Tom Freston

Tom has a new book, "Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Tom Freston, who has a new autobiography,
Unplugged Adventures from MTV to Tim Buck to Tom. Why
this book? Why Now?

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Well, we had this thing called the pandemic a while back,
and I had some time on my hands, and I
thought maybe it was time to try and I like writing,
trying to link together some of the things in my
life and see what kind of sense it might make.
So I started churning it out, and next thing, you know,
I thought, I thought, rather than do a business book,

(00:50):
which everybody's doing, I'd do something more along the line
of an adventure story and try and cast it as that.
And I try and put in, you know, a series
of favorite stories, whether they be physical adventures or adventures
like in the workplace, and kind of go from there,
and also try and give it a light, kind of
humorous tone, so it wasn't too serious and it was

(01:10):
fun fun to do.

Speaker 1 (01:12):
Okay, obviously you're well known for your tenure at MTV.
How did you decide how much MTV to include and
not include?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well, I didn't want to go into every little detail.
A lot of it's all been There's been a bunch
of books out on MTV documentaries. I think people kind
of know the story. I was always more and more
interested in my sort of my first chapter in life,
which was, you know, the years I spent in Afghanistan
in India, which sort of set the template for me.

(01:45):
They were like my most adventurous years I was younger,
but also those are the years where I learned various
traits that would turn out to serve me well as
someone who was running an eccentric media organization that was
unlike most others, which was the MTV network, a MTV nick, E,
VH one, Comedy Central, and I had I actually had
journals Bob from those years when I would I was

(02:09):
either bartending my way around North America or I was
traveling all over the world by myself mostly, And then
spent eight years running a business that was pretty successful
and then got, you know, got a series of unfortunate
events happened, and I came back to New York, you know,
bankrupt and broke in. Then I started at MTV and

(02:33):
the MTV story inventsment. I was like every MTV network's
running that for all those years and being there. That
was you know, all the things in my life that
I loved outside of traveling and living abroad was sort
of in one place. So it was in a sense
for me, it was a perfect job. You know, I'm

(02:53):
not saying that no one else couldn't could have done it,
but yeah, I wasn't. I didn't have a career path
of a traditional media executive, let's put it that way.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
So what lessons did you learn in your adventures in
the so called rag trade in Asia that translated to
your tenure at MTV.

Speaker 2 (03:14):
Well, when I lived there in Asia in the seventies,
it was a very tumultuous time in India. India was really,
you know, sort of still a brand new nation. It
was bureaucratics. Sixty percent of people were below the poverty line.
Today that number was like two or three percent. So
it was very poor, very ragged, and they were a
socialist government. They didn't allow any imports. There was no

(03:37):
foreigners really living there. I mean you couldn't go there.
And you know, there was no call centers in Bangalore.
So I learned humility first and foremost. You realize how
small and insignificant you are when you're living in a
place like that that seemed to be just made of chaos,
and I would find that the determination and you know,

(04:01):
flexibility I would need to wind my way through there
and be successful was very satisfying. So the improvisation and
tolerance of traveling low to the ground, and tolerance of
sort of eccentric individuals and so forth, and believing in
risk taking, we're all. You know, there was this part

(04:21):
of the things that I picked up there. That and
feeling confidence, feeling confidence in an international marketplace, which which
really led me to put the internationalization of MTV networks
on the front burners. And you know when they when
governments started to finally liberalize their media and allow satellite

(04:44):
and cable to come in the late eighties early nineties,
that was a big, big change. Yeah, you know, like
in the UK, I mean you could never really there
was and there was no radio stations even that played
music in the early days. So we kind of came
up when that was all happening. I said, well, I

(05:04):
want to get first in line for doing that. How
can we make say, let's start with MTV and can
we make it a real international network? Now CNN would
always say they were an international network, but they were
mostly in hotels. We were really in local language in
most places, in people's homes, and we had local versions
and it was greatly satisfying. But to answer your question,

(05:26):
you know, I learned it was the hardest work I
ever did in my life running that business. Existing there
so endurance and fortitude and humility and you know, an
appreciation of creativity and risk taking. We're all things that
came in handy later on in all parts of my life.

(05:47):
It was like a good school.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Okay, were you always a confident guy or did you
learn to be confident?

Speaker 2 (05:55):
I learned to be confident, and you know, I would
say even today, I still have a bit of that
imposter syndrome that a lot of people have, you know,
which came really evident to me. Like, you know, when
I finally got fired by son to Redstone, I said,
oh man, it's like the mask isn't ripped off. I
had for a second of flash there that you know,

(06:17):
they finally figured out I wasn't the right guy for
the job. I really was not incompetent, but I wasn't
everything I needed to be. But I dispelled that. But
confidence bills, you know, you start out in school and
you get from one grade to another, you get a
little more confident about your abilities. But my confidence skyrocketed
in my date, in my traveling days because I wasn't

(06:39):
traveling around going to golf courses. That kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
Okay, is confidence faked till you make it? How much
is that apart? Do we say, well, let me get
myself in the situation and figure it out, as opposed saying, oh,
this is my wheelhouse, I can do this.

Speaker 2 (06:56):
A combination, but a lot of the former. I think
a lot of the former. You know, you kind of
learn as you go. You build up confidence by doing things,
and you go in and you know, at MTV the
first time you have to interact with like major artists,
and am I really right for this? I mean, then
you find out, you know, you talk to people person
to person, You're like, I can do this too. These
are like regular people. There's ways to relate to those people,

(07:18):
to all kinds of people. So confidence bills as your
experience kind of magnifies.

Speaker 1 (07:23):
So what's the trick to connecting with artists?

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Well? I always found trying, don't look nervous, be yourself
what they really want to hear In many ways is
a connection to their music and their artistry. And if
you can come off as a genuine not so much
a fan, but an appreciator of what they do, and
be respectful of their time and what they've done, and

(07:49):
talk to them as regular people, it would be like
a conversation with anybody after a while. I mean I
was never really starstruck, except maybe by a couple of artists.
I mean, you know, it was always I always loved
what artists did, and I realized early on that I wasn't.
You know, I couldn't paint, I couldn't play the guitar.

(08:12):
I couldn't do a lot of artistic endeavors, but I could.
I wanted to work near create. I wanted to work
with creative people and be close to some kind of
artistic endeavor, and that I would be able to do that.
That that that came to me like when I was
in school, I felt that would be that would be
the lane I wanted to ultimately be in. That would

(08:34):
be satisfying for me. I couldn't make it, but I
could help other people do it.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
What is the trick to talking to business titans who
were sprinkled throughout your book.

Speaker 2 (08:46):
Well, you got to show them that you know how
business works. You know how what a P and L is, uh,
what ebata is. What they want to see. For example,
in a business plan, you can't come off as NAI.
If you can't, you want to come off with some confidence.
You've got to be able to defend numbers and if

(09:06):
you have a great ability to kind of process numbers
in your head about percentages and things like that. That
I found that always works. They want to you know,
in my line of work, it was always I would
always try and impress them first without creative output. I
always found at the beginning of a meeting if I
was going to see somebody, if I was trying to

(09:27):
help sell something, butether that be one of our networks
to an outside person and they kind of brought me
in to do it, or even to my own corporate
people that I work with. As you know, a great
it's hard to beat a great videotape, and you know
that people would stand up and salute at at the
end of it because that says, Okay, I'm really going

(09:49):
to listen carefully now to what this guy is going
to say, because he obviously they got something going on here.
And in many cases the videotape was better than in
what we were actually making, you know, because it's easy
to do a three minute piece of something that seems
really you know.

Speaker 1 (10:05):
Okay, But that's in the selling process when you're talking
about you in the book, it's about going to Cuba, Okay,
you go with Graydon Carter from Vanity Fair, you go
with less Moon Verters from CBS, you go with Rona
Howard's partner from Imagine. What's the key to connecting with
those people?

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Well, first of all, let me say I wanted to
go to Cuba by myself. I mean it started off.
I wanted to you know, Cuba was going through this
horrible period when the Soviet when the Berlin Wall came down,
in communism kind of vaporize, except for Castro. He's like
the last communist going just about. There's certainly the last
one in the Western hemisphere. But the music scene, despite

(10:48):
all the increasing poverty in Cuba was really vibrant, and
they had fantastic music there, and I wanted to go
in there and sort of get in on it and
make some connections. So I happened to to Brian Grazer
one day, who I hadn't known since the eighties. You know,
he was an early guy who I knew around MTV.
We would promote some of his films. We had a friendship.

(11:09):
I said, Hey, I'm going to Cuba. You know, I
want to check out the music scene there and get
a sense of it, because I know we can't start
MTV there. But if we could get some relationships with
some of these musicians and you know, find out what's
going on it could you know, we have a ravenous
network we could use this stuff. He says, oh, yeah,
I'd like to go, so you know, you know, I said, okay,

(11:32):
you want to go. So then he tells somebody else,
who tells somebody else. Next thing, you know, I got
a whole bolo to moguls. They all want to go
to Cuba. And I found this guy, this great guy
lives in La Jonathan Branstein. He was like my man
in Havana. He'd had been there many times, and he
got us the proper visas. Allegedly they were the proper
visas that you would need to go to Cuba. And

(11:54):
we all went. But I knew all these people, Bob
and as I kind of came up in the business,
you just run into a certain level of people. And
as you know, I knew Graydon from Vanity Fair, I
knew Brad gray tangentially less Moonvez and I worked in
like sister companies who also Jim Wyatt then was running

(12:18):
William Morris, I Ken I'm trying to remember now who
was house on the trip. But anyway, next thing, I'm
bringing now a group of fussy people to a communist
country I've never been to, and they and they want
a certain level of service which I'm not even sure exists.
So all of a sudden, now I'm like a tour

(12:39):
guide rather than someone who's sort of freelancing down there
trying to you know, meet as many people as I can.
And I'm with a lot of people who kind of
view this as some kind of holiday.

Speaker 1 (12:51):
But it was.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
It was fun. You know, we all got you know,
you rent the old cars from your youth and drive
around Havana, which is like it was exotic. It was
like I think two thousand and one and uh, you know,
Havana is a beautiful city. And we ended up having
a series of meetings. It was productive and it didn't
end well. Didn't end well, but we did have dinner.

(13:15):
We had lunch with the Fidel Castro, which was unexpected.
He thought, you know, we're a group of people in
town he wanted to meet, so he entertained us for
like five and a half hours out of lunch, which
was you know, just one funny story about that. So
we're told by this minder from the Ministry of Culture,

(13:36):
Jorge Gonzalez, who was a cool kind of dude, little
rotn guy. We were around and we met some of
the Cuban All the music seemed to go up through
people in the government, the Ministry of Culture. We had
a meeting there and as we're leaving that want to
hit Jorge's bosses and says, hey, do you guys want
to meet Fidel. We want to meet the big man,

(13:57):
you know, the big man. We want to meet Fidel.
He'd like to meet you. Well, yeah, we'd like to
meet Fidel. So they said, well, we got a he's
speaking tomorrow night to a group of school teachers outside
of Havana, and you know it's going to go late,
So would you guys be up to meetingum like one
or two in the morning. Oh yeah, whatever, it's Foridel Castro,

(14:18):
for God's sake. He's a man from history. So it
turns out that he doesn't use a cell phone. All
these cats use burner phones, and what they don't know,
they don't even use burner phones. They use payphones. So
they take us to this kind of club that's sort
of like a brothel. You know. People are dry humping
against the wall. It's the communist upper class. They're letting

(14:40):
off steam on a Friday. And we're waiting for the
call to come in. And the call comes in to
a payphone outside. We all go outside and it's like,
he can't meet you tonight, He's got to meet you tomorrow.
Why don't you come for lunch? I said, okay, So
we get ready, we go for lunch. We pull in
like two when was a fifty seven Cadillac invertible and
was a fifty four to Ford convertible, like a bunch

(15:03):
of yahoo. Gring goes and there he is on the
palace steps and I'm thinking, Wow, that's Fidel Castro. He's
a man from history. We tried to kill him like
eight or nine times with a CEO. What's he going
to say to us? What's his first words? And he
says he comes out and you look up at him.
He's on top of a flight of stairs and he says,

(15:24):
what do you guys produces the Sopranos? This is like
Cuba is only HBO subscriber. He's really a jump thinking god.
Gangsters tried to kill him, you know, and we had this,
We hired gangsters to take him out with exploding cigars
and wet suits filled with poison. And now he wants

(15:46):
to know who produced the Sopranos about the gangster so
is Brad Gray? Brad Gray then ran Brillstein Gray, He
said it was me, and so he works his way
forward and Fidel goes, that's my favorite show. That's my
favorite show. That was sort of his icebreaker, and then uh,
you know, we're let into the Palace of Ferns where
he would entertain foreign dignitaries, and we're all doing cocktails

(16:09):
and ganging around and talking about this and that, and
it was just bizarre. And then we would go in
to sit for this luncheon and I'm sitting at his
right and I always remember we all had place settings,
and his his el Comandante al hefe Fidel Castro was
his place card, which I of course stole when the

(16:29):
meal was over. But he sat us all down and
gone on and on, and he started, you guys, want
to drink any wine? You know? He wheels out this
this like all this wine from Chile and Algeria, and
we start drinking wine. Everybody's getting a little buzz. And
he just went on and on and on. He would
have this translator. He spoke perfect English, but he had
this translator who was always like a half a sentence

(16:51):
behind him. And then this guy could talk. So if
we were there for five and a half hours, he
talked for five of it. And at one point I
would a couple of points. I got up and I said,
oh that this is what am I doing here? I
came down here to listen to some music, make some connections.
Now I'm listening to the what's the price of kilo
aut of electricity? And uh, you know in one of

(17:14):
the one of the Cuban taps, which he knew by
wrote he he knew all these facts and figures. I
would go into the restroom and gonaix hail. But at
the end he he wheeled in. He said it's over.
They wheeled in this trolley with all these boxes of
cigars that he signed them all. And then he had
this American photographer who was a communist who left the

(17:36):
who had Steve still spoke with a bronx accent. He
came out and he autographed all these photos that he
Jonathan knew this guy, and it was like it was
like you know when you're at when the artists come
out at the end of a show to sign CDs
and everything that was were all these guys who were
sort of paid to not lose their cool, were like fanboys.

(17:58):
And then Grazer does and buy a photo, but he
says to Fidel, you know who running to know really
all about how he made his hair stand up straight.
He wanted to know about hair gel and Brian Grazer.
He says, well, sign sign my chest. When you just
sign my chest and he goes, no, I'm not gonna say,
well sign my shirt. Sure enough he Fidel Castro sign
says shirt. It was a it was a crazy uh

(18:21):
end to a memorable lunch.

Speaker 1 (18:31):
So you walk out of the building. At first there's silence,
Then you look at each other, what do you say?
What did everybody say? At that point?

Speaker 2 (18:39):
Well, we all get in the car and it's like
teeming rain, and just as soon as we're about to
pull out, the sky's open, you know, and it's all
of a sudden, it's like a tropical paradise again. So
we put the tops down and we're all kind of
stunned and people going, wow, that was something you believe
that you were heading to the airport because he had to.
We tipped in and charted a plane to cant Coon
because he couldn't really go on a commercial flight in

(19:01):
those days. So we took this little plane, we filled
it up and we get in a plane. I remember
Brad Gray says, no one had said anything really yet,
and he says, so where are we going next? You know,
let's just skip over the whole experience and go into
the next chapter. So it was a that was a a.
And then we all got fined fifty five thousand dollars.

(19:22):
That was bad news. That was bad news, and we
had to get out of it. We hired reich Hooter's
lawyer because he had had the same problem when he
made Buinnivist the social club, and the lawyer turned out
to be a guy who worked in the Treasury department.
He used to find people like us for doing it.
And then what the worst one worst thing happened to
less Moonviz. Because he was in the middle of negotiations

(19:43):
with David Letterman, and Letterman couldn't get over the less Moon.
He's having a link a fight negotiating with David Letterman,
and he did a skit called Lunch with Fidel and
Less and they would whe let these comedians. This guy
was dressed up as Fidel Castro and a guy was
dressed up at with the less Moonvez and Less would
say to these ina things like I have the biggest

(20:05):
office in Hollywood, or I went to Fiddel's Grammy party
and he let me whip some artists and you know,
things like that. And uh, I think Less took the
brunt of the joke, that's for sure, but it was
it was you know, we ended up getting I ended
up getting relationships in Cuba, which was my original intent,

(20:26):
and we were able to get some music out of
there and so forth.

Speaker 1 (20:29):
Okay, you were told that it was okay to do
it and then ultimately find you know, the Silicon Valley
mantra is you know, ask for permission after the fact.
Is that the kind of guy you are we're gonna
do it. It's gonna work out in the long run.
Are you fearful?

Speaker 2 (20:48):
Wait?

Speaker 1 (20:48):
Wait this is illegal or I heard this?

Speaker 2 (20:52):
Well in some cases yeah, but in this case, I
was told we had this what they call a cultural
exchange visa and Jonathan arranging, So man, it'd be a
lay up to get those I mean, you guys, you're
going down there looking for music. It's okay, and you know,
we all thought we were golden. Then when I get
this note in the mails, like an inch thick a
thing from a Treasury department, I called Jonathan and he goes, yeah,

(21:13):
we had it. I have it too. I got the
same package. But I think we jumped the shark when
we had lunch with Fidel Castro. That wasn't sort of
included as cultural exchange. But in general, I'd be more
inclined to if someone said, well, we could have a
problem doing that. I mean, you assess the risks, and
sometimes you just go ahead and everything works out. You're

(21:35):
not if you just play by the rules or listen
to lawyers all your life. You know, you're kind of
handicapped in a way, particularly if you want to move
with any speed.

Speaker 1 (21:46):
Okay, ultimately, Fidel bored you. But you know, we all
had these experiences with famous people and a lot of
times you say, I can't believe that's the guy. Other
times you go, wow, that guy lives up to the
rep So with all this history, the Cuban missile crisis,
et cetera, you're there with Fidel. You're saying, you know,

(22:07):
he may be boring me, but he knows what he's doing.
Or you're saying, I can't believe this guy's running the country.

Speaker 2 (22:13):
Well, no, you have to respect for him. I mean,
he would tell me he was still he told me
he still earns, he still earned sneakers, he works out
an hour a day. I mean, he had controlled this
whole country in every way, shape or form, like no
autocrat really gets a chance to do. Because it was
a small island, not that small. But you know, I
mean he was a man of consequence. He had withstood
a lot of stuff, and he was just dabbling around

(22:34):
with us. But I mean he was I don't know
what he was expecting from us, but he when he
starts talking, he kind of goes into a routine, and
you know, we're hearing all the facts about the triumphs
of the revolution and the superior medical system they have
and the work they do in Angola and this and that. Yeah,
and it's interesting. But if you're with somebody and they

(22:55):
talked for almost five hours straight, you know, you don't
see a lot of that. And at one point he
wanted to say, Less, I want you to bring back
a message to President Clinton. You know about these planes
that keep coming over from Florida dropping leaflets on Havana,

(23:16):
because then he shot two of these planes down. I want,
I want want, I want build and know, I want
Clinton to know that I don't mean problems. I have
good intentions. And Less goes, Yeah, I'll get the message
to him. But I'm thinking, but now George Bush is
the president. He's been the president for two months or
three months, and I'm thinking he, you know, he was

(23:36):
really really felt bad that uh, these Cuban exiles or
whatever you want to call him, or flying over and
doing these things. But and he had to defend his country.
I mean, I could put myself in his shoes. I'm thinking,
you just can't have somebody coming over in a piper
plane dumping stuff out and violating your airspace and you

(23:58):
warn them a few times and then you have to,
you know, shoot him down. I get it. But he
was concerned, and yeah, maybe that's one of the reasons
he wanted to meet us, was to have an opportunity
to send some you know, sort of under the table
or you know, messages back to the American government. Two
unusual connections.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
What other heads of stints have you met.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
Well, I'm trying to think in my life and when
I was at MTV and Viacom, you know, I met
or I met I met Justin Trudeau a few times
when we were working my work with Bread, I met him.
I'm going through the list now in my head. Once

(24:40):
I was in Mexico at a U two show years ago,
and I believe a president of Mexico showed up. But
you know, these were like not in depth meetings or anything.
This is sort of a meet and greet. I haven't
really had any exchanges with any you know, American presidents. Yes,
but I don't think as I think now, Bob, nothing

(25:02):
really jumps out of me that I was hanging out
with the heads of state in any consequential way.

Speaker 1 (25:08):
Okay, you go on about Bono reaches out after your
tenure at Via Commons, you work with him on Red.
Bono has a The public perception is shall I say,
Kira Sciro. Some people positive, some people negative. What do
people not get about Bono?

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Well, I'm a fan, you know. I know a lot
of people think he's a wind bag and why is
he doing all this stuff? But I've seen this guy
who has a very busy life, and all the amount
of time and effort he would spend on this when
he could be doing something you know that other people
might find more personally gratifying, vacationing or spending more time,

(25:49):
you know, around the house or listen to music. He would,
you know, go to Africa for a couple of weeks
and he'd work. He'd be working eighteen hours a day.
I mean, he really really wanted to make a difference.
He really cared about injustice. He really believed that activists
could be lifted up because change in governments. He really

(26:11):
believed this. He was a good man, he was a
great speaker. So I've seen him wear himself down. I
mean at some point that's how I kind of came
into the picture. Because McGuinness, Paul McGinnis, who you know,
he called me because I turned down Bono's overtures and
he called me. He said, you know, why don't you
come over. You know, Bono's got these do gooder things going.

(26:33):
It's kind of upsetting the band in a bunch of ways,
and he could use some help. These things are running
off the rails a bit. He could use a little
help and bring a little organization to bear. And so
I went over and be pitched me, and Bono pitched me,
and I think guy had been so good to me,
and I believed in what he was doing, and I

(26:54):
saw his sincerity, and I'm a fan. So I signed
up and said I would do three months. I'd give
you a report back. I go around and talk to
people and I'll tell you how many want to reorganize
these things in a way that might work more efficiently
and effectively and take up less of your time, which
I did. And it was interesting because in it it
was like, well, you're going to fire some people, you know,

(27:15):
he got some people here are either too political or extraneous,
and he was really reluctant on that score. And I saw,
like the loyalty the man feels, he's a loyal guy.
I could see why the band's been together for all
these years, something we don't really see in any bands
that have been around for that many decades. But you know,
finally I had my way and I said I'll see you.

(27:36):
And he said, well, why don't you just stay on
the board, Why don't you be the board chair. I
had had no real experience on being a board chair
or anything, but I said, sure, I'll do it. I'm
still the board chair. The work has been very gratifying
for me. And he's kind of peeled off the bed.
He's dropped off the board. He's a founder now he
still does stuff. But your question was is he basically

(27:59):
is he bullshitter or not. He's a hard working guy.
He spent so much of his personal time, Bob, I
mean so much on this work. I mean, you know,
for no money and doing it sincerely and being brought
to tears in places. So I have great respect for that.
And he could you know, he stands up a guy,

(28:20):
gives a good speech, and he you know, he's got
the ability to talk and relate to lots of people,
sort of almost a Clinton esque, you know, sincerity. He
listens to people. Yes, he talks a lot.

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Does he have a sense of humor about himself. Is
he aware of public perception or is he living in
a bubble?

Speaker 2 (28:45):
Oh no, he knows, you know. I mean I remember
one time I was down in as you know, he's
got a place down there, and we were driving around
in his car. It's got like I'm a modest car.
And you know, most artists they don't like to listen
to their own music. You know, they go into a
club and someone playing their music and it's like, I
don't want to hear. He can't get enough of his
own music. So I remember he's, Uh, we're in some

(29:07):
car and he's got it turned up to like eleven,
and there's some Someboddy like in the next car rolling
down in the windows, telling them basically to turn it down,
even though it's coming kind of coming through windows. He
he just thinks, it's how it's fucking bono, man, it's
fucking fuck bono. He goes, yeah, fuck bono. He likes,
he enjoys the people who take him down. I mean,

(29:27):
he's fully aware of it, and it just rolls off
him and he finds some humor in it. He knows,
he knows what people don't like about him. And you know,
he can roll with the punches.

Speaker 1 (29:40):
So what's the status of the organization today.

Speaker 2 (29:44):
Well, we have two organizations that basically are sort of
like a little conglomerate. There's one the One Campaign, which
is the activist organization that you know, it does two
things that sort of lobbies governments to line up and
do the right things on police and financial commitments they
make to the South to Africa and to and help

(30:04):
people in the South like be better to stand on
their own feet and you know, and help policies be
you know, how would I say this? You know, they
just be smart. AID if we're going to do aid
A doesn't work in a lot of ways, and we
recognize that and really the key to development in Africa
is going to be from the private sector. But one

(30:26):
place it does work is in the health sector. And
there's been twenty five million people now walking around in
Africa who would have been dead because they're on any
retroviral drugs which are financed thirty percent by the United States.
But and we were the leaders and the rest by
you know, other countries, and it's made a huge difference.
You know, towns where coffin making was the chief business

(30:47):
and the whole city was falling under and a state
was on its way to becoming a failed state. Kind
of revived and it's been great what we do now.
And now we're trying to switch to making it a
real African based organization helping African leaders, you know, kind
of finance their you know, end ofate, finance their own
health systems and so forth. That's a challenge for us.
The biggest challenge now, for one, is that Trump blew

(31:10):
a hole. You know, he closed down USAID and a
lot of foreign aids. So it's just crippling, and it's
such a hole it's impossible to fill with Bill Gates
or any of these foundations. It's and and it means
that you know, tens of millions of people aren't going
to get the drugs they need. We actually had stores

(31:31):
of these drugs for you know, stocked up in the UAE,
and rather than give them out, the Trump administration had
them burned. We had stores of these high protein bars
for children in Sudan. Rather than give them out or
give them to save the children or some other NGO,
we had them burned and destroyed. It's like cruelty is

(31:51):
sort of in the DNA of the administration and the
richest man in the world would would would say that
us AID, which spends one third of one percent of
the national budget, say twenty million dollars, is a criminal
organization that does that. He put in the wood chipper,

(32:12):
and it's and people who work there at criminals. I know,
these people they're like do gooders. I mean, they could
have made a lot of money and done things, you know,
made a lot more money. And if they were in
the private sector, and I'm sure there was a lot
of things going on there that could have been done
better or maybe you shouldn't have been done at all. But
that's like a footnote in the sense of the good

(32:32):
things that they did in the lives that they saved.
I mean, we give twenty forty billion dollars to Argentina.
You know. Meanwhile, the twenty billion that we were spending,
the part of what we spent in Africa was keeping
people alive, and it was burnishing America's image in a
good way, which we certainly need. And secondly, it was
good for American security because you don't want migration to

(32:54):
be you know, increased in flooding. And you know, it
was a small when the richest country in the histy
the world can't do that, and yet we have twice
that amount of money to the government of Argentina for
no apparent good reason. And you make people in the
civil service feel so diminished and disregarded. And these are

(33:15):
one these are these are people who are some of
our best citizens. It's just just sad. So we're dealing
with that. How do we plug the hole here? How
do we help get Africa on the road to being
self sufficient more quickly? Uh So we're doing that and Read,
which is sort of the sister organization, you know, they
do these phones and the you know, we've raised about

(33:35):
eight hundred million dollars and all the money goes to
the Global Fund, which is for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.
We want it. We want to get that to a
billion dollars. There's now, believe it or not, an AIDS
vaccine finally available, going to be available in the near term,
which is this huge thing with people have been talking

(33:56):
about for years. Uh So we're trying to figure out
how we couple that and the getting the distribution of
that done and paid for in a way that could
be efficient. So we've got a handful of challenges. We've
got an African CEO now, which is part of the
move to kind of I want to really move this
into being an African led organization, not Southern with a

(34:18):
bunch of white Northerners and eventually just have it sort
of sit there. So we're in transition trying to deal
with the discombobulation of this whole ecosystem that has been
created by the Trump administration and Doze and Musk and
all of that frustrating.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
So what is the overall budget of these organizations and
how many people are on the payroll?

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Well, if I look at Red and One together, it's
probably twenty five to thirty million a year. That includes
mostly employees, do gooders, activists. It's funded entirely from private
sector funds. You know, we have money, you know, John Dorr,

(35:07):
George Sorows, Mike Bloomberg, Build Gates Foundation, other people, And
that's what we do. And it's less money than we
used to spend. We've been hit like a lot of
organizations have with these cutbacks in general. So what we

(35:28):
can do a lot of good work with that amount
of funding. It's not all the money in the world,
and I would say, none of it's really wasted. It
goes to good effort. It goes for good But in
the case of Red, every cent that read raises, one
percent of it goes to buying largely these antiretroviral drugs.

(35:49):
So it's not like one of these things where people
give money and it's always going to some bloated overhead.
The overhead itself is covered by a couple of donors
and it's really small.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
In the book, you talk about as part of this effort,
you deal with politicos and you say they don't always
these elected officials don't always square with your perception, and
you can have a meeting of the minds. Can you
tell me more about that.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
Well, all my life I had avoided politic politicians. It's
one of the reasons I never met a lot of them.
When I was in working at MTV Networks, at Viacom,
I had avoided a lot of them. One they tried
to draft me and send me to Vietnam when I
was younger, just like they did to you two. Jimmy

(36:42):
Carter kind of ended my business like on the drop
of a nickel in the late seventies. The business I
worked so hard for for eight years. I announced one day,
we're going to do an embargo on clothes from India.
You know, there was no warning. It's just the same
thing that's happened now with Trump and his tariffs. I mean,
you're a small businessman and you just can't afford to
pay this kind of money. There's so many companies now,

(37:06):
like small companies that are going through exactly this. You're
a furniture importer from China or Indonesia. You've got to
pay fifty percent more for this stuff, and you know,
you don't your employees or you know, the parts that
you need that you're bringing in from out of the
country or heavily tarraft and you just can't handle it.
You're going to go under. So we're going to see
a wave and we're seeing it already of bankruptcies in

(37:26):
that small business sector. So I was, you know, and
you know, it always offended me that there was never
a warning, like, don't these politicians know that these businesses
could like give them a little time to adjust, don't
just kill everything day one. I mean, give them some warning.
There's like it's like they never had the stand put there,
you know, standing the feet stand in the shoes of

(37:48):
a small businessman. They don't know what it's like to
be living from nickel to dive and have a cash
flow crunch. I mean, they just decrease something and assume
everything's going to fall into place, but the pain is extensive.
So I was never a f of politicians. When I
started working with Red and One, I began to meet
a lot of them, and I was impressed by their sincerity.
I mean, these weren't the guys who were enforcing the

(38:10):
things that had pained me. But you know, even somebody
like Mike Huckabee, who I know now is sort of
the ambassador to Israel at all. I spent a lot
of time with him. We'd drive around. I was John Kasik,
John Podesta. We used to take these bipartisan groups on
these tours to see things. I found that the best
way to get someone as a being advocate about Africa
and extreme poverty was to take them there, because once

(38:31):
they got there, their hearts would open and they could
see that good things were being done, particularly in the
health area. And these were nice people. I remember a
time once we were in Liberia, which was really a
war torn country, and you know, had had this really
ugly civil war, and we were going to meet the president.
It was Bono myself. There was a group of us,

(38:52):
and then into town pulls up Lindsey Graham, John Thune,
and John the senator from Arizona who passed McKenney McCain
Sidney McCain. So all these people had spent ten days
of what was basically their recess ended the summer recess,

(39:14):
going around from Sudan to Rwanda, to Congo to Liberia,
going around on this congressional delegation when they you know,
they could have been home doing barbecues or listening to
their constituents. And I was so impressed. These were Republicans,
they cared about this issue. I mean, it's funny to
see where they are now, but I mean I would say, well,
they really in their heart, their hearts are okay. This

(39:36):
is an issue that you know, left and right could
agree on, and they have for a long time. So
I would as I spend time with these people, as
often happens, when you meet people with whom you might
have some prejudice against, they turn out to be human
and you have some common ground and you end up
having a good feeling about them.

Speaker 1 (39:56):
So talking about Africa, when I was growing up, there
was the Congo. Then I was in college at a
friend of mine set his brother had hitchhiked through Africa. Certainly,
in the seventies, a lot of young Americans went to Europe.
Now they go to Asia. On some level, Africa's still
a black hole. People are afraid to go there. What

(40:19):
is really going on in Africa now.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Well, it's hard to speak of it as a single
continent because it's fifty four countries and some of them
are really conflict zones, like the dr he liked, the Congo,
like the Sudan. I mean, you know, you look at
the eastern Congo. The six million people have been killed
there in the last ten twenty years in the wake
of the Rwandan comeback from their genocide, or the Sudan.

(40:44):
It's just, you know, we've seen this stuff on the
news recently, and now you've got al Qaeda about to
take over Congo and Urkina Faso, and South Africa, which
had been Africa's economy, has you know, has sort of
plagued with all kinds of political issues and shortages of

(41:06):
this and that. So but there are places that are
doing well you can Rwanda, Ghana, the hand Senegal, Kenya.
These are countries that are kind of emerging to be
middle class countries. So it's a mix. Some are war zones,
some are about to become true middle class countries. Others

(41:27):
are sort of on the middle. They're trying to fight off,
you know, to hottest organizations across the Sahel. You know,
look at Somalia. They've been lingering on the edge for
a long time, but there is a population explosion going
on there. There is, on average, an increase in disposable income.

(41:49):
A middle class is emerging in a lot of these countries.
Their primary problem is governance. You know, there's there's still corruption,
which is you know, the level of corruption is almost
equal to the amount of is greater than the amount
of foreign aid that pours in there in various places.
Some people think it's an unstoppable whole. I don't believe that.

(42:11):
I mean, I've seen progress in places when they get
governance in shape. Look at Rwanda, it's like you've never
been to a cleaner country, Bob. The whole population has
to go out on one Saturday a month and pick
up garbage and do things. I mean, the place and
you consider they had this awful eight hundred thousand people
killed in a genocide in nineteen ninety four. Now it's like, man,

(42:33):
it's like a paradise there, really clean and clear. I mean,
an exception to the rule, I'll say. But you know,
the problems are endemic in some of these other ones,
and they appear to be unsolvable. But I have a
connection when I go there, I feel somehow, I feel
this wonderful sense of purpose, I guess, and when you

(42:57):
see that, things can improve. I also love the arts.
The arts are booming and quite often as the arts
that can help bring up a country. You look at
a country like Nigeria Afro Beat, the music, the music
everywhere in Africa is sensational. I've been able to travel
independently to like so many of these musical meccas in
Africa and really dig down to the history there and
where there's me all our music kind of came from there.

(43:19):
So as a music fan first, I find traveling in
Africa fascinating. I made a lot of separate trips on
my own just sort of, you know, to take in
as much African music as I can.

Speaker 1 (43:31):
So to what degree on your travels have you been
afraid or unafraid for your personal safety?

Speaker 2 (43:41):
Oh, you know, I've been afraid in places when I traveled.
When I lived in Asia in the eighties or the seventies,
I should say, in Afghanistan, which people now say, you know,
the tourists, there was hardly any tourists. It was an
exotic play. It was open that people really friendly and hospitable.

(44:03):
People think of it as a place of continuous war.
They had had fifty years of peace. It was the
tourist posters. Weren't many tourists who said, visit Afghanistan and
see the world's friendliest people. That's not the last thing
most people would think these days. But if you were there,
it was like that all kinds of young Westerners would
pass through there. In those days. That was who the

(44:23):
primary tourists were, and it was everyone whoever went through there,
you know, basically had a good experience. When I went back.
I went back for twelve years in and out to
work for this TV station there, which I really did enjoy. Yeah,
it was dangerous because there would be the Taliban. There
was an insurgency fighting, so you would feel, you know,
you would have to drive fast at nights, so you

(44:43):
wouldn't get stopped by some kidnapping group, or there would
be a bomb suicide bombers here or there, and you know,
you're always sort of filled with adrenaline. But I didn't
really feel for my personal safety much in the seventies,
more later on in Africa, not really. You know, things

(45:05):
are a lot safer than people think. They may look
dangerous if you drop somebody into a place and it
looks like a little shady and dangerous, but you know,
and in the seventies, the most dangerous place in the
world's New York City. I mean my friends in Afghanistan.
I say, well, come on, New York, it's great, and
you go, no, that's crazy. I've seen what's going on
over there. I'm you're not going to get me near

(45:26):
New York. Too dangerous for me. The tables have turned now,
but I haven't been plagued with fears for my own
safety too much.

Speaker 1 (45:38):
Where have you not been that you would like to go?

Speaker 2 (45:42):
I was talking about that last I'd like to go
to Tasmania. Have you ever been there? You've been to Australia, right.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
I've been in Australia a couple of times, have not
been to Tasmania.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
I'd like to go there. I've only been in Australia once.
I'd like to go to New Zealand. I've never been there.
I'd like to go. I haven't really dug a deep pole,
and I'd like to really slower Argentina. Now that they
got all this American money, you must have been out
and bathe and some of that. I've never been really
down to Patagonia. I've never been to southern Chile. You know,
there's a bunch of spots, haven't There's a plus spots

(46:12):
I want to kind of feel. And I just went
to Taiwan with some I have this group of people
I kind of travel with, you know, we kind of
took go to places. We went to Taiwan in the fall,
I mean in the spring, and it was fantastic. I
had no idea it was such a beautiful island. We
wanted to get over there before the Chinese took it over.
And you go there and you come back with a
whole different impression. Number One, the natural beauty is just

(46:34):
you know, on the in the eastern part of Taiwan,
it's like it's like you can drive four or five
hours and almost not see another house. It's kind of
subtropical jungle, just fantastic. And the food's really good because
when Shanghai Check came over at the end of the
Chinese Civil War, all the rich people came to Taiwan
and they brought all their chefs with them. So the

(46:55):
level of food excellence in Taiwan is not to be
surpassed mainland. Maybe these days, I don't know, but that
was an interesting tripper. We go to Georgia, you know,
down there, not the one in America, but the one
down there on the southern belt of Russia where Stalin
was from. And so I try and keep an arm
in the fire and that keeps me excited. And every

(47:18):
time I go to Africa, I try to go to
a couple of new places.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
So when you have this group, how many people go.

Speaker 2 (47:25):
There's like four or five of us. There's this guy,
Sad Mussin, who's an incredible guy. You would love him.
He's the guy who convinced me to come back to Afghanistan.
He's the most optimistic man I ever met. He's probably
in his mid fifties now. He's the guy who started
the first private TV and radio stations in Afghanistan after
the fall of the Taliban, and he's living in London

(47:47):
now London in Dubai, and we'd like to go. We
went to Yemen, we traveled so much. So he's a
great travel partner, as is this guy Jonathan Branstein, who
turned out the guy who got me into Qbe but
had also been to Malley Molly got me into the
festival in the desert. You know, he's an eccentric traveler.
And then I have this friend from Yemen whose father

(48:07):
used to be president of Yemen. He now lives in
the UAE. He's in the group. And then there's these
two American guys who have a company called Zeba who
who that make really good fruits and nuts from Afghanistan.
They're still doing business there and they live in Lake Como,
which is always nice to visit, and they have this
kind of thriving business even now. In the age of
the Taliban, Afghanistan was famous for nuts and pomegranates and grapes,

(48:32):
so they put them in really kind of sexy looking,
great packaging sell them. It's a whole soul in the
Arawan and whole foods and those kind of grocers. But
these guys like to travel and they're really good at it.
So these are and we like to hike. So hiking
becomes like, you know, we go to a place where
you can, you know, hike up in the mountains and
have some nice, nice traveling around, seeing the nightclubs.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
Everybody's got a different traveling style. Some people their ideas
get a great hotel room, have service. Other people want
to go see the historical sites, the museums. You mentioned
the nightclubs. What kind of traveler are you?

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Well, I don't mind a good hotel, you know, if
I was, it depends if I'm taking a trip somewhere.
I mean, it's nothing like a nice hotel. I don't
want to stay. I mean I've stayed believe me, Bob,
I have stayed in my share fleabag hotels. I mean,
you know, I don't. I don't even go into it.
But you know, we go out now. I mean, we're
all kind of grown up, so we can afford a

(49:34):
decent hotel. And if there's a great hotel nearby and
it's not an armen leg, I would like to stay
there too. But a lot of it isn't you know,
if there's a national museum that sounds really cool, unique,
like there wasn't Taiwan, you'd go there. But I much
prefer being outside looking at scene, re hiking and trying
to get a sense of the vibe at the place.
And you know, I'd like to always investigate them. Whatever

(49:54):
the music scene is. That for me is a thrill.
But it isn't like I mean, I'm fully capable of
packing up and trying to someone says, come to the
Caribbean for a week, I have a house stay with us.
I say, that sounds good. I can do that.

Speaker 1 (50:10):
You know.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
I like going to California in the winter. You know,
to me, that's traveling. I love. I love the Santa
Barbara area. I just I've had a home up there
for twenty years, and you know it's beautiful. Of course,
now i just got eight or nine inches of rain,
so I'm just wondering if my house has kind of
washed away again. It's I don't know what happened to California, Bob.

(50:32):
It used to be beautiful every day, and now if
it isn't a wildfire, it's a flood, it's a debris flow,
it's a mud slide, it's like you're on the edge
of your seat. It's like it cats your adjuta.

Speaker 1 (50:45):
You know, you know it's harder when you're not here.
It's certainly rained these past few days in terms of
deleterious effects, fewer than I've ever seen. In terms of
major rain. I didn't go to visit your house. I
don't know what it's like there.

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Mine. Mine's turned out okay, and I couldn't believe it. Again,
over two inches of rain a day, and I thought
it'd be and I had this guy go check it out.
He says, you know, everything's okay, no leaks and no mudslives,
and I almost couldn't believe it. So I'm yeah, you're right.
I'm back here thinking the worst. And I don't know why.
It seems like there was good every No one really
had any major damage.

Speaker 1 (51:21):
No, we traditionally have this mud problem from the hill
behind our house. We put up, you know, a very
small fence, but nothing came through. I mean this, this
speaks to a completely different issue, which is perception. I mean,
when you ran MTV, it was a monoculture. If you
put an act on, they were known all over the world.

(51:44):
Now you know California's pejorative. You know, I saw this
great video where someone went to a business conference in
you know, North Carolina, and the legitimate people they are saying,
what about the twenty five dollars Hamburgers? You know, what
about everybody? Can your kid go to school without a gun?
You know, everybody thinks it's a hell hole, where as

(52:04):
we're living here. It's kind of a joke. Listen. It's
just like you're saying, there were all these places that
were off the grid. Is there any place that's off
the grid anymore?

Speaker 2 (52:16):
No? I mean, yeah, if there is one, someone's gonna
go there and put on Instagram and it'll be on
the grid in a bad way before you know it.
You know, but what you're saying is right. Like when
I lived in Afghanistan, people say, oh man, you must
be on the edge of your seat all the time.
Like people are living like normal lives pretty most of
the time. You know, it's not like that. I mean,
there may be a bomb on the other side of
the toath I can bear route, but you know, two

(52:37):
blocks away, everything's kind of normal. It's really kind of bizarre.
And California is that way everybody think is gonna be
just filled with homeless people. And but when you're even me,
who's experienced and spent a lot of time in California,
now I'm thinking, oh man, it's like I'm going to
wash into the sea, because you know, the media blows
it up and I have all these websites. I go
to the show rain gages and so forth.

Speaker 1 (52:58):
But yeah, well I remember in the nineties, couple times
we're rain this hard for a week straight. You could bear,
you know, you left your house, you would drive through
big puddles. You worry about your engine getting wet. I'm
not saying that there's not global warming. That there is,
but I mean it's kind of funny again, way a

(53:19):
point here, but I had to go out a number
of times during the rain. Nobody's out. It's like on
the East Coast, you tell people I didn't leave the
house because it was raining. They would have no idea
if it was snowing maybe, but here it's raining. People
are staying home.

Speaker 2 (53:36):
Yeah, and fantasy they don't know how to drive in
the rain. Yeah, lots as durable as the East Coast
people with this stuff.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
So you were in business school, you get a gig
at an advertising agency, you speak with this woman you
know who's in Europe and you drop out? How hard?
You know, Listen, the nature of being good in school
is perseverance, staying the course. You go to college, you
go to graduate school, and all of a sudden you

(54:11):
jump the track. I mean, how hard a decision was that?
What'd your parents say?

Speaker 2 (54:16):
It was so easy? You know, you got to remember,
you may remember of the era was like this is
now nineteen seventy one, seventy two. Freedom was in the air.
Every time you listen to a song is about going
down a highway or hitting the road. I remember always
just listening all that time to Joni Mitchell's International Adventures
in Blue, and I'm thinking I get part of that.

(54:37):
I mean, every time I go to the movies, it's
like I'm seeing walk about or and I'm alienated in
my work. And the idea that I'm going to spend
my precious time selling fucking toilet paper. That was like
a line too far. You know, I was already annoyed
when they had me on Gi Joe, But now toilet paper.

(54:57):
I just and then this woman made me this ears proposition.
Quit your job, fuck it, you know you'll do something.
Come with me, Let's go on an adventure. Let's go
on an adventure. Let's hitchhike down to all the way
down to Morocco across the Sahara Desert. And I said, oh, yeah,
that sounds fantastic. I was on a plane like a

(55:18):
week later, and I was gone for a year, and
it was like the defining year of my life, essentially,
and I really wasn't worried like you would be today.
Like someone was asking me that I got to go
to the book party tomorrow night and it's going to
be a lot of young people, and said, you know,
your book could be inspiring to young people, because today
young people they all have these panic attacks and they

(55:40):
have depression, and they're afraid to take moves, and they're
stuck in their ways and they think if they do
this or do that, they're never going to get hired again.
And tell them it ain't true. And it's hard to
tell them because the situations are different and everyone's different.
But for me, I never I mean I was never
chasing Big Bucks and I wanted to. I was very
much under the influence of the beats. I was in

(56:02):
the countercultural flow. The idea that I was even in
an ad agency. Kind of irritated me a bit, but
I had saved some money. I figured I'd do it
for a year. I had a plane ticket that was
good for exactly a year. I came back in exactly
the last day, and I would see what I found
and maybe, oh, new doors would open. And it was

(56:23):
the most valuable year to do it. And admittedly it
was a good time to do it. In that time.
You know, you can go anywhere. Iran and Lebanon, those
were like party places. I mean, the world is a lot,
you know, more fucked up now. So I never didn't
cross my mind not to do it. It did I

(56:43):
told my parents because they I had already spent a
year off before I took this job. I got out
of graduate school and I was a bartender or everywhere,
and I learned that trade and moving around. I had.
I had it in my bone somehow, and it was
about I'd rather trade experience for money, and I figured
I could always come back. I'm like, I'm thinking myself

(57:05):
as like a jazz sportet. I could improvise my way
into something or other. I'm not going to starve to death,
and I'm not going to think I'm like in a
formal orchestra and I have to go on some straight
line that some conveyor belt that other people were doing.
And it was in the air. I mean, I wasn't
the only guy. I mean America, people would quit and

(57:27):
go to somewhere in Vermont and northern California to communes
and like make furniture whatever they're doing. But in Europe
people would like to hit the road, like they had
this thing, the hippie trail, you know, all through all
these lower cost countries in Africa and in Asia. It
was exhilarating. That was fantastic, you know, And I wanted

(57:50):
to stay. That's why I started this business. I wanted
to stay and live out there. I'd stay there for
eight years. I said, this is like I lived so
vividly and I feel so alive here. Why would I
want to, you know, go back. I almost love being
in a place where I felt no one would ever
find me. Here. I'm going to, like, you know, kind
of figure my way out. I'm learning a little language,

(58:11):
make some friends, and it's a good challenge. I don't know,
Wanderluss whatever it is it was, but it was exhilarating.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
This clothing company. Was it a light bulb that went
off in your head when you were there seeing things
or was it more of the reverse. This is the
lifestyle I want. How can I support it?

Speaker 2 (58:32):
Well, I'll tell you. I am. After I was traveling
with this woman for a couple months, she had to
go back for a job, so I kept going. I
hitchhiked all over Africa and I at one point I
landed in Greece and I go to This is like
nineteen seventy two. So the night they broke into the watergate,
I landed in Michinos. And then it wasn't like some
you know, overly tourists at Greek Island. I was beautiful.

(58:55):
I thought I was stepping into a postcard. And they
had this beach there, this naked beach called Paradise Beach,
which now is a big nightclub. But then it was
like these two guys had at taverna and I was
in there one day and I see this little girl,
not a little girl, she's a woman, young woman, and
she was selling all these kind of beachy clothes to

(59:17):
German and tourists and so forth, and I got to
see her. Everone was like a frenzy. She had them
in these trunks and I had Indian deities painted on them,
and she was making them fortune. And I went up
to her afterwards. I said, that was really something. What's
the story. Where do you get all this stuff? She say, well,
I've been living in Katmandu for four years and I
design and make my own clothes. I do all this

(59:38):
stuff and then I pack it up in these trunks
and I take it overland from the Pole through India, Pakistan,
I ran Turkey, and I end up in Italy and
Greece and sell it right to the customers, her own
little vertical, integrated like enterprise. And I live in katman
Do I have a fantastic house. I have servants, I
throw parties. I go surfing in Sri Lanka. I ride

(01:00:01):
horses in Afghanistan. India is the greatest show on earth, Tom,
you really should go. So I said, Wow, that's fantastic.
So that kind of set set me to go to India.
I wanted. It was a very spiritual center in those days,
and I started thinking, if she's doing that, and I've
seen all this crappy clothing that was being made in
Morocco and cheap stuff from India. What if I toned

(01:00:24):
it up a bit. I knew nothing about this business,
mind you, But if I, let say, I got a
designer and we could make stuff that was of higher
quality because the cost differences were great, air freight was
just beginning. I could sell it to coholesale stores and
boutiques which were now beginning to be this new thing.
Everyone's opening these boutiques, and I could give it a shot.
And you know, and I would always think, well, that

(01:00:46):
way I could live in I'll get a house in India.
I'll live in house in India, and I'll find some
partners who I could trust and be good, and we
could make something for five dollars in New Delhi and
put it on a plane in twenty four hours later,
I could sell it for twenty five dollars in Manhattan.
And I basically did that. It ended up being the
hardest job I ever had in my life, and it

(01:01:08):
was very satisfied. I was a millionaire. I mean it is,
I had a partner, and next thing I know, I'm
a fucking My parents thought I was crazy, but it was.
We really did really well. We'd be in vogue in
women's Wear Daily and Mademoiselle magazine, and it was a
lot of work. We had cash flow problems. You know,

(01:01:28):
it got more difficult, but we grew every year. And
I imagine, Bob, I imagine this is the life for me.
I didn't want to be a big garmento, but I
would always be available to take these side trips, like
I would round up people in Afghanistan. I'd rent a bus,
we'd all go on some kind of adventure. I would think,
this is what I'm going to do. This is so

(01:01:48):
it's so exotic and so real, and I'm living a
life that no one at home could imagine. And then
it all came crashing down. So I had to reinvent
myself again, and I ended up like in a really
safe heart. We're at a lucky time, and you know,
timing is everything. The job I got at the company
that would become MTV, if I had been there a
month later or a month earlier, I wouldn't have gotten it. Now.

(01:02:09):
I just happened to show up when they said we
got to hire a lot of people who don't have
any experience in television, for which I was a primer,
a perfect candidate.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
You mentioned this Afghanistan renting a bus And there are
a couple of other times with the same behavior in
the book. Are you like the ring leader type? Are
you say, Okay, this is what we're doing. We're getting
everybody together and you're the cheerleader and you take them.
Were those anomalous?

Speaker 2 (01:02:38):
I wouldn't do that a few times? You know? I
mean there was a really I had a really great
group of friends there, and I just thought that it
was a big thing in the north of the country
every New Year's which for them is like the Spring
Equinox March twenty one. So I rented a bus and
I loaded up with people and you know, we kind
of split some expenses and I took out, rented this hotel,
we all pay for our rooms, and we took off

(01:03:00):
on this big road trip just like you know, eighteen
hour journey up through the Hindukush Mountains and back down
and Steven's Piscashi game. I meet the governor of the
province and vices to the palace and shows. You know,
they had a whole thing there for their New year celebration,
and we looked like we looked like we were off
of Jimi Hendrix's album cup. You know, everybody is dressed

(01:03:21):
up in shawls and all this habitdash Ree and these
girls who were designers. It was a great gang. And
people who kind of had been bidden by the same
bug as myself, who couldn't be They thought living in
Kabble was like fantastic. It was like this fantasy we
were living that nobody else knew anything about. It was

(01:03:41):
it was a magic time.

Speaker 1 (01:03:43):
To what degree have you run into those people, the
pre MTV, the wanderlust people. Have you run into them
or kept up with them later in life?

Speaker 2 (01:03:53):
Yeah? My designer Jill Lumpkin, who you wrote about in
Your Peace, she still lives in Bangalore. It's not called Belarub.
I mean, they've changed the name, but she's still living
in India. Fifty years later. The guy who was my
partner's nephew, We were his mentor. He became a real

(01:04:15):
estate maven, building big apartment buildings and hotels at a
private jet. He was doing better than anybody. He gave
Jill an apartment in Bangalore, like a three bedroom apartment
in a modern complex with a pool and a gym.
It's like living somewhere in you know, somewhere in the States.
She still lives there, has her social Security check wire
to India every month, and she couldn't be happier to

(01:04:36):
still be there.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
I was.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
I usually worried about it if she would adjust to
life there, But she's out on me. And there would
be other people like even now, some of my closest
friends are from my second round in Afghanistan. These people
that I would meet, like who were in Cobbled during
the who were war journalists, you know, Richard Engel or

(01:04:58):
Dexter Filkins, these guys who were kind of stars to me.
They were like the rock stars to me in a way,
who were out there and I admired what they did.
We still kind of hang out and we're all still
in touch, and there's like someone gets married from this
group and everybody goes, and it's like a reunion. I
just just this fellow I knew, Oza Mahmed, who was

(01:05:18):
this American guy of Pakistani descent. He got a he
won a Pulitzer Prize New York Time bureau chief in
Afghanistan and then bureau chief in Mexico City, and he
got married and Lisbon and everybody went. It was like
a reunion of the good old the good old days
in the war zone of you know, twenty ten to fifteen. Yeah,

(01:05:39):
those were heady times too.

Speaker 1 (01:05:41):
Okay. Tom Rush is a friend of mine and he
mentions this old girlfriend. And the funny thing about it is,
anybody else would say, oh, I had this old girlfriend whatever.
Not only is it Jill, It's always Jill Lumpkin of course,
which is a unique name. And I've heard all the
stories her flying back to New York and no regrets

(01:06:02):
on the album. Well, all of a sudden she shows
up in your book. What is so special about this woman?

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Well, first of all, you got to realize because I
was reading, I get online this paper from a Monacito,
Montecito journal, whatever it is. I see that Tom Rush
and Judy Collins are playing tonight right at the Libero
Theater in Santa Barbara. I'm saying, wow. And I've heard
him on your podcast, and I was always an admirer room.

(01:06:30):
He was the first musician I ever really met. When
I was in college. I did a show and I
booked him. I was sort of an entrepreneur. And anyway,
what's so special about Jill? Well, at the time, Jill
was like this real beauty she was working at Maxis
Kansas City in New York with this other woman who
was a matress. They worked the back room. And the

(01:06:51):
other one was Helen Martin, who that wasn't her name
at the time. She married Bryce Martin, the artist, and
she's now an artist herself. So that two of them
were these high cheekbone thin waf looking model like really
cool chicks, really right out of the boat. You know.
You look up Bohemian in the dictionary and it's them.

(01:07:11):
And she had this cool aura about her. I mean,
as I said in the book, she was like the coolest,
freest spirit I'd ever met in my life. I mean,
she just didn't care. And through her I met all
kinds of interesting characters. And in both Cobblin and Delhi,
she had a tendency. You know, she was very social,

(01:07:33):
she was very beautiful. Tom Russe really had a thing
about her. Evidently they still communicate. She calls them Tommy,
Tommy's in touch this and that, you know. Now she
was going out with some guy from Pentangle, remember them.
Pentager was one of those kind of gypsy bands in
the Irritations liming with that dude Swasties.

Speaker 1 (01:07:52):
Brute Yane people.

Speaker 2 (01:07:55):
She had a thing for this guy, you know she
But we were together for shit eight years seven and
now six seven years, and you know we never were
an item ourselves, but I always enjoyed her, and she
was a magnet for interesting people. And yeah, her and
Tom Rush were He was really taken with her. She was,

(01:08:16):
I mean, she still is beautiful, but I mean now
she's like my age. I mean, you know, she's getting
herself a security check wired to India, and you know,
I'd love to have been there and seen Tom Rush
play tonight. I met He'd never remember. I think I
met him in nineteen sixty four or five, but he
was a striking character in those days.

Speaker 1 (01:08:38):
So in the book, you say, I have this idea,
I'm going to sell slightly more upskilled than the usual
item to boutiques. Then all of a sudden, you're selling
to Bloomingdale's Involved. That doesn't happen by accident. How did
all that happen?

Speaker 2 (01:08:56):
Well, we had good stuff, and I had contacts. I mean,
I this girl Sidney Bachmann from Martha's Vineyard where I
was a bartender and my partner had a house there.
The guy who became my partner and Sydney was the
head of the fashion office, which like a key position
at the key retailer of the era, and she loved
what we did to the point where she would give

(01:09:17):
me stuff say, you know, basically, knock this off and
I'll get a whole bunch of it. So we were
always Bloomingdale's was always our biggest customer, but we also
sold to Bendel's, which was another like powerhouse fashion forward operation,
Macy's and you know, major stores, but a lot of
it was in you know, there was a real boutique
store kind of you know, there was a lot of them,

(01:09:39):
and they We used to have a thing called the
Boutique Show at the old McAlpin Hotel, which was like
some kind of Renaissance fare that would happen twice a
year and you would go and you would be able
to Celtics. People had stores in Florida or California or
what have you. So it was hard work. I set
up a showroom in New York, hire someone to run it,
and we have buyers come in and we were I

(01:10:00):
knew women who worked at these as fashion editors, so
I could get I had more than an average chance.
It's like getting a record on the radio. I had
more than an average chance of getting some editorial coverage
in Vogue or Mademoiselle or Glamour or one of those.
Essence and buyers would come in and everyone's always looking for, like,

(01:10:21):
what's the cool new place that hasn't been ruined yet
tourism wise, what's that place? Well, what's a cool new
company that no one knows anything about. It's sort of
under the radar, but they're doing something really good. And
we were that for a while. So that's how, you know,
we kind of boosted our sales. It was through connections
I had and the product that was good, and the

(01:10:41):
word of mouth, and you know, we went we went viral.

Speaker 1 (01:10:46):
Bob Okay, did you know how to run it and
how to price it because you'd been to business school?

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
Yeah, that helped a lot. I mean, my skills helped
a lot there. You know, we used to have a
thing of whatever our landed cost was. If you pay
some for four dollars, by the time you pay the
tariff in the air freight, it's like six dollars. Well,
I'll sell it for twelve dollars, knowing that the retail
will probably sell it for twenty four dollars. But you know,
the business as we got bigger, got more complicated because

(01:11:23):
when you sell to big stores, they take a discount.
If you got an agent in la he wants a commission,
and then people who are in the big stores they
don't pay it for a long time. So you might
be a millionaire on paper, which we were, but you
don't have any money. It's all tied up in receivables.
It's all tied up in inventory. Never you're always trying

(01:11:45):
to get your head above water. You're sort of basically
just hanging on. I know that's the thing that a
lot of people are going through today with Trump's tariffs.
I mean, things were already bad enough for these folks
and they're getting squeezed on pricing by competitors now they
got Yeah. But anyway, I'm having a business background and
a business orientation was really important and it kind of

(01:12:05):
set me apart. We were like the only kind of
Western people who own companies like this who were doing it,
which also brought me a bit of an advantage. So yeah,
I was putting my uh my business degree to good use,
which which which which was a big solace to my

(01:12:25):
beleaguered parents who kept thinking, why are you gonna get
a job and do something? Because when I came back
from India after being gone a year and they said,
what are you going to do? I said, I'm going
to start a business. You know, I got a box
of these shirts and I'm going to drive it around
in a Volkswagen see if there's a market forum. And
then when we became successful, they were like, wow, I

(01:12:45):
had to give it to my parents. They were patient
and supported me. I was on a mission.

Speaker 1 (01:12:52):
Okay, So what did you learn in business school?

Speaker 2 (01:12:59):
Well, you know, you take think first of all, I
went there. This will sound really dumb. This sounds really dumb.
So I'm in college. I'm a senior in college. I know.
You know, the draft now was like forty fifty thousand
people a month. My deferment's gonna route in June. That
coming June, when I graduate, I'll be in Vietnam by
the end of the year. I knew people in the service.

(01:13:19):
You're probably in the same situation. So what are you
gonna do. People gonna go to law school, going to
go to be a doctor, a dentist. I'm not going
to be a doctor or dentist or a lawyer. But
someone says, go to business school. I'm so dumb. I
didn't even know there was a thing as a business Wait.

Speaker 1 (01:13:34):
Wait, I graduated. I had no idea there was anything
such as an NBA, and I didn't know for years.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
Well, I'm the same big thing. So thank god someone
told me. I said, why don't you go to business school.
I'm working in a school cafeteria. Go to business school.
But there's business school, so you know. So I applied
to NYU. I wanted to go to a city. I
was in Vermont, and I want to buy to be
U and NYU. That was it. And I got into NYU.
You and that that was another thing that really changed

(01:14:02):
my life. But what I'd learned there. I had this
professor Peter Drucker, who was sort of the management guru
of the era. Put out a lot of books The
Age of cod Discontinent and everything. He was all about
innovation and change, and his classes were just fantastic, and
he real learned the key element of the business of
the American economy is entrepreneurs creating, correcting with customers, creating

(01:14:24):
new things. It isn't creating, it's innovating new things. He said,
someone's an inventor. They make something out of nothing. An
innovator is somebody who takes stuff that already exists and
somehow puts it together in a new way for a
new market or a new this and that. And I said,
now that's interesting. You know, that's a place in business
where it could be creative, It could be interesting, and

(01:14:45):
I'm going to keep my eye on that sector. You know,
it starts small. And the other thing was always always
look for jobs and sectors that were ascendant. You know,
you know, you don't want to be, you know, in
the buggy business. You want to be in something that
looks to be coming and being ascendant, which later on
my life was certainly cable television, and at one point
in my life it became importing. Importing was not a

(01:15:07):
big thing in the seventies early seventies. That was, you
know that the worldwide economic system was just sort of
adjusting to all this international trade. So I was really
uh intrigued with him, and I did really well in school,
even though I had sometimes I had work into the bartender.
I'd get out of work some nights at three am,
but I worked my ass off. I didn't want to

(01:15:28):
get thrown out of him. If I flunked out, I
was going to end up in Vietnam, you know. So
I worked hard at my you know, and I had
to hustle money because my dad's got I ended up
getting a scholarship, you know, when I was one semester in.
But I didn't really have any money to go to school.
But as you know, then school wasn't that expensive, not

(01:15:50):
compared to today. It's unbelievable, you know, for a couple
thousand dollars a semester. You know, now you know it's
a whole other thing, which you know impacts everything else.
But yeah, I liked business school. So I got an MBA,
and then it was okay, I'm going to take I

(01:16:10):
worked for sixteen years, eighteen years of school. I'm going
to take a year off and drift around and try
and keep up with some of these buddies I had
met who had their career path was not to have
one then their their career paths was never have a
grown up job, you know, which fits in sync with,
you know, some of the counterculture sensibility. I was that
was one of those guys. But I was never like,

(01:16:31):
I never got on the spiritual thing in any kind
of large degree. You know, I wasn't going to India
to sit in the cave or something with some sadus.
I was sort of on a reconnaissance mission.

Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
Okay, this all blows up the answer and an ad.
You go for a meeting at MTV. How exactly did
you sell yourself? What was it about what you said
that they said, okay, we want this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
Well I got this meeting through my brother who worked
at Columbia Records, and this guy Bob mcgrorty. And this
is at this point in time that company had just
started and they had Nickelodeon and the Movie Channel. The
MTV was still an idea they talked about, but it
hadn't been approved by the Warner Amex joint venture. They
hadn't they So I'm just trying to get in anywhere.

(01:17:21):
And when I went in to see him, I mean
I got a hair cut, I got a suit. I
remember buying a Georgia Armani's suit for like three hundred
bucks down on Orchard Street. I looked really good. I
went in and my sale line was, look, you need entrepreneurs.
I'm an entrepreneur. I know it sounds weird. I lived
in Asia for eight years, buy and large, but I
started this company. We're a multimillion dollar company. It kind

(01:17:43):
of went under because of a series of unfortunate events.
But I know all about music. I'm a music fanatic,
always have been, and I can bring a spirit to
this place. And I have creative abilities. I worked in
an ad agency and I had this whole portfolio of
I really went all out. I said, this is going
to be a protesy interview. I'm going to try and

(01:18:04):
blow it. I want to work at this company. So
I had this portfolio of all this stuff. We had
made catalog shots with models and you know, tear sheets
for magazines, and so I could look legitimate. I want
to look at the I didn't appear to be legitimate,
but I want to make myself look legitimately. So it
goes right away. Oh, this is fantastic. I want you to
go see my boss right away. And that's John Lack,

(01:18:27):
who was the guy who was the originator of the
idea of MTV. And he said to me, so, what
were you doing in Afghanistan? You were smuggling drugs And
he said it like it was a good thing, you know.
I said, no, not really. I wanted smuggling drugs, but
I did this and that and the other thing. And
he says, well, we're looking for people with no experience

(01:18:47):
in television. We need people who don't have can't we
don't need money, so we can't afford someone from NBC
who's just going to make stuff with some independent operations.
It's going to be expensive. We need people who can
think out of the box. I said, well I didn't.
I haven't even lived in a country that had television.
But I'm this, that and the other thing. I went
to the whole dittany. So they offered me a job
on the spot, and I said, this is going a

(01:19:09):
lot better than I thought. You know, I just came
in for an interview and thinking, well, well think about it.
Maybe we'll have you back. No, take a job, and
it's thirty five thousand dollars, take it or leave it.
I said, come in, count me in. So that's how
I got the job. And then like four months later
they hire Bob Pittman.

Speaker 1 (01:19:28):
Wait wait before you get there, you said, but I
got to go do something else for a month.

Speaker 2 (01:19:33):
Right, I did? I know? I know I skipped over
that part. I said, this is like I'm sitting there
and going, oh my god. I've been thinking, no one's
going to hire me. I've been running around in pajamas
for eight years, and they're going to think, who is
this guy? He's some drug smuggler. So they hire me,
and all of a sudden, I feel this wave of legitimacy.
And I said, well, I'd like to start, but I

(01:19:54):
can't really start for a month. He said, that's not
going to work. We need you right away. We're hiring
twenty people or something right away. I said, that's not
going to work. I got a I'm thinking, okay, I
got a job, and I'm thinking I'm going to go
into some corporate life and while it may be fun,
it's going to be nothing like what I left. So
I want to take like another run on the Marrakesh Express.
So I grabbed my then girlfriend and I told him

(01:20:16):
I couldn't start for a year. For a month, I
had to do some things. He said, well, I can't
wait a month. Look, if you want to take off
a month, do it, but the job may not be
here if you come back. But if that job's not here,
there'll probably be something else. So I split to Marrakesh
with my girlfriend and we roamed around Morocco for a
couple of weeks. And I came back and I remember

(01:20:37):
I entered the building on I think it was no
I went back. Yeah, I went back, and the job
was available. It wasn't a job I wanted. They put
me in a room where they stored soda and was
It was Saint Patrick's Day in nineteen eighty, ten years
to the day from when I went to the Fillmore
West and saw the Jefferson airplane with the Joshua light show,

(01:21:00):
and I saw music videos being I mean I saw
a video being made the old fashioned way by those dudes,
and I saw the power of music being linked up
with video some kind. But anyway, I started off, and
then they had me doing sales for a while, and
then they hired a Bob Pittman, who was he's twenty
one years old or twenty two years old. He's running

(01:21:22):
the biggest radio station in New York, having run the
biggest one in Chicago. He's like this long haired, one
eyed hippie dude who a sweet talker. He was working
with don Imus, and they hired him to kind of
be the point person to develop the concept of MTV
into a real channel, and he was looking to get six,
seven eight people to be on the first team. So

(01:21:44):
I went to see him saying, I'm your man, this
is why i came to the company in the first place.
I've seen music videos. I'm like nuts about this idea
is the big best idea in the world. You got
to hire me. I'll work my ass up for you. Meanwhile,
I'm like six or seven years older than him. I'm
like the only old guy. I'm like thirty three. So
he starts the same thing. He says, well, were you

(01:22:09):
smuggling hashi Ish because that was a big thing of
the day. I go, not really, I wasn't really smuggling
hash He says not really. He says that means you were.
That means you were right. He kind of trapped me,
so he says, you're hired. So he hired me to
be the head of marketing. So it was me and
John Sykes and Piskuy, Fred Cyber, Carolyn Bigger. There was

(01:22:29):
a handful of us. They were all shoved us into
the Sheridan Hotel, into these hotel rooms where you know,
We're just it's like a like like the kind of
startup you'd see in the internet. One hero, everyone's eating
pizza and you know, we had like eight people and
four phones and they had call waiting and we had
no money, but we were we were Everyone was like

(01:22:49):
a music fanatic. A lot of them came out of
either radio or record companies, and you know, we all
thought this was the greatest idea in the world. And
the people were I was like the highest paid guy
other by no sychs is making thirty grand a year
and they would have worked for less money. It's funny, Bob,
but you know, everyone talks about money, money, money these days.

(01:23:10):
None of these people were really concerned with money. We
were on a you know, on a crusade to do
something that sounded really exciting and if it worked out,
maybe we'd make some money. No one was imagining it
would be a multi billion dollar business one day.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
Okay, just to go back. You had nothing to do
during that month. You just wanted another month live in
the hippie lifestyle.

Speaker 2 (01:23:33):
Yes, yeah, I know, I'm athetic.

Speaker 1 (01:23:35):
Well wouldn't you normally say I can't believe I got
this job? I mean, what was for you it.

Speaker 2 (01:23:40):
Turned out to be. It was a blessing in disguise
because I when I came in, I'm now a level lower.
So the frontline guys who were higher than me, they
all ultimately got fired because they were out in front
and they're making threshold mistakes in a new business, and
you know, sooner or later, he's gone. He's gone, he's gone,
and I'm down just below the swing of the and

(01:24:00):
I'm seeing what's going on. I've seen, I'm learning stuff,
and you know, I realized I'm learning from their mistakes,
and I get elevated back to where I would have been,
and then I ultimately go up to MTV. So if
I had stayed and taken that higher job, maybe I
would have made some dumb mistakes and they would have
dusted me as well. So it all worked out. There's
that improvised life thing, you know, you take a chance

(01:24:21):
and you never know. But I followed my heart. I
wanted to I wanted to go back to Morocco. That's
where my you know, I was. It was like my
old It's like going back to your old lover, you know,
I mean, it was still there, that that third world thing,
and I wanted another. I wanted another run at it
got the best of me.

Speaker 1 (01:24:38):
So what was Pittman's special sauce.

Speaker 2 (01:24:42):
He was a great bullshitter. He was smart as a whip.
He had the Southern drawl. You know. I think he
was the son of a minister or something. He came
from Mississippi, and he would impress the hell out of
older people because here he is, this young guy. He's
wearing a suit, he's got long hair, he's got one eye.
He's programmed all these big radio stations. He says, I

(01:25:04):
got my finger on the pulse of the youth culture,
and they believe them. And he could talk like no
one could talk. I caught him the other day. I
was I was going through Instagram reels or whatever the
hell it is, and there's Bob Pittman. He's talking at
some conference in San Francisco. The same you know, he could.
He was like remind me of Shane Smith, same fucking lineus.
You know. He was just a smooth talking dude, much

(01:25:26):
different than Shane. But he making making something bad sound
really good and people are eating it up because it
comes out and sounds right. And he was a good manager.
He was a good manager and he was cheap. He
wouldn't give us any money to do anything because there
wasn't really a lot of money to give. And he
became a great friend of me, and he was my mentor.
For God's sake. He's the young guy. I'm the old

(01:25:48):
I'm the old man. And I never told anybody there
like I had an MBA. That would be like, you know,
like I had cancer or something, because all these people
kind of come from the creative side pretty much. I
was just like some dude from Afghanistan who was a
rug smuggler.

Speaker 1 (01:26:12):
So why exactly did Pittman leave?

Speaker 2 (01:26:15):
Well, the bloom was off the roads, he thought, and
others thought. We had a great run, and we went.
When our revenue got to like seventy million dollars, Viacom
Steve Warner Ames was having problems. There was the Atari
thing if you can remember that right, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:26:33):
They were losing the crashed.

Speaker 2 (01:26:35):
We got to sell some stuff. We got to sell
like some of these joint ventures. We got to get
out of this. We got to raise some money. So
we were put on the block and there was a
company called via Com then that had just bought showtime.
And then we went to Forestmen Little, that Bob new
Teddy Forceman. There was a big lbo operation that was
a big thing in the sixties or seventies or eighties
if you remember. It leveraged buyouts. So we worked out

(01:26:57):
a thing where we could buy the employees could buy
the copy in conjunction with money from Forestman Little, and
we put a bit on the table and then we
were going to get it. We were going to be
independent and free. And then Teddy forst. Then Steve Ross
got on some helicopter he flew to East Hampton and
when he got off he decided he was in sell

(01:27:18):
to the other guy. So like an extra fifty million dollars.
So we were a shit out of luck. And the
new guys who came in weren't all that pleasant. They
were like proper business people. And Bob, I think, felt deflated.
You know, I'm out of here. The blooms off the rose,
the party's over, so he les Garland Sykes. A lot
of people left, and I'm thinking, where the hell they going? Man,
this is still the greatest idea around. What else are

(01:27:40):
you going to find us better than this? They went
off to work at CIA or some promotion thing and
I think Bob was running Morton Downey Show, some kind
of stuff like that. He had a deal with MCA.
Everybody was everyone was desired by Hollywood people because they thought,
for some reason, the MTV executives had some kind of
special sauce. So I stayed where I was and Bob

(01:28:00):
made me president on the way out. So now I'm in.
Now I'm on top of the pile. And I had
to reconstitute everybody. And we were not impressed with the
new people, the new people who took us over, and
they came in to tell us, uh, you know what
was what. I had a management retreat going on in
Montalk at this place called Gurney's, and they came out

(01:28:23):
with a helicopter. Now, the only silver lining of this deal,
these guys getting a deal, was that the paltry amount
of stock options that were distributed would vest and be
paid out if someone bought the company. So we were
looking around, you know, we had like ten thousands. You know,
you're not going to make, you know, make forty fifty
thousand dollars, but that was a lot of money to us.
So they came in to talk to us. They set

(01:28:44):
up a little microphone in the ballroom and they start
off saying, well, we've talked to lawyers and we don't
think we have to pay out your stock options. This
is like the opener, you know. It was nothing like hey,
you guys have done a great job, we see a
great future ahead. We can't wait to work with you. No,
and like fuck you. And then they you know, they
talked a little bit about other stuff, and they left

(01:29:05):
in their helicopters, and then we proceeded to trash the barroom,
tip over fish tanks, tip over palm trees, bus glasses.
It was like a gang of like like led Zeppelin.
It infected us and anyway, then some of the Redstone
took over the company and and displaced those guys, and

(01:29:26):
I was off to work with him. He hired a
guy named.

Speaker 1 (01:29:29):
Okay, wait before before you go there, Bob makes you president.
Were you an impostor learning on the gig or did
you know how to do it?

Speaker 2 (01:29:38):
Oh? I was an impostor. I mean I had been around.
I think even it was still a small company, I
could do it. But then the new guy said, hey,
you're not a good enough president. We're going to give
you a co president. Because I don't think that, you know,
advertisers are going to like trust you, or you didn't
have the credibility to deal with advertisers. You were not
that school in that part of the business. So now
I have a co president and you know, this is

(01:30:00):
the guy I got along with him. Okay, but it
was a bit deflating. But meanwhile I was learning the
ropes on my half of the business. And then Sunder
came along. He took it over in a big takeout battle, big, big,
big battle. It was, you know, well chronicled on Wall Street.
And he hired Frank Biondi, this great guy, who immediately

(01:30:22):
made me the CEO and had me fire the other guy,
which I did, and then I was off with those
guys for you know, I was the CEO of MTV
Networks for seventeen years, and you know, we blew it
up into a multi billion dollar business. It was fantastic
because it wasn't like I was doing the same boring thing.
Things would come along and we'd be a whole different,

(01:30:43):
new kind of company. We started going international. We started
nick Toons Animation, finding these weird like animators and setting
them up to do business and set up a little
animation studio. Going international was a big We launched other networks,
Comedy Central among them, so it was always new, it
was always interesting, and I viewed my job as my

(01:31:04):
job was to keep the entity, this creative nucleus protected
because I had this management team that was amazingly talented,
and we were just filled with people who didn't want
to work in normal companies. We had the worst dress
group of people in any Manhattan office building. And my

(01:31:25):
job was basically to try and keep this as a
creative first company and to develop a culture there that
would be seen as a competitive advantage by others. And
I made the heads of our networks creative people, not
business people, which would have been the normal process in
the business world. We gave up half our key jobs
to women, but we had like Judy McGrath and John

(01:31:46):
Sykes and Jerry Laiborne and Herb Scannal and others, you know.
So I thought that if you had a creative person
running a network, the people who worked there would see
that we're a creative company at heart and create activity
and taking risks is our key aptitude. And everyone was
always encouraged to try and push the envelope, do stuff
we didn't have a lot of money, so they had to

(01:32:07):
kind of do it in an innovative way, and for
a long time it worked. We cranked out, you know,
we grew for seventeen years, four quarters each year. Every
quarter we were up double digits on the top and
bottom line. So it really went from seventy million dollars
a year to a few billion dollars a year in revenue.

(01:32:28):
And when really kicked in was Nickelodeon and when we
made the move to invent our own cartoons, basically create
our own cartoon characters rather than licensed looney tunes and
stuff like that. And then we can had consumer products.
And then Sumnder bought Paramount, so we were able to
make movies and so again we're reincarnated into a whole
other kind of business. So you learn a bit about

(01:32:49):
the movie business. It was. It was a great ride.

Speaker 1 (01:32:55):
Just got to go back to the party out in
mod talk. You're in charge and they're trashing the place.

Speaker 2 (01:33:02):
Well, I was second in charge. Pittman was still there.
This was his swan soa and he actually started it.
He started throwing the glass. He started throwing the glasses,
and then everybody said, well, hey man, he's throwing the glasses.
Let's throw the glasses. Then let's they had these palm
trees like in these pots and they're being thrown over
and fish tank and really, I mean it was quite
a scene to see. But everyone was so pissed, like

(01:33:24):
we had this little wonderland, we had a plan to
be out on our own, and now it's not just
not happening, but it seems like the new guys are like,
you know, not exactly our kind of people.

Speaker 1 (01:33:36):
Okay, so tell me about Sumner. Was Sunder just a
bull who took chances? Was he a brilliant businessman who
built this empire? Who was Sumner Redstone?

Speaker 2 (01:33:53):
That's a good question. He was a complicated man. He
inherited a driving theater business from his father and then
built it up. He was really the kind of guy
who started building the multiplexus. This is, you know, at
the time when theater business was quite big, and he
had dreams at sixty five or so, which was older

(01:34:13):
in those days than it is nowadays, to build an internet,
you know, to build a real company, big company. So
he started taking pieces of eye. He used to. He
built his fortune when he was an exhibitor by going
to movie screenings, you know. So he'd like see a
screening of Star Wars and he said, it's a good movie.

(01:34:34):
So he called his broker and buy a lot of
stock in Fox. And you know, I mean, he'd buy
a lot of stock at a time and he would
be he was able to parlor himself into being a millionaire.
It wasn't like he had inside information, but he had
sort of inside vibes as to what was happening, and
he placed big bets in the stock market and made
himself rich. And then he decided he wanted to build

(01:34:56):
a he wanted to become a mogul and start, and
he started with Us, and then he just kept doing
more deals. I mean, as soon as he got us
under control, that was taken over Paramount and then and
each time with another heaping of debt and then taken
over Paramount. Well, now I'm going to take over CBS.
So he m l Karmezan work out a deal. So

(01:35:17):
now it's CBS is in there, and they bring along
some other you know, they had Simon and Schuster and
you know, other businesses, and you know, then it was
always a mess to try and integrate all of this.

Speaker 1 (01:35:30):
And all away.

Speaker 2 (01:35:33):
I mean, he was a litigious guy. He was a
lawyer by training, and he was always had always had
his ears up for anyone he thought might be unfairly
treating us. Like. He was an anti trust lawyer. So
he always thought like John Malone and TCI, they were
the big, the big bohemoths of the day, and like

(01:35:53):
normally you couldn't get distribution for your network unless you're
willing to give, like Bob Johnson to give or discover give, give,
give him. It's sort of like what Trump's doing. Now,
give him a piece of the business and you get distribution.
He never wanted to play that game, so he would sue,
you know, he sued, Uh, he sued John Malone, He
sewed TCI against my wishes. He made lawsuits like a

(01:36:17):
profit center. He brought in Philippe Dumont, which is a
state lawyer, to kind of aid in a bet the
legal you know, our legal stance. So he was successful
at doing. He didn't care. He to suit people and win.
I mean, he was happy to be the thurd on
the on the cable golf course. Club didn't bother him
at all. So he was bold and brave and made

(01:36:39):
big moves and he was brilliant, but he he kind
of desired the limelight. So like Frank Biondi, who was
a very very able manager who I loved. The guy
was great. He he understood what we had at MTV
Networks and he ran it with a really light touch.

(01:37:00):
He understood that we were not a traditional, you know division,
and we were allowed at certain kind of freedoms and
they didn't really interferce so long as we delivered them mode.
But when Frank started getting like nice articles in the
New Yorker or whatever, you know, he was soon gone.
One day he was gone. And then with Mel, it
was the same thing. Mel was another really able guy.
Mel Karminson was a legend in the music business, in

(01:37:21):
the radio business. You know, he created Infinity Radio, sold
at the CBS, somehow worked out to be on the
top of CBS. You know, he kind of like worked
his way up and then he took us over and
he became my new boss. And again, you know, he
he kind of left us alone as so long as
we met our financial targets. I like Meil very much.

(01:37:43):
He was a real character. But again he was getting
credit for making move. You know, he was getting credit
for making a lot of smart moves that he made,
but Sumner didn't, you know, he was sort of stealing
the limelight. I think that Sumner desired and Sumner at
the end of the day, while he started really modestly
when we started, he would sit back at staff meetings,
let frank he was kind of like he was kind

(01:38:04):
of like learning the business, you know, at these meetings
and seeing how things really work. And when he got
to the point where we thought, Okay, now I know
what I'm doing. You know, I'm going to run the
whole baby, and you know, he was he didn't have
a lot of friends. I would notice that anybody who
got kind of close to him was gone. And I

(01:38:27):
kind of kept my distance, and he was always happy
to see me. And I tried to get him engaged
in a lot of things, and he would support us,
you know, he was a supportive guy. But in the
at the end of the day, he was he got
upset with me. I I I began, I didn't want

(01:38:48):
to be the CEO. I mean I didn't, but he
I remember clearly one day we we had had a
joint venture with HBO to run Comedy Central. After we
had these so called comedy wars, and we had a
board meeting one day. I remember walking down Broadway as
a spring day, the sun was out, and I'm with
Jeff Buchus, who became a good friend. He was running
HBO at the time. He said, you know, you and me,

(01:39:10):
we got the best jobs in town. This is these
jobs are fantastic. We get to do all these things
we love. We work with interesting people, businesses are vibrant.
He says. The only problem is one day they're going
to ask us to run these things and we're going
to be in a whole different ballgame. And he was right.
He ended up running Time Waterer. I ended up running Viacom.

(01:39:30):
But you know I took it over at a point
in time when the digital companies were really beginning to
make inroads into the legacy media companies, and you know,
we had this sort of how do we change direction?
And stock prices were stalled and you can only jack
up your price, which someonder was obsessed with stock price,

(01:39:52):
whereas Rupert Murdoch his nemesis, would fly around the world
and know how well his operations ran. Uh, some are
really looked at the stock price like that would like
the dog, the tail wagging the dog. So I fell
in a bit of disfavor and he fired me. And

(01:40:15):
that was it?

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):
Was it really that? You know, the company was split
into and less had good numbers. The division that you
ran the report wasn't as good, even though we both
know those are manipulated numbers. Was it inevitable or an
irrelevant of whether you wanted to keep the job? If

(01:40:39):
you could repeat it, would you play it any differently?

Speaker 2 (01:40:44):
Now? I thought we were making the right moves. I mean,
we had been thwarted into the real challenge for us,
for all these kind of media companies is how do
we how do we face the digital invasion that was
coming our way? You know, increasingly we were being decimated
by the yeah Who's and the Googles and the Facebook,
well not so much Facebook, so I mean that was

(01:41:05):
nothing at the time.

Speaker 1 (01:41:07):
How do we.

Speaker 2 (01:41:07):
Reinvent ourselves for the digital era? How do we make
this transition? Because we all, we weren't stupid, we saw
what was coming. We were coming to this on demand
streaming sort of model and these it was going to
be a more open world. And one of the we
tried to buy. We bought some small websites. We hired

(01:41:27):
a digital department trying to find our way around, but
then decided, you know, we need to really acquire something.
We're not going to really get there by any kind
of organic thing, which is what we were used to.
We weren't used to buying companies and integrating them. We
did everything ourselves. We grew organically. But we started off.
We had a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook when

(01:41:48):
they were doing like nine million dollars a year in revenue.
He was like twenty years old, and we made an
offer to buy it, and he turned it down. And
then we looked at YouTube, which launched in two thousand
and five, and that was you know, we saw that

(01:42:08):
these these digital networks were like this major paradigm shift.
This was a whole new thing. This is going to
become like this was going to really really decimate us
because no longer were you going to be a gatekeeper
on YouTube. Anybody could upload video, share it, comment on it,
this or that they could be peer to peer and

(01:42:31):
this is sort of going to unfold and evolve to
be the future. And sure enough we were the short
form Kings and along comes YouTube and we looked at YouTube,
and it was fascinating to see what they were doing.
But they were doing things that the traditional media people
thought were illegal. You know, they were taking copyrighted material

(01:42:53):
and uploading it for free. And while some companies like
you know, SNL would use they would put up Lazy Sunday.
That was an early thing that sort of went viral.
It was viewed as a content infringement machine by the
Viacom board. You know, if we buy it, hat, everybody's
gonna sue us because they can't sue YouTube now because
they don't have any money. They're not gonna Maybe they're

(01:43:15):
going to get sued. But you know, this can't happen.
This is not right. This is these digital guys are
just taking away everything for free. We're seeing the same
argument now with AI Bob. You know, it's the same thing.
They can't do it. The laws will never stand for it.
So what we had there, because I look now at
you know, were we too have been able to buy

(01:43:37):
YouTube Buyacom, would look a lot different today. But there
was a couple of things preventing that from happening. Besides
the disposition of the board, which you could say was
you know, maybe it's going to work out the kind
of why you could afford to buy it. You would
have to show Wall Street sort of immediate results that
it was going to show some profit, which wasn't going

(01:43:59):
to happen, and you would have to fund the infrastructure
that they've used to develop this amazing machine that we
all see now and just you're in awe. It's worth
almost six hundred billion dollars, So you know, in a
wood of wood of would have should have there was
a lot of wood. You could dream about it, but
it was impossible. We couldn't own it and lose money

(01:44:20):
for ten years like Google could. So and then I
tried to buy We looked at MySpace, which was the
pre eminent social network of the day, and we had
conversations with them, and they had that was attracting a
lot of independent bands, and they would get more traffic
on their little you know, on their site for some
of our shows, and we get for our own websites

(01:44:42):
on the shows. So Rupert Murdoch came in and bought it,
and that was a bad thing. I mean, it wasn't
a bad thing because we hadn't really decided we wanted it,
but for some there it was a bad thing because
Rupert Murdoch bought it his uh, his chief rise, and
Rupert started appearing on the covers of all these trade

(01:45:03):
magazines as the digital genius, the new digital guy. And
Sumner was like, you know, not that guy. And he
thought I had blown that because I was when Rupert
was buying it over a weekend with no due diligence.
I was in Hawaii with my two kids and my
wife for like a week vacation. And he told Charlie
Rose after he fired me that. Charlie asked him directly,

(01:45:27):
was yeah, was a YouTube factor? He goes, yeah, yeah,
we lost. I hate to lose, Sir Rupert Murdoch. So
that was one reason. And then you know, we missed
numbers for a quarter, but then the second quarter, our
second quarter numbers were fine. We were back on track.

(01:45:49):
You know. We were also precluded from the most obvious
thing for us to turn digital would have been to
have taken our library of twenty thousand videos and gotten
the video rights for them, just be one big Vivo.
You know. We could have set up the architecture to
do that and video on demand, and we could have
figured out innovative ways to put it out and program it.

(01:46:10):
But the record companies really put their foot down, the
legal side of the record companies. They felt that MTV
Networks had built a business on their backs. Nothing was
ever said about the money we paid them or the
fact that we made so many of their acts so popular,
but they didn't want another MTV on the Internet, so

(01:46:31):
it was impossible for us to get a hold of
the key programming form that had, you know, driven a
large part of our success on the Internet, which was
a big frustration and a big roadblock. Not to say
it couldn't have been one day conquered. But then it
didn't become my problem anymore because I got fired.

Speaker 1 (01:46:59):
Okay, before you get fired, you were also running Paramount.
What did you learn about the movie business? And having
been deep in the trenches, what is your perspective on
the movie business today?

Speaker 2 (01:47:15):
Well, I learned that it's a very opaque business where
it's kind of hard to keep track of who does what,
and you know, it's even though I learned that the
feature film is king always on the hierarchy in Hollywood,
nothing's higher than the movie business. Then came, you know,
the sort of television business, the premium cable business. Then

(01:47:37):
we were sort of at the next level basic cable,
and then the music business that was like a whole
other thing. They didn't understand that at all. They didn't
understand how these music companies were making all this money.
These guys were the most untraditional businessmen of all were
in the record business. I found it to be the
most interesting people and the most fun to be with.

(01:47:58):
You know, all these guys scoundrels and clever people and whatever,
but they all love their they love what they did.
But in the movie business, you learn that the movie
studio they take the bulk of the money. They'll find
out ways in terms of you know, we were we

(01:48:18):
were going to try and turn our brands into movies,
which we did do. Nickelodeon, MTV, VH one had like
that Ben Stiller movie, zoolanderv VH one. Everyone we made
like forty movies over course of time and sort of
sat at the hand of Sherry Lansing who helped us,
you know, become accomplished movie makers from just being little

(01:48:40):
cable weasels. I learned that everybody in my company wanted
to make movies. You know, all my top creative people
wanted to go to the movie studios. They wanted them.
Everyone wants to make a movie. I mean, come on,
I don't want to work on some Buffkis television show.
If I have a chance to work on a movie,
that's great for me. So it was, you know, there
was a pre we ate of exodus to want to

(01:49:01):
do this. But at the end of the day, we
didn't make much money on movies, even if it was
on our own ip. You know, we get a fee.
And then we found out one sunder bought Paramount that
we were an exclusive producer. In other words, we couldn't
take if we wanted to make a movie, and they
said no, we couldn't take it to Sony or Fox.

(01:49:25):
So we were sort of the prisoners of Melrose Avenue way.
It was unusual in the television business, it wasn't unusual
to have an exclusive deal, but he didn't see a
lot of that going on in the movie business. So
that was a big frustration. So always had a little
friction back and forth. And I'll say, like on the
Paramount side, they found a lot of our people to

(01:49:45):
be kind of arrogant, which was true. It wasn't like
a perfect match. But we came to a good equilibrium.
I can't say enough about Sherry Lansing. You know, she
was gracious and great despite the fact that we often
did stupid things. But we never got you know, I
could make more money in a couple hours on television
I could make on a movie and after absorbing all

(01:50:07):
that creative energy. But we had some hit movies and
it was always exhilarating when it happened. You know. We
did movies with the Jackass guys, with the South Park guys,
with Beavis and butt Head. We had movies like Election,
Napoleon Dynamite. You know, we had a flair for finding
some good projects. The Twilight series is a good example.
Some it came to us, or before it came to us.

(01:50:29):
We developed it from a book. We developed a script
for Twilight, and Paramount didn't want to make it. We
couldn't take it anywhere. It went to Summit. The thing
went on to make like three or four billion dollars
in box office. You know what they used to say.
John Dolson used to say, I don't want to see
some movie we turned down. Then you guys take somewhere
else and it's a hit. It'll be embarrassing, you know,

(01:50:51):
that kind of that kind of thinking, I would permeate
it permeate in Hollywood in those days, wasn't just John.
John was a guy that I was a really tough guy,
but I really came to respect him. He was He
really knew his rock and roll, he knew his music.
He was a funny man. Anyway, we made, like I guess,

(01:51:12):
forty movies over the years. They were largely lower budget movies,
and most of them were profitable. And it was an
interesting experience, you know, that being you know, have a
chair in Hollywood. But at one point, yes, when I
became the CEO of Paramount, reported to me, so now

(01:51:32):
I'm like the cable guy, like Dave's aslov I'm like
the cable guy. I'm in charge of a movie studio,
which I had never dreamed of.

Speaker 1 (01:51:41):
So what'd you learn?

Speaker 2 (01:51:43):
Well, I had learned a lot, you know what. One
of the first things I did was I got in
touch with Bob Daily, who, with Terry Simmel, had the
best run of probably any studio heads in history. And
I asked Bob Daily to be my mentor and teach
me the ins and outs, really the ins and outs
of the movie business that I might not have learned

(01:52:05):
just being a producer on the lot for Paramount making
movies and handing them over to him. So he had
his own little film school he set up for me,
and it was good to sort of learn from the
master how P and L's work, all the financial mechanisms,
and so I got myself equipped. And then Sherry decided

(01:52:26):
that she was going to leave, so I had to
find a new studio head, and Bob. I had Bob
interview candidates. I mean, the problem is all the studio
heads in those days, they used to kind of rotate
from studio to studio, and it was very rare that
someone from outside the system would actually take up and
run a studio. Bob Evans back in the day, you know,

(01:52:49):
he was an actor. He ended up running Paramount. I
had a pretty successful run, I must say. I mean
some of those movies at Paramount cranked out Love Story
in the late eighties, late seventies, Love Story, Apocalypse now
gon All came out under his reign for a guy
who didn't know what he was doing, and I ended
up hiring Brad Gray, who was the partner of Berlstein

(01:53:09):
Gray to run the studio. And then you know, we
acquired dream Works. Brad got caught up in this Anthony
Pelicano scandal, which really sullied his reputation and was a
big drama for him. And that's where I was when

(01:53:33):
I got fired, you know, I mean, I never really
got a chance to I installed Brad at the studio.
He was there for a couple of years. He ended up.
He died at a young age, at fifty nine, a
couple of years after I left. And that's my story.

Speaker 1 (01:53:52):
Well, David Geffen implored you to hire Brad Gray. In retrospect,
did you find that people were doing your a solid
or everybody had an agenda? You're better off just listening
to yourself.

Speaker 2 (01:54:09):
People had an agenda a lot of times. But in
the case of David, David was someone I had developed
a relationship. He was the first guy to give us
videos for MTV. He was the first guy we made
a movie with. He called me up one day in
New York. I was it was a Saturday morning. He's
in LA He calls me like ten o'clock in the
morning in New York. He says, you know, I saw

(01:54:30):
Beavis and butt Head last night. Our first episode ran
you know whatever, It was at ten o'clock. And it
wasn't like somebody on his staff handed him a video
tape and said check this out. I mean, was David
was on the case. He said, let's make a movie
with those guys. So so, all right, we'll make a movie.
He was in butt Head, so he was always a
source of good advice. And when I was going through

(01:54:54):
the exercise of looking for people, it wasn't like he
implored me. He called me one day and he said,
was in Bay Route. I remember this. He said, I
found the guy I think could work, which is Brad Gray.
Because we had already been through. I had already been
through all the studio hads I might want to hire,
like say Stacy Snyder. They all had contracts and other

(01:55:15):
people who were sort of on the second rung, they
weren't really there. And I started thinking, well, maybe we
look on the outside. Someone who's got the ability to
deal with talent, who's smart about the business, might not
necessarily have a pedigree purely have been in a movie studio.
And David said, you know, maybe Brad's your guy. Brad
was at the peak of his powers then he had

(01:55:36):
the sopranos and he had started turning Perlstein Gray in
a bit of a studio. He did Bill Mahery had
a relationship with Gary Shannling. He really had a lot
of aspirations and energy. And I had a bunch of
interviews with Bob with the Brad, I sent him to Bob.

(01:55:56):
Bob gave me the thumbs up. He really put him
through the trail. Seemed to be able and whatnot. And
we started out and he ran into a buzzsaw with Pelicano.
That was you know, there was two front page stories
about him and that really knocked him off balance. I
must say he recovered. But and when I left, he

(01:56:20):
was in charge of Paramount, so I hired Brad.

Speaker 1 (01:56:24):
Okay, you have all this experience. What's your view of
these businesses today? In your book you say somebody want
to start a cable channel and you're laughing, And then
I get emailed that Morgan Roland is starting a field
and stream channel. The movie business with a twenty five
straight drama failures. Where's it all going?

Speaker 2 (01:56:50):
Well, Morgan Wallin should save his money. I mean, he's
pissing in the wind, wants to start a you know,
in the cord cutting era where the TV revolution has ended,
and it's winding down these linear networks. Unless you've got
some exclusive product that's really unique, like news or sports,
you know, it's most of this other stuff's all available

(01:57:12):
on demand on streaming services. He'd be smart to start
in a different way other than setting up a linear
cable network. But now, I mean, it's no one likes
to see these movie studios disappear. I mean, we saw
a Fox get gobbled up by Disney. Disney had a

(01:57:33):
real smart strategy about going digital, which was doubling down
and getting more being a really invincible content supplier. And
you know, now we're looking at the Ellison's coming in
and buying Paramount. And when I looked at, for example,

(01:57:55):
the alternatives for Paramount, it's like my old high school.
You wanted to end up in good hands. You want
it to be solved. And they were having tough time
in the wake of a lot of the bad moves
that had been made. And here you have David Ellison
who actually likes movies. He makes movies, and he's good

(01:58:16):
at it, and they've made some movies. Had a wayward talent,
he understands the business. He's got a lot of money,
and you know, he made a master movie, put Sherry
Lansing on the board, you know, I mean, you get
a sense that Paramount's not going to disappear, which is
good news. I mean, the town doesn't want to see

(01:58:37):
another studio disappear. I remember back when we started MTV,
there was like forty record labels. You remember these days,
a lot of them started by entrepreneurs and run by
entrepreneurs who who basically had instincts and tastes, and they
kind of modeled these labels after their own taste. It
was a whole different game. Now there's like two and
a half record companies and a lot of stuff in

(01:58:57):
the outer rings, but it's a very different business. And
now people all over the town are losing their jobs
and they're thinking, is Ellison going to take over Paramount?
I don't know, I mean, I know, I know they
on paper it would make sense for them to do it.

Speaker 1 (01:59:15):
Which about Paramount buying Warner just to be clear.

Speaker 2 (01:59:18):
Yeah, it would make sense. I mean they could. They
could fold up a lot of stuff, save more, you
know the old arguments, you know, make efficiencies in the
back office. They could keep the movie brands separate, and
they'd have more clout and they could compete more avidly,
but you know, it would mean another movie studio disappears.

(01:59:38):
I love I love the area of the forty record companies.
I thought that was really cool, more interesting. But someone's
going to get someone's gonna you know. David Zaslov did
the deal with Warner Brothers because he saw a discovery
was going to be in sad shapes if they didn't

(01:59:58):
latch onto somebody, and he was able to engineer a
deal with John Malone, whereas they were able to actually
buy Warner Brothers. It was sort of brilliant in a way.
But in the meantime, while they're trying to save themselves,
you know, we're seeing the exhibition business not being great.
You know, there was I think some hope this summer

(02:00:19):
that people would like to go to the theaters, but
more and more people now have theaters in their homes
of one form or another. And it's what it was
the word they're using now, and not affordable. It's part
of the unaffordability problem going to the movies. So a
lot of the money has been sucked out of the
movie business. I don't know what happens, Bob, but it

(02:00:41):
seems like more consolidations probably in the wings. It seems
like the theater exhibition business is going to diminish, and
it seems like companies that are big are going to survive.
At the same time, you look around the edges and
you see, oh, there's creative companies like A twenty four
and Nion who are like sort of in the moll
of small movie companies of your where they have good

(02:01:04):
tastes and they can find a good movie and market it.
Within the big system, you still have like Fox search,
like and create, buy and create a buzz around, you know,
tasty movies. I've always been a guy who was happy
to sort of move around the edges rather than be
in the mainstream, you know, mainstream movie labels. You know,

(02:01:24):
it's a high investment business. You got to pay a
lot of money. With that movie that's out now with
I'm forgetting the name, it's getting to be that time
of night. But you know, with the Leonardo DiCaprio and
Serian Penn, I don't have you seen that.

Speaker 1 (02:01:41):
No, I haven't. Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

Speaker 2 (02:01:44):
Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's phil You look at
that and you go, that's good. It was fun, but
you know, it's made the economy. It kind of even
though it made a couple of hundred million dollars, it
kind of fell short of what it needed to make.
And I know Wonners Brothers has had some other successes,
So it's hard to say what's going to happen is
but it's clear that one something's going to happen in
Warner Brothers. And that's maybe the most legendary of all

(02:02:07):
the movie studios. You know, the one with the most
cachet about it is an NBC universe A going to
do something? Is Netflix going to do something? I don't know.
You know, I never thought that the tech guys, which
I always include Netflix sort of in that category. I
never thought they were that hot on buying movie studios.
I mean, they'd figure, why the hell do I need

(02:02:28):
to do that? I can't just license them.

Speaker 1 (02:02:31):
I think they would only be buying it for the titles.
I can't imagine I'm getting into production, et cetera. But okay,
you're off the radar with your clothing business. Then you
end up coming in the side door, going in mainstream
corporate America. Sumner cuts you loose and you have enough cash,

(02:02:53):
but you're offered some big jobs. Ultimately, you work with
Shane Smith Advice, you work with Oprah, you work with Bono,
and all those things are very fulfilling, but it's one
step removed from the game without mentioning names. I know
people who are contemporaries and you say how much longer
are you going to do this? And they say, I

(02:03:15):
don't want to lose access. So emotionally, you were offered
other big jobs subsequent to some nerve firing you with
hindsight to say I played it exactly the way I
wanted or did you say I played it? But I'm
not happy with the way some people treated me where

(02:03:36):
I was. What are your feelings about your post paramount activities?

Speaker 2 (02:03:42):
Listen, I never fully identified with my job, like I
know a lot of people do an entertainment business. I
just thought, you know, there's a lot of different things
you can do with your life. I had a great
run there twenty six years. I kept my toe in
a little bit on boards of some companies. I like
working with Advice, I like working with Oprah, but there's
no access I don't need. I don't need that kind

(02:04:02):
of access just for the sake but I have a
circle of friends. If someone doesn't want to be my
friend because I don't have a position of power in
the Hollywood structure, well you know, I couldn't care less.
I don't really need them as friends. I got plenty
of friends I've never been. I'm happy. In some ways.
I felt relieved I didn't have to deal with a
lot of this michigansh that's going on right now, you know,

(02:04:24):
to be in the big game with the big companies.
I know for some people that's their life and blood,
but it never was for me. I never fully identified
myself with my job, so it was easier for me
to have this transition than maybe some other people. So
I have no complaints. I also feel, at my age,

(02:04:44):
you know, I'm sort of got to do good or
thing going on. I went back to Afghanistan for twelve
years to work with a company. I was making hardly
any money at it. To me, it was so exhilarating.
I thought we were really you know, this was a country,
a company that had social purpose baked into its agenda,
gender equality, civilizing Afghans, connecting them each other, connecting them

(02:05:07):
to or I loved it. Trying to replicate a bit
of what we had done I had done in the past.
So again, that was a business on the margins if
there ever was want in the frontier market, and it
was a thrill to be there and do that. You know,
it wasn't it wasn't paying me a lot of money.
But how much money do you need? You know? I
don't understand why a billionaire, for example, thinks he has

(02:05:30):
to have two billion dollars, But the hell you can't.
You couldn't spend a billion dollars. You know, you really
have to put your mind to it. That's money has
never been my motivation. I wanted to have experience. I
want to have full experiences that I enjoyed with people
I like. I want to be able to see parts
of the world I used to dream about and continue

(02:05:51):
to do that. Stay healthy and have fun. It wouldn't
be fun running one of these companies right now. That's
another thing. It doesn't look like these guys are having
a ball right back. And you were there back in
the eighties and the nineties, people were having a lot
of fun running these companies. That ain't the case now.

Speaker 1 (02:06:11):
Okay, Finally, as someone who's been married a couple of
times number of relationships. Can someone balance a high powered
job like this with life, the life work balance or
really the nature of these jobs they're going to consume
so much of your time and mental energy.

Speaker 2 (02:06:31):
Well, a good question. You know, you really give up
a lot to really throw yourself into one of these jobs,
you know, because they're all consuming. But you know, I
look around and I see, you know, there's people who
I look at my friends in Ginianopolis. He ran Fox,
he ran Paramount. He was doing as big as anyone
could do in the movie business. And he and and

(02:06:54):
are still happily married. You know, look at Jeffrey Katzenberg
or Steven Spielberg. They been executives and producers and whatnot.
They're still married. Everybody doesn't get divorced. Peter Turning, Peter
Urnan is a great example of someone who was at
the top and figure out a way to do it differently,
you know, not on the sidelines, but in his own
little field and space, by investing in companies and doing

(02:07:17):
it really smartly. Well, you know, I don't see that
divorce is necessarily a phata company if you have a
high powered job.

Speaker 1 (02:07:26):
No, Okay, it's been great talking to you. Always great
talking to you Tom. The book, you know you've heard,
the surface of the story covers Tom's complete life from Connecticut,
from the Liverpool Docks to the Hollywood Bull. As Matt
the Hoople would say, the book is great. I couldn't

(02:07:47):
put it down. Unplugged by Tom Freston. Tom, thanks so
much for taking this time with my audience.

Speaker 2 (02:07:53):
Bob always good to talk to you and I appreciate
this the poortant opportunity to talk about the book. So
I'll see you soon out there.

Speaker 1 (02:08:00):
Absolutely to take care until next time. This is Bob left,
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