Tom Freston

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
My guest today is Tom Fresker. He was chairman of
MTV Networks, chairman of Viacom, is chairman of the board
of the One Campaign. Tom. Great to have you here.
Great to be here, Bob. So what's going on with
the One Campaign. Well, we're in full mode these days

(00:30):
with the pandemic. We've kind of pivoted you know, One
the One campaigns and activists organizations, so basically think of
it like as the n r A for the extreme poor.
We're trying to lobby politicians either directly or through people
who are you know, activists, who who who worked with
which are millions of people, and to get them to

(00:50):
do the right things for the people, the poorest people
on the planet. And we focus on Africa, and since
March it's been COVID COVID but the whole time and
these days it's all about vaccine equity, which you read about.
You know, the fourteen percent of the people have seventy
percent of the orders in for the vaccines. There's hardly
any in Africa. And until everybody on this planet is activated,

(01:16):
is inoculated, or we reached some kind of herd immunity.
This thing is going to continue to mutate, could come
back and bite us in They asked us fourteen percent
of the people in the northern countries. So we're all
about that and we've been you know, it's been a
real uh change with Trump leaving and Biden coming in,
because right away he committed to six billion dollars for

(01:40):
vaccines for people in uh less developed countries. And that's
sort of what I'm doing. It's all vaccines, all the time.
Tell me more about the organization, the history and how
many people are working in fundraising, etcetera. Well, you know it.
Bano started it, and uh he had had a thing
called the One Campaign, and he had a thing called Red,

(02:02):
which was a different organization that sort of was an
arm into the private sector. And then he had another
organization called Data, which sort of assembled a lot of
data essentially about what was going on in the world.
This is back in two thousand and five. So he
started this organization and the idea was, let's see how
many members we can get and let's begin to put

(02:25):
pressure on some of these key legislatures in the States
and elsewhere. He was able to assemble basically a gaggle
of billionaires to fund this. I mean, we it's are.
What we say is we don't want your money, we
want your voice. But we've got Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates,
Susie Buffett, you know, Jeff Skull, John Door, there's a
whole he's a great door opener, let's put it that way.

(02:46):
So it's funded privately. We've got about a hundred and
seventy employees. We've got twelve offices, uh main one is
in d C. But then we've got five or six
in uh in Africa, and we're you know, we're in Brussels,
were in Berlin, were in London, we're in Paris, we're
in Johannesburg, in Dakar, and the population of the people
who worked there are largely activists. I mean, we're not

(03:09):
not for profit. And uh, they're young, and they're smart
as hell, and they have swung literally billions and billions
of dollars from uh, you know, government budgets. Two Uh
do the right thing in a smart way. And I'm
not talking about a you know, uh foreign aid necessarily,

(03:31):
but it's been it's been very focused on health, also
agriculture and governance. So, um, we've got a board. I've
been the board chair for god, I guess it's like
thirteen or fourteen years. Now we've got an interesting board
and uh, you know, it's very fulfilling work for me
and very different. You know what I found when I
left MTV Networks and Viacom. You know, Bonna was the

(03:54):
first guy to call me up when I got fired.
He called me from dub and the next day we
had had her We had a we were friends and
had been together for a long time, not together, but
I mean MTV and you two kind of came up
and he said, why don't you come run Red, which
I barely knew about any I said, you know, I
just got fired last night. I'm not I'm not not

(04:15):
ready or really to make any big decisions right now
that he has. Bill Gates called me Steve's jobs call
me anyway. I put it off, And then about three
months later I went and saw him Paul at Paul
McGinnis is asking saying, please help this things kind of
you know, kind of coming apart. I said I would
study work for three months and see if we could

(04:35):
reorganize things, which I did do and in the process,
fell in love with the organization, fell in love with
what they did, and uh, it was like a whole
different group of young people, you know what I which
I have been working with for most of my career.
But they were they were activists. So I said I'd
stay on as the board chair and there I am today,
still doing it. How much of your time does it require? Well,

(04:57):
now it's about a third, I'd say. You know, our
CEO was just taken from us by Biden. He just
hired her, uh to come in and be sort of
the special envoy on vaccines. All the things we're advocating
for the USA to do, we now go to her
because she's in power and can and make those kind

(05:18):
of decisions. So it's inconvenient to lose your CEO. But
when you find out that she actually has the job,
that is the key to the highway, so to speak
for you know, helping us move along the vaccine equity spectrum.
It's it's it's good, but it's not full time. Historically,
there's been an issue of getting the money from the donors,

(05:40):
whether it be countries or individuals, into the hands of
the end user. I'm talking about foreign aid in general.
So what happens with the vaccines, Well, the vaccines go
through they get distributed. It depends by country, but basically
again they get distributed through the ministries of health in
these various countries who you know, and and funny in Africa,

(06:02):
because they've had a lot of experience with a bola
and other things, they actually are pretty set up for pandemics.
They have some experience in this area. So this is
not the type of thing that's likely to fall astray
and where you lose a lot of money. I mean,
they're getting vaccines, they're not getting they're not getting money,
but they you know, they and they already have existing

(06:23):
staffs and they can mobilize people to do these inoculations.
But that's not to say it's going to be an
easy task. And what is the status as we speak?
The virus is raging in India, to what degree is
it under control? And are there vaccinations in Africa? The
thing in India is really a mind blower because the

(06:45):
people thought Indian sort of had come through this. But
in Africa, Africa has so far gotten off a lot
easier than people thought they were. That's not to say
it hasn't been bad. In South Africa in particular, it
has been bad, but you know, they have a very
young population, uh and there's a lot of anybody's running

(07:08):
around from other infections people might have had, so they
have not had the death rates the hospitalization rates that
we've seen, say in America, of course no one's seen that,
but uh they are. You know, I think countries have
maybe twenty thousand vaccines done. That would be a high amount,

(07:28):
you know in a country like Ghana, now you see.
But but we've there's a big public relations efforts, so
to speak, to address this, and people are realizing that
it's on our own self interest to have this happen.
And now, like America, we have all the sexcess vaccines already.
I mean, anybody can get a vaccination we have. Canada

(07:50):
has four times as many vaccines as they have people.
These are they haven't all been delivered yet, mind you,
but that's what they have on order. And it's about
the same for the United States. I mean, we have,
you know, hundreds of millions of extra vaccines to go.
So at some point it wasn't really uh kosher to
be pleading for these vaccines to go to Africa. Before

(08:13):
we got our own population under control and vaccinated and
people felt comfortable. But we're at that point now, certainly
in the States. Since you're a king of marketers, we
have the issue in America where many people do not
want to get the vaccine. What can be done and
what what you might have done, you know, putting on
your hat of marketing not only the young people but

(08:35):
the public at large. Well, I mean, if you really
look where the and there's there's the anti vax people
that have sort of existed before, but you know, now
you see really the vaccine hesitant people are largely in
the Republican Party and they're largely evangelical. Those are the
two biggest groups. I mean, if someone like Donald Trump

(08:55):
came out and uh did p s A is along
the lines of what Elvis Presley did with polio back
in the fifties, that would be good to a lot
of these people. You can't really you know, you can't
really dissuade them with facts. Uh, there's this hardcore there's
probably never gonna get vaccinated, but there is this group

(09:16):
that can't be moved, and it's gonna take marketing and uh,
some kind of promotion. A doctor that I know in
Boston told me that when they were vaccinating people over
seventy they could get the six and they hit like
a dead end. So they started basically doing promotions. They said,
if you bring somebody with you to get vaccinated, if
you're over seventy, will vaccinate them too. It's sort of

(09:39):
like dex they'll be giving out toasters. But they were
able to drive it from like six up to seventy percent.
I don't know where they are now, but it shows
you things can be done. I mean a lot of
it is gonna be uh you know what. They need
people to They need people that they respect and like
like Donald Trump in this case, or leading evangelical to

(10:00):
say it's okay, don't worry about it. So if one
third year time is with the one campaign, what are
you doing with the rest of your time? Generally speaking,
obviously everything's crazy during COVID. Well, I've been spending a
lot of time, you know, these years since I work
with the Vice Media. Another thing that I've been working with,

(10:22):
I've work with this company called Mobi Media, which has
been based in Afghanistan, and I really went and I
used to live in Afghanistan before I ever had a
career at and MTV networks, and I kind of went
moved back there too, because they started these television networks
which are now, you know, really the leading ones in

(10:43):
the market. There was no television there under the Taliban.
So I'm spending a lot of time with them now
because of course we're looking at the Taliban maybe coming
back into Afghanistan, which is not going to be a
pretty picture. I work on that. I work on Red
UH and UH you know few other projects. I worked
with this company called Rain. They're a private equity company

(11:04):
and they do I've led investments like can Imagine Imagine
Entertainment with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, uh Matt and
Trey you know, the South Park guys. You know. So
UH RAIN will take a position in them and then
I'll you know, help work with their teams on things.
So I bounced around. I used to travel a lot, Bob,
I mean, I travel like four months a year, but

(11:26):
this last year has been grounded. Like everybody, let's go
back to Afghanistan. The last time we discussed this, you
had been going to Afghanistan, but then things changed and
the person was actually running your operation, UH was avoiding
killers So what is the status today of the stations

(11:47):
and the people running them. Well, it's worse. Uh, we've
kinda you know, they've they've killed a lot of our journalists.
They've set off, you know, suicide bombers have attack some
of our commuter us is to take people and it's
not you know, one of the success stories in Afghanistan
has been independent media and the independent media there is

(12:08):
more independent than is rated, even so more so than
in countries like India or Turkey. The Taliban does not
like this. We have a substantial news organization and the
people are really consumed by news when they're living in
a war zone, which they've been doing for forty years now. Uh,
but they've now had to basically enclose themselves in their

(12:30):
own many green zone. So when uh, my friend Satmossini,
who's the CEO, brilliant character, when he will go in,
I mean he goes in unannounced and he goes rather
than live in his house, he goes that is heavily
fortified compound and people come to see him there and
he'll stay a week and then leave on an unannounced basis.

(12:52):
So it's really hard for people to go anywhere. There's
the Taliban of the start of this assassination program. As
a result of their negotiations during the Trump hear they
sort of said they would no longer do mass terror, uh,
you know, things blowing up banks and public squares and
so forth. So they've sort of switched to just knocking

(13:13):
off Supreme Court justices, reporters, politicians, have people who work
at m G O s uh and uh. Anybody who
works at Too Low TV, which is the actual name
of it, there is you know, has to be very
careful and what is the reach of that TV network?
It reach us the whole country. There's right now there's

(13:34):
a there well when there was no television, now there's
a TV stations and loads of radio stations, and the
thing is and there's a lot of print publications. So
for the first time in its history, these Afghans are
connected to the outside world, which has made a big difference.
They're connected to each other. Layer on top of that,
the fact that where there was eleven thousand cell phones

(13:55):
when the Taliban ran Afghanistan, there's now thirty five million
of them, so people aren nected with each other. So
they've there's been like this twenty year period where this
war has been going on, but we've been working kind
of going over the head of the war for this insurgency,
and they've been they've really developed a lot of relative
freedoms that they've never had before. They've been connected to

(14:15):
each other, there's been a lot of social change. Women
are more liberated and empowered, and Uh, the sad thing
is right now, you've got about fifteen percent of the
population likes the Taliban. That's it. Of the people like
the government. The government's corrupt and predatory, and you know
figured that the Taliban is still like an armed religious

(14:37):
fanatic organization, still tied and intermarried with Al Qaeda. So
the there's my friend would tell me the best case
he sees in Afghanistan now is a civil war because
there's not going to be some kind of coalition government.
That seems extremely unlikely. And these characters have been living
up in the hills or in Pakistan for twenty years

(15:00):
and life has really changed. I mean, they're gonna be
like Rip van Winkle when they come back in the
cobble and they see people are on Facebook and they're tweeting,
and they all have phones and they're talking to each other.
So it's gonna be Uh, it's gonna be interesting to
see how this plays out. And I foresee it's not
gonna play out in a in a really uplifting fashion. Um,

(15:23):
should America ever have gone in and should they have
gotten now quicker? What do we know? Before the US
Russia was an Afghanistan and they ultimately pulled out without
any great achievements. Yeah, they they lost. They killed a
million Afghans this play six million others had this horrible ward.
You know they're not they're they're like, just just raise villages. Uh.

(15:46):
And before them, the British were throwing up Afghanistan. There's
a long history of this, the Graveyard of Empires, as
they like to say. We went in and vanquished the Taliban,
and we immediately set out and made threshold mistakes. That
kind of of uh kind of destined. It's kind of
was destined. What was gonna happen When it was over,
the Taliban wanted to negotiate a surrender to be part

(16:10):
of the process of the new government, and Donald Rumsfeld said, no,
we're not going to negotiate with you your terrorists. Now.
Mind you, when people have civil wars or things like
this is not uncommon. We've seen it in South African
other places. The opposing sides get together and work something out. Uh,
that didn't happen. So the Taliban was sort of shun
it off to Pakistan and uh, you know, resentful, and

(16:33):
Pakistan would fuel them. Uh. And then we we set
about putting in place. They centralized government for the country
in their new constitution, which they've never had before, which made,
of course corruption easier to do. We empower a lot
of old guys who actually they were so bad, these
warloades that they their behavior led to the Taliban in

(16:54):
the first place, and then we just dumped a lot
of money at it. You know, there's American hubris and
naivete and uh, we were like destined to fail. I
can understand why Biden wants to get out because I
don't see that things are going to change. I mean,
it's like pushing a string there. It's just I don't
know what's gonna happen. Some miracle really needs to happen

(17:16):
for the Taliban to try and assimilate into what has
been this newer, more modern culture that's turned up at
least in urban Afghanistan. So you were in Afghanistans decades before.
And you said, this was before they had a lot
of technology, and you've been there. Now the average American
doesn't even have a passport. But what was the appeal

(17:37):
of Afghanistan for you? Well, I had I have been
working at the time. I had been I had quit
a job at an ad agency in New York. I
just couldn't take it anymore. And uh, they they were
gonna assign me to Sharman toilet paper. And I realized
that and I had been already been working on g
I Joe. Mind you, this was during the Vietnam War,

(17:58):
so I was just an alienated guy. And an old
girlfriend called me up from Paris and said, Hey, I
want to go across the Sahara Desert. I was on
a plane like a week and a half later, and
I met her. We did do that. We broke up
like a little we're a little bit Florida. How do
you go across the Sahara Desert in those days? I
went all the way down from Paris through Spain and

(18:20):
Morocco to the very southern point of Morocco where the
road stopped, and then you get into what was basically
the back of a Ford truck pickup truck, not a
pickup truck. It was like, you know, a dump truck
and you drive a hundred and fifty miles at the
border of what was then a place called the Spanish Sahara.
It was Spain's last colony and you had to camp

(18:41):
out for a few days. So they opened the border
and then you'd go in and then you'd uh, you know,
tool around the Sahara. And I I did that for
about a month and ended up we split up, and
I ended up continue to travel for a year and
I met somebody in Greece, this girl in Greece, and
she said, you know, you gotta go to India. That
was the Holy Grail. This is like nineteen seventy two, Bob.

(19:04):
So when I went to it, it was like the
day I went to Afghanistan. My life sort of changed
because I was having a great time and soaking it
all in. I mean it was hitchhiking around and riding
on the back of trucks. I was a kid basically.
But when I when I showed up at the Afghan
Iran border, I went through Iran, Uh, it was like
I was in another world and a whole other planet

(19:25):
that the guy who was an immigration stamping passports he
was wearing his jacket was there was a jacket from
the high school band at the Akron High School. You know. So,
and what's often lost with people because they think Afghanistan's
just a place of continual war and terrorists. The Afghans
are actually hilarious and people go there. One of the

(19:49):
reasons we probably stayed this longest because at the top
military levels they all you get entranced then really engaged
with the Afghans. They're wonderful people. They got this great
soul and uh I fell for that and about that.
This was the most exotic place I'd been and I
wanted to try and figure out a way to support
myself and live there. And I basically I started a

(20:10):
company and I lived there for eight years there in India,
where I also started another company. Does a whole other,
a whole other lifetime, ago, a whole other career. It
was those are my defining great years. I love them. Okay,
what'd your parents say when you jettison the path and
went off across the god? You know, they were already
annoyed because uh I had gotten out of college. I

(20:34):
was gonna get drafted. I went to graduate school, which
was still possible. I wanted to get Someone said I said,
I got to get drafted, and said, we gotta go
to graduate school. Since well, I don't want to be
a doctor or a dentist or a lawyer. Sai, why
don't you go to business school? I was so out
of it, Bob, I didn't know there was such a thing,
you know, get an m b A. So I signed up,
went to n y U. And that's sort of when

(20:54):
I got out of there, I decided, Uh, I had
gotten out of the draft. How'd you get out of
the draft? Well? In then, at the end of my
first year of a two year program, they said, okay,
he's graduate school. Deferments are over. I'm back in the
draft pool. I said, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta.
I can't do that. So I I found a guy.

(21:15):
I knew a guy. The only thing that I got
in the Navy Reserve, which had it was one year
of meetings and then you had to go an active
duty for two years. And I had been working in
Lake George with this guy who ran a bar, but
he also ran a big steamship which used to be.
You know, in World War two they had cut it
up and brought it up to Lake George, and he

(21:36):
was in the Naval Reserve and he was able to
get me in. I mean, think about that. And then
I once I got in, I it was determined I
had some medical problems, so I gotta I got at
the ferment. And then just when I graduated, my parents said,
he's getting on the conveyor belt. He's gonna get a
grown up job. I split for a year. I went
to ask him and uh the Virgin Islands. And then,
you know, they were not happy about that. But then

(21:58):
I got a job at ben in ball Holes, which
they were elated about. And that lasted about two years,
and uh, I was just alien it. And then I
quit again. I took five thousand dollars and left, and
they were just sort of slack jawed. But you know,
what can they do. I was, you know, twenty two
or something like that, twenty three. What did your father

(22:19):
do for a living? Your mother? He was, Uh. I
grew up in in Fairfield County, not far from you.
I was from Rowait in Connecticut, of course, just a
little down the line. And my father, actually he was
in one of the mad Men guys. He worked in uh,
in public relations for a paper bag company called Union Bag,
which meant all my life I got free lunch bags.

(22:41):
You know, I didn't have to recycle him like my
fellow students did. So he you know, and he had
a lot of friends that are awaiting who were sort
of in that world of advertising public relations, and they
were what I saw. There was a window of what
I could. I I saw that was possible to be
in business and actually have a good time and do
something like these people were creative. I wanted to always

(23:04):
be around creative people. So anyway, they took it and
stride when I left, and then they became proud of
me because my company became very successful. I had no
idea what I was doing, but we build warehouses and showrooms,
and then of course I got wiped out and lost everything. Okay,
let's go back to the beating for a second. How
many kids in the family. There was me and my brother.

(23:25):
I'm a younger brother, right And what's he up to
right now? I mean I met up a couple of times.
For the people who don't know, uh, he's started retired.
You know, he was just Libby. He was he had
had it with the pandemic, so he got vaccinated and
went to beck Way, which is an island in the Grenadines. St.
Vincent and the Grenadines is one of the last island

(23:46):
nations in the Caribbean. It sounds like a rock band.
And he was the island of beck Way, and he
had rented a place for three months and he was
enjoying it there. He likes living on islands. But then
they had just had this volcano in St. Vincent. So
he got a vacuated by the American government and a
cruise liner that took him to Saint Martin. So he's
back in New York now a little up perturb, I said, Bill,

(24:07):
only you could get, you know, run from a pandemic
and then you have to get evacuated because of a volcano. Okay,
did you go to public school or prep school? I
went to a combination. I went to public schools in
Connecticut until my father wanted me to have a good
Catholic education. See, so he said, sent me to Fairfield Prep.

(24:29):
Right down the street. I mean literally right down the
street pass if we only knew, you know, that's where
I saw my first concert Ray Charles at Fairfield University.
I saw the Beach Boys at Fearfield University. Enough you
were there and there was another concert with the Young Rascals.
This was in the sixties. I think you might have
been in college at that point. Yeah. Well, after two

(24:50):
years of that, and I wasn't that happy because you know,
I have it's an hour and a half up there
and back, and you know, all my friends I didn't
really have. I kind of was contact with my local friends.
And my father said, I'll make you deal. I'll let
you transfer to the local high school and finish here
because I can see you wanted to play hockey, you
wanted to do this, meet some girls, and you know,

(25:11):
I want to be happy, but we gotta make a deal.
If I do this, you have to commit to me
that you go to a Catholic college. Wow. So I
had to. I took the deal that was on the table. Bob,
I said, I'll deal with that other one later, you know.
So he said, uh, that's that's what he said. So
when it came time to apply to college, my choices

(25:32):
were a lot more limited than the other kids that
were in school with and I I, you know, I
ended up going to a small college in Vermont, which
I never even visited. At that point in my life,
I've only been in two states, New York and Connecticut,
so you know, so I went to a combination and
so you went to St. Michael's in Vermont. There were
no women there, right exactly, but they had a important point,

(25:58):
a recurring theme with these ethnic schools. But there was
a There was a a school called Trinity College or
sort of the sister college in Burlington, right across the river.
But there were a lot of other colleges. There was
a lot of uh, there was sort of a college
town Burlington. It was a really cool town to go
to school. And if you weren't in St. Michael's, but
you could meet girls. I made a point of that. Okay,

(26:26):
growing up, were you like the leader of the group?
Were you popular? And then when you get to college,
were you, you know, the guy who was hanging with
everybody or you were more independent? What kind of kid
were you like growing up? I was independent. I mean
I really wasn't in any big click or anything like that.
But I was well liked and I got along. I

(26:47):
got a well, I I got I can get along
with anybody, so I would get along with everybody. Was
just a big bruiser guy, a bully. I could somehow
befriend him. And when I went to college, like I
made a fortune. I was. I took a cut and pay.
When I graduated, I was. I had all kinds of
jobs from dishwasher to where because I had had to
kind of work my way through college. But but I

(27:08):
got a little money in the system. So uh, but
there I was. Most of the other kids in that
school were from Upper New England. There was only a
few of us from the Tri City area who we
thought we were hit but we were nothing. You know.
All I really knew was like listening to New York
City radio growing up in terms of you know, never

(27:28):
really went into the city much. So I went to
graduate school. Okay, you were an Aspen We never discussed this.
You were a big skier. You mean, that's the reason
to go to Aspen, especially back then, although Aspen was different.
That was before all the chain stores were there. Oh yeah,
like people hadn't even heard of Aspen in nineteen seventy.
But what have you know. Sometimes you can remember something

(27:52):
with total clarity, and I can remember at the beginning
of my sophomore year in college, I was at a
part I went before school started. I was at the
University of Ramondic of fraternity and I had made friends
there too. And then this guy I knew kind of
this is in the afternoon, he's on a Bonneville motorcycle.
He kind of comes through and he I said, Hey, Tom,

(28:13):
how are you doing? This is his name is Tom too.
He says, Oh, Man, I just had the greatest summer.
I was down in this place, Lake George. It's while
down there. You know, there's all these girls. You can
make a lot of money. It's a beautiful place, and
you know you're crazy to go home and for the summertime.
I decided right then and there, this is what I'm
gonna do. I'm gonna finally be free, away from my parents,
away from the rules of college. So I went there.

(28:35):
And when I was there, like the cool gang in
that town where all these guys from Aspen they would
they would like be on the circuit. They would work
in Lake George, they would work in ask when they
go to the Caribbean, then run pot. They ran bars.
But they were like bohemians. My first real encounter with
and they there, they theyre they didn't even think of
having a career. They were, but they struck a nerve

(28:58):
with me, and I saw like a window for me
to have a more interesting life. But they always said, hey, man,
come out and finsess this in a Aspen. So as
soon as I got out of school, I bought a
car for like a hundred bucks and drove to Aspen
and showed up at the It was in the Aspen
and it was now the rich Carlton stands in its place. Yeah,
So I went in. I say where's Gary? And Gary

(29:20):
comes out and I said. He says, Tom, what are
you doing here? I said, well, this was a pilgrimage
for me. I wanted to check it out. You got anything,
you got any nice job for a for a hard
working man. He says, everyone filled up. You shouldn't let
me know, but you could be a dishwasher. And this
was like the nitty Gritty dirt band would play there
and Steve Martin and it was. It was a hopping place,

(29:41):
but I knew all the guys who kind of ran it. Well.
I worked my way up and I spent uh. Then
he sends me to go get a room at the
Independence Lodge, which is at the base of Ajax. It's
now a Ralph the Ren store, and they gave me
a room with no window. And then the guy says
to me, you're not gonna need a window if you're
working at the s spen in. I go, what is that?

(30:02):
He says, because those guys are wild. You'll be They'll
have you all night at some parties in Red Mountain
and you'll be thanking me that the sun's not waking
you up. You can sleep all day. So that turned
out to be, you know, that turned out to pretty
much be the case. But I I was there. I
skied a few times, but I had to rent all
my equipment, so it was really uh, you know, I

(30:22):
didn't have my own stuff. Wasn't a great skier, but
it was. I really fell in love with the town.
But I realized after three months I had to get
out of there. I go crazy. That was sort of
my brief psychedelic period. There was a lot of bad
things going on and Aspen in those days. I mean
it was Hunter Thompson had just run for it was
about to run for sheriff, but he had started that
freak party thing which you probably knew all about. They

(30:43):
were gonna fight the developers, the greedhogs, who ultimately turned
Aspen into what it is today. Okay, so you leave Aspen,
and then the next stop is I went through San
Francisco and down do Big Sir Her and they went
to uh San Diego. Had a friend of mine who

(31:03):
was in the Navy. He lived in Mission Beach, hung
out there a while. Then I I I tried to
dry I finally I couldn't drive my car in Mexico,
so I sold it in, flew to Port of the
Art and went to San Blass. I was there for
not long, and then her friend called me. I was says, hey,
I'm in the I'm in the Virgin Islands, and you
could probably get a job here at Tendon Bar. So

(31:23):
I went there and spent three months in the Virgin
Islands doing that. That was a whole other adventure. And
then from there I went to Martha's Vineyard and got
a job in the lamp post. And this was when
I met Tom Rush, who you just had on and
I met Jill Lumpkin who we talked about on your podcast,
who was his girlfriend on the Circle Game, who I

(31:44):
hired as a designer to work for me at my company,
Hindu Kush. She used to be a bar to waitress
at max Is in the city and she's living in
Indian now. I I had, I had, I said. I
sent her a copy of the link to your podcast.
I said, well, Tom's really talk talking about you so small,
small world. Why did your business in Afghanistan in India crash? Well?

(32:10):
As good as it was and we were, we were
making not crappy clothes, but really kind of stylish things. Uh.
You know, the Afghanistan they had a communist coup. You know,
generally not good for business. I mean, we were going around.
It was a big surprise to everybody in town, including
pretty much the Soviets, because these guys weren't ready for
prime time. And that was in April seventy eight. So

(32:31):
I kind of bailed. I have been there for a
coup in seventy three when they took out the king,
but that was like there's one oligarch to another. This
was the These were communists and they were not big
on doing business. So I kind of gathered some stuff
together and I said, let's, uh, let's go through the
Cobra Pass. And stay in pish hour and this thing

(32:52):
blows over, and uh with Jill and whatnot, and it
never it still hasn't blown over, Bob. They've been fighting
for forty three years. But then the Soviets invaded, god worse.
So I had a business in India at a house
in Delhi. I doubled down on that. But then like
six months later, Jimmy Carter, under pressure from the domestic

(33:13):
uh you know, apparel people put a quota and an
embargo on close from India and you had to get
quota from the Indian government. Since I was one of
the only kind of Caucasians doing this and didn't have
the government connectors, I didn't get anything. So I went
out of business, and uh I I came back with

(33:34):
my tail between my legs, trying to get a job.
And that's where when I ended up at MTV. Okay,
since you said you'd only been to New York in Connecticut,
where did all this wanderlusts come from? I think it
was just pan up. You know. My dad was in
the Navy in the Pacific War, and he used to
drive those boats that went up on the Pacific Islands.
The door would come down Statar, Bryan Ryan, and you

(33:56):
know of the guys get killed in Eily, he had
they called it shell shop then. But he went from
a guy in my side like a hundred and ninety
pounds to just pounds. And he spent the rest of
the war like a year and a half in Hawaii,
and he was he just never wanted He never said
a word to me about the war. I can never
get him to watch like Victory at Sea or anything
like that. And uh, he never wanted to go anywhere.

(34:20):
The only trip we ever took as a family was
a day trip to the Mystic Seaport. And uh So
when I went to Vermont to college, I you know,
I just got the jones I can do this. I
just felt exhilarated to travel. And then I would hear
all these stories like from these guys about Aspen in
other places in the Caribbean, and it seemed so romantic

(34:41):
to me, and I said, I want to do this.
And meanwhile I kind of beefed up my you know,
my reading with the beats and all of that. And
you know, I just was into expanding experiences I might encounter.
And uh, I gotta say this, all the traveling that
I've done has been really the defining thing in my life.
I mean in terms of you know, confidence and comfort

(35:03):
about myself and uh, empathy for other people. I mean
you said in the beginning less than half of Americans
have passports. So true, and that's that's really sort of
central to our problem as a nation. I think. You know,
so you never have that ability to look at America
through someone else's prism. But anyway I had. I just
love to travel, Okay. You know it's amazing because when

(35:26):
you go to other countries, you're like UK. You know,
it's a nation of travelers, will go to go. Oh,
We'll go, you know, things that people wouldn't even think
of in America. But were you so successful because of
what you learned in business school? Well, I had an
innate drive and ability to put things together and do it.
What I did learn in business school is I really

(35:48):
straightened out. I mean I really applied myself in business.
I mean on my studies. I kind of coasted through
high school like hosted through college. I still made like
the honor roll when I got to when I got
to business school, I just got so turned on. I
got I was number one of my class. I graduated
number one of my class. I had this one professor,
that's guy named Peter Drucker, who legendary. He was a

(36:11):
legend and he was you know, he'd hold these classes
and they were all about innovation and change. And I
got someone that I said, there's a window for me.
This is a this is you know, innovation and change
is what kind of drives America had. And I realized
if I could work on things that were new and interesting,
put things together in an interesting way, that's a creative way,
I could be a business person. So I was able

(36:34):
to apply some of the things I learned there. But
my success there I had no idea. What I was
doing was just done through hustle. I mean, I knew
when I was working there, Bob, nothing that I would
ever do in my life would be more complicated or
difficult than that, And that's been the case. I mean,
you know, you had the bride people, nothing was delivered
on times, stuff was done wrong. You know, there was

(36:55):
you know, this was really premass tourism. These places were
the uh you know, I think India had like seventy
thousand tourists a year or something at that point. So
you really had to hustle. So it was through determination,
which I guess was in bred in me. Okay, and
where have you not been that you want to go.

(37:17):
I haven't been to New Zealand. Love to go there.
I've been in Westralia, but only once. I'm I'm surprised,
since you know it's a long way down there. I'll
believe me. I know if I've been a few times,
I know it's I'd love to go to way Antarctica,
you know now I sent away The other day. I
was browsing through Amazon. I said, Lonely Planet has a

(37:39):
book on Antarctica. I said, well, I want to get that.
Find out what's the cool hotel there. So I'm studying
up on Antarctica. I haven't been to uh. You know,
I've been to almost every country in Asia. I've been
to half of the fifty countries in Africa. There's still
I want to go to the Central African Republic Um.

(38:02):
You know, the northern part of Japan. I don't know
if you've been to Hokkaido Island, the one in the
north where Sapporo is. They make that good beer up
there and they do all that skiing. That's supposed to
be amazing. That was where I was going to go
if it wasn't for the pandemic. That was my I
always like having a trip in the back of my
head that I can, you know, fantasize about. That's gonna
be coming up sometime over the horizon. So if you

(38:24):
told someone who really hadn't been anywhere two countries to
go to, what would you say? You Well, depend I
guess on a type of person, but let's put the
pandemic inside. I would always put India on top of
the list. It's the greatest show on Earth. I mean,
anything could happen any that's just a mind blower no

(38:47):
matter what. Uh India would be there. Greece, I mean,
I've been going to Greece. I've been renting a house
in Greece in the summers, is on a little island
where it's a lot less expensive than the Hampton's and
Greece that the people are wonderful, the light is great.
Greecent Italy pretty cool in Europe, and in in in
uh Africa, Senegal, you know, great, great music scene. And

(39:11):
Ethiopia is the other one who has a whole different
music scene. I'm very much into you know, African music,
and you know it's just a daily occurrence going to
clubs there and meeting and seeing musicians. And for the
American how safe is it in Africa? Say, oh, it's
safe and very safe. I would assume in all your

(39:33):
travels though around the world, you've had a couple of
scary experiences. Yes, yes, I have, and I had the
worst one was in Africa. Actually I went to uh
this thing called the festival in the desert and north
the Timbuck too. I was once again back in the
Sahara I went. I I assembled a group to go.

(39:53):
Is that they've been doing this thing for a bunch
of years. And I got Chris Blackwell to go and
Jimmy Buffett to go because number one, he loves to travel,
but he also had a jet. So we flew to
tim Buck two and we hired some guides and you
better have to drive like six eight hours in the
desert to get there. And the look. We had a

(40:14):
couple of people who came with us from from Bombaco
to Capital. But there was this guy from tim Buck
two who was gonna steer us in the wrong direction
and have us kidnapped, which happens frequently there by people
who ended up being in al Qaeda, who had just
killed some German tourists. Now we didn't know this at
the time, but after about four or five hours, we're

(40:36):
going to go, where the hell are we? We were
gonna get there, and then they jammed the brakes on.
We had like a little caravan going through, just blowing on,
you know, just going over these sand dunes, and uh,
they get out and this guy pulls out a gun
to this local local guy's head. He's like he's gonna
kill him. He says, you're you're cheating on me, You're
taking us in the wrong place. So they we we

(40:56):
we left him in the desert and turned around and
head of the other way and made it to the
fast stable. But I'm saying, oh, man, I just would
imagine every day we were these people that they kidnapped,
they were taking to Mauritania. They keep you like for
a year or two, you know. I just imagine waking
up every day and Chris enemy you and your fucking ideas,
you know, your big ideas. So that was that was scary.

(41:17):
But I didn't know how scary it was actually until afterwards. Okay,
let's go back to Vice. Vice was a media in
stock Darling and then it all kind of blew up
in Shane Smith was a bad actor. You brought in
a new ceo. What what's the status of Vice today?
You know, it took a few hits. It was I

(41:39):
loved the Vice guys and originally, you know, I met
them when I was a CEO of I when I
was CEO of viacom and and and did a deal
with them. They had a vision, they had a voice.
They were from the streets. They were running up business
on borrowed furniture. So I really like these guys. They
could make they were ready for YouTube was breaking and

(41:59):
they were gonna be able to do video at a cost.
And they really had a good ear for eye for
stories and uh an ear for stories and an eye
for making them good. And then you know, they kinda
we got a little Huber's in there. They took some
meat too, bumps. And then we saw you know, which
decimated sort of the upper ranks if you will, of
some colorful characters. And that was a big hit. And

(42:21):
then we had the whole thing. If you're a publisher,
you know this in UH online where Google and Facebook
are taking eighty to nine of all the advertising revenue,
taking a lot of companies and putting them out of business,
a lot of people doing good work. They just couldn't
have a business model that worked, so we had to
kind of dig ourselves out of the hole. Now. Oddly enough,

(42:42):
coincidentally and I was on a board meeting today and uh,
you know, we were profitable last year they recast. Uh
we had a hot run with HBO that left. Now
we've got the news operation on showtime and we also
have a sizeable presence online. But their engagement with people
is up thirty. They're profitable. They're sort of they're they're
they're back. I mean you may not know it, but uh,

(43:04):
you know they they they ran really hot and then
they cooled down. And Nancy Dubuke, who's the CEO there
now very talented as brought in pretty much a whole
new crew. And of course they've had the work remotely
all this year, but they've made they've made good progress.
It was it was an encouraging call. Okay, let's talk
about the landscape, first, the news landscape, then the media landscape.

(43:29):
What's going to happen in the news landscape on some level,
we have consolidation in newspapers such that there's the Big
three and you know, not really everybody else. When it
comes to network news, that is dying, and cable news
doesn't reach that many people. You know, for a long time,
it looked like Vice was going to be the alternative.
How do you see it playing out? Well, you know,

(43:51):
all the guys on table, the three networks we all watch,
I guess there's four or five now, I mean they've
all kind of take they're all in the Trump slam.
I mean they were really cooking, as was you know,
the you know, Washington Post and the New York Times
everything during the Trump period because everything was hot all
the time. So they've got a they gotta figure out

(44:11):
that they've created a model, which pretty much is economically
it's just talking heads. No one's really out doing any stories.
There's talking to people in the studio. That's where I
thought Advice had a real angle of young people. They're
really going to be interested, they can take a different
take on the news, and to some extent that was
largely true. Uh, but what happens now, I don't know.

(44:32):
The real shame is, like on the local level, local stations,
local uh newspapers. I mean, they're just consolidating, consolidating, sucking
costs out there really isn't much there. I spent a
good part of the of the pandemic up in Santa Barbara,
and they have up there. It's so bad that three

(44:54):
the three broadcast stations have joined together to have the
same weather report, and they're they're sharing news stories, which
are not many much of a news story to begin with.
So and and the money sort of has been just
sucked out of the that the linear television business and
from every aspect. So it doesn't look too good for

(45:17):
local news, and it doesn't look too good for uh
local newspapers. The problem there, of course, is we're gonna
have an even more ignorant siloed you know, populus, who
knows even less about what's going on than they then
they then then you. Now, I don't know what the
answer is, Bob. I mean, it seems like if you're

(45:39):
a big if you can hire reporters and really put
out good editorial product, like the Wall Street Journal or
the Washington Post, you can set up a digital business
that you know would sustain you. And those guys all
have done that. I mean, they have paying subscribers. Now,
they aren't that reliant on advertising, but they're like national
papers in a sense, I don't know what happens down

(46:01):
below them. To straighten that out, you know, trying to
prop up the past just doesn't work, like trying to
keep the physical bookstore alive, although they had a rebound
prior to COVID. You have to look to the future.
Just one other thing that may or may not be
on your radar in terms of you know, music, we
have it all figured out. Music was in the canary
in the coal mine. It was the first disrupted for

(46:23):
no other reason. The files were small, but there are
multiple outlets. For essentially ten dollars a month, you can
get all the history of recorded music. Whereas TV visual
entertainment has been completely balkanized. How does that play out?
Because one thing we know, people are not going to
subscribe to all these services like being pecked to death
by ducks. Yeah, they wanted to break up the cable bundle,

(46:46):
and now you've got the streamer bundle. Basically it's costs
you more than the cable bundle. Right, of course you're
getting better product and uh, you know, it's on demand
and there's no advertising, but I mean, the whole world
of interrupted television that still exists, the linear TV model
is just gonna collapse. I mean, there's not gonna be

(47:07):
much to hold it up after a while. The next
thing that's gonna happen is we're gonna see Netflix bid
on the NFL, you know, and we're gonna start seeing sports,
which is long with news. The mainstays of what's left
of the you know, broadcast cable sort of ecosystem. Those
two must have things are gonna be pecked away by

(47:28):
the by the more, by the richer streaming services. So
we're gonna be looking at what streaming service do you buy?
How many do you need? And right now you've got
Paramount has under Viacom has one with a lot of
paramount product, Warner Brothers has, you know, like all of
a sudden, it's all balk and that's what the hell

(47:49):
I mean, I'm not gonna buy all of these things.
It's gonna cost me a fortune. I would think that
there's gonna be some consolidation that's gonna happen. We know
that Disney Plus has it made, and Amazon and uh
and Hulu and uh Netflix all had sort of first
mover advantages. But what happens with the other guys. On

(48:10):
one hand, Discovery might have a shot because they have
a low price and they're sort of out of the
head to head competition the other guys with their own
own product. It's sort of in the nonfiction space, it's
sort of a niche business. AMC has all these independent movies,
a little niche business. I mean, if they can get
eight ten million subs, maybe they'll be happy. But if

(48:31):
you're a viewer, you know it's gonna be frustrating if
you want to watch a movie one night and it's
on another streaming service. You know, I don't see a
lot of people. I think some people now have three,
four and five, but I don't see that continuing as
a head scratcher. Okay, since you worked in Hollywood, has
there been a shifting of power? I mean when we

(48:52):
were growing up, certainly living in l A, you knew
the heads of every studio. Now the people in l
A don't even know the heads of the studio, but
they certainly know Read Hastings in Tim Cook. You know
Tim Cook has in you know unlimited checkbook. What you know,
Apple TV Plus at this point is basically given away free,
and they can afford to give it away free. But
are those that people who really have the power and

(49:15):
the people in Hollywood who operate completely differently, have they
fallen behind? Because in Silicon that's a data driven business,
real business, where Hollywood's a schmooze business. Has it? Finally,
if they is time, if times caught up with them, well,
in a sense, you know, if you were if you

(49:35):
didn't have a legacy studio business with all that overhead
that goes with it, and you were a triple a
independent producduction company like say Imagine Entertainment, Grazer and Ron Howard,
where you can regularly create content of high quality, you
you can say this is great. I'm like an arms dealer.
Now instead of going around to these studios, I can

(49:58):
I can on the basis of my repute Asian, I
can get a big deal with Netflix or with Apple
or something. So they have a lot of places to
sell stuff, and they have good stuff. For someone like them,
they are, i could argue, more empowered, and they can
be more and more of a talent magnet to get
because they can get stuff on the air. It's it's

(50:20):
but the whole schmoozing Hollywood agent thing is is sort
of being deconstructed, Bob. I mean you really can see
that happening. Uh. Um, it's not. Uh, it's not. Making
movies is not the most profitable business right now. And uh,
you know you saw what happened with the oscars. But

(50:41):
I would say being a being a good independent production
company doesn't have a lot of legacy costs going along
with you, is Okay. The problem there, though, is these
streamers don't really leave you any back end. So if
you have a big hit, you know, say you make
a Seinfeld, You're not gonna have a Larry David pay
day at the end of it. Because they keep a
hund percent ut of the i P. You can get
bigger fees, like maybe a three percent fee and maybe

(51:03):
some more on top of that, more than in the past,
so you're sort of just an indentured guy. You know.
That might change in the future, maybe if it gets
more competitive of some of these streamers would be willing
to grant certain producers some back end positions on the
stuff that they make. Okay, when MTV was in its heyday,
it was a mono culture what mtv A certainly said

(51:24):
on records, never mind the culture at large. Literally around
the world people knew. Now it's more bulk bulk and
I it's so balk and I that my question would be,
is something like the Oscars. Is it essentially done? Is
there no way to revive? Have people have their eyeballs
elsewhere nothing has critical mass? Is that where we're driving

(51:45):
and where do we end up? I think, you know,
I think it's not done. I mean one of the
reasons it keeps going is because for the Grammys and
for the Oscars, there's these huge licensing deals from ABC
and c B. Yes, like twenty five million, mean insane
amounts of money they pay, and you know they have
to keep doing it to make the money. If same

(52:06):
Netflix or Hulu or somebody were to take these and
they can run the Oscars without commercials, and uh, you know,
I think that there's always gonna be an audience for it,
And uh, I don't think it's necessarily dead, but I
mean people have sort of been award awards showed to
death in a way. But I mean, this is the Oscars.

(52:27):
It's the top of the line feature film in a way.
Is still king, although that's even arguable these days because
one of the things you've noticed, and it's accelerated during
the pandemic, is how people they aren't satisfied with the
ninety or two hour, ninety minute, two hour movie. They
want to dig into these characters and go on for seasons.
I mean, it's crazy. Binge viewing is the other thing

(52:49):
that's really made TV a lot more interesting than films.
Films are basically you know these uh you know, big
event films that can be franchised into sequels with comic
book characters. So let me ask a little differently, though
certainly when you were an MTV they were these international
stars built you mentioned you too, are those days done?

(53:12):
Let me put it this way, Uh, at this point
in time, Taylor's We've put out two records. I would
argue that the majority of Americans have never heard a
single song, Whereas when we grew up in the sixties,
I knew Louis Armstrong, Hello Dolly because I had to
wait for the Beatles. So so now is things continue
to separate irrelevant of the money involved. Is something like

(53:34):
the oscars. Oscars are just representative, but whether it be
a musician, whether it be anything a news outlet, is
everybody's market share essentially going to go down. Yeah, there's
more choices and people have more access, immediate access to
all those choices, and all kinds of rabbit holes you
can fall down when you get in digging in Spotify

(53:54):
or I mean, how do you even find good new music?
It's hard word of mouth or whatever. I mean, it's
a challenge from now. I used to look forward to
getting like Rolling Stone or something. You finally, what's a
good new who's got some albums out? It's very difficult
to you hear something on the radio, you know, terrestrial radio.
It's still out there. It's like the cock roads of
the media business and it just can't die. Uh and

(54:16):
serious is there. But you know, it's like your music,
you're you're oversaturated with choices. So it's hard to be
a megastar. And what we also saw the days of
the Anglo American dire straits, these people who could be
real worldwide stars that began to fall away as these
countries began to develop their own musical scenes and ecosystems

(54:38):
India and places like that, so they they're everything is
sort of local in a way. You know, an uber
star that's worth you know, that is huge all around
the world, hard to find these days. It's certainly not
Taylor Swift. Okay, Earlier you mentioned right up front, with
no prompting, that you got fired with Viacom. This is

(54:58):
a business where every but he lies. They lie about
their age. You know, David Geffin lied to get a
job at what was then William Morris, you have embraced it.
You know, how do you feel about getting fired and
what was it like at the time, and why are
you so up front with it? Well, I kind of
got fired under the best possible circumstances. I got fired

(55:22):
by a guy who was known to fire pretty much
everybody who would work for him before. So it wasn't
like novel I mean had although I think I think
he just drove mail karmas and out the door. People
assume Meil got fired, but Mel just couldn't take it anymore.
I fired Frank BEYONDI. These were bosses that I worked
for that I really liked. So I was reticent to
take this job from him because I kind of I

(55:44):
would leave a job that was perfect for me. It
was all the things I loved in one place, and
we had created it so and we were doing all right.
You know. He split the company into two, which was
a bad move to make, just when all the all
the digital guy these were like the last days of
the legacy media companies, the last hey days. I mean,
then the new guys were banging on the door. Google

(56:06):
and Apple and Facebook. They all the changes were in
the wind. But he called me over. He was piste
off about I had. I had worked for him for
I had figured it out, Bob. I think seventy one
quarters and every quarter we had what they would say
in the finance ray double digit earnings growth. You know.
We went public and we had like one my first

(56:28):
quarter when we were black Viacommon I was the CEO,
went down a bit. But he fired me because basically
he was going to install Philippe Dumont and I wasn't.
He really liked me and treated me well for a
lot of years, but uh, he called me over after
Labor Day and just said, you know, I got terrible
news for you. The board of directors wants me to

(56:49):
fire you immediately, which I really had to laugh, right
because I mean he is the board of director and Uh.
I found out afterwards that there have been a coup
brewing all of on. Uh so I just got up
and left. And a coup against you or a coup well,
I mean I think no, it was a coup against
me by Philippe, my my successor, who changed it all

(57:14):
into a sort of a legal strategy to run instead
of making it, you know, exalting the creative people and
trying to start for good creative work. And we're gonna
sue YouTube, We're gonna sue everybody. And that wasn't a
that wasn't a proper strategy, as it turned out. But
I I figured I had been there twenty six years,
I had a great run. I would have stayed. I

(57:37):
loved the people there. I I would have stayed. But
I figured out I was I was sixty when it happened.
I figured, you know, this is a new opportunity. Um,
there's that old addas one door closes and a lot
more open and all of a sudden, this stage of
my life has been a whole new chapter than I
had that chapter in in Asia. And so this chapter
has been just terrific. You know, I haven't had to

(58:00):
deal with that fucking guy I mean I would come
in the morning and there'd be a stack of facts
is on my chair about you know, he was holed
up in his house in Beverly Park as stack what
are you gonna do about the stock price? You know,
they looked like bomb threats. I fingured he had the
last fax machine on the planet. He was sending him over.
So I got fired and everybody knew it, so uh,

(58:22):
and he fired me. The reason was, well, I didn't
buy my Space. And what really annoyed him he never
even fucking heard him my Space. What annoyed him was
that Rupert Murdoch bought it. We weren't even really we
never even made an offer on it. I we had
looked at Friendster and you know, that kind of came
and went. And at the time Facebook was just really
only college students, so it was still kind of an

(58:44):
unproven thing. But anyway, Rupert Murdoch came in one weekend
and just bought the thing for five seventy million dollars,
No due diligence, no nothing, And he ends up as
like the new the new media guru, and he's on
the cover of all these magazines. He was some RS
arch enemy Rupert didn't think that way, but some of
who had a lot of envy for Rupert, uh anyway

(59:07):
that you know, so you know, he would say he
going on. Charlie Rosen said he had the prize and
he lost it. I didn't have the prize. We weren't
even really, you know, really seriously looking at buying it.
And then when Rupert sold it for thirty five million dollars,
I had a good laugh. I keep thinking I wasna
get a thank you note, but it never happened. Did
you ever talk to Sumner subsequent to your exit? There

(59:30):
was one time I was in a restaurant in l
a And he was having dinner. I didn't even know
he was there. He was having dinner with Bob Evans,
who character who I happened to like. But at the
end of the meal, I feel these hands on my
shoulder and he says, aren't you gonna get up and
say hello? You know? And I got up and said hello.
But that was pretty much the last time I ever

(59:51):
saw him, and both of them are gone now. Evan
Zan Sumner, So your your business fails overseas you come
back to America. What happens and how to end up
at what becomes him. I figured, man, that was rough.
I mean I loved what I was doing. I was
passionate about it. I mean I got it. I traveled everywhere.

(01:00:12):
India had fourteen states, then I went to every one
of them. I I just loved it. And then I
got wiped out. Now I'm in debt like a half
a million dollars, and who the fund is gonna hire me?
Everyone I knew had moved along in their careers or whatever.
But I knew one thing. I was gonna do something
I loved. And I had deduced that what I loved
was music. And I had been a fan, you know,
like you. I mean I was a real fan. I

(01:00:33):
really knew my stuff. So at one point I used
to come back and my brother worked for Columbia Records
in the mid seventies, and he'd say, hey, you know,
Bruce King scenes at the bottom line, why don't you
come along? And I see how these guys were riding
around in limousines, and I said this, I could do this,
This is easy. This is this was like the height
of the of the of the of the record company business.

(01:00:55):
So when I came back, I read an article that
I got I got a copy. I got copy the billboard,
and I would say what new companies were starting, because
I wanted to fear if I started a new company,
there'd be room to grow and I could maybe sell myself.
So my I saw this article an interview with this
guy named John Lax, and they're gonna start a music
video channel on TV. I thought this was the greatest

(01:01:15):
idea I ever heard of. This was fantastic. So I
asked my brother if he knew anybody at this one
er amics company, and it turns out he did. He
knew that this guy Bob mcgrorty, and he got me
an interview with Bob mcgroorty, and I got old. You know.
I went in and saw him and I said, hey,
you need entrepreneurs. I'm a music fan. I had this business.
I showed him all these things from Vogue magazine. I

(01:01:36):
could I can do stuff. This is the greatest idea ever.
He says, we gotta go and to meet John Lack.
So I go next sort of John Lax office, which
was dark. He had like a cocktail table and he
was like wearing slippers, and I told him where I
had been. He said, so you were a drug smuggler, right,
And I go, I'm not really and he he thought
that was an asset. But then he said the magic phrase.

(01:01:58):
He said, you know, we're starting to thing. It's gonna
be like we're gonna do the FM radio. We're gonna
do the AM radio. What FM did? He came out
of the CBS Radio group, and this is a whole
new video revolution. This is really the beginning of the
modern cable era. He says. But I'm looking for people
who have no experience in television. This was the magic
words for me, somethinking who the fund is gonna hire me?

(01:02:20):
I'm just like they think I was a drug smuggler,
you know. So they hire me and I get on
a team and he says, well, let's wait around. Uh,
you know, come on in and we're and we're not
gonna we have to still get the green light, but
we're gonna do this, So come on and we'll give
me a job in the meantime helping to sell Nickelodeon
and the movie Channel. So then he hires Bob Pittman

(01:02:43):
and uh, I go to see Bob, he says, go
see Bob Pittman. He's putting together a development team for
wasn't called MTV then for this music channel. So I
go in to see Bob, who was like twenty six
I'm now thirty four, and he's the hippie kind of
youth's whisperer. Everyone thought that smooth is talking bill best
bullshit and guy. Ever then he's a brilliant, brilliant guy.

(01:03:04):
We're still friends. But he said to me, so Black says,
I should see you. I said, yeah, I think this
is the greatest idea. I think it's I think it's
a winner, and you know, I think I could really add.
He says, well, we do. Now you were you were
a drug smuggler. He's the second guy who accuses me
of this and thinks it's a benefit. So he hired me,
and I was part of a team of five that

(01:03:26):
that you know, developed what became MTV. And then I
stayed and uh stayed and stayed, and you know, Bob
kept promoting me. And then when we tried to do
an L B O uh and and and lost, Bob
left the company. He left me president, and then Viacom
bought us. But it wasn't the Viacom a Sumner Redstone.

(01:03:48):
It was some other guys who's some of the redstone
later displaced. But that's how I got the job. And
I think God luck is so amazing and timing and
so amazing. I mean I might have not had that
copy of Billboard magazine, never seen that article, or maybe
my brother didn't know you know this guy, Bob McGroarty,
and you know, my whole life would have been different.

(01:04:08):
What happened to the debt? Oh, I paid it off.
You know when we were working there, I mean, no
one we were all making that thirty grand. I mean
we no one cared about money. It was like a startup.
We're just eating pizzas. And you know, we had we
had We had my my office I shared with John Psyche.
We had coal waiting, we had one phone with call waiting.

(01:04:29):
But I found out that I could got in this account.
He says, you know, you could write some of that
off as bad debt. And now you ever started making money,
it's only really in it cost you like two fifty
or three. So I gradually paid it off. Okay, So
what year do you go to work for MTV? Okay?

(01:04:53):
What year do you get married? Eighty? Okay, So if
you're making thirty grand a year. What's going on there?
My my then wife, she was working on Wall Street
and she was making like three times what I was making.
And you know, you know, you're just a rent paying
person in Manhattan, and it was you know, money wasn't

(01:05:15):
money didn't become a big thing to quite a while later,
you know, I mean, no one was making a ton
of money. But we made enough to live and survive
and ultimately bought an apartment down downtown and rebeca Okay,
so Tauga's first one, MTV launches. What's the experience on
the other side of the screen and what exactly is

(01:05:35):
your job? At the beginning in the years to go by,
I was ahead of marketing, so I was responsible for
getting people to watch this thing. When we launched, it
was unavailable in New York, it was unavailable in l A.
I mean it really started. MTV was really born in
the Midwest, and we we had a launch party and
at like a one bar we could find who had

(01:05:56):
some guy had like twenty cable customers, and it was
in New Jersey, so we had a lawn party there.
But what happened would be I these cities like Tulsa,
de Moine, uh Wichita. They had big cable systems, they
had room for MTV, the no One. So I would
go out there and spend times that I want to
immerse myself with the people who actually have this in

(01:06:17):
real time and see what effect it had. It was.
I was the first guy to know this was a
slam Cold's solid hit because when I show up there,
I have on a jacket with an MTV button at
the rent a car place, and the girl says, where
did you get that? How do I get that? I
got a pocket full of buttons, I realized. And then
I go to the radio stations to see what kind

(01:06:38):
of impact it had had on request and airplay, went
to record store and find out we were selling records.
But then I would go to nightclubs and bars and
just talk to people, and uh, it was the first
time I ever really spent any time in the Midwest.
But people were thrilled with this. They thought it was
a great sign of the future, and it was. It
was the beginning of the of the video revolution, which
you know still continues, but was a whole new visual

(01:07:01):
vocabulary for people. And at the beginning, as you know,
we had all these acts, no one ever heard of
you know, Duran, Duran and Culture Club and Cyndey Lauper
and the you know. So the record guys and the
record stores were saying, we're selling these records. People are
coming in asking for the buggles. Uh. The radio stations
would say, people are calling up requesting these songs. So

(01:07:21):
the radio stations A O R stations more mainly they
were in CHR stations, they would they would start playing
these singles. So we were able to show the record companies,
who didn't want to even make videos, that these things
actually work to sell records. They were like three many commercials.
So I did that, and then I worked on the
I Want My MTV campaign because we were then running
out of money and the cable operators were refusing to

(01:07:41):
pay the ten cents a month for us. So what
was their logic not paying the ten cent? We're gonna
pay you ten cents for this? I mean, who then
is gonna watch? No one's watching music on television? Who paid?
You know, at that point in time, they were paying ESPN.
ESPN was paying them to get carried. Now he has
been charges like five bucks aside even more maybe, But

(01:08:04):
then they had they the cable operators didn't want to
pay for anything. And if there was eleven cable operators
in the market, all these each of monopolists in his
own territory, they kind of had a little thing together.
So we decided based on the experience that people who
like who get this love it, that people who get
this are in our target audience, are really animated about it,

(01:08:24):
have a lot of time on their hands. We came
up with I Want my MTV. It was a Hail
Mary passed. We had like thirty million dollars we were
gonna go under, and we said, let's see if we
could pull this thing. If we could get some rock star,
some rock stars to say our name and validate us,
maybe hold our logo and you know, say call your
cable company and say I want my MTV. Maybe that

(01:08:46):
would work to get these guys over the line. We'll
sure enough. We started running these spots that like at
the levels of which they you you would introduce a
big movie, you know, a lot of rating points, and
within a week, every cable operator in market would be
calling us up and and and and taking it. So
for a couple of years we just rolled out market
by market until we got you know, we went from

(01:09:07):
like eight million homes, so like you know, fifty sixty
million to the get up to a hundred million. That
was that was how we saved ourselves. That's what I did. Okay.
So the marketing on some level, you could say you
were cable related market you were dealing with the different
cable systems, dealt with the cable systems. Uh yeah, okay.

(01:09:27):
But one thing that MTV was famous for was their creativity. Ultimately,
you know when John Melli Camp's Pink Cows and then
they were who was coming up with those ideas? Well.
We we had a small team, so we sort of
worked together. Now John Sykes, who I split an office with,
one of the world's great promotion man. He's you know

(01:09:49):
his ideas. Look, we gotta give away stuff that radio
stations aren't doing. Let's and John is the ultimate fan.
So what I want to one night stand with the
Fleetwood Mac, I mean, I want to be taken out
of private jet and meet the band and come back
home the same night or so. We would run those things.
So we get millions of entries. In those days they
come in postcards. We'd have whole offices full of fucking

(01:10:09):
Duffel bags and stuff. What I liked about my job
was that was it an nexus between the on air
promotion people, the regular promotion people, the people who did
the advertise in the ad sales guys, and the programmers
who dealt the music. So almost everything came through me.
So I got to you know, I got a lot
of exposure, which really helped me as I moved up
ultimately to like general manager of MTV and then v

(01:10:32):
H one and so forth, so I would get involved,
you know what I really wanted to do along with
somehow be involved with the programming and be closer to
the creative people. And I felt that we had an opportunity,
since we couldn't really pay a lot of money, we
have an opportunity to kind of turn that place into
a creative hothouse by giving people certain latitude and freedom.

(01:10:53):
We we were a reverend, We're a little you know,
let people take chances on things and get like a
long line of young people to come and work there.
And we you know, at some pople we have like
Judd Apatow as an intern, or Adam Sandler, John Stewart,
we had we were able to really have a great
creative resource, and I thought having a creative culture was

(01:11:14):
a big competitive advantage over other people. We didn't rent
shows from like uh uh you know, like from producers
because we really couldn't afford it. We had to make
our own stuff so we could make these channels kind
of look you know, singularly, you know, like that everything
kind of fit together, and uh, you know, that was
that's what we did. I mean, we just wanted to
be a little niche thing over on the side of

(01:11:35):
the road. Obviously we became very powerful force in the
music business. Yeah, so what happens is you launching eighty one,
you have the I Want my MTV campaign, although ultimately
you then have Culture Club. The real break is Duran Duran,
Duran Duran makes an very expensive video. It becomes very successful.
So at first the labels don't want to make videos, okay,

(01:11:59):
then they're saying how much you're gonna pay for us.
All of a sudden, everything flips where you have all
the power okay, and you made all the hits. What
was the experience on your side of the screen, so
to speak? It was something I mean, you know, you
went from being a nobody and everybody wants to take
you to lunch. And those days, the promotion people from
the labels, they were they were something you know what

(01:12:23):
I had to do, you know, attendance, the tendency of
the people as to develop hubris and get arrogant. I
always used to tell people were not as big as
we think, We're not as good as we think. When
we deal with the labels, you gotta look at it
sort of as a partnership. They all want to break
artists and do things, and we want things from them.
So you know, we're gonna play stuff, but we're gonna

(01:12:45):
be doing favors here or there, and it's gonna come
back and get us. We don't want them. They're gonna
be predisposed to want to hate us as we get
more and more powerful, and we got to try and
play against that and be nice. And we would rotate
all these guys through the head of you know, the
head of the music departments, because sooner or later they
go off the deep end, and uh, you know, I

(01:13:05):
think they were geniuses or something, but it would be
you know, you go from like, God, is there more
than three videos coming in this week to like, you're
getting sixty five videos? And people are sending strippers to
the office and there's all kinds of shenanigans going on.
But it was it was a heavy thing. I mean,
they're making videos. Then Lionel Richie's dance walking on the
ceiling from a million dollar video, and they were big

(01:13:26):
events and uh, we were able to deploy them worldwide
and they kind of paid off. But that whole rocket
ship of a ride was you know, you really sort
of needed a seatbelt to keep a sense of yourself.
But it was, it was. It was a great wide
I gotta say, it's fun to be on the inside.
A couple of very significant events happened a Live AID

(01:13:47):
and then the vim AS Video Music Awards become a
big thing. What's the history there, Well, you're absolutely right.
It was a game changer for us Live AID. Uh,
you know, they came around, Uh was geled off. They
came around and said, you know we're gonna be doing
this thing. It's gonna be in Wembley, We're gonna do
it in JFK Stadium. We said, well, we'll run it

(01:14:10):
the whole thing because well were we We have a
deal with the ABC. ABC wants to do a three
hour you know, sort of best stuff thing for later
that night. I don't know do that. But the thing
is we're in X million homes right now, the real
experiences all of this. This is this phenomenal thing you're doing.
So we were right up on the stage. We were
just off you couldn't see us, but you know, I

(01:14:33):
was right there, and I remember going, Uh. I drove
down that day with Sykes and Uh in a rent
a car and we didn't have any of our credentials
or anything. We couldn't get in, so we ended up
jumping the fence and you can believe it into what
was the artist area. You see Bob Dylan, all these
signs and every artists in the world. I'm thinking that
they really got to step up their security. But we

(01:14:56):
we got our credentials and that really was Uh. That
was a big moment. A thriller was a big moment.
And the Video Music Awards, where we could you know,
have like some of these punctuation marks on our schedule
where a lot of people who would not ordinarily watch
us would come and then they would begin to come
back and our over our average audience size would would grow.

(01:15:18):
As with are just our residents in the culture. Okay,
there are a couple of significant changes in the mid
to late eighties. One was uh, not really scripted program
but you have remote control, you had the game show.
Now we both know the issue is keeping the people
on attached to the channel so that you can get

(01:15:39):
advertising at a higher rate. But the public couldn't understand this.
So what was the decision. How did you make that decision? Well,
we spent a lot of time on this because what
we began to see, like around eight six, eighties seven,
was that the vibrancy of just running video music hours
ten videos an hour, the ratings were continuing to the

(01:16:00):
clients or of the novelty had worn off. There was
a hardcore audience, yes, but they could do other things
because they knew they could always come back. So two
things happened. We we we kind of said, well, you
know and and and then music could periodically being a
little you don't have Michael Jackson with a hot album
everybody wants to see. Well, maybe we could also be
we could be something bigger. We could be something that's

(01:16:21):
not just about the music that will be our core thing,
but we'll also be about a lot of the things
that the music is about news fashion. That's how it started.
So well, we hired Kurt Loder, We really stepped up
our what was our news coverage. We hired Cindy Crawford
in that house of style. These things got big numbers.
We did the Weekend Rock. I mean, they would get

(01:16:42):
bigger numbers in the video hours, and people would tell
us that they liked that. Our overall ratings would go up.
And then uh and then you know, there's sort of
there was there was this uh ampetus from the creative
group we had assembled to kind of stretch out and
do more. We could do promos really well. L but
you know, somebody came in one day so that I
made this. I made this thing in my basement, you know,

(01:17:06):
on a cheap cam. It's a game show called Remote Control.
It's sort of an Irreverend's. It kind of fits MTV.
It's gonna you know, it's Irreverend. It's a little wacky.
It's not like any game show on television. And said, well, yeah,
well let's let's make a few episodes and see what happened.
So we hired Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and that
became a hit. But that that began a process where uh,

(01:17:26):
it's sort of like taking a heroin. You know, you
would find that you were getting better numbers for stuff
there wasn't music videos, but we didn't want to lose
the music video franchise. We would then start a lot
of genre shows like Headbanger's Ball A hundred twenty minutes
got stepped up, where we would try and package music

(01:17:48):
by genre. That helped a bit. Uh, but then you know,
it kind of kept going and uh there would be
successes and we were feeling pretty good about things. So
we weren't getting a lot of pushback other than from
the older original fans. The new audience. You know, the
audience would cycle through MTV like in five years. You know,

(01:18:09):
five years basically you had an audience that kind of
came and left, and then you have a whole new
group of people. So you had to continue to reinvent
yourself for you're just gonna be you know, it's kind
of going stale. So uh. At one point, Doug, we
had a meeting in Doug Herz said, you know, uh,
we should do a soap opera. You know, young people

(01:18:29):
love to see other young people. They get a lot
of cues from them. Would be interesting. We could do
a soap proper. So I gave them some money to
develop a soap proper and they came back and said,
you know, we're gonna have to hire writers. It's more
expensive than than uh we can we can handle. We're
gonna have to pay writers. That's something we never really did.
I have real writers do things for an ongoing soap opera.

(01:18:50):
So and someone said, well, you know, we can't afford it.
They came back, well, we're really good at post production.
We can put stuff together. Why don't we get aloft
and soho, stick some cameras in there of some people
in and that's created the Real World, which was like
the biggest thing we've done almost ever. And I think
they're still running the damn thing. Uh So that sort
of was the start of reality TV, which unfortunately brought

(01:19:13):
us to The Apprentice and other bad things. But that's
sort of how it started. We didn't out a cheapness
and a desire to experiment. We fell into something. It
was very successful. So once we started, it was sort
of hard to take it off. And we tried to
keep the music, identity and image, you know, as well

(01:19:34):
as we could while we tried to, you know, run
this other stuff through the schedule, put music beds under
you know, some of these shows, so there was always
music there, but uh, you know, it did ruffle some
of our older fans the wrong way. So then we
started MTV two and we said, you know, if you
really like music videos all the time, here's the channel
that's just gonna do that. And we had Andy Shoen
was there. Then we we started that. It was sort

(01:19:56):
of sort of a freeform format. Okay, a couple of
so when you went to long form programming, was there
any pressure from above or was it organic or you
knew there would be pressure from above reratings and advertising.
One of the problems, uh, when you're embedded in a
public company and we went from me in the smallest

(01:20:18):
division to the biggest division, was you had to continue
to show growth. So no one was telling us what
the program or what to do. They were just saying,
I want you to make this amount of money by
the end of the year. So you figure it out.
You're so fucking smart. So we try and we try
and figure it out, and we go, well, you know
a lot of this is they it's gonna be hard

(01:20:41):
really to raise our race to the cable operators becauseis
are like long term deals. You just can't go in
and change them. So it's the advertising marketplace. And uh,
people seem to like some of this longer format that
this longer format show. So we would try and do it,
but you know, and just charge more. And then we
would add in the the MTV Video Music Awards would

(01:21:01):
make us seventy five million dollars a night. I mean,
it was huge. So then we said, well, why don't
we do a movie awards? You know, So then you
start going in the the the uh, the rabbit hole
of award shows and try and do them in your way,
and uh, you know, I got tired of going to
award shows, Bob. I'll tell you I've seen my share
of them. Okay, you talked about the five years cycle

(01:21:25):
in retrospect, you can certainly see it that way. But
from the other side of the screen, it was shocking
when the original VJs were canned. Whose decision was that?
And was that conscious We're gonna stay with the demo
as opposed to grow with our audience. How did that
come about? That was my decision, and I had to

(01:21:45):
overrule people who had built up relationships with Martha Quinn
and uh, you know, and and uh others. But I
decided that, you know, we just needed a new phase.
These people are old, and there's the people want to see.
If we really think we're an work for young people
eighteen to twenty four, they're gonna want to see people
who look to be approximately their age. That's gonna make
them feel better about it. It It isn't like my big

(01:22:07):
brothers MTV. So that's what we did. There was no pressure. Again,
I would say one of the great things about running
that company all those years was I didn't really get
any pressure about programmers. Just deliver the numbers, and we
always did and they left us alone. Okay, was it
like you were lying in bed one night and you said, God,

(01:22:29):
I got a can the VJs. I had come up
with the idea. Well, I don't know if I was
lying in bed, but it hadn't crossed my mind. I mean,
one or two of them might have been annoying, and
you say, you know, we're we we we gotta like
look at this thing holistically. We should be changing the
on air. Look, we should be changing the VJs. We
should be changing the shows. We we we gotta reinvent

(01:22:50):
this thing continually. And uh, I don't know when that
epiphany came, but and we didn't do them all at once,
but they kind of filtered away within a six month
period and we hired other people. But I uh, and
I know I see them all because they're all on
they're all on serious radio. Now I went CHATL or another.
So it's great here in their voices. Okay, under your management,

(01:23:16):
MTV spread all over the world. I always figured that
was because of your experience all over the world. Whose
decision and what degree were you involved? Well, that was
we did a joint venture in the UK for empty
a thing called MTV Europe, and I uh, I had

(01:23:38):
great confidence that I could go anywhere, that we could
go anywhere, that we could go do business anywhere. At
the same time, something important was happening, which is all
of these European countries and then subsequently in Asia and
Latin America, they were deregulating their television structure. Most of
these countries had stayed owned television maybe one independent channel,

(01:23:59):
and they were all terrestrial. Basically, they weren't there. They
were very little cable or satellite. But they began to
sort of open the doors and let private companies come
in and run TV networks. Now, of course you've got
Start TV and Asia or be sky b R Sky TV,
you know. But in the early days we were a
first mover, and um we were able to kind of

(01:24:22):
chase that around from content to kinda. I really wanted
to go back to Asia after we got set up
in Europe. And when we went to Europe, by the way,
the record companies are go, fuck you. We we don't
need any Americans coming over here telling us what to do.
And I say, this isn't gonna be the American MTV.
It's gonna be run by Europeans. Wenna have Dutch people
on and it's it's gonna be different. You're gonna like it,

(01:24:42):
and no, no, no, no, no, no no. And it
was harder to deal with the labels there because they
all could legally get together against you. But we had
on the air and we did all right, and finally
they realized this was a good tool in their toolbox
for promotion. But I wanted to go to Asia and
and this amazing thing just got Richard Lee in Hong
Kong launched this thing called Star TV, and he wanted.

(01:25:05):
He was gonna put five channels up on a satellite,
you know, to a small dish satellite that you could
pick up, you know what they call at this time
a high band satellite. It would the footprint cover all
the way from Taiwan to like, you know, Saudi Arabia.
The same signal would come down. So he got the BBC,
a couple of Chinese channels and uh MTV and we

(01:25:26):
we were able to get a licensing deal. So we
were on there. And then the weirdest thing happened. Star
TV number one was just a smash. People have been
strangled with no television choices all their lives, you know,
watching one or two channels if they even had that.
And now if someone had a satellite dish, there was
a whole new world open and up to them, even
if it was only five channels and they didn't speak
Kanthonese or Mandarin. But we would get all of a sudden,

(01:25:49):
we a New York Times reporter would be in a
in a cab of the Karin guerrillas on the Burmese
Thai border and he would go to the Burmese camp
and they have a satellite dish and all these guys
are sitting around watching like hip hop videos and he said,
this is like bizarre, and MTV became like a verb

(01:26:10):
in their world, and you know, so we we gotta
Then Murdoch bought Star TV, and I decided, we don't
want to be doing a licensing deal. Let's start our
own operated things. So we got a divorce from Murdoch
and started from scratch and built up an appreciable business
in Indian all the major territories, which was a blasphemy
about to be back. And you know, we'd always go

(01:26:31):
out on trips, and you know, we moved our headquarters
to Singapore. I'd always tack on an adventure. After we
were doing some business and met the guys in the
music business in Asia. They were wild. I mean they
those guys, they were something. But uh so we set
up we were the first worldwide network. MTV was. I mean,
I think and I don't know how much we used

(01:26:53):
out a hundred networks at one point. And then we
did the same thing in Latin America and then what
what the greatest thing was we would have tried through
these creative people from all these countries and then we
could Ingram intermingle them and move them around. And I
missed all I miss all that, but that's still that.
The last one was Africa, and I go to Africa
a lot now and MTV bas it plays all music.

(01:27:15):
It's all hip hop, and it's the most powerful music
force on the continent of Africa. Is MTV to this day? Wow?
And we're all these outlets profitable? They are now. They
weren't in the beginning, but they became profitable pretty quickly. Okay,
so certainly from six on, maybe the Internet starts creeping in.

(01:27:40):
Now you and me have a conversation at the time
when everybody is saying they've gotta play more videos, you say,
we're never gonna play videos because it's becoming on demand item.
You were way ahead of the marketplace personally. However, in retrospect,
one can say that MTV missed the Internet. So give
us those two takes. Well, you're exactly right. I mean

(01:28:01):
they came along and you can get all this music
on demand. I mean, who needs to sit around and
wait for Nirvan? I just you know, hit it and
it comes up. I can watch it ten times in
a row. The problem was the labels, and I had
this conversation with Bob Morgado took me up to his office.
I went to his office. I thought he was going
to congratulate me for the quarter of a million dollars
of retail sales of billion dollars of unplugged records. But no,

(01:28:23):
he was to tell me fuck you. He'd already fired
Moawston and all these people who we loved. Uh, you're
not gonna get online. We're not giving you the rights.
So MTV we were all set up with to just
move our entire music video library online on demand on
our websites, and the record companies wouldn't give it to us.

(01:28:44):
They give it to launch, they give it to some
new people. We we we don't want to be under
the thumb of MTV and create like another monster who's
building a business on our backs. Let's go to other people.
So MTV was sort of locked out in a way,
and that really allowed other people to come in and
do it, and uh, you know it, really it really

(01:29:07):
was a monkey wrench in our ability to increase our
digital footprint and move into the digital age. Because our
audience that like the canary in the colon, and they're
the first people to migrate the digital um. Yeah, that
was tough news, and we could not get that to happen.
We we wanted to, Laura knows, I mean it would
be an idiot that wouldn't want to do that, but
they wouldn't give us the rights. Now, but you did

(01:29:29):
have a presence online and certainly about turn of the
century it was not an insignificant audience. Was basically without
videos you couldn't make it or was there another way
to spin it so that you could have had a business.
Well you could have used some short like needle drop
lengths of music beds on things, but you know, we
could we had we would have news and information about music.

(01:29:52):
We had tour dates, we had everything about music, but
the music. You know, it's like a head shop in
the in the set in the sixties, they sold the
papers and the pipes, but they didn't sell you the pot.
We had everything but the music. Basically we tried to
skirt it in circum benefit we'd always be busted, you know,

(01:30:12):
and they were. They were nasty. I mean, uh, you know,
I was like a profit center for them busting down
you know, people trying to take their music online. So
you started thirty k you know, the old Viacom is
sold to Sumner. At what point does everybody start making
more money and are you negotiating for money or is

(01:30:33):
it take it or leave it? Well, Sumner bought the
company seven he bought it from these guys of the
prior Viacom. He installed Frank Beyondi, who made me the
CEO right away, and uh, he offered me a pile

(01:30:55):
of money that was more than I had every I
didn't I just I didn't even ask for it. He said,
they're gonna give you this, and it was and like
box car numbers like we see today. But from then on,
as these companies in cable became these money machines, and
you're embedded in these public companies, Uh, there was a
game going on, like the Alan Grubin's of the world

(01:31:17):
would be negotiating UH employees contracts at various companies, and
they'd always say, well, we're gonna what are they paying
at Disney, what are they paying at uh A Universal?
And you would find out that the pay levels, like
even in the record companies, were really high, So all
of a sudden people could have their We would say, well,
we're making more money than these guys in the record

(01:31:38):
companies we're making, you know, we want to be paid
on an equivalent basis. And then it was like someone
would move up the uh, you know, move up the ladder.
And then stock options became a big thing. Uh and
people were being granted a lot of those, and it
was always you were getting compared to players in similar
type of companies. And uh, all of a sudden, money

(01:32:01):
became everybody was rolling in potential salaries and bonuses and
stock options, and it really changed the game. I mean,
I gotta say, no one really came to work where
we work for the money. You can get paid a
lot more somewhere else for a lot fewer hours. It mean,
it's almost like a lifestyle decision. But then money kind

(01:32:21):
of came in, and uh, you know, you could argue
kind of spoiled things a bit. I mean, it was
nice to get it, Okay, all the I don't have
I don't have a history of working for the corporation.
But from my seat, my observer, you're the best corporate
manager I've ever encountered in that you saw yourself as
relatively equal to the people under you. You would not

(01:32:44):
make a decision, you would never say to Judy, you
have to put this. You have to do that because
someone gave you a call. How and where did you
develop your management style? Well, you're nice of you to
say that it was I figured I was a team player.
I had a team of people I trusted. People don't

(01:33:05):
like to be if you have good people, they don't
want to be overmanaged. And you know, there were times
when I would call up and say, by the way,
why aren't we playing guns and roases? I mean, what
kind of idiots are you people? And this thing is
you know, welcome to the jungle. You guys passed on that.
I mean I would, I would, but it would be

(01:33:25):
rare that I would really interfere too much with with
specific programming choices. I would green light shows they wanted
to do, and I would give advice, but I I uh,
I would defer to people who I thought maybe knew
more about it than me. I didn't want to step
on their toes. I wanted more of a collegial atmosphere
and as long as they were winning and doing okay,

(01:33:45):
I mean I had to balance. You know, the people
from Nickelodeon were very different from the people at MTV.
There was all these different, like little mini silos of
this place. The people at Comedy Central were different. I
tried not you know, you can't when you get to
a certain size, you can't micromana everything. So I would
defer to people who worked for me and try to
keep I tried to keep it egilitarian, and I most

(01:34:08):
of all wanted to keep it fun. Okay, but from
an outside perspective, and I've observed this, if someone said
I'm gonna call Tom Freston to get it on or
to do me a favor, that's not a game you played. No,
with rare exceptions, very rare exceptions. Yeah, Because sometimes you
call up and say, David Geffen just called me and

(01:34:31):
he asked the reasonable question, you know, what's the rationalelle
behind this? And they might say, well, I don't know
if there was much, Yeah, maybe you want to take
another look at something. And they might say yeah, or
tell David Giffen the ghost of it, We're not gonna
do it. But you know sometimes I mean I would
get those calls, Bob. They would come in night, day,
they would they have a whole bank of people calling

(01:34:53):
people at MTV trying to move it around because we
were in that you know, like sort of singular position. Uh.
And I was always of the I said, you know,
these people are our partners in a way, and we
gotta there's gotta be a little give and take. There's
gonna be a bit of give and take in our relationship.
We can't just we can't just say, you know, take

(01:35:13):
it or leave it all the time with everything. Uh,
they're predisposed not to like us, So let's try and
take a little bit of edge off that. By nature,
I try and be a collegial person and not a
dictatorial thing. I like to thinking of business like that.
Decisions kind of come up from the bottom rather than
you know, being like some authoritarian on top, which you

(01:35:37):
know at certain scale is unmanageable anyway, unless you have
a really small country company. Okay, So tell us about
the switch to running all of Viacom and your experience
doing that. Well. I was sitting in my office one day,
perfectly happy. My phone rings. It's some to Redstone, he says,
come up and see me in the Carlisle Hotel. It's

(01:35:58):
a spring afternoon. So I getting a taxi. I go
up to the Carlisle Hotel. I'm thinking, you know, Marilyn
Monroe and Jack Kennedy. You know, he had an apartment there.
It really wasn't a great apartment. It would looks like
a corporate apartment. So you never know what redstone you're
gonna get. He could be the screamer or the really
nice guy and and the really he says. You know,
I'm males not doing good. I'm thinking to myself, males

(01:36:20):
doing great. We're like in an all time high. Gotta
get rid of mail and uh and I would like
you to be the new CEO of IM. And I'm like,
oh fuck. I had just been joking with Jeff Bukas
about this day before. One day we're gonna we have
the best job running HBO and MT be the best
job in New York City. On day it's gonna be over.
They're gonna ask us to run these fucking companies. So
now the ask comes in and and I go, oh god,

(01:36:43):
how can I? Uh well, I don't really want to
work for this man. That's gonna be gonna take me
away from everything I love. You know, why can't I
be like Lauren Michael's and just keep the same job
forever and and and and and But you can't, So
I told him. I asked him some questions. I said,
let me think about it, give me twenty four hours.
I'm so flattered that you thought of me somewhere. Let
me think about it. So I went home. I said,

(01:37:04):
I gotta talk about it with my wife. Who could
you know, couldn't have cared. So I thought about it,
and I said, oh God, I gotta take it, because
if I don't take it, he's gonna give it to Less,
and Less will fire me. And that's it, man, at
the end of my career. And maybe maybe you know what,
it'll be great. It'll be kind of good. I can
learn some new tricks. I'm gonna be a public company CEO.
It's like the gold ring. I got the gold ring.

(01:37:24):
So I the next day I go to meet him.
He's in radio set. He's in the Cargie hall. Uh.
The CBS is having their upfront presentation. So he's got
a seat next to him. It's on the aisle. I
sit down next to him and he's watching the upfront
and I said, Summer, I thought about it all night.
I would love this job. I'd love to take the job.

(01:37:46):
And he goes, it's too late. I go, what do
you mean it's too LATEA I gave it to him,
I go Less, He gave it to Less. You told him?
I said, wait twenty four hours, it's only been like
seventeen hours. You can't do that. It's as well he's had.
I said, well, you into that to me? You know,
fuck you. That's bad. That's bad. I got up and
I sort of left. I said, you made a you know,
we had a deal. Do you want me? You're not.

(01:38:08):
So then like the next day he calls me and
he goes time. I gave it to Less, I told Less.
You know it's hard to take out. Can't be an
Indian giver. So how about this, how about we split
it and you unless become cos. I'll stay at CEO
and you unless run it as co chief operating officers
or whatever. So I said okay, And we did that

(01:38:30):
for two years. Okay, but at that time responsibilities were divided.
He was CBS, you were paramount, so he had an
equal title, but you had different purviews. Yeah, but there
was some things that that we had to fight over,
like if I wanted to buy something out of the
and use money from the corporate tail, he had to
agree to it. So there was a lot of built
in conflicts. I say, you know, we could be like

(01:38:52):
Bob Daily and Terry Simmel Less We could have a
perfect partnership. You got your thing, I got minors, and
we'll try and be reasonable. But uh uh so there
was areas where it did come together. But largely we
were both running the same things we did before, and
we took on all the corporate things, legal, human resources,
all the sort of all those organizations and investor relations.

(01:39:14):
So I got a lot of exposure to the investor community.
It was a different job. I had to really less
and I were the face of the company. But then,
uh there was pressure from the people on both sides,
you know, and the and these bankers would come around say,
you know, one of the reasons your stock's not going
up is because your your company is too big, it's
too complicated. What you really need to do is split

(01:39:34):
it up into two different companies. And uh, you know
that logic was faulty, but we did it, and uh
it was painful. I mean, so we had CBS Inc.
And less So I now became the CEO of my
separate public company, and so did less Moon Invest. Now,
of course, through all it followed, they reunited and they're

(01:39:54):
back together under Bob backage. But that's sort of the
story of how it happened. But when I was I
was only there for eight months until he fired me.
I mean, basically I was still rearranging the furniture in
my office. However, you suddenly had purview over Paramount, which
had been in a bad spell, and you made some
changes there. What were your experiences, what you learn in

(01:40:16):
the movie business. Well, I didn't know a lot. You know,
we had been making movies with Paramount for years, you know,
MTV and Nickelodeon. But being a producer of a movie
was not like running a movie studio. And I had
I had been able to sit at the table with
red Stone and and see John Dolton, who ran Paramount.
I I would I was like being in some business

(01:40:37):
school for running a media conglomorate. I learned a lot
through observation, But when I got out there and I
had to do it, I didn't know that Paramount was
in trouble. They were on a cold streak. The culture
wasn't particularly helpful, and the idea was well uh Sherry.
Sherry Lansing became the head of it, but then she
told me instead of John Dolton who left. But then

(01:40:58):
Sherry said, you know, I want to retire. I'm sixty.
I want out. So I had to find the new head.
And I said, well, this is an opportunity to sort
of maybe haven't turned the page and uh, you know,
start a new era. And then I also realized that
I'm like a cable weasel. I'm just a cable weasel.
We're at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain and
here I am running the studio. So I got Bob Daily,

(01:41:20):
who I knew. Bob Daily and Terry. They had once
offered me the job to run the Warner Music Group,
which I turned down. But I developed a good relationship
with both of them, and I asked Bob Daily if
he would be a mentor for me and teach me
the movie business. So for one summer, I would go
from my office in Santa Monica to his house and
we'd have classes. Basically, he'd give me homework. I learned

(01:41:40):
about film p and l's, what kind of deals exist,
how the movie business works. And I said, you know,
we we we got to get someone to replace Sherry
because she's gonna be out of here soon. So I
tried hiring some of the people who were running movies
to that that's the top job in Hollywood, as you know.
And what happened was when someone get fired, generally a

(01:42:01):
person for another movie studio who'd been running literacy. It's
like musical chairs. So I tried to hire Stacy Snyder,
who at the time was like the hottest I thought,
and she was a woman, and she was lovely and
smart and accomplished, and she couldn't get out of her contract.
And then I would ask around other places, and people
couldn't get out of their contracts. So then I would

(01:42:21):
go around and talk to people who used to be
near the top of a movie studio or had been,
and I would interview them. But then I would have
him come up to Bob Daily's house and have Bob
talked to them. And we were sort of getting nowhere.
I wasn't really turned on by anybody. And one day
I was in Beiruts actually on an MTV business and

(01:42:43):
David Geffin calls me. He says, I got the right
person for you to run the Paramount. Perfect guy. Who's
that Brad Gray? Really? Brad Gray? I knew Brad Gray.
But Brad was then at the top of his game.
He was, you know, a Millstein Gray. He was producer
of soprano those and blah blah blah. He had good taste.
He was this and that and intrigued me. And I

(01:43:04):
spent a lot of time with Brad. I already knew him.
Bob spent time with Brad, and then, uh, I thought
that Brad would have risen to the occasion of realizing
this is a really big company and it needs leadership,
and you can't be locked up in your office just
doing deals with the directors. You shouldn't be out there,

(01:43:28):
you know, with the rank and file and make this
culture of the place a little healthier. But you know,
one good thing we did was by dream Works. We
bought dream Works. But then I got fired, and uh,
you know, life went on the DreamWorks partnership, which I
really thought was gonna be a game changer for us

(01:43:49):
because it brought us a lot of movies that gave
us Spielberg and Geffen and Cassenberg sort of in our
tent that they were real players, could up our game.
But that relationship sort of fell apart under Brad, you know,
for for reasons that were no good and they ended
up buying out and going away, which was sort of
a big disappointment. I was gone by then, and anyway,

(01:44:12):
what I learned was it's its own little world. As
we all know, it's a very peculiar world. And I
Brad was very able in many ways and did have
good taste, and he did produce and some good movies
and hire some good people, But it didn't accomplish the
change of the full change I have been hoping for

(01:44:36):
at the end of the day. Okay, there was obviously
the MySpace public thing, but less uh, under promise and
over delivered. It's a Wall Street game. Well, you know,
we'll give you low projections where you gave accurate projections.
If you had to do it again, would you do
it differently? Well, we sort of overdid, under promise and overdelivered.

(01:45:00):
We delivered a lot. You know, we would we would,
we would, uh if we had. We always took a
little haircat over what we thought we could do, And
it wasn't really an issue that, um, we hadn't been
making our numbers. We'd, like I said, we've been making
our numbers all those years. The one thing that fell

(01:45:21):
out of whack. The first quarter was at MTV International,
which had been growing like a weed kind of like,
took a couple of big hits and sank, you know,
sank our earnings down and sank the revenues down. And
everyone was looking at our first earnings quarter under a microscope.
So there must be something wrong. You know. The next quarter,

(01:45:42):
by the way they were, we were up like so
I I thought we were going to see a lot
of growth going forward. But it didn't really turn out
that why they were getting rid of me was because
our numbers weren't good. There was just that I wasn't
the right guy for that job. You know, I was

(01:46:02):
not the mainstream businessman. In many ways, I wasn't, you know,
I was. I was enjoying it and looking to sort
of move up and try it. But you know, my
my world and basically dealing with creative people had changed.
Now I was dealing with Wall Street a good part
of the time and dealing with other issues, which I thought,
you know, I was gonna give it a go. I

(01:46:27):
I didn't think that just really came out of left
field for me getting fired. Okay, so you do get fired,
you say, you get a call from Bano where you
offered other jobs because you said earlier you got a
call from Morgado about running the Warner Music Group. We're
people looking for you, Morgado from from Daily and Semmel Daily.
And because Morgado and I were like sort of, you know,

(01:46:50):
at at odds with each other, He's like, well, I
could never hear I could never get along with that guy.
A lot of other people couldn't either. My mistake. But
after you leave via calm Are, there are other offers
that you end up turning down. Yeah, a couple came in,
A couple came in. But I what I figured out
was I didn't want to be grafted on top of

(01:47:10):
a company that I really didn't have that big emotional
connection to. I was really unlikely to fall into the
same type of beautiful place for me that the MTV Networks, Nickelodeon,
Comedy Central was. That was everything I loved, all about
all the things I loved, and I figured, you know,
I'd given it a good run, why not try something else?

(01:47:31):
So I thought I would do this portfolio approach to things,
which is maybe do something not for profit work, maybe
work with a private equity company. I went on the
DreamWorks board. I worked for Oprah for a couple of years.
I mean I did a lot of interesting things, Like
I went back The first thing I did was really
go back to Afghanistan. I went back there and started

(01:47:52):
training people. It was like the early days of MTV,
training people how to run a television network. That was fantastic.
You know, when Oprah started her cable channel, everyone thought
it would be a smashing success ratings wise. Why was
it ultimately not that level of success. Well, once she
wasn't on it, she was still in syndication, and uh,

(01:48:16):
they had a series of growing pains. I was a
consultant there, but she got the distribution and there was
a series of grower pains. I think there was an
element of overconfidence about things and they were on a
learning curve. They've now stabilized it into a decent profitable business.
But out of the box, the big thing was I'm
turning on the Oprah Winfrey network. I'm looking around for Oprah,
but Oprah couldn't really be on it legally. So small

(01:48:40):
things like having a music channel with no music right. Okay, Now,
you're a guy from Roewaiton who goes to school in Vermont.
All of a sudden, you're an MTV You're meeting a
lot of rock stars. Hey, were you ever intimidated? What
was the process? Is there anybody who still makes you

(01:49:00):
somewhat anxious, not only rock stars but other notable people
in the world. You know, I got confident in myself
early on. Yeah, and I never really had a problem
meeting with any movie star or uh rock star where

(01:49:20):
you'd be trembling and you couldn't open your mouth and
say anything. They're clearly people when you're in the presence
of someone you've idolized your whole life, you know that
you know and you can see that that that special sauce,
that charisma that lives in within that body you see
Mick Jagger or something. But I I never was afraid
to go in a meeting and meeting and talk to anybody.

(01:49:41):
I try it to be. I just always try to
be myself. Okay, who are the two most charismatic rock
stars you met in your tenure? David Bowie, who I
have a good story about, then lay it on us.
This is one of my favorite stories of all my time. There.
When I was doing the I Want a MTV camp
and I was always after David to his person, Let's

(01:50:02):
get David Bowie to do one that's like really huge. Now,
I mean, he's he's he's in the Pantheon for Christ's sake,
and he's making these great videos. So finally he says,
I'll do it, but you gotta come and see me.
Him and Stodd Switzerland skiing. I go. So I got
this guy Dale Pond, who was you know, our ad agency, uh,

(01:50:23):
and we all went over there and we got like
and it basically it moved into like a youth hostel.
You're in fancy old stad and David staying at the
Palace hotel. So we see him. We we agree to
go out one day and we set up in the
snow and he comes skiing down and we did about
five or ten rons. He skis down and you know
this turns and stopped, says, I want my MTV. He

(01:50:44):
was really enthusiastic about it. I had had some dealings
with him before and really liked the guy. He was
just just a pleasure to be with, and it would
be he would always ask you about yourself, and you know,
he was really an engaging character. And you know, after
were we of course we would have a hold your
hands like this because we sticked an animated logo in there.
So when we're finished, he goes, hey, uh, what you

(01:51:07):
want to go skiing? Sure? So I spent you know,
spent the day, uh, the rest of the day or
part of it, you know, skiing with David Bowie, which
was fine. And then he says, listen, I'm gonna be
at the Palace that I am taking a sauna if
you want to come, you know, meet me at the
Palace Hotel. So I go, sure, you know, I go
back to my youth hostel and uh. And I go

(01:51:30):
to the Palace Hotel and I go into the spa
where the the the he's in there. And I walk
into the steam room and uh or the sauna room
and who and and it's it's just him and me
and Paul McCartney and I go, wow, you got that
maybe then and they we're all just wearing towels. That
was That was a keeper. Okay, you must have a

(01:51:54):
couple of others. I'll take a pass. But I had
some wonderful times and a lot of the musical artists
that we love and enjoy. It was. It was a
privilege anybody you never met you wanted to. Well, you
know I had in the rock pop business in our era.
I think pretty much everybody came around. Uh. You know

(01:52:16):
there was people that I idolized, and you know that
I was fans of another musical genres that I would
have loved to have met, and I didn't. Okay, So
who were the exacts who impressed you, John Sykes? But
I'm also talking record company exects, record companies. Uh. I

(01:52:37):
love Gil Freezing because I thought Gil Freesing. I related
to Gil guilfrees and ran an operation sort of like
what I wanted to run. Those guys Chris Blackwell, uh,
Chris Wright, these guys that ran these small companies and
unfortunately all got disappeared in their logos, got folded into
something or other, something nondescript. They ran creative companies like

(01:53:00):
kind of place I wanted to be. You know, they
were in it for the music and they want they
believed in the artist and it wasn't like we got
to crank a single out. And they were artists friendly
and they were willing to take creative chances. So I
love Gil Freezing. He was terrific. I love Mo Austin
I thought Moe was wonderful. As crazy as he was.
I loved crass now, I mean he would be a guy.

(01:53:22):
I mean, that's one story about him. I always loved.
As he goes to Spain, they take him out in
some club one night. They they all get they're all
drunk and the Gypsy Kings come on and he's like,
goes nuts and he goes backstage. So I'll give you
guys a million dollars and they took it. That was
like how they would sign people. You know, it was

(01:53:42):
that nuts. And of course he made him into a hit.
They they produced. Jeff ear Off was a guy who
was unusual in the uh you know, on the lower
down below the label head because he was sort of
a visually trained guy who really had wonderful taste. And
he was responsible for you know, oh shepherding through you know,
Madonna's Easy Top. A lot of these people, police and

(01:54:04):
so forth who had really good videos. Uh he he uh.
He was great. I'm trying to think there were so many.
I love Doug Morris. Doug was soulful and I I
didn't have Irving for his short tenure at uh. Remember

(01:54:24):
he ran m c A for a while and after
I'll tell her left, No, I'll tell her replaced him.
He brought in all the replacement that was okay. You know,
after a while, the memory gets a little weak. Oh listen,
it's amazing how long it was ago. So obviously things
have changed in the fifteen odd years since you've been gone.
But is there any way to save MTV that you
no longer called music television? They certainly are on the

(01:54:48):
cable system. Is this just a fade out or can
there be a renaissance? Well, some people at the top
of these legacy companies would tell you, you know, all
of these linear networks are gonna go away. They're gonna
implode this the money is getting sucked out and they're
not gonna be able to hold his Everything is going

(01:55:09):
to the you know, streaming model. That's not to say
MTV couldn't resurrect itself or be something else in the
streaming world. All of these guys are gonna have to
figure out our way to uh uh kind of transition.
I'll say this, Um Bob Backish, who's now the CEO
of Viacom CBS and who I hired him? I love

(01:55:30):
he's a soulful guy. He's as smart as a smart
guy and he has been dealt a week hand, but
he's played it pretty well so far. They're never gonna
make I don't think MTV into what it was, which
was his music based phenomena, But they seem to have
I don't pay a lot of attention to, but they
seem to have reverted to this. We just have a

(01:55:54):
bunch of shows on there, and if they have a
hit show or another, you know, they can't they got
some kind of incarnation and reincarnation of the Jersey Shore
or maybe they can you know, make uh, some connection
to the younger audiences out there today. I mean, it's America.
Everybody comes back. It's never going to come back as
what it was, but I would say it's you know,

(01:56:18):
things have a hard time just totally dying off in
the media business. I mean, look, terrestrial radio still around. Uh.
I wouldn't I wouldn't know what to do, and I
haven't really thought about it. I haven't watched it much.
But they had some quick creative people there, and they
had some money to do things with. It's entirely possible
they could resurrect themselves. You know. Our biggest business was

(01:56:40):
always Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon's taken a huge hit. Well, you know,
in the beginning they started Philip they licensed all their
product to Netflix. So you have all these little five
six year old kids, they're watching SpongeBob. They just push
a button and one SpongeBob or one rug Rust after another.
You know, it's hard to get him to go back
and watch commercials. You know. Oh, it's that that's gonna

(01:57:01):
be the streaming generation. And so that took a big
hunk out of their out of what they were. They
had a great machine going on and uh, you know,
consumer behavior really uh has been a big factor for them.
So in your career, what was the personal peak when
you felt the best some specific moment. I love being

(01:57:25):
on the stage at Live aid Bob. That was something,
you know that was really pretty special. Uh. When we
launched MTV Europe initially we launched, we had a big
party in Amsterdam and I remember being in a speedboat
and going through the canals of Amsterdam with Elton John
and all these people, and it was a beautiful night
and I'm thinking, man, this fantastic. Uh. There was a

(01:57:49):
lot of moments I I told you in the beginning.
When I left the advertising business, it was because they
threatened to put me on the Sharman account with Don't
Squeeze Charman. Mr Whipple. Well, when we launched, when we
launched TV Land in the mid nineties, we went out
of our way to find a lot of these old commercials,
and I said, we'd be cool. Let's get a lot

(01:58:10):
of old commercial let's clear the rights and we can
run some old commercials with the old shows. So I'm
at a party and I met Mr Whipple. Did you
tell him your story? Yes, it just killed me. You
don't Squeeze the Charman. This guy made a whole living
on all these residuals on you know, being a guy
squeeze and toilet paper. I almost got into his ecosystem.

(01:58:31):
But I just thought that was an amazing piece of
synchronicity that we finally run into each other. He let
me because of Charman and Mr Whipple, I quit and
left in this whole other world appeared exactly amazing. You say,
another door opens, Thomas has been fantastic. You know, you
really radiate your intelligence and your ability to speak. A

(01:58:52):
lot of executives can't deliver. It's like I'm just wold,
I'm sitting here and go can this stay this great?
You were really ten of a ten skaler, as they
would say in spinal Top and eleven. So thanks so
much for doing this well. You asked me about things
for a really great period. So pleasure and always good
to see you, Bob. I don't know how you do it.
I don't know how you do it. I'll say one

(01:59:12):
last thing. I watched that Frank Zappa movie last night
on your recommendation, so verdict. Yeah, the verdict was I
loved it, you know, and I became I got to
hang out with Frank brow because you know, I hired
Weasel and Moon at one point, so I used to
go up to their house for happy hours. I thought
that the director, you know, who was not an ordinary
documentary director, did a great job. It was almost and

(01:59:35):
I read your thing you said it was almost impressionistic,
which I think was a was a good judgment on it.
And he was a guy who did it his way.
He was an impressive man. You know, what was your
experience with him since you were hanging out. Was he
engaged or distant? He was good. I would go there
and he was I didn't know he was sick at
the time, and it might have been I don't think

(01:59:56):
anybody knew. But my my main door to him was
through Ale who I would call up Gail and I'd say, Gail,
I want to come and see you. I'd love to
hire Dweasel to be a fej and then uh and
moon so and Gails such a flat out character. And
through Gail we developed a bit of a bond and
she said, you know, you gotta come up for happy hours.

(02:00:17):
We had happy hours up on Woodrow Wilson Drive there
and Laurel, can you go? You gotta be kidding me.
I'm saying to myself. I used to go see them
when I was living in New York that they were
playing at that theater. Uh, And I said, well, Frank
was like a legend and we've been through the PMRC
and all that stuff, and uh, he was good, you know,
but uh, he he had a he had a good
sense of humor. He had a chip on his shoulder

(02:00:40):
because he didn't feel he was successful like he deserved
to be. I think, so, you know, he he played
at that at a whole other level. And uh, not
a lot of people got that. He was always a
cult kind of artist. He was never going to be mainstream.
I mean, what was his big hit was Valley Girl,
right with Moon. That's the only tell me faith the
singles charts. But I I wasn't. I was a thrill

(02:01:04):
to meet him because I thought he was a real icon.
And uh, I thought, I don't know much about because
I never went into with anybody. But you know, to
die at prostate cancer, you know, twenty years later that
wouldn't have happened, but all of advances in prostate cancer
treatments and so forth, you know, he's a tough one.
Well it's weird because he died at fifty two. Now

(02:01:27):
from our perch, that seems so young. It seemed young then,
but now it's like in the prime of your life. Yeah,
exactly so. And then going going back to the movie,
you know, uh, there are a lot of people trying
to rewrite the sixties. Okay, but I thought that movie
got the vibe of the sixties, the vibe of New York.

(02:01:50):
When they actually showed the theater he played in New York,
I didn't go to those gigs. I was just stunned
how small it was. Now a little narrow theater but
it is like it was like there Hamburg in a way.
You know, they were playing for three months, they had
a residency, and they kind of got their ship together,
and they got this cult word of mouth thing, and
you know, they god knows, they looked so sixties. And

(02:02:12):
that first record album which he didn't like, the cover
of which I thought was fantastic. I we all had
it in college, freak out. People were rolling, you know,
marijuana joints on it all over the country. It's like
a discovery. I mean, he had that song you didn't
try to call me, and then he did a slow
version of Ruben just you know, I was primer in
the right front fender and you didn't call me. It

(02:02:32):
was both hilarious and poignant at the same time. Weasels
ripped my flesh. Oh yeah, all right, Okay, I think
we've covered it, So Tom until next time. Hopefully I
see you soon. When this COVID insanity ends. It's ending
at least here, I really think. So it's exciting to
come back to New York and see the city filling
up and coming alive, and all these people have vaccinated.

(02:02:54):
So that's how let's hope. So well, you know, the
story of the people moving a way turned out to
be untrue. Yes, there were wealthy people who went to
their country houses, but as far as people moving permanently
didn't happen. Do you believe the issue of offices is
a real thing or not a thing? Are people gonna
end up coming to the office or are they gonna

(02:03:16):
work remotely? Yeah? I think uh, I think they are.
I think there's probably a combination of both. Maybe people
don't need as much office space as they want. I mean,
you know, the sixth Avenue was like a morgue now,
but I think you're the people going in. People that
I talked to say we're going back in September, or
we're gonna try it in June. You know, you see
people like Netflix and Amazon saying we want everyone in

(02:03:37):
the office. If you're in a creative business, I don't
see how you can do it. It's amazing to me
that people have been able to do what they've done
with Zoom and Blue Jeans through this whole pandemic. God
help us that we didn't have the internet. But I
think I don't know. You know, New York City, the
whole concept of the idea of New York City was
based on the idea congestion is good, you know, be together,

(02:04:00):
be all jammed up, and good things will come out
of that. And you'll run into people, you know. I
don't think New York is gonna die, but it's it's
in for some tough times. But some people must want
to be back to work. If if you if you're
vaccinated and everything is safe, and this thing's disappeared, you know,
you just might want to get back and be with
other people. What about Manhattan itself? When you were living

(02:04:23):
in graduate school, you could be of lower income and
live in Manhattan. That doesn't happen anymore. Well, what's happening now?
At least I hope I'm seeing I you see all
these storefronts they're out of you know, there there's no
one in them anymore. And all these uh, all these
rental buildings that they've over built, rents are going down.

(02:04:43):
Maybe that maybe Manhattan is gonna be the new Williamsburg.
I don't know. You could be a young artist and
moved to New York again because things will be cheaper
asked for those stores and those restaurants. Young people are
gonna come in with new concepts. They got lower rents
and they're gonna figure something cool out. There's gonna be
a whole new thing. That's what I'm cat. That's sort

(02:05:05):
of my dream that there's gonna be a great reincarnation
that there are in twenty twenties. You know, maybe it's
maybe it's maybe it's that's what's in store for us. Well,
I think economically we're definitely coming back, you know, in
terms of the buildings to the buildings have to be
the companies who on the buildings have to go bankrupt
and the bank's take them back and resell them so
they can rent at a lower level. Because some people

(02:05:27):
bought these buildings at such inflated prices that you know,
the storefronts, they can only lower the price so far. Yeah,
I think that's what's gonna happen. Everything's gonna, you know,
prices to jimmy down. And because a lot of people,
no matter what happens, they're not gonna need as many
floors as they've had before probably, So there's gonna be
a surplus of rents and the people who are coming

(02:05:47):
in are gonna want to renegotiate their deals lower. I
just hope that when you look, go through midtown. You
see all that retail that exists on the ground floor
of the restaurants, the shoe stores and everything else. I
just really worry are all those people because they through
this whole COVID thing, They've had absolutely nobody there. It
was like a ghost town. It's amazing how many companies

(02:06:08):
going out of business. Like you go to a web site,
well I want to. I remember it's like the hiking
store and whist l A been there. My whole life
just went. And it's like the last of that type. Okay,
what's your take on l A, Because you do have
a house in l A. I saw that. I got
up in Santa herber Now, so you're in Montecito, Okay,
how often are you in Monito? Well, usually two months

(02:06:28):
a year. But I did eight of the eight of
the uh I called him now the pandemic months. I
did eight of them there, and I gotta say, I
fell in love with California all over again. And you know,
I just got out of that big place I'm up
on up on a mountain in a wildfire zone. But
it was it was nice. It was you know, se

(02:06:49):
the season change, not traveling, it was it was like
there was a silver lining to it all. But I
I I fell back in love with California. You know,
I love one thing I love about California and is
all the East Coast bullshit doesn't exist. No one ever
asked you what you got on your S A T S.
Where you went to college. Everybody's so full of ship
that if you come from the East Coast it's great,

(02:07:11):
everybody's gonna make it and all this other stuff. I mean,
when you're playing an elite level, it's certainly something different. Okay, Tom,
I'll let you go. This has been great. That's terrific.
Bob Okay, really enjoyed myself. I got to see you.
You're back until next time. This is Bob left sles

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