January 1, 2026 • 47 mins
Happy New Year! It's no secret that MTV fundamentally changed the nature of media and entertainment. But how did it actually get started? What made the world so obsessed with the concept of "Music Television"? In today's episode, Ben, Noel and Max get to learn the true origin story of MTV from none other than the legendary co-founder, Tom Freston. As an author, a businessman, a philanthropist and a world traveller, Tom shares not only his origin story ... but, get this: he also gives the guys some insider tips on how to pursue a life worth living (and pitches a wild idea to get them promoted).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We want to give a big
end of the year shout out to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. We've got We've got Big Bullen, We've
got Noel Brown. We also have a special guest today, Noel.
(00:50):
We can't believe this is happening. This is a true story.
We are speaking with the author, the world traveler, the
man who started MTV, none other than Tom Freston, creator
of the newest hip book Unplugged.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Thanks for being here, Tom, How are you.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I'm good, I'm very good.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
He's a busy man. Against the calls.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I'm fine. I'm just trying to disconnect my phone here.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
You're trying to unplug. Huh.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I need to be unplugged.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's tough. It's a very difficult thing to do in
this day and age. Ben. I think he did a
fine job of given the short version of an incredibly
storied career and cv. Tom, you are the co founder
of MTV, the former CEO of Viacom. You've had your
(01:56):
hands in just about every aspect of the entertainment and
media landscape that you know you could possibly imagine, but
even more than that, And I'd love to start a
little bit with some of your background. I saw an
article this morning from Forbes, I think it just came
out today describing you as a beat poet exec who
made MTV cool for twenty years. Can you tell us
(02:18):
a little bit about what that means. You talk a
little bit about like getting into the game as it
were in some of these more kind of wild West
days of the sixties and not wanting to work for
the man, and having that attitude kind of carry you
into this sort of freewheeling, you know, life of adventure
and entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Well, that headline, Kana threw me too, okay, I told
the reporter. He said, you know, what were some of
your seminal influences, And I said, well, in my life,
I was influenced by two groups of people, primarily the Beats,
you know, Perlengetti, Kerowhac Corso the rest of them, and
the Libertarians, which was sort of an odd mix, but
(03:02):
they both believed in individual freedom. They both believed in
a way that a life should be full of experience,
and the Beafs in particular, thought that you could go
through life sort of improvising your life, not having a
really set career path, but leaving yourself open to possibility, traveling,
(03:23):
hungering for experience, being with people that you like. And
that's sort of been a guiding maxim for me, along
with the fact that I never really wanted to do
any work in the mainstream. I thought life would be
a little more interesting over on the side of the road,
and by and large that's what I've been able to accomplish.
And the places I've worked and the things I've done,
(03:44):
none of them were really mainstream activities.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And this is strange because, to be quite honest with you, Todd,
MTV is a formative experience for us on this show,
and I'm sure you hear that all the time. If
we could, could you share a little bit of the
providence or the origin story of how you and your
(04:11):
pals came up with this idea of music television.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, and let me just qualify one thing at the outset,
which is the MTV you've seen for the last say,
fifteen years or so, is not the MTV that I'm
really talking about.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
We started out, for sure.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
We started out as a music service for young adults.
The idea was, if you drive back to nineteen eighty,
cable was just beginning. Most cities did not have cable TV.
It existed in some rural areas because people just wanted
distance signals and better reception. And in nineteen seventy nine
and eighty, various companies were cooking up things like CNN
(04:51):
or U, ESPN or USA Network, and we were going
to bounce our signals off of satellite, and we were
going to make cable TV kind of sweeped through the
hinter lands in the cities and become a universal utility. Essentially,
MTV and Nickelodeon was the other company under my sort
of umbrella. We were really the tip of the sphere.
(05:13):
Prior to that, you had free broadcast networks ABC, NBCCBS,
that's pretty much all it was there. Cable was going
to do to television what FM radio sort of did
to AM radio. They were going to have more slender services.
They called it narrow casting at the time, doing one
thing all the time, appealing to a certain audience, so
(05:34):
you really didn't care that everyone wasn't watching you. ABC
was just a bunch of disconnected shows, whereas everything we
did on MTV would be cohesive. They would all be
directed at younger music lovers. And the form that we
were going to build us around was the music video,
which was unknown to most Americans but had existed in Europe,
(05:57):
where I had seen it years ago, because in Europe
it was very difficult for record companies to get their
acts on the radio because there wasn't a lot of
radio stations they didn't play music, so they would make
these music videos and put them on shows like Top
of the Pops in the UK. On television, we thought
that this would be a great vehicle. Music's a big category.
(06:18):
We could have a music channel on television. We thought
we'd take the two things that the baby boomers who
we were targeting at that time, the two things they
really loved, music and television, and put it together in
a new way, and we call it MTV. And I
was on the team that developed that concept, and we
launched in nineteen eighty one, and at the bulk of
(06:40):
the programming, we tried to give it an underground sort
of cool sensibility, like this was something like you don't
know where it came from. And it really became a thing.
I mean, it really became a force in the cultures.
Easy to remember, easy to forget how revolutionary it seemed
at the time, given all that's happened, But back then
(07:01):
it really looked like something brand new, a sign of
the future that was coming and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It had a certain quality of pirate radio, had a
certain quality of punk rock kind of aesthetic. Even with
all those I mean, I think of the bumpers so often,
some of those early MTV animated bumpers with the clamation
using weirdo artists. Some of the animation that came later,
stuff like Beavis and butt Head, but in the earliest days.
I think the video that a lot of people associate
(07:27):
with the very very first days of MTVS video Killed
the Radio Star by the Buggles, which a lot of
people don't know this, but there is a tiny little
cameo in that video from Hans Zimmer, I think he
was in the band at the times, and he's got
this rack of crazy modular sins behind him, and you
can see a young Hans bopping with the Buggles. But
it's like you almost think of it as such a
(07:50):
connected piece, this idea of this mission statement or this
thesis video killed the radio star. But that wasn't exactly
on purpose. It just happened to be the one that
took off and sort of led this new style of
broadcast and the way of experiencing music. Can you kind
of talk about those early days and how quickly it
picked up or like, did it take a minute or
(08:11):
was it a kind of instant that people just saw
the potential and got on board with MTV?
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And what was the climate like? Was this a very
startup environment where you.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, it was like a bunch of us in a
hotel room with coal waiting. We didn't even have a
lot of phones, eating pizza and working day and night.
There was a handful of us and we were all
No one was making more than thirty thousand dollars a year,
and we probably would have worked for less because we
were all on a mission. We were like crusaders. Everyone was.
(08:41):
No one was from the world of television. I came
from eight years in Afghanistan and India. A lot of people
came out of record companies or radio stations. But we
were all passionate and you were right about the bumpers
and all that. We really tried to create an image
that would be coh. We didn't want We want an
MTV to be a place. It wasn't a show. I
wasn't going to go watch a show on MTV. I
(09:03):
was going to go watch MTV. We thought that's the
only way we really could survive, would be just a
because we didn't have a lot of shows for starters,
but we wanted people just to come there anytime. In
the early days we had we went on the air,
we only had one hundred and sixty eight videos. That's
like one video for every hour of the week if
you didn't repeat them, and it didn't take off immediately,
(09:28):
it took a while. We were everyone we dealt with
thought thought it was a bad idea. The cable operators
didn't want to pay us any money because they don't
like paying money to anybody, and they were all monopolists
in a particular geography. The advertiser said, no one's going
to watch music on television, will never get an audience,
and the record company said, we're not going to give
you these videos. You know, we want you to pay
(09:52):
for them, and we really couldn't afford to do that.
We said, well, they're going to sell records for you.
They're like three minute commercials. So for a long time
it was like for two years, it was just trying
to overcome a series of no no, no, no, no no.
But what we did know was that people who got
it once we went on the air in August of
eighty one, they loved it like the consumer had been
(10:16):
left out of the equation. I would go out, because
I was the marketing guy at the time, with this
other fellow, John Stikes, who was a promotion guy. We
would go to cities like Tulsa, Current then the biggest
cable system in America. And just even when I arrived
at the airport to rent a car, they saw MTV
button on my jacket. It was like, where did you
get that? Cool? I said, you know, you've heard of MTV?
(10:40):
They go, are you kidding me? Everybody here knows about MTV.
It's wild. It had just come on unannounced in the
middle of the night, like six weeks earlier, and the
town was going nuts for it. They went to a
radio station they were like, wow, all these people are
requesting songs from the Buggles in Duran. Duran grew we
never play on the radio. People are getting haircuts based
(11:03):
on various artists that they see. I went to a
bar and everybody was standing around like they were watching
an NFL game, but they were watching MTV. So we
had the first sign of life. No one who worked
at MTV got it at home. It was all an
abstraction to us. We were making it putting up on
our satellite. We only had two million subscribers, which was
(11:26):
not enough to do anything. So we decided, as we
were running out of money, to do sort of a
hail Mary pass, and we came up with it. I
won my MTV campaign, which would go right over the
cable operator's head and get these young Then it was
like rock and roll fans to torment their cable operator
to make sure they carry it, and it worked like
(11:48):
a charm. We would enlist major rock stars Mick Jagger,
David Bowie, p Townsend Hall and Oates, have them hold
our logo and validate it. Call your cable company and
say I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And you approached them in kind of a punk rock
sort of culture jammy way, like didn't you like find
Bowie on the slopes or something and like walk up
to him and try to get into record like his
little version of that.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Well, I had drawn to David Bowie cart I had
to find him. And you know, the first time I
met him, I saw him, I was just trying to
ask him to get permission to use some photos of him,
Like we couldn't even get those from the record companies.
They thought we were like a fan club or something.
And David Bowie just said, you want my picture. The
(12:32):
best way to get to an artist is to go
directly to them, don't go through the record company, don't
go through the manager. And he just said it is
it good for music? And I said yeah, we're going
to play music twenty four hours a day. Said sure,
So that was over. So then I called his manager
when we wanted to do this campaign. I said, you know,
we have this campaign. It's blah blah blah. We'd love
(12:54):
to have David in it. Well, David's skiing in Switzerland,
he's in stop, but he'll do it. So I got
the crew. We got on a plane to Zurich right away,
where like it's like mission impossible. And then we got
on a train to stod and we went out to
like this little hill that was off in the mainstream
(13:14):
and Bowie looked great. He was in you know, he
was in his legs dance phase, you know, blonde hair,
looking healthy. He's a good skier. Comes down and he
knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to come
down a hill and then stop with a squish, and
he was going to go hold his hands like this
and say I want my MTV. And uh so we did.
(13:36):
We did that a few times and then he he's
a really nice guy. He won't know if any of
us wanted to ski with him. And at the end
of the day he said, you know, Tom, what are
you doing later? You want to take a sauna at
the Grand Hotel, which was like the main hotel in
(13:56):
the shad. So I like, can't believe this is happening.
I go, yeah, I got nothing to do. So I
go back to like our place, which is like sort
of a youth host, the Loemost where the crew was.
I said, I'll see you losers later. I'm gonna go
take a sauna with David Bowie. So when I went
there into the spa, you know, got put a towel
(14:19):
on to go into the sauna room. We went in there.
He said, you know, he's a very pleasant guy. He
talked you about what books you're reading and all that
kind of thing. There's one other person in the sauna.
I look up in it's Squint and it's Paul McCartney.
Can you believe so that maybe you know, I was
(14:41):
there twenty six years that was maybe one of my
peak moments, you know, early on in my career.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
That's a weird place to meet Paul McCartney too, because
you're walking in, You've got the towel lawn. It's definitely
a sauna. It's not a pr thing, right, what was
did you have like an icebreaker?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Or yeah? Well he is in what you know? They
didn't know what was up. They said, what is MTV?
We start west where we started? What is MTV? That's
how little they knew about it. So I described it
to them and I'd be throwing water on the rocks.
They were both really, really nice, and I was very
self effacing and saying, you know, we're trying to get
(15:22):
this thing going. It's going to be really good for
music and going to be good for the category. It's
a new way for artists to express themselves. And we
would one day end up being in Europe, which we
did some years later, so that was a that was
a highlight for me. But with that, this campaign allowed
us to ramp up our subscribers to like seventy eighty
ninety million homes as cable built out and as more,
(15:46):
because we'd go into a market and run this advertising
on the broadcast networks at really high levels, so you know,
you'd have to be dead if you didn't know about it.
So people would call their company cable company and use
that language and put us on.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And one thing that's amazing here right that I'm sure
you get questions about MTV all the time, obviously. One
thing that's amazing about your book Unplugged. I didn't give
the full title, it's Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim bucktoo.
And Tom, we can't let it go here because you
(16:32):
mentioned something that I wish more interviews examined from your
book before we have this moment with David Bowie and
with Paul McCartney, before we have MTV and Nickelodeon and
so on. You have traveled the world, you said, eight years,
(16:55):
eight years abroad in places that honestly a lot of
Americans had not visited at the time. Could you tell
us a little bit kind of speaking to that mention
of improvisation and just hopping on the road. Could you
could you tell us what inspired your travels, what you
(17:16):
were doing. We have we have so many questions, but
maybe paint the stage. Okay, I'm a kid in the US.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'm a kid in the US and less. Remember it's
the sixties, so and there was alienation in the air,
there was freedom in the air. The counterculture was in
full force. There was the war in Vietnam. I had
gone to a graduate school to avoid getting drafted. Somehow
that I pulled that off, and then I took a
(17:45):
year off and I sort of improvised even with I
had an MBA that kept me out of the army,
and then I bartended my way out and asked spen
a Virgin Islands Martha's Vin. You know, I did a
lot of that. That was sort of improvising that I
wouldn't got a job at an ad.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Agency, Benton and Bulls.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Benton and Bulls is one of the big agencies at
the time, so I try that out. I got on
what they called the fast track for Procter and Gamble products.
So I did like I did a Gi Joe thing,
which I hated, scope mouthwis. The whole thing was a
learning experience, but it was enough for me to know
this wasn't for me. Then they wanted to assign me
a Sharman toilet paper, one of their big accounts, and
(18:26):
that was hard to digest. And I had a woman,
a girlfriend. She was living in Paris. She called me
up and see, well, how you doing. I said, man,
they wanted me to sell toilet paper. And she says, oh,
you can't do that. Come with me across. I'm going
to go across the Tahara Desert. You're going to hitchhike
down through Spain and Morocco. Go across the Tahara Desert.
(18:48):
I was on a plane ten weeks later. Ten days later,
excuse me, I got a passport and I was off
and I didn't come back for a year. We left.
We split up after two months, but I kept going.
And I had met another woman in Greece who told me,
you know, you got to go to India. That's like
the Holy Grail, that's the greatest show on Earth. And
(19:09):
I set out overland through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan
and India, and I just fell in love with that area.
I was fascinated. I had done a lot of homework.
I decided I wanted to live there, but I had
to create a job, and you couldn't really get a
job there in those days. And in those days, this
was the seventies. Now in India, the place was like
(19:32):
a shock to the system. Sixty percent of the population
was under the poverty line and it was a massive
humanity and it took a lot of energy just to
get through one day. But I said, this is so,
I feel so alive here. So I set up a
business to design it and make and then import into
the United States clothing, higher end clothing, more designer like
(19:55):
than the cheap sort of ethnic stuff. And I said
that would allow me to make enough money to live here.
It would be sort of a creative endeavor. Lord knows
what's going to happen. Once I start, other things will
happen to me. So I did that for eight years,
made a lot of money. I was a millionaire in
my twenties. Back then, I had a partner and we
(20:17):
were in you know, I knew people in New York,
so we would be in vogue and Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines.
We got a lot of coverage, we sold. We became
an unexpected hit. But at the end a lot of
bat I had a house, I had servants, I was
living like a pasha. Couldn't believe it. It was fantastic and
(20:38):
a very exciting place to be. But then the Russians
invaded Afghanistan, which kind of took that market away, that operation.
And then Jimmy Carter, of all people, after all we
had endured in India, you know, blackouts, strikes, cobra's dysentery,
(21:00):
you name it, he.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Discovered the actual cobras.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
By the way, those are real cobra.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It's in our backyard and they were in our backyard
eating the rats.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
That's right. But it was the cobra problem because they
released cobras to kill the rats. And then I believe
you would get some sort of bounty if you showed
that your cobra had killed rats. So people just released
more and more cobras, and it became this like self
like this rabuus kind of snake eating its own tail.
Thing would be created. Went from a rat problem to
a cobra problem.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Right, I go on YouTube. They have all these snake videos.
There's a rabbit hole on YouTube where you can see
all these cobras eating things. But then they declared an
embargo on clothing from India because the president put in
place tariffs kind of like today, because it was hurting
(21:48):
domestic manufacturing. So they outlawed it for a while, and
I basically went bankrupt. I did smuggle some some some
of the clothing I shipped to Canada and kind of
smuggled it into the US over the Saint Lawrence Seaway,
which was crazy.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Just so you know, folks, we are at Audio Podcast
and Ed Tubb, you had the most poetic look out
the window and I could see you traveling back to
the Saint Lawrence River.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
That situation, Yeah, that was a that was not going
to be a good way to make a living. So
I was out of work. I was out of luck.
I was broke. I was. I spent eight years doing that.
I'm thirty three years old. And I then saw this
article about the guy wanted to start a music channel,
and my brother, who worked at Columbia Records, recommended me
(22:42):
for an interview. And I realized that after traveling My
other main passion was music, and I was a music nut.
I knew I could tell you when I was growing up,
who sang what song? What was on the other side
of the record, all that, And I said, well, this
looks like fun, this looks like something I could do.
So I went in for an interview and they said,
we're looking for people with no experience in television because
(23:03):
we don't have any money and we can't afford to
hire people who have bad habits they've acquired working for
the broadcasters. So they hired me on the spot.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Wow, did I have to ask? Did your escape from
Kabul come up in the interview at all? When they
said what's your previous work?
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Well? Yeah, both two people thought I was a hash
he smugging as I asked about and they said it
in a way like it was a positive.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
That's one of these fellows. Is our CEO here at iHeart?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Were you smuggling the guy Bob Pittman, who now is
the CEO of iHeart? Bob Bob, I hope you're listening,
he said to me when he was twenty six. He
was younger than me. He was the head guy. He said,
what were you doing in Afghanistan smuggling drugs and I said,
not really, he goes, not really, that means you were.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
But I was a feature, not a bug. Right, You're hired.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
So I got hired by Bob.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
And this, this journey continues because, as you said, we're
doing something revolutionary. At this point, you know, I was
also in full disclosure. I was one of those kids
that got hacked by Uh, I want my MTV and
I was. I was bugging my parents that I remember vividly.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
There was one Christmas where, uh, you know, my my
parents asked me what I wanted, right, And instead of
picking you know, a toy or a trip or something,
I said, it'd be cool if we had MTV because
the kids up the street have it.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Oh, it's something you'd go to the kids up the
street's house. I watched a million.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I like those sort of origin of my MTV viewing stories.
I hear them a lot. People were young and going
over to friends' houses because pumpy my mother wouldn't let
us get cable. My mother would let me watch EMTV
well or whatever, but there was always someone in the
neighborhood who had it with lenient parents.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
That's right, yep, and then that would be the rallying spot.
I don't want to maybe now, I mean, let's just
go ahead and do it. You mentioned the idea of cable,
and I think there might be some bocks growing up
now that don't even really remember what cable was all about.
And you mentioned the idea of subscribers, and I think
we can certainly correlate that to the model that we
all now participate in against our will most of the time,
(25:26):
which is this sort of I don't know, the fatigue
of infinite subscriptions, all of these different things, which more
or less the way things are now. It's kind of
become what cable packages used to be. Where it was like,
you know, it was this illusion of choice. You know,
you could get all the different whatever channels, you get
the package you want, not have the ones that you
(25:46):
don't want. But now it's like there's so much crossover
and so much weird kind of I don't know, overkill.
If everyone's got their own thing, you can no longer
get everything in one place, so you have to have
all of them. Can you speak a little bit abou
how the landscapes changed from what cable was to where
we are now with the streaming thing, that to my
mind kind of resembles almost a more monstrous version of cable.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, we used
to call it, but there's a TV revolution, which meant
you're going to get more choices. So we started out
cable systems were twelve channels, and twenty four, then thirty
five and fifty four, and then it just kept going.
But they were all like you say, they were all
you're getting them all for one price, so you didn't
have to keep tracking, even though you maybe only watch
(26:30):
eight or nine of them, but you pay the same
price that was the cable package. And then they kept
raising the prices of the cable package. Then satellite came on,
and you know, there was a little bit of a
battle price. This went down a bit, but the TV
revolution kind of came to an end. It was replaced
by the digital revolution. And in this revolution, we have
the Internet, we've got social media, we've got all these
(26:52):
streaming services, we've got substacks, we've got podcasts, and we're
just we used to say you're gonna be able to
watch or listen to whatever you want, whenever you want,
And now they get out on whatever device, So there's
an infinite amount of choice. It's not thirty five channels,
and it's a hard thing. Do I have Hulu?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
I don't remember. Am I on his substack? I can't remember.
Someone's got to come up with a new kind of
aggregated package or at least show me on a screen
all the things I subscribe to so I can unsubscribe
to some of them.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Agreed, Do you, given your experience right and your deep
knowledge base with Asdall said, the changing landscape, we have
to ask you a little bit about the future. I mean,
do you see a course correction coming for streaming services?
Do we see a world where someone says, hey, I'll
(27:52):
just watch these three things? Are were returning back to ABC, CBC,
the TV with three channels.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
And to piggyback US, especially now with what we're seeing
as more of this corporate consolidation, these efforts to kind
of be the one company that has all the things.
Of course, there's a lot of talk about this merger
with Paramounts and Warner Brothers, after Warner Brothers already was
acquired by a company that we actually used to be
a part of Discovery in our early days of podcasting,
it just seems like it's getting deluded more and more
(28:20):
and more, and I'm just curious if that's a good thing.
Is this for the consumer? Is this anti consumer?
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Like?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
What is the future of anti consumer?
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Okay, make no mistake about it. Whatever happens with Warner Brothers,
who's like the crown jewel studio of hollywoods.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
They have all the all of it, all the legacy stuff.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yes, whatever happens, if it goes when Netflix, or if
it goes with the Paramount and the Lessons, there's nothing
in it for the consumer. It means prices are going
to go up because if Netflix gets it, you know,
it's going to fold into Netflix and they're going to
have they'll be able to raise their prices because they'll
be one less competitor, which was a big competitor. They'll
(29:02):
have more content that they can talk about, so they
can raise their prices. As a consumer, you're not getting
anything really extra. You know, you could have got them
from the two of them. And then you know, if
you're a let's say you're a producer. You guys produce
a show, so you got a new like Sopranos in
your mind, you used to be able to go to
(29:23):
Warners and you used to be able to go to Netflix,
two potential buyers. Now there's only one buyer of those,
So you've lost a buyer and you've given this company
more leverage to raise prices. So it's really a question
of consolidation, and it's trying. It's like, it seems like
it's this inexorable force. You know, why can't Warner Brothers
(29:46):
just stay where they were? And you know, the last
time we had a studio in Hollywood eaten up by somebody,
it was when Disney bought Fox. And if you look
at the amount of movies that the combined Disney Fox
puts out now, it's less than what they put used
to put out individually.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Arguably less good ones.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Well, they can't compete against themselves, right, They've essentially consolidated
a schedule to attempt to maximize their return.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
They stuck out a lot of costs, they unemploy a
lot of people, and you know, it's an I don't
know what happens at the end of this. I don't
know what happens. Yeah, this is is more and more consolidation,
and maybe some of these smaller streaming services go out
of business unless you're like you got a niche, like
you're the Criterion Channel or something, and you can can
(30:38):
live over on the sidelines and no one's really going
to mess with you.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, you point out, you point out that the indie spirit,
the art first still remains in some ways with outfits
like eight twenty four. I think we're big fans of
their work. But it does seem like what you're saying here, Tom,
is there be a big crunch of consolidation that takes
(31:04):
us back to the days of essentially three channels, even
if they pretend to be thousands, And it doesn't sound
like it's the best thing.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
No, you're gonna have in the old days, you've got
three channels for free. Now you're gonna have three packages,
each of which costs money and cost more money going forward.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
It's very strange because I keep thinking back through through Unplugged.
When we were reading it, it was a journey I
was not expecting to be quite honest, and it's a
hell of a story, and there there are a lot
of deep philosophical gems in this, and I love that
(31:56):
you mentioned Joseph Campbell. It seems almost as if mass
media is on a hero's journey of its own, would
you agree with that? And what do you like about
Joseph Capbell And please tell me if that analogies BS.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
No, I mean he was about the hero's journey. I
mean his his sort of philosophy underwride, you know so
much of life. I always found him as a source
of good advice. What would he be thinking of today's
media world. That's a good question. He'd probably be as
confused as we are. He's going to watch a lot
of shows, but he hasn't signed up for that network
(32:36):
yet streaming service.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
And we'd have to get out his sub sect. Yeah,
I'd love to add one more. Go back to music
briefly with this discussion of kind of the Future, because
as you mentioned, MTV isn't the MTV it used to be.
It's much more of a reality driven network, or at
least it has been for a long time with like
reality shows. And obviously they've made a lot of waves
in that medium, for better or worse, whatever your opinion
(32:58):
is on that kind of content. But they're certainly not
breaking artists anymore. There used to be MTV two, which
I thought was great. That was more like the old MTV,
but that's not really around anymore. And now it seems
to me that music has been removed entirely from what
MTV is or has been. I'm wondering if with things
like AI music generation and you know, AI video generation
(33:23):
and this question around the philosophical nature of art and
the artist and giving the people what they want, how
does that all fit in to your journey and how
does that all fit into kind of the trajectory of
media and culture, Because I mean, we literally have songs
charting now that were entirely generated by artificial intelligence mean
(33:44):
or machine learning, whatever the term might be.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, as I said before, we had the cable revolution
and you had sort of the digital revolution. You could
argue that the digital revolution is about the annibisa planted
by the AI revolution. And it's maybe too early to
know where the AI is going. I mean, it's going
to be the end of civilization or it's going to
make our lives a lot better. It's probably somewhere in between. Well,
(34:07):
so I'm glad in my career I don't have to
deal with a lot of the issues, the macro issues.
Is it going to put twenty percent of our people
out on the street. Is it going to eliminate so
many things, so many jobs, The fact that you can
make songs or TV shows with AI not using real people.
(34:30):
You know, I don't know. I'm alone. I shake my head.
Maybe I'm all fashioned, but I like authenticity and I
can't see myself getting emotionally entangled in a song that
I don't think any human being had a role in making.
(34:51):
That it's some kind of consolid dated ay, you know,
something out of chat GPT. It's just I don't know, maybe,
but maybe for other for younger people, they might not
find this so bad if the beat's good that they
don't really care about that.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Haven't we lost something at that point? Though? Kind of?
I mean, I don't know it not to be like
the old man screaming at clouds myself, but it does
feel like if it becomes so good that you quote
unquote can't tell the difference, or you just don't really
care that much, it haven't we lost something in that
connection to what it means to be a human and
to make art and to make something that is the
product of experience, Because isn't at the end of the day,
(35:30):
this AI stuff is kind of regurgitating the wealth of
human art, creativity, knowledge and sort of remixing it in
a way that's as hopefully as trans or as hard
to tell that it was done that way as possible.
Is it kind of like a way of like tricking us?
Speaker 3 (35:42):
I don't know, it's like a it is like a remix,
but like the remixes, we know at least we're mixed
together by humans, right, Yeah, these are going to be
much more deeper remixes.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It's it's also a new normal. We have to consider that, right,
because if you are privileged enough to have been in
an environment where you see you see live musicians, right,
you have that destination moment. Oh the new music video
it's coming out tonight at nine pm. Everybody get to
(36:16):
Timmy's house because his mom lets us watch HIMTV. You
have those moments of connection of authenticity. But then let's
say you're growing up. Now it's the end of twenty
twenty five as we record this, you're six years old, right,
you grow up in a place where live music exists.
(36:39):
But now it's normalized to have that AI experience. I'm
just wondering here, Tom, does the pendulum swing back? Do
we see a return to authenticity after a certain point
with Ai rolling out.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
I think so, okay, I think so. I mean, I
think people will have to be more hungry for that
real experience. I mean, if you're six years old, let's
say you grow up and you can be by the
time you're twenty, maybe you haven't been to a live concert,
and a live concert is something where, you know, music's
a lot deeper of an entertainment form than than film
(37:15):
or TV. I mean, there's a it's bigger than language.
You're in a you're in a crowd, there's not a
collective vibe, and everybody's in it together and it's really magical,
and you know, to not have it, I don't see
how you duplicate that with things all being artificial. You know,
(37:37):
maybe I'm just another old man screaming at the future.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Well, we're with you here, a fellow abbateur meteorologist, right,
We're also we're also getting a lot of folks in
the audience and friends of ours candidly when we said
we're going to have a moment to explore life and
(38:02):
history in the future with this guy. One thing a
lot of people are asking us about is the life
lessons or advice you would give not now for a
six year old, but let's fast forward for a twenty
year old right now growing.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Up in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Maybe maybe hopscotching around, doing some bartending at the vineyard
and so on. What would you want a young like,
let's say early twenties Tom Freston to know about the future.
What advice would you give yourself if you could travel
in time.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Well, let's say you just got out of school and
you're really young. And if you're really young, you're at
a point in your life where you can make some mistakes,
you can take some shots. There's no risk. Really, It
isn't like if you disappear for a while, people are
really going to know you're gone and disqualify you off
some kind of list. So get off the conveyor belt.
(39:00):
The world is the best classroom. I'm now speaking from
my own experience. What others would say this too? And
go places? Now, Maybe you can't go everywhere like I did,
but you can go places. You can have menial jobs,
you can work around, you can be a king of
the road for a while and see the world, see
the world outside this country, see the world from other
(39:20):
people's shoes, see what they think about our country. Get
some of the nuances involved in the global you know
sort of setup that we have today, Make some friends
in other places that you can continue to have through
the rest of your life, and don't feel guilty. Don't
feel like you have to go to work for Goldman
Sachs like a week after you get out of college.
(39:42):
That just baffles me. But you see these kids today,
they really have high anxiety, and they have they're more
prone to depression, and they have panic attacks. And I'm thinking, God,
you're in your young twenties. You should feel great. You
did the school thing. Of course, you you don't know
exactly what you're going to be. If you do know,
(40:02):
you're you're you know, you're really naive. So doors will
open to you that you would not even have imagined
if you take a break, take a few beats, and
get out there and get some experience, and because when
you come back, you're going to be a lot more
desirable of a job candidate and a lot more interesting
(40:23):
with a more interesting story as a job candidate than
if you've just been you know, going along drone like
in you know, thinking that you don't have a lot
of agency in what you're going to do with your life.
You know, a little improvisation could be good for sure.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
I mean, I think especially as like the traditional models
even of like college and career paths and stuff, they're
starting to, I don't know, fall apart a little bit.
It makes a whole lot of sense to just try
to collect experiences, collect various pieces of wisdom and knowledge,
various skill sets, and then be able to to kind
of improvise your way into finding the right path as
(41:03):
it presents itself. But you can't really see that path
if you don't go places in order to look for
those doors, right, because you know it's not if you're
looking for like the setout path that's going to be
what it is. But if you go abroad or go
elsewhere or just try different things, then you're gonna kind.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Of a good place. I'm an optimist. I know. Whenever
I go looking for an apartment, you see an apartment
you think you like, and then you don't get it,
and then you see something else you think you like,
and then you don't get it someone else rented it.
But at the end of the day, you find something
and you go, thank God, I didn't get those other two,
because this is a better one. And you know, I
(41:40):
think you can apply some of that optimism to like,
you know, career choice. Career is almost a different word
these days because you're in the world. We're in the
gig economy time, which I know it presents a whole
bunch of other issues and problems, and you know.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
I do, I do. Like I love the point about
about traveling, about taking a beat away from the conveyor
belts or the so called rat race, because often we
forget there's a whole other world out there. And Tom,
this reminds me of that that beautiful verse from T. S.
(42:19):
Eliot from Little gettings, we shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will be to
arrive where we started and know the place for the
first time. I feel like that that's kind of nailing.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, that's beautiful, that's really true. You do kind of
know it for the first time. You can say I
know myself and I know America. I really know America
for the first time, because you know, Americas are famous
for not traveling, right, Yeah, I think it used to
be twenty five percent of Americans had passports. Well, you know,
(42:53):
you go to the Netherlands like ninety nine percent of
people that passports. Of course it's a smaller country and
all that.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
It also, uh. The story that's going to stick with
my pal Nola and I is definitely going to be
the fact that man Bob never asked us if we
smuggled Hashish out of Kabul.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
You know what you should do. You should send him
an email say you're just speaking to Tom and wondering
if the fact that we've been smuggling Hashi shot us
somewhere that does that mean we could get out some
kind of promotion or a raise, or maybe you can
direct us into another side hustle.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Hell, I've never even seen Hashish until I went to
UH to Copenhagen, where it's Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
I think they smoke it all before it gets across there.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
It is there, it is Tom, this is the best.
I don't know. Do you have any any closing thoughts
to leave us when we could go so deep with this?
But I do first of all recommend everybody pick up
this book Unplugged. It is not entirely about the history
of MTV unplugged, which could be a topic of discussion
all its own. I think We're gonna leave that one
for another time. But yeah, I don't know, is there anything.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'm just please you guys have me on. I just
say the book is not a business book.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
No, no, no, It's.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
An adventure story and it's wrapped around us some business
things and in my life. But yeah, it's about history
going through you know, going from the sixties onward. You know,
the path that I took, which started out in a
relatively more free, optimistic environment, and what we find ourselves
(44:32):
in today. Things were ascendant and anything. You thought you
could do anything. But I say that a lot of
the rules then still apply now. And my book ends
up with reinventing yourself. I reinvented myself a third time
doing a lot of pro social work work, going back
to Afghanistan and helping a TV network there or working
(44:54):
in Africa for the extreme poor. I know, there's a
lot of lessons in there. It's funny when you write
a book like that, you don't think of what you're
writing your lessons. But people would say to me, that's
why I really learned a lot reading that. But people
like the book. It's it's kind of fun, it's good ride.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Well, but it doesn't come off as teaching lessons. You're not.
You're not preaching to people, You're just experiencing. You're expressing
these lessons you yourself have learned that are very universally applicable.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I would argue, I never thought i'd write a memoir,
you know, it never occurred to me till the pandemic
came along and I kind of started and I'm thinking,
how do I connect all of the sparate parts of
my life? Is there is there some overarching narrative? And I,
you know, you do a book like that. Of course
I'm older, you know, and sort of like you could
see it come into focus. So it was a satisfying experience.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
As fine reading.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
And you have genuinely made the world a better place
with your work, which I know sounds hyperbolic, right, but
we're I love that you're mentioning the fact of the
existence of things like one. I love that you're mentioning
the volunteering that you've done and returning to Afghanistan. And
(46:06):
if you want to learn more about this, folks, please
do check out Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck
to We're not blowing rainbows here. This is a page
turner again, Tom, it was not what I was expecting
and I was riveted and we can't thank you enough
for your time man.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Thanks Ben, thanks Aul, really nice to speak to both
of you guys. Good luck, happy holidays, and thanks so
much for giving me the time.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
And there you have it, folks, Tom Preston the one
and only. I can't believe that we got to hang
out with a living legend like that. And super big
thanks to everybody for tuning in. Big thanks to our
super producer mister Max Williams and Alex Williams who composed
our track and did some yoga with Noel.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
That's right, we did a hot yoga session. It was
at delay. Huge thanks to Chris Frostiotis and Eves cheff
Coat here in Sparait the Strickland, the quizzer A and
j Bahamas Jacob's.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
The Buzzler and big big thanks to doctor Rachel Big
Spinach Lands, Big thanks to our rude dudes of ridiculous crime.
If you dig us you'll love them and Noel thanks
to you and thanks to Max. This is the last
episode we're going to record in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Oh my gosh, have a great holiday you guys. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show, fellow Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. We want to give a big
end of the year shout out to our super producer,
mister Max Williams. We've got We've got Big Bullen, We've
got Noel Brown. We also have a special guest today, Noel.
(00:50):
We can't believe this is happening. This is a true story.
We are speaking with the author, the world traveler, the
man who started MTV, none other than Tom Freston, creator
of the newest hip book Unplugged.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Thanks for being here, Tom, How are you.
Speaker 3 (01:14):
I'm good, I'm very good.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
He's a busy man. Against the calls.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I'm fine. I'm just trying to disconnect my phone here.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
You're trying to unplug. Huh.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
I need to be unplugged.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
It's tough. It's a very difficult thing to do in
this day and age. Ben. I think he did a
fine job of given the short version of an incredibly
storied career and cv. Tom, you are the co founder
of MTV, the former CEO of Viacom. You've had your
(01:56):
hands in just about every aspect of the entertainment and
media landscape that you know you could possibly imagine, but
even more than that, And I'd love to start a
little bit with some of your background. I saw an
article this morning from Forbes, I think it just came
out today describing you as a beat poet exec who
made MTV cool for twenty years. Can you tell us
(02:18):
a little bit about what that means. You talk a
little bit about like getting into the game as it
were in some of these more kind of wild West
days of the sixties and not wanting to work for
the man, and having that attitude kind of carry you
into this sort of freewheeling, you know, life of adventure
and entrepreneurship.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Well, that headline, Kana threw me too, okay, I told
the reporter. He said, you know, what were some of
your seminal influences, And I said, well, in my life,
I was influenced by two groups of people, primarily the Beats,
you know, Perlengetti, Kerowhac Corso the rest of them, and
the Libertarians, which was sort of an odd mix, but
(03:02):
they both believed in individual freedom. They both believed in
a way that a life should be full of experience,
and the Beafs in particular, thought that you could go
through life sort of improvising your life, not having a
really set career path, but leaving yourself open to possibility, traveling,
(03:23):
hungering for experience, being with people that you like. And
that's sort of been a guiding maxim for me, along
with the fact that I never really wanted to do
any work in the mainstream. I thought life would be
a little more interesting over on the side of the road,
and by and large that's what I've been able to accomplish.
And the places I've worked and the things I've done,
(03:44):
none of them were really mainstream activities.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And this is strange because, to be quite honest with you, Todd,
MTV is a formative experience for us on this show,
and I'm sure you hear that all the time. If
we could, could you share a little bit of the
providence or the origin story of how you and your
(04:11):
pals came up with this idea of music television.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Yeah, and let me just qualify one thing at the outset,
which is the MTV you've seen for the last say,
fifteen years or so, is not the MTV that I'm
really talking about.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
We started out, for sure.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
We started out as a music service for young adults.
The idea was, if you drive back to nineteen eighty,
cable was just beginning. Most cities did not have cable TV.
It existed in some rural areas because people just wanted
distance signals and better reception. And in nineteen seventy nine
and eighty, various companies were cooking up things like CNN
(04:51):
or U, ESPN or USA Network, and we were going
to bounce our signals off of satellite, and we were
going to make cable TV kind of sweeped through the
hinter lands in the cities and become a universal utility. Essentially,
MTV and Nickelodeon was the other company under my sort
of umbrella. We were really the tip of the sphere.
(05:13):
Prior to that, you had free broadcast networks ABC, NBCCBS,
that's pretty much all it was there. Cable was going
to do to television what FM radio sort of did
to AM radio. They were going to have more slender services.
They called it narrow casting at the time, doing one
thing all the time, appealing to a certain audience, so
(05:34):
you really didn't care that everyone wasn't watching you. ABC
was just a bunch of disconnected shows, whereas everything we
did on MTV would be cohesive. They would all be
directed at younger music lovers. And the form that we
were going to build us around was the music video,
which was unknown to most Americans but had existed in Europe,
(05:57):
where I had seen it years ago, because in Europe
it was very difficult for record companies to get their
acts on the radio because there wasn't a lot of
radio stations they didn't play music, so they would make
these music videos and put them on shows like Top
of the Pops in the UK. On television, we thought
that this would be a great vehicle. Music's a big category.
(06:18):
We could have a music channel on television. We thought
we'd take the two things that the baby boomers who
we were targeting at that time, the two things they
really loved, music and television, and put it together in
a new way, and we call it MTV. And I
was on the team that developed that concept, and we
launched in nineteen eighty one, and at the bulk of
(06:40):
the programming, we tried to give it an underground sort
of cool sensibility, like this was something like you don't
know where it came from. And it really became a thing.
I mean, it really became a force in the cultures.
Easy to remember, easy to forget how revolutionary it seemed
at the time, given all that's happened, But back then
(07:01):
it really looked like something brand new, a sign of
the future that was coming and so forth.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
It had a certain quality of pirate radio, had a
certain quality of punk rock kind of aesthetic. Even with
all those I mean, I think of the bumpers so often,
some of those early MTV animated bumpers with the clamation
using weirdo artists. Some of the animation that came later,
stuff like Beavis and butt Head, but in the earliest days.
I think the video that a lot of people associate
(07:27):
with the very very first days of MTVS video Killed
the Radio Star by the Buggles, which a lot of
people don't know this, but there is a tiny little
cameo in that video from Hans Zimmer, I think he
was in the band at the times, and he's got
this rack of crazy modular sins behind him, and you
can see a young Hans bopping with the Buggles. But
it's like you almost think of it as such a
(07:50):
connected piece, this idea of this mission statement or this
thesis video killed the radio star. But that wasn't exactly
on purpose. It just happened to be the one that
took off and sort of led this new style of
broadcast and the way of experiencing music. Can you kind
of talk about those early days and how quickly it
picked up or like, did it take a minute or
(08:11):
was it a kind of instant that people just saw
the potential and got on board with MTV?
Speaker 1 (08:16):
And what was the climate like? Was this a very
startup environment where you.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, it was like a bunch of us in a
hotel room with coal waiting. We didn't even have a
lot of phones, eating pizza and working day and night.
There was a handful of us and we were all
No one was making more than thirty thousand dollars a year,
and we probably would have worked for less because we
were all on a mission. We were like crusaders. Everyone was.
(08:41):
No one was from the world of television. I came
from eight years in Afghanistan and India. A lot of people
came out of record companies or radio stations. But we
were all passionate and you were right about the bumpers
and all that. We really tried to create an image
that would be coh. We didn't want We want an
MTV to be a place. It wasn't a show. I
wasn't going to go watch a show on MTV. I
(09:03):
was going to go watch MTV. We thought that's the
only way we really could survive, would be just a
because we didn't have a lot of shows for starters,
but we wanted people just to come there anytime. In
the early days we had we went on the air,
we only had one hundred and sixty eight videos. That's
like one video for every hour of the week if
you didn't repeat them, and it didn't take off immediately,
(09:28):
it took a while. We were everyone we dealt with
thought thought it was a bad idea. The cable operators
didn't want to pay us any money because they don't
like paying money to anybody, and they were all monopolists
in a particular geography. The advertiser said, no one's going
to watch music on television, will never get an audience,
and the record company said, we're not going to give
you these videos. You know, we want you to pay
(09:52):
for them, and we really couldn't afford to do that.
We said, well, they're going to sell records for you.
They're like three minute commercials. So for a long time
it was like for two years, it was just trying
to overcome a series of no no, no, no, no no.
But what we did know was that people who got
it once we went on the air in August of
eighty one, they loved it like the consumer had been
(10:16):
left out of the equation. I would go out, because
I was the marketing guy at the time, with this
other fellow, John Stikes, who was a promotion guy. We
would go to cities like Tulsa, Current then the biggest
cable system in America. And just even when I arrived
at the airport to rent a car, they saw MTV
button on my jacket. It was like, where did you
get that? Cool? I said, you know, you've heard of MTV?
(10:40):
They go, are you kidding me? Everybody here knows about MTV.
It's wild. It had just come on unannounced in the
middle of the night, like six weeks earlier, and the
town was going nuts for it. They went to a
radio station they were like, wow, all these people are
requesting songs from the Buggles in Duran. Duran grew we
never play on the radio. People are getting haircuts based
(11:03):
on various artists that they see. I went to a
bar and everybody was standing around like they were watching
an NFL game, but they were watching MTV. So we
had the first sign of life. No one who worked
at MTV got it at home. It was all an
abstraction to us. We were making it putting up on
our satellite. We only had two million subscribers, which was
(11:26):
not enough to do anything. So we decided, as we
were running out of money, to do sort of a
hail Mary pass, and we came up with it. I
won my MTV campaign, which would go right over the
cable operator's head and get these young Then it was
like rock and roll fans to torment their cable operator
to make sure they carry it, and it worked like
(11:48):
a charm. We would enlist major rock stars Mick Jagger,
David Bowie, p Townsend Hall and Oates, have them hold
our logo and validate it. Call your cable company and
say I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
And you approached them in kind of a punk rock
sort of culture jammy way, like didn't you like find
Bowie on the slopes or something and like walk up
to him and try to get into record like his
little version of that.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Well, I had drawn to David Bowie cart I had
to find him. And you know, the first time I
met him, I saw him, I was just trying to
ask him to get permission to use some photos of him,
Like we couldn't even get those from the record companies.
They thought we were like a fan club or something.
And David Bowie just said, you want my picture. The
(12:32):
best way to get to an artist is to go
directly to them, don't go through the record company, don't
go through the manager. And he just said it is
it good for music? And I said yeah, we're going
to play music twenty four hours a day. Said sure,
So that was over. So then I called his manager
when we wanted to do this campaign. I said, you know,
we have this campaign. It's blah blah blah. We'd love
(12:54):
to have David in it. Well, David's skiing in Switzerland,
he's in stop, but he'll do it. So I got
the crew. We got on a plane to Zurich right away,
where like it's like mission impossible. And then we got
on a train to stod and we went out to
like this little hill that was off in the mainstream
(13:14):
and Bowie looked great. He was in you know, he
was in his legs dance phase, you know, blonde hair,
looking healthy. He's a good skier. Comes down and he
knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to come
down a hill and then stop with a squish, and
he was going to go hold his hands like this
and say I want my MTV. And uh so we did.
(13:36):
We did that a few times and then he he's
a really nice guy. He won't know if any of
us wanted to ski with him. And at the end
of the day he said, you know, Tom, what are
you doing later? You want to take a sauna at
the Grand Hotel, which was like the main hotel in
(13:56):
the shad. So I like, can't believe this is happening.
I go, yeah, I got nothing to do. So I
go back to like our place, which is like sort
of a youth host, the Loemost where the crew was.
I said, I'll see you losers later. I'm gonna go
take a sauna with David Bowie. So when I went
there into the spa, you know, got put a towel
(14:19):
on to go into the sauna room. We went in there.
He said, you know, he's a very pleasant guy. He
talked you about what books you're reading and all that
kind of thing. There's one other person in the sauna.
I look up in it's Squint and it's Paul McCartney.
Can you believe so that maybe you know, I was
(14:41):
there twenty six years that was maybe one of my
peak moments, you know, early on in my career.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
That's a weird place to meet Paul McCartney too, because
you're walking in, You've got the towel lawn. It's definitely
a sauna. It's not a pr thing, right, what was
did you have like an icebreaker?
Speaker 3 (15:01):
Or yeah? Well he is in what you know? They
didn't know what was up. They said, what is MTV?
We start west where we started? What is MTV? That's
how little they knew about it. So I described it
to them and I'd be throwing water on the rocks.
They were both really, really nice, and I was very
self effacing and saying, you know, we're trying to get
(15:22):
this thing going. It's going to be really good for
music and going to be good for the category. It's
a new way for artists to express themselves. And we
would one day end up being in Europe, which we
did some years later, so that was a that was
a highlight for me. But with that, this campaign allowed
us to ramp up our subscribers to like seventy eighty
ninety million homes as cable built out and as more,
(15:46):
because we'd go into a market and run this advertising
on the broadcast networks at really high levels, so you know,
you'd have to be dead if you didn't know about it.
So people would call their company cable company and use
that language and put us on.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
And one thing that's amazing here right that I'm sure
you get questions about MTV all the time, obviously. One
thing that's amazing about your book Unplugged. I didn't give
the full title, it's Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim bucktoo.
And Tom, we can't let it go here because you
(16:32):
mentioned something that I wish more interviews examined from your
book before we have this moment with David Bowie and
with Paul McCartney, before we have MTV and Nickelodeon and
so on. You have traveled the world, you said, eight years,
(16:55):
eight years abroad in places that honestly a lot of
Americans had not visited at the time. Could you tell
us a little bit kind of speaking to that mention
of improvisation and just hopping on the road. Could you
could you tell us what inspired your travels, what you
(17:16):
were doing. We have we have so many questions, but
maybe paint the stage. Okay, I'm a kid in the US.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
I'm a kid in the US and less. Remember it's
the sixties, so and there was alienation in the air,
there was freedom in the air. The counterculture was in
full force. There was the war in Vietnam. I had
gone to a graduate school to avoid getting drafted. Somehow
that I pulled that off, and then I took a
(17:45):
year off and I sort of improvised even with I
had an MBA that kept me out of the army,
and then I bartended my way out and asked spen
a Virgin Islands Martha's Vin. You know, I did a
lot of that. That was sort of improvising that I
wouldn't got a job at an ad.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Agency, Benton and Bulls.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Benton and Bulls is one of the big agencies at
the time, so I try that out. I got on
what they called the fast track for Procter and Gamble products.
So I did like I did a Gi Joe thing,
which I hated, scope mouthwis. The whole thing was a
learning experience, but it was enough for me to know
this wasn't for me. Then they wanted to assign me
a Sharman toilet paper, one of their big accounts, and
(18:26):
that was hard to digest. And I had a woman,
a girlfriend. She was living in Paris. She called me
up and see, well, how you doing. I said, man,
they wanted me to sell toilet paper. And she says, oh,
you can't do that. Come with me across. I'm going
to go across the Tahara Desert. You're going to hitchhike
down through Spain and Morocco. Go across the Tahara Desert.
(18:48):
I was on a plane ten weeks later. Ten days later,
excuse me, I got a passport and I was off
and I didn't come back for a year. We left.
We split up after two months, but I kept going.
And I had met another woman in Greece who told me,
you know, you got to go to India. That's like
the Holy Grail, that's the greatest show on Earth. And
(19:09):
I set out overland through Turkey and Iran and Afghanistan
and India, and I just fell in love with that area.
I was fascinated. I had done a lot of homework.
I decided I wanted to live there, but I had
to create a job, and you couldn't really get a
job there in those days. And in those days, this
was the seventies. Now in India, the place was like
(19:32):
a shock to the system. Sixty percent of the population
was under the poverty line and it was a massive
humanity and it took a lot of energy just to
get through one day. But I said, this is so,
I feel so alive here. So I set up a
business to design it and make and then import into
the United States clothing, higher end clothing, more designer like
(19:55):
than the cheap sort of ethnic stuff. And I said
that would allow me to make enough money to live here.
It would be sort of a creative endeavor. Lord knows
what's going to happen. Once I start, other things will
happen to me. So I did that for eight years,
made a lot of money. I was a millionaire in
my twenties. Back then, I had a partner and we
(20:17):
were in you know, I knew people in New York,
so we would be in vogue and Mademoiselle and Glamour magazines.
We got a lot of coverage, we sold. We became
an unexpected hit. But at the end a lot of
bat I had a house, I had servants, I was
living like a pasha. Couldn't believe it. It was fantastic and
(20:38):
a very exciting place to be. But then the Russians
invaded Afghanistan, which kind of took that market away, that operation.
And then Jimmy Carter, of all people, after all we
had endured in India, you know, blackouts, strikes, cobra's dysentery,
(21:00):
you name it, he.
Speaker 2 (21:01):
Discovered the actual cobras.
Speaker 3 (21:02):
By the way, those are real cobra.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah yeah, oh yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
It's in our backyard and they were in our backyard
eating the rats.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
That's right. But it was the cobra problem because they
released cobras to kill the rats. And then I believe
you would get some sort of bounty if you showed
that your cobra had killed rats. So people just released
more and more cobras, and it became this like self
like this rabuus kind of snake eating its own tail.
Thing would be created. Went from a rat problem to
a cobra problem.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
Right, I go on YouTube. They have all these snake videos.
There's a rabbit hole on YouTube where you can see
all these cobras eating things. But then they declared an
embargo on clothing from India because the president put in
place tariffs kind of like today, because it was hurting
(21:48):
domestic manufacturing. So they outlawed it for a while, and
I basically went bankrupt. I did smuggle some some some
of the clothing I shipped to Canada and kind of
smuggled it into the US over the Saint Lawrence Seaway,
which was crazy.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
Just so you know, folks, we are at Audio Podcast
and Ed Tubb, you had the most poetic look out
the window and I could see you traveling back to
the Saint Lawrence River.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
That situation, Yeah, that was a that was not going
to be a good way to make a living. So
I was out of work. I was out of luck.
I was broke. I was. I spent eight years doing that.
I'm thirty three years old. And I then saw this
article about the guy wanted to start a music channel,
and my brother, who worked at Columbia Records, recommended me
(22:42):
for an interview. And I realized that after traveling My
other main passion was music, and I was a music nut.
I knew I could tell you when I was growing up,
who sang what song? What was on the other side
of the record, all that, And I said, well, this
looks like fun, this looks like something I could do.
So I went in for an interview and they said,
we're looking for people with no experience in television because
(23:03):
we don't have any money and we can't afford to
hire people who have bad habits they've acquired working for
the broadcasters. So they hired me on the spot.
Speaker 1 (23:11):
Wow, did I have to ask? Did your escape from
Kabul come up in the interview at all? When they
said what's your previous work?
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Well? Yeah, both two people thought I was a hash
he smugging as I asked about and they said it
in a way like it was a positive.
Speaker 2 (23:32):
That's one of these fellows. Is our CEO here at iHeart?
Speaker 3 (23:35):
Were you smuggling the guy Bob Pittman, who now is
the CEO of iHeart? Bob Bob, I hope you're listening,
he said to me when he was twenty six. He
was younger than me. He was the head guy. He said,
what were you doing in Afghanistan smuggling drugs and I said,
not really, he goes, not really, that means you were.
Speaker 2 (23:57):
But I was a feature, not a bug. Right, You're hired.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
So I got hired by Bob.
Speaker 1 (24:03):
And this, this journey continues because, as you said, we're
doing something revolutionary. At this point, you know, I was
also in full disclosure. I was one of those kids
that got hacked by Uh, I want my MTV and
I was. I was bugging my parents that I remember vividly.
Speaker 3 (24:25):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
There was one Christmas where, uh, you know, my my
parents asked me what I wanted, right, And instead of
picking you know, a toy or a trip or something,
I said, it'd be cool if we had MTV because
the kids up the street have it.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Oh, it's something you'd go to the kids up the
street's house. I watched a million.
Speaker 3 (24:47):
I like those sort of origin of my MTV viewing stories.
I hear them a lot. People were young and going
over to friends' houses because pumpy my mother wouldn't let
us get cable. My mother would let me watch EMTV
well or whatever, but there was always someone in the
neighborhood who had it with lenient parents.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
That's right, yep, and then that would be the rallying spot.
I don't want to maybe now, I mean, let's just
go ahead and do it. You mentioned the idea of cable,
and I think there might be some bocks growing up
now that don't even really remember what cable was all about.
And you mentioned the idea of subscribers, and I think
we can certainly correlate that to the model that we
all now participate in against our will most of the time,
(25:26):
which is this sort of I don't know, the fatigue
of infinite subscriptions, all of these different things, which more
or less the way things are now. It's kind of
become what cable packages used to be. Where it was like,
you know, it was this illusion of choice. You know,
you could get all the different whatever channels, you get
the package you want, not have the ones that you
(25:46):
don't want. But now it's like there's so much crossover
and so much weird kind of I don't know, overkill.
If everyone's got their own thing, you can no longer
get everything in one place, so you have to have
all of them. Can you speak a little bit abou
how the landscapes changed from what cable was to where
we are now with the streaming thing, that to my
mind kind of resembles almost a more monstrous version of cable.
Speaker 3 (26:10):
Yeah, that's a good question. Well, you know, we used
to call it, but there's a TV revolution, which meant
you're going to get more choices. So we started out
cable systems were twelve channels, and twenty four, then thirty
five and fifty four, and then it just kept going.
But they were all like you say, they were all
you're getting them all for one price, so you didn't
have to keep tracking, even though you maybe only watch
(26:30):
eight or nine of them, but you pay the same
price that was the cable package. And then they kept
raising the prices of the cable package. Then satellite came on,
and you know, there was a little bit of a
battle price. This went down a bit, but the TV
revolution kind of came to an end. It was replaced
by the digital revolution. And in this revolution, we have
the Internet, we've got social media, we've got all these
(26:52):
streaming services, we've got substacks, we've got podcasts, and we're
just we used to say you're gonna be able to
watch or listen to whatever you want, whenever you want,
And now they get out on whatever device, So there's
an infinite amount of choice. It's not thirty five channels,
and it's a hard thing. Do I have Hulu?
Speaker 2 (27:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
I don't remember. Am I on his substack? I can't remember.
Someone's got to come up with a new kind of
aggregated package or at least show me on a screen
all the things I subscribe to so I can unsubscribe
to some of them.
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Agreed, Do you, given your experience right and your deep
knowledge base with Asdall said, the changing landscape, we have
to ask you a little bit about the future. I mean,
do you see a course correction coming for streaming services?
Do we see a world where someone says, hey, I'll
(27:52):
just watch these three things? Are were returning back to ABC, CBC,
the TV with three channels.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
And to piggyback US, especially now with what we're seeing
as more of this corporate consolidation, these efforts to kind
of be the one company that has all the things.
Of course, there's a lot of talk about this merger
with Paramounts and Warner Brothers, after Warner Brothers already was
acquired by a company that we actually used to be
a part of Discovery in our early days of podcasting,
it just seems like it's getting deluded more and more
(28:20):
and more, and I'm just curious if that's a good thing.
Is this for the consumer? Is this anti consumer?
Speaker 3 (28:25):
Like?
Speaker 2 (28:25):
What is the future of anti consumer?
Speaker 3 (28:29):
Okay, make no mistake about it. Whatever happens with Warner Brothers,
who's like the crown jewel studio of hollywoods.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
They have all the all of it, all the legacy stuff.
Speaker 3 (28:40):
Yes, whatever happens, if it goes when Netflix, or if
it goes with the Paramount and the Lessons, there's nothing
in it for the consumer. It means prices are going
to go up because if Netflix gets it, you know,
it's going to fold into Netflix and they're going to
have they'll be able to raise their prices because they'll
be one less competitor, which was a big competitor. They'll
(29:02):
have more content that they can talk about, so they
can raise their prices. As a consumer, you're not getting
anything really extra. You know, you could have got them
from the two of them. And then you know, if
you're a let's say you're a producer. You guys produce
a show, so you got a new like Sopranos in
your mind, you used to be able to go to
(29:23):
Warners and you used to be able to go to Netflix,
two potential buyers. Now there's only one buyer of those,
So you've lost a buyer and you've given this company
more leverage to raise prices. So it's really a question
of consolidation, and it's trying. It's like, it seems like
it's this inexorable force. You know, why can't Warner Brothers
(29:46):
just stay where they were? And you know, the last
time we had a studio in Hollywood eaten up by somebody,
it was when Disney bought Fox. And if you look
at the amount of movies that the combined Disney Fox
puts out now, it's less than what they put used
to put out individually.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
Arguably less good ones.
Speaker 1 (30:07):
Well, they can't compete against themselves, right, They've essentially consolidated
a schedule to attempt to maximize their return.
Speaker 3 (30:15):
They stuck out a lot of costs, they unemploy a
lot of people, and you know, it's an I don't
know what happens at the end of this. I don't
know what happens. Yeah, this is is more and more consolidation,
and maybe some of these smaller streaming services go out
of business unless you're like you got a niche, like
you're the Criterion Channel or something, and you can can
(30:38):
live over on the sidelines and no one's really going
to mess with you.
Speaker 1 (30:41):
Yeah, you point out, you point out that the indie spirit,
the art first still remains in some ways with outfits
like eight twenty four. I think we're big fans of
their work. But it does seem like what you're saying here, Tom,
is there be a big crunch of consolidation that takes
(31:04):
us back to the days of essentially three channels, even
if they pretend to be thousands, And it doesn't sound
like it's the best thing.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
No, you're gonna have in the old days, you've got
three channels for free. Now you're gonna have three packages,
each of which costs money and cost more money going forward.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
It's very strange because I keep thinking back through through Unplugged.
When we were reading it, it was a journey I
was not expecting to be quite honest, and it's a
hell of a story, and there there are a lot
of deep philosophical gems in this, and I love that
(31:56):
you mentioned Joseph Campbell. It seems almost as if mass
media is on a hero's journey of its own, would
you agree with that? And what do you like about
Joseph Capbell And please tell me if that analogies BS.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
No, I mean he was about the hero's journey. I
mean his his sort of philosophy underwride, you know so
much of life. I always found him as a source
of good advice. What would he be thinking of today's
media world. That's a good question. He'd probably be as
confused as we are. He's going to watch a lot
of shows, but he hasn't signed up for that network
(32:36):
yet streaming service.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
And we'd have to get out his sub sect. Yeah,
I'd love to add one more. Go back to music
briefly with this discussion of kind of the Future, because
as you mentioned, MTV isn't the MTV it used to be.
It's much more of a reality driven network, or at
least it has been for a long time with like
reality shows. And obviously they've made a lot of waves
in that medium, for better or worse, whatever your opinion
(32:58):
is on that kind of content. But they're certainly not
breaking artists anymore. There used to be MTV two, which
I thought was great. That was more like the old MTV,
but that's not really around anymore. And now it seems
to me that music has been removed entirely from what
MTV is or has been. I'm wondering if with things
like AI music generation and you know, AI video generation
(33:23):
and this question around the philosophical nature of art and
the artist and giving the people what they want, how
does that all fit in to your journey and how
does that all fit into kind of the trajectory of
media and culture, Because I mean, we literally have songs
charting now that were entirely generated by artificial intelligence mean
(33:44):
or machine learning, whatever the term might be.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
Yeah, as I said before, we had the cable revolution
and you had sort of the digital revolution. You could
argue that the digital revolution is about the annibisa planted
by the AI revolution. And it's maybe too early to
know where the AI is going. I mean, it's going
to be the end of civilization or it's going to
make our lives a lot better. It's probably somewhere in between. Well,
(34:07):
so I'm glad in my career I don't have to
deal with a lot of the issues, the macro issues.
Is it going to put twenty percent of our people
out on the street. Is it going to eliminate so
many things, so many jobs, The fact that you can
make songs or TV shows with AI not using real people.
(34:30):
You know, I don't know. I'm alone. I shake my head.
Maybe I'm all fashioned, but I like authenticity and I
can't see myself getting emotionally entangled in a song that
I don't think any human being had a role in making.
(34:51):
That it's some kind of consolid dated ay, you know,
something out of chat GPT. It's just I don't know, maybe,
but maybe for other for younger people, they might not
find this so bad if the beat's good that they
don't really care about that.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Haven't we lost something at that point? Though? Kind of?
I mean, I don't know it not to be like
the old man screaming at clouds myself, but it does
feel like if it becomes so good that you quote
unquote can't tell the difference, or you just don't really
care that much, it haven't we lost something in that
connection to what it means to be a human and
to make art and to make something that is the
product of experience, Because isn't at the end of the day,
(35:30):
this AI stuff is kind of regurgitating the wealth of
human art, creativity, knowledge and sort of remixing it in
a way that's as hopefully as trans or as hard
to tell that it was done that way as possible.
Is it kind of like a way of like tricking us?
Speaker 3 (35:42):
I don't know, it's like a it is like a remix,
but like the remixes, we know at least we're mixed
together by humans, right, Yeah, these are going to be
much more deeper remixes.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
It's it's also a new normal. We have to consider that, right,
because if you are privileged enough to have been in
an environment where you see you see live musicians, right,
you have that destination moment. Oh the new music video
it's coming out tonight at nine pm. Everybody get to
(36:16):
Timmy's house because his mom lets us watch HIMTV. You
have those moments of connection of authenticity. But then let's
say you're growing up. Now it's the end of twenty
twenty five as we record this, you're six years old, right,
you grow up in a place where live music exists.
(36:39):
But now it's normalized to have that AI experience. I'm
just wondering here, Tom, does the pendulum swing back? Do
we see a return to authenticity after a certain point
with Ai rolling out.
Speaker 3 (36:53):
I think so, okay, I think so. I mean, I
think people will have to be more hungry for that
real experience. I mean, if you're six years old, let's
say you grow up and you can be by the
time you're twenty, maybe you haven't been to a live concert,
and a live concert is something where, you know, music's
a lot deeper of an entertainment form than than film
(37:15):
or TV. I mean, there's a it's bigger than language.
You're in a you're in a crowd, there's not a
collective vibe, and everybody's in it together and it's really magical,
and you know, to not have it, I don't see
how you duplicate that with things all being artificial. You know,
(37:37):
maybe I'm just another old man screaming at the future.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
Well, we're with you here, a fellow abbateur meteorologist, right,
We're also we're also getting a lot of folks in
the audience and friends of ours candidly when we said
we're going to have a moment to explore life and
(38:02):
history in the future with this guy. One thing a
lot of people are asking us about is the life
lessons or advice you would give not now for a
six year old, but let's fast forward for a twenty
year old right now growing.
Speaker 2 (38:17):
Up in the world.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Maybe maybe hopscotching around, doing some bartending at the vineyard
and so on. What would you want a young like,
let's say early twenties Tom Freston to know about the future.
What advice would you give yourself if you could travel
in time.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
Well, let's say you just got out of school and
you're really young. And if you're really young, you're at
a point in your life where you can make some mistakes,
you can take some shots. There's no risk. Really, It
isn't like if you disappear for a while, people are
really going to know you're gone and disqualify you off
some kind of list. So get off the conveyor belt.
(39:00):
The world is the best classroom. I'm now speaking from
my own experience. What others would say this too? And
go places? Now, Maybe you can't go everywhere like I did,
but you can go places. You can have menial jobs,
you can work around, you can be a king of
the road for a while and see the world, see
the world outside this country, see the world from other
(39:20):
people's shoes, see what they think about our country. Get
some of the nuances involved in the global you know
sort of setup that we have today, Make some friends
in other places that you can continue to have through
the rest of your life, and don't feel guilty. Don't
feel like you have to go to work for Goldman
Sachs like a week after you get out of college.
(39:42):
That just baffles me. But you see these kids today,
they really have high anxiety, and they have they're more
prone to depression, and they have panic attacks. And I'm thinking, God,
you're in your young twenties. You should feel great. You
did the school thing. Of course, you you don't know
exactly what you're going to be. If you do know,
(40:02):
you're you're you know, you're really naive. So doors will
open to you that you would not even have imagined
if you take a break, take a few beats, and
get out there and get some experience, and because when
you come back, you're going to be a lot more
desirable of a job candidate and a lot more interesting
(40:23):
with a more interesting story as a job candidate than
if you've just been you know, going along drone like
in you know, thinking that you don't have a lot
of agency in what you're going to do with your life.
You know, a little improvisation could be good for sure.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
I mean, I think especially as like the traditional models
even of like college and career paths and stuff, they're
starting to, I don't know, fall apart a little bit.
It makes a whole lot of sense to just try
to collect experiences, collect various pieces of wisdom and knowledge,
various skill sets, and then be able to to kind
of improvise your way into finding the right path as
(41:03):
it presents itself. But you can't really see that path
if you don't go places in order to look for
those doors, right, because you know it's not if you're
looking for like the setout path that's going to be
what it is. But if you go abroad or go
elsewhere or just try different things, then you're gonna kind.
Speaker 3 (41:19):
Of a good place. I'm an optimist. I know. Whenever
I go looking for an apartment, you see an apartment
you think you like, and then you don't get it,
and then you see something else you think you like,
and then you don't get it someone else rented it.
But at the end of the day, you find something
and you go, thank God, I didn't get those other two,
because this is a better one. And you know, I
(41:40):
think you can apply some of that optimism to like,
you know, career choice. Career is almost a different word
these days because you're in the world. We're in the
gig economy time, which I know it presents a whole
bunch of other issues and problems, and you know.
Speaker 1 (41:58):
I do, I do. Like I love the point about
about traveling, about taking a beat away from the conveyor
belts or the so called rat race, because often we
forget there's a whole other world out there. And Tom,
this reminds me of that that beautiful verse from T. S.
(42:19):
Eliot from Little gettings, we shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will be to
arrive where we started and know the place for the
first time. I feel like that that's kind of nailing.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
Yeah, that's beautiful, that's really true. You do kind of
know it for the first time. You can say I
know myself and I know America. I really know America
for the first time, because you know, Americas are famous
for not traveling, right, Yeah, I think it used to
be twenty five percent of Americans had passports. Well, you know,
(42:53):
you go to the Netherlands like ninety nine percent of
people that passports. Of course it's a smaller country and
all that.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
It also, uh. The story that's going to stick with
my pal Nola and I is definitely going to be
the fact that man Bob never asked us if we
smuggled Hashish out of Kabul.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
You know what you should do. You should send him
an email say you're just speaking to Tom and wondering
if the fact that we've been smuggling Hashi shot us
somewhere that does that mean we could get out some
kind of promotion or a raise, or maybe you can
direct us into another side hustle.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
Hell, I've never even seen Hashish until I went to
UH to Copenhagen, where it's Yeah.
Speaker 3 (43:39):
I think they smoke it all before it gets across there.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
It is there, it is Tom, this is the best.
I don't know. Do you have any any closing thoughts
to leave us when we could go so deep with this?
But I do first of all recommend everybody pick up
this book Unplugged. It is not entirely about the history
of MTV unplugged, which could be a topic of discussion
all its own. I think We're gonna leave that one
for another time. But yeah, I don't know, is there anything.
Speaker 3 (44:04):
I'm just please you guys have me on. I just
say the book is not a business book.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
No, no, no, It's.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
An adventure story and it's wrapped around us some business
things and in my life. But yeah, it's about history
going through you know, going from the sixties onward. You know,
the path that I took, which started out in a
relatively more free, optimistic environment, and what we find ourselves
(44:32):
in today. Things were ascendant and anything. You thought you
could do anything. But I say that a lot of
the rules then still apply now. And my book ends
up with reinventing yourself. I reinvented myself a third time
doing a lot of pro social work work, going back
to Afghanistan and helping a TV network there or working
(44:54):
in Africa for the extreme poor. I know, there's a
lot of lessons in there. It's funny when you write
a book like that, you don't think of what you're
writing your lessons. But people would say to me, that's
why I really learned a lot reading that. But people
like the book. It's it's kind of fun, it's good ride.
Speaker 2 (45:11):
Well, but it doesn't come off as teaching lessons. You're not.
You're not preaching to people, You're just experiencing. You're expressing
these lessons you yourself have learned that are very universally applicable.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
I would argue, I never thought i'd write a memoir,
you know, it never occurred to me till the pandemic
came along and I kind of started and I'm thinking,
how do I connect all of the sparate parts of
my life? Is there is there some overarching narrative? And I,
you know, you do a book like that. Of course
I'm older, you know, and sort of like you could
see it come into focus. So it was a satisfying experience.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
As fine reading.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
And you have genuinely made the world a better place
with your work, which I know sounds hyperbolic, right, but
we're I love that you're mentioning the fact of the
existence of things like one. I love that you're mentioning
the volunteering that you've done and returning to Afghanistan. And
(46:06):
if you want to learn more about this, folks, please
do check out Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck
to We're not blowing rainbows here. This is a page
turner again, Tom, it was not what I was expecting
and I was riveted and we can't thank you enough
for your time man.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Thanks Ben, thanks Aul, really nice to speak to both
of you guys. Good luck, happy holidays, and thanks so
much for giving me the time.
Speaker 1 (46:34):
And there you have it, folks, Tom Preston the one
and only. I can't believe that we got to hang
out with a living legend like that. And super big
thanks to everybody for tuning in. Big thanks to our
super producer mister Max Williams and Alex Williams who composed
our track and did some yoga with Noel.
Speaker 2 (46:54):
That's right, we did a hot yoga session. It was
at delay. Huge thanks to Chris Frostiotis and Eves cheff
Coat here in Sparait the Strickland, the quizzer A and
j Bahamas Jacob's.
Speaker 1 (47:03):
The Buzzler and big big thanks to doctor Rachel Big
Spinach Lands, Big thanks to our rude dudes of ridiculous crime.
If you dig us you'll love them and Noel thanks
to you and thanks to Max. This is the last
episode we're going to record in twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
Oh my gosh, have a great holiday you guys. We'll
see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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