Tom Freston

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 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, 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

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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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, 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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

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

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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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.

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 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 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, 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? 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 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 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

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 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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? 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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. 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? 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 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. 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 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.

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. 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. 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? 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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, 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

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, 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.

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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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.

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 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, 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. 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 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 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. 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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? 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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

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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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. 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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