twenty six years at
this company, the company that started MTV and evolved into
something so much bigger, to several incarnations, and the chainsaw
was sent to me years earlier. This is sometime in
the nineties by the heavy metal band Anthrax. You know,
(04:47):
they were heavy metal band. They'd all autographed it, and
I used to get a lot of you know, gold
records since that jacket, stuff like that. But this was
a useful gift. And I was clearing out my office
after I got fired. I got fired in Los Angeles.
I came back to New York and I only wanted
to take a few things that were sentimental. But I
thought besides the sentimental photos and whatnot, you know, I
(05:09):
could use that chain, so I didn't have one, and
it'd be a useful gift, So I put it in
a banker's box with a few other things that was
a small one, and made my way down the elevator
to a lobby to exit.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
You talk about the exit from Viacom and you merge
there and they're just a sea of people waiting to
say goodbye to you, and love for you is palpable.
And it's funny because one of the producers on this
show worked at Comedy Central after you'd left, and she says,
like people still talk fondly about the Tom Freston era,
which is so sweet and also just a testament to
(05:44):
like all the fun and excitement and things you brought there.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
Well, we had a really unique culture, and I always
put the idea of us having a creative culture and
innovative culture really in the forefront. Is as how I
wanted this company to be, to edgy, to be you know,
casual and non hierarchical and risk taking and a place
at treasured creativity. And in my exit, as CNBC said,
(06:10):
there was like a thousand people in the lobby cheering
me on, cheering me out, give me a Heroes exit.
I had thought I could just sneak out, you know,
I have a bit of the imposter syndrome and a
mask had been ripped off now and I was depressed,
no doubt about it. But this gave me a great
lift off that still stays with me. I remember getting down,
(06:33):
getting through the lobby was all in slow motion. Down
the escalator into Times Square. I too my stuff into
a taxi got in rolled by the Broadway theaters, and
I said, you know, that was a good way to go.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
It's such an incredible career and obviously not where it stopped,
because there are so many amazing things that go on
after that. But take me back to the beginning of
your first interactions with TV and what meant to have
a TV in the household initially.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Well, I kind of grew up in a Leave It
to Beaver Way, if people out there remember what that
was about. That was sort of an all American post
war family, two brothers, a mother, and a husband, stay
at home mom. I grew up in the fifties. I
was an early baby boomer, and you know, television came
out black and white. We had one TV and we
would sit around and watch the shows of the day,
(07:25):
and you know, I mean one of the great moments
was in nineteen fifty six sitting around my family and
seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. I think
there was like sixty million people watching. It was like
like the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show years later,
but it was like a hurricane passed through the room,
and my mother and father were disgusted. My brother and
(07:48):
I were elated, and we kind of knew. I was
in sixth grade, we kind of knew that we were
going to grow up in a different world, with our
own music, with our own clothes, with our own style,
and we were sort of part of a new generation
that was really setting sale from the prior one, the
generation they would call the Great American Generation, the people
who fought in World War two and so forth. So
(08:09):
television was always there, and I followed a lot of
the shows, but I was in truth more interested in
the music of the era and spent a lot more
time listening to the early rock and roll radio stations.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
You know, one of the things that I've heard a
lot about the early MTV days is that most of
the people were hired were people who hated television. Did
you fall into that category?
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Well, when I got my job interview, they said, you know,
we're looking for people with absolutely no experience in television,
which is an unlikely line at a television company. But
it was the early stays of the cable programming era
and we were sort of the tip of the speer
out there with CNN, ESPN and cable was really just beginning.
It was mostly in rural areas, but they couldn't afford
(08:55):
to hire people who worked at the broadcast networks. There
was really only three or four places to work in
those days if you include PBS, and they didn't want
anyone bringing along any kind of expensive production habits, so
we had to sort of start from scratch, an event
from zero, And in retrospect, it was a brilliant move
to hire school teachers and people from radio stations and
(09:16):
record companies and me I came out of eight years
of living in Afghanistan and India, so it was a
great mixing pot of eccentrics and people who wouldn't normally
work in any kind of normal company. And we were
all on crusade either to you know, take Nickelodeon or
MTV across the nation and infuse it with our own
(09:38):
spirit and make it a very obvious counterpoint to the
traditional program that was being done on the networks. We
were the early narrow casters, as we were known, just
programming one thing to one audience as opposed to general
interest stuff like ABC, NBC and CBS.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's funny, there's like an old Garfield comic where they're
joking about narrowcasting and talking about like a food network,
and it's just a picture of lasagna, and I'm like
a picture of like a refrigerator or whatever, and not
really realizing that like a food network could be a
massive thing, or a music network could have a tremendous
influence on the world.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, we used to joke there could be a time network,
there could be all kinds of useless networks. But I
remember a man from the music industry, Bob Krasnow, came
to me once. He says, I got the greatest idea
in the world for you. This was nineteen eighty nine.
I was then the CEO of MTV Networks, which ruled
over you know, Comedy Central and pH one and MTV
and Nick and I got the greatest idea in the
(10:39):
world for you. Says, food is going to be the
new rock and roll. Chefs are going to be the
new rock stars. I thought he was crazy. I was
too trapped in my own thing and didn't have the
vision to think that this could possibly be true. But
sure enough, everything he said came out to be true.
And I missed the boat on that one.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, you mentioned that before where MTV you had been
traveling abroad. You've been in Afghanistan. Tell me about you
as a child. Were you adventurous? What were your thoughts
about the world beyond Connecticut where you were growing up.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
You know, we never went anywhere. My father fought in
World War Two and when he came back, he was
in the Pacific Theater. He didn't want to go anywhere,
and we only took one trip and that was like
sixty miles from our house to a mystic Connecticut where
they had some smelly old whaling ships. That was a
day trip. That was our only trip. So I was
sort of trapped there listening to radio from New York
(11:34):
City and gradually buying some record albums. And I was
a young boy. I was a stamp collector, and I
was always fascinated by exotic stamps, from you know, Africa
and Southeast Asia. I'd have stamps from Zanzibar and all
these faraway places. And you know, that, mixed in with
(11:55):
some shows of television about the French Foreign Legion in
Algeria and so forth, really captured my interest. But I
had only been in two states, New York and Connecticut
when I left to go to college on a bus.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And how is it that you end up working in
bars and various vacation towns during and after college.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
Well, I went to graduate school primarily to get out
of the draft. I went to business school, which turned
out to be a blessing in disguise. And when that
was done, I realized I'd been eighteen years in school.
I could use a break. And I had been sort
of entranced by the literature of the Beats, which was
all about you know, experience is a key thing in life,
(12:35):
not so much money, travel around. It's the world's greatest classroom,
build up a body of experiences. So that was one thing.
And then at the time, this was the late sixties
early seventies, freedom was in the air. Every other song
had something about hitting the road or leaving the road.
Joni Mitchell had a big album out called Blue, which
(12:57):
I loved and played incessantly. It was all about her
internet adventures, and my appetite was sort of wet and
ready to go. But I spent a year after school
tending bar in various resort towns Aspen, Saint Thomas, and
the Virgin Islands Martha's Vineyard that was known as sort
of life on the circuit. This was before mass tourism,
(13:17):
so I really was lucky in the sense that I
had a window to be in the Caribbean before the
big cruise ships and the resorts that you never leave.
Martha's in her Nassen were nowhere near the lux vacation
towns for billionaires. They were mostly filled with hippies and outlaws.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yes, hippies and outlaws, But you also ran into some
incredible company when you were in some of these places,
right like James Taylor shows off and some incredible musicians Sale.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Or Well, he was the big on Martha's Vinyard. He
had just sort of come out with his Sweet Baby
James album, and you know, it was sort of the
beginning of the year of the singer songwriters. And his
brother Alex, who I grew to New he had a
record store in town and they had speakers outside and
they would play incessantly James's two records all the time.
But I met James, I met Tom Rush, who was
(14:04):
a folk singer, and some other people, and that would
be something that that would be bumping into people for
the rest of my life. Out of the music business.
Twenty six years at this company, the company that started MTV,
and we're evolved into something so much bigger.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
We've got to take a quick pause.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
But back with Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
You know, on one hand you mentioned this like imposter syndrome,
and on the other hand you've talked about how your
dad is like really charismatic in this book and can
talk to anyone. Did you have a problem approaching celebrities
and things like that or did you grow into a
comfort with that. How did that emerge?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
You know, I was never a starstruck. I find it
kind of natural to talk to him, because, you know,
if you were able to get beyond the managers and
the record companies and talk directly to artists, you'd find
out they didn't have this huge aura around them. They
were approachable and they liked to talk you'd talk to
David Bowie, He'd want to know what books you were reading.
They'd be interested in you as much as you be
interested in them, so you could really speak to them
(15:18):
as if they were normal people, even though they might
have been traveling in many cases with a big entourage
around them. But I would say, of the everybody I met,
and over the years, I think I met every pop star,
movie star, president, magazine editor and so forth, it was
really the Beatles and David Bowie who were hitting shoulders
above all else and sort of the musical pantheon. But
(15:41):
even them, even those two, I got to know a
bit over.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Time, which just feels astounding the fact that you end
up later in Asana with David Bowie and Paul McCartney
and I want to talk about that, but before we
get to that, I am so fascinated with My twin
interests are like media and travel. Right Like, I was
(16:04):
an anthropology major, and one of the things I love
is just your ability to pick up and go to
Morocco and start traveling from there, and what drove you
to just leave everything and do that.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Well, after I spent a year on the road on
the circuit. If you will you know, tending bar and
resort towns. I got a job in a big New
York ad agency and I got on the fast track.
My first account was Gi Joe. This is an anti
war period, so we had to give him sort of
an honorary discharge and make him an action man. And
then I had a variety of other accounts that were
(16:37):
Procter and Gamble accounts. That was a big piece of
business for the agency. And I was going to be
assigned to charman toilet Paper, who had a big campaign
at a time called Don't Squeeze, a charman with this
character named mister Whipple, who research would show by nineteen
seventy three he was like the third most known and
admired man in America, which seemed incredulous. But I couldn't
(17:00):
really face the idea of selling toilet paper. And an
old girlfriend who was in Paris called me up and said,
you know you can't do that, Tom. Why don't you
quit your job and come with me. I'm going to
go across the Sahara Desert, which sounded really appealing to me,
as like impetus I needed. I had five thousand dollars saved,
so I was on a plane like a week later.
(17:22):
That sort of set in place. One of the major
decisions of my life kind of really freed me and
I was able to go out into the greater world
and learn a lot, build up my confidence, and learn
things that would ultimately help me a lot in my
business life.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
You know, It's funny. Before I went into magazines and
my friends and I started a magazine, I had worked
in advertising in India for a summer and I spent
the whole summer making a washing machine ads and like,
it was so creative and so fun and the people
around me were just like brilliant creatives. And on the
(17:59):
other hand, to spend your whole life making people feel
like one washing machine was better than other washing machine
when they were the same washing machine was just like
hard to imagine. But it feels like you found a
way to align your business and passions. Starting with being
in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Yeah, in my travels, I ended up in Afghanistan and India.
India was sort of the holy Grail in those days
in terms of traveling. And I had met this girl
in Greece who had lived in Nepole and she used
to make clothes in India and Afghanistan and put them
in trunks and take them overland and sell them like
in beach hotspots in Greece and Italy in the summertime.
(18:37):
She had her own little vertically integrated enterprise. So I
fell in love with Afghanistan from the first day I
got there. It seemed like people think Afghanistan's a place
at constant war, but this was a tail end of
fifty years of what they called the Golden Age. There
was no war. Afghanistan was steadily moving into trying to
(18:58):
embrace a form of marginity, and the people were welcoming.
And the few tourists would see a poster there that
said visit Afghanistan and see the world's friendliest people. If
you went, then that's what you would think. But there
were no cars. You were totally there was no advertising.
You were totally removed from modern life, which was sort
of intoxicating for me. And there was just a grand
(19:24):
you know, vistas and beautiful geography, and I developed a
fascination with the people. That really led to like a
five decade love affair for me. And I went on
to India, which was like the crushing India of the
seventies that was their most turbulent decade. Sixty percent of
the population was below the poverty line, and it was crowded,
(19:46):
and I was fascinated, though I was just skimming the service,
but I thought, maybe there's something for me here. How
could I start a business doing what that woman had done,
scale it up and get a house in New Delhi
and begin to live in a totally farign place and
making design clothes and sell them to better stores in
(20:06):
the US and elsewhere. And what was a dream became
a really solid, multimillion dollar business. It grew faster than
I ever had imagined. I had to hire staff, open showrooms, warehouses,
and it ultimately consumed me. But in the end, having
made a lot of money, I lost it. All bad
things happened. We had the Russians invade Afghanistan, and then
(20:30):
Jimmy Carter he put an embargo and huge tariffs on
any clothing from India, much as like we see today
with Trump, and my business went under. I came back
to New York after eight years of that, with my
tail between my legs, looking for a new career in
a new leson life in a new lane.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
But what you accomplished was insane the way that you
got these clothes into boutiques and larger stores. But did
you imagine yourself living the rest of your life out
in Asia at that time or had you thought always
that you'd come back to the States.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
No, I thought i'd stay. I mean, listen, I was young,
I have anything to lose, and I felt so alive there.
Life is so vivid, and it was so different from
the conformist Connecticut that I had grown up in. And
I had a circle of friends. I had developed a lot,
and there was a circle of foreigners around that were
kind of like minded. I developed a wide circle of
(21:26):
friends in Afghanistan and India who were local. I said, man,
this is the life for me. You know, I'm with
kindred spirits. I'm seeing new places. I wanted to learn
as much as I can about those countries, travel as
far within them as possible, and go on to Southeast Asia.
And yeah, I thought this was it. I had stumbled
into something that, you know, met all my needs. But
(21:48):
it was not to be.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So tell me about your interview with MTV.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Well, when I got back, I I knew I had
to start a new line of work, and I had
bought the only self help book I ever bought in
my life, What Color is Your Parachute, the premise of
which was, you have transferable skills. You can do different
things in your life. You can have different career paths,
and you can transfer those skills, and you should align
(22:14):
your skills again with something that you love. And they
had a whole little analysis to help you figure out
what that could possibly be. I had loved being in
Asia and being there, but then this analysis show them
my other love that I had some knowledge of was
rock and roll. How do I get in on that?
So I began looking for jobs in the music industry,
which was, you know, at a difficult but interesting time
(22:37):
in its evolution. My brother lined me up with an
interview at a company that was going to start a
series of specialized networks. It was called want Aramic Satellite
Entertainment Company. They started the Movie Channel, they started Nickelodeon,
they had plans to start a thing called a music channel.
And my brother got me an interview there and they
(22:58):
told me we're looking for people with no experience in television.
So I kind of said, they didn't even have television
where I'd come from. And I got hired as the
head of marketing. I mean it was amazing, amazing confluence
of time because if it had been a month later
or a month before, these jobs wouldn't have been available. So,
you know, serendipity kind of put me in the right
(23:18):
place at the right time, and all those skills. As
I said earlier, that I had developed sort of my
heart scrabble close to the ground life in Asia, where
I worked really hard would helped me out immensely in
my career and where I ultimately was, you know, the
CEO of a creative enterprise full of eccentric people.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
What was it about taking on the MTV job that
might have felt intimidating and then what felt easy because
you'd done it before.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Well, I had a lot to learn about the media business,
but I did a lot of research. I was always
a good researcher. I would dig up Wall Street Analyst reports.
People would send me about where this where the cable
television programming world was going. I knew the music, I
knew in tuitively. I had to figure out how we
would promote this thing so people would want it. But
(24:06):
that almost became a fatacom plea because when I would
go out to the early markets. The few markets where
we existed, people had seen MTV on television. It had
kind of they woke up one day and it was
on their cable system. They didn't have to sign up
for it. It was in the basic package, and it
was so groundbreaking and innovative. It's hard to imagine today
(24:26):
that MTV was like that. This wasn't like a flying
car or something, but it was something radically different on
television that had a whole new visual style. It was music.
If you liked music, you know, you couldn't tear yourself
away from looking at music videos, which were really a
whole new program form. At that point in time. Most
people had had no exposure to music videos before the
(24:49):
advent of MTV.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I grew up an era where Nickelodeon had really found
us footing and loved that and then graduated to MTV,
and obviously it affected me a lot in terms of
just like feeling like it was built for me. Both
those things, both those brands really taught me a lot,
I felt like as just a consumer. But then watching
the way India was affected by MTV and the way
(25:11):
that it sort of over the course of a summer
changed how people dressed, how they thought about the world.
It just showed me the power of the medium and
just an extraordinary way that I'd never thought about before.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Well, you know, with VH one and then later Comedy Central,
we kind of built a business that was all about kids,
teens and young adults, and we had a sizeable sort
of research cohort. We would try and get into the
minds of these people and find out what could we
do that these people would find interesting, What could we
do to be a step ahead of them, And really,
(25:43):
if we could make that connection with the audience and
build up loyalty in an era that was going to
have more and more choices and be more and more competitive,
if we could solidify that relationship and continue to refresh it,
you know, everything else we needed in our business would
kind of fall into place. So we really kept our
finger on the pulse and we had a lot of
(26:03):
creative people doing that. And when we went to India,
which was a thrill for me to be back back
on the street hawking something new in India, which was
just coming out of an era where they had like
one TV channel called Dordischan and now satellite and cable
were taking over India, making it for a long time
the most vibrant television market in the world. It was
(26:26):
a thrill to hire young creative Indians who could put
together their own version of what they thought an Indian
MTV could look like. And yes, that and other channels
really had a huge cultural impact on the country. Someone
did a research study once saying that soap operas produced
in what was then Bombay, in sort of middle class neighborhoods,
(26:49):
when they were bound by satellite into Indian villages, which
was where like seventy percent of the population lived, had
a huge impact on women in terms of their desire
to see their daughter educated, their desire to kind of shrink,
their desired family size, aspirational things about what to wear
and dress. And they said that like in one month
(27:12):
you could get what normally would have been six months
worth of social progress. So it was interesting and I
believe that I saw that with my own eyes. Television
is a great cultural influencer.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
We've got to take a quick pause, but back with
Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
One of the things that's so fun about this is
that the book is full of adventures and not just
the travel adventures, but also the ones at MTV. And
you talk about chasing down David Bowie to do a campaign.
Will you tell that story here?
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Sure? Well, I wanted this book to be I didn't
want it to be a business book because there's so
many of those. I thought, well, if I could. The
pandemic is when I wrote it, so I had time
on my hands that if I can make this more
of an adventure story, it'd be interesting to me. And
let's pick out ten to fifteen of my favorite adventures,
if you will. One involved how we kind of saved
the network from the dustbin. We had got into like
(28:19):
two million homes. But we found out that the cable operators,
this is in the early eighties, who had geographic monopolies everywhere,
they didn't want to add MTV out to their cable
systems because they didn't believe one people would want to
watch music on television. Two they want to pay us
ten cents a month because that would cut into their
profit margins. And three they didn't like the kind of
(28:40):
music we were playing anyway. They were more like Elvis
Presley fans. So we deduced that in places where we
were the fans were very avid and Rabbit. If we
could know harness them to demand that they cable companies
they had would add MTV to their systems, it would
conceive it would be the only thing that could save
(29:01):
us from going out of business because we would use
the customers to basically demand it, and then we would
roll out across the country, which we did. So we
ripped off an old campaign called I Want My MAPO,
which Vermont kind of quasi oatmeal manufacturer had used to
reach the young baby boomers to torment their parents so
(29:23):
they would buy this cereal instead of corn flakes or
something which worked. So we figured if we did that,
it would help if we were legitimized by having the
characters and the ads be rock stars. So we got
Nick Jagger, we got Pete Townsend of The Who, David Bowie,
Hall and Oates the Billy Idle. I mad go down
(29:44):
a list because I was involved in making those advertisements
for a couple of years. In three years, we basically
wrapped up the whole country market by market. But in
the case of David Bowie, which I was assigned to do,
is like, well you get him to do this, and
we had found out that it was easier to reach
the artist. I called his manager and she said, well,
(30:05):
he's skiing in Stott, Switzerland. He'll do it if you
want to go over there. It won't take long. So
he said, yeah, I got a crew. We jumped on
a plane. We flew to Geneva, we got on a
train to Stot. We went out to this little hillside
outside the main ski area and met David and he
was looking trim and in a good mood and blonde hair,
(30:25):
and he was in his Let's Dance era and he
wanted to ski down. He knew what he wanted to do.
Ski down and then swish at the bottom and say
I want my MTV. We did a few takes. We
said we'll take that back and post production will put
the logo in there. And he wanted the logo to
be on skis. So when it was finished he said,
anybody want to go skiing or hang out? And you know,
(30:47):
I had nothing else to do. And then at the
end of the day he said, hey, Tom, you want
to go for a sauna later at the Palace Hotel,
which was a Grondam hotel in Stadd. I said sure,
So I went back to our hotel tell where the
crew was staying, which was a couple of levels above
a youth hostel. I said, I'll see you losers later,
and I went to the spa and saw David and
(31:09):
we got outfitted in our towels and went into the sauna.
There was only one other person in there, and he
was high up on a platform, and it was Paul McCartney.
So here I am, this kid from Connecticut and now
in a sauna with my two biggest heroes, you know,
and wrapped in a towel. And they made it very
comfortable for me. You know, we throw water on the fire.
(31:31):
They wanted to know all about MTV, which was easy
for me to talk about. You know, it was not
intimidating at all. And I've been dining out on this
story for years.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
That's just an incredible story. And you say that one
of the things that's important to do is make a
lot of mistakes. Can you tell me about some of
the mistakes at MTV as you were trying to reinvent
yourself and what you learn from them.
Speaker 4 (31:52):
Well, you know, we took a lot of risks, so
we put a lot of shows on the air and
they just wouldn't work. So they'd disappear, they would die
a rapid death, and we back with something else that
it would work better. It was the same with Nickelodeon
and VH one and whatnot, and we certainly had our
share of turkeys. I remember we had an animated show
we really liked. It was by these guys in Scandinavia
(32:12):
made it called The Grunt Brothers of All Things. We
put that on the air. We thought that was going
to be really cool and great. It was not. So
Somewhere someone sitting around with six episodes of that in
a drawer. Maybe they'll come back one day. I don't know.
But why I encourage people to take risks, and that
involved trying stuff because you never know what's going to work.
(32:33):
I mean in the movie business they always used to say,
you know, the most movies fail. On television, most shows
don't succeed. We had a higher batting average in a
lot of places, but still most of the stuff we
tried didn't work, and it would just kind of go
away and onto the next thing.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
How did you know when to put more money into
something and when to keep the reins really tight and
allow creativity to change a format or build something new.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Well, we always had a budget we had to live under,
and we dellocate money to certain things in development, and
if we saw something was working, we'd put more money
into it. Sometimes you had to put up a lot
of money up front, and that was sometimes, you know,
kind of less in our ability to do things. For example,
at one point we had decided, at one point, if
we took ten percent of the one hundred and sixty
(33:22):
eight hours a week we were on and did things
other than straight music videos, we can make MPTV a
bigger place by being about some of the things that
pop culture was about, something that the music was about,
be that fashion or sports, or live events or movies.
And at one point we someone came in and said,
(33:43):
you know, Fox Network has started. They're targeting younger audiences.
They have these great popular soap operas. Why don't we
try doing a soap opera but make it a little edgier,
a little more gritty. And it turns out for us
to do it, we would have had to hire writers.
They came to meet this fellow, Doug Herzog came to
me with the presentation, and we could do a soap opera,
produce something every day and we'd have to have writers
(34:05):
and regular actors. And I said, you know, this is
a great idea. We probably could do it, but we
don't have the money. So they came back. He went
to these producers Una Murray with their names, and they
came back and said, well, okay, we were good at
post production, so why don't we just rent Aloft and
Soho and put some hidden cameras in there and get
(34:25):
like six to eight people, you know, cast them real
regular people, not stars, and have them live together and
let's see what happens. Because we knew that young people
love to see cues from people their age of how
they were living and what they were thinking. You know,
every time we turned the cameras on the audience, they
really enjoyed that. So that was the birth of the
Real World. And that started and kicked off really a
(34:50):
whole movement towards reality television, which doesn't always bring out
the best in American character, but nonetheless was a huge hit.
And it was always driven by the fact that people
wanted to see what kids their own age were doing.
The problem was, as he went on, I mean the
early cast, they had no idea what it was going
(35:11):
to become. They went into the show no pretensions or
errors or intentions. But then later on, as they realized
all these people became famous. When you began to cast people,
they would pretend to have more outrageous personalities. So these
shows became more exaggerated in terms of, you know, the
norm of human behavior, but the audience ate that up
(35:31):
as well, and then they were as different category as
a reality show, celebrity reality shows. We kind of kicked
that off with the Osbournes following Ozzy around with Sharon,
his wife and the kids, and then you know, they
came along and Dey's contests like Mark Burnett did with
The Survivor, and these things are still on the air.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
You've done so many things that have influenced so many
people and created something brands from like Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy
Central and then Vice and television stations in Afghanistan, and
you've been involved in all sorts of incredible charities as well.
What do you think is closest to your heart in
terms of all the stuff, like what is the show
(36:13):
or the production or the thing you made that feels
most special to you.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Well, there were a lot of successes in my media career,
and I was most proud of the management team I assembled,
people like Judy McGrath, Thug HERZG, Bill flannag and Van Toffler,
Jerry Labor and Herb Scannal. I mean, we had like
the best management team in the business, unbelievably talented in
(36:39):
terms of creativity. They also had business acumen and we
were able to for year after year after year after
year create and put out groundbreaking, genre breaking shows. And
just being around those people was a thrill. I mean,
they really deserved the bulk of the credit of the
stuff be invented. My job was sort of protect them
from corporate overseers outside world old and to give them
(37:01):
the ability to be able to execute on what they thought,
and of course I'd be part of the process. So
that was highly enjoyable to me. You know, starting out
in the animation business is a great example that was
a thrill. These days, you know, I'm really involved with
work I've done in the sort of do gooder category.
My long relationship in Afghanistan ended up with me going
back there after I was fired and helping launch the
(37:24):
first television stations, which were really a civilizing force and
what they now called the American occupation of twenty years,
which we really badly bungled, But that's a whole o
their story. But what wasn't bungled was the civilizing effect
of the medium on the Afghan population and making them
more tolerant and more connected to the outside world, more nuanced,
(37:46):
more aspirational, and things they wanted to do in their
personal life. And then in Africa, I work with this
thing called a One campaign that's about justice and where
you live shouldn't decide whether you live or die. And
we have fought on the global health front for preventable diseases,
influencing politicians to swing billions of dollars into programs that
(38:08):
have saved millions of lives. And I love going to
Africa and seeing the impact of that. And I love
going to Africa just to go to Africa and hear
the music and you know, partaking the culture there. And
by twenty fifty, one out of four people on the
face of the Earth is going to be African. It's
it's really a place with a totally exploding population and dynamism,
(38:32):
and it's going to be the continent to watch.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Oh thank you so much for this time. I really
appreciate it. Such fun talking to you.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Great to talk to you, magneshow was really nice. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Well. That does it for today. Big thank you to
Tom Preston for speaking with us. His book Unplugged Eventures
from MTV to Timbuktoo is out now and you can
get it wherever you get your books. We'll put a
link to in the show as well, just to make
that process faster for you. It really is a terrific read. Also,
(39:06):
if you like the show, be sure to follow us
on Instagram or Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
We're at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
We will be back next week with another brand new episode,
but in the meantime, from Will Dylan, Mary, Gabe, and myself,
thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(39:35):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by
my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost
three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the
utter COO host Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary
Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm gonna fix
that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier who I've
(39:57):
also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more.
Dylan Fagan is in the booth. He is always dressed up,
always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record
and then mix the show after he does a great job.
I also want to shout out the executive producers from
iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry.
We have social media support from Calypso Rallis. If you
(40:21):
like our videos, that is all Calypso's handiwork for more
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
That's it from us here at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Thank you so much for listening.
You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hey there are podcast listeners.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
I'm Monga's starticular ak Mango, and Will is off today.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
But I've gotten an incredible treat for you. If you've
listened to the show, you know how much I loved
Nickelodeon as a kid. My friends and I in third
grade used to practice for Doubledare every day in the summer,
just waiting for the execs to call spoiler alert. They
never did, but I love the way Nickelodeon felt like
(00:52):
it was talking to me and really providing this channel
for me.
Speaker 1 (00:56):
And then years later it was the same with MTV
and then Comedy Central, and weirdly enough, these channels were
something that I thought a lot about when Will and
I founded Mental Flaws years and years ago. Anyway, the
reason I am telling you any of this is that
for today's show, I am interviewing the wonderful Tom Freston,
(01:18):
one of the co founders of a scrappy little TV
channel called MTV, which grew into a massive, massive bohemo.
From MTV, he became president of MTV Networks, guiding Nickelodeon
VH one, Comedy Central, TV Land and all these other
channels through incredible eras of creativity. He is such a
(01:40):
hero to me. Then he became CEO Viacom. But the
truth is, none of this is the most interesting stuff
about him. After college, he hitchhiked across northern Africa. He
spent years in India running a clothing company. He even
helped launch a media network in Afghanistan. He is a
world traveler, a philanthropist, and best of all, he is
(02:03):
an incredible, incredible storyteller. So I was really excited when
he agreed to sit down with me and talk about
his new book. It's called Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Timbucktoo.
It is so good, such a wonderful read, and we're
going to talk about it here. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
So I'm here with Tom Preston, author of Unplugged Adventures
from MTV to Timbuck two. It's out now. It is
an extraordinary book. I've got to say, this book reminded
me of two books I really love. One is The
Man Who Time Forgot and another one called Barbarian Days.
And Barbarian Days is about like surfing and chasing this
(03:05):
high of travel in a way. And the Man who
Time Forgot is about britt Hadden, who was the co
founder of Time magazine, and the way that they were
just so creative and inventive in the way they started
that magazine and so like, there's something about both of
those that really was inspiring to me. But first I
want to start with just who this book is made
out to. It's made out to your brother and your sons.
(03:26):
Can you tell me about why you dedicated to them?
Speaker 4 (03:28):
Well, I love my sons, that's obvious and it would
be true for any father. And my dear brother who
was my only sibling. He was a couple of years
younger than me. He helped me out a lot in life,
and he had a tragic death this last winter in
the Caribbean. He fell down a flight of stairs. I mean,
you never know when it hits you, and kind of
went into a coma and never came out.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
And what do you want your sons to know from
this book about your life?
Speaker 4 (03:53):
That their life is full of possibility, that they don't
have to be trapped into one thing. They can change
lines and find things that are maybe suited for them.
This is a time of great change in the employment area,
and a lot of businesses that have sort of lost
their luster, new ones that are emerging, and they should
not be afraid to start different chapters in their lives.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
I love that, you know. I love openings of books.
And the opening to your book starts with the chainsaw,
which is just such an incredible image. Can you can
you talk a little bit about why you started your
book there?
Speaker 4 (04:25):
Well, I started my book because the opening scene is
me getting fired after you know, twenty six years at
this company, the company that started MTV and evolved into
something so much bigger, to several incarnations, and the chainsaw
was sent to me years earlier. This is sometime in
the nineties by the heavy metal band Anthrax. You know,
(04:47):
they were heavy metal band. They'd all autographed it, and
I used to get a lot of you know, gold
records since that jacket, stuff like that. But this was
a useful gift. And I was clearing out my office
after I got fired. I got fired in Los Angeles.
I came back to New York and I only wanted
to take a few things that were sentimental. But I
thought besides the sentimental photos and whatnot, you know, I
(05:09):
could use that chain, so I didn't have one, and
it'd be a useful gift, So I put it in
a banker's box with a few other things that was
a small one, and made my way down the elevator
to a lobby to exit.
Speaker 3 (05:21):
You talk about the exit from Viacom and you merge
there and they're just a sea of people waiting to
say goodbye to you, and love for you is palpable.
And it's funny because one of the producers on this
show worked at Comedy Central after you'd left, and she says,
like people still talk fondly about the Tom Freston era,
which is so sweet and also just a testament to
(05:44):
like all the fun and excitement and things you brought there.
Speaker 4 (05:49):
Well, we had a really unique culture, and I always
put the idea of us having a creative culture and
innovative culture really in the forefront. Is as how I
wanted this company to be, to edgy, to be you know,
casual and non hierarchical and risk taking and a place
at treasured creativity. And in my exit, as CNBC said,
(06:10):
there was like a thousand people in the lobby cheering
me on, cheering me out, give me a Heroes exit.
I had thought I could just sneak out, you know,
I have a bit of the imposter syndrome and a
mask had been ripped off now and I was depressed,
no doubt about it. But this gave me a great
lift off that still stays with me. I remember getting down,
(06:33):
getting through the lobby was all in slow motion. Down
the escalator into Times Square. I too my stuff into
a taxi got in rolled by the Broadway theaters, and
I said, you know, that was a good way to go.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
It's such an incredible career and obviously not where it stopped,
because there are so many amazing things that go on
after that. But take me back to the beginning of
your first interactions with TV and what meant to have
a TV in the household initially.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
Well, I kind of grew up in a Leave It
to Beaver Way, if people out there remember what that
was about. That was sort of an all American post
war family, two brothers, a mother, and a husband, stay
at home mom. I grew up in the fifties. I
was an early baby boomer, and you know, television came
out black and white. We had one TV and we
would sit around and watch the shows of the day,
(07:25):
and you know, I mean one of the great moments
was in nineteen fifty six sitting around my family and
seeing Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show. I think
there was like sixty million people watching. It was like
like the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show years later,
but it was like a hurricane passed through the room,
and my mother and father were disgusted. My brother and
(07:48):
I were elated, and we kind of knew. I was
in sixth grade, we kind of knew that we were
going to grow up in a different world, with our
own music, with our own clothes, with our own style,
and we were sort of part of a new generation
that was really setting sale from the prior one, the
generation they would call the Great American Generation, the people
who fought in World War two and so forth. So
(08:09):
television was always there, and I followed a lot of
the shows, but I was in truth more interested in
the music of the era and spent a lot more
time listening to the early rock and roll radio stations.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
You know, one of the things that I've heard a
lot about the early MTV days is that most of
the people were hired were people who hated television. Did
you fall into that category?
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Well, when I got my job interview, they said, you know,
we're looking for people with absolutely no experience in television,
which is an unlikely line at a television company. But
it was the early stays of the cable programming era
and we were sort of the tip of the speer
out there with CNN, ESPN and cable was really just beginning.
It was mostly in rural areas, but they couldn't afford
(08:55):
to hire people who worked at the broadcast networks. There
was really only three or four places to work in
those days if you include PBS, and they didn't want
anyone bringing along any kind of expensive production habits, so
we had to sort of start from scratch, an event
from zero, And in retrospect, it was a brilliant move
to hire school teachers and people from radio stations and
(09:16):
record companies and me I came out of eight years
of living in Afghanistan and India, so it was a
great mixing pot of eccentrics and people who wouldn't normally
work in any kind of normal company. And we were
all on crusade either to you know, take Nickelodeon or
MTV across the nation and infuse it with our own
(09:38):
spirit and make it a very obvious counterpoint to the
traditional program that was being done on the networks. We
were the early narrow casters, as we were known, just
programming one thing to one audience as opposed to general
interest stuff like ABC, NBC and CBS.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
It's funny, there's like an old Garfield comic where they're
joking about narrowcasting and talking about like a food network,
and it's just a picture of lasagna, and I'm like
a picture of like a refrigerator or whatever, and not
really realizing that like a food network could be a
massive thing, or a music network could have a tremendous
influence on the world.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
Yeah, we used to joke there could be a time network,
there could be all kinds of useless networks. But I
remember a man from the music industry, Bob Krasnow, came
to me once. He says, I got the greatest idea
in the world for you. This was nineteen eighty nine.
I was then the CEO of MTV Networks, which ruled
over you know, Comedy Central and pH one and MTV
and Nick and I got the greatest idea in the
(10:39):
world for you. Says, food is going to be the
new rock and roll. Chefs are going to be the
new rock stars. I thought he was crazy. I was
too trapped in my own thing and didn't have the
vision to think that this could possibly be true. But
sure enough, everything he said came out to be true.
And I missed the boat on that one.
Speaker 3 (10:58):
Well, you mentioned that before where MTV you had been
traveling abroad. You've been in Afghanistan. Tell me about you
as a child. Were you adventurous? What were your thoughts
about the world beyond Connecticut where you were growing up.
Speaker 4 (11:12):
You know, we never went anywhere. My father fought in
World War Two and when he came back, he was
in the Pacific Theater. He didn't want to go anywhere,
and we only took one trip and that was like
sixty miles from our house to a mystic Connecticut where
they had some smelly old whaling ships. That was a
day trip. That was our only trip. So I was
sort of trapped there listening to radio from New York
(11:34):
City and gradually buying some record albums. And I was
a young boy. I was a stamp collector, and I
was always fascinated by exotic stamps, from you know, Africa
and Southeast Asia. I'd have stamps from Zanzibar and all
these faraway places. And you know, that, mixed in with
(11:55):
some shows of television about the French Foreign Legion in
Algeria and so forth, really captured my interest. But I
had only been in two states, New York and Connecticut
when I left to go to college on a bus.
Speaker 3 (12:08):
And how is it that you end up working in
bars and various vacation towns during and after college.
Speaker 4 (12:14):
Well, I went to graduate school primarily to get out
of the draft. I went to business school, which turned
out to be a blessing in disguise. And when that
was done, I realized I'd been eighteen years in school.
I could use a break. And I had been sort
of entranced by the literature of the Beats, which was
all about you know, experience is a key thing in life,
(12:35):
not so much money, travel around. It's the world's greatest classroom,
build up a body of experiences. So that was one thing.
And then at the time, this was the late sixties
early seventies, freedom was in the air. Every other song
had something about hitting the road or leaving the road.
Joni Mitchell had a big album out called Blue, which
(12:57):
I loved and played incessantly. It was all about her
internet adventures, and my appetite was sort of wet and
ready to go. But I spent a year after school
tending bar in various resort towns Aspen, Saint Thomas, and
the Virgin Islands Martha's Vineyard that was known as sort
of life on the circuit. This was before mass tourism,
(13:17):
so I really was lucky in the sense that I
had a window to be in the Caribbean before the
big cruise ships and the resorts that you never leave.
Martha's in her Nassen were nowhere near the lux vacation
towns for billionaires. They were mostly filled with hippies and outlaws.
Speaker 3 (13:34):
Yes, hippies and outlaws, But you also ran into some
incredible company when you were in some of these places,
right like James Taylor shows off and some incredible musicians Sale.
Speaker 4 (13:43):
Or Well, he was the big on Martha's Vinyard. He
had just sort of come out with his Sweet Baby
James album, and you know, it was sort of the
beginning of the year of the singer songwriters. And his
brother Alex, who I grew to New he had a
record store in town and they had speakers outside and
they would play incessantly James's two records all the time.
But I met James, I met Tom Rush, who was
(14:04):
a folk singer, and some other people, and that would
be something that that would be bumping into people for
the rest of my life. Out of the music business.
Twenty six years at this company, the company that started MTV,
and we're evolved into something so much bigger.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
We've got to take a quick pause.
Speaker 1 (14:20):
But back with Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3 (14:37):
You know, on one hand you mentioned this like imposter syndrome,
and on the other hand you've talked about how your
dad is like really charismatic in this book and can
talk to anyone. Did you have a problem approaching celebrities
and things like that or did you grow into a
comfort with that. How did that emerge?
Speaker 4 (14:56):
You know, I was never a starstruck. I find it
kind of natural to talk to him, because, you know,
if you were able to get beyond the managers and
the record companies and talk directly to artists, you'd find
out they didn't have this huge aura around them. They
were approachable and they liked to talk you'd talk to
David Bowie, He'd want to know what books you were reading.
They'd be interested in you as much as you be
interested in them, so you could really speak to them
(15:18):
as if they were normal people, even though they might
have been traveling in many cases with a big entourage
around them. But I would say, of the everybody I met,
and over the years, I think I met every pop star,
movie star, president, magazine editor and so forth, it was
really the Beatles and David Bowie who were hitting shoulders
above all else and sort of the musical pantheon. But
(15:41):
even them, even those two, I got to know a
bit over.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
Time, which just feels astounding the fact that you end
up later in Asana with David Bowie and Paul McCartney
and I want to talk about that, but before we
get to that, I am so fascinated with My twin
interests are like media and travel. Right Like, I was
(16:04):
an anthropology major, and one of the things I love
is just your ability to pick up and go to
Morocco and start traveling from there, and what drove you
to just leave everything and do that.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Well, after I spent a year on the road on
the circuit. If you will you know, tending bar and
resort towns. I got a job in a big New
York ad agency and I got on the fast track.
My first account was Gi Joe. This is an anti
war period, so we had to give him sort of
an honorary discharge and make him an action man. And
then I had a variety of other accounts that were
(16:37):
Procter and Gamble accounts. That was a big piece of
business for the agency. And I was going to be
assigned to charman toilet Paper, who had a big campaign
at a time called Don't Squeeze, a charman with this
character named mister Whipple, who research would show by nineteen
seventy three he was like the third most known and
admired man in America, which seemed incredulous. But I couldn't
(17:00):
really face the idea of selling toilet paper. And an
old girlfriend who was in Paris called me up and said,
you know you can't do that, Tom. Why don't you
quit your job and come with me. I'm going to
go across the Sahara Desert, which sounded really appealing to me,
as like impetus I needed. I had five thousand dollars saved,
so I was on a plane like a week later.
(17:22):
That sort of set in place. One of the major
decisions of my life kind of really freed me and
I was able to go out into the greater world
and learn a lot, build up my confidence, and learn
things that would ultimately help me a lot in my
business life.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
You know, It's funny. Before I went into magazines and
my friends and I started a magazine, I had worked
in advertising in India for a summer and I spent
the whole summer making a washing machine ads and like,
it was so creative and so fun and the people
around me were just like brilliant creatives. And on the
(17:59):
other hand, to spend your whole life making people feel
like one washing machine was better than other washing machine
when they were the same washing machine was just like
hard to imagine. But it feels like you found a
way to align your business and passions. Starting with being
in Afghanistan.
Speaker 4 (18:15):
Yeah, in my travels, I ended up in Afghanistan and India.
India was sort of the holy Grail in those days
in terms of traveling. And I had met this girl
in Greece who had lived in Nepole and she used
to make clothes in India and Afghanistan and put them
in trunks and take them overland and sell them like
in beach hotspots in Greece and Italy in the summertime.
(18:37):
She had her own little vertically integrated enterprise. So I
fell in love with Afghanistan from the first day I
got there. It seemed like people think Afghanistan's a place
at constant war, but this was a tail end of
fifty years of what they called the Golden Age. There
was no war. Afghanistan was steadily moving into trying to
(18:58):
embrace a form of marginity, and the people were welcoming.
And the few tourists would see a poster there that
said visit Afghanistan and see the world's friendliest people. If
you went, then that's what you would think. But there
were no cars. You were totally there was no advertising.
You were totally removed from modern life, which was sort
of intoxicating for me. And there was just a grand
(19:24):
you know, vistas and beautiful geography, and I developed a
fascination with the people. That really led to like a
five decade love affair for me. And I went on
to India, which was like the crushing India of the
seventies that was their most turbulent decade. Sixty percent of
the population was below the poverty line, and it was crowded,
(19:46):
and I was fascinated, though I was just skimming the service,
but I thought, maybe there's something for me here. How
could I start a business doing what that woman had done,
scale it up and get a house in New Delhi
and begin to live in a totally farign place and
making design clothes and sell them to better stores in
(20:06):
the US and elsewhere. And what was a dream became
a really solid, multimillion dollar business. It grew faster than
I ever had imagined. I had to hire staff, open showrooms, warehouses,
and it ultimately consumed me. But in the end, having
made a lot of money, I lost it. All bad
things happened. We had the Russians invade Afghanistan, and then
(20:30):
Jimmy Carter he put an embargo and huge tariffs on
any clothing from India, much as like we see today
with Trump, and my business went under. I came back
to New York after eight years of that, with my
tail between my legs, looking for a new career in
a new leson life in a new lane.
Speaker 3 (20:48):
But what you accomplished was insane the way that you
got these clothes into boutiques and larger stores. But did
you imagine yourself living the rest of your life out
in Asia at that time or had you thought always
that you'd come back to the States.
Speaker 4 (21:04):
No, I thought i'd stay. I mean, listen, I was young,
I have anything to lose, and I felt so alive there.
Life is so vivid, and it was so different from
the conformist Connecticut that I had grown up in. And
I had a circle of friends. I had developed a lot,
and there was a circle of foreigners around that were
kind of like minded. I developed a wide circle of
(21:26):
friends in Afghanistan and India who were local. I said, man,
this is the life for me. You know, I'm with
kindred spirits. I'm seeing new places. I wanted to learn
as much as I can about those countries, travel as
far within them as possible, and go on to Southeast Asia.
And yeah, I thought this was it. I had stumbled
into something that, you know, met all my needs. But
(21:48):
it was not to be.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
So tell me about your interview with MTV.
Speaker 4 (21:53):
Well, when I got back, I I knew I had
to start a new line of work, and I had
bought the only self help book I ever bought in
my life, What Color is Your Parachute, the premise of
which was, you have transferable skills. You can do different
things in your life. You can have different career paths,
and you can transfer those skills, and you should align
(22:14):
your skills again with something that you love. And they
had a whole little analysis to help you figure out
what that could possibly be. I had loved being in
Asia and being there, but then this analysis show them
my other love that I had some knowledge of was
rock and roll. How do I get in on that?
So I began looking for jobs in the music industry,
which was, you know, at a difficult but interesting time
(22:37):
in its evolution. My brother lined me up with an
interview at a company that was going to start a
series of specialized networks. It was called want Aramic Satellite
Entertainment Company. They started the Movie Channel, they started Nickelodeon,
they had plans to start a thing called a music channel.
And my brother got me an interview there and they
(22:58):
told me we're looking for people with no experience in television.
So I kind of said, they didn't even have television
where I'd come from. And I got hired as the
head of marketing. I mean it was amazing, amazing confluence
of time because if it had been a month later
or a month before, these jobs wouldn't have been available. So,
you know, serendipity kind of put me in the right
(23:18):
place at the right time, and all those skills. As
I said earlier, that I had developed sort of my
heart scrabble close to the ground life in Asia, where
I worked really hard would helped me out immensely in
my career and where I ultimately was, you know, the
CEO of a creative enterprise full of eccentric people.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
What was it about taking on the MTV job that
might have felt intimidating and then what felt easy because
you'd done it before.
Speaker 4 (23:44):
Well, I had a lot to learn about the media business,
but I did a lot of research. I was always
a good researcher. I would dig up Wall Street Analyst reports.
People would send me about where this where the cable
television programming world was going. I knew the music, I
knew in tuitively. I had to figure out how we
would promote this thing so people would want it. But
(24:06):
that almost became a fatacom plea because when I would
go out to the early markets. The few markets where
we existed, people had seen MTV on television. It had
kind of they woke up one day and it was
on their cable system. They didn't have to sign up
for it. It was in the basic package, and it
was so groundbreaking and innovative. It's hard to imagine today
(24:26):
that MTV was like that. This wasn't like a flying
car or something, but it was something radically different on
television that had a whole new visual style. It was music.
If you liked music, you know, you couldn't tear yourself
away from looking at music videos, which were really a
whole new program form. At that point in time. Most
people had had no exposure to music videos before the
(24:49):
advent of MTV.
Speaker 3 (24:51):
I grew up an era where Nickelodeon had really found
us footing and loved that and then graduated to MTV,
and obviously it affected me a lot in terms of
just like feeling like it was built for me. Both
those things, both those brands really taught me a lot,
I felt like as just a consumer. But then watching
the way India was affected by MTV and the way
(25:11):
that it sort of over the course of a summer
changed how people dressed, how they thought about the world.
It just showed me the power of the medium and
just an extraordinary way that I'd never thought about before.
Speaker 4 (25:23):
Well, you know, with VH one and then later Comedy Central,
we kind of built a business that was all about kids,
teens and young adults, and we had a sizeable sort
of research cohort. We would try and get into the
minds of these people and find out what could we
do that these people would find interesting, What could we
do to be a step ahead of them, And really,
(25:43):
if we could make that connection with the audience and
build up loyalty in an era that was going to
have more and more choices and be more and more competitive,
if we could solidify that relationship and continue to refresh it,
you know, everything else we needed in our business would
kind of fall into place. So we really kept our
finger on the pulse and we had a lot of
(26:03):
creative people doing that. And when we went to India,
which was a thrill for me to be back back
on the street hawking something new in India, which was
just coming out of an era where they had like
one TV channel called Dordischan and now satellite and cable
were taking over India, making it for a long time
the most vibrant television market in the world. It was
(26:26):
a thrill to hire young creative Indians who could put
together their own version of what they thought an Indian
MTV could look like. And yes, that and other channels
really had a huge cultural impact on the country. Someone
did a research study once saying that soap operas produced
in what was then Bombay, in sort of middle class neighborhoods,
(26:49):
when they were bound by satellite into Indian villages, which
was where like seventy percent of the population lived, had
a huge impact on women in terms of their desire
to see their daughter educated, their desire to kind of shrink,
their desired family size, aspirational things about what to wear
and dress. And they said that like in one month
(27:12):
you could get what normally would have been six months
worth of social progress. So it was interesting and I
believe that I saw that with my own eyes. Television
is a great cultural influencer.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
We've got to take a quick pause, but back with
Tom Freston right after this break.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
One of the things that's so fun about this is
that the book is full of adventures and not just
the travel adventures, but also the ones at MTV. And
you talk about chasing down David Bowie to do a campaign.
Will you tell that story here?
Speaker 4 (27:57):
Sure? Well, I wanted this book to be I didn't
want it to be a business book because there's so
many of those. I thought, well, if I could. The
pandemic is when I wrote it, so I had time
on my hands that if I can make this more
of an adventure story, it'd be interesting to me. And
let's pick out ten to fifteen of my favorite adventures,
if you will. One involved how we kind of saved
the network from the dustbin. We had got into like
(28:19):
two million homes. But we found out that the cable operators,
this is in the early eighties, who had geographic monopolies everywhere,
they didn't want to add MTV out to their cable
systems because they didn't believe one people would want to
watch music on television. Two they want to pay us
ten cents a month because that would cut into their
profit margins. And three they didn't like the kind of
(28:40):
music we were playing anyway. They were more like Elvis
Presley fans. So we deduced that in places where we
were the fans were very avid and Rabbit. If we
could know harness them to demand that they cable companies
they had would add MTV to their systems, it would
conceive it would be the only thing that could save
(29:01):
us from going out of business because we would use
the customers to basically demand it, and then we would
roll out across the country, which we did. So we
ripped off an old campaign called I Want My MAPO,
which Vermont kind of quasi oatmeal manufacturer had used to
reach the young baby boomers to torment their parents so
(29:23):
they would buy this cereal instead of corn flakes or
something which worked. So we figured if we did that,
it would help if we were legitimized by having the
characters and the ads be rock stars. So we got
Nick Jagger, we got Pete Townsend of The Who, David Bowie,
Hall and Oates the Billy Idle. I mad go down
(29:44):
a list because I was involved in making those advertisements
for a couple of years. In three years, we basically
wrapped up the whole country market by market. But in
the case of David Bowie, which I was assigned to do,
is like, well you get him to do this, and
we had found out that it was easier to reach
the artist. I called his manager and she said, well,
(30:05):
he's skiing in Stott, Switzerland. He'll do it if you
want to go over there. It won't take long. So
he said, yeah, I got a crew. We jumped on
a plane. We flew to Geneva, we got on a
train to Stot. We went out to this little hillside
outside the main ski area and met David and he
was looking trim and in a good mood and blonde hair,
(30:25):
and he was in his Let's Dance era and he
wanted to ski down. He knew what he wanted to do.
Ski down and then swish at the bottom and say
I want my MTV. We did a few takes. We
said we'll take that back and post production will put
the logo in there. And he wanted the logo to
be on skis. So when it was finished he said,
anybody want to go skiing or hang out? And you know,
(30:47):
I had nothing else to do. And then at the
end of the day he said, hey, Tom, you want
to go for a sauna later at the Palace Hotel,
which was a Grondam hotel in Stadd. I said sure,
So I went back to our hotel tell where the
crew was staying, which was a couple of levels above
a youth hostel. I said, I'll see you losers later,
and I went to the spa and saw David and
(31:09):
we got outfitted in our towels and went into the sauna.
There was only one other person in there, and he
was high up on a platform, and it was Paul McCartney.
So here I am, this kid from Connecticut and now
in a sauna with my two biggest heroes, you know,
and wrapped in a towel. And they made it very
comfortable for me. You know, we throw water on the fire.
(31:31):
They wanted to know all about MTV, which was easy
for me to talk about. You know, it was not
intimidating at all. And I've been dining out on this
story for years.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
That's just an incredible story. And you say that one
of the things that's important to do is make a
lot of mistakes. Can you tell me about some of
the mistakes at MTV as you were trying to reinvent
yourself and what you learn from them.
Speaker 4 (31:52):
Well, you know, we took a lot of risks, so
we put a lot of shows on the air and
they just wouldn't work. So they'd disappear, they would die
a rapid death, and we back with something else that
it would work better. It was the same with Nickelodeon
and VH one and whatnot, and we certainly had our
share of turkeys. I remember we had an animated show
we really liked. It was by these guys in Scandinavia
(32:12):
made it called The Grunt Brothers of All Things. We
put that on the air. We thought that was going
to be really cool and great. It was not. So
Somewhere someone sitting around with six episodes of that in
a drawer. Maybe they'll come back one day. I don't know.
But why I encourage people to take risks, and that
involved trying stuff because you never know what's going to work.
(32:33):
I mean in the movie business they always used to say,
you know, the most movies fail. On television, most shows
don't succeed. We had a higher batting average in a
lot of places, but still most of the stuff we
tried didn't work, and it would just kind of go
away and onto the next thing.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
How did you know when to put more money into
something and when to keep the reins really tight and
allow creativity to change a format or build something new.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
Well, we always had a budget we had to live under,
and we dellocate money to certain things in development, and
if we saw something was working, we'd put more money
into it. Sometimes you had to put up a lot
of money up front, and that was sometimes, you know,
kind of less in our ability to do things. For example,
at one point we had decided, at one point, if
we took ten percent of the one hundred and sixty
(33:22):
eight hours a week we were on and did things
other than straight music videos, we can make MPTV a
bigger place by being about some of the things that
pop culture was about, something that the music was about,
be that fashion or sports, or live events or movies.
And at one point we someone came in and said,
(33:43):
you know, Fox Network has started. They're targeting younger audiences.
They have these great popular soap operas. Why don't we
try doing a soap opera but make it a little edgier,
a little more gritty. And it turns out for us
to do it, we would have had to hire writers.
They came to meet this fellow, Doug Herzog came to
me with the presentation, and we could do a soap opera,
produce something every day and we'd have to have writers
(34:05):
and regular actors. And I said, you know, this is
a great idea. We probably could do it, but we
don't have the money. So they came back. He went
to these producers Una Murray with their names, and they
came back and said, well, okay, we were good at
post production, so why don't we just rent Aloft and
Soho and put some hidden cameras in there and get
(34:25):
like six to eight people, you know, cast them real
regular people, not stars, and have them live together and
let's see what happens. Because we knew that young people
love to see cues from people their age of how
they were living and what they were thinking. You know,
every time we turned the cameras on the audience, they
really enjoyed that. So that was the birth of the
Real World. And that started and kicked off really a
(34:50):
whole movement towards reality television, which doesn't always bring out
the best in American character, but nonetheless was a huge hit.
And it was always driven by the fact that people
wanted to see what kids their own age were doing.
The problem was, as he went on, I mean the
early cast, they had no idea what it was going
(35:11):
to become. They went into the show no pretensions or
errors or intentions. But then later on, as they realized
all these people became famous. When you began to cast people,
they would pretend to have more outrageous personalities. So these
shows became more exaggerated in terms of, you know, the
norm of human behavior, but the audience ate that up
(35:31):
as well, and then they were as different category as
a reality show, celebrity reality shows. We kind of kicked
that off with the Osbournes following Ozzy around with Sharon,
his wife and the kids, and then you know, they
came along and Dey's contests like Mark Burnett did with
The Survivor, and these things are still on the air.
Speaker 2 (35:51):
I'm curious.
Speaker 3 (35:52):
You've done so many things that have influenced so many
people and created something brands from like Nickelodeon, MTV, Comedy
Central and then Vice and television stations in Afghanistan, and
you've been involved in all sorts of incredible charities as well.
What do you think is closest to your heart in
terms of all the stuff, like what is the show
(36:13):
or the production or the thing you made that feels
most special to you.
Speaker 4 (36:18):
Well, there were a lot of successes in my media career,
and I was most proud of the management team I assembled,
people like Judy McGrath, Thug HERZG, Bill flannag and Van Toffler,
Jerry Labor and Herb Scannal. I mean, we had like
the best management team in the business, unbelievably talented in
(36:39):
terms of creativity. They also had business acumen and we
were able to for year after year after year after
year create and put out groundbreaking, genre breaking shows. And
just being around those people was a thrill. I mean,
they really deserved the bulk of the credit of the
stuff be invented. My job was sort of protect them
from corporate overseers outside world old and to give them
(37:01):
the ability to be able to execute on what they thought,
and of course I'd be part of the process. So
that was highly enjoyable to me. You know, starting out
in the animation business is a great example that was
a thrill. These days, you know, I'm really involved with
work I've done in the sort of do gooder category.
My long relationship in Afghanistan ended up with me going
back there after I was fired and helping launch the
(37:24):
first television stations, which were really a civilizing force and
what they now called the American occupation of twenty years,
which we really badly bungled, But that's a whole o
their story. But what wasn't bungled was the civilizing effect
of the medium on the Afghan population and making them
more tolerant and more connected to the outside world, more nuanced,
(37:46):
more aspirational, and things they wanted to do in their
personal life. And then in Africa, I work with this
thing called a One campaign that's about justice and where
you live shouldn't decide whether you live or die. And
we have fought on the global health front for preventable diseases,
influencing politicians to swing billions of dollars into programs that
(38:08):
have saved millions of lives. And I love going to
Africa and seeing the impact of that. And I love
going to Africa just to go to Africa and hear
the music and you know, partaking the culture there. And
by twenty fifty, one out of four people on the
face of the Earth is going to be African. It's
it's really a place with a totally exploding population and dynamism,
(38:32):
and it's going to be the continent to watch.
Speaker 3 (38:35):
Oh thank you so much for this time. I really
appreciate it. Such fun talking to you.
Speaker 4 (38:39):
Great to talk to you, magneshow was really nice. Thank you.
Speaker 1 (38:46):
Well. That does it for today. Big thank you to
Tom Preston for speaking with us. His book Unplugged Eventures
from MTV to Timbuktoo is out now and you can
get it wherever you get your books. We'll put a
link to in the show as well, just to make
that process faster for you. It really is a terrific read. Also,
(39:06):
if you like the show, be sure to follow us
on Instagram or Blue Sky.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
We're at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
We will be back next week with another brand new episode,
but in the meantime, from Will Dylan, Mary, Gabe, and myself,
thank you so much for listening. Part Time Genius is
(39:35):
a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. It is hosted by
my good pal Will Pearson, who I've known for almost
three decades now. That is insane to me. I'm the
utter COO host Mangeshatikular aka Mango. Our producer is Mary
Phillips Sandy. She's actually a super producer. I'm gonna fix
that in post. Our writer is Gabe Lucier who I've
(39:57):
also known for like a decade at this point, maybe more.
Dylan Fagan is in the booth. He is always dressed up,
always cheering us on, and always ready to hit record
and then mix the show after he does a great job.
I also want to shout out the executive producers from
iHeart my good pals Katrina and Norvel and Ali Perry.
We have social media support from Calypso Rallis. If you
(40:21):
like our videos, that is all Calypso's handiwork for more
podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or tune in wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
That's it from us here at Part Time Genius.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Thank you so much for listening.
Part-Time Genius News
Hosts And Creators
Will Pearson
Mangesh Hattikudur
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