June 20, 2019 • 49 mins
At 15, Jarl Mohn got himself a pseudonym (Lee Masters!), a radio license and a job at a local station. Learn how the legendary CEO of NPR worked his way up from spinning records, how competing with a man in El Paso taught him everything he knows about sales, and why limited funds and a little bit of desperation led to groundbreaking successes at MTV, E! and NPR.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart radio.
So we came up with this logo and they ran
a trade campaign to full pages and they took a
shot of me. It looked like I had shaved the
logo into my head. So are we completely bald except
for the exclamation point and the E and the captions that?
(00:23):
Trust me, it'll catch on to this day, people mentioned
that to me, it went viral. It went viralent, viral,
before the days of things going viral. It was great fun,
but I didn't actually shave my head. Welcome to Math
(00:43):
and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing. I'm Bob Pittman,
and on this episode we have someone who made his
mark as a creative, but certainly as an expert on
the math side as well. You're Almone, the CEO of MPR.
He's an old old friend. Started out as a deal
personality at age fifteen, by the way, with the unaired
(01:03):
name of Lee Masters. He went on to become a
successful air talent programmer, running radio stations and finally even
owning radio stations. He was the operating head of v
H one and MTV and It's Heyday. He started e
Entertainment television television network. He was at CEO. He had
(01:24):
a great success there and they went on to be
the head of Liberty Investment, where he made smart bets
on companies like Price Line and t VO. He became
an investor for himself after that. Served on the boards
of E W, scripts, C NET, XM Radio. He was
on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
l A. He was the chair of the Southern California
(01:45):
a c l U for fifteen years. He loves and
collects art. He has a wonderful family. He's a nice guy.
He's known for his huge heart and sharp mind. Welcome you, Almon,
Thank you, Bob. So we're gonna start before we really
get into the media questions. We want to get you
in sixties, so I don't think too long to say.
The first thing that comes to your mind will jump
into it. Sure, do you prefer Twitter or Instagram? Instagram?
(02:08):
El Paso or New York City? Oh that's a tough one.
I'd have to say New York. But I did have
a lot of fun in El Paso. Grateful Debt or
Steve Miller band, Dead, MTV or E Entertainment. Oh Man
I'd have to say, you know, MTV was so much fun.
I would have to go with the MTV Okay, Sunrise
(02:30):
or Sunsets, m Sunset Yo. MTV raps are the Weekend
Rock Yo, MTV wraps, Boats or planes, Planes, Lee Masters
are all mom, I'm not fond of either of them. Well,
you have to pick one. I have to pick one.
I'd have to pick you are it's about to get harder.
Oh yeah, yeah, secret talent. I don't know that I
(02:51):
have any secret talent. Oh, cross road puzzles. Favorite city,
Los Angeles. Smartest person you know, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, right,
childhood hero, childhood hero, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, Okay, we
got excluding Bob Pittman. Favorite superhero, John Malone. Favorite piece
(03:11):
of art in your collection James Terrell. Favorite TV show
as a kid and now, Oh, favorite TV show as
a kid. I loved American Bandstand. That was really formative
for me. Today. Game of Thrones, historical Little Winston Churchill,
proudest career achievement here working at Npure favorite podcast. Oh
(03:33):
I can't answer that. I'd be a dead man. Okay,
we'll give you a pass on that one quote to
live by m back to Winston Churchill. Never give up,
Never give up, Never give up. Who would play you
in a movie? Brian Cranston? Do you just look like
Brian Cranston? What would be the title of your memoir? WHOA?
How did I get here? Okay, we're gonna end with
(03:56):
this one, because it really goes all through your history. Yeah, yeah,
us Live concert Pink Floyd. What year? Probably seventy three,
the year I met you, as a matter of fact,
So let's jump into it. Sure, let's start with your childhood.
You grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Tell me a
(04:17):
little bit about your mom and dad and how you
grew up. My father taught English literature and then he
edited a small newspaper new Hope, Pennsylvania, a real emphasis
on reading and literature. Didn't have a television in the
house or radio. As a matter of fact, I contend
that my entire career has been an active rebellion against
the way I was raised. My mother was an artist,
(04:39):
a graphic designer, so there was a real focus on
creativity in our house. And where did you find out
what was going on the radio or TV? If he
didn't have one in the house at friends. I wasn't
prohibited from watching or listening. I just wasn't allowed to
have one in the house, so it was very exotic
for me. So radio, how did you get started? I
(05:00):
was probably like eleven or twelve is when I really
glombed on the radio and loved it and loved listening
to it. That's when I said I would be great
playing records would be awesome. So I had a number
of jobs after school, save money, got my engineer's license
when I was fifteen because the little radio station in
my hometown you had to have a first class radio license.
(05:21):
So I saved up all my money and at the
fifteen went to Radio Engineering Institute and Sarasota, Florida for
a five week cram course so you can memorize the
answers to the FCC test. And I got my license
at fifteen and came back. They didn't want to hire
me at all, but they needed somebody to run the
religious tapes on Sunday and they didn't have anyone with
(05:41):
the first class radio license, so they were kind of
four stoff hire me, so an act of desperation on
their part, and that's how we started. Do you still
have the first class radio license. It's framed somewhere. I
don't think the FCC even uses those anymore, but I
have it somewhere. Those were the old days when the
disc jockeys were also the engineers, right combo job from
(06:04):
that period. You know, you've been a creative guy your
whole career. You've invented a lot of things and built
a lot of things. What did you learn that was
helpful to you as a creative type or a marketer.
Most of that learning and knowledge came over long periods
of time and mostly trial and error. I was a
fan and consumed a lot of media because I wasn't
(06:24):
allowed to as a kid. Then when I got into
the business, I think it was just a function of
experimenting and learning from others. I won't use the word stealing,
We'll use the art term appropriating things that I saw
other people doing that seemed to work. So you would
characterize your early career as being I'm gonna borrow other
(06:46):
people's Yeah, talk a little bit about Lee Masters. When
did that come about? When? What? When I decided I
want to be a disc jockey and I thought at
that time the name yr Moan as an air name
to not easy to remember, it's not easy to spell,
it's not easy to say, and of course this is
pre NPR. Now it's the perfect NPR name, but at
(07:07):
the time not what you would expect for this jockey.
So in my fifteen year old brain, I wanted to
come up with something that sounded big, and Lee Masters
is what I created. Lee Masters for a long time,
a long thirty five years. Somewhere in the back of
my brain, you're still Lee Masters. So let's talk about
the path you start out in this little radio station.
(07:29):
How did it go from there? I always I always
said that my career was always trying to find somebody
that was more desperate than I was. I think one
of the things that was helpful in my career because
I was young, didn't have any really big needs, didn't
have a family at the time, I could just pick
up and move and like a lot of people we
know into business, we moved around a lot and just
(07:51):
looked for the next opportunity. And I was always looking
for a station that was well programmed, because I knew
if the station sounded really good, I would probably sound better.
Louisville is where I met you, right, I was eighteen
and you were twenty maybe yep. So how did you
wind up in Louisville. I've been working in Indianapolis, and
at the time, I think Louisville was actually and still
(08:12):
is a smaller market. But the radio station there was
really successful, w A k y wacky wacky, big personalities.
I think it was owned by Lynn Broadcasting, and they
owned w f i L in Philadelphia, which was a
station I thought was the greatest top forty radio station
on the planet. I wanted to work for them, so
(08:33):
in my mind I had this plan. I'd go to
work for them in Louisville, do a good job, and
I'd find my way to Philadelphia. And when I was
ultimately offered the job, it was midnight to six and
the money wasn't that great, and I ended up not
doing it. But that was a lot of my logic.
You were on the first people I knew who was
in the meditation. While we were all talking rock music,
(08:56):
you were talking philosophy. So how did that happen? I
was pretty high strung, and I found that over the
years of doing it, I could never say with any
certainty that any of the good things that were happening
in my life were directly related to it. But at
a certain point I said, I'm not going to risk it.
(09:17):
I seems to be working. I'm gonna stick with it.
I still meditate. It's been forty six, forty seven years.
Do you think it enhances your creativity? I think probably.
You know, David Lynch has written beautifully about creativity and meditation,
and of all the things that he discusses about meditation,
(09:37):
that's the one that kind of resonates the most, which
is that when I meditate, I don't necessarily meditate to
find a solution to a problem, but it helps me
relax and get centered. So when I come out of
the meditation, I tend to be able to solve some
of the things I am having to deal with with
a little more agility. I don't know that I can
(09:59):
ever remember or having a moment of inspiration while I
was meditating it, but afterwards. So you run through this
radio career. You and I worked together in New York. Actually,
you and I were on the TV together on a
show called Album Tracks that ran after Saturday Night Live,
which you can find. Don't tell anybody where they can
if I don't tell anybody. Whether it's pretty bad, don't
(10:20):
tell anybody. But with a lot of hair and a
lot of mustaches, and you left to go be a
station owner in El Paso. You've been a creative guy.
You've had to come up with ideas. You probably I
didn't really like sales because you were a creative type
and those were those sales guys. How did all this
change with ownership when you go to El Paso? And
(10:41):
that's a great question and something I really had to
deal with because I was on the creative side of
the town and had been programming. I bought this a
MFM in El Paso, Texas. I've been working for you
at w NBC and I was twenty six. My friends
were saying, you'd go anywhere for a dollar. I used
to joke that I bought the number eighteen radio station
(11:02):
in a seventeen station market, and people say, well, how
did you do that? I said, well, there was a
station in Warrez, Mexico that was actually beating us in
al Paso. But I actually had a great time. It
was just a great experience. But it was a bit
frightening because I was approaching it as a programmer. We
had an FM country station Country at the time it
(11:22):
really started to take off with the urban cowboy phenomena
and what was going on in Houston at Gillies. But
within a year we had the number one station in
the city playing FM country. So I figured this is
gonna be great. I had taken on all this debt
to buy the station. I'm just gonna go around to
the retailers and the advertisers and the advertising agencies and
(11:43):
they'll just put money on the station. And we had
a very successful competitor and AM country station and a
guy who owned it and ran it named Jim Phillips.
And i would go around to advertisers and I'd never
done this before, and I was intimidated by it, frightened
by itt want to do it, but it was it
was a matter of life or death. And I would
(12:04):
go to these agencies and say, you know, we're the
number one station in the city, and you know you
should advertise on us. And I got the same reaction
almost everywhere. And you know, I can't buy advertising on
your station. I said, well why not. Jim Phillips is
my best friend, were Jim Phillips is the godfather of
my children? Or Jim Phillips is a relative, and I
(12:25):
was like stunned. I couldn't believe it. We had the
number one station and I couldn't get any advertising on
it because this guy had developed these really strong relationships.
And that is the moment when I realized how important
relationships are in anything, and particularly in selling. He showed
up for everything. He would go to everybody's birthday, parties, weddings,
(12:46):
three events in an after he'd spend twenty minutes, a
half hour, and then he'd go to something else. So
I said, I'm going to have to replicate that, and
I started doing that. And then I would say, look,
even though we have the number one station of town,
I'm not asking not to advertise on his station. Why
don't you spend for your business. It would be good
for you and only kate a little of your budget,
(13:08):
give us ten percent of your budget, and then spend
the rest of it with him. And very slowly we
were able to get the revenue, but it took a
lot longer, and it was all about the power of relationships.
Years later, I went back to El Paso to do
a speaking engagement, and part of the deal with the
people that asked me to come in and I said,
I'll do it. I have one thing you have to
(13:29):
do for me. So what's that. I said, you got
to set a meal for me and Jim Phillips, I
want to sit down and say hi to him. So
we met at the Steiner and he came in and
he said, man, you really taught me programming. You kicked
our ass. And I said, yeah, but you taught me
sales and it was this great moment and those are
lessons you still used today. Yeah. Absolutely, I still think
(13:50):
in a world that's so data driven, it's all face
to face and I know you do it with your company.
There's nothing more powerful than face to face attack. By
the way, I look at you on social and I
see you in every city in the country at the
NPR stations, then it's very impressive. And I suspect you
(14:10):
found a lot of pretty interesting people around the country.
Oh yeah, it's a great fun. I've done two cross
country trips. A friend of mine called me up when
I took this job at NPR, and he said, why
don't we fly across the country together and let's visit
small NPR stations that no one from NPR has been to.
And I said, it's a great idea. So we spent
ten days flew across the country and visit a lot
(14:33):
of radio stations. And then a couple of years later,
I have never driven across the country. I decided to
do that and I drove from the east coast to
the west coast and visited stations. So we have two
hundred and sixty three member stations and I've been in
a hundred of them. Wow, and it was fun. But
I ate a lot of Delhi sandwiches, and good for
you're bad for you? The Delhi sandwich not so good
(14:57):
takeaways Lessons for me. It's never worked out the way
I expected it would. It's always longer, more difficult, more secuitous.
Anyone that's an entrepreneur knows how difficult it is to
build anything successful. I don't know if it's a naivitate
or stupidity, but it's a great virtue because if I
(15:18):
knew how difficult some of the things would be before
I started, I probably wouldn't have done them. And it
turned out. Okay, it worked out. Just hold on a second,
because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll
be back after a quick break. Welcome back the math
and magic. We're here with y'r all moment. You have
(15:40):
a great radio career, you jumped to TV. I've been
trying to get you to come to join us a
number of times, but finally talked to you out of
radio to come to v H one. What did you
find was different about TV from radio? Were the fundamentals
that struck you at that moment? For me, it was
a great transition from the radio world to the television
(16:02):
world because there were so many similarities. If you had
picked me up and tried to drop me into a
broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I would have,
I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately we all
learned a lot of lessons about the fragility of this
brand new thing, music videos. And that was something that
(16:23):
we all kind of had to learn in real time
because at first everything that I had learned as a
programmer worked, and then I found that it started not working,
and it was humbling, it was embarrassing, and it didn't
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
(16:43):
and there were so many people watching and being really enthralled.
But but I think ultimately it became less interesting it
was television and we were using a lot I was,
at least using a lot of radio rules for a
different medium, and people were making four minute decisions of
what they were going to watch and not thirty minute
and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately had
(17:07):
to switch strategy to go to content that people would
watch for longer periods of time, long form, and that
was very controversial at the time, but you know it worked.
What were your first shows? This was one of the
most wrenching strategic decisions because MTV had been, as you
well know, is music television all the time, We're testing
(17:29):
all sorts of ideas and people when we asked them
about putting non music programming on, the answer was no,
absolutely not. The ultimate thought was, well, what would be
the obvious things that fit with music? And we started
with the Weekend Rock and hiring Kurt Loader from Rolling
Stone magazine and taking the MTV news segments and making
(17:49):
it a half hour show that worked, and then rockumentaries
specials as the second. The third was Club MTV let's
do an American band stand for today, Let's play music
videos and hired Downtown Julie Brown. That was a hit.
Every show that went on did well. Then we're getting
really cocky and think, man, we really know how to
(18:11):
make hits. But I think it was more a reflection
of the fact that music videos at the time had
run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
the game show, and all the research came back said
you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
to our good friend Marshall Cohen. We worked with an
MTV and still does work with both of us. Here
(18:33):
research Google, Yes, I said, I think we're asking the
wrong question. The question should be if we were to
do a game show, what would it look like? And
the answer came back, well, it should be your reverence
be crazy. We used all the information and hired Ken
Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a regular
(18:55):
on the show and it was a monster. But the
additional research the way we asked it indicated that it
would have been a disaster. It worked out great for
were you able yep? Oh yeah, yeah, and so you
were on a great run. Here there's some management changes.
Can I talk about this? There are two peers, one
(19:16):
of them gets promoted above you. This is probably a
situation a lot of people get into tell me about
your decision and then what you think about it in hindsight. Well,
and MTV, this was after you had left. There was
a position open for the presidency and it was me
and another guy, and it went on for a long
period of time. I was really seen as the creative
(19:38):
guy and the other guy was a business guy, and
the decision was to go with the business guy. It
was tough for me because I really thought I should
have that job, and I was very unhappy. But I
loved working there, I really did, and I made peace
with it and I said I'm gonna attempt to make
it work. I continued on for a period at the time,
(20:00):
and then what happened was the guy that had got
the promotion didn't like me being there, and ultimately I
was pushed out I think maybe six eight months afterward.
Shocked everybody. It shocked me. The traumatic thing was not
not getting the promotion. The traumatic thing was losing my job.
(20:21):
And there was a real personal lesson on this. So
much of the way I saw myself and defined myself,
I think, like many of us at MTV at the time,
was through affinity with the company and with the brand.
So I was devastated. I had never had anything like
that happened to me. It was just wrenching. I really
felt horrible. Now the good news is because of our
(20:46):
successes there. Two days later, HBO called me and said,
we got this cable network called Movie Time. We're looking
for a CEO. Would you be interested. I had been
approached by a recruiter I think four months before about
the same job. I said, are you kidding me? I
would never do that. That's awful. I would never do
that job. So now, of course I'm out of work.
(21:06):
I'm thinking maybe I should take a look at it.
And was able to negotiate my first equity where I
could own a piece of the company and get some
value if I grew it. So I was out of
work for basically. I was in negotiations forty eight hours
after I was But it still didn't feel good. And
years later, you know, I would talk to Tom Freston,
(21:28):
who took over as chairman when you left the company,
and he said, you know, it's the worst business decision
I've ever made. And I said, Tom, don't fret. It
turned out pretty good for me. For me, not for me.
You went on to Movie Time and of course movie
Tim who cares about that? You took that network and
you turned it into E Entertainment Television, and boy were
(21:50):
you on fire. I remember there was something about you
shaving the logo in your head. Well, people thought I did.
We had a trade ad. This is a great message
of the power of terrific creative The ad agency that
we used at the time, B B d OH had
this campaign. At the time, it was unusual to have
a one letter network, one letter and an exclamation point. Right.
(22:12):
That's another one of those fascinating behind the scenes conversations.
Because we were going to call it entertainment television. We
knew that we had done all this research. Do we
call it E N T Do we call it e
t V? And playoff the MTV thing? Do we call
it E N t V? What do we do? And
we did all this research against the three names, and
(22:33):
it came back it was E t V. We were
just going to be E TV, spinning off of the
the MTV. So we hire this creative team to go
away and do the logo and this marketing package for us.
They were coming up to my house in Connecticut and
they're doing a big presentation about the new logo and
they've got it hidden on one of these big poster
boards covered with a cloth as they always do this
(22:57):
big wind up pitch and then they do the big
reveal and I look at this exclamation point and the
e I said, where's the rest? They we decided not
to do it. I said, what we we spent all
this you did what? They said, No, no, no, we
don't like a TV we wanted to be. I said,
(23:18):
it is not what we hired you for. And they
basically convinced me that it was different, it would break through,
and we ended up doing it and it worked out.
We launched the network. The ad agency, a different group
from the design group. I had this idea. We were
trying to get carriage on the cable systems across the country,
so the network before was a dog total. So you
(23:40):
had a big rebuild job to do getting carriage as
well as getting users right. So it was tough because
it already had a really tainted brand. The cable operators
didn't want have anything to do with the advertisers didn't
want everything to do with it. We had to completely
reposition it. So we came up with this logo and
they ran a trade campaign just for the cable operators.
(24:01):
So it was in Multi Channel News and Cable Vision magazine.
There were probably three or four magazines. Was like two
full pages and they took a shot of me. It
looked like I had shaved the logo into my head,
so I was completely bald except for the exclamation point
and the E and the captions that. Trust me, it'll
catch on to this day, people mentioned that to me.
(24:25):
I said it ran three times across four magazines, so
total of twelve. It went viral. It went viralent viral,
before the days of things going viral. I think this
was people's zeroxyne and tearing it out and sending to someone.
But it was great fun. But I didn't actually shave
my head. It was it was disappointed. I thought it
was you really shaped the head. So you're known for
(24:46):
building strong teams at E you built a fantastic team.
I mean, you've got to convince people to come to
this terrible network that nobody wants to be associated with,
that has one letter instead of three letters for a name.
How did you build a team? And what lesson? See
a takeaway that you use even today building teams. And
we didn't have much money either, which really made it
(25:06):
even more complicated, and so out of desperation came the strategy,
which was, instead of me trying to go to look
at other cable networks and hire the best possible person
I could, I couldn't afford it. I didn't have the money.
And I thought about myself having been in a number
two spot and wanting to move to a number one spot.
(25:30):
In almost every one of these organizations, there's somebody in
the number two spots that's really excellent that's being blocked
by somebody that's not going anywhere. So I said, maybe
I can afford them, And that's kind of what the
operating strategy was. So one by one we hired people.
I needed a great head of distribution, so we looked
at a lot of cable networks and found somebody that
(25:52):
was in the number two slot. Did the same thing
for sponsorship, for advertising sales. The guy who ran ad
sales for me for years, Dave Cassaro. I hired him
from Fox Broadcast Network. He was the number two guy
in New York and his boss wasn't going anywhere. Was
highly successful, so I was able to cut a deal
with him. And again because he was a sales guy.
(26:12):
I didn't have to give him a huge salary, but
I wanted to give him a huge upside on performance,
so I was able to snag him. It's a really
funny story because we were so poor at the time.
We couldn't even afford daily Nielsen ratings. You know, in
the television business, every day you come in and overnights
the overnight's first thing you have in the morning is
(26:32):
you give your cup of coffee and you're looking at
the ratings and you saw how you did yesterday for
each fifteen minutes segment. We were so poor we bought
the ratings once a week, and it wasn't even by
hour or half hour fifteen minutes. It was by just
broad day parts. The audience was so small it was unreportable.
The sheet of paper would be a field of asterix,
(26:54):
and it maybe midday Saturday, ten to three on Saturday,
I'd get a point one, which was great writing today,
which was that's funny. Yes, it was rounded up. Dave Cassaro,
who ran advertising sales, would call me up every Monday.
He was in New York. I would be in my
office at nine o'clock in l A and he would go,
(27:16):
I can't believe you talked me into leaving my great job.
I can't believe it. And he would look at the
ratings and he would just what are you going to
do to get the ratings? So and this went on
every Monday for months and months and months, and slowly.
You know what we did was we focused on that
one day part Saturday Middays where he had a barely
(27:36):
a point one. What can we do to leverage that
and just build that up and then move those viewers
to another day part. And after a series of moves
and one massive failure after another, we finally got there
and we grew distribution and some of the hits you
had from that era where the big one was Talk Soup,
(27:58):
which is a great creative story. I love telling this
one because I think there's a phenomenal lesson in it.
We had given the programming department a budget. I said, Okay,
I want six thirty minute shows for prime time. That's
all we could afford doing. That's three our block. We're
going to run it from eight until eleven, and it
(28:19):
will repeat it. That will be the West Coast feed.
That's the philosophy. Come back with your lineup of six
half hour shows. So they go away, they work on it,
got the big presentation, same thing. The big poster board
is up in the conference room. Now they've got a
sheet over it. They do the reveal and I said,
they're only five here. I said, am I missing something?
(28:42):
Is there's something else? No? No, we ran out of money.
We don't have money for six. I just said, that's crazy.
We gotta have six. We can't do it two and
a half hour block and repeat it. We have to
do a three hour block. Well, we don't already money.
I said, you gotta come up with something. So I'm
running at the beach and run at the beach you
every morning, and I'm thinking, what can I do for
(29:02):
no money at all. It was at the period of time.
Do you remember HARALDA. Rivera had the talk show and
he had some skinheads on these, you know, white nationalists,
and guy picks up a metal chair and hits Haraldo
over the head with the chair and breaks his nose.
Everybody was showing that clip, and I went, man, that's
(29:25):
great television. There were all these talk shows at the time.
Sally Jesse, Raphael Jenny Jones, went Morton and Jerry Springer.
There were tons of them, and every one of them
had that bizarre moment. I'm running at the beach and
I'm thinking, what can I do for free? We could
lift that outrageous moment from every one of those talk
(29:47):
shows if we promoted after the thing was done, was
and tomorrow and Jerry Springer, it's going to be blah
blah blah blah. Bay. So I come in to the
programming meeting and I said, I've got an idea. I said,
I don't think it's a culterally great idea, but it's
an idea, and it won't cost us. Anybody will shoot
it in front of a blue screen. The set will
be a stool, it will have a host, and that's it,
(30:09):
and we'll run these clips and we'll get it for free.
We'll produce it for nothing. There was dead suns. Then
they finally started talking and said, we can't do that's
a terrible idea. That's awful television. I go, well, I
don't think it's a particularly great idea myself, but it's
better than your idea. You have no idea. I have
(30:29):
an idea. An idea is better than no idea. So
I said I'll tell you what, if you have an
idea that's even remotely close toine for the budget that
mine is, we'll go with yours, and if you don't,
we'll go with mine. Of course, they go away. Three
weeks later they come back. They have nothing, so they
cast Greg kinnear as the host. They said, he's a
(30:51):
good looking guy, he can read a prompter. He doesn't
have any personality. Go, no, no, he really does, he
really does. We just let us do a test. So
I said fine. So they showed me the tape and
he was awesome. I said, why wasn't he like this
on movie time? He's great. So they came up with
the name Talk Soup. We launched six shows. Of those shows,
(31:12):
there was one moderate hit, you know e News Daily,
and there was one monster runaway hit which was talking.
It was a monster and it was just pure desperation.
By the way, the best ideas come out of desperation.
I agree. So you're there, big success, you leave and
(31:34):
you go join the legendary John Malone at Liberty tell
us about that. It was the longest run I had anywhere.
I was there for nine years, and then the company
got sold Comcast after nine years, I was not creatively challenged.
I had an idea. At the time, we built a
great team. We had a great ad sales group, great
(31:55):
distribution group, great marketing group, and you know, I thought
what we could do was if we could get the
owners to buy some of these independent, small, medium sized
cable networks, we could consolidate and make a lot of money.
But I just couldn't get them to do it. So
I got frustrated. Liberty owned I think ten percent of
us at the time, and Dobb Bennett was the CEO.
(32:17):
They worked with John Malone. They knew I was getting Nancy,
and so they kept bringing ideas to me. John said,
we owned ten percent, we want and so ultimately he
came to me with this idea of Liberty Digital, which
was become an investment arm for Liberty Media. On the
digital side, Malone had sold tc I cable system to
(32:40):
a T and T, and one of the provisions in
this deal is that they could have some bandwidth on
all the systems even when they sold it. And they
wanted to create twelve twenty four hour day, fully interactive
e commerce channels, and so they wanted me as a
programmer to create this business does a turn and out.
(33:00):
Even today, that technology, the set top box technology is
not there, but that was the intention of the company.
And in the meantime they said, here, we'll put fifty
million dollars in cash in and we'll put some other assets,
and typical fashion, he gave me a bunch of dogs
and said, fix those. I'll put them in your portfolio
and make some investments. I'm not an investment professional. I
(33:21):
wasn't then, so I put together a team of people
that were from strategic consulting firms like McKenzie and ellie
k and Bain that had a lot of experience and
due diligence and doing deals that I didn't have, and
we just started making investments. And the timing was pre bubble,
so a lot of them were rocket ships. And that's
(33:42):
how I got into the investment business, kind of by accident.
You didn't seem to miss working. You sort of enjoyed
your life. Oh yeah, very much. So although I was working,
I wasn't. I think my line was got misquoted. I
actually had said working full time time for other people
is overrated, and everybody heard heard it as working is overrated.
(34:07):
But it was just working full time well, yeah, maybe.
So for thirteen years I just worked for myself. I
was working, I just wasn't running a company. I was
just doing investments and sitting on boards of companies I
invested in. What motivated you to go back to running something?
How'd that happened? Well? It was very different because I
didn't want to go back to work. Um. In fact,
(34:29):
I absolutely was opposed to it. I wanted to allocate
about of my time to not for profits, which cheer
for I think thirteen fourteen years of the a c
l U Southern California, civil liberty is very important to me. UM.
But I also got involved in public radio and KPCC
in l A had just been started as a second
(34:52):
NPR member station there. Really got deeply involved. It was
really fun being back in radio, even though it was
a different kind of radio. There had been a lot
of turnover in the CEO position at NPR. I really
love public radio. I really like the mission. I really
love the service and the content, the journalism. And when
the position came open, I was asked if I would
(35:15):
even consider it. I said, you know, I don't want
to work. I don't want to go to work. I've
got a great life. That's the one thing, that's the
one thing on the planet that I would do. So
I made a commitment to spend five years here, and
that's kind of how it came to be. I remember
the conversation you were. You were wrestling with it, and
I actually thought you were not going to do it,
(35:36):
but obviously the passion got you. So you arrive at NPR,
one of the great brands in audio, You look around,
you meet everybody. What you think was the big opportunity, Well,
you know, my take was that the mission and the
primary focus of the organization, which is journalism and storytelling,
was and has been from the beginning, very very good,
(35:57):
and so I didn't see that as being what needed help.
But the business side of the equation had not been
particularly well tended to five or six years in a
row of losses, and I saw a huge opportunity from
a sponsorship standpoint, from a fundraising standpoint, better station relationships.
A lot of people don't know this. We don't own
(36:18):
the stations, we don't manage the stations. They're fully independent,
and that's one of the beauties of the system because
they provide local service, they're locally owned, locally managed locally operated,
but I really saw an opportunity to kind of reduce
the friction between the stations and the network, develop partnerships,
help the stations, help us grow the revenue side of
(36:40):
the business, and that's kind of what we focused on
and rebuilding the management team to do that. When I
go talk to advertisers, I'm in the audio business. Everybody
wants to talk about two things, smart speakers and podcast
So tell us the story about podcasting here. NPR has
been in that business for a long time. A lot
of it be in just as being able to listen
(37:02):
to some of the programming that the network did on
demand on your own whenever you wanted to, and so
we had kind of a leg up. And also because
we've been doing spoken word for forty eight years, we
have that expertise and audio and storytelling, and so that
gave us a real advantage in scale. When podcasting is
(37:24):
a category took off with listeners and with advertisers, we
really kind of had au phole position. It's been a
real god's end. It's been great for the organization for
many other reasons, not just the business side of it,
in terms of reaching new people, expanding our mission bringing
new people into public radio, particularly a younger audience that
(37:46):
maybe doesn't have the affinity for the news service initially,
but also in things like NPR Music and some of
the other content targeting a younger audience or a more
diverse audience. So it gives us a chance to really
grow the brand, to get both into the NPR experience
that comes to the network when news becomes something that's
interesting or important to them. And it's also had another
(38:10):
interesting effect, which is we put people that have been
on the network for years, traditional journalists and correspondence in
a podcast with let's say a younger group of talent.
It really affects the sound of the network. We keep
the journalistic standards high, but making it more accessible to people,
(38:30):
more conversational, more informal, has really expanded the audience. Well,
you guys have done a great job. As a matter
of fact, we did the first I Heeart Podcast Awards
this year and you guys won the award for really
being a pioneer in this business. So thank you for that.
We're really appreciative. You've announced you're stepping down to CEO
when your contract expires, and you're gonna be the chief fundraiser.
(38:52):
That's like the harder job, isn't it. You and your
wife Pam, who's by the way, spectacular partner of years,
and are kicking it off with a ten million all
our donations. So not only fundraising. You're like saying, Okay,
I put my money up. Now what are you going
to do? What are your plans for that? I mean,
what kind of goal do you have for MPR through
that effort. Well, we have big aspirations. Will be our
fiftieth anniversary, So we think it's a great opportunity to
(39:16):
reach out to the people that are big believers in
public service journalism what we've done at NPR, and to
work with us and our member stations so we can
raise money not just for us, but also try to
be helpful to them. Back to the business side of it,
major gifts, the fundraising piece has never been a big
initiative at the organization, I think to the detriment of
(39:39):
us at NPR into the stations, So we think there's
a great opportunity. The personal number I have in my
head for us here is million. That's what I'd like
to do before. So I'm not gonna answer my phone
until you get to Anton's I was just trying to
get that on the table. You are a board member
of the Museum of Contemporary Art in l A for
(40:01):
quite a while, and art is a very important part
of your life. You had a great collection and a
lot of people come visit it. Where did that come from?
Both of my parents had a real affinity for art.
My mother was a graphic designer. My father loved art.
We grew up outside Philadelphia. Never once took me to
a museum, not once, but he would talk about art,
(40:23):
and so I think that probably had an impact. And
then ultimately, I think art can really open one's eyes
to the world and get you to think about a
different perspective. And so if you're in the business of
trying to come up with creative solutions to anything, even
if it's something mathematical, I just think it's an interesting
(40:44):
stimulant for the brain. At some subconscious level. I think
it is something that helps me with my own creativity
and my own problem solving. So let's jump real quickly.
Let's do some quick responses to looking at the future.
Let's hit some of them. Future podcasting I think huge
and it's exciting for many reasons. Audio documentaries. I think
(41:09):
we're going to see a lot of expansion in other categories.
Some of the work you're doing on comedic stuff. Can
I plug Ron Burgundy? I think you know right now,
what's the number? Twenty seven percent of the population listens
to a podcast once a week. There's so much headroom
for growth. I think it's going to grow in terms
(41:30):
of the number of people that listen the number of
podcasts they listen to. That's pretty formidable as it is.
Seven I think is the average if you're listening to podcasts,
and I think different forms, different lengths. So I am
very bullish about it. I think it's an exciting opportunity.
TV networks, Yeah yeah, I still think brands really matter.
(41:53):
Is Netflix a TV network? I don't know. People treat
it that way. It is a rand and they're doing
a lot of great original content. It's fascinating because now
you've got Hulu doing the same, Amazon doing the same,
and it's making, you know, the people that had really
been in the lead position before, like HBO and Showtime,
(42:15):
really have to step up and compete. We've both made
our careers working on brands. I think brands still will matter.
I think it's going to be much much harder to do.
And the scale of the money that's being spent on
this Amazon is a twelve billion, thirteen billion. It's more
money than you spent on talks. Just buy a little
(42:38):
bit ad agencies, ad agencies. Well, you know I've heard
and you would know this better than I. I don't
know that the for years the business separated. It used
to be one stop. You'd had someone to do the
buying and the planning for a campaign and also do
the creative and then they kind of got split. You
had creative shops and you had buying shops. And I'm
(43:00):
hearing from people now what's going back to consolidation under
one roof. I don't know enough about that business to know,
but I do know that great creativity is I think
going to be the thing that makes a difference because
the data. I don't think you keep an edge for
very long. I think with creativity you can math and
(43:21):
magic there you go exactly find out what it is.
We've got to excite people about it to get him
to do some Privacy. The Times right now is running
a whole series of articles on privacy. It's it's breathtaking
what's happening. I think it will become the issue of
the day as people become much more aware of it.
(43:42):
A lot of young people don't seem to care. There
is a I think a crossover point. My oldest daughter
never really thought about it, didn't think much about it.
But I wanted to get her a smart speaker. She says, no,
I don't want to have that microphone in my house.
I go, this is important to my business. You must
have a smart speaker. She has relented. She has one now,
but it was interesting as a thirty four year old.
(44:03):
Her notion and her concern about privacy is much different
now than it was when she was twenty. We think
about MTV, we think about e we think about all
these exciting ideas. How do you think people find these
new voices and come up with these new ideas today?
And do you think people are doing it? I look
back in the early days of the motion picture business
(44:23):
and you look at somebody like Irving Thalberg, who was
hired by Carl Lemley to run Universal. I think he
was nineteen or twenty at the time, and then Louis B.
Mayer hired him to be vice president of production for MGM,
and he did all the classics, the great MGM films.
(44:44):
I think he was twenty three at the time that
he produced and oversaw all of those incredible films and
Orson Welles. One of the things I love about Orson
Wells is a lot of people don't notice his favorite
medium was radio, and the reason was said, the listener
has to fill in some of it. The listener has
to participate to create the story. And so he did
(45:08):
War of the World's when I think he was one,
and he started working a Citizen King when he was
twenty three. I was mentioning this somebody one time, and
the response, which really helped inform my thinking, was really
young minds come up with great creative ideas and are
given the shot in new, really new businesses, but no
(45:29):
one's going to take the chance on an established indassy
throwing the keys. I think about you when you were
w m a Q in Chicago at twenty Charlie Warner,
who hired me, must have been out of his mind.
Why would you hire a twenty year old kid to
go to NBC's big am clear channel radio station in Chicago,
And then why would they take me to New York
(45:50):
at age's unbelievable, but they threw the keys. It's easy
in theory, it's very hard in practice. I think the
answer is you've got to find Bob Pittman, You've got
to find Orson Wells, You've got to find Irving Felberg,
because they're out there. I don't know who they are,
what I have the courage to do it throw the
(46:11):
keys to them? Probably not, but I think that's the
an certain So this is about stories from the frontiers
of marketing. You are young ones. What advice would you
be looking for that you could give somebody. The biggest
lesson for me, maybe there's something of value in this
for somebody else. Is the power of great ideas, the
power of great creative are hugely important, particularly in a
(46:36):
world where data is pervasive. This is not disparaging that
at all. You've gotta have that. Those are table stakes.
Everybody's gonna have it. Some people are gonna be better
at interpreting it than others, but everyone's gonna have access,
and it's going to be an arms race, and that
will always be something everybody has to have. The layer
over that, which I think is very important, and it's
(46:58):
the real value add whether talking about radio, television, networks,
ad agencies, filmed entertainment is the creative piece. I don't
hear as much conversation about the creative piece of the
equation as I do about data. If I were a marketer,
to differentiate myself from everybody else, I would focus on
(47:18):
that this sort of insists in the right place. This
podcast is about the mathew magical marketing, the analytical. We
gotta measure it. And of course once you measure it,
know everything. That doesn't cause anybody to do anything, you
have to do something about it. That's the magic. So
as you think about it, who's the greatest mathematician, you know,
the greatest mathematician, the person who just got the data,
(47:40):
understands it, has those insights. John Malone. Who's the greatest magician?
M hm, wow, I don't know. I gotta think about that.
In the greatest magician, I'm stumped. There's so many people
that have done just really great work. I would have
(48:00):
to Spielberg. We'll take it. Thanks Jarl, Thanks Leavings, Thanks
to my great friend, Thank you, Bob. Here are some
things I picked up for my old friend. Y're all
moan one relationships or everything in business. You all picked
that up from a salesman in El Paso who attended
(48:22):
everybody's birthday and baptism, and it's a lesson he hasn't forgotten. Two.
Desperate situations can be great for creativity. If you all
have more money for programming, he might never have come
up a talk suit. Three. The key to finding new
voices and not letting your brand get lapped is to
throw young people the keys and let them drive. It
(48:43):
could be scary, but it's something both Yarl and I believe.
Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
(49:04):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki
Etre for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for
their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
(49:27):
bring this show to your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart radio.
So we came up with this logo and they ran
a trade campaign to full pages and they took a
shot of me. It looked like I had shaved the
logo into my head. So are we completely bald except
for the exclamation point and the E and the captions that?
(00:23):
Trust me, it'll catch on to this day, people mentioned
that to me, it went viral. It went viralent, viral,
before the days of things going viral. It was great fun,
but I didn't actually shave my head. Welcome to Math
(00:43):
and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing. I'm Bob Pittman,
and on this episode we have someone who made his
mark as a creative, but certainly as an expert on
the math side as well. You're Almone, the CEO of MPR.
He's an old old friend. Started out as a deal
personality at age fifteen, by the way, with the unaired
(01:03):
name of Lee Masters. He went on to become a
successful air talent programmer, running radio stations and finally even
owning radio stations. He was the operating head of v
H one and MTV and It's Heyday. He started e
Entertainment television television network. He was at CEO. He had
(01:24):
a great success there and they went on to be
the head of Liberty Investment, where he made smart bets
on companies like Price Line and t VO. He became
an investor for himself after that. Served on the boards
of E W, scripts, C NET, XM Radio. He was
on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art in
l A. He was the chair of the Southern California
(01:45):
a c l U for fifteen years. He loves and
collects art. He has a wonderful family. He's a nice guy.
He's known for his huge heart and sharp mind. Welcome you, Almon,
Thank you, Bob. So we're gonna start before we really
get into the media questions. We want to get you
in sixties, so I don't think too long to say.
The first thing that comes to your mind will jump
into it. Sure, do you prefer Twitter or Instagram? Instagram?
(02:08):
El Paso or New York City? Oh that's a tough one.
I'd have to say New York. But I did have
a lot of fun in El Paso. Grateful Debt or
Steve Miller band, Dead, MTV or E Entertainment. Oh Man
I'd have to say, you know, MTV was so much fun.
I would have to go with the MTV Okay, Sunrise
(02:30):
or Sunsets, m Sunset Yo. MTV raps are the Weekend
Rock Yo, MTV wraps, Boats or planes, Planes, Lee Masters
are all mom, I'm not fond of either of them. Well,
you have to pick one. I have to pick one.
I'd have to pick you are it's about to get harder.
Oh yeah, yeah, secret talent. I don't know that I
(02:51):
have any secret talent. Oh, cross road puzzles. Favorite city,
Los Angeles. Smartest person you know, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, right,
childhood hero, childhood hero, Bob Pittman. Oh yeah, Okay, we
got excluding Bob Pittman. Favorite superhero, John Malone. Favorite piece
(03:11):
of art in your collection James Terrell. Favorite TV show
as a kid and now, Oh, favorite TV show as
a kid. I loved American Bandstand. That was really formative
for me. Today. Game of Thrones, historical Little Winston Churchill,
proudest career achievement here working at Npure favorite podcast. Oh
(03:33):
I can't answer that. I'd be a dead man. Okay,
we'll give you a pass on that one quote to
live by m back to Winston Churchill. Never give up,
Never give up, Never give up. Who would play you
in a movie? Brian Cranston? Do you just look like
Brian Cranston? What would be the title of your memoir? WHOA?
How did I get here? Okay, we're gonna end with
(03:56):
this one, because it really goes all through your history. Yeah, yeah,
us Live concert Pink Floyd. What year? Probably seventy three,
the year I met you, as a matter of fact,
So let's jump into it. Sure, let's start with your childhood.
You grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Tell me a
(04:17):
little bit about your mom and dad and how you
grew up. My father taught English literature and then he
edited a small newspaper new Hope, Pennsylvania, a real emphasis
on reading and literature. Didn't have a television in the
house or radio. As a matter of fact, I contend
that my entire career has been an active rebellion against
the way I was raised. My mother was an artist,
(04:39):
a graphic designer, so there was a real focus on
creativity in our house. And where did you find out
what was going on the radio or TV? If he
didn't have one in the house at friends. I wasn't
prohibited from watching or listening. I just wasn't allowed to
have one in the house, so it was very exotic
for me. So radio, how did you get started? I
(05:00):
was probably like eleven or twelve is when I really
glombed on the radio and loved it and loved listening
to it. That's when I said I would be great
playing records would be awesome. So I had a number
of jobs after school, save money, got my engineer's license
when I was fifteen because the little radio station in
my hometown you had to have a first class radio license.
(05:21):
So I saved up all my money and at the
fifteen went to Radio Engineering Institute and Sarasota, Florida for
a five week cram course so you can memorize the
answers to the FCC test. And I got my license
at fifteen and came back. They didn't want to hire
me at all, but they needed somebody to run the
religious tapes on Sunday and they didn't have anyone with
(05:41):
the first class radio license, so they were kind of
four stoff hire me, so an act of desperation on
their part, and that's how we started. Do you still
have the first class radio license. It's framed somewhere. I
don't think the FCC even uses those anymore, but I
have it somewhere. Those were the old days when the
disc jockeys were also the engineers, right combo job from
(06:04):
that period. You know, you've been a creative guy your
whole career. You've invented a lot of things and built
a lot of things. What did you learn that was
helpful to you as a creative type or a marketer.
Most of that learning and knowledge came over long periods
of time and mostly trial and error. I was a
fan and consumed a lot of media because I wasn't
(06:24):
allowed to as a kid. Then when I got into
the business, I think it was just a function of
experimenting and learning from others. I won't use the word stealing,
We'll use the art term appropriating things that I saw
other people doing that seemed to work. So you would
characterize your early career as being I'm gonna borrow other
(06:46):
people's Yeah, talk a little bit about Lee Masters. When
did that come about? When? What? When I decided I
want to be a disc jockey and I thought at
that time the name yr Moan as an air name
to not easy to remember, it's not easy to spell,
it's not easy to say, and of course this is
pre NPR. Now it's the perfect NPR name, but at
(07:07):
the time not what you would expect for this jockey.
So in my fifteen year old brain, I wanted to
come up with something that sounded big, and Lee Masters
is what I created. Lee Masters for a long time,
a long thirty five years. Somewhere in the back of
my brain, you're still Lee Masters. So let's talk about
the path you start out in this little radio station.
(07:29):
How did it go from there? I always I always
said that my career was always trying to find somebody
that was more desperate than I was. I think one
of the things that was helpful in my career because
I was young, didn't have any really big needs, didn't
have a family at the time, I could just pick
up and move and like a lot of people we
know into business, we moved around a lot and just
(07:51):
looked for the next opportunity. And I was always looking
for a station that was well programmed, because I knew
if the station sounded really good, I would probably sound better.
Louisville is where I met you, right, I was eighteen
and you were twenty maybe yep. So how did you
wind up in Louisville. I've been working in Indianapolis, and
at the time, I think Louisville was actually and still
(08:12):
is a smaller market. But the radio station there was
really successful, w A k y wacky wacky, big personalities.
I think it was owned by Lynn Broadcasting, and they
owned w f i L in Philadelphia, which was a
station I thought was the greatest top forty radio station
on the planet. I wanted to work for them, so
(08:33):
in my mind I had this plan. I'd go to
work for them in Louisville, do a good job, and
I'd find my way to Philadelphia. And when I was
ultimately offered the job, it was midnight to six and
the money wasn't that great, and I ended up not
doing it. But that was a lot of my logic.
You were on the first people I knew who was
in the meditation. While we were all talking rock music,
(08:56):
you were talking philosophy. So how did that happen? I
was pretty high strung, and I found that over the
years of doing it, I could never say with any
certainty that any of the good things that were happening
in my life were directly related to it. But at
a certain point I said, I'm not going to risk it.
(09:17):
I seems to be working. I'm gonna stick with it.
I still meditate. It's been forty six, forty seven years.
Do you think it enhances your creativity? I think probably.
You know, David Lynch has written beautifully about creativity and meditation,
and of all the things that he discusses about meditation,
(09:37):
that's the one that kind of resonates the most, which
is that when I meditate, I don't necessarily meditate to
find a solution to a problem, but it helps me
relax and get centered. So when I come out of
the meditation, I tend to be able to solve some
of the things I am having to deal with with
a little more agility. I don't know that I can
(09:59):
ever remember or having a moment of inspiration while I
was meditating it, but afterwards. So you run through this
radio career. You and I worked together in New York. Actually,
you and I were on the TV together on a
show called Album Tracks that ran after Saturday Night Live,
which you can find. Don't tell anybody where they can
if I don't tell anybody. Whether it's pretty bad, don't
(10:20):
tell anybody. But with a lot of hair and a
lot of mustaches, and you left to go be a
station owner in El Paso. You've been a creative guy.
You've had to come up with ideas. You probably I
didn't really like sales because you were a creative type
and those were those sales guys. How did all this
change with ownership when you go to El Paso? And
(10:41):
that's a great question and something I really had to
deal with because I was on the creative side of
the town and had been programming. I bought this a
MFM in El Paso, Texas. I've been working for you
at w NBC and I was twenty six. My friends
were saying, you'd go anywhere for a dollar. I used
to joke that I bought the number eighteen radio station
(11:02):
in a seventeen station market, and people say, well, how
did you do that? I said, well, there was a
station in Warrez, Mexico that was actually beating us in
al Paso. But I actually had a great time. It
was just a great experience. But it was a bit
frightening because I was approaching it as a programmer. We
had an FM country station Country at the time it
(11:22):
really started to take off with the urban cowboy phenomena
and what was going on in Houston at Gillies. But
within a year we had the number one station in
the city playing FM country. So I figured this is
gonna be great. I had taken on all this debt
to buy the station. I'm just gonna go around to
the retailers and the advertisers and the advertising agencies and
(11:43):
they'll just put money on the station. And we had
a very successful competitor and AM country station and a
guy who owned it and ran it named Jim Phillips.
And i would go around to advertisers and I'd never
done this before, and I was intimidated by it, frightened
by itt want to do it, but it was it
was a matter of life or death. And I would
(12:04):
go to these agencies and say, you know, we're the
number one station in the city, and you know you
should advertise on us. And I got the same reaction
almost everywhere. And you know, I can't buy advertising on
your station. I said, well why not. Jim Phillips is
my best friend, were Jim Phillips is the godfather of
my children? Or Jim Phillips is a relative, and I
(12:25):
was like stunned. I couldn't believe it. We had the
number one station and I couldn't get any advertising on
it because this guy had developed these really strong relationships.
And that is the moment when I realized how important
relationships are in anything, and particularly in selling. He showed
up for everything. He would go to everybody's birthday, parties, weddings,
(12:46):
three events in an after he'd spend twenty minutes, a
half hour, and then he'd go to something else. So
I said, I'm going to have to replicate that, and
I started doing that. And then I would say, look,
even though we have the number one station of town,
I'm not asking not to advertise on his station. Why
don't you spend for your business. It would be good
for you and only kate a little of your budget,
(13:08):
give us ten percent of your budget, and then spend
the rest of it with him. And very slowly we
were able to get the revenue, but it took a
lot longer, and it was all about the power of relationships.
Years later, I went back to El Paso to do
a speaking engagement, and part of the deal with the
people that asked me to come in and I said,
I'll do it. I have one thing you have to
(13:29):
do for me. So what's that. I said, you got
to set a meal for me and Jim Phillips, I
want to sit down and say hi to him. So
we met at the Steiner and he came in and
he said, man, you really taught me programming. You kicked
our ass. And I said, yeah, but you taught me
sales and it was this great moment and those are
lessons you still used today. Yeah. Absolutely, I still think
(13:50):
in a world that's so data driven, it's all face
to face and I know you do it with your company.
There's nothing more powerful than face to face attack. By
the way, I look at you on social and I
see you in every city in the country at the
NPR stations, then it's very impressive. And I suspect you
(14:10):
found a lot of pretty interesting people around the country.
Oh yeah, it's a great fun. I've done two cross
country trips. A friend of mine called me up when
I took this job at NPR, and he said, why
don't we fly across the country together and let's visit
small NPR stations that no one from NPR has been to.
And I said, it's a great idea. So we spent
ten days flew across the country and visit a lot
(14:33):
of radio stations. And then a couple of years later,
I have never driven across the country. I decided to
do that and I drove from the east coast to
the west coast and visited stations. So we have two
hundred and sixty three member stations and I've been in
a hundred of them. Wow, and it was fun. But
I ate a lot of Delhi sandwiches, and good for
you're bad for you? The Delhi sandwich not so good
(14:57):
takeaways Lessons for me. It's never worked out the way
I expected it would. It's always longer, more difficult, more secuitous.
Anyone that's an entrepreneur knows how difficult it is to
build anything successful. I don't know if it's a naivitate
or stupidity, but it's a great virtue because if I
(15:18):
knew how difficult some of the things would be before
I started, I probably wouldn't have done them. And it
turned out. Okay, it worked out. Just hold on a second,
because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll
be back after a quick break. Welcome back the math
and magic. We're here with y'r all moment. You have
(15:40):
a great radio career, you jumped to TV. I've been
trying to get you to come to join us a
number of times, but finally talked to you out of
radio to come to v H one. What did you
find was different about TV from radio? Were the fundamentals
that struck you at that moment? For me, it was
a great transition from the radio world to the television
(16:02):
world because there were so many similarities. If you had
picked me up and tried to drop me into a
broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I would have,
I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately we all
learned a lot of lessons about the fragility of this
brand new thing, music videos. And that was something that
(16:23):
we all kind of had to learn in real time
because at first everything that I had learned as a
programmer worked, and then I found that it started not working,
and it was humbling, it was embarrassing, and it didn't
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
(16:43):
and there were so many people watching and being really enthralled.
But but I think ultimately it became less interesting it
was television and we were using a lot I was,
at least using a lot of radio rules for a
different medium, and people were making four minute decisions of
what they were going to watch and not thirty minute
and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately had
(17:07):
to switch strategy to go to content that people would
watch for longer periods of time, long form, and that
was very controversial at the time, but you know it worked.
What were your first shows? This was one of the
most wrenching strategic decisions because MTV had been, as you
well know, is music television all the time, We're testing
(17:29):
all sorts of ideas and people when we asked them
about putting non music programming on, the answer was no,
absolutely not. The ultimate thought was, well, what would be
the obvious things that fit with music? And we started
with the Weekend Rock and hiring Kurt Loader from Rolling
Stone magazine and taking the MTV news segments and making
(17:49):
it a half hour show that worked, and then rockumentaries
specials as the second. The third was Club MTV let's
do an American band stand for today, Let's play music
videos and hired Downtown Julie Brown. That was a hit.
Every show that went on did well. Then we're getting
really cocky and think, man, we really know how to
(18:11):
make hits. But I think it was more a reflection
of the fact that music videos at the time had
run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
the game show, and all the research came back said
you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
to our good friend Marshall Cohen. We worked with an
MTV and still does work with both of us. Here
(18:33):
research Google, Yes, I said, I think we're asking the
wrong question. The question should be if we were to
do a game show, what would it look like? And
the answer came back, well, it should be your reverence
be crazy. We used all the information and hired Ken
Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a regular
(18:55):
on the show and it was a monster. But the
additional research the way we asked it indicated that it
would have been a disaster. It worked out great for
were you able yep? Oh yeah, yeah, and so you
were on a great run. Here there's some management changes.
Can I talk about this? There are two peers, one
(19:16):
of them gets promoted above you. This is probably a
situation a lot of people get into tell me about
your decision and then what you think about it in hindsight. Well,
and MTV, this was after you had left. There was
a position open for the presidency and it was me
and another guy, and it went on for a long
period of time. I was really seen as the creative
(19:38):
guy and the other guy was a business guy, and
the decision was to go with the business guy. It
was tough for me because I really thought I should
have that job, and I was very unhappy. But I
loved working there, I really did, and I made peace
with it and I said I'm gonna attempt to make
it work. I continued on for a period at the time,
(20:00):
and then what happened was the guy that had got
the promotion didn't like me being there, and ultimately I
was pushed out I think maybe six eight months afterward.
Shocked everybody. It shocked me. The traumatic thing was not
not getting the promotion. The traumatic thing was losing my job.
(20:21):
And there was a real personal lesson on this. So
much of the way I saw myself and defined myself,
I think, like many of us at MTV at the time,
was through affinity with the company and with the brand.
So I was devastated. I had never had anything like
that happened to me. It was just wrenching. I really
felt horrible. Now the good news is because of our
(20:46):
successes there. Two days later, HBO called me and said,
we got this cable network called Movie Time. We're looking
for a CEO. Would you be interested. I had been
approached by a recruiter I think four months before about
the same job. I said, are you kidding me? I
would never do that. That's awful. I would never do
that job. So now, of course I'm out of work.
(21:06):
I'm thinking maybe I should take a look at it.
And was able to negotiate my first equity where I
could own a piece of the company and get some
value if I grew it. So I was out of
work for basically. I was in negotiations forty eight hours
after I was But it still didn't feel good. And
years later, you know, I would talk to Tom Freston,
(21:28):
who took over as chairman when you left the company,
and he said, you know, it's the worst business decision
I've ever made. And I said, Tom, don't fret. It
turned out pretty good for me. For me, not for me.
You went on to Movie Time and of course movie
Tim who cares about that? You took that network and
you turned it into E Entertainment Television, and boy were
(21:50):
you on fire. I remember there was something about you
shaving the logo in your head. Well, people thought I did.
We had a trade ad. This is a great message
of the power of terrific creative The ad agency that
we used at the time, B B d OH had
this campaign. At the time, it was unusual to have
a one letter network, one letter and an exclamation point. Right.
(22:12):
That's another one of those fascinating behind the scenes conversations.
Because we were going to call it entertainment television. We
knew that we had done all this research. Do we
call it E N T Do we call it e
t V? And playoff the MTV thing? Do we call
it E N t V? What do we do? And
we did all this research against the three names, and
(22:33):
it came back it was E t V. We were
just going to be E TV, spinning off of the
the MTV. So we hire this creative team to go
away and do the logo and this marketing package for us.
They were coming up to my house in Connecticut and
they're doing a big presentation about the new logo and
they've got it hidden on one of these big poster
boards covered with a cloth as they always do this
(22:57):
big wind up pitch and then they do the big
reveal and I look at this exclamation point and the
e I said, where's the rest? They we decided not
to do it. I said, what we we spent all
this you did what? They said, No, no, no, we
don't like a TV we wanted to be. I said,
(23:18):
it is not what we hired you for. And they
basically convinced me that it was different, it would break through,
and we ended up doing it and it worked out.
We launched the network. The ad agency, a different group
from the design group. I had this idea. We were
trying to get carriage on the cable systems across the country,
so the network before was a dog total. So you
(23:40):
had a big rebuild job to do getting carriage as
well as getting users right. So it was tough because
it already had a really tainted brand. The cable operators
didn't want have anything to do with the advertisers didn't
want everything to do with it. We had to completely
reposition it. So we came up with this logo and
they ran a trade campaign just for the cable operators.
(24:01):
So it was in Multi Channel News and Cable Vision magazine.
There were probably three or four magazines. Was like two
full pages and they took a shot of me. It
looked like I had shaved the logo into my head,
so I was completely bald except for the exclamation point
and the E and the captions that. Trust me, it'll
catch on to this day, people mentioned that to me.
(24:25):
I said it ran three times across four magazines, so
total of twelve. It went viral. It went viralent viral,
before the days of things going viral. I think this
was people's zeroxyne and tearing it out and sending to someone.
But it was great fun. But I didn't actually shave
my head. It was it was disappointed. I thought it
was you really shaped the head. So you're known for
(24:46):
building strong teams at E you built a fantastic team.
I mean, you've got to convince people to come to
this terrible network that nobody wants to be associated with,
that has one letter instead of three letters for a name.
How did you build a team? And what lesson? See
a takeaway that you use even today building teams. And
we didn't have much money either, which really made it
(25:06):
even more complicated, and so out of desperation came the strategy,
which was, instead of me trying to go to look
at other cable networks and hire the best possible person
I could, I couldn't afford it. I didn't have the money.
And I thought about myself having been in a number
two spot and wanting to move to a number one spot.
(25:30):
In almost every one of these organizations, there's somebody in
the number two spots that's really excellent that's being blocked
by somebody that's not going anywhere. So I said, maybe
I can afford them, And that's kind of what the
operating strategy was. So one by one we hired people.
I needed a great head of distribution, so we looked
at a lot of cable networks and found somebody that
(25:52):
was in the number two slot. Did the same thing
for sponsorship, for advertising sales. The guy who ran ad
sales for me for years, Dave Cassaro. I hired him
from Fox Broadcast Network. He was the number two guy
in New York and his boss wasn't going anywhere. Was
highly successful, so I was able to cut a deal
with him. And again because he was a sales guy.
(26:12):
I didn't have to give him a huge salary, but
I wanted to give him a huge upside on performance,
so I was able to snag him. It's a really
funny story because we were so poor at the time.
We couldn't even afford daily Nielsen ratings. You know, in
the television business, every day you come in and overnights
the overnight's first thing you have in the morning is
(26:32):
you give your cup of coffee and you're looking at
the ratings and you saw how you did yesterday for
each fifteen minutes segment. We were so poor we bought
the ratings once a week, and it wasn't even by
hour or half hour fifteen minutes. It was by just
broad day parts. The audience was so small it was unreportable.
The sheet of paper would be a field of asterix,
(26:54):
and it maybe midday Saturday, ten to three on Saturday,
I'd get a point one, which was great writing today,
which was that's funny. Yes, it was rounded up. Dave Cassaro,
who ran advertising sales, would call me up every Monday.
He was in New York. I would be in my
office at nine o'clock in l A and he would go,
(27:16):
I can't believe you talked me into leaving my great job.
I can't believe it. And he would look at the
ratings and he would just what are you going to
do to get the ratings? So and this went on
every Monday for months and months and months, and slowly.
You know what we did was we focused on that
one day part Saturday Middays where he had a barely
(27:36):
a point one. What can we do to leverage that
and just build that up and then move those viewers
to another day part. And after a series of moves
and one massive failure after another, we finally got there
and we grew distribution and some of the hits you
had from that era where the big one was Talk Soup,
(27:58):
which is a great creative story. I love telling this
one because I think there's a phenomenal lesson in it.
We had given the programming department a budget. I said, Okay,
I want six thirty minute shows for prime time. That's
all we could afford doing. That's three our block. We're
going to run it from eight until eleven, and it
(28:19):
will repeat it. That will be the West Coast feed.
That's the philosophy. Come back with your lineup of six
half hour shows. So they go away, they work on it,
got the big presentation, same thing. The big poster board
is up in the conference room. Now they've got a
sheet over it. They do the reveal and I said,
they're only five here. I said, am I missing something?
(28:42):
Is there's something else? No? No, we ran out of money.
We don't have money for six. I just said, that's crazy.
We gotta have six. We can't do it two and
a half hour block and repeat it. We have to
do a three hour block. Well, we don't already money.
I said, you gotta come up with something. So I'm
running at the beach and run at the beach you
every morning, and I'm thinking, what can I do for
(29:02):
no money at all. It was at the period of time.
Do you remember HARALDA. Rivera had the talk show and
he had some skinheads on these, you know, white nationalists,
and guy picks up a metal chair and hits Haraldo
over the head with the chair and breaks his nose.
Everybody was showing that clip, and I went, man, that's
(29:25):
great television. There were all these talk shows at the time.
Sally Jesse, Raphael Jenny Jones, went Morton and Jerry Springer.
There were tons of them, and every one of them
had that bizarre moment. I'm running at the beach and
I'm thinking, what can I do for free? We could
lift that outrageous moment from every one of those talk
(29:47):
shows if we promoted after the thing was done, was
and tomorrow and Jerry Springer, it's going to be blah
blah blah blah. Bay. So I come in to the
programming meeting and I said, I've got an idea. I said,
I don't think it's a culterally great idea, but it's
an idea, and it won't cost us. Anybody will shoot
it in front of a blue screen. The set will
be a stool, it will have a host, and that's it,
(30:09):
and we'll run these clips and we'll get it for free.
We'll produce it for nothing. There was dead suns. Then
they finally started talking and said, we can't do that's
a terrible idea. That's awful television. I go, well, I
don't think it's a particularly great idea myself, but it's
better than your idea. You have no idea. I have
(30:29):
an idea. An idea is better than no idea. So
I said I'll tell you what, if you have an
idea that's even remotely close toine for the budget that
mine is, we'll go with yours, and if you don't,
we'll go with mine. Of course, they go away. Three
weeks later they come back. They have nothing, so they
cast Greg kinnear as the host. They said, he's a
(30:51):
good looking guy, he can read a prompter. He doesn't
have any personality. Go, no, no, he really does, he
really does. We just let us do a test. So
I said fine. So they showed me the tape and
he was awesome. I said, why wasn't he like this
on movie time? He's great. So they came up with
the name Talk Soup. We launched six shows. Of those shows,
(31:12):
there was one moderate hit, you know e News Daily,
and there was one monster runaway hit which was talking.
It was a monster and it was just pure desperation.
By the way, the best ideas come out of desperation.
I agree. So you're there, big success, you leave and
(31:34):
you go join the legendary John Malone at Liberty tell
us about that. It was the longest run I had anywhere.
I was there for nine years, and then the company
got sold Comcast after nine years, I was not creatively challenged.
I had an idea. At the time, we built a
great team. We had a great ad sales group, great
(31:55):
distribution group, great marketing group, and you know, I thought
what we could do was if we could get the
owners to buy some of these independent, small, medium sized
cable networks, we could consolidate and make a lot of money.
But I just couldn't get them to do it. So
I got frustrated. Liberty owned I think ten percent of
us at the time, and Dobb Bennett was the CEO.
(32:17):
They worked with John Malone. They knew I was getting Nancy,
and so they kept bringing ideas to me. John said,
we owned ten percent, we want and so ultimately he
came to me with this idea of Liberty Digital, which
was become an investment arm for Liberty Media. On the
digital side, Malone had sold tc I cable system to
(32:40):
a T and T, and one of the provisions in
this deal is that they could have some bandwidth on
all the systems even when they sold it. And they
wanted to create twelve twenty four hour day, fully interactive
e commerce channels, and so they wanted me as a
programmer to create this business does a turn and out.
(33:00):
Even today, that technology, the set top box technology is
not there, but that was the intention of the company.
And in the meantime they said, here, we'll put fifty
million dollars in cash in and we'll put some other assets,
and typical fashion, he gave me a bunch of dogs
and said, fix those. I'll put them in your portfolio
and make some investments. I'm not an investment professional. I
(33:21):
wasn't then, so I put together a team of people
that were from strategic consulting firms like McKenzie and ellie
k and Bain that had a lot of experience and
due diligence and doing deals that I didn't have, and
we just started making investments. And the timing was pre bubble,
so a lot of them were rocket ships. And that's
(33:42):
how I got into the investment business, kind of by accident.
You didn't seem to miss working. You sort of enjoyed
your life. Oh yeah, very much. So although I was working,
I wasn't. I think my line was got misquoted. I
actually had said working full time time for other people
is overrated, and everybody heard heard it as working is overrated.
(34:07):
But it was just working full time well, yeah, maybe.
So for thirteen years I just worked for myself. I
was working, I just wasn't running a company. I was
just doing investments and sitting on boards of companies I
invested in. What motivated you to go back to running something?
How'd that happened? Well? It was very different because I
didn't want to go back to work. Um. In fact,
(34:29):
I absolutely was opposed to it. I wanted to allocate
about of my time to not for profits, which cheer
for I think thirteen fourteen years of the a c
l U Southern California, civil liberty is very important to me. UM.
But I also got involved in public radio and KPCC
in l A had just been started as a second
(34:52):
NPR member station there. Really got deeply involved. It was
really fun being back in radio, even though it was
a different kind of radio. There had been a lot
of turnover in the CEO position at NPR. I really
love public radio. I really like the mission. I really
love the service and the content, the journalism. And when
the position came open, I was asked if I would
(35:15):
even consider it. I said, you know, I don't want
to work. I don't want to go to work. I've
got a great life. That's the one thing, that's the
one thing on the planet that I would do. So
I made a commitment to spend five years here, and
that's kind of how it came to be. I remember
the conversation you were. You were wrestling with it, and
I actually thought you were not going to do it,
(35:36):
but obviously the passion got you. So you arrive at NPR,
one of the great brands in audio, You look around,
you meet everybody. What you think was the big opportunity, Well,
you know, my take was that the mission and the
primary focus of the organization, which is journalism and storytelling,
was and has been from the beginning, very very good,
(35:57):
and so I didn't see that as being what needed help.
But the business side of the equation had not been
particularly well tended to five or six years in a
row of losses, and I saw a huge opportunity from
a sponsorship standpoint, from a fundraising standpoint, better station relationships.
A lot of people don't know this. We don't own
(36:18):
the stations, we don't manage the stations. They're fully independent,
and that's one of the beauties of the system because
they provide local service, they're locally owned, locally managed locally operated,
but I really saw an opportunity to kind of reduce
the friction between the stations and the network, develop partnerships,
help the stations, help us grow the revenue side of
(36:40):
the business, and that's kind of what we focused on
and rebuilding the management team to do that. When I
go talk to advertisers, I'm in the audio business. Everybody
wants to talk about two things, smart speakers and podcast
So tell us the story about podcasting here. NPR has
been in that business for a long time. A lot
of it be in just as being able to listen
(37:02):
to some of the programming that the network did on
demand on your own whenever you wanted to, and so
we had kind of a leg up. And also because
we've been doing spoken word for forty eight years, we
have that expertise and audio and storytelling, and so that
gave us a real advantage in scale. When podcasting is
(37:24):
a category took off with listeners and with advertisers, we
really kind of had au phole position. It's been a
real god's end. It's been great for the organization for
many other reasons, not just the business side of it,
in terms of reaching new people, expanding our mission bringing
new people into public radio, particularly a younger audience that
(37:46):
maybe doesn't have the affinity for the news service initially,
but also in things like NPR Music and some of
the other content targeting a younger audience or a more
diverse audience. So it gives us a chance to really
grow the brand, to get both into the NPR experience
that comes to the network when news becomes something that's
interesting or important to them. And it's also had another
(38:10):
interesting effect, which is we put people that have been
on the network for years, traditional journalists and correspondence in
a podcast with let's say a younger group of talent.
It really affects the sound of the network. We keep
the journalistic standards high, but making it more accessible to people,
(38:30):
more conversational, more informal, has really expanded the audience. Well,
you guys have done a great job. As a matter
of fact, we did the first I Heeart Podcast Awards
this year and you guys won the award for really
being a pioneer in this business. So thank you for that.
We're really appreciative. You've announced you're stepping down to CEO
when your contract expires, and you're gonna be the chief fundraiser.
(38:52):
That's like the harder job, isn't it. You and your
wife Pam, who's by the way, spectacular partner of years,
and are kicking it off with a ten million all
our donations. So not only fundraising. You're like saying, Okay,
I put my money up. Now what are you going
to do? What are your plans for that? I mean,
what kind of goal do you have for MPR through
that effort. Well, we have big aspirations. Will be our
fiftieth anniversary, So we think it's a great opportunity to
(39:16):
reach out to the people that are big believers in
public service journalism what we've done at NPR, and to
work with us and our member stations so we can
raise money not just for us, but also try to
be helpful to them. Back to the business side of it,
major gifts, the fundraising piece has never been a big
initiative at the organization, I think to the detriment of
(39:39):
us at NPR into the stations, So we think there's
a great opportunity. The personal number I have in my
head for us here is million. That's what I'd like
to do before. So I'm not gonna answer my phone
until you get to Anton's I was just trying to
get that on the table. You are a board member
of the Museum of Contemporary Art in l A for
(40:01):
quite a while, and art is a very important part
of your life. You had a great collection and a
lot of people come visit it. Where did that come from?
Both of my parents had a real affinity for art.
My mother was a graphic designer. My father loved art.
We grew up outside Philadelphia. Never once took me to
a museum, not once, but he would talk about art,
(40:23):
and so I think that probably had an impact. And
then ultimately, I think art can really open one's eyes
to the world and get you to think about a
different perspective. And so if you're in the business of
trying to come up with creative solutions to anything, even
if it's something mathematical, I just think it's an interesting
(40:44):
stimulant for the brain. At some subconscious level. I think
it is something that helps me with my own creativity
and my own problem solving. So let's jump real quickly.
Let's do some quick responses to looking at the future.
Let's hit some of them. Future podcasting I think huge
and it's exciting for many reasons. Audio documentaries. I think
(41:09):
we're going to see a lot of expansion in other categories.
Some of the work you're doing on comedic stuff. Can
I plug Ron Burgundy? I think you know right now,
what's the number? Twenty seven percent of the population listens
to a podcast once a week. There's so much headroom
for growth. I think it's going to grow in terms
(41:30):
of the number of people that listen the number of
podcasts they listen to. That's pretty formidable as it is.
Seven I think is the average if you're listening to podcasts,
and I think different forms, different lengths. So I am
very bullish about it. I think it's an exciting opportunity.
TV networks, Yeah yeah, I still think brands really matter.
(41:53):
Is Netflix a TV network? I don't know. People treat
it that way. It is a rand and they're doing
a lot of great original content. It's fascinating because now
you've got Hulu doing the same, Amazon doing the same,
and it's making, you know, the people that had really
been in the lead position before, like HBO and Showtime,
(42:15):
really have to step up and compete. We've both made
our careers working on brands. I think brands still will matter.
I think it's going to be much much harder to do.
And the scale of the money that's being spent on
this Amazon is a twelve billion, thirteen billion. It's more
money than you spent on talks. Just buy a little
(42:38):
bit ad agencies, ad agencies. Well, you know I've heard
and you would know this better than I. I don't
know that the for years the business separated. It used
to be one stop. You'd had someone to do the
buying and the planning for a campaign and also do
the creative and then they kind of got split. You
had creative shops and you had buying shops. And I'm
(43:00):
hearing from people now what's going back to consolidation under
one roof. I don't know enough about that business to know,
but I do know that great creativity is I think
going to be the thing that makes a difference because
the data. I don't think you keep an edge for
very long. I think with creativity you can math and
(43:21):
magic there you go exactly find out what it is.
We've got to excite people about it to get him
to do some Privacy. The Times right now is running
a whole series of articles on privacy. It's it's breathtaking
what's happening. I think it will become the issue of
the day as people become much more aware of it.
(43:42):
A lot of young people don't seem to care. There
is a I think a crossover point. My oldest daughter
never really thought about it, didn't think much about it.
But I wanted to get her a smart speaker. She says, no,
I don't want to have that microphone in my house.
I go, this is important to my business. You must
have a smart speaker. She has relented. She has one now,
but it was interesting as a thirty four year old.
(44:03):
Her notion and her concern about privacy is much different
now than it was when she was twenty. We think
about MTV, we think about e we think about all
these exciting ideas. How do you think people find these
new voices and come up with these new ideas today?
And do you think people are doing it? I look
back in the early days of the motion picture business
(44:23):
and you look at somebody like Irving Thalberg, who was
hired by Carl Lemley to run Universal. I think he
was nineteen or twenty at the time, and then Louis B.
Mayer hired him to be vice president of production for MGM,
and he did all the classics, the great MGM films.
(44:44):
I think he was twenty three at the time that
he produced and oversaw all of those incredible films and
Orson Welles. One of the things I love about Orson
Wells is a lot of people don't notice his favorite
medium was radio, and the reason was said, the listener
has to fill in some of it. The listener has
to participate to create the story. And so he did
(45:08):
War of the World's when I think he was one,
and he started working a Citizen King when he was
twenty three. I was mentioning this somebody one time, and
the response, which really helped inform my thinking, was really
young minds come up with great creative ideas and are
given the shot in new, really new businesses, but no
(45:29):
one's going to take the chance on an established indassy
throwing the keys. I think about you when you were
w m a Q in Chicago at twenty Charlie Warner,
who hired me, must have been out of his mind.
Why would you hire a twenty year old kid to
go to NBC's big am clear channel radio station in Chicago,
And then why would they take me to New York
(45:50):
at age's unbelievable, but they threw the keys. It's easy
in theory, it's very hard in practice. I think the
answer is you've got to find Bob Pittman, You've got
to find Orson Wells, You've got to find Irving Felberg,
because they're out there. I don't know who they are,
what I have the courage to do it throw the
(46:11):
keys to them? Probably not, but I think that's the
an certain So this is about stories from the frontiers
of marketing. You are young ones. What advice would you
be looking for that you could give somebody. The biggest
lesson for me, maybe there's something of value in this
for somebody else. Is the power of great ideas, the
power of great creative are hugely important, particularly in a
(46:36):
world where data is pervasive. This is not disparaging that
at all. You've gotta have that. Those are table stakes.
Everybody's gonna have it. Some people are gonna be better
at interpreting it than others, but everyone's gonna have access,
and it's going to be an arms race, and that
will always be something everybody has to have. The layer
over that, which I think is very important, and it's
(46:58):
the real value add whether talking about radio, television, networks,
ad agencies, filmed entertainment is the creative piece. I don't
hear as much conversation about the creative piece of the
equation as I do about data. If I were a marketer,
to differentiate myself from everybody else, I would focus on
(47:18):
that this sort of insists in the right place. This
podcast is about the mathew magical marketing, the analytical. We
gotta measure it. And of course once you measure it,
know everything. That doesn't cause anybody to do anything, you
have to do something about it. That's the magic. So
as you think about it, who's the greatest mathematician, you know,
the greatest mathematician, the person who just got the data,
(47:40):
understands it, has those insights. John Malone. Who's the greatest magician?
M hm, wow, I don't know. I gotta think about that.
In the greatest magician, I'm stumped. There's so many people
that have done just really great work. I would have
(48:00):
to Spielberg. We'll take it. Thanks Jarl, Thanks Leavings, Thanks
to my great friend, Thank you, Bob. Here are some
things I picked up for my old friend. Y're all
moan one relationships or everything in business. You all picked
that up from a salesman in El Paso who attended
(48:22):
everybody's birthday and baptism, and it's a lesson he hasn't forgotten. Two.
Desperate situations can be great for creativity. If you all
have more money for programming, he might never have come
up a talk suit. Three. The key to finding new
voices and not letting your brand get lapped is to
throw young people the keys and let them drive. It
(48:43):
could be scary, but it's something both Yarl and I believe.
Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
(49:04):
Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a
production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki
Etre for pulling research bill plaques, and Michael Asar for
their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
(49:27):
bring this show to your ears. Until next time,
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